@QMS
vassal of US foreign policy?

Paraguay's formal ties with Taiwan make "more sense" than recognising China, and will be a greater boost to development in the nation, president-elect Santiago Pena said. Paraguay is the last South American nation to recognise Taiwan over Beijing.https://t.co/exH2PnfAPo

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) July 15, 2023

Tangible benefits of infrastructure development adds to the value of these
BRI projects. As you say, making a positive influence in people's lives. The
wisdom of the BRI philosophy is repairing the world one bridge at a time.
Or treatment plants, rails, tunnels, dams, roads, ports etc.

Unfortunately, in the capitalist western countries, there is little to no
appetite for improvements unless large sums of profit are available.
The west has traded social benefit for corporate ROI. (return on investment)
Which hastens failures and increases poverty conditions.

Thanks for the OT, SOE!

@soryang

"Yoon's holy man cult leader Jeon Gong, advised him that Korea would be unified before the end of his presidency" sounds all too much like the prophecy King Croesus got from the Oracle at Delphi: "If you go to war with Persia, a great empire will be destroyed". He did, and one was - HIS.

Yoon is an unhinged megalomaniac. The nuclear consultative group was undertaken in response for his demand for nuclear weapons. He actually wanted nuclear weapons deliverable by South Korean air force aircraft, and the US came up with this alternative plan to bring its own nuclear weapons platforms back to South Korea on a somewhat regular basis. US-ROK joint military exercises unprecedented in size, scale and frequency add to the sense of siege in Pyongyang.

Yoon's handlers and the US have taken the opportunity of having a corrupt anti-democratic authoritarian figure in the South Korean presidential office to completely dismantle the diplomatic progress made in creating a "peace environment" on the Korean peninsula. Yoon knows literally nothing about foreign or defense policy, but is paraded around the world as some kind of international leader. This is the US way of having his handlers and propaganda managers cater to his ego and try to distract South Korean and world attention away from his brazen corruption and abuse of police powers. One of Yoon's behind the scenes string pullers is a former National Intelligence Service director with a military/intelligence resume going back to the dictatorship period trained by US Special Forces in psychological warfare. Lee Jong-chan's advanced age (born 1936) is a likely significant factor also in this retrograde cold war vintage return of nuclear weapons platforms to South Korea and increasing military exercises near the DMZ.

뛰는 핵관 위에 나는…윤석열 멘토 ‘원로 3인방’의 비밀
[제1562호] | Ilyo Shinmun 22.04.14

I've been following the nuclear issue, relations with North Korea, and military affairs on the peninsula closely for several years. I've been convinced since before Trump's fire and fury speech that Korea was the most likely place in the world for nuclear war to break out and that opinion hasn't changed with the war in Ukraine. There is a substantial risk of nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine or Kaliningrad for that matter. Putin warned several years ago as I recall that if NATO forces stepped "one inch" over the Kaliningrad border that he would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons to defend Russian territory.

But there are two key differences between the situation in eastern Europe today and on the Korean peninsula. The first is that both Russia and the US have greater flexibility in responding to "existential threats" than North Korea. Each side has substantial conventional military assets and the potential to extend their conflict geographically or in a "gray zone" without using nuclear weapons. They also have economic resources to influence and garner international support. North Korea has virtually none of this after decades of diplomatic and economic isolation and constriction that have led it to rely on the development of an credible nuclear deterrent because it has no credible conventional force alternative at this point. Currently, North Korea appears to be trying to increase economic support it receives from China, but is otherwise wary of cross border commerce and influence, in terms of both physical and political security. The lopsided nature of the balance of nuclear forces on the Korean peninsula (between the US and North Korea) make it more likely that the US would feel less restraint to employ nuclear weapons than on any Russian front.

