What is American Super Imperialism short sum up by economist Michael Hudson

[Milos Uzelac]

From the article economics of the new cold war from the Grayzone:

"call it “Super Imperialism,” in 1972, because it was really the US moving towards a unipolar order, where it was not competing with other imperialisms; it wanted to absorb European colonialism, absorb European imperialism, and really be the single unipolar power.

And of course that is what really has come about. The United States is trying to become the only dominant power in the world. And in today’s Financial Times [on May 5], one of the reporters said, it’s as if the United States wants to be the world’s absentee landlord, and rent collector. So we’re dealing with a monetary and a rentier phenomenon."

"Well the real existential threat isn’t a trade rivalry; it’s not one of technology at all. The existential threat is to the idea of an economy based on completely a rentier system. In today’s world, the banks play the role that landlords played from the feudal epoch through the 19th century.
And all the classical economics, the whole concept of free markets, from the physiocrats, with their laissez faire to Adam Smith, through John Stuart Mill, the whole of classical economics was to free industrial capitalism from the rentier class, from the landlords, and from banking and the monopolies that banks created in organizing trusts.

So the US realizes that the economy has been transformed in the last 40 years, since the 1980s, since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, when Margaret Thatcher said, “There is no alternative.” Of course, there were many alternatives.
But the United States says, if we can create, if we can turn the “rules-based order” of free markets and classical economics upside down, and say our rules-based order means no government power to regulate, no government progressive taxation, but a flat tax – like we convinced Russia to have, that they still have, by the way – if we can have a rules-based order that backs the rentier class – a hereditary, financial, wealthy 1% of the population – holding the rest of the economy in debt peonage, or reducing them to other forms of dependency in a patron-client relation, then we’ve restored essentially the feudal economy.

But in order for us to do that, we have to make sure that there’s no alternative; we have to prevent any alternative. And China is an existential threat, because what it is doing – its policy, which is very largely ad hoc, and purely pragmatic – China’s policy is exactly the policy that made the United States the industrial power of the world in the 19th century.

China, like the United States, built public utilities to provide public services at low, subsidized costs, so as to enable its private industry not to have to pay for the costs of education, for high rental costs and housing costs, and high monopoly rents.

China is doing exactly what the United States did, and what the United States now says, no other country can do what we did; we’ve pulled up the ladder, and our wealthy rentier layer of the population that got rich, now, having gained control of the United States, and its politics, we want to control the whole world.

And if there is another successful economy, whether it is China, or Russia, or Iran, or Venezuela – if there’s any other economy that retains a strong state power, strong regulatory power, progressive taxation, preventing a landlord class from somehow increasing housing costs, privatizing medical and health insurance, so instead of making it a public right – well, if we can prevent that from occurring anywhere, then people will really believe there is no alternative but to let our takeover that reverses the entire last two centuries of free-market economics, and now the economy has to be free for the 1% to take over government enterprise, to privatize every part of the government, including the government itself, including the central banks especially, and including the health system, the educational system – all running either for profit or at a cost that has to be paid by credit creation, and essentially recreate the economy of the 13th century."

https://thegrayzone.com/2021/05/12/new-cold-war-super-imperialism-michael-hudson/

What makes today’s Super Imperialism different from past “private enterprise” imperialism Past studies of imperialism have focused on how corporations invest in other countries, extracting profits and interest. This phenomenon occurs largely via privatesector investors and exporters. But today’s novel form of international financial 4 imperialism occurs among governments themselves, and specifically between the U.S. Government and the central banks of nations running balance-of-payments surpluses. The larger their surpluses grow, the more dollars they are obliged to put into U.S. Treasury securities. Hence, the book’s title, Super Imperialism.

 

Edited May 23, 2021 by Milos Uzelac