Trump/Vader 2024 vs Immortal Xi vs Global Inflation vs Economic Armageddon vs War
Internal political and economic dynamics within China and America are driving both to conflict and that will have enormous implications for New Zealand.
Trump/Vader 2024
Donald Trump 2024: Signs of a comeback bid for the presidency
In the days after the United States Congress decided to impeach Donald Trump over his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection, it seemed the possibility of his running for the presidency again was slim.
Eleven months later, those odds have tumbled.
Although the former president has yet to launch an official, or non-official bid to run in the 2024 election, this Monday saw him give the clearest indication yet that he could be seeking to stage a comeback.
In an interview with Fox News, the controversial Republican confirmed it was something that was up for consideration.
For Virgina to swing so hard against Biden who took it by 10points only a year ago is extremely concerning for a race seen as the bellwether for mid terms.
Biden’s inability to get anything done and the disaster of the Afghanistan collapse are mixing with the alienating inclusion via exclusion woke activists.
Legendary Democrat strategist James Carville blames “stupid wokeness” and is is critical of defund the Police and wanting to remove Abraham Lincoln’s name from schools. He argues most people are more concerned with economics than social justice mantras that come across as cult like to the middle voter.
The danger seems to be the midterms where Biden’s mishandling of the Afghanistan pull out and Democratic infighting over their Omni bill are hurting Democrat chances.
What’s most concerning is Trump campaigning on behalf of little known functional roles at electoral stations. He is championing candidates who would turn any contested election to the House of Representatives where Trump believes Republicans would have a majority.
It’s like Trump is building an apparatus that will refer contested results to the House in order to steal the 2024 election.
Like it’s really obvious that’s what he’s doing.
If Trump runs and wins it will be the beginning of the end for America.
Immortal Xi
Chinese Communist Party ‘historical resolution’ could see President Xi rule indefinitely
China is on the brink of adopting a “historical resolution” which could secure President Xi Jinping’s stranglehold for life.
A four-day, top-secret gathering of hundreds of top-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials is now underway, with the sixth plenary session of the Central Committee held in Beijing set to decide on a so-called “historical resolution” on the country’s achievements.
The “draft resolution on the major achievements and historical experience of the [party’s] 100 years of endeavours” – the first official announcement on Chinese history in four long decades – was delivered by Xi himself, and insiders expect the resolution to be passed.
If that does happen on Thursday as expected, it will set the tone for a rare congress which will be held next year, in which Xi is tipped to snag an unprecedented third term.
Xi is moving from crazed dictator into crazed God mode.
Our complex relationship with China is actually very simple. We are desperate to sell basic bitch milk powder and China is rich enough to exploit our desperation in the hope of gaining what they really want – our water.
China buys the National Party out and buys the Labour Party out so as to keep their interests safe.
Culturally National never talk about Chinese influence because their farmer, banker and speculator voters need that Chinese money and the Left don’t talk about Chinese influence because it’s xenophobic.
China’s cultural and economics crackdowns are increasingly repressive and their ongoing saber rattling over Hong Kong and Taiwan alongside their rapid military deployment and weapon upgrades all point to a China becoming drunk on their own power.
We need to decouple urgently from China economically while acknowledging China’s main influence in our country is through intimidation of their diaspora living here. As the recent investigation into Chinese spies in our Universities highlights, NZ culture needs to embrace and connect with our Chinese-New Zealand community so that they feel more loved by us than fear CCP activists.
Global Inflation
Pressure on Fed to raise interest rates as US inflation surges to 30-year high
Pressure on America’s central bank to raise interest rates has intensified after rising energy costs, supply shortages and increased consumption sent US inflation surging to a level not seen for more than 30 years.
Although the Federal Reserve has repeatedly insisted price pressures will prove “transitory”, financial markets were taken aback by a 6.2% increase in the cost of living in the world’s biggest economy over the past year.
