An Economy Is Not A Home
Did Trump Trade Ukraine for Gaza?
Sprout Imperialism and ‘My Beautiful Ukraine’
Unreported Truths of the Ukrainian 28 Points
Artificial Intelligence – More Silly Than Sinister
Snippets
Who Owns the Debts That Supposedly Threaten Us?
Criminal Power
Never mind the ethics: feel the money
An Economy Is Not A Home
Thatcher sold us the idea that the state machine resembled a household. Debt was dangerous, If there was a gap, cut down on things you can do without.
Against this there is Modern Monetary Theory – a state that controls its own currency need not solicit a bunch of rich creditors before it dare spend anything. True enough.
But also Thatcher’s model was a consuming household. The wage-earner goes off to an office or factory, or often now circulates to do deliveries or repairs at other people’s household. And that was an odd view for the daughter of a successful shopkeeper. Shops and other small businesses are often integrated into the rest of the household. And it’s the norm with farms. So borrowing to boost efficiency is often a promising idea,
This links to the other Thatcherite fantasy – that real wealth is only generated by private profit-making. In the year 2000 I published a book called Adam Smith: Wealth Without Nations, which is still available (http://www.atholbooks-sales.org/searches/authorsearch_begin.php). You can find the relevant portions on-line, showing that Smith simply invented the idea and did not try to offer reasons why it should be so. (https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/48-economics/the-core-falsehood-of-capitalist-economics/ ).
Use of Adam Smith by the elite is selective. The Financial Times is written for business people who need some hard unwelcome facts to be mixed with the usual propaganda. It recently reviewed a book called Ruthless: A New History of Britain’s Rise to Wealth and Power, 1660-1800:
“Smith’s book is littered with references to parliament’s economic interventionism. It was ruthlessly and often effectively protectionist. It promoted an accelerating number of new patents. It offered premiums for new inventions. It supplied an arena where landowners and merchants could lobby for new roads, bridges and canals.
“Yet, at the same time, Britain’s electorate remained small, with well under 10 per cent of adult males able to vote. This too aided industrial advance. Since the bulk of its inhabitants were unenfranchised, Britain’s governors rarely needed to worry about the thousands of mineworkers killed in the country’s unsafe pits, or the mutilating effects of the new piecework and unguarded machinery on the human body.
“Nor did they need to offer compensation for the effects of pollution or for land seizures to provide sites for new workshops. Not just Black slaves paid the price for rapid capitalist change. One of the fundamental and persistent questions raised by this book is just how far successful economic transformation can ever be combined with adequate protection for human rights.” (https://www.ft.com/content/67c1813b-87a4-42f1-9688-c355139b096f – pay site.)
But a majority of Labour MPs stick to privatisation, even though it has repeatedly failed. They are either unable to learn from anything that has happened in the world since they were 25 years old, or they see the general public as existing just to feed the sort of people who make money from privatised industry. Regardless, they are convinced they must be ‘fiscally responsible’. Feel obliged to ignore the welfare of 90% of us, to suit the interests of multi-millionaires who do a lot of financial speculation.
Had all of the Hedge Funds sunk without trace in 2008, and also speculative banks, most of us would have been better off. Banks owned by the state can do fine; but Labour was determined to re-privatise them as quickly as possible.
Austerity was more financial reassurance for the rich, with 90% of us paying the price. But just now, many suspect a stock-market bubble, and especially a bubble for companies that have made genuine advances with Artificial Intelligence.
The last few decades should have shown how dangerous it is to let the world economy become an adventure playground for the super-rich.
Did Trump Trade Ukraine for Gaza?
At the start of September, I speculated as follows:
“Gaza’s Yours, the Donbass is Ours?
“It occurs to me that Trump and Putin may have made a secret deal in their ultra-private meeting in Alaska.
“Trump lets Putin win in Ukraine, so long as he settles for the whole Donbass and the halves of two Oblasts he needs mostly as a land corridor to Crimea. Before 2022 he wanted the Donbass to become just autonomous, but could not have let it be conquered.
