Photo– Malcolm X Jazz Festival in Oakland on May 18th. Courtesy of Akubundu Amazu.
May 18 marked Haitian Flag Day, commemorating the day in 1803 when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence as the goal at the historic people’s congress in Akaye and created the Haitian flag. Flag Day signifies Haitian sovereignty and commemorates ancestors and other loved ones who have died fighting for freedom. With the people’s tremendous victory six months later, the country’s native name – Ayiti was restored.
The Haiti Action Committee called for an International Day of Solidarity with Haiti on May 18th to protest the impending arrival in Haiti of more foreign occupation troops. We send a salute and heartfelt thanks to the many individuals and organizations who participated in this Day of Solidarity. From Atlanta to Philadelphia to Guyana, Belize and Los Angeles, from Santa Rosa to Oakland to San Francisco in the California Bay Area, solidarity activists turned out to demand an end to US/UN intervention in Haiti. Our great respect goes to revered Guyanese elder Eusi Kwayana, now 99 years old, for his 24-hour hunger strike in solidarity with Haiti and Palestine. Thanks to the many organizations who endorsed the call to action, who helped spread the word and for their expressions of solidarity with the Haitian people’s struggle for liberation, including the Eastside Arts Alliance for inviting HAC co-founder Pierre Labossiere to speak about Haiti at the Malcolm X Jazz Festival in Oakland. For further information and more photos, see the Haiti Action Committee facebook page.
These solidarity actions amplify the people’s resistance in Haiti to US-backed terror and repression. We call public attention to the courageous demonstrations by the Haitian people. We honor the memory of Karl Udson Azor, a Haitian medical student. Following Haitian Flag Day in 2023, Azor publicly took off his shirt and shoes and laid them alongside a Haitian flag on the steps of the Monument of the Heroes of Vèrtières in Cap-Haitien, erected to the last battle of Haitian independence. Azor handed out his money to passing strangers, then sat down, doused himself with gasoline, and burned himself to death in protest over the ongoing destruction of Haiti, as reported in the Haitian media.
The root cause of the current crisis in Haiti goes back to the U.S.-orchestrated 2004 coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was elected in 2000 by a huge majority in a free and fair election. Aristide’s goal was to raise Haitians from a condition of misery to “poverty with dignity” through government policy to support the vast majority of Haitians, not transnational capital and Haiti’s ruling elite. His government constructed schools, health care centers and a hospital, and mapped Haiti’s vast natural resources, committing itself to use them in service to the Haitian people. He also demanded that France repay $21+ billion dollars as restitution for money extorted by France from 1826-1947 as “reparations” to the French enslavers for “lost property.”
The coup brought with it a UN occupation force led by Brazil that ushered in a period of extreme repression, cholera, massacres, rapes, and rigged elections, and in 2011 brought to power Michel Martelly and his fascist PHTK party, which controlled executive power through a series of rigged elections and terror. PHTK collaborated and coordinated activities with the Haitian police, the army, and the paramilitary death squads that have created what Haitians call a hell on earth in Haiti. During the beginning of 2024 alone, more than 1500 Haitians have been killed as a result of paramilitary violence. Journalists, clergy, peasant-farmers, students, workers, market women vendors, and others raising their voices in protest have been met with beatings, incarceration, rape, assassinations and mass killings.
Now, once again, the US and the UN are pushing for a new foreign invasion, this time fronted by troops from Kenya, Benin and the Caribbean. Contractors are already being flown into Haiti to construct a base for the foreign troops. The Biden Administration is providing $300 million for the invasion, including weapons and equipment in the form of 80 humvees, sniper rifles, riot control gear and more. The notoriously repressive Kenyan police are expected to arrive in Haiti any day now.
In opposition to the deployment of Kenyan police in Haiti, distinguished Kenyan author, playwright and social activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote “An Open Letter to William Ruto, the President of Kenya, first published on May 30th in PM News Nigeria. The letter criticizes Ruto’s recent visit to the White House and Kenya’s collaboration with the US-headed military invasion and continued foreign occupation of Haiti.
Without a trace of irony, the same foreign powers responsible for the disastrous state of affairs in Haiti are asking Haitians to believe that more foreign intervention masked by a UN Security Council resolution will resolve the crisis.
Haitian grassroots organizations have long demanded a people’s transitional government composed of honest and democratic individuals and organizations, but the US has corrupted the process and seen to it that this transitional council is composed almost entirely of people loyal to US interests. While the Fanmi Lavalas Party of President Aristide is participating in this council, as one of the few democratic forces represented there, it is relying on grassroots people power to create fundamental and lasting change.
As the U.S. organizes a new invasion and as the paramilitary death squads continue to unleash terror, we demand:
+ Stop using US tax dollars to fund the brutal Haitian police and affiliated death squads
+ Stop the flow of weapons from the US to death squads in Haiti
+ No more foreign intervention – End the occupation
+ Stop attacking and deporting Haitian refugees
+ Sovereignty and self-determination for Haiti
For an excellent update on the current situation, please listen to Haiti Action Committee co-founders Pierre Labossiere and Robert Roth on Pacifica/KPFA’s Flashpoints – https://kpfa.org/archives/2024/5/21/ – scroll down to Flashpoints at 5 pm.
For more information on how to directly support Haiti’s grassroots movement, go to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund.
With likely findings of war crimes and genocide by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel; and arrest warrants against two members of the Israeli war cabinet by the International Criminal Court (ICC), it may be time to consider the possible liabilities of the state and individual parties that have aided and abetted Israel in its war on Gaza. What are the governing laws? How have the international legal institutions addressed complicity in other cases of genocide? Could the complicity provisions apply to the United States and its leaders for assisting Israel in a war on Gaza that has cost so many thousands of civilian lives?
The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as including the killing (“with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”) members of a “national, ethnical…or religious group.” The crime includes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The ICJ’s interim judgment of last January in South Africa’s case against Israel held that the claim of genocide in Gaza was “plausible.” While the genocide law rests on “intent,” complicity in genocide has no such requirement. Article IV of the Genocide Convention provides that “persons committing genocide’ (or complicity in genocide) shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.”
The ICC prosecutor is now seeking arrest warrants for two members of the Israel war cabinet who have allegedly committed war crimes in the Gaza war. Both the ICC and the ICJ make complicity in genocide a crime under international law. The ICC has jurisdiction over individuals, while the ICJ can accept cases against both individuals and states.
U.S. law also condemns genocide. In U.S. Code Section 1091 (“Basic Offense”) there is language similar to the Genocide Convention’s definition of genocide. Although there is no reference to “complicity,” the law contains a section entitled “Incitement Offence.” It provides that “whoever directly and publicly incites another” to commit a genocide offense “shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”
The Genocide Convention, Article V requires the Contracting Parties to “provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide.” Article VIII allows “Any contracting party” to “call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action” against states under the UN Charter “as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide….”
How has the issue of complicity been dealt with in other genocide cases? The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted many individuals for complicity in the 1994 genocide, including government officials and military officers. Following the Bosnian genocide of 1992-1995, a number of senior political and military leaders were convicted of complicity in genocide. The ICJ held Serbia responsible for failure to prevent the Bosnian genocide. The Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979 resulted in the conviction of senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime.
Individuals convicted of complicity in genocide or related cases have included top leaders. For example, former Liberian President Charles Taylor was convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone for aiding and abetting war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not specifically genocide. Genocide requires proof of a specific discriminatory intent, while crimes against humanity require only proof of a general intent to attack a civilian population.
In the ICJ case of The Gambia v. Myanmar,a state-to-state claim, the Court dismissed all of Myanmar’s defenses, allowing the case to proceed to the merits stage. The question now is whether Myanmar violated the Genocide Convention in its treatment of the Rohingya people. While the case is still ongoing, the Court has reaffirmed the principle that all states have a common interest in the prevention and punishment of genocide and that any state can bring a case against another state for alleged violations of the Genocide Convention.
In March 2024, Nicaragua instituted ICJ proceedings for provisional measures against Germany for complicity in genocide through its arms sales to Israel for its war in Gaza. A month later the Court ruled against Nicaragua, finding that the legal conditions for such measures were not met. Nevertheless, the case shows the state parties that are not directly affected by the alleged harm can institute cases before the Court. The ability of such parties to stand before the Court is based on their right to act in the common interest.
In the United States, President Biden and other administration officials are named in an ongoing domestic lawsuit by the Center for Constitutional Rights for their alleged complicity in the Israeli-led genocide in Gaza. A federal district court in California dismissed the suit on technical grounds but did not rule on the merits. The case is now being appealed to a federal court of appeals. As Dr. William A. Schabas, a leading scholar of human rights law pointed out, U.S. complicity in the war on Gaza “has many parallels” with the Serbian government’s complicity in the Srebrenica massacre.
