Burn baby burn!

London firefighters (Dan Kitwood:Getty Images) Feb 25 2015

The austerity hustlers might want to think twice about slashing the pensions of firefighters. Here they’re protesting cutbacks to their pensions in London, England. This is only a 24-hour strike with a little fire display. Next time they may burn down Parliament. After that, they’re heading for Buckingham & may take out the whole empire. A lot of people around the world have their hopes pinned on that.

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/GettyImages)

Sign petition to participate in cultural boycott of Israel

 

The English singer & UNICEF ambassador, Robbie Williams is scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv this coming May. UNICEF claims its mission is to provide humanitarian assistance to women & children in poor countries. So apparently there’s a disconnect & Williams doesn’t know that just 45 miles away in Gaza, Israel killed & maimed hundreds of women & children in the siege last summer & made thousands homeless.

An Israeli concert promotion site said that since his career is “not quite in the superstardom ranks” anymore it was the perfect time for Williams to “rake in a few shekels from star-hungry fans.” We prefer to think the best of performers & think he’d want to know about Israeli ethnic cleansing. We can’t imagine the exorbitant fees paid to lure artists to Israel would reduce a humanitarian ambassador to venality & unseemly groveling for money. After all, he’s an artist, not a street monkey on a string, right?

Please sign & share this petition as part of the cultural boycott of Israel which is having a powerful impact.

https://www.change.org/p/robbie-williams-unicef-children-s-ambassador-please-don-t-play-tel-aviv-2015

New Hillary Clinton same as the old

CBS news reported that Hillary Clinton’s PR firm is coaching her to accent her “soft, feminine side” so she began chatting in homey style about her pregnancy, being a grandmother, challenging the “glass ceiling.” Previously they claim she tryed to downplay gender. Is it just me or is the old wooden androgynous Hillary indistinguishable from the new wooden feminine Hillary? She still talks like she has a pole stuck up her ass.

And as a postscript, whatever happened to politics in presidential campaigns?

Israel opens dams to flood Gaza and then claims it has no dams. How did they make the desert bloom?

Gaza flooding (Ibraheem Abu Mustafa:AP) Feb 25 2015

Last Sunday, media reported accusations from an official in Gaza that Israel opened “a number of dams” near the border with Gaza, flooding the Gaza Valley after a severe winter storm & causing many Palestinian families to evacuate along with damage to farmland. To Israel’s enormous disgrace, the story evoked outrage but not surprise. Israeli shame is blunted by the power of US support.

Soon enough, Zionist publications went ballistic (it appears their emotional apparatus is stuck in that mode) reporting Israeli claims that it has no dams in southern Israel. Most media immediately retracted the report as false.

Once again we witness the investigative shambology of modern media. Shambology enters the English language as of this post signifying a potpourri of false authority combined with canned news full of hearsay, half-truths, mysticism, baloney. You get the picture.
It should be easy enough to find out if there are any dams in Israel that could impact Gaza & they would not have to be on the border to do so. Can’t the reporters at least look at a map, query officials from Gaza & Israel about the locations, do that thing reporters are supposed to do, i.e., snoop around & ask questions? After all Israel already has an entire catalog of war & human rights crimes to account for so why add several more counts?

From what one can learn there are in fact no monstrous Hoover-type dams in Israel. But there are smaller ones including the Yeruham Dam (roughly 40 miles from Gaza) used for flood control, irrigation, & water supply. The dam is on a tributary of the HaBesor Stream which flows directly through the Gaza Valley & spills into the Mediterranean Sea.

Do we know as fact that Israel opened the dam? No we don’t. Is it possible? It’s more than likely. Is it verifiable? Absolutely. But only if reporters will do the work & then only if it is seen fit to print.

(Photo of flooding in Gaza by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/AP)

Speech I gave at veteran event in Minneapolis to raise funds for Winter Soldier Investigation 2007

With all the odious revelations and trials of military “kill teams”, it’s important to recall that it is US government policy indoctrinating young people in racism which turns them into war criminals. When they return to civilian life they, their families, and American society pay a price in PTSD, addiction, mental illness, homelessness, incarceration, suicide, violence. The antiwar movement and its veteran participants do not glorify soldiers; nor do we vilify them. These are excerpts from a talk I gave in Minneapolis at a meeting where veterans and military families protested the wars.

