November 23, 2023

Privacy & Transparency pop-up is now back every time you switch pages on DU (using Chrome on a laptop)

November 23, 2023

Turkey tells NATO that Sweden won't join by next week's meeting -sources

https://www.reuters.com/world/turkey-tells-nato-that-sweden-wont-join-by-next-weeks-meeting-sources-2023-11-22/



ANKARA/BRUSSELS, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Turkey has informed NATO that ratification of Sweden's membership bid will not be completed in time to allow the country's accession ceremony at a meeting of alliance foreign ministers next week, two sources familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. Last week, the Turkish parliament's foreign affairs commission delayed a vote on Sweden's NATO membership bid in order to hold further talks on the subject.

The commission will likely resume its debate on the matter on Tuesday or Wednesday, one of the sources said. NATO foreign ministers will meet in Brussels on those days, Nov. 28-29, a gathering that some in the Western defence bloc had hoped would mark Sweden's accession. The Turkish Foreign Ministry was not immediately available for comment. Both Sweden and Finland had requested to join NATO in May last year following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

President Tayyip Erdogan raised objections at the time to both requests over what he said was the Nordic nations' protection of those who Turkey deems terrorists, as well as their defence trade embargoes. Turkey endorsed Finland's bid in April, but has kept Sweden waiting. Turkey has demanded that Sweden take more steps to rein in local members of the Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK), which is considered a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States.

In response, Stockholm introduced an anti-terrorism bill that makes membership of a terrorist organisation illegal, while also lifting arms export restrictions on Turkey. It says it has upheld its part of a deal signed last year. For ratification, the bill needs to be approved by the Turkish foreign affairs commission before being put to a full parliament vote, which could come days or weeks later. Erdogan would then sign it into law to conclude the process, the length of which has frustrated Ankara's allies and tested its Western ties. While NATO member Hungary also has not ratified Sweden's membership, Turkey is seen as the main roadblock to Sweden's accession.

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November 23, 2023

Florida Republicans propose reporting students to Homeland Security for 'promoting terrorism'

https://www.reckon.news/news/2023/11/in-the-wake-of-pro-palestine-activism-florida-republicans-propose-reporting-students-to-homeland-security-for-promoting-terrorism.html



Florida college students could be investigated for supporting “foreign terrorism” threats under a new legislative proposal. Republican lawmakers in the state House and Senate introduced companion bills (HB 465, SB 470) after an increase of student activism efforts – mostly in support of Palestine and a ceasefire – across the country and the state of Florida amid the Israel-Hamas war.

Opponents of the legislation warn that the proposals could have dire consequences for free speech. “This legislation will have a chilling effect on all student expression throughout college campuses. I am concerned that this bill (HB 465), if implemented into law, will be weaponized by the state to suppress freedom of speech and ruin student’s lives by accusing them of promoting terrorism,” state Rep. Anna V. Eskamani, a Florida Democrat, told Reckon.

The bills put forth by state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia and Rep. John Temple, both Republicans from central Florida, state that foreign terrorist organizations include, but are not limited to, Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad. A representative of Rep. Temple’s office said they would respond to Reckon but did not by the time of publication. However, Rep. Temple told the Tallahassee Democrat, “Florida’s commitment is to stand with Israel and not be complicit to foreign terrorist organizations making postsecondary institutions a place for activism.”

The legislation, if passed, will require universities and colleges to report students who protest in support of ‘foreign terrorist organizations’ – not domestic terrorist organizations – as defined in the bill, to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Under the bill’s language, ‘promoting’ groups like Hamas and Palestine Islamic Jihad would also make students ineligible for institutional and state grants, financial aid, scholarships, tuition assistance and require students to pay out-of-state tuition without fee waivers.

