Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

The Center Falls Out in Europe

The EU Parliament election results are in - and what used to the be the fringe is now the norm.

Trump Authorizes $20 Billion Tax Increase

On Thursday President Trump announced a new 5 percent tariff on all goods coming from Mexico—nearly all of which will be paid by consumers in the form of higher prices. A new car imported from Mexico, for example, will cost $1-2,000 extra. Altogether, we’ll import nearly $400 billion from Mexico this year, so the tariff […]

#Google to limit access to modern ad blocking extensions in #Chrome to enterprise users who pay for Chrome. Users are not pleased https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterprise-manifest-v3/

Here’s What Powered the Democratic Win in 2018

Yair Ghitza at Catalist has a detailed look at the 2018 election that’s been updated with lots of new data. One of the things he looks at is the longrunning question of how important turnout is compared to changing minds. Here’s how it penciled out in 2018: Turnout: 37 million dropped off the rolls compared […]

The Anti-Abortion Strategy Closing the Last Clinic in Missouri Is Sneakier Than a Ban

Unless the courts step in, on Saturday June 1, Missouri will become the first state in the country without an abortion clinic since Roe v. Wade was decided almost 50 years ago. But it’s not because of the law Governor Mike Parson signed earlier this month banning abortions after eight weeks. Instead, the Planned Parenthood in St. […]

Who Was Naive About Bernie Sanders Meeting the Sandinistas?

This was adapted from Jonathan M. Katz’s newsletter, The Long Version. To get the backstory behind big international stories delivered to your inbox, subscribe at katz.substack.com. On December 4, 1984, a dump truck carrying volunteer government coffee pickers was ambushed in northern Nicaragua. The attackers, rebel soldiers known as Contras, ripped through the truck with […]

American Airlines Mechanics Are Threatening the “Bloodiest, Ugliest Battle” in Labor History

Mechanics at American Airlines are threatening to strike if a new contract isn’t negotiated, and the union president has declared that employees are prepared for the dispute to erupt into “the bloodiest, ugliest battle that the United States labor movement ever saw.” The statement comes just one day after the airline sued its union workers, claiming that they had engaged in an illegal work slowdown to strengthen their hand at the bargaining table.

American Airlines merged with US Airways in 2013 to become the largest airline in the world. The 31,000 mechanics who fixed planes for both airlines had existing contracts, but the merger didn’t produce a joint contract. American Airlines mechanics had contracts with the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and US Airways mechanics had contracts with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). American Airlines has been trying to update the collective bargaining agreement with the TWU-IAM Association (a partnership between the two unions that developed as a result of the merger), through contract talks since December 2015, with the National Mediations Board serving as a federal mediator between the two sides. But talks were suspended in April after reaching an impasse. In addition to issues of pay and benefits, the union is concerned that the company is potentially looking to outsource thousands of jobs.

Timothy KIlima is an Airline Coordinator for the IAM who has been personally involved with the negotiations. “The employees represented by the TWU-IAM Association want to preserve the work they do, the healthcare they have and to reach parity in benefits between the two pre-merger workgroups,” he told In These Times via email. “American Airlines demands to reduce the amount of work performed by their employees and a corresponding headcount reduction; to eliminate the better healthcare choices the employees already have; and refuses to improve the profit sharing formula that is one of the worst among their peers. In short, the employees desire to grow with a healthy American Airlines but at least want to keep what they have coming into the merger.”

On May 20, American Airlines filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas federal court claiming that mechanics have purposely slowed down their work in an effort to hinder the company’s day-to-day operations. According to the lawsuit, the mechanics’ actions have resulted in 650 flight cancellations and over 1,500 maintenance delays since February.

The union denies that there was ever a purposeful slowdown. “American Airlines should focus its time and effort to reach contractual agreements with its employees instead of falsely accusing them of trumped-up job action charges,” said Klima. “Collective bargaining agreements cannot be reached in courtrooms, in the media or by lobbying politicians. The TWU-IAM Association is eager to return to the bargaining table, which is the only arena where our contract disputes can be resolved.”

Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders also criticized the legal action, tweeting on May 21, “Instead of recognizing and addressing the concerns of workers, American Airlines has moved to sue @MachinistsUnion. Machinists keep passengers safe and on time. My message to American Airlines is simple: Stop the intimidation and bullying!”

On May 21, during one of the airline’s regular town hall meetings with employees at LaGuardia Airport, TWU president John Samuelsen confronted American Airlines president Robert Isom and told him that the union was prepared to strike. “I stand here to tell you—in front of this whole room, in front of everybody, anybody who’s listening—that you’re not going to get what you want,” said Samuelsen. “If this erupts into the bloodiest, ugliest battle that the United States labor movement ever saw, that’s what’s going to happen. You’re already profitable enough.”

Samuelsen also told Isom that workers are desperately trying to avoid what’s called a “self-help” situation under the Railway Labor Act. That means the company would be able to force employees into a contract without union approval if the government condones it. “If we ever get to a point where there’s self-help, we are going to engage in an absolutely vicious strike action against American Airlines to the likes of which you’ve never seen,” said Samuelsen. “Not organized by airline people, but organized by a guy that came out of the New York City subway system that’s well inclined to strike power, and who understands that the only way to challenge power is to aggressively take it to them. … We’re going to shut this place down.”

Isom replied, “I will tell you this, that anybody that seeks to destroy American Airlines, that is not going to be productive. It just won’t. We have to be able to work together to see the views of both sides. And I, believe me, I will send people back to the table."

The airline industry has seen its share of labor unrest over the last few years, and workers have been able to celebrate a number of organizing victories. The American Airlines battle mirrors the recent fight between Southwest Airlines and the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA). In March, Southwest sued the AMFA and alleged that workers had participated in an illegal slowdown, but employees were ultimately able to win an agreement that established pay raises, new bonuses and an end to the legal dispute. Last year, JetBlue flight attendants voted to unionize, and in February the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA) helped end Trump’s government shutdown by threatening to strike.

Organizing efforts have been met with extreme resistance from the airlines beyond the aforementioned lawsuits. In February, The Guardianrevealed that JetBlue president Joanna Geraghty sent employees an email warning that the company would cease to be successful if workers unionized. “So if anyone asks you to sign a card, I’m asking you to decline,” the email eads. This month, details of Delta’s union-busting campaign emerged, which included breakroom literature encouraging workers to spend their money on video games and alcohol rather union dues.

According to The International Air Transport Association, the airline industry is expected to generate net profits of $35.5 billion in 2019, better than the $32.3 billion netted in 2018. American Airlines is the world’s largest airline. Its parent organization, American Airlines Group, reported a fourth-quarter 2018 pre-tax profit of $387 million. “We expect our total revenue per available seat mile to grow faster than our network competitors, and to deliver strong pre-tax earnings growth in 2019,” the group said in a statement.

Last week, the TWU-IAM Association sent a letter to the National Mediation Board calling on the agency to compel further negotiations between the two sides, as the company has refused to engage in talks without a mediator. “These negotiations have reached the critical end stage with the largest scope and economic issues yet to be resolved,” reads the letter.

There’s No Need to Thank Me. Really.

Via Tyler Cowen, here’s a study that apparently surprised the experts but doesn’t surprise me at all. The researchers ran a 6-year experiment involving hundreds of thousands of people to see how they responded when nonprofits called to thank them for donating. Here are the results: Zip. Zero. Nada. This is not the usual “failed […]

Asia's glaciers provide buffer against drought

A new study assesses the contribution that Asia's high mountain glaciers make to relieving water stress in the region. The study has important economic and social implications for a region that is vulnerable to drought. Climate change is causing most of the region's glaciers to shrink.

