PLEDGE: Show Solidarity with Uber, Lyft & All Gig Economy Workers!

On Wednesday May 8, Uber and Lyft drivers will conduct a one day strike in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and other cities. May 8 is also the day that Uber, a multibillion dollar global company with nearly 25,000 workers around the world, will be selling stocks on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time.

The International Workers Solidarity Network is issuing this urgent call to pledge to take action in solidarity with these workers!

They are demanding increased pay, basic benefits, decision-making transparency, and a greater voice for drivers. These poorly paid and mistreated workers are on the cutting edge of the gig economy. Showing solidarity with them is showing solidarity with all workers!

Tell the billionaire owners of Uber and Lyft that they cannot get even richer on stocks while drivers are underpaid, overworked and voiceless.

SIGN THE SOLIDARITY PLEDGE

• On May 8, do not use Uber or Lyft and turn the app off in solidarity with striking workers.
• If an action is planned in your city, be on the picket lines with Uber and Lyft workers.
• If there is not an action planned in your city, show your solidarity by:
  • organizing a demonstration or picket at a public and visible location;
  • distributing fliers and other informational material at grocery stores, transit hubs, and other locations where workers gather;
  • or by organizing other creative actions, no matter how modest or small in numbers, to spread the word about the courageous action these workers are taking to fightback

Let us know what you have planned by emailing info@workersolidarity.net so we can help to spread the word.

via ALERT: Uber & Lyft Drivers Set to Strike – Take Action in Solidarity! — Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement

26 April 2019 | KATIE BO WILLIAMS | Defense One

This is historic. The House Rules Committee just announced it will be holding the first-ever hearing on Medicare for All this Tuesday, April 30th, at 10 AM. Action – Activate other legislators, including ours! Watch this amazing short documentary on health insurance – it’s not just about patient bankruptcies, but on how our current system affects our businesses, our schools, our essential services like police and fire, our doctors, our economy, our deficit, our tax bills, our infrastructure and our environment.

via Mon 4/29: April 30th – House Rules Committee – 1st hearing on Medicare for All. How you can help… Part 2 — INDIVISIBLE VENTURA

Pakistan’s enigmatic Prime Minister Imran Khan, charismatic and outspoken, has, it seems, tasked himself with rewriting the rule book on relations inside the Islamic world.

His trips to Saudi Arabia and now Iran confuse watchers and pundits. With $20 billion in Saudi financial backing on the table for Pakistan, money needed since Trump cut off military aid, Khan’s subsequent visit to Iran is seemingly inexplicable.

This is unless Khan has a broader agenda, a balancing act between India, China, Russia and America, while remaining on needed good terms with both Iran and Saudi Arabia.

To accomplish this, a number of Pakistan’s vulnerabilities will have to be minimized. A relationship with Russia, meaning a face-to-face between Khan and Putin will be key.

Behind the scenes, Russia’s need to reenlist India in the SU57 5th generation fighter program, which Turkey may also be joining, puts Russia into a balancing act as well. The real issue, however, may well hinge on Baluchistan.

Baluchistan, Pakistan’s most remote governate, is a key staging ground for destabilization efforts against, not just Iran but Pakistan as well. Broad accusations have been floated that the US, along with India and Israel, are arming, funding and even advising separatists groups such as Jundallah and its various offshoots, inside both Pakistan and Iran.

In 2005, the Bush administration asked the FBI to investigate charges that the CIA has involved itself in a “private enterprise” there, aided by Israel’s Mossad and India’s RAW. A report was written, “no collusion.”

The truth, however, as is almost always the case, was utterly different. By 2008, our sources, including private military contractors working illegally in Baluchistan, told us that an airfield north of Gwadar was a major distribution center for, originally opium and by that time processed heroin.

In general, we were able to discern that the region was awash with mischief, a meeting ground for the CIA/USAID, MI 6 and two proxy wars, one against Iran, the other against Pakistan.

Similar operations against Pakistan were being staged from within Afghanistan where training centers near the Pakistan border, run by RAW personnel existed openly with the tacit approval of both Kabul and Washington. As late as 2016, Pakistan asked for US help in stemming attacks that have thus far killed over 50,000 in Pakistan […]

via The Dilemma of Imran Khan — Astute News

via Retail Apocalypse: Rate Of Store Closures Accelerates After Already Hitting RECORD HIGHS — Nwo Report

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

25 April 2019 |  Colin Lecher | The Verge

Amazon’s fulfillment centers are the engine of the company — massive warehouses where workers track, pack, sort, and shuffle each order before sending it on its way to the buyer’s door.

Critics say those fulfillment center workers face strenuous conditions: workers are pressed to “make rate,” with some packing hundreds of boxes per hour, and losing their job if they don’t move fast enough. “You’ve always got somebody right behind you who’s ready to take your job,” says Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a prominent Amazon critic.

