Muhammed Muheisen is an award winning photojournalist who has covered events all over the Middle East, including the Iraq & Syrian wars. He is most renowned for his images of Afghan child refugees in Pakistan. Muheisen is a Palestinian, born in 1981 in Jerusalem & schooled at Birzeit University near Ramallah in the West Bank. He is now a Jordanian national.

One judge honoring his work with Afghan refugee children said “He caught the hope, desperation, & tragedy of the faces of the oppressed.” That he does. Because the children he photographs are living in squalor. But what’s magical & powerful about Muheisen’s work is how he captures the beauty, vibrance, & humanity of children living in the most desperate circumstances.
His method isn’t just waiting for a candid, poignant moment to happen. He says he works slowly with his subjects to earn their trust–when they open up to him & the moment unfolds. That relationship is what transforms his images into something wondrous.

These are Syrian refugees (many who were Palestinian refugees in Syria) in a camp on the outskirts of Mafraq, Jordan near the Syrian border. The little girl skipping rope is 10-year-old Zubaida Faisal. There’s no question these kids have been through hell. What’s wondrous is not that Muheisen hides that reality from us but by showing us their spirit tells us something about what it means to be human–& why the human race is worth fighting for.

(Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP)

Some of the ugliest sarcasms of neoliberal economics are played out in the mining industry which runs operations on a scorched earth business model. There are many multinational corporations involved–US, Mexican, Canadian, Australian, Indian, Russian, Chinese. Their strip & open-pit mining practices have deforested & chemically contaminated millions of acres on every continent. Their recklessness has made entire regions uninhabitable for flora & fauna; destroyed migration routes for birds; contaminated rivers with acids, arsenic, mercury & other toxicities; created neurological & congenital health problems for thousands; destroyed the livelihoods of tens of thousands of farmers; & are making this beautiful planet a monstrous eyesore.

Peru’s economy, completely warped by mining, is a case in point. Peru is more than 60 percent Amazonian rainforest vital to controlling climate on Earth, but deforestation & land conversion for mining are turning it into a wasteland. Short-range profiteering is a fatal flaw of the neoliberal business model. Under scorched earth policies, Peru now depends on mining for 62 percent of its export earnings because the government has bent over backwards with incentives to mining companies. Investment in mining is now near $9 billion a year according to official figures.

While mining is a bonanza to the Peruvian elite, it is a disaster for farmers who are engaged in ongoing battles with riot police defending open-pit copper mines like the $1.4 billion Tia Maria operation contaminating fields, groundwater sources, crops, livestock. The company running Tia Maria is Grupo Mexico, the outfit that still hasn’t cleaned up its 2014 catastrophic spill from a copper mine in Sonora, Mexico.

For the past couple years, the Peruvian regime–while sending riot police to defend Tia Maria & other mines–have conducted police operations against illegal gold mine operations in the Amazon Basin of Madre de Dios bordering Brazil & Bolivia. Like storm troopers, they’ve burned down over 55 mining camps, blown up & confiscated equipment, closed down businesses in the area which serve miners. Most of the 40,000 wildcat miners are poor immigrants from the Andean highlands displaced by multinational mining operations going on there, most notably by a Chinese consortium.

No one ever said capitalism functioned rationally. In many African countries, the World Bank fosters artisanal & wildcat mining. Dispossessed & impoverished miners use low-tech methods to extract gold which they sell dirt cheap to an agent who sells it on the world market. Everybody makes out like a bandit–except the miners who suffer extreme health conditions.

Reports are vague about how wildcat mining operations in Madre de Dios are run. It’s likely that small companies hire workers to operate low-tech mines & then broker the gold for export because certainly the miners aren’t profiting–& illegal gold is now 20 percent of all gold exports from Peru, making it the world’s fifth biggest gold producer. Customs officials estimate the value at about $3 billion–more than export of Peruvian cocaine. Forty thousand miner shares of $3 billion would be a substantial income which the miners are not receiving but thieving brokers are.

