Comments by "John Roberts" (@view1st) on "Geopolitical Economy Report" channel.

  1. It's a shame what's happening in Pakistan. Imran Khan seemed to be a politician who genuinely cared about his country and its people and under whose leadership the country appeared to have gained a greater degree of stability and prosperity. Now it will be sold out to the USA and used to antagonise both India and China, while serving as a base for continuing US clandestine operations in Afghanistan.
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  2. The World Trade Organisation (WTO) needs to be reformed or replaced, as should the United Nations (UN). Both serve the interests of western capital more than they serve those of the Global South, to the detriment of everyone else.
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  3. Can't really do that with Russia and China and I imagine India too. And sooner or later Argentina and Brazil may join them.
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  4. And for control over their energy.
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  5. Iran... and oil. Oh, and as you say, China and Russia. Slowly but surely the power of the two most powerful countries in the world are undermining the power monopoly the USA has in the Middle East (west Asia) and creating a system more conducive to respecting the economic and political interests of countries, opposing unipolarity in favour of the interdependence of states with no one country excessively dominating the rest.
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  6. To destroy the system you must be part of the the system. Remember Gorbachev, Yeltsin?
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  7. Are Belarus engaging in active hostilities with Ukraine? If not then why are they being lumped together with Russia.
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  8. Like the Bible, if it gets anything right it's by sheer chance.
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  9. They will do what Russia has done: ally themselves more closely with China.
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  10. The cold war is what I call the United States-led war of global hegemony. So really we are into US-led WOGH 2.
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  11. Trudeau does seem like a US puppet at times, too eager to please Uncle Sam. May be this is why.
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  12. A classic rentier economy.
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  13. GDP and GNP are not very good indicators of the health of a society. Perhaps that is the very reason why they are used; to use any other metric would show the USA and the UK to be less 'advanced' than they really are.
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  14. ​ @Marty-o5o  Purchasing Power Parity is how they measure such things.
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  15. How much of Ukraine will be left after Russia's 'special military operation'? Will Russia be forced to honour the contracts and loans taken on by Zelensky if they take the whole country or will they just declare force majeure and renege on those contracts and declare any loans odious debt?
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  16. Because it's not about that. It's about liberalism/neoliberalism.
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  17. They first came for Cuba but I did nothing because I was not from there. Then they came for Nicaragua but I did nothing for I was not from there either. They also came one by one for Iran, for Iraq, for Yugoslavia, for Libya, for Yemen, for Syria, for Sudan, for Ethiopia, for Egypt, for.... I still did nothing for I was not from any of those places. Then they came for me. But there was no one left to speak out for me.
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  18. Correction. It isn't the European Union that's waging a new cold war but the USA. The EU, consisting as it does of a comprador class, is merely carrying out their orders. An EU that truly represented Europe in a broad sense would not be doing this.
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  19. Will the introduction of central bank digital currencies in any way mitigate any great depression that may be coming or allow the USA to somehow wiggle its way out of disaster, as by creating a dollar area in the EU/Latin America similar to the sterling area that Britain created in the interwar years and persuading other countries to keep on using the dollar?
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  20. I think you may be overestimating Britain's influence on India, cultural or otherwise. If any English-speaking country has any influence on India it is the USA, and that, I think, it built purely around geopolitical considerations based on pragmatism and expediency.
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  21. Capitalists seek profit. At any cost. No other concerns matter.
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  22. Only closer economic relations between Russia, China and Germany and a greater independence of the European Union can undermine this vassalage. And that's exactly what Britain and the USA don't want!
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  23. ​ @yaoliang1580  A comprador class made up of collaborators.
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  24. A never-to-be-repeated accident of history. And the French revolution didn't destroy a system of oppression — the monarchy — it merely replaced it with a new form of oppression — the republic. The nobility of French feudalism was replaced by the haute bourgeoisie of capitalism. Also, you mustn't forget the counter-revolution of 1815 when the monarchy was briefly restored by the victors of Waterloo, or that none other than Bonaparte betrayed the republican values of the French revolution by declaring himself an emperor.
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  25. ​​ @flyingfishnet  The entire population of the world (approximately 8 billions) could fit comfortably in the state of Texas. And could be easily fed too. It's not resources per se that put limits on population, but access to resources by the majority of the world's population. We live in a world of artificial scarcity where resources are monopolised. That's not to say that we shouldn't do anything to mitigate the damage we, as a species, might be doing to the climate and ecology of the planet. Of course we should, but what I'm trying to say is population growth is not the main issue here. Also, population decline comes with its own problems, not least extinction!
