The Musical Chairs Musk And Trump Were Talm'bout.....,

sentinalcolorado  |   The city’s heightened alert comes after 3,000 to 4,000 Venezuelan migrants and their sympathizers met up in the parking lot of the Gardens on Havana shopping center on July 28 to await election results. Most in the crowd expected the ouster of incumbent strongman Nicolás Maduro, who later declared himself the winner of another six-year term.

Aurora police acknowledge they were not prepared for the convergence of so many people crammed at the southern end of the strip center in front of the Target store where witnesses reported shots fired into the air. Traffic was snarled because of all the parked cars. Some stores, whose customers said they were rattled by the noise of Venezuelans honking horns and banging on pots, chose to close early. The lot was strewn with beer bottles and trash.

Police say no injuries were reported, no arrests were made and nobody was ticketed or summoned.

Still, some anti-immigrant members of the community seized the opportunity to post on social media that the gathering was a riot and that it was organized by the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua (TDA). 

Police disputed those claims. They also debunked a Facebook post by Aurora Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky that “Thousands of these folks took over and completely shut down a part of our city. The police were totally overrun, and were forced to get out of the area for their safety.”

City officials have repeatedly disputed that account.

“Police did not leave, and were there for the entire event,” Aurora spokesperson Ryan Luby said in a statement.

Meanwhile, in Venezuela, Maduro’s claim to victory over opposition candidate Edmundo González remains contested, and his government has arrested thousands of protestors and otherwise cracked down on dissent.

Several Latin American countries, as well as the United States and European Union have held off on recognizing election results and demanded detailed data from Venezuelan polling stations to analyze the outcome.

By Thursday afternoon, leaders of Brazil and Colombia were calling for a new election with safeguards against ballot tampering and miscounts. In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden expressed support for new elections in comments to reporters that the White House later appeared to back away from.

Another convergence of Venezuelans is expected this Saturday now that opposition leader María Corina Machado has called for her supporters to “take to the streets” worldwide to rally in support of her party’s claim that González beat Maduro in a landslide.

“Let’s shout together for the world to support our victory and recognize truth and popular sovereignty,” she has said.

Venezuelans are still weighing where to gather Saturday in metro Denver, which has seen an influx of about 40,000 migrants in the last few years.

Some solo and others with young children have wound their way to North American and Colorado to flee poverty and violence back home. Most don’t have immigration papers, and several have told the Sentinel they’re torn between a desire to rally against what they see as a tyrant’s stolen election and their fear of being arrested here for protesting, then deported at a time of extreme upheaval back home.

Aurora’s Global Fest, the city’s biggest annual festival, will take place this weekend on the Aurora Municipal Center’s Great Lawn, the site of many political demonstrations in the last several years.

The city’s police posted on social media earlier this week that it is “actively monitoring the situation due to recent events” and “will provide communication and updates to our community if we learn of any large gatherings planned for or taking place in Aurora.”

Class Proxy War Gone Wild

 

I see this as a class proxy war gone insane: 

The wealthy want wage pressure on those below them in society. One way to do this is to import people from different cultures, and replace workers with others. This results in a low trust society: low trust in policing, media coverage, justice, the puppeticians and even the functioning of democracy. 

This wage pressure is leading working people to not have children, because children are expensive and hard to combine with one or more precarious jobs. Instead the imported people, who have better family networks, and who have no compunctions in demanding welfare support, produce the next generation of children, making the above 37% estimate an underestimate. Many of these children with foreign born parents are brought up thinking their parents ways are better than their new country’s. 

Children with native ancestry find themselves surrounded by children from other countries, and either give up (British White boys have among the lowest educational results), or try to fit in by adopting foreign religions or expressions (e.g. Inshallah is common parlance among young French kids these days). The “DEI History curriculum” doesn’t encourage them to strive either. To quote Battlestar Galactica, “All this has happened before, and will happen again”: the US is not Native American, Australia is not Aborigine, and Israel is not Palestinian. 

Pensions are a red-herring, brought out to divide the public and particularly to keep the old (voting) electorate on board. Why? Because Western companies could have been automating since the 1970s, just like the Chinese are doing. Xiaomi is building a factory that requires no people to pump out 60 high end cellphones a minute. Instead our ruling classes decided they could better line their pockets by outsourcing, investing in stock buybacks instead of technology, allowing in many uneducated people to do the “menial labour” & playing financial games. 

So I lay the blame for this crisis solely on the ruling classes. The entire thing is short-termist self-destructive insanity, but I guess that’s what happens when economies contract and the people at the top can’t stop living in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.

The Empire Strikes Back!

thecradle  |  The catastrophic debacle of Project Ukraine and the revival of an intractable West Asian war are deeply intertwined. 

Beyond the fog of Washington's “worry” about Tel Aviv’s genocidal rampage, the crucial fact is that we are right in the thick of a war against BRICS 11.      

The Empire does not do strategy; at best, it does tactical business plans on the fly. There are two immediate tactics in play: a US Armada deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean – in a failed effort to intimidate Resistance Axis behemoths Iran and Hezbollah - and a possible Milei election in Argentina tied to his avowed promise to break Brazil-Argentina relations. 

So this is a simultaneous attack on BRICS 11 on two fronts: West Asia and South America. There will be no American efforts spared to prevent BRICS 11 from getting close to OPEC+. A key aim is to instill fear in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi – as confirmed by Persian Gulf business sources.  

Even vassal leaders at the OIC show would have been aware that we are now deep into The Empire Strikes Back. That also largely explains their cowardice. 

