We Say Fight Back!

www.facebook.com/satyaveer.singh.714/videos/1952767668109694/?t=16

When I was young, it was my good fortune to make the acquaintance of an old German Jew who was dying, here in London, from the effects of long hardship and privation, of overwork and poverty. I did what I could to save, to prolong his life. I got him sent to Algeria, to the south of France, and got the most brilliant young physician on Harley Street to look after him. But it was too late. In the short time I knew him, he taught me more than all other teachers, dead or living. He saw more clearly than any other man the disease that was killing the world. His name was Karl Marx.

The man who spoke these words was named E. Ray Lankester. He was one of Great Britain’s foremost biologists at the turn of the twentieth century, and one of the few present at Marx’s funeral.

Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883. By the autumn of 1850, half of his life had passed. He was truly a man of the 1800s, rooted in his century. Today he belongs to the distant past, yet his name constantly crops up.

The collapse of the Soviet Empire at rst appeared to bury him in its rubble, in the oblivion that surrounds the hopelessly obso- lete. Marx was only the rst in a series of repugnant gures who now, fortunately, had been consigned to the history books: everything that had been realized in the Soviet Union and China had been designed rst in Marx’s imagination.

This is a notion that is still widely prevalent. But it soon turned out that Marx had an active afterlife, independent of the disintegration of empires. More than a few regretted his demise…

around the turn of the century, Marx became topical in a more spectacular fashion. The New Yorker named him the most important thinker of the coming century, and in a vote organized by the BBC, he came out top among philosophers as the greatest thinker of the last millennium.  www.versobooks.com/blogs/3784-marx-comes-painfully-close-to-describing-our-current-world?fbclid=IwAR3j2YGAAlREn7ja2KEcJ996_6RVY7CaKtuDTv7JpVS3XyJVZw3zjqpai44

The struggle continues. Below, from the IWW strike in the Keweeenaw Peninsula (Michigan) miners’ strike of 1913. Mine owners killed 70 men, women, and children.

‘We are not robots’: Thousands of Amazon workers across Europe are striking on Black Friday over warehouse working conditions

Thousands of Amazon staff members across Europe were protesting on Black Friday over the way the company treats its warehouse workers.

A coalition of unions across Europe coordinated the action, and the British trade union GMB published a video of workers telling Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “we are not robots” in five different languages.

In Italy, Spain, France, and Germany workers planned to strike for 24 hours or more. The Italian publication Corriere della Sera reported that managers were having to step in and package items to deal with demand.

UNI Global, the trade union helping coordinate the walkout, said roughly 2,400 workers were on strike in Europe, but people on the ground are reporting higher numbers of protesters.

Amazon Germany told Reuters that 620 employees participated in the strike across two of its warehouses, while the German union Verdi told Business Insider that 1,000 workers were walking out.

In Spain, unions said 1,600 employees had downed tools for the day. Local reports also claimed that Amazon asked Spanish police to intervene in the strikes by enforcing worker productivity inside a warehouse on the outskirts of Madrid. Citing police sources, El Confiedencial reported that the police categorically refused Amazon’s request. Amazon strongly denied the claims.  www.businessinsider.com/black-friday-amazon-workers-protest-poor-working-conditions-2018-11?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=topbar&utm_term=mobile&referrer=facebook&fbclid=IwAR0tDIsUi3ldwopUicIu2vt8Z2sqwEUHduPLNnUQZWiaUODtbQ3dpoWg4Oo

Ahead of tomorrow's protest at Amazon Rugeley, I’m calling on the company to sit down with @GMB_union to talk about union recognition and decent conditions for Amazon workers. Do the decent thing, or wait for a Labour govt to do it for you. #AmazonWeAreNotRobots @GMBWestMidlands pic.twitter.com/FoU6EgcncK

— Tom Watson (@tom_watson) November 22, 2018

White Women Wore Hoodies to a Tennessee Mall to Prove Its Hoodie Policy Only Targets Black Men

After footage of four black men being escorted out of a mall in Tennessee for wearing hoodies inside, four white women wore hoodies to the same mall to see if the policy was meant for everyone. And, yep, you guessed it, the women were able to walk freely around the mall with their hoodies—both up and down—without ever being shown the exit.

According to Raw Story, the initial incident that garnered national attention was captured by Kevin McKenzie, a black former reporter for the Commercial Appeal, who noted that he started recording the incident at the Wolfchase Galleria in Memphis, Tenn., after watching a white security guard tailing the group of young men like “he was a cat after mice.”