In the days and months following the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel, U.S. President Joe Biden (in close collaboration with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin) pledged ongoing arms aid for Israel’s war effort. The IDF has used the regular provision of U.S. bombs and missiles to level buildings and kill Palestinian civilians (mostly women and children). Although Biden has often called for more humanitarian aid and urged Israel to reduce the intensity of its attacks on population centers, he has continued to supply Israel with lethal weapons.
When the time comes for accountability, Biden, Blinken and Austin could find themselves charged with complicity to genocide under the ICC, the ICJ and/or U.S. federal jurisdiction.
You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet. That should be a commonplace idea. And that inevitably means facing up to the necessity of putting an end to capitalism in favor of an economic system of rationality, sustainability and equity for all the world’s peoples.
It can’t be said too many times that the concept of “green capitalism” is a chimera. Unfortunately, belief in that chimera is not limited to the world’s center-left political parties; it extends to the world’s Green parties. Various “Green New Deal” programs have been floated in recent years, generally revolving around a massive buildout of renewable-energy infrastructure and strengthening the social safety net. On their own, there is no rational argument that such programs, should they materialize, would not provide some benefits. But how transformative are such programs?
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Since 1897, Zionism has been the religious and political impetus behind what is now the nation-state of Israel, which, like the United States, is settled on the lives, land, and cultures of millions of Indigenous peoples. Although today’s Israel began as a refuge for European Jews fleeing the Holocaust, Zionism long ago broke out of its moral constraints to become a formidable geopolitical force that demands study. Which is why, in late 2023 America, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism was created. And why, because the Institute is fundamentally antizionist, it’s under attack for antisemitism.
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Whoops, they did it again. Only this time it was no “tragic mistake.” There were no apologies. Indeed, the IDF claimed the bombing was a “precision strike.” The target? An UNRWA school in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in central Gaza, which was being used as a shelter for thousands of displaced Palestinian families. The victims: at least 40 killed, 14 of them children and 9 women. Another 75 were wounded, including 23 children and 18 women. The weapon? A US-made GBU 39, the same bombs used to kill 45 people at the Tel al-Sultan tent encampment outside Rafah last week.
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As we enter the eighth month of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, the flow of weapons to Israel continues from the United States, Germany, Canada, Italy, Australia, and other Western countries. Even as some governments claim to have halted transfers or to not be sending weapons at all, they continue to provide licences or parts and components that are instrumental to the continuing onslaught. As people are now being pulled from the rubble in Rafah, in a strip of land already known as the world’s “largest open-air prison,” in a country and people bordered and confined by a violent settler colonial state, the relationships between the profiteers of the military-industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the border industrial complex come starkly into focus. And in the demands of the student encampments, the connections of these structures of state violence to universities becomes clear as well.
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Forgotten in the mainstream media’s coverage of the Israeli assault on Gaza—if it was ever known by the correspondents—is the long history of Netanyahu and Likud in the creation and support of Hamas. Despite the flood of reports and commentaries in the mainstream media no mention is ever made of Israeli’s complicity in creating and […]
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On Tuesday, Stacy Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the State Department, resigned in protest, after charging that Biden’s State Department falsified a report on whether Israel was restricting the flow of humanitarian goods into Gaza. Gilbert had been one of the Department’s experts helping to assemble the NSM-20 report to Congress assessing Israel’s compliance with US law in its military operations in Gaza. But she charges the report was removed from the experts before it was completed and its conclusions adulterated by the leadership of the department.
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As always when a representative of the right wing tells you he or she is campaigning to bring “freedom,” be afraid. Very afraid. For “freedom” in these cases means freedom for the richest financiers and industrialists to do whatever they want.
For them, “Freedom” is for capital, not for human beings without capital to invest. Today’s exhibit is the offensive against working people that is taking place in Argentina, where the new extreme right president, Javier Milei, is determined to see how far capitalist ideology can be pushed. So far, Argentines have pushed back but Milei, cheered on by domestic and international big business leaders, is nothing if not determined to ram through his austerity packages. And he has shown no inclination to allow mere democracy to stand in his way.
Nonetheless, there is no surprise here. President Milei ran on a program of extreme austerity, brandishing a chainsaw at his election rallies. Unfortunately, enough Argentines bought his siren songs, or were desperate enough to try anything given the country’s punishing inflation, to elect him, ending a one-term period in executive office by the ordinarily dominant Peronists. Alas, doing something new for the sake of doing something new, when it is aimed at you, rarely works. And here there is actually nothing new. President Milei simply promoted standard hard right ideology, albeit promoting it with unusual vigor. Snake oil is snake oil, as Argentine working people are already finding out.
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From The New York Post to The Wall Street Journal, right-wing pundits have lined up to malign students across the United States who have rightfully criticized their schools for supporting the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. As the genocide continues to unfold — claiming the lives of 35,562 Palestinians, including 15,000 children, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing — students, faculty and staff have brought overdue scrutiny to the complicity of their universities, whose endowments are altogether valued at more than $839 billion per the National Association of College and University Business Officers and invested extensively in the Israeli economy, including weapons manufacturers profiting directly from Palestinian death. Rather than accept that students oppose their tuition dollars being spent to kill Palestinians, right-wing pundits have instead accused them of being “paid protesters” in the employ of philanthropist George Soros.
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This was the week of rebukes for Israel: On Monday, the ICC requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, on Wednesday three European nations, Ireland, Spain and Norway, recognized Palestinian statehood and on Friday the ICJ ordered Israel to halt its military operations in Rafah, open the border crossings for humanitarian aid and allow international investigators into Gaza. Has the international community finally run out of patience with Israeli intransigence?
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When I was a young child, I would sometimes stay a weekend in the summer holidays with my cousins – who were of a similar age – on their farm. I grew up in north London: all concrete and cars, and fumes and arcades, and long black railings and grey school playgrounds, and rising tower blocks […]
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I am beyond tired of writing and reading about Trump, his minions Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, and the evils they plan to inflict upon the world. Reading or watching the news is a daily exercise in dread, self-torment, and exhaustion. The return of spring notwithstanding, things are grim these days. The Trumpist menace seems of a piece with a far-right axis on the march in India, Russia, Israel, China, and Hungary. Of course, it’s futile to wring one’s hands and lament Trumpian aspirations to authoritarianism without taking concrete action to prevent them. Yet despite nearly eight years of experience confronting the Trumpian specter, the answer to the traditional, eminently practical leftist question “What is to be done?” remains elusive, and the sense of burnout and political defeat—with the concomitant, complicated welter of emotions —is a specter difficult to vanquish.
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Ilan Pappé is 70 years old. He’s Jewish. His parents fled persecution in Hitler’s Germany. He’s an Israeli and served in the IDF. He hasn’t been radicalized by TikTok. He is, in fact, one of Israel’s most celebrated historians. None of that stopped Pappé from being detained by Biden’s TSA in Detroit, interrogated by the agents from the Department of Homeland Security about whether he’s a supporter of Hamas, and having his phone data copied. This crackdown isn’t about protecting Jews or Israelis or preserving the exceptional nature of the Holocaust.
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The encampments have gone. Tall metal riot fences ring USC. Underpaid security hovers nervously at metal detectors. They paw through your bag when you enter, past the receipts, gum, phone, AirPods, and the overdue library book you never even opened. They’re searching for something. A tent? A Palestinian flag? A keffiyeh? A signed declaration of your commitment against genocide? What they are searching for is unclear, and it’s apparent they themselves don’t even know. The result is not the point; the display is. Like most college campuses, USC is invested in the performative, the circus act in all its summer and acrobatics and glory, something to distract us, for the moment, from the mundanity of reality. The mundanity that college campuses are really just another business: meaningless, archaic, and invested only in its commodification and profit.
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China has considerable appeal in the Pacific as it offers market and donation benefits that are unencumbered by the regulatory millstones of Western countries, which are also offering deals like Australia’s “Step Up” initiative and development aid, and the US “Pacific Partnership Strategy” on diplomatic engagement and security. These projects have bigger geopolitical agendas than aid projects and are mainly concerned with countering China and undermining Pacific Island autonomy by setting up a donor-recipient dynamic.
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By Friday, at least 110,000 Palestinians had been forced to flee Rafah, which is now under bombardment. Many of them have already been displaced two or three times. But all of them know nowhere is safe in Gaza now. There’s no refuge, no place free of bombs and tank shellings and sniper fire, no tent camp or temporary shelter with a reliable source of water or working toilets or beds or food, no mosque to pray in as death hovers all around.
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The student-led movement against the genocide in Gaza that is sweeping college campuses across the United States, has made “divestment” from Israel central to its demands. It’s what the “D” in BDS stands for—Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions—a Palestinian-led international and nonviolent means of holding Israel accountable for decades of colonization, occupation, and war.
