Three of my brothers & several uncles & cousins are war veterans. They were all working class kids not eligible for draft exemptions dispensed to the well-heeled. They all paid a hefty price emotionally & some physically; only one became antiwar.

My brothers were naive rookies who went to war with heads stuffed full of patriotism & the romance & machismo of war portrayed in John Wayne movies. They came back with heavy hearts & great confusion from killing–& in some undefinable way, corrupted. The brothel, attached like a barnacle to the military, will do that.

The state legislature of Illinois has passed a bill to blacklist companies from state pension funds if they honor the economic boycott of Israel. Please sign & share the petition because the fight for BDS has now become a fight for civil liberties & the Bill of Right.

http://palestinelegalsupport.org/…/take-action-before-illi…/

Did you ever feel like this? There’s an allegory here & if that lion gets out of there alive he can tell us his side of the story. This photo of a lion escaping an angry herd of buffalo is taken in Maasai Mara, Kenya. Buffaloes are the primary prey of lions, tigers, & crocodiles. So it looks a lot like the allegory is all about the power of unity & numbers against the guy with the bigger jaws. At least some prefer to read it that way.

(Photo by Charles Comyn/Barcroft Media)

This is a bird covered in oil from the 100,000 gallons spilled by an abandoned pipeline into the Pacific Ocean off Goleta, California (near Santa Barbara). There’s always a different reason for oil spills: ruptured pipelines, sabotage or piracy on the line (by criminal gangs, & even the drug cartels in Mexico), typhoons & hurricanes, war & bombing, drunken captains, lack of maintenance. It’s always something with those oil companies, isn’t it!?

These oil spills have happened all over the world, on every continent, in every ocean. Plunder usually disastrously affects just the plundered countries but the oil companies have changed all that. They saw no reason to leave the plundering countries out of their catastrophes–not just with oil spills but with fracking contamination. And that would be the hallmark of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism: “chickens coming home to roost”.

The CBS drama Madam Secretary does such a good job of cleaning up how the US Secretary of State conducts business with foreign governments. A down-to-earth woman played by Téa Leoni wrestles with her conscience in negotiating treaties while spatting with her kids & necking with her high-principled professor husband.

Are they modeling the character on Secretary of State Madeline Albright who said the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi kids were “worth it” to achieve US policy goals? Or are we talking Hillary Clinton who collaborated with Bill Clinton to turn Haiti into a sweatshop haven for US businesses & a personal ATM machine for themselves? Who turned a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Myanmar to advance US investments in the country? Who brokered arms to the Egyptian military to use against the Egyptian uprising & advocated US military intervention in Libya? Who supported Israeli carpet bombing in Gaza last summer claiming Hamas “provoked” Israel?