Bulletins and News Discussion from March 3rd to March 9th, 2025 - Austerity And Its Consequences - COTW: Greece

Only time Dems clapped was when Trump was talking (negatively) about sending weapons to Ukraine

The Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum is a forum founded by Ukrainian restaurant business owner Oleg Magaletsky, exiled Russian separatists, as well as foreign sympathizers, which advocates for the disintegration of Russia. It was registered in Poland. On 17 March 2023, the forum was designated an "undesirable organization" in Russia.

The forum participants set as their goal the separation of the Russian Federation into independent constituent states. At the second forum, the topics for discussion included the deimperialization, decolonization, de-Putinization, denazification, demilitarization, and denuclearization of Russia. The forum participants also appealed to the national and regional elites of United Nations member countries, urging them to begin creating national provisional governments-in-exile.

According to French historian and sociologist Marlene Laruelle, the calls of the forum participants for the "liberation of enslaved peoples" refer to the slogan "prison of peoples" from the times of the Russian Empire and to the CIA-sponsored Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations during the Cold War. On 25 July 2022, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, ridiculed the Free Nations of Russia Forum held in Prague. He thanked the "pseudo-liberals" for confirming the words of the Russian leadership about attempts to disintegrate the country.

WTF is this? Micronations LARPing but with CIA backing?

Elon Musk calls Poland's foreign minister a “little man” and tells him to be quiet after Radoslaw Skorski claims that the Polish government pays for the use of Starlink in Ukraine and that it may be necessary to look for another alternative.

Elon Musk says it “makes no sense” for the United States to be part of NATO to “pay for Europe's security”. The Wall Street Journal says that many European leaders regret making their security dependent on the US.

• Telegram

Pope Pancho lives another day

What's going on with the Greek left these days? Haven't really heard shit since Syriza was in power.

Hilarious beyond belief, the new prime minister of Canada saying they "must protect our way of life, and our country" against the threat of American trade war and the threat of invasion

https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/mar/04/europe-live-news-us-military-aid-ukraine-peace-talks-russia

Oh he is a sad dog, didn't last a day.

Well it seems that the Russian gas tunnel operation in Kursk has worked, they're now geolocated on the edges of Sudzha in the old McDonald's area lmao.

Here's how the Kursk bulge looked around 36 hours ago:

Here's how it looks now:

It's wild watching polls turn against Ukraine exactly as we all knew was going to happen from the start. Just have make sure a bunch of people die first before we can start talking peace.

Western press calling those protesting HTS "Assad loyalists".

HTS are killing Alawite civilains.

Trump electronically repo'd HIMARS

China announces plans for major renewable projects to tackle climate change

BEIJING, March 5 (Reuters) - China said on Wednesday it would develop a package of major projects to tackle climate change as it moves to bring its carbon dioxide emissions to a peak before 2030 and become carbon neutral by 2060.

The world's largest producer of climate-warming greenhouse gas said it would develop new offshore wind farms and accelerate the construction of "new energy bases" across its vast desert areas, the National Development and Reform Commission, the country's economic planner, said in an official report published on Wednesday.

"China will actively and prudently work towards peaking carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality," the report read.

Among the proposed projects cited in the report by the state planning agency was a controversial hydropower facility on the Yarlung Tsangpo river in Tibet, which has raised concerns in India about its potential impact on downstream water flows.

It also said it would develop a direct power transmission route connecting Tibet with Hong Kong, Macao and Guangdong in the southeast.

However, coal will remain a key fuel, with the NDRC report saying the country will continue to increase coal production and supply this year even as it plans for trials of low-carbon technology at its coal-fired power plants and to promote initiatives aimed at substituting fossil fuels with renewables.

China has been struggling to strike a balance between fostering economic growth and meeting its environmental goals.

The NDRC said the 3.4% reduction in the amount of carbon emissions per unit of economic growth last year "fell short of expectations", blaming rapid growth in energy consumption as well as extreme weather.

China is not expected to meet its five-year goal to bring carbon intensity down by 18% by the end of this year, and it has not yet announced an annual target for 2025.

