In this post i will make an excursion into an issue directly related to the gradual erosion of national sovereignty, both in Spain and in many other affected countries.
Important: please bear with me that the numbers used here are used only as a thought experiment in order to make comparisons between the “hostile takeover investment” and the “assets being bought”. What is important to notice here is not the precision of the individual numbers but rather the orders of magnitude involved in the “transactions”.
During the Russian-Ukraine war some analysts have highlighted the remarks by Victoria Nuland about the the US having invested 5 Billion US$ (I’ll use the American Billion meaning here, meaning a thousand millions) since 1991 and (supposedly) until 2013 “promoting democracy” in Ukraine. This admission has been used as argument to prove that the US was actually behind the Maidan coup and that all Ukrainian post-Maidan pro-Western & anti-Russian governments have been controlled by Washington.
But for me, the most revealing insight of this number is how cheaply could be the hijacking of an entire country, a massive country in an important geostrategic location that in 2013 had a population of 45 million, a landmass of 600.000km2 and a GDP of 190 billions US$.
Ukrainian GDP, source here
Actually, “Cheap” does not even come close to define the takeover of Ukraine by US “interests”. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the actual “invested” number doubles Vicky’s 5B US$, when one takes into account the undeclared contributions of other countries as well as the “private sector” contributions, like e.g. the usual Soros’ Open Society NGO suspects. Even with this assumption, the “leveraged buyout” of Ukraine was successful using only 5% of Ukraine’s 2013 GDP (10 billion over ca. 30 years divided by 190 B = 0,053). Put in another way: The return of investment of Ukraine’s buyout / conquest was ca. 20 times the invested amount. Per year.
Of course, this is a very rough apples to pears comparison. GDP is the aggregate of all final goods and services officially transacted inside Ukraine in a given year; a grandma buying bread in Kiev will continue do so irrespectively of its government being pro Russian or pro US. In this example, grandma’s bread money will not directly fund Ukraine’s war against Russia, to be sure. But a whole national economy can be used in an economic war against other nations. In Ukraine’s case, the country severed almost all economic ties with Russia, causing a real pain in the Russian economy (exports to Ukraine stopped) and some industrial supply chains (e.g. Ukraine provided some advanced products to Russian businesses, like gas turbines or helicopter motors). The damage to the Ukrainian economy was greater (see graph), but at this point we know that the US Empire does not care about the fate of its pawns.
Ukraine lost over 50% of its GDP during the first post-Maidan years. Same source.
But again, the exercise here is to compare the magnitudes of the “investment” made into subverting Ukraine vs the size of the asset being “acquired”. And the magnitudes are telling: the Ukrainian population “bought” for an estimated 10B amounts to a cost of ca. 220US$ per citizen (10B / 45M). Very cheap indeed.
This cheap way of doing Empire is shocking in itself, but once we consider how the US government itself is financed, the implications are enormous. As many readers will know, the USA has the exorbitant privilege of having the world reserve currency and, together with the City of London and the Belgium based SWIFT payment system, has pretty much the complete control over the international financial system. This means that the USA can print unlimited amounts of dollars at basically zero cost and exchange this fiat money for real goods and services throughout the whole world.
So yeah, in effect the Cheap Evil US Empire has bought the economic and political control of Ukraine using money that it has printed at no cost out of thin air.
Again: this is an oversimplification, we cannot do an exact quantification of this complex event, but what we can do is to make an informed estimate of the orders of magnitude involved here.
Animportant counterargument is that, while the US$ can be printed in unlimited amounts at zero cost, this printing will have a future effect - increasing the budget deficit of the Cheap Empire government and causing inflation. Again, doing a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation, the USA.gov added a total of 14600B of debt from 1990 to 2014, including the period of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009. The 10B invested in Ukraine during this same time amount to a minuscule 0,07% of the total, this magnitude amounts to a rounding error. So, in the grand scheme of things, this “investment” didn’t meaningfully contribute to the rise of the Cheap Empire’s growing debt pile. The same argument can be made in the case of inflation.
