Bulletins and News Discussion from July 22nd to July 28th, 2024 - Fracas in Dhaka - COTW: Bangladesh
Bulletins and News Discussion from July 22nd to July 28th, 2024 - Fracas in Dhaka - COTW: Bangladesh
Image is of vehicles set aflame by protestors near a government building.
Since July 1st, students have protested the unpopular proposal in which 30% of government jobs would be reserved for veterans of the 1971 War of Independence and their relatives. In a country with a youth unemployment rate of around 20% and a population of 170 million, a large number of otherwise eligible and competent people would have been forced out due to favouritism for veterans. As with basically every country on the planet over the last couple years, Bangladesh is suffering from inflation and an increasing cost-of-living, further exacerbating tensions.
The student protests have been met with significant violence by the government - local newspapers report that over a hundred protestors have been killed, and thousands have been injured. Guns and tear gas have been used. Additionally, the government has completely cut internet access throughout Bangladesh to prevent organizing, which has had some success in dividing protestors, but has also only further angered various parts of the country due to the massive impact to Bangladesh's online industries and various startups. And a national curfew has been in place to limit movement, with the population told to remain home if they want to be safe.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh relented, stating that now, only 5% of government jobs would be reserved for veterans and their families. 2% would be allocated to members of minorities, with the remaining 93% distributed on merit. A period of tentative calm has arrived, but Hasnat Abdullah, a coordinator of the Anti-Discrimination Student Movement, has stated that unless the government restores the internet, removes the curfew, releases detainees, and forces certain ministers to resign within a few days, then the protests will resume.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Bangladesh! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
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The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week's thread is here.
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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
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We need to talk about a second Trump presidency and its effect on US imperialism, now that Biden is out of the way.
If you’ve seen my posts before you know that I am one of the few here that actually think Biden is a competent imperialist. Now that he’s irrelevant, we should contrast Trump’s and Biden’s policies (both have a one-term report card as president) and see how and why Trump will fumble the US imperialist ambitions.
First, Trump does not understand that the US is no longer an industrial power, but a financial power
MAGA is necessarily self-defeating, if it is being taken seriously. The main obstacle to the re-industrialization of the US is not China stealing jobs from America like Trump has been selling to his supporters, but finance capital aka Wall St that will do anything to prevent American from earning higher wages (an inevitable consequence of industrialization) which is detrimental to the banking sector. Not to mention the rise of labor movement - the re-proletarianization process - now that labor is re-tied to production, not debt anymore. Capitalists don’t want to deal with that - that’s the whole point of outsourcing American production base overseas - to crush the rising labor movement at home during the 1970s. Finance capitalists certainly don’t want that.
Even if Trump forces through a MAGA re-industrialization, how are you ever going to beat China in industrial terms? You don’t have the supply chain, you don’t have the low wage labor advantage, you will need many decades to re-acquiesce the technical proficiency required to compete at the global market, assuming you can find such skilled labor to begin with. Unless you have a central planning socialist economy, you will need to compete at the export market in order to keep the investment going. In doing so, the US is going to be destroyed by Chinese production, not to mention the dozens of Belt and Road countries coming online soon.
America’s strength lies in its currency and the deep well of finance capital it has amassed over the decades and has penetrated every corner of the global market. It is propped up by the virtual sector (finance, insurance, real estate, rent and lease) that boosts the strength of the US currency and thus its ability to wreck other economies and extort “free ride” from the rest of the world.
Biden understood this and played the correct move: let China build the supply chain for America. Because much of the intrastructure loan (~70%) for the Belt and Road countries were denominated in dollars, that means these countries will need to sell their products to the US to earn dollars to repay their Chinese creditors. With China unwilling to cancel their debt, that is the only way these countries can grow their economy. What the US needs to do then, is simply to build the IMEC supply chain logistics through India, flood India with dollars and obtain the goods through there, because these BRI countries will certainly be looking for ways to earn those dollars.