Of the many important participants in the antiwar movement—students, churches, women, civil rights groups, unions—there is one constituency with a towering moral authority no one disputes, and that is the veterans and active duty Gis. Their opposition to war cuts, like nothing else can, through the patriotic jingoism, racism and lies that justify war. That’s why the proponents of war are so relentless in trying to create antipathy between veterans and the antiwar movement. Everyone’s heard the story about Vietnam vets being met at airports by taunting and spitting protestors? This ugliest of slanders is intended to alienate people from the antiwar movement, in particular to isolate and demoralize veterans with misgivings or opposition to the war. It gives them no place to go for support.

In the early antiwar movement there was some confusion and discussion about the value of reaching out to veterans and Gis—but no one ever saw them as the enemies of peace; some doubted they could overcome the military brainwashing or stand up to the harassment they would certainly receive. That confusion decisively ended when hundreds and eventually thousands of vets and Gis began organizing against the war and made their opposition public with newspapers, petitions, and demonstrations and they approached the antiwar movement for collaboration and support.

Without the support of a mass civilian antiwar movement they were subject to intimidation, court martial, prison time, and often charges of mutiny or desertion in time of war, which carry a maximum penalty of death. You may not know that all of this was true in the first Iraq war in the early 90s. Black and Latino soldiers played a major part in this resistance because they were so outraged at the racism of the war against the Arab peoples.

As a result of our collaboration, defense campaigns were waged and demonstrations held to keep Gis from being prosecuted and jailed. We marched with veterans reaching out to soldiers and to support those victimized for exercising their legal right to oppose the war.

The respect we have for these brothers and sisters in the antiwar movement is signified by the fact that even today all marches are led off by contingents of veteran’s and Gis because they are a direct rebuke to the demagogues calling racist wars a fight for freedom and democracy. Thousands have been inspired and persuaded to oppose the war by their public speeches and protests

Many of the veterans who have been involved in this work for now more than 40 years are here tonight. They’re probably too modest to stand up and identify themselves but I think we should tip our hats to them and express our respect and gratitude for the remarkable contributions they have made to advancing civil liberties, the causes of peace and antiracism, and to making this a suitable world for human beings to live and love in.

Guilty verdict against Eddie Ray Routh in redneck court

wpid-Eddie-Ray-Routh

A Texas jury pumped full of patriotic fervor & other idiocies found Eddie Ray Routh guilty of capital murder in the shooting of American Sniper Chris Kyle & Chad Littlefield. A judge sentenced Routh to life without the possibility of parole.

It could be argued that Routh didn’t stand a chance in that kangaroo court. His goose was cooked after Clint Eastwood put out that malignant piece of war mongering glorifying the psychotic Kyle. What chance did a guy diagnosed with PTSD & exhibiting extreme psychosis & violent tendencies stand in comparison to that crap? He killed a patriot, an icon of US militarism, a whack job, a remorseless psychotic killer.

This is not a claim that Routh is some prize package but that he was mentally disturbed as a result of war deployment & should be treated for mental illness, not incarcerated where that illness will only get worse & likely lead to suicide.

In a FB discussion about Israeli veterans of the Palestinian occupation, there were those who got on moral high-horses, damning the now anti-occupation veterans for having committed unforgivable war crimes & deriding their role in exposing Israeli human rights crimes against Palestinians. Israel has a conscription army for all men & women over 18 years old. And as we know from US war resistance among veterans & soldiers, extreme pressures are put on them to conform–or they are prosecuted & vilified. That’s tough stuff for young people to stand up to.

There are those in the US also who want to extract contrition, want to beat the veterans up with moral superiority, want to ban them from human society. The antiwar movement never took that approach because we understand why young people enter the military, what pressures they are subject to within the military, & how terrifying it is to defy the rigid hierarchy of mind-control & unquestioning obedience.

There is a body of literature written by veterans describing the horrors of war. One of the most powerful from the Vietnam War is “Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans.” One veteran describes how he used Vietnamese peasants for target practice. When he returned to civilian life & realized what he had done, he described his inability to ever again trust himself or his sense of who he was.

There are remarkable, compelling, wrenching testimonies from veterans at Winter Soldier Investigations in 1971 & 2007, events organized by antiwar veterans to expose war crimes & atrocities by the US military in several wars. You can rock that moral high-horse till the cows come home, but only a fool would deride the antiwar impact & moral authority of those who suffer PTSD & despite the depleted psychic energy stand to denounce war & build opposition to it.

This verdict is an outrage & should be denounced. Along with the massive statistics on veteran & soldier suicides, it stands as testimony to the US treatment of working class kids who go to war, come back chewed up & in pieces, & are denied even elementary social, medical, psychiatric services.

(Photo of Eddie Ray Routh at his trial)