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submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net to c/news@hexbear.net

Image is of Trudeau and Trump together at Mar-a-Lago in November 2024. Source is here.


The Liberals, headed by Trudeau, have not been doing so hot lately. Polls have been rather poor, showing the party far behind the Conservatives, and the Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland (an outspoken apologist for Ukrainian Nazis) resigned recently, with more MPs following her lead. Trump's return to power has shaken the Canadian establishment due to his threats to impose massive tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which will have substantial economic consequences given that Canada sends most of its exports to the US, compounding the economic malaise that has affected most of the world over the last few years.

With all this bad news, there are rumors and reports that Trudeau will soon resign, ending his nine years of rule. His fall would be yet another casualty in the wave of incumbent parties falling across the imperial core, only to be replaced by more conservative parties that have very similar policies but wish to cast all blame and hardship onto minorities.


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Israel-Palestine Conflict

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. 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.


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[-] Fishroot@hexbear.net 39 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

So basically, the US realizes that reindustrialization is impossible and China realizes that there is need for investments.

So both realize their complementaries to one and the other.

China gets to build up the third world to become better producer and consumer and the states gets to have a cut in the pie as financial returns

[-] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 40 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Basically yes, but it’s not so much complementary but the fact that the US threatens to blow up its own economy through tariffs. If the US does that, the US economy will be damaged, but all the export economies in the Global South get wiped out just like during the 2009 GFC if not worse, and their ultimate fate is still IMF bail out and privatization. That is the stick.

It is a sane calculation to give in to the US threat because at least we’re not going through a mutually assured destruction in this scenario. It is still a win-win (carrot) for both the US and China and other developing countries if they can keep the US from going into an economic depression, while the US gets a good portion of financial control over their assets in return. This will become the renewed status quo until something in the global capitalist machine breaks again.

I’ve always said that the only way for China to gain leverage over this is to make the painful transition into a domestic consumption led economy, and doing that requires China to reclaim its monetary sovereignty instead of accumulating foreign reserves through export and investment. Without that, we will simply see a return to the status quo but with Europe out of the picture as a major player. None of the Global South debt situation gets resolved, the global financial institutions will remain in place, dollar hegemony will persist and capital continues to flow through the established neoliberal free trade system. An alternative is needed.

[-] sexywheat@hexbear.net 25 points 4 days ago
[-] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 31 points 4 days ago

Yes lol, the real and difficult question is how? It requires a complete overhaul the global financial system and resolves the external debt burden of the Global South countries that subjected them to Western financial imperialism.

Even the Russian proposal at the BRICS Kazan Summit acknowledges just how difficult it is to de-dollarize and they are proposing to do it realistically and slowly at a limited scale. Thankfully Russia didn’t say things like gold or crypto, which means at least the Russians aren’t stupid and actually understand where the difficulties lie.

[-] niph@hexbear.net 5 points 4 days ago

Maybe everyone could just use one big google drive spreadsheet or something

[-] Eldungeon2@hexbear.net 9 points 3 days ago

https://sputnikglobe.com/20250104/how-us-dollar-will-be-dethroned-by-brics-national-currencies-1121354599.html

Or multiple alternatives. Seems the strategy now is increasing trade amongst members with their own currencies rather than having a single alternative to the petrodollar.

[-] Fishroot@hexbear.net 18 points 4 days ago

Iirc Adam Tooze’s analysis on the US’ industrialization is impossible due to the fact that 1-the US dollar is too strong to be a viable export economy, 2-a trained/educated labour force and 3- a cheap labour force to compete with the global wages which are needed for industrial production to come back.

Part of me is really skeptical about China having the will to change the status quo of the economy as changes within a nation with a large population is difficult to execute. The other reasons might be that the post covid situation has shaken the health of Chinese economy and there is probably fear within the population’s appetite for spending/investing. I also think the real estate crisis is not over yet, if the Chinese economy was noticeably pegged vastly on its real estate, I don’t think the government would just let it “crash” to transition to say a consumption economy.

I do have a theoretical question: in the events that the USD stays hegemonic in the near and mid future. Is there a way to transform the USD into a Bancor like currency? I know that we need to take into account that the USD is a tool of US financial imperialism, but is there a way for non US states to pressure the US fed to “relinquish” the flow? I guess in this situation one of the means would be to introduce another reserve currency as a counterbalance.

[-] xiaohongshu@hexbear.net 30 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

US’ industrialization is impossible

Another reason, and perhaps most important of all, is that reindustrialization is incompatible with Wall Street finance capitalism because raising the wages of labor will reinvigorate the trade unions and workers movement, as the working class in the Imperial Core becomes re-proletarianized again instead of being a neofeudal debt slaves as they have been driven into after 50 years of neoliberalization.

If you’re interested in the theory I recommend reading up 贾根良‘s work (Marxist/MMT/Listian economics professor at the People’s University). After reading so much material, I found his stuff to make the most sense, and is a major source where much of my theory is derived from.

I kind of dismissed his “warning” back in 2018 Trump’s trade war when he said that the real goal of Trump’s tariffs were to eventually force China into opening up its financial market, because I thought the trade war didn’t really go anywhere, so I thought it was rubbish.

The thesis was that the contradictions built up by the hyperfinancialization of the US i.e. the growing of MAGA movement (or the disgruntled working class of Bernie Sanders’s movement) due to the persistent trade deficit over the years that led to a huge loss of domestic jobs needs to be resolved somehow. By transitioning the export of dollar from running trade deficit gradually into entering China’s financial market as investment, the US gets to retain its dollar hegemony while allowing trade deficit to be partially reduced (limited scale reindustrialization), thus preventing the lid to be blown off.

Honestly I wasn’t paying much attention until it started to make sense after the Ukraine war and Europe’s economy is now blown into pieces, as the US has reshaped a new geopolitical situation where Europe in austerity can no longer absorb the rest of the world’s exports, and that means the US becomes the world’s only and biggest consumer market that carries the export economies of the world (doesn’t even matter what currencies the trades are settled in).

This is why China is scared of US’s tariffs because they haven’t built up their consumer market enough to absorb the loss of trade with the US, and Europe/Japan are already out of the game to pick up that role.

in the events that the USD stays hegemonic in the near and mid future. Is there a way to transform the USD into a Bancor like currency?

I don’t think so. Bancor is a clearing currency that is used only by central banks to settle balance of payments, so the US dollar cannot become that.

However, in constructing an alternative financial system, bancor is ideal to prevent the situation we have today where the US can run a huge trade deficit without contributing anything, and China can accumulate huge trade surplus. The concentration of the world’s productive capacity into China was a pre-requisite for the US to deprive the rest of the world of their industrial capacity and rendering them vulnerable to US imperialism. A bancor system will punish both the US and China for running such huge trade imbalances.

So we now end up in a situation where the world’s two largest economies are reluctant to give up the status quo, and the sheer size of their economies completely eclipse the rest of the world’s. This is why the way out is for China to transition into a domestic consumption economy, as it will ease their ability to give up this advantage since it no longer has to accumulate so much trade surplus, and hence can allow industrial capacity to be distributed more equally to the rest of the world while China focuses on giving free healthcare, education and various utilities to its people and pioneering high tech sector.

this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2025
151 points (100.0% liked)

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