[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Posted by DanielS on Wednesday, 26 February 2020 12:17.
27:10: It is Poland’s explicit policy after 1935 to rid itself of 90% of its Jewish population. Given that there were more than three million Jews in Poland that’s a very large number. ..but from their point of view, the way to get rid of the Jews was to support right wing Jewish terrorists who are going to make a lot of trouble in Palestine so there could be a Jewish state.
...from the Nazi point of view, anti-Semitism is part of [their concept of] racial anarchy. The Nazi point of view is that Jews are the ones who are in the way of a racial struggle, which is non-political.
The Polish point of view is different. The Polish point of view is attached to the state. They don’t understand that the Nazis are about racial anarchy. ...the[y think rather that the] way to handle whatever problem they’re defining, even what they see as the struggle against Jews, is by way of states. So, you either negotiate with the British or behind their back you find a way to create a state in Palestine and then you can get the Jews sent off there.
...to emphasize the point that there are different kinds of anti-Semitism, it’s not just a matter of turning up the dial or turning down a dial ..or who is more anti-Semitic the Poles or the Germans.. there are issues of quality here which matter, especially when the quality has to do with the state. ..but where we’ve gotten to in history is the moment where Germany starts to destroy states. Where this theory of state destruction actually becomes practice.
30:40: Poland is where Hitler finally gets his war. It’s not the war that he wanted; it’s not a war that he had planned; it’s not a war that he expected. But when he made war against Poland it was the first war that he prosecuted while actively destroying the state.
When he talks to his high officers in July/ August 1939, before the war… early September 1939, what he tells them is that this war is not like other wars. It’s not about territory. It’s not about victory. It’s not about seizing a certain amount of land. It’s about destroying Poland as a state and as a nation.
In other words, it’s not just about destroying the Polish army; but about coming into the country, declaring that the civil code no longer functions; the Polish state does not exist; (this is where it gets interesting) the Polish state has never existed.
So, the claim that they make when they enter Poland is basically the same kind of claim that European imperialists made beyond Europe; that the territory we’re entering is uninhabited, at least in the sense of being uninhabited by political beings.
So, Poland is treated colonially in the sense that the Polish state is not acknowledged as an institution; actively not acknowledged. And the people who are thought to represent it, whether they are military officers, whether they are civilian politicians, whether they are Roman Catholic priests, are physically eliminated - killed: in the tens of thousands. That’s not an accident. That’s part of the idea of destroying the Polish state.
Posted by DanielS on Thursday, 20 February 2020 07:20.
Salvini quotes Ezra Pound, “If a man is not ready to fight for his ideas, either his ideas are worthless, or he is,”
Italian ethnonationalist leader Matteo Salvini is to stand trial on charges of illegally detaining migrants at sea after senators voted Wednesday to strip him of his parliamentary immunity.
A court in Sicily recommended that former interior minister Salvini stand trial for blocking migrants from disembarking from a coast guard boat last July.
But ministers cannot be tried for actions taken while in office unless their parliamentary immunity is revoked.
The Senate’s decision sends the chief of the anti-immigrant League party to trial for abuse of power and illegal detention, charges for which he faces up to 15 years in jail.
“I have defended Italy. I have full and total faith in the justice system,” Salvini told ANSA news agency after the vote.
“I am not worried at all, and I’m proud of what I’ve done,” he said, adding he would “do it again when I get back into power.”
Salvini had refused to allow 116 rescued migrants to leave the Gregoretti coast guard boat – where they had been languishing for about a week in insalubrious conditions – until a deal was reached with other European states to host them.
A Catania court accused him of “abuse of power” in blocking them on board from July 27 to July 31 last year, and of illegally detaining them.
Salvini insists the decision had the backing of the government and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte.
‘Head Held High’
Before the debate began, Salvini took to Facebook to say he had his “head held high, with the calm conscience of those who have defended their land and people.”
“If a man is not ready to fight for his ideas, either his ideas are worthless, or he is,” Salvini wrote, quoting Ezra Pound, a 20th-century American poet known for his fascist sympathies.
The Gregoretti on July 25 took on board 140 migrants who were trying to make the perilous crossing from war-torn Libya to Europe – the same day 110 migrants drowned off the Libyan coast.
After refusing to sign a pledge of allegiance to the state of Israel, the state of Georgia shut down a media literacy conference featuring journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin at Georgia Southern University. Martin had recently released a documentary critical of the Israeli government called “Gaza Fights for Freedom.” Now she is suing the state, claiming the decision is a violation of the First Amendment. Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), today she filed a federal free speech lawsuit against the university system of Georgia.
