GHW Bush, the Bicycling Ambassador to China

https://bushchinafoundation.org/u-s-china-relations-legacy/

GHW Bush was known as "the bicycling ambassador" and reportedly well received in China.

Sadly, after he became President over ten years later, shit happened.

Notably, the "Tiananmen Square Massacre," which I happen to believe was an early form US sponsored Color Revolution.  Of the many threads of evidence, I find the concurrent presence of Gene Sharp, the father of Color Revolutions, the most telling.

Bush, the CIA man, did not respond forcefully enough compared to what Congress and others wanted.

 (This always seems to be the stage directions.  The President is not doing enough, say the warmongers, we must have more.  Then, finally, the President relents and "reluctantly" bombs Serbia/Libya/Syria etc.)

In this case, though, they got the beginning of an adversarial relationship and not bombing as such.

Was GHWB being spooky all along, planting seeds for revolution in China during the 70's while appearing "friendly?"  Or was there a shift, from those who believed we could use China to counter Russia to vice versa?

Euromaidan Ukraine

Na'omi Allen was a supporter of Ukraine in the current war, but had a conversion to anti-Euromaidan after doing a deep dive finding Nazis and a very belligerent Ukraine.  She spells out many facts here I hadn't seen discussed anywhere else, with a solid discussion.

She mentions The Crimea Project which I'd never heard named before.  I already knew Zelensky had been planning to retake Donbas and Crimea against the wishes of most there.  And I judge it as a fact (not mentioned by Na'omi) that the Ukrainian reconquest had already begun when Russia sent troops.  That's on top of the 14,000 in Donbass who had been killed on the authority of Kiev up to that point over 8 years but mostly in the first two since the US-backed Nazi coup in 2014--which I judge as the beginning of the current war.

https://twitter.com/naomiallen_usa/status/1550285990547292161?s=20&t=upydyf3BBMWUfHkonp2tLA

The Ideological Tower of Babel

 So, Western Countries have officially "pledged" to massively replace fossil fuel usage with renewable energy.  There HAS been an increase in renewable energy, but fossil fuel usage is not reduced.  Keeping fossil prices low had been a big priority of the Biden administration, after it's ill advised sanction regime was wrecking all global commerce including oil.  Low prices means high output.  IOW, utter hypocrisy, which is also visible in the soft voluntary "pledges" which are always taken to avert incoming catastrophe.

While this utter hypocrisy has been the general rule, many sectors in the West especially the USA are flat out denialists, minimizers, and the like who call for the private energy market to solve things without government interference.   IRONICALLY many such people see "the Global Warming hoax" as either a central government psyop (to increase government power) or a general conspiracy of Soros, big banks, CIA, Israel, and so on.  So in effect there's a flavor of denialism that leans right, and another flavor of denialism that leans left.

Or to be more accurate, what I just called left denialism doesn't much exist, instead the self described left leaning faction opposed to renewable energy are Cornucopians, such as La Rouchies, who believe all we need is nuclear energy and then there is no need for population reduction, etc.  Other leftists don't see La Rouchies on the left at all but a kind of "American Libertarianism" which sees reduction of government regulation invariably as the solution to every problem, putting them generally on the far right except wrt to "social issues."

(I am reminded not to confuse La Rouchies with the followers of Ramsey Clark, whose IAC I heartily endorse.)

Meanwhile, western countries especially the USA and it's close associates UK, Canada, and Australia, promote something they call the "Rules Based Order" which means their rules, of course, in order to enrich their global financial stripping operations.

This Rules Based Order has necessitated a global Cold War ever since World War II, with periodic "hot" proxy wars, massive military spending, and endless international subversion operations.

It will be impossible to solve Global Heating in any meaningful way as long as the drive for western Hegemony continues.

But quite often, there isn't help on the other side either.  Russia is a major resource extractor and exporter and perhaps not surprisingly most online commentators, shills, and bots taking the pro-Russian or perhaps merely non-anti-Russian POV also either push flat out denialism (often regarding Covid too) or some flavor of the idea that the (what appears to them to be ongoing instead of a politically impossible hope) Green New Deal is a Soros/CIA/Israel etc conspiracy.

