Bulletins and News Discussion from October 14th to October 20th, 2024 - Paper Tigers
Bulletins and News Discussion from October 14th to October 20th, 2024 - Paper Tigers
Image is a frame taken from this video of Iranian missiles raining down on Israel without interception due to a weak and depleted air defense system after a year of war and genocide.
Mao, 1956:
Now U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger.
When we say U.S. imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.
Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.
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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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Since it's been one year on since the Gaza War started, I decided to look at some defense stocks to see how profitable the genocide machine has actually been. Overall, it seems pretty profitable for the companies with relevant weapons and supplies for the war at this stage, but if I was a vampire capitalist and just threw my money into defense as soon as I thought war demand was coming I'd be pretty disappointed at the outcome so far. One year in NVIDIA outperforms all of them by a ton, and the S&P 500 keeps pace in the middle of the pack.
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Raytheon (+70.05% 1 YR) is the best performer by far. It makes sense since the Iron Dome missiles are made by them. They are making a whole new facility in Arkansas for the purpose of making more of these things that won't be online until 2025, apparently. Whose to say whether the entity known as Israel will even last that long but hey, that just means money in Raytheon's pockets.
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Caterpillar (+47.03% 1 YR) a construction company that makes bulldozers for the IOF, so it's part of the genocide machine obvs. Recently they've been downgraded by Morgan Stanley so we'll see if this keeps up.
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L3Harris Technologies (+39.97% 1 YR) military helicopters and aircraft electronics. Great year for them, Oct 7 represents the bottom of a 2 year losing streak for them.
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Lockheed Martin (+38.14% 1 YR) has a sudden jolt right around the time the US authorized the production of more F-35s. It also happens to be the week where Netanyahu visited the US Congress. Below I have a photo of other companies that have a little jolt around that time as well.
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General Dynamics (+23.92% 1 YR) naval and communications. The stock seems to have been doing well before Oct 7 though so IDK.
And some losers...
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Boeing (-19.49% 1 YR) you know why. But you could have sold when the news was still breaking and done well for yourself.
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Elbit Systems (-0.56% 1 YR) they make drones and they made the Gaza wall defense towers that got owned on Oct 7. Israel doesn't care for defending its citizens right now because genocide but they seem to be pivoting towards the genocide business judging by the swing towards profitability recently.
I sometimes wonder if 'shareholders' can even be classified as humans. Just the thought of investing in something that is mostly used for offense is fundamentally repulsive to me. And then there are people who just get rich with it and talk about 'passive income'.
Even some fucking militaries see that orders can be morally wrong and give a way out for soldiers (at least on paper). And then you've got capitalists that see a genocide and only think about the financial opportunities without ever having to worry about facing something like the Nürnberg Trails under the current system.
I’d bet almost everybody with a 401k is invested in these companies through index funds.
Yerp, hence why American workers are more tied into imperialism than they think. Their future comfort depends on unchallenged American hegemony
Same with working and "middle" class families who have most of their wealth tied up in their home. Home values are a product of scarcity and the profitability of landlordism. Large landlords will keep bidding up the price of homes in high demand if they can reliably extort large rents, they will attempt to monopolize the market as much as they can.
The policy needed to end homelessness and drive down cost of living is to plunge housing prices into the ground. This can be done with free housing and massive state subsidized housing construction and appropriation of large landlords and redistribution. Since that will never happen in the US, instead we are left with monopolization of the means to exist so that those holding the property can extort maximum rent to bring us into bare subsistence.
Once this process is complete, we will be much more ripe for revolution. However, as it is there's still a large chunk of the population that are millionaires and sitting fat and happy on their home they bought in 1985
You bet. I also neglected to mention the S&P 500 has Raytheon, Caterpillar, and other $EVIL ETF companies included.
Well Ukraine is winding down as the war of Israeli belligerence picks up steam. Actual war production didn’t increase much, just is changing where it’s directed.
Yeah that's true these companies don't just get hype when a war starts, they get hype for promise of future profit. End of Afghanistan -> Ukraine for example had a 1 year gap, and a lot of these companies seemed flat for that time period. Well, not GD, you can see the story of the whole war with them. War begins -> small spike in price -> Biden says no F-16s or other too powerful weaponry to Ukraine -> that spike goes away -> slow increase in price as these promises to limit the scope of the war fade.
Yes it’s very obvious that AI and crypto are the next avenues the US dollar is now moving into.
