politics

edited with link to : https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/15818 venezuelanalysis for less MSM perspective

Recent arrest of 33 men increases criticism of President Nicolas Maduro’s overtures to anti-LGBTQ religious groups.

It was an otherwise ordinary night at the Avalon Club, a bar and sauna popular with the LGBTQ community in Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city.

Music was playing, drinks were flowing and guests were enjoying the accommodations, which included a restaurant, smoking room and massage parlour.

But that evening, on July 23, police would burst into the club, propelling the venue and its patrons into the national spotlight — and sparking questions about LGBTQ discrimination in Venezuela.

Patrons would later recount how the police arrived shouting, “Hands up!”

“I was having a drink with some of my best friends,” one guest, Ivan Valera, later told local media. “I thought it was a joke.”

But the officers proceeded to round up the 33 men in the establishment and hold them in the sauna’s locker rooms.

Luis – who asked to be identified by his first name only, to protect his privacy – told Al Jazeera that the police said they were conducting a “routine inspection”.

“At that moment I was calm,” he said. “I simply thought that it was a normal police procedure.”

But then the officers took Luis and the other men to police headquarters in Los Guayos, a municipality adjacent to Valencia. The men were not told what crime they were being charged with, Luis said. On the contrary, they were told they were “witnesses”.

“That’s when I began to question what was happening,” Luis told Al Jazeera. “Because why are we going as witnesses? Witnesses to what?”

Only after he was forced to give up his mobile phone and have his picture taken did Luis realise he was under arrest.

“[The police] said I have the right to a phone call,” said Luis. “That’s when I started to feel disoriented, like, what’s happening? They didn’t even tell us we were arrested

Being gay is not a crime in Venezuela. But the men were eventually charged with “lewd conduct” and “sound pollution” among other counts. The police offered images of condoms and lubricant as evidence for the supposed crimes.

In addition, the men’s photos were leaked to local media, where they were accused of participating in an “orgy with HIV” and recording pornography. Some of the men, like Luis, had not previously gone public with their sexuality.

But the backlash to the mass arrest was swift. Protests broke out in Caracas and Valencia, with demonstrators calling for the men’s release. The hashtag #LiberanALos33, or “Free the 33”, also went viral on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.

Thirty of the men were ultimately released on “conditional parole” after 72 hours in custody. The other three — the owner of the Avalon Club and two massage specialists — were let go 10 days after their arrest.

The Public Ministry of Venezuela and the Valencia Police did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/10/mass-arrest-at-lgbtq-club-in-venezuela-prompts-outcry-over-discrimination

In the case of the 33 men from the Avalon Club, Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab has recommended the charges be dropped.

But the experience has shaken Luis’s hopes for the future of the LGBTQ community in Venezuela.

This is a moderate-ish effort post about the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's State of Food Insecurity report, which is showing some grim news for some regions, Africa in particular. The results in the graph are from the Food Insecurity Experience Scale, a simple questionnaire that asks the following questions:

During the last 12 months, was there a time when, because of lack of money or other resources:

1. You were worried you would not have enough food to eat?
2. You were unable to eat healthy and nutritious food?
3. You ate only a few kinds of foods?
4. You had to skip a meal?
5. You ate less than you thought you should?
6. Your household ran out of food?
7. You were hungry but did not eat?
8. You went without eating for a whole day?

There's some some obvious criticisms about how effective this questionnaire is at understanding food insecurity (especially in the nominally calorically sufficient west), the first being the somewhat subjective nature of the experience and the second being that it likely underestimates "hidden hunger" or having sufficient access to calories but not to adequate nutrition that can underlie conditions like being overweight or obese.

