Image is sourced from this article.
It takes very little effort to find an article from Western state propaganda decrying Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas as authoritarian and rife with human rights abuses. This is the natural reaction the US has to any successful liberation movement. This fairly long report from Jason Cohen, a socialist who travelled to Nicaragua one week ago, should quell any suspicions.
He describes a country with high political consciousness among the masses, who are working to construct critical infrastructure for the country and their communities. There is a virtual education system that is free across the entire nation, which serves the dual goal of democratizing education and ensuring that those in rural areas or without much free time for university can still achieve degrees and a quality education; and these classes cover technical skills in the production of infrastructure and agriculture, but also political and ideological education in order to counter the fascist propaganda produced by imperialist nations abroad.
While Nicaragua is deeply invested in its nationality and national figures who led to their socialist revolution, such as Sandino, they are also immensely proud of their indigneous history, recognizing it as also part of their anti-colonial history which continues to the present day. Additionally, they honour the struggles of other nations on the continent, such as the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, as well as Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile. Countries around the world are also celebrated and admired, such as Burkina Faso; during the Reagan administration, Nicaragua and Burkina Faso were comrades in arms, and now Traore is continuing the legacy of Sankara’s anti-imperialism in the present. Perhaps most relevant today is their dedication towards Palestine, involving the creation of the Parque Palestina (shown in the post image), in which the Palestinian flag flies alongside the flag of Nicaragua. In July, Leila Khaled of the PFLP gave a speech in Nicaragua, in which the solidarity of the two nations was highlighted.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
The Country of the Week is Nicaragua! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants. More detail here.
Please check out the HexAtlas!
The bulletins site is here!
The RSS feed is here.
Last week’s thread is here.
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 daily-ish 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 (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
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.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
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.
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.
Probably. That monetary policy (adjusting interest rates) has anything to do with lowering inflation is a neoclassical myth. It only works if the inflation is caused by people having too much money, but the inflation in America is caused by high energy price, supply chain issues and monopolist price gouging.
The Fed doesn’t know what it’s doing. They had initially wanted to cause a recession with rate hike to increase unemployment and lower wages, hoping to bring inflation down this way. However, they unexpectedly caused the government deficit to rise through interest payment, which has so far been enough to keep the US economy afloat and preventing from falling into recession.
Now the Fed wants to lower interest rate, which will paradoxically create a higher risk of recession because less interest payment will yield less deficit.
(A more generous and also quite realistic take here is that domestic economy was never the main priority, as exemplified by Biden’s obsession about expanding NATO and fighting Russia instead of talking about fixing the economy. The goal of rate hikes, then, was to destroy the Global South economy and now that many countries are failing, they would ease the interest rates to allow US finance capital to flow into the Global South again)
But the US desperately needs a recession right now. They are having a lot of problems with military recruitment at the moment, and a recession can easily fix this problem with a “join the army if you don’t want to be poor” campaign. The US economy is such a mess right now.
And is it just me who thinks it’s completely insane to see left wing publications regurgitating neoclassical myths like using monetary policy to control inflation (or the US deficit is too high it’s going to bankrupt, for that matter)? Like, why are leftists succumbing to neoliberal theories? Does the Western left even follow Marx these days?
The piece does not subscribe to this view. Earlier on:
Thanks, I was about to go crazy.
even in such a case, near full employment, the effects of monetary policy is so ambiguous. if the private sector (not just businesses, everyone except the Government) are buying up goods/services beyond capacity then the interest payments increase would act as an additional stimulus.
taxes are so much better than interest rates. you can target it at income groups, you can target it at profits, you can target it at specific good/service.
another alternative, entire banking sector is under Government control. then the interest rates can be targeted at specific groups too. so if you want to buy a luxury car, you would be charged a higher rate compared to a mass manufactured regular car.
Australia has a luxury car tax, 33 percent for cars priced above a certain threshold
However the entire government sector is under banking control
While this isn’t an excuse, I think even on the left it’s hard to escape the underlying economic assumptions of society. While we should insist that leftists and leftists publications educate themselves and be better informed how the economy works… it’s not as simple as reading up on the first volume of Capital or even the third volume. Understanding the nuts and bolts of modern capitalism is hard. Of course it’s imperative the Marxists most of all understand it (again, not making excuses), but I think there’s just a dearth of resources out there to improve here.
I agree. Even Trotsky subscribed to such bullshit. He believed that the New Deal would bankrupt America lol.
Can you imagine if Trotsky had become the head of the USSR instead of Stalin? The Soviet economy would never have got out of its NEP phase. Thankfully Stalin understood monetary theory better than anyone else at the time, and Soviet industrialization was only made possible because of its firm rejection of liberal economics.
if anything New Deal spending wasn’t enough due to the opposition from the reactionaries. it wasn’t until WW2 when the war spending actually pushed the US into full capacity.
Exactly.
I think if Trotsky became head of the USSR, there probably would have been counter-revolution and full capitalist restoration one way or another within a decade or two.
Trotsky would have done the actual alliance with nazi germany and would have lost.
In most socialist countries, marxist economics is like a degree which requires studying at an universitiy, its not something which rando joe who was struggling with calculus I can read on in like a year.