Flatulent Phil is expected to do something for living on the dole but it doesn’t mean he has to like it–especially if it means money expended on plebeians better spent on his indolent clan.

Here our man is unveiling a plaque for an art, drama, & dance school opened in his name (groveling is part of feudal relations) & he is peeved as all-get-out that curtsying is not in the curriculum. Democracy has just gone too damn far. Why should plebeians be taught to sing & dance when his kids can’t even walk in a straight line sober!?

Some will look at this photo & say “You see, money can’t buy happiness.” True it can’t, but it can buy a loathsome Nazi sympathizer & antisemitic lowlife like Flatulent Phil respectability & keep him out of jail.

(Photo by Matt Dunham/AP)

(PS to those who think my Windsor posts just too lowbrow: get over it!)

African immigrants continue to depart from Libya for Europe by the thousands–so overwhelming are the forces of survival that compel them. This past weekend, an estimated 6,000 immigrants were rescued by “an array of European military vehicles.” The immigrants in this photo are being rescued by an Irish Navy ship.

European navies are now converging on the Mediterranean in preparation for a military assault on immigrants under the guise of going after “human traffickers” who for the most part are fishermen. These photos are likely a genre of war propaganda to make the navies appear humanitarian rather than barbaric when they start torpedoing immigrant boats. The question is, why weren’t they mobilized in the Andaman Sea doing search & rescue for the thousands of Rohingya still adrift? What other purpose would a European navy serve since none of them are at war?

Right-wing Italian politicians in northern provinces like Lombard, Veneto, Liguria (those regions probably least affected by immigration) are trying to work up a popular drumbeat against accepting immigrants & pledging not to shelter those saved at sea. Those politicians from the Lega Nord (Northern League) are the Italian version of the US Tea Party: xenophobic, racist, nationalist, provincial, with just enough populism to give them “street cred,” & singularly vicious & stupid.

In fact, such massive immigration does strain social services & housing resources in other parts of Italy–especially when it’s under the whip of neoliberal austerity policies for working people. But to be frank, Italy is not expending monies on housing for immigrants: they live either in squalid housing like tents, in the rough, or in filthy, overcrowded prisons (euphemistically called detention centers).

All the more reason to open the borders & allow immigrants free movement to the many other countries where they want to go to work & live. That’s what humane societies would do for people seeking refuge from war, persecution, poverty. Then they can move those navies forthwith to the Andaman Sea to rescue Rohingya fleeing from violent persecution in Myanmar & still adrift in boats without food, water, or medical care.

Immigration is a human right! Open the borders! This immigration crisis & threats of military bombardment are a call to arms. Political groups across Europe should be prioritizing rallies & protests demanding their regimes open the borders & give sanctuary to our brothers & sisters from wherever they are from. They should be incorporating those demands into every action against IMF-EU austerity policies. “An injury to one is an injury to all” remains the iron law of social transformation.

(Photo from AP)

Emancipation US-style: This unfortunate man is a drug addict in Kabul, Afghanistan under a bridge near the stinking Kabul River where hundreds of addicts congregate. This man is a victim of the US-NATO war.

Afghanistan has long been the world’s leading producer of opium & heroin (up to 90%) although drug use & addiction by Afghans was relatively low, despite decades of occupation & war. But after the US occupation in 2001, drug use spread at an alarming speed. According to a UN drug agency report in 2010, addiction grew from 940,000 in 2009 to over 1.6 million out of a population of nearly 33 million people. The UN report estimated there are 3 million more drug users in the countryside. Many of the addicts are small children, as young as four. UN estimates are somewhat at odds with those from the Afghan Health Ministry which in 2014 estimated the number of addicts at over 3 million people or over 11 percent of the population.

Several media reports claim the soaring addiction rates are due to the dislocation of Afghan refugees in Iran & Pakistan–particularly they implicate Iran where heroin is reportedly readily available. The statistics speak for themselves: mass addiction is directly related to war & all of its consequences. Not only are millions dislocated, but they are unemployed, orphaned, have seen loved ones blown up & seen fields, hospitals, schools, mosques, homes demolished by bombs. Afghans, like most people, have limited emotional ways to cope with such barbarisms–especially as the war continues.

Although the UN can’t bring itself to condemn the US-NATO war, the 2010 report did identify war-related trauma as one of the causes for increased drug use combined with availability of drugs, & limited access to treatment facilities. In the US, the primary treatment for addiction is incarceration–of course, directly related to the war on Black teens. In Afghanistan, media claims there are 100 treatment centers in all of the country with space for only about 2,300 people. They claim the facilities are all funded by “international aid.” Which international aid would that be? The kind that never materialized or the kind USAID/CIA took for payoffs to corrupt government officials?

There’s only one functioning government-run clinic in Kabul with space for 300 people in a metropolitan area of over 5 million people & certainly a high addiction rate. The head of the clinic claimed they treated over 6,000 addicts in the first three years of the clinic & sent them back to society healthy after six weeks. That would explain the sky high relapse rates from the clinic. It also doesn’t help recovery to go back to the same conditions of hunger, unemployment, grief that caused the addiction in the first place.

Truth of the matter is, most Afghan addicts aren’t getting any help at all. The corrupt regime is crying poor mouth about building more treatment centers & the US-NATO regimes don’t give a rat’s ass about suffering Afghans.

The US-NATO war in Afghanistan has gone on long enough insufficiently opposed. It’s long overdue time to rebuild the international antiwar movement to demand “US-NATO out of Afghanistan!” Our deepest regrets we have thus far been unable to restrain the barbarous hold of US & European militarism.

(Photo by Mohammad Ismail/Reuters

More than 50,000 farmworkers across Mexico’s Baja California peninsula (about 200 miles south of San Diego) have been on strike since mid-March against low pay, harsh working conditions including unpaid overtime, & labor abuses including sexual abuse. An estimated $80 million of produce, mostly tomatoes & strawberries slated for export to US supermarkets, rotted in the fields while strikers demanded health benefits, overtime pay, days off, water, work breaks, an end to arbitrary firings & abuse by field bosses & for wages to be raised from US $8 to $10 a day to about $20. Very modest demands when a pint of strawberries sprayed with pesticides sells for $4 to $5 a pint in US markets. The strike crippled the Baja state’s agricultural export economy.

The farmworkers have now accepted a settlement, which is hardly optimal, including an average $4 a day wage increase. The Mexican labor department helped negotiate the settlement & pledged to ensure agribusiness compliance because it needs to protect its agribusiness export economy & assure investors Mexico is a safe haven for super-exploitation. Mexico is where agribusiness first employed the neoliberal methods of the so-called Green Revolution & is a showcase of land expropriations from small farmers, chemical farming, & cheap & child labor.

Fidel Sanchez, the farmworker negotiator shown here (overcome with tears at the end of the strike), & some other strike leaders were farmworkers in the US for different periods of time. Without an ounce of sarcasm, media reported that after labor activism in US fields they became more militant & less tolerant of rotten labor conditions in Mexican fields. They certainly didn’t learn their militance from the US labor movement but from organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) which employs consumer boycotts & other pressure tactics against agribusiness, fast food joints, & supermarkets. The US labor movement couldn’t even get off its ass in 2012 to oppose the use of child labor in US agribusiness or to implement safety & protective laws for them. Over 800,000 child farmworkers work without water, with pesticides, using dangerous tools, & around livestock.

In truth, the US labor movement may have learned much more from the immigrant workers since many militant striking teachers & miners from Mexico were forced to flee here against threats of violence & death after their role leading strikes. And that remains a problem for Sanchez & the other strike leaders–highlighting their immense courage & our need to maintain vigilance lest a consumer boycott & other political actions become necessary in their defense against the Mexican government & agribusiness.

Our deepest respect to the farmworkers of Baja & to their leaders. Their intransigent stand against agribusiness has the potential to inspire others–& not just farmworkers.

(FYI: Driscoll’s is the US strawberry distributor most involved in this strike.)

(Photo by Don Bartletti/LA Times)

Thousands of refugees continue to arrive on the Greek island of Kos from Turkey which is only two-miles away. The Kos economy is based mainly on farming & tourism & reportedly is a favorite resort for Britons because of its historic ruins & beautiful beaches.

According to some British media, tourists are becoming quite disgruntled with the thousands of immigrants & are threatening to boycott the island. They’re tired of having to push luggage & bicycle past crowds of curious immigrants, having their view of the harbor obstructed, seeing laundry drying on guardrails, having their sunbathing disrupted, & seeing immigrants sleeping on benches & public streets. Hopefully that means they’ll go straight home & organize protests against the wars & violence perpetrated by their government which is causing this tsunami of fleeing refugees.

