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#coronavirus second wave
joseywritesng · 2 years
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Long COVID's grip is likely to tighten as infections continue
Long COVID’s grip is likely to tighten as infections continue
August 10, 2022 – COVID-19 is far from finished in the United States, with more than 111,000 new cases a day in the second week of August, according to Johns Hopkins University, and 625 deaths are reported every day. And as that toll mounts, experts worry about a second wave of illness from long-term COVID, a condition that has been around between 7.7 million and 23 million Americansaccording to…
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don-lichterman · 2 years
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'Not a single penny was...': Himanta Biswa Sarma threatens defamation case against Manish Sisodia over PPE kit allegations | India News
‘Not a single penny was…’: Himanta Biswa Sarma threatens defamation case against Manish Sisodia over PPE kit allegations | India News
New Delhi: Hours after Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Manish Sisodia alleged that Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma gave contracts to companies of his wife and son’s business partners to supply PPE kits at “exorbitant rates” in 2020, the BJP leader on Saturday (June 4, 2022) threatened to file a criminal defamation suit against him. While Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Sisodia said that two…
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sataniccapitalist · 3 months
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#thewaronyou
Another winter of death is now unfolding in the United States and across the Northern Hemisphere as the JN.1 variant of the coronavirus continues to surge globally. Wastewater data from the United States released Tuesday indicate that upwards of 2 million people are now being infected with COVID-19 each day, amid the second-biggest wave of mass infection since the pandemic began, eclipsed only by the initial wave of the Omicron variant during the winter of 2021-22.
There are now reports on social media of hospitals being slammed with COVID patients across the US, Canada and Europe. At a growing number of hospitals, waiting rooms are overflowing, emergency rooms and ICUs are at or near capacity, and ambulances are being turned away or forced to wait for hours to drop off their patients.
According to official figures, COVID-19 hospitalizations in Charlotte, North Carolina are now at their highest levels of the entire pandemic. In Toronto, Dr. Michael Howlett, president of the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians, told City News, “I’ve worked in emergency departments since 1987, and it’s by far the worst it’s ever been. It’s not even close.” He added, “We’ve got people dying in waiting rooms because we don’t have a place to put them. People being resuscitated on an ambulance stretcher or a floor.”
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Dr. Joseph Khabbaza, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at the Cleveland Clinic, told the Today Show website: “The current strain right now seems to be packing a meaner punch than the prior strains. Some features of the current circulating strain probably (make it) a little bit more virulent and pathogenic, making people sicker than prior (variants).”
Indeed, two recent studies indicate that JN.1 more efficiently infects cells in the lower lung, a trait that existed in pre-Omicron strains which were considered more deadly. One study from researchers in Germany and France noted that BA.2.86, the variant nicknamed “Pirola” from which JN.1 evolved, “has regained a trait characteristic of early SARS-CoV-2 lineages: robust lung cell entry. The variant might constitute an elevated health threat as compared to previous Omicron sublineages.”https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1MGIQxPf0Ig?rel=0An appeal from David North: Donate to the WSWS todayWatch the video message from WSWS International Editorial Board Chairman David North.DONATE TODAY
The toll on human life from the ongoing wave of mass infection is enormous. It is estimated that one-third of the American population, or over 100 million human beings, will contract COVID-19 during just the current wave. This will likely result in tens of thousands of deaths, many of which will not be properly logged due to the dismantling of COVID-19 testing and data reporting systems in the US. When The Economist last updated its tracker of excess deaths on November 18—before the JN.1 wave began—the cumulative death toll stood at 27.4 million, and nearly 5,000 people were continuing to die each day worldwide.
The current wave will also induce further mass suffering from Long COVID, which has been well known since 2020 to cause a multitude of lingering and often debilitating effects. Just last week, a pre-print study was published in Nature Portfolio showing that COVID-19 infection can cause brain damage akin to aging 20 years. The consequences are mental deficits that induce depression, reduced ability to handle intense emotions, lowered attention span, and impaired ability to retain information.
Other research indicates that the virus can attack the heart, the immune system, digestion and essentially every other critical bodily function. The initial symptoms of COVID-19 might resemble those of the flu, but the reality is that the virus can affect nearly every organ in the body and can do so for years after the initial infection. While vaccination slightly reduces the risks of Long COVID, the full impact of the virus will be felt for generations.
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The latest winter wave of infections and hospitalizations takes place just eight months after the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Biden administration ended their COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) declarations without any scientific justification. This initiated the wholesale scrapping of all official response to the pandemic, giving the virus free rein to infect the entire global population ad infinitum.
A virtual blackout of any mention of the coronavirus in the corporate media accompanied the swan song of official reporting. From then on, if illnesses at hospitals or among public figures were referenced at all, it was always with the euphemism “respiratory illness.” The words COVID, coronavirus and pandemic have been all but blacklisted, and the facts about the dangers of the disease have been actively suppressed.
Summarizing the cumulative results of this global assault on public health, the WSWS International Editorial Board wrote in its New Year 2024 statement:
All facts and data surrounding the present state of the pandemic are concealed from the global population, which has instead been subjected to unending lies, gaslighting and propaganda, now shrouded in a veil of silence. There is a systematic cover-up of the real gravity of the crisis, enforced by the government, the corporations, the media and the trade union bureaucracies. Official policy has devolved into simply ignoring, denying and falsifying the reality of the pandemic, no matter what the consequences, as millions are sickened and thousands die globally every day.
In response to the latest wastewater data, there have only been a handful of news articles, most of which have sought to downplay the severity of the current wave and largely ignored the deepening crisis in hospitals.
The official blackout has given rise to an extraordinary contradiction in social life. The reality of mass infection means that everyone knows a friend, neighbor, family member or coworker who is currently or was recently sick, or even hospitalized or killed, by COVID-19. Yet the unrelenting pressure to dismiss the danger of the pandemic means that shopping centers, supermarkets, workplaces and even doctor’s offices and hospitals are full of people not taking the basic and simple precaution of masking to protect themselves. Every visit outside one’s home carries the risk of being infected, with unknown long-term consequences.
As the pandemic enters its fifth year, it is critical to draw the lessons of this world historical experience. The past four years have demonstrated unequivocally that capitalist governments are both unwilling and incapable of fighting this disease. Their primary concern has always been to ensure the unabated accumulation of profits by corporations, no matter the cost in human lives and health.
The real solution to the coronavirus is not to ignore it, but to develop a campaign of elimination and eradication of the virus worldwide. To do so requires the implementation of mask mandates, mass testing and contact tracing, as well as the installation of updated ventilation systems and the safe deployment of Far-UVC technology to halt the spread of the virus. The resources for this global public health program must be expropriated from the banks and financial institutions, which are responsible for the mass suffering wrought by the pandemic.
All of these measures cut directly across the profit motive and the real disease of society: capitalism. As such, the struggle against the coronavirus is not primarily medical or scientific, but political and social. The international working class must be educated on the real dangers of the pandemic and mobilized to simultaneously stop the spread of the disease and put an end to the underlying social order that propagates mass death. This must be developed as a revolutionary struggle to establish world socialism.
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beardedmrbean · 23 days
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Even liberal San Francisco voters are getting tough on crime and public disorder.
Residents of the City by the Bay approved ballot measures Tuesday to set minimum police staffing levels, allow officers to chase suspects under reasonable suspicion they have committed or will commit a felony or nonviolent misdemeanor — with the help of drones — and set up public safety cameras that could use facial recognition technology to apprehend perps.
Another proposition that passed requires anyone who receives employment assistance, housing, shelter, utilities or food from city coffers to submit to drug screenings — and denies them those benefits unless they enter a treatment program.
The San Francisco Police Department had prohibited officers from pursuing nonviolent offenders unless there was an imminent risk to public safety.
Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, backed the ballot measures as she eyes re-election to a second full term in November — while facing challenges from Daniel Lurie, a nonprofit executive, and current and former city officials including ex-interim mayor Mark Farrell.
“We want San Francisco to be exactly what the people who live here want to see,” Breed said at a cocktail bar surrounded by supporters as the results rolled in Tuesday night, according to Politico. “And that is a safe, affordable place to call home.”
Voters also overwhelmingly approved tighter ethics rules for city employees regarding the receipt of gifts and mandating the teaching of Algebra I in schools by eighth grade.
Ballot measures allow voters to directly change laws during elections without the help of their elected officials.
Following a spate of state and local changes to crime policies in recent, San Francisco has been dogged by retail crime sprees, burglaries, rampant open-air drug use and public defecation.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, during a high-profile TV debate this past November against former San Francisco Mayor and current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, pointed to the city’s downfall as proof of failed liberal policies.
Dozens of big-name businesses have departed the city’s formerly bustling downtown area since 2020, the year after Breed was elected. Drug overdose deaths also hit a record high last year, with 806 recorded.
The descent into lawlessness was turbocharged by the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread rioting following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in summer 2020, as San Francisco and other cities embraced calls to defund law enforcement.
Breed supported a $120 million cut from the city’s police budget in 2020 — but reversed course the following year and pleaded with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to restore funding.
