If you have opinions about the subject matter of posts on this blog please share them. Do you have a story about how the system affects you at work school or home, or just in general? This is a place to share it.
I received a message from someone who had just seen this on my You Tube channel and liked it. I can't remember if I posted it to the blog here and couldn't find it. So I thought I'd repost it as it is about the class question that is so often obscured or outright hidden in US society. The obsession with identity politics is one of the methods used to avoid promoting the class issue in the US. They have done a good job of it, the mass media has convinced millions of Americans that they are middle class and this term is used to describe workers in the media. The serious journals of capitalism like the WSJ or Business Week use it though, they know that most working people never read them.
I agree with a lot of what he says, he speaks to the very basic things people desire and need. But he's not the first one to do that.And, he's right, capitalism makes us sick though he doesn't give the culprit a name. What is his solution? As far as I can see it is in transforming the Democratic Party in to party that can bring about the reform he talks about in this video. I believe that experience teaches us that this is not the case..
Look at AOC. Look at Sanders or Mamdani, so many will fall in to place as they refuse to recognise that there is only one way any of these, mild reforms really, can be realised and that is through a mass movement, a working class mass movement that would welcome small capitalists like Graham Platner as allies in this struggle.
Small capitalists, that middle layer, are also super exploited by big business. Some of them can move to the right but some can move to the left and be allies of workers and the labor movement depending on the balance of class forces and the program, strategy and tactics of the workers' movement. They will, as will most workers, be drawn to a program that speaks to their needs and a movement that has the power to win it.
In addition, an independent political party of the working class opposed to both the big business parties is key, none of what he says is possible without that development. How that will develop is another issue, but as a mass movement on the ground develops it is inevitable in my mind that it will take political expression, candidates will arise out of that movement, maybe individually at first who can say. The ability to trap such movements and usher them in to the Democratic Party is waning.
I will wait and see what he does when the power gives him options. Mamdani has no program for dealing with them. They are ruthless, they are killers. Both Democrats and Republicans have supported, armed and defended a genocide. Only a powerful and committed movement of the working class, committed to ending this system of production and building an economic system of production based on human need not profit can accomplish this social transformation.
It's not about integrity, he seems like a decent guy. That's not the issue; the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The mid terms are looking to be very interesting indeed and we can return to this issue again.
A horrific account of what it was like when the Zionist regime kidnapped members of the flotilla that was attempting to get food to a starving population in Ga*a. The most disconcerting aspect of this is it’s not shocking at all. It’s par for the course for the Israeli Offense Forces and what this woman describes here has been happening to Palestinian Muslims for decades. This regime, backed by the US and its western partners considers itself untouchable but support for Israel in the US and throughout the world is declining.
The woman in this video points out that some of her torturers had American accents. By most accounts there are some 20,000 Americans serving in the IOF. Many of them are dual citizens which is a result of the Zionist regime’s policy that anyone from any country in the world who claims to be Jewish immediately receives Israeli citizenship and the US has the largest Jewish population outside of Israel. Many of the settlers are Americans. These fanatics will be returning home and many have done so but are IOF reservists. They will be a threat to us all.
The victims of this latest kidnapping, a direct violation of international law, stress that what they are suffering does not compare to what the Palestinian people are forced to endure at the hands of this genocidal Apartheid, state. The Zionists could not do this without the support from the US and the US taxpayer. But that support is waning.
The activities of this US settler colony in West Asia is a threat to Jewish people throughout the world. Zionism cannot survive without anti-Semitism, or Jew hatred, as Arabs are Semites. Where anti-Semitism is absent, Zionism will create it, and it’s important to remember that.
Were it not for social media, despite its negative aspects, the true nature of the Israeli regime would have not been so exposed as it is now. The behavior we are witnessing the indigenous people of Palestine have been forced to endure for decades since the creation of Israel by western imperial powers over 70 years ago.
This will not end well for Israel or the rest of the world. But end it will.
Congress has its own CIA and it’s sounding the alarm about anti-AI grievances
Dan Boguslaw and Ken Klippenstein
May 28 2026
The intelligence report this story is based on comes courtesy of freelancer Daniel Boguslaw. If you’d like to see more like this, please become a paid subscriber so we can hire him! — Ken
As rage about artificial intelligence and the data centers powering it grows, Congress is taking notice — not with any legislation or law, but by spying on public opposition.
