when an Empire declines a variety of things have typically happened number one overreach that is a general term in which the Empire declines and as it does it tries to solve too many problems in too many of the far-flung reaches of the Empire and it can solve one or two of them but it misunderstands what it means for that Empire to decline what it means is you can't do all those things you may have been able to do them 20 years ago or 40 or 60 but you cannot anymore I believe that what we're watching
is the American Empire declining as the British Empire and so many other Empires before it declined engaging in overreach and here's what I mean we fought a war in Korea back in the early 1950s we couldn't finish it and so Korea was left cut in half half to one side half to the other in Vietnam we tried the same game with an already split system because the French weren't strong enough to prevent The Cutting of the country the way it happened and the United States failed again only this time the failure was no split country
left Vietnam became a unified country under the leadership of hoi Min the leader of the Vietnamese Communist party in Afghanistan we were defeated again and the country is now run by the Taliban which was the ostensible enemy I could go on but I won't I'll draw the conclusion you can't do what it is this country sets out to do it's not within your power it may have been after World War II we really were at the top of the mountain at that time and there's an argument that we were for the rest of the 20th
century but you cannot make that argument now the dollar is everywhere becoming less and less important it was once as good as or better than gold in the central banks across the world it isn't anymore it's barely half their reserves down from much much more than that more and more trade is conducted not in the dollar as it once was but in other currencies not just the Euro but also the Japanese Yen Chinese Yuan and so on what's my point Israel is an outpost of the United States Empire it was literally the creation of the
British Empire beforehand and it was handed off from a war if you like of the British Empire into becoming a ward of the United States Empire Israel exists because the United States supports it financially economically politically culturally and militarily never more so than right now can the United States afford to do that my answer and I believe this is the majority view in the United States is a resounding and a clear no and the reason for that is there is no end in sight there will be generations of hostility between Israel and the Palestinians what
has just happened since October guarantees it now that will be extended to include not only the Palestinians of the south in the Gaza Strip but the Palestinians of the North in West Bank and now the people of Lebanon and who knows how far this will go will the is Israelis really want to be in a state of bitter hostility with their Arab neighbors indefinately well if that's what they want that's what they're getting and their only safety already is and will continue to be drawing the United States in to a participation with them as far
as they can they cannot win this alone they probably can't win it with the United States but without the United States it's over in a Heartbeat by the way the same is true in Ukraine that is only winnable if the United States pours even more than it already has because what the United States has poured in clearly failed again you can see where the battle lines are in Ukraine the Israelis are on if I were a shrink I would call it a death trip there's something here that is really so far out of the range
of a reasonable Poli policy that you begin to wonder what kind of mentality would keep going in this direction the United States currently maintain somewhere between 700 and 800 bases abroad and the entity that does that is the Department of Defense all of that we are told and the whole world is told is done for defense is there a defense component in it sure but is there an offensive component equally sure that's how you guarantee the dominance of the United States in its Empire since the end at least of World War II if not some
years before the Israelis have an ongoing struggle with the Palestinians that dates from the beginning of the country of Israel as people who know the history know to think that all of this is about the aggressive Palestinians and the defensive Israelis is to take seriously the kind of propaganda that even the people who put it out when you talk to them privately don't do here's a joke more Israelis are clear that that's not true than Americans they put out that propaganda for foreign consumption inside Israel by the way in recent weeks and days as well
massive Street protests and other kinds of protests of huge numbers of Israelis who don't agree with this policy didn't agree with what they did in Gaza want Mr Netanyahu out of office want to reverse veral of the politics he represents I mean in America you get people shut down for saying this but inside Israel you can say these critical things and large numbers of people do and the government dares not cut it down at that point Mr Netanyahu has no options anymore unless he has a nuclear weapon and is prepared to explode it where he
