I’m poosting

Update for February 27th

Events

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Europe

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TeleSUR: Europe’s Energy Crisis Likely To Stay, Warn Analysts

People’s Daily: EU agrees on 10th package of sanctions against Russia

People’s Daily: Ukraine crisis brings EU’s strategic autonomy back into spotlight

Open Democracy: What the SNP leadership race says about the party’s post-Sturgeon future

Open Democracy: Government is ‘monitoring’ human rights lawyers, minister admits

Immigration minister Robert Jenrick made the extraordinary statement during a debate in Parliament on Monday about far-right protests in Liverpool, after claiming that human right lawyers “exploit and abuse our laws”.

Open Democracy: Home Office paying asylum seekers £1 an hour to clean detention centres

People’s Daily: Germany mum on Nord Stream explosions amid U.S. sabotage claims

Keep that tongue on that boot.

TeleSUR: German Inflation Rises to 8.7 Pct in January: Destatis

German inflation picked up again slightly to 8.7 percent in January after declining for two months, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) said on Wednesday. Energy and food continued to be the main price drivers.

Despite government relief measures, including a price cap for electricity, natural gas and district heating, overall energy prices in Germany in January were still up 23.1 percent year-on-year, according to Destatis.

That’s so weird!

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East Asia and Oceania

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Monthly Review: U.S. sends troops to Taiwan after general threatens war with China by 2025

WSWS: Amid mounting mass protests against IMF austerity, Sri Lanka’s autocratic president cancels local elections

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Central Asia and the Middle East

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TeleSUR: Türkiye Delivers Policy Rate Cut Amid Earthquake Recovery

People’s Daily: Erdogan holds phone talks with Russian, Ukrainian presidents

Monthly Review: Syria just suffered a devastating earthquake but Israeli bombing does not stop

MEE: ‘Earthquake diplomacy’: Assad’s regional isolation diminishes following Oman visit

Taking full advantage of a natural disaster, the Syrian president presses his advantage in his second regional visit in 12 years

TeleSUR: Palestinians Go on General Strike to Reject the Nablus Massacre

MEE: Israeli currency falls to three-year low as judicial reforms edge closer

WSWS: Banks burn in Lebanon amid collapse of state institutions

Lebanese banks were set aflame last week as the country’s increasingly desperate people took to the streets of Beirut in protest as the Lebanese pound fell to a new all-time low of 80,000 against the dollar. This came amid bank strikes and the government’s failure to take any measures to alleviate the long-running economic crisis.

MEE: US judge rules Afghan central bank assets cannot be awarded to 9/11 victims

TeleSUR: Earthquake of Magnitude 6.8 Strikes Eastern Tajikistan

“Little or no population” will be exposed to landslides from the quake, the USGS said, adding that the epicenter appeared to be located in Upper Badakhshan, a province bordering Afghanistan and China.

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Africa

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MEE: African Union condemns ‘racial statements’ from Tunisian president

The African Union on Saturday condemned comments by the Tunisian President Kais Saied suggesting people from sub-Saharan Africa in the country were linked to criminality.

Open Democracy: How migrants are changing the male face of Ghana’s gold mines

I work with the MIDEQ (‘Migration for Development & Equality’) project, and our research shows that women are migrating independently between countries in the Global South and doing male-dominated work such as mining and construction. It is evident that Chinese women are moving to Ghana for better job opportunities in mining – challenging the assumption that mining is for men.

Africa News: Algeria dissolves pro-democracy group amid wider crackdown

Africa News: Deadly Chad protests: death toll now estimated at 128

On October 20, 2022, opposition demonstrations against the continuation in power for two more years of the transitional president, General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, had been repressed in blood in N’Djamena, the capital, and in other cities of the country.

The authorities had initially announced that around fifty people had died, mainly young people shot dead in the capital by the forces of order, before re-evaluating this figure at 73 deaths. However, NGOs had denounced the underestimated figures.

Africa News: Burkina Faso holds reburial ceremony for Thomas Sankara

Africa News: Burkina Faso to recruit 5,000 soldiers to fight Jihadists

Africa News: Africa’s largest film festival kicks off in Burkina Faso

Africa News: Cyclone Freddy slams eastern Mozambique with exceptional rainfall

Africa News: Moroccans struggle to secure basic needs as prices rocket

Africa News: Nigerians keep watch for vote’s outcome after delays

MEE: Shadow games on the Red Sea as scramble for Sudan’s ports intensifies

Strange things are happening along the Sudanese coastline.

Foreign operatives appear to be living on small islands in the Red Sea, patrolling the waters around them and banishing the locals.

Billion-dollar deals are being made and then unmade. The whole world is coming to African shores, with dreams of power and profit occupying their thoughts. In the shadows, away from prying eyes, a game is being played.

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North America

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Naked Capitalism: People Got Used to Higher Prices and Are Outspending even Raging Inflation. They Don’t Want this Thing to Land

People want to get on with their lives, it seems. Their mood has improved. They’ve gotten used to living with high inflation. They got raises or got higher-paying jobs. Gasoline prices have plunged since the peak in mid-2022, and that matters a lot because it’s the most in-your-face inflation along with food inflation. They might still gripe about higher prices, but you live only once?

