Aaaaand I was 100% WRONG About China

[Eric the Green]

(08-28-2022, 04:18 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

(08-28-2022, 02:10 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: To use a common phrase, China is "too big to fail." It won't fall so soon after its modern peak just a few years ago. But it may undergo revolution in the mid-2030s. We'll see just how far it goes.

"Too big to fail" applies only to fiscally broken systems insofar that they have the coercive (usually military) clout to force others to give up resources in order to continue to fund the status quo. Most likely, what we're going to see is a sharp recession over the remainder of the 2020s, followed by one or both of the following
1) rekindling of nationalistic zeal, culminating in an expansionary, Russia-esque war campaign
2) Internal revolution, similar to what you just described, but probably a bit sooner (say, 2026 to 2031 if I had to give an approximate date).

Option 2 would likely take a bit longer, as the Chinese have the military to pacify their own people for a few years, but an external conflict would go into effect sooner.

Quote:We can't let the world burn. The world is burning from this "let things happen" ideology. We are all interdependent, and we are one world community, like it or not. The climate crisis is just one proof of that. It requires global cooperation to solve. Covid is another proof of that. Technology is yet another. The rise and fall of imperialism is another. Western colonialism made the world one, but now after the world wars The West is not ruling the world anymore. All regions and all races and nations are rising up and have their place, and borders cannot be walled off. The nationalists, trumpists and social conservative/America Firsters don't like it. It is a matter of them learning to adjust.

If that's what you want, then your best bet is voting for 90s/2000s style neocon (probably from among your generation's ranks).....but no one else outside the billionaire globalists wants to continue policing the world.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting a wall. Outside of the most populist 20% or so of the right, neither is anyone else. I'm not even suggesting protectionism. What I'm saying is that the global system of "free trade" enjoyed by most of the world today is made possible only by the Breton Woods agreement. More specifically, we gave the world a choice at the end of WWII:
1) If you join us, we will give you
- aid to rebuild
- preferential trade terms
- protection of all oceanic shipping routes courtesy of our navy.
2) And in return, you must
- stop fighting each other
- adopt the US dollar as your reserve currency
- purchase your oil in US dollars
- give us free reign to set global security policy as we see fit

There is no question there have been a lot of abuses here (I assume we can agree on that much), but the point is, we aren't seeing trade deficits and lower wages by coincidence, nor were the seeds of this trend sewn during the Reagan Administration. What we are seeing was by design ever since Bretton Woods was agreed to in 1944.

What I'm proposing is simple: we need to stop being the security force for the entirety of the world's oceans and re-negotiate obscenely disadvantageous trade deals in favor of terms that will better serve our national interests.

tl;dr:
1) The internecine wars of Europe only came to an end when America stepped in and made them stop via Bretton Woods and various accompanying treaties.
2) The current expenses levied to police the current system and trade deficits incurred to encourage cooperation never really served the US's best interests.
3) Even if we pretend for a moment that they did, the Soviet Union collapsed on Christmas of 1991, rendering the initial motivation for the arrangement obsolete. The oldest Gen X were barely 30, the oldest millennials around 10 (I was but a 5 month bundle of joy). As such, conservative Gen X and millennials have no interest in defending this system, while liberals of all generations never wanted this level of world policing in the first place.

It seems you may be putting too much emphasis on the Breton Woods agreement. The internecene wars came to an end because the Allies put an end to them and because Europe could see what condition they left themselves in. Imperialist rivalries came to an end too as The West was stripped of its colonies in the subsequent years.

After the Marshall Plan, Europe rebounded quickly. That meant that a free trade policy with the defeated and exhausted nations after WWII soon was no problem to the USA, because The West's recovery put free Europe on a level playing field. Free trade becomes a problem for the USA, and a boon to others, only when we tear down regulations and trade barriers with developing countries to where the bosses can outsource and take advantage of cheap labor. This happened starting with Reagan and neoliberalism. This was one reason for factory shutdowns and job losses, especially in the Rust Belt. Europe has done very well, especially since it moved toward democratic socialism, while the USA ended that trend after the Great Society. As far as prosperity and commerce itself is concerned, free trade with free Europe was no problem at all, except that it allowed corporations to become multinational and thus less subject to national democracy.

But neoliberalism also hollowed out these industries, because the bosses were given free rein to pay their workers a pittance, cut their benefits, destroy their unions, end overtime, take away their pensions, and raise taxes on their social security money while lowering taxes on themselves, and concentrate lobbying and campaign funding power in their hands. Globalized free trade also made the corporations harder for democratic power inside countries to control and regulate. Thus the middle class is vanishing--- thanks to neoliberal (libertarian economics/Reaganomics) policies. It is not only about free trade per se, but all about corporate and wealthy ownership power. Reagan's libertarian economics policies are by far the leading cause of the decline of the middle class.





The world policing duty of the USA is one reason the consensus Keynesian economics ran into trouble in the 1970s. We spent too much money fighting in Vietnam. Stimulating consumer demand could not counteract this, and social spending decreased to fund the war. This also sparked rebellion at home, and all this resulted in the ascension of a more centrist, limited Keynesian system under Nixon, Ford and Carter. The war on poverty was first defunded to support the war, and then limited by the more austere and limited regime that followed. This trend further limited expansion of the middle class in the USA somewhat even before Reagan. Furthemore, Keynesianism could not anticipate the power over oil gained by OPEC, and their cutoffs motivated by American foreign crises (Yom Kippur War and Iran hostage crisis) primarily caused the recessions of 1973-75 and 1978-82.

It seems someone has to keep shipping lanes open, if we don't want greedy autocratic powers like China interfering with our global economy. If the USA is not to do it, then others should help or work together through the UN. But meanwhile the military industrial complex set up after the Pearl Harbor attack continued to function, sending the USA to war in Korea and Vietnam and later to Afghanistan and Iraq. US interests and Keynesian economics were hurt by this. We should pull back from such adventures; on that we agree. It increases our debt, and adds this debt excuse to neoliberal/Republican demands for less social and environmental spending. Neo-con is as bad as neo-lib. Meanwhile though, what social regulations continued in the 1970s, chiefly environmental laws and consumer rights, motivated the bosses to strike back and recruit a talented actor to run for president in 1980 who would implement the neoliberal "free-market" program they had developed and funded.

Meanwhile the Chinese autocrats have plenty of military and bureaucratic power to crush internal dissent. They have been doing it easily already. In the USA the government did not need any coercion to bail out the economic powers' failures in 2008. They just loaned and spent more money. China certainly can prop up its industries in a similar way, and being an autocracy they can exercize enough regulatory clout so their capitalists don't overindulge in speculation, which is what causes economic crashes and bank failures in the libertarian USA.

The demographic and agricultural conditions you and your author assert are flat-out false. The 1 child policy is gone, and most Chinese are still farming. China has plenty of minerals, coal and solar power. The Chinese have never been inclined toward foreign conquest and war. Their wars are internal. You can predict an earlier such internal conflict earlier than I do, but I have my astrological means to chart events. It's hard for me to forget the cycle involved, since my own birth virtually coincided with the birth of the People's Republic. It's the same cycle that corresponds to the saeculum, too.