Ex-Fox News exec says the FCC should consider revoking Rupert Murdoch’s licenses

Gideon Rubin

RAW STORY
June 14, 2023

CEO and founder of News Corporation Rupert Murdoch (AFP)


A former Fox executive on Wednesday suggested that the FCC should consider revoking Fox News’ broadcast licenses.

Preston Padden, who served as a Fox executive from 1990 to 1997, writes for The Beast (BEHIND PAYWALL)  that the right-wing network may be a revocation candidate, citing a section of the Communications Act that requires the FCC to assess the “character qualifications” of those broadcasting on public airwaves.

Paddon notes that Judge Eric M. Davis, who presided over the Dominion lawsuit against Fox, determined that the network repeatedly aired “news distortion” about the 2020 election.

The judge’s order stated “The evidence developed in this civil proceeding demonstrates that it is CRYSTAL clear that none of the Statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true. Therefore, the Court will grant summary judgment in favor of Dominion on the element of falsity.”

Paddon notes that Fox declined to appeal the ruling and issued a statement in which it acknowledges it.

Paddon argues Fox News intentionally reported false allegations that the 2020 election was stolen over fears of losing viewers to competing conservative outlets.

“In my opinion, that means that the false news was presented knowingly,” Paddon writes.

Paddon said he reached out to Rupert Murdoch urging the Fox News CEO to halt spreading election lies and set the record straight by issuing a public statement.

Paddon writes that, “To my knowledge, no such statement ever was telecast.”

Paddon believes his former employer should be held accountable.

“False news has consequences,” Paddon writes.

“Despite all the factual information available to the contrary, millions of Americans, including Fox viewers, believe that the 2020 election was stolen. The rioters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were chanting ‘Stop the Steal.’"

“So, the issue at hand is: Should the FCC review Fox’s character qualifications to remain a steward of the public airwaves?”

Jared Polis mocks Libertarians after they say they won’t run candidates if ‘liberty minded’ Republican is on Colorado ballot

Sara Wilson, Colorado Newsline
June 14, 2023,

Jared Polis (Screenshot)

The Libertarian Party of Colorado said it will not run candidates in future competitive races that have “strong liberty minded” Republican candidates, the two parties announced Tuesday.

“We are calling upon the Republican Party to take our goals and objectives into serious consideration and run strong liberty minded, anti-establishment candidates going forward. If the Republican party runs candidates who support individual liberties, we will not run competing candidates in those races,” Libertarian chairperson Hannah Goodman wrote in a letter to the Colorado GOP, adding that the party reserves the right to run candidates if there isn’t a “strong Liberty” option.

Goodman did not offer a definition of what such a candidate specifically supports.

In some races, a right-leaning, third-party candidate could act as a spoiler, winning a higher vote share than the margin of victory and affecting which major party candidate wins.

“The Libertarian Party of Colorado is a third party. But we are the third biggest political party in the country. And while our candidates do not win the majority of elections in which we participate, our candidates have an impact on the outcome of these elections,” Goodman wrote.

Republicans point to the victory of Democratic Rep. Yadira Caraveo over Republican State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer for Colorado’s new 8th Congressional District last year. Caraveo got 48.4% of the vote, while Kirkmeyer received 47.7% of the vote. A Libertarian candidate, Richard Ward, walked away with 3.9% of the vote, leading some to argue that Kirkmeyer could have won if he wasn’t running.

It’s not certain, however, that all of Ward’s voters would have turned out for Kirkmeyer if he wasn’t on the ballot. The Libertarian emphasis on smaller government, however, does align with historical Republican values.

Goodman and her vice chair, Eliseo Gonzalez, wrote that the state’s “uniparty rule” under Democrats creates a lack of checks and balances on the government.

Democrats swept Colorado’s elections in 2022, winning every statewide office, five of the eight congressional district seats, and increasing their majority in the General Assembly.

The Colorado GOP, which is chaired by former state Rep. Dave Williams, tweeted that “if (we) run more limited-government & pro-liberty nominees (the Libertarians) won’t run spoiler candidates. Together we can break the stranglehold of Democrats’ one-party rule over Colorado.” Williams did not reply to a request for comment.

OF COURSE ONE PARTY RULE IS OK WITH THE GOP AS LONG AS IT'S THE GOP

“The Libertarians will only stand down if we recruit and nominate candidates who are more pro-freedom than not. They are not looking for the perfect candidate but they are making clear that our Party needs more nominees who will fight for limited-government in Denver and Washington D.C.,” Williams wrote in an email to supporters.

There are about 40,000 active, registered Libertarians in Colorado, making up about 1% of the active voter population, according to May data from the secretary of state’s office.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, mocked the tentative agreement between Libertarians and Republicans from his personal Twitter account.

“And if you run more pro-liberty candidates who support a woman’s right to choose, the freedom to marry who you love, reducing the income tax, private property rights to build housing on your own land, and legal Cannabis and Psilocybin small businesses then… maybe you can start calling your nominees Democrats,” he wrote.

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LIBERALTARIANS 

Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Shad Murib wrote in a text that spoiler candidates are not the roadblock to Republican victory.

“The Colorado Republican Party’s problem is not Libertarians spoiling elections for them – their problem is that their platform is opposed by the vast majority of Colorado voters. If their path to victory is to embrace folks who are even more extreme than then, I’d remind them that two wrongs don’t make a right,” he wrote.

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.

Glass: Neither a solid nor a liquid, this common yet complicated material is still surprising scientists

The Conversation
June 14, 2023, 

Glass Blowing (Shutterstock)

Glass is a material of many faces: It is both ancient and modern, strong yet delicate, and able to adopt almost any shape or color. These properties of glass are why people use it to make everything from smartphone screens and fiber-optic cables to vials that hold vaccines.

