I don't know the level of this type of indoctrination in Israel but knowing what I do I think so many Israeli's must be among the most militarized and bigoted/racist people. I have had discussions with many Jews who are liberal on almost all aspects of life except when it comes to Israel. At one level or another they justify the theft of Palestinian land and, as any conqueror must, demonize them and Arabs in general. Just the fact that the guy with the mic can get responses from these children like this and act like it's normal; it's child abuse. It made me thing too of all the children in the war torn regional wars from the Congo to Afghanistan and Iraq etc. I know some people will say that the Arabs teach their children to hate as well, to hate Americans perhaps, sometimes people's anger comes out in distorted ways. This may be so, although Zionism is the prime issue. But in any conflict there is an aggressor and a victim, the Palestinians are not the aggressors here, the Zionists are.
Saturday, 15 December 2012
In the aftermath of the Connecticut massacre and the tearful Obama revealing in the US mass media how much he cares about human life, lets not forget what happened recently in Bangladesh, something that has happened repeatedly in these places. Workers, many of them women and children have struck for better conditions in these places and have also been shot for doing so by forces allied to the US and the global corporations. The heads of US corpoirations and their representatives in the US Congress and the Pentagon, knew about the conditions that allowed this to happen, workers locked in unsafe factories unable to escape a fire. The author of the piece below is Adrian Salbuchi, an Argentinian writer. He wrote this piece for Russia Today. We reprint this for our readers' interest not as an endorsement for Mr. Salbuchi or his political views.
'Human price' in the capitalist equation (Op-Ed)
Published: 15 December, 2012, 21:07
The human price of a recent fire at a Bangladeshi factory was over a hundred lives, reminding the world that for “western free-market democracy,” the words “human price” have another, very direct meaning.
On November 24, a horrific flash fire broke out in a 9-floor sweatshop in Dakha, Bangladesh, belonging to Tazreen Fashions Ltd., killing 117 and injuring 200 of its 1600 workers manufacturing garments for prestigious global brands like Wal-Mart, C&A, Sears and others. This tragedy shows yet again just how much multinational companies profit from the Third World’s quasi-slave labor exploitation system, marked by a total disdain for human life, dignity and justice.
But Tazreen was just the first link in the global supply chain delivering clothes “Made in Bangladesh” to stores in Europe and the US. Clearly, the factory was not a safe place to work and its fire safety readiness was appalling. The fire broke out in mounds of highly flammable yarn and fabric illegally stored on the ground floor near electrical generators.
Once the fire was put out, capitalist profit greed carried on in its “business-as-usual” mode. You see, Bangladesh has grown to become the world’s second largest apparel exporter after China, which is no longer the cheapest place to manufacture. Many of the Tazreen factory’s victims were rural young women earning as little as $ 45 a month in what has become a 19 billion dollar export industry for the impoverished country. Bangladesh dubiously ranks as global leader in paying its garment workers the very lowest wages in the world.
In an article published on December 7, The New York Times newspaper reported that the dead workers show a “glaring disconnect among global clothing brands, the monitoring system used to protect workers and the factories actually filling the orders. After the fire, Wal-Mart, Sears and other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.”
“We didn’t know!”, is certainly a line that rings a bell…
Bangladeshi fire-men extinguish a fire in the nine-storey Tazreen Fashion plant in Savar, about 30 kilometres north of Dhaka on November 25, 2012.(AFP Photo / Stringer)
The truth is that the long chain running from the sweatshops of Dahka to C&A and Sears outlet stores in the US and European cities has many, many links; more than just a supply-chain, it often looks like a Gordian Knot.
The many middle-men, contractors, sub-contractors, distributors, suppliers, outsourcers and sub-outsourcers serve many purposes. Some are financial, such as using dirt cheap slave labour countries. Others are legal, to ensure that reasonable safety buffers are always in place between C&A’s and Wal-Mart’s top-brass and corporate legal liability at one end of that chain, and some 19 year old working woman whose life was just snuffed out in a blaze in cheery Bangladesh, at the other end.