A labor department report released on Wednesday showed prices rose by 0.9% in October alone – more than double the 0.4% jump in September – to push the annual rate of inflation to its highest level since December 1990, a time when global oil prices had risen sharply due to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Covid has seen the main banks of the West sink trillions more into quantitive easing to deal with the economic whiplash the pandemic has created and in NZ we saw with the pumping of billions into the pockets of property speculators how our own house prices have skyrocketed.
This game of printing money to pump into property and stock market speculation to create a false illusion of wealth can continue playing as long as hyper inflation doesn’t overturn the apple cart.
But what happens if it does?
What happens if hyper inflation does suddenly explode out of nowhere?
To date all the inflationary pressures caused by this mass printing has led to driving up property prices and stock markets without touching the essentials and basics of life, but one of the impacts of Covid has been to shut down the global supply chains which is now creating scarcity of products that can’t get to market because they are bottlenecked at a Port.
This seems insanely dangerous because all those hyper inflation pressures will immediately jump to the very basics everyone uses.
Your Kiwisaver going up and your property value climbing is one thing, paying $15 for a loaf of bread and $20 for milk is completely another.
To date the cost rises have been in things poor people have to pay, transport, rent and gas. That means food will be cut, hungry people get angry quickly.
After every great pandemic throughout history, the peasant revolt in the 1300s, the London riots of the 1600s and the social unrest right after the Influenza pandemic of 1918, society always goes through intense social change brought on by the economic collapse lockdowns generate.
If the bottlenecks of supply chains are blocked unleashing a tsunami of hyper inflation on the goods everyone requires for life, Central Banks will have no choice but to lift interest rates to desperately attempt to curtail that hyper inflation, which of course will mean the ocean of low interest debt that has been created to fuel hyper speculation will suddenly start feeling the true gravity of trillions in borrowing.
This is the new ‘normal’. Constant eruptions of external global disruptions that cause widespread damage. The climate crisis will simply exacurbate these economic meltdowns.
Economic Armageddon
China’s economy — the 2nd-largest in the world — is teetering on the brink of disaster.
Since this spring, Beijing has canceled initial public offerings, fined tech companies billions for antitrust violations, forcibly shut down China’sentire for-profit education industry, and sent CEOs running for the exitsto avoid the government’s ire. Even more dire, the Chinese megadeveloper Evergrande recently started missing payments on its more than $300 billion in debt, shaking global markets. The convulsions have woken the world up to a startling new possibility — that Beijing may be willing to allow some of its private corporate behemoths to collapse in a bid to reshape the economic model that made China a superpower.
The upheaval, spanning multiple industries and vast swaths of the country, is the result of one giant issue: China’s inability to borrow or buy its way out of its current economic crisis. For decades, the country relied on cheap labor and eye-popping amounts of debt, handed out by government-owned banks, to fuel economic growth — pouring money into massive apartment developments, factories, bridges, and other projects at lightning speed. Now the country needs people to actually use, and pay for, everything that’s been built. But the bulk of China’s population lacks the income needed to shift the economy from one driven by state investments to one sustained by consumer spending.
As a result, China finds itself stuck with a system that is overbuilt and overindebted. Take the country’s $52 trillion property market, of which the Evergrande mess is the poster child. With money easy to borrow, real-estate speculation became a popular way to store and build wealth for China’s young middle class. One academic described this model to me colorfully as an “addiction to real-estate cocaine.” It’s also been called a “treadmill to hell.”
As the government now attempts to deflate the real-estate bubble without bursting it, it has been forced to prepare the country for a period of slower growth and belt-tightening. And to make matters worse, China is also facing an energy crisis fueled by skyrocketing coal prices as well as a working-age population that is getting old without enough resources to retire on.
With China our new Economic Overlord, what hurts them hurts us.
The building blocks of globalized free market lowest cost capitalism is fracturing as the model can’t keep up with demand while decarbonising.
Those fractures are becoming impossible to ignore…
The world’s largest carmakers and other users of aluminium could be forced to halt production within weeks amid a “catastrophic” shortage of magnesium across Europe.