“For reasons I didn’t hear, one young man, in what appeared to be a nylon blue and white jacket with a hood that was not on his head, was handcuffed by a Memphis officer and led away as my video rolled,” McKenzie told the Memphis Flyer. “That’s when a black sheriff’s deputy approached me and told me I also was breaking the mall’s rules.” www.theroot.com/white-women-wore-hoodies-to-a-tennessee-mall-to-prove-i-1830449722?fbclid=IwAR3ca3TGbkxrRv2FgOKScP19MDU9kObRez4KdWajA6KAea66JXtIJM5i3hA

Special Sale — 50% off (paperbacks and ebooks) — Theodore W. Allen’s “The Invention of the White Race” (2 vols.) are on sale at 50% off plus Free Ebooks. These volumes have much supplemental front and back matter including internal study guides. Help to spread the word!

For info on “The Invention of the White Race” Vol. I: “Racial Oppression and Social Control” see www.jeffreybperry.net

 

Coming Soon: A documentary on the

Grenada Invasion

catapultfilmfund.org/films/TheGrenadaInvasion/

Thirty-Five Years On: The Mystery of the Grenada Invasion Remains

Thirty-five years ago, in late October, 1983, U.S. troops under the direction of Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, an island off Venezuela with a population less than Kalamazoo’s.

The invasion of Grenada presaged many of the events that blowback on the US today: unilateral warfare, official deceit about the motives for war, a massive military moving against an imagined foe, stifling the press, leaders proclaiming their guidance from God, denials of human and civil rights, systematic torture and subsequent cover-ups, an unsolved mystery that I will attempt to solve with a bit of speculation-and a hero who refused to go along.

Many of the players in the George W. Bush regime cut their teeth on the invasion of Grenada. Obama and now Trump follow the same lead. It is more than worthwhile to review the events that lead to the invasion, as well as what came next.

On March 13, 1979 a revolution took place in Grenada, the first in an African-Caribbean country, the first in the English-speaking world. The people who made up the revolutionary cadre were young, average age around 27. The uppermost leadership was predominantly middle class, educated abroad. www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/25/thirty-five-years-on-the-mystery-of-the-grenada-invasion-remains/

Teaching union leader calls on members to vote for strike

The prospect of a nationwide teachers’ strike is looming larger after a leader of the country’s largest teaching union, backed by the Labour leadership, called on members to vote for a walkout in protest at the government’s funding plans.

Flanked by Jeremy Corbyn and the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, the joint head of the National Education Union (NEU) told campaigners the government would listen to nothing short of a strike and implored them to vote for one in the union’s indicative ballot.

“From today, the campaign continues. We are ramping it up,” Kevin Courtney told a rally in Westminster on Tuesday evening. “We are grateful for the support of politicians from all political parties who will support us. We know we have support from Labour’s frontbench directly here and we thank them again for that. But we say it’s our actions that make the difference.”  www.theguardian.com/education/2018/nov/21/teaching-union-leader-calls-members-vote-strike?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR1XtYy6OIv_IKDuWDlS8HwfoCV8F3QS0eyQFD8WiS3e3HqoZ12MFe-T84Qhttps://www.facebook.com/beverley.massay.1/videos/724788061230853/?t=13

 

www.facebook.com/SputnikNews/videos/259695718051928/

The Little Red Schoolhouse

If you love research, academia may not be for you

Over the past few years, I’ve had a couple of conversations with friends that left me wondering exactly what universities have become.

These friends are either in the middle of a PhD or contemplating doing one, and  inevitably we turned to discuss whether a career in academia would be worthwhile. They wanted, simply put, a life that gave them time to think deeply about their chosen subject.

This is still, on the whole, what we think should be the essence of academia. Universities are supposed to provide space for serious thought. But I came away from our chats wondering whether my friends might have better luck pursing this goal outside the academy (more on this later).  www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/if-you-love-research-academia-may-not-be-you?fbclid=IwAR3QP2AKgg6121FjQ0s2rzYFWoeBCeVd8g6V_VcC96JWcjLDOthlLDpPHVk

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

War-whore, Cuckqueen, Sociopath, mother of Seven Wars, Hillary Clinton Says Europe Must ‘Get a Handle’ on Migration to Thwart Populism

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN2b8pnk_BI

Trump’s Criticism of Architect of Bin Laden Raid Draws Fire

He was the man who oversaw the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. As a member of the Navy SEALs, he became renowned as one of the iconic military officers of the post-9/11 era. And after retiring four years ago, Adm. William H. McRaven took on a huge challenge as chancellor of the sprawling University of Texas System.

So colleagues and commanders alike found it audacious for President Trump to label Mr. McRaven a “Hillary Clinton fan” — and impugn his lifelong nonpartisan political position.

“The president’s remarks were wrong on every level,” Nicholas J. Rasmussen, a top counterterrorism official in the George W. Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, said in an email on Monday. “Wrong about Bill and his politics. Wrong about the Bin Laden raid. And most troubling, wrong about what it takes for a commander in chief to enjoy the genuine respect of the women and men he should be honored to lead.”

Mr. Trump’s comments, in an interview broadcast over the weekend, reignited a war of words that started last year when Mr. McRaven, a four-star officer, called the president’s description of the news media as the “enemy of the people” the “greatest threat” to American democracy he had ever seen.  www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/us/politics/mcraven-trump-pakistan.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Dangerous human research alleged at San Diego VA

Two whistleblowers say dangerous medical research was performed on veterans suffering from alcoholism and liver disease at the VA San Diego Healthcare System, which serves the nearly quarter-million veterans in San Diego and Imperial counties, and has one of the largest research programs in the national VA network.

Federal investigators looking into the whistleblowers’ allegations sent a strongly worded letter this month to President Donald Trump and members of the veterans affairs committees of Congress urging a “truly critical look” into the San Diego VA.

Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, serves on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and said he’d ask for hearings on Capitol Hill after learning about the report from inewsource.

“It looks like the VA may have known about this for awhile while it was happening and didn’t act fast enough to stop it,” Peters told inewsource.

Quality of care issues have plagued the Department of Veterans Affairs’ healthcare system for years, most notably the 2014 cover-up of long wait times veterans endured to get appointments.

Whistleblowers exposed that scandal, and VA employees today continue to lodge a high number of complaints.  inewsource.org/2018/11/19/va-san-diego-research-samuel-ho/

Saudis Want a U.S. Nuclear Deal. Can They Be Trusted Not to Build a Bomb?

Before Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was implicated by the C.I.A. in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, American intelligence agencies were trying to solve a separate mystery: Was the prince laying the groundwork for building an atomic bomb?

The 33-year-old heir to the Saudi throne had been overseeing a negotiation with the Energy Department and the State Department to get the United States to sell designs for nuclear power plants to the kingdom. The deal was worth upward of $80 billion, depending on how many plants Saudi Arabia decided to build.

But there is a hitch: Saudi Arabia insists on producing its own nuclear fuel, even though it could buy it more cheaply abroad, according to American and Saudi officials familiar with the negotiations. That raised concerns in Washington that the Saudis could divert their fuel into a covert weapons project — exactly what the United States and its allies feared Iran was doing before it reached the 2015 nuclear accord, which President Trump has since abandoned.

Prince Mohammed set off alarms when he declared earlier this year, in the midst of the negotiation, that if Iran, Saudi Arabia’s fiercest rival, “developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” His negotiators stirred more worries by telling the Trump administration that Saudi Arabia would refuse to sign an agreement that would allow United Nations inspectors to look anywhere in the country for signs that the Saudis might be working on a bomb, American officials said.  www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-nuclear.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR0jN0bpP0HKmv8dPVFnLDKaIa8sQuJWwOT-v_A5wuFZEFWeWVxK6xmJiZI

An earlier Caravan

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MS4gFPr2Hk

White House approves use of force, some law enforcement roles for border troops

Health conditions worsen at Tijuana migrant shelter as mayor calls for help

Sickness has started setting in at a sprawling migrant camp in Tijuana, as Mayor Juan Manuel Gastelum declared a humanitarian crisis and asked for federal and international assistance for the more than 6,000 Central Americans who have poured into the region in recent weeks.

At the Benito Juárez shelter in north Tijuana, more than 4,700 migrants are in tents and under blankets that are now filling surrounding streets for about a one-block radius.

Inside the shelter, Paula Cortes, 21, and her family huddled around a 2-year-old baby Isaac, who lay feverish, listless and covered with blankets.

“He’s very, very sick,” his mother said in Spanish. “I’m too worried right now but they won’t send a doctor in here. They told us to take him outside to the medical tent.”

The Office of the Secretary of Public Health for Baja California did not return a request for comment, but a shelter aid worker confirmed the only current option for the young parents is to bring him to a medical tent set up outside Benito Juárez to deal with minor medical ailments.

