xiaohongshu [none/use name]
nothing if the feds don’t want something to happen. Jan 6 was as controlled as you can get.
The Bush family has very strong ties with the oil and gas tycoons in Texas. He can help the Democrats making inroad into the fossil fuel industries in the south that is traditionally a Republican stronghold.
For context, Trump pissed off too many oil and gas investors from 2016-2020. A lot of people who went all in on the shale revolution under Obama in 2013-2014 lost billions of investments because Trump stupidly wanted to keep gasoline price low. The whole oil drilling sector was in a slump going into Covid as consumption reduced further. It took Biden’s Ukraine war to restore the oil and gas profit margin.
There’s also Trump making his genius move of forcing America’s number one enemy, China, into signing long term LNG contract with American suppliers. Genius move for a genius businessman. Then Biden’s Ukraine war happened and the price of the LNG shot through the roof because Europe ran out of gas. The American LNG suppliers were already locked into long term contracts with China, so they could only see their own LNG being resold by the Chinese to Europe with huge profits.
The upshot is that Trump has pissed off a lot of people in the oil and gas sector that the Democrats now have a real shot at making inroads into the Texas oil and gas people that are traditionally the Republican base.
The Bush family is the key to making this happen. It’s all a calculated maneuver. Many Republican donor class hates Trump and really really do not want to see him coming back, but still could not cut their lifelong ties with the GOP itself. Will the domino start to fall? If the Democrats can pull this off, they can even get Texas in the future.
I don’t know about the General Megathread but usually these megathreads are topical. For example, the News Megathread started quite organically.
If you remember, by late 2021, the main boards of this site were mostly AOC posting, Bernie posting, a lot of your typical US electoralism and socdem stuff. International news items usually get drown out with little engagements (if you miss the timing, you probably wouldn’t even see them at all).
Then Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, and the Russia-Ukraine War Daily Megathread became the “containment zone” for all posts and discussions about the war. We were getting 1000-2000 daily comments at some point!
Because of the international scope of the conflict, some non-American Hexbears also started to post news and comments about the war from their home countries’ perspectives. It soon became the place where people share news and stories from different parts of the world outside of America.
Then we had a dedicated user (72 Trillion) who would post daily updates to the megathread with curated news items across the world. It became somewhat of a fanfare to wait for the daily news update to drop every day. We joked about how it’s a better news site than most of the internet out there. It was the gel that glued everything together.
And that was how it started to transition into the News Megathread that we know of today, mostly as a place for non-American Hexbears to discuss about geopolitics and economics all over the world.
Extra ironic that they opposed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
Let me ask you this question: suppose you’re a major political party in the US, would you rather lose tens of millions of donations, or several hundred thousand voters?
Because of Citizens United, if you lose voters (and even the election), as long as you have strong backers for your future campaigns, you’re gonna be fine.
But if you lose the donors, even if you win the election, you’re gonna be screwed no matter what in the future elections. If you cannot inspire confidence in the donors (not voters) and cannot ensure the continuous supply of treats, then you’re going to face a mass defection from the donor class. You’re then going into the next election cycle with an even more depleted resource for campaigning.
Citizens United has effectively ensured that the priorities of the donor class will always be protected over the voters (and I’m not so sure about Kamala losing either. If anything, the bourgeoisie hate Trump a lot more).
Also, Trump’s MAGA is the one who is facing a mass defection right now. That’s why he is desperate enough to platform Elon Musk, who he never saw eye to eye with in the past. The Trump campaign is desperate for finances, as the establishment abandons the increasingly deranged politics of MAGA, and if he cannot win this election, the Republican Party is screwed.
Physical notes and coins comprise only a very small percentage (<10%) of total dollar in circulation. Most people pay taxes through their bank accounts (or having their wages withheld for tax purpose).
It all happens in the banking system - it’s like an Excel spreadsheet: when you pay taxes, your bank simply subtract the number on your bank account and the add the number on the Treasury account by changing the numbers, which are then deleted on the Treasury side to balance out the sheet (to account for the taxation). They are just numbers - that are deleted (disappeared) once you have paid your taxes.
It has nothing to do with needing to tax billionaires to fund spending. The government simply delete the tax money on the “spreadsheet” once it has been paid.
Also, money is obviously not literally just debt.
Read David Graeber’s Debt: the First 5000 Years. It will change your perspective completely on this subject.
Honestly if Trump follows Elon Musk’s genius 2 trillion cuts it’s going to seriously fuck with the US ability to do imperialism for the coming decades.
The last two years of Biden was a huge gamble for the imperialist state and basically praying that the Global South doesn’t end up ditching the dollar (it worked because no alternative has been found yet).
Now the US needs to flood the Global South with the dollars again to retain its hegemony, and Trump cutting 2 trillion (which is a lot!) is going to destroy the monetary supremacy of US imperialism abroad.
I’m starting to think that they won’t allow Trump to win this time because you don’t want to screw with the imperialist machine.
Childish and stupid. Signs of an impotent regime.