IS IT A DIP OR A DROP, BIG DIFFERENCE

Germany’s Greens back Baerbock for chancellorship despite dip in polls

Kate Connolly in Berlin 

THE GUARDIAN, JUN 13,2021

Germany’s Green party has said it remains confident of securing the chancellorship and succeeding Angela Merkel at the country’s autumn election despite a drop in the polls, as it officially endorsed its lead candidate for the job.

Setbacks in recent weeks have led to the Greens slipping to second place behind Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) after commanding the polls for the first time in years. But this did not dissuade delegates from wholeheartedly throwing their support behind Annalena Baerbock at the party’s annual gathering on Saturday.

She received 98.5% of support at the weekend conference in a former post office rail depot in Berlin which many participants watched via video link.

Using her victory speech to emphasise the “fundamental changes and reforms” which she said were needed throughout Germany, Baerbock, 40, said: “There can be no more excuses, no ducking or muddling through … we are fighting for a new awakening.”

She apologised for mistakes she had made in the past weeks, including over her failure to register extra payments to parliament as well as errors on her CV which have since been corrected. Critics have seized on both incidents, saying they prove the party’s lack of professionalism and trustworthiness, and they are believed to have contributed to her own personal fall in the polls from a month ago – from 28% to 16% – to put her behind her main rival, Armin Laschet of the CDU.

© Photograph: Axel Schmidt/Reuters Annalena Baerbock, the German Greens’ co-leader, speaks at her party’s annual conference in Berlin.

The latest poll showed the Greens have dropped 6 points in the polls to 20% and the CDU has risen 5 points to 28%, prompting speculation over whether the Greens will manage to regain their momentum.

The poll results have also led to calls for Baerbock’s co-leader, Robert Habeck, to take the candidacy from her, although the idea was rejected at the weekend. Their joint leadership was also reconfirmed in a vote on Saturday.

Baerbock thanked the party for its “full solidarity” and for the “tailwind” it had given her to deal with the “headwind of the past few weeks”.

The mood surrounding the end of the 16-year Merkel era, together with urgency over the climate emergency and growing optimism that the pandemic will soon be under control, is being seized on by the Green party, which hopes to garner many new voters when Germans go to the polls on 26 September.

“For the first time in decades change is in the air,” Baerbock told delegates. “An era is coming to an end, and we have the chance to found a new one.”

But the party’s biggest challenge remains how it will take voters with it, amid a growing realisation that enthusiasm among young people in particular to do something for the climate crisis does not necessarily translate into ballots as easily as it might have hoped.

Analysts have compared the gap between ideology and the ballot box to intent and action, pointing at studies which show that Germans’ intentions to behave in an environmentally friendly manner do not mean they will. In a recent questionnaire, 24% of frequent flyers said they would be prepared to pay a form of compensation for the C02 emissions they had caused. But in reality less than 1% do so.

The party is aware of the difficulty it will have to communicate the link between what it sees as moral aspiration and tangible action without sounding heavy-handed and didactic.

It has a long-standing reputation, which it is trying to shake off, as a stickler for regulations. It was ridiculed for suggesting the introduction of one meat-free day a week in work canteens eight years ago; it has been attacked for appearing to recently question the ecological sense of single-family homes; and Baerbock earned scorn after appearing to suggest short-haul flights should be banned. What she actually said was that the rail network should be developed to the extent that short-haul flights would become obsolete, but that was not the line which stuck.

But the overall and perhaps most damaging impression being successfully pushed by opponents is that the Greens could make life for many Germans not just more rule-bound and restrictive, but also a lot more expensive.

The party’s plans to raise petrol prices have earned it derision and prompted accusations its policies will hit the least well off, leaving Baerbock and Habeck at pains to prove they will strive for social fairness.

Delegates have grappled with the question of whether the party can manage to communicate its message that measures such as higher fuel costs and CO2 emission compensation will ultimately translate into a better world. It has pledged to give revenues back to those less well off.

Habeck, in particular, tried hard to hammer home the message to delegates and the wider audience, that the party is one of “Freiheit nicht Vorschrift” – freedom not regulation.

But while for some party supporters its policies are seen as going too far, others feel the party is not going nearly far enough.

The traditional frictions between the 40-year-old party’s wings of so-called “realos” (realists) and “fundis” or fundamentalists have changed, but the groups still very much make their positions felt and the gap between them is often considerable.

In a row over the CO2 emission price, party leaders have insisted they are committed to €60 (£51) a ton from 2023. But Jakob Blasel, a 21-year-old climate activist who wants to represent the party in the Bundestag, delivered a passionate plea to delegates via video link for a price of €80 a ton by 2022, to rise annually by €15. Only then, he argued, would Germany have a chance of reaching Paris climate goals to limit global warming to 1.5C. He warned the Greens against “beating a hasty retreat in the face of criticism” over climate protection.