If anybody will finally be made “responsible”, it’ll surely be some scapegoat middle-man five, maybe ten, links down the supply-and-demand chain, as far away from C&A’s and Wal-Mart’s and Sears’ sensitivities as possible.
The New York Times adds, “Big brands demand that factories be inspected by accredited auditing firms so that the brands can control quality… Tazreen Fashions was one of many clothing factories that exist on the margins of this system. Factory bosses had been faulted for violations during inspections conducted on behalf of Wal-Mart… Yet Tazreen Fashions received orders anyway, slipping through the gaps in the system by delivering the low costs and quick turnarounds that buyers and consumers demand. C&A, the European retailer, has confirmed ordering 220,000 sweaters from the factory. But much of the factory’s business came through opaque networks of subcontracts with suppliers or local buying houses.”
They also quote Richard M. Locke, deputy dean of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management saying, “We as consumers like to be able to buy ever-greater quantities of ever-cheaper goods, every year… Somebody is bearing the cost of it, and we don’t want to know about it. The people bearing the cost were in this fire.” Not great comfort for the dead workers’ families, I suppose… But it is a revealing definition that exploitation, not democracy; that greed, not human rights is what really drives “Western free-market democracy”.
A Bangladeshi woman mourns as she holds the body of a relative who died in a fire in the nine-storey Tazreen Fashion plant in Savar, about 30 kilometres north of Dhaka on November 25, 2012.(AFP Photo / Stringer)
The Human Price
It’s when catastrophes like these occur that the masks of Greed Capitalism fall and its multiple ugly Medusa-like heads stare threateningly at the whole world. The same thing happened in 1984 with the chemical mass poisoning by Union Carbide’s Bhopal plant in India.Naturally, the global media help with the Corporate Over-world’s damage control with the usual “What a tragedy!”, “Oh, the humanity!”, and “Why didn’t anybody prevent this?” type commentary for the requisite number of days, shedding an alligator’s tear or two. However, they know – we all know – what the truth really is.
Because these dreadful events happen in far-off lands like Bangladesh and India, and since inhuman sweatshop conditions are the norm in “underdeveloped markets” like Mexico, Africa, India and South East Asia, it doesn’t really mean much to the West. Sure, the workers who are its victims have little or no legal or social security protection, pension funds, workers compensation insurance, health benefits or employer liability insurance protecting them. But then again, they are swarthy folk with impossible to pronounce names living in those ghastly lands.
They’re all on their own, because they are “owned” by a Behemoth “labour market” that calls the shots, all in the name of “supply-and-demand.” That same market awards a C&A CEO or Goldman Sachs trader or Wal-Mart shareholder tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars in dividends, bonuses and salaries at the top end of the chain, then gets away with paying hundreds of millions of super-poor workers $45, maybe $50 a month as “salary”.
Interestingly, the Times’ article carried as a subtitle, “The Human Price” which, more than they can imagine, can actually help put things in their proper perspective.
Perhaps the western media should start quoting “The Human Price” in nitty-gritty real numbers, just as they quote the New York, London and Frankfurt stock exchanges, or the cost of a barrel of Brent oil, or gold and silver prices. Conceptually, the closest applicable metric to measure “The Human Price” are the Foreign Exchange markets quoting national currencies.
So here’s an idea: just as every day CNN, Bloomberg, Fox, BBC and all the western global mainstream media hammer into our brains how many Euros, Yens, Mexican Pesos or Indian Pounds it takes to buy One US Dollar and vice versa, wouldn’t it help promote a more honest view of “capitalist democracy” if they began quoting the ”exchange rates” in the “Human Market”?
Just how much are the citizens of different countries and regions really worth from the viewpoint of Greed Capitalism’s Weltanschauung – its world view, so to speak?
This picture taken on 24 November, 2012 shows Bangladeshi people and firefighters trying to extinguish a fire in a garment factory in Savar, 30 kilometres north of Dhaka. The death toll from a fire at a Bangladeshi factory soared to at least 121 as rescue workers recovered 112 bodies on November 25, the national fire chief told AFP.(AFP Photo / Palash Khan)
For instance, we all know quite well that “a US Citizen” has one of the very highest values of all of the world’s citizens; that the United States stands ever ready to invade entire countries “to protect American citizens.” British, European Union and Israeli citizens are also “HVH’s” (High Value Humans).
