“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

Wish everyone a great weekend of celebration of their choosing. Mine will be surrounded by those I care about, more food than necessary, reflection of past year and future plans.

Just have to add some news.

Richard Wolff, a good economic educator has an article on the Economic war currently being conducted and its history from World War I forward.
The economic realities we face at the end of 2022 Asia Times Richard D. Wolff Dec 19, 2022
The economic warfare that has defined this year threatens to escalate into hot war, as it has in the past

The key fact is not the military war between Russia and Ukraine, so far a limited, secondary affair except for the massive on-the-ground suffering of the Ukrainian people and the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The year’s key reality is rather the economic warfare between the United States and the EU versus Russia and China: sanctions and countersanctions.

Their ramifications (energy-price spikes, supply-chain disruptions, and massive market shifts) worsened the inflation already troubling many countries. These, in turn, provoked central-bank interest-rate increases that added more disruptive and costly shocks to an already problematic 2022 global economy.
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Meanwhile, global changes in great-power alignments risk being misunderstood or undervalued because clashing capitalisms disguise themselves, yet again, in great principles. Russia versus Ukraine gets rewritten as anti-Russian NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) expansion versus Ukrainian self-determination.

US capitalism’s shift from neoliberal globalization to government-led economic nationalism to counter China’s rise in the global economy gets rewritten as required by “national security.” The further fracturing of Europe’s unity gets rewritten, in truly upside-down fashion, as a rebuilt US-EU-NATO alliance. Proliferating delusions need deciphering.
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The capitalist system that dominates globally today organizes 99% of its workplaces/enterprises with a small minority of employers who direct the large majority of employees. It forces today’s great powers (the United States, the EU and China) to mobilize their allies and compete to shape the decisions of the Global South.

The post-World War II years of US hegemony governed and held together a particular global arrangement of economies. The culmination of short-term instabilities and long-term trends inside and outside the great powers has undermined US hegemony. A struggle to shape the emerging “new world order” is under way. That struggle is the economic reality as 2022 ends.

The hegemonic war of maneuver is our context now; it will last until or unless a new global arrangement arrives.
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t would be wishful thinking to mistake this result as peculiar to the French. Many leaders and influencers around the world criticize and resent the last 75 years of economic hegemony wielded by the United States.

That perspective on current events has only strengthened in recent years as the US global empire has lost power, the United States lost wars in Asia, and China emerged as the first serious economic competitor against the United States since at least 1945. The Ukraine war has so far served mainly to validate and thus harden that perspective.
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Propaganda, trials and errors characterize efforts by all sides to navigate a dangerous, tension-filled time of change. One side’s “freedom fighters” are characterized by the opposing side as agents of domination by major powers. One side’s expansion of its international trade and capital is branded “aggressiveness” by another side rattling its swords. Shifts from neoliberal globalization to assertive economic nationalism are all rationalized as requirements of “national security.”
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World War I split socialists even as it strengthened a broadly defined socialism. World War II did the same. It not only hardened the splits within socialism (such as social democracy and Soviet socialism) but also extended the social reach of socialist variants of anti-capitalism, especially to the former colonies and China.

Capitalism has been the context and ultimate cause of world history’s two worst wars. Many had thought, hoped, and worked so that those horrific wars might enable and empower first the League of Nations and later the United Nations.

The goals of these organizations were to secure peace in place of global power politics moving toward war. They tried to achieve that goal without fundamentally challenging capitalism, the organization of an economy whose production entails a powerful minority (private or state) owning and operating enterprises. These organizations seem to have failed, but their failure left a lesson we can learn and build on.

Pepe one of the best writers on Asian geopolitical The full article is worth reading.

Can China help Brazil restart its global soft power? Asia Times Pepe Escobar Dec 22, 2022

Ten days of full immersion in Brazil are not for the faint-hearted. Even restricted to the top two megalopolises, Sao Paulo and Rio, watching live the impact of interlocking economic, political, social and environmental crises exacerbated by the Jair Bolsonaro project leaves one stunned.

The return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for what will be his third presidential term, starting January 1, 2023, is an extraordinary story trespassed by Sisyphean tasks. All at the same time he will have to

• fight poverty;
• reconnect with economic development while redistributing wealth;
• re-industrialize the nation; and
• tame environmental pillage.

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A concerted imperial campaign since 2010, duly denounced by WikiLeaks, and implemented by local comprador elites, targeted the Dilma Rousseff presidency – the Brazilian national entrepreneurial champions – and led to Rousseff’s (illegal) impeachment and the jailing of Lula for 580 days on spurious charges (all subsequently dropped), paved the way for Bolsonaro to win the presidency in 2018.

Were it not for this accumulation of disasters, Brazil – a natural leader of the Global South – by now might possibly be placed as the fifth-largest geo-economic power in the world.
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Batista sees Lula facing at least three hostile blocs.

• The extreme right supported by a significant, powerful faction of the armed forces – and this includes not only Bolsonarists, who are still in front of a few army barracks contesting the presidential election result;
• The physiological right that dominates Congress – known in Brazil as “The Big Center”;
• International financial capital – which, predictably, controls the bulk of mainstream media.

Bolsonaro reduced Brazil to resources-exporter status; now Lula should follow Argentina’s lead into Belt and Road
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Lula is already winning his first battle: approving a constitutional amendment that allows financing of more social spending.

That allows the government to keep the flagship Bolsa Família welfare program – of roughly $13 a month per poverty-level family – at least for the next two years.
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To recover from the previous, disastrous six years – which included a two-year no man’s land (2016-2018) after the impeachment of president Dilma – Brazil will need an unparalleled national drive of re-industrialization at virtually every level, complete with serious investment in research and development, training of specialized work forces and technology transfer.

There is a superpower that can play a crucial role in this process: China, Brazil’s close partner in the expanding BRICS+. Brazil is one of the natural leaders of the Global South, a role much prized by the Chinese leadership.

We will see if this is a trend. Countries not simply exporting raw material, but creating the industrial infrastructure for some processing and obtain the additional profit.
Indonesia bauxite ban drops a trade war gauntlet Asia Times Dec 24, 2022

Doubling down on Indonesia’s value-added mineral policy which has drawn fire from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and European importers, a defiant President Joko Widodo insists his administration will go ahead with its plan to ban bauxite exports in June next year.

Widodo made the announcement only days after returning from a visit to Brussels where he told the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-European Union (EU) summit that relations between the two regional blocs had to change.

“If we want to build a good partnership, then (it) must be based on equality, there should be no coercion,” he said in a surprisingly assertive statement. “There should no longer be anyone dictating and assuming their standard is better than others.”

“Indonesia wishes to underline the fact that developments that have added value and inclusivity will help support the world’s economic resilience,” he continued. “In this case, Indonesia will continue to build our downstream industry.”

The government acknowledged it will initially lose an annual US$500-600 million in export earnings, but Economic Coordinating Minister Airlangga Hartarto says increased refining will boost state revenues from 21 trillion rupiah ($1.37 billion) to 62 trillion rupiah ($4.0 billion) a year.
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