Friendly reminder: when commenting about a news event, especially something that just happened, please provide a source of some kind. While ideally this would be on nitter or archived, any source is preferable to none at all given.
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.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
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.
The Country of the Week is still Palestine, though we will switch next week to a new country.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly (biweekly?) update is here.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
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.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
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
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.
Last week's discussion post.
Actually, technically, they can. America is the only country that can print US dollars out of thin air, and this means technically the US can print exactly the amount needed to pay off however much the debtor’s countries owed to Chinese creditor (effectively meaning that the debt is written off).
However, I doubt they’ll do that though. Why? So long as those countries owe dollar-denominated debt, they’ll have to earn dollars, and that means competing with one another to sell their goods/services to America. They don’t need to own those countries’ infrastructures, they just have to make sure that those countries will function like what China used to, and provide an alternative source of goods/services to America.
What I’m most worried about is whether the Chinese economists (many of whom educated in Western neoclassical economics) understand the implications behind Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). If they think that the US wouldn’t dare to print too much dollar because it will somehow collapse their own economy by inflation, then they’d be sorely mistaken. Post-COVID Federal Reserve has created $4.5 trillion net assets (almost twice as much as the total amount of Fed assets pre-2019) and that is not even putting a dent in the US economy. Despite protests from the GOP and the “debt ceiling” debacle, America is not showing signs of restraining itself from creating new dollars at all.
Meanwhile, there is a real danger lurking behind for China, so long as the debt continue to be owed in dollar. What do you think is going to happen after the Belt and Road countries have become sufficiently industrialized? They will start competing with China as manufacturing export countries and at some point, will be able to replace China - effectively meaning that China has created a global supply chain for the US that ultimately replaces its own role in the global economy!
So long as China continues to want to remain as a net exporter country (meaning they run trade surplus, i.e. exporting more than importing), there will never be enough RMB/yuan liquidity for other countries to store as a global reserve currency. That means other countries will continue to prefer dollar as their investment vehicles, so the net flows of goods and services will move toward the US which is willing to absorb the excess demand of the dollar.
China wants to keep its people employed (it’s a huge country) but America doesn’t gives a shit about its own people, and this is what gives America the true, unique advantage in this dollarized world. It is totally willing to run a persistent trade deficit, de-industrialize itself, doom its people to poverty while the Wall Street finance capital rakes in more profit than ever.
What this means is that since China does not control the global reserve currency, it will be left with no significant advantage but instead having to compete as an exporter with many of the countries it financed itself. America, on the other hand, will have a strong advantage here as a net importer country.
So, the best way (and certainly not painless) is for China to write off as much dollar debt as possible, but this will also come with a whole lot of complications and implications as it upsets the behemoth of a globalized dollar financial system.
The system is designed in such a way that whatever happens, America will be the last to go down, and as you have stated, it’s a real head scratcher to see how the rest of the world can get away from the dollarized economic system with minimal damage to themselves.
Putin recently made an interesting statement in the BRICS Summit that the BRICS currency will not come in the form similar the euro, but will instead be focused on clearing settlements between central banks (which was what Keynes had proposed contra to the Bretton Woods system). So, after 18 months, it seems that at least Russia (and I believe China too) have finally come to grasp the core of the problem with dedollarization. How they’re going to solve it though, is going to be one to look out for.
its weird because i have seen conjecture that the BRI is chinas way of divesting itself of dollars. would be very strange to try to get rid of all its dollars only to have them all end up right where they started, so i think there are several scenarios here:
loans stay dollarized, BRI countries are forced to get IMF/WB loans to repay china and china ends up with a bunch of dollars it knows it cant do anything with. nothing changes.
loans are turned into raw material IOUs ala pre-GLF era china vis a vis SU. china gets stuff and accusations of being social imperialist, BRI guys get basic infra and maybe a famine or three, america gets a lot of potentially privatizable stuff and an itchy coup finger.
china decides its getting into charity and writes off everything, makes up difference idk how, maybe printing rmbs. fucks itself over in an expensive and public fashion. BRI guys happy, americans mad but only a little bit, "hospitals, but at what cost???"
bancors from god. wildcard. no idea what happens.
also wonder about the timeline of the bigger picture. we've seen the US go from absolute hegemony to... whatever it is currently in the span of 20ish years. assuming BRI is 100% done right now wrt basic infra, how long would it take for labor quality to catch up and for china alternatives to really phasing in? how much does automation speed this process? and will the bodies of its european and asian vassals be able to sustain america until all this plays out?
Since China is not buying any more US treasuries (to mitigate the effects of US sanctions like what happened to Russia) which means they will always accumulate dollar surplus that they have to divest/invest somewhere else, so long as they continue to run a trade surplus with the US (export more to the US than importing from the US).
It’s also not so weird when you consider that many Chinese economists today are trained from the same Chicago school of economics. They have all been indoctrinated with the faulty idea that the government (that has monetary sovereignty) cannot spend more money than it earns, because excessive spending causes inflation. If this is how you see the world, then you would think that it is possible to cause damage to the American economy when the US financial system can no longer absorb the large quantity of demand for dollar. So they’re probably betting that the US cannot afford to “print” this much money.
This kind of brainworms is actually most pronounced within the US itself, as you have seen the Democrat’s “how are you going to pay for it?” to the GOP’s “we are borrowing from China, who is owning our economy” to the completely asinine debt ceiling debacle not so long ago. You can only hope that US politicians do not fully comprehend the real power of their monetary system, but it seems that finance capital is so extreme these days they don’t even care what the consequences are anymore (e.g. let the poor suffer as we bail ourselves out during financial crises!)
Make no mistake, BRI is a very beneficial initiative that will likely help develop many countries of the Global South. The contention is whether they will still be tied to the same debtor relationship with the US, and whether de-dollarization can actually work for them.
For a timeline of the bigger picture, Michael Hudson believes that it is impossible for US to keep sustain this form of hyperfinancialized economy, as the real sector investment gets eaten up by the non-productive capital of real estate and healthcare. If you have been reading his books, he believes that the US economy will go through a slow crash, much like the fall of the Roman Empire as it could no longer keep up with the growth of the periphery (China, BRICS+). However, this does not mean the US cannot use its instruments of monetary imperialism to deal a lot of damage to the rest of the world in the short-medium term.
Personally, I tend to agree but I also think that we are entering perhaps the most bizarre and terminal phase of capitalism, where the US goes fully financialized and simply use the power of finance to get real goods and services from the rest of the world. Is this even realistic? Well, if there’s one thing that’s the closest thing to magic in the real world, it’s money (debt). And money is indeed what the one thing the US has.