Just when you think you’ve exhausted your adrenalin, you hear another Walmart story. This one doesn’t have to do with workers dying in fires or buried in cement debris at Walmart garment sweatshops in Bangladesh; it’s not about millions of dollars in Walmart wage theft from garment workers in Cambodia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, or Haiti; nor is it about the wretched working conditions, sexual assault, & physical violence to garment workers in those places. This Walmart story is about farmworkers on Mexican agribusiness plantations & the crime involves all the big US supermarket chains, including touchy-feely outfits like Whole Foods.

Mexico was the first country to feel the scourge of neoliberal agriculture. You could say it was the testing ground for a system that is now ravaging several continents. Under the aegis of the IMF, World Bank, the Ford & Rockefeller Foundations, the so-called “Green Revolution” was launched in Mexico in the 1940s, ostensibly to increase world food production to overcome mass starvation. Eventually other players entered including Monsanto, Dow, Dupont, USAID, & the Gates Foundation.

The green revolution, which is simply neoliberal plunder dressed like a cucumber, is production of cash crops for the export market making countries unable to produce food for themselves. One example of how that operates is that Mexican cuisine does not include much broccoli but under agribusiness thousands of acres are dedicated to broccoli for the export market & destroy the self-sufficient methods of traditional farmers. The green revolution involves chemical farming & genetically modified crops which cause land degradation, pollution, loss of biodiversity, depleted food quality, & of course, massive human health problems for farm workers; it also requires genetically restricted technologies making farmers dependent on outside companies for new seeds. The green revolution, like the war on drugs, is a bag job.

In some countries part of this neoliberal process is deforestation, hydroelectric projects, oil drilling, mining, massive water diversion schemes requiring the forced removal of Indigenous people from traditional lands farmed by them for countless generations, the dispossession of millions of farmers & farm workers, & their forced migration to urban poverty or (in the case of Mexico) to the US. In narcostates like Mexico, drug plantations are part of the picture & marijuana production has increased 35% since the beginning of the so-called “war on drugs.”

The ruthless expropriation of small farm holders by agribusiness isn’t an accidental feature of the green revolution but was intended to undercut radical proposals for agrarian reform that would serve farmers & not the Mexican & US oligarchs. Land ownership & tenancy are not left up for grabs but privilege international agribusiness in law & with military muscle against resisting farmers so that food systems are firmly in the control of agribusiness. The food shortage justifying this land grab has not thereby been solved but exacerbated & in a world where the majority of people depend on farming for their livelihood, that has meant dispossession & migration. At a certain point, neoliberalism becomes indistinguishable from colonialism.

So what has poor little Walmart got to do with all this? Have they just become our favorite whipping boy? Walmart runs supermarkets where they sell the drugged up, genetically modified produce. Over half of Mexican produce is for the US market so Walmart isn’t the only guilty party; it’s just the most ubiquitous one wherever you go on this planet whether you’re selling tee-shirts or tomatoes. And wouldn’t you know that one of the Walmart produce suppliers in Mexico got raided by cops last year for holding 280 migrant workers hostage & working them like slaves. They refused to pay them, wouldn’t let them leave at gunpoint, housed them in rat-infested quarters without toilet, bath or laundry facilities, sometimes without roofs, & often employing violence. Walmart, like usual, dummied up & claimed no knowledge of the criminality.

The agribusiness plantations are rife with child labor–an estimated 300,000 by human rights groups (though the Mexican government low balls it at a staggering 100,000). That’s no big deal to US supermarkets since in 2012 the Obama regime strengthened laws denying safety protections to the 800,000 children farmworkers here. It’s certainly no big deal to Walmart since there are thousands of kids working in their garment sweatshops, including the ones who died in fires & the building collapse. The World Bank, one of the chief architects of the green revolution in Mexico, issued a report last year deploring the growth of child labor in agribusiness. Mostly the report was a string of sociology 101 cliches including where they blamed child labor on uneducated parents.

This photo is workers from Bioparques (produce sold in Walmart & other supermarkets under Kaliroy brand name), a labor camp in the state of Jalisco. Bioparques is bankrolled by the World Bank (they got $17 million in 2007 to expand operations) & was honored in Mexico as a “socially responsible company.” They’re the outfit that held 280 workers as slaves. One escaped (others who tried before him were caught & severely beaten) & notified police, who raided the joint & let the migrant workers go free. This is a bus of them headed back home. Will anyone be surprised to know the legal case against Bioparques has stalled in the courts? It’ll be more of a shock if it ever moves forward. It’s not at all certain the Mexican NGO honoring Bioparques was unaware of their slaving. That’s just the way neoliberal barbarism rolls.

(Photo from Secretariat of Labor and Social Welfare, state of Jalisco, Mexico)

Lest we think the Ebola epidemic in West Africa has been licked, the latest statistics from the US Center for Disease Control is 18,000 down with the disease & nearly 6,500 deaths. The lack of media coverage is appalling & damning. If those statistics prevailed in France or Germany or the US–or any country deemed white by those who live in the past–the news would be front page.

