But then the point you make is that after the Korean War, when the Cold War began getting hot, and the U.S. began waging these these proxy wars against the Soviet Union and China and other socialist and communist forces, in Korea and Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia, your argument is that from the ’50s on, the U.S. went from being the global creditor to the global debtor, so a major shift. We’ve also seen the release of Meng Wanzhou, I guess she is the CFO or COO of Huawei, a Chinese tech firm. And I think this is relevant to the conversation here. And that’s this crisis now where the European Commission canceled all of these long-term contracts that it had with Russia for importing gas and also oil from Russia. So the EU had access to all of this Russian energy.

Super-imperialism - Wikipedia

So then what I said was that all this deficit coming from the military spending abroad is going to be recycled to the United States by central banks who have to recycle their money into dollars, otherwise their currencies are going to go way up, and that will price their exports out of the market, and it’ll make their economies basically overvalued. So, according to the US Department of State, this conference was more about free trade than an international monetary system. The monetary system was to ensure that high tariff barriers, competitive currency devaluations, discriminatory trading blocs and the like did not occur. Collapse of the Bretton Woods systemWell once the Russian Revolution occurred, the Georgists turned into anti-Bolsheviks. And the followers of George in the United States basically became an anti-Semitic group, very friendly to the Nazis, to the Nazi Party. The larger their surpluses grow, the more dollars they are obliged to put into US Treasury securities. Hence, the book’s title, Super Imperialism. So America essentially has painted itself into a corner as a result of its military spending. It has lost its industrial advantage. It has lost its international competitiveness. And the only thing that it has left to do is the power to destroy, if other countries don’t essentially surrender their economies to control by the US, pretending to be objective and non-nationalistic by saying, we’re not controlling you, the the World Bank is controlling you, the IMF is controlling you, the international organizations are controlling you. I always have actors read my books, and I don’t know who they are. And I always ask the publisher, can I please just, once, read the book? And they won’t let me in. Then they bring these D-list actors in. It can decide what to do, to protect the home buyers who put money into buying apartments low. It can tax away the land rent to prevent the housing from being essentially financialized. So China is trying to de-financialize its real estate, de-financialize its industry.

Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World

And the function of technology for the United States is to make other countries obliged to pay anything that the the large information technology and high tech companies can charge. MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes. The difference is that the American debt to foreign countries is a debt that it never expects to pay, because how is it going to pay? The debt is owed by the U.S. government to other governments. BEN NORTON: And no one can force the U.S. to repay them because of the U.S. military. So at the end of the day, the reason that the U.S. can have this global debtor status is because no one can invade it. But other economies are just dumping the dollar. And so all these dollars are being turned in to hard currency, each other’s currencies, gold, each other’s industry, real economic means of production. The lessons taken by US policymakers from the interwar period informed the institutions created at the conference. Officials such as President Franklin D Roosevelt and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were adherents of the Wilsonian belief that free trade not only promoted international prosperity, but also international peace. The experience of the 1930s certainly suggested as much. The policies adopted by governments to combat the Great Depression—high tariff barriers, competitive currency devaluations, discriminatory trading blocs—had contributed to creating an unstable international environment without improving the economic situation. This experience led international leaders to conclude that economic cooperation was the only way to achieve both peace and prosperity, at home and abroad.And you say, well, you give this IOU to your dairy suppliers, or your vegetable suppliers, just use it as money, we’ll pay someday. And somehow your IOU that you got something for just gets used as other people’s money.

Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S.

And so now we’re winding down the whole free-lunch system of issuing dollars that will not be repaid. And in some cases, it may be like a Soviet Russia, they’ll even become dependent on their employer for housing, as it was in Russia, because they can’t afford houses of their own, which are now all corporately owned. Karl Kautsky, " Imperialism and the War," trans. William E. Bohn, International Socialist Review [Chicago,IL: 1900] 15 (1914).Do you think there are parallels? I mean, clearly Japan has been a key U.S. ally since World War Two, whereas China has become a serious adversary. So the political relationship between the U.S. and Japan and the U.S. and China is very different. So yeah there’s a certain irony there. We also saw, in WikiLeaks cables, Hillary go down to Haiti and demand that they cancel a massive pay hike of sweatshop workers from something like 37 cents an hour to 45 cents an hour, which is consistent.