erronis
erronis's JournalNew Khashoggi revelations show we don't have the full story about his killing
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/06/jamal-khashoggi-egypt-saudi-arabia-biden-mbs-full-story/(With a kick to: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215594159)
Who else outside of Saudi Arabia was involved in this crime? What did U.S. officials know, and when, about plans to kill him? What else does the Biden administration know that it might not be telling us? Will they question Prince Khalid bin Salman, Saudi Arabias former ambassador to the United States and currently its deputy defense minister, during their meetings with him when he comes to Washington this week, about his own role in the murder, including phone records of his communications with Khashoggi?
From this morning's Heather Cox Richardson: Mussollini and the fascist racial hierarchies
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-5-2021(Reposted from https://www.democraticunderground.com/1017665699#post13)
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-5-2021
In his 1944 speech, FDR was careful to explain to Americans how they were different from the Italian fascists. He talked about Nazi overlords and fascist puppets. Then, in contrast to the fascists racial hierarchies, FDR made a point of calling Americans attention to the fact that the men who defeated the Italian fascists were Americans from every walk of life.
And then he turned to how fascism treated its people. In Italy, the people have lived so long under the corrupt rule of Mussolini that in spite of the tinsel at the topyou have seen the pictures of ittheir economic conditions have grown steadily worse. Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education, a lower public health, all byproducts of the fascist misrule.
To rebuild Italy, FDR said, the troops had to start from the bottom. [W]e have had to give them bread to replace that which was stolen out of their mouths, he said. We have had to make it possible for the Italians to raise and use their local crops. We have had to help them cleanse their schools of fascist trappings .
He outlined how Americans had anticipated the need to relieve the people starved by the fascists, and had made plans to ship food grown by the magnificent ability and energy of the American people, in ships they had constructed, over thousands of miles of water. Some of us may let our thoughts run to the financial cost of it, he said, but we hope that this relief will be an investment for the future, an investment that will pay dividends by eliminating fascism, by ending any Italian desires to start another war of aggression in the future .
FDR was emphasizing the power of the people, of democracy, to combat fascism not only abroad but also at home, where it had attracted Americans frustrated by the seeming inability of democracy to counter the Depression. They longed for a single strong leader to fix everything. Other Americans, horrified by FDRs use of the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure, wanted to take the nation back to the 1920s and in so doing had begun to flirt with fascism as well.
As he celebrated the triumph over democracy in Italy, he was also urging Americans to value and protect it at home.
Propublica publishing tax information on the wealthiest 0.001%
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-short-form-a-quick-guide-to-what-we-uncovered(Abbreviated overview.)
Many, many other stories just published.
https://www.propublica.org/article/why-we-are-publishing-the-tax-secrets-of-the-001
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
....
I'll be reading and staying tuned. Should be interesting.
"We Are Bellingcat" - excellent book for those who care about how to search for truth
I won't take a position on whether or not they (bellingcat) have hidden agendas. The only one that I can perceive is one that encourages transparency and citizen participation in investigative journalism.
https://www.bellingcat.com/book/
Based on a search on the tubes, bellingcat has struck a nerve with its investigations. The russian/ussr outlets (sputniknews.cccp, rt.cccp) as well as proxies (mintpressnews) are flooding the media with negative press which never answers the accusations, just tries to deflect, divert, deny.
They uncovered the facts behind the downing of MH17 over the Ukraine, the attempted assassins of the Skripals in England, the chemical warfare in Syria - all of these terrorist actions with the backing of the KGB officer in charge of the Russian plutocracy.
Of course these techniques should be used against any government (national or local) that tries to hide its actions from scrutiny. I expect more will be exposed around the world including those supposed bastions of democracy such as the US, UK, FR, etc.
Feel like fixing the climate crisis is your responsibility? ExxonMobil has been telling you that
https://www.businessinsider.com/exxonmobil-pins-responsibility-for-climate-crisis-on-consumers-study-2021-5Feel like fixing the climate crisis is your personal responsibility? ExxonMobil has been telling you that for 20 years, a study found.
When Naomi Oreskes lectures about climate change, she gets the same question over and over again.
"A member of the audience will say: 'Well, what can I personally do? What can I do as an individual to fix this problem?'" Oreskes, a science historian at Harvard University, told Insider. "Much less frequently do they say: 'What can we do about the way the fossil fuel industry is blocking policy action?'"
It's a common idea: That the best way to fight climate change is by making changes in your own life using less energy, eating less meat, driving less, flying less. But according to Oreskes and her colleague, Geoffrey Supran, a key source of this sentiment is a set of communications campaigns from ExxonMobil.
The researchers' latest analysis indicates that the oil giant started blaming the climate crisis on consumers two decades ago. In a study published last week, Supran and Oreskes analyzed 180 ExxonMobil documents discussing climate change from 1977 to 2014. The set includes internal communications, peer-reviewed publications, and "advertorials" advertisements fashioned to look like editorials and published in The New York Times op-ed section.
