According to a recent estimate, 41 million out of 325 million Americans live in poverty. That’s about 11-percent of the population & almost certainly a lowball estimate. The federal & state governments fudge & fiddle with numbers to determine eligibility for benefits for children, elderly, disabled, & the poor. In one instance several years ago, the government raised the IQ level for disability benefits & excluded thousands with learning disabilities who have limited access to employment. More often, they raise the income level to establish eligibility & exclude thousands.
Now Congress is withholding funding for poor children’s health insurance to make sure the tax bill for corporations & millionaires gets passed. They really have no idea how many children & elderly are going without food, how many are living on the streets, how many suffer & die from serious illnesses & infections because they could not afford health care. The worst part is they don’t give a damn.
Does anyone really care what China thinks about the US declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel while China is arming the Burmese military to exterminate the Rohingya people? With an economy based on sweatshops & a party to genocide, China has no cachet when it comes to human rights. In response to Trump’s provocation, China repeated its proposal for a Palestinian bantustate. Hardly avant-garde when the two-state thing is a stinking corpse reeking of deception & betrayal.
What China doesn’t talk about is its multi-million dollar contracts with Israel, including with universities & Israeli settlements in the West Bank, for high-tech & manufacturing technologies. In part, these contracts serve China’s economic needs & advance its political influence in the Middle East in competition with the US. In large part, these contracts counter the impact of the Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions (BDS) movement on the Israeli economy–& that is how China is making itself important to Israel.
Stand with Palestinians by honoring the economic boycott of Israel. Check every label on the products you buy to make certain the country of origin is not Israel.
Photo is Netanyahu being feted by Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijing in May 2013.
If you look up “Orientalist” in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of journalist Robert Fisk’s rear end which is where he speaks with pompous idiocy & gets paid handsomely for it. You know what it’s called when children do it at the dinner table but such unseemly toots have become our man’s journalistic stock-in-trade–especially in his contempt for the monumental, massive, fearless revolutions against dictatorship called the Arab Spring uprisings.
It was a natural progression for him to start tooting out apologetics supporting the Assad dictatorship. He fit right in with that crowd as an éminence grise of Islamophobia with disdain for Muslims, Arabs, & popular democracy. His sarcasms, often mistaken as insights, reached their heights when he told a Canadian interviewer that Muslim Arabs in the Middle East no longer believe in the nation-state; that nearly a million Syrian war refugees proved that by trying to forcibly cross the borders of Europe. With that, Fisk placed himself in the same league as that Slavoj Žižek guy. No deeper toots are heard in all of hell.
It may not always serve polemics, but I come from the political tradition of “kick ’em while they’re down” & try to take no prisoners. You don’t have to tell me it’s not a virtue. This is a piece I wrote in January 2017 on the death of Udo Ulfkotte, a perfectly detestable & corrupt German fascist who was eulogized by Assad supporters, including Eva Bartlett. I’m reposting it to show the scope of Assadist collaboration & political affinities with fascism.
To conform to standards of civil discourse, I changed the title but Google algorithms have not yet caught up with my uncustomary foray into diplomacy. Rest assured, it will be brief. Not that I’ve changed my characterization of Ulfkotte–not by a long shot. It’s just that “shithead” seems inadequate to describe this creep who developed the concept of “fecal jihad” waged by Muslims against other Europeans.
Assad supporters are braying like jackasses over the Guardian exposé of their scurrilous campaign to vilify the White Helmet rescue workers in Syria. They remind you of none so much as those troubled groupies who fall in love with incarcerated serial killers. For the longest while, they’ve been triumphal over all the bombing of civilians, choosing to call it “liberation from head-choppers.” Now, this exposé has them showing their true nature as something of a mesmerized cult around Assad & Putin.
The great tragedy of Syria is that supporters of the revolution against Assad’s dictatorship are so weak against such a confused & anti-intellectual cult who not only worship Putin & Assad; they worship militarism & glorify the Syrian army. What weakens the political forces who oppose Assad & support the revolution is that many support US military intervention under the misguided belief that US bombers & special forces will switch sides from their alliance with the counter-revolution & save the revolution. No one should oppose the revolution arming itself in self-defense. By any means necessary applies to revolution against dictatorship as it does to any struggle against oppression. But that’s a very different thing than calling on the US Pentagon, the epicenter of barbarism, to save the revolution–especially since the US played such a central role in defeating all of the Arab uprisings.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed with the massive suffering in the world because of war, occupation, & genocide & to become defeatist & misanthropic. Is it too late to turn the counter-revolution in Syria back & defeat it? Have the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Tunisia been decisively defeated? Is it all over but the crying? Those who have ever participated in massive struggle–from union strikes to antiwar mobilizations to social revolutions–never lose the vision of possibilities after they have witnessed the political power of united mass action in the cause of justice & freedom–even if they have been temporarily defeated. In that regard, Kashmiris & Palestinians stand as a model of how to stand ground against tyranny & that’s just one of the things that makes their struggles so important to all of humanity.
This photo is from the 1990s archives of the Indian occupation of Kashmir. It resonates with nothing quite so much as Abu Ghraib & the entire US occupation of Iraq. International solidarity is an imperative.
End the occupation. Self-determination for Kashmir.
The proposed tax bill in the US Congress is 1,100 pages long of legalese. A majority of Americans are opposed to it even though they haven’t read it because we know it’s a bonanza for corporations & millionaires. Most of the senators haven’t read it either but will pass it because they’re mostly millionaires.
Observe that the trade union movement in its inertial, collusive state has not done one damn thing to oppose this bill even though working people & the poor will get it in the jugular. The crisis of leadership in politics is profound & has nothing to do with the two corrupt political parties.
For the umpteenth time someone has suggested I stop writing about international politics & the war on Muslims to focus solely on injustice in the US. For the umpteenth time I will respond. My psychology & my political tradition are in accord that humanity is indissolubly one regardless of religion, culture, ethnicity, national borders. Our fate on this planet is indissolubly yoked by war & climate change, if by nothing else–if those 700 US military bases on foreign soil aren’t persuasive enough. The American political tradition expresses that imperative in “An injury to one is an injury to all.” The Islamic tradition expresses it in “To kill one human is as if one has killed the entire humanity” (which has become the slogan of the White Helmets). So my commitment stands on fairly solid ground & is shared by millions of people around the world who actively oppose war, occupation, genocide–most recently in Palestine & Burma.
In fact, I write plenty about US politics since I have been actively involved in them for going on 52 years. But in case my accusers haven’t noticed, women’s rights, civil rights, racism, poverty, class inequities are also inextricably related to what the US is doing overseas with its wars, occupations, sweatshop economics, & neoliberal plunder. I’m not going to stop writing in solidarity with freedom struggles around the world because you don’t understand those connections or don’t agree with my analyses. Let me speak frankly: if you don’t like what I write about, you can lump it. I’m not going to stick to reporting the local weather report just because you don’t get solidarity. I would never turn my back on the oppressed who are my brothers & sisters.
