Prof. Michael Hudson’s new book, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point” is a seminal event in this Year of Living Dangerously when, to paraphrase Gramsci, the old geopolitical and geoeconomic order is dying and the new one is being born at breakneck speed.
Prof. Hudson’s main thesis is absolutely devastating: he sets out to prove that economic/financial practices in Ancient Greece and Rome – the pillars of Western Civilization – set the stage for what is happening today right in front of our eyes: an empire reduced to a rentier economy, collapsing from within.
And that brings us to the common denominator in every single Western financial system: it’s all about debt, inevitably growing by compound interest.
Ay, there’s the rub: before Greece and Rome, we had nearly 3,000 years of civilizations across West Asia doing exactly the opposite.
These kingdoms all knew about the importance of canceling debts. Otherwise their subjects would fall into bondage; lose their land to a bunch of foreclosing creditors; and these would usually try to overthrow the ruling power.
Aristotle succinctly framed it: “Under democracy, creditors begin to make loans and the debtors can’t pay and the creditors get more and more money, and they end up turning a democracy into an oligarchy, and then the oligarchy makes itself hereditary, and you have an aristocracy.”
Prof. Hudson sharply explains what happens when creditors take over and “reduce all the rest of the economy to bondage”: it’s what’s called today “austerity” or “debt deflation”......more below
https://sputnikglobe.com/20230515/pepe-escobar-us-empire-of-debt-headed-for-collapse-1110374196.html
Iran’s Army has carried out a massive drone strike on the headquarters of the Israeli occupation forces in the Beersheba area, in response to the ongoing US-Israeli terrorist strikes against Iran.
In a statement, the Iranian Army announced that its drones heavily attacked the headquarters of Israeli regime in Beersheba on Friday morning.
It added that since Friday morning, the Iranian Army has been targeting the headquarters of the Israeli regime's defense forces in the occupied territories in Beersheba using destructive drones launched from various parts of the country.
“Beersheba is the site of strategic military installations and infrastructures of the Zionist regime's army, including bases associated with ground and air forces,” the statement said.
“This extensive operation will continue in the coming hours with large-scale attacks on other significant locations of Zionist regime bases,” it emphasized....more below
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The US military is facing a "historic challenge" as it attempts to counter Iran’s vast arsenal of “low-cost” drones and ballistic missiles, says a new report.
Nearly two weeks into the US aggression against the Islamic Republic, Tehran has managed to significantly strain American military inventories, Bloomberg reported, citing military experts and Pentagon officials.
The American publication wrote that US forces have been forced to dig deep into inventories of expensive, hard-to-replace interceptors to counter the Iranian barrage.
It stated that the US and its Persian Gulf allies have fired over 1,000 Patriot PAC-3 interceptors—nearly double the annual production capacity of these weapons.
“The United States led the long-range precision strike revolution, and this is the first war where we’re seeing the adversary have that kind of capability,” Bloomberg quoted Kelly Grieco, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center.
“It’s putting stress on the system that we haven’t seen before,” Grieco ...
