Image is of a crowd protesting in Athens.
Last week, on Friday, hundreds of thousands of Greeks poured into the streets to strike and protest on the second anniversary of the deadliest train crash in Greek history, in which 57 people died when a passenger train collided with a freight train. On this February 28th, public transportation was virtually halted, with train drivers, air traffic controllers, and seafarers taking part in a 24 hour strike - alongside other professions like lawyers, teachers, and doctors.
The train crash is emblematic of the decay of state institutions brought about from austerity being forced on Greece in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, in which the IMF and the EU (particularly Germany) plundered the country and forced privatization. While Greece has somewhat recovered from the dire straits it was in during the early 2010s, the consequences of neoliberalism are very clearly ongoing. Mitsotakis' right-wing government has still not even successfully implemented the necessary safety procedures two years on, and so far, nobody has been convicted nor punished for their role in the accident. The austerity measures were deeply unpopular inside Greece and yet the government did not respond to, or ignored, democratic outcry.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Bloomberg: China Sets GDP Target at About 5% Despite US Tariffs
Its not the targets or whether they meet them or not, but the neoliberal policies that have creeped up in 2022/2023 and 2024 that should have you worried. China will meet its "target" at the same time liberalization and straight up anti-worker legislation(the retirement age increase defended with the same rhetoric as western neoliberal ghouls do everywhere else) happens, while the housing bubble happened etc.
If the US realy does go into a very quick recession over these tariffs then its even more certain bad times are coming for the global economy. Nothing to be "chad" about it.
The problem is that China’s monetary system, like most neoliberal economies, does not allow the central bank to expand its monetary base without first accumulating foreign currencies, debt issuance or asset collateralization (all of which require the economy to continue growing).
This means that government expenses are tied to GDP growth, and we are down to 5% from the double digit growth from a decade ago.
Just compare the government budget expenditures in 2023 vs 2024:
Education in 2023: 4.12T yuan (+4.5% from previous year), 2024: 4.206T yuan (+2%)
Social welfare in 2023: 3.99T yuan (+8.9%), 2024: 4.21T yuan (+5.6%)
Healthcare in 2023: 2.24T yuan (minus 0.6%), 2024: 2.03T yuan (minus 9.1%)
Energy conservation and environmental protection in 2023: 563.3B yuan (+4.1%), 2024: 548.9B yuan (minus 1.4%)
This year it seems that the government is going to increase the deficit spending from 3% to 4% (to break from the neoliberal norm if ever so slightly) and issuing lots of special bonds, but still none of this solves the fundamental problem of a monetary system that relies heavily on accumulating hard currencies and having to “balance the budget”.
For example, pension funds are kept on separate accounts that are usually not touched, with a small fraction of them used in stock investment (unlike in the US where pension is tied to stock market growth which at the same time can be quite risky).
This means that to keep paying out pension, the economy has to keep growing or that fund will dwindle as the number of aging population increases. The hard currency fetish prevents the central bank from directly creating the money to pay out pension and various social expenses.
Nothing short of a complete abandonment of neoliberal market ideology and a complete revamp of the monetary system can change the mechanism by which new money is created. And until then, people will have to work harder to keep meeting the growth target or the government expenditure will suffer (not to mention the mountain of debt that is owed by the local governments that also directly affect local spending).