Why would China do that, you ask? Because the Chinese strategy is fundamentally anti-Trump. I have read from some commentators that China wants to use those BRI countries to flood America with cheap goods to destroy the US domestic industries - which is exactly what will happen if Trump proceeds with the MAGA “bring back the jobs” strategy. On the other hand, Biden’s strategy was practically immune to Belt and Road because they never wanted to re-industrialize in the first place! With so much loans given out in dollars, the US can easily own the entire supply chain once they have been built with the help of China/BRICS.
Trump came from the New York landlord class but it really shows, as evident from his failed business ventures in the past, that he never understood how the landlords wield their power.
Second, Trump wants to curb “illegal immigration” but does not have a solution to the labor problem
America has 11 MILLION “illegal immigrants”, good luck trying to play the whack-a-mole game while depleting all your resources doing so. It is never going to be done. And even if it somehow managed, how are you going to replace the source of labor that these immigrant workers have toiled?
Biden’s strategy was much simpler and effective: impoverish Europe, then transplant the European immigrant workers fleeing war and fascism into America to help build the Fourth Reich.
What Biden understood here correctly, and Trump did not, is that America is fundamentally a country of immigrants. It derives its strength from being able to poach immigrants from the rest of the world to come work in America - for the simple reason that the dollar is the most attractive currency in the world.
Think about this: developing countries spends tens of thousands of dollars if not more to feed, educate and cultivate their youth, give them scholarships to study overseas. Guess what, they all ended up wanting to stay in Western countries because the standards of living and the economic opportunities are simply magnitudes greater in the Western imperialist core. America gets free labor without needing to waste a single cent. America just need to wreck other countries’ economies and people will want to leave their home to come to America. It is doing the same to Europe right now.
Third, Trump wants to reduce deficit, which will be disastrous for the US economy
Trump is already talking about bringing interest rates down if he becomes president, which is a good thing from an economic perspective until you realize that a) high interest rate is squeezing the Global South and crunching their dollar reserves, making them more dependent on the dollar to function; and b) America’s deficit from the past year has been disproportionately driven by interest income payment due to the high interest payout from short-term treasury bills.
The first one - squeezing the Global South - is a risky gambit. Push them a bit too far and those countries will abandon the dollar and look for an alternative. In fact, we were seeing some movement along this front in the summer of 2022, when the interest rate hikes first began. However, Biden correctly gambled that China and BRICS would not dare to do anything to challenge the dollar, and it paid off. As of right now, 2 years after the fact, BRICS still hasn’t come up with a viable alternative. At the same time, a trillion dollar of interest payout in one year alone, starting to trickle down to the foreign sector even if you consider that most of the interest income went to rich people’s pockets. With two dozen African countries on the verge of default, and many more under severe dollar crunch, the newly liquified dollar is coming to provide temporary relief. Everyone now works harder to earn dollars just to survive another day. As such, the dollar remains king, and the gambit worked.
Additionally, lowering the interest rate is risky for US domestic economy - with nearly half of the 8% GDP deficit coming from interest payout, that means cutting the interest rate will inevitably cut the deficit spending if no new money creation comes from the Federal Reserve.
Trump brags about reducing America’s public debt, raised concerns about the $34 trillion debt. If Trump starts to lower interest rates, stop issuing new debt, then the deficit spending will hit a wall, and the US economy will enter a recession.
Fourth, Trump doesn’t understand the role of foreign wars in maintaining dollar hegemony
Trump is campaigning on ending wars under Biden (or at the very least, reducing foreign aid spending in Ukraine), bragged about not starting a single war during his term (maybe too incompetent to start a war with Iran after the Soleimani assassination lol), but he doesn’t understand that wars are what made the GDP goes up, and by extension, the strength of US dollar.
America doesn’t care about their equipments getting blown up in Ukraine, or in Israel. Under finance capitalism, every piece of military equipment blown up means GDP goes up, it means the US dollar becomes stronger. America then uses the strength of its dollar to wreck other economies. Without this, the military industrial complex grift cannot continue. How is Trump ever going to keep the military industrial complex happy?
Trump and Republicans alike criticize Biden’s foreign aid - $175 billion to Ukraine in the last 2 years. “Whoa so much of our taxpayers money goes to arm Ukraine!” Yes, but it serves the primary function of providing dollar liquidity to a world that is under dollar crunch.