The Government of Baja California Friday reported treating 818 respiratory infections and providing 1,286 general medical consultations to members of the migrant caravan.  www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/border-baja-california/sd-me-border-health-11232018-story.html

The International Economic War of the Rich on the Poor

General Motors wanted at least 7K workers to take a buyout; layoffs loom

General Motors hoped at least 7,000 white-collar workers would sign up by noon Monday for a buyout offer, but managers told employees last week that it was likely to fall short, raising the prospect of significant layoffs.

The number volunteering for the offer is likely be closer to 4,000 based on estimates by an actuary, some GM employees said managers told them.

That means 3,000 or more salaried workers in North America could be terminated starting in January if the automaker in fact opts for forced job cuts, which it has said it would consider if buyouts fell short.

That’s the message some GM managers gave salaried workers during department meetings held Thursday and Friday of last week, several employees who attended the meetings told the Free Press. The meetings were an 11th-hour attempt to help employees with 12 or more years at GM decide whether they want to take a voluntary buyout.  www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2018/11/19/general-motors-buyout-layoffs/2057463002/

Is Ford Preparing for Mass Layoffs After Losing $1 Billion to Trump’s Trade Tariffs?

On 9 October 2018, Fortune magazine reported that the Ford Motor Company was laying workers off as a result of tariffs on metal imports implemented by President Donald Trump. The story, headlined “Ford Prepares for Mass Layoffs After Losing $1 Billion to Trump’s Trade Tariffs, Report Says,” proclaimed that:

Ford is having a bad year in 2018. Its stock is down 29%, and the tariffs imposed by President Trump have reportedly cost the company $1 billion, as the company is in the midst of a reorganization. Now, the company is announcing layoffs.

Jim Hackett, Ford’s CEO, is working to engineer a $25.5 billion restructuring of the automaker, hoping to cut costs and remain competitive, the Wall Street Journal reports. But auto sales are down, and one reason is the trade tariffs that Trump has imposed on metals and other goods. According to Bloomberg, Hackett has said they have already cost the company $1 billion in profit and could do “more damage” if the disputes aren’t resolved quickly.

It is true that, according to Ford CEO Jim Hackett, the company lost $1 billion in profit as a result of Trump’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Hackett told Bloomberg Television on 26 September 2018 that “The metals tariffs took about $1 billion in profit from us — and the irony is we source most of that in the U.S. today anyways. If it goes on longer, there will be more damage.”  www.snopes.com/fact-check/ford-tariff-layoffs/

There are 1.77 million homeless in India, but the State is blind to them

They can be found everywhere but somehow the Indian State fails to notice them. They are the homeless people of India. According to the government’s definition, homeless or houseless are those who live in “the open or roadside, pavements, in hume-pipes, under flyovers and staircases, or in the open in places of worship, mandaps, railway platforms etc.” Yet when it comes to providing them the basic needs, governments have been failing to spend even their allocated funds. There are 1.77 million homeless people in India.

Last week, the Supreme Court took the Centre and states to task, saying that there should be an audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General of the money disbursed by the Centre to the states for a scheme under the National Urban Livelihoods Mission (NULM), and observed that these funds, which are meant for a specific purpose, should not be diverted.  www.hindustantimes.com/editorials/there-are-1-77-million-homeless-in-india-but-the-state-is-blind-to-them/story-ypUh96FiXSxfZbrts88GnK.html?fbclid=IwAR2Rv1TvgwvnAfiiN75glqRx8J9rfXYPfS67wKscgrswmmJsw2OX7dfDPwI

San Diego County homeless student count reaches record high.

New data show more than 23,800 students were homeless last year in San Diego County — a record high and a 4.7 percent increase over the previous year.

But a county Office of Education official acknowledges the homeless student count could be wrong. It all depends on who does the counting and how they interpret federal guidelines for calculating who is homeless. At stake is millions of dollars in federal funding.  inewsource.org/2018/02/13/homeless-student-count/

Michigan Cities Face Eviction Crisis

A number of Michigan cities struggle with evictions and the social costs of housing insecurity.

Three cities — Warren, Detroit, and Lansing – are among the top hundred large cities in America with the highest rates of court-ordered evictions. That’s according to EvictionLab.org, which tracks eviction data.

The city of Warren is number nine on that list.

In other places across the country, there are efforts afoot in cities such as Cleveland meant to tackle housing issues through the court system.

WDET’s Jake Neher traveled to Cleveland to find out about that city’s efforts to stem the cycles of housing insecurity and poverty.  wdet.org/posts/2018/11/12/87524-michigan-cities-face-eviction-crisis-here-are-some-solutions/?fbclid=IwAR3dJhEzFvWNjP8nMk9Ekuj-sb0mBKKq8ZL5G0UVFmxZjI5h5zEb290ZBL8

Harvesting in a trade war – U.S. crops rot as storage costs soar

U.S. farmers finishing their harvests are facing a big problem – where to put the mountain of grain they cannot sell to Chinese buyers.

