Wednesday, March 1, 2023

News chunks: The radical right fights for climate change; Christian nationalism in the Democratic Party

Core radical right dogma is to promote carbon pollution and climate change by denying that carbon pollution and climate change are significant issues. The NYT writes on the ongoing radical right war for more CO2 in the air and increased climate change:
The business world has been pulled into partisan politics, with Republicans bringing their battle against socially conscious investing to Congress

It’s been a widely accepted trend in financial circles for nearly two decades. But suddenly, Republicans have launched an assault on a philosophy that says that companies should be concerned with not just profits but also how their businesses affect the environment and society.

The rancor escalated on Tuesday as Republicans in Congress used their new majority in the House to vote by a margin of 216 to 204 to repeal a Department of Labor rule that allows retirement funds to consider climate change and other factors when choosing companies in which to invest. In the Senate, Republicans are lining up behind a similar effort and have been joined by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia.

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Deranged Democrats: The NYT writes on the crackpottery that Christianity can inspire in some people:
Mayor Eric Adams also suggested that banning organized public school prayer was a mistake, saying, “When we took prayers out of schools, guns came into schools.”

The mayor’s closest aide, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, took the stage to declare that the Adams administration “doesn’t believe” in the separation of church and state, characterizing the mayor of New York City as “definitely one of the chosen” as she introduced him.

Mr. Adams clearly had no issue with how Ms. Lewis-Martin, a chaplain, described his views.

“Ingrid was so right,” Mr. Adams said, to the astonishment of some of the religious leaders who filled the New York Public Library’s glass-domed reception hall on Fifth Avenue. “Don’t tell me about no separation of church and state. State is the body. Church is the heart. You take the heart out of the body, the body dies.”
Adams is one of God’s chosen? Pushing prayed out of schools brought guns in? The church is the heart of the body? Wow! Crackpot Christian nationalism theocracy and the “reasoning” it inspires is starting to poison the left. Or, maybe Adams is a radical right conservative?

Qs: Once the Republican Party fell to radical Christian nationalism, was the same poisoning of the Democratic Party inevitable? 

Is it time to revoke tax privileges for pro-theocratic dictatorship religion?

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Israeli democracy is coming to a vicious, bloody end: NYT columnist Thomas Friedman writes in an opinion piece:
Israel today is a boiler with way, way too much steam building up inside, and the bolts are about to fly off in all directions.

Lethal attacks by Palestinian youths against Israelis are coinciding with an expansion of Israeli settlements and the torching of Palestinian villages by settlers, as well as with a popular uprising against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial power grab. Together they are threatening a breakdown in governance the likes of which we’ve never seen before in Israel.

It is a measure of how serious the situation has become that several former chiefs of the Mossad — some of the most respected public servants in the country — have denounced Netanyahu’s judicial putsch, most recently Danny Yatom. He told Israel Channel 13 News on Saturday night, according to Haaretz, that if Netanyahu continues with his plans to effectively eliminate the independence of Israel’s high court, fighter pilots and special forces operatives will be able to legitimately disobey the orders that come from the government.

They “signed an agreement with a democratic country,” said Yatom. “But the moment that, God forbid, the country becomes a dictatorship” and they receive “an order from an illegitimate government, then I believe it would be legitimate to disobey it.”

This is not idle speculation. In the past few days, some 250 officers from the Military Intelligence’s Special Operations Division have signed a public letter stating that “they would stop showing up for duty” should the government proceed with its autocratic judicial overhaul, The Times of Israel reported. They added their voices to “groups of pilots, tankists, submariners, sailors and other special forces who have penned similar letters.”  
Israel has never experienced a Palestinian intifada, a Jewish settler intifada and an Israeli citizen judicial intifada all at once. But that’s begun to unfold since Netanyahu’s far-right government took office.

The state of democracy in America and elsewhere
It really does look like we are at the end of a golden period of democracy. Demagogic authoritarians, mostly radical right extremists, are openly attacking democracy and the institutions that support it. With the collapse of the Republican Party into a demagogic authoritarian radical right party, the US is no longer capable of effectively defending democracy in the US or anywhere else. Dictator wannabes everywhere smell and see the blood in the water. The dictators know exactly what they are doing, how to do it and are moving in for the final kill.

From the looks of things, it feels like we will probably see (~75% chance?) the end of democracy in the US within about 9-10 years. What Viktor Orban did to democracy in Hungary, the Republican Party wants to do to democracy here. With the radicalized Christian nationalist Supreme Court on its side, anti-democracy radical right power and wealth accumulators seem set to Orban* American democracy to death.  

* Orban used as a verb

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Child labor! The capitalists love it!! Double MAGA!!: The NYT writes:
Alone and Exploited, Migrant Children Work Brutal Jobs Across the U.S.

Arriving in record numbers, they’re ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws — including in factories that make products for well-known brands like Cheetos and Fruit of the Loom

It was almost midnight in Grand Rapids, Mich., but inside the factory everything was bright. A conveyor belt carried bags of Cheerios past a cluster of young workers. One was 15-year-old Carolina Yoc, who came to the United States on her own last year to live with a relative she had never met.


About every 10 seconds, she stuffed a sealed plastic bag of cereal into a passing yellow carton. It could be dangerous work, with fast-moving pulleys and gears that had torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp.

The factory was full of underage workers like Carolina, who had crossed the Southern border by themselves and were now spending late hours bent over hazardous machinery, in violation of child labor laws. At nearby plants, other children were tending giant ovens to make Chewy and Nature Valley granola bars and packing bags of Lucky Charms and Cheetos — all of them working for the processing giant Hearthside Food Solutions, which would ship these products around the country.
I could not figure it out. Now the recent spate of articles about states wanting to mostly get rid of child labor laws makes sense. It’s not mom and pop operations looking to have the kids help out on the family farm or small business. It’s huge, soulless corporations looking for cheap labor to exploit and rip off.

Let’s give out a HUZZAH! and a double MAGA!! for capitalism. And, boycott Chewy, Nature Valley granola bars, Lucky Charms and Cheetos!

Q: Can anyone see why a lot of capitalists would tend to would have a preference for the anti-regulation, anti-corporate taxes, pro-climate change Republican Party compared to the socialist, pedophile, lizard people Democratic Party?

Note: We can all rest assured that things are not nearly as nasty as they seem. The corporate giants will fire up their “Public Relations” machinery (professional liars and spinners) and tell us they do not use illegal child labor and there are plenty of potty breaks for all their happy workers at the Wonka Chocolate Factory, Inc.



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