Bulletins and News Discussion from October 23rd to October 29th, 2023 - Tunnel Vision

Also Joe Biden owes us money. Both the rest of the $2000 he said he'd send and student debt cancellation.

zero change from trump

Nah, change for the worse actually lol

Honestly I’m not so sure about that. I still think under Biden, the US is coming out stronger than ever.

I have been on the record saying that the US doesn’t need to win wars to maintain and expand its global hegemony, and in fact hasn’t won any protracted war since 1945, and none of this has ever stopped its continued imperial dominance.

The real power of American imperialism is financial in nature, and the key to defeating it is dedollarization. Without the world being able to do so, America continues to win.

Let’s look at what has been happening globally:

The primary goal behind the Ukraine war was to prevent the formation of Europe-Russia-China cooperation. That goal has been achieved, and European financial capital has all fled back to the US while its industries are left crippled. The threat of a powerful EU bloc as a third force that threatens to sway towards China has been eliminated.

By destroying European energy sovereignty, the US oil and gas industry has finally came back from the dead: the US turned from a net oil importer to a net oil exporter country last year, reaping in hundreds of billions of dollars of profit. Meanwhile, the military industrial complex enjoyed windfall profits from the ongoing conflicts.

The US doesn’t care about Russia. Sure, they would like to see it weakened as a competitor of armament and raw resource exporters who has the potential to supply China and the developing world. But remember what I said, the present day US imperialism is rooted in its financial domination, and what Russia does, does not matter for the US so long as the world remains dollarized.

Ukraine’s goal is just to drag Russia into a war to destabilize Europe, forcing them to spend unnecessary amount of resources to militarize (which profited the American military industrial complexes, while the imminent austerity would enable their industrial and financial assets to be carved up by American capitalists).

China is trying very hard to assert economic independence from the US, after decades of deliberate and strategic economic policies to tangle itself with the US, but its weak consumer base (the outcome of this deliberate strategy) has proved to be its ultimate weakness. It cannot afford to decouple from the US without substantial pain, for its consumer base simply could not absorb the loss of Western consumer markets, which means significant downsizing of their industrial production, mass layoffs and ultimately recession.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration continued to leverage the Fed rate hike (10Y US Treasury has gone above 5% now) is destroying the global economy (dollar debt has soared) and like a strong vacuum hose, is sucking international capital back towards the US. Domestically, the raising of interest rates has paid out ~$1-1.2T through interest income channels, mostly to the wealthy, and the effective outcome is that wealth is being transferred from the poor (disproportionately black and Hispanic families) to the rich white families (I wrote about it the other day here) - and what this really means is that the austerity is being burdened by the poor minorities while the gains are being reaped by the upper middle class white demographics, further perpetuating the socio-economic disparity between white and non-white populations in the US.

The ongoing expansion of the Belt and Road Initiatives (BRI) and the BRICS+ formation seem like a good way to decouple from US imperialism, but so far they are proving to be helping to dollarize the world instead of doing the opposite, since the majority of loans are still given out in dollar denomination.

Because the debt in BRI/BRICS+ projects are denominated in dollar, that means the developing countries that have taken on the loans need to find dollars to repay their creditors. Most countries have dollar reserves they use for import, but they have to earn those dollars with their labor and resources first. Meanwhile, America has the unique advantage of simply “printing” them out of thin air - anything for sale in US dollar, America can always “print” the necessary amount and pay for it.

What this effective means is that the US is using BRI/BRICS+ to build a global supply chain for itself while it gets to reap all the free lunches for itself, and the irony is that BRICS+ now has 11 countries to do the job for the US imperialists!

Russian resources sold to China after US sanctions -> China builds component and used it to build infrastructure in an African country -> African country industrializes and make new products -> African country needs to earn US dollar to pay back its Chinese creditor -> African country sells its new products to America to earn dollars -> America is being flooded by cheap goods manufactured by the newly industrialized BRI/BRICS+ countries

Yes, the domestic US industries will be destroyed, but the finance capitalists do not care! America is going to be eating everyone’s lunches anyway, it doesn’t need to make its own!

As Michael Hudson has always said, the key towards breaking the vicious cycle is what the Global Majority will decide to do with the question of debt. Only by canceling debt can we break the dollarization cycle that feeds into the US imperialist ambitions. If the new multipolar world fails to address the problem of growing debt and how to cancel them, it will never be able to replace the US as the alternative economic system, or the so-called “industrial socialism”.

I had a lot of hopes with all the talks about dedollarization last year, but this has proven more difficult than it appears to be. The BRICS summit in August has all but conceded this very uncomfortable truth.

The true battle line of the ultimate US-China showdown, or the finance vs industrial capitalism, is going to be drawn on how the world can effectively dedollarize.

Biden's presidency has been disastrous as far as presidencies go. Makes me long for the days of Barrack "Drone Strike Middle Eastern Children" Obama.

we love to see it folks

Death to America

Not just neutral on Covid, but defeated. Every protection has been dismantled for the sake of economy. An economy which admittedly has done fairly well in the usual terms of company profits and the like, but which has been on the verge of recession the whole time.

Other failures: Student loan relief. One might argue failure was a secret intention here, or that what he has done has been a success, but he promised to eliminate student loan, not reduce it somewhat for a lucky few. Also, soon, student loan payments will resume, making the situation much worse for the majority of those in debt.

Unemployment. Altogether too low as far as businesses are concerned. Wage growth has been surpressed, but at the "cost" of more union activity, in spite of Biden, who ran on being union friendly. He's done a few pro-union things, but unions won't readily forget how he kneecapped the rail strike.

The strange truth of it all is that Trump has done more to improve the lives of most working class americans simply by signing stimulus checks. I hardly think Trump set out to help people, but looking back, people will remember having some savings during trump, and bleeding those saving away during biden, despite both of them hating the guts of the working class.