A newly created intelligence agency of the Congress (yes, it has its own now) is warning that legislators are in danger from an angry public. The U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau, created after January 6 and in parallel to the 18-member Executive Branch intelligence community, laid out the warning in an internal intelligence report produced in April.
“ISB has prepared this Intelligence Note to provide the US Capitol Police and law enforcement personnel with information related to recent threats and attacks likely linked to grievances concerning data centers,” the report says.
There’s only one problem: the report admits that there is no evidence of any actual threat to Congress.
“The US Capitol Police is not investigating any data center-motivated threats to Members of Congress,” the report says.
Nonetheless, it goes on to warn that artificial intelligence “related policies introduced on the Hill and in local communities are likely to continue drawing opposition, increasing potential concerns for public officials.”
The Congressional intelligence office that authored the report was formed in the aftermath of January 6th and justified to bring the congressional police force “in line” with federal intelligence agencies and thereby gain more access to the massive existing intelligence community. The “intelligence note” was also distributed to police organizations and state-level fusion centers across the country.
“We now have a world class intelligence operation,” then-Chief of the U.S. Capitol Police Thomas Manger said last May. “We are significant players in the intelligence community in the Washington, D.C., region and, frankly, all over the country … Whereas before, we were basically just — we were consumers of information. The FBI would give us intelligence, other agencies would give us intelligence. Now we are gathering our own."
The motivation for the report appears to be an attack on the home of Indianapolis city councilman Ron Gibson. Gibson, a supporter of a local data center project, reported to police that someone had fired 13 gunshots through his door and left a note on his porch that read “No data centers.” No suspect has yet been arrested.
The intelligence report reveals that the Intelligence Services Bureau is monitoring social media content critical of data centers, looking for potential threats.
“You can be damn sure there are thousands more rounds where this comes from, and if you keep voting for data centers, we will all begin returning to the early days of American freedom and express ourselves via violence over words,” one user posted.
“Threatening the politicians who actually make decisions is actually logical,” another social media user posts. “I would rather shooters shoot up the senate than a high school [sic].”
Neither of these comments represents an actionable threat, the Capitol Police notes.
The report also summarizes crimes associated with data centers, including one committed over five years ago.
One example is that of Seth Pendley, who was arrested five years ago in 2021 and charged with attempting to blow up a data center in Northern Virginia. The Capitol Police connect him to Congress by noting that at some point he claimed to have “brought a sawed-off assault rifle into DC but left the weapon in his car, before proceeding to the US Capitol building but not entering it on January 6, 2021.” Pendley is incarcerated 600 miles away from D.C. in Terre Haute, Indiana.
What is clear is that data centers have become an overwhelmingly unpopular issue for American voters. A Gallup poll from this month found that seven in ten Americans oppose the local construction of data centers for AI. Their concerns range from the environmental pollution to the increased utility prices generated by data center water and electricity use.
The Intelligence Services Bureau report briefly touches on these concerns and more, identifying “possible government use of AI to spy on Americans,” “environmental impacts,” “rising energy costs,” and “loss of jobs in certain industries” as reasons why Americans oppose their construction. The report does not examine why activism regarding AI and data centers is anything other than free speech.
Grasping for evidence of increased criminal dangers, the report dedicates a full page to threats made against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who is neither an elected official, nor within the purview of the Capitol Police.
Altman blamed the attack on “incendiary” news media coverage, writing in his blog that “I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” In other words, AI leaders like Altman see the problem as one of controlling what the public says.
Congress, now in the intelligence business, is responding by focusing on the threat of the American public rather than the threat to the American public.
Subscribe if you wish Congress would pass laws, not intelligence dossiers
American Edmund Phelps recently died at the age of 92. Phelps was a classic free market mainstream economist from the monetarist school and winner of the 2006 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (the Riksbank prize in reality).
