Kat had an interesting post about Valerie Bertinelli awhile back, "Okay, so I'm griping about Valerie Bertinelli." Pairing it with this article, I'm done Val. I'm not watching your program anymore. You had some sense once upon a time. Now you don't. Please don't confuse yourself by saying, "A right winger won't listen to me anymore." I am a Democrat -- I'm just not a stupid one. You clearly are. I remember rooting for you when you were auditioning to join Regis. You had a lot of common sense then. Now it's gone. And it's not just politics. It's also you acting as though you're Eddie's widow. You've truly lost it. I won't be watching you on The Food Network anymore. And I really hope they drop you because you are not at all what you once presented. In fact, I see her dizzy smile now and hear Judy Collins singing "Marat/Sade."
Do people know that song today? It's from Judy's 60s album In My Life.
Actually, it's from a Broadway play, but Judy recorded it for that album.
Kat also had a great review this weekend -- she covered six new albums in "Kat's Korner: Simple Minds, Donna Summer, Barbra Streisand, Billy Joel, Frank Sinatra and Joss Stone."
At WSWS, Dominic Gustavo reports:
The deadline to mail in ballots in the UAW election to ensure that they are counted is fast approaching (November 18). Vote for Will Lehman and mail your ballot today! If you have not received a ballot, go to uawvote.com and request one immediately. For more information on Lehman’s campaign, visit WillforUAWPresident.org.
On Sunday, over 150 workers and supporters attended an online campaign rally held by United Auto Workers (UAW) presidential candidate Will Lehman.
The rally began with a powerful video of Lehman, a second-tier worker at Mack trucks in Macungie, Pennsylvania, explaining the basis of his campaign, accompanied by statements of support from workers across the US and, importantly, autoworkers in Mexico.
Lehman began his remarks by stating, “This campaign is about placing power where it belongs: with workers on the shop floor. I urge you to vote for me, and to talk to your coworkers about voting… By supporting my campaign, you are supporting the fight for rank-and-file power.”
The video showcased a compilation of workers throughout the country stating why they were voting for Lehman and describing the degrading conditions they were seeking to overcome. One worker at the Warren Truck plant in Michigan, asked about workers holding the power in the factories, replied, “That’s the way it should be.”
Lehman pointed to the deaths of workers in various industries, including Caterpillar worker Steven Dierkes, incinerated in a molten iron crucible in June; Illinois Stellantis worker and father of four Travis Baker, who died after being injured in August; and Catherine Pace, who died in March 2020 after contracting COVID-19 at the Stellantis Warren Truck Plant near Detroit. “The companies see these workers as less valuable than machines, who can be replaced as easily as replacing a part,” Lehman said.
At the same time, an unaccountable bureaucracy had developed within the UAW, Lehman explained, blocking workers’ struggles while enriching itself. “The UAW is staffed by people whose collective salaries are $75 million a year. Over 450 staff make over $100,000 a year, including two of my opponents, UAW president Ray Curry and international rep. Shawn Fain.”
He went on, “There is a massive parasitic apparatus sitting on top of us, dictating what we do, in bed with management, bribed and bought off.”
Will would be a great leader.
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Monday:
Any electoral success for the Republicans is due entirely to the reactionary and bankrupt policies of the Democratic Party and the impasse for the working class created by the two-party monopoly.
What have been the main “achievements” of the Democratic Party during the past two years, when it controlled the White House and both houses of Congress?
The central preoccupation of the Biden administration has been the prosecution of the war against Russia in Ukraine, which has the full support of the entire Democratic Party. This was reinforced two weeks ago when 30 liberal Democrats sent a letter to the White House pleading for a negotiated settlement with Russia rather than continuing to escalate the risk of nuclear war.
Within 24 hours, after a massive backlash within the political establishment, the letter was withdrawn and the leader of the “Progressive Caucus” issued a humiliating apology, reaffirming the group’s support for prosecuting the war until “victory.”
