January 13, 2025
🇨🇳🌎🇺🇸 [News: Trump, China and the three dollars problem]
“For more than a decade now, many developing countries have grappled with the problem of having their financial cycles determined in Washington even as critical components of their real cycle — commodity demand and prices, for example — are determined in Beijing. A unipolar force driving the global financial cycle alongside multipolar forces driving local real cycles is a bad idea for financial stability, but that seems to be a significant risk here.”
https://www.ft.com/content/6c9821f3-924f-4d07-a95e-765512b8c634
🇪🇺[News: EU Chips and chokepoints]
“In 2023, the European Commission released an economic security strategy document laying out how economic statecraft measures such as export controls could have ripple effects across the continent and beyond. Because several critical technology firms, including the Dutch semiconductor equipment giant ASML and the German enterprise software firm SAP, call Europe home, EU policymakers know that the continent is a potential chokepoint for technology supplies. Yet Europe’s economic security efforts have largely stalled. The bloc’s strategy is mostly defensive and reactive, focused on protecting Europe from China’s unfair trade practices, Russian aggression, or the United States’ potential imposition of sweeping tariffs. And even on these points, there is little agreement among EU member states “ https://www.foreignaffairs.com/europe/europe-must-unlock-its-geoeconomic-power?check_logged_in=1
🇪🇺[News: EU launches AI “factories” strategy]
“Funded with €1.5 billion of national & EU funding, the AI Factories will significantly boost the AI computing power of Europe”
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_6302
🇨🇳[News: China retaliate on Nvidia chipmaker & restricts exports of critical minerals]
China retaliates on US restrictions to access chips by targeting Nvidia with antitrust investigations plus restricting exports of Chinese critical minerals to the US
📱🇺🇸[News: Trump’s FCC pick pushes against content moderation and fact checking. Facebook abides]
“Brendan Carr, President-elect Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), vowed Monday to break up the “censorship cartel” of social media platforms.”
Zuckerberg recently announced the end of Meta’s fact checking policy and will be replacing it with x-styled community notes “to reduce bias”; an open alignment with the US government against the EU and Chinese regulatory approaches; and a movement of policy staff from California to Texas
https://x.com/esaagar/status/1876612227807236310 [Video of announcement]
Meta seems to be eager to realign his company to reduce tensions with the Trump administration: Zuckerberg appointed a new head of policy with Republican credentials; a Trump campaign manager and UFC CEO (Dana White) to the corporate board; and donated $1M to the Trump inauguration fund
📖 [Policy declaration: Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty and the role of Non-Alignment]
A policy document led by scholars from across the globe and activist Paris Marx calls for Non-Alignment https://disconnect.blog/p/why-we-must-reclaim-digital-sovereignty
🪐[Discussion: Oped]I was invited to draft a short op ed on Non-Alignment for a scholarly magazine. I’ll be pasting a draft here for your consideration, and suggestions, so that those of you interested can eventually add your names at the end [for the time being add your email addresses if you’re potentially interested, so that we don’t spam the list with exchanges https://pad.riseup.net/p/NATM_DraftOPED-keep
Comments, suggestions and your own work are, as usual, most welcome as a direct email to me for the next roundup, or directly to the list for circulation and discussion.
curated by Juan Ortiz Freuler – input welcome [juanof @ protonmail.com] – SIGN UP