Don’t you just love that wild & crazy thing capitalism’s got going? That creativity that just bursts at the seams & makes this world so diverse & original? Me neither.

(Phone by Lee Jin-Man/AP)

People cannot be faulted for confusion about what the hell is going in the world when you look at the shabby half-assed quality of news reporting. Just a few years ago, the US & European Union (EU) were heralding the new democracy in Myanmar. In fact, neither gave a rat’s ass about democracy there since they were only after a favorable investment climate & repression serves that best in the era of neoliberal plunder.

So now when the Myanmar military attacks unarmed students & Buddhist monks protesting repressive education reforms the US & EU have to cover themselves with expressions of incredulity & by pretending they were out-foxed by the regime. But repression only bothers them when it exposes their complicity with the junta.

In September 2012, villagers & political activists protested the Latpadaung copper mine project–a joint venture between a Chinese mining company & a holding company fronting for the Myanmar military in a deal struck by the junta in 2010. Protestors cited examples of nearby mountains destroyed by copper mining & nearby farmlands polluted with waste products from the mines. They claimed the mining caused environmental, social & health problems & demanded it be shut down. They protested the land grabs involved of 8,000 acres (3,200 hectares) without consultation or compensation–& the destruction of schools, homes, monasteries.

In November 2012, the military junta disguised as a civilian regime, went after the protestors, attacking them with water cannons, tear gas, smoke grenades, & white phosphorous incendiary devices. Over 100 protestors were hospitalized with serious burns. An official government commission, headed by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, was set up to investigate the police brutality as well as the social & economic sustainability of the copper mine.

Suu Kyi argued that Myanmar should honor the deals with foreign companies because “If we unilaterally break off ongoing projects, we stand to lose international trust.” The commission ruled in favor of the mining project & avoided criticizing the government or calling for punishment & censure for riot cops involved in the violent attacks on protestors. When Suu Kyi went to meet with villagers & protestors to defend the commission findings she said, “I think we have to de-prioritize our emotions & needs when it comes to the greater good.” The hundreds of outraged & dispossessed farmers answered her with heckling. She should have been arrested & prosecuted too–not just for the banality of her defense but for colluding with the military against the interests of the farmers & people of Myanmar.

The US & EU want in on the plunder in Myanmar so what’s a little violence against protesters compared to the billions they can extract & the hopes of getting a competitive leg up on China? As part of their dog & pony show of concern, the EU is hand-wringing about the excessive force when it trained Myanmar riot cops in crowd control & the US embassy in tweeting up a storm advising “patience, compromise & restraint” on Myanmar’s path to democracy.

There are days when the stinking hypocrisy is just too much to handle. This shouldn’t be one of those days since we need to express our solidarity with the arrested students who may not see justice without our help. This is the contact information for the Myanmar embassy in Washington, DC: http://www.mewashingtondc.com/contact_us_En.php

(Photo of arrested Myanmar students in police vans by Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters)

It’s impossible to imagine how wrenching Israel’s Operation Ethnic Cleansing was/is for the people of Gaza who saw their loved ones bombed to death, buried in cement rubble, disfigured & disabled with shrapnel, & the thousands made homeless by carpet bombing.

This grieving woman sits in front of her house that, according to the media caption, “was destroyed by Israeli shelling during a 50-day war last summer.” This is where we see that media doesn’t always (just usually) lie outright but they will never tell the truth about Palestinians. We should acknowledge first what’s unusual about this caption which doesn’t equivocate with words like “according to witnesses” or “according to Palestinian officials,” as if there was any confusion by anyone in the world that Israeli bombs leveled Gaza.

It isn’t parsing & nitpicking to ask why “shelling”? Why don’t they call it exactly what it was–not an attack by pasta or peanut shells but by megaton bombs? And what’s this “war” crap? Don’t you have to have two armies both with bombers & tanks to have a war? Is barbarism & genocide like shooting fish in a barrel now considered war too?

