If there’s one sure thing in politics, it is that as people become more conservative (not necessarily related to aging), they begin to retreat from concern about international problems. They may still do rah-rah for union or community stuff but they pay no heed anymore to war or Palestine or immigration. Sometimes their minds even play tricks so they can pretend there is no antiwar movement.

That conservative, provincial syndrome gets played out big time in US electoral politics. The prophets of lesser-evilism, who come out of the woodwork during campaigns, ask us to put aside solidarity–the very bedrock of social transformation–& accept Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric like it was good coin & not counterfeit populism. Well that’s just one of those accommodations that can’t be made. Solidarity with the people of Palestine & elsewhere is not some cheap, feel-good sentimentality. It isn’t something we can drop during elections because it’s in the way & then pick up again when the damn things are over. And that is exactly what we’re being asked to do by Bernie Sanders supporters.

Many people in this country are shackled by an inability to see others as our brothers & sisters. But the great freedom fighters of human history weren’t talking through their hats when they said solidarity was the sine qua non, the absolute imperative of social transformation. So no thank you to Bernie Sanders; we’re sticking with solidarity because that’s the way forward for all of us.

There are so many contradictions to the neoliberal system, so many complexities, so let’s leave all the heavy-duty matters to those who like statistical analyses & flow charts & to those who’ve read Das Kapital & lived to tell the tale. Let’s just take on the ones we understand, the ones that hit us right in the kisser & take our breath away. Like why aren’t Greek’s over 300 millionaires & billionaires being asked to step in & save the economy? Why are they going after the pensioners who don’t have a pot to piss in?

Let’s just take a look at the economics of life in the realms where working people dwell. A one-bedroom apartment rents from €255 to €288 (US $280 to $307) a month; utilities are €150 ($165) a month & a monthly bus pass goes for €30. So now without food & toilet paper, we’re over €400 a month climbing toward €500. But 45% of pensioners receive below the poverty limit of €665 ($730) a month. Sixty-percent of pensioners are living high at under €800 ($880) a month. That means if they split the dog food with their pet & water down their tea they can afford a chocolate bar once in a while.

One media source did an analysis of the Greek pension system. He concluded the system is a mess, full of corruption & theft. There were bogus claims, early retirements, loopholes, inefficiencies, bureaucracy, tax evasion. No one ever said capitalism was good at organization–especially for social services. But that’s a Mickey Mouse analysis, an evasion from admitting that neoliberal capitalism is in crisis. That’s the heart of the problem, not organizational chaos. The system isn’t working & they won’t try to repair it by clipping private profiteering or even by a modest reform like taxing the super-rich.

Is it too abstract a question to ask if there might be a relationship between the increasing impoverishment of retirees, increasing homelessness, & the growing number of millionaires & billionaires? Cause it sure as hell looks like one of those causation things.
Greek’s pension system does need reform. No question about that. The first reform is that those pension payments need to be at least doubled, accompanied by rent & transportation subsidies. Too expensive the neoliberal economists say, too extravagant? Nothing’s too good for working people who fought fascism in WWII, had to live through military dictatorship, raised their kids & cared for their elderly on a shoestring.

The Troika wants young Greeks to believe this fellow & other seniors are responsible for the financial crisis in Greece & that it has to be solved on their backs. It’s that old divide & conquer trick of turning on the vulnerable–a trick that’s only grown more putrid with age. The Greek chorus of resounding “No” was another way of saying “an injury to one is an injury to all,” which is the iron law of social transformation.

Our fullest solidarity with Greek seniors.

(Photo by Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)

When I did what they call non-traditional work in a formerly all-male factory (starting in the 1970s) it was a difficult adjustment because the environment was so male & so conservative politically. It turned out to be one of the most difficult–not to say wrenching–& enriching experiences of my life.

There were coworkers who stand out to me (some now FB friends) for helping me through all that–especially the WWII crowd who didn’t like women in “men’s work” but who hated unfair treatment of anyone & would often coach me how to handle things with management & coworkers. Among that group were several Greek immigrants. Talking with them felt like that invasion of the body snatchers thing. We recognized in each other that sense of class, of militance, of defiance that many around us did not share, at least with a woman. It wasn’t a sense of being plebeians but of refusing such a humbling designation.

