radiofree.asia

Category: United States

  • Denying the Demonic

    In March of last year as the coronavirus panic was starting, I wrote a somewhat flippant article saying that the obsession with buying and hoarding toilet paper was the people’s vaccine.  My point was simple: excrement and death have long been associated in cultural history and in the Western imagination with the evil devil, Satan, the Lord of the underworld, the Trickster, the Grand Master who rules the pit of smelly death, the place below where bodies go.

    The psychoanalytic literature is full of examples of death anxiety revealed in anal dreams of shit-filled overflowing toilets and people pissing in their pants.  Ernest Becker put it simply in The Denial of Death:

    No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat because it reminds people of death.

    The theological literature is also full of warnings about the devil’s wiles.  So too the Western classics from Aeschylus to Melville. The demonic has an ancient pedigree and has various names. Rational people tend to dismiss all this as superstitious nonsense.  This is hubris.  The Furies always exact their revenge when their existence is denied.  For they are part of ourselves, not alien beings, as the tragedy of human history has shown us time and again.

    Since excremental visions and the fear of death haunt humans – the skull at the banquet as William James put it – the perfect symbol of protection is toilet paper that will keep you safe and clean and free of any reminder of the fear of death running through a panicked world.  It’s a magic trick, of course, an unconscious way of thinking you are protecting yourself; a form of self-hypnosis.

    One year later, magical thinking has taken a different form and my earlier flippancy has turned darker. You can’t hoard today’s toilet paper but you can get them: RNA inoculations, misnamed vaccines. People are lined up for them now as they are being told incessantly to “get your shot.”  They are worse than toilet paper. At least toilet paper serves a practical function.  Real vaccines, as the word’s etymology – Latin, vaccinus, from cows, the cowpox virus vaccine first used by British physician Edward Jenner in 1800 to prevent smallpox – involve the use of a small amount of a virus.  The RNA inoculations are not vaccines.  To say they are is bullshit and has nothing to do with cows. To call them vaccines is linguistic mind control.

    These experimental inoculations do not prevent the vaccinated from getting infected with the “virus” nor do they prevent transmission of the alleged virus. When they were approved recently by the FDA that was made clear.  The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) for these inoculations only under the proviso that they may make an infection less severe.  Yet millions have obediently taken a shot that doesn’t do what they think it does.  What does that tell us?

    Hundreds of millions of people have taken an injection that allows a bio-reactive “gene-therapy” molecule to be injected into their bodies because of fear, ignorance, and a refusal to consider that the people who are promoting this are evil and have ulterior motives.  Not that they mean well, but that they are evil and have evil intentions.  Does this sound too extreme?  Radically evil?  Come on!

    So what drives the refusal to consider that demonic forces are at work with the corona crisis?

    Why do the same people who get vaccinated believe that a PCR test that can’t, according to its inventor Kary Mullis, test for this so-called virus, believe in the fake numbers of positive “cases”?  Do these people even know if the virus has ever been isolated?

    Such credulity is an act of faith, not science or confirmed fact.

    Is it just the fear of death that drives such thinking?

    Or is it something deeper than ignorance and propaganda that drives this incredulous belief?

    If you want facts, I will not provide them here. Despite the good intentions of people who still think facts matter, I don’t think most people are persuaded by facts anymore. But such facts are readily available from excellent alternative media publications.  Global Research’s Michel Chossudovsky has released, free of charge, his comprehensive E-Book: The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup D’Etat, and the “Great Reset.”  It’s a good place to start if facts and analysis are what you are after.  Or go to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s Childrens Health Defense, Off-Guardian, Dissident Voice, Global Research, among numerous others.

    Perhaps you think these sites are right-wing propaganda because many articles they publish can also be read or heard at some conservative media. If so, you need to start thinking rather than reacting. The entire mainstream political/media spectrum is right-wing, if you wish to use useless terms such as Left/Right.  I have spent my entire life being accused of being a left-wing nut, but now I am being told I am a right-wing nut even though my writing appears in many leftist publications. Perhaps my accusers don’t know which way the screw turns or the nut loosens.  Being uptight and frightened doesn’t help.

    I am interested in asking why so many people can’t accept that radical evil is real.  Is that a right-wing question?  Of course not.  It’s a human question that has been asked down through the ages.

    I do think we are today in the grip of radical evil, demonic forces. The refusal to see and accept this is not new.  As the eminent theologian, David Ray Griffin, has argued, the American Empire, with its quest for world domination and its long and ongoing slaughters at home and abroad, is clearly demonic; it is driven by the forces of death symbolized by Satan.

    I have spent many years trying to understand why so many good people have refused to see and accept this and have needed to ply a middle course over many decades. The safe path. Believing in the benevolence of their rulers.  When I say radical evil, I mean it in the deepest spiritual sense.  A religious sense, if you prefer.  But by religious I don’t mean institutional religions since so many of the institutional religions are complicit in the evil.

    It has long been easy for Americans to accept the demonic nature of foreign leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Easy, also, to accept the government’s attribution of such names as the “new Hitler” to any foreign leader it wishes to kill and overthrow.  But to consider their own political leaders as demonic is near impossible.

    So let me begin with a few reminders.

    The U.S. destruction of Iraq and the mass killings of Iraqis under George W. Bush beginning in 2003.  Many will say it was illegal, unjust, carried out under false pretenses, etc.  But who will say it was pure evil?

    Who will say that Barack Obama’s annihilation of Libya was radical evil?

    Who will say the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the firebombing of Tokyo and so many Japanese cities that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians was radical evil?

    Who will say the U.S. war against Syria is demonic evil?

    Who will say the killing of millions of Vietnamese was radical evil?

    Who will say the insider attacks of September 11, 2001 were demonic evil?

    Who will say slavery, the genocide of native people, the secret medical experiments on the vulnerable, the CIA mind control experiments, the coups engineered throughout the world resulting in the mass murder of millions – who will say these are evil in the deepest sense?

    Who will say the U.S. security state’s assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, Jr., Robert Kennedy, Fred Hampton, et al. were radical evil?

    Who will say the trillions spent on nuclear weapons and the willingness to use them to annihilate the human race is not the ultimate in radical evil?

    This list could extend down the page endlessly.  Only someone devoid of all historical sense could conclude that the U.S. has not been in the grip of demonic forces for a long time.

    If you can do addition, you will find the totals staggering.  They are overwhelming in their implications.

    But to accept this history as radically evil in intent and not just in its consequences are two different things.  I think so many find it so hard to admit that their leaders have intentionally done and do demonic deeds for two reasons.  First, to do so implicates those who have supported these people or have not opposed them. It means they have accepted such radical evil and bear responsibility.  It elicits feelings of guilt. Secondly, to believe that one’s own leaders are evil is next to impossible for many to accept because it suggests that the rational façade of society is a cover for sinister forces and that they live in a society of lies so vast the best option is to make believe it just isn’t so.  Even when one can accept that evil deeds were committed in the past, even some perhaps intentionally, the tendency is to say “that was then, but things are different now.” Grasping the present when you are in it is not only difficult but often disturbing for it involves us.

    So if I am correct and most Americans cannot accept that their leaders have intentionally done radically evil things, then it follows that to even consider questioning the intentions of the authorities regarding the current corona crisis needs to be self-censored.  Additionally, as we all know, the authorities have undertaken a vast censorship operation so people cannot hear dissenting voices of those who have now been officially branded as domestic terrorists. The self-censorship and the official work in tandem.

    There is so much information available that shows that the authorities at the World Health Organization, the CDC, The World Economic Forum, Big Pharma, governments throughout the world, etc. have gamed this crisis beforehand, have manipulated the numbers, lied, have conducted a massive fear propaganda campaign via their media mouthpieces, have imposed cruel lockdowns that have further enriched the wealthiest and economically and psychologically devastated vast numbers, etc.  Little research is needed to see this, to understand that Big Pharma is, as Dr. Peter Gøtzsche documented eight years ago in Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma Has Corrupted Healthcare, a world-wide criminal enterprise.  It takes but a few minutes to see that the pharmaceutical companies who have been given emergency authorization for these untested experimental non-vaccine “vaccines” have paid out billions of dollars to settle criminal and civil allegations.

    It is an open secret that the WHO, the Gates Foundation, the WEF led by Klaus Schwab, and an interlocking international group of conspirators have plans for what they call The Great Reset, a strategy to use  the COVID-19 crisis to push their agenda to create a world of cyborgs living in cyberspace where artificial intelligence replaces people and human biology is wedded to technology under the control of the elites.  They have made it very clear that there are too many people on this planet and billions must die.  Details are readily available of this open conspiracy to create a transhuman world.

    Is this not radical evil?  Demonic?

    Let me end with an analogy.  There is another organized crime outfit that can only be called demonic – The Central Intelligence Agency.  One of its legendary officers was James Jesus Angleton, chief of Counterintelligence from 1954 until 1975.  He was a close associate of Allen Dulles, the longest serving director of the CIA.  Both men were deeply involved in many evil deeds, including bringing Nazi doctors and scientists into the U.S. to do the CIA’s dirty work, including mind control, bioweapons research, etc.  The stuff they did for Hitler.  As reported by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, when the staunch Catholic Angleton was on his deathbed, he gave an interviews to visiting journalists, including Joseph Trento.  He confessed:

    He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles.  He had been on a satanic quest….’Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,’ he told Trento in an emotionless voice.  ‘The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted…. Outside this duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power.  I did things that, looking back on my life, I regret.  But I was part of it and loved being in it.’  He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day – Dulles, Helms, Wisner.  These men were ‘the grand masters,’ he said.  ‘If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.’  Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup.  ‘I guess I will see them there soon.’

    Until we recognize the demonic nature of the hell we are now in, we too will be lost.  We are fighting for our lives and the spiritual salvation of the world.  Do not succumb to the siren songs of these fathers of lies.

    Resist.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 at 2:41am and is filed under Barack Obama, Big Pharma, Bill Gates, CIA, COVID-19, Disinformation, Eugenics, George W. Bush, Hiroshima, Iraq, Japan, Libya, Lies, Lockdown, Media, Nagasaki, Opinion, Resistance, Syria, The “Great Reset”, United States, Vaccines, Viet Nam, World Economic Forum (WEF), World Health Organization (WHO).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Hunting in Yemen

    Iman Saleh fasting in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen (Photo Credit: Detriot Free Press)

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.

    Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

    Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

    “When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

    Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

    According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

    Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.

    As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.

    Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

    The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

    Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

    Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

    Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

    Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

    In response, Coe wrote:

    ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

    Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

    While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

    Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

    “The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

    Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

    Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

    The post Hunting in Yemen first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hunting in Yemen

    Iman Saleh fasting in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen (Photo Credit: Detriot Free Press)

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.

    Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

    Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

    “When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

    Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

    According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

    Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.

    As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.

    Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

    The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

    Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

    Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

    Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

    Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

    In response, Coe wrote:

    ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

    Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

    While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

    Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

    “The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

    Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

    Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

    This article was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2021 at 1:41am and is filed under Activism, Children/Youth, Crimes against Humanity, Hunger, Hunger Strikes, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism (state and retail), United States, War Crimes, War Industry, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Necessity Of Dismantling The US

    On February 26th, I interviewed Ajamu Baraka for my podcast. Baraka is a veteran grassroots organizer whose roots are in the Black Liberation Movement and anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity struggles. He is an internationally recognized leader of the emerging human rights movement in the U.S. and has been at the forefront of efforts to apply the international human rights framework to social justice advocacy in the U.S. for more than 25 years. He is a National Organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace, whose activities we discussed.

    Baraka has taught political science at various universities and has been a guest lecturer at academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad.

    The post The Necessity Of Dismantling The US appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • We Sampled Tap Water Across The US

    In Connecticut, a condo had lead in its drinking water at levels more than double what the federal government deems acceptable. At a church in North Carolina, the water was contaminated with extremely high levels of potentially toxic PFAS chemicals (a group of compounds found in hundreds of household products). The water flowing into a Texas home had both – and concerning amounts of arsenic too.

    All three were among locations that had water tested as part of a nine-month investigation by Consumer Reports (CR) and the Guardian into the US’s drinking water.

    Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, access to safe water for all Americans has been a US government goal.

    The post We Sampled Tap Water Across The US appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 at 1:45am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, China, Espionage/”Intelligence”, India, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Militarism, North Korea, Singapore, Surveillance, Syria, Trade, United Kingdom, United States, US Military Bases, Viet Nam, War Crimes, World War One, World War Two.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    The post Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Epidemiologist Warns That A Fourth COVID-19 Surge Is Under Way

    Leading US epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy in Minneapolis, gave a stark warning of a devastating new stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in interviews Sunday on two national television networks.

