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dresshistorynerd · 2 years

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How did cotton win over linen anyway?

In short, colonialism, slavery and the industrial revolution. In length:

Cotton doesn't grow in Europe so before the Modern Era, cotton was rare and used in small quantities for specific purposes (lining doublets for example). The thing with cotton is, that's it can be printed with dye very easily. The colors are bright and they don't fade easily. With wool and silk fabrics, which were the more traditional fabrics for outer wear in Europe (silk for upper classes of course), patterns usually needed to be embroidered or woven to the cloth to last, which was very expensive. Wool is extremely hard to print to anything detailed that would stay even with modern technology. Silk can be printed easily today with screen printing, but before late 18th century the technique wasn't known in western world (it was invented in China a millenium ago) and the available methods didn't yeld good results.

So when in the late 17th century European trading companies were establishing trading posts in India, a huge producer of cotton fabrics, suddenly cotton was much more available in Europe. Indian calico cotton, which was sturdy and cheap and was painted or printed with colorful and intricate floral patters, chintz, especially caught on and became very fashionable. The popular Orientalism of the time also contributed to it becoming fasionable, chintz was seen as "exotic" and therefore appealing.

Here's a typical calico jacket from late 18th century. The ones in European markets often had white background, but red background was also fairly common.

The problem with this was that this was not great for the business of the European fabric producers, especially silk producers in France and wool producers in England, who before were dominating the European textile market and didn't like that they now had competition. So European countries imposed trade restrictions for Indian cotton, England banning cotton almost fully in 1721. Since the introduction of Indian cottons, there had been attempts to recreate it in Europe with little success. They didn't have nearly advanced enough fabric printing and cotton weaving techniques to match the level of Indian calico. Cotton trade with India didn't end though. The European trading companies would export Indian cottons to West African market to fund the trans-Atlantic slave trade that was growing quickly. European cottons were also imported to Africa. At first they didn't have great demand as they were so lacking compared to Indian cotton, but by the mid 1700s quality of English cotton had improved enough to be competitive.

Inventions in industrial textile machinery, specifically spinning jenny in 1780s and water frame in 1770s, would finally give England the advantages they needed to conquer the cotton market. These inventions allowed producing very cheap but good quality cotton and fabric printing, which would finally produce decent imitations of Indian calico in large quantities. Around the same time in mid 1700s, The East Indian Company had taken over Bengal and soon following most of the Indian sub-continent, effectively putting it under British colonial rule (but with a corporate rule dystopian twist). So when industrialized English cotton took over the market, The East India Company would suppress Indian textile industry to utilize Indian raw cotton production for English textile industry and then import cotton textiles back to India. In 1750s India's exports were mainly fine cotton and silk, but during the next century Indian export would become mostly raw materials. They effectively de-industrialized India to industrialize England further.

India, most notably Bengal area, had been an international textile hub for millennia, producing the finest cottons and silks with extremely advance techniques. Loosing cotton textile industry devastated Indian local economies and eradicated many traditional textile craft skills. Perhaps the most glaring example is that of Dhaka muslin. Named after the city in Bengal it was produced in, it was extremely fine and thin cotton requiring very complicated and time consuming spinning process, painstakingly meticulous hand-weaving process and a very specific breed of cotton. It was basically transparent as seen depicted in this Mughal painting from early 17th century.

It was used by e.g. the ancient Greeks, Mughal emperors and, while the methods and it's production was systematically being destroyed by the British to squash competition, it became super fashionable in Europe. It was extremely expensive, even more so than silk, which is probably why it became so popular among the rich. In 1780s Marie Antoinette famously and scandalously wore chemise a la reine made from multiple layers of Dhaka muslin. In 1790s, when the empire silhouette took over, it became even more popular, continuing to the very early 1800s, till Dhaka muslin production fully collapsed and the knowledge and skill to produce it were lost. But earlier this year, after years lasting research to revive the Dhaka muslin funded by Bangladeshi government, they actually recreated it after finding the right right cotton plant and gathering spinners and weavers skilled in traditional craft to train with it. (It's super cool and I'm making a whole post about it (it has been in the making for months now) so I won't extend this post more.)

Marie Antoinette in the famous painting with wearing Dhaka muslin in 1783, and empress Joséphine Bonaparte in 1801 also wearing Dhaka muslin.

While the trans-Atlantic slave trade was partly funded by the cotton trade and industrial English cotton, the slave trade would also be used to bolster the emerging English cotton industry by forcing African slaves to work in the cotton plantations of Southern US. This produced even more (and cheaper (again slave labor)) raw material, which allowed the quick upward scaling of the cotton factories in Britain. Cotton was what really kicked off the industrial revolution, and it started in England, because they colonized their biggest competitor India and therefore were able to take hold of the whole cotton market and fund rapid industrialization.

Eventually the availability of cotton, increase in ready-made clothing and the luxurious reputation of cotton lead to cotton underwear replacing linen underwear (and eventually sheets) (the far superior option for the reasons I talked about here) in early Victorian Era. Before Victorian era underwear was very practical, just simple rectangles and triangles sewn together. It was just meant to protect the outer clothing and the skin, and it wasn't seen anyway, so why put the relatively scarce resources into making it pretty? Well, by the mid 1800s England was basically fully industrialized and resource were not scarce anymore. Middle class was increasing during the Victorian Era and, after the hard won battles of the workers movement, the conditions of workers was improving a bit. That combined with decrease in prices of clothing, most people were able to partake in fashion. This of course led to the upper classes finding new ways to separate themselves from lower classes. One of these things was getting fancy underwear. Fine cotton kept the fancy reputation it had gained first as an exotic new commodity in late 17th century and then in Regency Era as the extremely expensive fabric of queens and empresses. Cotton also is softer than linen, and therefore was seen as more luxurious against skin. So cotton shifts became the fancier shifts. At the same time cotton drawers were becoming common additional underwear for women.

It wouldn't stay as an upper class thing, because as said cotton was cheap and available. Ready-made clothing also helped spread the fancier cotton underwear, as then you could buy fairly cheaply pretty underwear and you didn't even have to put extra effort into it's decoration. At the same time cotton industry was massive and powerful and very much eager to promote cotton underwear as it would make a very steady and long lasting demand for cotton.

In conclusion, cotton has a dark and bloody history and it didn't become the standard underwear fabric for very good reasons.

Here's couple of excellent sources regarding the history of cotton industry:

The European Response to Indian Cottons, Prasannan Parthasarathi

INDIAN COTTON MILLS AND THE BRITISH ECONOMIC POLICY, 1854-1894, Rajib Lochan Sahoo

#i have fixed the wording in the beginning so it doesn't sound like i'm saying cotton in general dyed better than wool or silk #answers #fashion history #historical fashion #history #textile history #dress history #historical clothing #indian history #colonial history #indian textiles #cotton #slavery

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metamatar · 1 month

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Why do you always defend China like that? I mean I get the the world tries to do the red scare, but aren't you defending a nation state when you brush off every criticism? Or does the criticism like target things that hamper capitalists and the actual criticisms regarding China lie elsewhere?

"Always?" All I said India is worse than China on a reblog about censorship on the Monkey Man lmao. There's stuff on my blog this year critiquing: Chinese uselessness on Palestine, involvement in Congo and critiquing workers rights in China through the lens of Foxconn factories trying to replicate their model in India.

I'm getting accused of campism for saying that India's blood and soil fascism is way worse, more dangerous than Chinese high surveillance 'socialism with Chinese characteristics.' India is formenting religious pogroms. The average Chinese citizen is not lynching their neighbours and burning down their homes on suspicion of eating the wrong thing. For Netflix to distort and kowtow to rabid fascists when the United States is strengthening ties with India (for anti China reasons) is really dangerous, given how much influence organisations like the Hindu American Foundation have in US politics. The average Westerner hates China plenty. Liberals do however cluelessly support Indian origin politicians who are funded by the Sangh.

Look man. I'm Indian. India has, since the BJP came to power gotten worse on hunger indexes every year. For countries not at war, we have the highest rate of child hunger in the world: 1 in 5 children are wasting despite the economy growing 6% every year. Journalists are routinely jailed and die in there. Kashmir is still under curfew and internet blackouts. Whatever hysterical story you want to tell about China is reality in India too. Without any kind of economic prosperity.

Why do these lives not matter to you? Why does the fact that Indian govt is passing laws that would enable India to strip muslims of citizenship not seem urgent to you? Is it because you maybe only think that the lives of people only matter in so far as they can be weaponised in some kind of story aligning with american state department?

#hatemail

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yourtongzhihazel · 3 days

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Hi! Long time follower. Lots of questions but putting them in one ask, sorry.

1) could you link your post on social credit, and your post on china’s agricultural/urban policy? I can’t find them off the top of my head and enjoy reading them with my fiancé

2) Thoughts on the school of psychological and its place in the future of China? I tried to read a few articles but unfortunately there’s not much in English, and I think it’s an interesting topic with how it’s being handled currently!

3) thoughts on former emperor Puyi? I’ve read a few books on him but I like hearing others opinions. Do you believe his reeducation at the end of his life was a genuine change of belief, or was he an individual who recited whatever those in power told him?

My disorganization is really biting me in the ass! I do think you might be talking about this post. I'll have to go through my archive some day and pick out some highlights to archive on cohost.

I do have to admit, this is the first time I'm hearing about a "school or psychological" so I'm going to need some more information/context about it. I'm sure I can probably find something about it.

Puyi is interesting and I think a good reminder about how people shape poltical-economy which then goes on to shape people. In Puyi's case, he became a gardener/street sweeper and retired without much complaint, never once taking up arms against the state. I don't really care too much if someone genuinely believes any one thing or other. It really doesn't matter in the long run. What matters more is what they effect materially. To that, if you are born in a society which tells you to hate poor or brown people every single day from birth to adulthood, you will, more likely than not, hate poor/brown people! This is how the material world shapes a person's social being. However, this can be "unlearned", so to speak. A person who grows up or becomes conditioned in a socialist society adapts the ideology and values of that society. Through that, societies reinforce their superstructure which goes on to affect how that society continues to function (usually to preserve it).

