alanjjohnstone
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We only need to look at the BBC non-coverage of the anti-Corbyn manipulation of the Labour Party as revealed by Al Jazeera and the Forde Report.
Nothing should over-shadow Starmer’s rise to stardom
I draw attention to this month’s Material World
“…Socialism involves building democracy for our workplaces and in our local communities. But it also involves an administration on a world scale. We can envisage certain existing UN international bodies such as the World Health Organization, the International Labour Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization continuing. We can expect air traffic and air safety to still be organised globally under the authority of the International Air Traffic Association ensuring that your pilot and those in air control guiding your flight are properly certified and qualified. There will remain the World Meteorological Organisation and the Universal Postal Union. World NGOs such as the Red Cross, Oxfam, War on Want, Save the Children and Doctors Without Borders could continue.
Those conspiracists on the far-right construe that this will result in a globalist one-world government. We are not talking about a world Big Brother but rather about a world cooperative commonwealth, a network of organisations operating in coordination and collaboration for the welfare of the world’s population…”
Being part of the German media, DW may well be deliberately misleading us with statistics.
In 2014, when Crimea was annexed, two-thirds of the peninsula’s population was comprised of ethnic Russians.
The situation in Ukraine’s east and south is different, as not even half of all people there are Russian.
According to a 2001 census, most ethnic Russians lived in the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, making up 40% of the population. The regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson are home to some 25% and 15% ethnic Russians, respectively.
I came across this pro-Ukrainian, anti-Russian 2018 essay which had an interesting scenario.
“…The goal is to wait for the right moment when the internal political situation will develop in such an unfavourable way that Kyiv cannot refuse to implement the Minsk Agreements. And this would inevitably provoke a large-scale civil conflict. Then Russia would really introduce its troops, but they will be called peacemakers…”
Didn’t play out as exactly speculated but I suppose the SMO was close enough parallel by declaring an imminent genocide.
Sadly, Howard does not frequent this forum too often.
You may have to suggest he visits to comment on the video.
No doubt that it is a deliberate mistranslation by Western media sources but Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechen leader, said on Saturday that Moscow should consider using a low-yield nuclear weapon in Ukraine.
It has been mentioned before the pro-Russian neo-nazis.
Task Force Rusich “an openly neo-Nazi group highly likely operating on behalf of the Kremlin, has promoted the commission of war crimes in the conflict.”
But, of course, this information comes via the Guardian and therefore can be dismissed as CIA misinformation because we all know that Russia has no extreme nationalists that can remotely be described as neo-nazi in ideology.
Kuenssberg points out that if the predicted cost of funding the two-year energy freeze is around £120bn, the windfall tax is predicted to only raise £8bn.
“We haven’t got any numbers from the government,” says Reeves. “But we think we can raise tens of billions from the windfall tax.”
Media Lens focuses once again on the BBC bias
Over The Rainbow – Disneyfied News And The ‘Unprovoked’ Invasion Of Ukraine
I think our problem is how to counter the swing to Labour in the belief that they have the magic remedy for our problems.
Starmer by default has become the alternative prime minister even for his critics like Lynch and Graham. He is the lesser evil.
The Labour Party conference from my understanding reinforced his position and from my survey of the media, his leadership is unchallenged.
Can we actually pin him down to definite economic policies that we can expose as flawed and fated to fail?
We do need to say that global events and the market do determine economics but the danger is we parrot Truss who is using the same excuse. We have to differentiate our reasoning and to make it clear Labour’s answer is not going to succeed.
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Applying similar if not identical reasoning for the self-determination of Russian-speaking Ukrainians under Article 1 of the UN Charter, does Putin apply the same principle to the Uyghur population of the Xinjiang region or what is called East Turkestan?
A reminder of past articles on Chinese colonialism
“We are, literally, on the eve of destruction. Now is the time for the kind of political maturity leaders rarely demonstrate. The onus is on Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin to make sure that even while events on the ground in Europe devolve into chaos and violence, the leaders of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals do not allow emotion to get the better of reason. The consequences of failure in this regard are, for humanity, terminal.” – Scott Ritter
Two fundamental misunderstandings that could lead to a nuclear war
” a) Russia could be preparing to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine that would generate a non-nuclear response on the part of the U.S., and b) Russia believes that the U.S. would not respond with nuclear weapons if Russia were to use its own nuclear arsenal against NATO, the world now faces the real prospect of imminent nuclear conflict between the U.S. and Russia.
From the U.S. perspective, Russia’s unwillingness to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine underscores the overall impotence of Russia and its leadership, and therefore opens the door for decisive NATO intervention, including boots on the ground, in case of any Russian non-nuclear threat against Kiev itself.
From the Russian perspective, the documented U.S. reluctance to employ nuclear weapons in the case of a decisive Russian military victory over Ukraine opens the door for Russia ’s use of a tactical nuclear weapon against NATO in the case of a major NATO military intervention in Ukraine. “
Jonathan Cook offers this reminder of the two-edged sword.
Truss’ Mauling is a Sharp Reminder that the City can Bend Any Politician to its Will
“Can anyone doubt that had Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who came within a hair’s breadth of winning the 2017 election, actually made it into Downing Street, he would have been treated at least as harshly as Truss is being dealt with now? His radical programme of spending and investment was a much bigger threat to “the market” than Truss’s confounded efforts to win favour with big business and voters at the same time.
Corbyn’s programme would have been greeted with hostility not because it exuded incompetence, as Truss’s does, but because the City would have refused to stomach his plans to meaningfully redistribute wealth and make British society fairer. He would have been made to bend to the will of “the market” even more ferociously than Truss is being now.
The establishment who maligned Corbyn as a traitor, and a spy, and an antisemite, did so not because these things were true but because the former Labour leader was a threat to their wealth and privilege. The devastating war they waged on his political programme was simply a foretaste of the war they were all too ready to wage on his economic programme.”
