Category Archives: Resistance

Alaska: Russian War Resisters Update

Alaska Daily News: Gambell is about 200 miles southwest of the Western Alaska hub city of Nome and about 50 miles from the tip of the Chukotka Peninsula in Siberia.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy on Wednesday, as initial details of the situation were emerging, said he did not expect a continual stream or “flotilla” of individuals traversing the same route. He also warned that travel in the region could be dangerous as a fall storm packing strong winds was expected.

[Alaska U. S. Senator Dan] Sullivan, in a statement, said he has encouraged federal authorities to have a plan in place in case “more Russians flee to Bering Strait communities in Alaska.”

“This incident makes two things clear: First, the Russian people don’t want to fight Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine,” Sullivan said. “Second, given Alaska’s proximity to Russia, our state has a vital role to play in securing America’s national security.”

It is unusual for someone to take this route to try to get into the U.S.

U.S. authorities in August stopped Russians without legal status 42 times who tried to enter the U.S. from Canada. That was up from 15 times in July and nine times in August 2021.

Russians also try to enter the U.S. through Mexico, which does not require visas. Earlier this year, U.S. authorities contended with a spate of Russians who hoped to claim asylum if they reached an inspection booth at an official crossing.

Some trace the spike to before Russia invaded Ukraine, attributing it to the imprisonment of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny last year.

Anchorage immigration attorney Margaret Stock told alaskasnewssource the men are likely to be eligible for asylum, although she didn’t know the specifics of their case.

“Under U.S. law you are eligible for asylum if you don’t want to serve in a military that commits war crimes, and the Russian military has been committing massive numbers of war crimes,” Stock said.

And while Stock said the situation is unusual in Alaska, people cross into other parts of the country frequently to seek asylum.

“Although in Alaska we are not used to people walking up to our border or taking a boat up to our border seeking asylum, it’s very, very common in Florida, California other parts of the United States, because people have to get to a U.S. border in order to claim asylum,” Stock said.

Stock said the process includes formally applying for asylum and undergoing a hearing with an immigration judge. She said the process could easily take several months.

The village of Gambell, St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, in a 2017 news photo.

BREAKING: Two Russian Draft Dodgers Land In Alaska, Seek Asylum

Associated Press

BY BECKY BOHRER

2:40 PM Oct. 6, 2022 — Developing Story

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Two Russians who said they fled the country to avoid compulsory military service have requested asylum in the U.S. after landing on a remote Alaskan island in the Bering Sea, Alaska U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowskis office said Thursday.

Karina Borger, a spokesperson for Murkowski, said by email that the office has been in communication with the U.S. Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection and that “the Russian nationals reported that they fled one of the coastal communities on the east coast of Russia to avoid compulsory military service.”

Spokespersons with the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection each referred a reporters questions to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond Thursday.

Alaskas senators, Republicans Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, on Thursday said the individuals landed at a beach near Gambell, an isolated community of about 600 people on St. Lawrence Island. The statement doesnt specify when the incident occurred though Sullivan said he was alerted to the matter by a “senior community leader from the Bering Strait region” on Tuesday morning.

A Sullivan spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said it was the offices understanding that the individuals had arrived by boat.

Gambell is about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southwest of the western Alaska hub community of Nome and about 36 miles (58 kilometers) from the Chukotka Peninsula, Siberia.

UPDATE (AP):

Spokespersons with the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection referred a reporters questions to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security public affairs office, which provided little information Thursday.

The office, in a statement, said the people “were transported to Anchorage for inspection, which includes a screening and vetting process, and then subsequently processed in accordance with applicable U.S. immigration laws under the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The agency said the two Russians arrived Tuesday on a small boat. It did not provide details on where they came from, their journey or the asylum request. It was not immediately clear what kind of boat they were on.

This is a developing story . . . .

Gwynne Dyer on the New UK Government Disaster

Britannia Unhinged: UK’s Return to Trickle Down Economy is Suicide

The value of the British pound is already collapsing. And the strikes and protests proliferate.

Gwynne Dyer

“The Queen’s final act of service to the nation was to selflessly buy the economy one last fortnight,” said one tweet when all four wheels finally came off the British economy.