#hazel's press releases

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thelostdreamsthings · 9 months

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The Berlin Conference of 1884 divided Africa between the European empires, green-lighting rampant imperialism and genocide. As popular military rebellions devastate France’s neo-colonial grip on Africa, a reminder of how African resources were divided among colonial powers to build up the capitals of Europe, while Africa was kept in poverty, depravation and colonial domination.

One out of three lightbulbs in France is powered by uranium from Niger, where 90% of the people lack electricity. The Nigerien people are rising against neo-colonialism. Africa is progressing, and the era of European parasitism is fading...

Africa is embracing revolutions against neo-colonialism. That’s a good start, but…

What happens next is critical. The military power that freed the country needs economic smartness.

How to create jobs, grow the economy, boost trade, educate people, provide healthcare, build infrastructure etc. require very different types of skills and human resources.

Hopefully, China and Russia can guide them in these transformations.

The revolutionary belt over the last few years — Mali, Chad, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Niger…

France: Genocides, erases as much of African culture as it can, imposes the French language, and robs the resources of African countries to build France during the colonial period.

Continues robbing African countries in the neo-colonial period, keeping African countries poor and overthrowing any leader which dares to oppose France.

Forces African countries to pay a colonial tax and use the CFA Franc

Discriminates against Africans who leave former French colonies to come to France to escape poverty and depravation

Also France: …"Why would Africans hate us now?"

“My generation does not understand this: how can Africa, which has so much wealth, become the poorest continent in the world today?” - Ibrahim Traore, President of Burkina Faso

This is why Western thieves seek to maintain their control over resource-rich Africa

Most people in the West don't know about the Algerian War of Independance (1954 to 1962).

One million Algerians gave their lives in the war to kick the French out. During the war, various war crimes were perpetrated, such as the massacre of civilians, instances of rape, and torture. Additionally, the French forces were responsible for demolishing more than 8,000 villages and forcibly relocating over 2 million Algerians to concentration camps.

#africa

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mariacallous · 13 hours

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Across the globe, a diverse group of nations that view world politics differently from the United States are rising and flexing their diplomatic muscle in ways that are complicating American statecraft. From Africa to Latin America, to the Middle East and Asia, these emerging powers refuse to fit into traditional U.S. thinking about the world order. The successful pursuit of American interests in the mid-21st century calls for a strategy that attracts them toward the United States and its ideals but without expecting them to line up in lockstep with Washington.

“We refuse to be a pawn in a new cold war,” Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, said in November 2022. His views are shared in some form or another by leaders of Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and Turkey. All 10 of these nations are either in the G-20 or have economies large enough to warrant membership. A majority of them have populations larger than Germany’s. Collectively, they make up around a third of the world’s population and a fifth of its economic production, while also constituting a major share of the so-called global south’s population and economic production.

In the next two decades, emerging powers like these will climb the ranks of the world’s largest economies and populations, reshaping the structure of world politics in the process. Their diplomacy is increasingly ambitious. And they are taking positions that run counter to those of the United States with growing boldness. Washington and its allies should accept not only that these powers are emerging, but also that as they grow stronger, they will not align with Washington’s preferences on many international issues, especially when it comes to Russia and China.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, most of these powers declined to join the U.S.-led coalition to support Ukraine, refusing to take concrete action with sanctions on Russia or weapons for Kyiv. Some emerging powers, such as India and Turkey, even expanded economic ties with Russia.

Meanwhile, several of them pursued active diplomacy to end the war, challenging the U.S. policy of supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes.” Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example, pitched a plan to assemble a peace club to end the war and urged Washington to “stop encouraging war and start talking about peace.” Separately, Jokowi visited Kyiv and then Moscow, urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin to start a dialogue. South Africa led a delegation of African leaders to end the war, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has maintained a working relationship with Putin and sought to keep diplomatic channels open.

Most of these emerging powers also have warm ties with Beijing. They are reluctant to do anything that would endanger their economic relations with China. On a visit to Beijing in 2023, for example, Lula pledged to work with China to “balance world geopolitics”—a phrase that implied upending American global primacy. Even India, which sees China as an adversary and has grown much closer to the United States in recent years, is very unlikely to back the United States militarily in the event of a war over Taiwan.

Washington thus needs to avoid the urge to frame this world historical moment as a neo-Cold War ideological struggle. When the United States appeals to the emerging powers to sacrifice their interests for the liberal world order, they suspect that it is simply trying to woo them for its hard-power struggles with Russia and China. Their officials are quick to cite the 2003 Iraq War as evidence that Washington is not so committed as it claims to the liberal international order. They point to the many cases where the United States has compromised on its high principles and backed autocrats. President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza has only given them another reason to doubt the veracity of American claims to exceptional moral authority.

Most of these emerging powers have limited political headroom anyway for ideological struggles of the kind that so often animate U.S. foreign policy. Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar drove this point home when he pointed out that Europe’s ability to wean itself from Russian energy was a luxury that India did not have. “I have a population at $2,000 [per capita annual income],” he said. “I also need energy, and I am not in a position to pay high prices for oil.”

Given frictions between Washington and so many emerging powers of late, it can be tempting to disregard them and focus solely on countering Beijing and Moscow. But this would be a mistake. The emerging powers don’t pose a threat of the kind that U.S. adversaries can, but they also can’t just be ignored. China and Russia are certainly not going to ignore them—in fact, they are actively courting their leaders for political ties and market access with the hope of building a network of political and economic partners to obviate the need for ties to the West.

The emerging powers are also very open to China’s backing for alternative international institutions, such as the BRICS New Development Bank, that offer the prospect of infusions of capital without the bothersome conditions that accompany Western loans. They are critical of many aspects of the U.S.-led international order, which they see as dominated by former colonial powers and unfairly structured to serve the interests of the world’s wealthiest nations.

The good news for Washington is that the emerging powers don’t want to be vassals of China any more than they want to be vassals of America. They are not swing states ready to pick sides in a neo-Cold War. In fact, they actively seek a more fluid and multipolar world, one in which they believe they will have more leverage and freedom of maneuver. Many, moreover, maintain closer economic ties with the United States than China, especially when it comes to investment and defense cooperation.

Washington can make progress with these powers if it puts aside grand ideological framings about the liberal world order and focuses on developing a positive value proposition that offers meaningful benefit to their economic and political development, sovereignty, and aspirations for an enhanced voice in international affairs.

Although trade agreements have become politically unpopular for Republicans and Democrats alike, market access remains a powerful tool the United States has to this end. Other mutually beneficial economic arrangements are imaginable, focused on specific sectors and packages. So is cooperation on infrastructure investments, technology manufacturing, energy transition initiatives, deforestation, public health, and other areas.

Even when making progress on common interests, the emerging powers will also maintain substantial relationships with U.S. adversaries. Washington should not fall into the trap of judging the quality of its relations with the emerging powers by the strength of their ties to China or Russia.

Ultimately, the best way to engage with these nations is to help them strengthen their sovereignty so that they can resist the influence of U.S. adversaries and gain a real stake in sustaining a peaceful world order. This will take time and a change of approach but is likely to pay long-term benefits to America’s prosperity and continued global leadership.

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nicklloydnow · 5 months

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“When we spoke this week, she made clear that the decision of whether Ukraine wins or loses is now on us — almost entirely. As Congress debates how much more money to authorize for Ukraine’s assistance amid growing Republican opposition, she says that what we are really debating is our own future. Do we want to live in the kind of world that will result if Ukraine loses?

Hill is clear about her answer. A world in which Putin chalks up a win in Ukraine is one where the U.S.’s standing in the world is diminished, where Iran and North Korea are emboldened, where China dominates the Indo-Pacific, where the Middle East becomes more unstable and where nuclear proliferation takes off, among allies as well as enemies.

“Ukraine has become a battlefield now for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership,” she told me. “For Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage.”

(…)

“The problem is that many members of Congress don’t want to see President Biden win on any front,” she said. “People are incapable now of separating off ‘giving Biden a win’ from actually allowing Ukraine to win. They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden.”

“In that regard,” she continued, “whether they like it or not, members of Congress are doing exactly the same thing as Vladimir Putin. They hate that. They want to refute that. But Vladimir Putin wants Biden to lose, and they want Biden to be seen to lose as well.”

(…)

Ukraine has succeeded so far because of massive military support from European allies and other partners. So in that regard, we’ve now reached a tipping point between whether Ukraine continues to win in terms of having sufficient fighting power to stave Russia off, or whether it actually starts to lose because it doesn’t have the equipment, the heavy weaponry, the ammunition. That external support is going to be determinative.

(…)

It’s a question of whether Ukraine has enough resources, financial resources, not just to keep going on the battlefield, but also to keep the country together at home. And up until now you’re still seeing a lot of European countries stepping up. Not just you know, the United States, but definitely the EU, Japan, South Korea and others. Japan recently made an offer of additional major financial support. The Germans have said that they’ll make sure that the Ukrainian economy will continue to not just survive, but thrive, and over the longer term, they’ll help rebuild. This is still somewhat positive.

On the political side, however, we’ve got the problems of the policy battlefields on the domestic front. Ukraine has now become a domestic political issue in a whole range of countries, not just here in the United States, but in countries like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Germany and many more. And that’s an issue where it’s going to be very hard for Ukraine to win. Because when you get into the transactional issues of domestic politics, and you’re no longer thinking about national security, or these larger imperatives, then Ukraine dies a thousand deaths from all of the transactional efforts that domestic politicians engage in. Most political constituents, no matter the country, can’t really see beyond their own narrow interests.

