Bulletins and News Discussion from January 20th to January 26th, 2025 - Viva La Resistance

Image is of many Hamas soldiers supervising the handing over of Israeli hostages to cars heading out of the Gaza Strip.

After 15 months of genocide - and resistance to it - the Israeli regime realized that they could not win a military victory against Hamas, and were forced to sign a humiliating ceasefire in order to get their hostages returned.

With much of Syria under the control of Al-Qaeda, and an increasing level of covert infiltration into Lebanon, the crisis in the Middle East is not over, and we may still be in its beginning stages, as the center of hegemony continues its gradual shift away from the United States. Their navy, once considered the best in the world, is likely also not very happy about their ships and aircraft carriers being forced to retreat by Yemen, one of the poorest countries; and all eyes are on Iran, who has, over the last year and a half, demonstrated a newfound confidence and strength to directly strike Israel.

The recovery for Gaza will take, at a minimum, decades; it could indeed never fully recovery to even how it was before, considering it is not in Israel's interests to see their concentration camps recover. But Hamas has proven to be steadfast and the tunnel network has proven its resilience, despite facing some of the most powerful conventional bombing in history. This shows that Palestine's liberation is a when, not an if; and hopefully a much sooner "when" than expected before October 7th.

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An update on the United States migrant deportation flights situation: After México blocked US military transport planes deporting immigrants from using their airspace (a story first broken by us on hexbear, believe it or not, we actually managed to get something right and beat the mainstream media), Colombia decided to do the same. This led to the rather embarrassing scenario of the two C-17 Globemaster transport aircraft having to turn around mid flight.

The United States and Trump have decided to respond, and are not taking this lightly. Trump has now implemented, effective immediately (according to himself):
25% tariffs on all goods coming into the U.S. from Colombia, that will rise to 50% after one week.
A travel ban and visa revocation of all Colombian government officals.
Visa sanctions on all party members of the Colombian Government, and their 'allies'.
State treasury, banking and financial sanctions.
Enhanced border inspections of Colombian citizens and cargo.
So it has begun... He's actually going to do it, not that I expected him not to, deportation of illegal immigrants has popular support inside the USA (which only grew as Trump got closer to taking office) and Trump will definitely make very public displays of power and force here.
My takeaway: this is a warning shot towards México; they either let the US deportation flights use their airspace and maybe even land in México itself, or México will face the same sanctions as Colombia.
Trump heaps tariffs on Colombia after it refuses migration deportation flights, Reuters, 26 January 2025
- What's the likelihood of Sheinbaum calling his bluff?
  
  The question is if it is bluff? What if he actually does it and sanctions México? That's how Trump negotiation tactics work, he does these big threats, people think he's not serious, then he makes it clear that he can follow through, and usually gets a large amount of concessions. This kind of thing only works if you have a lot of leverage over your adversary, so they can't really call your bluff. But who knows. Colombia is already starting to cave to Trump's demands. I can't imagine México holding out for very long if the USA follows through on their threats.
  
  My thinking is that as much as you're right about the US having a lot of leverage over Mexico, it's a bit of a double bind because the US extending 25% tariffs to Mexico as well as Colombia hurts the US as much as it hurts Mexico. So I think it's possible that Sheinbaum can dismiss the threat on the ground that the US can only burn through so many bridges before they're literally starving and lose their hegemony.
  
  the US can only burn through so many bridges before they're literally starving and lose their hegemony.
  
  Read this latest article by Michael Hudson: Trump’s Balance-of-Payments War on Mexico, and the Whole World
  The US can destroy the entire Latin American economy and bring forth a global economic cataclysm if it really wants to. The question is who wants to bet against a mad man who wishes to exert maximum damage both to his enemies and to himself? If the Global South defaults and there is no alternative to the dollar regime, it’s still IMF bailout and privatization - except this time your leftist government gets voted out and replaced by yet another right wing dictatorship. The vicious cycle continues.
  Think of it this way: if a guy comes into the room with a bomb and threatens to blow the entire building up, believing he is somehow invincible to the blast, how would you react if you’re in the room? Are you willing to call his bluff?
  
  Think of it this way: if a guy comes into the room with a bomb and threatens to blow the entire building up, believing he is somehow invincible to the blast, how would you react if you’re in the room? Are you willing to call his bluff?
  An important question is what happens when someone inevitably calls his bluff? Will he stand down or will he blow himself up taking the rest of the building with him?
  
  History has already given us the answer, over and over again: the answer is always war.
- (a story first broken by us on hexbear)
  ???
  
  https://hexbear.net/comment/5851301
  As far as I'm aware my comment on these flights not being allowed in México was made (on the 24th January 2025, 19:09 UTC) before the mainstream news sites confirmed this.
  Earliest I can find is this NBC News piece cited by all the major news outlets, published at 10:01 UTC, a few hours afterwards.
  Stalking air monitoring channels on social media and FlightRadar24 can be useful sometimes. You can also see the USA publicly spying on everyone, they're flying lots of public missions around Iran and North Korea these days. Also Russia is still busy moving supplies out of Syria.
  
  wow, great insight
  
  News megathread is confirmed literally the best source of all news
- With the tariff wars, can’t these countries just move their trade elsewhere or trade with other countries?
  