Take Europe for example. After Nord Stream and sanctions against Russia, they now need to import American energy to sustain their manufacturing sector, and everything else. Without providing a channel for them to obtain dollars, they will be forced to abandon the dollar. Remember, you want to control the countries with your currency.
Biden understood this, but Trump doesn’t. Trump may be a Zionist, but without the strength of the dollar, the US empire cannot support the genocidal regime in Israel. That will be Israel’s downfall.
By giving billions of foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, these countries are going to use those free dollars to buy shit from Europe, which can in turn use those dollars to import energy from America. Who benefits? The US finance capital and the oil and gas sector.
Which brings us to the next part:
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Good effortpost, comrade.
comrade, i want to preface this saying your analysis was thought-provoking, and i enjoyed your perspective. i hope this doesn’t come off as aggressive or attacking you.
trump will not fumble US imperialism so much as point it in a different direction. the difference between trump and biden represents a historic tension within the american bourgeoisie. you rightly point out that the factories of old were removed in the interest of finance capital, and true on-shoring would undo that economic trick. however, there are at least two sorts of bourgeois still around that have contrary interests to that. first, members of the military industrial complex and anyone who seriously wants a USamerican hot war wants/ needs industrial production in order to wage war. this is not going very well, as we can see with efforts to bring chip fabs to USamerica and in failures to scale up 155 mm shell production. the economic incentives for these bougies, as newsheads are well aware, encourage massive boondoggle wunderwaffe in order to shore up profit margins, not actually taking on the dirty work of making weapons.
the second group is the still existing national bourgeois of the US. while they don’t necessarily produce 80% of the world’s steel anymore, they are much more likely to be seen and heard in a community. a five person private equity firm can nominally produce most of the world’s seat belts, but local fields and factories provide jobs that feel more real to the common person, even if they don’t make as much money. additionally, the agriculture and manufacturing interests broadly support trump. to give an example local to me, a comrade of mine has been working software at Haas Automation for a few months now. the management and ownership support trump. they cannot produce machine tools that are price and quality competitive with chinese competitors, because of supply chain inefficiencies in southern california, the rising cost of materials, and radical shifts in the immigration and labor arena that mean they can’t pay assemblers minimum wage anymore. trump is offering to fix that, somehow. we know it won’t work, but the pitch is being made to people who really want to hear it.
if the cost of capital inputs in the US goes up in order to encourage offshoring out of the US and brain drain into the US, there are still bougies with an interest against those capital incentives. could the average cattle rancher or drone manufacturer explain this process? no, USamericans lack education and curiosity. while i agree with your analysis that finance capital has a dominant role in the US, it is not irrational for a group of bourgeois who feel they are being left out to try and break in. it’s unlikely they’ll succeed, but the resolution of the contradiction between financial and industrial interests will come to a head in USamerica if we keep playing chicken with china.
to your first point, i think you could more easily explain most of the BRI with china’s repeated commitment to win-win diplomacy and the real issue of producing more stuff than their domestic market can handle. if your nation’s company uses your excess steel to build essential infrastructure that you get to collect partial income from while the country you’re doing it in thanks you for it, then that’s in your self-interest. i will say i’m broadly skeptical of the idea of biden as a savvy operator, but specially how do railroads in laos and ports in kazakhstan build USamerican supply chains? i could be wrong about the numbers here, but i believe the reason 70% of the loans are in dollars is because the serious use of loans denominated in national currencies didn’t start until 2022, and the BRI started in 2013.
to your second point, educated immigrants are the cause of a labor crisis for some bougies. yes, finance capital sees the college educated coders of the worlds and wants them in SF and NYC. for decades, most of the states bordering mexico have in some way or another built parts of the economy on the assumption of cheap, readily available, fairly skilled labor. people expect to be able to hire latinos who are fully qualified, do not complain, and work for less than minimum. it’s a reflection of the deep seated entitlement and white supremacy of our culture. now, the real cause of the decline in this availability was a combination of labor organizing amongst migrants and improving material conditions in mexico. see the above about the education and curiosity of the USamerican people.
