São Paulo, Brazil residents say no to subway fare increases

Try to guess which country this is since it seems the entire planet has had just enough of austerity & tyranny. No, this is not Turkey or Bahrain; it’s São Paulo, Brazil where cops using tear gas & rubber bullets against protestors are here trying to put out fires during a protest against a bus & subway fare hike. Bus fare was recently raised from about US $1.40 to $1.50. Minimum wage is just over $350 a month so you have to choose between riding the bus to work or eating. (The subway fare increase won't be a deterrent to World Cup attendees since most will be transported in limousines.)

Reportedly, protestors waved Turkish flags & chanted “The love is over; Turkey is right here.” Rebellion against injustice is a contagious thing. And those of us in the US hope it will soon catch on here.

(Photo by Gustavo Basso/NurPhoto/Zuma Press)

Attacks on human & democratic rights in Russia

During the Cold War, US propaganda counterposed communism & equated capitalism to democracy. The thuggish politics of Stalinism made that invidious contrast seem valid so for capitalism it’s something of a propaganda misfortune that restored capitalism in Russia is indistinguishable from Stalinism.

But of course, democratic rights are under attack everywhere because the oligarchs who run this world have an agenda not served by democracy & human rights. In that regard, Putin & Obama are soul mates. The surveillance systems that once characterized the Stalinist gulag now dominate US politics.

Religion is playing a central role in this political drama: Islamophobia & alarmism about “creeping sharia law” are contradicted by US willingness to collaborate with Islamist regimes against the democratic Arab uprisings. In Russia, Putin & the State Duma pander to the Russian Orthodox church to undermine democracy. Last year, they incarcerated the punk group Pussy Riot for “hooliganism on grounds of religious hatred” after they sang a protest song in Moscow’s Orthodox cathedral. This week, the Duma passed a new bill mandating imprisonment for “public actions expressing manifest disrespect for society & committed to insult the religious feelings of believers.” Fines & imprisonment differ if the protests are within a house of worship or held elsewhere. It may be a misdemeanor & is certainly a provocation to demonstrate opposition to the actions of religion within a place of worship. But outside the doors, on the public streets there should be no impediments to public protest.

A second bill passed hours later by the Duma will slap extortionate fines on & prohibit political activities of those advocating “non-traditional sexual relations” & “the rejection of traditional family values.” LGBTI activists protesting outside the Duma prior to the vote were arrested by police after being physically assaulted by right-wing thugs. The activist here being attacked is one of those protesting for their human & democratic rights. The homophobic legislation will only fuel greater violence against gays & allow the government to scapegoat LGBTI activists for the growing economic & political crises in Russia.

(Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

Child labor: the legacy of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan

How old do you think this child is? Two or three-years-old? The little guy is a brick worker in Kabul, Afghanistan photographed yesterday to commemorate the UN’s World Day Against Child Labor. He’s sleeping on his cart so is he also homeless?

This is the legacy of the nearly 12-year US-NATO occupation of Afghanistan accompanied by the other occupying armies of NGO camp followers. UN agencies take time & resources to chronicle child labor in Afghanistan but they can’t find it in themselves to condemn the war. This is what makes the UN a pity-mongering agency of war, not a force for peace.

Let this child’s photo stand as a scathing indictment of the war. US-NATO out of Afghanistan!

(Photo by Ahmad Massoud/Xinhua/Zuma Press)

Homeless in Athens, Greece

Homeless in Athens, Greece: there are so many dangers & indignities in homelessness often not considered: inclement weather; sickness & disease; bodily functions like toilet & menstruation; cleanliness; mental illness; fears, especially of children, elderly, & disabled; physical assault. This 36-year-old Athenian man named Michael was a hotel clerk for over 15 years; when the hotel closed he could not find work & became homeless a few years ago. Soon after he was diagnosed with lymph node & thyroid cancer.

Official unemployment figures for Greece under mandated austerity policies are 25% with a dramatic increase in people sleeping rough on the streets. But of course official figures are usually a catalog of estimates & deceits; millions of unemployed are excluded in the calculations so the actual figures are certainly much higher. Growing & massive impoverishment is the legacy of neoliberal plunder which treats human beings like trash & indicts this system as rotten to the core, as unredeemable, & unreformable.

Housing is a human right! If this stinking system cannot provide the elementary needs of human life, it has to go! The urgency of its demise has never been more apparent & the homeless are testimony to that indictment.

(Photo by Yannis Behrakis/Reuters)

Munduruku Indians continue demanding suspension of Belo Monte dam

On June 4th, the Brazilian government flew 144 Munduruku Indians to Brasilia for talks at Planalto Palace to end their week-long occupation of the Belo Monte dam construction site. Photos from the parley show a table of suited government officials facing an audience of Mundurukus. To anyone with half a brain, it was a position of authority & dominance--the position you take when you want to read the riot act not when you want to negotiate.