“Putin for his part goes no further than expressing disapproval if Israel gradually clears all of the Palestinians out of Gaza. And keeps up its erosion of Palestinians in the West Bank.” (https://labouraffairs.com/2025/09/01/notes-on-the-news-41/.)
In the second half of November, we saw Russia and China abstaining when Trump’s outrageous carve-up of Gaza was approved by the UN Security Council.
I’ve not seen anyone else link this to the USA throwing its gigantic weight behind a settlement that gives Putin about what he asked for back in 2022. More than he would have settled for before 2022, when he just wanted the Donbass to be allowed to have autonomy within Ukraine if a regional majority voted for it.
A crooked deal. But my concern from 2014 was Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority. Especially Crimea, which was part of Russia until Khrushchev moved it in 1954, and before independence in 1991 had serious doubts if it belonged at all.
After the government in Kiev turned violently hostile to any expressions of Russian culture, its elected regional government reacted by seceding. This was followed by it asking Russia to annex it, which Putin risked because he needed to keep the vital naval base at Sevastopol.
The two regional governments of the Donbass must have been told that Russia would not annex them. They demanded autonomy, and right-wing and heavily neo-Nazi militias violently attacked them. Both were split, and the government in Kiev let the militias join their regular army. The city of Donetsk was regularly shelled, with many civilian casualties, until the joint Russian and Separatist forces pushed back Kiev’s forces in 2022.
Mariupol, presented in the West as a victim of Russian aggression, voted against the Orange Revolution all through the crisis. Gave a majority to the Party of the Regions, which Kiev banned despite them condemning Russia sending its army in.
And I will say Kiev and not Kyiv, because that was the name in English before 2014. I will switch only when Russian-speakers cease to be harassed in lands where they have lived for centuries. Rights within the rump of Ukraine, as well as normalisation for those parts of former Ukraine that chose to secede.
Sprout Imperialism and ‘My Beautiful Ukraine’
To most West Europeans, the pogroms that drove out so many Jews were part of Russian history. And Leonid Brezhnev was always spoken of as Russian. But by the definition of Inherent Nationality being upheld in the Ukraine War, both count as Ukrainian.
Brezhnev was part of the mixed-origin community in Eastern Ukraine. A mix of Russians and Ukrainians who settled lands that had been depopulated until Moscow’s armies conquered the slave-raiding Tartars who were based in Crimea. Those lands were defined as the province of South Russia, separate from the Ukrainian heartland that Tsarism insultingly called Little Russia. But the Germans in the Brest-Litovsk Treaty united them as a Ukraine under German protection, including a chunk of what’s now Belarus and include the city of Brest-Litovsk. This and a chunk of West Ukraine was lost to Poland. Lenin decided to keep the rest as Soviet Ukraine, conciliating those who felt strongly that they were something other than Russian.
Crimea itself was included in the Russian Soviet Republic, where it remained until Khrushchev moved it in 1954. And the Kievan Rus that you hear about had not included Eastern Ukraine. It was the Russian culture that emerged from the north of Kievan Rus that gave it its Russian-Ukrainian mix.
What’s now Western Ukraine was taken by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It had a three-layer society there: Polish landlords on top, Jews doing middle-class jobs and a peasantry that spoke Ukrainian and were Orthodox Christians. And when the Ukrainians rebelled, they tended to do mass slaughters of Jews and Poles living among them.
The anti-Jewish attitudes remained when the expanding Tsarist Empire took over:
“A substantial majority of the violent anti-Jewish pogroms and discriminatory policies commonly associated with ‘Tsarist Russian anti-Semitism’ (especially from the late 18th century onward) were concentrated in the Pale of Settlement, and within that region, the most intense and frequent outbreaks occurred in what is now western Ukraine.” (Grok.)
“The heartland of the pogroms was the entire Pale of Settlement. While modern Western Ukraine was a hotspot, particularly during the 1903-1906 wave, it would be inaccurate to isolate it from the broader context of state-sanctioned antisemitism and social upheaval that affected the entire Jewish population of the Russian Empire.” (DeepSeek)
The Banderist movement in World War Two was continuing a long-standing tradition. And as recently as 2016, there was a Polish film that gave an accurate picture of what had happened. (https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/West-Ukraine-The-Bitter-Past.)
