Komunitas
hexbear.net
I always thought that the problem with stuff like the Solarpunk Manifesto is that it’s like Soviet Aesthetic purged of workers and labor. I could make a drawing or a song based on the ideal of Communism, such as it may exist in the far (hopefully not too far) future. Soviet art tends not to depict that per se, instead what you see is workers labouring and happy to be labouring under Socialism, building out that Communist ideal. Solarpunk as an ideology is meant to be an antidote to despair, so the ideal Solarpunk world is already built. The focus of Soviet art always seemed on people, wether they were working, fighting or building that Communist ideal. The focus of Solarpunk is on places, it is farms, gardens and green plazas, all devoid of mosquitoes, never being built but always being used - and I think only a minority of the Solarpunk artists caught up with that and started adding people on work suits doing the work of maintaining those places. This is a picture I found online of a Sistema Agro-Florestal (Agri-Forest System) in Brazil. It is an idea that is arising under capitalism to combine local, native flora with staple foods and cash crops, in a way that permits you to more reliably control pests and cut back on both fertilizer and presticides. It also allows you to utilize land for food production without completely breaking down natural ecosystems, as native fauna like birds, mammals and insects, can make use of the Forest part of the system for transit and other purposes. If I’m not mistaken, this sort of thing is also becoming a thing in upscale coffee farms in order to a) improve crop quality due to symbiosis, b) reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events such as heatwaves and extreme rains. There’s also the idea to increase cocoa production in Brazil back to historical levels, as the country has had to deal with the Witch’s Broom plague for decades at this point. So its not limited to small scale family farms either. Again, its an idea of that is arising in capitalist Brazil and, presumably, in many other places as well. This is a drawing by a magazine in capitalist Brazil depicting an idealized version of Agri-Forest systems.. There’s a guy using a hoe to till the soil and there’s another guy climbing a ladder to harvest fruit. Idealized in a way, as there’s no use of machinery, not even for watering crops. But its something human and achievable right away. And this is a Solarpunk farm. Labor is only implied - the lady is having her cup of coffee in the morning, raring to go. But go where? The even larger implication is that everything is automated. The future is optimistic. Even the picking of delicate, fresh fruit has been optimized by ghibli octoarms machines. Then you’ve got the floating gardens in places like Mexico, which harness native techniques to create pockets of extreme fertility and endurance in the middle of Mexico City. It really is something to behold but it is not something that can be appreciated without the labor involved in creating, maintaining and cleaning canal farms in the middle of a metropolis. My hypothesis is that what forces of production remain in the US are so regressive that the people with a positive, environmental outlook into the future just aren’t in industry or farming. They are city dwellers who, for the most part, wish their cities were livable spaces. Whereas elsewhere in the Global South, however regressive the landowners and capitalists may be when it comes to rewarding labor, environmental pressures do force them and their media to open the way for different ways of doing things. Even if it starts as a cynical ploy to acquire carbon credits or greenwash their initiatives of capital, something like a large scale sugar farm that doesn’t do harvest burns respond to a real, social demand for fewer miserable months of mass air pollution in a year, for an instance - while also being a frontier for capital investment.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
Panama Canal belongs to Panama, says the country’s president after Trump’s threat. In social media posts on Saturday, the US president-elect accused Panama of charging “exorbitant” fees to cross the canal and threatened to take back control of the waterway. “Our country’s sovereignty and independence are not negotiable,” Mulino said in a video published on X. Mulino said that a 1977 treaty between the two countries recognized Panama’s sovereignty over the canal. “Panama respects other nations and demands respect. With the new US government, I aspire to preserve and maintain a good respectful relationship,” he said. “Security issues such as illegal migration, drug trafficking and organized crime must be a priority on our bilateral agenda, as they are a real threat that should concern us,” he added He went on to suggest growing Chinese influence in the region, writing: “When President Jimmy Carter foolishly gave away a dollar during his term in office, it was solely for Panama to manage, not China, or anyone else.” Trump doubled down on the suggestion during remarks in Phoenix on Sunday, arguing that the US has a “vested interest” in operating the canal without Panama charging “exorbitant prices and passage fees” for ships operated by US companies and military personnel. The Torrijos–Carter Treaties (Spanish: Tratados Torrijos-Carter) are two treaties signed by the United States and Panama in Washington, D.C., on September 7, 1977. The treaties guaranteed that Panama would gain control of the Panama Canal after 1999, ending the control of the canal that the U.S. had exercised since 1903. The treaties are named after the two signatories, U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the Commander of Panama’s National Guard, General Omar Torrijos. The treaties were the source of vehement controversy in the United States, particularly among conservatives led by Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, who regarded them as the surrender of a strategic American asset to what they characterized as a hostile government. Support for the treaties came from a variety of interests, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and members of Congress, such as Ernest Hollings, Hubert Humphrey. More moderate conservatives, including former President Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger, both made public statements in support of the treaty. Many world leaders also came out in support of the treaties, including positive statements from Bolivian President Hugo Banzer, Dominican President Joaquín Balaguer, Guatemalan President Kjell Laugerud, Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza, Peruvian President Francisco Morales Bermúdez, Chilean President Augusto Pinochet and Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez. Actor John Wayne, who was friends with Omar Torrijos. Wayne and fellow conservative William F. Buckley believed that the Panamanians had the right to the canal and sided with President Jimmy Carter. Wayne was a close friend of Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos Herrera, and Wayne’s first wife Josephine was a native of Panama. His support of the treaty brought him hate mail for the first time in his life. John Wayne normally: John Wayne when he is friends with Socdem Military Dictator of Panama:
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Atomic Shop Mothman Bed (150⚛️ (50% off!)), Leaves on (22-May-2026) Purple Axolotl Plushy (Free), Leaves on (2-Jun-2026) Rebar Reel Rod Paint (Fallout 1st) (Free), Leaves on (2-Jun-2026) Gnarled Fence (300⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Mothman Weather Bundle (1500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Stone Cathedral C.A.M.P. Kit (700⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Terrible Cryptids Bundle (1300⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) The Wicker Mothman Bundle (1500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Mothman Cultist C.A.M.P. Bundle (1275⚛️ (15% off!)), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Plague Doctor Mask (500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Gloom Goliath (900⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Black Rider Power Armor Skin (1400⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Current Events Minerva’s Big Sale, Ends on (25-May-2026) Murmrgh’s Special Pick, Ends on (25-May-2026) Season 24: Rip Daring and the Cryptids Beyond the Cosmos, Ends on (2-Jun-2026) The Big Bloom Event, Ends on (2-Jun-2026) Purple Axolotl Regions: Skyline Valley & Cranberry Bog Changes on: (2-Jun-2026) Daily Challenges 1ˢᵗ Scrap junk to produce Glass (x10) 250 ⭐ Gold Star: Complete a Daily Challenge (x6) 1000 Catch a Fish in the Ash Heap Region (x2) 250 Collect Toilet Paper (x2) 250 Kill an Enemy in the Ash Heap Region (x5) 250 Kill an Overgrown during The Big Bloom Event (x3) 250 Scrap junk to produce Fiberglass (x5) 250 Take a Camera Picture at the Starlight Drive-In (x1) 250 Minerva’s Location: The Whitespring Resort Asylum Light (750 gold) Brotherhood Recon Pocketed Armor Limb (188 gold) Brotherhood Recon Pocketed Armor Torso (188 gold) Cowboy Chaps (113 gold) Cowboy Duster (113 gold) Cowboy Hat (75 gold) Crusader Pistol (2000 gold) Dynamite Bundle (150 gold) Flare (38 gold) Floater Freezer Grenade (113 gold) Floater Tubes (1500 gold) Gauntlet (188 gold) Gauss Minigun Triple Barrel (113 gold) Gauss Shotgun Precise Stock (75 gold) Gauss Shotgun Refined Receiver (150 gold) Gauss Shotgun Vicious Receiver (150 gold) Ghoul Chair (375 gold) Gorilla Chair (375 gold) Hellstorm Missile Launcher (2000 gold) Meat Bag Stash Box (750 gold) Plasma Caster Aligned Sniper Barrel (113 gold) Plasma Caster Calibrated Capacitor (150 gold) Plasma Caster Pulse Capacitor (150 gold) Plasma Caster True Capacitor (150 gold) Plasma Caster True Long Barrel (113 gold) Plasma Cutter Cryo Blade (150 gold) Plasma Cutter Flaming Blade (150 gold) Plasma Cutter Shock Blade (150 gold) Science Chalkboards (750 gold) Solar Armor Chest Piece (750 gold) Solar Armor Left Arm (563 gold) Solar Armor Left Leg (563 gold) Solar Armor Right Arm (563 gold) Solar Armor Right Leg (563 gold) Super Mutant Tube (1500 gold) T-65 Helm (1238 gold) T-65 Left Arm (750 gold) T-65 Left Leg (750 gold) T-65 Right Arm (750 gold) T-65 Right Leg (750 gold) T-65 Torso (938 gold) Turbo-Fert Fertilizer (563 gold) Unstoppable Monster (1000 gold) Daily OPS: Uplink Location: Glassed Caverns Enemy Faction: Scorched Enemy Mutations: Piercing Gaze, Toxic Blood
Komunitas
hexbear.net
https://archive.ph/hk3PL Navy’s Top Admiral Previously Said He Would “Push Back” Against Extending USS Gerald R. Ford’s Deployment The admiral said keeping the carrier, which was just sent to the Middle East, at sea could result in big maintenance repercussions and crew strain. ::: spoiler more The decision to send the Ford Carrier Strike Group (CSG) from the Caribbean to the Middle East was made after the Navy’s top officer said he would give “push back” against such an order over concerns about the welfare of the crew and the condition of the ship after being deployed for so long. The carrier departed Norfolk last June for the Mediterranean. It was later dispatched to the Caribbean last October by President Donald Trump to take part in a mission that ultimately resulted in the capture of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. Trump’s new deployment order for the Ford came as he is considering whether to attack Iran amid ongoing negotiations and after sending the Abraham Lincoln CSG to U.S. Central Command area of operations. “I think the Ford, from its capability perspective, would be an invaluable option for any military thing the president wants to do,” Adm. Daryl Caudle, the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), told a small group of reporters, including from The War Zone, last month at the Surface Navy Association’s (SNA) annual symposium. “But if it requires an extension, it’s going to get some push back from the CNO. And I will see if there is something else I can do.” Caudle didn’t provide any specifics about what actions he would take to forestall an extension. Regardless, the order to send the Ford CSG to the Middle East will extend its time away from its homeport even further. The ship won’t even get to the region until near the end of this month and it’s unclear how long it will be needed there, although Trump has mentioned something of a loose timeline. “I guess over the next month, something like that,” Trump said Thursday in response to a question about his timeline for striking a deal with Iran on its nuclear program. “It should happen quickly. They should agree very quickly.” There is also a chance that the Ford could be ordered to turn around should a deal be reached with Iran. Trump also said it would be “very traumatic” for Iran should no deal be reached. On Friday, Trump gave reporters his rationale for ordering the Ford to the Middle East. “We’ll need it if we don’t make a deal,” the U.S. president told reporters. “The strike group’s current deployment has already been extended once, and its sailors were expecting to come home in early March,” The New York Times, which was first to report that the Ford was ordered to the Middle East, noted. “The new delay will further jeopardize the Ford’s scheduled dry dock period in Virginia, where major upgrades and repairs have been planned.” NO MAINTENANCE, ONLY DEPLOYMENT It is publicly unknown what discussions the CNO had with senior administration and Pentagon officials and whether he raised any objections or sought alternatives to keeping the Ford at sea longer than anticipated. We have reached out to his office and will update this story with any details provided. We also reached out to the White House and Joint Chiefs of Staff, which referred us to the CNO’s office. At the SNA conference, Caudle emphasized that there is a price to be paid for the strike group after being away from homeport for more than 200 days under often intense conditions. That was almost exactly a month ago. “I am a big non-fan of extensions, and because they do have significant impact,” Caudle explained. “Number one, I’m a sailors-first CNO. People want to have some type of certainty that they’re going to do a seven-month deployment.” Beyond affecting people, extensions also have a detrimental impact on the ship in addition to its previously noted dry dock schedule. “So now, when the ship comes back, we expected the ship to be in this level of state in which it was used during that seven-month deployment, when it goes eight, nine-plus months, those critical components that we weren’t expecting to repair are now on the table,” Caudle pointed out. “The work package grows, so that’s disruptive.” In addition to the maintenance issues Caudle brought up at the SNA conference, the Ford also is also plagued by sewage issues. You can read more about how detrimental deferred maintenance is to carriers — or any U.S. Navy warship for that matter — that get their deployments extended in our deep dive here. It is not unusual for there to be two carriers deployed to the Middle East region. For instance, a year ago, the U.S. Navy had both the USS Harry S. Truman and the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carriers in the Middle East at the same time, engaged in combat operations against Yemen-based Houthi rebels. However, the Navy has 10 active carriers after the Nimitz, the service’s oldest, returned to port in December ahead of a scheduled decommissioning. There are scheduling and logistical support limits to how many can be out at sea at the same time without massive disruptions down the line. The USS Eisenhower, the last carrier to make an extended deployment, has seen its planned maintenance extended for a half year and counting as a result of the additional strain of being away from its home port for so long. The Navy’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget shows that work on the ship was supposed to have been completed last July, but it is still unfinished. The lack of availability reverberates across the rest of the fleet. That in turn limits the options commanders have when planning or preparing for contingencies and puts the overall carrier availability plan out of whack. As for the rest of the fleet, three other carriers are in various maintenance periods taking them out of action for extended periods. In addition, the USS George Washington is forward deployed to Japan, two carriers are preparing for deployment and two are in post-deployment mode. The move to send the Ford to the Middle East comes amid a growing buildup of forces ahead of a potential conflict with Iran. In addition to the Ford, the Pentagon is also dispatching a peculiarly small number of Air Force tactical aircraft to the Middle East, joining a limited number of aircraft already there on land and sea. The move to send the Ford to the Middle East comes amid a growing buildup of forces ahead of a potential conflict with Iran. In addition to the Ford, the Pentagon is also dispatching a peculiarly small number of Air Force tactical aircraft to the Middle East, joining a limited number of aircraft already there on land and sea. In addition to the Lincoln, there are also at least nine other warships in the region, including five Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyers. Submarines are also there, but their presence is not disclosed, and there are more than 30,000 troops on bases around the Middle East. Another CSG, with its embarked tactical aircraft and Aegis-equipped escorts, would certainly bolster America’s firepower in the Middle East. As we have frequently pointed out, even with the jets that are there and those arriving, there is not enough tactical airpower there now for a major sustained operation. A second CSG would provide significant help. It remains unknown what orders Trump will give or when, but a second carrier strike group in the region gives him more options. also a few excerpts from the article about sewage trouble linked above, just to top this off The world’s largest aircraft carrier is experiencing difficulties with a service that is an integral part of every sailor’s life — the bathroom. … The complications primarily involve the Ford’s vacuum collection, holding and transfer system, or VCHT, which transports and disposes wastewater by sucking fecal matter through pipes using pressure. … NPR also reportedly obtained copies of emails that showed there were 205 breakdowns with the toilets over a span of four days. One of the emails placed the onus on sailors and said they were mistreating and destroying the sewage system. Carter confirmed to Military Times in an emailed statement that the Ford averaged about one maintenance call per day and that those calls were often the result of “improper materials being introduced to the system.” what are the sailors flushing down those toilets The bathroom issues aboard the Ford, meanwhile, are not a new phenomenon. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report pointed out that the sewage pipes woven throughout the ship were too narrow to properly serve the flushes of the 4,000-plus crew members onboard. To unclog the toilets, the Navy has been forced to spend $400,000 per flush of a unique acidic chemical designed to flush out and unburden the strained pipes. :::