“I’m proud this city believes in giving people second chances,” she said in December 2021. “Nevertheless, we also need there to be accountability when someone does break the law … Our compassion cannot be mistaken for weakness or indifference … I was raised by my grandmother to believe in ‘tough love,’ in keeping your house in order, and we need that, now more than ever.”
The pivot to the center came just in time, as disgruntled San Francisco voters went on the following year to recall District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a progressive prosecutor and former public defender.
Before that, parents had ousted three members of the city’s school board for pushing a progressive political agenda and keeping classrooms closed during the coronavirus pandemic.
A former city supervisor, Breed was elected mayor in 2018 to finish out the term of the late Ed Lee, who died in office. She was later elected to a five-year term in November 2019.
She is still working to regain the trust of law enforcement officials, however, with the San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs’ Association saying in November that her “commitment to dismantling the criminal justice system has remained a focal point.”
Breed is battling a high disapproval rating, with 71% of likely general election voters taking exception to her job performance, according to a San Francisco Chronicle poll last month.
The city’s ranked-choice voting system could also throw a wrench into Breed’s re-election bid if she does not receive at least 50% support in the initial round, as second- and third-place candidates often receive more votes than those at the top of the ticket.
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berniesrevolution · 1 year
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CATALYST JOURNAL
While the uptick in strike activity in 2021 is heartening, its influence should not be exaggerated. The number and extent of job actions was noticeable but still very small by historical standards, and union density continued to decline. A significant labor upsurge might be in the works, but it is not in evidence yet.
In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Pope Francis spoke movingly of the workers keeping the world turning in dark times:
People who do not appear in newspaper and magazine headlines or on the latest television show, yet in these very days are surely shaping the decisive events of our history. Doctors, nurses, storekeepers and supermarket workers, cleaning personnel, caregivers, transport workers, men and women working to provide essential services and public safety, volunteers, priests, men and women religious, and so very many others. They understood that no one is saved alone.1
These workers have done everything we’ve asked of them and more. They have been through hell, particularly those who have risked their health and well-being to care for the sick, educate the young, feed the hungry, and deliver the things the rest of us need to get through this period of grinding uncertainty. Employers, politicians, and talking heads have lauded them as essential workers, but the stark gap between the praise and the grim realities of working life in the United States — which was already miserable for millions before the pandemic — have pushed many to the breaking point. Indeed, record numbers of American workers have quit their jobs in what the media has dubbed the Great Resignation. According to the US Labor Department, 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs in November 2021. The number of monthly quits has exceeded three million since August 2020, and the trend shows no sign of slowing down.2 Job switchers span the employment ladder, but turnover has been largely concentrated in the low-wage service sector, where workers are taking advantage of the very tight labor market to get a better deal for themselves. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, workers with high school diplomas are currently enjoying a faster rate of wage growth than workers with bachelor’s degrees, a remarkable situation that has not occurred in decades.3
Worker discontent is not only finding expression in the form of quitting and job switching. In 2021, we witnessed a modest increase in the frequency and visibility of collective action in the workplace. Tens of thousands of workers, union and nonunion alike, challenged employers through protests and strikes across sectors and in many different geographical regions. Workers in health care and social assistance, education, and transportation and warehousing led the way, but they were joined by workers in hotels and food services, manufacturing, and other industries. Protests and strikes tended to be concentrated in states where labor is relatively stronger, namely California, New York, and Illinois, but some states with low union density, like North Carolina, saw an uptick in labor action, too. Pay increases were easily the most common demand, but health and safety, staffing, and COVID-19 protocols were high on the agenda as well.
The year 2021 was less a strike wave than a strike ripple, and it has not yet resulted in any appreciable increase in unionization. A few trends stand out. The first is that labor protest and strike action were heavily concentrated among unionized groups of workers. Unionized groups of workers accounted for nearly 95% of all estimated participants in labor protests and more than 98% of all estimated participants in strikes. The second is that protests and strikes were concentrated by industry — namely health care and education, which together accounted for roughly 60% of all labor actions. Finally, protests and strikes were heavily concentrated geographically. Just three states with relatively high levels of union density — California, New York, and Illinois — accounted for more than half the total estimated participants in protests and strikes. In short, collective workplace action is by and large taking place where organized labor still retains residual sources of strength. In this context, spreading protest and strike action beyond its current industrial and regional confines depends on unionization in new places.
Conditions conducive to labor action — rising inflation, pandemic-related pressures, and a tight labor market — are likely to persist into 2022, and the Biden administration’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been meaningfully supportive of worker organizing. US labor is probably not on the verge of a historic breakthrough, but in this context, workers may have an opportunity to make modest material and organizational gains.
Making new organizational gains is critical to the fortunes of the labor movement and the reviving US left. The vast majority of the workers involved in strikes and labor protests last year were already members of unions, not unorganized workers looking to unionize. This is why it is so concerning that last year’s uptick in labor action occurred amid a further decline in union density in 2021. The overall rate of union membership stands at 10.3% of the total labor force, while the total number of union members, just over fourteen million in 2021, continues its long decline.4 While some have argued that treating union density as the key measure of labor’s strength is a mistake, it seems clear that, at least in the US context, where union density and union coverage almost entirely overlap, it does provide an effective measurement of working-class power.5
Boosting the level of union density should therefore be among the leading priorities of progressives and socialists in the United States. As the power resources school of welfare state scholars has long argued, the relative strength of the labor movement and its affiliated political parties has been the single most important factor shaping welfare state development over time and across countries. Here in the United States, where we have never had a nationwide social democratic party aligned with a strong labor movement, the weakness of working-class organization is clearly reflected in the fragmentation and stinginess of our welfare state. The state-level wave of attacks on organized labor that began in 2010 have made it that much harder for unions to defend working-class interests and reduce inequality. But the fact that they were able to meaningfully mitigate the growth of inequality, even during the period of neoliberal retrenchment, shows that rebuilding the labor movement needs to be a chief priority of any progressive political agenda.6 The Biden administration’s pro-union stance suggests it understands this. But if it’s unable to act decisively to boost union membership, all the pro-union rhetoric it can muster will ultimately amount to little.
TRACKING LABOR ACTION
Researchers at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) began documenting strikes and labor protests in late 2020. Their ILR Labor Action Tracker provides a database of workplace conflict across the United States, based on information collected from government sources, news reports, organizational press releases, and social media. It counts both strikes and labor protests as “events” but distinguishes between the two. The major distinction between strikes and labor protests, according to this methodology, is whether the workers involved in the event stopped work. If they did, the event is defined as a strike; if they did not, it is defined as a labor protest. The Labor Action Tracker also collects data on a number of additional variables, including employer, labor organization (if applicable), local labor organization (if applicable), industry, approximate number of participants, worker demands, and more.7
ACTION TYPES
In 2021, there were 786 events with 257,086 estimated participants.8 Over 60% of the events were labor protests, while less than 40% were strikes (there was one recorded lockout). Roughly one-third of the estimated number of workers participated in labor protests, while roughly two-thirds participated in strikes. Further, the average number of estimated workers per labor protest (188) was significantly smaller than the average number of estimated workers per strike (553, see Table 1 for details).
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DURATION
Neither labor protests nor strikes tended to last very long, which tracks with the generally sharp decline in strike duration in recent decades.9 Labor protests in particular were very short affairs. Of the labor protests with a start and end date, 96% lasted for just one day or less. Strikes also tended to have a short duration, but they typically did not end as quickly as protests. Of the strikes with a start and end date, one-third lasted for one day or less. Roughly two-thirds of strikes (68%) ended within a week, and over 90% ended within thirty days. One strike stands out for its unusually long duration: a 701-day strike by United Auto Workers (UAW) members against a metallurgical company in Pennsylvania, which began in September 2019 and ended in August 2021.
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INDUSTRIES
An informed observer will not be surprised by which industries saw the largest number of labor action events (Table 2). The leading two industries by far were health care and social assistance and education, which are both highly unionized and have been subjected to enormous pressures during the pandemic. Together, they accounted for nearly 40% of the total labor protests and strikes. These industries also comprised over 60% of the overall number of estimated labor action participants — health care with 41.5% of the estimated participants, education with 18.8%. The overrepresentation of health care and education workers becomes even starker when we compare this to their employment shares in the overall labor force. In 2020, these two industries accounted for 16.3% of total nonfarm employment — health care with a 13.8% share and education with 2.3%.10 Put another way, the share of health care workers in 2021 labor actions was roughly three times larger than their share in the nonfarm labor force, while the share of education workers was more than eight times as large.
These two pace-setting industries were followed by a second tier of industries including transportation and warehousing, accommodation and food services, and manufacturing. It is not surprising to see these listed among the most turbulent industries, as they contain a mix of highly unionized employers and nonunion employers that have become a major focus of labor organizing activity, namely Amazon — the most frequently targeted employer, with twelve total labor actions — which was the target of twice as many labor actions as McDonald’s, the second-most targeted employer.
The industrial distribution of labor protests generally follows the overall distribution of labor action, with the notable exception of manufacturing, which saw far more strikes than protests. While the health care industry did not experience the largest number of strikes, it accounts for more than half of estimated strike participants (53%). Workers in education (12.4%) and manufacturing (16%) also accounted for outsize shares of the estimated number of participants.
