afellowkid

Is it by adding "Library:" into the title of a new article? Or is there some other specific way of categorizing it to make it appear in the library?

Part 1: NATO failed in Ukraine against Russia. Now it's targeting China (Youtube/Invidious)

Part 2: Anti-China hawks' drive to expand NATO into Asia may destroy Western military alliance (Youtube/Invidious)

Personally I found some of Escobar's comments in part 2, around @8:03 regarding DPRK to be pretty interesting. He talks about how although the Western media focuses on the military aspect of relations between Russia and DPRK, that recently, signs are showing of Russia's intention to help with getting DPRK re-integrated into international trade and especially his comments in regard to building a trans-Korean railway to link with the trans-Siberian railway and how this topic is likely to come up on the next Eastern Economic forum in September. (This railway concept isn't a new one, but I found his comments about recent events interesting) as well as potential inclusion in other trade deals/organizations, etc.

Anyway, just sharing these. They cover a lot of topics in this discussion.

Excerpts:

In 1922, only one American in ten owned an automobile. (Everyone else used rail.) At that time Alfred P. Sloan (President, General Motors) said, 'Wait a minute, this is a great opportunity. We've got 90 percent of the market out there that we can somehow turn into automobile users. If we can eliminate the rail alternatives, we will create a new market for our cars. And if we don't, then General Motors' sales are just going to remain level.'

Sloan wanted to get in very big in this field. What he bought was phenomenal: the largest bus-operating company in the country and the largest bus-production company. And using that as a foothold, GM moved into Manhattan. They acquired interests in the New York railways and between 1926 and '36 they methodically destroyed the rails.

When they finally motorized New York, General Motors issued ads throughout the country [...] trying to show that motorization is the wave of the future. They issued these ads and they said, `The motorization of 4th and Madison is the most important event in the history of community transportation.'

GM worked hard to create the impression of a nationwide trend away from rail. But there was no trend. Buses were a tough sell. They jolted. They smelled. They inched through traffic. City by city, it took the hidden hand of General Motors to replace streetcars with Yellow Coach buses.

In 1936, a company was founded that would grow to dominate American city transportation. National City Lines had no visible connection to General Motors. In fact, the director of operations came from a GM subsidiary, Yellow Coach, and members of the Board of Directors came from Greyhound, which was founded and controlled by General Motors.

Over the next few years, Standard Oil of California, Mack Truck, Phillips Petroleum and Firestone Tire would join GM in backing this venture.

"They don't take the service out, they just cut it back. They'll take and cut it from 10 minutes to 12 minutes, from 12 to 15, from 15 to 20, from 20 to 30. So they reduce the service. And every time you reduce the service you make it less attractive. And the less attractive the fewer riders. And then they say, `Well see, we can't make any money.' So they abandon it."

Narrator: Edwin Quinby was a rail buff with a talent for financial sleuthing. In 1946, he mailed a warning to influential people in hundreds of cities across the country. His 33-page broadside was filled with surprisingly detailed research. It brought to light what GM had worked hard to hide.

Edwin Quinby (voice over): "The plan is to destroy public utilities, which you'll find impractical to replace after you discover your mistake. Who are the corporations behind this? Why are they permitted to destroy valuable electric railways?"

Mass Transportation Magazine (voice over): "Queer Case of Quinby, by Ross Schram. Edwin J. Quinby took full advantage of the great American privilege of the free press to feed the lunatic fringe of radicals and crackpots springing up like weeds in the United States today."

National City Lines, General Motors and the other defendants were found guilty of conspiracy to monopolize the local transportation field.

"These companies, that had probably eliminated systems that in order to reconstitute today [1996] would require maybe $300 billion, these companies were individually fined $5,000."

Narrator: The Justice Department would spend the next 25 years trying to limit GM's influence on transportation. It would begin three major investigations into monopoly practices: two were settled out of court; one was eventually dropped. An effective way to rein in GM was never found.

From "Alternative Views" TV program

"Americans go to Nicaragua, they're welcome there, they go by the dozens of thousands to witness, to document these things. Eight thousand people killed, all civilians, killed. Mostly women and children. And this is a deliberate technique of the CIA, it's part of crippling a country, it's part of forcing it, traumatizing it, paralyzing it, until it grinds to a halt, until you've broken it completely, and then, as Reagan would dream, you can put in the marines eventually, and people will welcome the marines as they hand out care packages from their trucks because they're so crushed and so desperate that anything would make them feel better."

"They're trying to create conditions in Nicaragua, they have in northern Nicaragua for five years, where the farmer can't get his produce to market, where children can't go to school, where the government administration of the country grinds to a halt, where hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people where international capital is is scared off, as john was saying so very very well. the techniques are raw terrorism."

"The CIA today is running 50 covert actions, this came out in one of the oversight committee's debates, destabilizing almost one-third of the countries in the world today. That cannot make this world a calmer more peaceful safer place for anybody to live in it. Nicaragua's only the most famous one."

"The Sandinistas searched for an independent position in foreign relations and pluralism at home. They sought to break their economic dependency on north American markets and US transnational corporations, despite tremendous obstacles such goals have been achieved though to varying degrees. Campaigns in health and literacy carried out with enthusiastic popular support have won international praise. A unique land reform plan was developed and implemented winning support even from the US agency for international development in 1981, and elections were held last November. But the heavy weight of external aggression has taken its toll. the country is now focusing much of its energies on defense in order to defeat the Contras."

"By 1984 the united states congress had begun to grow weary of supporting the Contras. Thousands of civilians had been killed and the contras were going nowhere there were the reports of the CIA mining of Nicaragua's harbors and a CIA printed manual containing instructions in assassination and terrorism was revealed. Congressional leaders began to feel that the CIA had gone astray and aid to the Contras was temporarily halted by Congress. However, Contra aid continued to flow from unofficial sources."

"What we've been able to tell there's three routes--first of all, during the time when the countries were getting the official government pay from the united states, it was vastly in excess of the amount of money that had been appropriated--but the three routes, that have since been supposedly shut off, appear to be: One, selling American military equipment at fire sale prices, at unbelievably cheap prices to shell companies that turn out to be companies that are owned by the CIA, which in turn then give it to the Congress. That's one way. The second way is laundering the money through El Salvador, Honduras, and Israel, as we reported in the New York Times about on January 12th. The third way is leaving enormous amounts of military supplies around in Honduras after these incredible war games and then everybody goes out for a beer and the Contras come in and load up a few trucks and drive away and nobody saw it happen."

ABSTRACT: Neoliberal processes take place in rapid compromises with political sovereignties of nations. The only unsovereign political space where neoliberalism is practiced today is Palestine, particularly in the West Bank, since the Oslo peace process. The portrayal of Islam in a certain light is essential to the success of neoliberal practices in the region. In line with this, Israel’s official 2007 campaign, “Brand Israel,” saw millions of dollars spent for this propaganda. One of the central points is “pink-washing” where Israel portrays itself as a haven for homosexuals while deliberately glossing over its occupation of Palestine. Israeli occupation does not distinguish between queer and straight. This phenomenon of employing gay rights as political strategy, and in this case anchored in Islamophobia, is termed by theorist Jasbir Puar as “homonationalism.” Gender is clearly an organising principle of Israeli re-pression and what needs to be looked at is whether gender is also an organising principle of Palestinian resistance. The Palestinian queer movement is deeply embedded in anti-pinkwashing activism and differentiates itself from Western notions of queerness. This article applies these crucial understandings to the current context of Palestine because it is a predominantly vibrant, contemporary site.

Excerpt regarding Palestinian queer movement:

Anti-pinkwashing and queer rights activism has been picking up tremendously in recent years. In 2019, a Palestinian teen was severely stabbed near Tel Aviv (a gay haven according to the “Brand Israel” campaign), allegedly by his own brother based on perceived sexual and gender identity. This snowballed into unprecedented protest actions across Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Israel (Ziv, 2019). This was also the first time there was widespread reporting by the media on an incident of violence against the queer community in Palestine. A statement by Al Qaws, the organisation at the heart of the move-ment that followed, read: "This attack exposed how complicit our society is in covering up and legitimizing violence against LGBTQ people. Furthermore, this crime and the subsequent social reaction reemphasizes how much the violence against LGBTQ people in Palestine can-not be divorced from violence against women or ongoing colonial violence including Pinkwashing." (Al Qaws, 2019) A rallying point in this movement was seen in placards with slogans calling for the freedom of Palestinian queers to not align with their occupiers, as collectively building a gender- and sexuality-diverse civil society was the only solution. This was a watershed moment in the Palestinian queer movement as it saw very public protest actions that continued for several days, assertively calling for a resilient struggle for a free Palestine for all.

In the five years between January 2015 and January 2020, drone strikes killed 909 Afghan civilians, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Through interviews with victims, civilians who were mistakenly targeted, a former U.S. drone operator and independent investigators, "Remote Killing" exposes the numerous human tragedies caused by these unmanned but ruthless killers.

Thousands of South Korean unionists and their progressive supporters rallied in downtown Seoul to protest against joint US-South Korea war games planned for later this month.

The drills will be the largest in years, and follow the May election of President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has promised to take a hardline with North Korea. Union leaders worry about risks.

Oh Eun-Jung, National Teachers Union:

"The threat of nuclear war is growing on the Korean peninsula, conservative forces of Yoon Suk-yeol in South Korea and those in the U.S. are frantically conducting aggressive war drills in the sky, the land, and the sea, and are about to start large-scale military exercises, aimed at the invasion of North Korea. We must stamp out this behavior of anti-reunification forces."

Lee Seung-Woo, Construction worker:

"We not only oppose the war exercises, but we want the U.S. Forces Korea, which is actually controlling and interfering with the Korean peninsula to leave this land. We believe that only then will the eighty million Koreans from both North and South be able to live peacefully."

CGTN footage of protest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOfwt9BsriU

Press TV footage and article:

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/08/13/687322/South-Korean-unionists-protest-US-South-Korea-war-games

Edit: https://www.chosun.com/national/labor/2022/08/16/6N7F5YEK3VCGBJ4SFKZLKYGO5I/

This article is in Korean. Here is a machine-translated excerpt:

A YouTube video of the Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), which contains the activities of the Unification Vanguard, is also controversial. The 2-minute and 58-second video released by the Federation of Trade Unions includes a song called [Anti-U.S. Anti-War Song] by a folk song group called '[Our Country]' as the background music. '[Our Country]' is a songbook known for its NL (National Liberation) tendency, and "The reality of the US Empire has been revealed. The enemy of the people of the world is the US imperialists” “The end of the US imperialists is not far off. Behold, that crazy final blow.” “Look, the burning wave of anti-Americanism. Let's wipe out the U.S. imperialism all over the world" and "The morality of the people in this age is only anti-Americanism" and so on.

The Unification Committee also held a camp called 'Unification School' and lectured on 'The History of America's World Aggression' and 'The Confrontational History of the DPRK-U.S.'. At a rally on the 13th, the KCTU read a solidarity message sent by the Korean Workers' Union, a North Korean workers' organization controlled by the North Korean Workers' Party, at a rally on the 13th. Article 8 of the current National Security Act stipulates that 'a person who contacts a member of an anti-state organization or a person who has received an order through a meeting or communication, etc., shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 10 years'.

Edit 2: The song, Anti-U.S. Anti War, and also it seems this is the video the article mentions

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/321700

In the spring of 1992 documentary filmmaker Dong-won Kim met Cho Chang-son and Kim Seak-hyoung, two North Koreans arrested by South Korean authorities years before. Convicted of spying for the North, they were incarcerated and spent thirty years as political prisoners. These men, and many others like them, underwent conversion schemes in prison that involved torture: those who renounced their communist beliefs were released from prison early. The others, known as "the unconverted," served their full terms. None could return home to the North, however, until the turn of this century, when tensions between North and South eased significantly. Director Dong-won Kim followed these men for ten years, documenting how they survived -both physically and psychologically, the dehumanizing time spent in prison, and their quest, once released, to finally go home.

Some lines appearing in the documentary:

In 1972, there were more than 500 long-term communist prisoners in South Korea. About 350 of them were converted by the conversion scheme. 19 died because of the conversion scheme, 117 died of illness in prison. 102 had been released as unconverts till the end of 1999.

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconverted_long-term_prisoners

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_(film)

Here, nearly everything is shared. There are two community electric cars - donated by the Erssons who no longer have a private car-, shared bicycles (and bike trailers), an extensive fruit orchard, berry and grape patches, and a considerable community garden space. Photovoltaics provide about two-thirds of the energy consumed by the complex. [...] Rents here are lower than the Portland average because the Erssons want Kailash to be accessible to all income levels. There’s a 300-person waitlist, but Ole hopes others will follow their example.

"If you look at it from an economic perspective no business would want a complex landscape like this because it's way too much maintenance, but what you have to do is turn the maintenance over to the residents, and then they do it: they get joy; it's an antidepressant; it's a way of creating food; it's a way of creating community; so you have to do it in a certain way, but it's definitely a lot more work than the typical grass and shrub landscape for sure."

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9204

Additional footage on the [fort] they built and the attack upon it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAPC1wI08IM