The Queen’s death and funeral took up the first twelve days of Liz Truss’s tenure, so the new prime minister’s work of destruction could not get properly underway until last Friday. Then, however, Truss and her faithful sidekick Kwasi Kwarteng, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), got to work with amazing speed.

Kwarteng’s ‘mini-Budget’ on Friday was a suicide note that virtually guarantees defeat for the Conservative Party at the next election, two years from now. There is growing doubt that Truss’s government can even survive that long.

She is the fourth Conservative prime minister in the past six years, and at each turn of the wheel the party she currently leads has grown more mutinous. Moreover, it did not choose her as its leader.

That choice was made not by her fellow Conservative members of parliament but by the party’s 160,000 paid-up members, who tend to be old, white, non-urban and very ideological.

New British Bible — or Apocalypse??

What drew them to her was her fanatical devotion to the cause of lower taxes and a smaller state, as exemplified in a book she and Kwarteng co-authored ten years ago called ‘Britannia Unchained’.

So as soon as the Queen’s obsequies were safely past, she and Kwarteng gave them what they longed for: a Budget that is the political equivalent of asset-stripping. It contains unfunded tax cuts, mostly to the benefit of the rich, of around $50 billion a year.

Where will the money come from to make up the lost tax income, plus an extra £65 billion to help voters cover horrendously high energy costs this winter due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

Why, they’ll just borrow it all. All that extra spending will allegedly boost the growth rate of the British economy from an average of 1.5% a year to 2.5%, and the extra tax revenue will easily cover that.

At least that’s what Liz Truss believes, in the firm belief that she is walking in the footsteps of her heroine, sainted former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. She is not.

The Blessed Margaret cut taxes, but she also cut government spending. The Truss-Kwarteng partnership is spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave. It’s not ‘Britannia Unchained’; it’s ‘Britannia Unhinged’.

Nobody believes this will work except a few right-wing think tanks that try to justify low taxes for the rich by touting the old ‘trickle-down’ model, also known as the ‘horse and sparrow’ theory: feed the horses enough oats, and eventually there will be lots of horse-poop for the sparrows to eat.

The sad news for Truss and Kwarteng is that the ‘free market’ they so revere isn’t stupid. The value of the British pound is already collapsing.  Former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers says: “My guess is that the pound will find its way below parity with both the dollar and the euro.”

Meanwhile, investors look at Truss and Kwarteng’s business model, do the math, and flee. In the words of Paul Donovan, chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, they now see the Conservative Party as a ‘doomsday cult’.

And as interest rates soar to fight runaway inflation, millions of Britons find they cannot afford to pay their mortgages. The poor cannot even afford to feed their children. The strikes and protests proliferate.

It’s probably around this time – midwinter, say – that the next rebellion occurs in the Conservatives’ parliamentary party. However, changing horses would make little difference unless the policy changes. It wouldn’t.

The next prime minister would be chosen by the same tiny band of Conservative Party members, no matter who the MPs want – and the members’ mindset favors the ideological purist over the pragmatic realist.  As one MP said: “You can have as many leadership elections as you like. You are only going to end up with the nutter winning.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has already issued its first warning to the United Kingdom to get its house in order. Larry Summers accuses the British government of “behaving like an emerging market turning itself into a submerging market,” but Truss is not shifting.

It’s a bit like the slow-motion car crash that brought the Sri Lankan government and economy down, which took more than six months from start to finish. Liz Truss’s government will not last a year, and the Conservative Party may then split, leading to an early election (due anyway by 2024).

The Labour party is already seventeen points ahead in the polls, and its lead may even widen. It will be a wild ride, but the next British government will be led by Labour, which will rapidly reverse everything that Truss aspires to do.

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Gwynne Dyer

Gwynne Dyer

Gwynne Dyer has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years, but he was originally trained as an historian. Born in Newfoundland, he received degrees from Canadian, American and British universities.