Edmund Phelps
Phelps researched and taught at Yale University until 1966. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote the papers that made him famous. He was founding director of the Center for Capitalism and Society at Columbia University, from 2001 to its closure in 2024. In 2013, he published the book, Mass Flourishing, a statement of his belief that “modern values” — a shared desire to create, explore and meet challenges — are the wellsprings of economic dynamism, but were being lost because the innovative ‘competitive free markets’ were being suppressed by ‘corporatism’ and the dead hand of the state.
In the 1960s, along with arch monetarist Milton Friedman, Phelps strongly opposed the Keynesian view that central banks and government should try to manage employment and inflation. He claimed that this approach could only end in an inflationary upsurge. Phelps argued that central banks can control long-run inflation, but have little control over long-run average output growth at the same time. When two objectives become incompatible as they did in the stagflation of the 1970s, Phelps insisted the best policy for the monetary authorities would be to bring ‘inflation expectations’ down, even if it meant raising interest rates at the expense — at least temporarily — of jobs. The stagflation of the 1970s and early 1980s in the major economies discredited Keynesian macro management and appeared to vindicate Phelps. Phelps became a leading theorist of the neoliberal period that followed, supporting ‘balanced’ government budgets, privatisation and low inflation.
Phelps argued that capitalist economies cannot reduce the unemployment rate by accepting high inflation, something that economists had, until then, assumed to be the case, based on the Phillips curve. That was because if public spending increased, all the ‘economic agents’ (ie households and businesses) would ‘expect’ to see higher inflation, then demand higher wages (workers) and higher prices (bosses). Inflationary expectations would nip in the bud any desired economic growth and the associated fall in unemployment.
Phelps was right that Keynesian macro management that aimed to deliver full employment without inflation was impossible – but not for the reasons he cited, which was too much government spending. I and others have shown that the failure of Keynesian policies was primarily due to the falling profitability of capital in the 1970s. At first, central banks lowered interest rate in the hope that this would boost the economy. That policy was reversed in the early 1980s by US Fed chair Volcker. But what really broke inflation of the 1970s was the major slump of 1980-82, that saw US manufacturing decimated and unemployment rising sharply.
In recent years, Phelps’ expectations theory has been increasingly adopted by central banks and mainstream economists as monetarist and Keynesian theories of inflation have been found wanting in the Great Recession of 2008-9 and in the pandemic slump of 2020. During the post-pandemic spike in inflation in 2022, the economic advisers to the Biden White House put it like this:“Over the longer-term, a key determinant of lasting price pressures is inflation expectations.”
But Phelps’ theory does not explain why inflation began in the first place. The theory removes any objective analysis of price formation. Once inflation is rising for other objective reasons (in the case of 2022, clearly due to global supply shortages), expectations may come into play. But all the empirical evidence shows that only if inflation has been running high for months, do ‘economic agents’ factor this into their future outlooks. In this sense, expectations are largely adaptive—i.e. backward-looking rather than purely forward-looking. They do not drive inflation, but instead follow it.In analysing Phelps’ theory of inflation, economist Jeremy Rudd points out that: “at best, only circumstantial evidence of a causal relationship in which expectations determine the long-run properties of inflation; it could equally well reflect a situation where respondents to these surveys are making reasonably plausible inflation forecasts in response to observed changes in actual inflation.” He concluded, “A review of the relevant theoretical and empirical literature suggests that this belief rests on extremely shaky foundations, and a case can be made that adhering to it uncritically could easily lead to serious policy errors.”
Phelps continued to argue that inflation was caused by excessive government spending and ‘expectations’ of rising inflation. But the global financial crash of 2007-8 and the ensuing Great Recession of 2008-9 put paid to that theory. Inflation in the ‘real economy’ remained low in the early 2000s and government budget deficits were small, but still there was the biggest slump since the 1930s. As Phelps admitted: “Economists also failed to see the inherent dangers. The majority of my colleagues were simply not capable of believing that the market could fail. After all, they spent the past thirty or forty years preaching that whatever price the market sets must be right.” However, that critique applied to Phelps himself.