(Continue Reading)
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mariacallous · 5 months
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An official investigation into a pandemic would seem an unlikely source of sordid entertainment. But such is the nature of contemporary politics in Britain that the inquiry into its official response to COVID-19 has been reduced to just that.
Over the past few weeks, in an office building near Paddington Station in west London, some of the United Kingdom’s most distinguished lawyers have questioned those at the heart of the British state about their response to the pandemic. The inquiry is set to reach its peak in a few weeks’ time, when investigators question former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other key ministers, including current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who was then the chancellor (finance minister), and Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, whose reputation has been little enhanced by his decision to quit politics after a very public extramarital affair and instead become a reality TV star.
Already, the inquiry has shone a light on the bombast and buffoonery in Downing Street, led by and personified in the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson. Most of the coverage so far has been focused on the questions of who said what to whom. And it has been colorful—women denigrated with sexist slurs, other civil servants dismissed with elaborate insults, multiple hatreds laid bare— with most of the vulgarity emanating from the testimony of Dominic Cummings, a self-styled Rasputin figure who had been at Johnson’s right hand until they spectacularly fell out and became archenemies.
While the palace intrigues have caught the media’s attention, the more important failures—the gradual erosion of the publicly funded National Health Service (one of very few state institutions in Britain that remain overwhelmingly popular) and the wider weaknesses of state structures—have yet to receive a proper airing. (That time may yet come. The inquiry has been split into five so-called modules, and it is only midway into the second.)
The state’s dysfunction, however, needs to be seen in a wider context. At the onset of the pandemic, Britain was mired in self-delusion. Years of austerity had drained public services of the ability to do anything more than muddle through, with no slack in the system in case anything went wrong. A sense of entitlement among a small group of Conservative Party politicians, all educated at elite schools, had reinforced a foppish self-belief rather than self-awareness. And decades of denial about the U.K.’s real place in the world had infused, in politicians of all parties, a view that Britannia did still rule the waves.
How else to account for Johnson’s approach to the pandemic, painfully laid bare by several of his former advisors? In devastatingly deadpan evidence, the deputy head of the civil service, Helen MacNamara, said she struggled to think of a single day when Downing Street adhered to the emergency rules it had set, which many citizens were prosecuted for failing to follow.
She described how in the crucial period leading up to the first lockdown, Johnson declared that the United Kingdom’s “world-beating” systems would cope better than all others. For 12 crucial days, people were allowed to go about their daily lives unaffected, even after the World Health Organization declared on March 11, 2020, that the coronavirus outbreak was a pandemic.
The disease, Johnson blithely told colleagues, would be no worse than swine flu. He and his officials had no interest in learning from others, such as from countries that had coped with the SARS virus. MacNamara revealed how ministers fell about laughing when they were told about European states shutting down, mocking the Italians for rushing to do so.
This sense of go-it-alone braggadocio, very much a Johnson hallmark, had seemingly been turned into a governing principle since the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.
As early as March 13, MacNamara marched into the prime minister’s office to tell him that the National Health Service would be overwhelmed. “I think we are absolutely fucked. I think this country is heading for a disaster. I think we are going to kill thousands of people.” Johnson finally declared a lockdown on March 23. By then it was already very late, and many lives were lost that otherwise might have been saved.
That was just the start. Texts and WhatsApp messages have also provided a treasure trove of material attesting to the government’s inability to cope. The head of the civil service, Simon Case, wrote to a colleague he had “never seen a bunch of people less well-equipped to run a country.” He described the atmosphere inside Downing Street as “mad” and “poisonous.”
Throughout the two-year pandemic, Johnson would repeatedly get the science wrong, veering between desperation and complacency. One of his officials’ diary entries noted that he had expressed the belief that the coronavirus was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people.”
Nor were government structures properly equipped. The head of the health service admitted that there was a “disconnect” between government and the realities on the ground. Very few senior civil servants had any science background.
Other faults cited by experts in the inquiry and outside it have been overcentralization in the health service and a failure to consult regional authorities across broader policymaking, and a lack of understanding of demographics. Differential impacts on poorer people or ethnic communities were accepted as inevitable. Epidemiological data was inconsistent and disorganized. There were not enough hospital beds or dedicated wards. Supplies of personal protective equipment for health workers were in shambles, as was testing, and tracing was a nonstarter. Borders were not closed for many weeks. Throughout the crisis, informal procurement policies bordered on the corrupt, with several companies linked to friends of ministers receiving large contracts and sometimes producing equipment that failed to work.
In short, contingency plans for governing in an all-consuming crisis of the kind that arrived with COVID-19 did not exist. But this was not only a matter of Johnson’s administrative incompetence. The British political system has for centuries been based on the so-called good chap theory of decent people playing by informal rules and doing their best. Regulations and structures are habitually dismissed, usually by the political right, as stiflingly un-British. At the apex of power, the relationship between the prime minister, his or her cabinet, and senior officials is blurred and subject to interpretation by each set of incumbents. Civil servants have a duty to political impartiality and to not making public statements, leaving them invariably to being blamed for government mistakes. Although these pressure points have always existed, morale is said now to be at an all-time low.
The watchword now is resilience, and it is at the heart of preparations that the opposition Labour Party, which has a consistently large lead in opinion polls, is making for government after a general election that is most likely to take place between May and October in 2024. The task is considerable. Politics based in precedence and making it up as you go along may have worked in the past (although as ever in Britain, the country’s performance is seen through rose-tinted spectacles), but there’s little reason to think they will be adequate to present and future transnational crises—from climate to migration to natural resources to another pandemic.
What is required is a thorough reconstruction of the United Kingdom’s governance. One of the key figures in any future Labour government is a top civil servant who shortly after delivering her report Johnson’s “party-gate” scandals announced that she was moving to be chief of staff to the likely next prime minister, Keir Starmer. Her main task, which she has already begun planning, is an overhaul of structures, rights, and responsibilities of government departments. This is expected to be wide-ranging.
It has been necessary and, indeed, instructive—and possibly entertaining—for the COVID-19 inquiry to delve into the miscreance of Johnson and his cabal. But it has so far been insufficient in terms of addressing deep-rooted systemic failings.
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theculturedmarxist · 9 months
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In 2022 and early 2023, a highly publicized petition campaign sought to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. Louisiana law sets high hurdles for recall initiatives; in a jurisdiction the size of New Orleans, triggering the process requires valid signatures from twenty percent of registered voters on a petition requesting a recall election, and the effort ultimately failed. Nevertheless, the campaign is worth reflecting on for three reasons.
First, it at least bears a strong family resemblance to right-wing Republican attacks on Democrat-governed cities that recently have escalated from inflammatory rhetoric to concerted attempts to disempower, by extraordinary means, jurisdictions Democrats represent. To that extent, the Cantrell recall campaign is of a piece with the many Republican efforts at voter suppression around the country and the right’s broader and more openly authoritarian assault on democratic institutions at every level of government about which Thomas Byrne Edsall sounded the alarm in the New York Times.1 Second, the NOLATOYA campaign illustrates how race can function as a condensation symbol, a shorthand, diffuse, even tacit component of a discourse of political mobilization while not necessarily defining the mobilization’s policy objectives. Third, the character of the campaign, especially in light of the larger tendency of which it may be an instance, and the opposition’s responses also demonstrate the inadequacy of race-reductionist understandings even of the racialist element that helped drive it and the other reactionary initiatives, such as the Mississippi legislature’s move to undercut the authority of Jackson’s elected government.
The recall’s sponsors sought to stoke and take advantage of anxieties about street crime—most conspicuously the waves of porch piracy, carjackings, and homicides that spiked in New Orleans as in many cities during and after the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown—as well as the prodigiously bad, borderline dangerous condition of municipal roads and streets, a seemingly inexplicable and chronically unresolved breakdown of the city’s privatized sanitation pick-up operation, and the at best inconsistent quality of other public services.2 The campaign also played on hoary, racially inflected tropes such as generic allegations of incompetence and evocations of charges of immoral and “uppity” behavior, for example, in attacks on Cantrell for allegedly having an affair with a police officer on her detail, living at least part-time in a municipally owned luxury apartment on Jackson Square in the heart of the Vieux Carré, and flying first class at the city’s expense on international trade junkets.3 Recall supporters eventually leveled inflammatory allegations of incompetence, hostility to law enforcement, or corruption against the black, recently elected Orleans Parish District Attorney and unspecified judges and suggested that subsequent recall initiatives should target them as well.
