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)

A little dose of skepticism never hurts anybody when they’re reading media reports about what millions of people think. If you fall for every poll that comes down the pike you’re going to end up in that hell with cynics & misanthropes who see the majority of people as “sheeple”.

Last week, the world was aghast at descriptions of unspeakable CIA torture including waterboarding, anal rape, prolonged solitary confinement. So it should give pause that the headlines a week later are triumphant, not even horrified in reporting that a majority of Americans polled approve that torture. If that can be shown beyond dispute, we’re talking psycho nation. The next thing we’ll hear is that people want a front row seat at Guantanamo like the psychos in the hills of Sderot overlooking Gaza.

Christopher Hitchens wasn’t the most ruthless of social critics but nearly thirty years ago he did a rather derivative investigation of public polling. The research then was overwhelming that polls are chock full of bias in the way questions are formulated. If you look at the questions from the several polls on CIA torture, there is not a single word about the actual torture methods. Poll subjects were not asked “Do you think it proper for the CIA to inject food up their butts & anally rape prisoners to extract information from them?” “Do you think waterboarding should be used & do you know how waterboarding is done?” Do you think prisoners should be told their families will be raped & killed if they don’t supply information?” “Do you think prisoners should be stripped & chained to the walls of their cells for hundreds of hours or do you think that’s depraved?”

Instead, in the Pew poll they were asked “Overall, do you think the CIA’s interrogation methods in the period following the September 11th terrorist attacks were justified or do you think they were not justified?” & they were asked “Regardless of whether or not you think the CIA’s interrogation methods were justified, do you think they provided intelligence that helped prevent terrorist attacks, or don’t you think so?”

The Washington Post-ABC News poll asked “As best you can tell, do you think the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists did or did not produce important information that could not have been obtained any other way?” & they were asked “All in all, do you think the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists was justified or unjustified?”

You have got to be kidding! Using those questions to claim the majority of people in this country favor the unspeakable & depraved methods of the CIA is a frigging mockery & insult to intelligence. Circulating those polls like they’re the gospel truth is arrant political manipulation & an attempt to demoralize the actual majority of us who are bereft & horrified that our government is run by psychopaths who use such methods on other human beings.

Enough with the polls! Use them for toilet paper. Better yet, use them to educate on the inventiveness used to convince us we’re living in a land of psychos & perverts indifferent to human suffering. Nothing brings down solidarity faster that misanthropy.

There are more than a few journalists & bloggers writing outraged posts against unidentified white writers discussing civil rights in the US & directing hostility at white activists engaged in the new movement. When the outrage comes from privileged “white privilege theory” advocates, that’s one thing. They get their sociology & guilt-baiting all mixed up with politics. But when it comes from Black bloggers, it’s worth some serious attention–although it doesn’t carry the same force as if it came from Black community activists engaged in building the new movement.

As one of those white writers who blog frequently on civil rights let me say I understand some of the resentment since it can be compared to males commenting on the women’s movement. Feminists would appreciate male supporters writing cogent analyses of our struggle but more often what we get is ignorant diatribes & false accusations about our mistakes–like the regrettable piece in the UK Guardian by Anthony Loewenstein or articles that think feminism is all about “sex-negativity” or advancing Islamophobia & US military goals. If they’re going to comment they should at least inform themselves beyond media misrepresentations about feminism.

Most of the bloggers aren’t identifying which white writers they’re offended by & that would be good to know because if we can examine the offensive writings we can better understand what it is that outrages. From what I’ve observed in progressive politics over the past nearly 50 years, one of the chief problems is that white activists patronize Black activists–massively & more than they get things all wrong. Although they also do that.

Political relations between Blacks & whites are so poisoned by decades now of whites standing by whilst SWAT teams go after the Black community that many just can’t conceive solidarity of any kind–maybe because they’re too young to remember the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s & it certainly isn’t taught in US schools. That movement incorporated thousands of anti-racist white people willing to put themselves on the line to oppose apartheid US-style. That movement also educated millions of whites who only observed the struggle. Such is the force of Black political power.

You can talk about white privilege cause it’s for real but it’s also a profoundly mitigated thing because racism contaminates every institution in our society & degrades all human relationships in every sphere of life. It’s the kind of privilege that comes back to bite you in the ass in a malignant “divide & conquer” strategy.

Black activists & the Black community don’t need my blog posts to analyze racism in the US but there are a lot of white people that do because their primary source of information is the media which has been beating the drums against Black youth for nearly 40 years. The media narrative about Black narco-terrorist gangs (used to justify the war on the Black community) was intransigent among whites, including political activists. And I know that because of my own writings on the issue & the hostility they faced from whites.

Anti-racist white people are a new & welcome part of the new civil rights & Black power movement & they are necessary for that movement to achieve its historic goals since it challenges the very foundations of US capitalism, armed to the teeth & accustomed to violence against the Black community.

Racism is fundamental to capitalism ideologically, economically, & militarily & has been since its inception. There will be no social transformation in this country without the leadership of Black activists–not just because of their political insights but because they represent Black power. The historic mission of ending the tyranny of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, requires unity on the basis of justice & solidarity. Not for one moment should Black activists allow themselves to be patronized or humiliated. And not for one moment should anti-racist whites allow themselves to be guilt-baited out of supporting Black power in every way they can.

The media caption to this photo said: “Visitors follow king penguins as they march through the Zoo in Basel, Switzerland. The penguins are only let outdoors for a walk in the winter.”

Well everybody loves a penguin but they aren’t on this earth to entertain human gawkers or enrich zoo keepers. They’re from Antarctica where they spend their lives waddling around, socializing, & foraging in the ocean, not warehoused in cement barracks.