    Dr. Osterholm explained the context and real dangers hinted at in the statement by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, when she declared last Monday that she was afraid and felt a sense of “impending doom” about the pandemic.

    On Sunday, speaking with host Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” Osterholm said, “At this time, we are in a category five hurricane status with regard to the rest of the world.

    The post Epidemiologist Warns That A Fourth COVID-19 Surge Is Under Way appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • No Talks Needed For US Return To Iran Nuclear Deal

    Last month, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei announced that Tehran is in “no hurry” to return to its obligations under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, and is prepared to wait until the US lifts its illegal sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

    Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi has stated that a possible US decision to rejoin the 2015 nuclear deal, also known asthe Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), does not require any talks.

    Speaking to the deal’s remaining signatories during a virtual meeting on Friday, Araqchi added that “Iran will suspend its steps [scaling back compliance with the deal’s terms] as soon as [US] sanctions are lifted and this is verified”.

    The post No Talks Needed For US Return To Iran Nuclear Deal appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US Sinks to New Low in Rankings of World’s Democracies

    The US has slipped 11 points in a decade – below Argentina and Mongolia – according the latest report by a democracy watchdog. Continue reading

    The post US Sinks to New Low in Rankings of World’s Democracies appeared first on BillMoyers.com.

    This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

  • End US-UK Nuclear Collusion

    On March 16, the United Kingdom announced (in its Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Foreign Policy and Development titled Global Britain in a Competitive Age) that it will increase the limit on its nuclear arsenal for the first time in decades. Instead of maintaining a cap of 180 warheads (as it had previously stated), the UK will increase its stockpile cap to 260 warheads – a 40% increase. The review also broadens the role of nuclear weapons to include the possible use of nuclear weapons to address emerging technologies (cyber attacks).

    The post End US-UK Nuclear Collusion appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • How many is too many?

    The United States of America is victim of its own propaganda. Since being founded, the USA has always depicted itself as a beacon of democracy and liberty, a land of opportunity and hope where a person can accomplish rags to riches through hard work and initiative. For many the American Dream is viewed as a reality and can we be surprised that the Statue of Liberty’s inscription is taken literally:

    Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

    The impoverished peoples in countries south of the United States suffering deprivations unimaginable to the majority of Americans have sought escape from failed nation-states crime ridden societies and the encroaching effects of climate change to achieve a better life for themselves and their children.

    However, rather than a welcome, they meet with a wall, not just the physical one Trump tried to build but a wall of indifference and outright rejection. Political commentators declare that America can no longer afford to accept any more newcomers, no matter how ‘deserving’ or contrary to international treaties it has signed up to. The present pandemic is even being used as justification to turn away the needy and the vulnerable. The change of president has brought a superficial change of policy at the southern border but it has not departed from being one of deterrence, albeit Biden’s approach is ‘softer’ than Trump’s draconian hard attitude. Biden remains attached to the belief that the solution is better management to slow down and reverse the flow of peoples wishing to make the USA their new home. He still does not treat the migration of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans as a genuine humanitarian crisis where the proper response would be to facilitate and expedite the reception of these desperate people. America has dealt with mass migrations in the past such as the Dustbowl and the Black exodus from the Southern states, not to mention the influx of European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. The United States is now far better placed to allocate the necessary resources.

    A common argument made by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, but even by some on the liberal left, is that the United States is full, that it is already an over-crowded country and no longer able to take any extra people. Such claims are providing ‘intellectual’ succor to the mass-murderer, Patrick Crusius, who targeted Hispanics and killed 23 at El Paso in Texas.

    But just how many is too many?

    Using 2019 figures and the present migrant bottleneck US state of Texas as an example

    There is approximately 7,268,730,000 people on the planet. The land-mass of Texas is 268,820 square miles (7,494,271,488,000 square feet). If we divide 7,494,271,488,000 square feet by 7,268,730,000 people, we get 1031 square feet per person. This is enough space for everyone on earth to live in a town-house while altogether fitting on a landmass the size of Texas. And we’re not even accounting for the average four-person family who would most likely share a home.

    Of course, there are large tracts of Texas uninhabitable and we have not included the necessary space for the resources to support such a population. This is just to give an idea of how it isn’t actual space that is lacking but to show that America is not running out of room any time soon.

    Again, we can compare actual density of the United States by taking the example of New York City which is far and away the most populous city in the U.S., home to an estimated 8.5 million people in 2016. More people live in this one city than in the entire states of Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, New Mexico, Vermont, and the District of Columbia combined. For sure, New York City is rather crammed, but it is certainly not an uncomfortable place to live in terms of space as many New Yorkers would affirm. Besides, many cities in other countries are far more densely populated.

    New York City consists of five boroughs spanning five counties, the most densely populated of which is New York County. This county, which consists principally of the island of Manhattan, is far and away the most densely populated county in the U.S., housing 72,000 people per square mile. At that population density, the entire population of the United States could reside in the tiny State of Connecticut. Brooklyn has slightly less than half the population density of Manhattan. The top four most densely populated counties in America are all in New York City.

    If all Americans lived at the same population density as the average population density of all five of New York City’s boroughs (approximately 28,000 people per square mile), we’d all fit comfortably in the combined area of Delaware and Maryland.

    Or we can take the 10 million plus residents who call Los Angeles County home. If you are familiar with Los Angeles County, you know that life at this level of urbanization is not too uncomfortable nor unbearable, providing ample parks and open spaces. At a similar population density of Los Angeles County, the entire U.S. population could fit inside the state of New Mexico.

    Again in reality we would still need to figure in access to adequate water resources and would need much more land area to account for agricultural purposes, public services, transportation and, of course, sustainability and conservation. But, this is merely another thought experiment to demonstrate that if America has enough room to fit its entire population comfortably into an area the size of New Mexico, the US has enough space for far many more people from outside its borders unlike what the anti-immigration lobby assert.

    If truth is to be said, the USA’s fertility rate is falling below the replacement rate for the existing population and only because of immigration has an actual population decline been avoided and a future demographic problem averted. Rather than US politicians reacting with sanctions to turn away arrivals, for the health and wealth of the nation, they should be welcoming many more newcomers.

    Numbers don’t matter, the type of system matters. It is not overpopulation that is the problem but the chronic underproduction that is a built in feature of capitalism.

    The ‘overpopulation problem’ is really a misuse of resources problem. Capitalism, as a system of rationing via the market, is justified in people’s minds by a belief in scarcity. ‘There isn’t enough to go round’, so we must be restricted in what we are allowed to consume. It has become a cliché to speak of, ’this overcrowded country.’

    We should not give the impression that everything is easy, that a massive expansion of available resources is a simple matter. For one thing, there may be environmental implications. But a socialist society is the best-equipped to handle these implications and to strike a balance. Not only is capitalism in effect a system of artificial scarcity, it is also a system of organised waste. Socialist society will use the resources of the Earth to ensure that every man, woman and child is amply fed, clothed and sheltered. Capitalism cannot do this — it does not exist for this purpose.

    This article was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2021 at 11:57pm and is filed under Migration/Migrants, Population, Socialism, United States.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • How many is too many?

    The United States of America is victim of its own propaganda. Since being founded, the USA has always depicted itself as a beacon of democracy and liberty, a land of opportunity and hope where a person can accomplish rags to riches through hard work and initiative. For many the American Dream is viewed as a reality and can we be surprised that the Statue of Liberty’s inscription is taken literally:

    Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

    The impoverished peoples in countries south of the United States suffering deprivations unimaginable to the majority of Americans have sought escape from failed nation-states crime ridden societies and the encroaching effects of climate change to achieve a better life for themselves and their children.

    However, rather than a welcome, they meet with a wall, not just the physical one Trump tried to build but a wall of indifference and outright rejection. Political commentators declare that America can no longer afford to accept any more newcomers, no matter how ‘deserving’ or contrary to international treaties it has signed up to. The present pandemic is even being used as justification to turn away the needy and the vulnerable. The change of president has brought a superficial change of policy at the southern border but it has not departed from being one of deterrence, albeit Biden’s approach is ‘softer’ than Trump’s draconian hard attitude. Biden remains attached to the belief that the solution is better management to slow down and reverse the flow of peoples wishing to make the USA their new home. He still does not treat the migration of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans as a genuine humanitarian crisis where the proper response would be to facilitate and expedite the reception of these desperate people. America has dealt with mass migrations in the past such as the Dustbowl and the Black exodus from the Southern states, not to mention the influx of European migrants arriving at Ellis Island. The United States is now far better placed to allocate the necessary resources.

    A common argument made by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, but even by some on the liberal left, is that the United States is full, that it is already an over-crowded country and no longer able to take any extra people. Such claims are providing ‘intellectual’ succor to the mass-murderer, Patrick Crusius, who targeted Hispanics and killed 23 at El Paso in Texas.

    But just how many is too many?

    Using 2019 figures and the present migrant bottleneck US state of Texas as an example

    There is approximately 7,268,730,000 people on the planet. The land-mass of Texas is 268,820 square miles (7,494,271,488,000 square feet). If we divide 7,494,271,488,000 square feet by 7,268,730,000 people, we get 1031 square feet per person. This is enough space for everyone on earth to live in a town-house while altogether fitting on a landmass the size of Texas. And we’re not even accounting for the average four-person family who would most likely share a home.

    Of course, there are large tracts of Texas uninhabitable and we have not included the necessary space for the resources to support such a population. This is just to give an idea of how it isn’t actual space that is lacking but to show that America is not running out of room any time soon.

    Again, we can compare actual density of the United States by taking the example of New York City which is far and away the most populous city in the U.S., home to an estimated 8.5 million people in 2016. More people live in this one city than in the entire states of Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, New Mexico, Vermont, and the District of Columbia combined. For sure, New York City is rather crammed, but it is certainly not an uncomfortable place to live in terms of space as many New Yorkers would affirm. Besides, many cities in other countries are far more densely populated.

    New York City consists of five boroughs spanning five counties, the most densely populated of which is New York County. This county, which consists principally of the island of Manhattan, is far and away the most densely populated county in the U.S., housing 72,000 people per square mile. At that population density, the entire population of the United States could reside in the tiny State of Connecticut. Brooklyn has slightly less than half the population density of Manhattan. The top four most densely populated counties in America are all in New York City.

    If all Americans lived at the same population density as the average population density of all five of New York City’s boroughs (approximately 28,000 people per square mile), we’d all fit comfortably in the combined area of Delaware and Maryland.

    Or we can take the 10 million plus residents who call Los Angeles County home. If you are familiar with Los Angeles County, you know that life at this level of urbanization is not too uncomfortable nor unbearable, providing ample parks and open spaces. At a similar population density of Los Angeles County, the entire U.S. population could fit inside the state of New Mexico.

    Again in reality we would still need to figure in access to adequate water resources and would need much more land area to account for agricultural purposes, public services, transportation and, of course, sustainability and conservation. But, this is merely another thought experiment to demonstrate that if America has enough room to fit its entire population comfortably into an area the size of New Mexico, the US has enough space for far many more people from outside its borders unlike what the anti-immigration lobby assert.

    If truth is to be said, the USA’s fertility rate is falling below the replacement rate for the existing population and only because of immigration has an actual population decline been avoided and a future demographic problem averted. Rather than US politicians reacting with sanctions to turn away arrivals, for the health and wealth of the nation, they should be welcoming many more newcomers.

    Numbers don’t matter, the type of system matters. It is not overpopulation that is the problem but the chronic underproduction that is a built in feature of capitalism.

    The ‘overpopulation problem’ is really a misuse of resources problem. Capitalism, as a system of rationing via the market, is justified in people’s minds by a belief in scarcity. ‘There isn’t enough to go round’, so we must be restricted in what we are allowed to consume. It has become a cliché to speak of, ’this overcrowded country.’

    We should not give the impression that everything is easy, that a massive expansion of available resources is a simple matter. For one thing, there may be environmental implications. But a socialist society is the best-equipped to handle these implications and to strike a balance. Not only is capitalism in effect a system of artificial scarcity, it is also a system of organised waste. Socialist society will use the resources of the Earth to ensure that every man, woman and child is amply fed, clothed and sheltered. Capitalism cannot do this — it does not exist for this purpose.

    The post How many is too many? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We are living through a time of fear not just of the virus but of each other

    Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy.

    We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with the concerns of others.

    In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this moment of crisis.

    Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe, averting danger.

    Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our health.

