There have been signs for a while that Cuba is retreating on internationalism. Even in its most beleaguered periods, that was fundamental to Cuba. Its near-silence during Israel’s US-financed Operation Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza last year & its call for a bantustate solution signal that retreat big time.

Now Cuban president Raul Castro has exonerated Obama from culpability in crimes & aggression against Cuba & other Latin American countries. He actually uttered: “I want to apologize to President Obama because he doesn’t have anything to do with all of that.” But Senor Castro, what about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Gaza?

I don’t watch the Dr. Oz show nor do I follow his advice since rave reviews always set off my skepticism meter & he clearly derives commercial benefits from recommending products. That’s the way capitalism works, including capitalist medicine–& certainly commercial, corporate-sponsored television. I haven’t vetted the ten doctors demanding Columbia University sever ties with him. But I recognize a lynching party when I see one. It’s certain a little vetting would turn up commercial ties to questionable sources.

For several years, drug medicine has been going after natural medicine modalities, including Chinese medicine, homeopathy, Ayurvedic medicine, naturopathy, & supplements–attempting to vilify, criminalize, & restrict them. Whether people like it or not or think us fools, we should have a right to decide which health modalities work best for us. Even the National Health Institutes include some of these modalities.

Ridiculing natural health practices is one thing. Those of us who use them don’t give a rat’s ass what others think as long as they work for us. But it is an outrage that people who think themselves progressive would endorse these lynching parties. Leave us to our follies.

You can quote the Hippocratic Oath against Dr. Oz till the cows come home (& this post is not a defense of him) but we can point to the barrage of TV ads appealing to victims of pharmaceutical drugs to join class action suits.

If one ever needs proof that capitalism has entered its barbaric phase, reading Forbes magazine will lay all doubts to rest. In the period of its decline capitalism doesn’t have access to writers & apologists of the highest moral & intellectual character & has to resort to troll-like thinkers that operate like court jesters from medieval courts. The only thing they’re missing is the little cap with bells on it & the phony scepter that signify a fool.

This is the second anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh where 1,135 garment workers, mostly women & children, died & over 2,500 were injured–many permanently disabled & no longer able to work. Many were buried alive in the rubble. There are still 135 bodies buried in mass graves whose DNA has not been identified so families can give respectful burial.
Nothing has changed for sweatshop workers in Bangladesh; under international scrutiny the wages were raised from US $9 to $16 a week. Some of the 29 US & European retailers they produced for sell a pair of underwear for more than $16. But most importantly, after the initial furor from the Rana collapse calmed down, none of the retailers forked over any compensation money to the victims’ families.

And this is where the intellectual tinker-bells of capitalism come in. In article after article, before bodies had even been recovered from Rana rubble, these amoral apologists were arguing that sweatshops & child labor are necessary, progressive, & improve the lives of their workers; that almost $2 a day beats the World Bank poverty measure of $1.25 a day; that “poor” countries cannot afford the safety standards of “rich” countries; that if sweatshops lay the kids off they’ll all become prostitutes; that it is outright colonialism for retailers to demand safety standards in foreign sweatshops; that poor people in Africa, Asia, & elsewhere clamor for sweatshop jobs. You read too much of this crap at one sitting, you get constipated.

There’s no hope for these creeps if they defend sweatshops; there’s no merits to sweatshops; there should be no future for neoliberalism if its standards of well-being in a country are sweatshops & child labor.

We should take a moment to honor those who died & those who survived the Rana Plaza collapse. And we should commit ourselves to ridding this planet of the abomination of exploited labor.

(Photo is a woman grieving a beloved lost in the Rana collapse; by A. M. Ahad/AP)

The Vietnam War is not just another in the endless litany of US military interventions. The massive international antiwar movement gave it historical importance for several reasons: it broke the repressive political climate of the McCarthy witch-hunt; it signaled that militarism & colonialism can be defeated; it showed the power of international solidarity & opposition to colonialism. And quite frankly it showed that the US is not a nation of political deadbeats but are capable of standing massively against tyranny & war.

One of the outcomes of the war was the “Vietnam Syndrome,” considered a disease state & rued by politicians & the Pentagon because it was a political mood of opposition to US interventions. The think tanks worked overtime to counter this “pathology,” developing PR gimmicks like “low-intensity war” (anything but low-intensity if you were on the receiving end) & proxy wars. The Vietnam Syndrome was not decisively reversed until the Gulf War, which also signaled the decline of the antiwar movement.

Media usually congratulates itself by attributing antiwar opposition to its coverage. Press censorship is a feature of US wars which was in fact loosened somewhat during the Vietnam War. But with the Gulf War media again embedded themselves up the ass of the Pentagon & we know almost nothing about the barbarisms inflicted on other peoples–except in Gaza by Israel & bankrolled by the US. Being embedded means you report war news from Pentagon press releases.

This is a photo from April 25, 1965, at a time when the Vietnam War was becoming a central issue in US politics & the antiwar movement was erupting. US marines are storming a village searching for “Vietcong insurgents” & completely heedless of civilians under fire. The caption explains: “As was typical in such situations, the men of the village had mostly disappeared, & the remaining villagers revealed little when questioned.” That’s because the men would all have been shot as “Vietcong insurgents” & the villagers did not support US occupation.

