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Bulletins and News Discussion from March 3rd to March 9th, 2025 - Austerity And Its Consequences - COTW: Greece

Image is of a crowd protesting in Athens.

Last week, on Friday, hundreds of thousands of Greeks poured into the streets to strike and protest on the second anniversary of the deadliest train crash in Greek history, in which 57 people died when a passenger train collided with a freight train. On this February 28th, public transportation was virtually halted, with train drivers, air traffic controllers, and seafarers taking part in a 24 hour strike - alongside other professions like lawyers, teachers, and doctors.

The train crash is emblematic of the decay of state institutions brought about from austerity being forced on Greece in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, in which the IMF and the EU (particularly Germany) plundered the country and forced privatization. While Greece has somewhat recovered from the dire straits it was in during the early 2010s, the consequences of neoliberalism are very clearly ongoing. Mitsotakis' right-wing government has still not even successfully implemented the necessary safety procedures two years on, and so far, nobody has been convicted nor punished for their role in the accident. The austerity measures were deeply unpopular inside Greece and yet the government did not respond to, or ignored, democratic outcry.

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  • South Korea air force jets accidentally drop bombs on homes, injuring 15

    POCHEON, South Korea, March 6 (Reuters) - Fifteen people were injured in South Korea on Thursday after bombs dropped by fighter jets landed in a civilian district, damaging houses and a church during military exercises in Pocheon, the Air Force and the fire department said. The Gyeonggi-do Bukbu Fire Services said in a statement that 15 people were wounded, out of which two were seriously hurt. Pocheon is about 40 kilometres (25 miles) northeast of Seoul, near the heavily militarised border with North Korea. South Korea's Air Force said eight 500-pound (225kg) Mk82 bombs from KF-16 jets fell outside the shooting range during joint live-fire exercises. "We are sorry for the damage caused by the abnormal drop accident, and we wish the injured a speedy recovery," the Air Force said in a statement. Residents in the area have protested about the disturbance and potential danger from nearby training grounds for years. Residents were evacuated around midday as authorities checked whether there were any unexploded bombs, Yonhap news agency said. Reuters' photographs from the scene showed shattered windows and a church building strewn with debris. The defence ministry said earlier on Thursday that South Korea and U.S. forces were holding their first joint live-fire exercises in Pocheon, linked to annual military drills due to start next week.

    South Korea and the United States will kick off their annual Freedom Shield exercise on Monday, said Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The joint drills, which will run until March 20, aim to strengthen the readiness of the alliance for threats such as North Korea, the JCS said. This year's drills will reflect "lessons learned from recent armed conflicts" and North Korea's growing partnership with Russia, it added. "Our planners look across the globe and identify the trends that are changing and we look at how we can incorporate that into our exercises," Ryan Donald, a spokesperson for the United States Forces Korea (USFK), told a media briefing on Thursday. About 70 combined field training sessions are scheduled for this year's exercise, said Lee Sung-jun, a spokesperson for Seoul's JCS.

  • China Could Build an “Island Chain” Around America

    • damn it must be cool to be capable of building things

    • china could do a stinky poo in my bed

    • “Over the course of the last decade,” writes Admiral Holsey, “the United States has focused predominantly on the Indo-Pacific, while China has taken a global approach.” By going global, China has emplaced Latin America and the Caribbean “on the front lines of a decisive and urgent contest to define the future of our world.” The SOUTHCOM chief sees Beijing’s gambits in the Western Hemisphere as part of a globe-spanning strategic offensive: “China is assailing U.S. interests from all directions, in all domains, and increasingly in the Caribbean archipelago—a potential offensive island chain.”

      We're dealing with levels of projection that have never been seen before on this planet. And the worst part is that I know they don't actually believe that China is fucking funnelling guns and fortifications into the Caribbean or whatever, they're just writing this drivel to prod Trump into devoting more resources to the region + Latin America.

      [...] By securing commercial and diplomatic access to seaports spanning the globe, then, China has been laying the groundwork for a network of Mahanian-style bases for many years. What would Holsey’s offensive island chain look like? For one thing, it would not be an island chain occupied entirely by authoritarian societies friendly to China and hostile to the United States. That’s a marked difference from Asia’s first island chain, inhabited solely by U.S. allies, partners, or friends closely spaced from one another on the map and wary of the mainland.

      Nor would an offensive Caribbean island chain completely sever U.S. access to the Atlantic and Pacific, the way the first island chain—which encloses 100 percent of China’s continental crest—obstructs access to the Western Pacific and points beyond.