Based on the FAO's surveys Asia and Latin America appear to be trending back down from their pandemic spikes, but hunger in Africa has trended upward unabated. Likely issues include the continued importance of subsistence agriculture for nutrition among lower-income households, disruption of imports of grain and fertilizer due to the Ukraine-Russia conflict (most small farms in Africa are engaged in nutrient mining, meaning they take more nutrients off the soil from harvests than are replenished through fertilizers and natural processes), lack of postharvest storage (forcing producers to sell their crops when prices are low at harvest and then rebuying when prices are high during the off season), conflict (including farmer-herder conflict; climate change is shifting the areas where forage is available for pastoralists), continued high rainfall variability and its attendant consequences, and the continued fragmentation of small farms as land gets subdivided among more and more people. An increasing share of African small farms are no longer on land areas large enough to sustain an average household given current yields.

tl;dr and his ilk can shove it, things are getting worse for a lot of people, we have enough food but its production and distribution are highly uneven, fuck systems that allow people to starve in the midst of abundance.

"Damage mag" Jokerfied zine

Degrowth isn’t just political poison, it is also based on faulty economics

ctrl + f "science" NOT FOUND

In reaction to the rise of degrowth, a new generation of socialists has emerged to forcefully argue that “the politics of less is a bad strategy” if your goal is to win over workers.

a new generation of Democrats who have innovative new messaging strategies to convince ~~workers~~ voters that Hillary Clinton's Walmart CEO praxis is actually good for ~~workers~~ voters, and their small town deserves to be destroyed because its inefficient according to redditor spreadsheet analyses.

Matt Huber has written, “Degrowth... is overwhelmingly a movement of and for the professional class”

I don't disagree that greenwashed neoliberal NGOs are reactionary idpol and not Marxist, but Jacobin writers should avoid this argument

if we take degrowthers at their word, they are not just making a political argument, but an economic one

I'm just trying to understand how our modes of production will be altered by new innovations, which no socialist talks about because they don't really read contemporary science like Marx did: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=carbon+circular+economy&btnG=

By misdiagnosing growth as the culprit, instead of capital’s insatiable drive to accumulate profit, degrowthers fundamentally misunderstand both how and why capitalism produces both inequality and ecological destruction

Seems like a distinction without a difference but ok go off

Both the orthodox economists and the degrowth Left are guilty of mistaking effect for cause. Hickel does this when he says that “capitalism is fundamentally dependent on growth.” The actual production of stuff is certainly necessary for capitalism, but contra Hickel, that new stuff is only important or “socially necessary” (within capitalist markets) insofar as it successfully realizes a competitive profit. It is therefore the profit-mania that Marx described that drives growth under capitalism, not growth for its own sake. If capitalists cannot earn sufficient profits, they stop investing, and growth disappears.

abstract philosophy about 'do chickens or eggs come first?' is a very important argument to debate while the world burns!

But what must be explained is the fact that over the past few decades, many advanced capitalist countries have seen continued economic growth with a simultaneous and steady decline in CO2 emissions. This is something Hickel regards as “an illusion of accounting”—in other words, it isn’t real.

finance imperialism exporting their messy pollution industry to the periphery happens in those very same countries (the segregated black side of town is next to the factories, weird!) as well as in other nations. New Rule: You are only allowed to critique degrowth if you know where your trash goes when you throw it out lol

...the expansion of low-carbon energy such as nuclear has always been achieved by active and powerful states through the pressure of working-class political movements. This was true in Sweden, where the Social Democrats and the Trade Union Confederation led the charge directly; in France, by a state-owned enterprise with strong ties to French Communists; as well as in the United States, which managed a less ambitious transition through New Deal legacy public power authorities.

coincidentally I recently posted about this 2011 science: "Why nuclear power will never supply the world's energy needs”

news summary: https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.html

full PDF: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?” https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5/6021970/06021978.pdf

The degrowth cohort has reams of peer-reviewed papers claiming this to be true, and their entire worldview depends on clean energy taking too long to build.

But this is fundamentally a symptom of capitalist realism.

haha "i will not read those pages of science, instead I will quote that art critic Mark Fisher". DSA socialism beyond parody!

a recent study shows that even reducing energy demand needn’t actually translate into reduced material throughput demand

so what are you doing to build infrastructure to get people things? Degrowth is about literally getting people access to what they need, like we saw in 2020 how using China to build medical supplies is not a smart plan lol. Workers are demanding local production of insulin, what kind of low-energy structures are you building to achieve this?

