Riddle me this: you enter a proxy war against Russia. You have a 24 to 1 military expenditure advantage. 18 months into the conflict, you’ve run out of military hardware and are overwhelmed by Russian artillery shell production!
Time to wash your hands, wish them luck, and wave goodbye…
Global Military Expenditure – 2022
| USA & Allies | US$ Trillion | Percentage | ROW | US$ Trillion | Percentage |
| USA | $1.537 | 54.0% | China | $0.292 | 10.2% |
| Reset of NATO | $0.360 | 12.6% | Russia | $0.086 | 03.0% |
| US Allies | $0.234 | 08.2% | India | $0.080 | 02.8% |
| All others | $0.278 | 09.6% | |||
| TOTAL | $2.131 | 74.3% | TOTAL | $0.736 | 25.7% |
De-Industrialized and Outsourced
How did it happen? Widespread corruption, a ton of incompetence, and a mother-load of arrogance. But most of all, ignorance. Blind and willful ignorance of Russia’s industrial capacity, and historical approach to war: attrition. Ignorance or amnesia that we in the west have long ago exported our industrial capacity, plants, and engineers. During all the blue and yellow flag waving, we just forgot that we’d outsourced production, decades ago, to China, Russia, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and everywhere else.
You can’t fix this kind of stupid. Nor can you quickly change a domestic population busy flipping patties, frothing milk, prompting chatbots, and feigning outrage? We’ve got brilliant minds too, but they are not trained as engineers or even welders. They are quants deployed in the banking and financial speculation sector. Spreadsheet wizards, conjurors of currency adjustments, options, swaps, and equity instruments. Naturally, when it came time to fight Russia, we banked on an exotic array of financial sanctions above artillery shells.
Turns out you can’t build artillery shells with equity swaps. We mistook the map for the territory and paper for commodities, and factories.
No one thought you’d need factories, plants, assembly lines, welders, engineers, and tradesmen to fight a peer. Nor will we be educating the necessary number of engineers or welders anytime soon. It would take years and we suspect these skills might breed racism, transphobia, homophobia, white supremacy and Trump voters. So, no it’s not happening in any time frame relevant to Ukraine.
Creating the best protection racket in history
A little bit of history. The USA found itself unchallenged after World War two. Imperial Europe was broken. The USA economy, industry, culture, and military ruled supreme. The USSR posed a useful resistance. Conjuring reds under beds had its purpose. The Russian horde was always coming. They’ve been coming for 80 years, and they are still coming. It’s a long-held tradition. Even the British Empire feared the Russians were coming for the entire 19th century, but that’s another story.
Old Europe reluctantly relinquished their colonial possessions. They were struggling to hold on to them, anyway. It was our time in the sun. And ours was an enlightened neo-colonialism disguised behind a free-trade mantra. We were lauded for freeing the subjugated peoples of the world from their colonial masters whilst hording global investment opportunities for ourselves and our most useful buds.
Collecting Tributes
We didn’t ask for annual tributes. Collection is a nuisance, it’s far more efficient to simply print the money you need, as you need it. Usually, a government can’t just print money at will, it causes inflation and at some point, if you continue, the currency will collapse. True, except when you possess the reserve currency. All that inflation is diluted across the world.
That is how you fund the biggest and most expensive military in the world, NATO, the IMF, the World Bank. That is how you maintain over 900 military bases across 130 countries out of thin air.
The magic of the dollar
In the early 1970s, we defaulted on the gold-standard, “sorry Chumps, no more gold here!” The world’s been awash with dollars ever since. Here is some more magic, foreign governments don’t won’t to hold on to our dollars, not whilst we continue to just print more of them. So, they give them back to us and we exchange them for another piece of paper (US Treasury bills) that we also print, add a little bit of interest – that we also print – and presto!
Some of the neo-colonial free-trade plunder we share with our favorite foreign friends. After we’ve taken the juicy bits for ourselves, things like mining rights, weapons sales, utilities, infrastructure projects…
Keeping order
It happens. Sometimes a country elects a populist leader with crazed notions of nationalizing infrastructure, increasing taxes on foreign entities and other non-cordial notions. Ostensibly, they’re hoping to raise their country out of poverty. It’s nonsense, of course, and when these leaders refuse to see reason, we are forced to orchestrate a change of government.
Remember Gaddafi? The Colonel had notions of unifying all of Africa. As Hillary said, we came, we saw, he died.
Right now, things are different. The consequences of these hapless economic sanctions and the failed proxy war against Russia can’t be overstated. Countries throughout the Middle-East, Africa and South America are shunning relationships with us and our allies in favor of Russia and China. The BRICS organization, China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Shanghai’s Cooperation Organization are forming alternatives to our international rules-based order. Western economies are in recession, our infrastructure neglected, and inflation intractable.
And then there is the debt
Too many snouts in the troth
There are just too many snouts now feeding at the troth. The good times may have continued for some time longer. The dam wall finally burst with the pandemic. Bill Gates and his big Pharma, World Health Organization cowboys deployed the mother of all scams. The ensuing global money printing to fund lockdowns and the vaccination theatre exploded. During and in the after math everyone needed to be compensated. It was wall to wall bailouts throughout 2021 and 2022.
By this stage, the Military Industrial knobs were livid they’d missed out. They were eager to make up for lost time. The Brookings Institute, all the leading geopolitical think tanks and the MIC were frothing. There is no alternative: Russia must be broken up. We need to get our hands on the largest unexploited land mass in the world: Siberia. If we don’t, the next century will not belong to us; it will belong to Moscow and Beijing.
Hallucinations and paranoia
More and more of our elites appear to be suffering from hallucinations about our military, industrial, economic, financial and technological supremacy. And our intelligence agencies seem as much at war with its own domestic population as with foreign threats.
There can be no rational explanation for FBI Director Christopher Wray’s vague responses to congress. He does not seem to know half of what is going in the organization. For example, last week, he was unable to explain why his officers are writing reports on a rising threat of radical Catholics. It is like a faulty AI program is in control. At this point who would be surprised if the agencies had deployed an AI system to manage the overwhelming quantity of mega-surveillance data coming in and lost control of it? Large AI systems are notoriously subject to hallucinations.
Making hay
Make hay while you can, because whilst everyone knows the end is coming, no one knows when.
The best protection racket in history has gone hyperbolic.
Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage (thetricontinental.org)https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/
A world run by stunted infants – yeahbut news (yeah-but.com)https://yeah-but.com/index.php/2024/03/12/how-a-generation-of-stunted-infants-rules/
