Bulletins and News Discussion from August 12th to August 18th, 2024 - Marshall Plan: Now As Farce - COTW: Ireland
Image is of one of Ireland's only manned navy ships, the Samuel Beckett. Image sourced from this BBC article.
Putler has been HUMILIATED by the Kursk offensive and this proves that Russia's army is in tatters and unable even to defend its own territory. However, it is simultaneously true that Russia poses an existential threat to countries thousands of miles away, as this recent Politico article demonstrates. Ireland - a country that immediately springs to mind as one surrounded by enemies - is being bullied due to its lack of military.
Despite bearing responsibility for 16 percent of the EU’s territorial waters, and the fact that 75 percent of transatlantic undersea cables pass through or near Irish waters, Ireland is totally defenseless. And I mean completely unable to protect critical infrastructure, or even pretend to secure its own borders. [...] Ireland’s “navy” of six patrol vessels is currently operating with one operational ship due to chronic staff shortages. [...] Ireland simply has no undersea capabilities. How could it, when it barely spends 0.2 percent of GDP on security and defense? And it has, in effect, abdicated responsibility for protecting the Europe’s northwestern borders.
For all we know, the dreaded sea-people from the Bronze Age Collapse could soon emerge from the North Atlantic.
Unfortunately, things are even worse up in the skies. Ireland has no combat jets, and it’s the only country in Europe that can’t monitor its own airspace due to the lack of primary radar systems. Instead, the country has outsourced its security to Britain in a technically secret agreement between Dublin and London, which effectively cedes control over Irish air space to the Royal Air Force. This must be the luck of the Irish — smile and get someone else to protect you for free.
While this is very silly, rearmament has long been a part of US imperial strategy on an economic level. Desai, discussing the US imperial strategy in the WW2 period:
By 1947 [...] the domestic postwar consumer boom was nearing its end. While financing exports became more urgent, the 1946 elections returned a Congress unlikely to approve further loans. Now the Truman Administration concocted the ‘red menace’ to ‘scare the hell out of the country’, enunciated the Truman Doctrine of US support for armed resistance to ‘subjugation’ which launched the cold war, and Congress granted $400 million to prevent left-wing triumphs in Greece and Turkey in 1947.
One reading of history states that the US was so intimidated by the USSR that this forced a policy of massive arms production even outside of official wartime. Why this arms production is not occurring today can be puzzling, and (very reasonably) explained by neoliberals exporting industrial production overseas. However, a different historical reading can explain both the first Cold War, and the ongoing situation in which American weaponry is being almost purposefully given in insufficient numbers to give Ukraine a chance of victory and thus only prolonging their suffering (while generating massive profit for the military-industrial complex):
In this sense the Cold War was not the cause of US imperial policy but its effect. It combined financing exports with fighting combined development by national capitalisms as well as communism. When such ‘totalitarian regimes’ threatened ‘free peoples’, ‘America’s world economic responsibilities’ included aid to countries battling them.
By selling massively expensive weapons to Europe, America could simultaneously guarantee export markets for its industries, trap Europe into reliance on American industries at the expense of their own, and divert European funds away from constructing factories which could compete with American ones. Providing a way to defend against Soviet communism (and now Russian "imperialism") is merely a happy side-effect, and so the lack of effectiveness of American weaponry is causing no great panic among the military-industrial complex, nor an urgent plan to quintuple artillery shell production or Patriot missile production - the deals for F-35s and such are still there, and they are what matter.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Ireland! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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.
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.
I heard about Japan raising interest rates which collapsed some segment of people who were schemin and tradin but was that all there was to it? Are the underlying reasons behind Japan's change important to the global economy?
Also, I guess Intel died in their quarterly earnings report, which looked bad for AI development.
Is this just a flash in the pan, or is this all supposed to mean something? Is the economy just chugging along or what? Does line go up?
my interpretation of events is that this is yet another confirmation that the stock market is essentially disconnected from conditions on the ground, now to the point that the biggest stock market crash in Japanese history has had little perceivable impact. the Dow Jones could plummet 20,000 points (well, it couldn't because of the controls, but y'know) and everybody would bust out their Ron Paul It's Happening gifs but we'd soon learn that it was just the stockholders getting jiggy with it and trying to get some cash and it'd be back where it started in 48 hours and there would be no consequences
Nothing ever happens, I remember a thing years back where Janet Yellen was interviewed at some financial thing and it came to Boom and Bust cycles and she said something along the lines of 'I think with the new controls we've managed to eliminate those' obviously that is nonsense but it could very well be that the stock market (which isn't the economy but I digress) now is uncoupled by the economy and will experience unceasing boom, I mean even with that mini crash the S&P is still up some 10% did the US economy grow by 10% of course not that'd be insane but hey that's happening and will keep happening I guess, until there's a glut of money and capital but considering the US' position as the global hegemon they can draw that bow quite a bit before it breaks.
my fee-fees is that the job market started bleeding (finally, according to fed), which heralds lowering interest rates. "economy got shittier - market rejoiced" dynamic. line will seesaw for the future, i think, with contradictory information and feelings. ai will likely slowly implode, cause it would be small compaanies hyping themselves up and then seeing its shit, so it would be missing revenues for ai, but with sligthly lower interest rates they can sustain themselves with money from real economy.
there’s a theory out in the world, I think mostly among radlib economists, that the recession of 2008 has never ended, and we are in a decade-plus “long recession”. the core of the argument for this is that the solution for the recession, quantitative easing, was not only a band-aid that can only be used once, but also essentially putting the foundations of the economy on a sand pit that the federal reserve promised to keep filling forever.
quantitative easing is the printing of money to provide constant liquidity. liquidity is important because one consequence/ aspect of USamerican financial imperialism is denominating debts in US dollars. this means that most every country needs constant dollars to even service debt, let alone pay it off. one possible crisis of ‘08 was a massive, international run on the dollar because everyone needed to pay their debts. that’s why a lot of banks were affected by the crisis even if they didn’t actually own mortgage backed securities. this was avoided by printing a lot of money forever. this manifests in 0% interest loans, created from whole cloth by a central bank.
the Japanese central bank followed suit in policy, and the relative difference in value between the yen and the dollar has allowed for the ‘carry trade’. this is buying Japanese bonds at 0% interest, and then buying US Treasury bonds for the profit and the dollars. treasury bonds are separate from the federal reserve, so they aren’t a part of the 0% interest thing. so it’s true that some people, as you said, were scheming with this to make a profit, but many countries and foreign companies used the carry trade to generate dollars. the elimination of the carry trade is of some global significance, because dollars are that much harder to get if a country has a debt crisis. does this mean quantitative easing is over, or even under threat? no. but the system can’t last forever, and in the past the fed has shown that sometimes they make decisions for the stock market instead of long term financial imperialism.
nvidia announced that the next best AI chip was delayed for production snags, which led to some tech companies sliding. the intel stuff is worse than just a bad quarterly. they don’t make any AI chips, because they didn’t get involved in design a decade ago. the fabs they’re building in USamerica are all behind schedule or failing. every 13th and 14th generation CPU has a chance of having a computer ruining defect (i think they melt at certain temperatures/ length of use), and intel has chosen not offer a recall or a solution. arm holdings now makes better laptop and data center chips. they also laid off 15k people last week. the long and short of it is that they spent something like $150 billion on share buybacks in the last 30 years, and a lot less on research and factories. there’s a good chance intel gets splintered up and bought by various competitors or simply catastrophically fails in the next two years.