cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8310979

Private Equity companies have rolled up manufacturers of ambulances, fire trucks, and other first responder equipment tools in the United States and Canada.

As a result, a small handful of companies control supply and pricing, and have aggressively raised costs and increased order backlogs.

Equipment in the North American market are ten times more expensive than for comparable tools from China, and wait times are three years or longer.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/code-red-why-your-city-cant-affordor

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/43929

US President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is costing nearly $2 billion per day, according to a Harvard analysis based on estimates from the Pentagon. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian agency said the money could instead be used to save more than 87 million lives around the world.

Tom Fletcher, the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), spoke at Chatham House on Monday about a “cataclysmic” funding crisis for the UN, in large part due to the termination of billions of dollars in funding from the US and other major powers such as the UK. Fletcher said his agency has seen its budget cut by around 50%.

"We're already overstretched, underresourced, and literally under attack," Fletcher said, citing the more than 1,000 humanitarians who have been killed in conflicts around the world over the past three years.

The Iran war, launched at the end of February by the US and Israel, Fletcher said, has stretched UN budgets even further, both by causing chaos within Iran and Lebanon—where more than 5,000 people in total have been killed, including thousands of civilians, and more than 4 million displaced collectively—but also by creating economic upheaval that has exacerbated crises elsewhere.

"You have the [Strait] of Hormuz—fuel prices up 20%, food prices up almost 20%, our humanitarian convoys blocked," Fletcher said. "We've had to take those convoys by air and by land. And the impact, which I think we'll be feeling for years, of those price rises on Sub-Saharan and East Africa, pushing way more people into poverty."

Fletcher said that just a fraction of what the US has spent waging the war could have been used to provide a full year of funding for a plan he laid out in January to provide lifesaving food, water, medicine, and shelter to those in dozens of countries facing war and poverty.

“For every day of this conflict, $2 billion is being spent. My entire target for a hyper-prioritized plan to save 87 million lives is $23 billion," he said. "We could have funded that in less than a fortnight of this reckless war. Now, of course, we cannot.”

Beyond the financial toll, he said, US actions may have done irreparable damage to the authority of international humanitarian law and to UN bodies tasked with enforcing it.

He noted the dramatic increase in the number of humanitarian workers killed around the world over the past three years. According to a UN report earlier this month, of the more than 1,010 of them who were killed in the line of duty, over half were killed during Israel's genocide in Gaza and escalating attacks in the West Bank.

"A thousand dead humanitarians in three years," Fletcher said. "When did that become normal?"

He called out the UN Security Council, where the US is one of the permanent members with veto power, for its weak responses to the killing of humanitarians and other flagrant violations of the laws of war.

"Don't just give us a generic statement where you say humanitarian workers should be protected," he said. "Make the phone call, call out the people killing us, stop arming those who are doing it."

He said "big powers" view geopolitics in a highly "transactional" way and do not use the Security Council as a mechanism for defending international humanitarian law.

"I wouldn't have thought I'd need to say that a couple of years ago, that the Security Council should be defending international humanitarian law, and yet here we are," he said.

He said that Trump’s recent violent rhetoric toward Iran—which again verged into outright genocidal territory over the weekend when he pledged to “blow up the entire country” with overwhelming attacks on civilian infrastructure—has only further corroded international law.

“The idea that suddenly it’s okay to say, ‘We’re going to blow stuff up,’ ‘We’re going to bomb you back to the Stone Age,’ ‘We’re going to destroy your civilization,’ that kind of language is really dangerous,” Fletcher said. “It gives more freedom to all the other wannabe autocrats around the world to use that sort of language.”

But he said the aggression of the US and its allies has also made the world more warlike and less "generous," leading countries to put more money into defense that could otherwise go toward alleviating global suffering.

"Whether you're making the cuts [to UN funding] for ideological reasons or because you're too busy bombing someone else or because now you feel more insecure at home and so you have to invest more of your money in defense and less in generosity," he said, "all of that ultimately has an impact on the over 300 million people that we're here to serve."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/43972

Condemning the illegal US blockade choking Cuba, trade unions, political parties, Palestine solidarity organizations, and veterans of the historic anti-Apartheid struggle picketed US consulates in the South African cities of Johannesburg and Durban on April 17.​

“65 years ago, the American imperialists sent their mercenary bands to invade the young, revolutionary country of Cuba,” recalled Ronnie Kasrils, a stalwart of the South African Communist Party (SACP), addressing the protest in Johannesburg, held on the 65th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961.