      All of that being the case, it is doubtful in the extreme that China will negotiate military access throughout the Greater and Lesser Antilles, the loose line of islands that forms the northerly and easterly rim of the Caribbean Sea. The PLA Navy will be unable to make the Antilles into an impassable barrier, the way the United States and its Asian allies and partners can by stationing military implements along the first island chain.

      But the Chinese navy could cause serious trouble anyway. Think about plausible candidates for PLA Navy bases in the Caribbean. Two stand out: Cuba and Venezuela. Cuba is a fraternal communist country, and perpetually impoverished. Thus, both out of ideological solidarity and in order to boost its economy, it might well prove receptive to CCP entreaties to host Chinese warships. Venezuela is ruled by a leftist regime and might likewise prove a convivial host for China’s navy.

      ...

      That Havana or Caracas would go so far as to host such a system is doubtful: the United States does remain the regional hegemon by far, and the last attempt by an external great power to station its missiles on Cuba nearly led to thermonuclear war. But either of these countries might take the lesser step of admitting PLA Navy flotillas on a rotating or permanent basis without that shore fire support. Even smaller-scale arrangements would let Beijing threaten to stage what Mahan’s contemporary Julian S. Corbett called a “war by contingent.” Corbett recalls that a modest contingent of British Army forces supported by the Royal Navy landed in Iberia during the Napoleonic Wars. The army fought alongside Portuguese and Spanish partisans, bogging down French forces sorely needed for the main fighting front to France’s east.

      In short, Britain extracted disproportionate gain from the amphibious expedition. The Iberian theater was so distracting, and devoured so many martial resources, that the little emperor wryly called it his “Spanish Ulcer.”

      Think about what responses a Chinese naval presence—a Caribbean Ulcer—would likely elicit from Washington. It would beckon U.S. leaders’ strategic gaze to home waters, long regarded as a safe sanctuary. Tending to that zone of neglect would reduce the policy energy available for theaters like East Asia. It would stretch U.S. naval and military forces that are already under strain trying to manage security commitments all around the Eurasian perimeter. It would probably compel the U.S. Navy to station a squadron of combatant ships at one or more Gulf Coast seaports for the first time since the Navy vacated them after the Cold War. That would impose a new, old theater on the U.S. Navy—amplifying the demands on a too-lean fighting force. And on and on.

      First, the US Navy doesn't need any help to fall apart given the war they waged to unblock the Red Sea - and lost. Second, this is all under the assumption that China will indeed want to militarily challenge the US for hegemony, when there's no indication of that at all. They don't even want to economically challenge the US for hegemony right now, much to our disappointment. I think it's infinitely more likely that China will eventually gain Taiwan back by some method or another (probably after a couple US aircraft carriers crash into each other and their satrapies in South Asia collapse due to lack of funding and/or internal unrest), then just basically chill. There's no reason for China to get involved in a second Cold War when they know perfectly well how the first one ended for the USSR. They see how well the whole "world empire into which all goods flow and which produces nothing of productive value" thing is going for the US (increasingly badly) and rightfully see no reason to aspire to that position, when peaceful co-operation does genuinely seem more effective, efficient, and less likely to lead to catastrophic (and potentially nuclear) wars.

    • China is gonna build a hospital in Trinidad and Tobago and they're gonna call it a military base and say they're getting encircled

  • A thought just occurred to me on these tariffs. There is of course the bullying and domestic political reasons for Trump doing it. But it could also be accomplishing a roundabout, latent greedflation sort of thing for US companies.

    These tariffs go into effect, US companies importing these goods raise their prices at least in commensurate, but in many cases a little more. It sucks for a while but the economy absorbs it generally; people are just forced to take out more credit and/or shift their spending (even though for a great many, there is not much more blood left in the stone). Eventually Trump takes the tariffs away, and perhaps companies lower their prices a little bit, as a PR show, but nowhere near to reflect the full tariff relief. That then sets the new standard, and latent profits start flowing.

