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Will China, Not the U.S., Rule the 21st Century?

I recently read Ray Dalio’s Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. While I take issue with many of Dalio’s views, his method for measuring national power is worth paying attention to. He breaks it down into eight key pillars—education, innovation, competitiveness, military strength, trade influence, economic output, financial center dominance, and reserve currency status—and then uses something called z-scores to compare countries across each one.

Having recently written to you about the ongoing U.S.–China trade war (see here and here), I was curious how this framework would stack up when applied to the two major powers today. So I went digging—and sure enough, I found a recent dataset that applies the same methodology using updated numbers. I’ve plotted it in this week’s chart below.

Again, what you’re seeing here are z-scores—basically, a way to show how far above or below the global average a country sits in each category. A score of 0 means you’re at the global average. Scores below 0 mean you’re trailing it. Anything above 1 means you’re solidly ahead. Above 2? You’re in rare company—top-tier status.

Now, the U.S. still dominates in the areas you’d expect—finance and military power. For example, America’s financial center strength (2.7) dwarfs China’s (0.2). Same goes for reserve currency status: 1.9 for the U.S., versus -0.6 for China.

Naturally, I’m not exactly sold on that financial dominance narrative. A bit hard to claim that with nearly $37 trillion in debt, deficits that would make a drunken sailor blush, and a global reserve status that’s losing altitude fast.

Either way, here’s where things get interesting…

Data shows that while, yes, the U.S. still leads in finance and military power, China’s catching up fast in the areas that matter most for the future.

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DHS Alerts US Public On Iran Retaliation Threat: Just Some ‘Low-Level’ Cyberattacks?

The latest Department of Homeland (DHS) alerts are telling the American public to expect some form of Iranian retaliation in response to this weekend’s major US bombing raids targeting three key Iranian nuclear energy and uranium enrichment sites.

And the Pentagon is preparing for potential attack on US bases in the Middle East, whether in Iraq or Syria where reduced troop presences still remain, or in the Gulf Arab countries – home to major naval and air bases.

But the latest DHS warnings speak of a not-so-new threat (which gets repeated just about every year) of stepped-up Iranian cyber threat activity.

A fresh terrorism advisory bulletin from DHS warns that Iran’s response could include violent actions on US soil as well as increased cyber operations.

The supposed heightened threat environment predicts likely low-level cyberattacks from pro-Iranian hacktivists, but also more serious threats from state-backed Iranian hackers:

“The ongoing Iran conflict is causing a heightened threat environment in the United States,” the DHS said. “Low-level cyber attacks against US networks by pro-Iranian hacktivists are likely, and cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian government may conduct attacks against US networks.”

But behind the headlines, the reality is that the fear-mongering from US officials will front-run the actual threats and ‘attacks’ – and likely grow louder, according to the all too familiar playbook of the Bush-Cheney era…

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US auditors arrive in Kyiv to check for corruption

American auditors have just landed in Kyiv, and their plan is simple – to dig out what is really happening with the billions of dollars that the US has already sent to Ukraine.

The West has poured an estimated $133bn into Ukraine since the start of the war over three years ago, but for much of that time there has been little accountability or reporting on where the money went and to whom.

Ukraine has been plagued by corruption since independence and as bne IntelliNews has reported, corruption is not a problem of the system; it is the system. Ukraine has long been dubbed one of the most corrupt countries in the Former Soviet Union (FSU). Part of the motivations behind the 2014 Euromaidan evolution was that former president Viktor Yanukovych is believed to have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from the state.

Now that the US ardour for supporting Ukraine is beginning to cool, the Trump administration intends to hold the Zelenskiy administration to closer account. And the momentum for more transparency has been building. When the US ran out of money for Ukraine at the start of 2023, part of the $60bn emergency bailout package included several tens of millions of dollars in a special budget dedicated to accounting and audits.