would decide to do it he has no chips the man is out of chips that's why he needs the United States what what is he going to do go to war perpetually Israel is a small country the Arab world is a very large Place Palestinians are a small part of it the whole Arab world is United on this question more so than ever before do they want to fight with Israel no clearly they're afraid and they're hesitant I understand that but there's no solution here other than sitting down and working out an agreement otherwise you
have Perpetual War people like Netanyahu think think that that's an option it isn't any more than for Mr zalinski that's an option it isn't you can talk like that but sane people understand it's the bravado because everyone knows that the war in Ukraine by the way like every other war will end with an agreement it'll may be a very lopsided agreement that's being decided on the battlefield and then the question is raised which I raise as a human being do you really really want to destroy to kill to poison the relationships of human beings to
the extent you are doing while you work your way to sitting down for the agreement you know has to happen Mr Putin in Russia made clear and ironically he was quite right he said the deal that I can make with you Mr zalinski is much better now at the beginning of our hostilities than it will be if we fight and that's what happen now they will be much poorer Mr zalinsky can't face it in the end that will be the Heritage the inheritance of the Israelis that are left a legacy of hostility and bitterness that
I would not wish on the Israeli people even though they are in the end responsible for it it is an extraordinary situation and I'm not arguing where the Rights and Wrongs are my guess is they're very nicely distributed on both sides sides that's not the question Hamas did a terrible thing last October Israel has done a terrible thing but the question of who escalates I'm afraid that's all on the Israeli side they made the decision to respond first the way they did in Gaza then in the north and now in Lebanon and I fear for
where that's taking them as well as everybody else the course of action is the one they should have followed 2 years ago 6 years ago 10 years ago I understand the impatience you had others okay we can't go back and rewrite history or replay the game I get it but you're going to have to stop somewhere how many losses in a row are you going to take the Russians have shown the world something I didn't believe was true that they have a very powerful military apparatus not just to ground troops and all of that but
the ability to ramp up the production of missiles and planes and bombs and drones on a scale I did not understand and I follow this stuff a lot and it's true of the people who I rely on for information we're all sitting here amazed the message it's a little too late to tell everybody oh you don't have to worry the United States that told Mr Putin you can't do it you can't do it he did it the reality is out you told the Israelis look you have to work something out they gave us the finger
if you like and we're stuck now with really unpleasant decisions of the sort you've perfectly nicely laid out if the Israeli IDF invades Lebanon there will be very quickly in the United Nations a virtually unanimous votes excluding the United States Israel and maybe one or two little islands in the Pacific who will vote in favor of the Israeli American position and the rest of the world will vote against it how are you going to strengthen the argument in the world that what the United States is doing in arming of Ukraine is because we are so
dead against one country invading another when we're providing the guns with which Israel and the IDF are literally about to do that the cost to the United States is precisely to be stuck in the Dilemma the answer is not to choose which way to go let me give you a metaphor if you don't mind you're walking down the street it's late at night you're eager to get home and out of the alley steps a menacing person who say says to you I have a gun here and I have a knife and I'm going to give
you free choice as to which way I'm going to kill you now there's two kinds of reaction One reaction is to sit there and puzzle over which way you should choose the other one is to say I don't accept the choice I am going to look for another way out the United States cannot continue to do what it is doing if the Russians given who they are and their size and their power if they want to rework the boundaries of their situation in Europe you got to sit down and try to work that out and
it's the same with Israelis and the Palestinians I understand that the negotiation is difficult but going into more war is not only not a solution it's the one that's already failed piling on more you know it's like that sorry political candidate who believes that every time a criticism is made you double down and do more of it the earlier incursions used the same argument that you're using now they were defensive and they would quote put an end to these hostilities and it's the military brain thinking that when you win the war you're done all the
smartest military brains from clausa witz on down have understood war is just politics by another form the whole point is that the previous invasions of Lebanon by Israel like the previous hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians were justified by many as solving their problem it never did if you think suddenly escalating the horror is somehow going to solve the problem that the earlier pre escalation Horrors didn't then you live in a different planet from me the Arab countries are becoming stronger and and richer that's part of the whole change in the world economy it's reflected
