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By Dr Nancy Hudson-Rodd

Rohingya have been persecuted for decades by various military regimes, now to the point of extermination, currently under a quasi-democratic government. The 2008 Constitution ensured military control of three main ministries of defence, home and border affairs, guaranteed 25% of the positions at regional, state and national governments, and the right to take control of the country during a crisis. The Constitution grants immunity to past and current generals for any crimes they may be charged with.

In a brilliant military tactical decision, Aung San Suu Kyi, married to a foreigner, denied the right to become President by the Constitution was granted a special title of State Counsellor.  Suu Kyi is the democratic front-piece, visiting world leaders, seeking their investments, dropping of economic sanctions, and silence on Rohingya rights to exist. She has been silent and non-supportive of Rohingya freedom despite requests from fellow Nobel Laureates, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Barrack Obama. The word Rohingya is illegal in Burma.

Nearly 150,000 illegalised, dehumanised Rohingya remain segregated in more than 60 internally displaced camps, isolated behind barb wire, guarded by machine-gun wielding security troops since 2012.

Current military and security forces are attacking the majority of Rohingya who live outside camps in secured towns and villages divided into ‘security grids’ described by human rights researchers as ‘vast open prisons’. Here “without freedom of movement, farmers can’t go to their fields, fishermen can’t go to the sea, traders can’t go to markets, students can’t go to university and sick people can’t go to the nearest hospital” Pierre Peron, spokesman for the UN Humanitarian Aid Operation.

Aung San Suu Kyi, on a state visit to India when she heard of the 9 October border post attacks, urged the military to act within international law in their operations. This is a hollow request. The army acts with impunity, committing atrocities for decades, with no accountability.

The Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA) announced that it would protect the 200 Rohingya refugees expected to land in Langkawi soon.

All four boats are believed to be carrying Rohingya refugees who are fleeing their homeland following the genocide which is still taking place in their country. It is also believed that no fees were charged the refugees as they are all fleeing their homeland to save their own lives as well as their family members (MMEA, 10 October 2016).

As government forces cracked down on Rohingya, reports emerged of military dug mass graves inside a Muslim cemetery in which Rohingya bodies were dumped, thirty thousand Rohingya hiding in rice fields, women and girls being raped by soldiers, houses and whole villages destroyed. The government use helicopter gunships to support ground troops, then supplemented by local Rakhine men given guns to hunt down Rohingya civilians. The military confirm 130 people have been killed.

The NLD-led government flatly denied accusations by international rights groups of human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings by the security forces. The military continues unfettered with their long-term agenda of Rohingya genocide. There is still no international response to protect the Rohingya, despite the United Nations Responsibility to Protect (R2P) repeated alerts:

Mass atrocity crimes are occurring and urgent action is needed. Stateless Rohingya in Burma/Myanmar face systematic persecution that poses an existential threat to the community.

Urgent requests by the various United Nations authorities for the military to not harm civilians and to permit humanitarian aid to be delivered to the displaced people are ignored. The Government of Burma denies the extent of damage inflicted on communities despite satellite images show 1,250 buildings destroyed, and arson attacks against five Rohingya villages in Maungdaw, but accused the Rohingya of burning their own homes.

Humanitarian organisations, since 9 October, denied access to the 160,000 Rohingya in desperate need of food, life-saving medical assistance, clean water, and other forms of aid, while the military destroys food supplies.

Unless urgent action is taken more Rohingya people will be dying from starvation than from bullets and bombs fired by the Burmese Army. The Burmese government and military will be responsible for a slow motion massacre using hunger and disease as their weapons. Our children, pregnant women and the elderly are the most vulnerable to starvation. What kind of government deliberately targets children with starvation like this and how can the international community stand by and let this happen (Tun Khin, Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK (BROUK) 24 November 2016)?

A collective national memory that denies full humanity to Rohingya, has allowed for varying levels of getting rid of, from land confiscation, to destruction of schools, of places of worship, businesses, to removal from public work places, community markets, from farming, health care, from universities, to escape as refugees, to forcible segregation in internally displaced camps, to killing, to genocide.

Professor Penny Green, School of Law, Queen Mary University, London, concluded genocide is taking place in Myanmar and the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) warned of the serious and present danger of the annihilation of the country’s Rohingya population in Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar 2015.

Genocide is defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”. As signatory to the Convention, Australia has an obligation, under the convention to take meaningful steps to prevent genocide.

Australia, the wealthiest country in the region, should offer immediate asylum to Rohingya fleeing assault. It could send its formidable border force brigade and navy to rescue Rohingya from boats drifting in the Bay of Bengal. It could loudly condemn the atrocious attacks on the Rohingya people.

Western governments have shielded the offending Burmese government’s abusive policies and practices, cloaked in terms of democratisation and political reform, for too long. By remaining silent, all are complicit in the ongoing genocide. The Rohingya need immediate protection.

Dr Nancy Hudson-Rodd is a human geographer, research associate Asia Institute and School of Land and Food, University of Tasmania, who has conducted over a decade of research on land confiscation, human rights, and Rohingya in Burma.

26 November 2016

By thehindu.com

A new humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Myanmar after the military crackdown on “Islamist jihadists” in the Rakhine State, home to more than one million Rohingya Muslims. The military claims it began the counter-terror operation after three border security posts came under attack on October 9. But since then more than 130 people have been killed in the State and 30,000 displaced, triggering a new wave of migration of Rohingyas to neighbouring countries. The army denies targeting civilians, but satellite images taken after the start of the crackdown indicate that hundreds of buildings were burnt down; reports suggest that even those who tried to flee the country were shot dead. The migrants are not welcome in Myanmar’s neighbourhood either. The violence itself is not surprising given the record of persecution of the Rohingyas in Myanmar. Many in the Buddhist-majority country call them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh though they have been living in Rakhine for generations. Myanmar’s military started a systematic persecution of the Rohingyas in the 1970s when thousands were deported to Bangladesh. The rest were stripped of citizenship by the junta, which often used the Rohingya problem to drum up support for itself among the Buddhist majority.