Cale Brooks is a video editor and also a former influencer content creator.

"socialism isn't an out of touch gamerchair movement for arts school radlibs, I'm literally a communist" He's got some nice theory, but in reality Marxism is about application of theory for praxis. Like workers taking control over production to do what they believe is right for their local community, instead of whatever the Pete Buttigieg PMC class of Walmart consultant spreadsheet nerds who make claims about what is 'most efficient in the marketplace' :pete:

Michael Roberts on the Chinese economy: * But it’s not a turn to a consumer-led market economy that China needs to get the economy going again, but planned public investment into housing, technology and manufacturing.*

This is pretty despicable.

The move by the Biden administration protects nearly a million acres of Indigenous land from future uranium mining.

President Biden on Tuesday designated a new national monument on lands near the Grand Canyon, shielding the area from future uranium mining and protecting nearly a million acres of land sacred to more than a dozen tribes.

Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni, which translates to “where tribes roam” and “our footprints” in the Havasupai and Hopi languages, is the fifth national monument President Biden has designated during his time in office, and contains diverse ecology including federally protected species like California condors and a dozen plants found nowhere else on Earth. The region is also rich in uranium, where it has been mined since the 1950s when it was used primarily for developing nuclear weapons. Today, uranium from the Grand Canyon is used for nuclear energy plants and power reactors in submarines and naval ships.

“Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have traveled to the Grand Canyon, awed by its majesty. But few are aware of its full history,” said Biden. “From time immemorial, over a dozen tribal nations have lived, gathered, and prayed on these lands. But some one hundred years ago they were forced out. That very act of preserving the Grand Canyon as a national park was used to deny Indigenous people full access to their homelands.”

Indigenous nations and environmental groups have fought to protect the area from uranium mining since at least 1985, citing potential risks to sources of drinking water, including ongoing contamination of the sole source of water for the Havasupai reservation — one of the most isolated communities in the United States and reachable by an eight-mile hike from the rim of the Grand Canyon.

On Monday, Republican leaders in Arizona voted to formally oppose the monument’s designation, calling the move a federal land grab. More than 80 percent of land in Arizona is federally controlled, including 21 Indian reservations, and both state and local officials fear Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni will decrease the amount of land available for sale to private individuals.

“With global climate the way it is and with global politics the way it is, is it really the smartest thing to do — from a national security standpoint and an energy standpoint — to forever lock off the richest uranium mining deposits in the whole country,” said Travis Lingenfelter, Mohave County District 1 supervisor. The new monument will overlap with about 445,000 acres in Mohave County.

Representative Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican and chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, joined Lingenfelter in his opposition of the designation.

“This administration’s lack of reason knows no bounds, and their actions suggest that President Biden and his radical advisers won’t be satisfied until the entire federal estate is off limits and America is mired in dependency on our adversaries for our natural resources,” Westerman said in a statement, adding that Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni would leave the U.S. reliant on countries like Russia for uranium.

“I have a thousand-plus acres of private land included in this,” said Chris Heaton, a local landowner with claims to property that predate Arizona statehood in 1912. “This is a problem. They are coming after our private land and private water rights.”

According to the White House, the new monument will only include federal lands, and not state or private lands, and will not affect property rights.

In 2012, a 20-year ban on uranium mining was enacted by then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. However, the new designation will not have an impact on mining claims that predate that ban, and two operations within the monument’s boundaries, including one approved by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022, will continue to operate.

The designation of the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukven National Monument comes during President Biden’s three-state tour to discuss his environmental agenda and successes, which include $370 billion in tax incentives for wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources that he signed into law last year.

Iraq's official media regulator on Tuesday ordered all media and social media companies operating in the Arab state not to use the term "homosexuality" and instead to say "sexual deviance," a government spokesperson said and a document from the regulator shows.

The Iraqi Communications and Media Commission (CMC) document said that the use of the term "gender" was also banned. It prohibited all phone and internet companies licensed by it from using the terms in any of their mobile applications.

A government official later said that the decision still required final approval.

The regulator "directs media organisations ... not to use the term 'homosexuality' and to use the correct term 'sexual deviance'," the Arabic-language statement said.