Magnesium is a key material used in the production of aluminium alloys, which are used in everything from car parts to building materials and food packaging.
China has a near-monopoly on global magnesium manufacturing, accounting for 87 per cent of production, but the Chinese government’s efforts to reduce domestic power consumption amid rising energy prices have slowed output to a trickle since September 20.
In Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, the world’s main magnesium production hubs, 25 plants had to shut down and five further plants slashed production by 50 per cent as a result of the power cuts.
…if China’s domestic real estate bubble implodes, investors with external holdings may have to sell enmasse causing a glut.
How much of NZs housing market consists of Chinese speculators?
Looks like we might find out.
The economic threats makes the current sabre rattling military threats look friendly.
Will China Really Invade Taiwan?
In March, Adm. Philip Davidson, the outgoing commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, told a Senate panel that China posed a “manifest” threat of invading Taiwan “in the next six years.”
No senior official had ever issued such a specific or urgent warning about the fate of the tiny democratic island 100 miles off of China’s eastern coast. But since Davidson’s testimony, boatloads of military officers, active and retired, have sounded similar alarm bells. Some congressmen, such as Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, have even called for recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation and making NATO-like commitments to defend it from invasion—a step that would reverse 42 years of U.S. policy, further destabilize relations with China, and possibly precipitate war.
At the same time, a debate has erupted among more scholarly analysts over whether China’s Communist leaders really want to invade Taiwan—and, if they do, whether the Chinese military is capable of doing so now or in the near future. With few exceptions, the pessimists tend to be military officers, who measure the balance of power by which side has more or less of what sorts of weapons systems, while the less-panicked tend to be experts on China’s history and politics who view the statistics in a broader context.
Hyper inflation, economic meltdown and a planet stumbling from a global pandemic that originated in China.
These are all the ingredients for conflict and a hot war.
One of the most concerning elements of all of this occurred last year before the US election when Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, contacted his a Chinese to tell them America would not attack them.
If China was convinced Trump wanted a war in 2020, they will certainly think he’ll start one in 2024. Their hawks will be demanding force before then.
Right now. All roads lead to war.
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It’s the kids I feel sorry for……….
Trump is a shoe in, because everyone forgets the imbalance in the US electoral system (except the republican party). This coupled with the Leninist discipline of the state Republican parties to make sure they win the “fly over states” by any means necessary. Means the next presidential election has already been gerrymandered to death by the Republicans. They got this.
Blacks, disabled, and anyone with a parking ticket they don’t like who votes democrat just won’t get their vote counted. It’s that simple.
So buckle up kids, were in for one hell of a ride unless the working class in the USA and China can get their collective acts together and topple these crazy dictators – war it is.
Framing the notion that Biden is somehow “better” than trump is naïve at best, and possibly even disingenuous (we still have 3 more years of Biden before real comparisons between their respective policies can be made – just because one is crass, brazen and narcissistic, while the other is frail, soft-spoken and has trouble remembering anything doesn’t automatically mean much of actual consequence). Republicans are much easier to hate on because (on paper) they deliberately don’t come across as socialist, despite consistently growing the government faster, as the Democrats. Factually, of course, BOTH are completely controlled by their giant US corporate masters.
Also keep in mind that the only reason we currently have the 100% safe, 100% effective vaccines is because Trump rammed through “Operation Warp Speed”.
Fluffer of the week award!
Sarcasm often really doesn’t come through in text form.
The warmongering is coming mainly from the US. China is blustering in defence.
China is outperforming the US so does not need war to win.
US has good cause to risk war because it has nothing left to assert it global hegemony. The money printing since 2008 is not going into production but as you put it into speculating on existing assets.
These assets retain their original value, determined by the labour value it takes to produce them.
But speculation drives up their price, reflected in a devaluation of money, inflation.
The combination of money inflation and slow down in production is ‘stagflation’.