They eventually all retired to move back to Greece but even after I had moved to work in other parts of the plant, they invited me to their retirement parties. I always think of them & now I wonder if they’re queuing up at ATM machines like other seniors or if they’re marching against the Troika. It’s my own little connection to Greek history.

Bernie Sanders, the exemplar of populist rhetoric, was asked what his administration cabinet would look like. He suggested conventional political thinkers & hacks like Joseph Stiglitz & Robert Reich. But his most telling choice was Paul Krugman, the NY Times columnist who blithers about tax cuts for the rich & the dangers of income inequality & is at the same time an enthusiastic proponent of sweatshops. For nearly two decades now he’s written near-odes to cheap labor. But “Krugman does a great job,” according to Sanders. Sweatshop workers might disagree.

This is a bad year for the politics of expedience & lesser evilism if you’re a supporter of BDS & Palestinian justice. There isn’t a single candidate to vote for that doesn’t wholeheartedly support Israel. Yet you see progressives all over the place, including those who think they’re honchos on the left, endorsing Bernie Sanders & Jill Stein. And now Hillary Clinton has come out with a full-fledged promissory note that she will stand with Israel, oppose BDS, & go to the mat denying Israel is an apartheid regime in return for big bucks from billionaire Zionists.

Peddling influence is the least of her problems. For anyone who did their homework, that’s how Obama operated also. And all the jamokes before him. That’s the way US politics work. It’s a rigged system favoring millionaires & corporations. This should be where that “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” stuff kicks in but it takes some longer to wean from desperate hope springing eternal that a rigged system can be gamed.

The problem isn’t taking money from Zionists; the problem is Clinton’s support for Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing. The role Israel plays as a US military fortress is so fundamental to US control of the Middle East that she doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting the Democratic nomination unless she tows the line. She doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the welfare of Jews; not a whit more than she cares about defending Palestinians against dispossession & carpet bombing.

Let’s be frank: if you want to separate the wheat from the chaff among political candidates, Israel & Palestine are the touchstone because of the role Israel plays in enforcing neoliberal predation & the role Palestinians play in the historic struggle against it. All else is blither. Because if Clinton, Sanders, & Stein (& lord knows who else) won’t draw the line at apartheid in Israel, they will acknowledge no barriers to injustice anywhere.

The Greek economic crisis is a classic elaboration of how neoliberal capitalism works–or rather how it doesn’t work, even on paper. What kind of system is it where banks lend billions to pay the interest on old debts? That’s “robbing Peter to pay Paul” writ large & hardly sound economics. You don’t have to be a sophisticated economist to see the folly of that because it operates exactly like every usurious title & payday loan chop shop.

Capitalism may be irrational but it is complex & operates differently in different countries, under different circumstances. Some capitalist countries are run by feudal monarchs; some by military juntas; others by flatulent parliaments. Some have strong labor & civil liberties traditions; under many regimes these are violently repressed. Rebellion against austerity policies in Europe is breaking out in southern Europe, in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy which are considered weaker economies relative to northern Europe.

Greece doesn’t seem the strongest country to resist neoliberalism except for its strong political & radical traditions, including in the fight against fascism. The importance of Greek working people in Cold War politics was not missed by the CIA which collaborated with Greek generals. The weakness of the labor movement in Greece today is a result of the military coup in 1967 which ruled until 1974 & repressed labor organization & civil liberties but did not destroy working class defiance.

We can really get a window into how capitalism operates by looking at Greece. SYRIZA is negotiating with the Troika but they are not in full control of Greece. Not by a long shot. That’s why they advisedly called a referendum to strengthen their position in negotiations, thereby gaining the authority of a popular mandate. There are contending political figures & parties in Greece; there are bankers & corporations. There is a capitalist class who will not lose their shirts & their gravy train to upstart politicians & dissident workers without a fight. That’s why they have a military which can intervene to save Greek oligarchy. Not unlike the military in Egypt.

Greece isn’t the first country to experience the trauma of debt bondage.The hundreds of thousands of refugees & immigrants traveling north from south Asia, the Middle East, Africa, from the Americas are driven by the whip of neoliberal austerity & dispossession going back to the 1980s & only become more ruthless with time. Healthcare, education, social security, housing, employment have been decimated for millions of people.