A government spokesperson said a penalty for violating the rule had not yet been set but could include a fine.

Iraq does not explicitly criminalise gay sex but loosely defined morality clauses in its penal code have been used to target members of the LGBT community.

Major Iraqi parties have in the past two months stepped up criticism of LGBT rights, with rainbow flags frequently being burned in protests by Shi'ite Muslim factions opposed to recent Koran burnings in Sweden and Denmark.

More than 60 countries criminalise gay sex, while same-sex sexual acts are legal in more than 130 countries, according to Our World in Data.

There's going to be a November vote on abortion. The GOP wanted to jack up the ability to pass it to 60% of the vote.

In what is being celebrated as a victory for abortion rights advocates, Ohioans have decided to keep the minimum voter threshold of a bare majority for amending their constitution, rejecting an attempt to raise it to 60%.

[...]

Issue 1 may sound tedious, but the rare summer election had potential implications for a later vote, scheduled in November, which could establish a state-wide right to abortion.

"Settlers is a factually incorrect book, actually my friends aren't demonic wendigo vampires" www.ReadSettlers.org

Recently, however, the administration adopted a cruel new border restriction that goes beyond Trump, and really does make things worse in a way that is likely to kill innocent people. In this case, the main victims are not migrants, but Americans and others who need blood plasma to live.

Bookchin redditors: "Biden is CRUEL and RACIST for stopping our neo-apartheid undocumened slave caste from crossing the border (which shouldn't exist!!!) to sell their vital fluids to bloodless indoor kids like me. DSA Disability Caucus vampire lives matter, Amber is a fucking ableist!!! I need their blood! Need that blood..."

The new border restriction will predictably exacerbate the shortage, as well as deprive many poor Mexicans of a valuable source of income. Lind and Dodt point out a paternalistic rationale for the restriction. To my mind, Mexicans (and others) should be allowed to decide for themselves whether they want to take the health risks involved in becoming frequent plasma donors. For many, the extra money might well be worth it. By mitigating their poverty, it might even enable them to improve their overall health, in the long run.

PMC anarchists: "True Marxism is free association between free producers, we need to smash the Stalinist state like Ukrainians did to help the IMF transform their oppressive authoritarian economy so they can choose to be ~~exploited~~ set free by fascist privatization. It's liberation to become empowered with the agency to make the rational choice as an individual in the marketplace to go on vacation to visit Jeffrey Epstein's decolonized pagan temple as a ~~sex slave~~ sex worker. Biden is racist for his cruel paternalism in actually believing that black lives matter and taking action against Big Tobacco to stop their 'small consumer joy' genocide of menthols and other targeted advertised products. Smash the state for our free market utopia!!!"

the argument that paid plasma donation qualifies as "labor for hire" strikes me as highly dubious. It is far more akin to the sale of a commodity. If a Mexican on a B1/B2 visa sells a used car or a basket of fruit while in the United States, that surely doesn't qualify as "labor for hire." The same reasoning applies to selling blood plasma.

PMC = satanic holocaust demon class :brace-cowboy:

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University, and author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom and Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter.

"anarcho-neoliberalism isn't real" imagine being a woke radlib and thinking you're a rebel instead of someone who is so ideologically anti-worker that even a segregationist finance capitalist like Biden consistently attacks you from the left lmao. sTaY wOkE!!1

In Australia there has long been disquiet about the revolving door between high political office and big business.

A survey published two years ago by a major public health journal found two-thirds of people believe public officials — including politicians — should either be banned from lobbying altogether, or subject to a cooling-off period of as long as five years.

Last January, a report by the Human Rights Law Centre found former officials were more often granted meetings with government as well as a "sympathetic audience". The shift of bureaucrats and politicians into corporate roles was creating an "elite class of the politically powerful and the incredibly rich", while alienating the Parliament from "the values and interests of voters".

The research focused on tobacco, gambling and mining. But there's another area of public policy where the path from politics to the corporate world has been so well-trodden, for so long, it's worn to a shine: Australia's sprawling defence portfolio, where billions of dollars in contracts are showered on arms-peddlers every year.