Now, let’s be honest. Most Western countries’ constitutions poetically state that “all men are created equal”, and have certain “inalienable rights”, etc., etc., which may look nice on paper… but when reality hits, things look mighty different!
So, let’s begin with the Value of ‘One US Citizen’ and then work our way through the values of citizens of our planet’s one hundred and ninety odd nations, to see what “rates of exchange” we get.
Let’s try out a few:
One US Citizen = 10 Germans (Yep! Germany lost the War);
One US Citizen = 100 Egyptians; or 1,000 Mexicans; or 10,000 Iraqis, or God only knows how many Libyans, Syrians or Iranians (hundreds of thousands, surely!)
Such a rating scale could go up or down depending on how angry the White House, Congress and AIPAC are on a particular day.
Then there would be: One Israeli Citizen or “One US-Israeli Dual Nationality Bi-Citizen” would probably be worth 10 or more US Citizens.
On “The Human Price” scale, Israeli’s are tops! They are Gold; Platinum, even.
Israelis have the absolutely highest value of them all. Maybe that’s because of “supply-and-demand”; I mean there are less than 7 million Israelis out of a total global population of 7 billion; that’s 0.01per cent of mankind!
In numbers they are so, so very scarce that one would expect to never ever even hear about Israel and the Israelis, and yet…Sorry, Americans: you guys are definitely NOT tops…
One Israeli = 10 Americans at least…
The point is that under US/UK/Israeli “Corporate democracy”, “all men are equal” but – as George Orwell aptly observed in “Animal Farm” – “some men are much more equal than others…”.
So try asking C&A, Wal-Mart, Sears how much a Bangladeshi rural young woman working 12-hour-a-day-7-days-a-week shifts to meet those huge garment orders is worth. The obvious reply will be: 45 bucks a month, take it or leave it! Why, that’s about 1% of what she’d be “worth” if she were working in New York, Chicago or London!
One final rather sobering thought just went through my mind: can any of you RT readers imagine what the “Rate of Exchange” would be between One Israeli Citizen and One Palestinian “Non-Member, Observer Non-State” Living Entity? Oh dear, my calculator just went dead…!
Adrian Salbuchi for RT
This is from a long article on the Petraus affair by James Petras Probably too long for here. So we are putting on this devastating conclusion. The full text can be found here
The economic elites are repeatedly involved in massive swindles of retail investors, mortgage holders and each other. Multi-national corporations and the fabulously wealthy engage in capital flight, fattening their overseas accounts. The Executive himself (the ever-smiling President Obama) sends clandestine death squads and mercenary-terrorists to assassinate adversaries in an effort to compensate for his incapacity to defend the empire with diplomacy or traditional military ground forces or to prop-up new client-states. Cronyism is rife: there is a revolving door between Wall Street and US Treasury and Pentagon officials. Public apathy and cynicism is rife; nearly 50% of the electorate doesn’t even vote in Presidential elections and, among those who do vote, over 80% don’t expect their elected officials to honor their promises.
Aggressive civilian militarists have gained control of key posts and are increasingly free of any constitutional constraints. Meanwhile the costs of military failures and burgeoning spy, security and military budgets soar while the fiscal and trade deficit grows. Faction fights among rival imperial cliques intensify; purges, blackmail, sex scandals and immorality in high places have become the norm. Democratic discourses are hollowed out: democratic state ideology has lost credibility. No sensible American believes in it anymore. Is there a broom large enough to clean this filthy Augean stable? Will a ‘collective Hercules’ emerge from all this intrigue and corruption with the strength of character and commitment to lead the revolutionary charge? Surely the sell-out and crude humiliation of American military officials on behalf of the ‘chicken-hawk’ civilian militarists and their foreign interests should make many an officer re-think his own career, loyalty and commitment to the Constitution.
Elite Intrigues: It’s Not About Sex, Stupid!