Toxic air will shorten children's lives by 20 months, study reveals

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/03/toxic-air-will-shorten-childrens-lives-by-20-months-study-reveals?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Librem_Social #climatechange #climatecrisis

Humans and volcanoes caused nearly all of global heating in past 140 years

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/30/humans-and-volcanoes-caused-nearly-all-of-global-heating-in-past-140-years?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Librem_Social #climatechange #climatecrisis

Gut bacteria's connections to human health, disease

Researchers have made an important advance in understanding the roles that gut bacteria play in human health.

Combination of three gene mutations results in deadly human heart disease

Scientists believe that more common forms of disease may be the result of a combination of more subtle genetic mutations that act together. Now researchers have used technological advances to prove that three subtle genetic variants inherited within a family worked together to cause heart disease in multiple siblings at a very young age.

New Hampshire Lawmakers Just Overrode the Republican Governor’s Veto and Abolished the Death Penalty

New Hampshire just became the 21st state to abolish the death penalty. Earlier this month, Republican Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed a measure to end capital punishment statewide, but on Thursday lawmakers voted to override the veto. “The death penalty has been an issue every New Hampshire legislator has grappled with over many years,” Democratic state […]

Venezuela Is a Case Study in the Brutality of U.S. Sanctions

On May 8, nearly a year to the day since the U.S. pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal, the Trump administration slapped a fresh round of sanctions on Iran, whose economy is already reeling.

The Iran sanctions are but the most recent example of a U.S. foreign policy tool that consistently causes or exacerbates humanitarian crises. For a preview of what Iran is likely to suffer, we can look to another country currently in U.S. crosshairs: Venezuela.

The devastating effects of the Trump administration’s broad economic sanctions, first imposed against Venezuela in 2017, were exposed in a paper released on April 25 by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs—who has served as a special advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General—on behalf of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The sanctions have deprived the Venezuelan economy of “billions of dollars of foreign exchange needed to pay for essential and life-saving imports,” the report explains. The result was a staggering 40,000 total deaths in 2017 and 2018 and more than 300,000 Venezuelans put at health risk due to a lack of access to medicine or treatment. The paper received brief press coverage in the last week of April of this year, but was quickly overshadowed by opposition leader and self-declared interim president Juan Guaidó’s third failed coup attempt.

Hurting civilians

Sanctions against Venezuelan officials, individuals and companies go back for more than a decade, with the Obama administration paving the way for the Trump administration’s significant escalation today. In 2015, the Obama administration declared a “national emergency” around Venezuela and labeled it a threat to “national security.”

Using the same rhetoric of emergency, the Trump administration extended the sanctions to target Venezuela’s financial institutions. The administration froze billions of dollars of Venezuelan government assets held in the U.S., from gold reserves to trade credits to oil funds from CITGO. At the same time, the U.S. impeded Venezuela’s ability to restructure its debt and perform routine financial activities; prohibited Americans from doing business with Venezuela’s oil company, PDVSA; and pressured other international actors like India to enforce Venezuela’s economic isolation.

While the sanctions ostensibly target government officials and assets, the burden falls not on the government “but on the civilian population,” according to Weisbrot and Sachs. The sanctions have pushed inflation into hyperinflation and will cause Venezuela’s GDP to drop by 37.4 percent in 2019, the authors estimate.

Juan Carlos Rosales, a father of five from just north of Caracas, has experienced the toll of sanctions firsthand. Rosales’ 14-year-old son broke his arm weeks ago and has been unable to obtain surgery due to a shortage of medical supplies. The crisis has touched the family in other ways. Thanks to hyperinflation, the money that once covered a month’s worth of education, medicine and food “does not even cover a piece of candy,” Rosales says. Unable to afford food, Rosales depends on the government’s Local Committees for Food Distribution and Production, better known by their Spanish acronym CLAP. The “public services subsidized by the state,” he says, have made the crisis “less painful.” Unfortunately, in late May, the U.S. prepared to sanction the food aid program, accusing officials of using it to launder money.

