You know the US is up to no good in its rapprochement with Cuba around the recent prisoner exchange. Obama & Cuban president Raul Castro announced plans to reestablish diplomatic relations, including a US embassy in Havana, & the US will loosen travel restrictions, though tourist travel will remain banned. This allows for the free flow of CIA agents to Cuba to replace the one Cuba just released. Obama also announced a review of Cuba’s status as a terrorist state, which is good but not earth-shattering, since the only thing Cuba has trained & sent abroad for decades is doctors.

At the same time, Obama agreed to ask Congress to remove the economic embargo which has been in place since 1960 as a way to topple the Castro regime. You’d think this move would have Cuban exiles in south Florida in a frenzy but pollsters report anywhere between 70% & 90% are now in favor of ending the embargo. Not because they want to stop putting the squeeze on the Cuban Revolution that sent them packing but because the embargo has proven ineffective & they have other connivances up their sleeve.

It’s astonishing that media from the NY Times to right-wing exile press continue the mantra that Cuba is a police state & one of the most repressive regimes in the world, up to its eyeballs in human rights abuses. You’d think US media would be circumspect in such damnations only a week after the release of the report on CIA torture at Guantanamo & as awareness of police brutality against the Black community circles the globe. It appears temerity is a necessary part of propaganda. Or could it be these media were thinking of Guantanamo, the US-controlled part of Cuba?

Michael Moore is no communist but in “Sicko”, his 2007 documentary on health care in the US, they had to bring 9/11 first responders to Cuba to get necessary health care they could not get in the US. No one in Cuba dies from lack of health care. And no one lives on the streets.

Cuba has huge political problems, in no small part due to the embargo, so it is a monumental advantage to get the embargo removed. What compromises Cuba is asked to concede, & what it will agree to, remain to be seen. Despite its problems, the Cuban Revolution remains a beacon for the oppressed around the world & we need learn from its achievements & its failings alike.

The photo is a classic American car in Havana. Because of the embargo, Cubans have had to be extremely inventive & “sustainable” with resources. As a result, they have made important innovations & contributions, including in such fields as Chinese herbal medicine.

(Photo by unidentified photographer)

As farces go, they don’t get better than the US accusing North Korea of hacking Sony to prevent the release of the film “The Interview” about two US journalists attempting to assassinate Kim Jong-un. If it turns out to be true, we can send Kim a list of other unworthy films & ask him to have a go at them too. Adam Sandler films would be first on the list.

But that isn’t where the farce begins & ends. Obama had the temerity to go ballistic about the hacking when the whole world knows from the Edward Snowden revelations that agencies of the US government run global surveillance programs with the cooperation of telecommunications companies & European governments. The US government is reading our emails, listening in on our phone calls, & stalking us on social media. And they want us to care about a little hack-job on Sony!?

The FBI issued a statement saying North Korea’s hacking fell “outside the bounds of acceptable state behavior.” How can that be read as anything other than sarcasm? They wouldn’t give any details on how the agency concluded North Korea was behind the Sony attack but we can hazard a guess that their global surveillance system was involved.

The US has imposed crippling sanctions on North Korea for more than 50 years & has been running surveillance on the country all of that time. A little payback is overdue.

(Photo of security guard outside Dec. 11th LA premiere of “The Interview” by Kevork Djansezian/Reuters)

So much for going “gentle into that good night.” If the ruling elites don’t want seniors protesting, they ought to leave their pensions & social security alone in the austerity programs. But today’s seniors aren’t that provincial. They’re from the 1960s-1970s generation that in their millions around this globe were on the march for democracy & against the Vietnam War. Resistance to injustice & tyranny was the gestalt of the times. So they know a thing or two about politics. Some have been active for all those years & in every war & struggle since; some are coming back & taking up their place again.

This fellow at a Madrid protest is one of thousands in several Spanish cities who marched against the proposed Public Security Law moving through the parliament which takes a direct hit on the right to protest. The Spanish oligarchy (including their predatory moochocracy) is tired of protests against the IMF-EU imposed austerity program.

The provisions of the proposed law are so draconian you can’t believe they’re not a Monty Python skit. Many protesters covered their mouths with tape & carried placards calling the measures a “gagging law.” Police at the Madrid protest forced media photographers to produce identity papers. Hefty fines will be levied for burning the national flag, for demonstrating near the parliament or other “key installations”, for circulating photos of cops considered particularly dangerous, or for attempting to stop evictions & home repossessions. Depending on the offense, fines go from 600 euros (US $745) for insulting a riot cop, to 30,000 euros (US $37,000) for burning the flag or protesting home repossessions, all the way up to 600,000 euros (US $745,000) for protesting outside parliament. How is that distinguishable from farce?

Unrestrained police powers are considerably promoted in this piece of rubbish law, including rights to summarily expel African immigrants trying to enter Spanish territory in the North African enclaves of Ceuta & Melilla. Currently immigrants who rush the barb wires fences between Morocco & the enclaves face police brutality but the possibility of remaining in Europe if they succeed. After being assaulted, many limp with injuries into the refugee quarters in the enclaves hoping for a chance to make a better life than neoliberal plunder in Africa provides. Immigration policy doesn’t get more barbaric but this new law is sure going to try.

Our fullest solidarity with the protesters in Spain. May they kick that damn law from here to kingdom come.

(Photo by Andres Kudacki/AP)

This is a little Thai boy struggling against flood waters in the Waeng district of southern Thailand on the Thai-Malaysian border. Thailand has declared a disaster emergency in all 13 districts of southern Thailand where dozens of villages were evacuated & most roads closed down from landslides.

Reportedly about 116,000 people are affected & okay, that isn’t as many as lots of other natural disasters but it would seem to warrant more than back page coverage. Come to think of it, a good share of planet Earth is covered under flood waters at any given time & there is never much media attention to it. South Asia seems to be particularly hard-hit.

This might suggest a method to the media madness of inundating us with every little tidbit & morsel of celebrity gossip. If we’re preoccupied with the Kardashians or even just with denouncing that media fetish, then perhaps we won’t notice the planet is drowning from climate change. No information, no questions asked! And God forbid, no sense of human solidarity with those losing everything & being displaced.

It isn’t that there is no media reporting on the connections between climate change & flooding (as well as hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, wildfires, dust storms, tornadoes), but that given the scale & destruction of these “natural disasters” there ought to be sustained, systematic education instead of the patchy reporting we get now. Such reporting would put neoliberal agriculture, mining, deforestation, & war under a spotlight & challenge the very foundations of corporate wealth. That aint gonna happen in the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post.

The UN held a Climate Summit in September to which Ban Ki-moon invited representatives of the very forces causing climate change. They hold frequent such gatherings because they can see an environmental tsunami coming at them but they’re caught in their own system & unable to break out of the plunder-for-profit racket that is the very character of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. So they tinker around with proposals for legislation. The UN just held another one in Lima, Peru. Another conference; another dead-end.

The nearly one million people who marched outside the summit were an assembly of forces from across this globe fighting to save our beautiful planet, a struggle that in most countries is led by Indigenous peoples going toe-to-toe with the bulldozers & military might of neoliberalism. Solidarity has become the strategy for human survival.

(Photo from EPA)