War is big business. Look no further than Ukraine, an atrocity prompting cartwheels in the boardrooms of companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. Hundreds of thousands dead perhaps, but the world's top arms dealers outperformed the NASDAQ by an average of almost 24 per cent in the year following the Kremlin's invasion.

Of course, there are real-world justifications for piping public money into multinationals that manufacture weapons. They just don't make the business any less fraught. Now, the $400 billion AUKUS program has military contractors searching for angles, and to their aid has come a generation of revolving-door salesmen and lobbyists.

There is Joel Fitzgibbon, a former defence minister turned lobbyist for a firm whose clients include French weapons-maker Dassault, Spanish shipbuilder Navantia and arms company Raytheon. And Brendan Nelson, also a former defence minister, who is now a senior executive at aerospace company Boeing.

Joe Hockey, treasurer in the Abbott government, and Christopher Pyne, yet another former defence minister, also make fascinating case studies.

There's no suggestion any of these former cabinet ministers have broken the law or engaged in misconduct. But there is something discomforting about the concept of cabinet ministers in particular who switch from protecting the Commonwealth to protecting a balance sheet.

In 2018, Pyne's advisor, Adam Howard, established GC Advisory Pty Ltd one month after quitting the minister's office. In 2019, just weeks after Pyne farewelled the defence portfolio, Howard restructured the company and handed him half of it. I asked the pair whether Pyne paid anything for these shares, but both declined to answer, saying the transfer was "commercial in confidence".

Pyne had actually begun talks about a defence-related corporate role while still in cabinet, and soon after leaving government had to be reminded of his obligations under the government's code of conduct for lobbyists.

Pyne told me that at all times he has "complied with the requirements of the Ministerial Code of Conduct". It's likely he came to the attention of the Attorney-General's Department only by dint of his high profile because otherwise management of the government's code of conduct for lobbyists has been, to put it delicately, a farce.

The code stipulates cooling-off periods for senior officials, ministers and advisors — they must not lobby for a period of 12 to 18 months on behalf of companies with which they had dealings while in office.

But an audit in 2020 found the regulation of the code was often done by just two civil servants in the Attorney-General's Department who had the benefit of no system whatsoever for checking whether former officials were properly outing themselves as lobbyists. Indeed, a year earlier, the department failed to identify exactly how many lobbyists it had itself registered, overstating that number to the Parliament by 40 per cent.

The department had not been checking the end dates of government employees, had never conducted a "compliance risk assessment" and had "no method" to determine if lobbyists were abiding by the rules, or even declaring "whose interests they are representing". The department says it has now fixed these issues, and several months ago the audit office signed off on the reforms it has implemented.

What has not changed, however, is that enforcement of the rules does not go much beyond the seeking of solemn assurances that such rules won't be broken. The regulation of lobbyists, you will be unsurprised to read, was always designed to be "light touch".

Hockey's slipstream from ambassador to corporate adviser — as head of a US-Australian firm called Bondi Partners — was just as eye-watering.

Bondi Partners LLC was registered in DC on November 22, 2019. The paperwork records a "commencement date" of November 7, 2019.

The former US Ambassador's final day in the public service was not until January 31, the following year. Joe Hockey's DFAT-employed American advisor, Alex Tureman, filed the papers in DC while both men were still being paid by Australian taxpayers.

Later, when Bondi Partners' Australian entity was finally registered with Hockey its sole shareholder, he was still two days shy of handing back the keys to the embassy; indeed, his 100 shares were listed against 3120 Cleveland Avenue, Washington, the official residence of the Australian Ambassador.

Tureman told me that "as a sole proprietor" he registered Bondi Partners LLC, along with two other companies in 2019, "with no immediate intent to utilise them", and that the company which was eventually used, Bondi Partners International LLC, was not incorporated until March 26, 2020.

He said he abided at all times by the DFAT code of conduct and that he "did not conduct any business until I had concluded my employment with the Embassy".