The 87-year-old, who was a commander leading armed guerrillas against South Africa’s Apartheid regime at the time, added, “They thought the people would rise up against Fidel Castro and overthrow him. But … the people were ready, and they defeated the American scum.”

Ever since the Bay of Pigs, he argued, “US imperialism”, from Kennedy through to the Bushes and Clintons, well before the current President Donald Trump, have tried to defeat the Cuban revolution by blockading the country. Trump has tightened the blockade, choking the supplies of essentials for the people of this small island nation. “We are raising funds. We are sending food … medicines … solar panels,” he added, calling for contributions.

Read more: Trump once again threatens to attack Cuba. Havana vows to resist

The Cuban sacrifice for African liberation

“All of us must make the necessary contribution to save thousands of Cuban lives, because they were here, fighting [against the Apartheid regime] alongside our own combatants of the African National Congress,” said the ruling party’s First Deputy Secretary-General Nomvula Mokonyane.

Cubans also fought alongside the anti-colonial forces in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, Kasrils recalled.​

And when these wars were won, all the Cubans took back home with them were the remains of their dead, Mokonyane pointed out. “They never took any mineral [wealth]. They didn’t believe we owed them anything. They believed this was about humanity. This was about justice. Therefore, the Cubans will forever remain in our minds and in our hearts, and in our actions.”

“Destabilizing the entire world”

Protesters and speakers also raised placards and slogans in solidarity with the people enduring the US-Israeli attacks in Iran, Lebanon, and Palestine.    

The US, which is “destabilizing the entire world,” is the “biggest terrorist organization in the world,” general secretary of the Zimbabwe Communist Party (ZCP), Ngqabutho Mabhena, who also participated in the protest, told Sputnik Africa.

“Colonialism, imperialism, and injustice are still rife amongst us”

Activists also organized the “Bay of Pigs remembrance event,” including a documentary screening and a roundtable discussion on history and contemporary global politics at the Castle of Good Hope, a historic monument in Cape Town.

“Colonialism, imperialism, and injustice are still rife amongst us,” said Calvyn Gilfellan, CEO of the public entity responsible for managing, maintaining, and promoting the castle as a heritage site and a tourist attraction.

“Let the Bay of Pigs be a reminder that we need to stand up and stand together against imperialist powers and the threat to sovereignty across the Global South.”

The post Cuba solidarity protests target US consulates in South Africa appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

From Peoples Dispatch via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/51578019

It's our fault for not voting for Kamala, of course . . . .

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/51557515

Deliveries of oil starting to fall, shit getting even more shit

The Iran war is now the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Physical crude hit $150 a barrel. Futures markets are acting like a deal is around the corner. And James Gutman is back on Energy Empire to explain why those two numbers don't match — and what happens when they do.

This is James's fourth time on the show. He walks us through why the shock has already been absorbed but the real pain is still in the pipeline, why energy independence gave the US, Israel, Russia, and China each a permission structure to act more aggressively on the world stage, and why Europe — which didn't want this war — is now building a post-war security architecture for the Strait of Hormuz without the country that started it.

On the ground: 70% of American farmers can't afford fertilizer. Europe has six weeks of jet fuel left. The US can't deliver the weapons its NATO allies already paid for. And James makes the case that this war may bring us to peak oil demand — not because of any climate agreement, but because the world is making sure this never happens again.

We're dropping this right before Earth Day. Jigar got the Earth Day award two years ago. James thinks Trump deserves it this year.

https://archive.is/2026.04.20-025139/https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-a-e-asks-u-s-for-a-wartime-financial-lifeline-3f9ea3a0

https://archive.is/2026.04.19-124113/https://fortune.com/2026/04/19/what-is-becoming-chinese-chinamaxxing-tiktok-trend-american-critique/

The subtext of every “very Chinese era” video isn’t really about China. It’s about what young Americans feel they’ve been denied. Chinamaxxing romanticizes things that feel structurally out of reach at home — compact, affordable-looking apartments; public transit that works; streets safe to walk at night; multigenerational households as an antidote to loneliness; communal meals as an antidote to atomization. The comparison is implicit but unmissable: they have this, and we don’t.

Gen Z Americans now carry an average of $94,000 in student-loan debt, and the psychological weight of that number is fueling what Fortune‘s Jacqueline Munis has called “disillusionomics” — a generational rejection of traditional financial prudence rooted in the belief that the old rules no longer apply. One-third of Gen Z says they believe they’ll never own a home. Many are planning to forgo children. Youth unemployment hit 10.8% last year against a 4.3% national average.

