alanjjohnstone
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It was a legal seizure by the courts, Marcos.
The post said so, “the ships were not physically confiscated”
What i am suggesting is that this is eventually all leading up to the US Navy actually taking the ships by force in what would be viewed by any non-partisan observer as an act of piracy by the USA
Soon there will be piracy on the high seas by the USA
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/200814043301330.html
Trump legally has seized the cargo of four tankers transporting Iranian fuel to Venezuela, US officials said on Thursday, as it steps up its campaign of maximum pressure against the two heavily sanctioned allies.
No military force was used as the ships were not physically confiscated. Rather, US officials threatened ship owners, insurers and captains with sanction to force them to hand over their cargo, which now becomes US property, the official said.
It is not clear where the vessels – the Bella, Bering, Pandi and Luna – or their cargoes currently are, but the ship captains weeks ago turned off their tracking devices to hide their locations.
In Switzerland, meat is incredibly expensive. Compared to the EU average, the Swiss have to pay 2.3 times as much for meat (food in general costs “only” 1.6 times as much as EU average.)
The Swiss Animal Welfare Act is considered the strictest in the world. Swiss law stipulates the maximum number of calves, chickens or pigs a farm may keep. That is 18,000 laying hens, for example. In Germany, farms keep an average of 30,000 hens — some farms even up to 60,000. In Switzerland, for example, the castration of piglets without anaesthesia has been banned since 2010, and keeping laying hens in battery cages is prohibited since 1992. Swiss law requires at least 0.9 square meters of space for fattening pigs — in the EU, only 0.65 square meters are mandatory.
One might suspect that the high meat prices in Switzerland are a result of that — in other words, that more animal-friendly husbandry drives up production costs and that farmers and livestock ultimately benefit.
But that’s not the case, says Mathias Binswanger, Professor of Economics at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland in Olten. “The higher price primarily benefits the retailers, not the farmers.”
“Switching to producing organic meat is often not worthwhile for farmers,” adds economist Mathias Binswanger.
According to calculations the farmer receives just two francs of the 28-franc difference; the slaughterhouse gets three francs and the retailers 23 francs.
This way, meat from animal-friendly husbandry becomes disproportionally pricey and unattractive for customers.
Philipp Zimmermann of Unia, the largest Swiss trade union says “In Switzerland, the meat-processing industry isn’t a model industry either.”
Many employees work for wages without a general minimum wage, Zimmermann says, adding that “depending on the Swiss region, they don’t earn enough money to live on.”
https://www.dw.com/en/switzerland-meat-animals-farmers/a-54550887
If it worked before, do it again
The birther conspiracy theory against Kamala Harris
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53774289
A diplomatic victory for Israel, without a doubt
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53770859
Yet i see no mention of UAE’s military intervention in Yemen or Libya being one of the motivations, even though i think it is the anti-Iran alliance the major reason
The forced assimilation of Native Americans
Tattooed like in concentration camps
Yet another story of Native Americans suffering land grab.
“This land is all we have left. And yeah, we’re gonna fight. I’m gonna fight,” said Rita Bilagody, a Navajo activist
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/12/navajo-nation-dams-big-canyon-pumped-storage-project
The canyon, however, as well as the regions nearby and the Native culture they sustain, could be altered permanently, if developers get their way.
Phoenix-based Pumped Hydro Storage LLC has received a preliminary permit from federal regulators for its Big Canyon Pumped Storage Project – a string of four huge dams near the Little Colorado River, along with reservoirs and a power-generation facility.The project is the third Pumped Hydro has proposed in the Big Canyon region – the two previous ones received major pushback from tribes and environmentalists. If built, it would flood Big Canyon. The environmental and cultural costs of this proposal would be major. Tribal members and environmentalists say the project would flood several miles of canyons sacred to the Navajo; risk damaging cultural sites for several tribes; draw vast amounts of critical groundwater; potentially harm habitats for plants and animals, including some endangered species; and risk adverse effects for waterways leading into the Grand Canyon.
Sovereignty is at the core of the fight against the Big Canyon project.
In addition to the Navajo, the department noted at least 10 tribes – including the Havasupai tribe, Hopi tribe, Hualapai tribe, Kaibab band of Paiute Indians, Las Vegas tribe of Paiute Indians, Moapa Band of Paiute Indians, Paiute Indian tribe of Utah, San Juan Southern Paiute tribe, Yavapai-Apache Nation and Pueblo of Zuni – would be affected
We do have a problem with our clarity with “isms”
On another thread (#205620 https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/topic/anti-zionism-is-not-anti-semitic/page/16/#post-205620)
Lew suggests that we are not anti-Zionists because we are anti-all nationalisms and that singling out this particular nationalism leaves the Party open to a charge of ant-semitism. Likewise we are not anti-Scottish or Catalonian independence.