Documents obtained by The Verge show those productivity firings are far more common than outsiders realize. In a signed letter last year, an attorney representing Amazon said the company fired “hundreds” of employees at a single facility between August of 2017 and September 2018 for failing to meet productivity quotas. A spokesperson for the company said that, over that time, roughly 300 full-time associates were terminated for inefficiency.

The number represents a substantial portion of the facility’s workers: a spokesperson said the named fulfillment center in Baltimore includes about 2,500 full-time employees today.

Assuming a steady rate, that would mean Amazon was firing more than 10 percent of its staff annually, solely for productivity reasons. The numbers are even more staggering in North America as a whole. Amazon operates more than 75 fulfillment centers with more than 125,000 full-time employees, suggesting thousands lose their jobs with the company annually for failing to move packages quickly enough [. . .]

via Amazon’s self-fulfillment center fired “hundreds” for failing to meet productivity quotas — Hawkins Bay Dispatch

AP tells us:

“Amazon, which hooked shoppers on getting just about anything delivered in two days, announced Thursday that it will soon promise one-day delivery for its U.S. Prime members on most items.

“The company hopes that cutting delivery times in half will make its $119-a year Prime membership more attractive, since every other online store offers free deliveries in two days. Amazon also can’t compete with Walmart and Target, where ordering online and picking up at a store is becoming more popular with shoppers.”

Which makes me wonder how much worse the Amazon warehouse worker is gonna have it.

Wait, what’s that you say?

“Critics say those fulfillment center workers face strenuous conditions: workers are pressed to “make rate,” with some packing hundreds of boxes per hour, and losing their job if they don’t move fast enough. “You’ve always got somebody right behind you who’s ready to take your job,” says Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and a prominent Amazon critic.

“Documents obtained by The Verge show those productivity firings are far more common than outsiders realize. In a signed letter last year, an attorney representing Amazon said the company fired “hundreds” of employees at a single facility between August of 2017 and September 2018 for failing to meet productivity quotas. A spokesperson for the company said that, over that time, roughly 300 full-time associates were terminated for inefficiency…

“…The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” according to the letter, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.” (Amazon says supervisors are able to override the process.)”

There is almost nothing positive I can say about Amazon. Just the way Walmart ruined local, main street, Mom & Pop commerce, Amazon is wrecking everything else in retail. I get it that in the rural outposts of the Empire, sometimes there is no other option; hell, even here in downtown Seattle there is no other option than Amazon, and it makes me furious.

But imagine being fired by an algorithm because another algorithm says you are not fast enough? Aside from Comrade Trump, who amongst us really wants automated firing? Is having your singing fish a day earlier worth this dystopian version of Workers Paradise #3?

via Amazon To Automate Everything, Including Firing Workers — Mock Paper Scissors

  By Bruce C.T. Wright

At least nine people who were arrested by a Dallas police officer who was eventually accused of murdering a man in his own home have had their cases dismissed, according to a new report. The development could be damning for Amber Guyger, the now-former cop who was indicted for breaking into the home of Botham Shem Jean before shooting him to death.

All of the dismissed cases originated before Guyger killed Botham Jean, a 26-year-old native of St. Lucia who was simply home watching TV when the off-duty officer illegally entered and killed him under the implausible excuse that she thought he was burglarizing her own apartment. Citing court documents, the Dallas News reported that “Dallas County prosecutors in one case wrote that they were seeking the dismissal because the fired officer was ‘indicted for murdering an innocent man in his own home.’”

If prosecutors were going so far as to dismiss cases that Guyger brought in, that could indicate how strongly they feel their case against the former cop is. The implication was that prosecutors were so confident they can secure Guyger’s conviction that they were already getting ahead of any potential wrongful arrest lawsuits that could be initiated once the former cop is found guilty.

Guyger’s defense attorneys, on the other hand, may not be nearly as confident as their prosecutorial counterparts of their latest move was any indication. Her murder trial was initially slated to begin in August before it was pushed back until late September, more than a year after Guyger killed Jean.

There were also reports that Guyger, who has been out on bail since her indictment in December, may have violated the terms of her conditional release by living her best life and vacationing on a Caribbean cruise, which was subpoenaed for its records last month. In addition to possibly showing Guyger violated her bail, the subpoena could allow prosecutors to portray her as a carefree vacationer following what appeared to be a cold-blooded murder of an innocent man […]

via People Arrested By The Trigger-Happy Amber Guyger Are Having Their Cases Dismissed — News One

The April 16 arrest of Julian Assange has resurrected the narrative that emails stored on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were not hacked by Russia, but leaked by a disenchanted employee, Seth Rich, who wanted to expose how Bernie Sanders was systematically undermined during the 2016 primaries by the DNC. According to this narrative, Rich communicated with Assange and handed over the DNC emails through Wikileaks’ secure online drop box.