to your third point, i think you are completely correct about the actual long term consequences of lowering interest rates. to trump and the average USamerican and the average USbougie, the rest of the world does not exist and they miss cheaper mortgages/ loans for their companies. did biden meaningfully differ from this? i mean i know there’s the veil of ignorance between the fed and the president, but i think the USbougies, finance and otherwise, are legitimately split on whether to lower interest rates or not. the firehose of free money was really nice, even if some naysayers keep saying you can’t have infinite money forever.
to your fourth point, donald trump’s claims of being anti-war are complete bluster. he tore up the intermediate nuke treaty, he tore up the iran deal, he droned more people than obama, and he stopped reporting civilian casualties from drone strikes. yemen, somalia, iraq, and syria experienced no lightening in US imperialism under trump. he moved the USamerican embassy to jerusalem. afghanistan got several years of no change before a half-assed negotiated withdrawal. what trump understands is that the people are tired of war, or at least of this war on terror. they are especially tired of the wars where US soldiers are really officially present, which was just Afghanistan. USamerica is now postured with a dozen little tripwire forces around the world to stir things up, with no major casualty causing commitments. in theory, that’s all so we can better transition towards the pacific. that aligns with a faction of the intelligence and state apparati. biden’s emphasis on nato and israel are commitments unique to him, and people interested in one or the other have aligned themselves with him.
to your fifth point, during obama’ second term, 15.8 gigabarrels of oil reserves began extracting in the US in megaprojects (producing >20k barrels/ day). that’s using the best probable estimates of some of the reserves. this was broadly seen as restarting american oil production. under trump’s term, 440 gigabarrels of reserves began extracting in megaprojects. the amount of crude oil USamerica extracted tripled from 2010-2020. the north dakotan and texan shale fields over bet on oil prices, started overproducing, and accidentally brought the price of oil down. trump happened to be president. in terms of signing off permits for exploiting public land and gutting the EPA, the trend line of evermore oil and gas in the US increased just as stably under trump as obama.
to your sixth point, you claim trump is an incompetent imperialist for trying to force NATO to spend more on the military, but biden is a genius imperialist for aiding the brain drain of europe and the dismantling of its infrastructure. are these not dual processes? increasingly bellicose rhetoric makes europe ratchet up spending, which forces cuts on social services. declining standards of living and the increasing risk of having to make or wield weapons leads to the people who can afford to leave leaving.
i’ll readily agree that trump seems to be less bloodthirsty about russians and eastern europeans. but doesn’t he more than make up for that with how heinous his rhetoric and actions are towards latin americans? in terms of preserving imperial hegemony, it’d be smartest to cut bait on the failed ukrainian experiment. depending on whether you think we need a war with china or not, the next step people within the state and intelligence agencies could want is double checking that the US grip is secure under the incredibly chauvinist monroe doctrine. i do not think trump is the dark horse anti-imperialist-by-way-of-incompetence some claim.
There are too many points to respond to so I’m just going to go for the main ones, feel free to let me know if you need further clarification:
One, the military industrial complex has been financialized since the Gulf War, when American pulled off a total and complete victory over Iraqi Soviet armaments with minimal losses. Since then, the Pentagon had to find ways to get Congress funding for more war machines, which is how you get trillion dollar trash like the F-35. The goal is no longer to produce functional weapons, but to grift the US federal government into spending endless money into products that never work.
Two, You are correct there are national bourgeoisie that are industrialists. They belong to a minority and are helpless against the finance capitalists. You cannot look at Boeing - one of the greatest aerospace engineering company - today, and tell me the industrial capitalists still hold anything other than marginal influence in America. Every sector in America has been financialized.
This is how you get hospitals taken over by private equity firms that no longer care about quality of healthcare, but to cut costs and forced overtime to squeeze out every ounce of profit. This is how you get schools and universities getting involved in real estate ventures that care more about asset price inflation than to provide quality education. This is how you get tech companies like Intel getting into unprecedented scandals because they care more about stocks buyback and paying out dividends to shareholders rather than to engineer actual, functional products.
