March 4, 2022

“LeftEast Condemns Putin’s Imperial War Against Ukraine” — statement from a post-CP European collective that our comrade Kurt Stand describes as independent Marxists and socialist feminists trying to rebuild the left throughout Eastern Europe. And more from the Euro left, this from transform! europe.

Want to think through the class composition of the Canadian (and by proxy, the US) convoy movement? Here’s a sharp Marxist analysis of who was part of the far-right movement in Ottawa; its inheritors come to the DC region on Saturday.

Shortest of reads: excerpt from POLITICO Playbook Monday morning, but an evergreen if there ever was one: “A gift for all journalists (and anyone else spending time on the occupational hazard known as Twitter): WaPo’s Jose Del Real has come up with a handy flowchart for those critical few seconds after you’ve drafted your few lines of brilliance and before you hit the ‘Tweet’ button.”

Watch our comrade David Schwartzman and others challenge neoliberal trickle-down economics in light of the huge challenges the world now faces. It was four against one, the neoliberal Nicholas Economides (Professor of Economics, Stern School of Business, NYU), at the Helix Center, February 26, 2022, in People & Things in Motion: Economics and the Future.

And check out David Schwartzman’s contribution and others in this dialogue on an energy commons. 

Majority of US Voters Blame Corporate Profiteering for Inflation — 80% of voters want the federal government to “crack down on large corporations that raise prices unfairly.” From Common Dreams, tipped by our comrade Dave R.

Touted by an upstate NY comrade, Andrew Bacevich’s imagined letter from JFK (on the Other Side) advising Joe Biden in advance of his own SOTU message. In both the Berlin Wall and Cuban Missile crises, JFK advises, “I set aside the question of fault — the U.S. not exactly being an innocent party in either instance — in favor of identifying the terms of a resolution. That meant conceding their side had legitimate concerns we could ill-afford to ignore.” From TomDispatch/Common Dreams.

Some useful history; Krugman surprises more often than we might think. A benefit of globalization (since the “long 19th century”) has been how much harder it’s become to get real material benefits from the use of brute military force.

Yep, Facebook again, this time corporately looking the other way while Putin’s digital gangsters wallow in the FB disinformation pool. The whistleblower Frances Haugen, writing in The Guardian, hopes that Nick Clegg can recover his nice-guy cred as Facebook’s latest human shield (shedding slime from his days as David Cameron’s LibDem co-bro?).

Comrade Nate McIntyre describes how society can reform for the better after climate change in their piece Democracy 3.0: “The Earth’s problem was well understood, long before it became a crisis, in fact, back in that so-called Information Age. Only then humanity hadn’t acted fast enough.”