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style="display:none;font-size:1px;color:#333333;line-height:1px;max-height:0px;max-width:0px;opacity:0;overflow:hidden;">Economist
Michael Hudson describes how China created an alternative to the
Western neoliberal order, and how the Global South can challenge
the rent extraction of US-centered financial colonialism.</div>
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Global Majority can free itself from US
financial colonialism</a></h1>
<h3 class="subtitle"
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Michael Hudson describes how China created an
alternative to the Western neoliberal order, and
how the Global South can challenge the rent
extraction of US-centered financial colonialism.</h3>
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<p
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</span><a
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<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Industrial
capitalism was revolutionary in its fight to
free Europe\u2019s economies and parliaments from the
hereditary privileges and vested interests that
survived from feudalism. To make their
manufactures competitive in world markets,
industrialists needed to end the land rent paid
to Europe\u2019s landed aristocracies, the economic
rents extracted by trade monopolies, and
interest paid to bankers who played no role in
financing industry. These </span><em>rentier</em><span>
incomes add to the economy\u2019s price structure,
raising the living wage and other business
expenses, thus eating into profits.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
20</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>
century saw the classical aim of clearing away
these economic rents rolled back in Europe, the
United States, and other Western countries. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">However,
today, land and natural-resource rents in private
hands are still rising and even receiving special
tax advantages. Basic infrastructure and other
natural monopolies are being privatized by the
financial sector \u2014 which is largely responsible
for carving up and de-industrializing economies on
behalf of its real estate and monopoly customers,
who pay out most of their rental income as
interest to bankers and bondholders.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">What
has survived from the policies by which Europe\u2019s
industrial powers and the United States built up
their own manufacturing is free trade. Britain
implemented free trade after a 30-year fight on
behalf of its industry against the landed
aristocracy, aimed at ending the protectionist
agricultural tariffs, the Corn Laws, which had
been enacted in 1815 to prevent opening the home
market to low-priced food imports, which would
have reduced farming rents. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">After
repealing these laws in 1846 to lower the cost of
living, Britain offered free-trade agreements to
countries seeking access to its market in exchange
for these countries not protecting their industry
against British exports. The aim was to deter less
industrialized countries from working up their own
raw materials.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>In
such countries, Europe\u2019s foreign investors
sought to buy rent-yielding natural resources
headed by mineral and land rights, and basic
infrastructure headed by railroads and canals.
This created a diametric contrast between
rent-avoidance in the industrial nations and
rent-seeking in their colonies and other host
countries, while European bankers used debt
leverage to gain fiscal control of former
colonies who had won independence in the 19</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>
and 20</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>
centuries. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Under
pressure to pay the foreign debts that were run up
to finance their trade deficits, development
attempts, and deepening debt dependency, debtor
countries were obliged to relinquish fiscal
control of their economies to bondholders, banks,
and creditor-nation governments, which pressed
them to privatize their basic infrastructure
monopolies. The effect was to prevent them from
using revenue from their natural endowments to
develop a broad economic base for prosperous
development.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Just
as Britain, France, and Germany aimed to free
their economies from feudalism\u2019s legacy of the
vested interests with rent extraction privileges,
most of today\u2019s Global Majority countries need to
free themselves from the rent and debt overhead
inherited from European colonialism and creditor
control. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">By
the 1950s these countries were being called \u201cless
developed\u201d or, even more patronizingly,
\u201cdeveloping.\u201d But the combination of foreign debt
and free trade has blocked them from developing
along the balanced public/private lines that
Western Europe and the United States followed. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
tax policy and other legislation of these
countries has been shaped by U.S. and European
pressure to observe international trade and
investment rules that perpetuate geopolitical
domination by Western bankers and rent-extracting
investors to control their national patrimony.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
euphemism \u201chost economy\u201d is appropriate for these
countries, because the Western economic
penetration of them resembles a biological
parasite feeding off its host.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Seeking
to maintain this relationship, the U.S. and
European governments are blocking attempts by
these countries to follow the path that Europe\u2019s
industrial nations and the United States took
for their own economies with their 19</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>-century
political and fiscal reforms that empowered
their own takeoff. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Without
these countries adopting fiscal and political
reforms aimed at developing their own
sovereignty and prospects for growth on the
basis of their own national patrimony of land,
natural resources and basic infrastructure, the
world economy will remain bifurcated between
Western </span><em>rentier </em><span>nations
and their Global Majority hosts and held subject
to neoliberal orthodoxy.</span></p>
<h3 class="header-anchor-post"
style="position: relative;font-family: 'SF Pro Display',-apple-system-headline,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,'Apple Color Emoji','Segoe UI Emoji','Segoe UI Symbol';font-weight: bold;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: antialiased;-webkit-appearance: optimizelegibility;-moz-appearance: optimizelegibility;appearance: optimizelegibility;margin: 1em 0 0.625em 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 1.16em;font-size: 1.375em;">The
success of China\u2019s model poses a threat to the
neoliberal order</h3>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">When
U.S. political leaders single out China as an
existential enemy of the West, it is not as a
military threat but for offering a successful
economic alternative to today\u2019s U.S.-sponsored
neoliberal world order. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>That
order was supposed to represent the End of
History, succeeding through its logic of free
trade, government deregulation, and
international investment free of capital
controls, while detouring away from industrial
capitalism\u2019s anti-</span><em>rentier</em><span>
