Lferhw

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

US🇺🇸 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent:

‘If you do the right thing, if you want to work hard, if you want to make good decisions, then there is still the American Dream.’

The bottom 50% of Americans own just 2.5% of the nation’s wealth.

The richest 1% of Americans now own 31.6% of all household wealth, the highest share since WW2.

The top 10% own 67.5% of all U.S. wealth, leaving just 32.5% for the remaining 90% of Americans.

The top 0.1% alone own around 14.5% of all household wealth, almost six times as much as the entire bottom half of the country.

The wealth share of the top 1% has risen from about 23% in 1989 to over 31.6% today, while the bottom 50%’s share has fallen from around 3.5% to roughly 2.5%.

‘They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.’

—George Carlin

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The US empire is waging an all-out assault on international law.

Why? Because the US knows its hegemony is declining fast, so it plans to wage even more barbaric wars around the world, in a desperate attempt to save its global empire.

What the US is doing to Gaza, Cuba, and Iran is what it plans to do across the Global South. And US officials want to make sure that they are never held accountable for their genocidal crimes against humanity.

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

“Will that drawing down of foreign aid be compensated by the proposal to have a merging of some sort between our Pentagon and your military?"

"Yeah," Netanyahu responds. "I'm calling it, 'From aid to partnership…'"

"I think the meshing of our two great countries of talent would strengthen America's competitive position."
————————

Straight from the horse’s mouth. Anyone who says it’s not a merger is LYING TO YOU.

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

Stack Overflow has seen the number of monthly questions on its platform collapse from 300k to 7k since launch of ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, annual revenue is actually up 2x during that span to more than $115m.

How? It has licensed its back-catalog of human answers to AI labs and created an enterprise product called “Stack Internal”, a GenAI tool powered by millions of its Q&A (currently used by 25,000 companies).

[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.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

"Decimos que el sur del Líbano se convertirá en Gaza y así lo hacemos, destruiremos todo a nuestro paso. Las casas de las aldeas libanesas tienen siglos de antigüedad y las destruimos todas, hemos destruido hasta 20.000 casas y 200.000 civiles nunca volverán".

Israel Katz, Ministro de Defensa de "Israel", se enorgullece de perpetrar otra limpieza étnica en el sur del Líbano, destruir 20.000 casas y expulsar a más de 200.000 personas de sus casas, que tienen siglos más de historia que "Israel".

Miren la sonrisa sádica de este criminal cuando habla de genocidios y limpieza étnica, estos nazis son realmente malvados y disfruten con las matanzas que perpetran.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

En 1918, Mary Turner, una joven negra de 21 años, estaba embarazada de 8 meses, cuando su marido decidió plantar cara y acabar con su patrón esclavista blanco tras años de torturas, por lo que fue linchado hasta la muerte.

Mary protestó públicamente contra el linchamiento de su esposo... y en represalia, una turba de racistas blancos la secuestró, la colgó boca abajo, la quemó viva, le rajó el abdomen, le sacaron el feto para aplastarlo y luego acribillaron su cuerpo con 60 balas.

Nunca olviden el origen de EEUU, así es como se construyó ese pais, con la sangre de los nativos y la esclavitud hasta la muerte de los negros.

[Juan Bordera🌍🇵🇸 @JuanBordera]

Ya no son previsiones, modelos, teorías... es la realidad.

Vamos a vivir un El Niño como no se ha visto otro en la historia medida.

Lo increíble que es esta gráfica solo se ve superado por lo increíble que es que prácticamente ningún "medio de comunicación" la sacará.

[Prof. Eliot Jacobson @EliotJacobson]

Breaking News!
Code: y-axis alert.

Nino 3.4 SST is now up to 3.63 SD above the 1991-2020 baseline, about 1-in-7000 in the absence of anthropogenic warming.

