Image is allegedly of the note Trump wrote while editing a speech while on the way back from the G20 summit.
The top Russian-Chinese agent, Donald Trump, has decided that the pace of dedollarization and the decline of American financial hegemony is going too slowly. He has therefore decided to put tariffs on everybody; from America's largest trading partners to uninhabited islands. In the process, he is trying to create an autarkic America. Jokes aside, interpretation and analysis of this has ranged across a wide spectrum. I think we can broadly agree that the most idiotic are the "true believers"; those that actually believe Trump's every word, and that this will somehow bring back American manufacturing and whatever other inane promises he has made.
However, there is a much more interesting debate. The first camp are those who believe Trump is acting as an inadvertent accelerationist due to his lack of understanding about how the world economy and dollar hegemony functions (and that this will subsequently ensure that countries flock to China instead). The second camp are those who believe that Trump does know what he's doing, at least to a certain extent, and that the effective result of this period of madness will be countries kowtowing to the United States; renegotiating trade deals to be even more in favor of the US in order to get tariffs reduced. There's even a yet more cynical camp who believes that in fact, this entire trade war is just theater for further national wealth redistributions from poor to rich; that all these monumental international trade wars are more of a sideshow. To quote the linked article: "[...] out of the mountain of tariffs that threaten to turn into a global trade war will emerge the mouse of further tax cuts."
I'm not embarrassed to admit that I have absolutely no idea which one of these is the closest model to reality. We're in new economic and political ground, and even if the tariffs are quickly renegotiated and/or dropped, the impacts will continue to reverberate around the world for years. I'm sure we'll debate this for months to come here, though!
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
This will be my last post in the foreseeable time since I'll delete the account after I've posted this so I better make it count. Partly because things suck and partly because I decided to do more praxis instead of stewing online.
There's no reason to beat the dead horse that's tariffs and Trump so just a quick update, they had numbers and the numbers were really good like low inflation much lower than anticipated while Fed says 3% inflation for the year and that they don't see the need to do anything about it, meanwhile Bonds keep going up as people flee the US Dollar into gold, yen and swiss franc and other currencies like I said. US 10YR Bonds are going even higher as stock markets crap themselves as capital is fleeing the USA because shits fucked.
So I'll focus on my original hatred the germans. There's a new poll AfD is now highest polling but honestly who cares at this point, elections are still far away and there's honestly not much of a difference between CDU and AfD, it's like Pepsi and Coke, could be that they got boosted by all this fear and uncertainty could be a bigger incoming trend it's too early to tell but then again CDU is determined to go all in on what the AfD wants.
Anyways coalition time this is the new cabinet
Economy: CDU They just put a pretty incompetent guy in here who's micro fixation is getting rid of the VAT
Finance: SPD
Interior: Alexander Dobrindt CSU This guy is a massive piece of shit, racist, fascist you name it and a huge Zionist and someone that is in the pocket of car lobbies that talked about there being a 'Anti-Deportation-Industry' in germany, calling climate activists like Last Generation and XR, climate RAF something which considering he is bavarian and how criminal the police and state is there in its repression is really fucking bad.
Labour: SPD
Defence: SPD <- Guy under Scholz who is quite popular keeps his position
Infrastructure: CDU
Health: CDU
Ecology: CDU
Foreign: CDU
Family: CDU
Digital: CDU
Justice: SPD
Education: CSU <- Again these are like absolute freaks
Agricultural: CSU
Foreign Aid/Development: SPD
What did interest me about their new coalition, what they have in their 'Koalitionsvertrag', their coalition contract. So what they are going to focus on, it's a 146 page document that I've read. Well mostly the first couple of pages about how germany is under attack I skimmed because I don't care for the lamentations of the germans how things are totally unfair.
Economy
There is a ton of stuff here and most of it is really vague but the things they do mention over and over again are words like 'pragmatism, flexibility and de-regulation'. In short companies should be much less regulated and free to do whatever with a specific point being german car manufacturers who don't have to worry too much about CO2 emissions from their cars. They offset this by going 'Now you can get subsidies for EV vehicles going up to 100k' so germans will buy the newest electric Porsche or whatever.
One small thing they want to accomplish is bring down energy cost by 5 cent per kWh so that combined with less regulations might mean that they will ease sanctions on Russia to get that gas back and get cheap energy again.
Green Policies
This of course means when it comes to green policies they do a big talk about how they are comitted to goals and things, but they do not mention actual policies and my take on this is that they'll do fuck all regarding emissions and we might even see more rollbacks on those pesky laws that make polluting harmful because the overall message to me is 'All Hail the Economy' and they'll sacrifice the environment at its altar. Climate protections will get optimised aka they will get removed
National Security
Yeah guess what massive more surveillance and shit because of other countries waging 'hybrid warfare against the german state'. Now I know what you are thinking bombing Nordstream but no Germany has been in a sort of mania about Russia secretly bombing germany so that plus the 'antisemitism' will get used for a massive expansion of the surveillance state designating and deporting people for political activism which we already saw with Pro-Palestine EU-Citizens getting deported without any courts. And considering that there's even conspiracy theories that green activists are actually working for Putin there will be a massive political repression.
Social Policy
They'll reform the Bürgergeld aka former Hartz IV aka benefits will get slashed again. Oh also consumer protection is also gone.
Asylum Policy
I don't know what to tell you shit's fucked it'll be extremely fucked and will go against EU rights and law, International rights and laws, it'll be fucking bad.
This is mostly it there's other stuff but most is really vague and they've got some of the best german word people out there to write up gems like
Which I mean words have no meaning.
One thing that is notably absent is anything concerning combatting the rise of right-wing extremism, fascism, nazism. AfD is quite clearly a nazi party and they are permitted because well Germany is a nazi country but I think it should be repeated again that in this coalition that ran on 'we are going to stop the AfD'. They didn't put a single thing against the AfD.
Cheers notceps