Fabulous Christmas to everyone!

Posted by: Chevrus | Dec 24 2020 14:08 utc | 3

source of the mutated virus I forgot to post this..

Posted by: snake | Dec 24 2020 14:26 utc | 5

A Merry Christmas to all and a safe New Year…..(and PEACE to ALL).

Posted by: georgeg | Dec 24 2020 15:33 utc | 7

Sorry, Americans: no candies for you this Christmas:
Congress Blocks Trump’s Request to Increase COVID Relief Aid Amid Looming Government Shutdown
–//–
Joke of the week: this time, we have a double-header, from the same newspaper:
How India could tweak China in the South China Sea

India could soon give Vietnam the BrahMos supersonic missile, a weapon that would erode China’s naval advantage in the disputed waters.
[…]
To date, India has refrained from shipping the missile to Vietnam for not altogether clear reasons. China has made it crystal clear in state media commentaries and statements it considers delivery of the BrahMos to rival South China Sea claimants a strategic red-line. Beijing has also repeatedly warned New Delhi against inserting itself more directly in the South China Sea disputes.

I searched for that in the Global Times and the Xinhua and found no data that confirms the highlighted part of the quote. There was only one instance of “BrahMos” in 2020, which merely states the system was tested.
The most it has is one statement by Sun Shihai, an expert at the South Asia Research Center of Sichuan University, in the Global Times article. He stated that “China and India should avoid a vicious arms race and refrain from using force as a threat, despite some Indians’ belief that building a strong military is the right way to ensure a peaceful border”.
So, yes, China is opposed to an arms race between itself and India – and the BrahMos, logically, is part of that – but then so is Russia officially against a new arms race against the USA. There’s a long distance between being against an arms race and admitting your enemy has absolute military supremacy over one region just because of a new military toy – let alone a supersonic one, in a hypersonic era.
China slowly retreating from Pakistan’s Belt and Road

Pakistan’s army is set to take near-total control of the Beijing-financed China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a US$60 billion infrastructure building plan replete with railways, roads, ports and special economic zones (SEZs) that is key to China’s global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
[…]
Recent media reports, citing data compiled by Boston University researchers in the United States, note that overall lending by the state-backed China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China declined from a peak of $75 billion in 2016 to just $4 billion last year. Provisional 2020 figures show that amount shrunk to around $3 billion in 2020.

Someone should teach those journalists some maths: the whole project cost USD 60 billion. USD 75 billion already were lent in 2016 alone – more than covering for the entire cost of the entire project. The article revolves around a new bill passed in the Pakistani parliament giving its Army more power on supervising the project, with an explicit aim to better guard it against external threats and terrorist sabotage.
Most likely scenario is that the project is already paid and in construction, those additional loans by the two State Chinese banks having nothing to do with the Corridor, but with other projects.
–//–
Game over for Japan:
Japan reports record-high 3,450 new COVID-19 cases
Never fooled me. Paper tiger.
–//–
Good news:
Llegan a Cuba nuevas locomotoras desde Rusia
Seven TGM-8KM locomotives have just arrived to Cuba. It is part of a larger deal made between Russia and Cuba in 2016.
–//–
It’s done. Happy now, Westerners?
Protecting intellectual property rights equals to protecting innovation
30 from now, Westerners will be whining for the opposite reason: that China’s IP protection laws are “too harsh/unfair”, as China becomes the leading innovation center of the world.
–//–
Very interesting read for those uninitiated in American History or basic philosophy:
John Locke and America’s Cult of Private Property
It explains a lot, specially on the differences between liberalism on the American Left, on the American Right, and between American liberalism and European liberalism. It also explains why both sides claim they’re the real America.
–//–
One more defeat to the “herd immunity” believers:
One in 85 in England have COVID-19, China and Brazil stop UK flights: COVID-19 daily bulletin
–//–
China’s top market regulator probes Alibaba Group over alleged monopoly
Jack Ma tried to get to the CPC, but the CPC got to Jack Ma first.
Let this clown serve as a lesson for the rest of the Chinese bourgeoisie.
–//–
With Hacking, the United States Needs to Stop Playing the Victim
That FireEye/Solarwinds fuck up was too much even to the NYT.
–//–
Trump pardoned some dozens of war criminals. I’ll not post any link here because I’m sure it will be the most talked about topic in this thread.
–//–
Brexit deal finally concluded:
UK and EU agree Brexit trade deal
The report is 2,000 pages long and I won’t read it, but the fact is Boris Johnson is claiming victory. Implied in his speech is that the UK won’t have to adjust to any additional EU regulations in exchange for the maintenance of zero tariffs. Honestly, I doubt that. The key here is “additional”: after decades in the EU, the UK has already adapted to the EU’s tastes and regulations.
The “fishing waters” imbroglio seems to be left unresolved. A sign that it didn’t matter in the first place.

Posted by: vk | Dec 24 2020 16:05 utc | 9

Well, as predicted Republicans blocked the Unanimous Consent motion to approve the $2000 stimulus payment, AND GUESS WHAT?
Trump knew very well this would happen when he pulled this STUNT two days before Christmas before leaving to play golf!
Merry-f*cking-Christmas!
…Asshole narcissist playing golf at this moment.

Posted by: Circe | Dec 24 2020 16:38 utc | 11

RE: -vk | Dec 24 2020 16:40 utc | 13

“Richard Wolff is one of the only two Marxist economists still alive in the USA – the other being Michael Hudson. They are not pure Marxists, though, and often degenerate to an underconsumptionist theory – a typical trait to contemporary American Marxists.
However, in this case and as expected, prof. Wolff agrees with me. You can only print money in a useful manner to a certain extent.”

