Mitch McConell says the quiet part out loud.
Exact full quote from CNN:
“People think, increasingly it appears, that we shouldn’t be doing this. Well, let me start by saying we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” McConnell said. “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”
cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4085063
I was skeptical until tesla became a thing. In 2010 a friend wanted me to buy and i refused because it was so oviously a scam. Despite huge subsidies it has made a majority of its profits from bitcoin, wich is also a scam. Yet its worth a lot of money. The only way to explain it is that the rate of profit is low enough that most proffit is coming from risk rather than from the actual natural rate of profitthe us already deep into the canobalistic phase all societies end in.
So esentially we are living in the industrial equivalent of an agrarian crisis. unless something fundamental changes in our understanding of phisics the empire may colapse under a significant enough stocastic shock. And that treshold is only going to get smaller. In this analogy covid was the equivalent of the 1315 famine. Wich didnt cause a collapse but made it clear the collapse was imminent.
What we are seeing with ludicrously over valued companies like Tesla and cryptocurrencies is what Marx described as fictitious capital.
The US is not going to collapse from investor shock, its produces a huge surplus of food and oil, and the use of its military to enforce the dollar as the world’s reserve currency protects it from market crises since the whole world subsidises the federal reserve simply printing more money.
Prehaphs i wss not clear. The important part is not that the hogs are allocating funds to tesla is why they are doing it. Because the rate of profit is very low. This tells us that western societies are well into the canibalistic phase. This also means that the societies ability to resist stocastic shocks is decreasing.
In my analogy i mention the 1315 famine, a few years were a bit too wet. Grain yields fell a little and a lot of people died. The thing is that those climatic variations are very common but they only cause a famine when the rate of change in land productivity with respect to labor is low enough. This makes the society unable to react to these shoks that normally wouldnt be a problem. By 1315 standards of living had been on the decline for over a generatio(as they are now).
In the elite sphere it means wealth bexomes more concentrated class conciousnes and solidarty breaks down so that they are less wigling to coperate. And eventually it all inevitably ends in an orgy of cannibalism.
While the rate of profit plays a sligthly different role than the rate of chang in land productivity with respect to labor. It is also related to a societies ability to react to crisies and to how canibalistic its elites get.
We see more rash imperialist adventures, we see them eating europen industry, we see them play scams on each other more brazenly. Etc.
It also means that same military is less likley to adapt to changes because there is neither will nor enough unclaimed surplus for that. It means its not worth it to hold dollars because us investments ate not profitable.