So the picture I'm trying to present here is that we are on the construction floor of the tower of Babel, and our hope of ever surviving is vastly diminished by the fact that nearly everybody has a different set of wrong ideas.

Those who solidly believe in the necessary Degrowth and Non-Hegemony are a tiny few.

The Ending of US Hegemony

It's clear now that there are two possible ways ahead.  One involves the US voluntarily giving up the self declared mantle of "World's Policeman" or Hegemon, the single dominant "power" in the world to which none others dare to compete.  The other involves that outcome happening involuntarily.  The first is greatly to be preferred by all, and opens up possibility of other humanity preserving options, such as tackling global heating.

It was the pretense at World's Policeman which led to the creation of NATO in the first place.  The notion is an insult to actual policemen, no matter how regressive they are.  The US has never involved itself in foreign affairs except to the promotion of naked self interest, not unlike any other major European country, The US has fought major aggressive land wars for much of the time since World War II, proxy wars most of the rest of the time, overthrown 83 governments, and tried many more times than that.  It maintains constant pressure on it's "allies" (vassal states) to ignore it's flouting of international law, obey the rules it invents for further self-aggrandizement, and participate endlessly in an endless war against all rising competitors.

Naturally, people raised in the US and other western countries have a narrative in which it was the West which aggrandized by Russia following the world war, and not the reverse--which is far more true.

The US has endlessly sought to destroy not only regimes which cooperate with Russia, but have sought Russian assistance in desperation, or planned to have more socialized economies than could be conveniently pillaged by Western banks.  Global Hegemony is effectively Global Totalitarianism in service of financial pillage.

Russia, in contrast, has generally supported the vassal states on its periphery and helped them, sometimes with a heavy hand, resist western sponsored attempts at regime change.

This pattern goes back to nearly every example you can think of, even the Tanks in Hungary, and outrageously supporting the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, which was an unfortunately successful attempt at regime change organized by the US against a Russian vassal state which had been doing fairly well beforehand relative to what came after...a longstanding pattern.  But outrageousness is not unusual, you can go on and on with such examples, such as Libya.

Now today, it appears to many, we have something different.  They see it as a clear "Unprovoked Russian Invasion."  The uniformity of that phrase alone should make it very clear it was not "Unprovoked" at all, in fact it was meticulously and outrageously provoked in greater and greater degrees, going back about as far as you wish.

Right after WWII the US began protecting and supporting Ukrainian Nazis for the precise reason that they would be useful for the US plan of neutralizing if not destroying Russia.  And service to that goal has not stopped for one instant since.

The US was involved in the dissolution of the Soviet Union through co-opted Gorbachev and manchurian Yeltsin, and quickly moved in to move everything possible away from Russia, preventing any attempts at re-unification in highly Russian speaking areas.

The US was undeniably involved in both the 2004 and 2014 coups in Ukraine, the second being far more notorious.  The US backed the Neo-Nazi militias involved there and in Odessa.

Since the Neutral (in fact having descended directly from the US-installed government of 2004) government of Yanoukovich was overthrown and replaced with what has transparently a been a US vassal state committed to an unchangeable policy of local if not global de-Russification, it's clearly been a proxy war ever since then.  14,000 in Donbass were killed after the historic Russian dominated region declared and voted for succession, which should have been their right and especially under such circumstances.

But it's hard to fight back against the western press which is little more than a Ministry of Truth operated by western intelligence sources, which inverts nearly every actual fact and replaces with a simple good (us) vs evil (them) narrative.  And once you start seeing how they do this now, it's clear they have been doing the exact same thing as far back as you wish to look, all transparently in service of of global economic domination.

So the more people have kept up with "everything" and memorized each and every detail, the more they have been completely deluded, so long as never venturing into or trusting alternative sources, via comparable reactionary mechanisms in the media narrative, including the endless battle between super regressive social forces and those merely unable right now to fight them.

Peterson's Theory of Potential Use Value

 First, a little nugget of Marxism I was told about on Twitter, Lenin's short essay on the 3 Sources of Marxism.