The US is beset by stagflation unless is can use it military power to bully the world to get cheaper inputs and retain the dollar as a world currency which holds up its ‘value’ artificially.
China’s problems of are a different order. A restored capitalist economy on steroids drawing on its huge size and labour market.
That is a problem of youth compared with US decrepitude.
But Chinas phenomenal expansion since 2000 cannot continue without correcting for the distortions introduced by internal rather than external pressures.
Sooner or later its surplus profits will exceed the demand for investment in production and divert surplus capital into speculation in existing assets.
This has already happened as capital floods into property creating a fictitious bubble of wealth that is popping right now.
But while speculation in the US is a symptom of failure to prevent the rate of profit falling, in China is represents an unproductive drain on profits that can be corrected by the state.
Chinese state capitalism is much more centrally managed than anything the US could dream of.
The US state is run by finance capital and will never allow all the speculative fictitious capital to simply be written off.
The revolving door between business and govt does not allow it since it doesn’t have the central power to allow a massive depression to cuts costs of production and restore profits.
In China the state has much more direct control over capital and labour.
Since 1990 economic development is no longer driven by a plan but by the market.
While prices are now set by the value of labour in the market, business remains state controlled.
So when capital is diverted to speculation in land the state can respond by allowing inflated land values to collapse cheapening land as an input stimulating investment in production.
Of course the property losses also hurts US speculators. A gain for China.
As long as the Chinese state can keep capital pouring into expanding production in China and increasingly around the world via the Belt and Road project, its rate and mass of profits will increase while US rate and mass declines.
In the process it is diverting value from it rival imperialist powers, notably the US, into its own economy.
It is this fundamental life and death contest between the rising Chinese and declining US imperialism that is shaping the outline of our future.
But its not a paint by numbers scenario. The future is not fate.
It is up to workers everywhere to recognise this and unite against both major ruling classes to prevent our dependence on both these rival powers drawing us into war.
In the event of war, we must refuse to join either side, but fight the class war for our independence as the socialist republic of Aotearoa.
Some times the government has to be kind so we don’t have to kill no one.
“If Trump runs+ wins it will be the beginning of the end for America”.
Surely we are well past the beginning already?
As for China, why does everyone fall for all the Western propaganda emanating from USA against it? It gets a bit tedious when you consider the track record of the two Countries.
The CCP targets innocent people and tortures and kills them. Many more each year than the US’ collateral deaths in their petrodollar war. The CCP has already admitted to forced organ harvesting so we know they are fucking evil. They said they stopped it, but there’s no way that they have, given the growing number of organ transplants every year (before the CCP virus). It makes sense for the CCP to prove their innocence. But they can’t, so they refuse to cooperate
Unless you can offer some proof of Chnia practicing forced organ harvesting I will regard your comment and everything else you state as Chinese policy as utter rubbish
CCP supporters never accept anything as proof of CCP crime, period. Just like any cult member. They don’t care whether their leaders might be criminals, so they don’t care whether they actually are
At this point in time the onus is on the CCP to prove their innocence
It is the CCP that is the great lier. Not the free world (US excluded)
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3003508/china-stopped-harvesting-organs-executed-prisoners-2015-prove-it
“Voluntary” my ass
First of all Trump will win in 2024 quite simply because the people who voted for him in 2020 have no reason not to vote for him again. On the other hand there are many who believed they were duped by the Democrats into voting for a man with early stage dementia, who was put there to block the socialist Bernie Saunders.
The Democrats will be caned for this deceit.
So Trump is a shoe in!
Now Trump believes in the Franklin Roosevelt concept of “Fortress America”
The US needs not trade with anyone. They can meet all their needs from within, food, oil, minerals manufacturing. When boiled down that is what Trump wants. To go back to when “America was Great”
That policy has collateral effects for the rest of the world, mainly China who needs Walmart and the like to keep stocking their shelves with “made in China” product.
XI is well aware of this.
