Cristopher Cortez

soy feliz con un elote

[Joshua @WxPolitics15]

What are the best works to read about the Cultural Revolution that aren’t just anticommunist polemics?

[Rakesh Kumar @Rakeshhkumaar]

Using equivalent methodology to the claim “Communism killed 100 million,” how many has capitalism killed?

The Black Book of Communism counts famine deaths. Britain killed 100 million in famine deaths from 1880 to 1920. That’s only counting one event.

But you won’t read that in your textbook. You won’t see that on the news. Why? Because the same system that killed millions also owns the press. It writes the history. It controls the narrative.

[Roderic Day @RodericDay]

China: "Socialism, not any other -ism"

The Economist: "Leninist developmental state of China"

US State Dept.: "Xi is Stalin's successor"

Wikileaks: "Redder than red"

CIA: "economics controlled for political ends"

Westies, Ultras: "Capitalist betrayal 😭😠"

[Dan Collins @DanCollins2011]

I went over the list. A lot of biotech companies.

Are Xingjiang slaves developing the $300b in cancer drugs we will license from China this year?

Lol

[Micah Springut @mspringut]

The first "structural stone buildings" you'll see in the US will be regular buildings with self-supporting stone facades (not bearing the building's load). That's the easier/faster code path than making entire structures, slabs and cores out of stone.

These building will be similar in form to Soho's cast iron buildings, with columns and beams forming a separate layer in front of the main building. Reinforced stone columns and girders could be a lot thinner than the cast iron versions and require far fewer columns, though we'll hopefully have a ton of column anyway.

[Chetuya Chinagolum @Chetuyachinago]

Ho Chi Minh, the scholar who brought communism to Vietnam, was never originally a communist. He was a deeply committed anti-colonial patriot who initially admired Western liberalism, American democracy, and U.S President Woodrow Wilson’s speeches on self-determination. 1/n

[Maria-Fe Celi @mfceli]

Narcotraficante indultado por Trump, vuelve a su país.
Recuerden esto cuando les digan que EEUU quiere vencer al narcotráfico.

[Media Lens @medialens]

'There was a stunning Freedom of Information release last week of a CIA note that indicated that the CIA did not believe that the Venezuelan elections from 2006 to 2020 were significantly affected by election fraud. So the imposition of the vast bulk of Western sanctions which crippled Venezuela over that period – and at one point caused devastating famine and mass emigration – were knowingly based on a lie.'

[David Fishman @pretentiouswhat]

New essay: China is Not Pulling Up the Ladder

A critique of the idea that industrialization depends on other countries voluntarily giving up productive sectors, and that the interests of a few countries are the same as the entire Global South.🧵

https://t.co/vHbzmnSErF

[Kyle 🚄 @KyleTrainEmoji]

Can you name any victims of Mao Zedong, the Most Evil Man in History?

Don't worry, I can help. Meet one of the virtuous innocent landlords who lost everything after the revolution Mao led:

[Dante Muñoz @TheDanteMunoz]

60% of all assets in China are owned by the Communist Party of China AND 96% of businesses are privately owned.

The essentials like energy, construction, banking, and telecommunications are publicly owned to create a stable environment for entrepreneurial small businesses.

[New Afrikan❤️🖤💚 @Liberation_Blk]

I am so sick of the way western media covers Nicaragua and the left here eats it up🙄 ..On the 47th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution, Ortega didn’t say abolish all electoral processes. He said parties aligned w/U.S. interests and U.S.-backed intervention will no longer be allowed to compete or foment coups.

After seeing what Trump’s done in Honduras, Colombia and others, I can’t believe ppl would deny U.S. meddling in Latin American elections is a real threat. An FSLN supporter clarifies here: https://t.co/6OVwEZPol0

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

En La India, turistas adinerados pagan a residentes locales para que carguen con ellos con una camilla de mano para subir los escarpados escalones de piedra del monte Girnar, que tiene más de 10.000 peldaños.

El capitalismo en una imagen, te dirán que es el turista quién crea riqueza y deben darle las gracias.

[Palestina En Español 🎒 @PalestinaVence]

🇻🇪 La CIA reconoció que NO hubo fraude masivo en Venezuela.

Tras casi 20 años de vigilancia sobre los sistemas electorales, la inteligencia estadounidense no encontró evidencia concluyente de manipulación electrónica a gran escala.