Another counterargument might be the case that the US Empire’s “cheap buying” power is exercised inside a complex system that includes the US military supremacy, its economic and financial muscle, etc. The “cheap buy” cannot be successful without this backing that includes both soft and hard power. Indeed, but by developing further our analysis, we can establish the following important facts. First, that many of the factors included in the “cheap supremacy complex” are self-sustaining business in themselves. Examples like Wall Street and the usual behemoth US finance corporations are clear - they made money irrespective of the past events in Ukraine. But there are others: the individual members of what I call the “MSM, Hollywood, academy, diplomacy/think tank, NGO complex” do not need to be financed directly by the US Government, as they are mostly self-sustaining, too. The US Military is a big drain on the US finances but the Military-Industrial-Complex does in part sustain itself by selling overpriced weapons to the US allies satrapies. And this brings me to the second point: the interrelation between the different actors creates an evil cheap “virtuous circle” – for example in the case of Ukraine, after 2014 it started arming itself from Western manufacturers. Also, the market was opened wide for Western business while Russian companies were cut off from it. This happened in many sectors: agrifood, automotive sub assemblies, media, banking… By politically taking over a country, you will invite your economic vultures entrepreneurs inside and proceed to invest loot its assets. Also, the country will increase the use of your zero-cost dollars and its reliance on the Angloamerican financial system, thus reducing the inflationary pressure on the US$.
A third important factor in this process is the role of the local comprador elites oligarchs. If your country’s big men are dependent on the US-based financial system, they will be supportive of your political moves in the country, because they risk losing most of their ill-gotten wealth, that is usually conveniently stored abroad in Angloamerican controlled tax havens. Also, if an important share of your local big businesses and corporations is already in the hands of Wall Street whales like Vanguard, Blackrock and similar megafunds, your CEOs and business leaders will be pressured to support the Cheap Empire as well.
Perhaps the biggest argument against this thesis is that it might only be successful when the target country has a significant unrest among a large part of the population. This is definitely true, I cannot imagine for example the Swiss or the Singaporean population storming their respective government buildings in a Maidan-like insurrection, even when foreign interests would plow large amounts of money into these countries. But it is also equally true that the population of many countries is experiencing growing economic, financial and political issues since at least the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. The polarization caused by both Mainstream Media and Social Media (both usually owned by Wall Street or Silicon valley megacorps) has also greatly contributed to a growing friction inside many countries, and provides an appropriate opening for the “Cheap Empire” game.
Other examples of Cheap Empire-making could be analyzed in detail, but it would make this post too long. Suffice it to mention two Southeast Asian examples: Thailand and Myanmar. Brian Berletic at the YT channel The New Atlas, and blogging anonymously at The Land Destroyer before, has extensively documented the Cheap Empire play in both countries, with the main actor there being the National Endowment for Democracy, a front NGO that is actually run by the US State Department and funded by USAid.
In South America I will mention the newly elected Argentinian PM Javier Milei. While some libertarians, conservatives and Trump supporters see Milei as a legitimate anti-establishment figure, the sad truth is that Milei will do nothing more than implement the usual neoliberal reforms and put Argentina firmly under the Washington yoke. While probably not being as ruinous to Argentina as the Maidan coup was to Ukraine, Milei will gladly sacrifice Argentina in order to damage the enemies (in this case mainly China and Brazil) of the Cheap Gringo Empire.
Cheaply Learned Lessons:
1) The above analysis makes it clear that this modus operandi is a great way for the US to exert real influence over most of the World’s nations. We can also expect that the Cheap Empire will not stop it, on the contrary, it will continue to implement it more and more often.
2) The only credible way for this system to stop would be when/if the “dollar export scheme” stops working, and this will most probably only happen with the end of the global reserve currency status of the US dollar.
3) The global reserve currency status is deeply linked to the Angloamerican-controlled global financial system. The Washington-Wall Street axis will defend it at all costs, and its main tactic will be to create crises in other currencies and regions and trigger a capital “flight to safety” to the US$. They will implode the Euro and the Yen and together with them the European and Japanese economies . The same will happen with their lesser satraps in Africa, Ibero-America and elsewhere. At that point, the dollar will be the “last man standing” of the Western financial system. Eventually, as all other historical reserve currencies that have existed, the dollar will fall, but it will take out first their allies’ economies.
4) This process will probably take several years and even several decades yet to complete. A swift collapse of the dollar is unlikely. In this case, its most probable catalyst would be a coordinated attack by powerful states on both the financial plane of the dollar and probably also on key points of the physical US financial infrastructure as well (like cyberattacks on banking servers and data centers).
What do you think, dear readers? It’s that easy to build a Cheap Empire and Influence People?
This is a masterful three-part commentary. It's organised so effectively, describing the specifics of Spain/Catalonia and Ukraine, then going to the global picture.
I've been working for some months on an (unfinished) explanation for my adult children of why we're about to make an unambiguous entry to World War Three and suffer a financial/economic collapse deeper and longer than the GFC. You've saved me much fine-tuning because I'll just hand over your work - Thanks!
Hola, acabo de descubrir este canal por pura casualidad y me ha emocionado descubrir que aún se pueden encontrar en nuestra deslucida y atribulada España personas que razonan con discernimiento en temas tan delicados como los que aquí expone. Gracias por los artículos y un cordial saludo.