I’m taken aback by the number of committed Palestinian supporters promoting Bernie Sanders . It’s tough to come to grips with but you can’t have it both ways in politics. You can’t do lesser-evil if it means supporting a candidate who will maintain the status quo of support for Israeli apartheid & ethnic cleansing. At some point political principles have to prevail over an expedience that gets you nowhere.

If you don’t know what to do with a wasted vote for Sanders or Clinton, use the political energy to build BDS & the antiwar movement.

Many may think we should engage in discussions with the anti-immigration crowd & other right-wingers who come to my wall, usually over issues of racism & immigration. But one of the arts of politics is knowing when to save your breath.

You can’t reason people out of deeply held prejudices & idiocies; you can’t talk them down from racism & hate. I tried to do that for years until I understood reason was insufficient. The haters just use those go-arounds to hone their epithetical skills & you work your adrenalin into a lather for nothing.

Racism is profoundly irrational, taking human consciousness to a place akin to hell where hatred & fear create a cesspool of venom. It’s scary stuff & leads to monstrous crimes. Before the US civil rights movement in the 1960s, it was embedded in the culture. It still is, but is more discreetly expressed, even if less venomous.

Often, on Zionist walls on Facebook, you can see that same kind of stuff we know so well from KKK rantings. It makes you feel ashamed, as if you came acrosssomeone in the act of violence.

The news about refugees becomes more gruesome by the day. These are refugees waiting at Canakkale, Turkey for a raft to Lesbos, Greece. The UN count of January arrivals in Greece is 50,668 to date. Media reported yesterday that 25, including 10 children, had drowned when their raft capsized. Just this month alone, 236 have drowned. Some were reported burning their life vests in a bonfire to keep warm.

EU officials are pressuring Greece to do more to stop the movement of refugees. The Greek coast guard was already spotted disabling rafts in mid-sea. Is that the kind of proactive refugee policy being demanded? Or does the EU want the Greek military to just shoot them as they come ashore?

EU officials are also in Turkey trying to get the regime to honor the agreement they hammered out in November to stop the movement of refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, & elsewhere. In return for 3 billion euros (USD$3.2 billion), visa-free travel for Turks within Europe, & renewed talks about Turkey entering the EU, Turkey was supposed to have tighter, more militarized border controls & naval patrols. There were news reports of Turkish coast guard boats disabling refugee rafts mid-sea. But apparently the EU hasn’t come up with the dough they promised so Turkey is not in full compliance with the agreement. The EU is looking more like a mafia operation than a governmental contraption.

Tuesday, the Danish parliament, following the lead of Switzerland, approved a law allowing refugees to be searched on arrival in the country & their cash & belongings confiscated if they have value over 10,000 kroner (£1,000) (USD$1,449) & ‘have no sentimental value to their owner.’ Who decides what has sentimental value? The justification for the Nazi tactics is to reimburse the government for the expense of processing refugees.

For decades, Scandinavian countries have managed to elude criticism despite deep involvement in military manufacturing & now in military operations in Syria & Iraq. Sweden had an international reputation for respecting human rights & accepting asylum seekers, including US conscientious objectors of the draft during the Vietnam War. But that’s about to change. Last week, Norway began deporting refugees to Russia through the Arctic. Finland is going to deport 20,000 of the 32,000 refugees it accepted in 2015 & Sweden announced it will reject the asylum applications & deport 80,000 of the 160,000 it accepted last year. The question is, where will they deport them to? Back to the war zones they came from?

The US, which is leading the military carnage in Syria & Iraq, has accepted less than 3,000 Syrian refugees since 2012. And there’s an even bigger problem that is not noted. Of the hundreds of thousands of refugees, the majority are Syrian. But there are hundreds of thousands of refugees who are Afghan, Pakistani, Palestinians from refugee camps in Syria (denied entrance to Jordan), from several African countries (where the US is involved militarily & economically), & others. What about them? Have any of them been given asylum?

The refugee crises all over this planet highlight the growing barbarism of neoliberalism which has no respect for national boundaries or sovereignty when it comes to plunder & war but then puts up the barricades when it comes to human rights. For working people, that doesn’t work.