Around the year 2000, the researchers found, a new trend emerged in the company's public-facing communications. The advertisements began to focus on how consumers use energy.
"Be smart about electricity use," one 2007 advertorial suggested, continuing: "Heat and cool your home efficiently." "Improve your gas mileage." "Check your home's greenhouse gas emissions."
Focusing on how consumers power their homes and cars, Oreskes and Supran argue, helps ExxonMobil "downplay" its role in extracting and burning the fossil fuels that are filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and raising global temperatures. It places both the blame and the responsibility for solving the problem onto individuals.
It's all about messaging. Deflecting. Propaganda.
No One Wants to Work [For You] Anymore: The End of Oligopsony
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/05/16/no-one-wants-to-work-for-you-anymore-the-end-of-oligopsony/This post highlights a very important discussion that may change the way that workers are treated in this capitalist economy. At least I hope it does.
Every single one of these jobs pays between $3.67 (Michigans minimum tipped hourly wage) and $15.00 an hour. None of them are full time, most have variable schedules, and only one place assures workers one weekend day off every week. None of them offer health care or childcare assistance of any kind. None of them offer enough hours regularly with enough compensation to pay for a one-bedroom apartment within walking distance, and likely not within a 10-mile radius.
Until the pandemic, these employers were able to tell workers what theyd pay, take it or leave it. They could act in concert without having to coordinate to set market pricing because it was simply understood by workers that hourly workers pay fell in this range and it was an employers market.
Employers have acted like a cartel, with collusion on price fixing for labor enabled by other monopolistic entities like Facebook and Google.
Excellent post and comments from Heather Cox Richardson today
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-13-2021The story is not entirely new. Heritage (as it is known) published a report last February outlining best practices for voting, many of which are in the new bills coming out of Republican-dominated state legislatures. And in a March article for the New York Times, Nick Corasaniti and Reid J. Epstein outlined the role of Heritage Action in Georgias and Arizonas voting restrictions, noting that at least 23 of the proposed state bills that dealt with voting had language that looked like that of Heritage. They also wrote that Heritage plans to spend $24 million to change voting laws in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas, and Wisconsin before the 2022 election, and that the person behind the Heritage voting policies is Hans von Spakovsky, who mainstreamed the idea of voter fraud in the Republican Party, although experts agree it is vanishingly rare.
What is new and dramatic about the video is seeing Anderson make her pitch to donors for a coordinated right-wing effort to take the vote away from their opponents. She talks of working with similar groups: We literally give marching orders for the week ahead, Anderson said. All so were singing from the same song sheet of the goals for that week and where the state bills are across the country.
Heritage Action is fighting hard against the Democrats For the People Act, which would protect the right to vote, end partisan gerrymandering, and limit money in politics. Heritage summarized the bill, which it called the Corrupt Politicians Act, in a short sheet for lawmakers. Anderson explained: Weve made sure that every single member of Congress knows just how bad the bill is . Then weve made sure theres an echo chamber of support around these senators driven by your Heritage Action activists and sentinels across the country where weve driven hundreds of thousands of calls, emails, place[d] letters to the editor, hosted events, and run television and digital ads.
And this exceptional comment(s):
Ellie Kona4 hr ago
In Heathers video chat today (5/13/2021), she talked about Stephen Douglas. Stephen Douglas, of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, drafted the KansasNebraska Act of 1854 to allow the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether or not to allow slavery, rather than to be decided by Congress, and the Northerners in opposition to slavery and oligarchy formed the Republican Party. The Democratic Party split between north and south. As the Southern Democrats escalated to the point of seceding from the Union, Douglas took a stand that secession was in opposition to democracy and sided with Lincoln and the Union for a mainstream position. With the split in the Democrats, the Republicans prevailed. As it echoes to today, the party split looks like a good thing.
Heathers point was that the spin-off element can become very dangerous.
As Heather describes the campaign of the Heritage Action for America, we see ever more clearly how the danger comes in the form of not just the Jan. 6 insurrection, but the sophisticated monied manipulation of state legislators, and even of public opinion, as through letters to the editor, to create the appearance of legitimacy and the will of the people.
How is Heritage connected to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)? Both are funded by the Koch Foundation. Note that ALEC wrote the 360 voter suppression bills pending/passed across the country.
What is the counterpart progressive PAC that is spoon-feeding legislation to elected officials and their staff?
Fellow HCR Reader Jeff Carpenter looked for a progressive PAC. The best he could find is the State Innovation Exchange (SiX):
New Republic article of 1/03/2020, Have Democrats Found Their ALEC?
https://newrepublic.com/article/156110/democrats-found-alec
The State Innovation Exchange (SiX) provides an online database of liberal and progressive model state-level legislation that has been passed in a state for politicians and activists to replicate and enact in state legislatures.
https://stateinnovation.org/
Jeff learned that progressive state groups are more like libraries than lobbies, and big donors prefer national legislation over state legislation. Jeff contacted a SiX spokesperson who said:
We do not operate like ALEC (For example, were not a bill mill that churns out copycat legislation. We know that policy alone wont fix our democracy and economy, so we take a policy plus approach--we share policy research from issue experts, as well as communications, strategy, connections with movement partners, and other types of support that legislators need.) We do provide tailored support for state legislators, and democracy is one of our primary issue areas.