Gottfried Boehm, architect of concrete churches, dies at 101

BERLIN (AP) — German architect Gottfried Boehm, who was famous for his concrete brutalist-style church buildings, has died at 101.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

Boehm's Cologne architecture office on Thursday confirmed his death on Wednesday night but didn't give a cause.

Boehm, who was born in Offenbach in central Germany in 1920, built more than 50 churches, many of them in his signature concrete style. He was one of the most famous postwar architects in the country and in 1986 became the first German to receive the renowned Pritzker Architecture Prize.

One of his most best-known sacral buildings is the Catholic pilgrimage church Mary, Queen of Peace, in Neviges near the western city of Duesseldorf. Built in the brutalist style and consecrated in 1968, the church became famous for its irregular roof and forum-like interior.

Boehm also created other buildings such as the city hall of Bensberg near Cologne, a glass-and-steel fronted theater in Potsdam, and a pyramid-shaped public library in Ulm.

The governor of North Rhine-Westphalia state, Armin Laschet, praised Boehm for his work.

“His unique architecture style made him world-famous,” Laschet said adding that Boehm leaves behind a “visible and impressive lifework.”

The Associated Press

NOT FOR SALE, GIMME A BID ANYWAY
Montenegro has no plan to sell state property to ease debt - report


BELGRADE (Reuters) -Montenegro has denied it has plans to sell state property to ease its debt burden, a local newspaper said on Sunday, after a Reuters report quoted senior officials as saying the tiny Balkan country was preparing the way for asset sales.

© Reuters/STEVO VASILJEVIC FILE PHOTO: Workers fit a manhole on Bar-Boljare highway

The Reuters report on Friday also quoted a senior European Union official as saying Montenegro was looking to raise cheap EU credit in a plan - to be spearheaded by state lenders from France, Germany and Italy - to reduce its financial reliance on Chinese debt.

In 2014, Montenegro, with a population of 628,000 people, borrowed $944 million from China to fund a stretch of a highway to the border with its neighbour Serbia.

The loan sent total government debt skyrocketing and it now equals 103% of economic output.

The Dan daily newspaper, quoting an unnamed finance ministry official, said on Sunday there are no plans for selling state property for the repayment of the Chinese debt, "nor is there any need for that."

"This government has ensured that Montenegro has the money to finance all obligations, including those to Chinese creditors," Dan quoted the official as saying.

"We are open for cooperation with our European partners, to reach the most favorable ... conditions for financing of strategic projects ... such as the highway," the official added, according to the article.

Finance Minister Milojko Spajic told Reuters in a recent interview that the government wants to make a strategic review of assets, that could ultimately lead to regular sales. He also stressed that Montenegro's state finances were stable.

(Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic; Editing by Gareth Jones and Andrew Heavens)

A Few Thoughts on the GOP's Critical Rage Theory

Running out of conspiracy theories to match their IQAnon, Republican politicians have discovered critical race theory as the next worst thing to endanger American civilization.

PIERRE TRISTAM

June 13, 2021 by Flagler Live

As lawmakers in at least 15 states are attempting to pass legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about the role of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and oppression throughout U.S. history, educators and communities are pushing back. (Photo: via Zinn Education Project)


In 1973 the Black legal scholar Derrick Bell published a thousand-page book called “Race, Racism and American Law.” It was a study of how the law failed to address racism, not just regarding Blacks, but Asians and other immigrants. Bell proposed innovative teaching techniques to challenge the convention that the law was in any way colorblind. The book wasn’t heavily reviewed. One reviewer in a scholarly journal even asked: “how much in demand (or how valuable) is a course dealing solely with racism, especially in the seeming ebb tide of student activism?"

If only he knew. Bell had given birth to what would be called critical race theory, which finds the civil rights achievements of the 1960s insufficient. Racism is too embedded in politics, law and culture to be countered only institutionally, and there are no such things as neutral laws or neutral perspectives. They’re all defined by the person’s point of view, itself defined by race. In other words, race and perspective are impossible to separate from how law is meted out, how history is taught, how literature is read—or whether a banker decides to award a loan to a client or how a jury judges a defendant.

"There’s no question that like any other theory, critical race has its pros and cons. It’s fascinating and insightful in many ways, and it’s debatable and controversial in others. But that’s what theories are for."


Those are big assumptions. They’re not uncontroversial. Just because the driving aim addresses a fundamental injustice doesn’t make the method inherently virtuous, or right. There is something confining, deterministic, in a premise that judges a white person incapable of a certain understanding or fairness just because that person is white. It’s a bit like Calvinistic dogma that if you’re not among the chosen ones, your soul is doomed no matter what you do. Predeterminism of the sort just doesn’t jive with a democratic character jacked up on free will and individualism.

