After surviving 50 days of apocalyptic destruction, the people of Gaza must be struggling to regain equilibrium while grieving loss, dealing with homelessness, being without power & sanitation. Celebrating survival has so many heavy provisos, including the continuing Israeli blockade of Gaza–so it is lovely to see children out & about at the beach again & this man playing with his baby (12 days after Israel’s ceasefire) without fear of being bombed.

Those who witnessed the gruesome & barbarous assault on Gaza need also take a deep breath before plunging into building the economic boycott (BDS) of all Israeli products (barcode beginning 729) with rallies, teach-ins, speak-outs, forums. It’s a whole new world for Palestinian solidarity which is now international & massive. Israel & its Zionist supporters are trying furiously to clean up their new image problem; the Exodus mythology, so carefully constructed for 66 years, was blown to shreds by their bombs. Israel is no longer viewed as a righteous, beleaguered nation beset by terrorists but a monstrous military machine that mows down Palestinian children, claiming they’re going after Hamas rocket nests.

Regrettably, the way Zionists are dealing with their image problem is with racism & increased Islamophobia that exposes the supremacist & colonial ideology at the heart of Zionism. Islam & Arabs are the new boogeymen we’re supposed to be afraid of or they’ll eat our children–just like “commies” of the McCarthy era put fluoride in the water to corrupt the morals of youth. If this crap isn’t opposed in the boldest & most steadfast way, we will wind up in another era of repression with free speech as the first casualty. The fight for Palestinian justice is an essential part of the fight for democracy around the world.

(Photo by Mahmud Hams/AFP/Getty Images)

At the sight of these two odious creatures, invidious animal comparisons leap to mind–from bovine to serpentine to reptilian. And the animals rise up in a chorus of rebellion. So we leave their physiognomy to speak for itself & for lives spent in service to vanity & all that’s ugly in this world.

Clinton is signaling here to all those corporate & political forces Kissinger serves so well, so shamefully, & so murderously that she too will bend her knee to their service if they reward her with false honors of the kind he racks up. Depravity worked for Kiss-ass-inger; she hopes it will work for her too.

In the 1950s, the ruling elite took a nonentity at Harvard who was full of himself & could wing an IQ test, an unscrupulous, devious, cynic wedded to no ideology except self-aggrandizement & they turned him into a minion extraordinaire, a courtier to power. All they had to do was stroke his vanity which is his guiding light.

Since his student days he’s been known for a certain way of operating: flattering & sniveling deference to authority figures but abusive, vindictive, manipulative, deceitful with those he deems subordinates. Many of his biographers claim he intellectually towers over all others but when you read their panegyrics you see they’re in no position to judge.

Idealism is no part of his nature & this he considers intellectual freedom because he has no conscience to answer to. He’s been a windbag since his first attempt at authorship writing his dissertation. None of his books come in under 400 pages; his two volumes of biography come in at just under 2,500 pages–& there probably isn’t more than a couple truths in the entirety.

He has a new book coming out–probably another ten-pounder–on the new world order. He was one of the political architects of the Washington Consensus, the neoliberal approach to plunder orchestrated by the World Bank, IMF, & Pentagon. Global economic plunder is ramming against the parameters of the nation-state & they haven’t a clue how to deal with it because for all their feigned intellectualism, they don’t want to face that capitalism has entered its barbaric phase & is whirling out of control.

Joshua Cooper Ramo is a chief officer & partner in Kissinger Associates, the secretive consulting firm owned by Henry whose clients include some of the largest corporations & investors in the world. Ramo, who coordinates investment in China, wrote “The Beijing Consensus”, a ‘wither China’-type article elaborating the Chinese economic model as an alternative to the Washington Consensus. Liberal critics claimed Ramo ignored that degraded labor, including child labor, was the core of China’s economic success when that was probably what most appealed to him.

A few years ago Ramo authored another book described as “provocative” by reviewers who couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about. Not to worry! He wasn’t talking about much. His book is called “The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us & What We Can Do About It”. He suggests that Henry’s generation ran the world according to outdated idées fixes & methods when what is needed in the era of globalization is the pragmatism, flexibility, & resilience of hedge fund managers & Hezbollah operatives. (If the profundity escapes you, you’re not alone.)