policies. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">We
can now see the absurdity in this self-satisfying
evangelical view that had emerged just as Western
economies were deindustrializing, as a result of
the dynamics of their neoliberal finance
capitalism. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
vested financial and other </span><em>rentier</em><span>
interests are rejecting not only China but the
logic of industrial capitalism as described by
its own 19</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>-century
classical economists.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Western
neoliberal observers have closed their eyes to
recognizing the ways in which China\u2019s \u201csocialism
with Chinese characteristics\u201d has achieved its
success by a logic similar to that of the
industrial capitalism advocated by classical
economists to minimize</span><em> rentier</em><span>
income. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Most
late 19</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>-century
economic writers expected industrial capitalism
to evolve into socialism of one form or another,
as the role of public investment and regulation
increased. Freeing economies and their
governments from control by landowners and
creditors was the common denominator of the
social-democratic socialism of John Stuart Mill,
the libertarian socialism of Henry George
focusing on the land tax, and the cooperative
mutual-aid socialism of Peter Kropotkin, as well
as Marxism.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Where
China has gone further than earlier socialist
mixed-economy reforms has been in keeping money
and credit creation in the hands of government,
along with basic infrastructure and natural
resources. </p>
<div class="captioned-image-container-static"
style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px;margin: 32px auto;">
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border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"
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style="mso-padding-alt: 1em 0 1.6em;">
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<tr>
<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
<td class="content" align="left"
width="650" style="text-align: center;"><a
class="image-link" target="_blank"
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</figure>
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<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Fear
that other governments might follow China\u2019s lead
has led U.S. and other Western
finance-capitalist ideologues to view China as a
threat by providing a model for economic reforms
that are precisely the opposite of what the 20</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>
century\u2019s pro-</span><em>rentier</em><span>,
anti-government ideology fought against.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
foreign debt overhead owed to U.S. and other
Western creditors, and enabled by the 1945-2025
international geopolitical rules designed by U.S.
diplomats at Bretton Woods in 1944, obliges the
Global South and other countries to recover their
economic sovereignty by freeing themselves from
their foreign (mainly dollarized) banking and
financial burden. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">These
countries have the same land-rent problem that
Europe\u2019s industrial capitalism faced, but their
land and resource rents are mainly owned by
multinational companies and other foreign
appropriators of their oil and mineral rights,
forests, and latifundia plantations, who extract
resource rents by emptying out the world\u2019s oil and
mineral resources and cutting down its forests.</p>
<h3 class="header-anchor-post"
style="position: relative;font-family: 'SF Pro Display',-apple-system-headline,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,'Apple Color Emoji','Segoe UI Emoji','Segoe UI Symbol';font-weight: bold;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: antialiased;-webkit-appearance: optimizelegibility;-moz-appearance: optimizelegibility;appearance: optimizelegibility;margin: 1em 0 0.625em 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 1.16em;font-size: 1.375em;">Taxing
economic rent is a precondition for economic
sovereignty</h3>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">A
precondition for Global South countries to gain
economic autonomy is to follow the advice of the
classical economists and tax the largest sources
of rental income \u2013 land rent, monopoly rent, and
financial returns \u2013 instead of letting them be
sent abroad. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Taxing
these rents would help stabilize their balance of
payments, while providing their governments with
revenue to finance their infrastructure needs and
the related social spending needed to subsidize
their economic modernization. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">That
is how Britain, France, Germany and the United
States established their own industrial,
agricultural, and financial supremacy. This is not
a radical socialist policy; it always has been a
central element of industrial capitalist
development.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Recapturing
a country\u2019s land and natural-resource rents as
its fiscal base would enable it to avoid taxing
labor and industry. A country would not need to
formally nationalize its land and natural
resources outright; it simply needs to tax the
economic rent over and above actual \u201cearned
profits,\u201d to cite the principle of Adam Smith
and his 19</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>-century
successors that this rent is the natural tax
base.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">But
neoliberal ideology calls such taxation of rent,
and the regulation of monopolies or other market
phenomena, an intrusive interference into the
\u201cfree market.\u201d</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>This
defense of </span><em>rentier</em><span> income
inverts the classical definition of a free
market. The classical economists defined a free
market as one free </span><em>from</em><span>
economic rent, not as one free </span><em>for </em><span>the
extraction of economic rent, let alone as
freedom for creditor-nation governments to
create a \u201crules-based order\u201d to facilitate
foreign rent extraction and stifle the
development of financially and trade-dependent
host countries.</span></p>
<h3 class="header-anchor-post"
style="position: relative;font-family: 'SF Pro Display',-apple-system-headline,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,'Apple Color Emoji','Segoe UI Emoji','Segoe UI Symbol';font-weight: bold;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: antialiased;-webkit-appearance: optimizelegibility;-moz-appearance: optimizelegibility;appearance: optimizelegibility;margin: 1em 0 0.625em 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 1.16em;font-size: 1.375em;">Debt
remission is a precondition for economic
sovereignty</h3>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
fight by countries to free themselves from their
foreign debt overhead is much harder than
Europe\u2019s 19</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>-century
fight to end the privileges of its landed
aristocracy (and less successfully, of its
bankers), because it is international in scope,
and is now confronted by a creditor-nation
alliance to maintain the system of financial
colonization created two centuries ago, as
former colonies sought to finance their
independence by borrowing from foreign bankers.