Now, just as apartheid South Africa lost global prestige after U.S. university students successfully forced many universities to financially divest from the then-pariah state, there appears to be some momentum toward a parallel impact on Israel. The administration of the prestigious Brown University is the latest to have agreed to explore divestment from Israel in response to student demands.
Divestment can mean different things depending on the nature of the institution’s financial ties. But the idea behind it is simple: It means removing all financial ties, such as withdrawing investments, and therefore ending direct complicity in criminal and unjust actions. American institutions of higher learning are economic powerhouses with massive endowments, and ultimately can be described as “big businesses.” Many of them use their funds to directly or indirectly invest in Israel. Harvard University, for example, was found in 2020 to have invested nearly $200 million of its $40 billion endowment in companies with ties to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
While the latest wave of student-led encampments is new in its scope, motivated especially by the horrors of Israel’s latest wave of mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza, the student demands for divestment are not new. They are built on a decades-long foundation for protest constructed by an international solidarity movement in support of Palestinian liberation.
The BDS movement, launched by Palestinian unions and other civil society institutions in 2005, explains on its website that “Israel is only able to maintain its oppressive regime over the Palestinian people and avoid accountability for its genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip because of international state, corporate and institutional complicity.”
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), with a long history of organized and coordinated boycott and divestment campaigns, has crafted helpful guidelines on how to divest, and has offered context for such efforts: “[W]e recognize that the Israeli occupation is not the only illegal occupation in the world, although it is the longest and deadliest one.” Moreover, according to AFSC, “It is also the only place in the world from which a call was issued by the occupied people to the international community to use economic activism tools such as boycott and divestment to help end the occupation.”
Columbia University in New York, an epicenter of the current student-led campus actions, has a history of using divestment as a tool of protest that far predates the encampment launched by students on April 17. Although many media outlets cite Columbia’s 1968 sit-ins against the Vietnam War as a parallel, Omar Barghouti, Tanaquil Jones, and Barbara Ransby wrote in The Guardian, that the university’s 1985 anti-apartheid student sit-ins are even more relevant to today’s protest. The Coalition for a Free South Africa successfully pushed Columbia University to divest from apartheid South Africa. Nearly three decades later, a campaign called Columbia Prison Divest also forced the university to pull investments from for-profit prison companies.
And, four years ago, Columbia’s undergraduate school, called Columbia College, passed a historic student vote calling for divestment from Israel. The list of campus divestment-related victories specific to Israel is surprisingly long. Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, the Associated Press called student-led divestment demands against Israel “increasingly commonplace on many American college campuses.”
What’s different today is that the pace of Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians has significantly ramped up and is a bona fide genocide-in-progress, so much so that Israeli officials fear the International Criminal Court could issue arrest warrants against them. The official figures of Israel’s victims in Gaza since last October number more than 34,000, with more than 40 percent of those being children. Israel has decimated so much of Gaza that authorities are unable to keep track of the dead, meaning the death toll is likely even higher.
Young people, including Jewish students, are deeply moved by Israel’s savagery and the resulting Palestinian suffering. They are closely monitoring the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza on social media, forming digital ties with Palestinians, and grieving over the deaths of Gaza’s children. It’s only natural that they are pouring their rage toward the institutions they have the most proximity to and power over: The administrations of the schools where they pay exorbitant fees to attend, and that have invested in or partnered with Israel.
Until the tide fully turns against Israel for being an oppressive apartheid state, educational institutions will embrace it as a matter of pride. Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Central Florida, and University of Michigan are examples of schools that tout their collaborations with Israeli institutions. And there are Israeli efforts specifically aimed at legitimizing the colonial state at U.S. universities through donations of “Israel bonds.”
Whether or not calls for divestment by the current student-led movement and the long-standing BDS movement succeed or have a concrete result, the symbolic impact of labeling Israel’s actions as immoral can have a ripple effect, potentially discouraging schools from taking on such a controversial affiliation. The fact that students at Brown University, Northwestern University, and the University of Minnesota have successfully forced their schools’ administrations to vote on divesting from Israel is a major step toward delegitimizing Israel. Smaller colleges such as the Seattle-based Evergreen State College are also following suit.
Detractors of divestment say the efforts will have little effect on Israel. Others say they are antisemitic even though the initiatives are aimed at the Israeli state and institutions complicit in apartheid and genocide, not against Jewish individuals. Indeed, the current student movements in solidarity with Palestinians have the support and participation of many justice-seeking Jewish groups and individuals.
Minnesota’s congressional representative Ilhan Omar put it best in 2019 when the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the BDS movement. She said, “We should condemn in the strongest terms violence that perpetuates the occupation, whether it is perpetuated by Israel, Hamas or individuals… But if we are going to condemn violent means of resisting the occupation, we cannot also condemn nonviolent means.”
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
In November of last year, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) over its illegal approval of a wastewater disposal pipeline that would service STAMP. According to the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, the USFWS approved the Genesee County Economic Development Center’s (GCEDC) construction of the 9.5-mile pipeline without conducting a sufficient environmental review and without a government-to-government consultation with the Nation—in direct violation of their sovereign rights.
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Photo: Student protest against BlackRock Vice Chairman and then Pitzer Trustee Robert Fairbairn, on the wall of a Pitzer College dorm in Fall 2019. | Donnie Denome – The Student Life.
On April 1, the administration of Pitzer College in Claremont, California, outside of Los Angeles, announced that it would be suspending its student exchange program with the University of Haifa in Israel. The following day, the Dean of Faculty’s Office claimed in a statement that the decision to suspend the program did not “reflect an academic boycott,” but “lack of enrollments for at least five years, exchange imbalance, or curricular overlap.” The statement could have passed for a belated April Fool’s Day joke, seeing as how students and faculty at Pitzer and other schools belonging to the consortium of Claremont Colleges had been demanding their institutions sever ties with the Israeli economy and academia due to the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has killed at least 34,488 Palestinians, including 14,500 children and 8,400 women, according to Al Jazeera at the time of this writing.
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Had she not been murdered in Rafah protecting Palestinian homes from demolition, Rachel Corrie could have become the mother of today’s protesters on US campuses. They’re certainly the inheritors of her fierce moral spirit and unflinching courage…
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California Highway Patrol riot squads firing “rubber” bullets and tear gas at antiwar students on the campus of UCLA.
America, why are your libraries full of tears?
– Allen Ginsburg, “America”
+ As America’s liberal elites declare open warfare on their own kids, it’s easy to see why they’ve shown no empathy at all for the murdered, maimed and orphaned children of Gaza. Back-of-the-head shots to 8-year-olds seem like a legitimate thing to protest in about the most vociferous way possible…But, as Dylan once sang, maybe I’m too sensitive or else I’m getting soft.
+ Here’s the political background to the police raids against antiwar students on campuses across the country this week, violent crackdowns that have Joe Biden’s fingerprints all over them: On Tuesday, Biden demonized the protesters as hate groups. On the same day 22 Democratic House members called for the students at Columbia to be cleared from the campus, this was followed by Chuck Schumer speaking on the floor of the Senate denouncing the occupation of Hind Hall as an act of terrorism. Then the NYPD did its vicious nightwork at Columbia and CCNY. On Wednesday morning, the Biden White House compared these brave students–from Columbia to UCLA, Indiana to Texas–to the white power tiki torch thugs at Charlottesville. On Thursday, Biden gave a speech that would have condemned the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, women’s movement, Native American Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, Stonewall, anti-apartheid movement, BLM and the labor movement he claims to venerate (not to mention the Boston Tea Party) as outside the American tradition of free speech. Biden is the author of the most repressive crime laws in the history of a nation whose statutes are full of repressive crime laws. He hasn’t changed. In fact, he’s gotten worse as his brain demyelinates and his grip on power becomes more and more tenuous.
+ In contrast to Biden’s reactionary blandishments of the antiwar movement, here are the words of the most successful progressive leader in the US today, Shawn Fain, head of the UAW:
The UAW will never support the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice. Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months. This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong. We call on the powers that be to release the students and employees who have been arrested, and if you can’t take the outcry, stop supporting the war.
+ Perhaps the UAW will now retract its premature endorsement of Biden? Unlikely, of course. The endorsement itself probably doesn’t matter much. Many of the UAW’s rank-and-file will still vote for Trump. The campaign money might. The endorsement lends Fain’s very clear statement even more weight. Fain’s statement is not going to change Biden’s mind. He’s encased himself in 50 years of pro-Israeli political concrete. But it helps to undermine the disgusting narrative put out by the White House and top Democrats that the students are naive dupes of Hamas, justifying these brutal crackdowns.
