Saturday, September 4, 2021
Labour reverses ban on Palestine Solidarity Campaign speaker
Asa Winstanley
Activism and BDS Beat
3 September 2021
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/labour-reverses-ban-palestine-solidarity-campaign-speaker
Labour has apologized for telling its youth wing that it could not speak alongside the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) at the UK party’s annual conference later this month.
Young Labour had been told by a party official “that they could not invite PSC to address one of their events at conference,” the campaign said in a statement on Thursday.
“When pressed for a reason, they were informed that PSC’s positions were ‘controversial,’” the campaign explained.
After discussions with party officials on Wednesday night, PSC and Young Labour were informed there “had been a mistake” and that PSC could be invited after all, “and an apology was given.”
On Tuesday, Young Labour’s chair Jess Barnard posted on Twitter that she had been told by unnamed party officials that “anyone from Palestine Solidarity Campaign will be refused as a speaker, as will Jeremy Corbyn” – a left-wing political activist and the party’s former leader.
The campaign said in its statement on Thursday that it had been “informed by well-placed sources” that a senior party official had cited PSC’s support for the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, BDS.
The official had claimed this “might violate the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism.”
“Cloud of suspicion”
Contacted by The Electronic Intifada, PSC declined to name the senior Labour official, citing assurances of confidentiality given to its sources.
The Labour Party did not respond to a request for comment.
The bogus “working definition” of anti-Semitism approved by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance in 2016 has been used for years now to quash freedom of speech on Palestine.
It is an anti-Palestinian document, because it conflates legitimate criticisms of Israel and its racist ideology, Zionism, on one hand, with anti-Jewish prejudice on the other.
PSC explained that it had not been banned from the conference. Like previous years, it would have a stall at the event and hold a meeting on Palestine.
The group blamed “the Israeli state and its allies” for long-running efforts “to delegitimize the global campaign for Palestinian rights, most particularly by conflating that campaign with anti-Semitism.”
This creates “a cloud of suspicion around raising the cause of Palestine, which leads to a chilling effect,” PSC said.
Young Labour’s Jess Barnard said on Wednesday that her group would be going ahead with an event outside the main conference area. Organizers dubbed it “the event that David Evans and Keir Starmer tried to ban from [the] Labour conference.”
Evans and Starmer are Labour’s general secretary and leader. Both belong to the party’s right.
World Federation of Trade Unions backs Nabisco strikers
https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58736/
By a guest author posted on September 2, 2021
This statement was issued Aug. 25 by the Secretariat of the World Federation of Trade Unions/La Federación Sindical Mundial.
Nabisco workers on strike in Chicago say, “No contract, no snacks!”
The World Federation of Trade Unions, which is the militant voice of 105 million workers in 133 countries around the world, conveys its solidarity to the workers of Nabisco Company in the U.S.A. who are on strike in five locations: NABISCO distribution centers outside Atlanta, as well as in Portland, Ore., Aurora, Colo., Richmond, Va., and Chicago, Ill.
Nabisco workers in all five locations join voices and demand from the Company to stop exporting their jobs to Mexico and to end its demands for contract concessions.
The world class-oriented trade union movement stands by the side of NABISCO workers who fight from Oregon and Colorado to Illinois, Virginia and Georgia against negative changes in their contracts and working conditions. We urge the fulfillment of their just claims and the protection of their working rights.
Sordid source of ‘lab-leak’ accusation – against China
https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58745/
The U.S.-China Solidarity Project has just released an up-to-date, in-depth look at the network of anti-China think tanks responsible for promoting the bogus lab-leak theory that COVID-19 originated in Chinese labs.
“Capitalism on a Ventilator” can be found at these and other online locations: kobo.com/us/en/ebook/capitalism-on-a-ventilator andworld-view-forum.myshopify.com/products/capitalism-on-a-ventilator.
The report, “Chinese and U.S. Activists Say NO to the Biden’s Virus Origin Investigation!” was put together by the editorial team that produced “Capitalism on a Ventilator,” the book comparing COVID responses by capitalist and socialist governments. (kobo.com/us)
In May, U.S. President Joe Biden ordered intelligence officials to “redouble” efforts to investigate the origins of COVID-19, including the allegation that the virus came from a laboratory in China. Biden asked the groups to report back to him within 90 days — a deadline that is looming as summer draws to an end.
“That puts the expected release of Biden’s investigation at any day now,” said Siu Hin Lee, an author of the new report and an editor of the book. “Our report provides ammunition for progressive U.S. forces seeking to counter the growing anti-China narrative, a poisonous focus which started in right-wing circles and has since metastasized, gradually garnering mainstream acceptance even among some leftists.”
