Violence AGAINST Anti-War Student Protesters Escalates Across The US - YouTube
Sam parses through yesterday’s mass escalation of violence against anti-war student protesters on college campuses across the US, with the NYPD sending a SWAT team to infiltrate the Student occupation of Harold Hall, and police in LA allowing a pro-Israel violent mob assault UCLA protesters, also expanding on the absurd and constant attempts to completely misrepresent these campus protests and the student activists behind them.
The Biden administration is claiming the International Criminal Court has no jurisdiction to charge Israeli officials for war crimes. This comes after rumors that the ICC may be close to issuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials over possible crimes in Gaza. The International Court of Justice has rejected a request by Nicaragua to order Germany to halt exporting arms to Israel, but the court declined to throw out the case. For more, we speak with human rights attorney and war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody, who says ICC charges would be a “huge” development. “Since Nuremberg, no international tribunal has issued an arrest warrant for a Western official. For decades, we’ve had this double standard where international justice has only been effective for crimes committed by leaders of developing countries or by enemies of the U.S. like Vladimir Putin.”
The Preacher and the Slave - Wikipedia
“The Preacher and the Slave” is a song written by Joe Hill in 1911. It was written as a parody of the Christian hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By”. Copying or using the musical style of the hymn was also a way to capture the emotional resonance of that style of music and use it for a non-religious purpose.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, also commonly known as the Wobblies) concentrated much of its labor trying to organize migrant workers in lumber and construction camps. When the workers returned to the cities, the Wobblies faced the Salvation Army, which they satirized as the “Starvation Army”, who were said to have tried to drown out IWW with their religious music. Hill had first encountered the Salvation Army in Sweden when he was a child.
The lyrics:
Verse 1 Long-haired preachers come out every night Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right But when asked about something to eat They will answer with voices so sweet:
Chorus You will eat (You will eat) bye and bye (Bye and bye) In that glorious land above the sky (Way up high) Work and pray (Work and pray), live on hay (Live on hay) You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (That’s a lie!)
Verse 2 And the starvation army they play And they sing and they clap and they pray Till they get all your coin on the drum Then they tell you when you are on the bum
Chorus You will eat (You will eat) bye and bye (Bye and bye) In that glorious land above the sky (Way up high) Work and pray (Work and pray), live on hay (Live on hay) You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (That’s a lie!)
Verse 3 Holy Rollers and jumpers come out They holler, they jump and they shout Give your money to Jesus they say He will cure all diseases away See country shows near Chesterfield Get tickets as low as $20 You might also like
Chorus You will eat (You will eat) bye and bye (Bye and bye) In that glorious land above the sky (Way up high) Work and pray (Work and pray), live on hay (Live on hay) You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (That’s a lie!)
Verse 4 If you fight hard for children and wife Try to get something good in this life You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell When you die you will sure go to hell
Chorus You will eat (You will eat) bye and bye (Bye and bye) In that glorious land above the sky (Way up high) Work and pray (Work and pray), live on hay (Live on hay) You’ll get pie in the sky when you die (That’s a lie!)
Verse 5 Working folk of all countries unite Side by side we for freedom will fight When the world and its wealth we have gained To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:
Chorus You will eat (You will eat) bye and bye (Bye and bye) When you’ve learned how to cook and how to fry (and bake a pie!) Chop some wood, ‘twill do you good And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye (That’s no lie!)
There comes a time when the operation of the machine is so odious that you cannot even tacitly participate. You’ve got to place your bodies on the gears, the wheels, all the mechanism. And you’ve got to indicate to those who own it and those who run it that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all. - Mario Savio
Quoted by Utah Phillips in track Unless you are free on album Fellow Workers
We in the US have forgotten so much about our own history. It’s been sterilized with the dangerous bits removed.
Recommended Music: Utah Phillips and Ani DiFranco
- Fellow Workers
- The Past Didn’t go Anywhere
Billy Bragg
- The Internationale
International Worker’s Day - Wikipedia
Today is International Worker’s Day, known as Labour Day in most countries. The date was originally chosen by the American Federation of Labor to commemorate the strike that ended in the Haymarket Massacre
It’s a day for, among other things, solidarity with protests
Some don’t seem to understand the connection between universities and Israel and the divestment demands of the student protests. Three links that may help:
Cornell student suspended over Gaza protest speaks out - YouTube
Across many American universities - student protesters have set up encampments on their campuses and are calling for their universities to withdraw investment from companies with links to the Israeli military.
