The Fundamental Difference between the U.S. and China

Why is the United States so anti-Chinese? Why all this Sinophobia?   

It’s because of the basic difference between China and the U.S. that virtually none of our basically ignorant “leaders” — much less the mainstream media — seems to understand. Let me explain.

On the one hand, you have the United States. It’s leading a coalition of overwhelmingly white European colonialists who with less than 25% of the world’s population think they somehow have the right to control the entire world. In this context, the U.S. with 4.2% of the population considers itself the leader that can dictate terms to the other 95.8% of the world, including those Europeans whom it has successfully and surprisingly reduced to the status of obedient and subservient vassals.

In its position as world hegemon that alone emerged unscathed from the ravages of World War II (aka the second Intercapitalist war) the U.S. has decided to maintain control the world militarily. As a result, it annually invests more of its national treasure in war and preparation for war than the next nine countries combined (including China and Russia). A huge proportion of that treasure is spent on maintaining more than 750 military bases in more than 80 countries across the planet.

U.S. bases represent a key element in our country’s neo-colonial strategy aimed at controlling the Global Majority (i.e. former colonies) by regime-change interventions. These interventions have the United States removing from office any governments seeking to directly improve the lives of their citizens by redistributing income, or by providing healthcare, education, or other benefits and laws directly benefitting working classes rather than the wealthy and corporate interests. Since the 1950s, the world has witnessed such interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, and other locations too numerous to list here.

Yes, regime changes benefit the rich and powerful. However, in terms of directly benefitting you and me, those operations and the bases that support them contribute virtually nothing. Yes, they keep millions of military personnel off the streets as well as providing jobs for those working in weapons manufacturing plants. However, the bases and forever wars they stimulate are otherwise completely counterproductive.

For instance, over the past two years, Washington has spent $175 billion on its proxy war in Ukraine which according to Lloyd Austin is aimed at regime change in Russia. That means $175 billion not spent on universal healthcare, not funding college tuition, not providing improvements in infrastructure, not spent on highspeed rail or on mitigating the effects of climate change. All of us can see the results in our decaying urban centers with homeless beggars sleeping on sidewalks and in tents under our bridges.

In other words, overseas military bases are completely parasitic. They live off the rest of us devouring the nutrients that would otherwise sustain and improve our quality of life. Internationally, their purpose is to maintain “stability” in a world where power and wealth have since WWII been concentrated in the U.S. and Europe – the imperial countries that have controlled the world for the past half-millennium. It’s a world of billionaires on the one hand and grinding poverty on the other – especially in the former colonies.

Contrast this U.S. parasitism with the policies of China. As indicated above, China spends far less than the United States on its military. China maintains but a single military base outside its borders. It hasn’t fired a bullet beyond those confines over the last 40 years.

Instead of investing in bloodsucking military bases, China maintains what might be described as development nodes across the planet. Over the past decade and more, its “Belt and Road Initiative” has constructed highways, ports, electrical grids, and highspeed rail systems across Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America from Beijing to Tierra del Fuego. And those installations have vastly improved the lives of ordinary people wherever they appear – including those of the Chinese people themselves. As everyone knows, China was recently recognized by the United Nations as successfully raising more than 800,000 of its own citizens from extreme poverty.

What I’m describing here is the rebalancing of the world. Led by China, the planet’s majority is asserting the power that belongs to it in terms of population, which by the way is not white. China has about 18.5% of the world’s population; Africa has about the same; India has slightly more. All those non-white people are rebelling against the humiliation of control by the whites who have drawn completely arbitrary borders. That’s legendary in Africa and the Mid-East where colonizers in their tents drew lines on maps arbitrarily cutting up Africa and all that Mid-East desert land floating on a sea of oil. And they did so with virtually no knowledge of the countries, cultures, and populations they were dividing.

Accordingly, the non-white victims of such ignorance are currently refusing to honor such geographical restrictions. Under pressures from climate change (induced by the colonizers) and by the absolute decimation of western regime-change wars, the victims of such policies are relocating massively. And they won’t be stopped by walls, laws, or border patrols – and much less by ignorant nativist arguments. Yes, people of color are here to stay. Get used to it. Trump or no Trump, they will not be denied.

