Deepest sympathies to the families & friends of those injured & killed in the bomb blast in a Lahore, Pakistan public park. It’s an insanely criminal act against men, women, & children.

I’m not one to swoon over the pope washing the feet of refugees. I grew up with a ritualized version of it & even as a child it seemed awkward to me. Now it just seems demeaning because in an inverse way it accepts inequality without challenging it. I don’t question the pope’s good intentions but that’s what the road to hell is paved with.

There’s a lot of elation about Sanders’ wins in Washington, Hawaii, & Alaska & photos of thousands attending his rally in Seattle, with lines a mile long waiting to get in to hear him. Impressive. He’s bungled so many questions–especially those involving racism–& still by comparison to Clinton he comes out smelling like a rose.

But why the illusions? Why do seasoned activists utter nonsense like ‘he might save Palestine’ when he defends Israel & a Jewish-only state with such vehemence? Why are some of Sanders’ supporters castigating Blacks who voted for Clinton & uttering crap like “What the black voter did to Sanders is unforgivable”? Why are people swooning over his campaign video featuring Hawaiian Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who blames Islamic theology for conflict in the Middle East & is a supporter of the BJP, Indian Prime Minister Modi’s right wing nationalist party?

Why the unwillingness of Sanders’ supporters to address the realities of his long tenure in office & instead make him an icon of principled politics when the congressional record is clear: he is massively compromised on all the big questions like war, US militarism, Israeli apartheid, undocumented immigrants/refugees, & the environment. In some circles, where the truth is spoken bluntly, he is called a blowhard.

His large following is not a testimony to idealism but to the triumph of credulity & burying your head in the sand as a political strategy. An examination of his record shows him to be hopelessly compromised & even outright corrupt.

Let’s take just one example: his co-sponsorship in 1998 of H.R.629, the Texas Low-level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Consent Act. It was an agreement between Texas (under the governorship of George Bush), Maine, & Vermont to ship radioactive nuclear waste from Main & Vermont (a state 95% white) to Sierra Blanca, Texas, a small city near El Paso & the Rio Grande River. Sierra Blanca was over 70% Mexican-American with the highest poverty levels in the country & without political representation. Then president Bill Clinton signed H.R. 629 into law despite years of public opposition to the nuclear dump site.

The Sierra Blanca site was owned by Harold Simmons, a tycoon powerful in Texas politics as a major donor to the GOP who made his fortune by hiring lobbyists & buying politicians. One Simmons company was responsible for the lead poisoning of an impoverished Black community in Cadillac Heights, Texas & for other toxic dump sites which cost US taxpayers $4.4 billion in Superfund monies.

This is what is called ‘environmental racism’–going on at the same time as Indian reservations were being bribed to become radioactive waste dumps. Sanders co-sponsored H.R. 629 with Texas congressman Joe Barton, a rightwing politician who continues to distinguish himself for idiocies & treacheries on environmental matters, including his assertion that wind is a finite resource & his support for the Keystone pipeline.

Sanders’ congressional speech supporting H.R. 629 typifies his ability to speak out of both sides of his ass. He first stated opposition to nuclear power & acknowledged the problem of radioactive waste. Then he argued for moving Vermont’s radioactive waste to Sierra Blanca, saying: “No reputable scientist or environmentalist believes that the geology of Vermont or Maine would be a good place for this waste.” Would any reputable politician not marinated in white supremacy then suggest it be dumped in Texas among poor brown people with limited access to healthcare?

In the end, it doesn’t matter if people support Sanders; what matters is the political method used to justify doing so. People who want to make this world suitable for human beings to live in ought to be ruthless with the truth & not accept false prophets & saviors.

(Photo by Mihajlo Maricic/Getty Images)

A bird pooped on Bernie Sanders. Isn’t that a good omen in Chinese folklore? I’ve had dozens of pet birds poop on me & I should warn Sanders that it doesn’t mean squat & won’t save his ass from his rotten politics.

The headlines are exuberant: “Rolling Stones make history with free concert in Cuba.” We’re told the concert was the result of months of diplomacy between the US & Cuba & that hundreds of thousands attended the free concert at a decrepit sports stadium.

Questions emerge which are not answered. Like why was the US government negotiating the terms of a rock & roll concert for the Rolling Stones who are British? And who paid for the free concert?

Maybe from the point of view of rock & roll this concert is cool. But from the point of view of politics, it’s a crying shame. In June 2014, the Rolling Stones contemptuously defied the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli apartheid & performed in Tel Aviv. Just one month later Israel launched the seven-week bombing siege over Gaza which directly targeted children.

The National Enquirer is now the go-to source for campaign news. But do I care if Cruz has five mistresses? Or that Trump’s misogyny has singlehandedly reduced the campaign for US president to a beauty contest between wives & the laughing stock of world opinion? No, I don’t. I’m more interested in how lesser evil voters are managing to explain all this farce.

