Media (& not just in the US) has hijacked the story of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa which the Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates could affect 1.5 million by early next year. The story has now become about the threat of Ebola to the US & European countries & alarmist speculations about purposely infected ISIS operatives on suicide missions & terrorists using bags of Ebola vomit for bioterrorism. This tops in burlesque all the anti-communist scares of the McCarthy era combined & would be comical were it not for the 1.5 million people in West Africa threatened with devastating disease.

Partly the intention is switch & bait so we don’t notice nothing is being done to medically address the disaster. But it can only be pulled off convincingly with the grotesque mind-set of white supremacy & includes suggestions that Liberians are foiling attempts to provide treatment due to ignorance.

During the Ethiopian famine of 1974, deranged Harvard academics applied the medical model of triage & claimed it more merciful to leave famine victims die. We don’t know if the genocide model of triage is being applied to West Africa; we only know nothing is being done to address the catastrophe. Coming out of the “zero population” crowd, there have always been warped people who promoted this crap–of course only for countries with brown & black populations. It would be unthinkable to suggest this for nations considered primarily white because the outrage would be thunderous.

There are also the religious nutcases & talk radio hosts who claim famine & epidemic are divine punishment for violating their catalog of sins. And there are the sociopaths who claim famine & epidemic are nature’s way of trimming population. Add to this cacophany the libertarians like Mike Adams of Natural News who claim the Ebola epidemic is a conspiracy, that Ebola was invented in a laboratory.

You don’t need to devise conspiracy where there is no evidence. You don’t need to see divine retribution or any other crazy-assed misanthropic explanation when neoliberal healthcare (i.e., the almost complete absence of healthcare) alone indicts. Liberia, the epicenter of the epidemic in West Africa, not only does not have Ebola treatment centers; it doesn’t have primary health care facilities because the president & Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is investing millions in a military arsenal.

When Obama deployed 4,000 troops of the 101st airborne division to Liberia it was under the guise of humanitarian aid. It was claimed they were going to supervise the construction of 17 treatment centers of 100 beds each & to train medics. But the 101st airborne division is a combat unit that may include medics but is distinct from the medical corps. If the CDC projects 1.5 million Ebola victims in the next four months what the hell will 1,700 beds do to address the disaster? Why do they need a division of elite combat-trained soldiers to stand around watching construction? Why aren’t they deploying hundreds of doctors & nurses instead of a few medics? There’s little evidence the 101st airborne division is or ever has been deployed for humanitarian purposes. The only people who believe the Pentagon sends soldiers for humanitarian purposes are those who’ve watched too many WWII movies.

There are confusing reports about the development of an Ebola vaccine to prevent the spread of the disease. Many reports conflate a vaccine for prevention with a serum to treat those already afflicted. The few who contracted Ebola & were treated in US hospitals were given experimental serums not yet cleared by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for mass production.

There are apparently universities under contract with the CDC engaged in research for a vaccine & for a serum. There are, more significantly, three Canadian companies contracted to develop a vaccine by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), a division of the US Department of Defense. The function of the DTRA is to counter weapons of mass destruction (including biological weapons) & provide combat support. Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, a Vancouver company, was contracted for $140 million by the DTRA to develop an Ebola vaccine. In March 2014, Tekmira was granted a Fast Track designation from the FDA but in July, as the epidemic developed in West Africa, the FDA placed a full hold on clinical trials. That full hold was modified to a partial hold in August. Information is too sketchy to make accusations but it certainly appears fishy, maybe even criminal, for the FDA to fart around on the development of a vaccine when over a million human lives are at stake.

What the hell kind of world is this where millions of human beings are denied basic medical care? Where epidemics are militarized? Where millions of lives are jeopardized? Where people with the good sense to distrust corrupt governments are portrayed as ignorant & causing their own demise? This is the world of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, where human life is deemed expendable in the pursuit of monumental wealth for the few.

This little girl is 9-year-old Mercy Kennedy in Monrovia, Liberia grieving her mother who died after being taken away in an ambulance to an Ebola ward the previous day. Mercy walked around in a daze in her nightgown & flip-flops & was found by neighbors following the sound of her wailing. This small child’s grief is only a fraction of the cost of indifference, racism, & neoliberal colonialism.

What can we do to resist this? We can demand Obama withdraw the troops from West Africa & deploy medical personnel.