Scandals have plagued the Defence Ministry, including one last year when the government was caught procuring eggs for four times the market value and heavily overpaying for dud winter jackets. Zelenskiy sacked Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov in September 2023 in a military shake-up to crack down on corruption, but it remains rife. Reznikov himself was not accused of any wrong-doing.

The arrival of the US audit team has been confirmed by US State Department of contracts worth $814,806. That amount will cover the hotel accommodation of the employees who will stay in the capital of Ukraine for a month in the luxurious Hilton Kyiv hotel.

The audit comes as Trump has been leaning on the Ukrainian presidential administration to cut a ceasefire deal with Russia, but Zelenskiy has proved reluctant to do so. Some experts have speculated that audit comes as part of the pressure Trump hopes will push Zelenskiy into cutting a “quick and dirty deal” with President Vladimir Putin.

A group of 80 to 100 people is in charge of a comprehensive audit, according to reports, checking how funds for military and humanitarian support, logistics, security and security were spent.

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Biden Judge DEFIES Supreme Court, Says His Order Barring Deportation of Illegal Aliens to South Sudan Remains in Effect – Stephen Miller Responds

US District Judge Brian Murphy on Monday evening defied the US Supreme Court and said his order barring deportation of illegal aliens to South Sudan remains in effect.

In a 6-3 decision, the US Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump Administration to resume deporting illegal aliens to ‘third-party’ countries.

The Supreme Court granted the Trump Administration’s emergency application and paused Judge Brian Murphy’s order blocking the third-country removals.

Liberal Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissented.

In her dissent, Sotomayor said, “Rather than allowing our lower court colleagues to manage this high-stakes litigation with the care and attention it plainly requires, this Court now intervenes to grant the Government emergency relief from an order it has repeatedly defied. I cannot join so gross an abuse of the Court’s equitable discretion.”

Last month US District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, said the Trump Administration violated his court order to provide the aliens with “meaningful” due process since they were being sent to “third-party” countries.

Some of the aliens are from Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba, so sending them to South Sudan puts them in danger, attorneys argued.

Judge Murphy said the US must maintain custody of the dangerous aliens during the process.

Judge Murphy also ordered the US government to provide interpreters and counsel to the aliens during the interview.

President Trump fumed and said that because of the judge’s order, 8 of the most violent criminals on earth are currently being held in Djibouti, a tiny country on the Horn of Africa next to Ethiopia.

The US government doesn’t even have a detention facility in Djibouti, so 11 ICE agents are detaining the aliens in a conference room in a converted Conex shipping container on the US Naval base in Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti.

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Tame the ‘Rising Lion’ Before It Eats Us!

Israel’s government, which has undertaken, with prevaricative impunity the illegal occupation and theft of Palestinian water sources, farmland, homes, property, and energy resources through ethnic cleansing and the execrable crimes of mass starvation and genocide in Gaza, has further escalated a world crisis by the preemptive bombing attack on Iran, through a self-proclaimed “Operation Rising Lion.”

This deadly deceit is of monumental proportions that one must struggle with the horrific reality it presents.

Attempting to label such crimes as a defensive strikes does violence to reason. The historical record will show that Israel’s oft-repeated insistence on the Iranian nuclear weapon threat was a contrivance to justify an arms buildup funded almost entirely by the American taxpayer.

America’s so-called defense of Israel’s freedom has been turned into a protection racket of such dimensions as to make the mafia blush. That racket has its own devises. Democratic and Republican Administrations, alike, have been contemplating an attack on Iran for decades. President Trump’s assurances of avoiding war while working closely with Netanyahu damages the President’s credibility, either he was not telling the truth or he was misled by people in his own foreign policy establishment.

Israel’s government now defines freedom thusly: Freedom to commit genocide, freedom to starve a defenseless population, freedom to wage aggressive war, and freedom to posture and to lie about all of their inhuman actions before the entire world and to demand everyone agree or be smeared as “anti-semites.”

