If you’re feverish about a US war with Russia you should get off Facebook & call 911.

Syria has put me within six-degrees of crazy on Facebook.

These slum residents in Navotas, a Manila suburb bordering Manila Bay, are sifting through the debris of a fire on Tuesday that left over 1,600 families homeless. Navotas is considered one of the worst slum areas in Manila & like other slums in other districts has been repeatedly hit with fires.

Fire forensics are not reported, or more likely never done, but officials always recite the same list of causes: cooking accidents, faulty or pirated power lines, flammable building materials, overcrowding, piles of recycling materials gathered from dumpsites, or cause unknown. Residents usually suspect arson & say fire trucks arrive late & when they do often lack water hydrants.

The resident’s suspicions are more than justified. These slum fires in Manila are part of scorched earth neoliberal economics which dispossessed hundreds of thousands of rural workers & farmers, replaced them with agribusiness plantations, & forced them to relocate into urban slums. Now, neoliberal urban policies are mandating privatization of public lands where many of the slums are built & forcing residents into relocating or homelessness. That’s why there are dozens of slum fires in Manila every year.

As part of the privatization policies, the Philippine Supreme Court ordered government officials in 2008 to demolish slum dwellings all along Manila Bay so multinational investors could build resorts, upscale shopping malls & condominiums, golf courses, free trade zones. Then Philippine president Aquino & other officials made it clear they intended aggressive action to clear out the tens of thousands of slum residents & relocate them to rural areas with no possibility for employment. Because the resistance of slum residents to evictions has been so forceful against bulldozers & riot police, officials long ago took the line of least resistance by resorting to arson.

This fire in Navotas highlights the deadly intersection between scorched earth economics & Duterte’s vigilante war on drugs. Police & fire officials made a mockery of forensics by claiming within only 12 hours of the fire that initial investigation showed the cause was a candle left unattended by drug users during a methamphetamine session. The Navotas police chief said many of the residents were drug users & pushers, that the slum was considered Manila’s “most notorious community,” & that it had become a safe haven for criminals & murderers to hide out. As a result, the area was being cordoned, residents would not be allowed to return & would be forcibly relocated. Usually residents with no place to go just rebuild on the same site. Now the drug war justifies forcible removal.

The published kill list of 520 drug war victims in the first seven days of Duterte’s reign of terror (July 1st to 7th, 2016) included 17 victims from Navotas. When the year 2016 ended, there were well over 6,000 victims, likely a very large number from Navotas although the figures are not available.

(Photo by Bullit Marquez/AP)

It must seem the epitome of arrogance for Syrian revolutionists & their supporters to disagree with almost the entire pantheon of western gurus: Noam Chomsky, Patrick Cockburn, Tariq Ali, Robert Fisk, Chris Hedges, Vijay Prashad, John Pilger, Glenn Greenwald, Glen Ford, Seamus Milne, Seymour Hersh, Ajamu Baraka. After all, these guys–& it is noticeable that they are all men–are the left intellectual avant-garde of the past 40 years, even outside the west.

The problem with gurus is that they are not infallible & they don’t speak ex cathedra for “the left.” Sometimes when you scratch below the surface of their analyses, you learn they’re not that left at all. For every one of those celebrity journalists & authors there is an entire catalog of serious misjudgments long before they fell apart over Syria.

It’s no surprise they can’t distinguish between revolution & counter-revolution in Syria since not a one of them has any real credentials in that regard. They operate in elite circles, are accustomed to deference, & likely have no understanding at all of working people nor any respect for our capacities to enter history & change it. Like the lilliputian socialist groups who support Assad & carpet bombing of civilians, their writings reflect theoretical torpor & political inertia where they can no longer tell the difference between a political analysis of Syria & the conspiracy mongering of Global Research, complete with “reptilian Rothschild banksters.”

If the Islamophobia & anti-Semitism of Assadist apologia, including that of these gurus, doesn’t hit you in the face, if the demonizing of rescue workers & small children doesn’t sicken you, if marching for Assad & Russia with fascists & libertarians who believe “jihadists” & Jewish people are the problems in this world doesn’t horrify you, then maybe it’s time to accept that you were only on the left by a misunderstanding. The bandwagon is not a reliable guide in politics.

As inauguration day approaches, I find myself contemplating life as a cloistered nun. Someone could notify me when Trump’s impeached.

Syrian Girl just put out a new video attacking little Omran which is making the rounds among Assad supporters, many of whom don’t have all their marbles. You have to ask, why does that little boy rankle them so much? What kind of mentality fixates on a 5-year-old child to vilify him?

One reason only. He bears testimony to the world that Assad is bombing civilians without mercy & that children are suffering the unimaginable.

Historical documentation is overwhelming: only war mongers & racists exploit children for purposes of propaganda.

To my mind, Glenn Greenwald went off the deep end when he campaigned for Chuck Hagel as a lesser evil candidate for Secretary of Defense. Since when do progressives give a damn who administrates US wars?

He’s a wreck on Russia & those damn emails & he was dreadful on Dilma Rousseff’s removal in Brazil. He just doesn’t get how capitalism works & you don’t have to be anti-capitalist to get that.

When it comes to Syria, he’s gone over to the dark side. If you’re a serious investigative journalist, you can’t talk like Syrian Girl–especially when her level of political discourse is as debased as it gets. Or unless you share her idiocies & repugnant prejudices.

This is the 7th anniversary of the 2010 Haitian earthquake. The looting of that country headed up by Bill Clinton & Hillary Clinton, both acting as representatives of the US, & the scale of US criminality committed against the Haitian people is beyond barbarism.

