Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: January 5th, 2023

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  • The budget hole is actually not a big deal.

    There was way less national debt before Covid-19 but the actual issue is that in 2011, the neoliberals pushed through a constitutional amendment requiring the country to have a balanced budget.

    Then Covid comes and the war in Ukraine. The covid expenses are a given, but then the government pumps a lot of money into the military because the government sees itself as part of the western bloc and wants it to survive.

    So they ran a deficit budget for two years as an arbitrary exemption, and now the constitutional court says “you can’t actually” - so the government is gonna do austerity now and throw people under the tank it just bought.

    There’s no risk of collapse whatsoever. It’s just the new (old) form of the bourgeois state enforcing bourgeois interests.



  • Venezuela’s economic crisis really began after oil prices fell drastically in 2014 and the west used Chavez’s death/Maduro’s election to increase pressure on the country via sanctions which for example made buying parts to maintain oil refineries difficult. Before that, it was doing about as well, or better (of course, failing to become independent from oil exports) compared to the other countries in Latin America.

    Argentina was already in a crisis for the last …20 years-ish, but this acceleration of the crisis happened in a week even as Milei backpedaled on some potentially damaging promises like cutting trade with China.






  • Well, there’s a bit of context behind it:

    The name is a meme in Poland and comes from the 1969 adventure-comedy mini-series Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową (How I unleashed World War 2).

    In the second episode, the main character is in hiding insideof Nazi Germany after escaping from a Prisoner of War camp. He is eventually arrested for an unrelated reason and this is the fake name he gives to the German bureaucrat using the typewriter. Unsurprisingly, he is baffled by the spelling, especially once he gets it right… since he gets an even more difficult fake birthplace to spell by the MC.

    Edit: If you mean Grzegorz, it means George and isn’t too difficult, I suppose.







  • Yeah, I know. The same map keeps popping out from time to time since about 2015. I think it originates from some LDPR guy.

    After some digging, it originates from 2014:

    TVP Info, 23 April 2014 “State Duma to the Polish MFA: Let’s Partition Ukraine” supposedly from a letter from Zhirinovsky. - He was unhinged enough to be seen making those claims and the west could be seen using those as proof Russia was out to get Ukraine from day 1. Genuine proposals or propaganda? Who knows. The war did indeed happen and claims that Poland is gonna march into Lviv are still showing up from time to time, in spite of them being frankly unlikely.

    Additional context: Poland was ruled by libs back then… but very atlanticist ones that still had ambitions to for example overthrow the government of Belarus and indeed Ukraine (pre-Maidan), so while less reactionary, state media had still a heavy baggage of bias in foreign policy questions.


  • Yeah, it’s something I see popping up from time to time and it annoys me every time.

    It almost feels like a losing battle, because “No, Poland isn’t going to reclaim its pre-1939 territories like it’s a cored province in a map game” never sticks, and a few weeks later someone goes and makes a reference to it again.

    Support for such a thing isn’t even widespread among the far-right opposition, while the media, from lib to mainstream fash are all overwhelmingly positive towards Ukraine and eager to sabre-rattle against Russia.

    What Poland does do however, is try to expand its regional influence. Especially in the Baltics the Belarusian opposition (with the hope of them getting into power eventually).