Yet that’s one of the tenets of critical race theory. The theory’s defenders often enough consider their assumptions self-evident, bypassing the need to prove their case with more than outrage or sanctimony. But there’s also something liberating about it when it basically says: let’s stop kidding ourselves by pretending that race isn’t as defining a factor as it is, especially when whites are the first to say it isn’t, the first to cry “race card!” when they haven’t experienced an iota of the racism people of color or immigrants routinely do. Sometimes the assumptions need no more proof than the day’s news stories, from George Floyd to rigged valedictorian tabulations to attacks on the military’s push for diversity. And that’s before wading into social mierda’s sewers. The Declaration’s truths aren’t the only self-evident game in town.

Bell was looking at his own mass of headlines when he proposed his new method. Two seminal events then turned critical race theory into a movement.

In 1981, Harvard law School offered a course that took its title from that of Bell’s book. But the professor was white. Students protested. They wanted a Black professor. The law school refused. Students informally launched a course of their own, inviting Black scholars to lecture. One of those students and two of the guest lecturers, Charles R. Lawrence, Richard Delgado and Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, would go on in 1993 to write the first book that gave critical race theory its name (“Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, And The First Amendment”). The book would be greatly influential and I think justifiably controversial in one of the theory’s major achievements: all those hate-speech laws you see around the country are its direct result.

The book opened the way to making words, not just actions, objectionable under the First Amendment. That, too, is the fruit of critical race theory. The same year of “Words That Wound” Catharine MacKinnon published “Only Words,” at heart an attack on the First Amendment as a shield for porn, which MacKinnon equated with actual violence and the subjugation of women. None of these theories bear accepting at face value. I personally find them more offensive to the First Amendment than the other way around.


Carlin Romano’s famous review of MacKinnon’s book, impossible to imagine in a post-MeToo era, made the point in The Nation: “Suppose I decide to rape Catharine MacKinnon before reviewing her book. Because I’m uncertain whether she understands the difference between being raped and binge exposed to pornography, I consider it required research for my critique of her manifesto that pornography equals rape and should be banned. I plot and strategize, but at the last minute, I chicken out. People simply won’t understand.” The review gets only more savage after that. MacKinnon called it “a public rape,” prompting Romano to reply, I think correctly: “She’s gone from saying pornography is rape to saying book reviewing is rape. Catharine MacKinnon’s mind is one long slippery slope.” But that’s what the marketplace of ideas is about.

In popular culture, there was a connection between critical race theory and Spike Lee’s absurd belief the year of “Only Words” that only Blacks should make movies about Blacks. He’d objected to Norman Jewison directing “Malcolm X.” Lee was an outlier then. He’s conventional now. We see his thinking in the more recent wave of cancel-crazy opposition to “cultural appropriation,” as if whites couldn’t possibly write truthfully about other races (or portray them in movies or the stage), as if men couldn’t possibly write about women (sorry Flaubert: Madame Bovary repudiates you), as if art were gender and racially and ethnically coded. I don’t know of a definition of art that is more contrary to art. There’s also an alarming and increasingly common connection between “Only Words”’ fallout and college campus attacks on the First Amendment in the name of protecting or respecting minorities.

Of course it’s easy to cherry-pick the theory’s extremists to demolish it. It’s also dishonest to base the analysis on its extremes, or to dismiss it–let alone repress it–because of them.

The other event that brought the theory to the streets was the O.J. Simpson trial in 1994 and 1995. As Jeffrey Rosen, a legal scholar, wrote at the time of Simpson’s attorney Johnnie Cochran, his “strategy in the courtroom might be best described as applied critical race theory.” Blacks wouldn’t convict Simpson–not because he wasn’t guilty, but because the system was stacked against him. Cochran’s thinking may have been as flawed as MacKinnon’s. It proved obviously persuasive to the jury of Simpson’s peers. Explode that to a national scale of how Blacks may see whites and vice versa, and you begin to see the reach of critical race theory in our lives.


But it’s hardly just theory. It’s simply impossible to look at the more abject record of American law and not see the rank racism critical race theory points toward in decisions such as Dred Scott (Blacks couldn’t be citizens), Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal), Korematsu v. United States (nothing wrong with sending Jap-Americans to concentration camps) and the more recent decision upholding the Muslim ban during the Trump years. (Yes, it was a Muslim ban even by the most restrictive interpretations.)

This isn’t cherry-picking anymore. These decisions were the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John of American law. Just because they’ve been repealed (Korematsu was repealed in the very same breath as its Islamophobic twin was ratified) doesn’t remove them from what still makes us what we are. It doesn’t remove what the legal scholar Jamal Greene called the “reasonable possibility” that such decisions weren’t just products of individual racists on the court, but of reasoning thought sound at the time because the Constitution enables racism. That Constitution is still with us. And that, in a nutshell, is critical race theory. All sanctimony and outrage aside, that nut is hard to disprove as a “left-wing myth.”

"If there ever was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that critical race theory is reality–that American institutions such as our legislatures and courts are sick to the core with racism–Trumpist Republicans are providing us that proof in spades."

