junebug2 [she/her, comrade/them]

Most countries maintain a nominal split between fiscal and monetary policy (or however you want to describe it). Japan has the Bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance, the EU has the Europe Central Bank and dozens of finance ministries, the UK has the Bank of England and the Treasury, China has the People’s Bank of China and the Ministry of Finance, and the USA has the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. The people in charge of the finance departments are appointed with different goals and objectives then those in monetary ones. The fact remains that these are all political agencies subject to political will. Central bankers are supposed to be “above politics”, because in liberal theory economics and politics are separate.

Trump represents a split in government and economic priorities from within Washington, compared to the past. i would argue that he also represents a factional squabble over profits and contracts within the USAmerican bourgeoisie. Trump calling for the Federal Reserve to do what exactly he wants to support a tariff policy most liberals (read USAmerican liberals and conservatives) think is stupid had Powell dragging his feet and saying no. China owns over 800 billion dollars of USAmerican debt/ dollars. A different situation could see them cooperate.

To give an example, the Plaza Accords of 1985 are mostly known for the effect of kneecapping a rising Japan. The actual agreement was for Europe and Japan to lower the value of the dollar, because they felt it was too high. The agreement did fix the trade deficit the US had with Europe. The dollar had appreciated after Volcker of the Federal Reserve raised rates, which created currency depreciation that led other countries to the negotiating table. When the Empire is at stake, both hands can work together just fine. If the various finance theorists and decision makers decide that some policy is necessary for containing China and maintaining US financial hegemony, Powell will call an emergency meeting on the spot.

SMO is Special Military Operation, which is what the war is called by Russia. This is partially a reflection of Russian military law (peacetime units have all the stuff but not all the infantry, and the ability to mobilize roughly scales with the threat) and jokingly pushing back on the media always saying “full scale invasion”. In real life, i say “the Russian intervention in the Ukrainian Civil War” as often as i can.

Do the Nazis have a plan? Probably not a good one. That said, the negotiator in Istanbul was associated with the Zelensky government, and he was assassinated by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Could they actually get the President? Maybe not, but at this point the Nazi militias have been integrated into the security services, so they might have inside information.

Way back in 2022, the official case for war included demilitarizing and denazifying Ukraine. Prior to the war, Ukraine had the second largest armed forces in Europe (after Russia), with over 500,000 men in the field. NATO/ the West is light on infantry and heavy on planes, spies, and bombs. Ukraine is only an attractive partner to the West when they have a large army.

For a decade up to the war, ethnic tensions in Ukraine were rising with CIA backing, and it explicitly targeted Russian speakers. The reality on the ground is that two provinces, Luhansk and Donetsk, formerly of Ukraine, are mostly Russian speaking. The language was banned in school and then in public, and there was regular artillery shelling of civilian centers. The Azov and other militias built up their influence there, not during this war. It’s less about Russia having a plan for after the war, and more that the security threat of Ukraine comes from how influential violently anti-Russian neo-Nazis are within the state. Ukraine is only an attractive partner to the West when they are ideologically anti-Russian.

Russia has tried several Nazi militia members taken as prisoners of war. i think they intend to kill or imprison as many as they can get, purely because it’s a material threat to their state. If the Ukrainian military is defeated and neo-Nazi hierarchy remains, NATO will support Ukrainian veterans becoming a decades-long terror threat

These are good questions, and i’ll try to answer them as best i can as a certified SMO-watcher since spring ‘22. Russia is broadly prosecuting the war as gently as possible. War remains a horrific sacrifice of human life, but Russia has almost totally avoided striking major civilian infrastructure, let alone civilians. The only major incident i can think of is the TV broadcast station in Kiev. They constantly attack power switching stations, but not power plants. Ukraine has almost no functional transformers or switching stations, and many parts of the country have 16 hour rotating blackouts. Russia did not strike heat and electrical generation until this last winter. Now, why is this? Some people say it’s a combination of optics and the sense of fraternity between Russians and Ukrainians. More cynically, you could say they want to keep a state around to negotiate with and don’t want to further encourage the formation of Ukrainian ISIS.

