To the Heart of the Beast

“It was the workers in these industries who taught me that there was a systematic conflict between profits and health.… When you start thinking that, when you start to interfere with the forces of production, you’re going to the heart of the beast.” –Tony Mazzocchi, leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International (OCAW), who… Continue reading To the Heart of the Beast

On my return

As the 2012 presidential election geared up, it seems, I lost the stamina to keep a regular political writing habit. With the election of Trump, battle lines have been drawn, and no one can remain silent and not be complicit. I will return to my regular political writing, and do all I can to organize for a better future for all of us.

Prison Profits

“The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws…” -Corrections Corporation of America, in their annual report. Chris Hedges excoriates the company and its… Continue reading Prison Profits

Other consequences, all deleterious, flowed from the militarization of foreign policy. In Afghanistan and the United States, so intimately ensnarled over all these years, the income gap between the rich and everyone else has grown exponentially, in large part because in both countries the rich have made money off war-making, while ordinary citizens have slipped into poverty for lack of jobs and basic services.

-Ann Jones, writing from Afghanistan.

So given this extreme human suffering and repression imposed by the Saudi monarchy in multiple countries, what should the US – the Leader of the Free World and the self-proclaimed Deliverer of Freedom and Democracy – do? To Riedel, the answer is obvious: work even harder, do even more, to strengthen the Saudi regime as well as the neighboring tyrannies in order to crush the “Arab Awakenings” and ensure that democratic revolution cannot succeed in those nations.

-Greenwald skewers another

“There’s just no other word for it. It is a campaign of terror – highly effective terror – regardless of what noble progressive sentiments one wishes to believe reside in the heart of the leader ordering it.”

Glenn Greenwald on Obama’s drone program. A new report highlights the ways it terrorizes the people of Pakistan.

You don’t end war by encouraging a parliament to pass a resolution, or by swapping politicians and governing forms, but by creating a culture that finds blowing innocent men, women and children to bits as abhorrent as pushing an old lady into oncoming traffic. Those in power can’t start wars if they don’t find anybody willing to fight them.

-Charles Davis on social revolution