>There will always be some ineradicable incentive for unions to do things that benefit their own members even if they do some vague harm to society at large. Corporations will always try to exploit this incentive for their own benefit. It is easy to say in an abstract sense “Unions shouldn’t give in to that,” but in the real world, it is not easy at all. Should the United Mine Workers demand that coal mines shut down, because of the environment? Should the Machinists union tell Boeing to shut its factories where its members manufacture weapons that are used to blow up poor people on the other side of the world? Etc. Antitrust issues can sometimes be seen as just another big picture dilemma that does nothing to help working people put food on the table right now. > >In lieu of solving this timeless tension in today’s little blog post, let’s think about the more modest goal of how antitrust and organized labor can work together more effectively. First, we all have to realize that we’re all part of one holistic policy goal. We think that allowing corporations to proceed unchecked down the road to ultimate power is a bad idea. It is bad for workers, who will be crushed, and it is bad for governments, who will be co-opted, and it is bad for all citizens, who will suffer as corporate power sweeps away regulations and rearranges all of society to benefit shareholders at the expense of everything else, like AI gone awry. Organized labor should make it a point to use its own political capital—a very real weapon, if Kamala Harris wins the White House—to support antitrust efforts and protect its enforcers. And the antitrust world should correspondingly recognize the fact that simply limiting corporate power by fighting monopolies will never be enough; unless there are unions inside of the companies to constantly exercise power on behalf of the workers, there is no actual institution that will be carrying on the fight to prevent companies from just proceeding right back down the same harmful monopolistic path over and over again. We’re peas in a pod here. Don’t want huge companies and their idiot billionaire bosses to run the world? Break them up, and unionize them. It’s the best program we have.

https://beta.maps.apple.com/

It doesn’t seem to support Firefox or mobile browsers, at least not.

Maps on the web is compatible with these web browsers >On your Mac or iPad >- Safari >- Edge >- Chrome > >On your Windows PC >- Edge >- Chrome

https://beta.maps.apple.com/

It doesn’t seem to support Firefox, or not yet at least. Maps on the web is compatible with these web browsers >On your Mac or iPad >- Safari >- Edge >- Chrome > >On your Windows PC >- Edge >- Chrome

xyz

>In the confidential assessments, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said 11 of the 22 large banks it supervises have “insufficient” or “weak” management of so-called operational risk, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. > >That contributed to about one-third of the banks rating three or worse on a five-point scale for their overall management, the people said. The scores are the latest sign that US regulators are concerned about the level of risk at the country’s largest banks in wake of a series of failures last year. > >Operational risk is one of the categories by which regulators evaluate overall risk at the banks they oversee. Each bank’s individual ratings are closely held, but regulators sometimes use aggregate data on banks’ grades to highlight areas of concern in discussions with other agencies and the industry.

>Our understanding of China — and U.S.-China relations — has become a defining feature of all global politics. The China Report is a new show produced in collaboration with Pivot to Peace where every week, hosts Amanda Yee and KJ Noh will be helping through all the propaganda with an independent view of the country we are told to hate, but know so little about.

First two episodes:

• Exposed: Pentagon Ran Covert Anti-Vax Operation to Discredit China
• WSJ Accuses China of Secret Spy Bases in Cuba: Cold War Madness Gets Crazier

I’d never heard of Pivot to Peace.

• https://peacepivot.org/
• https://www.youtube.com/@pivottopeace2492

>[…] > >But rarely do we have examples of propaganda so flagrant from our “free press” that it is hard for readers not to notice them. This week the state-corporate media made my job a little easier. Over the past few days, it has reported on two closely comparable events that it framed in entirely different ways. Ways that all too clearly serve state-corporate interests. > >The first such event was an Israeli air strike last Saturday on a school in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians, including children, had been sheltering from months of a rampaging Israeli military that has slaughtered many tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure. > >The massive scale of death and destruction in Gaza has forced the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide – not that you would know from the media coverage. The genocide case against Israel has been largely disappeared down the memory hole. > >The second event, on Monday, was a Russian air strike on a hospital in Kyiv. It was part of a wave of attacks on Ukrainian targets that day that killed 36 Ukrainians. >Let us note too that, despite huge numbers of Palestinian women and children being killed each day by Israeli missiles, the news media largely stopped covering the carnage in Gaza months ago. The BBC’s main evening news barely reports it. > >The fact alone that the killing of 36 Ukrainian civilians attracted so much attention and concern from the western media, in a war that’s more than two years old, when there is a far larger daily death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which our governments have been directly aiding, and the slaughter is of more recent origin, is telling in and of itself. > >So how did our most trusted and progressive media outlets report these comparable events, in Gaza and Ukraine? > >The headlines tell much of the story. > >[…]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Cook

>After nine months of an Israeli mass murder campaign in Gaza, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has confirmed what my colleagues Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada (EI) and Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone reported back in October: that Israel invoked the Hannibal Directive and killed its own citizens on Oct. 7th. > >According to one Israeli military source, Israeli forces were ordered to turn the boundary area around Gaza into a “killing zone” — thereby knowingly killing Israelis in that zone. Under the Hannibal doctrine, Israel’s aim was to kill its own people rather than let them be traded in a future exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons. The Israeli military has suppressed this killing of its own people on Oct. 7th all while manufacturing support for its rampage in Gaza ever since. > >The same establishment media outlets that have long ignored this aspect of Oct. 7th smeared my independent media colleagues at Grayzone and EI for reporting it. This includes two hit pieces in the Washington Post, and even more brazenly, three pieces in Haaretz — which is now acknowledging what it has repeatedly attacked Max and Grayzone for reporting.

• Scahill: I’m leaving The Intercept and starting Drop Site News
• Ryan Grim: This is an email I never thought I'd be sending

There seems to be a rash of exoduses from The Intercept going on. Two months ago, Ken Klippenstein quit for The Grayzone: Why I'm Resigning From The Intercept

Some may recall Glenn Greenwald’s exit in 2020.

• My Resignation From The Intercept
• Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept

• Friedrich Engels
• Che Guevara
• Robert Owen
• Mao Zedong
• Peter Kropotkin

Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla's Original Sin > Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web. > >Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.

>A Marine veteran and true American patriot, Mr. Ritter is also a noted former Chief UN weapons inspector, author and journalist. He was enroute to Russia to attend an international conference in St. Petersburg.

• Malaysia Sun: US seizes Scott Ritter's passport
• Al Bawaba: US confiscates former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter passport
• RT: ‘It was about sticking it to the Russians’ – Scott Ritter on US seizure of his passport
• Daily Beast: Moscow Throws Putin Fanboy Scott Ritter Under the Bus

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Ryan Grim @ The Intercept, 2020: Joe Biden, Five Years Before Invasion, Said the Only Way of Disarming Iraq Is “Taking Saddam Down” >Biden told Ritter that no matter how thorough the inspections, the only way to eliminate the threat was to remove Saddam Hussein. […] “You and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam is at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam’s program relative to weapons of mass destruction. […] > >Hussein, it turned out, did not have an active WMD program. > >During questioning, Biden mocked Ritter as “ol’ Scotty boy” and suggested that his demands — that the international community compel Iraq to cooperate with inspectors — if met, would give Ritter the unilateral authority to start a war in Iraq. Biden argued that such decisions belonged to higher-level officials. “I respectfully suggest they have a responsibility slightly above your pay grade, to decide whether or not to take the nation to war,” Biden said. “That’s a real tough decision. That’s why they get paid the big bucks. That’s why they get the limos and you don’t. I mean this sincerely, I’m not trying to be flip.”

http://archive.today/2024.05.30-203844/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/30/us/politics/biden-ukraine-russia-weapons.html

>The global War on Terror was based on a mistake.

Quintupling down are we? Never change, The Atlantic.

ETA: Not sure if there’s a paywall, so just in case: https://archive.ph/68sf0

>Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Interior Department, accused US President Joe Biden of using Jews to justify US policy in the conflict.

>“He is making Jews the face of the American war machine. And that is so deeply wrong,” she said, noting that ancestors of hers were killed by “state-sponsored violence.”

>“I think the president has to know that there are people in his administration who think this is disastrous,” Call said of the war overall and US support for it. “Not just for Palestinians, for Israelis, for Jews, for Americans, for his election prospects.”

In case of paywall: http://archive.today/M5OFY