What is surprising this time is the silence of the government led by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy. Ms. Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto ruler, has not said much about the military operation in Rakhine, or spoken for the Rohingya cause. When her party took power in April, ending decades of military rule, many had hoped that it would signal the dawn of a new era of peace and democracy in Myanmar. But the government has been largely ineffective in tackling internal security and humanitarian issues. The operation in Rakhine shows the change of guard in government hasn’t brought any meaningful difference to Myanmar’s most disadvantaged sections. True, the army still remains a powerful institution. It controls the security, defence and border ministries besides wielding considerable economic power. It is also possible that the generals are escalating the conflict on their own. Even so, the government cannot remain in denial about the atrocities. Ms. Suu Kyi bears responsibility for what is happening in Rakhine now because her party rules, not the junta. For decades, Myanmar persecuted the Rohingya people while the world ignored their plight. By all accounts, that situation has not changed.

http://www.thehindu.com/

25 November 2016

By Maung Zarni

A failed state is a deeply problematic concept invented in the halls of Western policy makers and academics who suffer from the cancer of
selective amnesia – about the role their own regimes and “civilizations” have played in creating, witting or not, these so-called “failed states”.

Heard of slavery and TransAtlantic Slave Trade? Heard of Bretton Woods Agreement which gave birth to the global process of well-financed
plunder of the world – under the banner of “Free Market”? Heard of European Colonialisms ? , just to name a few.

Behind a failed state is a western imperialist power and its design on that state.

My advice to my fellow activists or activist-scholars is not to parrot bullshit even if it is fashionable and fundable in the INGO industry and the academic world.

To “a failed state”, I much prefer a ‘failed society’ ‘a failed culture’ ‘a failed people’.

By “a failed society”, I mean a society that has failed to equip each of its citizen with a conscience, empathy and ability to think for him or herself.

My own society – Myanma (note the correct spelling) or Burma – is a textbook example of a failed society.

We have produced no significant critical voices which would have enabled the society to self-correct.

As such there is NO home-gown solution to prevent or end war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

As scary as the rise of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage in USA and UK these two societies – in contrast to We the Burmese – are capable of mounting a meaningful opposition against the forces of Evil – like Fascism, racism, etc.

It is NOT that these predominantly white societies are NOT racist; they ARE very racist. But they also have a significant segment of society which are self-reflective, compassionate, intellectual and principled.

Alas, no such luck for the victims of Burmese colonial wars and a genocide at home.

24 November 2016

Maung Zarni is a Burmese democracy advocate, human rights campaigner, and a former research fellow at the London School of Economics. He lived and worked in the United States for 17 years.

By Satya Sagar

The abrupt demonetisation of 500 and 1000 rupee notes by the Narendra Modi regime is a drastic move that is staggering in its scale, ambition and repurcussions. The only other figures in modern history one can think of, devious or stupid enough to attempt something similar, are the likes of Marcos, Suharto, Idi Amin and Pol Pot.

For all its audacity however, the decision could go down also as the grandest of blunders made by anyone in Indian political history. Poorly planned and implemented it is likely to prove disastrous not only for the country’s economy but – ironically enough,– for the BJP’s own electoral fortunes.

The abolition of the two currency notes – that make up 86% of all cash in circulation in the Indian economy –  has affected almost every family in the second most populous nation on the planet. The harassment of the common citizen – particularly from the ranks of the urban and rural poor-through denial of access to income, savings and livelihood will not be forgotten anytime soon.

The Modi government’s  supporters have termed demonetisation a ‘surgical strike’ against black money, calling it a ‘bold’ , ‘necessary’ and ‘well intentioned’ step. A more rabid section of his fans see all complaints as coming from those who benefited from black money, mainly the BJP’s political opponents. The Prime Minister himself has called upon the nation to ‘make sacrifices’ and put up with hardship for 50 days in this battle against corruption.

However, growing consensus among economists both within and outside the country is that demonetisation is a foolish measure and will hurt the Indian economy badly – especially farmers, small businesses, labour and anyone part of the country’s informal sector – and operates on a daily basis through cash transaction. The informal sector constitutes over 30 % of the Indian economy in value and 92% in terms of workforce employed[1].

Since the drastic policy was announced on November 8, all these have come to a complete standstill, leaving millions without livelihood or means to buy basic goods. As one respected economist has pointed out demonetisation may have permanently damaged India’s informal sector[2].

A severe deflation is predicted over the next six months to a year or even longer, as spending power disappears or goes down for millions of Indians and businesses shut down. There is also the concern that, with government issued currency losing credibility through demonetisation, more and more people will keep their money in unproductive but safe assets like gold and property.

So, why would the government take such a high risk step ? What was Mr Modi really trying to do when he announced a measure that directly affects almost every single family in the second most populous nation on the planet?  Who are the real beneficiaries of this drastic policy? Will it really stop black money from circulating in the economy and end corruption from the country?

Despite all this propaganda it is quite clear now that demonetisation has nothing really to do with black money, that constitutes a sizeable 20 % of the Indian economy, of which only 6% is hoarded in cash, the rest being stashed away in gold, real estate and foreign accounts. If the government was serious about hurting the beneficiaries of black money they would have started by prosecuting those who keep such ill-gotten wealth in non-cash assets. Also, given the large-scale collusion of the Indian political class and bureaucracy in corruption the Modi regime should have first gone after its own ministers and government officials (particularly from the tax and revenue collection departments) to set a public example.