There’s no doubt the government was planning to pull a fast one on the Indian protestors but things must not have gone so well because by June 6th the Mundurukus were protesting all over town--lying on the street (to symbolize the dead) in front of the Ministry of Mines & Energy & continuing their call for suspension of Belo Monte construction. Here Munduruku protestors are being prevented by security from entering Planalto Palace only two days after the parley.

There’s no report on whether the government will fly the Mundurukus back home (1,000 miles/1,600 kilometers away) where they will surely reoccupy the construction site. The government is caught between what is called a rock & a hard place: do they want them obstructing dam construction or obstructing government? It might be wisest for the government to surrender now.

(Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

The going for rebels is getting good!

Indian cops in the city of Srinagar in Kashmir are here attempting to break up a protest of government workers against the state government using water cannons (which cause a number of injuries including to eyes, internal organs & broken bones) with toxic purple dye. These volatile protests (demanding payment of arrears in wages, that all temporary employees be made permanent, & to raise the retirement age by two years because India has no social security net) have been going on for a few years now without resolution, despite the intransigent protests of workers.

There is globally an explosion of mass opposition to labor & social policies, uprisings against tyranny throughout Arab countries, militant protests against austerity policies in several European countries & in Latin America, movements by native tribes against land grabs & fracking on most continents. Even the politically somnolent US showed some indignation & militancy during the Occupy movement. But despite the rise in active militancy there are few unmitigated victories recorded. Mubarak was replaced with Morsi; sweatshops continue; fracking lines keep getting dug; land grabs are backed with military occupation; pensions & schools keep getting devastated.

This has led many intellectuals with a considerable distance from plebeian activism to write jeremiads bewailing the impotence of activism & heralding a prolonged era of despair--where rebels hold the fort by consoling each other for the futility of resistance to injustice.

Well let us write another obituary--for commentators who think they have a damn thing to tell those of us who don’t give up when the going is getting good. Millions of people around the world in motion & they’re throwing in the towel already!? Go back to your libraries & leave the rest of us alone to change the world!

It is absolutely right & judicious to ask why there are so few unqualified victories, why social transformation is still a distant dream, & why it’s so damn hard when so many people work & die for it. One reason is certainly the advantages & opposition of state power: military & police might, attacks on civil liberties, aggressive surveillance systems; propaganda, & bone-headed fundamentalists in every country. An entrenched system with powerful institutions of deceit is an extremely difficult thing to challenge let alone bring down.

If rebels & oppositionists are having trouble figuring all this out, knowing what to do about it, who to trust, where to turn for leadership that is understandable. It requires the broadest movement unity & democracy, discussion, debate, collaboration to come to understanding, let alone agreement about what is going on & what to do about it.

This is not the time for jeremiads. For rebels this is time for collaboration & unity in action. Those who believe in social transformation don’t have time for cry babies who are not so much disappointed in the results as daunted by the opposition of the powers-that-be.

(Photo by AP)

Protests rock Turkey

The massive protests in Turkey against the repressive government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are extremely important especially because of that special military relationship Turkey has with the US since the end of WWII. The prominence of the Turkish military in politics (within Turkey & in the region) has been bankrolled by billions of dollars of US Pentagon largesse--first against the former Soviet Union, against the citizens of Turkey, against the Kurds, as support forces in Afghanistan & Iraq, for proximity to Syria, & supporting Israel. The Turkish army is the second largest army within NATO & one of the largest in the world because the US views the country as a military outpost more than a country of people with a very different vision of their destiny.

We don’t read much about this magnificent country because the White House & Pentagon want its importance kept a military secret. But dissidents in Turkey, those with a very different vision from Erdoğan, are making themselves heard in the hundreds of thousands in protests rocking the country.

Here an unidentified woman of the 1960s-1970s generation is letting loose not just a slingshot but decades of opposition to military collaboration between the Turkish & US oligarchs at the expense of human freedom. Our fullest respect & solidarity with the dissidents of Turkey.

No US aid to Turkey!

(Photo by Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)

Susan Abulhawa: The Palestinian struggle is a black struggle

 

One of the pillars of my trip to Gaza with the Palestine Literature Festival turned out to be an ongoing discussion regarding the essential blackness of the Palestinian struggle and the need to form greater ties with our “natural allies” from Africa and South America in particular. At one event, a man in the audience questioned the usefulness of seeking alliances or help from Africa, where, he said, people are “hungry and poor and in need of help themselves.”
I pointed out that the image he holds of African peoples was planted in his mind by those who also plant the same image of us around the world. We, too, are viewed as helpless, hungry and needy. We, too, are seen as less human somehow, as savages, terrorists. The various layers and tempers of our and their intellectual, cultural, social and historical lives are ignored, or worse, intentionally obscured. Instead, the challenges of our societies are highlighted as all-encompassing truths.
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'I didn't think of Iraqis as humans,' says U.S. soldier who raped 14-year-old girl before killing her and her family .

