The Final Countdown – 6/21/23 – U.S. Doubles Down on Claim China is Building Base in Cuba

On this episode of The Final Countdown, the hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan discuss a wide range of topics, including U.S. claims of China opening a base in Cuba.  

Ted Harvey: Former Colorado State Senator, Chairman of StopJoe.com
KJ Noh: Journalist, Political Analyst, Writer, & Teacher
Luis Garate: Journalist, Expert in International Relations, and Director of Comunicambio 

The show starts with Former Colorado State Senator and Chairman of StopJoe.com Ted Harvey joins to discuss Hunter Biden’s plan to plead guilty. 
In the second half of the first hour, the hosts spoke to journalist KJ Noh to talk about U.S. claims of China opening a base in Cuba. 
 
The show wraps up with Luis Garate talking about the ex-Prime Minister of Peru being detained on conspiracy charges. 

AL JAZEERA COLUMN: Tied to a Drowning Man

The interconnectedness of the world economy means that US economic woes will have severe effects on others.

During the Tajik Civil War of the late 1990s soldiers loyal to the central government found an ingeniously simple way to conserve bullets while massacring members of the Taliban-trained opposition movement. They tied their victims together with rope and chucked them into the Pyanj, the river that marks the border with Afghanistan. “As long as one of them couldn’t swim,” explained a survivor of that forgotten hangover of the Soviet collapse as he walked me to one of the promontories used for this act of genocide, “they all died.”

Such is the state of today’s integrated global economy.

Interdependence, liberal economists believe, furthers peace—a sort of economic mutual assured destruction. If China or the United States were to attack the other, the attacker would suffer grave consequences. But as the U.S. economy deteriorates from the Lost Decade of the 2000s through the post-2008 meltdown into what is increasingly looking like Marx’s classic crisis of late-stage capitalism, internationalization looks more like a suicide pact.

Like those Tajiks whose fates were linked by tightly-tied lengths of cheap rope, Europe, China and most of the rest of the world are bound to the United States—a nation that seems both unable to swim and unwilling to learn.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, a process that began in the 1970s and culminated with dissolution in 1991, had wide-ranging international implications. Russia became a mafia-run narco-state; millions perished of famine. Weakened Russian control of Central Asia, especially Afghanistan, set the stage for an emboldened and highly organized radical Islamist movement. Not least, it left the United States as the world’s last remaining superpower.

From an economic perspective, however, the effects were basically neutral. Coupled with its reliance on state-owned manufacturing industries to minimize dependence upon foreign trade, the USSR’s use of a closed currency ensured that other countries were not significantly impacted when the ruble went into a tailspin.

Partly due to its wild deficit spending on the gigantic military infrastructure it claimed was necessary to fight the Cold War—and then, after brief talk of a “peace dividend” during the 1990s, even more profligacy on the Global War on Terror—now the United States is, like the Soviet Union before it, staring down the barrel of economic apocalypse.

Read the full article at Al Jazeera English.

Why No Jobs?

It’s his third year in office, yet Obama still hasn’t focused on jobs. Why not?

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