There is no way we can compensate the people of Gaza for their losses & trauma. The over one million people who protested Israeli barbarism are the forces of international solidarity that can stand against the new monstrous incursions Israel is surely plotting. Our mission is to build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel & demand no aid of any kind to Israeli apartheid & genocide.

(Photo by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters)

Many people apparently don’t realize that if you support the moribund two-state solution in Palestine, i.e., the bantustate solution of the Oslo Accords, you thereby legitimize the racist, colonial ideology of Zionism & existence of a Jewish-only state. There’s no way that doesn’t make you a Zionist according to the definition even if you abhor the racism. It puts one in a politically untenable position because racism is the essence of Zionism. It’s another situation where you just can’t have it both ways.

Many take that contradictory position because they’re concerned about the fate of Jewish Israelis. The proposal for a democratic secular state where Jews live in harmony with Palestinians more than accounts for that concern. Israeli youth were born in Israel & it would be barbaric to simply deport them elsewhere. (Although deportation back home doesn’t seem unreasonable for recent settlers who are violent & psychotic supremacists & would be unable to live in harmony & equality with anyone.)

The proposal for a democratic secular state shows the political spirit & willingness of Palestinians to solve the problems created by Zionist colonialism rather than extract revenge for now 67 years of apartheid & barbaric violence.

Many also support the bantustate solution because they are reactionary & fundamentally racist, even those who think they’re socialists. The way you tell the difference between the misguided & the racist is the latter’s refusal to analyze or criticize Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing & their reduction of Palestinian resistance to terrorism. They fixate on Hamas–although they couldn’t tell you one damn thing about the politics or history of Hamas or any other group in the Palestinian struggle.

Too many people are convinced Jews & Palestinians could never live together. Those skeptics need to study Black Reconstruction in the US after the end of slavery along with the history following the US Civil Rights Movement to see the transformative power of justice. Things didn’t regress politically for Blacks because those struggles didn’t work but because of massive repression & violence used against them. A revolution will be required to sustain justice.

No one says a democratic secular state will be easy to achieve–it will take a revolution against Zionism & neoliberalism–but the alternative is continued apartheid & ethnic cleansing. That’s only acceptable to Zionists, whose ideology has proven a scourge to the human race.

For a democratic secular state in Palestine, build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel & demand no aid of any kind to Israel.

There is probably no more dreaded period of time in US politics than the two years of campaigning for president. The banality of Democrats can hardly keep pace with the burlesque of the Republican road show which I like to refer to as a traveling clown car. The capitalists have a crisis of leadership in this country & it’s on full sorry-assed display in campaigns.

We’re getting just a whiff of all that with this nonsense about Clinton’s emails. As the socialist candidate for president, I expected to lose by a landslide. But as the whole sorry spectacle unfolds things are looking up for me & I may have to prepare my acceptance speech.

The official narrative about the military dictatorship in Myanmar (formerly Burma) is that it took power in a 1962 coup & dissolved after the 2010 elections when a civilian government took over. We’ve seen that scenario play out in several countries, most notably in Latin America, but after the grotesque deceptions of the military in the Egyptian uprising we should question when & why the military just steps back from direct rule. Sometimes the ruling elite deems the stability of neoliberal capitalism better served by posturing a democratic face while the junta waits in the wings if & when outright barbarism would best serve.

To justify lucrative trade relations with Myanmar after the 2010 elections & the so-called restoration of democracy, the US & European regimes (EU) claimed the human rights record was improved & they pointed to the release of Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest in 2010. For her political defiance of the junta, Suu Kyi had received dozens of honors including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. For obvious reasons, the US & EU didn’t elaborate whether the junta had ceased use of child soldiers, slave labor, child labor, human trafficking, systematic use of sexual violence, torture, or allegations of genocide against the Rohingya Muslims.

Yesterday, hundreds of riot cops attacked students & Buddhist monks protesting a long-disputed education bill that muzzles academic freedom. The protesters had planned to march from Mandalay to Rangoon but were attacked by the cops about 90 miles from Rangoon. Protesters were beaten, dragged into trucks, & carted off to jail.