in their participation in the bricks Alliance they are gaining in wealth in capacity in power Israel is looking at a situation what are they going to take on the whole world I mean this is a dead end they ought to turn around before they get even more deeply embedded in this military solution the Israeli economy that's a phrase that has no content anymore it's like the null set in mathematics there's nothing in there anymore they're going to be a basket case economically for years even if they quote unquote win they're losing this situation Netanyahu and
the extreme right-wing government they have is itself a sign of the failure of what earlier politics had achieved and the solution wasn't more violence that was crazy to think that military people perhaps can be excused for thinking like that but not the rest of us and I hope that the sanity comes back and they come to their senses and realize they have to cut deals and that those deals will be painful everyone in the world right now including the United States although here it's done quietly is readjusting to an altered World economy there are now
two poles of power and wealth not one and if you pretend otherwise if you don't understand it you will make miscalculations like the war in Ukraine has made you'll make decisions about sanctions that are stupid they're just stupid because the people in Washington I know many of them they're perfectly smart but they have blinders on don't want to face what I just said how the world has changed and how it isn't going to go away anytime soon by the way the gap between the bricks and the G7 they were roughly equal in 2020 now the
GDP added up 29% of world GDP is in the G7 33% is in bricks Bingo bricks is bigger and the Gap gets worse each year including right now so that's the reality that's changing everybody's Behavior after World War II the dollar became virtually universally recognized as the Global Currency basically playing the role in the world that once was played by the British pound say in the 19th century or early part of the 20th central banks in virtually every country held as reserves to support their own currency gold and the dollar leading to the very famous
phrase the dollar is as good as gold yes exactly Saudi Arabia and the oil countries adopted the program of selling oil around the world to any buyer but only for dollars and then parking those dollars in New York City Banks or in US treasuries it became the focus and there are enormous benefits to that the United States for example was able to pay for the goods and services produced around the world the French wine the Japanese computer the fill in the blank by sending them dollars unlike in other countries those dollars didn't come back to
buy goods and services here they held on to the dollar cuz it was useful to them to do so which means that for 5050 years the United States was able to consume the produce of the world and gave them an exchange little green pieces of paper our currency that cost us nothing and are worth per se nothing the benefits of doing this were incalculable I mean you couldn't explain American economic well-being in the last 70 years without the role played by the dollar that's all gone today uh Central Bank around the world depending on the
numbers you use hold reserves only 50% in dollar instead of the 80 or 90% that was the norm as little as 20 years ago and so the symbolic meaning of that is enormous the financial meaning the real consumption all of that inflation means that prices in general are going up not all of them the same rate some of them can go down but the general direction of prices is up that's all the word inflation means okay step two in the logic if Rising prices are an inflation the next question is who determines the prices answer
employers determine prices everyone listening or watching this program knows that if you're an employee you've never been called into a room to participate in setting prices that's done by the boss that's done by the corporate board of directors the leading managers it's a tiny group of people in our country that US Census Department lists employers 3% of our population the other 97% are not let's be honest 3% set the prices 97% pay them and don't set them okay there's no democracy in an inflation a tiny group of people never elected to the job which doesn't
exist it's simply understood that if you're an employer you set the price you raise it you lower it you keep it the same your business Okay so when inflation means employers made the decision why did they raise prices answer the same reason they do everything else to maximize their profits that's what makes a business successful so we can answer the question an inflation happens if and when employers see profit in raising prices so they do okay that means that inflation is a profit driven phenomena that hurts the rest of the people who have to pay
more for what they used to get for less and it's great for profets cuz that's why it's done all right the minute you understand that then you understand that we live in a system whose economic Arrangement is the opposite of democracy we don't democratically decide what things are going to cost in the store we never did we have an autocracy we have an authoritarian economic system that gives a tiny percentage of the people control over the prices we all pay when they run an inflation and when we have a mass of people complaining about it