Many NATO military theorists really only understand manuever and big arrows on a map. Attrition, that is the exchange of matériel until one side can’t continue, is seen as a failure or defeat state. Any NATO general caught in such a “trap” would try and force some kind of breakout to regain initiative. It would be disingenuous to say all Western military planners are incapable of understanding other ways of warfare, but the journalists and analysts definitely do not. The Western commentariat have created an alternate reality, where Russia promised to win the war in three weeks, but the map lines have actually barely moved because of NATO. In warfare between people of roughly equal or similar capacity, you cannot fight or breakout beyond small, well-planned actions of combined arms. Taking terrain would involve sacrificing personnel and equipment for almost nothing. There are individual tree lines and villages that have seen excess of ten thousand casualties in Eastern Ukraine. This chipping away strategy is a reflection of a lot of new technological developments in war, but the end result is a slow and grinding conflict.

This leads into your next questions, why would anyone want a slow and grinding war? The fact of the matter is that Mr. Zelensky is not freely governing his country, and there are significant Banderite neo-Nazi factions in Parliament, industry, and especially the military. The Azov Nazis and their ilk would assassinate Zelensky, and really any President, who tried to settle for peace. They nearly negotiated peace in Istanbul in ‘22, but Ukraine shot their own negotiator. For all that Russia is a reactionary shithole that hates queer people, they sincerely meant “de-nazification” as a major war aim. Until the people who actively want millions of Ukrainians to die in a bid for ethno-nationalist glory do not have money, guns, or influence, the war will continue. For better and mostly for worse, this means the war will continue for the foreseeable future. A decapitation strike like you’re imagining wouldn’t be aimed at Zelensky or many MPs, but at milita commanders and fascist propagandists. These people are embedded into society, and have moved themselves into the back lines or blocking positions to escape death at the frontline.

thank you comrade, i had thought those tarps by the shore might have covered ramps to the ship or something. now that you say it, i can see the prow is on the dock. definitely not a great place for a boat to be

the second image especially looks to me like the ship is lying on one side. what do you mean by split in two? is it the tarps at the right/ upper part of the images? i don’t want to disagree with your analysis, i just don’t see it

i said ONE billion, and i also said that relatively few deaths would be directly caused by disasters like wet-bulb events. As of AR6, the IPCC says that 3.3-3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change. They also say that given the projected global emissions for 2030, it is “likely that warming will exceed 1.5 degrees C during the 21st century”. This is because political factors force the IPCC to consider scenarios where the world cuts all emissions right now. In reality, 2023 saw a peak in demand for coal.

Even if we don’t hit any tipping points in the next ten years, and if we can predict ocean behavior and the weather, 2023 was 1.35 degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average. According to a report about climate change and insurance risk, more than 2 degrees of warming by 2050 is baked in by current policy, and that there is a roughly 90% chance of catastrophic warming between now and 2050. To be clear, they classify ‘catastrophic’ as 25% GDP loss and around 2 billion people dead. If global warming is limited to 2 degrees by 2050 then 800 million will die, and if it is limited to 1.5 with some overshoot 400 million will die.

There is a degree to which all reports are questionable, and unfortunately money for climate research, at least in USAmerica, is being cut right as our models start to diverge from baseline data. The actuaries who wrote the insurance paper aren’t more qualified than climate scientists. That said, it’s not like there’s any version of climate change extreme enough to make corporations and bourgeois governments change their spots. Is the AMOC going to turn off tomorrow? Are we going to see 8 degrees of a warming? i would say no. Everyone has to find their own signal to noise ratio with this sort of research, and i stand by my prediction.

It’s incredibly disheartening to say, but the fact of the matter is that no state of the world is permanent. Every moment of history has its massacre, and there are people with morality and clear eyes capable of calling it out. Vastly more will try and write their memoirs as tragically sympathetic but incapable. Still more will pretend it didn’t happen. Much like how communist parties were able to bring about the last famines of Russia and China, we hope to see the last of these massacres.