I assume vk is well aware of the strongly pejorative connotation the term “Maarxist” carries with the great majority of MSM-programmed Americans[akin to something just slightly less bad than being a “Pedophile’].
It is not a term I would associate with Michael Hudson after listening to his discussion with Escobar.

Posted by: gm | Dec 24 2020 17:19 utc | 13

blues @Dec24 17:20 15
Thanks Blues. I hope your 3TTRV gets attention.
Happy holidays!
!!

Posted by: Jackrabbit | Dec 24 2020 18:30 utc | 15

gm @14–
In that discussion, Hudson self-describes as a Classical Economist, of which Marx was one. Even the renowned Charles A. Beard was smeared as a Marxist for his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution he published in 1918, which is further evidence in what Hudson called the “Counter-Revolution” waged by Bankers, Rentiers and their allies against the progress made in eradicating Feudalism. My own research is rooted in what Hudson writes here:
“This has led many countries to reconsider the character of macroeconomic management – and behind it, the body of economic and political theory guiding today’s societies. What seemed at first glance to be a systemic policy failure of mainstream economics is coming to be seen as not so much a failure as part of an orchestrated class to protect financial wealth and its allied rentier sectors. Economic policy has passed out of the hands of elected democratic government to central banks and other government agencies controlled by financial planners and the rentier class behind them. Their post-crisis management has enabled these interests to gain control of a large swath of the pubic domain of debtor countries, along with industries and real estate in the creditor nations themselves. [My Emphasis]
That is from the the Preface to the book from which this excerpted essay is derived, which I’ve linked to before. And finally for your holiday reading, here’s the link to Veblen’s book on the topic, Absentee ownership and business enterprise in recent times: the case of America.
The terms Marxism, Socialism and Communism were made into pejoratives to smear and discredit those tarred and were pushed prior to WW1, Russian Revolution, Red Scare, and the war to destroy the aims of Industrial Capitalism, which was to end Feudalism and Banker and Monopolist control of enterprise and government. The reason why Hudson champions Industrial Capitalism ought to be plain to see now–like Marx he sees it as the interest base capable of dealing with humanity’s longstanding enemies: The Creditor Class and its allies.

Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 24 2020 18:50 utc | 17

@ Posted by: gm | Dec 24 2020 17:19 utc | 14; @ Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 24 2020 18:50 utc | 18
My hypothesis is that Marxist economists adopt an underconsumptionist stance simply because otherwise they wouldn’t have any chance of having a good career as economists. Economists are a naturally reactionary class in capitalism, capitalism’s clerics, so they can’t viably go to the logical conclusion of Marxism that capitalism will be over.

Posted by: vk | Dec 24 2020 19:29 utc | 19

Posted by: vk | Dec 24 2020 16:40 utc | 13
I’ve read almost everything Michael Hudson has written. Even his more academically work. He almost never writes about underconsumption, overproduction or the falling rate of profit. He is first and foremost a scholar of the history of economic thought and a balance of payment analyst (with Marxist background of course).
If you want to grasp how prolific he was at his best, try to get a copy of his 2-volume series on Trade, Development and Foreign Debt.
The man is a genius.

Posted by: vato | Dec 24 2020 19:52 utc | 21

While governments around the world are planning to spend trillions on clean energy, EV’s, renewables and the green energy revolution, there are a number of limiting factors:
https://c260b21c-7949-410b-a684-eec2cc6e094c.filesusr.com/ugd/6c8cd0_ec9fdba8b8784425a3fd7cd7bf9b9508.pdf
see also the mind blowing recent [2020] book: ‘The Rare Metals War, the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies’ by Guillaume Pitron, Scribe. ‘La guerre des metal rares’ [2018]

Posted by: Paul | Dec 24 2020 20:52 utc | 23

vk@10 seems to be unaware that “fair competition” includes employers paying on average the market cost of employee’s labor power. Their use of said labor power in the production process generates more value than they bought, which surplus value is the ultimate source of profits and interest. Their exploitation of labor power is conducted entirely in “fair competition” as understood by pretty much everyone pushing for an anti-trust policy.
Historically anti-trust, fair competition policies, are vain efforts of the petty bourgeoisie to stem the tides of concentration and centralization of capital. Since concentration and centralization of capital lead short term to expanded reproduction, and in the long term to crises that will eventually destroy enough capital to restore profitability (barring catastrophic wars and/or social collapse,) new petty bourgois are constantly spontaneously regenerated in new places, novel businesses and unexpected forms. As both social newborns and as ideologically blinkered by their class position, they tend to rediscover the same failed nostrums. In the nineteenth century, the petty bourgeoisie included lots of small farmers convinced soft money, which favors debtors, specifically silver, regulating railroads etc. were the promised land to fair competition. We all know how much good breaking up the trusts did.
The proper socialist policy re Ali Baba in my opinion is not anti-Marxist fair competition utopianism, which is ultimately simply aping the West, a failure of nerve. I think the proper policy is to socialize Ali Baba.
Re the CPC debate? The CPC proper is losing control not just of many provincial governments (any effort of provincial parties to maintain control over them was targeted in the Bo Xilai affair, I think,) but the central government as well. The US government wants to encourage the government’s increasing reliance on the Chinese bourgeoisie (in Taiwain and elsewhere, entering Chinese economy via uncontrolled foreign trade, as well as more purely domestic.) When the government achieves independence from the party, it will be able to truly reorganize the Chinese economy to promote capitalism, the private power of the owners of the means of production over social investment. That is the true meaning of democratic freedom, after all. The conclusive restoration of capitalism in China I think will require a murderous attack on the party as well as a huge rollback in human welfare. I expect the casualties, direct and indirect, will exceed the alleged toll of the Great Leap Forward *and* the Cultural Revolution *combined.*

Posted by: steven t johnson | Dec 24 2020 21:27 utc | 25

karlof1 | Dec 24 2020 18:50 utc | 18…and 19, and to all at MOA
Thanks for today’s reading refs! A climax is upon us.