(…)

One thing that we need to bear in mind here is that Putin turned for assistance to two countries that should give Americans and members of Congress pause — Iran and North Korea. Russia has had significant shortfalls of ammunition and sophisticated technology because of sanctions and other constraints. Ammunition has come from North Korea, which continues to provide Russia with all kinds of rounds for shells, and Iran has stepped up with the production of drones. Iran and North Korea both see this as a kind of international opening for them. If Russia prevails on the battlefield, you can be sure that Iran and North Korea will get benefits from this. We already see Russia shifting its position on the Iranian nuclear front, and we also see Russia making a major shift in its relationship with Israel. Putin has gone from being a major supporter of Israel, to now an opponent, and has switched from what was always very careful public rhetoric about Israel to pretty antisemitic statements. Putin never denigrated Jews in the past. On the contrary, he presented himself as a supporter of the Jewish population. This is a dramatic shift and clearly because of Iran. Now, whether Iran asked Putin to do this, I honestly can’t say, but we can all see this deepening relationship between Russia and Iran. That is a real problem for the administration and for others who are now looking at the Middle East and trying to figure out how to stop a broader war with Lebanon, with the Houthis in Yemen, and all of the Iranian proxies, because Iran and Russia have become fused together now in two conflicts.

(…)

But it’s not just China and Russia who are learning from this war. So are we. We’ve seen the impact of drone warfare and we’re thinking about how we deal with this ourselves. We’ve been kind of shocked to see how much wars like this take up ammunition stocks — this is not the type of war that we’ve fought for a very long time. When we’re thinking about our own defense, our own national security, we need to be looking very carefully at this conflict. The way that Putin has played with the idea of using tactical nuclear weapons, the use of drones on the battlefield, the use of mines, the use of ships and blockades in the Black Sea, the difficulty of pushing forward in a counteroffensive against these deep entrenchments, how various military systems including defensive equipment actually perform in real time and conditions. We can see how effective our ATACMS were, for example, our Patriot batteries. This is, in a way, a proving ground for our own equipment.

(…)

Well, there’ll be multiple ways he will define it, one of which is defeating the United States, politically, psychologically and symbolically. If the United States doesn’t pass the supplemental [bill to approve aid to Ukraine], and we get this chorus of members of Congress calling for the United States to pull away from Ukraine, Putin will be able to switch this around and say, “There you go. The United States is an unreliable ally. The United States is not a world leader.” And there will be a chilling effect for all our other allies. In the past, Putin has actually, for example, approached the Japanese and said, “Look, we can be your interlocutor with China. The United States is not going to be there to assist you in a crunch.” And that’s certainly what this is going to look like. The Japanese, the South Koreans, the Vietnamese, others that we have bilateral treaties with, are going to wonder, “OK, the United States made such a push here to support Ukraine, along with other European members of NATO, and now they’ve just walked away from it.” And you put that on top of Afghanistan and the withdrawal, also the withdrawal from Iraq, withdrawal from Syria, and the whole fraught history of United States interventions in the last two decades, and Putin will be able to present a pretty potent narrative about the United States’ inability to maintain its commitments and forfeiting its role as an international leader. So that that becomes a major political win.

(…)

We’ll be at each others’ throats. There’ll be no way in which this is going to turn out well. There’ll be a lot of frustration on the part of people who thought that this was the easier option when we reel from crisis to crisis. There’ll also be the shame, frankly, and the disgrace of having let the Ukrainians down. I think it would create a firestorm of recrimination. And it will also embolden so many other actors to take their own steps.

One key challenge is going to be the nuclear front. There’s several different ways in which we can look at the nuclear front. There’s the moral imperative. We pushed Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons that it had inherited from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. And we gave assurances along with the United Kingdom, that Ukraine would not end up in the situation that it is in now. We guaranteed its territorial integrity and sovereignty and independence and also assured Ukraine that we would step up to help. This opens up a whole can of worms related first to the moral jeopardy of this, that we obviously don’t stick to our word.

But also in terms of nuclear weapons, we could face proliferation issues with Japan, South Korea, other countries — even NATO countries who currently see themselves covered under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. They will start to worry about how much we would actually support them when they needed it, and how vulnerable they are to pressure or attack by another nuclear power. Think about the dynamics between India and Pakistan, for example, or China and India, or China and South Korea and Japan; and the predicament of leaders in other countries who will be thinking right now that, “I’m going to be extremely vulnerable — so perhaps I should be getting my own nuclear weapon.” You’re hearing talk about this in Germany, for example. You hear it all the time in places like Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, we know that they have nuclear aspirations. So this opens up a whole set of different discussions.

(…)

That it’s actually being spent at home! That’s the irony. Because every time you send a weapon to the Ukrainians, it’s an American weapon. You’re not buying somebody else’s weapons to go to Ukraine. It’s also a fraction of our defense budget.

It’s really a circular process here. We are providing weapons to Ukraine, we’re buying them from major manufacturers of defense systems here in the United States, which are obviously providing jobs for the people who are making them. And then we’re going back and we’re ordering more because we’re replenishing and upgrading our own weapons stocks. This is all part of our own system. These defense manufacturers account for huge numbers of jobs across the whole of the United States, so arming Ukraine means significant job creation and retention across the United States and also in Europe and elsewhere.

People in Congress know that, it’s just that they’re playing a different game. They want to play up this issue of “it should be spent at home” because of the transactional nature of congressional supplemental bills.

Let’s just put it frankly — this is all about the upcoming presidential election. It’s less about Ukraine and it’s more about the fact that we have an election coming up next year. The problem is that many members of Congress don’t want to see President Biden win on any front. People are incapable now of separating off “giving Biden a win” from actually allowing Ukraine to win. They are thinking less about U.S. national security, European security, international security and foreign policy, and much more about how they can humiliate Biden.

In that regard, whether they like it or not, members of Congress are doing exactly the same thing as Vladimir Putin. They hate that. They want to refute that. But Vladimir Putin wants Biden to lose, and they want Biden to be seen to lose as well.

For Vladimir Putin now Ukraine has become a proxy war. It’s not a proxy war by the United States against Russia. We’re trying to get Russia out of Ukraine, period. But for Putin, Ukraine is a proxy war against the United States, to remove the United States from the world stage. He’s trying to use Gaza, and Israel like that now, as well. He’s trying to whip up anti-United States sentiment wherever he can. I’ve just come back from Europe and from a whole host of conferences where there’s just so much rage and grievance about the United States and Putin is fanning the flames.

Putin sees Biden as a major opponent. He is an obstacle for Putin to be able to win on the battlefield of Ukraine. So Putin wants Biden to fail. Putin would be thrilled if Trump would come back to power because he also anticipates that Trump will pull the United States out of NATO, that Trump will rupture the U.S. alliance system, and that Trump will hand over Ukraine. So right at this particular moment, Putin sees an awful lot that he can get out of undermining Biden’s position.

Now, the problem, of course, is that currently many members of Congress and others are thinking about whether they want to run to be vice president for Trump, and what they should perhaps do now to support Trump and pave the way for his presidency. So the idea of giving Biden anything that could positively affect the election is just a bridge too far.

(…)

We’re not doing anything to put Putin in political jeopardy. We’re just fighting with ourselves all the time. And we can’t see past that. Biden’s got to try to help Ukraine, but can he get enough people to see past the election and also see the jeopardy we are in? We are in peril. We don’t see it. There’s such an anti-American wave that’s out there in the world. People want to see America fail and pulled down to size.

Ukraine has become a battlefield now, for America and America’s own future — whether we see it or not — for our own defensive posture and preparedness, for our reputation and our leadership.

American leadership is still very important. But other countries are starting to make plans for a world without us at this particular point. And you can be sure that Vladimir Putin, and President Xi and many others will be pretty ecstatic if we give up on Ukraine. And that could happen just as soon as December or January, because if Congress goes home for the holidays without passing the supplemental, and everyone’s back in their constituencies, there’s a lot of stuff that can happen in their absence, in that vacuum, that void that we have created. Everybody else in the rest of the world would be wondering, not just, “Where is America?” but, “What on earth has happened to America?” And if President Trump thinks that he’s going to be the leader of the free world when he comes back into office — well, think again. There won’t be a free world to be leading at all. And that’s not an overstatement. That’s just a fact.

(…)

So the best case scenario is, of course, one in which Ukraine continues to be able to hold its own and if we helped build it up militarily, where it can make another push or another series of pushes. If we think about World War Two and other wars, there were multiple offensive efforts, counteroffensives, and you just kept on trying until you succeeded. It will be very difficult to have an absolute victory over Russia. But what you want to have is Ukraine in a position to have a negotiation, a diplomatic solution, on its terms, not on Russia’s terms. A solution in which Ukraine is recognized as the party in the right, as the aggrieved party by the whole of the international community, and where Ukraine is, if not completely in territory, but materially and in every other way possible, made whole.

Another aspect of having this war resolved on Ukraine’s terms is that Russia is going to have to pay for or contribute to the reconstruction of Ukraine in some fashion. That is another major reason why Putin would see the U.S. and its allies stepping back as a major win, because then there’d be no leverage whatsoever or pressure put on Russia for rebuilding Ukraine. Russia could just step back, wash its hands of all of this and let everybody else fix what it broke.

So the best possible outcome here, beyond Ukraine being able to prevail on the battlefield, is a negotiated settlement that is in Ukraine’s favor, that leads to commitments to its security and reconstruction, and leads to some soul searching in Russia. That’s not going to happen under these current circumstances. The only way that that happens is when Russia believes that everybody else has the fortitude and staying power for this conflict. And right now, that’s not what we’re displaying at all. Actually, we’re looking pretty pathetic, I can’t think of any other way to describe it. And for Putin, this is just such a gift. This is such a gift.