</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Starting
in the 1820s, newly independent countries like
Haiti, Mexico, and other Latin America nations, as
well as Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, and other former
Ottoman colonies, won nominal political freedom
from colonialist control. But to build up their
own industry they had to take on foreign debt \u2013 on
which they almost immediately defaulted, which
enabled their creditors to establish monetary
authorities in charge of their fiscal policy. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
governments of these countries were turned into
collection agents for international bankers by
the late 19</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>
century. Financial dependency on bankers and
bondholders replaced colonial dependency,
obliging debtor countries to give fiscal
priority to foreign creditors.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">World
War II enabled many of these countries to
accumulate substantial foreign monetary reserves
as a result of supplying raw materials to the
belligerents. But the post-war order designed by
U.S. diplomats, based on free trade and free
capital movements, drained these savings, and
obliged the Global South and other countries to
borrow to cover their trade deficits. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
resulting foreign debts soon came to exceed the
ability of these countries to pay \u2013 that is, to
pay without surrendering to the destructive IMF
demands for austerity that blocked the investment
needed to raise their productivity and living
standards. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">There
was no way that they could meet their own
development needs to invest in basic
infrastructure and provide industrial and
agricultural subsidies, public education, health
care, and other basic social spending that is
characterized by the leading industrial nations.
This still remains the case.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Their
choice today, therefore, is between paying their
foreign debts \u2013 at the cost of blocking their own
development \u2013 or claiming that these debts are
odious and insisting that they be written off. </p>
<div class="captioned-image-container-static"
style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px;margin: 32px auto;">
<figure style="width: 100%;margin: 0 auto;">
<table class="image-wrapper" width="100%"
border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"
data-component-name="Image2ToDOMStatic"
style="mso-padding-alt: 1em 0 1.6em;">
<tbody>
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<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
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width="1456" style="text-align: center;"><a
class="image-link" target="_blank"
href="https://substack.com/redirect/5dc75575-0184-4323-8d11-abe602cd3cba?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="position: relative;flex-direction: column;align-items: center;padding: 0;width: auto;height: auto;border: none;text-decoration: none;display: block;margin: 0;"
moz-do-not-send="true"><img
class="wide-image"
data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/5a7d0751-b535-4b83-8e1a-edc385d07174_1608x1329.png","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":1203,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":221559,"alt":null,"title":null,"type":"image/png","href":null,"belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":"https://www.geopoliticaleconomy.report/i/168565388?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5a7d0751-b535-4b83-8e1a-edc385d07174_1608x1329.png","isProcessing":false,"align":null,"offset":false}"
alt="" width="550"
height="454.42994505494505"
src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SPMS!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5a7d0751-b535-4b83-8e1a-edc385d07174_1608x1329.png"
style="border: none !important;vertical-align: middle;display: block;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;height: auto;margin-bottom: 0;width: auto !important;max-width: 100% !important;margin: 0 auto;"
moz-do-not-send="true"></a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</figure>
</div>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">At
issue is whether debtor countries will gain the
sovereignty that is supposed to characterize an
international economy of equals, free of foreign
post-colonial control over their tax and trade
policies, as well as their national patrimony.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Their
self-determination can only be achieved by joining
together in a collective front. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Donald
Trump\u2019s tariff aggression has catalyzed this
process by drastically reducing the U.S. market
for exports from debtor countries, preventing them
from obtaining the dollars to pay their bonds and
bank debts, so these won\u2019t be paid in any event. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
world is now busy de-dollarizing.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
need to create an alternative to the U.S.-centered
post-war order was expressed in 1955 at the
Bandung Conference in Indonesia, and then later by
the Non-Aligned Movement. But these countries
lacked a critical mass of self-sufficiency among
themselves to act together. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Attempts
to create a New International Economic Order in
the 1960s faced the same problem. Countries were
not industrially, agriculturally, or financially
strong enough to \u201cgo it alone.\u201d</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Today\u2019s
Western debt crisis, de-industrialization, and
coercive weaponization of foreign trade and
financial sanctions under the dollarized
international financial system, capped by the
\u201cAmerica First\u201d tariff policy, have created an
urgent need for countries to collectively seek
economic sovereignty, to become independent from
U.S. and European control of the international
economy. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
collective BRICS+, with Russia and China taking
the lead, have just begun talking about making
such an attempt.</p>
<div class="captioned-image-container-static"
style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px;margin: 32px auto;">
<figure style="width: 100%;margin: 0 auto;">
<table class="image-wrapper" width="100%"
border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"
data-component-name="Image2ToDOMStatic"
style="mso-padding-alt: 1em 0 1.6em;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
<td class="content" align="left"
width="1456" style="text-align: center;"><a
class="image-link" target="_blank"
href="https://substack.com/redirect/6f5cc832-e99d-4a88-bf9d-78e24d3a5138?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="position: relative;flex-direction: column;align-items: center;padding: 0;width: auto;height: auto;border: none;text-decoration: none;display: block;margin: 0;"
moz-do-not-send="true"><img
class="wide-image"