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Atomic Shop Mothman Neon Billboards (250⚛️ (50% off!)), Leaves on (21-May-2026) Purple Axolotl Plushy (Free), Leaves on (2-Jun-2026) Rebar Reel Rod Paint (Fallout 1st) (Free), Leaves on (2-Jun-2026) Gnarled Fence (300⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Mothman Weather Bundle (1500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Stone Cathedral C.A.M.P. Kit (700⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Terrible Cryptids Bundle (1300⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) The Wicker Mothman Bundle (1500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Mothman Cultist C.A.M.P. Bundle (1275⚛️ (15% off!)), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Plague Doctor Mask (500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Gloom Goliath (900⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Black Rider Power Armor Skin (1400⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Current Events Season 24: Rip Daring and the Cryptids Beyond the Cosmos, Ends on (2-Jun-2026) The Big Bloom Event, Ends on (2-Jun-2026) Purple Axolotl Regions: Skyline Valley & Cranberry Bog Changes on: (2-Jun-2026) Daily Challenges 1ˢᵗ Scrap junk to produce Gears (x5) 250 ⭐ Gold Star: Complete a Daily Challenge (x6) 1000 Complete the Event: “The Big Bloom” (x1) 250 Consume an Alcoholic Beverage while on a Team (x5) 250 Deal a Critical Hit to an Enemy using Automatic Weapons in VATS (x5) 250 Eat a Cooked Meal in a Teammate’s C.A.M.P. (x5) 250 Join a Team with another Player (x1) 250 Kill a Creature while in a Team (x10) 250 Minerva’s Location: Away She will next be at The Whitespring Resort on 21-May-2026 Daily OPS: Uplink Location: Valley Galleria Enemy Faction: Blood Eagles Enemy Mutations: Elite Enemies, Danger Cloud
Komunitas
mander.xyz
Since people already answered the question, here’s some unrequested tip: If you want mammals to avoid bird feed, mix some of the hottest chili powder and/or pepper seeds that you find into the feed. The birds won’t care, they don’t get pepper burned, but squirrels (and you) do. Picture related:
Komunitas
lemmy.world
Atomic Shop Cardinal Bird Cage (Fallout 1st) (250⚛️ (50% off!)), Leaves on (20-May-2026) Purple Axolotl Plushy (Free), Leaves on (2-Jun-2026) Rebar Reel Rod Paint (Fallout 1st) (Free), Leaves on (2-Jun-2026) Gnarled Fence (300⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Mothman Weather Bundle (1500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Stone Cathedral C.A.M.P. Kit (700⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Terrible Cryptids Bundle (1300⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) The Wicker Mothman Bundle (1500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Mothman Cultist C.A.M.P. Bundle (1275⚛️ (15% off!)), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Plague Doctor Mask (500⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Gloom Goliath (900⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Black Rider Power Armor Skin (1400⚛️), Leaves on (9-Jun-2026) Current Events Season 24: Rip Daring and the Cryptids Beyond the Cosmos, Estimated end date (2-Jun-2026) The Big Bloom Event, Ends on (2-Jun-2026) Purple Axolotl Regions: Skyline Valley & Cranberry Bog Changes on: (2-Jun-2026) Daily Challenges 1ˢᵗ Drink Tea (x1) 250 ⭐ Gold Star: Complete a Daily Challenge (x6) 1000 Catch a Fish in the Savage Divide Region (x2) 250 Complete an Event or Activity (x1) 250 Eat a Fish (x5) 250 Eat a Fish Bit (x6) 250 Kill an Enemy in the Savage Divide Region (x5) 250 Kill an Insect during The Big Bloom Event (x5) 250 Weekly Challenges ⭐ Complete a Gold Star Daily Challenge! (x3) 1500 🔁 Repeatable Under Rank 100: Gain XP (x10000) 100 🔁 Repeatable at Rank 100 or above: Complete a Public Event (x3) 300 Build light sources in a Workshop or C.A.M.P. (x9) 1000 Collect Caps (x2500) 1000 Collect a Teapot (x5) 1000 Collect a Teddy Bear (x9) 1000 Complete the Event: “The Big Bloom” (x5) 1000 Kill a Mirelurk (x30) 1000 Kill an Insect during The Big Bloom Event (x30) 1000 Plant a Crop in a Workshop or C.A.M.P. (x25) 1000 Sell Scorchbeast Steak to an NPC vendor (x1) 1000 Minerva’s Location: Away She will next be at The Whitespring Resort on 21-May-2026 Daily OPS: Uplink Location: Arktos Pharma Biome Lab Enemy Faction: Blood Eagles Enemy Mutations: Piercing Gaze, Volatile
Komunitas
hexbear.net
That’s just not true lol. The late years of Mao was plagued with factional feuds under the backdrop of Cultural Revolution (Gang of Four vs the reformers). Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, a highly decorated military commander, was being denounced on stage as part of the struggle session and banished to work at a factory, simply because he was on a committee that approved a satirical novel (Liu removedan) that was deemed reactionary: Label says: “Anti-party element Xi Zhongxun” Zhou Enlai was so afraid of being on the chopping block of Mao that he spent decades deliberately relegating himself to the third in-command just to prevent the image of him “overshadowing” Mao. Many liberal reformers that came into power after Mao had themselves experienced being banished to the countryside. Let’s just say that there are a lot of mixed feelings about Mao. On the one hand, it is undeniable that his contribution to the party and the nation was indispensable (and the legitimacy of the party itself), but he had also done many mistakes especially late in life that caused a lot of turmoil. The transition from Deng wasn’t smooth either. After the June 4th incident (Tiananmen incident) in 1989, which many forgot started because of the privatization of state-owned enterprises causing many new graduates to lose their previously guaranteed employment, the party split into two embittered factions: the conservatives who want to roll back liberal reform and return to Mao era planning (Chen Yun faction) and the liberal reformers that wanted continue the liberalization policy (Deng Xiaoping faction). Amidst the factional struggles, Jiang Zemin, who was Chen Yun’s protege (conservative faction), ended up being the compromise candidate to lead the party. Moving up north from his Zhejiang base, Jiang Zemin was politically isolated in Beijing and was very much in a precarious position. Deng came out of his retirement in 1992 to do his infamous Southern Tour, during which in his Wuhan speech in August, hinted very strongly at a coup (“the reform must continue by any means necessary”) if the reforms were to be rolled back. This culminated in the Zhuhai meeting where top ranking military commanders and senior officials secretly met with Deng, bypassing Beijing altogether, with the plan of a coup installing Qiao Shi if Jiang refuses to pursue the liberalization route. Jiang Zemin folded and the conservative faction (Chen Yun et al.) were all purged throughout the 1990s. Xi Jinping’s ascent was also plagued by the Bo Xilai’s scandal (who was supposedly to be on the left wing side of the party). Xi himself was far more moderate during his early career and played a neutral “wait and see” stance at the Zhejiang branch during the 2007 Chen Liangyu’s rebellion (Shanghai branch) who wanted to form the Five Southeastern Provinces group to challenge the central government’s imposition of authority against the local governments. When Chen was eventually purged, perhaps as a reward, Xi was given the position of head of CPC Shanghai and ascended to the national committee from there. The drama of the CPC history was no less intense than in any other country’s politics, to be fair.
Komunitas
piefed.social
Saved you a click: The primary barrier remains the lack of access to competitively priced, long-term power, according to the industry. “Energy costs are a significant factor in the overall production cost of a smelter,” said Ami Shivkar, principal analyst of aluminum markets at analytics firm Wood Mackenzie. “High energy costs plague the US aluminium industry, forcing cutbacks and closures.” “Canadian, Norwegian, and Middle Eastern aluminium smelters typically secure long-term energy contracts or operate captive power generation facilities. US smelter capacity, however, largely relies on short-term power contracts, placing it at a disadvantage,” Shivkar added, noting that energy costs for U.S. aluminum smelters were about $550 per tonne compared to $290 per tonne for Canadian smelters.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
By Ace Thelin – May 17, 2026 Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project Commune or Nothing! This book asks the fundamental question we often ignore, “what is required of us to continue living?” Chris Gilbert, professor of political studies at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela in Caracas, traveled the country to give a first hand account of the diverse communes growing and struggling to build socialism. The book strikes a balance between theorising the emerging communal socialism and telling the everyday struggles of those living in and creating communes in contested terrains with little certainty of the future. Gilbert begins by quoting Marx, writing “that theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses, ” then he adds, “that happens when it connects with the ideas, projects and dreams developed by the people.” Historical Roots The beginning of the book situates the historical currents Venezuelans find themselves in today. While communal socialism wasn’t endorsed and championed by Hugo Chavez until 2009, it has deep historical roots. While a minority of Venezuelans can claim to be fully indigenous, the majority of Venezuelans have indigenous and/or African ancestry. Venezuela’s history includes indigenous and African maroon societies. Venezuelans in their connection to the land have a framework of history that spans centuries and defines what they believe is possible. Peruvian Marxist intellectual Jose Carlos Mariátegui broke with the consensus of the Third International when he published Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Realityin 1928. He highlighted the absence of private property in Incan culture as essential in understanding and building a future socialist communal society. “The problem of the land,” the third of his seven essays, detailed a collective approach to land management and highlighted the Incan ‘ayllus,’ the social kin groups that made up the economic units of Incan society that managed land collectively. Iraida Vargas and Maria Sanoja described 500 years of resistance and cooperative societies of weavers, potters and cultivators of roots in their book Los Hombres de la Yuca y el Maiz. Creative examples of resisting colonialism and class oppression are deeply layered throughout Venezuelan’s history. Ezequiel Zamora 1817-1860 was an anti-oligarchical federalist who continued the Bolivarian and communal struggle and spoke of a continuing ‘historical current,’ of continuous visionary striving to create societies free from oppression. Miguel de Buria led a rebellion in the 1500s, when enslaved Africans rebelled and allied with the Jirajara indigenous nation. Resisting Spanish colonialism successfully for 75 years, the nation led by King Miguel forced the Spanish to recognise them as a sovereign, self governing nation. The Bolivarian Revolution is built and thrives because of the ancestors that make it possible. The Earth Belongs to (S)he Whom Works it A new constitution, nationalising the oil and the land law of 2001 opened the door to grassroots movements in building Socialism. This land law did not take land from the ownership class. It allowed the Venezuelan working class to cultivate land that wasn’t being used, neglected land and buildings, land in the margins, land not being exploited by the capitalist class. This crack, this opening was seized by the descendants of maroons and indigenous peoples as well as those who have toiled for centuries fighting the injustices of European colonialism. “The commune is the space in which Socialism will be born,” Chavez emphasised the importance of indigenous societies in Venezuela and South America in building socialism. He often quoted a book about the Incas, El Imperio Sociaista de los Incas, by Luis Baudin. Chávez came to the conclusion, after different trials and tribulations, that the basic cell of socialism had to be the commune. Chavez, led by the people, had succeeded in lifting millions out of extreme poverty. Using the wealth from oil revenues to fund healthcare, housing, education and food security, substantial gains were made by the working class. But Chavez learned this wasn’t good enough. He studied ceaselessly, always keeping in mind and in touch with the conditions of the majority working class. The Bolivarian Revolution was a work in progress from the beginning, ready to pivot toward a different revolution, something that could change the long term trajectory of society. The vanguard communes were the initial cells of a post-capitalist society because they were self managed by the people living on them, committed to egalitarian principles and participatory and protagonistic democracy. In many ways, the state funded worker managed cooperatives still mirrored too much of the capitalist system. Communes, on the other hand, teach us about direct social property, whereas the state can only teach us indirectly. There are no bosses in communes, lives and outcomes are interwoven, decisions affect everyone, we all swim or we all drown. Many communes have started their own schools, transportation, energy sourcing; the more self-sufficient the less dependent on the state. There are Evangelical Christian communes in Venezuela, based on the idea of desprendimiento, which speaks of detachment and generosity. One of Venezuela’s weaknesses has been its dependency on the world oil market under U.S. imperial control. If oil is subsidising the economy, most people are hardly motivated to turn to the Earth and build self sufficiency. If the government is providing goods, what do you need communes for? When the cost of oil went from $100 barrel in 2014 to $30 barrel in 2016 the subsidies dramatically diminished. U.S. sanctions in 2015 “made the economy scream.” The change in conditions pushed Chavistas toward building communal socialism. The Move Toward Communal Socialism Cooperatives started in 2003 but were built by oil revenues. They mirrored regular capitalist business practices with hierarchies and bosses hiding behind cooperative laws. Collective private property still had adversarial relationships with other cooperatives. After experiments with various forms of state property, Chavez formally announced in 2005, that the goal of his movement was the establishment of “21st Century Socialism.” We have to remember that capitalist production is also social, but capitalist property is private and anti-social. Capitalism always leads to the concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. Chavez changed the discourse to ‘social property enterprises.’ Finally in 2009, Chavez moved toward communes. He was inspired by revolutionary Chinese communes and the Hungarian philosopher Istvan Meszároš. Meszaros spelled out how the various components of the capital system all interpenetrate each other and can successfully resist any partial attempt to overthrow them. Socialists must confront the market, wage labor and private capital accumulation as well as indoctrination in schools, ownership of the media, co-opted religious beliefs, conformist culture, patriarchy, racism, legal and political institutions and the nuclear family as the cell of the economic system. We have to understand the totality or the historical superstructure if we are to create and sustain revolutionary dynamic change. In alignment with the masses of people fuelling the Bolivarian Revolution, Chavez and the National Assembly passed the The Organic Laws of Popular Power (Leyes Orgánicas del Poder Popular) in December of 2010 that helped redirect some power toward the communes. We must create a new organic system and the will to build it under siege, as stated by Chavez in one of his last speeches, when he implored, during a televised council of ministers, meeting on October 20, 2012, “Comuna or nada.” He died on March 5, 2013. Moving as freely associated producers, a communal system offers a framework of social metabolic exchange usable by individuals to secure their own ends, whereas capitalism has conflict built into it. Antagonistic value production makes every commodity a battle between the owner and the worker. Communes are only viable through cooperation, leading to the manifestation of a radically different social metabolism in greater alignment with particular places, intimacy with the land and natural life rhythms. Communes must overcome the structural conflict between capital and labor. Labourers dependence on capital is the material basis of the state. Communes, as cells of the new socialist society, make possible the long term withering away of the state. Only when the cells connect can socialism become viable. Only through the power of the motivated and determined masses, united across regions and borders, can we overcome the structural forms of imperialism and capitalism. Louisa Caceras commune took up garbage collection in Barcelona, adding a grocery store and recycling operations as well as a community plant nursery. The key is to have control of all aspects of the business and complete self governance. Extricating ourselves from the long-standing organised capitalist relationships maybe the most difficult thing, yet we must create an ecological civilisation. The Communal Union and Foundational Congress Chavez warned that “socialist islands would be swallowed by the capitalist sea.” Communal cells form a national political body by linking up to confront the external counterrevolution and the internal fifth column. In Merida in 2019, sixteen communes met at Che Guevara commune and participated in a foundational congress to form a Communal Union. Two hundred delegates from 50 communes met in March 2022 at El Maizal commune. What is the relationship between the Communal Union and the increasingly bourgeois state? A state that under sanctions, declining oil revenues and Nicolas Maduro, reverted back to many of the capitalist patterns and compromises with the bourgeoisie. El Maizal Commune serves some eight thousand people from twenty consejos comunales. No doubt communards are walking on the wobbly tightrope of maintaining good terms with the PSUV, ruling socialist party, while keeping an eye on the long term goal of eliminating the bourgeois state through participatory and protagonistic democracy. The goal is a communal socialist state, but at the same time communes are forced to build while the power of western imperialism, capital accumulation and monopoly control of resources still dominates. The point is to break and rupture the dependency relationship with the imperialists and the national bourgeoisie. One good example of this is the ‘productive workers army’ that is committed to change the rules of the game and break with the conditions of dependency. Economic dependency separates workers, enterprises, and countries by imperial dictates, IMF loan entrapment and comprador ruling classes. The productive workers army wages “battles” across the country, repairing broken facilities and consciousness at the same time. Under capitalism people are not organised by neighbourhoods or place. They sell their labor to the market, buy from the same market and become dependent while reinforcing the built in exploitation of the market. Venezuelan Deputy Jorge Arreaza: Commune is Emancipation for Working Class El Panal Commune Seething with Popular Power. On January 23, 1958 Venezuelan president Marcos Perez Jimenez was forced out of office and so began the compromised, corporate, even farcical fourth republic that lasted 40 years until Chavez won the election in 1998. There was a massive rural to urban migration in the second half of the 20th century creating dense barrio communities, struggling for basic amenities, such as electricity, water and housing. The rural migration to the cities also brought solidarity, ecological values of reciprocity to the land and connection to indigenous imagination not beholden to the dominant top down capitalist values dictating policy and determining the direction of the country. Much of the construction such as highways and massive housing blocks for military officers and bourgeois loyalists, was funded by booming oil wealth. Immigration to the cites also included culture, music, small businesses and revolutionary political organising. Robert Longa helped organise the Alexis Vive vanguard commune in 2001 well before Chavez settled upon the commune as the basic unit to create Socialism. The larger Panel commune was created in 2006. One of their livelihoods is making clothes and the cadres wear baby blue shirts that stand for open sky, dreams and hope. The first task and accomplishment they achieved, was running the drug dealers out of the neighbourhoods and often the police aligned with them. Longa loved Che and fell for Chavez. They both spent time in Yare prison and Longa was released in 1999, when Chavez became president. This is when the drug dealers were defeated, drug dealers that the state had encouraged in order to weaken the revolutionary consciousness of the barrio. The commune is clean, orderly and self monitored with cameras to prevent drug traffickers and their police allies from infiltrating their hard won territory. Territory that is now 20 years in the making, marking the flagship commune as a leading participatory and protagonistic model. Learning, self-discipline and embodying the highest values necessary to change the whole structure of society is the conscious metabolism of the commune that encourages people to commit themselves to take charge of their own lives and strengthen the community as a whole. Alexis Vive is the most militant vertically commanded vanguard commune within the larger El Panal (beehive) greater commune. Their conscious discipline and moral example is diametrically opposed to the blind obedience capitalism thrives on. They think about the revolutionary side and strategic implications of every activity. Visionary leader Barbara Anacona Martinez understands those strategic aims and sees elections as choosing spokespersons, not representatives. She reminds her comrades the importance of interpretation, and understanding the strategic aims that can meld with the people. She cites and quotes from important theoretical works such as The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism by Marta Harnecker when teaching cadres over the course of daily activities. The communes are self-educated, emphasising that anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism are essential understandings and goals of outreach and creating a long term strategy that moves beyond the social relations of capitalist inertia. The communes have banks to manage finances and interact with the larger dominant capitalist system in Venezuela. They act as a firewall, while being a link to the state and economy at large. They are a temporal link serving the commune, an economic arm. Very different than how banking exists in the dominant society. They are not cells of market socialism, because they are under the control of the self governed communes. The emphasis is on non-alienated labor and internal democracy. Communes seek a rupture with the logic of antagonistic value production; owner vs. worker. Communes center right livelihood and enjoyment above the profit motive and in so doing they reveal the wealth of relations that is subjugated under the dictatorship of capital. In 2015, the United States imposed devastating sanctions, “putting the entire population in a concentration camp.” Dazed patients were seen wandering the streets without medication, baggy clothes from severe weight loss reminded everyone what cruelty moves this world. In 2020 El Panal expanded. They called that year, ‘Year Zero.’ It was an end and a beginning. Through the genius of the people and the will of the cadres throwing themselves into action, great things happen. The communes ‘defund the police,’ by finding jobs for the youth and unemployed, preventing drug addiction and crime by addressing the roots of problems before they can grow. To Those Who Seize the Sky by Assault What must be overcome is the capitalist law of value and what is needed is a change in the rules of the game. No longer will the capitalist system destroy by extracting surplus value and reinvesting it by metastasising the metabolism of extraction for private accumulation, thus creating obscene poverty and wealth by uncontrolled expansion. This global imperialist system, twisted by the competition between capitals and states, creates artificial scarcity that plagues the world. We must throw off the reign of capital by creating social non-alienated labor, freely working for the mutual benefit of all. To break the shackles of the market and the dictatorship of capital, we must work together with the awareness of each others’ needs and desires, freeing ourselves from the senseless destructive norms of society. Internal democracy allows for self critique and corrections as part of an emancipatory process. Communes must be the cells that grow, irreversibly and irresistibly toward the new society. This is the formula that can defeat the triad of wage labor, state power and capital. The transition moves through dual power co-existence. Communes must struggle within the larger capitalist system while maintaining autonomy. We’ve seen how the state can return to its bourgeois foundations and the ancient regime reappears with new language that masks old patterns, such as the so-called “revolutionary bourgeoisie.” The results are not predetermined, the future is uncertain, but we do have a solid foundation, a starting point and a deep popular psychology connected to the long struggle for freedom. We have a coherent beginning. The Gordian knot of Socialism must be consciously and carefully untied. The educator must continue to be educated by the dynamism and multi layered calculus of an ever-changing and interconnected world. We must remodel the house from the inside out. The communes can be the soil in which a new human being is cultivated, where the sum of the processes in the building up of life creates an evolutionary metabolism that overflows and washes away the oppressive system which must be composted if we are to survive and thrive. Venezuelans are walking the long red sacred path out of the darkness and into the light. “¡Comuna o nada!” (The Wealth of Relations) From Orinoco Tribune via This RSS Feed.
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Morgan Leez AP RIO RANCHO, N.M. — The global oil bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz has generated an enviable — and politically sensitive — financial windfall on the other side of the world in New Mexico, a rare Democratic-dominated state where fossil fuels are a bedrock of progressive social services. New Mexico produces more oil than any other state besides Texas, and the state’s revenue from taxes, royalties and lease sales helps cover the cost of college tuition, all school meals, health insurance and a new initiative for free universal child care. Now that oil prices are surging from the conflict with Iran, money is flooding into the state treasury and creating an uncomfortable situation for Democrats who oppose the war and would rather reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. “It’s hard for people to think about, ‘Oh great, we have this windfall,’ and children are getting killed on the other side of the world,” said Deb Haaland, the former U.S. Interior Department secretary running for governor. Haaland is one of two Democrats running to succeed Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is wrapping up her second term in office. A former congresswoman and state party chair, Haaland worked to limit unfettered oil and gas exploration while serving in President Joe Biden’s Cabinet. Now she wants to use money amid the energy boom to increase New Mexico’s child tax credit and boost the refundable working families tax credit, payouts that would most benefit people with low incomes. “We have obligations to try to have a better world overall,” said Haaland, a member of Laguna Pueblo who could become the first female Native American governor in the U.S. “I think we can do that.” Her rival for the Democratic nomination, Albuquerque-based District Attorney Sam Bregman, said he wants to offset inflation with one-time $500 checks from the state to residents making less than $200,000 a year. He also wants to waive personal income taxes on residents 65 and older. “It is the resources of the people that’s generating that revenue,” he said. “We ought to give it back to the people.” For every $1 fluctuation in the average annual price of oil, New Mexico sees a roughly $59 million swing in state government income. That means the state is likely to see a $850 million surge in annual state government income for the budget year ending in June alone based on war-time price changes — equivalent to 12% of annual general fund spending, according to the state Legislature’s budget and accountability office. New Mexico sends much of its relatively heavy crude oil from its patch of the Permian Basin to Texas distribution hubs and refineries along the Gulf Coast. Prices could remain high with no end in sight for the war despite a fragile ceasefire. A nest egg that moderates dependence on oil In New Mexico, surges in oil income automatically flow into a series of trust accounts designed to gradually reduce the state’s reliance on fossil fuels, helping the state generate investment income to underwrite Medicaid, early childhood education, infrastructure projects and an expansion of mental healthcare. The strategy has tempered discomfort among many Democrats with dependence on oil income, in a state with entrenched swaths of extreme poverty and the nation’s highest enrollment rate in Medicaid. “For New Mexico and New Mexicans and especially the progressive left — which sort of controls the state — it’s always something they really don’t want to admit or talk about or get angry about,” said Lonna Atkeson, a political science professor who has analyzed voting behavior in New Mexico and directs the LeRoy Collins Institute at Florida State University. “Like, ‘We should not be funding our stuff with that money.’ I’ve heard those arguments.” The winner of this year’s governor’s race will take the helm of a state investment council overseeing a roughly $68 billion state nest egg, including investments that defray costs for K-12 public education. New Mexico is not alone in reaping the financial benefits of the war. In Alaska, the state forecast an additional $1.05 billion for the current fiscal year and the one beginning July 1. “It really is this small group of energy-reliant states like North Dakota, Alaska, New Mexico and Wyoming that are going be affected most directly,” said Justin Theal, who researches state fiscal trends as a senior officer for The Pew Charitable Trusts. He described the situation as “a double-edged sword.” “It raises costs for households and businesses which can potentially dampen consumer spending and reduce sales taxes that almost every state relies on as well,” Theal said. Wartime oil prices hold silver lining for New Mexico Three contenders for the Republican nomination are advocating for even more aggressive tax relief while oil prices are riding high. “Republicans are using the ‘e-word’ — eliminate income taxes,” said Albuquerque-based pollster Brian Sanderoff, president of Research and Polling Inc. A Republican last won election to statewide office in 2016. At the same time, they’re questioning whether universal childcare will be financially sustainable. The program is coming under direct fire in a lawsuit from cannabis entrepreneur and Republican candidate for governor Duke Rodriguez. He previously served as human service secretary under former Gov. Gary Johnson, a crusader for limited government who unsuccessfully ran for president as a Libertarian. The lawsuit alleges the childcare program was implemented in November by Lujan Grisham without required authorization from the Legislature — though supporting legislation was passed this year. A court has ordered the administration to respond within 30 days. Reflecting on the state’s oil income, Rodriguez says, “We don’t have a resource problem, what we have is a real results problem. We just spend and spend and spend with no accountability.” Republican businessman Doug Turner describes wartime oil prices as an opportunity to overhaul the state tax code and wants means testing for childcare benefits. He lost the 2010 Republican primary to then-district attorney Susana Martinez, who went on to serve two terms as governor. Gregg Hull, a former three-term mayor of Rio Rancho on the outskirts of Albuquerque, wants New Mexico to join the ranks of states with no personal income tax like Texas and Wyoming. Personal income taxes account for about $2.2 billion in annual state government income, offsetting about a fifth of annual general fund obligations. Hull said he wants to double down on the oil economy by funneling budget surpluses to infrastructure projects in the state’s main oil-production zone. “This morning, when I was looking at a price of a barrel of oil, I said, ‘Well, that’s not great for consumers, but it’s awesome for New Mexico,’” Hull said. ___ Associated Press writer Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska, contributed to this report. The post New Mexico politicians grapple with oil windfall from Iran war that’s both ‘awesome’ and awkward appeared first on ICT. From ICT via This RSS Feed.