MAGA & Neo-Confederate Racism, By the Numbers

[The most revealing analysis of the mythic underpinning of the authoritarian upsurge I’ve seen points straight to the “restoration” of a zombie version of white Jim Crow Dixie culture, circa 1920-1950. This survey bolsters that impression. Progressives who want to push back effectively against this drive need to get over the tendency to ignore this history & culture and its stubborn legacy.]

Washington Post — September 28, 2022

Just how racist is the MAGA movement? This survey measures it.




Opinion by Jennifer Rubin

It has long been understood that the MAGA movement is heavily dependent on White grievance and straight-up racism. (Hence Donald Trump’s refusal to disavow racist groups and his statement that there were “very fine people on both sides” in the violent clashes at the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville.)

Now, we have numbers to prove it.

The connection between racism and the right-wing movement is apparent in a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute.

The survey asked respondents about 11 statements designed to probe views on racism. For example: “White Americans today are not responsible for discrimination against Black people in the past.”

The pollsters then used their answers to quantify a “structural racism index,” which provides a general score from zero to 1 measuring a person’s attitudes on “white supremacy and racial inequality, the impact of discrimination on African American economic mobility, the treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system, general perceptions of race, and whether racism is still significant problem today.” Higher scores indicate a more receptive attitude to racist beliefs.

 Continue reading MAGA & Neo-Confederate Racism, By the Numbers

Trial by Winter: The Ukraine War Is Coming to Western Europe

AP News: Lights out, ovens off: Europe preps for winter energy crisis

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — As Europe heads into winter in the throes of an energy crisis, offices are getting chillier. Statues and historic buildings are going dark. Bakers who cant afford to heat their ovens are talking about giving up, while fruit and vegetable growers face letting greenhouses stand idle.

In poorer eastern Europe, people are stocking up on firewood, while in wealthier Germany, the wait for an energysaving heat pump can take half a year. And businesses dont know how much more they can cut back.

“We can’t turn off the lights and make our guests sit in the dark,” said Richard Kovacs, business development manager for Hungarian burger chain Zing Burger. The restaurants already run the grills no more than necessary and use motion detectors to turn off lights in storage, with some stores facing a 750% increase in electricity bills since the beginning of the year.

With costs high and energy supplies tight, Europe is rolling out relief programs and plans to shake up electricity and natural gas markets as it prepares for rising energy use this winter. The question is whether it will be enough to avoid governmentimposed rationing and rolling blackouts after Russia cut back natural gas needed to heat homes, run factories and generate electricity to a tenth of what it was before invading Ukraine.

Europes dependence on Russian energy has turned the war into an energy and economic crisis, with prices rising to record highs in recent months and fluctuating wildly.

In response, governments have worked hard to find new supplies and conserve energy, with gas storage facilities now 86% full ahead of the winter heating season — beating the goal of 80% by November. They have committed to lower gas use by 15%, meaning the Eiffel Tower will plunge into darkness over an hour earlier than normal while shops and buildings shut off lights at night or lower thermostats.

A map of Russian gas pipelines into Europe

Europes ability to get through the winter may ultimately depend on how cold it is and what happens in China. Shutdowns aimed at halting the spread of COVID19 have idled large parts of Chinas economy and meant less competition for scarce energy supplies.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said this month that early preparations mean Europe’s biggest economy is “now in a position in which we can go bravely and courageously into this winter, in which our country will withstand this.”

“No one could have said that three, four, five months ago, or at the beginning of this year,” he added.

Even if there is gas this winter, high prices already are pushing people and businesses to use less and forcing some energyintensive factories like glassmakers to close.

Its a decision also facing fruit and vegetable growers in the Netherlands who are key to Europes winter food supply: shutter greenhouses or take a loss after costs skyrocketed for gas heating and electric light.

Bosch Growers, which grows green peppers and blackberries, has put up extra insulation, idled one greenhouse and experimented with lower temperatures. The cost? Smaller yields, blackberries taking longer to ripen, and potentially operating in the red to maintain customer relationships even at lower volumes.

We want to stay on the market, not to ruin the reputation that we have developed over the years, said Wouter van den Bosch, the sixth generation of his family to help run the business. “We are in survival mode.”

