You might be interested in the following lectures about the financialization of healthcare through the International Finance Corporation (IFC) which is an arm of the World Bank:
The short version is that you’re dealing with finance capitalists who have a lot of profit to make by financializing the healthcare sector of peripheral countries, whereas Michael Hudson was talking about industrial capitalists who wanted to maximize profit through industrial labor. These two are diametrically opposed to one another and their oppositions can manifest in the Global South as well.
Privatization is the only way for foreign capital to control the industrial assets of the peripheral countries.
Otherwise these sovereign countries would own all the production and resources and would refuse being exploited by Western imperialism!
Even today, 40% of China’s export earnings go to foreign owners. That’s the deal you make with the Devil. And the reason why nobody in China thought the US would start a trade war with China, until Trump actually did in 2018.
Disclaimer: did not watch the video and have no intention to.
The guy has been blacklisted for a few years now. Most likely pissed off the wrong people who have connections with both the criminal organizations and the party officials, and was forced to issue an apology and back down from whatever he was exposing.
The story is simple. Don’t piss off people with powerful connections (both the black i.e. criminals/triads and the white i.e. police/officials) who have the means of beating you up and disappearing you.
You can laugh at these people but they would also have been the ones to carry Bernie to victory if he hadn’t been screwed by the DNC (and the electoral system at large).
These people are infinitely more likely to open up to a leftist candidate than your affluent lib who call themselves progressives and shit on the left for not toeing the Democratic party line.
At the risk of posting the same thing again, I am now fully on board with the punishment theory.
Libs are extremely vindictive when minorities aren’t behaving as the good, subservient roles that white liberals expect them to be. They are supposed to embellish the progressiveness of white liberals, not to stand up for themselves. The libs now want to punish the Latinos that they perceive to be voting for Trump and cost Harris the election.
If the rate cut is not compensated by an increase in government spending, then recession is a certainty. It is a mathematical problem.
And Trump literally said he’s going to get Elon Musk to cut government spending because “inflation is caused by too much spending” which is one of the most pernicious myths of the neoclassical economics that unfortunately we see not only being peddled by the right, but from the left as well!
The unique situation with the US under the Biden administration is that the high interest rate paradoxically paid out huge amount of money (about $1 trillion in 2023 alone, and has exceeded US annual military spending) mostly to the rich people, and the trickle down has so far been enough to keep the economy from going under.
By cutting rate, you are slowing the outflow of the money, and if the government is not going to play the role of a big spender to stimulate the economy (Elon Musk wants to cut deficit by 2 trillion!), then there isn’t going to have enough money in the circulation to drive the economy. People will be laid off, consumption (demand) will plunge, businesses will close down, the supply chain will falter, large corporations will then consolidate the assets of all the failing businesses (just like they did during the 2009 GFC and the 2020 pandemic) as the people get squeezed even harder.
The question here is whether there is a revolutionary potential in America or it’s a “everyone out for themself” kind of situation, if the latter then it’s fascism time.
I was one of the people who thought the bourgeois ruling class would not let Trump win because he’s a liability. But now it has finally dawned upon me what the liberal bourgeoisie is going for: Trump’s win will be a punishment for the voters who did not turn out for Harris/Democrats.
The ruling class wants to discipline those who think they can punish the Biden/Harris administration by abstaining. They want to punish the minorities who went for Trump after being told the inflation was just their imagination, those who stood up for the genocide in Gaza, and those who sat out of the election for the Democrats’ lackluster campaign.
This is why I fully believe that Trump’s foreign policy against Palestine is going to be even more vicious than Biden’s - the ruling class wants to spite the people who failed to show their support for Harris, and instead Trump’s presidency is simply a tool that will be used to crush the hope and instill the sense of fear and dread and guilt into every person who refused to support the Democrats. You don’t want to vote for us because of Gaza (or any other issue)? Here I’ll make sure that you remember this decision for the rest of your life.
Remember, the role of fascism is to defend liberal capitalism under crisis. Trump is playing that role. And if enough American voters who sat out of 2024 can be scared into voting the Democrats again in 2026 mid-terms and the 2028 presidential election, then the system is merely functioning as intended. A self-correcting maneuver through disciplining the voters, if you will.
With third party movement now officially dead, the question for the American left is: what is to be done from now on?
Neoclassical economics teach that for developing countries to become rich and transition into high income countries, they have to open up their domestic market so foreign direct investments can throw their money into and help develop your economy. Taking IMF loans is actually good and working hard to pay back your debt is a sign that you’re being responsible and credit worthy for foreign investors.
This is not just a China problem, but for many countries in the Global South. The Chicago school has forged itself as the mainstream brand of economics and has succeeded in exported its ideology to the entire Global South by training top students who went to study in the top economics and business schools in America and brought those ideology back to their countries.