It will also struggle to meet a separate target to cut the amount of energy consumed per unit of growth by 13.5% by the end of this year, despite exceeding expectations with a 3.8% reduction last year, analysts said.

"Despite the world record expansion of renewables, an inconvenient truth is that China's economy hasn't become much more energy efficient in recent years," said Yao Zhe, global policy advisor with Greenpeace in Beijing.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-joint-address-chips-act-horrible-bill-2025-3 Trump trying to get rid of CHIPS act. How you run on bringing manufacturing etc and tariffing other countries on their tech.... But go on a grudge tour with this act

Is there any historical parallel to something as large and complex as the United States trying to run on its own momentum while all the essential bureaucrats and government funding are being purged on a whim? Because that's the position we were in even before Trump decided to blow up the economy.

....is the JDPON Don meme real?

Germany’s ‘Whatever It Takes’ Moment Powers European Markets

• Merz announces historic plan to fund defense, infrastructure
• Stocks rally, bonds slump as investors assess spending shift

Germany’s extraordinary spending plans are shaking up the region’s markets, powering European equities past US peers this year and reviving the euro from the brink of parity with the dollar.

Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz said Germany would do “whatever it takes” — a catchphrase made famous by former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi — to defend the country and amend the constitution to exempt defense and security from limits on fiscal spending.

The move drove up Germany’s benchmark DAX stock index by as much as 3.8% and the prospect of more borrowing sent the country’s bond yields tumbling, both seeing the biggest moves since 2022. The pan-European Stoxx 600 climbed 1.8% to near a record set earlier this week, while traders bet on hefty gains for the euro.

“Big, bold, unexpected — a game changer for the outlook,” said Evelyn Herrmann, Europe economist at Bank of America Corp., adding that it represented a “paradigm shift.”

Making Europe Great

The historic plan, unlocking hundreds of billions of euros for transportation, energy and housing, is a dramatic shift that upends Germany’s controls on government borrowing. It invokes memories of Draghi’s 2012 speech to save the euro, which became a shorthand for policy determination.

Deutsche Bank AG strategist Maximilian Uleer — a long-standing bullish voice on European stocks — said the region was facing its own “Make Europe Great Again” moment — a play on US President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan for America.

Uleer reiterated his overweight stance on European stocks overall, calling the German proposal “above even our positive expectations.”

Stocks geared toward the German economy jumped, with the country’s mid-cap MDAX Index surging as much as 6.9% — the most since March 2020. That was led by construction firms such as Bilfinger SE and Hochtief AG, up 24% and 18% respectively. Defense companies like Rheinmetall AG added to a stellar rally this year, while heavyweights Deutsche Bank and Siemens AG were both up over 8%.

“There’s a very strong dynamic in Germany,” said Frederic Surry, deputy head of equities at BNP Paribas Asset Management, who has reduced his overweight on the US in favor of Europe. “We’re looking at a broadening, notably on midcaps.”

Winning Stocks

European stocks have been among the best performers in the world this year, as investors bet on stimulus and a potential cease-fire in Ukraine. Cheaper valuations have also proved attractive at a time when funds are exiting pricey US equities, overshadowing concerns around a global trade war for now.

The benchmark Stoxx 600 is on course to outperform the S&P 500 by the most in a decade on a quarterly basis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Nine of the top 10 best performing stocks this year in the MSCI World Index — the benchmark for the developed world — are now European, data compiled by Bloomberg show. They include defense companies Rheinmetall, Thales SA, Leonardo SpA and Saab AB.

Euro Recovery

The euro climbed nearly 1% to its strongest level since November at over $1.07. Just a month ago, the common currency was a whisker away from parity with the dollar, trading almost at $1.02. This shifting dynamic could potentially reverse a multi-year US dollar rally, according to Julian Weiss, head of global Group-of-10 vanilla FX options trading at Bank of America.

Banks including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. have been abandoning predictions that the euro will slide to be worth the same as one greenback. Instead, some hedge funds are now buying options wagering the euro will climb another 12% to $1.20 in six to nine months, according to traders familiar with the transactions. “This is Merz’s ‘Draghi moment’,” said Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB. “The strong recovery in the euro suggests that Europe’s star is rising.”