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This winter, for the first time in a quarter century, California was drought free—but not everyone was thrilled. On the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County, where some seventy-seven thousand live atop rugged coastal bluffs and steep hills, the near-biblical rains that have inundated the region in recent years pose an existential threat. Overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the peninsula is some of the most coveted real estate in Southern California. It contains the wealthiest suburb in Los Angeles, with an average household income of $367,000. There are sprawling mansions, winding horse trails, six golf courses, and private clubs boasting initiation fees as high as $300,000. At the luxury Terranea Resort, rooms rent for $700 a night and, were you to stroll the grounds as I did one Saturday afternoon this past January, you might encounter a shareholders meeting for a union-busting law firm with clients like Starbucks and Amazon. From the smoggy flatlands, the peninsula can seem like paradise, but there’s a big problem underfoot, one poised to worsen as the climate grows more volatile: Its terrain is underlain by layers of bentonite clay that, when wet, enable entire masses of earth to separate and slide from the more stable ground beneath. Combine this with cliffside erosion from ocean waves and the fact that the peninsula sits on several active fault lines, and you get landslides. (Here, landslide refers both to the slow-moving but consistent shifting of the earth and to catastrophic episodes of accelerated movement.) The problem has plagued the peninsula for hundreds of thousands of years, but when combined with more recent development in especially hazardous areas and the increasing power of storms, it has grown demonstrably worse—and more costly. This became undeniable between 2022 and 2024, when record-breaking rainfall—the most intense since the late 1800s—accelerated movement to levels not seen in decades, overturning a period of relative stability sustained by prolonged drought and sending twelve homes into a canyon in one part of the peninsula and leaving hundreds of residents indefinitely without power in another. Those that call the Palos Verdes Peninsula home now find themselves approaching a crossroads: Will they double down on costly, ineffective measures to stabilize the land and protect private property, or is a wholesale retreat from paradise in order? Either way, who is going to pay for it? The debate highlights some of the more intractable problems we face when it comes to adapting to climate change. Over a century ago, East Coast financier Frank A. Vanderlip set out to turn the Palos Verdes Peninsula into the nation’s most rarefied residential enclave. At that time, few were aware of the ground’s geological instability. Unburdened by such inconvenient knowledge, Vanderlip pressed ahead with his vision to divide the land that reminded him, as he wrote in From Farm Boy to Financier, “vividly of the Sorrentine Peninsula and the Amalfi Drive” into one hundred-acre parcels containing extraordinary Mediterranean-style estates with tennis courts, swimming pools, and polo grounds. He wanted a country club with a golf course and a yacht club. He hired the Olmsted Brothers, of Central Park fame, to design the community. These were to be private residences, staffed by caretakers and farm workers, designed for periodic or extended stays by members of a tight social circle whose wealth was rooted in eastern capital. By December 1925, roads had been carved, hundreds of thousands of trees planted, boulevards laid out, and a clubhouse erected. Sixty-five percent of available lots had been sold. The Great Depression prevented Vanderlip’s grandiose plan from being fully realized, but developers in the postwar years carried forward the spirit of his ambitions. This second phase brought denser, subdivision-style neighborhoods to the area. Trouble surfaced, however, in 1956 when road construction began to accommodate new residents and connect the functionally isolated peninsula to Los Angeles. As work progressed, cracks in homes and buckling along roads began to appear, signaling land movement. Within two years, the land lurched forty feet toward the sea and dropped ten feet vertically, destroying more than one hundred homes and damaging another fifty, many within the Portuguese Bend Beach Club, a private gated community opened just eight years earlier by Vanderlip’s son. There, hillside cottages and a clubhouse once abuzz with galas were crushed like matchsticks as ground from higher up broke loose onto them. Engineers tried to stabilize the landslide by installing twenty-three large steel-reinforced caisson shear pins deep into the bedrock (think nailing down a book sliding off a table), which only briefly slowed movement before it failed and the slide resumed, carrying some of the caissons down to shore. Angry homeowners filed suit against Los Angeles County over the damage, in the process uncovering a government-commissioned study of California’s oil-bearing regions from 1946 that documented “an extensive landslide area” on the peninsula twenty years earlier. In the end, the court found that the county had failed to warn residents of the risk, resulting in a $9.5 million settlement. The 1956 landslide and resulting legal battle should have provoked serious debate about the wisdom of suburbanizing the peninsula, but the event was largely treated as an anomaly. Development exploded, along with the population: Between 1953 and 1967, it grew 730 percent. But of course, the land didn’t stop moving. Following severe rainfall, major landslides occurred in 1974, 1978, and 1987, mostly affecting Rancho Palos Verdes, the densest of the peninsula’s four municipalities and home to roughly half of its residents. In 1985, the city launched an ambitious engineering effort to halt the Portuguese Bend landslide area, the most active of all. The strategy involved an elaborate system to drain a lake’s worth of water from the mountain, extensive reshaping of the land, and the construction of a massive retaining wall. The price tag? Up to $40 million ($122 million in today’s dollars), a considerable sum given the city’s modest $5.94 million budget and the uncertain science behind such remediation efforts. “You’re talking big bucks there,” Charles Abbott, the city’s public works director, told the Los Angeles Times. He was unconvinced the effort would succeed—as were many residents. “I don’t think there’s a . . . chance in hell they can do it,” said Robert Smolley, a mechanical engineer who lived in the area at the time. But simply doing nothing was never an option, not on a stretch of coastline that valuable: Vacant lots less than a mile from the active landslide area were selling for between $175,000 and $400,000 (roughly $537,000 to $1.2 million today). Indeed, one of the project’s explicit aims was to, as the Los Angeles Timesreported, “return about 500 acres of land to economic viability in an area with some of the most expensive real estate in the country.” Then—as now—Rancho Palos Verdes operated on a shoestring budget, relying primarily on property taxes, and so had a vested interest in preserving the value of private property. But both the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978—which sharply reduced the city’s primary revenue source—and other landslides that decade had severely strained its finances. So to fund the remediation project, the city relied on grant money and its cash reserves. It also created a redevelopment agency that would redirect future property taxes toward the project, as well as future feasibility studies and capital needs beyond it. Despite all the city’s efforts, the project never produced a permanent fix. Phase I, which entailed the installation of some twenty-five dewatering wells, slowed movement to less than one foot over the first five years. Phase II, undertaken in 1988, showed promise, but as the infrastructure of the first phase aged, movement again began to increase. Phase III—completed in 1990 and involving the relocation of sixty thousand cubic yards of soil to form a temporary embankment on the shoreline—proved similarly temporary: Heavy rainfall in 1995 accelerated movement, and within fifteen years the embankment had disappeared. Only three of the original wells remained operational. Another stabilization effort in the late 1990s—involving additional dewatering wells, piping systems, and mass regrading—took place, and although some measures temporarily slowed the slide, by 2005 the ground was moving at the same rate as before 1984, underscoring the failure of these efforts. A 2018 study proposed yet another phased program, with $33 million in capital costs. Advanced planning and environmental review for the project proceeded over the next four years, while the city pursued grants and lobbied local, state, and federal officials for support. Officials gave tours of the landslide area to Senator Ben Allen and a representative from Senator Diane Feinstein’s office in 2021, and that same year requested the full project cost from President Joe Biden through the recently introduced Inflation Reduction Act. But the funding never materialized. Drought conditions in California during that time appear to have reduced the urgency of the landslide threat. But this ended abruptly in 2022 when a particularly aggressive storm season accelerated the pace of movement to about a foot a week in some places. Nine atmospheric rivers crossed California in just three weeks that December, the longest stretch on record. More storms followed. By April, residents in Rolling Hills Estates, located in the central interior of the peninsula, began noticing hairline fractures in their homes. Within months, twelve homes had slid into a canyon. Accelerating land movement spread across the peninsula, reaching Rancho Palos Verdes by the summer, where nearly three hundred homes were affected in and around the Portuguese Bend neighborhood. Gas service was lost first, followed by electricity a month later, after shifting ground brought down a power line and sparked a fire, prompting utility providers to deem continued service too dangerous. More than a year later, power has returned in patches, but 174 homes remain dark and only twenty-two homes have had their gas restored. Last spring, SoCalEdison said in a statement it would only consider restoring electricity once “movement is closer to pre-2023 levels.” But slowing that movement would depend on dewatering wells that require the very electricity being withheld. The Palos Verdes Peninsula seen from the air. | Wikimedia Commons/The Baffler Residents, meanwhile, are struggling to refrigerate food and medicine, keep the lights on, charge devices, and heat their homes. For fifty-two-year-old Steven Barker, life involves “taking cold showers, eating takeout and Crock-Pot meals and grappling with the impossible math of which investments—installing a large propane tank, converting gas-powered appliances, switching to solar panels—are feasible or even possible for a house on the edge of disaster,” as he told the Los Angeles Times. In effect, Portuguese Bend has become California’s largest off-grid community. Among the homes without utility service is Villa Narcissa, one of Vanderlip’s original estates, which sold for $10.5 million in 2020. The sprawling estate has breathtaking views of Catalina Island and includes a 7,700-square-foot Tuscan-style villa, ten guesthouses, a swimming pool, and a tennis court. But today it is not serviced by either Southern California Edison or the Southern California Gas Company. Instead, a fifty-six-kilowatt generator keeps the lights on and the refrigerators running. The irony is difficult to ignore. “It’s so Mickey Mouse, so substandard,” a structural assessor working on homes in the landslide zone told the Los Angeles Times in 2023, “You have a luxury community with world-class golf courses and amazing views of the ocean, but some homeowners are literally living in Third World conditions.” Politicians are quick to blame climate change for the peninsula’s woes—but while the storms of recent years were almost certainly intensified by a warming climate, the deeper problem is that we built there in the first place, despite evidence that the land was unstable. A Landslide Moratorium Ordinance has technically been on the books in Rancho Palos Verdes since 1978, when a landslide destroyed forty-five homes and the city council banned construction in an 1,100-acre area, including Portuguese Bend. But the law has been made all but toothless by carve outs and courts willing to side with property owners. Among the developers who sought out an exemption was Barry Hon, who had assembled three hundred acres within the moratorium zone with an eye toward building luxury condos and a golf course in the early 1990s. Hon was eventually granted an exemption by the city per the recommendation of the city’s geologist, Perry Ehlig, who told the Los Angeles Times that “the city probably doesn’t need a moratorium, per se, because its building code requirements are strict enough to prevent slide problems.” But just weeks before the project was set to open in June 1999, a massive landslide tore through the site. After a new developer spent more than $160 million on repairs, it succumbed to bankruptcy. The property was later acquired by Donald Trump and opened as Trump National Golf Club Los Angeles in 2006. The courts further hollowed out the moratorium. In 2002, owners of sixteen vacant residential parcels filed suit in Monks v. City of Rancho Palos Verdes after the city denied them an exemption from the construction ban, arguing that the restrictions deprived them of any economically viable use of their property. The California Court of Appeal ruled in their favor, arguing that the city had failed to demonstrate sufficient imminent danger to justify the restrictions. Of the parcels allowed to be developed after the Monks ruling, three were red-tagged as unsafe following the 2023 landslides, while five Monks plaintiffs have applied for buyouts through FEMA’s $42 million voluntary program—which was launched in 2024 and is expected to buy out roughly twenty homes in Rancho Palos Verdes at 75 percent of their pre-disaster market value. Another $10 million arrived in February from FEMA. That initial outlay from the federal government for this program already exceeds the $31.79 million Los Angeles County has allocated to assist victims of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, which displaced about 150,000 people (over three times the population of Rancho Palos Verdes) and caused between $95 billion and $164 billion in property and capital losses. For those displaced by the fires, aid is capped at $18,000 per household—while the buyout allocation for Rancho Palos Verdes works out to more than $2 million per home. (FEMA also distributed $154 million to over sixty-four thousand residents impacted by the fires.) In other words, homes that in many cases were knowingly built on hazardous land are now being bought out on the public’s dime. Meanwhile, in some areas, construction continues at a breakneck pace: Between 2018 and 2024, Rolling Hills Estates built more new housing per capita than any other jurisdiction in Los Angeles County, even as several townhomes in the area slipped into a canyon. Monks and other legal decisions since 1965 have left officials with few options. If the cities on the peninsula try to prevent development through building restrictions, property owners can argue that their land has been taken without compensation. But if the city allows development to proceed and additional homes are destroyed by landslides, legal precedent has been set that enables property owners to pursue inverse condemnation claims by arguing that municipal action or inaction contributed to the damage, allowing them to recover the market value of their homes. That is the legal argument now being made by sixteen homeowners whose properties were destroyed in the most recent landslides, including Connie and Derek Anderson, who bought their home in February 2023—only to have it red-tagged six months later. The suit, originally filed in 2024 against Rancho Palos Verdes, neighboring Rolling Hills, and other public agencies, argues that leaks, storm drains, and other infrastructure failures allowed excess water to seep into the hillside and accelerate the movement of the ancient landslide. In a press statement, attorney Terry Bailey said: The plaintiffs are demanding damages to be proven at trial. The premise here is that the disaster might have been avoided had those systems functioned better—but the notion that better drainage alone could have kept