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November 23, 2023

Secret Warnings About Wuhan Research Predated the Pandemic

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/11/covid-origins-warnings-nih-department-of-energy

https://archive.li/33Ext



“Delete That Comment”

In late October 2017, a US health official from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a glimpse of an eagerly anticipated work in progress. The WIV, a leading research institute, was putting the finishing touches on China’s first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory. Operating with the highest safeguards, the lab would enable scientists to study some of the world’s most lethal pathogens. The project had support from Western governments seeking a more robust partnership with China’s top scientists. France had helped design the facility. Canada, before long, would send virus samples. And in the US, NIAID was channeling grant dollars through an American organization called EcoHealth Alliance to help fund the WIV’s cutting-edge coronavirus research.

That funding allowed the NIAID official, who worked out of the US embassy in Beijing, to become one of the first Americans to tour the lab. Her goal was to facilitate cooperation between American and Chinese scientists. Nevertheless, says Asha M. George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, a nonprofit that advises the US government on biodefense policy, “If you want to know what’s going on in a closed country, one of the things the US has done is give them grant money.” In emails obtained by Vanity Fair, the NIAID official told her superiors what she’d gleaned from the technician who’d served as her guide. The lab, which was not yet fully operational, was struggling to develop enough expertise among its staff—a concern in a setting that had no tolerance for errors. “According to [the technician], being the first P4 [or BSL-4] lab in the country, they have to learn everything from zero,” she wrote. “They rely on those scientists who have worked in P4 labs outside China to train the other scientists how to operate.”



She’d also learned something else “alarming” from the technician, she wrote. Researchers at the WIV intended to study Ebola, but Chinese government restrictions prevented them from importing samples. As a result, they were considering using a technique called reverse genetics to engineer Ebola in the lab. Anticipating that this information would set off alarm bells in the US, the official cautioned, “I don’t want the information particularly using reverse genetics to create viruses to get out, which would affect the ability for our future information gain,” meaning it would impair the collaboration between NIAID and the WIV. “I was shocked to hear what he said [about reverse engineering Ebola]. I also worry the reaction of people in Washington when they read this.”

There was good reason to fear that such a revelation could derail the fledgling partnership. One year earlier, the US Department of Energy had warned other agencies, including NIAID’s parent entity, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), that advanced genetic engineering techniques could be misused for malign ends. The Energy Department had developed a classified proposal, reported on here for the first time, to ramp up safeguards against that possibility and develop tools to better detect evidence of genetic engineering. The proposal, which was not implemented in its suggested form, prompted a heated interagency battle, six people with knowledge of the debate tell Vanity Fair. On January 10, 2018, as the NIAID official prepared her official trip report for the US embassy in Beijing, she wrote to colleagues, “I was shocked to hear what he said [about reverse engineering Ebola]. I also worry the reaction of people in Washington when they read this. The technician is only a worker, not a decision maker nor a [principal investigator]. So how much we should believe what he said?” She concluded, “I don’t feel comfortable for broader audience within the government circle. It could be very sensitive.”

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November 23, 2023

Tesla Faces Off Against Nordic Labor Solidarity

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-11-21-tesla-sweden-union-sympathy-strikes/



Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla has been involved in an escalating dispute with IF Metall, the trade union representing its mechanics in Sweden. After several years of the union trying to get the company to sign a collective bargaining agreement, the mechanics went on strike on October 27—and now Tesla is facing a full-blown campaign of sympathy strikes. Dockworkers are refusing to unload Tesla shipments, electricians will not repair Tesla chargers, cleaning companies will not service Tesla buildings, and now as of Monday, the Swedish postal union is refusing to deliver Tesla mail and packages.

As my colleague Harold Meyerson noted last week, these kind of strikes are largely illegal in the United States thanks to the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (though the exact legal details, as usual in the American context, are hideously complicated). Carry out a sympathy strike in the States and you might be fired, see your union de-certified, or even be sued for damages. In theory Tesla could just abandon the Swedish market, but it is quite large relative to its size—nearly 45 percent of auto sales there this year have been EVs, and the Tesla Model Y has been the best-selling vehicle by a big margin. So it’s worth examining the Tesla situation for some lessons.



