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No cuck n chad ranking this week, maybe next week as well unless something funny and cool happens. I'm travelling to Bashar Al Assad's based Syria this week and staying for a while. I'm changing jobs soon and got a relatively fat paycheck for doing that and also around two months off in between jobs. So I decided to take my wife to Syria and Lebanon, where it's quite cheap, and I live for free there with random family members, and I sort of got addicted to the Middle East when I last visited. In exchange for no rankings, you'll get cool stories and possibly some pics if the internet situation permits and I feel comfortable doing so. If I die in an American or Israeli airstrike on Damascus, tell Bernie Sanders that he's a cuck and bury me next to Prigozhin.

Bank of Canada study finds it is more profitable for countries to ignore sanctions on Russia than comply

The Bank of Canada has published a study that concludes that as not enough countries have joined the sanctions on Russia, it is more profitable to ignore sanctions than comply.

The study looked at what affect on a country non-adherence of third countries to the sanctions regime affects the sanctioning countries. The study concluded if an insufficient number of countries support restrictive measures, Russia loses less, while those countries that are friendly are better off thanks to increased trade of goods that can be sold at higher prices.

“Our welfare analysis demonstrates that the sanctioned country’s welfare losses are significantly mitigated, and the sanctioning country’s losses are amplified, if the third country does not join the sanctions, but the third country benefits from not joining,” the study found.

To illustrate, the study’s calculations conclude that if a critical mass of countries were to join in restricting Russian gas purchases, Russia's GDP growth would decline by 9%. However, as long as only European countries comply with the measures, Russia's per capita GDP is reduced only by 4%.

At the same time, those countries facilitating the trade of sanctioned goods see substantial gains in their balance of trade. A raft of countries have seen their trade turnover with Russia explode in the last 18 months, including most of Central Asia, Turkey, China and even the Baltic states, which have become a gateway for goods to Russia. Despite the war with Georgia in 2008, today the small country in the Caucasus is more economically dependent on Russia than at any time since its independence thanks to booming trade.

I bring a sort of "constantly bringing up the Chilean coup" vibe to 9/11 that liberals and chuds don't really like

Hell yeah Gunther

Allende was a threat because he was a marxist, and it is a FACT that all marxists don't know Basic Economics (TM), so he was going to run Chile down completely and plunge them into stone age. So We (TM) had to intervene to avoid this, we had to grab this shady general Pinochet, give him money and training and direct him to coup Allende and install a decades-long dictatorship in place, so that WE can run Chile down by OUR terms.

What if there had been no coup in Chile in 1973?: The Thirty-Sixth Newsletter (2023)

If there had been no coup in Chile, there might not have been coups in Peru (1975) and Argentina (1976). Without these coups, perhaps the military dictatorships in Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay would have withdrawn in the face of popular agitation, inspired by Chile’s example. Perhaps, in this context, the close relationship between Chile’s Salvador Allende and Cuba’s Fidel Castro would have broken Washington’s illegal blockade of revolutionary Cuba. Perhaps the promises made at the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting in Santiago in 1972 might have been realised, among them the enactment of a robust New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974 that would have set aside the imperial privileges of the Dollar-Wall Street complex and its attendant agencies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Perhaps the just economic order that was being put in place in Chile would have been expanded to the world.

But the coup did happen. The military dictatorship killed, disappeared, and sent into exile hundreds of thousands of people, setting in motion a dynamic of repression that has been difficult for Chile to reverse despite the return to democracy in 1990. From being a laboratory for socialism, Chile—under the tight grip of the military—became a laboratory for neoliberalism. Despite its relatively small population of roughly ten million (a tenth of the size of Brazil’s population), the coup in Chile in 1973 had a global impact. At that time, the coup was not just seen as a coup against the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende, but as a coup against the Third World.

Hexagonal world news service best world news service ty

The lib consensus seems to be that Putin is hoping Trump wins the 2024 election and pulls the rug, forcing Ukraine to accept defeat. I can't help but wonder if Putin is planning almost the opposite. Steamroll Ukraine in 2024, before the US election, shocking the West. Trump can then use that complete failure as ammunition to secure victory. Frankly, I think a second Trump presidency is already pretty likely, and that little nudge might push it into "sure thing" territory.

