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By Marilyn Langlois

The wisdom of our mothers and mothers’ mothers from the dawn of time is reverberating throughout the cosmos, “What part of share the resources of the earth don’t you understand? Why aren’t you challenging the sanctity of private property rights at the top and making sure nobody is too rich or too poor?”

Our mothers carried us in the womb and brought us into this world, introducing us to the magical healing power of tender human touch. They immersed us in unconditional love, empowering us to face the many challenges of life. They taught us to communicate with words and actions, to resolve conflicts without inflicting pain on others. Our mothers taught us to share with our brothers and sisters. Well, maybe not all mothers were able to do all of that, but they did their best. We forgive them and still love them.

When mothers teach their children to share they start by setting a good example, taking no more for themselves than they would grant others and often taking less so their children can be amply nourished. They impart a strong sense of love and belonging, allowing for the cultivation of empathy and solidarity.

In the course of relatively recent human history (several thousand years or so) the lesson of sharing has been forgotten countless times for myriad reasons involving traumas, abuse, and disasters both natural and man-made. As a result, young people growing up are exposed to greed-inducing practices like punishment, humiliation, shaming, judging, and winner-take-all competitions, that have become embedded in schools, churches, civic life and workplaces. Even mothers with the best intentions often fall into the trap of over-reliance on carrots and sticks, sending the message that good deeds like sharing are a commodity to be traded rather than intrinsically valuable.

Our human family has over seven billion people throughout globe. That’s a lot of relatives! We often lament the multitudes who are oppressed and too poor, lacking good jobs, housing, food, education, health care and basic freedoms. We’re also aware of the small yet powerful percentage of people who own assets worth tens of millions, hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, in addition to their income, but we rarely consider the magnitude of those numbers. Here’s how a mother might explain to her children what “too rich” looks like, using basic math and a bit of imagination:

A former drug dealer (not a profession you should aspire to!) told me he used to handle so much money that when delivering cash to his suppliers they weighed it rather than count it. A $100 dollar bill weighs one gram, so a million dollars worth weighs 10 kilogram; 10 million dollars worth weighs 100 kilograms; 100 million dollars worth weighs 1,000 kilograms or one metric ton, and a billion dollars worth weighs 10,000 kilograms or 10 metric tons. Imagine what it would look like if no one could own more wealth than they were able to carry on their backs and the rest were used to eradicate poverty.

Now let’s use your favorite snack, the chocolate chip cookie, as an example. A chocolate chip cookie of 10 cm diameter and 1 cm thickness can be purchased for a dollar at the bakery. A one meter by 10 cm by 10cm box packed tight would contain 100 cookies, enough for several classes at your school.. A cubic meter would have 10,000 cookies. Ten million cookies would fill a structure the size of a house ten meters high, ten meters long and ten meters wide.. A billion dollars worth of cookies would fill a huge warehouse floor to ceiling, ten meters high, 100 meters long and 100 meters wide. That’s a lot of cookies for one individual to own when many children go to bed hungry every day and never get any treats or snacks.

Cookies disappear once they’re eaten, so let’s look at an asset that could keep on giving: houses for rent. The median home price in the US is currently around $250,000. (Much higher in popular regions). Assuming a net rental income averaging $12,500 per year (after paying taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance and property management expenses), a millionaire could own four homes, live in one and rent out the other three, receiving $37,500 a year without lifting a finger. Might be nice for your grandparents who worked all their lives and want to supplement their old age pension. Someone with $10 million could own 40 homes, net close to $500,000 per year, live lavishly on half that and use the other half to buy yet another rental home and keep getting richer without working at all. With $100 million and 400 homes, your net earnings soar to near $5 million per year, and a billionaire with 4,000 homes rakes in just shy of $50 million per year. Who needs that much when billions of people don’t own their own home, can only afford to rent cramped and dilapidated housing, or are homeless and sleeping on the streets?

Now go out and use your communication skills with your fellow humans to come to a consensus about where to draw the lines between having a dignified life and being “too rich” or “too poor,” and follow through accordingly.

In our topsy turvy world, the vast majority of people appear to inexplicably consent to a cabal of oligarchs controlling most of the earth’s resources and refusing to share, finding it acceptable for a few dozen people own as much as half of humanity.

Wait a minute. When one child grabs all the toys for himself and refuses to let his sisters and brothers have any, we intervene with an emphatic “that’s not OK!” But when certain individuals are allowed to amass more wealth than they could possibly need or use in thousands of lifetimes, where’s the outrage?

The super-rich have become so adept at distracting and dividing the rest of us to keep us mired in clashes over all kinds of injustices—wars, racial oppression, patriarchy, partisanship, environmental degradation–that we often overlook the lust for power and profit at the root of every one of these evils. Hence, our most fundamental task is to make sure nobody is too rich or too poor:

• by challenging the sanctity of private property rights at the top and expropriating the excess wealth of the super-rich, and
• by empowering workers to build a society that ensures decent living standards, high quality of life and dignity for all; where everyone contributes, and the children, elderly and disabled are cared for.

Both of these tasks are incompatible with the capitalist-driven regimes governing most of the world.  Many governments, including the US, that are democracies in name only, pay a lot of lip service to (2), with no intention of ever fully implementing it.

When it comes to (1) –challenging the sanctity of private property at the top—just voicing those words, let alone advocating or implementing them is a cardinal sin according to power elites.  Absolutely unforgivable.  Even after their excess assets are expropriated, via a hefty wealth tax or other means of forced redistribution, the formerly super-rich would still have ample means for a good life, so there is no logic at all to their greed and fear of losing the gravy train. Governments bought and paid for by oligarchs and big corporations have no problem expropriating folks at the bottom on flimsy grounds–foreclosing homes, seizing cars, raiding bank accounts.  But the ill-gotten and obscenely excessive gains of those at the top are sacrosanct.

In the economic crises of 2008 and 2020, the US chose to bail out rapacious private financial institutions, leaving many foreclosed homeowners and unemployed workers hung out to dry.  The current COVID-19 crisis is being exploited by “the dysfunctional and violent psychology of the global elite,” who seek to consolidate their domination and control over our lives, ushering in a new high-tech era of increasing surveillance, robotics and social isolation as people are conditioned to view each other as potential biohazards rather than kinfolk and comrades in our human family.

Wherever bottom-up social movements have gained traction, the ruling elites have swiftly intervened with overt and covert sabotage. This has happened to varying degrees with iterations of socialism, communism, the election of Patrice Lumumba in DRC, the Poor People’s Campaign led by Dr. King, the Lavalas Movement in Haiti and the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, as examples.   Their tools include massive propaganda campaigns, flattery, threats, lies, co-optation, infiltration of organizations to cause divisions, economic warfare, violent military attacks and assassination of charismatic leaders.

