Yves here. Get a cup of coffee. This is a meaty discussion among Michael Hudson, Ben Norton, and Max Blumenthal on the tools America has used to achieve and preserve economic and political dominance. The talk includes current topics like vaccine diplomacy and the role of the Gates Foundation, the malign influence of the IMF and World Bank, China’s challenger economic model, the new Cold War, and MMT.
In a talk this long, there will inevitably be a few discordant notes. One is depicting Boomers as conditioned to be Russia-haters due to nuclear war fears with the old USSR. Another is a discussion of the recent success of the Greens in Germany, which far too many people who should know better see as US meddling. Our EU kitchen cabinet thought this was all wet. For instance, from PlutoniumKun, reacting to a Diana Johnstone article making that claim:
When situations develop in a predictably bad direction and some people including yours truly saw it coming, at least in broad outlines, and pretty much no one took basic steps to change the trajectory, it’s hard not to marvel at our collective stupidity. I sent a little rant to our Brexit group, which is overweight in experts in banking, IT, and regulatory matter, on the Colonial Pipeline hacking debacle and the role of crypto in it.
Note that as of yesterday, gas shortages were starting to stick. Local contacts said nearly all gas stations around Atlanta were out of gas, for instance. From the Wall Street Journal:
Much good discussion via e-mail of this tweet by Clive, Colonel Smithers, vlade, and David. Key easily hoistable points. David:
All previous tactics for 2022 have been based on the assumption that (1) Le Pen will get into the second round and (2) she will then lose to whoever is the other candidate…..But over the last year or so, we’ve begun to see indications that Le Pen might not, in fact, be unelectable after all. This is partly because recent events have moved the debate in her direction, over such questions as national sovereignty, Europe, industrial policy, political Islam, immigration etc. It should be stressed that these are not “right-wing” issues historically: they were issues addressed across the political spectrum until fairly recently, but which have since been abandoned by all the mainstream parties. Now (industrial sovereignty is a good example) everyone is talking of them again. But it’s partly also because of the mess that the rest of the French political
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The hydrogen paste – it sounds really cool, but unfortunately, the blow comes in the last sentence. The annual production of a new plant they are building will be 4 tonnes/year. US alone consumes > 3000litres (which is ~3t) of gas. Per person. So the output of the factory would suffice for one person in the US.
Yes, they will be able to scale. But the scale they need is hundreds of millions times more, more likely more than billion times more. I hope to be wrong, but I just can’t see how they could scale so much even in a decade or two.