(…)

He’s about to, and it’s on us. We’re at the point where it’s on us. If we leave the field, then he will win. His calculation is that our domestic politics and our own interests override everything, and that we no longer have a sense of national security, or of our role in international affairs. This is a moment for him to get rid of not just Pax Americana, but America as a major global player.

(…)

The decision is ours, this decision is entirely ours. We’re just falling all over ourselves to engage in self-harm at the moment. Ukraine shouldn’t be a partisan issue. I just hope that people are going to be able to dig deep, and realize the moment that they’re in.”

“The skeptics are correct that our recent counteroffensive did not achieve the lightning-fast liberation of occupied land, as the Ukrainian military managed in the fall of 2022 in the Kharkiv region and the city of Kherson. Observers, including some in Ukraine, anticipated similar results over the past several months, and when immediate success did not materialize, many succumbed to doom and gloom. But pessimism is unwarranted, and it would be a mistake to let defeatism shape our policy decisions going forward. Instead, policymakers in Washington and other capitals should keep the big picture in mind and stay on track. A Ukrainian victory will require strategic endurance and vision—as with our recent counteroffensive, the liberation of every square mile of territory requires enormous sacrifice by our soldiers—but there is no question that victory is attainable.

(…)

The current phase of the war is not easy for Ukraine or for our partners. Everyone wants quick, Hollywood-style breakthroughs on the battlefield that will bring a quick collapse of Russia’s occupation. Although our objectives will not be reached overnight, continued international support for Ukraine will, over time, ensure that local counteroffensives achieve tangible results on the frontlines, gradually destroying Russian forces and thwarting Putin’s plans for a protracted war.

Some skeptics counter that although such goals are just, they simply aren’t achievable. In fact, our objectives will remain militarily feasible as long as three factors are in place: adequate military aid, including jets, drones, air defense, artillery rounds, and long-range capabilities that allow us to strike deep behind enemy lines; the rapid development of industrial capacity in the United States and Europe as well as in Ukraine, both to cover Ukraine’s military needs and to replenish U.S. and European defense stocks; and a principled and realistic approach to the prospect of negotiations with Russia.

With these elements in place, our effort will bring marked progress on the frontlines. Yet that requires not veering off course and concluding that the fight is hopeless simply because one stage has fallen short of some observers’ expectations. Even with significant challenges, Ukraine has achieved notable results in recent months. We won the battle for the Black Sea and thereby restored a steady flow of maritime exports, benefiting both our economy and global food security. We’ve made gains on the southern front, recently securing a bridgehead on the eastern bank of the Dnieper River. And elsewhere, we have held off enormous Russian assaults and inflicted major losses on Russian forces, including by thwarting their attempts on Avdiivka and Kupiansk. Despite their gargantuan effort, Russian troops failed to secure any gains on the ground.

(…)

The problem is not just that a cease-fire now would reward Russian aggression. Instead of ending the war, a cease-fire would simply pause the fighting until Russia is ready to make another push inland. In the meantime, it would allow Russian occupying troops to reinforce their positions with concrete and minefields, making it nearly impossible to drive them away in the future and condemning millions of Ukrainians to decades of repression under occupation. Russia’s 2024 budget for the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, amounting to 3.2 trillion Russian rubles (around $35 billion), is clear evidence of Moscow’s plan to dig in for the long haul and suppress resistance to Russian occupation authorities.

Moreover, whatever the arguments that such a scenario would be less costly for Ukraine and its partners, the reality is that such a negotiated cease-fire is not even on the table. Between 2014 and 2022, we endured approximately 200 rounds of negotiations with Russia in various formats, as well as 20 attempts to establish a cease-fire in the smaller war that followed Russia’s 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea and occupation of Ukraine’s east. Our partners pressed Moscow to be constructive, and when they ran into the Kremlin’s diplomatic wall, they insisted that Ukraine had to take the “first step,” if only to demonstrate that Russia was the problem. Following this flawed logic, Ukraine made some painful concessions. Where did it lead? To Russia's full-scale attack on February 24, 2022. Declaring yet again that Ukraine must take the first step is both immoral and naive.

(…)

Skeptics also argue that supporting Ukraine’s fight for freedom is too expensive and cannot be sustained indefinitely. We in Ukraine are fully aware of the amounts of assistance that we have received from the United States, European countries, and other allies, and we are immensely grateful to the governments, legislators, and individuals who have extended a helping hand to our country at war. We manage the support in the most transparent and accountable way: U.S. inspectors of military aid to Ukraine have found no evidence of significant waste, fraud, or abuse.

This support is not, and never has been, charity. Every dollar invested in Ukraine’s defense returns clear security dividends for its supporters. It has enabled Ukraine to successfully rebuff Russian aggression and avert a disastrous escalation in Europe. And Ukraine has done all this with American assistance totaling roughly three percent of the annual U.S. defense budget. What is more, most of this money has in fact been spent in the United States, funding the U.S. defense industry, supporting the development of cutting-edge technology, and creating American jobs—a reason that some local business leaders in the United States have publicly opposed withholding or cutting military aid to Ukraine.

Moreover, while the United States is Ukraine’s top defense partner—and Washington’s leadership in rallying support for Ukraine has been exemplary and essential—the United States has hardly borne the burden alone. As NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, recently noted, other NATO members, including European countries and Canada, account for more than half of Ukraine’s military aid. A number of countries have provided more support as a percentage of GDP than the United States has: the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, and the United Kingdom. Germany's assistance continues to grow, making it Ukraine's largest European supporter in absolute terms.

Attempts by some skeptics to brand Ukraine’s fight for freedom as just another futile “forever war” ignore these facts. Ukraine has never asked for American boots on the ground. The deal is fair: our partners provide us with what we need to win, and we do the rest of the job ourselves, defending not only our borders but also the borders of global democracy.

The United States has spent decades, and hundreds of billions of dollars, building and protecting an international order that could sustain and protect democracy and market economies, thus ensuring security and prosperity for Americans. It would be foolish to give up on that investment now. If democracy is allowed to fall in Ukraine, adversaries of the United States will perceive weakness and understand that aggression pays. The price tag for defending U.S. national security against such threats would be many times higher than the one for supporting Ukraine and could spark decades of global turbulence with an uncertain outcome.

(…)

At the end of last month, I attended a NATO ministerial meeting in Brussels. What struck me most was the disparity between the mood inside the chamber and the mood outside it. On the sidelines, reporters opened their questions by asserting that the war had reached a “stalemate” and that “war fatigue” would cripple support, before wondering why Ukraine wouldn’t offer to trade territory for peace. Yet such defeatist narratives were absent in the official discussions, with ministers making a firm commitment to additional military aid and sustained support.

However prevalent a false narrative of attrition becomes, we should not allow it to set policymaking and our shared strategy on a disastrous course. Nor should we be duped into believing that Moscow is ready for a fair negotiated solution. Opting to accept Putin’s territorial demands and reward his aggression would be an admission of failure, which would be costly for Ukraine, for the United States and its allies, and for the entire global security architecture. Staying the course is a difficult task. But we know how to win, and we will.”

#fiona hill #dmytro kuleba #putin #trump #biden #russia #ukraine #war #nato

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argumate · 2 years

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I'm still (still!) trying to figure out the Chinese Debt Problem in terms I can understand and this is what I've got so far:

between 1980 and 2010 the Chinese economy grew like crazy thanks to huge amounts of infrastructure investment.

this makes sense because before 1980 it didn't have any infrastructure to speak of (thank you warlords, Japanese, civil war, and Mao) so there was a ton of potential to scale up.

how it worked was very simple: the government(s) (central and local) financially repressed the people (made them work their ass off for low wages) and subsidised export businesses (with favourable exchange rates) while building roads, railways, docks, airports, dams, power stations, and all the other stuff you need to be the industrial centre of the world.

simultaneously the country urbanised at a furious pace, with local governments making huge amounts of money selling land to property developers who tiled it with apartment blocks for everyone to move into and also speculate on as the prices kept going up (and up, and up) and there wasn't much else (legal) available to invest in (see financial repression).

oh and they get rid of all the Cultural Revolution era stuff and let smart kids go to university again.

productivity soars! and the entire world outsources its manufacturing to China, leading to the fastest and most complete technology transfer / upskilling process in world history.

you might think all the financial repression and hard work would make people mad, but the economy is growing so fast they're all getting better off in absolute terms, so they're cool with it (after the initial adjustment pains are dealt with in 1989).

"the" debt level (speaking loosely) is going up quickly as the government(s), banks, state owned enterprises, and private companies are all borrowing like mad (from each other, and the people) to fund this breakneck expansion, but it's driving productivity up so quickly that the economy is growing faster than the debt, making it completely manageable and not a problem at all.

by 2010 this program stops working: infrastructure has reached capacity and you can't boost productivity by building more highways and railways, there are more university graduates than there are jobs, everyone who matters already has two apartments and the people who don't can't afford one because they're so expensive, and flooding the world with cheap subsidised goods is pushing other countries into debt and unemployment and starting trade wars.

now the debt is still rising quickly but the economy isn't keeping pace any more, which means the interest payments are going to take up an increasing fraction of future budgets, state owned enterprises are going to have to cut back and fire people, private businesses are going to go broke, and things rapidly get worse from there.

