#bilateral meeting

[humanmorph]

guy who only listens to friends at the table watching the severance s2 teaser :wow they used the song that's referenced in the PAL19 episode description. bold choice

[uniqueeval]

India, Brazil FMs may discuss crackdown on illegal migration during talks in Delhi this week

Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira. File | Photo Credit: R.V. Moorthy The plight of hundreds of men and women, many of them Indian, who are stranded at an airport in Sao Paulo as they are suspected to be illegal immigrants, maybe discussed during meetings with Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira, who landed in Delhi on Sunday. Mr. Vieira is in New Delhi to hold the 9th India-Brazil…

[umarfarooqzahoor]

Leaders Meet Nourishes Bilateral Bonds & Economic Strategies

Strengthening growth is possible with regional and global economic cooperation of nations across the globe. Global development may remain tentative and uneven if economies do not participate collectively.

Primary responsibility of leaders on the top is to set a positive growth graph that tends to bend towards more stability and contributions from the developed sections/nations. It is the need of an hour to shift the focus toward the reinforcing underpinnings to witness strong growth over time.

Economic cooperation is mandatory presently for a durable world’s economic growth. Due to the interdependence of nations, it is necessary to have close international cooperation that works for the benefit of all. To work in favour of a better future, a powerful engine i.e. integration of nations can participate in sustained world growth, reducing poverty and more well-defined capital allocation.

It is very important to carve the roadmap laid to success. Leaders try to define a goal and strengthen their economies by nourishing their bilateral relationships. President of Mali & entrepreneur, Sheikh Umar Farooq Zahoor also contributed their visionary ideas to this.

[mesetacadre]

this might be a silly question, but. ive recently learned more about the devastating effects of sanctions on countries like cuba, dprk, or venezuela, and how much unnecessary suffering they cause among the population, especially when it comes to food or medicine shortages. but then bds also calls for sanctions against israel, and im wondering, is there any meaningful difference between that and the sanctions already imposed by the US on other countries? i feel a bit hypocritical when i argue against sanctions while at the same time supporting bds, i feel like they are very different situations with different outcomes but i lack the understanding to really grasp how they are different, if that makes any sense

Sanctions are the systematic blockade of all or certain sectors of trade under military or economic threat by the sanctioner (mostly just the USA in recent history) to any potential agents who might try to ignore the sanction. These sanctions typically include things like medical supplies, food if the country is dependent on imports (like most countries who get sanctioned), electricity, fuel, both light and heavy industry, agricultural products and machines, the global financial system, and other such key sectors. These sanctions, overwhelmingly, only serve to impoverish the country, create undue suffering and political strife. This political strife/instability is usually the main goal of sanctions, to destabilize the target government. However, this political instability more often than not does not result in a magical restoration of "democracy" or "human rights", it usually leads the country down a path of further isolationism and political violence that only worsens its general situation. It also makes it much easier for factions like ISIS to gain popularity and support, since people are desperate. Sanctions are inhumane measures which only makes a country suffer for no good reason. The sanctioners know this, they don't care, and I'd wager that suffering is often the actual point of these sanctions. What has the 60 year old blockade achieved in Cuba? It has only caused pointless poverty, and the stated goal of the sanctions, which is to ultimately remove the communist government, has failed, is failing, and Cuba is managing to make due with what they have.

BDS call for sanctions mostly in regards to military equipment and related products/services, for NATO to stop aiding the genocide, or the banning of Israel from international events such as the olympics. No Israeli will ever go hungry because they no longer get European-made ordinance or because they don't get to participate in Eurovision. This is what BDS says in their Sanctions and governments campaign (which is behind two menus, this is also not the main focus of BDS, by far):

The BDS movement calls for sanctions against Israel, similar to the sanctions that were imposed against apartheid South Africa. These sanctions could include a military embargo, an end to economic links and the cutting of diplomatic ties. In the meantime, the BDS movement is calling for states to take steps to meet their legal obligations not to be complicit in the commission of particular Israeli crimes and not to provide recognition, aid or assistance that help Israel maintain its regime of settler colonialism, apartheid.. This includes, for example, the obligation for states to immediately end to all trade that sustains illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the suspension of free trade agreements and other bilateral agreements with Israel.

Notice the greater emphasis on military and diplomatic ties, and how economic/trade sanctions are only called for when it «sustains illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory». Sure, this will (if it is ever adopted by Israel's significant trade partners) cause some suffering for the poor illegal settlers who had just moved into their shiny new apartment blocks built atop acres of land that sustained the surrounding Palestinian villages. The mere existence of these settlements cause more suffering than any sanction could ever cause.

Calling for these sanctions against Israel, which again, don't even come from comparable agents, are both less harmful towards the total population of Israel, and occur in a completely different context. I'm not going to pretend I care about the wellbeing of settlers whose houses didn't even exist 10 years ago. If these sanctions ever do occur in a significant enough scale (dubious), and those settlers don't want to find themselves in a food desert because Carrefour closed all their stores in the west bank, they shouldn't have moved into land stolen from a people facing genocide in the first place. We're also wagering hypothetical and non-global suffering against the now more than 100,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza in the past year, not even counting those who died ever since the first Nakba.