Europe about to abandon its neoliberal fiscal “balance the budget” rule to invest heavily in military and infrastructure.

Is this the turning point for the European economy?

Meanwhile, Trump appears to have bought into the charlatans who told him that “dollar must weaken” in order to re-industrialize, which will prove fatal if it keeps going. I give it a few months before the US realizes the huge mistake it is in and will likely attempt to pivot by then.

The work report of the government from Third Session of the 14th National People's Congress is out on March 5th, summarized below:

Looking back at 2024

• 5% GDP growth
• Food production reached 1.4 trillion pound for the first time
• New employment in the urban area: 12.56 million
• Alternative energy vehicle production breached 13 million annually

Target for 2025

• GDP growth at ~5%
• New employment in the urban area: >12 million jobs
• CPI to reach 2%
• Food production at ~1.4 trillion pound
• Energy consumption per unit GDP to fall ~3%

Important work for 2025

• Budget: deficit spending to reach ~4% (from 3%, or +1.6T yuan from previous year)
• Government investment: to arrange new local government bonds at 4.4T yuan (+500B yuan), combined government debt to reach 11.86T yuan (+2.9T yuan)
• Special debt: to issue special extra long term government bonds at 1.3T yuan (+300B yuan), and new special government bond at 500B yuan
• Consumption: to implement targeted policies to raise consumption, to arrange extra long term bond at 300B yuan to support consumption (subsidies to trade in older goods with new goods)
• Nascent industries: to further propel the development of nascent industries e.g. commercial airliners, low attitude airspace economy. To cultivate biotech production, quantum technology, embodied AI, 6G and other nascent industries. To accelerate the digital transformation of manufacturing sector. To develop AI networked EV, AI-powered phones and computers, AI-powered robots etc.
• Education: to increase the number of higher and middle education degrees, to gradually implement free pre-school education
• Market environment: to implement long term mechanisms to resolve problems with outstanding payments by corporations/companies, to increase law enforcement actions against corporate crimes
• Opening up: to push for the orderly opening up of internet and cultural spaces, to further the opening up of telecommunications, healthcare, education and various sectors
• Housing: to continue implement strong policies to slow the plunging real estate prices and stabilize the market. implement the redevelopment of provincial towns and aging residential housing units. to encourage purchase of stock houses (oversupplied units). to continue the good work on settlement/closing for housing purchases.
• Rural development: to revitalize the rural industries, to activate the central government coordinated inter-provincial food production compensatory policy, to increase support for food producing provinces, to expand on channels to improve farmers’ income.
• Urbanization: to push for guaranteed housing system for qualified citizens who are turning from farmers into urban workers. to continue the revitalization of urban and redevelopment of old neighborhoods in cities.
• Ecology: mechanisms to encourage healthy and green consumption, to encourage new green, low carbon production and lifestyles
• Employment: to enlarge the employment opportunities for high school graduates, to strengthen the welfare guarantee for gig workers and new hires. to improve benefits for tech talents.
• Healthcare: to optimize the drug procurement policy and strengthen the regulation and evaluation of drug quality (note: this was a huge scandal in China last year when many hospitals procured fake drugs to lower costs), to increase the per capita subsidies of citizens health insurance and basic public healthcare service by 30 yuan and 5 yuan, respectively
• Social welfare: to raise the minimum amount of urban citizen pension by 20 yuan, to formulate policies to encourage birth, to provide childcare subsidies

Overall, not that different from last year’s budget, with the exception on the new emphasis on AI. The budget deficit is still on the conservative side, breaking from the usual 3% to 4% this year. It may or may not be enough to boost the slumping consumption, but time will tell. Other than that, nothing indicates fundamental change from the usual policies.

