Daniel Pantaleo, the rogue police officer who choked the unarmed 43-year-old Black man named Eric Garner to death for allegedly selling single untaxed cigarettes, will not go to trial. Garner was murdered on July 17, 2014 in his native borough of Staten Island.
There is no admittance at Craig Watts’ Perdue contract chicken farm in Fairmont, North Carolina. Nor is Watts allowed to open the barns to admit air or sunlight. But, fed up with the abuse to farmers, consumers and animals he has tolerated for too long, Watts allowed cameras into his barns so the public could see what Perdue calls “humane.” It is “not as advertised” says Watts, an understatement.
This week tens of thousands of people in the United States flooded the streets to demand racial justice. It is one of many issues that has been building for years, reaching the tipping point and seeming to explode in a national awakening. We also saw that in the last two weeks with national protests for living wages.
Above all, always be capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in the world.
— Che Guevara1 To my children (1965)
I once lived in Peru’s southern Andes, in the majestic corn belt of the royal Inca. The dimensions of the surrounding sierra were enough to quiet my ambitious, over-sized and over-active American ego. Moreover, those rural and ancient environs were truly the agemates of eternity. The indigenous populace that stippled the earth there—my neighbors—kept it all alive. Andahuaylillas, my temporary hometown in the mountains, was a maize-growing hamlet of maybe three thousand people. Neighbors there were kind, and they constantly sought me out to share life with me.
In the White City, all the days are beautiful days. The weather is temperate and mild. The parks are spacious and gleam with care. People stroll with elegant animals, talking on the latest devices, filling the cafes at all hours of the day. In the coffeehouses where the best coffee in the world is brewed cup-by-cup for them, they sit in parallel rows like they did as children in school, seeing no one else now, gazing intently into the white screens of their gleaming devices.
Yesterday, in the Afghan Peace Volunteers’ (APVs’) “Borderfree Center” here in Kabul, I heard someone banging on the front gate and hurried downstairs to open it. As it happened, I was the only one at the Center that morning. Outside the gate stood two women with their burkas pushed back.
Now that Malala Yousafzai has won her hard-earned and well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize, she and her amazing, tragic story is back in the spotlight. Per usual, nevertheless, the corporate media has taken this positive development and exploited it, in the service of US imperialism.
Back in the mid 1980s, when I was a newly single mother of four, I went back to work with a nearly blank resume. I took one low-paying job, then somehow landed a better one, as assistant to the young president of a wholesale company.
It enabled me to cover the rent and necessary expenses in a time when a decent administrative or secretarial job did. For that I was thankful and proud to survive without assistance. It seemed like a dream job, but it lasted less than a year, from December to December to be precise.