I just saw a video of the NAFO meetup in Lithuania and holy shit. These are the people posting about how indestructible NATO is? They're the sort of people that street gangs in my country would send 14 year old boys after to beat them up as a joke. I have a feeling that the people posting SLAVA UKRAINI on Reddit are cut from the same cloth lmao

(cw: police violence, sa) Ex-law officers plead guilty to charges of torturing two Black men in US | Al Jazeera (Aug 14 2023)

In January, the officers entered a house without a warrant and handcuffed and assaulted the two men with stun guns, a sex toy and other objects. The officers mocked the two men with racial slurs in a 90-minute torture session, then devised a cover-up that included planting drugs and a gun, leading to false charges that stood against the victims for months.

In portugal 2 red wine depots broke and red wine is just flooding down the street like a river it's crazy 🇵🇹

Did Ukraine win yet?

In Denmark the so-called "robustness commission" has announced its recommendations for "a more robust healthcare system".

Denmark's universal healthcare system is widely popular, doctors and nurses are among the most trusted professions and very few people would dream of moving towards the wasteful nightmare that is the American model. There are however challenges. An aging population means more demand for care and greater workers to carry out the care, recruiting enough healthcare workers is a challenge and those in the system experience having too many tasks. In addition significant regional and social inequalities in healthcare exists and the increasing cost of new treatments is straining the healthcare system.

Of course the recommendations doesn't address price gouging by the medical-industrial complex. Instead, the chairman of the commission used today's press event to fingerwag and blaming the public for having too much "hygge", for drinking, smoking and eating too much.

The recommendations themselves are a mixed bag. Stove of it is reasonable enough but it has some huge red lights in it. Austerity dog whistles like "core services" is being blown and although part of the stated goal is to reduce inequalities, one of the principles introduced is that "everyone should not get the the same". On the face of it this means that "resourceful" patients will have to do more stuff themselves without actually seeing doctors or nurses who will them have more time for the less resourceful patients. It sounds nice but it has the potential of pushing a development towards a more stratified system where the middle class has private health insurance while the service for the poor ends up becoming a poor service.

Another potentially concerning suggestion is that of reducing the amount of care given. Palliative care should start sooner for terminal patients than is the case today, patients should be "more included in their health care decisions" with the started goal of talking them out of the more invasive and expensive options. This can have it's good sides, patients should give informed consent and there is little sense in stressing dying people with invasive treatments but again, in the hands of the neoliberal state it can easily become a reduction in service.

The worst suggestion is the formation of a so-called "prioritising commission" who will be takes with finding ways to cut care. The commission will be enabled to tighten criteria for receiving treatments dented too expensive for their effectiveness and will potentially be enabled to introduce copayments or to reduce today's full coverage with a mere subsidy. This has the potential to be a significant blow to today's principle of free and equal access to healthcare.

The government has already signals it's willingness to form the "prioritisation commission". The government has also decided to increase military expenditure to two percent of GDP and to replace every ship in the Danish navy.

IIPPE 2023: part one - the end of US hegemony?

By Michael Roberts, taking us through a variety of presentations.

The annual conference of the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE) took place last week in Madrid. The IIPPE conference brings together leftist economists, mainly post-Keynesians and Marxists, from around the world to present papers and panels on a range of subjects. Most of this year’s near 400 attendees are academics, students, researchers or lecturers. Given that the conference was in Madrid, there was a large turnout of Spanish and Portuguese speakers and papers on issues in Latin America.

...

Let me start first with the subject and debate in the session that I participated in. The session was called Imperialism, hegemony and the next war – a grand and ambitious title. I was first in with short slide presentation entitled, Profitability and waves of globalisation.

I argued that globalisation, defined as the expansion of trade and capital flows globally, took place in waves i.e periods of fast expanding trade and capital globally and then periods where trade and capital flows fall off and countries revert to trade and capital barriers. I reckoned that we could distinguish three waves of globalisation, from about 1850-80; from about 1944-70; and the largest from the mid-1980s to end of the 20th century.

What drives these waves? I argued that they could be tied to a change in the profitability of capital. In each of the periods before these waves, the profitability of capital in the major economies fell significantly. In order to counteract this fall in national profit rates, the leading capitalist economies looked to expand foreign trade and capital exports in order to gain extra profit from the less technologically developed and cheaper labour economies of what we now call, in shorthand, the ‘Global South’.