Some of the media coverage is indistinguishable from farce–so reminiscent of the hysterical propaganda (in both the sense of hilarity & panic) circulated during the McCarthy era in the US. Communists then were hiding in the bushes & putting fluoride in the water to corrupt the morals of youth. Now they report the “human trafficking” trade out of Turkey is thought to be controlled & financed by ISIS & that ISIS operatives are on the dinghies posing as refugees. Boogey men are everywhere.

They also report that in 2010, before US-NATO bombers took out Libya, Gaddafi demanded 5 billion euros a year from the EU to block the flow of immigrants from the North African coast to Italy or he threatened to “turn Europe black.” Media reports say that Gaddafi’s deeply repugnant proposal (which has only been reported in tabloids so could be fabricated or exaggerated) may be a key strategy of ISIS to crush the West. Of course nothing has proven more effective in creating massive immigration from North Africa than the US-NATO war against Libya.

Media report the claims of unidentified “European intelligence agencies” that ISIS has already started a “psychological attack” on Europe by flooding the continent with refugees using Kos as their entry point & ruining the vacations of white tourists. There are always new lows to white supremacist anxieties & derangement & to war propaganda–just when you think they can’t go lower.

It’s a pity that refugees are interrupting vacations in Kos. Lord we wish we cared. The photo is a Syrian woman with her children just rescued in a drifting dinghy offshore.

Immigration is a human right! Open the damn borders!

(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)

Li Wangyang was a worker in a glass factory & a democracy & labor rights activist in Shaoyang, China, who advocated & set up labor unions independent of Chinese government control. In 1989, he helped found a workers’ association to support the democracy movement throughout China that became known as Tiananmen Square & put a poster on a city traffic sign urging a general strike.

Following the massacre of activists by the military on June 4th 1989, Li organized a memorial for the victims. As a result of his activities, he was arrested & served 21 years in the Chinese gulag on charges of counterrevolutionary propaganda, incitement, & subversion. During that time, he was subject to hard labor, torture, beatings which caused blindness & loss of hearing, & solitary confinement.

In May 2011, Li was released for reasons of poor health & checked into a hospital for treatment of diabetes & heart disease where his devoted sister visited him daily. Despite the torture, Li was not cowed. “To accelerate the arrival of a democratic society, to accelerate the arrival of a multiparty system in China, I won’t retreat, even if it means I will lose my head,” he said in an interview shortly before his death.

On June 6th, 2012, his relatives found Li hanged in his hospital room, suspended from a thin ribbon around his neck. Officials declared his death a suicide–& there isn’t a single person outside the Chinese government stupid enough to believe that because Li was blind & had difficulty standing or moving without help. Li remained outspoken until his death in demanding vindication of those massacred at Tiananmen Square. He was murdered because he could not be broken.

Thousands of protestors marched in Hong Kong days after his death to mourn & honor Li & to demand a formal criminal investigation of his death. We should take a moment to honor this remarkable man. May he rest in peace; may his life & death keep us steadfast & inspire a whole new generation of freedom fighters not just in China but throughout the world.

Photo is poster of Li Wangyang at Hong Kong protest.

(Photo by Vincent Yu/AP)

Betty Windsor just knighted HHHHarry. At first they thought it was for doing nothing special–just another medal to hang on his worthless chest to go along with his empty head. But then they learned it was for going six months without getting caught doing something unseemly. Why do the English put up with this crap?

You can’t reason with lesser evilism in US politics. If you try, your eyes go crossed & your brain cells get scrambled into new configurations that make a hurricane look like a balmy day. It’s a peculiar form of cognitive impairment, hopefully sui generis to the US & the rest of the world has been spared, only because they have more worthless bums to choose from than two flanks of the same party.

It’s hell to go through every election when the range of candidates go from war criminals & thieves to the deranged–& lesser evil advocates can parse a significant difference. You can’t endure it if you don’t view their public statements as a low form of satire. Take Huckabee, for example. The list of his idiocies grows with every utterance but at least he expresses the racist & misogynist sewer that is his mind. Hillary Clinton postures as a populist while openly serving Wall Street & militarism & lesser evil voters don’t bat an eyelash when they defend her.

