Ecuador Toes the U.S. Company Line in Palestine
This is a timely article from The Intercept that weaves together a couple threads we’ve been pulling lately. Ecuador, under the leadership of increasingly conservative Daniel Noboa, has a prime seat on the 15 member UN Security Council this year and has signaled through diplomatic cables that it is in agreement with the United States that there should be no pathway to Palestinian statehood. This is complicated by Ecuador’s recent storming of the Mexican embassy, which the U.S. had to condemn publicly while covertly coordinating on Palestine. What a tangled web we weave.
“A second cable dated April 13 sent from the U.S. Embassy in Quito, Ecuador, relays Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Gabriela Sommerfeld’s agreement with the United States that Palestine should not be recognized for statehood. In cooperation with the United States, according to the cable, Sommerfeld instructed Ecuador’s permanent representative to the United Nations José De La Gasca to lobby Japan, Korea, and Malta (all rotating members of the Security Council) to reject the proposal. Lobbying of permanent member France is also mentioned.”
The Intercept: Leaked Cables Show White House Opposes Palestinian Statehood
Arizona Is Ground Zero for the Libertarian Education Ideology
One of my treats to myself this year was a subscription to The Baffler. They tell stories the good old fashioned way. A proper narrative lede to draw you in, central characters that move the story along and genuine reporting to support it all. Arizona is in the news lately for revitalizing an abortion ban that was passed before Arizona was even a state. This article steps back to look at how the education system has been the proving ground (K-12 and University) for the most extreme neoliberal blueprint to simultaneously rip apart the public education system and infuse it from the bottom up and top down with radical conservative ideas.
From the article:
“Boyes said that Arizona’s freedom schools would achieve optimal long-term impact if the centers could open both K-12 and university education to a ‘free-market approach’—in his words—and ‘get rid of the public education, create private education as a replacement, and have a market for education.’ In this radically different vision of a future United States, most families would not be able to send their kids to school because there wouldn’t be a free public education system to receive them. But in the interim, Boyes suggested, the government did have a role to play during a transition period to “private for-profit” schools: ‘The state would continue to provide funds at a declining rate for a short period of time.’”
The Baffler: Raising Arizona: The Koch network’s war on education goes west
How the 32-Hour Workweek Became a Talking Point
Fewer members doesn’t mean less of an impact. That’s one of the lessons we learned from Shawn Fain’s approach to leading the UAW. We can debate tactics and outcomes but there’s no question that Fain and others like Christian Smalls were able to put labor center stage in the last couple of years in a profound way. One of the surprising corollaries has been the normalization of the 32-hour workweek in the conversation about worker’s rights, artificial intelligence and the future of industrialization.
From the article:
“‘It really made people reflect on what’s important in life,’ Fain told me in January. Workers were deciding, he said, that working 12-hour days, seven days a week, cobbling together multiple jobs to scrape by ‘is not a life.’ And so the shorter hours demand made its way from grumbling workers to the UAW’s strike demands to major headlines. It was ‘like a bolt out of nowhere,’ said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist of work at Boston College who has researched and advocated for shorter hours for decades. ‘It legitimated [the demand] hugely.’ Suddenly, New York Times editorial board member Binyamin Appelbaum was endorsing the call and urging President Joe Biden to act on it for workers across industries. ‘Americans spend too much time on the job,’ Appelbaum wrote. ‘A shorter workweek would be better for our health, better for our families and better for our employers.’”
In These Times: A 32-Hour Workweek Is Ours for the Taking