Trendy thinking isn’t Henry’s style. He prefers the turgid rather than glib broad-spectrum theorizing. The teaser to his book circulating now in the media is just chock-full of imponderables. His new book is likely an attempt to show he hasn’t lost it as Ramo claims. Now if there’s one thing Henry knows, it’s how the system works–or rather how to work the system. For all his vaunted brilliance, Henry failed in many of his negotiating strategies (Le Duc Tho who negotiated for North Vietnam made chopped liver out of him & refused to accept the Nobel Peace Prize with him in 1973) & relied solely on deceit, maneuvers, assassinations, intrigues, treacheries, & above all the persuasive power of bombs & mass murder. If countries didn’t bow graciously to bribery & plunder, he just bombed them into smithereens or overthrew their governments. Which raises the question, if he’s so damn smart how come he relied primarily on brute force? His international rap sheet for war & human rights crimes is a mile long & touches every continent: Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, Cambodia, Laos, Nigeria, Angola, Argentina, Palestine.

Henry, & likely Ramo too, know how the system works but they can’t control it & most importantly they can’t expose it–if they want to keep working it. So they talk gibberish & gobbledy-gook which they feed to gullible undergraduates to make it appear capitalism is inspired & democratic rather than out-of-control plunder that is bringing down the planet & making the lives of millions a hell on earth.

And that’s what Hillary wants in on. That’s why she’s putting her gnarly arm around his grotesque head. And she is what they call “the lesser of two evils”?

(Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

It’s been so long since the last major union battles in the US that most of us don’t remember them–even if we went through them. In 1981, then president Reagan fired over 11,000 striking air traffic controllers & banned them forever from federal service. His intervention to bust the union signalled a turning point in US labor history which wasn’t in the most dynamic state to begin with coming out of the Cold War.

In 1985, the state of Minnesota intervened with the National Guard to bust the Hormel meatpacker’s union in Austin, MN after a six month strike over cutting wages & dangerous working conditions. Those two strikes were a double whammy against labor militancy & both exposed the collusion of top union officials with union busting. So it’s no wonder that in the past nearly 30 years organized labor has acted more like a whipped puppy than the strongest section of the labor force. There’s a retrenchment within unions with officials talking tough, making deals, & standing steadfast against militant action in defense of safety, wages, benefits. Officials only get off their lard-asses to campaign for Democratic candidates like Elizabeth Warren. And if Hillary Clinton is the candidate for president, they will vigorously (as vigorously as a lard-ass can) campaign for her, claiming she is on the side of labor.

For those who’ve witnessed & been part of this process of decay, the emergence of fast food workers on the scene is a phenomenon of the greatest excitement & importance. It’s a gust of wind in the oxygen-free zone of the labor movement where there has been no serious labor organizing for decades. The percentage of US unionized workers is down to 11%, leaving most working people no way to fight for safety or wages or rights on the job. And employers have taken full advantage of this vulnerability. Working people have to eat crow in order to earn a living.

Fast food jobs were once considered “entry-level” jobs for people just out of high school as if that designation justified low wages, no benefits, & no rights whatsoever. It’s no longer just young people working these restaurants but seniors who can’t survive on social security alone & family people with kids to feed.

Union officials, still in cahoots with the union-busters, are already looking for ways to derail this new movement among fast food workers & get them into a “respectable” union that can sit on their militancy. Things are changing in this country & that con job may not be so easy to pull off anymore.

These McDonald’s workers in South Los Angeles are demanding $15 an hour & the right to form unions. Our fullest solidarity with their struggle.

(Photo by Bob Chamberlin/LA Times)

Joan Rivers has finally died. Hollywood Rests in Peace. She became very rich tearing people apart. It’s one thing to go after movie stars for fashion faux pas; it’s quite another to call for genocide in Gaza & justify it saying only those with the lowest IQs were being killed. This kind of talk doesn’t just skirt the edges of fascist-type thinking but plunges right in & wallows.