This is far from the first time an arrogant foreign business, convinced that it can impose U.S.-style hyper-exploitative labor relations at will, has tangled with Nordic union power and been unceremoniously crushed. Probably the most famous previous example was when McDonald’s tried to bigfoot the Danish labor movement in the 1980s by refusing to sign any union contracts. As Matt Bruenig writes, after several years of failed negotiations, the unions gave up and called sympathy strikes in key industries connected to the company:



Workers also picketed McDonald’s stores across Denmark. Hey presto, a few months later the company gave in. That victory is why today, Denmark’s McDonald’s workers make a base hourly rate of about $20 per hour, with bonuses for overtime, night, or weekend work, and have an additional week of paid vacation on top of the legally mandated five weeks.

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November 23, 2023

The Commodification of Everything

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-11-21-commodification-of-everything-polanyi/



In the hyper-capitalism that characterizes today’s economy, more and more of human life is becoming commodified, used primarily as arenas for corporate profit. In the face of these deeper trends, government efforts to moderate the effects by using transfers to reduce income extremes, or increasing social investment, can be futile sandcastles. Sometimes government policy working through private players, such as Obamacare or Biden’s industrial subsidies to private industry, serves to reinforce this deeper trend. My intellectual hero, Karl Polanyi, wrote about the relentless tendency of capitalism to turn everything into a commodity. Writing in 1930s and 1940s, almost a century after Karl Marx, Polanyi’s explanation of how this dynamic worked was informed by more history and was more persuasive than Marx’s cruder version.

But when I was young, we enjoyed something of a pause, which some optimists assumed was permanent. Mobilized citizens, democratic governments, and workers organized into trade unions insisted that the preconditions of a good life—health, decent employment, education, housing—must not be treated as mere commodities for maximum profit. The Danish social scientist, Gøsta Esping-Andersen, writing in the spirit of Polanyi, looked at Scandinavian social democracy as an ongoing process of “de-commodification.” Unfortunately, that was then. In the past half-century, the tendency of capitalism to commodify everything has returned with a vengeance. And commodification, it turns out, goes hand in hand with concentration. As formerly social goods get turned back into commodities, corporations use hyper-concentration to further increase profits.





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November 21, 2023

RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE nonstop music hits ( mixed by DJ jheCk24 )

November 21, 2023

Sen. Joe Manchin doesn't commit to staying in Democratic Party as he weighs 3rd party presidential run

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/15/politics/joe-manchin-democratic-party-2024/index.html



Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia on Wednesday wouldn’t rule out a departure from the Democratic Party, saying he’s never considered himself “a Washington Democrat” as he weighs a potential presidential run. “I’ve never considered myself a Washington Democrat. I’ve been a very independent person,” Manchin told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins when asked whether he’d leave the party.

Pressed by Collins on whether he was considering ditching the “D” by his name, Manchin – who is not running for reelection next year – responded: “Sure, you always consider that, absolutely,” adding that “they might throw me out so, who knows, they might do me a favor. I don’t know, we’ll see.” Manchin’s announcement last week that he would not seek another term in the deeply red state came as a blow for Democrats hoping to hold onto a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate.

Manchin said that while he has received a “nice note” from Democratic President Joe Biden since his announcement, the two men haven’t spoken about the decision. “He’s been traveling quite a bit,” Manchin said, adding, “I’m sure we’ll be talking.” Manchin, a moderate Democrat, has found himself at odds with members of his party throughout his congressional tenure.

While he helped Biden notch some key legislative wins in the first half of his presidency, the senator has also been an outspoken Biden critic – especially on issues of the environment, energy and the economy. “No matter what [letter] I have by me, I’m an independent thinking, I vote independently and I have always done that for 40 years,” Manchin told Collins.