Phelps stood firm against those who wished to revive Keynesian policies in the wake of the great slump. Monetarist theory had failed, because it was not prices in the shops that had got out of hand, but financial asset prices, which eventually collapsed and triggered the crash. But let’s not return to Keynes, said Phelps. “The thoughts of some have turned to Keynes. His insights into uncertainty and speculation were deep. Yet his employment theory was problematic and the “Keynesian” policy solutions are questionable at best… At the end of his life, Keynes wrote of “modernist stuff, gone wrong and turned sour and silly”. He told his friend Friedrich Hayek he intended to re-examine his theory in his next book. He would have moved on. The admiration we all have for Keynes’s fabulous contributions should not sway us from moving on.”
Nevertheless, the global financial crash did bring a change in Phelps’ thinking. After 2009, like many other mainstream economists caught napping, he recognised that “some parts of the market are not sufficiently regulated”. Governments would have to monitor bank lending to make sure that it was used for productive investment rather than for speculation in financial assets and property. I’m afraid Phelps’ hopes on achieving that have been sorely dashed since 2009 with continued credit-fuelled speculation in the stock market, bank runs and the rise of cryptocurrencies.
Throughout, Phelps continued to advocate free market capitalism with fervour: “policy must aim to build a business sector of high dynamism and broad inclusion. The research task is to identify the institutions that are pathways to dynamism and the institutions that are obstructions.” For Phelps, socialism was only one threat to business dynamism, the other was corporatism—”a system where established businesses and entrenched special interests collude with governments to stifle bold, uncertain innovation in favour of stability and protectionism”.
Phelps continued to advocate the ‘deregulation’ of labour markets ie ending any labour job rights with no say from employees. As he put it: “The less frequently employees have to look for new positions in which they need to exercise their full potential, the more the innovative strength of companies declines. Models such as the co-determination that is practised in Germany can be particularly harmful. For example, if a decision to move a plant from one town to another was submitted to the employees, they would always vote no, even though it might be in the best long-term interests of the company and society.”
In his last years, Phelps severely criticized Trump’s economic policies for trying to control the economy and tell companies what to do. This was “like economic policy at a time of fascism.” He called for free trade internationally, prudent fiscal measures and the maintenance of the independence of the Federal Reserve from government interference – a true free market neoliberal to the end.
On Immigrants, Identity, and Who the Real Enemy Is
Richard Mellor Afscme Local 444, retired HEO/GED 5-22-26
A few years ago, my brother Roger Martinez and I were walking past a hookah bar on the Edgware Road in London when three young black women sitting at one of the outside tables, heard Roger’s accent and asked us if we were from America; we said we were.
"We can't go to America," one of them said.
"Why not?" Roger asked.
"We're Somalis, Muslims”, one of them replied, “Trump says we're terrorists and he's barred us from entering the US. There's only 12 million of us on the planet.", she added with a wry smile.
We had forgotten about that ban entirely. We stopped and talked for a while. They were warm, funny young women with strong London accents — they'd been born there. Roger asked about traditional dress and head coverings. They were all dressed as young western women typically dress. They explained that they wore traditional clothing when they wanted to show respect to their parents, at cultural events, or simply when they felt like it. It was part of who they are.
I feel no threat or anxiety about immigrants wearing traditional clothing. When I left London more than fifty years ago, Young Indian women almost always dressed in traditional clothing. That's largely changed now, and it changed on its own terms, over time, within families — not because anyone demanded it.
I'll be honest: when it comes to the full covering of a woman's face and body, as practiced by some Muslims, I find it difficult to look at its origins without seeing misogyny and patriarchy. Whether the Quran demands it or Allah commands it are questions I'll leave to those with more knowledge of the subject than me and to the women themselves. What I am certain of is this — no priest, no mullah, no religious authority, and no politician has the right to tell a woman how to dress. And we should stress that Madison Avenue and the fashion industry pressure women relentlessly too, shaming girls into a different kind of conformity. The coercion comes from many directions.
I’m writing this commentary after watching some of the coverage of the far-right rally in London last week and the disgusting spectacle in the video above, of the rabid crowd chanting "take them off" at three French women on a stage dressed as fully covered Muslim women. It accomplished nothing except cruelty, and if the fascist elements that are behind such events thought they might “shame” this section of the immigrant population in to “assimilation” as they see it, they are wrong.