    Too noisy’ protests

    It is therefore far from surprising that the UK’s draconian new Police and Crime Bill – concentrating yet more powers in the police – has arrived at this moment. It means that the police can prevent non-violent protest that is likely to be too noisy or might create “unease” in bystanders. Protesters risk being charged with a crime if they cause “nuisance” or set up protest encampments in public places, as the Occupy movement did a decade ago.

    And damaging memorials – totems especially prized in a time of fear for their power to ward off danger – could land protesters, like those who toppled a statue to notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last summer, a 10-year jail sentence.

    In other words, this is a bill designed to outlaw the right to conduct any demonstration beyond the most feeble and ineffective kind. It makes permanent current, supposedly extraordinary limitations on protest that were designed, or so it was said, to protect the public from the immediate threat of disease.

    Protest that demands meaningful change is always noisy and disruptive. Would the suffragettes have won women the vote without causing inconvenience and without offending vested interests that wanted them silent?

    What constitutes too much noise or public nuisance? In a time of permanent pandemic, it is whatever detracts from the all-consuming effort to extinguish our fear and insecurity. When we are afraid, why should the police not be able to snatch someone off the street for causing “unease”?

    The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislation – against noisy, inconvenient and disruptive protest – is being passed in states across the United States. Just as free speech is being shut down on the grounds that we must not offend, so protest is being shut down on the grounds that we must not disturb.

    From the outbreak of the virus, there were those who warned that the pandemic would soon serve as a pretext to take away basic rights and make our societies less free. Those warnings soon got submerged in, or drowned out by, much wilder claims, such as that the virus was a hoax or that it was similar to flu, or by the libertarian clamour against lockdowns and mask-wearing.

    Binary choices

    What was notable was the readiness of the political and media establishments to intentionally conflate and confuse reasonable and unreasonable arguments to discredit all dissent and lay the groundwork for legislation of this kind.

    The purpose has been to force on us unwelcome binary choices. We are either in favour of all lockdowns or indifferent to the virus’ unchecked spread. We are either supporters of enforced vaccinations or insensitive to the threat the virus poses to the vulnerable. We are either responsible citizens upholding the rules without question or selfish oafs who are putting everyone else at risk.

    A central fracture line has opened up – in part a generational one – between those who are most afraid of the virus and those who are most afraid of losing their jobs, of isolation and loneliness, of the damage being done to their children’s development, of the end of a way of life they valued, or of the erasure of rights they hold inviolable.

    The establishment has been sticking its crowbar into that split, trying to prise it open and turn us against each other.

    ‘Kill the Bill’

    Where this leads was only too visible in the UK at the weekend when protesters took to the streets of major cities. They did so – in another illustration of binary choices that now dominate our lives – in violation of emergency Covid regulations banning protests. There was a large march through central London, while another demonstration ended in clashes between protesters and police in Bristol.

    What are the protesters – most peaceful, a few not – trying to achieve? In the media, all protest at the moment is misleadingly lumped together as “anti-lockdown”, appealing to the wider public’s fear of contagion spread. But that is more misdirection: in the current, ever-more repressive climate, all protest must first be “anti-lockdown” before it can be protest.

    The truth is that the demonstrators are out on the streets for a wide variety of reasons, including to protest against the oppressive new Police and Crime Bill, under the slogan “Kill the Bill”.

    There are lots of well-founded reasons for people to be angry or worried at the moment. But the threat to that most cherished of all social freedoms – the right to protest – deserves to be at the top of the list.

    If free speech ensures we have some agency over our own minds, protest allows us to mobilise collectively once we have been persuaded of the need and urgency to act. Protest is the chance we have to alert others to the strength of our feelings and arguments, to challenge a consensus that may exist only because it has been manufactured by political and media elites, and to bring attention to neglected or intentionally obscured issues.

    Speech and protest are intimately connected. Free speech in one’s own home – like free speech in a prison cell – is a very stunted kind of freedom. It is not enough simply to know that something is unjust. In democratic societies, we must have the right to do our best to fix injustice.

    Cast out as heretics

    Not so long ago, none of this would have needed stating. It would have been blindingly obvious. No longer. Large sections of the population are happy to see speech rights stripped from those they don’t like or fear. They are equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a “nuisance” or are “too noisy” in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathy – especially so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.

    That is how fear works. The establishment has been using fear to keep us divided and weak since time immemorial. The source of our fear can be endlessly manipulated: black men, feminists, Jews, hippies, travellers, loony lefties, libertarians. The only limitation is that the object of our fear must be identifiable and distinguishable from those who think of themselves as responsible, upstanding citizens.

    In a time of pandemic, those who are to be feared can encompass anyone who does not quietly submit to those in authority. Until recently there had been waning public trust in traditional elites such as politicians, journalists and economists. But that trend has been reversed by a new source of authority – the medical establishment. Because today’s mantra is “follow the science”, anyone who demurs from or questions that science – even when the dissenters are other scientists – can be cast out as a heretic. The political logic of this is rarely discussed, even though it is profoundly dangerous.

    Political certainty

    Politicians have much to gain from basking in the reflected authority of science. And when politics and science are merged, as is happening now, dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent. On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of one’s irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.

    But medicine – the grey area between the science and art of human health – is not governed by laws in the way gravity is. That should be obvious the moment we consider the infinitely varied ways Covid has affected us as individuals.The complex interplay between mind and body means reactions to the virus, and the drugs to treat it, are all but impossible to predict with any certainty. Which is why there are 90-year-olds who have comfortably shaken off the virus and youths who have been felled by it.

    But a politics of “follow the science” implies that issues relating to the virus and how we respond to it – or how we weigh the social and economic consequences of those responses – are purely scientific. That leaves no room for debate, for disagreement. And authoritarianism is always lurking behind the façade of political certainty.

    Public coffers raided

    In a world where politicians, journalists and medical elites are largely insulated from the concerns of ordinary people – precisely the world we live in – protest is the main way to hold these elites accountable, to publicly test their political and “scientific” priorities against our social and economic priorities.

    That is a principle our ancestors fought for. You don’t have to agree with what Piers Corbyn says to understand the importance that he and others be allowed to say it – and not just in their living rooms, and not months or years hence, if and when the pandemic is declared over.

    The right to protest must be championed even through a health crisis –most especially during a health crisis, when our rights are most vulnerable to erasure. The right to protest needs to be supported even by those who back lockdowns, even by those who fear that protests during Covid are a threat to public health. And for reasons that again should not need stating.

    Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.

    Because otherwise, those in power who took advantage of the pandemic to raid the public coffers and waste billions of pounds on schemes whose main purpose was to enrich their friends have every reason to dismiss anyone who protests against their cupidity and incompetence as endangering public health.

    Because otherwise, leaders who want to crush protests against their their current, and future, criminal negligence with extraordinary new police powers have every incentive to characterise their critics as anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccine, or anti-public order, or anti-science – or whatever other pretext they think will play best with the “responsible” public as they seek to cling to power.

    And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to stretch out the pandemic – and the emergency regulations supposedly needed to deal with it – for as long as possible.

    Selective freedoms

    Quite how mercurial are the current arguments for and against protest was highlighted by widespread anger at the crushing by the Metropolitan Police this month of a vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard in London. A Met police officer has been charged with kidnapping and murdering her.

    In the spirit of the times, there has been much wider public sympathy for a vigil for a murder victim than there has been for more overtly political demonstrations like those against the Police and Crime Bill. But if health threats are really the measure of whether large public gatherings are allowed – if we “follow the science” – then neither is justified.

    That is not a conclusion any of us should be comfortable with. It is not for governments to select which types of protests they are willing to confer rights on, even during a pandemic. We either uphold the right of people to congregate when they feel an urgent need to protest – whether it be against the erosion of basic freedoms, or in favour of greater safety for vulnerable communities, or against political corruption and incompetence that costs lives – or we do not.

    We either support the right of every group to hold our leaders to account or we do not. Selective freedoms, inconsistent freedoms, are freedom on licence from those in power. They are no freedom at all.

    Fight for survival

    What the UK’s Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the US and Europe, is to declare some protests as legitimate and others as not. It leaves it to our leaders to decide, as they are trying to do now through the pandemic, which protests constitute a “nuisance” and which do not.

    The political logic of the Bill is being contested by a minority – the hippies, the leftists, the libertarians. They are standing up for the right to protest, as the majority complacently assumes that they will have no need of protest.

    That is pure foolishness. We are all damaged when the right to protest is lost.

    It is unlikely that the aim of the Police and Crime Bill is to keep us permanently locked down – as some fear. It has another, longer-term goal. It is being advanced in recognition by our elites that we are hurtling towards an environmental dead-end for which they have no solutions, given their addiction to easy profits and their own power.

    Already a small minority understand that we are running out of time. Groups like Extinction Rebellion – just like the suffragettes before them – believe the majority can only be woken from their induced slumber if they are disturbed by noise, if their lives are disrupted.

    This sane minority is treading the vanishingly thin line between alienating the majority and averting oblivion for our species. As the stakes grow higher, as awareness of imminent catastrophe intensifies, those wishing to make a nuisance of themselves, to be noisy, will grow.

    What we decide now determines how that struggle plays out: whether we get to take control of our future and the fight for our survival, or whether we are forced to stay mute as the disaster unfolds.

    So pray for the “anti-lockdown” protesters whether you support their cause or not – for they carry the heavy weight of tomorrow on their shoulders.

    The post We are living through a time of fear not just of the virus but of each other first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We are living through a time of fear not just of the virus but of each other

    Welcome to the age of fear. Nothing is more corrosive of the democratic impulse than fear. Left unaddressed, it festers, eating away at our confidence and empathy.

    We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with the concerns of others.

    In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this moment of crisis.

    Once fear takes hold, populations risk agreeing to hand back rights, won over decades or centuries, that were the sole, meagre limit on the power of elites to ransack the common wealth. In calculations based on fear, freedoms must make way for other priorities: being responsible, keeping safe, averting danger.

    Worse, rights are surrendered with our consent because we are persuaded that the rights themselves are a threat to social solidarity, to security, to our health.

    Too noisy’ protests

    It is therefore far from surprising that the UK’s draconian new Police and Crime Bill – concentrating yet more powers in the police – has arrived at this moment. It means that the police can prevent non-violent protest that is likely to be too noisy or might create “unease” in bystanders. Protesters risk being charged with a crime if they cause “nuisance” or set up protest encampments in public places, as the Occupy movement did a decade ago.

    And damaging memorials – totems especially prized in a time of fear for their power to ward off danger – could land protesters, like those who toppled a statue to notorious slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol last summer, a 10-year jail sentence.

    In other words, this is a bill designed to outlaw the right to conduct any demonstration beyond the most feeble and ineffective kind. It makes permanent current, supposedly extraordinary limitations on protest that were designed, or so it was said, to protect the public from the immediate threat of disease.

    Protest that demands meaningful change is always noisy and disruptive. Would the suffragettes have won women the vote without causing inconvenience and without offending vested interests that wanted them silent?

    What constitutes too much noise or public nuisance? In a time of permanent pandemic, it is whatever detracts from the all-consuming effort to extinguish our fear and insecurity. When we are afraid, why should the police not be able to snatch someone off the street for causing “unease”?

    The UK bill is far from unusual. Similar legislation – against noisy, inconvenient and disruptive protest – is being passed in states across the United States. Just as free speech is being shut down on the grounds that we must not offend, so protest is being shut down on the grounds that we must not disturb.

    From the outbreak of the virus, there were those who warned that the pandemic would soon serve as a pretext to take away basic rights and make our societies less free. Those warnings soon got submerged in, or drowned out by, much wilder claims, such as that the virus was a hoax or that it was similar to flu, or by the libertarian clamour against lockdowns and mask-wearing.

    Binary choices

    What was notable was the readiness of the political and media establishments to intentionally conflate and confuse reasonable and unreasonable arguments to discredit all dissent and lay the groundwork for legislation of this kind.

    The purpose has been to force on us unwelcome binary choices. We are either in favour of all lockdowns or indifferent to the virus’ unchecked spread. We are either supporters of enforced vaccinations or insensitive to the threat the virus poses to the vulnerable. We are either responsible citizens upholding the rules without question or selfish oafs who are putting everyone else at risk.

    A central fracture line has opened up – in part a generational one – between those who are most afraid of the virus and those who are most afraid of losing their jobs, of isolation and loneliness, of the damage being done to their children’s development, of the end of a way of life they valued, or of the erasure of rights they hold inviolable.

    The establishment has been sticking its crowbar into that split, trying to prise it open and turn us against each other.

