It’s not even going to be difficult to ‘justify’ for them after however many months/years hearing western libs say _{fuck you we don’t care} cluster ^munitions and _depleted ^uranium are Safe™ and its okay to target civilians if they’re on the other side and might have different opinions to you.

Don’t you believe that people can change their mind?

Is it also an implied threat to Ukrainian refugees? Either come back and fight or we’ll unleash the Anglo-European terror machine on you by turning your host nations against you with some terrorism.

Eastern Europeans in the Jungle to Europeans in the Garden and back.

Red Button -------------- Blue Button

Loyal to the ----------- Loyal to the cold

fanaticism ------------- logic of capital

of fascism -------------- accumulation

------------- sweating ------------

And at the same time devaluing European assets, ready for US capital to fly in for the fire sale.

Honestly wouldn’t be surprised to hear in a few years that the CIA explicitly taught such tactics to them. They could always pass it off to western Europe as something that would be used against Russia, knowing that when a third of the weapons shipped to Ukraine don’t make it to the front lines, there’s going to be lots of opportunities to destabilise western Europe if they get uppity at any point.

So I got it slightly wrong. I think Michael Hudson is very good but his more informal talks aren’t always the clearest. That comes across in the following extract from an interview but it made sense after a couple of read throughs for me (maybe you’ll have more luck the first time):

Who has benefited the most from China’s boom?

[Interviewer]: Let’s talk about China’s debt problem again. Unlike the United States, China has been very cautious, some might say conservative, about expanding its debt. Although China may need more aggressive fiscal and monetary policies to boost the economy, especially now; and the central government’s debt is quite low (some local governments are facing debt risks). China once debated whether China should also engage in fiscal monetization, especially during the 2020 epidemic. But considering the risks, the government ultimately rejected the proposal. What do you think of China’s trade-off between risk prevention and economic stimulus?

Michael Hudson: There are two ways for governments to create money, printing paper money or creating digital money. The use of digital currency, the Chinese government is already doing.

In the West, the state allows private banks to create credit, and the wealthy create credit and lend it to the government. But China does not want to have an independent financial class, so the central government can start printing money; however, local governments in local cities and towns cannot.

So the question is, how do local governments finance spending? This is exactly the problem you mentioned that local governments are really facing. Since local governments at the provincial, municipal, and district levels cannot print money and issue bonds, they either go to the bank to borrow money or collect taxes, but the taxes are not enough, so local governments have adopted a financing model of selling land to real estate developers. This is one aspect of the housing and real estate issues facing China today.

I think there is a simpler solution, the central government is eligible to issue currency that it can loan to local governments for government-sanctioned social spending. In this way, there is no need to rely on land sales for financing.

In fact, local governments can use propaganda to say that we should do what the 19th-century Western classical economists wanted to do, so as to drive down land prices and house prices. Economists such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx argued that the government could tax the gains from land rents. You don’t want to tax laborers, industrial companies, but you can tax gains on land instead of the price increase of buildings on land.

In this way, people cannot go to the bank to borrow money to speculate on housing prices, because housing prices only reflect the cost of housing construction, and housing construction will not increase land rents.

The only thing that doesn’t want China doing this right now is the banking system. The bank told the government that instead of taxing the land, it would be better to sell it. Banks will lend to developers, and local governments will purchase land from local governments, so that local governments will be able to carry out construction.

However, more and more debts in China are accumulated in banks. In addition to developers, when residents invest more and more funds in purchasing houses, they must also borrow from banks and pay interest.

At this time we found that the banks will be stronger than the government, which is what the banks want. This is basically the core of the current conflict in China. Who profited from China’s prosperity and got richer and richer? Is it the Chinese people and the government, or the bankers and real estate developers? This is the biggest political issue in China this year.

I’m unsure what he means by ‘at this time’, whether this was a study done before the interview or just ‘today’ as in the era that we’re living in.

Edit: for an example of what I mean by unclear, take this quote:

Banks will lend to developers, and local governments will purchase land from local governments, so that local governments will be able to carry out construction.

I’m unsure if this is a misstatement and whether:

• it should read that “Banks will lend to developers, and local [developers] will purchase land from local governments, so that local governments will be able to carry out construction”, or
• local governments are buying and selling land to themselves, treating themselves as developers in order to make borrowing from the bank legal, perhaps, or
• this is a complicated way of saying local governments are mortgaging their property, or
• this is a complicated process whereby one local government borrows money from a bank as a ‘developer’ and purchases land from another local government, and vice versa, again perhaps as a legal loophole.

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this!

Then it was worth it 🙂

If it’s hot water, you can get water solar panels/rigs, too. Probably not too helpful in some places but many places get enough hours of sunlight to start the hot water going. On top of insulating the pipes, most of the heat lost on the way to the rooms might be gained by being able to start the heating at however many degrees higher than it would be if you pulled it straight out the ground. Also good for jacuzzis in the summer, when you’ll be getting 60°C+ water out the panels and nothing to heat except water for pots. It’s a luxury but only because water’s so expensive to heat and we’re aiming for luxury, aren’t we?