Officials from the European Union, which has been training Myanmar riot cops in crowd control, issued a statement condemning the violence & deeply regretting the use of force against peaceful protesters. Who the hell do they think they’re kidding!? Since when does the Myanmar military need lessons in crowd control when brute force has served them so well for nearly 20 years?

Suu Kyi is now an elected leading figure in the Myanmar government & wants to run for president. The military connived a constitutional provision preventing her from doing so. This provision should have the entire world scratching its head in bewilderment since no one has been a better servant of tyranny than Suu Kyi since she was released. She sits in the reviewing stands with the generals for military parades. But more significant, she traveled in 2012 to pick up that worthless Nobel Peace Prize while the regime was conducting a brutal ethnic cleansing & forced migration against Rohingya Muslims–& she never uttered a peep of protest.

The 800,000 Rohingya residents of Myanmar have been subject for decades to violent state-sponsored persecution & discrimination conducted by the military, including denial of citizenship (though they have lived in the region for decades), religious persecution, forced labor, land confiscations, arbitrary taxation & various forms of extortion, forced eviction & house destruction, restrictions on travel for health & work, restrictions on marriage, education, & trade. And Suu Kyi, the democracy icon heralded as “the Mandela of Asia,” has nothing to say about that!?

When queried by reporters about the persecution of Rohingya, Suu Kyi responded with platitudes urging people to all just get along & exhortations for the rule of law. Some excused her platitudes as diplomacy & political caution. That was in 2012 but by now her political reputation is irredeemably tarnished. She has refused to speak out against genocide, extrajudicial killings, sexual violence, arbitrary arrest & detention (including of journalists), land confiscation, child soldiers, forced labor, & internal displacement–all documented by human rights groups. Her silence is so deafening regarding the Rohingya & military crimes in the state of Kachin that 23 human rights groups signed an open letter of protest.

No one today would look to Suu Kyi to intervene on behalf of the students & monks assaulted & arrested yesterday. Nobody is puzzled anymore that she refuses to speak out against the violence & human rights crimes of the regime. What’s the point of all those prestigious honorifics or of getting elected to parliament if you have to clam up to get them? But justice is not who she answers to. Sitting in the reviewing stands with the generals & holding smooch-fests with H. Clinton, Obama, & Lagarde from the IMF tell us which side sister Suu Kyi is really on. And in the long-run, she will go down with that junta. Pity that. But it only takes one betrayal–silence on genocide–to go from heralded to heckled.

(Photo of student getting ganged up on by riot cops by Soe Zeya Tun/Reutes)

Syngenta is a Swiss agribusiness company (in competition with Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, & Dupont) that produces genetically-modified seeds, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, fungicides–the entire menu of toxic chemicals they lather on the global food supply. To further its economic interests, it lathers US political candidates & organizations with lobbying money–$1,150,000 in 2012. To promote its image in community service, it’s begun to sponsor an annual photography contest on the theme of “Scarcity-Waste” to address their claim that the world faces “increasingly limited resources.” That claim of course is used to justify population control/eugenics programs & explain away the massive unemployment & immigration rates. They just announced the 2015 winners.

Later this year, the 2015 winning photos will be touring, including in several cities in Brazil. Could that be a Syngenta gesture of “no hard feelings” for the 2007 shootout where their hired goon squad killed one protester & injured several other landless farmers of the Landless Workers’ Movement protesting land grabs?

Syngenta also has operations in the Philippines where agribusiness has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of farmers & driven them into urban slums. That must be why this photo is one of the 2015 finalists–another act of contrition to mask their crimes. The photo is of the slum surrounding Smokey Mountain dump site in Tondo, a district of Manila, Philippines.

Smokey Mountain was a landfill site since the 1950s & in forty years became a smoldering potpourri of toxicity & disease where unemployed scavenged for recyclables. In response to international notoriety, the Filipino government stopped delivering trucks of garbage there in 1995 & declared it closed but without providing alternative employment or housing to the 30,000 residents of the area.