Cuba has survived these dirty tricks—a shining example of a revolutionary government walking the talk when it comes to healthcare, education, housing and making sure everyone can live a dignified life, despite being subjected to 60 years of crushing economic sanctions, which, if lifted, would substantially raise living standards.  Cuba has no billionaires or even multi-millionaires.   If Cuba can do it, so can we!  In the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania.

I invite all social movements and caring people–on the left, right and center–to join in a unifying rallying cry to smash private property supremacy at the top and proclaim nobody should be too rich or too poor.  It’s time to expropriate the excess wealth of the super-rich, redistributing and collectivizing it among state-owned enterprises, worker-owned cooperatives, and public services, supporting a modest amount of private possessions for all individuals.

The house we can all live in has a quality-of-life floor with a minimum material living standard and a ceiling of maximum material personal wealth, constructed on a stable foundation of “equi-archy,’ and surrounded by a beautiful garden, open to the sky, where everyone could enjoy unlimited intellectual, social and cultural wealth.

Encourage everyone you know to join in this chorus.  If enough of us speak out they cannot silence us all.  We are energized by our sense of fairness and justice, our love of community, our close relationships with family, friends and comrades.  In honor of Mothers’ Day, another potent motivator can propel us forward and make us unstoppable.  Let’s tap into that primal, renewable power source generated by a mother’s love.

During my 70 years on this earth, certain moments have touched that spark in the depths of my soul–unconscious memories of my near death at birth, when my mother never gave up and willed me to live–experiencing the miracles of birthing my two healthy daughters, cradling them in my arms overflowing with joy–sharing my daughter’s agony at losing her best friend to a fatal car accident–my sister and I accompanying our mother in her last days on this earth with love, tender touch, song and few words, endlessly grateful to her–coaching my daughter through a long and arduous childbirth, cheering her on for the final push and  her ecstatic shriek at holding her beautiful newborn–witnessing my niece’s anguished sobbing at losing her 16 year-old daughter to suicide, and holding her tight.

Look inside and find those spaces where you viscerally sense the potency of a mother’s love.  A power with the potential to overcome all misguided and destructive forces, if we band together. Let’s harness that invincible power together and make every day a Mother’s Day of revolutionary solidarity.

Marilyn Langlois is a member of TRANSCEND USA West Coast.

11 May 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Indi Samarajiva

The New York Times recently published a list of ‘true leaders’ in the fight against COVID-19. They spend exactly one sentence on Asia and the rest on white leaders that mostly did worse than Iran. The structural racism is mind-boggling, and it’s getting people killed.

According to the NYTimes, Iran Completely and Utterly Botched Its Response to the Coronavirus, but countries with higher mortality rates like Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Denmark are listed as true leaders. It makes no sense. It’s just racism, so structural that the Editorial Board can’t even see it. It’s built into the edifice of the paper itself.

By any objective measure, the true leaders are all in Asia, with an asterisk for New Zealand and Australia and participation points for Iceland and Greece. That’s it. Every major western leader has failed and this list is actively making people stupider.

In an age of pandemic, this blithe ignorance doesn’t just mean random brown weddings are getting drone struck. The ignorance of the New York Times is now getting its own readers killed.

Truly True Leaders

Let me tell you what true leadership is. Zero. Zero people need to die from coronavirus. Every death is a failure of leadership. Vietnam has zero deaths. Taiwan has six. Korea has 250, which they mourn. These are true leaders, and we should praise and learn from them.

In its editorial on leadership, the New York Times devotes exactly one sentence to Asia. Here it is, in its entirety.

President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan likewise responded at the first sign of the new danger, keeping the virus under control and enabling her to send millions of face masks to the United States and Europe.

That’s it. The Times only discusses a non-white country once, and even that is in relation to white people.

Where Is Asia?

To be completely honest, it’s not clear that the Editorial Board even knows where Asia is.

South Asian countries have the added advantage of recent experience tangling with an epidemic.

I live in South Asia. The term has a meaning, we have SAARC for example, which ends in Bangladesh. This article only mentions Taiwan and South Korea, which are not in South Asia. These countries are in East Asia, which is a different place.

What Did They Miss? (Everything)

If the Editorial Board knew where East Asia was, they would know that it is next to China. By any measure, these countries should have been hammered, but they somehow fought the virus down. The entire region had fewer deaths in total than Europe has every day. To be clear, more people will die today in countries the Time praises than have died total in the countries they omit.

New York Times readers don’t even learn that countries like Vietnam or Thailand exist. There’s no discussion of South Korea, or the Indian state of Kerala — actual success stories where people didn’t die in droves and aren’t dying right now. There’s no talk of the institutions these people built, the diligent execution of test/trace/isolate regimes, how they took care of their people, and even avoided lockdowns.

Instead, it’s just a bunch of empty words spouted by white people. That’s what leadership means to the NYTimes. White people merely rising above the level of Donald Trump. For example, they include Italy, until recently the greatest public health failure on planet Earth.

In Italy, the European country hardest hit by the pandemic, Giuseppe Conte, a law professor who was originally plucked from obscurity by a coalition of rowdy anti-establishment parties and subsequently emerged at the head of a more orthodox government, has won respect for ordering stern measures and pledging that the state will take care of people.

Why is Italy in this article at all? Italy has had 115X the death toll of South Korea, and hundreds of people are still dying every day. The Italian Prime Minister recognized that this was bad… after it happened. That’s not leadership, it’s just not being a sociopath.

And let’s talk about the great white hope, German Chancellor Angela Merkel. A scientist, a woman, and a failure. By any objective, non-racist, standard, Germany has failed. Merkel presided over more deaths two days ago (287) than South Korea has had total. She has presided over a similar death toll to Iran, which is widely described as a basket case. And yet she is praised, because she’s so eloquent.

Like Ms. Ardern, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany acted early and calmly, warning Germans that many of them would fall prey to the novel coronavirus.

This is not leadership. Leadership is not calmly telling people that they’re going to die. Leadership is saving their lives.

People have done this. Many people have done this. Vietnam has a similar population to Germany, a fraction of the GDP, and a land border with China. They somehow prevented anyone from dying, but they are not mentioned in this article at all. Because racism. Because even the New York Times views Asia as hopelessly oriental and foreign and not just different human beings that could be learned from.

In fighting a pandemic, knowledge is power and racism has made the West stupid and weak.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Western countries wasted valuable time computer modeling white people and debating various outcomes when the best practices were clear from the beginning. If they had just followed Asian leadership they could have saved themselves.

Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and basically every country near China reacted in January. They didn’t wait for anyone to warn them and they’re not blaming people now. These nations had all been preparing and building pandemic institutions for decades. The playbook they followed is hundreds of years old (find/isolate/trace), the only major additions being PCR testing and PPE. Every country could have just looked over there and copied them. Many other countries, like mine, have.

