news

Lol, how have I not seen this on here yet https://www.newsweek.com/china-mocks-us-9-11-anniversary-cartoon-1826083

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/0MZ03

Early morning cope from me:

Business Insider reports: Ukrainian commander says he'd be dead if he fought exactly how the US and its allies taught him. By Sophia Ankel.

Lol. Lmao even.

A Ukrainian commander trained by US, British, and Polish soldiers told the Financial Times that if he followed their advice exactly he would be killed.

Weasley journalists doing wordplay to soften the words of the dude they're quoting a few lines lower.

Western allies of Ukraine have offered training to thousands of troops in the hope of steeling them for battle against Russia's invasion force.

Remember, they're only getting less than a month of training before being herded into minefields.

But some have said that the principles they learn from NATO countries often do not pan out on the battlefield.

Obviously

"If I only did what [western militaries] taught me, I'd be dead," said a special-forces commander in Ukraine's 78th regiment who spoke to the FT. The outlet didn't give his full name, referring to him as Suleman.

Shame.

During his training, Suleman said he was offered "some good advice" but also "bad advice ... like their way of clearing trenches. I told them: 'Guys, this is going to get us killed.'"

Serious shame they didn't follow the advice.

He isn't the only Ukrainian soldier who has spoken out against the Western approach to instruction.

There's also western mercs that have gone over there and said the western approach doesn't train them for fighting an actual war.

A senior intelligence sergeant in the 41st Mechanized Brigade, who goes by the name "Dutchman," told openDemocracy last month: "I don't want to say anything against our partners, but they don't quite understand our situation and how we are fighting."

Good.

The soldiers believe that instructors have never fought a war like Russia's invasion of Ukraine — the first clash of two heavily-armed militaries for decades.

And they would be correct.

Most Western forces have experience of very different conflicts, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan where their side had huge advantages in resources and far superior technology.

And then still losing to them

"We need people to understand how to effectively clear trenches, enter them, how to throw grenades effectively, how not to trip on booby traps, to understand what grenades the [Russians] throw — essentially to understand the enemy," Dutchman told openDemocracy.

Pretty common-sense shit that the western powers lack.

In some cases, Ukrainian soldiers have decided to ditch their training completely because it proved ineffective on during their slow-moving counteroffensive, The New York Times reported earlier this year.

Good on them for prioritizing not dying a pitiful death of a one-shot demining device.

A report published by the UK-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) earlier this month argued that Western nations should stop training Ukrainians to become NATO-style officers.

Holy shit, there's actually British intelligence with something smart to say?

Drills should focus on the conditions on the battlefield Ukrainians are fighting on, RUSI warned, instead of NATO-standard norms because it could increase the risk of things going wrong during live operations.

Practice like you'd play. Novel concept.

NATO forces also train Ukrainian soldiers to overwhelm their enemies with the type of firepower that it does not possess.

And will never possess in this war.

About 63,000 Ukrainian troops have been trained in the West as of August, openDemocracy reported.

May god have mercy on their souls.

The 35-day crash course basic soldier training is mostly held in Germany and the UK, an unnamed source involved in the process told the outlet.

Oh they heard about the complaints about how less than a month of training before deployment is akin to murdering these poor bastards, so they revised the training to be more than a month.

Barely.

Brazil: Far-right Activist to Serve 17 Years for Coup Attempt

He is part of a group of 1,390 accused of the riots that took place on January 8, when Bolsonaro's supporters attacked the headquarters of the three branches.

On Thursday, the Brazilian Supreme Court sentenced Aecio Lucio Costa Pereira, a right-wing activist who participated in the coup attempt against President Lula da Silva, to 17 years in prison.

He is part of a group of 1,390 accused of the riots that took place on January 8, when supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro attacked the headquarters of the three branches in Brasilia.

Costa Pereira's guilt was declared unanimously and proclaimed by the Supreme Court President Rosa Weber. The events occurred eight days after the inauguration of Lula, who clearly defeated Bolsonaro in the October 2022 presidential elections.

However, this far-right politician did not recognize the result of the elections and encouraged his supporters to protest.