Like BDS points out, these types of grassroots and targeted boycotts/sanctions worked in South Africa, and the white South Africans didn't even suffer that much. Wager these short-lived and targeted sanctions against these other half-century long sanctions sustained by the US' strongarm policy that have prevented basically anything from getting into Cuba or the DPRK.

While those two things are both called sanctions, they have radically different objectives, methods, range, timescale, and character. I can't reiterate this enough, the North Korean collective farmer and the Israeli settler in the west bank have nothing in common when it comes to their position. Only one of them is complicit in genocide through their own actions, only one of them has any degree of blame, and only one of their governments is actually doing anything that warrants any kind of international action. And again, the BDS strategy focuses much more on military sanctions. Let's also be practical for a second, and acknowledge that the US is never going to withdraw their support for Israel, and especially will never sanction Israel. Israel is simply never going to face the same kind of sanctions that Venezuela or Cuba are facing, nor with the same severity, nor with the same restrictions on products essential for life.

[wink-wonk]

Work do be actively sapping my will to live this week and it truly is only wednesday

[super-ultra-mega-deluxe]

Simply believing in ML, or joining an ML org, will not help when the lights go out or food runs out. How can we contend with that?

Marxism-Leninism isn't an arbitrary set of beliefs for one to adopt on a whim, it is a political theory and specifically action, part of which is in fact to "help when the lights go out" or even better, to make sure they don't! communist politics- and really any politic- are what those politics do. Marx explicitly frames it as such, as an ideological formulation that is a tool for practical application. taken outside of its context and application, Marxism is an absurd nothing, as again are all politics. i could provide examples of how communists facilitate the production and distribution of goods, or otherwise manage economics at variable scale and locale, which is rather what i assume you mean to be getting at with your question. your framing is rather nonspecific however: in what economic and political context is there a communist party contending with failures in energy infrastructure and food production and distribution?

the "help when the lights go out" strikes a particular chord, as somewhat recently the socialist nation of Cuba has been forced to contend with fuel shortages; their domestic oil production can't meet the needs of the general populace, and oil imports are inconsistent due to the US embargo. the people of Cuba are, thankfully, not becoming grossly immiserated or dying en masse despite such being the intention of the embargo. they have instituted fuel rationing and rolling blackouts to further conserve fuel and maintain essential services, such as their healthcare system. this of itself is obviously only a reactive policy; the state has also been rebuilding and expanding its oil storage facilities to better handle fluctuations in supply, and more recently they have agreed to a bilateral development agreement with China to substantially expand Cuba's nascent solar power generation. paired with their newfound partnership with BRICS- a move which undermines the aforementioned embargo in a much more material way than a UN vote- Cuba is on a path to fully meet the energy needs of its people and even expand access over the next decade.

that all said, i doubt you specifically care much for Marxist-Leninist experiments as they exist, and are more concerned with the prefiguration of politics before anything like achieving state power, and more specifically within the imperial core, where denying the possibility of effecting revolutionary politics is the most prominent. there are not presently many Marxist-Leninist parties of note in the US, the imperial core, but even less principled communist parties nonetheless consider the economic realities of the workers they represent first and foremost. the old Black Panthers were perhaps the closest to a truly revolutionary socialist movement in the US, and one of the policies they are most famous for is the free breakfast program and the broader Survival Programs they ran. these programs provided food and medical care and education and transportation for many who were subject to economic insecurity; the failure of these programs was a failure of militancy and counterintelligence and scope. the modernly popular if unfortunately less coherent and less principled PSL also runs health and wellness programs, such as kitchens and exercise classes and vocational programs and so on, which is their attempt at replicating such formulations.

it is rather specifically a concern of communists to organize the proletariat to provide for their own needs outside the purview of a capitalist state, and every revolutionary of note before, during, and after seizing power emphasizes such. the ability to do so pending a revolutionary moment is necessarily limited however; you cannot build an administration of economy parallel to an extant state without coming into conflict with that state. even non-communist organizations attempt to build up community programs, but they are either dissolved or incorporated into the state apparatus or otherwise operate under its purview. the ultimate goal is then as always the destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the building of a proletarian state machine, the armies of people organized in enforcing the will of the proletariat as a class, which allows for the more concrete and pointed organization of the economy broadly.

[whatcoloristhatcat]

out of curiosity, why do torties and calicos get those colour splits on their faces?

they don't actually fully know! the thing is is that the split face pattern in torties appears WAY too often in genetically normal torties for it to be considered anything but a normal tortie pattern. some examples of what we're talking about btw!

there's some theories out there, but i'd need to see more research before posting anything definitive :p the theory that makes the most sense to me has to do with bilateral symmetry, which most animals display. although the x-inactivation causing torties is random, the pattern often seems to "meet" at the midpoint of a cat's face, right on that line of symmetry

[bonefall]

Genuine question, is the two-faced kitten phenomenon not related to chimerism?

