Where were all the CIA & FBI agents denouncing the new imaginary McCarthyism when the old J. Edgar Hoover McCarthyism was still in force? Taking notes at an antiwar meeting?

A recent photo of Trump has appeared. He appears to be medicated. The deep state got to him pharmaceutically. They didn’t need a soft coup.

When the history of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, is written, it will require a special court to handle the posthumous indictments of the officials, corporations, armies, institutions that allowed the most monstrous crimes against human beings.

The contemptible but impeccably manicured Lawrence Summers, a former economist for the World Bank, president of Harvard, & official in the Clinton & Obama regimes, said this about the practice of US & European countries dumping millions of tons of toxic waste & putrid garbage in plundered countries:

“Just between you & me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the less-developed countries?…the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable & we should face up to that…I’ve always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.”

Because capitalist managers like Summers found the logic so impeccable, these mountains of landfills are all over the place in plundered countries & have become the only source of income for millions of dispossessed rural workers forced to move to urban slums. They earn a living picking through toxic metals & chemicals from old electronics, dirty diapers & stinking dog poop, decaying food full of maggots & bacteria in order to find recyclables to sell for a few bucks a day.

Families that live in slums near the dumpsites have astronomical skin & respiratory infection rates & high cancer rates but no access to medical care because part of scorched earth neoliberalism is privatized healthcare. We’re talking barbarism.

This photo is the garbage dump in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a country engaged in a neoliberal development binge. Hundreds of people lived in makeshift homes on the 50-year-old dump. On Saturday there was a landslide as the garbage shifted, burying at least 49 shelters, killing 65 so far, & with many still missing.

Neoliberal capitalism is a sociopathic system, an antisocial system that considers the poor a useless excrescence on the body politic. True to that derangement, the authorities did not provide skilled search & rescue operations, equipment, ambulances, grief counselors. Bereaved family members were left to scrounge through the garbage by hand & shovel to find their own beloved without safety equipment & using their mobile phones for light in night searches. They had to use plastic sheets to carry the bodies & survivors found because not even stretchers were provided by authorities. Families complained bitterly that the back hoe shown here was brought in for media cameras.

Contrary to the racism & stinking elitism of lowlife cement-heads like Lawrence Summers, poor working people are human too. One man wandered through the scene crying crying “My babies, my babies, my little daughter.” Neighbors explained that he had lost his wife & four children.

(Photo by Tiksa Negeri/Reuters)

Indian friends are grieving the loss of Rajini Krish, a 27-year-old Dalit scholar, who took his own life on March 10th. Suicide among Dalit scholars is a phenomenon in India as it is also among Indian farmers dispossessed by rural neoliberal economics.

Suicide is a social phenomenon, not a personal failing or weakness. It takes considerable psychic pain & grief to overcome the primal instinct for survival & it is common among the most oppressed.

Those who do not understand the character of suicide might find it useful to go to a FB page where his friends are paying tribute to him to understand why a young man who seemed to be rising above the limits of his caste would take his own life.

Anyone who has grown up feeling a sense of inferiority because of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, or physical stature can understand how a man considered an inferior & subordinate caste would be haunted by self-doubt & overcome by that under extreme stress–especially if one is looked down on while at the same time socially isolated. One person commented that Dalit graduate “students lack support systems which they can depend & fall back on. Rejection in upper caste social circles & neglect from Dalit faculty members & peers gives way to alienation. These structures might give a feeling of isolation to any person.”

It must always be said when someone takes their own life that we need judge them by their lives, not the nature of their death. It is not ours to judge or condemn but to understand. From his friends, we know Rajini was a fighter & that is not a contradiction to his death. Feeling the sting & indignity of inequality made him a fighter but it also made him deeply sensitive & perhaps more of a fighter for others than for himself.

Rajini’s life matters to us because he stood against caste & class inequality & because he was one of ours. Our sincere condolences to his family & friends. Hold him in your heart, respect that he knew best the limits of his endurance, & fight like hell against the monstrous system of caste & class that would take the life of a beautiful young man & shred it. May his troubled soul be at peace & may he return to the same lustrous star as Rohith Vemula–that star where all fighters against injustice go to rest in peace.

Rajini Krish’s last post on FB: “When Equality is Denied, Everything is Denied”

Tribute wall to Rajini Krish:

https://www.facebook.com/muthukrishanan.jeevanantham?pnref=story

“Pretty sure my vacuum cleaner hacked my email.”–Michael Bierly

“KellyAnn can be forgiven for thinking her microwave is a camera…she’s still suffering from PTSD after the Bowling Green Massacre” –Bob Lindsey

Yet another group that needs to be educated about the character of Israeli apartheid & the cultural boycott of Israel (BDS). It is a powerful weapon for an unarmed people against one of the mightiest military forces in the world.