There’s no question these mines should be closed down. All of them–not just the wildcat mines. It isn’t the environmental & health catastrophes, nor the displacement of tens of thousands of farmers that concern the regime, but that they aren’t getting their cut of the plunder from the wildcat operations.

Peruvian farmers & workers aren’t on this planet to serve as chattel for multinationals & they do not serve that role compliantly–which is why police repression is so severe in Peru. As long as there is continuing resistance to mining in Peru, there is hope. Our fullest solidarity with that resistance.

Photo is Peruvian riot police in La Pampa after one of their recent wrecking operations against wildcat mines whilst their comrades-in-arms defend the “legal” mines.

(Photo by Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images)

There have been protests of thousands for weeks against new military legislation being railroaded through the Japanese parliament. The proposed law would reverse Article 9 in the constitution outlawing the use of military for war. It’s essentially a “no war” article. It isn’t a pacifist commitment but was imposed by the US occupying regime after Japan’s defeat in WWII.

The reversal of Article 9 has been in the works for a while. Part of the railroading is coming from the US who want to incorporate Japan into an offensive naval & troop force as US competition with China heats up in the South China Sea & the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership goes into effect. There is no shyness about acknowledging all this in the media. Forbes, a voice of US capitalism, & other media sources lay it out quite bluntly.

The question is, what does Japan have to gain from re-militarizing since, even with US military aid, costs & affects on society will be immense? There are no glib answers to that. Japan is not an impoverished country but one of the strongest economies in the world. It is however facing economic, social, & political crises like every other neoliberal capitalist country. They’re not re-militarizing only to address regional conflicts with Korea or only to buttress US military might but because war is inherent to capitalism. The need is built into the system to try to resolve its internal crises & volatilities–like Fukushima–through war. There’s an economy to war that serves the ruling elite but devastates the lives of working people.

These protesters in Tokyo are denouncing the proposed militarization of Japan. Why should they send their young people abroad to fight when their real dispute is with their own regime?
Our fullest solidarity with them.

(Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

Hillary Clinton who earns between $200,000 & $300,000 for one of her wooden speeches & has all sorts of conditions attached (like private jet & full rights to the video), declines to endorse a raise in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15.00 an hour. And she still has the chutzpah to play the populist card.

Ramzy Baroud, the important Palestinian political writer, recently published a broadside criticism of “self-tailored ‘leftist’ western intellectuals.” That’s an amorphous description making it hard to tell who he’s going after. From his article, they appear to be academic writers without any relationship to activism, not just from somewhere in the northern hemisphere, but–based on examples he cites–from the US. And boy that sounds a lot like the leftists who fry a lot of other leftists in both hemispheres–the type who campaign for Bernie Sanders so he can “lead the political revolution against capitalism.” We wish we knew who he was referring to so we could chime with our own insights since we have our own disputes with this lot. He’s not the only one to take issue with their presumptions.

But the “left,” even in the US, is at least at diverse as protestantism–with a lot of different political perspectives, from elitism to outright kooky. Lots of them talk a language no one else understands–or wants to. Lots of them only talk to themselves. And many of them are making important contributions to politics through activism & theoretical work. They don’t get published in prestigious media since their theoretics aren’t banal & they’re not all credentialed. But they continue as the backbone of political opposition to US neoliberal capitalism.

If he’s talking about the Sanders revolutionaries, he really nails them for their lack of international commitment. But what troubles in Baroud’s article is his discussion of what he calls “the left’s insistence on the ‘client regime’ theory.” As he defines it, this is a belittling & racist view pawning itself off as solidarity “where only the ‘white man’ determines the flow of history & outcomes of conflicts. Everyone else is either a helpless bystander or a ‘client regime’ that receive a ‘cut’ from the colonial spoils once the bad deed is done.”

In this regard, he singles out the “left’s” indifference to conflicts in African countries because “there is no palpable link to western governments or corporations.” He might want to take a closer look at those conflicts. Because they’re all there, including Israel.