(Photo by Eddie Adams/AP)

We approach the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon on April 30th 1975, when the People’s Army of Vietnam & the National Front of South Vietnam (known as the Viet Cong) routed the US military, considered the mightiest in the world. It marked the end of the war & nearly 20 years of US involvement. It also marked the reunification of Vietnam.

Opposition to the Vietnam War mobilized millions around the world in every country. In the US alone, there were protests of over a million people. The Vietnamese had been fighting the French for over 40 years & had sophisticated regular & guerrilla armies & a steely commitment to freedom from colonialism but their victory was not solely military. International solidarity played an important role by weakening the options of US militarism.

Many activists of that era committed their lives to organizing against the war; many activists in the antiwar movement today are veterans of that war along with veteran antiwar activists. For them the Fall of Saigon was a glorious moment, the kind where you remember exactly where you were. It’s not a reliving of youth’s glory days to do a retrospective of that event. It is imperative to understand that US militarism can be defeated & that mobilized international opposition is a vital part of that.

This is one of the iconic images of the evacuation of Saigon (now renamed Hồ Chí Minh City) taken on April 29th 1975. It’s often identified as the roof of the US Embassy being used for evacuations. In fact it’s the roof of an apartment building reserved for employees of USAID & the CIA, about a half mile from the embassy. The airport & US airbase couldn’t be used since the North Vietnamese Army was shelling them & shooting down planes trying to take off. The wreckage littered the runway.

The CIA chief in Saigon marshaled South Vietnamese politicians (including the deputy prime minister & defense minister), generals, & police officials who had colluded with the US to gather at his house with their families for evacuation. He had to punch some of them out to quell their hysteria. This photo is the evacuees fleeing justice by boarding a CIA helicopter taking them to US ships off Vietnam. The very definition of rats fleeing a sinking ship.

The same international movement needs to be rebuilt to oppose wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Kashmir, Syria, Gaza, & elsewhere. The Palestinian solidarity protests opposing the 2014 Israeli Operation Ethnic Cleansing stand as a model for what is possible.

(Photo by Hubert Van Es/United Press International)

Think there might be a connection between Adam Sandler’s rabid Zionism supporting the expropriation & dehumanization of Palestinians & news that his new western movie is so racist & disrespectful toward Native Americans that Native actors walked off the set?

The movie was described as a satire but anyone who’s ever seen a Sandler movie knows they never rise above sentimentality & frat boy humor. We’re talking lowbrow friends in high places or that crap would never make it to the screen.

The mostly Navajo actors left the set because the script repeatedly degraded Apache women & elders. So the issue isn’t just racism but includes misogyny & social hatred for seniors. Examples given of disrespect are women in the film named Beaver’s Breath & No Bra & an actress squatting & urinating while smoking a peace pipe.
This post isn’t intended as celebrity tittle-tattle but to expose the nexus between white supremacy & Zionism.

(Photo is actors Saginaw Grant & Loren Anthony on the set of “Ridiculous Six,” the Sandler burlesque before they walked off, from lorenanthony on instagram)

Is it only intellectual lowbrows who find the imbroglio between & about Cornel West & Michael Eric Dyson unseemly & narcissistic? It’s all the personal stuff that dominates political campaigns between the two parties. Let the two of them slug it out–but instead everybody under the sun is weighing in like it was a substantive dispute. It’s very telling about people’s politics. It must be said that Malcolm X & Martin Luther King, Jr. were also subjected to severe criticisms but they were too political to get caught up in it.

There’s a war against Black youth going on in this country which for the first time in forty years the media is actually reporting. There’s a new leadership emerging among Blacks that is casting off the compromised old guard. And we’re supposed to give a rat’s ass that West is criticized!? He can take care of himself & duke it out with Dyson. There’s a civil rights movement to build.

Maybe there is a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against the Clintons (though why would their own kind expose them?) or maybe their massive corruption is finally catching up with them. The funding of the Clinton foundation clearly violate ethics standards involving tens of millions of dollars no matter how many shyster lawyers they find to explain it away & it’s of a piece with Clinton foundation theft in Haiti.

The NY Times clearly thinks there’s a problem here because they don’t want her corruption to come back at the presidency. The question isn’t if some right-wing conspiracy is stalking the Clintons but why the US Justice Department hasn’t launched several investigations into the foundations they appear to use as personal ATM machines.

The European Union (EU) & its naval goon squad Frontex are coming under attack internationally for their barbarism in allowing thousands of immigrants to drown in the Mediterranean Sea. If they do not respond to the protests, their continued psychopathic indifference leaves humanity no choice but to set EU politicians adrift in a plastic dinghy with a leak. What was satire now becomes political necessity if humanity is not to collude in this monstrous crime.

