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.
When the US said it was going to send tanks to Ukraine I saw a lot of talk about how they can only produce a small number of them per month. For whatever mix of reasons I figured the US would be pumping out tanks like crazy, along with all kinda of other weapons. How drunk am I on propaganda? Does the US now focus on other things like jets / missiles / balloons or is it just that they only make a few of that particular tank or have the neoliberal termites been too greedy? ty for any insights
deleted by creator
So uh, where does all that money go?
You'd have to audit the pentagon to answer that lol
deleted by creator
Plus that's not even accounting for theCIA's budget, let alone their off the books shit
deleted by creator
They've never ever had an unqualified audit opinion lmao
And they never will
:porky-happy:
All the shit America does build is really expensive. I think one Javelin is 250k, while a Russian Kornet that is equivalent in most situations is 20k.
Or like the Patriot air defense missiles that cost hundreds of times as much as the cheap missile they're being used to shoot down.
It's graft and corruption on an incredible level. And the US gets away with it because enough of their wunderwaffen do work, and hteir economy is big enough, that they can crush anyone trying to resist. Like it doesn't matter if your tank is a massively overpriced piece of shit as long as the gun works and your enemies are militias with rifles. It doesn't matter how over-priced and over-tuned the F-35 is if all you're asking it to do is dropping very mature 40 year old guided bombs on random civilian buildings with a few insurgents hiding in them.
:wojak-nooo:
It's not corruption! It's because they have tons of magic sci-fi stuff that's so secret you couldn't even imagine what it is!
We also have way more tanks than we could need, and the plant mostly just refits existing tanks with upgrades. Gotcha here is we don’t sell anyone our top of the line tanks in terms of armor and electronics, so we have to produce some export model tanks if we want to send them to Ukraine.
The ARMY has been trying to shut down Abrams production for a long, long time. They know it's too expensive and over-weight to be good and want to switch over to lighter, simpler wheeled vehicles. Congress keeps forcing them to buy new tanks to keep the factory open.
:ira:
The US military desperately wants to stop buying more tanks since they have way more than they need and are mothballing perfectly good tanks because congress keeps buying more as a sort of public jobs program for the towns that depend on the tank factories. So it's possible that the overall rate of production is just high enough to keep these factories afloat.
:geordi-no: Public Jobs Program for green energy transition
:geordi-yes: Public Jobs program for more death machines
It's one of the most clever ways of ensuring US military worship. Even :bern-disgust: constantly votes to keep Boeing factories open because they're based in Burlington. Spread one factory in every state across the US and Congress will never vote down a military spending bill.
The US is only going to send tanks in export configuration, which means a lot of work for the Abrams tanks. Such as removing the depleted uranium armor, detuning the engine, and removing other classified technologies. The USA also wants to send the new version of its tank, the M1A2, instead of the M1A1, the A1 is the tank of witch there are plenty in storage.