data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/5b7d3d36-5ed0-43aa-911c-5b7935cb2f22_7872x4314.jpeg","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":798,"width":1456,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":22568483,"alt":null,"title":null,"type":"image/jpeg","href":null,"belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":"https://www.geopoliticaleconomy.report/i/168565388?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b7d3d36-5ed0-43aa-911c-5b7935cb2f22_7872x4314.jpeg","isProcessing":false,"align":null,"offset":false}"
alt="" width="550"
height="301.4423076923077"
src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GMQ5!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b7d3d36-5ed0-43aa-911c-5b7935cb2f22_7872x4314.jpeg"
style="border: none !important;vertical-align: middle;display: block;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;height: auto;margin-bottom: 0;width: auto !important;max-width: 100% !important;margin: 0 auto;"
moz-do-not-send="true"></a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<figcaption class="image-caption"
style="box-sizing: content-box;color: #777777;font-size: 14px;line-height: 20px;font-weight: 400;letter-spacing: -.15px;margin-top: 8px;width: 70%;padding-left: 15%;padding-right: 15%;text-align: center;">The
2024 BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia</figcaption></figure>
</div>
<h3 class="header-anchor-post"
style="position: relative;font-family: 'SF Pro Display',-apple-system-headline,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,'Apple Color Emoji','Segoe UI Emoji','Segoe UI Symbol';font-weight: bold;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: antialiased;-webkit-appearance: optimizelegibility;-moz-appearance: optimizelegibility;appearance: optimizelegibility;margin: 1em 0 0.625em 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 1.16em;font-size: 1.375em;">China\u2019s
success has made a global alternative attainable</h3>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
great catalyst for countries to take control of
their national development has been China. As
indicated above, its industrial socialism has
largely achieved the classical aim of industrial
capitalism of minimizing </span><em>rentier</em><span>
overhead, above all by publicly creating money
to finance tangible growth. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Keeping
money and credit creation in government hands,
via China\u2019s state-owned banks, prevents
financial and other </span><em>rentier</em><span>
interests from taking over the economy and
subjecting it to the financial overhead that has
characterized Western economies. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">China\u2019s
successful alternative for allocating credit
avoids making purely financial gains at the
expense of tangible capital formation and living
standards. That is why it is viewed as an
existential threat to the current Western banking
model.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Western
financial systems are overseen by central banks
that have been made independent from the Treasury
and government regulatory \u201cinterference.\u201d Their
role is to provide the commercial banking system\u2019s
liquidity as it creates interest-bearing debt,
mainly for the purpose of making wealth
financially by debt leveraging (asset-price
inflation), not for productive capital formation.</p>
<div class="captioned-image-container-static"
style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px;margin: 32px auto;">
<figure style="width: 100%;margin: 0 auto;">
<table class="image-wrapper" width="100%"
border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"
data-component-name="Image2ToDOMStatic"
style="mso-padding-alt: 1em 0 1.6em;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
<td class="content" align="left"
width="880" style="text-align: center;"><a
class="image-link" target="_blank"
href="https://substack.com/redirect/5dfb748d-315e-4327-ae0a-555415280e35?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="position: relative;flex-direction: column;align-items: center;padding: 0;width: auto;height: auto;border: none;text-decoration: none;display: block;margin: 0;"
moz-do-not-send="true"><img
class="wide-image"
data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/7ebb5776-9a1c-4e47-9e36-0eb85d5e26ce_880x570.png","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":570,"width":880,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":37946,"alt":null,"title":null,"type":"image/png","href":null,"belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":"https://www.geopoliticaleconomy.report/i/168565388?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7ebb5776-9a1c-4e47-9e36-0eb85d5e26ce_880x570.png","isProcessing":false,"align":null,"offset":false}"
alt="" width="550" height="356.25"
src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Mhz0!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7ebb5776-9a1c-4e47-9e36-0eb85d5e26ce_880x570.png"
style="border: none !important;vertical-align: middle;display: block;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;height: auto;margin-bottom: 0;width: auto !important;max-width: 100% !important;margin: 0 auto;"
moz-do-not-send="true"></a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</figure>
</div>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Capital
gains \u2013 rising prices for housing and other real
estate, stocks, and bonds \u2013 are much larger than
GDP growth. They can be made easily and quickly by
banks creating more credit to bid up prices for
buyers of these assets. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Instead
of the financial system being industrialized,
Western industrial corporations have become
financialized, and that has occurred along lines
that have deindustrialized the U.S. and European
economies.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Financialized
wealth can be made without being part of the
production process. Interest, late charges, other
financial fees and capital gains are not a
\u201cproduct,\u201d yet are counted as such in today\u2019s GDP
statistics. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Carrying
charges on the rising debt overhead are </span><em>transfer
payments</em><span> to the finance sector, by
labor and businesses, out of wages and profits
earned by actual production. That shrinks the
income available for spending on the products
produced by labor and capital, leaving economies
debt-ridden and deindustrialized.</span></p>
<h3 class="header-anchor-post"
style="position: relative;font-family: 'SF Pro Display',-apple-system-headline,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,'Apple Color Emoji','Segoe UI Emoji','Segoe UI Symbol';font-weight: bold;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: antialiased;-webkit-appearance: optimizelegibility;-moz-appearance: optimizelegibility;appearance: optimizelegibility;margin: 1em 0 0.625em 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 1.16em;font-size: 1.375em;">The
strategy of creditor-rentier nations to prevent
withdrawal from their global control</h3>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
broadest strategy to block countries from
avoiding the </span><em>rentier</em><span>
burden has been to wage an ideological campaign
from the educational system to mass media. The
aim is to control the narrative in a way that
depicts government as an oppressive Leviathan,
an inherently bureaucratic autocracy. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Western
\u201cdemocracy\u201d is defined not so much politically as