+ The “naive” students at Columbia understand the historical context of their movement and the previous movements on their campus better than any of the administrators seeking to evict, suspend, expel & imprison them. It is why, despite the police raids, expulsions and arrests, they will win and their tormentors fall in disgrace.
+ Columbia University has an endowment of $13.6 billion and still charges students $60-70,000 a year to attend what has become an academic panopticon and debt trap, where every political statement is monitored, every threat to the ever-swelling endowment punished.
+ Doesn’t the White House have anyone who speaks Arabic on staff? Perhaps they didn’t hire any–that would be a Biden thing to do. Or perhaps they’ve all quit. Who could blame them, hearing the administration equate “intifada” with hate speech? “Intifada” means “shaking off,” as in a protest or uprising, the kind of public action allegedly protected by the Constitution. In Arabic, the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war protests, the women’s movement, the OWS protests, and the BLM protests were all called “intifadas,” as was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.This Intifada will likely spell the end of the Biden presidency without a single stone being thrown.
+ The Biden administration is not only incapable (more likely unwilling) of practicing peace-seeking diplomacy in Gaza or Ukraine, but here at home, as riot police batter unarmed students from coast to coast, in raids the White House’s own belligerent and bigoted statements instigated and justified. It’s a dereliction of the duties of his office and should be as impeachable an offense as any malfeasance Trump engaged in.
+ In 1970, Richard Nixon famously made a trip to the Lincoln Memorial to actually talk with anti-war protesters for more than two hours. Biden sneers at them, encourages the liberal press to smear them and university presidents to send in riot squads to clear them off campus…
+ Columbia student organizer Jon Ben-Menachem: “Joe Biden should immediately stop making statements which manufacture consent for threats to the physical safety of American students.”
+ One of the Columbia trustees that Baroness Shafik “consulted” with before “inviting” the NYPD Riot Squad to invade campus, break into Hind Hall and arrest the students in her care was Jeh Johnson, Obama’s former director of Homeland Security who now sits on the board of Lockheed. Johnson once claimed that Martin Luther King, Jr. would have supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
+ For nearly two days, the NYPD covered up the fact that one of their officers had fired a gun inside Hind Hall, while they were arresting students. Ultimately, the shooting was only revealed by the New York City DA’s office. If you call in the NYPD, you can pretty much guarantee there will be bang-bang…Is there any doubt now that the NYPD raid did more damage to the buildings at Columbia than the students? The people who invited these cops on their campus should never be guardians of students again.
+ Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich: “We must obliterate Rafah, Deir al-Balah, and Nuseirat. The memory of the Amalekites must be erased. No partial destruction will suffice; only absolute and complete devastation.” While chastizing college students for calling their campaign an “intifada,” Biden is shipping Israel the weapons to carry out Smotrich’s putsch into Rafah…
+ Yousef Munayyer: “No one asks how Palestinian students are supposed to “feel safe” at institutions who invest in and profit off of the murder of their relatives.”
+ Prem Thakker: “The dilemma for American college students is that their tax and tuition dollars are helping fund a plausible genocide; if they protest that fact, their tax and tuition dollars are then used to beat and arrest them & their teachers.”
+ Daniela Gabor: “Minouche Shafik wrote a 2021 book – ‘What We Owe Each )ther’ – where she proposes a reset of the social contract to improve intergenerational fairness. Then she went to Columbia and brought a notoriously violent police force into that social contract.”
+ John Fetterman, the oafish senator from Pennsylvania, went from being a quirky political clown to Pennywise, the clown from Stephen King’s “It”: “The protesters at Columbia demonstrated that there are two factions of the protesters–there’s the pro-Hamas and then there’s the really pro-Hamas.”
+ The great jazz pianist Vijay Iyer: “Gen Z has agitated for action on gun control, climate change, reproductive justice, trans rights, voting rights, racial justice, immigrant rights, reducing police violence, and stopping genocide. Elders have failed them at literally every turn.”
+ Judith Butler: “If calling for an end of genocide is understood as making a Jewish student feel unsafe, then the safety of the situation has been oddly co-opted by that particular Jewish student. Palestinians are the ones in need of safety [from genocide].”
+ At Dartmouth, the police threw to the ground Professor Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old head of the university’s Jewish Studies program.
+ Raphael Orleck on the bodyslamming arrest of the chair of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies program, Annelise Orleck: “That’s my fucking mom—-she’s okay now and bailing out the students who got arrested. I’m so proud.” Orleck has been banned from the Dartmouth campus, where she’s taught for 34 years, for the next six months for trying to protect her students from NH riot police. Orleck has been banned from the Dartmouth campus, where she’s taught for 34 years, for the next six months for trying to protect her students from riot police.
+ The pro-Israel fanatics who attacked UCLA students Tuesday night with clubs and bottle rockets, as campus security cowered inside a building like deputies of the Ulvade police force, shouted out it’s time for a “Second Nakba!” Don’t wait for Biden or CNN to condemn this eliminationist rhetoric and violence.
+ Around 3:30 on Weds., morning, the pro-Israel mobs attacked four student journalists for the Daily Bruin on the campus of UCLA. The gang surrounded the Bruin reporters, including editor Catherine Hamilton, sprayed them with mace, pointed laser lights at their faces and verbally harassed them. Hamilton said she was punched repeatedly in the chest and upper abdomen as she tried to break free. Another student journalist was shoved to the ground, beaten and repeatedly kicked. “We expected to be harassed by counter-protestors,” Hamilton said. “I truly didn’t expect to be directly attacked.”
+ Momma, we’ve found the “outside agitators”… The Daily Beast reports that before the violent attack on anti-war demonstrators at UCLA, Jessica Seinfeld (wife of the comedian) and Bill Ackman (billionaire husband of the plagiarist Neri Oxman) gave thousands of dollars for a pro-Israel demonstration on campus.
+ UCLA professor Danielle Carr: “It’s hard to overstate the degree of outrage & betrayal on behalf of all the faculty now, especially after what happened last night, after about 200 very violent pro-Israel protesters descended on the camp and were shooting fireworks and acting real violent. And it took the university several hours to respond and secure the students’ safety. The irony that in the name of student safety the encampment will be facing a militarised police invasion tonight, probably including tear gas, it’s just hard to say fully how disgusted many of the faculty are finding this.”
+ As Professor Carr predicted, the day after the pro-Israel mob assaulted UCLA students and faculty, the California Highway Patrol arrived on campus, not to protect the students from “outside” assailants, but to open fire on them with tear gas and rubber bullets…
+ The Los Angeles Public Defenders’ Union called the UCLA arrests “shameful and a complete failure of leadership”. President Garrett Miller said they are ready to “represent every person facing charges.”
+ There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Joe…?
Biden: Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It is against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations, none of this is a peaceful protest. pic.twitter.com/0Nkttggsy4
+ From Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”:
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
+ Biden on the George Floyd protests: “We will not allow any President to quiet our voice. We won’t let those who see this as an opportunity to sow chaos throw up a smokescreen to distract us from the very real and legitimate grievances at the heart of these protests.” But that was then under Him, this is now under Me…
+ Contrary to Biden’s deplorable speech denouncing the student anti-war demonstrations as violent, a new report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) found that 99% of campus protests over Palestine at US colleges have been peaceful.
+ Biden received five draft deferments during the Vietnam War but, like Trump, never took part in the student movement to end the genocidal war in Southeast Asia. He was happy for others–poor whites, Hispanics and Blacks–to serve, kill and die in his place. No surprise he condemns the students protesting to end his wars.
+ In his memoir, Promises to Keep, Biden admitted he “never saw the war as a great moral issue.” While enjoying his draft deferment to attend Syracuse University, he described being irritated by the anti-war protests on campus. His irritation rose to fury after SDS occupied the chancellor’s office and hung banners out the window of the Administration Building. “They were taking over the building,” Biden wrote, “and we looked up and said, ‘Look at those assholes.’ That’s how far apart from the antiwar movement I was.”
+ The bike lock the NYPD held up as proof that “outside agitators” were behind the occupation of Hind Hall is available for sale on campus via Columbia’s Public Safety department under their “Crime Prevention Discount Bike, Locker and Laptop Lock Program”.
+ Chris by Bike: “Cops don’t know this is a bike lock because they’ve never investigated a bike theft in their lives.”
+ Ralph Nader: “The enforcer president of Columbia University— Minouche Shafik—is one of the wealthiest people in America. As president, she makes over $2000 an hour every weekday. In three days, she makes more than many blue-collar workers at Columbia make in a year.”
+ Professor Sami Schalk, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “At the hospital, the nurse took photos ‘in case you want to file a report.’ Report to whom? The very people who strangled me at work in broad daylight with cameras rolling? Those people?”