Not always! Sometimes it is!

Like I explained, a chimera is a fusion of two fully fertilized zygotes in one body. The chimeras we're talking about are Natural Fusion Chimeras: the result of two fully fertilized zygotes which fused together in utero.

Though the "split face" is the most dramatic example of it, many chimeras are actually fused in patches all over the body. This can resemble a mosaic, which is where that other term "mosaicism" comes from!

But like I explained, it's important to understand that chimerism and mosaicism are actually two VERY different things under the hood, which can be confused for each other if you don't actually know what the terms mean.

(Chimera = Two full sets of zygotes. Mosaic = one zygote with extra info.)

This is a chimera dog, his name is Tiger!

Tiger's face is not split. He has black patches! This is one type of chimera!

Here is another example of a chimera, this time a cat with the split face in question. His name is Narnia.

Chimeras are a fusion of two sets of genes, and that expression doesn't have to "meet in the middle." It just happens to occur sometimes, because the majority of multi-cellular life on earth is bilaterally symmetrical.

That's fancy talk for most animals being mirrored on both sides. It's a pattern in nature. A cleft palette is most common in the middle of the lip, having two faces splits a skull down the middle, having a divided tail happens at the tip, etc.

There's evolutionary theories about it, but bottom line is that it's just an observable fact of the natural world. Animals are usually bilaterally symmetrical, so if it's going to NOT be symmetrical, it will happen split down the center.

So, torties can just have the split face and it's nothing peculiar.

Like this one! Probably not a chimera, just a cute tortie with a split face pattern! Tortoishells are known best for it because they're common and beautiful, but they can be any two colors.

Here's one who's gold, gray, and white. Also genetically a tortie but I'm actually not a cat genetics enthusiast, you'll have to ask someone else for that info

Here's the pattern in black and white.

So, in a nutshell, the canon design for Moonpaw is actually not uncommon in nature, nor is it a dead ringer for being a TRUE chimera. Not even with the heterochromia, though it does help.

It is your mission and moral imperative to make your Moonpaw design as BONKERS as possible. NO RULES. SMASH TWO CATS TOGETHER. GO NUTS!

[privatehousesanatomy]

House X /maybe fem?)Reader where House falls in love with a singer he just cured. Maybe while checking if she can sing again and he plays the piano while she sings or something? I think that could be a cute one, because everytime I see House making Music, he seems so...emotional and vulnerable. :3

ONE MORE SONG - gregory house x fem!reader

this is a cute idea! i hope i was able to bring your vision to life <3 also, thanks so much for being my first request, i had a lot of fun writing this!

slight fluff ( it is house, after all )

🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷

you'd heard about vocal chord injuries all the time. singers strained their voices too hard during performances, especially as they got older, but you were still young. you did everything you could to protect your voice, and yet during rehearsal you found yourself unable to make a sound. at first you thought maybe you were coming down with something, but when a week passed and you had no other symptoms besides no voice, you decided to seek medical help.

there wasn't a single doctor who was able to help you. they ruled out everything from strep to laryngitis, and you even had tests done to rule out cancer. everything came back clean. you were suddenly deemed a medical mystery with no voice.

your symptoms began progressing shortly after that. you were having difficulties breathing and swallowing, and any last remnants of your voice that you might have had were slowly diminishing as well.

princeton-plainsboro teaching hospital was your last ditch effort in figuring out what was wrong with you. doctor gregory house claimed to be one of the best diagnosticians in the country, if not the world, so you were putting a lot of faith in him to figure out what was wrong with you. you were warned right from the jump that you likely wouldn't meet the man in charge of your medical file, and it was something you came to terms with. however, he surprised everyone by taking a major interest in you as a patient rather than you as a puzzle. music was a hobby of his, and it wasn't often that his patients shared that hobby.

the first time you met house, you weren't sure how to feel. he was this grumpy, older man who walked with a cane and looked to be the epitome of the word "miserable". he was sarcastic and rude, not giving a damn about how he treated his employees, nurses, or even you. and yet there was something about him that you couldn't get enough of. almost as if you could see through the facade he put up.

your diagnosis was bilateral vocal cord paralysis, though you were lucky that it didn't kill you. there were a few close calls, but they were able to reverse the paralysis with surgery, and for the last year, you've been going to voice therapy to strengthen your vocal cords and improve your breath control while speaking. you were doing amazing, and on the one year anniversary of your surgery, you actually had a follow up appointment with house's team. it was rare that they followed up with patients, but it was also rare for house to have taken such an interest in the case.

"house, where did you get a piano?" doctor cameron asked as she watched her boss suddenly wheeling a piano into the office.

"don't ask," house replied, pushing it into the middle of the room and getting it set up. he then turned to you. "come here."

"what for?" you asked, very confused as to what he was doing.

