:up:

For the love of God you people need to read this interview:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/01/michael-hudson-what-is-causing-so-much-inflation.html

BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, it’s pretty interesting, Professor Hudson, because if you listen to Fox News, or a lot of right-wing analysis, they say that the problem behind the inflation is that the Biden administration is just spending so much money, and he’s a socialist, and he’s funding all of these programs, and Build Back Better. And it’s hilarious because, meanwhile, his own party won’t even approve the watered down version of Build Back Better, which is like every few weeks there’s a trillion dollars less, and then less spending, and less spending. .... So while the right wing is freaking out and claiming that Biden is a socialist, spending all this money on social programs, in fact that money is going toward increasing the military budget, and not going to social programs. I don’t know if you wanted to comment on that.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Sure, I think that Schumer has a great influence over the Republican Party, and I think Schumer and Pelosi meet with their counterparts at the Republicans and say, “Please call us a socialist. We’re not going to disagree with you.” Because they know that 85% of Americans like the word socialism. And the more that Republicans call them socialist, that helps them solidify the base that really wants socialism, so that the Democratic Party can throw cold water on that and prevent socialism. It’s a great scam.

BENJAMIN NORTON: That’s an interesting point; it’s an interesting idea.

MICHAEL HUDSON: But actually, the Biden administration, they haven’t spend money into the economy. Spending money into the FIRE sector – the finance, insurance, and real estate sector – isn’t spending money into the economy; it’s spending money into the overhead that is preventing the economy from growing. Just the opposite. And to be fair to Biden, he hasn’t followed through on any of his other campaign promises, either. He hasn’t cut back student debt like he promised. He hasn’t raised the minimum wage like he promised.So it would be unfair to single out just the infrastructure. He has universally repudiated every campaign promise that he made, because his clientele are the campaign contributors, not the voters.

...

MICHAEL HUDSON: Quantitative easing is a significant factor because it has been a huge subsidy to the financial sector. It’s a bad term. It was supposed to be – what quantity is easing? Not the money supply, because all this is occurring on the Fed’s balance sheet. It means that the Fed is letting banks pledge their junk mortgages, their bonds, and their stocks in exchange for Federal Reserve deposits that they can use to increase their lending base. And the official original reason in 2009 was the Fed said, we’ve got to have higher housing prices.

Americans are only spending maybe 35% of their rent of their income on rent and housing. We’ve got to increase that to 43%. So if we can lower the interest rates, people can take out larger and larger mortgages, and there will be a huge flood of lending into the mortgage market, and Americans will have to pay more for their housing. And that will make the banks richer, the insurance companies richer, and our clients in the financial sector richer. So quantitative easing was designed to increase the price of housing to Americans, and then it was to create a huge stock market boom.

...The Fed’s aim is inflation. But it doesn’t want to inflate the economy, real prices, it wants to inflate stock and bond and real estate prices, for the 1%. So essentially, this is part of the war of the 1% against the 99%. They’ve got almost all the growth in wealth since the pandemic began. There has been about, I think, $1 trillion growth, more than that, in the private wealth. All of this wealth that has been created has been basically taken by the 1%, who have made it financially, through financial capital gains, rising prices for their stocks, bonds, and real estate, not by the economy at large.

The economy at large, the 99%, have had to go further and further into debt during the pandemic. And once the moratorium on rent and mortgage payments expires in a month or so, there is going to be a huge wave of evictions, not only of renters, but even of homeowners that couldn’t afford to make their mortgage payments. And there’s going to be just a huge explosion.

Also there's a whole thing about how the Fed has probably illegally loaned $4.5 tillion dollars to JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, and probably has journalists under gag orders from reporting it, but that's like small fry stuff.

Ah, fare enough.

See what I mean? Your just like NOS. — frank

What? Able to spell words correctly?

Oh dear I should have known that you don't know what fentanyl - or opioids - are made out of. My mistake I should not presume basic competence, very silly of me.

