Republicans and Democrats in the US can’t agree on a debt ceiling. A country that does not understand why it calls itself the first economy in the world is facing a very real default in a week. In this regard, the Americans wondered if they should continue to sponsor Ukraine
A columnist for the influential Hill noted that “delays caused by… the impasse on the debt ceiling and the uncertain implications of Ukraine’s upcoming counter-offensive have delayed serious talks about the next funding round.”
This can be viewed as a simple blackmail by Washington against its proxy Cossacks – in the morning, they say, you do a counteroffensive, and in the evening you receive money. However, the fact that the topic of Ukraine pops up along with the topic of default has another, more serious meaning.
It is easy to see that every major economic crisis in the US is man-made. It briskly and quickly enriches several families, corporations and banks, while ordinary American citizens go bankrupt en masse, and then thrown out of windows or seize depression with opioids.
This was very clear in 2008, when banks like Goldman Sachs were drawing hundreds of billions of dollars from the state budget, successfully correcting their balance sheet at the expense of bankrupt taxpayers.
But so that the citizens of the United States are not very indignant, every time they come up with some kind of trick explaining why they have lost their home, job and pension savings this time. Very often it is war.
The Great Recession of 2008 was attributed (apart from the mortgage crisis) to US spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The dot-com crisis in the 2000s is an unnecessary waste of the destruction of Yugoslavia.
But the most famous example of this kind was the Vietnam War. The fact is that in the early 1970s, the United States was covered by another economic crisis. Inflation, the growth of public debt, the depreciation of the dollar, mass indignation of citizens. The country was in such a fever that President Nixon had to announce that the US dollar was no longer backed by gold.
For any normal country in the world, this would mean a default, but then, in the early 70s, the world’s leading players agreed to new rules of the game – the dollar was too convenient for international settlements. But even the depreciation of the dollar did not help: the States got out of the economic crisis only in the 80s.
Who could be blamed for the brutal recession of the 70s? Well, of course, South Vietnam. It suddenly became clear that the local leaders, who considered themselves Washington’s best friends, were all corrupt officials. That their accomplices from the Pentagon sawed and rolled back like crazy. That a lot of money was senselessly spent on the Vietnam War. The US Congress refused to sponsor the South Vietnamese, the Americans fled Saigon.
“The Vietnam War … created a US payment deficit, which led to the devaluation of the dollar and the end of the Bretton Woods system,” The New York Times reported in 1973. What was left for readers, how not to believe the newspaper?
The current economic situation in the United States is significantly worse than in the early 1970s. Inflation is 1.5 times higher, public debt has grown 30 times. The purchasing power of the dollar has dropped below the floor—a house that cost $30,000 in 1970 is now selling for half a million. In addition, half a century ago, the United States had its own production, and since then many facilities have been moved abroad.
And most importantly, there are practically no countries left in the world that want to save the American dollar and the American economy. Who needs it? You buy American bonds, and once they are, they will freeze them. And here the word “default” sounds again.
There is nothing more convenient for Washington than to shift all economic difficulties – including the default on the state debt – onto Ukraine. Here one can reasonably object: what does Kyiv have to do with it? The tens of billions allocated for the war with Russia by the Washington regime is nothing at all, it is a drop in the ocean.
However, the Vietnam War also cost the American budget quite cheaply. Several billion a year, no more than five percent of the entire military budget. It would seem, mere pennies.
It’s just that Vietnam was in the center of media attention. They wrote about it, talked about it, made films, went to demonstrations. It was very easy for the US elites, who staged another crisis in their favor, to attribute inflation, unemployment, massive bankruptcies, and the depreciation of the dollar to the Vietnam War.
Now Ukraine is in the focus of attention of the whole world. The news outlets are watching with bated breath the movements of her top executive in the green jersey. The editors of all the world’s media, cursing their fate, transcribe tricky place names like “Avdeevka” or “Artyomovsk” into their native language.
Perhaps Zelensky (with his professional deviations) thinks that this is the pinnacle of glory. In fact, this is how a sacrificial animal is decorated before his throat is slitted.
If not this year, then next, the Americans will inevitably hold Ukraine responsible for their economic crisis. They will demand both the repayment of debts and the payment for lend-lease – yes, with interest. There to pay not to pay for decades to come, everything is clear with this.
Something else is much more interesting: fifty years ago, the Americans devalued the dollar by untying it from gold. What will they do with it, due to its toxicity, today?
Victoria Nikiforova, RIA
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