China needs to change tack in order to keep growing its economy instead of drowning, but how? there are three options:

mass unemployment! stop subsidising export industries, stop madly building highways and apartments no one needs or can afford, and let the chips fall where they may! obviously this is completely out of the question as it would destroy the legitimacy of party rule.

hyperinflation! if you want to keep buying stuff that doesn't pay off, just keep printing more money, eventually it won't be worth anything any more but that's somebody else's problem! obviously this is also completely out of the question, nobody voluntarily destroys their economy like this on purpose, this is what happens if everything else fails.

rebalance the economy towards consumption! this is the official government policy and coincidentally the only option that actually makes sense: pay people more, ease off on the financial repression, stop building stupid stuff, let domestic consumption drive economic growth instead of the export market, and achieve a moderately prosperous society! sadly it's politically impossible to pull off but it's a nice idea.

just keep trudging on with the status quo => nationalisation! if debt keeps rising then private businesses who are constrained by the need to be profitable will exit the market (witness Evergrande, Sunac, etc.) and state owned enterprises that are not so constrained will take over an ever increasing share of the (increasingly planned) economy, with hilariously painful results.

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miss-boss-bitch · 1 year

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Chapter 1

Mortimer & A New FOB

Kyubi pulled her car up a nice driveway to a large house in a modest residential area, opposite the house Denzel and Candice Remington lived in. She sat in her car for a few minutes, pondering her next move. Sure, she could go straight in to the Remington home and see if ‘Kandii’ had heard about Officer Denzel's accident yet. Maybe she was crying her eyes out at the news of her husband, or maybe the new memories of how she hated the relationship she had been in had taken hold and she had already started getting her things together. Whatever the situation had become in the household over the last few hours, Kyubi knew there was at least four more people in there for her to play with, so she would need a base of operations for now for her to observe who was in the house, and the best ways to shape their new lives into something Kyubi saw more...fitting. This house she had pulled up into, opposite the Remington's looked promising, like it could accommodate her quite well while she observed Kandii and her children across the street before she began to warp their lives. She opened the car door and and started to walk towards the front door, the clicking sound of her heels on the brick drive could be heard as she opened the door, not even worrying if anyone was home.

As she entered she could see a tall and well-toned man with very close-cropped hair and well groomed beard come down the stairs. Dressed in a dark designer suit, his hard eyes glared at this stranger who had waltzed into his house. As he took in this figure before him, his expression softened as he saw how beautiful she looked in the dimmed evening light. Though still suspicious of someone entering his house unannounced, he let her approach him as he took in her captivating presence. Something about the way the light gleamed off her skin so subtly, off her lips, lips that got closer and closer to him, growing more tantalizing as they closed the distance. She stopped just an inch before his face. "Who the devil are you?" he barely manged to whisper, as he stared into her eyes as if they went on for infinity "Some people certainly call me a devil, but you can call me Kyubi. And you are?" she softly replied. "Uh.. Mortimer. Mortimer Giles." he answered uneasily, a little unsure at this beautiful stranger in front of him, or why he was answering her questions. "Well Morty, you are not needed here. I don't know much about you, and I already have my eyes set on a family, so I don't have anytime for you darling. It just so happens your house lets me spy on them, and you being here will just be getting in my way. So here's what you're going to do. For Me. I assume you work seeing as you live in a neighbourhood like this, and wear your luxury suits. Italian I believe? Well, you can go ahead and call your boss telling him you want to quit your job. Then I want you to book a flight to go to China. Make sure you go economy honey, you've lived to well too long, and I don't think you need to any more. So make sure you get the cheapest seats possible. But give the stewie a nice big tip to make sure they leave you alone the entire journey. Once you get there, I want you to go out into the wilderness and find a nice big cliff in the middle of nowhere. And then Morty? You know what you will do for me, so you're not in my way, even in China? You'll jump off it, for me. You will live out your last days suffering and defenceless to the wild animals out there for no reason other than to amuse me. If you do somehow survive you will kill yourself anyway immediately. You will leave a note on your person stating that you were unhappy with your life. Now put all your cash and cards on the table, book your flight and leave me alone, OK? And all the best darling"

As Mortimer opened his laptop to book plane tickets, Kyubi peered through her new house window. She saw Candice throwing out clothes and possessions; obviously Denzel's. Good. Obviously she had heard about his 'latest' drinking problem and was acting on it. Kyubi decided to go across and actually speak to her in person. It was always more fun for her to see the person she was talking to. As she left she turned to Mortimer as he browsed his cheapest airlines. "Make sure you're gone by the time I'm back. Ciao Morty". She blew him a kiss and left him to his fate.

---

Candice knew she had a lot to do. She’d have to quit her job at the coffee shop. Bye, bye to that stupid little place with the pitiful income it gave her. God that was a boring place to work anyway, everyone so pious and proper. Her life would need some reorganisation, but she’d have so much more time to be the real her now, she just knew it. She was looking forward to that. And the hot, hot idea of sex that she was going to be paid to have. Her memories of enjoying her work were gone, just as her happy memories of family life with Denzel and her kids had been replaced with memories of fights and arguments over his drinking. She may be the one leaving but God it felt good trashing his stuff after years of being stuck in toxic rut. As she threw his vinyl record collection on the ground, with most shattering intro pieces, she looked up to see a tall slender woman standing before her, her pink hair gently fluttering in the evening breeze, a calm aura almost counteracting Candice's inner rage.

"Yes? Can I help you?! I'm super fucking busy right now and not really in the fucking mood to talk to strangers" she snapped, her once polite vocabulary now filled with vulgar expletives.

"Hey Candice, it's me Kyubi? We spoke on the phone earlier. I'm Denzel's friend, and I'm also your friend so you can talk to me" Kyubi said through a barely contained giggle.

"Oh hey Kyubi! Good to see you. unlike my dead beat fucking husband. Gone and wrote his patrol car off. While at work. Because once again the loser had to get drunk. Well fuck that shit. I'm outta here. Not wasting another second on that asshole. Kids are old enough to look after themselves, I'm gonna make a new start. Thinking off going by Kandii, going to the city, getting an actual decent job or something at least. I dunno. Shit."

Now Kyubi had met Candice/Kandii, she didn't want her to go yet. She could have some more fun with her, and find out more about her family. If that cop could see what she was going to do to them in retaliation for him pulling her over...

"Oh babe, yeah. Kandii is a much better name for you. Candice didn't suit you, sounded way too posh and classy, which so isn't you is it? Besides much easier for someone like you to spell huh? Make sure you dot both i's with cute hearts!" she laughed.

"Hey! you calling me dumb?" Kandii said a little glum.

"No way Kandii, you're super smart at important stuff like shaking your butt, I just know spellings not your strong point since you never went to school as you were too busy bunking off to sell yourself for a packet of fags or two, remember?"

"Oh yeah! Well I guess I'm a little dumb with boring stuff" Kandii joked back.

"So very dumb, girl" Kyubi snorted as she watched Kandii's eyes glaze over, as years of education and basic knowledge slipped away from her mind. "Anyway, you probably don't have anyway to stay, so stay at mine tonight. Leave a note for the kids, and come over. Don't bring any stuff, you won't need anything from your old life in your new one"

---

Kandii woke up the next day in a haze of foggy memories. She thought a guy had lived across from her, but Kyubi insisted it had always been her. Kandii rubbed her head; everything ached. As she tried to sit up in bed, she ended up rolling over and puking all over the floor. God, what had she done last night?! Faint memories of partying around Kyubi's all night, practising her sexiest dance moves to blaring music began to surface as Kyubi had encouraged her on. More memories of the night formed as it slowly came back to her. Bottles of Lambrini laying discarded on the floor that she had consumed, next to used syringes she had injected without a second thought. She didn't know why she felt so rough today though, she knew booze and drugs had always been part of her life before now.

Kyubi appeared in the door way in a Louis Vuitton dressing robe, her immaculate hair and features a stark contrast to Kandii's hungover aura. She had a glass of water in one hand and a shot of vodka in the other. She took a sip of water as she came in and handed Kandii the shot glass. "Morning girlfriend! I'd say you had a wild night last night, but I guess that was actually tame for you huh? Seeing as you had no punters? Don't worry, you'll get them at the sort of places you'll be working soon enough. Anyway, I felt soooo bad about what happened with Officer Denzel I thought I’d come and help you out. You know, as we were drinking buddies, I guess you could say I feel partially responsible for what happened to him" she said with a barely straight face as Kandii listened while downing her shot glass. "Now, I know you wanna be a stripper in the big city, but just in case you have a reputation here among the community, I thought some people here might still want to hire you. So, I wrote you up some resumes this morning and sent the to pretty much every business in town. You’ll love what they say."

“Um, why, what did you write?” asked Kandii, wondering why Kyubi had even bothered, she knew she didn’t want a nice little job like that dull one at the restaurant any more.

“Let’s see,” said Kyubi as she held up a spare resume, “‘Employment: The Silver Leaf Coffee Shop, June 2008 to April 2011. Reason for leaving: was fired for stealing company property, poor hygiene and unprofessional image, and performing oral sex with customers in the toilets. Isn’t it perfect for you?"

Kandii slowly nodded in agreement. She couldn't remember why she left her previous job, she knew it was boring, but what Kyubi said sounded right. She listened on as Kyubi rattled of a few more points about attire and attendance issues. Tears started to form in her eye as her reality set in. Deadbeat husband arrested. Currently unemployed with no where to go. No life skills to back her up. she was gambling everything in going to the clubs in the city. if it failed, she knew no business here would have her any more. Part of her couldn't tell if she was happy or devastated about that.

Kyubi sat next to Kandii on the bed and put her arm around her. “With a CV like that you’ll soon become a stripper, but until you start getting paid you need to cut costs now you’re a single parent to multiple kids.”

Kandii leaned her head on Kyubi’s shoulder. “What can I do?”

“OK, first thing , rent a moving van and put all of your clothes and every knick-knack, wall hanging, end table and anything you can carry in it and donate it to charity. You need the tax write off for next year. Keep some underwear, bras and stuff. The rest of your clothes we can replace for your new job. Get rid of all of your dishes and cooking stuff except for one bowl, plate, knife fork, pot, and stuff. Get as big of a donation and thus tax break as possible.”

“Yeah,” said Kandii between sniffles, “that sounds good.”