They’re considered a “flagship species” in conservation biology which still can’t define what the term means so meanwhile it’s become a fancy marketing term for super-exploitation. By raising the public profile, they can make more dough parading them. There’s more cruelty in these zoos under the guise of biodiversity conservation than you can shake a stick at.

In a humane society the entire concept of zoos will be rethought along with circuses. You don’t have to get up close & personal with gorillas & lions but treating them like spectacles will not be an option.

(Photo by Georgios Kefalas/Keystone)

It isn’t explained anywhere why they threw a tango party in St. Peter’s Square to celebrate Pope Francis’s 78th birthday. It’s very charming but wouldn’t a solemn high mass be more appropriate?

It’s a little disconcerting to know that if there weren’t continents & a vow of celibacy between you, you’d be in the dating range of Pope Francis. Does he even know who Elvis Presley is? Did he ever do the hustle? Why did he take the road less traveled? Maybe we were meant for each other.

But anyway happy birthday to the pope. This is the age when you add “& many others” & really mean it. He could not have celebrated it with a more charming couple than the one here dancing the tango. Looks like they’re still swooning for each other after all these years.

(Photo by Gregorio Borgia/AP)

There’s a political symmetry between Mexico & the US that has the potential to change everything to the advantage of the oppressed. For decades, the US has conducted a brutal war on Black youth, including harassment, hundreds of police shootings, mass incarceration. They got away with it all because media drew on fathomless cesspools of racism to persuade people Black youth were feral, dangerous, drug-addicted, gang members.

There was a climate of impunity which cop killers used to full advantage because judges would buy almost anything as an alibi. Even vigilantes like George Zimmerman could take a Black kid out & walk away scot-free.

And then in Ferguson they went too far. The history of why the Black community of Ferguson drew a line against tyranny will have to be written; the participants, the process need to be chronicled because history is never an impersonal dialectic. We want to know those young activists as well as we do Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, & Martin Luther King, Jr., because they are counterposing a new civil rights & Black power movement to the co-optations of Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson who serve the status quo.

Mexico has been under the tyranny of neoliberal plunder for decades now, in agriculture, industry, & now with the privatization of PEMEX (the state-owned oil & gas company) which is making Mexico a land of oil spills & contaminated rivers. It’s now become a narco-state where crime syndicates & state apparatus converge. To carry that off terror & what activists called a “reign of impunity” were required.

Just in the past decade, thousands have been disappeared, thousands murdered by the military. It’s one of the most dangerous countries in the world for reporters & those who speak the truth because President Peña Nieto & Felipe Calderón before him wanted to assure foreign investors that Mexico was safe for business & open for plunder.

And then they pushed the boundaries of impunity too far when the Mexican police abducted 43 student teachers & handed them over to criminal cartels to dispose of like they were garbage. Ayotzinapa, the teacher’s college they attended, became an international clarion call just like Ferguson. The response across Mexico is shaking the foundations of the Nieto regime & challenging the future of neoliberalism.

Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan author of “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” (as cogent today as it was when published in 1971), recently quoted a previous warning of Mexican political activists: “The rulers have lost control of fear; the rage they have unleashed is turning back against them.”

Not only have the rulers lost control of fear & unleashed undaunted opposition movements, but the struggles in Ferguson & Ayotzinapa have tapped the wellsprings of international solidarity too long dormant but drawn into action around Gaza. It’s all of a piece because neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, is running out of options to solve its crises & is attempting to do so on the backs of working people.

To borrow & reformulate the declaration of Attica prisoners in 1971: ‘We are human. We are not beasts & do not intend to be beaten or driven as such.The oppressed have set forth to change forever the ruthless brutalization & disregard for our lives here & throughout the world. What has happened here is but the sound before the fury of those who are oppressed.’

(Photo of Mexican protester by Pedro Pardo/AFP/Getty Images)

The problem with Norman Finkelstein (as clearly seen in his December 12th debate monitored by Mehdi Hasan) is that he’s completely locked into Oslo Accord-think, despite the utter devastation they have wreaked on Palestinians & the bankruptcy of a bantustate solution. He’s like a broken record replaying the debate around the Accords & one wishes Edward Said were still around to answer Finkelstein since he seems to respect so few other Palestinians.

Increasingly he reveals his deep conservatism about social transformation & one wonders if he regresses politically to defend the existence of Zionist Israel or if he is just psychologically saddled that way.To speak of limiting justice by going no further than “enlightened public opinion” is a mockery of history. To identify “enlightened public opinion” as embodied in international law or represented by European governments is a mockery of reality. But the evidence in this debate suggests Finkelstein is quite flexible about public opinion since he also asserts his right to differ with majority opinion. Why would he deny that right to others?

The Palestinian call for the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (BDS) counterposes to Finkelstein’s legalism & misanthropy a conviction in the possibility of changing public opinion by convincing millions to support the justice of Palestinian demands–& the proof of their conviction are the millions of people around the world today who stand with Palestine.

Salma Karmi-Ayyoub, the Palestinian activist who debated Finkelstein here, spoke with compelling force, but too briefly. One wishes the clutter in this debate (including the Zionist journalist) would be removed so she could stand toe-to-toe with Finkelstein & bring clarity to this dispute.

A Palestinian man in the audience questioned Finkelstein’s disrespect for BDS since this creates division among Palestinian supporters. His question evoked the most revealing outburst from Finkelstein who said he is not pro-Palestinian, that he has “no interest in Palestine” but only in justice. A most regrettable distinction. And a damning one too.

(Photo of Palestinian man questioning Finkelstein is screen shot from video)

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/headtohead/2014/11/time-boycott-israel-20141116114716395219.html