The rest of the world/ “West” doesn’t necessarily hate Palestinians specifically (though they clearly don’t view them as human). Rather, climate change means we will see one billion people dead by 2035 (i am not a scientist, but this is my prediction). Climate change will induce natural disasters and reductions in agricultural land. This will directly kill a relatively small number of people. Far more will become climate refugees, and many of them will flee towards the “West”.

The “West” wants Palestine to be the blueprint for concrete slum-hells, full of constant surveillance, starvation, and bombardment. They can then construct them along the southern edge of their area of influence to funnel climate refugees into. They also want a blueprint for unpersoning millions of people in the eyes of Joe Public. This will let them wash their hands of confronting any of the moral and practical crimes of unfettered capitalism and imperialism.

The “optimistic” take is that the above paragraph will objectively never come to pass. There is a point where people will snap back, and there is such a thing as too many people for high tech surveillance, and there is such a thing as too few concentration camp guards. Even if we have to watch as demons in human skin kill one billion of our comrades and siblings, the world will not end. There will be moments of joy and bird song and good food. There will also be roughly seven billion people left on Earth, and one billion people to avenge.

Our goal as socialists and communists, and i would say as humans, is to try and stop all that shit. If we can’t stop all of it, or even any of it, our goal is to prevent it happening again. Imperialism is self-defeating, capitalism will ultimately lead itself into crisis after crisis until it is destroyed, and there will need to be cockroach communists to try and provide mutual aid in the ashes. The fate of Cassandra was to have knowledge of future events while being unable to impact them. Cassandra did not have 150 years of theory and praxis from people trying to predict the future and change it.

Sorry if this is too long, but i agree with your outrage and i’ve been thinking about how to respond for a few days.

Hey, check out this Nature article from 2022 that says a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would effectively reverse the ocean temperature and global temperature effects of climate change without majorly impacting caloric availability for rich people in the West. The lower yield version minimally effects the West, and the higher yield version of India-Pakistan is only safe in Australia and New Zealand.

The flip side is that the Indian subcontinent is subject to incredible and unique pressure due to climate change, and India and Pakistan have despised each other for decades. Pakistan has a nuclear first-strike doctrine because they think it’s the only thing that can protect Lahore (11 million people, 10 kilometers from the Indian border). The USAmerican retreat from global affairs towards the Western Hemisphere and Pacific (alleged for decades, kinda happening now) will free up regional powers. It makes sense that the first place to see this go hot is a place that hasn’t been directly pushed down by USAmerica. It’s basically impossible to say if the agency is involved with this specific terrorist attack, but the recent coup in Bangladesh suggests they’re in the region

i do sometimes really agree with the idea behind “horses surrounded by oceans of drinkable water”. but the sheer number of kids i have seen turn from belligerent to enthusiastic about education because they were moved closer to the board or given glasses is unreal.

it’s worth noting that the median USAmerican reads at a 6th grade level. what that means is they can read a page of info, and then tell you what the words on the page mean and report back on the basic content of the page. abstract or critical thinking problems are beyond them. half of people are worse off. it is more accurate to say that most people in our pig country will need education, not re-education.

even for young people, from the 1990s to the early 2010s, most school districts required reading to be taught incorrectly. an unfortunately mistaken psychologist thought that guessing at words from the first letters and the picture should be taught instead of phonics. the above is essentially the strategy of certain “middle readers”, and the idea was that the “good” cohort would sort themselves out, and teaching a different strategy to the “bad” cohort would help them. what happened is that the “good” cohort does figure some things out, and the other two don’t learn how to read.

holding a kid back a grade was also basically banned by no child left behind, so you’d just advance fourteen year olds reading at a second grade level

have you thought about an oxygen mask or oxygen therapy? the cheapest kits i saw on amazon were ~$60. idk if it would fix everything you’re talking about, but some people use them when their lungs aren’t passing enough oxygen to their blood

i am personally Californian, so that probably makes the book more impactful, but i cannot shill for Malcolm Harris’ Palo Alto enough. It’s a very good history of how the capitalist forces and the people that embodied them shaped California while also taking workers into consideration. Available here