Bloomberg: China Sets GDP Target at About 5% Despite US Tariffs

So what was trump’s “big announcement”

libs on resetera dot com, the world's most lib website, are now regularly saying things like, "China is the more reasonable global power", "at least China reigns in its oligarchs", "China is going to push BRICS to dedollarize and the rest of the world will move on when the US collapses"

material reality is simply too powerful, folks

(then they go on to say "Russia has spent decades destroying america from within" so who knows)

Russian Wage Growth Hits 16-Year Peak Amid Race to Find Workers

Russia’s real wages in 2024 increased the most in 16 years as the country grapples with a lack of workers and even seeks to import them from so-called friendly countries, including Myanmar.

Annual growth in real wages reached 9.1% last year, the highest since 2008, according to Federal Statistics Service data published late Wednesday. This contrasts with the 2.7% globally estimated by the International Labour Organization.

The salary spike reflects a still-acute labor shortage as the army and industries servicing military needs draw scarce workers away from other sectors of the economy, forcing companies to compete with salaries and benefits. Unemployment stood at a historic low of 2.3% at the end of last year, though edged up to 2.4% in January, the statistics service data show.

The workforce shortfall has fueled inflation and limited economic growth potential, spurring Russia to seek new sources of labor to plug the gap in its market. Measures have included attracting teenagers and pensioners to using prisoners and inviting foreigners from countries that maintain good ties with Russia.

In the current economic conditions, “it’s necessary to look at completely new countries” to attract labor migrants to Russia, Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov said in the State Duma on Monday, as Moscow prepared to host a government delegation from Myanmar. Russia is discussing bringing in workers with the country’s leadership, Reshetnikov said, according to the state-run Tass news service.

Thousands of North Korean laborers were sent to work at construction sites across Russia last year amid workforce shortages due to the Kremlin’s war with Ukraine, South Korea’s Yonhap News reported, citing the nation’s spy agency.

Running out of people to work in the economy.

Macron apparently given some unhinged bellicose speech

Truly funny how you can see continuity of trump saying europe should spend on military, biden causing a war, and euros now think it’s their own idea to spend more on military, just breathtaking

Investors dare to imagine a world beyond the dollar

Investors are starting to imagine a financial system without the US at its centre, handing Europe an opportunity that it simply must not miss.

This exercise in thinking the unthinkable comes despite a cacophony of noise in markets. Mansoor Mohi-uddin, chief economist at Bank of Singapore, recently travelled to clients in Dubai and London. To his surprise, not one of them asked him about short-term issues like tech stocks or tweaks to interest rates. Instead, he says, “people were saying, ‘What’s going on?’ The free trade, free markets, globalisation era is over, and nobody knows what’s going to replace it.”

They refer, of course, to the new US administration. Within a month of retaking his seat at the White House, Donald Trump & co had all but trashed the transatlantic alliance, and ridden roughshod over the key checks, balances and institutions on which true US exceptionalism is built.

“It’s such a momentous change going on. If it continues like this, capital allocators will wonder: ‘Do I want to stay allocated to the US?’” Mohi-uddin says.

This cuts across asset classes. In stocks, the preference for Europe is clear — markets are streaking ahead of the US in a highly unusual pattern. But flighty stock markets are just the surface. The bit that really matters is the international use of the dollar, and dollar bond markets, as the supposedly risk-free bedrock of global finance.

This is already starting to show. On Tuesday, for instance, despite the shock of new US trade tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the dollar is not climbing in its usual fashion. Deutsche Bank says this in part reflects “the potential loss of the dollar’s safe-haven status”.

“We do not write this lightly,” wrote currencies analyst George Saravelos. “But the speed and scale of global shifts is so rapid that this needs to be acknowledged as a possibility.” What was once outlandish is now becoming plausible.

Economists close to Trump have been clear that they view the dollar’s status as the world’s pre-eminent reserve currency as a blessing and a curse — “burdensome” as adviser Stephen Miran put it. It remains a possibility — again unthinkable just a few weeks ago — that the US could seek to pull the dollar lower in an effort to support domestic manufacturing. But the US could also dismantle its own exorbitant privilege through accident rather than design by pushing the big beasts of bond markets — foreign central banks and other official reserve managers — into the arms of other nations.

The dollar makes up more than 57 per cent of global official reserves, according to benchmark data from the IMF, far in excess of the US’s slice of the global economy. The euro accounts for 20 per cent, and everyone else is picking up scraps.

