Portside

On Dobbs and the Present Danger (Geoffrey Jacques)
Re: Supreme Court’s Abortion Ruling Shows What Happens When Democracy Is Thwarted (Daniel Millstone)
A Sad Day  --  cartoon from CoCo in Libération (France)
Two Supreme Court Decisions That Will Live in Infamy  --  cartoon by Ted (Edward) Littleford
Re: Today’s Republican Party – After Hearing Evidence of Trump’s Coup Plot (Jennifer Nouri)
Birth control vs. Gun control  --  cartoon by Bill Bramhall
Re: Getting Real About the Post-‘Roe’ World (Arlene Halfon)
Re: Europeans Have Far More Reproductive Freedom Than Americans (Stan Nadel)
Record Corporate Profits  --  meme
Re: Colombia’s First Ever Left Wing President (Jeff Kerr-Ritchie)
My Dream is to Travel Back in Time  --  cartoon by Beeld Dirk van de Wiel (Netherlands)
The Constitution Still Protects...  --  cartoon by Clay Jones

Resources:

Debunking 5 Top Inflation Myths (Economic Policy Institute)

On Dobbs and the Present Danger
 

Outlawing abortion is a central goalpost in the unfolding of the far right wing's takeover strategy. The crusade to install a white minority theocratic tyranny in the United States begins by revoking the political rights and personal freedoms the people of this country have won over the last sixty years or so. All this was signaled explicitly by SCOTUS Associate Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson, starting with his first sentence, where he directly says he and his gang, all of whom perjured themselves before the United States Senate and the American people, are explicitly empowering the United States government and state governments to make laws "respecting an establishment of religion."

Eliminating individual liberty in the realm of sexual relationships is a very important front for the right wing in this crusade, since it is necessary to squash those freedoms in order to advance the subjugation of women, which is itself a fundamental and essential part of the drive to establish their vision of a theocratic "family values" tyranny. Some of these right wing fantasies include the erroneous belief that their "family values" agenda can solve the country's economic woes by driving women from the public sphere, including the public workforce, and restoring the public labor market as a white male-dominated or male-only preserve, with some "worthy" exceptions among women, and maybe, in special cases, the racially oppressed, demeaned, and degraded minorities. The MAGA dream includes turning the "respectable" parts of the workforce white again. Forcing all women to have children regardless of their will is essential, in the MAGA-theocratic mind, to achieving this goal. They also believe these restrictions will raise white birth rates, which is another essential feature of their program.

These are among the economic and social aspects behind outlawing a woman's right to plan her reproductive choices and the size of her family. However, true to the time-honored "bread and circuses" tradition of tyrants, most voters that back these politics are consciously enamored primarily by what they take to be the benefits of liquidating the establishment clause of the First Amendment, as well as by the revocation of the 14th and 15th Amendments, and by the anti-abortionist's mystical, anti-reality, anti-scientific, fictional and fanciful arguments.

The SCOTUS would-be theocratic tyrant majority has already announced their movement's agenda. Outlawing the right of a woman to control her fertility choices is just the beginning. Restricting voting rights, dissolving, in substance, the public school as such, and finally and decisively wiping out the "well-regulated militia" qualification for gun ownership, are all just as important, in this vision, as outlawing contraception for the unmarried, using the state to govern the private behavior of consenting adults regarding which sex acts, sexual relationships, love relationships, and marriages are legal and illegal, and the reinstatement of government-enforced censorship over artistic representations of sexual and family matters.

This is serious stuff. The fascist-far right-GOP coalition's program for establishing a white minority authoritarian state in the United States is well thought out and complex. Its strategy of attacking sexual and relationship rights as a first front is explicitly copied from Nazism; the parallels are chilling.

We must not buy into or give credit or comfort to the fictions that fuel the theocratic and tyrannical fantasies of the far right wing, nor should we credit the claims that striving for the legal monopoly of a single establishment of religion, as these right wingers favor, is just. (They like to peddle the fiction that the United States is, or once was, "a Christian country." This is not only demonstrably untrue. It is poison.) We need to take seriously the right wing's very real desire for religious and cultural civil war, a war they believe they will win because their god is on their side. They're counting on the notion that the people of the United States haven't read and don't care to read the Constitution, and don't really care what it says or why it says what it says.

The pro-fascist MAGA current leaders, including the perjuring majority on the Supreme Court, are also counting on the idea that a large enough portion of the population holds the Constitution in such contempt that they will consent to its revocation, a process in which Dobbs v. Jackson is an important first step. (There is so much that is socially corrosive and corrupt about right wing political uses of fundamentalist religion; however, the most hypocritical part of the U.S. right wing version of religion is its practical rejection of Christian history and ethics, and of monotheism.) But it'll do us no good to deny the plain fact that these fascists are actually hypocritical, cold-blooded believers in no ethics derived from any religious or spiritual source whatsoever; or to deny that are telling us what they're planning to do to us, and to our country.