It must be noted, as Keymer Ávila, a professor of criminology at the Central University of Venezuela told In These Times via email, the U.S. sanctions are not the original cause of Venezuela’s crisis. The “collapse of oil prices,” most recently in 2014, in a “rentier” state that relies almost exclusively on the nationalized oil industry for revenue, was merely the trigger, Ávila argues. The collapse was worsened, Ávila says, by “decades of improvised decisions,” a “lack of transparency,” “clientelism,” and “corruption and widespread embezzlement” on the part of various Venezuelan governments, from before Chávez to Maduro. None of this, however, should be used to whitewash the history of U.S. intervention in Venezuela or the violence of the domestic opposition, on display, for example, in the 2017 helicopter attack on the Supreme Court. Nor does it invalidate the successes of the Chávez regime, chief among which, as Greg Grandin notes, are drastic reductions in “poverty, inequality, illiteracy, child mortality rates and malnutrition.”

Rather, a crucial task of the Left is to recognize the current failures of the Venezuelan state while defending its sovereignty. Part of the latter is recognizing the consistently devastating effects of sanctions.

A violent history

Sanctions have a long history of worsening conditions for those that they purport to protect. While they are often billed as “targeted” or “smart” to minimize civilian damage, the brunt of the burden falls upon the most vulnerable, as the CEPR report makes clear is the case in Venezuela.

Perhaps the most notorious case of the deadly application of sanctions was against Iraq in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. Resolution 661, enacted by the UN Security Council on August 6, demanded that UN Member States refrain from trading or carrying out financial transactions with Iraq. After the Persian Gulf War ended in late February 1991, these sanctions were codified in Security Council Resolution 687. President George H.W. Bush made clear that the UN sanctions would not be lifted “as long as Saddam Hussein is in power.”

As evidence mounted over the next five years that the sanctions were killing hundreds of thousands of children, the U.S. continued to pressure increasingly skeptical Security Council members into compliance. Asked in 1996 about the death of as many as 500,000 children due to malnutrition exacerbated by the sanctions, then-U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright infamously replied, “[The] price is worth it.”

While later studies would revise the estimate downward—a 1999 analysis found that as many as 227,000 children under 5 were killed as a result of the war, the great majority due to sanctions—and highlight the role of Hussein in aggravating the conditions, the figures remain stark. Many point out that the supposed alternative to military intervention killed more civilians between 1990 and 2000 than did the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011. One UN official described the effects as “genocide.” The sanctions were only lifted in 2003, after the original U.S. goal, regime change, was successful.

When the call comes from within

To be sure, sanctions can sometimes be a tool of social movements, as in the anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa, officially imposed by the U.S. in 1986 yet called for much earlier by activists around the world. The crucial distinction, says Garrick Ruiz, former North America Regional Coordinator for the Palestinian BDS National Committee, is, “Who is asking for sanctions?” In the case of South Africa, Ruiz says, sanctions were “a way for the international community to engage in solidarity with the people of the country.” A strong international grassroots movement pressured companies, universities and governments to comply. In the end, the New York Times noted in 1993, the sanctions “helped hasten the end of apartheid through a combination of psychological and economic pain.”

Ruiz and others channel the legacy of that fight in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. The 2005 Palestinian call for BDS was “signed by just a huge swath of Palestinian civil society,” Ruiz says. It called upon civil society organizations and “people of conscience” to impose “broad boycotts” and “divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa.” Following the call, the Palestinian BDS National Committee was formed as the coordinating body for the BDS campaign. Activists, seizing on the momentum of the movement, pressured a wide range of actors to divest their resources from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation, from universities, to Norwegian pension funds, to multinational telecommunication companies. Ruiz contrasts the “bottom-up call for sanctions” with the U.S. government's “top-down form of sanctions.”