The campaign’s titular co-chairs were black: one, Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, was a perennial candidate for electoral office who received five percent of the vote in the 2021 mayoral primary that Cantrell won with nearly sixty-five percent; the other, Eileen Carter, is a freelance “strategy consultant” who had been a first-term Cantrell administration appointee.4 Its sources of financial backing remained shadowy for months, but disclosures eventually confirmed that more than ninety percent of the campaign’s funding came from a single white developer and hospitality industry operative, Richard Farrell, who, in addition to having contributed to Cantrell in the past, had been one of Louisiana’s largest donors to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.5 Opponents of the recall argued that the fact that the initiative was funded almost entirely by a Trump mega-donor and its organizers’ attempt to purge the voter rolls in order to reduce the total number of signatures needed to force a new election6 indicated a more insidious objective, that the campaign was a ploy to advance the Republicans’ broader agenda of suppressing black voting and to discredit black officials.7
After much hype, the campaign failed abysmally. Certification of the petitions confirmed both that organizers had fallen far short of the minimum signature threshold required to spur a recall election and that support was sharply skewed racially. The latter was no surprise.8 The campaign originated in one of the wealthiest, whitest, and most Republican-leaning neighborhoods in the city. And, as I have indicated, proponents’ rhetoric—notwithstanding their insistence that the initiative had broad support across the city—traded in racialized imagery of feral criminality, and it too easily veered toward hyperbolic denunciation of the mayor’s purported moral degeneracy and an animus that seemed far out of proportion to her actual or alleged transgressions, which in any event hardly seemed to warrant the extraordinary effort of a recall, especially because Cantrell was term-limited and ineligible to pursue re-election in 2025. The extent to which recall advocates’ demonization of her drifted over into attacks on other black public officials also suggested a racial dimension to the campaign that no doubt made many black voters wary.
A racial explanation of the recall initiative offers benefits of familiarity. It fits into well-worn grooves of racial interest-group politics on both sides. It permits committed supporters of the recall to dismiss their effort’s failure as the result of blacks’ irresponsible racial-group defensiveness to the point of fraudulence and conspiracy, and it enables opponents to dismiss grievances against Cantrell’s mayoralty by attributing them to an effectively primordial white racism linked via historical allegory to the Jim Crow era.9 So, when journalists Jeff Adelson and Matt Sledge estimated that, although fifty-four percent of registered voters in Orleans Parish are black and thirty-six percent are white, seventy-six percent of the petition’s signers were white and just over fifteen percent were black, the finding was easily assimilable to a conventional “blacks say tomayto/whites say tomahto” racial narrative. The authors’ punchy inference that “White voters were more than seven times more likely to have signed the petition than a Black voter” reinforces that view.
By Adelson and Sledge’s calculation, more than 23,000 white voters signed the recall petition compared with roughly 7,000 blacks. At first blush, that stark difference seems to support a racial interpretation of the initiative. Yet that calculation also means that more than 57,000 white voters, for whatever reasons, did not sign it. That is, roughly two and a half times more white Orleans Parish voters did not sign the recall petition than did. One might wonder, therefore, why we should see support for the recall as the “white” position. Signers clustered disproportionately in the most affluent areas citywide, and those least likely to sign were concentrated in the city’s poorest areas. As Adelson and Sledge also note, there are many reasons one might not have signed the petition. Those could have ranged from explicit opposition to the initiative; skepticism about its motives, likelihood of success, or its impact if successful; absence of sufficient concern with the issue to seek to sign on; or other reasons entirely. That range would apply to the seventy percent of white voters who did not sign as well as the nearly ninety-five percent of black voters who did not. From that perspective, “race” is in this instance less an explanation than an alternative to one.
Organizers and supporters of the recall no doubt also had various motives and objectives, and those may have evolved with the campaign itself. Batiste and Carter are political opportunists and, as a badly defeated opponent and a former staffer, may harbor idiosyncratic personal grievances against Cantrell; they also cannot be reduced merely to race traitors or dupes not least because roughly 7,000 more black voters signed onto the recall petition. Farrell and the handful of other Republican large donors who sustained the initiative likely had varying long- and short-game objectives, from weakening Cantrell’s mayoralty to payback for the city’s aggressive pandemic response, which met with disgruntlement and opposition from hospitality industry operators, to fomenting demoralization and antagonism toward municipal government or government in general, to enhancing individual and organizational leverage in mundane partisan politics, including simply reinforcing the knee-jerk partisan divide. And, even if not in the minds of initiators all along, voter suppression in Orleans Parish may have become an unanticipated benefit along the way.
Other enthusiasts no doubt acted from a mélange of motives. Demands for “accountability” and “transparency,” neoliberal shibboleths that only seem to convey specific meanings, stood in for causal arguments tying conditions in the city that have generated frustration, anxiety, or fear to claims about Cantrell’s character. Those Orwellian catchwords of a larger program of de-democratization10 overlap the often allusively racialized discourse in which Cantrell, black officialdom, unresponsive, purportedly inept and corrupt government, uncontrolled criminality, and intensifying insecurity and social breakdown all signify one another as a singular, though amorphous, target of resentment. The recall campaign condensed frustrations and anxieties into a politics of scapegoating that fixates all those vague or inchoate concerns onto a malevolent, alien entity that exists to thwart or destroy an equally vague and fluid “us.” And that entity is partly racialized because race is a discourse of scapegoating.
But race is not the only basis for scapegoating. As I indicate elsewhere, “the MAGA fantasy of ‘the pedophile Democratic elite’ today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the ‘Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker’ and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.”11 The scapegoat is an evanescent presence, created through moral panic and just-so stories and projected onto targeted individuals or populations posited as the embodied cause of the conditions generating fear and anxiety. As an instrument of political action, scapegoating’s objective is to fashion a large popular constituency defined by perceived threat from and opposition to a demonized other, a constituency that then can be mobilized against policies and political agendas activists identify with the evil other and its nefarious designs—without having to address those policies and agendas on their merits.
A Facebook post a colleague shared from a relative long since lost to the QAnon/MAGA world exemplifies the chain of associations undergirding that strain of conspiratorial thinking and its scapegoating politics: “It’s time for Americans to stop hiding behind the democracy dupe that has been used as an opiate to extort American wages to wage war against any country that said no to Rothschild’s money changing loanshark wannabe satan’s cult.” My colleague underscored that the antisemitism apparent in that post was a late-life graft onto the relative’s political views; neither Jews nor Jewishness had any presence in the circumstances of their upbringing, neither within their family nor the broader demographic environment. Antisemitism, that is, can function, at least for a time, as an item on a checklist that signals belonging in the elect of combatants against the malevolent grand conspiracy as much as or more than it expresses a committed bigotry against Jews or Judaism.
It is understandable that the partly racialized recall campaign would provoke a least-common-denominator objection that it was a ploy to attack black, or black female, political leadership. It no doubt was, at least as an easy first pass at low-hanging fruit in mobilizing support. However, complaint that the recall effort was racially motivated missed the point—or took the bait. Scapegoating is fundamentally about misdirection, like a pickpocket’s dodge. A politics based on scapegoating is especially attractive to proponents of anti-popular, inegalitarian agendas who might otherwise be unable to elicit broad support for programs and initiatives that are anti-democratic or facilitate regressive redistribution.12 And the forces driving the Cantrell recall campaign fit that profile.
That it was backed by significant right-wing donors yet failed so badly raises a possibility that the recall campaign may never have been serious as an attempt to remove Cantrell from office.13 If their prattle about accountability, transparency, and responsibility to taxpayers were genuine, organizers should have admitted the failure and not bothered to submit their petitions and thereby avoided the administrative burdens of the certification process—unless forcing that extraordinary undertaking were part of a Potemkin effort to simulate a serious recall campaign. Instead, well after it should have recognized and acknowledged failure, the campaign organization attempted to keep recall chatter in the news cycle by means of coyness and dissimulation regarding the status of their effort and continued to manufacture supposed Cantrell outrages, no matter how dubious or picayune, to feed the fires of salacious exposé of the “you won’t believe what she’s doing now!” variety. When authorities confirmed the magnitude of the failure, including evidence of thousands of obviously bogus signatures nonetheless submitted, organizers fell back on the standard MAGA-era canard in the face of defeat—challenging the credibility of the officials designated by law to determine the signatures’ validity. Notwithstanding the complex motives and expectations of individual supporters, all this further suggests that the recall initiative at one level was suspiciously consistent with the multifarious assaults on democratic government that right-wing militants have been pursuing concertedly around the country since at least 2020.
That larger, more insidious effort and its objectives—which boil down to elimination of avenues for expression of popular democratic oversight in service to consolidation of unmediated capitalist class power14—constitute the gravest danger that confronts us. And centering on the racial dimension of stratagems like the Cantrell recall plays into the hands of the architects of that agenda and the scapegoating politics on which they depend by focusing exclusively on an aspect of the tactic and not the goal. From the perspective of that greater danger, whether the recall effort was motivated by racism is quite beside the point. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. With or without conscious intent, and no matter what shockingly ugly and frightening expressions it may take rhetorically, the racial dimension of the right wing’s not-so-stealth offensive is a smokescreen. The pedophile cannibals, predatory transgender subversives, and proponents of abortion on demand up to birth join familiar significations attached to blacks and a generically threatening nonwhite other in melding a singular, interchangeable, even contradictory—the Jew as banker and Bolshevik—phantasmagorical enemy.