Assange first stated in a June 12, 2016, interview that Wikileaks had more of the missing emails from Hillary Clinton’s private email server during her time as Secretary of State: “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct.”

Two days later, the computer security company “Crowdstrike” published a report that the DNC email servers had been hacked by Russia. The mainstream media quickly embraced the Russia hacking narrative to explain why Clinton and DNC emails were in the hands of Wikileaks.

Here’s what the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima had to say on June 14, 2016:

Russian government hackers penetrated the computer network of the Democratic National Committee and gained access to the entire database of opposition research on GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, according to committee officials and security experts who responded to the breach.

However, multiple sources pointed out major problems with Crowdstrike as a competent and impartial investigator into the alleged Russian hacking:

The Nakamura [Nakashima] piece marked the first salvo in the Russian hacking meme. But the claim was not backed up by independently verified forensic evidence—it rested solely on the conclusions of a computer security company—Crowdstrike. The pro-Ukrainian politics of Crowdstrike’s founder, Dmitri Alperovitch, and his strident opposition to Russia cast a pall of bias over the findings of Crowdstrike. No U.S. Federal Law Enforcement official or agency was given access to the DNC servers. Neither the FBI nor Homeland Security were permitted to examine the servers and the alleged evidence of a hack.

In his 2019 best-selling book, Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump, Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service officer, detailed the multiple flaws in the Crowdstrike investigation and the puzzling decision to deny the FBI access to the allegedly hacked DNC email server.

Almost a month after Assange’s interview that Wikileaks had more Clinton emails and was vetting them for eventual release, Rich was murdered on July 10, 2016, in very strange circumstances. Nearly two weeks later, on July 22, Wikileaks dumped 20,000 DNC emails on its website.

A July 25, 2016, story published in Vox by Timothy Lee covered the Wikileaks DNC dump and found that many showed the DNC favored the Clinton campaign over Bernie Sanders. In November 2017, Donna Brazile, the former chair of the DNC, confirmed that the DNC had systematically supported Clinton over Sanders. Brazile’s admission provides a solid foundation for understanding what motivated Rich to leak to DNC emails to Wikileaks in the first place.

In an August 2016 Dutch television interview, Assange firmly hinted that Rich’s murder was related to his leaking of DNC emails to Wikileaks:

Assange: Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often significant risks. There was a 27-year old that works for the DNC who was shot in the back… murdered.. for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.

Host: That was just a robbery wasn’t it?

Assange: No. There’s no finding.

Host: What are you suggesting?

Assange: I am suggesting that our sources take risks and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.

Wikileaks then offered a $20,000  reward for information leading to the conviction of those responsible, fueling the rumors that Rich was Wikileaks source.

Those who claimed that Rich was responsible for the release of the DNC emails were vilified and forced to backtrack on their claims. Here’s how Wikipedia summarized the situation:

Fact-checking websites like PolitiFact.com,^[5][8] Snopes.com,^[9] and FactCheck.org stated that these theories were false and unfounded.^[4] The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post wrote that the promotion of these conspiracy theories was an example of fake news.^[10][11][12]

Influential figures such as Fox News and Sean Hannity were forced through litigation to abandon their investigations into Rich’s murder due to his parents leading the charge condemning “conspiracy theories”.

Rich’s parents condemned the conspiracy theorists and said that these individuals were exploiting their son’s death for political gain, and their spokesperson called the conspiracy theorists “disgusting sociopaths”.

A story published by two Fox News reporters, Malia Zimmerman and Ed Butowsky, in May 2017 was subsequently pulled from the news site and Hannity also stopped covering the story.

Even Bongino’s book, Spygate, failed to mention the Rich connection and what this meant to the whole Russia hacking narrative, which he uncritically endorsed as valid.

After Fox News reporters and Hannity suspended their investigations into Rich leaking the DNC emails, only alternative news sources were willing to investigate the available evidence. Most prominent among them was National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower, William Binney, who was among the first to conclude that Rich was responsible for the leaking and that Russia was being framed by the Deep State.

Binney, a former Technical Director at the NSA, together with Ray McGovern, a 27 year CIA analyst, wrote on September 20, 2017:

We stand by our main conclusion that the data from the intrusion of July 5, 2016, into the Democratic National Committee’s computers, an intrusion blamed on “Russian hacking,” was not a hack but rather a download/copy onto an external storage device by someone with physical access to the DNC.

After Q Anon publicly emerged in late October 2017, Seth Rich was soon mentioned in several posts alluding to his role as the true source for the Wikileaks DNC email leaks, and that he was murdered as a result by hitmen tied to the MS-13 criminal gang and the Clintons.

