The developed countries. Developed at whose expense?
Who's next?
The unwillingness of mankind to learn from the mistakes of others, as well as from the miscalculations of their ancestors, is becoming increasingly dangerous. Two world wars, the threat of a nuclear apocalypse, and now also the very real prospect of ecological and climatic collapse practically do not change anything in the life of more than seven billion “bare monkeys”.
Developed countries do not want to sacrifice any significant share of their own well-being, and in countries of "underdeveloped" the public, it seems, really wants only one thing - to live the same way as in developed ones. Meanwhile, only having embarked on a process of more or less equitable redistribution of world wealth, mankind will reserve the chances that at least something remains on the planet for future generations.
Countries that we habitually continue to call developed and from which we have been invariably encouraged to take an example over the past decades, are essentially the main dependents of all other states. Although it was they who inherited the “heavy legacy” of colonial rule, when it seemed that they would have to pay for centuries with those whom they had robbed so purposefully for so long.
In reality, five or six decades after the collapse of the colonial empires, things didn’t turn out quite like that, or rather not at all. The former colonies, without the normal ability to master the natural wealth they inherited, turned into hostages and, it seems, the eternal debtors of their former owners.
Even the majority of the countries of Latin America, which were freed from Spanish and Portuguese rule for a hundred, or even more years, earlier than the states of Asia and Africa, found themselves in a position of economic outcasts. And only in the third millennium did something like the economic breakthrough of China and India take place, and after them some other countries.
However, despite the fact that all the hiking trails in Europe are now literally trampled by the inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom, it is clearly too early to say that someone is already close to the developed countries. Well, let’s leave the Middle East experiments with universal Arab prosperity so far, since, apart from the still very backward Iran, nobody seriously claims to create a self-sufficient economic system.
Innocent deception
The population of developed countries is accustomed to respecting themselves, starting with culture (and especially political) and ending with the economy. According to the principle "we work well and therefore live well." And this is despite the complete absence of serious natural resources, an aging and stagnating real economy and a frank excess of all kinds of services, from tourist services to fashionable haircuts for cats and dogs.
Even with the California Silicon Valley, with the vaunted German industry, with French winemaking and Italian shipbuilding, and with all the fashion brands scattered around the world, developed countries, by and large, have long been parasites. They parasitize on foreign resources, including Russian gas, on foreign brains and on other people's labor, now basically not Chinese, but Chinese satellites. But they continue to confidently reckon themselves "ahead of the rest."
The famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith, a Canadian by origin, a researcher, as they say, from God, called this whole system "the economy of innocent deception." And the whole fraud, in his opinion, is that annoying terms like capitalism or social democracy have gradually replaced the “market system”, which official Russia is still almost ready to pray for.
John Kenneth Galbraith
In the past, 2018 was celebrated 110 years since the birth of Galbraith, but he managed to predict the last global crisis with its soap bubbles of trillions of dollars, launched, in fact, to nowhere. In non-existent mortgages, in insurance and pension funds, but mainly in virtual gaming exchanges, painfully similar to MMM. And launched only for the sake of superprofits of a selected cohort of financiers.
D.K. Galbraith convincingly showed that the real power in the modern economy does not belong to those who possess capital, but to those who manage, or rather manipulate, these capital. The approaching era of effective managers, whom Anatoly Chubais himself was the first to talk about, threatens to deprive the entire second and even more so third tier of the world economy of any chance of getting closer to the first - thereby the “developed countries”.
According to Galbraith, it’s quite simple to understand the whole basis of the current leadership of developed countries.
“The main economic function is the development and creation of new products, and no manufacturer will produce a new product without first creating demand for it. Not a single manufacturer will abandon measures to form demand for existing goods and stop supporting this demand - the age of advertising, the art of sales, television and consumer management has come, which means that consumer and market independence are losing ground. ”
In conditions when no more than 10 percent of the future value of a product or service is spent on raw materials and production, and 90% is spent on their promotion, developed countries quietly go precisely into the sphere of promotion. And they continue their "innocent deception."
In whose favor is the alignment?
So, as in the previous colonial era, Europe, having exhausted almost all of its own resources, continues to keep Africa and most of Asia in the position of “petitioner” and “consumer”. What? Yes, all the same - financial and managerial resource.
The United States behaves a little more cunningly, continuing to pump the whole world with empty dollars and trumpeting everywhere about its own technological and intellectual leadership. However, all this leadership is based only on the fact that due to the unlimited issue of pieces of paper with portraits of presidents and Benjamin Franklin, who has never been in the White House, almost anything promising is being bought right away. To the brain, of course.
From the “Military Review” dossier: The United States consumes up to 25% of the world's annual minerals, more than 50% of global uranium consumption, about half of the aluminum used, as well as more than a quarter of the extracted oil, natural gas, tin, copper and iron ores. At the same time, the United States does not give back and does not produce the same equivalent, except for dollars.
For decades, the United States has had an acute trade and budget deficit. Goods are imported into the country much more than the state exports outside. The difference is covered due to the fact that countries outside the US annually get poorer by the same equivalent that Americans are getting richer. There is a continuous redistribution of world wealth in favor of the United States.
The USA consumes about 20-25% of total world oil consumption, China - 13%. At the same time, the US population, which in many ways burns this enormous amount of energy, is only 4,3% of the world's population.
The average American consumes four times more goods than the "average inhabitant of the planet": five times more than any Hispanic, 10 times more Chinese and 30 times more Indian, and also throws out twice as much garbage and spends three times more water.
Europe and America, whose population makes up only 20% of the world's population, consume 60% of all products produced on the planet. Since the beginning of the 90-s, after the collapse of the USSR, the world (read: western) public has been trying to declare Russian mineral resources as a “common” asset.
Congratulations
Western propaganda is simply lying - there really were no real advantages for the developed countries over all the others, either. They either ate their resources or, with all their might, save on a rainy day, like the United States, its oil. Allegedly more qualified Western cadres are nothing more than a bluff; in the production of something real, they are slightly better than others.
Likewise, with labor productivity, which in the West and in Japan can be higher, but only thanks to a higher degree of automation and reliance on the existing technological advantage.
The main thing, in which the developed countries of their competitors are superior, is the availability of the most powerful financial levers and a managerial resource, that is, those same “effective managers”. Europeans, Americans and Japanese have already managed to breed them for decades ahead and put them in key positions in transnational corporations around the world.
This practice was perfected by a real revolutionary Leiba Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky. And this, by the way, has become one of the main reasons for the mass repressions, which began as a big party purge. By the way, if we were talking about the “demon of revolution”, regaining popularity in certain circles, then in developed countries they learned to use one more of its methods, which they even called “Trotsky's scissors”.
In his case, it was a monstrous difference in prices for industrial and agricultural products, of course, in favor of the proletariat, in order to suppress the independence of the kulaks, and indeed the counter-revolutionary peasantry. The developed West uses such “scissors” in order to prevail over the prices of its services over the prices of real consumer goods produced, for example, in China itself.
The final alignment of all this kind of “market manipulation” is no longer a secret to anyone. The so-called developed countries openly consume the planet’s resources and are not at all interested in the fact that the “underdeveloped” countries approach them in terms of consumption. The second and third echelons will continue to be kept in poverty, incite everywhere possible and impossible conflicts that lead to a reduction not only in consumption, but also in the population itself.
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