It was reported in early November that over 300 health care workers had died from Ebola. This raises some questions. Of the handful of health care workers flown out of West Africa to hospitals in the US, Switzerland, Spain only one has died in addition to Thomas Duncan, the Liberian visitor to the US who died in a Dallas hospital. One question is, who decides which health care workers get to stay & die in West Africa & which ones get flown out for elite care? And a second question is, why aren’t the treatments so effective in the US, Switzerland, Spain being made available to people in West Africa?

The CDC & FDA can blither on about the protocols & expense of testing drugs for the mass market but anyone who watches TV knows of at least a half-dozen class action suits at any given time for drugs that killed or permanently incapacitated people. Did they get to bypass the protocols & fast-track their way to fortune?

This is an Indian paramilitary soldier guarding a polling station during voting in Kashmir state elections. Political analysts have been writing a long time about militarization in schools, on national borders, of the police, even of outer space. For heaven’s sake, today SWAT teams are used not just to apprehend armed & dangerous criminals but to serve warrants on church ladies for unpaid parking tickets.

What also needs to be analyzed is militarization of the ballot box which has been going on a long time in a lot of countries. It’s common to see guys like this at election queues. What do they think is going to happen? Is someone going to try to run off with the ballot boxes or go hog-wild stuffing them if there aren’t armed guards hanging around?

There are plenty of ways to rig an election without holding a gun to people’s heads beginning with limiting who gets on the ballot (as we just saw in Hong Kong). The US election commission knows a thing or two about that. The Florida election commission & US Supreme Court wrote the book on that when they ignored massive voter fraud & threw the election to George Bush. Militarization of elections does not protect them from voter fraud. There were soldiers all over the place during the Egyptian election that put Mohamed Morsi in power but there were very credible complaints about widespread fraud.

Given the shabby state of electoral politics today one wonders why paramilitaries are necessary. It’s hard for people to understand in places like the US where the political choices are so deplorable you’d have to send SWAT teams door-to-door to rout people off their asses just to get the majority to vote. “Why bother?” makes perfect sense.

Popular suffrage is an achievement of the capitalist revolutions against feudalism but in truth, suffrage is not likely to play a central role in getting rid of capitalism because elections are so easily rigged. Under neoliberalism, elections are a shell game to siphon off energy from popular rebellion. During election years in the US, antiwar & other social protest go way down, almost to nothing. Al Sharpton & Jesse Jackson hot-footed it to Ferguson as proxies for Obama precisely to keep the movement within electoral limits. This time the movement is bigger & deeper than their machinations can control.

Of course what this militarization of the ballot box represents is conflict & imbalance in power. And that is sure as hell true in Kashmir under barbaric occupation by the Indian military. It certainly doesn’t mean the outcome of popular suffrage will serve justice in Kashmir which is why political dissidents are calling for a boycott of the elections. One cannot be dismissive of voting even in US elections when so many Blacks & Latinos are gerrymandered & maneuvered out of voting rights. But one doesn’t have to be a fool about them either. Sometimes the only time you throw your vote away is when you actually cast it. And sometimes, like in Kashmir, casting a vote will defy justice.

(Photo by Mukhtar Khan/AP)

Elite athlete Kobe Bryant & other Los Angeles Lakers wear “I can’t breathe” tee shirts in a pre-game warm up yesterday in LA. Their act of solidarity is a welcome rebuke to nincompoops like Charles Barkley, the retired basketball star whose fame went straight to his head & rotted his brain.

First he mouthed off about “unintelligent” Blacks valuing criminal behavior over academics. Then he called protesters in Ferguson violent “scumbags.” Now he’s defending not just the grand jury decision on Eric Garner but the right of four cops to gang up on Garner while one of them strangled him to death. Barkley told an interviewer, “When the cops are trying to arrest you, if you fight back, things go wrong.” Things go wrong: such a delicate way of describing murder.

Something went really wrong with Barkley too explaining why he has his head stuck up his ass. He’s trying to take up where Bill Cosby left off in defense of white supremacy. What they get out of it is a career way beyond their talents. We can expect to see “Sir Charles” as a TV sports analyst for many years to come. We have only one word of advice to him: beware karma. It can get real nasty.

Hats off to the LA Lakers for this act of solidarity. You can file this image under “This rebellion aint going away soon.”

(Photo by Luis Sinco/LA Times)

On Monday, UNICEF released a report declaring 2014 a devastating year for children. They said “Never in recent memory have so many children been subjected to such unspeakable brutality.” Children have been “orphaned, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, raped & even sold as slaves.” That judgement would make neoliberal barbarism even worse than feudalism. It might indicate that neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, is heading not just for dystopia but for hell on earth.

The report estimates 230 million kids are in war zones including Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, DR Congo, & Ukraine. The pattern of conflict is so evident one wonders why in the entire report mixing statistics, pieties, banalities, & wishful thinking, that nary a word is spoken about the causes of this “unspeakable brutality.”