Fabrice Leggeri, the head of Frontex whose name translates as horse manure, said saving lives should not be a priority over patrolling & surveillance of the borders. According to him, Frontex has no plans to ask for more boats or increase search & rescue operations near Libya because that would only encourage immigrants to risk the trip. He’s even parsing maritime law requiring ships to rescue anyone drowning. He said, “If you look carefully at the law of the sea, search & rescue is only where there is a distress call.” Not likely to come from a rickety fishing trawler or a dinghy without radio equipment. But with additional aerial surveillance he added, Frontex “can make a difference & anticipate more disasters.” Meaning they can watch mass drownings in real time on their high-tech satellite equipment. The more he talks, the more he documents the need to fry his ass in criminal court.

Of course, he’s just the captain of the EU goon squad. Today the EU is meeting in Brussels for an emergency summit on the crisis in the Mediterranean. They began the meeting with a moment of silence for those men, women, & children who died last Sunday. How about we tell them to take that moment of silence & shove it where the sun don’t shine? Boats, not empty rituals, are what is needed. Reportedly the draft proposal coming out of the summit is to use military force against immigrants under the guise of fighting traffickers. Does that mean troops in Libya? Who will they be shooting at? Has European civilization fallen that low that asylum seekers will be shot at like an invading army? There should be massive protests all over Europe, not just stinking little picket lines.

Piling criminal ignominy on ignominy, the EU summit indicates only 5,000 of the tens of thousands of immigrants will be allowed refuge in Europe. The rest will be deported back to the war zones & poverty they fled. This young man rescued from the sea is at Lampedusa island waiting for a ship to Sicily. The likelihood is he’ll be processed, fingerprinted, & deported without due process.

It cannot be stressed enough that immigration is a central issue in world politics affecting every country. The fate of humanity depends on solidarity with them, on seeing them as brothers & sisters, on standing with them in demanding Europe open the borders. “An injury to one is an injury to all” is not just empty phrase-mongering; it is the iron law of social transformation.

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

The first Earth Day in 1970 held such promise (even while the US pummeled Vietnam with bombs & Agent Orange) but that was before neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, went into full swing in the 1980s.

The environmental movement which has had US mobilizations of over a million people has since been hijacked & corporatized. The corporate funding of organizations is to make sure the movement doesn’t go beyond touchy-feely ritual to political demands. The operative rubric is: “Those whom the gods of capital would destroy they first make money-grubbers.”

This photo is from the Niger Delta in Nigeria, an area of massive oil company plunder & wanton destruction of the environment. It is regrettably an exemplar of how corporations & corrupt regimes cover their asses, with media operating as PR. The media caption claimed this man is engaged in “oil bunkering,” that is, hacking pipelines to steal crude oil, then refining it, & selling it abroad. The caption (quoting the Nigerian finance minister under then president Goodluck Jonathan), said theft accounts for a fifth of Nigeria’s two-million barrels a day production–an estimate at odds with Shell Petroleum claims that theft accounts for up to 100,000 barrels a day.

Shell called for greater security for their pipelines & said such sabotage & theft are responsible for the environmental blight of farm lands & rivers in the Niger Delta that make it look like scorched earth. They explained that Shell flyovers spotted unknown persons tapping pipelines & installing valves to waiting barges & trucks. Media reports in Nigeria & around the world claim Nigerian pirates, militant groups, & criminal gangs are killing their own economy, sabotaging their government, threatening the very foundations of Nigeria’s petroleum industry.

Millions of barrels bunkered every year by pirates with three-gallon buckets!? At what point does propaganda become outright farce? Nigeria is a major oil producer & 80% of government revenues come from oil exports but after 58 years of oil exploration in Nigeria, the kleptocratic government neither meters nor monitors the volume of oil production by Shell & other oil companies, has no functioning regulatory agencies, & doesn’t have a clue what is produced & loaded on to tankers. It is an open secret that after bribing government officials, the oil companies simply loot thousands of barrels.

Nigeria imports most of its fuel due to lack of refining facilities so where are the pirates getting their millions of bucket-loads refined? In sheds behind their houses? The closer you look at the story the sillier it gets.

In fact, Shell has a long history of collaboration with the Nigerian government to use deadly force & repression against opposition to their presence in the Niger Delta, which is an environmental & human rights disaster.

In a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, it was exposed that politicians & military officials, not pirates, militants, or small time operators, are responsible for the majority of oil thefts. They’re the ones who can commandeer & control access to barges & tankers to help oil companies loot thousands of barrels a day. The diplomatic cable reads: “The military wants to remain in the Niger Delta because they profit enormously from money charged for escorting illegally bunkered crude & from money extorted in the name of providing security on the roads.”

And yet the media portrays neoliberal plunder as the work of small time operators like this man. More importantly, they make Nigerian working people the culprits for taking back a few bucket-loads of the millions of barrels stolen from them daily by a corrupt regime & multinational predators like Shell.

The brief against multinational corporations piles documentation on top of documentation. As they plunder the earth & assassinate activists, they also bankroll the movement formed to oppose them. Either we take back the environmental movement & stand independently with these brothers & sisters or we perish together. That’s not a jeremiad; it’s a certainty.

(Photo of Niger Delta by Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters from November 2012 but the situation has only worsened since then)