When people feel attacked, they hold more tightly to the traditions they came from. That's human nature. The second and third generations — the children and grandchildren of immigrants — will negotiate their own relationship with their heritage, and that negotiation will happen within families, organically, in ways that no outsider can engineer or accelerate. Muslims make up roughly 6% of the UK population. And they are overwhelmingly working class. They are not a threat. They are neighbors and, more importantly from a workers’ perspective, they are our class allies.
There is also a breathtaking hypocrisy at the heart of the demand that immigrants abandon their cultural traditions. The British Empire once encompassed 23% of the world's population. British officers, colonial administrators, and settlers went to Africa, India, and across the globe and dressed, worshipped, and conducted themselves as British people. Any soldier who "went native" was considered an embarrassment. The Empire imposed itself on the world. It did not ask permission and it did not assimilate.
Finally, and most importantly: anyone who thinks this movement will stop at Muslims is not paying attention. Muslims are simply the most visible target right now. A Sikh friend told me with some horror that a few Sikhs had shown up alongside the racists at that rally. They would do well to reconsider. The turbans, the kippahs, the crosses that aren't the right kind of cross — all of it is on the list. So are atheists like me.
The crisis ordinary British people are living through is not caused by immigrants. It is a failure of a system that cannot provide basic necessities in one of the wealthiest countries on earth. The people at the top of that system need someone to blame, and immigrants are a convenient answer. Meanwhile, the wars, the drone strikes, the destabilization of entire regions of the Global South — these are what drive people northward in the first place. They are not invaders. They are the refugees of other people's wars
Watch Gary Chambers speak and understand something: this is what defiance looks like. Standing against the deliberate redrawing of electoral maps designed to dilute Black voting power in Louisiana, he is not intimidated and he will not be silenced. And he is not alone.
A few days ago I posted a TikTok video making a simple point that the corporate media works hard to obscure — the American working class is not the monolithic conservative bloc they want you to believe it is. When Black Lives Matter took to the streets, the cameras and the commentators worked to frame it as a Black movement, full stop. That was a lie of omission. It was a multiracial movement. BLM had many allies particularly among the youth mired in student debt and other members of the community confronting the state in the streets. That truth matters because it points toward something they fear more than any single protest — the possibility of a united working class that knows its own power.
We cannot manufacture that movement from the top down. It will be built from below, as it always has been, and it will come. What is happening right now in Minneapolis, where communities are organizing direct resistance to ICE operations, is not an isolated incident. It is a glimpse of what is coming. Real political education happens in struggle, not in lecture halls.
Gary Chambers comes from a community that has fought one of the longest and most brutal battles in American history, against a system of racial oppression that stretches back centuries. That community is not going backwards. Not now. Not ever.
There are times when those in power get a little too cocky, when confidence becomes arrogance and they underestimate the anger their policies generate in society. We are living in such times. The American working class currently lacks the organized leadership and political party it needs and the movement against the capitalist offensive has not yet raised its head above the parapet. And as I was reminded more than once in my political education, consciousness tends to lag behind events and this is more so when it has been decades since a major mass movement has taken to the streets.
But what we are seeing with Gary Chambers, what we saw in Minneapolis, will multiply a hundredfold. A ruling class that is losing its grip on the global stage, that failed in Iraq, failed in Afghanistan, and is flailing across the Middle East, is forced to turns its aggression inward, against its own workers.
Trump's rise was not inevitable. It was made possible by the dismal failures of the Democratic Party to offer a serious alternative but in in large part, by the absence of an organized, united working class movement and a party of our own. That vacuum was filled by the ugliest currents in American life — white supremacists, Christian nationalists, the settler mentality dressed up in electoral politics, fascist mobs given permission to come out into the open. That is the honest account of how we got here.
But here is what is equally true. American history is a history of resistance. The Native peoples were never fully defeated. Enslaved Africans broke their chains and remade this country in the process. The millions of Europe's poor, shipped here to work the mines and textile mills, built a labor movement from nothing. Racism has been the ruling class's most effective weapon in its long war against working class unity — but it has never been a permanent solution, only a postponement.
It will not be easy for them up ahead. They have reason to be worried. We have reason to keep going.
Many sources document the horrific consequences of the Bengal famine of 1943 in greater detail, and I encourage readers to explore them. I chose this particular account because it connects that famine to the broader issue of British colonialism. It doesn't frame capitalism as the root cause, nor does it advocate for democratic socialism as the remedy — partly because it originates from within the BRICS group. Still, given that each BRICS country has been a victim of western colonialism brings a different historical perspective than that of western European capitalism.
