As Marxist economist Michael Roberts explains in a recent post, core inflation in Western economies isn't going down:
This is what worries central banks. And what it also shows is that interest-rate hikes have little effect on reducing inflation, which rose because of food and energy prices, something central banks cannot control and are now falling for reasons nothing to do with central banks. Instead, central bank rate hikes are increasing the cost of borrowing to spend for households and invest for companies. Indeed, as ECB chief Lagarde said at her press conference, monetary tightening was being ‘very efficient’ in squeezing the real economy. As I have argued in a previous post, profits are now being squeezed as price inflation abates. And rising interest rates are squeezing companies at the other end.
Sure, if consumer spending and business investment slumps, then core inflation will eventually fall, but only as economies drop into recession. Even then, the major economies may enter a slump in production and a rise in unemployment this year, but still have inflation rates well above the levels of two years ago – the worst of all possible worlds.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
Here is the archive of important pieces of analysis from throughout the war that we've collected.
February 6th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
February 7th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
February 8th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
February 10th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
February 11th's update is here on the site and here in the comments.
Links and Stuff
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can, thank you.
Resources For Understanding The War Beyond The Bulletins
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. I recommend their map more than the channel at this point, as an increasing subscriber count has greatly diminished their quality.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have good analysis (though also a couple bad takes here and there)
Understanding War and the Saker: neo-conservative sources but their reporting of the war (so far) seems to line up with reality better than most liberal sources. Beware of chuddery.
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 fairly brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. The Duran, of which he co-hosts, is where the chuddery really begins to spill out.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent journalist reporting in the Ukrainian warzones.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ Gleb Bazov, banned from Twitter, referenced pretty heavily in what remains of pro-Russian Twitter.
https://t.me/asbmil ~ Now rebranded as Battlefield Insights, they do infrequent posts on the conflict.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/riafan_everywhere ~ Think it's a government news org or Federal News Agency? Russian language.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ Front news coverage. Russian langauge.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of the really big pro-Russian (except when they're being pessismistic, which is often) telegram channels focussing on the war. Russian language.
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
Any Western media outlet that is even vaguely liberal (and quite a few conservative ones too).
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.
Last week's discussion post.
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the CIA said it's not true so there you go
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If Mi Lai report got out today, libs would also said it's conspiracy theory. Libs gonna defend their regime no matter what their opinions doesn't matter, tbh.
Merkel also just admitting that she never intended to uphold Minsk agreements and it was to buy time to build up Ukrainian military forces..
Someone posted a Danny Haiphong stream here the other day and one of the guests mentioned that that line had been mistranslated and the German quotes basically said that Minsk 2 effectively ended up buying time for military build up.
That doesn't mean the West wasn't acting in bad faith, just maybe that Merkel didn't directly admit it. Not being able to read German I couldn't say for sure, but the guest didn't exactly come across as a NATO shill?
I looked it up again. At first she defends her record, saying she was trying to prevent exactly this kind of war. When pressed by the interviewer if that might have been a mistake in hindsight, she says she was against NATO membership for Ukraine in 2008. And then:
Literally: And the Minsk agreement 2014 was an attempt to give time to Ukraine.
You could translate this to "buy time", but I don't know if you should. Then she goes on to talk about how Ukraine used that time to get stronger, and that Putin could have overrun them in 2015 and that NATO couldn't have helped as much.
In context you could maybe read it like this: "I wanted to prevent this war, but we were hedging our bets and also buying time for Ukraine." Or more charitably: "I wanted to prevent this war, which did not work, but that ended up giving Ukraine time to prepare."
She's kinda defensive here, so keep that in mind. She's being pressured into justifying her actions in hindsight.
Edit: Also it doesn't specify what the goal was in "giving time", it just says Ukraine used that time to get stronger.
Interesting, so it sounds like it's more that it's ambiguous? Thanks for looking into this!
Liberals put Hersh on the naughty boy list for reporting that Obama was doing nefarious shit in Syria, so they now consider him a stooge of Putin.
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Even if we get definitive proof that the US did it, I won't be able to use it as an example of how the current US government lies about things like this (and then by extension, US govt narratives about things like the Xinjiang situation or anything going on in the DPRK) with the people I know. Because they'll just retcon it in their minds as "welllll... Biden basically said he was going to do it, but he couldn't just outright say it, so this doesn't mean the government habitually lies about other countries".
As I have pointed out at least German mainstream media is reporting on it, but Hersh offers neither witnisses nor evidence only an anonymous source (trust me bro). The guy is 85 years old and people act like he is his 1970 self, simply because he tells them what they already want to believe.
He should definitely betray the anonymity of his source so they can go to jail where they belong for divulging state secrets.
He doesn't have to do anything, but unless he provides evidence then this is just an interesting story to drive yourself insane with.
This is why the only reliable sources are the CIA and NATO. You know they're honest because they're the good guys!!
Post 1 story he’s published that ended up being wrong. Libs like to scoff him off as a conspiracy theorist but everything he’s broken the story on ended up being denied, and then later found to be true.
It also just confirms what is obvious to all. The massive military superpower with the economic incentive and the means to blow the pipeline blew up the pipeline. It’s not exactly hard to put the pieces together here if you use a realist or materialist lens
I saw libs on twitter talk shit on his OBL Raid reporting, I get bad vibes from his Seth Rich coverage, but 80 good/ 20 bad and I certainly believe him on this
I forget what its' called but you can't extrapolate future trends from past successes. And that's with science stuff, not whistleblower reporting. No one cares if Hersch has been right in the past, he needs to present evidence now.
He has evidence, whistleblower accounts from sources he is keeping anonymous.
He can have all the evidence he wants piling up in his office, he needs to show it to people instead of just going "trust me bro" or no one can do anything with this story.
Yeah he’s going to reveal his sources so they can get fired and put in jail lol
No, he's not, because if he did they'd get fired or put in jail. But without evidence his story is worthless.
Are you understanding what I'm saying? This isn't about what we want or don't want to be true, this is about what can be proven.
Plenty of journalism relies on anonymous sources. Deal with it
Jesus christ, dude.
Alright then
well, isn't cia and nato always went with anon source to make up ridiculous shite. But for this instance, there's only two party that could do it, either the Russian or american with their guard dog. The pipe line not gonna blew itself and the one that blew it not gonna admit it nor put the evidence especially during the war. Maybe 3 decades later, the party that blew it might published a book and said "yeah, we blew it"
Excluding the off chance of total collapse of the state that did it, it's not like we're going to have anyone willing to go on the record and telling the truth about what happened for the next several decades. This is the best we're ever going to get.
And it's not like the story is implausible. The US were the ones most likely to benefit from the sabotage as it removed one of Russia's political leverages over Europe as well as a temptation for Europe to seek peace to save their industry.
Until some archive is opened we can't know for sure who did it but we can know that our is more likely that the US did it than if someone else did.
Sure, but it's still just a just-so story. I can't show this to anyone to convince them the US did anything. There's no evidence.
There's nothing to debunk. He hasn't provided any evidence, just a narrative that lines up with publicly available facts.
they can't say "Well this guy was in this country when Hersch says he was in this country" bc Hersch hasn't released any names or corroborating facts. Right now it's just a nice story.
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must have missed the Bennet thing. What happened?
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Wow, thanks. Just watched an hour of it.
Was this podcast recent or only simply uploaded 5 days ago?
Also is there a written translated (official) transcript anywhere? I mean, i guess this is his official YouTube account with the translation overlaid, but still.
looking more into it, Bennett is already walking the comments back a bit