For the Record

The Goldstone report on Israel's attack on Gaza

If you were really in any doubt about whether Israeli forces have engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians, you can put those doubts to rest.

The full UN site on the fact-finding mission is here.

The summary report is here.

The full report is here.

Time to divest from the Israeli occupation

I recently received an email update from Mazin Qumsiyeh:

It is sometimes really hard to even begin to describe our feelings living under brutal Israeli occupation and noting the indifference, complicity, and hypocrisy of so many people in Israel, in America, in Europe and elsewhere. Every day, the Israeli “system” violates dozens of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Examples just in the past week include imposing a curfew on Jayyus village and terrorizing its population (this after confiscating most of its very rich agricultural lands), kidnapping of over 100 Palestinians in a spat of four days (to add to the 11,000 political prisoners held in Israeli torture cells), denial of right of movement, continued siege on Gaza strip, denial of rights of education, more land confiscation, pillaging a big portion of the humanitarian aid and much more.  If I was to write details of these violations, many readers would stop reading very quickly.  Visitors to this area think that Israel is doing these things “to defend itself” and sometimes may go overboard in “security measures.” Security measure that puts millions under a siege.  This maddening description is like saying the Apartheid White South Africa or Nazi Germany in occupied Poland were acting in self defense and sometimes they went a bit too far. Occupiers and colonizers do not have the right of self defense against the resistance of people who they occupy and colonize.

Indeed.  Forty-two years on, just what does Israel expect?  And how is Palestinian resistance (such as it is) to the illegal and brutal occupation supposed to justify yet more illegal and brutal actions? 

For the sake of both Israelis and Palestinians, the occupation must end.  I agree with Naomi Klein that

It's time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.

On Feb 7, Hampshire College became the first U.S. institution of higher learning to pledge to divest from companies based on their activities in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. You can write to President Hextor in support of this action here.

UPDATE: Here's a film, 'Closed Zone', by Israeli Yoni Goodman, that brings certain effects of the Gaza blockade to animated life.

The true measure of power

The true measure of power is how much you can get away with, which makes the gangsters running the U.S. effectively all-powerful.

Shut out

CNN warehoused a stock of pink pixels to mark GOP pickups on these three pages. They haven't needed them yet -- but their logistics team was on fully taxed in trying to keep the streams of baby blue flowing.

This marks what, as Bill Montgomery notes, may turn out to be an extremely rare electoral outcome: while not every race in the midterm has been decided yet, it seems that no Democratic-held Senate or House seat or governorship was picked up by a Republican -- apparently such a shut out has never happened before.

Pre-election weekend linky post

• A cheering reflection on the cultural underpinnings of the left blogosphere political movement. Especially cheering when read as a sort of "happy face" take on the value of bricolage in response to Thomas Frank's depressing doctrine of the context of cool. Also most excellently proceeding from the core Lennon-ist exhortation to "try something new".
• Vids: good natured people and one fucking psycho. (Though I note that Big Time manifests a bit of stung-ness in response to a huge dis from his long time bud Ken Adelman.)
• Ramsey Clark, former USAG and Saddam's lawyer, worries about "victor's justice".
• There's a good deal to read on the incredibly hilarious "101st fighting keyboarders fuckup" reported by the Times over the weekend; most cheering is that Bush considered it a pet project and even engaged in a bit of sympathetic interpretative prediction of the reaction of the sweet cherries that the 101st would pluck from his document treasure trove: "Bush extended his arms in exasperation and worried aloud that people who see the documents in 10 years will wonder why they weren't released sooner. "If I knew then what I know now," Bush said in the voice of a war skeptic, "I would have been more supportive of the war." " Note that this anecdote is from last March's Weekly Standard! [Backstory; more: apparently Laurie Mylroie and some other crazies, worried about the evaporating WMD justification for the Iraq invastion, enlisted PowerLine's moronic "Big Trunk" Mirengoff and others in pressuring a pair of congressmen to pressure Bush to pressure Bush's third CIA boss, Negroponte, to release 2 million pages of captured Iraqi docs on line. Or something like that. The goal was for an "army of Davids" -- in InstaIgnorance's asinine phrase -- to open-source translate them out of Arabic to provide the retrospective propaganda that would induce the war critics to shut up. Because we know how the right wing blogosphere is so knowledgeable about other cultures and so public spirited. For months, the IAEA was warning the Cheney Admin to take the docs down since they tell you in detail in Arabic how to build a nuke, info that the IAEA suppressed from the public until last March. Needless to say, they paid no attn until the NYT broke the story over the weekend. The national security party at work. I've been rotflmao all weekend!]
• A very cool formula to predict the outcome of a given congressional race without polls.
• The Clinton folk wargamed an Iraq takeover in 1999 and predicted that even with 400K troops, the likely outcome would be chaos. Rummy's New Model Army tried to do it with a third of that. Result? Chaos! (Incidentally, I've never seen a decent explanation of just why Rummy digs the light military so much. Maybe his thought is just as straightforward as this: with the same manpower a light military can fuck up a lot more places than a heavy military.)
   

