alanjjohnstone
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Something to be linked to on your internet travels as a lesson from the past
As Marcos pointed out AOC will receive just only 60 seconds of air-time at the Democratic Convention. Other than Sanders, none of the other progressives will have a speech. A Republican anti-Trumpist will get prime place for his speech.
The DNC Party machine are always in control. Those on the Left that advocate a vote for Biden and then a radical campaign after he is elected are delusional.
There is no centrist base for progressives to appeal to. There are the small progressive faction and then there is the Republican-lite corporate one who runs the Democratic Party.
It is David North’s Socialist Equality Party website
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_North_(socialist)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Equality_Party_(United_States)
Credit where credit is due, reluctant =though as i am to concede it, the WSWS does some useful research if you need some facts and figures and quotes about current politics and it is well worth a visit.
Our Africa blog has posted on this story
https://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2020/08/sudans-race-question.html
https://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2020/07/sudan-slavery-and-racism.html
And from a few years back
https://socialistbanner.blogspot.com/2015/10/was-slavery-all-black-and-white.html
Plus numerous other blog-posts of tribalism and xenophobia
Into the lions den.
Courage act of defiance or foolhardy idiocy?
Just watched a video of two individuals labeled as antifa (probably wrongly) making a protest at the Sturgis motorbike festival about them not wearing masks.
It set off a mass hysteria and baying for blood like a Pavlov’s dog reaction among the predominant several hundred Trump right-wing bikers on the street. The two protesters indeed needed arrested by the police for their own protection. That mob was not going to listen reasonably to any 1st Amendment right.
Identity politics V, the Identitarian movement
A new kid on the racist block – Patriotic Alliance
Patriotic Alternative claims that “native British” people are being eradicated and proposes extreme measures to protect “the indigenous peoples of the United Kingdom”. It says it would call a “complete halt” to immigration and pay people “of immigrant descent … to return to their ancestral homelands”. Patriotic Alternative claims that children are being exposed to pro-LGBT and anti-white “propaganda” and advocates home-schooling using its own package of hateful material on “history and culture”.
Won’t that all be up to Putin?
He isn’t going to allow another Ukraine, is he? He may jettison Lukashenko for political expediency, but a new despot with an improved image will replace him.
Added
Lukashenko said he had secured a pledge from Russia in his phone call with Putin to provide security assistance in the country if needed.
Kamala Harris – the war hawk
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/14/kamala-harris-hawk
Biden – the bellicose belligerent
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/14/will-biden-be-less-belligerent-than-trump/
The Chicken Industry
The American meat industry in 2017 processed 9 billion chickens. By the 1970s, with the industry cranking out so much chicken new products and methods of cooking needed to be developed. By the late 1980s, the real price of chicken was less than one third of what it cost in 1955. In the mid-1920s the average American ate about 14 pounds per year. Between 1976 and 1989 per capita consumption rose by 50 percent. By 1980 that average American was eating roughly 35 pounds of chicken per year. By 1995: more than 50 pounds. 2001: 82 pounds. In 2016, it was up to nearly 92 pounds.
From sales to marketing to the chickens, the corporations run it all. Farmers are paid on the basis of ‘feed conversion’, how many of the chicken delivered to the farmer can be raised and returned for slaughter with as efficient use of feed as possible. Farmers under contract for the same particular company, and there aren’t many such companies given the inherent concentration built into the system- the ten largest poultry companies control about 80 percent of the market, compete with each other under that metric with the winners getting paid more than those ranked lower (the cost of feed deducted from all). Only the company holds all the information. Contracts can be cancelled by the company at any time. Meat companies have farmers making capital investments and competing with each other, not in a free market, but in company owned corporate fiefdoms. Thus exists the surreal scenario of farmers owning the means of production while playing the role of serfs on their own farms. Contract farming started with chicken but soon swallowed up hog farming as well. Nearly all hogs are grown under contract farming.
In 1950 wages for meatpacking were only slightly lower than U.S. manufacturing. By 1960 wages in meatpacking were 15 percent higher, a number that basically held through the 1970s. By the time the anti-union work of the 1980s was done wages in meatpacking were 20 percent lower than manufacturing. By 2002 they were 24 percent lower; today they are 44 percent lower. Regulations were withdrawn and line speeds were once again increased unilaterally by companies.
Soon after The Jungle was published Sinclair lamented ‘I aimed for the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.’ Over a century later it is clear that the main players again adorn the stage: The Meat Trust, the exploited immigrants, the amputated limbs, now along with bounded farmers. The jungle remains a dark, forbidding place.
The Healthcare Industry Prepares for War
I wonder who will have the greater influence.
Meghan hails BLM…she found inspiration in peaceful anti-racism protests
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/14/meghan-duchess-of-sussex-george-floyd-protests
OR
Dolly Parton
“Of course BLM matters… Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!”
The USA rebuffed at the UN over anti-Iran resolution
The proposal to extend an arms embargo on Iran won support from only the Dominican Republic at the security council vote.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/14/us-iran-un-arms-embargo-nuclear-deal
Suzanne DiMaggio, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace, said that the US focus was not on building coalitions on the issue but on provoking a diplomatic confrontation at the UN to please Trump’s core supporters. She said the ultimate US aim was also to try to provoke Iran into a reaction…
Another article on the lesser evil quandary of Chomsky
In a fake democracy voting for corporate candidates just legitimizes our servitude. That’s the problem.
Voice of America has its officials sacked and a Trump loyalist is placed in charge
