Hasn’t Ukraini been winning the war for the past 80 years or something and keeps shooting down 50 out of every 24 Russian missiles? They could help.

The capital composition of the US military industrial complex has evolved quite a lot since its birth during the preparation for WWII and the primary industries involved that produced basic high use materiel like artillery shells and bullets had to diversify and switch operations to other commodities, primarily more high tech (although not necessarily useful or quality tech), less quantity, higher price stuff because they’d go bust after the stockpiles and quotas for shells etc were full.

If anyone did an economic history of US MIC companies there would be a lot of merges and repurposing of the old shell factories etc since they’re very useful for long term combat in land warfare, not so much for just restocking a standing army that uses some in exercises.

Basically you have vampiric companies diversifying outside the war economy context that created them so there’s no need for industrial scale production on a war economy level and they switch to producing far fewer but more Gucci missile systems and components.

The what now? That’s not a job for China. Invading to depose the brutal regime of Charles and restore demuhcrasee is only for the good ol US of A.

Seriously calling their surreal bicameral system where one house are actual landed aristocrats “democracy” and not crappy almost-republican monarchy is misinformation. Don’t get me started on the endless list of medieval crap they maintain as lifelong paid professions with some bizarre paragovernmental authority like guardian of the king’s underpants and stuff like that.

You could send him bits of obscure history of real US gov ops over time, like small parts of the book Acres of Skin on human experimentation in US prisons. Having said that though, social isolation correlated with mental illness is an highly exacerbating factor so don’t push it too far, not worth losing a friend over.

The weird thing here is the implication of data collection for a decade, which I really don’t think is covered by any law.

I love the conspiracy theory that Iran recruits the most useless and unhinged people like that right wing gun nut kid with the demolition ranch tee and the Ukraine nafo nut for ultra high stakes ops instead of anyone more capable. But I guess if bunker removed Bibi said it then it must be true.

What infighting? In the western bloc the banking-industrial capital is reaching new heights of consolidation but the only manufacturing that it can’t outsource over to SEA sweatshops is the arms industry because it’s all protected knowhow and technologies that can’t be outsourced. This constantly causes issues because outsourcing to neo-colonial hellholes with zero working rights is the preferred method of preventing a declining profit rate, and we’re talking about an industry that requires a unique form of government sponsored oligopoly - monopsony Frankenstein market so it’s basically massively artificial and kept afloat by constant military engagements to create more market activity otherwise production dies out. Competing geopolitical adversaries drive up continuous R&D so that throws a necessary lifeline to this monster.

There’s some removed due to banking-industrial consolidation and conglomeration because it erodes the mid-upper middle class of millionaires and millionaire wannabe investor/hustler ancap types that want to become Elon Musks with daddy’s 400k which all manifests in mass media noise because that’s the most important voting group (as the influencing class of everyone below and the default “voice of society”, the upper middle class is the class overlord of journalism, PMC, the academia, career politicians etc). But that’s just hyenas fighting over getting scraps from the big boss table, not a sign of infighting at the actual big boss table. Petite bourgeois infighting.

And internationally there are peripheral capitalist nationalisms plus geopolitical forced alliances to prevent global domination by the West. That could be legitimate infighting but it’s also artificial, without bougie capitalist states forcing their industries to act as national enterprises and not proceed to multinational expansion and merging with western multinationals (the consolidation I mentioned above) they’d also be peachy with international-western capital. All capital is by definition a future traitor of national projects and the ultimate doom of bougie politics.

It’s a huge shame that for some reason it’s just conspiracy theorists that mention Vanguard, State Str., BlackRock and Blackstone because they’re exactly the predicted consolidated-conglomerated mega-capital appearing at the height of capitalist historical development. Not abnormal at all, not a conspiracy, not a secret cabal, just fully predicted capital consolidation. The various primadonnas like Musk and Bezos are in the news because they’re thirsty for publicity, exposure and showing off but they don’t represent global capitalism. It’s these asset management companies that are the real core.

One of the best developments in decades was the West (through France) losing their neo-colonies in central-west Africa because it hurt western capital’s cheap resource extraction. The entire system is incredibly precarious and rests upon the periphery not turning socialist and cutting off cheap SEA labour and African/S. American/Asian resource plunder. Which is also lowkey why western media barely reported on Burkina Faso kicking out the French. If that holds, expands and turns meaningfully socialist it’s game over for capitalism.

Otherwise there are market fluctuations due to technological disruptions and market share redistribution but it’s just noise and mainly relevant to investors.

The WSWS Trotsks are addicted to trying the old opportunistic entryism tactic despite consistently becoming corrupted by CIA type libdemcap slogans. As soon as you bite the “Trump is an aberration” bait you’re instantly poisoned to think that some Democrat election victory is an improvement, somehow, vaguely. The whole idea of Trump exceptionalism is that Trump isn’t simply an uncouth, unpolished manager of western capitalism but otherwise exactly the same type of functionary but somehow different and worse as if multiple Trumps don’t control both parties as a class regardless of more polished public facing career politicians who aren’t as obnoxious as him. Basically politics on the level of liberal bougie aesthetics and what is palatable to some affluent urban elite. Some polished rabid interventionist like Obama or the Clintons is fine to them.

Trump should be seen as even more characteristic of the system itself, capitalism-imperialism without PR clothes, randomly opportunistic, chaotic, populist etc otherwise the trap of post-Trump “return to respectable capitalist normalcy” springs automatically.

Unfortunately as long as these views dominate then most energy is getting siphoned into the Democrat “humane imperialism/capitalism” scam, nobody will have to enforce dictatorships because there’s no organized interstate working class movement to threaten the system itself (only low level resistance to ICE and the intention to vote Dems next time) and more polished bougie liberal approved candidates will return. Same thing that happened after the 99% thing when Bernie acted as the bait for the same type of electoral politics scam.

Basically middle class bougie liberals are implicitly framing this as social class semantics, as class shame about internationally being represented by some pro-redneck populist that makes them look lower class (existential level problem for liberal social capital, can’t look bad through associations with uncultured bougies but a military-industrial complex puppet politician with 5 PhDs is perfectly desirable).

It’s lowkey a type of stress over making the real workings of the system too obvious and ruining manufactured consent so why the hell do the Trotsks also feed into this instead of framing Trump as an absolutely typical bourgeois overlord that is finally not hidden behind the PR curtain of professional politicians? They’re all exactly like that in function. Not to mention that the entire mainline discourse about Trump is great man theory of history in its most extreme.

And besides this it’s not like there’s no labour aristocracy that primarily gains from this while other working class groups get much less and get ideologically gaslit about not being members of some potentially either fully corrupt or workerist union with zero radical ultimate aims.

Even the global North(west) contains highly exploited groups with only a minority getting the benefits.