Last Monday, Bernie Sanders was asked by Chris Hayes on MSNBC if he agreed with Hillary Clinton that the political force behind the BDS movement is anti-Semitism. “I think there is some of that, absolutely,” he responded. Really!? We’d like him to elaborate on that very serious charge. What evidence does he have, what sources can he quote since he has kept himself 100 miles away from the movement & doesn’t know squat about what is going on? In fact, the movement, led by Palestinians, eschews anti-Semitism & polemicizes against it.

Uber-populist Hillary Clinton will join the Clooneys at a fundraiser next month hosted by billionaire & Uber company investor, Shervin Pishevar. Tickets will be $353,400 for a piece of Clinton’s soul. There’s so little left to mortgage since Israel & Haim Saban already own her.

The next day, the Clooneys will have another fundraiser at their LA mansion for the discounted rate of $33,400 a piece.

Every time George opens his mouth to talk politics & war-monger, his sex appeal drains through the floor. He’s now riding on empty & can start looking for grumpy old man roles.

In 1973, the satirist Tom Lehrer said, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize.” The Nobel prize was jointly awarded that year to Kissinger (then US Secretary of State) & Lê Đức Thọ, a Vietnamese general & leading political figure, who declined it. It would have been grotesque, even criminal to accept it since the US was then engaged in carpet bombing North Vietnam.

The award has always been a discredited honorific for colonialists & war makers beginning with Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, an instrumental figure in colonizing the Philippines, Cuba, & Puerto Rico for the US; & in 1919 with Woodrow Wilson who took the US into WWI fought among European powers & the US over the colonial division of the world.

The Nobel committee throws in do-gooders once in a while & genuine leaders ever so occasionally but mostly it has the political merit of toilet paper. When they threw in a rookie like Obama, they must have thought he showed promise as a war-maker. He has not disappointed those hopes. When they chose Aung San Suu Kyi, the Myanmar dissident, they must have known she was open to compromise not only with the military junta & neoliberal plunder of Myanmar’s natural resources but with the gruesome ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims.

Suu Kyi received the award in 1991 while she was under house arrest but could not travel to receive it until 2012. Whilst she traveled to Norway to pick up the thing, there was a violent onslaught by the regime against Rohingya which she remained quiet as a mouse about. Commentators were mystified; some thought her silence was equivocation, others thought her afraid to speak out. Well if a Nobel peace prize winner can’t speak out against butchery, who the hell can & what is the purpose of receiving the damn thing if remaining silent about monstrous human rights crimes is part of the bargain!?

What wasn’t understood is that Suu Kyi’s silence was consent; at no time has she ever expressed scruples or outrage at the mob violence against Rohingya, the concentration camps for Rohingya, at forcing thousands to flee to Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, or in rickety boats on the Andaman Sea. When asked about it, she denies there is a genocide & resorts to double-talk & evasions. She doesn’t come across less smarmy than any other corrupt politician whose names are legion.

Now a book titled “The Lady & The Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi & Burma’s Struggle For Freedom,” by Peter Popham, exposes what is behind the double-talk & it comes as no surprise. The book describes an anti-Muslim outburst by Suu Kyi after an October 2013 interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today program. The interview was conducted by Mishal Husain, a British woman of Pakistani descent & a Muslim.

Husain pressed Suu Kyi on the issue of ethnic cleansing & repeatedly challenged her to condemn anti-Islamic terrorism in Myanmar. Suu Kyi refused & under pressure lost her composure–that presumed Buddhist serenity that masks her indifference to genocide. Following the interview, she was heard to mutter, “No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim.” No one told her that her comments would be overheard & used against her either–not to discredit her; she’s done that all by herself–but to clarify where she actually stands so admirers can get past adulation to a realistic evaluation of her political character. It’s a case of chickens coming home to roost.

Photo is Suu Kyi with her mad face on during the Husain interview when she was being cornered & couldn’t weasel out of it.

(Photo is screen shot from BBC video)

Just so we’re all clear on who is being demonized by opponents of refugee rights to asylum: about half of the 4.8 million Syrian refugees are children. This is 11-year-old Yasmeen Mohammed from Eastern Ghouta in Syria, now living in a refugee camp near the Jordanian city of Mafraq. Yasmeen said, “All I want is to go back to my school in Syria & see my friends.’”

The Jordanian monarchy is hardly a model for refugee rights since it denies asylum to all Palestinians fleeing Syria & has now partially closed the borders to Syrians. But with a population of 8 million people, it had taken in nearly 630,000 Syrian refugees as of October 2015. According to the European Union’s own figures, in a population of 508 million, EU countries received just over one million asylum applications but of course many were declined, many have been deported, refugee camps have been forcibly dismantled & residents made homeless. How many the EU has actually accepted is uncertain but some reports claim it is less than the country of Jordan.