They know that for the Hegemon, multipolarity equals “chaos,” unipolarity equals “order,” and malign actors equal   “autocrats” - such as the new Russian-Chinese-Iranian “Axis of Evil” and anyone, especially vassals, that opposes the “rules-based international order.” 

And that brings us to a tale of two ceasefires. Tens of millions across the Global Majority are asking why the Hegemon is desperate for a ceasefire in Ukraine while flatly refusing a ceasefire in Palestine. 

Freezing Project Ukraine preserves the Ghost of Hegemony just a little bit longer. Let's assume Moscow would take the bait (it won’t). But to freeze Ukraine in Europe, the Hegemon will need an Israeli win in Gaza - perhaps at any and all costs - to maintain even a vestige of its former glory. 

But can Israel achieve victory any more than Ukraine can? Tel Aviv may have already lost the war on 7 October as it can never regain its facade of invincibility. And if this transforms into a regional war that Israel loses, the US will lose its Arab vassals overnight, who today have a Chinese and Russian option waiting in the wings. 

The Roar of the Street is getting louder - demanding that the Biden administration, now seen as complicit with Tel Aviv, halt the Israeli genocide that may lead to a World War. But Washington will not comply. Wars in Europe and West Asia may be its last chance (it will lose) to subvert the emergence of a prosperous, connected, peaceful Eurasia Century.

The catastrophic debacle of Project Ukraine and the revival of an intractable West Asian war are deeply intertwined. 

Beyond the fog of Washington's “worry” about Tel Aviv’s genocidal rampage, the crucial fact is that we are right in the thick of a war against BRICS 11.      

The Empire does not do strategy; at best, it does tactical business plans on the fly. There are two immediate tactics in play: a US Armada deployed in the Eastern Mediterranean – in a failed effort to intimidate Resistance Axis behemoths Iran and Hezbollah - and a possible Milei election in Argentina tied to his avowed promise to break Brazil-Argentina relations. 

So this is a simultaneous attack on BRICS 11 on two fronts: West Asia and South America. There will be no American efforts spared to prevent BRICS 11 from getting close to OPEC+. A key aim is to instill fear in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi – as confirmed by Persian Gulf business sources.  

Even vassal leaders at the OIC show would have been aware that we are now deep into The Empire Strikes Back. That also largely explains their cowardice. 

They know that for the Hegemon, multipolarity equals “chaos,” unipolarity equals “order,” and malign actors equal   “autocrats” - such as the new Russian-Chinese-Iranian “Axis of Evil” and anyone, especially vassals, that opposes the “rules-based international order.” 

And that brings us to a tale of two ceasefires. Tens of millions across the Global Majority are asking why the Hegemon is desperate for a ceasefire in Ukraine while flatly refusing a ceasefire in Palestine. 

Freezing Project Ukraine preserves the Ghost of Hegemony just a little bit longer. Let's assume Moscow would take the bait (it won’t). But to freeze Ukraine in Europe, the Hegemon will need an Israeli win in Gaza - perhaps at any and all costs - to maintain even a vestige of its former glory. 

But can Israel achieve victory any more than Ukraine can? Tel Aviv may have already lost the war on 7 October as it can never regain its facade of invincibility. And if this transforms into a regional war that Israel loses, the US will lose its Arab vassals overnight, who today have a Chinese and Russian option waiting in the wings. 

The Roar of the Street is getting louder - demanding that the Biden administration, now seen as complicit with Tel Aviv, halt the Israeli genocide that may lead to a World War. But Washington will not comply. Wars in Europe and West Asia may be its last chance (it will lose) to subvert the emergence of a prosperous, connected, peaceful Eurasia Century.

I'd Wager That Official Estimates Only Count 1-in-4 Homeless

NYTimes  | Garbage, feces and needles run through the rivers in Missoula, Mont. On the streets of San Francisco, tents are so thick that sidewalks in the Tenderloin neighborhood have become “unofficial open-air public housing.” In Portland, Ore., a blaze shut down an on-ramp to the Steel Bridge for several days in March after campers tunneled through a cinder block wall and lit a campfire to stay warm.

In a surge of legal briefs this week, frustrated leaders from across the political spectrum, including the liberal governor of California and right-wing state legislators in Arizona, charged that homeless encampments were turning their public spaces into pits of squalor, and asked the Supreme Court to revisit lower court decisions that they say have hobbled their ability to bring these camps under control.

The urgent pleas come as leaders across the country, and particularly in the West, have sought to rebound from the coronavirus pandemic and restore normalcy in cities. In more than two dozen briefs filed in an appeal of a decision on homeless policies in a southern Oregon town, officials from nearly every Western state and beyond described desolate scenes related to a proliferation of tent encampments in recent years.

They begged the justices to let them remove people from their streets without running afoul of court rulings that have protected the civil rights of homeless individuals.

“The friction in many communities affected by homelessness is at a breaking point,” the attorneys for Las Vegas, Seattle and more than a dozen other cities, as well as national municipal organizations, wrote in one brief. “Despite massive infusions of public resources, businesses and residents are suffering the increasingly negative effects of long-term urban camping.”

Homeless rights advocates agreed that tent encampments were unsafe both for their vulnerable occupants and the communities around them. But they said the gathering legal campaign was merely an attempt to fall back on timeworn government crackdowns rather than pursue the obvious solutions: more help and more housing.

“They’re seeking to blame and penalize and marginalize the victims rather than take the steps they haven’t found the political will to take,” said Eric Tars, the senior policy director at the National Homelessness Law Center.