Winston Churchill's alleged statement — "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like Rabbits." — echoes what British establishment figures routinely said of the Irish. Churchill similarly expressed contempt for the Chinese. This was not a personal flaw of his, he was expressing British policy toward the people it colonized.
British colonial attitudes toward India and Africa were tested first in Ireland. A Parliamentary inquiry into Irish immigration described it as "an example of a less civilised population spreading itself as a substratum beneath a more civilised community." The novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley, visiting Ireland in the mid-19th century, wrote to his wife that he was "haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country."
The same world view was exported to the Americas. In a letter to a Swiss mercenary, the British military official Jeffrey Amherst — later Governor of Quebec and Virginia — wrote, "You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race." It's worth noting that the deliberate distribution of infected blankets was not a widespread documented practice; what the letter reveals is the attitude — the casual willingness to contemplate genocide.
That attitude persists. Today, members of the US Congress and the current administration deploy similar language when speaking about Palestinians and Iranians, even as the US and its western allies support what many are calling a genocide in Gaza and a war of aggression against Iran.
The pattern is consistent: to colonize or subjugate a people, the aggressor must first dehumanize them — both to justify the assault and to secure the loyalty of its own working class. The bitter irony is that the contempt the British ruling class directed at the Irish or Indians was the same contempt it held for its own workers at home.
That fact alone reveals something important: the most reliable allies of working people in any country are the working people of other countries. We share the same enemy. Wars fought over disputes between competing ruling classes are not fought in our interests.
It's why Marx's simple slogan — Workers of the World Unite — remains so threatening to the global capitalist elite. It names the one coalition that could actually end the arrangement.
On the first day of talks during US President Donald Trump’s recent state visit to China, his host China’s Xi Jinping invoked the so-called “Thucydides trap” to warn against any war beween the two superpowers that now dominate the world economic and political landscape.
Xi was referring to the fifth-century BC Greek historian Thucydides who (it is claimed) argued that the threat posed by the then rising power of the Athens maritime city state so frightened the longstanding land-based hegemonic power, Sparta, that the latter went to war to crush Athens. Xi warned that if the US had any such ambitions with China, it would be a trap for the US.
The concept of the Thucydides Trap was first developed by Herman Wouk, the novelist and WW2 veteran in 1980. Wouk then compared the U.S.-Soviet cold war to the “cold war” that developed between Athens and Sparta once they had defeated Persia, their common enemy in the middle of 5th century BC. In 2015, American political scientistGraham Allison took up the lessons of the Peloponnesian (a mainland Greek peninsular) war between Athens and Sparta as an analogy for the rising conflict between the US and China. Allison claimed that, among a sample of 16 historical instances of an emerging power rivalling a ruling power, 12 had ended in war. He cited the First World War, where the rising European power, Germany, went to war against the declining hegemonic powers of Britain and France. Then there was the rising economic power of Japan in WW2 that launched an attack on the US in 1940. Allison reckoned that Thucydides showed that when a rising power (such as Athens) challenges the status of a ruling power (such as Sparta), war would be difficult to avoid. This was the ‘trap’ that the US should avoid, said Xi, not surprisingly. Ironically, in the Peloponnesian war it was the emergent power (Athens) that lost and the dominant power that won (Sparta) and it was the same for the world wars of 20th century. So the Thucydides Trap is not really a good analogy for Xi to use.
But anyway, is the Thucydides Trap of ancient Greece relevant to the increased rivalry between the US and China in the 21st century? The examples that Allison cites are hardly convincing. For example, the US was no declining power in the 1930s – on the contrary. And WW1 kicked off because a much weaker power, Austria-Hungary, launched an attack on the Balkan states that brought Russia into the conflict and which then spiralled to involve the world.
