As a socialist, I would say the powers that be let Trump take an election he didn’t win to make a wrenching shift to the right in American politics. Clinton’s populist rhetoric would have required a much slower pace. That rightwing agenda is worked out in think tanks, special advisory bodies, private agencies of the corporate elite. Reversing Obamacare is part of that but the eventual target is the $800 billion slash in Medicaid programs: a frontal assault on the working poor, disabled, unemployed, elderly.

Given that, does the Russia investigation still matter? You bet your sweet ass it does. First, because it is profoundly undemocratic & probably involves criminal misconduct by Trump & his officials. But most importantly, because it can help bring Trump & his rightwing agenda down. And that’s a good thing.

More Mexican immigrants suffocate to death because of barbaric US immigration policy

RGV detention center for immigrants (May 2014 Brietbart)

Media is reporting the suffocation death of 10 undocumented immigrants from Mexico abandoned in the rear of a tractor trailer rig in San Antonio, Texas about 238 miles (383 km) north of the US-Mexico border. Thirty-nine people, including children, were stuffed into the trailer without air-conditioning or air holes, food or water with outdoor heats near 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius). At that level of outside heat, temperatures in enclosed vehicles can rise to 175 degrees Fahrenheit (79 Celsius) or higher in such overcrowded conditions. All of the survivors are being treated in hospital.

This is not the first such incidence on the border. In May 2003, in comparable intense heats, 74 people from Mexico & Central America were trapped in a tractor trailer near Victoria, Texas about 175 miles (282 kms) north of the border. Nineteen men, women, & children (a 5-year-old boy & four teens) died of asphyxiation, hyperthermia, & dehydration after the driver abandoned the rig when he heard screams of the refugees.

In the Victoria case, 14 defendants were prosecuted, including the driver. They certainly should have been. But there are questions about how the drivers got truckloads of human beings past the border patrol stations with K-9 dog units on the border & on the highways leading north.

Media is already beating the drums about prosecuting the driver who has been arrested & about the criminality of human trafficking. That’s a switch & bait tactic to draw attention away from US immigration policy that must be indicted for criminal disregard of human rights. People who can cross the border with dignity would not resort to human traffickers or submit to such inhuman conditions. Were it not for US economic policies in Mexico & Central America or neoliberal scorched earth policies, men, women, & children would not be forced to come to the US for work.

This photo is an immigrant detention center in the Rio Grande Valley on the border, with men, women, & children stuffed like sardines into a concrete room with no chairs, beds, or any attempt to treat them as human beings rather than livestock.

No human being is alien to us. Immigration is a human right. Open the damn borders.

(Photo was smuggled out of RGV detention center & published by Breitbart in May 2014)

A survey of those dismissive about “Russiagate” & Russian interference in US politics would find direct correspondence to those who talk about AIPAC control of the US government & Zionist control of the media–which can be ignorance but is most often poorly veiled anti-Semitism analogous to Hitler’s belief that Jewish bankers run the world.

Of course Israel meddles in US politics; & vice versa. It’s beyond dispute the US is up to its eyeballs meddling in foreign countries. But we condemn that interference & meddling because it is undemocratic & violates the rights of working people in those countries. We don’t use it to justify undemocratic Russian meddling in US politics. That’s the cesspool you find yourself in when you defend Russia because of its support for Assad & because of your veiled support for Trump.

Anyone remember Sunni & Shia being at each other’s throats till US-Euro-Australian forces began bombing Iraq to smithereens? What are the CIA & special forces for but to manufacture conflict? All the better to accomplish complete destruction & a new form of colonialism. Witness Iraq.

Anyone who can look at Mosul & still call on the US to play a progressive military role in Syria doesn’t understand the first damn thing about the nature of US militarism which is destruction & domination, not democracy.

US out of Iraq & Syria. US out of Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya.

There is almost a complete news blackout about the refugee crises at European borders, at the US & Australian borders, & about Rohingya refugees when we know there are hundreds of thousands living in concentration camp-like squalor or homeless & many are being thrown in jail as “illegal aliens.”

The one exception to the blackout is the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean only because the rescue organizations keep us informed. The MSF/Doctors Without Borders rescue operation uses Twitter to keep us informed daily. Their posts are really worth following because they always highlight the humanity of refugees. They never express detachment or a sense of noblesse oblige toward them but always a sense of them being one of ours, one with us.

https://twitter.com/MSF_Sea

Protests around the world in solidarity with Palestinian defense of Al Aqsa

US protest for Aqsa July 24 2017

It’s being reported there are protests around the world in solidarity with Palestinian defense of Al Aqsa. This one appears to be in New York City. If you hear of protests, please keep us posted. If there is no rally in your town, it’s easy enough to call one by making some phone calls (to the local mosques, students groups, church groups, etc.).

The attacks on Al Aqsa are a call to arms. But if you are unable to protest, you can participate in & build the cultural & economic boycott of Israel (BDS).

Long Live Palestinian Intifada. #HandsOffAlAqsa.

Al Aqsa- from aqsa to kashmir July 24 2017

Azadi (freedom): from Aqsa to Kashmir, we will be free.

Long live Palestinian & Kashmiri Intifada. End the occupations. Self-determination for Palestine & Kashmir.