    ‘Kill the Bill’

    Where this leads was only too visible in the UK at the weekend when protesters took to the streets of major cities. They did so – in another illustration of binary choices that now dominate our lives – in violation of emergency Covid regulations banning protests. There was a large march through central London, while another demonstration ended in clashes between protesters and police in Bristol.

    What are the protesters – most peaceful, a few not – trying to achieve? In the media, all protest at the moment is misleadingly lumped together as “anti-lockdown”, appealing to the wider public’s fear of contagion spread. But that is more misdirection: in the current, ever-more repressive climate, all protest must first be “anti-lockdown” before it can be protest.

    The truth is that the demonstrators are out on the streets for a wide variety of reasons, including to protest against the oppressive new Police and Crime Bill, under the slogan “Kill the Bill”.

    There are lots of well-founded reasons for people to be angry or worried at the moment. But the threat to that most cherished of all social freedoms – the right to protest – deserves to be at the top of the list.

    If free speech ensures we have some agency over our own minds, protest allows us to mobilise collectively once we have been persuaded of the need and urgency to act. Protest is the chance we have to alert others to the strength of our feelings and arguments, to challenge a consensus that may exist only because it has been manufactured by political and media elites, and to bring attention to neglected or intentionally obscured issues.

    Speech and protest are intimately connected. Free speech in one’s own home – like free speech in a prison cell – is a very stunted kind of freedom. It is not enough simply to know that something is unjust. In democratic societies, we must have the right to do our best to fix injustice.

    Cast out as heretics

    Not so long ago, none of this would have needed stating. It would have been blindingly obvious. No longer. Large sections of the population are happy to see speech rights stripped from those they don’t like or fear. They are equally fine, it seems, with locking up people who cause a “nuisance” or are “too noisy” in advancing a cause with which they have no sympathy – especially so long as fear of the pandemic takes precedence.

    That is how fear works. The establishment has been using fear to keep us divided and weak since time immemorial. The source of our fear can be endlessly manipulated: black men, feminists, Jews, hippies, travellers, loony lefties, libertarians. The only limitation is that the object of our fear must be identifiable and distinguishable from those who think of themselves as responsible, upstanding citizens.

    In a time of pandemic, those who are to be feared can encompass anyone who does not quietly submit to those in authority. Until recently there had been waning public trust in traditional elites such as politicians, journalists and economists. But that trend has been reversed by a new source of authority – the medical establishment. Because today’s mantra is “follow the science”, anyone who demurs from or questions that science – even when the dissenters are other scientists – can be cast out as a heretic. The political logic of this is rarely discussed, even though it is profoundly dangerous.

    Political certainty

    Politicians have much to gain from basking in the reflected authority of science. And when politics and science are merged, as is happening now, dissent can be easily reformulated as either derangement or criminal intent. On this view, to be against lockdown or to be opposed to taking a vaccine is not just wrong but as insane as denying the laws of gravity. It is proof of one’s irrationality, of the menace one poses to the collective.

    But medicine – the grey area between the science and art of human health – is not governed by laws in the way gravity is. That should be obvious the moment we consider the infinitely varied ways Covid has affected us as individuals.The complex interplay between mind and body means reactions to the virus, and the drugs to treat it, are all but impossible to predict with any certainty. Which is why there are 90-year-olds who have comfortably shaken off the virus and youths who have been felled by it.

    But a politics of “follow the science” implies that issues relating to the virus and how we respond to it – or how we weigh the social and economic consequences of those responses – are purely scientific. That leaves no room for debate, for disagreement. And authoritarianism is always lurking behind the façade of political certainty.

    Public coffers raided

    In a world where politicians, journalists and medical elites are largely insulated from the concerns of ordinary people – precisely the world we live in – protest is the main way to hold these elites accountable, to publicly test their political and “scientific” priorities against our social and economic priorities.

    That is a principle our ancestors fought for. You don’t have to agree with what Piers Corbyn says to understand the importance that he and others be allowed to say it – and not just in their living rooms, and not months or years hence, if and when the pandemic is declared over.

    The right to protest must be championed even through a health crisis –most especially during a health crisis, when our rights are most vulnerable to erasure. The right to protest needs to be supported even by those who back lockdowns, even by those who fear that protests during Covid are a threat to public health. And for reasons that again should not need stating.

    Politicians and the police must not be the ones to define what protests are justified, what protests are safe, what protests are responsible.

    Because otherwise, those in power who took advantage of the pandemic to raid the public coffers and waste billions of pounds on schemes whose main purpose was to enrich their friends have every reason to dismiss anyone who protests against their cupidity and incompetence as endangering public health.

    Because otherwise, leaders who want to crush protests against their their current, and future, criminal negligence with extraordinary new police powers have every incentive to characterise their critics as anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccine, or anti-public order, or anti-science – or whatever other pretext they think will play best with the “responsible” public as they seek to cling to power.

    And because otherwise, the government may decide it is in its interests to stretch out the pandemic – and the emergency regulations supposedly needed to deal with it – for as long as possible.

    Selective freedoms

    Quite how mercurial are the current arguments for and against protest was highlighted by widespread anger at the crushing by the Metropolitan Police this month of a vigil following the murder of Sarah Everard in London. A Met police officer has been charged with kidnapping and murdering her.

    In the spirit of the times, there has been much wider public sympathy for a vigil for a murder victim than there has been for more overtly political demonstrations like those against the Police and Crime Bill. But if health threats are really the measure of whether large public gatherings are allowed – if we “follow the science” – then neither is justified.

    That is not a conclusion any of us should be comfortable with. It is not for governments to select which types of protests they are willing to confer rights on, even during a pandemic. We either uphold the right of people to congregate when they feel an urgent need to protest – whether it be against the erosion of basic freedoms, or in favour of greater safety for vulnerable communities, or against political corruption and incompetence that costs lives – or we do not.

    We either support the right of every group to hold our leaders to account or we do not. Selective freedoms, inconsistent freedoms, are freedom on licence from those in power. They are no freedom at all.

    Fight for survival

    What the UK’s Police and Crime Bill does, like similar legislation in the US and Europe, is to declare some protests as legitimate and others as not. It leaves it to our leaders to decide, as they are trying to do now through the pandemic, which protests constitute a “nuisance” and which do not.

    The political logic of the Bill is being contested by a minority – the hippies, the leftists, the libertarians. They are standing up for the right to protest, as the majority complacently assumes that they will have no need of protest.

    That is pure foolishness. We are all damaged when the right to protest is lost.

    It is unlikely that the aim of the Police and Crime Bill is to keep us permanently locked down – as some fear. It has another, longer-term goal. It is being advanced in recognition by our elites that we are hurtling towards an environmental dead-end for which they have no solutions, given their addiction to easy profits and their own power.

    Already a small minority understand that we are running out of time. Groups like Extinction Rebellion – just like the suffragettes before them – believe the majority can only be woken from their induced slumber if they are disturbed by noise, if their lives are disrupted.

    This sane minority is treading the vanishingly thin line between alienating the majority and averting oblivion for our species. As the stakes grow higher, as awareness of imminent catastrophe intensifies, those wishing to make a nuisance of themselves, to be noisy, will grow.

    What we decide now determines how that struggle plays out: whether we get to take control of our future and the fight for our survival, or whether we are forced to stay mute as the disaster unfolds.

    So pray for the “anti-lockdown” protesters whether you support their cause or not – for they carry the heavy weight of tomorrow on their shoulders.

    This article was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2021 at 8:55am and is filed under Activism, Authoritarianism, Censorship, Civil Disobedience, Civil Liberties, COVID-19, Fearmongering, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Lockdown, Martial Law, Police, Politics, Propaganda, Propagandists, Protests, Repression, Resistance, UK Hypocrisy, United Kingdom, United States, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • China Issues Annual US Human Rights Report

    China published its annual US human rights situation report on Wednesday at a time when the US-led ideological battle against China has intensified, mainly over Xinjiang and other domestic issues. 

    By highlighting the COVID-19 turning into a human tragedy, disorder in American democracy vividly reflected in the Capitol riots, and recent growing discrimination against ethnic minorities including Asian-Americans, China slammed the US’ terrible human rights record, which makes its remarks on other countries’ human rights situation pure “hypocrisy and double standards.”

    The post China Issues Annual US Human Rights Report appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • As the US Launches Its Run for a Seat on the UN Human Rights Council, It Should Seek to Reform Its Own Ambivalence Toward International Human Rights Law

    When the US returned to the UN Human Rights Council as an observer in January 2021, it promptly announced that it would run for a seat on the Council. The Biden administration says it agrees with some criticisms of the Council, but that it will be best positioned to reform the Council when it again has a seat at the table. In remarks to the Human Rights Council earlier this week at the adoption of the US UPR outcome, US Acting Assistant Secretary of State Lisa Peterson acknowledged that the US’ own human rights record is far from perfect, and that “American leadership on human rights must begin at home.” 

    The US should be a full participant in the work of the Human Rights Council, and the Biden administration is correct in recognizing that the US must confront its own human rights failings if it hopes to provide leadership by example at the UN. In earlier posts, The Advocates highlighted some challenging aspects of both the human rights situation in the US and the Biden administration’s responses to UPR recommendations to address them, and there are certainly other specific issues requiring attention. But there are also broader concerns about how the US approaches its international human rights obligations that the Biden administration has, so far, not shown much interest in addressing.   

    Human Rights Treaty Ratification 

    The US was instrumental in the founding of the UN, but is not yet a party to several of its core human rights treaties. In its Human Rights Council presentation, the US discussed several UPR recommendations it received urging it to ratify a number of international human rights treaties. It explained that while the Biden administration supports ratification of additional human rights treaties (specifically naming the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child), ratification requires the affirmative vote of 2/3 of the US Senate. Past US Presidents signed these treaties long ago, but the Senate has failed for decades to ratify them.   Assistant Secretary Peterson’s remarks noted that the administration “will continue to review how we can approach ratification of these treaties.”  

    Not mentioned in the US presentation were rejected UPR recommendations concerning other treaties, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was also signed but never ratified, and the International Convention on the Rights of Migrant Workers or the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR (regarding abolition of the death penalty), which have not ever been signed. The Biden administration apparently has no plans to take action on these  treaties. 

    Domestic Implementation of Ratified Treaties 

    It’s equally important to note that the US has long neglected its obligation to implement in domestic law and policy the treaties it has ratified. In some countries, the law allows direct application of a treaty in domestic law once the treaty has been ratified. In others, including the US, that’s not the case. National legislation also must be passed to make the provisions of the treaty applicable in domestic law, so that it can be applied by the courts or government agencies. Without this additional step, which in many areas has not ever been taken, the international treaty obligations of the US can’t be enforced in US courts.  

    The federal government also often takes the position that its hands are tied when it comes to the conduct of states. The truth is that efforts to persuade state governments to comply with international human rights treaty obligations (or even make the states aware of those obligations) have been few and far between. While it examines what it can do to advance the ratification of additional treaties, the Biden administration should also undertake a thorough review of actions it can take to implement and enforce the treaties that are already in place. 

    The International Criminal Court 

    The US has a particularly checkered history with the International Criminal Court. The US participated in the negotiations that led to the founding of the ICC, but joined six other countries (China, Israel, Libya, Qatar and Yemen) in voting against the adoption of the statute at the UN. President Bill Clinton signed the founding treaty, known as the Rome Statute, but never submitted it to the Senate for ratification. President George W. Bush later informed the UN that the US did not intend to ratify it. Since then, US relations with the ICC have varied wildly, from supporting the referral of potential crimes by the UN Security Council and arranging for the surrender of foreign suspects to pressuring other countries to sign treaties agreeing not to surrender US personnel to the court.  

     The Trump administration was actively hostile to the ICC.  President Trump issued an Executive Order imposing sanctions on the ICC, its staff, and anyone who dared to assist it, all in retaliation for the opening of a preliminary inquiry into possible war crimes in Afghanistan. US officials who object to the jurisdiction of the ICC typically claim it infringes on US sovereignty, but that is not true. The Rome Statute very clearly provides that its jurisdiction is secondary. The ICC will step in only when the responsible nation is unable or unwilling to conduct a genuine investigation into war crimes, genocide, or crimes against humanity, and to pursue any prosecutions that arise from that investigation. There is no doubt that the US is fully capable of doing so. If it wishes to lead the world on human rights, it certainly must also be willing. 

