John Mearsheimer is a realist who’s still and always faithful to the liberal international order, unlike the also liberal Jeffery Sachs. All-In Summit 2024: John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs

One year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.

But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.

Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism.

Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases.

Ravid has made a name for himself by uncritically printing flattering information given to him by either the U.S. or Israeli government and passing it off as a scoop. In April, he wrote that “President Biden laid out an ultimatum to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their call on Thursday: If Israel doesn’t change course in Gaza, ‘we won’t be able to support you”. In July, he repeated anonymous sources that told him that Netanyahu and Israel are striving for “a diplomatic solution” – another highly dubious claim.

We are constantly told that solutions to some of the greatest challenges facing poor and working class people in the U.S. do not exist. Meanwhile, billions taxpayer dollars are being used to fund the genocide of Palestinians.

That very money could have ended homelessness in the United States.

Money for our needs, not the U.S.-Israeli war machine!

Summary

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington asked CBO to indicate whether the 2021 increase in the value of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), which increased Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, had a positive or negative impact on labor force participation. In CBO’s assessment, the TFP increase likely reduced the fraction of people participating in the labor force as a response to the higher transfer income that people received when not working. The reduction in labor supply is likely concentrated among the minority of SNAP recipients who are of working age. The agency has not quantified the size of that effect.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21481107

cross-posted from: https://hcommons.social/users/adachika192/statuses/113319778088755780

Israeli Court Orders Government to Explain System for Medical Evacuations From Gaza: Three Israeli human rights groups filed a petition after the closure of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt, slowing the evacuation of patients.
(New York Times, 2024-10-15)

“The order stems from a petition filed by three Israeli human rights groups in early June, following the closure of the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt after the Israeli military began assaulting the area in May.”

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21481567

October 16, 2024

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21454211

October 15, 2024

Much credit to this post.