 
An Iraq War veteran serving five life terms for raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her parents and sister says he didn't think of Iraqi civilians as humans after being exposed to extreme warzone violence.
Steven Green, a former 101st Airborne soldier, in his first interview since the 2006 killings, claimed that his crimes were fuelled in part by experiences in Iraq's violent 'Triangle of Death' where two of his sergeants were gunned down.
He also cited a lack of leadership and help from the Army.
'I was crazy,' Green said in the exclusive telephone interview from federal prison in Tucson, Arizona. 'I was just all the way out there. I didn't think I was going to live.'

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King's Troop prances for Phil

It may seem fatuous to take potshots at moochocracy from a former colony but they’re trying to restore feudal relations here so it’s useful to study the institution in order to know how to act if we don’t put a stop to this trend & we end up serfs again.

When Betty Windsor toured the new offices of the BBC last week we witnessed not just the unseemly spectacle of journalists groveling (we’re used to that from the White House press corps) but their curtsying & doing the “Your Royal Highness” thing. Democratic-minded people around the world blushed for England’s 4th Estate.

Here the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery are prancing in the park to set off a 41-gun salute for the 92nd birthday of Philip (who Betty affectionately calls her “anus horribilis”) in the hospital now for his usual flatulence problem which they delicately refer to as gastrointestinal disorder.

The King’s Troop is mainly a ceremonial troop that does choreographed prancing & fires gun salutes with empty cartridges. They claim it has an operational role in defense of the UK but who’s kidding who? If England is threatened will they dance right up to the enemy in minuet formation & yell boo!?

Phil has an impressive catalog of military & royal titles--all bestowed by his relatives including Betty. European “royalty” all derive from a common ancestor (a deranged troll living in the Black Forest) & are related to each other in a labyrinth of incestuous pairings. He’s a duke, an earl, a baron, a prince, several different kinds of admiral, field marshal,  & commodore--all honoring a guy who stoked the boilers & controlled the searchlights on a few ships outside war zones. He’s received umpteen decorations by 48 states but that only suggests sycophancy is still a thriving business in the Commonwealth. He’s even honored as a god by an isolated tribe in the South Pacific--formerly an Anglo-French colony--but that reflects the legacy of colonialism & attempts by Buckingham to encourage this nonsense.

Phil best described himself when he complained, "I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children." But Phil actually doesn’t have a last name which is why the troll’s offspring are all given numbers to identify them. Our man not only suffers from that gastrointestinal thing but also is known for flatulent racist outbursts of royal (in the sense of utter & not pedigree) idiocy.

(Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

Dear Israel: Kick Out the Negroes! Letters from the Israeli Government Archives

I found these letters in the Israeli government archives during the Spring of 2013. Addressed to Israeli leaders, they are personal letters from private citizens, applauding their decision to deport African Hebrew Israelites from the country. There is nothing strange about the fact that U.S. citizens sent these letters to the Israeli government. What is notable is that the Israeli government kept these letters on file for over four decades. What purpose do these letters serve? Were they kept on record because they provide ideological support for the government's anti-African policies? If so, the authors of these letters make for strange bedfellows, as their letters reveal them to be unapologetic racists.
 "October 7, 1971
Dear Mrs. Golda Meir,
Have just listened to the news on the TV, and heard that you had refused to allow a group of negroes to land and stay there. I am delighted. You have enough trouble without allowing a lot of negroes to latch onto you. They said they were 'Jews' but they are not. All they want is to make trouble. A Negroe is not a Jew. I am against negroes and Jews mating.
The one thing that Jews have, more than others, is brains. You will have to rely on brains to protect you. Jews, as a group, have no friends. They have to depend on each other. Don't let anyone push you around, and tell you what to do. You know what to do for yourselves, better than anyone else does.
Keep negroes away from the press and cameras. They want to stir up strife. They had a bad time for the past hundred years, but the Jews have suffered for thousands of years, and they don't go around looting, burning and murdering, and spreading venereal disease.
Let's face it, negroes are not civilized now. In time, they may be. Right now, they are so full of hate and venom, you can't expect anything from them but trouble, and a burden to Israel. Rich negroes won't go to settle in Israel. Only the poor trash. The Jews have been good to the Negroes, and all they got in return, was hate and abuse. Jews are fighting for their lives in Israel. They can't afford to take in any more new enemies.
My prayers are with you.
A friend
Augusta Hermon"
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Daniel Ellsberg: Edward Snowden, Saving Us From the United Stasi of America