"The real precipitating factor for this ugly ‘fight at the top’ is the crumbling of the US empire and how to deal with its new challenges. Signs of decay are everywhere: Military immorality is rampant; the be-medaled generals sodomize their subordinates and amass wealth via pillage of the public treasury and military contracts; politicians are bought and sold by millionaire financial donors, including agents of foreign powers, and foreign interests determine critical US foreign policy. The disrepute of the US Congress is almost universal – over 87% of US citizen condemn ‘the House and Senate’ as harmful to public welfare, servants of their own self-enrichment and slaves of corruption.The economic elites are repeatedly involved in massive swindles of retail investors, mortgage holders and each other. Multi-national corporations and the fabulously wealthy engage in capital flight, fattening their overseas accounts. The Executive himself (the ever-smiling President Obama) sends clandestine death squads and mercenary-terrorists to assassinate adversaries in an effort to compensate for his incapacity to defend the empire with diplomacy or traditional military ground forces or to prop-up new client-states. Cronyism is rife: there is a revolving door between Wall Street and US Treasury and Pentagon officials. Public apathy and cynicism is rife; nearly 50% of the electorate doesn’t even vote in Presidential elections and, among those who do vote, over 80% don’t expect their elected officials to honor their promises.
Aggressive civilian militarists have gained control of key posts and are increasingly free of any constitutional constraints. Meanwhile the costs of military failures and burgeoning spy, security and military budgets soar while the fiscal and trade deficit grows. Faction fights among rival imperial cliques intensify; purges, blackmail, sex scandals and immorality in high places have become the norm. Democratic discourses are hollowed out: democratic state ideology has lost credibility. No sensible American believes in it anymore. Is there a broom large enough to clean this filthy Augean stable? Will a ‘collective Hercules’ emerge from all this intrigue and corruption with the strength of character and commitment to lead the revolutionary charge? Surely the sell-out and crude humiliation of American military officials on behalf of the ‘chicken-hawk’ civilian militarists and their foreign interests should make many an officer re-think his own career, loyalty and commitment to the Constitution.
Friday, 14 December 2012
So here we go again. As of this writing, at least 26 people have been murdered at a school in Newtown, Conn. One shooter, a 20 year old is dead while another suspect who was found hiding in nearby woods is in custody. According to reports, the second man was wearing camouflage pants and claims he "didn't do it".
The White House has announced that "Now is not the day to discuss gun control". Today's massacre is the third deadliest school shooting in US history and no doubt all the familiar platitudes will be thrown out in response to yet another tragedy. The perpetrators were loners, dark, listened to this or that type of music. They are usually white males and from what we call here in the US "middle class" families.
There will be calls for more gun control as if there is not some deeper problem in US society than a person's access to firearms. The US has the highest gun ownership in the world, 88 for every hundred people yet the US is number 28, with a murder rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people.
All these issues will be discussed in the media, the perpetrators mental state, his (most likely a male) family life, his parents. Why did such a seemingly normal person go nuts? Or if he was already exhibiting failed mental capacity and a penchant for violence, why was nothing done about it?
This reminds me of the soldier that came back from Iraq and shot his pregnant wife, his three year old daughter, their dog and himself. When I first read about it I recall one of the first statements showed surprise as there seemed to be no issues of financial hardship or infidelity. There was no (at least initially) mention of Iraq and what he did to others or what others did to him in that madness. This should have been the first and most important issue.
A detailed and serious probe in to the sickness of US society will not take place because in a society of "free individuals" we all make choices we have to live with. We are all responsible human beings in control of our own destiny. There is no "society" no "system" that molds, creates or encourages a certain type of behavior.
In this Christmas season, that is supposed to be a season of goodwill and love (and a spiritual occasion) but is in actually a commercial holiday, a "realize profits holiday" the next one being New years and the one after that Valentine's Day, it has been impossible to avoid all the ads for seasonal movies. These trailers are filled with explosions, people being beaten, shot, killed. The way to solve a problem it to "kick ass". Then there is the regular programming. Go to Europe or other countries and see the difference, the amount of times guns are pointed at people on their TV shows compared to ours. I know there are statistics that confirm this.