...

And the decline of the hegemonic US economy relative to the rising economies of China, India and East Asia has increased. This relative decline was taken up in the next paper by Maria Ivanova (Goldsmiths University). She pointed out that the US runs a significant and long-lasting trade deficit with the rest of the world. It is only able to pay for this because of its monopoly issuance of the US dollar, which is the major transaction and reserve currency in the world. However, the dollar’s hegemony is gradually weakening and now there are attempts by other economic powers, like the BRICS group (increasing in size), to reduce their reliance on the dollar and replace it with alternatives.

...

Sergio Camera from UAM Mexico presented us with a battery of data and analysis to show that the US economy is in a structural crisis, still gradual maybe, but nevertheless showing clear signs that US capital’s ability to expand the productive resources and to sustain profitability is declining. This explains its intensified effort to strangle and contain China’s rising economic strength and so maintain its hegemony in the world economic order.

...

Sean Starrs from Kings College, London then provided a refreshing counter-balance to the hype that US imperialism and the dollar is soon about to lose its dominance in the world economy. In his presentation, he pointed out that most of China’s key exports were made by foreign companies (70%), not Chinese companies; and that most of the profits from China’s exports were realized in the imperialist bloc, not in China (this is something that G Carchedi and I also found in our work on the economics of modern imperialism).

Moreover, China is not yet a serious contender to the US in the technology industries globally, despite the hype. The US remains the dominant techno power and also holds most of the personal wealth in the world (45% unchanged in the last two decades).

The discussion in the session revolved round how to balance these trends. Is the US losing its hegemonic power or not? Are the BRICS+ in a position to replace US hegemony in the next decade or so? Will these rivalries lead to major military conflicts?

In my view, while there has been a relative decline in US economic and political hegemony since the golden days of the 1950s and 1960s, from the 1970s onwards that decline has been gradual and possible challenges to US hegemony eg: Japan in the 1970s; Europe in the 1990s; and now China (+BRICS); have not and will not succeed in replacing it.

I likened the situation using the analogy of the decline and collapse of the ancient Roman Empire in the 3rd century ACE. Some scholars argue that the Roman Empire collapsed because of outside forces ie invasions and rising contender states (ie BRICS?). But others argue, rightly in my view, that the real cause was the economic disintegration of the dominant slave economy within Rome. Roman conquests had ended in the late 2nd century ACE and there were not enough slaves to sustain the economy so that productivity dropped off and eventually weakened financial support for the military. Rising and extreme inequality in Rome was a symptom of this decline and eventual collapse.

In the 21st century, globalisation has fallen away and regionalisation is emerging. Inequality of wealth and income in the US and the G7 is at extremes. But above all, the profitability of capital in the imperialist bloc is near all-time lows. The collapse of the Roman Empire also ended the dominance of the slave-owning mode of production, to be eventually replaced by a feudal system. The increased internal disintegration of the US economy could not only end its global hegemony, but also usher in a new mode of production.

Uhh, let me melt steel

Update for September 4th to September 10th

Part 1

The Country of the Week is Chile!

As mentioned in the preamble, feel free to post or recommend any material related to Chile, whether from a thousand years ago or yesterday. You can post it anywhere in the thread, but you can also reply to this comment if you wish.

If you're feeling particularly ambitious and want homework, you could take on any or all of these questions (no reward, but I'll be very proud of you):

• Who are the main political actors? Are they compradors, nationalists, international socialists, something else?
• What are the most salient domestic political issues; those issues that repeatedly shape elections over the last 10, 20 years. Every country has its quirks that complicate analysis - for example, Brexit in the UK.
• What is the country's history? You don't have to go back a thousand years if that's not relevant, and I'm counting "history" as basically anything that has happened over a year ago.
• What factions exist, historically and currently? If there is an electoral system, what are the major parties and their demographic bases? Are there any minor parties with large amounts of influence? Independence movements? Religious groups?
• How socially progressive or conservative are they? Is there equality for different ethnic groups, or are some persecuted? Do they have LGBTQIA+ rights? Have they improved over time, or gotten worse?
• What role do foreign powers play in the country’s politics and economy? Is there a particular country nearby or far away that is nearly inseparable from them, for good or bad reasons? Is their trade dominated by exports/imports to one place? Are they exploited, exploiters, or something in between?
• If applicable, what is the influence of former colonial relationships on the modern economy and politics?
• Is the country generally stable? Do you think there will be a coup at some point in the future, and if so, what faction might replace them?