The new report shows how a network of think tanks including the Atlantic Council, the Hudson Institute and the Center for the New American Security has teamed up with Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and others — including the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Gordon, who along with Judith Miller in 2002 promoted the Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction lie and is now playing a crucial role in demonizing China.
As of the end of August, the U.S. COVID death toll is well over 600,000 in a country of over 333 million. By contrast, the number of COVID deaths in China, a country of 1.4 billion, has remained below 5,000.
The lab-leak theory has gained traction as the Delta variant ravages U.S. schools and communities, while China numbers remain substantially lower — even as the new strain started appearing there.
The report, “Chinese and U.S. Activists Say NO to the Biden’s Virus Origin Investigation!” can be found at tinyurl.com/5ynswr96 and is available for download.
Report from New Orleans: Government does nothing for the poor
https://www.workers.org/2021/09/58750/
By John Catalinotto posted on September 2, 2021
Sept. 1 — Gavrielle Gemma, union and political organizer since the 1970s and now working with the New Orleans-based Workers Voice Socialist Movement, called Workers World to report on the situation there, post-Hurricane Ida. Gemma is now living in a modest single-family home in the Florida neighborhood of New Orleans, part of the Upper Ninth Ward.
“It’s bad,” she said. “Only poor folk stayed once the mayor and governor advised that people evacuate. That means the people left had no choice, no place to go, no money to pay for hotels or motels — assuming they could find a room. If they had made the evacuation mandatory, then the government would be responsible for the welfare of the people who left. But they’re doing nothing.
“The biggest immediate problem is that there is no electricity. The company that provides it — Entergy — says it may be a month before they restore full service. And it is hot, hot, hot, in the ’90s with high humidity. To stay alive in this weather, you need water and a way to get cool. The cooling centers — for people in danger of heat exhaustion — had no food or water.
“Look, we don’t expect miracles. They can’t stop a hurricane. But even if we’re not dying in the flood, they’re letting us starve in the streets. From Day One, someone should have been out,” said Gemma, “telling people what to expect and what to do. Tankers with water and with food could have been going street to street, bringing ready-to-eat food and water to drink, tarps to cover leaks.
“Here it is three days after landfall, and the government only set up three places in the city where you can go for water. Then when you get there, you have to wait in line for hours.
“Not only do we have no power and no food, but there is no gasoline available. There are already long lines of people waiting for gas and for ice. The only people getting by are those few with generators.
“The money to buy one lousy F35 bomber would be enough to get a home generator to every household in the city.
Compound crises: COVID, cutbacks, Ida
“This will give your readers an idea of what the state government is like here,” Gemma added. “The state government rejected the extra COVID-19 federal unemployment insurance of $300 a week for the last two months. This was like robbing $2,400 from people who needed money badly. And you know, no one gets paid sick days here.
“The state is even abandoning New Orleans residents with enough resources to evacuate or relatives to house them. The governor’s message to them is: ‘Don’t come back. We can’t take care of you.’ So even when stores reopen, many people will have no money to buy food. And for every purchase you need cash, no food stamps, no SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
“Already people are being evicted from their homes. It will only get worse after Ida.
“Biden took responsibility for leaving Afghanistan — good that the U.S. got out. He could order federal efforts to deliver aid to New Orleans. In California, giant planes are used in firefighting. He could use cargo planes to deliver aid here.
“Biden’s coming here to see Louisiana post-Ida. The people in my neighborhood are angry as hell that nothing is being done to help. They’re ready to protest.
“On top of the other problems in Louisiana is the surge in COVID-19 cases. Jamming people into a shelter to solve one problem will cause another. It’s criminal how the state authorities have handled the pandemic here.
“We’ll turn these words into action. The Workers Voice Socialist Movement will mobilize to fight for demands to help the working class of New Orleans. I’ll be part of that.”
Sotomayor Rips Right-Wing Justices as Supreme Court Effectively Overturns Roe v. Wade
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/09/02/sotomayor-rips-right-wing-justices-supreme-court-effectively-overturns-roe-v-wade
In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor slammed conservative justices for opting to "bury their heads in the sand" when faced with a "flagrantly unconstitutional law."
JAKE JOHNSONSeptember 2, 2021
The conservative U.S. Supreme Court issued an unsigned order in the dead of night Wednesday leaving Texas' draconian abortion ban in place, a move that effectively overturns Roe v. Wade and imperils reproductive rights across much of the United States.
The high court's decision—against which Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and John Roberts dissented—lets stand the most restrictive abortion ban in the country, an unprecedented law that deputizes private individuals to sue anyone who performs an abortion or "aids and abets" one after around six weeks of a pregnancy.