I've read with great interest Steve Keen's Dissertation on the Labour Theory of Value.  In Keen's view, Marx actually abandoned the Labour Theory of Value while writing his critique of the Gotha program.  In that paper, Marx admits their are natural sources of value beyond human labor.

But he seemed to find this discovery inconvenient in writing Capital, and does not develop it there.

Although it was originally developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, today pretty much only Marxists cling to the Labour Theory of Value today.  Neoclassical economists have a hedonic theory of value, determined by people's subjective choices.  I can see both value and error in both approaches.

A theory of Profit could be developed with or without the Labour Theory of Value, though it is easier with that frame to produce Excess Value.  But the key thing which Marx derives from the Labour Theory of Value is the tendency for Profit to fall, thereby leading to Imperialism, and ultimately leading to communist revolution.

But it doesn't seem that the rate of Profit has necessarily fallen, or that communist revolution is inevitable in the most advanced Capitalist countries.  (Or at least not until recently, when things are clearly going haywire thanks to unremitting drive for US Hegemony, primarily.)

So it these regards Marx seems now like the historical Jesus, whose actual messages is reputed by historians to be "Repent, the end of the world is at hand."  The Apostle Paul reworked that message in combination with Jesus' alleged resurrection into a different kind of less time bound religion based on Faith.  The millenial part was downplayed.  So it has been with Marxists also.

What I've never seen properly explored, to my mind, is how the Labour Theory of Value includes what could be called Normative elements.  By looking only at the human production (or extraction) of value, we downplay a lot of people within Capitalist, Feudalist, and perhaps even earlier human societies consider to be wealth.

So, for example, the Physiocrats considered Land to be the ultimate source of value.  Keen looks back to the Physiocrats as having got it right, which is easy to do if you consider Land in the more general form of Resources, which could include minerals, water, sunlight, wind, and the natural processes which recycle human waste.

But once we start looking at resources rather than labour we come right up against other questions, such as who "owns" the resources.  If we only think of the human labour, we have abstracted away such concerns and don't have to think about them at all.  And that is much more conducive to thinking about wealth on a collective scale.  So it is that Adam Smith called his book the Wealth of Nations and not the Wealth of People.

While Smith might have gladly recognized that people own land, factories, etc, Marxists would prefer the ideal that wealth comes about from social production.

It's clear that once we throw Property into the analysis, the rate of profit from human labor need never fall, as the capitalist might (in theory) just keep increasing their property forever (though this is impossible), such as more and more automated factories.

Marx has ways of accounting for the machinery of factories in this way as valued by the labor that was put into them.  But this leads to a conundrum.

This is what I want to explore.

I'm going to start with something simpler.  Imagine a lake having streams running into it.  Those streams are considred "free" but the lake is "owned" by some rich person, who charges commoners to extract fish from it.

In this case, the Owner did not do anything, nor was any previous human labor "invested" in the production of fish.  All the owner did was obtain recognized possession of the lake and it's value, possibly by fighting wars.  Such "wars" did not create wealth either, they simply allowed the victor to claim unique possession, recognized by other humans to the degree that they are no longer fighting over it.

So here we have something like Excess Value, but it did not result from capitalist investment.  In fact this sort of income which goes to the owner is called Rent.

It was in this sort of way that the Spanish Empire, which started hundreds of years before Adam Smith and resulted in an unproductive economy that actually ultimately impoverished most Spaniards.

So it would have been reasonable for Smith NOT to look at wars and the seizures they may enable as any kind of source of wealth, though that had been historical and continues to this day in the popular imagination.

And Marx as well, taking a collective view.

The fact that one person may have "ownership" of the lake does NOT, in this view, make the collective union of all people wealthier.  It might just as well have been someone else, or society as a whole, if not for how the lake is actually used by others, which might be regulated for better or worse by having one person own it.

In fact, it almost seems the Labour Theory ofValue presupposes that Earth is All for All of Us, and not reserved, say, for non-human species or processes.  And we humans may chose to recognize the ownership of someone or some collective of some kind, but this does not make humanity as a whole more or less wealthy.  It is only when someone DOES something with the resource that makes us more or less wealthy than we were primordially.

