Images from last Saturday’s march in Yemen protesting the Saudi-led bombing campaign evoke memories of the Arab uprisings in 201l. Their importance & inspiration to suffering humanity around the world in the struggle for democracy & human rights cannot be overestimated.

Women played a leading role from Egypt to Bahrain to Yemen. While the US-NATO justified their wars as salvation armies for women from the tyrannies of Islam, women in veils were leading protests against violent military resistance from the regimes. And of course the youth were just as glorious & defiant.

Solidarity is one of the most powerful forces in the world. It is not an act of noblesse oblige but the iron law of social transformation. It can change the world.

Someone shared this extraordinary document in a post about Bobby Sands & the 1981 hunger strikers in Northern Ireland. It is a solidarity statement smuggled out of Israel’s Nafha prison from Palestinian political prisoners to the hunger strikers who were Irish political prisoners in Long Kesh prison near Belfast.

Lately I’ve been getting a ration of you-know-what for being intransigent, intolerant, over-scrupulous, negative, & without compassion. Criticism comes with the territory when you’re an opinionated woman so I’m not complaining. Though to be frank, it gets tedious. But if I fell apart every time someone got in my face, I’d be in an asylum by now.

Let me just say, the times do not call for sentimentality or playing footsies with harsh reality or for beating around the bush with euphemisms. If we’re going to figure out what the hell to do to end the terrible human suffering, we need to be ruthless in assessing & facing up to what is actually going on.

Wouldn’t we all love to be the bearer of good news, waking up every morning singing the Hallelujah chorus, but the world has more than enough doing the Panglossian thing.

It isn’t wallowing in negativity to be a social critic. It’s the way you learn, through discussion, how to work with others to make this world a suitable place to live.

https://www.facebook.com/electronicresistanceteam/videos/1144921772217292/?pnref=story

It has been my contention that the murderous Saudi-led, US & UK-backed carpet bombing of Yemen now going on for one year, is an attempt to crush every vestige of the glorious Yemen uprising that erupted in 2011.

This is a video of the protest yesterday in Sana’a, Yemen, which seems to dwarf anything we remember from 2011-2012. Our most heartfelt respect & solidarity with the people of Yemen.

Long live the Yemeni revolution against tyranny!

Deepest sympathies to the families & friends of those injured & killed in the bomb blast in a Lahore, Pakistan public park. It’s an insanely criminal act against men, women, & children.

I’m not one to swoon over the pope washing the feet of refugees. I grew up with a ritualized version of it & even as a child it seemed awkward to me. Now it just seems demeaning because in an inverse way it accepts inequality without challenging it. I don’t question the pope’s good intentions but that’s what the road to hell is paved with.

There’s a lot of elation about Sanders’ wins in Washington, Hawaii, & Alaska & photos of thousands attending his rally in Seattle, with lines a mile long waiting to get in to hear him. Impressive. He’s bungled so many questions–especially those involving racism–& still by comparison to Clinton he comes out smelling like a rose.

But why the illusions? Why do seasoned activists utter nonsense like ‘he might save Palestine’ when he defends Israel & a Jewish-only state with such vehemence? Why are some of Sanders’ supporters castigating Blacks who voted for Clinton & uttering crap like “What the black voter did to Sanders is unforgivable”? Why are people swooning over his campaign video featuring Hawaiian Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who blames Islamic theology for conflict in the Middle East & is a supporter of the BJP, Indian Prime Minister Modi’s right wing nationalist party?

Why the unwillingness of Sanders’ supporters to address the realities of his long tenure in office & instead make him an icon of principled politics when the congressional record is clear: he is massively compromised on all the big questions like war, US militarism, Israeli apartheid, undocumented immigrants/refugees, & the environment. In some circles, where the truth is spoken bluntly, he is called a blowhard.

His large following is not a testimony to idealism but to the triumph of credulity & burying your head in the sand as a political strategy. An examination of his record shows him to be hopelessly compromised & even outright corrupt.

Let’s take just one example: his co-sponsorship in 1998 of H.R.629, the Texas Low-level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Consent Act. It was an agreement between Texas (under the governorship of George Bush), Maine, & Vermont to ship radioactive nuclear waste from Main & Vermont (a state 95% white) to Sierra Blanca, Texas, a small city near El Paso & the Rio Grande River. Sierra Blanca was over 70% Mexican-American with the highest poverty levels in the country & without political representation. Then president Bill Clinton signed H.R. 629 into law despite years of public opposition to the nuclear dump site.

The Sierra Blanca site was owned by Harold Simmons, a tycoon powerful in Texas politics as a major donor to the GOP who made his fortune by hiring lobbyists & buying politicians. One Simmons company was responsible for the lead poisoning of an impoverished Black community in Cadillac Heights, Texas & for other toxic dump sites which cost US taxpayers $4.4 billion in Superfund monies.

This is what is called ‘environmental racism’–going on at the same time as Indian reservations were being bribed to become radioactive waste dumps. Sanders co-sponsored H.R. 629 with Texas congressman Joe Barton, a rightwing politician who continues to distinguish himself for idiocies & treacheries on environmental matters, including his assertion that wind is a finite resource & his support for the Keystone pipeline.

Sanders’ congressional speech supporting H.R. 629 typifies his ability to speak out of both sides of his ass. He first stated opposition to nuclear power & acknowledged the problem of radioactive waste. Then he argued for moving Vermont’s radioactive waste to Sierra Blanca, saying: “No reputable scientist or environmentalist believes that the geology of Vermont or Maine would be a good place for this waste.” Would any reputable politician not marinated in white supremacy then suggest it be dumped in Texas among poor brown people with limited access to healthcare?

In the end, it doesn’t matter if people support Sanders; what matters is the political method used to justify doing so. People who want to make this world suitable for human beings to live in ought to be ruthless with the truth & not accept false prophets & saviors.

(Photo by Mihajlo Maricic/Getty Images)

A bird pooped on Bernie Sanders. Isn’t that a good omen in Chinese folklore? I’ve had dozens of pet birds poop on me & I should warn Sanders that it doesn’t mean squat & won’t save his ass from his rotten politics.

The headlines are exuberant: “Rolling Stones make history with free concert in Cuba.” We’re told the concert was the result of months of diplomacy between the US & Cuba & that hundreds of thousands attended the free concert at a decrepit sports stadium.

Questions emerge which are not answered. Like why was the US government negotiating the terms of a rock & roll concert for the Rolling Stones who are British? And who paid for the free concert?

Maybe from the point of view of rock & roll this concert is cool. But from the point of view of politics, it’s a crying shame. In June 2014, the Rolling Stones contemptuously defied the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli apartheid & performed in Tel Aviv. Just one month later Israel launched the seven-week bombing siege over Gaza which directly targeted children.

The National Enquirer is now the go-to source for campaign news. But do I care if Cruz has five mistresses? Or that Trump’s misogyny has singlehandedly reduced the campaign for US president to a beauty contest between wives & the laughing stock of world opinion? No, I don’t. I’m more interested in how lesser evil voters are managing to explain all this farce.