+ During a week of ever-escalating assaults on students and faculty, Jill Biden is hosting the first ever “Teachers of the Year” State Dinner at the White House. Some of the best won’t be there because they’re in jail, in the hospital or trying to arrange bail for their incarcerated pupils…
+ Ari Fleischer was better at his job and he was one of the worst hired liars I’ve ever seen. To compare the racist violent mob at Charlottesville to students on campuses large and small across the US is just repulsive at a personal level and self-destructive on a political one.
The evil that would have to be in your heart to compare campus protests against a US supported mass murder to white supremacists Charlottesville. Jeane Pierre underscores the false connection to antisemitism again at the end of her comments sanctioning violence against students pic.twitter.com/9CplA0MLIy
+ On May 6th, the Pulitzer Prizes are scheduled to be announced at Columbia University. On Wednesday., night student journalists at Columbia, many of them reporting from inside Pulitzer Hall, were threatened with arrest if they moved across their own campus to report on a police raid targeting their fellow students and faculty. They won’t win any Pulitzers, but their reporting has been far more vivid, informative and less biased than the elite media the administration and NYPD allowed on university grounds.
+ One of the lies the Adams administration used to justify the paramilitary raids on Columbia was that “a wife of a known terrorist” was inside Hind Hall with the protesters. NYC media ran with this obvious lie. This morning Deputy Police Commissioner Rebecca Weiner said the woman wasn’t in Hind Hall, wasn’t part of the protests, but had been seen on campus last week and that they “have no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing on her part.”
+ The woman Adams slanderously smeared was Nahla al-Arian wife of Sami-al Arian, the former professor of computer engineering at South Florida (and CounterPunch contributor), who was never convicted of a crime by a jury but pled to one count after a mistrial, then was wrongly held under house arrest for refusing to testify in a federal case…the charges were later dismissed. Adams falsely Sami al-Arian was “arrested for and convicted for terrorism on a federal level” and implied that Nahla, a retired elementary school teacher, had somehow helped to train the students in civil disobedience. In fact, she was in NYC with her two daughters Laila and Lama, both journalists, stopped by the encampment for about 20 minutes and, according to her daughter Lama, had some hummus and left because she was tired. Nahla called the Columbia students “beautiful and busy.”
+ “The whole thing is a distraction because they are very scared that the young Americans are aware for the first time of what’s going on in Palestine,” Nahla Al-Arian said. “They are the ones who influenced me. They are the ones who gave me hope that at last the Palestinian people can get some justice. I sat and I felt happy to see those students fighting for justice for the oppressed people in Palestine.”
+ According to Lama, one of the best young documentary filmmakers around, her mother found out this week that more than 200 of her relatives have been killed in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
+ Anyone who wants to know more about the bogus case against Sami Al-Arianand the decades-long harassment of his family should watch the documentary, The USA v. Al-Arian, which shows how in the post-9/11 mass hysteria the Patriot Act was used against a university professor for merely knowing someone who was a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad years earlier.
+ Two days after the raid, Adams was still being pushed to name how many “outside agitators” had been arrested by the NYPD. Adams had no answers, because there weren’t any and shrugged off the questions, saying: “I don’t think that matters…One professor poisoning a classroom of students is just as bad as 50.”
+ A year ago, NYC Mayor Eric Adams vowed to bring what he’s learned from Israeli Police to the NYPD. That rare promise kept…
+ Adams justifying the police raids: “These are our children and we can’t allow them to be radicalized.” Adams and the Democrats have done more damage to academic freedom than Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo.
+ In Eric Adams, the people of NYC must endure the hybridization of the lies of a politician with the lies of an NYPD cop.
+ The real “outside agitators” on the campuses of Columbia, NYU, and CCNY were the police themselves. (For example, less than half of all NYPD officers live in NYC and only 25% of LAPD officers live in Los Angeles.)
+ Dana Bash’s first husband, Jeremy Bash, was chief of staff of the CIA (2009-2011) and later chief of staff of the Pentagon, under Obama. Daughter of an ABCNews producer, she is a creature of DC.Raised there. Went to GW, then right to work for CNN, which she’s never left.
+ Remember months ago, when Bash scolded Rep. Pramila Jayapal for having the audacity to voice her concern about 15,000 (at that time) Palestinians killed by Israel by saying: “You don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women.” (They do, as the State Department’s Country Report on Israel recently confirmed.) The IDF doesn’t even have to vet Bash’s stories, they come out fully synched with the Israeli theme of the day.
+ On the very day the Biden administration condemned Russia’s use of choking gas in Ukraine, it applauded police raids on campuses across the US where riot cops drenched non-violent students in tear gas who were protesting a genocidal war in Gaza, where Israel has repeatedly used, in violation of international law, US-made white phosphorous munitions.
+ Someone in the Biden campaign should take notice of this, but apparently they’ve written off anyone under 30 (along with anyone who has a conscience.)
+ Six faculty members from Washington University in Missouri — four of whom were arrested at Saturday’s protest — are not only banned from campus, but are forbidden from speaking with Wash U staff and students even in off-campus settings.
+ The windbags who bellow the most bombastically about the sanctity of the Constitution are almost always shown to know almost nothing about it. I give you the senator from Tennessee…
+ Melanie Newport: “Hearing that the students in our UConn campus jail are not being fed. Also we have a campus jail.”
+ How will they divide the spoils?Now, on to the University of Chicago!
+ Columbia Encampment response to the use of police force and the refusal of divestment: “If the University does not come forward with real, concrete proposals that address our demands, we will have no choice but to escalate the intensity of protest on campus.”
+ Marisa Kabas: “For years conservatives derided college kids as liberal snowflakes… Now that their power is clear, universities are trying to shut them down, and cops are beating the shit out of them. You don’t beat the shit out of snowflakes.”
+ If a video emerged of Joe Biden sticking a lit cherry bomb up Commander the German Shepherd’s ass, Aaron Rupar would find some way to defend it and still excoriate the disgusting Kristi Noem for shooting the family puppy Cricket in a South Dakota gravel pit…
+ Columbia doctoral candidate Rachel H H: “Insane that Columbia has locked down campus to everyone. No research, no books, no labs. No libraries, no medical services appointments, no studio or practice space. No lectures, no concerts. Just the pure administrative university and its disciplinary power.”
+ In reply to a question from FoxNews about the campus protests,White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Department of Education will be involved in the investigations, suggesting that the Biden administration may be pursuing federal “hate crime” charges against student protestors
+ Before you take out that student loan, which you’ll be paying off until you get that first social security check when you’re 85, you might consider whether the school you choose allows snipers on campus…
+ Imagine the reaction from the White House, Congress and the US media if Putin had used these violent police tactics to suppress anti-Ukraine war protests on campuses in Russia.
+ Is there any doubt that USAID would be funding these student protests if they were happening in Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Brazil, Russia, Belarus, South Africa, Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, Colombia, Chile…?Russia, Belarus, South Africa, Syria, Iran, China, North Korea, Colombia, Chile…?
+ The country has lost its friggin’ mind…
+ According to a database compiled by the Appeal, nearly 2,000 people have been arrested at 72 campus protests this month. The fate of many of the students, some of whom face absurd charges like “hate crimes against law enforcement,” is in the hands of local prosecutors.
+ Move over NYC firefighters who raised the US flag over the still-smoking ruins of the World Trade Towers and your fallen comrades, you’ve been replaced by heroic NYPD riot cops beating up unarmed students to the soundtrack of Woody Friggin’ Guthrie…
+ More embarrassing than the US triumphalism after the invasion of Grenada…
+ Judith “Free Speech” Miller should be hiding her face for the rest of her life and afterlife…
+ This one’s for you, Rachel: The Evergreen State College has agreed to“divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian Territories.”.
+ Despite the police crackdowns (or perhaps as a solidarity response to them), the Palestinian solidarity & anti-war student actions have now spread to at least 154 college campuses in the US over the past two weeks…
+++
+ A new study in Nature: “Using an empirical approach… the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices.”
+ Temperatures every month between July and December of 2023 beat the prior record by at least 0.3C. And September shattered the previous record by 0.5C.
+ A UN labor agency report warns of the rising threat of excess heat, and climate change on the world’s workers. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that over 2.4 billion workers — more than 70% of the global workforce — are likely to face excessive heat as part of their jobs at some point, according to the most recent figures available, from 2020. That’s up from over 65% in 2000.
+ The two families (Ferrero and Mars) who own the biggest chocolate corporations have more wealth than the combined GDP of the two countries (Ghana and Ivory Coast), which supply the most cocoa beans.
+ In the last ten, severe storm outages increased by 74% compared with the prior decade. High winds, rains, winter storms, tornadoes and hurricanes, accounted for 80% of all power interruptions over the last 20 years.
+ In China, EV sales have quadrupled in four years. Chinese EVs now account for about two-thirds of all global EV sales.
