NPR just published an exposé about nine secret experiments performed by the US military on 60,000 Black, Japanese-American, & Puerto Rican enlisted soldiers during WWII. There have been previous exposés about US government human experiments, including CIA experiments, from 1940 through 1970. The WWII experiments were all racist-based–as were many of the later ones.

The WWII experiments were with mustard gas which affects a person within seconds, producing burns & irreversible damage, including cancer, chronic skin diseases, respiratory illnesses, eye problems. Mustard gas was first used as a weapon of war by the Germans in WWI so US scientists knew damn well what mustard gas did to human beings: skin blisters, vomiting, blindness, internal & external bleeding, stripping of mucus membranes in the bronchial tubes.

According to NPR, because the experiments were secret, they were not recorded on the men’s military records so they have no proof they went through them. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. They were not volunteers but were ordered or offered incentives to participate. Rollins Edwards, a participant & the man in this photo, said he never questioned the experiments. “Defiance was unthinkable especially for Black soldiers,” he said. “You do what they tell you to do & you ask no questions,”

Participants were also threatened with dishonorable discharge or military prison time if they told & were unable to disclose the cause of their disfiguring & chronic health problems to doctors after they were discharged.

Now here’s the kicker! Given what we already know about human experiments, especially the large number of racist experiments conducted by US government scientists–(that includes Tuskegee, eugenics experiments on Black, Latina, Native American, & disabled women, & on women in Guatemala & Puerto Rico)–NPR should have felt entirely confident asserting the unmitigated racism of these experiments that rival Dr. Josef Mengele & other Nazi scientists in debasement.

Instead, showing the corporate sponsorship to which they dance, NPR pulled its punches. They said we should remember the US & its scientists were preparing for chemical warfare in WWII–as if that justified racist experiments on human beings. They claimed scientists wanted to see if there were variables between how different ethnicities reacted to chemicals & that “at the time” scientists thought Blacks were more resistant.

“At the time” has to be one of the most atrocious & banal excuses for historic crimes ever invented. At the time of these experiments, there was a major political campaign to desegregate the US military. At the time, Black & Puerto Rican soldiers were coming home in body bags, all shot up, missing limbs just like every other soldier. So they can cut the crap on that “at the time” stuff.

Rollins Edwards is here showing the scars from exposure to mustard gas 70 years ago as part of the WWII experiments. He says he has constant itching on his arms & legs which break out in rashes where he was burned. During outbreaks his skin falls off in flakes & he carries a jar of the flakes to show people what happened to him.

(Photo by Amelia Phillips Hale for NPR)

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is here leading 37,000 people in a mass yoga session in Delhi’s Rajpath, an area where protests have been banned. The event is part of the first International Yoga Day called by Modi. Mass yoga sessions were held in several countries including the US & China. The day was built as one to promote “harmony & peace.”

The Chinese government violently suppressed the Falun Gong about 15 years ago for holding similar mass events with qigong, calling it heretical. There are no reports they cracked down on the mass yoga events–though yoga is rooted in Hinduism.

Students & teachers in Chile have been protesting for at least a decade for education reforms–often in pitched battles with riot police over the right to protest. The government isn’t building new public universities & profit in higher education is the norm–debarring thousands of working class kids from getting a college education. The protests include thousands of high school students because public education is being replaced by charter schools, a neoliberal method to undermine & destroy public education.

The system, which had been universal, free public education, was privatized & deregulated under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet when Chile became the testing ground for Milton Friedman’s antisocial, scorched earth neoliberal assaults on social & public services for working people. Education became a consumer product & not a social right. The policies remain in place, administered by successive “democratic” regimes after Pinochet.

Both high school & university students want education brought under control of the central government rather than by municipalities. Municipalizing education was neoliberal strategy & created wide inequalities in education based on unequal funding resources–not unlike segregated education in the US. In fact, one Chilean NGO termed the system “educational apartheid,” among the most unequal education systems in the world.

The current Chilean president Michelle Bachelet is a socialist of the French president François Hollande kind (who discredits the designation every time he opens his damn mouth, deports entire communities of Roma, or prevents refugees from entering France). She was elected in 2014 based on promises of education reform which she didn’t deliver in her first term of office from 2006-2010.