It is more imperative than ever to rebuild the international antiwar movement & to demand that refugees from war & poverty be given every respect & right due under international law & every measure of human civilization. Open the damn borders, stop stealing from refugees, & end the deportations!

(Photo by Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images)

Nothing will ever make us long for the ‘good old days’ of war correspondence with Lara Logan, the embedded & Islamophobic CBS reporter who acted like a cheerleader for US wars or with Richard Engels, the sycophantic NBC war correspondent. There was no distinction between their reports & press releases from the Pentagon. Does either network even have a correspondent covering any of the many wars now? Because there is almost no real news.

This photo is an example of war correspondence in the era of news blackouts & barbarism. The caption reads: “Herat, Afghanistan–A man walks with his cow at sunset.” Golly it’s bucolic. But what about those US bombers?

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau made quite a display of greeting Syrian refugees at the airport last month. Good for him, but under international law he has an obligation to do so, even if other countries flout that obligation. Has international law become so degraded now that it’s a feather in their cap when some political figure actually complies with them?

In October 2014, former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper deployed troops, including special forces, & six fighter jets as part of the US-led bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria & Iraq. In October 2015, Trudeau, fulfilling a campaign promise that got him elected, announced he would withdraw the warplanes but did not set a date for the withdrawal. The planes are scheduled for deployment until March 2016. Apparently the planes are still there on bombing missions. How long does it take to pull them out? Presumably no longer than the eleven hours it takes to fly from Damascus to Ottawa. So why are they still there? Do we have another case like Obama of Mr. Hope & Change not delivering on his promises?

Facebook has apparently tired of asking me to write a bio without any response & is now asking me to “Describe Who You Are.” The existential question: who am I? How the hell do I know!? I’m not that deep that I actually want to answer that.

But let me give FB an answer so they’ll leave me alone. Those who I block think I’m intolerant; most others just wish I had fewer opinions. Me? I’m grateful to FB for introducing me to so many lovely people all over the world.

Now enough with the introspection.

Chelsea Handler tries to compensate for her banal comedic talents by grandstanding–like sitting on a camel topless except for Star of David pasties while on a visit to Israel.

Handler visited Israel in January 2015 ‘to explore her Jewish roots” for a personal documentary & referred to Israel as her “homeland.” While there, she did the obligatory photo op with Shimon Peres. There’s a problem with that narrative. Handler was raised in Livingston, New Jersey & has zilch relationship to Israel. Her American father was Jewish & her German-born mother was the daughter of a Nazi. How does that make Israel her homeland? Does she identify with storm troopers?

There’s some economic news coming out of the World Bank (WB) that many may have missed.  As of October 2015, the World Bank raised the new global poverty line from USD$1.25 a day to $1.90 a day.

The increase is the World Bank’s version of a cost-of-living adjustment except that they say the $1.90 was set using 2011 prices. Why not 2015 prices? Or those of 1892? Originally, starting in 1990, the World Bank had set the poverty line at USD$1.00 a day & increased it to $1.25 in 2008. The problem of course is that it doesn’t make a lick of sense by any measure of economic well-being. In any country in the world, you could earn double or triple the official poverty line & you would still be living in miserable conditions.

In their FAQ sheet on the increase, the WB said over 900 million people globally lived in extreme poverty under the poverty line in 2012 & projected that would decrease to 700 million by 2015. What the hell does that mean? What do you do with that kind of information?

This idiotic measure of poverty has nothing to do with quality of life for poor working people & everything to do with the World Bank’s political manipulations of poverty. The WB exists & works in collusion with the IMF to enrich & promote neoliberal multinational mining & agribusiness enterprises expropriating millions of farmers & agricultural workers. It imposes austerity conditions on countries that ravage social services like health care, education, social services for elderly, infirm, & disabled, makes millions homeless, & creates massive child labor. The WB is a key operator in the impoverishment of millions of people on every continent & doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what happens to them. African refugees can give volumes of testimony on that score. Witness Greece, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, India, Myanmar, a good share of Latin America, & all of Central America.

In contrast, Jim Yong Kim, the current WB president earns $848,542 a year in salary ($476,360) & benefits ($372,182). Economists at the WB earn $124,000 a year; consultants earn $45 an hour, interns $23 an hour. This is the “let them eat cake” mentality writ larger than grotesque. Are analysts in the top strata of earners in the entire world really suitable to the task or capable of understanding grinding poverty? Can they possibly give a damn except with some twisted sense of pity or noblesse oblige? Who in their right minds can consider $1.90 ($64.60 a month) the poverty line when it’s not even close to what is required in any country to live a worthy life?