To dispute the ‘client regime’ theory, he also cites the debate between those who claim AIPAC controls the US Congress & those who claim the US manipulates & bankrolls Israel for its own purpose. That’s an important debate having nothing to to with supremacy. Understanding the power relations in international politics is of the essence. The US Pentagon has a lot more weight to throw around than AIPAC lobbyists hustling votes in Congress. And there’s another issue: suggesting AIPAC runs the US Congress is just a few steps away from claiming Jews control the media & banks. That is certainly not what Baroud is suggesting but that is where that claim often leads.

The broader issue in the ‘client regime’ debate is understanding the power relationship between the US Pentagon & those states like Israel, Egypt, Bahrain, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, & others, which receive billions in US military aid. It is a debate socialist theoreticians have made fundamental contributions to–most notably Trotsky. There is no supremacist point of honor to acknowledge that the political relationship is often weighted heaviest toward those with the big guns & bombers.

Antiwar activists take no pride in the role the US military plays internationally. For most it means a lifetime committed to building opposition through thick & thin, through the ups & downs of political life–a lifetime they might have spent gardening. These should not be swept up in a broadside criticism of phoniness on the US “left.”

Obama sat down with the BBC for a less-than-hard-hitting interview prior to his visit to Kenya. Most people schooled in the US don’t know squat about Africa; many think it’s a country, not a continent. But that is going to have to change because it’s very clear the US & European countries are in headlong competition with China over extracting resources at the expense of democracy, peace, national sovereignty, human rights, & human life. That’s what the John Prendergast/George Clooney crap is all about. If you want to know what they envision for African countries, think Niger Delta & Shell Oil; Somalia & US drones; 6 million deaths in the DR Congo from war to extract diamonds & metals; starvation & war in South Sudan; child labor; Ebola; massive dispossession & forced immigration of millions. That’s the nature of neoliberal colonialism.

For those left critics who oppose BDS because it would adversely affect Israeli workers, what about Palestinian workers? Don’t they count? Doesn’t apartheid matter? Will you side with an Israeli union federation deeply rooted in colonialism or with the Palestinian union federations who oppose it & are calling for the boycott of Israel? There isn’t much room for political sophistry here.

This is a reminder that no stone should be left unturned in building BDS. BDS can play a role in reversing the xenophobic trend which has brought the US labor movement to a dead-end.

http://www.bdsmovement.net/2015/a-statement-issued-by-the-general-federation-of-palestines-trades-unions-gaza-13226

The bullheaded commitment to lesser evilism from sections of the US left is really taking a beating in the Bernie Sanders campaign. If you want to politically anatomize the differences between the Sanders kind of socialists & others, Palestine is the touchstone. But the hallmark of Sanders kind of socialists is their indifference to international issues. They think they’re being oh-so dialectic when they turn their backs on Sanders’ war policies & support for Israeli colonialism under the mantra “No body is perfect.”

Did Code Pink really stand up & applaud John Kerry when he entered the Senate hearing room about the Iran deal? I haven’t read the deal, I don’t think Code Pink has; most media commentators are vague about its content because it doesn’t seem to be available for public access yet. So why would an antiwar group ever applaud a representative of US militarism in several countries & who functions as a nuclear cop in Iran? The US has no rights to police the world to suit its economic & political interests. It must be remembered Iran has no military bases or troops stationed outside its own country & the US has nearly 1,000.

A primary demand of Palestinians is the right of return for millions of refugees–not only from the 1948 expulsion but from the 1967 occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, & East Jerusalem, & the ongoing internal displacement of thousands whose lands & homes are being expropriated by Israeli settlers. Most of the refugee camps are located in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, & Syria (where they are now under attack by ISIS & the Assad regime).

There are over 7 million Palestinian refugees worldwide. Over 4 million are registered for humanitarian aid with the UN refugee agency; nearly 2 million are unregistered & ineligible for aid. About 355,000 Palestinians inside Israel & nearly 60,000 in the occupied West Bank are internally displaced after their homes & villages were demolished & confiscated or their residency rights revoked. This is a current political & humanitarian crisis, not a historical problem.