#world socialist web site

[angryisokay]

WSWS straight up lying about shit happening in our plant 😂 idk who this ‘rank and file committee’ they speak of is, never heard of them and I certainly don’t trust people who refuse to be identified.

If you read and believe WSWS, please know they’re lying asshats who have no interest in workers rights. Stop supporting them and their hysterical nonsense.

[xtruss]

Biden Administration Issues “Weasel Words” Assurances To Secure Assange’s Extradition

— Thomas Scripps | Wednesday April 17, 2024 | ​World Socialist Web Site | WSWS.ORG

The United States has provided “assurances” to the UK government to further its pursuit of WikiLeaks founder and journalist Julian Assange, held in London’s maximum security Belmarsh prison.

The US is seeking to prosecute Assange on charges under the Espionage Act which carry a de facto life sentence for publishing documents exposing war crimes and human rights abuses carried out by Washington and its imperialist allies.

Julian Assange. Photo by David G. Silvers, Cancillería del Ecuador/CC BY-SA 2.0

When, at the end of last month, the UK’s High Court offered the US the opportunity to provide such commitments to prevent Assange from appealing against his extradition to America, the World Socialist Web Site wrote, “The court’s proposals are a fig leaf. US prosecutors will furnish ‘assurances’ as worthless as those already provided in connection with his conditions of imprisonment.”

This has been confirmed. The commitments required by the court were that Assange would not be subject to the death penalty, and two connected points that he would not be prejudiced at trial by virtue of his Australian nationality and would be granted free speech rights under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

A facsimile of the letter sent by the US Embassy to UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron Tuesday, published by Consortium News, reads:

“Assange will not be prejudiced by reason of his nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and sentencing. Specifically, if extradited, Assange will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial… the rights and protections given under the First Amendment.” It then stresses, “A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. Courts.”

It continues: “A sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange… These assurances are binding on any and all present or subsequent individuals to whom authority has been delegated to decide these matters.”

Assange’s wife Stella was quick to point out the “blatant weasel words” of the first assurance, which only states that Assange can “seek to raise” First Amendment rights—it does not guarantee that he will receive them.

Legally, this should bar extradition outright.

Section 87 of the UK’s Extradition Act (2003) requires the courts to “decide whether the person’s extradition would be compatible with the Convention rights [European Convention on Human Rights] within the meaning of the Human Rights Act 1998… If the judge decides the question… in the negative he must order the person’s discharge.”

Article 10 of the Convention is the right to freedom of expression, or free speech. The same protection is enshrined in the US legal system in the form of the First Amendment. But the US Embassy’s letter leaves the door open to this right being denied to Assange at the say so of the US courts.

As Stella Assange noted, the letter pointedly “makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no first amendment rights because he is not a US citizen.”

Both the lead prosecutor Gordon Kromberg and the former CIA Director Mike Pompeo have made this claim.

Stella Assange added that her husband’s “life is at risk” every day he is in prison: 'The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family's extreme distress about his future—his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.”

Her statement underscores the cynicism of the death penalty assurance offered by the US. Substantial medical evidence has been provided in Assange’s case confirming the significant likelihood of suicide in the event of extradition to and imprisonment in the US. His mental and physical health have already declined sharply in the five years he has spent in Belmarsh.

Nor is it beyond the US government—whose intelligence agencies surveilled Assange and plotted his assassination—to renege on its promise or see to it that Assange is killed “unofficially”.

Underscoring the case’s lawless character, on the same day the US sent its “assurances” to the UK, CIA Director William Burns submitted a statement to the Spanish courts. Burns asserted that “the CIA’s statutory privileges… to protect intelligence sources, methods, and activities at issue” in a case examining the Agency’s spying against Assange, refusing to either confirm or deny its involvement or to provide “factual bases for my privilege assertions”.

None of this was acknowledged by the Democratic Party-aligned New York Times, which sunk to new lows in its reporting of the case by citing some of Stella Assange’s comments while excising her reference to the Biden administration’s “weasel words”, allowing it to run a totally uncritical article headlined, “U.S. Lays Out Protections for Assange if He Is Extradited”.

The UK courts will likely take the same wilfully credulous view.