This little guy is 7-year-old Czoton, a worker in a balloon factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He’s one of those living under the official poverty line. Balloon workers earn between $10 to $25 a month. The imaginary poverty line doesn’t mean squat to him or his fellow workers. And it doesn’t to anyone without the political purpose of justifying poverty.

(Photo of Czoton is from 2009; photographer unidentified)

As a postscript: It’s of considerable interest that our man Kim, who is a medical doctor, was a cofounder of Partners in Health (PIH) with Dr. Paul Farmer–because it’s not irrelevant to how the ruling elite manage poverty, it should be noted that Farmer has created quite a humanitarian PR image of himself & the work of PIH which many Haitian & human rights activists challenge.

In 2009, he was named UN Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti serving under Bill Clinton as UN Special Envoy. That would explain why the good doctor with a heart reeking of compassion never made a peep when the UN rejected compensation claims from victims of the cholera epidemic brought to Haiti by UN occupying troops. It doesn’t explain why Farmer didn’t object to Clinton’s collaborations with former dictator Duvalier or with president & former terrorist Michel Martelly; didn’t object when both Clintons operated as Obama’s agents to turn Haiti into a sweatshop haven; or didn’t notice the Clinton Foundation wasn’t delivering anything for the millions in donations it received. Is the good doctor stupid or has he been corrupted?

Feminist Majority (FM), the foundation behind Ms. Magazine, just announced its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president. Using only hyperboles & outright lies about her actual achievements, they claimed their endorsement was based on her “stellar women’s rights & equality record, but also on her vision for the future.”

There is nothing surprising in a conservative group of Democratic women endorsing Clinton; it was a foregone conclusion that FM would do so given the political composition of the board of directors & the regrettable way they misuse feminism. Clinton’s gender wasn’t the determining factor in the choice but her stinking reactionary politics are because they accord with the politics of the FM board.

FM & its associates have led the monstrous campaign in support of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan under the guise of liberating women from the Taliban & the burqa by bombing the country into smithereens. Board member Dolores Huerta who founded the United Farmworkers accepted the 2011 Metal of Freedom award from Obama one month after his administration permanently barred the Department of Labor from pursuing safety & protective measures for children farmworkers. Board member Lorraine Sheinberg has political connections to & has been honored by the most reactionary Zionist organizations in the US; her husband Sidney is a key player in American Zionism. Eleanor Smeal who announced the decision for FM has always played a central role in yoking the women’s movement to the Democratic Party & counterposing electoralism to independent movement building.

Truth of the matter is Hillary Clinton hasn’t done squat for women’s rights nor for that matter children’s rights. The screeching testimony to that is Haiti. When US Secretary of State, she worked in league with her husband as Obama’s representatives to turn Haiti into a sweatshop haven for women & children workers. She collaborated with the Clinton Foundation in massive theft of contributions for personal enrichment. One could write volumes on the Clinton’s crimes against the people of Haiti.

All the millions the Clinton Foundation raised for Haiti relief & not a damn thing to show for it. Not even port-a-potties for people still homeless from the January 2010 hurricane. The Red Cross at least has six shacks to show for the millions they raised.

These kids are crossing a polluted canal in Port-au-Prince, Haiti where the Zika virus is being reported. The mosquito which spreads it thrives in rainwater, open sewers, garbage, polluted canals which abound in Haiti six years after the hurricane. Zika is apparently a relatively mild infection–unless you’re pregnant or your health is already compromised by homelessness, poor nutrition, stress, lack of medical care. Since the Clinton Foundation didn’t do a damn thing to address the cholera epidemic brought to Haiti by UN occupying troops, it’s unlikely it’ll do a damn thing to address Zika. But it should provide sufficient documentation that Hillary Clinton & her unsavory consort have never had the best interests of women & children at heart & even have a criminal relationship to them.

Enough with the lesser evil justifications! What about standing steadfast with the women & children not just of Haiti but of Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, & US children farmworkers?

(Photo by Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters)