news
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today/ . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
view the rest of the comments
I know nothing. I am no expert in anything economically. But if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that some very telling things have happened.
Republicans want power internally, and they are willing release most power externally to get it. Fascists want Europe to be Fascist are willing to give up all of the worlds' resources to do it. Trump wants to be a real statesmen guy and add territory to the US and win trade wars to prove it. US Hegemony was already failing, but the infrastructure to replace is isn't there yet. So my best guess is that Trump wins for a year or two, midterm blue wave locks up the country domestically and every nation the US tries to bully has built up the infrastructure with each other/China to start cutting the US out. It will be a long process still, but I imagine the talks are already happening. The US status as the world importer ends both as a consequence of increased domestic manufacturing and other states realizing it's going to happen anyway due to a depression and they might as well plan for it. BRICS figures out a solution to the currency issue (probably not an intentionally permanent one but if it works no one will fix it.) Trump's tower begins to fall, he tries to course correct but it's too late and the the stress kills him. Republicans look at Elon for leadership, but he's too weird to them to be a charismatic fascist leader so they fall back on old style conservatism. California exerts more control over the rest of the country until Newsom is elected president and he actively jettisons the south of the US, then invades them just to bully them.
This still doesn't make sense to me. Much of the government's power internally comes from it's external power ie imperialism, the extraction of superprofits, migration of skilled labor, cheap commodities from primary production etc etc. Giving up external power will just make them less powerful overall, there's no benefit to their internal power.
This won't work out for them unless I'm really missing something.
There's been some indication that Trump's being influenced on some of this stuff by the project 2025/Heritage Foundation people which is a billionaire backed think tank. I suspect this is a Shock Treatment in all but name with global Capital doing everything they can to rip the copper out of the walls and put the 99% of the US on a footing more equivalent to those in the third world. They'll weather a few years of passing on tarrifs to the consumer, investing to gain from Brics wins, all while also profiting from the war machine and watching us cut each other's throats to survive.
They usually wait for a crisis before doing shock treatment, but it seems they're too impatient to wait for a crisis and instead are using shock treatment as the crisis. I don't think that's going to work out well for them - the hallmark of shock treatment is that the crisis disorients the population so that they can privatize and hollow out the government without anyone noticing.
But if they create the crisis I don't think that works? Instead of cutting each other's throats there will just be more Luigis.
I think you could probably make the argument that whether through CIA directly, or School of Americas graduates, most crisii (sp? crisises?) have been manufactured. Also, as much as I hate to admit it, an H5N1 outbreak would probably be in their favor now that they've normalized the "can't avoid getting sick" mentality.
But to be realistic, that would require Luigis who understand who's pulling the strings. Stochastic terrorism hasn't been too detrimental towards Capital, so far. And they have been cranking that othering up to levels I haven't seen since the Bush years. Also, also, CEOs are like the Lieutenants of Capital, billionaires probably find the whole Luigi thing to be more like talking about what's going on at the front; Unlike most of us, they understand that they're in a Class War.
Well what they do is manufacture the underlying conditions which make crises more likely - Hurricane Katrina was used as a crisis to expel Black people from their properties and privatize the school system, but the only reason Katrina became a crisis is because of decades of steady neglect of the roads and bridges and levees. So when you dig into the cause of the crisis, yeah, you do find that it was porky all along.
I guess what they're doing right now might be intended to soften the US up to make H5N1 into a proper crisis when it goes pandemic, but they're just moving so fast. Softening up New Orleans took 25-30 years. Where's their patience?
... also I guess maybe they expect a crisis to happen really soon and they don't have 25 years to whittle away at the State.
Back in the day they had an American Left and the USSR to deal with. Both those are gone and even the remaining "Left" in America is largely sinophobic and ignorant as hell.
Personally, I just don't see that much of a risk for them. There's been a pretty steady downward spiral my whole life and I think we're just reaching that point where everything is lining up in their favor. We're heading for some depression era shit and there's nothing really standing in their way.
Which is not to say I've given up. I still think there's possibilities going forward, but it's probably going to get much worse before it gets better. People have to acknowledge the class war before they're ever going to fight it.
But now they have BRICS and multipolarity to deal with, it's like their plan is to give up on ruling the rest of the world to rule over their own little kingdom of shit.
Well keep in mind, I'm separating Global Capital from US government. Imo, Global Capital, as a whole, doesn't really have any true allegiance to anything more than profit. They're making money from our suffering, they're making money from neoliberal micro financing scams in Africa, they're making money from China growing other nations, they're making money from the US doing genocide; They've got their thumb in every pie.