Kovacs, grower van den Bosch and bakers like Andreas Schmitt in Frankfurt, Germany, are facing the hard reality that conservation only goes so far.

Schmitt is heating fewer ovens at his 25 Cafe Ernst bakeries, running them longer to spare startup energy, narrowing his pastry selection to ensure ovens run full, and storing less dough to cut refrigeration costs. That might save 510% off an energy bill that is set to rise from 300,000 euros per year, to 1.1 million next year.

“Its not going to shift the world, he said. The bulk of his costs is “the energy required to get dough to bread, and that is a given quantity of energy.”

Schmitt, head of the local bakers guild, said some small bakeries are contemplating giving up. Government help will be key in the short term, he said, while a longerterm solution involves reforming energy markets themselves.

Europe is targeting both, though the spending required may be unsustainable. Nations have allocated 500 billion euros to ease high utility bills since September 2021, according to an analysis from the Bruegel think tank in Brussels, and they are bailing out utilities that can’t afford to buy gas to fulfill their contracts.

Governments have lined up additional gas supply from pipelines running to Norway and Azerbaijan and ramped up their purchase of expensive liquefied natural gas that comes by ship, largely from the U.S.

At the same time, the EU is weighing drastic interventions like taxing energy companies windfall profits and revamping electricity markets so natural gas costs play less of a role in determining power prices.

But as countries scramble to replace Russian fossil fuels and even reactivate polluting coalfired power plants, environmentalists and the EU itself say renewables are the way out long term.

Neighbors in Madrid looking to cut electricity costs and aid the energy transition installed solar panels this month to supply their housing development after years of work.

“I have suddenly reduced my gas consumption by 40%, with very little use of three radiators strategically placed in the house,” neighbor Manuel Ruiz said.

Governments have dismissed Russia as an energy supplier but President Vladimir Putin still has leverage, analysts say. Some Russian gas is still flowing and a hard winter could undermine public support for Ukraine in some countries. There have already been protests in places like Czechia and Belgium.

“The market is very tight and every molecule counts,” said Agata LoskotStrachota, senior fellow for energy policy at the Center for Eastern Studies in Warsaw. “This is the leverage that Putin still has — that Europe would have to face disappointed or impoverished societies.”

In Bulgaria, the poorest of the EU’s 27 members, surging energy costs are forcing families to cut extra spending ahead of winter to ensure there is enough money to buy food and medicine.

More than a quarter of Bulgarias 7 million people can’t afford to heat their home, according to EU statistics office Eurostat, the highest in the 27nation bloc due to poorly insulated buildings and low incomes. Nearly half of households use firewood in winter as the cheapest and most accessible fuel, but rising demand and galloping inflation have driven prices above last year’s levels.

In the capital, Sofia, where almost half a million households have heating provided by central plants, many sought other options after a 40% price increase was announced.

Grigor Iliev, a 68yearold retired bookkeeper, and his wife decided to cancel their central heating and buy a combined air conditionerheating unit for their tworoom apartment.

“Its a costly device, but in the long run, we will recoup our investment,” he said.

Meanwhile, businesses are trying to stay afloat without alienating customers. Klara Aurell, owner of two Prague restaurants, said she’s done all she can to conserve energy.

“We use LED bulbs, we turn the lights off during the day, the heating is only when it gets really cold and we use it only in a limited way,” she said. “We also take measures to save water and use energyefficient equipment. We can hardly do anything else. The only thing to remain is to increase prices. That’s how it is.”

The gourmet Babushka Artisanal Bakery in an affluent district of Budapest has had to raise prices by 10%. The bakery used less air conditioning despite Hungarys hottest summer on record and is ensuring the ovens dont run without bread inside.

While it has enough traffic to stay open for now, further jumps in energy costs could threaten its viability, owner Eszter Roboz said.

“A twofold increase in energy costs still fits into the operation of our business and into our calculations, she said. “But in the case of a three to fourfold increase, we will really need to think about whether we can continue this.”

___

Spike reported from Budapest, Hungary; Janicek from Prague; and Toshkov from Sofia, Bulgaria. Videojournalist Irene Yagüe contributed from Madrid.