That's Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Pride of the Boomers, Pride of the Senate" which went up less than an hour ago.
First up, some very bad economic news. Jerry White (WSWS) reports:
The Yellow bankruptcy and mass layoffs are intended as a ruthless act of intimidation against all workers. Confronting an increasingly militant movement of the working class, the Biden administration has decided to allow the company to go into bankruptcy as a warning, aimed particularly at the 340,000 United Parcel Service (UPS) workers who will begin voting on a sellout agreement backed by the Teamsters union apparatus this week.
While Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien has hailed the UPS agreement as “historic,” it has provoked a firestorm of rank-and-file opposition for maintaining the poverty wages of part-time workers, who make up two-thirds of the workforce, and including a de facto freeze in real wages for package delivery drivers, plus reduced pension payments in Western states.
More than 22,000 Yellow workers were prepared to strike on July 24 after the company reneged on its pension payments earlier this month. The Teamsters bureaucracy suddenly called off the strike, however, claiming it had reached a deal with Yellow to pay its $50 million pension obligation within two weeks.
It is now clear that the Teamsters leadership had no intention of calling a strike at Yellow, and its announcement justifying the decision was based on lies. The union bureaucracy was well aware that the company was headed towards bankruptcy, but was determined to prevent a strike lest it embolden UPS workers and other sections of the working class. Making clear the union bureaucracy would not conduct even the pretense of a fight against mass layoffs, Teamsters President O’Brien said over the weekend, “Today’s news is unfortunate but not surprising.”
That rally in Charlottesville may not be remembered for its ties to right-wing Christianity, but as Anthea Butler, a professor of religion at the University of Pennsylvania, explains in a report on Christian nationalism and the January 6 insurrection, “The Klan has been an unmistakable symbol of white Christian nationalism.” The Confederacy itself, Butler notes, was explicitly founded as a “Christian nation,” and slaveholder Christianity was central to the postbellum mythology of the South. The monument that the white supremacists in Charlottesville were there to protect was, of course, a statue of Robert E. Lee.
It’s important, then, to understand the presence of Blackmon and her many colleagues that night and the following day in Charlottesville—described vividly by the journalist Jack Jenkins in American Prophets (2020), his deeply reported book on the religious left in the United States—as a form of prophetic witness to a new, dark chapter in American democracy’s reckoning with white Christian nationalism. That reckoning began well before Donald Trump’s election—the long march of the Christian right toward overtly racist nationalism is an old story—but we saw it most dramatically in Charlottesville and on January 6, 2021, when violent insurrectionists stormed the US Capitol carrying crosses and flags, including Confederate battle flags. It’s also evident, more insidiously, in the Republican Party’s attacks on elections and voting rights, on reproductive rights and LGBTQ folks, on the First Amendment and public education, and in the banning of books on race, gender, and the uglier sides of American history.
Blackmon, who lives in St. Louis—and was deeply engaged in the protests on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., in 2014—is now the associate general minister for the United Church of Christ, one of the major mainline Protestant denominations, and the senior pastor of Christ the King UCC, a historic Black congregation in Florissant, Mo. When asked what a progressive Christian response could or should look like in this moment, she immediately drew a contrast with the highly organized Christian right. Those on the right, she said, “have created a long-term strategy.” Progressive Christians, on the other hand, “are wrestling, because we don’t have a strategy. We don’t have a collective response; we don’t have a unified response.”
Blackmon also noted that some of the campaigns most closely associated with Christian nationalism—especially the attacks on LGBTQ rights and the Supreme Court’s religiously motivated assault on women’s bodily autonomy—not only pervade right-wing white evangelicalism and Catholicism, “they are very much present in conservative Black churches.” Christian nationalism, she said, “has found its way into the Latinx community, into the Black community.”
“The fact that we’ve refused to speak out against it in our pulpits and in our theology,” Blackmon said, “has left us ill-equipped in this moment. There are people who will push back strongly against racism but won’t push back at all against sexism. There are people who will push back against sexism and racism, but [calling out] heterosexism is a bit too far. There are people who will push back against all of those but aren’t willing to risk their class status. We have to decide what it means to be on the progressive side of the Gospel.”
This is C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot" for Monday:
A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.
Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the
Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the
whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident
US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have
leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters
and civilian killings in the Afghan war.
The new logs detail how:
•
US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse,
torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct
appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.
• A US helicopter gunship involved in a
notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after
they tried to surrender.
• More than 15,000 civilians died in
previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no
official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081
non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent deat
The Biden administration has been saying all the right things lately about respecting a free and vigorous press, after four years of relentless media-bashing and legal assaults under Donald Trump.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, has even put in place expanded protections for journalists this fall, saying that “a free and independent press is vital to the functioning of our democracy”.
