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West Sends Depleted Uranium Weapons to Ukraine: MEP to Warmongers – “You Make Me Sick!”
By , April 29, 2023
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Interior of an Ybor City, Florida cigar factory, circa 1920. (Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library via Wikimedia Commons)
On a fall day in 1902, in a working-class town not far from where Florida governor Ron DeSantis would grow up, West Tampa cigar workers walked off the job to protest what they viewed as an assault on their freedom. Factory management had obstructed the cigar workers’ lector, or reader, who read to them as they crafted their highly coveted, hand-rolled product.
This was no minor affront.
The lector was the very emblem of the Tampa-area cigar workers’ proud status as free, autonomous workers. They — not the factory owners — handpicked the lector. They — not the factory owners — chose what the lector would read: novels, the news, or, most enraging to management, radical material.
The business establishment’s attack on this totemic figure — which culminated in the violent deportation of the lector himself — sent cigar workers across greater Tampa into the streets, brandishing signs in Spanish and Italian. The explosion of mass solidarity forced management to relent. The workers would keep their reader, at least for the time being.
Cuban patriot Jose Marti poses with cigar-factory workers after giving a speech in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida in 1893. (University of South Florida historical photography collections via Wikimedia Commons)
El lector could hardly be more alien to Ron DeSantis’s Florida. While DeSantis frequently touts his working-class Italian roots, scorns well-connected elites, and drapes himself in the garb of freedom, the Tampa cigar workers would have scoffed at his anti-union, free-market populism as counterfeit liberty — a surefire way to press workers further under the thumb of swaggering employers.
Many of the cigar workers sympathized with or were card-carrying members of the Socialist Party of America. They and other Florida Socialists of the era — tenant farmers in the cotton-growing North, timber workers in the Panhandle, trade unionists in and around Jacksonville — saw working-class solidarity as the lifeblood of freedom, and democracy in the factory and the fields as the solvent to petty tyrants.
DeSantis, the son of two Rust Belt parents, cites his working-class background when explaining the origins of his crusading, freedom-focused philosophy. Early in his new book, The Courage to be Free, DeSantis declares that he’s animated by “blue-collar values,” unlike the “entrenched elites” that come out of places like Yale and Harvard Law (his two alma maters). He spoke in a similar register at his second inaugural address this year, using the words “freedom” or “free” fourteen times and “liberty” four, dwarfing even his favorite bête noire, “woke” (three).
So what does freedom look like to DeSantis? A sort of pre–New Deal society with a weak welfare state, weak regulatory state, and, crucially, weak labor unions.
The Tampa cigar workers would have scoffed at DeSantis’s anti-union, free-market populism as counterfeit liberty.
As a US representative from 2013 to 2018, DeSantis voted to axe Medicare and Social Security spending, applauded lifting the retirement age to seventy, and helped found the social spending–phobic House Freedom Caucus. As governor he has taken aim at Florida’s teachers unions, one of the few bastions of organized working-class power in a “right to work” state with just 4.5 percent of the workforce unionized. The Florida Legislature, at DeSantis’s urging, is currently considering legislation to make it easier to decertify public sector unions and harder to collect dues.
To DeSantis, freedom’s nemeses are “woke” media outlets, bureaucrats, and corporations — not because, say, companies constantly stomp on workers’ right to organize, but because some businesses now feel compelled to use anti-racist language. Likewise, being part of “the elite” doesn’t mean having a flush bank account or exercising direct control over workers’ livelihoods, but instead betraying a dash of social liberalism. As DeSantis writes in his latest book, Clarence Thomas is not a member of the ruling class, and “some who acquire great wealth, be it an oilman from Texas or an automobile dealer from Florida, are also part of the ‘outs’ because they do not subscribe to the prevailing outlook and philosophical preferences of the ruling class.”
A 1904 portrait of socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs by artist Harry Daniel Murphy. (Morning Oregonian via Wikimedia Commons)
One story from DeSantis’s book is illustrative. Working a summer job as an electrician’s assistant, DeSantis is sent home because he’s wearing “worn-out boots” that aren’t up to code. Rather than fault his employer for not supplying him with safe attire, DeSantis fumes about “the federal government’s regulatory Leviathan” — also known as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), an agency formed thanks to bottom-up pressure from the labor movement.
The Tampa cigar workers and their Florida Socialist Party brethren had a more realistic appraisal of who held power in society and who was a threat to the freedom of ordinary people. The state party dated its inception to a February 1900 speaking appearance by Eugene V. Debs, the most famous US Socialist of the day, in downtown Tampa. Debs thundered through a two-hour address on “Labor and Liberty” as the thousands-strong crowd, the Tampa Tribune reported, “filled all the available space in Courthouse square . . . and overflowed into courthouse windows, neighboring roofs and tree-tops.”
