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Rob’s comments below are in italics.
Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
The news this week has been dominated by Trump backtracking on his commitment to be fully transparent about what was going on with Jeffrey Epstein.
Do you think he's on the list, presumably?
It's undeniable that he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein for 10 or 15 years. According to his biographer, they fell out not over any misgivings about what might have been going on with Epstein's sexual escapades, but over a difference of opinion over a rivalry over some real estate deal that they were both involved with. Whether that's true or not, I'm unsure. I thought it was extraordinary that Trump made the offer to come clean about Epstein, bearing in mind that it was open knowledge that he and Epstein had been on very friendly terms for a number of years.
He was on the flight logs...
I can't believe that he would have even made that offer had he been seriously implicated in anything likely to be revealed personally. The two main theories that have come up as to why he suddenly, having made that offer, decided to backtrack on it is either that it had been drawn to his attention that a whole lot of people that he didn't want to embarrass might be implicated in unsavoury goings on there, or that he decided it would be more advantageous to him to continue with being able to blackmail or coerce various people who were involved if the details remain secret rather than coming out into the public domain. Either of those seems plausible to me. What mystifies me is that he didn't foresee the difficulties in fulfilling that promise or the fact that the general public, including many of his supporters, would react so violently to the sudden reversal of the activity on that front.
Yeah, I agree. I think it's quite an obvious bait and switch pre and post-election. I think paying quite obvious lip service to whatever was said to get voted in. Whether someone is pulling the strings above him or whatever goes back to the usual questions of who's really in charge?
Ghislaine Maxwell remains the only person in prison in the world for human trafficking to nobody!
He clearly underestimated the determination of the general public to demand justice on these particular issues.
It's obvious also that the secret services, the intelligence services, are heavily involved with this. It's well known that MI6 and the CIA on Mossad have sexual blackmailers as one of their main weapons in their armoury to pursue their own goals.
The revelations that have come out over the Kennedy assassination have had less impact on public sentiment than I would have expected.
The apathy is quite astounding, isn't it?
I expected that that would cause much more of a public outcry.
You know, it's now... It's now been made abundantly clear that the CIA was involved with the assassination of their own head of state and was seriously involved in the cover-up afterwards.
Which is old news to anyone of a conspiratorial bent. However, it appears to me that for many people, if it's not literally on BBC News or written in The Guardian, it's as if it never happened. I don't know how much clearer it has to be.
Anna Paulina Luna, who has done such good work uncovering all the details, is also totally committed to revelations about Epstein, which is in itself quite interesting. It'd be interesting to see if that brings her out of favour with Donald Trump.
But once again, we could say that the parallel with the United States at this point in history is very much reminiscent of the state of the British Empire and, for that matter, the French one in 1914. Although Germany was blamed for starting the First World War, it was clear that the British had a strong interest in restraining Germany, which was rapidly overtaking Britain as a dominant industrial power.
Many of these issues appear to stem from geopolitical control rather than the reasons they are actually given.
Yeah. Now we've a situation where the United States has clearly fallen behind Russia in terms of industrial output, sophistication, technology, and infrastructure development. The railways in this country are a joke, but they're even more of a joke in the United States. Yeah, the trains still chug along at 50 miles an hour. I'm surprised they're not burning logs. So there we are. But of course, the worrying thing is that Britain and France didn't have nuclear weapons in 1914, and the United States does now. When all of the other attempts to bring the situation under control to their liking fail, you know, there seems to be a real possibility that they might go, oh, well, let's go for broke, which of course would be catastrophic for all of us. Alarming times we're moving through.
Amtrak is the biggest joke in the United States.
Another thing is that in the early 19th century, as bankers and industrialists rose to prominence and prosperity, British industry could produce a wide range of goods much more cheaply than other countries could. They could then export those goods, import food, and import any raw materials that we couldn't source ourselves. The traditional ruling classes, which had been the landowners, were alarmed by this prospect. In particular, they didn't want cheap imported grain entering the country and undercutting what they could earn from their landholdings and the rents they could charge their tenant farmers. So there was an attempt to impose tariffs on imported corn. David Ricardo, an economist from the banking class, was strongly in favour of free trade.
It took 30 years of squabbling and going back and forth before we eventually abolished the Corn Laws and introduced a free trade regime worldwide. We now have a very similar situation in the United States, where the entire economy has been undercut and effectively deindustrialised, apart from the manufacture of weapons. Essentially, this is a form of rent seeking. It's a form of charging interest for money. It's making money by moving things around, conducting financial transactions, rather than by actually producing goods and trading them.
All of this talk about tariffs is likely to increase the costs to American consumers and, by extension, to American industry. They've only just woken up to the fact that a lot of the raw materials that they need, even to make their weapons systems, come from China, which is ironic.
So, the world's in flux. More and more countries are aligning themselves with China. China has experienced an enormous increase in the prosperity of its citizens. It took me a while to realise that the China we have today is not at all the China of our imagination from the Chairman Mao years and the great leap forward in the Cultural Revolution and poverty-stricken masses. A considerable proportion has been moved from landless peasants into some kind of middle-class existence. There's very little sign that the Chinese population are unhappy with their leadership. It looks coercive to us. However, it appears that what the Chinese population strives for more than anything is stability, and their current leadership has delivered that to them, along with
Because they invested heavily in educating their workforce, sending them abroad to Western universities, amongst other things, they managed to provide a whole level of competence which has faded out in this country and perhaps even more drastically in America. Those are the things to look out for. Additionally, the shift away from reliance on the dollar as an international reserve currency and a key component of the global trading system could occur much more rapidly than many people anticipate.
There could be a tipping point in the chain of events.
Okay, that's my review for this week. Once again, let's hope we're still here in time for next week's broadcast.
Depending on how quickly I get this episode out, we are talking on Sunday evening as well with a free live discussion on Zoom (register here).
Yeah, by all means, bring any questions you have or raise any topics for discussion when we meet on Sunday.
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