a geologically unstable hillside from becoming saturated during recent storms is difficult to take seriously. The case remains pending. The mounting costs of remediation, legal settlements, and buyouts on this waterfront tract of paradise reveal just how untenable the status quo has become. Beyond the federal government’s buyout program, the city of Rancho Palos Verdes has poured around $64 million into emergency response since early 2023, including dewatering wells ($4 million) and repairing part of Palos Verdes Drive South ($2.8 million)—a part of the road that’s costs between $700,000 to $2.5 million to maintain for the last five fiscal years. All of this has exceeded the city’s annual budget of around $40 million, with a significant share funded by dipping into reserves, drawing on federal Covid-19 relief funds, and deferring other planned capital projects like park improvements. By my estimate, total spending since 1985 has surpassed $200 million, though that figure is likely an undercount, as it does not account for the routine road repair, sewer fixes, monitoring, wells, or liability payouts. Councilmember David Bradley said last month the city had spent “well beyond [its] means,” after the council approved a $12.2 million match, more than a quarter of its annual budget, to compete for a recent $49 million federal grant. To fund the landslide remediation project, the city will need support from county, state, and federal grants. Officials are applying for every grant available, but accessing those funds requires significant local contributions. Mayor Paul Seo remains hopeful they will receive the needed support via grants, and he remains committed because, “the return that we’re going to get, if we do get it, is pretty large,” as he told the Daily Breeze. “It’s just doing the mental calculus of what we’re going to tighten in the next couple months, that’s going to be the brutal part. But I think we need to keep pursuing this and make sure that we put our foot on the gas to try to get some money back.” This comes after the city was awarded a $23 million federal grant in 2023 that was later reduced to $16 million. Meanwhile, the voluntary buyout dollars have yet to be allocated, and in 2024 the city applied for $37.8 million in federal funding that was denied on the grounds of “pre-existing instability,” rendering it ineligible. The local governments of the peninsula could—and probably should—mandate retreat through eminent domain, but the option is politically anathema. No politician has seriously proposed it, in part because doing so would be an acknowledgment that the area is no longer habitable, a message that runs counter to the interests of real estate developers, property owners, and officials seeking reelection. It would also theoretically require even bigger buyout programs at market rates that remain artificially high because the risks associated with building in hazardous landscapes have long been subsidized through disaster relief, infrastructure spending, and legal guarantees of compensation, effectively socializing the costs of risky private development decisions. In the end, whether the approach takes the form of managed retreat, unplanned retreat, or strict land-use regulation, the financial burden will inevitably fall on the public. Elsewhere, in communities facing climate disasters, insurance markets have played a decisive role in forcing retreat even without direct government intervention by raising premiums or pulling out of risky markets altogether. But here on the peninsula, insurance has no role to play. “Earth movement,” which includes landslides, has long been excluded from standard homeowner policies, meaning residents have long been living on land where the primary hazard has been uninsurable, producing a political economy of risk where there is an expectation that the state will step in. There are small signs of progress. In October 2023, local officials adopted an emergency moratorium banning new construction on vacant lots in the Portuguese Bend landslide area and made it permanent two years later, though how long such restrictions will survive ongoing legal challenges remains uncertain. As climate change intensifies storms and other extreme weather, we are forced to confront a difficult reality. The structure of U.S. property rights makes sensible climate policy extraordinarily difficult to carry out. Until that changes, our climate response will continue to effectively be a publicly funded safety net for some of the wealthiest property owners in the region, who frame their demands as requests for public assistance to protect homes, an argument that rings hollow in a county where more than seventy-two thousand people are unhoused, close to the all-time high. “There is light at the end of the tunnel,” the geologist Michael Phipps said in a 2024 interview, describing dewatering efforts that have only marginally slowed the slide. “We were going eighty-eight miles an hour on the freeway and now we’re decelerating and we’re only going eighty miles an hour now.” What ultimately binds the peninsula together is a deep-seated faith that prosperity makes possibility infinite, that with enough wealth and persistence and political leverage the limits of land, geology, and climate can be overcome. But faith is a slippery slope. From The Baffler via This RSS Feed.
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Iran’s Supreme Leader hails “new chapter” in Strait of Hormuz. U.S. considering “short and powerful” wave of strikes against Iran. Iranian President: Iran open to resume diplomacy if U.S. drops “maximalist approach” and blockade. Iran war has cost U.S. $25 billion, Pentagon says. Oil prices briefly cross wartime peak. New maps show “Orange Line” expanding Israeli control of Gaza. Hamas warns Gaza ceasefire “edging close to collapse.” Israeli forces kill 15-year-old Palestinian during raid in Hebron. Israel intercepts Gaza-bound aid flotilla. Unchecked surveillance reauthorization clears House. Maine Gov. Janet Mills suspends Senate campaign. Supreme Court guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 6-3 ruling. Jerome Powell to remain on Fed board after chairmanship expires, citing “unprecedented” White House pressure. Russian attacks kill three, wound 17. Chemical warning alert issued after Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure. U.S. and allies release statement in support of Panamanian sovereignty. U.S. charges sitting Sinaloa governor and nine officials with cartel ties. Madagascar detains French serviceman, expels embassy agent over alleged destabilization plot. Mali’s Tuareg rebels demand Russian withdrawal. Sudan’s army chief vows no negotiations with RSF. Somali forces kill 22 al-Shabaab militants. India floats plan to deploy crocodiles and venomous snakes as living border barriers against migrants. From Drop Site: A growing rat infestation plagues tent cities in Gaza. Drop Site is now live on WhatsApp. Get our latest reporting, podcasts, and breaking news, delivered directly. Join the channel here. This is Drop Site Daily, our free daily news recap. We send it Monday through Friday. Today’s edition is being sent to more than 750,000 subscribers. Help us grow that number by forwarding and recommending this newsletter. Subscribe now U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh at the conclusion of the inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla / POOL / AFP via Getty Images. Iran and Ceasefire Iran’s Supreme Leader hails “new chapter” in Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei said on Thursday that Iran will protect its “nuclear and missile capabilities” as national assets, and that two months after the U.S.-Israel war on Iran began, “a new chapter is emerging in the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.” In a written statement read by a state television anchor in commemoration of National Persian Gulf Day, Khamenei said, “We and our neighbors across the waters of the Persian Gulf and the (Gulf) of Oman share a common destiny. Foreigners who come from thousands of kilometers away to act with greed and malice there have no place in it—except at the bottom of its waters.” He added, “America’s hollow bases do not even have the strength and capacity to ensure their own security, let alone that there is any hope that America will provide security to its dependents and American-loving people in the region.” He stated that a “new legal framework and management system,” for the Strait of Hormuz, will economically benefit Iran, as well as “advance comfort and development for all the region’s nations.” U.S. considering “short and powerful” wave of strikes: U.S. Central Command has presented President Donald Trump with a plan for a “short and powerful” wave of strikes on Iran, Axios reported, with an eye to “breaking the negotiating deadlock.” The strikes would likely include infrastructure targets, the report said. Senior Iranian officials told Drop Siteearlier this month that in the event of another round of attacks, Iran would suspend diplomatic channels with the United States indefinitely and “impose significantly greater costs on United States interests.” Central Command chief Brad Cooper is set to brief Trump on Thursday on a range of options for escalation against Iran, including these strikes, seizure of parts of the Strait of Hormuz to reopen shipping, and special forces operations targeting Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, according to Axios. Iranian President: Iran open to resume diplomacy if U.S. drops “maximalist approach” and blockade: Tehran is open to resuming diplomacy with the United States if Washington reduces its “maximalist approach” and stops its blockade targeting Iranian ports and ships in the Persian Gulf, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said during a phone call with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi Thursday, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency. Pezeshkian discussed regional developments and criticised U.S. measures such as restrictions on Iranian maritime activity, saying they complicate the regional environment. While reaffirming Iran’s willingness to pursue diplomatic solutions and a “fair resolution” to the conflict, he said progress depends on the U.S. adjusting its approach and avoiding further escalatory steps. Iran war has cost U.S. $25 billion, Pentagon says: Acting Defense Department comptroller Jules Hurst III told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the war on Iran has already cost the United States roughly $25 billion, with most of the spending going to munitions, including roughly 1,100 JASSM-ER stealth cruise missiles and more than 1,000 Tomahawk missiles. Several experts have pushed back against the $25 billion figure, with Democratic Representative Jason Crow, an Army veteran, saying the real figure is “probably 2 or 3 times that—guaranteed.” Stimson Center research fellow Kelly Grieco estimates munitions expenditures alone at $17 to $25 billion, with confirmed equipment losses—including E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft, radars, KC-135 tankers, and F-15s—adding at least another $5 billion before operational costs and base damage are factored in. The Pentagon is preparing a supplemental funding request for Congress, which reports say could reach as high as $200 billion. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also addressed the cost of the war in an appearance before Congress on Wednesday, responding to a question from Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.)about the effects of the war on the cost of gas and food for Americans by accusing him of “playing gotcha about domestic things.” Oil prices briefly cross wartime peak: Global oil prices surged early on Thursday with the price of Brent crude briefly crossing $126 per barrel, its highest since the launch of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in late February and the highest level since 2022 amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Before the war began, Brent crude was trading around $70 per barrel. Columbia University reports show Iran’s energy resilience: A new report from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy concludes that forced production shutdowns of Iran’s oil fields are unlikely to cause serious or permanent damage. The analysis finds Iran could resume production at roughly 70 percent capacity “promptly” if the blockade is lifted, recovering most pre-war output within months, citing the country’s track record of successful shutdowns and restarts following the 2016 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the post-Covid recovery in 2023.A second report from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy found that Iran holds considerably more crude storage capacity than previously assumed, suggesting forced production shut-ins are not as imminent as US officials have indicated. Total Iranian crude stocks stood at approximately 68 million barrels as of April 22—roughly 55 percent of nameplate capacity—leaving an estimated 17 to 20 days of effective spare storage at current export rates. Columbia analyst Antoine Halff, who co-founded the geospatial intelligence firm Kayrros that provided the underlying data, notes that Iran has deliberately expanded its storage infrastructure and diversified export options since 2016 in what appears to be deliberate contingency planning. Lithuania signals support for joining U.S.-led Strait of Hormuz navigation coalition: Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said Thursday he supports his country joining the U.S.-led “freedom of navigation” mission in the Strait of Hormuz and intends to present the proposal to the State Defence Council, though he noted parliamentary approval would be required. The announcement comes as Washington is actively pushing allied nations to join the coalition to restore shipping access through the strait, according to a State Department cable seen by Reuters. JPMorgan’s Dimon warns of coming bond crisis: JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon cautioned Tuesday that compounding geopolitical and fiscal pressures—including elevated oil prices, widening government deficits, and instability stemming from the Iran war—are pushing global markets toward a bond crisis. Speaking at the Norges Bank Investment Management annual conference in Oslo, Dimon warned that a credit recession, when it arrives, “would be worse than people think” and “might be terrible.” Lebanon Casualty count: At least 2,586 people have been killed and 8,020 wounded in Israeli attacks in Lebanon since March 2, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Health. Israeli attacks on Lebanon continue: At least 9 people were killed—including 5 women and 2 children—and 23 wounded, among them 8 children and 7 women, in Israeli attacks on Thursday morning, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry via the National News Agency, with the heaviest casualties reported in Jibshit and Toul. Additional strikes hit towns such as Chehabiyeh and Sultaneyah, while artillery targeted areas near Zawtar al-Sharqiya and Mifdoun. The Israeli army issued forced displacement orders to residents in 15 southern Lebanese villages, ordering them to move at least one kilometer away into open areas. Hezbollah said it carried out drone attacks on Israeli military targets, stating the operations were conducted “in response to the Israeli enemy’s breach of the ceasefire and attacks on villages and the destruction of homes in southern Lebanon,” and claimed direct hits on Merkava tanks in Bint Jbeil and artillery positions south of Yarine. Twelve Israeli soldiers were wounded in the attacks. Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel Casualty count: Over the last 24 hours, two Palestinians were killed—one killed in a new attack and another recovered from under the rubble after an earlier attack—and eight were injured across Gaza. The total recorded death toll since October 7, 2023 has risen to 72,601 killed, with 172,419 injured. Since October 11, the first full day of the so-called ceasefire, Israel has killed at least 824 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 2,316, while 764 bodies have been recovered from under the rubble, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. New maps show “Orange Line” expanding Israeli control of Gaza: The Israeli military quietly issued new maps of Gaza showing an expanded restricted area that make up an estimated 11% of Gaza’s territory beyond the “Yellow Line” demarcating the part of the enclave occupied and controlled by Israeli troops since the October “ceasefire,” according to Reuters. The new maps show Israel effectively controlling nearly two-thirds of Gaza. The Israeli military sent the maps to aid groups in Gaza in mid-March. The additional restricted area is marked on the maps with an orange line and the Israeli military reportedly said the area between the orange and yellow lines is a restricted zone to enable aid delivery. COGAT, the branch of the Israeli military that oversees the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, publicly acknowledged the expanded zone in response to Reuters saying, “The boundaries of these areas (the Orange Line), in which coordination is required, are determined and updated in accordance with the operational situational assessment.” Hamas warns Gaza ceasefire “edging close to collapse”: Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan said Israel’s actions are pushing the Gaza ceasefire toward collapse, rejecting the idea of isolated “violations” and instead calling it ongoing aggression “at a lower intensity,” in an interview with Al-Jazeera Mubasher on Wednesday. He sharply criticized U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, accusing him of playing a “dirty game” by enabling Israeli non-compliance, adding that trust in him is now “shaken.” Hamdan stressed Hamas’s stance: “we honor [agreements]—unless the other party nullifies it,” and warned that Israel is “edging close to nullifying the agreement.” Israeli forces kill 15-year-old Palestinian during raid in Hebron: Ibrahim Abdul Fattah Al-Khayat, 15, was killed Wednesday evening after being shot by Israeli forces during a raid on the Hawz area of Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, according to Palestine Online. Medical sources said he was struck by a live bullet in the abdomen and transferred to a Hebron hospital in a private vehicle, where doctors announced his death. Israeli forces raided the area with a large number of military vehicles, closed the main road, forced shops to shut, and fired live ammunition and tear gas at residents, wounding others; a civilian was also arrested, and a charity headquarters was stormed and searched. Israel intercepts Gaza-bound aid flotilla: Israeli forces have intercepted a number of boats from the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), a humanitarian mission heading toward Gaza and challenging its blockade, using drones, communications jamming, and armed boarding teams near the Greek island of Crete, said organizers on Thursday. “Our boats were approached by military speedboats, self-identified as ‘Israel’, pointing lasers and semi-automatic assault weapons, ordering participants to the front of the boats and to get on their hands and knees,” the GSF mission said. Flotilla organisers report that at least 22 vessels were surrounded and seized about 965 kilometers from Gaza, while 36 boats remain en route. Israeli authorities confirmed detaining around 175 activists and taking control of ships. The flotilla says its objectives are to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, push for a permanent humanitarian corridor, and increase international pressure on those supporting the blockade. Rat infestation exacerbates suffering for displaced Palestinians in Gaza: A proliferating rodent crisis is menacing displaced Palestinians across Gaza, where families—living in overcrowded tents and makeshift shelters amid mountains of uncollected waste and untreated sewage—report nightly attacks by rats and mice biting sleeping children, destroying food stores, and chewing through clothing. A United Nations rapid assessment of more than 1,600 displacement sites this month found rodents and pests frequently visible in over 80 percent of them, affecting 1.45 million people, with more than 70,000 skin infection cases—including scabies, lice, and bedbugs—recorded so far in 2026. Majd Sukar, head of the Gaza Municipality’s Preventive Health Department, attributed the crisis to the scale of Israeli bombardment creating ideal breeding grounds, compounded by an Israeli blockade on rodenticides, insecticides and other basic sanitation supplies—leaving municipal responders without the vehicles, equipment, or chemical tools needed to contain what Sukar called “a war of rats” layered onto the war of bombs. Read the full report from Ahmed Dremly here. Gaza Health Director: Israel systematically blocking medical supplies as disability crisis compounds: Dr. Muneer Alboursh, Director General of Gaza’s Ministry of Health, warned Wednesday that Israeli forces are systematically targeting Gaza’s health sector and blocking the entry of medical supplies—including prosthetics—as the territory faces a rapidly expanding disability crisis. Before the war, Gaza had 55,000 registered disability cases. With approximately 172,000 people wounded since the war began, medical estimates suggest 25% will sustain permanent disabilities—adding roughly 43,000 new cases and bringing the total to nearly 100,000. More than 5,000 amputations have already been documented, 20% of them children and 11% women. U.S. News By Julian Andreone, with Ryan Grim. Have a tip on Capitol Hill? Email Andreone at [email protected]. Unchecked surveillance reauthorization clears House: Forty-two Democrats in the House of Representatives joined Republicans in voting to pass a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without any amendments to close the data broker loophole, allowing the U.S. government to purchase Americans’ information from companies like Google and Meta, or the backdoor search loophole, which allows the American intelligence apparatus to access, without a warrant, the communications of any citizen who has contact with a person outside the United States and use the data to spy on them or even recruit them to an intelligence agency. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said before the bill passed that it would be “dead on arrival” in the Senate because it includes an amendment that would ban a Federal Reserve Central Bank Digital Currency. This means the House will likely need to vote again today on a different FISA package to prevent it from expiring by the Thursday deadline. As Glenn Greenwald notes, both parties played games with their votes to allow the measure to pass Wednesday. Maine governor suspends Senate campaign: Maine Gov. Janet Mills suspended her Senate campaign Thursday morning, citing an inability to compete financially against Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and political newcomer who leads her by more than 30 points in recent polling. “While I have the drive and passion, commitment and experience, and above all else—the fight—to continue on, I very simply do not have the one thing that political campaigns unfortunately require today: the financial resources,” Mills said in her announcement. Platner, 41, is backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and has received large crowds at town halls across the state; he is now the likely Democratic nominee against five-term Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins. Supreme Court guts Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in 6-3 ruling: The Supreme Court’s conservative majority struck down Louisiana’s majority-Black 6th Congressional District on Wednesday, finding it relied too heavily on race, effectively gutting the Section 2 provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that has long protected minority communities from redistricting that dilutes their political power. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority that Section 2 is now limited to cases of intentional discrimination—a far higher bar—while Justice Elena Kagan warned in dissent that the decision allows states to “systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power” without legal consequence. The ruling is expected to have its broadest effect in 2028, when Republicans could move to redraw more than a dozen Democratic-held districts previously shielded under the law. In the wake of the decision, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Jeff Landry told his party’s House candidates he would suspend next month’s primary elections so that state lawmakers could pass a new congressional map first; an official announcement of that suspension could come as early as Friday. Powell to remain on Fed board after chairmanship expires, citing “unprecedented” White House pressure: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell confirmed Wednesday he will remain on the Fed’s Board of Governors after his chairmanship expires May 15, staying on for a “period of time to be determined” as a governor—a move that prevents President Donald Trump from immediately filling his seat and potentially shifting the balance of the Federal Open Market Committee. Powell cited the Trump administration’s “unprecedented” legal pressure on the central bank as his reason for staying, and said he will remain until the matter is resolved “with transparency and finality.” He acknowledged Kevin Warsh as his likely successor, said he would keep a “low profile” to avoid functioning as a shadow chair, and noted his governor’s term runs until January 2028—giving him legal standing to remain on the board regardless of who succeeds him as chair. Pro-Israel super PAC attempts to conceal ad buy in Nebraska congressional primary: Democratic Majority for Israel had placed a $176,050 ad buy targeting populist candidate John Cavanaugh in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District primary before a video surfaced of centrist candidate Denise Powell pledging on camera to reject support from AIPAC and DMFI. “Yes, I’m not accepting money from any special-interest group in this category,” Powell told a Nebraska Young Democrats Forum, referring to Israel. In a matter of days, however, New Democrat Majority PAC had increased its own ad purchase by the same amount as the canceled DMFI buy, with identical reservations on the same broadcast and cable channels—a transfer confirmed by an internal Hearst Television email stating “cancel spending for DMFI PAC and moving money to New Democratic Majority.” Powell has continued to deny accepting or soliciting support from pro-Israel groups, but her campaign declined to condemn the spending shift or call on New Democrat Majority to take down the transferred ads. Read more about the race in the latest from David Dayen at the American Prospect, here. Street denies taking AIPAC money: Pennsylvania State Senator Sharif Street denied receiving any money from AIPAC during a congressional debate with State Assemblyman Chris Rabb; both are vying to represent Pennsylvania’s 3rd Congressional District. Drop Site’s Ryan Grim notes, however, that the portal AIPAC uses to funnel money to candidates—the “Pro-Israel Network”—previously featured Street on its website, soliciting donations of $500 and $1,000 to his campaign. AOC lays out vision for peeling MAHA voters away from Trump: The EPA has not gotten back to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) since she exposed its administrator, Lee Zeldin, for meeting with Bayer-Monsanto about their legal issues on glyphosate in a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing Tuesday. Zeldin testified under oath earlier in the hearing that he had not met with those executives; after Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that he had in fact met with them, Zeldin said the meetings were “brief.” AOC told Drop Site’s Julian Andreone that she thinks Democrats can win back MAHA voters, saying, “There is very real, deep and persistent corruption in poisoning American communities.” Haley Stevens rips Mallory McMorrow in Michigan Senate race: This week, CNN uncovered old Mallory McMorrow social media posts making derogatory comments about the Midwest. What matters is how Stevens responded, specifically by coming hard at McMorrow. According to a recent survey sponsored by Drop Site and Zeteo, antiwar candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is in position to win a three person race against both McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens, but would likely lose to either one in a head-to-head contest. The animosity between McMorrow and Stevens makes it likelier that each stays in the race, increasing El-Sayed’s odds. Other International News Russian attacks kill three, wound 17: Russian attacks across Ukraine killed at least three people and wounded 17 over the past 24 hours, regional officials said Wednesday, as U.S.-led peace negotiations remain largely on pause. In Donetsk, at least two people were killed and four wounded across 19 Russian attacks that damaged dozens of residential buildings and infrastructure; in Sumy, a 60-year-old woman died from carbon monoxide poisoning after drone strikes “deliberately aimed at residential buildings” caused large-scale fires; and overnight attacks in Odesa struck civilian infrastructure, including a hospital, damaging its cardiological and surgical departments and wounding two. Chemical warning alert issued after Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure: Russian authorities issued a chemical hazard emergency warning in parts of the city of Perm on Thursday after Ukrainian drones struck industrial sites across the region, in a second day of heavy drone attacks on Russian oil and gas infrastructure deep inside the country. Governor Dmitry Makhonin said workers sheltered in place, reported “no significant damage,” and confirmed no injuries—but residents described a chemical odor in the air, and social media footage showed large smoke columns over the city. NASA satellite imagery also captured a black plume trailing roughly 80 miles east of the city. Ukraine has continued a wave of attacks on Russian oil and gas facilities across the west of the county using long-range drones. U.S. and allies release statement in support of Panamanian sovereignty: The United States and five regional partners issued a joint statement backing Panama’s sovereignty, a move that underscores Washington’s renewed focus on the Panama Canal as a strategic asset and concerns about Chinese “economic pressure” in the region. Canal-adjacent port operations had long been managed by a Hong Kong–based company without major U.S. objection. Panama’s Supreme Court annulled that company’s contract in January. The U.S. has alleged that China has taken excessive retaliatory action, with its Federal Maritime Commission reporting that China detained nearly 70 Panamanian-flagged ships in March alone. Beijing responded to this week’s statement by saying that “it is the United States that is politicizing and over-securitizing the port issue.” The statement has elevated concerns about further foreign involvement in the region; in January, Trump told reporters that a U.S. takeover of the Canal is “sort of on the table.” U.S. charges sitting Sinaloa governor and nine officials with cartel ties: U.S. prosecutors unsealed an indictment Wednesday in New York charging Sinaloa state Governor Ruben Rocha Moya, 76, and nine current and former officials with working with the Sinaloa cartel’s “Chapitos” faction—the sons of imprisoned cartel co-founder Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman—to move narcotics into the U.S. in exchange for bribes and political support. The indictment alleges that the cartel assisted Rocha Moya in his 2021 gubernatorial election by kidnapping opposition candidates, stealing ballots, and intimidating opponents. Three of those indicted are members of Claudia Sheinbaum’s Morena party. The indictment comes on the heels of a CIA scandal that saw agents operating without authorization in opposition-governed Chihuahua state. Madagascar detains French serviceman, expels embassy agent over alleged destabilization plot: Madagascar has detained former French national serviceman Guy Baret and declared a French embassy agent persona non grata over an alleged plot to destabilize the country, authorities announced Tuesday. Deputy Prosecutor Nomenarinera Mihamintsoa Ramanantsoa confirmed Baret has been placed in pretrial detention at Tsiafahy maximum-security prison alongside Malagasy army Colonel Patrick Rakotomamonjy and other alleged accomplices. Prosecutors have charged the group with spreading false information, plotting to sabotage infrastructure, including power lines and thermal plants operated by state utility Jirama, and criminal conspiracy, with actions allegedly planned for April 18. France summoned Madagascar’s charge d’affaires in Paris to “vigorously protest” the expulsion, calling the destabilization accusations “not only unfounded, but also incomprehensible.” France previously helped former President Andry Rajoelina flee Madagascar in October after youth-led protests over water and energy shortages brought President Michael Randrianirina to power. Mali’s Tuareg rebels demand Russian withdrawal: Mali’s Azawad Liberation