  The question is who is going to buy their stuff? The US is playing the role of running a huge current account deficit in order to absorb the exports from all over the world, and indirectly “creating jobs” in the Global South even though it is highly exploitative through global institutions like the IMF, World Bank and the WTO.
  Since there is no alternative to the dollar, then everyone is dependent on the US to “create jobs” in their country because they have been robbed of their economic sovereignty and have to earn dollars in order to purchase fuel, food and other essential commodities and technology to survive, pay back foreign debt etc.
  You can say, but the US trade is still only ~15% of global trade, but it sits at the top of the global value chain which means that many downstream and intermediate supply chains are heavily dependent on US imports. When the US stops consuming, the end result was the 2009 global recession.
  The balance of payments of the entire world has to add up. Europe is already in austerity mode. Japan is trending downward. China is committed to a trade surplus ($1 trillion surplus in 2024) strategy. Who is going to buy your stuff then?
  This is why we need to turn the world toward more balanced trade (aka Keynes bancor or like Comecon during the USSR times running its own parallel trade network separate from the dollar system) in order to stop the US from weaponizing world trade.
  
  Well explained, would the hope then for balanced trade be hinged on coalitions like BRICS creating a currency or effective trade network?
  
  Keynes’s bancor idea back in 1944 is still the most sound proposal and to my knowledge, nobody has yet to come up with anything better than that (although I am always willing to learn).
  If BRICS were to create a currency, then it has to operate in a bancor-like mechanism. Which is not a currency that anyone can use, but an accounting unit used to clear international trade settlements between central banks.
  Basically, there is a limit on how much bancor each country’s central bank can accumulate, proportional to its share in the global trade. If a country runs a persistent trade deficit (like the US being a super importer), then they would run out of bancor quickly and their currency will depreciate, making their goods cheaper. On the other hand, if a country runs a persistent trade surplus (like China being a super exporter), then they’d reach the limit on the amount of bancor they can accumulate and their currency will appreciate, which makes their goods more expensive.
  As such, this automatic balancing mechanism removes the incentives for countries to run huge trade imbalances, and if it had been adopted back in 1944 instead of Bretton Woods, we would never have seen the situation we have today with the US and China being the two major players massively benefiting from this global trade arrangement (even in the post-Bretton Woods era).
  Obviously the US is not going to like this idea, but the question is how can we get China on board? This will require them to redistribute their huge industrial capacities to the other Global South countries, who have been robbed of their industries and deliberately concentrated by the US in China over the decades, in order to make them vulnerable to US imperialism.
  It’s not without reason that I keep saying that the only way for China (and the world) to go is for it to transition away from an export economy into a domestic consumption led economy. This will require China to raise the wages of its workers - it will make their goods and services more expensive to export, but that’s fine, because why should China compete with other Global South countries to export cheap low/intermediate value added goods to Western countries? China should be focusing on giving free healthcare, free childcare, free tertiary education and all sorts of social welfare to its people while concentrating on high tech sector development.
  In this way, China no longer has to run a persistent trade surplus, and its people will have the money to on importing goods from the other Global South countries, and this redistribution of industrial capacity to the Global South will also ease China into getting on board with a bancor system. And only then, we can seriously talk about dedollarization and true decoupling from the Washington led neoliberal consensus.
  In other words, China has to take up the role in absorbing the global exports and take that role away from the US. Simply doing so will sharply reduce China’s trade surplus and automatically makes the bancor a much more attractive idea - a built-in incentive, if you will.
  Conversely, as long as the world cannot come together, the dollar will reign supreme and the US will continue to retain its ability to abuse the power of the dollar to fuel its imperialist ambitions and wreak havoc on the Global South countries.
  
  In other words, the U.S. needs to be punished for stealing the Global South's wealth, rather than it punishing others for not being good enough thieves. LOL.
  And the Global South needs to build enough political power to be able to force that kind of situation, because otherwise it's just a "macro" example of how workers are punished everyday in capitalism for not having the might to be able to own and defend the means of production without being destroyed by the state for non-compliance with corporate profit demands. As goes the capitalist-worker relation, so goes the empire-nation relation, and through it just a larger scale, global capitalist-worker relation. Global institutions like the IMF, the U.N., etc.—and also national governments—act toward global workers as the cops and domestic courts and agencies (IRS, etc.) act toward "domestic" workers.
  
  Yes, but that can incur more costs. The US is a country with a large wealthy consumer base (when compared to the Carribean and Latin American countries) that's close by, or even a land neighbour in the case of México, reducing shipping costs and allowing for easier trade of perishable goods. And the US is Colombia's biggest trading partner. Sure Colombia could try sell their coffee and flowers to the EU or China if they are willing buyers, but there would also be additional costs due to the increased distance of travel for these goods. So either way it's not a good situation.

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