If we thought lesser evil politics was rough-going during the Sanders campaign, it was just heating up for the Drumpf vs Clinton main round. The alarmism about Drumpf ushering in fascism is nothing but manipulation or naiveté about how, by, & for whom this government is run & about how fascism rises to state power. Drumpf cannot usher in fascism on his own despite his demagoguery. That is not the power dynamics of how fascism took power in Germany, Spain, or Italy.

Angela Davis, who in March swore on Democracy Now not to endorse a candidate, already by June was saying “We have to defeat Trump by any means necessary.” That’s the mantra to chasten those who will not be browbeaten by the manipulations of lesser evil voting & it’s not more valid coming from her than from any other lesser evil advocate.

Those who vote for Stein may be ignoring the provincialism of her politics & how dead wrong she is on Syria & Israel & on US militarism but at least they can identify Clinton as a war criminal from her record & have a clearer sense of how & by whom this country is run. The most important contribution Stein has made to this election is her cogent elaboration of the folly of lesser evil politics & her ability to make chopped liver of the parsing between the politics of Drumpf & Clinton.

So while some are pontificating about how at odds the burkini is with Enlightenment values, female liberation, & the summer heat, many of us are rushing to the stores to buy one. Shaming us with war propaganda from the Pentagon will not deter us from finding comfort at the beach.

Meanwhile, those so up-in-arms about the burkini are missing all the action at the Olympic games in Rio over the attire of the women’s volleyball teams. Women’s attire at sports events has long been noticeably scantier & more sexualized than men’s attire. This is particularly evident in the uniforms of women’s beach volleyball teams which are tiny bras & bikini bottoms exposing half the women’s asses. Women’s objections to the differences are not prudery but rather to sexploitation that promotes exhibitionism in women as sexual freedom & sexualizes women athletes in order to attract commercial contracts.

Olympic uniforms are dictated by the international sports federations (FIVB for beach volleyball, FIG for gymnastics, FINA for swimming, etc.) so people can bark on about the hijab as a coercive style & women’s right to wear what they want but for the most part, elite women athletes do not choose what uniforms they will compete in.

When beach volleyball became an Olympic event in 1996, the beach volleyball federation (FIVB) mandated women’s uniform as a skimpy bikini less than six inches wide with the option to wear a body suit underneath in cold weather or for modesty purposes. FIVB introduced bikinis intentionally to highlight sexual attributes rather than athletic prowess & not for practical or performance-enhancing reasons. Otherwise, why are male beach volleyball players uniformed in baggy shorts & shirts?

As a result of pressure, in 2012, FIVB modified their uniform requirements to allow women players to wear shorts & sleeved tops. The Australian Sports Commission (part of the Australian government) published a fact sheet on sexploitation in women’s sports & were particularly cogent in their objections to the sexualized image of women athletes.

Reportedly, many women beach volleyball players prefer the bikini to shorts & shirts. Condemnations of FIVB regulations do not include excoriating the women athletes who don’t recognize the problem or who actually do prefer playing ball in a bikini–especially because there’s plenty of sponsorship money involved for them.
But where are those so up-in-arms about the exploitation of the burqa & hijab? If women’s freedom of choice is so important to them, why aren’t they going ballistic about athletic federations mandating sexualized uniforms? Do they perhaps think the bikini is a symbol of women’s liberation? Who are they to decide? Are they only concerned about the freedom of Muslim women because they think Muslim women are too stupid or oppressed to choose their attire all by themselves?

The distinction between governments or sports federations that mandate women’s attire & the right of women to choose what they wear for religious, cultural, or fashion reasons is not subtle. What women wear is nobody’s damn business but the women themselves.

Photo on top (by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters) is Egypt’s Doaa Elghobashy (L) & Germany’s Kira Walkenhorst during the women’s beach volleyball qualifying match in Rio de Janeiro on August 7, 2016. Germany won by 2-0. So do those two points prove that bikinis are more performance-enhancing than burkinis?

Photo in middle is uniform of women’s volleyball federation (by Getty Images). You don’t have to be a feminist or blue-nosed to consider it inappropriate attire in an international venue.

Photo on bottom is male beach volleyball uniform at Rio 2016 Olympic games (by Matthias Hangst/Getty Images).

The Guardian-UK newspaper has really gone over to the dark side of news reporting–most noticeably about the Palestinian & Kashmiri struggles for self-determination. Their photojournalism now focuses on moments in sports, religious rituals & festivals portrayed anthropologically, & even donkey races in Italy.

But this photo may take the cake for cynicism & corruption. They’ve hardly covered the military siege in Kashmir, particularly the extremes of violence against unarmed protesters. But they published this photo today with the caption “Srinagar, India: A policeman rides through a wall of fluorescent tubes during India’s Independence Day celebrations.”

