blog of the post capitalist transition.. Read or download the novel here + latest relevant posts
Author: thefreeonline
The Free is a book and a blog. Download free E/book ...”the most detailed fictional treatment of the movement from a world recognizably like our own to an anarchist society that I have read...
1. Europe is weak and divided and few would waste their lives to confront Russia’s 5000 Nukes … 2.The 800 billion would have to go for inferior US Arms 3.Without US Satellite Net and Elon’s Starlink Europe would last 3 days.
What kind of “strategic autonomy” can a group of 27 countries with often divergent objectives that depend on a private satellite network and the nuclear cover of a “reluctant ally” have?
As everyone knows, Ursula von der Leyen launched her €800 billion “ReArm Europe” plan because “ something fundamental has changed.” Our European values—democracy, freedom, and the rule of law—are under threat. We see sovereignty being called into question, but so are ironclad commitments. Everything has become transactional. “The pace of change is accelerating, and the actions needed must be bold and decisive .”
A demonstrator is holding a placard depicting a skull that reads ‘Russians burn in hell’ in Warsaw, Poland
Let’s also ignore for a moment the curious contradiction according to which one would want to rearm to “defend democracy” but, to do so, circumvents democratic institutions and proceeds “autocratically” (the “plan” will not be voted on by either the useless European Parliament or the 27 national parliaments). Translated: in whose name are we rearming ?
It’s also clear that these €800 billion are largely a three-card game, because in reality—with the exception of a portion consisting of new debt issued by both the European Union and individual nation states—a large part of them are transfers of funds intended for European “cohesion funds.” That is, the financial instruments created to ” reduce economic, social, and territorial disparities between EU Member States and regions ,” with the aim of ” promoting harmonious and sustainable development by strengthening economic, social, and territorial cohesion within the Union .”
In practice, Rearm Europe will authorize individual states to take these funds and, instead of spending them on building better infrastructure, wind or solar farms, modernizing water and sewage systems, or providing vocational training for the unemployed or young people, use them to buy weapons.
A vile game, but generally simple, like any low-budget hack.
The real problems, however, begin when you move from “finding the money” (it’s very easy to get into debt) to what to do.
‘The deranged European “elites” will fail, one way or the other. Their perception of reality is distorted by delusions, their resources – military and also intellectual – are far too small, and their aims make no sense. But the problem for the rest of us is that they may yet cause enormous damage on their way down the rubbish chute of history’.
Videos circulating on social media showed police beating and dragging protesters, including footage of an 87-year-old woman suffering a head injury as bystanders rushed to attack police and help her.
A protest outside Argentina’s Congress, where pensioners and football collectives came together to oppose President Javier Milei’s economic policies, erupted into chaos on Wednesday. Police brutalised old and young firing rubber bullets and tear gas at demonstrators, who hurled stones and torched dumpsters.
President Milei is accused of a massive robbery of tens of thousands in a Cyber swindle after promoting a new Coin in the name of the State before immense profits were withdrawn as it was it was rug pulled $LIBRA: Milei enfrenta investigaciones por presunta estafa – La FM
Retirees in Buenos Aires have staged regular weekly protests demanding higher pensions and citing worsening living conditions. While previous demonstrations saw minor clashes, including the use of tear gas against the elderly, Wednesday’s protest was the largest and most intense to date, according to observers.
Demonstrators and riot police clash during a protest against the government of Javier Milei on March 12, 2025 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. photo .. Tomas Cuesta / shared with thanks
What began as a peaceful demonstration reportedly spiraled into violent clashes, with police deploying water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets as protesters responded by throwing stones. A dense cloud of tear gas engulfed the congressional palace, according to local media. Amid the chaos, a police car was set ablaze, and dumpsters across the city were torched.
Some of the alleged football hooligans reportedly hurled sticks and cans at officers. With an estimated 800 officers deployed, the heavy police presence moved to suppress the demonstration.
Outrage and grief have shaken Jalisco and the entire country after the discovery of three clandestine crematoriums on a ranch in Teuchitlán, where hundreds of items of clothing and between 200 and 400 pairs of shoes were found, in addition to charred skeletal remains.
There, at a location supposedly searched by the state government in September 2024, they found three cremation ovens, clandestine graves, hundreds of human remains, and countless personal items and clothing, along with lists of names.
The discovery of the forced recruitment and extermination camp run by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has sent shockwaves throughout Mexico.
It is a moment that makes plain the profound severity of the crisis gripping the country and the collective trauma endured after nearly twenty years of the so-called “drug war.”
Civil society organizations have called for Saturday, March 15, to be a day of national mourning, with no place for politicians. The below text by Silvia L. Gil, published in Revista Común and translated by Scott Campbell, wrestles with the significance of what was found in Teuchitlán and what might be needed to counter the horror.
Several years ago, I heard a colleague say that in order to stop evil from reproducing itself, we had to stop denying it. She argued that our societies had put on a blindfold. Although this may be true in some parts of the world, it seemed to me that in Mexico what we needed was more of a truce, to stop staring horror in the face.