Violence doesn’t fall from the sky so who exactly is behind this suffering? Can a single scoundrel or source be identified? Because the Occupy movement had its weaknesses but thousands of activists around the world could point to who they thought was behind all this carnage: the filthy rich “one percent.” Could neoliberalism with its land & resource dispossessions, forced migrations, ethnic hatreds, sweatshops, slums, prisons, & just general plunder have anything to do with it? Could US Pentagon & NATO wars & drone bombings be implicated even a teensy-weensy bit? Could they at least mention Israeli ethnic cleansing in Gaza? Since over 6 million people have died & millions more made refugees in DR Congo in the past 16 years (the deadliest conflict since World War II), could UNICEF consider just a word about multinational mining operations driving the conflict? Perhaps they could even go out on a limb & say something about cops in the US shooting down unarmed Black kids in the streets or railroading them into prisons for spitting on the sidewalk or a little backtalk.

Instead the report speaks of “innovating for equity,” “reimagining the future,” & “scaling up solutions.” UNICEF with the lovely Christmas cards & they can’t even work up a human emotion about the horror of 230 million kids subject to “unspeakable brutality”!? Is a little outrage too much to ask?

This grieving child is 11-year-old Esther Tokpah from Monrovia, Liberia, who lost both parents in the Ebola epidemic in West Africa where nearly 18,000 people contracted Ebola & about 6,500 died. And still no vaccine or healing serum! And only because under neoliberalism, health care is eliminated to facilitate plunder.

We appreciate UNICEF keeping us abreast of the carnage even if they are unwilling to address it with anything other than banalities & abstruse sociology. But if we want to sincerely defend the children of this world from the most unspeakable violence we will have to organize ourselves to act on their behalf. That is the demand of this historic moment. Neoliberal barbarism cannot be allowed to turn our children into not just the chattel but the offal of their plunder.

(Photo be Michel du Cille/The Washington Post)

You can’t tell if something’s changing in the world or if social media only makes it seem so because now we know what other people are doing. But just the knowing solidarity protests against police violence toward the Black community are going on around the world is itself transformative.

Solidarity isn’t just wishy-washy sentiments of good-will; it’s the iron law of social transformation & scares the willakers out of the ruling elite–especially as their system has entered a spiral of crises they are unable to maneuver out of except with brute force.

What’s with all the clamor for prosecuting the Bush-Cheney gang for sanctioning torture? Why stop there when Obama campaigned to close Guantanamo & end torture but instead continued both? Bush is conscienceless; Cheney is a psychopath, one gene away from a slug. Obama campaigned like he could distinguish evil. So if he can pretend a conscience, we can pretend to let him walk scot free of the stench & culpability of this report. He needs to face the music for these unspeakable crimes along with the Bush regime.

Because I only get four TV channels my viewing options are quite limited. But even beggars have their standards. I can’t do soap operas, game shows (Though I must admit I do like checking Vanna White’s gowns.), or the Victoria’s Secret special tonight.

I don’t mind that young women strut in their underwear & ridiculous wing get-ups. The standards of 6 feet tall women under 100 pounds each is disturbing but we’re used to that. You know what’s the most creepy? That it’s a white supremacy parade. There’s something so Aryan (in the Nazi sense) about it all & I don’t think I’m just reading that ethos into this spectacle. The models are mostly blond but even if they threw a brunette in it wouldn’t change anything. If they threw in a Black model that wouldn’t change anything.

Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro is making news for her comments after the killer cop was allowed to walk for murdering Eric Garner. With supreme arrogance & insolence (though still perfectly coifed), Pirro claimed on her TV show that the public needs retraining to show more sensitivity & obedience to cops. The killer cop now becomes the victim & Garner a belligerent disobedient boor who got what his insensitivity deserved.

Before we get all aghast at the racism & stupidity of Pirro we need take a gander at her personal & political history to see that her entire career is based on such swill. She’s a social climber from Westchester County north of NYC, married for nearly 40 years to Al Pirro (divorced last year), a hustler who got bagged & sent up the river for tax evasion on their personal wealth. He hasn’t been prosecuted for his mob connections or for buying her elective offices in Westchester because they partied at their mansion with all the highest officials in the state, including the governor. She hasn’t been prosecuted either for sharing in the income tax fraud. But then she has friends in high places.

This photo is being considered for an annual photojournalist award by the Guardian UK. It’s a Palestinian man holding up the body of one-year-old Noha Mesleh at her funeral on July 25th. The child was killed when Israel bombed the UN school used as a refugee center In Beit Hanun.

There are many reports, including in mainstream media, about the horrific physical & psychological trauma sustained by the children of Gaza who were directly targeted by Israeli bombers. But of course the trauma of adults who watched their children suffer & die or suffer & live with severe shrapnel damage, amputation, & psychic devastation is also massive. You can see that in the faces here. Especially as Zionists malign them as using their children for human shields; especially as they try to keep their children safe now midst mountains of cement rubble & without a place to live.