For Louisiana farmer Richard Fontenot and his neighbours, the solution was a costly one: Let the crops rot.

Fontenot plowed under 1,000 of his 1,700 soybean acres this fall, chopping plants into the dirt instead of harvesting more than $300,000 worth of beans.

His beans were damaged by bad weather, made worse by a wet harvest. Normally, he could sell them anyway to a local elevator – giant silos usually run by international grains merchants that store grain.

But this year they aren’t buying as much damaged grain. The elevators are already chock full.

“No one wants them,” Fontenot said in a telephone interview. As he spoke, he drove his tractor across a soybean field, tilling under his crop. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Across the United States, grain farmers are plowing under crops, leaving them to rot or piling them on the ground, in hopes of better prices next year, according to interviews with more than two dozen farmers, academic researchers and farm lenders. It’s one of the results, they say, of a U.S. trade war with China that has sharply hurt export demand and swamped storage facilities with excess grain.  uk.reuters.com/article/uk-usa-trade-china-grains/harvesting-in-a-trade-war-u-s-crops-rot-as-storage-costs-soar-idUKKCN1NQ0GR

Arrested Nissan executive Kelly says Ghosn paid appropriately – NHK

A former Nissan Motor (7201.T) executive arrested along with ex-chairman Carlos Ghosn has defended Ghosn’s compensation, saying it was discussed with other officials and paid out appropriately, Japanese public broadcaster NHK said on Saturday.

Japanese prosecutors say Ghosn and Kelly conspired to understate Ghosn’s remuneration by about half the 10 billion yen (69.07 million pounds) he earned at Nissan over five years from 2010. The company has also cited other, multiple infractions. uk.reuters.com/article/uk-nissan-ghosn-kelly/arrested-nissan-executive-kelly-says-ghosn-paid-appropriately-nhk-idUKKCN1NT069

Oil tumbles on oversupply concerns, sinking world stocks

Oil prices plunged on Friday on concerns about oversupply, sending world stock markets lower as lagging energy shares weighed down Wall Street.

Both Brent and U.S. crude fell to their lowest levels since October 2017 and were on course for their biggest one-month decline since late 2014. Although the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is expected to curb output, rising U.S. oil supply has fuelled persistent concerns about a global surplus.

Tumbling oil prices pushed U.S. energy shares down more than 3 percent. As a result, the benchmark S&P 500 stock index ended lower to confirm correction territory, having dropped more than 10 percent from its record closing high in late September. Trading volume was light in a shortened session after the Thanksgiving holiday.

MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe also fell.  uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-markets/oil-tumbles-on-oversupply-concerns-sinking-world-stocks-idUKKCN1NS01O

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason

China: The Land That Failed to Fail (by Restoring Capitalism and Becoming an Empire)

In the uncertain years after Mao’s death, long before China became an industrial juggernaut, before the Communist Party went on a winning streak that would reshape the world, a group of economics students gathered at a mountain retreat outside Shanghai. There, in the bamboo forests of Moganshan, the young scholars grappled with a pressing question: How could China catch up with the West?

It was the autumn of 1984, and on the other side of the world, Ronald Reagan was promising “morning again in America.” China, meanwhile, was just recovering from decades of political and economic turmoil. There had been progress in the countryside, but more than three-quarters of the population still lived in extreme poverty. The state decided where everyone worked, what every factory made and how much everything cost.

The students and researchers attending the Academic Symposium of Middle-Aged and Young Economists wanted to unleash market forces but worried about crashing the economy — and alarming the party bureaucrats and ideologues who controlled it.

Late one night, they reached a consensus: Factories should meet state quotas but sell anything extra they made at any price they chose. It was a clever, quietly radical proposal to undercut the planned economy — and it intrigued a young party official in the room who had no background in economics. “As they were discussing the problem, I didn’t say anything at all,” recalled Xu Jing’an, now 76 and retired. “I was thinking, how do we make this work?”

The Chinese economy has grown so fast for so long now that it is easy to forget how unlikely its metamorphosis into a global powerhouse was, how much of its ascent was improvised and born of desperation. The proposal that Mr. Xu took from the mountain retreat, soon adopted as government policy, was a pivotal early step in this astounding transformation.