Now is Xi also adopting annother Roosevelt policy of changing consumer product factory output to military output and looking to engage in conflict to utilise the output.
Military manufacture cranked in earnest by Roosevelt, initially to supply the UK, was cemented as the US manufacturing cornerstone by Eisenhower and has remains to this day.
China however, unlike the US, does not have the resources to go it alone. It needs to import coal, iron ore, and protein. Little else however.
Xi walks a fine line to keep both his factories working along with keeping his people fed in the manner to which they have become accustomed.
Economicaly there will be a shake down.
There will be casualties who carry real life changing burden and anguish. They will be predominantly those in the second quartile who will be dropped into the bottom quartile becoming dependant on welfare.
NZ as a producer of protein, sits well to weather the storm as a country but the casualties here will be real for sector who are powerless to effect the outcome
The Hillary and Sanders couldn’t see eye to eye. Biden can tell you what happens when not cams can see eye to eye. There will be no more fucken billionaire presidents. Democrats will literally crawl over broken glass to stop that.
Taiwans history is complex, but mostly it’s fair to say it is a renegade state, that China and the world has accepted until recently, will probably revert back to China.
So just because it’s conveninet for the West to NOW want to support Tawian, PURELY to piss of China, it is a really DUMB excuse to go to war over. Imagine Alaska seeding from the USA during a civil war and China after 40+ years of agreeing NOT to get involved, suddenly deciding to defend it and supply it with serious military weaponary against a resurgent USA wanting to invade.
Secondly, China has Gold and LOTS of it, it would seem. So it’ll most probably be the ‘last man’ standing or the ‘least worst shirt in the laundry basket’.
How many overseas bases does China have? How much of a treat to the uSA or Europe is the possible one in Djibouti (?), that about every sizable country also has some sort of base.
I am NOT defending China as a political system or a country I’d like to live in. But at least it’s corruption is WELL documented in NZ etc, unlike our own and the wests.
We’ll just have to deal with whoever comes out on top and try not to pick the side of the collapsing empire, almost sure to ‘NOT win’.
Taiwan is not a renegade state. It is the side that lost in the 40s after WW2. The CCP is not China. China is not the CCP
Taiwan is not a “renegade state” …never ruled by CCP. It established itself as a democratic state independent of CCP China. All Chinese do not belong to CCP/mainland China. Saying Taiwan is an integral part of China is like saying that North Korea has a claim over South Korea or that Scotland has no right to independence from England etc. Taiwan has only had Chinese people there since Koxinga, a Ming Loyalist Governor/General evacuated his navy and soldiers to Taiwan in 1661 to use as a base to fight the Qing and overran the Dutch colonialist-trader outposts and the fledgeling indigenous Kingdom that was starting to arise. Saying CCP has right to Taiwan is like saying England has inherent right to Nth Ireland even though it was a Scottish Free Church colonization. Taiwanese Chinese are like the Scottish to the English …similar but not the same.
You forgot environmental armegedon. Not helped by…
“There are more delegates at COP26 associated with the fossil fuel industry than from any single country, analysis shared with the BBC shows.
Campaigners led by Global Witness assessed the participant list published by the UN at the start of this meeting.
They found that 503 people with links to fossil fuel interests had been accredited for the climate summit.
These delegates are said to lobby for oil and gas industries, and campaigners say they should be banned.
“The fossil fuel industry has spent decades denying and delaying real action on the climate crisis, which is why this is such a huge problem,” says Murray Worthy from Global Witness.
“Their influence is one of the biggest reasons why 25 years of UN climate talks have not led to real cuts in global emissions.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59199484
Change a couple of words and it’s almost NZ…
Jacinda’s inability to get anything done and the disaster of the coming economic collapse are mixing with the alienating inclusion via exclusion woke activists…
Is it possible that nationalistic tendencies are stoked and whatever reverse policy to the stumbling and bumbling incumbent are promulgated to ensure that an assault on foundational laws of a country are able to be repealed for maximum effect… one watches Putin and Xi and one becomes envious (of the power)
Is it possible that nationalising water via Three Waters legislation simply enables the next party to sell it easier to a country that is “expanding its influence” at the three poles, Arctic, Himalayas and Antarctic to secure climate resistant resources for the largest population on earth… the country is excellent at probing the grey zone of international laws, treaties and, agreements to get its own way, backed up by economic bullying as necessary. Science and research turn to economic and military plundering in a second….