That the problem was not exactly that we should look more or better, but that to survive in the face of what we already saw we should stop looking. At least for a while. This apparent paradox – pain surrounds us, but we cannot become so sensitized as we run the risk of being paralyzed – is very important in this time when violence and extreme precarity have intensified.
There comes a point at which we are unable to assimilate all that we see in a world of injustice. If in other latitudes with this situation – which we can call a global war against life – an answer is sought to the initial question of how to not deny the pain that is spreading throughout the world, in Mexico, the question did a double somersault: once we have seen it all, once we have moved beyond any fictional scenario, what kind of deep transformation of the human do we need so that the horror never repeats itself again?
Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the Regional Network of Migrant Families and the collective Traces of Memory have called for a vigil and an act of national mourning in the Zócalo on March 15th at 5:00 p.m.
In Colima, the Colima Network of the Disappeared has called for a demonstration on March 15th at 4:30 p.m. in the Plaza de Las y Los Desaparecidos, located on Avenida Galván, in the center of the capital.
A few days ago, the group of family members “Guerreros Buscadores de Jalisco [Warrior Searchers of Jalisco]” uncovered remains at a ranch known as La Estanzuela in the locale of Teuchitlán. There, they found crematorium ovens, innumerable graves (it is said that the same graves were used on several occasions), human remains, clothing, shoes of the victims…
For years it was known that young people were captured through offers of employment. In the midst of extreme precarity, many opted to go to the place where the job was supposed to be offered.
They never returned home.
Others were taken by force. The ranch served as a forced recruitment center: only some survived – the strongest – who could ascend the criminal structure. Collectives of the family members of the disappeared affirm that this reality was know about for more than ten years. Authorities were alerted on countless occasions. A survivor has related that in the three years they were there, some 1,500 people were killed.
It is impossible to have exact numbers, to know the scale of the horror. We can probably only know a bit of what happened by weaving the testimonies of the surviving victims. I wonder how long it will be before we can truly hear their words. To understand the objective of an atrocity of this type is very difficult.
The absence of intelligibility is part of the same device of power: the less we understand, the more we are paralyzed in horror, the less sense we can make of what initially seems to respond to the irrational, to the monstrous and unnameable, the more space this kind of power will have to deploy itself.
Mexico currently has 123,808 disappeared and unaccounted-for persons, according to this month’s report from the National Search Commission. It must be kept in mind that these numbers are always provisional. For the first time in the country a greater effort at identification is being made, but there are also innumerable families that make no reports because they are either afraid of the consequences or because they know doing so will yield no result. Jalisco is one of the most violent states in the country.
And it is the state with the highest number of disappearances. The governor of Jalisco, from the Citizen’s Movement party, Enrique Alfaro, ran out of Mexico almost the day after his term ended in October 2024. At the moment, he resides in Madrid, following the footsteps of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto. In recent times, Madrid seems to be a refuge not only for the international right, but also for the suspected collaborators with organized crime.
When we try to understand how a horror of this size is possible, there is a reading that is essential to make, but which, unfortunately, is not enough: we are facing a system of absolutely unbridled and cruel capital accumulation. What this “unbridled” means is that all limits that delimited the framework of this accumulation have been blown apart, so that any means to achieve it becomes possible.
Atrocities are normalized because they are a means to open new market niches, but because above all, just like legal markets, the drive for more – greater extraction, greater yield, greater consumption – is a mandate that permanently mobilizes (Sayak Valencia has worked on this link between subjectivity, violence, and capital).
Ceasefire Negotiations-rushing out a bunch of ad hoc goose-eggs to score quick media points.
They are literally not listening to any of Russia’s conditions or demands. Russia has stated repeatedly that no land can possibly be given to Ukraine, because it is now enshrined in the Russian constitution. How deluded does Trump have to be to actually even remotely believe that Russia would hand over the largest nuclear power plant in Europe to Ukraine?
The charade also continues to highlight the incredible hypocrisy of the ‘Rules Based Order’. On the very same day that Trump and the West attempted to guilt-trip Russia into an unfavorable ceasefire, Trump himself threatened to forcibly annex a fellow NATO member’s territory—in front of the Reichsmarschall of NATO himself, no less:
TRUMP ON GREENLAND: “Denmark’s very far away & really has nothing to do…What happened? A boat landed there 200 years ago or something and they say they have rights to it. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t think it is, actually.”
The cultivation of the land we love.. tearing down the barriers of large estates and patriarchal and racist power! The March continues to fuel the struggles of the working class!
MST Communiqué No. 16/2025 Sao Paulo, March 10, 2025
Continuing the mobilization and struggle of March 8 throughout the country, this year Landless Women are holding their 2025 National Day of Struggle, with the slogan “Agribusiness is violence and environmental crime; women’s struggle is against capital!”
The activities take place between March 11 and 14 in all regions of the country, during which the main causes of struggle and demands of women in the fields, waterways, and forests will be presented to society.
During this period, women gather in meetings, planting campaigns, training sessions, marches, and protests, denouncing the violence perpetuated by agribusiness in the expropriation of women’s bodies and territories. as well as in the poisoning of people and lands, in the commodification of food and nature, drying up rivers, taking lives, producing hunger and inequalities, and deepening the environmental crisis.
The Free 