These are Palestinian actors doing children’s theater in front of a bombed-out house in Gaza City. The Guardian-UK caption said “witnesses” claim the house was “destroyed by Israeli shelling” during Operation Ethnic Cleansing last summer. Does that mean the jury is still out on whether evil fairies from outer space might have done it? Why doesn’t the Guardian drop the nonsense!?

The caption did cite a “global children’s charity” that the children of Gaza show signs of extreme distress & trauma. Good thing they had that charity because God knows, you can’t trust the parents of Gaza when they say the same thing about their kids. They could be the same people as those “witnesses.”

Thousands of children hunted & traumatized by bombers, watching their terrorized parents scramble to protect them, watching their homes reduced to rubble, & now living in homelessness must be hell on earth. It’s wretched enough to contemplate.

There is no reason for despair but only cause to become evangelists for the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel (BDS). Spread the word.

(Photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

It’s wonderful to hear Pope Francis call capitalism “the dung of the devil.” That’s so much more eloquent than calling it horse manure. Our man is moving right along & such an improvement over the last two. Now if he can just get women’s rights & Israeli apartheid straight, he’ll be cooking with gas. He must be one of those who doesn’t like identity politics.

Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped from jail for the second time through a tunnel leading right out of his cell. Thirty thousand disappeared people in Mexico, many into secret prisons, & only Guzman escaped–twice. How do you spell corruption & money passing hands?

How do you feel about another Bush for president? Because our man Jeb has raised nearly double what Clinton has in super-pac money. Thus far the candidates include war criminals, liars, union busters, racists, women haters, boneheads, halfwits, xenophobes, inarticulate fools, & more boneheads. No wonder cynicism is riding high in the US.

In doing the post on Honduras, I came across the role Oscar Arias, then president of Costa Rica, played in the US-backed coup in 2009. During his earlier 1986-1990 presidency he formulated one of those phony-assed peace plans to broker the brutal US Contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. I don’t recall much about the plan now except that it called for greater US involvement. For this he was nominated (& eventually won) the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize.

Harvard University sponsored a speech by Arias at that time which the Boston (where I lived at the time) antiwar movement mobilized for. In his speech he talked about how some US initiative was helping restore democracy in war-torn Nicaragua. The audience erupted in thunderous applause. In the question & answer session, I stood up & in the most respectful language challenged his peace plan for promoting US aggression. The audience erupted in thunderous booing that seemed to go on forever.

If you’ve never been booed, I can assure you it’s a moment of living hell though I managed to get through my spiel, telling the audience I intended to finish my question whether they liked it or not. But I was flustered & neglected to throw back at them how they applauded democracy in a country besieged by US aggression & yet wouldn’t allow me to ask a simple question in an educational venue.

My omission still fries my ass.

Many young activists may not remember that the relationship between Central American countries (Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador) & the US was the focus of antiwar & solidarity work throughout the 1980s. Since the defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution, mostly what we read now is about the tsunami of immigration from Central America to the US or alarmist reports about the the growth of criminal gangs in those countries & the epidemic of femicide in Honduras. Media presentation is that they are thuggish, brutish societies.

In fact, Central American countries have always & continue to play a key role in US politics in the Western Hemisphere. They are not however just backdrops in US politics or “banana republics,” (a demeaning term social activists should not use). They’re complex societies & should be given due respect–especially considering all the violence they’ve sustained from the US military.

Honduras is making news now because of revelations that Hillary Clinton, representing the Obama administration, was directly involved in the 2009 coup against “democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya.” It’s probably stretching the truth in Honduras to claim the elections were democratic & Zelaya is certainly no prize package politically. He’s an oligarch presenting himself as a democrat (not unlike Clinton in the presidential campaign) & was unlikely to bring enduring democratic change to Honduras. The US, nevertheless, has no right to interfere in Honduran politics.

But much more significant, Honduras is making news now because for the past several weeks tens of thousands of protesters have held nightly vigils demanding the ouster of corrupt president Juan Orlando Hernandez involved in the looting of at least US $350 million from the social security system which provides medical care & pensions to approximately 600,000 public & private workers & their families. It’s not mentioned in most media reports that a focus of the protests is a demand to end US intervention in Honduras.

Militarization increased in Honduras after the 2009 coup with the deployment of US troops & the commitment of president Orlando Hernandez to put “a soldier on every corner.” Orlando Hernandez is Obama’s kind of guy. Since the coup, there’s been an avalanche of abuses by soldiers, arbitrary detentions, murder, torture, rape. They never mention all this in those femicide or gang reports.