Moreover, the core lesson of the Peloponnesian war, according to Thucydides himself, was not the inevitability of war between rival powers, but the decisions made by the ruling elites in the two states. In the case of Athens, its rising economic strength led to hubris on the part of Athens’ leaders. They thought they could invade Sicily, which was supported by Sparta at the time, and so gain huge new prosperous lands. But Athens was heavily defeated in their invasion, which weakened it so much that eventually Sparta triumphed. US historians and military strategists naturally like to raise this angle on the Thucydides Trap to argue that if China decides to invade Taiwan it will suffer the same fate as Athens did in Sicily. They are happy to conclude that it was the ‘declining’ power, Sparta, that eventually crushed the ‘rising power, Athens. So the US will win its battle for hegemony if China attempts to occupy Taiwan.
But China is not so foolhardy. Yes, Taiwan is seen as part of China and must be returned to the mainland, but Taiwan is not 5th century BC Sicily. The US cannot really defend the Taiwanese statelet from China short of outright war, which it is probably not capable of sustaining, unlike Sparta could with Sicily. Moreover, in the 21st century, the rival powers have nuclear weapons of mass destruction that pose the possibility of annihilation for both (and the rest of us) in any war. Behind Xi’s comment is that China seeks to play the waiting game. His warning about the ‘trap’ is to push back against any ideas that the US may have about military conflict with China over Taiwan.
In my view, the T-trap analogy is not very applicable to the 21st century global power struggle. A better analogy is not the Peloponnesian Wars, but the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage some 200 years later. By 250 BC, the Roman Republic had come to dominate most parts of the Mediterranean through military prowess and a developing slave economy. But there was one major rival power that stood in the way of Rome’s total domination, the north African city state of Carthage. Carthage controlled Sicily just as Sparta had done. Rome launched an invasion of Sicily, which it eventually captured from the Carthaginians after 25 years of conflict. Carthage was not finished, however, and it took a series of wars (including the famous invasion of Rome by Carthage’s military leader Hannibal) before Rome was able to defeat its rival and completely destroy the city and its people. Rome then became the sole hegemonic power in the Med and it expanded its empire further through military conquest that provided millions of slaves for its domestic economy. But this did not last. Rome’s slave supply dried up and the Roman state eventually lost any form of civic democracy and slipped into a corrupt military dictatorship under a succession of (sometimes insane) emperors.
This analogy fits better to the rise of the US as the dominant power in the 20th century faced with only one rival, the Soviet Uinion. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the US achieved complete dominance, as Rome did in 200 BC. But as in Rome then, the internal economic contradictions within the US capitalist economy have now begun to eat into its power from within. The ‘globalists’ at the head of the US state machine are still trying to control the world with financial repression and military adventures, just as Rome did under its emperors; but US political institutions under Trump have taken an increasingly corrupt and autocratic (kinglike) form.
The US empire is now in decline. This is starkly indicated by the rising net liabilities of the US economy to the rest of the world ie. foreigners own more US assets that US investors own of foreign assets. It is significant that the US net international investment position went negative just as the US became the sole hegemonic power in the early 1990s.
US imperialism had managed to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was losing relatively in trade and output to other major economies, particularly China. Europe had integrated further into the Eurozone and widened towards eastern Europe using the cheap labour supply available there. And the Asian tigers leapt forward with new technologies. But particularly China took over as the manufacturing and trading global power (partly driven by US multi-nationals which had located there in the 1990s).
The negative investment position of the US reflects the inability of US industry to compete in world goods markets. The reaction of the Trump administration to the high US trade deficit has been to impose tariffs and other measures to ‘protect’ American industry and reduce imports, but with no discernable success. So increasingly, the US has relied on foreigners buying more US companies and stocks (‘the kindness of strangers’) to finance its trade deficit.
There is still a long way to go before the mighty US economy will be on its knees. It may have the largest net liabilities globally, but it can manage that because it is also the only country that can issue dollars – and the dollar is still the international currency for trade, investment and reserves. Trade surplus nations like Germany, Japan and China must use most of their dollar earnings to buy dollar assets in the US economy. So the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the dollar keeps the US empire ticking over.
From its peak of economic and military power in the Med in 200 BC, Rome took several centuries to decline and fall. It won’t be so long in the modern capitalist world. Maybe down the road, the US leaders will become more desperate and try to provoke China into a conflict. But China is unlikely to give Trump and the US globalists an excuse for outright war. As Xi says, China will not fall into the T-trap.
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