Better fascism than the milquetoast left.

#New General Election Poll

🔴 Trump 48% (+3)
🔵 Biden 45%

Trump vs Newsom.
🔴 Trump 47% (+3)
🔵 Newsom 43%

Trump vs Harris
🔴 Trump 48% (+3)
🔵 Harris 45%

Trump vs Buttigieg
🔴 Trump 47% (+3)
🔵 buttigieg 44%

Data for progress - 1011 LV - 6/28

https://x.com/PpollingNumbers/status/1807242872766263792

Are the Democrats cooked?

It is how people who think they are the Adults in the Room talk.

He’s not going away. You have to think of it as a criminal organization. Biden is not just some figurehead, the Biden family is a brand with its complex network of political and business elites. Even Obama who has retired cannot escape from it, he is still owned by the Wall St elites who now demand that he makes phone calls to his connections and tells them to toe the line.

The primary which never really happened except with a few fringe candidates is a process that allows the brokering and bargaining of these money connections with the presidential nominee. Now it is too late, nobody else except for Hillary Clinton has the political ties deep enough that could match Biden’s, but it is unlikely that the Clintons today have nearly as much political capital as Biden, because of Ukraine.

The fact is that way too much interests have been tied into the Biden presidency, especially with Ukraine being his “masterpiece” involving hundreds of billions of dollars, a lot of people are going to lose their money if the tap is suddenly turned off. They have spent a lot of fortune on “donations” to get their premium seats and access to the tap, and they’re going to be really pissed if they lose the treats they were promised.

The problem of the bourgeoisie with Biden is his senility, but at the end of the day, losing the election is nowhere near as important as maintaining this delicate balance of interests of the political and business elites that own the Democratic Party.

So, the debate will be memory-holed and everyone will just pretend like nothing bad has happened by July 4th. The dissenters (if they were stupid enough to make the noise) would be purged from the power center. Meanwhile, the political machinations of the country will work behind the scene to ensure that Biden gets elected on November.

I think you underestimated the number of Bernie Sanders supporters who were exiled to r/cth and are not American.

While it is true the vast majority are Americans, lots of people who phonebanked for Bernie during the 2015 primary campaign were not American, have never been to America, and probably aren’t even English native speakers. (And no we weren’t Russians lol)

The funniest outcome is that most of you have seriously overestimated the memory retention capacity of your average American and Biden’s atrocious debate performance will be forgotten by July 4th, and everyone will look at you funny like “wtf are you talking about” when you try to remind them of the debate.

It is not so simple….

The 5% interest rate actually resulted in huge interest income payment (est. $0.8-1T in 2023), and although much of the money went to the rich, clearly the money had been spent as well as consumption index did not continued to rise.

The problem? The US federal budget deficit was $1.7T last year, which means that nearly 50% of its deficit spending in 2023 was sustained by the interest payment from high interest rates. This means that if the US starts cutting rate, it’s going to end up with less income payment, less deficit, less money for consumption, and driving the economy into recession.

There is no easy way out. The monetary policy is in a quandary that has no solution. Keeping the rates high is a ticking time bomb for a financial crash (we don’t know when though, but the risk persists), but lowering the rates without also compensating for an increase in deficit spending through other means will also drive the economy into recession.

There is also another dimension that a lot of these analyses don’t take into account, which is the impact of high Fed rates on the rest of the world. The number of Global South countries under severe economic distress has gone way up since the US hikes its interest rates, compounded by Covid disruption immediately prior. Many countries are running out of dollars and they are looking for a way out, but since there hasn’t been any alternative (there is nothing coming out of the BRICS+ front), everyone still has to earn dollars to dig a way out.

So they will keep exporting to the US, as cheaply as possible, in hopes of surviving the next wave of economic hardship. In effect, the US gets to export its inflation to the rest of the world. And the prices are not really coming down domestically because of energy prices and monopolists wanting to rake in more profit by keeping their prices inflated.

Hexbears please tell me which of the following scenarios is more likely:

The President - also the High Priest of the Neoliberal sect - has been subjected to an occult ritual to become the Vessel for the Dark God of Capital, which takes an unknown form residing within the flesh of the President. In the evening, the entity leaves the flesh and returns to its Temple, as it finds the frail body of the President a harsh condition for long-term habitation.

The President is senile.

As others have said, there is no such thing as a comprehensive nuclear defense system. Everyone is vulnerable.

The real question is how would the opposite side react? The MAD deterrence has never been broken. This is truly uncharted territory.