Homelessness has increasingly overwhelmed state and local governments across the country. In California alone, more than 170,000 people are homeless, accounting for about one-third of the nation’s homeless population. More than 115,000 of those homeless Californians sleep on the streets, in cars or outdoors in places not intended for habitation, according to a federal tally of homelessness conducted last year.

Five years ago, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in case from Boise, Idaho, that it was unconstitutional for cities to clear homeless camps and criminally charge campers unless they could offer adequate housing. In the nine Western states covered by the circuit, that ruling has since prompted billions of dollars of public spending on homelessness.

 

 

One Way Or Another, Critical Mass Will Bring About Changes

tomsdispatch  |  Today, more than 38 million people officially live below the federal poverty line and, in truth, that figure should have shocked the nation into action before the coronavirus even arrived here. No such luck and here’s the real story anyway: the official measure of poverty, developed in 1964, doesn’t even take into account household expenses like health care, child care, housing, and transportation, not to speak of other costs that have burgeoned in recent decades. The world has undergone profound economic transformations over the last 66 years and yet this out-of-date measure, based on three times a family’s food budget, continues to shape policymaking at every level of government as well as the contours of the American political and moral imagination.

Two years ago, the Poor People’s Campaign (which I co-chair alongside Reverend William Barber II) and the Institute for Policy Studies released an audit of America. Its centerpiece was a far more realistic assessment of poverty and economic precariousness in this country. Using the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure as a baseline, which, among other things, measures family income after taxes and out-of-pocket expenses for food, clothing, housing, and utilities, there are at least 140 million people who are poor — or just a $400 emergency from that state. (Of that, there are now untold examples in this pandemic moment.)

As poverty has grown and spread, one of the great political weapons of politicians and the ruling elite over the past decades (only emphasized in the age of Trump) has been to minimize, dismiss, and racialize it. In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” coded it into Republican national politics; in the 1980s, in the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the fabricated image of “the welfare queen” gained symbolic prominence. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s welfare “reforms” enshrined such thinking in the arguments of both parties. Today, given the outright racism and xenophobia that has become the hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency, “poor” has become a curse word.

It is, of course, true that, among the 140 million poor people in the U.S., a disproportionate number are indeed people of color. The inheritance of slavery, Jim Crow, never-ending discrimination, and the mass incarceration of black men in particular, as well as a generational disinvestment in such populations, could have resulted in nothing less. And yet the reality of poverty stretches deep into every community in this country. According to that audit of America, the poor or low-income today consist of 24 million blacks, 38 million Latinos, eight million Asian-Americans, two million Native peoples, and 66 million whites.

Those staggering numbers, already a deadweight for the nation, are likely to prove a grotestque underestimate in the coronaviral world we now inhabit and yet none of this should be a surprise. Although we couldn’t have predicted the exact circumstances of this pandemic, social theorists remind us that conditions were ripe for just this kind of economic dislocation.

Over the past 50 years, for instance, rents have risen faster than income in every city. Before the coronavirus outbreak, there was not a single county in this country where a person making a minimum wage with a family could afford a two-bedroom apartment. No surprise then that, throughout this crisis, there has been a rise in rent strikes, housing takeovers, and calls for moratoriums on evictions. The quiet fact is that, in the last few decades, unemployment, underemployment, poverty, and homelessness have become ever more deeply and permanently structured into this society.

Country Music Industry Confused By Man Actually From Country Making Actual Music

facebook  | People in the music industry give me blank stares when I brush off 8 million dollar offers. I don't want 6 tour buses, 15 tractor trailers and a jet. I don't want to play stadium shows, I don't want to be in the spotlight. I wrote the music I wrote because I was suffering with mental health and depression. These songs have connected with millions of people on such a deep level because they're being sung by someone feeling the words in the very moment they were being sung. No editing, no agent, no bullshit. Just some idiot and his guitar. The style of music that we should have never gotten away from in the first place.

Since going viral nine days ago, he has received over 50,000 messages from people reacting to the song. He said some messages include stories about "Suicide, addiction, unemployment, anxiety and depression, hopelessness and the list goes on." 

Lunsford provided more details about who he exactly is... 

My legal name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford. My grandfather was Oliver Anthony, and "Oliver Anthony Music" is a dedication not only to him, but 1930's Appalachia where he was born and raised. Dirt floors, seven kids, hard times. At this point, I'll gladly go by Oliver because everyone knows me as such. But my friends and family still call me Chris. You can decide for yourself, either is fine.

In 2010, I dropped out of high school at age 17. I have a GED from Spruce Pine, NC. I worked multiple plant jobs in Western NC, my last being at the paper mill in McDowell county. I worked 3rd shift, 6 days a week for $14.50 an hour in a living hell. In 2013, I had a bad fall at work and fractured my skull. It forced me to move back home to Virginia. Due to complications from the injury, it took me 6 months or so before I could work again.

From 2014 until just a few days ago, I've worked outside sales in the industrial manufacturing world. My job has taken me all over Virginia and into the Carolinas, getting to know tens of thousands of other blue collar workers on job sites and in factories. Ive spent all day, everyday, for the last 10 years hearing the same story. People are SO damn tired of being neglected, divided and manipulated.

In 2019, I paid $97,500 for the property and still owe about $60,000 on it. I am living in a 27' camper with a tarp on the roof that I got off of craigslist for $750.

There's nothing special about me. I'm not a good musician, I'm not a very good person. I've spent the last 5 years struggling with mental health and using alcohol to drown it. I am sad to see the world in the state it's in, with everyone fighting with each other. I have spent many nights feeling hopeless, that the greatest country on Earth is quickly fading away.

