alanjjohnstone
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“Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act,”
Yet another US state declares most abortions illegal – Georgia. It preempts access to abortion before most women even realize they’ve missed a period and might be pregnant. The intention is to eventually succeed in challenging the precedent set by Roe in 1973.
Georgia Joins National Anti-Abortion Onslaught With “Heartbeat Ban”
“Georgia’s impending ban on almost all abortion care will endanger women and families both here and in surrounding states, while criminalizing physicians like me who are trying to provide compassionate, comprehensive health care for patients.”
Georgia has one of the worst maternal death rates in the nation. And the most recent data indicates that black women are almost three times more likely to die from childbirth than white women are. In 2010, Amnesty International singled out Georgia as the U.S. state with the worst maternal mortality rate. The Global Health Justice Partnership (GHJP) at Yale University released a report showing across-the-board declines — including in countries classified as “least developed” by the U.N., the state of Georgia is hovering at 40.8 deaths per 100,000 live births. When these numbers are broken down further, the racial disparity is striking: 27.1 deaths per 100,000 live births for white women and 62.1 for Black women.
“and assume there is no reply to my substantive comment”
VM, are you now dismissing my contribution to the discussion as not a serious attempt at a response?
Perhaps, I should take the same offence at that disrespect. 🙁
Some members would accuse me of Party heresy in explaining myself in such a manner so my post should not be taken so lightly and treated as insignificant.
Robbo’s comments were an opportunity for you to respond with reasoned arguments against his observations, even though you consider these to be ad hominem attacks.
Debate is what this forum is all about and it will lead to disagreements and some might express themselves injudiciously.
Worth a read for placing everything in perspective
“By the way you forgot he is anti-semitic and his ex-wives hate him.”
I recognized this as VM’s humour, Robbo which you should have done.
I don’t think Robbo did launch a personal attack towards you but expressed an interpretation of your post, VM, and where he believes it is leading to.
But let’s focus the exchange.
The issue is that regardless of sincerity, good-intentions and a genuine overlap of socialistic ideals, radical reformers such a Corbyn and Sanders will have their wings clipped as soon as they get close to acquiring real political power.
Back in 2016 I read an article that if Sanders became president, he would achieve very little because of an informal alliance between the Republicans and the majority of Democrats would spring up
In 2020, we see that the liberal/left Democrats presidential nominees mostly agree on universal free healthcare yet the centrists have already put forward the watered-down version of yet another private insurance integrated healthcare system to ensure division. On the foreign relations they may distance themselves from Netanyahu but none actually renounce the US-Israel alliance.
As for AOC, I have quoted her as expressing a very SPGB-type comment on another thread but when it comes to actually policy, such as the Green New Deal, the practicalities of implementation is again side-stepped. This is echoed around the world where despite the public commitments, government action is diluted.
I accept that the SPGB is small because we do not express our sympathy or solidarity sufficiently when fellow-workers engage in the class struggle which unavoidably involve making certain demands upon the State.
This isn’t the Party subscribing to reformism but accepting that our fellow-workers will inevitably challenge those in political power to change policy, be it environment or trade union rights. Our task is to understand that but to go one step further, and advocate the capture of political power to change IT, itself and make it the tool for societal system change.
It is not what we say but how we say it, that has been the Party’s problem. We urge class struggle and suggest it is for the participants and not the Party to assume its direction. We then blame workers for not heeding the road-map we lay down for them when they take their various twists and turns on the journey. If they head off up a dead-end or take a dangerous detour, we should explain why the diversion is a mistake, but we shouldn’t retard their will to take on that journey. To continue the metaphor, our role is to put into place the road-signs and if our fellow workers fail to go the way we indicate, it is simply to continue to put up the signs showing the right directions to our destination.
We are the compass of the working class. Not its shepherd.
So it is all a matter of attitude and approach. We don’t try to command.
Finland is holding its general election.
