alanjjohnstone
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Defund the police – No chance.
The well-to-do neighbourhoods will become increasingly gated communities with their own private security patrols.
But business will finance their protectors by other means.
A variety of companies – including financial institutions, technology companies, retailers, local universities and sports teams, provide funding to police foundations. Donations may be, in part, to curry favor with a force that exists primarily to protect property and capital, said the report by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit corporate and government accountability research institute, and its research database project LittleSis.
“Not a lot of people are aware of this public-private partnership where corporations and wealthy donors are able to siphon money into police forces with little to no oversight,” said Gin Armstrong, a senior research analyst at LittleSis.
“Police foundations are a key space for orchestrating, normalizing and celebrating the collaboration between corporate power and the police,” the LittleSis report said.
The Vatican issued its first-ever set of comprehensive environmental guidelines. The document is the fruit of a collaboration across all Vatican departments and suggests concrete ways for the Church to implement Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’, including a call to all Catholic institutions to “avoid supporting companies that harm human or social ecology and environmental ecology (for example, fossil fuels).”
This is the first-ever endorsement of the divestment movement to come from the Vatican, and it comes on the heels of the largest-ever announcement of divestment by faith institutions. In May, 42 institutions in 14 countries announced their commitment to drop fossil fuels.
Advisers to the world’s wealthy are urging them to hold more gold. Some are channelling up to 10% of their clients’ portfolios into the yellow metal as the massive central bank stimulus reduces bond yields. Nine private banks spoken to by Reuters, which collectively oversee around $6 trillion in assets for the world’s ultra-rich, said they had advised clients to increase their allocation to gold. Of them, four provided forecasts and all saw prices ending the year higher than they are now.
Gold prices have already risen 14% since the start of the year to $1,730 an ounce, many private bankers bet that gold – a hedge for both inflation and deflation – has further to run. UBS, the world’s biggest wealth manager, said gold could hit $1,800 by year-end in its base-case scenario, driven by ultra-low interest rates and investors seeking gold to hedge their portfolios, or even touch a record high of $2,000 in the event of a second wave of novel coronavirus infections.
The blog has several posts on TPP.
The government’s planned post-Brexit trade deal with New Zealand will have a negligible effect on the British economy and could actually make it shrink slightly and leave people worse off, according to government forecasts, the effect on GDP (gross domestic product) from the deal will be “close to zero”
I think this article is an example of how right-wing conspiracies are then propagated by the left wing as described by Marcos in his posts.
https://dissidentvoice.org/2020/06/beware-the-hijacking-of-u-s-protests-into-a-color-revolution/
Believe it or not, there could be a kernel of truth in accusations coming mostly from the political right as to the possible role of the notorious liberal billionaire investor and “philanthropist” George Soros…
A silver lining for farming?
https://www.dw.com/en/in-europe-climate-change-brings-new-crops-new-ideas/a-53785519
Places in northern Europe, meanwhile, could see agricultural benefits from climate change, including longer growing seasons and a shorter frost period “allowing the cultivation of new crops and varieties,” said the report. Suitable cropland around the Baltic Sea could more than double by 2100, from 32% of land area today to about 76%, with certain crops now common to southern Europe taking root further north.
In the northern German state of Lower Saxony, where average temperatures have risen nearly 2 degrees Celsius in the last several decades, some farmers have started cultivating fruits typically found further south, such as apricots and nectarines.
Sicily is one of Italy’s top olive oil-producing regions, along with Calabria and Puglia. But some farmers there have begun focusing their attention on crops native to tropical regions, including mangoes, avocado and lychee fruit, recent years have seen an exponential growth of these crops and the introduction of new species such as papaya, replacing citrus fruits which “are no longer remunerative,” said Vittorio Farina, an associate professor in agriculture at the University of Palermo.
The rightwing populist media enjoy targeting Asians for eating wild-life animals and spreading diseases. Here is another report
A restaurant in Albania is offering diners meat from illegally hunted bears – part of an illicit trade in wildlife that is “out of control” in the country, investigators claim. Researchers said it was the first time they had seen bear meat cooked in Europe, and experts warned that the crude butchering of animals may lead to outbreaks of zoonotic diseases such as coronavirus.
Just to remind an often forgotten 1899 article by Eugene Debs in the topic of prison labour that could well be applicable for today.
<u>https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1899/prison.htm</u>
“It is therefore with the economic system, which is responsible for, not only prison labor, but for the gradual enslavement and degradation of all labor, that we must deal before there can be any solution of the prison labor problem or any permanent relief from its demoralizing influences…
…It is popular to say that society must be protected against its criminals. I prefer to believe that criminals should be protected against society, at least while we live under a system that makes the commission of crime necessary to secure employment….”
