Bulletins and News Discussion from February 12th to February 18th, 2024 - The Prodigal Failson - COTW: Brazil
Bulletins and News Discussion from February 12th to February 18th, 2024 - The Prodigal Failson - COTW: Brazil
Image is of Brazilian chuds storming the National Congress building in opposition to Lula winning the election, on January 8th, 2023, in their remarkably even shittier version of the January 6th events in America.
Bolsonaro, who is in the tragic category of pro-US South American leaders who are so awful and uncharismatic that even they can't get the US to help them overthrow a democratically elected left-ish government, has recently been facing that most elusive of things in this current world order: consequences for his actions. Bolsonaro and his friends have been under investigation by the police, and his passport has now been seized, meaning he is unable to leave the country. Alongside the man himself, the leader of the Liberal Party, Valdemar Costa Neto, has been caught up in searches and investigations. Brazilian Army Colonel Bernardo Correa Neto, a former aide to Bolsonaro, was very recently arrested upon his return to Brazil from the US, as well as another colonel.
From the Hexbear South American correspondent (a position I just made up), @Redcuban1959@hexbear.net:
Lol, they are really fucked. Iirc, this is a municipal election year in Brazil, Bolsonaro can't campaign publicly, he can't promote his candidates. The leader of his party is currently in prison. And even if he is released from prison, they are forbidden to communicate with each other. The high-ranking members of the Liberal Party are pretty much fucked because they can't communicate with each other and getting support from Bolsonaro could be very bad, as left-wing candidates will exploit the fact that Bolsonaro will probably be imprisoned for planning a coup.
The FBI seems to have concluded its investigation into Bolsonaro's money laundering scheme in the US and handed over its findings to the Brazilian Federal Police, I don't think Bolsonaro can even go to the US anymore, or any other country. And it could get even funnier, there is a very small chance of the Liberal Party being banned and all its seats in congress and the senate being transferred to other politicians, many of whom, even if they are conservative, will be much more favorable to Lula's social and economic reforms, as it has been proven that Bolsonaro used the party to finance the coup.
The Country of the Week is Brazil! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
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A stock market that always goes up is just poor allocation of capital, right? Wealth must come from somewhere and flow somewhere. If a stock market continues to see growth, it inherently means wealth will flow towards those with the greatest stock value (the shareholders). By extension, wealth must be created by the workers, and this type of stock market serves only to transfer wealth from workers to shareholders.
A stock market is supposed to be used to efficiently allocate capital between different options, so assessing the aggregate value of a market sounds like it doesn't capture the actual point of the market, right? Assuming no economic growth and fixed interest in an entirely free market, you'd expect that stock market returns should be ~nil since it should efficiently allocate capital to where it's needed: profit in one sector and loss in another sector should equalize.
All this is to say: Japan's Nikkei has been going up despite a recession, and China's Hang Seng has been going down despite 5% growth. Yet, everyone points to the Chinese stock market as if it's an indicator for China's economy.
Capital isn't really allocated rationally under a capitalist system, outside of the logic of increasing profit. It is also best to remember that capital and profit, by their nature, are always expected to transfer wealth from workers to shareholders. Otherwise, they would be failing at their purpose. I think what you are rightly pointing out is that we are living in one of the greatest asset-bubbles of all time, and there are a number of reasons for this.
imo, I think a big one is "quantitative easing," which was the "solution" to the financial crisis of 08. Once the state realized that they could print money infinitely while adopting a 0% interest rate (largely because of the petro-dollar) the federal reserve printed out trillions of dollars in stimulus that was confined largely to finance capital. This became a big draw to investors to pour even more capital into stocks and other assets as everything was growing because of large cash infusions. Stock buy-backs and fund-managers buying residential real estate with this additional cash grew the bubble even further, while additional piles of money went to increasingly speculative venture capital firms. Venture capital firms, flush with cash, began pouring money into "tech," allowing for large companies to operate at a net-loss while adopting an increasingly financialized, or rent-seeking model. You see the consequences of this over time, people often refer to it as "enshittification" but the strategy is to use large "capital runways" to corner a particular part of the market ("disruption") and then when they run out of cheap money either turn to the market based on its "potential" or create an even more expensive, often subscription based, model to continue to dictate the terms of the market.