Is it possible that unfettered bullish behaviour on a global scale results in black swan bears clawing along nationalistic lines as suits the current geo-militaristic desire of a country. Debt bondage can be weaponised if nations just say “we won’t pay”. Combating hyper-inflationary pressures as a nation could be seen as the first steps in declaring a war…
An ascendant hegemony faltering economically leads to drawing straws and collecting allies along with showing of force to insist they are the rising ascendency… you cannot build a world dominating economy and military without exercising its legs. Taiwan, Pacific Island nations, Myanmar, Boundary redrawing in Tibetan and Bhutan, Mongolia annexing, Arctic claims, Antarctic claims, influence of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, severing the Chicken Neck Siliguri corridor, skirmishing the disputed Kashmir
No mention of space and cyberspace security which outside of RocketLabs is just all a bit too much to most kiwis to contemplate. Hacking of DHBs and repeated DoS attacks not from benign forces.
All very US style behaviours from a rising hegemon.
All your topics bear a little meditation over a rum and coke Martyn.
I could write an essay on any of those topics Martyn so it’s difficult to know where to start. However:
BIDEN
It’s not that he can’t get things done so much as the things he wants to do (or the people controlling him want to do) are patently bad and must be stopped.
TRUMP
I doubt he will run again because he’ll be too old by then. Meanwhile he is busy flushing the Republican party of RINOs by endorsing candidates and primarying those who won’t retire: We’ll see a fresh new lineup in 2024.
XI
He is repeating the same cultural mistake as all the other Chinese dynasties: Ruling from the centre with absolute authoritarianism. It will all go pear shaped again and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are people in Beijing planning his assassination as a write. China, like so many of their fireworks, will ultimately be a fizzer but might blow your hand off too.
INFLATION
It’s what happens when you print money to paper over the cracks during a faux pandemic. It is making the rich richer and the poor poorer. As one of the former, I can testify that the returns on my offshore investments have been stellar for the last couple of years. I’m heavily into anything the Greens don’t like as a matter of principle: Coal mines, weapons manufacture, GMOs, nuclear anything and torturing puppies
OK Boomer.
FYI
“Glasgow: The shock new pact between China and the United States unveiled in Glasgow has been hailed as a breakthrough as the deadline looms for the climate summit’s negotiations.
The world’s two largest emitters declared global warming an existential crisis which demands co-operation between the superpowers.
In a boost to the flagging COP26 talks and sign of a possible thawing in the fractured relationship between both countries, Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua and his US counterpart John Kerry stunned observers by unveiling the joint declaration pledging tougher action this decade.
The agreement was negotiated in secret for months during about 30 virtual meetings and negotiation sessions in Shanghai, London and Washington before final terms were settled in Glasgow on Wednesday night local-time (Thursday AEDT)”
“Xie described climate change as an “existential crisis” and said agreement between the US and China on how to deal with global warming far outweighed their differences on the issue.
Kerry, a former US secretary of state under Barack Obama, framed the surprise agreement as much-needed momentum for the COP26 talks.
“The two largest economies in the world have agreed to work together to raise climate ambition in this decisive decade,” Kerry told reporters in Glasgow.
“Our teams have worked together for months, and we have worked in good faith. We have found common ground.”
Kerry described the joint-declaration as a “road map for our present and future collaboration” on climate change.”
https://www.theage.com.au/world/europe/existential-crisis-united-states-and-china-stun-cop26-with-joint-climate-change-pact-20211111-p597wq.html