A lemmygrad user.

AFAIK it wasn’t just cheap consumer goods but a decrease in the cost of living in general, with lower rent, affordable housing and low cost college that maintained a comfortable “international labour aristocracy” of sorts at home, while repressing “subversives” of every sort.

Currently key sectors of the US economy such as housing, healthcare and education are financialized to the point that most have to put themselves into massive debt to afford it. This is counterproductive to keeping down economic unrest, so it’d need to be tackled somehow. On the other hand, importing the bureaucrats, researchers and such from the upper classes of the ROTW has been policy for decades, which now stands in contradiction with both the surge in racist/xenophobic sentiment that is somehow extending to visas (usually a tool of upper middle class migrants) and also China’s competitive industrial complexity.

I can’t see what “treats” that can be handed down to the local white population without dismantling the housing, student debt and healthcare cartels, which would require lots of bourgeois infighting, though I bet the Democrats would be happy to oblige in co-opting the grassroots movements towards that rather than dismantling the empire.

Then again, I’m just doing freestyle sociology because this is all off the top of my head lol

Can’t sit down to write a proper reply right now, but I think you’re on the right track. Just disagree with outright invasion and occupation of Venezuela.

I reckon an expansion of forced labour camps along the southern border works better with a perspective of a Milei/Libya strategy of destabilization of neighbouring countries driving refugees north, either through imposed anti-leaderships (Noboa) or through drone warfare (Haiti).

That could be the basis for some sort of “reindustrialization” along the southern border with refugee labour, pivot the US navy from North Africa to the Eastern South America and could even make sense with annexing Canada for Arctic Sea control.

Need to read up some more to back this up, but I think I can fit direct strikes on Cuban soil more than actual Venezuelan boots-on-ground occupation. I also think that any geopolitical predictions need to take into account the surprising growing unrest in USA soil from the last couple years.

There’s probably a cool thesis that could be written about a contradiction within the “America First” movement by being both anti-war and USA exceptionalist in times of decaying imperialism that can only maintained through war. Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard are the best examples of this.

Losing my password to the old account here actually tanked my mental health. Glad to be back!