The MoveOn petition to deploy UN troops to Palestine is such an affront  for sheer recklessness in putting Palestinians in harm’s way–& not just recklessness but temerity since Palestinians have not requested such an intervention.They already have an occupying army.

Did people miss Ban Ki-moon’s collusion with Israel in Operation Ethnic Cleansing? Do they think that just Ban’s personal failing rather than UN policy? But what about the role of UN troops in Haiti, including introducing the ongoing cholera epidemic? Statistics are staggering: nearly a million Haitians afflicted as of November 2014; nearly 9,000 have died. That doesn’t include the nearly 500 who died in the Dominican Republic when the disease spread, as epidemics are wont. And the worst of it is the UN refuses any culpability. What kind of “peacekeeping” force is that?

Now today we hear that UN troops–far from being a peacekeeping force–joined Haitian riot cops against protesters demanding democratic elections & the removal of president Michel Martelly & prime minister Laurent Lamothe. You can understand the Haitian desire to remove those two bums when you know Martelly is a former death squad member & the both of them collaborated with the two Clintons to set up Haiti as a sweatshop nation (& most likely rigged the election that Martelly won). Now the worst part is that UN troops didn’t just interfere in Haitian politics but they opened fire on the protesters. Once again, what kind of “peacekeeping” force is that?

It’s hard for the UN to hoodwink the Haitians who have protested for years at the UN mission in Port-au-Prince for the withdrawal of the violent so-called “peacekeepers.”

One could ignore the MoveOn petition if the group weren’t tied to the Democratic Party (DP), which helps set pro-Israel policy in this country. The petition should be considered a pernicious sneaky-assed DP campaign to win support from Palestinian solidarity activists for military intervention against Palestinians. It would be difficult for the US Pentagon to send troops if Israel is ever threatened but with the cover of “peacekeepers” UN troops could serve as proxy–just like they do in Haiti, the DR Congo, & several other countries.

There is no foreign military solution to Israeli occupation & ethnic cleansing in Gaza & the West Bank. Building the economic & cultural boycott (BDS) of Israel, building the solidarity movement, demanding “No military aid to Israel” is the mission of Palestinian solidarity.

(Photo of UN “Peacekeeper” firing on Haitian protesters today by Dieu Nalio Chery/AP)

At the time of the Oslo Accords there was a debate among Palestinian supporters about their character. Edward Said was one of the most outspoken critics of the Accords & I agreed completely with his critique that they were the terms of Palestinian surrender. I was excoriated for calling them a bantustate solution by one writer who argued they were the best the Palestinians could get. My response was, ‘Absolutely so, if you rely on regimes colluding with Israel against Palestinian justice. But if you trust Intifada & social struggle, Palestinians can achieve self-determination & not settle for a travesty.

The treacherous character of the Oslo Accords has been more than exposed in the 21 years since they were signed & have proven themselves to be not just terms of surrender but justification for intensified ethnic cleansing & apartheid. They have been divisive to the Palestinian struggle & have privileged people like Mahmoud Abbas, a traitor to Palestine if there ever was one.

The discussions now around these European parliament resolutions recognizing Palestine as a state remind me very much of that debate in the early 90s. I consider these resolutions a dead-end, an end-run around Palestinian self-determination, a diversionary tactic, & an attempt to discredit a democratic secular state where Jews & Palestinians can live in peace. They are nothing but a massive compromise with injustice & Israeli apartheid. How Palestinians on the front lines of struggle deal with these resolutions is one thing; but why would Palestinian supporters ever agree to such massive & miserable concessions when for the first time in 66 years millions of people around the world stand with Palestine!?

What exactly is being recognized anyway? Does anyone really want to claim that Gaza, which cannot even rebuild after Operation Ethnic Cleansing due to the Israeli embargo, is a state? That the West Bank is sovereign whilst Israel continues to occupy & move in thousands of settlers? Why instead don’t those parliaments denounce Israeli apartheid; sever their military & economic contracts with Israel; promote the economic & cultural boycott of Israel; demand Israel end the embargo & stop Zionist settlements?