And so they spent money left and right in January, and they outspent even this raging inflation. We already saw surprising strength from new and used vehicle sales coming out of the auto industry, and from the retailers’ point of view earlier this month, which showed that consumers were in no mood for a landing.

Today, we got inflation-adjusted (or “real”) consumer spending trends for January from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) on durable goods, nondurable goods, and services is adjusted for inflation based on the PCE price index, which blew out.

WSWS: US Fed interest rate hikes far from over

Common Dreams: Biden Administration’s 517,000 New Jobs Can’t Overcome Inherent Economic Burdens

Naked Capitalism: One Texas Judge Will Decide Fate of Abortion Pill Used by Millions of American Women

STATnews: ‘A slippery slope’: A looming nationwide abortion pill ban could undermine the entire drug approval system

People’s Daily: Over 100,000 homes, businesses in California suffering power outages due to winter storm

Climate Change News: US offers $550m to tackle pollution in poor neighbourhoods

People’s Daily: Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 accounts for 85 pct new COVID-19 cases in U.S.

Jacobin: Strikes Were Up Significantly Last Year

New numbers show that the number of strikes and the number of workers on strike both went up last year. Labor is still incredibly weak, but more workers walking off the job is a very good thing.

Common Dreams: We Are Here: What If They Gave A Hate Party and Nobody Came?

Because God knows haters gonna hate, the sorry likes of neo-Nazis and The Goyim Defense League declared Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, a National Day of Hate, per orders to, “Shock the masses with banner drops, stickers, fliers, and graffiti.” Instead, law enforcement and faith leaders prepped to confront brown-shirted storm-troopers improbably met only with glad defiant crowds proclaiming “Love Not Hate,” “A Day of Resolve,” “We Are Here.” So okay. Maybe there’s a sliver of hope for us.

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South America

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TeleSUR: Over 16,000 Haitian Migrants Deported From Dominican Republic

Monthly Review: Fidel Castro’s legacy lives on as Cuba keeps sending ‘Doctors, not Bombs’ all across the World

Canadian DImension: Protests in Cuba vs. Peru: a case study in Canadian hypocrisy

TeleSUR: Cuban FM Calls for Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp Shut Down

Can they do a sequel to the USSR please? It’s been 30 years

Normally by this time in the winter season we’ve had a few inches of snow accumulation and maybe one big storm.

So far we have had less than one single inch of snow total and it melted in 45 minutes.

:agony-acid: we are so fucked I hate being a climate scientist

I thought I’d start off today with a piece by, of all places, Common Dreams.

:bloomer:

Ukraine and The Tunnel at the End of the Light

“Light at the end of the tunnel” was an iconic phrase used by the warmongers who kept the U.S. in Vietnam long after the War had been lost. The implication was that insiders could see through the fog of war and know that things were getting better. It was a lie.

In January 1966, long before the military height of the War, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told President Johnson that the U.S. had a one-out-of-three chance of winning on the battlefield. But Johnson, like Eisenhower and Kennedy before him, and Nixon after him, didn’t want to be the first American president to lose a war. So, he ginned up a simplistic lie and “soldiered on.”

The lie was blown by the Tet Offensive in January 1968. More than 100 U.S. military installations were attacked in a simultaneous nationwide assault that stunned the U.S. The broadcaster, Walter Cronkite, then “the most trusted man in America,” bellowed on national television, “I thought we were supposed to be winning this damned thing.” It was the beginning of the end of the U.S.’ murderous and failed occupation.

We’re now facing another light-and-tunnel event, this time in Ukraine. Only now, it’s not the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s the tunnel at the end of the light. What do we mean by that?

Until now, it’s been all light. Remember when the scrappy Ukrainian forces were kicking the barbarian Russian hordes’ asses? When every development betrayed the Russians’ clod-footed strategy, its soldiers’ bad morale, its army’s poor provisioning and worse leadership, and the perilous political situation for Putin back home? The testosterone was flowing. The bravado was intoxicating. The exceptionalism was sublimely seductive. It was only a matter of time and pluck and determination before Ukraine would bloody the bully’s nose and show it what the West was made of.

Remember?

No more.

You can prosecute a war for only so long on the strength of smoke and mirrors, delusions and illusions, lies and press releases. Eventually, however, reality catches up with you. The thuggishly propagandized American citizenry couldn’t know it, but that catching up began in the first weeks of the War and has only accelerated since.

Within the first week of the War, Russia had destroyed Ukraine’s air force and air defenses. By the second week, it had taken out most of Ukraine’s armories and weapons depots. Over following weeks and months, it systematically demolished artillery shipped in from former Warsaw Pact, now NATO, countries in Eastern Europe. It dismantled the country’s transportation and fuel supply systems. It has recently taken out most of the country’s electrical infrastructure.

The Ukrainian army has lost an estimated 150,000 troops, a pace more than 140 times the rate of U.S. losses in Vietnam. This, at a time when 10 million of its formerly 36 million people have fled the country. The military is down to dragooning 16-year-old boys and 60-year-old men to man the barricades. It cannot get replacement ammunition. Russia has knocked out some 90% of Ukraine’s drones, leaving it largely sightless. Delivery times for the tanks that are the hoped-for “game changer” are running into months and years. Not that that will matter.