Neoliberal capitalism is spiraling into a global crisis; the system is out of control & ‘all the king’s horses & all the king’s men’ can’t put this monstrosity back together again. It’s an irrational system held together by periodic bloodletting in war & by outright theft legitimized in law. You can formulate laws to make plunder legal but you can’t formulate laws to make the system work. Immense wealth for an itsy-bitsy number of people is maintained at the expense of millions of working people; those who come out on the short end are called excess population. Social hatred, eugenics, & ethnic conflict are essential to this system.

Well Greek working people have put their foot down & this is good news around the globe because they have more organized power to resist than workers in many other countries. Those further north (including in the US) who think they’re sitting pretty today fortified against all that impoverishment can think again. There’s a tsunami moving north because neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, just can’t help itself. The oligarchs are not moving backwards in history through feudalism to slavery–they’re going straight to slavery. Until we draw the line & stop them.

This photo is Greek pensioners being shut out by the banks which claim the till is empty without bail out money. Our fullest respect & solidarity with Greek working people–because the Greek people can’t stand their ground alone.

(Photo by Emilio Morenatti/AP)

It’s all over but the crying for the Troika!

According to the Greek interior ministry, the “no” side is officially projected to win by 61 percent.

Hats off to our Greek brothers & sisters.

Homeless in Athens: this elderly man sleeping rough is the European Union-IMF bail out plan for Greece. Pensions are directly targeted along with other social services.

Greeks are voting in a public referendum today whether to accept or reject EU-IMF extortion. There have been massive protests demanding a “no” vote. Which ever option they choose, life will be hell for awhile. But a “no” vote giving the bum’s rush to plunder will be the most emancipating choice in the long run. They can rebuild an economy without doing it on the backs of working people & strengthen their forces to bounce capitalist predation once & for all.

Revolution don’t come easy but it never comes by groveling before tyranny.

Our fullest solidarity with our Greek brothers & sisters.

(Photo by Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Images)

This refugee woman & her infant are leaving a train in a border town between Macedonia & Serbia. Likes thousands of others, she’s trying to get north to other countries in Europe.

While the US & European Union militarize their borders & whip up right-wing nationalists against refugees, photojournalism documents that tens of thousands of them are women with infants & small children. Just as often, it is unaccompanied children. That’s as true on the US border as it is in the Mediterranean Sea & the borders of Europe.

It takes a special kind of barbarism to build barrier walls & take your navies after women & children. It’s neoliberal barbarism, a scorched earth economics that sees human life as dispensable in service to private wealth & oligarchy.

Immigration is a human right for all men, women, & children. Open the damn borders! If that means the end of neoliberalism, all the better for building a humane world.

(Photo by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images)

Everybody likes a holiday, especially the ones with picnics, parades, & firework displays. The 4th of July celebrations in the US are always an extravaganza par excellence. Fireworks don’t get bigger–even in cities where parks & libraries are closed down for lack of funds.

No one wants to cast a pall over celebrations of the American revolution against British tyranny because, believe it or not, it was one of the first revolutions against colonialism. But while the new Americans were fighting the British they were also exterminating the indigenous peoples in the most savage ways. So savage, that the US wars against the original Americans became a model, a matrix for other barbarisms, for other genocides, including Hitler & the colonial state of Israel.

We could try to put colonialism of the Indians aside for just one day & celebrate a victory over British colonialism–since after all, they had at that time a good share of the human race in shackles. But the US government has turned the day into a celebration of militarism, of triumphalism over millions of people. Just like the British in 1776.
July 4th doesn’t signify emancipation in Afghanistan or Iraq or any of the countries where the US military is stationed or bombing. It doesn’t signify the end of occupation or of war–or for that matter, the extermination of Native Americans. If you stand in solidarity with the victims of US militarism it’s really hard to join the parades here which are a spectacle of flag-waving patriotism & nationalism.

So those in the US who see people around the world as brothers & sisters, not as enemies, have a real hard time on the 4th of July. It’s not our day. It’s not our festival anymore. We prefer solidarity to militarism. Call us old-fashioned.

This is the 4th of July “Baby Parade” in Port Carbon, PA. The small boy is being indoctrinated into American triumphalism, not the spirit of 1776, by his parents who are pulling the cardboard tank.

(Photo by Jacqueline Dormer/The Republican-Herald/AP)