Syngenta has lots of connections to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), a financial institution involved in establishing neoliberal agribusiness in the Philippines & elsewhere–& not just agribusiness but the entire panoply of neoliberal austerity & impoverishment of working people. The ADB boasts of the microenterprises their largesse has helped establish in Tondo, including cooperatives for masonry services, handicrafts, a commercial water-supply service, & an eco-laundromat. Those employed are now between 200 & 300. Maybe a couple hundred more–but what about the other 29,700 unemployed scavengers?

Without a public housing project, what the Filipino regime & neoliberal institutions established is essentially a refugee camp surrounded by garbage dumpsites–because though Smokey Mountain is closed they continue to dump landfill in the area. Residents call it Happy Land–a name ironically derived from what local dialects call smelly garbage: hapilan.

As part of neoliberal austerity, there are no health facilities in Happy Land where the tuberculosis rate is one of the highest in the world & when chemical vapors & rotting unmentionables from the landfill create massive respiratory, skin, intestinal, & other catastrophic health problems.

Happy Land has become one of the sites in the world attracting slum tourists–a phenomenon rooted in privilege, racism, & white supremacy. The accounts of some of those tourists speak of the “poor but happy,” of the delight at seeing a white visitor–or they pity-monger.

The militancy of many slum residents in the Philippines belies the accounts of the ADB, the public relations factory of the regime, the rancid accounts of slum voyeurs. We stand in solidarity with them & hope that soon working people in more privileged countries will get off their leaden asses & put an end to neoliberal plunder.

(Photo by Lasse Bak Mejlvang)

One of the central demands of women’s struggle against oppression has always been reproductive rights: access to safe birth control, abortion, and no forced sterilization. None of the demands against discrimination, including pay equity, have been realized but the greatest and often violent opposition has been to abortion rights. Many religious people object to the morality of abortion but their voices are not more compelling than those of millions of women around the world who seek to end an unwanted pregnancy by legal or illegal means.

Religious objections should not hold sway in modern countries with separation of church and state though religion is not the reason most countries control or outright deny women’s access to abortion. Control of women’s biology and the reduction of women to baby machines is the primary method of politically and economically controlling them. For governments, it is a matter of social engineering and never was an issue of morality.

The demand to end forced sterilization is a necessary part of abortion rights. Forced sterilization is a practice rooted in eugenics and the theory of overpopulation from the late 19th century. Going as far back as Thomas Malthus, overpopulation alarmism has always been rooted in European colonialism and racist hatred. The historic connections between racism, colonialism and eugenics are direct and in the early days, there were never even attempts to mask that association.

Forced sterilization was widely and legally practiced throughout the US in the 19th and most of the 20th century–directed at “undesirables,” those with disabillities, Blacks, Latinas, Native Americans. Much of the practice was forced sterilization, without the knowledge or consent of thousands of Black, Latina, & Indigenous women who would go into clinics for routine procedures and come out sterilized. These practices continue in the US and other countries. Today, Native American women have considerable on-going litigation over forced sterilizations; Israel acknowledges performing it on Ethiopian immigrants; 148 women prison inmates in California were sterilized without consent (between 2006-2010); it’s been rampant in China to enforce the one-child policy. For US population control programs in African countries and India most notably, eugenics and forced sterilization is the guiding principle because at the heart of eugenics is the most monstrous, stinking racism and white supremacy.

That is precisely why the women’s movement of the 1970s included “Abortion on demand; No forced sterilization” as a demand–precisely to draw a hard line between those who wanted birth control and abortion for racist purpose to deny reproductive choice and feminists who believed in women’s right to control their own bodies. Abortion is a practice that allows women that control; sterilization completely denies it which is why it is the preferred method of eugenicists.

The most frenetic periods of overpopulation and eugenics alarmism were at the turn of the 20th century in an era of great anti-colonial uprisings and massive migrations leading up to WWI. It was unashamedly promoted all over the world and directed in the US and elsewhere at immigrants, the working class, disabled, gay, Jewish, Black, Latino, or Indigenous peoples. It was always associated with the power elite and shilled as gospel in most elite universities.