In her blistering dissent (pdf) against the 5-4 decision, Sotomayor condemned the Supreme Court's most conservative justices for opting to "bury their heads in the sand" when faced with a "flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny."The law's empowerment of private citizens rather than state officials to enforce the abortion ban was designed to make the new restrictions difficult to challenge in court. Plaintiffs who win their lawsuits against abortion providers and others—potentially including those who drive a person to a clinic to obtain the procedure—are entitled to $10,000 and the recovery of their legal fees, a reward that reproductive rights advocates have characterized as a bounty.
The Texas law, Sotomayor noted, "equates to a near-categorical ban on abortions beginning six weeks after a woman's last menstrual period, before many women realize they are pregnant, and months before fetal viability."
"The act is clearly unconstitutional under existing precedents... The respondents do not even try to argue otherwise. Nor could they: No federal appellate court has upheld such a comprehensive prohibition on abortions before viability under current law," Sotomayor continued. "Taken together, the act is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this court's precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas."
Turning her attention to the conservative justices who refused to block the law—Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas—Sotomayor wrote that "the court has rewarded the state's effort to delay federal review of a plainly unconstitutional statute, enacted in disregard of the court's precedents, through procedural entanglements of the state's own creation."
"The court should not be so content to ignore its constitutional obligations to protect not only the rights of women, but also the sanctity of its precedents and of the rule of law," Sotomayor added.
Legal analysts and advocates warned that the high court's ruling all but spells the end for Roe v. Wade, a landmark 1973 decision that established abortion as a constitutional right—a right that has long been in the crosshairs of the conservative movement.
"We can stop debating about whether the court overturned Roe v. Wade. They did. So what if it’s on a technicality? It's not a technicality to the people forced to carry pregnancies to term against their will," wrote Jessica Mason Pieklo, executive editor of Rewire News Group. "In the immediate, it means that Roe is dead letter law in Texas. And probably Mississippi and Louisiana—the other states in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And it means more bad news is coming."
"But it doesn't mean people stop needing access to abortion," she continued. "Nor does it mean that providers will stop providing that care. After this week though, it is undeniable that the abortion landscape is radically changed—for generations."
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 22 states across the U.S. currently have laws that could be used to restrict or gut abortion rights. The research organization notes in its latest round-up that nine states have "unconstitutional post-Roe restrictions that are currently blocked by courts but could be brought back into effect with a court order in Roe's absence."
In Texas, the near-term consequence of the law—known as Senate Bill 8—could be the imminent closure of the massive state's relatively few abortion clinics, many of which cannot withstand the risk of a wave of lawsuits.
"If this was a criminal ban, we’d know what this is and what we can and cannot do," Jessica Rubino, a doctor at Austin Women's Health Center, told the New York Times. "But this ban has civil implications. It requires a lawyer to go to court. It requires lawyers' fees. And then $10,000 if we don't win. What happens if everybody is sued, not just me?"
"My staff is nervous," she added. "They've been asking, 'What about our families?'"
Amy Hagstrom Miller, president and CEO of Whole Woman's Health, said in a statement earlier Wednesday that "we are heartbroken that this law has not yet been blocked."
"Last night, our waiting rooms were filled with patients and their loved ones, and our staff were pouring their hearts out trying to help every person they could up until 11:59 pm—the minute before S.B. 8 went into effect," said Hagstrom Miller. "But today, we will be forced to turn away most Texans seeking an abortion. Anti-abortion politicians in Texas can no longer hide behind the guise of health or safety—this is an abortion ban, plain and simple. It robs Texans of their ability to make decisions about their health and their futures. We have been here before, and we'll continue serving our patients however we legally can and fighting for their right to safe, compassionate abortion care."
With fundamental reproductive rights under assault from the courts and Republican-led states, Democratic members of Congress are facing growing pressure to respond with legislative action.
In a joint statement on Wednesday, Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus co-chairs Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said Congress must "immediately take action to enshrine the right to access abortion into federal law."
"The House should immediately pass the Women’s Health Protection Act... to ensure that states like Texas cannot ban this critical health service, and we urge the Senate to do whatever is necessary to send it to the president's desk," the lawmakers said. "Congress must also continue to strike down other restrictions on access to abortion in federal law, including bans on insurance coverage like the Hyde Amendment."
The three House Democrats also urged the Biden administration to uphold its "commitment to protecting the right to abortion."
"We call on Attorney General Garland to explore whatever steps the Department of Justice can take to respond to this blatant violation of Texans' constitutional rights," they said. "Everyone—no matter their income, where they live, or how they're insured—has the right to make their own decisions about their bodies and their lives, and we are committed to promoting policies that protect the reproductive freedom of all people."
Greg Palast on Georgia’s New Mass Voter Challenge and Steven Donziger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGVZW-LBL8Y
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