China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users, college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union.  www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-rules.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

China Intensifies Crackdown on Marxist Student Activists

therealnews.com/stories/china-intensifies-crackdown-on-marxist-student-activists?fbclid=IwAR2MLQBk9ClHc2Q9RcMY2RCCXGkw0IKJQFevH8rnLEg1Ae0p1q0p9wSGOeI

A Conversation with Steven Spielberg: Using Schindler’s List in the Classroom

sharemylesson.com/teaching-resource/building-toolbox-against-hate-schindler%E2%80%99s-list-classroom-305839?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=lp-ad-look-web-gr1&fbclid=IwAR0j6RAr-R5i0RTZTr959m2-v9fUhrWYo1URWkVOManEAUC8_H5KFCmAdms

Against Schindler’s List

This, the day before Hitler’s birthday, has been rightfully designated as Holocaust Remembrance Day. In an ear of rising inequality, deepening segregation, and intensifying irrationalism, it makes good sense to look back on what is best called the Shoah, to reflect, and to insist, “Never Again.”

This day, however, is trivialized by yet another national showing of the official text on the Shoah, Stephen Spielberg’s movie, “Schindler’s List.” The film is now the sanctioned starting point for the study of the Holocaust in most US classrooms and the basis of understanding for millions of people. That is tragic. Spielberg’s movie is fiction. It deliberately ignores the historical context of the Shoah. Worse, if people follow the prompting of the film, they will recreate the conditions that made fascism possible. A harsh critique of “Schindler’s List” is quite in order.

Nationwide free showings of “Schindler’s List,” without big commercial interruptions began in 1997, when the Ford Motor Company sponsored the event. Henry Ford was a fascist, a significant contributor to Nazi coffers and ideology. This deepened the paradox set up on 24 March, 1994 when the fictional “Schindler’s List” was used by the most popular television news program in the U.S., “60 Minutes”, as proof that the Shoah indeed occurred (in rebuttal to “revisionist historians” who argue that the Shoah is a hoax). The movie is based on a novel, historical fiction drawn on real events.

“Schindler’s List,” opens with no historical background. We are simply in the midst of the construction of the war against the Jews. How did the Nazi’s come to power? Why were they so popular? Who fought back? How was fascism defeated? All of these questions are silenced. Instead, we meet Schindler: Nazi-about to be a hero.

Contrary to the fictional movie, Schindler was no angel of mercy. He was an early volunteer to the fascist movement. He was a Nazi profiteer, never needing to be dragged along. Against the film’s claim, “The list is the ultimate good,” not all of “Schindler’s Jews” were survivors. In one SS sweep, Schindler turned over 700 of them. They were sent to a death camp and killed. richgibson.com/SchindlerListCrit2001.htm

Who Funds the US’ Fascists (video below)

www.facebook.com/becausefacts/videos/194087694860464/?t=139

PBS on the Rise of popular fascism: Documenting Hate (video)

www.pbs.org/video/documenting-hate-new-american-nazis-vrbezk/

El Chapo Jury Hears About Bribes to Mexico’s Public Security Secretary

Solidarity for Never

Chavezista’s Results: Jets, Horses and Bribes: How a Venezuelan Official Became a Billionaire as His Country Crumbled

Spy versus Spy

Taibbi: Why You Should Care About the Julian Assange Case

Forget Jim Acosta. If you’re worried about Trump’s assault on the press, news of a Wikileaks indictment is the real scare story

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London since the summer of 2012, is back in the news. Last week, word of a sealed federal indictment involving him leaked out.

The news came out in a strange way, via an unrelated case in Virginia. In arguing to seal a federal child endangerment charge (against someone with no connection to Wikileaks), the government, ironically, mentioned Assange as an example of why sealing is the only surefire way to keep an indictment under wraps.

“Due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case,” prosecutors wrote, “no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.”

Assange’s lawyer Barry Pollack told Rolling Stone he had “not been informed that Mr. Assange has been charged, or the nature of any charges.”

Pollock and other sources could not be sure, but within the Wikileaks camp it’s believed that this charge, if it exists, is not connected to the last election.

“I would think it is not related to the 2016 election since that would seem to fall within the purview of the Office of Special Counsel,” Pollack said.

If you hate Assange because of his role in the 2016 race, please take a deep breath and consider what a criminal charge that does not involve the 2016 election might mean. An Assange prosecution could give the Trump presidency broad new powers to put Trump’s media “enemies” in jail, instead of just yanking a credential or two. The Jim Acosta business is a minor flap in comparison.

Although Assange may not be a traditional journalist in terms of motive, what he does is essentially indistinguishable from what news agencies do, and what happens to him will profoundly impact journalism.