"for a sandwich," he rolled his eyes. "obviously i want to make sure your vocal cords are healing properly," he added. so, despite your apprehension about his methods, you approached the piano and sat down on the little bench. house sat down beside you. "you think you can still sing?" he asked.

"i don't know...i haven't really tried," you admitted.

"well, you're going to now," house said, starting to play the tune of one of your songs on thr piano. he'd really gone as far as to look into your music and pick one of your songs.

despite being nervous, you started to sing the words, and you quickly realized that it wasn't as hard as you thought it would be. sure, it didn't sound near as perfect as it used to, but considering you'd gone through bilateral vocal cord paralysis and survived, it sounded pretty damn good. you couldn't help but notice that house was really getting into it, and you could have sworn you saw a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

you two had become rather...close during your time in his care a year ago. you two bonded over your shared love for music, and during that time you really got to see a different side of the man he presented himself to be. in fact, it wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination to say that you two even developed feelings for each other, but unfortunately nothing ever came of it. when you were discharged from the hospital, you were also discharged out of his life, and over the last year, house couldn't stop thinking about you. that was why he scheduled this "follow up" appointment with you. he never saw his patients after they were out of his care, but he realized that if he wanted a chance, he was going to have to take it now.

when the song ended, he glanced at you before the rest of his team, now shooing them out of the office to make themselves useful either within the clinic or with their current medical mystery. it was really just a ploy to get a moment alone with you, and once you two were alone, he turned his attention back to you. god, you could get lost staring into those bright blue eyes of his, and he seemed to pick up on that.

"what?" he asked, breaking the silence between the two of you.

"oh...nothing," you replied, feeling a little flustered. his eyes flickered down to your lips, and he drew in a deep breath.

"you know, i don't ever follow up with my patients," he told you.

"you don't?" you asked, and he shook his head. "then why me?"

"because i haven't been able to stop thinking about you since you walked out of this hospital," he admitted.

"oh come on...i couldn't have been that special," you replied, raising an eyebrow.

"i've never...i've never connected with a patient like this. i've never felt like this before," house said. you were quiet for a minute, trying to process what he was saying.

"would it be wrong for me to say that i feel the same about you?" you ask finally, and there was that little smile of his trying not to show itself again. he didn't speak, but instead leaned his head in and pressed his lips against yours. you could have melted against his lips, and you were surprised at how well they fit together. after a few moments, though, you pulled away to breathe.

"i feel like we're breaking so many rules right now," you laugh, and house finally cracked a real smile.

"it's what i do best," he said, pulling you in for another kiss.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Lula and Biden to announce clean energy partnership, defying Trump

The bilateral meeting between Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and U.S. President Joe Biden on the 19th will unveil a significant joint initiative on energy transition, a top priority for both leaders, according to official sources confirmed by GLOBO. Brazil's message is clear, official sources noted: "Regardless of the outcome" of the recent U.S. elections, which paved the way for Republican Donald Trump's return to the White House on January 20, "the Lula administration will uphold the agenda it's been building with the U.S."

Trump neglected the energy transition during his first term (2017-2021), and the topic lost steam following his election, but despite the evident disappointment his victory caused within the Brazilian government, the Presidential Palace and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have kept their plans for the bilateral meeting between the two heads of state intact.

The agreement will be similar to the Partnership for Workers' Rights announced by the two presidents in September 2023, which will also be part of the agenda of topics to be discussed by Lula and Biden in Rio. The energy transition partnership began being developed in early 2024, with the intention of starting implementation in 2025.

Combating climate change is a key topic in the shared agenda of Lula's Brazil and Biden's U.S., and it is expected to become a point of contention between the Brazilian president and Trump. Government sources admitted that "the future of the initiative is uncertain, but it will be announced." One goal is to change the energy matrix of both countries and promote renewable alternatives. Teams from both governments will begin working on an action plan that opposes Trump's energy vision. "We will advocate for clean energies, discuss biofuels, green hydrogen, electric cars," commented one of the consulted sources. This vision is far from the American president-elect, a proponent of fossil fuels and considered a climate change denier by environmentalists.

Continue reading.

[adaginy]

The Big Guide to Humans

Introduction: We cannot call this the "Complete Guide to Humans" because there are so many varieties and differences that it would be a lie. We are attempting, however, to make this as complete as we can, and that does make "Big" an accurate description.

Below is an image of humans that many species will be most familiar with. When the humans sent out a probe intended to leave their star system, they included it as part of an introduction to their species. Although humans reached occupied space well before their introduction did, this is inexplicably the most well-known image of them, despite being so simplified and culturally skewed as to be nearly inaccurate. That said, it provides a starting point. If your species does not use vision or cannot extrapolate a 2-dimensional drawing into 3 dimensions, please seek out a Pioneer Plaque Reconstruction attuned to your species' needs. Words presented in bold will have chapters with further detail.