Demanding Iran remove its nuclear energy production was an intentional nonnegotiable demand, which all participants in the JCPOA understood. It was the first Trump Administration which cancelled the agreement to limit Uranium production to 3.6% enrichment, necessary for the production of electricity for Iran’s nearly 90 million people.

Once that agreement was terminated, Iran was continually subjected to charges they were seeking to enrich uranium for the purposes of building a nuclear weapon, which gave the US and Israeli hawks opportunities to conjure mad mullahs with nukes whose sole purpose was to destroy Israel. So, the attack on Iran would be a practiced deception of a morally depraved “Do unto others before they do unto you.”

There is a body of international law which forbids preemptive strikes, but when it comes to Israel, international law does not apply, which makes one wonder why in the world Israel would want to remain in the United Nations or, conversely, why the UN would want them in. But that is an issue for the General Assembly.

Imagine Iran’s predicament if it had acquiesced to Israel’s other non-negotiable demand that it remove its ballistic missile systems. It would not have been able to respond to the attack. Israel sought the unilateral disarming of Iran, in order to bring about its own version of “shock and awe,” heavy bombardment, then with U.S. help, invasion and regime change.

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The Rise of the Permanent Political Class

How Career Politicians Stay in Power Forever

Walk into any government building, and you’ll see them—the same faces, year after year, decade after decade. They call themselves “public servants,” but they’ve never worked a real job outside politics. They don’t know what it’s like to struggle to pay rent or worry about layoffs. Instead, they’ve turned governing into a lifelong career, insulated from the people they claim to represent.

This isn’t an accident. It’s by design.

Once elected, these politicians do everything they can to stay in office. They raise money from wealthy donors, pass laws that help their friends, and rig the system so challengers can’t compete. They talk about “fighting for the working class” while voting for policies that keep wages low and prices high. The longer they stay, the richer they get—while the rest of us foot the bill.

The Money Machine Behind Political Lifers

Running for office costs a fortune. That’s no problem for career politicians. They’ve spent years building networks of lobbyists, corporations, and special interest groups who fund their campaigns. In return, they pass laws that benefit those same donors.

Think about it: How often do you see a politician leave office poorer than when they started? Almost never. Many arrive with modest savings and leave as millionaires. They write laws that let them trade stocks based on insider information. They take high-paying “consulting” gigs after retiring. Some even get their family members jobs in the same system.

Meanwhile, the average worker hasn’t seen a real raise in decades.

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Russia Ready To Help Iran, Says Has ‘Every Right’ To Nuclear Energy Program

The Kremlin has announced Monday that Russia stands ready to help Iran in its ongoing conflict with Israel and the United States in the Middle East, based on specific requests.

Such assistance “all depends on what Iran needs,” presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained, as quoted in TASS. “We have offered our mediation efforts. This is concrete. We have stated our position, which is also a very important form of support for the Iranian side.”

“Going forward, everything will depend on what Iran needs at this moment,” Peskov continued, while Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is currently in Moscow, preparing to meet with President Vladimir Putin.

“Just today, the Iranian Foreign Minister [Abbas Araghchi] will meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, where they will be able to exchange views in the wake of this traumatic escalation,” Peskov stated. That’s when he made clear, “And, in fact, the Iranian side will be able to inform us about its proposals and its vision of the current situation.”

It is highly unlikely that Moscow would actually give any level of direct military assistance, but it could possibly come in the form of safety, containment, or logistical help at now damaged nuclear facilities, following American forces’ weekend bombings of three key sites.

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How Trump’s Weakness Betrayed America’s Interests in Iran

In mid-February 1945, a dying Franklin Roosevelt, on his way home from his final meetings with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, met with Saudi King Ibn Saud on the deck of the USS Quincy on the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt.

An account of the conversation from the Office of the Historian of the US State Department reads, in part:

His Majesty called attention to the increasing threat to the existence of the Arabs and the crisis which has resulted from continued Jewish immigration and the purchase of land by the Jews. His Majesty further stated that the Arabs would choose to die rather than yield their lands to the Jews.

