Tag Archives: empire

21st of October 2024 I am so happy to have been asked to contribute to this round table in honour of David. We were close friends for over fifty years. All who knew him well could sense the extraordinary unity between his life and work. His life bore testimony to his ideals. There were no obvious tensions, loose pieces. I want to capture something of what we got from him because his thinking remains an indispensable fount of wisdom in an increasingly deranged world. Let me start...

How not be to taken over by the Empire. Although Michael Hudson doesn't mention in this post, this is a goal of the trade war as well as the economic war that the US is waging worldwide to cement permanent US global hegemony.Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of NeoliberalismNote to China Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the...

I would simply add to what Ramanan says in this post that the US is functioning like all previous empires, for good and ill. The good is that empire reduces transaction costs in international trade and the imperial economy, so it is a benefit to belong to that system. On the other hand, it is the empire that formulates and enforces the rules, for the "benefit of the empire," which means in practice that the core comes first rather than the empire as whole being considered as an integrated...

This post was first published on Pieria in July 2013. I have re-posted it here on Coppola Comment because it now seems terribly, terribly timely. I have been reading James Rickards' book Currency Wars. In this, Rickards reviews the use of fiat currency over the course of the last century, and concludes that the present global fiat currency system is inherently unstable and on the point of collapse. He calls for return of the gold standard to stabilise firstly the US dollar and, following...

The expansion of banks such as Citigroup into Cuba, Haiti, and beyond reveal a story of capitalism built on blood, labor, and racial lines.  Scrubbed from the pages of glossy coffeetable books, the history of U.S. imperialism can be found in the archives of Wall Street’s oldest, largest, and most powerful institutions. A deep dive into the vaults and ledgers of banking houses such as Citigroup, Inc., and J. P. Morgan Chase and Co. reveals a story of capitalism and empire whose narrative is...