In 2017, Georgia-Pacific invented the so-called Texas two-step, a legal scheme to skirt liability for consumer harms like widespread asbestos exposures or the opioid crisis. That year the company quietly reincorporated itself in Texas and used a Texas law to split itself into two entities. One, the new Georgia-Pacific, received almost all of the company’s assets and carried on business as usual as a multibillion-dollar company.
The other company — Bestwall, LLC — was saddled with all of Georgia-Pacific’s asbestos liabilities, which included tens of thousands of legal claims from people who lost loved ones to deadly asbestos-related cancers like mesothelioma, and people who were sick themselves. Bestwall then promptly filed for bankruptcy, trapping these legal claims in bankruptcy court.
This is now used by other companies, too, according to the article
He knows what's best for black people (like "sending social workers into the homes", since they don't know how to take care of their kids!).
He knows what's best for young people (his mind's not going to be changed when they protest something!). He's gonna hold onto that torch for a while longer.
And he loves children. And Israel is just a little underdog baby country, trying to hold it's own against the mean bad old (far too tan) men around it!
But don't worry, Biden knows what's best, and Bibi will come around, with some firm, paternal, "come to god" talkings-to.
Both Hamas and Israel have rejected a ton of different versions of a cease fire. Kinda hard to keep track of them all.
Both have also accepted terms for one version which the other one does not agree with. Resulting in headlines like "(Hamas/Israel) rejects cease fire".
The referenced article primarily critiques the phrasing and tone of the headlines. Through engineering of the headline, you can affect how the body of the article is perceived. The headlines are all quite flaccid and downplay the significance of the refusal. Not coming to an agreement right now, is an admission of intent to enter Rafa.
Headlines are very important as many people will only skim the title. Perhaps you did the same here, and were bamboozled by the headline of the original article?
The links you posted here are just more examples of what the original piece was criticising.
The headline in the linked article says something which is patently and demonstrably false. That's my only point. Yes, it's "just the headline" and we all should RTFA all the time, but still --- it's a factually incorrect statement. (Had it been, "...Isn't Telling Us The Whole Story," that would have been nice --- it's a matter of opinion still, but it's not patently incorrect.)
From the linked article:
Israeli officials just rejected a cease-fire deal that could have brought hostages back because Israel wants to continue waging war. This should be a scandal — but American mainstream media isn’t reporting on it.
From the AP article:
Egyptian officials said that proposal called for a cease-fire of multiple stages starting with a limited hostage release and partial Israeli troop pullbacks within Gaza. The two sides would also negotiate a “permanent calm” that would lead to a full hostage release and greater Israeli withdrawal out of the territory, they said.
The linked article is very much an opinion piece. Claiming "Israel wants to continue waging war" is an opinion, and yeah, it seems pretty obviously true, but "Netanyahu wants to hold on to power, and waging war is his surest bet" is another valid (IMHO) opinion. But again, opinion, so at some level it's a matter of taste (my point really is that ascribing motive to someone or something is getting into the opinion business, no matter how obvious things are). But to claim that the "American mainstream media isn't reporting on it" is pretty disingenuous.
I would say it is quite well established that Israel wants to continue the conflict. I don't think that is an opinion at this point.
Sure, the title isn't the best, but isn't that also the point they are trying to make?
To put it briefly, the story is being reported on, but it seems that the media who live off clicks and eyeballs are basically doing the equivalent of "anti-clickbait" and downplaying the significance of these stories.
My best friend in shul, and still to this day, comes from a long line of anti-Zionist leftists. My own family history is more mixed, but includes several socialists and anti-Zionists.
Interestingly, one of the portions of the IHRA definition of antisemitism enshrined in this law is:
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
Now, e.g. means "for example" which means it's not the only example. Might another example be the silencing of anti-Zionist speech? After all, as stated in the article:
The Jewish Bund was the largest Jewish trade union movement and Jewish political party in Europe, and it fought for Jewish liberation alongside the struggle for socialism and international solidarity with other workers and oppressed peoples. [...] Against Zionism, the Bund insisted “wherever we are, that’s our homeland.”
