Image is of Venezuela’s Maduro and Colombia’s Petro walking together at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas in 2022, sourced from this article.

Ordinarily, I avoid straying into the American domestic situation, but the government shutdown appears to be continuing into increasingly harmful territory. If the situation is not resolved, soon tens of millions of Americans will lose food assistance, and already millions of federal employees are furloughed or are working without pay. To those not in the know, this situation has essentially stemmed from the Democrats refusing to sign off on the Republicans’ plan to substantially shrink Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, which would eventually result in tens of millions losing healthcare coverage and tens if not hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

To be clear, though, the Democrats have not exactly been paragons of healthcare: they not only oppose plans to make affordable healthcare a right (in defiance of wide popular opinion), but also do their part to maximize suffering. Biden’s policies during the pandemic ensured at least one million people died, and millions of children lost public healthcare coverage. We may never know the true toll, as the US decided that simply ceasing to report on a problem means that the problem no longer exists.

In other news, over the last couple weeks, the US has expanded their hostility against Venezuela by also including Colombia in their ire, and particularly the left-leaning leader, Petro. Both countries are now experiencing major economic and covert pressure by the US to try and cause regime change. The US has deployed an aircraft carrier to the waters near Venezuela and is conducting a military training operation with Trinidad and Tobago, which Venezuela has warned may be the prelude to the long-awaited attack.

Additionally, the US is attempting to combat Chinese geopolitical interest in central America and the Caribbean by carrying out digital attacks and launching pressure campaigns against Chinese and pro-Chinese countries and organizations. Given China’s enormous economic weight, if central America were to break all ties with China, it would be a catastrophe for them; such decisions would only be made by outright compradors, and the resulting economic problems would make their reigns unpopular and, hopefully, brief.

Last week’s thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

Please check out the RedAtlas!

The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.

The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine

If you have evidence of Zionist crimes and atrocities that you wish to preserve, there is a thread here in which to do so.

Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:

UNRWA 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.
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.

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.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
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.

  • carpoftruth [any, any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
    38·
    11 hours ago

    In Canadian Indigenous news, here’s one for the nuance heads. I tried to archive link this but archive.is returned a ‘bot’ error message. APTN is the Aboriginal People’s Television Network, an Indigenous owned media outlet (as far as I can tell) so click on it anyway. Some content for this post also came from this story, which is archived.

    nuance below. No content warning, just a tedious legal issue that is one more long term consequence of not respecting treaties or more promptly resolving treaty disputes

    spoiler

    In the mid 2000s, the 21 First Nations governments party to the Robinson Huron Treaty brought a lawsuit against Canada saying that the terms of that treaty were not being honoured.

    The First Nations said the fact that the $4-per-person annuity had not increased since 1874 breached the treaty, because resource extraction projects operating on their land had been generating profits that far exceeded what their members received.

    The judge on the trial ruled in favour of the First Nations, which resulted in a $10b CAD settlement.

    Five per cent of that sum went to the lawyers from Nahwegahbow Corbiere Genoodmagejig/Barristers & Solicitors who argued the case on behalf of the First Nations.

    Per their website, this law firm is owned, staffed and operated by Aboriginal people and is located in Anishinabek territory, which is covered by the Robinson Huron treaty.

    This equates to about $510m CAD in fees. The legal firm took the case on partial contingency, meaning that they charged reduced rates for some of their staff in exchange for a percentage of any settlement, should the case be successful. Lawyers commonly operate purely/mostly on contingency in personal injury or employment law for example. In this case, the contingency was uncapped, meaning that the firm got 5% of any settlement, not 5% up to some maximum dollar figure. The firm donated half their percentage of the settlement (~$250m CAD) to various Indigenous community projects.

    Subsequent to winning this settlement, two of the First Nations part of the original case (Atikameksheng Anishnawbek and Garden River First Nation) brought and successfully won a lawsuit over this amount of fees, and the judge ordered the fees reduced to $23m CAD from $510m CAD. The lower fee represents approximately $350/h of legal effort, as the case took ~65,000 hours.

    “When we saw the legal fee of half a billion dollars, it just was so astronomical and know that there were 15 to 17 of the nations within the Robinson Huron Treaty territory that would get less than what that firm was getting,” [Chief Karen Bell] said in an interview with CBC.