and that's been the United States in the last 2 years we turn to an institution set up for this called the Federal Reserve our Central Bank and if you look at the charter of the central bank one of its jobs is to maintain price stability so right off the bat when we have an inflation we know that the Federal Reserve has failed to do one of the two things it was asked to do so what does the Federal Reserve do in the case of the United States in the last 2 years it raises interest rates
now for the mass of people this makes a bad situation worse in addition to Rising prices of my breakfast cereal and my haircut and my computer program I now have to pay more on my credit card because the interest rate on my balance has just gone up so this is a solution that makes the problem worse so I'm here to tell you that it's not the only solution that the Federal Reserve in acting in that way shortcut what should have been the debate how do we deal with the inflation that the employer class has imposed
on us and we might have then remembered and I remind people we might have remembered that a Conservative Republican Richard Nixon on the 15th of August 19 1971 confronting an inflation then made the following decision which he announced on TV as of tomorrow morning any company that raises its price we will come for you we will arrest you and we will throw you in the clink and any Union that raises your wages or tries to we will do the same he declared what came to be known as a wage price freeze did it stop the
inflation hna dime right away real quick did it raise interest rates no it chose an alternative policy we live in a country which not only did not do what it did a few years ago but acted as if there was no option that the raising of interest rates was the universally accepted only way to stop in it for people like me let me assure you I sat there stunned even I I'm used to this and let me add a personal note I went to the same graduate school and got my PhD from the exact same
faculty that granted it to Janet yelen she's a classmate of mine I know what she knows I learned it from the same Professor reading the same books at Yale University at the same time so there I'm watching a woman who I know knows the same thing I was taught about inflations and interest rates and wage price freezes which by the way have been used all over the world in many countries over many many decades so we have lots of experience with that tool to fight inflation but we live in a country that can't face most
of its economic problems because they too function as distractions from these kinds of real issues a few years ago we had shortages we couldn't get toilet paper we couldn't get medicines of all kind we have shortages right now the most popular nonsense spoken about shortages in the past was ready supply chain disruptions okay that's a euphemism that's another way of saying shortages now I can show you shortages across the board all over the place virtually every year since 1971 to assign to shortages some sort of role as evidence at the very least you'd have to
show me that there were more shortages during a time of wage price controls than there were during all those years when there weren't price controls let's be honest every policy designed to solve any problem turns out to have strengths and weaknesses look I'd be the last one to argue that a wage price freeze didn't have all kinds of problems not particularly the shortages the more powerful argument at the time since I follow these things since that time the biggest problem was escapism in other words there was an escape Clause you could apply for an exemption
from the wage price freeze so every corporation went to work hired the most expensive lawyers imaginable and lobbyists to go to Washington to get an exemption for your firm or your industry and that's a terrible that leads to all kinds of misallocation I get all that but interest rates have that as well interest rates have their strength and weaknesses one of the weaknesses of the interest rate is we've had elevated interest rates and they didn't prevent our inflation we're still struggling with an inflation and there are as many people now saying that prices are going
to go back up as there are people saying that they're going to go down so interest rate is not some magic bullet it's not some guarantee but it really hurts a lot of people and it helps others the bigger your company the less an interest rate increase is going to hurt you because the reason we have central banks including the bank of the US and what later became the Federal Reserve at the beginning of the 20th century was because when we left interest rates to the quote free market we got crazy volatility that was extremely
dangerous to the stability of the system we brought in The Regulators we brought in the institution to deal with the ineffectiveness and the danger of not doing it we're stuck because I'm a Critic of capitalism I don't mind telling you that we don't work well without a central bank and we don't work that well with one that's a contradiction but it is not resolved by oscillating back and forth between the two pretending when you don't have a central bank that getting one will solve your problem makes no more sense than responding to the failures of
the Central Bank by extolling the virtues of a free market you can't go with either of them
