Missing from this article is the catastrophic neoliberalization of the Russian economy which Clinton helped administer, leading to immense suffering and the emergence of the oligarchs, thus laying the groundwork for Putin's rise to reactionary power

https://twitter.com/BillClinton/status/1512115104988422150

Neoliberal shock doctrine began in 1991 before Clinton took office, but Clinton helped sustain the catastrophe, with Larry Summers playing an important role in this in the Clinton administration cepr.net/can-we-blame-l…

I am getting a very important medication a month late, due to yet another breakdown in communication between my health insurance, pharmacy, and doctor's office. I've made over a dozen phone calls over the past month trying to sort this out The high cost of health care in the US is awful, but I often get even more pissed off by how poorly it all works

A motley of private/corporate bureaucracies, with no one responsible for ensuring they can actually work together as a single system

Some facts about the WWII internment of people of Japanese descent that I find important

First, FDR issued the order. Every once in a while I encounter liberals and progressives who are shocked to learn this 2. FDR’s Executive Order did not single out people of Japanese descent, but it was understood

As his AG later wrote: “You signed the original Executive Order permitting the exclusions so the Army could handle the Japs. It was never intended to apply to Italians and Germans.”

A shout out on this anniversary of Executive Order 9066 to George Carlin, who had a bit about how rights are fake and gave his audience a homework assignment: look up Japanese Americans 1942 Whenever reactionaries try to posthumously conscript Carlin to their side I remember this bit and his rants about cops

A sampling of claims that vilifying China provides the unifying national project we need to mend our broken politics, and is perhaps even the key to enacting a progressive agenda

Jim VandeHei, cofounder and CEO of Axios, 2018

axios.com/china-united-s… Matt Yglesias, 2018: "anti-China politics could be the unifying national project we need"

Then he wrote a book based on this premise

I 100% support more coverage that features the voices of Ukrainians in this moment, but I also think media outlets can do so without specifically seeking out the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion to do PR for them

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azov_Batt…

https://twitter.com/OrlaGuerin/status/1493161801827205120

The 78 year old grandmother was picked up across a wide range of media outlets

I really want to know how this happened. Azov Battalion is pretty notorious. Neither this correspondent nor producers nor anyone else on the team did any research? Plausible but also mindboggling

OK, my short list of the books about China that I have found most helpful

Ho-fung Hung, _The China Boom: Why China Will Not Rule The World_

Succinct structural analysis of China's political economy and history, in global context. Especially recommend Chapter 3 on 1980-2008

https://twitter.com/Vinncent/status/1492810809642205188

Ching Kwan Lee, _Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt_

Study of the impacts of "reform and opening up" on the working class, workers' power and resistance. Discusses parallels between the experiences of the Chinese and US working class in this period

Sinophobic attacks are heating up in the GOP primaries. These are screenshots from competing Senate candidates in MO

A similar fight is playing out in the PA primary (which includes Dr Oz)

politico.com/newsletters/po… Another MO GOP Senate candidate: ‘going so far during an interview with China Watcher as to link the CCP to the rise of critical race theory and “cancel culture” in the U.S’

A common conspiracy theory on Fox News and other rightwing media, grown a lot since the 2020 BLM protests

This is theft and mass murder. It is grotesque that the US even has the power to do this. We need a new world economy that is not US supremacist

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1492089973738287105

The WH figures they can get away with this in part because the white supremacist narratives surrounding "humanitarian aid" make it an effective fig leaf here

We have ample experience that current methods of aid cannot make up for the economic destruction of a country

Benjamin Franklin 1751: "in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth" Two lessons:

Whiteness has a history and there have been dramatic shifts in who gets included (and what inclusion means)

Also, racism causes hallucinations

Very useful. Some takeaways

Threat inflation. US leaders and media regularly exaggerate the likelihood that Russia will invade, and how imminent an invasion might be

https://twitter.com/volod_ishchenko/status/1487158278656245763?s=21

https://t.co/4WfQslkfbt If Putin invaded he would incur significant costs within domestic politics, including popular opposition. This gets ignored in US threat inflation

A lot of people on the left who defend the Chinese Communist Party, or hold out hope that deep down it really is socialist (this includes David Harvey), draw heavily upon Giovanni Arrighi, especially his _Adam Smith in Beijing_

This is a deep mistake. Lemme explain Arrighi (who I learned a lot from!) anticipates that China could be on a trajectory to a post-capitalist economy. The deep problem is that he bases this on his definition of capitalism as belonging to the realm of global exchange—as distinct from domestic markets and production

This editorial may have some points about particular cases where accusations of antisemitic tropes go too far. I dunno, this does get into judgment calls

But I have some critiques at the level of fundamental analysis
jewishcurrents.org/how-not-to-fig… First, I think it fails to take sufficiently seriously the way that conspiracy theories structure antisemitism. Conspiracy theories get a mention, but a proper analysis of the structure of this thought is lost in the rest of the article