Image is of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline, which transports gas from Russia to China. This isn't an oil pipeline (such as the ESPO) but I thought it looked cool. Source here.
Trump has recently proposed a 500% tariff on goods from countries that trade with Russia, including India and China (who buy ~70% of Russia's oil output), as well as a 10% additional tariff on goods from countries that "align themselves with BRICS." Considering that China is the largest trading partner of most of the countries on the planet at this point, and India and Brazil are reasonably strong regional players, I'm not sure what exactly "alignment" means, but it could be pretty bad.
Sanctions and tariffs on Russian products have been difficult to achieve in practice. It's easy to write an order to sanction Russia, but much harder to actually enforce these sorts of things because of, for example, the Russian shadow oil fleet, or countries like Kazakhstan acting as covert middlemen (well, as covert as a very sudden oil export boom can be).
Considering that China was pretty soundly victorious last time around, I'm cautiously optimistic, especially because China and India just outright cutting off their supply of energy and fuel would be catastrophic to them (and if Iran and Israel go to war again any time in the near future, it'll only be more disastrous). Barring China and India kowtowing to Trump and copying Europe vis-a-vis Nordstream 2 (which isn't impossible, I suppose), the question is whether China and India will appear to accede to these commands while secretly continuing trade with Russia through middlemen, or if they will be more defiant in the face of American pressure.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
Only 60-70M people pay income taxes in China, because you need to make at least 5000 yuan/month (~$700 USD) in order to be eligible for paying personal income tax.
That’s ~5% of China’s total population, or ~9% of its total workforce. The rest of the 90% don’t even make 5000 yuan/month. How are you going to lower the tax more on the poor?
The local governments are running on a tight budget right now because of the overhanging debt and there are even SOEs that have delayed wage payments to their employees for months now. This is why Xi has recently doubled down to unswerving support for both the public and the non-public sector to reaffirm the party support for private capital.
The era of public sector driven growth is over. China’s economic model that adheres to neoclassical rules dictates that private (and foreign) capital has to come and save the economy.
Full agreement here. But this is going to cut into the corporate profits and many key sectors including EV and solar panels have been embroiled in price wars that have been driving down their profit to razor-thin margins.
This means the corporations have to exploit the workers even harder to squeeze out more surplus value just to survive. Of course, the government is well aware of this and has been calling to stop the price wars drive by cutthroat competition.
However, the main tax revenue of both China’s central and local governments is the value-added tax and followed by corporate income tax, which presents a dilemma for the government. They need the tax revenue from the corporations to maintain their operating expenditures (somebody has to run the city subway, rails, public utilities and infrastructure, you know), and so exploitative practices will continue until we have a system where the government finances do not rely on these sources of income.
(Not so) fun fact: the EV price war in China was started by Elon Musk’s Tesla in 2023 and has since driven the EV prices in China down so much that we’re looking at ~4-5 surviving companies at the end of this as profits are being cut to non-existent for most of the ~50 EV companies that are still hanging by the thread. In 2018, there were over 500 EV companies in China. The vast majority of them have and will eventually implode, causing more unemployment and job losses down the road.
You realize that Huawei employees get ZERO day of annual leave? Yes, zero.
Workers do not own Huawei. They have access to own “virtual shares” if they sign what’s called the “Striver’s Pledge”, which demands that you forgo many common benefits including annual leave in exchange for better overtime pay, virtual share ownership, and promotion opportunities.