Reporters regularly publish stolen, hacked and illegally-obtained material. A case that defined such behavior as criminal conspiracy would be devastating. It would have every reporter in the country ripping national security sources out of their rolodexes and tossing them in the trash.

A lot of anti-Trump reporting has involved high-level leaks…www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/taibbi-julian-assange-case-wikileaks-758883/

Greetings. We are Anonymous.

We have obtained a large number of documents relating to the activities of the ‘Integrity Initiative’ project that was launched back in the fall of 2015 and funded by the British government. The declared goal of the project is to counteract Russian propaganda and the hybrid warfare of Moscow. Hiding behind benevolent intentions, Britain has in fact created a large-scale information secret service in Europe, the United States and Canada, which consists of representatives of political, military, academic and journalistic communities with the think tank in London at the head of it.

As part of the project Britain has time and again intervened into domestic affairs of independent European states. A most demonstrative example is operation ‘Moncloa’ in Spain. Britain set to prevent Pedro Baños from appointment to the post of Director of Spain’s Department of Homeland Security. It took the Spanish cluster of the Integrity Initiative only a few hours to accomplish the task.  www.cyberguerrilla.org/blog/operation-integrity-initiative-british-informational-war-against-all/

The Magical Mystery Tour

Of Cultures Destroyed by Western Sexual Exploitation and Violent Religious Prudery

In working on my latest book Perv, some of the saddest material I came across involved the stormy cross-cultural conflicts erupting between Western ideals of sex and those discovered among other “exotic” societies. The field of cultural anthropology has its own dark history in this regard. For an embarrassingly long time, in fact, some unethical scholars were in the dubious business of publishing thinly veiled “ethnopornographies” of their trusting subjects. With revealing titles such as Untrodden Fields of Anthropology (1898), Neger-Eros (1928), and Erotikon (1966), these researchers seemed far less concerned about educating Western audiences than they were in titillating readers with lurid true stories of savage lust. Some of these scandalous volumes even included explicit “photodocumentation” of the subjects at hand, which arguably involved the production of sexually exploitative images of indigenous people.

It’s disturbing stuff. Yet in terms of the sheer amount of damage that Westerners have done to other cultures in response to their simply having different (and usually harmless) sexual customs from our own, religious missionaries definitely take the cake. In a distressingly large number of cases, the Church’s historical encroachment into far-flung corners of the globe has served to level whole societies through its many aggressive campaigns to save “savage” souls from their carnal “sins.”

…Among the most despicable of prudish missionaries was a dogmatic French priest named Honoré Laval, who managed to nearly wipe out the entire Mangareva culture of French Polynesia in the mid-19^th century. When he and his fellow clergymen first set foot onto the Gambier Islands in January, 1834, the free-spirited Mangarevans (whom, Laval assured the bishops in Bordeaux, were ignorant pagans seething with lasciviousness and therefore in desperate need of salvation) numbered at over nine thousand. After a few short decades of his unbridled theocratic rule on the islands, in which he banished anyone who dared to question his sacred cause, it numbered at just a few hundred. During this time, Laval destroyed every last Mangarevan idol and artifact and replaced the ancient temples with cathedrals and convents. The latter he stocked with young native women, whom he saw as being especially vulnerable to the Devil’s lewd temptations. Instead of swimming bare-chested in the azure waters of the archipelago as their ancestors had done since time immemorial, they could now only wander aimlessly along the convent halls while fingering their rosaries, draped in the suffocating habits of old French nuns.  blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/of-cultures-destroyed-by-western-sexual-exploitation-and-violent-religious-prudery/?fbclid=IwAR3kncguhCaw-Bilzmc1A5M2FTGvbqSMJ07z3_CrDdxtoOu2g2h2J6ZQF5s

Tuam babies: Church must address ‘shameful chapter’

The Catholic Church should make reparations for what happened at mother and baby homes in the Republic of Ireland, a minister has said.

The comment was made by Katherine Zappone to Pope Francis during his two-day visit to Ireland.

Nearly 800 children died at a former mother and baby home in Tuam, County Galway, between 1925 and 1961.

Significant quantities of human remains were subsequently found in there, some in a septic tank.

“I hope the Church will make reparation for its part in this shameful chapter,” the Irish Children’s Minister told the Pope.  www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45324302

Head of U.S. Catholic bishops kept 2 priests accused of abuse in active ministry

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo is president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, making him one of the most powerful Catholic officials in the country. He has also been one of the most vocal critics of the church’s handling of its sex abuse scandal.

