ALB
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They are not just reformists but war-mongers leading the charge to revive German militarism.
“The German Green party, which has its roots in the peace movement, has been one of the most avid supporters of more weapons being sent to Ukraine. The party was also actively backing a decision to send Leopard 2 main battle tanks, which the German government approved this week.”
German foreign minister: ‘We are fighting a war with Russia’
More details of corruption in the Ukraine regime:
https://www.vox.com/world/2023/1/24/23569257/ukraine-corruption-officials-resignation-purge
And we are having to pay higher energy bills to prop up this corrupt regime.
Yes, it’s all coming out now in the pro-NATO media what anyone informed about the Ukraine regime already knew from the start — that widespread institutionalised corruption was an integral part of it. Despite this we were told sob stories about “poor little democratic Ukraine” needing to be helped and that we should be prepared to make sacrifices, eg higher energy bills, to do this.
Something is only being done now about it because the US, which is financing the Ukraine government, has become worried about where its money has been going. If they hadn’t brought pressure Zelensky (and the tame pro-NATO media) would have continued to let it pass’
I didn’t know the JWs were banned in Russia. They seem a pretty harmless group of religious nutters. Nutters yes but hardly “extremists”. Had an amusing argument with them when they called round a few weeks ago. Easily won the argument.
Authoritarian states don’t like them because they refuse military service (as they did in the days of the old USSR and even in Nazi Germany) and I suppose the Putin government as defender of the Orthodox Christian faith doesn’t like them because they attack Orthodox Christianity. It is probably true that they themselves don’t care whether where they live is part of Russia or Ukraine since they are not interested in states and politics.
Yaron Brook assumes that the capitalists who have left Britain are “entrepreneurs” as those who invest in the production of wealth but most of them will be financiers whose connection with wealth production is pretty precarious. They are not even employers of workers who produce wealth. I see in fact that his own business was “asset management” ie investing the riches of the rich on the stock exchange, etc. So a financier himself.
According to this he is a follower of Ayn Rand and so a bit of a nutter:
Although he’s a prize bastard the leader of the Wagner gang of mercenaries has made a telling response to the US government’s plan to list them as a criminal gang:
“Entrepreneur and founder of the Wagner private military company Yevgeny Prigozhin ironically commented on the US statement that the country is going to impose sanctions against his PMC due to its qualification as a “serious transnational criminal organization.” This is reported by his press service in Telegram.
“FINALLY, NOW PMC WAGNER AND THE AMERICANS ARE COLLEAGUES,” THE BUSINESSMAN SAID.
According to Prigozhin, the relationship between his PMC and the American side can now be called “showdown of criminal clans.”
https://earlybulletins.news/politics/226765.html
Yes, (like all armies) the US army is a gang of mercenaries.
The Labour Party is now openly pro-capitalist and proud of it. In a declaration of political bankruptcy Starmer is on record as saying:
“When Labour held a conference for business leaders at Canary Wharf, one of London’s financial hubs, last month, Starmer said the party wasn’t just pro-business but “proudly pro-business”.
He also told world capitalist business leaders and politicians at Davos:
“that ‘the British economy will be open for business again’ under a Labour government.”
https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/959345/is-labour-now-the-party-of-business?amp
Despite all this, leftwing union leaders like Lynch and Graham will still be calling, even if lukewarmly, for workers to vote for the Labour Party in the coming general election. They must know that they will live to regret this as, sooner or later, they will come into conflict with a Labour government over their members’ pay.
The business elite in Britain too want a change of government as the Tories have run out of steam. They are quite prepared to let Labour, as their alternating government party, have a go instead.
Workers should have nothing to do with this. They shouldn’t vote for British capitalism’s other party. In fact they would be well-advised to get their unions to disaffiliate from the Labour Party and, in the absence of this, contract out of paying the political level (as we do).
It appears that Russian-speakers are not the only linguistic minority being discriminated against by the Ukraine regime. Hungarian-speakers seem to be getting it too:
Govt official: Anti-Hungarian decisions, actions in W Ukraine unacceptable
People are missing the point the New Scientist writer was making — that the worst case scenario of business as usual and emissions continuing at their 2014 level is now off the table, precisely because business has not continued as usual as governments have taken some steps to try to reduce them.
