|
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2026-022
Last week’s posts on Moon of Alabama:
—
Other issues:
RIP Michael Parenti:
Empire:
SouthAm:
Syraqistan:
Zionism:
Europe:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
Posted by: Nobody Special | Jan 26 2026 23:16 utc | 214
He is so angry at Drumpf, the fascist dictator of Drumpf land, that he is cheering on the CIA stealing money from working class folks to send it to Israel so Israel
—-
Give me a break. Because I’m against Trump, THEREFORE I am in favor of the CIA. This is tenth grade Manichaean “reasoning”. I’d laugh at you, but you are too sick to be funny. And just a note, we are all bored with the mockery that is the stock and trade of disruptors. Obviously you can’t “discuss” anything without resorting to slander.
Your “points” 1-6 are utterly irrelevant to the unprecedented assault on the Constitution by Trump. Whatever money is involved with the Somalis (which you do not bother to quantify) is chump change compared to the extra $500 Billion that Trump wants to add to the already obscene Department of War budget, the $150 Billion that he has already added to the DHS budget, and the $100 Billion he has cut from healthcare support.
Whatever “damage” you assert has been done by the “CIA supported” Somalis doesn’t move the needle compared to Trump’s assault on the Bill of Rights and the Separation of Powers. However “alien” the Somalis are, they are less harmful than Nazi-manques like Bovino, trigger happy Call of Duty players, and psychyopathic dog murderers like Noem.
Leaving aside your CIA fetish, the whole moral panic about Somali fraud, the smears about IQ 68, are straight from Trump central, from one “reporter” who went around to some day care centers and “proved” there is massive fraud.Anyone who isn’t a shill for his attempt at dictatorship has long since realized that anything Trump or his hand-picked loyalists says is a lie until proven otherwise. The whackjob reactionary line is that the Somalis are some vast Sorosian (or in your case, CIA) conspiracy. Could all you conspiracy theorists please get your talking points aligned?
What is really happening is that citizens are outraged by lawless, murderous gangsters, and they are organizing to prevent further arbitrary murders. According to Trump central, Mr. Pretti was really an assassin (later retracted), but he is still called an agent provocateur of some “vast conspiracy”. The coordinated lying agitprop in the face of the damning videos is frightening. Even some GOP, the WSJ, and Fox have called them out. But, to you, what’s happening in Minneapolis is ONLY about some CIA conspiracy. (Not saying they might not be somehow peripherally involved, but this is DHS’s and the FBI’s baliwick.)
I’m not saying Trump is a hero. I have no idea if whoever controls him is better or worse than the CIA faction john brewster supports. I’m just saying that what is happening in Minnesota is a CIA / Mossad color revolution style operation. In fact, it looks exactly like what the CIA / Mossad recently pulled in Iran. And john brewster is cheering on the CIA / Mossad. I can only roll my eyes, give a chuckle and move on.
Well, you have really lost the thread here. You compare the actual depredations of Trump to some vague CIA conspiracy theory. Reality check: Trump is a clear and present danger to the Constitution, the rule of law, and the Separation of Powers. He is a crook, constantly enriching himself and spitting on the Emoluments clause of the Constitution as he floats meme coins, dismisses Federal regulations for and grants pardons to anyone who pays him a big enough bribe, and uses the power of his office to set up business deals for his children.
Saying that opposing him somehow supporting the CIA is a strawman to shut up any opposition to Trump. Far from saying you “have no idea” whether Trump is “better or worse”, your position is objectively pro-Trump; and that makes you a hypocrite.
Posted by: john brewster | Jan 27 2026 2:22 utc | 220
More Evidence of Destructive Deflation in China | naked capitalism
This begins with an explanation of why deflation is bad. This should not be controversial but it is. I think that’s a testimonial to the power of right-wing media to propagandize. Hard money is good for creditors. [Soft money is a populist—in the comprehensible sense of the word, as in populists in the nineteenth century—nostrum. It’s no cure for capitalism either.] Smith moves on, noting that
Even though China had been stereotyped as export driven (it has yet to transition to a consumer-led economy), it had for many years had investment, particularly in real estate, as a bigger driver of growth.
This is, by the way though I doubt Smith would dare admit it, a form of financialization. Financialization has been a part of the business cycle and normal capitalist function for centuries. After demonstrating reason to see investment, the main driver of growth, in relative decline, she observes
China’s trade surplus is so large that it is already pushing the limits of what its partners can absorb.
Moving on to a South China Morning Post article (impeccably right-wing source,) she quotes the article, which cites a mainland professor by the way,
As China grapples with persistent deflationary pressure, scholars from one of the country’s top universities have urged the government to take more forceful action to prevent the economy from becoming trapped in a Japan-style downward spiral…
Of course the right-wing paper doesn’t notice that Japan failed to solve their stagnation problem for decades, but neither apparently does Smith. The basic assumption—shared by Smith is very much a believer in reformed capitalism—is that proper policies will cure capitalism. She then turns to another right-wing paper, the Wall Street Journal.
China had an earlier overcapacity/deflationary pressures problem in middle of the last decade, which it did combat successfully. Most experts argue that it will be harder to do this time due to the difficultly of rationalizing these sectors (for instance, electronic vehicle plants often had investment support of local governments; rationalizing would mean making some areas winners and others losers) along with the sheer magnitude of the challenge being greater this time/
What she means by rationalizing is limiting production, bankrupting whole cities and even regions, lowering wages and living standards, etc. The popular gimmick in such circles for fixing capitalism is increased consumption. She seems to assume that the backstopping of this by expanded social welfare spending such as employment insurance, pension reform in the sense of actually providing pensions to live on, etc. will suffice. In practice, most so-called consumer economies has financialized real estate, home mortgages but also auto loans and credit cards. At this point, with the real estate deleveraging already pressuring banks profit margins, expecting a Western-style credit card bubble is unlikely. Hence the emphasis on social welfare spending. When capitalism is in trouble the brave and bold thinkers like Smith think of ways to socialize their costs and losses. She concludes by extensively quoting one Brad Setser thread on X blaming Xi personally for his ideological hostility to social welfare spending. It doesn’t take too long for capitalist propagandists to notice that in practice the socialist government of PRC is an obstacle to capitalist development according to the most complete market principles. The irony I think is that Xi’s reluctance may lie in old-fashioned austerianism, namely the notion that the state must pay its way with money it gets from private hands, not run the economy.
It’s not obvious to me that Smith is thinking clearly. Smith early in the post observes
Recall that it is excessive private debt to GDP levels that generate financial crises.
This is true when the general rate of profit persistently declines and further investment in financial assets like mortgages, loans, credit card accounts and of course stocks and bonds stop acting as credit that stimulates further investment—which means more growth—into a burden that causes further declines in profit, deflation, etc. To my knowledge there are no believers in capitalism who can supply a reasonable theory of the dynamics of profits, either in the business cycle or in the long run. Smith appears to be no exception.
Aside from concluding that it would be utmost folly to think capitalist economists have the welfare of the Chinese people, much less the Chinese state, at heart, much less that they have a rational understanding of a fundamentally irrational system, it seems clear that opposition to Xi is opposition to the national government, the CPC and what remains of Maoism.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Jan 28 2026 19:31 utc | 270
|