economically, as a free market whose resources are
allocated by a banking and financial sector
independent of regulatory oversight. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Governments
strong enough to limit financial and other </span><em>rentier</em><span>
wealth in the public interest are demonized as
autocracies or \u201cplanned economics\u201d \u2014 as if
shifting credit and resource allocation to the
financial centers of Wall Street, London, Paris,
and Japan does not result in an economy planned
by the financial sector in its own interest,
with the aim of creating monetary fortunes. Its
aim is not to improve the overall economy and
living standards.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Global
Majority officials and administrators who have
studied economics at U.S. and European
universities have been indoctrinated with a
value-free (that is, rent-free) pro-</span><em>rentier</em><span>
ideology to frame the way they think about how
economies work. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">This
narrative excludes consideration of how debt
polarizes economies by growing exponentially at
compound interest. Also excluded from mainstream
economic logic is the classical contrast between
productive and unproductive credit and investment,
and the related distinction between earned income
(wages and profits, the main components of value)
and unearned income (economic rent).</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Beyond
this ideological campaign, neoliberal diplomacy
uses military force, regime change, and control
of the main international bureaucracies
associated with the United Nations, the IMF, and
World Bank \u2014 and a more covert network of
non-government organizations (NGOs) \u2014 to prevent
countries from withdrawing from today\u2019s pro-</span><em>rentier</em><span>
fiscal rules and pro-creditor laws. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
United States has taken the lead in using force
and regime change against governments that would
tax away or otherwise limit rent extraction.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">It
should be noted that few early socialists (except
anarchists) advocated violence in pursuit of their
reforms. It has been the vested interests,
unwilling to accept loss of the privileges that
are the basis of their fortunes, who have not
hesitated to use violence to defend their wealth
and power against attempts at reform to check
their privileges.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">To
be sovereign, nations must create an alternative
that enables them to be in charge of their own
economic, monetary, and political development. But
American diplomacy views any attempt to enact the
necessary political and tax reforms and strong
government regulatory authority as posing an
existential threat to U.S. control over
international finance and trade. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">This
raises the question of whether it is possible to
achieve reforms and a strong public economy
without war. It is natural for countries to wonder
whether they can achieve economic sovereignty
without a revolution, such as the Soviet Union,
China, and other countries that fought to end
their domination by their foreign-supported
landlords and creditors.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
only way to protect economic sovereignty against
military threats is to join an alliance for mutual
support, since individual countries can be
isolated in the way that Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran
have been \u2014 or destroyed, like Libya. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">As
Benjamin Franklin put matters, \u201cIf we don\u2019t hang
together, we will hang separately.\u201d</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">American
writers characterize the attempt of other
countries to join together to achieve economic
sovereignty as a civilizational war. While this is
indeed a civilizational contest, it is the United
States and its allies that are waging aggression,
against countries trying to withdraw from a system
that has provided the United States and Europe
with a huge inflow of economic rents and debt
service from host countries subject to U.S.-backed
diplomacy.</p>
<h3 class="header-anchor-post"
style="position: relative;font-family: 'SF Pro Display',-apple-system-headline,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,'Apple Color Emoji','Segoe UI Emoji','Segoe UI Symbol';font-weight: bold;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: antialiased;-webkit-appearance: optimizelegibility;-moz-appearance: optimizelegibility;appearance: optimizelegibility;margin: 1em 0 0.625em 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 1.16em;font-size: 1.375em;">How
U.S.-centered financial colonialism replaced
European colonial occupation</h3>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">After
World War II, the era of settler-state colonialism
gave way to financial colonialism, with the
international economy dollarized under U.S.
leadership. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
Bretton Woods rules established by 1945 enabled
multinational corporations to keep economic
rents for land, natural resources and public
infrastructure out of domestic fiscal reach.
Governments were reduced to the role of acting
as collection agents for foreign creditors and
as protectors of foreign investors from
democratic attempts to tax </span><em>rentier</em><span>
wealth.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
United States was able to weaponize world trade by
monopolizing oil exports through U.S. and allied
oil companies (the Seven Sisters), while U.S. and
European agricultural protectionism and World Bank
\u201caid\u201d policy steered food-deficit countries to
focus on tropical plantation crops instead of
grain to feed themselves. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">President
Bill Clinton\u2019s 1994 NAFTA free-trade agreement
swamped Mexico\u2019s market with low-priced U.S. farm
exports (highly subsidized by strong government
support). Mexican grain production plummeted,
leaving it food-dependent.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>To
block governments from taxing or even fining
foreign investors to recover compensation for
damages to their countries, today\u2019s </span><em>rentier</em><span>
powers have created Investor-State Dispute
Settlement (ISDS) courts requiring governments
to compensate foreign investors for increasing
taxes or imposing regulations that reduce
foreign-owned income. (I provide the details of
this in Chapter 7 of my 2022 book </span><em><a
href="https://substack.com/redirect/212f719d-9fec-47c5-bdbf-747c6365236d?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="color: rgb(54,55,55);text-decoration: underline;"
moz-do-not-send="true">The Destiny of
Civilization</a></em><span>.)</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">This
system blocks national sovereignty, including by
preventing host countries from taxing the economic
rent of their land and natural resources owned by
foreigners. The effect is to make these resources
part of the investor-nation economy, not their
own. (The Saudi oil company Aramco, for instance,
was not a corporately distinct corporate affiliate
but a branch of Standard Oil of New York (ESSO).