At its core, demonetisation is essentially an an attempt at economic and social engineering – on behalf of corporate banking and financial elites – the new paymasters Modi genuflects to after having ditched the small and medium mercantile lobbies the BJP represented for long. The Indian middle-classes, both real and aspirational, are rooting for the policy as they see a consolidation of their own power and future benefits in it.

With one stone, the policy’s architects have tried to slaughter many birds: recapitalise public banks burdened with bad loans; lend out new deposits to cronies in the corporate sector; enrich new entrants into the digital banking business, give the government extra funds to spend on its pet projects and steal a march over political rivals.

a. Rebooting troubled Indian banks: The bad loans or Non Performing Assets (NPAs) in the Indian banking sector, stood at nearly6 lakh crore rupees by end of March 2016[3].  Over 90 per cent of this is on the books of public-sector banks, with the State Bank of India accounting for the highest amount. Even this sum, stunning as it may be, is considered a gross underestimation and if loans that face the risk of being declared NPAs are also taken into account, theoverall stressed advances of Indian banks will double[4].  A bulk of the NPAs are in turn due to default on interest payments by the corporate sector, which has been milking the banking system through its political patrons.

The increase in deposits of banks expected due to the crackdown on black money is expected to help banks get into better health, lower interest rates and enable them to resume lending to Indian businesses again. In other words, demonetisation is a way of saving many Indian public sector banks while also providing corporates with fresh loans,  a very dubious strategy given those in power seem to have no real will to recover money from their defaulter cronies.

b. Increasing the government’s cash flow: One of the justifications being given now for demonetisation is that an estimated Rs.16 lakh crores circulating in the Indian economy as cash, mostly in the form of 500 and 1000 rupee notes, will all get accounted for as they will be forced to go through the banking system. Assuming that a significant portion of the cash held in high denomination notes is ‘black money’ – it is argued that a significant percentage of this black money will not come back at all due to fear of penalties and prosecution and becomes useless. This will reduce the overall liability of the Researve Bank of India by anywhere between 2-4 lakh crore rupees, providing a windfall to the state exchequer. This calculation has been challenged by several economists but even if it were right, the moot question is what the government plans to spend all this extra money on, given its extremely poor record of spending on health, education and infrastructure for the welfare of the population?What is the guarantee that it will not all end up in the pockets of ruling party politicians and their businessmen friends?

c. Boosting the digital cash economy: In July this year a new study by Google and Boston Consulting Group[5] predicted an exponential increase in digital payments, estimated to grow by 10 times to touch US$500 billion by 2020 – or around 15% of the Indian GDP by that time. A bulk of these payments, the study said, will be micro-transactions, with over 50% of person-to-merchant business expected to be under100.

The biggest barrier to this prediction coming true however is supposed to be the fact that a vast majority of Indians prefer to use cash over digital money. Cash, as a percentage of total consumer payments in India, is around 98%, compared with 55% in the US and 48% in the UK, according to report by Payments Council of India released in 2015[6].

In one sweeping stroke, the Modi regime has changed all that and through demonetisation is about to force millions of Indians into the waiting arms of around a dozen private ‘payment banks’ given licences to operate by the Reserve Bank of India in 2015. Among the big non-banking sector corporate grabbing these licenses are Reliance Industries, Airtel, Aditya Birla group, Vodafone, Paytm and Tech Mahindra. The fact that Paytm[7] saw more than five-fold rise in overall traffic in less than 18 hours of the demonetization is an indication that ‘achche din’ have really arrived for the BJP’s cronies in the new banking sector.

Ironically  (or maybe not so ironically) the total black money stored in digital form in foreign banks and in benami names in domestic banks and in shares, bonds and other financial instruments is much bigger than that in hard cash. In the absence of a honest political ruling class, bureaucracy or police the shift to a digital economy will only make it easier to store black money while making companies in the banking sector rich.

d. Cutting political opponents to size: Apart from all these dubious motives behind demonetisation there seems to be something even more devious at work. There are serious allegations of a scam–that BJP insiders changed their hoards of black money into white in various ways in the run up to the new policy. While these charges need further investigation, the Indian media has already reported a suspicious surge in bank deposits in the months just prior to demonetisaion and even produced evidence of the BJP’s West Bengal unit depositing large sums of cash[8] into its account just hours before the announcement was made. Given the widespread use of black money in cash by all political parties during elections demonetisation is calculated to hit the BJP’s opponents in the upcoming Punjab and Uttar Pradesh elections. Public discontent over the policy could however negate any such gains.

Looking at the demonetisation policy from a more long-term political perspective the portents under the current regime are scary. What Narendra Modi is really proving is that he is capable of playing a very high-risk game in order to boost his own stature, ram through policies that benefit his corporate cronies and care two hoots for the welfare of the Indian masses (despite being a chaiwallah’s son himself!). It is a display of high confidence, even arrogance, on part of the BJP ‘strongman’ that is extraordinary even by his previous record and standards.

The other point to note is that the Indian right wing, represented by the BJP and the Sangh Parivar, is not at all hesitatnt about turning the entire country or even the Indian Constitution upside down in pursuit of whatever objectives they deem worthwhile. In that sense the idea of ‘revolution’ or overthrow of the state and current social order,  rhetorically championed for long by leftists, is being implemented in practice by the right-wing. The Sangh Parivar has become the only effective insurrectionary force in the country today- with truly frightening possibilities in future, including a political emergency to accompany the financial one.

This is not to say at all they will necessarily succeed in their plans. Fortunately for Indian democracy, those espousing fascist control also seem to be cocksure and foolish – as undoubtedly Modi and his men have been with the demonetisation decision –a truly spectacular self-goal on their part.

With public anger against the policy growing steadily this is perhaps the right time for opponents of the Parivar’s various, draconian gameplans to get their act together and mobilise the Indian people. How seriously they carry out this mission will determine whether it is the Parivar or its opponents who finally go out of circulation –like the recently abolished currencies.