Humankind has been using glass in some fashion for millennia, and researchers are still finding new uses for it today. It’s not uncommon to hear the oft-repeated factoid that glass is actually a liquid, not a solid. But the reality is much more interesting – glass does not fit neatly into either of those categories and is in many ways a state of matter all its own. As two materialsscientists who study glass, we are constantly trying to improve our understanding of this unique material and discover new ways to use glass in the future.


Obsidian is a naturally formed glass.

  Layne Kennedy/Corbis Documentary via Getty Images

What is glass?

The best way to understand glass is to understand how it is made.

The first step to make glass requires heating up a mixture of minerals – often soda ash, limestone and quartz sand – until they melt into a liquid at around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,480 Celsius). In this state, the minerals are freely flowing in the liquid and move in a disordered way. If this liquid cools down fast enough, instead of solidifying into an organized, crystalline structure like most solids, the mixture solidifies while maintaining the disordered structure. It is the atomically disordered structure that defines glass.




When molten glass cools, it freezes the disordered, amorphous structure it had as a liquid. Cdang/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

On short timescales, glass behaves much like a solid. But the liquidlike structure of glass means that over a long enough period of time, glass undergoes a process called relaxation. Relaxation is a continuous but extremely slow process where the atoms in a piece of glass will slowly rearrange themselves into a more stable structure. Over 1 billion years, a typical piece of glass will change shape by less than 1 nanometer – about 1/70,000 the diameter of human hair. Due to the slow rate of change, the myth that old windows are thicker at the bottom due to centuries of gravity pulling on the slowly flowing glass is not true.


Colloquially, the word glass often refers to a hard, brittle, transparent substance made of fused sand, soda and lime. Yet there are many types of glass that are not transparent, and glass can be made from any combination of elements as long as the liquid mixture can be cooled fast enough to avoid crystallization.

From the Stone Age to today


Humans have been creating tools with glass for thousands of years, like this Roman cup from the fourth century. MatthiasKabel/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Humans have been using glass for more than 4,000 years, with some of the earliest uses being for decorative glass beads and arrowheads. Archaeologists have also discovered evidence of 2,000-year-old glass workshops. One such ancient workshop was uncovered near Haifa in modern Israel and dates back to around 350 C.E. There, archaeologists discovered pieces of raw glass, glass-melting furnaces, utilitarian glass vessels and debris from glass-blowing.

Modern glass manufacturing began in the early 20th century with the development of mass production techniques for glass bottles and flat glass sheets. Glass became an essential part of the electronics and telecommunications industry in the latter part of the 20th century and now forms the backbone for the internet.


Fiber-optic cables use glass to efficiently transmit information. 

Hustvedt/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Glass enabling technologies of tomorrow

Today, scientists are far beyond simply using glass as the material for a cup or a mirror. At the cutting edge of research into glass is the ability to manipulate its complex atomic structure and relaxation process to achieve certain properties.

Because glass is atomically disordered and always changing, any two points on a piece of glass are likely to have slightly different properties – whether it is strength, color, conductivity or something else. Because of these differences, two similar pieces of glass that were made in the same way using the same materials can behave very differently.

To better predict how a piece of glass behaves, our team has been researching how to quantify and manipulate the chaotic and ever-changing atomic structure of glass. Recent advances in this field have had direct benefits to existing technologies.

For example, phone screens do not crack as easily as they did in 2014 in part because new processing techniques decrease the differences in atomic bond strengths to make it harder for cracks to propagate. Similarly, internet speeds have vastly improved over the last 20 years because researchers have figured out ways to make the density of glass used for optical fibers more uniform and, therefore, more efficient at transmitting data.

A deeper understanding of how to manipulate the changing, chaotic structure of glass could lead to big advancements in technology in the coming years. Researchers are currently working on a range of projects, including glass batteries that could enable faster charging speeds and improved reliability, fiberglass wind turbines that require less maintenance than existing turbines, and improved memory storage devices.

John Mauro, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Penn State and Katelyn Kirchner, PhD Candidate in Materials Science, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/01/04/archives/the-glass-bead-game-glass-bead.html

The Glass Bead Game - The New York Times 

Jan 4, 1970 ... Originally published in German in 1943 after almost a decade of arduous labor, very much the book of Hesse's old age, slow‐moving and laden with ...

https://literariness.org/2022/10/12/analysis-of-hermann-hesses-the-glass-bead-game

Analysis of Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game 

Oct 12, 2022 ... The last novel by the Swiss German author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), The Glass Bead Game is a serene bildungsroman conceived in the form of ...

Of mice and matriarchs: the female-led societies of the animal kingdom

The Conversation
June 14, 2023,

Meerkats live in matriarchal groups. Jason Boyce/Shutterstock

Queen Elizabeth II’s record-breaking long reign was exceptional in many ways - not least because England has been ruled by men for most of the last thousand years. Until recently, the crown was passed to the monarch’s eldest son and daughters were married off to royals in other countries.

But in most other social mammals, females commonly remain and breed in their birth groups, inheriting the status and territory of their mothers while sons leave to find unrelated partners elsewhere.
Social relationships between resident females vary but are often supportive. For example in African elephants, females assemble in family groups and older females are usually dominant over younger ones.


This family of elephants lives in Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa. Jonathan Pledger/Shutterstock

Overt competition is rare and relationships between matriarchs and younger females are relaxed and supportive. Elephant matriarchs act as reservoirs of information about where to find food and water and their presence is particularly important in times of famine or drought.

Where species live in larger groups that include members of several families, as in yellow baboons and spotted hyenas competition for status and resources can be more common and females often support close relatives in clashes with other families.

Female yellow baboons are loyal to their closest relatives.Tukio/Shutterstock

Daughters frequently inherit their mother’s social rank. All members of some families may be consistently dominant to others, often enjoying higher breeding success and survival as a result.

