When useful idiots regurgitate propaganda and claim that the US-Israeli war against Iran is supposedly because of "nuclear weapons", don't forget that Netanyahu admitted the real goal: It was always about regime change. The US & Israel want a new puppet regime, like the Shah's.

This is an obvious sign that the US plans to massively escalate its war against Iran, and it's worried about retaliation in neighboring countries. The question now is not if, but when: Will Trump escalate before or after the midterm election? Iran, meanwhile, is prepared.

Western so-called "democracies" are doing everything they can to prop up the hereditary family dictatorship in Saudi Arabia, which beheads dissidents. The UK is deploying fighter jets to defend the Saudi dictatorship. The US has 100+ military advisors in Saudi Arabia, overseeing the wealthy oil regime's war against Yemen, the poorest country in West Asia. The "democratic" West loves monarchies, when they serve its imperialist interests.

Revelations of another US-backed drug-trafficking regime in Latin America: Bolivian oligarch Samuel Doria Medina is a politician who was previously allied with current right-wing President Rodrigo Paz. Doria left the government when he discovered that drug traffickers pay the Bolivian authorities $80,000 USD per plane full of drugs, in order to protect them. The Bolivian regime of Rodrigo Paz is a close US ally and a member of Trump/Rubio's Shield of the Americas alliance. This is a pattern: the US government consistently supports the worst drug traffickers in Latin America.

A huge global survey found Israel is the least popular country on Earth, following its genocide in Gaza. Another poll shows 67% of people in dozens of countries oppose Israel. Even 62% of North Americans dislike the Israeli regime. Here is the evidence: geopoliticaleconomy.report/p…

This image perfectly summarizes the politics of Latin America's right-wing elites: total subservience to the US and Israel. They exploit "nationalist" rhetoric, but are loyal to foreign imperial powers. This is from a rally in support of Brazil's far-right Bolsonaro dynasty.

The world's richest oligarch is funding far-right politicians across the planet. These far-right movements are not "populist", by definition, when they are bankrolled by billionaire plutocrats.

I agree that it's absolutely outrageous. This shows how Silicon Valley billionaire oligarchs manipulate the politics of so-called "democracies". But the problem is that when the Democrats take office, they will forget this happened and praise Zuckerberg as an ally, just like Trump. The solution: Silicon Valley corporate monopolies like Meta, Google, and Amazon should be nationalized and turned into apolitical public utilities, as water, electricity, internet, and transportation (and finance) should be. Or, at the very least, if they can't be nationalized, these corporate monopolies should be broken up. Separate Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Break up Google. Endorce antitrust legislation. But the Democrats won't do any of that either. When they take power, the Trump-loving Silicon Valley CEOs of today will rebrand as loyal Democrats and cozy up to the new Democratic president. They only care about maximizing earnings and market share. Politics is a game to them.

The world is going to suffer for many more months through a massive energy crisis. The oil price is back up to $110 USD, which is basically the same as it was at the peak of the US war against Iran in April and May. This is going to have very negative consequences for the global economy. Inflation has already been rising in most countries, and will likely further increase. The US war against Iran unleashed what the International Energy Agency called the biggest oil supply disruption crisis in history. Now, Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and depots are only making this worse. Moreover, the US-backed Saudi war against Yemen has led Ansarallah to retaliate by hitting Saudi oil infrastructure, further exacerbating the energy crisis. There are no signs of this getting better any time soon. Buckle up.

The problem with this argument is it rests entirely on the widely misunderstood concept of labor productivity. Many people, especially non-economists, hear calls to "increase the average labor productivity of Brazilian workers" and think that means the reason Brazil is so much poorer than Switzerland is because Brazilian workers are supposedly lazy and don't work as hard as Swiss workers. But that is false and absurd. Labor productivity is simply defined as worker contribution to real GDP per hour of labor. The reason labor productivity is low in Brazil, and in the periphery in general, is because of the productive structure of the economy. Brazil, like most of Latin America (and the periphery as a whole), has an economy centered on exports of agricultural goods, minerals, energy, and other commodities. These are very low value-added, labor-intensive sectors with lots of international competition (and therefore low profit margins). The reason Switzerland's labor productivity is so high is because it has monopolistic "moats" in some very high value-added sectors like specialized financial services (ie, banking for global oligarchs) and advanced manufacturing. A Swiss banker working on a computer in an air-conditioned office will have an exponentially higher labor productivity than a Brazilian farmer or miner (or even a Brazilian banker), not because the Swiss banker works harder (they objectively don't), but because they work in specialized high value-added services and can simply charge exponentially more for their labor. These high value-added industries can't just be magically recreated in the periphery. Every country in Latin America and Africa would love to be the next Singapore (and many have tried), but you can't skip stages of development. Not everyone in the world can just work in the high value-added service sector -- especially when the high labor productivity in the advanced economies fundamentally depends on cheap energy, food, and minerals produced by workers in the periphery. When we talk about the global value chain, we're really talking about a highly stratified global division of labor. And it is very, very difficult to move up it. That takes years of careful planning, investment, education, training, infrastructure build-out, technology transfer, etc. -- which in turn requires political stability and the ability of the state to implement long-term planning without significant disruption. Neoliberalism was never as simple as "the government must spend less". It was about the state giving power to markets and the investor class to decide what the priorities of political-economy policymaking would be. This investor class (consisting of both foreign investors and the domestic compradores) prioritizes maximizing return on investment, not developing the productive capacity of the local economy. That's why it primarily invests in the extractive commodity export sector. This also explains why Brazil (and most of Latin America) significantly deindustrialized during the neoliberal period, and has become even more dependent on the low value-added export of commodities.