Satya Sagar is a journalist and public health worker who can be reached sagarnama@gmail.com

17 November 2016

By Andre Vltchek

Only citizens can vote in the US Presidential elections, yet the impact is global.

The world is suddenly in disarray, in panic. A man notorious for his bigoted rhetoric, a man who believes in American exceptionalism, who wants to build the walls and to ‘restore order’, has been elected the 45th President of the mightiest nation on Earth. Hiscountryis doubtlessly in decline;it is indebted and some would even argue, hopelessly bankrupt, but it is still the Empire,the sole one to this day.

Below the surface, Mr. Trump may not be any viler than the Democratic candidate Mrs. Clinton and her clan has been for years. The establishment with which she has been inseparably intertwined for years and decades has been murdering millions all over the world, looting entire continents, and brutally guaranteeing that the Western world would always stay firmly in control of the entire Planet.

Throughout the years, Mrs. Clinton has been using ‘politically correct’ rhetoric, mainly (and often in a twisted way) in order to silence those who dared to criticize her deeds. Still, no matter what her words were stating, millions of people have been vanishing, worldwide, as a result of the policies introduced by her and by her former boss, President Barack Obama.

Donald Trump is brusque, aggressive, narcissistic and most likely, brutally honest. What he says is often pure trash, but whatever it is, he is not embarrassed to parade it in public. He has been giving many advanced warnings to both his supporters (including his voters) and to his adversaries. Objectively speaking, he is not any more or any less dangerous than Mrs. Clinton.

Both candidates come from the moneyed, pro-establishment milieu. Yet Mr. Trump evokes much greater fearall over the worldthan his rival, from Asia and Africa to Latin America.

It is at least partially because the mainstream Western propaganda rallied determinedly behind the well-tested and ‘reliable’ Mrs. Clinton (she has proven to be subservient to the Western imperialist regime and to market fundamentalist dogmas), and the Western mainstream media is exactly what is giving ‘marching orders’ to the local press, particularly in ‘client’ states in all parts of the world.

*

Nonetheless, Mr. Trump is definitely frightening on his own account, and just because he ran against (and defeated) the establishment candidate, does not make him less so.

Rowan Wolf, Managing Editor atThe Greanville Post and publisher ofUncommon Thought,recently summarized what I felt about the recent elections, when she wrote to me (it was right after the results were announced):

“I am frightened over the election of Trump. Things were going to be bad here even without that because his position as the candidate for president legitimated the ugliest bigotry and violence. His election, legitimates and institutionalizes it at the highest levels possible. It is not as if this ugliness was not present in the US as it certainly was, but it was not celebrated. His racism extends outside the US and he has already stated numerous times that he would use nukes in the Middle East and just take the oil. He also hates the Earth. He plans to reverse or remove all environmental protections and regulations, and he doesn’t “believe” in global warming. His presidency could not happen at a worse time for our planet.”

*

I had the extremely bad fortune of spending ‘the day after’ in the den of the Western pro-establishment mainstream media based in Asia Pacific – the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand (FCCT).

Or perhaps it was not only ‘bad fortune’ but also some type of perverse desire to witnessthe great and genuine desperation of those who have, for years and decades, been serving the Empire and its ‘liberal’ dogmas, twisting the truth and manufacturing hyper-reality.

Even before my arrival at the FCCT, the results of elections were finalized. I expected a great mess, and mess it was. I witnessed depressed glances, nervous laughter, small talk, and an excessive consumption of booze.

Speeches soon followed: made by the members of Western human rights organizations, of several NGO’s, and press corps.

Some Iranian exile began trashing Iran, somehow loosely connecting it to the US elections. Someone else had a go at the Philippine’s anti-imperialist President Duterte. And of course, China was hit on several occasions, and so was Russia, particularly that ‘evil’ Putin. One after another, speakers mimicked Ms. Clinton’s derogatory pronunciation of Russian President’s name.

No one mentioned Thailand or Indonesia even once.

It was all grotesque and endlessly sad.

Then the chest beating and insulting the voters slowly began… a slow masochistic public orgy.

In the end, several well-behaved members of the public began queuing in front of the microphone, asking polite questions. Not sending the panelists to hell, not insulting them directly to their faces… Nothing like that! People were just asking non-confrontational questions, and then, patiently and politely waiting for replies.The ‘client’ states of the West were still very far from the rebellion.

*

Then my phone became extremely active, as I began receiving messages from all corners of the globe.

From Sudan: “I never thought Donald would win! The Sudanese are making fun of Trump saying that he looks like our President Al-Basheer.”

From Italy: “Better than Killary, but still disgusting”.

From Uganda: “Our government is acting as if it didn’t back Hillary before the elections.”

From Argentina: “Now in the US they will have to eat their own crap… as they made others eat it for decades.”

From Indonesia: “Trump said that he would increase tariffs on imported products. In that case he’ll have to pay more for his suits, as he apparently wears some that are made in Indonesia”.

*

“Where were you on the 9-11?” Or now: “Where were you on 11-8?”

Some people compare these two events.

On both occasions (or before), no one bothered to listen, to face reality, and as a result, some terrible events took place.

On 11-8 I was in Bangkok.

On 9-11 in Hanoi, Vietnam, sipping coffee, and looking out of my window. The apartment was on a higher floor of the “Hanoi Tower”. The building was literally growing out from the old French prison, where Vietnamese patriots used to be tortured, raped and executed by the French colonialists. If I were to walkall the way towards the very glass panel, I would be ableto see, far below, two shiny guillotines, preserved for people to rememberthe ‘great enlightened rule of the West over Asia’.

Suddenly on the horizon, the sky lit up in a tremendous explosion of colors. The villages surrounding Hanoi were shooting firecrackers and makeshift rockets up to the sky. It was a great fireworks display, something I had never seen before.

