AND Weekly editorial – Yankee imperialism, giant with feet of clay
We publish this unofficial translation of the Weekly editorial of A Nova Democracia published here.
Janet Yellen, US Treasury Secretary in Joe Biden’s administration, met with dozens of CEOs of the largest Yankee banks on the 18th. The reason was the deep financial crisis of the imperialist state and the risk of insolvency of the public debt, which could trigger a world crisis of unprecedented magnitude.
Currently, the indebtedness of the single hegemonic superpower amounts to 31 trillion dollars, equivalent to 121% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product – by far the largest public debt in the world. Yankee imperialism maintains this exorbitant level of debt through “guarantees” to speculators that it will be repaid. The “guarantee”, of course, comes from its financial and economic hegemony over the whole world – it is the owner of the dollar machine, currency valid anywhere in the world and owner of the “most guaranteed” treasury securities – thanks to which it diverts the wealth and finances of its colonies and semi-colonies by imposing on them, through the World Bank/IMF, severe policies of financial adjustments and draconian attacks on labor rights, social security and generalized cuts in public services (This is why we are witnessing, now, in Brazil and all over the world, the privatization of education, public health, the destruction of the civil service).
Even so, the machinery of monopoly economics has its limits.
The US economy is facing serious problems. Since 2001, the Yankee government’s expenditures have exceeded its income; since then, the financial health of the imperialist state has depended on the sale of debt securities (when a government is a “lender”, with speculators, and guarantor of payment at a certain rate of interest).
However, in the pandemic (as a qualitative leap in the general crisis of imperialism) indebtedness reached levels higher than those seen in the Great Depression and the Second World War, granting enormous fiscal guarantees for its monopolies and crumbs of aid for American families, as an extreme measure to avoid the generalized bankruptcy of its economy. On the other hand, the participation of the Yankee GDP in the global economy only fell during the 1980s (it was 23% and now it is 15%); the rate of economic growth of the country has been in permanent decline since the 1970s, without respite and with the inexplicable phenomenon, for bourgeois economists, of the successive rises in interest rates and inflation. If the Yankee economy shows exhaustion, for how long will it be able to stay in debt?
The prospects of the Biden administration are to negotiate with the Congress – with a “Republican” majority – to extend, until June, the public debt limit. The political crisis is still an obstacle. There is no optimism that it will be easy to pass such a measure, even at the cost of the government cutting federal projects, which would affect Biden’s popularity and serve the electoral purposes of the evil “Republican”. First of all, the increase in the quantity and quality of the class struggles of the masses, from the bowels of Yankee imperialism for their rights which will necessarily be the object of reaction.
Yankee imperialism – as the head of the world imperialist system – is in decline and tormented by countless internal contradictions. From within, the masses exclaim their cry of protest against the maximum exploitation, mainly the blacks, against social oppression, against the hateful racism and systematic police violence that has degraded living conditions, a pretext that grows in the same proportion as the crisis. To counteract its irreversible tendency to stagnation, imperialism is using its finances for continuous wars of aggression against the oppressed nations, to reactivate the industrial capacity to take advantage of it in the war industry, as a guarantee of recovering the investment with the subsequent plundering of the invaded and devastated nation. They have reaped failures in Iraq, in Syria and, most humiliatingly, in Afghanistan, raising fierce enemies wherever their troops passed by. Their flag is the most hated in the world, with good reason. It is the perfect image of a dying pachydermic beast, surrounded by predators and mortally wounded. For the oppressed and exploited, all over the world, there is no more propitious moment than this to fight for their liberation, to bury the imperialist regime and rule a new social order of the proletariat.