The challenge colleges face with student demands for Israeli divestment | PBS NewsHour
Protests show no signs of letting up and universities are handling their respective situations differently. Columbia University warned of mass temporary suspensions, state troopers were called in at Texas and nearly 300 people were arrested at other schools over the weekend. Geoff Bennett has perspectives from student protesters and discusses their demands of divestment with Charlie Eaton.
Divestment was also used against South Africa to help end apartheid: Wikipedia
Disinvestment (or divestment) from South Africa was first advocated in the 1960s in protest against South Africa’s system of apartheid, but was not implemented on a significant scale until the mid-1980s. A disinvestment policy the US adopted in 1986 in response to the disinvestment campaign is credited with playing a role in pressuring the South African government to embark on negotiations that ultimately led to the dismantling of the apartheid system.
Biden is in danger of losing the election because of his support Israel’s war crimes and genocide. It would be best if he kept his mouth shut and his opinions to himself in regards to what protests are “acceptable”.
White House denounces Columbia protesters’ occupation of campus building | Semafor
The White House issued what is being viewed as its strongest condemnation yet of the pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations. “President Biden respects the right to free expression, but protests must be peaceful and lawful. Forcibly taking over buildings is not peaceful — it is wrong.”
Mehdi Hasan providing important context on the media’s framing of the recent military exchange between Iran and Israel. Western mainstream media either exclude the context or provide a biased framing of the context. It’s done all the time and it’s meant to be invisible because it’s meant to manipulate our perspective and inhibit our understanding. Noam Chomsky called it manufacturing consent.
“Iran did what pretty much any country in that situation would do.”
Why hasn’t the US called for an investigation into mass graves in Gaza? | The Guardian
Nothing screams ‘covering up war crimes’ like insisting that there should absolutely not be an independent investigation
Did you know that the Palestinians are the very first people in the world to ethnically cleanse and mass murder themselves? I know it sounds weird, but – as American and Israeli politicians keep reminding us – these are “savages” that we are talking about here. Normal rules don’t apply, you’ve got to follow the Palestine Rules.
The Palestine Rules dictate you do the following: ignore every international agency if that agency says anything remotely critical about Israel. Certainly don’t listen to international aid agencies like Oxfam when they argue that the government of Israel is “deliberately blocking and/or undermining the international humanitarian response in the Gaza Strip”. Nope, the fact that babies in Gaza are dying of malnutrition is all their fault. The fact that children in Gaza are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known is nothing to do with Israel, it’s the fault of those pesky Palestinians.
The fact that there are an unprecedented number of child amputees in Gaza is the Palestinians’ fault. Let’s be very clear here: if every single Palestinian had fled the land they were born in back in 1948, when Israel was founded, if they’d just completely renounced their Palestinian identity, none of the horrors currently unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank would be happening. Can’t argue with that logic, can you?
And yet cities in the Southwest are still growing. The delusional thinking about the future is off the charts.
Megadrought forces end to sugarcane farming in parched Texas borderland | The Guardian
In February, the cooperative announced that it would close its 50-year-old sugarcane processing mill, the last remaining in the state, by the end of this spring. It didn’t even make it to the end of the season, with most workers employed until 29 April. Ongoing megadrought meant there wasn’t enough water to irrigate co-op members’ 34,000 acres of sugarcane, and that effectively puts an end to sugarcane farming in the south Texas borderlands.
…Increasingly dry farms find themselves vying with other farms, cities, industries and mining operations for dwindling resources. In 2022, drought decimated Texas cotton and forced California growers to idle half their rice fields. Water disputes are also on the rise as decreased flows in the Colorado River and other vital waterways pit state against state, states against native nations and farmers against municipalities.
Americans have long described their government as being democratic. But an honest look at the history and evolution of the government here tells a very different story. The April 29, 2024 episode of the The Majority Report with Sam Seder includes interview with Ari Berman, national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones, to discuss his recent book Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It..
“Minority Rule” serves as a culmination of his reporting on modern-day efforts at the GOP’s undemocratic takeover and how they play into an ever-shifting battle between democracy and elite rule.
Stepping back, Berman looks to America’s inception and the central role the US Constitution played in bolstering the US’ constraints on popular rule, with institutions like the Senate, Supreme Court, and Electoral College all serving to act as checks to the people’s power of democracy and federalism.