Funny you mention that. Just before the invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban had basically all but eliminated the poppy trade in the country. This was after, of course, the CIA had encouraged poppy production to help fund the Mujahideen - the same American allies who would fly planes into American buildings a couple of decades later. And after the invasion, guess what made a triumphant return? And what a total coincidence that the American opioid crisis began precisely in the wake of that invasion! It almost like American pharmaceutical companies - which source almost all their opiates from Afghanistan - took advantage of a devastated country in order to profit off killing desperate Americans back home. It's almost like dead Americans are the results of American war profiteering and policy. Actually, it just is that. Cool, right? Pounds of flesh everywhere.

Even after the US withdrawal, the US is going to kill more Afghanis than the Taliban:

While limited humanitarian exceptions for trade have been carved out in recent weeks, the World Health Organization has already warned that up to 1 million Afghan children may die as a result of malnutrition over this winter if drastic steps are not taken. Children are already bearing the brunt of the humanitarian catastrophe, punctuated by horrifying stories of kids being sold to pay for food. And the country’s notoriously harsh winter is already taking a toll: Afghans are freezing to death as they flee the country with their families.

U.S. sanctions policy is directly to blame, pushing Afghans over the edge as they already struggle to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and the political upheaval created by the collapse of the central government. As Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote this December, after returning from a trip to Afghanistan on behalf of the WHO, “I can clearly state that if the United States and other Western governments do not change their Afghanistan sanction policies, more Afghans will die from sanctions than at the hands of the Taliban.

The deaths will be brought about as a result of deliberate policy decisions made in the U.S. Alongside new sanctions imposed after the Taliban takeover, the U.S. froze nearly $10 billion of Afghanistan’s central bank holdings here. The Biden administration refuses to release the funds despite ongoing public protests by Afghans.”

https://theintercept.com/2022/01/09/afghanistan-sanctions-human-rights-hawks/

Whose the terrorist state exactly?

the discord between Trump and the elites — Number2018

There is no discord between Trump and the elites, and the policy divergences you mention are minor blemishes backed up more by rhetoric than by action. What discord there has been is nothing other than intra-elite power struggle over who gets to sit in the shiny chair. Biden has been objectively worse on both immigration and select aspects of climate policy, and American foreign policy is contemptible no matter which imperialist goon is in charge. As someone else said, if Trump supporters were actually ideologically consistent and not brain-dead morons, they would all be Biden supporters, insofar as the latter can and has been delivering on Trump promises.

But to what extent your (supposedly critical) discourse here is different from the current dominant rhetoric? It also presupposes the existence of the ultimate truth behind the spectacle — Number2018

It presupposes that one is able to make judgements without being a sophist and a bore. If you have anything of interest to say, say it.

"It was no heroic storming of the Bastille. January 6th was a massive LARP that got out of hand. Trump has been around long enough for us to know his pattern as a serial line-crosser. Like a comedian, he’s always trying out new material, and if he gets the right reaction, he comes back with a bigger delivery next time. January 6th was Trump dipping a toe in the lake of strongman politics. The reason it wasn’t worse is because Trump has also been constantly mislabeled as a Hitler, Stalin, or Pinochet. The man has no attention span, no interest in planning or strategy, and most importantly, no ability to maintain relationships with the type of people who do have those qualities (like Steve Bannon). Even if he wanted to overturn “democracy itself” — I don’t believe he does, but let’s say — Trump has proven over and over he lacks the qualities a politician would need to make that happen.

Which brings us back to Cheney. All those things Trump is rumored to be, Dick Cheney actually is. That’s why it’s so significant that he appeared on the floor of the House yesterday to be slobbered over by the Adam Schiffs and Nancy Pelosis of the world. Dick Cheney did more to destroy democracy in ten minutes of his Vice Presidency than Donald Trump did in four years.

...It was under Cheney’s watch that we turned into a country that snatched people off the streets all over the world, put them in indefinite detention in an archipelago of secret hell-holes, threatened to rape their family members, and resorted to techniques like “rectal feeding” so often that one Guantanamo Bay prisoner had to bring a special pillow to sit in court. The core principle of Cheney’s politics was protecting his new bureaucracies of murder and open-ended detention from legal challenge. That meant creating structures that were legally invisible. Are you on a watch list? Has the FBI sent out a National Security Letter to your telecom provider? Have you been approved for “lethal action” and put on the “distribution matrix,” a.k.a. the kill list?."