Murderous mothers

But females aren’t always tolerant or supportive. In the meerkats that I have studied in the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa for the last 30 years, one dominant female monopolises breeding in each group, producing up to three litters a year for up to ten years. Their daughters and sons initially remain in their mother’s group and help to feed and protect their younger siblings.

Queens go out of their way to prevent their daughters from breeding successfully. Early in my career, I was astonished to see one of my favourite meerkat queens emerge with blood on her muzzle from her group’s sleeping burrow, where her eldest daughter had just given birth.

This meerkat queen was pregnant at the time. She went back down and soon emerged with a dead pup that was still warm – then returned and brought up three more pups that she had just killed.

My team’s later work showed that one of the most common causes of pup death was infanticide by pregnant females and studies of several other social mammals have revealed similar trends.

Killing your own grandchildren may not sound like a recipe for evolutionary success, but it often makes sense for pregnant female meerkats. If groups can only rear a small number of pups, queens will increase their genetic contributions to future generations if they suppress pups that will compete with their own offspring.

Daughters share 50% of their mother’s genes while grandchiLdren only share 25%, so it is in the queen’s best interests to make sure that their groups raise their daughters rather than their granddaughters.

When the daughters of meerkat queens are three to four years old, they become potential rivals to the queen and she evicts them from her group. As members of other meerkat groups don’t allow emigrating females to join them, evicted females either found new groups with wandering males or (commonly) die in the attempt.

When a queen eventually dies, the other females in her group fight to inherit her position. The oldest and heaviest female usually wins, taking over the queen’s status, breeding role and territory before starting to evict her sisters.

Walkabout sons

And what about the queen’s sons? In most mammals, mating with a close relative creates weaker and less healthy babies and reduces the breeding success of females. So female meerkats avoid mating with their sons, brothers and other relatives.

Males are usually less particular about who they mate with because they do not pay the same costs of raising young. However, where the females in their group are relatives and won’t mate with them, they need to leave their birth groups to find willing partners.

Unlike females, male meerkats voluntarily go walkabout, either replacing males in other groups or shacking up with evicted females and attempting to found new groups. A similar tendency for females to avoid breeding with close relatives and for males to leave their birth groups to find willing partners elsewhere is common in many other mammals - including many species where males are substantially larger and stronger than females, like lions and baboons.
Contrasts in succession

But females don’t always stay at home - and males don’t always wander. There are some mammals where the situation is reversed. These include a number of bats, horses, monkeys - and all three African apes. For example, female gorillas often leave their birth groups to breed in other groups while males may stay and breed there, inheriting the breeding position from their fathers.

A feature of many these species is that resident breeding males or groups of related males hold their positions for relatively long periods – longer than the age at which most females reach sexual maturity. So one explanation is that females need to leave their birth groups to find unrelated breeding partners. Males in these species don’t need to leave as immigrant females willingly mate with them.

A preference for male succession is widespread in many human societies and is often attributed to the need for monarchs to be battle leaders and the greater strength and fighting ability of males.

However, African apes are our closest living relatives and they all form groups where females leave but males remain. This suggests dispersing females and resident males may have been the ancestral norm in hominin societies too. If so, it may be because females dispersed to avoid inbreeding, rather than because of differences in strength and fighting prowess between the sexes.

Tim Clutton Brock, Professor of zoology, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

HOMES FOR PEOPLE NOT PROFIT

Divided San Diego City Council passes controversial homeless encampment ban

2023/06/14
Members from the San Diego City Council on Tuesday, June 13, 2023, in San Diego. - Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune/TNS

The San Diego City Council voted 5-4 Tuesday to adopt a controversial policy to ban homeless encampments on public property after hearing hours of public testimony.

The ordinance was supported by Councilmember Stephen Whitburn, who proposed it, and Councilmembers Marni von Wilpert, Jennifer Campbell, Raul Campillo and Joe LaCava.

Mayor Todd Gloria also supported what they referred to as an unsafe camping ordinance, with he and Whitburn saying it would address a public safety issue while also helping to get homeless people off the street and into a shelter and connected to services.

The ordinance would prohibit encampments on public property, and people could be cited or arrested if they refuse an available shelter bed. The ordinance was written to be in accordance with the Martin v. Boise federal ruling that prohibits a person from being cited for sleeping outside if there are no shelter beds available.

An overflow crowd at City Hall shared passionate pleas for and against the ordinance.

Many people in opposition to the ordinance said it would be unworkable because there are far too few shelter beds available to enforce the rule, which a city study released Tuesday confirmed.

Whitburn and other supporters of the ordinance said enforcement would be done gradually, not overnight, and more shelter beds are planned that will make the ordinance possible.

Von Wilpert supported the ordinance while also saying she agreed that the city could not arrest its way out of its homeless crisis.

Citing the escalating number of homeless people dying of drug overdoses on the streets — from 86 in 2018 to 317 in 2021 — von Wilpert said action was urgently needed to get people off the street and into services.

"I don't have a problem with people living on our street, but I do have a problem with people dying on our street," she said.

Von Wilpert added an amendment to Whitburn's motion to approve the ordinance that included having enforcement begin at least 30 days after the opening of a safe sleeping area that would accommodate 100 people and is expected to open July 1 at 20th and B streets.

Councilmember Kent Lee said he opposed the ordinance because he believed it could be legally challenged and went beyond trying to address unsafe camping. He also said it could create a false sense with the public that the ordinance would be a solution to homelessness and clear encampments.

Councilmember Vivian Moreno also opposed the ordinance and shared Lee's concerns, including questions of whether this would be a drain on police resources.

"A real plan would lay out goals of enforcement and match it with new resources," she said.

She moved to continue the item to September to give time to create an enforcement plan, but the motion was not supported.

Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe opposed the ordinance and said she was concerned there would not be enough shelters vacancies and about the parks that would be prioritized for enforcement.

Councilmember Raul Campillo supported the motion and said it's impossible to pass laws that only have upsides for everybody.