Violent suppression in Oaxaca

Events in Oaxaca have taken a turn for the worse (see here and here).  A brief summary:

In a state in Mexico with little money, and not much of that going to public services, teachers hold their annual strike for better wages and against the imposition of fees on children who go to school.

The state government is less tractable this year, and has police attack the teacher's encampment on the zocalo in Oaxaca.  The teachers, without guns, repel this attack.

A huge, loose network of popular groups pledge solidarity with the teachers, and the central demand of the movement - a demand supported by the majority of people in the state - becomes the resignation or removal of the corrupt governor.

At the same time, they begin setting up new forms of self-government, many directly based on or inspired by indigenous forms of local self-government, and creating a democratic coalition called the APPO, to push for broad changes in state and local government to begin respecting, and meeting the needs, of the population, which is majority indigenous and where many have long been excluded from exercising power and left in poverty.

The state government, while ceasing to function in almost all normal respects, wages a low-intensity dirty war against the rebellious population through police officers in plain clothes and, well, thugs. They kill at least thirteen people over the course of the half-year since the people's uprising began, and the government ceased to function (while the governor who precipitated the rebellion refuses to leave).  Meanwhile, the protesters, who have put up barricades in the city of Oaxaca to fend off these attacks, kill no one.

A central part of the struggle, from the start, is control of and access to information. The police destroyed the teacher's small mobile radio station in the initial attack, and student allies soon began broadcasting from a public university.  Supporters of the movement took over a number of government and commercial radio stations, and while state and private security forces have struck back and knocked some stations off the air, the movement is giving voice to a people long excluded from public conversation.

The thirteenth person that the ruling PRI-affiliated attackers kill is an independent, activist journalist from the United States, Brad Will of Indymedia.  Days later, the Mexican federal government sends militarized police into the state.  They do not go after the murderers, but instead use tanks and force to try to dislodge the nonviolent social movements from the city of Oaxaca.  At least one boy is killed by a federal police tear-gas canister.

This disaster has been going on for months, but only recently have a couple of reports shown up in the U.S. media (no doubt because the violent invasion has caused Mexican stocks and the peso to drop); as per usual the reporting (see this article by Mark Stevenson) is misleading in the extreme.  You know the routine by now.  First, follow the "he said she said" blueprint---in particular, for God's sake, don't explicitly contrast the number (in the dozens) of (relatively) wealthy elite bemoaning the lack of tourist income with the number (in the thousands) of protesters willing to put their lives on the line today for a decent and unharrassed life in the future.  Second, leave out crucial information---in particular, don't say who was responsible for the killing of Brad Will, which killing is being cited as grounds for "stopping the violence" by sending in the riot troops.  Third, last but not least, paint the protesters (appropriate subtext intact, of course) as crazed wackos, silly kids, and Dark Others on a tear:

The protests began as a teachers strike but quickly spiraled into chaos as anarchists, students and Indian groups seized the plaza and barricaded streets to demand Ruiz's ouster.

