Washington\u2019s IQ follows the Fed\u2019s interest rate \u2014 it is negative. Washington is a black hole into which all sanity is sucked out of government deliberations.<\/p>\n
Washington\u2019s failures are everywhere visible. We can see the failures in Washington\u2019s wars and in Washington\u2019s approach to China and Russia.<\/p>\n
The visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping, was scheduled for the week-end following the Pope\u2019s visit to Washington. Was this Washington\u2019s way of demoting China\u2019s status by having its president play second fiddle to the Pope? The President of China is here for week-end news coverage? Why didn\u2019t Obama just tell him to go to hell?<\/p>\n
Washington\u2019s cyber incompetence and inability to maintain cyber security is being blamed on China. The day before Xi Jinping\u2019s arrival in Washington, the White House press secretary warmed up President Jinping\u2019s visit by announcing that Obama might threaten China with financial sanctions.<\/p>\n
And not to miss an opportunity to threaten or insult the President of China, the US Secretary of Commerce fired off a warning that the Obama regime was too unhappy with China\u2019s business practices for the Chinese president to expect a smooth meeting in Washington.<\/p>\n
In contrast, when Obama visited China, the Chinese government treated him with politeness and respect.<\/p>\n
China is America\u2019s largest creditor after the Federal Reserve. If the Chinese government were so inclined, China could cause Washington many serious economic, financial, and military problems. Yet China pursues peace while Washington issues threats.<\/p>\n
Like China, Russia, too, has a foreign policy independent of Washington\u2019s, and it is the independence of their foreign policies that puts China and Russia on the outs with Washington.<\/p>\n
Washington considers countries with independent foreign policies to be threats. Libya, Iraq, and Syria had independent foreign policies. Washington has destroyed two of the three and is working on the third. Iran, Russia, and China have independent foreign policies. Consequently, Washington sees these countries as threats and portrays them to the American people as such.<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s President Vladimir Putin will meet with Obama next week at the UN meeting in New York. It is a meeting that seems destined to go nowhere. Putin wants to offer Obama Russian help in defeating ISIS, but Obama wants to use ISIS to overthrow Syrian President Assad, install a puppet government, and throw Russia out of its only Mediterranean seaport at Tartus, Syria. Obama wants to press Putin to hand over Russian Crimea and the break-away republics that refuse to submit to the Russophobic government that Washington has installed in Kiev.<\/p>\n
Despite Washington\u2019s hostility, Xi Jinping and Putin continue to try to work with Washington even at the risk of being humiliated in the eyes of their peoples. How many slights, accusations, and names (such as \u201cthe new Hitler\u201d) can Putin and Xi Jinping accept before losing face at home? How can they lead if their peoples feel the shame inflicted on their leaders by Washington?<\/p>\n
Xi Jinping and Putin are clearly men of peace. Are they deluded or are they making every effort to save the world from the final war?<\/p>\n
One has to assume that Putin and Xi Jinping are aware of the Wolfowitz Doctrine, the basis of US foreign and military policies, but perhaps they cannot believe that anything so audaciously absurd can be real. In brief, the Wolfowitz Doctrine states that Washington\u2019s principal objective is to prevent the rise of countries that could be sufficiently powerful to resist American hegemony. Thus, Washington\u2019s attack on Russia via Ukraine and Washington\u2019s re-militarization of Japan as an instrument against China, despite the strong opposition of 80 percent of the Japanese population.<\/p>\n
\u201cDemocracy?\u201d \u201cWashington\u2019s hegemony don\u2019t need no stinkin\u2019 democracy,\u201d declares Washington\u2019s puppet ruler of Japan as he, as Washington\u2019s faithful servant, over-rides the vast majority of the Japanese population.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the real basis of US power\u2014its economy\u2014continues to crumble. Middle class jobs have disappeared by the millions. US infrastructure is crumbling. Young American women, overwhelmed with student debts, rent, and transportation costs, and nothing but lowly-paid part-time jobs, post on Internet sites their pleas to be made mistresses of men with sufficient means to help them with their bills. This is the image of a Third World country.<\/p>\n
In 2004 I predicted in a nationally televised conference in Washington, DC, that the US would be a Third World country in 20 years. Noam Chomsky says we are already there now in 2015. Here is a recent quote from Chomsky:<\/p>\n
\u201cLook around the country. This country is falling apart. Even when you come back from Argentina to the United States it looks like a third world country, and when you come back from Europe even more so. The infrastructure is collapsing. Nothing works. The transportation system doesn\u2019t work. The health system is a total scandal\u2013twice the per capita cost of other countries and not very good outcomes. Point by point. The schools are declining . . .\u201d<\/p>\n
Another indication <\/a>of a third world country is large inequality<\/a> in the distribution of income and wealth. According to the CIA itself, the United States now has one of the worst distributions of income of all countries in the world. The distribution of income in the US is worse than in Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia\/Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Canada, Cote d\u2019Ivoire, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Guinea, Guyana, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malawi, Mali, Malta, Mauritania, Mauritius, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, UK, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, and Yemen. <\/p>\n The concentration of US income and wealth in the hands of the very rich is a new development in my lifetime. I ascribe it to two things. One is the offshoring of American jobs. Offshoring moved high productivity, high-value-added American jobs to countries where the excess supply of labor results in wages well below labor\u2019s contribution to the value of output. The lower labor costs abroad transform what had been higher American wages and salaries and, thereby, US household incomes, into corporate profits, bonuses for corporate executives, and capital gains for shareholders, and in the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that had made the US an \u201copportunity society.\u201d<\/p>\n The other cause of the extreme inequality that now prevails in the US is what Michael Hudson calls the financialization of the economy that permits banks to redirect income away from driving the economy to the payment of interest in service of debt issued by the banks.<\/p>\n Both of these developments maximize income and wealth for the One Percent at the expense of the population and economy.<\/p>\n As Michael Hudson and I have discovered, neoliberal economics is blind to reality and serves to justify the destruction of the economic prospects of the Western World. It remains to be seen if Russia and China can develop a different economics or whether these rising superpowers will fall victim to the \u201cjunk economics\u201d that has destroyed the West. With so many Chinese and Russian economists educated in the US tradition, the prospects of Russia and China might not be any better than ours.<\/p>\n The entire world could go down the tubes together.<\/p>\n Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Washington\u2019s IQ follows the Fed\u2019s interest rate \u2014 it is negative. Washington is a black hole into which all sanity is sucked out of government deliberations. Washington\u2019s failures are everywhere visible. We can see the failures in Washington\u2019s wars and in Washington\u2019s approach to China and Russia. The visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping, was … Continue reading “No Brains In Washington”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2958,"featured_media":4299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[144,486,174,66,745,1808,727],"class_list":["post-20412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-china","tag-economy","tag-iran","tag-russia","tag-usa","tag-war","tag-washington"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/pcr.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20413,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20412\/revisions\/20413"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}