PJShannon
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“Germany wants to save the Nordstream project for a gas pipeline under the Baltic from Russia to Germany, while the US wants to scupper the project.”
This may give the impression that Nord Stream is an on-paper proposal only. In fact the pipelines are already built. Nord Stream 1 was completed and onstream in 2012, and Nord Stream 2 was completed in Sept 2021, but NS2 certification was suspended by Scholz yesterday (22 Feb). Both pipelines are ‘fiercely opposed by the United States and Ukraine, as well as by other Central and Eastern European countries’, the US because of unacceptable Russian influence in Europe, and Ukraine et al because of the loss of overland gas transit fees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream).
From naval warfare, I think, it meant sailing under a false flag to fool the enemy. So it would be something the Russians do while pretending to be Ukrainians, in order to create a pretext for hostilities. Bombing an empty school would fit the bill perfectly.
‘What hold does the U.S. have over them?’
Er, being the only thing standing in the way of Russia taking over the whole of western Europe?
Ukraine can’t join Nato anyway, because it doesn’t meet the requirements. Clause 6 of Nato’s 1995 Study on Enlargement states:
‘States which have ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes, including irredentist claims, or internal jurisdictional disputes must settle those disputes by peaceful means in accordance with OSCE principles. Resolution of such disputes would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance.’Putin’s already got what he wants, a partly balkanised Ukraine, and will aim to keep the dispute over Donetsk and Luhansk simmering in perpetuity. So the incentive to invade isn’t there at present, though the outlook could change. Interestingly, ‘neutral’ Finland has just announced a $9.4bn deal to buy dozens of US F35 stealth warplanes.
Meanwhile the sabre-rattling plays well at home, especially for Biden seeking to cut Trump support off at the knees prior to 2024, and Bozo Johnson desperate for some misdirection. By having the military out in force, Putin comes off like a macho rock star for the voters, without really needing to do anything further.
This sounds like a carbon copy of the meeting we went to in Lancaster, except there the speaker said that Insulate Britain was deliberately devised to be a win that the government couldn’t reasonably say no to. Cue incredulous expression. As for inconveniencing the public, they argued for broken eggs and omelettes. I wonder if they’ll keep scaling down their ‘win’ demands until they finally do win the right of pigeons to fly over urban built-up areas.
A few members of Manchester and Lancaster branches went to Liverpool yesterday for the 2nd annual Merseyside Marxist Bookfair, where we had a stall. Attendance and stalls looked to be somewhat reduced from the last occasion in 2019 and there were no talks this time, so the event was somewhat low key and does not seem to be going from strength to strength. This might be because the organiser insisted on first establishing stallholders’ views on trans rights, saying they would refuse entry to anyone expressing (in their opinion) anti-trans views.
Some literature was sold or given away during the day. Meanwhile four members took leaflets down to the train station at Lime Street where there were crowds, and distributed approximately 500 leaflets. As at Glasgow, the QR code on the leaflets connected to climate change landing pages on the website, from which a link opened a live Jitsi meeting at 7.30 that evening. Two teenage enquirers turned up at this meeting and asked various questions, and I understand a lively discussion ensued. We hope to get stats in due course for the number of leaflet recipients who scanned the QR code through to the landing pages. In Glasgow the ratio was about 1:25.
Maybe it was awash somewhere else, as I say. Moot question whether we did the right thing by being in the wrong place!
The pitch we had was in the city centre near George Square, because Glasgow members advised us that was the best place to be. There were events and the odd march in the city centre but no other organisations giving out leaflets so we had the run of it to ourselves. If there were left groups there they might have been hanging round outside the conference zone, or else maybe Sauchiehall Street two miles away.
There were over 200 hits directly to the landing pages that were not link-throughs from another web page, ie, they could only have come from the QR code on the leaflet. As there were 5.5k leaflets distributed this gives a ratio of about 1:25.
Alan, as you know, results from activities tend to form a long tail after the event so it’s not possible to say definitively what we got out of it. It wasn’t a runaway success, it wasn’t an abject failure. Yes we ought to do more leafleting, in my opinion, as it’s an activity most members can easily do and it’s now the most direct way of engaging with people now that public meetings have become a rarity. The QR code worked very well, with about 1 in 25 using it to access the landing pages. It also meant we could design the ‘front-end’ leaflet texts to be short and accessible while leaving the larger part of the argument to the ‘back-end’ ie, on the landing pages. The Party has always had a bad habit of overstuffing leaflets with prolix content that does more harm than good in my view.
As the lead speaker in the FAQ The Tax Argument (Pt.1) cited by PGB, I should add an anecdote that I don’t think I mentioned at the time, which was that when I attempted to explain the tax argument to a friend who ran her own cafe, she got it straight away. ‘Of course I’m the one who pays my workers’ income tax,’ she said, ‘it’s a different cheque that I write, on a different day in the month, and it goes straight to the Inland Revenue, so it’s obvious’. Her view was that workers don’t understand who really pays tax because they’ve never run their own business or employed anyone.
Incidentally, it’s possible that in 1817 no worker paid income tax, but it was already a familiar concept because it had been introduced by the Pitt government in the 1790s as a fundraiser to fight Napoleon, and kept being ‘temporarily’ reintroduced in succeeding years. That’s why it was a hot topic and why Ricardo said what he did. The state needed to grow, which meant taxing the rich who had all the money, but they kept evading every attempt to tax them directly (windows, horses, dogs, shoe buckles, wig powder etc) so the Exchequer increasingly resorted to an indirect tax via wages, which the rich couldn’t evade. This sleight of hand had the possibly unintentional consequence of persuading workers that they are stakeholders in capitalism when in fact they aren’t.
Yes he’s still a bit stuck on the ‘rich’ question. Problem he’s probably got is that ‘tax the rich’ is printable in the Guardian and ‘abolish the rich’ isn’t. Even so, he’s getting a lot of people to ask the right questions, so I don’t think it’s helpful to call him an idiot.
George Monbiot seems to be moving further and further in our direction – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/oct/30/capitalism-is-killing-the-planet-its-time-to-stop-buying-into-our-own-destruction
“it is ourselves who must dampen down any positive hope and expectation”
That’s the opposite of what we need. If we don’t have optimism in the revolutionary potential of the youth then we’ve got no hope at all. The last thing we want to be doing is killing what spirit there is. Instead we need to foster it and direct it in the right way.
ALB is also correct that the Roman Empire declined over centuries – technically it didn’t disappear until 1453 when the Ottomans took Constantinople. But Boris will assume the great unwashed don’t know any more history than he does.
I have a friend who bangs on at great and baffling length about UFOs, though he’s very politically down to earth in other respects. He doesn’t think it’s aliens – he wishes it was, because they’d probably run the world better than humans do – but he does think there’s a cover up. Interestingly of the 144 sightings the Pentagon report looked at, they were unable to find an explanation for 143 of them. Presumably they took into account comets and pissed people walking home from pubs.
