Gold rush: how the UAE fuels the war in SudanThis is a story as old as the hills. An outsider turning two factions against each other and reaping the dividends of chaos. The UN said earlier this year that the “complex financial networks established by RSF before and during the war enabled it to acquire weapons, pay salaries, fund media campaigns, lobby and buy the support of other political and armed groups. But my well-placed source from within Sudan claims that despite the denials, it is common knowledge on the ground that the UAE is actually funding both sides in the conflict. Gold is smuggled out of Sudan and eventually finds its way to the UAE, from where it is sold on the global gold market. But it’s not just the UAE involved. The Wagner mercenary group is also taking its cut of the gold. The smuggled precious metal has become a crucial revenue stream to fund Wagner operations and contributed towards funding Russia’s war with Ukraine. In Sudan, gold smuggling via the UAE has made the RSF commander, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, one of Sudan’s — if not one of Africa’s — richest men.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/gold-rush-how-uae-fuels-war-sudanSCOTUS Is Helping Corporations Dodge Consumer LiabilityGeorgia-Pacific and its Koch parent company are just one of several companies that are trying the two-step bankruptcy tactic. Sequestering the claims in bankruptcy court, which offers companies protections that the civil court system does not, allows otherwise thriving companies to offload their liability and avoid compensating victims. Other companies following suit include Trane Technologies and Saint-Gobain, two major manufacturing companies that both have asbestos liabilities, as well as Johnson & Johnson, a pharmaceutical company whose talc products, including its baby powder, contained asbestos for decades The Supreme Court’s decision in the Georgia-Pacific case comes at a critical moment for this legal strategy, as the courts decide whether to green-light the Texas two-step and let companies continue to use it to escape liability. “The courts are split as to whether this is going to be allowed,” said Joanne Doroshow, the executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy, a legal group that advocates for consumers and victims seeking damages in court from companies like Georgia-Pacific.The Supreme Court is expected to soon issue a ruling in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, a case involving Purdue Pharma, the company whose aggressive marketing of OxyContin and other narcotics accelerated the opioid epidemic. Purdue filed for bankruptcy in 2019 and has used bankruptcy court to shield its owners, the Sackler family, from any personal liability for the harms of the opioid crisis. The court’s decision in that case will have ramifications on Georgia-Pacific and the Texas two-step.
https://jacobin.com/2024/05/supreme-court-georgia-pacific-texas-two-stepGeorg Lukács. The fascist slogan “Liberalism = Marxism”The internal contradiction of the class situation of fascism necessarily manifests itself in all its ideological and polemic positions. The fascists themselves feel this very strongly. In the great theoretical works this contradiction is covered with roundabouts, with “mythical” constructions of history, with eclectic philosophical sophistry, etc. But in propaganda literature, where one is serious and directly addresses the proletarian or proletarianized masses, is forced to look at them clearly. And indeed Goebbels in his pamphlet Der Nazi-Sozi (The Social Nazi), conceived in the form of a dialogue, formulates this contradiction as an objection to fascist propaganda in these terms: “This means, therefore, if I understand correctly: the NSDAP is a proletarian party with bourgeois leadership”. The rebuttal is obviously not as clear as the statement of the difficulty. Goebbels is forced to sidestep the question of the class content of fascism with completely empty phrases. “We are neither bourgeois nor proletarian. The concept of the bourgeois has died and that of the proletarian will never come back to life,” he writes in his reply and continues his “refutation” in the same style. These empty words are repeated in the most varied variations in all fascist writings. And it is understandable. Indeed, they state the central difficulty of fascist propaganda among the working masses. These masses, as a result of the growing crisis of the capitalist system, oppose capitalism in an increasingly energetic way. Fascism can only gain ground among the masses if it appeals to their anti-capitalist instincts (which do not yet mean conscious opposition to capitalism), if it stimulates them, develops them and makes them the basis of organization and action. But the entire fascist mass movement – whose mass base is precisely this instinctive anti-capitalism of the masses – is at the same time subservient to the interests of big capital. Fascism must therefore conduct its propaganda in such a way that the followers won on the basis of anti-capitalist mass sentiments are used in practice as safe supports of the capitalist system.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1931/liberalism.htm