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 mean, what’s the worst that can happen? The worst for China is probably become like Japan (unthinkable just a few years ago if you ask me, but COVID changed everything), with a couple decades of stagnation. Wealth inequality will deepen but it’s not like China is going to “collapse” as some people are obsessed with. It is a world superpower after all.
I think people are scarred by the USSR collapsing but remember that it was a voluntary dissolution - if Gorbachev had wanted to carry the USSR in a decaying state for a few more decades, it was totally doable. As long as the ruling political regime wants to keep going, I don’t see there is any way for a developed economy to collapse. The countries that collapsed happen under the conditions of their productive capacities being destroyed.
I wouldn’t put much stock in the youth Maoism thing. It was a collective outburst of emotion on the internet (much like Americans protesting about Trump on the internet), but the Chinese government has a lot of tools to keep things under control. They control the algorithms after all.
What I am worried about the most are the Global South countries. Like it or not, China is a superpower and its policy will affect the rest of the world. Even China’s non-intervention will deeply affect the Global South. We’re already seeing Mexico (the 8th largest car manufacturing country in the world) putting up 50% tariffs against China, and the EU crying about trade imbalance with China. This shows that the world is close to its limits for absorbing China’s exports. The loss of consumer market in the US cannot simply magically re-appear elsewhere - someone has to be willing to run the deficit to absorb the global export surplus goods, which nobody is willing to do.
CADTM made a report about the BRICS Summit at Rio this year titled The BRICS are the new defenders of free trade, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank:
So, BRICS will continue to defend neoliberal free trade. No new alternative economic doctrine has emerged.
This is also why I have to remind everyone that the Ukraine war that caused the US sanction on Russia’s foreign reserves and the Biden rate hike in response to inflation after the oil and gas supply was disrupted, was a very very special period in the post-90s world. There was a lot of potential to break the dollar hegemony, for the dollar liquidity shortage across the world was seriously driving many countries to look for alternatives. This was why BRICS came to the spotlight in 2022. Unfortunately that window of opportunity is mostly gone.
I don’t know what we’re going to see next. The next US economy crash isn’t going to be pretty (e.g. the AI bubble bursting), because remember that last time China saved the world by going into the infrastructure investment that drove the construction and raw material sectors. This time, even China does not have that capacity anymore, so there is little to no mitigation when the US inevitably exports its unemployment to the rest of the world, just like the 2008 GFC.
It is only now that you learn to appreciate why China’s domestic market can save the world.