But that view of something useful to US only coming from labour discounts the massive potential in each and every resource, potential that might in fact be degraded by human usage, extraction, etc.

The ultimate source of value therefore comes from the ultimate potential use value of resources, either as they are or in use.

In most cases, exploiting a resource makes us less wealthy, to the degree it depletes that resource for more valuable future uses.

It should be clear we have badly abused the natural resources on earth increasing exponentially with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

We have pursued unsustainable population growth, war and vast arms (all pure waste), unsustainable development of fossil fuels, who best use is in chemical production for the (hopefully infinite) human future, and mostly left in the ground for now.

Instead, we've turned the earth into the waste bucket for our "wealth creating" growth.

What we've been doing is not becoming more wealthy, but less.

Now faced with a human catastrophe that would have been unimaginable before, a likely vast die off from climate change effects, and possibly extinction from that or nuclear war.

It would be folly to consider this lesser wealth, close to bankruptcy, and not the greatest human wealth of all history as assessed by financiers and Economists.

Bankruptcy is indeed the correct notion, as we have indebted ourselves to the earth itself, by stealing and burning so much of its contents.  And then what have we done but create an unsustainable society on the edge of extinction?

Even though it has given many far more people far more hedonic value than ever before.  The question is not how many happy people, but how many unhappy people, how many starving or otherwise suffering, now and in the future.  Hedonicity is the natural state of nature, which humans reduce by adding to whatever degree their presence is unhappy.  Every human is a cost to nature, the question is what is the minimum number of humans to have a happy, artistically, and technologically creative society of the scale that could in thousands of years mount defenses to challenges like asteroids, as that is an asset to other life on earth as well.

So this is how understanding the Potential Use Value works.  In many cases, it's better to do less than more, especially when doing anything unsustainable, such as removing carbon stored from millions of years in a few hundred.

The New World Order in Myth and Fact

Reading about the Georgia Guidestones, which I admired (never been there though), I find a lot of people say such things are in the ideology of the New World Order.

This is such a sickeningly misguided idea--that advocates of sustainable population, and other forms of sustainability, are part of an oligarchic conspiracy.

All my life the Oligarchic conspiracy has been BOOM.  Growth in people, production, consumption, waste, destruction, and war.

Quite simply the Oligarchy wants more power, control, and wealth, without limits.  That's who they are.*  They probably well know we're driving straight towards the cliff that follows Peak Everything.  But they don't care because they think it won't affect them, they're not slowing down now one iota with grabbing everything they can while the grabbing is still good.

But to shut down those who would call for any kind of sustainability, these Oligarchs would be happy to disparage their opponents in any way possible.  While pointing eyes in another direction.

So creating and promoting a myth that people like me calling for sustainability are the true warriors for oligarchy...works perfectly for the actual Oligarchy.

(*What about the world's soon to be leading economy--and society.  China.  Well, you would only be showing your ignorance here.  For some time now, China has had a 3 Child Policy.  Also China is not an Oligarchy or participant in the world Oligarchy, but instead a People's Bureaucracy.)

(*What about Bill Gates, who has sometimes talked about limiting population growth.  As an Oligarch himself generally you can predict he's lying whenever his lips are moving.  If he talks good things--which negative population growth would be--he's trying to sell you something else, like US Finance Hegemony.  His personal example is 3 children, not sustainable now.)

Only voices in the wilderness like me (independent rational minds) can promote such truly sustainable ideas (for now) as the 0.5 Child Policy, which would be the way to AVOID going over the cliff at the end of Peak Everything.

The other side is shills for the oligarchy, willing or otherwise.  The whole Movement Conservative thing is Oligarchy, sometimes in disguise.

I've long felt the planetary target population SHOULD be 500,000,000, just as the Guidestones say, though if human society were to shrink it's per-capita footprint enough, it could be as high as 1 Billion.  OTOH, it's not entirely clear 500,000,000 by itself guarantees sustainability either, and humans were locally ecocidal historically with those and even smaller numbers.

Where we are now is clearly unsustainable, with the planet quickly being degraded for all living beings and non-human species becoming extinct at an alarming rate.