There's not enough room in a single post to express just how crazy this is. Please read:

https://t.co/mOwp2kHT6y

[Renzo™ @fwrenzo1]

The "Middle Class" was a 50-year fluke designed to prevent a communist revolution during the Cold War. Now that the threat is gone, the elites are systematically dismantling it. You aren't "falling behind"; you’re being pushed back into the peasantry.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Recordar cómo la URSS se plantó ante la FIFA en 1973 y se negó a jugar el partido de vuelta en el Estadio Nacional de Chile, en las eliminatorias del Mundial, después de que el genocida Pinochet convirtiera el estadio en un centro de tortura y exterminio.

La FIFA, aún con las gradas manchadas de sangre, se negó a anular el partido en Chile, todo lo contrario, le dio el partido perdido a la URSS por 2-0 y otorgó la victoria al regimen criminal de Pinochet.

La imagen fue dantesca, los jugadores de Chile marcando un gol ante un rival fantasma, por mera formalidad, con un cartel que decia "la juventud y el deporte unen hoy a Chile"... una juventud que fue masacrada por las calles por el carnicero de Pinochet.

La misma mafia de la FIFA que hoy se niega a expulsar a "Israel" de sus competiciones y que anuló una tarjeta roja a un jugador porque Trump lo ordenó, también apoyó el golpe de estado en Chile, toda la vida siempre al servicio del poder político del capital.

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

Krugman: "I do think that conditional tariffs on Chinese cars are probably going to be necessary."

While it's sensible for countries to have an industrial policy vis-a-vis China, I have an issue with the double standards at play here.

When developing countries were advocating for tariffs and other protectionist measures throughout the neoliberal era in attempts to catch up with the West, Krugman and many other economists staunchly defended free trade.

Now that some developing countries have become a competitive threat, the economists that once defended free trade say that tariffs are "necessary."

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

"Los amos del universo son judíos, tenemos a Zuckerberg de Facebook, tenemos a Sergey Brin de Google, tenemos a a Jan Koum, el fundador de Whatsapp... todos somos nosotros, debemos controlar el mundo digital y las redes sociales".

Norm Coleman, político sionista estadounidense, nuevo Vicepresidente de la Junta de Política de Defensa del Secretario de Guerra Pete Hegseth, afirma que los sionistas "controlan el mundo" y que deben controlar las redes sociales también para imponer el relato de "Israel".

Vean a los sionistas diciendo en público "conspiranoias antisemitas" de que los judíos controlan el planeta... son los primeros que difunden estas teorías y que orgullosamente admiten controlar el poder mediático.

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

This is the kind of graph future documentaries pause on before saying, ‘By then, the warning signs were obvious.

[Assal Rad @AssalRad]

I’m guessing this version of “from the river to the sea” will get zero media attention.

[Prof Zenkus @anthonyzenkus]

The problem with Jeff Bezos' ideology is that it's based on a false premise. The idea that "six thousand years ago someone invented the plow" is based on a faulty belief that ancient humans functioned as individuals. They did not.

Ancient humans were collectivist. The likelihood that one individual invented anything is slim to none.

This is the myth of the genius.

Archeological evidence demonstrates that for hundreds of thousands of years, early humans congregated around communal gathering places, like the fire, and engaged in problem solving and passing on of shared learning down through generations.

Additionally, the plow (and tools like it) were developed by humans in Mesopotamia, Europe, Egypt, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa as well as other places - not in one place by one person. This is known as parallel development.

Believing that the plow was invented by one genius is like believing language was invented by one person. It is a silly myth and represents the projection of current moral standards onto past events.

This is called 'presentism' and it is both an uncritical and ignorant way to view history.

Social learning was the main driver of human evolution. Collectivism is how we both survived and progressed as a species.

The myth of the genius is an example of uncritical analysis and a flawed lens used to justify the grotesque hoarding of wealth and obscene inequality that is currently tearing at the social fabric our species.

It needs to be thrown on the trash heap of history.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out.

The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing.

Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnick’s own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees.

The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in.

Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal.

The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals.

The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion.

This is your tax money.

It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the President’s children and the Commerce Secretary’s children.