Posted by: chu teh | Dec 24 2020 21:43 utc | 27

Yasha Levine offer some sober end of year clarification. Always a good writer and thinker.
An extract:

It might have been easy for people to believe that there was surging leftwing movement in American politics while Bernie Sanders’ star was rising in 2016 and 2020. I had always been skeptical about how deeply that left movement actually went, but even I — cynical as I am — started believing in it a bit last winter. Shit. Bernie has a chance, I thought. Maybe there is something real happening here. But then he got crushed, endorsed drooling Joe Biden, licked the “we can move him left” boot, ducked out of the fight, and exposed a totally barren political left landscape. Turns out that Bernie’s “revolution” was really nothing other than an electoral campaign, after all — and that campaign and all the organizational energy it harnessed dissolved immediately with his candidacy. What did it leave behind? Not much, other than huge platforms for a few top influencers and political operatives who leveraged the Bern into lucrative Patreon and Substack careers.
Who am I talking about? Well, people like David Sirota, who seems to have taken his official Bernie campaign Substack newsletter and privatized its massive email list post-election for personal profit. Or his comrade Briahna Joy Gray, who just launched a podcast with a Chapo cohost that’s already raking in more than $35,000 a month. Meanwhile, the people whose interests these two Bernie operatives had represented — the millions who gave Bernie a few bucks — are being immiserated more and more. David and Briahna are now on different sides of the Force the Vote fight, arguing endlessly on platforms with multi-tiered subscription offers. And what service do these leftwing influencers provide to the people? As far as I can tell, not much other than distraction and politics-as-entertainment. It’s all very fucking grim.

Good luck to all for the year ahead and particularly good luck to Yemen, Iran and Venezuela and all those nations being jackbooted by the USAi. PEACE please.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Dec 24 2020 21:57 utc | 29

HIB Trumps $2K noTrump
Become an Oligarch, join the deplorable don’t matter (DDM) movement.

Posted by: snake | Dec 24 2020 22:49 utc | 31

The narcissistic sociopaths and their parsimonious $600 offer get totally played by Trump.
Joe Biden at the centre of the insult to the USA citizens and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi fawning all over his discounted compassion.
Scumbags like these top four are the sign that the US citizens have ZERO champions in their national leadership.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Dec 24 2020 23:37 utc | 33

Does anyone suspect it unlikely that Reps and Senators wouldn’t have checked with trump whether he would sign the prospective legislation?
Has anyone considered the possibility that this is a public show?
I can only speculate as to “why?” But, just because i can’t answer that question doesn’t mean it’s wrong to reason from the probable facts in evidence.
…
I felt the same way about the “shutdown” over the “wall”. .gov pisses away trillions. $5B over the wall was a sideshow.
But for what?

Posted by: oglalla | Dec 25 2020 1:24 utc | 35

I voted for Bernie in the primary of 2016 because although he was just less bad on foreign policy his domestic program was ok. This time I voted for Tulsi Gabbard because her foreign policy was ok and she appears to be as she presents herself. I didn’t vote in the actual Presidential elections because we the people had lost when the nominations were done. Since then Bernie is ok as a member of Congress but doesn’t have what it takes to make his program happen. Similarly for Jeremy Corbyn. He let the Zionists gut his party and later him. National politics in the US is a lost cause. Why waste energy? The EU is just as bad. Even b. doesn’t seem to notice that covid is providing the mechanism for the “great reset” and will be the NWO

Posted by: gepay | Dec 25 2020 3:33 utc | 37

Not only has Trump made fools of both Pelosi and McConnell but he could have some more tricks yet to play. Monday is the next tricky day for the law makers. Katie Halper and David Dayen discuss and the terrain and tactics are set out by David.
Trump may well be a detestable turd but he sure is a devlish tricky detestable turd. Pelosi is wholly responsible for the bill getting to Trump with a built in timefuse that Trump alone can detonate.
THAT is the Pelosi leader of the House for ya! Perhaps we should henceforth refer to Pelosi as Comrade Pelovskaya.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Dec 25 2020 11:04 utc | 39

@Maracatu #1
A Bahamian bank offering a cryptocurrency is nothing more than a combination of attempt to cash in and an attempt to stay relevant.
Due to the US’ flexing of muscle – the value of Caribbean banking and citizenship (tax haven and wealth hiding) has been steadily declining for all but the super rich or citizens of a handful of nations.
This as Harris Kupperman’s multi-month prediction about bitcoin price rise continues to hold true, despite his (accurate) view that it is pure Ponzi scam. Bitcoin blew through its previous all time high, now it is making new highs every few days. Presently at $24500.
Look up Kuppy’s article here

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 12:05 utc | 41

@vk #13
As usual, your understanding of what Marxist thought is, is dated from before the World Wars.
Michael Hudson was a socialist in his youth, but is not a Marxist by any stretch of the imagination.
His work is entirely based on reality:
the reality of how money came to be (government created money for taxes)
the role of government spending and regulation vs. bankster’s goals
For that matter, the utter failure of Marx’s political predictions as well as the failures of Leninist governments only serves to further underscore the fundamental flaws of Marx’s economic theories.
Investment, and most money for that matter, was primarily a function of government in Marx’s era – vs. the masses of private capital that dominate governments today.
Nor is the fact that workers in the Western democracies never rose up to overthrow Capital – it was only in 3rd world nations where peasants rose up to overthrow feudal lords, where Communism arose.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 12:23 utc | 43