    As of now, the Biden administration has unfortunately failed to make any movement toward more positive relations with the ICC. The US rejected UPR recommendations to ratify the Rome Statute, and to cooperate with the ICC regarding the Afghanistan inquiry, stating that while it “shares the goals of the ICC in promoting accountability for the worst crimes known to humanity,” it is not a party to the Rome Statute and has never accepted its jurisdiction over US personnel. Despite numerous UPR recommendations to lift sanctions and at least one lawsuit by human rights defenders threatened with sanctions, the Biden administration has said only that it is thoroughly reviewing the matter. In public statements, it has continued to reject the authority of the ICC to pursue investigations in Afghanistan and in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.  

    As the US pursues its candidacy for a seat on the Human Rights Council and its stated agenda to reform the Council and restore its own place as a global leader on human rights, it has a lot of work to do. High on the list should be to reform its ambivalent approach to its own international human rights obligations and take strong action – both at home and in the international community. 

    The Advocates for Human Rights is a nonprofit organization dedicated to implementing international human rights standards to promote civil society and reinforce the rule of law.

    Curious about volunteering? Please reach out. The Advocates for Human Rights has an opportunity for you.

    Eager to see change? Give to our mission, our vision, our work. Your gift matters.

    This post was originally published on The Advocates Post.

  • On Contact: America’s Secret Government

    On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses the rise of America’s secret government with journalist and author David Talbot. David Talbot’s book is ‘The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government’.

    The post On Contact: America’s Secret Government appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • North Korea Speaks Out On US Foreign Policy, Demands Respect

    Choe Son Hui, First Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, gave a statement to media on the 17th.

    The statement said:

    The United States has tried to make contact with us through several channels including that in New York since mid February.

    Recently, it requested the contact with us by e-mail and telephone message through different channels and, at the night just before the start of the joint military exercises, sent us through a third country another message for our affirmative response to the contact.

    However, we deem it not necessary to consent the US attempt to get time again.

    We declared already our stand that any DPRK-US contact and dialogue cannot be made unless the US hostile policy is withdrawn and, accordingly, will ignore such US attempt in the future.

    The post North Korea Speaks Out On US Foreign Policy, Demands Respect appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • High Hopes for Substantial Progress on the Death Penalty Tempered by Mild Rhetoric from US Human Rights Council Delegation

    A wide view during the 19th Session Human Rights Council. 15 March 2012. Photo by Jean-Marc FerrŽ

    As the Trump administration drew to a close, anti-death penalty advocates were devastated by an unprecedented series of federal executions. Candidate, and later President-Elect Joe Biden, expressed his opposition to the death penalty as the killing spree continued, leading death penalty opponents to hold high hopes for swift action to both end the federal death penalty and implement the incentives to move states toward abolition of which Biden frequently (if vaguely) spoke.  

    During the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review of the US, many countries made recommendations about the death penalty. Those recommendations ranged from an immediate moratorium on executions and abolition of the death penalty, to steps to ensure that racial discrimination does not play a role in the death penalty, to ensuring that those who face the death penalty are adequately represented. 

    When a UN member country accepts a UPR recommendation, it is committing to working toward its implementation, and must report on its progress in doing so at the next UPR cycle. There is no penalty, beyond some potential embarrassment, for failing to complete the job. Acceptance of these death penalty recommendations would provide the underpinning for strong movements by the administration, via both appropriate executive actions and pressure on other necessary actors, including Congress and state government officials, to help the US keep its commitments.  

    Despite previous strong statements from President Biden about his opposition to the death penalty, however, the US response to these invitations from its Human Rights Council peers was muted, at best. It only partially accepted most death penalty recommendations, and dodged making firm commitments in favor of excuses based on federalism and the powers of the executive branch of government.  

    Worse, in its remarks to the Human Rights Council at the adoption of the UPR outcome, the US opined that the recommendations it received on the death penalty “reflect continuing differences of policy, not differences about what the United States’ international human rights obligations require.” This is not, in fact, a matter of mere policy difference. As we have previously explained, the federal government’s application of the death penalty has been squarely in violation of the international human rights obligations of the US.  

    The US delegation representative went on to “note that President Biden supports legislatively ending the death penalty at the federal level and incentivizing additional states to follow the federal government’s example,” but provided no insight into how the administration plans to accomplish these objectives. 

    Can President Biden eradicate the federal death penalty with the stroke of a pen? No – but he can commute the sentences of everyone currently on federal death row, and he can instruct the Department of Justice to adopt a policy that US Attorneys are not to seek the death penalty going forward. He can make the passage of recently introduced legislation to abolish the federal death penalty a top administration priority. Can President Biden end the death penalty in US states through executive action? No – but he can ensure that every available federal measure is used to make continued executions come at a great cost. That will take a concerted effort by a number of government agencies to review funding programs and other mechanisms for applying the necessary pressure (including FDA oversight of the use of pharmaceutical products for lethal injection), which the President should initiate immediately. It will take bolder statements and bolder action by President Biden to push death penalty abolition forward during his Presidency. 

    The US did fully accept one death-penalty related recommendation, one for which The Advocates specifically lobbied the country that gave it. Belgium recommended that the US ensure those facing the death penalty have adequate legal representation. Now, it is the responsibility of the Biden administration to begin to implement that recommendation not just at the federal level, but at the state level, where most death sentences are issued. As we discussed last Fall in connection with World Day Against the Death Penalty, the legal representation made available in many US states to poor defendants in death penalty cases (and they are almost always poor) is abysmal. President Biden can dramatically reduce the imposition of new death sentences simply by taking steps to ensure that everyone facing a potential death penalty trial has a good, qualified lawyer.  

    Progress has been made toward ending the death penalty in the US in recent years, despite the horrific series of federal executions carried out by the Trump administration. Executions in death penalty states have been slowly declining for decades. Virginia officially abolished the death penalty just last month, and there are hopeful signs that Wyoming and Nevada may soon do the same. In Georgia, which has not abolished the death penalty, new death sentences plummeted after the state created a capital defender office to provide qualified counsel to every defendant in a capital case. The Biden administration must seize the opportunity to build on this momentum, not simply watch from the sidelines and root for it to continue.

    The Advocates for Human Rights is a nonprofit organization dedicated to implementing international human rights standards to promote civil society and reinforce the rule of law.

    Curious about volunteering? Please reach out. The Advocates for Human Rights has an opportunity for you.

    Eager to see change? Give to our mission, our vision, our work. Your gift matters.

    This post was originally published on The Advocates Post.

  • At the UN Human Rights Council, Biden Administration Does an About-Face from Trump Administration Stance on Systemic Racism

    The US delegation appeared before the US Human Rights Council in Geneva this morning for the interactive dialogue on the outcome of the Council’s Universal Periodic review of human rights in the United States. As we mentioned in our preview of the appearance yesterday, the written submission by the US indicating whether it accepted the recommendations made by its peer delegations contained a few surprises, particularly on the topic of systemic racism and police violence.  

    During the Trump administration, the US had taken the rather unsurprising (at the time) stance that systemic racism in the US simply did not exist, and that it certainly did not play a role in disparities in police violence. Last summer, when the Council convened an urgent debate on the topic, the Trump administration had hotly opposed the process and refused to participate, but furiously worked behind the scenes to ensure that all references to the US were deleted from the resolution that was ultimately issued. The Trump administration’s rejection of the role of systemic racism in policing continued when the US delegation made its presentation for the UPR interactive dialogue, during which many other member countries nevertheless recommended that the US take steps to address the problem.  

    The Biden administration took office before the written response of the US to the UPR recommendations was due to be submitted. The response submitted on March 4 accepted a number of recommendations on the need to address police violence and to ensure that race is not a factor in policing but failed to accept the recommendations that expressly called for systemic racism in policing to be eradicated. Given the forthright statements previously made by both President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken acknowledging the need to do exactly that, it came as a surprise that the US did not accept these recommendations.  

    In its oral presentation to the Council this morning, however, the US took a decidedly different position. Acting Assistant Secretary of State Lisa Peterson stated:  

    Last summer, as protesters marched to demand justice following the tragic death of George Floyd, we were reminded, once again, of how pervasive systemic racism is in the United States and the urgent need to address it. What many Americans did not see, or had simply refused to see, could not be ignored any longer. Floyd’s death was a flashpoint within a longstanding national conversation around police brutality against African-Americans and persons of color that galvanized a global call to end the injustices of systemic racism across the globe. We saw this very Council take up this issue last summer during its Urgent Debate on Racism. And in that regard, we welcome the High Commissioner’s statement that the implementation of HRC resolution 43/1, stemming from that debate, will reflect and amplify the voices of victims, as well as their families and communities in all countries. The United States is dedicated to eliminating racial discrimination and the use of excessive force in policing. The Department of Justice has issued guidance stating unequivocally that racial profiling is wrong and has prohibited racial profiling in federal law enforcement practices. Many states have done the same. Our Department of Justice prosecutes individual officers who violate someone’s civil rights and investigates police departments that might be engaging in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives persons of their rights. We also seek to proactively prevent discrimination or the use of excessive force by participating in increased training of federal, state, and local law enforcement officers across the country. 

    As a general rule, accepted recommendations are the ones that officially “count” in the UPR. Accepted recommendations are the ones the member country will be expected to work toward implementing, and for which it will be called to account for its progress at the next UPR cycle. But “noted” (or not accepted) recommendations are frequently implemented anyway. And both Council members and civil society organizations like The Advocates will certainly press the US to live up to its words this morning, in addition to the letter of the recommendations it accepted.  

    The Advocates for Human Rights is a nonprofit organization dedicated to implementing international human rights standards to promote civil society and reinforce the rule of law.

    Curious about volunteering? Please reach out. The Advocates for Human Rights has an opportunity for you.

    Eager to see change? Give to our mission, our vision, our work. Your gift matters.

    This post was originally published on The Advocates Post.

  • The U.S. Returns to the UN Human Rights Council

    In its first major outing following its return to the UN Human Rights Council, the US delegation will participate on Wednesday, March 17, in an interactive debate on the outcome of the Council’s Universal Periodic Review of human rights in the US. Since the review took place in November of 2020, there’s been both a change of administration and a sea change in the US approach to the Council. Long before the review, the Trump administration had withdrawn the US from the Council, but it nevertheless participated in the Council’s US review. 

    As we noted back in November, the national report submitted by the Trump administration in advance of the review struck a rather defiant tone on some hot button issues. For example, in responding to recommendations from the previous cycle of the UPR about police violence and systemic racism, and anticipating an even greater focus on these issues in the current cycle, the US flatly rejected that systemic racism in US law enforcement is even a problem in need of solutions. By contrast, the Biden administration has readily admitted that systemic racism is a serious problem in US law enforcement, albeit while always carefully pointing out that the US is not alone in this.  

    After the recommendations of the other Council members were made orally at the review session, they were put into a written report, and the US began working on its response while former President Trump was still in office. Shortly after the change of administration, newly confirmed Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the US would resume its participation as an observer in the Human Rights Council and will run next year to regain its seat as a Council member. Earlier this month, the Biden administration submitted the US “addendum” to the report of the UPR working group, in which it indicated which of the recommendations made by other member countries it accepts, and therefore will work to implement, and which it does not accept. Many of the accepted recommendations dealt with the problem of police violence and the need to work to ensure that race is not a factor in police actions, but somewhat surprisingly, the US addendum did not support recommendations that referred expressly to systemic racism. How the US will reconcile the inconsistency between the statements of President Biden and Secretary Blinken acknowledging the problem of systemic racism with its failure to accept such recommendations remains to be seen at the upcoming Wednesday dialogue. The Advocates will be making an oral statement to the Council on police violence and systemic racism in the US on Thursday, March 18.  

    Other vitally important human rights issues were also raised by the recommendations received by the US, including several that were addressed in stakeholder reports and lobbying by The Advocates in advance of the review, including the death penalty, human trafficking, and the rights of immigrants. The written response of the US to those recommendations contains many hopeful signs, and we look forward to hearing these issues addressed by the US delegation on Wednesday. 

    The Advocates for Human Rights is a nonprofit organization dedicated to implementing international human rights standards to promote civil society and reinforce the rule of law.

    Curious about volunteering? Please reach out. The Advocates for Human Rights has an opportunity for you.

    Eager to see change? Give to our mission, our vision, our work. Your gift matters.

    This post was originally published on The Advocates Post.