“Yes, also you can no longer afford car insurance let alone a car.”

“My car’s paid off,” said Kandii.

“But there’s still gas, insurance, upkeep and stuff,” said Kyubi. “Look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you. I’ll find a notary public. You transfer your car title to me. I can barely afford it..."Kandii glanced down at the designer robe Kyubi was wearing, "...but I’ll take your car off of your hands. You pay me for the cost of putting the title in my name of course. You can use public transportation.”

“Thanks Kyubi. You’d do that for me?”

“Yes, of course. It won’t be easy on me, but it’s the least I can do.”

“You’re such a bestie!” said Kandii, perking up a little.

---

An hour later, they were at a notary public and Kandii signed her sporty convertible over to Kyubi and gave her $300 to cover the cost of the title transfer at the DMV. Then they went to get Candice’s name changed legally to Kandii. Eventually they made their way back to the Remington’s townhouse.

By the afternoon, everything but the furniture too big for Kandii to move by herself was gone.

“Do you own or rent this place?” asked Kyubi looking around.

“Rent.”

“Good,” said Kyubi, “we need to find you a cheaper place to live. How much money do you have?”

“About $900 in checking and a couple thousand in savings.”

“OK, tomorrow I'll find you a cheap place to live in the city.”

“You’d do that for me?” asked Kandii.

“Yes, of course, what are friends for?!” Kyubi laughed

Kandii hugged Kyubi.

”I’ll come by early and help you get ready. I’ll help you do some sexy makeup just like the trashy stripper you want to be, and tease your hair up big, REALLY big! Big hair is sexy hair, and the bigger the sexier.”

As they talked the front door opened. Looks like it was finally time to meet the kids...

———

Based on: Scott's World by Snurff on Mcstories.com & Lifesaver by Iron Nick on Mcstories.com

#story

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kneedeepincynade · 11 months

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Western leftists from the height of their throne discuss about the most ultra shit you will ever see and dispense "licenses of communism" while comrades in the exploited world know who to trust and look up to,and it's surely not those hig in their thrones of nothing

The post is machine translated

Translation is at the bottom

The collective is on telegram

🤡 Un "giornalista" della BBC, imbevuto di suprematismo occidentale, ha sciorinato - di fronte ad un leader del Partito Comunista del Sud Africa - la classica retorica sulla «democrazia», che deve essere per forza quella «Occidentale», altrimenti non è vera «democrazia», ma «autoritarismo» 🤦‍♀️

🇬🇧 Il giornalista: «Ammiri la Cina, ammiri - sembra - Putin. Sembra che la tua visione per il futuro del Sud Africa verta verso di loro, [una visione] autoritaria piuttosto che democratica» 🤦‍♂️

⭐️ Il Compagno: «No, il Socialismo non è autoritarismo» 💕

🇬🇧 Giornalista: «Allora come puoi descrivere la Cina come progressista?» 🤡

⭐️ Il Compagno: «No, la Cina è molto progressista. La Cina si rifà al Leninismo e al Marxismo, dove i mezzi di produzione sono controllati dallo Stato. Vogliamo il Sud Africa attraverso la Visione e l'Immagine della Cina, dove fai crescere l'economia, riduci la disoccupazione, riduci la povertà. Non puoi negare questo della Cina. E lo Stato gioca un ruolo centrale in tutto ciò» 🚩

🤡 L'Occidente non è in grado di accettare che esista un modello alternativo al loro. Come scrive il Compagno Liu: «Dividono in due i percorsi politici del Mondo: Occidentali e "malvagi" - solo il percorso politico occidentale è corretto e progressista, tutto il resto è malvagio e arretrato» 😡

⭐️ "Non importa quanta crescita e sviluppo abbia raggiunto la Cina, non è "progressista" perché non è una "democrazia e libertà in stile occidentale" - tutti i Paesi del Mondo devono seguire incondizionatamente tale via. Questo è il pensiero dei Media Occidentali e di molti Occidentali" 😡

💬 "Loro stessi costringono altri Paesi a seguire la loro strada, o pianificano rivolte e guerre. La storia dell'Occidente è piena di aggressioni coloniali, saccheggi e massacri, ma credono di essere sempre nel giusto, senza colpa. Non riescono a rendersi conto che lo stile di vita più alto all'intero dei loro Paesi si basa sullo sfruttamento ingiusto di innumerevoli Paesi del Terzo Mondo"😡

🌸 Iscriviti 👉 @collettivoshaoshan

🤡 A BBC "reporter", imbued with Western suprematism, rallied - in front of a leader of the Communist Party of South Africa - the classic rhetoric on "democracy", which must necessarily be the "Western" one, otherwise it is not true «democracy», but «authoritarianism» 🤦‍♀️

🇬🇧 The journalist: «You admire China, you admire - it seems - Putin. It seems your vision for the future of South Africa is towards them, [a vision] authoritarian rather than democratic» 🤦‍♂️

⭐️ The Comrade: «No, Socialism is not authoritarianism» 💕

🇬🇧 Journalist: «So how can you describe China as progressive?» 🤡

⭐️ Comrade: «No, China is very progressive. China harks back to Leninism and Marxism, where the means of production are controlled by the state. We want South Africa through the Vision and Image of China, where you grow the economy, reduce unemployment, reduce poverty. You can't deny this about China. And the State plays a central role in all of this ′′ 🚩

🤡 The West is unable to accept that there is an alternative model to theirs. As Comrade Liu writes: «They divide the political paths of the World in two: Western and "evil" - only the Western political path is correct and progressive, everything else is evil and backward» 😡

⭐️ "No matter how much growth and development China has achieved, it is not "progressive" because it is not "Western-style democracy and freedom" - all countries of the world must unconditionally follow that path. This is the thinking of the Western Media and of many Westerners" 😡

💬 "They themselves force other countries to follow their path, or plan revolts and wars. The history of the West is full of colonial aggressions, looting and massacres, but they believe they are always right, without guilt. They fail to realize that the highest lifestyle within their countries is based on the unjust exploitation of countless third world countries"😡

🌸 Subscribe 👉 @collettivoshaoshan

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allthebrazilianpolitics · 1 year

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Trade and carbon credits, not Ukraine, lead the agenda at Lula-Xi talks

As Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva arrives in China today, his visit marks Brazil’s return to the diplomatic stage among the Global South – but also reveals a growing distance from geopolitical questions preoccupying the West.

While Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dominated much diplomatic conversation in Europe and in Washington, Lula’s official schedule doesn’t mention it, despite previous vows to discuss peacemaking strategies with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“From what I heard, removing Ukraine from the list of things that they’re going to discuss was a demand from the Chinese government,” says Igor Patrick, a research scholar at the Kissinger Institute on China at the Wilson Centre.

“There’s still some interest from the Brazilian part to raise the issue and to discuss ideas, and they hope to release a joint statement where they mention the Ukrainian conflict, calls for a peaceful solution and mediated diplomatically, but it’s not officially on the program and to a large extent that was expectable,” Patrick told CNN.

The trip’s focus, instead, will be overwhelmingly on trade, how Chinese investment can help Brazil’s economy get back on track, and the potentially lucrative universe of carbon credits.

#brazil #politics #china #ukraine #environmentalism #economy #brazilian politics #chinese politics #ukraine crisis #international politics #foreign policy #mod nise da silveira #image description in alt

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tomorrowusa · 1 year

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Recent demonstrations in China may have initially been protests against severe government lockdowns. But they quickly evolved into criticisms of censorship and the dictatorial style of leader Xi Jinping.

Xi is a classic micromanager. His régime has even tried to regulate how much toilet paper people can use by putting facial recognition cameras in public bathrooms. China has a growing Orwellian-named “social credit” system which punishes or rewards people based on how worthy or untrustworthy citizens’ behavior is – according to the ruling Communist Party.

The strict COVID lockdowns in China have seemed increasingly suspicious. China isn’t using the effective mRNA vaccines which have brought down the infection rate and reduced the seriousness of infections for people in North America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea; not sure why this is except, possibly, misplaced nationalism. Outside China such lockdowns are a tool of the pre-vaccine period of the pandemic.

My own impression is that Xi is using COVID policy as an excuse to increase his personal control over the population. Control freak Xi would rather have lockdowns than import better vaccines.

People in China are generally becoming fed up with Xi’s efforts to impose an intrusive digital Stalinism on the population. And the government’s so called “Zero Covid” restrictions are having a negative impact on the Chinese economy which is spilling over into international trade. Apple has production facilities in China, and because of government policy it is falling behind in production of iPhones.

China is trying to keep the rest of the world from following the current wave of dissent. Elon Musk’s mass firings and drastic weakening of moderation have helped China flood Twitter with spam to drown out reports about the protests.

Elon Musk Slashed Twitter's Safety Team. Then a Chinese Spam Campaign Ran Rampant

In a bizarre move, China is censoring World Cup coverage to keep people from seeing large crowds without masks.

China Appears To Be Censoring The World Cup Coverage Due To Lockdown Unrest

The Chinese Communist Party apparently doesn’t want Chinese people to see that the rest of the world is doing a better job at controlling COVID – without severely controlling people’s lives.

Like Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China is an example of what can happen when one person is allowed unlimited power. Democracy may be more messy but it does a better job in the long run.

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bisexualvalve · 2 years

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Harvesting the Blood of America’s Poor: The Latest Stage of Capitalism

For much of the world, donating blood is purely an act of solidarity; a civic duty that the healthy perform to aid others in need. The idea of being paid for such an action would be considered bizarre. But in the United States, it is big business. Indeed, in today’s wretched economy, where around 130 million Americans admit an inability to pay for basic needs like food, housing or healthcare, buying and selling blood is of the few booming industries America has left.

