All Together, Now: Everyone Hate Putin, Hate Russia

By Mike Whitney

The Unz Review, March 2, 2021: Why is Vladimir Putin standing up to the richest and most powerful men in the world? Why is he bad-mouthing their “pet project” Globalization and trash-talking their “Great Reset”? Does he really think these corporate mandarins and “silver spoon” elites are going to listen to what he has to say or does he realize that they’re just going to hate him more than ever? Why is he doing this?

Here’s what’s going on: At the end of January, Putin was given the opportunity to address the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland (online). The WEF is a prestigious assembly of political leaders, corporatists and billionaire elites many of who are directly involved in the massive global restructuring project that is currently underway behind the smokescreen of the Covid-19 pandemic. Powerful members of the WEF decided that the Coronavirus presented the perfect opportunity to implement their dystopian strategy which includes a hasty transition to green energy, A.I., robotics, transhumanism, universal vaccination and a comprehensive surveillance matrix that detects the location and activities of every human being on the planet. The proponents of this universal police state breezily refer to it as “The Great Reset” which is the latest make-over of the more familiar, “New World Order”. There’s not a hairsbreadth difference between the Reset and one-world government which has preoccupied billionaire activists for more than a century. This is the group to which Putin made the following remarks:

“I would like to speak in more detail about the main challenges ..the international community is facing…. The first one is socioeconomic….. Starting from 1980, global per capita GDP has doubled in terms of real purchasing power parity. This is definitely a positive indicator. Globalisation and domestic growth have led to strong growth in developing countries and lifted over a billion people out of poverty….Still, the main question… is what was the nature of this global growth and who benefitted from it most…..

… developing countries benefitted a lot from the growing demand for their traditional and even new products. However, this integration into the global economy has resulted in more than just new jobs or greater export earnings. It also had its social costs, including a significant gap in individual incomes…. According to the World Bank, 3.6 million people subsisted on incomes of under $5.50 per day in the United States in 2000, but in 2016 this number grew to 5.6 million people....

Meanwhile, globalisation led to a significant increase in the revenue of large multinational, primarily US and European, companies…In terms of corporate profits, who got hold of the revenue? The answer is clear: one percent of the population.

And what has happened in the lives of other people? In the past 30 years, in a number of developed countries, the real incomes of over half of the citizens have been stagnating, not growing. Meanwhile, the cost of education and healthcare services has gone up. Do you know by how much? Three times…

In other words, millions of people even in wealthy countries have stopped hoping for an increase of their incomes. In the meantime, they are faced with the problem of how to keep themselves and their parents healthy and how to provide their children with a decent education….

These imbalances in global socioeconomic development are a direct result of the policy pursued in the 1980s, which was often vulgar or dogmatic. This policy rested on the so-called Washington Consensus with its unwritten rules, when the priority was given to the economic growth based on a private debt in conditions of deregulation and low taxes on the wealthy and the corporations….

As I have already mentioned, the coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated these problems. In the last year, the global economy sustained its biggest decline since WWII. By July, the labour market had lost almost 500 million jobs…. In the first nine months of the past year alone, the losses of earnings amounted to $3.5 trillion. This figure is going up and, hence, social tension is on the rise.” (“Session of Davos Agenda 2021Online Forum, Putin Addresses World Economic Forum, Jan 27, 2021)

Why is Putin telling his elitist audience these things? 

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Trump, Not Keynes, Holds the Key to Economic Recovery in the West

Tony Blair: laughing all the way to the bank 
since leaving office.*

This article, by Mike Whitney in the Unz Review, explains how US (and by extension European) monetary and fiscal policies* saved criminally reckless Western financial institutions from bankruptcy. The method was to provide the bankers with virtually limitless amounts of cash at negative real interest rates, which enabled them to blow a huge stock market bubble that financed their return to solvency. At the same time, Whitney argues, governments were careful to limit the magnitude of monetary stimulus so as to insure no substantial growth in aggregate demand or, therefore, in employment or wages.

On the latter point, Whitney offers the correct Keynesian analysis. But Keynes addressed the problems of a different age, when the US economy was largely self-contained, with external trade amounting to less than 5% of GDP.

Globalization with input factor mobility, i.e., free movement of labor from the Third World to the First World, free movement of capital and technology from the First World to the Third World, and free movement of the products of sweatshop labor from the Third World to the First World means lower wages and higher unemployment in the First World, which in turn shrink aggregate demand resulting in even lower wages and higher unemployment.

The Keynesian solution to shrinking demand and rising unemployment was deficit spending to raise aggregate demand and hence employment and wages. But today, in an era of globalization to the max, the effect of deficit spending is primarily to suck in more cheap Chinese shoes and shirts, computers and car parts, all of which Americans and others in the First World used to make for one another. Add in the effects of computerization, automation, robotization and insane student debt and the outlook for employment and wages for ordinary folks becomes, as is now apparent, bleak indeed.

There are two measures to improve the welfare of the proletariat. One is massive infrastructure spending, since this generates work that cannot be off-shored and is still largely beyond the scope of automation and robotization. The other is a return to free trade without input factor mobility, which as David Ricardo explained in his 1817 classic, “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” yields the benefit of “Comparative Cost”, or “Comparative Advantage” as it is now known, i.e., the benefit of increased total output and lower costs than if each nation tried to produce in isolation.

These,  as I explained here, in a post that was rejected for publication in the Unz Review, are the economic policies espoused by Donald Trump, i.e., restoration of the border to limit influx of labor from the Third World, and the imposition of tariffs to restrict influx of products of foreign sweatshops financed with First World capital and technology, thereby achieving the benefits of comparative advantage through international trade, and last but not least a massive infrastructure renewal project.

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* Said policies are administered by governments largely owned by said criminally reckless financial institutions, for example, the great American banking firm of J.P. Morgan, which took former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair on as an "adviser" for a fee of two million pounds per year. This is in accordance with the Western tradition of political bribery, which as explained by Thomas Macaulay (The History of England (1848)), involves payments made after the bribed individual leaves office, an arrangement that is entirely legal, and one that no politician would ever think of changing.