FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

Posted by admin_akashic on Aug 7th, 2022 in Civilization, Prophecy

THE IMPERIAL DRIVE

making it difficult for the poorer, less technologically advanced countries to protect then* tiny fledgling industries.
The three structures were wired together by a rule that prohibited the World Bank from making loans to any country that refused to join the IMF or to abide by the GATT.

This system made it difficult for debtors of the United States to reduce then* obligations through currency or tariff manipulation. It strengthened the competitiveness of U.S. industry in world markets. And it gave the industrial powers, and especially the United States, a strong influence on economic planning in many First Wave countries, even after they had attained political independence.

These three interconnected agencies formed a single inte-grative structure for world trade. And from 1944 to the early 1970’s, the United States basically dominated this system. Among nations, it integrated the integrators.

SOCIALIST IMPERIALISM

American leadership of the Second Wave world, however, was increasingly challenged by the rise of the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. and other socialist nations portrayed themselves as anti-imperialist friends of the colonial peoples of the world. In 1916, a year before he took power, Lenin had written a slashing attack on the capitalist nations for their colonial policies. His Imperialism became one of the most influential books of the century and still shapes the thinking of hundreds of millions around the world.

But Lenin saw imperialism as a purely capitalist phenomenon. Capitalist nations, he insisted, oppressed and colonized other nations not out of choice but out of necessity. A dubious iron law, put forward by Marx, held that profits in capitalist economies showed a general, irresistible tendency to decline over time. Because of this, Lenin held, capitalist nations in their final stage were driven to seek “super-profits” abroad to compensate for diminishing profits at home. Only socialism, he argued, would free colonial peoples from their oppression and misery, because socialism had no built-in dynamic requiring their economic exploitation.

What Lenin overlooked is that many of the same imperatives that drove capitalist industrial nations operated in socialist industrial nations as well. They, too, were part of the world money system. They, too, based their economies on the