@blues #15
3TTRV is nothing more than a variant of ranked choice voting.
I am categorically against it – ranked choice voting in Europe has resulted in the Center Left and Center Right parties’ views merging into an indistinguishable mass. Or put another way: the American Democrat and Republican parties’ collective actions on behalf of the wealthy in the past generation, is only different than European socialism because Europeans still remember being the epicenter of 2 World Wars.
In my view, political parties are merely descriptions for collections of people and their shared interests. This dynamic inevitably results in dualism unless it is over-ridden by some specific greater purpose.
Or put another way: it is the rank and file Republicans and Democrats in the US and Social Democrats/Christian Democrats in Europe who form and use power. Merely changing the voting system – even if it were magically possible – would not change the ongoing emergent interests of these collections of people.
Only when the emergent interests change enough, will change occur. We saw this with the elections of Obama and Trump: huge numbers of Americans are (rightly) dissatisfied with how the country and their lives are going.
This is why I have, from the very beginning of my participation at MoA, been of the view that “the worse, the better”.
Only after the economic situation for enough people gets bad enough, will change be able to occur.
The lockdowns are accelerating the estimated timeframe. These unilateral acts, which have destroyed a huge number of livelihoods and a wide swathe of the world economy and underscored the power governments have over individual lives, may well energize enough people for real change to occur.
Unfortunately, real change never occurs by reason but rather by emotion.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 12:36 utc | 45

@NemesisCalling #37
The premise of the article is false: the proportion of voters that identify as “non-religious” has been growing steadily for a long time.
Nor are the views noted necessarily “religious”.
Religion has nothing to do with isolationism – note the Crusades in the Christian past, the Tibetan golden era when Tibetan armored cavalry dominated their near-hinterlands, the Muslim Wahhabist jihad of today and the public Christian support for Israel.
I find Victor Davis Hanson’s descriptions more accurate:
the coastal elites benefit from access to the greater world markets – to sell to and the buy labor from – whereas the hinterlands where goods are manufactured/farming is performed, suffer from the accelerated exposure to far cheaper labor abroad and foreign mercantile policies.
His own personal experience is instructive: in the 1980s, his 5th generation farm grew raisins for the European markets – selling them for $1200/ton. The advent of the EC included EC subsidies to Turkish and Greek farmers; the price for raisins fell to $400/ton within a handful of years.
This same setup is repeated for American auto and steel manufacturers or pretty much any other production economy function.
Note that Hanson doesn’t advocate cutting off all imports.
What he notes is that the American political elite – of both parties – sold out their constituents in favor of American oligarchs and foreign interests.
Or in other words – it isn’t religion, it is economics and government policies arising from different fundamental interests which separate the coasts from “flyover” land.
This is particularly interesting because the Democrat party believes in “demographic destiny” – that incoming surges of immigrants, particularly Hispanics, will guarantee political power for the foreseeable future. Hanson shows this is fundamentally wrong by looking at the evolution of political preference in the many waves of immigrants in the past, even as Trump showed in 2020 that a billionaire Republican can achieve improvements in minority votes. Trump’s anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric simply isn’t relevant enough compared to his anti-China outsourcing stance.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 12:53 utc | 47

@40 Uncle Tungstenovich
No, I think you’re the Comrade!
Timefuse my ass! Quit with the the catchy word spin that means squat. Pelosi put the $2000 for unanimous consent to try to accelerate the process of getting the $2000 approved!
The Republicans knocked it down, so we’ll see what happens on Monday and you’re no clairvoyant! So quit painting Pelosi as a saboteur. You can bet your ass Pelosi will try to put McConnell in the hot seat on this. However if Trump signs the bill Republicans had flown in to Florida before that; it’s over. Mitch McConnell will have cover. If he doesn’t sign it then the House will have to take up the stimulus increase and then send it to McConnell for Senate approval and my guess is; he’ll knock it down cause the last thing Mitch wants is anything that looks like a socialist handout attached to him. So Mitch will be responsible once again for a miserly outcome and Trump knows this perfectly well! He did this only to make himself look magnanimous without lifting a finger or caring about who is affected by this delay! He’s an ego-driven asshole you pretend is clever, when he’s just an evil narcissist trying to take credit for something he already knows will not pass the Senate!
So you know squat! You’re a one-trick pony trashing Dems before they even make a move cause you could care less what happens and who’s affected; although after all this time you’re suddenly a purist defender of the little people when you’re nothing but a tool. You just spit out nonsensical vitriol against Biden coz he won’t be giving Putin any passes and that’s all you care about. I got your number mister and I won’t let you get away with even an iota of bullshit. So you better cross your t’s and dot your i’s or quit demonizing the Dems, Biden, the Squad and Sanders on every thread for ulterior motives!
@49 c1ue-less
Is that all you could conjure up, LBJ???Anything spit out against Biden by a biased rightist Trumplican bootlicker like you should be worn as a badge of honor. Biden’s not my favorite politician, but already he has the great distinction of putting down the depraved lunatic Trump that would go as far as chaining himself to the Oval Office to hold on to power and not go down as the all-time LOSER he really is.

Posted by: Circe | Dec 25 2020 13:34 utc | 49

@ Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 12:23 utc | 44
The issues you rose in your comment are very complex and I won’t delve into them fully in a comment section of a blog.
But I’ll tell you these two observations:
1) your interpretation on Marxism is not only 100% wrong (and I’m not rounding up), but it achieves the feat to condensate all of the failures and prejudices of postwar Western center-leftism (social-democracy);
2) Michael Hudson’s concept of money and debt are fundamentally wrong. The key here is that none of those are an innovation of capitalism; they are just institutional devices created over history. What is important is not that there is money and debt in capitalism, but that they exist in capitalism in the form of capital. Hudson obviously can’t see that, so he tells us absurd little stories about why because of the Code of Hammurabi we should all write off debt in modern capitalism.
There’s a reason those underconsumptionist wackos only emerge in the USA. The USA has the standard fiat currency, so they live up with the illusion they can print money forever without any serious consequences (the MMTers merely say that, if an inflationary cyclone emerges, the State just has to increase taxes). They’ll disappear as fast as the antivaxxers did with the COVID-19 when the Dollar Standard falls.