The irony is that the diplomatic overtures of previous presidents Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump to North Korea created an atmosphere in North Korea that would have contributed to its well being, made it more receptive to negotiations, and likely would have resulted in softening of its hard line policies and the prospect of reducing the nuclear threat if not eliminating it. Increased cultural and economic ties would have influenced North Korea in positive policy directions. However, the permanent US national security state and its propaganda organs undermined this approach from the start, seeking to stigmatize both Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump. Trump lost his nerve and allowed Bolton to sabotage the diplomatic approach at the Hanoi summit. Trump faced almost universal rejection of his flexible diplomatic approach to North Korea, and just couldn't withstand the tidal wave of withering anti-North Korean criticism in the English language media. Since then the US and Yoon objective has been to eliminate the last vestiges of the understandings reached earlier at Singapore thereby creating a tense hostile atmosphere. Offers of dialogue and negotiations by Japan, the US and South Korea are simply public relations ploys and nothing more. Yoon's holy man cult leader Jeon Gong, advised him that Korea would be unified before the end of his presidency. What else does he need to know? This internet charlatan probably represents an intelligence asset. His purpose is to reinforce the regime change policy toward North Korea recommended by Yoon's political/intelligence handlers.

(Source 열린공감TV 3.21 다시 주목받는 3년 전 천공의 용산시대 예언! 윤석열 멘토로서 그의 영향력은 어디까지? ) Teacher Cheon Gong says he isn't Yoon Seok-yeol's mentor but has been "coaching" him according to his conscience. The Yongsan era begins! How far does the mentor's influence extend?

I doubt if China or Russia will allow any new sanctions to be adopted by the UN security council. They are already so severe they only worsen the tension and increase the possibility of war.

South Korea’s President Yoon meets Zelenskyy in Ukraine
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/7/15/south-koreas-president-yoon-in-...

Meanwhile back at home:
Twenty-two people have died, 14 are missing and thousands have been evacuated as a third day of torrential rain causes landslides in South Korea.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/15/torrential-rain-batters-so...

Read Valentine's Hotel Tacloban, his first book, a couple of days ago. Really, an incredible account, similar to the Bridge on the River Kwai story.

@snoopydawg

But, why? Why is the United States so far behind China in the development of critical infrastructure?

.

China doesn't allow empty land to be privately owned and held for speculation. Unused land is owned by the People for the common good. So it was a simple matter to build modern railways.

US attempts to built short route railways between cities, even in the unoccupied west have failed completely due to the exorbitant costs of buying right-of-ways from land speculators — or the refusal of someone in the chain of privately owned parcels of vacant land refusing to sell. It's capitalism at its very worst.

In China, you either use the land or you lose the land. So infrastructure opportunities are available to everyone.

.

Stunning information on why China has been able to build its high speed railways. We let our oligarch owned railways to deteriorate so badly that there is almost a derailment every GD day! Someone on naked capitalism has been keeping track. It’s really almost daily.

The Great Chessboard: China’s Economic Rise and the Collapse of America

The One Chart That Explains Everything

You see the development of a high-speed rail system that is unrivaled anywhere on earth. You see the actualization of plan to connect all parts of the country with modern-day infrastructure that reduces shipping costs, improves mobility and increases profitability. You see a vision of the 21st century in which state-directed capital links rural populations with urban centers lifting standards of living across the board. You see an expression of a new economic model that has lifted 800 million people out of poverty while paving the way for global economic integration. You see an industrial juggernaut expanding in all directions while laying the groundwork for a new century of economic integration, accelerated development and shared prosperity.

Is there a high-speed rail system in the United States that is comparable to what we see in China today?

No, there isn’t. So far, less than 50 miles of high-speed rail has been built in the United States. (“Amtrak’s Acela, which reaches 150 mph over 49.9 miles of track, is the US’s only high-speed rail service.”) As everyone knows, America’s transportation grid is obsolete and in a shambles.

But, why? Why is the United States so far behind China in the development of critical infrastructure?

It’s because China’s state-led model is vastly superior to America’s “carpetbagger” model. In China, the government is directly involved in the operation of the economy, which means that it subsidizes those industries that enhance growth and spur development.