The Rapporteur Judge Alexandre de Moraes accepted the accusations of illicit association, violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d'état, qualified damages, and destruction of public property. He suggested a sentence of 17 years in prison and was supported by judges Edson Fachin, Luiz Fux, Jose Toffoli, Carmen Rocha, Gilmar Mendes, and Rosa Weber.

Judge Cristiano Zanin, Lula's former personal lawyer, asked to reduce the sentence to 15 years, while Judge Luis Roberto Barroso set it at ten years.

The discrepancy was opened by the reviewing judge Kassio Nunes Marques, who dismissed some of the charges, such as the accusation of a coup d'état, which in his opinion could not be applied since Lula's overthrow was not consummated. Judge Andre Mendonca spoke in a similar vein.

Both Nunes Marques and Mendonca have a clearly conservative profile and are the only ones who reached the Supreme Court thanks to Bolsonaro, who proposed them precisely because of their alignment with his political ideas.

Why can’t US citizens go to DPRK regardless of US policy against it? Isn’t it up to DPRK who they let in? I’ve tried to find this answer and the closest I’ve come is that the tour groups (which is pretty much how you have to enter) are refusing US passport holders. Is this the answer? Are any US citizens still traveling there secretly? (Besides the defecting soldier guy)

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/nlMaE

New slop drop from New York slimes

Ukraine Says It Has Retaken Strategic Village Near Bakhmut The small village of Klishchiivka is the second settlement in eastern Ukraine that Kyiv’s forces say they have retaken in three days. By Matthew Mpoke Bigg, Cassandra Vinograd and Vivek Shankar

Here's a shot of the "Strategic Village" from the article.

There ain't shit there.

It's a tiny blip a bit south of the town of Artyomovsk that's pretty much open ground and not worth spending significant numbers of lives defending. The article says its a good spot that can let the Ukrainian artillery take pot shots at any Russian forces moving to/from the city towards the rear but those pot shots are going to be taken far away with the Village being use as buffer space.

The rest of the article is a fucking waste of space as it's all about how ukraine's grain is necessary to save starving brown people in West Asia and Africa and how evil Russia is for trying to stop food from going to the poor starving people.

Except it fucking hasn't, it's gone to the fucking western powers to make their fucking treats and that's fucking why Russia broke the grain deal in the first place

IIPPE 2023: part one - the end of US hegemony?

By Michael Roberts, taking us through a variety of presentations.

The annual conference of the International Initiative for the Promotion of Political Economy (IIPPE) took place last week in Madrid. The IIPPE conference brings together leftist economists, mainly post-Keynesians and Marxists, from around the world to present papers and panels on a range of subjects. Most of this year’s near 400 attendees are academics, students, researchers or lecturers. Given that the conference was in Madrid, there was a large turnout of Spanish and Portuguese speakers and papers on issues in Latin America.

...

Let me start first with the subject and debate in the session that I participated in. The session was called Imperialism, hegemony and the next war – a grand and ambitious title. I was first in with short slide presentation entitled, Profitability and waves of globalisation.

I argued that globalisation, defined as the expansion of trade and capital flows globally, took place in waves i.e periods of fast expanding trade and capital globally and then periods where trade and capital flows fall off and countries revert to trade and capital barriers. I reckoned that we could distinguish three waves of globalisation, from about 1850-80; from about 1944-70; and the largest from the mid-1980s to end of the 20th century.

What drives these waves? I argued that they could be tied to a change in the profitability of capital. In each of the periods before these waves, the profitability of capital in the major economies fell significantly. In order to counteract this fall in national profit rates, the leading capitalist economies looked to expand foreign trade and capital exports in order to gain extra profit from the less technologically developed and cheaper labour economies of what we now call, in shorthand, the ‘Global South’.

...

And the decline of the hegemonic US economy relative to the rising economies of China, India and East Asia has increased. This relative decline was taken up in the next paper by Maria Ivanova (Goldsmiths University). She pointed out that the US runs a significant and long-lasting trade deficit with the rest of the world. It is only able to pay for this because of its monopoly issuance of the US dollar, which is the major transaction and reserve currency in the world. However, the dollar’s hegemony is gradually weakening and now there are attempts by other economic powers, like the BRICS group (increasing in size), to reduce their reliance on the dollar and replace it with alternatives.

