Hate mail to my presidential campaign

This June, I will commemorate fifty years of political activism, coming of age at a 1966 protest against the Vietnam War on the University of Minnesota campus. It has been an enriching life, though because I am a blunt spoken working class woman, not always an easy road.

People sometimes express concern that praise I receive for my posts on Facebook will make me heady with vanity & throw my commitments out of whack. I sincerely appreciate positive response but I’m not that vainglorious. You don’t stay committed in transformational politics if you put your ego over the demands of building movements for social justice. For all the praise I receive, I am familiar with equal doses of opprobrium. If you want to make the world a better place, you can’t let either get to you.

But sometimes it does. This morning I received a message on my campaign wall from an anonymous person. It isn’t the insults that disturb but the level of malice & petty cruelty. I share it here because sometimes you just don’t want to sustain social hatred alone.

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“Mary Scully is a joke. She purports to run for president yet can’t get a single endorsement or raise one fucking dime. She has less followers than the local pub. She spews incessant and tiresome garbage about over throwing the world order when she couldn’t overthrow the goddamned neighborhood association of her trailer park.

I will be taking a huge shit on your grave, Mary, whenever that wonderful day comes to pass, you nasty asshole. Given your shitty living conditions, lack of financial resources, despicable character, advanced age, non-existent social circle and bitter constitution your demise can’t be too far away. Most of the world won’t care when they throw you in the pauper cemetery. I’ll be sure to visit and fertilize the grave with my biomass fuel, cunt.

Hahahaha. You can barely keep track of all your mutts and you expect to dismantle the US military as well as prosecute US govt officials under some ridiculous notion of international law of which I guess you are the sole arbiter, enforcer and punisher. Oh dear, Mary, all this has the ring of….complete and utter insanity. You are a fucking fruit cake, a clueless clown spewing nonsense beyond that of even the most hair brained conspiracy theorist. You should have stayed hunkered down with your soul mate Ted Kazinsky. Perhaps you would still be allowed conjugal visits. Lol.

A dismal, desperate, sad, empty, meaningless future awaits you. Stick to saving the occasional homeless dog. Your activities as a political change agent / activist are a total waste of time and only serve to expose your incredible hubris that your extreme POV is the only salvation for all the worlds problems. You, when can’t solve your own poverty, misery and anger, are going to solve the problems of the entire world, eh Mary? By destroying what is and then rebuilding under some crazy assed notion that has only existed in your ridiculous daily manifestos? JFC, you give crazy new respectability. Get out of your novel and see the world a bit. Your life as a recluse is driving you mad.”

Israel commemorates International Women’s Day by honoring Naomi Campbell, frequently charged with felonious assault on female subordinates

Naomi Campbell & Shimon Peres (Amir Cohen) Mar 8 2016

This grotesque encounter is what you get when Israeli colonialism, apartheid, & ethnic cleansing try to feign association with progressive social movements like feminism. British model Naomi Campbell does the obligatory photo op with former paramilitary terrorist & past Israeli president Shimon Peres after he presented her an award at an event commemorating International Women’s Day today at the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa, Israel.

Actually, given her nearly 20-year rap sheet of anger management issues toward female subordinates, she may be the most appropriate candidate for that award from Peres who has his own rap sheet as a terrorist against Palestinians.

Going back to 1998, she has been sued, served community service, & pleaded guilty to charges by women maids & assistants umpteen times for violence & verbal & physical abuse against them including: several assaults with telephones; threats to throw one out of a moving car onto a busy highway; head-butting one & slamming another against a wall; grabbing one by the neck & violently shaking her head; biting one on the lip & yanking her to the ground by her hair while screaming “You f*****g worthless bitch”; slapping one & beating her on the head with a Blackberry.

She has also assaulted an actress, her drug counselor, & kicked & spit at police at Heathrow after going berserk on a plane.

In 2010, Hague prosecutors, in a case against former Liberian president Charles Taylor for war crimes, claimed Taylor delivered “blood diamonds” to Campbell after a 1997 dinner at Nelson Mandela’s home. Beside her violence, that may be her primary connection to Israel since it is up to its eyeballs in the blood diamond trade.