Starry-eyed optimists have argued for years that the euro’s slice of the pie should be bigger, but they have been fighting reality. Europe’s bond markets are fragmented into constituent states, with Germany at the centre. The monetary cohesion is there but not the fiscal or strategic cohesion. No national market is simultaneously large, safe and liquid enough to suit a reserve manager’s needs. Super-sized trades leave a mark and in an emergency, these big hitters find only the slick US government bond market will do.

The EU has struggled to offer an alternative. That is where this moment in history comes in. Its urgent need for defence spending simply overwhelms the capacity of its individual national bond markets. Joint borrowing — easily said but devilishly tricky to do — is the obvious answer. The result could well be that Europe is thrust further to the centre of the global financial system.

The Covid-19 pandemic offered a taste of how pooling resources might work at scale. Then, bonds issued by the EU itself, rather than individual states, were met with enormous demand. The urgency of the present situation offers little choice but to move fast. “Collective action could be an answer, even if consensus has not built yet,” said analysts at rating agency S&P Global in a note last month.

If the EU could seize this moment, it would tap in to a deep well of willing buyers keen to trim US exposure. “Plenty of reserve managers could shift very quickly,” says Mohi-uddin. “There would be huge take-up.” US dominance of global debt markets does not have to end with a bang. Large, slow-moving investors would simply have to accumulate other assets rather than necessarily dumping their Treasuries. But over time, the result would be the same. Regime shifts of this kind do not happen often. But they do happen. Sterling was the global reserve currency once too.

Leave it to Comrade Trump to achieve the impossible, folks.

The question is what are they moving their assets into? Bitcoin and gold? lmao.

In Panama news they're selling two ports to Blackrock to appease him and prevent invasion. I suspect we won't hear about the canal again after this but who knows.

https://archive.is/Rpud4

BlackRock to buy Panama Canal ports after pressure from Donald Trump

Blackrock buying a controlling interest in two of the ports that service the Panama canal from the Hong Kong based conglomerate that currently owns them

https://archive.is/jytZ9

The same purchase will include some euro ports:

The deal also includes an 80 per cent stake of CK Hutchison’s ports subsidiaries, which run 43 ports in 23 countries, including the UK and in Germany.

Please let this be real:
https://xcancel.com/fresh_sadegh/status/1897010936499826692

Far news agency (an IRGC affiliate) reports about the formation of the “Islamic Resistance in Syria”, an umbrella group made up of resistance forces. Their aim is “to confront American-Israeli-Turkish plots to dismantle Syria with the help of the current militia ruling Damascus”

Anyone got a list, or know some trump 1 policy I can list that Biden didn' repeal?

BREAKING: The Supreme Court just weakened the Clean Water Act's limitations on raw sewage discharge into our water in a 5-4 ruling.

Owning the libs by making everyone drink more doo doo water

Chinese Embassy: "If war is what the U.S. wants, be it a tariff war, a trade war or any other type of war, we’re ready to fight till the end."

im late ik. Democrats are so useless all sitting there doing nothing, no booing, no slogans, no shouting, nothing. except for that one guy.

Trump's speech is just about to start, PBS, Hasan, and Erin Reed

Ben Shapiro calls for the pardon of Derek Chauvin

Libs think the Ukrainian military denazified later in the war. Do we have sources about this? To what extent is it true, if at all?

*This article is from 2023: The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov Battalion. Would I need a more recent source or does this suffice?

Syria's industrial sector faces widespread closures under Al-Qaeda-linked government: Report

https://thecradle.co/articles-id/29180

cuck n chad ranking: blast from the past edition

Note: RUS vs UKR back in first row

The probable future coalition partners of the CDU and SPD just announced their basic understanding to proceed with an absolutely INSANE militarization programme.

The outline is at least 500 billion €s for military hardware and investments in military-relevant infrastructure, with no theoretical limit - over the past couple of days, politicians have thrown around numbers like 800 billion and even higher. That's basically the entire Pentagon budget for Germany to spend over like 5 years or so.