The west, however, was blind, and they did get hammered, even with months more to prepare. The crazy thing is that they’re still blind, even when the results are so abundantly and tragically clear.

The fact that the New York Times can write an article in April 2020 with one sentence on Asia is insane. By that, I mean doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

The west got into this mess because they did not follow Asian leadership. The couldn’t even understand that non-white leadership was possible. They remain in this mess because they’re still too stubborn and racist to learn. Asian countries copied and learned tons of things from the west, which is why they’re more advanced today. There’s no shame in it, it’s called progress. The west is too proud to copy back, and their people are dying as a result.

This is very real. All of the white countries mentioned besides New Zealand and Australia are still burying people every day. Every day a loved one dies a horrible death — gasping, terrified, and alone — and each death was preventable. They are dying from COVID, but Asian countries have shown that COVID is preventable. They are really dying from western hubris, as published in the New York Times.

True leaders aren’t a bunch of white people dragging around their excuses. True leadership isn’t talking after the fact, or telling people that they’re going to die. True leadership is being organized, planning ahead, and following common-sense public health measures, and right now that leadership is coming from Asia. The New York Times needs to pull its head out of its structurally white ass and see.

Indi Samarajiva A writer living in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

4 May 2020

Source: medium.com

By Countercurrents Collective

The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Virtual Summit “United against COVID-19” was held on Monday, May 4, via videoconference.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev chaired the NAM summit. The meeting took place in the format of the Contact Group, which includes regional representatives.

The Republic of Azerbaijan convoked the meeting as president of the Movement for the period 2019-2022, given the need for concerted and effective responses to current global challenges.

According to AzerNews, the head of the Presidency’s Foreign Policy Affairs Department, Hikmat Hajiyev, emphasized the importance of strengthening international solidarity, and mobilizing efforts of both states and international organizations in the COVID-19 battle.

“We hope the NAM Contact Group Summit will make a significant contribution to the mobilization of efforts, strengthening solidarity and multilateralism among member countries in the fight against the new coronavirus,” stated Hikmat Hajiyev, as reported by the source.

A communiqué issued by the Coordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Movement, March 25, 2020, in New York, expressed “concern over the rapid spread of COVID-19, which poses a major challenge to humanity” and noted “in the face of this type of global emergency, a spirit of solidarity must be at the heart of our efforts.”

The statement added:

“At this juncture, the enactment and application of unilateral coercive measures against member states of the Movement has an impact on the capacity of states to respond efficiently to procure medical equipment and supplies to adequately treat the population of entire peoples in the face of this pandemic” and expressed the long-standing NAM principle – reaffirmed by the heads of state and government, as well as by the foreign ministers at numerous Summits and Ministerial Meetings – of “strong condemnation of the promulgation and application of unilateral coercive measures against member states of the Movement, which violates the United Nations Charter and international law.”

Another NAM communiqué released April 9, 2020, extended the organization’s full support to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the leadership of its Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“It is time to avoid the politicization of the virus and to set aside all political ideologies and discrimination for the good of humanity; it is time for global unity and the redoubling of international solidarity and multilateral cooperation to ensure that that our common enemy, COVID-19, with serious health and socio-economic consequences, is defeated sooner rather than later,” said the document.

The President of the Republic of Cuba Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez in his statement during NAM virtual summit denounced the terrorist attack with an assault rifle and over 30 rounds that struck Cuban embassy in Washington on April 30.

He demanded from the U.S. government a thorough and swift investigation, harsh sanctions and security measures and guarantees for the Cuban diplomatic missions in U.S. territory, as it must do under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

The Cuban President said: NAM has shown its relevance in the present situation.

He said:

COVID-19 has proven to be a global challenge. It goes beyond borders, ideologies or levels of development. Therefore, the answer to it must also be global and joint and it should put political differences aside.

It is not possible to predict exactly the extent of its consequences. The high figures of infected persons and many human deaths are showing its devastating impact in an increasingly interconnected world which, still, has not been able to make use of such interconnection for the sake of solidarity and is paying today the price for its inability to correct serious social disbalance. It should be stated openly: Had we made solidarity global, as it was done with the market, the story would have been different.

There is a lack of solidarity and cooperation. Those values cannot be replaced with profit making, which is almost the only incentive for those who worship the market while forgetting about the value of human life.

He said:

An analysis of the events that have disturbed humanity in the last four months must include the costly mistakes of neoliberal policies, which led to a downsizing of state management and capabilities, excessive privatizations and a neglect of the majorities.

This pandemic has evidenced the fragility of a fractured and excluding world. Not even those who are most fortunate and powerful would survive in the absence of those whose work create and sustain wealth.

The multiple crises it is bringing about foretell ravaging and lasting effects for the economy and all spheres of society.

The Cuban President said:

The pandemic is worsening the pressing problems in a planet riddled with deep inequalities and where 600 million people are living in dire proverty and nearly half of the population have no access to basic health services, whose management is defined by the market and not by the noble goal of saving lives.

In the meantime, global military expenditures are over 1.9 trillion dollars, of which more than 38%, or 732 billion, were appropriated in the United States in 2020.

I wish to share with you this quotation from the Commander-in-Chief of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz: “Instead of spending so much in the development of increasingly sophisticiated weapons, those having resources for that should promote medical research and put the results of science at the service of humanity, thus creating tools for health and life and not for death.”

he said:

Let us call, together with the Secretary General of the United Nations, for the end of wars, including non-conventional ones, so as to safeguard the right to peace.

We reject the recent and serious military threats by the government of the United States against the sisterly Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

We reaffirm our solidarity with the government and the people of Nicaragua and reject measures against their right to wellbeing, security and peace.

The attempts at re-imposing the neocolonial past to Our America by publicly declaring the validity of the Monroe Doctrine are running counter the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace.

In this complex situation, the United States is attacking multilateralism and it disqualifies unjustly the role of international organizations, particularly the World Health Organization.

He said:

We must be aware that assistance from the industrialized North shall be scarce. We have to complement each other, share what we have, support ourselves mutually, and learn from successful experiences. A useful choice could be resuming in the future the annual meetings of NAM health ministers in the framework of the World Health Assembly.

Cuba is ready to share its experiences with the NAM countries, to which it is bound by historic ties of friendship.

He mentioned the ruthless tightening of the US economic, commercial and financial blockade policy aimed at bringing Cuba’s trade and access to fuels and foreign currency to a full standstill.

He said:

Through tremendous effort and sacrifice, Cuba has been able under such conditions to keep in place our universal and free public health system that has dedicated and highly qualified professionals who enjoy world prestige in spite of the crude and slanderous campaigns by powerful adversaries.

Right away, Cuba has drawn a plan including measures based on our main strengths: A well-structured State that has the responsibility to protect the health of its citizens and a society with mass involvement as to decision-making and giving solutions to its problems.

The work resulting from years of resource appropriations to develop and strengthen health services and sciences has been put to a test and the evolution of the epidemic in Cuba in the last two months is showing the good impact social investment policies may have when facing the biggest and most unexpected challenges.

In spite of the huge constraints being imposed on us by the protracted U.S. economic, commercial and financial blockade, that are posing a big daily challenge to keeping our public health system in place and facing this pandemic in particular, Cuba has ensured the right to health of the Cuban people with the involvement of society as a whole.

Scientific development has allowed us to treat different communicable diseases successfully both in Cuba and in other nations. This time, the pharmaceutical industry has expanded the manufacturing of drugs of proven efficacy to prevent and deal with COVID-19 that we have shared with other countries.

He said:

In response to requests that were made, in the last month 25 new medical brigades of Cuban health professionals have joined the efforts in 23 countries to fight the pandemic. They have joined those who have already been providing services in 59 States, many of which are NAM members.

He reiterated:

Cuba shall not give up its solidarity vocation even when, out of political reasons, the U.S. government continues attacking and obstructing the international cooperation being provided by our country, which jeopardizes access to health services for tens of millions of people.

We have a responsibility to combine our willingness and efforts to face this immense challenge.

Let us promote international cooperation and solidarity. Our endeavor shall be decisive.

Let us do it for the right of our peoples to health, peace and development, fully abiding by the founding principles of NAM. Let us do it for life.

6 May 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

One hundred years ago, representatives from a few powerful countries convened at San Remo, a sleepy town on the Italian Riviera. Together, they sealed the fate of the massive territories confiscated from the Ottoman Empire following its defeat in World War I.

It was on April 25, 1920, that the San Remo Conference Resolution was passed by the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council. Western Mandates were established over Palestine, Syria and ‘Mesopotamia’ – Iraq. The latter two were theoretically designated for provisional independence, while Palestine was granted to the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish homeland there.

“The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the (Balfour) declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” the Resolution read.

The Resolution gave greater international recognition to Britain’s unilateral decision, three years earlier, to grant Palestine to the Zionist Federation for the purpose of establishing a Jewish homeland, in exchange for Zionist support of Britain during the Great War.

And, like Britain’s Balfour Declaration, a cursory mention was made of the unfortunate inhabitants of Palestine, whose historic homeland was being unfairly confiscated and handed over to colonial settlers.

The establishment of that Jewish State, according to San Remo, hinged on some vague ‘understanding’ that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”

The above addition merely served as a poor attempt at appearing politically balanced, while in reality no enforcement mechanism was ever put in place to ensure that the ‘understanding’ was ever respected or implemented.

In fact, one could argue that the West’s long engagement in the question of Israel and Palestine has followed the same San Remo prototype: where the Zionist movement (and eventually Israel) is granted its political objectives based on unenforceable conditions that are never respected or implemented.

Notice how the vast majority of United Nations Resolution pertaining to Palestinian rights are historically passed by the General Assembly, not by the Security Council, where the US is one of five veto-wielding powers, always ready to strike down any attempt at enforcing international law.

It is this historical dichotomy that led to the current political deadlock.

Palestinian leaderships, one after the other, have miserably failed at changing the stifling paradigm. Decades before the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, countless delegations, comprised those claiming to represent the Palestinian people, traveled to Europe, appealing to one government or another, pleading the Palestinian case and demanding fairness.

What has changed since then?

On February 20, the Donald Trump administration issued its own version of the Balfour Declaration, termed the ‘Deal of the Century’.

The American decision which, again, flouted international law, paves the way for further Israeli colonial annexations of occupied Palestine. It brazenly threatens Palestinians that, if they do not cooperate, they will be punished severely. In fact, they already have been, when Washington cut all funding to the Palestinian Authority and to international institutions that provide critical aid to the Palestinians.

Like in the San Remo Conference, the Balfour Declaration, and numerous other documents, Israel was asked, ever so politely but without any plans to enforce such demands, to grant Palestinians some symbolic gestures of freedom and independence.

Some may argue, and rightly so, that the ‘Deal of the Century’ and the San Remo Conference Resolution are not identical in the sense that Trump’s decision was a unilateral one, while San Remo was the outcome of political consensus among various countries – Britain, France, Italy, and others.

True, but two important points must be taken into account: firstly, the Balfour Declaration was also a unilateral decision. It took Britain’s allies three years to embrace and validate the illegal decision made by London to grant Palestine to the Zionists. The question now is, how long will it take for Europe to claim the ‘Deal of the Century’ as its own?

Secondly, the spirit of all of these declarations, promises, resolutions, and ‘deals’ is the same, where superpowers decide by virtue of their own massive influence to rearrange the historical rights of nations. In some way, the colonialism of old has never truly died.

The Palestinian Authority, like previous Palestinian leaderships, is presented with the proverbial carrot and stick. Last March, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, told Palestinians that if they did not return to the (non-existent) negotiations with Israel, the US would support Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.

For nearly three decades now and, certainly, since the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993, the PA has chosen the carrot. Now that the US has decided to change the rules of the game altogether, Mahmoud Abbas’ Authority is facing its most serious existential threat yet: bowing down to Kushner or insisting on returning to a dead political paradigm that was constructed, then abandoned, by Washington.

The crisis within the Palestinian leadership is met with utter clarity on the part of Israel. The new Israeli coalition government, consisting of previous rivals Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, have tentatively agreed that annexing large parts of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley is just a matter of time. They are merely waiting for the American nod.

They are unlikely to wait for long, as Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said on April 22 that annexing Palestinian territories is “an Israeli decision.”

Frankly, it matters little. The 21st century Balfour Declaration has already been made; it is only a matter of making it the new uncontested reality.

Perhaps, it is time for the Palestinian leadership to understand that groveling at the feet of those who have inherited the San Remo Resolution, constructing and sustaining colonial Israel, is never and has never been the answer.

Perhaps, it is time for some serious rethink.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

6 May 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Pepe Escobar

Fasten your seat belts: the US hybrid war against China is bound to go on frenetic overdrive, as economic reports are already identifying Covid-19 as the tipping point when the Asian – actually Eurasian – century truly began.

The US strategy remains, essentially, full spectrum dominance, with the National Security Strategy obsessed by the three top “threats” of China, Russia and Iran. China, in contrast, proposes a “community of shared destiny” for mankind, mostly addressing the Global South.

The predominant US narrative in the ongoing information war is now set in stone: Covid-19 was the result of a leak from a Chinese biowarfare lab. China is responsible. China lied. And China has to pay.

The new normal tactic of non-stop China demonization is deployed not only by crude functionaries of the industrial-military-surveillance-media complex. We need to dig much deeper to discover how these attitudes are deeply embedded in Western thinking – and later migrated to the “end of history” United States. (Here are sections of an excellent study, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia , by Jurgen Osterhammel).

