When Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO) was sworn in as president of Mexico last December, he had a menu of populist promises to Mexican voters (human rights to environmental), all of which he is systematically & expeditiously trashing in his first few months in office. Mexico has long functioned as the southern flank of US anti-immigration policy, including with the aggressive use of federal police & paramilitary death squads, even though the Mexican parliament made it legal in 2010 for immigrants & refugees to travel across Mexico to the US border.
Now in violation of its own laws, the Mexican government under AMLO has escalated open violence against Central American refugees by attacking the caravan in the southern state of Chiapas. Federal police have been threatening the caravans since before AMLO was elected but he cannot claim to stand for human rights if he does not pull the police off the caravans & allow them safe passage. That is however the quid pro quo for the US giving $4.8 billion of public & private investment to Mexico. US media is reporting that Mexican citizens are turning against the refugees in contrast to the hospitality & assistance they have always proffered. Since so many Mexicans are forced by political repression & economic exigency into joining the exodus to the US, these reports are likely fabrications as part of a propaganda war against Central American refugees.
The US is threatening to veto a UN resolution against rape as a weapon of war because references to sexual & reproductive health services for women & girls imply support for abortion. The contentious phrase is the clause that urges “UN entities & donors to provide non-discriminatory & comprehensive health services, including sexual & reproductive health, psychosocial, legal & livelihood support & other multi-sectoral services for survivors of sexual violence, taking into account the specific needs of persons with disabilities.”
The appeal of Burmese reporters Wa Lone & Kyaw Soe Oo has been rejected by the Burmese Supreme Court & they are to remain in jail for the duration of their seven-year sentence for reporting on a massacre of ten Rohingya men. In an almost comical understatement, Reuters says the case “has raised questions about the country’s transition to democracy.” The transition to democracy in Burma was always a fiction maintained so the gold rush of foreign investments in the neoliberal economy would not again become subject to sanctions as they were after the military crushed the 1988 uprising. Every aspect of the Burmese capitalist economy is controlled by the military. To overcome economic stagnation, the generals allow neoliberal investment policies but still maintain control of the economy lock, stock, & barrel. Most foreign investments are joint venture projects with the military. A sham transition to democracy was part of that process with Aung San Suu Kyi playing a role as champion of democracy while colluding with the generals.
A contingent of disabled activists marching in the Sudanese revolution. Those with disabilities no longer accept social isolation & exclusion but have participated fully in the European anti-austerity protests & in every Arab Spring uprising.
This is a beautiful essay by Kashmiri writer Majid Maqbool addressing aspiring young Kashmiri writers but his appeal for steadfast honesty in writing is universal. If I were to advise young writers (or speakers), I too would place steadfast honesty as most important along with a refusal to bend to flattery or blandishments. Too many lose their way & become dull by learning to sing for their supper.
Kashmir, which almost never appears in photojournalism–even during the uprising & pellet gun onslaught in 2016-17– is a frequent subject these days during India’s prolonged election procedures. (They began on April 11th, will be conducted in seven phases, & the results will be announced on May 23rd.) Most of the photos show long lines at polling stations when in fact Jammu & Kashmir have the worst voter turnout percentages of any state in India. In Srinagar, the percentage has been close to ten-percent of eligible voters since 1999 & those are probably government officials & their flunkeys. The low turnout is interpreted as a complete rejection of India, not just the occupation.
This is one of the photos which shows the voter queue at a polling station in Mujgund on the outskirts of Srinagar.
A young man in Gaza, undaunted by tear gas fired by Israeli soldiers, carries the Palestinian flag at a protest in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli military jails.
The US Department of Health & Human Services & US Justice Department received over 5,800 complaints of sexual abuse of unaccompanied children refugees being held in US detention centers between 2014 & 2018. The documentation, released in February of this year, came not from either government department but from Congressman Ted Deutch of Florida who said the documents “detail an environment of systemic sexual assaults by staff on unaccompanied children.” The allegations include children forcibly strapped to chairs, subjected to pornographic videos, molested, raped, denied medical care. There are nearly 16,000 refugee children held in US concentration camps, all of them living in inhumane conditions with over one-third of them subjected to sexual assault.
These conditions will not end until the immigration rights movement severs all financial relationships & political commitments to the Democratic Party & organizes an independent movement to demand ‘open the damn borders’, ‘no concentration camps’.
This unaccompanied nine-year-old girl from Guatemala is in the back of a US Border Patrol vehicle waiting to be incarcerated for crossing the border into New Mexico (in June 2018). Her fate is very scary indeed.
In November 2018, Save the Children (the NGO which in 2014 gave a “global legacy award” to war criminal Tony Blair) estimated that 85,000 children under the age of five have starved to death “over the last three years” as a result of Yemen’s civil war. UN estimates of acute malnutrition among small children are considerably higher at 1.3 million children & 14 million people overall. There certainly is a catastrophic civil war in Yemen but does Save the Children not consider the now four years (since March 2015) of Saudi-coalition carpet bombing an even more compelling reason for mass starvation as well as thousands of other deaths? Is it because the UK & US are involved up to their eyeballs in that bombing?
The international antiwar movement is so busy defending Syrian & Russian bombing in Syria that it hasn’t been able to mobilize antiwar opposition to the carnage in Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, or even Syria.
You have to be an unthinking fool to come of age hating on or looking down on others because of gender, ethnicity, religion, or class & yet so many do & we’re supposed to see the reason in it when in large part it’s profoundly stupid, in every way supremacist, & leads to pogroms, massacres, genocides, & wars. Let me add that you have to be a complete pinhead if you think I will let you express such idiocies on my wall. It’s hasta la vista baby & another one bites the dust! You can’t reason with stupid nor supremacist. Political power is the only thing either understands.
(Prompted by another guy who tried to post crap against Jews on my wall.)
