xiaohongshu [none/use name] @ xiaohongshu @hexbear.net

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12 mo. ago

Don’t get me wrong, they’re both extremely bad, it’s just one is more blatant than the other.

Initially I didn’t believe they would let Trump win, but now it’s even more clear what the intention is.

Trump is going to do all the unpopular policies that the Democrats want but are too afraid to do on their own. If any of these cause a backlash, Trump and the Republicans will be the ones to face the consequences.

Meanwhile, the neocons firmly have Trump in control now. The MAGA clowns have retreated into obscurity. The first Trump term was a surprise, but after 8 years, the bourgeois elite surely have found more than one way to keep him on a leash.

they would rather lose than win with a socialist

It’s just priorities. Would they rather lose the voter base or lose the billionaire Zionist donors? The choice is simple.

I mean, Biden’s interest rate hike is arguably even more regressive in terms of wealth transfer ($1 trillion free interest to the rich every year, higher than the annual defense spending, while the poor have to endure even more expensive debt repayment burden) than Trump’s massive tax cuts and welfare cuts.

It’s just that interest rate operates “invisibly” so people don’t notice as much as the blatant Republican policies, but if you look into the data, it’s just as regressive, if not more so.

Just to point out it’s still the Israeli model though: have to register overseas.

Helping real estate moguls like the Pritzkers to gentrify black neighborhoods around Chicago.

There is no going back to the 90s.

The lavishness of the 90s was fueled by credit expansion under the financial deregulation by Reagan and later further deregulated under Clinton, as well as the vast amount of finance capital that flowed back to the US from stripping the Soviet industrial assets and monetizing them into financial assets.

Turns out, when it is easy to borrow, you can consume lots of stuff, invest a fortune in the stock market and giving the appearance of higher living standards. But it also turns out that debt has to be repaid somehow.

All of this ended first with the dotcom crash and then the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. The middle class and the working class in America never recovered following the 2008 global financial crisis. The only people who made it are the top 1%.

Hong Kong Proposes System to Recognize Same-Sex Partnerships Bloomberg

Hong Kong has proposed a framework to grant legal recognition for same-sex partnerships, marking a major step forward for the LGBTQ community.

The city’s top court ordered the government to establish laws for such relationships two years ago. Legal recognition would allow same-sex couples rights including participation in each other’s healthcare matters and handling of post-mortem affairs, according to a proposal dated on Thursday and submitted earlier to legislature.

To gain recognition, couples must first register for legal marriage, partnership or other forms of union outside Hong Kong, according to the proposal. Registration in the city would also require at least one of the partners to be a resident.

Establishing a legal framework for same-sex unions could help Hong Kong improve its reputation. The financial hub saw an exodus of capital and white-collar workers after pro-democracy protests in 2019 followed by three years of Covid isolationist policies. Multinational companies in the city are increasingly showing support for LGBTQ rights, widely seen crucial in attracting talent.

But the government’s proposal noted that society still holds differing views on the matter. “We must carefully consider these perspectives and judiciously strike a balance to avoid division and maintain harmony in the society,” it said.

The top court had told the government to comply with its ruling by October 2025. The original case was brought by jailed pro-democracy activist Jimmy Sham, who has been seeking to have his New York-registered marriage recognized in the former British colony. It was the first time the city’s highest court directly addressed the issue of same-sex marriage.

The judgment followed a series of court rulings in the past several years that helped advance LGBTQ rights. The government recognized the overseas unions of couples in specific circumstances, including foreigners seeking spousal visas, in a Court of Final Appeal decision in 2018.

Vietnam stood on the “wrong” side during the Cold War and paid for it. American capital went into China and not Vietnam, and as a result, China gained access to the US consumer market, while Vietnam went down with the USSR.

But Vietnam could just turn to China for the same development without capitulating to the US, and it would likely benefit much more.

They have both listened to the IMF and oriented their economies to rely heavily on export oriented growth, so they are competitors. Who in China is going to buy Vietnam’s surplus goods that it cannot sell to the Americans? And why should the Chinese government favor Vietnamese products over its own domestic products?

When Chinese businesses invest in Vietnam, they want to take advantage of Vietnam’s status to circumvent the US tariffs put up by Trump during his first term. This is why Trump is levying a heavy tariff against Vietnam and several other countries like Mexico that Chinese exporters have used to evade tariffs.

Funnily enough, Vietnam actually has a much more stringent labor law and restricts overtime to less than 200 hours per year (no limit in China). So there have been cases where Chinese businesses only realized they couldn’t exploit the Vietnamese workers as hard after they have set up shop there lol.

Only when China reduces its trade surplus and starts importing from these countries, displacing the role of American consumers, can countries like Vietnam really benefit from China. Otherwise it’s going to be pure mercantilism while the US hides behind tariffs and waiting for these countries to kill off each other’s economies.

You misunderstood what I’m saying. I am specifically talking about China opening up its market to foreign capital vs other countries trying to play the same game.