Considering that at the time of the O.J. Simpson trial Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and, a year later, Fox News were reducing all politics to ideology, it’s a wonder the theory took another quarter century to become the latest fodder in the culture wars. The delay is telling, and one of the many ironies giving the lie to the seriousness of this new fear over critical theory. The theory grew, thrived and itself became embedded in academic, legal and social perspectives even as Reagan, Bushes and Trump presidencies and the Scalia-Roberts-Barrett reaction in law attempted to make America wasp again. More to the point, the theory was in the scope of liberal journals like The Nation, the New Republic and Dissent and of critics, among them Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jeffrey Rosen, Ronald Dworkin (taking on critical legal studies, the race theory’s sibling) and others, long before conservatives noticed it.


Only now, running out of conspiracy theories to match their IQAnon, Republican politicians have discovered critical race theory as the next worst thing to endanger American civilization. Their rage seems to have been instigated by a few paragraphs in the monumental New York Times 1619 Project, those parts that placed slavery much deeper in the founders’ liturgy than these present-day Trumpist paragons of diversity and love for their colored brothers and sisters are comfortable with.

After the failed attempt of Trump’s 1776 Commission to transform American history into Herman Wouk-washed hagiography, these defenders of the American faith are passing laws in several states to ban the teaching of critical race theory without understanding the first thing about it, calling it “indoctrination” and cherry-picking their way through a few dumb examples. Florida just enacted one such sanitizing bull through a Department of Education rule, turning American history into a Disney ride through Happyland. Nothing less should be expected from a state that prefers to whitewash the word slavery in its civic standards.

There’s no question that like any other theory, critical race has its pros and cons. It’s fascinating and insightful in many ways, and it’s debatable and controversial in others. But that’s what theories are for. Their evolution in the free spirit of academic and cultural freedom allows them to be challenged and refined, to grow or wither. The last thing they need is political hijacking. That’s what the Soviet Union did to its academies. That’s what North Korea still does. And that is what our more Trumpist legislatures and education departments are doing—proudly, self-righteously and vengefully.

So here’s the great irony: we’ve gone from a theory that considers racism inseparable from laws and institutions in American life to the actual enactment of rules and laws that forbid the teaching or consideration of racism as inseparable from American life. Put another way: if there ever was proof beyond a reasonable doubt that critical race theory is reality–that American institutions such as our legislatures and courts are sick to the core with racism–Trumpist Republicans are providing us that proof in spades. They are elevating critical race theory from theory to fact, and from controversy to necessity.

© 2019 Pierre Tristam


Pierre Tristam is a journalist, writer, editor and lecturer. He is currently the editor and publisher of FlaglerLive.com, a non-profit news site in Florida. A native of Beirut, Lebanon, who became an American citizen in 1986, Pierre is one of the United States' only Arab Americans with a regular current affairs column in a mainstream, metropolitan newspaper. Reach him at: ptristam@gmail.com or follow him through twitter: @pierretristam

World's Most Powerful Imprison Julian Assange for His Virtues—Not His Vices

The Wikileaks founder exposed the truth over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths they came after him, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power.

CHRIS HEDGES June 13, 2021 by Scheerpost


Julian Assange of the WikiLeaks website holds up a copy of The Guardian newspaper as he speaks to reporters in front of a Don McCullin Vietnam war photograph at The Front Line Club on July 26, 2010 in London, England. (Photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Note: The following text is based on a speech delivered at a rally Thursday night, June 10, in New York City in support of Julian Assange, currently imprisoned at Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom under threat of possible extradition to the United States. John and Gabriel Shipton, Julian’s father and brother, also spoke at the event, which was held at The People’s Forum.

A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.

This why we are here tonight. Yes, all of us who know and admire Julian decry his prolonged suffering and the suffering of his family. Yes, we demand that the many wrongs and injustices that have been visited upon him be ended. Yes, we honor him up for his courage and his integrity. But the battle for Julian’s liberty has always been much more than the persecution of a publisher. It is the most important battle for press freedom of our era. And if we lose this battle, it will be devastating, not only for Julian and his family, but for us.

The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.

Tyrannies invert the rule of law. They turn the law into an instrument of injustice. They cloak their crimes in a faux legality. They use the decorum of the courts and trials, to mask their criminality. Those, such as Julian, who expose that criminality to the public are dangerous, for without the pretext of legitimacy the tyranny loses credibility and has nothing left in its arsenal but fear, coercion and violence.

The long campaign against Julian and WikiLeaks is a window into the collapse of the rule of law, the rise of what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of inverted totalitarianism, a form of totalitarianism that maintains the fictions of the old capitalist democracy, including its institutions, iconography, patriotic symbols and rhetoric, but internally has surrendered total control to the dictates of global corporations.

