cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8852451

The US Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Exxon Mobil can sue Cuban state-owned companies in American courts for more than $1 billion over an oil refinery, terminals, and hundreds of service stations that Cuba nationalized after its 1959 revolution, handing Washington a fresh weapon against the island it has blockaded for decades.

The 6-3 decision, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, held that the 1996 Helms-Burton Act strips Cuban state enterprises of the sovereign immunity that normally shields foreign governments from US lawsuits. The court’s three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Elena Kagan writing that the law contains no such provision.

Helms-Burton is the 1996 law that codified the decades-old US embargo of Cuba into statute, stripping any president of the power to lift it alone. Its Title III provision lets US nationals sue over property the Cuban government reclaimed from foreign corporations after the revolution, and sue all companies that later do business using those assets. The provision was considered so aggressive, and so likely to anger allies whose firms invest in Cuba and to poison any future US-Cuba settlement, that every president continued to suspend it in six-month incremental waivers for over two decades, until Trump let the suspension lapse in 2019. Exxon sued the same day.

The ruling lands as Trump tightens the screws on Havana, which is already reeling under a renewed US oil blockade that has caused brutal shortages and hardship across the island. Together with a similar decision last month (Havana Docks Corp. v. Royal Caribbean Cruises), it opens the door to thousands of pending claims, nearly 6,000 certified ones worth almost $2 billion before interest, seeking to extract wealth from a nation the US has worked to isolate since Cubans first took control of their own resources in 1960.

(Based on information from the Supreme Court ruling and reporting by the AP, CNN, and Bloomberg Law.)

📸 Photo: March 12, 1996, President Clinton signs the bill into law.

https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/2069521576781828290

Constructive Criticism: A Handbook

“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder

On the Relation Between Knowledge and Practice, Between Knowing and Doing

Quotations from Mao Tse Tung

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48573158

How come humanity gives so many resources & time to realize the hallucinations of somebody who didn't have a single original idea in 42 years, while the people who have solutions to solve our actual problems are left without them?

Your car may be logging how you drive and selling it to insurers, sometimes for pennies. What it costs you, how to opt out, and what Oregon just changed.

Democratic Party Stands With Trump on Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/23268014

Voting is Not Harm Reduction An Indigenous Perspective February 2020 – When proclamations are made that “voting is harm reduction,” it’s never clear how less harm is actually calculated. Do we compare how many millions of undocumented Indigenous Peoples have been deported? […]

I may not have been paying too much attention, but somewhere along the way, I now need to log in to....read reviews on IMDB.com?

I mean, sure I could create a burner email, probably, and sign up, but I hate this kind of thing so very much.

I am almost 40 and was recently diagnosed with adhd. I started taking Ritalin earlier this week and I have to say that I have been able to accomplish so much in my work that I was dragging my feet on before.

I work freelance, so I can just put off tasks until they are needed.

I told my brother about it today and found out that both he and his fiancee are also on psych meds. This applies to my wife's immediate family as well.

As I said, the meds work for me and things have improved a lot, but why is society setup in such a way that such a large number of people need to be medicated to be part of it?

Anyway maybe this is more of a rant, but I also wonder what percent of people in your family are on some kind of psych meds.