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-authoritarians?r=5mz1&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

---

I'll say it again: the only reason why anyone gives a shit about Jan 6 like they do is class snobbery over the fact that a bunch of dirty rednecks dared to set foot into some marble halls, and the fact that Democrats, who are otherwise indistinguishable from Republicans except for flying rainbow flags and being more effective at ruining things, need some kind of differentiating signal to pretend that they aren't - and it is apparently working.

B-b-but Jan 6! Our "democracy" was uNdEr AtTaCK!!

Like I'm sorry but anyone not embarrassed or outright laughing at this pseudo-gravitas ought to jump down a well and stay there forever. It's like something you find in a cheesy video game.

Similar campaigns were organized before the appointment of Mueller as a special counsel, the two impeachments, and before the 2020 elections. Will Trump be indicted? Or, at least, will he be prevented from running in 2024? — Number2018

That's what's nuts. There are plenty of reasons that Trump should hang from his neck until dead: his treatment of migrants, his persecution of Assange, his loosening of environmental controls, his enabling of white nationalism, his being a tool of corporate power, literally a hundred other things. But what does he get pinged on? "Russia", some stupid riot, saying dumb things. The truth is that if they actually went after anything substantial, they'd all have to hang too because the democrats fundamentally share the same policy positions as Trump with minor rhetorical changes. The kids are still in cages, the oil platforms are still being drilled, the genocidal state of Israel is still being showered with money, and the capitulation to corporate power has not changed one iota.

Jan 6 is an effort to draw a pseudo-bright line in the sand because if anyone looks too closely, they'd recognize that there is little too distinguish these power hungry fucks whose existence is harmful no matter what stupid colors they wear. The reason for the disproportionate hysteria over a three-hour nothingburger is because without this shit there is nothing to distinguish them and Americans might be in danger of actually recognizing that fact.

Do you think the division between political north and south tracks the division between the two sides of 'profit upon alienation' in Theories of Surplus Value? And furthermore that profit upon alienation is strictly a redistributive mechanism of value, rather than a creation of value. — fdrake

Yes, but if I understand correctly, Smith is interested in the particular form in which profit upon alienation takes under imperialism. To the degree that profit upon alienation is redistributive, he notes that Marx outlined three such ways in which such redistribution could be maximized: by lengthening the working day, by increasing productivity, or by deceasing wages. Smith contends that Marx only examined the first two mechanisms at any length, because he (Marx) figured the labour market would always equalize wages via competition anyway - but he never contended that capital would go HAM in restricting the free movement of labour, which makes the third mechanism particularly relevant in the conceptualization of imperialism. It's worth quoting Smith on this point actually:

"Marx treated divergence of wages as the result of temporary or contingent factors that ceaselessly mobile capital and labor would erode over time, and which could be safely excluded from analysis, as he made clear in Capital III: “important as the study of frictions [local obstacles obstructing the equalization of wages] is for any specialist work on wages, they are still accidental and inessential as far as the general investigation of capitalist production is concerned and can therefore be ignored." This exclusion from consideration of systematic divergences of wages from a common average, implying the exclusion of divergences in the value of labor-power and the rate of exploitation, applies to the whole of Capital.

Marx’s level of abstraction is clearly inappropriate for our task. Study of workers’ status in labor markets and their mobility across borders reveals that, in today’s imperialist world, the condition of equality between workers is profoundly and shockingly violated; and ... global competition has not produced any measurable progress toward the international equalization of real wages—on the contrary, overall wage dispersion has increased during the neoliberal era. Neoliberal globalization has greatly relaxed restrictions on the mobility of capital across national borders, but there has been no such relaxation of the free movement of labor—on the contrary, imperialist governments are responding to increasing migration pressure by militarizing their borders and criminalizing migrant workers".

