The Ebola epidemic still rages in West Africa

Lest we think the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has been licked, the latest statistics from the US Center for Disease Control is 18,000 down with the disease & nearly 6,500 deaths. The lack of media coverage is appalling & damning. If those statistics prevailed in France or Germany or the US–or any country deemed white by those who live in the past–the news would be front page.

It was reported in early November that over 300 health care workers had died from Ebola. This raises some questions. Of the handful of health care workers flown out of West Africa to hospitals in the US, Switzerland, Spain only one has died in addition to Thomas Duncan, the Liberian visitor to the US who died in a Dallas hospital. One question is, who decides which health care workers get to stay & die in West Africa & which ones get flown out for elite care? And a second question is, why aren’t the treatments so effective in the US, Switzerland, Spain being made available to people in West Africa?

The CDC & FDA can blither on about the protocols & expense of testing drugs for the mass market but anyone who watches TV knows of at least a half-dozen class action suits at any given time for drugs that killed or permanently incapacitated people. Did they get to bypass the protocols & fast-track their way to fortune?

Militarization of the ballot box

Kashmir elections (Mukhtar Khan:AP) Dec 11 2014

This is an Indian paramilitary soldier guarding a polling station during voting in Kashmir state elections. Political analysts have been writing a long time about militarization in schools, on national borders, of the police, even of outer space. For heaven’s sake, today SWAT teams are used not just to apprehend armed & dangerous criminals but to serve warrants on church ladies for unpaid parking tickets.

What also needs to be analyzed is militarization of the ballot box which has been going on a long time in a lot of countries. It’s common to see guys like this at election queues. What do they think is going to happen? Is someone going to try to run off with the ballot boxes or go hog-wild stuffing them if there aren’t armed guards hanging around?

There are plenty of ways to rig an election without holding a gun to people’s heads beginning with limiting who gets on the ballot (as we just saw in Hong Kong). The US election commission knows a thing or two about that. The Florida election commission & US Supreme Court wrote the book on that when they ignored massive voter fraud & threw the election to George Bush. Militarization of elections does not protect them from voter fraud. There were soldiers all over the place during the Egyptian election that put Mohamed Morsi in power but there were very credible complaints about widespread fraud.

Given the shabby state of electoral politics today one wonders why paramilitaries are necessary. It’s hard for people to understand in places like the US where the political choices are so deplorable you’d have to send SWAT teams door-to-door to rout people off their asses just to get the majority to vote. “Why bother?” makes perfect sense.

Popular suffrage is an achievement of the capitalist revolutions against feudalism but in truth, suffrage is not likely to play a central role in getting rid of capitalism because elections are so easily rigged. Under neoliberalism, elections are a shell game to siphon off energy from popular rebellion. During election years in the US, antiwar & other social protest go way down, almost to nothing. Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson hot-footed it to Ferguson as proxies for Obama precisely to keep the movement within electoral limits. This time the movement is bigger & deeper than their machinations can control.

Of course what this militarization of the ballot box represents is conflict & imbalance in power. And that is sure as hell true in Kashmir under barbaric occupation by the Indian military. It certainly doesn’t mean the outcome of popular suffrage will serve justice in Kashmir which is why political dissidents are calling for a boycott of the elections. One cannot be dismissive of voting even in US elections when so many Blacks & Latinos are gerrymandered & maneuvered out of voting rights. But one doesn’t have to be a fool about them either. Sometimes the only time you throw your vote away is when you actually cast it. And sometimes, like in Kashmir, casting a vote will defy justice.

(Photo by Mukhtar Khan/AP)

Los Angeles Lakers express solidarity with Eric Garner. Charles Barkley’s brain continues to rot.

Kobe Bryant (Luis Sinco:LA Times) Dec 11 2014

Elite athlete Kobe Bryant & other Los Angeles Lakers wear “I can’t breathe” tee shirts in a pre-game warm up yesterday in LA. Their act of solidarity is a welcome rebuke to nincompoops like Charles Barkley, the retired basketball star whose fame went straight to his head & rotted his brain.

First he mouthed off about “unintelligent” Blacks valuing criminal behavior over academics. Then he called protesters in Ferguson violent “scumbags.” Now he’s defending not just the grand jury decision on Eric Garner but the right of four cops to gang up on Garner while one of them strangled him to death. Barkley told an interviewer, “When the cops are trying to arrest you, if you fight back, things go wrong.” Things go wrong: such a delicate way of describing murder.

Something went really wrong with Barkley too explaining why he has his head stuck up his ass. He’s trying to take up where Bill Cosby left off in defense of white supremacy. What they get out of it is a career way beyond their talents. We can expect to see “Sir Charles” as a TV sports analyst for many years to come. We have only one word of advice to him: beware karma. It can get real nasty.

Hats off to the LA Lakers for this act of solidarity. You can file this image under “This rebellion aint going away soon.”

(Photo by Luis Sinco/LA Times)

UNICEF declares 2014 a devastating year for children

Esther Tokpah (Michel du Cille:The Wash. Post) Dec 10 2014

On Monday, UNICEF released a report declaring 2014 a devastating year for children. They said “Never in recent memory have so many children been subjected to such unspeakable brutality.” Children have been “orphaned, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, raped & even sold as slaves.” That judgement would make neoliberal barbarism even worse than feudalism. It might indicate that neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, is heading not just for dystopia but for hell on earth.

The report estimates 230 million kids are in war zones including Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, DR Congo, & Ukraine. The pattern of conflict is so evident one wonders why in the entire report mixing statistics, pieties, banalities, & wishful thinking, that nary a word is spoken about the causes of this “unspeakable brutality.”

Violence doesn’t fall from the sky so who exactly is behind this suffering? Can a single scoundrel or source be identified? Because the Occupy movement had its weaknesses but thousands of activists around the world could point to who they thought was behind all this carnage: the filthy rich “one percent.” Could neoliberalism with its land & resource dispossessions, forced migrations, ethnic hatreds, sweatshops, slums, prisons, & just general plunder have anything to do with it? Could US Pentagon & NATO wars & drone bombings be implicated even a teensy-weensy bit? Could they at least mention Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza? Since over 6 million people have died & millions more made refugees in DR Congo in the past 16 years (the deadliest conflict since World War II), could UNICEF consider just a word about multinational mining operations driving the conflict? Perhaps they could even go out on a limb & say something about cops in the US shooting down unarmed Black kids in the streets or railroading them into prisons for spitting on the sidewalk or a little backtalk.

Instead the report speaks of “innovating for equity,” “reimagining the future,” & “scaling up solutions.” UNICEF with the lovely Christmas cards & they can’t even work up a human emotion about the horror of 230 million kids subject to “unspeakable brutality”!? Is a little outrage too much to ask?

This grieving child is 11-year-old Esther Tokpah from Monrovia, Liberia, who lost both parents in the Ebola epidemic in West Africa where nearly 18,000 people contracted Ebola & about 6,500 died. And still no vaccine or healing serum! And only because under neoliberalism, health care is eliminated to facilitate plunder.

We appreciate UNICEF keeping us abreast of the carnage even if they are unwilling to address it with anything other than banalities & abstruse sociology. But if we want to sincerely defend the children of this world from the most unspeakable violence we will have to organize ourselves to act on their behalf. That is the demand of this historic moment. Neoliberal barbarism cannot be allowed to turn our children into not just the chattel but the offal of their plunder.

(Photo be Michel du Cille/The Washington Post)