Its decline in respectability began with WWII and the Nazi exterminations (which were eugenics applied to a European population rather than in the colonies) and in the post-colonial period after WWII. It is in the post-WWII period when eugenics theory was discredited that overpopulation began to be highlighted more and in a few decades became a frenzy. It is not coincidental that after the US Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and the women’s movement of the 1960s-70s eugenical theories reached a fever pitch because the entire thrust of those movements undermined white and male supremacy which are fundamental to capitalist social control. It can no longer operate without them.

In the post-WWII period, the driving force of population alarmism was massive nationalist and anti-colonial movements leading to decolonialization. Much of the frenzy was led by British and French colonial officials who feared a political backlash from the anti-colonial movements if they openly pushed population control programs. They certainly could no longer openly espouse eugenics. NGOs and private agencies like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations were always centrally involved in population control and eugenics but this is when their role as government proxies became indispensable and have remained so. Several colonial administrators transitioned to heading NGOs involved in eugenics and population control. One example is the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) founded in Bombay in 1952. Colville Deverell who administered several British colonies became the first Secretary-General of IPPF in 1964. The IPPF continues to be funded by governments, foundations, and the UN. Although Planned Parenthood in the US is historically associated with eugenics and has never repudiated it, feminism has made it difficult for them to openly pursue or acknowledge now.

The decline of the women’s movement began very rapidly with the legalization of abortion in January 1973. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Opposition to abortion became a central social issue for religious fundamentalists and the right-wing in the US. In the 42 years of legality, these political forces aligned with the Catholic hierarchy have conducted a relentless and well-financed onslaught to reverse abortion rights using hundreds of legislative initiatives, legal actions, often paramilitary violence and assassinations of abortion providers.

One of their targets was funding for the “family planning”/population control programs overseas and their efforts have been extremely successful in limiting abortion rights and access for millions of women. The few remaining women’s rights groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW) and NARAL Pro-Choice America have an electoral and lobbying political perspective and in over four decades of sustained assault have only used their authority three times to call massive protests in defense of abortion. Those marches in Washington, DC all drew nearly half a million people. The last one was in 2004.

Of course the right-wing onslaught against abortion dovetails with the perspectives of the ruling elite which has never been reconciled to abortion rights because it weakens their control over women. The ink wasn’t dry on the 1973 Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion in the US before the US instituted the first of many restrictions against funding abortion in the eugenics programs overseas. Sterilization, with or without consent, remains the primary method of “family planning” in the plundered countries because it disempowers women.

Under the ravages of modern capitalism, control of population is a way of managing the crises their policies create. They have no possible solutions to massive poverty, starvation, unemployment, homelessness, immigration–not if they want to continue plundering. So eugenics provides a barbaric safety valve by destroying the reproductive potential of millions of women.

Abortion rights in the US are a political shell game between the two parties of capitalism, with Democrats feigning support for women’s rights and Republicans playing tough moral guardians. If there’s any confusion on that score, a delegation to a 1994 UN population control conference in Cairo was led by then Democratic Vice President Al Gore who said, “The US does not seek to establish a new international right to abortion, and we do not believe that abortion should be encouraged as a method of family planning.” How does that differ from Ellen Sauerbrey, US Ambassador to the UN under George Bush, who said “There is no fundamental right to abortion”?

How that rancid ideology works out in population control programs and the role of NGOs and foundations as proxies (including the Ford, Rockefeller, Buffett, and Gates Foundations along with the World Bank) has just been exposed in the most gruesome way in India. But of course it is reproduced in countries around the world–from Kenya to Uganda to the Philippines to the US. In Bilaspur, a city in the Indian state of Chhattisgarh, thirteen women given tubectomies in a government-run sterilization camp died and 69 were hospitalized, twenty of them in critical condition. One doctor had operated on 83 women in six hours–about four minutes per woman. In the most predictable ways, the government went into overdrive. It arrested five doctors, including the surgeon. They found the drugs used were contaminated with rat poison & arrested the pharmaceutical manufacturer & his son.