The number of collection centers in the United States has more than doubled since 2005 and blood now makes up well over 2 percent of total U.S. exports by value. To put that in perspective, Americans’ blood is now worth more than all exported corn or soy products that cover vast areas of the country’s heartland. The U.S. supplies fully 70 percent of the world’s plasma, mainly because most other countries have banned the practice on ethical and medical grounds. Exports increased by over 13 percent, to $28.6 billion, between 2016 and 2017, and the plasma market is projected to “grow radiantly,” according to one industry report. The majority goes to wealthy European countries; Germany, for example, buys 15 percent of all U.S. blood exports. China and Japan are also key customers.

It is primarily the plasma– a golden liquid that transports proteins and red and white blood cells around the body– that makes it so sought after. Donated blood is crucial in treating medical conditions such as anemia and cancer and is commonly required to perform surgeries. Pregnant women also frequently need transfusions to treat blood loss during childbirth. Like all maturing industries, a few enormous bloodthirsty companies, such as Grifols and CSL, have come to dominate the American market.

But in order to generate such enormous profits, these vampiric corporations consciously target the poorest and most desperate Americans. One study found that the majority of donors in Cleveland generate more than a third of their income from “donating” blood. The money they receive, notes Professor Kathryn Edin of Princeton University, is literally “the lifeblood of the $2 a day poor.” Professor H. Luke Schaefer of the University of Michigan, Edin’s co-author of $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America, told MintPress News:

The massive increase in blood plasma sales is a result of an inadequate and in many places non-existent cash safety net, combined with an unstable labor market. Our experience is people need the money, that’s the primary reason people show up at plasma centers.”

Almost half of America is broke, and 58 percent of the country is living paycheck to paycheck, with savings of less than $1000. 37 million Americans go to bed hungry, including one-sixth of New Yorkers and almost half of South Bronx residents. And over half a million sleep on the streets on any given night, with many millions more in vehicles or relying on friends or family. It is in this context that millions in the red have turned to selling blood to make ends meet. In a very real sense then, these corporations are harvesting the blood of the poor, literally sucking the life out of them.

MintPress News spoke to a number of Americans who consistently donated plasma. Some of them did not want to be fully identified. But none were under any illusions about the system and how they were being exploited.

“The centers are never in a good part of town, always somewhere they can get a never ending supply of poor people desperate for that hundred bucks a week,” noted Andrew Watkins, who sold his blood in Pittsburgh, PA for around 18 months.

The people who show up are a mix of disabled, working poor, homeless, single parents, and college students. With the exception of the college students who are looking for booze money, this is probably the easiest and most reliable income they have. Your job may fire you at any time when you’re on this level of society, but you always have blood. And selling your blood doesn’t count as a job or income when it comes to determining disability benefits, food stamps, or unemployment eligibility so it’s a source of money for the people who have absolutely nothing else.”

Rachel from Wisconsin, who donated hundreds of times over a seven-year period, also commented on the obvious socio-economic makeup of donors.

We were poor, all of us in there you could easily tell that we were on the lower ends of the income bracket. They incentivize you with bonuses and the more you donate in a month the more you’ll get paid, recruiting friends bonuses, holiday bonuses, etc.”

Keita Currier from Washington, D.C., noted how she and her husband had little choice but to continue visiting clinics in Maryland for years but resented their payment methods.

They’re predatory, the price set for your plasma is based on a whim. For example, one place I donated the first five times you get $75, then you get 20, 20, 30, 50, 25. It’s random, it doesn’t matter, but they know you are desperate and if you don’t do your $30 donation you won’t get your 50 next time. Apparently, the plasma is worth something in the hundreds, so it is not surprising that you’re screwed over.”

Zombifying America’s poor

Respondents all agreed that they were indeed being exploited, but in more ways than one. Desperate Americans are allowed to donate twice per week (104 times per year). But losing that much plasma could have serious health consequences, most of which have not been studied Professor Schaefer warns, stressing that more research is necessary. Around 70 percent of donors experience health complications. Donors have a lower protein count in their blood, putting them at greater risk of infections and liver and kidney disorders. Many regulars suffer from near-permanent fatigue and are borderline anemic. All this for an average of $30 per visit. Rachel described the terrible Catch-22 many of the working poor find themselves in:

I got turned away twice – once for being too dehydrated and once for being anemic. Being poor created a shitty paradox where I couldn’t eat, and because I couldn’t eat my iron levels weren’t high enough to allow me to donate. That was a week of a pay cut, money I desperately needed for rent and bills and meds.”

A Maryland plasma center is shown in a promotional image for CSL Plasma, one of the largest corporations dominating the market

The process of giving blood is not a pleasurable one. Currier noted that after constantly donating, “the bruising gets terrible…Sometimes they can’t find the vain ‘n’ shit or they insert it wrong and they have to adjust the needle underneath your skin” she said, claiming that just thinking about it freaks her out, and revealed that her husband had to temporarily stop donating as his bosses thought he was on heroin due to the track marks on his arms.

Watkins agreed. “You could always tell how long someone had been doing the job by that needle,” he recalls. “Once they’d been there a year or so, they’d have stabbed literally thousands of people and could just tap your elbow once and slide the needle into the vein with no problems. New guys would miss the vein, punch through the vein, or try to hunt for it with the needle tip, which would leave terrible bruises.”

There is also little thought for the comfort of the patients. As Watkins explained, the thermostats are always turned down to around 50-60ºF for the plasma’s sake. Once the amber-colored plasma has been extracted, your cooled blood is re-injected in a painful process that feels as if ice is being inserted into the body. “Combined with the already cold air temperatures, this was maddening,” he notes.

Thus, America’s zombie poor are left almost permanently mentally drained like heroin addicts, and with similarly bruised and punctured arms, except they are being paid for the inconvenience. But perhaps the worst thing about the experience, according to those interviewed, is the dehumanization of the process.

Donors are publicly weighed to make sure they are heavy enough. Obese people are worth more to the bloodthirsty companies as they can safely extract more plasma from them each session (while paying out the same compensation). “They definitely turn you into a product in a very literal sense,” Watkins says; “It’s deeply exploitative and a symptom of just how far gone capitalism is.”

Many centers are enormous, with multiple rows of dozens of machines working in an attempt to appease the insatiable appetite of the vampiric corporation. And there is, according to Watkins, no lack of human “victims” willing to be treated like animals in battery farms, in exchange for a few dollars: “It was an assembly line to extract liquid gold from human mines,” he notes.

Currier also highlighted the treatment of the staff and the cost-cutting measures of clinics in Maryland she visited would enact:

Usually the places are hugely understaffed which means they frequently don’t change gloves, the people are overworked, and at the minimum you’re staying there for 2-3 hours which means you have to plan a whole day around this shit only to get 20 bucks in your pocket to make it through the next few days. It’s depressing, disheartening and frankly embarrassing to have to hustle like this. I feel like shit after I donate.”

Exploitation reaches new levels

But the exploitation of humans has reached new levels in clinics on the U.S.-Mexico border. Every week, thousands of Mexicans enter the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood to for-profit pharmaceutical corporations. The practice is banned on health grounds in Mexico but is completely legal north of the border. According to ProPublica, there are at least 43 blood donation centers along the border that prey primarily on Mexican nationals in a legally ambiguous practice.

According to a Swiss documentary on the subject, there are precious few checks on the cleanliness of the blood these companies accept, with some donors interviewed admitting they were drug addicts. But all is sacrificed in the pursuit of dazzling profits, something donors were well aware of. Rachel from Wisconsin admitted,

I did it for the money, I think we all do it for the money, but it’s not really something you out and out say because there’s a veneer of “helping the sick” slathered over it. But I caught glimpses of what kind of industry it was on occasion through innocuous questioning. The amount of plasma drawn from one person per donation was worth upwards of $600, I never really got a clear answer on that.

Andrew from Pennsylvania agreed, noting wryly,

I know my plasma was worth thousands of dollars per donation [to others], because I’ve seen what a hospital in my city charged a hemophiliac for platelets, so the pittance that they pay is ridiculous, but there is only one buyer making offers at the human level. If you’re poor and out of other options, you’ll take $40 however you can get it. Any port in a storm.”

Big pharma is particularly interested in the blood of the young. One billboard campaign from Grifols intentionally targeted working-class students. “Need books? No worries. Donate Plasma” reads the headline. Teenager blood is in high demand in, of all places, Silicon Valley, where anti-aging technologies are the latest trend. One company, Ambrosia, charges $8,000 per treatment to aging tech executives, infusing them with the blood of the young, turning these individuals into bloodsuckers in more ways than one. Despite the fact that there is no clinical evidence that the practice has any beneficial effects, business is booming. One committed customer is PayPal co-founder turned Trump surrogate Peter Thiel, who is reportedly spending vast sums of money on funding anti-aging startups. Thiel claims that we have been conned by “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” and believes that his own immortality may be just around the corner, a notion that has deeply concerned academics and commentators alike.

The new and booming blood market is the perfect embodiment of the late capitalist dystopia modern America has become. The dehumanizing process of harvesting the blood of the poor to fund the quixotic immortality dreams of the super-wealthy turns the former into walking, living zombies and the latter into vampires, feasting on the blood of the young; a true American horror story worthy of Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft. As Rachel from Wisconsin said:

It really is an industry where ‘squeezing blood from stones’ is about as literal as you can get.”

#america #late stage capitalism #blood banks

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beardedmrbean · 2 years

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do u think we need to MAGA?

I think there are many ways we could improve the country, I'm not so much with the nostalgia return to the way things were mindset that that particular phrase invokes, in my mind at least.

There is absolutely a return to things we have been lacking for a long time, would love to see manufacturing return for a big one, double whammy of creating loads of quality good paying jobs for people here and getting our economy back in order and back to being the envy of the world and screwing china over since they'd lose those jobs.

Win Win in my mind.

Glad joey got that chip manufacturing thing going on with one of the economic packages, that was a good move.

