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Jim Kavanagh

Can we admit how completely fucked we are?

Donald Trump is destroying the American economy and the American empire. More precisely, the Trump administration is accelerating the demise of the United States, internally and externally, that's been underway for a long time.

We are truly at the end of the road. It’s a road along which we have been alternately force-marched and slow-walked for decades and we’re at the point where our toes are hanging off the edge of the cliff. The abyss beckons. No one is going to pull us back.

This is the culmination of capitalist decline, imperialist defeat, and Zionist fanaticism. It is the American answer to the question: Socialism or barbarism? It is the collapse of the post-WWII U. S.-dominated world order, of the American (and “Western,” Euro-Atlantic) project tout court, and of all pretenses regarding it.

Terms like “democracy,” “human rights,’ “international law,” or “peace and prosperity” are nothing but bad, unfunny jokes.

Donald Trump is an appropriate villain for this last act of the American tragi-comedy, which has always been plagued by a hubris based on ignorance and arrogance. But it’s a world stage, and he is just a crude personification and culmination of the domestic and global forces that have been at play. All the American and Western liberal and conservative actors have played their parts in setting the stage for the tragic dénouement we are living through.

The Trump administration is engineering the final collapse of the American economy and empire using aggressive, simplistic versions of bipartisan policy frameworks that have underlain American politics for a long time.

These have been combined with the exceptional decline in America’s economic infrastructure, the exceptionally sad state of American political consciousness, the exceptionally stubborn attachment to the atavistic Zionist colonial project, and with Trump’s exceptional narcissism, to create a perfect storm of aggressively stupid and self-destructive policies that will lead to a catastrophic collapse of America’s already fragile social economy and standing in the world, as well as all the fictions of exceptional historical and international virtue premised thereupon.

BRICS And The Fundamental Paradigm Shift in the Political Economy of the World

"one of the biggest stories in the world and nobody is talking about it"

As a marxist, I’ve always known that an indispensable resource for understanding what is happening in the political economy of the country and the world is the business press. It’s the place where capitalists are required to rigorously and honestly take stock of the present state of, and ongoing developments in, what we call the infrastructure.

Thus, I came across this video from a channel called Inside China Business, by a guy named Kevin Walmsley, who has lived and worked in China since 2012 for a company called Direct Equipment. The video is entitled, bluntly, “The BRICS trading system is already wiping out US farmers, as global price discovery is destroyed” and it gives a concrete analysis, which surprised me, of how the BRICS system has already upended the global commodities trading system that was “for a hundred years” based on the U.S. dollar and essentially managed from Chicago. As he says, “This is one of the biggest stories in the world, and nobody is talking about it”—because few people know how. He knows how.

He talks about how the BRICS are developing

a new global trading system, which is completely independent of the U.S.-led system based on U.S. dollar trading and the SWIFT bank system. the system that we use in western countries … that has obvious advantages to us and obvious disadvantages to everyone else. If we're honest with ourselves there is no logical reason why a farmer in Brazil who's selling soybeans to China should use an American bank or the exchange in Chicago to make the deal happen, or need U.S. dollars to do so….Now, China, Brazil, and the other BRICS have the technology to build their own system, buying and selling directly without U.S. dollars, without Western banks, and without going through commodities traders and going through exchanges in Chicago.

By Any Means Necessary Discussion of GDP Plunge and Trump Floating Election Delay (7/30/2020)

 Trump Floats Election Delay As US Economy Contracts At 33% Annual Rate

In this segment of By Any Means Necessary hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Jim Kavanagh, political analyst and contributor to Counterpunch and ThePolemicist.net (where you can read his latest piece, "Over The Rainbow: Paths of Resistance After George Floyd"), to talk about ongoing concerns that President Trump will attempt to postpone the elections and how this morning's unprecedented news that the US economy contracted by nearly a third in the last quarter may be impacting Trump's political calculus.

“By Any Means Necessary” on Radio Sputnik is hosted by Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman and aims to connect the political, social and economic movements shaping the world around us. With a sensibility informed by movements from Black Power to #BlackLivesMatter with a dash of Occupy, the show elevates the people and narratives that (while often ignored) are driving some of the most important changes in the world.

Discussion with Charles Dunaway on His Wider View Radio Podcast (7/30/2020)

Jim Kavanagh on the George Floyd Protests, COVID, and the election

This is the first episode since our summer hiatus and I am delighted to welcome Jim Kavanagh back to kick off our 4th season of Wider View.  

Jim refers to a recent article by Ajamu Baraka and echoes his call to expand the George Floyd protests into a struggle for the structural change that we need in this nation. (Broadcast on August 1)

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PressTV Discussion of Unprecedented Drop in GDP (7/31/2020)

Second-quarter GDP plunged by worst-ever 32.9% amid virus-induced shutdown

PressTV Discussion of EU Coronoavirus Recovery Plan (7/19/2020)

EU summit on post-coronavirus economic recovery plan ends without breakthrough

The EU leaders gathering together in Brussels to discuss the €750-billion coronavirus recovery package, but they didn't manage to reach an agreement on a deal.

By Any Means Necessary Discussion of post-Covid Recovery Prospects (5/8/2020)

From Ahmaud Arbery to Amazon, Imperialism Is Showing Its True Colors

In this episode of By Any Means Necessary, hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Atlanta-based community organizer and activist Monica Johnson to talk about the news that Georgia police have finally charged the men involved in the videotaped killing 26-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, how various conflicts of interest between the accused killers and local law enforcement appear to have obstructed the investigation thus far, and why the case's handling seems to only confirm long-term doubts about the inability of Black families to get justice from the state.