Inflation is skyrocketing and working class living standards are being slashed. The Federal Reserve is pursuing a deliberate policy of increasing unemployment through the raising of interest rates in an effort to use social misery as a bludgeon against demands for wage increases.
In two years in office, the Democrats have done nothing to improve the conditions of the vast majority of the population. The White House dropped any push for voting rights legislation. It did nothing to protect the rights of immigrants, instead stepping up the deportation and exclusion of asylum seekers to record levels, beyond even the level of the Trump administration. It regards women’s right to abortion as a means of motivating people to vote, while refusing to defend it in practice.
And, confronted with a party that sought to overturn the 2020 election and block Biden’s own inauguration through the methods of coup and political assassination, the Democrats have shielded the Republican Party.
Nearly two years after the coup attempt, neither Trump nor any of his top co-conspirators has been prosecuted. There has been no serious investigation into the January 6 conspiracy or the social and political forces behind it.
Since Biden’s speech last Wednesday, warning that Trump and his allies represent a dire threat to democracy, he and other leading Democrats have turned the declaration that “democracy is on the ballot” into a hollow sound bite.
The differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, however bitter and intense, are entirely tactical.
In domestic policy, the Democrats seek to use the trade union apparatus to suppress the working class, while employing the demagogues of identity politics to split the working class along race and gender lines. The Republicans wish to dispense with the unions, which are rapidly losing their ability to hold back the class struggle, and proceed directly to the deployment of the police and military violence.
On the fundamental question of which class they serve, the Democrats and Republicans are united. They are different components of a two-party system of capitalist-imperialist reaction.
Among the wounded is Major General Kadhim Bohan, head of the Iraqi civil defense directorate, while twelve other people who were trapped inside the building remain unaccounted for. Search parties continue in their search for the missing, according to Brigadier General Qusai Younis, head of Baghdad's al-Rusafa Civil Defense
The cause of the fire is still unknown.
The building houses large stores of perfumes and household items.
The huge blaze required the deployment of sixty civil defense teams and more than 50 firefighting vehicles, in an operation that took up to 10 hours according to Younis.
After a year-long crisis in Iraq triggered by contested elections, Iraq finally has a government headed by Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani. While this ends the political impasse, it’s unclear whether his new cabinet will bring about change or usher in more of the same.
Al-Sudani is backed by the Coordination Framework, an alliance of powerful pro-Iran Shi’a factions that holds 138 out of 329 seats in parliament. The Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Sadrist movement that won a plurality of parliamentary seats in the October 2021 elections played no part in picking either the prime minister or the new president — a first since Iraq’s democratic transition, which does not bode well for a government that now effectively lacks legitimacy.
The new government will also need to fend off the sporadic but persistent protests that have swayed the country since October 2019 and are likely to regain momentum. These demonstrations, which forced the resignation of the government of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi in 2019 and prompted an early election, reflect public frustration with long-unaddressed demands. Over the past three years, a coalition of protestors, activists and youth-led entities has since formed to push the government to address the country’s dysfunction through changes in the political system.
Outrage over corruption continues to be the major driver for the demand for reform of a power-sharing system that divides government posts among Iraq’s communities and fuels patronage-based abuse. It has not gone unnoticed that the new government has formed using the same methods and tactics and the same parties that have dominated Iraqi politics since 2005. Citizens may well ask, why should corruption change if the system that produces it has not? The latest corruption scandal at the Ministry of Finance involving the theft of $2.5 billion from the tax authority could implicate many who enjoy the support of powerful political parties in Iraq, including those backing the prime minister.
The new bill, titled Serving the Flag, has been drafted by the Iraqi parliament’s security and defense committee and proposes assigning all Iraqi men between the ages of 18 to 35, with limited exceptions, to mandatory military duty, according to the deputy-chairman of the parliamentary committee Sagvan Sindi.
The length of the service differs based on the academic level of the recruited, Sindi added. The draft compels secondary school graduates to 18 months of military service, preparatory school graduates to 12 months, university and institute graduates to 9 months, master’s graduates to 6 months, and doctorate graduates to 3 months.
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