my gut feelings about USamerican domestic politics is that we are about to see a commensurate rise in state’s rights with all the federal bloodshed that’s happening. Some people might not call it that, but a lot of lawyers are going to make money talking about state and federal authority soon. Your South Carolina’s already don’t have expanded Medicaid, and now they have some sort of mandate to terrorize trans and Hispanic people. Your Oregon’s are going to be forced to lean more on regional alliances and might face budgetary issues. They might also terrorize trans and Hispanic people. Firefighting agreements and water compacts already “unite” most of what’s west of the Rockies. i am not familiar enough with things east of that. If domestic politics are scrambled, and Trump/ DOGE manage to gut the CIA and bureaucracy, then foreign policy is a crapshoot. USamericans truly do not think or care about other people in the world.

The Monroe Doctrine revival idea is tempting, because it’s very rational. Yeah, the USA has been forced to recalibrate and retreat following the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the strongman demagogue who’s back in office has always been obsessed with Latin America. To put a very crude finish on the topic, Texas and the South have a moral/ race war angle on Mexico and Central America. They will always be chomping at the bit to shoot up more water stations and put up more barbed wire. California and the West managed a complex rotation of accepting and deporting vulnerable populations for massive economic gain for well over a century. They will always try and send a donation or lobby a bill away from messing with the money. i do not think those competing forces will be resolved until there is revolution on Turtle Island.

The national and international capitalist both have no stake in invading Mexico or anywhere in Latin America. The current system is set up so that the first gets cheap labor in the USA, and the second gets it abroad. Historically, the CIA directly profits from the drug trade across Central America. i refuse to entertain the idea that Trump is somehow a delusional or irrational actor, he’s just petty and unfamiliar with the usual reasons and excuses of statecraft. For better or for worse, lots of people can tell that the current system needs to change. i think Trump ‘24 is Nixon’s second term as farce.

Nixon pivoting on the gold standard makes infinitely more sense in retrospect than it did in the moment. i won’t pretend to know what is cooking within the current USamerican administration, but the long hangover of quantitative easing after ‘08 and China’s assertion of its global position all vaguely echo the rise of Japanese manufacturing and the inflation crisis that Nixon had. When Nixon abandoned the gold standard, the average USamerican thought they were being saved from foreign price gougers.

The Fox News-tier story that’s been pushed around for the last few years is that Communist Triads (yes, seriously) are sending fentanyl one step away from being synthesized over seas, and the last step is done in Mexico or Canada. This dodges all customs, and furthers the nefarious plot to undermine our sacred and precious democracy. This explains a little why China, Mexico, and Canada are all part of the fentanyl thing in Trump’s mind. Warning for The New York Post, but it’s a good brainworm sample.

In reality, China has the largest chemical industry in the world, and makes most every precursor chemical used in USamerica. This includes chemicals used by pharmaceutical companies, and maybe savvy consumers, to make fentanyl and carfentanyl. Most precursors are some type of piperidone, and most of those are already List 1 chemicals. If you have the knowledge and equipment, you can synthesize fentanyl without using any of those precursors. You could also make your own piperidone the long way from black pepper. Is this a thing Trump will bring up and threaten about? Yes. There isn’t really a reality to the narrative though, so idk how China can fold towards the fantasy story.

i’ve been seeing it as a justification for massively expanding deportations. While imprisoning large numbers of people who lack formal protections would probably extend the lifespan of capitalism and the current settler system in the USA, there aren’t enough prison spaces for the citizen prisoners. There also isn’t enough bourgeois unity on the issue. A little over a decade ago, California was federally court ordered to shed prisoners because they had people triple bunked. Prison populations are only down like 30,000 since then, and i don’t believe we have built any new prisons. One of the many hellish propositions my neighbors agreed to last November was bringing back three strike laws for theft and drug offenses. i was able to successfully persuade “conservative” people that the prop was a bad idea because we would need to foot the bill for multiple new jails.

i understand that in many parts of USamerica there is a long history of using incarcerated slave labor for agriculture. In California, it’s not that i think any of the government officials are like, morally opposed to it, it just doesn’t make sense logistically. We are already going to be stuffing the jails full of shoplifters and narcotics possessors. What’s more, things like picking strawberries and pruning grapes are actually highly skilled tasks. Like, where i live grows a lot of strawberries, and they have tried to build robot pickers (not delicate enough to grab, too much dirt in the field) and training/ hiring US citizens who were veterans or unhoused or ex-felons (they were too slow/ couldn’t hack it). Now part of that is because pickers are overworked and underpaid, but you cannot pull someone off the street and then expect them to be able to fill ten flats an hour.

