Hasbara is a Hebrew word defined by the Israeli government as “public diplomacy” that seeks to “influence the perception of Israel abroad.” Critics like Noam Chomsky, meanwhile, have described hasbara more bluntly as a “sophisticated system of propaganda.” On the internet, hasbara now includes a network of websites and users dedicated to manufacturing pro-Israel posts and manipulating social media platforms to remove content sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2024/04/israels-propaganda-machine-is-filling-the-internet-with-misinformation/

"we must begin to gain control of housing and force its de-commodification. We need to create large funds to acquire said housing and we need to house our own. The management of this housing needs to be self-managed by occupants in a federated system of housing cooperatives. Municipal social housing efforts should wage this fight in tandem."

Second, we must begin to gain control of our employment. There are two main ways to do this — unionization and cooperation.

Resources should be dedicated to both the bottom-up founding of self-managed worker cooperatives as well as the conversion of existing business into self-managed worker cooperatives.

Community defense should be encouraged whenever and wherever possible, with measures taken to limit legal risks to the overall organization. Medic work and survival-based mutual aid are also critical here.

Recruitment efforts must be taken. It’s not enough to only bring in new members to an organization. There must be ongoing engagement. We need mentorship. We need accessibility. We need a formal education program that covers not only theory, but also the practice of participating in our organization and, most especially, in organizing as a general practice.

Restorative Justice. We need a group that dedicates itself to learning this, training others, and establishing best practices.

Finally — and this really is lucky number seven — people need to embrace the social. Have hobbies. Treat people as friends — normal friends — not just “comrades in arms” or potential debate partners or whatever you want to call the current state of Left expectation setting and infighting. Maybe drink a beer once and a while. Play some board games. Do sports. This past Sunday was Easter so, for Christ’s sake, break some bread with comrades. It was also Trans Day of Visibility. Be visible, be a part of your community — your neighborhood, your school, your workplace, etc. — and show kindness even more than militancy. If the people who know you are fond of you, you’re winning half the battle right there.

https://dsa-lsc.org/2024/04/02/democratic-socialists-of-america-and-the-2024-elections-forging-a-new-path/

In 1968, Harold Wilson’s Labour government ended free milk in secondary schools and three years later, Margaret Thatcher, then Conservative Education Secretary, stopped free milk for primary school children, earning her the taunt “Thatcher Thatcher, milk snatcher!”

In 1980, she also abolished the minimum nutritional standards for school meals and the statutory duty of local education authorities to provide a meals service. The standard of school meals fell so dramatically that a 1999 survey found that, despite food rationing, children in the 1940s and 1950s had a better diet than children growing up in the 1990s.

[...]

The current #FeedTheFuture campaign is calling on the government to expand free school meals to 900,000 children in England living in poverty who are not currently eligible. But Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, go further, calling for universal free school meals across England, arguing that just like desks, books and bathrooms, we should give free school food to every child.

The British government could do well to look at countries already providing universal free school meals, including Brazil, India, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and a number of states across the USA, with Kenya and Benin making firm commitments. Indeed, London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, made the news by introducing free school meals to all children in London’s state-funded primary schools. Today, 418 million children receive free school meals worldwide.

https://sussexbylines.co.uk/business/economy/school-meals-an-investment-in-future-health/

- Less than 30% of Democrats emphasized the need for more high-quality jobs.
- Less than 5% campaigned on bold progressive economic policies to help workers, such as raising the minimum wage or a jobs guarantee. Despite polling that demonstrates the popularity of these progressive economic policies across the ideological spectrum, and especially among working-class voters, most Democratic candidates did not focus their campaigns on these issues.

Almost no candidates campaigned on polarizing cultural rhetoric. Despite the popular association of progressive politicians with such causes and slogans, Democratic candidates overwhelmingly avoided defending diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, critical race theory in schools, and the like. They also avoided terms often associated with the party’s progressive wing.

Few candidates campaigned on anti-elite rhetoric. Less than 20% of candidates employed economic populist talking points targeting large corporations, billionaires, or Wall Street price gouging.

Economic populists performed especially well in districts with majority-white, non-college-educated populations and in highly working-class districts. Their average vote shares were, respectively, 12.3 and 6.4 percentage points higher than other candidates’ in such districts. Economic populists also performed better than other candidates in rural and small-town districts, where their average vote share was 4.7 percentage points higher.Despite evidence showing that they are particularly appealing to working-class voters, working-class candidates were vanishingly rare. Only 2.3% of Democratic candidates worked exclusively in blue-collar jobs before entering politics. If we also include pink-collar jobs such as teachers and nurses, this figure is 5.9%.

When they made it to the general election, candidates with working-class experience performed about as well as other candidates. The small group of candidates with primarily working-class occupational backgrounds who made it to the general election performed poorly, largely because almost all competed in deep-red districts.