  • Shifty Shifters: Movers and Shapers like a Trillion Locusts

    The final report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concludes that the project has been ‘the most successful anti-poverty movement in history’. Two key claims underpin this narrative: that global poverty has been cut in half, and global hunger nearly in half, since 1990. This good-news narrative has been touted by the United Nations and has been widely repeated by the media. But closer inspection reveals that the UN’s claims about poverty and hunger are misleading, and even intentionally inaccurate. The MDGs have used targeted statistical manipulation to make it seem as though the poverty and hunger trends have been improving when in fact they have worsened. In addition, the MDGs use definitions of poverty and hunger that dramatically underestimate the scale likely of these problems. In reality, around four billion people remain in poverty today, and around two billion remain hungry – more than ever before in history, and between two and four times what the UN would have us believe. The implications of this reality are profound. Worsening poverty and hunger trends indicate that our present model of development is not working and needs to be fundamentally rethought.

    — Jason Hickel, Third World Quarterly , Volume 37, 2016 – Issue 5

    *–*

    How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.

    Most of the 3.5 billion earn an average of $2.50 a day. The poorest 40 percent of the world population accounts for just 5 percent of all global income. About 80 percent of all humanity live on less than $10 a day. And the poorest 50 percent maintain only 7.2 percent of the world’s private consumption. How exactly could they have accumulated an amount of surplus wealth comparable to the 85 filthy richest?

    — Michael Parenti

    Genocide Phnom Penh

    Staggering, no,  the memory hole shoveling going on and perpetrated by elites in commerce, weapons, media, education, a la industrial complexes in the second decade of the 21st Century? Like plagues of locusts. Leeches two hundred worth per hominid, and the tapeworm eats the last, next and current generation like a desiccating alien of our nightmares.

    The more light shining on the criminals, spotlights onto the military war lords, floodlights on the entire punishment cabal in governments, in corporations, in policing and uniformed military agencies, the more that bearing witness just peters out. It flags the average Yankee, and the doodle dandy is football, flicks and frolicking with furious caloric intent.

    Welcome to the West. Then, the mind-numbing retorts to the initiation of discourse, of legitimate discussion about the ails of the world, largely set loose by the captains of industries — the military-media-legal-medical-penal-computing-financial-education-energy-AI-real estate-poison-agriculture COMPLEX. And, boy, is it never really “complex” — it’s about the art of the steal, the art of the scam, the art of the grift, the art of the toll-fine-fee-garnishment-penalty-tax-attachment set forth by the lobbies of the lords of death with the Eichmann’s of Bureaucracy greasing the skids and oiling the wheels. Keep those hedge funds going, the trains running, the profits heaping.

    • “We can only take so much trauma.”
    • “The human brain can’t take so much truth.”
    • “Trigger Warning; The Following Stories About Wealth for the Rich and Poverty for the rest of Us Might Cause Spasms of Collective Amnesia, Anxiety, Animosity.”
    • “There is no meek shall inherit the earth. We are talking about the meek and the poor inheriting the toxins, pollutants, the penury, the profound suffering inflicted upon them generation after generation by the rich and their enablers, the ultimate evil — those turning a blind eye to suffering, raping, razing, murdering.”

    I’m getting it from all angles, really, the tired, the over-educated (in terms of college but not in terms of smarts). The tired middle class. Retired and one-trick phony environmentalist ponies. All those huffing and puffing and blowing down the Trump Towers, folk who are self-blinding themselves, as if bearing the truth of Biden et al, as well as bearing the weight of protecting Everything/Anything Empire, while the chorus of War Mongering Democrats a la LGBTQA-+ sing ‘Hallelujah, No More Trump’ puts them right smack where Oedipus was, exposed to the truth and overcome with shame, grief, and remorse. Poking eyes out is the least the people who follow the perverse leaders should do.

    Except, their blinding is symbolic, life-long, from womb to cradle to grave, as in turning a blind eye to the roots, the very radical cause of all the suffering, the police no-knocks, the cesium floating in lungs and bellies, and a dozen other micro-particles from this or that nuclear fallout incident. Symbolic and demonstrative of the kill-for-profits Capitalism.

    It is too too much for the masses — The Truth —  so we all have to gather round the Zoom screen, tune into Amazon Prime, and sing, Give Peace a Chance while the world is fleeced by the billionaires, but also those millionaires (we tend to give millionaires, multi-millionaires a get-out-of-jail pass, when they too are the culprits helping spread that poisonous fallout).

    Professor Bernd Grambow (co-author from IMT Atlantique) added “the present work, using cutting-edge analytical tools, gives only a very small insight in the very large diversity of particles released during the [Fukushima] nuclear accident, much more work is necessary to get a realistic picture of the highly heterogeneous environmental and health impact.”

    Lockdowns for a flu virus, lockdowns for free thought, lockups for free speech, lock and loaded for the Empire, shackled to bills-mortgages-policies-ballooning debt…. BUT  for fuck’s sake, we can’t lock-down the fossil fuel monsters, lock-up the Fukushima shills, shutdown the Olympics, punish and quell the military saber rattlers (read: purveyors of nuclear- chemical-bacterial-viral-digital-intergalactic weaponry).

    Business as usual is a trillion easy dollars in Pandemic Profits, and a cool several trillion more with mandatory masking, Zooming, SARS-CoV2,3,4,5,6 annual vaccinations and semi-annual boosters.

    Passports to their hell. Yet, when you talk to a Kamala Harris floozy, well, they get teary eyed, sing the All Spangled Banner of Buffoonery, and then tell you to hit the road, no more Haeder in their House.

    Literally, people want nothing of politics, or the reveal — showing how their own colonized and kettled thinking under the guise of “liberal” looting under the Democrat Vote has always been part of the problem, not any solution to the world thievery or a pathway to  world peace.

    So What is The Answer?

    It is not a $64,000 question, for sure, since the answer is collectively simple, easily repeated, easily understood, Yet, that is the jig, always looking for the messiah, or having their cake (capitalism) and eating it (profits-profits-profits) too. They are limited and limiting, and they gladly take the Kool-Aide and mix in a shot of Jack Daniels and a jigger of high fructose fizz.

    Resisting for them is not an option. If they can’t converse, frame, contextualize, harmonize, recount, go back in history, recall the scene of the crime(s), then how the hell can these same folk who ask, Well, you sure know how to criticize and go on and on about the ills of Capitalism, but show me any other system that works. Humanity is humanity, whether in the center of Wall Street or out on the Rez?

    This is their thinking, their great retort, and so, how do we get to that point where we just get to the basics, the Cornel West basics– Watch his rumble in the jungle: At Harvard, the worst kind of man-eating institution, along with a few hundred elite schools on this side and that side of the pond:

    Listen to him, watch him, feel his presence of soul, Dr. West. Not a perfect man, thank god!

    So, what is the answer? Justice. Social-spiritual-ecological-cultural-gender-age-racial-ethnic-ecnonmic-educational-food-energy JUSTICE? Using the inverse, the answer is the whole human-whole earth, toward holism, embedded in systems thinking, what it means to have the commons, what it is to be a society among other societies that is ecologically-based, agrarian-centered, humanistic-thriving, environmentally-aware, is, well, the opposite formulation of these Gandhian sins:

    Wealth Without Work
    Pleasure Without Conscience
    Knowledge Without Character
    Commerce (Business) Without Morality (Ethics)
    Science Without Humanity
    Religion Without Sacrifice
    Politics Without Principle

    It doesn’t take much K12 education and applied learning to understand that reversing these sins and following the antithesis would illuminate the bearable weight of being a human in the world, triggering change at a global and galactical level. Prometheus steals the fire from the gods and gives it to people. Bound to the mountain. Prometheus grows weary. The future, oh, the future, swallowed up by that lack of hope. Let us all be Prometheus, and help each other take from the thieves, the rich, and give warmth and fire to the world. Unbound us together. Break the chains of the illicit gods and their devils.

    Really, though, one person’s hope is another person’s oppression. In capitalism, there is the king of the dung heap, the winner being the one who dies with the most toys. Dog-eat-dog, and survival of the most unfit (using the Seven Sins of Humanity above as illustrative of what makes capitalism really zip along).

    In Western culture, it all might seem like a Greek Tragedy of Trailer Park or Mar-a-lago proportions. It might all seem like a hardscrabble blues tribute to American stick-to-it-ness. That hardened soul, as DH Lawrence ascribed —

    The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

    We know that Western soul is a killer from the womb — those royals and despicable ones from the Old World, those Belgium in the Congo, those Romans, those hard, soldiering, religious zealots, hand in hand with silver chalice and golden rosary, those kings and queens, launching the deplorable ones, the rabble into crusades of raping-ravaging-razing. There is no “American soul” without the British slave traders-merchants-purchasers; no American soul without the French and Spanish interlopers. The American soul is part and parcel those former Nazis and the money-changers, the globalists looking for a micro-penny for every human corpuscle exploited in their gaming humanity. This is Turtle Island, not some chunk of land named for an Italian map maker for the king.

    Now that’s a dark dark killer that never melts — Capitalism.  It is now cleaned up, a la Madison Avenue and slick green-blue-pink-white washing, no longer presented as cold, stoic, but happy, illustrious, coopting, brainwashing, gleeful, the ice cream truck coming to serve all the children with gooey goodies. Shifty, slick, liberal, slippery, hip. It is now a virus inside a thousand viruses —

    A democratic society shapes itself – by means of the participation of its citizens in discussing and deciding how things should be organised and to what ends.

    But, as even their name reveals, the Global Shapers want to “shape” society from above and in their own interests.

    This is not the solution to global problems, and, the rockets and payloads of Bezos and Musk and DoD and the rest of the capitalists looking for lucre and gold on Mars and the Moon. Reset is not rebounding. Reset is not reconvening the true holistic way of life. Reset is not returning to a point in time in our civilizations where we come together in mutual aid, live a biodynamic present and future, hold onto sacred tribal principles, understand the soil-air-water. The reset is not a return to sanity, actualization for woman, man, child, ecosystem. This reset is the rich’s bargain basement theft of our agency, our independence, our collective will to strike at them as the felons of our time. Their reset is tracking our every movement, each blink of the eye, each snore and defecation. This reset is about pulling strings, forcing the Faustian Bargain each moment. They will fine-garnish-withhold-penalize-criminalize our unborn, and our dying parents. You get a universal income, but not to be spent on what they do not want you/us to spend it on.

    The foregone conclusion is what the teachers teach the children. It is what the media paint around us. Each narrative directed and shot for Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or Vudu, they are set to propagandize for the rich, the resetters, the titans who want mars colonized, who want the moon for their private resort. Orbiting Club Meds in the ionosphere.

    Yet, the Lesson is Dead Wolves, Manatees and Turtles

    The very place of Trump and Spring Break, Florida, is emblematic of the fall, the disgusting imbalance of the world, of sanity, of thinking. Manatees dying off in unfathomable numbers. Turtles washing up sick and dead. The expansion of the ocean, wiping out much of Florida by 2100. The bastion of Spring Break and lust and speedboats and dream hoarding.

    Florida has seen an alarming rise in manatee deaths in 2021.

    Something not to be proud of, and to lend pause for humanity, but not more than once, and give it to me once in that 24-hour news cycle, please. At least 432 Florida manatees have already died in 2021, well over double the state’s 5-year average for the same time period.

    Hundreds of sea turtles washing up on Southwest Florida beaches this year in a mass mortality event that researchers say will impact the recovery of the protected species is not a good sign of HUMAN health. The Great Reset has nothing to say about the reality of our own commons.

    Gray wolves in the North American wilderness.

    Then you have Wisconsin, gun-toting AR15-loving murderers taking on a record 216 wolves killed in 60 hours. What does this say about this society, this blood sport society of high powered weapons, radar trackers, dually pick-ups, $340,000 campers, TV, booze, and a quick trip in the woods to murder wolves?

    Migrants rescued by Save the Children’s Vos Hestia

    Or, the hard cold soul of the European, Italians, putting 20-year sentences on people working with charities to help stranded and sinking and drowning refugees from African countries. Imagine that world of the cold Great Resetters.  Save the Children and MSF among dozens facing sentences of up to 20 years over humanitarian work

    Humanitarian organizations are rejecting what they say is an attempt to criminalize lifesaving aid to migrants and refugees at sea after Italian prosecutors charged three groups with aiding and abetting illegal immigration through their rescue operations in the Mediterranean.

    Over 20 people are facing up to 20 years in prison. — Source.

    rescue operation

    Each story of injustice is the tip of the proverbial iceberg, demonstrating the insanity of systems — legal systems of punishment-abandonment-unruly laws against the suffering, laws meant to pay the rich, pay off the rotting bureaucrats, the Eichmann’s, big and small, who keep the wheels and the gears of death grinding, whether those wheels are those of the Empire, or the Capitalists, or the Economic Hitmen-Frontmen-Debasers, or all the pigs who make money off the penury and punishment unleashed by Capitalism.