Posted by: vk | Dec 25 2020 14:12 utc | 51

Merry Christmas Everyone

Posted by: ld | Dec 25 2020 14:37 utc | 53

@c1ue | Dec 25 2020 12:12 utc | 43
Thank you. I’ll do that–And I sensed much the same as you just wrote, did come through clearly in the Hudson/Escobar video karloft1 had put up.
Another pithy and memorable statement Hudson made in that video: [paraphrasing] ‘the powers behind western-style finance/credit capitalism [and the Great Reset/Davos overlord Trash co-conspirator crowd] are working to drive the world to a global *neo-feudal system*…”.
—With themselves as the [over]Lords of course, and ‘the serfs(that would be the rest of us) “will own nothing, and be happy about” [or else?…].
Maybe that’s why Trump trashed the Davos crowd thoroughly in his Jan 21, 2020 address to the *Annual Gathering*:
mockingbird CNN spin: Trump snubs Davos vision in another America-first speech
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-world-economic-forum-davos-switzerland/
Full Trump speech YT (35 min):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2O3Z3IAkUc

Posted by: gm | Dec 25 2020 15:10 utc | 55

@55 Hoyeru
Not so fast. The UK will pay an economic price. Oh, and by the way: Fuck UK hubris. The UK was an ulcer on EU’s ass anyway. I would say: good riddance!

Posted by: Circe | Dec 25 2020 15:21 utc | 57

One more thing my dear Tsirtsyeya, happy holidays, may the coming year be bountiful and free of bugs, of the garden, cell and computer kind.
Pelosi sounds awful in Spanish, almost as awful as the lady’s looks and his fridge with ice cream. Pelo in Spanish is hair, so I call her Pelosi del Sobacosi, that is hairy arm pits, something that does not bother me at all, to the contrary and going against present times fashion, a bit of hair is exciting, if rightly placed.

Posted by: Paco | Dec 25 2020 15:49 utc | 59

India admits liberal democracy an inferior system to socialism, will never catch up with China; will start to play dirty to win:
Why India so interested in South China Sea?

Posted by: vk | Dec 25 2020 16:47 utc | 61

@48 c1ue
Hi C1ue. Merry Christmas to you and yours.
…
I know you often include statistics to back up your claims, which is appreciated. However, in this case, I believe the statistic you cite, that America is increasingly areligious, belies an important confusion on the part of these Americans polled.
I will offer you this: those that are often the least politically-minded or, iow, inactive, still probably have very strong opinions regarding religion, regardless of affiliation. In addition globalists are very anti-religious or, at least, anti-Christian. While conservatives are not only most likely Christian (or Christian-friendly jews) but also very opinionated politically. All groups therefore have strong opinions about religion.
The consumer society, as a result of globalist control wrested away from the nationalists, has confused a great number of Americans and has put them to sleep politically. But they have also been programmed to despise religiousness. These are globalist friendly consumer classes, including the young and “liberal” who have been told that conservatism and religiousness and white supremacy go hand in hand in hand. They are useful golems in the sorcery of globalist control.
But the actual productive classes of the local economy have always been pro-American isolationist, often conservative and Christian. They coalesced under a protectionist banner for many decades, Protestants, Catholics, and good Jews.
The problem the coastal, globalist elites are soon to encounter is one of an out-of-control golem where the sorcerer will be outed and the terms will be named again and out in the open for all to see. The terms of course being the displacement of the racial question in favor of the globalist question.
The confusion that the current outward trend of globalism engenders is nipping at the heels of the globalist class. For instance, locally here in the NW, BLM went to Nike headquarters and protested not for good paying local jobs for the productive class and an end to outsourcing labor for slave-wage jobs abroad, but for more BIPOC admin positions within Nike’s exective group. IOW, they are not protesting any kind of globalist injustice, but rather seeking a mere cut of the take.
The racial lines being drawn in this country are a farce. I know it. You know it. And when our economy craters more as a result of multipolarity in the global order, nationalist (read: Christian (i.e. the alliance of Protestants, Catholics,and good Jews)) will upend the coastal globalist control and bring down the golem to a thunderous crash which will rock the U.S. consumer class back into reality.
The productive class will then coalesce around Christianity as a uniting force always emphasizing American-first isolationism.
This is the rational path of history and what must come provided the globalists go quietly. If they don’t, they threaten a confrontation with Russia that will engulf the world. They are literally currently trapped in a pincer movement.
The question I have repeatedly asked here and now again is whether China will allow the globalist class safe harbor. It is an important question.

Posted by: NemesisCalling | Dec 25 2020 17:19 utc | 63

@Circe #50
Your attacks might be hurtful if you weren’t such an idiot.
Juvenile, incompetent, inexperienced, lacking insight, emotionally fragile, the list goes on and on.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 17:52 utc | 65

@vk #52
As for underconsumption wackos – it is extremely ironic that you ascribe that to Marxism when it is the neoliberal economists who try to justify Western overspending vs. Eastern high savings rates – with the latter as “underconsumption”.
The reality of economics is that complexity yields wealth. The primary reason Western economies are wealthier is that they are far more complex. Complexity encompasses both breath and depth of goods and services as a function of coverage of needs and desires.
This complexity is what money velocity attempts to quantify.
Japan is nearly the perfect example of this. Despite a largely enclosed economy, Japan has an extremely impressive GDP. It is because Japan has a hyper-evolved internal ecosystem.
Yes, the Japanese trade surplus helps but Japan needs this in order to import the vast amounts of energy and other natural resources – the surplus isn’t why Japan has an enormous GDP. Taiwan, for example, actually started earlier than Japan in taking advantage of Western markets (and Western geopolitical trade favoritism), but their economy is puny compared to Japan’s.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 18:02 utc | 67

I second c1ue’s recommendation @69. Also good, though much shorter, is Hudson’s “Finance as Warfare.”