In contrast, American capitalism is a savage free-for-all in which private owners are able to divert great sums of money into unproductive stock buybacks and other scams that do nothing to create jobs or strengthen the economy. Since 2009 US corporations have spent more than $7 trillion on stock buybacks which is an activity that boosts payouts to rich shareholders but fails to produce anything of material value. Had that capital been invested in critical infrastructure, every city in America would be linked to a gigantic webbing of high-speed rail extending from “sea to shining sea”. But that hasn’t happened, because the western model incentivizes the extraction of capital for personal enrichment rather than the development of projects that serve the common good. In China, we see how fast transformative changes can take place when a nation’s wealth is used to eradicate poverty, raise standards of living, construct state-of-the-art infrastructure, and lay the groundwork for a new century.

Here’s more from a report by the Congressional Research Service on “China’s Economic Rise…”

7 TRILLION effing dollars on stock buybacks instead of investing the money back into American infrastructure and other things that could lift millions of people out of poverty. Wasn’t it once very frowned upon that companies did that or possibly illegal?

That the government is bitching about how China is going to replace America as the leader is so fcking hypocritical since it was the government that allowed and helped corporations offshore their factories and good paying jobs for American workers. Just wtf did they think would happen?

If you haven’t seen how hollowed out just one town in America after Clinton signed NAFTA take a look at this essay. of course it’s just one town out of thousands scattered across America. And instead of the government insisting that corporations start putting their profits back into America and paying people a living wage it’s planning to attack China in a few years to stop them from replacing America. Well in my opinion they have already done that. 800 million people in China have been lifted out of poverty. Even Russia is working on lifting their people out of it by reducing how much they spend on their military. We could do that, but our military gets more money every year and they send billions to foreign countries to help keep America as the top hegemon. And what have we done about it? We keep voting for the people who have been screwing us for 50 years.

@snoopydawg

It ties in very well with an article on that site that was a podcast with Michael Hudson about the reindustrialization of america and why it is hopeless in the face of our the entrenched powers:

Michael Hudson: Why the U.S. Economy cannot Re-Industrialize
July 10, 2023 By amarynth In Michael Hudson

https://globalsouth.co/2023/07/10/michael-hudson-why-the-u-s-economy-can...

This is a podcast of Michael Hudson with Macro N Cheese and the podcast links are in the text of the transcript.

Transcript Ep 232 Macro N Cheese – Hudson

https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-232-is-the-us-a-fai...

Michael Hudson [Intro/Music]: America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor. You can’t have both. You can’t have a class war against labor and reindustrialization with the labor unionization that goes with it.

To set the stage for the discussion the first thing was to define the USA as a failed state, which it is to so many in this country. Being somewhat comfortable doesn't really help much because the basic essential services that a true state would provide do not exist. To continue:

[00:03:58] Hudson: Well, I think it's a failed state because its economy is paralyzed and we're in a debt deflation, an economic polarization, that is just transferring all wealth and income away from labor, away from industry, into really the financial sector and what I call the finance, insurance, and real estate [FIRE] sector.

And what's failed is, right now President Biden says that he wants the future to reindustrialize. He realizes that ever since the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party has been solidly behind de-industrializing the United States, and that's actually going back to the 1960s and early 70s when economists were celebrating what they called a post-industrial society. Well, what does a post-industrial society mean? It meant a society without blue collar labor, really service labor, which happened to be a society without labor unions. And the promise was that a post-industrial society was going to make everybody richer and you'd have easier working conditions, and shorter working
days, and productivity would rise, and everybody would have an easier, more prosperous life.

Well, that hasn't happened.

Later Hudson discusses the enshitification of our military products. But, as we've seen with the Instant Pot and just about any piece of furniture or "durable" product, all of our stuff is crap. As I siad in a different thread... education, healthcare, infrastructure, everything that works toward people's quality of life. In Tucker's discussion with Pence... he doesn't concern himself with stuff for us. Just about every small city in indy looks just like Greenwich NY, as shown in a different posting here. But, back on topic:

[00:14:32] Hudson: Well, you’re using a trick word: ‘military.’ Military, for the United States, is different from what the word ‘military’ meant in every other society from the beginning of time. When you say military, you think of an army fighting. You cannot conquer a country without invading it, and to invade it, you obviously need an army, you need troops. But the Americans can’t mount an army, of enough size, to occupy anybody except Grenada, or Panama, because the Vietnam War stopped the military draft. What America does have, what it calls military, is what you quite rightly linked it to: the military industrial complex. It makes arms. And weapons.