To that degree, what Smith calls 'global labour arbitrage' is the imperialist form which profit upon alienation takes in contemporary capitalism. The redistribution becomes geographic - extensive and 'horizontal', as it were - rather than intensive and 'vertical' between capital and labour. It's super interesting.

There's a huge number of forces at play and they're not all going in the same direction so much that they can be summed up in a simple idea like, the riot didn't matter and the dems are stupid. — Baden

It's really not this big complex thing. Jan 6 was never a threat to anything resembling the American political system. Not even a little bit. It doesn't take a genius to know this. The discourse around this has been histrionic because it does nothing but obscure systemic issues in order to shunt them into some one-time event where the Goodies can fight the Baddies and the Goodies can come out on top. You're right that summing it up like this is stupid, but that's exactly its role, and that's exactly the problem.

It's apolitical politics with exactly zero stakes, which is precisely why the dems and repubs can stand hand-in-hand solemnly finger-wagging at a bunch of dressed-up morons while the populace nod slowly along with weighty earnestness. Jan 6 is an excuse for the ruling class to array everyone against a convenient scapegoat, nothing more, and the faster it is treated that way, the better. It was a bit shit and sure they should probably all rot for a bit. Gotcha. Move on. Maybe to, I dunno, actual threats to the American political system. Economy-wide wage strike by employers, anyone? Kind of a big deal right now.

I think that the stock market is just a game that rich people play with each other and I don't care if a few hundred of them have advance knowledge to guide their buys and sells. — Michael

It's a game rich people play, yes - but the stakes are the lives of ordinary people. Unlike some inconsequential fracas by the Potomac.

I'm British. — Michael

Ah right, well, you'll be there soon then, right after the Tories are done with your NHS.

but it did far more harm than Pelosi buying or selling stocks with knowledge that few other people had. — Michael

Really? You think a conflict of interest that directly plays into how a nation's laws are made - which itself is nothing but one case among others - is a minor trifle compared to a slightly outsized bar-room brawl? Nah, don't talk to me about priorities.

This is what I mean about people being really dumb and being sucked in to spectacle. Pelosi's insider trading is infinitely more harmful, with far broader and far more damaging systematic effects, than anything that happened on Jan 6. That people can't see this is completely wild.

Do you know why GoFundMe is your country's healthcare insurer? Hint: it isn't because of Jan 6.

If you think Jan 6 was ever even remotely a genuine threat to the certification of the Presidential election than it deserves to have been one.

By contrast, Pelosi's insider trading is a real thing.

It is no more, in fact far less, of a mischaracterization than the idea that this 'attack' merits even a fraction of attention given to it by the pundit class and their pliant audiences.

Nah, I just don't buy into liberal side-shows that matter to no one. If there was even a tenth of the energy invested into, I dunno, Pelosi's insider trading, or the treatment of Julian Assange, or the general political rot that is the democratic party as a whole - things that matter and have widespread, systematic ramifications for people who live real lives and don't magpie themselves to the latest shiny spectacle involving men in camo dress-up with scawwwy guns and flags - maybe it might be OK to let this rubbish fly.

More people died at a fucking Travis Scott concert than this cosplay convention.

What's obvious is that some powerful people were made to feel uncomfortable for a bit, and now, having directed everyone to feel sorry for them, they've had their wishes granted. The class element of unwashed rednecks dirtying the marbled halls of power is too good an image to pass up I guess.

Attack? They were basically waved in by cops while staying obediently between the velvet ropes while dressed up as fucking moose. This is a bread and circus show for peasants, and it's pathetic that anyone takes it seriously.

No, but as long as people keep frothing about stupid shit like some shiny building getting scuffed - instead of, I dunno, literally anything of substance - it won't be long.

You can be as cynical as you like and still admit the obvious. — Baden

Exactly what is obvious? Exactly when did getting shot in America become something exceptional?

I'm pointing out that if even Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz are using such language to describe it then it's a stretch to characterise the investigation as just some Democrat propaganda or whatever. — Michael

What choice do they have? It's why the democrats are going so hard into this. It's an easy win for them. It's possibly the only win they might ever get that isn't just placating their corporate overloads. Even though it is entirely irrelevant to anything that matters to anyone and made for people who think politics is a Michael Bay movie.