Only Whites civilized

Way beyond the Renaissance, in the 17th and 18th centuries, whenever Europe referred to Asia it was essentially about religion conditioning trade. Christianity reigned supreme, so it was impossible to think by excluding God.

At the same time the doctors of the Church were deeply disturbed that in the Sinified world a very well organized society could function in the absence of a transcendent religion. That bothered them even more than those “savages” discovered in the Americas.

As it started to explore what was regarded as the “Far East,” Europe was mired in religious wars. But at the same time it was forced to confront another explanation of the world, and that fed some subversive anti-religious tendencies across the Enlightenment sphere.

It was at this stage that learned Europeans started questioning Chinese philosophy, which inevitably they had to degrade to the status of a mere worldly “wisdom” because it escaped the canons of Greek and Augustinian thought. This attitude, by the way, still reigns today.

So we had what in France was described as chinoiseries — a sort of ambiguous admiration, in which China was regarded as the supreme example of a pagan society.

But then the Church started to lose patience with the Jesuits’ fascination with China. The Sorbonne was punished. A papal bull, in 1725, outlawed Christians who were practicing Chinese rites. It’s quite interesting to note that Sinophile philosophers and Jesuits condemned by the Pope insisted that the “real faith” (Christianity) was “prefigured” in ancient Chinese, specifically Confucianist, texts.

The European vision of Asia and the “Far East” was mostly conceptualized by a mighty German triad: Kant, Herder and Schlegel. Kant, incidentally, was also a geographer, and Herder a historian and geographer. We can say that the triad was the precursor of modern Western Orientalism. It’s easy to imagine a Borges short story featuring these three.

As much as they may have been aware of China, India and Japan, for Kant and Herder God was above all. He had planned the development of the world in all its details. And that brings us to the tricky issue of race.

Breaking away from the monopoly of religion, references to race represented a real epistemological turnaround in relation to previous thinkers. Leibniz and Voltaire, for instance, were Sinophiles. Montesquieu and Diderot were Sinophobes. None explained cultural differences by race. Montesquieu developed a theory based on climate. But that did not have a racial connotation – it was more like an ethnic approach.

The big break came via French philosopher and traveler Francois Bernier (1620-1688), who spent 13 years traveling in Asia and in 1671 published a book called La Description des Etats du Grand Mogol, de l”Indoustan, du Royaume de Cachemire, etc. Voltaire, hilariously, called him Bernier-Mogol — as he became a star telling his tales to the royal court. In a subsequent book, Nouvelle Division de la Terre par les Differentes Especes ou Races d’Homme qui l’Habitent, published in 1684, the “Mogol” distinguished up to five human races.

This was all based on the color of the skin, not on families or the climate. The Europeans were mechanically placed on top, while other races were considered “ugly.” Afterward, the division of humanity in up to five races was picked up by David Hume — always based on the color of the skin. Hume proclaimed to the Anglo-Saxon world that only whites were civilized; others were inferiors. This attitude is still pervasive. See, for instance, this pathetic diatribe recently published in Britain.

Two Asias

The first thinker to actually come up with a theory of the yellow race was Kant, in his writings between 1775 and 1785, David Mungello argues in The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500-1800.

Kant rates the “white race” as “superior,” the “black race” as “inferior” (by the way, Kant did not condemn slavery), the “copper race” as “feeble” and the “yellow race” as intermediary. The differences between them are due to a historical process that started with the “white race,” considered the most pure and original, the others being nothing but bastards.

Kant subdivided Asia by countries. For him, East Asia meant Tibet, China and Japan. He considered China in relatively positive terms, as a mix of white and yellow races.

Herder was definitely mellower. For him, Mesopotamia was the cradle of Western civilization, and the Garden of Eden was in Kashmir, “the world’s paradise.” His theory of historical evolution became a smash hit in the West: the East was a baby, Egypt was an infant, Greece was youth. Herder’s East Asia consisted of Tibet, China, Cochinchina, Tonkin, Laos, Korea, Eastern Tartary and Japan — countries and regions touched by Chinese civilization.

Schlegel was like the precursor of a Californian 60s hippie. He was a Sanskrit enthusiast and a serious student of Eastern cultures. He said that “in the East we should seek the most elevated romanticism.” India was the source of everything, “the whole history of the human spirit.” No wonder this insight became the mantra for a whole generation of Orientalists. That was also the start of a dualist vision of Asia across the West that’s still predominant today.

So by the 18th century we had fully established a vision of Asia as a land of servitude and cradle of despotism and paternalism in sharp contrast with a vision of Asia as a cradle of civilizations. Ambiguity became the new normal. Asia was respected as mother of civilizations — value systems included — and even mother of the West. In parallel, Asia was demeaned, despised or ignored because it had never reached the high level of the West, despite its head start.

Those Oriental despots

And that brings us to The Big Guy: Hegel. Hyper well informed – he read reports by ex-Jesuits sent from Beijing — Hegel does not write about the “Far East” but only the East, which includes East Asia, essentially the Chinese world. Hegel does not care much about religion as his predecessors did. He talks about the East from the point of view of the state and politics. In contrast to the myth-friendly Schlegel, Hegel sees the East as a state of nature in the process of reaching toward a beginning of history – unlike black Africa, which he saw wallowing in the mire of a bestial state.

To explain the historical bifurcation between a stagnant world and another one in motion, leading to the Western ideal, Hegel divided Asia in two.

One part was composed by China and Mongolia: a puerile world of patriarchal innocence, where contradictions do not develop, where the survival of great empires attests to that world’s “insubstantial,” immobile and ahistorical character.

The other part was Vorderasien (“Anterior Asia”), uniting the current Middle East and Central Asia, from Egypt to Persia. This is an already historical world.

These two huge regions are also subdivided. So in the end Hegel’s Asiatische Welt (Asian world) is divided into four: first, the plains of the Yellow and Blue rivers, the high plateaus, China and Mongolia; second, the valleys of the Ganges and the Indus; third, the plains of the Oxus (today the Amur-Darya) and the Jaxartes (today the Syr-Darya), the plateaus of Persia, the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates; and fourth, the Nile valley.

It’s fascinating to see how in the Philosophy of History (1822-1830) Hegel ends up separating India as a sort of intermediary in historical evolution. So we have in the end, as Jean-Marc Moura showed in L’Extreme Orient selon G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophie de l’Histoire et Imaginaire Exotique, a “fragmented East, of which India is the example, and an immobile East, blocked in chimera, of which the Far East is the illustration.”

To describe the relation between East and West, Hegel uses a couple of metaphors. One of them, quite famous, features the sun: “The history of the world voyages from east to west, Europe thus absolutely being the end of history, and Asia the beginning.” We all know where tawdry “end of history” spin-offs led us.

