China doesn’t need Russia lol. But Russia would be useful as a cannon fodder to keep the imperialist attention away from China.
On Chinese internet, a popular phrase is “a half-dead bear is a good bear”. Understand what it means?
xiaohongshu
joined 1 year ago
I have never met a Trotskyist irl before in my life.
My friend, the Trotskyists have long been integrated into the US government in the form of neocons.
The whole regime change strategy was derived from Trotsky’s exporting revolutions to the third world countries to foment world revolution, except here they want to export regime change to the third world countries to ensure America’s interest in the region.
Michael Hudson talked about the Fed actively recruiting Trotskyists in the 20th century to fight the USSR:
MICHAEL HUDSON: You always had to be aware that most of your followers are going to be FBI plants pretending to be people who they weren’t and would be writing up reports that were not usually very accurate, as I later found from the FBI files on my father and my friends.
They wouldn’t talk so much about the future change. They talked about where things went wrong. Especially how Stalinism had really destroyed Russia and what Russia really would have done if it would have been a truly socialist country as it set out to be instead of the way that it actually went.
So it was really where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t how to do it right. It was an awareness of all the things that can go wrong and all of the dangers.
KARL FITZGERALD: Just on McCarthyism — what was it like living through that period?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, none of my friends or people we knew were attacked. That was basically against the Stalinists at that time and gradually, by the time I wrote Super Imperialism, as I mentioned before, I was amazed when I was given a top-secret security clearance, because the FBI said they’d gone over my report and they knew for sure that I wasn’t Stalinist and wasn’t pro-Russian.
So all of a sudden all the McCarthyism sort of knocked out the Stalinists, and many of the liberals I knew were all standing up to the Stalinists, imagining that they were wrongly prosecuted like the Rosenbergs, and yet it was the Rosenberg’s cousin that had introduced Trotsky’s assassin, Jackson, to Trotsky, as his girlfriend.
So I was not very sympathetic with the Stalinists who were being attacked at that time.
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spoiler
All you have to do is set up a group of non-governmental organizations to begin grooming future leaders like Ms. [Annalena] Baerbock in Germany. You set up something like the World Economic Foundation that appoints leaders like presumably the George Soros Foundation. And you’ll get people that look like they’re very smart but also very corruptible and basically who want a really good greedy life.
In the early 1970s the Catholic Church had sent me around the country. They were one of my first backers, for various reasons. I had gone to New Mexico and had a plan for state and local finances. And a man came up to me afterwards and said, “I’ve never heard a banker talk like that. That’s wonderful. Will you come to the Ford Foundation? I want to meet you next week. Let’s have lunch.”
He explained that he worked with the CIA and the Ford Foundation basically was a front for the CIA to recruit people. So I went and met with him and I found it was quite cool. I found that he was quite cool. I found that his demeanor had suddenly changed.
This was early in the 1970s, before the Carter election by about five years. He began by trying to impress me, and he said, “We’re trying to create future presidents of the United States. When I first met you I thought that you could be material. But we decided that a southern governor is basically the kind of person that fits. Somebody who’s progressive. Somebody who can sort of not be an anti-Black racist, but somebody who, being southern, has all of the ways of thinking that a southerner has.”
Today we would call that neoliberal, basically. Non-socialist.
He said that he had been brought up by Malcolm Moos who had written the part of the (unintelligible) Eisenhower farewell address warning about the military-industrial complex. And so of course that’s what we’re doing, we’re all here [at the Ford Foundation] to support the military-industrial complex.
And I could see that I was not going to have any future with the Ford Foundation and it was obvious to me that he’d gone to the FBI and said, “Look I think I got someone here, could you give me his file?” and then he read the file on me and said, “Uh oh.”
So his advice to me was that if I wanted, since I was at a PhD in economics, that if I wanted to rise in economics I should attach myself to some prize winner — a Nobel Prize winner ideally — it was just beginning to be given — and try to just jump up and find a backer among the prize winners.
I realized that, wait a minute, the Nobel Prize is going to be given to people who — what we know now is neoliberalism, in the Chicago School, the one thing that I don’t want to do is take this guy’s advice, and indeed the only Nobel Prize winner that I ever was friendly with was the Swedish prize winner of the second Nobel Prize who wrote An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, [Gunnar Myrdal].
He invited me to come and work in Sweden and be his successor, but it turned out that almost all the Swedes in that group were mainly into disarmament and tended to fall asleep in an alcoholic daze at the end of each meal, so I never did follow him up there.
So I wasn’t groomed, to make a long story short.
Support for socialism (and a nostalgia for the USSR) is still fairly high across the board among Russians. If Russia were to suddenly adopt socialism tomorrow, most people would accept it. They may not like it, they may even be critical of communism, but most would still accept it over the current system. The same cannot be said for any of the Western capitalist countries.
The biggest hurdle is how are you going to convince the people that a second USSR won’t turn into another disaster.
Remember that most people today who have lived through the USSR period also lived through its most corrupt and inept period during the late USSR. The older generations who grew up in the 50s-early 70s had great memories of it, but many people growing up in the 80s have a very different view of what the USSR meant to them.
Besides, and perhaps even more importantly, those who lived through the nightmare of the 1990s do not want to return to that period any longer. They would rather have stability, even if it meant a more deteriorated material condition but still rather comfortable and safe, than to risk plunging the country into another mass poverty and crime-ridden era. Putin played a very important role in stopping that madness, which is a fact that many have come to accept despite criticisms of him.
Read up what happened to Russia in the 1990s and you will very quickly understand that the living memories of the period still haunt every Russian to this day.
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.
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.
How the heck did the Ukrainian Air Force manage to make a come back? Didn’t Ukraine receive the old F-16 variants and had trouble with their pilot training? How did they manage to evade Russian air defenses?
And there are still Ukrainian MiGs and Sus with their pilots around? I don’t know if that’s an indictment against the Soviet air defenses system (often boasted to be the best in the world) or a commendation to the build quality of Soviet jets.