She represented a genre on TV including Howard Stern & Simon Cowell where demeaning others, especially women & vulnerable, was considered high hilarity. If you were fat or short or disabled or not surgically altered to perfection, she made you a butt of the cruelest jokes–& that includes a lot of us. Only those laughed who consider humiliation & cruelty a form of humor–the very type who’d make good concentration camp guards.

Comments from FB friends on the thread about Rivers last week clarified why she might have been so cruel toward others but there were no excuses offered for why she used humor to incite social hatred & intolerance. Most of us can’t honestly say we’ll miss her or regret her passing. But may she RIP anyway.

You can be forgiven for thinking this the receiving line at the Vampires Ball. There’s more corruption in this photo than even Beelzebub can fathom. Hell hath no pit hole deep enough to contain their stinking corpses. Ugly isn’t a necessary part of aging but when your life mission is shilling US militarism, nature does not play kind with you. It’s a variation on the theme of Oscar Wilde’s “Portrait of Dorian Gray.”

These troll-like creatures are former US Secretaries of State Kissinger, Baker, Albright, Powell, & Clinton at the ceremonial groundbreaking of the US Diplomacy Center in Washington DC. When finished the center will be a museum & education center–which in DC-speak means a place where they clean up historical reality & peddle barbarism as heroic.

We wish they had all chosen to “go quietly into that dark night” but they still all earn big bucks on the corporate speaking circuit & in teaching, advising, & business. Kissinger has a book due out this month on the ‘new world order”. The trailer for the book floated in several media outlets makes it look as lyrical as insurance actuary tables. So much for his vaunted genius which has only ever been manifest in barbarity.

Clinton of course, is running for POTUS but even her own party thinks she may be too corrupt & are priming Elizabeth Warren to challenge her with Clinton representing the extreme right-wing of the Democrats (DP) & Warren the moderates. There is no left-wing in the DP & never has been. That’s an illusion fostered to rake in union campaign dough & the support of corrupt Black, Latino, & feminist leaders. It takes so little illusion to deceive & that is the folly of US politics.

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Media reports a military coup in Lesotho, Africa that has sent the prime minister into exile in South Africa. Apparently Letsie Seeiso, the “king”, can sit tight because similar to Betty Windsor, his duties are ceremonial while he feeds at the public trough. As usual, no media source has found it necessary to explain the politics behind this coup but there are plenty of issues facing the working people of Lesotho that warrant popular rebellion. This is a slightly edited version of a post from October 2013 describing a little of the integration of Lesotho’s economy into neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism:
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This photo seems to capture an endearing shyness in these young herd boys from Lesotho, Africa. The caption says they’re going to the opening ceremony of the Mateanong Herd Boy School built by the charity Sentebale in the village of Mokhotlong. You want to believe this photo is about the bucolic rather than the barbarous but you have to ask what this herd boy school is all about–especially since Sentebale was founded in 2006 by Harry Windsor from the British moochocracy & Seeiso, the brother of Lesotho’s “king”.

Lesotho is a mountainous kingdom of just over two million completely surrounded by South Africa. Its economy is based on agriculture, livestock, sweatshop manufacturing for the US garment market, diamond mining, & remittances from workers who work in South African mining. Nearly 50% of the population live below the USD $38.00 a month established by the World Bank as the international poverty level (based on the 9,000 B.C.E. economy).

Lesotho has the third highest HIV rate in the world (23% of the population), partly explaining its orphan population of over 350,000 children. But HIV is not the only health issue. Child & infant mortality is high (hospitals are reported to have roach-infested maternity wards) & life expectancy for both men & women is only 42 years. That may be because there are only five doctors per 100,000 people. The Gates Foundation is involved in health care primarily around the issue of HIV & has been sharply criticized for devastating health care by diverting staff from basic care & focusing on vaccinations rather than providing essential healthcare & food to a malnourished population. Many HIV patients reportedly have so little food they vomit their free pills.