They’re going to be scapegoating up a storm to distract from India’s criminal policies of population control. And not for the first time. Indira Gandhi’s notorious sterilization program in the 1970s sterilized over 8 million men, sometimes with compensation but mostly forced. India now has one of the highest rates of female sterilization in the world provided free by the government in sterilization camps to control population, i.e., eugenics. There are between four to five million women sterilized every year. Some media reports claim sterilization is popular for family planning because it’s free and “sidesteps cultural resistance to and problems with distribution of other types of contraception in rural areas.” Cultural resistance? Problems with distribution? You can peddle that baloney to a kindergartner but it’s just a slick way of blaming people for the policies of their government. Is it difficult to distribute birth control because primary healthcare is in such a sorry state? India reportedly has one of the world’s worst records on maternal healthcare (and that’s saying a mouthful) with high death rates for both mothers and infants at birth. Media reports don’t distinguish who the women are by caste but just as Gandhi’s forced sterilization program targeted Dalits, it is certain they are most affected now.

It isn’t that sterilization is popular with young women but that the government does not provide alternative birth control in order to compel sterilization without putting a gun to the women’s heads. Women who ask about birth control are told surgical sterilization is their only choice. It offers incentive fees of about US $10-20 which is about a week’s pay in a country where 180 million people live on less than $1.25 a day. The government offers those payments to the women, to the health workers recruiting them, to the doctors and sets sterilization quotas for each state. Sterilization is the cornerstone of India’s corrupt family planning system.

Now there’s something curious going on here because at the London Family Planning Conference in 2012 attended by all the big players in population control/eugenics, over US $4.6 billion was pledged to family planning programs and India was one of the target countries. In addition, the Gates Foundation targeted India directly and through Family Planning 2020 (where private donors invest in family planning) to the tune of millions of dollars. The Gates Foundation boasts of its collaboration with the Indian government in family planning. So are they involved in these sterilization camps? Is that where the incentive money comes from? But then why are there no family planning programs in India? Why isn’t birth control available? Why is prenatal care inadequate? Where the hell is all that money going? Because if you look at the conditions in the sterilization camps, you find instances like in West Bengal where 106 women were dumped in a nearby field for recovery from surgery. You find women dragged out of recovery and sent home contrary to sound medical practice; women given inferior, questionable medicines that kill. Or you find instances of squalid grimy health facilities where one surgeon works on 83 women in six hours. And you find thousands of cases every year of failed operations, complications, or death due to sterilization. So what exactly is the agenda here?

Once again, women must fight the historic battles against eugenicists in government and those in humanitarian disguise like the Gates and other foundations to take control of health care, of reproductive rights and services and wield them in the service of women and children. In the absence of a feminist response to these programs and in one of the ugliest of historic sarcasms, it is right-wing forces opposed to women’s reproductive freedoms who do the most investigative exposes of the population control/eugenics programs. And they do it not to advance women’s rights but to deny them.

Even those with religious objections to abortion cannot abstain from this struggle against eugenics and forced sterilization because it is not just the colonization of women’s bodies but of entire regions of the world. Women’s rights are human rights and that mantra is not diminished by the odious Hillary Clinton who repeats it while supporting eugenics programs in the US and around the world.

http://songsoptokkblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/mary-scully.html

This is an aerial shot of the thousands of civil rights activists who marched last Sunday across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the historic civil rights march in 1965 which was attacked by state troopers & deputized goon squads. The media caption called this protest a “symbolic walk.” Just like the power brokers try to turn International Women’s Day into a cultural love-fest of “stiletto runs” instead of social protest, they’re trying to turn the erupting civil rights movement into a symbolic stroll.