"We didn't come here to solve homelessness with one vote," he said. "We came here today on a proposed ordinance that aims to reduce the impact of problematic conduct that many levels of government have failed to solve or, worse yet, have exacerbated."

Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera requested an amendment that would address the racial disparity in the homeless population, which has a greater percent of Black people than in the county's overall population. His amendment was accepted by Whitburn and calls for the city manager to receive monthly reports on the demographics of homeless people who are contacted, cited or arrested under the new ordinance.

Elo-Rivera also proposed an amendment that would strike a prohibition against camping within two blocks of a shelter, which he said could deter people who sometimes camp in front of the city's Homeless Response Center to be one of the first in line to receive a shelter bed.

Whitburn declined to accept the amendment, and Elo-Rivera said he could not vote for the ordinance because he had significant concerns that it would do more harm than good.

More than 200 people signed up to speak either for or against the ordinance. People in favor included downtown residents who spoke about dangerous encounters with people on the street, fear of going outside their own homes and filth left outside their businesses.

Opponents included homeless people and service workers who saw the proposal as dangerous and a step back from progress that had been made in connecting people on the street to services, rehab and potential housing.

In one of the more controversial aspects of the ordinance, encampments would be banned in many areas even if no shelter beds are available because of public safety concerns. The absolute ban would be in place two blocks from existing shelters or schools, in all city parks, riverbeds, waterways, trolley stops and transportation hubs.

Encampment bans in those areas also would not follow a settlement the city had agreed to years ago that allows people to sleep in public areas from 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. Under the ordinance, camping in areas seen as a public health issue would be prohibited 24 hours a day.

Homeless advocate Michael McConnell, speaking against the ordinance, said the ban would create boundaries where people would be allowed to sleep on one side of the street but not the other.

"What are we going to do, send police to move people from one side of the road to another?" he said.

Hanan Scrapper, regional director for People Assisting the Homeless San Diego, also opposed the ordinance.

"We agree with Mayor Gloria and the council that encampments are not an acceptable way for any human being to live," she said. "But an anti-camping ordinance will not lead to the outcomes we all want to see. Such an ordinance will only further disperse the problem around the city and region, and make the jobs of homeless service providers, like PATH, much more difficult."

Supporters of the ordinance included Dave Rodger of Filippi's Pizza Grotto.

"We have homeless people coming into our restaurant taking food off of people's plates," he said. "It's out of control."

Greg Newman, owner of a Gaslamp District business and downtown resident, said the ordinance wouldn't be a solution, but would be an opportunity to improve conditions in the area.

"We should be able to enjoy the city as much as homeless people do," he said.

Data recently released by the San Diego Regional Task Force on Homelessness found a 32 percent increase in the number of unsheltered homeless people in the city of San Diego, with about 3,300 people living outdoors.

Arecent count conducted by the Downtown San Diego Partnership found an all-time high of 2,100 people living on sidewalks and in vehicles just in downtown neighborhoods.

Homeless encampments are found in many other areas in the city, and the ordinance would ban homeless encampments 24/7 throughout all of Mission Bay.

Mission Beach Town Council President Larry Webb said he supported the ordinance because it would protect families and access to the bay and parks, but he also said it should be coupled with services to help people on the street get help.

Downtown resident Jarvis Leverson also supported the ordinance and said walking in his neighborhood had become dangerous.

"This is not a referendum against homeless people," he said. "I actually have compassion and respect for their situation. This is a vote against blocking the sidewalks. You cannot let tents block people from having safe passages. God forbid someone gets killed because they didn't have a way to cross the street."

Leverson said he and his children were almost struck by a car two months ago when he had to push his stroller into the street because the sidewalk was blocked by tents.

"Vote yes on this measure," he said. "We have a right to walk without putting our lives in danger."

Formerly homeless man Ken Saragosa spoke passionately against the ordinance.

"The problem in San Diego is not that the laws are not specific enough," he said. "The problem is you can't arrest homelessness out of existence. Unhoused people don't like being unhoused any more than you don't like having them around."

Saragosa said homeless people often are cited for petty crimes that are not enforced against housed people, while homeless people often are victims of crime that go unreported.

Colleen Anderson, executive director of the San Diego Tourism Marketing District, said she has seen how homelessness has destroyed tourism in San Francisco, and she feared the same was happening in San Diego.

Shelby Thomas, director of advocacy and leadership for the San Diego Housing Federation, called the ordinance ineffective and said it would criminalize the very existence of people in the most need.

Townspeople Executive Director Melissa Peterman opposed the ordinance.

"Homelessness is a crisis that affects real people, individuals and families with emotions and struggles and aspirations," she said. "The ordinance before you today dismisses their humanity and the systemic oppression that limits access to housing, and it is unjust to blame the victims of inequality.

"People experiencing homelessness have the right to occupy public housing where they can seek housing and access essential services without fear of punishment," she said.

The ordinance was supported by representatives of some Balboa Park organizations, including Forever Balboa Park CEO Elizabeth Babcock.

"It is a park for everyone, including the many, many visitors who come every day and have a right to a safe space," she said.

Serving Seniors President and CEO Paul Downey said the ordinance was putting the cart before the horse because more shelters needed to be in place before it should be passed.

_____

© The San Diego Union-Tribune

Dozens drown in deadliest migrant shipwreck off Greece this year

Agence France-Presse
June 14, 2023, 

Survivors of a shipwrecked migrant ship arrive by yacht at the port in Kalamata town, about 240 kilometers southwest of Athens, on Wednesday, June 14, 2023.


At least 59 migrants drowned early on Wednesday and more were feared missing when their boat capsized and sank off Greece, the country's coast guard said.

By midday, 104 were rescued, but it remained unclear how many were on board when the vessel went under, authorities said.

The shipwreck was the deadliest off Greece this year.