In other words, average global temperature will not rise to 5 degrees about the pre-industrial level. It still might rise to 3 degrees above it, but that’s not the same. Even so, as he says, a “warming of around 3°C by the end of the century” is “still dangerous, but not hellish.”
To accept that the worst case scenario is not going to happen doesn’t weaken our case against capitalism that, by its nature as involving a competitive struggle for profits between capitalist enterprises from different states, it is unable to deal with global warming and the climate changes it brings in a rational way, and that only socialism, as a world of common ownership and production directly to satisfy people’s needs, can.
It does, however, weaken the case of XR and others that the problem is so dangerous that we should forget about socialism and make trying to deal with it (in effect within capitalism) the over-riding priority.
Apparently, the situation is bad but not as dire as is sometimes claimed:
Here’s is an extract from the article:
“Ten years ago there was a genuine fear that we were heading forcatastrophic warming of between 4°C and 5°C by 2100. Today, those worst-case scenarios are no longer plausible.
The story goes back to 2014, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. To make this baggy monster tractable, the scientists boiled themdown to four: one very high scenario, one very low and two in between. The very high one assumed that there would be no climate action whatsoever and that use of fossil fuels would continue on an upward trajectory until 2100. It became known as the business as usual scenario, or BAU.
BAU quickly garnered more scientific and media attention than the other scenarios, in part because it extrapolated the situation at the time, but also because it made for sensational scientific papers and apocalyptic newspaper headlines. A BAU world would have been a “truly catastrophic hellscape of a planet”, says climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of NGO Berkeley Earth in California.
In the years since, however, the world has changed dramatically. Progress on renewable energy technology and implementation of climate policies have bent the emissions curve downwards towards warming of around 3°C by the end of the century. Still dangerous, but not hellish. And further progress isn’t just possible, but promised. Recent analyses show that, if countries achieve the net-zero pledges that they have already put on the table, warming will stay under 2°C.
As a result, the BAU scenario is no longer even remotely plausible, says Roger Pielke, an environmental scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Nor is the next-worse of the four. “It looks like the apocalyptic scenarios, as of today, are off the table,” he says.
If anything, says Hausfather, BAU was implausible in the first place. It wasn’t just a conservative extrapolation of current trends, but a turbocharged one that assumed, for example, that the use of coal would increase fivefold by 2100, with no climate mitigation action whatsoever.
And yet, the now-obsolete BAU scenario continues to dominate scientific discussions of our climate future. According to a recent analysis by Pielke, the two most recent reports by the IPCC actually increased their emphasis on that worst-case scenario.This bias is also reflected in scientific journals. An analysis by Pielke’s colleague Matthew Burgess found that in the aquatic conservation literature, over 90 per cent of papers published between 2015 and 2022 use the BAU scenario – and about a third use it exclusively. It leaks out into the news media too. “The picture that we paint in terms of science, assessment, journalism and policy is dominated by the most extreme scenario,” says Pielke.
This puts climate scientists on the horns of a dilemma. Do they admit BAU was never really that plausible and risk deniers saying “we told you so” and spreading further muck about climate modelling? Or do they keep pushing BAU and risk it becoming obvious they are hawking a straw man, opening the door to… deniers saying “we told you so”? ”
We face the same dilemma — of seeming to argue that capitalism (responsible for climate change) is not as bad as some people claim (because it can and is doing — in fact has to do — something about it).
Yes, looks like the Ukrainian lie machine has been caught out again. In any event, either he knew what had happened or his suggestion shows that there is some healthy scepticism even in Ukraine about what their lie machine comes up with.
Just heard on the news that a Ukrainian helicopter has crashed on a nursery. Be interesting to see what story they cook up to explain who caused that.
Here, for anyone who wants to go further into Marxism and Law, is a Party member (at the time) arguing with an SWPer on Pashukanis’s theory of law:
https://legalform.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/warrington-standing-pashukanis-on-his-head.pdf
For the record, here is the viewpoint of the exiled (on release from gaol in a prisoner swap) leader of the main opposition party in Ukraine (now banned) He says they’re a lot of people in Ukraine who want a peaceful settlement. That could be true but they will have to keep their heads down as calling for a settlement with Russia is a crime.
Anyway, here it is:
