This is a first for me but I’m re=posting this from the Week in Review thread whereI posted it a few minutes ago: something just happened that might mean that Macron has more troops than he knows what to do with- he might just have to send them to Ukraine because France must be running out of barracks.
I’m referring to the recent election in Senegal which resulted in a landslide victory for a young candidate promising change. And change in Senegal almost certainly involves putting an end to the French neo-colonialist tricks that have mired its former colonies in poverty and dependence.
Senegal is one of the larger and more important of the West African colonies that France exploited for a century and more- if it goes the same way as Niger et al things are going to become very interesting as Africa approaches the tipping point. And BRICS replaces the Empire.
I returned to the subject to add this quote:
“…Soon-to-be president Bassirou Diomaye Faye ran on a pledge of redistributing Senegal’s wealth and on Monday 25 March committed to lowering the cost of living. He has previously mentioned he wants Senegal to have closer ties with Russia.
“Faye also said France (the previous colonialist power to control Sengal) should “leave Africa alone”, and has previously stated that “Africa belongs to Africans” – a nod to his plans of left-wing pan-Africanism and to renegotiate gas and oil contracts, with Senegal due to start production on recently discovered oil and gas reserves later this year…”
All from an article at The Canary- part of the City of Bristol’s reparations for its part in the Slave Trade.

Posted by: bevin | Mar 27 2024 16:02 utc | 3

The Dali had an electric bow thruster, which could have steered the ship. Now you know why the cyber attacker tripped the electric power. The engines kept running and the speed actually increased somewhat. So the attacker set the rudder, then tripped the AC power.

Posted by: JackG | Mar 27 2024 16:18 utc | 5

A story over at globalsouth.co regarding NATO beligerence and idiocy at the UNSC is worth noting:
“💠@worldpravda:
From now on, Russia will mention NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia at every session of the UN Security Council, said Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitry Polyansky.
After France blocked the UN Security Council session on the 25th anniversary of the bombing, there will no longer be “any business as usual in the Security Council”, Polyansky added.
“This is a very serious moment – in fact, at the instigation of France, one member of the Security Council was denied the right to convene a meeting. By such an action, our Western colleagues seriously deceived themselves. Instead of holding a peaceful meeting where they would mutter theses about ‘Russian propaganda’, now before every meeting of the Security Council, until we agree on how to avoid a similar situation in the future, NATO aggression will be mentioned in front of the cameras, which will also be included in the minutes of all upcoming meetings,”
stressed Polyansky.
Now this is from Monday 25 March, so there could be developments that I’m missing. But if you go to the Permanent Mission of the RF to the UN, there’s more details …
So, firstly, there is this statement in the UNSC by Russia’s Permament Representative:
_______________________________
Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia at the UN Security Council with regard to the 25th anniversary of NATO aggression against Yugoslavia
Mme.President,
I regret the decisions that you made today.
We called a meeting in connection with the 25th anniversary of the NATO aggression against sovereign Yugoslavia, the consequences of which continue to influence the degradation of the situation in the Balkans. Contrary to the cynical statements of our Western colleagues, this is not a “historical” issue at all. The situation in Kosovo remains on the agenda of the UN Security Council and is being actively discussed. It is well known that lately, the situation there deteriorated dramatically. In order to understand how to establish lasting peace on Serbian soil, it is necessary to talk about the true causes of the current escalation.
On March 24, 1999, a US-led coalition of countries of “defensive alliance” invaded the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on the pretext of stopping the ethnic cleansing allegedly taking place in Kosovo. In reality, the Yugoslav army and police were fighting an exhausting battle against Kosovo Albanian terrorist gangs in the province. The infamous Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), whose leaders are now on trial in The Hague, ruthlessly massacred the Serb and disloyal Albanian population. However, Western propaganda turned the KLA thugs into freedom-loving rebels and warriors of the good, and the legitimate authorities of Yugoslavia, who defended constitutional order, into war criminals. Cynical provocations were organized to demonize the Serbs.
NATO’s aggression against a sovereign country lasted 78 days and resulted in unimaginable suffering, numerous victims and catastrophic devastation for its population. That is what NATO members who are also members of the Security Council and are present now ion this Chamber did not want to hear.
The aggression against Yugoslavia was a flagrant violation of international law: the fundamental purposes and principles of the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act of the CSCE, and the norms and principles of international humanitarian law. The reputation of the UN Security Council, which did not authorize the Alliance’s forceful actions against Yugoslavia, was seriously undermined. The Council simply had to face fait accompli.
Since the beginning of the blood-stained collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, orchestrated and sponsored by the United States, Germany and others, and the attack on Yugoslavia, the Alliance has undermined the established security architecture that had ensured peace in Europe for many decades. This is the signature destructive manner of the North Atlantic Alliance.
The attack on Yugoslavia launched a series of large-scale aggressions by the United States and its allies around the world: against Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria. Everyone knows what they led to. The anti-constitutional coup in Kiev in 2014 also tracks its roots back there.
Some Security Council colleagues would probably say that the events of 25 years ago are “history” and have no relevance today. However, it is clear to any reasonable mind that the destruction of a sovereign state led to the chaos that is gaining momentum today, and not only in Kosovo but in the Balkans as a whole. That is what we were going to discuss at today’s meeting. I think you agree that this matters for the work of the Security Council, which adopted resolution 1244.
Mme.President,
Since the representative of France argued today that the fact of this meeting being scheduled in advance by the Presidency is invalid, we will be forced (since we cannot trust written communications from the Presidency anymore) to insist that the agenda for each meeting of the Security Council be approved by procedural vote. Let us call this established precedent the “de Rivière clause”.
Thank you.
_____________________________________
These NATO regimes are conducting themselves like teenagers engaged in vandalism. It’s really quite pathetic and remarkable.
There’s more. The same Representative made some comments to the press:
—————
Remarks to the press by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia with regard to the 25th anniversary of NATO aggression against Yugoslavia
Today, on 25th anniversary of NATO aggression against sovereign Yugoslavia, we witnessed another act of diplomatic aggression – from France, current NATO member. This time it happened at the UN Security Council. Aggression was made against freedom of speech and freedom of expression in the highest UN body. France and other NATO members used procedural maneuvers in order to prevent the UN Security Council meeting on the issue of the utmost importance, which has serious repercussions for Serbia, the current situation in Kosovo, as well as for the entire region of Western Balkans.
As you know, the situation in Kosovo, in particular for the Serbs living in the region, is getting worse every day. The Security Council even held an urgent meeting on this issue on 8 February, 2024. Our aim today was to discuss the root causes of the endless series of escalations in the region in order to prevent them from happening in the future, either in Western Balkans or in other parts of the world. And the cause for that was NATO aggression against sovereign Yugoslavia, which lasted 78 days. The North Atlantic Alliance did not get any mandate from the UN Security Council. Despite the so-called reasons, which you hear from Alliance members today, the main reason is the unwillingness to admit one of the hugest mistakes in NATO history in a fear to be exposed in front of the world community as a number of aggressive and invasive states trying to build neo-colonial system across the entire world.
We have already seen many examples of it, not only in Yugoslavia, but in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and finally Ukraine. It looks like our NATO colleagues are not willing to hear what we were going to say. They are scared to hear this, in particular scared of their legal responsibility, because they have not yet accounted for what they did in former Yugoslavia. Also, we have to note that the current UN Security Council meeting was confirmed by the Japanese Presidency of UNSC at the beginning of March. Thus, we stay assured that a huge part of responsibility lies on Japan for its inability as President [of the Council] to accomplish its duties properly. And of course, it was a complete shame and disgrace to play this spectacle in front of the Serbian Prime Minister, which is absolutely inadmissible.
I thank you.
———————
In contrast to the teenage or infantile idiocy of the NATO regimes, and Quisling Japan, the disinterested support of the long since destroyed Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the Representative of the Russian Federation is really quite remarkable. Admirable, even. No wonder Serbs continue to hold their older brothers in such respect.
This is what the collapse of the brutal Western Civilization looks like. Mischievous, clueless spoiled brats telling an idiot’s tale full of sound and fury …

Posted by: N Hanrahan | Mar 27 2024 17:23 utc | 7

Steve Bannon asked Lara about her investigation.
Steve Bannon: You say there may be something. Here’s the other thing that’s concerning me. Why they run to the mic. You had McCabe on this morning at sunrise on CNN saying, It’s not terrorism. It’s not terrorism. It’s not… It might not be terrorism. But why do you come to the mic Right away, we need facts, we need empirical evidence, we need an investigation. What is your investigation telling you?
Lara Logan: Well, I have a better question for you, Steve. Why are you coming to the mic telling the country that it’s not terrorism when your own intelligence agencies are telling you it is? And I know they are because I didn’t make this up. These are not my words. I’m talking to people who are on the inside, some who are on active duty, some who are retired. And everyone, literally, from critical infrastructure in the Department of Homeland Security to the intelligence agencies, they know there’s no other… This is a cyber attack on a critical infrastructure corridor for the United States.
For those people who think this is just a river, this is in Baltimore, what does this matter? You don’t know anything about what you’re talking about. The I-94 corridor on the Eastern Seaboard is literally what connects the North and South. And when I talk about hazardous materials, this is a brilliant, well-planned strategic attack on one of the most important supply chains in the United States of America. The only other one is in the Western side in California. That’s the only one that’s busier. And what you have done, you now have shut it down.
And When I talk about hazardous materials, what are we talking about here? This is refined fuels, right? This is propane gas. This is diesel. This is fuel. This is flammable materials. This is oversized loads, nitrogen, chemicals. Everything that you need for your economy to move has literally just been shut down for 4-5 years.
How did they do it? They knew that they had to target one of two main anchor points on that bridge. There are two load-bearing pylons that any structural engineer can identify that are on the end of each side of the bridge. These are the ones that are thicker and stronger than anything else on that bridge. When you hit one of those pylons, when you take that out, the reason you see so much of that bridge collapse instantly is you just brought 50% of the span of that bridge coming crumbling down. And what you don’t see beneath the surface of the water steep is absolutely catastrophic. It is a structural nightmare and a logistical nightmare because you have the entire bottom part, the concrete part of that bridge, and you don’t know the extent of the structural damage to that, and you won’t know it until you pull all of that infrastructure out of there and you get to look at it.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/lara-logan-francis-scott-key-bridge-collapse-everyone/
Yes, from TGP, but Lara Logan has done some solid pieces in the past…

Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 27 2024 17:36 utc | 9

The latest from Michael Hudson
China in charts
https://michael-hudson.com/2024/03/china-in-charts/
GROUPTHINK and denial
Why ?
Why are China doing what they are doing ?
To extract what they need more easily – Period.
It Sounds nice, except all of these proposed investments, they don’t actually address the root causes of economic deficiencies in Africa.
BRICS is talking left while walking right.
Instead of concentrating on making sure African countries become fully sovereign and self sufficient regarding their food deficits, energy deficits, and manufacturing deficits. China is concentrating on making it easier to extract what they can.
Just look at their agricultural policy.
Africa is forced They forced into switching away from producing the core crops that they need for their actual food security; the wheat, the corn, the rice, and so on; to producing the cash crops for exports; the bananas and the watermelons and the tomatoes and the coffee and tea and tobacco, all of that.
Which, as soon as you start producing for exports, you have to serve the taste of your consumers in the global North, which means you start using seeds that are not native to your soil, and fertilizers and pesticides, all of which you have to import from Russia which doesn’t help the situation at all.
And you do that for 30 years, you burn the fertility of your soil, and then you have to double down on the potency of those seeds and fertilizers and pesticides. And that’s exactly where they are. And by the way, the concept of ‘food security’ was invented and imposed on them in the 1960s, precisely to do this.
Biggest oil exporters on the continent. Take Nigeria, today imports 100 of its gasoline. Angola imports 80 of its fuel from the usual suspects. Libya, the third biggest exporter- same thing- imports quite a bit of its fuel, and the list goes on. And these are the countries that have the massive oil resources. This classic playbook of oil and gas companies, that they use on countries in the global South. So again, this energy deficit is by design, not by accident.
Africa is always forced to play the role of the place for cheap raw materials. The place where their large consumer market consumes the industrial output from the global North. And most importantly, Africa is the place where obsolete technologies, assembly line manufacturing- that is no longer needed in the global North- is delivered to tgem under the umbrella of development and job creation and cooperation.
But what it does- effectively- is that it locks Africa at the bottom of the global value chain. Whereby, what BRICS call “industry” in the global South, is where you have to import the machines, you import the intermediate components to assemble- from the global north, you import the fuel to power those factories- and they even import the packaging. And they use low cost labour, racing to the bottom to assemble and produce low value-added content.
So, what they import is high value-added content, what they export is low value-added content. So, you can double, triple, quadruple your exports, you’re always locked at the bottom of the value chain. So, take these three structural deficits and that’s the root cause of Africa’s problems.
They had a major victory in the global South- in Africa in particular- on the international taxation front, with the UN tax convention vote that happened a few months ago in New York. That is finally going to take the design of the international taxation architecture away from the OECD, and into the UN system, where you have one country, one vote.
And you can finally transform that system. And that’s a major victory. And that’s a big battle to continue shaping how that international tax architecture is going to be done under the UN tax convention. And the process leading up to that vote was viciously attacked and interrupted by the US, the UK, all the OECD countries, except one country from the OECD group. Which was Colombia, that voted and lobbied against the OECD to take the tax system into a more international, democratic space.
Hudson remains in complete denial. Projects that denial onto others with the help of his little elfs.
BRICS is talking left while walking right.

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 27 2024 18:11 utc | 11

So what’s the solution ?
Africa needs to form its own group free from BRICS and the West. South America needs to do the same.
Because we’re talking about technocrats, bureaucrats, politicians, academia, even civil society, that’s been brought up in a colonial educational system and a colonial public discourse space that’s dominated by the economic theory and the economic ideology, that you get in the US and other people get in the rest of the world.
So, that is part of the struggle, is decolonizing the mind and decolonizing the thinking. There’s of course, the limited fiscal policy space because of the external debt trap. There is these false solutions and dangerous distractions and hijacking of narratives, like the narrative food security versus food sovereignty.
To its credit, the African Union actually has a comprehensive- very ambitious- transformative agenda for the continent, it’s called Agenda 2063. You can Google it and find it on the African Union website. It’s very thorough, very ambitious and wonderful. And it’s been approved by member states on the continent.
These are burning priorities. The other thing- that they also know about themselves- is that they don’t have the freedom to think in a radical transformative way, that will disrupt the global economic architecture, because they’re vulnerable. Because you can take any African country, and think of a dashboard of vulnerabilities that those countries have. Food security, energy security, debt problems, internal security, regional security, so many pressure points that anybody from the global North can easily push those buttons, and make a whole lot of trouble for those countries.
So The global South has to organise, unite, and propose a geopolitical bargain with BRICS and the West.
Because these critical minerals- or strategic minerals- that are needed for decarbonizing the energy system- globally- the numbers don’t add up, in the sense that, if most of the decarbonization happens in the global North first, without changing the consumption pattern- the obsession with growth, the obsession with consumerism in the global North- then again, there’s not going to be anything left- in terms of critical minerals- for development and deployment in the global South.
But if we prioritize the industrialization, repositioning of the global South, with the minerals being used primarily to build the renewable energy infrastructure, clean transportation, clean public transportation- not everybody driving around with their own Tesla battery- and clean cooking infrastructure in the global South, then the volume of minerals left in the system will not be sufficient for the global North to continue its obsession with growth and consumerism. And it forces the conversation about degrowth. It forces the conversation about redesigning the transportation system in the global North towards public transportation. It forces the conversation in the global North towards marshaling all the research and development capabilities towards material science research, to get rid of the planned obsolescence that is built into every piece of technology we produce in the global North. And forces the conversation about quality of life and the care economy, in a circular economy in the global North. Because right now, it’s not even on the table for the big players. It’s just, ‘let’s get all the minerals we want, to industrialize and decarbonize on these growth obsessed models.
that is critical. And as I said earlier, it forces the conversation, also about the position of the middle class and labor, both in the North and the South. When you stop outsourcing assembly line jobs to the global South, and throw workers in the global North under the bus, then you empower labor to have a critical voice in redesigning economies in the global North. And that’s a win for everybody.
Full discussion HERE
https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-264-deconstructing-the-colonial-archetype-with-fadhel-kaboub/

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 27 2024 18:28 utc | 13

Voters in the U.S. who despise both Biden and the equally despicable Trump now have the option to vote for Literally Anybody Else.
https://literallyanybodyelse.com

Posted by: Dalit | Mar 27 2024 18:41 utc | 15

More trouble in Baluchistan. A suicide bomber killed five Chinese engineers working on a hydro-electric power project in the Pakistani region. This follows an attack on a Chinese-operated port in the same region last week, where seven of the attackers were killed by security forces. Local talent at work, or foreign-directed escalation?

Posted by: AJ | Mar 27 2024 18:45 utc | 17

Africa’s Carbon Market Initiative. is “A Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing”.
https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-245-decolonizing-our-minds-with-fadhel-kaboub/
These are supposed to be the best of the best. These are the models that we’re going to scale up. And they did an investigation to see if this is actually greenwashing, or if there’s actual positive impact.
They couldn’t find a single piece of evidence in these top 50 projects, that this is actually making a positive contribution. In fact, they estimated that 60%of these projects, or something like that, don’t quote me on the exact number, was essentially straight out greenwashing. Another 17 or 18%, about 20% couldn’t really be fully determined, it’s like questionable to say the least. And then the rest was, there’s no positive contribution that can be noticed.
So we’re talking about a fraud on a Global scale that governments are selling to the Global South, because they don’t want to admit the historic responsibility of the historic polluters and pay for actual climate reparations.
African continent can be summarized in four points.
1. As the place for cheap raw materials.
2. As the place where their industrial output can be dumped for theur consumers.
3. As the place for low cost, exotic tourist destinations.
4. As the place where obsolete technologies and assembly line manufacturing, that is no longer needed in the Global North is delivered to them as development, as aid, as trade, as partnership, as technical assistance, to lock them in at the bottom of the value chain.
So that’s the vision that the rest of the world has for them.
They have to unite as one, Africa reasserting its position on a Global scale.
Thry have all the strategic minerals needed for high tech industrialization, but especially for renewable energy manufacturing. NOT FOR EXPORT, but to deploy on the continent to deliver electricity to the 600 million people who already don’t have any access to electricity today. To deliver clean cooking technology and infrastructure to the 970 million people on the continent today who are, on a daily basis, inhaling toxic fumes, because there is no clean cooking technology. And it’s mostly women and children who are exposed to this.
So the potential to manufacture and deploy clean energy technology, clean cooking technology, is both a development transformation solution, but it’s also climate solution. It’s a public health solution and it’s a gender balance solution.
They have the resources. They have the market at scale. We’re not talking about a small market here. We’re talking about 970 million people exposed to toxic fumes. That’s close to a billion people who will be their customers, if you deploy the technology and deliver it at low cost or subsidized cost, and transform people’s quality of life. And that’s millions of jobs of manufacturing on the continent.
We’re not talking about export oriented growth, which is the old model that locked them at the bottom of the value chain. That BRICS propses. We’re talking about leveraging their resources and capabilities and the market potential at scale, to deploy transformative technologies on the continent for themselves.
That’s how you industrialize. You don’t industrialize by locking yourself at the bottom of the value chain and pretend you have containers going in and out of the country. As BRICS builds the infrastructure to move them out of continent as quick as they can. Ports, road, rail.
There’s no discussion about the international trade system and its rules that BRICS love so much international law., That forced countries into debt because they just couldn’t feed themselves, because the Global North is heavily subsidizing its agriculture and dumping cheap food in the Global South. To the point where we destroyed food sovereignty in most of the Global South.
There’s no discussion about industrialization in the Global South. They’re saying, ‘oh, we’ll just outsource more of the technologies and assembly line manufacturing that we no longer need. Now you can have it and let’s call that development and industrialization.’
While at DAVOS every BRICS member has talked about keeping the,status quo going. Free trade and trade liberlisation.
BRICS is talking left while walking right.

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 27 2024 18:54 utc | 19

The world map geopolitically, economically, is being redrawn as we speak. And it’s been happening and accelerating over the last few years for a number of reasons. So think post 2008, think post COVID and think especially post Russia-Ukraine conflict and all the economic consequences that it’s done. You notice major disruptions to the old vision of globalisation, this lean and mean type of supply chains, just in time supply chains and all of that.
And shifting towards more repatriating strategic industries back home. The Europeans have even spelled it out for you. They’re referring to it as technological sovereignty, high tech sovereignty, not just food sovereignty and energy sovereignty.
The US is doing the same with all the intel investments in Ohio, bringing strategic industries back home with the Inflation Reduction Act and its focus on renewable energy production and especially electric vehicles manufacturing with specific incentives to build more of the content of those vehicles in the United States to take advantage of those.
So you have the emergence of three major hubs globally because of all of these shifts. And those hubs will be Western Europe with the EU dominating that bloc, North America with the US and Canada to some extent dominating this part of the world, and with an Asian bloc dominated by China, and Russia and Central Asia in that hub.
And that leaves the rest of the world, meaning primarily the African continent, as the place or the region that all three of these blocs perceive as the place for cheap raw materials, the place for dumping the surplus output produced by the three major blocs, and as the place for low cost assembly line type of manufacturing.
And the three blocs that we’re referring to, north America, Western Europe and Asia, they see themselves as increasingly focusing on consolidating their sovereignty in terms of food, energy, high-tech manufacturing, strategic industries, and geopolitical, geostrategic sovereignty within the region.
With the US dominating Latin America, China and Russia dominating the entire region, with the exception maybe of Japan and Australia, although there’s a lot of back and forth pushing in that territory that will be unfolding over the next couple of decades.
And with Western Europe dominating to some extent its traditional colonial territories in North Africa and the rest of Africa. So that’s the world that is emerging. So the question for for the global South in general, and for Africa as a continent in particular, how do thry position ourselves on this new geopolitical map ?
BRICS isn’t the answer.
When you have 3 super power blocks focusing on consolidating their sovereignty in terms of food, energy, high-tech manufacturing, strategic industries, and geopolitical, geostrategic sovereignty within the world.
If the global South doesn’t unite they don’t have a long term strategic vision for themselves, they’re going to be part of somebody else’s strategic vision.
They’re going to use their economic diplomacy and their soft power – in some cases hard power – to nudge every small player into the piece of the puzzle where they want them to fit. So knowing what those three blocs are and what they see for themselves in the next 50 to 100 years, that’s the starting position for the global south, knowing how to wiggle yourself into a more favorable position.
And it’s going to be really hard to do it as an individual country, as a small country in the global South. You can only do it as a bloc of your own , and you can only do it with long-term strategic visions for yourself so you can get the most out of these partnerships.
And as the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, has said repeatedly, she refers to the strategy that all small developing countries should have, which is “friends of all, satellites of none”.
In other words, you want to have your own vision for what is important to you as a country, as a region, as a bloc. And then you partner with anybody in the global North, whether it’s China, whether it’s England, Germany, the US. Russia Friends of all, satellites of none. You partner on equal terms. You partner as in partnership, not as in hierarchical relationship.
in terms of the role of China, Russia in the global South, on the African continent, in particular, with its Belt and Road initiative, they should not be 100% in favor of decolonizing the African continent in terms of de-linking its neocolonial relationship with Europe, for example, and replacing it with a new extractive neocolonial relationship with BRICS.
Why it’s important for the African continent to recognize, number one, that it’s still colonized by a global North extractive economic relation. And number two, to escape that colonial relationship, you have to develop your own independent vision and then partner with China or partner with Germany or partner with the US. Or with Japan or Russia.
It doesn’t matter who the partner is going to be, but it matters the terms of that relationship. And to some extent, we’re not seeing that coherent vision emerge yet. And that’s been one of the most important things, academics, public intellectuals, and people who have influence in government policy on the African continent, is formulating that coherent pan-African vision for economic sovereignty, food sovereignty, energy sovereignty, technological sovereignty, and then leveraging that coherent vision – on African terms – to partner with anybody.
So if China is interested in African natural resources for its Belt and Road initiative, for its new industrial policy – because China’s industrial policy right now is very different in terms of its stages of industrialization, very different from China in the 1990s or the early 2000s. China is really kicking into higher gear right now in terms of industrialization.
And as a result, the internal composition of its economy is changing. And that doesn’t just shift the composition internally, it also influences how China expands its role in the global economy moving forward. This whole shift of global strategic positioning of the US and Europe and Asia – Then it has to be in global South terms as an equal partner as one global South bloc.
Because the power blocks the global South have to deal with don’t really worry about immediate short term outcomes. They’re really thinking long term, whether it’s economic, whether it’s territorial like in the issue of Taiwan. China is in no rush. They’re thinking, not today, not in a decade, not in two decades. Three decades, four decades and longer.
The first things that the African continent, country by country, but also at the African Union level, on the Pan African level, need to recognize that the current solutions are actually false solutions deep in those traps. Then the next step, once they agree that this is not working for them, this is actually working for the global North in general.
Foreign direct investment, they tell you that FDI is going to get you out of poverty. Well, FDI is worse than export-oriented growth because at least export-oriented profits that are generated are retained within the country, reinvested, possibly. But FDI profits are repatriated to the global North, so it’s even more extractive than your domestic export-oriented manufacturing.
Tourism, again, is extractive, because if you don’t have food, if you don’t have energy, the more tourism you have, the more food and energy you have to import, the more high tech equipment you have to import for hotels and entertainment and transportation for tourism and all of that. So it’s all of these things that are supposed to bring foreign currency reserves to get you out of the debt trap, they tend to actually push you further and deeper into debt.
If you’re exporting low value-added manufacturing with low cost labor and subsidized wages and subsidized industries for export oriented manufacturing, you’re importing the capital, you’re importing the intermediate components, and you’re importing the fuel to produce electricity for that manufacturing, and you’re only exporting low value added output, you’re never getting out of that trap.
And if they continue with the same economic model, just shift in terms of de-linking from Europe and linking into the Asian economic development engine is still going to be extractive. So that’s the danger of blindly decoupling with one part of the world and saying, well, BRICS is better and more friendly. Are we going to link to their engine? It’s still going to be extractive.
FULL discussion HERE:
https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-200-africas-place-in-the-multi-polar-order-with-fadhel-kaboub/

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 27 2024 19:29 utc | 21

However, there’s an opportunity in that delinking and saying, okay, now we can start with a fresh partner that comes from a global South perspective, and we have a better chance of negotiating partnerships that are more balanced,in terms of what a Pan African partnership with different power blocs would look like.
As a global South bloc – if the partnership,looks too threatening, say, for Germany or for the US, then offer the global South something better. Offer a non-neocolonial relationship, and they’ll take it. And let’s compete.
Isn’t this all about competition? The global South would love to have Germany and the US and England and China and Japan and Russia compete truly for partnership with a global south bloc on theur terms, not on neocolonial terms.
As a global South bloc you play them off one another.You could technically kill three power blocs with one stone.
The lack of food sovereignty, lack of energy sovereignty, and the deficiencies in the type of industrialization that they have. If you look at the energy crisis on the African continent.
The African continent has been living an energy crisis for decades, that culminates today in the fact that 600 million Africans don’t have any access to electricity. Which means you don’t have electricity, you don’t have transportation, you don’t have education, you don’t have health, you don’t have pumping water, you don’t have sanitation, all kinds of other problems. It’s such a critical pillar of economic life.
The entire African continent ( as a bloc ) has all the natural resources and human capabilities needed for a renewable energy revolution, for producing the solar panels and the wind turbines and the geothermal energy. All the raw materials are literally there. The human capabilities are there.
What’s lacking is access to the actual manufacturing technology. So this is where you would want to partner with, say, companies in China, companies in Germany, and Japan and other countries to manufacture renewable energy capabilities on African soil. So you build a Pan-African industrial policy that captures value-added, uses the raw materials and then deploys the output to produce renewable energy for the African continent.
So now you have triggered a different kind of industrial policy with technological partnership from the global North, from whoever, now you have the first pillar of a transformative economic policy for the African continent. So now you’re industrializing, you’re building economies of scale. So you’re lowering cost per unit and you’re deploying the production of clean electricity on the African continent.
Now that your industrialization has kicked in and manufacturing capabilities have kicked in, you move straight into the next strategic choice that you have, which is food sovereignty. As part of your industrialization policy, you start manufacturing – NOT FOR EXPORTS, not to assemble widgets for the global North – you start producing the agricultural equipment that you actually need for your food sovereignty strategy on the African continent.
You start manufacturing the water pumps, you start manufacturing the irrigation systems, you start manufacturing whatever is needed to build the second pillar in your Pan-African strategy. And with that coherent vision, all of a sudden you have a strategy for industrialization that is sovereign and that uses and leverages your resources and capabilities in complementary ways.
That same strategy allows you to tackle the energy deficiency that you have. You leapfrog into using your industrial base to tackle the lack of food sovereignty. And now you’re off to the races. Because with every unit you spend, you invest in these areas, is the equivalent of many, many multiples of it in terms of external debt and dependency, and as a result, less geopolitical external influence on how you manage your resources and how you deploy your economic capabilities.
These partnerships would include Pacific Island nations, will include Latin American countries, any partner, whether it’s a global South and global North country, as long as it’s on these terms, to build this level of resilience in the global South and to allow them at the same time to tackle the climate crisis. Because they’re not going to tackle the climate crisis by exporting more fossil fuels to save Europe from its current energy crisis.
South America should unite and form their own bloc and do the same.
FULL discussion HERE:
https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-200-africas-place-in-the-multi-polar-order-with-fadhel-kaboub/
BRICS is talking left while walking right. Hiding behind international law and WTO rules while they do it.

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 27 2024 19:52 utc | 23

“In contrast to the teenage or infantile idiocy of the NATO regimes, and Quisling Japan, the disinterested support of the long since destroyed Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the Representative of the Russian Federation is really quite remarkable. Admirable, even. No wonder Serbs continue to hold their older brothers in such respect.
This is what the collapse of the brutal Western Civilization looks like. Mischievous, clueless spoiled brats telling an idiot’s tale full of sound and fury …”
Posted by: N Hanrahan | Mar 27 2024 17:23 utc | 7
Best post I have read today-thanks

Posted by: canuck | Mar 27 2024 19:58 utc | 25

Not via loans – MMT shows you how to do it and how to become fully sovereign over time.
Gold standard, fixed exchange rates, money scarcity, ” sound finance ” – Were all designed to keep the global South in chains.

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 27 2024 20:00 utc | 27

Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 27 2024 17:36 utc | 9
I don’t know that the I-95 corridor supply chain has been shut down. There are a # of major ports along the coast, in LA, SC, VA, NY/NJ, all bigger by tonnage than Baltimore.
So there are numerous ways to pick up the slack.

Posted by: Mary | Mar 27 2024 20:14 utc | 29

Posted by: Mary | Mar 27 2024 19:42 utc | 22
Yes, you are right. I actually noticed that since have driven it from Horton all the way to Key West and often gone up and down the East Coast (decades ago!). This one is the Interstate 695, being a beltway around Baltimore for those going North-South on I-95. I guess the journalist made a typo.

Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 27 2024 20:22 utc | 31

Posted by: canuck | Mar 27 2024 20:05 utc | 28
Did you take the time to read his posts carefully? EC is making a useful point that critiques Hudson’s position intelligently. I like Hudson’s analysis but his commitment to a Keynesian form of capitalism gives him blind spots.
But why am I asking if you took the time to read his posts carefully… of course you didn’t.

Posted by: Patroklos | Mar 27 2024 20:33 utc | 33

@Scorpion 30
One problem in Africa is that there are several local power blocs, often extremely exploitative, e.g. Ugandan/Rwandan (Ugandan puppet regime) exploitation of DRC minerals through slave labour mining. Kenya is another example.
Add to that a belief that the “west” (or China, Japan, Singapore, et alia) is best (no, we cannot use thirty year old computers so that children can learn to program in school—they need the latest and greatest, so that they can work word processors and spreadsheets), and one becomes rather discouraged. The one thing that the apartheid regime got right (for Afrikaner children) was due to corruption—BBC microcomputers (white English schools got IBM PCs), so we got to program from grade 1…

Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Mar 27 2024 20:56 utc | 35

Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Mar 27 2024 20:56 utc | 35
Thanks for reply etc. No doubt you are right that there are huge internal disparities, disagreements etc. That’s how the conquistadores, who numbered so few, could effect a conquest in Mexico and beyond, by playing various rivals off each other. (It also helped that they were in a regional funk following a truly vicious cold period around 1450 that was devastating economically and demographically.)
If they cannot find a way to come together, then they will continue to be picked off and exploited. I presume that many of their elites get filthy rich going along with such exploitation and their internal political systems don’t have the ability to push back, just as no end of US elections trying to ‘take our country back’ make any difference.
(That there are significant differences at the voter level is starkly revealed by these recent statistics: https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/25/the-great-divorce-3-7-million-have-fled-counties-that-voted-for-biden-since-2020/ )
Everywhere I look in the world today with obvious problems, they always come down to bad leadership which always comes from bad leadership classes and class systems. You could argue that the workers should just arise and throw the bums out, but unless they have a superior ethic and savoir faire themselves – and how would they in a culture without good leadership and ethics – it will just replace one group of thugs with another.

Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 27 2024 21:08 utc | 37

@bevin et alia:
Part I of two-part series about nationalism and religion:
https://socialistplanningbeyondcapitalism.org/the-monotheistic-roots-of-nationalism-part-i-%ef%bf%bc/

Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 27 2024 22:05 utc | 39

“@6 canuck.
Curious that one has more than 1 tonne of paydirt and no mill? Or do I have the wrong picture in regards to paydirt? Maybe its mill/sluice? I have family in YT. They just sluice dirt a few times 2 sometimes 3. Its mostly just small w some nugs. They do ok tho.”
Posted by: Tannenhouser | Mar 27 2024 21:42 utc | 38
Well it is a bit complex.
In Ontario Canada you have patented and unpatented claims. patented claims means you own the timber, the land and the mineral rights and you pay a land tax. In claims you lease claims (roughly 42 acres to a claim) form the crown (ie the Ontario provincial government) where you only get mineral rights and the Indigenous peoples have an interest that the company has to negotiate terms with the Indigenous-ie nbot pure title..
I have some patents with some excellent gold values. The problem is the rich parts are 6 inches to a foot wide veins and the host rock beside it has no gold values. To mine successfully one need about 10″ width. So for the math a ten foot wide vein with a foot of .5 oz/ton or 14 grams/ ton gold with the host rock having no values that means is 10 ft of rock is .25 grams of gold per tonne ($20/tonne less costs ) which is not economic.
However, with a big fucking 40 tonne excavator some dynamite and some expertise you can dynamite the vein exactly and load up the truck (20-25 toness per) take it to a local mill and make some money.
The property I have was a gold mine in the 1930’s-it paid, reportedly the highest wages Northern Ontario-but-it was in the middle of nowhere and the tow brother that owned the mine had a general store, a bar and a whorehouse on the grounds and I don’t think the workers k left the mine with much money.
I was in the Yukon working on a sluice job when I was 16 on a summer job-45 years ago-1978-it was great summer-we all did alright. It was beautiful late June, early July I can’t remember it being dark. The property was about 100 kilometers South of Dawson City.
Hard rock mining is more tricky than placer-your family is doing a much better job than what I described in my previous post.

Posted by: canuck | Mar 27 2024 22:45 utc | 41

Several articles on Chinese development projects in the Americas. Looks to me like the US has already lost and in the coming century the related Chinese and Latin American peoples will increasingly re-unite.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/china-behind-super-highway-that-targets-us-with-mass-migration-economic-warfare-5610607

Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 27 2024 23:02 utc | 43

Thanks for the explanation canuck.

Posted by: Tannenhouser | Mar 27 2024 23:33 utc | 45

Posted by: Patroklos | Mar 27 2024 20:33 utc | 33
Nailed it .
🙂
Canuck has proven time and time again he has an inbuilt DNA that simply refuses to learn anything. That doesn’t fit in with his ideology or confirmation bias. Nuance isn’t in his vocabulary. Nuance is always needed in just about everything in life.
Why I use the term “ideologues” a lot.
He attacks my posts each and every time because I embarrassed him regarding how the FED and money actually works. Even though he is a gold bug. I explained in great detail that he didn’t even understand the gold standard. Was on the wrong side of the argument. Plays away at neoliberal Utd like the Duran.
I was trying to help. He didn’t see it that way.
I could post white and within 5 mins he would post black. He simply hasn’t forgiven me.
He’s also dipped himself in GROUPTHINK and will say anything to please the group. When all I really care about is the truth, or do my best searching for the truth regardless who I upset within the group.
Many, many, many, posters on here have helped me regarding military matters and other things I know very little about and a “thank you” is all they were looking for. I try to return the favour when it comes to money and different monetary systems countries use. It’s about all I’ve got give, because I’ve studied it extensively for 20 years.
It’s why we are all here after all to share our knowledge.
Everything I posted above is Dr Fadhel Kaboub’s work which I have also studied and understand as he is also a MMT expert. His work deserves to be shared. A nuance worthy of debate.
Why for the last week or so I have been saying be careful, very careful, as BRICS is talking left while walking right at this point in history. Way too many people are in denial and don’t understand de- dollarisation.
History might change of course. However, right now today and for many years, BRICS is simply not doing what it says on the tin.

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 28 2024 0:46 utc | 47

IMO it would be damn silly to rebuild that bridge in Baltimore. Given that once in 100 year accidents mean exactly that – there will be one inside 100 years, building a vehicle bridge down river of a container port is incredibly f**kin stupid. I recognise that up to 200 years of corrupt city ‘planning’ probably led Baltimore into building that bridge down stream of the port which made Baltimore viable, it doesn’t make the decision smarter. At some stage/time honest civic leaders would have recognised the foolhardiness of the move and organised either sea or vehicular traffic differently, the only thing to be learned from this most people already know.
That is politics in amerika where the lowliest civic employee prolly jagged the gig corruptly and the job has always been corrupt.
This will be reinforced when indolent, tightwad leaders rebuild the bridge in exactly the same spot. This is rather than being straight with the people of Baltimore and saying “We should never have intersected sea and road this way, so next time we will do it better by moving the bridge further upstream”. I guess it could be the other way around but from a perusal of maps of Baltimore there doesn’t appear to be a suitable spot for a port further downstream whereas up stream it appears possible to build a vehicle bridge with both a shorter span and no necessity to build the bridge so high.
Of course shifting the roads which connect is going to be an expensive job that will piss off many Baltimorians for a generation so it won’t be done. Most likely because everyone was so lucky this time, that ‘only’ about 6 people died. If it happened in rush hour as it easily could have, hundreds would have been killed making moving the intersection easier.
People can be mugs thinking something actually has to happen before they remediate it, rather that doing something to avoid a major fatality before an accident.

Posted by: Debsisdead | Mar 28 2024 2:22 utc | 49

testing

Posted by: E | Mar 28 2024 3:28 utc | 51

I read through the comments at NK on its related article. Below are two comments of interest imv.

BillC
March 27, 2024 at 1:13 pm
Today’s “box ships” are designed for economy at the expense of redundancy. One huge diesel engine (piston diameter ca. 1 meter) drives a solid propeller through a solid shaft, red line around 90 RPM. No transmission, no clutch, no variable pitch. Nice and simple, but ONE of each.
“Reverse gear” means: stop the engine, switch controls on certain components (fuel injectors, …?), and restart the engine using large volumes of stored high-pressure air. Rudder control is hydraulic using electric pumps powered by diesel generators, not the main engine. When the engine or electrical system fails, you have an uncontrolled but massive vessel drifting on momentum, tide, and wind.
These vessels have traded reliability for economy, and that’s what keeps our stores full of merchandise that arrives cheaply by container from overseas. Unless we continuously upgrade our port infrastructure to be robust enough to survive certain but unpredictable “accidents” or we force the container trade to transition to more reliable and costly vessels, we’ll continue to see events like this every few years. That’s the price of “cheap” … and of the profits it generates.
David in Friday Harbor
March 27, 2024 at 8:38 pm
Globalization and cost-cutting are the culprits here, although the dolphins surrounding the bridge supports were a joke.
The MV Dali is crewed by 22 Indian nationals at the very bottom rung of the maritime compensation sale; virtual slaves. Their mission is to do the bare minimum to maintain the vessel with their main focus on conserving fuel. A G-Captain poster reports rumors that the crew complained that power had been failing continuously during MV Dali’s 36 hours at the quay, possibly due to faulty refrigeration units in the cargo tripping the ship’s circuit breakers.
A massive Neopanamax container vessel isn’t maneuverable in port under the best of circumstances due to its single-shaft fixed-pitch propeller. The loss of power rendered the vessel impossible to steer as the single bow-thruster required electrical current to function. Under the command of a Baltimore Pilot unfamiliar with the ship’s propulsion systems, if the main engine was reversed once it got turning again, cavitation and torque-thrust would temporarily render the rudder useless (as apparently happened to the Titanic) and probably caused the “hook” to starboard just before the collision. Dropping the anchor at that point was merely a gesture.
But we can get a bunch of ticky-tacky from ScAmazon and Walmart — cheap!

Posted by: suzan | Mar 28 2024 3:56 utc | 53

Meanwhile, capitalism is like anything that has lost the formula for stopping, it is excess hypostatised, for which the only analogy is cancer.
Posted by: Patroklos | Mar 27 2024 18:41 utc | 16
Darkly poetic and true.

Posted by: Ahenobarbus | Mar 28 2024 4:38 utc | 55

54: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc-bwzN6IVk

Posted by: us-boomer | Mar 28 2024 5:45 utc | 57

Somebody else learning Russian?
I have been stock for 4 years in basic level, I am open to any help I can get. YouTuber I’ve found more useful for my modest progress is “amazing Russian” by Olga something.
Might be useful to nick a job as an interpreter explaining Murricans the terms of surrender after they lose ww3

Posted by: Mariátegui | Mar 28 2024 7:15 utc | 59

@ Posted by: Debsisdead | Mar 27 2024 20:24 utc |
Thanks for that -we are paying the price in the U.K. and will do with another ‘wasted generation’.
Our last chance was to retake politics to grass roots and 11 million voted for Corbynite Labour manifesto. Even with the unprecedented winter election, mired by terrorism (again) and distraction – Prince Andrew’s grilling on his trafficking for sex accusations, suddenly scheduled and filmed for the BBC , mid election! Even with the mass media and their Antisemitism witchcraft accusations; even with the quisling Starmer muddying the waters over BrexShit and his failure to use the revelations of NHS privatisation, which even Trump admitted…they still had to resort to postal vote fraud to declare a victory for Bozo.
The first thing they did was get rid of Corbyn and now all the new grassroots representatives he encouraged. They can’t risk another popular rising.
Everything that followed was long pre-planned – hard BrexShit, Freeport’s, Covid, Ukraine , the final battle to take over the world and financial reinvention, golden billion…
A Corbyn government in 2017 would have stopped the geopolitical shenanigans and continued wars – we would be well on the path of joining the Russians and Chinese and Iranians and Venezuelans and African nations in forming the POLYCENTRIC world – instead of dying on the hill of unipolarity, the Collective Waste heap, that we have doomed ourselves and our kids to.
What a complete waste! For the benefit of our usual rich masters and owners of our fascist west. In which we, the masses, are the bad guys. We shall pay our dues to humanity for our xenophobic ‘to do and die and not ask why’ servitude.

Posted by: DunGroanin | Mar 28 2024 7:48 utc | 61

The general difficulty with developing an industrial economy in Africa is similar to that of doing so in the west.
Banks functionally run after get-rich-quickly schemes (much easier to get funding to chase derivatives and the like, if one has enough capital, than to build an industrial facility). Example—successfully pay off an industrial loan on time, apply for a second loan for 1/3 the sum for upgrades (six odd years later, tendency is to get worse with time), get denied.
Zoning and permitting may be easier (at this point, zoning is more of a municipal game than a public interest matter). Small industrial projects can often be bankrupted before they get started, because municipal and other authorities play clout games, and there is little recourse.
Energy is often but not always easier in the west (EU economic suicide, e.g.). Then again, even in the west, on-site power generation and conditioning (some motors and VFDs are expensive enough to warrant a three phase UPS and other conditioning, and often infrastructure is not in a good condition.
Low income and accumulated wealth generally preclude small scale industry financed locally, especially in Africa (a small dosing pump may set you back $5k, and the income of the project must more than cover the maintenance costs—western “use it until it fails and replace” cannot work with such fine margins…

Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Mar 28 2024 9:37 utc | 63

Posted by: Echo Chamber | Mar 28 2024 0:46 utc | 47
Thanks for your contributions. The canucks of this world notwithstanding, I appreciate your posts a great deal. But don’t worry about Canuck. He’s a hayseed with the internet. It’s like giving a machine gun to a chimp.

Posted by: Patroklos | Mar 28 2024 10:01 utc | 65

I should point out that industrial projects may start with a budget for legal games, but because authority is command power coupled with freedom from responsibility for one’s own actions, municipalities, regulators, and others may quickly consume the “excess” capital of a project with their clout games, and having a larger such budget (if not large enough to sue out of choice and still pay land rent et alia), simply appears to them as an opportunity to play more games. There are no principles.

Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Mar 28 2024 10:59 utc | 67

@Echo Chamber regarding BRICS
Something is deeply wrong with the way Echo Chamber describes the actions of BRICS in Africa, particularly how he denigrates the deals African Countries make with China.
“BRICS is talking left while walking right”, he says.
It’s true, the African continent is being exploited and has been exploited mostly by the West. It has been for more than 60 years now since Decolonization, and has been for centuries before during the Age of Colonizazion and its more open plundering and murder of Africa. But how is that China’s fault?
I looked into it last year during the crisis in Niger, and the extent to which poor Niger has been exploited is staggering. Much of it Echo Chamber even mentions himself. They don’t have sovereignty over major parts of their economic and financial policies, their currency and central bank are controlled by France. Their mining industry is mostly controlled by French state companies. For a long time they didn’t even give protective gear to workers mining uranium ore (!) or accept damages for the uranium poisoning of workers, until some French (!) workers finally claimed damages for their exposure to uranium some 30 years ago.
It’s a difficult task to find out how much of the extracted value of resources stays in Africa, because the content of many of the contracts are not public, even though a company like Areva is basically a French state company. Though when you look at some official statements you might get a glimpse of it. In May 2014 Areva (now Orano) signed a new five-year agreement for two of the larger uranium mines based on the 2006 mining law in Niger. They made that public I presume because they thought of themselves as gracious masters to so benevolently increase the royalty rates for those poor blacks. “The royalty rate will potentially increase to 12% of market value”, the new agreement says. 12%! 12% of the value of just the measly uranium ore, not the more valuable refined Uranium or the value it has when it fuels around 25-30% of French power plants. And this increase only happens “potentially”, reserved just for when revenue actually increases. Let’s assume that the percentage of value remaining in Africa for the whole production chain stays at 5-10%, and even that might be charitable.
Now China comes along and offers them deals where lets say 20-50% of the value stays in Africa. Compared to what the West has been offering Africa this is clearly the better deal. Also, it does not come with political strings attached. The Chinese do not demand subservience or “democracy” lessons or whatever the West might call it. The reaction of Echo Chamber, his diatribes against BRICS, look suspiciously similar to what I read in rags like the Financial Times or The Economist. If they are more serious papers (like the FT), they are not even technically lying when they try to insinuate that those deals with Chinese Companies are “unfair”, because they are more profitable for China than for Kenia or Angola etc. It’s just that if the West had offered Africa deals like these, they whole continent would be in a completely different shape.
How do I know the percentage of value staying in Africa is much higher with Chinese deals? Well, again, it’s difficult to put exact numbers down. But the problem itself again is described by Echo Chamber, when he complains, that e.g. crude oil is being exported by Nigeria and refined oil (petroleum) imported, of course to the detriment of the Nigerian economy and its people. The West had 60 years time to build oil refineries and did not do it of course. You know who is building oil refineries in Africa? China is of course, one very large one for example with the Lobito Refinery in Angola. They build refineries, they build factories, ports, airports, highways, rails, hospitals. And here all those wankers and rightwingers and liberals come crawling out of their holes and try to smear China, apparently because it does not give these out “for free” or something, trying to have profitable relationships for boths sides. How dare they?
Oh and those people you want to peddle, “Fadhel Kaboub”? Don’t know this guy and I don’t have time to look into all his diatribes as well, but he is a Professor at an American College and he often cooperated with liberal establishment institutions. Why should I treat him as an authority? I’m more inclined to think I should be suspicious of him.
Oh and this talk about “degrowth”? There is a sensible part of it, probably, because there is so much need for mindless growth in Capitalism. But this is not what some of these WEF wankers are talking about, when they talk of degrowth. Try telling that to Africans. There are hundreds of millions of Africans who do not have a stove or running water at home! Try walking up to them and preach that “we all” need to tighten our belts. But bring a camera, I’d like to see them spitting in your face for such a vile proposal.

Posted by: Roland | Mar 28 2024 13:08 utc | 69

Greetings to the bar from Montreal in the morning. A roundup of stuff to consider, for those so inclined.
Délégation du Québec à Houston
Une diplomate québécoise « toxique » [the diplomat is Xin Gao, who just quit]
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/2024-03-28/delegation-du-quebec-a-houston/une-diplomate-quebecoise-toxique.php
From the Daily Mail, a couple headlines that I’ll leave without further exploration —
“Louis Rees-Zammit WILL sign for Super Bowl champions Kansas City Chiefs – but Saffron Barker won’t be joining Taylor Swift as WAG after split” [former Welsh rugby star who split from his YouTuber star girlfriend, Saffron, last week]
“Rampaging monkey gangs terrorise Thai tourist town as cops arm themselves with slingshots and tranquiliser guns” [ …. ]
Here in Canada, there’s good news about a threatened species, the elusive Newfoundland Marten, making a comeback
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/a-tiny-critter-who-could-elusive-newfoundland-marten-makes-improbable-comeback-1.6824166
Interestingly, a former Canadian PM is Paul Martin. Had a shipping company, it’s run by his sons now – CSL group, based in Montreal
https://x.com/CSLships/status/1770906507363647758

Posted by: Bruised Northerner | Mar 28 2024 13:34 utc | 71

“Might be useful to nick a job as an interpreter explaining Murricans the terms of surrender after they lose ww3”
They won’t want to hear it. CNN will tell Anericans they won and that will be proof enough.

Posted by: Fred777 | Mar 28 2024 13:54 utc | 73

to joncu… I am really really really tired of the “boris and Natasha” insinuendos – unless perhaps you jest???
As has been mentioned many times, the captain of the out of control vessel is ukrainian. Also, someone mentioned that the ship had a negative inspection in June 2023 in the port of San Antonio Chile. Others have mentioned that the vessel was unaccompanied by tugs. When the ship sent its distress call, why didn’t it call for tugs? What were the pilots doing?
Putin is clearly a very intelligent man, but I doubt he could pull all these strings at once. Besides, why should he? Murika is falling apart all on its own. Paraphrasing Napoleon, when your enemy is screwing up, don’t get in his way. Not original. First found in Sun Tsu. Cheers.

Posted by: Formerly Miss Lacy | Mar 28 2024 14:17 utc | 75

Posted by: Formerly Miss Lacy | Mar 28 2024 14:17 utc | 75
Others have mentioned that the vessel was unaccompanied by tugs. When the ship sent its distress call, why didn’t it call for tugs? What were the pilots doing?

The tugs helped them move away from the docks etc but had separated long before they were on a straight path out. Apparently this is entirely normal. As to your other questions: even if they did call for tugs the whole event lasted 4 minutes from first power-down to impact. Not enough time for tugs to help.
I believe others have explained here that the pilots only assist the master of the vessel. They also give permission for a vessel to leave – I believe based on other reports – and since the vessel had power failure issues whilst in harbour, perhaps those pilots slipped up granting permission to leave harbour.
Other bridges have added ‘dolphins’ in front of core support columns, basically blobs of cement preventing impact. They work. This bridge, if it had them, would not have been damaged by the Dali event.

Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 28 2024 14:35 utc | 77

De-indrustrialization of Europe in a grander scheme of things towards achieving global dominance is a fairly popular staple topic among tin foil hat wearers. But tell me it doesn’t look so.
Posted by: persiflo | Mar 28 2024 13:10 utc | 70
As I just posted, it is exactly so. However, you err in bringing tinfoil hats into the discussion. It’s pretty much impossible to buy tinfoil anymore. We are forced to resort to aluminum.

Posted by: Honzo | Mar 28 2024 14:49 utc | 79

The Left, far Right and climate chaos
byJoão Camargo and Leonor Canadas
“…The far-right is rising everywhere. The fact that it had a massive result in the recent Portuguese elections is only a surprise for those who haven’t been paying attention. In communicational terms, the far-right is the anti-system. It exists, was built with huge amounts of capital on the ashes of neonazi groups, the remnants of colonialist, old time fascists and opportunists with the support of mainstream media and a huge boost from social media. It was an organizational effort, planned and executed with a lot of money, time and energy….
“…The climate crisis means fascism. This isn’t a new insight, it’s just physics. In rising material scarcity, authoritarianism and violence to maintain capitalist order, privilege and property will always push into fascism, even if that wasn’t the plan. But fascism is clearly one of the key plans of capitalist elites. Last week European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen accompanied Italy’s far-right prime-minister Georgia Meloni to Cairo to bribe the Sisi Egyptian dictatorship with over 7 billion euros on behalf of the EU into imprisoning climate and war refugees there.
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/03/27/the-left-the-far-right-and-climate-chaos/

Posted by: bevin | Mar 28 2024 15:31 utc | 81

“the far-right is the anti-system”
LOL
https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2015/11/17/breitbart-news-network-born-in-the-usa-conceived-in-israel/

Posted by: Simon | Mar 28 2024 15:45 utc | 83

In agrarian societies, power only had a concealing mask since the time of the Pharaoh of Egypt, a priestly mask.
Nowadays (1963/67/1997-) the power hides behind two masks, for the entertainment and confusion of the plebs.

Posted by: Simon | Mar 28 2024 15:49 utc | 85

@Honzo 78
You seem to be talking about a nexus of the state and finance-oriented firms, while I am talking about the conduct of industrial firms, and why I find their conduct strange and dysfunctional. I am not sure I understand how your comment pertains to mine—had the neocon gambit worked, Putin folded, and they suddenly had massive amounts of cheap material and labour (the problem of capitalism is eventually you run out of other people’s resources…), I don’t see the problems that I raise going away.
The problems would become even more severe insofar as these industrial firms become finance-oriented (i.e. provide loans for the purchase of their equipment)—if your customers become broke because of your bad practices (e.g. built-in obsolescence), they cannot pay back the loans for the equipment that they purchased from you, and you cannot recoup the cost by refurbishing the equipment and selling it anew.

Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Mar 28 2024 16:14 utc | 87

@72 Scorpion and @86 Roger
Thanks for the replies.
There is an argument in the abstract, that one should be wary of trading partners or wary of other countries on the international stage in general, so Africa should be wary of China as well. Even clear acts of goodwill, like Russia and China voiding tens of billions of debt for African countries, might have happenend mainly for PR reasons. Well, okay. But that argument rings hollow when made by western establishment shills.
I see all of that (what Echo Chamber referred to) more as a defensive maneuver by Westerners, who realize that they finally might have lost their priviledged access to Africa and beyond, but at least they think they might still be able to keep Russia and China out of it and their arguments are geared towards this (“China is as bad as we are”, “A TRULY free Africa muss free itself from China”, diatribes such as these). Here a potential half truth might still be a full lie, because even if Africans maybe should be wary of China, their relationships right now are clearly to the benefit of both the Africans and Chinese.
And Brazil, India and South Africa have massive problems at home, sure, but I still would advocate to not be too harsh to them. Even a somewhat dysfunctional BRICS is still striving for a multipolar world and that alone opens up much needed space for the majority of the world outside the West. Even if the West were to be correct, that BRICS was not to be trusted, BRICS’ mere existence breaks up the monopolistic or monopsonistic status quo, and that is a good thing.

Posted by: Roland | Mar 28 2024 16:30 utc | 89

Posted by: NemesisCalling | Mar 28 2024 16:16 utc | 88
Because of a promise. The promise being that when we negotiated with China during Nixon, we were proceeding from a position of strength.

Interesting…. is it actually possible that the Western elites believed they could give away their manufacturing sectors in return for maintaining hegemony at the financing level which they regard as primus inter pares? It appears so.
Or maybe there is some sort of Guru Hariri scheme to transcend body-level practicalities altogether by creating a Brave New mainly cyber World in which quaint oddities like the working classes are sterilized out of existence, a process towards which the West is now inching. Or less radical digital currency schemes binding the world together under a ‘One Ring’ of Accounting. Any such over-arching, aka centralized, binding factors will trump national sovereignty whilst still being easy prey to the questing parasites always thirsting to engorge themselves on the blood of power. Moreover, such approaches are technical and ideological, aka materialist, and therefore insufficient basis for humane civilizational mores and longevity. Aka: more of the same materialist mess.
I like the promise of BRICS multipolarity and agree that the Hegemon’s days should be numbered. I just don’t trust most mainstream narratives, including that one, and fear multipolarity is WEF-Globalism in disquise and so suspect that it’s less about China versus America etc. and more about the top versus the rest of us at the bottom with the elites class world wide more or less on the same page pulling the wool over our eyes as usual.

Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 28 2024 18:39 utc | 91

I shall guess that you speak a Latin-derived language, and probably not Romanian

Last I checked, Romanian is a Latin-derived language. How is it not?

Posted by: joey_n | Mar 28 2024 20:55 utc | 93

The one thing I see missing from your equation echo chamber is the wealth already locked up in mining. Diamonds gold etc . At no point is this mentioned . If these nations can nationalise their own resources then spread sheets change. Bananas and tomato’s will never make a nations wealth when it’s gold is stripped by European and American companies. Who unlike China are not investing in anything no roads rail or anything. Just a thought

Posted by: Hankster | Mar 28 2024 21:38 utc | 95

Arnaud Bertrand writes about the Colour Revolutionary who is running for the EU Parliament on a platform of following the CIA’s orders
“… Raphaël Glucksmann is now in 3rd place in the French polls for the upcoming EU elections so I think it’s high time someone wrote a honest portrait of him.
“He’s right behind Le Pen and Macron’s parties and to me he’s by far the scariest character of the three. And I absolutely hate and despise both Macron and Le Pen…
“Glucksmann has a very revealing personal history. He was a key actor in several US-led color revolutions and their aftermath (in Georgia and Ukraine) and his father André is an ex-Maoist philosopher turned American-asset – a so-called “atlantist” – towards the end of the cold war (you can literally read, directly on the CIA website, a report on how he defected entitled “France: defection of the leftist intellectuals”:….”
https://www.defenddemocracy.press/raphael-glucksmann-is-now-in-3rd-place-in-the-french-polls-for-the-upcoming-eu-elections/

Posted by: bevin | Mar 28 2024 23:47 utc | 97

I-95 inner Baltimore harbor Fort McHenry tunnel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_McHenry_Tunnel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immersed_tube
Soon to go *blubb blubb blubb*? 😛
Yeah of course that’s impossible (sarcasm).
I-94 is elsewhere (as expected… lol).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-94
No matter what there will always be large ramifications from taking out big infrastructure.
All ports are not equal, especially big ports, their context and use is often relatively unique and somewhat specialized. This very quickly becomes apparent when reading the official reports on the top US ports. My old comment from way back when (a few years ago) has links to examples of such.
Adjustments even when possible will take time, possibly a lot of time. If it was small stuff it would be easy but it’s bound to be a relatively large amount and the difference in difficulty might not (almost surely will not) scale linearly.
Everybody thinking it is an accident would be great for both any would-be bridge/infrastructure deconstructors, and CYA-/face-saving-mode politicians, and anyone in agencies who believes it might make it easier to track people down. Hard to say or even guess just how much or who benefits the most.
I see no reason to conclude that it is either an accident or not, both are entirely possible imo.
However I would point out that bridge pillars are not magnetic… 😀
Sure you’re not going for the needle in the haystack but at the same time there’s a lot more non-pillar than pillar to hit.
Either way: hurray! 😀

Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Mar 29 2024 2:06 utc | 99