...

Sergio Camera from UAM Mexico presented us with a battery of data and analysis to show that the US economy is in a structural crisis, still gradual maybe, but nevertheless showing clear signs that US capital’s ability to expand the productive resources and to sustain profitability is declining. This explains its intensified effort to strangle and contain China’s rising economic strength and so maintain its hegemony in the world economic order.

...

Sean Starrs from Kings College, London then provided a refreshing counter-balance to the hype that US imperialism and the dollar is soon about to lose its dominance in the world economy. In his presentation, he pointed out that most of China’s key exports were made by foreign companies (70%), not Chinese companies; and that most of the profits from China’s exports were realized in the imperialist bloc, not in China (this is something that G Carchedi and I also found in our work on the economics of modern imperialism).

Moreover, China is not yet a serious contender to the US in the technology industries globally, despite the hype. The US remains the dominant techno power and also holds most of the personal wealth in the world (45% unchanged in the last two decades).

The discussion in the session revolved round how to balance these trends. Is the US losing its hegemonic power or not? Are the BRICS+ in a position to replace US hegemony in the next decade or so? Will these rivalries lead to major military conflicts?

In my view, while there has been a relative decline in US economic and political hegemony since the golden days of the 1950s and 1960s, from the 1970s onwards that decline has been gradual and possible challenges to US hegemony eg: Japan in the 1970s; Europe in the 1990s; and now China (+BRICS); have not and will not succeed in replacing it.

I likened the situation using the analogy of the decline and collapse of the ancient Roman Empire in the 3rd century ACE. Some scholars argue that the Roman Empire collapsed because of outside forces ie invasions and rising contender states (ie BRICS?). But others argue, rightly in my view, that the real cause was the economic disintegration of the dominant slave economy within Rome. Roman conquests had ended in the late 2nd century ACE and there were not enough slaves to sustain the economy so that productivity dropped off and eventually weakened financial support for the military. Rising and extreme inequality in Rome was a symptom of this decline and eventual collapse.

In the 21st century, globalisation has fallen away and regionalisation is emerging. Inequality of wealth and income in the US and the G7 is at extremes. But above all, the profitability of capital in the imperialist bloc is near all-time lows. The collapse of the Roman Empire also ended the dominance of the slave-owning mode of production, to be eventually replaced by a feudal system. The increased internal disintegration of the US economy could not only end its global hegemony, but also usher in a new mode of production.

I must be seeing things, no, this cannot be. Earlier this year, english football club Chelsea FC paid 88 million pounds to ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk (No, they do not play in Donetsk) for an ukrainian kid called Mykhailo Mudryk. Performaces aside (he's terrible), the price tag is extremely sus. I don't know man, I must be seeing things. It's like when Germany gave Leopard MBTs to Ukraine, 14 of a variant and 88 of another.

COINCIDENCE? I'm losing my fucking mind here.

The Guardian: UK ‘mortgage meltdown’ looms amid ‘terrifying’ growth in arrears

However, while homeowners were more likely to make cuts to other spending before falling behind with mortgage payments, buy-to-let landlords may take a different view, he said.

“We are more likely to see arrears in the buy-to-let sector, where landlords face a unique set of challenges. If a landlord finds their mortgage is no longer affordable, or the rent no longer covers their outgoings, they only have two choices – sell or default. If they opt to sell, they may have to wait up to a year for the tenancy to end, unless they are willing to sell with a tenancy in place, which is more difficult. “Landlords are also more likely to opt to default than those struggling with a mortgage secured against their main residence, so this is an area to watch,” he added.

I have been really busy and work lately, so I've been holding off on listening to the new season of Blowback because it's not a podcast you can casually listen to and it will make me mad, which will interrupt my work. That being said, how is it that I just now learning that Benazir Bhutto and her admin were instrumental in the creation of the Taliban? Honestly, it makes her assassination very funny.

For your dunking pleasure. https://truthout.org/articles/is-brics-an-anti-colonial-formation-worth-cheering-from-the-left-far-from-it/

Ctrl-F - "authoritarian" - four matches.

Ctrl-F - "autocrac" - five matches

(Edit - typo)