Today, before our livestream, Prof. Hudson has sent me this email, I decided to share it with you:

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We Need a New Political Vocabulary

The media are describing the elections throughout Europe in terms of center-right and center-left.

What does the word “centrist” mean? It means not advocating a structural change in the economy’s basic trends. The idea is to maintain the basic status quo.

But the present status quo is hurting Europe’s economies and turning them onto a war footing under U.S. leadership. It means suffering inflation and trade deficits are a result of U.S.-sponsored trade and investment sanctions against Russia and China. It means a radical shift in European trade away from the East to dependence on the United States.

That’s why these parties and their leaders are so unpopular. They all have similar policies, but a different rhetoric appealing to different groups. But throughout Europe and even North America, voters are turning away from them.

So “centrism” means pro-US, neoliberal policies. The status quo means letting U.S. leaders control European politics via NATO and the European Commission, just as Americans are controlled by the Deep State. Most Americans do not want either President Biden or Donald Trump to be elected this November. But they’re not given a choice.

Neither are the European parties given a choice. Critics of the U.S.-centered foreign policy are called extremists.

There are no “left-wing” parties in the traditional meaning of the political left

The “left,” by the way, no longer exists in the way that it did when I was growing up in the 1950s. Social Democratic and Labor parties are not socialist or pro-labor, but pro-austerity. And they are no longer even anti-war. The British Labour Party and German Social Democrats have put their faith in right-wing Thatcherite Reaganomics.

The social democratic parties – which were on the left a century ago – are imposing austerity and cutbacks in social spending. Limiting Europe’s budget deficit to 3% means that all economic growth is to be spent on military rearmament – 2 or 3% of GDP, mainly with U.S. weapons. That means falling exchange rates for eurozone countries.

This is a problem of eurozone rules. They are not really centrist or conservative. They are hard right-wing austerity, squeezing labor and government spending that the left-wing parties used to support long ago.

What are called “right-wing” parties are now the populist pro-labor, anti-war parties

The irony is that what is called the “far right” is supporting the policies of what used to be called “the left.” And like the left used to be, the main supporters are the younger people. They are bearing the brunt of falling real wages throughout Europe.

They see that their path to upward mobility is no longer what it was for their parents (or grandparents) in the 1950s after World War II ended and there was much less private-sector debt, housing debt, credit-card debt or other debt – especially student debt, by the way. Back then, everyone could afford to buy a house by taking out a mortgage that only absorbed 25% of their wage income – and was self-amortizing in 30 years.

The result is that the West is experiencing the same political extremism and demands for a break from the status quo that the BRICS+ countries are expressing.

The difference is that Russia, China and other leading BRICS countries are working rapidly to reinvent the future, to undo the debt-ridden economic polarization that has spread through both the West and Eurasia as a result of the US/NATO sponsored neoliberal “centralism”.

The idea that centrism means stability and preserves the status quo turns out to be self-contradictory. Today’s status quo is squeezing wages and living standards, and polarizing economies. They are turning NATO into an aggressive anti-Russian and anti-China alliance that is forcing national budgets into deficits, leading social welfare programs to be cut back.

What turns out to be most radical is Europe following NATO ‘s transformation from a defensive alliance to an offensive alliance in keeping with U.S. geopolitical attempts to maintain its unipolar dominance of world affairs, by joining America’s sanctions on Russia and China, and emptying out their own arsenals to send weapons to Ukraine to try and bleed the Russian economy.

This hasn’t hurt Russia. Russia is much stronger, and the sanctions have in fact protected its own industry with import-displacing investment. But the sanctions have hurt Europe, especially Germany, and put it in danger of direct military conflict with Russia.

All other parties are called extremist. The AfD in Germany, Marine le Pen’s National Rally in France, Georgia Meloni’s Italian Brothers are depicted as smashing and breaking the economy – by being nationalist, by opposing the war in Ukraine (and hence accused of being pro-Russian), and being populist. But that’s precisely why voters are supporting them. We are seeing a universal rejection of the status quo. And the centrist parties call all opposition neo-fascist. There is almost no counterpart on the left, except for Sara Wagenknecht’s party in East Germany.

The old division between right and left parties has become meaningless. The recent rise in parties described as “far right” reflects the widespread popular opposition to the US/NATO support of Ukraine against Russia. Traditionally, anti-war policies have been left-wing, but Europe’s “center-left” parties are following America’s pro-war leadership. This is presented as an internationalist stance, but the international order has become unipolar and U.S.-centered. European countries have no independent voice.