Truth of the matter is, most of the eligible US electorate don’t bother to register; those who do don’t bother to vote & the president is chosen by a minority of the misguided. Bernie Sanders is nothing but an operator using a cagey, though time-worn device to garner support for Clinton. In a speech in Boston in the 1980s, when he still had an ounce of political integrity left & wasn’t just a smooth-talking gasbag, he said the majority of people not voting could reflect good judgement about politicians; it could also reflect political passivity, a cynicism that goes nowhere. That might be the last time he had an original thought & didn’t just play populist.

Sanders was right in that Boston speech. The only alternative to lesser evilism is for US voters to recognize there are no saviors; populist rhetoric will not save the US from growing inequality & militarist destruction. We have to act on our own behalf to bring the changes necessary. When US voters & non-voters alike get off our leaden asses to affect change, that’s the dawning of a new day. Those people around the world being bombed by US drones or with bombs supplied by the Pentagon will at last see something worth respecting in the US.

Tony Blair, described so aptly as “a gassy eruption stinking of farts & sulphur,” has moved from special envoy for the Middle East Quartet (The UN, US, EU, & Russia), interfering against democracy in the Middle East, to a new position chairing the European Council on Tolerance & Reconciliation dealing with antisemitism.

Despite his cowardly & sniveling demeanor he must be held in high esteem by the international oligarchy–likely not for any political creativity but for his more greasy qualities–those indefinable somethings that make him so repulsive. If he worked in a factory, he’d soon have to face the music of his repugnancy & would only be able to survive through his talents of toadyism.

Why anyone would put a hapless character like Blair to deal with the rising incidents of antisemitism in Europe is only a mystery if you believe the European Council on Tolerance & Reconciliation actually deals with xenophobia & antisemitism. If in fact it deals with xenophobia, why doesn’t it incorporate the even greater increase of violence against Muslims, including governmental restrictions?

In fact, the council is a right-wing Zionist group embedded in the highest levels of international Zionism, allied with Israel, & with US & EU neoliberal plans for the Middle East. What that sniveling ‘eruption of stinking farts & sulphur’ will be doing is coordinating campaigns to disrupt BDS & discredit & smear Palestinian solidarity as antisemitic. Really, it will be quite a seamless transition from what he did in the Middle East as envoy for the ME Quartet.

Many cannot resist the temptation to spit or hurl when they see his image. It leaves a toxic miasma wherever it’s posted, requiring exorcism. Feel free to perform one by hurling horse manure at his photo. Regrettably, as we continue to build the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel, we will be running up against this decaying wretch who feeds off human suffering. Let Palestinian solidarity be the movement that buries him.

(Photo by Chris Jackson/PA)

This of course is the iconic image of the unknown protester dubbed Tank Man taken June 5th, 1989. He was particularly courageous in stopping a line of tanks heading for Tiananmen Square, Beijing, because the day before on June 4th, 26 years ago today, the Chinese regime violently suppressed pro-democracy protests. The death toll from that assault remains disputed–some claim hundreds, others estimate thousands. It led to a regime crackdown on democracy which has not yet eased but only gotten worse.

Every year, including today, tens of thousands of democracy activists in Hong Kong commemorate the Tiananmen massacre. As we know from the protests & occupations last year, they have their own beefs with the Chinese regime over undemocratic elections & massive inequality.

Every year also commemorations of Tiananmen confront the falsification of history by those who deny a crackdown & massacre ever took place. Perhaps they’re too young to know it was followed live on international television for days. There were millions of witnesses; the documentation is beyond dispute & only the most cement-headed ideologue of Chinese communism would be so foolish as to try.

Reclaiming the history of Tiananmen Square is part of advancing the struggle for democracy in China. Chinese students studying abroad are circulating a letter, now with 100 signatures, detailing the violence which is not taught in Chinese schools. A Chinese newspaper denounced the students as influenced by “some overseas hostile forces.” Of course it wouldn’t be believable & denunciations obviated if it didn’t resonate completely with the lack of democratic rights in China today.

There are reportedly thousands of protests in China including labor disputes since it’s become a sweatshop haven & neoliberal austerity is fully operative–& environmental disputes, since the rivers are overcome with green slime & toxic effluents from factories. When the massive battalions of Chinese working people re-enter the historic battle against tyranny, neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, is confronting a force much more powerful than a phalanx of tanks. In the parlance of the street, tyranny can kiss its ass goodbye.

Our solidarity with the tens of thousands who gathered in Hong Kong today to commemorate the democracy movement of 1989. We stand with you.

(Photo by Kin Cheung/AP)