The impending bifurcation of the global financial system may spell an end to the neoliberal “rules-based” new world order’s status quo.
“The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called ‘philarguria’ – love of money, silver-mania. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak.
The Greek concept of ‘hubris’ involved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor.
That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving the gods. That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage. Chieftains, kings and temples were in charge of allocating credit and crop-land to enable smallholders to serve in the army and provide corvée labor. Rulers who behaved selfishly were liable to be unseated, or their subjects might run away, or support rebel leaders or foreign attackers promising to cancel debts and redistribute land more equitably.
The most basic function of Near Eastern kingship was to proclaim ‘economic order’, misharum and andurarumclean slate debt cancellations, echoed in Judaism’s Jubilee Year. There was no ‘democracy’ in the sense of citizens electing their leaders and administrators, but ‘divine kingship’ was obliged to achieve the implicit economic aim of democracy: ‘protecting the weak from the powerful’.
Royal power was backed by temples and ethical or religious systems. The major religions that emerged in the mid-first millennium BC, those of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Zoroaster, held that personal drives should be subordinate to the promotion of overall welfare and mutual aid.
What did not seem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord aristocracy would conquer the Western world. In creating what became the Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course, the political system. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and industry into debt.
This was done on a purely opportunistic basis. There was no attempt to defend this ideologically. There was no hint of an archaic Milton Friedman emerging to popularize a radical new moral order celebrating avarice by claiming that greed is what drives economies forward, not backward, convincing society to leave the distribution of land and money to ‘the market’ controlled by private corporations and money-lenders instead of communalistic regulation by palace rulers and temples – or by extension, today’s socialism. Palaces, temples and civic governments were creditors. They were not forced to borrow to function, and so were not subjected to the policy demands of a private creditor class.
But running the population, industry and even governments into debt to an oligarchic elite is precisely what has occurred in the West, which is now trying to impose the modern variant of this debt-based economic regime – U.S.-centered neoliberal finance capitalism – on the entire world. That is what today’s New Cold War is all about”. -Michael Hudson, The Saker
The coming conflict may determine what kind of political and economic system the world will use.
At issue is more than just U.S. hegemony, however. The very “democracy” that we’ve been taught to love has become nothing more than a coy term for a financial-political structure/state attempting to impose itself militarily throughout the globe.
While the term “Orwellian” has been put to improper use as shorthand for exercises of authority with which one disagrees, the obfuscation of words and ambiguity of language is a pervasive phenomenon that has been observed for well over millennia.
“For tyranny is a kind of monarchy which has in view the interest of the monarch only; oligarchy has in view the interest of the wealthy; democracy, of the needy: none of them the common good of all. Tyranny, as I was saying, is monarchy exercising the rule of a master over the political society; oligarchy is when men of property have the government in their hands; democracy, the opposite, when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers". -Aristotle’s Politics, Book III
“Ipse dixit”…
Furthermore, what is referred to as “autocracy” in the West today is in actuality a government that is mighty enough to ward off a Western-oriented financial oligarchy from indebting the population to itself.
The euphemism of “globalization” is simply a financial form of colonialism backed by the threat of covert “regime change” to prevent countries from withdrawing from the U.S dominated system.
The fall of the Soviet Union was supposed to validate how futile it would be for governments to try to construct an alternative economic system free from debt financing.
China’s admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001 was considered at the time to be confirmation of Margaret Thatcher’s claim that There Is No Alternative (TINA) to the new neoliberal order backed by U.S. diplomacy.
The West emerged from World War II relatively free of private debt. But ever since 1945, the volume of debt has expanded exponentially, reaching crisis proportions in 2008 as the junk-mortgage bubble exploded.
The United States is now forced to sustain itself primarily off financial gains like interest, and foreign investment instead of creating wealth through its own labor and industry.
All the while, China, India, Iran, and other economies have already rejected joining in on the NATO trade and financial sanctions against Russia.