alanjjohnstone
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I think the claim has always been that immigration and mobility of labour from Eastern Europe were encouraged by businesses to acquire cheap labour and increase the numbers in the job market.
Now that the available numbers in the reserve army of the unemployed have dropped, workers momentarily have stronger leverage in pay bargaining.
In due course, the balance of power will return to management, perhaps by the mass re-training of HGV. I recall before the arrival of Eastern European plumbers, women were actively being given apprenticeships. Personally, lacking the tools and knowledge, I remember I could never get a plumber to do very simple tasks such as fit a washing machine. It wasn’t worth his time.
I blogged a Scottish farmer who complains that because of labour shortages because of fewer seasonal workers from Europe, he now has to pay overtime to get the crop picked. His complaint is that his workers by earning extra money through overtime means don’t stay.
“The fear is that these workers will head home earlier than required due to reaching their financial target,” he said. “They are actually starting to disappear off farm already, where historically we have relied on workers finishing the fruit season and migrating over to field veg in the months of September and October.”
He didn’t recognise that the previous situation was that poverty wages tied workers to the fields just like a serf in olden times
https://socialist-courier.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-waste-of-capitalism.html
Once again we will witness state law enforcement officers versus federal law enforcement agents
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58470259
FACE (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) Act prohibits any form of threatening or violent behaviour towards anyone trying to obtain an abortion. US Attorney General Merrick Garland said he would enforce FACE to protect clinics and patients.
Israel’s military chief warned military plans dealing with Iran’s nuclear programme have been “greatly accelerated”
A war of words or a clear warning of intentions?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/7/israels-military-chief-says-accelerating-iran-strike-plans
The National Unity Government views itself as a shadow government composed of elected legislators who were barred from taking their seats when the military seized power, called for a nationwide uprising.
The group’s acting president Duwa Lashi La called for revolt “in every village, town and city in the entire country at the same time”
It controls no territory, does not directly control any armed force and has won no diplomatic recognition from foreign countries. Members of its shadow Cabinet are in hiding inside Myanmar and in exile.
There were no immediate signs of heightened resistance activity, although some student groups and ethnic armed organizations expressed solidarity.
The ethnic armed forces, which have been fighting for decades for greater autonomy from Myanmar’s central government, operate independently of the National Unity Government.
https://apnews.com/article/myanmar-e2481c051f093429700be2789c27faef
Twenty livestock companies are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than either Germany, Britain or France – and are receiving billions of dollars in financial backing to do so, according to the Meat Atlas, which was compiled by Friends of the Earth and the European political foundation, Heinrich Böll Stiftung.
Raising livestock contributes significantly to carbon emissions, with animal agriculture accounting for 14.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Scientific reports have found that rich countries need huge reductions in meat and dairy consumption to tackle the climate emergency.
United Nations human rights monitors have strongly condemned the state of Texas for its new anti-abortion law, which they say violates international law by denying women control over their own bodies and endangering their lives.
Melissa Upreti, the chair of the UN’s working group on discrimination against women and girls, slammed the new Texas law, SB 8, as “structural sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst”.
“This new law will make abortion unsafe and deadly, and create a whole new set of risks for women and girls. It is profoundly discriminatory and violates a number of rights guaranteed under international law,”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/07/un-experts-condemn-texas-anti-abortion-law
China consumed 86 million tonnes of meat in 2020 or about 30% of global demand.
CellX unveiled a selection of lab-grown pork dishes and said it was aiming to produce the more environmentally friendly meat at competitive prices for the world’s top meat-eating nation by 2025.
Capitalists welcome
The Taliban would welcome German investment in Afghanistan.
“The German government could encourage its entrepreneurs to come and invest in our country,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said. The Taliban would pave the way for investments and ensure companies’ security, he said.
500 arrested in the recent protests but has it been a success. Not so according to this former XR activist.
XR is “not on a growth trajectory” and “the numbers are clearly much lower than during the October 2019 rebellion”…
“We do have to notice that XR is not exponentially growing,” he says. “And sometimes XR says ‘you need 3.5 per cent of the population to be actively involved to actively succeed’. Well, XR is orders of magnitude short of that…
Read hesitantly rejects the notion of a sweeping revolutionary force.
Extinction Rebellion makes “substantial asks” on activists, including encouraging people to break the law, which he says is “tricky for some people”
he hopes this will create a “radical flank to the Green Party but it would be a moderate flank to Extinction Rebellion – a little more careful than Extinction Rebellion is sometimes being, so as not to alienate people”.”
Anti-covid health workers came onto the field to stop the Brazil-Argentinan world cup qualifier. They accused four of the Argentinian players of breaking Brazil’s quarantine rules.
A thinktank report is calling for the government to encourage the consumption of “alternative proteins” that do not come from animals.
Despite the vegan hype, the UK today consumes only 6% less meat per capita in the home than in 1974.
The protest is still happening in a protracted war of attrition where Modi’s government has not compromised, nor the farmers prevailed.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58455866
Another larger protest is scheduled for 27 September
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/5/israels-alarmist-claims-raise-the-stakes-against-iran
“Iran is only two months away from acquiring the materials necessary for a nuclear weapon,” Gantz told dozens of ambassadors and envoys at an August 25 briefing.
“Iran has the intention to destroy Israel and is working on developing the means to do so,” he said. “Israel has the means to act and will not hesitate to do so. I do not rule out the possibility that Israel will have to take action in the future in order to prevent a nuclear Iran.”
Gantz’s words should be taken seriously, said Yaniv Voller, senior lecturer in politics of the Middle East at the University of Kent. “These threats are not merely empty words…”
“What is referred to as Plan B actually appears to be Israel’s Plan A – coercive measures that likely will draw the US and Iran into a broader war that will see the balance in the region shift dramatically in the direction of Israel while forestalling any US-Iran rapprochement for years if not decades,” Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft…“Biden knows that bombing Iran is the fastest way to make sure the Iranians get a bomb,” Parsi added.
“These claims are probably no more valid than the whole series of alarmist claims the Israelis have been making about Iran’s nuclear capability since the 1990s,” Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and chair of the Middle Eastern Studies programme at the University of San Francisco, told Al Jazeera. “Each and every one of these frightening predictions over the past quarter-century has proven wrong, so there is no reason to take this latest iteration any more seriously.”
Several Republican-controlled states will now be following the example of Texas.
The evangelical Taliban is effectively in control of much of the USA
Jonathan Cook on the role of the Jewish Chronicle in smearing Corbyn as an anti-semite.
Jewish Chronicle’s libel payouts were a small price to pay for smearing Corbyn and the left
The Jewish Chronicle served as the chief attack dog on Corbyn and the Labour left, in service of an establishment represented by the Conservative party and the long-dominant right wing of the Labour party…The paper’s role was to breathe life into the claim that Corbyn and his supporters were anti-semites, and the paper managed it by maliciously conflating antisemitism and the left’s criticisms of Israel as a racist, apartheid state that oppresses Palestinians. The Chronicle’s job was to initiate the antisemitism libels and lies against Corbyn and his followers that served to feed and rationalise the fears of prominent sections of the Jewish community. Those fears could then be cited by the rest of the corporate media as evidence that Labour was riding roughshod over the Jewish community’s “sensitivities”. And in turn, the Labour left’s supposed indifference to Jewish sensitivities could be attributed to its rampant antisemitism… to deny Labour has some especial antisemitism problem, separate from that found more generally in British society, is itself proof of antisemitism. Once accused of antisemitism, as the Labour left endlessly is, one is guilty by definition – the choice is either to confess to antisemitism or be proven an antisemite by denying the accusation.