MAGA at this point is a poisoned phrase, no matter how good the person or how good the intentions you're going to get people resisting you on it.

Could get people voting against a program where state and federal grants are combined to cover tuition and books for any state college you want to go to provided you qualify for in state tuition and if you don't you can still get the amount the others get knocked off your bill by campaigning with the phrase

Make American Education Great Again

(you know I'm right)

There's some of the concepts and plans involved in what Trump was doing that I agree with some I don't even Joe has a few that I agree with, chip thing for one should bar members of congress and their families investing in that kind of thing 'lookin at you nancy'

so I dance around from side to side depending on the issues and how I perceive them, fun because I wind up getting to tick everyone off eventually.

There is absolutely things that can be done to bring us back around to being the global economic and cultural powerhouse we were, we still are those things but to a lesser degree and I'd like to see that done.

not sure what all that entails, but I hope that folks at the top can unbunch their knickers and remember that it's not supposed to be American vs American and grow the fuck up and get to work

also going to be them telling people no, which people don't like, but if they want to act like toddlers they can be responded to like todlers

#anonymous

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mariacallous · 4 months

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If U.S. President Joe Biden wants to check the pulse of the arsenal of democracy, all he has to do is look at Bill LaPlante’s wall in the Pentagon. The U.S. Defense Department industrial chief’s office is covered with production charts for every weapon that the United States is building to fend off a potential war with China while helping countries such as Ukraine and Israel fend for themselves in wars of their own.

It’s like an electrocardiogram of the U.S. defense industry: There’s a line going up to count the number of units moved and a line going sideways for the time that it took to move them. There are production rates for the Patriot missiles that the United States has sent to the Middle East to provide backup for Israel, the sea-launched Standard Missile-6 that the United States has deployed to the Indo-Pacific to potentially bloody China’s nose if it launches an assault on Taiwan, and the guided multiple launch rockets—known as GMLRs—that helped the Ukrainians liberate Kherson and the areas around Kharkiv in a one-two punch to the Russian army in 2022. “It’s a whole stair step,” LaPlante told a small gaggle of reporters at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California in early December 2023. The chart, he said, “keeps going and going.” And even though business is booming, Defense Department officials are facing a problem from hell. How can the Pentagon mobilize the U.S. defense industry to respond to not just one conflict or two, but potentially three wars? Foreign Policy talked to a dozen defense ministers, officials, and experts across the NATO alliance. They described an almost Sisyphean task to rebuild the trans-Atlantic—and trans-Pacific—defense industrial base to fight three wars not during a world war, but when much of the Western world is at peace. “We are moving from a just-in-time, just-enough economy model to a peak demand model,” said Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, the chairman of NATO’s military committee, in an interview in his office at the alliance’s Brussels headquarters in October. Much like the manner in which the Western world had to convert factories at dizzying speed to produce protective medical equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic, Western leaders need to “make sure everybody understands the sense of urgency of where we are,” Bauer said. Officials are still trying to figure out what the right number is for every weapon on LaPlante’s chart. What makes planning especially difficult is the friction of war. Nobody expected the war in Ukraine to suck up thousands of artillery shells every single day, year after year. Few thought that Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip would exhaust precision-guided munitions in a couple of months. If the United States were in a war with China over the Taiwan Strait, it could run out of long-range precision munitions within a week, according to one study.

There was a time when the United States could turn plowshares into swords; in the Second World War, the United States built more of pretty much everything than any other combatant, from tanks to planes to ships to landing craft. Then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it the “arsenal of democracy” because it was. In five years, U.S. factories built 141 aircraft carriers, 88,410 self-propelled guns and tanks, and 257,000 artillery guns.

Now, Washington is trying to get back in business after three decades of post-Cold War belt-tightening that saw companies merge and production lines slow down. LaPlante said that the Pentagon has built a facility in Texas that has the capacity to surge 155 mm artillery shells as needed. Boeing is growing its capacity to build sensors for Patriot missiles at its Huntsville, Alabama, facility by nearly a third. In Europe, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic are becoming major producers of ammunition. Germany is buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of artillery shells while Rheinmetall sets up shop inside Ukraine. Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have begun jointly procuring 155 mm barrels for Ukraine. And the Swedish manufacturer Saab—which no longer makes cars—is producing so many diesel-electric submarine hulls that it’s even looking at Southeast Asia as potential clients. Building industrial muscle means that the Pentagon needs to rebuild long-atrophied bureaucratic muscle, too. LaPlante has deputized a so-called “joint production cell” within the Pentagon, comprising defense officials who are visiting production floors. It’s not just a question of getting scientists and dollars, but also of getting factories full of skilled welders, assemblers, and foremen. “It’s dusting off a lot of skills that we’ve had in this country that we haven’t used in a while,” LaPlante said.

But there’s a bigger problem, too: It’s one thing to assemble shells and missiles, and another thing altogether to assemble higher-end gear such as the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, which runs at about $750 million per airplane, with a production line that snakes across three U.S. states. Building the aircraft is so complex that U.S. officials have compared it to the nearly four-decadeslong process of building the interstate highway system.

Some of the weapons still have to be funded. Congress has already agreed to fund SM-6 and GMLRS. Other projects, such as the Pentagon’s plan to get up to 100,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery produced by 2025, need Congress to pass the supplemental budget, LaPlante said. With Congress out for the holidays, that’s on hold until at least January. And across the Atlantic, the European Union has fallen far behind its target of producing 1 million artillery rounds per year to feed Ukraine’s voracious appetite for ammunition while replenishing NATO stockpiles.

But when LaPlante and other Pentagon officials go into meetings with industry and members of Congress to tout their plans, they face two big questions about the United States’ military-industrial buildup. Are they going to pull the plug, especially as Congress wavers on additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel? And even if they’re for real, are their plans even enough?

When it comes to putting shells in barrels, since December 2022, the U.S. industrial base has doubled its output of 155 mm ammunition, growing it from 14,000 rounds per month to between 28,000 to 30,000, LaPlante said. U.S. Army officials hope to get to 60,000 rounds per month by September 2024, and to the magic number of 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025.

The Pentagon has put about $3 billion toward the ramp-up so far, the price of about four B-21 bombers, sprinkling contracts across five U.S. states and three countries.

The European Union is producing between 600,000 and 700,000 artillery shells per year, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told reporters in November, well short of the 27-nation bloc’s 1 million shell goal, which it hopes to reach next year. To support Ukraine and recapitalize its own stockpiles, Europe will have to reach about 3 million rounds per year in the next 10 years, Pevkur said.

But Ukraine’s appetite for artillery ammo is voracious, about 6,000 shells per day at the peak of fighting this year— and the shortage of U.S. military aid is already causing troops to hold their fire on the front lines. The pain of growing the arsenal is hard, Western officials concede, but the pain of losing the war would be far worse.

“There is no option but to rise to the occasion in this regard,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson said in an interview with Foreign Policy.

And when it comes to so-called smart bombs—weapons with GPS guidance kits built in—the situation is even more dire. Despite the United States allowing Israel to raid precision munition stockpiles in the region, more than half of the air-to-ground weapons fired into the Gaza Strip since October have been unguided “dumb bombs,” according to U.S. intelligence reports.

All of that is without accounting for the weapons needed to fight the next war: ships, submarines, sea-based missiles, and coastal defenses. China has done everything short of invading Taiwan, though it has vowed to do so at some point soon. In a naval fight, shipyards count as much or more than hulls in the water, and there the United States is beached. Even when it comes to what the United States is really good at—building and operating high-end nuclear submarines—they are artisanal affairs. The rest of the U.S. Navy is shrinking while China’s is growing. “We’re spending 3.3 percent of GDP on national defense and you’re building a paltry 1.2 subs” a year, said U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I don’t think that is making [Chinese President] Xi Jinping quake in his boots.”

The United States has to outsource its defense procurement, as do most countries—which, in the long hangover of the post-Cold War era, means a very rude awakening. Some NATO countries, such as Poland, which keeps more of its defense industry in state hands than most other member countries, can expand production lines on the back of public spending.

The United States can only prod and pray—the Pentagon’s own soon-to-be-released industrial strategy indicates that defense companies wouldn’t be able to respond fast enough for the U.S. military to fight a modern war.

For instance: The biggest bottleneck in sending GMLRS and 155 mm ammo to Ukraine is the lack of rocket motors, said Heidi Shyu, who oversees the Pentagon’s technology strategy. So the U.S. Defense Department has initiated a parallel effort to make sure that rocket motors get built, too. But it’s a slog.

“Ramping up production is not like a light switch, where you can flip the switch and bang, you can tenfold your production,” Shyu said. “You just can’t do that. Every country that has the ability to ramp up production is in the process of ramping up.”

Further down the food chain, the U.S. Defense Department is running into problems; there aren’t enough testing beds for new weapons systems, for example. There aren’t enough good programmers to write good code. And there aren’t enough little things that go boom up and down the U.S. supply chain to feed all of the Ukrainian gun barrels, let alone those of other allies.

Europe is feeling the same crunch.

“What are the smaller obstacles? First, fuses. Second, gunpowder. Third, shells.” said Pevkur, Estonia’s defense minister. “You have to be able to solve all of these small details in order to be ready to produce more rounds.” U.S. partners are getting creative, given the lack of backup. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced a 1-million-drone target to build one-hit kamikazes that can strike Russian troops deep behind their lines. They’re conducting do-it-yourself air defense with obsolete Soviet-era munitions. And Taiwan, still stuck in a billion-dollar backlog of U.S. weapons sales, has started doing F-16 maintenance on its own.

But none of that is going to restore the arsenal of democracy, whose shelves—already bereft, if not barren—aren’t getting restocked like they used to.

“There is an end to every stockpile,” Bauer said. “There’s an end to it.”

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