On the Twenty-Fourth Anniversary of the Martyrdom of the Secretary-General, Commander Abu Ali Mustafa: PFLP“With the unity of our people, our resistance, and by harnessing the energies of the Arab nation, we can stop the genocide and thwart the ‘Greater Israel’ plan.” “If I fall, take my place, my comrade in the struggle.” O valiant masses of our people in the homeland and the diaspora Sons of our Arab nation and the free people of the nation and the world, We commemorate the twenty-fourth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Secretary-General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the great national and pan-Arab leader, Abu Ali Mustafa. He was assassinated by treacherous zionist aircraft while performing his national duties in his office in the occupied city of Ramallah, in a perfidious zionist crime. He left behind an honorable legacy of sacrifice and giving, immortalizing his presence in the record of the great and eternal figures. The enemy tried to assassinate the idea by assassinating its holder, but Abu Ali’s blood turned into a flame that illuminates the paths of resistance and fighters. His immortal testament, “We returned to resist, and on the principles, we do not compromise,” remains alive among the generations of our people. The national leader dedicated his life to Palestine and returned to the occupied homeland believing that resistance and unity are the only path to freedom and return. He was a living symbol of a resistant Palestine, a voice for the poor and the toilers, a conscience for the unity of our people, and an example of revolutionary steadfastness and resolve that knows no compromise.
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/21112/Greedflation With A Side Of GaslightingA new study shared exclusively with The Lever details how corporate media has routinely downplayed the effects of corporate greed on price increases, often citing industry talking points or providing no explanation at all for crippling inflation over the past few years. Lawmakers then parroted these anti-greedflation narratives as they slashed pandemic aid, blocked spending, and abandoned efforts to increase the national minimum wage. Now, with greedflation making a comeback as companies use President Donald Trump’s tariff threats to justify jacking up prices, the study’s co-author warns that politicians and regulators could once again use skewed corporate coverage to justify policies that further hurt consumers. “Policymakers are just being fed this constant diet of, ‘Oh, it’s beyond [businesses’] control,” Hal Singer, an antitrust economist and managing director of the economic consulting firm Econ One, told The Lever. “What worries me is that this is our information ecosystem, and this is how policymakers are being informed. I want to make sure they’re getting accurate information.” The study, conducted by Singer and Abla Abdulkadir, found that corporate news outlets tended “to attribute industry price hikes to factors beyond the control of the sellers in that industry.” The report noted that many of the articles examined failed to cite impartial experts or note that the stock markets experienced high returns during the years companies were raising prices. The study examined business reporting by the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, The Economist, Politico, Financial Times, CNBC, Bloomberg, and Axios from January 2023 to the present. It found that on average, roughly 60 percent of the articles blamed price hikes on factors outside companies’ control rather than profit motives. Axios led the pack with 100 percent of its articles ignoring greedflation as a possible cause, followed by CNBC with 73 percent of its coverage neglecting to mention corporate incentives for price hikes. Coming in third was The Washington Post, owned by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, with 65 percent of its articles failing to mention that companies might have a hand in raising prices.
https://www.levernews.com/greedflation-with-a-side-of-gaslighting/‘Culture has lost the ability to grasp the present’: An extract from Mark Fisher’s ‘Ghosts of My Life’In his book ‘After The Future’, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi refers to the “the slow cancellation of the future [that] got underway in the 1970s and 1980s”. By ‘future’, he elaborates: I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak after the Second World War. These expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegel-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge; and so on. My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of temporal lens. I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. (After The Future, AK Books, 2011, pp18-19). Bifo is a generation older than me, but he and I are on the same side of a temporal split here. I, too, will never be able to adjust to the paradoxes of this new situation. The immediate temptation here is to fit what I’m saying into a wearily familiar narrative: it is a matter of the old failing to come to terms with the new, saying it was better in their day. Yet it is just this picture – with its assumption that the young are automatically at the leading edge of cultural change – that is now out of date. Rather than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time. But faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. This is quickly established by performing a simple thought experiment. Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/mark-fisher-ghosts-retromania/