But the biggest test of Biden’s commitment remains imprisoned in a jail cell in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been held since 2019 while facing prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act, a century-old statute that has never been used before for publishing classified information.
Whether the US justice department continues to pursue the Trump-era charges against the notorious leaker, whose group put out secret information on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, American diplomacy and internal Democratic politics before the 2016 election, will go a long way toward determining whether the current administration intends to make good on its pledges to protect the press.
Now Biden is facing a re-energized push, both inside the United States and overseas, to drop Assange’s protracted prosecution.
Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, is a liar.
To be specific, his statement at the weekend that Julian Assange’s actions in publishing US cables and defence material “risk[ed] very serious harm to our national security” is a clear, indeed blatant, lie.
Let’s cite the authorities who over the years have confirmed that WikiLeaks’ publication of the Chelsea Manning material, including the Iraq and Afghan war logs, did little or no harm to national security:
- Barack Obama’s defence secretary at the time of the releases, Robert M Gates: “I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer, and so on. I think — I think those descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought. The fact is, governments deal with the United States because it’s in their interest, not because they like us, not because they trust us, and not because they believe we can keep secrets … Other nations will continue to deal with us. They will continue to work with us. We will continue to share sensitive information with one another. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for US foreign policy? I think fairly modest”;
- The US Department of Defense in a secret report obtained by Buzzfeed in 2017: no “significant impact”; “disclosure of the Iraq data set will have no direct personal impact on current and former US leadership in Iraq”;
- Officials of Blinken’s department briefing Congress in 2010: “We were told [the impact of WikiLeaks revelations] was embarrassing but not damaging”;
- US military officials at the trial of Chelsea Manning: “I don’t have a specific example,” when asked to confirm the much-vaunted claim that the releases had placed the lives of US sources in danger.
Blinken knows all this. He worked as an adviser to Joe Biden when the latter was vice president under Obama. Yet he continues to peddle the lie that the Manning material damaged national security.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has denied several times this lie, as Assange neither did espionage activities, violated laws, nor any of the 18 charges by the US government.
The Mexican leader insisted that the major problem is that Assange told the truth about what really happened in Iraq and other places, uncovered corruption and violation of rights and laws in the United States, so that´s why they want to silence him and punish him for using his right to freedom of speech.
The move is expected to strengthen a central Australian Defence Force framework – Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance (GWEO) – which underpins fundamental assets of the nation’s military including manufacturing, storage and distribution, disposal, and research and development.
By signing the monumental agreement, Australia will be able to both carve its place as a major player in weapons export and also grow domestic stockpiles through on-shore production.
The deal was finalised in a bilateral meet between Defence Minister Richard Marles and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Friday.
Turkey renewed its air strikes on PKK positions in northern Iraq on Sunday.
Issuing a statement, the Turkish Ministry of Defense declared that PKK positions were targeted during these airstrikes.
News sources also announced that 2 terrorists were killed in the attacks.
Turkish ministry's statement also said that the armed forces of this country continue to fight effectively and decisively against terrorists to eradicate terrorism.
Under the pretext of fighting PKK terrorists, Turkey has deployed its troops in areas of northern Iraq and Syria and is conducting aerial attacks on parts of the northern areas of these countries.
Turkish airstrikes that allegedly targeted a civilian hospital and killed eight people in Iraq have been made the subject of a formal complaint to the UN human rights council.
It is the first case to be brought on the issue of Turkish airstrikes against the Yazidi people. The attack on 17 August 2021 destroyed the Sikeniye medical clinic in Sinjar and left more than 20 people injured.
The four claimants, either survivors or witnesses to the airstrikes, say they violated their right to life under international law, as guaranteed by article 6 of the international covenant on civil and political rights.
Further, the claimants allege that Turkey failed to investigate the killing of civilians resulting from the airstrikes and provide victims with effective remedies, constituting a violation of their rights to a prompt, independent and effective investigation under the same covenant.
A North Carolina school board censured one of its Christian members for posting an anti-LGBTQ+ image on social media that showed an American figure assaulting an LGBTQ+ figure. The Christian man defended posting the image, saying he had free speech rights to oppose “woke” cultural issues.
The Mount Airy Board of Education held a special meeting on July 10 to censure board member Randy Moore, a U.S. Army veteran who was appointed to the board in January 2021. Moore had posted a Facebook image of a figure in red, white, and blue colors kicking the midsection of another rainbow-colored figure symbolizing the LGBTQ+ community, The Mount Airy News reported.
- Truest statement of the week
- Truest statement of the week II
- A note to our readers
- Oil rich Iraq can't even deliver electricity to th...
- TV: The strike and what it boils down to
- A look at Cornel West's campaign
- Books (Stan, Ava and C.I.)
- 2023 Passings
- Books
- Tweet of the week
- This edition's playlist
- Highlights