 It’s a new multi-polar world. It’s time has come. It is long overdue. My only fear is that the “leaders” of the collective west might find the loss of hegemony so threatening that they’ll decide to end the world by initiating a nuclear war. They’ve thought about this before. Remember “It’s better to be dead than red?”

Their new line seems to be: “It’s better to be dead than not in complete control.”

God help us!

Regime Change in the U.S.: A Taste of Our Own Medicine

 I’ve given up on the United States. It’s irreformable. It’s a failed state.

Think about it.  As things stand, the U.S. can do nothing but fight wars, close borders, impose sanctions, and fight meaningless culture wars. And even at that, despite the more than $2 billion it spends on “defense” each day, our country can’t win its forever wars. It lost in Vietnam, in Iraq, and Afghanistan. It’s in the process of losing in Ukraine. And yet, it’s planning a further foray into China.

Ukraine is the best illustration of the failed policy just mentioned. We’ve sent billions upon billions to support the war there, but the Russians are prevailing, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, our own infrastructure is in decay; millions are without healthcare, millions more are addicted to pain killers; there’s a mass shooting every day (literally); homelessness abounds, young people can’t afford college tuition; prisons are overflowing; our money-driven elections are a sham, and our government is complicit with the genocide unfolding in Gaza. At the same time, we end up blaming the poorest people in the world – the immigrants at our southern gates – for all our problems.

Yes, we need regime change.

And I’m not just talking about changing presidents or even the criminals now “serving” in the Congress.

No, I’m talking about REGIME CHANGE – a new order responsive to people like us, rather than to corporations, bankers, financiers, and Wall Street.

That means replacing all that with a system that would cut military spending by at least 75%, prioritize the issue of climate change, close foreign military bases, eliminate nuclear weapons, practice real diplomacy (which always means dialog and compromise) and derive its leadership from the working class, instead of from the bosses who control our work lives.

So, if we need regime change, why not apply to the U.S. the formula our bosses routinely use for that process — I mean the one it’s employed against the Soviet Union all during the Cold War, against Iran in 1953, Guatemala the following year, Cuba over the last 65 years, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua since 1979; Venezuela since Hugo Chavez instituted his Bolivarian Revolution. . .. The list goes on and on., but the formula’s always the same.

In every case, it’s: (1) make the life of working-class people as miserable as possible (2) by creating crisis. (I’m talking about military coups, sanctions, creation of food and fuel shortages, outright terrorism, and deprivation of human rights.) In fact, (3) make ordinary people so miserable that (4) the victims of such measures will rise and overthrow Stalin, Mossadegh, Arbenz, Castro, Allende, the Sandinistas, Maduro, etc. and (5) introduce a fascist American puppet like Resa Pahlavi or Augusto Pinochet.  

Again, that’s the strategy: immiserate ordinary people and make them overthrow America’s official (usually socialist-leaning) enemies and replace those enemies with right-wing fascist pawns.

The problem is (for the U.S.) that such gambits rarely work for long. They often end up awakening the left who then replace American puppets with leftists like Lula in Brazil.

Well, I’m thinking, why not turn the tables on the bosses and run the same gambit here at home, but this time against the bosses themselves? In our current circumstances, this might entail:

  1. Not voting in the next election.
  2. Alternatively, voting for “uncommitted,” for Cornel West, RFK, or Marianne Williamson.
  3. Thereby, allowing Donald Trump to be elected next November.
  4. He’ll of course make our lives miserable over the short term.
  5. But his policies will make clear the above-noted disfunctions of the system and awaken the currently dormant left.
  6. This may eventually spark a progressive movement for the radical systemic change I’ve been referring to.
  7. Which one way or another may eventually overthrow the corrupt system that even now immiserates our lives.

It’s worth a try. And when you think about it, what have we got to lose? As I said:

  • Our system is broken beyond repair.
  • It is incapable of addressing our real problems noted above.
  • We need something to awaken the left and force the required changes,
  • This means enduring at least four years of fascism under Donald Trump who might refuse to leave office after four years.
  • Sparking even wider discontent and rebellion.
  •  And at the very least, giving us a taste of our own medicine.

In any case, it’s what “our” government has been doing all over the world at least since the end of the Second Inter-capitalist War. There’s no way of sugar-coating the required remedy.