Image is from this article, of protestors in Mexico tearing down a steel fence.
While military, economic, and covert pressure on Venezuela and nearby countries in South America proper continues to mount, a similar process is occurring against Mexico, currently under the leadership of the very popular Sheinbaum, who has generally followed the footsteps of AMLO in terms of policies.
While figures in the Trump administration have made statements to the effect of wishing to bomb Mexican territory, internal pressure within Mexico is rather hard to generate when the government is doing generally positive things for people. As such, protests - comically denoted “Gen Z protests” despite young people being a vanishingly small proportion - have arisen in Mexico, very obviously astroturfed by pro-US and anti-Sheinbaum interests. The first protest, on November 15th, gathered less than 20,000 people, while the second, on November 20th, gathered perhaps 200. Article headlines suggesting that Mexico was “on the verge of collapse” have proven rather sensational and wishcast-y.
While it’s easy to poke fun at these farces (I certainly am), it’s important to keep in mind that soft coups have long been part of the American strategy in Latin America, and with unlimited money and many resources to throw at a project, even incompetent forces can eventually create enough chaos that it can make the ruling president or party feel forced to resign. Such eventualities are certainly not inevitable, and even weak states can provide enough resistance to force the US to try a hard coup instead, with outright bombing campaigns and covert military operations. Cuba has provided perhaps the best example in the western hemisphere of how such plots can be subverted with enough national support (e.g. the hundreds of times the CIA tried to kill/maim Castro, plus the Bay of Pigs debacle), but you do have to be willing to take extraordinary measures to do this - the sorts of measures figures like Chile’s Allende did not take in the 1970s, and the measures Venezuela’s Maduro appears to be taking right now. We shall see what path Sheinbaum takes.
Last week’s thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
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The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
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.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
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.
In Canadian Indigenous news, here is a story about the relationship between the Tahltan Central Government (TCG) and Skeena resources, owners of the Eskay Creek mining project, which is on Tahltan land in northern BC. This article is not written with a Marxist lense, but it is not hard to see the material forces at work. I encourage reading the whole thing.
As Canada’s role in the future world economy is likely to be driven by the resource sector, I believe these issues are worth understanding for news heads. This is where the rubber meets the road with respect to the political economy of Indigenous decision making. Canada is by far the most obvious location for friendshoring to serve American resource needs, and the vast majority of the Canadian resource sector falls under Indigenous consultation obligations.
The article goes on to describe different financial and ownership relationships between parties as well as potential conflict of interest.
TCG has a lot of capacity compared to most First Nations governments in BC and are located in a highly desirable area for resource extraction, colloquially known as the Golden Triangle. TCG has a strong track record of negotiating agreements with resource extraction companies and the province which give them an unprecedented amount of say in project development, and implementing UNDRIP.
Nisga’a Lisims Government, home of the first modern BC treaty from 2000 (The Nisga’a Final Agreement) and benefactor/partner in the Ksi Lisims gas terminal project is also in the same general area. See my previous post on Ksi Lisims from a few months ago.
One of the key constraints to understand is the size of First Nations governments relative to the economic size of the projects in question. TCG is about 3000 people and Eskay alone is a several billion dollar project, which is one of several major mines in the territory, with more in development. The possibility for regulatory capture increases in these circumstances. It’s the regulatory equivalent of the old joke that if you owe the someone a thousand dollars you’ve got a problem, if you owe someone a million dollars, they’ve got a problem. This issue is common to anytime a large industry player comes to a small jurisdiction (think of the sway Walmart has in a small town).
There are also limits to what specialized technical expertise exists in a community of 3000. There is tremendous traditional knowledge in First Nations communities, but this experience does not extend to the detailed design and operation of large open pit mines, tailings dams, pipelines, or shipping terminals. It’s easy to dunk on technocracy, but the reality is that if a community decision is made to support resource development in a Nation’s territory and to use the economic activity associated to support the Nation’s community, then there is need for people with a high degree of training to understand, regulate, and make decisions related to these complex resource projects. That kind of person ideally comes from the community itself, but there is a limited local workforce to draw from, especially Indigenous communities that have suffered from genocide, residential schools, poverty etc. in living memory.
The Canadian legal system including the Indian Act is structured to support assimilation. It does so more softly than it did 100 years ago and there is less focus on cultural assimilation, but incentives for economic assimilation are just as strong as ever in a country founded to be hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Canada has been nothing but resource extraction disguised as a country from it’s very inception. Fishing the Grand Banks, the fur trade, agriculture, ranching, logging, oil, mining, it’s all resource extraction in service of the greater imperial powers. First it was the British empire and then America.
Yep and I don’t see that changing, insane real estate market notwithstanding.
Yep, the statement that First Nations don’t have a veto is common and generally true. This is an exception, though as this story illustrates, actually executing a veto is fraught.
indeed, but this isn’t a uniquely Canadian issue. I’m not aware of any state where Indigenous communities actually have a veto over large scale development. Usually it is a question of having more or less input on risk mitigations/governance and deriving more or less economic benefit.