Let’s say the US (through the Ukrainian Armed Forces) uses a low yield nuke on a village in Russia-occupied Ukraine. 10 people are killed. How would Russia respond? Unload the rest of its nuclear arsenals against American cities? Retaliate against an American village? How would things escalate from there? I don’t think anybody can predict what would happen, which is what makes the entire scenario so scary.

But one thing for sure is that the world is going to change overnight. Its significance would likely exceed 9/11, when everyone would be so shocked that they could still recall what they were doing at the very moment the news came on even decades later.

Reagan tried that with the Star Wars program while turned out to be a complete disaster but it did drive the USSR into overspending their defense budget and overstretching their economy.

This is the new model for America’s war, perfected in Ukraine.

This hypothesis is stolen from Michael Hudson: You send military equipments to get blown up in Ukraine, killing Ukrainian soldiers, the government gives more money to defense contractors to replace the lost equipment. GDP goes up. In fact, for every American tank blown up in Ukraine, GDP goes up, the strength of US dollar goes up, which it then leverages to wreck the economies of the Global South. Rinse and repeat. It doesn’t even matter whether new equipments get built, or if they are functional, as long as GDP goes up, the strength of the dollar goes up.

Same here with the Phillipines. GDP for America is gonna go up for every Filipino killed, who will be dying for America’s war. No need to sacrifice American lives like they did in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore.

I was wrong and too naive to think that the Ukraine war would be confined to industrial warfare alone, which Russia is winning handily. But it looks like we are going to see a transition into financial warfare very soon, and when that happens, global flashpoints are going to erupt all across the world, and it would take a lot of collective sanity to ensure that nukes don’t start flying.

Everyone is missing the point of this comic.

It means that revolutions take place faster the further away you are from the Imperial Core!

Proof that Bill Watterson is a secret Maoist:

I have a hard time taking these people seriously. They invariably try to sell an impression that the American empire is in a terminal decline, the dollar is gonna collapse soon that’s why you have to invest in Bitcoin and gold if you don’t want to lose your entire savings.

I call them the “multipolar grifters” which have grown into quite an industry of its own since the Russia-Ukraine war started in 2022 because there is obviously a growing demographics of people (many from the Global South) who hold anti-imperialist views and are disgusted at the empire, but the “online leftist sphere” was too milquetoast to know where to stand between Russia and Ukraine so they lost nearly all the audience during those critical early moments. It took 6 months before those leftists even begin to say things like “maybe NATO shouldn’t be sending weapons to Ukraine”, which is already too late when you should have thrown your support behind Russia from day one. One reason to read theory is to know where you should stand from the very beginning, but online leftists never bothered to read theory so they don’t know what to do when the opportunities present themselves.

Like how everyone copes with climate change:

This might be the hottest summer in a century, but hey, it’s also the coolest summer over the next hundred years. Let’s cherish it while we still can.

Remember folks, this is the most important election of your lifetime. You get to choose between:

Make Fascism Great Again vs Build Back Fascism Better

I don’t think it matters to the rest of us.

This is a bourgeois election, which means it’s the bourgeoisie choosing their representative. Trump and Biden are auditioning for the position to their bourgeois donors, not you.

Trump is incompetent but Biden is senile. Pick your poison.

Downvotes from libs is like a badge of honor for every communist poster. I like being downvoted.

This is an extremely simplistic view of the relationship between labor and capital.

First, this is not ultraleft. The ultraleft position is that all major governments (including the USSR, China and other AES) are actually bourgeois and imperialist and their people suffer from the same exploitation indistinguishable from those who are exploited in the imperial core, so their solution is that all leftists have to perform revolutionary defeatism within their own country (again, including the USSR, China and other AES) in order to overthrow their respective bourgeois regimes and come together internationally to enact communism on a global scale.

And as I have said, the comment you posted is also a very simplistic take on the matter.

We have to look at this from the perspective of revolutionary potential, in other words: does the working class in the Imperial Core have more, less or equal revolutionary potential as the working class in the Global South?

To dissect this question, we need to understand how the global economy works post-1971, after the vast export of their industrial capacity to the rest of the Global South while the US empire sustains itself as a global debtor (which is fundamentally different from the British empire, which was a global creditor).

