The recent allegations from organizers of the 1st Israeli Feis, a traditional Irish dance troupe, against the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) are something that need to be taken very seriously. They cancelled their performances in Israel claiming IPSC activists threatened to kill everyone participating in the event by shooting them in the head.

The growth of BDS & Palestinian solidarity around the world is an alarming development not just to Israel but to neoliberal plans for the entire Middle East. Zionist forces are mobilizing to counter BDS in a many-pronged assault. Big money & big political forces are involved. The Israeli law firm, Shurat HaDin, is planning a legal offensive against BDS activists & organizations to tie up resources & activists; campus anti-BDS groups are being organized & bankrolled with big money; state legislatures are formulating anti-BDS bills; politicians & candidates like Obama & Hillary Clinton are publicly committing to oppose BDS; Bono & other celebrity shills for neoliberalism are staging extravaganza tributes to the likes of Shimon Peres, the former president of Israel during Operation Ethnic Cleansing; & the Irish dance ensemble are fabricating accusations, for which they haven’t a shred of evidence, to discredit BDS campaigns.

If in fact the Irish dancers were threatened as they claim, they ought to prosecute. No one should be subject to death threats for dancing the Irish jig in Israel or for anything else. But for criminal prosecution, evidence is required. And that doesn’t exist because it never happened–unless Mossad operatives impersonated IPSC activists, which is a possibility. But it’s enough to discredit BDS by circulating slanderous accusations–accusations which have the hand of the Israeli Embassy in Ireland written all over them.

This is the time to review or google COINTELPRO, the FBI program used for decades to spy on & cause dissension in political movements in the US. There’s no trick too loathsome, too lowdown for police agents to use to discredit & destroy social justice movements. These police programs exist in every country. The only reason we know about COINTELPRO is because activists went after them in the courts & at a weak moment in judiciary history, the FBI was exposed.

BDS is touching a central nerve in Israeli apartheid & in neoliberal control of the planet. Of course it will set off a furious offensive. When these accusations are made, they must be exposed for the horse manure they are against Palestinian solidarity.

This photo is Palestinians in the occupied West Bank fleeing Israeli tear gas & asking 1st Israeli Feis to do the right thing. There’s no hint of a threat to the dancers nor did IPSC activists issue ultimatums. Asking insistently on a FB wall or in a picket line is not a threat; it’s called democracy.

The only worthy political response to this barrage is to build the hell out of the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel & continue to defend Palestinian justice.

(Photo by Hamza Burnat)

International observers of US electoral politics can be forgiven for thinking Republican (GOP) candidates are just there for comedic relief since they provide no end of banal idiocies & hopelessly stupid remarks. They don’t come dumber. Just when you think Donald Trump takes the cake, Mike Huckabee pipes in, or Bobby Jindal–& all hell breaks lose in idiocy.

In fact, the Republicans play a central role in politics. Just as the Democrat’s purpose is to manage & control dissent from the left, the GOP’s is to manage crazies & reactionary ideologues on the right. Those who espouse ideas of the Confederacy, misogyny & mangled views on female anatomy, anti-immigration xenophobia represent big money forces in US politics who want white & male supremacy & social hatreds of all kinds written into the already dead-ass Constitution. The GOP provides a window into the gestalt of US rule.

It’s not that the Democratic Party represents the progressive wing of oligarchy; there is no such thing in the era of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. The DP is there solely to manage dissent from liberals & the left.

Fast-food joints are not much more than sweatshops. In terms of puny little wages, lack of benefits, & rights on the job, they’re indistinguishable. Workers are most often treated like serfs. In some places they’re expected to come in on time off for meetings without pay; they’re often promised raises & promotions that never materialize.

It’s no coincidence that most employees are young or senior, female, Black, brown, & immigrant. It is a thunderous rebuke to the US labor movement (now divided into two federations) that it didn’t long-ago organize these workers. But it’s just so damn busy sucking up to politicians & in internecine turf wars.

This is a group of fast-food workers from Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen in Kansas City, Missouri: from left, Francie Marion, Sophia Steele, Marcus Washington, Marie Fry, Ronny Reed, & Robin Rhodes (kneeling). They are protesting (about a month ago) with hundreds of other fast-food workers outside the annual general meeting of McDonald’s in Oak Brook, Illinois. They were demanding an hourly wage increase to $15 across the US.

These young people are the faces of labor rebirth in the US which for decades has been led by pompous barrel-chested blowhards who reduced organized labor from over 30% in 1964 to less than 10% today because they’re unwilling to organize & unable to stand their ground against aggressive management policies.