As for the US gov? Slaves (in all but name) and soldiers is my guess for their ideal future. They'll continue poking every weakness they can, shoving resources into every right wing death squad waiting to be born. They're not giving up, they're just trimming the fat and taking the mask off. Is it a good idea? Hopefully not. Hopefully, it blows up in their face.
Multipolarity is not in global capital's interests; they do have an allegiance to the imperial core, even if they aren't loyal to any one country. Unless we're moving to some new stage of superimperialism where they ascend above the imperial core and move to live in Elysium on Mars where all of their needs are taken care of by robots or some shit, they still have to live somewhere. They need higher production/finance separated from primary production/resource extraction, so they need a core and a periphery.
... although I did think that they were working to make New Zealand into their bunker nation during the first COVID waves. For a few months it actually did look like they were going to uproot themselves from the rest of the imperial core to hide away on a fortress nation, so maybe we'll see something like that again when H5N1 inevitably mutates.
Maybe? But I think we all are maybe being a bit optimistic about what a multipolar world will look like. I think some of them are seeing it as an opportunity for more conflict. Making the US's fall in status not a loss, but like a shift in the tides.
During the Bush years we suspected that was happening with Dubai.
https://www.gainesville.com/story/news/2007/03/15/halliburton-moves-headquarters-to-dubai/31516752007/
I think it might be worth it to read Geopolitical Economy by Radhika Desai. I think she foresaw with this book what is happening here and now. I haven't finished it yet, and I'm not sure its a revolutionary text in the same way State and Revolution was. However, the argument she makes is that capital is still very much a nationalist project, and it has not transitioned beyond national interests and ties. I think the reality is, there hasn't truly been an alignment of global capital, in the sense that, there are many equally powerful capitalist entities that have transcended the influence of the state through collaborative means. "Global Capital" as we understand it is by and large American Financial Capital, and most of their assets are tied to the success and failings of America. The reason for this is there hasn't been a transition away from the dollar as the dominate global currency. Maybe if they keep pushing hard on crypto and bitcoin, and most of the corporate entities performed their transactions through that system instead of a state-owned system, then we might see a true "Global Capital". However, as it stands, a national currency as the backbone of "global capital" naturally ties its value to the state, and the state has all the cards when it comes to that currencies value. To maintain its value, it has to maintain its usefulness on the world stage, and to maintain its usefulness it has to squash competition, which Desai argues creates uneven and combined development of those states, pushing them through rapid and compressed development and eventually becoming contenders to the leading state. This eventually will bring about a multipolar world, as states are more or less on equal footing. The emergence of BRICS also signals a lack of true "global capital", in the sense that it is an effort to bolster national development, something Global Capital would see as irrelevant, since they should exist above any one state's influence.
I should point out that while billionaires fund think tanks, they're mostly staffed by compete cranks or idiot nephews who need busy work. They're adult daycares where goofballs dream up impossible plans or try to influence classes at universities.
Most of the time when they actually do get their hands near the wheels of power their job is to do bullshit studies that politicians can point at to support whatever bill they're pushing. Like say Representative Goofus wants to invade Cuba, he'll get the Heritage Foundation to make a chart explaining why Cuba's gonna destroy the world and needs regime change.
That's their primary function
True that. But most of those cranks also come from schools like George Mason U/ Mercatus who have been teaching what the Billionaires have been paying them too for like 30, 40 years now. This has always been the end goal.
I never said they were smart. I also never said 'the government' wants power internally, I said the republicans do. There are many forms of oppression and control that do not rely on or even include a federalized government.
I never said the government wants anything, my only point is that Republicans get their power from the government. They can ramp up repression, of course, but actual control will slip from them no matter how much they repress the population.
I mean, this is true, but you have to also remember that these states exist as interacting blocks of capital and all of our efforts that go into subjugating foreign states means that we are putting less effort into developing our own national capital and national product. Eventually, our meddling in world affairs develops nations economically, at a rate faster than we developed economically. Most obvious example of this, I think, is China, where we negotiated with them to liberalize their economy. They did so under very specific conditions, and then utilized the capital we were pouring into the country to rapidly industrialize themselves at a rate faster than we ever could have, given the conditions under which we did.
If you think about the UK Empire, while the United Kingdom was developing industrialization across its empire, it was also aiding in the development of It's territories that it controlled. The competition, they brought to the table, caused places like the United States, Japan, and Germany to seek their own form of rapid industrialization.. Eventually, the United Kingdom had to turn to protectionist policies in order to maintain its imperial goals and its dominance as the workshop of the world. Free trade had effectively weakened its position over time on the global stage.