(Photo by Jerome Delay/AP)

There are so many questions posed but not answered about the Ebola epidemic in Guinea, Sierra Leone, & Liberia, three of the poorest countries in the world. Where thorough investigation is required, we get piecemeal reports that don’t add up to a coherent narrative. This is when you see US media expose its real character because while health organizations project the spread of Ebola in West Africa to potentially 1.5 million people by early next year, US media is focused on a couple US citizens who contracted the disease & is scare-mongering about ISIS suicide agents coming across the US border to terrorize with biochemical warfare. This is where white supremacy dovetails with propaganda & a grand switch & bait to distract from the travesties & abominations of neoliberal healthcare in Africa–& possibly the application of the racist triage theory where elite academics & politicians consider it more merciful to let people without a function under neoliberal plunder simply die miserably.

The ecology of Ebola is not well known, or at least is not consistently elaborated. But the first reported breakouts were in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1976. There have been 34 episodes since then in several central & western African countries with an estimated death toll of over 4,000 deaths (certainly a lowball estimate). The reported death toll in Western Africa during this episode is nearly that figure now. The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) calls this epidemic “the largest in history”; the World Health Organization (WHO) calls the current epidemic “a public health emergency of international concern.”

We haven’t heard from any public health agencies in the affected countries because even primary healthcare is in a shabby state under neoliberal regimes. Liberia has two treatment centers for Ebola victims, one with only eighteen beds. Mostly people have been dumped in squalid quarters without beds & no medical personnel. Or they’ve been left to die in their homes & in the streets. The Nobel Peace Prize winning president of Liberia is too busy building up a military arsenal to provide for public health. In nearly 40 years of Ebola episodes, no public health agencies comparable to the CDC have been established in the affected countries so that pronouncements about Ebola come from Geneva (WHO) & the US (CDC).

Many articles describe the reluctance of Liberians to go for treatment as though it were ignorance & superstition. Photojournalists show government teams going out to communities to educate & bully. (Would that people in the US were as “superstitious” about their own regime!) If you know victims are simply dumped in empty buildings without medical treatment, are sprayed down with some kind of decontaminant like they were livestock, are left to die in the streets, & corralled into guarantine, that “superstition” is the height of wisdom & self-preservation.

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), who have been treating Ebola epidemics in Africa for 20 years, issued two reports (July & August 2014) excoriating in the frankest diplomacy the criminal failures of what they term the “humanitarian system” to address this epidemic. Their report titled “Where Is Everyone?” takes everybody in that system out, including the UN, WHO, the so-called “international community”, & NGOs. They said without batting an eyelash in apology: “the UN is “at the heart of the dysfunction.” NGOs are no-show & government humanitarian aid has been promised but not delivered.

Their damnation is worth quoting in whole. In the past 20 years, they say “operational capacities in the United Nations system have been gradually reduced through reforms. For example, the restructuring of the World Health Organization in Geneva has led to the closure of its viral hemorrhagic fever unit. Member states should be held accountable for an unceasing reduction of response capacity. A destructive spiral has materialised, leading to what we see today: lack of leadership, deficient coordination and, last but not least, a striking absence of operational capacity. This is compounded by the fact that the international community simply doesn’t feel responsible for responding to what is happening in regions that are not perceived as politically or economically interesting.” In other words, no one is doing a damn thing to address the suffering & save the lives of millions of people in central & west African countries. That’s where the media switch & bait comes in: to disguise this treachery behind alarmism about Dallas being taken out by Thomas Duncan & ISIS coming over the border with bags of Ebola vomit.

This little girl is 9-year-old Nowa Paye being taken to an ambulance after showing symptoms of Ebola infection in a village 30 miles north of Monrovia, Liberia (Sept 30th). Can you imagine what it’s like for a small child to be carted off by some stranger in a space suit with no certainty for her family she will ever return or that she will receive medical treatment!?

(Photo by Jerome Delay/AP)

Judging by the twitter-sphere, thousands of people around the world & some media saw images of protesters in Hong Kong making this hands up gesture & concluded it was the influence of protesters in Ferguson who made famous the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” gesture against police violence.

This is when media really struts its investigative powers. The same media sources unwilling to give a coherent explanation of the Israel-Palestinian conflict in 66 years really went to town getting to the bottom of this gesture. Was it mimicry? Solidarity? A coincidence? Or just the traditional gesture of surrender against the threat of police violence? Of course, to corporate media that solidarity thing would be of most concern.

When you follow out the media investigation, you understand why news is so inscrutable, but mostly unreliable. To debunk any notions of influence, one often-quoted reporter says she interviewed two Hong Kong protesters in a crowd of 300,000 & they said, “Nope, there’s no relationship to Ferguson.” Well that settles it then. Another protester claimed the gesture was advised by protest organizers against police brutality & had no connection to Ferguson. Define “connection.”