Symbolic doesn’t cut it anymore. Not whilst thousands of Gazans are sustaining a winter without housing due to Israeli ethnic cleansing; not whilst Israel is trying to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque; or whilst they continue to tear down homes & villages, assault & incarcerate thousands of protesters in their gulag.

Supporting these parliamentary resolutions is in the same league as MoveOn’s call for UN troops to Palestine–although the call for UN occupation has got to take the cake for misguided. And they’re in the same league precisely because at heart they doubt Intifada & Palestinian solidarity & are looking for a gimmick as a substitute.

Long live Intifada! Take it international! No phony bantustates but only justice.

Media reports that a document wrenched from the US Justice Department by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit proves federal agents are making up phony profiles & friending all over social media. We knew that. Now it’s proven. It claims one thing they’re snooping around for is suspicious spending sprees, so for heaven’s sake don’t pose in any new outfits for a while & keep your new car to yourself.

As a longtime activist it’s always given me the willies that the person chatting you up at a meeting is playing you for the FBI or police. It rankles that you can’t have a private phone conversation about sensitive things with your confidants & family. Most (I’d be naive to say all) activists for social justice don’t lead creepy private lives so there isn’t a hell of a lot to expose there–except maybe some Playboy magazines some would rather feminist collaborators not know about.

But this thing going on now is several degrees worse than that invasion of privacy. It makes Orwell’s “1984” look like a fairytale rather than a nightmare. It could be called the militarization of private life. Or more aptly, the denial of private life. And the most dangerous thing about it is the intentions to do harm to people. That’s palpable. They want to know where you work, live, party, exercise, walk; they want to know your every waking thought, as if conspiracy was constantly brewing on FB. They want to know every damn thing about you so they can use it not to find people fencing stolen goods but activists trying to make this world a better place. They want to get activists fired from their jobs & in the police radar.

Now there could be another way to look at this. Outside of the undercover fakers at political events, I’ve only met a handful of FBI agents in my life; one came out from undercover to testify against me in a court of law–& got caught on video lying. One said it was during her tenure & her position to post my criminal record for using a weapon of mass destruction but she must have been away that day. Yeah sure. If you can put up with a sneering attitude & contemptuous arrogance, they’re not half-bad. But my stomach for sneering & arrogance is not that strong. And I’d imagine not a lot of people like them outside their inner circle of snoops & assassins. Paranoia & misanthropy aren’t that easy to live with.

So maybe this FB duty is an agent’s cry for help, an appeal for friendship. Maybe if you don’t know they’re reading your email, documenting your every word, reporting you to the cops or your employer, scoping you out for surveillance, then you’ll like them just for who they are. If we did an FBI profile on FBI agents & other snoops, we’d find a sorry-assed lot: know-it-alls, the holier-than-thous, the self-righteous, the conformists who only break rules when no one is looking & they think they can’t get caught. You’d find people proud they don’t take anti-psychotic meds because they want to be present, in the Zen sense, as they wreak their havoc on others.

So shed a tear for the social misfits, malcontents, anti-social psychos that end up in the FBI but we still need to find a way to kick their asses & defend the Bill of Rights.

(Image is a lonely FBI agent looking for love on FB)

Just when you think you’ve exhausted your adrenalin, you hear another Walmart story. This one doesn’t have to do with workers dying in fires or buried in cement debris at Walmart garment sweatshops in Bangladesh; it’s not about millions of dollars in Walmart wage theft from garment workers in Cambodia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Haiti; nor is it about the wretched working conditions, sexual assault, & physical violence to garment workers in those places. This Walmart story is about farmworkers on Mexican agribusiness plantations & the crime involves all the big US supermarket chains, including touchy-feely outfits like Whole Foods.