Saying we are internationalists comes up short also because it still incorporate the idea of nations, even if we and many others fully understand what is being meant and in the past used such a word before “world socialist” became popular.
Socialists seek social equality for all people so I think i am a feminist because many females around the world are deprived of that equality – economic, political and culturally – and being feminist includes being male, female and transgendered because we are humanists but not in the religious sense of secularism. And here too popular language is confusing because we are not anti-theist – atheists – but materialists.
We are, however, generalists – monists – the exceptions to society’s norms do not affect our overall understanding and conclusions about the world as it is.
“Language serves not only the purpose of distinguishing things but also of uniting them – for it is dialectic.” – Dietzgen
As Adam points out, the media view Kamala Harris as a woman of color, not as a law’n’order top cop. Harris herself did not see Tulsi Gabbard as of the Hindu faith but as an Assad apologist, while the media did not view Sanders as the possible first non-Christian but Jewish president but as an old white man against Clinton – a woman. The media picks and chooses the personality and character of their politicians according to their political agenda.
It is this identity politics we are up against where simplistic tokenism and gesture policies substitute for analysis. Was the reason another possible VP pick – Tammy Duckworth – not chosen because she is disabled and in a wheelchair, not the correct image to be aired, just as FDR had his polio hidden and Kennedy hid his Addison Disease from the public.
i think we have to seriously consider that with Biden’s failing faculties, and the likelihood of him being a one-term president, the VP choice is an endorsement of the next president by the Democratic Party establishment, a safe pair of hands to pass on to.
Kamala Harris is the pick for VP.
An ex-attorney general, a glorified cop, not an appeal to the progressive for the African-American vote but to reassure the law’n’order brigade. Also to placate identity politics as she is of Jamaican-Indian heritage.
Her history is that she blocked evidence to keep an innocent person in jail, her state denied early release to non-viol minor offenders on the grounds it reduced the numbers used for prison labour, jailed pot smokers, and threatened jail for truancy, and much more.
Bernie Sanders endorses Harris, Biden’s pick for VP
There seems to be manipulation of figures in NY.
https://apnews.com/212ccd87924b6906053703a00514647f
New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes could actually be a significant undercount as New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.
The governor of NY Andrew Cuomo was interviewed numerous times on CNN by his own brother Chris Cuomo where he faced as you can expect friendly soft questioning even when it was apparent that the care-home toll was extraordinary high. He was never challenged on anything, his claims taken at face-value until CNN’s Jake Tapper did a piece and instead of answering him directly Andrew Cuomo went on another program to refute the charges. CNN is clearly to the Democratic Party what Fox News is to Trump. (MSNBC are also uncritical of the Democratic Party and was a news outlet that targeted Sanders)
Globally the elderly in care-homes were initially sacrificed as low-priority but the policy was the continuation of a trend that began with the privatisation of caring for the old and it became a for-profit industry. A demographic who are disposable and are discarded.
If stocks run low a “smart distribution centre” will automatically order more.
One positive things of the pandemic lockdown was that there was no shortage of volunteers to deliver provisions to households, people are friendly and neighbourly with a sense of community solidarity rather than patronising charity. People found that they enjoyed helping others.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian journalist not without wide influence.
He was among the loudest and most hostile opponents of Corbyn throughout his time as leader and one of the chief purveyors and justifiers of the fabled antisemitism narrative against Corbyn.
Freedland argued that strenuous criticism of Israel was antisemitic by definition because Israel lay at the heart of any proper Jew’s identity. Freedland argued that Jews and Israel were all but indistinguishable, and to call Israel racist was to malign Jews who identified with it. Freedland pushed hard for Labour to be forced to adopt that new, troubling definition of antisemitism, produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that shifted the focus away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel. Under this new definition, claims that Israel was “a racist endeavour” – a view shared by some prominent Israeli scholars – was treated as definitive proof of antisemitism. If anyone weaponisation of antisemitism against Corbyn it was Freedland
It was because this back-drop aspect of politics that i believe this thread was first begun and the topic title was chosen.
In the broader debate of zionism, nationalism and anti-semitism and racism, the course of the exchanges would be of course different but it was centred upon an orchestrated smear campaign against Corbyn and the coordinated endeavour to get a misleading definition of anti-semitism to equate it with anti-Zionism in an attempt to protect Israeli government policy and its Zionist ideology.
Making such a conspiratorial accusation may well have had me up on charges of being anti-semitic if i was a Labour Party member.
Having lost a lot of the science arguments, climate change deniers are now called “lukewarmers”
Two prominent lukewarmers are False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the Planet by Bjorn Lomborg, and Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger, reviewed here