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (11/1/2019)

Contrary to Mainstream Media Reports, Slowdown Begins: Are We Close to Recession?

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time.

On Wednesday, the Washington Post reported, "The US economy cooled over the summer, growing at a 1.9 percent annualized pace from July through September, the latest sign that the slowdown is deepening. Economists anticipated slightly weaker growth following President Donald Trump’s decision to dramatically expand his trade war with China." On Friday, the Post reported, "The United States added 128,000 jobs in October as the jobless rate ticked up to 3.6 percent, outperforming analyst forecasts during a month in which one of the largest private-employer strikes in recent years weighed on the economy."

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (10/4/2019)

Will the Ukraine Scandal Turn Out to Be a Double-Edged Sword for Dems?

It's Friday, which means it's panel time!

On Thursday night, investigators from the House of Representatives released a trove of text messages obtained from former US Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, in which US State Department officials and Rudy Giuliani — US President Donald Trump's personal attorney — negotiated with a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The texts show that US officials felt Trump would not agree to meet with Zelensky at a summit unless the Ukrainian president publicly promised to investigate both the 2016 US presidential election and a Ukrainian energy company that employed Hunter Biden, the son of current Democratic presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden. As this continues to play out, where’s the leverage? Who has the advantage?

[My related article: Dead Man’s Hand: The Impeachment Gambit]

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (9/20/19)

If Ukraine Connection With Trump Is True Could This Be The Real "Russiagate"?

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time.

A battle between Congress and the White House, set off by an anonymous whistle blower and believed to involve the government of Ukraine, according to two former US officials who spoke to the Washington Post, has moved into the public eye. The whistle blower, an intelligence official who worked at the White House, said US President Donald Trump made a "promise" to a foreign leader, which the official found sufficiently alarming to alert Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson. Atkinson found that the complaint reached the threshold of an "urgent concern," which would require him to notify congressional oversight committees on the matter. However, Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, has been unwilling to provide Congress with the details of what Trump allegedly did, causing some to charge that he is improperly protecting the president. What happened?
[Related article: Dead Man’s Hand: The Impeachment Gambit]

The Pentagon said Thursday that the US will leave it up to Saudi Arabia to decide whether there is sufficient proof accuse Iran of being behind the drone strikes that hit two Saudi Aramco oil facilities last weekend. “We'll wait until the final assessment's completed with the Saudis and that they've made the declaration,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman told reporters. Really? Well that’s a change of tone. “This was an attack on Saudi Arabia. We're supporting their investigation. We have teams on the ground working with them, but we're not going to get ahead of their conclusions.” What are we to make of this?

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warned Thursday that if the US or Saudi Arabia attacks Iran, an "all-out war" is sure to follow. "We don't want war, we don't want to engage in a military confrontation," Zarif told CNN, noting that any conflict would result in "a lot of casualties." The latest source of tension between the three nations is last Saturday's drone strikes on Saudi oil facilities, which temporarily halved Saudi Arabia's oil production and for which the Yemeni Houthis have claimed responsibility. However, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday that the attacks were "an act of war" against Saudi Arabia, and that they involved not just drones, but cruise missiles, pointing the finger at Tehran. President Trump tweeted September 15 that the US military was "locked and loaded" to respond against the perpetrators, though he said the following day that the US would prefer not to go to war. Where will all of this tension lead?
[Related Article: Eve of Destruction: Iran Strikes Back]

"Californians, the Trump administration said Thursday, breathe the same air, and live in pretty much the same environment, as the rest of the country. Their vehicles spew the same gases. So their emissions standards should be the same as everyone else’s," the San Francisco Chronicle reported in August 2018 on the Environmental Protection Agency's proposal to revoke federal waiver under the Clean Air Act allowing the state to enact more demanding vehicle emissions standards than the rest of the US, colloquially known as the tailpipe emissions waiver. On Thursday, the administration officially revoked the waiver, but a legal battle is sure to ensue.

In an attempt to keep the economy from faltering, the US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates Wednesday from 2.25% to just below 2%. While President Trump has called for the Fed to cut rates, the reduction is much more modest than he might have liked, emphasizing the gap between how the Fed and the White House view the American economy as the 2020 elections loom. Is this effort to keep the economy strong being made because of the projections of a recession and the data that continue to point in that direction?

All those stories and more!

GUESTS:

Caleb Maupin — Journalist and political analyst who focuses his coverage on US foreign policy and the global system of monopoly capitalism and imperialism.

Dr. Jack Rasmus — Professor of economics at Saint Mary's College of California and author of "Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression."

David Schultz — Professor of political science at Hamline University and author of "Presidential Swing States: Why Only Ten Matter."

Jim Kavanagh — Political analyst and commentator and editor of The Polemicist.

Listen to "If Ukraine Connection With Trump Is True Could This Be The Real "Russiagate"?" on Spreaker.

The Critical Hour is a daily 60-minute news analysis and talk radio program on Radio Sputnik hosted by Dr. Wilmer Leon. Introduction above is theirs, with related articles of mine referenced in brackets.

Week in Review Discussion on The Critical Hour (8/16/19)

Global Unrest: Hong Kong Protests, Chinese Tariffs, US Near Recession and More!

It’s Friday, so that means it's panel time. 

Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airways has been caught up in the fallout of ongoing pro-democracy protests in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. Hundreds of flights were canceled this week because of protests at Hong Kong International Airport, and the airline has threatened to fire employees who take part in the demonstrations. It was announced Friday that the company's CEO Rupert Hogg and Chief Commercial Officer Paul Loo are resigning. The airline's stock has fallen almost 24% since April. What’s going on in Hong Kong and why?