Image is of Venezuela’s Maduro and Colombia’s Petro walking together at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas in 2022, sourced from this article.
Ordinarily, I avoid straying into the American domestic situation, but the government shutdown appears to be continuing into increasingly harmful territory. If the situation is not resolved, soon tens of millions of Americans will lose food assistance, and already millions of federal employees are furloughed or are working without pay. To those not in the know, this situation has essentially stemmed from the Democrats refusing to sign off on the Republicans’ plan to substantially shrink Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which would eventually result in tens of millions losing healthcare coverage and tens if not hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.
To be clear, though, the Democrats have not exactly been paragons of healthcare: they not only oppose plans to make affordable healthcare a right (in defiance of wide popular opinion), but also do their part to maximize suffering. Biden’s policies during the pandemic ensured at least one million people died, and millions of children lost public healthcare coverage. We may never know the true toll, as the US decided that simply ceasing to report on a problem means that the problem no longer exists.
In other news, over the last couple weeks, the US has expanded their hostility against Venezuela by also including Colombia in their ire, and particularly the left-leaning leader, Petro. Both countries are now experiencing major economic and covert pressure by the US to try and cause regime change. The US has deployed an aircraft carrier to the waters near Venezuela and is conducting a military training operation with Trinidad and Tobago, which Venezuela has warned may be the prelude to the long-awaited attack.
Additionally, the US is attempting to combat Chinese geopolitical interest in central America and the Caribbean by carrying out digital attacks and launching pressure campaigns against Chinese and pro-Chinese countries and organizations. Given China’s enormous economic weight, if central America were to break all ties with China, it would be a catastrophe for them; such decisions would only be made by outright compradors, and the resulting economic problems would make their reigns unpopular and, hopefully, brief.
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.
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.
Agree and disagree.
The rate cuts are coming after trade agreements, which are all happening on China’s terms. Does that mean that China is determining the policy of the Federal Reserve? I’m skeptical there’s a real mechanism for that since even Trump can’t directly set those rate cuts. Instead, I think the Fed is responding to trade negotiations.
But in terms of actual trade flows, the former is actually what happened. Trade did increase between countries all over the world except for the US’s direct European vassals, but they simply don’t matter that much anymore. Almost all of those countries you listed have increased trade with China or at least remained flat. India has moved further from the US’s trade orbit. Even Argentina is increasing trade with China despite being a puppet on strings for the US. The appearance of “scrambling” does not reflect the real flow of materials and commodities. Per the OECD:
Malaysia’s the only one you mentioned that actually decreased:
And we can look at others:
Iran unfortunately was a big decline all around:
I could go on. The data demonstrates that the BRICS boosters were, basically, correct in their assertion, although of course nothing is ever as dramatic as the hype men make it out to be. Now, I think I know how you’ll respond - that China is dumping commodities that would have gone to the US on these countries, but it’s not sustainable. However, I don’t think that’s accurate either. Take a look at where China’s export growth was:
Versus its trade with the US:
The main areas of Chinese export growth are not in the commodities it sold to the US but commodities it bought from the US! And these are mostly very high value add, high complexity commodities that the world outside of the US and Europe are just not capable of producing at scale. And they’re essential components of economic development for those countries. China’s not exporting vast quantities of clothes and cheap plastic garbage, but instead the necessary pieces for countries to build up their own productive capacity.
Agreed on your whole final section about consumption/five year plan/etc.
There isn’t. I don’t want to imply that some institutions are independent of the control of the bourgeoisie, but the Fed has some fairly robust protections of its independence (an independence which in the grand scheme of things, serves the interests of the bourgeoisie anyway). That doesn’t mean that Trump can’t have folks roll up to Powell and threaten his position or his safety if he doesn’t comply, but that seems like a stretch to think he would do this at Trump’s behest for China when he wouldn’t do what Trump demanded earlier w/r/t rates.
Agreed. The fact that it’s Scott Bessent, a finance guy who was also a key player of George Soros’s team that engineered the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, running the trade war and negotiations really show that it’s the finance capitalists that are running the show.
I highly doubt that they will give Trump what he wants re: re-industrialization other than using it as a leverage for the US to reconfigure the global supply chain through financial takeovers by killing the exporter economies in Europe and in the Global South.
Again, quoting my favorite statistics from China’s custom office:
Jan-Sep Total Year-on-year change:
ASEAN Total: Export +14.7% Import -0.4%
RCEP Total: Export +9.9% Import -0.4%
Belt and Road Total: Export +11.4% Import -2.3%
BRICS partners:
Brazil: Export -3.3% Import -6.8%
Russia: Export -11.3% Import -7.7%
India: Export +12.9% Import -2.3%
South Africa: Export +3.8% Import -1.2%
You will see that China’s export to all those regions have generally grown (and even negative in some major BRICS partners) but imports have been negative, suggesting that China is dumping its export surplus goods to the other regions, especially the EU (Export +10.5%, Import -3.8%) and effectively destroying the EU’s green tech and EV industries there.
For many exporter economies, that means further trade deficit against China and they will have to compensate for that by ramping up the export of their goods elsewhere, to America, for example.
The figures you quoted for those countries do not explain how else are those countries going to improve their trade surplus (current account) from their worsening trade deficit with China, where running a trade surplus for those countries who have bought into the IMF export-led growth strategy is a core aspect of neoliberal free trade economics. In other words, they have no choice but to appease the US even more in order to gain access to the US consumer market.
Again, you can see that without a strong domestic consumption economy, China’s vast industrial capacity is essentially the mercantilistic weapon wielded by the US to destroy the industries in the rest of the world and reshapes it under its new interests, as evident by the many countries signing trade deals with Trump.
And I have said this before, if China fails to transition into domestic consumption economy, the Belt and Road Initiative will effectively become a new supply chain built by the Chinese, but gifted to the Americans.
You are assuming that the White House has no advanced information from the Fed about their key rate policy days in advance, and has to find out from the news network in real time as does everyone else.
Of course the US federal government has prior information from Powell even if the Fed is technically “independent”, otherwise how else do you think the government typically coordinates its economic policies to ensure market stability if the Fed can just switch the key rates up and down on a whim?
Perhaps the biggest indicator that the Fed rate is a carrot dangled by the US imperialists for China is what happened back in September 2024, when the Fed lowered its rate for the first time since Biden hiked it in 2022. Within a week, China immediately followed up with its major monetary easing policy (the “924 policy”) as its first attempt to reduce the burden of the local government debts. So, everything tracks here: the Fed has a direct influence on China’s local government debt burden, and it seems China desperately needs it to overcome the impending debt crisis.
Finally, Trump is simply one of the roles you see on the stage here. The US finance capital (the entire behemoth of Wall Street) is not panicking yet, that should tell you how much they already have Trump kept under their control, nearly a decade after his first surprise electoral victory in 2016.