But a foolish US scheme to expend Ukraine’s future in an effort to weaken Russia pilled in most of the West’s elite. It was taken up by both what I call Upper London and by a clique in Brussels dominating the European Union.
These European hegemonists should not be casually called Europe. Russia remains a largely European nation, with Siberia dominated by people who settled from European Russia. And most people in Western Europe had no wish to weaken Russia. Independent states in Middle-Europe opposed it. So to match my concept of Upper London, I’ll try calling it Sprout Imperialism. Based in Brussels, though they come from all over the place.
Unreported Truths of the Ukrainian 28 Points
Ukraine after the US move was all over the news, with Western media reports ignoring how much of the war was a civil war from 2014 to 2022. One ‘reporter’ even showed a map that omitted the successfully secessionist parts of the Donbass when they showed the position before Russia sent in its army.
Western media want their public to forget the public honouring of Banderists that played such a role in splitting Ukraine. Ignore that the 28 points include the following:
“Ukraine will adopt EU rules on religious tolerance and the protection of linguistic minorities.
“Both countries will agree to abolish all discriminatory measures and guarantee the rights of Ukrainian and Russian media and education.
“All Nazi ideology and activities must be rejected and prohibited.” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/21/trumps-28-point-ukraine-plan-in-full-what-it-means-could-it-work).
Kiev has been trying to suppress the largest of the Orthodox Christian churches in Ukraine, because it still recognises religious superiors in Moscow.
Russia is also making big concessions over funds that were frozen from 2022:
“The draft proposes that $100bn of frozen Russian assets should be invested “in US-led efforts to rebuild and invest in Ukraine”, with the US receiving 50% of the profits and Europe adding $100bn in investment for reconstruction.
“This is reminiscent of the US minerals deal with Ukraine earlier this year, extracting an American price for involvement, and it also leaves the European Union with nothing but hefty bills.
“The sums it mentions may not be sufficient, either: earlier this year the total cost of reconstruction in Ukraine was put at $524bn (€506bn).
“Some €200bn in Russian frozen assets are largely held by Euroclear in Belgium, and the European Union is currently working on a plan to use the money to fund Kyiv financially and militarily.
“The rest of those frozen assets would go to a ‘US-Russian investment vehicle’, under the draft, so Russia would see some of its money come back, but again there would be a financial benefit for the US.” (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cde6yld78d6o.)
As I write, things are very much in the balance. But there is a suspicion that the clause about an amnesty will appeal to corrupt elements in the government. This was claimed on X, formerly Twitter:
“Kyiv made changes to the peace plan proposed by the US to avoid auditing the received international aid and possible corruption accusations, reports The Wall Street Journal citing a US official. According to him, the original draft provided for a full audit of all international aid to Ukraine to identify potential corruption schemes. However, in the final version of the 28-point document, this section was changed: it now states ‘full amnesty for all parties for actions taken during the conflict.’” (“https://x.com/Zlatti_71/status/1991744043391266867.)
Europe’s modified version left out the amnesty: a key change that most people missed. In the lively discussion on X (Twitter), I never saw this mentioned. Only saw one person note that the US version has a ban on Nazis, and the leaders of Europe removed it.
Artificial Intelligence – More Silly Than Sinister
“When the UK charity Hundred Heroines had its Facebook group taken down it was accompanied by a message from the social media company that simply said the page “goes against our community standards on drugs”.
“Now, after more than a month of appealing, the photography charity is celebrating the reinstatement of its group after the tech company’s AI tools mistook it for an organisation promoting the class-A opioid heroin.
“The Gloucestershire-based organisation, which celebrates female photographers, has had its Facebook group taken down twice in 2025 for apparent breaches of community guidelines related to the promotion of drugs.
“The latest takedown came in September. After a second appeal in 12 months, the Hundred Heroines: Women in Photography Today page was restored with no explanation or apology last week.” (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/nov/18/charity-facebook-page-hundred-heroines-reinstated-wrongly-flagged-drug-content.)