The photo is a contemptuous slap in the face to Kashmiris who in their thousands are facing down Indian troops armed with curfews, checkpoints, surveillance, pellet guns, live ammo, & tear gas in their struggle for independence from India.

There isn’t much to say about it except shame, shame, shame to the Guardian.

End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.

(Photo by Danish Ismail/Reuters)

There really isn’t a coherent report yet on the shooting of 23-year-old Sylville Smith by Milwaukee police on Saturday night. But when the sheriff & media don’t detail how a routine traffic stop led to his death & instead report his previous arrest record, they’re pulling a bait & switch–especially when most of his 13 arrests were for things like shop lifting, speeding, driving without insurance & with a suspended license, or having booze in the car. Those are the dumb things youth without money do & hardly rise to the level of criminality.

The sheriff said Smith had a bunch of drug arrests, a robbery charge, & was accused of a felony last year but if he was not found guilty in a court of law for any of these, it is not relevant to his shooting but only to character assassination. You can’t just summarily execute people because they do naughty things or even criminal things.
It’s also not relevant to keep reporting that he was shot by a Black officer. Many of the cases of Blacks being shot involve Black officers. It’s not a matter of personal racism but of social policy. Under the Obama administration, violence against Black youth & their incarceration rate has not improved an iota from the Clinton administration.

What’s relevant is how a traffic violation led to the shooting death of a 23-year-old man. What’s relevant is that his shooting caused such an extreme reaction in the Black community–almost certainly because of seething resentments not just at aggressive policing in their neighborhoods but at the entire nexus of discrimination & oppression including unemployment, underemployment, segregated education, segregated housing, indignities, injustices, humiliations of every kind.

An analysis of the violence against the Black community cannot end with hating on the police who are only the front lines of this sustained assault. The war on the Black community comes from the highest reaches of power in this country–that is, all the way to the White House & the Department of Justice, both now led by Blacks. When those institutions are again led by whites, the policies will not change because the oppression of Blacks is systemic & institutionalized–though it is suffered personally.

Racism is so built into the system that modern capitalism couldn’t operate without it. The fight against racist persecution strikes at the very heart of inequality & is understood by the powers that be as a direct challenge to their ability to play one section of working people off against another.

Our fullest solidarity with the Black community in Milwaukee.
Photo is phalanx of riot police lined up against protesters yesterday in Milwaukee.

(Photo by Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters)

Al Jazeera held a panel on Kashmir moderated by Folly Bah Thibault. Included on the panel was Vivek Katju (on the left in this photo), a retired Indian Foreign Service officer who once served as one of India’s chief negotiators with Pakistan on the issue of Kashmir. He was debating Kavita Krishnan (on the right), who is secretary of the All India Progressive Women’s Association.

Krishnan pointed out that 400 Kashmiris, including an unspecified number of children, have been blinded & permanently disabled by pellet guns. In a state of nationalist agitation, Katju asked why Kashmiri parents “allowed & pushed” their children into protests & “asked them to pick up stones” against Indian troops. Thibault intervened to ask Krishnan why Kashmiri political leadership did not prevail on parents to stop their children from participating in protests.

Krishnan wasn’t given much chance to answer but she did point out that many of the small children were injured by pellet munitions whilst in their homes & in their mother’s laps because of the aggressive character of Indian troops. She also pointed out that the old guard leadership is not in charge of Intifada. It is a youth rebellion & pre-teen kids will inevitably be drawn into struggle when an entire country is under occupation.

Israel has long justified the high injury & fatality rates among children by claiming Palestinians use their children as human shields when in fact Israel targets children. That is almost certainly the case in Kashmir & the documentation of human rights crimes, including where, how, & how many children were injured in this current siege will likely testify to that.

Even if there were throngs of small schoolchildren pelting stones, that does not legitimize Indian troops using pellet guns or any other kind of munitions against them or against adult protesters because pellet munitions & live ammo against unarmed protesters are human rights crimes. The problem is not politicized kids nor reckless parents, but the barbaric character of military occupation.

The other issue of who is leading Kashmiri youth is of the greatest importance for the future of self-determination. If youth feel the old guard has failed them, they will forge a new leadership with a new strategy that brokers no discounts on justice & accepts no compromises on self-determination just as Palestinian youth are doing. That crisis is the age-old crisis of social transformation everywhere.

(Photo is Vivek Katju on left & Kavita Krishnan on right from screenshot of Al Jazeera video)

This video about an art colony in Kashmir was shot a few days before the current siege began on July 9th. It gives a wonderful sense of Kashmiri young people who the Modi regime wants us to see as terrorists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBUwW5z6aNo

The president of Pitzer College in Claremont, CA (about 40 miles from LA) had quite an anti-identity politics conniption fit when a Black woman student in off-campus housing advertised on FB for a non-white roommate.

