One of the most promising & important developments in immigration rights is the defiance of African immigrants in Israel whose rights are under siege by the Zionist regime & vigilante violence promoted by politicians. Their struggle for the right of asylum exposes the inherent racism of Zionism & is as important to the struggle of Palestinians as it is to immigration rights. It is certainly one of the most important developments in Israeli politics for a long time.

For too long, Africans fleeing from the colonial plunder of their countries have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea, been incarcerated in isolated detention centers without minimum standards of housing or health care, or deported & dumped willy-nilly back on the continent. Seeking asylum in Israel is a safer route & Israel has every obligation to honor their demands since it has long been a key player in the neoliberal plunder, particularly in South Sudan.

For the past few years, African immigrants have waged resistance to incarceration & deportation & as the persecution & inflammatory racist rhetoric of Israeli politicians crescendoed in the past year, they set up Occupy-type encampments in public parks & at detention centers.

Here they set up an encampment outside the detention center in Holot, Israel & were joined in protest by defiant inmates. We cannot express our solidarity strongly enough.

(Photo by Oliver Weiken/EPA)

Under neoliberal capitalism, there’s a scam invented every minute. It’s pointless to sleep with one eye open because those think tanks they operate invent one doozy after another to outsmart us–all of the switch & bait kind. The muckraker has become more indispensable than the NY Times to keep track of the trickeries they’re cooking up.

Plunder is the very nature of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. The plunder is so relentless the entire planet is undergoing climate chaos & the predators are still unable to restrain their rapacity. Working people need to be the ones to stop them & that historic mission requires a clear understanding of the foxy-assed machinations they use to fool us.

Diamond & gold mining, particularly in African countries, is a cornucopia of plunder for multinational conglomerates, leading to war, massive human suffering, & millions of African deaths. As opposition to “blood diamonds” grew around the world, the mining & jewelry industries pulled a fast one. Along with government officials collusive in the plunder & NGOs, industry representatives set up the phony Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) in 2003 to stop trade in “blood diamonds.” A component organization of KPCS is Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) which established standards of conduct for gold, platinum, & diamond industries to regulate labor standards, indigenous people’s rights, & environmental contamination, The 300 companies certified by RJC are the largest mining companies, refiners, & jewelers in the world. It’s the neoliberal version of putting a fox to guard the chicken coop & has not changed the character of massive & violent exploitation one iota.

This swindle is an old one employed by neoliberal predators. Back in the 1990s, the forestry industry set up Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) to certify companies as deforesting in a green tradition. You can find their certification logo all over paper products. Companies like Weyerhaeuser, notorious for reckless logging practices which led to landslides in Washington state, are certified because SFI is bankrolled by the industry & won’t saw off the hand that feeds it. Greenwashing might be too tepid a term for such deceit.

Not to be outdone in trickery, the palm oil & palm kernel industry set up the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2004 to certify sustainable production of palm oil which is now an ubiquitous ingredient in everything from cosmetics to food. It is not possible to certify palm oil as sustainable when the very character of plantation production (primarily in Indonesia & SE Asia) requires massive deforestation & the destruction of natural habitat for, most notably, orangutans, elephants, tigers, rhinos, & birds. The effects on climate change, in particular massive flooding, have been reported with compelling force but the neoliberal plunderers cannot restrain their greed.

Does conflict of interest mean anything anymore!? Nope! Not in the barbaric phase of capitalism. It will take more than product boycotts to stop this plunder but the stakes are immense. Nothing less than the survival of humanity & the rest of the animal world is at issue. And that’s not just Armageddon-speak!

(Photo of young Sumatran elephant named Raja displaced by palm oil deforestation & who subsequently died by Ulet Ifansaasti/The Ecologist)