This legal nicety meant that its income and
expenses were consolidated into the parent
company\u2019s U.S. balance sheet. That enabled it to
receive a tax credit for the \u201cdepletion allowance\u201d
for oil, rendering the company effectively free of
U.S. income tax, although it was Saudi oil that
was being depleted.)</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Other
nations permitted the United States to dictate the
post-World War II order, with it promising
generous aid to support free trade, peace, and
post-colonial national sovereignty, as spelled out
in the United Nations Charter. But the United
States squandered its wealth on military spending
abroad and financial wealth addiction at home. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">That
has left America\u2019s post-industrial power based
mainly on its ability to harm other countries with
chaos if they do not accept the U.S. \u201crules-based
order\u201d designed to extract tribute from them.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
U.S. imposes protectionist tariffs and import
quotas at will, and subsidizes agriculture and key
technologies as potential global high-tech
monopolies, while forbidding other countries from
implementing such \u201csocialist\u201d or \u201cautocratic\u201d
policies to become more competitive. The result is
a double standard in which the U.S. \u201crules-based
order\u201d (its own rules) replaces adherence to
international law.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">U.S.
agricultural price support policy initiated under
Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s provides a good
example of double standards. It made farming the
most heavily subsidized and protected sector. It
became the model for the European Economic
Community\u2019s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP)
introduced in 1962. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">However,
U.S. diplomacy opposes the attempts of other
countries, especially Global South countries, to
impose their own protectionist subsidies and
import quotas aimed at achieving self-sufficiency
in basic food production \u2014 while U.S. \u201caid
lending\u201d and the World Bank have (as indicated
above) supported the exportation of tropical
plantation crops by Global South countries by
lending for transportation and port development.
U.S. policy has consistently opposed family-owned
farming and land reform throughout Latin America
and other Global South countries, often with
violence.</p>
<h3 class="header-anchor-post"
style="position: relative;font-family: 'SF Pro Display',-apple-system-headline,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,'Apple Color Emoji','Segoe UI Emoji','Segoe UI Symbol';font-weight: bold;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: antialiased;-webkit-appearance: optimizelegibility;-moz-appearance: optimizelegibility;appearance: optimizelegibility;margin: 1em 0 0.625em 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 1.16em;font-size: 1.375em;">Moves
toward a multipolar world order</h3>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">It
is not surprising that, inasmuch as Russia has
long been the United States\u2019 main military
adversary, it has taken the lead in protesting
against the unipolar U.S. order. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Advocating
a multipolar alternative to the U.S. neoliberal
order in June 2025, Russian Foreign Minister </span><a
href="https://substack.com/redirect/1e56f609-55d6-4f97-b5e2-0e0071e48b7e?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="color: rgb(54,55,55);text-decoration: underline;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Sergey Lavrov described
the post-colonial economic subjugation</a><span>
of the countries that achieved political
independence from colonialist rule in the 19</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>
and 20</span><sup
style="font-size: 0.75em;line-height: 0;">th</sup><span>
centuries but which are now facing the next task
needed to complete their liberation:</span></p>
<blockquote
style="border-left: 4px solid #ad0000;margin: 20px 0;padding: 0;">
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);margin-left: 20px;line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Our
African friends are paying more and more
attention to the fact that their entire
economies are still largely based on siphoning
off natural resources from these countries. In
fact, all value added is produced and pocketed
by the former Western metropoles and other
European Union and NATO members.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);margin-left: 20px;line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">\u2026</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);margin-left: 20px;line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
West is using illegal unilateral sanctions,
which increasingly become the harbinger of a
military attack, as this has happened in
Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya and is now happening
in Iran, as well as the instruments of unfair
competition, initiating tariff wars, seizing
other countries\u2019 sovereign assets and taking
advantage of the role of their currencies and
payment systems. The West itself has actually
buried the globalization model, which it
developed after the Cold War to promote its
interests.</p>
</blockquote>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Marco
Rubio made the same point in the U.S. Senate
hearings to confirm him as Donald Trump\u2019s
Secretary of State, explaining that the \u201cpostwar
global order is not just obsolete; it is now a
weapon being used against us.\u201d</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">Violating
the rules of foreign trade and investment that the
United States itself dictated in 1945, and yet
another instance of Washington resorting to the
\u201crules-based order\u201d of its own rules, President
Trump\u2019s unilateral tariffs aimed both at shifting
the New Cold War\u2019s military costs onto other
countries, which are expected to buy American arms
and provide proxy armies, and at reviving the
U.S.\u2019s lost industrial power by forcing countries
to relocate industries to the United States and to
permit U.S. companies to extract monopoly rents by
controlling the leading emerging technologies.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
United States aims to impose monopoly rights and
related </span><em>rentier</em><span>
privileges uniquely favorable to itself on the
entire world\u2019s trade and investment. Trump\u2019s
\u201cAmerica First\u201d diplomacy demands that other
countries conduct their trade, payments and debt
relationships in U.S. dollars, instead of their
own currencies. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
U.S. \u201crule of law\u201d is one that permits unilateral
U.S. demands to impose trade and financial
sanctions dictating how and with whom foreign
countries can trade and invest. They are
threatened with economic chaos and confiscation of
their dollar reserves if they do not boycott trade
and investment relations with Russia, China, and
other countries refusing to submit to U.S.