+ Sixty corporations are responsible for half of the world’s plastic pollution, led by Phillip Morris, Danone, Nestlé, Pepsico and Coca-Cola.
+ Almost half of China’s major cities are sinking because of water extraction and the increasing weight of their rapid expansion. One in six are subsiding by more than 10mm per year.
+ Pollution levels near freeways are 3 to 4 times higher than neighborhoods farther away, leading to an increased risk of respiratory, cardiovascular and reproductive health problems. The effects of this pollution get worse as the traffic volume increases.
+ This has the flavor of a BP ad after Deepwater Horizon…The US is producing more oil (13 million barrels on average every day in 2023) and exporting more LNG than at any time in history.
+ Last year was by far the most destructive wildfire season on record in Canada. But the total burn area so far in 2024 is 20 times what it was by this time lie 2023.
+ Ten years after the Flint water crisis became public and 7 years after the city was ordered to replace the lead service it still hasn’t done so.
+ Florida’s coral reefs have experienced a 90 percent decline in the past 40 years, largely due to warming oceans.
+ The recent storms that flooded Dubai were made 40% more intense by climate change.
+ Taxing big fossil fuel firms could raise $900 billion for climate finance by 2030.
+ The rate of primary forest loss in Indonesia soared by 27% last year according to a World Resources Institute analysis of deforestation data.
+ According to Consumer Reports, climate change will cost a typical child born in 2024 at least around $500,000 over their lifetime—and possibly as much as $1 million—through a combination of cost-of-living increases and reduced earnings.
+ Since 1976, more than 4 billion solar panels have been manufactured worldwide and the cost per panel has declined by 96 percent.
+ US emissions declined by 3% last year, almost all of it in the power generation sector, as emissions continued to climb in the transportation, industrial and agricultural sectors.
+ Mashable: “The last time CO2 levels were as high as today, ocean waters drowned the lands where metropolises like Houston, Miami, and New York City now exist.”
+ A new report from the International Energy Agency forecasts that by 2030 1 in 3 cars in China is expected to be electric, while only 1 in 5 in USA/Europe.
+ Our friends at the Alliance for the Wild Rockies are running this ad on the bison slaughter outside Yellowstone, which is really pissing off all the right people. Pass it around to help them piss off more…
+++
+ Corrections officers in NY’s Broome County Jail assure pretrial detainees will be paid for their labor. However once assigned a job, they receive no compensation and are forced to work under threat of disciplinary sanctions and solitary confinement.
+ NYC’s attorneys, who are required to report all settlements and judgments against the NYPD, failed to report $1.2 billion in payouts over a 10-year period–about half of the total payouts during that period.
+ Tough on crime, anti-bail reform DA Sandra Doorley got caught speeding (55 in a 35 mph zone), refused to pull over, called the police chief, and then berated the patrol officer.
Doorley: “Sorry, I’m the DA. I was going 55 coming home from work.”
Cop: “Fifty-five in a 35.”
Doorley: “I don’t really care.”
Then Doorley calls the police on her cell, demanding: “Can you please tell him to leave me alone?”
Then she handed the phone to the officer and went back into her garage to the door of the house, saying, dismissively: “This is ridiculous. Just go away.”
The cop orders her not to go into the house several times.
Cop: “Ma’am, come outside, you can’t just go inside, this is a traffic stop.”
Doorley: “Listen, I know the law better than you. Would you just leave? Would you just leave me alone?”
+ At least 94 people died after they were given sedatives and restrained by police from 2012 through 2021, according to findings by the AP in collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism. That’s nearly 10% of the more than 1,000 deaths identified during the investigation of people subdued by police in ways that are not supposed to be fatal. About half of the 94 who died were Black. Behind the racial disparity is a disputed medical condition called excited delirium, which fueled the rise of sedation outside hospitals. Critics say its purported symptoms, including “superhuman strength” and high pain tolerance, play into racist stereotypes about Black people and lead to biased decisions about who needs sedation.
+ The Miami mother of a mentally ill son who was fatally shot by a cop is jailed simply for sharing news stories about the cop, without comment, on Facebook.
+ Since 1991, homicide rates have fallen in New York City by 86% and in Los Angeles by 73%.
+ The last growth industry in America: “Florida is charging formerly incarcerated people $50 a day even if they’re no longer in prison. The “pay to stay” fee is based on the length of the original sentence, so even when they’re released they must keep paying for a prison bed they’re not using.”
+++
H5N1 virus. CDC/ Courtesy of Cynthia Goldsmith; Jacqueline Katz; Sherif R. Zaki.
+ There are reports out of Ranchi, India of 8 human H5N1 cases: 6 poultry farm workers & 2 doctors (which is of particular concern if accurate as canaries of H2H spread)
+ CDC found one virus from a cow with a marker known to be associated with reduced susceptibility to neuraminidase inhibitors (a change at NA-T438I).
+ RNA analysis shows that bird flu has been spreading in US cattle since December. The USDA didn’t make an announcement until March. In April USDA shared only partial data, making it hard to track the virus’s spread. (Imagine the outrage if the Chinese did this. Well, you don’t have to imagine.)
+ One in five milk samples in the US has shown genetic traces of bird flu. The question is why aren’t we testing cattle herds?
+ Out of 33 dairy farms in 8 U.S. states, only 23 people have been tested for highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 by states–less than 1 person per farm.
+ Rick Bright, virologist: Seeing a mutation that confers resistance to flu antivirals is a huge concern actually. If this were to spread, it could render flu drugs in stockpiles less effective. There are not many alternatives in abundant supply…This is not something to minimize; something to watch very closely.
+ Why aren’t American chickens vaccinated? Not only has an H5N1 vaccine always been available for day-old chicks, but it’s regularly updated for circulating variants.The US is the only major country that doesn’t have mandatory #H5N1 vaccines for poultry, even though an H5N1 vaccine for day-old chicks has been widely available and regularly updated for newly circulating variants.
+++
+ More than three years into the Biden administration, the FDA is finally poised to ease restrictions on marijuana. But it turns out to be another Bidenian half-measure, since, as our friend Sanho Tree, a drug policy expert at IPS, pointed out, “dropping marijuana down to Schedule III still allows criminalization of people using it without a prescription.”
+ Teenage suicide rates in the US are much higher on school days and in school months, and are lowest in July when most schools are out.
+ There are now 2.4 million more female than male undergraduates on U.S. campuses (8.9 million women compared to 6.5 million men).
+ The fertility rate in the US dropped to its lowest level in nearly a century at 1.6–.5 points below the replacement rate. Immigration is the only thing propping up the US economy.
+ Pro Publica: “Cigna tracks every minute that its staff doctors spend deciding whether to pay for health care. Dr. Debby Day said her bosses cared more about being fast than being right: ‘Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,’ Day said.”
+ In the last 10 years, the number of people shot in road rage incidents quadrupled. Two of the three cities with the highest # of incidents are in Texas, Houston and San Antonio.
+ By 2022, the number of people living in extreme poverty reversed course and began to rise.
+ Between 2019 and 2022 inequality in both rural and urban China has increased; the higher the quintile, the higher the cumulative real per capita growth. The gap is more extreme in rural areas.
Chotiner: A lot of people still think of Iran-Contra when your name comes up. Do you think that’s fair?
Abrams: Well, it’s fair because that’s what comes up when you Google my name.
Chotiner: Right. Do you feel reformed in some way?
Abrams: Reformed from what?
Chotiner: Oh, just the crimes. People should always have a chance to reform.
Abrams: I think that’s a really offensive and, frankly, quite despicable question.
+ The Biden administration has been secretly sending long-range missiles to Ukraine. The ground-based ATACMS have a range of 190 miles. Previously the US had been shipping Ukraine short-range M777 Howitzers, with a range of 25 miles, and medium-range Himars, with a range of 55 miles. The Russians have been using BM-30 Smerch (range: 43 miles), 2A36 Giansint B Howitzers (range: 25 miles) and the D-30 Howitzers (range: 13.6 miles)
+ According to Naalsio, an open-source researcher who has created a spreadsheet of documented equipment losses during Russia’s ongoing Pokrovsk Raion offensive, in central Donetsk, the Russian military seems to be suffering a 6-to-1 ratio of equipment loss compared to the defending Ukrainians. The Russians appear to think the sacrifice is worth it in order to seize the strategically and logistically important city of Chasiv Yar, which is located nearly 50 miles north of Avdiivka.
+ Internal emails show U.S. border agents joking about killing immigrant children and committing other abuses, while referring to immigrants by the derogatory slur “tonk.”
+ TIME: Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles?
Trump: “I think a lot of people like it.”
+ Trump said this week that he’s good with states tracking women’s menstrual data and pregnancies to prosecute abortions. Laura Bassett recounts the grim history of the police already engaged in that kind of surveillance.