Front said Wednesday its objective is for Russia’s Africa Corps to “withdraw permanently” from the country, with spokesperson Mohamed Elmaouloud Ramadane telling AFP during a visit to Paris to meet French security officials that the rebels view Russia’s intervention negatively because Moscow “supported people who committed serious crimes and massacres” under President Assimi Goita’s government, which seized power in a 2020 coup. The statement follows a coordinated weekend offensive by a rebel alliance including the Azawad Front and the al-Qaeda-linked JNIM across multiple cities, during which Goita’s Defence Minister was killed. Russian fighters were seen withdrawing from the northern town of Kidal in trucks after reportedly negotiating an exit corridor through Algerian mediation. Ramadane said the rebels intend to push on toward Gao, Timbuktu, and Menaka, and claimed the Goita government would fall “sooner or later.” France has urged its nationals to leave Mali “as soon as possible” given the volatile security situation. Sudan’s army chief vows no negotiations with RSF: Sudanese Armed Forces commander General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan reiterated Wednesday his refusal to negotiate with the Rapid Support Forces, vowing to continue military operations until the country is “fully cleared” in remarks at a ceremony honoring former chiefs of staff on Wednesday. Burhan said there would be no negotiation with the RSF or those who support them, vowing to end what he called Sudan’s “nightmare.” Somali forces kill 22 al-Shabaab militants: Somalia’s military killed 22 al-Shabaab militants, including a commander, in an operation conducted alongside foreign troops in the country’s Lower Shabelle region, the government announced Wednesday. Nigerian troops kill 18 militants: Nigerian troops killed at least 18 Islamist militants and destroyed several insurgent enclaves in coordinated operations across Borno state, the military announced Wednesday, with 11 fighters killed in the Bulabulin forest and seven in the Timbuktu axis. The operations are part of an intensifying campaign to dismantle strongholds of Boko Haram and its splinter group Islamic State West Africa Province, which have waged a 17-year insurgency across the country’s Borno state, killing thousands and displacing two million people. India floats plan to deploy crocodiles and venomous snakes as living border barriers against migrants: India’s Border Security Force issued an internal directive in late March ordering frontier units to explore “the feasibility of deploying reptiles in vulnerable riverine gaps” along the country’s 4,096-kilometer border with Bangladesh, where difficult marshy and riverine terrain has made fencing impossible in stretches, according to a document first reported by Northeast News. Wildlife conservationists warn the plan is ecologically unworkable—crocodiles are not native to the border regions and would likely die if relocated, while flooding could spread venomous snakes into residential fishing communities on both sides—and human rights activists have condemned it as an extension of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s broader campaign of “extrajudicial methods” against undocumented migrants. Al Jazeera’s full investigation of the potential policy is available here. 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US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday lashed out at a Democratic lawmaker over his criticism of President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran. During testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Hegseth attacked Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) for describing the Iran War, which Trump launched in late February without any authorization from Congress, as a “quagmire.” “You stain the troops when you tell them, two months in, two months in, congressman, shame on you, calling this a quagmire,” Hegseth said. “The effort, what they’ve undertaken, what they’ve succeeded, the success on the battlefield to create strategic opportunities, the courage of a president to confront a nuclear Iran, and you call it a quagmire, handing propaganda to our enemies!” Hegseth attacks Garamendi: "You stain the troops when you call this a quagmire two months in, handing propaganda to our enemies. Shame on you. Don’t say I support the troops on one hand, and then a two-month mission is a quagmire. That’s a false equivalation [sic]. Who are you… pic.twitter.com/WhsjEE3nbH — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 29, 2026 Hegseth continued by saying that calling the war a quagmire was “reckless to our troops,” and then asked the congressman, “Who are you cheering for here?” After questioning Garamendi’s patriotism, Hegseth told the California Democrat that “your hatred for President Trump blinds you to the truth of the success of this mission, and the historic stakes that the president is addressing.” Hegseth’s tirade against Garamendi came after the congressman on Tuesday introduced a new war powers resolution aimed at ending the Iran war. “Trump’s war is nothing short of a self-inflicted national security and economic disaster,” Garamendi said in explaining his support for the resolution. “Thirteen American servicemembers and thousands of Iranian civilians have been killed. Americans, who are already plagued by one of the worst affordability crises in years, are now paying unconscionable amounts for a tank of gas and are struggling to keep food on the table.” Later in the hearing, Hegseth was confronted by Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) about the strategic failures of the war, particularly the continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has resulted in global oil and gas prices spiking upward. Hegseth dismisses concerns over the Strait of Hormuz being closed because the US blockaded Iran’s blockade Moulton: So they blockaded us, and then we blockaded their blockade—that’s like if President Madison had said, well, the British just burned down Washington, but don’t… pic.twitter.com/PuK4A3gtHS — Acyn (@Acyn) April 29, 2026 “Would you call Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz winning?” Moulton asked. “Well, I would say the blockade that we hold that doesn’t allow anything to come in or out of the Iranian port…” Hegseth responded, before being interrupted by Moulton. “OK, we we blockaded their blockade,” Moulton said. “They blockaded us, and then we blockaded their blockade—that’s like saying, ‘Tag, you’re it,’ or like if President Madison had said, well, the British just burned down Washington, but don’t worry, we’re going to burn it down as well.” From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
Signs at PAS conference // anonymous protester Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber. Several protesters were dragged from the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) meeting’s conference hall this past Sunday in Boston. The crowd clapped as security hauled them off—in support of the activists disrupting the very event they were attending, hosted by the organization where most of them were ostensibly members. The demonstrators sought to challenge the misleadingly-named panel entitled “A Scientific Dialogue on the Care of Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth,” an early morning event at one of the largest and most influential academic pediatric gatherings in the United States. Erin in the Morning reported last week that all the speakers on stage for this particular workshop—the only one dedicated exclusively to trans care—were tied in one way or another to the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM). Civil rights groups argue SEGM is plagued by seedy origins, pseudoscientific fanfare, and tireless anti-trans advocacy, fueling countless state and federal attacks on transgender people. This is what motivated the activists who disrupted the event, and the independent efforts of other clinicians to either change or stop the PAS panel with SEGM affiliates altogether. “Trans liberation now!” one protester yelled as they were wrestled out of the door. “This is a hate group!” Reports indicate the audience was visibly sparse for a convention with 7,000 attendees. Nonetheless, they overwhelmed the room with applause for the dissidence. The demonstrators were wrestled into the hallway after only a minute or two. There, PAS clinicians were autonomously staging their own, separate action—redirecting attendees to evidence-based resources about trans health care, passing out pride flags, and distributing peer-reviewed literature critiquing the “Gender Dysphoria Report” commissioned by the Trump Administration—and co-authored by Dr. Moti Gorin, the Colorado State University bioethicist chairing that PAS panel. Researchers published a scathing commentary on the report in the Journal of Adolescent Health, which was handed out to people passing by or entering the room. This paper found that the report contained “numerous violations of scientific norms” and “misrepresentation[s] of scientific evidence.” “The [HHS] report is a dangerous example of government incursion into the provision of evidence-based medical care,” they concluded. Health care workers at the conference told Erin in the Morning they were concerned that unwitting attendees wouldn’t know about SEGM’s hate group status, panelists’ ties to the wider anti-trans pseudoscience network, or ethical and methodological controversies surrounding their work. SEGM’s crowning achievement has arguably been its ability to artificially inflate doubt around trans people’s health care and market anti-trans propaganda as dispassionate clinical concern—which in turn manufactures legal grounds to restrict care. A report published by the Southern Poverty Law Center said that “since its founding, members of SEGM have undertaken a global media and public policy blitz to challenge the affirming care model, advocate against gender-affirming care, and lend scientific credibility to legal claims against LGBTQ+ civil rights.” It also designates SEGM as an anti-LGBT hate group.(SEGM disputes this.) Even more, medical professionals at the conference would be able to receive continuing medical education (CME) credits from the event, which are necessary for doctors to maintain their licensure. Last year, an Erin in the Morning investigation into SEGM’s CME content at Washington State University found its presentations were rampant with pseudoscience and political messaging. After people filed complaints and called its accrediting status into question, WSU removed SEGM content from its for-credit offerings. This is why Dr. A Koyama, an Arizona-based pediatrician, approached the conference room doors with her own sign—”KNOW THE PANELISTS.” It was plastered with a QR code leading to *Erin in the Morning’*s investigation into the PAS speakers. When she saw other people passing out the papers, she joined that effort, too. Even with a disruption or two the panel went on, save some light apparent sabotage; a QR code meant to submit questions to panelists was leaked online. “I don’t feel that what happened on that day was a big organized event,” Koyama told Erin in the Morning in a phone interview. “It was more like, one or two friends saying, ‘I’m going to do this,’ or ‘I’ll bring that.’ People just coming together by themselves.” It was around this time security guards asked her to leave because of her sign. She obliged, which is when she encountered a couple dozen protesters on the sidewalk—a brass band, a team of trans youth, and a cadre of allies and supportive health care providers. They were picketing the event and handing out fliers to warn attendees about SEGM’s history of anti-trans activism. The youth canvassing on the outside had no idea that these doctors on the inside were organizing, too. Koyama stepped up to the mic to join the trans youth on the pavement. “I am proud to have been kicked out of PAS for our sign,” she declared. Meanwhile, posters were spotted around the convention center’s perimeter reading: “Transphobia isn’t science. Conversion therapy isn’t health care.” (This was ostensibly a nod to “gender exploratory therapy,” sometimes also marketed as “Cass-informed therapy,” which deploys conversion tactics condemned by human rights groups and experts.) Protect Trans Futures, a grassroots direct action group led by young, transgender Bostonians, led the sidewalk protest. “We are the ones that have benefitted from the evidence-based medicine that’s come about,” Teddy Walker, PTF’s co-founder, told Erin in the Morning. “We are the ones that have been able to start our transitions as minors, and that has saved our lives.” The 21-year-old organizer said that over the span of hours, the modest group engaged in dialogue with hundreds of medical professionals, handing out upwards of 800 flyers about the event. “Every provider we talked to was shocked and outraged once they heard what was happening,” Walker said. Protect Trans Futures also organized an email-petition campaign that sent messages to around two dozen PAS leaders and sponsors for every signatory, resulting in over 90,000 emails sent by the time they capped the drive on Monday. The goal: Convince PAS to drop Dr. Moti Gorin and cancel the panel, or at least strike its eligibility for CME credits. Although PAS is hosting the event, the CME credits had to be approved by the Baylor College of Medicine, a partner institution, which said it reviewed the panel for compliance ahead of time. After the panel, the Pediatric Endocrine Society also came out in opposition to the event. “Prior to and during the meeting, we had been in communication with some of PAS leadership about our serious concerns” it said in an email to members. “While the description advertised the session as a scholarly review, the panel was made up entirely of individuals who have espoused views that run counter to the bulk of the primary literature and the advice around care provided by the vast majority of major medical associations. While PES welcomes different points of view, we believe that presentations at conferences should be as evidence-based as possible.” Neither PAS leadership nor Gorin responded to a request for comment for this follow-up. The other panelists—Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, Dr. Anna Hutchinson, and Dr. Steven Montante—did not respond to initial requests for comment for Erin in the Morning’s reporting on the matter. In response to internal backlash ahead of the event, PAS Program Chair and Q&A moderator Dr. Daniel Rauch, of the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine in New Jersey, told the audience that PAS had tried to recruit an affirming gender care provider, but those they asked declined to participate. It is not clear who they asked, how many providers they asked, when they asked or why they turned PAS down. He also said he added resource links to gender-affirming literature to provide additional perspectives. Meanwhile, in a prior interview with Erin in the Morning, Gorin rejected characterizations that SEGM or the Trump-ordered report he worked on might contain hateful or pseudoscientific rhetoric. He said he picked a cohort for the panel that was approved by PAS; one he felt was diverse. He tapped into clinicians from different countries, different areas of medicine, and people who may not “agree on everything.” He had hoped that detractors would attend the panel and engage with the speakers. But unlike other conference sessions, the PAS moderator didn’t even give the audience a chance to hold the microphone to directly address them. Walker, meanwhile, said the events of the day were nonetheless “a huge win” for their organizing to spread awareness of anti-trans actors and narratives. “Everyone told us: ‘We are with you. This panel does not represent our views. We don’t understand how this was allowed to happen.’” Erin In The Morning is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber. From Erin In The Morning via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
lemmy.world
I think this one happened rapidly because of conquistadors and plague. A rapid empire collapse making the elite location untenable and unaffordable. I recently read 1491 and it was excellent. It describes how these immense civilizations were in the New World, and how rapidly they collapsed as hogs infected with diseases accidentally escaped the explorer’s camps and killed of 90% of the populations. It talks about De Soto seeing the banks of rivers filled with dozens of cities of thousands of people, and then two or three years later explorers coming by and finding nothing but ruins. That seems much more of the type of collapse that would just leave entire buildings empty and abandoned.