AI is truly the perfect avenue for the dollar: it’s all hype with some functional utility that are actually useful for real world tasks - a deep well where billions and billions of investment money can be sunk into to pump up the US dollar, which in turn allows the US imperialists to crush other countries’ economies, without actually producing any useful goods and services.
The same with crypto, which has been fully “tethered” with the dollar at this point. Another scam to sink billions of investment money into to prop up the strength of the US currency.
Marx and Lenin would be bewildered to see how hyper-financialized capitalism has turned itself into if they were to be alive today.
ugh can't believe crpyto is doing another pump. if it gets official U.S. state backing (which like you stated, looks inevitable) it's going to go above 100k and might stay there until the empire falls
still not fucking with btc but good luck to anyone that wants to try to make some money off this dying husk
It’s purely speculative asset. Lots of people are going to lose their money when the whales do their pump and dump.
the US can infinite pump it with free federal reserve money
crypto moves lockstep with the US stock market
NVIDIA is great because it sits as the material base for AI and crypto both. Even if one scam runs out of steam, you still got the other. And I guess they also have gaming and other stuff too.
I think Marx would have done well as a crypto influencer, at least in the early days when it was all still mostly nerds. Guy like him knowing the ins n outs of capital would know to milk these dorks for all the money they're worth.
people use ASICS for mining now as far as i know
Why does pumping crypto and ai strengthen the dollar?
It generates demand for US dollar.
Clearly investment in real productive sector is not fashionable these days, nor can many of the traditional American industries compete with other industrialized countries in the long run. Nobody wants to invest in actually realistic technology or industry that only pays dividends in 30 years. They want quick get rich scheme that promises good yield within a year, within a quarter even. AI and crypto (in the form of stablecoins that allow hard currencies to be swapped in and out easily) are the perfect avenues as fictitious speculative assets that can draw in billions and billions of investments from all over the world hoping to make a quick buck. This pumps up the dollar in the process as you’d need to obtain or exchange other currencies into dollars to make the investment.
It is also no coincidence that they just gave out 2 Nobel Prizes for AI. That’s going to generate a huge interest for investing in a technology that is more hyped than its actual utility.
Regarding crypto, Michael Hudson described the utility of crypto in relation to the dollar exchange rate as such, comparing it to how the US made itself as the tax haven for money laundering in the 1960s:
Today, as foreign countries de-dollarize their trade – for instance, when Russia and China trade for oil and industrial products in each others’ currencies – U.S. financial strategists worry about what this will mean for the dollar’s exchange rate.
Actually, transacting such foreign trade in non-dollar currencies has no effect on the U.S. balance of payments. It does not appear in the trade balance or even in foreign investment, although de-dollarization may deprive U.S. banks of currency-trading commissions to handle such transactions.
What does affect the demand for dollars is conversion of assets denominated in foreign currency into the dollar. This king of confidential banking is what pressed up the Swiss franc so much in the 1970s and ‘80s that it priced Swiss manufactures out of foreign markets. Companies like Ciba-Geigy had to move their production across the border to Germany to prevent the rising franc’s valuation from making them uncompetitive. (When that company brought me over in 1976, I found that the price of a coke was over $10, and a regular meal cost $100.)
The U.S. is seeking to protect the dollar’s high value, not lower it, so it sees acting as the destination for world’s tax avoiders, criminals and others as a positive national strategy. (“Kleptocracy is us.”) The plan is not to condemn tax crime and more violent criminal activities, but seeking to profit for being the banker for these functions. The logic is, “As the world’s leading free-market democracy, we’re providing a secure for the world’s capital, however it may be ‘earned’ or otherwise obtained.”
Crypto and AI are also very energy intensive, so that probably helps keep those industries profitable. It is almost a full petro dollar cycle being reversed. Instead of dollars being horded for fossil fuel transactions, now they are being invested in AI and crypto to drive fossil fuel demands higher.
I've been collecting data on USDT prices for most currencies from Binance, weird how in all cases it is the same as black market prices.
Can't forget about one of the most evil of them all, and a major asset for providing surveillance on behalf of the Zionist entity. Palantir, which is up 150.0% 1YR.
Add that to the $EVIL etf, jeez how did I miss them. I guess it's a smaller company which means per cent growth is a bit easier for them, but yeah they grew right out the gate when Oct 7 happened.
So I guess war games are more profitable than actual war.
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