“These are the goals, in Marx and Engels’ own words, followed by an analysis of how deeply they have seeped into the United States governing structure.”
“ICE apparently failed to turn over records after multiple requests. In December, ICE purchased access to two databases of automated license-plate reader data.”
The Baton Rouge Bus Boycott which occurred in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1953, was the first large-scale boycott of a southern segregated bus system. The Baton Rouge Boycott inspired the Montgomery Bus Boycott two years later. [..] The boycott was prompted partly by the 1950 decision by the Baton Rouge city council to support the financially strapped municipal bus company by revoking the licenses of nearly 40 competing black-owned companies.
Today, the Louisiana governor has barred companies expressing opposition to the Israeli government’s Gaza occupation policy from engaging in contracts with the state of Louisiana, becoming the 25th U.S. state to do so.
Then as now, what the State giveth, the State taketh away, so this sort of political correctness masquerading as commercial policy is not exactly new or surprising.
The real curiosity is that twenty-five U.S. states, now including the Democrat governor of a state with a microscopic Jewish population, would be so curiously eager to align their administrations with the territorial ambitions of a foreign government on the other side of the world.
Exactly what articulable public policy objective is being advanced by curtailing freedom of expression in this way? Well, perhaps the objective is not one of public policy, but to respond to a private pressure campaign. The effect, however, is to ensure that company owners that refuse to do business with the state of Israel are also placed at a disadvantage domestically: to be taxed just as heavily but to have fewer commercial opportunities.
If the courts do not curtail this practice (which almost certainly runs counter to the freedom of expression guarantees in state constitutions), one could certainly imagine this anti-boycott ‘tool’ being applied in a variety of ways to force merchants to perform services they would otherwise morally object to.
If it’s acceptable to extort merchants into fulfilling orders from a foreign government and to, say, bake gay wedding cakes, as is presently fashionable, perhaps forcing merchants to support Louisiana’s prison labor regime is a reasonable next step?
“East Chicago officials knowingly built the elementary school and, later, the public housing complex on a polluted industrial brownfield, then ignored decades of warning signs that people in this predominantly black area of the city were being poisoned.”
Read more: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/on-poisoned-ground-burns
“Chicago required the use of lead service lines between street mains and homes until Congress banned the practice in 1986. Yet as Mayor Rahm Emanuel borrows hundreds of millions of dollars to overhaul the city’s public water system, Chicago is keeping lead service lines in the ground.”
“Family and community are the only things left in Adams County, Ohio, as the coal-fired power plants abandon ship and the government shrugs.”
“70 years ago, one out of every 20 U.S. jobs required a state license; today, almost 1 in 3 American occupations requires a license.”
“Around a dozen Google employees have already quit over the company’s involvement in an artificial intelligence drone program for the Pentagon called Project Maven.”
Read more: https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/14/google-project-maven-employee-protest/
“The combination of automated plate readers every 10 yards or so with always-on cameras that feed into an always-watching (and recording) nexus of ‘private-public’ surveillance is bleak, depressing and scary. Worse, it’s real.”
Read more: https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2018/04/17/when-the-meter-feeds-on-you/
“Uber, Lyft, and several other firms critically involved in self-driving cars have their own ideas about how to improve personal transport — and one of the biggest involves you not being allowed to drive your car at all.”