Dmitry Orlov

I stand by my long-time dictum that “The US is not a democracy and it doesn’t matter who is president.” The US is decrepitating at a perfectly acceptable rate (for the global majority that is sick and tired of its “hegemony”). Great hegemonic nations need two ingredients to stay hegemonic: economic supremacy and military supremacy.

In case of the US, everyone was forced to use the US dollar in trade, especially oil trade, from which the US was able to profit handsomely just by printing money, or they’d get Saddamed or Khaddafied to death. What it really boiled down to is “Pay us or we’ll kill you.” So, how is that supremacy doing now?

Let’s look at the economic power first. If you look (very briefly) at the US federal budget, you will find that fully a third of it is borrowed into existence and when I checked a few months ago the US was forced to keep borrowing a trillion dollars every three months; that sort of thing doesn’t tend to go on for long.

Meanwhile, a BRICS meeting in Kazan this October is expected to produce a plan for a US dollar replacement for international trade and in preparation for that event gold hit $2550/oz for the first time ever and international investors are starting to unload US Treasuries and are balking at buying any more of them. So far, 49 countries have filed the paperwork to join BRICS; you see, very few countries can afford to be left out of international trade once the USD goes buh-bye.

If you take away from the US Treasury Dept. the ability to borrow, there will only be enough money left for social spending — nothing else — but cutting out everything else will cause the tax base to shrivel to a point that it won’t be able to support social spending either. What will that do for the societal well-being of a country whose culture takes very few things completely seriously — certainly not justice or integrity or virtue or truth — but money is definitely one of them? So much for economic supremacy.

Now let’s look at military power. The US (and a really pathetic handful of allies) tried to stage some sort of “Operation Provide Blah-blah-blah” trying to wrest control of the Red Sea and, consequently, the Suez Canal, from the Ansar Allah, a.k.a. the Houthi Movement, named after the venerable Abdul-Malik Badruldeen al-Houthi. As it stands, only Chinese and Russian ships can sail unmolested past the Gate of Lamentation (a.k.a. Bab el Mandeb) at the entrance to the Red Sea. Other navigation choices include rounding the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa or braving Russia’s Northern Sea Route; one is expensive, the other politically unpalatable. The result of this mission (of which little is now heard) is a hole in the flight deck of a certain US aircraft carrier caused by a Houthi rocket, after which event (of which nothing was said) said carrier limped home to Norfolk.

More recently, when Iran promised retaliation for Israel’s assassination of HAMAS political leader and Palestinian billionaire Ismail Haniyeh while he was on a visit to Teheran, a high-level US delegation flew to Teheran and very quietly begged the Iranians not to attack Israel (again) because, as the previous Iranian rocket and drone attack on Israel demonstrated, Israel can’t defend itself and the US can’t defend it either. Nevertheless, the US did send an aircraft carrier to the region (one of the remaining few that are still serviceable) — to do what exactly? To fly effective aircraft sorties to shore without mid-air refueling, maximum distance from shore has to be under 300 nautical miles; the reach of hypersonic rockets, which everyone except the US and its allies now seems to have and which the US hasn’t learned to intercept, is farther than that. A single hit on a US aircraft carrier is worth a thousand aircraft sorties. So much for military supremacy.

When a certain political scheme no longer works — and US supremacy, while it lasted, was indeed a political scheme — thieves rush in and loot whatever is left. This is to be expected and this is what happened: thief Biden and thief Zelensky, thick as thieves, held a tag team event to loot both the US and the EU, filtering well over a hundred billion through the corrupt wreck of a nation that was the former Ukraine. Everything was going fine with Biden playing the part of an aged and wise “capo” of a mafia clan while his evil minions saw to the actual looting of the treasury.

But there surfaced a tiny problem: Biden became so senile that he no longer understood that he is senile and this became painfully obvious to everyone who saw him debate Trump. Something had to be done and three other mafiosi — Pelosi, Schumer and Obama — conspired to replace Biden. But with whom? The three mafiosi wanted to compile a short list of candidates and then hold a mock election at the Democratic convention to “choose” a predetermined winner.

Biden managed to thwart their plan by… endorsing Kamala Harris, a diversity hire (sort of black and probably a woman, although childless and who can tell what’s what with American “women” these days) who is either mentally retarded or permanently drunk or both. Poor Kamala seems to have three modes: drunk and happy in the morning (cackle-cackle-cackle), drunk at work during the day and trying to act sober but making no sense, and drunk and testy and ready to pass out in the evening. If that describes your girlfriend, then congratulations — you are a loser!

Pelosi, Schumer and Obama — the trio of mafiosi — struggled with this choice for as long as they could but in the end had to give Kamala’s candidacy their grudging consent. Kamala is definitely nobody’s choice but Biden’s… and Putin’s. You didn’t expect that, now, did you? Cheers!