Our fullest solidarity with these young workers. May they kick ass!

(Photo by Sarah Gilbert)

Yesterday marked the 2014 beginning of Israel’s 51-day Operation Ethnic Cleansing (Protective Edge) in Gaza. Social media & photojournalism exposed the truth of Israeli barbarism for all the world to see: schools, mosques, hospitals, refugee centers, entire neighborhoods were bombed to smithereens. There are those, including erstwhile leftists, who shook their heads & said “Why did Hamas make Israel do that?” (Some cement-heads aren’t worth a grimace but we never cease efforts to persuade.)

This little guy is walking in the rubble that still exists in Gaza because Israel maintains the blockade & won’t allow removal of rubble or reconstruction. We can ask what happened to all the millions promised in international reconstruction aid but the Haitians, Afghans, & Iraqis are best able to answer that question: it ain’t happening–even without the machinations between Israel, the Palestinian Authority, & the UN.

Since photographic documentation doesn’t hold much water for cement-heads, maybe the authority of Mego Terzian, the president of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), can cause some cracks. MSF operates in Gaza. Dr. Terzian issued a statement in August 2014 at the cessation of Israeli carpet bombing where he didn’t mince words: he said Israel left a “wasteland” behind & he called for ending the genocidal blockade.

Today, he issued another statement denouncing Israel. He said there were over 10,000 wounded Palestinians, including 7,000 women & children. One year later, “the majority of our patients who need surgical care or physical therapy for the wounds of war are under 18 years old.” According to the UN, there are “hundreds of thousands” of Gazans who need medical care & psychological support. But, Dr. Terzian pointed out, 70 health facilities were partially or totally destroyed by Israeli bombing under the guise of taking out Hamas rocket nests. He didn’t mention the ambulances that were also bombed.

MSF denounced “the unacceptable normality of decades of Israeli occupation marked by massacres” both in Gaza & in the West Bank: “The rhetoric of Israel on its right to defend itself is an excuse to always up the bloodiest offensive & a colonial policy that stifles the Palestinians & deprives them of a future.”

Israel got a bunch of generals & law professors (speaking of cement-heads) to testify that they were a model of humanitarian carpet bombing. Shouldn’t the doctors & medical personnel who treated the injured in Gaza carry more weight? Shouldn’t the people of Gaza be allowed to testify?

Build the economic, cultural, & academic boycott of Israel. Let the cement-heads stand with Israel & the US Pentagon.

(Photo by Said Khatib/AFP/Getty Images)

For those who get nerve pain from computer work I have a tip that works like a charm & almost without fail. It’s from a Texas doctor who worked with factory workers suffering repetitive motion & carpal tunnel problems. I discovered & used it when I had repetitive motion disability in both arms from my job. I couldn’t work & couldn’t get disability so I needed to find a cure. This remedy resolved the problem in 3 weeks & it’s done the same for the many coworkers I suggested it to.

Get a high-quality B-Complex 100 & take it twice a day until the pain goes away. Then you can cut back. Don’t get a lower dose because it doesn’t work as well or as fast.

And don’t report me to the FDA for practicing medicine without a license.

Frederick Douglass has to be one of the most outstanding & inspiring figures in US history. An escaped slave who became a leader of the abolitionist movement, writer & orator, he was committed to Black, women’s, Native American, & immigrant rights. He said “I would unite with anybody to do right & with nobody to do wrong.”

FB friends from Ireland & Britain might be interested to know he traveled & lectured there for a couple years, including during the Irish “potato famine” (considered genocide by many), & collaborated with abolitionists & freedom fighters in both countries.

In the 1872 elections, he ran as vice president with presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull for the People’s (Equal Rights) Party. He’s one of those the young can learn the most from theoretically & in movement building. Alice Bach & I might consider dedicating our campaign to the memory of this remarkable man’s contributions. We follow, with great respect, in his footsteps fighting for the same things. We honor him as a teacher.

(Photo is Frederick Douglass)

If there’s one sure thing in politics, it is that as people become more conservative (not necessarily related to aging), they begin to retreat from concern about international problems. They may still do rah-rah for union or community stuff but they pay no heed anymore to war or Palestine or immigration. Sometimes their minds even play tricks so they can pretend there is no antiwar movement.

