CarmineCatboy2

I think people in the US have been conditioned to expect low inflation forever, because inflation was concentrated on assets and large expenditures like Health, Education, Housing and so on. It's cultural inertia, really. Down here we are 30 years removed from a hyperinflation crisis, so even media discourse considers wether or not the minimal wage rises above or according to inflation. We also have all the problems you have, like shrinkflation and lowering quality of foodstuffs. And arguably ours are worse. But the discourse of 'what happened, I used to be able to buy a penny' is never done with the implication that inflation itself is simply wrong for existing.

that the multipolar bloc

Here's the thing: it's not a bloc.

There's only one bloc in the world today and it's the West. Everybody else is just doing diplomacy with each other. India is an outright religious fascist state, it sees itself in competition with China and it is kept at arm's length by both Russia and the United States. China is a market communist society that does business with pretty much everyone, including people who make long speeches about how evil it is. Russia is a social conservative state that is pushed into alliances of inconvenience with countries that it used to oppose, like Iran. Brazil is a social democratic country that until recently was under a pseudo fascist government, and even so it wouldn't break relations with it's trade partners out of the bare minimum of pragmatism. BRICS recently welcomed all sorts, from the Egyptian junta to the Saudi Monarchy and the theocracy in Iran.

The world at large is made up of a large plurality of political and economic systems. That things like the ongoing genocide in Gaza makes that same world coalesce in a consensus that goes against the agenda of the Western Bloc doesn't mean that the multipolar world is a Bloc. The fact that the world at large agrees with and supports South Africa's efforts against israeli apartheid and the ongoing genocide, but the West's elites and boomers refuse to even entertain the notion means that it is the West that is an anomaly. Everything it does, from it's support for the Palestinian Genocide to it's uncanny ability to elevate insane, genocidal figures like Navalny and Lai as Liberal Heroes, points to that.

This is why the 'New Cold War' is against China. Because there's no Chinese Bloc like the old Communist Bloc. The only Bloc in the world today is the United States and it's vassals.

That's the funny thing. Israel doesn't even hide how much they despise Biden and want Trump to get elected even though the policies are the exact same. And the Dems will still go out to defend them.

its a parable about every layer of the value creation chain

I think the US is gonna keep militarizing itself. And that it won't be the number 2 on that front any time soon. As for economics, unless the US balkanizes it will never cease to be a great power. It's not like Britain, whose entire financial system depended on tax farming the shit out of India. The US is an 'empire' unto itself, it's relatively safe from Climate Change, and it's population is nothing to scoff at. It has all the financial and human resources to be a world class power, it has only failed to utilize them due to being high on their own supply. Plus the full spectrum dominance of media in the West means the US has ways to spin things around and pretend that it's still the dominant economic power.

The problem we have I think is that the US doesn't just want to be number 1. That's everyone in a position to get there. That's arguably China's ambition. The US is used to being a number 1 in such a way that it thoroughly outclasses everyone else to the point that regional powers don't exist. Britain at it's height wasn't that.

I guess what disappoints me the most in Lula's current government is the constant conciliation and compromise.

It's fair to be afraid of what comes next. I am too. There's no political figure on Lula's level anywhere in Brazil, to say nothing of the center left in general or his own party. But what you're describing here is governing. There are always limits to power, and there are further limits imposed by local politics and Congress. We are, for an instance, lucky that the brazilian judiciary is the sort to permit gay marriage by fiat, and that the evangelical lobbies are still too weak to legislate against it. But barring that sort of thing it's hard to find a single political figure that would have performed as well as Lula did in his center-left agenda.

Lula has been able to do good things because of the conciliation and compromise. He's been able to rule the country despite being a minority government because he's uniquely able to deal with the bourgeoisie's material interests. For good and ill, Lula is just about the last politician capable of talking to the political elites of Brazil in a way that does not render them schizophrenic and self sabotaging.

In 2010, Chang wrote in The Christian Science Monitor that "China could fail soon" and predicted an economic crash.[11] In an article, "The Coming Collapse of China: 2012 Edition," published by the Foreign Policy, Gordon G. Chang admitted that his prediction was wrong but arguing that he was off only by one year: "Instead of 2011, the mighty communist party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it."[12] On May 21, 2016, The National Interest published another article by Chang, "China's Coming Revolution." In it, he argued that the ruling class in China is divided and that it cannot deal with its economic problems. Chang claimed that would lead to a revolution, which would overthrow the CCP. He did not give the exact year that those events would take place.

Church of the Latter Day Chinese Collapses

You can already. The difference between Lula and Obama is that the latter ruled the most powerful country on earth with a supermajority and couldn't even achieve milquetoast liberal promises. The former is president of a country that was defeated in the Cold War and who's always ruled with a conservative and ever more hostile Congress, but still manages to achieve funding for public services like socialized education and health care.

I always say there's a massive difference between being a liberal in the global south and a liberal in the imperial core.

At one point I got to watch another video of John Mearsheimer talking about how China's present and Japan's past exist in parallel. His argument being that Imperial Japan was not acting irrationally when it declared war on the US. The japanese leadership was under no illusion that it would be an easy war, or that they had any but the slimmest chances of winning. They only perceived it as the only way out of the economic catastrophe that the US embargo imposed on them. The argument then continues as Mearsheimer claims that China must be somehow both assured and contained in such a way as to not cause another war in east asia.

Yet I feel that he's got it completely backwards. It is the US that perceives hegemony as the only means by which it's continues prosperity is ensured. And it is the US that has to be contained and assured in such a way as to prevent a larger war, as well as to put an end to the regional wars that it constantly triggers on a whim. It is the United States who has to realize that growing prosperity in places like China and american withdrawal from hegemony status does not actually impede american development in any way.

Israel: helps coup plotters in Brazil by creating a parallel intelligence agency for them

Also Israel: criticizing genocide is a red line

When the Ukraine War began my mind wandered towards wether the West would demonstrate the old Cold War pragmatism and eventually focus on winning the peace. Meaning that even if Ukraine lost the richer half of their territory, nothing could really stop the West from harnessing their still significant human and financial capital in order to ensure the western half is comparatively prosperous. It would mirror the situation with the Koreas as the US of the last century wasn't just a financial parasite. It made actual political investments whenever it was deemed necessary, in Latin America, in East Asia and in Europe. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the whole of Europe and even LatAm at times - these countries all benefitted from american economic policy at one point. It wasn't just the libertarian romanticism of letting asset managers create wealth in a win/win scenario. It was ruthless pragmatism and a willingness to harness american power as part of world war competition. For an instance, what industry Brazil has today is because FDR did a major tech transfer during WW2. It was done to the chagrin of the american national bourgeoisie. It was one of the elements that lead to the Business Putsch conspiracy. All in all what mattered is that it secured Brazil's support and stability against the Axis.

Now? It's horrifying to see how the European Union is unable (nay, unwilling) to win the actual existing peace within itself. Sure, they treated Greece like garbage, and we all agreed to pretend that the country isn't stagnated into oblivion. But even so I wondered if the first peer conflict in the old continent in a century would light a fire under their arses. It didn't. Europeans are helping the Americans to hollow out the copper fillings of each other's homes. The trillion dollar investment required to make Ukraine more than just a lucrative tax farm and into an actual politically stable nation is never going to happen because the Europeans won't make that investment on themselves.