Please like & share this page.

https://www.facebook.com/Radiohead-Dont-Play-for-Apartheid-Israel-264499483977673/?pnref=story

Australian rock group Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds are slated to play Tel Aviv on November 19 & 20th, 2017. The group has played Israel four times previously but not since Palestinian groups called for a cultural boycott in 2005 to protest Israeli apartheid.

In the education of Nick Cave about the character of Israeli apartheid we are not starting out from ground zero. He has in the past & more than once participated in activities to support Palestinians, including signing a letter in 2014 protesting the use of drone bombers in Gaza during Israel’s seven week carpet bombing offensive. Obviously our man’s understanding of apartheid & ethnic cleansing does not go deep enough.

On this page we will suggest all the social media & other places you can contact Nick Cage to discuss with him the imperatives of standing with Palestinians.

Please like & share this page:

https://www.facebook.com/Cultural.Boycott.Israel/

Has the imaginary deep state taken Trump down in that soft coup? He hasn’t been heard from in a while. Are the reptilian Illuminati in charge now? How will we know the difference?

Israeli kids in a Purim 2017 parade–one dressed as Elor Azaria, the IDF soldier who executed a wounded Palestinian at Purim 2016 in Hebron in the occupied West Bank.

The intent of such costumes is to indoctrinate children with racism, colonial supremacy, nationalism. An analog is the cowboy & Indian costumes & movies in the US, pre-civil rights movement. Children in Israel were encouraged to attend Purim celebrations dressed as Elor Azaria. There was a costume competition for the kid with the best likeness & a man offered to make 300 Azaria masks to hand out as prizes.

It is a very different thing for Kashmiri children to play armed militant against an occupying army because it expresses fear & a commitment to defending themselves against terrorism–though not the wisest way to do so. Israeli children are being inculcated with militarism, not self-defense; with racist aggression against unarmed Palestinians.

This will fully take its revenge on Israeli society which will turn children into hateful psychopathic killers looking for honor in extrajudicial execution of Palestinians. It’s unlikely a permanent military fortress was the vision & aspiration of Zionism in its origins but when it cast its fate with racism & colonialism hoping to strike a better bargain for persecuted Jews, this was the inevitable result.

The hope for Jews to end the hatred & persecution against them is to stand against racism & colonial supremacy which is why Jewish activists have always played prominent roles in the struggle against apartheid, colonialism & against Zionism.

The vision of a democratic secular state where Palestinians & Jews can live in harmony as brothers & sisters is the alternative to this militarized dystopia. Honor the economic boycott of Israel by buying nothing with barcode beginning 729 to advance that vision before Zionism has twisted any more generations of children.

(Photo by Lior Mizrahi / Getty Images)

Jews celebrated the festival of Purim yesterday. It’s a carnival-like, annual celebration of a story from Hebrew scripture where Jews of the Persian empire thwarted a plot to massacre them 2,500 years ago. Costumes, masks, parades accompany the more somber aspects of the ritual. Except in Hebron in the occupied West Bank, where Zionist settlers & right-wing provocateurs from Israel converge to booze it up & intimidate Palestinians. The reveler-provocateurs are fully protected by a beefed up deployment of Israeli soldiers.

During Purim 2016 in Hebron, Zionist settlers used loudspeakers at the Ibrahimi Mosque to sing racist songs calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from Hebron. There are 250,000 Palestinian residents in Hebron & less than 1,000 Israeli settlers. The mosque is an ancient religious site for Palestinians which Israelis are violently trying to reclaim as part of their phony biblical claim to Palestine, just as they do with the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

It was during Purim 2016 in Hebron that Israeli soldiers encountered two Palestinians: 21-year-old Ramzi Qasrawi & 21-year-old Abd Elfatah Ashareef. They shot & killed Ramzi & wounded Abd. The offense? Walking while Palestinian. Whilst Abd was lying motionless on the ground, Israeli soldier Elor Azaria walked up & shot him in the head. An Israeli military court just let Azaria walk for extrajudicial execution with a sentence of 18 months for manslaughter.

That ruling came down two weeks ago, just before Purim 2017, giving the right-wing plenty of time to organize this years provocation in Hebron. Authorities should have locked out the buses carrying right-wingers from Israel looking for trouble–even if they came dressed in clown suits. Instead, they allowed them to come, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, an extremist activist who came dressed as Elor Azaria. Loudspeakers at the parade praised Azaria as a national hero.

These photos from Purim 2017 in Hebron are worth a thousand lies. Palestinians must have been terrified for their children & for themselves. The most effective way to render solidarity against this aggression is to demand no US aid of any kind to Israel & to honor the boycott of Israeli products by buying nothing with a barcode beginning 729 & by encouraging others to do the same.

(Both photos by Baz Ratner/Reuters)