control.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
United States\u2019 leverage to obtain these foreign
concessions is no longer industrial leadership and
financial strength, but its ability to cause chaos
for other countries. Claiming to be the
indispensable nation, the U.S.\u2019s ability to
disrupt trade is ending its former international
monetary and diplomatic power. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">That
power originally was based on U.S. holdings of the
world\u2019s largest monetary gold reserves in 1945,
its status as the largest creditor nation and
industrial economy, and, after 1971, its dollar
hegemony, arising in large part as a result of its
financial market being the safest for other
nations to hold their official monetary reserves.</p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
diplomatic inertia created by these former
advantages no longer reflects the realities of
2025. What U.S. officials do have is the ability
to disrupt the world\u2019s trade, supply chains, and
financial arrangements, including the SWIFT system
for international payments. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
U.S. and European confiscation of $300 billion of
Russia\u2019s monetary deposits has darkened America\u2019s
reputation for financial safety, while its chronic
trade and balance-of-payments deficits threaten to
disrupt the international monetary system and free
trade that made it the major beneficiary of the
1945-2025 world order.</p>
<div class="captioned-image-container-static"
style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px;margin: 32px auto;">
<figure style="width: 100%;margin: 0 auto;">
<table class="image-wrapper" width="100%"
border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"
data-component-name="Image2ToDOMStatic"
style="mso-padding-alt: 1em 0 1.6em;">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
<td class="content" align="left"
width="1320" style="text-align: center;"><a
class="image-link" target="_blank"
href="https://substack.com/redirect/67a85c77-cf1f-403b-8aec-f4173d58b3f0?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="position: relative;flex-direction: column;align-items: center;padding: 0;width: auto;height: auto;border: none;text-decoration: none;display: block;margin: 0;"
moz-do-not-send="true"><img
class="wide-image"
data-attrs="{"src":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/254d700b-a1cf-47db-85bc-0956e01a2bce_1320x450.png","srcNoWatermark":null,"fullscreen":null,"imageSize":null,"height":450,"width":1320,"resizeWidth":null,"bytes":77242,"alt":null,"title":null,"type":"image/png","href":null,"belowTheFold":true,"topImage":false,"internalRedirect":"https://www.geopoliticaleconomy.report/i/168565388?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F254d700b-a1cf-47db-85bc-0956e01a2bce_1320x450.png","isProcessing":false,"align":null,"offset":false}"
alt="" width="550" height="187.5"
src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Yl1R!,w_1100,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F254d700b-a1cf-47db-85bc-0956e01a2bce_1320x450.png"
style="border: none !important;vertical-align: middle;display: block;-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;height: auto;margin-bottom: 0;width: auto !important;max-width: 100% !important;margin: 0 auto;"
moz-do-not-send="true"></a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><br>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</figure>
</div>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">In
keeping with the principle of national sovereignty
and non-interference in other countries\u2019 internal
affairs that underlay the creation of the United
Nations (the basic principle of international law
grounded in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia),
Russia\u2019s Foreign Minister Lavrov described (in his
speech cited above) the need \u201cto establish foreign
trade mechanisms [that] the West will be unable to
control, such as transport corridors, alternative
payment systems and supply chains.\u201d </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">As
an example of how the United States had paralyzed
the World Trade Organization, which it had created
on the basis of free trade at a time when America
was the world\u2019s leading export power, he
explained:</p>
<blockquote
style="border-left: 4px solid #ad0000;margin: 20px 0;padding: 0;">
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);margin-left: 20px;line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">When
the Americans realized that the globalized
system they had created \u2013 one built on fair
competition, inviolable property rights, the
presumption of innocence, and similar
principles, and which had allowed them to
dominate for decades \u2013 had also begun benefiting
their rivals, primarily China, they took drastic
action. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);margin-left: 20px;line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">As
China started outplaying them on their own turf
and by their own rules, Washington simply
blocked the WTO\u2019s Appellate Body. By
artificially stripping it of a quorum, they
rendered this key dispute settlement mechanism
inactive \u2013 and it remains so to this day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
United States has been able to block foreign
opposition to its nationalist policies by having
veto power in the United Nations, IMF, and World
Bank. Even without such power, U.S. diplomats have
been able to block United Nations organizations
from acting independently of U.S. wishes by
refusing to appoint leaders or judges not
primarily loyal to U.S. foreign policy. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
charged with keeping nuclear proliferation in
check is the most recent notorious case in
point. </span><a
href="https://substack.com/redirect/5e5881b9-2ea6-4bed-b8b8-8c80a02d28b1?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="color: rgb(54,55,55);text-decoration: underline;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Iran published documents
showing</a><span> that the agency\u2019s leader
Rafael Grossi provided U.S. and Israeli
intelligence with the names of Iranian
scientists who were killed, and details of the
Iranian nuclear refinement sites that were
bombed. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
U.S. veto has prevented the UN Security Council
from condemning Israeli attacks on the
Palestinian population. And when the
International Criminal Court (ICC) brought </span><a