The alternative viewpoint is from Marxist and heterodox economics like MMT that say you should not open yourself up to IMF and foreign loans, but instead work on self-sufficiency in agricultural and energy sector (which would include cooperation with neighboring countries such as forming a regional bloc among African and Asian countries, for example).
Of course this is easier said than done when US imperialism would use its global institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and GATT (WTO) to force poor developing countries into opening up their domestic markets and enable foreign capital to come in and entrench itself within the economy, such that when the time comes, they can threaten to uproot your entire economy and making it ever more dependent on the whims of foreign imperialist powers.
As an example, ASEAN is a regional economic bloc for the ten Southeast Asian countries. To disrupt their independence, Agent Soros was activated and launched a speculative attack on the Thai central bank, and resulted in the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 during which many countries (including Russia!) defaulted and had to take IMF loans to save their economies. Mission accomplished. This is just an average example of how Western imperialism fucks with the Global South.
Ironically, Malaysia was one of the few countries that did not take the IMF loans during the Asian Financial Crisis. The current Prime Minister Anwar who is big on joining BRICS, was also a fervent neoliberal supported by the NED who pushed for taking the IMF loan in 1997 as the Deputy Prime Minister. He was then immediately persecuted and imprisoned for conducting sodomy by the Prime Minister of the time, Mahathir, leader of the far right Malay ethnosupremacist party whose anti-Semitism led him to firmly believe that the “IMF is a tool of Jewish cabal” to control their economy. Asian politics can be wild.
Those were the only two restrictions left for China’s manufacturing sector: foreign investors were not allowed to invest in “publishing printers“ which have to be controlled by Chinese owned companies” and “production and processing of traditional Chinese medicine”.
It’s a complete removal of all restrictions on its manufacturing sector and a signal to foreign investors that China is not going to become a protectionist country (which it should).
@SeventyTwoTrillion@hexbear.net - just came back from touching grass and saw your comment asking me to comment, still catching up with the US election news and still processing.
(also I have no idea what’s going on with the mod situation or whatever that happened over the past week but I hope you stay and run the news mega because this is probably my only attachment to the site)
I will give my hot takes now for the sake of driving a discussion: Harris lost, the Democrats won, Trump a sacrificial lamb, third party movements annihilated, Biden will have the last laugh though he (or his demented mind) probably won’t live long enough to see it
First of all, the US electoral system is designed to PUNISH. What you’re seeing now is the (non-)voters getting disciplined. Trump didn’t exactly win, Harris lost because millions of voters did not turn up to vote for various reasons that we’re all too familiar with. If you refuse to vote for Harris, you DESERVE Trump. That’s what the libs are snickering about now. Arab voters chose to punish Harris for committing genocide in Gaza? Well, how about you getting punished by Trump who will hopefully deport all of you? The libs are going to be enjoying the schadenfreude of seeing minorities and immigrants getting punished under Trump and continue to scold those who refused to support them.
The Democrats will not change their way just because they lost the election. The system is working exactly as intended, and the new Trump administration is being used as a fascist terror regime to scare the (non-)voters back into the fold of the Democrats by 2026 mid-term elections. And because of this, the genocide against Palestinians will almost certainly be ramped up under Trump just to spite on the people who wanted to punish them for the genocide.
The main question is: will the American voters who have decided to sit out this election be scared enough by Trump into voting the Democrats again in 2026 and 2028? If so, then the system is simply correcting itself, and all the Democrats have to do is to be patient and wait 2 years.
To repeat: the US electoral system is designed to PUNISH. American DemocracyTM meant to rule by FEAR.
Meanwhile, the DNC will fundraise like no tomorrow until 2026. Wealthy liberal donors so appalled by Trump’s victory will be dishing out their live savings to protect “American democracy”. What’s unique this time is that the Democrats have also secured enough of the traditional Republican establishment donors who have splintered off Trump’s MAGA party that the DNC will now receive double income from both the Democratic liberal and the Republican establishment. Because of how Citizens United works, the DNC will go into the mid-term with very strong financial backing and will certainly have no trouble running their campaigns (reminder that Harris out-spent Trump 4:1 in this election - they have the money for sure).
As such, the Democrats will continue to rebrand itself as the new Republican Party over the next 4 years, achieving what they have already dreamed of for decades. This is a huge win for the Democrats even when they have lost the election.
Third, Biden has already set off a ticking time bomb when the Fed started to reduce interest rates back in September. There is no indication that anyone will stop the rate cut from now on, with Trump himself wanting to cut the rate even faster.