Geoffrey Robertson KC, founder and joint head of Doughty Street Chambers which is representing Assange, and who previously represented him directly, claimed, “Unless you can guarantee it [free speech rights], I think the British courts will be dubious about extraditing Mr Assange to a situation or to a trial where he doesn’t have the equal protection of the laws.”

This will doubtless be the legally impeccable argument advanced by Assange’s lawyers at the next hearing scheduled for May 20. But the High Court has already accepted equally worthless assurances at an earlier stage in the case to override warnings about Assange’s significant risk of suicide—barring extradition under Section 91 of the Extradition Act.

These “guaranteed” that Assange would not be placed in America’s supermax prison, the ADX Florence, or be subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMS), implicitly acknowledged to constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment prohibited under Article 3 of the Convention. But in each case, the undertaking was given “subject to the condition that the United States retains the power to impose SAMs [or an ADX designation] on Mr Assange in the event that, after entry of this assurance, he was to commit any future act that met the test for the imposition of a SAM [or ADX designation].”

The UK’s High Court responded favourably in their December 2021 judgment that it could “see no merit in the criticisms made of the individual assurances… There is no basis for assuming that the USA has not given the assurances in good faith.”

Screenshots of the US Letter of Assurances From X, Formerly Twitter. Megan Specia @meganspecia! US has filed assurances in Assange extradition case, which were requested by a British court before it makes a final decision on his ability to appeal. Next step is a hearing on May 20.

In its latest ruling, dismissing Assange’s right to appeal provided the new assurances were given, the High Court was again at pains to stress the trustworthiness of the US state, even to the point of denying that there was “anything to show” a connection between CIA plots to kidnap or poison Assange and the prosecutor’s attempt to have him extradited.

If the assurances are accepted by the High Court on May 20, Assange’s request for an appeal will be dismissed, leaving him at imminent risk of extradition. His legal team have submitted a preliminary appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but it is unclear whether the UK would abide by orders from that court to keep Assange in its custody until it has reached a decision even if Strasbourg agrees to hear the case.

Amid the vital and ongoing legal defence being mounted, workers must understand that Assange’s fate depends on stepping up the global campaign demanding his release.

[devanmaistry]

The origins debate

“The 1619 Project,” was published by the New York Times as a special 100-page edition of its Sunday magazine on August 19, 2019 to mark the 400th anniversary of the initial arrival of 20 African slaves at Point Comfort in Virginia. They were traded for food for the Dutch ship on which they had come and their employment status is indeterminate. The Project, according to the Times, intends to…

[grison-in-space]

It's never too late. We are beginning to think about how and why we exploit animals, and how it is not morally consistent with our values; several prominent anarchists and communist bloggers on Tumblr have admitted that veganism is ethically and financially superior on every level, though they don't participate in it, which is sad. All it takes is a little extra work. The collapse of capitalism will also bring the collapse of the animal industry, or vice versa. The meat plants subjugate both humans and animals, causing persistent trauma- in fact, it has the highest rate of trauma among every category of labor. If you support abolition, you should support all abolition: children, psych people, and animals. On a site like Tumblr, we have an opportunity to promote the breakdown of all positions of power. We are all equal.

Honey, you have the wrong fucking blog to the extent that I can only assume you are spamming this message to everyone you think might listen. I have gone on the record several times to say:

I am a pragmatic empiricist. I care much less about ideological consistency than I do about observed outcomes. There are traps there, too—sometimes people get too much into the weeds about observing proxies for desired goals—but essentially I do think that careful observation of the world around me is much more valuable than starting with a consistent ideology and assuming that good intentions will yield good outcomes.

I am motivated by animal welfare. For me, part of that involves meeting animals on their own level, using their own species-specific signals to assess stress and comfort, and understanding animals within their own social context. Therefore,

I am opposed to animal rights narratives that encourage people to project their own imagined emotional responses onto animals without assessing the animals' actual signals in context. Additionally,

I believe as a behavioral ecologist that, for good and for ill, humans are essentially animals participating in a broader ecosystem that includes us. I do not think humans are special or exist outside that broader web, and I think that ecological intervention works most effectively when we see ourselves as part of nature rather than as some kind of twisted unnatural personification of original sin. Conflict and death are part of life. You won't make a better world by pretending otherwise.

I am a disabled person ("psych people?!"), and more specifically an autistic and neurodivergent person. I literally spelled out for you last night that I have difficulties eating and that imposing more barriers to that ("a little extra work") is a significant burden for me. Your easy dismissal of this point is, in context, amazingly and blithely ableist. Wow.

"psych people?!" I am happy to critique coercive psychiatry and medicine more generally, but that one's new on me. If you're not brave enough to use the language of mad/crip pride, are you entirely sure you understand the points of the dialogue? Your demonstrated grasp of disability justice is already extremely poor; this ain't helping.

I am not anti-state (i.e. I am not an anarchist; I am a democratic socialist) and I routinely criticize daydreams about burning entire systems to the ground and replacing them with a vague new system. Those criticisms are usually based in historical analysis of attempts to do exactly that, which have typically resulted in a lot of bloodshed, generally from the most vulnerable people in society. They also often yield a new and not necessarily more egalitarian power structure that continues to oppress people, sometimes more aggressively than the institution preceding it.

For the same reason, I am not a communist. I think communism offers too many opportunities for unscrupulous people to seize power, creating more inequality under the banner of equality itself. Again, this position comes from reading the history of communist states from as many perspectives as I can get my mitts on.

I frequently critique assumptions that capitalism is the only root of social problems. This does not mean that I am pro-capitalism. It means that I think you have to think deeply about problems, especially when it makes you uncomfortable, to understand how to solve them. Many problems that capitalism exacerbates are actually rooted in problems about impulse control (as with Ideas Jerry the other day), basic human social dynamics, emotional regulation, complex traumas, and many other things. You must understand how these problems arise before you can construct a structure that guards against them effectively.

Fundamentally, I think you are probably optimistically spamming this message to anyone that you think will listen. I invite you to consider how effective that is as a tactic to advance your politics: when you pick the wrong person, at best you leave the impression that people serving your ideology are essentially self centered and bad at listening. At worst, you wind up pissing people off enough to sit down and lay out exactly how many points they disagree with you on. Coalitions of solidarity are based on listening carefully to one another and finding the places we agree on; shit like that is antithetical to building them because it sends a very effective signal that you are either very, very bad at listening or uninterested in doing so.

Either way, get out of my house.

[southernsolarpunk]

Source from The Guardian

Source from World Socialist Web Site

Source from ABC News

[probablyasocialecologist]

I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. If a tornado came through and wiped the whole thing out, the stock market would plummet and the net worth of a country the size of Slovenia would vanish from the ledgers in a day. I used to live in Baltimore and remembered the kind of people who would go to the Preakness in their stupid hats and Sunday best while the whole swath of the city it was situated in starved and languished for lack of funds. This was like that, but without the hats. I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target.

[...]

I learned more about myself on my trip to Austin than I did about F1. I learned that I’m the kind of person who would rather be right than happy, would rather stand in my ivory tower than frolic in the fields below. I experienced firsthand the intended effect of allowing riffraff like me, those who distinguish themselves by way of words alone, to mingle with the giants of capitalism and their cultural attachés. It is to give this anointed everyman a taste of the good life, to make them feel like a prince for a day, and that if they do this with enough scribblers they will write nice words and somehow ameliorate the divide between the classes. My hosts were nice people with faces. They showed us extraordinary hospitality. If one takes many trips like this, I can see how it warps the mind, the perception of the world and our place in it. Power is enticing. Like Lewis Hamilton? You can eat steaks that cost the same as your electricity bill and meet him again. You, too, can bask in the balding aura of Prince Harry and the fake glow of Instagram models. Any wealth and status you lack, you can perform. What I received wasn’t a crash course in Formula 1 – in fact, Formula 1 only became more mystifying to me – but journalism, as viewed by the other side. The great irony of the other side is that they need journalism. The petrochemical companies, deeply powerful institutions, need journalists to write about all the things they attach themselves to that are not being a petrochemical company. Formula 1, on a rapacious tangent for growth and new markets, needs journalists to spread the good word of one of the richest sports in the world. Unfortunately for the other side, journalism still remains a double-edged sword. Send me on an experience and I’ll have an experience. Sadly, I suffer from an unprofitable disease that makes me only ever capable of writing about the experience I’m having. The doctors say it’s terminal.