    In his ruling, [Judge] Myers criticized the lawyers for bringing their personal interests and the 21 First Nations’ interests into conflict by charging the high fee, discouraging the First Nations from getting outside legal advice on their fee, and pressuring them to approve it.

    [Legal counsel for the law firm] Gover said the ruling “echoes centuries of paternalistic attitudes toward First Nations” and undermines the right of Indigenous leaders to make their own informed decisions. “The chiefs, elders and other trustees involved in this agreement were experienced negotiators who drove a hard bargain and were well aware of what they were doing over the entire course of this litigation,” he said.

    I will finish on a koan: If the legal team claiming very high fees for winning an Indigenous rights case is Indigenous, is it still settler logic to have an opinion?

    I’ve used the word Aboriginal in this post as this is the word used by the parties to describe their organizations.

    • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      12 hours ago

      I’m not sure what the objectively correct opinion is here, but I think it’s good that the fees were reduced, especially given the work done. $510M for 65,000 hours translates to almost $8,000/hour. That’s obscene. Maybe you could justify 10% of that depending on the risk taken by the firm, but there is no way that they should have expected to walk away with 5% of a multi-billion dollar settlement. I’m sure that no one anticipated the settlement to be as big as it was, but also there should have been some better discretion exercised by the law firm.

      The fact that the law firm is indigenous is a red herring at best. It’s still just a law firm. It’s appropriate that an indigenous firm did the work, but just because a firm is indigenous doesn’t mean it can’t also be in the wrong. Rainbow capitalism is not the solution to problems caused by capitalism.

      It’s also really sus that they chose to donate half their fees after the fact. It looks like they knew it was too much, but that if they wrote a big enough check they might get to keep what was still an excessive amount. The fact that they donated the money, rather than just giving the money back to the beneficiaries, is also potentially very scummy. It creates a situation where the projects funded by that money, or at least the plans based on those funds, are now potentially in jeopardy due to this decision.

      After the final settlement was reached in 2023, the legal team donated half of its original $510-million fee — about $255 million — back to the communities to fund cultural and language programs.

      “In the wake of Judge Myers’ decision, it’s far from clear how those planned commitments will be affected,” Gover said.

      A judge ruled that the money shouldn’t have been paid to the law firm in the first place. The fact that it was donated to “good causes” is irrelevant. It looks like they wanted to make it difficult to roll back the decision on the fees by committing funds to community projects, effectively holding those projects hostage and creating a politically fraught situation to use as leverage.

      In my very humble opinion, I think that it’s paternalistic to assume that an indigenous law firm wouldn’t try to get as much as possible out of this situation, nor use highly questionable tactics in doing so. They are lawyers, and lawyers are good at working the system and justifying things to themselves and others. It’s a shame that this whole thing got so messy, but this is how things go under capitalism. This is actually an example of things working as intended, which is as good a reason as any to scrap the whole system and build something better.

      • carpoftruth [any, any]@hexbear.netMEnglish
        10·
        9 hours ago

        Agreed, at best it seems like the law firm underestimated the potential of their own success. This case is a really big win for Indigenous communities in general (not just those under Robinson Huron, but as precedent for other treaties with fixed rates of benefits). Still, a payout of $250m spread between however many partners is a pretty gross amount of generational wealth for a few individuals. Even if they are all benevolently sharing wealth that’s just too much money.

        Anyway I think that the legal status of Indigenous people in Canada is a contradiction in the Canadian political economy that is critical to understand in the context of significant change, so I think these types of stories are worth following. One that is imo more legally significant is the Cowichan land title issue. I intend to do a post about that at some point as it seems like BC has accidentally liberaled themselves into some form of land back.

        • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          7·
          7 hours ago

          The issue is that even if they were benevolently sharing wealth, it’s not theirs to share. The money was either going to go to them or the communities, so if they actually wanted to do the right thing they would have simply given the money back. Getting the $10B payout is great, and I wouldn’t begrudge them an appropriately generous contingency payment that compensates them for their efforts and their risk, but they got a bit greedy.

          I would love to read a post about the Cowichan decision. I think the implications on private property rights are overblown, but it has a lot of people rattled. It’ll be interesting to see what shakes out from it. Anything that gets people this upset about property rights has to be a good thing.