But again, these are a funny kind of weapons. Suppose you had a winery that made wine that was so good, that really wasn’t for drinking. It was for wealthy people to buy, and to trade. And as the years go by, the wine would turn to vinegar. It’s not wine for drinking. It’s wine for making a profit, a capital gain.

Well, you can say the same thing about America’s military arms, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now — or as President Biden calls it, Iraq. The arms, basically, are there to create a huge profit for Raytheon, and the other companies in the military industrial complex. They’re for buying, and they’re for giving to the Ukrainians, to let Russia blow them up.

But they’re not for fighting. They’re not for winning a war. They’re for being used up, so you have to replace them now, with yet new buying. And so the United States State Department has asked Germany and other European countries, well, you’d promised to pay 2% of your GDP on military arms to enrich our military industrial complex.

But now that we’ve given all these tanks and missiles away – Russia just blew up 12% of all the tanks in just one week – so we only have a few weeks left to go before they’re all wiped out. Because they really don’t work on the battlefield. They’re not for fighting, they’re for being blown up. Now we want you to actually increase your spending to 4%, to replenish all of the stocks, you’ve just depleted, 10 years, maybe 20 years, of your arms stocks. And you have to now replenish them very rapidly, in order to meet the NATO targets, that we and the State Department, have set. So military today isn’t really how you control other countries. America’s found it much easier to do this by financial mechanisms.

This ties in well with Ritter's description of our phenomenal Patriot systems.

OTOH, I think it's becomes obvious to so many people (present personal shitlib family excluded) that this cannot continue. The indentured will just quit.

Wow, so much interrelated information, all red flags that are screaming for a detour.

.

Why wasn’t Ukraine accepted into NATO? Because US weapons are not worth the money countries pay for them and their performance in Ukraine has blown the lid off that secret. Assange was right. Our forever wars are just done to suck up money to defense companies and for them to give kickbacks to congress members who have long been captured by defense companies. We don’t do wars to keep America safe, but to give defense companies boatloads of money. This article is worth reading in full.

The Incredible Shrinking NATO

The latest desperate move would be to give the Ukrainian air force (which, by the way, no longer exists) some older F-16 fighter jets. These can be anywhere up to 50 years old and are peculiar in having an air intake that’s very close to the ground, making them very effective as runway vacuum cleaners during takeoff. They cannot operate from the dirty and pitted runways that are typical in the Ukraine because the debris would get sucked into the engine and destroy it. If the Ukrainians attempt to pave new runways for them, the Russians would instantly spot this from the geosynchronous satellite that is permanently pointed at Ukrainian territory. Rather than put some fresh bomb craters on these new runways, they could do something more subtle: use one of their super-cheap Geranium 2’s to spread metal shaving for the F-16’s engines to vacuum up… and burn up in flight. And since these are single-engine planes, there is no possibility of limping home on the remaining engine: the pilot would have to catapult and the plane would crash. But there is an even more important reason why the idea of giving F-16’s for the Ukraine is unworkable: these planes are able to carry nuclear bombs and Russia has already announced that it would see this step as a nuclear escalation. But provoking a nuclear conflict with Russia is verboten, so F-16’s are a no-go.

Why is the failure of relentlessly propagandized Western weaponry more important than just about anything else, including the increasingly dire state of Western finances, the ridiculous failure of anti-Russian sanctions, the obscenely huge numbers of Ukrainian casualties or the general Western fatigue with all things Ukrainian and especially with the flood of Ukrainian refugees that the West can no longer cope with?

The reason is simple: NATO is not a defensive organization (remember, USSR has been gone for over 30 years); nor is it an offensive organization (well, it did bomb Serbia and a few other relatively defenseless countries, but it can’t possibly think about facing off against Russia or any other well-armed nation).