[workersolidarity]

Biden proposes $1 trillion in social spending cuts after announcing $375 million more for war in Ukraine - World Socialist Web Site

I'm not a big fan of the Trots at WSWS, but when they're right, they're right.

Of course Biden never had any intention of protecting social spending in the US. He had two years to prioritize social spending, raise the minimum wage, he promised Paid Family Leave, sick leave, and swore he would expand Obamacare.

Of course he did nothing of the sort.

Biden has had decades in Congress and the Senate to prioritize Working Class people and has instead chosen to pursue an Imperialist Neocon agenda, sending nearly $170 BILLION for the Proxy-war in Ukraine.

But of course, Biden doesn't have a single extra $1 for the homelessness epidemic, healthcare, or any of the supposed Priorities he had when coming to office.

Biden's only interest is enriching the wealth of the Trans-Atlantic Capitalist Class.

[icedsodapop]

Ah yes World Socialist Web Site... Good socialist praxis is when my rape apologism for a millionaire celebrity outweighs my solidarity with the workers he had abused and created toxic workplace environments for!! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

[dionysus-complex]

also lmao I’d find the World Socialist Web Site more credible if this weren’t their response to every single fucking labor contract won in collective bargaining

[theculturedmarxist]

This article was submitted to the WSWS by Maxim Goldarb, the head of the Union of Left Forces (For a New Socialism) party, which has been banned by the Zelensky government. The World Socialist Web Site unequivocally opposes and denounces the persecution of left-wing and oppositional tendencies in Ukraine by the NATO-backed Zelensky regime. We call on our readers to distribute the information about the state-backed repression of anti-war opposition in Ukraine as widely as possible.

Ukraine has long been proclaimed the freest country in the post-Soviet space. In the pro-NATO media, the country is even portrayed as a bulwark of democracy. But this is a lie. The right-wing oligarchic regime that came to power in the Western-backed coup in February 2014 has severely persecuted its opponents, using terrorist methods.

The most tragic example of not just persecution, but murder by the ruling regime in Kiev of its ideological opponents took place in Odessa on May 2, 2014, when far-right nationalists, with the full connivance of and open assistance from the authorities, blocked anti-fascist activists in the building of the House of Trade Unions and set fire to the building. To escape the burning building, many jumped out of windows to their death. Even on the ground, some of those who had survived were then murdered by neo-Nazis. In total, more than 40 people died, among whom were Vadim Papura, a member of the Komsomol (Communist youth union), as well as Andrei Brazhevsky, a member of the left-wing Borotba organization.

For this crime, no one was ever punished, even though those responsible were recorded in many photos and videos. One of the organizers of this massacre subsequently became the speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, another one became a member of parliament on the lists of the party of former President Petro Poroshenko.

In the same way, the killers of a number of well-known opposition politicians and journalists who have died since 2014 have not been punished. This includes the ex-deputy of the Socialist Party of Ukraine, Valentina Semenyuk-Samsonenko (her murder on August 27, 2014 was disguised as suicide); the ex-deputy and organizer of opposition actions Oleg Kalashnikov (he was killed on April 15, 2015); the popular writer and anti-fascist publicist Oles Buzina (killed on April 16, 2015), and many others.

The Communist Party of Ukraine, one of the largest parties in the country, was banned in 2015.

In addition, opposition-minded politicians, journalists and activists, many of whom are left-leaning, have been beaten, arrested and imprisoned in recent years on trumped-up charges of “high treason” and other overtly political charges. This happened, in particular, with journalists Vasily Muravitsky, Dmitry Vasilets and Pavel Volkov, as well as human rights activist Ruslan Kotsaba and others. It is telling that even in the courts, which are under heavy pressure from the authorities, the accusations of “high treason” as a rule fell apart and turned out to be completely untenable.