It’s the worst. They try to make you feel bad about it. Sucks for them bc id-much-gaf but there is a twang of pity as I realise they are probably just very very confused. Or a comprador but I don’t talk to many of them, so.

And it’s all my fault. I was making a joke to make it sound like Biden or Bush had said something they shouldn’t say but would say because they are both gaff machines. But now I have caused all this turmoil and explained it so it’s not even funny anymore if it ever was. Thankfully we got to see a capybara emote out of so everything turned out well. Oh and we had chips for dinner.

I’m fairly sure they’re talking about the image…

for the capitalists to come back, smear their memory full of garbage and brainwash a big chunk of the population to become class traitors.

The alternative is letting the bastards get away with it.

Now I’m not suggesting you do anything that will get you killed! I don’t even like those organisations that try to get their members arrested at protests out of principal. Fuck that. Stay safe and practice good op sec.

These capitalists and bootlickers will kill people for feeding the poor, sure, but only the most vocal and visible comrades. There’s a distinction between that likelihood and the notion of ‘going out guns blazing’, which is not generally a requirement.

Of course, a lot depends on your identity, location, and the direction of the class struggle. A communist in Ukraine or South Korea, for example, risks a lot more than a white communist union organiser in Paris or Melbourne. But these factors just determine the actions you’re personally willing to take.

A bit. But not really. We are part of the collective, the mass of the world’s workers. Our fate and that of the working class is the same. Whatever happens, either my comrades will stand with me and I with them or we’re all fucked, anyway.

There’s no greater human force than unified thought and action. Once you see yourself as part of the collective, there is a lot less room for fear. Either we all get free or we’ll all be killed and whittled down individually in one way or another, anyway. There’s no option where the bad things don’t happen. Only some control over which ones and how we respond.

For the fear that remains, I try not to think about it. Whatever happens to me, they will never stop history. Marxism takes away much of the fear. It’s no coincidence that the bourgeoisie don’t want you to read Marx and don’t want a united working class.

I was more scared before, when I thought changing the world meant sticking my neck out on its own. When I thought I’d have to be the main character if I wanted to change the world. Now I trust the working class will do it whether I like it or not. The only choice is to work with it or get in it’s way—and that one’s easy.

As for those who came before. They were titans. They didn’t so much fail as they failed to achieve everything all in one go.

Our earliest comrades basically had to start from scratch. Few examples, no theory, insufficient lessons to learn from. Still, their mistakes we’re not in vain. They achieved so much.

They stopped the Nazis, ended colonialism, brought about the concepts of: the welfare state, paid time off, redundancy pay, weekends, limited working hours, universal suffrage, universal healthcare, universal education, universal housing, universal jobs, universal dignity. Before the unions, socialists, communists organised to fight back against the ruling class, these things didn’t exist. That’s a legacy to be proud of and we join the legacy by joining them.

However bleak the world is, however unevenly spread are the fruits, the world still reaps the benefits of what previous comrades fought for. It’s not done until it’s done and unfortunately it can’t all be won in a lifetime. Luckiky, this all started a few lifetimes ago so we might be able to win what’s left to be won within ours.

On the one hand if we must try and fail so the next generation will succeed, then that’s our lot. At the same time, with climate change and China’s rise, we (a) don’t have the option of failing and (b) are already winning. The communist states, being dictatorships of the proletariat, are us and we are them. The fight is half won already.

Tissue-paper tigers.

Oooooh

(Edit: as in ‘crow’ not ‘boo’.)

The yanks told Saddam the same thing before he turned his internal shitshow towards Kuwait. Is this the turning point? Remember, that although Blinken is on record, the papers can pretend from tomorrow that it never happened and libs will be like:

Of course we need to send the marines in to Ukraine to preserve democracy. (Not too much democracy. We don’t want the communist party to get too comfortable. But nice, polite, civil democracy, that’s tolerant and not rude to ethnic cleaners.) Zelensky went too far. Who could’ve guessed that he would start bombing kindergartens in Russia after realising that sending high tech missiles against well defended military bases doesn’t work after the ‘high tech’ parts have been removed so the Russians can’t reverse engineer them? At least we can count on our friendly neighborhood US military to protect Ukrainians from their own government. They sure are lucky that my leaders are willing to make sacrifices to protect the world from harm. What’s that? Yes, it was obvious to me from the beginning that Ukraine was governed by the most corrupt and evil totalitautharian government in history. Why yes, I always thought Putin was a fine chap; at times I thought he and I were the only ones to see that invading the Donbas was the right decision. Why do you ask?

Just think. There’s enough steel there to repair and build some domestic railways. They could be building their own belt and road. Instead they prefer war.

In light of the rest of the profile, it could be like an anarcho-primitivist that isn’t ready to part with their modern racism.