Media parsing of this gesture was almost comical. “Almost” might be too equivocating. One claimed the influence could be subconscious from watching Ferguson protests on the news. One reporter said there’s no relationship between use of the gesture in the two cities because in Ferguson it was defiance against police violence & in Hong Kong it was functioning as a “simple symbol of defiance”. Knock, knock, is anybody home!?

But for farce in vetting this story nobody outdoes Hot Air, the Islamophobic blog associated with Michelle Malkin, the nasty-assed racist & right-wing libertarian who has distinguished herself with anti-immigration xenophobia. Citing the same two Hong Kong protesters as proof, the appropriately named Hot Air claims “there aren’t even tenuous links between the actions of the Hong Kong protesters & those who demonstrated in Ferguson.” Define “tenuous.” Couldn’t they even cede to that subconscious thing? Then this racist xenophobic site accuses those who claim otherwise of “cultural chauvinism” for assuming Hong Kong protesters are engaging in “mimicry.”

But racism will out & Hot Air blows it in the final riposte when it says: “There may be a larger issue exposed by this lazy display of appropriation on the part of so many. It might have simply been an honest mistake born out of the presumption that the world revolves around American domestic affairs, but it may have been a reflection of the need some have to confirm that the events in Ferguson were, as we were so often told in August, transformative.” One can almost hear the sneering at the Black community in Ferguson. To Malkin & her troupe, the US foreign policy of putting down Muslim terrorists is pivotal & the struggle of the Ferguson Black community against police violence just a local rebellion not worthy of news coverage.

It really doesn’t matter if the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture in Ferguson influenced democracy protesters in Hong Kong because it resonates with millions of protesters around the world facing extreme police violence. It is now a political symbol of rebellion to injustice & will always be associated with Ferguson–& now Hong Kong. It was brilliant in Ferguson; it is brilliant in Hong Kong because it transformed a symbol of surrender into one of defiance against tyranny.

(Photo of Hong Kong protesters using the hands up gesture by Wong Maye-E/AP)

There is a specter haunting Europe & that is the racist persecution & scapegoating of Roma in every country. Racism is not just part of the matrix of militarism but essential to the strategy of “divide & conquer” to take the heat off the ruling elites & dump it on the most impoverished & powerless people in society. It’s a slippery slope that ends up in pogroms & concentration camps.

This woman is a Roma living in Halandri, a suburb of Athens, Greece, where seventy-four Roma families have lived in a slum compound since 1971 (43 years). The Greek government has been attempting for months to evict the residents for illegal occupation of land in defiance of Greek law granting ownership rights to anyone who possesses land for longer than 20 years. The government plan was to demolish the compound (likely for purposes of gentrification) & relocate the Roma community to Mount Patera near Megara, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside the city at an altitude of 750 meters (just less than half a mile) with freezing temperatures & no essentials like running water, electricity, santitation, or schools & health facilities, & the nearest road 15 kilometers (nearly 10 miles) away. Residents don’t want to be evicted from a place they’ve made home for 43 years; their kids go to school in the area, they all work nearby & they will have neither schools nor jobs in the remote mountain outside Athens.

An estimated 140,000 Greek Roma live in about 200 makeshift compounds. Reportedly the Greek government has received 12.5 euros for badly-needed infrastructure projects but only 10,000 euro are accounted for. Some municipal officials were prosecuted for financial corruption involving 1.3 million euros designated for infrastructure projects that never materialized. Forced & illegal relocations of Roma from urban compounds have gone on in Greece since about 2000. They generally involve police brutality & forced removal to remote, undesirable locations. It was referred to by one human rights official as “institutionalized apartheid”–& that’s as good a term as any. Earlier this year, a Roma representative wrote an open letter to Greek officials protesting these relocations, titled “Roma means human, not human garbage.”

Leaders of the Roma community have been litigating & negotiating with officials for months for a deferral to find a more suitable location than Mount Patera. Roma rights organizations have filed formal complaints against Greece under the European Social Charter mandating housing as a human right. They claim racism & discrimination against Roma & systemic violations of the right to adequate housing in Greece. There’s really no shortage of laws (under the UN, the European Union, & Greek legislation) protecting Roma but there are also no provisions for enforcing their rights against officials hell-bent on ignoring them.

Officials in Athens had no intention of postponing the eviction & yesterday gave the community a half-hour to clear out peacefully before they moved in riot cops & bulldozers. The Roma community responded by setting up road blocks on a main traffic artery in Athens, setting dumpsters & tires on fire to block riot cops from attacking them or bulldozers from moving in to demolish. They were no match against a superior military force. Again might trumps rights.