On <- this side of the image is a man, or male human. On -> this side is a woman, or female human. We are already deeply oversimplifying things and will explain human sex/gender better later. A man is on average approximately .7 LocalDistanceUnits high, and a woman approximately .6, but this varies widely. The humans rendered in the image are likely in the second quarter of their lifespan, and considered to be fully adult. Both are usually approximately symmetrical bilaterally, less so if your species can see internally. Their external surface is covered with skin that is mostly pliable (areas that experience impact or motion stress may turn harder) and sensitive to touch. We will start from the bottom due to image alignment reasons, but the most important parts of a human are near the top. At the bottom is their feet. Most humans have five "toes" at the ends of them. Though analogous to their more familiar hands and fingers, the toes are usually not particularly dexterous. Each foot is attached by a rotating hinged joint to a leg. The legs make up approximately half of the human's height, with a hinged joint in the middle, called a knee, and a rotating joint at the top that connects them to the torso. The legs are used for locomotion. The torso contains most of a human's internal organs, including the reproductive organs, which are attached to external organs between where the legs meet the torso. !! Humans almost never have these exposed as in the image. If their external reproductive organs are deliberately exposed to you, they are likely offering to mate with you, on the expectation that you want to mate with them. !! The small dot a little less than .1 LocalDistanceUnit above the reproductive organs is a "navel," an artifact of their birth process. It is unimportant except as a visual landmark. The area around it is often somewhat soft, and a human in distress may fold its legs upward to protect the area. The two dots further up the torso are "nipples." In women, they are the secretion point for glands that offer nourishment to humans in the earliest stages of human development. In men, they are an artifact of the development process. Women are less likely to have their nipples exposed casually when not nourishing young humans -- refer to the previous warning about external reproductive organs -- although some human cultures do not differentiate between male and female nipples, allowing both to be exposed. However, they are not to be deliberately touched outside of mating. Near the top of the torso are the rotating joints that attach the humans' arms. The arms are somewhat longer than the torso and end in hands, which themselves end in fingers: Four in alignment and one at an angle so it can be brought to meet the others. Humans use their hands and fingers to move, lift, or manipulate objects both light and heavy, to gesture in ways that add to language and communication, and as the focal point of their sense of touch. On a column above the torso is the human's head. It contains, from bottom to top, the organs for their sense of taste (the large single opening), their sense of smell (the small paired openings), their sense of vision (the two semi-contained moist balls), and their sense of hearing (a hole on each side of their head, surrounded by a flap of stiffened skin). Above the eyes, hidden in a productive shell, is the human brain. This is the organ that processes sensory information, thinks, and remembers. Humans would say this organ stores humanity, which we will adopt as a catchall term for the sort of thing you're likely reading this book for, if you aren't interested in their physical bodies. At the top of the head is a human's hair. Most of a human's skin has hair on it, and some humans having much more noticeable bodily hair, but the hair at the top of their heads is often thicker and longer than hair elsewhere. Many humans style this hair in cosmetic display.

--- As I write things, I will try to edit the original with links. Maybe. Every time I edit, I have to fix the bold text.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things

There's this great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers, where Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, is feverishly telling Sydney Poitier (playing an ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting Eisenhower had with aliens where Ike said, "hey, look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."

Poitier dismisses Aykroyd ("Don't listen to this man. He's certifiable"). We're meant to be on Poitier's side here, but I've always harbored some sympathy for Aykroyd in this scene.

That's because I often hear echoes of Aykroyd's theory in my own explanations of the esoteric bargains and plots that produced the world we're living in today. Of course, in my world, it's not presidents bargaining for alien technology in exchange for cow-lips – it's the world's wealthy nations bargaining to drop trade restrictions on the Global South in exchange for IP laws.

These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.

Prior to the advent of "free trade," the world's rich countries fashioned debt into a whip-hand over poor, post-colonial nations. These countries had been bankrupted by their previous colonial owners, and the price of their freedom was punishing debts to the IMF and other rich-world institutions in exchange for loans to help these countries "develop."

Like all poor debtors, these countries were said to have gotten into their predicament through moral failure – they'd "lived beyond their means."

(When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to "restructure" according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover, brands them with a permanent scarlet letter, and subjects them to humiliating micro-management whose explicit message is that they are not competent to manage their own affairs):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

So the poor debtor nations were ordered to "deregulate." They had to sell off their state assets, run their central banks according to the dictates of rich-world finance authorities, and reorient their production around supplying raw materials to rich countries, who would process these materials into finished goods for export back to the poor world.

Naturally, poor countries were not allowed to erect "trade barriers" that might erode the capacity of this North-South transfer of high-margin goods, but this was not the era of free trade. It wasn't the free trade era because, while the North-South transfer was largely unrestricted, the South-North transfer was subject to tight regulation in the rich world.

In other words, poor countries were expected to export, say, raw ore to the USA and reimport high-tech goods, with low tariffs in both directions. But if a poor country processed that ore domestically and made its own finished goods, the US would block those goods at the border, slapping them with high tariffs that made them more expensive than Made-in-the-USA equivalents.

The argument for this unidirectional trade was that the US – and other rich countries – had a strategic need to maintain their manufacturing industries as a hedge against future geopolitical events (war, but also pandemics, extreme weather) that might leave the rich world unable to provide for itself. This rationale had a key advantage: it was true.