I turned my television set on. On the BBC coverage, two airplanes were flying, in slow motion, towards the towers of the World Trade Center.

A few minutes later I received a phone call from my best friend in Santiago de Chile.

“You would not believe what is happening here,” he reported to me, breathless. “People, total strangers, are stopping here, in the middle of the street. They are crying, falling into each other’s arms, and whispering: “Justice takes time, but it always comes!”

They were referring to 9-11-1973, when the United States overthrew one of the oldest and greatest democracies on Earth. Chile was raped, its people murdered, its form of government and its economic model were shattered.

A few hours after the “event”, both the Vietnamese and Chilean governments expressed their shock and support for the American people. In Vietnam, the celebrations were not reported. But they took place. Everyone knew it.

The great anger against the Empire could be felt, and is still felt, not only in those two great nations, but also all over the world.

People are outraged. Those in the United States are… and also those in the rest of the world are…although they are outraged for totally different reasons… but outraged they all are nevertheless!

“Democracy” is the rule of people. It does not mean the ‘Western multi-party system’. It only means the ‘rule of the people’, in Greek. It can be based on the ancient ‘heavenly mandate’ on which the Chinese system is based even now. It can be the modern Latin American form of participatory democracy… as long as people are ruling.

However, they are not ruling. Not in the West, nor in most of the countries of the rest of the world, where the governments are forced upon them by Western imperialism to defend their states and to often adopt very tough measures to do so.

People in the United States had spoken, expressing their frustration and anger.

People in the rest of the world were not asked who should be leading the world.

The next, the most logical step for the world shouldnow be, immediately to reject the leadership of both the United States and Europe.

Brexit and 11-8 should be followed by the WORLD-EXIT. What does it mean? Simple: ‘Let the West eat its own shit, alone, finally’! And let the world be free from those governments and economic and colonialist concepts, which no one here (in Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East) really elected and wants!

Once we are at exiting, rejecting and defending, let’s also build huge protective walls around all non-Western countries. To defend them from theCrusaders and hordes that have been looting and plundering the entire Planet for centuries.

The citizens of the United States have spoken. Oh yes! So let the rest of the world do the same!

Let them vote on WORLD EXIT! It is clear what the result will be!

*

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

23 November 2016

By Chris Hedges

My relatives in Maine are deplorables. I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy. They also nourish the magical thinking peddled by the con artists in the Christian right, the state lotteries that fleece the poor, and an entertainment industry that night after night shows visions of an America and a lifestyle on television screens—“The Apprentice” typified this—that foster unattainable dreams of wealth and celebrity.

Those who are cast aside as human refuse often have a psychological need for illusions and scapegoats. They desperately seek the promise of divine intervention. They unplug from a reality that is too hard to bear. They see in others, especially those who are different, the obstacles to their advancement and success. We must recognize and understand the profound despair that leads to these reactions. To understand these reactions is not to condone them.

The suffering of the white underclass is real. Its members struggle with humiliation and a crippling loss of self-worth and dignity. The last thing they need, or deserve, is politically correct thought police telling them what to say and think and condemning them as mutations of human beings.

Those cast aside by the neoliberal order have an economic identity that both the liberal class and the right wing are unwilling to acknowledge. This economic identity is one the white underclass shares with other discarded people, including the undocumented workers and the people of color demonized by the carnival barkers on cable news shows. This is an economic reality the power elites invest great energy in masking.

The self-righteousness of the liberal class, which revels in imagined tolerance and enlightenment while condemning the white underclass as irredeemable, widens the divide between white low-wage workers and urban elites. Liberals have no right to pass judgment on these so-called deplorables without acknowledging their pain. They must listen to their stories, which the corporate media shut out. They must offer solutions that provide the possibility of economic stability and self-respect.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood the downward spiral of hating those who hate you. “In a real sense all life is inter-related,” he wrote in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. …”

We cannot battle the racism, bigotry and hate crimes that will be stoked by the Donald Trump presidency without first battling for economic justice. This is not a gap between the tolerant and the intolerant. It is a gap between most of the American population and our oligarchic and corporate elites, which Trump epitomizes. It is a gap that is understood only in the light of the demand for economic justice. And when we start to speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the protofascism being embraced by many Trump supporters.

I spent two years writing a book on the Christian right called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I spent many months with dispossessed white workers in states such as Missouri, Kansas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California. I carried into the book project all the prejudices that come with being raised in the liberal church—a disdain for a magic Jesus who answers your prayers and makes you rich, a repugnance at the rejection of rationality and science and at the literal interpretation of the Bible, a horror of the sacralization of the American empire, and a revulsion against the racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and blind intolerance that often afflict those who retreat into a binary world of good and evil.

Those enthralled by such thinking are Christian heretics—Jesus did not come to make us rich and powerful and bless America’s empire—and potential fascists. They have fused the iconography and symbols of the American state with the iconography and symbols of the Christian religion. They believe they can create a “Christian” America. The American flag is given the same sacred value as the Christian cross. The Pledge of Allegiance has the religious power of the Lord’s Prayer. That a sleazy developer and con artist was chosen as their vehicle—81 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump—for achieving this goal is startling, to say the least. But this is not a reality-based movement. Most of those who profit from this culture of despair, many wrapped in the halo of the ministry, are, like Trump, slick, amoral trolls.

My view of the tens of millions of Americans who have fallen into the embrace of the Christian right’s magical thinking underwent a profound change as I conducted interviews for the book. During that time I did what good reporters do: I listened. And the stories I heard were heartbreaking. I grew to like many of these people. The communities they lived in, many of which I visited, looked like the towns where my family lived in Maine. They were terrified of the future, especially for their children. They struggled with feelings of worthlessness and abandonment. I fear the Christianized fascism in which they enshroud themselves, but I also see them as its pawns.