An important takeaway from the nature of this threat is that a race-first politics is not capable of responding effectively to it. Race reductionism fails intellectually and is counterproductive politically because its assumption that race/racism is transhistorical and its corresponding demand that we understand the connection between race and politics in contemporary life through analogy with the segregation era or slavery do not equip us to grasp the specificities of the current moment, including the historically specific dangers that face us. This is not a new limitation. That anachronistic orientation underwrote badly inaccurate prognostications about the likely political impact of changing racial demography in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and was totally ineffective for mounting challenges to charterization of the Orleans Parish school system and the destruction of public housing in the midst of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing.15 Race-reductionist interpretation could specify neither the mechanisms nor the concatenation of political forces that impelled either of those regressive programs. Race reductionists seemed to assume that defining those interventions, as well as the regressive real estate practices commonly known as gentrification and the problems of hyper-policing, as racist would call forth some sort of remedial response.16 It did not.
Similarly, just as assertion that mass incarceration is the “New Jim Crow” does not help us understand or respond to the complex political-economic or ideological forces that have produced mass incarceration,17 criticism of contemporary voter suppression efforts by tying them to those at the end of the nineteenth century does not help us specify the nature of the threat, the objectives to which it is linked, or approaches to countering it. Regarding voter suppression and disfranchisement, even in the late nineteenth century, while a) its point was openly and explicitly to disfranchise blacks and b) there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the commitments to white supremacy expressed by disfranchisement’s architects, disfranchising blacks for the sake of doing so was not the point either; neither was imposing codified racial subordination an end in itself.
The racial dimension of the reactionary campaign then was also a smokescreen that helped to facilitate assertion of ruling class power after the defeat of the Populist insurgency by attacking blacks as a scapegoat, a misdirection from the Democrat planter-merchant-capitalist elites’ sharply class-skewed agenda, including codified racial segregation, which they could not fully impose until the electorate had been “purified.” From the architects’ perspective, the problem with blacks’ voting was ultimately that they did not reliably vote Democrat. If black voters could have been counted on to vote for the Democrat agenda, committed white supremacy likely would have found expression in areas other than suffrage. Indeed, one facet of Bookerite accommodationist politics at the time—articulated by, among others, novelist Sutton Griggs—was that black Americans’ reflexive support of Republicans had forced Democrats to resort to disfranchisement and that, if principled Democrats felt they could count on black votes, they wouldn’t need to pursue such measures.18 Among advocates of voter suppression today, black voting is in part a metonym for a composite scapegoat that includes Democratic or “liberal” or “woke” voters, all of whom, like the liberal pedophile cannibals, are characterizable as not “real Americans” and whose voting is therefore fraudulent by definition. And propagandists meld the images together in service of deflecting attention from the right’s regressive policy agenda.19
It is instructive that at the same time contemporary rightists commonly tout evidence of support from blacks and Hispanics. Of course, that move is largely a cynical ploy—the lie, straight from the fascist agitator’s handbook, accompanied by a knowing wink to the faithful—to deflect criticism of their obvious racial scapegoating. However, knee-jerk dismissals of that reaction as disingenuous or of black and Hispanic supporters as inauthentic, dupes, or sellouts are problematic. There is certainly no shortage of malicious racism within the right wing, but black and Latino supporters of right-wing politics cannot all be dismissed as the equivalent of cash-and-carry minstrel hustlers like Diamond & Silk or cash-and-carry lunatics like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas, just as the 7,000 blacks who signed the Cantrell recall petition cannot be dismissed as dupes of the NOLATOYA campaigners. While the percentages remained relatively small, increases in black and Hispanic votes for Trump between 2016 and 2020 indicate that those voters see more in the faux populist appeal than racism or white supremacy.20
What is true of those black and brown voters who are unlikely to see themselves as racists21 is no doubt also true for some percentage of whites who gravitate toward the reactionary right’s siren song.22 I do not mean to suggest that we should pander to the reactionary expressions around which the right has sought to mobilize those people. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that what makes many of them susceptible to that ugly politics is a reasonable sense that Democratic liberalism has offered them little for a half century. Obama promised transcendence and deliverance, based on evanescent imagery deriving largely from his race. His failure to live up to the “hope” he promoted set the stage for an equal and opposite reaction.
Most of all, race-reductionist explanations and simplistic historical analogies are counterproductive as a politics because they fail to provide a basis for challenging the looming authoritarian threat. I have asked supporters of reparations politics for more than twenty years how they imagine forming a political coalition broad enough to prevail on that objective in a majoritarian democracy.23 To date, the question has never received a response other than some version of the non sequitur “don’t you agree that black people deserve compensation?” or sophistries like the flippant assertion that abolition and the civil rights movement did not have a chance to win until they did.24 Recently, a questioner from the audience, someone with whom I have had a running exchange over many years regarding racism’s primacy as a political force, catechized me at a panel at Columbia University [beginning at 1:01:48] for my views on the Mississippi legislature’s attacks on the city of Jackson. There was no specific question; the intervention was a prompt for me to acknowledge that the Jackson case is evidence of racism’s independent power. That interaction captures a crucial problem with race reductionism as a politics. It centers on exposé and moralistic accusation.
But what would happen if we were to accept as common sense the conviction of advocates of race-reductionist politics that “racism” is the source of the various inequalities and injustices that affect us—including the anti-democratic travesties being perpetrated on Jackson’s residents and elected officials? What policy interventions would follow? And how would they be realized? Those questions do not arise because the point of this politics is not to transform social relations but to secure the social position of those who purport to speak on behalf of an undifferentiated black population. Insofar as it is a politics at all, it is an interest-group arrangement in which Racial Spokespersons propound as “racial” perspectives points of view that harmonize with Democratic neoliberalism. For the umpteenth time,25 a politics focused on identifying group-level disparities within the current regime of capitalist inequality is predicated logically, but most of all materially, on not challenging that regime but equalizing “group” differences within it. That anti-disparitarian politics hews to neoliberalism’s egalitarian ideal of equal access to competition for a steadily shrinking pool of opportunities for a secure life.26 And, as has been explicit since at least 2015, when the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed a more social-democratic approach toward the center stage of American political debate, anti-disparitarian “leftism” is a militant ideological force defending neoliberalism’s logic against downwardly redistributive threats, to the extent of denouncing calls for expanding the sphere of universal public goods as irresponsible and castigating appeals to working-class interests as racist.
Decades of race reductionist assertion and resort to history as allegory in lieu of empirical argument and clear political strategy27 have propagated another discourse of misdirection. Insistence that any inequality or injustice affecting black people must be understood as resultant from a generic and transhistorical racism, for instance, shifts attention away from the current sources of inequality in capitalist political economy for reductionist antiracists just as culture war rhetoric does for the right. As the genesis of the “racial wealth gap” has shown, the premise that slavery and Jim Crow continue to shape all black people’s lives and forge a fundamentally common condition of suffering and common destiny has underwritten a racial trickledown policy response that is a class politics dressed up as a racial-group politics.28 The sleight-of-hand that makes capitalist class dynamics disappear into a narrative of unremitting, demonic White Supremacy does the work for Democratic neoliberals, of whatever color or gender, that the pedophile cannibal bugbear does for the reactionary right. Thus race reductionism can present making rich black people richer and narrowing the “wealth gap” between them and their white counterparts as a strategy for pursuit of justice for all black people or attack social-democratic policy proposals as somehow not relevant to blacks and indeed abetting white racists, or attempt to whistle past the fact that the Racial Reckoning produced by the Summer of George Floyd culminated most conspicuously in a $100 million gift from Jeff Bezos to Van Jones and a flood of nearly $2 billion of corporate money into various racial justice advocacy organizations.
The rise of the authoritarian threat should raise the stakes of the moment to a point at which we recognize that this antiracist politics has no agenda for winning significant reforms, much less a strategy for social transformation, that it is not only incapable of anchoring a challenge to the peril that faces us but is fundamentally not interested in doing so. There seems to be a startling myopia underlying this politics and the strata whose interests it articulates—unless, of course, its only point is to secure what Kenneth Warren characterizes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem,”29 no matter what regime is in power. In that case, the Judenrat is in effect its model, and therefore all bets are off.
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scotianostra · 1 year
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Happy 36th Birthday singer-songwriter Paolo Nutini born January 9th 1987 in Paisley.
He is the oldest child of two and attended St Andrews Academy in Paisley where his career and love for music began,  when an artist was late to perform in his school, Paolo was asked by the music teacher to go up and sing a song.
As a teenager, in between writing songs, Paolo used to work a Saturday shift in  the family fish and chip shop business, and was expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and enter the business full time, but always knew he wanted to pursue singing.
Paolo found work as a roadie for the band Speedway, as well as performing live himself. He performed solo, as well as with Dome and Dick from The Dongues. Paolo also went on to work at Glasgow’s Park Lane Studio.
Paolo Nutini’s big break was quite an unusual one. During a homecoming concert for David Sneddon, staged by local radio station 102.5 Clyde 1, Paolo won an impromptu quiz. He was given the chance to get onstage and perform a couple of his own songs, whilst the crowd waited for Sneddon’s arrival. A member of the audience was so impressed with the performance that he offered to become Paolo’s manager.
Nutini was then invited to perform on BBC Radio Scotland after a journalist from the Daily Record saw him perform at the Queen Margaret Union. At the age of 17, Nutini moved to London and performed regularly at Balham’s Bedford pub. He was soon offered support slots with KT Tunstall and Amy Winehouse, he signed for Atlantic and began work on his first album, working with Coldplay and Badly Drawn Boy producer Ken Nelson, Nutini generated an impressive amount of buzz before his first single, “Last Request,” was released in the early summer of 2006. 
