Ukraine is a millstone around Europe’s neck

M. K. Bhadrakumar

Indian Punchline | May 29, 2022

“Brotherly friends”: Ukrainian President Zelensky (R) and visiting Polish President Andrzej Duda, Kiev, May 22, 2022

The fallout of the war in Ukraine over Europe is largely seen in terms of the uncertainties over the continent’s heavy dependence on Russian energy and the impact of it on the economies of the 27 EU member countries. Imposing restrictions on Russian oil has proven a much more complicated task than imagined previously.

Countries that are highly dependent on Russian fossil fuels are concerned about the implications of such measures for their own economies. Hungary, for example, is apparently asking for financial support of between $16 billion and $19 billion to move away from Russian energy. It also refuses to discuss the matter at the upcoming Extraordinary European summit on Monday/Tuesday in Brussels. Prime Minister Viktor Orban asked in a letter to the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, that the oil embargo be removed from the topics of discussion at the summit.

The WW III that Biden and All Other Neocons Are Leading U.S. Toward

Eric Zuesse

The intensely neoconservative U.S. President Joe Biden is leading the world into a World War III against both Russia and China, but despite the U.S. spending annually around half of the entire planet’s military expenditures (not only in its ‘Defense’ Department but in its Treasury Department and other Government agencies), America is actually inferior to both Russia and China regarding leading-edge geostrategically crucial technologies of both nuclear and laser weapons, and is getting farther behind each year, because for both Russia and China their own national sovereignty is what their enemy, the U.S. Government, aims to conquer, whereas no one poses a threat to the U.S. Government’s continuing rule over its own people (it becomes increasingly a police-state).

The U.S. Government is the only and supreme champion of sanctions and coups and invasions for regime-change producing the creation of new vassal-nations throughout the globe, whereas both Russia and China must protect themselves from that or else become themselves new U.S. vassal-nations. So: they are laser-focused on NOT allowing America to grab their nation. Truly, for them, this is an existential issue, NOT a matter (such as is the case regarding the U.S. Government) of growing to become the world’s first and only all-encompassing global empire (a luxury that only America’s billionaires, who control the U.S. Government, require). This basic distinction is the reason why whereas the U.S. has over 800 military bases spread throughout the planet, Russia and China are concerned ONLY about not allowing U.S. forces to be based so near to their borders as to enable a U.S. missile to annihilate their capital’s command-and-control within less than ten minutes and so to enable the U.S. Government to grab control of them so fast that the targeted nation’s (Russia’s and China’s) retaliatory weapons won’t be launched in self-defense.

Will NATO Aggression Force Russia to Extend the Special Operation Beyond the Ukraine?

Batiushka

The Saker Blog | May 27, 2022

The three aims of the Russian Federation’s Special Military Operation in the Ukraine were clearly announced by President Putin at the outset on 24 February. They were very specific, very limited and deliberately excluded the occupation of the whole of the Ukraine, let alone attacks on any territories outside it. Moreover, any suggestion of the use of nuclear weapons was quite absent – that was only ever raised by the hysterical irresponsibility and propaganda of Western politicians and journalists. Let us recall that the three aims were, firstly, the liberation of the Russian Donbass from the Nazis, and, secondly and thirdly, the demilitarisation and denazification of the Ukraine as an ‘Anti-Russia’, created there by the West since 2014. In other words, the Russian aim was to finish the unfinished World War II against Nazism and definitely not trigger a ‘World War III’.

As Things Continue to Deteriorate in Ukraine, Everyone Is Positioning Themselves For The Incoming Ukrainian Disintegration

Gonzalo Lira

[THIS VIDEO IS POSTED HERE FOR NON-PROFIT, NON-COMMERCIAL, EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THAT OF ITS PARTICIPANT(S) AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEW OF THE JOP]

MSM Offers Rare Glimpse Into How Bad Things Are Really Going For Ukrainian Forces

Westerners would be a lot less cavalier about demanding a foreign population keep fighting until total victory if they truly understood the horrors of war. Unfortunately, there’s a propaganda machine of unprecedented sophistication that has spent generations preventing them from obtaining that very understanding.

Caitlin Johnstone

While everyone’s focused on the latest mass shooting in the US, The Washington Post published what may be the first major acknowledgment from the mainstream western media that Ukraine’s war against Russia has not been nearly the cakewalk they’ve been leading the public to believe.