The only Ag Barons who would agree to have their disposable labor that can’t ask for help from local services because of language barriers and government indifference taken away in exchange for government supervised contractors with paperwork would have to be so racist they couldn’t understand profit. It’ll be a battle between the people who actually run farms or otherwise abuse migrant labor and people who delusionally think that the slur-named deportation operation from the 50s could be pulled off again tomorrow.

before 2030, there will be the territories incorporated into Russia, which might go over the Dniper in the south and won’t near Kiev, a western-backed rump state based in Lvov, and a depopulated zone in the central area. the western fringe of Maine (USamerican state, lots of trees) has no electricity and a population density of 1 person per 267 square miles (around 700 square kilometers). i think the Russian strikes at power infrastructure are trying to cause the same thing. de-electrifying (and by extension de-populating) the center of Ukraine will maintain the watershed for Crimea and Zaporozhia and have fairly obvious counter-insurgency benefits. the details probably hinge on whether there’s more money to be made from keeping the current debts denominated in hryvnia or from some kind of ECB wizardry. the IMF, Chevron, and Shell are already committed to a few billion dollars in debt, and i think that will be an eternal stone on the neck of the Lvov rump state

unlimited overpriced LLMs on the US military

12ft.io got around the paywall for me, if anyone wants to read the whole thing

i do try and proofread my comments a few times to make sure i’m not saying anything too sectarian or jargon-y, and i would be happy to answer questions about anything i say in comments or pms. my issue with shipwreck/ xiaohongshu and what i see as a habit of willfully missing the point so they can restate their thesis aside, i am happy to discuss anything

i don’t agree, and moreover you aren’t replying to my point in general or to the aspect that you quoted. i literally did not say what you claim i am saying. this is, i feel, a consistent issue of yours. the marshall plan is irrelevant when half the reason Nixon ended the gold standard was France buying up too much USamerican gold with Vietnam dollars. its doubly irrelevant when the only reason it worked was the direct damage of the second world war and the lack of “efficiency” in European markets prior to the war.

i do not, at any point claim that China is on track for hyper-financialization. in fact, i explicitly argue that China is taking advantage of the US already having done so. America did not decline during de-industrialization, it ascended. if the common (white, cis, straight) working joe hadn’t been screwed over completely by finance, the American project would have ended in the 70s. you are conflating together three different currency regimes of USamerica, none of which are analogous to China’s current situation.

i do not associate the issues you are talking about with bretton woods. Polanyi’s The Great Transformation laid out everything that was going to happen before it did, long before the Austrians got involved. the connection between dollars and trade deficits has nothing to do with Keynesianism, an ideology/ economics program that has never been relevant in the USA. fully most of what you lay out here is the exact argument of the re-dollarization people that you have spent hundreds of words and many days arguing is farcical dogshit. what am i supposed to think you are saying?

In the spirit of discussing the Chinese dollar bonds, i’d like to talk about “China’s Foreign Exchange Reserves: Past and Present Security Challenges” by Yu Yongding, published first in July 2022 (so 5 months after Russian forex got seized) and translated here. It concludes, amongst some other things, that “[China] should strive to avoid becoming a creditor as much as possible”.

The internationalization of the RMB is a good for security in the long term, but in the short term “even if China’s foreign exchange reserves consisted entirely of RMB assets, their security would not change.” Why? “Because the key to the problem does not lie in the currency that China’s foreign exchange reserves are denominated and settled in, but in whether China owes the United States money or vice versa.” If the US does not want to service the debt, then China is left in the lurch/ bag-holding even if the $1 trillion US dollars in China’s reserve magically turned into RMB. The security threat outlined in this article is China being stiffed to the tune of trillions, and the security solution outlined is to stop being owed anything. The author repeatedly notes how China’s current foreign exchange reserves generate negative investment returns, largely because they are over-leveraged. Most countries have much smaller reserves of dollars on hand. So Mr. Yu advocates for getting dollars out of the country in a way that generates positive investment income.