Komunitas
news.abolish.capital
Ang Rebolusyonaryong Konseho ng mga Unyon sa Paggawa-Pambansang Nagkakaisang Prente-Laguna (RCTU-NDF-Laguna) ay nagpapaabot ng pinakamataas na pagpupugay sa lahat ng mga proletaryo ng mundo sa ika-123 taong araw ng paggawa sa Pilipinas. Sa gitna ng lumalalang mga kondisyong pang-ekonomiya at pampulitika dahil sa nabubulok na yugto ng monopolyong kapitalismo, panahon na upang palakasin ang ating hanay at sumulong sa ating proletaryong rebolusyon bitbit ang ibayong lakas, mas mataas na pananaw sa pulitika, at hindi natitinag na paninindigan laban sa mga sakripisyo at kahirapan—sa pamamagitan lamang nito magkakamit ang ating hanay ng malalaking tagumpay. Sa araw na ito, pagpugayan natin at alalahanin ang buhay at sakripisyo ng ating mga bayaning manggagawa na inialay ang kanilang angking talino, at natatanging buhay para sa kapakanan ng inaaping uri at laban sa mapang-aliping sistemang sahuran. Sa araw na ito, muli nating itaas ang ating mga kamao, at baybayin ang mga hamong ating kinakaharap sa kasalukuyan. Ang Mayo Uno ay hindi lamang isang selebrasyon; ito ay isang simbolo ng pakikibaka para sa karapatan at dignidad ng mga manggagawa. Isa itong mahalagang araw na nag-ugat mula sa makasaysayang pagkilos sa anyo ng WELGA ng mga manggagawa sa Chicago noong Mayo 1886, kung saan lumaban sila at nagbuwis ng buhay para sa mas makataong kondisyon sa trabaho at paggigiit ng walong oras na pagtatrabaho. Ang kanilang sakripisyo at katatagan ang nagbigay-daan sa pagkilala sa mga karapatan ng manggagawa sa buong mundo. Sa Pilipinas, naganap ang unang pagdiriwang ng Araw ng mga Manggagawa noong Mayo 1, 1903. Inorganisa ito at pinangunahan ng Union Obrera Democratica de Filipinas, ang unang labor federation sa bansa. Itinataguyod nito ang mga karapatan ng lakas-paggawa habang kolonyal ang bansa at nasa ilalim ng pang-aalipin ng mga Amerikano ang Pilipinas. Mahigit 100,000 na manggagawa ang nagmartsa mula sa Plaza Moriones sa Tondo patungong Malacañang upang hilingin ang ganap na kalayaan; habang sumisigaw ng paglaban at kamatayan sa Imperyalismong Amerikano. Mula noon, naipagtagumpay ng manggagawa sa Philippine Assembly ang isang panukala na ginawa ang unang araw ng Mayo (Mayo Uno) na Araw ng Paggawa, at isang pambansang pista opisyal sa Pilipinas. Sa lalawigan ng Laguna ng rehiyong Timog Katagalugan, naganap ang kauna-unahang pagdiriwang ng Mayo Uno noong 1979 sa syudad ng San Pablo sa Laguna. Daan-daang manggagawa mula sa mga pagawaan ng desikadura ang nagtipon-tipon, at lumahok upang ipaglaban ang makatarungang pasahod at pagkilala sa karapatang mag-unyon. Nagkamit ng makabuluhang tagumpay ang pagsasama-sama, at pagkilos ng manggagawa para sa disenteng trabaho at kanilang karapatan. Ngunit sa kabila ng mga tagumpay na ito, patuloy pa ring nahaharap sa mga hamon, lalo na sa epekto ng pandaigdigang krisis sa trabaho at kabuhayan. Maraming manggagawa ang nawalan ng trabaho, at ang mga manggagawa ay nahaharap sa mas mababang sahod at mas masahol na kundisyon sa trabaho. Sa kasalukuyan, ang monopolyong kapitalismo ay umabot na sa kanyang pinakamataas at nabubulok na yugto, kung saan ang mismong pagkaganid nito ay nagdulot ng mas malalim at mapaminsalang krisis, na mas masahol pa sa Dakilang Depresyon ng dekada 1930. Nagaganap sa kasalukuyan ang pinakamasamang epekto ng pagkaganid sa tubo at kapangyarihan ng malalaking Imperyalistang kapangyarihan gaya ng Estados Unidos. Kamakailan lang, sinalakay ng US at Zionistang estado ng Israel ang Iran para agawin ang rekurso ng langis nito at kontrolin ang Strait of Hormuz, ang makipot na karagatan sa pagitan ng Iran at Oman, palabas sa Indian Ocean. Bahagi ang pananalakay ng mas malawak na layunin ng imperyalistang US na ipataw ang hegemonya nito sa buong Middle East. Ang Iran ang pangatlong may pinakamalaking reserba ng langis, kasunod sa Venezuela (#1) at Saudi Arabia (#2). Sa Iran at Venezuela pangunahing bumibili ng langis ang China, ang nangungunang imperyalistang karibal ng US. Dahil dito, kagyat at pangmatagalan ang epekto ng gera sa ekonomiya ng Pilipinas. Lubos na umaasa ang Pilipinas sa imported na langis mula sa pandaigdigang merkado para sa mga pangangailangan nito sa transportasyon, produksyon at paglikha ng enerhiya. Malaking bahagi ng inaangkat (60%-65%) ay sa anyo ng repinadong langis na binibili pangunahin sa China, kasunod sa South Korea at Singapore. Samantala, 35%-40% sa pambansang konsumo ang inaangkat na krudong langis, pangunahin sa Saudi Arabia, ng nag-iisang plantang nagrerepina nito sa bansa. Mabilis ang pagsirit ng presyo ng langis sa Pilipinas dahil ito ay kontrolado ng mga sakim sa tubo na malalaking kartel sa langis. Sinasamantala nila ang batas sa deregulasyon ng industriya ng langis na nagbibigay sa kanila ng buong laya na itakda ang presyo ng bentahan na walang pananagutan o sagutin. Dahil dito, awtomatikong ipinapasa ng mga lokal na subsidyaryo ng dayuhang kumpanya ng langis sa Pilipinas (Shell, Caltex, Total) at malaking kumpanyang burges komprador ang pinalobong presyo ng langis sa mga Pilipinong konsyumer. Sa kasalukuyan, umaabot na sa ₱130.00 ang kada litro ng diesel, ₱97-₱98 naman ang kada litro ng gasolina, kasabay nito ang pagtaas ng presyo ng mga pangunahing pangangailangan ng mamamayan katulad ng pagkain, tubig, at kuryente. Samantala, dapat ilantad at batikusin ng sambayanang Pilipino ang papet na rehimeng Marcos Jr sa pagtanggi nitong kundenahin ang panggegera ng US at Zionistang estado ng Israel sa Iran. Ang kanyang hindi pagkibo, at kawalang aksyon ay naglalantad sa kanyang labis na kainutilan. Gayundin, tiba-tiba, at patuloy na pinagkikitaan ng pangkating Marcos Jr na kasabwat ng malalaking kompanya ng langis ang malaking buwis sa langis sa anyo ng VAT at Excise Tax lalo na kapag sumirit ang presyo nito sa merkado. Ang hindi maiiwasan at hindi mapapasubalian na katotohanang ito ay naglagay sa mga manggagawa sa buong daigdig upang maranasan ang pinakamasahol at hindi makatuwirang mga kundisyon sa pagtatrabaho, maubligang tanggapin ang barat na sahod, at malupit na pang-aapi sa kanilang karapatan. Sa Pilipinas, gaya na lamang sa probinsya ng Laguna, maraming manggagawa ang tumatanggap ng sahod na hindi sapat, iba-iba ang halaga at walang kakayanan na matustusan ang kanilang pang-araw-araw na pangangailangan. Sa kabila ng pagtaas ng presyo ng mga bilihin at serbisyo, ang sahod ng manggagawa sa probinsya ay nananatiling nakapako sa napakababang ₱508.00-₱600.00. Maraming manggagawa ang nasa ilalim ng kontraktwalisasyon, na nagdudulot ng kawalang-kasiguraduhan sa kanilang trabaho. Ang mga ‘ENDO’ o end-of-contract schemes ay nagiging dahilan ng napapabayaan at hindi pantay-pantay na mga benepisyo. Samantala, sa kabila ng ating karapatan na mag-organisa at bumuo ng mga unyon, patuloy tayong nakakaranas ng paglabag sa ating mga karapatan. Sa halip na proteksyunan ng estado ang karapatan ng manggagawa, patuloy nitong binubusog ang mga tauhan ng NTF-ELCAC na pangunahin ay binuo para supilin ang manggagawang nag-oorganisa para sa kanilang karapatan at sa isang banda ay proteksyunan ang iteres ng kapital. Hindi pa ito nagkasya, at nagtayo pa ito ng sariling pederasyong SAHUD upang gamitin sa panlilinlang sa manggagawa sa kapakinabangan ng kapital. Ang pagsugpo sa mga unyon at ang pananakot sa mga lider ng manggagawa ay nagiging hadlang sa mga hangarin ng manggagawa para sa mas maayos na kondisyon sa trabaho. Sa kabila ng mga hamong ito, kailangang ipaalala sa lahat na hindi tayo nag-iisa. Ang pagkakaisa at sama-samang pagkilos ang susi sa ating laban. Ang bawat hakbang patungo sa pagkamit ng ating mga karapatan bilang manggagawa ay isang hakbang patungo sa mas magandang kinabukasan. Kaya’t panawagan sa lahat ng manggagawa, na patuloy na mag-organisa at lumaban para sa makatarungang sahod, kasiguraduhan sa trabaho, at paggalang sa ating karapatang mag-unyon. Huwag tayong matakot na ipahayag ang ating mga hinaing. Sa ating pagkakaisa, makakamit natin ang ating mga layunin. Bagamat tama lamang na manawagan ng mas mataas na sahod at permanenteng trabaho sa pamamagitan ng regularisasyon, hindi sapat ito upang wakasan ang nabubulok na sistemang monopolyo kapitalismo. Mayroong malaking pangangailangan para sa mas mataas na pulitikal na mga panawagan na naglalayong isulong ang radikal na reporma, ganap na pangangailangan na bumuo ng mga rebolusyonaryong unyon, at isang walang kondisyon na panawagan para sa mga proletaryo na magkaisa at pangunahan ang pambansa-demokratikong rebolusyon sa Pilipinas tungo sa sosyalismo. Hangga’t mayroong imperyalismo na nananakop at naghahari sa mundo, ang mga manggagawa ay nakatakdang magdusa mula sa pagsasamantala, krisis, at pang-aaping suportado ng estado. Ang ating tungkulin ay pagsama-samahin ang ating hanay, pangunahan ang rebolusyon tungo sa tagumpay, at itatag ang diktadura ng proletaryo kung saan ang mga mamamayan ay tunay na makikinabang mula sa mga pambansang industriya na hindi kontrolado ng mga kapitalista, at tunay na pag-unlad pang-ekonomiya na dulot ng nasyonal na agrikultura. Dapat mabatid ng mga manggagawang Pilipino na ang malakolonyal at malapyudal na sistemang kinukubabawan ng imperyalismo na ugat ng napakababang sahod at pang-aalipin sa kanyang uri ay matatransporma lamang sa pamamagitan ng Demokratikong Rebolusyong Bayan. Kung gayon, nararapat tayong makiisa at iugnay ang ating pakikibaka sa sahod at karapatan sa paggawa sa pakikibakang anti-pyudal ng malawak na masang magsasaka at kapwa itaas ito sa anti-imperyalistang pakikibaka. Higit sa lahat, kailangang yakapin ng manggagawa ang armadong pakikibaka bilang esensyal na sandata sa pagpapalaya sa sambayanang Pilipino mula sa imperyalismo, pyudalismo at burukrata kapitalismo. Kung laksa-laksang manggagawa ang lalahok sa armadong pakikibaka, sasampa sa New People’s Army, at mamumuno rito, tiyak na magkakamit ng malaking igpaw pasulong ang rebolusyong Pilipino. Hinog ang kasalukuyang sitwasyon sa Pilipinas at sa buong daigdig upang ibayong pasikarin ang kilusang paggawa. Ang pagpapataas ng proletaryong pananaw at paninindigan ng mga manggagawa at pagyakap nila sa kanilang dakilang tungkulin bilang mga hukbong mapagpalaya ay susi sa pagtatagumpay ng rebolusyon, pagtatatag ng diktadura ng proletaryado, hanggang sa ganap na pagpawi ng pagsasamantala ng tao sa tao! Mabuhay ang CPP-NPA-NDF! Mabuhay ang RCTU-NDFP! Mabuhay ang uring manggagawa! Mabuhay ang sambayanang Pilipino! The post Manggagawa ng buong daigdig, magkaisa! Labanan ang gyerang agresyon ng Imperyalismong US! Isulong ang proletaryong rebolusyon hanggang sa tagumpay! appeared first on PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web Central. From PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web Central via This RSS Feed.
Komunitas
hexbear.net
We’re unveiling the victims of capitalism monument. It’s just a plague that we stuck in the ground because the whole world are victims of capitalism. The educational component is literally just look anywhere. Victims of capitalism and it’s just a sign that says “species diversity and total insect biomass have dropped like, what, 70-90% globally since the destruction of the USSR? lol”
Komunitas
lemmy.world
If there was a plague that had a 100% human infection rate and killed 87% of the people infected it would still only set back world populations to around the start of the 1900s
Komunitas
piefed.social
It’s interesting how we hear hear little from the very virtuatous celebrity mob who have plagued us with sanctimony in the last decade of social media and it’s been the obscure few who stand up and said something in the face of hardened persecution. Weirdly seems to be a lot of 80s/90s crew that do speak up.