Image is of the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline, which transports gas from Russia to China. This isn't an oil pipeline (such as the ESPO) but I thought it looked cool. Source here.
Trump has recently proposed a 500% tariff on goods from countries that trade with Russia, including India and China (who buy ~70% of Russia's oil output), as well as a 10% additional tariff on goods from countries that "align themselves with BRICS." Considering that China is the largest trading partner of most of the countries on the planet at this point, and India and Brazil are reasonably strong regional players, I'm not sure what exactly "alignment" means, but it could be pretty bad.
Sanctions and tariffs on Russian products have been difficult to achieve in practice. It's easy to write an order to sanction Russia, but much harder to actually enforce these sorts of things because of, for example, the Russian shadow oil fleet, or countries like Kazakhstan acting as covert middlemen (well, as covert as a very sudden oil export boom can be).
Considering that China was pretty soundly victorious last time around, I'm cautiously optimistic, especially because China and India just outright cutting off their supply of energy and fuel would be catastrophic to them (and if Iran and Israel go to war again any time in the near future, it'll only be more disastrous). Barring China and India kowtowing to Trump and copying Europe vis-a-vis Nordstream 2 (which isn't impossible, I suppose), the question is whether China and India will appear to accede to these commands while secretly continuing trade with Russia through middlemen, or if they will be more defiant in the face of American pressure.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
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 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.
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.
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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.
Honestly I think your position is too cynical. It is entirely possible to be anti-imperialist/America while still being an adherent of neoliberal economics. Russia and China as you mentioned are the two prime examples of this.
Both of their policies aren’t necessarily that they want to become “friendly” with the US, and it would be ludicrous to suggest that either of the leaderships isn’t aware of the danger of making deals with the empire.
However, when you only have the neoliberal toolbox, your solutions are going to be constrained by what’s available in the box.
For Russia, if you’ve seen my past comments, it’s becoming clear that the prolonged period of high rate (20%) from Russia’s central bank (Nabiullina-Siluanov-Kudrin neoliberal faction) has finally impeded the Russian government’s effort to drive domestic investment (Mishustin-Belousov nationalist faction). Without the high interest rate, Russia would have been in a far better shape today since the war started. It’s not that they are not trying to do anything, but they are ideologically constrained by what’s available in their neoliberal toolbox.
And for China, again, I’ve said many times that they have fully bought into the IMF “balance the budget” indoctrination and believe that they have to rely on export-led growth to drive domestic investment (so as to keep government deficit low). As such, when the economy is slowing down, they only have the neoliberal toolbox to rely on due to ideological indoctrination by the IMF/Western neoliberal economics. In fact, the CPC is very adamantly against welfare state and has publicly stated this many times, and Xi Jinping has said before that Latin American-style “welfare state” will only encourage the people to turn lazy. This is also a major reason why they keep missing the obvious solution to alleviate the domestic consumption problem. These people aren’t stupid, you know.
If anyone is curious, here (below the spoiler tag) is an excerpt from the piece linked above, machine translated by Firefox, starting with Xi's unfortunate, disappointing statement about "welfare" and "lazy people." Still very illuminating regarding the perspective of China's leadership. That it's mostly rooted in material reality, that alone is refreshing in contrast to reading anything put out by western heads of state. Compare it to Trump's latest public disclosure.
spoiler
The analyses are quite good, but as always, the problem for the Chinese leadership is how are you going to convince the local governments into getting onboard with these policies?
To understand why is this such a big issue, we need to briefly go through the Chinese economic history after Mao:
During the early days of reform and opening up, local governments were given a lot of autonomy to promote growth as centralized bureaucratic inefficiency had stifled the national economy.
Under this new central-local relationship, the local governments only had to pay a fixed amount of fiscal tax to the central government and were allowed to keep the rest of the revenues for themselves. This wasn’t so much of a problem in the early days when most provinces were still poor. However, soon the Southeastern coastal provinces were able to take advantage of their exporting capacities and grew very lucrative light manufacturing industries.
Their GDP growth would far surpass those of the other regions, and because the fiscal tax amount was fixed, these coastal provinces would soon accumulate large quantities of wealth, so much so that they began to exempt corporate taxes and initiated a wealth-sharing scheme with the corporations themselves. This only served to exacerbate the wealth disparity between the provinces as corporations would rather invest in those regions where they are allowed to enjoy tremendous benefits and wealth-sharing with the state governments.
By the early 1990s, due to the existing arrangement, the central government received only ~20% of the tax revenues while the rest of the 80% were left for the local governments to do as they please.
To remedy this, the Tax-Sharing Reform was implemented in 1994 that would have profound and unexpected consequences to the Chinese economy.
First, under this new tax reform, local governments would have to pay a much higher tax rate to the central government, and the central government would then re-distribute the wealth back to the local provinces as needed. 75% of value-added tax goes to the central government, while the local governments only get to pocket the remaining 25%.
Second, and more important, local governments are now responsible for their own finances and operating expenditures. This new policy relieved the central government from having to finance for large scale investments as well as the operating expenditures of the SOEs spread across the country. The local governments would now have to find their own means of financing these budgets.
Almost immediately, the Northeastern Three Provinces (Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning) - the fortress of China’s heavy industries - began to panick. These provinces were where most of the heavy industry SOEs were located and heavy industries typically require huge amount of investment and budgets to finance their operations, especially when compared to the light manufacturing sector. Previously, they were able to rely on the central government financing and enjoyed relatively prosperous living standards, but now under the new tax-sharing scheme, they would be the ones to lose the most.
And so, lacking the means to finance themselves, the Northeastern Three Provinces did something so radical that would have a far-reaching consequence to this day - privatization.
Private capital did what private capital does best with their “reforms” of these SOEs and laid off millions of workers. To emphasize on how radical this meant: this would be the first time since the founding of the PRC that a Chinese worker would experience unemployment!
Between 1996-2002, nearly 60 million Chinese workers would lose their jobs. Economic recession fueled sky high rate of inflation, corruption was abundant as local officials would sell off state assets worth billions of yuan for cheap to private capitalists. It would take China joining the WTO in 2001 and turned itself into the world’s factory (while stripping off labor rights) to reverse the economic downturn.
However, this would not be the only consequence. The new tax-sharing policy has made the local governments realize that they can no longer rely on central government financing, and would begin to seek other non-tax revenues to replenish their coffers. And where could the local governments go to find another source of lucrative revenue? That’s right - selling and leasing land.
The seeds for a speculative property bubble had been sown since the late 1990s, and now all it needed was to wait for a new national policy to come into effect for it to blow up.
As the subprime mortgage crisis in the US led to a global financial crisis around 2008, the loss of export revenues would led the central government to carry out a new national policy - a 4 trillion yuan stimulus for infrastructure building.
The time has finally arrived. Local governments would take advantage of their land financing ability, and formed a local government-shadow banks/financial institutions-property developer triad. First, they borrow heavily from the financial institutions through shadow banks to invest in infrastructure building and new housing projects, hoping to drive up land prices that they can then sell off for lucrative sums of income. A speculative housing bubble was being fueled.
By 2015, the amount of hidden debt (i.e. debt borrowed through shadow banks) racked up by the local governments was so massive that the central government had enough of it. And the infamous 谁家孩子谁抱 (if this is your child, then you fetch them yourself) policy aka “we’re tired of bailing you out anymore and you’re now going to be responsible for your own debt problem” was implemented.
Before this, local governments were not allowed to borrow from banks, hence it had to go through shadow banks and ended up as “hidden debt”, but now the central government has conferred the local governments the ability to issue their own debt in public. As expected, the borrowing became even more reckless after this, as peer competition forced each municipal and provincial governments to invest even more in housing and infrastructure to drive up land prices. Truly surprisingly, the housing bubble imploded. Nobody could have seen this coming.
As you can see, a lot of the problems in China today stem from the conflicting and contradictory relationship between the central and the local governments, and the inability of the former to curb the recklessness of the latter.