There are now thousands of Haitian refugees traveling to Brazil & with African & Asian refugees attempting to make their way through Latin America, Central America, Mexico to the US border to apply for asylum–an odyssey of nearly 9,000 miles (14,485 km).

These are Haitians last October lining up to interview with an immigration agent in Tijuana, Mexico near the California border. US immigration can only handle about 75 people a day. Until September 2016, Haitians were eligible for Temporary Protection Status against deportation for periods from 6 to 18 months, subject to renewal. But since then US Homeland Security sticks them in detention facilities & processes them for deportation back to Haiti. Most of the thousands waiting to be processed at Tijuana don’t realize that they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of receiving asylum.

Immigration is a human right. Open the borders.

Our fullest solidarity with the Haitian people in bouncing the US military & looting apparatus out of Haiti. Haiti for the Haitians.

(Photo/Gregory Bull/AP)

According to local news, just across the US border in Reynosa, Mexico, immigrant shelters are increasingly serving African & Asian undocumented immigrants. That is true along the entire southern US border from California to Texas & has been since 2011.

Africans from several countries & Asians (mostly Bangladeshis & Indians) have chosen to travel to Brazil because their destination is the US. They each pay thousands of dollars to an organized network of human smugglers for false papers to cross them through 10 countries on foot, boat, & bus to the border of Mexico. That involves traveling in overcrowded fishing boats, trekking through mosquito-infested jungles, dodging armed bandits & immigration authorities, temporary encampments.

Because Mexico has no deportation agreements with some of the African countries of origin, Mexican authorities will issue Africans transit permits to get to the US border. Most, probably those with false papers, do not register for permits & must navigate the treacheries of the 1,450-mile trek on their own.

Mexico is hardly a model of enlightened immigration policy. It functions as the southern flank of US immigration & in 2015 deported more than 165,000 Central Americans. It also has one of the highest immigration detention rates in the world, including of children, & in 2015, detained 190,000 from around the world.

African refugees want to get to the US border because individuals from Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan are given US Temporary Protection Status against deportation for periods from 6 to 18 months, subject to renewal. It doesn’t mean US Homeland Security always honors that amnesty because it is also supposed to be provided to refugees from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria, & Yemen & as of September 2016, it began detaining & then deporting Haitians.

There are now thousands of Africans encamped along the US-Mexico border because the US grants asylum to only 50 Africans a day. That’s why the US Border Patrol reported that it apprehended 6,126 African & Asian refugees trying to cross illegally in 2015. In the first seven months of 2016, nearly 8,000 Africans & Asians had registered with Mexican immigration in Chiapas. Just to process the registered would take US officials over six months when the International Organization for Migration estimated that 20,000 more African refugees were already en route from Brazil to the US.

The US is trying to involve Latin American countries in policing & containing refugee transit to the US & has deployed immigration agents to Mexican immigration facilities on the southern border to impede the traffic from Africa, Asia, & the Middle East.

This photo is African, Asian, Haitian & refugees from other countries waiting to register with Mexican immigration in Tapachula, Chiapas on the southern Mexican border.

Immigration is a human right. Open the borders.

(Photo by Encarni Pindado for the Guardian)

Local news reported that a team of forensic anthropologists & their students from Texas State University (TSU) exhumed unmarked mass graves of undocumented immigrants near Falfurrias, in Brooks County, Texas & found 30 bodies just in the last week.

Falfurrias is on the main highway 70 miles (115 km) north of the US-Mexican border. There is a three-lane border patrol checkpoint with canine units to sniff out immigrants being smuggled. To circumvent the checkpoint, “coyotes” (human smugglers) drop off vans of undocumented immigrants a few miles south of the checkpoint & drive north past the checkpoint to wait while the immigrants trek around border patrol through private ranch land. The detour of about 25 miles (40 km) takes a few days on foot in extreme subtropical heat & humidity (100℉ / 38 ℃) & arid terrain.

Since 2010, the border patrol in Brooks County have found the remains of over 461 immigrants who died, mostly from heat exhaustion. That is why Brooks County is called the “real Death Valley” & “one of the deadliest killing fields” for undocumented immigrants in the US.

The bodies were routinely handed over to a funeral corporation paid $1,000 per body. Rather than comply with state & national laws regarding the proper handling of bodies, the funeral corporation dumped them together without identification in trash bags, shopping bags, milk cartons, or no containers at all, often in shallow graves only 6 inches from the surface where animals could get at them. Sometimes only the skull is found. The burial grounds were like a landfill site.

When investigative reporters exposed the mass graves, the elite Texas Rangers “investigated” & found no wrongdoing on the part of authorities or the funeral corporation which had close association with then Texas governor Rick Perry. The investigative reporters have cited several state & national laws violated.

The university forensics teams are part of Operation Identification (OpID) started in 2013 as a collaboration between forensics investigators from TSU, Baylor University, & the University of Indianapolis (UI). They exhume unmarked graves, transport the bodies to TSU, & analyze the remains to identify & return them to their families in Mexico or Central America. Since 2013, 192 bodies have been exhumed–the youngest 14 years old & the oldest 60. So far 20 have been identified.

One of the investigative reporters asked two of the forensics professors why they launched OpID. Professor Krista Latham from UI said they were doing it for the families & because “everyone deserves to be mourned properly.” Professor Lori Baker from Baylor said “Would you want to see your son buried that way? Or your mom, or your sister, or your brother? This is not how you want someone you love to be buried.”

Photo is of exhumations in Falfurrias killing field January 2017.
Immigration is a human right. No human being is an alien. Open the borders.

(Photo from University of Indianapolis/Guy Housewright)