What about the calamities that a shrinking population would cause.  Well, those calamities are of the kind that come from Greed Based Society, ie Capitalism.  A well planned socialist economy could either grow or shrink as needed.  Noam Chomsky has pointed out that it's more costly the provide for more children than more old people.  With an expanding population you're always needing more of everything, even when there aren't resources or room for anything more.

And there will be far greater calamities caused continuing growing approach, which well seems to be inevitable.

What about the growth of Women's Rights leading to reducing population growth?  Well if you ask that question you have not been paying attention to what's been happening to Women's Rights globally.  And even if it were otherwise, as it may still be somewhere, you still aren't seeing anything like sustainable degrowth.

The only way to get degrowth is to do degrowth.

Oligarchs are on their side, not Ours

The organization of right wing anti-abortion forces was helped a lot by the big money people who wanted GOP to win for other reasons.

Koch, etc.

Nothing new about this sort of alignment of political forces.   Religion has always been the opiate of the masses, enabling their rulers to exploit more.

Meanwhile, US oligarchs have not and will not be lining up to support progressive causes.  Liberal oligarchs support "Globalization" meaning continuing disinvestment in the USA, and Imperialism, War, etc, and heartily oppose all Progressive causes which cost money.

So, there's no oligarch money or organization for progressive causes.  Instead they wield the "liberal media" to push progressives and populists into fighting for them in Imperialism and Endless War.  They have no need to do so for abortion or other rights.  In fact, the opposite.  No right to abortion means more cannon fodder and prison labor.  And "Growth."

So unlike the other side, we are on our own.

Brad DeLong Re-Outing Himself

 I've sorta followed the (near endless) blogging of Economist Brad DeLong for over 18 years.  I have no plan to quit now, there have been good morsels, though I'm ruing a sort of rightward drift since about 2010 I think I've been seeing.

Apparently the rise in leftism, including Communism, in the USA has led him to re-out himself as a strong anti-Communist, as he must have done often before I started following him (though...I once remember him once saying that nationalizing energy would be a good thing, and of course health insurance) and also he is outing himself as what I'd call a Growth-Hegemonist.  He praises (far beyond its merit even in neo-liberal Economists phony hedonic "value" system) the "rising prosperity" (i.e. unsustainable growth) since 1870, without apparently noticing how the planet was getting destroyed at an exponentially increasing rate that persists.  And though the lucky of us on earth are more comfortable (I love my infinitely variable Air Conditioning) and "entertained", we may be more lonely, depressed, and anxious than humans overall in many previous centuries, while likely seeing their planetary civilization go over the abyss following the millions of other species who have done so since 1870.  (Well, those of us who are not lucky enough to be either traders or university professors or others who don't think much about the future.)

Example quotation:

 Hobsbawm’s past political commitments lead him to believe both that (a) Kim Il Sung was a megalomaniac tyrant, and that (b) U.S. intervention to stop his extending his empire by conquest was a backward step for humanity.

But it's been clear for a long time that DeLong takes his information regarding US Enemy countries from the most extreme Imperial Propagandists, such as Timothy Snyder, and completely ignoring the other side.

Synder ascribes death caused by the Red Army in fighting back Nazis as "Deaths caused by Communism."

From the 1917, USSR Communists had only been defending themselves against a western onslaught.  None of their deaths in fighting against Nazis and Imperialism should be counted against Communism.  Therefore the "Deaths caused by Really Existing Communism" at least in Soviet Union should actually be counted as about 10,000 or so deaths caused by Stalin's purges, and that's it.  Meanwhile, 100 M violent deaths caused by Capitalism.  (In Afghanistan, they were defending a progressive regime.  Similar to the situation in Syria.  And now, seeing what we've seen in Ukraine, it's easy to believe there could be better than Western explanations of what happened even in Poland.  It's easy to believe the Color Revolutions didn't just start in the 90's, but right from 1945.)

The utter vicious lying by the west regarding first Communists and now Russia (not Communist, but still a western "Rival" that they feel they must "Defeat") is beginning to expose itself to many people with the OT lies regarding Ukraine and Russia in the conflict the US started in 2014.