Under the cover of the drug war & with the full cooperation of the Honduran regime, the US has been expanding its military operations in Honduras with Pentagon expenditures going up every year. The Associated Press called the expansion “the most expensive initiative in Latin America since the Cold War.” According to the LA Times, Defense Department contracts tripled to over $67 million between 2002 & 2012. In 2011, the US authorized $1.3 billion just for military electronics in Honduras. Honduras has the only large US air base between the US & Latin America which is vital to US military domination of the region. They spent $25 million in 2012 to make the base permanent & $89 million more to house the 600 US troops stationed there. (If one counts mercenaries the count is likely much higher.) The entire Pentagon operation has entailed $20 billion since 2002 for troops, ships, clandestine bases, electronic equipment, direct aid to Honduran military & police. One should ask if Honduras still has national sovereignty?

In such a political environment, it is extremely courageous for protesters to hit the streets & demand a halt to all this. We stand with them & should be on the alert to mobilize in their defense lest US aggression against them become more overt & violent.

Our fullest solidarity with the democracy movement in Honduras.

Photo is vigil protest in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

(Photo by Jorge Cabrera/Reuters)

Media is reporting that Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras & the new finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos are attending a meeting in Brussels today with eurozone heads of state & finance ministers for “another chance to convince skeptical European creditors that it can be trusted to enact wide-ranging economic reforms which would safeguard its future in the common euro currency.” There are lots of questions raised here but the only one that matters is “why in the hell did SYRIZA go through the charade of a popular referendum on austerity & then ignore the decisive vote against it”?

There are the economics of the crisis in Greece & then there are the politics. When we say economics, we don’t mean statistics on trade balances, privatization, taxation, loan repayment schedules, bank bailouts, or all the other mechanics of how capitalism works. We mean that neoliberal capitalism is in a global economic crisis which it is trying to solve on the backs of working people. And not for the first time in Greece. The austerity program the Troika is attempting to ram down the throats of Greek working people is the kind of austerity program they’ve been implementing for decades in African countries causing the tsunami of immigration to Europe & elsewhere.

Neoliberal colonialism now enters the eurozone through the portal of Greece. The last time colonial politics entered Europe was under German fascism which led to the holocausts of millions of people, including Jews, disabled, LGBT people, Roma, socialists, communists, liberals. That’s how desperate capitalism is; that’s how deep its crisis. We always need remember that capitalism in crisis becomes more dangerous, more ruthless, more violent—more demanding in its austerity. But we also need remember that capitalism in crisis is violent precisely because it is floundering. An international banking system which tries to solve its financial problems on the backs of pensioners & schoolchildren isn’t sitting pretty; it’s in big trouble.

Then there is the political crisis in Greece which is a crisis of leadership for working people. SYRIZA appears to have reached the limits of its program—a program that allows staying in the eurozone & doesn’t raise the question of whether to stay under capitalism or not. Greek working people invested trust in SYRIZA, a trust being betrayed in Brussels. It isn’t the trust of European creditors SYRIZA should be worried about but the trust of Greek workers. And they’re blowing that big time. The loss of trust & respect for SYRIZA presents the biggest problem of all. Because, where & who is the alternative?

Burning people with false promises leads to demoralization. A demoralized working class that doesn’t trust, that doesn’t have a program against austerity is a weak & vulnerable working class. Accepting the Troika’s demands of more privatization, higher taxes, smaller pensions, would exact untold human suffering on Greeks. There’s no question that would be a massive defeat. But it isn’t sufficient to write jeremiads. The question for Greek working people is what to do next. And we need all be thinking about that because what’s happening in Greece is headed for Portugal, Spain, Italy, & it’s headed north to Ireland. No working class in Europe will be left unaffected—especially the vulnerable like elderly, children, immigrants, Roma.

International capitalism is spiraling into crisis & squeezing working people to death to solve it. Like the Greeks last Sunday, we need to put our foot down. We need to think carefully about a program for protecting people from neoliberal assault & we need to choose our political leadership accordingly. Until then, it ain’t over till it’s over.

Photo is Greek supporters of “No” campaign in Athens on July 3rd, two days before referendum where 61% of Greeks voted no to austerity. Prime minister Tsipras addressed the crowd. One week later, he ignored their mandate.

Our fullest solidarity with Greek working people.

(Photo by Milos Bicansk/Getty Images)

Don’t you wish this was some surreal still from a sci-fi movie instead of reality? The photo, taken in 2010 by South African Pieter Hugo, was just shortlisted for the 2015 Prix Pictet photojournalism award. The young man standing in the photo is Aissah Salifu who worked at the Agbogbloshie market in Accra, Ghana.

