Image is of a Colombian campaign rally in support of Iván Cepeda of the left-wing Historic Pact.
As always, my weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.
preamble
The unstable stare-down in the Middle East continues. Yet again, there's been little region-level change, but there have been some big escalations. Namely, the entity has decided to go further into Lebanon, with all the casualties and destruction that will bring them, while simultaneously abandoning bases elsewhere in the theater due to constant pressure by Hezbollah. Seeking to pressure Hezbollah away from their successful strategy of attrition on IOF forces that attempt to advance only to receive rapid onset symptoms of FPVdroneitis, they have also decided to resume airstrikes on Beirut, which is an obvious violation of the region-wide ceasefire that Iran may or may not militarily respond to, but they do seem very diplomatically displeased as of me writing this sentence. Meanwhile, Iran has responded to US drone incursions with strikes on Kuwait military bases. Trump has escalated his demands lately, so a return to war seems more likely than ever.
In Bolivia, Paz appears to be escalating in response to undiminished general strikes, with Congress allowing him to declare states of emergency at will, and therefore get the military more easily involved. In Colombia's runoff elections, far-right candidate Espriella won the first round of the runoff election with 43.7% of the vote ahead of left-winger Cepeda's 40.9%. Every poll had Cepeda beating Espriella by varying margins, so this appears to be a fairly standard case of the US putting their thumb on the scale; as the saying goes, they do not trust the population of Colombia to do democracy correctly and they couldn't risk them accidentally electing the wrong person.
Over in Sudan, the conflict appears like it is moving in a pro-SAF direction, with some significant military gains against the UAE-backed RSF, although the military situation is still fairly complicated. A potentially notable news item that I missed a couple weeks ago is that the US seems to have ended their strategic ambiguity over who they consider the true government in Sudan, as they now firmly recognize the SAF over the RSF. Why exactly this has occurred is a little beyond me. Could be because they see how the winds are blowing militarily; could be because they want to fuck over the UAE for some perceived slight (to be America's ally is fatal etc etc). The humanitarian situation appears no better though, with millions of people remaining in incredible hardship and near-starvation, and RSF-backed genocidal atrocities of the kind that Zionists would nod approvingly at.
Thankfully, China is looking at all these manifold crises and has dramatically escalated the speed at which they are writing strongly worded letters and are calling for a revitalized UN.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
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I mostly wonder which money will finance all this, state debt? Usually these dont go very well together:
-------------- vs. -----------------------------
Here in Sweden they currently "solve" it by the state loaning a bunch and just pushing the problems with financing onto the next government (and for the current government this means not even using this to finance good things, it is mostly overpriced defense spending, to where I imagine most of the danish money also will go) Also, throughout the last decades it has mostly gone like this:
liberal government does NPM, slashes a bunch of good stuff and lowers taxes --> succdem government comes in, undoes some (but not all the damage, and usually don't come with much new good stuff), raises taxes because former government reforms were expensive as shit --> liberal government does NPM, slashes a bunch of good stuff and lowers taxes --> and it continues on like this.
It is interesting though how we've come this far with the contradictions that it is "obvious" to the public that no party has a reasonable answer, and so the vote is just spread thin. We also had a "crisis" of government a couple of times now. I wonder how long the welfare states can continue on like this. Atleast we have SOME type of industry unlike those pesky norwegians (who btw are also spending less and less on the welfare state despite their fund and all).
State expenditure for states which can issue their own currency isn't hard-capped, the state can literally just create more currency to pay for whatever it wants. EU states relinquished the ability to fund themselves by giving this power to the European Central Bank, which has a rather strict policy of an arbitrary 3% yearly deficit.
Though neoliberal propagandist ghoul economists tell us continuously that states are funded through tax revenue, this is false: why would a state need to collect the same currency that it can create in arbitrary amounts? The thing is: they're aware of this themselves, they only keep this lie to public in order to falsely equate public finance to private finance. Everyone understands that a private household cannot continuously spend more money than it receives, so extrapolating this in a false equivalency to public finances is a wonderfully easy propaganda exercise to lie as to why "there's no money for healthcare/pensions/education".
They prove they lie when, suddenly, those spending limits are erased when it comes to military spending: the EU announced already that public spending targeting the rise of military expenditure to 5% of GDP will not have to comply with the EU deficit rules. So, it turns out we could all along increase our public spending for healthcare, education and pensions, and the thing preventing us was NOT taxation, was NOT financing, it was EXCLUSIVELY dictated from the top.
Whether the funding comes from debt or from direct creation of currency by the ECB is very irrelevant, Japan for example has like 300%GDP of public debt and it's not a burden to the economy. It will never be a burden, because that debt is denominated in Japanese Yen, of which the government can create unlimited amounts, so there's never any risk of default. The only time in which Euro countries have suffered from debt issues was when they democratically elected progressive leaders (such as Greece's Syriza) and, in response, the ECB threatened to either comply with austerity or stop funding them. Again, the problem was not debt, it was the top-down dictating austerity under threat of artificial bankruptcy.
that 5% GDP mil spending is pretty crazy on its own. im wondering if the end result wont be that they made the really difficult and responsible choice of not paying for the good stuff while borrowing to finance the bad stuff
I know you would like to have your teeth fixed but Russia exists which is very scary and we need the money to pay for our "A Panzerfaust In Every Home" programme. If the Russians win they will just take your teeth anyways and then you wouldn't have much use for a dentist.
All the NATO countries are increasing their defence spending to 5%. What's likely to happen is that they'll overpay for military hardware, but also a lot of accountants are going to be stretching the definition of defence spending to include what would normally just be regular civilian infrastructure or industrial policy. There simply isn't anywhere for 5% of GDP to go. It's an insane number.
In fact, this is already happening - Italy’s government met the 2 percent of GDP spent on defense target not through new spending but by reclassifying existing spending
Europe’s difficult trade-off between military and welfare spending: The Italian case
rare galaxy-brain NATO move - make your tanks ridiculously heavy and practically unusable in most of the world, and then use that to justify a whole bunch of infrastructure construction that can handle those tanks
If NATO governments weren't ruled by jingoistic Slava Ukraini brained ghouls, this could be a cool opportunity to increase infrastructure spending, disaster relief etc. actually useful things that could be realistically framed as "military".
thats the funny part. at least in the 70s it would have been a massive make work programme. a useless one that produces no value sure, but now this is just funneling european purchasing power into the pockets of, like, 500 atlantic shareholders.