El informe admite que no se probó ejecución real de ningún plan y que “otros factores explicaban mejor los resultados”: apoyo popular del chavismo, programas sociales, alta movilización de su base, división de la oposición.

Esto desmonta años de acusaciones infundadas usadas para justificar sanciones y presión externa.

Venezuela ha resistido con procesos electorales y auditorías.

Los hechos pesan más que las narrativas.

La manipulación es un hecho, lee por ti mismo y haz tu análisis, acá les dejo el documento.

[Luis de Velasco e Isla @VelascoIsla]

Siempre he pensado que una muy buena manera de modernizar barrios de baja calidad de construcción de los años 60-70 sería algo similar a lo que propone Antonio Giraldo. 🧵

1) escoges un solar en un barrio con edificios degradados de cuatro plantas.

[Paco Arnau @ciudadfutura]

Sanghay en 1995. Nunca en la historia, si exceptuamos a la URSS, un país ha progresado tanto en tan poco tiempo. La superioridad del socialismo sobre el capitalismo es más que evidente.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

"Quiero que me reembolsen dinero por proteger el Estrecho de Ormuz, hemos acordado que nos reembolsarán dinero los países de la región como Arabia Saudí, Emiratos, Qatar... Aunque no lo necesitamos, nos hicimos con Venezuela y tenemos más petróleo que nadie".

El genocida Trump afirmó que sus regímenes marionetas de Oriente Medio le pagarán por invadir territorio de Irán mientras se vanagloria una vez más de estar robándole el petróleo a Venezuela como un vulgar pirata.

Esta es la cara real del imperio de Epstein, no el que te muestran sus películas de propaganda, auténticos piratas genocidas que viven del saqueo y el genocidio, como garrapatas que chupan la sangre a su víctima.

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

Volkswagen, China and the breakdown of unequal exchange

The New York Times has a long, mournful piece about how Volkswagen’s troubles “were made in China”. It’s worth reading, because beneath the corporate detail lies the story of an entire imperial economic arrangement beginning to come apart.

For four decades, VW has been a major force in the Chinese car market, and for many years China supplied half or more of the company’s worldwide profits – profits that, as the Times notes, paid for “high salaries and generous benefits” for its workforce back in Germany. Which is another way of saying that a German corporation has been drawing the bulk of its wealth from Chinese labour and the Chinese market, and repatriating it to fund living standards in the imperial core.

This is unequal exchange: the systematic transfer of value from a poorer country to a richer one, even at nominally “fair” market prices.

The arrangement suited the West very well, so long as China remained where it had been assigned, at the lower end of the global value chain – assembling, manufacturing, supplying cheap labour, while design, profit and prestige stayed in the West. What the West never grasped is that China had never agreed to occupy this position on a permanent basis.

The times they are a-changin’. Chinese firms – BYD, Geely, Xiaomi – have overtaken VW not only in China but across Latin America, Africa, and now the European Union itself, VW’s home turf. The company is slashing its model range by half, and reportedly preparing to lay off up to 100,000 workers and close four European factories.

How did China manage this, with no empire to plunder and no colonies to super-exploit? By leveraging the advantages it actually has: those of a vast socialist country with a fundamentally planned economy. The NYT, almost despite itself, lists them – state-controlled banks strategically issuing low-interest capital; local governments backing the new industries; a decades-long, state-directed bet on electric vehicles that Western firms lazily dismissed. This is the patient, planned, production-oriented development that neoliberalism forbids.

That is the real source of the anguish now emanating from the pages of the Western press. It is not simply that Volkswagen built the wrong cars. It is that the mechanism by which the imperial core has been enriching itself at the expense of the periphery is corroding – and a formerly poor, semi-colonised, blockaded nation has shown that the the economic chains of imperialism can be broken.

[Rakesh Kumar @Rakeshhkumaar]

Liberals: “Joseph Stalin was a brutal dictator.”

Meanwhile, a 1955 declassified CIA report stated:

“Even in Stalin's time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by a lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist's power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely captain of a team (...)”

[brandon s. @b_cuse_]

This is the correct policy approach to housing btw. It’s completely unsustainable for housing to be a constantly appreciating asset when it is also a basic human need.