+ Before the Supreme Court, the lawyer defending Idaho’s law preventing medically necessary abortions for wanted pregnancies admitted that doctors would be prohibited from performing the procedure even if it meant that the woman would lose an organ…
+ Around 200 people gathered near Lake Como, Italy this week to mourn Mussolini on the 79th anniversary of his death.
+ Washington Senator Maria Cantwell, the top recipient of airline industry campaign donations, inserted language into a spending bill that will undermine Biden’s rule meant to give passengers automatic refunds when their flights are canceled.
+ From Macron’s speech to the EU: “The EU must demonstrate it is never a vassal of the United States.”
+ Brazil’s unemployment rate has hit a 10-year low, with 244,000 new, formal sector jobs in March – 35,000 in manufacturing.
+ Brett Chapman: “The biggest problem facing Native Americans in the U.S. today is being invisible as members of modern society. Because Indigenous history has been whitewashed out of U.S. history in schools, we are largely seen as a historical people.”
+ Bianca Tylek, director of Worth Rises: “There is no way to incarcerate our way out of drug addiction … there is nothing about prisons—the way they are built, the way they are designed, the way they are financed, the way they are structured—that is meant to help deal with drug addiction.”
+ $100 million: the amount private companies banked from forcibly removing homeless people in California alone.
+++
+ David Menschel: “It’s kind of bizarre to feel the need to say it, but it’s a very very bad sign for a society if one cannot freely protest a genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, mass graves, and the mass incineration of children. That is a very bad place for a culture to be.”
+ In Kai Bird’s biography of Oppenheimer, warped unrecognizably by Christopher Nolan’s film, Bird recounts how Berkeley’s administration routinely used the football team and frats to bust striking teachers and student protesters on campus.
+ Former British PM first-week book sales…
Tony Blair: 92,000
David Cameron: 21,000
Liz Truss: 2,228
+ A senior at Columbia: “There are so many cameras on campus my mom is going to find out I vape on the cover of the New York Times.”
+ Strange, I seem to recall Cicero’s hands being nailed to the rostra of the Forum Romanum…
+ With an awareness of how traffic pollution and congestion have distressed the lives of many residents of west Oakland, the owners of Oakland’s new baseball team, the Oakland Ballers are encouraging fans to bike and walk to games at Raimondi Park this summer. Go Ballers!
+ Puppy killing is the most depraved way yet to own the libs. But we know it will just keep getting sicker, in a game of political gross-out. I remember when Sen. Joni Ernst ran campaign ads in Iowa showing her castrating hogs. That seems almost pastoral, after South Dakota Gov. Kristi Neom’s depraved account of dragging her 14-month-old puppy Cricket to a gravel pit for summary execution because Cricket wouldn’t “hunt right.” Then she killed the family goat.
+ In response to Gov She-Ra, the puppy killer, people have been posting photos of their dogs. We’ve had several over the years but none quite like Boomer the Aussie: escape artist, mountain climber, goose chaser, food larcenist, sock-shredder, & hole-digger, who’d chase & return a ball once but never saw the point of doing it again. His smile was often evidence that something nefarious was a-foot…a-paw, I guess. An anti-authoritarian whom Gov She-Ra would’ve considered a “bad dog” and sent for execution in the gravel pit. Boomer had his own psychic for a while, a woman in Texas, who would send him calming messages over the phone for $10 a minute–messages he treated with his customary indifference to human commands, rational, disciplinary or esoteric. A loyal, free-thinking, protector of everyone who showed him the affection he was due. He was the raucous epicenter of our family for 13 years. Boomer ¡Presente!
+ Boy George accepting the Grammy Award for Culture Club in 1984: “Thank you, America. You’ve got taste, style, and you know a good drag queen when you see one.”
+ Bob Marley: “Punks not Rasta but them fight down the Babylon system an’ love black people.”
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” Mario Savio
Celebration in San Jose de Bocay. Photo: Becca Renk.
“I was three years old when he was killed,” says Xiomara Hernández. “My little brother who is here with me today is the baby, he was just six months old.”
Xiomara is standing on a rock above a rushing stream, looking down on the spot where her father, Sergio Hernández, was murdered along with U.S. engineer Ben Linder on April 28th, 1987. Another fifty meters downstream, Pablo Rosales was killed; shot and bayoneted through the heart. The three were ambushed and murdered by U.S.-backed Contra forces while they were building a weir, measuring the stream to install a hydroelectric system so the rural community of San José de Bocay could have electricity.
We’ve brought a small delegation from Casa Ben Linder in Managua to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the murders, joining 200 people from San José de Bocay for the annual event organized by the Bocay Electrical Service Development Association, APRODELBO. This organization was founded to finish the work Ben, Pablo and Sergio started on the hydroelectric plant and continues to provide electricity to 2,000 people in the region today.
From the beautiful pond created by the small hydro system, we have hiked up the heavily wooded trail to the spot where the three were killed. Xiomara tells me this is only the second year that Sergio’s family has participated – for many years no one knew where they were, and Pablo Rosales’ family still hasn’t been located. Through the magic of the internet, however, Sergio’s family now been found and Xiomara feels it is important to be here.
“It’s very hard, you know?” she says. “It’s painful to be here today, but it’s important to remember.”
In 1987, Sergio and his family were war refugees, having been displaced from their home further north by Contra attacks. For a time, they were part of a farming cooperative near El Cuá, but the El Cedro co-op was attacked by the Contras twice in three years – they killed 17 members and kidnapped 9 others, burned the homes and slaughtered the cattle. Sergio and his wife moved their seven children to San José de Bocay, where he volunteered to work with Ben Linder on a project to bring electricity to the town.
Ben Linder was a peace activist and engineer from Portland, Oregon, who had moved to Nicaragua in 1983 to contribute his skills to the popular Sandinista Revolution. He was a clown and a unicyclist who worked with the popular circuses in Managua. As an engineer, Ben worked to bring electricity to war zones in northern Nicaragua where U.S.-funded contra guerillas attacked villages in the dark – electricity made them safer. After building a successful hydroelectric plant in El Cuá, Ben and his coworkers began work on a new plant in San José de Bocay, near the Honduran border.
Pablo Rosales was a young farmer who had been kidnapped by the Contras the previous year and forced to fight with them. He managed to escape, and then brought his wife and four children into town where they were living in a plastic house in the refugee settlement in San José de Bocay.
On 28 April 1987, Sergio and Pablo went to work with Ben along with other farmers from the refugee settlement. Sergio took the lead as the small group hiked to the construction site. When Ben sat down to write in his notebook, Sergio stood nearby and Pablo Rosales waited aways downstream.
Froylan Jarquín was there that day. “I was part of the Ministry of the Interior at that time, working nearby and my boss called me to say, ‘Get over there.’ When I arrived here at the site, I found the three of them dead. A group of Contra came here and killed them.” Froylan points to the thick tree cover where the Contras had waited to ambush the group, emptying 30 bullets into the clearing.
“They threw a grenade, it landed in the sand and shot fragments everywhere. Down there is where Ben fell,” Froylan says, pointing to a large flat rock in the stream. “And Sergio fell there next to him. Pablo was 50 meters downstream.” The Contra were waiting for them that day because they had orders to kill Ben for the work he was doing on behalf of the Nicaraguan people. Ben was the first North American to be killed by the Contra, killed by the government of his own country of origin, the United States.
Back at the pond, students from the Ben Linder public elementary school and other schools dance folklore, recite a biography of Ben Linder, and have a drawing contest. Our group contributes songs and a juggling show, and everyone breaks four piñatas. The children’s joy is palpable; the spirit of Ben’s playful clowning is present.
“Last year was the first year I was here, I came on my own,” says Xiomara. “But this year, three of my father’s kids are here and many of his grandkids. My dad has 31 grandkids now, and our family is still growing.”
Xiomara introduces us to her sister via video call, Isabel Hernández grins at us from her hammock in the North Caribbean Autonomous Region, and assures us that she’ll be here next year with her family in tow.
After the event, we go to see the hydroelectric plant run by APRODELBO, the Nicaraguan organization that represents the legacy of Ben Linder, continuing to fulfill his dream of renewable energy for the region.
They tell us that just this week they have just finished installing electricity to 85 houses built for families living in extreme poverty in the Barrio Benjamín Linder. The new homes were built by the Nicaraguan Housing Institute and the municipality of San José de Bocay, and were given free of charge to the families, complete with a stove and gas tank. José Luis Olivas, head of the environmental management unit of APRODELBO, drives our group out north of town to see the new houses at dusk, just as the lights are coming on in the yellow and lavender and green homes.