This video of the invasion tells a more accurate story.  Cast your eye upon the row upon row of Darth Vaderian riot police, inexorably marching down upon the unarmed and unresisting protestors, beating their shields with their clubs in unison and backed up by a row of tank-like vehicles each as big as a two-story house.  We've seen those outfits before, of course, in Palestine, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and elsewhere where those in power have realized that when metal meets flesh, the laws of physics are typically on their side.

Among the more pathetic scenes are women pleading with the riot police ("No puedes massacre a su jente!"---"You can't massacre your people!").  These pleadings seemed to have little impact, perhaps because, following recent global trend, the "police" might well be mercenaries who could care less about the people they are violently oppressing.  Still, for the moment, the thugs at least are human. Imagine what protest will be like when their jobs get outsourced---in five, ten years?---to robots of war.

Another stolen election?

U.S.ers, two stolen presidential elections down, wring their hands as the presumptive thieves rain terror upon the world, with no good left behind.  Meanwhile, in Mexico the possible theft of a presidential election (the validity of which will be ruled on Sept. 6)  is not being taken sitting down.

Besides the massive (though, unsurprisingly, thwarted) public protests, on Friday leftist legislators forced sitting president Vincente Fox to abandon his state of the union address, breaking a tradition of 180 years.

Other ways in which Mexico seems better equipped than the U.S. to deal with election fraud are discussed here.

March for Peace, Justice, and Democracy in NYC this Saturday

United for Peace and Justice is organizing what looks to be a great opportunity to demonstrate this Saturday, April 29.  The march will start at noon in Manhattan, just north of Union Square, proceed south along Broadway to Foley Square, and end with a Peace and Justice Festival; logistical details are here.

Last week, Bill Camarada posted a call for us all to commit ourselves to participating in massive anti-war demonstrations for the foreseeable future that will---we must hope against hope---make some difference to the increasingly insane course of events:

I never thought I’d say this, but the era of the political demonstration is back.

The immigrants’ rallies are a harbinger. But we now need to prepare for something far bigger.

It is now clear beyond a doubt that George Bush plans to attack Iran, almost certainly before Election Day, and quite likely with tactical nuclear weapons.  [...]

As this manufactured crisis approaches, we need to get out into the streets for the largest peaceful anti-war demonstrations in American history. We will need to get far out in front of the politicians. Given the horror of what’s in store, we have no choice.

And we can do it. The largest anti-Vietnam war rallies brought together roughly half a million people. We can run rallies all over the country, and bring together 20,000,000 people to stop this insanity. [...]

This fall’s marches need to be impeccable. Learn the lessons the immigrants have taught us: bring your American flags. We are Americans. We speak for true patriotism. And we don’t want America, our country, in our generation, to be remembered as the mass murderers who unleashed a horrifying new age of nuclear warfare.

UPDATE: OTHER DEMONSTRATIONS.  There will be a demonstration this Saturday at Rice University in HOUSTON calling for the U.S. to put more resources into stopping the kidnapping and brutalization of Ugandan children at the hands of the Lord Resistance Army.  And demonstrations are being planned this Sunday in WASHINGTON D.C. and elsewhere across the nation protesting the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Hey professor, do you know what your retirement savings are up to?

I bet you didn't know that TIAA-CREF donates 86% of its political cash to the GOP!

I'm sorry, but this is unacceptable. Why is the pension home for scholars in bed with the fucking anti-science party, which is constantly trying to undermine our autonomy using assholes like David Horowitz?

Furious? Call and complain: 1 800 842 2776.

To find a "bluer" home for your pension, start here.

[What's going on here? Answer: in 2002, one Herbert M. Allison took over as chairman, president, and CEO. (Between then and 2004, $22 million of our retirement savings went into Allison's pockets. That's roughly 2000 years worth of savings for your typical assistant professor! The top five paid bosses, including Allison, skimmed on the order of $60 million.) Allison had been at Merrill Lynch up to '99 (ML donated 64% of its political dough to the GOP in 2004). Between these jobs, he was National Finance Chairman to the John McCain campaign.]

  

How many cops

does it take to "control" a 1000-person peace parade?  Looks like they're ready for May Day in Berlin.