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

If you have evidence of Israeli crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

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.


  • xiaohongshu2 [none/use name]@hexbear.netBanned
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    3 months ago

    Hello all, I apologize for my absence but my attention was required elsewhere due to academia. Within this timeframe I have been very busy and had not had much time to use this website as much as I would have liked to. Due to not using the website for long I close the tab on my computer by accident rendering me unable to get my password back due to forgetting my login details, mainly my password!

    I am back now so I hope I did not worry anyone too much whilst I was away. I will write a summary of events soon as things are getting really tense globally. It seems in my absence so much has occurred so bear with me!

    hexbear-chapochat

    • CascadeOfLight [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 months ago

      Once again, MMT is only a description of how money works, in the same way that hydrodynamics is a description of how water works. Hydrodynamics can tell you how to build a pump for a well, but not whether you would be violating someone’s water rights. MMT can tell you how to utilize money to organize social activity, including the most relevant thing to us, building industrial capital, but it doesn’t tell you whether bond markets or anyone else would allow you to.

      In fact, half of Hudson’s Killing the Host is about exactly how US institutions are completely beholden to finance capital, and would never allow the use of monetary policy to increase industrial production! Hudson uses the MMT framework to explain how the Federal Reserve prints staggering amounts of money to inflate the price of financial instruments (including stocks and bonds) for the benefit of financial capitalists, instead of printing money to inflate the prices of goods and labor which would lead to the formation of a productive economy.

      The whole point of MMT is that money is just an organizational tool, like writing or calendars - as a technology it was invented (in the ‘western’ world at least) in ancient Mesopotamia and has persisted through multiple system of political economy. But in every case, its basic features are the same: it exists only as an IOU issued by a government, which can later be used to pay taxes, and a government with currency sovereignty can issue money at will to order people subject to its taxation (or who, for whatever other reason, need to obtain money denominated in that currency, such as, for instance, repaying IMF loans or making international trades) to hand over goods or perform services for the government.

      Whereas this person is saying that the behavior of money depends on “the consensus of the monetary system’s stakeholders”, and the fact that the federal reserve didn’t take action to slow rising treasury yields (i.e. falling global demand for dollar holdings) is proof that you “can’t consolidate the central bank and treasury”. They seem to go on a lot about “constitutional consensus” as a reason MMT doesn’t work, as if the behavior of money in general through all of history is dependent on the specific provisions of a specific state’s constitution. They say “it is a constant theme of their literature that the foreign sector can be treated as a non entity that does impose constraints on policy space” when that is literally the opposite of true, and Super Imperialism is primarily about how US interference in other countries’ monetary policy prevents them from being able to use their currency sovereignty to develop their own economies.

      It’s true that by the logic of MMT, a country with all of the resources it needs within its own borders (== within the boundaries of its monopoly on violence == within the region it can enact taxes on) can print however much money it needs to mobilize fallow resources (or until 100% employment is reached) while ignoring the effects on its currency’s exchange rate, precisely because it doesn’t need to obtain resources through trade - exactly as was seen in the USSR under Stalin and, as a shadow of that, Russia after 2022. The sanctions applied to Russia “should” have collapsed it, because most other countries in the world would have collapsed under this sanctions regime, but unlike those countries Russia is capable of producing all its own food, fuel and raw materials. Indeed, freezing a bunch of the oligarch’s money and preventing capital flight from Russia meant rubles had to be invested in productive industries, on top of the state increasing spending on war production, which combined to give a massive boost to Russia’s productive economy! However, the Russian central bank did everything in its power to prevent and undo this, because it’s controlled by neoliberals, so printing money to develop the economy “doesn’t work” because at every turn, neoliberals will sabotage it!

      To go poking around their other tweets, here they complain about insider trading:

      They say “sure would be cool if we had an agency in the government in charge of investigating insider trading”, but using their logic the fact that insider trading wasn’t investigated proves that it can’t be - and in our currently existing political economy, they would be right! Investigating insider trading is specifically against the financial interests of the groups that hold political power over this economy, so it is impossible to investigate insider trading in the same way it’s impossible to implement the recommendations of MMT for building a productive economy. But that doesn’t mean that ‘investigating insider trading’ as an activity can never occur, the same way it doesn’t mean that MMT is incorrect.

      They also have a tweet that seems to be implying an MMT researcher is racist because they refer to "yellow dollars" in the context of Chinese dollar holdings...

      …rather than understanding that “green dollars” - the kind of money you keep in your pocket in real life - and “yellow dollars” - US treasury bills - are called that because of the color of the paper they’re printed on?? That seems like a pretty important feature of the dollar economy to be completely unaware of!

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    I wont post a source as it’s just a telegram post but I’m wondering if anyone has seen anything concrete about the news of US warships moving towards Panama to ““free”” the canal? Hesgeth was talking big talk about “stopping Chinese influence”

  • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Bessent is a true believer who loves kool-aid

    Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is likewise ignorant:

    I advised Scott Bessent, now Trump’s Secretary of the Treasury who is leading the tariff war, in 2013 when he was still with Soros. An investment bank engaged me to advise Bessent on China’s economy and consumer trends and go over my book The End of Cheap China.