Every person in that building deserves a hundred times over the wrath and hysteria directed at those outside of it. Instead they will find white knights who cannot wait to suck up to power and come to its swift defense. What better indication that you are being taken for a complete idiot when you agree with both democrats and republicans?

Imagine getting this panty-twisted over a carnival gone rowdy.

I hope it hurts.

If there's anything to be disgusted about it's the inability of the American political and judicial system to extirpate him — Wayfarer

Lol, Trump is a consummate product of the American political and judicial system, perhaps its most paradigmatic and representative one, and the only idiots are those who have faith in that self-same system to undo its own pristine work.

Even Mitch McConnell called it a "failed insurrection" — Michael

Oh well if Mitch McConnell said it it must be true. The man is known for his integrity and honest commentary, a true liberal darling.

One wonders where that warm and fuzzy feeling was when liberals were losing their mind over Russian "interference" because they could not possibly imagine that they were so useless that they let a shitstick like Trump walk right into office.

After all, remember when liberals all kum-ba-yah'd after Trump's win and wished him well and gave him pats on the back for his win? They surely didn't start squealing like dying pigs before larping as Star Wars resistance characters while launching massively funded federal investigations that turned up next to nothing?

Hypocrite dogs.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-histrionics-and-melodrama-around

In full:

The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay" while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump's 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post's White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic. “House Democrats [waited] their turn on the House floor to talk to Dick Cheney as a beacon for American democracy,” reported CNN's Edward-Isaac Dovere; “One by one, Democrats are coming over to introduce themselves to former VP Dick Cheney and shake his hand,” added ABC News’ Ben Siegel. Nancy Pelosi gravely introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to sermonize and sing about the importance of American democracy. The Huffington Post's senior politics reporter Igor Bobic unironically expressed gratitude for “the four legged emotional support professionals roaming the Capitol this week, helping officers, staffers, and reporters alike” — meaning therapy dogs. Yesterday, CNN's Kaise Hunt announced: "Tomorrow is going to be a tough one for those of us who were there or had loved ones in the building. Thinking of all of you and finding strength knowing I’m not alone in this." Unsurprisingly but still repellently: Kamala Harris today compared 1/6 to 9/11.

That the January 6 riot was some sort of serious attempted insurrection or "coup” was laughable from the start, and has become even more preposterous with the passage of time and the emergence of more facts. The United States is the most armed, militarized and powerful regime in the history of humanity. The idea that a thousand or so Trump supporters, largely composed of Gen X and Boomers, who had been locked in their homes during a pandemic — three of whom were so physically infirm that they dropped dead from the stress — posed anything approaching a serious threat to “overthrow” the federal government of the United States of America is such a self-evidently ludicrous assertion that any healthy political culture would instantly expel someone suggesting it with a straight face.

Sorry, you don't merit refutation. — ZzzoneiroCosm

This is the way.

Yeah but I don't take you seriously.

Yeah that ain't it chief.

I'm going to quote you back at you, and let's see if you pick up how dumb this sounds:

Praxis was explaining that nobody will remember any of this in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election. — frank

They're trying to block Trump from running again. — frank

So no one would care if there wasn’t an upcoming election? The presidential election is three years from now and Americans have a very short attention span, in case you hadn’t noticed. — praxis

Considering the democrats have failed at delivering literally anything save a modest bit of funding to prop up the US's crumbling infrastructure to keep it running at below-baseline, I'd say that yeah, their current single pitch to the electorate has been to 'get the Jan 6 perpetrators'. Never mind that Covid is now probably worse under Biden than it was under Trump, or that they have exactly zero positive vision other than to keep their corporate donors happy. I'd say yeah, this is literally the only play they have for political relevance, which is why they are leaning so heavily into it. And liberal American morons are eating it right up.

In any case, Djokovic’s entry would be a huge propaganda victory for the anti-vaccination movement and even if he’s deported, he becomes in effect a martyr for their cause. — Wayfarer

Not martyr enough.

@Maw - OK, quickie reviews of Smith's Imperialism and Suwandi's Value Chains: basically both books are really good compliments to one another. Smith's is very much a book on economics: its primary concern is with prevailing economic measures (GDP, Purchasing Power Parity, Productivity, Value-Added, Unit Labour Costs, etc), and doing deep dives into each of them to show how they obscure the enormous amount of productivity that happens in the global South, only to attribute it all to the global North. It's basically showing contemporary economic measures to be accounting tricks, all of which entrench and perpetuate the divide between North and South. It's alot of numbers, as well as the (deliberately) flawed methodologies behind those numbers. Pretty technical and I had to read it almost twice over. Smith's ultimate concern is with the question of 'value', and showing how contemporary imperialism can be can be understood in terms of Marx's theory of value.

The big distinction that he makes - which is the thing that I think is going to leave a lasting impression on me, no matter how much else I forget - is that between value created and value captured. For him, the North captures value, even as it is created in the South. It's this distinction that is papered over in bourgeois economics, which only has an eye for value-added as a matter of exchange rather than production. It literally does not have the conceptual capacity to make this distinction. The other thing it really drove home to me was just how novel the shift of global production to the South has been. I've been so used to hearing about production in developing countries that I never considered just how contemporary this has been - I mean, we're talking in the last twenty years, on unimaginable scales. Any attempt to come to grips with modern capitalism without recognizing this shift is going to come up short. It's not an easy read and it's a bit dry in places, but it is incredibly comprehensive and massively well researched.

Suwandi's book shifts the focus from economics to sociology - her study is a study in control. It looks at the mechanisms by which control is exerted by the North on the South, and busts myths about globalization being a matter of decentralization. Decision making happens in the North, no matter how much production has shifted to the South, which remains utterly dependant. The complementary side of that is her focus on labor practices - how this control actually plays itself out on the factory floor: the deskilling of workers, their 'flexibilization', the lack of bargaining power, etc. The crowning chapter is her fieldwork in a pair of Indonesian factories, where she details a few interviews she has with factory executives, and shows how much it's the imperatives from elsewhere that govern work on the ground. It's alot more qualitative than Smith's quantitative approach (and alot easier to read), and the two together really paint a nice (and depressing) picture of how contemporary imperialism functions.

Both are also pretty hostile to some other Marxist takes (like David Harvey), which reckon that imperialism either isn't such a big deal any more, or that it takes place outside the capital relation (through sheer violence and cohesion, etc). Both show nicely show imperialism isn't some extrinsic force to capitalism, but that it's central to it's function. Given that domestic markets in the North have been more or less saturated, and it's easier just to move capital out of the North than to attempt to drive down worker wages and standards (further than they have been), the shift in production is necessary for capitalism, not just some corollary. The big lesson for me is that imperialism needs to join the list which includes the explosion of finance, the reliance on real estate, basement low interest rates, and private equity and privatization, as among the major pathologies of contemporary capitalism. The latter issues are so often debated about in the West (because they are more 'tangible' for 'us'), but you hardly hear about the former (I'm guilty of this). Yet in terms of the sheer numbers of people affected, imperialism is probably the most damaging of them all.

Lol let Djokovic rot

*sigh*

God the democrats are really going to be faffing about on a topic that affects exactly zero lives on the day-to-day while the Republicans watch on in glee aren't they.

I mean you have to be a literal moron to think Jan 6 is the election play. Like dropped on your head and then beat by mallets kinda moron.

Jan 6 is the democrat's Hunter Biden.

Crises are capitalists' wet dream. Every time there is one - without tipping over into full blown revolution, which is the only proper alternative - they consolidate and secure their power and wealth. Anyone who knows anything about anything should know this. Capitalism lives on crises - it is an accelerant to it. The revelant question is at what point they tip their hand too far. Maybe once the hospital system explodes. Maybe not even then.

Here you go:

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii123/articles/robert-brenner-escalating-plunder

Incidentally, Americans who have not read this article are bad people.

Refreshing.