The other metaphor is Herder’s: the East is “history’s youth” — but with China taking a special place because of the importance of Confucianist principles systematically privileging the role of the family.

Nothing outlined above is of course neutral in terms of understanding Asia. The double metaphor — using the sun and maturity — could not but comfort the West in its narcissism, later inherited from Europe by the “exceptional” US. Implied in this vision is the inevitable superiority complex, in the case of the US even more acute because legitimized by the course of history.

Hegel thought that history must be evaluated under the framework of the development of freedom. Well, China and India being ahistorical, freedom does not exist, unless brought by an initiative coming from outside.

And that’s how the famous “Oriental despotism” evoked by Montesquieu and the possible, sometimes inevitable, and always valuable Western intervention are, in tandem, totally legitimized. We should not expect this Western frame of mind to change anytime soon, if ever. Especially as China is about to be back as Number One.

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2 May 2020

Source: asiatimes.com

By Madawi al-Rasheed

The death of Arabic professor Abdullah al-Hamid on Friday after his health deteriorated in a Saudi prison is both shocking and revealing of the Saudi government’s brutality.

Born in Buraydah in the central Qasim province, Hamid was truly a unique activist whose political trajectory dates back to the early 1990s, when he emerged as a determined and stubborn human right defender and reformer seeking constitutional change.

Hamid graduated from the Arabic language department at Riyadh University in 1971. This was followed by a doctorate from Al-Azhar University in Egypt in the field of literary criticism. In addition to teaching Arabic literature, Hamid was a renowned poet.

In 1993, he was one of the six founding members of the Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights (CDLR), and was arrested on 15 June. He was subsequently released and arrested three times between 1993-1996.

Prison turned out to be his second home, as in the last 27 years Hamid continued to be arrested and released. The repression that Hamid was subjected to took place under three Saudi kings: Fahd, Abdullah and Salman.

In 2009 Hamid defied the ban on civil society, and together with other colleagues and activists announced the establishment of the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights, known in Arabic as HASM and English as ACPRA.

After several years spent defending his political project in Saudi courts, in 2013 Hamid was sentenced to 11 years in prison, alongside a further unserved six from a previous conviction, followed by a travel ban after his release.

He died before he was released.

Bridging traditions

Unlike other Saudi civil society groups, HASM was a genuine non-governmental organisation and unsurprisingly had no royal patron. Its mission statement was to defend human and political rights and call for political reform. Its activism focused on supporting prisoners of conscience, and exposing torture in Saudi prisons.

But Hamid’s most valued contribution to this political struggle was his articulation of the centrality of rights from within the Islamic tradition. He belongs to a long tradition of Islamic reformism that the Saudi government was determined to suppress, criminalise and target in the most brutal ways, lest their discourse appealed to others.

Unlike Salafi jihadis, Hamid and his comrades insisted on jihad silmi – peaceful struggle to protect society from the excesses of power – by deploying civil resistance, demonstrations, strikes and sit-ins.

Peaceful jihad rested on risky hard work. It must be performed for the collective interest of Muslims, and should be void of personal desires to seek wealth and privilege.

Hamid’s jihad was performed by the “word”, jihad al-kalima. In several pamphlets, he explained that military jihad may be necessary to defend the country from outside threats, but that internally only peaceful jihad by the word can lead to fortifying the internal structures of justice and respect for rights.

Hamid defended the right of Saudis to stage demonstrations and proved that the Islamic concept of rahat, the peaceful crowd which assembles in the public sphere demanding rights and exposing injustice, is a central right in Islam.

This of course angered the official Salafis of the establishment, who had always called upon people to “whisper in the ear of the sultan” should they want to voice their opinion. This whispering, otherwise known as secret advice, became a trademark of official Salafis.

But Hamid proved that demonstrations are legitimate actions from within Islam that allow people to engage in politics and correct injustices. He was consequently abhorred by official religious scholars, judges and above all the ruling establishment.

His Arabic writing skills and knowledge of the Islamic tradition, coupled with his longing for a just society, allowed him to reinterpret Islamic texts and combine them with global discourse on democracy, civil society and human rights. He was a veritable Islamic intellectual and advocate.

Enduring example

Hamid’s activism ended in March 2013 when he was arrested together with more than a dozen colleagues. HASM was officially dissolved by a court ruling, and its founders lingered in prison with no royal pardon on the horizon.

The Saudi charges against Hamid represented a mix of vague statements. They included: planting the seeds of discord and strife, questioning the independence of the Saudi judiciary and the Council of Higher Ulama, describing the Saudi regime as a police state, and inciting public opinion against the security and intelligence services, and, most importantly, against the legitimate Muslim ruler of Saudi Arabia.

As the frail Hamid stood in court during his trials and defended himself in eloquent and convincing prose, he emerged as an articulate advocate of human rights.

His own defence circulated on social media with supporters absorbing a new language of rights that had been suppressed under the auspices of the official religion of the state, namely the Wahhabi Salafi tradition, its judges and scholars.

Hamid’s project will remain alive even after his death.

The language of rights and entitlement will remain as a testimony of his nuanced articulations and fierce struggle to move Saudi Arabia from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional state in which citizens and their rights are guaranteed.

Hamid framed rights in a religious language rather than imported concepts. He fused tradition with new meanings that promised respect for human rights, property and the right to defend oneself against a brutal judiciary and monarchy.

While the Saudi government provided rehabilitation centres and re-educational forums for its violent militants who carried out serious and brutal attacks between 2003 and 2009, Hamid lingered in prison simply because he proved to be more dangerous than their outright violence.

His long prison sentence reflected the government’s fear of reformist Islam and the language of peaceful resistance. The five-star militant rehabilitation centres that the regime popularised as a flagship of its anti-terrorism efforts were propaganda opportunities, while peaceful reformers were incarcerated in the infamous al-Hayr prison.

Hamid tried to break the entrenched dividing lines between ideological groups that had in the past rejected each other – Islamists and liberals, for example. He also rejected the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shia, and endeavoured to defend all prisoners of conscience, in addition to immigrants in Saudi Arabia.

He rejected the gender inequality and regarded women as equal citizens, long before the government officially endorsed women’s rights. He strongly believed in rights for all and was a true national hero.

The journey towards a just society, transparent government and political representation in Saudi Arabia will continue even after Hamid’s death. He will be remembered as a brave, determined and stubborn reformer.

While many of his colleagues are still in prison, including economist Mohammed al-Qahtani, lawyer Waleed Abu al-Khair, and many others, the harsh and cruel prison sentence and his eventual death are reminders of how far the Saudi government can go to silence peaceful reformers – especially those who follow Hamid’s arduous and dangerous path.

Madawi al-Rasheed is visiting professor at the Middle East Institute of the London School of Economics.