Pitzer President Melvin Oliver called her post “inconsistent with our mission & values” because the college wants to engage “complex intercultural issues, not to isolate individuals on the basis of any protected status.”

Our man Oliver would really get that intercultural stuff since Pitzer was founded in 1963 as a woman’s college. Its first president was male & all but two of the seven presidents since have also been. Because women don’t get “intercultural issues”?

The young woman found a roommate whose ethnicity was not disclosed but she was not browbeaten or shamed into submission & insisted that living with another non-white person “can be necessary.” Damn straight in a society marinated in racism. It’s hard enough working things out with a roommate without having that crap involved also.

This is what passes for coverage of the barbaric siege in Kashmir: an Indian paramilitary thug stopping a man & his child on a motorbike “during curfew like restrictions” in Srinagar. What exactly are “curfew like restrictions”? This might be a new threshold in military double-talk. Is curfew-like something like being dead-like or pregnant-like? Is it some middle zone where you’re ordered to stay home but if you violate the ban they won’t fill you full of buckshot like they did the young worker biking home from work?

Why are this man & his child being stopped? Is there any suggestion they are fleeing a crime scene or headed to create one? Or is harassment the very character of occupation? Is he out & about during a curfew to buy provisions or medications? Why is it necessary to stop him?

Reportedly, schools & colleges, businesses, banks, professional offices & most government offices remain closed & public transport not operating but is that a result of those “curfew like restrictions” or of calls by independence groups to shut down the country in protest?

The media narrative repeated ad nauseam is that Kashmiris rose up en masse after the execution of Burhan (the man whose name cannot be mentioned on FB without denouncing him first for terrorism). His murder may have been the trigger event but summary executions of Kashmiri activists in staged shootouts with paramilitary thugs were almost daily news for a long time & Kashmiris must have been seething with outrage at the executions of so many idealistic young.

Our fullest solidarity with Kashmiri self-determination. End the occupation.

(Photo by Farooq Khan/EPA)

This is the scene after a police operation against illegal drugs in Manila, Philippines: two dead people who may or may not have been dealers or even users.

Filipino president & thug-in-chief Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to declare martial law if the country’s judiciary interferes with his vigilante war on illegal drugs. He has already engaged police, vigilante squads, & now the military in this campaign.

Last Sunday, he read out a list of judges, mayors, politicians, & police officials allegedly involved in drug trafficking to intimidate them. Some of them may well be involved, just as those same types are involved in drug trafficking everywhere. It’s likely that Filipino banks are rolling in dough from money laundering.

But shooting down alleged small-time drug hustlers & more likely drug addicts in the street has nothing whatsoever to do with addressing drug trafficking in the Philippines or anywhere else–& Rodrigo Duterte knows that.

There’s another political agenda going on here having nothing to do with drug peddling but with terrorizing the Filipino people into compliance with the re-militarization & neoliberal transformation of the country which is impoverishing millions of working people.

Our fullest solidarity with the struggle of Filipino activists against this vigilante war.

(Photo by Francis R. Malasig/EPA)

Rodrigo Duterte was recently elected president of the Philippines on a law & order platform inciting police & vigilante violence & summary execution against drug dealers & addicts, rapists, murderers, & journalists. He congratulates police & vigilantes who execute drug users & offers them bounties to do so.

Drug use is a social & a health problem, not a crime, regardless of one’s moral judgement about it. What Duterte is doing is modeling the US war on drug policies that led to summary execution of hundreds of Black youth, the incarceration of thousands (often for life without parole), & martial law in the Black community.

Those involved in criminal drug trafficking have the right to due process even if the entire nexus of drug traffickers from transporters & processors to bankers laundering trillions of revenues escape investigation & prosecution. If they were prosecuted, entire national economies & banking systems would collapse, including in the US. So it is small-time hustlers who are mainly targeted.

Duterte is a thug, a hit man with what he thinks is an electoral mandate for mass murder. Since his election one month ago, over 800 suspected drug users have been executed with not just impunity but his encouragement. That’s about eight people a day. That’s a bloodbath. Reportedly 600,000 people have also surrendered to authorities in the past month. If there’s a single money launderer among them it would be a first in drug trafficking history.

You can detest drug trafficking & deplore drug use but in civilized, democratic societies drug peddlers have the right to due process & addicts to health services to address their problems, which certainly include detoxing, nutrition, housing, employment, & for the 1.5 million homeless children in the Philippines, counseling to deal with the grief & trauma of their lives.

Yesterday, Filipino students in universities throughout Manila held simultaneous candle light protests demanding the end of extrajudicial killings. Our deepest respect & fullest solidarity with them for standing up against the murderous regime of Rodrigo Duterte who should be charged with well over 800 murders & human rights crimes violations.

(Photo by Mark R. Cristino/EPA)