He concludes with: 

That being said, I HATE the way the Internet has divided all of us. The Internet is a parasite, that infects the minds of humans and has their way with them. Hours wasted, goals forgotten, loved ones sitting in houses with each other distracted all day by technology made by the hands of other poor souls in sweat shops in a foreign land.

When is enough, enough? When are we going to fight for what is right again? MILLIONS have died protecting the liberties we have. Freedom of speech is such a precious gift. Never in world history has the world had the freedom it currently does. Don't let them take it away from you. 

Just like those once wandering in the desert, we have lost our way from God and have let false idols distract us and divide us. It's a damn shame.

Meanwhile, the political left is triggered by this song for speaking the truth. And the country music industry is "confused by man actually from the country making actual music."

America's 330 Million Burns As Much Oil As China And India's 2.8 Billion

statista  |  Even with the share of renewables in electricity production rising continuously over the past years, oil remains the world's most important energy source when factoring in transport and heating. 29 percent of the world's energy supply in 2020 came from oil, according to an analysis by the International Energy Agency (IEA). As our chart based on the Energy Institute Statistical Review of World Energy 2023 shows, two countries were particularly heavy oil consumers in 2022.

The United States consumed 19 million barrels of oil per day, followed by its fiercest economic and political competitor, the People's Republic of China, with 14 million barrels per day this past year. The usage of other countries pales compared to the two superpowers: The rest of the top 8 consumers combined only amounted to two thirds of the amount used by the U.S. and China.

When looking at the change in oil consumption between 2012 and 2022, the picture changes significantly. U.S. oil usage only increased by about nine percent, with China and India emerging as growth leaders with 42 and 41 percent consumption growth, respectively. All in all, four out of the five BRICS countries are featured in the top 8 oil-consuming countries, and three out of four have shown a considerable increase in appetite for fossil fuel over the past decade.

The Rich Will Buy Up The Burnt Up Part Of Maui While The Governor Pretends To Stop Them

Hawaii is unique. The islands and what was the Kingdom of Hawaii have been victims of colonialism. The Hawaiian people’s fear of a land grab is real, and based on historic actions of both Britain and the United States. The 1993 Appology Resolution from US Congress on this was a small step in the right direction. There is still a strong sovereignty movement in Hawaii who seek sovereignty from the US. This issue ties in with that. No different than the history of Continental North America, and even presently, Indiginous peoples are always faced with others trying to take their land for monetary gain. Hawaiians are not recognized as “Native Americans”, but the historic facts would support that the Hawaiian people do hold Indiginous title/Aboriginal title/Native title to the islands.

It is kind of like banning Indian names for football teams while taking away their land and keeping them on a reservation. The government will probably ban the word "aloha" and use of leis while taking away their land. Uncle Ben and Aunt Jamaima scenario, we cannot have anything that reminds us how the Democrats oppressed people outside of their hate groups. Be ready for any reminder of Maui being take off the shelves.

I am not surprised that liberals do not realize that negating cultural appropriation is the epitome or embodiment of racism. Telling people to stay in their own lane, or race that is, is what people in the klan used to always say. Dumbing down people in public schools was entirely effective.

npr  |  Hawaii's governor vowed "to keep the land in local people's hands" when Maui rebuilds from a deadly wildfire that incinerated a historic island community, as local schools began reopening.

Gov. Josh Green said Wednesday that he had instructed the state attorney general to work toward a moratorium on land transactions in Lahaina. He acknowledged the move will likely face legal challenges.

"My intention from start to finish is to make sure that no one is victimized from a land grab," Green said at a news conference. "People are right now traumatized. Please do not approach them with an offer to buy their land. Do not approach their families saying they'll be much better off if they make a deal. Because we're not going to allow it."

Also Wednesday, the number of dead reached 111, and Maui police said nine victims had been identified, and the families of five had been notified. A mobile morgue unit with additional coroners arrived Tuesday to help process and identify remains.

The cause of the wildfires, the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century, is under investigation. Hawaii is increasingly at risk from disasters, with wildfire rising fastest, according to an Associated Press analysis of FEMA records.

Since flames consumed much of Lahaina about a week ago, locals have feared that a rebuilt town could be even more oriented toward wealthy visitors, Lahaina native Richy Palalay said Saturday at a shelter for evacuees.

Hotels and condos "that we can't afford to live in — that's what we're afraid of," he said.

Many in Lahaina were struggling to afford life in Hawaii before the fire. Statewide, a typical starter home costs over $1 million, while the average renter pays 42% of their income for housing, according to a Forbes Housing analysis, the highest ratio in the country by a wide margin.

Pinkertons Making A 21st Century Comeback With Impunity

 

counterpunch  |  During a recent visit to Portland, Oregon, my husband and I watched a private security guard help up an unhoused man from the sidewalk. Three white women looked on at the interaction that took place in the trendy Nob Hill neighborhood on August 7, 2023, right in front of a yoga studio.

But the guard was not responding with compassion. Seconds earlier, the tall and very muscular man sporting a flak jacket emblazoned with the word “security,” had walked right by me toward the unhoused man and savagely knocked him to the ground without provocation or warning. Blood streamed from the victim’s face and onto the sidewalk. He stood up as the guard hovered over him and stumbled toward the damaged glasses that had fallen off his face during the assault. The guard, who was twice the man’s size, picked up and offered him the hat that had also fallen off his head and ushered him away.

It’s increasingly common to see private security guards patrolling the streets of Portland—considered one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Not only are businesses banding together to pay for private armed patrols, but even Portland State University is using such a service on its campus. The city of Portland also recently increased its private security budget for City Hall by more than half a million dollars to hire three armed guards.