This is the context in which “becoming Chinese” lands. It isn’t that Gen Z has carefully studied comparative political economy and chosen Beijing. It’s that they were raised on a promise — get the degree, get the job, get the house, get the healthcare — that increasingly feels like a lie. American higher education, once the most reliable on-ramp to the middle class, now generates crippling debt in exchange for credentials that pay less in real terms than they did for their parents. Tuition at U.S. public universities has increased 153.8% since the early 1980s in inflation-adjusted terms, growing 65% faster than currency inflation and 35% faster than wages. The institution, sold as the gateway to prosperity, has become its single largest private obstacle.

Slate‘s Nitish Pahwa captured the emotional logic cleanly: “You told us we couldn’t have a high-speed railroad and universal health care, and it turns out they have it across the street! I’m going to live at their house now!” It is, as he described it, a petulant-toddler reaction to a broken promise — and one that Western institutions have given Gen Z ample grounds to throw.

The content gaining traction — tea rituals, slow routines, dense and futuristic cities, food culture that feels abundant and communal — maps precisely onto what young people say is missing from their own lives. “China becomes less of a destination,” Litman said, “and more of a canvas to project those desires.” A sense of wellness and calm. A feeling of prosperity. An everyday beauty that American strip-mall culture conspicuously fails to provide.

Shaoyu Yuan, a scholar who studies Chinese soft power, told NPR the trend operates on two tracks at once: one that “weakens American narrative authority by highlighting content that highlights U.S. dysfunction,” and another that “makes China look more attractive.” The Week The dysfunction track, crucially, writes itself. Nobody needs Beijing to fabricate footage of American potholes, ER bills, or decaying Amtrak cars.

Bullet-train footage isn’t just rail — it’s a vote. And the vote is being cast by a generation that has no Cold War precedent for its view of China. New Pew Research data shows American adults under 34 view China far more favorably than those over 50. The 2020s have been a decade of compounding American institutional failure — a pandemic, political rupture, an affordability crisis, student loan servicers treated as adversaries, a healthcare system that bankrupts the sick, and a growing sense that the system is not working as advertised. Chinese modernity, filtered through a TikTok feed, offers an implicit counter-narrative: cities that work, infrastructure that impresses, a culture that feels rooted and forward-moving simultaneously.

Their power lies in the specific comparison they invite — not “is China better in every way,” but “why does an ordinary life there appear to include things an ordinary life here no longer does.”

But the Cold War analogy cuts in both directions. American culture won the ideological struggle of the twentieth century not because Washington planned it perfectly, but because it generated something the other side couldn’t manufacture: a genuine, bottom-up, organic want. The “Becoming Chinese” trend, for all its irony and imprecision, is producing exactly that kind of signal — uncoerced, youth-driven, and spreading on its own momentum.

The American century was built on the world’s desire to be American, a desire so powerful that it didn’t require irony or caveats. The question the turbulent 2020s is forcing is a simpler and more unsettling one: what happens when the generation that was supposed to inherit the American promise looks around at their student loans, their rent, their medical bills, and their crumbling train stations — and decides they’d rather be something else?

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/43237

By Kit Klarenberg – Apr 15, 2026

Kit Klarenberg argues that Hezbollah’s battlefield resilience has derailed “Greater Israel” ambitions, exposing Israeli overreach and strategic exhaustion. “Israel’s” war reveals a recurring pattern of miscalculation, where military escalation produces diminishing returns for Tel Aviv.

On April 8th, the Zionist entity struck a demonic blow to the heart of Beirut, dropping 1,000 pound bombs in densely packed residential areas, killing untold civilians and injuring many more. One of Lebanon’s most dire mass-killings since the end of the 2024 Israeli aggression on the country, it marked the resumption of “Israel’s” avowedly genocidal invasion. With bombs raining down apace even as rare in-person talks between the pair are being carried out, Zionist Occupation Force-backed settlers are moving quickly to establish a permanent presence in the country’s south.

Whatever abrupt pause in the war on Iran is sustained by duelling blockades of the Strait Of Hormuz must be viewed in the context of the Zionist entity’s longstanding determination to annex Lebanese territory, in service of ‘Greater Israel’. Tel Aviv’s criminal incursion ignitedMarch 16th, Orwellianly dubbed by officials a “targeted ground operation against key targets.” It was not until10 days later that major news outlets deigned to call it an invasion.