But why does China have so many US dollars? Shortly after China’s opening up, “the shortage of foreign exchange was the main bottleneck”. As such, the RMB was devalued sharply. In 2003, financial turmoil caused China to delay the appreciation of the RMB until 2005. As a result of the late appreciation, “China’s trade surplus increased sharply, and, on the other hand, the domestic asset bubble and the strong expectation of RMB appreciation led to a large inflow of ‘hot money’. China’s capital account surplus once exceeded the trade surplus and became the primary source of new foreign exchange reserves. It is fair to say that China’s failure to let the RMB appreciate in time and its lack of exchange rate flexibility were the conditions that led to the country’s excessive accumulation of foreign exchange reserves.”

Why can’t the RMB just replace the dollar? “In short, for the RMB to become an international reserve currency, China must fulfill a series of preconditions, including establishing a sound capital market (especially a deep and highly liquid treasury bond market), a flexible exchange rate regime, free cross-border capital flows, and long-term credit in the market. In short, China must overcome the so-called ‘original sin’ in international finance and be able to issue treasury bonds internationally in RMB. Otherwise, it will be difficult for the RMB to become an international reserve currency and RMB internationalization will remain incomplete.”

China will not do many of those things, because that would be giving up control of the economy to financial markets. But that’s the rub, isn’t it? China can’t establish itself as the world’s reserve currency, not least because its financial institutions are not ‘advanced’ enough. The USA is a decrepit shell that has spent 40 years hollowing itself out to be the best financial market possible. The current proposal seems to be using both of these facts to China’ advantage.

De-dollarization is a non-starter unless the US goes apeshit crazy with SWIFT sanctioning. SDRs are cool, but the World Bank and IMF are USAmerican puppets for shock therapy. A bancor would require a lot of diplomatic work that no one will want to do for a while. Too many debts already exist denominated in dollars. The proposal with re-dollarization is to take advantage of the facts that China has too many dollars and some nice manufactured goods and that most of the Global South has commodities or other inputs for manufacturing and too much dollar debt. The US wants to be the turbo-finance hub of the world. Now, many of us here would argue that’s a broader manifestation of USamerica standing in the role as the current hegemon in a capitalist world and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. At the ground level though, the finance people are blind dogs chasing blood, and they could not care less from where it flows. If the debts are getting paid, there shouldn’t be anything to complain about. And i personally doubt that the ‘Art of the Deal’ President is going to be some savvy financial genius. i think some guy once said something about capitalists selling the rope to hang themselves. As it is currently argued, China is setting up a win-win-win that slowly de-leverages their oversized dollar reserves and other countries’ debt.

Saudi Arabia may be mostly aligned with the West and the dollar, but that is a role they were forced into, not one they chose. The whole idea of the petrodollar comes from when OPEC tried to grab the “West” by the balls in the 70s and 80s, and then ended up with too much money to do anything with. Cash alone doesn’t do much in the desert. The US won that fight, because the Gulf States ended up recycling all of that money into US debt. Oil price spikes, a global recession, and soaring interest rates were the ingredients in the very first neoliberal shock. Interest rate and currency exchange rate manipulation led to IMF loans conditional on reforms, and the accompanying mass privatization and austerity. The US in 2024 has nowhere near the industrial or political capacity to pull off a second global financialization, mostly because there’s nowhere left in the world that hasn’t already been financialized. Even Russia and China represent financial markets outside the US’ control, not fully untapped markets. After 2008, quantitative easing, and the acceleration of money printing since 2020, domestic investors, banks, and the stock market depend on the federal interest rates in a way they really never have before. The snake is eating its own tail.

If anything, China’s attempts to do literally anything other than buying more US debt represents learning from the 80s. i do not see this as an obvious China L, though it may turn out to be.