Blood diamonds (also known as conflict diamonds) are diamonds mined in a war zone, particularly in African countries. They are a plundered natural resource & at the expense of African working people in several countries–most notably the DR Congo. At this time, all diamonds, without exception, are considered blood diamonds by human rights groups & activists though the industry has attempted through a scheme called the Kimberley Process to circumvent scrutiny & continue trading in African blood.

Campbell deserves this honorific for women’s rights about as much as Peres does for peace when he is one of the chief architects of Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing.

Use your outrage & visceral disgust to build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel (BDS). Buy nothing beginning with barcode 729.

(Photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters)

U.S. intervention into Honduras & the 2016 presidential elections

Bertita

The assassination of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres puts a spotlight on the role of the US in Honduras & in Central America generally. That includes the Obama administration & his Secretary of State Clinton, not just in the 2009 Honduran coup but in the ruthless implementation of neoliberal economic policies–which are indistinguishable in many ways from colonialism. Those policies are what Berta Cáceres spent her life opposing, why she was murdered, & why there are thousands of unaccompanied Honduran children crossing the US border as refugees.

Bernie Sanders supporters are tendentiously using Clinton’s role in the 2009 coup to discredit her. As an agent of the Obama administration, her role was absolutely pernicious & integral to massive political repression in Honduras including assassinations like that of Cáceres. But using Clinton’s role in the unspeakable crimes sanctioned & bankrolled by the US against the people of Honduras to gain debater’s points in a freaky election is the small-minded trap you get caught in when you cannot break with lesser evil political thinking.

Obama/Clinton policy in Honduras is of a piece with US policy in Honduras & Central America since the beginning of the 20th century when US fruit corporations created “banana republics.” The US has intervened repeatedly in military coups & to maintain military juntas in order to protect US commercial enterprises. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration used Honduras as a base to attack Nicaragua’s Sandinista government & as a base for its “war on terror” in other countries like Guatemala & El Salvador. Honduras received millions in annual military aid & was the largest military aid recipient in the region.

Thousands of Honduran police & military officials were trained at the US School of the Americas in the barbarisms of mass kidnapping, disappearances, mass rape, torture, assassination. The CIA trained death squads in Honduras; the US Pentagon set up training camps for guerrilla troops to be used against Nicaragua & where hundreds of Hondurans were detained, tortured, executed. This was under the supervision of John Negroponte, then US Ambassador to Honduras & certainly one of the most monstrous torturers & political operatives in the history of US foreign policy & human rights abuses.

What is condemned by US policy in Honduras is the entire US government which is based on over 100 years of wars & massive human rights crimes–& not just in Central America but on every continent. You cannot simply elect a lesser evil politician to tinker out some adjustments in foreign policy. The scale & duration of the crimes, the military edifice required to maintain the system, & the integral relationship of criminality to what the US has become call for a thoroughgoing, unsparing critique of the system. The entire military apparatus has to be dismantled, along with the CIA–& prosecutions would be required to bring even a modicum of justice for decades of unspeakable crimes committed against the peoples of Central America.

When Bernie Sanders supporters with a lesser evil mentality substitute the necessary political critique with small-minded parsing of distinctions that don’t exist, they make a mockery of politics, of democracy, of social transformation. They accept the status quo.

But of course Sanders will not be the Democratic nominee; Clinton will be because it’s a rigged system. Whichever option the Republicans put up against her will be loathsome. But if progressives take the route of lesser evil & choose Clinton over Drumpf or Cruz, they will show that they misunderstand the most fundamental questions of US politics today. The overwhelming majority of eligible US voters do not bother to register or if they register do not bother to vote because in a passive way they recognize there is no meaningful distinction between the two parties; there is no lesser evil. It’s the chimera, the shell game of US political treachery.

At the least, Sanders supporters should have the decency not to make debater’s points off the assassination of one of the most important political leaders of our era–Berta Cáceres, who lost her life not from tinkering with a corrupt system but by actively opposing it.

May she Rest in Peace & her name be forever honored as one of the great leaders & teachers of working people around the world.

(Photo is Berta Cáceres)