You cannot look at all of that and tell me there is still an industrial capital in the US. They have been completely financialized. Every sector.
Three, of course Belt and Road countries benefit from Chinese investments. That’s a given. But the main problem is still finance capital.
Let me give you an example: before the USSR dissolved and became the Russian Federation, the ruble-dollar exchange was determined to be at 0.6 RUB/USD. American policy consultants came in and say, look, if you want to integrate into the free market, you have to calculate your economy GDP our way. In the USSR, the size of their economy was calculated in Gross National Products (GNP) terms, and was at its worst only half the size of US industries in the 1980s.
When the USSR dissolved, Russia had to convert their calculation into Gross Domestic Products (GDP), which include all the virtual assets like stocks and bonds, real estate, rent/lease etc. Russia’s GDP was nearly the same as their GNP (<2% difference), since their industries were not financialized. But suddenly, the US GDP appeared many times larger than Russia’s economy. The ruble fell from 0.6 RUB/USD, to 120 RUB/USD in 1992, then 1000 RUB/USD in 1993, then 6000 RUB/USD by 1998 - after which it reset. Russia defaulted.
That’s the power of finance capital. All your Soviet industrial assets became pennies for the US capitalists to play with. Imagine your $100 bill is worth a quarter a year from now - it can happen in a world run by finance capitalism and it HAS happened to Russia already.
As long as the Belt and Road loans are denominated in US dollars, the US can easily gain control of it. That’s because they need the dollars to pay back their debt. If China’s calculation were to flood America with cheap goods from BRI countries, then they will succeed with Trump, but not Biden.
Four, Trump is a populist. He doesn’t understand how the system works. He only says things that can get him votes. Like a snake oil salesman, he’s selling the American people a pipe dream that can never be fulfilled. He says he wants to stop wars, but in doing so (even performatively), he will only fumble whatever system that was already in place, leading to disastrous outcome for US imperialism. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. Trump wants to have both. Either go full imperialist bloodbath mode, like Biden did, or risk throwing away all that gave US imperialism its strengths.
Like all populists, Trump cannot change the system. He can only pretend to change, but there is no way he can defeat Wall St, if he even wants to do so. Same as Bernie. Only a revolution can destroy Wall St, and it’s not going to happen in America.
Gonna come back to this when my brain isn't melting out of my ears.
Interesting that the major backers of Trump seem to be Silicon Valley. How does that figure into your analysis?
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How will kamala factor in? I feel like she might have a chance
Biden’s strategy was much simpler and effective: impoverish Europe, then transplant the European immigrant workers fleeing war and fascism into America to help build the Fourth Reich.
The war is very far from Central EU and the "white" label becomes more and more honorary the further east you go.
Besides why are we mixing up narratives? We know the material and historical origin of the war. We also know why the sanctions were put in place and we definitely know Biden even 2 years ago was just as senile as he is today.
His neolib foreign policy team only cared about Ukraine as an opportunity to weaken Russia while allowing for more grifting for the MIC. There was never this grand master plan or any other.
They actualy believed the sanctions would work. They actualy believed Russia would at minimum suffer a color revolution or get stuck on Afghanistan 2.0. They literaly wrote articles about this possibility.
So we can't turn around and pretend they actually had a plan and thought the EU would crash or even that the white ubermench would be suffering so much they would take a plane ticket to work in a Mcdonalds in NY.
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If what you've outlined is also how the national security state sees things, then Harris will 100% be president. There's no way they will have Trump fuck things up.
Biden has already appointed Harris as his successor, so Biden is no longer needed in the same way a frail king is no longer needed when an ambitious heir apparent is old enough. Regardless of whether Biden has Covid or "Covid," his health will quickly turn for the worst, he'll probably die before election day (when's the last time we saw Biden live?) with help from his "doctors" should his body prove to be unusually tenacious, Harris will use this time of national mourning to consolidate her position, and MSM will platform a bunch of red MAGA freaks mocking the late great Biden to further alienate people away from Trump. If that isn't sufficient, they can always rig the votes or get faithless electors in swing states refuse to vote for the felon to be president.