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[–]mzyps 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Take the Ukraine and the International Monetary Fund. Under the IMF’s operating rules – number one, it cannot make loans to a country involved in war. You may have noticed there’s a war going on in Ukraine right now. Number two it can only make loans to a country that it calculates has the ability to repay the loan. There is no way in the world that the Ukraine can possibly pay any of the money that it’s borrowed from the IMF because it’s not going to exist as the Ukraine anymore. The United States says ah yes Ukraine can pay because we are going to ask all of the countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America to a break off trade completely with Russia, China, Iran and any country that does not join our pressure to make Russia pay all of the money that Ukraine owes to the IMF and to other foreign investors and all of the money that the IMF has paid into the bank accounts of Zelenski and the kleptocrats is now going to be a Russian liability.

[...]

MH: “That’s the idea. When President Biden said in February of last year 2022. He said that this war in Ukraine is not about Ukraine. This is the beginning of a two-decade war, maybe three decades. He said, this war will go on not only until we defeat Russia, but once we destroy Russia we can then go against our number one enemy China. It’ll take 20 or 30 years for us to uh destroy China and it’s going to take all of our allies an enormous fight of their own Army and their own citizens dying and their own economic resources to support the U.S encirclement and sanctions and its attempt to isolate the Chinese Community along with the entire Shanghai Cooperation Organization: Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the whole rest of the world is to be isolated somehow by the United States without its own Army and without being a creditor anymore and without having its own industrial base. Nobody would have believed a science fiction story that would have said that an economy with all of the liabilities and negative features that the United States had could be any kind of a power at all except being like England after World War II which is the position America is in economically. But what makes America different from England and World War II is America doesn’t have a higher power that’s fighting against it. America is Its Own Worst Enemy fighting against itself instead of other countries fighting against this, so uh you’re having the dynamic of this International conflict that’s dividing the world into two – on the one hand the United States and Europe on the golden billion, “the Garden”, and on the other hand the rest of the two-thirds of the world’s population, the global majority, which America calls “The Jungle” which is to be cut down and clear-cut and privatized for the benefit of “the Garden”.”

[–]ageingrockstar 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm a big fan of Michael Hudson. I'm not much of a fan of Yves taking his work and putting her own foward in front of it, as she always seems to. I found her forward this time actually quite inane. She's making all sorts of unjustified assumptions about what a 'BRICS currency' would be, when no-one yet actually knows, and then criticises it based on her own, probably false assumptions (e.g. that it would require setting up a central 'BRICS bank', that there should be membership requirements to be able to join BRICS and then use it, etc). I highly doubt that BRICS is going to make the same mistakes that the EU did with the Euro, primarily because BRICS does not want to be anything like the EU. Finally, she quotes an utter idiot extensively, Jim O'Neill, just because he came up with the terms 'BRICS' for a Goldman paper. No, that does not make him the BRICS 'creator', as she labels him. I doubt the BRICS name will last anyway, as the grouping expands. I came away stupider after reading her forward, which I only read because it was attached to a Michael Hudson piece and which she's riding the coat-talis on.

Here's the same interview (transcript) on Michael's own site, without the stupid forward :

https://michael-hudson.com/2023/08/creating-an-independent-world/

[–]RandomCollection[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

https://archive.is/TxukV

It's no mystery why the US has forced the rest of the world to move away from the US dollar.