That conservative, provincial syndrome gets played out big time in US electoral politics. The prophets of lesser-evilism, who come out of the woodwork during campaigns, ask us to put aside solidarity–the very bedrock of social transformation–& accept Bernie Sanders’ rhetoric like it was good coin & not counterfeit populism. Well that’s just one of those accommodations that can’t be made. Solidarity with the people of Palestine & elsewhere is not some cheap, feel-good sentimentality. It isn’t something we can drop during elections because it’s in the way & then pick up again when the damn things are over. And that is exactly what we’re being asked to do by Bernie Sanders supporters.

Many people in this country are shackled by an inability to see others as our brothers & sisters. But the great freedom fighters of human history weren’t talking through their hats when they said solidarity was the sine qua non, the absolute imperative of social transformation. So no thank you to Bernie Sanders; we’re sticking with solidarity because that’s the way forward for all of us.

There are so many contradictions to the neoliberal system, so many complexities, so let’s leave all the heavy-duty matters to those who like statistical analyses & flow charts & to those who’ve read Das Kapital & lived to tell the tale. Let’s just take on the ones we understand, the ones that hit us right in the kisser & take our breath away. Like why aren’t Greek’s over 300 millionaires & billionaires being asked to step in & save the economy? Why are they going after the pensioners who don’t have a pot to piss in?

Let’s just take a look at the economics of life in the realms where working people dwell. A one-bedroom apartment rents from €255 to €288 (US $280 to $307) a month; utilities are €150 ($165) a month & a monthly bus pass goes for €30. So now without food & toilet paper, we’re over €400 a month climbing toward €500. But 45% of pensioners receive below the poverty limit of €665 ($730) a month. Sixty-percent of pensioners are living high at under €800 ($880) a month. That means if they split the dog food with their pet & water down their tea they can afford a chocolate bar once in a while.

One media source did an analysis of the Greek pension system. He concluded the system is a mess, full of corruption & theft. There were bogus claims, early retirements, loopholes, inefficiencies, bureaucracy, tax evasion. No one ever said capitalism was good at organization–especially for social services. But that’s a Mickey Mouse analysis, an evasion from admitting that neoliberal capitalism is in crisis. That’s the heart of the problem, not organizational chaos. The system isn’t working & they won’t try to repair it by clipping private profiteering or even by a modest reform like taxing the super-rich.

Is it too abstract a question to ask if there might be a relationship between the increasing impoverishment of retirees, increasing homelessness, & the growing number of millionaires & billionaires? Cause it sure as hell looks like one of those causation things.
Greek’s pension system does need reform. No question about that. The first reform is that those pension payments need to be at least doubled, accompanied by rent & transportation subsidies. Too expensive the neoliberal economists say, too extravagant? Nothing’s too good for working people who fought fascism in WWII, had to live through military dictatorship, raised their kids & cared for their elderly on a shoestring.

The Troika wants young Greeks to believe this fellow & other seniors are responsible for the financial crisis in Greece & that it has to be solved on their backs. It’s that old divide & conquer trick of turning on the vulnerable–a trick that’s only grown more putrid with age. The Greek chorus of resounding “No” was another way of saying “an injury to one is an injury to all,” which is the iron law of social transformation.

Our fullest solidarity with Greek seniors.

(Photo by Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)

When I did what they call non-traditional work in a formerly all-male factory (starting in the 1970s) it was a difficult adjustment because the environment was so male & so conservative politically. It turned out to be one of the most difficult–not to say wrenching–& enriching experiences of my life.

There were coworkers who stand out to me (some now FB friends) for helping me through all that–especially the WWII crowd who didn’t like women in “men’s work” but who hated unfair treatment of anyone & would often coach me how to handle things with management & coworkers. Among that group were several Greek immigrants. Talking with them felt like that invasion of the body snatchers thing. We recognized in each other that sense of class, of militance, of defiance that many around us did not share, at least with a woman. It wasn’t a sense of being plebeians but of refusing such a humbling designation.

They eventually all retired to move back to Greece but even after I had moved to work in other parts of the plant, they invited me to their retirement parties. I always think of them & now I wonder if they’re queuing up at ATM machines like other seniors or if they’re marching against the Troika. It’s my own little connection to Greek history.

Bernie Sanders, the exemplar of populist rhetoric, was asked what his administration cabinet would look like. He suggested conventional political thinkers & hacks like Joseph Stiglitz & Robert Reich. But his most telling choice was Paul Krugman, the NY Times columnist who blithers about tax cuts for the rich & the dangers of income inequality & is at the same time an enthusiastic proponent of sweatshops. For nearly two decades now he’s written near-odes to cheap labor. But “Krugman does a great job,” according to Sanders. Sweatshop workers might disagree.