A country that manages its own central bank can create as much of its own currency as it wants, and use that money to buy anything for sale in its own currency.

This may not be crucial while global markets are operating to the country's advantage (say, while the rest of the world is "willingly" pricing its raw materials in your country's currency), but when things go wrong – war, plague, weather – a country that can't make things is at the rest of the world's mercy.

If you had to choose between being a poor post-colonial nation that couldn't supply its own technological needs except by exporting raw materials to rich countries, and being a rich country that had both domestic manufacturing capacity and a steady supply of other countries' raw materials, you would choose the second, every time.

What's not to like?

Here's what.

The problem – from the perspective of America's ultra-wealthy – was that this arrangement gave the US workforce a lot of power. As US workers unionized, they were able to extract direct concessions from their employers through collective bargaining, and they could effectively lobby for universal worker protections, including a robust welfare state – in both state and federal legislatures. The US was better off as a whole, but the richest ten percent were much poorer than they could be if only they could smash worker power.

That's where free trade comes in. Notwithstanding racist nonsense about "primitive" countries, there's no intrinsic defect that stops the global south from doing high-tech manufacturing. If the rich world's corporate leaders were given free rein to sideline America's national security in favor of their own profits, they could certainly engineer the circumstances whereby poor countries would build sophisticated factories to replace the manufacturing facilities that sat behind the north's high tariff walls.

These poor-country factories could produce goods ever bit as valuable as the rich world's shops, but without the labor, environmental and financial regulations that constrained their owners' profits. They slavered for a business environment that let them kill workers; poison the air, land and water; and cheat the tax authorities with impunity.

For this plan to work, the wealthy needed to engineer changes in both the rich world and the poor world. Obviously, they would have to get rid of the rich world's tariff walls, which made it impossible to competitively import goods made in the global south, no matter how cheaply they were made.

But free trade wasn't just about deregulation in the north – it also required a whole slew of new, extremely onerous regulations in the global south. Corporations that relocated their manufacturing to poor – but nominally sovereign – countries needed to be sure that those countries wouldn't try to replicate the American plan of becoming actually sovereign, by exerting control over the means of production within their borders.

Recall that the American Revolution was inspired in large part by fury over the requirement to ship raw materials back to Mother England and then buy them back at huge markups after they'd been processed by English workers, to the enrichment of English aristocrats. Post-colonial America created new regulations (tariffs on goods from England), and – crucially – they also deregulated.

Specifically, post-revolutionary America abolished copyrights and patents for English persons and firms. That way, American manufacturers could produce sophisticated finished goods without paying rent to England's wealthy making those goods cheaper for American buyers, and American publishers could subsidize their editions of American authors' books by publishing English authors on the cheap, without the obligation to share profits with English publishers or English writers.

The surplus produced by ignoring the patents and copyrights of the English was divided (unequally) among American capitalists, workers, and shoppers. Wealthy Americans got richer, even as they paid their workers more and charged less for their products. This incubated a made-in-the-USA edition of the industrial revolution. It was so successful that the rest of the world – especially England – began importing American goods and literature, and then American publishers and manufacturers started to lean on their government to "respect" English claims, in order to secure bilateral protections for their inventions and books in English markets.

This was good for America, but it was terrible for English manufacturers. The US – a primitive, agricultural society – "stole" their inventions until they gained so much manufacturing capacity that the English public started to prefer American goods to English ones.

This was the thing that rich-world industrialists feared about free trade. Once you build your high-tech factories in the global south, what's to stop those people from simply copying your plans – or worse, seizing your factories! – and competing with you on a global scale? Some of these countries had nominally socialist governments that claimed to explicitly elevate the public good over the interests of the wealthy. And all of these countries had the same sprinkling of sociopaths who'd gladly see a million children maimed or the land poisoned for a buck – and these "entrepreneurs" had unbeatable advantages with their countries' political classes.

For globalization to work, it wasn't enough to deregulate the rich world – capitalists also had to regulate the poor world. Specifically, they had to get the poor world to adopt "IP" laws that would force them to willingly pay rent on things they could get for free: patents and other IP, even though it was in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term interests of both the nation and its politicians and its businesspeople.

Thus, the bargain that makes me sympathetic to Dan Aykroyd: not cow lips for alien tech; but free trade for IP law. When the WTO was steaming towards passage in the late 1990s, there was (rightly) a lot of emphasis on its deregulatory provisions: weakening of labor, environmental and financial laws in the poor world, and of tariffs in the rich world.

But in hindsight, we all kind of missed the main event: the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This actually started before the WTO treaty (it was part of the GATT, a predecessor to the WTO), but the WTO spread it to countries all over the world. Under the TRIPS, poor countries are required to honor the IP claims of rich countries, on pain of global sanction.