    Idk, it would be playing with fire though, especially in very low margin industries. For smaller companies that can’t handle it, they may get hit too hard and could go under. Doing this could also open space in tight markets and provide some further juice to capital consolidation

    • Tariffs are only useful for developing countries to protect developing industries. They will only serve to make US companies even less competitive with overseas companies. When the tariffs go away, US companies will have to have competitive prices again or go under. Many would go under, as you said. Engels said it best 140 years ago

      I have no idea how anyone could think this is sound economic strategy

      • The real problem is that it is not even a strategy. Import taxes are an useful and strategic measure that you can take. Just not in a blanket fashion or by themselves. Let's say you want to start hiring americans into blue collar jobs to make cars or whatever. You may or may not want to raise import taxes over cars brought in from México or China. What you probably don't wanna do is raise import taxes over everything that comes from México or China. Or better yet Canada. China/México can probably offer capital goods (machinery, etc) that bolster your competitiveness. Canada is your resource colony, that's where you get input goods and extra energy from.

        Hence all the contradiction in Trump's speeches. He says that tariffs can substitute income taxes while at the same time saying they'll reindustrialize the country. That can't happen by default. If your tax base is tariffs then you're still importing everything you need, just paying for government via import taxes. If you reindustrialize then you don't have to import nearly as much and therefore needs to levy taxes some place else. The former is exactly what Trump's government wants to achieve. The most regressive taxation system imaginable, the sort which you only see in countries like Brazil.

        Brazil used to do developmentist economics, even during the pro US dictatorship era. There was protectionism as part of a broader industrial policy. The 1982 onwards financing crisis triggered by the Volcker Shock made that untenable. So Brazil ended up devaluing its currency and retooling the economy away from import substitution towards being export driven. Most things tied to industrial policy was dismantled - except for a handful of things such as the regressive heavily consumption based tax system, the high import taxes and agricultural subsidies. Trump's tech-landlords seem to think even agricultural subsidies are superfluous. All you need to do is levy export taxes instead.

  • as i posted this random noise yesterday, duality of polling, cont.:

    also, interesting article, in case newsheads don't poke around website:

    https://jacobin.com/2025/03/class-dealignment-occupation-progressive-electorate

    • Seeing people glaze Starmer over literally being the carrot to Trump's stick is maddening, Britain is a fetid Lovecraftian hell island and beige Hitler announcing HMS Queen Elizabeth being cut in two like a fortune cookie by hypersonic missiles in a year or two will be ASMR to me.

      I know said glazing is purely vibes based and temporary but still, got people in my group chats talking about Ukraine winning and shit, driving me nuts.

    • I've stopped dismaying that the most anti-war (ukraine war at least) energy right now is on the right, mostly because in my country that's very much not the case but it's gotta fucking suck to live in these power centers like uk and germany where they're lefts only rise the more pro-war they are

      • i literally can't get over fucking germans with their fucking anti-deutsch brainworms can't pounce on the cult of fucking shukhevich, or whatever the fuck his name is (same with poland). it's baby brain shit, when ukraine ambassador goes to bandera grave, you pummel on it, but noooooooo, we gotta be pro nato so that we can support war, instead of searching for easily explainable reasons why oppose it (like we don't want to be in nato, obviously we don't want ukraine be in nato). and even then, in fucking britain, military spending is literally pure empire building, nobody has managed to attack britain in 200 years, the fuck are you on about, buy antiship/anti-aircraft missiles and sit tight, literally sane military policy for that fucking island. instead they are like boohoo we need more military (spends it on spying on gaza like a boss).

        fucking euro-elitist dipshits

      • it's rage inducing. I got in an argument last mayday with dipshits giving out anti russia leaflets, all the arsenal of democracy and appeasement tripe ect ect. second internationale brainworms are rife in Europe's so called left

    • As much as I hate to say it, the rise of Reform/Farage has been coming, and Reform got screwed by the first past the post system in the last election. Reform had a large share of votes, but got minimal seats in government by comparison. Labour only won by such a large margin last time round because they were able to play the first past the post system to their advantage, Starmer got less votes than Corbyn in actuality. But eventually once a movement or party gets popular enough (such as Reform in this case), no amount of electoral obscurity can stop them from taking the largest share of seats in government.

  • Elon Musk calls Poland's foreign minister a “little man” and tells him to be quiet after Radoslaw Skorski claims that the Polish government pays for the use of Starlink in Ukraine and that it may be necessary to look for another alternative.

    Elon Musk says it “makes no sense” for the United States to be part of NATO to “pay for Europe's security”. The Wall Street Journal says that many European leaders regret making their security dependent on the US.

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  • Romanian shenanigans continue:

    fascist isolationist guy is not registered for elections after getting first round (which he won) annulled.

    On one hand, whatever, he is a fascist dimwit, on the other - shining illustration how well leftist parties can win elections without the power of a strike behind them.

