Tidbits – Mar.28 2024 – Reader Comments: Ceasefire, Standing With Palestinians; RFK, Jr; Government Numbers About…; Single-Payer Saves-Report France; Greatest Baseball Films; Seafood’s Potential; Käthe Kollwitz – New Exhibition at MOMA in New York

https://portside.org/2024-03-28/tidbits-mar28-2024-reader-comments-ceasefire-standing-palestinians-rfk-jr-government
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Author: Mar 28, 2024 - Reader Comments, Announcements, Cartoons
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Lifelong Battle for Democracy  --  Cartoon by Mike Luckovich

 


 

Mike Luckovich
March 26, 2024
Atlanta Journal-Constitution

 

Re: Angela Davis: Standing With Palestinians
 

Reflecting on the past 60 years.

"This is the first time in my own political memory that the Palestine solidarity movement is experiencing such broad support both throughout the U.S. and all over the world."

"Despite efforts to persuade the public that any critique or even questioning of the state of Israel is equivalent to antisemitism, astute young people, including radical Jewish activists, are pointing out that the most effective struggles against antisemitism are necessarily linked to opposition to racism, Islamophobia, and other modes of repression and discrimination. This is the first time in my own political memory that the Palestine solidarity movement is experiencing such broad support both throughout the U.S. and all over the world. Here in the United States, despite the McCarthyist strategies employed against those who call for freedom and justice for Palestine on campuses, in the entertainment industry, and elsewhere, we are in a new political moment, and we cannot - we must not - capitulate to those who represent the interests of racial capitalism and the legacies of colonialism."

Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Re: As Israel Defies UNSC Demand for Gaza Ceasefire, UN Human Rights Body Slams
 

I agree with this analysis, you decide for yourself  The genocide in Palestine is a calamity that will live forever in the minds of people throughout the world who support justice and peace

Lloyd

 

Re: Bobby, Think It Over: Your Candidacy May Doom Democracy
 

Even the other Kennedys don't like him.

Eleanor Roosevelt
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

      =====

the guy is an anti-Vaxer who took a bunch to Samoa to convince people to let their kids get measles. He has no pride, no honor. Just another rich bum, who cares what his family name is? We are not a monarchy and should not worship celebrities! IMHO.

Charles Patrick Lynch
Posted on Portside's Facebook page

 

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Updates Branding in New Appeal to Latino Voters  --  Cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz

 

 

Lalo Alcaraz
March 21, 2024
pocho.com

 

Bridge Collapse as Politics in Era of Trump  --  Cartoon by Dr. James MacLeod

 

 

Dr. James MacLeod
March 26, 2024
MacLeodCartoons

 

Re: (Mostly) Useful Government Numbers About Poverty, Jobs, and Unemployment, Including the Latest Employment Report for February 2024

(posting on Portside Labor)
 

Can you pass this info on to Frank Stricker?

I learned from students who worked as baristas or for fast food places that their unemployment benefit was so low ($20/week or less) that it wasn't worth applying for. So their numbers also aren't counted.

It's so sick that those who need the benefit the most get the least.

Cordially,

Lita Kurth

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Does this help?

The salary a single person needs to live comfortably in 25 major U.S. cities

Natalya Panteleyeva

 

Boeing  --  Cartoon by Nick Anderson

 


 

Nick Anderson
March 25, 2024
Counterpoint

 

Re: Single-Payer Healthcare Would Save Money and Lives
 

I am now living in Nice, France and have access to the French single-payer system.

It is UNBELIEVABLY GOOD and INEXPENSIVE.

Prior to getting m Carte Vitale (admission into the system, I paid 100% of the cost of everything here.

Yup!

MRI?  Approx. $60.00

12 blood tests (results of all – the NEXT DAY and sent directly to you and your doctor – $110.00

Cataract surgery (both eyes) approx.. $2,700.00

Oh, and I have 2 cancers. I was informed that all of my cancer treatments will be FREE for life!

All prescription drugs are negotiated by the state for ALL PEOPLE and are almost embarrassingly cheap.

I had a nurse come to our apartment to remove stitches near my eye?  $20.00( house call on a Saturday!)

IT WORKS and don't believe anyone who tells you it doesn't!

Frank Zuback

 

Re: Why Has Niger Declared US Military Presence in Its Territory Illegal?
 

We are not wanted there, Unless we have other ulterior or evil motives we should respect the Niger's People's decision. We should not engage in intervention, destabilization, and sabotage. Let Niger chart their destiny. Bring our SOLDIERS HOME! UPGRADE THEIR BENEFITS TO LIVING WAGES AND SALARIES NOT JUST A SURVIVAL ONE.

