junebug2

joined 3 years ago
[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 31 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 50 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 33 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 9 points 6 months ago

in my part of fire country, we’ve had four big wildfires in the last decade and one of them was actually caused by “arson”. the fire department is always trying to figure out how the fire started, and if some human caused the fire they call it arson. it’s pretty much the second thing you said. if you started a camp fire in the woods out here right now you’d be fined if caught. there are big signs every where in natural areas that say whether fire is allowed or not, and it’s usually not. there are also mandates for trimming trees and clearing brush before traditional fire season starts. burning trash or starting a campfire in the woods at this point about be a malicious or negligent act, and that makes it legally arson.

the way the brush fires work in our neck of the woods is that mountains and canyons that run east to west create a natural bellows when wind comes off the great basin. any fire that starts rapidly spirals out of control, and high winds can send embers and chunks of debris dozens of miles to start new fires. fires don’t just randomly burst into existence naturally though. part of my high school burned down cause of a guy flicking cigarette butts into dry grass. one of them was the power company, another was sunlight hitting broken glass in a field, and the most recent one was a transformer on some private street exploding. idk how the fire people figure this out once it’s all a burn scar, but arson is a real thing that causes wildfires.

you’re totally right that the coverage of it as arson is super sensationalizing and kinda weird, especially because calfire won’t announce a cause for a few more days or weeks. the news in LA fucking loves to talk about crime and make fun of people. in my memory, people who started campfires or had some of their property start a wildfire are usually cast as homeless/ drug addicts/ otherwise disposable. if it’s obfuscating blame, i’d say it’s not the news covering for climate change, it’s them covering for the state’s ineptitude. crime and person of interest stories are like jingling keys in front of many of my neighbors, so we aren’t asking about evacution plans, future proofing, water management, or zoning laws.

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 10 points 6 months ago

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

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 42 points 7 months ago (1 children)

qin-shi-huangdi-fireball unlimited overpriced LLMs on the US military

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

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 5 points 7 months ago

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

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 9 points 7 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 49 points 7 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 35 points 7 months ago (6 children)

then google it. mr. klein has been publicly feuding with hasan for months. people here are broadly familiar with that. you pushing the glasses up on your nose and saying, “um, actually, if events aren’t mentioned in the article from fox news, then they didn’t happen,” is asinine. no investigation, no right to speak

[–] junebug2@hexbear.net 50 points 7 months ago (5 children)

countries on the persian gulf exported around 18 million barrels of oil per day in 2022 (according to wikipedia). now, ~1.8 million of those were from Oman, who’s kinda on the outside, and Iran themselves. i think there’s an argument for this collapsing the global economy specially because of knock-on effects with China’s oil imports almost entirely coming through the Gulf, but i think there’s an earlier problem.

crude oil has ‘flavors’, namely light or heavy (referring to the length of hydrocarbon chains) and sour or sweet (referring to the relative amount of sulfur). the upshot of that is that oil refineries are built to take in specific flavors of oil. part of the reason Chevron is so mad about Venezuela is that, for fairly obvious geographical reasons, Venezuelan oil fits the refineries for the USA pretty well. shorter carbon chains have higher boiling points (more butane and less boat oil) and sweet oil does not need to have the sulfur removed from it. for instance, Saudi Arabia’s most common crude oil export is called ‘Arab Light’, which is a medium and sour crude oil. if Iran strikes at oil rigs, refineries, and distribution centers, there is no guarantee that other, unaffected infrastructure can actually do the same job. refineries built for sweet crude can not refine Arab Light. there could be barrels and barrels of oil sitting on boats and in pipelines, unable to be refined.

all of that is to say, depending on how and where Iran strikes oil infrastructure, the issue could very quickly become whether or not certain petroleum products are available at all, not just if the price is spiking. the price would also spike. there would be rationing and restrictions on international trade, most likely. in the areas most affected (hard to predict without knowing details), there would be pressure to declare ‘move it or lose it’ wars, with ‘it’ being all the fuel you currently have in stockpile. desperation and material interest can erase all alliances. the flip side of what could be several regional wars is that people are aware that those wars could happen. Saudi Arabia recently denounced genocide in Palestine (too little too late), and had meetings with the Iranian military. it’s certainly not a coincidence that Saudi Arabia didn’t start changing its tune until after True Promise II. Iran discussing strikes on oil infrastructure is as much a diplomatic tool as actually striking the infrastructure

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