This meme is not even true to be honest. The entire German V-2 team under von Braun surrendered to the Americans on May 2, 1945, with complete packages of intact V-2 rockets (ready for deployment), combat launchers and military personnel trained to operate all those equipments. The Americans literally got everything on a platter.

This is not exactly correct. The Soviets did try to get German rocket scientists, but they didn’t get any valuable ones except for Helmut Grottrup. The rest already surrendered to the Americans in advance. The development of Soviet space/rocket program was not the same as the American’s.

However, German scientists (those who were not members of the Nazi Party or involved in the V-2 project) did helped significantly in the R-1 development, especially in gyroscopy which the Soviets lagged behind.

Also, the German scientists were treated very well by Stalin, and even as their program was being ended in Gorodomlya Island, they were given generous compensations for their relocation back to East Germany. However, the Soviet scientists (under the leadership Korolev) wanted to make their indigeous rockets (R-2) and so the German research team in the Gorodomlya Island was mostly restricted to theoretical development, with no means of experimentally testing their theoretical findings, so their G-1 rocket development remained stuck.

Eventually the Soviet scientists already learned how to do everything by themselves (by which point, the R-2 was already much superior to the original German V-2 rocket) and no longer needed the Germans, so their program ended.

Copied and pasted from a past comment of mine:

The entire V-2 team under von Braun from Peenemunde surrendered to the Americans on May 2, 1945 and brought with them more than 400 core scientific-technical employees, full documentation and reports and more than 100 intact copies of the A4/V-2 rockets ready to be shipped to the front, together with the combat launchers and the military personnel trained to operate the missiles.

The Peenemunde site was by then already deliberately destroyed to prevent anything useful from falling into the Soviet hands.

Operation “Ost” did happen, however, but the highest ranked German scientist they managed to recruit was Helmut Grottrup, who was von Braun’s deputy for missile radio-control and for electrical systems. He had claimed to be an anti-fascist, we may never know the truth, but he was indeed imprisoned by the Nazis for a time.

The vast majority of the German specialists who worked for the Soviets were not former associates of von Braun in Peenemunde, but were instead introduced to rocket technology when the Soviets established the Institutes RABE and Nordhausen in Germany after winning the war.

Werner von Braun later remarked:

“… the USSR nevertheless succeeded in acquiring the chief electronics specialist Helmut Gröttrup… But he was the only important catch from among the Peenemünde specialists.”

Other German scientists who worked for the Soviets such as Kurt Magnus and Hans Hoch (leading academics in gyroscopy) as well as Manfred von Ardenne (later awarded Hero of Socialist Labor) came from the academia and adjacent industries, and were not members of the Nazi Party.

They also managed to recruit workers and technicians who were POWs liberated from the Dora concentration camp (which supplied personnel for the notorious Mittelwerk factory, where von Braun had committed crimes against humanity including the torture, beatings and execution of the prison labor). Many of the POWs were involved in the sabotage of the A4 (V-2) rocket production at Mittelwerk, and resulting in substantial proportion of misfires and inaccurate flight trajectory when the Nazis used the rockets against England.

In other words, the Soviets had to reverse engineer pretty much everything from scratch (the R-1, which is the copy of A4/V-2), while the Americans got everything they needed. The Americans only fired the V-2 a few times, and then went on with their own “hybrid” designs such as the Navaho, Aerobee and Viking.

And in spite of all this, with such overwhelming advantage, the Americans still LOST the race against the USSR. The R-7 became the world’s first ICBM to be launched in 1957.

To put it in the terminology of you computer nerds, the Americans got the entire core dev team, with the complete source code and full documentations, and the whole tech support team, while the Soviets had to work with and piece together information from third party developers, and still raced ahead of the Americans.

They were not exactly friendly until the last few years. China was looking to deepen its economic ties with the US and EU, and saw North Korea’s nuclear development as a nuisance to their path towards prosperity. You have to understand that, at least from 2005-2015, China has a lot of pro-Western libs who love America. I cannot emphasize enough how many of my friends saw capitalism as the way forward even as late as 5 years ago.

Of course, Trump gave China the biggest wake up call they could ever hope for, and things have never been the same since.

The complete financialization of the US economy.

Nearly every single S&P500 company is majority owned by institutional investors, with 88% of them having one of the Big Three (Vanguard, Black Rock and State Street) as their top investor, and with the only exceptions being Tesla, Amazon, Alphabet, Berkshire Hathaway, Facebook, Oracle, Walmart, Comcast and Kraft-Heinz where insiders are still the top shareholders. The Big Three has 15-20% controlling stakes in nearly every large American corporation, and through the means of coordinated proxy voting, dictates the policies of the board of directors.