The trend is a knee-jerk response to sharply rising homelessness. There are tents belonging to unhoused people sprinkled throughout downtown Portland and Nob Hill. Like much of Portland, many of the unhoused are white, but, as Axios in a report about a homelessness survey pointed out, “the rate of homelessness among people in the Portland area who are Black, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander grew more rapidly than among people who are white.”

Three summers ago, Portland—one of the nation’s whitest cities—was also an epicenter of the nationwide racial justice uprising in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “There are more Black Lives Matter signs in Portland than Black people,” joked one Black resident to the New York Times. As Donald Trump’s administration sent armed federal agents to Portland to quash the uprising, the city’s residents and officials came to symbolize a heroic resistance to rising authoritarianism.

The brutal savagery of what we witnessed in Nob Hill was in jarring contrast to the signs, stickers, and posters that many Portland businesses continue to display on their windows, declaring that “Black Lives Matter,” or “All Genders are Welcome,” and that promise safety to everyone. Everyone but the unhoused, apparently.

Shocked by the violence of the security guard’s assault, my husband and I confronted the perpetrator. He responded that hours earlier the victim had allegedly assaulted a woman in the neighborhood. In the seconds before he was attacked, however, I had walked within a few feet of the unhoused man as he muttered to himself in what sounded like a mix of English and a foreign language. The man had been minding his own business.

In a detailed three-part investigation for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) in December 2021, Rebecca Ellis examined how businesses have begun paying unknown sums of money to hire private security patrols. According to Ellis, “Private security firms in Oregon are notoriously underregulated, and their employees are required to receive a fraction of the training and oversight as public law enforcement.” She added, “They remain accountable primarily to their clients, not the public.”

Business owners and residents are claiming that rising homelessness is the result of increased drug addiction, forcing them to resort to private security. But researchers point to high rents and a lack of affordable housing—not drug use—as the cause of people living without homes.

What Caused The Riots In France?

fp  |  French police are plagued by “a double problem of racial discrimination and brutality, with neither one being acknowledged by governments past and present,” said Sebastian Roché, an expert on policing at Sciences-Po university in Grenoble.

In France, images of similar incidents “have emerged in the past, but not as damning as these ones,” said Éric Marliere, a sociologist at the University of Lille. “We are looking at a very violent scene that reminds of the George Floyd case” and has contributed to accelerating the protest movement, he said. 

This is also yet another major headache for French President Emmanuel Macron, who’s seeking to rebuild his political capital at home and abroad after months of crippling strikes over his pension reform, and has now had to postpone a scheduled trip to Germany in order to deal with the new crisis, after being forced to leave early from a European summit in Brussels to hurry back to Paris last week.

French police have a long history of heavy-handedness, particularly with ethnic minorities. In the early 1960s, officers under the command of Paris police chief Maurice Papon killed dozens, if not hundreds, of Algerians taking part in a demonstration for independence. Over the following decades, the heavily immigrant, poverty- and crime-ridden suburbs at the margins of France’s biggest cities posed a constant challenge for police. But tensions between residents and security forces in the banlieues have grown worse over the past 15 years, according to Roché, particularly as a result of the 2005 riots. 

Back then, “the police were taken by surprise and lost control of the situation,” he said. In the following years, under different governments, a new approach was developed to police the banlieues, he said, one that largely revolved around the tougher units—such as the anti-criminality brigades, which are specifically designed to carry out arrests and tend to attract the most hot-headed elements. Officers also started being equipped with “LBDs,” riot guns firing rubber bullets that can cause severe injuries or even death.

“The logic became: ‘The police aren’t there to connect with people, earn their trust, and reassure them, but to detain them,’” Roché said. “A police officer who arrives in a banlieue arrives with their LBD, in a position to impose their point of view by force and instill fear,” he said.

This approach continues to be in fashion today. In the thick of the recent violence, Alliance Police Nationale and UNSA, two police unions, defined the rioters as “savage hordes” and “vermin,” against which police are “at war.”

In line with this rhetoric, French cops tend to be more trigger-happy than their European counterparts. The rough French average of 44 people killed by police every year since the turn of the decade pales compared to the hundreds who die in the United States, but it’s much higher than in Germany or the United Kingdom. Some of it may have to do with the lower standards and shorter training that have resulted from Macron’s efforts to quickly beef up police ranks after he came into office in 2017. In recent years, admission rates have gone from one in 50 candidates to one in five. New recruits are now only getting eight months of training, compared to three years in Germany.

All Is Not Well In "The Garden" As Video Games Cause A Week Of Serious Unrest...,

Telegraph  |  French police said they were “at war” with “savage hordes of vermin” on Friday night as France was rocked by violent waves of riots and looting and about 1,000 more people were arrested.

Two of the country’s top police unions threatened a revolt unless Emmanuel Macron’s government restored order after protests broke out over an officer’s shooting of a teenager outside Paris.

“Today the police are in combat because we are at war. Tomorrow we will enter resistance and the government should be aware of this,” they said.

It came as British travellers were warned about the risk of curfews and travel restrictions due to the spiralling upheaval and vandalism around France.

A domestic intelligence note seen by Le Monde has warned riots could become increasingly “widespread” and go on for “the coming nights”.

The French government announced on Friday that all major public gatherings that could “pose a risk to public order” would be banned. Various rock concerts have been pulled. Some 45,000 police were deployed. 

The Interior Ministry said 994 arrests were made during Friday night, with more than 2,500 fires. The night before, 917 people were arrested nationwide, 500 buildings targeted, 2,000 vehicles burned and dozens of stores ransacked.