24 April 2020

Source: middleeasteye.net

By David Korten

The COVID-19 emergency has exposed our societies’ failure to address the needs of billions of people. Simultaneously, we are witnessing a fundamental truth about human nature: There are those among us eager to exploit the suffering of others for personal gain. We can be reassured, however, by how few of them there are. Their actions contrast starkly with the far greater numbers at all levels of society demonstrating their willingness, even eagerness, to cooperate, share, and sacrifice for the well-being of all.

The pandemic has also exposed extreme vulnerabilities in the global market economy, including its long and highly specialized linear supply chains, corporate monopolies shielded from market forces, privatized technologies, and ruthless competition without regard for its impact on people and the Earth.

This is an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how our beliefs, values, and institutions shape our relationships. We can create a world that works for everyone or face a future that no longer works for anyone.

Discussions now underway in many community, national, and global forums suggest a significant widening of what is known as the Overton Window: the range of public policies that the mainstream population is prepared to consider at a given time.

While there is an almost universal desire to move rapidly beyond the COVID emergency, the spectrum of what we want post-pandemic is broadening. Many are articulating that they do not want to simply return to business as usual. In the United States, for example, we see the need for:

• A system of health care accessible to everyone regardless of income or documentation;

• Just compensation and job security for those who do our most essential but often least-rewarded work; and

• A guarantee that if your job evaporates, you won’t starve.

At a deeper level, this emergency is reminding us that we are living with another emergency—climate change. The combination of the two emergencies is helping us awaken to the profound implications of the simple truth that we are living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth. Our well-being depends on Earth’s well-being. Life is the goal, community is essential, and money is only a tool.

To avoid a climate catastrophe, we must use this opportunity to join in creating an economy that:

• Meets our basic needs while simultaneously healing and securing the health of the human community and Earth’s living systems; and

• Prepares us to respond rapidly and appropriately to the array of significant future emergencies likely to arise with alarming frequency.

From these insights, many additional imperatives follow, including the need to:

• Shift power from profit-maximizing corporations to self-organizing, self-reliant, life-serving communities;

• Achieve an equitable distribution of power and resources among and within these communities; and

• Limit the human use of resources to those applications (such as recycling and regenerative agriculture) that increase the well-being of people and nature while eliminating those (such as war and financial speculation) that consume massive resources to no beneficial end.

The expanding Overton Window may allow us to consider vast new possibilities. Here are two:

1. We may see growing recognition of the distinctive social benefits of shopping in locally owned stores, operated by neighbors who pay local taxes and are in business to make a decent, but modest, living serving their neighbors. This contrasts starkly with the experience of impersonal corporate chains such as Amazon.com and Walmart that are in business solely to maximize the extraction of money from our local communities while leaving as little as possible behind.

2. For those of us able to work at home and meet remotely via the web, the many benefits of doing so may make this form of working and meeting the new norm. We reduce the time devoted to long commutes in heavy traffic or sitting in crowded airports and planes. This change in our behavior carries the potential for a dramatic reduction in the need for cars and airplanes and the pollution that their production and operation create, while increasing opportunities to get to know our family and our neighbors. Better for the health of people, family, community, and Earth.

But would such changes mean lost jobs? Actually, a vast amount of work must be done. Among the needs that will become more important in a post-COVID world are:

• Converting to wind and solar energy.

• Growing nutritious food locally in ways that restore the health of the soil.

• Eliminating waste by recycling everything.

• Assuring everyone access to affordable high-speed internet.

• Caring for and educating our children.

• Preparing for the inevitable emergencies ahead.

• Providing care and housing for the homeless while helping those who can transition back to community life.

• Providing health care for everyone.

The COVID-19 crisis has imposed immense hardship on billions of people. But that hardship is dwarfed by what lies ahead if we continue on our current path. Now we must step up to prevent the collapse of the regenerative systems by which Earth creates and maintains the conditions we need to exist.

This current emergency provides the possibility for a new emergence—the birthing of a truly civil civilization dedicated to the well-being of all people and the living Earth.

DAVID KORTEN is co-founder of YES! Media, president of the Living Economies Forum, a member of the Club of Rome, and the author of influential books, including “When Corporations Rule the World” and “Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth.” His work builds on lessons from the 21 years he and his wife, Fran, lived and worked in Africa, Asia, and Latin America on a quest to end global poverty.

24 April 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Philip A Farruggio

Singer/Songwriter Neil Young wrote the song ‘ Four Dead in Ohio’ for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young:

Four Dead In Ohio Lyrics

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’.
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin’.
Four dead in Ohio.

Gotta get down to it.
Soldiers are gunning us down.
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it.
Soldiers are cutting us down.
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon’s comin’.
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drummin’.
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.
Four dead in Ohio.

It was a beautiful Spring day in May of 1970 when four Kent State University students, protesting the illegal bombing of Cambodia and the entire Vietnam ( so called ) War, were gunned down by Ohio National Guard troops, many the same age as them. The event made national headlines and ignited a mass of students from literally hundreds of universities to go on strike. This writer was in my third or fourth year at Brooklyn College, who remembers, and I finally became outraged. Up until then, at my own admission, I only cared about playing on our soon to be first year football team, and of course, chasing woman. Oh yeah, and enjoying the pot that my friends and I smoked each and every Friday and Saturday night. I was just 20 years of age and really ‘ feeling my oats’. Yet, when the news made the daily headlines about those four kids, well, just like ME, I swayed over to the campus looking for action. A large group of us literally chased the military recruiters from our campus. No violence. Those guys probably knew deep down that the shit was gonna eventually hit the fan over this ongoing Amerikan tragedy.

The stench from the dual killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy still filled many of our young minds two years after the fact… Or should I say facts? Two well respected leaders gunned down and by now, 1970, the conspiracy theories were holding lots of water. I had already known about The Beast, ever since, believe it or not, I read the 1967 Playboy magazine interview with New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison about the JFK assassination. It opened my eyes to what probably happened, as compared to what my government was telling us. The more I read of that fateful day in November of ’63 the more I knew, intuitively, that The Beast was real. So, we closed down the campus, took over the school president’s office, and waited for the cops to come. That event never occurred ( to my satisfaction) and we ended the strike after a few days. There were some concessions made, nothing of major importance, but enough to make us say that ‘ We Won!’. Those four kids at Kent State didn’t bask in our glory, did they? They say, from historians looking back , that President Nixon was affected enough to start realizing that he had to get out of this mess called Vietnam. Of course, when it comes to The Beast and how it operates, it only reacts when it already has the table turned. So, Nixon waited it out until he won re-election 30 months later to then slowly use the ‘ Get out of jail free ‘ card beginning the process… of course his impeachment/resignation left it to another. Point is, the Kent State killings, coupled with the illegal bombing of another sovereign nation, slowly woke up our Moms and Dads to the truth of it all: This ( so called ) war was not worth it! I can recall, at an Easter dinner a few weeks earlier, with all my aunts and uncles present, the famous words of my father, who voted for Nixon in 1960, Goldwater in ‘ 64 and Nixon again in ’68: ” Let me make this clear. Before I see either of my two sons being sent to Vietnam, I ‘m gonna personally drive them to Canada!! And that’s that!”