"In my estimation, there has not been in American history a more important leak than  Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely includes  the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago. Snowden's whistleblowing gives us the possibility to roll back a key part of what has amounted to an "executive coup" against the US constitution.
Since 9/11, there has been, at first secretly but increasingly openly, a revocation of the bill of rights for which this country fought over 200 years ago. In particular, the fourth and fifth amendments of the US constitution, which safeguard citizens from unwarranted intrusion by the government into their private lives, have been virtually suspended."
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National conference focuses on West Bank boycott efforts

The fourth BDS national conference.
(Asa Winstanley / The Electronic Intifada)

Reports on Saturday’s fourth national Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions conference in Bethlehem tended to focus on the shaming of Palestinian Authority minister Jawad Naji (including my own initial one). But the conference itself was a bigger story.
The main reason the audience was so angry with Naji was that the focus throughout the day was on local boycott initiatives. The PA undermines these through its many contacts with Israeli officials and institutions.
Despite the minister’s walk-out and his thugs’ subsequent bloody attack on Nizar Banat (the man who supposedly “insulted” PA leader Mahmoud Abbas), the conference was a vibrant and exciting event.
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Powerful video! Alicia Keys! Don't Play Apartheid Israel

People around the world are calling on Alicia Keys to join figures such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Alice Walker and Roger Waters who are boycotting Israel's human rights abuses.

In the spirit of the South African movement that helped end Apartheid, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) was called for by Palestinian civil society in 2005.

This film is inspired by the Palestinian women who every day nonviolently resist the illegal occupation of their land.

Starvation in Afghanistan

The US-NATO war in Afghanistan has gone on for nearly 12 years with no end in sight--unless you believe Obama’s baloney about pulling out in 2014. They tout the US army role in liberating women even while the Pentagon stands exposed for turning a blind eye to sexual assaults on its female members. For evidence of that obscene claim, they’ve been pointing to the same beauty shop in Kabul where women who’ve lost their children, spouses, brothers & sisters, homes, mosques, schools, & fields can get their finger nails polished!

The war has created millions of refugees & massive homelessness; child labor is rampant because their labor is needed for survival when adults have been killed; thousands have had limbs blown off by land mines; thousands are subjected to drone aerial bombings; war crimes are routine. And now the World Bank reports that Afghan children suffer one of the highest levels of chronic malnutrition in the world. “Food insecurity” (that means mass starvation) is the most alarming in rural areas where 80% of the population live. As the BBC so delicately puts it: “The pressure put on natural resources has led to deforestation & land degradation.” Now what pressure would that be!? Atmospheric pressure or US-NATO bombing!?

Food is imported from other countries but prices have increased 60% per year for the past 5 years so people can’t afford to buy it. Once again raising the question of what the hell those thousands of NGOs & UN agencies are doing in the country? Meanwhile the CIA is trucking in bundles of cash to bribe government officials & flying out bundles of drugs to be processed & distributed. Feeding starving people is no part of the equation in the Afghanistan war.

These children are from Bamyan Province where many farm families are migrating to avoid starvation.

US-NATO out of Afghanistan! Bring the troops home now!

(Photo by Maria De La Guardia/Medair)

What climate change!?

Climate change!? What climate change!? Clusters of super-cyclones, the largest recorded in human history; most continents & archipelagos flooded half the year; oceans with mountainous vortexes of plastic debris--& that’s only half the story! But hey,  greed is on a roll! It’s clear those who run this planet are incompetent & criminal boobs. They have to go--unless we can manage to position them in the path of one of those cyclones or in the wake of that flooding.

(Photo of flooding in Germany by Michaela Rehle/Reuters)

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations. Interview.

"The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.
Snowden will go down in history as one of America's most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning. He is responsible for handing over material from one of the world's most secretive organisations – the NSA.
In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided, he wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."

Cruelty of Israel's Cast Lead assault captured by new documentary

Where Should the Birds Fly shows the everyday injustices faced in Gaza.

EI 6 June by Daryl Meador -- Where Should the Birds Fly, the new documentary directed and narrated by Fida Qishta, begins with chilling footage of Israeli bulldozers destroying houses in Rafah in 2004. Qishta, a native of Rafah, the city in the south of the Gaza Strip, watched her parents' house of 30 years crumble under the bulldozers. As it was destroyed, her father told her and her family to leave and keep walking. "He feared if our eyes took in the sight, our hearts would be filled with hate," Qishta says. The young woman channeled the intense anger and frustration felt from this episode, and many others caused by the Israeli blockade, to create a touching film that reveals many of the daily injustices in Gaza.
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Haggai Matar: We all profit from the occupation

Haaretz 6 June -- It's convenient to place all blame for the occupation on the extreme Zionist settlers. The painful reality, however, is that we all share responsibility.
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