Early statements call for "an army of 100,000 drones, 2,000 Patriot missiles, at least 800 tanks and 1,000 Taurus cruise missiles", with more to come.

This gigantic defense programme will be financed entirely by debt, and they plan to suspend the "debt brake" - but just for defense stuff, pointless social spending like schools and hospitals will not be exempt from the austerity program.

Just insane. All the German MSMs I'm looking at are celebrating. It will be interesting if any leftist organization can mobilize against this monstrosity, this really can't be true.

Really feels like Europe is going completely off the rails this week. Maybe I'm a little out of whack too since I've basically listened to 5 hours of Mercouris et al. every day for some days now and this was to be expected, sort of...but I can't see any good come of this.

Oh well, maybe they'll fix some of the shittier roads at least so that tanks can drive over, or they'll run out of money, or they just find that throwing money at a problem doesn't magically create tanks. There's this adage of "Germany is the country that spends the most on its military and basically gets nothing out of it", and that was still very true over the last couple of years. As far as I know, virtually none of the hardware that the first 100 billions dollars were supposed to buy actually arrived in the depots, it's all still mostly on order lol.

Source: The Krautwave

Anyone get their SOTU bingo card ready? My free space is Dem leadership (Jeffries, Pelosi) clapping at some ghoul shit Trump says like securing the border or sending more aid to

A number of schools in Hunan, Anhui and Zhejiang provinces in China have recently started implementing a new policy of 2-day off week for high schoolers, and have sparked quite a debate among parents and netizens in China.

• High schoolers in Grade 10 and 11 will now get 2 days off per week, and Grade 12 students get to have 1 day off every week.
• Currently, there is no weekend for many high schoolers in China (the “higher ranking” a school, the tougher the routine), you get half a day off per week (~2 days off per month).
• A typical high school day looks like this: wakes up at 6am, arrives at class room at 7am, starts morning self-study routine, sits through the classes, stays for the evening self-study session, gets home at around 10pm, and if you’re lucky, gets to bed at around 12am. Rinse and repeat every day.
• As anticipated, many parents are not happy with the new policy: the gaokao (national unified exam) is so competitive that even a 1-point difference in scoring can make or break your chances of getting into university. Some parents in Hangzhou are worried that their kids might be disadvantaged if kids from the other cities don’t have as many days off.
• This has led to an explosive demand for private tuition on the weekends as parents send their kids to tuition classes instead. Previously, tuition was part of the school program and parents pay ~1000 yuan per semester. Now they have to pay an additional 1000-2000 yuan per month.
• Some private tuition companies have seen the business opportunity and have begun advertising “weekend packages” for parents, with such slogans as “you can go to work with a peace of mind. we will take over the duty of the school to take care of your kids instead.”
• One such “weekend package” as reported by the news which includes tuition for 6 subjects + physical education costs 3680 yuan per month, which is 47% of the monthly income for an average household.
• Some parents are now petitioning for the schools to keep their libraries open on the weekend and crowdfunding to pay for the teachers’ “weekend overtime fee”.
• Even more absurdity ensued, as some schools received “letters to volunteer to return to school on the weekends” by “very concerned” students.

China can be a magical place sometimes. The level of extreme competition has intensified in recent years to such an extent that it is taking a toll on everyone’s daily lives, and I don’t blame the people who want to emigrate to Western countries at all. I know many Chinese immigrants overseas who don’t want to put their kids through this.

Boy Boy just came out with a video where they interviewed an Australian who was tortured repeatedly removed, waterboarded, electric shocked to face and genitals, etc) for six months by the CIA at various US black sites all over the world including Guantanamo Bay. He said the Australian Ambassador to Pakistan was even present at one of the times he was tortured! https://youtu.be/xEqrm9OIqro

what the fuck. He said he saw other captives completely lose their minds and weren't able to recall their own names. They accused him of training the 9/11 hijackers with kungfu which he was a practitioner of.

Two Alawite families that my mom knows from her university days have been killed in Baniyas. She's in a facebook group with her old classmates and it's just full of obituaries of old people that have been mercilessly slaughtered by the terrorists. I don't know what to say, death just surrounds my people from all angles.