That's about the only form of justice his many war crime victims (survivors and otherwise) will get.
It's a grim reminder these kinds of individuals getting into spheres of power and do all sorts of terrible things - is by design in the US capitalist system.
This system is designed for psychopaths - who're willing to do their bidding - to flourish, and even be honored.
But to the asshole who kicked it (one can only hope he finally choked on his own bullshit) - here's a nice neat summary for a war criminal -
If Biden wants Black votes, he needs to act like it and respond to
Black people’s demands. Yes he predictably lost control of the House in
the 2022 midterm elections, but he didn’t do very much when he had a
congressional majority. What happened to the Voting Rights Act? Congress
could have reaffirmed its original purpose and revived its enforcement
capabilities with new legislation but they didn’t. They prefer to point
fingers at the conservative controlled Supreme Court rather than lift a
finger to do what they claim to want.
High profile Black media personalities have their positions because
they will not advocate for Black people or their politics. Their job is
to provide cover for the people who at best don’t want to hear from
Black people or at worst actively work against them. They are on the
television screen and have bylines in the right newspapers precisely
because they have agreed to disappear Black people.
Be prepared for more bamboozlement under the guise of journalism.
Understand that Black politics will not be part of any discussion.
Making it so would create a problem for people whose goal is to win
office while also excluding the people whose votes they need. Media are
an important part of sham democracy. No one should expect anything more
than, “But Trump!” between now and November 2024.
The world faces twin crises of climate breakdown
and runaway inequality. The richest people, corporations and countries
are destroying the world with their huge carbon emissions. Meanwhile,
people living in poverty, those experiencing marginalization, and
countries in the Global South are those impacted the hardest. Women and
girls, Indigenous Peoples, people living in poverty and other groups
experiencing discrimination are particularly at a disadvantage. The
consequences of climate breakdown are felt in all parts of the world and
by most people, yet only the richest people and countries have the
wealth, power and influence to protect themselves. With that power comes
huge responsibility.
If no action is taken, the richest will continue to burn through the
carbon we have left to use while keeping the global temperature below
the safe limit of 1.5°C, destroying any chance of ending poverty and
ensuring equality. The world needs an equal transformation. Only a
radical reduction in inequality, transformative climate action and
fundamentally shifting our economic goals as a society can save our
planet while ensuring wellbeing for all.
It
just needs one state to invoke the Genocide Convention and change the
narrative and the international dynamic. That will only happen through
the power of the people in pressing the idea on their governments.
Climate Central, an organization that describes itself as “an
independent group of scientists and communicators who research and
report the facts about our changing climate and how it affects people’s
lives,” released a report this week examining
average temperatures from around the world, finding that in no other
point in at least 125,000 years has there been a warmer 12-month period.
Ninety-nine percent of humanity was exposed to above-average
temperatures in the period between November 2022 and October 2023, the
report found, with around 5.7 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion
individuals being exposed to at least 30 days of higher-than-normal
temperatures that were “made at least three times more likely by the
influence of climate change,” the organization said.
Here are the ten dumbest things we’re being asked to believe about Israel’s war on Gaza, in no particular order:
1. That Israel had no idea what Hamas was up to prior to
October 7, but ever since October 7 has known about every hospital,
mosque, school, refugee camp and water tower that Hamas is hiding in.
2. That the blame for all of the deaths caused by Israeli weapons launched by Israel rests solely on Hamas.
3. That Hamas is using “human shields” — meaning Hamas bases
are hidden amidst civilian populations — yet Israel is managing to kill
thousands of civilians without doing any meaningful damage to Hamas.
4. That it would be perfectly fine to murder children by the thousands even if they were
being used as “human shields” — as though resolving a hostage situation
by mowing down thousands of child hostages would be regarded as
reasonable and acceptable by the public if it happened in our own
country.
5. That it is only by pure coincidence that Israel bombing
“Hamas targets” in civilian infrastructure and residential buildings
just so happens to look exactly the same as what you’d expect to see if
Israel was simply bombing civilian infrastructure and residential
buildings and lying about its reasons for doing so.
7. That this bombing campaign has anything to do with freeing Israeli hostages — as though the bombing campaign itself has not killed dozens of hostages, and as though anyone believes Israel would stop bombing Gaza after the hostages are returned.
8. That the only reason anyone could possibly oppose the
detonation of thousands of bombs on an open air prison full of children
would be if they had very strong and hateful opinions toward the members
of the religion of Judaism.
9. That Hamas attacked Israel entirely out of the blue and completely unprovoked, solely because they are evil and hate Jews.
OCHA reports that, since Oct. 7, “In nearly half of these incidents, Israeli forces were either accompanying or actively supporting the attackers.” The settlers have long been an extrajudicial arm of the Israeli regime, doing what the government does not want to take official responsibility for. In the current ultra-right government, however, this relationship of open. The minister in charge of settlement policy is Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the far-right Religious Zionist party who is himself a settler extremist. After settlers attacked the Palestinian town of Huwara in February, Smotrich said, “I think that Huwara needs to be erased.”