That was the plan: instead of paying American workers to make Apple computers, say, Apple could export the "IP" for Macs and iPhones to countries like China, and these countries would produce Apple products that were "designed in California, assembled in China." China would allow Apple to treat Chinese workers so badly that they routinely committed suicide, and would lock up or kill workers who tried to unionize. China would accept vast shipments of immortal, toxic e-waste. And China wouldn't let its entrepreneurs copy Apple's designs, be they software, schematics or trademarks.

Apple isn't the only company that pursued this strategy, but no company has executed it as successfully. It's not for nothing that Steve Jobs's hand-picked successor was Tim Cook, who oversaw the transfer of even the most exacting elements of Apple manufacturing to Chinese facilities, striking bargains with contractors like Foxconn that guaranteed that workers would be heavily – lethally! – surveilled and controlled to prevent the twin horrors of unionization and leaks.

For the first two decades of the WTO era, the most obvious problems with this arrangement was wage erosion (for American workers) and leakage (for the rich). China's "socialist" government was only too happy to help Foxconn imprison workers who demanded better wages and working conditions, but they were far more relaxed about knockoffs, be they fake iPods sold in market stalls or US trade secrets working their way into Huawei products.

These were problems for the American aristocracy, whose investments depended on China disciplining both Chinese workers and Chinese businesses. For the American people, leakage was a nothingburger. Apple's profits weren't shared with its workforce beyond the relatively small number of tech workers at its headquarters. The vast majority of Apple employees, who flogged iPhones and scrubbed the tilework in gleaming white stores across the nation, would get the same minimal (or even minimum) wage no matter how profitable Apple grew.

It wasn't until the pandemic that the other shoe dropped for the American public. The WTO arrangement – cow lips for alien technology – had produced a global system brittle supply chains composed entirely of weakest links. A pandemic, a war, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or Houthi paramilitaries can cripple the entire system, perhaps indefinitely.

For two decades, we fought over globalization's effect on wages. We let our corporate masters trick us into thinking that China's "cheating" on IP was a problem for the average person. But the implications of globalization for American sovereignty and security were banished to the xenophobic right fringe, where they were mixed into the froth of Cold War 2.0 nonsense. The pandemic changed that, creating a coalition that is motivated by a complex and contradictory stew of racism, environmentalism, xenophobia, labor advocacy, patriotism, pragmatism, fear and hope.

Out of that stew emerged a new American political tendency, mostly associated with Bidenomics, but also claimed in various guises by the American right, through its America First wing. That tendency's most visible artifact is the CHIPS Act, through which the US government proposes to use policy and subsidies to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America's shores.

This week, the American Economic Liberties Project published "Reshoring and Restoring: CHIPS Implementation for a Competitive Semiconductor Industry," a fascinating, beautifully researched and detailed analysis of the CHIPS Act and the global high-tech manufacturing market, written by Todd Achilles, Erik Peinert and Daniel Rangel:

https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/reshoring-and-restoring-chips-implementation-for-a-competitive-semiconductor-industry/#

Crucially, the report lays out the role that the weakening of antitrust, the dismantling of tariffs and the strengthening of IP played in the history of the current moment. The failure to enforce antitrust law allowed for monopolization at every stage of the semiconductor industry's supply-chain. The strengthening of IP and the weakening of tariffs encouraged the resulting monopolies to chase cheap labor overseas, confident that the US government would punish host countries that allowed their domestic entrepreneurs to use American designs without permission.

The result is a financialized, "capital light" semiconductor industry that has put all its eggs in one basket. For the most advanced chips ("leading-edge logic"), production works like this: American firms design a chip and send the design to Taiwan where TSMC foundry turns it into a chip. The chip is then shipped to one of a small number of companies in the poor world where they are assembled, packaged and tested (AMP) and sent to China to be integrated into a product.

Obsolete foundries get a second life in the commodity chip ("mature-node chips") market – these are the cheap chips that are shoveled into our cars and appliances and industrial systems.

Both of these systems are fundamentally broken. The advanced, "leading-edge" chips rely on geopolitically uncertain, heavily concentrated foundries. These foundries can be fully captured by their customers – as when Apple prepurchases the entire production capacity of the most advanced chips, denying both domestic and offshore competitors access to the newest computation.

Meanwhile, the less powerful, "mature node" chips command minuscule margins, and are often dumped into the market below cost, thanks to subsidies from countries hoping to protect their corner of the high-tech sector. This makes investment in low-power chips uncertain, leading to wild swings in cost, quality and availability of these workhorse chips.

The leading-edge chipmakers – Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, etc – have fully captured their markets. They like the status quo, and the CHIPS Act won't convince them to invest in onshore production. Why would they?

2022 was Broadcom's best year ever, not in spite of its supply-chain problems, but because of them. Those problems let Broadcom raise prices for a captive audience of customers, who the company strong-armed into exclusivity deals that ensured they had nowhere to turn. Qualcomm also profited handsomely from shortages, because its customers end up paying Qualcomm no matter where they buy, thanks to Qualcomm ensuring that its patents are integrated into global 4G and 5G standards.