It was certainly symbolic on the part of Obama & the 100 politicians who led it off because they have all been mute for years in response to the police murders of hundreds & massive incarceration of thousands of Black kids for minor offenses. But thousands walked that bridge on Sunday as a declaration that the struggle against racist oppression is on again. Just like the hundreds of activists who jammed the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin after the March 6th police murder of Tony Robinson, a 19-year-old unarmed Black teen.

The original Selma march focused on the disenfranchisement of Blacks & led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965–which a 2013 Supreme Court ruling just gutted, leading to all sorts of state initiatives to deny Blacks & Latinos voting rights. You don’t have to have an ounce of respect for either of the two US capitalist parties to know that the denial of voting rights is an important political battle & an outrageous flouting of the Bill of Rights.

All throughout the US, but particularly in the South, there are monuments to the Confederacy & white supremacy. The historian James Loewen wrote a popular history, “Lies My Teacher Told Me” (1995) which exposes how Blacks, Latinos, & Native Americans are simply written out of US history in school textbooks. He also wrote a sequel, “Lies Across America” (1999) which describes those Confederate monuments, many built at the turn of the 20th century after the 1890 ruling establishing Jim Crow (US apartheid) in the South. It was the era of the lynch mobs where hundreds of Black men & women were hung.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge is not mentioned in his book but it is named after a supporter of slavery & Confederate general during the US Civil War (1861-65). Earlier he had served as a volunteer in the Mexican-American War (1847-49) which wrested most of the Western US from Mexico. After that war, he moved to California to participate in death squads against Native Americans. When he retired from his marauding & mayhem adventures, he became a Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan & a US Democratic Party senator. He died in 1907 (& not a moment too soon). May he rot in peace.

The bridge was constructed & named after him in 1940 when Jim Crow ruled the South by Alabama legislators who certainly knew what he was all about & were making it a monument to white supremacy. Commemoration marches of the 1965 march are held every year at the bridge & there is great historic irony that this monstrous tribute to racism & social hatred has become the venue for the struggle against it. Whether the bridge is ever renamed is for Black civil rights activists to decide. But we can all savor what the corpse of old Pettus would do if he knew history would exact revenge on his rancid legacy.

(Photo by Butch Dill/AP)

It’s not a good sign that Israel’s politicians are deranged & don’t try to hide it anymore. It’s the nature of Zionist ideology to produce whack jobs but after 67 years of ethnic cleansing with the full collusion of the US & most other world regimes, they think they can say & get away with anything. Is the fraying of that Exodus myth & the massive growth of BDS driving them over the edge or do they just not know that a new day has dawned?

This glassy-eyed guy is Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current Minister of Foreign Affairs. He’s a Soviet Jew from Moldova who moved to Israel in 1978 at the age of 20 & now lives in Nokdim, a settlement in the West Bank near Bethlehem built on Palestinian land. He has had a long career as a politician despite investigations for accepting bribes, corruption, & fishy business dealings. He also has anger management problems & assaulted a 12-year-old kid in Nokdim who allegedly hit his son.

He’s considered a polarizing figure in Israeli politics which he seems to take great pride in, saying “I’ve always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.” Some of those new ideas include bombing the Aswan Dam because Egypt once supported Yasser Arafat; executing Palestinian members of the Knesset as “terror collaborators”; drowning Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea “since that’s the lowest point in the world”; the execution of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails; a nuclear strike on Gaza; opposing any peace agreement with Palestinians “that will allow the return of even one Palestinian refugee to Israel.” So speaketh the schnook from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.

On Sunday, when he spoke at a conference on a college in Israel he said about Palestinian citizens of Israel: “Whoever is with us should get everything. Whoever is against us, there’s nothing else to do. We have to lift up an axe & remove his head, otherwise we won’t survive here.” The latest of his new ideas then is to behead Palestinians who oppose the Jewish-only state.

With politicians like this Israel doesn’t need enemies. He’s evidence for the moral, spiritual, & political dry-rot that is Zionist ideology.
Build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel. Demand no aid of any kind to Israel.

(Photo is deranged Lieberman over-medicated so he doesn’t keep beating on kids in his neighborhood)