I was in the London courtroom when Julian was being tried by Judge Vanessa Baraitser, an updated version of the Queen of Hearts in Alice-in Wonderland demanding the sentence before pronouncing the verdict. It was judicial farce. There was no legal basis to hold Julian in prison. There was no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the U.S. Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Julian in the embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Julian and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Julian is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration.

The U.S. government directed, as Craig Murray so eloquently documented, the London prosecutor James Lewis. Lewis presented these directives to Baraitser. Baraitser adopted them as her legal decision. It was judicial pantomime. Lewis and the judge insisted they were not attempting to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press while they busily set up the legal framework to criminalize journalists and muzzle the press. And that is why the court worked so hard to mask the proceedings from the public, limiting access to the courtroom to a handful of observers and making it hard and at times impossible to access the trial online. It was a tawdry show trial, not an example of the best of English jurisprudence but the Lubyanka.

Now, I know many of us here tonight would like to think of ourselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is in fact conservative, it is the restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning democracy, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system is the supreme act of defiance. This truth terrifies those in power.

The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape. Prove this truth, as Julian, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.

Shortly after WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes—including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the Collateral Murder video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to U.S. checkpoints—the towering civil rights attorneys Len Weinglass and my good friend Michael Ratner, who I would later accompany to meet Julian in the Ecuadoran Embassy, met with Julian in a studio apartment in Central London. Julian’s personal bank cards had been blocked. Three encrypted laptops with documents detailing US war crimes had disappeared from his luggage in route to London. Swedish police were fabricating a case against him in a move, Ratner warned, that was about extraditing Julian to the United States.

“WikiLeaks and you personally are facing a battle that is both legal and political,” Weinglass told Assange. “As we learned in the Pentagon Papers case, the US government doesn’t like the truth coming out. And it doesn’t like to be humiliated. No matter if it’s Nixon or Bush or Obama, Republican or Democrat in the White House. The US government will try to stop you from publishing its ugly secrets. And if they have to destroy you and the First Amendment and the rights of publishers with you, they are willing to do it. We believe they are going to come after WikiLeaks and you, Julian, as the publisher.”

“Come after me for what?” asked Julian.

“Espionage,” Weinglass continued. “They’re going to charge Bradley Manning with treason under the Espionage Act of 1917. We don’t think it applies to him because he’s a whistleblower, not a spy. And we don’t think it applies to you either because you are a publisher. But they are going to try to force Manning into implicating you as his collaborator.”

“Come after me for what?

That is the question.

They came after Julian not for his vices, but his virtues.

The criminal ruling class has all of us locked in its death grip.

They came after Julian because he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians; because he exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo; because he exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered US diplomats to spy on U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France, Russia, and the UK, spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included the eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003; because he exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya, replacing it with a murderous and corrupt military regime; because he exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama and General David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that under post-Nuremberg laws is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, that they authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of U.S. citizens in Yemen, and that they secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians; because he exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform; because he exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party; because he exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency permits the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.

Julian exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths they came after Julian, as they have come after all who dared rip back the veil on power. “Red Rosa now has vanished too. …” Bertolt Brecht wrote after the German socialist Rosa Luxemburg was murdered. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.”

We have undergone a corporate coup, where the poor and working men and women are reduced to joblessness and hunger, where war, financial speculation and internal surveillance are the only real business of the state, where even habeas corpus no longer exists, where we, as citizens, are nothing more than commodities to corporate systems of power, ones to be used, fleeced and discarded. To refuse to fight back, to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to live in truth, is to bear the mark of Cain. Those in power must feel our wrath, and this means constant acts of mass civil disobedience, it means constant acts of social and political disruption, for this organized power from below is the only power that will save us and the only power that will free Julian. Politics is a game of fear. It is our moral and civic duty to make those in power very, very afraid.

The criminal ruling class has all of us locked in its death grip. It cannot be reformed. It has abolished the rule of law. It obscures and falsifies the truth. It seeks the consolidation of its obscene wealth and power. And so, to quote the Queen of Hearts, metaphorically of course, I say, “Off with their heads.”

Copyright Robert Scheer, 2020.


Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is "America: The Farewell Tour" (2019).

PRISON NATION USA
‘Last Week Tonight’: John Oliver Slams U.S. Prisons “Cooking Prisoners To Death” Through Lack Of Air Conditioning

Matt Grobar 12 hrs ago

© HBO


On this week’s episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver decided to have some “summer fun” with his main segment.

“It’s been getting hotter and hotter outside…so tonight, we’re going to talk about popsicles. There are tons of them in America, and when they get too hot, it can be a real problem,” said the talk show host. “Sorry, did I say popsicles? I meant prisons.”

The host then segued to the “real problem” heat poses for America’s incarcerated. “Don’t be surprised. You knew no fun was happening here,” he deadpanned. “Don’t be mad at me; be mad at yourself. You chose to be here.”

Oliver noted that he has talked many times on his show about “the injustices of mass incarceration, and how little society seems to care” about them. From his perspective, “a pretty good example of that” is the fact that, in some of the country’s hottest states, including Texas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, over half the prisons lack air conditioning in their housing areas. In Texas, he explained, “that’s the case” in almost three-quarters of prisons, despite the fact that the heat index inside of them can reach 150 degrees.

At present, he noted, “there’s a growing population of older prisoners,” who are more susceptible to the heat. Over 40% of these people “have a chronic medical condition,” which puts them at increased risk of heat stroke. “That is remarkably dangerous, and I would argue that the only time getting murdered by the heat is acceptable is if you’ve committed the crime of being a lobster,” he said. “But unless you happen to be a tasty sea weirdo with edible arms and a pile of scrumptious ass meat that pairs beautifully with melted butter, I’m going to say that that is very wrong.”

He continued to explain that “physical conditions” are just one part of the equation. Within America’s prisons, there are also an increasing number of prisoners with mental health concerns. Many of these people are taking medications, which can interfere with their bodies’ ability to regulate temperature. Because of this, many prisoners avoid taking their medications when the temperature rises. This then explains, he said, “why there’s an increase in the “frequency of suicide watches and self-harm behaviors” over the course of the summer.

“This situation is so bad, the UN Committee Against Torture has expressed particular concern about deaths from extreme heat exposure in prison facilities in Texas,” said Oliver, “and while you probably assumed Texas prisons were bad, maybe not ‘International Human Rights Watch List’ bad.”

Oliver knows some viewers might be thinking, “Well, come on. It’s prison. These prisoners should not be comfortable.” And to this, he says, “F**k you.

“They’re human beings who, I would argue, deserve humane treatment, regardless of what they did,” he continued, noting that “even if you are fully on board with our current system of punitive justice on a ridiculous scale,” there are actually people directly upholding the prison system that find the situation indefensible.

Oliver said that another common rationale for denying prisoners reasonable air conditioning is that it would be too expensive to install. Yet another, expressed by politicians including State Sen. John Whitmore of Texas, is that they simply “don’t want to” provide it.

While prisoners oftentimes go without AC, it is provided in many cases to prison staff. In at least one case, reported in 2015 by ABC News 8, it was even being provided for a Texas prison’s in-house pig farms.

“Look, I’m not against pigs getting treated comfortably. I love pigs. Pigs are like big, chubby dogs you can eat at Christmas,” Oliver said. “I just question prioritizing their comfort over humans.”

While the host says “correction systems do seem to acknowledge” that they have an issue with heat, they too often deal with the issue through half measures, including large fans and water misters, which can oftentimes backfire, increasing the “heat stress” prisoners experience.

Ultimately, this all amounts to a “deadly situation,” which Oliver noted is “only going to get worse, especially as summers are getting hotter and hotter.”

“While this is clearly just one small part of a much larger discussion about whether and how prisons should exist in this country, until such time as we have that discussion, there’s actually an easy solution to this one problem, and that is, prisons need air conditioning, so put air conditioning in. That’s it,” Oliver concluded. “I know this show has trained you to anticipate nuance, but this one is really pretty straightforward. We shouldn’t be cooking prisoners to death, the end.”

Click here to read the full article.

PRISON NATION
Most States In America Have More Prisons Than Colleges

BY : NIAMH SHACKLETON 

UNILAD

ON : 14 JUN 2021 

Most States In America Have More Prisons Than Colleges PA Images

Nearly 75% of US states offer more places for incarceration than they do higher education.

Recent data shows there are concerningly more prisons in the US than there are colleges, despite studies showing that those who go to college are less likely to end up behind bars.

Wyoming came bottom of the list, having 2,700% more prisons than colleges. Meanwhile, Mississippi had 92 prisons, compared to just 18 colleges. It also had an incarceration rate of 626 per 100,000 residents.

While Wyoming had the largest percentage difference, overall, Texas had the highest number of prisons at 313.

Person in handcuffs (Pexels)

On the other hand, Massachusetts, one of the country’s most educated states, had 88 colleges compared to 107 jails.

Meanwhile, California is the place to go if you’re looking for plenty of college options, as it boasts an impressive 280.

The data, put together by Studee, suggests that if more colleges were built across the country, incarceration rates would drop, as the level of educated citizens rose.

Explaining its methodology, Studee said:

We looked at official education attainment data from the census and incarceration rates from the National Institute of Corrections to see if there was a correlation between the number of people incarcerated in each state and the number of people who were educated to degree level or above.

The Palm Beach County Main Detention Center (PA)PA Images

The university hunting website concluded that, in the majority of states, a lower rate of education to degree level correlated with a higher incarceration rate.

According to Studee, the US has more prisons, jails, and higher rates of incarceration than ‘any other country in the world,’ but also has one of the globe’s best education systems.

Previous studies have also shown a correlation between those who did not pursue higher education and higher levels of incarceration. However, not only can education prevent people from finding themselves behind bars, it can also reduce the chances of someone reoffending.

People throwing graduations caps (Pexels)

According to a study by the RAND Corporation in 2016, prisoners who took part in some kind of educational programme while serving their sentence were 43% less likely to return to prison.

In addition to this, prisons with college programmes were found to have less violence among incarcerated individuals, American Progress cites.

Featured Image Credits: PA Images

Black Lives Matter Protesters

 ‘Overwhelmingly Peaceful’, 

Harvard Research Finds

BY : JULIA BANIM UINILAD ON : 12 JUN 2021 

PA Images

The number of Black Lives Matter protests across the globe has increased significantly over the past 12 months, and now research has found the demonstrations are ‘overwhelmingly peaceful’.

A new study from researchers at Harvard, which revealed how the BLM marches of 2020 were ‘remarkably nonviolent’, corrects the false yet prevailing narrative that such demonstrations were ‘overtaken by rioting and vandalism or violence’.

In cases where there was violence, it was very often the case that it was instigated by police officers or counter protesters rather than the protesters themselves, the study suggests

PA Images

The authors of the study, from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, wrote:

Such claims are false. Incidents in which there was protester violence or property destruction should be regarded as exceptional – and not representative of the uprising as a whole.

In many instances, police reportedly began or escalated the violence, but some observers nevertheless blame the protesters.

The claim that the protests are violent – even when the police started the violence – can help local, state and federal forces justify intentionally beating, gassing or kettling the people marching, or reinforces politicians’ calls for ‘law and order’.

After having collected and analysed data from 7,305 events, researchers found that 96.3% of protests involved no damage to property or injuries to police officers. In 97.7% of cases, no injuries were reported among protesters, bystanders or police officers.

Injuries among police officers were reported in 1% of the events. An officer killed in California was allegedly shot by members of the far-right ‘boogaloo’ group, not by BLM protesters.

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PA Images

The deaths of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty during this time period are understood to be unrelated to the BLM protests.

According to the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, it’s important to correct the narrative of ‘protests vs. policing’ due to the long term effects this can have on factors such as election outcomes, public policy and public attitudes toward social justice movements.

If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article and wish to speak to someone in confidence, contact Stop Hate UK by visiting their website www.stophateuk.org/talk

SPACE RACE 2.0

‘Divine Vessel’ To Mark China’s First Human Spaceflight Since 2016

By Ryan Woo and Liangping Gao

© Reuters/CHINA DAILY The Long March-2F Y12 rocket carrying the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft is transferred to the launch pad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese spacecraft will blast off from the Gobi Desert on a Long March rocket in the coming days, ferrying three men to an orbiting space module for a three-month stay, the first time China has sent humans into space for nearly five years.

Shenzhou-12, meaning "Divine Vessel", will be the third of 11 missions needed to complete China's space station by 2022. Among them, four will be missions with people on board, potentially propelling up to 12 Chinese astronauts into space - more than the 11 men and women that China has sent since 2003.

The craft will also carry into space the hopes of some in Earth's most populous nation.

"The motherland is powerful," one person wrote on Chinese social media, which has lit up with well-wishes for the Shenzhou-12 crew. "The launch is a gift to the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party."

Chinese astronauts have had a relatively low international profile. A U.S. law banning NASA from any connection with China means its astronauts have not been to the more than two-decade-old International Space Station, visited by more than 240 men and women of various nationalities.

China, which aims to become a major spacefaring power by 2030, in May became the second country to put a rover on Mars, two years after landing the first spacecraft on the far side of the moon.

It also plans to put astronauts on the moon - the farthest celestial body that humans have travelled to.

Gallery: 'Ring of fire': Rare solar eclipse (USA TODAY)


THIS TIME, MEN

The Shenzhou-12 crew is to live on the Tianhe, "Harmony of the Heavens", a cylinder 16.6 metres (55 feet) long and 4.2 metres (14 feet) in diameter.

The planned three-month stay would break the country's record of 30 days, set by the 2016 mission - China's last crewed flight - of Chen Dong and Jing Haipeng to a prototype station.

Three men from China's first and second batches of astronauts will be on this mission, Yang Liwei, director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office and China's first astronaut, told state tabloid Global Times last month.

China's space bloggers speculate they will be Nie Haisheng - who at 56 would be China's oldest astronaut sent into space - Deng Qingming, 55, and Ye Guangfu, 40.

The authorities typically do not announce a mission's crew until near or after the launch. China Manned Space did not respond to a Reuters fax request for comment.

The oldest human in space was John Glenn, who flew on the space shuttle at age 77 in 1998 - after having been the first American to orbit the earth in 1962, a U.S. senator and a presidential candidate.

While no women are scheduled for the Shenzhou-12 mission, they are expected to participate in every following mission, Yang told Global Times.

Two women, Liu Yang and Wang Yaping, were selected in 2011 among China's second cohort, after the first batch of 14 men in the mid-1990s. Liu was China's first woman in space in 2012, while Wang was the youngest, at 33, in 2013.

China began building its space station in April with the launch of Tianhe, the first and largest of its three modules. This year it aims to send a robotic cargo resupply spacecraft and three more astronauts, this time for a six-month stay.

(Reporting by Ryan Woo and Liangping Gao; Editing by William Mallard)

Back to the future: 2020s to echo roaring 20s or inflationary 70s?

By Dhara Ranasinghe

A screen displays a chart that tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the floor at the NYSE in New York

LONDON (Reuters) -The 2020s have only just begun but there is already a rush to draw parallels with the past, prompted by a belief that COVID-19 will mark a turning point for the world economy and financial markets.

For some, a post-pandemic economic boom accompanied with optimism about the future echoes the 1920s. Others reckon this decade is beginning to feel like the 1970s, as dormant inflation awakens.

Whatever path the decade takes will of course matter for the trajectory of stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities.

"Changes, shifts and dynamics of narratives matter in the formation of long-term expectations and ultimately (market)prices," said Amundi CIO Pascal Blanque.

Here's a look at which decade the 2020s could resemble.

1. 1920s

In the 1920s, technological and scientific advances led to mass production of goods and the electrification of America, alongside booming stock markets and wealth.

Fast forward to the 2020s and the global economy is expected to grow 6% this year, a rate not seen since the 1970s. Stocks are near record highs, and tech valuations at their highest since the late 1990s dotcom peak. COVID-19 appears to be a catalyst for technological change, spurring digital adoption.

No wonder parallels are drawn with the "Roaring Twenties".

The 1920s ended with a stock market slump and economic depression, but economists believe policymakers have heeded lessons from the past and are unlikely to turn off the money taps too fast.

"A lot will come down to the extent to which monetary and fiscal stimulus translates into real productivity and improvement in structural growth rates," said Kiran Ganesh, head of multi asset, UBS Global Wealth Management

Reuters/CARLO ALLEGRI FILE PHOTO: FILE PHOTO: A Wall Street sign is pictured outside the New York Stock Exchange in New York

"Then we are in a roaring 20s scenario, but if the investment ends up wasted we are going back to the 2010s ...when it proved very hard to generate growth."

2. 1930s

The chances that the 2020s revisit the 1930s -- when households struggled to recover from a downturn, birth rates fell and inequality fuelled populism -- is a possibility but is not considered the most likely.

Figures quoted by Oxfam show the world's billionaires became $3.9 trillion richer between March and December 2020 even as economies shrank and tens of millions of workers lost jobs.

There are signs governments are trying to narrow yawning disparities.

The world's richest economies back a minimum global corporate tax rate of at least 15%. A $1.8 trillion American Families Plan is expected to lift more than 5 million children out of poverty.

But birth rates are low. The U.S. fertility rate fell and remained below 2.5 in the 1930s. Today, that rate is at record lows around 1.6, below the roughly 2.1 replacement level.

China had a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman in 2020, on par with ageing societies Japan and Italy. A COVID-led baby bust could further pressure public finances.

3. 1970s

If inflation returns after a long absence, surely the 1970s -- when oil prices soared and U.S. inflation hit double digits -- is a better fit?

Fans of this scenario argue that hefty fiscal stimulus will give inflation in major economies a long-needed boost. BofA estimates, for example, that the U.S. government will spend $879 million every hour in 2021.

Low wage pressure from Asia is also receding as ageing populations squeeze the supply of workers, boosting wages in developed economies.

Bond investors need to be wary if inflation roars back, as do central banks which have not experienced inflationary pressures for decades.

"Many people think we are in the 1930s but I think we will wake up somewhere in the 70s," said Amundi's Blanque.

4. 1980s or even 2010s

Many economists agree the 2020s will mark a break with the "small government" 1980s as public spending increases are sustained to aid the post-virus recovery.

They also think a rerun of the last decade, the 2010s, is unlikely, as governments ditch austerity and embrace a bigger role for the state in the economy.

This all suggests a departure from the 1980s-style neo-liberal policies pursued by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, an ideology that has dominated market thinking ever since and shaped the decade after the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

Agreement on a minimum global tax rate is evidence of a possible shift, although it is still early days.

UniCredit chief economist Erik Nielsen said greater state involvement in the economy, whether via direct ownership, regulation or taxation, was a risk to growth but the details of any intervention mattered.

"One thing is clear, however: It'll lead to massive changes in relative growth between sectors and hence in investment opportunities," he said.

(Reporting by Dhara Ranasinghe; Additional reporting and graphics by Sujata Rao and Thyagaraju Adinarayan; Editing by Tommy Wilkes and Jane Merriman)