While the number of overnight arrests was the highest yet, there were fewer fires, cars burned and police stations attacked around France than the previous night, according to the Interior Ministry. Gerald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, claimed the violence was of “much less intensity”.

Hundreds of police and firefighters have been injured, including 79 overnight, but authorities have not released injury tallies for protesters.

Protests have continued into a fourth night, with rioters in Paris on Saturday night setting fire to a bus and clashing with police. Unrest has also spread to Lyon and Grenoble.

Meanwhile, security will be beefed up during the upcoming Tour de France bike race, which is due to start in Spain on Saturday.

Mr Macron faced intense pressure on Friday to impose a state of emergency as he called on parents to keep their children at home and blamed video games for “intoxicated” young protesters.

In updated travel advice, the Foreign Office said: “Locations and timing of riots are unpredictable. You should monitor the media, and avoid areas where riots are taking place.”

 

 

With Lying And Stealing As Its National DNA - Israel Must Surely Fail...,

antiwar  |  As Israel celebrates its 75th anniversary, the state-building project it cemented into place in 1948 by expelling 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland is showing the first signs of unraveling.

The surprise is that Israel’s woes spring not, as generations of its leaders feared, from outside forces – a combined attack from Arab states or pressure from the international community – but from Israel’s own internal contradictions.

Israeli leaders created the very problems they all too obviously lack the tools to now solve. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bombardment of Gaza in recent days, killing dozens of Palestinians, should be understood in that light. It is one more indication of Israel’s internal crisis.

Once again, the Palestinians are being used in a frantic bid to shore up an increasingly fragile “Jewish” unity.

Israel’s long-term problem is underscored by the current, bitter standoff over Netanyahu’s plan for a so-called judicial overhaul. The Israeli Jewish population is split down the middle, with neither side willing to back down. Rightly, each sees the confrontation in terms of a zero-sum battle.

And behind this stands a political system in near-constant paralysis, with neither side of the divide able to gain a stable majority in the parliament. Israel is now mired in a permanent, low-level civil war.

To understand how Israel reached this point, and where it is likely to head next, one must delve deep into the country’s origin story.

Morality tale

The official narrative is that Israel was created out of necessity: to serve as a safe haven for Jews fleeing centuries of persecution and the horrors of the Nazi death camps in Europe.

The resulting ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the erasure of hundreds of their towns and villages – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe – is either mystified or presented simply as a desperate act of self-defense by a long-victimized people.

This colossal act of dispossession, aided and abetted by western powers, has been reinvented for western publics as a simple morality tale, as a story of redemption.

Israel’s establishment was not only a chance for the Jewish people to gain self-determination through statehood so they would never again be persecuted. Jews would also build a state from scratch that would offer to the world a more virtuous model of how to live.

This tapped neatly, if subliminally, into a western, Christian-derived worldview that looked to the Holy Land for salvation.

Jews would restore their place as “a light unto the nations” by “redeeming” the land they had stolen from the Palestinians and offering a path by which westerners could redeem themselves too.

"Surplus Humanity" Means That NiggaHertz Bout To Go Off The Charts

therealnews  |  Well actually, there’s three new books because I published The Global Police State in 2020, and this year, there are two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure? But what happened was I was writing and thinking about and speaking about this crisis from 2008 and on, and then the pandemic hit. And it became clear to me as I started researching that and engaging with other people that the pandemic has accelerated in warp speed the crisis itself, and it’s introduced a whole new set of concerns as we face this crisis of humanity. And that book also goes into considerable detail on digitalization, because the digital transformations underway are absolutely tremendous. They’re linked to everything else.

But then the companion to Global Civil War – And both of these came out in 2022 – Is Can Global Capitalism Endure?, which is really the big summation of the crisis and what we can expect in the following years and the following decades. So if it’s possible, I would love to put out a summary here of where we’re at with this crisis.

This is a crisis like never before. This is an existential crisis. It’s multidimensional. Of course, we can talk about the economic or the structural dimension, deep economic, social crisis. We’re on the verge of a world recession, but I think it’s going to be much more than that. It’s going to be another big collapse which might even exceed what we saw in 2008. But it’s also a political crisis of state legitimacy, of capitalist hegemony, of the crack up of political systems around the world. And it’s also a social crisis of what technically we can call a crisis of social reproduction. The social fabric is disintegrating everywhere. Billions of people face crises for survival and very uncertain futures. And of course, it’s also an ecological crisis, and this is what makes it existential.

I am suggesting that the 21st century is the final century for world capitalism. This system cannot reach the 22nd century. And the key question for us is, can we overthrow global capitalism before it drags down and destroys all of humanity and much of life on the planet along with it?

So let me step back and say that we can speak about three types of crises. Of course, there are periodic receptions, the mainstream goals of the business cycle that take place about once every 10 years, but we’re in something much more serious. We’re in what we can call a structural crisis, meaning that the only way out of the system is to fund it. The only way out of the crisis is to really restructure the whole system. The last big structural crisis we had was the 1970s. The system got out of that by launching capitalist globalization and neoliberalism. Prior to that, we had the big structural crisis of the 1930s, the Great Depression. System got out of that by introducing a new type of capitalism, New Deal capitalism, social democratic capitalism, what I call redistributive nation state capitalism. And before that, just to take it back once more – Because these are recurrent, they happen, these structural crises about every 40 to 50 years – Was from the late 1870s to the early 1890s. And the system got out of that by launching a new round of colonialism and imperialism.

