Due to the harassment from a whack-job over the past few days, I turned off the message function on my Facebook presidential campaign wall. The jackass would leave a nastygram & then hide by blocking a response. That way I couldn’t block him. I received so much hate mail from Zionists on this blog that I had to do the same thing. I had to make that creep go away.

Many polls have been done since Drumpf announced his candidacy in June 2015 about the demographics of his supporters. Polls are tendentious things, highly politicized, & not particularly meaningful as social analysis. Drawing conclusions from them is problematic since they are all done within the parameters of Democratic voters versus Republican voters & both parties have sustained profound crises of confidence among voters for decades.

Nevertheless, it’s probably true that a large number of Drumpf supporters are white, less educated working class people–though one poll reports that Republicans in all the major demographic groups, including women, well-educated, & well-heeled, broadly support Drumpf.

Articles are emerging now to explain this phenomenon of white working class people supporting a racist dumb-ass xenophobe like Drumpf. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say, explain away this phenomenon. The primary theme is that these supporters are not racist but are attracted to him because of his views on trade & outsourcing their jobs. Perhaps you have to part of or closer to the working class than the NY Times or the pollsters to know most workers don’t make a distinction between racism & outsourcing since the jobs are going to countries with brown-skinned people. Brown-skinned people who many US workers arrogantly believe are too stupid to do the jobs white male factory workers once exclusively did–because until affirmative action in the 1980s, skilled factory jobs were primarily done by white men. Sweatshops overseas they can live with. But not outsourcing aircraft & turbine engines.

The authoritative voices called on to explain why white working class people support Drumpf include officials from the AFL-CIO, the largest of the two labor federations in a fractured US labor movement. One of its research affiliates did a survey of about 1,700 people in a couple states on the East Coast.

It’s been a mighty long time since the AFL-CIO has had the pulse of where American workers stand on anything because it has its head stuck too far up the Democratic Party’s ass–sharing all of its political vices, particularly xenophobia & opposition to undocumented workers. It operates in several countries as an adjunct to the CIA to foster sweatshop economics & subvert worker’s rights.

The AFL-CIO officials try to put a positive spin on working class support for Drumpf & insist it isn’t racism. It’s racism all right & the same kind that infects the AFL-CIO leadership (which is why they don’t recognize it); the same kind reflected in Obama administration immigration & economic policies; the same kind as European Union officials (who are all highly educated affluents) denying asylum to hundreds of thousands of refugees.

An analysis of the Drumpf phenomenon should not include giving an alibi to white uneducated working class stiffs for their racism which is not distinguished in malignancy from that of their educated affluent counterparts. It’s all of a piece. Crocodile tears for the poor, unschooled, xenophobic workers doesn’t cut it because it patronizes. Women, Black, Latino, or Native American–& now Muslim–workers who’ve experienced the viciousness of white, especially male co-workers harbor no illusions about the massive problems we’re up against & see no compelling reasons to explain it away with pity-mongering workers. Nor certainly to repress our indignation in the interests of some phony working class harmony. Harmony–but not at our expense.

Working people who continue to blame immigrants & refugees for problems created by Wall Street & the White House aren’t lacking advanced degrees since it’s the people with advanced degrees promoting these ideas & policies. What is needed are massive social movements in defense of undocumented workers, refugees, & workers rights everywhere in this world. What is needed is to rebuild the labor movement based on democracy & not on racism, elitism, & autocracy.

(Photo by John Minchillo/AP)

International Women’s Day should not have come & gone without taking a moment to pay respects to the countless grieving mothers whose children have been disappeared, tortured, or murdered–surely the most merciless & monstrous of political crimes.

The weight of those crimes fall hardest now on the mothers & fathers of Mexico, Palestine, Kashmir, but they are or have been practiced in over 50 countries.

Not just our condolences but our solidarity is imperative since many of the countries we live in contribute considerably to these crimes through military aid & armaments–or through standing mute & doing business as usual with the criminal regimes. It’s not a question of noblesse oblige but of what kind of world we want to live in, whether it is suitable for children to live & love in.

The presidential elections raise the question of how the US government is run. The social studies catechism teaches all that stuff about three branches: judicial, legislative, executive. They don’t mention Wall Street, lobbyists, think tanks, special advisers (like Kissinger), or other ways the oligarchy intervenes to make sure their interests are best served.