  • Some worrying events in the Middle East as of the past 48-72 hours. A United States Navy Carrier Strike Group, presumably the USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), was spotted entering the Red Sea on ESA Satellite Imagery on March 2, and one of its planes was observed on FlightRadar24. So the US carrier is back in the Red Sea.

    Earlier today (March 4) , the United States Air Force flew a nuclear capable B-52H Stratofortress bomber off of the coast of Israel and Gaza, descending down to a low altitude of 11 000ft at times. We know that this bomber (Registration 60-0037) is nuclear capable due to the presence of 'New START agreement' fins on it's fuselage, pictured below. If you're interested in reading the whole documentation of how New START applies to the B-52 fleet, the 240 page PDF documentation is available here. So yes, the USA did fly a nuclear capable bomber off of the coast of Gaza.

    In response, Ansarallah (known as the Houthis in western media) have claimed to have shot down the 15th MQ-9 Reaper drone of the conflict so far, with the wreckage landing in the Red Sea. The US will be forced to fly their jet engined RQ-4B and MQ-4C drones again to carry out surveillance.

    Twitter source

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  • Investors dare to imagine a world beyond the dollar

    Investors are starting to imagine a financial system without the US at its centre, handing Europe an opportunity that it simply must not miss.

    This exercise in thinking the unthinkable comes despite a cacophony of noise in markets. Mansoor Mohi-uddin, chief economist at Bank of Singapore, recently travelled to clients in Dubai and London. To his surprise, not one of them asked him about short-term issues like tech stocks or tweaks to interest rates. Instead, he says, “people were saying, ‘What’s going on?’ The free trade, free markets, globalisation era is over, and nobody knows what’s going to replace it.”

    They refer, of course, to the new US administration. Within a month of retaking his seat at the White House, Donald Trump & co had all but trashed the transatlantic alliance, and ridden roughshod over the key checks, balances and institutions on which true US exceptionalism is built.

    “It’s such a momentous change going on. If it continues like this, capital allocators will wonder: ‘Do I want to stay allocated to the US?’” Mohi-uddin says.

    This cuts across asset classes. In stocks, the preference for Europe is clear — markets are streaking ahead of the US in a highly unusual pattern. But flighty stock markets are just the surface. The bit that really matters is the international use of the dollar, and dollar bond markets, as the supposedly risk-free bedrock of global finance.

    This is already starting to show. On Tuesday, for instance, despite the shock of new US trade tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the dollar is not climbing in its usual fashion. Deutsche Bank says this in part reflects “the potential loss of the dollar’s safe-haven status”.

    “We do not write this lightly,” wrote currencies analyst George Saravelos. “But the speed and scale of global shifts is so rapid that this needs to be acknowledged as a possibility.” What was once outlandish is now becoming plausible.

    Economists close to Trump have been clear that they view the dollar’s status as the world’s pre-eminent reserve currency as a blessing and a curse — “burdensome” as adviser Stephen Miran put it. It remains a possibility — again unthinkable just a few weeks ago — that the US could seek to pull the dollar lower in an effort to support domestic manufacturing. But the US could also dismantle its own exorbitant privilege through accident rather than design by pushing the big beasts of bond markets — foreign central banks and other official reserve managers — into the arms of other nations.

    The dollar makes up more than 57 per cent of global official reserves, according to benchmark data from the IMF, far in excess of the US’s slice of the global economy. The euro accounts for 20 per cent, and everyone else is picking up scraps.

    Starry-eyed optimists have argued for years that the euro’s slice of the pie should be bigger, but they have been fighting reality. Europe’s bond markets are fragmented into constituent states, with Germany at the centre. The monetary cohesion is there but not the fiscal or strategic cohesion. No national market is simultaneously large, safe and liquid enough to suit a reserve manager’s needs. Super-sized trades leave a mark and in an emergency, these big hitters find only the slick US government bond market will do.

    The EU has struggled to offer an alternative. That is where this moment in history comes in. Its urgent need for defence spending simply overwhelms the capacity of its individual national bond markets. Joint borrowing — easily said but devilishly tricky to do — is the obvious answer. The result could well be that Europe is thrust further to the centre of the global financial system.

    The Covid-19 pandemic offered a taste of how pooling resources might work at scale. Then, bonds issued by the EU itself, rather than individual states, were met with enormous demand. The urgency of the present situation offers little choice but to move fast. “Collective action could be an answer, even if consensus has not built yet,” said analysts at rating agency S&P Global in a note last month.