Young people are surrounded by a climate of consumption and advertising tempting them with all the commodities that they should own if they want to be happy, be something, get the girl and many of them will never be able to get these things and many will find that they are no happier when they do have them, that the ideas that material possessions create happiness is a lie. The future for young people is bleak and they know it. Some of them are driven nuts by it but we all lose our humanity in this madness, this race to nowhere.
A Honda ad last night has some Santa Character driving along telling a prospective buyer, (and the audience) to go buy something that'll make you happy "all the time", that something being a Honda. It will not make them happy all the time of course, maybe for a superficial moment. Having a job and being productive not in the capitalist sense in that you produce profits for the bosses, but production as a human being in that your labor contributes to the well being of collective society this is a step towards being happier, more content. Having shelter, access to real education, health care and being part of the decision making process that makes society function is what happiness is, basic security.
The system, the society, in which we live, which is the soil that nurtures us, will not be questioned to any serious extent by their mass media. When we see a wilting flower we check the soil; that's the first place to start here.
Instead, the talk of gun control on the one hand and more guns on the other, more prisons and harsher sentences, these topics and the personal individual make up of the perpetrators will dominate the discourse. After a while it'll die down--------until the next one.
The White House has announced that "Now is not the day to discuss gun control". Today's massacre is the third deadliest school shooting in US history and no doubt all the familiar platitudes will be thrown out in response to yet another tragedy. The perpetrators were loners, dark, listened to this or that type of music. They are usually white males and from what we call here in the US "middle class" families.
There will be calls for more gun control as if there is not some deeper problem in US society than a person's access to firearms. The US has the highest gun ownership in the world, 88 for every hundred people yet the US is number 28, with a murder rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people.
All these issues will be discussed in the media, the perpetrators mental state, his (most likely a male) family life, his parents. Why did such a seemingly normal person go nuts? Or if he was already exhibiting failed mental capacity and a penchant for violence, why was nothing done about it?
This reminds me of the soldier that came back from Iraq and shot his pregnant wife, his three year old daughter, their dog and himself. When I first read about it I recall one of the first statements showed surprise as there seemed to be no issues of financial hardship or infidelity. There was no (at least initially) mention of Iraq and what he did to others or what others did to him in that madness. This should have been the first and most important issue.
A detailed and serious probe in to the sickness of US society will not take place because in a society of "free individuals" we all make choices we have to live with. We are all responsible human beings in control of our own destiny. There is no "society" no "system" that molds, creates or encourages a certain type of behavior.
In this Christmas season, that is supposed to be a season of goodwill and love (and a spiritual occasion) but is in actually a commercial holiday, a "realize profits holiday" the next one being New years and the one after that Valentine's Day, it has been impossible to avoid all the ads for seasonal movies. These trailers are filled with explosions, people being beaten, shot, killed. The way to solve a problem it to "kick ass". Then there is the regular programming. Go to Europe or other countries and see the difference, the amount of times guns are pointed at people on their TV shows compared to ours. I know there are statistics that confirm this.
Young people are surrounded by a climate of consumption and advertising tempting them with all the commodities that they should own if they want to be happy, be something, get the girl and many of them will never be able to get these things and many will find that they are no happier when they do have them, that the ideas that material possessions create happiness is a lie. The future for young people is bleak and they know it. Some of them are driven nuts by it but we all lose our humanity in this madness, this race to nowhere.
A Honda ad last night has some Santa Character driving along telling a prospective buyer, (and the audience) to go buy something that'll make you happy "all the time", that something being a Honda. It will not make them happy all the time of course, maybe for a superficial moment. Having a job and being productive not in the capitalist sense in that you produce profits for the bosses, but production as a human being in that your labor contributes to the well being of collective society this is a step towards being happier, more content. Having shelter, access to real education, health care and being part of the decision making process that makes society function is what happiness is, basic security.
The system, the society, in which we live, which is the soil that nurtures us, will not be questioned to any serious extent by their mass media. When we see a wilting flower we check the soil; that's the first place to start here.