This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close.

We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket.

Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

https://t.co/yFOl7zvOhC

[Ben Inskeep @Ben_Inskeep]

BOMBSHELL reporting finds Princeton climate researchers took tens of millions of dollars from BP to publish research, shaped and edited by BP, promoting carbon capture & storage and fossil fuels.

Landmark "Wedges" climate paper promoting CCS now confirmed to be BP propaganda.

[Erick Gutiérrez @Erickisback1]

El poder de los cárteles mexicanos descansa en tres cosas:
- La epidemia de consumo dentro de los Estados Unidos
- El tráfico de armas desde los Estados Unidos
- El lavado de dinero en el sistema financiero de Estados Unidos

Si en verdad quieren acabar con el narcotráfico, atiendan esos factores

[Martin Sonneborn @MartinSonneborn]

„Es gibt keine Gesellschaft mehr. Was es gibt, ist eine transnationale Sicherheitselite, die damit beschäftigt ist, die Welt mit Ihren Steuergeldern unter sich (und ihresgleichen) aufzuteilen. Die Kriegstreiber in diesem Land und anderen Ländern haben ein Bündnis geschlossen, um Geld aus den USA, der EU, aus jedem NATO-Staat heraus- und zu den eigenen (Finanz-)Eliten zurückzuschleusen, indem sie es im Blut der Menschen waschen, das in den Kriegen in Afghanistan, dem Irak, Somalia, dem Jemen, Pakistan vergossen wird.“

Jüngere werden vielleicht erschrecken, und vielleicht auch Vergessliche unter den Älteren, weil die Sätze, die Julian Assange 2011 auf der Antikriegsdemonstration in London gesagt hat, Sätze sind, die er gestern gesagt haben könnte. Sie beschreiben nämlich ein Muster: das Muster westlicher Wertekriege und ihrer drei wiederkehrenden Wesensmerkmale: Die Werte, mit denen sie legitimiert werden, gibt es nämlich nicht - jedenfalls nicht bei denen, die vorgeben, sie mit vorgehaltener Waffe zu vertreten. Und: Sie - ausnahmslos Angriffs- & Profitkriege - werden von der als „Verteidigungsbündnis“ vermarkteten NATO „antizipiert“, orchestriert & exekutiert und ziehen die weitere Vermögenskonzentration in den Händen Weniger nach sich, womit sie - ausnahmslos, aber nicht ausschließlich - der Profitmehrung professioneller Kriegsprofiteure dienen.

Immer dasselbe - in zeitlichen Schleifen, auratischen Wellen, historischen Episoden. Dasselbe eine Muster, wieder und wieder: dieselben knarzenden Argumentationsschemata & Narrationsabsolutismen. Dieselben Behauptungen, Tatsachenverdrehungen, Selbstvergewisserungen.

Dazu der immer selbe Raub an der Gesellschaft und den Menschen, die sie tragen. Dieselbe soziale Verarmung, dieselbe geistige Leere und dieselbe ethische Verelendung. Und immer dasselbe Elitenbereicherungs-, „Sicherheits“-, „Feindes“- & Tötungsmuster. Wieder und wieder und wieder.

Wir, die wir alt genug sind, uns (mit Assange) an die letzte Welle westlicher Wertekriege zu erinnern, können den erinnerungslosen Jüngeren heute nur eines sagen, nämlich: dass sie sich einmal erinnern werden. Wenn sie, nachdem (in 15 Jahren) die nächste Welle westlicher Wertekriege losgebrochen sein wird, ihrerseits auf erinnerungslose Junge treffen.

Assange hatte schon damals und hat noch heute recht. Wir müssen eigene Netzwerke und Bündnisse schließen, um unsere Werte gegen den eigennützigen Zynismus der Kriegstreiber zu behaupten. In diesem Land und anderen Ländern.

Heute vor 2 Jahren war Julian Assange nach 14jähriger politischer Verfolgung & Haft endlich wieder frei.