Biden Stoops to Conquer Brazil’s Lula

The tragicomic “insurrection” in Brasilia on Sunday was destined to meet a sudden death. The universal condemnation and, in particular, the brusqueness with which the Biden Administration distanced itself from the protestors, sealed their fate. Certainly, this revolt is no “civil war,” although it is difficult to make predictions about new protests in the country.

Biden Stoops to Conquer Brazil’s Lula

West’s neoliberal ‘age of abundance’ is over, as war and sanctions boomerang home

Aug 27, 2022 — France’s President Emmanuel Macron, a former banker, warned “we are living the end of what could have seemed an era of abundance.” Western wars and sanctions are boomeranging back at home. The neoliberal phase of capitalism is collapsing.

Neoliberalism has lost the key pillars it was built on: cheap energy and raw materials from Russia, cheap labor and consumer goods from China, an unsustainable bubble of household debt, low to zero interest rates, and Washington’s ability to organize regime-change operations in any country where a government tried a socialistic or state-led economic model.

West’s neoliberal ‘age of abundance’ is over, as war and sanctions boomerang home via Multipolarista

Calling a recession and blaming it on interest rates

The latest US GDP figures for second quarter of 2022 renewed the debate about whether the US economy was in a recession or not. Real GDP contracted in the second quarter of this year by a 0.9% annualised rate (or by 0.2% quarter over quarter). That meant the US economy had contracted for two successive quarters, and so ‘technically’ (by that definition) was in a recession. Real GDP is now up only 1.6% from Q2 2021. And business investment is slowing, up only 3.5% from this time last year, the slowest rate since the end of the COVID slump in 2020.

Calling a recession and blaming it on interest rates

The Different Ways That US And Chinese Governments Use Their Power

Russia’s war on Ukraine both reflects and deepens a global split that should remind us of Karl Marx’s famous remark: “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.” The United Kingdom already lost its particular social order—its empire—while the United States is now losing its.

The Different Ways That US And Chinese Governments Use Their Power