Rather, NATO is a captive buyers’ club for US-made weapons. That is what vaunted NATO standards, with which the Ukraine must comply before it is deemed worthy to be invited to join NATO, are all about: to comply with these standards, your weapons have to be mostly US-made. That is also the reason for all of the various wars of choice, from Serbia to Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya and Syria: these were demonstration projects for US weapons, with the additional goal of using up the weapons and the munitions so that the Pentagon and the rest of NATO would have to reorder them. The geopolitical rationales for these military conflicts are mere rationalizations. For instance, between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2.5 million tons of bombs on Laos during 580,000 bombing sorties—equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. What was the geopolitical rationale? Nobody can even remember if there ever was one. But those bombs were about to expire and needed to be used up and reordered to keep the money flowing.

In response to such strange inducements, US-made weapons tend to be overly complex (so that their makers can charge more for the useless extra features) and rather fragile (never tested against a peer adversary like Russia or China, or even against Iran), developed slowly (to clean up on R&D funding), built slowly (because what’s the rush?) and very high-maintenance (so that US defense contractors can get even richer delivering spare parts and service). These weapons were supposed to be tested every so gently by giving hell to backward tribesmen armed with old Kalashnikovs and RPGs

@exindy

Thanks for the link. I felt completely cleansed by the second paragraph he wrote. Someone needed to say these things and make these declarations.

Furthermore, all money related institutions are to be made public utilities--markets will remain markets and perform their economic function, but their purpose is to serve humanity first .... Material development must serve humanity and the environment, for the reality is Nature is the real boss as we exist thanks to Nature.

I would only add: We must always be on the lookout for enlightened thinkers and philosopher kings. They will not be politicians and must be drafted to lead us.

Those of us who follow MOA are impressed by quite a few of the commentors. Karlof1 voiced many opinions that I shared. He started his substack a week or so ago and seems to be hitting his stride.

BTW, I think it helps that he hails from the Pacific coast and is very much immersed in our tribulations. Tho this current piece is directed toward dealing with the climate catastrophe it is very much in tune with all of our current societal failings.

Sunday Sermon: To Distract and Fool
The subversion of discourse from reaching the root of the problem

https://karlof1.substack.com/p/sunday-sermon-to-distract-and-fool

What was and remains free within the Outlaw US Empire is the freedom to plunder and exploit at will because of the freedom from regulation, except in very rare and extremely limited instances. And historically, that's been THE KEY for 4,000+ years, excepting those rare moments when "tyrants" allied with commoners to regulate the actions of the rich and powerful--The Money Power. Those who are reading it will agree that the best subtitle for Hudson's trilogy on Debt might be "A History of Creditor Rule and Ruin."

So, "what is to be done"? The Money Power must be stripped of its power, governments purged of its influence, very strong anti-corruption and regulatory enforcement laws must be enacted AND strictly enforced with punishment being extreme--forfeiture of all wealth and life imprisonment in most cases. Furthermore, all money related institutions are to be made public utilities--markets will remain markets and perform their economic function, but their purpose is to serve humanity first. And that leads us to the need to rewrite the verbiage of corporate charters so that they are made to first serve the public and second protect the environment prior to providing any remuneration to owners. And given that the vast majority of markets are those that can be considered natural monopolies, all such institutions within those markets must be public utilities. Material development must serve humanity and the environment, for the reality is Nature is the real boss as we exist thanks to Nature.

Extreme? Not at all when we examine the damage wrought by the Money Power, particularly the wars it creates to make A Fistful of a Few Dollars More, Ukraine being a prime example as well as the continuing Plunder of Syria. Why is genuine democracy so feared by the Money Power over the past 4,000+ years? Because that power knows it would never be allowed to exist in such a polity where the Four Freedoms truly reigned. And so we are littered with trolls and fleas of all sorts as we've seen in this thread whose agenda is to keep the sort of thinking I just elaborated out of discussion threads as readers might get ideas. Always the fingers are pointed this way or that way at some other thing that isn't anywhere near the root of the problem. The problem is the existence of the Money Power and its disease, Pleonexia, and its control over government that emasculates it from even attempting to enforce what laws are already in place--and within the Outlaw US Empire we actually do have some laws that haven't been nullified: yet.

I understand he is having some critical surgery next week. May he do very well.

And with that I am off to read about life in the Outer Hebrides. Please stay safe.