This year really is just gonna be us swinging from election to election, I suppose. I feel Lenin's beaming red eyes on me.
Up next on our electoral tour is Portugal. The current government - a coalition of the center-left Socialists and the center-right Social Democrats - has been mired in corruption scandals, resulting in a general election being called a mere two years after the last one. The fascist and vaguely populist Chega party has gained significant support over the last two years due to the economic hardships. Yesterday, the Social Democrats secured a narrow win of 79 seats compared to the Socialists' 77. Chega, in third place at 48, would appear to be the best candidate for a coalition, though the leader of the Social Democrats has said that they would refuse a coalition with them due to their xenophobic views. Regardless, the fascist surge is worrying, if expected.
Portugal's economy is going pretty badly even as European countries go, with little growth in productivity or investment over the last decade. The origins of this crisis date back to Portugal making the euro their national currency in the early 2000s, thus surrendering their ability to control their own currency, becoming reliant on investment from Germany and France, and suffering greatly in the 2012 European debt crisis. Unemployment and low wages spurred emigration; in 2013, the youth employment rate was about 40%; this has only come down to 25% recently and is increasing again. The government is heavily reliant on debt for public spending, with a debt-to-GDP ratio skyrocketing to over 100% in the two decades since the turn of the millennium. The capitalist sector is simply not profitable enough and hasn't been for 40 years, which is only a problem if you are a capitalist economy. For more on the Portuguese economy, check out Michael Roberts' recent analysis, from which I obtained a lot of this information.
Inside Portugal is the same story playing out across much of Europe. A failing center or center-left political party, unable to cope with the economic troubles of the last few years due to absolute obedience to neoliberal policies. A fascist party rising, but with no alternative economic plan, hoping that perhaps oppressing minorities and going after "wokeism" will make their God, The Economy, rain blessings down on them again.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Portugal! 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.
![](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/7fa847e2-f3f7-4660-bf0e-9410cfbcf86c.jpeg)
Sounds like China won't be bailing out real estate firms:
"Communism" is when the free market is allowed to flourish.![emoji peltier-laugh peltier-laugh](https://www.hexbear.net/pictrs/image/7f45d169-1810-4e53-ae51-6d9b385a1291.png)
Actual free market lmao
Why bail out the investors when you can simply take their assets at a significant discount?
Because the problem is what happens when all the investors’ financial assets are wiped out.
Post-2009 crash, the local government found themselves unable to finance themselves as the global consumption slump caused export revenues to fall. At the same time, the central government injected huge Keynesian-esque fiscal spending to prevent a recession, but with export demands down and domestic consumption not adequate to absorb such huge volume of spending, those money naturally went to real estate and infrastructure building. This mitigated the immediate troubles that came with the global financial crisis, and prevented a recession in China, but it also spawned new problems that they would eventually have to deal with, decades down the road. This was the first time property market emerged in China. Instead of investing into the real economy, much of the money went to the real estate virtual side of the economy.
Local governments in deep debt were unable to get new loans from the financial institutions, so to repay their debt they had to liquidate something. Since the real economy had slumped, the easiest way is to sell land to real estate developers, who build houses and various infrastructures that the investors could spend their money in. This created a complex and emergent relationship between local government, financial institutions and real estate developers whose fates are deeply entangled. Local governments get their GDP up quickly by selling land (instead of making long term investment in the real economy), which allowed banks to make a profit by handing out more loans, and which further promoted the cycle of investments from the private sector into the real estate because that’s the easiest way to make your asset values go up.
I have simplified a lot, but keep in mind also that the proliferation of shadow banks and the vast amount of non-real estate related corporations that have borrowed and invested into real estate, as well as households that have taken mortgage loans and have invested much of their personal wealth into the properties they bought.
Clearly, bailing out the real estate companies is just kicking the can down the road. The property bubble has to burst at some point.
But what happens when those trillions of RMB are getting wiped out? You have many non-real estate companies that will see that assets slashed in half, and that might just tip them into insolvency. What happens when thousands or tens of thousands of companies in China start going bankrupt?
The local government would immediately lose their cash revenue needed to finance their state functions, and there needs to be a completely restructured system in place to ensure that the local governments don’t fall into disarray.
The households who have spent a lot of their personal wealth buying houses will also see their assets plunge, and the anxiety might cause them to start saving and spend less, which in turn could trigger a spiraling recession as consumption goes down.
This is a complex crisis with no easy solution at hand, as far too many sectors not directly related to the real estate have got themselves involved in the investment schemes (some figure says up to 20% of China’s GDP). The central government has to walk a tightrope carefully balancing which and what sectors are going to be negatively affected as the property market fails, enact the appropriate policies to mitigate damages (which is inevitable), and even small missteps could easily snowball into huge crisis.
To be clear, China is not going to collapse, and the crash is likely not going to be as bad as the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis in the US, but it is undergoing a challenging and complex crisis that needs the government to be extremely diligent to ensure that the damages dealt can be minimized.
China a libertarian's dream??