Mexico was the first country to feel the scourge of neoliberal agriculture. You could say it was the testing ground for a system that is now ravaging several continents. Under the aegis of the IMF, World Bank, the Ford & Rockefeller Foundations, the so-called “Green Revolution” was launched in Mexico in the 1940s, ostensibly to increase world food production to overcome mass starvation. Eventually other players entered including Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, USAID, & the Gates Foundation.

The green revolution, which is simply neoliberal plunder dressed like a cucumber, is production of cash crops for the export market making countries unable to produce food for themselves. One example of how that operates is that Mexican cuisine does not include much broccoli but under agribusiness thousands of acres are dedicated to broccoli for the export market & destroy the self-sufficient methods of traditional farmers. The green revolution involves chemical farming & genetically modified crops which cause land degradation, pollution, loss of biodiversity, depleted food quality, & of course, massive human health problems for farm workers; it also requires genetically restricted technologies making farmers dependent on outside companies for new seeds. The green revolution, like the war on drugs, is a bag job.

In some countries part of this neoliberal process is deforestation, hydroelectric projects, oil drilling, mining, massive water diversion schemes requiring the forced removal of Indigenous people from traditional lands farmed by them for countless generations, the dispossession of millions of farmers & farm workers, & their forced migration to urban poverty or (in the case of Mexico) to the US. In narcostates like Mexico, drug plantations are part of the picture & marijuana production has increased 35% since the beginning of the so-called “war on drugs.”

The ruthless expropriation of small farm holders by agribusiness isn’t an accidental feature of the green revolution but was intended to undercut radical proposals for agrarian reform that would serve farmers & not the Mexican & US oligarchs. Land ownership & tenancy are not left up for grabs but privilege international agribusiness in law & with military muscle against resisting farmers so that food systems are firmly in the control of agribusiness. The food shortage justifying this land grab has not thereby been solved but exacerbated & in a world where the majority of people depend on farming for their livelihood, that has meant dispossession & migration. At a certain point, neoliberalism becomes indistinguishable from colonialism.

So what has poor little Walmart got to do with all this? Have they just become our favorite whipping boy? Walmart runs supermarkets where they sell the drugged up, genetically modified produce. Over half of Mexican produce is for the US market so Walmart isn’t the only guilty party; it’s just the most ubiquitous one wherever you go on this planet whether you’re selling tee-shirts or tomatoes. And wouldn’t you know that one of the Walmart produce suppliers in Mexico got raided by cops last year for holding 280 migrant workers hostage & working them like slaves. They refused to pay them, wouldn’t let them leave at gunpoint, housed them in rat-infested quarters without toilet, bath or laundry facilities, sometimes without roofs, & often employing violence. Walmart, like usual, dummied up & claimed no knowledge of the criminality.

The agribusiness plantations are rife with child labor–an estimated 300,000 by human rights groups (though the Mexican government low balls it at a staggering 100,000). That’s no big deal to US supermarkets since in 2012 the Obama regime strengthened laws denying safety protections to the 800,000 children farmworkers here. It’s certainly no big deal to Walmart since there are thousands of kids working in their garment sweatshops, including the ones who died in fires & the building collapse. The World Bank, one of the chief architects of the green revolution in Mexico, issued a report last year deploring the growth of child labor in agribusiness. Mostly the report was a string of sociology 101 cliches including where they blamed child labor on uneducated parents.

This photo is workers from Bioparques (produce sold in Walmart & other supermarkets under Kaliroy brand name), a labor camp in the state of Jalisco. Bioparques is bankrolled by the World Bank (they got $17 million in 2007 to expand operations) & was honored in Mexico as a “socially responsible company.” They’re the outfit that held 280 workers as slaves. One escaped (others who tried before him were caught & severely beaten) & notified police, who raided the joint & let the migrant workers go free. This is a bus of them headed back home. Will anyone be surprised to know the legal case against Bioparques has stalled in the courts? It’ll be more of a shock if it ever moves forward. It’s not at all certain the Mexican NGO honoring Bioparques was unaware of their slaving. That’s just the way neoliberal barbarism rolls.

(Photo from Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, state of Jalisco, Mexico)