That means that all standards-conforming products generate royalties for Qualcomm, and it also means that Qualcomm can decide which companies are allowed to compete with it, and which ones will be denied licenses to its patents. Both companies are under orders from the FTC to cut this out, and both companies ignore the FTC.

The brittleness of mature-node and leading-edge chips is not inevitable. Advanced memory chips (DRAM) roughly comparable in complexity to leading-edge chips, while analog-to-digital chips are as easily commodified as mature-node chips, and yet each has a robust and competitive supply chain, with both onshore and offshore producers. In contrast with leading-edge manufacturers (who have been visibly indifferent to the CHIPS incentives), memory chip manufacturers responded to the CHIPS Act by committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new on-shore production facilities.

Intel is a curious case: in a world of fabless leading-edge manufacturers, Intel stands out for making its own chips. But Intel is in a lot of trouble. Its advanced manufacturing plans keep foundering on cost overruns and delays. The company keeps losing money. But until recently, its management kept handing its shareholders billions in dividends and buybacks – a sign that Intel bosses assume that the US public will bail out its "national champion." It's not clear whether the CHIPS Act can save Intel, or whether financialization will continue to hollow out a once-dominant pioneer.

The CHIPS Act won't undo the concentration – and financialization – of the semiconductor industry. The industry has been awash in cheap money since the 2008 bailouts, and in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over. If you include Apple in that figure, the amount US corporations spent on shareholder returns instead of investing in capacity rises to $698b. Apple doesn't want a competitive market for chips. If Apple builds its own foundry, that just frees up capacity at TSMC that its competitors can use to improve their products.

The report has an enormous amount of accessible, well-organized detail on these markets, and it makes a set of key recommendations for improving the CHIPS Act and passing related legislation to ensure that the US can once again make its own microchips. These run a gamut from funding four new onshore foundries to requiring companies receiving CHIPS Act money to "dual-source" their foundries. They call for NIST and the CPO to ensure open licensing of key patents, and for aggressive policing of anti-dumping rules for cheap chips. They also seek a new law creating an "American Semiconductor Supply Chain Resiliency Fee" – a tariff on chips made offshore.

Fundamentally, these recommendations seek to end the outsourcing made possible by restrictive IP regimes, to undercut Wall Street's power to demand savings from offshoring, and to smash the market power of companies like Apple that make the brittleness of chip manufacturing into a feature, rather than a bug. This would include a return to previous antitrust rules, which limited companies' ability to leverage patents into standards, and to previous IP rules, which limited exclusive rights chip topography and design ("mask rights").

All of this will is likely to remove the constraints that stop poor countries from doing to America the same things that postcolonial America did to England – that is, it will usher in an era in which lots of countries make their own chips and other high-tech goods without paying rent to American companies. This is good! It's good for poor countries, who will have more autonomy to control their own technical destiny. It's also good for the world, creating resiliency in the high-tech manufacturing sector that we'll need as the polycrisis overwhelms various places with fire and flood and disease and war. Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector.

Pluralizing high-tech production will make America less vulnerable to the gamesmanship of other countries – and it will also make the rest of the world less vulnerable to American bullying. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe so beautifully in their 2023 book Underground Empire, the American political establishment is keenly aware of how its chokepoints over global finance and manufacturing can be leveraged to advantage the US at the rest of the world's expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology – but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.

Image: Mickael Courtiade (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/197739384@N07/52703936652/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[workersolidarity]

🇮🇶⚔️ 🇺🇲 🚨

GOVERNMENT OF IRAQ MOVES TO END U.S. OCCUPATION PRESENCE

The Iraqi government will move to end the presence of the U.S.-led coalition occupation in Iraq, according to the Iraqi Prime Minister, Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani.

Al-Sudani made the comments at a joint press conference with the visiting Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez on Thursday, Dec. 28th.

Al-Sudani said the topic was broached during his meeting with Sanchez, during which they discussed the details of the presence of the international coalition in Iraq.

"We appreciate the role of the coalition in supporting Iraq's efforts to confront the Islamic State militants," Al-Sudani said.

"The Iraqi government is in the process of rearranging the relationship with the international coalition in light of the presence of capable Iraqi forces," said the Iraqi prime minister, stressing that "the Iraqi government is moving toward ending the presence of the international coalition forces, which include security advisers who support the security forces in the areas of training, advice, and intelligence cooperation."

The two leaders discussed in depth the difficult situation in the Middle East, including the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Al-Sudani said he appreciated Spain's role and its "courageous stance in condemning these attacks."

Sanchez, for his own part, expressed his country's desire to develop relations with Iraq, in particular the fields of transportation, education, climate change, and defense.

The Spanish Prime Minister also met with the Iraqi President, Abdul Latif Rashid, to discuss ways to enhance bilateral cooperation, and the need to end the genocide in Gaza.

Spain is part of the U.S.-led international coalition tasked with training and advising Iraq's Security Forces in its fight against the radical islamic group, ISIS.

#source

@WorkerSolidarityNews