Child labor is widespread, including an estimated 35,000 boys who work as shepherds in the mountains. Little boys, some as young as 5-years-old, leave their families for months & sometimes years at a time to herd cattle & sheep. In freezing temperatures they have to fend off feral dogs, snakes, & other predators, including armed livestock rustlers; they are deprived of all education; they are forced to endure long periods of complete isolation. Their pay for one years work is one cow or several smaller livestock like sheep.

It is reported the herd boys often become hostile & antisocial & are known for their shyness since they have no idea how to live within a community. One UNICEF worker said, “I’ve worked with child soldiers & seen the look in their eyes, but it’s not as lonely as the look in a herd boy’s eyes because at least child soldiers run in groups.”

The Lesotho government & Sentebale have established a few herd boy night schools to teach reading, writing, & basic arithmetic but to attend the boys often must walk 15 to 20 miles round-trip on unlit mountain paths from the cattle post to the school. This charitable largesse is likely more about public relations for Harry Windsor than beneficial to the young herd boys.

(Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

In the past two weeks, there have been two catastrophic oil spills in Mexico–one in the state of Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico & one in the northern state of Nuevo Leon not far from the Mexican border with Texas. Oil spills are constant in Mexico which Mexican officials always attribute to oil thieves tapping into pipelines; a variation on that theme is drug cartels diversifying business & pirating oil from illegal taps. That story only flies because being a reporter in Mexico is a dangerous profession so no thorough investigations can be done without getting in harm’s way. But even on the surface, the story stinks to high heaven.

The oil industry in Mexico was nationalized in 1938 when the Mexican government booted predatory oil companies from the UK & US & took over the industry. The government-owned oil company is called PEMEX. Despite corruption originating in the government & not nationalization, PEMEX provided affordable energy for Mexican working people. The corruption entailed theft by officials in place of investing profits to maintain the infrastructure & develop energy technology. But being an outdated system isn’t why it’s susceptible to illegal tapping.

The technology of even old pipelines means it’s unlikely the thousands of illegal siphons are by fellows from the nearby town driving up with barrels in the back of a pickup to fill & resell on street corners, as media & oil industry publications claim. Pipelines shipping volatile & flammable oil & gas are under extreme pressure monitored by PEMEX; a leak along the line can be detected within minutes & maintenance crews dispatched for repair. The pressure & volatility make it prone to fires & explosions & extremely dangerous for untrained petty thieves who try to tap a line. Even the drug cartels would have to hire specially trained mechanics to siphon without blowing themselves up. Yet there are over a thousand illegal taps reported every year in Mexico.

The story might not be of as much interest were it not that oil piracy is a major issue in other oil-producing countries, most notably Nigeria–& the story coming out of Nigeria bears a striking resemblance to that in Mexico: Nigerian pirates, militant groups, & criminal gangs are killing their own economy, sabotaging their government, threatening the very foundations of Nigeria’s petroleum industry by illegal siphons. But after 58 years of oil exploration in Nigeria, the government neither meters nor monitors the volume of oil production by Shell & other oil companies, has no functioning regulatory agencies, & doesn’t have a clue what is produced & loaded on to tankers. After bribing corrupt government officials, foreign oil companies simply loot thousands of barrels. A US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks exposed the collaboration between Nigerian politicians & military officials. They’re the ones responsible for the majority of oil thefts, not militants or small time operators, because they can commandeer & control access to barges & tankers to help oil companies loot thousands of barrels a day.

Speculation you say to assume the same might be happening in Mexico? There was already a court case brought by PEMEX in a US court in 2011 where the head of a Texas refinery was convicted of selling stolen Mexican fuel & another case accuses 12 US oil & gas companies of dealing in stolen fuel. Shell & ConocoPhillips are both accused of handling the contraband. Most of these oil companies are headquartered in Texas.

There is indeed massive fuel theft in Mexico facilitated by the present government which opened PEMEX to neoliberal privatization in December 2013. The Mexican government did not invest PEMEX profits in development & instead for years relied on subcontracting to firms like Halliburton & other oil service companies. Halliburton (which earned ignominy in Iraq) & one of the other companies provided technology to the Deepwater Horizon rig which caused the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Last year Halliburton pleaded guilty to destroying evidence needed by BP in litigation over that spill.