He appeared at special Atlantic Records showcases at Carnegie Hall and the Montreux Jazz Festival, as well as opening for the Rolling Stones and Paul Weller. These Streets, was ultimately released in July 2006 alongside his second single, “Jenny Don’t Be Hasty.” The album fared quite well climbing to double-platinum status and sent four singles into the Top 40. Accordingly, an American release followed in January 2007.In his singing his Scottish accent, shines through, he doesn’t try to sing in an American accent like most singers do, Paolo automatically sounded like no one else.His second album, Sunny Side Up, appeared in June 2009, featuring increased contributions from Nutini’s backing band and a bright, sprightly disposition. Sunny Side Up was a number one hit, and one of the biggest-selling albums of the year – and went on to claim Best Album at the Ivor Novello Awards.
The past few years Nutini has been living in his home town of Paisley, there has been the odd appearance on Karaoke posted on social media, but little news of any new materials as yet. He did however buy the Chewbacca mask worn by Lewis Capaldi on stage at TRNSMT festival, the original bidder pulled out of the auction. Paolo also donated tent thousand pound to mental health charity Tiny Changes and plans to raffle the mask to raise even more.
The Tiny Changes charity was set up in memory of Frightened Rabbit’s front man Scott Hutchison, who took his own life in 2018 after struggles with depression.
A wee Paolo story from 2020 is when he paid for a man’s food shop at Aldi after he’d forgot to bring his wallet. Apparently the embarrassed shopper went to shake Paolo’s hand, to be told: “You can’t do that just now.” it was during the first wave of the Coronavirus.
Paolo was back witha bang this year with his new album, Last Night in the Bittersweet, it is his first release in eight years. Last Night in Bittersweet received a more than respectable score of 87 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic from four critics' reviews, indicating "universal acclaim"
The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart dated 8 July 2022, and by midweek, was outselling the album at number two by a ratio of 4:1.[10] It is Nutini's third consecutive UK number-one album.
The Paisley singer recently played 5 sold out gigs at the Glasgow OVO Hydro, he is kicking off a world tour in Canada with gigs in North America beefore heading to Australia, he then comes back to Europe for a series of shows.
The song is from the new album.
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lesbiantenets · 2 years
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Downloadable Reproductive Justice Zines
Barnard College has curated a selection of reproduction justice zines available for download directly on their website.
The zines included so far:
Abortion-Positive Coloring Book for Hard Times by the Lilith Fund
The Lilith Fund provides food-related, superhero, and other illustrations to color in with pro-abortion messages.
A Guide to Medication Abortion for Barnumbia by Reproductive Justice Columbia
Medication abortion 101.
¿Por qué el gobierno es así? : Una fanzine sobre la lucha por el acceso al aborto y la justicia reproductiva en la era de COVID19 by the Lilith Fund
Escribiendo en junio de 2020, un autor de Lilith Fund aconseja sobre cómo navegar por la justicia reproductiva durante la cuarentena de COVID-19 y cómo los lectores pueden apoyar a los trabajadores locales esenciales y a los inmigrantes indocumentados. El zine, escrito en español, incluye dibujos en acuarela y otros gráficos a todo color.
What is this thing called M.E.? author's name not listed.
Menstrual Extraction became popular in the 1970s, but after the passage of Roe v. Wade, feminist activists focused their efforts on medical abortions and the practice became less common. This zine gives a history of M.E. and describes how it is safer than other DIY abortions and how using it instead of a medical abortion can help women reclaim their bodies as well as give women in poor areas and developing countries a more affordable and empowering option. *Scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive with assumed consent. The zine had previously been online. We attempted to reach the creator without success.
Who is fit for motherhood? : Why abortion is not the only reproductive right by Lauren Jade Martin
Lauren Jade Martin, author of perzines Boredom Sucks, You Might As Well Live, and Quantify puts out this "condensed and simplified" version of her senior project, which focuses on the intersections of race and class in reproductive rights. She considers reproductive rights other than those related to abortion, such as forced sterilization, forced birth control, and population planning, issues that often disproportionally effect poor women, women of color, and immigrant women. The zine explores the tension between second-wave feminism and these reproductive rights abuses, and describes how the interests of middle and upper-class white women are often different from and even oppositional to the interests of poor women or women of color. Lauren includes a lengthy bibliography, photographs, historical and current information, and her email address. *Scanned and uploaded to the Internet Archive with Lauren's permission
Why Is the Government Like This : A Zine About Fighting for Abortion Access and Reproductive Justice in the Age of COVID19 by the Lilith Fund
A Lilith Fund artist accuses Texas legislators with responding poorly to the coronavirus pandemic, using bans on elective surgery to prevent access to surgical abortion in the state. The zine is illustrated with watercolor paintings.
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molkolsdal · 2 years
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For 36-year-old Sweety, being a transgender woman “is a curse”.
Hailing from a remote village in Indian-administered Kashmir’s Budgam district, Sweety was in her early 20s when she realised she is transgender.
Back then, espousing a transwoman’s life was not an easy decision in a conservative place. But being the youngest child of her parents and “the most loved one”, her gender did not invite much trouble initially.
However, her luck did not last long. In 2016, Sweety lost both her parents within a span of four months.
With the coronavirus pandemic forcing people indoors, the social meetings of the LGBTQ community have also stopped. But home is not a safe place for the marginalised community.
In a desperate bid one day in March this year, Sweety took the risk of meeting her friend in the neighbourhood
“When I reached home after the meeting, my brother slapped me. He choked me, I felt breathless. He tied my legs and then started hitting on my feet with a stick,” she said.
“Even the children in the house started crying. He stopped only when my sister-in-law intervened. My belongings were thrown out and I was asked to leave the house.”
Abandoned by her elder sibling, “presumably to maintain their social status”, as she put it, Sweety has now been living independently and managing the odds, facing all adversaries.
“For my family, my existence is a curse. They want me dead as soon as possible as they consider me a social liability,” she told Al Jazeera as she prepared her meal in a dimly lit room.
Sweety said she was thrashed so severely that she could not walk properly for weeks.
With restrictions on movement and social gatherings in place, the region’s LGBTQ residents have been pushed to live with hostile family members who often subject them to all kinds of abuse.
The problem has been compounded by a long spell of lockdowns in Kashmir, starting in August 2019 when the region’s special status was scrapped by the Indian government.
The six-month-long security shutdown was quickly followed by the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in March last year. This year, a vicious second wave of the virus saw another long lockdown in the restive region.
According to the 2011 census, there are more than 4,000 LGBTQ members in the region, though the number could be higher as many are believed to be reluctant about expressing their sexual orientation.
The community members say the lockdowns saw a spike in violence and persecution against them, with many stories of domestic abuse emerging from the region.
A prolonged conflict against the Indian rule has also overshadowed their plight, with many of them abandoned by their families and subjected to physical, verbal and sexual violence.
They say they frequently receive pornographic videos, unsolicited photos of sexual organs, text messages from strangers demanding sex and lewd phone calls. They are also threatened about making their identities and photographs public on social media.
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dojae-huh · 1 year
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This is for Q3 (July-October) of 2022.
135.1-40.4=94.7
94.7 is the price of producing the goods and the content (music albums, shows, concerts).
40.4-27.6=27.1
27.6 were spent on advertising, distributing and on staff salaries (I guess?)
22.1 - what's left after taxes, the real gained money the company can add to the capital
6 coins spent gave 7 coins back, 1 coin of gain. And it's a very good quarter for SM. This company is really not that big, heh.
Correct me if I'm wrong with what I've written, I'm not an expert in economics.
Anyway, I'm posting the graph because I was surprised how much Appearence brings in? NR and Puma feed the boys? Heh. To be fare, there were still not that many concerts held in 3Q.
I also want to know what is MD/licensing - streaming and other groups performing SM songs on their own shows? How is it so high?
...
Considering how much money albums bring in, do you think it is in SM's interests to sabotage itself when it comes to its current breadwinner if there is not a big obstacle in the way? After the repack has been already done (money spent on its production)? Forget idols as people, cold-blooded business talk here.
I think the root of the problem is MarkHyuk being in two permanent units (and it were the fans who demanded OT7 and Dream to stay, originally there was planned another unit (or two) without MarkHyuk and with new neos). Both units bring in similar amount of money (similar album sales, sold out stadiums), so neither can be forgotten at this point of time. And if there is a problem with one unit (cancelled 127 Dome dates for 127 in January, cancelled Dream Show in July) it is the domino effect and a displacement of all initially planned events. Add to it 3 SMTown shows that must be attended (because as Kangta said, the newer artists help the older artists to perform before giant crowds).
The concerts are important right now as the bond with fans must be reinforced. The concerts and fanmeets in Japan are very important (I'm talking Dream upcoming Dream show in November), as it's the second largest musical market, and NCT is finally on the rise there. SM is still lagging behind Hybe and JYP. Dream has launched a Japanese fanclub, and a membership costs ¥5,400 for one year (~38USD). Dream will perform in 10-15-17k seat capacity venues. If they sell out, it's 72k with 5 concerts.