So now, from 2008 and on, we’re in another deep structural crisis. And I know later in the interview we’ll get into that dimension, that economic structural dimension. Technically, we call it an overaccumulation crisis. But I want to say that there’s a third type of crisis, and that actually is where we’re at: a systemic crisis, which means the only way out of the crisis is to literally move beyond the system. That is, to move beyond capitalism. So when I say that we are in a systemic crisis, this can be drawn out for years, for decades. But we are in uncharted territory. This is a crisis like no other. If we want to put this in technical terms, we’re seeing the historic exhaustion of the conditions for capitalist renewal. And the system, again, won’t make it to the [22nd] century.

As you pointed out in the introduction, the ruling groups, at this point, are in a situation of permanent crisis management, permanent state of emergency. But the ruling groups are rudderless. They’re clueless. They don’t know how to resolve this crisis. And quite frankly, they cannot. They can’t. What we’ve seen is that over the past 40 years, world capitalism has been driven forward by this trickle process that I lay out in these two new books, Global Civil War and Can Global Capitalism Endure?, of globalization, digitalization, and financialization. And these three processes have aggravated the crisis, really created and aggravated the crisis many times over. And just to summarize a couple other things here, what we’ve seen over the last 40 years is the buildup of this structural crisis and the problem of surplus capital, meaning that corporate profits in 2021 were a record high even in the midst of us all moving down and suffering. Record high profits. So the transnational capitalist class has accumulated enormous amounts of wealth beyond what it can reinvest, hence stagnation, beyond what it can even spend.

And what this has led to is this mass of what we call – I know we’re going to get into this later in the interview – This mass of fictitious capital, meaning all of this capital around the world which is not backed by the real economy of goods and services. It’s what technically we call fiat money, this unprecedented flow of money. And it’s led to this situation where in the world today we have this mass of predatory finance capital which is simply without precedent, and it’s destabilizing the whole system.

But let me conclude this introductory summary by saying the problem of surplus capital has its flip side in surplus people, surplus humanity. The more the surplus capital, the more hundreds of millions, even billions of people become surplus humanity.

And what that means is that the ruling groups have a double challenge. Their first challenge is what do they do with all the surplus capital? How do they keep investing in making profit? Where can they unload this surplus capital and continue to accumulate? But the second big challenge, because the flip side is surplus humanity, is how do you control the mass of humanity? Because there is a global class revolt underway. That’s the title of the book, Global Civil War. After the late 20th century worldwide defeat of proletarian forces, now the mass of humanity is on the move again. There are these rebellions from below breaking out all over the world. And the ruling groups have the challenge of how to contain this actual rebellion underway and the potential for it to bring down the system from, oh, no.

If You Are Poor - Please Don't Make A Mistake Of Any Kind...,

welcometohellworld  |  Autumn Harris' lungs were so filled with fluid they weighed four times what a normal person's lungs should weigh during her autopsy. The thirty four year old died in an Alabama prison in 2018 after going untreated for pneumonia by medical staff for weeks according to a malpractice lawsuit filed by her father in 2020 that will finally get a hearing next year. Six years of waiting for the possibility that maybe someone will be held responsible for his daughter's death.

Harris had been arrested because she missed a misdemeanor court hearing over an alleged theft of $40 Alabama.com reported.

State investigators interviewed women Harris was being held with and one said she got so sick toward the end that she started to hallucinate and was calling one of them momma.

If you are poor please do not make a mistake of any kind. Please do not fuck up in such and such a way leading you to need $40 very badly or to miss a court date. Do not fuck up even once despite the entire world being littered with boobytraps just waiting for you to make a false step. The floor is lava but not in the way that usually means. If you are poor almost every fuck up you might make carries with it a potential death sentence in this country.

It sounds facile and obvious to say that kind of shit doesn't it? It's almost like what's the point? You know it and I know it and people walking through the obstacle course on hard mode know it better than anyone.

I guess we have to keep saying it anyway.

We're all of us walking through the obstacle course to be clear it's just at varying degrees of difficulty. Unless some of you reading this happen to be rich in which case can I have $50,000?

Sergei Lavrov Said U.S. And NATO Seeking A Russian "Final Solution"

mid.ru  |   I will not speak now about the West’s actions in other geopolitical areas. Today we regard the policies of the US and the West as a whole as the main problem creating difficulties in all areas. In short, this is what it means. Washington’s policy of dictate in international affairs means precisely that the Americans can do anything anywhere they want, even at the other end of the Earth.  They do what they think is necessary. All other countries cannot do anything without the US’s approval, even in response to direct security threats the US creates on their borders.

Like Napoleon, who mobilised nearly all of Europe against the Russian Empire, and Hitler, who occupied the majority of European countries and hurled them at the Soviet Union, the United States has created a coalition of nearly all European member states of NATO and the EU and is using Ukraine to wage a proxy war against Russia with the old aim of finally solving the “Russian question,” like Hitler, who sought a final solution to the “Jewish question.”

Western politicians – not only from the Baltics and Poland but also from more reasonable countries – say that Russia must be dealt a strategic defeat. Some political analysts write about decolonising Russia, that our country is too big and “gets in the way.” The other day I read an item in The Telegraph that called for liberating Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, while leaving Karelia, Koenigsberg and the Kuril Islands for negotiations. Of course, it is a tabloid, but we have to read yellow sheets because they sometimes make headline news.

