This is a common genre of photojournalism for Africa: a malnourished, clearly unhealthy little girl which NGOs will use to pity-monger & exploit to raise funds. Her name is Francine Sevasao & she lives in Madagascar, an island country off the coast of East Africa. We’re told Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world & that the southern part of the island is now sustaining a severe food shortage effecting at least 200,000 people, including 40,000 children under the age of five.

Upon investigation we learn that 80 percent earn their living in agriculture & that 90 percent of the 22 million Malagasy live under USD $2.00 a day. Quite frankly, if 90 percent are living under $2.00 a day, compared to the cost of living a whole lot more than 200,000 people are hungry in Madagascar. Nearly 20 million more.

The top agricultural products produced in the country include rice, beans, cereals & other starchy foods like maize, potato, cassava, numerous kinds of fruits & vegetables, coffee, tea, cacao, sugar, pepper, vanilla, cloves, honey. According to the government’s promotional literature, about 3.6 million tons of rice & one million tons of cereals & starchy foods are produced annually. They also have considerable livestock breeding of cattle, sheep, goats, swine, ducks, & chickens. The ocean surrounding Madagascar in rich in fish, shellfish, crustaceans. So why in the hell are so many people starving?

You can probably see the problem coming like a Mack truck. Since the 1980s, the IMF & World Bank have been imposing privatization schemes on the country in exchange for loans, expropriating agriculture & fishing for agribusiness plantations & skewing the economy for export markets.

As a result of IMF interference, there’s a thriving sweatshop industry in the country with child labor & tariff free zones; the tourist industry is going gang-busters with thousands of orphaned children exploited in prostitution; homelessness among city children is rampant.

They don’t explain all that in the media; one has to piece the story together from dozens of reports. But the general matrix of exploitation remains the same across the globe–that is, the pattern of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism.

The IMF & World Bank issue country reports on the different economies where precious little can be learned about their methods of turning human beings into slaves. The reports are a collection of pieties & banalities like the January 2015 IMF report that said about Madagascar: “Younger people & large families are on average poorer than older people & small families.” IMF analysts aren’t that stupid but if they write reports about their barbaric practices, there might actually be a revolution somewhere.

This post is not a fund raising appeal but a call to arms. Even if Madagascar’s elite cannot be immediately forced to stop collusion with the IMF & World Bank, what’s to stop them from getting rice & beans from India or some other nearby country? Or what’s to stop them from halting exports of food products until its own people are fed? Nothing but greed.

(Photo by Shiraaz Mohamed/EPA)

Media coverage of the refugee & immigrant crises is a curious thing. It’s focused now on refugees coming through Eastern Europe & reports almost nothing on those coming from northern African routes through Libya & Morocco or on the crisis at Calais, France.

There has been no coverage of Calais since late July except for a single photo in the Guardian-UK today of a young man giving another a haircut. The caption to that photo read “A man has a haircut at a site dubbed the “New Jungle,” where some 3,000 people have set up camp, many hoping to get to England.” Shouldn’t a respectable liberal newspaper find out who dubbed it the “New Jungle” & call out the arrant racism of that rather than repeat it? And shouldn’t a newspaper in England consider this story top priority when in just the past several months an estimated 37,000 refugees have attempted to cross the Channel Tunnel (50 km/31 mi long) to enter England?

Counterpunch published an article titled “Trump & the Islam Question” after he again recently exposed his xenophobia, racism, & utter stupidity in New Hampshire responding to a halfwit in the audience who called out the ‘problem we have in this country called Muslims.’

The article is useful but the author overestimates Trump’s intelligence by claiming Trump adeptly calculates how to ‘play the race card.’ He does!?

Trump is a narcissistic blowhard who doesn’t know a damn thing about anything. And in truth, as president he wouldn’t have to because of all those think tanks. His speeches, even at the debates, are full of bombast & boasts without a shred of political content–except for the grunting, chest-pounding expressions of primitive social hatred for women, immigrants, Blacks, Latinos. (Apologies to gorillas for the invidious comparison.)

October 7th will be the 14th anniversary of the longest war in US history–the monstrous US-NATO war on the people of Afghanistan. Democracy Now, Rolling Stone, & The Nation magazine have all reported about heinous war crimes committed by Green Beret operatives between 2012-2013 in Wardak province where they tortured, disappeared, & murdered 17 Afghans. Their bodies were later uncovered just outside the US military base after the Green Beret were driven out of the area by protests against the murders. Matthieu Aikins is the investigative reporter who uncovered the story.

The man in this photo is named Qandi, a man detained with the murdered men, who was tortured & held for nearly a year & then released without charge. In his testimony he said simply “I saw with my own eyes that they killed people.”

