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Sunday, March 3, 2024

NATO leads Ukraine to 3 big defeats

With the disorderly retreat from Avdiivka, Ukraine has now suffered three major defeats in a row since its rapid advances in fall 2022 against thin Russian forces in the open plains of the northeast. The Battle of Bakhmut may have caused the Wagner Mutiny, but Zelesnky threw many of his best forces into the battle against a force of mercenaries and ex-convicts promised freedom through service. Feeding the Bakhmut meatgrinder was not a unanimous strategy but General Syrsky had Zelensky's ear and promised a victory. It never materialized.

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Notes on Ukrainian fascism and its relations to Germany and Nazism, 1918-1941

The following are research notes outlining basic facts about the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists prior to the Nazi's forming the Ukrainian SS "1st Galicien" Division in 1943. Sources include scholarly articles; Canadian, British and American newspapers; and declassified OSS/CIA and other American government materials.

 
Edmonton Journal, October 10 1961
 

Friday, November 10, 2023

Imperialist disasters unfold in Ukraine and Palestine

Zelensky's fascist-riddled and corrupt wartime dictatorship (he is cancelling elections scheduled for this spring) and his NATO financiers and arms dealers should have sat down with Putin last fall when Russia's northern front collapsed, the encirclement of Kharkiv was defeated, and the Kherson regions was recaptured in the south.

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

The Jama Expulsion in context

Between Sarah Jama's expulsion from the ONDP caucus, the Paul Miller fiasco in Hamilton East, and the glorious do-nothing reign of Hamilton Mayor Andrea Horwath, you can see the NDP cratering in Hamilton, one of the historic NDP strongholds in Ontario. We've already seen the big cracks in other traditional NDP strongholds in Windsor, Sault Ste. Marie, Timmins, and across northern Ontario. We've also seen the NDP's big gains in working-class Brampton completely rolled back in the wake of the ONDP's incredible backstabbing of their Brampton North MPP, Kevin Yarde, just before the 2022 election.

Monday, October 2, 2023

Manitoba's NDP: Permanent Austerity and Open for Business

October 3, 2023 is the Manitoba election. The ruling PCs led by Heather Stefanson are on the ropes after first coming to power two terms ago in 2016. They deposed an unpopular, exhausted and divided NDP dynasty that had held office for seventeen long years. The NDP is on the cusp of retaking power under the leadership of Wab Kinew. Kinew was leader in the 2019 election and was soundly defeated. If the NDP wins, he will become the first Indigenous provincial premier in Canada.

The Manitoba election has seen the PCs adopt a nasty scapegoating strategy against trans people first developed by America's right-wing movements and now provincial governments in Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Ontario. The scapegoating of trans people under the guise of “parental rights” serves to rally its right-wing base among various conservative and religious communities. However, scapegoating of this nature is also about deflecting attention and scrutiny from the PC government’s terrible policies of permanent austerity, privatization, and profits over people.

Kinew and the NDP have positioned themselves against the PC’s scapegoating and have also pushed hard on promises of healthcare reinvestment. However, a closer investigation reveals a broad and deep consensus between the NDP and PCs on most economic and fiscal policy. These shared policies put wealthier people and business interests first while containing social programs, public development and democratic planning within the strict confines of permanent austerity. The following is an attempt to unpack aspects of this right-wing consensus between Manitoba's PCs and NDP.

Thursday, August 10, 2023

The Decline of Democracy in Capitalist Ontario

As the Greenbelt is bulldozed, the province's recycling is privatized without a peep, and the healthcare system is being strangled to death and shaken down by corporations and right-wing doctors, I have been working my way through this book after stumbling upon it at Novel Idea, a great independent bookstore in Kingston.

Tom McDowell documents the rollback of democratic mechanisms within the Ontario legislature and the centralization of decision-making power in the hands of cabinet and premier. The argument McDowell makes is an obvious one: democratic decision-making and diffused power in parliament are rolled back due to a series of economic crises that hit the province in the 1970s and early 1980s, and then again in the first half of the 1990s.


Thursday, July 6, 2023

A Timeline of the Site C Dam in British Columbia

This timeline was originally created in February 2021 when costs were revised upwards to $16 billion.