href="https://substack.com/redirect/a1b96694-137d-41d8-96d8-a33ecbfd55fe?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="color: rgb(54,55,55);text-decoration: underline;"
moz-do-not-send="true">charges against Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu</a><span> for
committing war crimes and crimes against
humanity in a </span><a
href="https://substack.com/redirect/ca5d2062-d2ce-44df-b3c0-9c8fee7ce05a?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="color: rgb(54,55,55);text-decoration: underline;"
moz-do-not-send="true">genocide</a><span>
against the Palestinians, </span><a
href="https://substack.com/redirect/d087eaa8-79ce-4110-babf-f23577711a2a?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="color: rgb(54,55,55);text-decoration: underline;"
moz-do-not-send="true">U.S. officials imposed
sanctions on the ICC</a><span> and demanded the
removal of the prosecutor.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
world no longer is to be governed by international
law, but by unilateral U.S. rules, subject to
abrupt change depending on the vicissitudes of
American economic or military power (or loss
thereof). </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>As
</span><a
href="https://substack.com/redirect/c2aed1ee-7d9e-42ad-8750-1d2b93962d5b?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="color: rgb(54,55,55);text-decoration: underline;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Russia\u2019s President
Vladimir Putin</a><span> described this new
state of affairs in 2022, \u201cWestern countries
have been saying for centuries that they bring
freedom and democracy to other nations,\u201d yet the
\u201cunipolar world is inherently anti-democratic
and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through
and through.\u201d</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
United States\u2019 self-image depicts its long
dominant world position as reflecting its
democracy, free market, and equality of
opportunity that has enabled its power elite, in
their view, to acquire their status by being the
economy\u2019s most productive members, through their
management and allocation of savings and credit. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>The
reality is that the United States has become a </span><em>rentier</em><span>
oligarchy, one that is increasingly hereditary.
Its members\u2019 fortunes are made mainly by
acquiring rent-yielding assets (land, natural
resources, and monopolies) on which they make
capital gains, while paying most of their rent
as interest to their bankers, who end up with
much of these rents and have become the new
oligarchy\u2019s leading managerial class.</span></p>
<h3 class="header-anchor-post"
style="position: relative;font-family: 'SF Pro Display',-apple-system-headline,system-ui,-apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,'Segoe UI',Roboto,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif,'Apple Color Emoji','Segoe UI Emoji','Segoe UI Symbol';font-weight: bold;-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: antialiased;-webkit-appearance: optimizelegibility;-moz-appearance: optimizelegibility;appearance: optimizelegibility;margin: 1em 0 0.625em 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 1.16em;font-size: 1.375em;">Summary</h3>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">The
real conflict over what kind of economic and
political system the Global Majority will have is
just gaining momentum. </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>Global
South countries and others have been driven so
deeply into debt that they have been obliged to
sell off their public infrastructure to pay its
carrying charges. Recovering control of their
natural resources and basic infrastructure
requires the fiscal right to impose an
economic-rent tax on their land, natural
resources and monopolies, as well as the legal
right to recover environmental cleanup costs
caused by foreign oil and mining firms, and to
implement financial cleanup costs (</span><em>i.e</em><span>.,
write offs and cancellation) of the foreign debt
burden imposed by creditors who have not taken
responsibility to ensure that their loans can be
paid under existing conditions.</span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;">U.S.
evangelistic rhetoric describes the imminent
political and economic fracture of the world
economy as a \u201cClash of Civilizations\u201d between
democracies (i.e., countries that support U.S.
policy) and autocracies (i.e., nations acting
independently). </p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>It
would be more accurate to describe this fracture
as a fight by the United States and its European
and other Western allies </span><em>against</em><span>
civilization \u2014 assuming civilization entails, as
it seems it must, the sovereign right of
countries to enact their own laws and tax
systems for the benefit of their own populations
within an international system that has a common
set of basic rules and values. </span></p>
<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;"><span>What
Western ideologues call democracy and free
markets has turned out to be an aggressive </span><em>rentier</em><span>-financial
imperialism. And what they call autocracy is a
government strong enough to prevent economic
polarization between a super-rich </span><em>rentier</em><span>
class and an impoverished population at large,
such as is occurring within the Western
oligarchies themselves.</span></p>
<div style="font-size: 16px;line-height: 26px;">
<hr
style="margin: 32px 0;padding: 0;height: 1px;background: #e1e1e1;border: none;"></div>
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<p
style="margin: 0 0 20px 0;color: rgb(54,55,55);line-height: 26px;font-size: 16px;margin-bottom: 0;"><strong>Michael
Hudson</strong><span> is president of the
Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic
Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street financial analyst,
and distinguished research professor of
economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas
City. He is the author of many books, including
"Super Imperialism," "...And Forgive Them Their
Debts," and "Killing the Host." You can follow
his work at </span><a
href="https://substack.com/redirect/6f29e4a9-09cf-4725-8407-30ee526e05e5?j=eyJ1IjoibHZwcGIifQ.9RIwWbE6EVIB7Jy8lfazxZKfps8R18neRGMKwOiqnRM"
rel=""
style="color: rgb(54,55,55);text-decoration: underline;"
moz-do-not-send="true">Michael-Hudson.com</a><span>.</span></p>
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