LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA - OCTOBER 20: Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks during a town hall campaign event at the Lancaster County Convention Center on October 20, 2024 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Trump is campaigning the entire day in the state of Pennsylvania. Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris continue to campaign in battleground swing states ahead of the November 5 election. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

By Nirmal P. Acharya

Donald J. Trump has been elected the next President of the US. But no president will save America because it has been completely ruined by hyper-financialized capitalism.

The evilest thing about finance is that it adds value without labor. Once a country is financialized, it is obsessed with making money through finance, like a drug addiction. Industries are gradually transferred to other countries, sliding irreversibly towards the hollowing out of manufacturing. Slowly the financialized state is failing, and it is getting closer and closer to collapse.

Here is the story of financialization in the US. The two World Wars not only helped the US get out of the domestic crisis but also allowed the military industry capital of the US to grow and dominate American politics from the 1940s to the 1970s, which is what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex". The failure of the Korean War and the Vietnam War greatly weakened the ability of the US to wage war independently. Since Nixon's era, the capital that dominated the US has transferred to finance, and the military capital has given way to financial capital. During the Reagan era, the collapse of the Soviet Union and China's reform and opening up accelerated the strong rise of American finance, and the barrier-free American financial capital was quickly transferred to and replaced by "usury" capital.

Since then, the US has entered the stage of hollowing out of the real economy and serious polarization of the domestic people. After the defeat of the Iraq War, the "Democratic Party" representing the interests of usurer capital has increasingly lost its domestic public opinion base in the US, which led to Trump's victory in the election in November 2024. From this moment on, the US will strive to return to the era when military-industrial capital dominated American politics. But the return might not be destined to succeed.

After World War II, military-industrial capital ruled the US against China and the Soviet Union; The Korean War and the Vietnam War. With Trump in the White House, the US will once again enter the military-industrial dollar era, military capital will dominate the US economy and diplomacy, and the employment rate of the US military industry and related industries will rise sharply. But the military market is the battlefield. At present, the US can only target rivals China and Russia. That is to say, the US, which has achieved the hollowing out of manufacturing, has much less chance of playing military with the alliance of China and Russia, the world's largest industrial country and largest resource country, than playing financial with the Sino-Russian alliance.

I can't help but be intrigued by the MCC's mission and destiny under the Trump presidency.