OnMarch 23rd, Tel Aviv’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich – aself-proclaimed fascist – made “Israel’s” objectives unambiguously clear. He urged the ZOF to formally annex southern Lebanon. Since then, over a million people have been displaced, thousands killed, and civilian infrastructure razed en masse. While a significant chunk of the country is now occupied, the cost for Tel Aviv was substantial. Unrelenting Hezbollah fire producedheavy casualties and record equipment and vehicle losses, including 21 Merkava main battle tanks in a single day onMarch 26th.

On April 2nd, Israeli media openly advertised the impending ceasefire in the war on Iran. It was revealed the Zionist entity was preparing to intensify its air campaign against Lebanon, due to the enormous damage inflicted upon the ZOF by the Resistance. Tel Aviv reportedly planned to “[reduce] the current focus on Iran,” in order to support “Israeli ground forces attempting to seize Lebanese territory.” Were it not for hell being unleashed from the skies, the ZOF would currently be in big trouble.

OnApril 5th, the ZOF’s Northern Command chief admitted Tel Aviv had grossly overestimated damage inflicted upon Hezbollah during its October 2024 invasion of Lebanon. The entity’s political and military chiefs had long claimed the Resistance faction was obliterated by the illegal intervention. TheZOF estimated 70 – 80% of Hezbollah’s rocket capabilities were destroyed during the 2024 war. This reverie was comprehensively shattered by hundreds of the group’s projectiles targeting Tel Aviv daily, throughout the Zionist-American war on Iran.

No wonder that conflict is now on hold. Hezbollah remains a redoubtable adversary, which can independently, and in tandem with its Resistance comrades, thwart Tel Aviv’s annexation of Lebanese territory, andpermanently expel Zionist settlers from northern Palestine. This wreaks havoc with “Greater Israel’s” construction, which Benjamin Netanyahuopenly yearns to be his enduring political legacy, and literal ‘get out of jail free’ card. Hence, southern Lebanon must be annexed, and Hezbollah neutralised. But attempting to do so will, as before, end in fatal catastrophe.

‘Forced Expulsions’
In June 1982, Zionist militants invaded Lebanon, ostensibly to drive Palestinian freedom fighters away from the entity’s claimed northern border. Quickly, it became apparent ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft were the ZOF’s true goal. As a declassified July 1983 US National Intelligence Council assessment noted, ultra-Zionists then as now were calling for all-out annexation of Lebanon’s south. Which is precisely what temporarily came to pass, until Hezbollah drove the ZOF out decisively in 2000. Along the way, obvious lessons weren’t learned by Tel Aviv.

The Council correctly predicted the ZOF would create a puppet state in the south, to fulfill “some day-to-day governing tasks,” while “real power will remain in Israeli hands.” Despite judging the costs “of semi-permanent occupation” to be “not inconsequential,” they were perceived as “manageable”, due to the entity’s “proven track record” of suppressing “unrest” in territory it illegally occupies. “Forced expulsions, use of local surrogates, and ruthless counterintelligence operations” by the ZOF were forecast, which the NIC believed would negate “increasingly” hostile local opposition.

“If, as expected, the IDF gets a handle on the guerrillas in the next six – 12 months, domestic unease will decline,” the NIC concluded. This assessment couldn’t have been more wrong. Unmentioned by the Council, Hezbollah was quickly founded following the Zionist entity’s invasion. Inspired by the Islamic Revolution and assisted by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps, the group rapidly gained in strength, spreading revolutionary fervour among Lebanese citizens of every faith, until forcibly purging ZOF militants from Lebanon outright in May 2000.

Hezbollah’s success – repeated with an unprecedented battering of Zionist invasion forces in 2006 – inspired new generations of Resistance fighters, including Hamas. Today, the faction is the most popular and potent political and social force in Lebanon, embraced by citizens of every faith. Bashar Assad’s fall also did not, contrary to widely-held assumptions, make it remotely difficult for Iran to equip and coordinate with Hezbollah. A failure to comprehend these inconvenient truths has led the Zionist entity into disastrous ruin in Lebanon, yet again.