I was a bit surprised that despite its laudable welfare state and generous social services, there has been no left social democratic party in power in Finland for two decades.
Ocean researchers are asking themselves if they’re witnessing the transformation of an ecosystem. The Bering Sea last winter saw record-low sea ice. Climate models predicted less ice, but not this soon, said Seth Danielson, a physical oceanographer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
“The projections were saying we would’ve hit situations similar to what we saw last year, but not for another 40 or 50 years,” Danielson said.
One of Israel’s new friends, Bolsonaro of Brasil, stated that the Nazi genocide of the Jews during World War Two could be forgiven.
He also asserted, after a tour of the Holocaust memorial Yad Vadshem, that the Nazis had been “leftists.”
Netanyahu as yet makes no comment
https://www.timesofisrael.com/brazils-bolsonaro-says-holocaust-crimes-can-be-forgiven/
Trump, Fox News and other right-wingers are determined to describe Democratic Party as left and far left.
If the past is anything to go by, designating it as such will make “centrists” and “moderates” shift to the right to avoid the appellation and the overall effect will make the Democratic Party more right-wing. We already witness it in the general reluctance to defend Ilyan Omar and AOC from the media smears, in case the mud sticks to the Democratic Party.
I find it particular ironic that Fox News host questioned if Omar is a real American when the TV channel’s owner, Australian Rupert Murdoch, took out US citizenship in 1985 just to circumvent the law that restricts foreigners from controlling the media and he only re-located his HQ from Australia to America in 2004 to attract more Wall St cash. And it is said that his former marriage with Wendi Deng floundered because of a supposed link to Chinese intelligence (as well as her alleged affair with Tony Blair.)
Murdoch must be the archetypical “globalist” that the right-wing fear-monger about, yet it is Soros who gets the attention.
Looking at pics of climate change protests I notice the SWP have not lost their technique of flooding a march with their Socialist Worker placards
The Right go after the Pope
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/13/steve-bannon-matteo-salvini-pope-francis-is-the-enemy
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called capitalism “irredeemable.”
“Capitalism is an ideology of capital — the most important thing is the concentration of capital and to seek and maximize profit,” she explained, during an interview. “To me, capitalism is irredeemable,” she added.
Nevertheless, her words still put the fear of death into the right-wing in America.
In the six weeks from February 25 and April 7, her name was mentioned 3,181 times on Fox News and Fox Business; not a day went by that she wasn’t discussed. Hosts and guests smeared and misrepresented Ocasio-Cortez’s agenda, caricaturing it while painting it as radical, dangerous, far-left socialism. They often draw bleak comparisons between her progressive vision and the turmoil in Venezuela, to “bring the kind of socialism that destroyed Venezuela.” to attack her policies. They’ve repeatedly attacked her intelligence, used her age to discredit her, and dismissed her as a “little girl.” They have accused Ocasio-Cortez of using “minority privilege” to criticize Fox personalities and trying to push “Latin American values” on the U.S.A
The irony here is that AOC isn’t really a socialist. She is a progressive neo-New Dealer who calls for the reform of capitalism, not its abolition.
But in the end, it may all come down to good business practice.
Fox presenter Stuart Varney acknowledged, “We have an AOC segment every single day, almost every single hour. She’s good for our ratings”
The Australia Labor Party candidate for the West Australian seat of Curtin, Melissa Parke, has pulled out following reports that she told a public meeting last month that the way Israel treated Palestinians was “worse than the South African system of apartheid”.
Another US state, Ohio, is banning abortions after a detectable heartbeat. The law makes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/12/ohio-governor-abortion-signs-heartbeat-law
A legal response is what they want. They hope to provoke a legal challenge with the potential to overturn the US supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that legalized abortion up until viability, usually at 22 to 24 weeks.
“The heartbeat bill is the next incremental step in our strategy to overturn Roe v Wade,” said the Ohio Right to Life president, Mike Gonidakis.