Unlike the left-wing parties, Europe’s new right is nationalist. After World War II, internationalism seemed to promise a peaceful world. Wars were blamed on nationalism and national rivalries. These were supposed to end. But what tuned out to be international was countries following U.S. Cold War leadership – and now, U.S. neoconservative military aggression against China and Russia. So instead of internationalism ending national rivalries, it has set the United States against Russia and the rest of Asia. This is not peaceful internationalism. It is a unipolar U.S. military alliance.

What seemed to be a peaceful and even prosperous international order has turned into an American nationalistic, self-serving order that is impoverishing Europe. Donald Trump has announced that he will support a protectionist tariff policy, not only against Russia and China, but also against Europe. He has promised that he will withdraw funding for NATO, and oblige European members to bear the full costs of restoring their depleted supply of armaments, mainly by buying U.S. arms. Even though these have turned out not to work very well in Ukraine.

Europe will be left by itself. If non-centrist political parties do not intervene to reverse these trends, Europe’s and America’s economies are going to be swept up in the existing domestic and international polarization. So what turns out to be radically disruptive is the status quo that the centrist parties support.

For Europe, centrist party leaders are all supporting the U.S. drive to defeat and ultimately break up Russia, and then to do the same to China. That means joining the America’s neocon drive to treat them as enemies. It means imposing trade and investment sanctions.

The problem is that these sanctions are impoverishing Germany and other European countries. The sanctions against Russia have reversed German and other European linkages with Russia, China and any other designated enemies of the United States.

Since 2022 this conflict has ended what had been decades of the basis of European prosperity. Germany’s economy is shrinking, and its former industrial leadership of Europe – and the basis of the euro’s exchange rate – is being ended. Is this really “centrist”? Is it a left policy, or a right-wing policy?

The idea is that most political differences between Europe’s parties is marginal, basically supporting the neoliberal policies of rearmament and the resulting fiscal stringency and Euro trade deficits that adherence to U.S.-NATO policy entails.

It also means that families, businesses and governments are obliged to borrow rising sums just to maintain their status quo under NATO leadership. Germany’s announced aim of raising its military spending to the target level of 2% or even 3 or 4% of GDP.

Given the limits of German industrial production, that means turning to U.S. arms makers for much of the buildup. This trade will weaken the euro’s exchange rate against the dollar, just as Germany has turned to the United States for natural gas and other materials hitherto bought at much lower prices from Russia. The result has been to raise the European cost of living and doing business. That will make is exports less competitive in world markets – with U.S. exporters picking up much of the slack.

The real question is whether it will follow the unrealistic domino theory that, as President Biden said in his disastrous presidential debate with Mr. Trump on June 27, if Europe doesn’t stop Russia in Ukraine, Putin will march right through Poland on his way westward. That is what the NATO head has been parroting.

The reality is that Russia is in no position to invade Poland or any other Central European country. That is because no nation, not even the United States can afford a land war in today’s world. The Vietnam protests ended America’s military draft forever, and populations throughout the world would shy from fighting as U.S. proxies in what looks to be a vain attempt to prevent much of the global majority from joining the BRICS+ to trade and invest among themselves. Donald Trump announced in his debate with President Biden that he agreed with the military consensus that Ukraine will be unable to prevent Russia from absorbing its eastern and southern Russian-speaking provinces, probably to Odessa if Ukraine and NATO refuse to negotiate a settlement leading basically to NATO’s dismantling. Yet NATO’s leadership are afraid to acknowledge that their hopes in 2022 were merely a fantasy.

Perhaps Denmark has the most efficient military stance a half-century ago: Replace its army with an answering machine saying, “We surrender.” Only comedy can deal appropriately with the fantasy that Europe must sacrifice its economy to help the United States prevent the global fracture that is ending the former world order.

The conservative anti-euro parties present themselves not as radical but as seeking to restore Europe’s lost prosperity and diplomatic self-reliance. The “centrist” parties are not producing stability, but dependency and economic shrinkage as Europe becomes a satellite of U.S. policy and its antagonism to the rapidly growing BRICS economies.

In sum, the “centrist” position became the radical ideology responsible for agreeing to deindustrialize Germany by abandoning its trade with Russia. And now, new pressure is being made to sanction trade with China. The result is a widening European trade and payments deficit with China. Along with Europe’s rising import dependency on the United States for what it used to buy from the East, the weakening euro position has led foreign countries to de-euroize just as they are de-dollarizing their official monetary reserves."