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Topic: What's Going on in the Americas? (Read 623781 times)
  • jax
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What's Going on in the Americas?
There are a number of threads from the Old World, any news from the New? Anything American goes.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1525 –
Yes, we got agrobusinesses and hobby farmers, and not that much in between.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1526 –
Quote from: Frenzie – on
That depends on how you define farmer. They also employ plenty of people to work for them. I suppose you could say those are farmhands and not farmers, but the discourse — probably quite purposefully — rarely if ever makes such a distinction.
Must be different discourses in our respective neighbourhoods. In my neighbourhood farmhands are never mixed up with farmers. On the other hand, city folks (defined by me as anyone who is less aware about countryside life than I am) little know that farmhands are a thing. For city people, all "peasants" necessarily have their own houses in the countryside and they help each other out in a neighbourly way, basically serving as farmhands to each other. In reality, countryside people normally have neighbourly enmity, which grows in direct proportion with the size of their property and exponentially with their business acumen.

The definition of a farmer does not really depend much. It is legal and socioeconomic, fairly uniform across the Western civilisation. If you do not produce to sell, you are not a farmer, even if you have a full-blown livestock farm or agricultural machinery to till the land - and you do it too. You're a farmer when you produce to sell, but if you do not have a registered business, you're illegal. So, the complete definition of a farmer is agricultural or livestock farming (or both) producing to sell and also registered as such. Farmhands may or may not be there - they are unnecessary to the definition. Given modern mechanised production methods, absentee business owners are common, just collecting the profits while some other people do the work - and it is again unnecessary to the definition whether they do or don't get paid.

Quote from: Frenzie – on
But it's also a thing to keep in mind here in Europe: farmers are often a well-to-do class. Sure, profits aren't necessarily great every year and sometimes they might operate at a loss, but that's no different from any other business.
There's no "But" about it. Being a well-to-do business owner is characteristic to being a farmer. Any savvy business owner will whine government subsidies and bailouts to himself, no matter the business area. If you do not know how to profit from bankruptcies or you have moral objections to such profiteering, then you're unfit as a business owner.

Farmers are goaded by legal and socioeconomic arrangements to be self-profitable business owners more than feeders of the nation. This is why I had to stop farming - in current civilisation it is required to be a farmer and a business owner at the same time, and more so a business owner. I could not do it.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1527 –
Farmer, business owner and hedge fund manager.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1529 –
Quote from: ersi – on
Happy New Year to everybody, including Venezuela https://news.az/news/-why-the-us-struck-caracas-and-what-comes-next-for-venezuela

How happy it will be for Venezuela depends on what comes next. We have a precedent.

United States invasion of Panama

This didn't turn out too badly for Panama in the long run, but not that great in the short run. But Panama was in many ways easier, Panama is pretty much the best case for Venezuela. Worst case would be decades of warfare between different security forces and criminal gangs.

The consequences for the US, with an even more flagrant breach of international law, and for the world at large remains to be seen. This is not a stabilising move. And even if it were, this administration is not the one to hang around to make sure they get it right.  

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1530 –
Quote from: jax – on
How happy it will be for Venezuela depends on what comes next. We have a precedent.
We have tons of precedents. We have the original 13 states becoming the current 50. Among the newer states, we have eternally backwards slave states like Mississippi and Alabama, exploited wastelands like Nevada and Alaska, genocided and annexed other countries like Iroquois Confederation, Cherokee lands, and Hawaii. There are also territories (subjugated colonies) like Puerto Rico and American Samoa, and nominally independent protectorates like Palau. Then there are examples of incursions and regime change experiments in half of the Caribbean islands and across much Latin America in various forms and with various outcomes. It is far from clear which one of these provides a close parallel.

What is clear is that the invasion was not legal either in international or domestic terms. And the point is that nobody will care about the legality. The point was to show dictatorial colonial force in action. Much depends on whose project it personally is. If Marco Rubio's, then the next country in the crosshairs is Cuba. If Trump thinks Marco Rubio is about to get too much glory, then the next step may easily be Greenland. If part of the goal was to distract from the Epstein files, then the problem is that the operation turned out smooth and quick, because this makes it a tiny bite in the news cycle, so next action may come rather sooner than later.

The invasion of Venezuela was not good for Putin in the short term, because Trump showed how to overturn a country in a few hours, while Putin is bogged down for years now, could not take Kiev in three days, could not capture or unalive Zelensky. What a shame for Russia-patriots. On the other hand, Trump demonstrated that he is of Putin's and Xi's ilk. The imperial colonists now have their spheres of influence clearly carved out. Putin can take all of Ukraine, Baltics, Poland, whatever. Xi is free to take Taiwan, because Taiwan is in the wrong hemisphere from Trump's point of view - Taiwan's problem, not Trump's.

What will Europe do? I have been complaining about Europe's lack of sense of geopolitics ever since Jugoslavia fell apart. Bosnian war was recoverable by making Bosnia a real country, not a bundle of bantustans. Kosovo was avoidable. Moldova/Transnistria was fixable by defining the issue for what it is, not for what it is not. Russia's attacks on Georgia, Crimea and Donbass were foreseeable. The inflammation of relations with Poland and Hungary was the fault of bad policy and faulty diplomacy by the EU, specifically Germany. It was absolutely urgent to make Ukraine whole two years ago at the latest. Everything has gone wrong and the EU entirely did it to itself. The EU is the sick man of Europe.

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1531 –
One might have thought that it takes a bit of time and brainwashy propagit to normalise gross overreach of power. But in USA murders of white citizens got normalised instantly, no explanations required. These are Bolshevist style extrajudicial executions on the spot, a new normalcy in USA. And it's murder of citizens by ICE, a federal agency that is supposed to have no interaction with citizens at all.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/24/us/invs-videos-show-federal-officer-recovered-gun

Re: What's Going on in the Americas?

Reply #1532 –
That, or the strong Sturmabteilung echoes.

Some claim we need to go Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System

Quote
With the Liberal International Order (LIO) in decline, scholars have focused increasingly on the possible return to a Westphalian great power system marked by sovereigntist claims and balancing among states. The actions of the Trump administration, however, raise a number of significant puzzles for such accounts—the US seems willing to sign deals with traditional adversaries including Russia and China, while targeting long-standing allies like Canada and Denmark. At the same time, transactional politics often serve narrow personalist interests rather than national objectives.

In short, a Westphalian lens focused on states and sovereignty may generate intellectual blinders that misreads the emerging international order. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative account, which we label neo-royalism. The neo-royalist order centers on an international system structured by a small group of hyper elites, which we term cliques.

Such cliques seek to legitimize their authority through appeals to their exceptionalism in order to generate durable material and status hierarchies based on the extraction of financial and cultural tributes. This short paper lays out the key elements of the neo-royalist order, differentiating it from the Westphalian and Liberal International Orders, and applies its insights to better grapple with the emerging system being promoted by the United States under Donald J. Trump. For policymakers and scholars, the neo-royalist approach clarifies recent events in US foreign policy. Theoretically, the field should take contending ideas of international order seriously, and establish a research agenda beyond a backward looking view to the Westphalian moment.