Many of the other problems you are describing were legit Western anti-China propaganda.

It went from 46% to 20%.

As I have explained before, America has been running a permanent trade deficit for the past 40 years (last year, it was $900+ billion) to absorb the global surplus capacity of the exporting countries. This ensures that the world is always running in an over-supply mode, keeping prices of the goods cheap while the workers in the exporting countries employed.

When Trump suddenly threatens to slash this massive trade deficit, while many people focus on Americans having to pay higher prices and consume less, the corresponding effect is that the exporting countries in the Global South also faces a slump in consumption demand, which will inevitably lead to production downscale, unemployment and finally recession.

This is what some of those pro-BRICS commentators who confidently said “American imports only comprised a small fraction of world trade! Nobody cares!” don’t understand about international trade, especially since the world is no longer running in a fixed exchange rate regime in the past. Well, turns out the Global South exporting countries care.

The export goods have to go somewhere, and if not, assuming constant global demand, you’re going to be competing with the other exporting countries to dump them somewhere else, and how are you going to compete with the Chinese goods? If you can’t compete with China, then you will go into recession, and maybe looking for an IMF bailout in the near future. So, they still have to sell to America, and what Trump is doing is simply waiting to see what concessions these countries would give. And those exporting countries now compete with one another to see who can be the first to sell their goods to the US to maintain their competitive advantage.

Re-industrialization is a scam. The real goal is to reshape the global supply chain to America’s interest.

This is also why I always say that the only way to counter-attack is for China to ramp up its import to absorb all these exports from the Global South. This means China will have to give up its export industries and transition into a domestic consumption economy (should have done that like 10 years ago). This will automatically render the dollar hegemony useless because those countries will no longer have to sell their goods to the US.

Let’s not pretend like China didn’t open up its market to the Americans in order to kill the Soviet Union, whom they perceive as attempting to encircle China through Vietnam. Both Mao and Deng were fully on board with it.

We only didn’t criticize China because it ends up becoming very successful and reaping quite a lot of benefit out of it (and part of the reason why China isn’t going to give up the status quo anytime soon), but when other countries try to play the same game, they get labeled as compradors.

This. At this point, Russia taking Ukraine simply means that the European leaders can scaremonger their people into accepting the austerity and fascism even more easily. All in the name of preventing Russian threat, while the capitalists profit from it.

They know that Russia has no interest nor is it capable of invading Europe, but the people would be scared enough into accepting the hardship they’d have to undertake to stop Putin’s madness.

It is true that the euro is extremely poorly designed. No argument against that.

However it still pisses the US off that the Europeans were able to take advantage of the Soviet assets to turn itself into an economic powerhouse that could at least, tilt the balance of power in the grand scheme of things.

For example, if the EU were to stand behind China, then the US would be under even more threat. This is why the Ukraine war has to happen, to sink the euro as a potential alternative to the dollar, and their way of preventing backstabbing by the Europeans is to ensure that the Europeans do not have the means of doing so.

Their solutions come almost entirely from the neoliberal toolkit. That’s what they know, and they are trying to solve it the neoliberal way.

A lot of articles related to Ukraine have been “scrubbed” from the internet over the past 2-3 years. I have only managed to track down a portion of the sources and these days, I only write stuff that I have firm sources on. There are a lot more shenanigans that have to be omitted because it is so difficult these days to track down the original articles I’ve read years back.

Russia’s finance capital is actively impeding Putin’s effort for implementing import substitution and self-sufficiency. Their central bank follows IMF orders and uses high interest rates (20%) to kill off the government subsidies for re-industrialization.

If anything, Russia is imperialist in the sense that it is helping to advance American imperialism lol.

Any discussion about imperialism that doesn’t include an analysis on the expansion of finance capitalism is just vibes-based and not rooted in Lenin’s theory on imperialism.

Some leftists claim Russia was just reacting to NATO expansion. But: Ukraine offered to stay neutral before the 2022 full-scale invasion. They were willing to discuss security guarantees without joining NATO. Russia invaded anyway. Why? Because the issue wasn’t NATO. It was Ukraine’s independence.

This is just selectively ignoring all the important events that led up to Russia’s invasion:

1. The Ukrainian civil war erupted in 2014 when the new fascist coup regime repealed the Kivalov-Kolesnichenko Law that granted the status of regional languages to minority languages including Russian, on the very first day of taking power. This was seen as the beginning of Ukrainian ultranationalist move to ethnically cleanse the Russian minorities and hence the Donbass separatist uprising.
2. After the civil war, both Minsk Agreements explicitly planned the return of both Donbass oblasts to Ukraine, under the condition that the local governments will be given more autonomy on cultural rights such that minority rights cannot simply be repealed by the central authority, which we all know is ultimately to ethnically cleanse the Russians from the lands of Ukraine. Crimea, however, will not be returned for obvious reasons.
3. Ukraine rejected the implementation of both Minsk Agreements (because then they will not be allowed to ethnically cleanse the Russians), and instead, over the next 7 years, allowed NATO to openly train and arm its military.
4. After Biden came into office in 2021, Zelensky (overwhelmingly elected as the peace president) went to the White House and met with Biden, and came out with a completely different, much more aggressive stance, including openly flirting with joining NATO, overturning the Budapest Memorandum for non-nuclear proliferation etc.
5. Alarmed by the development, Russia called for an immediate security meeting with the US, which culminated in the US-Russia Summit in Geneva in June 2021. Russia proposed resolving their security concerns but was ignored by the US side.
6. Not two months after the Geneva “peace” summit, the Biden administration began sending Javelins and Stingers to Ukraine under the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) in August 2021, then again in December 2021. A clear provocation to the Russians for attempting to deescalate.
7. By February 2022, artillery shelling against the pro-Russian Donbass provinces had increased in intensity by an order of magnitude. Peace would not hold. The rest is history.

But in what way was the destruction of Europe help the health of the empire in the long run? Obviously American capitalists are all about it in the short term, but it weakens the overall position of the empire relative to China, which is far more significant geopolitically.

The EU has been the true challenger to American capitalism since its formation in the 1990s. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, because its economy was never financialized, the American and European capitalists had been able to harvest their industrial assets and monetized them.

The amount of finance capital generated from monetizing Soviet industrial assets was so vast that it instantly allowed the US and the EU to “hyperleap” into fully neoliberalized economy, and the EU was born in 1993. The creation of euro would soon follow and officially adopted in 1999.

Since then, the euro has emerged as a challenger to dethrone the dollar. It is no coincidence that the Balkan conflicts started as soon as the EU was formed, to keep the EU to spend on militarization. It is also no coincidence that when Saddam wanted to sell his oil in euro, Iraq was immediately invaded in 2003. It is also unlikely to be a coincidence that as soon as Nord Stream was built, the Ukrainian fascist coup and civil war took place in late 2013. Finally, when Nord Stream 2 was completed, the current Russia-Ukraine war happened.

The goal of the US finance capital has always been to kill the euro. This is why the Russia-Ukraine war has to happen:

As you can see, Chinese yuan poses little to no threat to the US. In fact, China has repeatedly stated that they are not interested in anything other than the status quo, which is to preserve the dollar hegemony that has benefited its economy so much.

This is also why after the Ukraine war, when Putin was rallying other countries and calling to de-dollarize, China (and Xi) has been unusually quiet about it. Because why should they?

If the Ukraine war and the $300 billion confiscation of Russian foreign reserves cannot make China give up the dollar, then Trump’s trade war has even smaller chance of doing so.

The PRC and BRICS bank are increasingly more important to the financial backing of the third world while the imperialist financial systems continue to lose their group.

This changes nothing, because China has been very reluctant to internationalize the RMB to preserve its export advantage. It doesn’t want others to hold Chinese yuan as a savings currency, and they’re more than happy to let the dollar play that role.

What has been happening with BRICS are countries starting to adopt bilateral/multilateral currency trade to reduce exposure of their dollar reserves from being confiscated by the US. This is more of a protective measure than de-dollarization, which I have explained again and again, that it can only happen at the real production/trade level i.e. China importing goods and replacing the role of the US as a net importer.

In the same vein, when saving, these countries will still swap the foreign currencies into USD through the forex market.

I’ll give you an example: after the Ukraine war erupted, Russia who was cut off from the dollar began to sell large quantity of oil to India, and accumulated a vast amount of Indian rupees. However, Russia soon realized that it cannot use those rupees at all, because after accounting for importing goods from India, there is nothing else for it to do.

Russia cannot sell rupee to buy Chinese yuan so they can use them to purchase Chinese goods, because the Indian central bank would not allow it as it will fuck with their exchange rate. And the forex market isn’t interested in holding rupee and trading away their yuan, at least not at a price favorable to them. As a result, Russia was forced to hold all the rupees they cannot use while sending away valuable commodities e.g. oil to India, practically for free.

The problem for most countries is that nobody wants to accumulate their currencies. The US dollar does not care though. You are free to use the dollar to do whatever you want: buy Chinese yuan, Indian rupee, gold, crypto, anything that people are willing to sell in exchange for the US dollar. And this is why the dollar is the global reserve currency, not the yuan or the rupee.

The problem for Russia is that it has been shut out from accessing the dollar, but for other countries, they will still buy the USD. This is why the foreign holder of US treasuries has increased in spite of Trump’s debacle, simply that it has switched hands - the Chinese no longer hold as much treasuries, and the money ended up in the UK, Japan and the Cayman Islands end up buying those treasuries. Everything has to balance out.

Sorry for not putting up a source because it is such a matter of fact in China that everyone already accepts as a given.

Here’s an article about it: https://www.sohu.com/a/286706975_175523 (use machine translation)