    I took an instant disliking - Bessent was one of the most arrogant and ignorant on China people I had ever met. He was uber bearish on China and was largely ideologically driven in his analysis. Communist countries couldn’t succeed was basically the jist of his views.

    Data and rational analysis did not reign supreme. … He thinks America has the upper hand with China right now. I worry for America. We have one of the most ignorant on China yet arrogant people I’ve ever met running a trade war against China.

    from https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/04/fall-out-from-the-tariff-wars.html

  • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Lula da Silva Advocates for Latin American Unity at the IX CELAC Summit - Telesur English

    Article

    Brazil’s President Lula da Silva calls for Latin American unity at CELAC Summit, prioritizing democracy, climate action, and economic integration amid global instability.

    During his address at the IX Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva issued an urgent call for unity among Latin American and Caribbean nations. Against a backdrop of global economic destabilization and the resurgence of old hegemonies, Lula warned of the threats facing the region and the need for collective action.

    The Brazilian leader stressed that Latin America is navigating one of the most critical periods in its history. In his speech, he emphasized that attempts to restore outdated spheres of influence threaten national autonomy and urged countries to set aside differences to tackle shared challenges. “If we remain divided, we risk becoming mere zones of influence in a new global division among superpowers,” he asserted.

    Lula outlined a three-pillar action plan focused on defending democracy, combating climate change, and advancing economic integration. First, he underscored the importance of safeguarding democratic systems in the region, cautioning against eroding political trust and the rise of authoritarian agendas. “Our nations’ security depends on eradicating hunger and ensuring opportunities for all,” he declared.

    Second, he addressed the urgent need for collective climate action, noting that Latin America and the Caribbean are disproportionately vulnerable to its impacts. “We must act together to mitigate this threat,” he urged.

    Finally, Lula highlighted the necessity of strengthening economic and trade integration among member states, arguing that a unified regional economy is vital to counter unilateral measures like the tariffs imposed by the U.S. under Donald Trump. “Trade wars have no winners,” he concluded.

    Lula’s appeal comes at a pivotal moment for the region, where geopolitical and economic tensions demand coordinated, solidarity-driven responses. The summit marks a crucial platform to redefine Latin America and the Caribbean’s role in the emerging global order.

  • companero [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Google has blurred the Starykostyantyniv Air Base in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine. This airfield was attacked by Kalibr cruise missiles in the recent missile attack and has been a prime target for other missile attacks and drones. It is also believed to house F-16s.

    https://t.me/AMK_Mapping/9124

    “Blurred” makes it sound somewhat innocent, but if you look at it on Google Maps, it’s clearly a thorough censorship job with deliberately chosen areas to “blur” (probably cut out, replaced with old imagery, and blurred).

  • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    Leaked Data Reveals Massive Israeli [sic] Campaign to Remove Pro-Palestine Posts on Facebook and Instagram | Drop Site News

    A sweeping crackdown on posts on Instagram and Facebook that are critical of Israel [sic]—or even vaguely supportive of Palestinians—was directly orchestrated by the government of Israel [sic], according to internal Meta data obtained by Drop Site News. The data show that Meta has complied with 94% of takedown requests issued by Israel [sic] since October 7, 2023. Israel [sic] is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far, and Meta has followed suit—widening the net of posts it automatically removes, and creating what can be called the largest mass censorship operation in modern history.

  • MarmiteLover123 [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    Seems as if I spoke too soon. US airstrikes do continue on Yemen for the 27th night in a row, targeting the capital, Sana’a. The Yemeni people will not even get to have one night of peace. We truly live in a rotten world sometimes.

    Lots more airstrikes on Sana’a, including targeting the Nuqum mountain again.

    Farmland in Sana’a Governorate targeted.

    Reports from other sources of huge explosions in Saada Governorate.

    Al Masirah TV twitter

    Xcancel mirror

  • Boise_Idaho [null/void, any]@hexbear.net
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    2 months ago

    https://xcancel.com/comradesipho/status/1910956026674778410

    While many Chinese businesses are reeling from the trade war, Qi, the Maga merchandise maker, brushed off any suggestion his might suffer.

    Trump supporters, he said, were willing to pay any price for items bearing the image of their beloved president - and US suppliers were making such a huge profit on them that they could afford to partially absorb the tariff impact.

  • mkultrawide [any]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    He’s close to some important people but he also seems to be all talk sometimes.

    I wonder if this is related to whatever gains have been made by the US against Ansarallah’s air defense systems that @[email protected] mentioned. Is KSA allowing the USN to resupply in Jeddah? I was under the impression that the Saudis had been keeping out of this. Maybe this is someone in the Resistance finally designing that the ZCC doesn’t get to let the US operate from their territory without a cost (finally).