Posted by: spudski | Dec 25 2020 18:10 utc | 69

@NemesisCalling #64
Merry Christmas to you and yours!
I would note that I didn’t say the America overall is becoming areligious; what I stated specifically was that voter polls were showing decreasing overt religious affiliation among voters.
One does not actually have to correlate directly with the other.
As for your thesis: I would agree that the “red states” are more religious in general. However, it is far less clear to me that this “more religious” is actually particularly meaningful given the unique “American way” the major religions are practiced in the US. From my view, a power clique coalescing around Christianity isn’t significantly different than one coalescing around Yahweh or Mammon. Catholic history, in fact, has undergone multiple cycles of corruption and “return to values” – the worst of which yielded the many flavors of Protestantism – which, I think, still dominates American religion in politics, if not on the ground.
Be that as it may, I would note that the notion that Christianity will be the influence which rekindles American unity and direction is highly suspect.
Among other things – Christianity is not united in any way. Among other things, there are a lot of people like me who are not anti-religious or religious, not maniacal vegan Gaia worshipers or cynical coal burning industrialists.
Thus while 65% of Americans poll as “Christian” – I question how many are really strongly so and among those who strongly identify and practice, how united they are.
From my view: the issue is class based, not religious/race/sex based. Multipolarity was used in the late 1800s/early 1900s to divide potential union members in steel shops: the Swedes would be played off against the Finns and Czechs. Thus I see the Democrat party nonsense as pure 2020 version oligarch nonsense.
So while I can hope that Americans will absorb the lessons of 2020 and push for something better – my realistic side believes that the most likely outcome is increased radicalization and division.
As such, I focus on specific top issues:
1) Health care. I don’t care if you’re religious or not – health care in the US is a travesty and an ongoing crime of historic proportions. Americans pay nearly twice as much, as a percentage of per capita income much less in absolute terms, than anyone else in the entire world. This includes Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Monaco – all uber-wealthy enclaves. This is an annual theft of around $2 trillion.
2) Military spending. The US military spend more than the next dozen or so nations following it. It is clearly unnecessary – thought to be fair, much of this is offset by the economic benefits from the dollar as reserve currency.
3) Collusion by American elites in offshoring.
4) Monopoly and oligopoly.
None of these issues have any direct bearing on religion – but they have direct bearing on every American.
My preference for Trump over Biden is entirely based on this – Trump addressed 3) and didn’t make 1), 2) or 4) worse vs. Biden doing literally nothing in any of these areas – and arguably made several worse as part of his historical record.

Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 18:21 utc | 71

Posted by: Lemming | Dec 25 2020 17:08 utc | 63

you do realize your throwing “Putin’s agent” insults around make you look like toddlers in a playground, right?
Makes it very puzzling from a non-american point of view, but funny nonetheless. It only serves to expose americans as brainwashed drones, which I find refreshing after the 90s and 2000s era of worldwide “‘murica fuck-yeah” propaganda.

They eat too much freedom fries, that screws up their brain chemistry.

Posted by: hopehely | Dec 25 2020 18:33 utc | 73

Posted by: vk | Dec 25 2020 14:12 utc | 52
So you’re suggesting you’re the expert on debt while that fool Michael Hudson has been wasting his career?
“LOL”, as the kids say.

Posted by: Observer | Dec 25 2020 19:50 utc | 75

Medicare for all – for Congress that is!
Kyle Kulinski has found the turd floating on the Democrats soup bowl. Too good.
This D party has no shame, no compassion and no brains. You would think it was trying to mirror its other half the Repugnants. But of course the Dimratss thought of it first.
Bemildred #41 re giving Trump asylum. Well I can offer a two month space where he would only have one simple task – to pick up the toothbrush and scrub the sunlight off my front steps and then he could have one bowl of porridge. All the time I would read Marx to him or recite all of Vladimir Putin terrific press conferences. I could read some of my vast library of Russian tomes to him so that his dread fear of the ruskies is driven to peak terror. Stay well comrade.

Posted by: uncle tungsten | Dec 25 2020 20:27 utc | 77

The incident in Nashville on xmas morning amerikan time really underlines the thesis put forward by Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman, in an article entitle “Failure is an Option” that not only is amerika a failed state, it was designed by its ‘constitutional framers’ to become one.
I’m drawn to this youtube vid made about 4 hours after the explosion in Nashville, because it reveals the bureaucratic bouillabaisse of a plethora of different emergency & law enforcement organisations each with a different culture mindest objective that claim to be responsible for attending to and/or investigation this carefully planned to minimise loss of life, incident.
Just as Ackerman says in his article which I apologise for quoting so much from, but it is behind a paywall