Used sensibly and with humans checking its unreliable judgements, it is indeed very useful:
“Mathematicians say Google’s AI tools are supercharging their research
“AlphaEvolve, an AI system created by Google DeepMind, is helping mathematicians do research at a scale that was previously impossible – even if it does occasionally “cheat” to find a solution…
“The system was consistently much faster than a single human mathematician would have been…
“One downside is that the system has a tendency to ‘cheat’, says Tao, by finding answers that appear to answer a problem, but only by using a loophole or technicality that doesn’t truly solve it. ‘It’s like giving an exam to a bunch of students who are very bright, but very amoral, and willing to do whatever it takes to technically achieve a high score,’ says Tao.” (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2504763-mathematicians-say-googles-ai-tools-are-supercharging-their-research/ -pay site.)
Listen to it, but never trust it. Never let it make independent decisions.
I was reminded of an old nursery rhyme:
“There was a little girl, /Who had a little curl, /Right in the middle of her forehead. /When she was good, /She was very, very good / But when she was bad, she was horrid.
But sadly, corporations who have been told they should look just to profit prefer to sack expensive human supervisors. Trust to AI to not get it wrong too often
Snippets
Who Owns the Debts That Supposedly Threaten Us?
We in the Ernest Bevin society recently had a private discussion on this.
To me, it is a mix of private individuals, corporations, foreign governments, and a few transnational institutions.
In the case of China, it is mostly corporations and regional governments owing money to banks. Private individuals mostly have a lot of savings. Not entirely trusting the developing social security system.
In the USA, vast numbers of private individuals own the public debt. Either as bond holders or investors in hedge funds etc. that own such debt.
It’s a matter of governments insisting on borrowing from the rich rather than taxing them. Possible only because the rich have got control of the political process.
It probably began in the 17th century with Britain’s National Debt: a way round the successful blocking of taxation after 1688. Rich people could give their money for the government to use, but still own that money and expect a good return.
Note also that any debtor can try to evade repayment, or simply repudiate it. Imperial Spain did that – called a bankruptcy, but since no one could enforce the claim it did not damage the state. No one could repossess without some superior state.
Debts also can be written off, if the creditor decides so. After Hitler came to power, a lot of debts and Versailles penalties were written off. And Nazi Germany’s own debt was ignored in the Cold War and then simply written off.
Debts are not an objective reality in the way the weather is. They are maintained by human society, which has infinite freedom to adjust. The payment or non-payment is a matter of power.
And as I said earlier, the rich were bailed out by governments that then squeezed ordinary people, when debt became a problem in 2008.
Hooding Robs – steal from the poor, give to the rich. But most elected representatives are among the rich, or else among the Next Nine who have not been squeezed.
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Criminal Power
“Deadly Rio police raid failed to loosen gang’s iron grip, residents say….
“Residents of the Alemão and Penha have also told the BBC that it has done little to loosen the tight grip the CV has on their favelas.
“They said that their daily lives had barely changed since the mega-operation, describing seeing armed men roaming the community the very next day, even as the bodies of those killed were still being removed.
“Comando Vermelho (CV) and groups like it enforce strict rules in the areas they control.
“These criminal enterprises have moved beyond the sale of drugs and now hold the monopoly for the provision of gas, cable television, internet and transport.
“Residents report being charged over the odds for gas cylinders, often having to pay one third more than in zones not under gang control.
“Rules imposed by gang members affect everyday life.
“As CV has banned cars working for ride-hailing apps from entering the favelas, locals are restricted to using motorbike taxis and vans which have been authorised by the gangs to operate there.» (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62012e6g9lo.)
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Never mind the ethics: feel the money
«Norway suspends $2.1tn oil fund’s ethics rules to avoid selling Big Tech stakes.
«Jens Stoltenberg says move will avoid forced sale of shares in Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet over their work for Israel ». (https://www.ft.com/content/12a5ce89-25d7-4de4-82cf-abb86ffa06a2 – pay site.)
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Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams
Labour Affairs 