    If the EU could seize this moment, it would tap in to a deep well of willing buyers keen to trim US exposure. “Plenty of reserve managers could shift very quickly,” says Mohi-uddin. “There would be huge take-up.” US dominance of global debt markets does not have to end with a bang. Large, slow-moving investors would simply have to accumulate other assets rather than necessarily dumping their Treasuries. But over time, the result would be the same. Regime shifts of this kind do not happen often. But they do happen. Sterling was the global reserve currency once too.

    Leave it to Comrade Trump to achieve the impossible, folks.

    The question is what are they moving their assets into? Bitcoin and gold? lmao.

  • Well it seems that the Russian gas tunnel operation in Kursk has worked, they're now geolocated on the edges of Sudzha in the old McDonald's area lmao.

    Here's how the Kursk bulge looked around 36 hours ago:

    Here's how it looks now:

  • Hey so something interesting (or perhaps a nothingburger) is happening WRT Puerto Rico. According to the Daily Mail (archived link) some lobbyists are pushing for Trump to sign an executive order to give Puerto Rico independence. Those born in the island after 2026 would cease to have US citizenship, and all federal funding would be cut. I'm unsure about how they would deal with all the federal property in the island, or the military bases.

    The lobbyists' argument is that the island is costing the federal government $657B so it would be better to just let it go. Now, this is obviously pretty concerning because Trump is a neoliberal who easily could fall for that argument, and obviously they are very racist against Puerto Ricans so they are not concerned at all about the damage this would cause to the island. Now, keep in mind that while there is support for independence within PR, most who are pro-independence want to first create a self-sufficient economy in the island, which is far from the present situation. Apparently one of the lobbyists behind this draft executive order is a bourgeois Puerto Rican living in the US; presumably this is someone who would benefit from Puerto Rico becoming a neoliberal "sovereign" client state, as opposed to a colony.

    My personal take is that I still doubt anything will come of this. Resident commissioner (non-voting congressman elected by PR) Pablo José Hernández spent yesterday putting out fires claiming that no one in congress actually supports this draft. Whether or not that's true, it definitely seems that no one wants to be up-front about supporting this. Trump himself hasn't said anything about Puerto Rican independence at any point, he has only ever stated his opposition to statehood for the island. I think Rubio certainly doesn't want to let this go through, since the US bases and military equipment in Puerto Rico are a relatively important part of power projection against Cuba and Venezuela. Also, the dumbest possible reason, Puerto Rican independence is mostly something supported by liberals and leftists in the island, so it'd be kind of a culture war L for Trump to be the one to grant it.

    Also, in theory Trump doesn't have the power to make the decision to drop a US territory like that, it'd have to go through Congress, but obviously that's not stopping him.

  • God damn look at this:

    "The Economist’s country of the year for 2024"

    The Economist,[1] a journal that speaks for the British millionaires, is pursuing a very instructive line in relation to the war. Representatives of advanced capital in the oldest and richest capitalist country, are shedding tears over the war and incessantly voicing a wish for peace. Those Social-Democrats who, together with the opportunists and Kautsky, think that a socialist programme consists in the propaganda of peace, will find proof of their error if they read The Economist. Their programme is not socialist, but bourgeois-pacifist. Dreams of peace, without propaganda of revolutionary action, express only a horror of war, but have nothing in common with socialism.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/may/01c.htm

  • 92 of the International Republican Institute's destabilization programs in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela have been CANCELED following cuts to State Dept. and USAID grants. 175 of the Institute’s programs worldwide are now in limbo because they directly depend on NED funding.

    Yet another open admission that the opposition activists, “political prisoners”, and US-bankrolled “religious groups” in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela exist only because of DEEP, LUCRATIVE and sometimes long-standing CONTRACTS.

    Washington's political and media mercenaries (see: “democracy activists”) have been making bank 🤑💰💳 in recent decades in Latin America. SecRubio's friends in Latin America are desperately calling him to try to get their payments resumed. He probably had to change his number.

    Another L for Narco "Nazi' Rubio

  • Pipe/tunnel guys, we are so back.

    Photo is supposedly of a Russian soldier infiltrating Sudzha (Kursk region) through a gas pipeline.

    It sounds like the operation might have been a failure, but we'll have to wait for more info. I would not be surprised, because it's likely Ukraine expected this and planned for it due to previous events.

  • North Korean media have published photographs of the country's first nuclear-powered submarine, armed with "guided missile nuclear weapons," under construction. Thus, the DPRK is preparing to enter yet another elite club of powers.

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