How otherwise do we explain Obama, elected because he promised the moon but who hasn’t come through on a single pledge? It’s a hard thing to own up to, but the president doesn’t run this country. The monied interests are not so reckless with their international investments that they would put a rookie like Obama in charge. He has “advisers.”

These are India’s “first batch of female fighter pilots.” There’s a militarist trend in journalism promoting the notion that women in elite military units are a sign of women’s advancement. They made a spectacle of the first Muslim woman fighter pilot & when women trained for US special forces.

There’s nothing laudable or progressive in training a handful of women to bomb or terrorize other people. That is no measure of women’s progress but of tokenism & giving a softer, gentler face to military barbarism. The only measures worth a patoot are the elimination of sweatshop economics, the end of violence against women, & the end of discrimination in every sphere of economic, political, & social life.

Media today is bursting with headlines like “Palestinian kills US tourist in stabbing spree on Tel Aviv boardwalk” & “US student dead & at least 13 others injured in attacks across Israel.” The problem with the reporting about three separate attacks is the dearth of information. There’s all sorts of extraneous filler in the articles about what rightwing Israeli politicians had to say; that Joe Biden’s family (he is visiting the immediate area for talks with Shimon Peres) were dining on a nearby beach; & a non sequitur about Netanyahu’s alleged snub of Obama.

The incident of particular interest is the Palestinian man, now reportedly shot dead by Israeli police, who stabbed 10 people in a “stabbing rampage.” Some reports say he was running down the boardwalk; other reports say “he was running along the Tel Aviv beachfront stabbing pedestrians & motorists stuck in traffic.” We’d just like to know how one person could manage to stab so many people since the logistics seem improbable; stabbing someone takes quite an effort. Did he just brandish a knife or actually skewer them?

The Guardian-UK says “Initial accounts of the attacks were confused & contradictory.” You bet your sweet ass they were. They still are–even within the same article in the Guardian. What’s curious about that is the Israeli police are usually media’s only source of information. Can’t the police get their story straight?

According to the Guardian, the assailant, who was shot dead trying to flee, was later identified as a 22-year-old Palestinian man from Qalandiya. They know his age & where he’s from, but not his name? There was apparently another incident in occupied East Jerusalem where a Palestinian “gunman opened fire on Israeli police” before being shot dead by police. Other than his name, Fouad Tamimi, & age (he was 25), there is no other information. The third incident of an alleged stabbing in Petah Tikva near Tel Aviv isn’t described at all. What kind of sloppy-assed reporting is that!?

The Guardian (which functions as the rightwing Jerusalem Post’s European edition) says these latest attacks ‘come after months of violence in Israel & the Palestinian territories in which 183 Palestinians & 28 Israelis have been killed since October.’ Well we’d sure like them to explain the differential there because the rate of Palestinians killed is nearly seven times that of Israelis & yet all the news coverage is about that alleged “stabbing Intifada.” Stabbing Intifada, my ass! There is a pogrom against Palestinian youth which media refuses to report.

We would like to know about those 183 Palestinians killed. Israel also claims 121 of them were knife assailants. We want reports on the circumstances & the forensic results along with an explanation for why Israel won’t return the bodies to Palestinian families for respectful burial. But as we see, vague allegations better serve propaganda.

We regret if Palestinian youth actually did use a knife or gun because those Israelis injured are not the ones calling the shots in Israel. But color us skeptical as all get-out until we get confirmation from Palestinians. If Israel can’t provide names & forensic details that can be verified, the assailants could just as well be Israeli agents provocateur. It’s been done before.

Photojournalism on these three alleged incidents are also scanty & journalistically embarrassing.The caption to this photo (the typos are all theirs) says: “An Israeli policeman clear the spot where, according to Israeli police spokesperson, at least 10 Israelis were stabbed, in the popular Jaffa port area of Tel Aviv, Israel March 8, 2016.” Were they all stabbed on that spot?

We are undaunted in our support for Palestinians. As in Kashmir, the criminals are not those who resist occupation; the criminals are the occupiers.

Build & honor the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel (BDS) & demand no US aid of any kind to Israel.

(Photo by Amir Cohen/Reuters)

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.

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)