These institutional investors are financial capitalists who see the companies as investment vessels, not as industrial capitalists who want to grow their respective industries. They could not care less if the companies go bankrupt as long as they see a return in short term profit. Vanguard, for example, has a deep $7.7 TRILLION assets and do not care at all if some of their businesses go down.

Then you have private equity firms, also known as “corporate raiders”, who raise high stake loans to perform “leveraged buyouts” of established companies. They conduct “financial engineering” i.e. paying themselves dividends, lower wages and force overtime without pay, layoff employees, skirt labor laws, refuse to honor contracts, strip off assets and saddle the companies with debt until these are forced to declare bankruptcy. Then, like true parasites, they ditch the host and jump on to the next companies to suck off their wealth built up over the past century.

You also have venture capitalist (VC) firms that leveraged Obama’s Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) era after 2009 to raise easy capital to profit from tech/software companies. You can read this article about how Andreesen Horowitz perform their operations to destroy software startups:

The thing about these two strategies for VC is that they both can turn a profit. That second one, though, works a little differently than the first. Regardless of whether the company succeeds, pumping its valuation before selling your shares can mean you will make money, even if the business itself doesn’t survive in the long term. But hyping a startup isn’t something a VC can do alone. He needs help. He needs the media.

It happened to Groupon. It happened to Substack. It happened to Imgur. And many others, and it will happen to Reddit and all other software companies in America.

This is by no means only restricted to software companies though, for the rot of finance capitalism had already been sown since Reagan’s and Clinton’s deregulation era that massively expanded Wall Street’s influence, and subsequently fueled most prominently by Obama’s low interest rate monetary policy for them to encroach into every crevices of American industries.

Cisco, used to be the world’s leading telecommunications company, now a shadow of its former self after being financialized by Wall Street.

Boeing, used to be the world’s leading aviation engineering company, now churning out defective products that nearly never happened in its history, after being financialized by Wall Street.

Intel, used to be the world’s semiconductor pioneer, now struggling to keep up with Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung, after being financialized by Wall Street.

And this is the fate of America - a financial oligarchy will continue to devour and strip off every remnant of the American industries built up over the past centuries, and there is nothing to stop this in its tracks.

It’s UN Security Council sanctions. They are not lifting existing sanctions, just not implementing new sanctions on the DPRK.

In Russia, there are two versions about why Russia participated in the sanctioning of DPRK.

First, is that Russia wanted to appease the West so they went along with the sanctions.

Second, is that China wanted the DPRK to stop developing its nuclear weapons (remember the Chinese leadership has a lot of libs who love America at one point, especially before Trump), but the DPRK didn’t listen (good decision, considering what happened to Libya) so China decided to punish DPRK from the UNSC as a warning, and dragging Russia to go along with it.

Both versions are not mutually exclusive.

But this is exactly what the US wants: to trigger a capital flight from Europe and devouring the rival currency bloc i.e. the EU/eurozone.

US moves to advance prisoner swap deal with Iran and release $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration has cleared the way for the release of five American citizens detained in Iran by issuing a blanket waiver for international banks to transfer $6 billion in frozen Iranian money from South Korea to Qatar without fear of U.S. sanctions. In addition, as part of the deal, the administration has agreed to release five Iranian citizens held in the United States.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken signed off on the sanctions waivers late last week, a month after U.S. and Iranian officials said an agreement in principle was in place. Congress was not informed of the waiver decision until Monday, according to the notification, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

The outlines of the deal had been previously announced and the waiver was expected. But the notification marked the first time the administration said it was releasing five Iranian prisoners as part of the deal. The prisoners have not been named.

You know the air force mechanic who always rushes to the tarmac to greet the disembarking pilots to tell them how much he admired them, took extra care to polish the planes to impress them, and when he goes home, would spend the evening booting up the flight simulator to fantasize about being a hot shot pilot?

Or the pencil pusher working in the intelligence/military agencies fantasizing he’s in a Tom Clancy novel working to help the good guys defeat evil communist regimes?

Yeah, those people.

From telegram:

Trump’s re-election as president will not help relations between the Russian Federation and the United States. This was stated by the press secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov. He urged Russians not to rely on Trump’s actions.

“In essence, there cannot be and never have been any changes in Washington’s foreign policy. Therefore, I would not pin any hopes on the elections in America,” he said.

At the same time, when Trump ran for election for the first time, Russia had high hopes. In 2016, candidate Trump was widely promoted by the Russian media, and the State Duma greeted his victory with applause. However, contrary to promises, Trump did not lift sanctions against Russia and did not make significant changes in relations with the Russian Federation.

