US hypocrisy

Canada is supporting US efforts to overthrow Nicaragua’s government.

There are no official policing authorities as such when it comes to international relations.  Realists imagine a jungle of states, the preyed upon and the predators, a grim state of affairs moderated by alliances, agreements and understandings. But there is one body whose resolutions are recognised as having binding force: the Security Council, that most powerful of creatures in that jumble known as the United Nations.

It’s capitalism after all.  Those political parties for the rich and powerful know how to sell exploitation and subjugation by their good cop/bad cop marketing. If you don’t buy this, you get Trump.  But if you buy what they sell, you get Biden, an imperialist with the crime bill, Patriot Act, and the rest of the schemes for the rich and powerful.   W.E.B DuBois talked about this in 1956 saying, “I shall not go to the polls. I have not registered. I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist.

If there is one conclusion to draw from the agreement this week between Israel and the United Arab Emirates – with Israel temporarily “suspending” its threat to illegally annex parts of the West Bank, in return for “full normalisation” with the Gulf state – it is this: The peace industry is back in business.

It is time to stop irresponsible finger-pointing.
All over the world, as this essay is being written, well over 17 million COVID-19 cases have been reported, and 676,000 people died. And instead of concentrating on serious research, trying to save human lives and attempting to stop the global calamity, ‘residents’ of the White House are spending all their energy on their own political survival, as well as on the survival of the regime.

The book of hours on Julian Assange is now being written.  But the scribes are far from original.  Repeated rituals of administrative hearings that have no common purpose other than to string things out before the axe are being enacted.  Of late, the man most commonly associated with WikiLeaks’ publication project cannot participate in any meaningful way, largely because of his frail health and the dangers posed to him by the coronavirus.  Having already made an effort to attend court proceedings in person, Assange has come across as judicial exotica, freak show fodder for Judge Vanessa Bar

Santiago de Cuba. Photo: Bill Hackwell
Today Cuba celebrates the 67th anniversary of the assault on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks that mark the beginning of the Cuban Revolution. From this beginning, Cuba’s altruistic view of making the world safer and healthier began.

Peter Beinart, an influential liberal commentator on Israel and Zionism, poked a very large stick into a hornets’ nest this month by admitting he had finally abandoned his long-cherished commitment to a two-state solution.

Annexation by Israel of occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank was never likely to happen on July 1, as many observers assumed. The date was not a deadline; it was a window opened by the Israeli government to carry out annexation before US President Donald Trump leaves office.
Unhappily for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that window could slam shut in a matter of months, if current polling trends continue and Trump loses the presidential election in November.

The Kafkaesque Imperium has taken yet another absurd step towards mean absurdity with another superseding indictment against Julian Assange.  This move by the US Department of Justice seems to have surprised those involved in his extradition proceedings.  Mark Summers QC, one of the members of the Assange legal team, did not conceal his astonishment at the call over hear