Agbogbloshie became notorious as an illegal electronic waste dump for the US & Europe. Illegal because according to the Basel Convention, an international treaty that went into affect in 1992, hazardous waste cannot be transferred between “developed” & “undeveloped” countries. The obvious racism & recklessness was deplorable. In the past few years, there’s been an attempt to legitimize transfers as recycling projects & to deny countries are even dumping. That campaign is led by Bloomberg writer Adam Minter who wrote the book “Junkyard Planet.” Many have begun to claim e-dumping is all a myth. Well perhaps they could explain to us where in the hell the dead electronics are going?

Minter functions as a sort of junkyard dog for the entire industry of electronic recycling facilities, electronics manufacturers, brokers & agents who arrange to move the illegal shipping containers overseas. There’s a mafia character to the industry. He claims most electronics are bought by China so they can recycle metals in the components. That doesn’t accord with a recent UN report that the US & China contribute most of the world’s tonnage of electronic waste & that less than a sixth ends up recycled. According to that UN study, 42 million tonnes of e-waste were dumped & only about 6.5 tonnes were taken for recycling in 2014.

The United States led e-waste dumping with over 7 million tonnes in 2014, ahead of China with six million, followed by Japan, Germany & India. Canada came in 15th place with a dump of 725,000 tonnes most of which they dumped in the Philippines despite protests & the Basel Convention.

According to Minter & others, the e-waste at Agbogbloshie is from Accra & other cities in Ghana, not the US or Europe. There’s no reason to dispute where it comes from. Either it’s being delivered in shipping containers from the US & Europe to Ghana’s ports or it isn’t. That’s completely verifiable. But it’s coming from somewhere & whether it’s dumped from overseas or not, it remains an environmental & human rights catastrophe.

Workers, including children, earn meager sums breaking apart computers, refrigerators, hair dryers, cell phones all filled with toxic metals that affect their health in catastrophic ways. One dull-witted writer talking about Agbogbloshie said the workers there don’t live long & they don’t have much but they’re always smiling. Such stupidity & white supremacist insularity makes you want to weep. But it’s far better to seek active ways to stop e-dumping & to affect the electronics industry to change how they produce things so they are not an environmental & health disaster.

(Photo by Pieter Hugo/2015 Prix Pictet)

It’s bad enough PBS uses David “Poop-for-Brains” Brooks for regular commentary but today they had Jessica Vaughan from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) on as counterpoint in a discussion on immigrants. One researcher discussed how innumerable studies going back a century show Mexicans & immigrants in general, legal or undocumented, have lower crime rates than people born in the US. A tense, glum-faced Vaughan responded that everything Donald Trump said was true. Of course, Vaughan is on a mission: to vilify immigrants as uneducated criminal lowlifes. Because CIS is not a research institute at all but a right-wing propaganda apparatus.

CIS does lots of studies–most of which are regularly debunked by reputable researchers. One study they did was on “Third World gold-diggers” that claimed foreign women marry US citizens to get work permits so that means bogus marriages are prevalent among terrorists. Non sequiturs are inevitable when you’re racist & not working with a full deck–& when you’re getting paid big bucks to invent whole studies slandering immigrants.

This is still a democratic society so racists are free to invent & spew bile. That’s their right. But we have to ask PBS why they insist on treating right-wing lowlife ideologues like reputable research institutes & thinkers when they know damn well they are not. Could it be all that corporate funding PBS depends on?

When activists speak of solidarity & unconditional support for the people of Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, & everywhere else, that doesn’t mean we anoint them all as saints or think they don’t have social divisions & problems as great as our own societies. War & occupation aggravate these & by no means ameliorate social conflicts.

Every society has its tough guys, hustlers, petty & grand thieves; every political movement has its extremists, goofballs, & clueless hangers-on. These don’t determine or affect our solidarity one iota. We keep our eyes on those struggling to end oppression, occupation, & war by whatever means they deem necessary (even if we’re not always in full agreement with their methods)–& we keep our eyes on the children.

Solidarity doesn’t mean turning a blind eye & playing stupid; it means recognizing that military intervention is to control, not to manage social conflicts. It means trusting other peoples don’t need outside intervention to address their conflicts, that they’re capable of handling their own problems if they’re not being bombed to smithereens.

For political activists, the debates among occupied & persecuted peoples are of great interest because how they conduct their struggles have the ability to change the world or at least to affect our struggles against our own regimes. Those under fire have lots to teach the rest of us. It isn’t up to us to parse political distinctions in these countries & publicly excoriate those we think lacking so some can weasel their way out of solidarity. Solidarity with the oppressed is unconditional. Period. No caveats, no addenda, no ulterior motives. Only the recognition that solidarity is the iron law of social transformation.