Over the last week, Sri Lanka has been hit by their worst national natural disaster since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Over 2 million people (about 10% of the population) were affected; the death toll is currently climbing past 600; nearly a hundred thousand homes have been damaged or destroyed, transport infrastructure is heavily damaged; industry has been damaged; and farmland has been flooded. The cost of damage so far looks to be about $7 billion, which is more than the combined budget spent on healthcare and education in Sri Lanka.
While there is plenty to say meteorologically about how this yet another concerning escalation as a result of climate change (Sri Lanka does experience cyclones, but they are usually significantly weaker than this), it's important to note that such disasters are, to at least a certain extent, able to warned about and their impacts somewhat mitigated. However, this requires both access to early detection and warning equipment, and an economy in which development is widespread - in this case, particularly in the construction of drainage systems and regulated construction, which has not generally occurred.
The IMF, on its 17th program with Sri Lanka, is doing its utmost to prevent such an economy from developing, as they instead promote reductions in public investment. On top of this, the rebuilding effort for Sri Lanka is already being planned and funded, and such donors include, of course, many Sri Lankan oligarchs, who will rebuild the damaged portions of the country yet further according to their visions, while sidelining the working class.
Perhaps neoliberalism's decay into its eventual death occurring concurrently into the gradual intensification of climate change and renewed wars signifies the rise of the era of disaster capitalism.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. 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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
I fully agree with your macroeconomic analysis, and I'm an avid supporter of planned economies. Markets are an outdated tool now that we have modern computational capabilities, and a transition towards 100% publicly owned economy is completely feasible and desirable thing.
Not xhs but the thing is, planned economies don't exclude markets, and markets themselves have existed in pretty much every economy (you could only say the incas didn't have one, for example). Markets exist so that we are able to exchange qualitatively different concrete labor in terms of an abstract, quantitatively commensurable socialized labor. The Soviet Union was certainly a market economy, and Stalin even rants on trots wanting to abolish markets before the necessary development of the productive forces, only being possible when the amount of labor it takes to realize any commodity is rather negligible. Markets certainly have a use as a developer of these forces, where firms with higher organic composition of capital outcompete those who have less. Centralization of the productive forces, the primary goal of the lower stage of communism, is simply the logical conclusion of this advance in efficiency of organization.
Markets as in "free" markets are certainly outdated, although I would rather use the term unrestricted markets. Private competition but also private investment is just plain dumb, private individuals being able to invest unfathomable quantities of money without even the possibility of rational decision-making. Even if they did have such a possibility, it would simply be way more efficient for the state to take on the responsibilities of this investment, having centralized all information gathering upon itself, and able to take account of the economy as a whole as well as the prospects of the future.
Hmmm, not sure I agree with your definition of market. In what sense was there a market economy in the post-NEP USSR, if production quantities, prices, and allocation of goods were given not by converging priced in markets but by centrally planned decisions?
I agree that markets historically have been used for that, but they only ever served as an approximation. Nowadays we have technology enabling us to directly measure the total amounts of quantified labor that goes into each good or service produced, so the information can be collected to almost perfection and used on an economic plan without the need for a market.
I mean, as a place where commodity exchange simply happens, I would say it fits the definition perfectly well.
Well, back in the middle ages, demand of an individual was much more closely correlated with their production, as they mostly produced what they directly consumed through agriculture. With capitalism, and participation in a market, that consumption has been largely abstracted. I think in this way, the market is nicely suited to accommodating the needs of an individual in the particular, where they can raise prices if there is a great amount of demand for a certain commodity. Which is obviously not to say that there isn't a need for generally calculating market values and regulating the market itself with them. The soviets had exactly this problem, where shortages occurred if there was a major difference in production and consumption.
It didn't, though? The USSR didn't have commodity production. The prices of goods weren't determined by markets, they were centrally decided as a political decision. Production wasn't guided by profit motive of capitalist owners, it was centrally decided as a political decision. Without surplus value, there is no commodity.
Shortages in the USSR were mostly by design, not by "lack of information in supply-side". Capitalist economies are so-called "surplus economies", meaning that capitalist firms typically operate at less than full production (except in situations of physical or political reasons for shortages) because, since there is a wide availability of unemployed labor, and they don't produce more because there's not enough demand for their products (hence advertising). This is because demand is capped by the private sector's wealth/income, which is the main limit to consumption in capitalism. There are no shortages of, say, cars, because if the demand for the cars goes high enough, you either raise the prices as a company or you produce more by employing more labor.
The Soviet Union was a so-called "shortage economy". They ran a full-employment, self-suficient economy, and so the number of total goods put into the economy was limited not by consumption, but by actual inability to put more people to work because there are literally no more people to employ. Since the allocation of production was a political decision, and production was limited, there will always be shortages. The economy has labor and capital to produce, say, 10 tons of steel and 10 tons of cloth. Producing 11 tons of steel requires that you reduce the production of cloth, because you need to reallocate labor or capital. Now, imagine people demand 10 tons of cloth and 15 tonnes of steel at current prices. You have two politically different choices: you raise the prices of cars until the demand is lowered to 10 tonnes, or you just allow for a shortage and allocate cars based on waiting lists or merits. The first decision allocates the goods by level of income/wealth, the second decision allocates based on randomness/merit.
Furthermore, even if what you said were true about shortages in the USSR being caused by lack of information between supply and demand: this problem has been solved by technology years ago, and is actually already implemented in market economies, but to the benefit of capitalists and not the people. When you click "purchase" on and item online or you scan an item's barcode at a supermarket, not only does the reseller immediately get the information of what you purchased and which warehouse it comes from. They also add the item to a list of backorder, and their regional distributor gets notified, and in turn the distributor notifies the producer. This happens instantaneously through the internet, not anymore through "market and price signals" as upheld by right-wing economists from the Austrian school or neoliberals. This is actually one of the main reasons why Amazon and Walmart can destroy other businesses and their model has imposed itself over time, because they don't rely on markets anymore with their distributors, they have enough economic power to force their distributors to act according to their own volitions instantly, as dictated by company policy coming from the top.
This can be just as easily implemented in a socialist economy without commodity production, to enable instant knowledge of supply and demand on an economy-wide level. It would actually likely lead to unseen levels of efficiency in labor usage.