Image is from this Black Agenda Report article by the Communist Party of Kenya.
In June, large anti-government protests shook Kenya. President Ruto and his parliament were attempting to pass the new Finance Bill 2024, which, among other things, would have hiked taxes on the population, with a 16% sales tax on bread and a 25% duty on cooking oil, as well as new taxes on financial transanctions and vehicle ownership. There would also have been levies on women's sanitary products and digital goods such as phones, among other measures affecting hospitals.
Hundreds of protestors stormed the parliament building and began to tear the place apart. Shortly afterwards, on June 26th, Ruto announced that he was withdrawing the bill, calling the tens of deaths and hundreds of injuries "unfortunate". A couple weeks later, Ruto then fired his entire cabinet (aside from his foreign minister) and communicated his wish to the nation to form a "broad-based government". Funnily enough, in July, it was announced that the majority of positions were to be filled by members of the old cabinet, while other positions were taken by members of the opposition. This has prompted scepticism among the population, including calls to resign, but there haven't (yet) been any major anti-government events to pressure this outcome. The Communist Party of Kenya has been working to get some of their comrades back after they were abducted by the police during the protest period, and have otherwise supported the protests against Ruto.
The measures in the bill were strongly encouraged by the IMF. Kenya's debt is currently around $80 billion, of which about 10% is owed to China for infrastructure projects (such as a railway linking the capital, Nairobi, to the port city of Mombasa, as well as 11,000 kilometers of road throughout the country). The rest is owed to a combination of the US, IMF, World Bank, and Saudi Arabia. More than half of government revenue is going towards repaying the debt - but despite these massive payments, it has only grown. The most recent round of IMF plundering (and the impetus for current events) began in 2021, when they offered a 38-month programme to "help" Kenya, which would involve the usual warfare on the poor and the dismemberment of any useful societal institutions.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you've wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don't worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
How do you go from "unconditional" to "a temporary incentive that barely covers anything"?
I think a lot of people are not particularly familiar with the pre-Yang grifter UBI platform, specialy on reddit.
The basic argument was that given an unconditional income people would rather use their time to do things that can lead to improving their material conditions. If you have income you can study or take a second job or learn a craft etc. This was supported by the Manitoba experiment and the fundamental point still holds.
The caveats and the left critique is only against the Yang grifter shit. On that I agree its just pipe dreams. But a serious UBI proposal existed before then and it definitely included key points like healthcare reform. From day 1 I think most people understood it would make no point to be given UBI just to spend on healthcare and rent. At that point its not income its a subsidy to those industries.
So considering a serious UBI proposal, as I see it COVID got nothing to do with this. It wasn't unconditional and it wasn't income, it was some temporary stimulus people got. Not only that, during the pandemic people were literaly doing the opposite of having freedom to take other activities. Education and some jobs were temporarily moved online but otherwise nothing changed.
Nobody took COVID checks and were like "guess I don't have to work for the next 5 years now".
I think worse still is pushing this narrative starts to validate mainstream neoiibs economics gaslighting narratives that the problem with inflation was that people had too much extra money and the years the Fed spent trying to control inflation through interest rates targeting "excess savings". Both of these are absolute garbage nonsense theories that only serves to punch on the working class.
At best you're validating neoliberals arguments here, we should be careful, this realy depends on whether you are talking about serious UBI or Yang shit. Its not so superficialy simple like that.
The Manitoba experiment was primarily about studying whether people would drop out of the workforce when given a set amount of money each month. The left critique has never, at any point, been that people would stop working if a UBI program were implemented, so I'm not sure who you are arguing with. That's a right wing talking point, and it's the same one they level against socialism.
Additionally, the primary result of the Manitoba experiment with regards to education was that teenage boys dropped out of high school to get a job to support their family at a lower frequency and got better grades, not that they were retraining or getting post-secondary education at a higher rate. The latter runs dangerously close the neoliberal narrative that the reason people are poor is because they aren't educated enough.
The left critique of UBI isn't that more money for the working class leads to inflation. The left critique of UBI is that it will lead to inflation when there is no government pressure on prices/profit-seeking behavior, and that it cannot work as a broad program under neoliberalism specifically because such government intervention is anathema to neoliberalism.
"Excess savings" started decreasing 6 months before the Fed even raised interest rates. It started doing so because the pandemic aid stopped and a mix of supply chain issues and "pricing strategy" increased inflation. The Fed doesn't even target excess savings. Again, this ties back to what the criticism of UBI is: the profit motive incentivizes businesses to raise prices when they know their customers have more disposable income, and their ability to do so is subject to the demand elasticity of the product(s) they sell and the concentration within their market. UBI as a broad program can only work such that there is state intervention to prevent price increases, and that state intervention is incompatible with neoliberalism.
I think a lot of the critiques against UBI are critiques that can also be directed at other material improvements for the working class as well. Of course capital is going to try and appropriate it through price gouging, they already do that with wage increases. Of course the reactionary forces are going to try and use UBI to argue in favour of slashing welfare services, they do this with every material improvement for the working class. Look for instance at how Margaret Thatcher used working class home ownership, a good thing, to create generations of deranged chuds.
Replacing welfare payments with an UBI could have the possibility of making punishing the poor a little harder for capital. Services for the poor ends up becoming poor services and there is a very different political cost to slashing something for the lazy racislised poor and then slashing the check everyone receives each month.
UBI is not going to make sweeping changes in society and abolish all poverty and exploitation, only idiot liberals thinks so. It could, however, arguably be a reasonable reformist improvement over the means tested alms for the poor it would replace.
The other criticism of UBI, and one that the Manitoba experiment didn't address, is that the realistic goal of UBI under capitalism would be to use it to do away with guaranteed services (Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, libraries, etc). Fairly standard government privatization scheme but even more markety. This is how a person like Hayek can promote it - under his ideology the guaranteed government services wouldn't exist.
UBI would then be under the same pressures as the minimum wage and social security payments. Which is to say, kept as low as possible in the interests of capital even as prices rise. Whereas before you might have guaranteed hip replacements, now you have a guaranteed $900/month and the insurance you can afford will only pay for half. That kind of thing.