” in the absence of a ruling nobility or established church, without a Hegelian bureaucracy or military caste, the only source of legitimate authority Americans will recognize is the sovereignty of the people — yet the concerted exercise of popular sovereignty is precisely what the nation’s institutions are designed to rule out.
The origins of this American Sonderweg lie in a thwarted revolution. In the years immediately after the Revolutionary War, plebeian majorities, still imbued with the ideological radicalism of the rebellion, demanded and obtained from their state legislatures inflationary measures designed to shift the burden of war debts from cash-poor farmers to creditors. More than any other aspect of the turbulent politics of the 1780s, it was horror at such spoliation that inspired James Madison and his fellow Framers to convene their wildcat convention in Philadelphia (the proceedings had no sanction from any provision of the existing constitution), where they resolved that popular majorities must be prevented from ever again extorting policies of property redistribution from the government.
But in a land-abundant continent whose free inhabitants enjoyed the world’s broadest franchise, and where they had done so even before the revolution, there was no question of restricting the suffrage. The Framers had to innovate new methods of fettering popular sovereignty that could function even in the presence of a broad electorate. Madison’s jujitsu solution to this puzzle, taking its inspiration from Montesquieu, was to use the force of democracy against itself: to divide the state into fragments, arming each with a veto over the others — fissuring public authority vertically between the states and national government, and horizontally between the different branches of the state at each level — so that no electorate, however broad or narrow, could exercise real control.
Like a topiary that grows into the shape of the frame that surrounds it, the whole culture of US politics took on the shape of its Madisonian mold. Nothing in the Constitution gives the Supreme Court a veto over duly enacted legislation; nor is there anything in Madison’s text about a supermajority requirement for ordinary laws to pass the Senate (a feature shared by no other representative body in the world). Yet judicial supremacy and the Senate filibuster were smoothly incorporated into the fabric of national institutions.
The Madisonian stamp on the party system was especially consequential. When national party organizations emerged in the 1840s, they took the form of loosely organized patronage machines serving officeholders with intensely local political horizons. As a result, they pointedly lacked central governing bodies with the power to decide uniform national policies and impose them on their candidates and officeholders. (Parties of the Left that did have such features emerged later, but they were written out of politics by discriminatory ballot laws unknown in conventional democracies.)
Thus, the programmatic mass party — the main instrument by which electorates in modern democracies can seek comprehensive adjustments of policy — was stymied from an early date.”

Ackerman goes on to point out using examples of how deliberate, extreme and unusual this is that right from the get go amerikan administration has been fragmented vertically and horizontally to ensure that no matter how ‘the people’ may decide they want their government to act, any uniform action which could impact on the designated ruling elite is simply impossible.
Of course the fact that despite more than 70% of its citizens want medicare for all, but even the alleged radical leftists in congress aren’t prepared to bat for it illustrates the effectiveness of Madison & Co’s stymy.
Hence the plethora of city, state & federal ‘officials’ all (even the US Attorney for Nashville) wearing some militaristic uniform.
The video is especially noteworthy in that apart from the city fire chief, none of these types gave out anything that could remotely described as newsworthy, all they said was “Hi, we’re here so y’all can get back to what you do best, consuming”.
Equally of interest is the reason that amerika has failed so badly in 2020.
Ackerman posits that is because the ruling elite is no longer the cohesive well ordered controller of amerika it once was.
Instead it has become a greedy rabble of frequently competing interests. Quoting Ackerman one last time:
“There is a void at the center of the state, in the space where popular sovereignty ought to be, a deliberately engineered vacuum that sucks in dysfunction, incompetence, and venality of every kind. Incoherent and undemocratic, the American form of government has turned into a trap — a recipe for state failure, scratched out on an ancient parchment.”
The pandemic and amerika’s massive failure to deal with it competently much less justly was Ackerman’s example of amerika’s failure, well I reckon at a micro level the chaotic response that will bubble with intercine conflict unless there is some quick & real breakthrough demonstrates how the inefficiency & ineptitude that is amerika is now a daily obstacle to all its citizens.

Posted by: Debsisdead | Dec 25 2020 21:01 utc | 79

“AT&T outage reported: Planes grounded, 911 disrupted in wake of Nashville explosion. See the outage map”
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2020/12/25/att-outage-internet-down-hours-after-nashville-explosion/4045278001/

Posted by: gm | Dec 25 2020 21:39 utc | 81

Uncle T.
Once again I beat you ass.
Quote from Nancy Pelosi:

If the President is serious about the $2,000 direct payments, he must call on House Republicans to end their obstruction. On Monday, I will bring the House back to session where we will hold a recorded vote on our stand-alone bill to increase economic impact payments to $2,000.

We’ll see what Trumplicans and McConnell do with that!
So what you wrote earlier about her holding a unanimous consent vote Thursday so Trumplicans could knock it down and she could use that as an excuse so as to not hold a full vote on the floor is as I wrote earlier: plain ol’ spin and bullshit.
The only turd you refer to is the one that you pulled out of your hapless brain, disgusting jackass peasant! Or is it Neanderthal? Same difference.
🖕

Posted by: Circe | Dec 25 2020 22:04 utc | 83

The Nashville AT&T Building (aka the Batman Building) at 33 stories, is the tallest building in stat of Tennessee.
According to Wikipedia the building is now owned by some *three letter* company called MTL LEASING LLC, (purchased in 2019, and it looks like AT&T, which renewed its lease in March 2019, is still the major tenant.
The explosion knocked out AT&T services [?including data and cloud storage services??] to a large chunk of Nashville, Cincinnati/adjacent N Kentucky, N. Ala, and N. Ga.

Posted by: gm | Dec 25 2020 22:09 utc | 85

@ Posted by: c1ue | Dec 25 2020 18:02 utc | 68
Marxism is not underconsumptionism. In no circumstances.
What I’m saying is that there’s an active and conscious movement by recent American economists who claim to be Marxist, and they indeed quote Marx’s theories in Capital, but then distort it in the end to deliver an underconsumptionist conclusion or even twist to Marx’s theory.
Evidently, for an American, the world would be a much better place if Marx was wrong and the underconsumptionists were right – but what they’re doing is intellectually dishonest, as they’re attributing to Marx a theory that not only wasn’t his, but one that he refuted in Das Kapital.
If the Americans think underconsumptionism has scientific merits, then speak publicly as underconsumptionists – don’t try to ride on Marx’s reputation to do so. At least the MMTers own the shit they’re talking and writing.