This is a deliberately timed policy such that when the interest income dried up, it will be at least 6-12 months (depending on the rate at which the deficits are drained) after the election. This means recession - and if you think the last two years of inflation was bad, what’s coming is going to be far worse. Many people will lose their jobs. I don’t know if it will be 2009 GFC level recession, but whoever is in the government over the next 2-4 years will be in hot water trying to resuscitate the economy.
Combined this with Elon Musk pledging to cut 2 trillion deficit, if they really went through with this, we’re going to be looking at an epic proportion of the US economy meltdown (which will also send shockwaves across the world so for those of you living in the Global South, don’t get too excited over this). I doubt the establishment will let it happen but Trump and Musk are both wildcards so anything goes.
Incidentally, the Wall Street will survive this round of onslaught no matter what, as China has already committed to a financial opening up and lifted all foreign investment restrictions for their manufacturing sector. China is definitely going after the foreign investment route, and I will not pretend that this isn’t a Biden foreign policy win for bullying the Chinese libs into agreeing to this bullshit. What is almost certainly going to happen is that the Wall Street will jump all in for the Chinese stock market and buy up Chinese assets while Trump struggle to re-industrialize the American manufacturing sector. Trump thinks he can take on Wall Street, but in the end China will once again save the American bourgeois class from their domestic “threat” (I don’t think Trump is an actual threat, but rather an aberration that needs to be corrected). The working class will suffer, they will blame Trump and the GOP by the next election, and the affluent libs will be as insufferable as you can imagine.
Again it must be repeated just how incredibly well timed the Fed rate cut in September was. I don’t know what the Biden administration was on but they have played their cards and adapted to a very dynamic geopolitical situation extremely well, that’s for sure. (I already wrote about how the Fed rate cut + a global recession will allow the US imperialists to take a big bite on the globe a while back, so I will just skip the entire essay here).
Fourth, this election also sealed the fate of third party electoralism. People would rather sit out than to vote for a third party. The bourgeois establishment has achieved their goals of preventing third party voting (not that it was ever an actual threat to begin with, now that we look back in hindsight) and the ratchet effect of Democratic-Republican bipartisan machine will continue to spin. I don’t think the third parties are ever coming back from this - Bernie Sanders had one good opportunity to run as a third party candidate when getting screwed by the DNC last time, but that opportunity to reshape the American political landscape is now forever lost. It’s either voting for the Democrats or face an ever vicious Republican party - those are the only choices left now. The only way out of this nightmare is a revolution.
Finally, we’ll talk about some wildcard scenarios. While I still think that Trump will follow the neocon strategy as before (or rather, unable to stop the wheels already in motion), the fact that you have Trump and Musk as two crazy people running the show warrants further speculations into the wildcard scenario that may arise. Most worrying is Trump wanting to appoint Musk as the DOGE minister to cut 2 trillion spending. This is going to be a huge drain on the US deficits that are important to flood the Global South and get them hooked on the dollar.
Not understanding how the US monetary imperialism works, they might just fuck this up and screw up the dollar liquidity essential to maintaining the US hegemony, while at the same time landing the US into a huge economic crisis that could be beyond what the establishment had envisioned. I have mentioned about Wall Street flooding the Chinese capital markets, but the US economy is so massive that an epic meltdown of the economy might end up inflicting such a huge blow on the Chinese export economy that even the Wall Street financiers get drowned there. This is obviously not something that the bourgeois establishment would like to see happen, and this could actually trigger WW3 if we are unfortunate enough to end up in this scenario.
Repeating my question from last week: somebody tell me what to look out for during the election! I want to impress my friends about how I am an expert in American politics. Which states have the most likely chance to have a huge upset? Which counties are going to be the deciders in this tight race? Which places do Kamala need to win? Which ones do Trump need to secure? I need a crash course on this election.
Definitely, China’s economy is strong enough that they can resist multiple waves of onslaught (it all depends on how it plays out in the longer term), the developing countries won’t be so lucky as you said.
China will be “fine”, but it needs to be noted that the “Keynesian” approach during the 2009 GFC by printing 4 trillion yuan stimulus can no longer be replicated today. It gave rise to the many problems that China is facing today.
The reason was that the stimulus was pumped into the economy when the real sector went into a slump (reduced consumption from America which was served by the Chinese export industries). As a result, most of the stimulus money went into infrastructure building and real estate market (which did not exist in China before 2008).
This is why you see so many infrastructures like high speed rails and new cities (“ghost cities”) cropping up across China in the 2010s. It directly stimulated the utilization of raw materials like concrete production, as well as infrastructure building sectors. It also allowed the local governments, whose finances had been hit hard by the GFC and the slump in the real sector, to make quick cash by selling land to property developers. It also drove up GDP numbers so many local governments would compete with one another by selling more and more lands, building more and more properties even knowing that they can not be filled in the long run. It was a way of “gaming” the system to get promoted and receive more funding from the central government.