    Not me. Not I. Over my dead body.

    The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.
    — Ernesto Che Guevera

    Che Guevara Photo

    The post Shifty Shifters: Movers and Shapers like a Trillion Locusts first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Department Of Health Pressured Brazil Into Rejecting Sputnik V

    The developers of the Russian vaccine against the coronavirus have condemned the actions of the American authorities and stressed that nations should be fighting as a united front against the pandemic.

    The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has admitted in its annual report that it used “diplomatic relations” in order to force Brazil, one of the worst-hit countries in terms of the pandemic, to reject authorisation of the Russian coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V.

    The American authorities put their actions down to the need to “mitigate efforts” by Russia to boost its “influence” in the region, which, as the department’s paper argues, would be detrimental to the “US’ safety and security”. The report did not elaborate on how Brazil’s approval of an additional vaccine to fight the pandemic would undermine US security.

    The post US Department Of Health Pressured Brazil Into Rejecting Sputnik V appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • How ‘Big Ag’ Ate Up America’s Small Farms

    The roads were icy and the wind biting cold as we started our 10,000-km journey through the heart of America one January morning. Sristy Agrawal, Rajashik Tarafder — young physicists pursuing their PhDs — Rumela Gangopadhyay, a theatre artiste, and I wanted to witness the state of farming in rural America, the quintessential “Trump country”.

    Shooting in the frigid weather amid a pandemic was gruelling, but the warm welcome we got from farmers — Republican or Democrat, black or white — made up for it. We were surprised to learn that the American farm landscape, like India’s, is dominated by small farmers. They make up 90% of all farms, but produce only 25% of the market value. This was our first clue to America’s rural crisis. In the last decade, income of small farms has consistently been in the red.

    The post How ‘Big Ag’ Ate Up America’s Small Farms appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Digital Colonialism: The Evolution Of American Empire

    In 2020, billionaires made out like bandits. Jeff Bezos’s personal holdings surged from $113 to $184 billion. Elon Musk briefly eclipsed Bezos, with a net worth rise from $27 billion to over $185 billion.

    For the bourgeoisie presiding over “Big Tech” corporations, life is grand.

    Yet, while the expanded dominance of these corporations in their domestic markets is the subject of numerous critical analyses, their global reach is a fact seldom discussed, especially by dominant intellectuals in the American empire.

    In fact, once we investigate the mechanics and numbers, it becomes apparent that Big Tech is not only global in scope, it is fundamentally colonial in character and dominated by the United States. This phenomenon is called “digital colonialism.”

    We live in a world where digital colonialism now risks becoming as significant and far-reaching a threat to the Global South as classic colonialism was in previous centuries.

    The post Digital Colonialism: The Evolution Of American Empire appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • “Engaging the World”: The “Fascinating Story” of Hamas’s Political Evolution

    On February 4, representatives from the Palestinian Movement, Hamas, visited Moscow to inform the Russian government of the latest development on the unity talks between the Islamic Movement and its Palestinian counterparts, especially Fatah.

    This was not the first time that Hamas’s officials traveled to Moscow on similar missions. In fact, Moscow continues to represent an important political breathing space for Hamas, which has been isolated by Israel’s Western benefactors. Involved in this isolation are also several Arab governments which, undoubtedly, have done very little to break the Israeli siege on Gaza.

    The Russia-Hamas closeness is already paying dividends. On February 17, shipments of the Russian COVID-19 vaccine, Sputnik V, have made it to Gaza via Israel, a testament to that growing rapport.

    While Russia alone cannot affect a complete paradigm shift in the case of Palestine, Hamas feels that a Russian alternative to the blind and conditional American support for Israel is possible, if not urgent.

    Recently, we interviewed Dr. Daud Abdullah, the author of ‘Engaging the World: The Making of Hamas’s Foreign Policy’, and Mr. Na’eem Jeenah, Director of the Afro-Middle East Center in Johannesburg, which published Dr. Abdullah’s book.

    Abdullah’s volume on Hamas is a must-read, as it offers a unique take on Hamas, liberating the discussion on the Movement from the confines of the reductionist Western media’s perception of Hamas as terrorist – and of the counterclaims, as well. In this book, Hamas is viewed as a political actor, whose armed resistance is only a component in a complex and far-reaching strategy.

    Why Russia? 

    As Moscow continues to cement its presence in the region by offering itself as a political partner and, compared with the US, a more balanced mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, Hamas sees the developing Russian role as a rare opportunity to break away from the US-Israel imposed isolation.

    “Russia was a member of the Quartet that was set up in 2003 but, of course, as a member of the (United Nations) Security Council, it has always had an ability to inform the discourse on Palestine,” Abdullah said, adding that in light of “the gradual demise of American influence, Russia realized that there was an emerging vacuum in the region, particularly after the (Arab) uprisings.”

    “With regard to Hamas and Russia the relationship took off after the (Palestinian) elections in 2006 but it was not Hamas’s initiative, it was (Russian President Vladimir) Putin who, in a press conference in Madrid after the election, said that he would be willing to host Hamas’s leadership in Moscow. Because Russia is looking for a place in the region.”

    Hamas’s willingness to engage with the Russians has more than one reason, chief among them is the fact that Moscow, unlike the US, refused to abide by Israel’s portrayal of the Movement. “The fundamental difference between Russia and America and China … is that the Russians and the Chinese do not recognize Hamas as a ‘terrorist organization’; they have never done so, unlike the Americans, and so it made it easy for them to engage openly with Hamas,” Abdullah said.

    On Hamas’s ‘Strategic Balance’

    In his book, Abdullah writes about the 1993 Oslo Accords, which represented a watershed moment, not only for Hamas but also for the entire Palestinian liberation struggle. The shift towards a US-led ‘peace process’ compelled Hamas to maintain a delicate balance “between strategic objectives and tactical flexibility.”

    Abdullah wrote:

    Hamas sees foreign relations as an integral and important part of its political ideology and liberation strategy. Soon after the Movement emerged, foreign policies were developed to help its leaders and members navigate this tension between idealism and realism. This pragmatism is evident in the fact that Hamas was able to establish relations with the regimes of Muammar Gaddhafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, both of whom were fiercely opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood.

    In our interview, Abdullah elaborated:

    From the very beginning, Hamas adopted certain principles in respect to its international relations and, later on, in the formation of a foreign policy. Among these, there is a question of maintaining its independence of decision-making; non-alignment in conflicting blocks, avoidance of interference in the affairs of other states.

    Mr. Jeenah, an accomplished writer himself, also spoke of the “delicate balance.”

    “It is a delicate balance, and a difficult one to maintain because, at this stage, when movements are regarded and regard themselves as liberation movements, they need to have higher moral and ethical standards than, for example, governments,” Jeenah said.  “For some reason, we expect that governments have to make difficult choices but, with liberation movements, we don’t, because they are all about idealism and creating an ideal society, etc.”

    Jeenah uses the South Africa anti-apartheid struggle which, in many ways, is comparable to the Palestinian quest for freedom, to illustrate his point:

    When the liberation movement in South Africa was exiled, they took a similar kind of position. While some of them might have had a particular allegiance to the Soviet Union or to China, some of them also had strong operations in European countries, which they regarded as part of the bigger empire. Nevertheless, they had the freedom to operate there. Some of them operated in other African countries where there were dictatorships and they got protection from those states.

    Hamas and the Question of National Unity

    In his book, which promises to be an essential read on the subject, Abdullah lists six principles that guide Hamas’s political agenda. One of these guiding principles is the “search for common ground.”

    In addressing the question of Palestinian factionalism, we contended that, while Fatah has failed at creating a common, nominally democratic platform for Palestinians to interact politically, Hamas cannot be entirely blameless. If that is, indeed, the case, can one then make the assertion that Hamas has succeeded in its search for the elusive common ground?

    Abdullah answers:

    Let me begin with what happened after the elections in 2006. Although Hamas won convincingly and they could have formed a government, they decided to opt for a government of national unity. They offered to (Palestinian Authority President) Mahmoud Abbas and to (his party) Fatah to come into a government of national unity. They didn’t want to govern by themselves. And that, to me, is emblematic of their vision, their commitment to national unity.

    But the question of national unity, however coveted and urgently required, is not just controlled by Palestinians.

    The PLO is the one that signed the Oslo Accords,” Abdullah said, “and I think this is one of Hamas’s weaknesses: as much as it wants national unity and a reform of the PLO, the fact of the matter is Israel and the West will not allow Hamas to enter into the PLO easily, because this would be the end of Oslo.

    On Elections under Military Occupation

    On January 15, Abbas announced an official decree to hold Palestinian elections, first presidential, then legislative, then elections within the PLO’s Palestine National Council (PNC), which has historically served as a Palestinian parliament in exile. The first phase of these elections is scheduled for May 22.

    But will this solve the endemic problem of Palestinian political representation? Moreover, is this the proper historical evolution of national liberation movements – democracy under military occupation, followed by liberation, instead of the other way around?

    Jeenah spoke of this dichotomy:

    On the one hand, elections are an opportunity for Palestinians to express their choices. On the other hand, what is the election really? We are not talking about a democratic election for the State, but for a Bantustan authority, at greater restraints than the South African authority.

    Moreover, the Israeli “occupying power will not make the mistake it did the last time. It will not allow such freedom (because of which) Hamas (had) won the elections. I don’t think Israel is going to allow it now.”

    Yet there is a silver lining in this unpromising scenario. According to Jeenah, “I think the only difference this election could make is allowing some kind of reconciliation between Gaza and the West Bank.”

    Hamas, the ICC and War Crimes 

    Then, there is the urgent question of the anticipated war crime investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Yet, when the ICC agreed to consider allegations of war crimes in Palestine, chances are not only alleged Israeli war criminals are expected to be investigated, but the probe could potentially consider the questioning of Palestinians, as well. Should not this concern Hamas in the least?

    In the Israeli wars on Gaza in 2008, 2012 and 2014, Hamas, along with other armed groups had no other option but to “defend the civilian population,” Abdullah said, pointing out that the “overriding concept” is that the Movement “believes in the principle of international law.”

    If Hamas “can restore the rights of the Palestinian people through legal channels, then it will be much easier for the Movement, rather than having to opt for the armed struggle,” Abdullah asserted.

    Understanding Hamas

    Undoubtedly, it is crucial to understand Hamas, not only as part of the Palestine-related academic discourse, but in the everyday political discourse concerning Palestine; in fact, the entire region. Abdullah’s book is itself critical to this understanding.

    Jeenah argued that Abdullah’s book is not necessarily an “introductory text to the Hamas Movement. It has a particular focus, which is the development of Hamas’s foreign policy. The importance of that, in general, is firstly that there isn’t a text that deals specifically with Hamas’s foreign policy. What this book does is present Hamas as a real political actor.”

    The evolution of Hamas’s political discourse and behavior since its inception, according to Jeenah, is a “fascinating” one.

    Many agree. Commenting on the book, leading Israeli historian, Professor Ilan Pappé, wrote,

    This book challenges successfully the common misrepresentation of Hamas in the West. It is a must-read for anyone engaged with the Palestine issue and interested in an honest introduction to this important Palestinian Movement.

    • (Dr. Daud Abdullah’s book, Engaging the World: The Making of Hamas’s Foreign Policy, is available here.)

    The post “Engaging the World”: The “Fascinating Story” of Hamas’s Political Evolution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Culpability and Recalibration: MBS and the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi

    It was a brutal way to go, and it had the paw prints of the highest authorities.  On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian insider turned outsider, was murdered by a squad of 15 men from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  He was dismembered and quite literally cancelled in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

    This state sanctioned killing was a vile, clumsy effort against a journalist and critic of a person who has come to be affectionately known in brown nosing circles as MBS, the ambitious, bratty Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  Since then, every effort has been made on his part, and his followers, to repel suggestions of guilt or involvement.

    It is worth remembering how the narratives were initially developed.  First, the killing was denied as a libel against the kingdom.  “Mr Khashoggi,” claimed an official statement from the Saudi authorities, “visited the consulate to request paperwork related to his marital status and exited shortly thereafter.”  Then, his death was accepted, but deemed the result of a dreadful accident in which the men in question had overstepped.  The death subsequently became the work of a blood thirsty gang of sadists who had acted on their own volition or, as US President Donald Trump called them, “rogue killers”.

    Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir was a model of dissembling grace, telling news networks that it had all been a “tremendous mistake” which the Crown Prince was “not aware” of.  “We don’t know, in terms of details, how.  We don’t know where the body is.”