But how wrong was his mistaken optmism
“…Fortunately the system of leasing and contracting prison labor for private exploitation is being exposed and its frightful iniquities laid bare. Thanks to organized labor and to the spirit of prison reform, this horrifying phase of the evil is doomed to disappear before an enlightened public sentiment…”
Prison labour has grown into lucrative corporations
https://www.ranker.com/list/companies-in-the-united-states-that-use-prison-labor/genevieve-carlton
YMS, Am i right that you once suggested that the Party invested its funds into gold? Or am i misremembering?
Prof John Drury, a member of a subgroup to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), said evidence shows that rather than mass panic or selfishness in times of emergency, people actually tend to show solidarity and cooperation.
Omar Iihan says she will do her utmost to get Biden elected even though she believed Tara Reade’s sexual assault claim and thinks Biden has repeatedly lied about the incident.
https://jonathanturley.org/2020/05/26/omar/
Just where will she draw the line on a president’s conduct…what is allowable in his personal behaviour. But of course she is a follower of a religion where the founder married a 6 year old and consummated the marriage when she was 9 years old. Hypocrisy is inherent in her mind-set.
Obviously the source is biased but posted for the alternative view.
https://www.fwi.co.uk/news/fw-opinion-8-reasons-why-becoming-vegan-is-the-wrong-choice
Did a quick check
France sees itself as the promoter of the universal and colorblind philosophy that was supposed to protect us from racial tensions. French people are raised to believe that there is only one race: The human race. Race is understood as biological, so mentioning it is to assert that there are hierarchies between human beings.
Due to a law dating from 1872, the French Republic prohibits performing census by making distinction between its citizens regarding their race or their beliefs…
Article 1 of the French constitution (1958) says that “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs.” Delvainquière (2007, 20) interprets this as an affirmation that “France does not recognise minorities, whether they be ethnic, religious, linguistic or other. Under French law, all citizens have equal rights, and the law is not intended to accord specific rights to given “groups” defined by their community of origin, culture, beliefs, language or ethnicity.”…there exists no French version of affirmative action based on racial or ethnic characteristics” . Further, even where there are policies that could be considered positive action measures targeting immigrants or minorities (including, for example, the designation of several spots at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques for students from particularly disadvantaged school districts), the initiatives are framed in terms of “merit” not on the basis of any socially relevant group characteristic. French law also prohibits the collection of data on race or ethnic origin this would render it difficult to implement or effectively monitor an affirmative action policy.
https://www.queensu.ca/mcp/immigrant-minorities/evidence/france
During his 2012 presidential campaign, François Hollande promised to remove the word race from the constitution. From his point of view, race does not exist and, therefore, should not be mentioned in any official text…a commission of lawmakers working on the revision of the constitution unanimously agreed to remove the word from the founding text of our republic. On Thursday, the alteration was unanimously adopted by the National Assembly. Former prime minister Manuel Valls, now a National Assembly deputy affiliated with President Emmanuel Macron’s party, promptly said he was “proud to vote with emotion for the removal of the word race from our Constitution.”
However, we don’t have ethnic statistics in the national census, but the law allows researchers and statisticians to collect such data for the purpose of studies as long as the subjects remain anonymous.
“I came to understand race as not just a biological difference but as a social construct producing social effects. Of course, blacks, Arabs, whites, Asians, Roma — we all belong to the human race. But history has created racial categories that still have an impact on the lives of those who descend from people who were enslaved and colonized…But the reality of the country of enlightenment is different from the claimed ideal…Racism is not addressed in a structural way in France. And that is because race is not addressed as something tangible. How can a country seriously fight racism, if race is not handled even as a fictional category? If race does not exist, racists do, and they act based on the belief of the existence of categories. So getting rid of the word will not work as a magic trick that would suddenly make racism disappear. Making the word race taboo will not change anything in the lives of people who are affected by racism. It will deprive scholars and activists of a powerful tool to study the implications of racism. And it may lead to the criminalization of those who dare use that word; attempting to classify someone by race can be grounds for a lawsuit. Denying the existence of race means denying the reality of racial discrimination…”
Some organizations, such as the Representative Council of Black Associations of France (French: Conseil représentatif des associations noires de France, CRAN), have argued in favour of the introduction of data collection on minority groups…
…However, that law does not concern surveys and polls, which are free to ask those questions if they wish. The law also allows for an exception for public institutions such as the INED or the INSEE whose job it is to collect data on demographics, social trends and other related subjects,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France
It is not simply all black and white (pun intended)
