Michael Hudson: My thoughts on the non-viable US proposed settlement
None of the proposed peace deal announced by Trump can be realized in practice. Iran has said, rightly so, that for starters it needs a release of the funds that the U.S. has grabbed, including its recent seizure of Stablecoin.
But the confiscation can’t be released without Congressional approval – and that seems unlikely, given South Carolina’s Lindsay Graham’s firm opposition, and that of the AIPAC-backed congressmen and senators. And Israel will not stop killing Shia in Lebanon, or Palestinians on the West Bank.
How can Iran drive the U.S. military out of its bases in West Asia with Israel being its largest base and proxy army, its “landed aircraft carrier” and foreign legion along with its fellow jihadists under Jolani’s al Qaeda in Syria?
The United States as a rentier empire
All empires are rentiers. Since antiquity they have sought to extract tribute. The major empires from Persia to the Mongols were willing to leave domestic economic systems in place – to collect taxes to pay the imperial conquers.
European colonialism was much less tolerant of other countries’ religion and economic organization, seeking to destroy them and even to treat them as subhumans, from the Spanish conquistadors to America’s settler states to Britain’s conquest of India and Africa, emulated by other European countries (Portugal, France and Holland).
The empires that other countries achieved by military conquest and occupation, the United States since World War I has sought to achieve by financial control and increasingly by control of foreign trade. This has remained the case even though the United States has lost its former industrial power that enabled it to run a balance-of-payments and trade surplus in the years after World War II.
U.S. imperial strategy is now seeking to do with IT, AI and chip-making what it has done with oil and with its dollar-centered international financial system: weaponize its trade monopoly to extract monopoly rents in IT and AI just as it has sought to do by extracting natural-resource rent.
Having lost its ability to emulate Britain’s free-trade imperialism, the United States has relied increasingly on achieving economic rent, from natural-resource rent to monopoly rent.
All forms of economic rent are a weaponization of economic relations, from land rent to monopoly rent, interest and other forms of financial extraction of economic surpluses.
The aim of empires is to obtain every form of economic rent.
The way to end natural-resource rent is by a land tax. This is based on the fact that natural resources are a national patrimony and, like land, the natural tax base.
The threat to monopoly rent is other countries creating their own rival technology – and deterring European satellites and other countries from adopting sanctions locking themselves into reliance on U.S.-based IT, telecom systems, computer chips and AI.