The US tech industry is a vacuous industry, as many have pointed out, where tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of over-educated workers in the imperial core draw large salaries in unprofitable businesses set up for the distinct purpose of being bought by a larger competitor or venture firm. This also has a contradictory effect of taking other jobs, outside of software development and computer infrastructure, and lowering the pay of work that traditionally was able to support social reproduction... But US tech appears to be a giant rube-gold berg device to obfuscate and mystify the increasing exploitation and predatory rent-seeking behavior of US capital. The mystique of defining it as "tech" appears to be a superstructural development, where people are fed a vision of a better world through technological development, but where they have actually entered into an economic arrangement that seems to have more characteristics of peonage than a reproletarianization of the imperial core. I think this is what some people are trying to call "neo-feudalism" but idk if I would support the claim that this is a economic system that is distinct enough to break from what we would describe as capitalism/imperialism. (and I am not sure that that is what all proponents of "neofeudalism" are really getting at either).
anyway, this is my take on the asset bubble, but idk if I am an expert really, and I would love to be corrected and learn more
Assuming no economic growth and fixed interest in an entirely free market, you'd expect that stock market returns should be ~nil since it should efficiently allocate capital to where it's needed: profit in one sector and loss in another sector should equalize.
I don't think so. A patient piggy will reinvest returns (dividends, aka surplus value) into the market itself, thus accumulating mass of money in an exploitative economy will grow yoy in the market.
Sure, but that would happen on an individual basis and not in aggregate. Unless monetary supply grows outside of economic growth (leading to inflation), the market as a whole should not be worth more than it's constituent parts.
I think you should consider what you mean by the worth of the stock market as a whole. Do you mean value, or the money-price? Under bourgeois economics, there is no contradiction there because they believe that the medium of exchange creates new value in-itself. Even if it doesn't make sense, that is the assumption 90% of economists are working under. Marxist economics would look at it differently... simply because the exchange-value of the overall stock market (reflected in its monetary prices) has grown outsized does not mean that it is reflective of its actual value. Exchange does not actually create value in-itself, value is created by socially-necissary-labor-time. Exchange-value is easily quantifiable, but it is not always reflective of the value embodied within an object itself. The exchange-value of the market reflected in price can be affected by fictitious capital and financial "innovations" that conceal growing levels of exploitation and usury.
Monetary supply is not the sole cause of inflation either, in fact inflation is often caused by an increase in prices itself. It sounds like maybe the contradiction that is bugging you is that the monetary supply has grown almost exponentially and this has caused inflation in assets, but only in the last few years has there been an increase in consumer prices that people commonly would describe as inflation. I think part of the disconnect that might be revealing is that part of the inflation we have experienced has been reflected disproportionately in the money-price of homes, but people who own homes have seen the increase in housing prices as "appreciation" of their home value and assets, not as inflation. So that is written off as an achievement for most individuals, while ignoring the social crisis it has caused for anyone who was born too late. Homes aren't inherently worth more than they were 30 years ago, but the price of a home has grown much
Gotcha, I think that's what I'm missing. Thanks!
Exchange creating value is fucking absurd.
In aggregate as well, i think. But kinda hard to explain why. Imagine a blackbox of capitalist economy in equilibrium, which outputs 2 trillion for the owners of means of production they don't spend on luxury. As an average porky sees exponential growth, they will put them in the market to get more dividends next year (as an absolute).
So the stock market evaluation will grow (linearly), but the return on the price (something like p/e) of the share will continue to diminish
If a stock market continues to see growth, it inherently means wealth will flow towards those with the greatest stock value (the shareholders). By extension, wealth must be created by the workers, and this type of stock market serves only to transfer wealth from workers to shareholders.
You're missing the forest for the trees. The only reason for stocks to be distributable on a market in the first place—in other words, for anyone other than the workers to own any shares of a company—is to steal from the workers. Period. So it's not "this type of stock market"; it's any type of stock market.