The coast guard said the boat, which was en route to Italy, was spotted in international waters late on Tuesday by an aircraft belonging to EU border agency Frontex and two nearby vessels, around 50 miles (80 km) southwest of the town of Pylos in southern Greece.



It said those on board had refused assistance offered by Greek authorities late on Tuesday. A few hours later the boat capsized and sank, triggering a search and rescue operation.

State broadcaster ERT said it had sailed from the Libyan town of Tobruk, which lies south of the Greek island of Crete, with most on board being young men in their 20s. Their nationalities, as well as where the boat had sailed from, were not immediately confirmed by Greek authorities.

Survivors were taken to the town of Kalamata, the authorities said.

Greece is one of the main routes into the European Union for refugees and migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Most cross to Greek islands from nearby Turkey, but a growing number of boats also undertake a longer, and more dangerous journey from Turkey to Italy via Greece.

About 72,000 refugees and migrants have arrived so far this years in Europe's frontline countries Italy, Spain, Greece, Malta and Cyprus, according to United Nations data, with the majority landing in Italy.

(Reuters)

https://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/HAREMI_printable.pdf

EMPIRE - Angelfire

Empire / Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-25121-0 (cloth). ISBN 0-674-00671-2 (pbk.).

Inside the re-emergence of the old Confederacy

The GOP Is Building Mini Fascist Laboratories in Red States Nationwide

The GOP is consolidating its power in Red states by asserting control over elections, purging tens of millions of voters off the rolls, destroying public schools, and arresting Black voters and parading them before cameras in shackles.


Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks at a press conference Titusville, Florida on May 1, 2023.
(Photo: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)


THOM HARTMANN
Jun 14, 2023

Common Dreams

Increasingly, the Republican Party is consolidating its power in a minority of states and turning them into little laboratories of neo-fascism. This is tough on people in those states — particularly people who are Black, queer, or female — but what is its larger impact on America?

“Power tends to corrupt,” Lord Acton famously noted, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

This is the great danger at the state level for both American political parties as the GOP sinks deeper and deeper into its mire of regionalism, violence, racism, homophobia, misogyny, gun deaths, pollution, and victimhood, led by corrupt politicians like Trump, DeSantis, Kemp, and Abbott.

Reestablishing a national political dialogue like we had before the Trump presidency is thus now a singular challenge facing our nation, particularly since we’re one of only 7 democracies in the world that essentially forces a 2-party system through first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections.

The differences between Red and Blue states are increasingly stark, and growing month-by-month as Red states pass more and more laws to regulate every intimate detail of people’s private lives.

(By contrast, in parliamentary systems whichever party gets, for example, 12 percent of the vote ends up with 12 percent of the seats in Parliament; the result is a robust multi-party system.)

When our two political parties are so highly regionalized that their control is largely uncontested, the normal push-and-pull of politics fails. Sclerotic, corrupt little empires of power emerge, as we see today with parts of the Democratic Party in New York State and the GOP across the South and up through several Midwestern states, particularly Ohio.

While there are regional economic and cultural differences between Red and Blue states, the deciding factor is increasingly the willingness or unwillingness of the two parties to enfranchise or disenfranchise Black and young voters while meeting or violating the needs of the state’s citizens.

Generally, Red states are committed to making it difficult for all but middle-aged white people to vote (and trying to block the vote of college students); Blue states welcome the participation of as broad a cross-section of society as possible.

Red states embrace guns, book and abortion bans, and pollution; Blue states are leading the way into pluralism, a clean energy future, and rebuilding their schools and infrastructure.

The contrast is startling: a child living in Mississippi is fully ten times more likely to be killed with a gun than a child living in Massachusetts.

Everybody in Oregon votes by mail and has for more than a quarter-century; Texas Republicans just made it extremely difficult for people in Houston to do the same, so they could force citizens in that very Blue city to take time off from work and stand in line for hours.

A woman in California can get an abortion any time within the constraints of Roe v Wade; a woman or her family in Texas can get stalked, hit with $10,000 lawsuits, and even go to prison if she tries to do the same.

Minnesota is joining 18 other states to become sanctuaries for trans people; being publicly trans in Florida can get you imprisoned or even killed.

The differences between Red and Blue states are increasingly stark, and growing month-by-month as Red states pass more and more laws to regulate every intimate detail of people’s private lives.

Thus, America is being balkanized, much like it was in the early 19th century.

Donald Trump and the fascists he has empowered are the main force leading the GOP into this doom spiral, with considerable help from billionaire-owned rightwing media. But this is not the first time this has happened in American history.

America is being balkanized, much like it was in the early 19th century.

In my book The Hidden History of American Oligarchy, I chronicle how the invention of the Cotton Gin — which could do the work of 50 enslaved people — led to a widespread and massive consolidation of wealth and power in the deep South. The plantation families, made fabulously wealthy by the Gin, then took over both the economics and the politics of the South, turning it into what today we’d call an oligarchic fascist state.

They also took over the Democratic Party in the process (it was founded by Thomas Jefferson and had always had its base largely in the South) and turned it from a national player in American politics into a corrupt regional power-broker focused almost entirely on immunizing the morbidly rich while keeping down Black people, working class whites, and women.

Following the Civil War, Democrats largely ceased to be a national party for two generations. The 1868 party platform still clung to the South’s embrace of racism and the oppression of Black people, stating bluntly:
“In demanding these measures and reforms we arraign [accuse] the Radical [Republican] party for its disregard of right, and the unparalleled oppression that and tyranny which have marked its career. … Instead of restoring the Union, it has, so far as in its power, dissolved it, and subjected ten States, in times of profound peace, to military despotism and negro supremacy.”


The Democrats — then openly the party most devoted to white supremacy — essentially said, “Screw the rest of the country; we’ve got our piece of it in the South and parts of New York and that’s all we care about.”

