Image, sourced from this article, is of George Bush in 2002 meeting with María Corina Machado, who was even then being trained as a figure to oppose Venezuelan socialism, and very briefly succeeded with the Carmona Decree. Now the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, she has begged the Zionist entity to drop bombs on the Venezuelan people.
As of me writing these sentences, it appears that the ceasefire in Gaza is underway. Zionist ceasefires are, of course, an oxymoron - not only in the grand sense that their work to continue genocidal atrocities against others locally and regionally will not cease until the Zionist entity's occupation of Palestine is overthrown and Palestinians can resume the governance of their territory - but also in the literal sense; that bombings and shootings are often only merely reduced, and rarely cease entirely (as was/is the case on their northern border with Lebanon). Nonetheless, hopefully the population can receive some aid, and the long process of rebuilding can begin.
On the other side of the world, it seems increasingly likely that a new war is set to begin. Because the US is eschewing the usual process of generating pro-war propaganda and casus bellis (aside from a laughably transparent Nobel Peace Prize award) and seems content to just skip straight to the "bomb and depose" step, it's quite hard to predict what precisely they want to do. Anything seems to be on the table - from freely striking Venezuelan territory where "drug dealers" are to try and prompt a Venezuelan response, to assassinating Maduro and/or his generals and hoping a power vacuum can be filled with compradors, to attempting to outright invade Venezuela and establish direct American control over important government sites. All appear to be possibilities, though as of right now, the most drastic measures seem unlikely due to their difficulty.
We know that the US has almost totally abandoned diplomatic communication with Venezuela, and that the US has deployed warships, a nuclear submarine, F-35s, surveillance planes, and at least 4,000 military personnel to the Caribbean, with some sources putting the numbers higher. Some people have suggested that the point is to try and force Maduro into a situation where he must begin hostilities, or be seen as weak and perhaps overthrown from within. It is at least encouraging that Maduro is not like Allende in Chile, and is taking this situation extraordinarily seriously; the masses are being trained and mobilized in the event of an invasion, and military drills are ongoing. Venezuela has no real capacity to stop the US from attacking and bombing them, but it is much more possible to prevent a West-friendly puppet from gaining meaningful control of the country. A comprador might be able to make a brief statement or decree in a Venezuelan city saying that Chavismo is over, but actual power will hopefully prove very elusive.
2020, and particularly 2022, has clearly become a turning point for the Western imperial system, in which increasingly aggressive and reckless moves are required to keep the system functional (stability is, at this point, out of the question). Unfortunately, this has also resulted in the deaths of many long-lasting, inspiring figures, such as Nasrallah, and many more will certainly die before the empire collapses. If Maduro is assassinated - and I'm having trouble imagining how he won't be doggedly pursued in the days. weeks, and months to come - I have hope that a successor will rise to continue to lead the Bolivarian Revolution.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
I read this news story (for now it is just a proposal from Bessent) and my mind couldn't comprehend that they want to set PRICE FLOORS, someone had to point it out to me. I glanced at what was written and I just assumed we are talking about the usual price controls, so setting price ceilings.
[edit] and of course, every lib is calling Trump a Communist for this, lmao.
It is simply a defense mechanism against mercantilism. The Western countries are forced to raise the prices because no country could possibly compete with China’s industries without driving down wages and production costs, which will undoubtedly destroy their own domestic industries in the process.
In the old days, after the Industrial Revolution, under free trade, the most industrialized nation with the most cost efficient productive capacity will be able to flood the competitor’s markets and kill off their domestic industries.
The most successful countries were the countries running trade surpluses, weaponizing mercantilistic warfare to destroy the trade revenues of their competitors.
It took two world wars to eliminate such excess industrial capacities in the West.
After the collapse of Bretton Woods in the 1970s, global trade was kept in a unique configuration where the US, whose currency is no longer tied to gold, is able to run persistent trade deficits in order to absorb the surplus industrial goods from the rest of the world, thereby balancing the excess industrial capacity of the world.
Such oversupply of industrial capacity was what allowed global commodities to remain relatively cheap over the past few decades, as surplus values were extracted from the Global South and in return, the consumption demand for such surplus capacity in the US keeps the workers employed and factories opened in those Global South economies.
The US finance capitalists are the true winners of this arrangement, as the de-industrialization killed off the growing trade union movements that accompanied the rise of the post-war industrial capitalism. However, the long term consequences of de-industrialization began to emerge in the 2010s, after the GFC in 2008 ended what remained of social mobility of the middle class, in the form of populism under the Sanders and Trump.
So what you’re really seeing, at its core, is the US attempting to transition away from the neoliberal arrangement that had worked so well for nearly half a century. The US knows that there is no way any Western country could possibly compete with Chinese industrial goods, so it is attempting to upend this trade relations by invoking global tariffs, which will reduce the consumption demand from the US, and thereby causing an excess of surplus capacity in the rest of the world.
If no other countries wants to run up their deficits to absorb such surplus capacity, then we will return to the old days of mercantilism. The EU market, once projected to overtake the US in the 2020s, is now dead in the water because of Ukraine. China also struggled to transition into domestic consumption after Covid.
The chaos created by the US tariffs thus has the potential to cause damage to many exporter economies as they desperately lower their costs (and wages) to compete China’s vastly superior and cost efficient productive capacity. The US can then pick off the failing economies by bailing them out, and reshapes the global supply chain through financial takeovers.
Thoughts on opportunity potential for left movements during quakes from the shakeup (shakedown)?
Take everything I say with a grain of salt:
Leaving sanctions and military invasion and coup aside for now, if you’re a developing country in the Global South with a newly elected socialist government, Fadhel Kaboub would suggest that in order to fully exercise monetary sovereignty to benefit your own people, you will first need to achieve food and energy self-sufficiency.