Instead, the talk of gun control on the one hand and more guns on the other, more prisons and harsher sentences, these topics and the personal individual make up of the perpetrators will dominate the discourse. After a while it'll die down--------until the next one.
Well here's one for you. A California judge has felt the need to make an issue of the lack of fight a woman showed during a sexual assault. The woman's boyfriend threatened to mutilate her face and genitals with a hot screwdriver, beat her with a piece of metal and made other violent threats before raping her and forcing oral copulation. The woman must have been terrified.
The judge, who was a former prosecutor in a sex crimes unit pointed out that in that unit he'd seen cases where a woman's vagina had been "shredded" by a rape and didn't see evidence of it in this case.
The judge, who was a former prosecutor in a sex crimes unit pointed out that in that unit he'd seen cases where a woman's vagina had been "shredded" by a rape and didn't see evidence of it in this case.
The woman reported the threats but apparently didn't report the rape until almost three weeks later. "I'm not a gynecologist, but I can tell you something: If someone doesn't want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down." the judge is reported as saying, "The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case,"
In the state of California, rape victims don't have to prove they resisted or were prevented from resisting because of threats. The reasons for that should be obvious to anyone yet this judge decided that to be a true victim of a sexual assault one has to resist. This personal view of his had important consequences in the case as he denied the prosecutor's request for a 16 year sentence and the guy got 6 years as that was what the case was "worth". The judge received a public admonishment from the California Commission on Judicial Performance and apologized saying he was frustrated because of the argument with the prosecutor over the appropriate sentence.
According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), as of 2005, 60 percent of rape crimes went unreported, most rape survivors do not report the crime. According to RAINN this number has fallen: in 1992, 84 percent of rapes went unreported.
One possible reason rapes go unreported according to RAINN is that even when survivors do file reports, nothing happens. RAINN claims that only 6 percent of all rapists, whether or not their crimes are reported, will ever serve a day in jail.
I was also reading today about rapes of women that are incarcerated and the piece gave some instances of an Alabama prison that has quite a reputation for this offense. Rape is considered by most sources to be the most unreported violent crime in the US.
It might explain why this particular victim took her time to report the actual rape and the judge proved her fears justified.
Thursday, 13 December 2012
I have to applaud Google boss Eric Schmidt who has defended Google’s tax avoidance as simply “capitalism”at work. Google shifted $10 billion to Bermuda last year in order to avoid paying taxes on it.
“It’s called capitalism” Schmidt announces triumphantly, “We are proudly capitalistic, I’m not confused about this.”.
“I am very proud of the structure that we set up. We did it based on the incentives that the governments offered us to operate.”
The government of course is a government for and of capitalists designed to defend and advance the capitalist mode of production and the profits they accumulate from it. So it’s no surprise that Google is not the only multinational that avoids paying taxes. Rich individuals have also stashed away between $26 and $32 trillion in order to avoid taxes according to recent reports.
Schmidt’s comments are important in that it is one of those rare occasions that an important figure, a representative of the few thousand unelected people that control the political and economic life of the country, admits that massive wealth accumulation in fewer hands and what amounts to plunder is an integral part of the capitalist mode of production.
If we think about it, the capitalist class rarely if ever uses the word capitalism with reference to production. In fact they do their utmost to avoid mentioning that we live in a system of production and this system is known as capitalism at all. You can be a “capitalist” which they link to freedom and individual rights, but there is no capitalist class or capitalist system.
In their serious journals though, they are very conscious of their role and discuss how best to manage the system they govern, the system called capitalism.
For the corruption and excesses and thievery that occurs day in day out, they apply terms like “crony capitalism” or describe corruption as a simply a product of bad apples, evil individuals as opposed to an integral part of the system’s functioning. Corrupt individuals just stray from the “Rule of Law.”
So I thank Eric Schmidt for his honesty and sharing with us the true nature of the system of production in which we live.
So I thank Eric Schmidt for his honesty and sharing with us the true nature of the system of production in which we live.
Wednesday, 12 December 2012
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