Michael Moore on Mother Jones and the 2020 election

Mother Jones is the name by which Mary Harris Jones (1830-1930), a legendary union activist and organizer, was known. The nickname was given to her by the workers because of the caring way she dealt with them especially during strikes.

Known as the miner’s angel, Mother Jones became an active campaigner for the United Mine Workers Union. A political progressive, she was a founder of the Social Democratic Party in 1898. Jones also helped establish the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905. For all of her social reform and labor activities, she was considered by the authorities to be one of the most dangerous women in America.

Nothing could dissuade Mother Jones from her work. At the age of 82, she was arrested for her part in a West Virginia strike that turned violent and was sentenced to 20 years. But her supporters rallied and convinced the governor to grant her a pardon. Jones, undeterred, returned to organizing workers.

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Australian government absurdity on fires and climate change

Parts of Australia are going though a terrible time with bushfires burning out of control, coupled with a drought and heat wave. The city of Sydney is blanketed by a smoky haze because of the fires and there seems to be no real prospect or relief other than hoping for rain.

The conservative Australian government. like the US government, consists of people who want to do nothing about climate change . Like Trump, the Australian government is a fierce defender of coal, and in its attempt to shift attention away from the contribution that global warming may be playing in creating this crisis, its deputy prime minister has issued a statement that comes close to matching the stupidity of Donald Trump who blamed Californian forest fires to the forest floors not being swept clean of debris.

The deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, has conceded Australia must take further action to combat the climate crisis and acknowledged that the bushfires ravaging New South Wales and South Australia have further shifted community sentiment on the issue.

But McCormack, who is acting prime minister while Scott Morrison returns from a much-maligned holiday in Hawaii, also linked the fires to other causes, including dry lightning strikes and self-combusting manure. [My italics-MS]

Film review: The First Temptation of Christ (2019)

Some of you may remember my review of the hilarious short (45 minutes) film The Last Hangover by a Brazilian comedy troupe Porta dos Fundos that that has a reputation for skewering religion, politics, culture and other hot-button topics. That earlier film envisaged the Last Supper as a massive drunken blowout that resulted in the apostles waking up the next day to find Jesus missing and having only the vaguest notion of what had happened.

The troupe has returned with an even funnier short film (45 minutes) The First Temptation of Christ that is being streamed on Netflix. The central premise is a surprise 30th birthday party for Jesus thrown by his parents Mary and Joseph when he returns from spending forty days in the wilderness. But things start to go awry because Jesus (played here by the same actor who played Judas in the other film) has brought a friend Orlando with him whom he met during his desert sojourn. God (whom Jesus has known all his life as just his Uncle Vittorio) also turns up and he and Joseph and Mary have to tell the oblivious Jesus the truth about his real parentage, that he is the Son of God with miraculous powers, and what his mission in life is to be. We also have cameos by the Buddha, Shiva, and other gods who all get their share of barbs thrown at them.
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Dominos and disability rights

Mike Ervin writes in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of The Progressive magazine about the way that the Dominos pizza chain responded to a blind customer Guillermo Robles who filed a lawsuit in 2016 that the company’s mobile app did not have the features that would enable blind people to navigate it, thus violating Title III of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act that requires that disabled people be provided with access to places of “public accommodation”. This act has opened up vast areas of life that had hitherto been closed to people with disabilities.
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Trump’s deranged rally speech

Seth Meyers describes the rally that Trump held while the impeachment process was going on, where he went on a tirade against dishwashers, showers, sinks, toilets, and other household items.

It seems to me that the places that Trumps lives in, which proudly bear his name, have the lousiest appliances. How many people have exploding dishwashers or showers that give out four drops of water or toilets that must be flushed ten times?

This is what happens because of Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric

The hatred that he has been promoting has reached such a pitch that ordinary people are trying to kill random strangers on the spur of the moment.

A woman has been charged with attempted murder after telling police in Iowa that she deliberately drove into a girl because she appeared “Mexican”.

The victim, who is 14, sustained “numerous injuries” in the incident.

Police say she was struck while walking to a local school, near Des Moines, on the evening of 9 December.

They initially appealed for the public’s help in identifying the hit-and-run before Nicole Marie Poole Franklin was arrested.

“Investigators determined that this incident was an intentional act, not an accident,” Clive police said in a Thursday statement announcing the attempted murder charge.

Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Police Chief Michael Venema said he was “shocked” by the suspect’s admission.

“Franklin told investigators that she ran the girl over because she was, in her words, ‘a Mexican’,” Chief Venema said. “She went on to make a number of derogatory statements about Latinos to our investigators.”

“I want to say, in the strongest terms possible, that there is no place in our community, or any other for that matter, for this type of hatred and violence,” he added.

The poisonous climate that has been created will take a long time to clear away. What I fear is that it will get even worse before it gets better.

It never seems to strike these people that the many Americans in Mexico might be endangered because of revenge attacks.

Christianity Today approves impeaching Trump

In an interesting development that has caused some consternation in Christian circles, the evangelical magazine Christianity Today founded in 1956by the late Billy Graham has come out with an editorial approving the impeachment of Donald Trump. It says that the fact that Democrats have been out to get him from the day he took office and that they support Trump’s pro-life and religious freedom positions is not enough to counterbalance the fact that he is unfit for the office he holds.
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HSBC and the drug cartels

The war on drugs is a massive paramilitary and military operation involving the US working with the military of various countries armed forces that can erupt into in gunfights with drug cartels. But as the excellent program Cartel Bank in the Netflix documentary series Dirty Money points out, there is a weak link in the drug business that can be more easily targeted but is not being done. The real pressure point that can be applied to stop or at least limit the drug trade is to choke off the money flow because, after all, the drug cartels are in it for the money not for any ideology.
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Let the game of chicken begin!

Republican senate leader Mitch McConnell has made no secret of the fact that he plans to use the Senate trial on impeachment as a pro forma exercise in which he uses his party’s majority to ram through an acquittal as soon as possible without calling on any witnesses or even presenting any defense. Then he and Donald Trump can claim a great and glorious victory. In fact, he has proudly boasted that this is his goal. If that were to come to pass, one can already write Trump’s tweets: “It was the greatest acquittal in the history of the world.” “I am the most innocent person the world has ever seen.” And so on. You know the dreary script by now.
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The menace of private equity firms

Cory Doctorow argues that private equity firms are terrible and should be abolished and points to 1982 as the year they took off, thanks to former treasury secretary William Simon.

This was the starter pistol for future leveraged buyouts, through which companies like Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group buy multiple companies in the same sector and transmit “winning strategies” between them: new ways to dodge taxes, raise prices, and avoid regulation. PE owners suck any financial cushion out of companies — funds that firms set aside for downturns or R&D — and replace it with “brutal debt schedules.” The PE owners benefit massively when this drives up share prices, but take no downsides when the companies fail.

Under PE, companies have emphasized firing workers and replacing them with overseas subcontractors, and amassing “brands, patents and tax loopholes” as their primary assets. PE firms specialize in self-dealing, cutting in the banks and brokers who set up the deals for a share of the upside. A company bought by a private equity firm is ten times more likely to go bankrupt than one with a traditional capital/management structure.

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