Aikins’ investigation is very important & the publicity has prompted the Pentagon to the fourth phony criminal investigation of the charges against the Green Beret. The first three exonerated the murderers & so will this one. Impunity from criminal charges for war crimes was in issue between the US & Iraq as well as the US & Afghanistan. The US negotiates what they call bilateral security agreements specifically exempting US soldiers from being prosecuted in the occupied country so the military can let them off scot-free.

What Aikins’ investigation should not obscure is that the Afghanistan War began in 2001 with US war crimes too gruesome to contemplate. When US special forces & their Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) defeated Taliban forces on November 9th 2001 at Mazer-e-Sharif, hundreds of Taliban soldiers surrendered. At least 800 were confined to a prison compound which US bombers pummeled for three days as witnessed by journalists & Red Cross representatives. The BBC reported that Afghan troops holding the prisoners continued to shoot at Taliban bodies in the compound debris after the bombing siege to make sure they were dead.

The US & Northern Alliance then moved 168 km (105 miles) to lay siege to Kunduz where thousands more Taliban surrendered. Afghan general Abdul Rashid Dostum, collaborating with US special forces, then stuffed about 2,000 Taliban prisoners into closed metal shipping containers without food or water for transport to a prison 301 km (187 miles) away. They were intentionally suffocated & when they arrived at the prison witnesses testified they saw blood & other body fluids flowing from the containers. According to a declassified US State Department intelligence report, 1,500 were buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili under the supervision of US special forces. The same report of the incident said Afghan witnesses (like the truck drivers) were later tortured or killed.

These monstrous crimes were in the first month & a-half of the war against Afghanistan & they have not ceased. The infamous Bagram prison is a US rendition center for torture & interrogation–not of suspected “terrorists” but of students, farmers, workers.

A great tragedy of our era is the weakness of the international antiwar movement in responding to the horrors of the wars against Afghanistan & Iraq. Nothing is more imperative than marshaling those forces in defense of Afghans who have sustained over 30 years of war. Find a rally or organize one to demand “US-NATO out of Afghanistan!”

(Photo of Qandi is still shot from video interview on Democracy Now)

Behold the jester for Israeli apartheid! Pharrell Williams just shot himself in the ass by continuing with his performance today in Cape Town, South Africa as part of an endorsement deal with Woolworth’s, a grocery chain that sells Israeli products. The BDS movement promised to protest his gig if he did not cancel.

The City of Cape Town shamefully imposed a limit of only 150 BDS activists protesting the event. During the barbaric 2014 carpet bombing siege of Gaza, protests across South Africa, including Cape Town, included hundreds of thousands of people.

These are really epic times we’re living through, confusing & stressful times. It calls on us to unravel & understand complex historic processes at a time when media obfuscates & stands justice on its head. Just getting the facts straight is an ordeal.

Every once in a while we need to pause & just get back to basics so we don’t lose our bearings–the basics of what human life is really all about. There’s so much human suffering created by inequality & realpolitik. But still despite so many disunities we create music, poetry, art, stories to charm one another–& the bonds of human love.

This is Syrian refugees marching along a Turkish highway to the Greek border. Turkish authorities continue to obstruct their movement, holding some back from traveling & in some instances using aggressive border police against them. Turkey is allowing the US to use its airbases to launch air strikes but assaults refugees fleeing from the bombing.

It’s clear to all except the halfwits that run the European Union that the movement of refugees is not going to be held back by razor wire & brutalities at every damn border. You cannot stop hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war & bombing. You can hassle them along the way & make their life a living hell but you won’t stop them.

In the past short while I’ve been called a brilliant journalist a few times. I’m always a little embarrassed at such praise & don’t get too puffed up about it (maybe a little for a moment)–though surely I’m flattered. So you can keep it coming if you like–just to test the limits of my humility or vanity.

But let me admit to something so that others–especially young people & those timorous about their abilities & who they are–will take heart & learn to respect the contributions they can make to a better world.

In preparing a post about the death of Kashmiri activist Irshad Ahmad Ganie, there was a dearth of information about who he was. Media reports were vague on every detail including the date of his death. The primary source of information was Indian police officials in Kashmir who labeled him a top official & operative in Lashkar-e-Taiba, identified by the Indian government as terrorist. He was accused by police of involvement in several violent incidents & had a bounty on his head.

This little Kashmiri boy is three year-old Burhan Bashir who was injured in an attack last Friday that killed his father, 38 year-old Bashir Ahmad Bhat. Unknown gunmen–most likely Indian paramilitary assassins–threw a grenade & then fired a volley of bullets at them. The father, a former political militant, was returning from evening prayers & picked up Burhan, a nursery school student, from a shop where he had left him.

Burhan, not realizing he was injured & likely in shock, walked home where his family saw the little guy was bleeding & took him to hospital where he died. He
was buried next to his father today.