The problem with this logic is that you cannot fight China without settling the business with Europe/Russia first.

The 2009 financial crisis had weakened the US financial sector and allowed the EU to develop as a rival currency bloc (thanks to cheap Russian energy supply), whose alignment with Russia and China could pose a direct threat to US hegemony on the world.

This is why the post-2009 strategy has been to sever Europe-Russia ties, first with the Maidan coup (just after Nord Stream 1 was completed) and then the current war in Ukraine (just after Nord Stream 2 was completed).

Trump was also part of the strategy, make no mistake, although he preferred the “art of the deal” bullshit rather than Biden’s bomb Ukraine and Nord Stream strategy to make the Europeans yield.

It doesn’t matter whether Trump supports Putin or not at this point.

The European theater is now a settled business. Biden has gone in decisively and scared European capital into fully rallying behind the US, while Trump wanted to play some “art of the deal” master only to be scoffed off by the Europeans.

China and Russia had both tried to sway Europe to their sides throughout 2022, but all attempts had failed. Biden’s “diplomacy” proved too powerful to resist.

Both the Dems and GOP can now unite in turning their focus towards China, because Europe/Russia is irrelevant at this point.

IMEC is coming:

And as I have been warning over the months, the excess dollar liquidity pumped up since COVID and after the interest rate hikes of 2022 has to go somewhere:

They won’t be invested in the US, i.e. re-shoring of industries isn’t going to happen, because the bourgeoisie are afraid of raising wages and living standards of the working class, which would only lead to more labor unions and workers movement to challenge them from within.

Instead, the excess money will flood the developing world to create an alternative supply chain to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Whether they can succeed or not is another matter, but in their minds, finance is more powerful than industry. After all, it was the US that suppressed the industrial growth of the Global South to concentrate all the industries in China, whose vast cheap labor they could easily exploit to drive the global wages down. Now China is fighting back, all the US has to do is to alleviate the very suppressive structures they have imposed on the Global South, and allow their industries to grow.

After the summer of 2022, when dollar had flown back to the US, creating a liquidity drain across the developing world who find themselves having to work harder to earn dollars to service their debt and import energy/food/commodities priced in dollar, you bet they’d welcome the dollar flooding their economy.

BRICS is at its most perilous moment. It is not their fault that they cannot replace dollar in the short amount of time, because nobody can. Now it’s about how they can shield themselves from the impending assault of the weaponized dollar regime that Biden (or Trump) is about to set upon the world.

IMEC is coming

Pursuant to this Memorandum of Understanding, the Governments of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the European Union, the Republic of India, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the French Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Italian Republic, and the United States of America (the “Participants”) commit to work together to establish the India – Middle East – Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The IMEC is expected to stimulate economic development through enhanced connectivity and economic integration between Asia, the Arabian Gulf, and Europe.

The IMEC will be comprised of two separate corridors, the east corridor connecting India to the Arabian Gulf and the northern corridor connecting the Arabian Gulf to Europe. It will include a railway that, upon completion, will provide a reliable and cost-effective cross-border ship-to-rail transit network to supplement existing maritime and road transport routes – enabling goods and services to transit to, from, and between India, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, and Europe.

As I have been sounding the alarm over the months, the Biden counter-offensives have begun. The real goal is to reroute the supply chain away from China and its Belt and Road Initiative. (Still, without Iran, the IMEC supply chain looks odd)

When Hitler’s General Staff were planning Operation Barbarossa, they gave themselves 4 months to crush the Red Army. After the first winter, they would run into significant logistics and manpower issues.

And yet, they still invaded the USSR, fully confident in the supremacy of the Third Reich and that the inferior Slavs - who could not even make anything more complicated than a lightbulb - would instantly crumble from the full might of the Nazi forces.

The fascist mentality never changes.

Can you elaborate?

The US shale revolution has already dealt serious blow to oil producing countries like Russia, Venezuela and Iran when the US flooded the market with their cheap oil and causing the plunge in world’s oil prices in 2014-2016. The US has already won the oil battle.

I am going to go against a lot of people and say this: it’s always about destabilizing Europe, which is a prerequisite for their final confrontation against China.

I recently watched the Chinese economist Wen Tiejun’s assessment about the war in Ukraine (who has similar views to Michael Hudson’s): if the early 20th century conflicts in Europe (WWI and WWII, which was just the continuation of WWI) was an inter-imperialist war between industrial capitalist powers, then the early 21st century conflicts in Europe is an inter-imperialist war between financial capitalist powers. All this is to set the stage for the final confrontation between finance capital (amassed under the US) vs industrial capital (consolidated under China).