However daunting, our despair can only be a feeling that we redirect into action. Barriers to voting, voter suppression bills, are already being passed as a set up for the minority to overpower the majority in the 2022 elections and beyond. The time is now to make our voices heard as individuals by writing/texting/calling elected officials, corporations, local newspapers, and social media.
How to get started, if you havent already? Here are 5 of more than 40 grassroots organizations:
Vote Forward: https://votefwd.org/
Fair Fight: Home | Fair Fight
League of Women Voters (members do include men!): https://www.lwv.org/
Common Cause: commoncause.org
5 Calls: https://5calls.org/
Whats your favorite organization in support of democracy?
70Reply
Gigi3 hr ago
My favorite organization in support of democracy is Joe Bidens administration.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
Questionwhy am I still surprised that Heritage was doing everything that Democrats were accused of? Bussing people in to act like locals was something we often heard idjt45 raging about during the New Hampshire primary. There is no bottom to their madness and it explains why many politicians never even knew what they were proposing. Hello Marjorie and her America First caucus looking like a fool talking about an outside organization and no one blasted her on it.
Great list and background info Ellie. Thank you.
Guardian: US democracy on the brink: Republicans wage 'coordinated onslaught' on voting rights
This is such an important article. Please read/comment/recommend to others.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/24/democracy-under-attack-america-us-voting-rights-republicans
The fragility of democracy has been exposed at levels that I think even white America was blind to, said Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter.
Republicans have openly talked about their intentions. Everybody shouldnt be voting, John Kavanagh, a Republican in the Arizona state legislature, told CNN earlier this month. Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.
Politicians May Be Guilty of 'Social Murder' in COVID Response - BMJ via Medscape
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/945395Intentional negligence. Willful murder.
An editorial in an influential British medical journal says politicians who didn't respond aggressively enough to control the coronavirus pandemic should be held responsible for those deaths, which the editorial says could be classified as "social murder."
"Politicians must be held to account by legal and electoral means, indeed by any national and international constitutional means necessary," wrote Kamran Abbasi, MD, the executive editor of BMJ.
Abbasi writes that the phrase "social murder" was coined by philosopher Friedrich Engels to describe the conditions created by privileged classes in 19th century England that "inevitably led to premature and unnatural' death among the poorest classes."
Today, the phrase may describe "the lack of political attention to social determinants and inequities that exacerbate the pandemic," he writes.
"When politicians and experts say that they are willing to allow tens of thousands of premature deaths for the sake of population immunity or in the hope of propping up the economy, is that not premeditated and reckless indifference to human life?"
Among the politicians mentioned in the editorial are former U.S. President Donald Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi all leaders of nations with high numbers of deaths.
History of Repuglican dirty deeds to cheat the elections - HCR
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-5-2020Her Letters from an American should be required reading for anybody that cares about where we've been and cares about the lessons to be learned.
To what end? Why are Republicans accepting this anti-American behavior from Trump?
It seems to me they are unwilling to risk losing Trumps voters in the future because they are determined to regain power. They dont much care about our democracy, so long as they have a shot at keeping Trumps people on their side. But then, again, to what end? If Republicans regain power in 2022 or 2024, what will that look like? Do we have any reason to think they will then begin to defend our democracy? Do we have any reason to think they are interested in anything but even more legislation that moves wealth upward?
We have been in a spot much like this before. In 1884, Americans turned against the Republican Party because it had abandoned its support for ordinary Americans in favor of the industrial leaders who put money into Republican lawmakers political war chests, as well as into their pockets. Voters put Democrat Grover Cleveland into the White House, the first Democrat to hold the presidency since James Buchanan was elected in 1856.
Horrified, the Republicans flooded the country with stories of how Democrats were socialists who would attack the rich by ending the legislation that protected businesses. If Democrats continued to control the government, Republicans said, they would destroy America. In 1888, they suppressed Democratic votes and created modern political financing as they hit up businessmen for major donations. Despite their best efforts, voters reelected Cleveland by about 100,000 votes, but Republicans managed to eke out a win for their candidate, Benjamin Harrison, in the Electoral College. Harrison promised a BUSINESSMANS ADMINISTRATION, and indeed, in office, he and his men did all they could to cement the Republican Party into power so it could continue to defend business (among other things, they added six new states to the Union to pack the Electoral College).
But voters still didnt like the Republicans platform, which seemed more and more to funnel money from hardworking Americans upward into the pockets of those men who were increasingly portrayed as robber barons. In 1892, they voted for Cleveland in such numbers they couldnt be overridden in the Electoral College. Voters also put Democrats in charge of Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
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