They hate a secular world they see as destroying them. They long for the apocalyptic visions of Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series. They want the cruelty and rot of “secular humanism” to be obliterated before they and their families are lifted into heaven by the rapture (an event never mentioned in the Bible).

I finished my book with a deep dislike for megachurch pastors who, like Trump, manipulate despair to achieve power and wealth. I see the Christian right as a serious threat to an open society. But I do not hate those who desperately cling to this emotional life raft, even as they spew racist venom. Their conclusion that minorities, undocumented workers or Muslims are responsible for their impoverishment is part of the retreat into fantasy. The only way we will blunt this racism and hatred and allow them to free themselves from the grip of magical thinking is by providing jobs that offer adequate incomes and economic stability and by restoring their communities and the primacy of the common good. Any other approach will fail. We will not argue or scold them out of their beliefs. These people are emotionally incapable of coping with the world as it is. If we demonize them we demonize ourselves.

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” in story after story makes clear that members of the white underclass are also victims and deserve our empathy.

The liberal class has no hope of defeating the rise of American fascism until it unites with the dispossessed white working class. It has no hope of being an effective force in politics until it articulates a viable socialism. Corporate capitalism cannot be regulated, reformed or corrected. A socialist movement dedicated to demolishing the cruelty of the corporate state will do more to curb the racism of the white underclass than lessons by liberals in moral purity. Preaching multiculturalism and gender and identity politics will not save us from the rising sadism in American society. It will only fuel the anti-politics that has replaced politics.

Liberals have sprinkled academic, corporate, media and political institutions with men and women of different races and religions. This has done nothing to protect the majority of marginalized people who live in conditions that are worse than those that existed when King marched on Selma. It is boutique activism. It is about branding, not justice.

Murray Bookchin excoriated the irrelevancy of a liberal class that busied itself with “the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, car[-]bumper sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies and finally, the knee-bent humble pleas for small reforms—in short the mere shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment, insurgent conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary project in history.”

Human history, as Bookchin and Karl Marx understood, is defined by class struggle. America’s corporate elites successfully fused the two major political parties into a single corporate party, one that seized control of electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, universities, the arts, finance and nearly all forms of popular communication, including Hollywood, public relations and the press. There is no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. And Trump is about to remove whatever tepid restraints are left.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The only route left is revolt. If this revolt is to succeed it must be expressed in the language of economic justice. A continuation of the language of multiculturalism and identity politics as our primary means of communication is self-defeating. It stokes the culture wars. It feeds the anti-politics that define the corporate state.

“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left,” Richard Rorty wrote. “Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”

Our enemy is not the white working poor any more than it is African-Americans, undocumented workers, Muslims, Latinos or members of the GBLT community. The oligarchs and corporations, many of them proponents of political correctness, are our enemy. If we shed our self-righteousness and hubris, if we speak to the pain and suffering of the working poor, we will unmask the toxins of bigotry and racism. We will turn the rage of an abandoned working class, no matter what its members’ color, race or religious creed, against those who deserve it.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

First published in Truthdig

22 November 2016

By Ralph Nader

Optimists are hoping for a Trump makeover. They cling to his brief victory remarks suggesting that he wants to be the “president of all the people.” In his 60 Minutes interview following the election Trump said that the protestors were out in the streets because “they do not know me.” They recall his statement some months ago that he had to say outlandish things in order to get greater media attention and reach more people than his Republican primary competitors.

Character and personality are not prone to change in most people. Especially in the case of Trump, who sees these campaign tactics as reasons for his “successes.” However, the assumption to exalted, higher offices of public trust and power sometimes brings out the better angels.

So far, though, the signs are foreboding. Trump values loyalty, and people like Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich stuck with him at his lowest points earlier this year. Trump knows very little about the awesome job given him by that dead hand from the past – the Electoral College – which has once again caused a plurality of voters to see their chosen candidate lose (Even Trump acknowledged its unfairness on CBS’s 60 Minutes after the election).

Lack of knowhow coupled with blind loyalty brings Trump to rely heavily on these old hands behind the worsening corporate state and military belligerence.

His transition appointments are delighting the corporatists. The man chosen to oversee the changes in the Environmental Protection Agency denies that climate change is man-made and scowls at regulation of harmful pollutants. Trump has opened the door to the big oil and gas lobbyists to control the Department of Energy and the Department of the Interior. Wall Streeters are smacking their lips over Trump cavorting with opponents of regulating that giant gambling casino.

His military advisers do not come from the ranks of prudent retired officials who see perpetual war for what it is – a mechanism for national insecurity, authoritarianism and profits for the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in his 1961 farewell address. To the contrary, many of Trump’s military advisors have been quick to embrace an Empire mentality and its warfare state.

One can imagine how a major stateless terrorist attack on the U.S. during his administration could provoke Trump into a heavy-handed retaliation with dangerous and unforeseen consequences. This is exactly what these adversaries want him to do in order to further spread their propaganda campaign against the U.S. Meanwhile, our civil liberties, and the domestic necessities of the people are shoved aside.

His first two major assistants – Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Chief Strategist Steve Bannon – have called for corporate tax reductions and elimination of the estate tax on the rich (the only ones who pay it). Despite the “small government” façade, they are not likely to challenge the deficit-swelling combination of a larger military budget, decreased revenue and continuation of the bailouts, subsidies and giveaways known as crony capitalism that have enriched Trump and his plutocratic allies over the years.

Intrigue and internal fighting inside the White House and top Cabinet levels are likely if Trump insists on giving powerful roles to his three children and son-in-law (albeit without pay). Nepotism and conflicts of interest are acidic cocktails and undermine the integrity and transparency of public office.

Then there is the explosive crackdown on immigrants – many of whom benefit millions of Americans by working in low-wage jobs – that can produce daily turmoil, not to mention the exorbitant human cost of breaking up families in communities across the country.