However, this is very difficult for a small economy if you (or the previous governments) listened to the IMF and have already over-invested in export capacity.
To transition away from the export-oriented economy into a self-sufficient domestic consumption-led economy is very costly for most countries that wish to achieve this, because once you have spent years and finite resources investing in something (sunk costs), then it becomes the one (or several) thing you’re good at.
Your economy will be even more vulnerable during the transition, and you’re basically betting that the entire decision to make the transition is well worth the risk.
The problem here is that there is no clear alternative. The BRICS+ bloc has not made itself an alternative institution that offers a different economic doctrine from neoliberalism, and worse, they all want to run trade surpluses against each other. In this case, wouldn’t it be better to bet on securing the US market as Trump attempts to reshuffle the deck?
Then there is an entire “chain of suspicion” being played out with your competitors. Let’s say we have two exporter countries e.g. Thailand and Indonesia - one wishes to invest in the extra costs to transition away from export-led growth and decouple from the US, while the other bets on Trump being an aberration or even an opportunity for a reshuffle, and thus instead double down on the export strategy.
You literally will not know which one is the correct decision 5-10 years down the road. If you make the transition and then the US and China have a rapprochement, then you’re in trouble because you would have given up your competitive advantage and let your competitors overtake you and even capture the market you once secured. In this case, you’re screwed.
So the cost of transition becomes even greater, especially with Trump’s erratic behavior that has turned the global economy into a “slot machine” that makes you think that if you whisper the right words, or do the right ritual for Trump, you could somehow win the lottery and become the next key partner of the US market, displacing your competitors. This also in part explains why so many countries are desperately trying to make deals with the US.
This is why I still prefer the Chinese-style Marshall Plan strategy, or China gives up its net exporter status to absorb the surplus goods from the Global South, because the Chinese economy is more resilient to make the transition much better than the other smaller economies. By importing goods from those exporter countries who have over-invested in export industries, it helps raise the wages of those countries and prepares them to better invest in achieving self-sufficiency in food and energy, which is absolutely critical to shield one’s economy from the US economic and financial warfare.
Kaboub’s suggestion is that a bloc of Global South countries, such as neighboring countries in the African continent, to band together and form regional blocs, and make a grand bargain with China - demanding technology sharing in exchange for their market. However this would require China giving up its net exporter status, as dumping cheap goods on to those countries will not help those countries develop themselves, whereas gaining access to the know-how of green technology from China can help the African countries gain their own energy and food self-sufficiency.
Obviously there are plenty geopolitical, economic and ideological obstacles that would need to be resolved, so it’s never that simple. And the US simply has to make sure that those countries can never get together by creating division and chaos around them.
This makes sense, but I do find additional questions as I think through it. Why is national-level self-sufficiency the criteria, why not a self-sufficient bloc of mutually balancing economies? And why are food and energy categorically different from other necessities: metals, medicine, microchips, fertilizer, agricultural equipment, commercial trucks, plastics, etc?
That’s what I wrote in the end - Kaboub mentioned that a regional bloc of neighboring countries, especially weak economies, could come together and complement the economic diversity of one another, assuming that they can resolve whatever political, ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic tensions.
As to why self-sufficiency is so important? The most prominent example is the DPRK.
Despite what the propaganda tells you, the DPRK was one of the fastest growing economies in Asia in the 60s and 70s, next only to Japan. It was one of the most urbanized countries enjoying high living standards in Asia (far higher than China at the time).
However, geographically, Northeast Asia is like rolling one of the worst starting conditions for a socialist country. The DPRK lacked both arable land for agriculture, and oil for fuel. As a result, the DPRK relied extensively on importing food and fuel from the USSR, and it had especially benefited from the Sino-Soviet split since both sides did not want the DPRK to fall into the sphere of influence of the other.
By 1973, crop failure in the USSR prompted the US-Soviet grain deal, resulting in a lack of agricultural supplies that the USSR could send to the DPRK. This was a critical moment that spurred the rise of Juche ideology (self autonomy aka self sufficiency), as the DPRK decided to invest heavily in agricultural mechanization to maximize the use of its limited arable land. (To give you an idea, agriculture comprises 20% of the DPRK’s GDP since the last few decades, even to this day. South Korea, in comparison, spent only 2% on agriculture, as it decided to import its food supply from foreign countries)
And they did succeed, the food sufficiency problem was practically resolved by the 1980s. However, due to the heavy mechanization of its agricultural sector, which required petroleum to operate, the DPRK still relied exclusively on the oil supply from the USSR.
By 1991, as the USSR collapsed, the newly formed Russia found itself in deep poverty, failed industries and was unable to deliver petroleum to the DPRK. This led to a breakdown in the agricultural sector in the DPRK, causing food shortage and severe famine. Combined with one of the worst weather in 1994-1996 (hail storm, flood and drought all within 2-3 years), the DPRK economy never recovered.
This shows how important it is to secure food and energy supply and ensure that they are under the control of foreign capital.
I assume you mean: and ensure that they are not under the control of foreign capital.
High volatility and the basis for everything else. Stability quickly crashes when people can't eat or work.
forget about government cheese we're gonna have government beans
They’re somehow worse than straight up tariffs. Both price floors and tariffs just raise prices. Theoretically (if not in practice) tariffs increase tax revenue while floors just transfer money from consumers to producers (capitalists).
well in this case, the soybeans that are being subsidized and bought up aren't even going to be consumed by us since we usually just export them. So we're just gonna buy a bunch of useless soybeans to rot (or sold off to a 3rd party at a loss).
Very efficient market stuff going on here
government ~~cheese~~ tofu when?
the soybeans will ferment in the massive silos, and then someone will open them in a couple years when they remember the beans and be swept away in a tidal wave of delicious soy sauce
Magic of the Free market