A spokeswoman for Hockey said he was "not involved in any US business registrations prior to March 2020", and that he complies with "all relevant codes of conduct and legislation in Australia, the US and the UK".

DFAT has strict policies requiring the declaration of both "real" and "apparent" potential conflicts of interest; officials are required to seek permission for secondary employment and to acknowledge any potential conflicts of interest in an online form. As a head of mission, Mr Hockey had an additional obligation to provide an "annual written declaration".

Neither man answered questions about whether they filed declarations or sought permissions concerning their planned venture, and DFAT did not answer queries about the issue either.

It seems clear, though, that by at least the beginning of November 2019, the men had developed a plan to launch Bondi Partners, a US-Australia firm which now boasts of "navigating the critical intersection of policy, politics and the private sector", and that timing raises an obvious quandary.

During meetings that Hockey and Tureman held at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, how should taxpayers discern — beyond both mens' assurances — whose interests were being served? Those of the Commonwealth, which was paying their salaries, or those of their yet-to-be-announced private venture?

Hockey's spokeswoman assured me that "for the entirety of his diplomatic posting, [he] was 100 per cent dedicated to advancing Australia's national interest".

Since leaving the embassy, however, the former ambassador has not been shy about spruiking his "government … and political experience" to those willing to buy it.

And he has aimed his firm, in particular, at the sluice of defence spending coming down the pipeline, principally by recruiting military and security officials from both Australia and the US, including Donald Trump's pick for secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer. He even tapped the Australian defence attache with whom he worked at the DC embassy.

He and his wife, investment banker Melissa Babbage, have persuaded the Packer-backed Ellerston Capital to let them take a cut of any "national security" investments they can send its way. They've called this arrangement the 1941 Fund, and Ellerston's Ashok Jacob has said it's about getting aboard the "government-induced gale force tailwind" of national security spending.

One intriguing aspect of Joe Hockey's corporate transformation is his reluctance to work as a lobbyist. Unlike Pyne, his name is absent from the federal government's lobbyist register and he pitches himself, rather, as a provider of executive counsel.

(Bondi Partners does appear on the lobbyist register, but only as the owner of a lobby shop named Pacific Partners Strategic Advocacy — which the register says has not ever had a client.)

By contrast, the same register suggests Pyne, a famously gregarious personality, is minting it.

Among the many clients of his other firm Pyne & Partners are Saber Astronautics, Droneshield Limited and Electro Optic Systems, which flogs remote-controlled guns to the Persian Gulf. Even the UAE Embassy is a customer, which takes quite some getting your head around; a foreign diplomatic service pouring petrodollars into the wallet of a former Australian defence minister.

Some will say that our former hard-working ministers deserve the chance to enjoy an income after politics. It's just that, well, they already do. Both Hockey and Pyne enjoy taxpayer-funded pensions in excess of $200,000 — for life.

Keir Starmer interview in Time Magazine a couple months ago.

In another part, he says: “I’m conscious that we’ve got a lot to learn internationally as a Labour party so we study intensely the US and particularly the journey of Biden into office because the Democrats are our sister party.”

It probably won't go beyond just "asking questions" and "what if" discussions, but even so. From 2015 to 2023, just talking about class in any way was considered 'racist and sexist' in lib circles. I guess they want to shift their rhetoric closer to the left for the 2024 elections, but not proposing any policies that this rhetoric would logically imply. Look, you stupid leftists, we are talking the same way that Bernie did in 2016/2020, you should support Joe 2024!

Throughout his trip to New Hampshire, he appeared bent on demonstrating that no candidate talks tougher. He promised that, under his presidency, Mexican drug cartels would be “shot stone cold dead,” and vowed that when it comes to federal bureaucrats, “we are going to start slitting throats on Day One.”

The crowd that listened to DeSantis at the Rye event, a barbeque, hosted by former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, was heavily Republican. And, by and large, DeSantis’ message went down fine. But not everyone liked the word choice, particularly the bit about slitting throats.

“If I was in charge of his PR, I would have said, ‘Don’t use that terminology,’ ” said Norm Olsen, a GOP primary voter from Portsmouth who describes himself as a “Sununu Republican.”