The Digger

  Empire of Emperors: What Is China, and Why You Should Worry About It An excerpt from David Goldman’s new book: ‘You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World’ BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN Lyndon Johnson apocryphally told Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir that it was hard to be president of three hundred million Americans. She replied, “It’s harder to be prime minister of three million prime ministers.” Xi Jinping might add that it is even harder to be the emperor of 1.4 billion emperors. We tend to think of the West as individualistic and China as collectivist. In some ways that’s true, but the notion can also be misleading. As individuals, the Chinese are the most ambitious people in the world. Ambition is the sinew that holds together the sprawling, multi-ethnic, polylingual empire that China has been since its founding. For 5,000 years, China’s ambition has been constrained by the limits of nature. The great flood plains of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers supported a large...

  The New Tyranny Few Even Recognize By  Charles Hugh Smith Clearly, the Fed reckons the public is foolish enough to believe the Fed’s money will actually be “free.” It’s pretty much universally recognized that authorities use crises to impose “emergency powers” that become permanent.  This erosion of civil and economic liberties is always sold as “necessary for your own good.” Of course the accretion of ever greater power in the hands of the few is for our own good. How could it be otherwise? (Irony off) In this environment of “emergency powers”, it’s almost refreshing to find a power grab so blatant that its sheer boldness boggles the mind.  I’m talking about the Federal Reserve’s  FedNow , a proposed system of instant payments and digital dollars. This paper from the Cleveland Fed describes the system:  FedNow paper from clevelandfed.org  (PDF) (via Cheryl A.) The rationale for the system is two-fold:  The Fed sees the current ACH (automatic cl...

“Liberalism & Fascism: The Good Cop & Bad Cop of Capitalism” – GR in Black Agenda Report This article was published  here  in  Black Agenda Report . It was workshopped, like nearly all of RED’s articles, in our collectively resourced, anti-capitalist research collaborative.   It is part four of a four-part series entitled “Fascism: A Counter-History.” Part one can be read  here , part two  here , and part three  here . Fascist modes of governance are a very real and present part of the so-called liberal world order. “ The model for Nazi Germany’s white-supremacist colonial expansion was the U.S.” “There is currently one state [the United States] that has made at least the weak beginnings of a better order.”  — Adolph Hitler in 1926 “Give Franco a hood and he would be a member of the Ku Klux Klan .”‑— Langston Hughes The One-State-One-Government Paradigm  It is often presumed that each individual state has a particular form of governme...