That is a follow up to this post (https://vultcult.blogspot.com/2025/03/oh-look-us-crapitalism-threatening.html).
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/04/02/exxon-essequibo-and-imperialism/
https://liberationnews.org/exxon-essequibo-and-imperialism/
Great deep-dive into the historical backstory and context of what's driving events today.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/03/30/rubio-threatens-venezuela-with-military-action/
What is it all about? Gee, can you guess from the below?
Last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Guyana to attend the military exercises of the US Navy. During his trip, Rubio, an anti-communist hawk, spoke about the possibility of intervening militarily in the dispute between Venezuela and Guyana over the Essequibo, a border area between both nations which has an extension of 159,542 km2. Since 1962, Venezuela has claimed the west coast of the Essequibo River as its own.
Rubio, in a threatening tone, said in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, that “If [Venezuela] were to attack Guyana or ExxonMobil or something like that, it would be a very bad day, a very bad week, for them, and it would not end well”. The Secretary of State made these statements about the fact that recently, a Venezuelan Coast Guard ship expelled a few support vessels of the ExxonMobil company, which has developed economic operations in Guyana, producing up to 250,000 barrels of oil per day.
In so many ways they are a resilient people - a way forward to how to handle adversity,
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/03/why-israels-plans-to-forcibly-depopulate-gaza-wont-work/
What Israel and its sponsors still can’t accept is that the Palestinian struggle is not a security matter, but a political issue. Palestinians fight for their rights, and as long as their rights aren’t achieved, they will continue fighting.
Any mega-projects to change geography, demographics, or the cosmos itself, without a political solution that includes the basic rights of an entire people, will fail.
He dared speak about ... reality.
US hostility began to escalate after South Africa, like much of the Global South, maintained a non-aligned posture on the war in Ukraine. This intensified after South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January 2024, amid its US-funded genocide in Gaza.
https://blackagendareport.com/lecture-humanist-view-toni-morrison-1975
I've only been through about half of it, but some great insights to be learned. A choice section -
So it would seem that to continue to see a race of people, any race of people, as one single personality, is an ignorance of gothic proportions. An ignorance so vast, so public, a perception so blind and so blunted, imagination so bleak that no nuance, no subtlety, no difference among them can be ascertained. Which may explain in part why in 1975, we are left with pretty much the same mental equipment we had in 1775. The equipment that hadn’t the curiosity to record the names of human beings in a ship’s manifest hasn’t the curiosity to examine the medieval minds of scientific racists, theologic racists, historical racists, literary racists.
No real surprises in the article, but what really impresses me is how the Zionist commenters and their lies and propaganda are called out.
Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is the inevitable denouement of its settler colonial project and apartheid state. The seizure of all of historic Palestine — with the West Bank soon, I expect, to be annexed by Israel — and displacement of all Palestinians has always been the Zionist goal.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/23/chris-hedges-the-last-chapter-of-the-genocide/
That is, childbirth (i.e. labor) and capitalism.
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/03/21/childbirth-under-capitalism/
Really powerful.
... that is this, I think about the following.
First some background.
In coming to know that a lot of colleagues have (or will have) lost their jobs, in some cases it involves some people whom one doesn't respect or like. In this regard, it can be very easy to fall into the trap of somehow reveling in the hateful glee at watching them suffer or squirm or be in a bad spot.
Yes, it's a very ugly thing to feel and have inside. Hence the point of this post.
I remind myself that the decisions taken by my respective employer on whose jobs to eliminate and whose to transition are a matter of role and circumstance.
That is, those that were behind the choices and decisions did so based on 1) whether the role is still needed going forward, and if so 2) can it be transitioned to a service provider.
And let's be clear - this isn't about cost or profit or anything; other than a mask/hide a long set of bad or poor business decisions from the company's owners, to avoid accountability.
Once this is understood, this means that in my case - my job only survived because it was deemed necessary to continue, and only then because it's been determined it cannot be transitioned to a service provider - at this time.
But tomorrow? Next month? Next fiscal quarter? Next fiscal year? Next calendar year? Three years? Five years? And so on ...
... who really knows.
So in this regard, the same criteria that's been used to eliminate colleagues that I respected, has also been used to eliminate those who I don't. In other words, what I think or feel or know or believe makes no difference.
Today and tomorrow I have survived. But down the road, that can also be me as well.