These actions would eventually precipitate in the real estate bubble and the local government debt crisis that China is facing today.
But today’s China has a very different problem: the problem of excess housing and “ghost cities”. There are many housing properties that could not be sold, and will not be sold, and will be left empty for a long time. You might have heard stories about the ghost cities being filled up eventually, but many of those cities were actually planned around the early 2000s (for example, Binhai New Area in Tianjin, Zhengdong New Area in Zhengzhou etc.), and also rare exceptions like Pudong New Area in Shanghai that benefits from being a prime location. There are many new cities that were initiated in the 2010s that will never see their properties filled up.
So now the infrastructure building route is a dead end. Building more properties would be a waste of resources because nobody is ever going to live in them, and many infrastructures like high speed rails are good but they are not strong enough stimulus to drive the entire economy. You need people to consume (buy stuff) to drive the local economy.
This is why transitioning into a domestic consumption economy, and abandoning the export oriented economy, is the most straightforward way of decoupling from the US. It’s painful to radically re-orientate the industries you have built up over the decades, and it’s painful to abandon the export revenues, but the US imperialists are betting precisely on China procrastinating on initiating a transformative change to its own economic system.
There are two types of Belt and Road loans: Infrastructure loans and Rescue loans.
Infrastructure loans are lent out for infrastructure projects, and are mostly in USD.
The reason is that by around 2013, China realized that accumulating US dollars through their huge trade surplus is the equivalent of collecting junk papers. The US doesn’t allow China (or any other country) to purchase critical assets and industries, so the surplus earnings are recycled back into US Treasuries to buy US debt (think of the Treasuries as a sink to absorb all the excess dollars America has spent overseas). China realized that instead of buying US bonds, they can lend out those dollars to other developing countries to build infrastructure, accumulate good will and utilize those dollars in a productive manner. However, in terms of de-dollarization, the outcome is the same: now it is the Belt and Road recipient countries that owe Chinese creditors in dollars, meaning that they have to earn dollars (by selling stuff to Americans or dollar-paying customers) to pay back their Chinese creditors. As long as China does not offer bailouts or debt cancellation, it makes no difference whether those dollars are kept in US Treasuries or circulated outside as infrastructure loans.
On the other hand, the Emergency Rescue loans are given out for countries in financial distress and can no longer pay back their debt in dollar, and are mostly in Chinese yuan. The prime example here is Argentina, whose dollar debt is so heavy that there is no way they can make their timely payments. So what China has been doing is to give out these Rescue loans in yuan (also sometimes using the IMF Special Drawing Rights) to rollover the dollar debt and keep refinancing and praying that something miraculous will happen by itself. It’s essentially the same as kicking the can down the road and trying to avoid the inevitable for as long as possible.
The exact proportion of Belt and Road loans in dollars is not made public, although I have seen from both English and Chinese sources (independent parties who did the calculations) that it’s about 70% USD.
On one hand, you can understand why China does this: unlike IMF or any America controlled institutions which the US can “print” an infinite amount of dollars and lend them out at any amount at will, the dollars held by the Chinese creditors came from the hard work of Chinese labor and resources and selling these goods and services to dollar-paying customers ($300 billion trade surplus from America every year), so it is understandable that China is not willing to give away their labor and resources for free.
On the other, China also needs to understand that there is no way these dollar debt can ever be repaid by the Global South countries. All these lending is only going to make the Belt and Road countries becoming ever more dependent on the US, who can create the dollars out of thin air, unlike China who has to earn them by making products for American consumers. The only way out is debt cancellation - cut your heavy losses and radically shift your position, and forget about being an exporter to the American economy. China is still unwilling to turn away from the US who has been their main source of wealth and prosperity over the years, and this is what gives the US such a strong hold over them.
Trump is selling a dream. It’s a delusional dream (bringing the jobs back? deporting the immigrants who “stole” your jobs?) that will never be fulfilled, but at least it’s a dream to indulge in for many desperate people while it lasted.
Kamala and Biden are selling fear (Trump is worse than Hitler) while not bringing anything to the table. You’re not getting anything unless you belong to the affluent upper middle class segment of the population. It’s living in fear knowing that Trump could become a president again.
Trump’s charisma, like Obama’s, lies in knowing how to weave together a dream-like story and sell it to their credulous audience. But a dream is still a dream, and deep inside the subconscious, everyone knows that it has to end at some point. That’s when dreams turn into nightmares - the harsh reality that awaits them when they finally wake up.
Not surprising at all if you remember what happened when the Russia-Ukraine war started.
They had the permission to let the mask slip for a bit then, now they are allowed to fully take off the mask.