Quite a few such statements have been made, including in our non-system opposition. No Western politician has refuted them. President of France Emmanuel Macron, who proposed creating a European Political Community as a format which all European countries apart from Russia and Belarus will be invited to join, has also suggested convening a conference of European states. He suggested that it should be open for the EU member states, Eastern Partnership countries (Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan), as well as Moldova and Ukraine. I doubt that Belarus will be invited. The potential participants as the EU states and Eastern Partnership countries, plus – note this - politically active emigres from Russia. It has been said (not in Macron’s presentation but in subsequent comments) that some Russian regions, which are trying to maintain ties with Europe, could be invited as well. I believe that everything is clear. It is not a black-and-white situation, contrary to what our Western colleagues claim; it reflects their strategy of global domination and unconditional suppression of all countries on pain of punishment.

The Western politicians are talking only about sanctions. Ursula von der Leyen has recently said in Davos that new sanctions will be imposed on Russia and Belarus, that they know which sanctions to adopt to strangle the Russian economy and cause it decades of regression. This is what they want. They have shown their true colours. For many years, UN Security Council members discussed sanctions against countries that violated international law or their obligations. And every time the Western countries that initiated such measures promised that the sanctions would not harm the people but would be targeted at the “regime.” What became of their promises?

They openly say that sanctions against Russia are designed to incite the people to rise in a revolution to overthrow the current leaders. Nobody is observing or intends to observe proprieties any longer. But their reaction and frenzied attempts to ensure, by hook or by crook, by any foul means possible, the domination of the US and the West, which Washington has already brought to heel, is proof that, historically, they are acting contrary to the objective course of events by trying to stop the rise of a multipolar world. Such change does not happen on orders from the high offices on the Potomac or in any other capital, but for natural reasons.

The Arctic Is Russian

politico  | Since the end of the Cold War, the Arctic has largely been free of visible geopolitical conflict. In 1996, the eight countries with Arctic territory formed the Arctic Council, where they agreed to environmental protection standards and pooled technology and money for joint natural resources extraction in the region. Svalbard, Europe’s northernmost inhabited settlement, just 700 miles south of the North Pole, perfectly represents this spirit of cooperation. While a territory of Norway, it is also a kind of international Arctic station. It hosts the KSAT Satellite Station, relied on by everyone from the U.S. to China; a constellation of some dozen nations’ research laboratories; and the world’s doomsday Seed Vault (where seeds from around the world are stored in case of a global loss in crop diversity, whether due to climate change or nuclear fallout). Svalbard, where polar bears outnumber people, is considered a demilitarized, visa-free zone by 42 nations.

But today, this Arctic desert is rapidly becoming the center of a new conflict. The vast sea ice that covers the Arctic Ocean is melting rapidly due to climate change, losing 13 percent per decade — a rate that experts say could make the Arctic ice-free in the summer as soon as 2035. Already, the thaw has created new shipping lanes, opened existing seasonal lanes for more of the year and provided more opportunities for natural resource extraction. Nations are now vying for military and commercial control over this newly accessible territory — competition that has only gotten more intense since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

An antenna within the KSAT Satellite Station, the world's largest ground station for polar orbiting satellites relied on from the U.S. to China. | Ola Lewitschnik for POLITICO

For the past two decades, Russia has been dominating this fight for the Arctic, building up its fleet of nuclear-capable icebreakers, ships and submarines, developing more mining and oil well operations along its 15,000 miles of Arctic coastline, racing to capture control of the new “Northern Sea Route” or “Transpolar Sea Route” which could begin to open up by 2035, and courting non-Arctic nations to help fund those endeavors.

At the same time, America is playing catch-up in a climate where it has little experience and capabilities. The U.S. government and military seems to be awakening to the threats of climate change and Russian dominance of the Arctic — recently issuing a National Strategy for the Arctic Region and a report on how climate change impacts American military bases, opening a consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, and appointing this year an ambassador-at-large for the Arctic region within the State Department and a deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and Global Resilience. America’s European allies, too, have been rethinking homeland security, increasing national defense budgets and security around critical energy infrastructure in the Arctic as they aim to boost their defense capabilities and rely less on American assistance.

But 17 Arctic watchers — including Norwegian diplomats, State Department analysts and national security experts focusing on the Arctic — said they fear that the U.S. and Europe won’t be able to maintain a grip on the region’s energy resources and diplomacy as Russia places more civilian and military infrastructure across the Arctic, threatening the economic development and national security of the seven other nations whose sovereign land sits within the Arctic Circle.

Even as the U.S. says it has developed stronger Arctic policies, five prominent Arctic watchers I spoke with say that the U.S. government and military are taking too narrow a view, seeing the Arctic as primarily Alaska and an area for natural resource extraction, but not as a key geopolitical and national security battleground beyond U.S. borders. They say the U.S. is both poorly resourced in the Arctic and unprepared to deal with the rising climate threat, which will require new kinds of technology, training and infrastructure the U.S. has little experience with. Several U.S. government officials involved in Arctic planning told me in private they also fear a nuclear escalation in the Arctic, which would threaten to engulf Europe and its allies in a larger conflict.

“We’re committed to expanding our engagement across the region,” one of those officials, granted anonymity to speak candidly about a tense geopolitical region, told me, “but we’re not there yet.”

“The [Defense] Department views the Arctic as a potential avenue of approach to the homeland, and as a potential venue for great power competition,” America’s new deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and Global Resilience, Iris A. Ferguson, wrote me in an email. Ferguson described Russia as an “acute threat” and also outlined fears that China, a “pacing threat” was seeking “to normalize its presence and pursue a larger role in shaping Arctic regional governance and security affairs.” (China has contributed to liquid natural gas projects and funded a biodiesel plant in Finland as part of its Belt and Road Initiative now reaching the Arctic.)