Grover Cleveland was the only Democrat elected president between 1860 and 1912, and he was the exception that proved the rule: he won the election of 1886 by being an above-partisan-politics anti-corruption candidate in a nation dominated by two increasingly corrupt parties. For example, he vetoed more bills than every president before him combined.

Today it’s the Republican Party that’s openly committed to white supremacy — but no Grover Cleveland-style anti-corruption, national-vision-for-the-country Republican candidate for the presidency is anywhere in sight today.

Instead, Republicans fall all over themselves in a mad rush to deliver more tax cuts to their billionaire owners, more pollution from the industries that fund their campaigns, more voting restrictions in parts of the states they control with large Black populations, and more guns to their citizens.

Yesterday, The Washington Postnoted, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO) introduced legislation that would reinstate massive corporate tax loopholes, kill the new tax credits for electric vehicles and clean energy, and end a tax on toxic waste sites used to fund their cleanup.

The Texas legislature this month handed control of elections in dark-blue Houston (3 million voters) to Republican partisans, who can then ensure long lines and challenges to people who insist on casting a ballot.

At the same time, Republican politicians from Florida to Arizona to Iowa are openly embracing the rhetoric of political violence. In Idaho, the party recently hosted a “Trigger Time With Kyle” event where donors could pay to shoot assault weapons with Kyle Rittenhouse.

This is why the GOP is shrinking. And, in the process, retreating into Red state enclaves that reject the proclaimed values of America.

Embracing abortion restrictions, book bans, promoting guns, and hating on queer people aren’t, it turns out, good politics for a party that wants to hold power nationally.

Neither is promoting fascism a useful political strategy: yesterday Republican-aligned protesters with pro-DeSantis signs and giant swastika flags showed up outside Disney World in Orland; odds are voters were not amused.

In this regard, it’s a good thing for America that today’s GOP is collapsing nationwide.

The bad news, however, is that the GOP is consolidating its power in Red states by asserting control over elections, purging tens of millions of voters off the rolls, destroying public schools, and arresting Black voters and parading them before cameras in shackles.

At the moment, their main advantage nationally is that the Party still has the support of the CEOs of the nation’s largest social media companies, oil companies, Vladimir Putin and MBS, bigoted white evangelicals, and most billionaires.

But will that be enough to avoid becoming a regional faction resembling the Confederacy? Increasingly, it looks like the answer is “no.” For six years the Republican Party has been telling America who it is, and broad swaths of the electorate are now believing them.

Today’s GOP must make a choice.

Will it continue down the fascist road that Trump, DeSantis, and Abbott have paved, devolving farther and farther into a corrupt, hateful, violent whites-only regional presence?

An amplification of the reemergence of the old Confederacy, this time as the GOP?

Or is it capable of change?

Now, we discover, it turns out I’m not the only one who’s noted this bizarre new dynamic. The rightwing billionaire Koch network Tuesday morning released an ad against Donald Trump claiming that he’s “Joe Biden’s secret weapon.”

Apparently, they don’t just want regional power: they want to control the entire country. After all, it takes nationwide federal power to get looser pollution controls and more tax cuts.

But will the GOP repudiate fascism, misogyny, and racism and offer contrasting ideas to voters that aren’t just amped-up voter suppression, more guns, and the destruction of public education — with or without Donald Trump?

I’m not holding my breath.

Here's What It Means to Be Anti-Woke: You're Pro-Bigot

In very simple terms, the word "woke" means being aware of discrimination and social crises and wanting to repair them in order to make a more happy, loving, and egalitarian society.


Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis takes the stage in front of a sign reading "Awake Not Woke" at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 24, 2022 in Orlando, Florida
(Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)


THOM HARTMANN
Jun 06, 2023

Common Dreams

Ron DeSantis says he’s going to save America from “wokeness,” proclaiming to a Los Angeles fundraiser:

“So in Florida, we say very clearly, we will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Our state is where woke goes to die.”

Nikki Haley declares:

“Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic, hands down.”

Donald Trump is more nuanced, preferring to simply say racist things aloud without using the DeSantis shorthand.

“I don’t like the term ‘woke,” Trump told an Iowa audience, “because I hear the term ‘woke woke woke’ — it’s just a term they use, half the people can’t define it, they don’t know what it is.”


Trump notwithstanding, their competitors for the GOP nomination for president — along with Republican politicians across the country seeking their own re-election this year and next — are falling all over themselves to condemn “woke” and promise to be even tougher on “wokeness” than the last guy.

But what do they mean?

In 1938, Lead Belly sang a song about the “Scottsboro Boys,” a group of young Black men and boys who were falsely charged with rape and sentenced to the death penalty in Alabama in 1931. In the song, he talks about meeting the Scottsboro defendants, saying:

“I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep your eyes open.”

Republican politicians across the country seeking their own re-election this year and next... are falling all over themselves to condemn “woke” and promise to be even tougher on “wokeness” than the last guy. But what do they mean?

The phrase had a major revival in the Black community, as NBC News notes, in 2014 after Michael Brown was murdered by Ferguson, Missouri white police officer Darren Wilson.

“Stay woke” meant “keep an eye out for white cops who want to kill you” and to stay alert to and aware of other aspects of structural racism in American society. More recently, the term has expanded to being aware of and trying to do something about homophobia, misogyny, and our nation’s social ills.

Woke, in other words, means being aware of these social crises and wanting to repair them, to make a more happy, loving, egalitarian society.

Which is exactly why Republicans are using “woke” as their latest hate-filled dog whistle.

While these shout-outs to white racists, fascists, and haters go all the way back to the founding of the republic, most people are familiar with their more recent incarnations.

In the 1968 election and for his 1972 re-election, for example, Nixon rolled out his “War on Drugs” and talked constantly about “law and order” to signal to white people that he was going to come down hard on the Black community.

It was integral to his successful Southern Strategy to bring disaffected Dixiecrats — racist white Southern Democrats pissed off that LBJ had signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts into law in 1964/1965 — over to the GOP.

