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https://www.globalresearch.ca/top-pentagon-commander-requests-astronomical-sum-money-prepare-war-china/5739129

Top Pentagon Commander Requests Astronomical Sum of Money to Prepare for War with China

The commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific region submitted a request to Congress March 1 for $27.3 billion in new anti-China spending. Admiral Philip Davidson, who can fairly be termed an anti-China fanatic, leads the Indo-Pacific Command made up of 380,000 military and civilian personnel and a vast array of air, land and sea weaponry. It is the largest of the 11 commands that span the globe and outer space — the enforcers of the most far-flung empire in history.

The funding increase that Davidson is seeking for his command — not the total allocation — is greater than the entire budget of the whole armed forces of Brazil.

In an October 2020 public forum, Davidson stated: “I believe China is the strategic threat of the century to the U.S., but really certainly to the entire free world.” Extreme hostility toward China has been expressed by other top officials in the new administration, including by President Biden himself.

In reality, it is the United States which has engaged in endless war for many decades that is the real “strategic threat” to its allies as well as it enemies.

Red line denoting the Pentagon’s “first island chain” (Wikimedia Commons)

The Indo-Pacific Command covers 34 countries encompassing 60% of the world’s population. As a part of the “pivot to Asia” announced under the Obama administration — and continued under Trump and now Biden — a major shift is underway. The aim is to base over 70% of U.S. overseas military forces in the Asia/Pacific region, clearly aimed at the People’s Republic of China.

The additional request comes on top of the $738 billion Pentagon budget for this year which passed — as do all military budgets — with overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress. The Pentagon budget is larger than the military budgets of the next 13 countries combined, and four times the size of China’s.

The Pentagon and virtually the entire political establishment falsely promote Cold War-style propaganda depicting China as an aggressor. But it is not China that is encircling the United States with military power — it is the other way around. Davidson’s request for additional funding is explicitly meant to accelerate the encirclement.

The ‘First Island Chain’ — A sacrifice zone in Pentagon planning

In his demand for extra funds, Davidson wrote that the United States “requires highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the first island chain, featuring increased quantities of ground-based weapons. … These networks must be operationally decentralized and geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos.”

The “first island chain” in Pentagon-ese are those island states and provinces ringing China’s east coast, including Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan, northern Philippines, Borneo and smaller islands. As a glance at a map of the region shows, Taiwan — a province of China still ruled by the side of the civil war that was defeated in 1949 — is the key link of the chain and would be of immense strategic importance in case of a war. This motivates the vast U.S. military sales to Taiwan.

The words “requires highly survivable, precision-strike networks along the first island chain” means that the Pentagon anticipates those countries would suffer major losses in case of a U.S. war on China. John Foster Dulles, the former U.S. secretary of state who devised the island chain strategy in the 1950s, referred to these countries as “unsinkable aircraft carriers.”

Such an outcome means nothing to the war planners. Nor do they regard participation as optional. “These networks must be … geographically distributed along the western Pacific archipelagos” (writer’s emphasis).

Contrary to the media propaganda here, China is not seeking either a new war or global domination. Nor do any of the peoples of the region, who have suffered greatly at the hands of imperialism, want a new war.

As the latest demand for ever-greater military spending makes clear, the grave danger of new wars comes from the Pentagon, the military-industrial corporations, and the capitalist politicians in Washington. They are fanning the flames of racism and chauvinism to prepare public opinion for aggression to come.

A new U.S. war with China would threaten the world with unthinkable destruction. The danger of such a war cannot be ignored, it must be resisted.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar21/deflationary-tsunami3-21.html

Too Busy Frontrunning Inflation, Nobody Sees the Deflationary Tsunami

It's an amazing sight to see the water recede from the bay, and watch the crowd frolic in the shallows, scooping up the flopping fish. In this case, the crowd doing the "so easy to catch, why not grab as much as we can?" scooping is frontrunning inflation, the universally expected result of the Great Reflation Trade.