On Oct. 10,the ultra-nationalist Zionist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir distributed 10,000 U.S.-supplied assault rifles, helmets and body armer for “civilian security teams” to be used by settlers against Palestinians not only in the West Bank, but also to attack and displace Palestinians in mixed Jewish-Palestinian cities within the Israeli green line.
Palestinians on lockdown while settlers run riot
Since last month, Israeli forces have put Palestinians under a lockdown while allowing settlers to travel freely in the West Bank to hunt them down. Palestinians require Israeli permits to travel and access their own lands, and are imprisoned by the Israeli separation barrier, which the world knows as the apartheid wall.
Palestinians are also blocked from accessing the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem, violating their religious rights to attend the third most important shrine in Islam. The IDF is attacking and worshipers who are praying in the streets, having been denied access to the mosque.
Settlers and soldiers even detained for 6 hours and tortured Palestinian Authority officials visiting the area.
Israeli forces and settlers have been committing “necroviolence.’ The regime prevents proper burial rites for Palestinian martyrs by withholding bodies, while settlers actively seek out and attack funeral processions. Due to the movement restriction, local mosques are being used to hold bodies of Palestinians killed in areas in the West Bank.
See, psychopaths know no bounds. They partner with other psychopaths to do psychopathic things - like serial-killing and committing war crimes.
Earnestness - in that that as technology evolves, there'll always be those in positions of power within the US capitalist system that will use it to exploit and steal from those who create.
Hope - in that my best defenses to the above, is 1) recognizing and understanding the value in the words and music I create, and 2) never letting any entity attempt to see it as less than that. By this, I mean not allowing myself to be reduced (as many of the corporate mediums would like) to a 'content provider'.
Our study showed that teachers wrote more when describing behavior
incidents of Black students compared with white students. They also used
more negative emotions, words like “anger,” “hurt” and “disrespectful,”
and used more verbs, such as “scraped,” “hit” and “spanked.” We found
the opposite was true for Asian and Hispanic students compared with
white students.
Further, we found that teachers used more words, negative emotions,
verbs and impersonal pronouns when describing incidents for boys
compared with girls.
And to think, I grew up thinking this person was a legitimate Cree native born in Saskatchewan.
Indeed - I remember her Sesame Street appearances.
Normally I would not link to something from the CBC (I grew up on them, but consider them these days as corporate propaganda), but I've always respected the program 'The Fifth Estate' -
The part that really bothers me isn't just the personal or professional deception - that's pretty awful.
What I find really disturbing is that the media and entertainment businesses that obviously knew about this long ago, and never bothered to correct this because she made money for them.
And I don't buy the idea that she never knew her own background -
Even Sainte-Marie herself confirmed that she was born in the United States.
In March 1982, she signed a marriage certificate making her union
with Hollywood composer Jack Nitzsche official. On the certificate,
obtained from the County of Los Angeles, Sainte-Marie certified that she
was born on Feb. 20, 1941, in Massachusetts to Albert and Winifred St.
Marie.
The ruling class (or 1%, or the rich, or elites, or MIC, or whatever term one would like to describe that small group of people who control the vast majority of wealth and power) of the US capitalist system do not see the United States as a country. They see it as just another market to exploit, land to plunder, wealth to steal from the majority, resources to extract and consume, etc.; like any other that's a part of its empire.
And they themselves are trying to destroy this country under the assumption that they can reform and reorganize it into a more fascist one where the corporations they control and the government are fused together. What they fail to understand is that they are following the same path as how previous empires collapse and die.
Or to put it a different way -
Capitalism needs the illusion of democracy to keep the majority working class under control and obedient to the ruling class.
Fascism gets rid of this illusion altogether for same goals as above, because they don't think it'll be needed.
In either case, it'll be game over for us here in the US, as well as the rest of the world. The US capitalist ruling class is unable respond to the very existential problem its created - climate change. The system of capitalism is only capable of doing nothing more than virtue signal about climate change. Even if the empire doesn't crumble completely, I highly doubt the successor system of fascism will do any better; because it will be more hyper-focused on exploiting the majority and the land even more that it already has.
Our only hope as a species - is for the working majorities around the world in each country to unite together in a broad movement. And mass against the status quo systems of governments:
- to create a new system in a more humane and democratic format
- to stop the endless consumption and destruction of the planet.
Only when the lands and resources are under democratic control, can we as humans really take steps to stop the destruction of the planet, and reorganize governments to really serve the needs of its people, over the rich and powerful.
The challenge is two-fold:
1) Getting the majority of people around the world to recognize that - by in large - it's their systems of governments (and the ruling class that controls them) that are the causes of the suffering and destruction of their lives and their futures.
2) That only a more socialist and democratic form of government - one that the people can truly channel to address issues like climate change - is the way forward.