Martin was dismayed by the university’s decision: “This censorship of my talk based on forced compliance to anti-BDS laws in Georgia is just one level of a nationwide campaign to protect Israel from grassroots pressure. We must stand firmly opposed to these efforts and not cower in fear to these blatant violations of free speech,” she said.
Abby Martin
✔
@AbbyMartin
After I was scheduled to give keynote speech at an upcoming @GeorgiaSouthern conference, organizers said I must comply w/ Georgia’s anti-BDS law & sign a contractual pledge to not boycott Israel. I refused & my talk was canceled. The event fell apart after colleagues supported me
Twenty-eight states have already mandated loyalty pledges to Israel as a means to outlaw dissent. But in December, President Trump passed legislation effectively criminalizing the Boycott Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) movement that aims to put pressure on the Jewish state through economic action, along the lines of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. The law mandates that any public institution would be subject to losing all funding if the government deems that they are not doing enough to stamp out anti-Semitism, which, it explicitly states, includes any criticism of the Israeli government. In December, MintPress reported that the British government under Boris Johnson is planning to introduce similar legislation.
“The hyperbolic notion that conservatives are the ones being persecuted on college campuses has made blatant censorship campaigns against people for criticism of Israel, or other progressive protests, go completely ignored,” Martin wrote:
CAIR’s Legal Defense Fund Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas said,
“There is no place where free speech is more important than on campus. And this attempt to suppress Abby’s views – denying students, academics, and others from hearing her lecture – is as brazen as it is illegal. In adopting this anti-BDS law, Georgia has prioritized the policy preferences of a foreign country over the free speech rights of Americans, like Abby, who speak on this state’s college campuses.”
While US advocates and local politicians struggle to get their first public banks chartered, Mexico’s new president has begun construction on 2,700 branches of a government-owned bank to be completed in 2021, when it will be the largest bank in the country. At a press conference on Jan. 6, he said the neoliberal model had failed; private banks weren’t serving the poor and people outside the cities, so the government had to step in.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) has been compared to the United Kingdom’s left-wing opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, with one notable difference: AMLO is now in power. He and his left-wing coalition won by a landslide in Mexico’s 2018 general election, overturning the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that had ruled the country for much of the past century. Called Mexico’s “first full-fledged left-wing experiment,” AMLO’s election marks a dramatic change in the political direction of the country. AMLO wrote in his 2018 book “A New Hope for Mexico,” “In Mexico the governing class constitutes a gang of plunderers…. Mexico will not grow strong if our public institutions remain at the service of the wealthy elites.”
The new president has held to his campaign promises. In 2019, his first year in office, he did what Donald Trump pledged to do — “drain the swamp” — purging the government of technocrats and institutions he considered corrupt, profligate or impeding the transformation of Mexico after 36 years of failed market-focused neoliberal policies. Other accomplishments have included substantially increasing the minimum wage while cutting top government salaries and oversize pensions; making small loans and grants directly to farmers; guaranteeing crop prices for key agricultural crops; launching programs to benefit youth, the disabled and the elderly; and initiating a $44 billion infrastructure plan. López Obrador’s goal, he says, is to construct a “new paradigm” in economic policy that improves human welfare, not just increases gross domestic product.
The End of the Neoliberal Era
To deliver on that promise, in July 2019 AMLO converted the publicly owned federal savings bank Bansefi into a “Bank of the Poor” (Banco del Bienestar or “Welfare Bank”). He said on Jan. 6 that the neoliberal era had eliminated all the state-owned banks but one, which he had gotten approval to expand with 2,700 new branches. Added to the existing 538 branches of the former Bansefi, that will bring the total in two years to 3,238 branches, far outstripping any other bank in the country. (Banco Azteca, currently the largest by number of branches, has 1,860.)
Digital banking will also be developed. Speaking to a local group in December, AMLO said his goal was for the Bank of the Poor to reach 13,000 branches, more than all the private banks in the country combined.
At a news conference on Jan. 8, he explained why this new bank was needed:
There are more than 1,000 municipalities that don’t have a bank branch. We’re dispersing [welfare] resources but we don’t have a way to do it. ...People have to go to branches that are two, three hours away. If we don’t bring these services close to the people, we’re not going to bring development to them…
They’re already building. I’ll invite you within two months, three at the most, to the inauguration of the first branches because they’re already working, they’re getting the land … because we have to do it quickly.
Salvini quotes Ezra Pound, “If a man is not ready to fight for his ideas, either his ideas are worthless, or he is,”
Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute; author of twelve books including “Web of Debt” and “The Public Bank Solution.”