    Statements of this nature run the risk of being totally implausible while also being revealing.  It certainly showed a level of audacity.  But in the exposure of the operation, the Saudi intelligence services also risked looking amateurish and startlingly incompetent.  As a reward for their activities, 11 of the crew were tried by the Saudi government, eight of whom were convicted of murder.  Their names have never been released.

    Investigations into the murder are generally of the same view: the operation was authorised by the Crown Prince or certainly someone in the highest reaches of the Saudi government.  The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnès Callamard, thought as much.  In June 2019, the rapporteur published a report finding that the execution “was the result of elaborate planning involving extensive coordination and significant human and financial resources.  It was overseen, planned and endorsed by high-level officials. It was premeditated.”

    The latest publication to stack the shelves of the Kingdom’s culpability comes in the form of a declassified US intelligence report submitted to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.  The authors of the short document are clear about the lines of responsibility.  “We assess,” goes the Executive Summary, “that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”  This conclusion was arrived at given the role of the Crown Prince in “the decision making in the Kingdom”, the participation “of a key adviser” along with members of bin Salman’s protective detail, and his “support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.”

    Sombrely, the compilers of the report can only state the obvious.  “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”

    The details of the report corroborate other findings.  The team sent to Istanbul had seven members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective guard, the Rapid Intervention Force.  It would have been hard to envisage the participation of these men in an operation without approval of the Crown Prince.  Members of the squad also included those from the Saudi Centre for Studies and Media Affairs (CSMARC) based at the Royal Court.

    The only note of slight uncertainty to come in the report is the state of mind Saudi officials were in terms of harming Khashoggi.  It was clear that the Crown Prince saw the journalist “as a threat to the Kingdom and more broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him.”  What was less clear that “how far in advance Saudi officials decided to harm him.”

    The neglected, and no less obscene aspect of the Khashoggi affair apart from his extrajudicial killing, is the business as usual approach taken by various powers towards Saudi Arabia.  President Trump was merely the frankest of them all, not wishing to cloud lucrative weapons deals and the ongoing security relationship.  “The United States,” he promised in a statement, “intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.”

    The Biden administration prefers dissimulation and forced sincerity.  US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saw the need to “recalibrate” rather than “rupture” the relations between the two countries.  “The [US] relationship with Saudi Arabia is bigger than any one individual.”  It was sufficient for the US to illuminate the issue of Khashoggi’s killing.  “I think this report speaks for itself.”

    Just to show he has been busy recalibrating away, Blinken announced a visa restriction policy named after the slain Saudi – the Khashoggi Ban.  Some 76 Saudi nationals have received bans for having “been engaged in threatening dissidents overseas, including but not limited to the Khashoggi killing.”

    Ahead of the report’s release, President Joe Biden called his Saudi counterpart, King Salman, making much of human rights and the rule of law.  But doing so did not mean holding the Crown Prince to account for his misdeeds.  What mattered was “the longstanding partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia”.  The Royals, to that end, can rest easy.  There will be no substantial change in the arrangements between Washington and Riyadh, merely a heavy layering of cosmetics. That’s recalibration for you.

    The post Culpability and Recalibration: MBS and the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Culpability and Recalibration: MBS and the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi

    It was a brutal way to go, and it had the paw prints of the highest authorities.  On October 2, 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian insider turned outsider, was murdered by a squad of 15 men from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.  He was dismembered and quite literally cancelled in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

    This state sanctioned killing was a vile, clumsy effort against a journalist and critic of a person who has come to be affectionately known in brown nosing circles as MBS, the ambitious, bratty Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  Since then, every effort has been made on his part, and his followers, to repel suggestions of guilt or involvement.

    It is worth remembering how the narratives were initially developed.  First, the killing was denied as a libel against the kingdom.  “Mr Khashoggi,” claimed an official statement from the Saudi authorities, “visited the consulate to request paperwork related to his marital status and exited shortly thereafter.”  Then, his death was accepted, but deemed the result of a dreadful accident in which the men in question had overstepped.  The death subsequently became the work of a blood thirsty gang of sadists who had acted on their own volition or, as US President Donald Trump called them, “rogue killers”.

    Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al Jubeir was a model of dissembling grace, telling news networks that it had all been a “tremendous mistake” which the Crown Prince was “not aware” of.  “We don’t know, in terms of details, how.  We don’t know where the body is.”

    Statements of this nature run the risk of being totally implausible while also being revealing.  It certainly showed a level of audacity.  But in the exposure of the operation, the Saudi intelligence services also risked looking amateurish and startlingly incompetent.  As a reward for their activities, 11 of the crew were tried by the Saudi government, eight of whom were convicted of murder.  Their names have never been released.

    Investigations into the murder are generally of the same view: the operation was authorised by the Crown Prince or certainly someone in the highest reaches of the Saudi government.  The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnès Callamard, thought as much.  In June 2019, the rapporteur published a report finding that the execution “was the result of elaborate planning involving extensive coordination and significant human and financial resources.  It was overseen, planned and endorsed by high-level officials. It was premeditated.”

    The latest publication to stack the shelves of the Kingdom’s culpability comes in the form of a declassified US intelligence report submitted to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.  The authors of the short document are clear about the lines of responsibility.  “We assess,” goes the Executive Summary, “that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”  This conclusion was arrived at given the role of the Crown Prince in “the decision making in the Kingdom”, the participation “of a key adviser” along with members of bin Salman’s protective detail, and his “support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.”

    Sombrely, the compilers of the report can only state the obvious.  “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”

    The details of the report corroborate other findings.  The team sent to Istanbul had seven members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective guard, the Rapid Intervention Force.  It would have been hard to envisage the participation of these men in an operation without approval of the Crown Prince.  Members of the squad also included those from the Saudi Centre for Studies and Media Affairs (CSMARC) based at the Royal Court.

    The only note of slight uncertainty to come in the report is the state of mind Saudi officials were in terms of harming Khashoggi.  It was clear that the Crown Prince saw the journalist “as a threat to the Kingdom and more broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him.”  What was less clear that “how far in advance Saudi officials decided to harm him.”

    The neglected, and no less obscene aspect of the Khashoggi affair apart from his extrajudicial killing, is the business as usual approach taken by various powers towards Saudi Arabia.  President Trump was merely the frankest of them all, not wishing to cloud lucrative weapons deals and the ongoing security relationship.  “The United States,” he promised in a statement, “intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region.”

    The Biden administration prefers dissimulation and forced sincerity.  US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saw the need to “recalibrate” rather than “rupture” the relations between the two countries.  “The [US] relationship with Saudi Arabia is bigger than any one individual.”  It was sufficient for the US to illuminate the issue of Khashoggi’s killing.  “I think this report speaks for itself.”

    Just to show he has been busy recalibrating away, Blinken announced a visa restriction policy named after the slain Saudi – the Khashoggi Ban.  Some 76 Saudi nationals have received bans for having “been engaged in threatening dissidents overseas, including but not limited to the Khashoggi killing.”

    Ahead of the report’s release, President Joe Biden called his Saudi counterpart, King Salman, making much of human rights and the rule of law.  But doing so did not mean holding the Crown Prince to account for his misdeeds.  What mattered was “the longstanding partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia”.  The Royals, to that end, can rest easy.  There will be no substantial change in the arrangements between Washington and Riyadh, merely a heavy layering of cosmetics. That’s recalibration for you.

    This article was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2021 at 11:09pm and is filed under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Extrajudicial Killing, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, United States.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Over 800 Organizations and Individuals in the United States Demand the Biden Administration End Its Support for the Brutal Moïse Regime in Haiti

    Above photo: By Professor Danny Shaw who is currently in Haiti

    United States – Today, February 24, 72 organizations and 700 individuals published an open letter calling for the Biden administration to end its illegal and destructive intervention in Haiti. While Joe Biden and the Democrats condemned the Trump forces for not respecting the results of the U.S. election, they are supporting Jovenel Moïse’s refusal to leave office after his term as president ended on February 7, 2021. Moïse has unleashed violent gangs, the police and the military against protesters who are demanding that he respect the Constitution and step down.

    “President Biden claims to care about racial equity but his actions in Haiti show the emptiness of that rhetoric,” said Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace. “For centuries now, the United States has employed force to dominate Haiti, the first Black Republic that was established in 1804 after the defeat of French and Spanish colonizers. President Biden has an opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to democracy and Black self-determination by ending support for the Moïse regime and denouncing the current violence.”

    The past two presidents of Haiti, Michel Martelly and Jovenel Moïse, were hand-picked and forced into office by the United States during the Obama administration against the will of the Haitian people. Moïse is currently ruling by decree after dismissing most of the legislators and refusing to hold elections. With the backing of the Core Group, composed of the United States, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, the European Union and the United Nations, Moïse is trying to push a new constitution through using a referendum in April. The new constitution being written by members of the Core Group and without any real participation of the Haitian people would grant greater power to the executive office.

    Since February 7, the rogue Moïse government has launched a brutal crackdown on all dissent resulting in home invasions, arrests, the firing of Supreme Court judges and a police inspector general, attacks on the media and the use of chemical agents and live ammunition to disperse protests, as documented by the U. S. Human Rights Clinics.

    “The current situation in Haiti is critical,” stated Marleine Bastien, the Executive Director of the FANM In Action and a leading voice in South Florida’s Haitian community. “The Superior Council of Haiti’s Judiciary, The Haitian Bar Federation, and credible civil society organizations inside Haiti and their diaspora allies agree that President Moise’s term has in fact ended.  It is time for President Biden to keep his promise and respect the democratic rights and  self-determination of the Haitian people.”

    Here is the open letter:

    On February 7, 2021, Jovenel Moïse’s term as president of Haiti ended – but with the support of the Biden administration he is refusing to leave office. This has created an urgent crisis in the country. A mass movement, reminiscent of the 1986 popular movement that overthrew the brutal U.S.-sponsored dictatorship of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, is demanding Moïse step down. We are alarmed by the abundance of evidence of severe human rights violations by the Moïse regime to quell the protests.

    One of the main calls from the mobilizations of hundreds of thousands in the streets of Port-au-Prince and across Haiti has been for the United States, United Nations and the Organization of American States to stop their interference. These bodies, as part of the “Core Group” of imperialist nations and institutions targeting Haiti, are currently pushing their rewrite of the Haitian Constitution through a referendum on April 25.

    These organizations have a long history of neocolonial intervention in Haiti and the region. Ever since the democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide was overthrown for a second time by a U.S.-sponsored coup in 2004, Haiti has been occupied by a United Nations force that, at its height, deployed 14,000 troops and personnel. This occupation has changed form over the years (from MINUSTAH to BINUH), but it is ongoing.

    The U.S. government has consistently stood as a barrier to popular democracy in the Americas. The 2009 coup in Honduras; the 2019 coup in Bolivia; and the ongoing blockades of Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela are but several examples of the U.S.’s poor record on human rights and lack of respect for sovereignty in the region. By its own admission, the State Department “works closely with the OAS, UN, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and individual countries to advance its policy goals in Haiti.” Under the guise of fighting drug trafficking, the U.S. continues to train and fund the Haitian National Police.

    The U.S. establishment spin doctors seemingly live in an alternate universe, claiming, “The remarkable lack of popular response to calls for mass protests in recent weeks indicates that Haitian people are tired of endless lockdowns and squabbling over power.” The reality is quite the opposite: the Haitian people are united in their call for a peaceful transition to democracy.

    We express our solidarity with the Haitian people and our support for their rights to democracy and self-determination. We join our voices to the demands of the Haitian people who are calling for the following:

    We demand that Jovenel Moïse

    • Immediately step down.

    We demand that the Biden Administration:

    • Withdraw financial support for the illegal constitutional referendum and Moïse dictatorship;
    • Respect the will of the vast majority of the people demanding democracy and Haitian self-determination
    • Reaffirm support for the right to peaceful protest;
    • Immediately cease all U.S. financial and military support to Haiti’s security forces
    • Condemn the recent violence against protesters and journalists; and,
    • Demand the immediate dismantlement of all paramilitary forces in Haiti and the disarmament of gangs carrying out wanton violence against the popular movement.

    The whole world is watching!

    See here for signatories.

    *****

    Contacts:

    Ajamu Baraka – Black Alliance for Peace, 202-643-1136.

    Margaret Flowers – Popular Resistance, gro.ecnatsiseRralupoPnull@ofni, 410-591-0892.

    The post Over 800 Organizations and Individuals in the United States Demand the Biden Administration End Its Support for the Brutal Moïse Regime in Haiti first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.