Honestly, I even think Hobsbawm is a bit of a Revisionist himself.  See quote from DeLong above.

But back to the whole Glorious Long Century narrative:

DeLong counts as progress made possible by monopolization and financialization the progress which was actually made by possible science and technology and a bit of liberalism.  What was really going on in "the long 20th century" was merely a continuation of the Industrial Revolution.

It could have been much much better WITHOUT the financialization and monopolization.  See for example Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backwards."

What actually happened 1870 onwards was a massive destruction of the ecosystem often for little benefit, massive and endless warmaking, with a few nice things for a few more lucky people than had been the case previously.

People often live longer now, though you will find lots of octegenarians in the 19th century and going back as well.  Currently US lifespans have been decreasing.

But like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx, economists persist with a "value system" that has absolutely nothing to do with our fundamental "wealth," the world itself, which has been massively degraded and now going over a cliff.

The phony hedonic value system believes we can infer value from peoples stated (or operative in limited cases...such as the limited "goods" the market has to offer--love, peace and sustainability not being on the menu) preferences.  But this is impossible for numerous reasons, both fundamental and technical.

For one thing, to really know what a different set of choices would be like, we can't just guess, we'd have to live those lives completely.  And not just one of them, ALL of them.  And over again infinite times because of unknown variables.  And on into the distant future while their actions still have some effect.

And ephemeral choices are little against the backdrop of exploitation, destruction, and war.

Naked Theft was behind much of western affluence and still is.

DeLong can be good, sometimes, on welfare economics, inequality, and things like that, compared with other capitalist economists.  And he's often an interesting read, better when he's not up on his anti-Communist high horse.  But like all social democrats, he's not really challenging the oligarchy, or leading us away from a catastrophic future, but rather right in to it.

The "Right to Life"

First of all, the self-described "Right to Life" is a bourgeois sham, most especially in the USA.  No one actually has a right to life...they have don't even have a right to be offered a job (wage slavery opportunity) or other support mechanism, without which they will quickly die of starvation or other resource inadequacy.  If the capital exploitation system doesn't have a need for you, you're toast.  There's no right to even a bare subsistence.

And likewise, in the USA at least, for medical care.  You might be able to get emergency care without "health insurance" or vast funds but not treatment, and even then you'll be obliged to pay it off through wage slavery, if you can find any, possibly facing crushing payments for the rest of your life, if there is any.

Not dissimilarly there is no right to be protected from the elements, including heat and cold.  There is no right to housing, and if you set up a tent on land you don't own you will probably be evicted.  There is no absolute right to be safe from accidents, including industrial accidents, or acts of war--especially when participating in military actions.

And that's if they're "Innocent Life."  If they're believed to have been involved in particular kinds of felonies, sometimes including murder, they may get executed by society.  I myself oppose the death penalty as it is ever likely to exist, but most people in the USA do not oppose it and it has a long history.  I might favor the death penalty applied to war criminals like former US presidents, which is not likely.

Nor does it appear that this often proclaimed "Right to Life" include any organisms who are not "Human."  We seize, exploit, and transform the world in ways unfavorable to most other species, already causing one of the largest extinction events in world history.  And with the effects of Global Heating only getting started, it can only get far far worse.  This is, by far, the greatest crime of humanity, or at least the part of humanity which contributes to Global Heating.  But Global Heating is only one of the latests in a long line of other species destruction going back over 10,000 years as well.  Since the dawn of civilization, Humans have been ecocidal.

When I bring up the continued existence of non-human species. gotcha  interlocutors immediately accuse me of defending "animal rights."  Let me be more clear, I think the so-called "right to life," is a faulty concept which should never be used in serious arguments or law, for either animals or humans.  But meanwhile, senseless destruction of the biosphere is the greatest collective crime of humanity.

It is precisely because the so-called rights of liberalism as expressed in the Declaration of Independence (not an active part of US law) and much less so in the US Constitution are negative rights, the the right to life is so meaningless.

Since there is no "right" to any kind of resources or protection, the negative "Right to Life" really only applies to human fetuses, for which the life support mechanism is presumed and thereby enslaved by the "Right to Life" granting authority.