In a new article titled “Ukrainian volunteer fighters in the east feel abandoned,” WaPo reports that contrary to the triumphant narratives the western world is being spoon-fed, many troops in eastern Ukraine have been surviving on one potato per day and deserting their posts because they feel their leaders have turned their backs on them and they’re being sent to certain death.

“Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and Grad rockets on a key eastern front line. Outnumbered, untrained and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end,” The Washington Post reports, citing multiple named sources.

Karl Marx: Historian of Social Times and Spaces

Red May TV | May 13, 2022

Drawing on current perspectives in philosophy of history and a rigorous reading of Karl Marx’s oeuvre, George Garcia-Quesada’s recent book, Karl Marx, Historian of Social Times and Spaces, demolishes the all-too-common portrayal of Marx as an evolutionary determinist. By unpacking Marx’s concepts of social space and social time, he highlights the ways it can explain dynamics of complex multilinear development of human societies and of capitalism in particular. Cordelia Belton and Edwad, hosts of the podcast REEL ABSTRACTION, lead an inquiry into the book and consult with Massimiliano Tomba, whose own book, Marx’s Temporalities shows that an adequate historiographical paradigm for capitalism must consider the plurality of temporal layers that come into conflict in modernity.

George Garcia Quesada, Massimiliano Tomba, Edwad, Cordelia Belton

SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rswhe2trn8A

[THIS ARTICLE IS POSTED HERE FOR NON-PROFIT, NON-COMMERCIAL, EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THAT OF ITS AUTHOR(S) AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEW OF THE JOP]

Uno Kozo’s Theory of Crisis Today

Red May TV | May 28, 2022

This panel discusses and explores the new English translation of Uno Kozo’s Theory of Crisis (Brill 2021). Originally published in Japan and in Japanese in 1953, Uno’s Theory of Crisis presents a radical reinterpretation Marx’s Capital to clarify the inevitability and periodicity of capitalist crisis. Emphasizing how the commodification of labour-power is the fundamental cause of capitalist crisis, Uno’s Theory of Crisis differs from other Marxist theories of crisis that emphasize the cause of crisis in over-production/under-consumption, or else in the tendency of the profit rate to fall. The panel features scholars of Uno’s method for political economy and discusses how his Theory of Crisis can help us to write the history of class struggle in today’s conjuncture of multiple capitalist crisis.

Ken Kawashima, Wendy Matsumura, Gavin Walker, Dr. Richard Westra

SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RFCRthZsq4

[THIS ARTICLE IS POSTED HERE FOR NON-PROFIT, NON-COMMERCIAL, EDUCATIONAL PURPOSE. THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THAT OF ITS AUTHOR(S) AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEW OF THE JOP]

Ukraine Update: Ukraine Must Give Russia Territory, Says Henry Kissinger

Countercurrents | May 26, 2022

Ukraine conflict has now entered in the area of intensive diplomacy. Davos, now the seat of the World Economic Forum (WEF), is rich with Ukraine debate.

Media reports said:

Veteran U.S. statesman Henry Kissinger has urged the West to stop trying to inflict a crushing defeat on Russian forces in Ukraine, warning that it would have disastrous consequences for the long term stability of Europe.

The former U.S. secretary of state and architect of the Cold War rapprochement between the U.S. and China told a gathering in Davos that it would be fatal for the West to get swept up in the mood of the moment and forget the proper place of Russia in the European balance of power.

Marx’s Capital Lecture 1 Historical Introduction and Overview

Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice | February 09, 2022

363 views Feb 9, 2022 The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) is pleased to host a series of public lectures on Volume 1 of Marx’s Capital, given by the political economist and activist Andy Higginbottom. This is the first lecture of the Marx’s Capital Lecture series, held on 7th February 2022.

To sign up for CSSGJ events, please go to our website http://www.cssgj.org

Update on Ukraine Crisis

Times concedes that the Russian operation in Ukraine is inexorably gaining upper hand. Some US military analysts have begun advising Ukraine's mentors that war is lost & Kiev must sue for peace NOW – or else… One hell of an "information war", isn't it?https://t.co/ggGR4u32GS

— M. K. Bhadrakumar (@BhadraPunchline) May 11, 2022