Generating discontent

One irony of U.S. sanctions is that they fail to achieve even the (often imperialist) goals of the United States. In Iraq, the U.S. government’s repeated affirmations that sanctions would not be lifted unless Saddam Hussein stepped down made clear that the goal was to trigger the disaffected masses to overthrow Hussein. This did not happen. Rather, many Iraqis saw their crisis as exacerbated by U.S. aggression: As an Iraqi Army officer told the New York Times, “Most people thought, 'Saddam is feeding us while the Americans are trying to starve us to death.''' Saddam Hussein played on this perception with a media campaign that broadcast and exaggerated the effects of the sanctions. At one point, Hussein instructed doctors to wait to bury individual children until there had been enough deaths to stage a mass funeral and generate outrage. The effectiveness of this campaign and the brutality of the sanctions led to long-lasting anti-American sentiment. Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 attacks were in part motivated by the sanctions. In the wake of President George H.W. Bush’s 2018 passing, bitter Iraqis, asked by journalists about his legacy, denounced “Mr. Embargo.”

The case of Iraq makes clear that the impoverished, hungry and sick victims of sanctions are not ideal candidates to overthrow their governments. Nor are they easily misled into blaming those governments for the effects of external sanctions. In the last month, Iranians and Cubans have taken to the streets in massive numbers to protest U.S. sanctions. In Venezuela, Juan Carlos Rosales knows whom to blame as well: “Ever since the executive decree, the situation here has been lethal.”

Restoring suffering, not democracy

Regardless of their devastating results, the use of sanctions against “unruly” countries is a frequent U.S. foreign po licy tactic, often posed as the only alternative to an invasion. The Trump administration has eagerly embraced this approach. On April 30, President Trump threatened to impose a “full and complete embargo” and the “highest-level sanctions” on Cuba for supporting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. These threats were concurrent with an escalation of Iranian sanctions, first in the lifting of waivers that had previously allowed major buyers of Iranian oil to continue importing the product, then in the new round of sanction on May 8 that targeted Iranian metals. These actions joined existing Trump administration sanctions against Iranian “individuals, entities, aircraft and vessels."

History shows the consequences of these sanctions will not predominantly fall on the Iranian government, but on the Iranian people, who have suffered under U.S. sanctions since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Although there has not yet been a comprehensive study of the toll of the Trump administration sanctions on Iran, Iranians report that their everyday lives have become more difficult, in the form of drug shortages, increased air pollution, job loss and long food lines. This most recent round of sanctions—which, in addition to restricting oil imports, targeted the export of industrial metals that make up 10% of Iran’s export economy—will only tighten the noose.

Trump’s talk of a potential “military option,” and his administration’s shockingly cavalier admission that the Venezuela sanctions are meant to “increase pain and suffering,” should rid us of any notion that the U.S. is imposing sanctions to “restore democracy” or “respect human rights,” as the Trump administration claims. Moving forward, we must see the use of deadly sanctions as mere cover for a march toward regime change—a ruse that will claim thousands of lives.

“Freedom Gas”: The Trump Administration’s Ridiculous New Plan to Rebrand Fossil Fuels

This story was originally published by Grist and is shared here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.  The Trump administration has rebranded natural gas with a new, patriotic-sounding name: “freedom gas.” In a Department of Energy press release on Tuesday, Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes talked about exporting US natural gas as “spreading freedom gas throughout the […]

#SteveBell on #TheresaMay's #legacy – #cartoon | Opinion | The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2019/may/30/steve-bell-on-theresa-mays-legacy-cartoon

#UK #Politics #Satire

For the Record: Here’s the Email Telling the Navy to Hide the USS John McCain

Here’s the fabled email instructing the Navy to keep the USS McCain out of sight during President Trump’s visit to Japan: President Trump says he knew nothing about this. The secretary of defense says he knew nothing about it either. I believe them. This was cooked up by Trump aides in the White House who […]

A #randomnothing tries to be cute.