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November 21, 2023

The Banks' Latest Hit Job

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-11-20-martin-gruenberg-fdic-harassment-republican-deregulation/

Last July 27, the several bank regulators, after long delays and several bank failures, issued new rules on higher capital standards for banks. This means that banks must hold more of their own equity capital as a cushion against losses. The banks resisted this at every step of the way, since it cuts into profits. They have spent massive sums to weaken or delay implementation of the rules. Two lead regulators pushing for this were Michael Barr, vice chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve, and Martin Gruenberg of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Almost immediately, various people in Washington began getting calls from the right-wing press trying to get something, anything, on Gruenberg and Barr.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal broke a big story on the FDIC, and the big banks and their Republican allies in Congress are trying to use it to force Gruenberg’s resignation. A Journal investigative piece, several months in the making, documents that FDIC’s examinations division has been a toxic boys’ club of sexual harassment. The details are vulgar and appalling. Many women complained, the agency did not take most complaints seriously, and at least twenty women quit. According to my sources, many of the details in the Journal piece began with tips fed to the Journal reporter by Republican FDIC officials and holdover staff, who might have acted internally to address the problem rather than leak material to the press. Now Republicans are demanding Gruenberg’s resignation. And here the story gets more complicated.

If Gruenberg resigns, the Republican Vice Chair, Travis Hill, becomes acting chairman. In July, Hill voted against adopting the higher bank capital standards, as did the other Republican on the FDIC board, Jonathan McKernan. Both have parroted industry talking points. So if Gruenberg is forced out, the FDIC board would be deadlocked 2-2, with a Republican chair, and tougher capital standards would be effectively dead. That’s what this affair is really about. In addition, there are several pending regulatory rules that would be killed if Republicans get control of the FDIC, including resolution plans for banks with $100 billion or more in assets (a direct response to banking crash of March 2023) as well as rules on corporate governance and risk management.



Nobody has accused Gruenberg of sexual harassment himself. The accusation is that he failed to police the agency. It’s charming that Republicans are suddenly obsessed about keeping government safe from sexual harassment. I can’t find another case where congressional Republicans, the party of serial sexual predator Donald Trump, investigated abuses. But on the merits, is Gruenberg culpable for failing to monitor the conduct of the roughly 6,000 people who work for the FDIC or establishing procedures for complaints and remedies? We will soon learn more about that, but here’s what we know so far. In 2020, the FDIC’s Inspector General issued a report on sexual harassment at the agency, and proposed 15 procedural remedies to create a safer work climate and avenues of redress.

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November 21, 2023

How Larry Summers's Bad Predictions Hurt the Planet

https://prospect.org/environment/2023-11-20-larry-summers-inflation-prediction-climate-change/



It is definitely amusing to see Larry Summers flail away at recalibrating his opinions in real time. For years, in full public view, Summers insisted that high public spending was “the least responsible economic policy in 40 years,” and that the only way to keep the economy safe from crushing inflation was to increase unemployment significantly. With last week’s report on the Consumer Price Index, we have essentially returned to Federal Reserve benchmarks on inflation on a trend basis. And this was done without a meaningful rise in unemployment; while the headline rate has skipped up half a percentage point from 3.4 to 3.9 percent, most of that is due to higher labor force participation, and it’s certainly nowhere near what Summers claimed was vital.

As a result, Summers has attempted to erase history. He now says that “transitory factors” like supply bottlenecks were pushing up inflation, and now that they have eased, inflation is coming down. I appreciate Summers’s obvious study of the Prospect’s special issue on supply chains, but this is manifestly not what he was saying as recently as a few months ago. His entire public commentary was set up in opposition to anyone who would raise the possibility of “transitory factors” and supply chain crunches as the source of inflation.

If we could merely focus on Summers’s desperate, gaslighting attempt to get on the right side of the data, we could have a good laugh and move on. But unfortunately, we can’t. The incorrect movement he led pushed the Fed to raise interest rates and tighten the economy. And while people are now falling over themselves to credit the Fed with engineering a “soft landing,” avoiding both stubborn inflation and recession, its rate hikes have had real consequences, particularly on one of the most important economic issues of our time, the effort to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a sustainable energy system.



That transition was necessarily going to be front-loaded with investment. Things not currently built must be built: solar arrays, geothermal sites, onshore and offshore wind platforms, transmission grids to send that renewable energy along, manufacturing plants to produce the components for all of this, electrified vehicles at every level of transportation, building retrofits, and more. So the rate of interest to finance that production was critical to the enterprise, as much if not more so than the subsidies that would entice companies to make the investments.

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