Remember all the other failed “game changers”? The M777 howitzers and the Stryker armored fighting vehicles? The HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and the PATRIOT air defense systems? All were going to turn the tide at one time. All have proven impotent to stop Russia from seizing 20% of Ukraine’s territory and annexing it and its people to Russia.

The U.S. lost the economic war, as well. Remember Joe Biden’s delusional prediction that the U.S. would see that “the ruble will be reduced to rubble”? And that “the most stringent sanctions regime in history” was going to “weaken” Russia, perhaps even leading to Putin’s overthrow? Most of it backfired, badly. Last year, the ruble reached its highest exchange rate in history. Russia’s 2022 trade surplus of $227 billion was up 86% from 2021. The U.S.’ trade deficit over the same period rose 12.2%, and is approaching $1 trillion.

As a result of all of the above and more, the tide of insider opinion has turned against the War. Senior officials in Europe are talking openly about how the losses are unsustainable and they need to get back to security architectures that prevailed before the poisoned CIA-supported coup in Maidan in 2014. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently let slip that “It will be very, very difficult to eject the Russians from all of occupied Ukraine in the next year. The Washington Post warned recently that Ukraine faced a “critical moment” in the war, belaboring the fact that U.S. support was not limitless and would soon be reached. Hint. Hint.

The Rand Corporation, one of the U.S.’ best-connected strategic whisperers, just published a report stating that “The consequences of a long war far outweigh the benefits.” It explicitly states that the U.S. needs to husband its resources for its more important upcoming conflict with China. Newsweek headlined that “Joe Biden Offered Vladimir Putin 20 Percent of Ukraine to End War.” It also revealed that “Nearly 90 percent of the world isn’t following us on Ukraine.” Vast swaths of Latin American, Africa, and Asia refuse to support the U.S. in its demand for sanctions against Russia.

These are not “Light at the end of the tunnel” divinations. Quite the contrary. If there’s a common thread running through it all it is the sickening recognition that the war is lost, militarily, economically, and diplomatically, that there is no plausible scenario in which those losses will be turned around by soldiering on, and that what is needed now is a hide-the-loss, get-out-any-way-you-can, face-saving exit strategy.

That will not be available, either. That’s where the tunnel at the end of the light comes into play.

Even before the U.S. and its NATO puppets undertook the War, the rest of the world—and that means most of the world—was congealing itself into an anti-Western economic and security bloc. Led by China and its strategic ally, Russia, that bloc includes more than a dozen trade and security organizations. Those include the BRICS confederation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, working explicitly to devise multi-polar institutions to stand up to the U.S.’ unipolar hegemonic model.

It includes the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a security compact made up of leading nations from east, central, and south Asia, including China, Russia, India, and soon, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. It is explicitly working to devise measures to prevent the kind of predatory military assaults the U.S. carried out against Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Afghanistan.

The organizing economic engine behind these efforts it is China’s Belt and Road Initiative. BRI is a dizzyingly ambitious plan to connect Asia and more than 100 nations with 21st Century economic infrastructure, everything from highways and high-speed rail lines, to power generation, energy pipelines, communication systems, cities, ports, and more. It is critical to understand why BRI poses such daunting challenges to U.S. supremacy in the world.

Infrastructure is so powerful because it spins off a vast, unimaginable array of secondary, and tertiary economic benefits. It was the railroads in the nineteenth century that bound the U.S. together as the world’s first continental-scale market. Manufacturers could produce for a larger market, and, therefore, at larger scale, and, therefore, at lower cost, than could producers anywhere else on earth.

The railroads made the U.S. the largest market in the world for iron, steel, machine tools, grading equipment, farm equipment, and scores of other commercial and industrial products essential to a modern industrial economy. The U.S. began the 1800s with 1.5% of the world’s GDP. It ended the century with 19% of a four-times larger number, making it the largest economy in the world.

Similarly, automobiles. People think it was Henry Ford and mass production that made the Twentieth Century “The American Century.” In fact, it was the build-out of millions of miles of roads and, later, interstates, without which automobiles would have remained expensive playthings of the wealthy. Those roads stitched the country together into an asphalt network that allowed individual mobility, by virtually anybody, anywhere, down to every street address in the country. The world had never seen anything like it.

The secondary and tertiary economic effects were astounding, everything from the world’s largest markets for steel, glass, plastics, and rubber, to gasoline, diesel, highway construction on a continental scale, repair shops and drive-ins, to the entire panoply of culture we know of as suburbia. The Twentieth Century was the Century of the Automobile. The infrastructure the U.S. built to make it possible was the major reason—at least economically—that the U.S. led the world for most of that century.

China is now proposing to do the same for Asia in the Twenty-First Century, but on a much larger scale. It is leading an infrastructure build-out that will dwarf Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system. It will serve most of the five billion people in Eurasia, thirty TIMES more than the 150 million people Eisenhower’s project helped.