Perhaps it was when a guy a few blocks away from me, Tommy L., joined the Marines and came home in a box. I didn’t know him well at all, but I knew his mom. She was our crossing guard on Ocean Ave, which was right by our church, St. Edmunds. Each Sunday after Mass we would see Mrs. L. as we crossed Ocean Ave. She always had this beautiful smile and greeted everyone with it. After her son died in the Nam, you could see how she now had what I always called ‘ The Mona Lisa smile’ from that famous DaVinci portrait. It had that look, to me, of someone who was saying ‘ If you only know what I am going through’. Then, a year later, another guy from our neighborhood, a Polish born son of my friend’s building superintendent, Vito P., was killed on some famous ( for whom?) hill in Vietnam. The last time I saw Vito was , coincidentally,at Mass in St. Edmunds. He was home on leave from the Army, standing there in his Ranger uniform, replete with beret tucked onto his shoulder. Months later we got the word. I used to see his kid brother, who I knew adored Vito, at the school yard where we played softball. He would be hanging out with characters that I would always warn him against. He ignored me, and got into glue sniffing, Quaaludes and finally horse ( heroin). Sometime later, maybe a few years after Vito’s death, his brother OD’d and died. What is it they say ‘ When the war comes home’? Well in May of 1970 it had… and transformed me into the activist anti empire and anti war writer and street corner protestor I have been since then.

And what about ‘ Feeding the beast’? Well:

1933 Germany: Reichstag fire and Enabling Laws to snuff out political parties and dissent

1964 Amerika: Gulf of Tonkin resolution based upon imaginary attack by North Vietnam on our ship

1991: Saddam Hussein encouraged by US non commitment to Kuwait to invade Kuwait over oil drilling dispute. War on Iraq followed

2001, September 11th- Twin Towers and Pentagon attacked in highly suspicious manner, leading to the Patriot Act, increased military spending and 2nd war on Iraq to follow

March 19th , 2003 – Illegal and immoral war on Iraq over WMDs to this day never found. More increases in military spending along with occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and NATO servicemen dead or damaged for life.

2008-09 – Subprime scam costs taxpayers trillions of dollars to bail out failed Wall Street companies.

Meanwhile, health care system is still a joke as is the needs of infrastructure throughout Amerika.

2011 Libya- USA led NATO carpet bombing of Libya, causing death , destruction and refugee crisis that has still caused havoc throughout the region and Europe.

2020 Pandemic- Trump crew ignored the crisis for almost 2 months, even denying it as a HOAX. Our economy is teetering on default as the super rich get most of the bailout. Oh, but the increased military spending survives, eating up around HALF of our federal tax revenues.

Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, Cross Currents and Off Guardian sites.

23 April 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. Navy to “shoot down and destroy” Iranian gunboats, should they harass American vessels at sea. His declaration comes after a confrontation in the Persian Gulf.

“I have instructed the United States Navy to shoot down and destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea,” the U.S. president tweeted on Wednesday morning.

A week earlier, the U.S. Navy accused the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) of “dangerous and provocative” actions, claiming that nearly a dozen Iranian vessels buzzed a group of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf.

The U.S. Fifth Fleet later published video footage of the encounter, which showed the gunboats circling a larger U.S. ship.

Tehran brushed off the accusations, disputing the “Hollywood” scenario portrayed by the U.S.

The Iranian government considers U.S. naval activity in the gulf highly provocative. The Iranian Navy condemned the patrol as “adventurism.”

The U.S. and Iran almost came to war at the beginning of the year, when the U.S. assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani with a drone strike at an airport in Baghdad, apparently in retribution for a series of Iranian-sponsored attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq.

However, tension in the Persian Gulf has been high since last summer, when the U.S. and its Western allies blamed Iran for a series of sabotage attacks on oil infrastructure in the region. U.S.-led naval patrols were stepped up, and American troops and air defense systems were sent to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Based in nearby Bahrain, the U.S. Fifth Fleet has been active in the gulf both before and since the flare up last year. The U.S. insists patrols are essential to protect shipping routes against Iran’s “malign behavior.”

Another media report said:

U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf have been authorized to open fire on Iranian ships if they ‘harass’ them at sea, President Donald Trump said, as tensions between Washington and Tehran escalated despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We’re not going to stand for it. if they do that, that’s putting our ships in danger and our great crews and sailors in danger – I’m not going to let that happen. And we will – they’ll shoot them out of the water,” Trump said on Wednesday during the daily White House press conference normally dedicated to the pandemic response.

He would not say if that meant a change to the rules of engagement (ROE) currently in effect.

Trump accused the Iranian Navy of once again harassing the U.S. naval forces currently deployed in the Persian Gulf, saying there had been an incident on Tuesday in addition to the Pentagon’s claims from last week.

That provided some context for his tweet earlier in the day, threatening to “shoot down and destroy” Iranian boats, but resulted in plenty of confusion about the rules under which U.S. warships would be allowed to open fire.

Last Wednesday, the Pentagon claimed that 11 boats of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) “repeatedly conducted dangerous and harassing approaches” of six U.S. ships as they conducted drills with army attack helicopters “in the international waters of the North Arabian Gulf” (the U.S. name for that body of water).

The boats came within 50 yards of the expeditionary vessel USS ‘Lewis B. Puller,’ and within 10 yards of the Coast Guard cutter USCGC ‘Maui,’ the US Department of Defense said.

Tehran denounced the US claim as “false and fake stories” and released its own video of the incident, accusing the U.S. Navy of “adventurism” and failure to follow international law and maritime protocols regulating navigation in the Persian Gulf.

23 April 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Millions of people have lost their jobs, and their lifelong savings. In developing countries, poverty and despair prevail.

While the lockdown is presented to public opinion as the sole means to resolving a global public health crisis, its devastating economic and social impacts are casually ignored.

The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy and extreme poverty.

This is the true picture of what is happening.

How is it implemented? The fear campaign plays a key role. The lockdown is presented to national governments as the sole solution.

The economy is the basis for the reproduction of real life.

It is also the basis for upholding public health endeavors.

This closing down operation affects production and supply lines of goods and services, investment activities, exports and imports, wholesale and retail trade, consumer spending, the closing down of schools, colleges and universities, research institutions, etc.

In turn it leads almost immediately to mass unemployment, bankruptcies of small and medium sized enterprises, a collapse in purchasing power, widespread poverty and famine.

VIDEO: COVID: Closing Down the Economy is not the Solution – Prof. Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

21 April 2020

Source: www.globalresearch.ca