Image is of Elon Musk giving the Nazi salute a week or so ago.
I didn't really want to keep spotlighting American domestic events as I had assumed that shit would calm down pretty quickly, but it appears that the Trump administration, including Musk, are determined to bring down the empire from the inside.
One of the most important lessons of ruling a country - and especially an empire - is to never, ever believe your own propaganda; and yet now we have neo-Nazi failsons disrupting parts of the imperial apparatus and causing general government mayhem because they actually seem to believe in libertarianism; that the state and the capitalists are somehow in opposition, rather than working in lockstep to maximise profit and boost American hegemony around the world.
I'm not so optimistic as to believe that a national collapse is FOUR DAYS AWAY, like those weird anti-China cranks often speculate - the US has at least a decade or two left even under these conditions. But consider the damage being inflicted in these past couple weeks, and extrapolate that over the next four years. Does any living American political figure possess the competency to halt - or even meaningfully slow - the already ongoing decline? And could they achieve power (or even be allowed to do so) after Trump's term is done?
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
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.
I saw someone asked about Trump’s sovereign wealth fund a few days ago, and here are some very superficial thoughts about it.
Of course, as Stephenie Kelton already wrote in her blog, SWF is completely non-sensical for the US, who is the one who runs huge trade deficits such that other countries can accumulate the dollars the US spent (by exporting their own goods to earn the dollars) to store in their wealth funds.
In other words, the US can simply print the money it needs to spend, and storing “wealth” in a fund while you are not running a surplus is a completely ridiculous idea.
However, let’s get a bit creative about it. From The Class Politics of the Dollar System by Feygin and Leusder, an interesting paragraph stood out near the end:
So, in theory, here’s what the US can do: Trump’s SWF can offer its debt (guaranteed by the Federal Reserve) at a slightly higher yield than US treasuries. So when the US spends its money as usual, and when the surplus dollars are absorbed back to the US government, instead of buying treasuries, investors could choose and even prefer to purchase the SWF debt offering a slightly better return. Then, the US government can use these new “wealth” from the SWF to fund active investment in domestic industries, thereby circumventing the “national debt” problem.
Notice that nothing has really changed here, what changed is merely the re-framing of US deficit spending from the federal government “racking up national debt” (bad! scary!) into “investing them in wealth fund” (good! prudent!) with extra steps. There is absolutely no need to do anything like this but this roundabout way might play better for the media and the people’s perception of how the government manages its budget.
Again it all depends on the mechanisms of the proposed SWF (no details yet, and I also haven’t double checked the logic of the flow yet), whether the US financial infrastructure actually allows this (I’m not an expert) and whether it is in the class interest of the bourgeoisie to do so.
Great post. Would the Fed see this as circumventing their power, and fuck with interest rates in response or something?
Well for anything like this to work, the securities issued by this new fund will have to be backed by the Fed itself, just like how it guarantees the treasury bills/notes/bonds issued by the US Treasury Department, since US treasuries are the safest long-term investment one can make as long as you bet that the US won’t default.
Otherwise investors might as well choose to gamble in the stock and bond markets that offer potentially much higher yields.
To be fair, we don’t even know what Trump is going to do, and for all we know it could be one of his stupid ideas about using tariffs (how??) to finance the SWF.
I’m just saying that this could potentially be used to reframe the negative perception about “debt and deficit” without having to educate the masses about why the national debt and the deficits aren’t necessarily bad.
MMT with Trumpian characteristics?
I think Trump wants SWF not because a sovereign state could save its own money but like other SWFs to buy up real assets in other countries.