The neoliberalized American economy since the 1970s has been propped up mostly by the so-called FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate - a terminology coined by the economist Michael Hudson) which are essentially non-productive sectors that do not produce real goods and services. This is a prominent feature of finance capitalism devouring industrial capitalism:

The strength of its currency is derived from real estate ownership (land value), stocks and bonds market, intellectual property rights and licensing, financial derivatives etc. Now, you might think all these are virtual and therefore the US dollar is worthless. But no, this is what the world (held under the gunpoint by the US empire) has decided to calculate their GDP and currency exchange rate, which then allows the US to wreck other economies in the Global South using the strength of its currency, maintaining dominance over them and essentially extorting free lunches from all over the world, as most of the real goods and services today are produced by the Global South countries.

In other words, the financial empire is more like a landlord who does not have to work for a single day but can get everything he wants simply through extracting rent and concession. The US empire is doing this on a global scale against other countries.

While the Imperial Core enjoys the benefits of cheap goods and services from the Global South, this does not mean that their working class truly benefits from it. Instead, their exploitation became a form of debt slavery. Wages are kept low so workers have to borrow money to sustain themselves, which transforms their class character into one of debtor.

This kind of financialized capitalism means that unlike the late 19th and early-mid 20th centry, which was dominated by industrial capital, the working class in the Imperial Core today has their labor tied to debt (mortgage, rent, credit cards, student loans, medical bills etc.) rather than to industrial productivity, which was a key argument from Marx that proletariat is a uniquely revolutionary class because being freed from the land under the feudal arrangement, the labor performed by the proletariat is now directly tied to industrial profit under capitalism. The capitalists had to rely on labor to compete with other capitalists in order to make profit.

It has been described that the Imperial Core today under finance capitalism is more like a neo-feudal society rather than the industrial capitalism of the previous centuries. And this is largely true: just like the serfs in the feudal era, whose labor was tied to their land, the working class in the Imperial Core today work bullshit jobs to earn money to pay off their debt, which is what was necessary to survive in the first place. The manufacturing and service sectors pale in comparison to the FIRE sector, as much has already been exported to the rest of the Global South (and especially against China).

I am already writing too long but to conclude very quickly: the working class in the Imperial Core does have diminished revolutionary potential, which means that not only do they have to fight for better working conditions etc., but also the defeat of the non-productive FIRE sectors within their own countries in order to free themselves and the world of debt slavery. It is more akin the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism, but in reverse. And only then, will they have the true potential to seize the means of production.

In other words, working class in the Imperial Core cannot simply organize just for improving the benefits of their own, but also need to incorporate anti-imperialism into their core struggles (which includes performing revolutionary defeatism of their own imperialist government) in order to defeat finance capitalism (which is rooted in the Imperial Core), which would then allow the socialist movements across the Global South to rise up against their bourgeois regimes, and by doing so advancing socialism across the world.

EDIT: can’t believe I forgot to say about the Global South. The working class of the Global South today suffers from the opposite problem: a left wing government (revolutionary or democratically elected) is immediately wrecked by sanctions, currency depreciation, burdening debt overhead from both currency depreciation and capital flight, endless coups, economic hardship etc.

So, the fundamental nature of struggles between working class in the Imperial Core and the Global South is different, YET they are tied together by the principal contradiction of anti-imperialism. According to this admittedly shallow and underdeveloped understanding of the world, countering imperialism (whose main instrument is finance capital i.e. currency) would simultaneously disentangle the contradictions of BOTH the working class struggles of the Imperial Core and the Global South, and opening up the spaces for further revolutionary struggle against Capital. Once again Mao’s On Contradiction could prove very useful in the analysis here.

Maybe r/politics is still run by CTR, which was installed by the pro-Clinton faction back in 2015. They’d have reasons to want to swap out Biden for Hillary.

Btw anyone here remembers the overwhelmingly pro-Bernie r/politics until it suddenly became pro-Clinton overnight? Many of us ended up in r/cth precisely of that reason despite having never listened to the podcast before.

You cannot predict stock market, AI or not.

In the past, you can use trend analysis to look at the historical movement of commodity prices, for example. But these days the US has gained such total control of various critical sectors (oil, energy, for example) which have significant impact on the global economy, and it can happen because of political decisions, not economic.

For example, in 2015 oil price crash was a deliberate decision of the US to destroy the petroleum export dependent economies of Iran, Russia and Venezuela with its shale revolution. It was purely politically motivated. You literally cannot predict how the stocks will move because the world economy is dependent on what the US imperialists want to do at the spur of the moment.

The US can bomb Nord Stream because it feels like it and there goes the European economy.