So when millions of gallons of PEMEX oil & gas are being siphoned, the likelihood is these operators are involved up to their eyeballs because they have the resources to bribe officials to look the other way when they drive tankers up to siphon & to clear customs when they drive them across the US border. It is probably not at all coincidental the oil spills in Mexico are exactly where Halliburton & other companies have set up operations & facilities. If the Mexican government really wanted to stop illegal tapping, it could send some of the 45,000 soldiers now deployed ostensibly & so ineffectively against drug trafficking to guard the pipelines.

The spill on Rio Hondo in Veracruz is in the Gulf of Mexico aquifir system previously hit by oil spills & contaminates the water supply for millions of people. The mid-August oil spill in Nueveo Leon is on the Rio San Juan which supplies water to the city of Monterey & is a tributary to the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo in Mexico) on the US-Mexican border–which is the fourth largest river basin in North America. PEMEX claims 90% of the oil spill in Rio San Juan is cleaned up. Meanwhile residents are on an emergency drive to provide clean water because they know full well it will be years, if it is ever cleaned up.

Multinational oil companies view Mexico as a Wild West for profiteering & promise billions to develop the industry. They’ve already laid out entire maps for fracking Mexico. If we want to see what kind of development they plan for Mexico we only need look at the Niger Delta. That environmental catastrophe awaits Mexico.

Photo is a dead bird floating in the Rio Hondo in Veracruz after the gas pipeline spill on August 27th.

(Photo by Feliz Marquez/AP)

I have great admiration for photojournalism & am particularly smitten with those who focus on people & the human face. Enough already with the scenery! I wouldn’t say I’m a groupie but I’m fortunate to have several photojournalist friends. World travel & danger seem to be part of their lives, along with a remarkable interest in people.

This photo is by Umesh Solanki who documents people from the Dalit, Adivasi, & Other Backward Classes in India. The image needs no commentary. The little girl really speaks for herself.

(Photo by Umesh  Solanki)

“The face is the mirror of the mind, & eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.” (St. Jerome)

Photo is from the Faces of Tibet album by Steve McCurry, a renowned photojournalist most famous for the “Afghan Girl”, featured on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic Magazine. He has photographed in many war zones including Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Cambodia, the Philippines, Pakistan, & Afghanistan. He was featured in a 2003 documentary titled, “The Face of the Human Condition”.

His artistic eye is obsessed with human faces & he has captured their beauty as few others. Muhammed Muheisen, who photographs children in war zones & as refugees, is another whose photographs have that remarkable character. Surely they must have influenced the wonderful new trend started by “Humans of New York” (HONY). Unlike HONY who quotes something endearing about the subjects, McCurry doesn’t tell us much about his subjects. He lets the faces speak for themselves. “If you wait,” he said, “people will forget your camera & the soul will drift up into view.”

It’s hard to believe Ben Stein, the right-wing commentator for Fox News & other reactionary venues, is anything but a parody based on his film roles. He seems direct from the cast of Monty Python’s “Upper Class Twit of the Year.” But he came by his idiocy honestly; he inherited it from his father Herbert Stein, who was an economic advisor in the Nixon regime (1971-74). Herbert had a treacherous streak since he was a proponent of the Chicago School of Economics associated with Milton Friedman & the murderous Chilean coup in 1973 where Friedman first applied his economics.

Herbert had a theoretical bent of mind & formulated “Herbert Stein’s Law” that claims “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Pomposity apparently runs in the family because he postulated this banal tautology with the same solemnity his progeny has made so infamous–as if they both watched too many cartoons & missed their calling in the circus. They both cop an attitude but they talk like they have marbles in their mouths & rocks in their heads.