Allan Baluyot

 

Re: The Greatest Baseball Films
 

Peter Dreier left one of the greatest baseball films I have ever seen out of his otherwise excellent list.  That was "American Pastime" (2007).  This film involved a game played between Japanese-Americans held in a concentration camp during WW2 and local townspeople.  The film is a critical but warmhearted melodrama, showing both racial animosity and developing tolerance.

Marcosa Santiago MD
Rumney NH

 

Re: Assessing Seafood's Potential To Reduce Global Hunger, Improve Health
 

(posting on Portside Culture)

Recently, for the first time in human history, the sea stopped being the major source of food for humans. This is a paradigm shift we [have] not felt the full effect of.

While this article mentions the need for oversight, it does not talk about how you would go about regulating the thousands of factory trawlers that are responsible for the ongoing collapse of ocean fishing.

Farming ocean fish, on the other hand, has been an absolute disaster. Look at farm raised salmon in Scotland for example, it has produced disease riddled fish and killed off the wild salmon. The shrimp farms in SE Asia are so awful that if you saw them you'd never eat another shrimp.

Commercial fisherman in the US that I've talked to hate the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The constantly changing limits set make it almost impossible for smaller operators to make a living, yet, if not enforced, would accelerate the collapse of fishing.

To have sustainable fishing you'd have to have international enforcement on a scale never before seen. Major policy changes would be needed to keep smaller operations going, the only kind that can selectively fish and reduce harm to reefs, the taking of "trash fish", etc.

As difficult as all this is we must do it before the ocean ecosystems collapse.

I hope someone from the Canadian Maritimes can share their story about what happened with cod...

Cap'n Steve

 

Käthe Kollwitz’s Working-Class Women  -  New Exhibition  --  New York City - Museum of Modern Art  -  March 31 - July 20, 2024

 

Image credit: LIFE AND WORK OF K�THE KOLLWITZ; Organizer: Women's Museum, Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy

In the early decades of the 20th century, when many artists were experimenting with abstraction, Käthe Kollwitz remained committed to an art of social purpose. Focusing on themes of motherhood, grief, and resistance, she brought visibility to the working class and asserted the female point of view as a necessary and powerful agent for change. “I have no right to withdraw from the responsibility of being an advocate,” she wrote. “It is my duty to voice the sufferings of men, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain-high.” The first major retrospective devoted to Kollwitz at a New York museum, this is also the largest exhibition of her work in the US in more than 30 years.

Born in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Kollwitz was based in Berlin from the 1890s through the early 1940s, a period of turmoil in German history marked by the upheaval of industrialization and the traumas of two world wars. Though she had trained briefly as a painter, she quickly turned to drawing and printmaking as the most effective mediums for social criticism. This exhibition includes approximately 120 drawings, prints, and sculptures drawn from public and private collections in North America and Europe. Examples of the artist’s most iconic projects will showcase her political engagement, while preparatory studies and working proofs will highlight her intensive, ever-searching creative process. 

Organized by Starr Figura, Curator, with Maggie Hire, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints.

Read an excerpt from the Käthe
Kollwitz
 exhibition catalogue about
the artist’s sympathetic portraits
of Berlin’s working-class mothers.

https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/1051

At the end of the 19th century, the population of Berlin reached almost two million, far exceeding its capacity. It is estimated that by 1912, 100,000 of the city’s dwellings were inhabited by 600,000 people. Overcrowding increased the spread of disease, and working-class districts like Prenzlauer Berg, where Käthe Kollwitz and her family lived, were marked by poverty and unemployment. Abortion was made illegal in Germany in 1872, but by the early 1900s the law was being protested, and the issues of women in the workforce and birth control were being debated in the public sphere.

In a number of works made between 1903 and 1905, Kollwitz directed her attention to the working-class women she encountered in her daily life, a subject she revisited with even greater focus after she completed her Peasants’ War cycle in 1908. She gained firsthand knowledge of their lives through her proximity to her husband Karl’s medical practice. As she recalled, “[Only] when I became acquainted with the women, who came to my husband seeking aid and incidentally also came to me, did I truly grasp in all its power, the fate of the proletariat. . . . Unresolved problems like prostitution, unemployment, tormented and worried me and acted as the source of my attachment to the depiction of the lower classes.

 

Käthe Kollwitz. Unemployment. 1909. Black chalk and white opaque watercolor over blue pencil on gray-brown paper

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Käthe Kollwitz today.


Source URL: https://portside.org/2024-03-28/tidbits-mar28-2024-reader-comments-ceasefire-standing-palestinians-rfk-jr-government