In past Republican Party electoral victories, there was always a modicum of checks and balances to slow their plutocratic greed and power grabs. As of January 21, 2017 the Republican Party controls the Executive Branch, the Congress, the Supreme Court and most likely 33 governorships and 32 state legislatures. The anti-democratic Electoral College is the cause this November of giving the GOP control over the White House and, by extension, the Supreme Court (see nationalpopularvote.com).

Other than an unlikely vigorous and fearless free press, not just in Washington but also back in the localities, or a self-destructive Trump implosion, the redeeming power of the people can only come from the grass roots.

Our country is in an extraordinarily high-risk condition, given who possesses the reins of power. Self-described conservatives and liberals can curb that power if they form alliances back in the Congressional districts around the major initiatives on which they agree (See my book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left/Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State). Such alliances have occurred with success in the past.

With the power brokers employing their divide-and-rule tactics, such potent political alliances will require citizen action and adequate funding in all Congressional districts with focused and sustained intensity on their Senators and Representatives. Congress, with only 535 lawmakers, is the most accessible of the checks and balances reachable by the people back home.

How many enlightened billionaires, serious citizen-patriots and advocates for transforming elections and governance step up?

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest book is The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future. Other recent books include, The Seventeen Traditions: Lessons from an American Childhood, Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build It Together to Win, and “Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us” (a novel).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

First published in CommonDreams

18 November 2016

Modi accuses Islamabad of spreading terrorism

NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday accused Pakistan of being the “origin and spread” of terrorism and said India and Israel had agreed on the need for the international community to act with a resolve against terror networks and the states that harboured them.

The remarks came as India and Israel on Tuesday decided to further broaden their already close defence partnership and intensify cooperation in combating radicalisation and extremism.

“We recognise that terrorism is a global challenge, knows no boundaries and has extensive links with other forms of organised crimes.“Regrettably, one of the countries of its origin and spread is in India’s neighbourhood,” said Modi in his media statement after holding talks with visiting Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

“We agreed that the international community must act with resolve and determination against terror networks and states that harbour them,” added Modi.He sought Israel’s help in containing terrorism and extremism from Pakistan. “President Rivlin and I deeply value our strong and growing partnership to secure our societies. Our people are constantly threatened by forces of terrorism and extremism,” he said.

“We noted the strength of our growing defence partnership. And agreed on the need to make it more broad-based through production and manufacturing partnerships,” he said.Modi added that the Israeli president had also assured support for India’s UN Security Council permanent membership.

He also asked Israel to invest in India for high-technology manufacturing and in the services sectors.“We have identified water management and conservation, and collaboration in scientific research and development as two areas of priority engagement. We both agreed that the current trajectory of the Indian economy opens up many promising opportunities for Israeli companies,” he said.

Referring to growing collaboration between the two countries, particularly in defence sector, Rivlin said his country was ready to “Make in India and Make with India”.“We stand together in defending our people and our values,” Rivlin said.The two sides inked two pacts to strengthen cooperation in agriculture and water resources management sectors.

16 November 2016

By Ahmed Jazbhay

Against all odds, Donald Trump’s bigotry against Hispanics, Latinos, Muslims and Sikhs have catapulted him to the White House.

His extremist vitriol made him quite popular amongst evangelical Zionist Christians, ultra-right wing White extremists and even the White middle class.

Dissatisfied with the Obama administration, with the Republican Party and with their personal economic circumstances, which saw a firm deterioration in the 1970s. This accelerated in the twenty-first century and many were attracted to Trump’s bigotry.

Political commentators expected Trump’s campaign to fizzle out sooner rather than later, but his ever-growing support base caught some hard-line Republicans by surprise. He never stopped making controversial statements at any point in his campaign. Even claims of sexual assault could not damage him.

In effect, Trump’s popularity represents the success of bigotry and much that is wrong with mainstream politics in the United States. It has also helped re-ignite a long-discredited xenophobic feature in the country.

No one seemed able to conjure up a meaningful plan to halt Trump’s bigotry-laden steam train in its tracks. Strategists in the US are now scampering around to figure out how to contain the situation.

However, should Trump really be contained? Perhaps a Trump presidency is what the world requires, to re-ignite the drive for true and meaningful liberation.

The United States presents itself as a bastion of democracy and capitalism, protector of the free world and the guardian of the international human rights dispensation.

The American Public Relations machinery (the mainstream media, Hollywood etc.) have punted this facade for decades and it has taken the bigotry of a billionaire businessman to bring it into question.

A Trump presidency is beginning to expose the true nature of the modern/colonial Islamophobic world under the stewardship of the American empire.

At the commencement of the War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks, George Bush and the American establishment were at pains to argue that this was not a War on Islam.

Trump does not pretend to do so even stating that under his presidency, Muslims would be banned from entering the United States and that all Syrian refugees would be sent home as they could be ISIL operatives.

The fact that his views hold so much currency after having been accepted by American voters, speaks volumes about the real nature of the American empire.

His Islamophobic rhetoric has woken up many liberals and even conservatives from their slumber. It has conscientised oppressed populations that the world has descended into disorder of the highest proportion where the paradigm of war is increasingly going to be used as a tool of resolving political conflicts with far reaching consequences for human life.

The non-Western world has begun to realise that the empire only wants complete control, domination and subordination of non-white peoples.

The grand opera of non-racialism, multi-racialism, inclusivity and mutual respect purported by the American empire was just meant to pacify the oppressed.

It will soon begin to crumble, since a Trump presidency will expose the illusion of the international human rights regime and will reveal the myth of the American venture of spreading democracy.

A Trump presidency will help unmask, attack and obliterate these myths because it  clearly demonstrates that the American empire, as the global leader of the modern/colonial world, can only be sustained through a combination of violence, deception, insincerity and lies.