The Japanese fanclub opening and the Dream show 2 (scheduled for November) were announced in September. 2 Baddies comeback was in September. The timeslot for 127's comeback with the repack was only possible in late October-early November. What did October have? 2 concerts in US and 2 Olympic stadium concerts. US concerts were announced in August. The Seoul dome concerts were announced at the end of September. What did early November have? 2 concerts in Indonesia (a new market SM pays special attention to, Indonesian fans are among those who stream the most), also announced in September.
The repack's fate was sealed already in September, people. Before 2 Baddies comeback happened. SM just didn't tell us.
Ergo, the concerts, especially the Olympic stadium ones, were prioritised over the repack. The fans meeting idols in real life were prioritesed over the music show appearences. And it's not only about the concert dates themselves, but fans' money spent on tickets as well, I guess. And what is more important for 127 neos regarding dreams come true with the help of SM? To perform before 60000 alive fans or wake up 3 a.m. and perform on a music show before a hundred of fans 2 weeks in a row? Not to mention, idols get more money from concerts, especilly abroad.
And fans complain? Because they don't think, but emote.
Don't take me wrong, this year is messy, and I don't want a repeat of it. But I acknowledge that there are circumstances out of SM staff's control, like the coronavirus making new waves with new variants or getting into the artists, and countries' extending covid restrictions last minute. After the covid there is surelly no lack of music acts and sport teams wanting to rent venues. I doubt securing one is that easy of a job this year.
Before covid really hit, NCT system worked. 127zens are loud, but let's be honest, there are more of solo stans than unit-stans.
in 2022 127 neos got solo projects (Mark, Taeyong, Taeil, Jaehyun), radio-shows (Yuta), movies/tv (Yuta, Doyoung, Jaehyun (a postponed release, but let's count)), brand deals (Jaehyun, Yuta and Mark (I think?)), DJ gig (Johnny), OSTs and side projects (Doyoung, Taeil, Haechan, Mark, Taeyong, also Yuta, Yuta sang in the OST for his movie), MC gig (Jungwoo) and magazine covers (Doyoung, Jaehyun, Jungwoo, Haechan, Yuta). There was new YT content with games (with subs in 6 languages). The Dingo live session. Vlogs from all concerts and all special pop-up stores to those fans who couldn't attend to get the feeling of how it was. The work of "let's make fans happy" is being done. However, it is never possible to make everyone happy. There will always be people who are dissapointed.
MarkHyuk being in two units is a problem in my opinion, the problem that SM didn't plan when the NCT system was created. It were the fans, the circumstances (dremies showing too much chemistry and SM creating too good of a concept for them), and the need for a proper vocalist and a proper rapper. As such, the blame is not on SM or the NCT system (the way it was designed) for this. 127 wouldn't debut without Mark, but it could have been lacking Haechan if the two units were planned as permanent right away. No 2Dongs, no MarkHyuk, no Sun&Moon in this alternative reality...
SM has a problem and it deals with it however it can while trying to earn from both units.
There is an additional problem. The covid prevented the debut of the new two groups (NCT new unit (or two, there is Hollywood) and the new bg) and slowed down aespa's development as a new breadwinner. The circle of one new group every 4 years was broken. Currently it's Dream and 127 that bring in the most money, and yes, SM will milk both because it has to comeback on its feet after the pandemic.
Look at 2020, SM earned nothing that year, it actually got below the minus (-300 grey is net profit). You know why 127 are so loud about being late bloomers? Because they didn't give the money invested in them back quickly enough. Taeyong even thanked for additional budget for Favorite. 2019 also was a weak year. Yes, the revenue and the expenses are from all the activities and businesses, some of them are not profitable.
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NCT position in 2018 and 2019
I wholly agree that SM needs a proper reforming of its inner structure to be more efficient (who was forgotten to be mentioned in a promo post again recently? Yuta?), and a better communication between the artists and the planning team is desireable, but from what I gather, the problems the company shows are widespread in all Korean institutions, they even shoot dramas about it. What I do not agree with is that SM staff who works with 127 or the company (at least in the face of LSM, who is in charge for now, or the current CEO who supervised Cherry Bomb and created multiple versions wanting it to be perfect) intentionally neglect or don't care about 127 neos.
If this were so, they wouldn't get solos or money for cover MVs, no song-writing and producing opportunities, no day-offs and surfing trips in the middle of promotional week.
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if-you-fan-a-fire · 3 years
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“The coronavirus pandemic has ravaged many disadvantaged communities. Those include people who are incarcerated; more than 2,700 inmates have died. In no small part, this is a delayed but inevitable consequence of the punitive criminal justice policies of the 1980s and 1990s. That era’s mandatory long prison sentences have slowly transformed many U.S. prisons into what one legal scholar called “maximum security convalescent homes.” And just as nursing homes were ravaged by the pandemic, so were prisons.
As we find in our research, the United States can expect to see more — and costly — health consequences from this increasingly geriatric prison population.
How did we get here? In the 1980s and 1990s, policymakers in both parties competed to be “tough on crime” by mandating long prison sentences and reducing or eliminating opportunities for parole. In Washington and in every state capital, politicians ramped up punishments that included “three strikes” laws — in which anyone convicted of three felonies could be sentenced to life in prison — and statutes that mandated sentences of life without the possibility of parole. Every state now has such a law. Political scientists Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner have described how political leaders can focus on a few aspects of a complicated public policy question, leading to one-sided policies that eventually need to be corrected. We found something similar here.
To justify throwing away the key for hundreds of thousands of incarcerated individuals, significant intellectual groundwork had to be laid. This involved two main steps.
First, the United States had to abandon the idea that prisons rehabilitate. In 1974, sociologist Robert Martinson facilitated this with his National Affairs article “What Works? Questions and Answers about Prison Reform.” The article later became informally known as “Nothing Works!” It concluded that rehabilitation programs are ineffective, something that became widely accepted as fact, although Martinson himself would go on to repudiate this view.
A second major step involved dehumanizing those to be permanently incarcerated. Politicians came to believe that a new generation of “irredeemable” children — called, at the time, “super-predators” — would never be productive adults. Those two beliefs — that a new kind of remorseless sociopath had no chance of redemption — combined to enable policies that put children in prison until their natural deaths, perhaps 60 years later.
Ignoring the obvious When U.S. leaders focused on getting tough, they had to ignore some uncomfortable facts. The United States would end up with tens of thousands of septuagenarian prisoners; they would need expensive medical care; they would be vulnerable to violence or exploitation by younger prisoners; their costly continued incarceration would add very little to public safety, as they would be unlikely to reoffend after a certain age; and their large numbers behind walls would involve human rights concerns.
More than 200,000 people in U.S. prisons now serve sentences that they cannot outlive. Our research showed that people who commit crimes leading to long prison sentences tend to be about 26 years old when the crime occurs. Such a person might now be about 56, if the offense took place in 1991 at the tough-on-crime movement’s peak. Twenty years from now, if we see another pandemic, that individual will be 76, suggesting there will be a further wave of illness and death behind bars. The figure below shows the relative shares of youthful and elderly people in U.S. prisons.
Without parole, prisons become infirmaries In our recently published research, we simulated a prison population with parole, then eliminated parole to see what would happen mathematically. If most individuals come into prison at a relatively young age, and become eligible for parole after serving, say, 20 years, then the prison system never develops a very large number of elderly prisoners. Even with low rates of parole, when an individual is eligible after 20 years, few serve 50 years.
But with no possibility of parole, the number serving extremely long terms, and therefore growing into their 70s and 80s behind bars, expands dramatically. Eliminating the possibility of parole means that what had been unlikely now becomes inevitable. Parole not only offers the incarcerated individual a chance to leave; it also lets the system discharge infirm and elderly individuals once they no longer threaten community safety.
North Carolina’s experience illustrates these trends Like other states, North Carolina adopted life without parole policies in 1994, part of revisions designed to reduce some crimes’ punishments and increase others. As the figure below shows, the prison population had been expanding rapidly before these changes. Afterward, it declined for almost a decade as fewer individuals served time for relatively low-level offenses. But after about 10 years, the trend reversed. Total incarceration numbers increased dramatically, as happened nationally as well.
While many analysts have critiqued mass incarceration, few have noted the change in the ages of those incarcerated. As you can see, North Carolina’s prisons didn’t add more individuals under the age of 30. All the growth was in the older age groups. What happened wasn’t that more were going to prison. Rather, they were less likely to leave.
Policymakers did not just get tough on crime in the 1980s and 1990s. They ignored costly parts of the picture, leaving their children’s generation to solve the resulting problems. Among other things, these policies made the coronavirus pandemic much worse in prisons than it might otherwise have been. The pandemic has been catastrophic in the nation’s prisons. But if we see another such crisis 10 or 20 years from now, the impact will be much worse as middle-aged prisoners age into their golden years behind bars.”
-  Analysis by Frank R. Baumgartner, Tamira Daniely, Kalley Huang, Patrice McGloin, Niharika Vattikonda, Kamryn Washington, Sydney Johnson, Allison Swagert, Alexander Love and Lyle May, “Thousands of prisoners have died of covid-19. Because of the ‘tough on crime’ era, there’s worse to come.” The Washington Post. August 26, 2021.