These contender countries did not have to go through the same kind of developmental process that the United Kingdom did, where they went from a feudal country to a mercantile country to a capitalist country. They jumped right to being a capitalist country. After the Civil War in America, for example, industrialization of agriculture exploded since the central tension of the Civil War was surrounding the industrialization of the East Coast method and the slave labor of the South.
This meant that the United Kingdom was now competing with a former colony on the same footing which was industrial production. And it required the United Kingdom to do protectionist measures in order to maintain its supremacy. But this was a futile effort.
I think what we're seeing here is a similar kind of shift in policy for America, except instead of it being centered around industrial capital, it's being centered around technological capital. So much of our world is driven through cloud computing and large data analysis and every day personal computing and China is no longer trailing behind us in this regard. They have established themselves as the chip foundry of the world. They achieved this goal due to the relationship between our capital investment in their low cost labor and their communist five-year plan model.
Their great firewall has protected and insulated the development of their own technological capital. They have some of the most widely used apps in the world thanks to their sheer population size and those apps account for every aspect of a Chinese citizens digital life. In China, you do not have to carry a wallet. You just need your cell phone in some parts of the country.
We know that Silicon Valley has been desperately trying to recreate the everything app like they have in China. And they have failed to do so for decades. They have not been able to recreate the kind of success that China has had. Between their failing front on Ukraine, and the PR nightmare that is Israel, all the time spent in Iraq and Afghanistan that amounted to very little, We have not had the same kind of success that the United Kingdom had with their empire, and it is because we are trying to subjugate developed countries as supposed to countries that were not full capitalist industrial nations.
I think there is a distinct possibility that these kinds of moves would have been made by the Democratic Party as well, in terms of tariffs on China at a minimum. But possibly, tariffs on Mexico and Canada as well. So much of our manufacturing, especially cars, for example, come out of Mexico and Canada. Instead of paying workers in Ford factories in America to assemble Ford trucks, we pay workers in Mexico in factories to assemble Ford trucks and then we pay to ship them here. All of the parts that are manufactured externally get shipped to Mexico and the cost of importing is a lot less.
The problem with that, however, is that we have industrialized Mexico in such a way that makes them a prime candidate for other countries to build cars as well, which is why we are in a conflict with China. China understands that Mexico has a very skilled labor force when it comes to car assembly, and they wish to use that labor force to build their own cars.
Naturally, this is a problem for America because now America has to compete with Chinese cars. And as we know from people like Peter Thiel, competition is for losers, according to them. They would rather have a monopoly. The way that you do that is by returning manufacturing internal to America. Forgoing the external development of other countries so that we may, "have cheaper cars", or more accurately so that a greater portion of surplus value can be extracted from cheap labor abroad, So that we can avoid having to compete on a global market with global car manufacturers who are producing them at a cheaper rate, create this condition where people like Peter Thiel can have their monopoly.
The calculation from what I can estimate is that having a monopoly at home stands to be better than having a monopoly globally. Because having a monopoly globally causes problems, problems of development where these countries are becoming more and more developed as a result of building their productive forces. Because they become more developed, they become less reliant on our need for development. Then we become in conflict because they become contenders. India is another example of a country that soon will become a contender state that will no longer need the developmental aid of a place like America.
In order to bring labor power back home to America though, you need shock therapy in order to reduce the cost of that labor power. And while there has not been an official declaration of emergency at the federal level that would necessitate the need for shock therapy, I think they have realized that they don't need to declare any sort of state of emergency. They understand that the deck is stacked so far in their favor over the decades of manipulation of the courts that they can do anything and it will take far longer to undo the damage they've done than it would for them to do the damage in the first place. The result is the same even if it's criminal.
I was under the impression the relatively low China 10% tariff number was because it's on top of already-existing tariffs?
I think you're right. For instance steel was ~30% now it's 40%
It's still a weaker pressure put on China than Mexico
They say that, as if it's not their fault.
That's kinda what I was getting at in the post, they are actively exchanging America's soft power for hard power domestically. Likely there will be a roll back of military in other countries with an increased military presence in America, especially at the border or at protests.
Elon musk actually called out USAID what it is. Fascinating.
What did he say about it?
I believe the quote was, USAID is a criminal organization. But he probably thinks it's criminal because he thinks it's giving tampons to the disenfranchised or some shit.