The situation has become more and more aggravated with each passing year, especially after Volodymyr Zelensky became the president of Ukraine. The formal reason for the complete elimination of the remnants of civil liberties and the start of open political repression was the military conflict in Ukraine that began in February 2022.

All opposition parties in Ukraine, most of which are left-wing parties, including the Union of Left Forces (For New Socialism) party, which I lead, were banned on fabricated, carbon-copy accusations of being “pro-Russian.”

The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has also detained a number of opinion leaders and journalists who spoke to the media before the war, criticizing the government. All of them were accused of promoting a pro-Russian position, high treason, espionage, propaganda, etc.

In February-March 2022, a number of well-known bloggers and journalists were detained on charges of high treason and placed in pre-trial detention centers (SIZOs). Among them were Dmitry Dzhangirov (a supporter of leftist views, who worked with our party), Yan Taksyur (a supporter of leftist views), Dmitry Marunich, Mikhail Pogrebinsky, Yuri Tkachev, and others. The reason for their detention was not ephemeral treason at all, but the authorities’ fear of their public political position, which did not coincide with the official line of the government.

In March 2022, the historian Alexander Karevin, known for his political activities, disappeared without a trace after SBU officers visited his house. Karevin has repeatedly sharply criticized the actions of the Ukrainian authorities in the field of the humanities, language policy and the politics of historical memory.

In March 2022 in Kiev, Olena Berezhnaya, a lawyer and human rights activist, well known for her anti-fascist positions, was detained and placed in a pre-trial detention center under suspicion under Article 111 of the Criminal Code, i.e., for treason. Just a few months prior, in December 2021, she had spoken at the UN Security Council about the lawlessness in Ukraine.

On March 3, 2022, the SBU detained the left-wing activists and anti-fascist brothers Alexander and Mikhail Kononovich in Kiev on charges of violating Article 109 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (“actions aimed at forcibly changing the constitutional order or seizing state power”). They were placed in a pre-trial detention center until the end of 2022, where they were beaten and tortured, and denied timely medical assistance.

In May 2022, in Dnipro, the SBU detained the brother of the former presidential candidate Oleg Tsarev, citizen of Ukraine Mikhail Tsarev, on charges of “destabilizing the socio-political situation in the region.” As a result, in December 2022, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison on charges of terrorism.

On March 7, 2022, six activists of the opposition organization Patriots for Life disappeared without a trace in Severodonetsk. In May 2022, one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, Maxim Zhorin, posted a photo of their dead bodies on the Internet, claiming that they “were executed,” and that their murder was connected to their political views and carried out by paramilitary structures.

On January 12, 2023, Sergei Titov, a resident of Belaya Tserkov, a half-blind and disabled person with a mental illness, was detained and placed in a pre-trial detention center. He was declared a 'saboteur.' On March 2, 2023, it was reported that he had died in the pre-trial detention center.

In February 2023, Dmitry Skvortsov, an Orthodox publicist and blogger, was detained in a monastery near Kiev and placed in a pre-trial detention center.

Since November 2022, Dmitry Shymko from Khmelnytsky has been in the dungeons for his political beliefs.

Hundreds of ordinary people have already been prosecuted in today’s Ukraine for distributing political content on the Internet that the authorities considered prohibited.

The authorities have taken under tight control the information space of Ukraine, including the Internet. Any personal publication of citizens about mistakes at the front, about corruption among the authorities and the military, and about the lies of officials are declared to be crimes. Such individuals, as well as bloggers and administrators of TG channels, are subject to harassment by the police and the Security Service.

By the spring of this year, according to the SBU, 26 Telegram channels were blocked—channels on which people had informed each other about the locations where military summons were being handed out. Six Telegram channel administrators were searched and charged with crimes. Thus, public pages were blocked in the Ivano-Frankivsk, Cherkasy, Vinnitsa, Chernivtsi, Kiev, Lviv and Odessa regions. These pages had more than 400,000 subscribers. The public administrators of these channels face 10 years in prison.

In March 2022, Article 436-2 (“Justification, recognition as lawful, denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, glorification of its participants”) was introduced into the Criminal Code of Ukraine. In reality, it is directed against any citizens of Ukraine who have views that differ from the official government line.