Isn't this Bundism a form of self determination? And wouldn't denying the anti-Zionism inherent in it be tantamount to denying the self-determination of the Jewish people?
Can I sue Congress under the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
iirc my history correctly, a lot of Orthodox Jews thought that establishing a Jewish homeland was a bad thing because only The Almighty could return the Chosen People to the Holy Land.
Something tells me that Congress isn't too concerned with protecting the self-determination of Bundists and would be quite irked at any attempt to resurrect the Bund in the US. Though, with the resurgent popularity of labor groups, maybe there's an opportunity there...
That said, your post got me thinking...
I know there are many varying opinions being shared at the many protests in support of the Palestinians, but I wonder if there's some appreciable nuance in the IRHA definition where one could claim they aren't saying any State of Israel is a racist endeavor, but this particular one is.
If insurance providers were not legally bound to pay out for plans, and if failure to pay wouldn't see customers flee, they never would.
Nowhere is safe from climate change, but insurers will continue to sap up as much money as they can, and pay out as little as they can, before they finally shut down and leave the government to pick up the mess. They'll charge premiums for decades, and then right as the disasters those premiums are supposed to cover folks for start to ramp up, they'll close up shop and laugh their way to the bank.
Private insurance is a cancer that should be cut out.
Clearly the market is telling you it's time to leave that area. I would not move into an area if they would not ensure me in the area and if I lived there before I would be moving out.
That becomes difficult when their homes are now uninsurable. If they can't find a sucker buyer to take it off their hands for enough that they can afford one elsewhere, they're stuck. The govt absolutely needs to step in. If only to save money on disaster relief efforts in future.
I agree that the government ought to step in and just buy the house from them so that they can move to somewhere they're not going to be flooded all the damn time.
Edit: As you mentioned above, if they bought it, they could knock it down to save on disaster relief later.
I love how deeply concerned GOP congress critters have become about antisemitism. I'm sure their tiki torch carrying constituents will agree wholeheartedly! 😆
They actually are where the push first stated on the right. After all, redefining antisemitism as being anti Israel is great if you’re primarily concerned with getting the Jews out of your country. Besides, it it’s fine that Isreal has citizenship decided on race and religion, isn’t it really antisemitic that we complain about doing the same thing here.
The first two paragraphs sum this up pretty well: "To understand the current headline-dominating furor over the protests taking place on college campuses against the war in Gaza, think about the death toll of each. As of the time of writing, more than thirty-four thousand Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military in Gaza, almost certainly a massive undercount. On US campuses, that figure is zero.
It’s this cosmically vast discrepancy in terms of “harm” and “safety” that more than anything explains the absurd and ongoing freakout over college students protesting the war on Gaza — one that would be laughable if it weren’t so menacing."
However, despite routinely portraying themselves as both climate champions and defenders of taxpayer interests, New York governor Kathy Hochul and Democratic legislative leaders have so far declined to include the legislation in the final state budget, which is being ironed out this week.
If the provisions are excluded, as some environmental groups now presume, the decision would be a massive win for some of Hochul’s major campaign donors who are tied to fossil fuel companies that would have been required to make payments, according to campaign finance records reviewed by us.
In the absence of a new superfund law, much of the cost of climate mitigation could fall on working-class New Yorkers: Hochul has recently declared that she opposes any new tax increases on the wealthiest residents in her state, which has the country’s second-largest number of billionaires.
When people were upset at Substack for hosting Nazis, multiple people told me that Germany’s laws prohibiting hate speech were the right way to do it (often claiming incorrectly that the US had similar laws or regulations).
I told those people that restrictions on speech would inevitably be used against points of view they agreed with that needed to be heard, when those became “hate speech” from the point of view of the powerful.
Every one of these people told me no, that’s not how it works, they’re only going to restrict actually hateful speech, so there’s no problem.
jacobin.com
Hot