During the World Economic Forum in Davos, newly elected Argentine President Javier Milei blamed “collectivism” as the “root cause” of the world’s economic problems.
Milei’s assessment is backward, says author, journalist and political analyst Caleb Maupin speaking to Sputnik’s Critical Hour on Tuesday.
“Since the 1980s and the late ’70s, we’ve been destroying the welfare state. Here in the United States, we’ve been deregulating. We have schools for profit,” Maupin explained. “We’ve got private corporations fighting our wars. [We’ve] got prisons for profit in multiple states. The idea that we’re moving towards socialism in the West is just absurd. We’re gutting the welfare state.”
The reason the West has been gutting the welfare state is because it is controlled by global corporations.
“The US economy is not the American economy. It is the economy centered around big banks, the corporations, ultra-monopolies, trust cartels and syndicates based here in the West,” Maupin argued.
“But really, the US government and the US monopolies are the big corporations at the top of our economy [that] are propping up a global system. They’re not really concerned about the domestic economy of the United States”.
This is dangerous because as the American empire flounders, it will take increasingly desperate measures to hold onto its hegemony.
“The Biden administration is trying to escalate every one of these international confrontations as quickly as they can,” Maupin said, pointing to the conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and rising tensions with China as evidence. “They’re almost hoping that they can play a game of bluff, and that they can push as close to the edge of that cliff of a straight up World War Three confrontation as they can get.”
Maupin warned that “we’ve increasingly got a West led by the United States, the center of the NATO alliance, that is trying to remind everybody who they once were,” adding that the “bluster” coming from the US is it being “forced to adjust to the fact that we’re having a much more multipolar world [and] that, the world is not going to be centered, economically speaking, around Wall Street and London for much longer.”
Russia and China do not want a third World War, Maupin said. But he warned that if a World War does start, “everyone knows” that “Russia and China are going to win,” adding that the aggressive policies of the US are “not strategic for America at all.”