Geoffrey Jacques

Re: Supreme Court’s Abortion Ruling Shows What Happens When Democracy Is Thwarted
 

Here, via Portside https://portside.org/2022-06-24/supreme-courts-abortion-ruling-shows-wh… Brennan Center folk link the anti-small-d democratic supremes with bars to ballot access and to abortion rights. Will we be able to overcome these fascist forces in black robes and white?

Daniel Millstone

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

A Sad Day  --  cartoon from CoCo in Libération (France)

CoCo (Corinne Rey)

Libération (France

Two Supreme Court Decisions That Will Live in Infamy  --  cartoon by Ted (Edward) Littleford

Ted (Edward) Littleford

June 24, 2022

Re: Today’s Republican Party – After Hearing Evidence of Trump’s Coup Plot
 

Pure insanity.

Jennifer Nouri

Posted on Portside's Facebook page

Birth control vs. Gun control  --  cartoon by Bill Bramhall

Bill Bramhall

June 29, 2022
New York Daily News

Re: Getting Real About the Post-‘Roe’ World
 

They will be monitoring computer searches, social media, appointments, etc.

Women of the World Unite!! All women should be conducting searches, looking for organizations and means for self-induced abortion, ordering abortion pills. Make appointments at "Pregnancy Crisis Centers" that try to keep you from abortion; fill up their schedules.

Do whatever you can to convey that you're in a crisis pregnancy and to keep the woman haters busy. Let them try to investigate every single one of us so they can't tell the pregnant from the too old and too young and not pregnant and states where abortion remains legal, etc.

And if you buy pills, donate them to those who need them.

Screw the haters (figuratively, not literally).

Arlene Halfon

Re: Europeans Have Far More Reproductive Freedom Than Americans
 

Poland is a big chunk of Europe, and it isn't alone in pushing harsh restrictions.  Europa is very diverse and this article understates the diversity--not all of Europe is like Scandinavia. This is like saying abortion rights are fine in the US--except in Texas, Mississippi, Alabama & etc.

Stan Nadel

Record Corporate Profits  --  meme

Re: Colombia’s First Ever Left Wing President
 

I find it laughable that one Columbian voter explained his refusal to vote for the leftist Gustavo Pdtro because he could never support someone who had engaged in armed struggle. What about Nelson Mandela, from armed struggle to South African president? Or Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein fighter to politician in Northern Ireland? 

Jeff Kerr-Ritchie

My Dream is to Travel Back in Time  --  cartoon by Beeld Dirk van de Wiel  (Netherlands)

Beeld Dirk van de Wiel

June 25, 2022
van 9 tot 5 (Netherlands)

The Constitution Still Protects...  --  cartoon by Clay Jones

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Clay Jones

June 27, 2022
Sarasota News Leader

Debunking 5 Top Inflation Myths (Economic Policy Institute)

EPI Staff

June 6, 2022
Economic Policy Institute

The labor market is largely strong right now, but inflation continues to be a pressing economic concern.

The reasons for escalating inflation are hotly debated, but some theories gaining traction have not been grounded in the data. EPI research sets the record straight on the causes of inflation—and how policymakers can best restrain it. Below, we debunk 5 top inflation myths.

• Myth #1: Workers’ wage growth is driving inflation. Nominal wage growth—while faster relative to the recent past—has lagged far behind inflation, meaning that labor costs have been dampening, not amplifying, inflationary pressures all along.

• Myth #2: Corporate profits are not contributing to inflation. In fact, fatter corporate profit margins have driven over half of the increase in prices in the nonfinancial corporate sector between the second quarter of 2020 and the end of 2021. This is not normal. From 1979 to 2019, profits only contributed about 11% to price growth. Ignoring the role of profits makes inflation analyses a lot weaker.

• Myth #3: Federal relief and recovery measures overheated the economy and fed inflation. Evidence from the past 40 years suggests strongly that profit margins should shrink and the share of corporate income going to labor compensation should rise as unemployment falls and the economy heats up. But the exact opposite pattern has happened so far in the recovery—casting much doubt on inflation expectations rooted simply in claims of macroeconomic overheating. In short, the labor market is strong, but it’s not overheating.

• Myth #4: Removing import tariffs would be a major tool to fight inflation. Tariffs were put in place far before early 2021 when inflation began rising, and eliminating tariffs could not significantly restrain it. Further, removing tariffs would not be costless. Tariff removal could result in job losses, plant closures, cancellations of planned investments, and further destabilization of the domestic manufacturing base, which would increase domestic dependence on unstable import supply chains.

• Myth #5: Investments in child and elder care would accelerate inflation. In fact, investments in child and elder care could help restrain inflationary pressures. By subsidizing families’ use of child and elder care and providing direct investments to providers, such investments could boost future labor supply by allowing working-age parents or children who want to look for paid employment to do so while remaining confident their family members are receiving care.
   

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