Florida Socialists won the most adherents in manufacturing-heavy Tampa and Jacksonville, but there were dozens of other branches scattered across the state. In the tiny northeast town of Hastings, black tenants and farmhands used the party local to set up a cooperative store in a bid to break the yoke of peonage. When the hamlet of Gulfport — across the bay from Tampa — incorporated in 1910, its mayor and four of five city councilors claimed Socialist Party membership and, rejecting the nostrum that private investors knew best, fashioned a democratic economic development that built up the city’s water works along with a Citizen’s Ice and Cold Storage.
But Tampa’s local was perhaps the most effervescent in the state, mixing seamlessly into the burbling elan of working-class neighborhoods like Ybor City. There, with cigar factories looming in the background, working-class clubs and cultural centers proliferated; political debates, speeches, and rallies rang out; prolabor newspapers of various languages and ideological stripes churned off the presses; and Socialists racked up impressive vote tallies. Italians, Spaniards, and Cubans and Afro-Cubans lived in close proximity and worked alongside each other in the cigar factories. Trolleys running through the neighborhood flouted Jim Crow laws.
Florida Socialists won the most adherents in manufacturing-heavy Tampa and Jacksonville, but there were dozens of other branches scattered across the state.
The cigar workers, classic artisans, were the beau ideal of the community. They set their own hours, drank café con leche on the job, and even cut the workday short if there was a neighborhood baseball game. Interviewed decades later, one former cigar worker and Italian immigrant glowed: “I did love it because I had plenty of freedom. . . . If there was a ball game, I quit and go.”
The cigar workers struck repeatedly in those early decades of the 1900s, jostling for democracy on the factory floor. They fought for uniform wages across factories, resisted employer attempts to crush their unions, and, of course, battled to retain their beloved lector. Factory owners, in tones that Ron DeSantis could surely appreciate, angrily insisted on their right to govern the workplace as they wished, free from the collective meddling of workers.
The electoral highwater mark of Florida’s Socialist Party came in 1912, when Eugene Debs placed second in the state in the presidential race, besting both Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. World War I–era repression tore the party apart, and routed strikes spelled the end of the cigar workers’ cherished freedoms. In the 1920s and ’30s, the final lector platforms — the “advanced pulpits of liberty,” in Jose Marti’s memorable description — were razed. The business owners had won.
The cigar workers were the beau ideal of the community. They set their own hours, drank café con leche on the job, and even cut the workday short if there was a neighborhood baseball game.
Ron DeSantis, too, is winning today. Eager to “make America Florida,” he’s all but certain to run for president while flying the freedom flag. But in a political and economic system where workers hold vanishingly little power, his is less an anti-plutocratic agenda than a platform of plucking out disfavored elites and plopping in traditionalist ones.
The Tampa cigar workers might have asked in response: What kind of freedom and for whom? The labor liberty of the lector and the organized worker, or the union-busting freedom of the factory owner? Working-class solidarity, or DeSantis’s hollow populism?
In leaked recording, Levin confirms that the U.S. government is “working in collaboration” with left-wing groups to stop overhaul of Israel’s judicial system.
By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News
Justice Minister Yariv Levin said that groups fighting against the proposed reforms to Israel’s judicial systems enjoy support from the American government, echoing previous claims from coalition lawmakers that the Biden administration is funding the protests.
While dining at the home of a prominent ultra-Orthodox political strategist, Levin was secretly recorded by a guest at the residence saying that those pushing for the reform are facing an incredible challenge, as activists opposed to the overhaul have immense resources at their disposal.
“There is no doubt that we are at a truly unimaginable disadvantage. The fact is that [the anti-reform movement] is in control of the courts, the attorney general, all the heads of the economic system,” Levin said in the video, which was published by Walla.
“The American government is working in cooperation with them on this matter [of stopping the overhaul legislation],” he added. “We can see that based on repeated public statements from [American] government representatives.”
President Joe Biden has criticized the potential changes to Israel’s legal system, insinuating that he would not invite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House until the matter is dropped.
Biden’s comments on internal Israeli politics sparked backlash from lawmakers as diverse as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Public Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
Multiple reports have found that the Biden administration is funneling money towards advocacy groups that are organizing the anti-judicial reform protests, a revelation that has triggered concern from some American lawmakers.
“On top of that, add that [the left is] in control of [major Israeli news outlets] Israel Hayom, Yediot Ahronot, Haaretz, Ynet, Walla, whatever you can think of,” Levin continued.
Without naming specific lawmakers, Levin said one of the reasons for the reform’s lack of progress was discord within the Likud party. He also stressed that it is critical for the legislation to “not take too much time” to come to fruition.
“The situation can’t remain the way it is,” he said.
The post Biden admin supporting anti-judicial reform protests, says Israel’s justice minister appeared first on World Israel News.
Polish prime minister, education minister slammed Dr. Barbara Engelking for saying Poles “failed” Jews in WWII, threatening to defund her institute.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Over 300 institutions and academics from around the world have risen to defend a noted Polish Holocaust historian from her government’s attack on her after she stated that Poles “failed” their Jewish fellow citizens during World War II.
The historical groups and professors, including Yad Vashem, the foremost Holocaust documentation, research, education and commemoration institute in the world, issued a statement Thursday condemning Warsaw for its threats against Dr. Barbara Engelking, founder and director of the Polish Center of Holocaust Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences.
“We regard such censorious tendencies and the notion that the continued financing of academic institutions should be conditional upon whether the research produced within them meets the expectations of politicians, as extremely dangerous and unacceptable,” the statement says in part.
“Such actions are aimed at discouraging other scholars from undertaking research that might be met with a similar hate campaign.”
Engelking condemned Poles for their antisemitic behavior after the Nazis took over their country in an interview on Poland’s largest private channel, marking the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising on April 19th. She said that her countrymen often “falsif[y] history” in overstating how much they helped Jews when the Germans were hunting them down, and that Jews were “unbelievably disappointed with Poles during the war.”
“Poles had the potential to become allies of the Jews, and one would hope that they would behave differently, that they would be neutral, kind, that they would not take advantage of the situation to such an extent and that there would not be widespread blackmailing,” she said in another part of the interview.
“Poles simply failed,” she said.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki slammed the noted scholar, who has published several books in multiple languages on such subjects as the survival strategies of Jews in Warsaw and on the fate of Jews seeking refuge in Polish villages during the Holocaust. In a tweet of well over 800 words, he criticized her “scandalous opinions” regarding her coreligionists’ behavior, firing back that “We know that there could be tens, if not hundreds of thousands” of cases where Poles saved Jews.
Her statements were part of “an anti-Polish narrative,” he said, as blame for the murder of Polish Jewry rested squarely on Germany.
The Nazis held Poland in their totalitarian grip for over five years.
Education Minister Przemysław Czarnek threatened to defund Engelking’s institute, saying, “I will not finance an institute that maintains the kind of people who simply insult Poles.”
Poles “were the greatest allies of the Jews, and if it had not been for the Poles, many Jews would have died, many more than were killed in the Holocaust,” he claimed.
Of the 3.3 million Jews who lived in pre-War Poland, only 380,000 survived, according to Yad Vashem’s research.
The state broadcasting authority jumped into the act as well, opening legal proceedings against TVN, because “if the guest on a program is lying, the journalist must tell viewers that it is a lie.” TVN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered in New York.
Morawiecki and his nationalist Law and Justice Party made a point of passing a law in 2018 that prescribes criminal proceedings for individuals or organizations who allegedly defame the “Polish nation” by assigning guilt or complicity to Poles for Holocaust crimes committed on Polish soil.
It was widely condemned at the time as an attempt to portray Poles solely as Nazi victims and whitewash the role so many of them played in aiding their oppressors’ mission to wipe out the Jewish people.
While readily acknowledging the heroism of over 7,000 Poles in saving Jews during the Holocaust, who are documented by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, the Israeli government also saw the law as a distortion of the truth. Knesset members across the political spectrum called it an attempt to deny the Holocaust, and tensions arose between the countries’ administrations.
The post Hundreds of groups, academics defend Polish Holocaust historian from gov’t attack appeared first on World Israel News.
In her three years of service in the New Delhi embassy, Hodaya Avzada met many who compared Israel favorably to themselves.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Many Indian Hindus identify closely with Israel even though there are so many differences between the tiny Jewish nation and the huge south-east Asian country, an Israeli diplomat who spent three years in the country said Sunday, according to The Jewish Chronicle (JC).
Hodaya Avzada, who had been posted to the Indian capital for three years before being transferred recently to serve as a first secretary in Israel’s London embassy, told British supporters of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology that Hinduism is a religion, but also, “in a lot of ways is a national feeling” and an “identity.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which has led India since 2014, is an unabashedly Hindu nationalist party.
Although Hindus are a majority in India, Avzada told her audience that “they feel like they have to protect Hinduism” not only in their country, but throughout the region, “where they are in small numbers — Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, some in Pakistan,” the JC reported.
This could be comparable to Israeli governments continually speaking up for and helping Jews around the world, and not only Israeli citizens. Israel provides emissaries to Jewish communities in order to strengthen Jewish education and a relationship with Israel, gives security advice to Jewish institutions, demands action against antisemitism at the highest levels of government, and helps their coreligionists physically. For example, the IDF sent its rescue unit two years ago to Surfside, Florida, when a condominium filled with Jews suddenly collapsed one night, to try and find survivors in the wreckage.
The Jewish identity of the country is also a subject that raises heated emotions, with much of the current controversy over judicial reform revolving around the alleged dichotomy of being both a Jewish and a democratic state.
“They look up to us in so many ways,” the diplomat said, noting that “Israel was a country created from nothing, had no natural resources, no nothing, and then became this regional superpower.”
Over recent decades, India’s economic growth has exploded, with per capita earnings leaping seven-fold over the last 30 years as it becomes a high-tech nation. According to the International Monetary Fund, it is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
“Security-wise, Israel’s experience also speaks to India,” she noted, “because India also has security threats around it, and Israel is of course well-known for its defense forces.”
Jerusalem and New Delhi share close defense ties, with joint military drills, intelligence sharing and numerous deals that provide over $1 billion in Israeli military equipment to the sub-continent. There are also joint research and development projects in numerous areas, including cybersecurity, water conservation and agriculture as well as weaponry.
Avzada enjoyed her very first posting, having come from a job in the Bank of Israel to the diplomatic corps. “Being an Israeli in India is amazing. Being an Israeli diplomat in India is outstanding,” she told her audience.
Similarly, in an interview on the British evangelist Revelation TV last month, she said of her time in New Delhi, “Being an Israeli in India is a very unique experience, because there’s such a love towards Israel, and we sense that.”
The post Israeli diplomat says Indian Hindus identify closely with Jews and Israel appeared first on World Israel News.
No, this didn’t happen in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia – but in New York City’s Times Square on April 29, 2023.
No it’s not Afghanistan ,Pakistani nor Saudi Arabia but it’s Times Square, New York.
— Azzat Alsaleem (@AzzatAlsaalem) April 29, 2023
The post WATCH: This happened in Times Square, New York City appeared first on World Israel News.
Pyper Midkiff, a 12-year-old soccer player from Arizona, is hospitalized after suffering a cardiac arrest on April 27 during practice. She collapsed suddenly and has been in the hospital ever since, yet her story has sparked a massive outpouring of love and support from the soccer community, both in the Valley and across the nation.
Her father, Matt Midkiff, a physical therapist and soccer coach of 28 years, commented that this kind of event is completely unexpected, especially with a seemingly healthy 12-year-old like Pyper. He expressed his shock at the situation but was comforted by the tremendous support they have received over the last 72 hours.
The family was relieved to hear that 24 hours after the cardiac arrest, Pyper woke up for the first time. Treatment is ongoing, and she is currently undergoing a cooling study to protect her heart, liver, brain, and kidney function from tissue damage. She is expected to be at the Phoenix Children’s Hospital for weeks as she continues to recover.
Doctors are still performing tests to identify the cause of Pyper’s cardiac arrest. However, it is not unheard of for such an event to occur in a young person. Immediate response and CPR are key in this situation, and luckily Pyper’s coach, an ICU nurse, acted quickly to deliver CPR.
The family is grateful for the waves of love they have been receiving, and they believe it has been instrumental in Pyper’s recovery. Matt Midkiff said that his family had experienced lifetimes of love in two and a half days. Pyper’s story serves as an important reminder of the fragility of life, the power of support and love, and the importance of being prepared for medical emergencies.
Candace Chapman Scott, a 36-year-old former mortuary worker from Arkansas, is accused of a “shocking and depraved” crime: selling body parts from medical school remains to a man she met through a Facebook group for $11,000. Scott pleaded not guilty to 12 charges in the case, including mail fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Prosecutors are asking the court to keep Scott in custody before her trial; they cite the egregious nature of the accusations as cause to keep her behind bars. Scott allegedly sold the man 20 boxes of body parts – which included, per the indictment, fetuses, brains, hearts, lungs, genitalia, and large pieces of skin – and received PayPal transfers of $1,600 per transaction for a total of $10,975.
The man accused of purchasing the remains, Jeremy Lee Pauley, is facing charges in Pennsylvania for abuse of a corpse, receiving stolen property, and dealing in proceeds of unlawful activities.
Scott was employed at Arkansas Central Mortuary Services, a funeral home that sends cadavers to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock for medical students to examine. Allegedly, in October 2021, Scott began offering Pauley remains that the mortuary was responsible for cremating.
Leslie Taylor, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences spokeswoman, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that university officials have yet to be informed whether any remains were identified. Because embalming damages DNA, identification is difficult. According to Taylor, the medical school still contracts with Arkansas Central Mortuary Services.