This new law is formulated in such a way that, in essence, it provides for punishment for “thought crimes”—words or phrases spoken not only publicly, but also in a private conversation, written in a private messenger or SMS message, or said over the phone. In fact, we are talking about an invasion of the privacy of citizens and of their thoughts. This, in fact, has been confirmed by the practice of law enforcement—conviction for likes, private phone calls, and so on. For simple conversations on the street and likes on the Internet under posts, as of March 2023 there have been 380 sentences, based on court records, including those sentenced to prison.

Thus, in June 2022, in Dnipro, a resident of Mariupol was sentenced to five years in prison, with a trial period of two years. In March 2022, the individual had claimed that shelling of the civilian population and civilian infrastructure in Mariupol was carried out by servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Another sentence, based on a telephone conversation in March 2023, was handed down against a resident of Odessa. That person was sentenced to two years on probation for “unpatriotic and anti-state” conversations on a mobile phone.

A resident of the village of Maly Bobrik in the Sumy region was convicted under Part 1 of Art. 436-2 of the Criminal Code in June 2022 and sentenced to a term of six months in prison because she had, in April 2022, near her yard and in the presence of three persons, expressed approval of the actions of the Russian authorities in relation to Ukraine, and later refused to admit her guilt.

At least 25 Ukrainians have been convicted of “anti-Ukrainian activities” on social media. Nineteen people were found by law enforcement officers in Odnoklassniki and held in the country. According to the investigation, these residents of Ukraine distributed “Z” symbols and Russian flags on their pages and called the invasion “liberation.”

Sentences were also handed down against those who did not distribute such publications, but only “liked” them (i.e., expressed a form of approval on social media). The texts of at least two sentences say that the so-called “likes” had the goal of “bringing the idea to a wide range of people of changing the borders of the territory of Ukraine,” and “justifying the armed aggression of the Russian Federation.” The investigators justified the prosecutions on the grounds that personal pages have open access, and liked publications can be seen by many people.

For instance, in May 2022, in Uman, a pensioner was sentenced to two years in prison with a probationary period of a year for “rejection of the current Ukrainian authorities... on the Odnoklassniki Internet network,” having put down “likes... to a number of publications that justify the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.”

In Kremenchug in May 2022, a citizen of Ukraine was convicted under article 436-2 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. Using a pseudonym, this individual had spoken on the social media platform Odnoklassniki about the Nazis in Ukraine and the development of biological weapons funded by the Pentagon.

The repressive actions carried out by the current government to fight against those who disagree with it have turned Ukraine into the most repressive state in Europe, a state where any person who dares to oppose the authorities, the oligarchy, nationalism and neo-Nazism risks freedom and often even their life.

We ask you to disseminate this information as widely as possible, since in the current situation only wide international publicity about the facts presented in this article can help save thousands of people whose freedom and life are now under serious threat in Ukraine.

[truth-has-a-liberal-bias]

The “Independent Legislature Theory” Explained, in Relation to the Jan. 6th Insurrection

...

The “independent legislature theory” embraces the idea that the state legislatures can simply pick their own electors, either through sham findings of “fraud’ or in open defiance of the popular vote. And nobody can take them to court or stop them, because they have the “independent” power to do as they please.

On January 6, 2021, this was the theory that the Republican coup plotters actually attempted to put into effect.

In the run-up to the coup attempt, pro-Trump legislators in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin submitted alternate slates of electors—on the theory that the legislature could invalidate the popular vote and declare Trump the winner.

The coup was to take place on January 6, the day set for a joint session of the US Congress to certify the Electoral College vote. Trump’s fascist mob was unleashed to storm the US Capitol and compel Congress to halt the certification.

Working in tandem with far-right Republican representatives and senators who raised objections to the duly certified elector slates from certain states won by Biden, Trump’s fascist foot soldiers were to create the conditions, if necessary by kidnapping and killing elected officials, for Trump to declare an emergency and maintain power as de facto dictator. The fake elector slates submitted by Republican state legislatures were to be used to give the coup a pseudo-legal cover.

