This is the second anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh where 1,135 garment workers, mostly women & children, died & over 2,500 were injured–many permanently disabled & no longer able to work. Many were buried alive in the rubble. There are still 135 bodies buried in mass graves whose DNA has not been identified so families can give respectful burial.

Nothing has changed for sweatshop workers in Bangladesh; under international scrutiny the wages were raised from US $9 to $16 a week. Some of the 29 US & European retailers they produced for sell a pair of underwear for more than $16. But most importantly, after the initial furor from the Rana collapse calmed down, none of the retailers forked over any compensation money to the victims’ families.

And this is where the intellectual tinker-bells of capitalism come in. In article after article, before bodies had even been recovered from Rana rubble, these amoral apologists were arguing that sweatshops & child labor are necessary, progressive, & improve the lives of their workers; that almost $2 a day beats the World Bank poverty measure of $1.25 a day; that “poor” countries cannot afford the safety standards of “rich” countries; that if sweatshops lay the kids off they’ll all become prostitutes; that it is outright colonialism for retailers to demand safety standards in foreign sweatshops; that poor people in Africa, Asia, & elsewhere clamor for sweatshop jobs. You read too much of this crap at one sitting, you get constipated.

There’s no hope for these creeps if they defend sweatshops; there’s no merits to sweatshops; there should be no future for neoliberalism if its standards of well-being in a country are sweatshops & child labor.

We should take a moment to honor those who died & those who survived the Rana Plaza collapse. And we should commit ourselves to ridding this planet of the abomination of exploited labor.

(Photo is a woman grieving a beloved lost in the Rana collapse; by A. M. Ahad/AP)

An Indian army spokesman said the forces, many of them trained death squad members, opened fire only after “mobs” tried to storm the army camp with stones but he insisted the soldiers exercised restraint. That would explain why the injured protesters were treated for bullet wounds & being hit by teargas shells but they only mentioned one soldier was treated after being hit by a stone. If the protesters were packing anything heavier than little stones, those death squad guys would have to go home to mama crying.

The truth of the matter is that Indian soldiers are armed with TAR-21 assault rifles made in Israel for use in urban warfare. It’s one of the most modern & deadliest assault rifles in the world. It can accommodate a 30-round magazine & sustain a rate of fire of 750 to 900 rounds per minute. Does that sound like restraint against unarmed civilians? Does this photo of a young man enveloped in tear gas look like restraint?

The work of Kashmiri activists on social media is forcing an end to the news blackout that prevailed for so long. But as we know from media coverage of Palestine, India & media will try to control the narrative just as malignantly as Israel & media does about Palestinians, turning them from freedom fighters into terrorists.

Long live Kashmiri Intifada! Stand against the occupation!

(Photo of Kashmiri protester facing unrestrained brutality is from the Times of India)

Let’s not beat around the bush. Opposing war & occupation has been the sine qua non not just of transformational but of progressive politics for over 100 years. The US wars in Iraq & Afghanistan are so monstrous that to support them takes a special kind of political criminality on the part of politicians & half-witted racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia on the part of working people–a majority of whom oppose the war. But since Sanders talks a good line on student loans, what’s a few decades more of massive bombing & occupation in those two countries? They’re not Americans after all so they’re not really human.

(PS: for those Sanders supporters who call themselves socialists, it would be valuable to review the history of WW1 when support for the war among most socialist groups created a massive international rupture in the movement from which it has not recovered. But go ahead, campaign for Sanders since you’re probably not marching against the wars anyway.)

(Photo of Sanders by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Tobin claims “The BDS movement isn’t merely economic warfare; it is an effort to delegitimize the entire notion of Zionism & the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty or self-defense in their ancient homeland.” Actually, the BDS call is necessarily conservative & does not challenge the sovereignty of Israel at all. This allows those who oppose the military occupation, Israeli settlements, apartheid, & the bombing of Gaza to honor the boycott whilst remaining a supporter of Israeli sovereignty. It’s a contradiction but politics are full of those. As for the self-defense baloney, since Israel is one of the most sophisticated military forces in the world & Palestinians are unarmed, cry me a river.

Many BDS activists are not constrained & do want to expose Zionism as a racist, supremacist ideology & do challenge Israeli sovereignty. The Palestinian proposal for a democratic, secular state where Jews & Palestinians can live as brothers & sisters is the only real solution, the only possible solution.

BDS is fundamental to getting to that democratic society based on human rights. Build the hell out of it.

(Photo is BDS rally in Montoro, Spain from FB wall of BDS India)

Who knows why the Israeli government uses that 1860 date other than as part of inventing a history for a fabricated people? There isn’t much available information about it since it’s so obviously goofy. Theodor Herzl, the Hungarian guy who thought up political Zionism, wasn’t even born until 1860 & the decision to forcibly colonize Palestine wasn’t made till the first Zionist Congress in 1897.

One Zionist source, grasping at straws to explain that 1860 thing, says, “A total of 23,320 men & women have been killed defending the land of Israel since 1860, the year that the first Jewish settlers left the secure walls of Jerusalem to build new neighborhoods.” Why in the hell did they leave secure walls to build settlements? Did they militarily force Palestinians off their lands or just move to a new area? Or is that just another fabrication since Jewish colonialism doesn’t show up in the history books for that period?

The figure of 23,320 comes from several Israeli government sources & includes 6,373 killed in the so-called “War of Independence” in 1948–what Palestinians call the Naqba, (“catastrophe”) when 700,000 fled in terror or were forcibly expelled by those death squads. It also includes 9,967 killed between 1860 & the present in “terrorist attacks.” For death squads, resistance to colonialism is termed terrorism.

There aren’t any reliable figures on Palestinian losses but they don’t need to go back to the fictitious date of 1860. Some sources estimate Palestinian fatalities as high as 2 million since 1948 & 7 million now living as refugees. Two million may be too high but in the Naqba itself, at least 20,000 Palestinians were killed & there have been numerous Israeli massacres since at refugee camps as well as recent bombing sieges over Gaza which have killed thousands of people.

The NY Times knows all that; they don’t have a fact-checker problem. They have a political problem.

Cut through the propaganda. Build & honor the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel. Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.

(Photo by Ariel Schalit/AP)

As we know from disability rights, every human being is perfect just as they are. That doesn’t mean we don’t acknowledge the problems they face. It only means we want societies that don’t create disabilities & that don’t treat them as less than human beings by depriving them of necessary benefits, isolating them, & patronizing & pitying them.