The future of humanity depends on a ferocious rejection of racist discrimination & social hatred. There is no way forward without solidarity with those persecuted for their identity. Without that political solidarity, it’s all downhill from here for all of us.

(Photo by Thanassis Stavrakis/AP)

Now this is what you call commitment! These Hong Kong democracy protesters came in their own battle gear to stand up against a massive display of police force armed to the teeth & going hog wild with the tear gas. But they came in their thousands & numbers is the strength of working people & the force of justice.

We should honor these protesters, now on the front line of the fight for democracy which is a worldwide struggle manifesting on every continent. Political struggle engages ordinary people to collectively accomplish the extraordinary task of social transformation. Struggle for justice is when the creativity & genius of ordinary people becomes most apparent. And these makeshift gas masks are only the half of it.

We salute them & send them our fullest solidarity.

(Photo by Alex Hofford/EPA)

The Cold War myth is that democracy is the political system of capitalism & tyranny the political system of socialism. Stalin’s gulag lent a certain persuasive power to that fabrication but you could look around the world & see it didn’t make a bit of sense. Capitalism is more often associated with dictatorship & repressive juntas than with the kind of so-called democracy we have in the US.

We can never be dismissive of the Bill of Rights but in fact for most of US history (& this is true in other countries) working people have had to fight tooth & nail for the right to speak their minds, publish what they think, & protest for what they believe. US history is a battleground of democracy against state repression. You don’t notice this contradiction with the Bill of Rights unless you actually stand at odds with US policies. But the history of the labor & civil rights movements in particular will stand your hair on end for the violence used against protesters.

These riot cops in gas masks are in capitalist Hong Kong (where the capitalist operations of so-called socialist China are negotiated) facing off against hundreds of thousands of democracy protesters. Do you think that Cold War stuff might be a bill of goods? Do you think Mao’s “Little Red Book” might need a little updating?

Winning the right to protest without police violence is becoming increasingly more difficult in every country & ending that violence is central to the struggle for democratic rights.

Our fullest solidarity with the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

(Photo by Xaume Olleros/AFP/Getty Images)

Since the emergence of feminism in the 1960s, war has always been an issue to the the US movement since there has never been a time without a US war. How feminists relate to war & to the antiwar movement was always a disputed issue. Many who don’t know the internal history of the women’s movement have a simple-minded attitude towards it–as if it were a monolith of white, middle-class, man-hating prudes. Complexity befuddles too many. There were many disputes within feminism & the attitude to US war was chief among them.

In the 1960s-70s generation & the era of the Vietnam War, conscription was an issue in the US. The debate was whether to demand women’s inclusion in the draft or as more radical women proposed, oppose the draft for both men & women. Women have always been in the military primarily as nurses, medics, & clerical workers but in the 1970s they began to get recruited in large numbers & allowed into military academies so they could become generals. It was only last year women were allowed to serve combat duty. They’re now in every branch of the service, including as pilots.

Whether this inclusion is an advance for women’s emancipation is an important issue to discuss. Desegregating the US military for Blacks was a substantial civil rights campaign during WWII but it’s a mixed bag because it means more young people get killed, maimed, or chewed up by US wars. And the same has proven true for women since the sexual assault statistics in the military are astronomical & they come back with the same war injuries & psychological traumas as male veterans.

Women serve in the military all over the world. The story of Mariam al-Mansouri, a combat pilot from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is taking the news by storm & there are many striking features to the story. It was released at the same time as the quote by the Saudi Arabian sheikh who opposed women driving cars because he thought it would damage their ovaries. (The less said about the sheikh, the better!) More significantly, it was released in the context of crescendoing Islamophobia where media is absolutely brazen & shameless in promoting animosity toward Muslims. When FOX news commentators ridiculed her in the most demeaning & misogynist way, it evoked a backlash of defense by feminists, US veterans, & others.

Ironically, Saudi Arabia (where women aren’t allowed to drive), the UAE, Jordan, Qatar, & Bahrain have allied with the US & its NATO henchmen to conduct bombing campaigns against Islamic State paramilitary groups in Syria. The stinking fish in the story is that US war propaganda includes two components: whipping up irrational Islamophobia & using feminism to serve US militarism & colonialism. The wretched hatred of Muslims is being interwoven with right-wing feminism & there is increasing evidence they intend to run us around the block with that deadly combination. In the end several more countries will be reduced to rubble & feminism will be discredited. Colonialism will be advanced & women’s freedom from oppression will be outmaneuvered. It’s a double whammy that cannot be allowed.