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sophsweet · 30 days
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Quotes from Coronavirus Vaccine Designers and Researchers since SARS-COV1
Coronavirus Vaccine History Back in 2004, SARS vaccine trial spotlights continued peril by Helen Pearson was published in the science press. But public-health experts remain concerned that a second wave of infections could erupt, either from human contact with infected animals or by the virus escaping from laboratory samples.Pearson, Helen SARS vaccine trial spotlights continued peril. Nature…
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In November 2021, Temple Israel in Springfield, Missouri, began looking for a new rabbi. A quick perusal of job listings from other Reform synagogues left the search committee stunned: Scores of congregations, many offering higher salaries in larger cities, had been unable to fill their positions for months, sometimes longer. Eventually, Temple Israel entered into a fee-for-service agreement with a rabbi two hours away. He would come in for Shabbat, High Holiday services, and adult-education classes, but he wouldn’t attend community meetings, collaborate with local faith leaders, or recruit new members to the synagogue. For only the second time in its 125-year history, Temple Israel wouldn’t have a full-time rabbi.
Their experience is no outlier. A Conservative congregation just outside New York City, offering $150,000 a year plus benefits and a free three-bedroom home, spent three years trying to find a replacement for its rabbi after he announced his retirement in 2019. (Like other rabbis I spoke with, he delayed retirement to tide over the congregation.) There were simply not enough interested candidates.
In the past 15 years, the number of American Jews choosing to become rabbis has plummeted, and so has the share of rabbis interested in serving congregations, as more and more end up in nonprofits, hospitals, universities, and elsewhere. This has threatened the vitality of hundreds of synagogues as well as the future of the schools that have ordained rabbis for more than a century.
Without a rabbi, synagogue membership tends to dwindle to the very dedicated. Enrollment in the Hebrew school goes down. Fundraising becomes harder. Nobody gets a hospital visit from the rabbi or a call of comfort during a difficult time.
Judaism is far from the only faith tradition facing this problem. In many Christian denominations, a wave of early retirements during the coronavirus pandemic accelerated long-term declines among priests and pastors. Scores of prominent Christian seminaries have been forced to sell their campuses due to shrinking enrollment, and many have merged resources and properties with other schools, even those of other denominations. Typically, Catholic priests once had to wait a decade after ordination before leading their own parish; today, the wait time can be less than three years.
Whether this represents a crisis or an opportunity for renewal is the subject of much debate among Jewish leaders.
“Yes, we need to figure out what is going to happen to congregations who are not getting rabbis,” says Emily Hendel, who oversees career services for the Rabbinical Assembly, a 1,600-member organization of Conservative rabbis. “But it does not negate the advantages of having rabbis serve in other places.”
Even as the rabbi shortage has worsened, new institutions of Jewish learning, social activism, and lay leadership have flourished, largely thanks to the growing engagement of younger Jews. Very little of this renaissance, however, is affiliated with large, established synagogues or the seminaries that supply them with rabbis. Almost none of it is tied to the denominations.
A new center of gravity for American Jewish life is emerging, far removed from synagogue life and the institutions that have defined it. The centralized Judaism of the 20th century is giving way to a series of independent organizations, reflecting a broader trend across faith communities toward religious individualism. This new Judaism raises questions about what a rabbi should be in the 21st century, whom they should serve, and what to do now that so many congregations can’t find one.
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beardedmrbean · 2 years
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HONG KONG (AP) — Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam said Monday she wouldn't seek a second term after a rocky five years marked by huge protests calling for her resignation, a security crackdown that has quashed dissent and most recently a COVID-19 wave that overwhelmed the health system.
Her successor will be picked in May and the city's security chief during the 2019 protests is among the possible choices.
“I will complete my five-year term as chief executive on the 30th of June this year, and I will also call an end to my 42 years of public service,” Lam said at a news conference. She thanks her team of local officials and the central authorities in Beijing, and said she plans to spend more time with family, which is her “sole consideration.”
Speculation had swirled for months about whether she would seek another term, but she said that her decision had been conveyed to the central government in Beijing last year and was met with “respect and understanding.”
“Less than two years into my chief executive term, because of the anti-extradition bill and because of interference from foreign forces and also the attack of COVID-19, I was under great pressure,” Lam said. “However, the motivation for me to press on was the very staunch support behind me by the central authorities.”
She presided over a period in which Beijing firmly established control over the former British colony that was returned to China in 1997. For years, the city rocked back and forth between calls for more freedom and growing signs of China extending its reach into the city, even after Hong Kong was promised 50 years of freedom to govern itself semi-autonomously from the mainland.
Lam's popularity sharply declined over her five-year term, particularly over legislation that would have allowed crime suspects to be extradited to mainland China for trial and later over her leadership during the 2019 protests that saw violent clashes erupt between police and protesters.
She also strongly supported the national security law initiated by Beijing and implemented by her government that was seen as eroding the “one country, two systems” framework that promised after the handover from Britain that city residents would retain freedoms not found in mainland China, such as a free press and freedom of expression.
The security law and other police and court actions in the years since have virtually erased the city's pro-democracy movement, with activists and the movement's supporters either arrested or jailed. Others have fled into exile.
Hong Kong media say the city's No. 2 leader John Lee is likely to enter the race to succeed Lam. Chief Secretary Lee was the city's head of security during the 2019 protests and is known for his support for the police force during the protests and his tough stance against protesters.
Hong Kong's leader is elected by a committee made up of lawmakers, representatives of various industries and professions, and pro-Beijing representatives such as Hong Kong deputies to the China's legislature. One of the unfulfilled demands of the 2019 protests was direct election of the city's chief executive.
The election for the chief executive had been set on March 27 but was postponed until May 8 as the city endures its worst coronavirus outbreak of the pandemic.
Lam said that holding the polls as originally scheduled would pose “public health risks” even if a committee of only 1,462 people is involved.
Lam previously served as chief secretary, secretary for development and other roles in civil service. She earned the nickname “good fighter” for her tough stance and refusal to back down in political battles.
Lam renounced her British nationality in 2007 when she was appointed secretary for development. Her husband and two children have retained their British nationalities.
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mariacallous · 2 years
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ROME — Italy appeared poised on Sunday to turn a page of European history by electing a hard-right coalition led by a daughter of post-Fascism whose long track record of bashing the European Union, international bankers, vaccine mandates and migrants has sown concern about the European Union sticking together as it struggles to keep pressure on President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia for his war in Ukraine.
As Italians went to vote on Sunday morning, weeks of opinion polls suggested that Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the nationalist Brothers of Italy party, would lead her coalition over a fractured left and resurgent southern-based anti-establishment movement to win a majority in Parliament, making her the prohibitive favorite to become the country’s first female prime minister.
The victory would come as formerly taboo and marginalized parties with Nazi or Fascist heritages are entering the mainstream, and winning elections, across Europe. This month, a hard-right group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads became the largest party in Sweden’s likely governing coalition. In France this year, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen — for a second consecutive time — reached the final round of presidential elections. In Spain, the hard-right Vox, a party closely aligned with Ms. Meloni, is surging.
But it is Italy, the birthplace of fascism and a founding member of the European Union, that would send the strongest shock wave across the continent after a golden age of European-centric stability led by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, who directed hundreds of billions of euros in recovery funds to modernize Italy and helped lead Europe’s strong response to Russia.
Ms. Meloni’s victory would show that the allure of nationalism — of which she is a strong proponent — remained undimmed, despite the breakthroughs by E.U. nations in coming together to pool sovereignty and resources in recent years, first to combat the coronavirus pandemic and then Mr. Putin’s initiation of the largest conflict in Europe since World War II.
How — and how deeply — a right-wing coalition in Italy led by Ms. Meloni could threaten that cohesion has emerged in recent weeks as a major concern of the European establishment.
Ms. Meloni has staunchly, and consistently, supported Ukraine and its right to defend itself against Russian aggression. But her coalition partners, Matteo Salvini, the firebrand leader of the League, and former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, have clearly aligned themselves with Mr. Putin, questioning sanctions and echoing his propaganda.
That fracture — and the bitter competition between the right-wing leaders — could prove fatal for the coalition were it to win, leading to a short-lived government.
Ms. Meloni had spent the campaign seeking to reassure an international audience that she her support of Ukraine was unwavering. She also sought to allay concerns by condemning Mussolini, whom she once admired, and Italy’s Fascist past. She also made more supportive noises about Italy’s place in the European Union and distanced herself from Ms. Le Pen and Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Hungary, whom she had previously emulated.
But that pivoting was more for international markets than Italian voters, who didn’t much care about her past, or even her affinity for illiberal democracies. The Italian electorate had not moved to the right, political scientists said, but instead again resorted to a perennial desire for a new leader who could possibly, and providentially, solve all of its ills. And Ms. Meloni found herself in the right place at the right time.
Hers was virtually the only major party to remain outside Mr. Draghi’s national unity government, allowing her to soak up an increasing share of the opposition. Her support surged from 4 percent to nearly 30 percent, by far the largest of any single party.
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