It will demonstrate that we live in a world governed by the idea of coloniality – the continuation of power arrangements that emerged from colonialism and continues to manifest itself long after the end of formal colonialism.

A Trump presidency will assist in making it clear that we are not free. Oppression has merely managed to change forms. It may just be the spark to conscientise the world to this fact. It is the missing ingredient to wake up the marginalised to the reality of its hellish condition.

We may begin to realise that everything we know about ourselves and the world has been constructed for us by Eurocentric thinkers to further a neo-colonial agenda of dominance and subservience.

Thank you America for voting trump into power.

Dr Ahmed Jazbhay

Executive Member: MEDIA REVIEW NETWORK

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13 November 2016

By Kevin Zeese

The Obama administration faced reality on Friday when they recognized the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would not be ratified by this Congress. The TPP is dead.

How did people power win?

We have worked to stop the TPP and other Obama trade agreements for more than five years. We were part of the ‘movement of movements’, the largest coalition ever opposing a corporate trade agreement, which stopped it. It included all sorts of activists who work on human rights, worker rights, the environment, climate change, Internet freedom, health care, food safety and more.

People told us stopping the TPP was impossible. Even after the election of Trump, people still told us we could not win, the corporations wanted this and they would get it. But, after years of work, the impossible became the inevitable and the TPP is dead.

Even before the election the TPP was near death. Years of people working to stop it made TPP stand for Toxic Political Poison. First, the movement exposed the TPP which the Obama administration had sought to keep secret while it negotiated a global corporate coup with the aid of hundreds of corporate lawyers, executives and lobbyists.

The movement organized spectacle protests that drew attention to an agreement being secretly negotiated. People across the country organized leafletting, teach-ins and visibility actions. There were national and global days of action, and there were Twitter storms and memes on Facebook. It became impossible to hide the TPP. The secret was exposed. Once exposed, the movement educated people about what it contained. Wikileaks and others leaked portions of the document. As more was exposed, it became less popular.

The movement conducted national call-in days that garnered hundreds of thousands of calls to Congress. When we went to Congressional offices, phone calls coming in on the TPP were constant. When fast track was being considered in 2015, we built an encampment on Capitol Hill for three weeks. We worked across the political divide with Tea Party and conservative Republicans who shared our concerns about the trade deficit, lost jobs and loss of sovereignty.

The battle over fast track trade promotion authority slowed the progress of the TPP. It took years longer to get fast track than the administration had hoped. One compromise that the administration made to get fast track was to publish the TPP text after it was completed so the public and members of Congress could read it. Again, the more people read about it, the less popular it became.

These political battles also showed the risk associated with the TPP. John Boehner, the former Speaker of the House, lost his job because of how he twisted arms to get votes for fast track and how he punished Republicans who exposed fast track. Members fought back against these tactics and Boehner’s career was quickly ended. He may have won fast track for Obama, but lost his place in Washington, DC. A message was sent to all elected officials – be careful with the TPP, it is politically toxic.

By delaying fast track the TPP was pushed into an election year and that was a key to our victory. In the campaign, those running for office were forced to answer to the people. Do you support the TPP? Do you support giving up US sovereignty? Allowing unsafe foods into the country? Forcing GMO’s into global agriculture? Increasing the prices of pharmaceuticals? Making corporations more powerful than governments? The questions kept coming because the TPP affects everything.

Every candidate for president had to come out against the TPP. The only one who didn’t was Gary Johnson who did not seem to understand the agreement. He believed the slogan “free” trade when in fact it was corporate trade, crony capitalism on an international scale. Senators who supported TPP changed their positions in order to keep their jobs. Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan continually warned the President that the votes were not there to ratify the agreement, even in a lame duck session.

Popular Resistance has been planning all year for an action camp and series of protests next week to kick off the lame duck and stop ratification. This will now turn into a celebration — the people stopped a global corporate coup. The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) also died as a result of people powered pressure on both sides of the Atlantic. We will ensure that the final agreement, the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), perhaps the most dangerous of Obama’s three agreements, is also dead. TiSA is also in trouble as member nations experience difficulty completing its negotiations.

All these Obama agreements failed because the corporations demanded too much. They wanted to force the US big finance capital system on countries all over the world. They wanted to institutionalize pushing public services into private profit centers. They wanted the power to sue corporations if their profits were impacted by laws written to protect the public interest. Leaks showed the US was the most aggressive on behalf of corporate interests out of all the countries involved in these negotiations. This almost made it impossible to reach agreement on the TPP and has stopped agreement on TTIP and TiSA. If Trump attempts to negotiate a “better deal” for US corporations it will be almost impossible to get other countries to agree. The TPP and Obama trade agenda may end up like the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has made little progress since the Seattle protests of 1999. They are likely to flounder and go nowhere.

Now, we need to put forward a new approach to trade, an approach that protects the people and planet and that is negotiated in a transparent and participatory way. Trade must make the Paris climate agreement goals a reality, lift up international labor standards and protect the environment as well as the food supply, Internet, access to healthcare and more. We need agreements that allow communities to protect themselves from corporate abuses. The death of the TPP is a step toward ending neo-liberalism that has privatized public goods, enriched corporations and created a global wealth divide. Future trade agreements should work toward making the International Declaration of Human Rights and related agreements reality. Trade can uplift the world but it must be clear that is one of the goals of trade.

The defeat of the TPP is a tremendous victory that should propel us forward. It shows organized people have power even in the US oligarchy. We need to build on this power, continue our unity as a movement of movements and demand that the people’s agenda becomes the political agenda, not the agenda of big business and the wealthy oligarchs. It is time for people power to rule. We still have a lot of work to do, but we should celebrate this great victory and move to set a people’s agenda for the United States.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance.

12 November 2016