Last week's country was Libya.

Discussions included:

• A Responsible Statecraft article on how the Libyan civil war related to the Sahel, and particularly Niger.
• An article by Vijad Prashad in 2020 on the Libyan war.
• A story from @LargePenis@hexbear.net's communist uncle.
• @vomit_sounds@hexbear.net talking about Qaddafi, the Green Book, and (further down) Syrian ba3thism.
• My post after having read Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including potential books that might be part of a hypothetical reading list on Libya.

Also, honorable mention, @thelastaxolotl@hexbear.net's effortpost on the current state of Mexican politics.

Geopolitics Reading List (so far):

General Theory:

• Super Imperialism, by Michael Hudson.
• Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis, by John Smith.
• Superexploitation and the Imperialist Drive of Capitalism: How Marini's 'Dialectics of Dependency' Goes beyond Marx's 'Capital', by Andy Higginbottom.
• Capital Volume 3 Lecture Series, 32 videos, 10-15 minutes each, by Andy Higginbottom.
• World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, by Immanuel Wallerstein.
• Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire, by Radhika Desai.
• Capitalism, Coronavirus and War: A Geopolitical Economy, by Radhika Desai.

United States:

• Drug Cartels Do Not Exist: Narcotrafficking in US and Mexican Culture, by Oswaldo Zavala

Chile:

• Santiago Boys Podcast, analyzing Allende's government and Cybersyn.

So that Pro Publica article from the previous thread on the LCS being a piece of crap had a little comment and hyperlink about the USS Gerald R. Ford having reliability issues. Looks like its a PDF from the DOD with all kinds of reliability information from the different weapons programs. Honestly not sure if there's a more secure way to link to the PDF, but let me know so I can update it.

There's some gems in there like for the Gerald Ford Catapults:

During testing from March through June 2022 (after the PIA), EMALS achieved a reliability of 614 mean cycles between operational mission failures (MCBOMF) during 1,841 catapult launches (where a cycle is the launch of one aircraft). While this reliability is well below the requirement of 4,166 MCBOMF, EMALS showed slight improvement in reliability from FY21 (460 MCBOMF throughout 1,758 catapults). However, during the first underway of IOT&E in September 2022, EMALS reliability appeared to regress and slowed CQ. While the data are still being analyzed, the adverse effect to operations on two of the ten days of CQ was significant.

Fun blurb on the ships self defense systems

There may not be enough data to determine the operational effectiveness and suitability of the self-defense capability ofCVN 78 against anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) due to testdata that will not be available for reasons discussed in the Ship Self-Defense System article of this Annual Report.

Which leads to this in a different sections of the report:

The Navy will not complete the remaining planned firing events against the SDTS configured with a representation of SSDS Mk 2 Mod 6 due to there being no AN/ SPY-3 radar set available to install on the SDTS. Additionally, the Navy planned to use data from live operational firing events from the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) IOT&E, but modifications to the DDG 1000 AN/SPY-3 radar no longer support the use of the DDG 1000 test data for validation of the Probability of Raid Annihilation (PRA) test bed. The PRA test bed is the high fidelity model and simulation the Navy intends to provide the remainder of the SSDS Mk 2 Mod 6 performance data.

In FY22, the Navy conducted no tests on SSDS Mk 2 Mod 1 (Nimitz-class) or Mk 2 Mod 5 (Whidbey Island-class and Harpers Ferry-class), as a result of funding shortfalls, prioritization of remaining funding to conduct CVN 78 operational test on the SDTS, and Strike Group availability.

Some of the lingo goes over my head but nonetheless, the US Navy doesn't seem like its doing so hot.

Editing in another thing I saw that was interesting

I guess this JAGM is supposed to replace the Longbow Hellfire and HELLFIRE Romeo missiles and caught this:

JAGM is survivable against a nascent or limited cyber attacker. JAGM is not survivable against a moderate-to-advanced capability threat. The Army mitigated key vulnerabilities found in two cyber test events conducted in 2017. The most recent Navy testing revealed additional vulnerabilities.