Posted by: vk | Dec 25 2020 22:12 utc | 87

Fake news:
One Vaccine Side Effect: Global Economic Inequality
No. This is what is happening: the rest of the world will receive either one of the five Chinese vaccines (which can be preserved in a normal refrigerator and last for weeks at 27°C, say, in a scenario of power shortage) or the Russian vaccine Sputnik V (whose laboratory has already stated can already produce to half the world’s population). The First World countries have already blocked the Chinese and Russian vaccines because they have to give it to their own Big Pharma, so they’re closed off this international system. But they can’t produce for everyone in those countries because those vaccines are expensive to produce and to store: they’ll have to choose who will and who will not receive the vaccines. You don’t need to be an expert on capitalism to know which will be the main criteria: sure, healthcare workers will be the first (because even ideology has its limits), but a class struggle will commence to decide who’ll be the second. My guess would be that the rich (capitalist class) and their clerical minions (middle class and petite-bourgoisie) will be second and third, respectively. The working class will be last, and the lumpenproletariat may not receive them at all: they’ll be left to die.
The Russian and Chinese people will probably be 100% vaccinated by next year’s end, as will the Cuban people (who have already developed a domestic vaccine either way). The nations able to get out of the First World’s totalitarian grip and knock on China’s and Russia’s door will also have access to enough for their entire populations. This will be a political – not economic – issue.

Posted by: vk | Dec 25 2020 22:22 utc | 89

I know all barflies love polls. Here’s one from China, a place we don’t get to see polling results from often. I thought the report very clear as were the questions. My only beef with the sample is it being 100% urban.
Here’s an explanation of “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy by the Chinese. Probably should be read before looking at the poll results.

Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 25 2020 23:29 utc | 91

@ Posted by: james | Dec 26 2020 0:18 utc | 93
That link wouldn’t work for me but here’s the site:
https://michael-hudson.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/superimperialism.pdf

Posted by: suzan | Dec 26 2020 0:28 utc | 93

gm @73: Re: Marxism “I guess it mostly boils down to where you get your programming from.”
We know where a good portion of the anti-Marxist (capitalist) programming comes from, which is corporate mass media. Of course that happens to be practically all mass media in the West.
I wonder where Marxist programming comes from? I wonder who could be spending even a minuscule fraction on promoting Marxism of what big business spends on selling anti-Marxism? That is quite the mystery.

Posted by: William Gruff | Dec 26 2020 0:55 utc | 95

U are a monkey, u see u do. There is nothing new under the sun, the Jesus, christos, that is the truth.

Posted by: humperdink | Dec 26 2020 1:52 utc | 97

As usual, c1ue is shamelessly incompetent, responding to my @26 with mindless abuse. vk is a regular so @44 c1ue tries to pretend to argue.
“Investment, and most money for that matter, was primarily a function of government in Marx’s era – vs. the masses of private capital that dominate governments today.” This is either insane or maybe just a shameless Big Lie technique. This isn’t even true of England, where the Bank of England started a market in government bonds to stabilize government finances and bind the landed aristocracy investing their surplus (as they had most of the wealth,) and, oh, yes, the businessmen who were starting to get rich from manufactures. In places like the US, private banks *printed their own currency* and there wasn’t a national currency until the famous greenbacks were a desperate wartime measure. Gold and silver was money and people who wanted soft money, the predecessors of the Hudsons, wanted silver. The smarter reformers of the time at least wanted to tax the main form of wealth, land (look up Henry George, though c1ue might just think it a dandy new religion to tout.)
“Nor is the fact that workers in the Western democracies never rose up to overthrow Capital – it was only in 3rd world nations where peasants rose up to overthrow feudal lords, where Communism arose.” In the so-called Third World countries, the working class still led the revolutions. The free and easy assumption that feudalism was still around in later nineteenth century and even in the twentieth century (China in 1949 really was feudal? Sic!) is truly mystifying. I’m afraid the only obvious explanation is the free and easy assumption that the lesser races are hopelessly backwards. Even more offensive is the pretense that workers’ revolutions had nothing to do with “Western democracies.” The Chartists, teachers of Karl Marx—a man who unlike the c1ue’s of the world actually learned from workers!—were essential to creating English democracy, such as it was. French democracy was critically shaped by the wwokers’ element in the repeated revolutions in France, including their very impure form as “sans culottes.” Workers rose in Germany and were defeated, to give us, eventually, Hitler. (Note the absence of Leninism in the German Revolution in 1918, 1919, indeed no mass Leninist party till 1920, after the best chance was lost.) Fascism arose in the ferocious struggle against workers’ revolution. As a fellow opponenet of revolution, this is very likely not a problem for c1ue, though.
Petty bourgeois delusions about restoring “middle class” honest, “free competition” by kicking out the foreign competition, sticking it to the big bourgois who connive in betraying their country is reactionary utopian. The most contemptible part about pretending to support Trump for stuff like that is the Trump hasn’t successfully pursued any such policy. His stupid tariff spats are no more effective than Jefferson’s dimwitted Embargo Act.
Hudson is also probably wrong about the earliest states creating money simply for taxation. Money for foreign trade, exchange, was almost certain deeply implicated. Sumerian temples, Lydian monarchs etc. would find it easier to use money than manage barter.

Posted by: steven t johnson | Dec 26 2020 2:09 utc | 99