Image is of military and civilian sites across Caracas which were bombed by the United States as of last weekend.
As everybody has already known for a couple days, the US has abducted Maduro and his wife in a massive operation (of which the exact details are not currently known, but involved hundreds of aircraft and at least some bombing of military and civilian targets), and has threatened Venezuela and the socialist party with further abductions and widespread murder if they do not hand over control of the country directly to the United States. In a statement that really says it all, Trump said that Machado is not being considered for the colonial viceroy position due to her sheer unpopularity. Various parties and countries around the world - and inside the US - have expressed their disapproval, which, as we all know, will not shift US foreign policy a single iota.
A few months ago, when the pressure campaign on Venezuela began, I speculated that Maduro was going to be killed or captured eventually. Flagrantly illegal and violent American military campaigns in Latin America are not new. The US has been invading land, looting banks, assassinating democratically elected leaders, and otherwise overthrowing countries in the region for their own economic benefit for the better part of two centuries, under both Democratic and Republican parties. Unfortunately, we all know that Russia and China are unlikely to do anything meaningful to contest the US in their attempt to more violently assert hegemony in Latin America. I doubt very much that the China of today will come out to bat for Venezuela and start meaningfully pressuring the US economically. For better and worse, we are far from the days of the USSR.
However, Latin America has, historically, met the US in its radicalism, committed to wars of anti-colonial nationalism, and carried out successful revolutions against the dictators placed in control from the US. As history continues ever onwards and conditions develop, I can only assume that we shall once again enter that radicalizing cycle. In that vein, the big question on my mind, and everybody else’s, is: what comes next? Does the Venezuelan socialist party have the social and military cohesion to wage a years-long guerilla war against occupying troops? Can they quickly transition from a conventional to guerilla force as their military facilities are bombed, or will it take several years? Can they prevent the theft of their oil resources and make the attempt at foreign occupation more costly in both the manpower and economic costs than what that war will generate? Can Venezuela manufacture weapons for this guerilla war in a state of blockade? Will this military campaign begin immediately upon soldiers landing, or will it take a period of relatively unopposed occupation of months or even years? Will Cuba, Colombia, and even Mexico be in the same situation by the end of the year, with abducted leaders?
Yemen is the very recent proof that seemingly weak countries can force the American military to retreat in defeat. Can Venezuela follow? We shall see what Maduro has done to prepare the country for this war very soon. The only certain thing is that the murderous violence propagated by a trembling and dying empire shall be defeated eventually, whether it takes months, years, or decades, and the end result will be a socialist victory.
Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
CGTN reports that the Chinese central bank will be loosening its monetary policy this year, in line with comrade @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net’s recommendations, though it specifies that this loosening will be “moderate”:
[Emphasis added by me]
It is good news that China seems to be responding, albeit slowly and progressively, to the economic situation of the country, with the “stagnating” (for western standards) in domestic consumption, growing inequality and poorer job prospects for highly trained young people (again, hurts to type this as a Spaniard).
As an aside, been watching a channel called “Zaza in China”, which is about vlogs of a Chinese guy in his mid-30s with a 996 job and sending 40% of his income to his parents because they don’t have a pension. The guy lives very modestly sharing a flat in Shenzhen with strangers, making $1000/month (which seems a bit low IMO for a 996 job in a large city, any input from Chinese people would be welcome). I wonder if young people like him do see this turn of the CPC policy and look at it with hope, because he does criticize the unemployment and job prospects for young people.
is that $1000 converted with respect to purchasing power parity? I imagine $1000 USD can get a lot more in Shenzhen than San Francisco.
Not converted, raw conversion from yuan to USD
Ah I checked one (1) source that says rhe median Shenzhen wage is ¥10,000/mo, and the USD$1000 only amounts to ¥6,978/mo. Seems low but idk.
https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/595051
Complete neoliberal incoherence, this will at best pump stock market and increase debt burden
True stimulus comes from fiscal side, not monetary. Lowering reserve requirement has questionable efficacy. And lending itself depends on demand. Capitalists take loans on expected profit.
Workers take loan based on current, future cash flows which in turn is based on stability of employment. In many countries (I do not know if its the case in China) public sector worker wages are inflation-indexed, this allows them to take on more debt than private sector workers where inflation doesn’t result in higher wage (due to massive reserve army). But regardless, since China is in deflation, this doesn’t apply.
True, if you have state owned banks, as China does, you can tell them to lend to certain people, but state owned banks don’t create Government money (that comes from only Government spending and lending), they create bank money which are expected to be paid back with interest (if any) unlike Government spending which have no expectation of payment (except for taxes and stuff). But this and interest rates are their only good levers without using fiscal policy, with the risk of NPAs, (basically, bad debts) blowing up reducing capital and limiting future lending without capital injections (which is closer to/is fiscal policy depending on how its done).
Fun fact, that’s how Indian economy survived 2008 so well, its banking system had less foreign exposure true but also it directed public banks to lend more to infrastructure and such. Eventually, NPAs blew up, around 2011/2012 or so. The Gov recapitalized it, merged bad public banks with others , later the banks became more cautious wrt lending.
A big chunk of Chinese expenditure comes from provincial level administration, and afaik a lot of that comes from debt. I’m unaware of the impact this monetary policy could have on expenditure in provinces, many of which according to comrade @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net are in debt due to heavy infrastructure spending.
I’m saying this from a position of lack of knowledge of the functioning of the Chinese funding of the administration, not throwing loaded questions around, I’m genuinely interested on an answer
Comrade @FuckyWucky@hexbear.net is correct. The shift from fiscal (Keynesianism) to monetary policy (Monetarism) reflects the paradigm shift with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Fiscal is government spending, monetary is central bank controlling interest rate to “influence money supply”.
What this monetary loosening is really saying is that “look, our household debt level isn’t as high as those of Western countries and Japan, so we need to encourage the people to take on more debt to spur domestic consumption”.
This is not to say that the Chinese government is not doing fiscal policy, but a lot of those came in the form of subsidies to promote trade-ins of automobiles and electrical appliances. As I have been saying, the real fiscal spending should spent on creating job guarantee, ensure social safety net, and directly raise the income of the rural/migrant worker population.
The key number to watch is deficit spending from the government (currently ~4% of GDP), which reflects actual fiscal spending from the government that has not been taxed back.
For comparison, the US has been running 6-7% deficit for the past two years. The problem with the US is that most of that money did not reach the working class people, but it does not change the fact that the US government (as do any country that has monetary sovereignty) has the power to create new money out of thin air. The most recent example was the Covid stimulus, where each person in the US received a lump sum $2000 in cash, while still far from adequate, still prevented the US (and the world) from going into recession during the pandemic.
The easiest way to think about the difference between “state created money” (deposits created from central government deficit spending) and “commercial lending” (deposits created from commercial bank loans) is that the former is the money that can circulate permanently in the economy (until or unless they are taxed back by the government, otherwise they cannot go anywhere), while the latter drives up money supply but it has to be paid back at some point in the future (with interests), so there is no net financial asset creation (you cannot “save” those money).
When the private sector debt is high, the only way to offset this is for the government to create new money (run the deficit itself) so the private sector has access to new source of permanent money that they can use to service their debt. If not, the private sector (and local governments) will have to rely on borrowing from commercial banks to access new money, and when their debt bubble gets too large, the economy slows down, which is exactly what is happening in China today.