But this summer, Rev. Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, a priest whom DiNardo had promoted, was arrested for allegedly molesting two children. DiNardo, the archbishop of Galveston-Houston since 2006, has vowed to release by January a list of all the priests in Houston who have been, in the church’s judgment, “credibly accused” of sexually abusing a child.

Now, a CBS News investigation has uncovered a lack of action by DiNardo in handling sex abuse allegations in his own archdiocese.

John LaBonte said Rev. John Keller molested him when he was 16 years old. He said DiNardo has allowed Keller to continue presiding over one of the largest Catholic churches in Houston.

“I shrank. I was like, I’m not here. I left my body. They say there’s the flight and fright. Well, I was frozen,” LaBonte said. www.snapnetwork.org/dinardo_mishandling_abuse_nov18

www.facebook.com/SupportBlackGroupEconomicsNow/videos/2028502327169165/?t=16

Belleville bishop challenged on abuse

Belleville bishop challenged on abuse

“Sexually violent predator” worked in diocese

Few knew of his time in southern IL until recently

Two more accused abusers missing from church site

Catholic officials should hire outside firm to look through its files

This recommendation just made by church’s top abuse lay leader

WHAT

Holding signs and childhood photos at a sidewalk news conference, clergy sex abuse victims and their supporters will disclose, for the first time, that a convicted child molesting cleric who was deemed “sexually violent” worked in Belleville.

They will also call on local Catholic officials to

–update the diocesan website and add names of all three publicly accused clerics who are missing, www.snapnetwork.org/belleville_bishop_challenged_on_abuse_nov18

Genital mutilation ban ruled unconstitutional; judge drops charges against sect

A federal judge Tuesday dismissed female genital mutilation charges against several doctors in the first criminal case of its kind nationwide, ruling the law is unconstitutional.

The opinion by U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman comes two weeks after defense lawyers mounted the first challenge to a 22-year-old genital mutilation law that went unused until April 2017.

That’s when Dr. Jumana Nagarwala of Northville was arrested and accused of heading a conspiracy that lasted 12 years, involved seven other people and led to mutilating the genitalia of nine girls as part of a religious procedure practiced by some members of the Dawoodi Bohra, a Muslim sect from India that has a small community in Metro Detroit.

Friedman delivered a significant, but not fatal, blow to a novel criminal prosecution because the judge left intact conspiracy and obstruction charges that could send Nagarwala and three others to federal prison for decades.   www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2018/11/20/judge-dismisses-key-count-genital-mutilation-case/2066855002/

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

www.facebook.com/beverley.massay.1/videos/724788061230853/?t=9

 

www.facebook.com/sweetmomentsshared/videos/1457268061062860/?t=14

Retired ‘Navy SEAL’ praising Trump on Fox News was a fake

Fox News ran a story on Oct. 8 about a decorated Vietnam War Navy SEAL and glass artist who created an enormous presidential glass seal he hoped to give to President Donald Trump.

On Thursday, 11 days later, the network retracted the story after being told the Trump supporter never served in Vietnam at all, much less earned commendations for his service.

In the segment, John Garafalo said he served in the Vietnam War with the U.S. Navy SEAL team. Fox News reported that he also received two Purple Hearts and about two dozen other medals for his service.

The man’s claimed record turned out to be a fabrication. It was first discovered by former Navy SEALs. Both these SEALs and family members of Garofalo contacted Fox News about the story, according to the Navy Times.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXb7P0S_pjo

www.facebook.com/ClassicFM/videos/1194622154037900/?t=37

 

www.facebook.com/visitsenja/videos/2084168851909533/?t=55

So Long

EARTH: U.S. Climate Report Warns of Damaged Environment and Shrinking Economy

A major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies on Friday presents the starkest warnings to date of the consequences of climate change for the United States, predicting that if significant steps are not taken to rein in global warming, the damage will knock as much as 10 percent off the size of the American economy by century’s end.

www.facebook.com/darronw3/videos/2824463150912664/?t=11

The report, which was mandated by Congress and made public by the White House, is notable not only for the precision of its calculations and bluntness of its conclusions, but also because its findings are directly at odds with President Trump’s agenda of environmental deregulation, which he asserts will spur economic growth.

Mr. Trump has taken aggressive steps to allow more planet-warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plant smokestacks, and has vowed to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, under which nearly every country in the world pledged to cut carbon emissions. Just this week, he mocked the science of climate change because of a cold snap in the Northeast, tweeting, “Whatever happened to Global Warming?”  www.nytimes.com/2018/11/23/climate/us-climate-report.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage