My sources for the preamble come mostly from here, here, and here.
The thread image depicts Kenyan police, trained by the Zionist entity, in a meeting with President Ruto before being sent to Haiti, sourced from this article.
As has been planned for the last couple years, foreign police officers have been inside Haiti for a few months now. It will surprise nobody to learn that this has not gone very well. Gangs continue to control much of the country, and violence has continued in the form of massacres and forced relocations (approximately 1.3 million). Something like 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, is under the control of one gang or another.
The aim by the US was to import 2500 police officers to Haiti from a wide variety of countries. One of those was Kenya; President Ruto had to fight his own country's courts to force this through, and ironically is now apparently considering withdrawing those officers once the UN mandate expires on October 2nd. The issue here is not only the limited manpower (Haiti has a population of 12 million), but also very pedestrian things, like the fact that the officers who arrive don't even speak the language.
The situation in Haiti appears to be a fairly standard operation of American national control, in which both battling sides are being supported by the US in order to create maximum disorganization and prevent a coherent political force from arising and thus threatening their Caribbean interests. While the US funds foreign forces to arrive in Haiti to "control the situation" or similar justifications, the Haitian gangs get their weapons smuggled in from the US itself. That this is happening alongside escalations against Venezuela is obviously not a coincidence - in a world in which American interests are being gradually shrugged off, and where the American state military is becoming rapidly more impotent and unable to dissuade and defeat even tiny states like Yemen, total imperial dominion of their immediate surrounding territory must be ensured by any means necessary.
The police and the gangs are likely designed to be mutually reinforcing, without even much kayfabe of fighting each other. As an example, once the Kenyan police arrived, they immediately began brutalizing anti-government protestors instead of focussing on gang activity. They were trained by the Zionist entity, after all.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel'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.
China has raised the income of its people many times over in the past decades. At some point it's not a question of incomes anymore, it's about affordability. It's about supply and cost of production. If there are enough goods produced at a low enough cost then prices will fall. If there is insufficient supply then you can throw as much money as you want at the problem, but that will just cause prices to increase.
How is spending power related to housing prices? You don't suddenly make more money just because your house is worth more. You are again obufscating and dodging the issue, namely: who was spending more liberally under conditions when housing prices were skyrocketing (not a good thing btw)? Answer: people who invest in real estate.
Well, so what if they are no longer spending as liberally on real estate with the expectation of making fabulous profits? Housing is not for speculating.
No we absolutely cannot. You cannot seriously tell me that Chinese workers work and live in the same conditions today as they did 30-40 years ago. It is obvious even to someone who has never been to China that the difference between then and now is astronomical.
"China can abanon its neoliberal model by adopting the quintessentially neoliberal western model of deficit spending and driving up its national debt to GDP ratio." Genius. Next you will say that China should emulate Japan's brilliant new economic approach adopted after the Plaza Accords, when they transitioned away from their successful export driven model of the 1970s and 80s.
What a bizarre framing. Are you saying that people across the global south do not have needs that are not yet fulfilled? As long as there are needs there is demand.
You are talking about liquidity. Global south countries are too dollar poor to afford to buy in the same quantities as the West but that does not mean there isn't demand. It just means they need to stop trading in the dollar. It means they need to start trading in national currencies and making bilateral deals for e.g. resources bypassing the dollar entirely.
Or they pay China back in ways other than the dollar. They have resources that China needs. Or China foregoes their debts as it has done repeatedly in the past, because by helping their development China also helps itself. When they have more productive capacities they will also have more to sell to China in the future. This makes for a win-win scenario.
You keep claiming you want to stop balancing the budget (running a trade surplus is not "balanced" btw, it's actually by definition an imbalance) but your entire framing relies on the assumption that the "global budget" must be balanced. Your entire view of the global economy is identical to that of the US which sees world trade as a zero sum game.
Furthermore, you can only massively deficit spend without negative consequences if you print the global reserve currency because doing so is a way of offloading the cost onto everyone else holding your currency.
I repeat, you are simply advocating for China to take the US's place in the global system of ripping everyone else off. This is bad for the rest of the world and it is also bad in the long term for the country doing it, as we can see clearly in the US which has lost its manufacturing power as a result and a become hyper-financialized rentier economy.
Is this the same government that you are constantly accusing of operating under a neoliberal framework? I can imagine nothing more neoliberal than wanting to implement a debt driven US style consumption model.
And if the Chinese government has already decided that this is the way to go, why are you still here complaining about how things need to change? Then they are already in agreement with you and will try to ramp up consumption. Problem solved.
You are still not getting it. China improved the living standards and the income of its people by creating huge surplus values which we sent to the West over the past two decades in exchange for foreign IOUs before we can invest domestically to improve our own lives.
A tremendous amount of wealth and surplus values created by Chinese labor and resources have been sent to the West when they could have been used to directly improve the lives of its own people because of neoliberalism. That’s my point!
China can transition into a new model where the government simply runs up the deficit without having to care for trade surpluses. This was how Stalin brought the USSR into a modern industrialized nation after being ravaged in 5 years of civil war where much of the newly formed nation was destroyed and wealth looted.
Wrong. You obviously don’t understand how people think when purchasing houses (not just Chinese people, but this is the main reason for most people).
Say you are a middle class family and you bought a new house to live in. When the asset price is inflating, if you are suddenly laid off, you still have the back up plan of selling your house and downgrading your living conditions, and take the cut from your house price to sustain yourselves while getting back on your feet. This is how most people see as “investment” when purchasing a new home. So, you will be more “bold” with consumption when your house price is rising because you know there is always a back up option when things go wrong. This was what happened back in 2016-2019 when most people jumped into the house purchasing bandwagon.
However, if the asset price is deflating (we are back to 2017 level, I have friends who have lost 40-50% of their house value at this point), and you are getting laid off, not only can you not sell your house (who’s going to buy a house with a depreciating price??), you still have to pay the same mortgage for the next 20-30 years while losing your main source of income. In this scenario, you are way more fucked than if the house price is inflating.
This is also why the middle class has mostly stopped consuming. Almost everyone I know around me and their families have significantly reduced spending since the last 2-3 years. The post-Covid recovery simply never came, and the economic downturn made everyone afraid of what will happen if they lose their jobs. Everyone is trying to save whenever possible in case of such rainy day expenses. And that causes a downward spiral as businesses receive less income, the workers less wages etc.
Remember that China does not have social safety nets, no jobs guarantee program, no free healthcare. You can get into serious trouble if you lose your jobs. These weren’t so much of a problem when the property market was booming just a decade ago, but they are emerging as cracks in the society now.
Not sure if you’re serious, but you realize that China has now dominated 90% of the global solar panel industries with no peer competition, right? It is the most advanced manufacturing nation on green technology, yet such dominance in the global market have not improved the wages of the workers in those sectors. Instead, the government is now trying to consolidate the industries due to “overcapacity” so not only will there be losers, there will be many who are about to lose their jobs.
Which part of the deficit spending and abandoning neoliberal model did you not catch after I have written it for like a dozen times?
You are still thinking in a neoliberal model, comparing what I am advocating with the US and Japan model.
Well, clearly they’re not because they have listened to the IMF to balance their budget. This is why Global South countries continue to sell to the US and the wealthy Western countries to accumulate their financial assets, before they are allowed to invest domestically.
Who is going to accumulate, say, Indonesian rupiah apart from what’s needed to import from the country?
That’s the trouble Russia and India ran into after the Ukraine war started. Russia began diverting its oil sale to India and ended up accumulating a huge amount of Indian rupees it cannot use. In the end, they had to settle with the UAE dirham, and guess what currency the dirham is pegged to? You guessed it… the US dollar.
This is literally a real world experiment that shows bi/multi-lateral trading in national currencies do not work nearly as well as many imagined, and in fact even make the countries more vulnerable now that they have accumulated all sorts of currencies and have to take the extra steps to purchase the currency they ultimately want to save in.
Which part of “China is running trade surpluses against these countries” did you miss? China is reducing imports from those countries - which means China is NOT interested in their products (except for raw materials but that’s about the extent), nor does China have the domestic consumer market to absorb their export goods. So we are still back to selling to Western countries to earn the money to pay back their creditors.
Again, the whole point is to abandon the IMF export-led growth model so the Global South countries can trade with each other. In its current form, we’re looking at mercantilism because everyone wants to run trade surpluses when the trade deficit country decides to pull back and imposes tariffs.
International trade has nothing to do with domestic government budget. I don’t understand what you’re asserting here.
Trade deficit is not government budget deficit. Trade deficit means you import more than you export. Budget deficit means the government is spending more than it taxes back. The “deficit” here has nothing to do with one another whatsoever except that government spending can be used to import stuff from other countries, if one chooses to.
Who says that? Neoliberal economists?
Are you telling me that Chinese government cannot simply run a deficit to provide a jobs guarantee program to sustain a full employment? What is that if not neoliberalism?
Who says that? If China doesn’t want to buy from them, then they will have to sell to the US, at the mercy of Western imperialism.
Again, which part of running deficit and abandoning neoliberal model you’re not getting?
Why do you keep looping back to US style neoliberal model? I am literally calling for the end of that.