OnMarch 27th, ZOF chief of staff Eyal Zamir issued a grave warning during a security cabinet meeting. Namely, “Israel’s” military “is going to collapse in on itself,” due to “mounting operational demands and a deepening manpower shortage,” which could rapidly prove catastrophic. Already, an infantry battalion intended to be deployed to Lebanon had been redirected to the West Bank, to “keep the peace” as armed settlers carry out violent if not murderous attacks on Palestinians. The ZOF would’ve struggled to field further forces there.

Then on April 3rd, the ZOF openly admitted “its goal of disarming Hezbollah…is unrealistic, as it would require the military to launch a full-scale invasion of Lebanon,” which it wasn’t able to wage. In other words, Hezbollah was undefeated, and Lebanese territory couldn’t be stolen. Having been engaged in perpetual, multi-front war since October 7th, 2023, the exhausted Zionist entity lacked the muscle to achieve its Lebanese goals while alsotargeting Iran, dangerously contrary to intelligence, military and political forecasts.

Hezbollah’s Chief: ‘Lebanese Resistance Will Not Surrender, The Battlefield Will Speak’

‘Living Room’
“Israel” was so ruinously overextended attempting to wage war on the Resistance – without Ansar Allah even having fully joined the fight – it was reportedly considering an extraordinary, desperate solution. Namely, inviting Syria’sMI6-installed extremist government to battle Hezbollah. Ahmad al-Sharaa’s regime is maintained in power exclusively via a brutal, repressive domestic security and military apparatus. Forces could not be deployed in sufficient numbers to counter Hezbollah without risking major domestic upheaval. However, Israeli outlet Maarivreported on April 5th that this novel solution was being seriously considered:

“Only two actors want to fight Hezbollah – Israel and the new Syrian regime headed by al-Sharaa. According to Israeli officials, this is an intersecting interest, even if not an alliance in the classical sense. As far as Israel is concerned, this is a regime that hates Hezbollah, sees it as an enemy, and may actually become a partner of interests in the Lebanese arena…Understandings between Israel and Syria will be formed.”

Under the auspices of these “understandings”, the ZOF would “take over southern Lebanon, while the Syrians will act in northern Lebanon against Hezbollah.” However, the Empire reportedly “very much [preferred] not to reach such a scenario.” After all, it would be a deeply hazardous Faustian bargain, imperilling al-Sharaa’s already brittle rule. While he and his army of ISIS fighters may detest Hezbollah, the overwhelming majority of Syrians reject an alliance with “Israel” at a time when local Resistance elements are growing in strength.

A key source of al-Sharaa’s domestic unpopularity is his relentless, servile quest for cordial relations with Tel Aviv. Behind-closed-doors talks that began upon his December 2024 seizure of power culminatedthis January with the signing of a “joint mechanism”. Through it, Syria and “Israel” were to share intelligence, and peaceably resolve grievances old and new. This astonishing capitulation by al-Sharaa laid the foundations for formal normalisation of relations between the two, which successive Syrian governmentssteadfastly refused ever since “Israel’s” creation.

However, during al-Sharaa’sflying visit to London in late March, he revealed how despite positive “direct and indirect dialogue,” the Zionist entity “changed its mind at the last minute,” and normalization remains unforthcoming. The reasons for this sudden change of heart weren’t stated. One explanation could be that for all al-Sharaa’s eager subjugation of his country and government to “Israel”, he opposes Netanyahu’s insatiable expansionism. In September 2025, al-Sharaa cautioned other countries in West Asia could be affected by Tel Aviv’s deranged “Greater Israel” designs.

With Hezbollah supposedly dismantled, and Syria at last transformed into a doting Anglo-American puppet state, “Greater Israel” could be advanced without hindrance – or so Netanyahu thought. In reality, the “great opportunity” about which he boasted from the Golan Heights following Bashar al-Assad’s fall has become a dangerous trap. While al-Sharaa’s contempt for Hezbollah makes for a marriage of convenience, relying on Syria to deal with the group would inevitably boomerang on both parties spectacularly.

As history old and new amply shows, the Empire and its Zionist proxy underestimate Ansar Allah, Hezbollah, Iran, and the wider Resistance at their immense peril – but persist in doing so. Over and again across decades, the same failed strategies have been applied without success, and aren’t subsequently revised. The Empire’s crushing past defeats by the Resistance are spun as victories, and/or promptly forgotten about. All along though, in the real world, the Zionist-American military machine is ever-weakened, and Palestine’s long-overdue liberation grows irresistibly closer.

(Al Mayadeen)

From Orinoco Tribune via This RSS Feed.

How Israel stole Abraham