There’s no question women can fly fighter jets. They can do almost any damn thing except pee standing up. There’s no need to go all libertarian & see conspiracy here but Ms. al-Mansouri, even in her hijab, serves US war propaganda very well–whether she knows it or not. She may contradict the hate narrative of the downtrodden Muslim woman but she’s the cat’s pajamas for feminism in the service of war.

Antiwar feminists need to start kicking ass & taking the narrative of what feminism stands for back from those who would use it to eventually discredit & destroy it. Feminism is about ending violence & oppression against women & opposing racist wars & colonialism is central to that mission.

(Photo is screen shot of Mariam al-Mansouri from video on Yahoo)

One of the most famous & regrettable quotes of Mao Zedong comes from a speech he gave to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in 1938: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” He went on to say: “All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power.” And again: “In this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. You gotta ask yourself where the hell Mao learned his Marxism. But we sure now know where the current Chinese regime learned theirs.

There have been several days now of spectacular, massive protests in Hong Kong over the democratic right of suffrage; that is, residents of Hong Kong want Beijing to drop its schemes to control elections in Hong Kong in order to install the same kind of politics they maintain on the mainland where one party backed by a mighty army determines who’s in charge & there is no electoral democracy.

Those in countries where parliamentary democracy prevails well know that popular democracy does not grow out of elections. More & more, elections are jockeying over figures from competing parties with identical politics or political programs only distinguished from bad to worse. More & more, we see maneuvers using elections to outsmart popular demands for democracy & the end of tyranny (as against the Egyptian uprising). More & more elections are a swindle because in one way or another the nominating process is controlled & election laws so prohibitive that only millionaires can afford to run. In most countries people tolerate this outrage & express their cynicism by boycotting elections & becoming politically passive. In Hong Kong, the democracy movement is taking a stand against these electoral manipulations & represents a fight for genuine electoral democracy.

Hundreds of thousands in Hong Kong are protesting China’s proposed electoral scam & will be doing so at the ceremony tomorrow marking the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Protesters are occupying government buildings & the central business district of Hong Kong blocking traffic & closing down banks & businesses. That business district is where billions of dollars in Chinese trade & commerce transpires.

This year is also the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre which the active democracy movement in Hong Kong commemorates with annual protests demanding justice for those murdered & incarcerated. Tiananmen was an event where the Chinese regime tried to demonstrate Mao’s assertion that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The annual protests are held to counter that repugnant assertion with a demand for accountability by the regime for its crimes in Tiananmen.

There have been concerns expressed that China would in fact sic the army on Hong Kong protesters. Such an option can never be excluded but China would have hell to pay if it took that route. The stench & stigma of the Tiananmen massacre still has not politically dissipated. For now, Hong Kong riot cops are using extreme violence against protesters, including indiscriminate use of tear gas. Protesters, familiar with police brutality prepared for that eventuality with training exercises in how to handle tear gas attacks. Many showed up dressed in plastic, makeshift gas masks, & other equipment & are using umbrellas they used for a rain storm to defend themselves against tear gas attacks.

In a very real way, the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong is a struggle for the soul of socialism. If Mao is right that military repression is necessary for socialism, who in their right mind would want it!? If ‘only guns can transform the world’, who but criminal cartels & the National Rifle Association would want any part of it!? As the Hong Kong protesters show, as the Arab uprisings & anti-austerity protests & Occupy movement showed, social transformation is driven by the human demand for freedom & justice & peace. It is not political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun but tyranny.

Our fullest solidarity with our brothers & sisters in Hong Kong. May they shove those umbrellas where the sun don’t shine–up the keister of Chinese tyranny that still has Tiananmen to answer for.

(Photo of protest in Hong Kong on Sept 28th by Apple Daily/AP)

In all the media hoopla over the new Clinton kid, the voices of the millions of children who have suffered or died under policies shilled by the two despicable grandparents should be heard. Pity the Clinton child. Prosecute the grandparents for crimes against humanity.

There is one possible upside to this new Clinton kid. Maybe the two odious grandparents will opt out of making life a living hell for millions of other kids–most notably in Haiti–& spend the rest of their paltry lives doting on the kid. I refuse to congratulate them. Who gives a rat’s ass about their pathetic personal lives!?

While the odious Clintons celebrate the new kid, these Syrian children are fleeing from US carpet bombing. Until the current US bombing of Syria, most military aid was given to paramilitary groups fighting the tyrannical Assad regime.

Hillary Clinton, in her bid to be chosen presidential candidate, is attempting to distinguish her policies from Obama by moving more to the right on Syria as well as other conflicts. Bill Clinton publicly & fully supports her barbaric perspectives. Stand with the children of Syria by marching against US war in Iraq & Syria.

US out of Syria! End the bombing!

(Photo by Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images)