In the same way as Hillary Clinton, Bachelet played the populist role to the hilt during the election campaign, even promising to trim the sails of neoliberalism. She promised to re-centralize education, make it free again, & financed by corporate taxes. File that under “A Snowball’s Chance in Hell.”

Last February, Bachelet enacted an education reform law. Like all such legislation that tries to pull the wool over people’s eyes, it was full of loopholes, stalling tactics, promises for future programs to correct the problems not addressed, even education vouchers like the right-wing is trying to install in US education. What the legislation doesn’t do is dismantle neoliberal education & replace it with free, universal public education.

Former student leader, now legislator Camila Vallejo, who will chair the education commission in the Chilean legislature, supports Bachelet’s program as a gradualist & pragmatic approach. Some other observers call the new legislation a partial victory showing how popular movements can gradually transform state policy & how difficult it is to dismantle the neoliberal model of education. It wasn’t difficult to install the model under Pinochet. Why does dismantling it have to be gradual? Or will that bring students into conflict with the neoliberal political forces that really run Chile?

Sometimes social movements do have to accept partial victories; In fact, that’s the norm. But one should not look at a dissembling piece of legislation meant to deceive & demobilize the social movement of students & teachers & call it a partial victory when it’s a massive con job.

The same political forces trying to cover for the treacheries of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil by discrediting social protest of millions against her are operative in Chile: small-minded political thinkers who think when politicians talk a good game they mean business.

This photo is a protest in Santiago of students & teachers not persuaded by that partial victory baloney. The protesters were hit by a petrol bomb in a conflict with riot cops.

(Photo by Andres Stapff/Reuters)

There’s only one thing to say about cockroaches (despised in every language): all those millennia of survival against all odds, all that evolution, so little to show for it.

Usually World Refugee Day is a ceremonial event of little value except for those who like empty gestures & symbolic things. But yesterday activists across Europe made World Refugee Day 2015 into one of active solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of refugees & immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, & elsewhere. There were solidarity protests in Spain, Germany, Italy, & several cities in France.

In Berlin, protesters chanted “No frontiers, no nations, stop deportation” &“Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here”. Banners & chants also protested IMF-European Union austerity measures in Greece, highlighting that the common enemy of immigrants & Europeans is European leadership & the scorched earth economic policies of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. In solidarity with Greece, many waved Greek flags & one poster read, this “technocratic, cold & neoliberal Europe that is led by Germany is unbearable.”

In Israel’s ongoing campaigns to fabricate religious traditions at Muslim holy sites, they are trying to reclaim & destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. For a few years now they have debarred Palestinian men under 50 years old from entering the mosque. Worshippers have to kneel in the public streets while sightseeing groups are allowed to tour & Zionist thugs vandalize.

Israel heralds itself as the only democratic country in the region. Possible to have freedom of religion–a touchstone of modern democracy–in a Jewish-only state? The Al-Aqsa age ban on men speaks for itself.

Rick Perry claims the Charleston massacre was an accident; presidential candidate Lindsey Graham (also known for stupid & mean-spirited) says it’s an attack on Christianity. Any takers for the “Twinkie defense”?

Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas running for president 2016, called the Charleston church shooting an “accident.” A coincidence he was Texas governor right after GW Bush, that they’re both born with a silver spoon in their mouthes & rocks in their heads, that they’re both racist & hateful toward immigrants, both liars & war mongers? The only difference is it’s hard to tell which one is more stupid & repulsive.

The distinctions being made about treating Black & Arab gunmen as terrorists & criminals & white gunmen as mentally ill are very powerful politically. The reasons for not allowing a diagnosis of mental illness as a criminal defense for racist gunmen are inarguable. But the truth of the matter is that racist massacres are not normative even in the white supremacist US where tens of thousands of people are schooled in high-power assault weapons & other methods of mass murder in the military.

Donald Trump wants Oprah as his running mate. He thinks they’d win easily because everybody loves her. Against Mike Huckabee, that’s a shoe-in. And maybe against some of the other bumble-bums too because even if Trump can’t, at least Oprah can put a coherent sentence together. She grovels for celebrity but that’s an ideal quality for the vice-presidency. Witness Biden.

The more Trump talks, the more the US electorate can’t wait to say, “Trump, you dumb-ass, you’re fired!”