Month: Sep 2020

Nobody should be Illegal!!

by Alleen Brown

Field workers with Palo Alto Vineyard Management prepare to harvest Syrah grapes on Oct. 25, 2017, in Kenwood, Calif. Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

As wildfire smoke billowed into the wine-producing region of Sonoma County, California, workers continued harvesting grapes, day and night. Even in evacuation zones, where the safety threat from flames was severe enough for officials to ask residents to leave the area, the county agriculture commissioner invited workers to continue laboring in the fields, doling out evacuation-area access passes to dozens of agricultural producers.

With undocumented immigrants — many of them workers from Latin American Indigenous communities — already economically drained after surviving months of the pandemic with virtually no government support, workers were in no position to decline an offer for work.

For the workers, their hands were forced by a combination of circumstances as toxic as the ash that falls over the region’s famous vineyards: the economic drive to keep the wine industry going; the lack of resources for non-Spanish-speaking workers; a near-total dearth of economic support; the economic stresses of the coronavirus pandemic; and a climate of fear around immigration enforcement that prevents the workers from asking for help…..

continue reading HERE

Read Our Complete Coverage of The War on Immigrants

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Grocery workers say morale is at an all-time low: ‘They don’t even treat us like humans anymore’ – By Abha Bhattarai August 12, 2020

That’s about $400 each for every woman, man and child in the USA. The US already has enough deployed nuclear bombs to annihilate the planet dozens of times over, many on submarines that make a surprise attack impossible.

A new US policy is to reject all international treaties and make smaller nuclear weapons to be ‘used alongside conventional forces’.. an obvious new danger. Chinese nuclear forces are tiny in comparison, but enough to destroy the US in retaliation.

$13.3 billion for new nuclear missiles

by Christina MacPherson, shared with thanks

Air Force awards Northrop Grumman $13.3 billion contract for new nuclear missiles, Market Watch  Sept. 8, 2020 By Associated Press Critics call project wasteful, but Esper says nuclear arsenal ”needs to be modernized”

WASHINGTON — The Air Force on Tuesday awarded a $13.3 billion contract for engineering and development work on a replacement for the Minuteman 3 missile, which has operated continuously for half a century as a key part of the nuclear force.

Critics call the replacement project wasteful and dangerous. Democrat Joe Biden has not said whether he would, if elected in November, support the project, known officially as the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent. The project has bipartisan support in Congress.

Continue reading “What a way to spend tax-payers’ money! $13.3 billion to Northrop Grumman for new nuclear missiles”

Right-wing social media accounts and the Tory tabloids recently went into apoplexy in response to a contrived controversy surrounding the playing of the openly racist anthems of Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia at the BBC Proms.

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Decades of constant blasting by media propaganda have convinced the white majority that immigrants are stealing away their scant privileges, even as the ruling class loot the country, and that all would be well if the Empire returned. But its not just Britain, almost every State is now ruled and mostly owned by far right oligarchies, the 1%, who sometimes let us choose between their brainwashed stooges.

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Cruel Britannia: -Land of Dope and Gory-

by Blosc, shared with thanks

For as long as I can remember, English politicians have stoked fears about the swarms of immigrants bringing Britain to breaking point or castigated spongers and work-shy benefit cheats, while all the while promoting a myth of Albion, purveyor of the rule of law and democracy.

These tendencies have only sharpened during Brexit, where Little Englanders trumpet this scepter’d isle, Land of Hope and Glory ‘mother of the free… wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set. God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet’.

All the while the same reactionaries demonize immigrants and Johnny foreigner, belittle and sneer at calls for racial and gender equality and smear those who seek to create a just society as terrorist sympathizers and anti-Semites.

There is no introspection of self-awareness to any of this. If they could overcome the cognitive dissonance, these modern-day jingoists would cringe in shame at an Empire built on oppression. Cruel Britannia ruled the waves through peddling dope and prosecuting gory murder against anyone who dared challenge perfidious Albion.

Nevertheless, the procession of shameless propaganda to placate the herd, hardly represents a recent phenomenon. Anyone who reads Irishman, Robert Noonan’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a novel over a century old, will be struck by eery echoes in the Daily Obscurer or Daily Chloroform of our contemporary tabloids’ mendacious assault on the poor, hollow jingoism and xenophobic bigotry.

Continue reading “Cruel Britannia: -Land of Dope and Gory-“

enred_sinfronteras@riseup.net

By Millaray Painemal Morales *Indigenous Debates, Sept 9, 2020

from Red Latina sin Fronteras translation thefreeonline with thanks.

In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, women from Chile continue to fight for their rights within their communities and within the nation state. In the context of the pandemic, they suffer from not being able to sell their crafts and vegetables, and from police violence.

The environmental and health crisis has been an opportunity to strengthen organizations, train and network with feminist movements in the cities. They do not forget the October 2019 fight and add themselves to the request for decent pensions and a new multinational and joint Constitution.

The most excluded and marginalized sectors that live in large cities and indigenous peoples who live in rural areas are those who suffer the most from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

The deaths and infections among the most vulnerable are a reflection of the situation of social and economic inequality, caused by the neoliberal policies that have been applied for more than 30 years.

Chile is a clear example of social and economic inequality in Latin America. This inequality has its roots in the installation of the neoliberal economic model during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and in a Constitution that was imposed by force and brought with it the privatization of education, health, social security and water, a vital element for the human being, but that today has become a market good.

“Inequality has its roots in the installation of the neoliberal economic model during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and in a Constitution that was imposed by force and brought with it the privatization of education, health, social security and water”

In the 1990s and with the arrival of democracy, these circumstances continued in force and affected the Mapuche communities in the south of the country with the installation of hydroelectric companies, roads and forestry companies.
In 1997, one of the emblematic struggles was carried out against the installation of the Ralco dam, in Alto Bío-Bío, and led by two great Mapuche Pewenche women: the Quintreman sisters.las hermanas Quintreman.

Meanwhile, Chile was seen by the rest of the world as an example to follow in terms of modernity and development. This view changed as of October 18, 2019, when protests by high school students began in Santiago due to the rise in prices of the subway ticket.

The mobilizations spread throughout the territory and gave rise to an unprecedented social outbreak that had numerous slogans, including one that expresses the national feeling: “Chile woke up.”

Continue reading “Wallmapu: Mapuche Women and the Struggle for our territorial Autonomy”

note to US readers> Assange is not an anarcho-capitalist! In Europe the term ‘libertarian’ just means anti-hierarchy or anarchist.

The political motive of the process against Julian Assange

The libertarian ideology of Julian Assange was analyzed on the third day of the trial against his extradition to the United States based on the testimonies of two experts, who consider that it is a politically motivated process and an escalation of the “war against journalism” by part of the US Republican administration.

By Lourdes Gómez *

“The decision to indict Julian Assange is a massive and unprecedented escalation of President (Donald) Trump’s war on journalism,” said Trevor Timm, director and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), a foundation established eight years ago in San Francisco to protect press freedom.

JOURNALISM ON TRIAL

The Californian foundation has contributed $ 100,000 to the defense costs of Assange against the surrender order to be tried in the United States for obtaining, possessing and disclosing secret military and diplomatic reports, as confirmed by the also lawyer when giving a video statement. conference.

“The indictment is clearly unconstitutional,” he said, referring to the First Amendment to the US Constitution that protects the right to freedom of expression.

Continue reading “Assange’s libertarian ideology analysed in UK Stalinist Show Trial”