Ben Stein got an Ivy League education at Columbia & Yale–but quite frankly after George Bush (either one–take your pick) graduated from Yale, there’s a stinky miasma around that distinction that just won’t go away. Nepotism got him out of the Vietnam War & a job writing speeches for Nixon (& later following his father, with Gerald Ford). Stein’s rhetorical flourishes (which at their most emotive sound like the engine on an air conditioner) could not have helped the Nixon cause one iota. Stein is a blowhard & pervert & while he was writing speeches for Nixon defending Vietnam, he claims he was at protests where there was “a lot of balling” going on. Only in his wet dreams.

Stein continues to hold the universally despised Nixon in highest esteem as a peacemaker. He cried at Nixon’s resignation & claims he still cries about it 40 years later. He wrote a eulogy for Milton Friedman in Time Magazine entitled “Milton Friedman, Freedom Fighter” (2006). So is it any surprise his views on other issues are drawn from cesspools? He opposes women’s reproductive rights, disavows climate change, & not only opposes evolution but campaigns in speeches & a documentary film for creationism & intelligent design. His propaganda film against evolution is called “Expelled” No Intelligence Allowed” but he wanted to title it “From Darwin to Hitler” because he claims “Darwinism inspired & advanced Nazism.”

Stein’s emotive repertoire might be stuck in engine mode but he’s a busy boy commenting on political events about Israel & Blacks in this country. He’s a rabid Zionist who wrote a column denouncing criticisms of Israel for its military raid against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May 2010. In international waters Israeli commandos attacked six civilian ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza to break the Israeli blockade. Nine unarmed solidarity activists were shot & killed. Stein claimed the commandos were attacked by activists but he won’t explain why the hell the commandos forcibly boarded the ships.

It’s Stein’s unspeakably stupid comments about Blacks in the US that most distinguish him & the more you know of them, the more wretched he becomes. It’s not exaggeration to say he hates Blacks–more than he hates everybody else, that is. In 2005, with the entire world watching Hurricane Katrina on live TV for over a week, the Bush regime did nothing, nada, zip, zilch to rescue thousands of Black men, women, & children. The nation stood aghast while media beat the drums about looting–as if starving people should consider supermarkets sacrosanct. This is Stein’s take on all that: “George Bush did not cause gangsters to shoot at rescue helicopters taking people from rooftops, did not make gang bangers rape young girls in the Superdome, did not make looters steal hundreds of weapons, in short make New Orleans into a living hell.” How do you jam so much racism, stupidity, & lies into one sentence!?

In 2011, when IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of raping a hotel maid in NYC, Stein rushed to his defense. But of course every time he opens his mouth, he proves himself an idiot. He said: “People who commit crimes tend to be criminals. Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes?” Translated, that means you can’t call the head of the IMF a gang banger; he’s not Black!

Stein went on to say Strauss-Kahn is a “short fat old man” who didn’t have a gun or a knife so how can prosecutors claim he forced the woman to have sex with him? And he proceeds to impugn the woman accuser who is Black & thus to Stein’s mind not believable.

As if Stein hasn’t already made a complete ass of himself over & over again, CNN & other media interviewed him on the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson. His comment is worth reading in full: “The idea of calling this poor young man unarmed when he was 6’4″, 300 pounds, full of muscles, apparently, according to what I read in the New York Times, on marijuana. To call him unarmed is like calling Sonny Liston unarmed or Cassius Clay unarmed. He wasn’t unarmed. He was armed with his incredibly strong, scary self.” Once again, how can you jam so much racism into one sentence!?

Shall we ignore that Muhammad Ali changed his name from Cassius Clay in the 1960s? Shall we ignore that not having a weapon spoke to Strauss-Kahn’s defense but not Michael Browns? Should we accept that being short & fat means you’re not a rapist but being a big kid means you’re scary & your muscles constitute an assault weapon? Or should we recognize that Ben Stein is not just a bone-headed buffoon but a vicious nasty-assed racist?

Two-bit halfwits like Stein aren’t usually worth the time of day. But when he attempts to vilify a young man murdered in the prime of life for nothing more than being Black, we should hold him in contempt & demand he be thrown off the airways.

Stein is just as ugly as he is stupid & bears an unfortunate resemblance to Kissinger who he worked with in the Nixon regime. Use his photo for practicing your horse manure shot.

(Photo by Nathaniel Welch)