The alternative news investigation into Rich’s role in leaking the DNC emails subsequently languished but gained renewed life a year later on October 4, 2018, when the NSA responded to a Freedom of Information request that showed Rich had indeed been communicating with Assange. In their response to a FOIA request filed by attorney Ty Clevenger about information concerning Seth Rich and Julian Assange, the NSA wrote:

Your request has been processed under the provisions of the FOIA. Fifteen documents (32 pages) responsive to your request have been reviewed by this Agency as required by the FOIA and have found to be currently and properly classified in accordance with Executive Order 13526. These documents meet the criteria for classification as set forth in Subparagraph © of Section 1.4 and remains classified TOP SECRET and SECRET.

Since the FOIA request and the NSA response were not released, the NSA’s startling admission received no attention by the mainstream media, and only a few alternative media sources picked up the story. One of these was an April 19, 2019, article by Mark McCarty who cited a blog post published six months earlier (October 23, 2018) that first discussed the NSA FOIA response.

McCarty raised important questions over the precise language used in Clevenger’s FOIA request and what this meant in terms of documents being withheld. In his April 19, 2019, article he pointed out that many of these questions were resolved by Binney in an April 17 interview:

“Ty Clevenger has FOIAed information from NSA asking for any data that involved both Seth Rich and also Julian Assange.

And they responded by saying we’ve got 15 files, 32 pages, but they’re all classified in accordance with executive order 13526 covering classification, and therefore you can’t have them.

That says that NSA has records of communications between Seth Rich and Julian Assange. I mean, that’s the only business that NSA is in — copying communications between people and devices” […]

via Assange Expected to confirm Wikileaks source of DNC Emails was Seth Rich not Russians —

Special report

[UPDATE. WEDNESDAY APRIL 24 2019. FOLLOWING WIDESPREAD GRASSROOTS DISQUIET OVER THE XR BUSINESS WEBSITE, IT HAS BEEN TAKEN DOWN. WHAT THIS MEANS FOR XR AND ITS POSITION ON CAPITALISM IS NOT YET CLEAR. WE WILL PUBLISH FURTHER REPORTS AS INFORMATION COMES IN]

When Extinction Rebellion first burst into action in the UK last November, it felt as if something was finally going to change.

Their high-profile arrival on the political scene had a noticeable effect on awareness of environmental issues and gave people permission to speak more freely than before about our society and its relationship to nature.

Yes, there were many criticisms of XR tactics and language from the likes of the new Green Anti-Capitalist Front and activist Emily Apple.

But when this month’s big week of action in London got underway, with Waterloo Bridge and Oxford Circus blocked and Marble Arch occupied, it felt as if something important and radical was happening.

And perhaps it was, because, presumably, the vast majority of those who turned out, including the nearly 1,000 who were arrested, genuinely believe that our civilization needs to change course if life on this earth is to survive.

But the integrity of XR as an organisation was dealt a fatal blow on Easter Monday, when its Twitter account started plugging links to a new website called XR Business, which had been announced in a letter to The Times.

Among the signatories was Gail Bradbrook, director and shareholder of Compassionate Revolution Ltd and Holding Group member of XR. This is just not some separate support group, but an intrinsic part of the XR apparatus.

The very existence of the site was bad enough, but the home page was (and is) hideous. A corporate satellite view of Europe lit up like a Christmas tree. What sort of environmental movement would choose such imagery?

We should have seen this coming. We had, after all, already read investigative journalist Cory Morningstar’s excellent digging into the “climate change” industry on her Wrong Kind of Green blog.

But somehow we wanted to give XR the benefit of the doubt and even naively plugged the London protests in our last bulletin.

The XR Business site, however, is a declaration of Rebellion Extinction. This is now officially an ex-Rebellion, shorn of all pretence of radicalism.

Instead, what we find is a list of “business leaders” who have identified environmental catastrophe as yet another get-rich opportunity.

And they are prepared to hijack and exploit people’s real love for life and nature in order to push their profiteering agenda.

First name on the list of these so-called “leaders” is Seb Beloe, partner at WHEB. WHEB describes itself as “a positive impact investor focused on the opportunities created by the transition to a low carbon and sustainable global economy”.

It adds: “We focus on nine sustainable investment themes with strong growth characteristics, derived from providing solutions to major social and environmental challenges”.

On a page headed “thought leadership” WHEB announces that it is “actively involved” in organisations “at the leading edge of sustainable and responsible investment”.

These include the Global Impact Investing Network, which explains in turn on its website that it brings together “impact investors and intermediaries who have the capacity to invest and intervene at scale, making multi-million dollar investments and aggregating funds large enough to access institutional capital” […]

via Rebellion Extinction: a capitalist scam to hijack our resistance