The North Carolina case itself arises from a brazen instance of partisan gerrymandering on the part of the state legislature, which the state’s own Supreme Court struck down as illegal.  While the case has attracted national attention because of the invocation of the “independent legislature theory,” it is also highly revealing as a case study of an anti-democratic conspiracy by state government officials to subvert the will of the state’s citizens. [,,,]

Full story here from World Socialist Web Site

[drsonnet]

There has as yet been no mention of the implications of the WNV (West Nile Fever) outbreak for the 2 million and more Gazans who are trapped in the enclave under conditions where the entire infrastructure has been demolished and access to healthcare, food, water and shelter are nonexistent. There is no way to implement standard public health precautions such as preventing formation of standing water and widespread use of mosquito repellent. Gaza has become a breeding ground for infectious diseases, with the entire population made vulnerable to large scale epidemics of not just WNV, but flu, pneumonia, bacterial dysentery, cholera, polio, measles and meningitis. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) noted in mid-April that even if an immediate ceasefire were implemented, they expected nearly 12,000 people would lose their lives in Gaza as a result of disease. And if the genocidal campaign persisted, nearly 90,000 could die of secondary health impacts. Dr. Seema Jilani, Senior Health Technical Advisor for Emergencies, observed, “With Gaza’s health system decimated by Israel, diseases once easily controlled are now spreading, and children, especially malnourished children, are the most susceptible. Projections suggest that the spread of cholera, measles, polio, and meningococcal meningitis pose a mortal threat … Immunity, previously ensured thanks to high levels of vaccination, is now decreasing especially among children and babies, who have now missed multiple doses of key vaccines including Hepatitis B, polio, and rotavirus.” Jilani added, “Respiratory infections and other endemic infectious diseases are currently widespread due to exposure, overcrowding in shelters, lack of access to proper sanitation facilities, and inability to access treatment. The IRC and partners working in Gaza have seen children die from diarrhea—affecting children at rates 25 times higher than before October 7th—otherwise easily treated with fluids and antibiotics. Half of the over 330,000 respiratory infections reported from October to January were children under 5, many of whom might face fatal or debilitating consequences given the current state of health care in Gaza.”

West Nile fever epidemic in Israel - World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org)

[amethyinst]

from world socialist web site a trotskyist platform. i now hate trots

[sortyourlifeoutmate]

I remain mystified by this "World Socialist Web Site" as it appears - at a glance - to be a few stories on people here or there forming unions, peppered with other articles on how Ukraine should surrender in its US/NATO proxy war (against, uh, someone - it's not important who), and then things like this where they've apparently checked what the general consensus is and deliberately gone against it, presumably because being contrary is socialist?

Unclear how this is a class issue. Hmm.

Also, as an aside, big fan of the people I've seen attacking Brand as a pawn of the globalist elite. I love the idea of two sides tearing each other to shreds over whether someone is speaking The Truth or is actually just a tool of The Elites when the someone they're talking about is Russel fucking Brand, noted and notorious sex pest, now highly-paid podcast lunatic.

What a time to be alive.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Brazil’s Congress launches January 8 coup inquiry as Lula covers for the military

More than four months after the fascist storming of the seats of political power in Brasilia by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, the Brazilian Congress has begun a Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPMI) into the Acts of January 8, 2023. The presentation of the agenda for the six-month investigation, which was scheduled for Thursday, has been postponed until next week.

The events that this Commission of Inquiry are to investigate represent the biggest shock to Brazil’s civilian regime since it was established in1985-88, after 21 years of military dictatorship. The attempted coup of January 8, which was unquestionably prepared at the highest echelons of the state and the armed forces, revealed that sections of the Brazilian ruling class are determined to dispense with any democratic facade and reestablish dictatorship as their means of exercising political power.

As the World Socialist Web Site wrote in January, the attack in Brasilia “represented both the culmination of the offensive by Bolsonaro and his civilian and military allies to promote a coup to overturn the election, and the first episode in a new political stage of the developing fascist movement in Brazil.”

The response of the Brazilian establishment in the following months, particularly that of the Workers Party (PT) government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has demonstrated that there exists no faction of the bourgeoisie that is capable or willing to respond to the growing fascist threat. The conditions in which the parliamentary investigation into the coup attempt is being held only confirm this elementary truth. 

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