The US doesn’t really care about Russia (although destroying it is nice), as Russia’s economy is far too weak to be any major player in the game other than as raw resource supplier. What the US fears to death, though, is the EU alignment with Russia, which would then set the stage for EU integration with China.

So, the war in Ukraine is not really about Ukraine or Russia, ironically. The US doesn’t care about NATO tanks blown up in Ukraine, or a few F-16s getting shot down. Instead, it’s to sever whatever links left between the EU and Russia, and to ensure that European capital flows to the US sphere, and not towards the other direction.

To understand why this is has to happen, we have to go back to the 2009 financial crisis that dealt a serious blow to the US financial sector.

The EU was established in 1993 in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, and the eurozone followed soon after in 1999. European financial capitalists had been able to exploit and cannibalize the vast amount of public assets in the newly collapsed post-USSR states, and through which amassed a powerful financial bloc that poses a threat to the dollar regime. (The EU and eurozone are also replete with their own contradictions and crises, but we’re not going into that today, simply that the euro has for the most part maintained a 30% strength over the dollar exchange rate).

After experiencing a major setback after the 2009 financial crisis, the US realized that it has to depress the growth of European financial capital. Nord Stream 1 came online in 2011, endowing Europe with cheap energy supply that greatly accelerated their post-GFC economic recovery. Thus, the Maidan coup in 2013 was exploited by the US and the sanctions against Russia in 2014 were meant to deal a blow against EU-Russia relations. The US also spoiled the second EU-Russia pipeline project (South Stream) that was meant to go to southern Europe (Russian gas now goes to Turkey instead).

Then Nord Stream 2 was completed in 2021, and the US kept finding ways to block its certification process, and the opening of the pipeline was delayed indefinitely when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, and then crippled permanently when it was sabotaged in September 2022.

As you can see, the net effects of the war in Ukraine is really the destabilization of Europe, and its financial capital outflow towards the US. Euro was weakened to around parity with the dollar, though it has regained to like 7% stronger than the dollar now, still far from its previous 30% strength against the dollar. Their industries have now fled the region, some to the US (only to be cannibalized by the financial raiders), and some toward the East.

This is also why European neoliberals are so ready to induce self-inflicted wounds against their own economies: the strength of US finance capital takes precedence to European industrial capital. If the US financial sector needs help to fight against China, then Europe is willing to sacrifice themselves if that means the US gets to devour their finance capital.

And we are really getting to the point where the vast majority of the global financial capital has now been consolidated under the US, while industrial capital are amassing towards the BRICS bloc (although it really is just China, as the rest of the BRICS+ countries are still too weak economically).

The heightened contradictions of capitalism have now set the stage for the final confrontation between the two opposing systems: financial capitalism vs industrial capitalism. Can finance capitalism defeat industrial capitalism simply through weaponizing finance and printing currency? Can industrial capitalism resist against the omnipresent, all-pervasive threat of the dollar regime?

This is not a joke btw.

Back in 2014, when Europe and Russia were planning on building another gas pipeline - what would have been known as the “South Stream” - the US insisted that the pipeline cannot be owned by the gas producer and forced them to outsource the pipeline ownership to a third party. (Michael Hudson compares this to an apartment building having their elevators owned by another company, who will charge whatever fee they want every time you want to go to a specific floor) The EU complies but Putin said nobody is that stupid and scrapped the pipeline. Turkey became the gas hub for southern Europe instead.

And that’s just one of many examples.

I saw him retweeted this once (the other artwork, not this one), he knows lol.

SSNs are also called attack submarines.

SSBNs are the big guys who carry large quantity of nuclear warhead ballistic missiles whose job is to lay low, stay hidden to maintain a first/second strike capability.

SSNs are the small guys who are fast and agile out on a hunt for enemy submarines. They also have limited capacity to launch cruise missiles on naval and land targets. Also known as the “fast attack subs”.

The Soviets/Russians also have SSGNs which are in between the two and capable of carrying long range guided cruise missiles, whose job is to stay hidden and then launch a large salvo of cruise missiles capable of overwhelming the enemy fleet’s defense.

Then you have the SSKs - the really small guys, the diesel-electric attack subs that operate on batteries and are extremely quiet but have limited range. They are usually built for littoral (coastal) defense rather than blue water naval power projection.

Cows are evolutionarily closer to whales than horses.

How?!

This was from last year FYI. Nothing will come out of it because Putin is too scared to even challenge his country’s own Central Bank. He claims to be a nationalist but the neoliberal branch literally doesn’t care about what he says at all.