As Nixon‘s right hand man, John Ehrlichman, told reporter Dan Baum:
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. Do you understand what I’m saying?

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

“We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“


And it worked:




Source: adapted from Wikipedia on US Incarceration rates



Nixon, as you can see, had considerable success in his generation’s version of today’s “war on woke.” Literally millions of careers were disrupted, people imprisoned, and lives brutally ended by his campaign to seize and hold political power. It echoes to this day, particularly in Red states where a joint can still get you years in prison.

Republican use of language to demonize people who aren’t straight white men have bridged America’s modern political history.

— Reagan referred to “welfare queens” and “young bucks buying steak” with food stamps.

— George HW Bush had Willie Horton, the “unrepentant rapist and killer” of white women.

— George W. Bush handily lumped all Muslims into the “radical terrorist” category as he ran illegal torture sites around the world.

— Donald Trump referred to “Mexican murderers and rapists” while throwing a sop to “good people on both sides.”

— And now the GOP has settled on the word woke as their way of shouting out to racists, Nazis, and hate-filled bigots.

The simple reality that every demagogue in history has known is that it’s more powerful to declare revenge and war against an enemy than to proclaim a positive vision for the future. It’s why Trump recently told his followers that he is “your retribution.”

Words have the meaning that culture and repetition give them, which gives us the key to using “woke” against Republicans.

While the openly Nazi and racist Republican base knows well how attacking woke is shorthand for hating on Black people, queer folk, and progressive allies, the word has a much more amorphous meaning for most of the rest of America.

And therein lies the opportunity for Democrats.

A week before the 1988 election, the front page of The New York Times carried a story headlined:

“Dukakis Asserts He Is a ‘Liberal,’ But in Old Tradition of His Party.”


Rush Limbaugh had started his show — and his relentless demonization of the word liberal — just four months earlier.

At its core, their effort to turn woke into a pejorative is about the politics of elimination, about erasing large swaths of American history, about pushing queer people back into the closet, about turning schools into indoctrination factories.

By the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton won, in part, by running away from the word. The New York Times headline for September 26, 1992 told the entire story:

“Clinton Says He’s Not Leaning Left but Taking a New ‘Third Way.’”


Running for re-election in 1996, The Washington Post’s headline highlighted Clinton’s continuity: “Clinton Says He Is No Liberal.”


It would be thirty years before a Democratic nominee for president could safely assert that he was a liberal (and Hillary continued to avoid the word right up to the day she lost in 2016).

Joe Biden, in 2020, came right out and said it:

“I was always labeled as one of the most liberal members of the United States Congress. … All during my career as a senator and as vice president — the things that we did in the United States — as president and vice president of the United States, I thought they were pretty progressive.”


Meet, in other words, the power of reframing a word.

Progressives and Democrats need to take a page from the old Limbaugh playbook and pound on the GOP’s use of the word “woke” as a slur.

Make it as simple as possible, whenever Republicans invoke the word:“If you’re anti-woke, that means you’re pro-bigot.”
“By attacking people who are woke to our nation’s history, you’re saying you side with the Nazis and the Klan.”
“I’m woke and proud of it. You’re a hater and should be ashamed of yourself.”
“It’s another Republican proclaiming his bigotry by attacking woke.”

Republicans attack woke, in addition to shouting out to the racist base, because they’re trying to hide how deeply they’re in the pockets of fringe groups from the white supremacist movement to rightwing billionaires who disdain democracy.

— They don’t want voters to think they’re owned by the fossil fuel and weapons industries.

— It’s embarrassing to them when we point out that nine of the last ten recessions happened during Republican presidencies, or that their abortion bans are really about controlling the bodies and lives of women and have nothing to do with “saving the children” they’ll deny food or healthcare to the moment they’re born.

— They want their book bans framed as anti-pornography campaigns rather than what they really are: anti-intellectualism, attempts to whitewash history, and a fear of modernity.

Which is why they constantly talk about “woke.”

It’s a word that, at this moment, means different things to different people.

But, at its core, their effort to turn woke into a pejorative is about the politics of elimination, about erasing large swaths of American history, about pushing queer people back into the closet, about turning schools into indoctrination factories.

Rhetoric like this rarely turns out good. Hitler villainized Jews for years before he started killing them; Rwandan Hutus called Tutsis “cockroaches” before the slaughter began; Pinochet called union organizers “communists and parasites,” then started pushing them out of helicopters.

As we saw so vividly with Richard Nixon’s War On Drugs, language has meaning, impact, and the ability to transform societies.

Therefore, job one for Democrats must be to strip the GOP anti-woke message of its ambiguity. To call out their dog whistle of hate and bigotry for what it is. To do so in political campaigns and letters to the editor; in calls into talk shows and C-SPAN; in conversations with friends, neighbors, and even random strangers.

Turn on a light, the old saying goes, and the cockroaches will scatter. It’s time to bring honest and unflinching light to the Republican Party’s misuse of the word “woke.”

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


THOM HARTMANN
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Full Bio >

'Get the sins out': Taqueria brought in priest to hear staff confess to workplace crimes

A California taqueria chain under investigation for wage theft hired a priest

Gideon Rubin
June 14, 2023, 

Priest Praying' [Shutterstock]

A California taqueria chain under investigation for wage theft hired a person it identified as a priest to compel employees to confess to ‘workplace sins,’ the U.S. Department of Labor said.

A Taqueria Garibaldi employee testified during a federal court case brought by the Department of Labor that the Sacramento-area restaurant chain offered employees the “priest” to hear confessions during work hours, the agency said in a news release.

“The employee told the court the priest urged workers to ‘get the sins out,’ and asked employees if they had stolen from the employer, been late for work, had done anything to harm their employer, or if they had bad intentions toward their employer,” the agency said.

