Bulletins and News Discussion from December 23rd to December 29th, 2024 - The War on Christmas: Hypersonic Holidays

Image is from Futurama.

Happy holidays, fellow godless communists. We are in year three of the Five-Year Plan to eliminate all Christmas cheer and create a world free of the joys and festivity of Christmas. Nobody should have to be reminded that in our concrete brutalist communist strongholds, NO ornaments are allowed in December. Please report any Christmas trees, snowflakes, baubles, and presents to the evil secret police, and anybody caught violating their Volcel Pledge by having a tentative kiss under a mistletoe will be shot on sight.

Developments lately have been grim. Our Supreme Communist Dictator Brandon is being removed from office by Christmas-loving patriots, and soon, Christmas will adorn the White House for another four years. This is obviously very disappointing, but while Christmas joy is strictly prohibited, good vibes are still strongly encouraged. Revolutionary optimism (a term we only bring out when things are going very badly and we need to be delusional) shall triumph over defeatist rhetoric by stooges of the Christmas regime.

We must have hope. Our foreign allies aiding us in destroying Christmas now possess hypersonic weaponry, allowing us to compete with and overcome the engine technology powering Santa's sleigh. Abroad, they have destroyed factories and hit cities with missiles travelling at unimaginable speeds into precise targets, while the Christmas regime struggles to produce their own such missiles, as they are still reliant on aircraft bombing campaigns. Precision has a quality all its own, or something along those lines. We just have to hold out another two years or so, and I swear to you: we will live in a world without this accursed holiday.

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In the last month of the year, the Russian government is pouring huge amounts of money into the economy. There are settlements under government contracts, advance payments for new government contracts, and much more.
The scale of spending can be imagined using 2023 as an example. Exactly one year ago, at the beginning of December, the federal treasury held 13.2 trillion rubles of government funds in bank accounts. During December, government funds decreased by 2.6 trillion. Slightly less was spent through off-budget sources. How much can be judged by the growth of the money supply.
In December 2023, the M2 aggregate grew by a record 5.83 trillion! Subtract 1.4-1.5 trillion in loans, and you get more than 4 trillion rubles. As of December 1, 2024, the Treasury holds almost 14 trillion in bank accounts. Most likely, no less than last year will go into the system, and taking into account inflation, even more. About 3-4 trillion. Plus off-budget. We will see specific figures in January.
The government fights back against the central bank’s monetary austerity. It’s better late than never. The central bank will, predictably, raises key rate early next year because “spending more money into the economy means more inflation”.
A tug of war situation where we will have to see if the government will run out of money to spend first (since they don’t control the money printer) or if the central bank’s key rate will lose its efficacy first?
This is a war of attrition between the industrial and finance capital within Russia that has been going on for more than two years.
- Why doesn't the bigger state institution simply eat the smaller state institution?
  
  Because the libs are willing to bring down the entire economy if they don’t get their way.
  I also suspect (this is admittedly pure vibes-based speculation from intuition developed over several decades of being a communist) that Xi was truly shaken by how much further the Shanghai libs were willing to go to let Covid spread to the whole country. The entire Zero Covid policy had to be dismantled because of them, and these are the people who are willing to kill millions and place the entire country in jeopardy just to make sure that the “market principles are not violated”.
  The last few years have really made me reevaluate my long-standing criticism of Stalin’s purge. It was brutal, violent and no doubt that many innocent people were entangled in it, but I shudder to think of the alternatives where the libs continued to hold sway in the Soviet government. No way the Five-Year Plans would have succeeded, and that means the Soviet Union would not have been able to industrialize in time to defeat Nazi Germany.
  Like, if you were the president of Russia or China today, what would you do with the libs?
  For Putin and many Russian people, it’s the fear of slipping back to the 1990s hellworld. It’s better to be slowly boiled to death than to be plunged into a nightmarish dystopia. It is understandable that nobody is ready for a radical change that will uproot the entire society. So, they did some small scale motion against the libs but never willing to go all the way.
  For China, their economy has been growing well in spite of the challenges. It is better to pretend that the status quo can somehow persist, than to try anything radical that would upset the balance. There was some purge against the libs during the 20th CPC Congress in the fall of 2022, then Covid spread throughout the entire country. By winter, Zero Covid was dismantled. I can’t even say I was surprised when the government has decided to “save the property market” this year, despite the disappointment.
  For Xi in particular, it was personal for him to be against radical change:
  
  —-
  Bottom line is that getting rid of the libs is more difficult than most people pretend it to be. If you succeed, you get called a brutal dictator who killed plenty of innocent people. If you fail, you get blamed for the catastrophe that befell your country. You need a revolution with the people fully behind you to go all the way with it.
  
  You need a revolution with the people fully behind you to go all the way with it.
  What's your read on the average Chinese citizen's understanding and desire for such a thing these days?
  
  The average people don’t care as long as their lives continues to improve, and life has been quite good in the last 10 years or so compared to the previous decades (like, at a scale you cannot even imagine).
  But that’s not to say that everything is going well in China and that people are satisfied. There have been a lot of netizen outrage during Covid, the property bubble and the recent unemployment (which is a bit of an issue right now, especially with youth unemployment) but most of that takes place on the internet. It’s the typical complaints you see on social media and very little of that will translate into actual movement on the ground. (And no, there is not going to be people toppling the government no matter how much foreign intelligence agencies want to engineer a color revolution for that)
  And to be quite honest, the only people who can distinguish and are actively hostile against the libs are the leftists/nationalists, which generally comprise of the old left and a smaller section of youth who were radicalized just before and during Covid (starting around late 2019-2020). The vast majority of the average people don’t participate in such discourse and wouldn’t know the difference between industrial and finance capital, have very superficial understanding of liberalism socialism etc., just like everywhere else.
  (Also it goes without saying that what we’ve seen on the internet is mostly people who live in cities that are relatively wealthy compared to the rural regions. There are many many millions of people who still live in the rural area who have limited connection to the netizens discourse and their lives are just as distant to your average urban Chinese people)

697 comments