I marvel at the sight, thinking that the project is a worthy tribute to the spirit of Benjamin Linder: the joy of colorful houses, the most vulnerable families cared for, the renewable energy that provides electricity, light and safety. We can feel the spirits of our heroes and martyrs, Ben, Pablo and Sergio, are indeed ¡presente, presente, presente!
After seeing how much things have changed for the better for the people of Bocay in recent years, we return to the hotel where I am immediately reminded that the treatment of Nicaragua by the United States remains the same as it was in 1987. We find urgent messages waiting for us from our colleagues in the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition in the U.S. “We just found out that the new sanctions package against Nicaragua will be voted on by the full Senate any day now!”
We wave goodbye to Xiomara and her family and immediately sit down to send out emails and post on social media to gather signatures against the latest in a long list of U.S. aggressions against Nicaragua going back 200 years to the Monroe Doctrine.
Why is the U.S. targeting tiny Nicaragua yet again? Two weeks ago, Nicaragua brought Germany to the International Court of Justice for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. This Tuesday, the ICJ will hand down its initial ruling, and the U.S. Senate plans to immediately punish Nicaragua for defending Palestine with further illegal unilateral coercive measures. In the spirit of Ben Linder, the peace activist who gave his life for Nicaragua, I will do everything I can to stop these sanctions. I hope you will join me – please sign here to tell the U.S. Senate to say NO to more sanctions on Nicaragua.
One of the two major-party candidates for the presidency of the United States has allowed an decades-long ethnic cleansing to morph into a genocide, a horror that could be stopped with one phone call; has escalated the drilling of oil and gas despite the existential threat of global warming; forced railroad workers to swallow a bad contract by breaking their strike; and spent his Senate career as an errand boy for banks. And that’s the lesser evil!
Joe Biden really is the lesser evil in this dismal race for the White House, and that such an office holder is easily not the worst candidate is surely sufficient to illustrate the decline of the world’s still extraordinarily dangerous superpower. Out of more than 300 million people, this is the best the country can do? Given the quite understandable reluctance (to put it mildly) for the types of folks who are reading these words to contemplate voting either for President Biden or Donald Trump, what do we do when the lesser evil is so evil that he has the sobriquet “Genocide” attached to his name?
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It isn’t easy, being a liberal mainstream reporter these days, what with big news stories about “the Israel-Hamas war” passing you by, as you wrestle fecklessly with your two major journalistic goals: (a) to objectively document evil by exposing corruption; and (b) to keep your job and get everybody to like you. I’ve investigated pro-Palestine […]
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+ Jonathan Greenblatt, the president of the ADL, posted a video outside of the Columbia University campus which included a call to “bring in the National Guard.” Three of the four students fatally shot on May 4, 1970, by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University were Jews: Allison Krause, Sandra Lee Scheuer, and […]
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Protests in and around Columbia University in support of Palestine and against Israeli occupation. Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY-SA 4.0
The student protests on the campus of Columbia University this April have reminded me of the protests that took place there 56 years ago. Along with about 700 or so other men and women, I was arrested and jailed at the Tombs in Manhattan. Those arrests didn’t curtail student protests. Indeed, there were demonstrations later that year and again in 1969, 1970, 1971 and 1972. When push comes to shove, Columbia has called on the police again and again and the police have arrived in force and have made arrests.
The current president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, an Egyptian-born American economist and a baroness, has surely not acted on her own impulses to establish what she might call “Law and Order.” Rather, she has surely followed the orders, the prayers and wishes of trustees, deep pockets and alumni who have wanted to see demonstrators punished for exercising freedom of speech and for practicing old-fashioned American civil disobedience.
Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots CEO, and a major financial contributor to Columbia —and my classmate— recently said, “I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken.” He also said, “I believe in free speech, say whatever you want, but pay the consequences.” That doesn’t sound like free speech, not if it comes with a price tag. Back then, the protests were largely about Vietnam. Now, they’re largely about Gaza and Israel. The names have changed, but the underlying story is much the same. Shouldn’t students today have a significant role to play when and where it comes to university investment?
Columbia University president Shafik was deputy governor of the Bank of England, and a vice president at the World Bank. She surely knows who has buttered her side of the crumpet and who has poured her cup of tea. Over many decades, Columbia has known very well how to make cosmetic changes and alter its image. It is now, as it was in the 1960s, about making money, expanding and occupying more and more of the island of Manhattan, and about mass-producing students to become consumers and citizens loyal to the social institutions that have made the US a global superpower.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, we raised awareness about the university’s collaboration with the war machine and with institutions of racism and patriarchy. Columbia began to hire women and Black and brown intellectuals and to revise the curriculum in response to student demands to make education relevant to their own lives and their times.
In 1968, I was not a student at Columbia. I was already a professor at the State University of New York who had graduated from the college in 1963 when it was still locked in the mindset of the Cold War, and McCarthyism and could not be accurately described as an “Ivory Tower.” In 1968, my beef with Columbia had its roots in my undergraduate years when I was rebuked for using Marxist sources for essays I wrote for teachers and slammed for thinking critically and questioning academic dogma. In 1969 when I was arrested again for my role during a campus protest, one of my former professors said that since I was a “Columbia scholar and a Columbia gentleman” I should apologize to the university. When I declined to knuckle under, the powers that be had me arrested and jailed. Who then was the scholar and the gentleman?
My freshman year at Columbia, my classmates and I were required to read Jacques Barzun’s tome The House of Intellect. It didn’t take long for me to see that the house of intellect was a house of cards. In 1968, we didn’t blow it down or blow it up, but we rocked it for a time and then watched as it put its house back in order and restored its foundations.
I don’t believe it’s possible to dismantle Columbia now, much as it wasn’t possible to dismantle it in 1968. It’s too big, too powerful, too wealthy and too rapacious. But protesters today can certainly raise awareness about the political and economic ties between the US “power elite,” as Columbia professor, C. Wright Mills called it, and the power elite in Israel. Things may not improve in the Middle East any time soon, but they won’t stay the same way they have been for the past half-century, either. The student protesters with their tents on campus are a sure sign that the times have changing and will go on “a-changin’” as Dylan suggested.
Too bad Columbia is locked in the past. Too bad it has given up on meaningful dialogue with student protesters today. Too bad it doesn’t see the handwriting on the wall. Over the past few weeks, I’ve wondered what Columbia professor Edward Said, the author of Orientalism—and for a time an independent member of the Palestinian National Council—would think and say. Indeed, he seemed to occupy a kind of middle ground when he observed in 2003, the year he died, that with regard to Palestine, “nobody has a claim that overrides all the others and entitles that person with that so-called claim to drive people out!”
That middle ground seems to have evaporated. Indeed, the ground under our own feet has shifted dramatically. There is less room for dissenting opinions today than there was in ’68, near the height of the war in Vietnam. There are also more virulent anti-Arab and more virulent anti-Jewish voices today than there were then. Better prepare for the rocky road ahead.
Australian Nuclear Free Alliance gathering, March 2024. Image by Ray Acheson.
AUKUS is the awkward-sounding acronym for “Australia-United Kingdom-United States”—a trilateral military alliance that stands poised to waste billions of dollars, proliferate high-level radioactive material and impose its safekeeping on First Nations communities for hundreds of thousands of years, increase global militarism and potentially provoke a nuclear war. If this doesn’t sound like a good investment to you, you’re not wrong. The deeper one digs into the details of this deal, the more one becomes flummoxed by cascading levels of absurdity. It is strikingly disadvantageous for Australia, yet other countries including Canada, Japan, and New Zealand/Aotearoa, have expressed interest in collaborating. Australian activists have been mobilizing to stop AUKUS for several years; it’s past time those living in other AUKUS states or those clamouring to partner with the alliance get informed and active, too.
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Though Utah’s state government has failed to pull the Great Salt Lake from the verge of collapse, on March 20, 2024, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed a law that prohibits the state and local governments from granting legal personhood to animals, plants, or major ecosystems like the Great Salt Lake. The law is a reaction to a growing rights of nature movement in Utah seeking to secure legal personhood for the Great Salt Lake. By passing this law, Utah joins Ohio and Florida in banning rights of nature as a response to popular, grassroots campaigns seeking to secure rights-based protections for the ecosystems all life depends on. Because rights of nature laws would disrupt corporate exploitation of the natural world, these legislative efforts to squash the rights of nature movement are entirely predictable and similar to historical efforts to squash other rights-based movements like the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. Instead of giving up in the face of setbacks like these, rights of nature advocates must learn how to enforce rights of nature outside of courtrooms and the legislative process along with adapting tactics and strategies for the long game of transforming the legal system into one with a rights of nature framing.
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Columbia students were right in 1968. History proved it. Columbia students are right today. The university has no good answers to their demands that the school stop investing in genocide. Calling in the NYPD proves it.
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