Taqueria Garibaldi eventually agreed to a consent judgment ordering the restaurant to pay $140,000 in back wages and damages to 35 employees. Che Garibaldi Inc. operates two Taqueria Garibaldi restaurants in Sacramento and one in Roseville.
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The court’s May 8 action followed an investigation conducted by the agency’s Wage and Hour Division, which found that Taqueria Garibaldi denied employees overtime pay for hours over 40 in a workweek, a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

"Federal wage and hour investigators have seen corrupt employers try all kinds of scams to shortchange workers and to intimidate or retaliate against employees but a northern California restaurant’s attempt to use an alleged priest to get employees to admit workplace “sins” may be among the most shameless," the agency said.

The agency also determined that the employer illegally paid managers from the employee tip pool, threatened employees with retaliation and adverse immigration consequences for cooperating with the department, and fired one employee they suspected of complaining to the department.

“Under oath, an employee of Taqueria Garibaldi explained how the restaurant offered a supposed priest to hear their workplace ‘sins’ while other employees reported that a manager falsely claimed that immigration issues would be raised by the department’s investigation,” Regional Solicitor of Labor Marc Pilotin said in a statement.

“This employer’s despicable attempts to retaliate against employees were intended to silence workers, obstruct an investigation and prevent the recovery of unpaid wages.”

In addition to aiding the recovery of $70,000 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages, the judge ordered the restaurant and its owners to pay the department $5,000 in penalties, citing the willful nature of their violations.

“The U.S. Department of Labor and its Solicitor’s Office will not tolerate workplace retaliation and will act swiftly to make clear that immigration status has no bearing on workers’ rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Pilotin said.

The defendants were also permanently forbidden from committing FLSA violations.

“Specifically, the court ordered Taqueria Garibaldi not to take any action to stop employees from asserting their rights, interfere with any department investigation, or terminate, threaten or discriminate against any employee perceived to have spoken with investigators,” the agency said.

Cyclone Biparjoy, meaning "disaster" in Bengali

100,000 evacuated as cyclone threatens India and Pakistan

Agence France-Presse
June 14, 2023

People take photos by a waterfront in Karachi as Cyclone Biparjoy approaches on Wednesday 

(Asif HASSAN)

More than 100,000 people have been evacuated from the path of a fierce cyclone heading towards India and Pakistan, with forecasters warning Wednesday it could devastate homes and tear down power lines.

Biparjoy, meaning "disaster" in Bengali, is making its way across the Arabian Sea and is expected to make landfall as a "very severe cyclonic storm" on Thursday evening, government weather monitors said.

Powerful winds, storm surges and lashing rains were forecast to hammer a 325-kilometer (200-mile) stretch of coast between Mandvi in India's Gujarat state and Karachi in Pakistan.

India's Meteorological Department predicted the storm will hit near the Indian port of Jakhau late Thursday, warning of "total destruction" of traditional mud and straw thatched homes.

At sea, winds were already gusting at speeds up to 180 kilometers per hour (112 miles per hour), forecasters said.

By the time it makes landfall wind speeds are predicted to reach 125-135 kilometers per hour, with gusts up to 150 kilometers per hour.

"Over 47,000 people have been evacuated from coastal and low-lying areas to shelter," said C.C. Patel, an official in charge of relief operations in Gujarat.

More were expected to be moved inland throughout Wednesday.

India's meteorologists warned of the potential for "widespread damage", including destruction of crops, "bending or uprooting of power and communication poles" and disruption of railways and roads.

In the beach town of Mandvi, streets were mostly empty Wednesday with just a few hungry stray dogs roaming abandoned beach shacks, next to large, rolling waves under strong gusts and grey skies.


The Gujarat state government released photos showing lines of residents clutching small bags of belongings and boarding buses inland away from areas predicted to be worst hit.

- 'High to phenomenal' -

Pakistan's climate change minister Sherry Rehman said Wednesday that 62,000 people had been evacuated from the country's southeastern coastline, with 75 relief camps set up at schools and colleges.


She said fishermen had been warned to stay off the water and small aircraft were grounded, while urban flooding was possible in the megacity of Karachi, home to around 20 million people.

"We are following a policy of caution rather than wait and see," she told reporters in Islamabad. "Our first priority is saving lives."

The Pakistan Meteorological Department forecast gusts up to 140 kilometers per hour in the southeastern province of Sindh, accompanied by a storm surge reaching 3.5 meters (11.5 feet).

Fishing has also been suspended along the Gujarat coast with conditions expected to escalate from "rough to very rough" on Wednesday to "high to phenomenal".

"There could be flooding in some low-lying areas and we are prepared to handle that," Mohsen Shahedi, a senior official from India's National Disaster Response Force, told reporters.

Five people have already been killed in India including two children who were crushed when a wall collapsed, while a woman was hit by a falling tree when riding a motorbike.


Cyclones -- the equivalent of hurricanes in the North Atlantic or typhoons in the Northwest Pacific -- are a regular and deadly menace on the coast of the northern Indian Ocean, where tens of millions of people live.

Scientists have warned that storms are becoming more powerful as the world gets warmer with climate change.

Philippines' most active volcano: Mayon eruption may last months 

DW News
14 hours ago

MAYON VOLCANO

Nearly 15,000 people have left their homes since the Philippines' most active volcano began showing signs of restiveness. A six-kilometer danger zone was expanded by one kilometer once the Mayon volcano began spewing hot lava. Authorities warn volcanic activity may persist for months.

 

Philippines: Tens of thousands evacuated or in standby to flee after Mayon volcano eruption

FRANCE 24 English

Jun 13, 2023 

 #volcano #eruption #Philippines

Tens of thousands of people who live near the nation's most active volcano in Philippines have been evacuated. Many of them are villagers who live in poor farming communities. Lava has been flowing from the "Mayon" volcano... and there are concerns of larger eruptions. FRANCE 24's Jean Emile Jammine.