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  26. They do the same with their coverage of Russia. It's laughable and sad at the same time.
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  27. Like with Russia — not a hot war but a cold war. Especially regarding the European Union and countries like Japan and South Korea. The USA wants to partially disconnect their economies and keep Eurasia disunited.
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  28. And unfortunately it's what the present economic system is. In a word rentierism.
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  29. It's only a problem if you desire to control the whole world and another country stands in your way by remaining independent and able to resist your domination.
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  30. 16:44 The ICJ did not explicitly say that Israel was committing genocide. Rather it said that their was sufficient prima facie evidence to suggest genocide was being committed but with the implication that the matter needed further investigation to confirm with the allegations were true. In other words the I.C.J. was stalling.
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  31. The effects of depopulation will take decades to have an effect and most of Europe and the USA are also effected by below replacement fertility rates. It therefore won't just be China and Russia that are effected. The impact will be felt everywhere and every country will have to find its own way of dealing with the problem.
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  32. Even if it means these 'allies' face the destruction of their own economies and industries. With allies like these who needs client states.
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  33. Espérons que les contraintes économiques imposées aux États-Unis (par exemple la dédollarisation) les empêcheront d’escalader la situation à ce point.
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  34. Well said! And I would add the the cold war was also about the deterrence of state planning by the former colonies of western Europe as a means of achieving national economic development. Just look at the vitriole directed against China and Russia and their planned economies and the praise for a 'free market' that never existed. The West didn't — and still doesn't — want other countries developing and outcompeting them and up until now the rest of the world was assigned the task of merely providing the basic raw materials and initial unskilled labour for the West to then add value by turning those raw materials into manufactured goods. Unfortunately for the West this state of affairs may all change as first China, then Russia, and then India and Latin America break away from this one-sided and unfair system and develop their national economies.
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  35. ​ @etow8034  "Sexually assimilated them." I read it as sexually assaulted them. 😆
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  36. And the Norwegians, Finns and Danes
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  37. Didn't you watch the video?
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  38. It's basically what the British employed during the empire, applying it to others, of course, not itself. At home it was protectionist.
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  39. For me they seem to be nothing more than intelligence assets, giving a public face to the CIA, FBI, etc.
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  40. Since the time of tsar Peter the Great Russia has looked to western Europe as its inspiration and before then I would say it looked inward rather than eastwards. The West (principally western Europe) was rising at that time (industrial, cultural and technological revolutions) and Asia was declining (as a total of world GDP). Only now with the apparent rise of an Asia led by China does Russia increasingly look towards the east, balancing its outlook between East and West.
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  41. It certainly looks that way.
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  42. It would appear that these repeated crises can go on indefinitely seeing as capitalism has repeatedly shown how adaptable it is to changing circumstances no matter how bad it might be for humans or the environment. European feudalism lasted a thousand years and the Greco-Roman slave economies that preceded it for at least five hundred despite both having in retrospect their shortcomings. So what makes you think that capitalism is going to end any time soon (assuming the era of the global corporation we seem to be in now can still be defined as capitalism rather than, say, neo-feudalism).
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  43. It WAS originally a German name pronounced in the German way, BUT it has since been anglicized and is now pronounced according to American English.
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  44. It's been planned. Much of the weapons are obsolete or obsolescent or they're just getting rid of old stock that's coming to the end of its service life. They are also planning to buy new weapons from the USA, replacing not only their own stock but the major part of their own weapons industry, thus making Europe increasingly dependent on United States to a hitherto unprecedented degree. The same goes for Europe's energy industry, made to a high degree dependent upon the USA.
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  45. Or... capitalism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.
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  46. I think the United States is betting on being able to control Europe and use them as a captive market, destroying the EU's domestic economies in the process.
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  47. The 'West' is just a cover word for the rapacious economic imperialism of western European and north American capital, especially the core capitalist states vis‐à‐vis the periphery. Nothing much has changed since the 19th century regarding capitalism's insatiable need to seek out new and higher rates of profit by whatever means necessary.
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  48. To people in the USA and Canada a 'fortnight' is a period of 2 weeks.
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  49. I thought it was the USA through institutions like the IMF that was doing that and every time a leader comes to power that tries to make their country better they get overthrown. Ask yourself, who overthrew Khan, China or the USA?
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  50. NATO is outdated. There is nothing that NATO can do that the EU can't, security wise (not that I support an EU army).
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