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/left-populists-working-class-voters/

- focusing on a handful of issues that immediately affect the day-to-day lives of working people — with a particular emphasis on the question of affordable housing.
- Yet rather than just use their platform to highlight a specific set of issues, KPÖ politicians in both Styria and Salzburg practice a form of politics that emphasizes face-to-face contact with constituents. To this end, they hold regular office hours where they point people toward relevant social services, assist them with bureaucratic matters such as filling out application forms for welfare programs and even provide those in financial emergencies with direct aid from a fund to which all KPÖ elected officials donate a portion of their monthly salaries. Based on this practice, the KPÖ managed an unprecedented jump from 0.4 percent of the vote in the 2018 Salzburg state parliament election to 11.7 percent in 2023. In the capital, the Communists even earned 21.5 percent, finishing behind only the ÖVP.

Yet entirely in keeping with their formula for success in recent years, the Communists did not let their opponents’ rhetorical mudslinging distract them from the actual issues. With impressive message discipline, they continued to concentrate on demands such as a rent cap and increased public housing — and thereby succeeded in controlling the political discourse. With the pending runoff election for the city’s new mayor, it appears this dynamic will continue for another two weeks.

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/austria-salzburg-communists-far-right-election/

Israeli forces in Gaza have created invisible “kill zones” near their operations in Gaza where soldiers are under orders to fire on anyone who is not Israeli military personnel, according to an explosive new report in Haaretz, a prominent Israeli newspaper.

“This kind of indiscriminate killing is illegal and falls far short of any gold standard for civilian harm,” argued Brianna Rosen, a senior fellow at Just Security.

The news casts significant doubt on Israel’s accounting of the number of Hamas militants killed during its operations in Gaza. Israel claims that more than one in four of the over 32,000 Gazans killed since October were members of Hamas, but the rules for making such a designation are loose. “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its forces operate,” a reserve officer who served in Gaza told Haaretz.

“When a person's status is in doubt, international humanitarian law requires combatants to presume that that person is a civilian,” Ramming Chappell told RS. “This new reporting from Haaretz seems to confirm yet again that the Israeli military is not taking sufficient measures to protect civilians.”

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-weapons-israel-2667646466/

lot of carbon offset projects are based in economically developing countries where governments can make money from efforts to plant trees that trap and store carbon dioxide. A carbon credit represents a metric ton of CO2 sequestered, and companies can then claim those credits as evidence that they have canceled out some of their own pollution.

However, a steady stream of investigations and research has found that many of those credits don’t represent real emissions reductions at all. Oftentimes, projects overestimate the amount of carbon dioxide they can offset. Or trees might not survive long enough to keep CO2 from building up in the atmosphere and heating the planet. In other instances, tree farms might replace native vegetation, doing more ecological harm than good and negatively impacting the livelihoods of communities that depend on those resources.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/15/24130886/climate-change-corporate-watchdog-sbti-carbon-offsets

But the true significance of the attack lies not in its desire to empty northern Gaza’s largest civilian refuge, which houses 30,000 people, but in foiling Faiq Mabhouh’s pivotal role in coordinating the delivery of humanitarian aid to starving civilians in Gaza while restoring a semblance of social order to the north.

In other words, the attack on al-Shifa was an assassination operation aimed at breaking down civil order in northern Gaza. It aimed to facilitate Israel’s genocidal project and pave the way for total control over the area without resistance.

The unfolding events of the past few days expose Israel’s intentions of engineering famine and contributing to social breakdown. It reminds us that this is not only a war against Gaza’s resistance but also against its people.

https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/the-real-reason-israel-stormed-al-shifa-hospital-yet-again/

The forthcoming general election is once again likely to be dominated by claims about a housing shortage and a dire need to build more homes. Housebuilding is an article of faith across the political spectrum.

The evidence, however, does not support this thinking. Quite the reverse. Over the last 25 years, there has not just been a constant surplus of homes per household, but the ratio has been modestly growing while our living situations have been getting so much worse. [...] What has changed for the worse is not the amount of housing per household, but its cost. And cost, in turn, has a great deal to do with the landlordism that is at the heart of the present crisis.

We now find ourselves in a situation where one in every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord. We have four times as many landlords as teachers. As a consequence, virtually everyone struggles to afford a home that meets their needs despite a net gain in housing stock.

Our recent history shows us that landlord abolition, while maintaining adequate levels of housing stock, is an entirely realistic ambition.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis

The Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) system, set up 20 years ago, provides the most authoritative assessments of humanitarian crises. Its figures for Gaza are the worst ever by any metric. It estimates that 677,000 people, or 32% of all Gazans, are in “catastrophic” conditions today and a further 41% are in “emergency” conditions. It expects fully half of Gazans, more than 1 million people, to be in “catastrophe” or “famine” within weeks.


https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/21/we-are-about-to-witness-the-most-intense-famine-since-world-war-ii-in-gaza