You know the Great Reflation Trade: the world has saved up trillions, governments are spending trillions, it's going to be the greatest boom since the stone masons partied at the Great Pyramid in Giza. It's so obvious that everyone has jumped in the water to scoop up all the free fish (i.e. stock market gains). Only an idiot would hesitate to frontrun the Great Reflation's guaranteed inflation.

Unless, of course, what we really have is a tale of reflation, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Everyone frolicking in the shallows scooping up the obvious, easy, guaranteed gains is so busy frontrunning inflation that nobody sees the tsunami rushing in to extinguish the short-sighted frolickers. ( When Does This Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham Finally Implode? 3/3/21)

Gordon Long and I discuss The Deflationary Tsunami racing toward the frolickers in a new video program. It's not that there aren't inflationary dynamics in play; there are. The issue is that not all the dynamics in play are inflationary, and the deflationary dynamics have been building for the past two decades.

Funny things happen when we substitute debt for earnings and speculation for productive investment. That's what America has done for the past two decades: as wages stagnated for the bottom 95%, we've inflated speculative bubbles in everything to generate the illusion that we have "wealth" that we can borrow against, and then use all that "free money" (free fish!) to consume and speculate in all the shallow safe waters created by interest rates falling decade after decade, making it ever cheaper to borrow, buy and blow speculative bubbles.

Here's an example of the dynamics near-zero yields and interest rates have unleashed: in the frenzy of ever-lower rates, one crazed frolicker buys a $200,000 house for $500,000. Suddenly every homeowner in the neighborhood has $300,000 in "free money" to borrow and blow-- free fish! It would be crazy not to scoop some of that "free money," so homeowners refinance at low rates and extract the "free money" created by the speculative bubble powered by declining rates.

So what if your earnings buy less every year--there's "free money" galore--you just have to borrow it. And never mind value--what's value other than what some frolicker will pay?

What new utility or productivity was created when the $200,000 house was revalued at $500,000? None. How about the commercial building that went from $2 million to $5 million? None. Or the stock with phantom fantasies instead of actual profits that went from $2 to $20?

A few problems arise from all this frolicking with the "free money" created by declining rates and speculative manias. One is that rates/yields have hit zero and are starting to rise. It's fun to imagine rates sliding into negative territory, but banks can't really afford to pay us $1,000 a month to borrow money from them. I know it's hard to imagine, but the banks need us to pay them interest and principal.

That interest and principal piles up, even at near-zero rates. Combine stagnating wages that buy fewer goods and services every year with ever-higher debt loads and monthly payments, and then add in higher taxes, and presto, we end up with insolvent households and enterprises that must borrow more to stay afloat. If they can't borrow more, they default.

Those that can't borrow more can't spend, and that's a problem because the entire economy depends on everyone borrowing and spending more every year. i.e. "growth."

Just as new loans create money, defaults send money to money heaven. When loans are paid off or written off due to default, the money supply shrinks. That is deflationary.

When discretionary spending dries up, that's deflationary. When the free fish of speculative phantom wealth created by bubbles run out, that's deflationary.

It was fun to frolic in the fantasy that we could borrow our way to prosperity on the phantom collateral of speculative bubbles, but that's not sustainable. The wealth conjured by zero rates inflating speculative bubbles is illusory. Real wealth requires sustained increases in productivity that are widely distributed to wage earners. Anything other than that is illusion destined for a messy, shattering destruction.

Speculative bubbles pop. All phantom wealth vanishes back into the air it emerged from. Insolvent borrowers counting on ever lower rates of interest and ever higher valuations default. Lenders who leveraged up to loan gobs of "free money" to uncreditworthy borrowers will be destroyed by the monumental write-offs of uncollectible debts based on phantom valuations.

Those looking up from their "free fish!" frolicking will see the tsunami too late to save themselves. None of the frolickers will be able to outrun the tsunami or avoid being crushed as it sweeps all the debris of a speculative mania into the flooded ruins beyond the shoreline.

There's much more in our 53-minute presentation, The Coming Deflationary Tsunami: