this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Bulletins and News Discussion from July 7th to July 13th, 2025 - Sanctions on Russia: The Sequel
(hexbear.net)
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.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
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.
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Want to share an article I read in the Financial Times over the weekend. Really lays bare the reality of the global situation, where even the most ghoulish financial columnists can no longer deny the shifting global power dynamics to China. The whole article is worth reading, but I'll share some choice quotes here.
And take a look at how they admit that even the "massive real estate meltdown" a few years ago that most Western commentators said would cause "China's collapse" has been handled with relative grace.
Also some fun riffing on AI:
Overall a good look at how some of the ghoulish businessmen understand view the world at this moment in time; certainly not encouraging for the United States.
Why is this a valid argument at all? This absolute nonsense. Be very conscious here, there is only one reason the west is praising the CPC's stance on AI. Its because they're in favor of it, yet we've been here before, Did anyone forget the dozen a day articles about "draconian" censorship laws and how the CPC is evil bad dictatorship for requiring things like masks and ID-movement tracking during COVID?
Of course they`ll flip the script because for now China is doing exactly what they want. Nobody on the left should be happy about this, at least unironicaly, This is literaly "trust the plan" but capitalists using it against ourselves to justify their own garbage slop.
So we know AI is just garbage slop but if it was realy bad surely China would've just banned it already? Surely it wont turn out exactly like it happened the last time the CPC did a crackdown
AI will be so much bigger than this and no IMO there is a near zero chance the CPC will stop AI if it gets big enough. The only possible time is now or in case of massive public backlash, otherwise its pretty damn indisputable, if the CPC couldn't handle Tencent having a single bad day lol, then they wont bother with their NVDIA size AI slop maker either.
The best we'll get is some "feel good" laws like Chinese teenage gaming laws that barely do anything for the vast majorty, but hey at least they have something so their hands are clean.
Adam Tooze was famous for saying that Germany can take a 5% GDP hit by cutting off Russian energy without having to go through deindustrialization. Look where Germany is heading today lol.
He was also adamant that the countries could just export their goods to one another when Trump went off with his Liberation Day tariffs because the US comprises only a small proportion of the world trade.
I really want to like Adam Tooze because he seems very knowledgeable in many things but also incredibly naive in others.
Regarding China, it was never about economic collapse. The real questions to ask are why hasn’t China’s incredible GDP growth and technological advancements translated into wage growth and social safety nets for the poor? There lies the answer to China’s deflation problem.
I’ll just give one example to make the point: China absolutely dominates the solar panel industry, and easily took 90% of the global market share. It has no peer competition in the world. It produces twice the amount of global solar panel demand in a single year!
And yet all major Chinese solar panel companies including their entire supply chain are now making huge losses and none of that growth ended up being transferred to income growth for the workers in the sector. If anything, we’re looking at production and investment downsizing simply out of sheer overproduction crisis, and that means unemployment down the road.
A major reason that the solar panel industry has not yet imploded was because the local governments had invested so much wealth (guess where did the money come from) into giving massive subsidies to the solar panel companies that it has become a sunk cost for the local governments. If the solar panel companies shut down their production, it’s going to incur even more losses to the local governments (the main tax revenue for both central and local governments is value-added tax) this will in turn impede their operating expenditures (somebody has to run the subways, trains, road maintenance, public services, and pay the civil servants etc, you know) and their ability to pay off the massive amount of debt these governments have owed to the financial institutions.
And so, even more wealth (again, where did those money come from) had to be invested to keep the industry from imploding, and then they wonder why the average working class people refuse to spend their money to consume?
PS. does anyone know what’s the beef between Tooze and the Chapo boys? The last time I heard about him being mentioned on the pod (maybe 2021 or 2022, some time around Covid, Matt was definitely still around) they got really sarcastic about him. I remember something about Felix insinuating that he was hitting on their partners or something?
Yeah China's got a lot of problems that seem like they have really easy solutions if the party was just willing to move even just a little bit away from its current frame of mind regarding production and trade. Alas.
To be fair, it is very difficult to govern a country with 1.4 billion people, and many problems began their rot at the municipal/provincial level that were not adequately or incapably addressed by the central government. This is why there has been so much corruption scandals across all levels being exposed in recent years. Almost scary to see a never ending number of corruption cases, almost on a daily/weekly basis. A long-term consequence of post-Mao decentralization, which clearly needs to be reformed.
As an enjoyer of Chinese history, I cannot help but notice the recurring pattern across the dynasties: centralization of power led to inefficient bureaucracy and economic calcification, while decentralization led to a flourishing economy but also set in the rot of corruption with disastrous consequences down the road. A cyclical trend that has gone on for thousands of years as dynasties rose and fell. Sometimes I wonder if the Communist Party in China will also succumb to the same cyclical pattern that has so pervaded the entire history of our civilization? What does the future even look like? After all, the country is not even 80 years old - a mere blip along the 5,000-year civilizational history.
The FT has always been surprisingly rational compared to other neolib outlets
Their greed makes them do light materialism sometimes.
Gotta be cognizant enough for counting the money even if you still huffing from your supply
It’s directed towards capital owners, so it has to be a little more honest sometimes, nestled in between articles about the top 10 islands to build a bunker on