• Under her jurisdiction, in "progressive" San Francisco, 56% of all inmates in SF jails were black, along with 40% of all arrests (Only 5.8% of the population is black). Ignores police brutality, protected 14 of her officers who were caught sending extremely racist text messages. Oversaw San Francisco’s felony conviction rate rising from 52% to 67% in only 3 years.
  • As part of her tough on crime approach she assigned senior prosecutors to misdemeanors like graffiti and vandalism, tripling the number of cases brought to trial.
  • After a federal judge orders California to expand prison releases to reduce crowding, her office argued in court that if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.
  • Spent years jailing disproportionately black nonviolent cannabis users while opposing taking cannabis off DEA’s list of most dangerous substances and literally laughing at the idea of legalizing it multiple times, even as her Republican opponent ran to the left of her on the issue. She then tried to pander by admitting to smoking herself despite prosecuting others, but got her story all wrong. Drug convictions under her office soared, convicting more people of marijuana possession than her predecessor (she also admitted to smoking marijuana) 2
  • Laughs about threatening parents with jailtime for truancy. 2. The stories of several mothers she jailed.
  • Pushed a law that forced schools to turn over undocumented students to ICE.
  • Opposed reforming California’s three-strikes law, which is the only one in the country to impose life sentences for minor felonies and incarcerates black people at 12x the rate as white people, three different times, even while her Republican opponent supported reform.
  • Tried to deny a transgender inmate healthcare and endangered trans women by forcing them into mens prisons, leading to the rape and torture of at least one trans inmate.
  • Appealed a judge ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional and won on a technicality, resulting in continued executions.
  • Supports the controversial DNA search technique that can be used on people even if they’ve not been charged with a crime.
  • Supported the discriminatory practice of cash bail in court, until 2016.
  • Protected serial child rapists by refusing to prosecute in the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal.
  • Lied about her state’s solitary confinement to block a suit by inmates, claiming there was none in California when there were about 6,400 victims of the practice, which is considered torture.
  • Opposed legislation that would require independent investigation of fatal police shootings despite criticism from many civil rights advocates including California’s Legislative Black Caucus.
  • Opposed statewide implementation of police body cameras and ignored police brutality, multiple officers raping a teenager, and other officers sharing racist and homophobic messages, despite multiple requests from the public defender.
  • Stood by silently as $730 million was spent on moving inmates to for-profit private prisons.
• Fought to uphold wrongful convictions from her office, in one case, she witheld information about a police lab tech who was fabricating evidence (and a judge admonished her for it). She refused DNA testing to prove the innocence of a man on death row. Defended Johnny Baca’s conviction for murder even though judges found a prosecutor presented false testimony at the trial, to which she relented only after a video of the oral argument received national attention and embarrassed her office. She hid evidence of exculpaltory evidence of a man who was convicted solely by one witness (he is still serving a 70 year prison sentence). When evidence pointed towards a black defendant being framed by police, Harris avoided DNA testing to keep him on death row.
  • Used a technicality to stop the release of a man serving 27 years-to-life after being wrongfully convicted of possession of a knife under the three-strikes law she supported. When civil rights groups and nearly 100,000 petition signatures got him released after 14 years she took him back to court again for a crime he didn’t commit.
  • Protected several of her officers with records of misconduct, by refusing to provide their names to defense attorneys, so that their convictions would be upheld and people would stay in prison.
  • “Systematically violated defendants’ civil and constitutional rights” in crime lab scandal.
  • Kept her Orange County DA office from being charged for running an unconstitutional jailhouse informant program they tried to cover up.
  • Oversaw a state prosecutor falsifying a confession to get a life sentence and then destroyed the evidence, upheld a conviction secured by a prosecutor lying under oath, and oversaw the framing of another man. The officers were not fired, but the state was forced to pay out ~13M USD.
  • She fought against providing compensation to those her office wrongly convicted.
  • Sponsored a bill allowing for prosecutors to seize profits before charges are even filed and opposed a bill that would reform civil asset forfeiture.
  • Defended a prison’s religious discrimination in hiring policy
  • Refused to review a case in which a pharmaceutical CEO killed his wife but made it look like a suicide after their son died under mysterious circumstances as well.
  • Refused to prosecute PG&E for its massive gas pipeline explosion.
  • Claimed to be unaware of sexual harassment and retaliation by her top aide over a 6 year span.
  • Refused to investigate Herbalife’s exploitation and fraud, received donations from people connected to the corporation.
  • Refused to prosecute Trump's treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, despite his bank's illegal forelosure practices, which ruined thousands of lives. She also was the only democratic presidental candidate to get money from him.
• A favorite candidate of wall street. Helped raise money with a former wells fargo banker who defended the fake accounts scandal.
  • Backtracks on medicare for all, says she doesn't want to do away with private insurance.
  • Accepted thousands of dollars of campaign funds from Donald and Ivanka Trump multiple times.. Accepted money from Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO and a charter school magnate. 2
• Voted to give Trump increased military spending two different times.
  • Supports Trump escalating the war in Syria. Co-sponsored a "destabilize Iran" bill.2
  • Supports Israel’s right-wing government and cozies up to AIPAC, co-sponsored resolution against Obama in support of illegal settlements, does not support Palestinian rights, and calls BDS “anti-semitic”. Another Anti-Palestine rant at AIPAC, 2. Condemned pro-palestine protestors of Netanyahu's July 2024 visit to the US congress as "despicable, hateful, and anti-semitic"
  • Is against open borders, opposed calls to tear down 700 miles of border fence.
  • Fought to limit amount of land indigenous tribes could place in trust and tried to take reservation land away from a tribe just to keep them from evicting a non-indigenous man who had lived there without paying rent for 24 years.
• Mocks the activist call to “build more schools, less jails”. Mocks criminal justice reformers as unrealistic..
  • Says that Kaepernick's take-a-knee protest in support of black lives matter, was a russian op. Claims that "russian bots" are targeting her.
  • Laughs out loud when its suggested that she's a progressive.
• Voted two different times to block federal funding for abortions.
• Wants to use solar panels and green energy... to make war.
• Tells guatemalan immigrants: "don't come here"
• Appoints a communication director who was outraged that ICE didn't pick up two undocumented commentators on MSNBC.

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say Democrats were the most gullible 😐

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21423185

[important article - has information on far-right Zionist thugs in Canada and US]

Yoav Litvin is an Israeli-American doctor of psychology/neuroscience, a writer and photographer.

14 Oct 2024