Ellen Brown - The American Dream is Alive and Well - in China

90% of the Chinese are home owners, says Ellen Brown, and by the time they are 35 years old most own their own homes. Okay, they are smaller and not as well built, but Chinese debt is a lot lower as the government subsidizes health care, education, transport, and its industries. The Chinese have lower wages but their cost of living is a lot less.

Bannon says these subsidies are unfair, and that the Chinese use their vast army of slaves to economically take over the world. A trade war is not about trade, says Bannon, it's about warfare. But the West once had a system of state subsidies and free university education, which made us strong and helped our economies, so why don't we go back to that to level the playing field?

Labour would like to improve the NHS, renationalise the railways, improve regulations on the energy supply to lower costs, etc, but this could give British companies a competitive edge in the global market which could be deemed unfair. And I would like to see more trains all over the U.K. taking much of the lorries off the roads too. So, perhaps the answer is for economists and mathematicians to work out the correct tarrifs, or for all countries to abandon the destructive neoliberal system and adopt a mixed economy instead.

The neoliberal globalisation destroys democracy because the British people support the NHS and some renationalisation. And who sets the international neoliberal free trade system and what say do we have in it?

Below is very MMT.

All this was done with the help of China’s federal government, which in recent decades has pumped massive amounts of economic stimulus into the economy. Unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, which went straight into big bank reserve accounts, the Chinese stimulus has generated new money for productive purposes, including local business development and infrastructure. Sometimes called “qualitative easing,” this “quantitative easing with Chinese characteristics” has meant more jobs, more GDP and more money available to spend, which in turn improves quality of life.

The Chinese government has done this without amassing a crippling federal debt or triggering runaway inflation. In the last 20 years, its M2 money supply has grown from just over 10 trillion yuan to 80 trillion yuan ($11.6T), a nearly 800% increase. Yet the inflation rate of its Consumer Price Index (CPI) has remained low. In February of this year, it was just 1.5%. In May it rose to 2.7% due to an outbreak of swine fever, which drove pork prices up; but this was a response to shortages, not to an increase in the money supply. Radically increasing the money supply has not driven consumer prices up because GDP has increased at an even faster rate. Supply and demand have risen together, keeping consumer prices low.

Below are Bannon and Spalding twisting everything, making their own reality. And Bannon even pretends to care about American workers. These guys are said to be very intelligent, but they have no insight into how their minds work. It's like the school bully who says his victims deserved it, it was their fault. In other words, these two guys are as thick as a plank of wood.

Steve Bannon on the trade war.

Gen. Robert Spalding on the trade war.