The current fighting in Sudan is part of a wider network of regional flashpoints that are largely economic in nature, says the BBC.
Egypt and Sudan face potential war with Ethiopia over its new upstream Nile dam, while the CAR, Chad, Eritrea, and South Sudan are also involved in separate civil wars over resources. Sudan’s civil war is all about agriculture, land and gold. Russia’s notorious Wagner Group is allegedly involved in gold smuggling out of Sudan, while the Kremlin is keen to establish a military base on Sudan’s Red Sea coast to exert control over the world’s busiest trade route.
In short, this is business as usual for capitalism, while innocent people get killed.
Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News network tried to justify telling lies on the basis of free speech, and ended up paying $787m because ‘lies have consequences‘.
Meanwhile, many US parents want to ban books to ‘protect’ their children, forgetting that the internet exists and children don’t read books anyway.
To celebrate Utah’s new Sensitive Materials in Schools Act, one parent wrote in to demand a ban for ‘one of the most sex-ridden books around, the bible,’ which is packed with ‘incest, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, dildos, rape, and even infanticide.’
‘Get this PORN out of our schools!’, wrote the parent. ‘If the books that have been banned so far are any indication… this should be a slam dunk.’
A 10-year-old girl in the allegedly communist state of North Korea has been discovered wearing a Christian Dior coat worth $1,900, while poverty and starvation rage across the country (tinyurl.com/4em5ew2d).
Fears for the girl were allayed, however, after the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un stepped in, saying ‘Don’t worry kid, I’m your father, and nobody will say a damn thing or I’ll have them executed.’ They were present to enjoy the spectacle of a Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile launch.
Ensuing public outrage did not materialise as the national press plastered the incident across no front pages, and intrepid local journalists continued to avoid alternative careers as inmates in the country’s re-education camps.
As I argued in the Boston Review in 2018, ‘With automation, the plutocrats get the increased efficiency and returns of new machinery and processes.’ And what about the rest of us? We get ‘stagnant wages, increasingly precarious work, and cultural kipple.’ The struggle we face isn’t about technology — of the tools we use — it is about application.
It is a struggle to change relations of production.
As new and headline-grabbing technologies emerge, and as their applications become more enticing and widespread, we ought to remember what this is all about and keep our eye on the prize.
We can imagine a future in which the robots are owned by and work for the many instead of the few: https://tinyurl.com/nhfy383c.
As Sunak and Suella campaign to obstruct refugees arriving to UK shores, thwarting many families from cheerful reunions, King Charles applauds the resources used to bring Ukrainians and their quarantined pets back together. 2,500 pets have been reunited with their Ukrainian owners.
Emily Perry, head of the Ukrainian pets initiative, said: ‘They lost everything, so to see them being united with their pets, we all feel it makes this job worthwhile.’
Speaking about the king, she added: ‘He said ‘we all love our pets’ so he could understand being an animal lover.’
Such a pity that people are not treated with a similar compassion (yhoo.it/3YCL6kw).
2022 was bad for a lot of billionaires, who lost nearly $2 trillion all told.
But fear not, because they were buying luxury cars in even greater numbers, roaring in top gear past stock, crypto, and bond market crashes and up the slopes of soaring interest rates, energy and food hikes, and febrile economic conditions.
Yes, the ultra-wealthy are increasingly purchasing luxury vehicles. Rolls Royce announced that it had recorded its ‘highest ever annual sales’ in 2022, delivering 6,021 motor cars, up 8% from 2021.
‘This is the first time in the company’s 118-year history that its sales have exceeded 6,000 in a single 12-month period,’ the British luxury carmaker said.
Podcast with Rutger Bregman, historian and author of “Humankind: A Hopeful History,” talking about the common misperception that humans are cursed with an ‘evil’ nature.
“The notion that our civilization is just a thin veneer, just a thin layer, and that below that lies raw human nature, which is nasty — this is a hugely popular and influential theory in our culture.” Bregman says that that dark side of human nature is perpetuated in our culture — across literature, movies, and news feeds — and is not an accurate portrayal of our true nature, and there is plenty of science and research indicating that human nature is evolving to be kinder and more cooperative. See our review of Humankind here.
As Andrew Murray has pointed out (Communist Review Autumn 2022), Russia ticks off many of the boxes of Lenin’s description of imperialism.
It present ‘an astonishing degree of economic monopolization’ with 22 oligarchic groups accounting for 42 percent of employment and 39 percent of sales. In finance, Sberbank provides banking for 70 percent of Russians, controls a third of all bank assets, and operates in twenty-two countries. Moreover, Russia has repeatedly used military interventions in Chechnya, Kazakhstan and other former Soviet republics as well as in Syria and (with the mercenary Wagner Group) West Africa.
Simply put, in Murray’s words Russia ‘is an imperialist power’ (tinyurl.com/3acktdrt).
Just in case you believe China is ‘communist’, let President Xi and co’s online mouthpiece, Global Times, put you straight.
Here’s their recent editorial, no doubt a response to US government attempts to ‘decouple’ US capital from China: ‘Private enterprises and foreign companies in China can be at ease, explore and develop the Chinese market without any concerns. And the rewards will be generous.’
What are these generous rewards? The profit extracted from the unpaid labour of Chinese workers, of course. There is no other source.
More info on how the profit system works here.
‘Hunger has great positive value to many people. Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy.’
Think that’s a joke? Nope, it’s from a 2008 essay by Professor George Kent of the University of Hawaii.
He goes on to say:
‘Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour… How many of us would sell our services if it were not for the threat of hunger?… More importantly, how many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?’
This essay was published in the UN Chronicle, which bills itself as ‘the magazine of the United Nations, since 1946’.