His Majesty stated that the hope of the Arabs is based upon the word of honor of the Allies and upon the well-known love of justice of the United States, and upon the expectation that the United States will support them.

The President replied that he wished to assure His Majesty that he would do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs and would make no move hostile to the Arab people. He reminded His Majesty that it is impossible to prevent speeches and resolutions in Congress or in the press which may be made on any subject.

His reassurance concerned his own future policy as Chief Executive of the United States Government. His Majesty thanked the President for his statement and mentioned the proposal to send an Arab mission to America and England to expound the case of the Arabs and Palestine. The President stated that he thought this was a very good idea because he thought many people in America and England are misinformed.

What Saud was saying, in other words, was: Why should Arabs have to pay the price for Germany’s crimes? Yet even then, the longest-serving president in our history recognized that when it comes to the politics of the Levant, the Lobby rules.

In the 75 years since its founding, Israel has repeatedly undermined the United States and has murdered numerous American civilians as well as 34 members of the crew of the USS Liberty. Still more, Israel poses a unique, continuing and dangerous counterintelligence threat. It acts with impunity because Congress is bought and paid for by money funneled to it from its domestic lobby, AIPAC. It treats US presidents like doormats. Bill Clinton famously asked after his first meeting with Netanyahu in 1996, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?”

Good question.

Americans are increasingly asking themselves with regard to Israel: At what point does it become enough?

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Map Shows Where 250 Million Acres of Public Land is Being Sold Off

The largest single sale of national public land in modern history could be carried out as part of President Donald Trump‘s budget bill to help pay for his sweeping tax cuts.

However, a professor who is an expert on climate policy questioned the efficacy of the proposals, telling Newsweek that “selling off public lands will not reduce federal spending to any significant degree.”

Newsweek has contacted the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service via email for comment.

Why It Matters

The Senate committee said that a lot of the land owned by BLM and USFS cannot be used for housing, and so by opening up portions of federal land for large-scale housing construction, they intend to solve the “housing crisis.”

However, the nonprofit land conversation organization The Wilderness Society argued the opposite—that research suggests “very little of the land managed by the BLM and USFS is actually suitable for housing.”

It warned that much of the public land eligible for sale in the bill include “local recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors.”

The organization said the measure “trades ordinary Americans’ access to outdoor recreation for a short-term payoff that disproportionately benefits the privileged and well-connected.”

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The Constitution Won’t Save US From Trump’s War Idiocy

On June 21, US president Donald Trump ordered airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. You may have heard. As I write this, we’re in the “boasting about how splendid it all is” phase of Trump’s cyclical foreign policy approach.

Phase One: Pretend to be “anti-war” and feverishly “negotiating” to avoid escalation of this or that long-term conflict.

Phase Two:  Escalate.

Phase Three: Brag about what a genius he is.

Phase Four: Backtrack and maybe whine a little when it blows up in his face – or, rather, in the faces of the troops he puts in harm’s way.

It remains to be seen whether we’ll get the usual Phase Four (a la the ignominious but long overdue US surrender in Afghanistan after his “surge,” the Iranian strikes on US bases in Iraq after his operation to murder Iranian general  Qasem Soleimani, etc.), or whether he’ll really screw the pooch and set the Middle East on fire this time when the Iranians retaliate.

In the meantime, let’s talk about the US Constitution.

This morning, I received an email from Defending Rights and Dissent, a pro-Constitution organization with a history stretching back to the era of McCarthyism.  Subject line: “Trump shreds the Constitution. Bombs Iran. TAKE ACTION.”

DRAD wants you to write “your” US Representative and US Senators, urging them to support a “War Powers Resolution” requiring Trump to stand down, on the clear and irrefutable constitutional claim that only Congress has the authority to declare war and that Trump’s actions are therefore illegal.

Okay, yeah, I did that.

But realistically, Congress isn’t any more likely to reassert its power over US war-making this time around than it did with Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and numerous other belligerent actions/involvements.

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