Moving forward, Abe walks Sam and Emma through some of the major periods of democratic progress and (largely racist) backlash in US history, including reconstruction’s shift towards a multi-racial democracy and the following minoritarian overthrow in the South that established Jim Crow rule, and the major progress made under the Civil Rights Movement – which saw a variety of voting-right legislation passed over the 1970s – and the GOP’s reaction that we’re still dealing with today. Parsing deeper into this latter era, Berman looks at the role played by folks like Pat Buchanan in pushing the GOP back toward their project of minoritarian rule, establishing the blueprint of the GOP’s takeover of the undemocratic institutions of US politics and the establishment of a network of think tanks and foundations to shape the generations to come. After an extensive conversation on how the politics (and normalization) of Pat Buchanan paved the way for a Donald Trump presidency, grounded in culture war and white resentment, and how the GOP’s takeover of Wisconsin politics at the outset of the 2010s provided an easy laboratory for anti-democratic policy, Berman wraps up the interview with a plea for the Democratic Party to recognize and strategize against these institutional threats to US democracy, and how refusing to do so paves the way for the likes of Donald Trump.
They’re committing war crimes and genocide so yes, they should be arrested, tried and if found guilty, imprisoned.
Netanyahu asks Biden to help stop ICC arrest warrants over Gaza war
Israeli officials have grown increasingly concerned over the last two weeks that the ICC is preparing to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Herzi Halevi.
Land Back: Indigenous Environmental Stewardship and the Path Forward
Indigenous peoples around the Earth serve an outsized role in the conservation of natural resources including land, water, flora, and fauna.
We make up only about 6 percent of the total global population, yet occupy, own or manage an estimated 20 to 25 percent of Earth’s land surface. The lands Indigenous peoples inhabit or maintain also hold most of Earth’s remaining biodiversity and intersect with about 40 percent of all protected areas and ecologically intact lands.
I deeply appreciate this post by Ben Werdmuller explaining who he is and offering insight into how and why he became the human he is. This is the kind of thoughtful human-to-human sharing that makes the internet worth having because it provides an opportunity for real connection and understanding. This is the internet at its best.
My view on the world — as is true of yours, and of everybody’s — is a function of my lived experiences, and the lived experiences of the people I care about.
It’s not about leading the world; it’s about living in a peaceful one
World Central Kitchen says it will resume operations in Gaza : NPR
The aid group World Central Kitchen said it was resuming operations in Gaza, less than a month after seven of its staff were killed in Israeli airstrikes.
“The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire. We are restarting our operation with the same energy, dignity, and focus on feeding as many people as possible,” CEO Erin Gore said on Sunday.
Gaza residents are experiencing catastrophic levels of hunger and a U.S. official said earlier this month that parts of Gaza are already experiencing famine.
Israel Has Already Imposed Unavoidable, Exponential Famine on Gaza outpacing Somalia’s - ZNetwork
Juan Cole summarizes a story by prominent foreign policy journalist Colum Lynch:
Lynch has seen a memo entitled “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths,” which was produced by food security experts in US AID and the State Department, and which they sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. These US officials gave the memo a subheading that is damning for the Israeli government of PM Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel-imposed administrative challenges are preventing the delivery” of food.
So two things are being asserted:
Famine in Gaza is now unavoidable and will kill many civilian noncombatants even if more food aid starts getting in now.
The responsibility for this starvation of children, women and noncombatant males lies squarely with Israel, which is obstructing food aid deliveries.
That is all you need to know. These experts have never seen a situation so bad.
Yesterday Manton shared a recent post by Manuel Moreale The web is not dying – Manu:
Let’s imagine we ban TikTok. And Facebook. And Instagram. And Threads. And all the other huge platforms. There would still be one global town square left. It’s called the web. The web itself IS the global town square.
That’s all well and good BUT while many of us love blogs and a more open web what about the people who rely upon TikTok and the corporate social media? I’m not one of them. I left FB years ago and stopped using Instagram several years ago. I don’t use TikTok. But the world is bigger than me.
I think we should be careful in our idealistic statements about the open web, the small web, etc. The corporate web, for all its many downsides, still serves billions of people that are not us. While it’s full of misinformation, TikTok is being used by a whole generation to keep up on current events. And let’s be honest, if our concern is misinformation and bias, those can be found on the social media owned by US companies like Facebook, Instagram and Xitter. Not to mention that the corporate news sites: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC all have their own bias and agenda which translates into what and how “news” is presented.
Another quote from Moreale’s post:
Sure, it’s a lot harder to reach a million people if you have to start from your own little corner of the web. But you know what? Tough shit.
That statement comes from a position of priviledge. The small indy web is largely dominated by white, middle class straight men and good for them that they have their place on the internet. Meanwhile TikTok and the corporate social media is far more diverse because it’s more accessible and that’s important to remember.
TikTok is not just funny memes and entertainment. Its users are sharing current events often as they unfold, often the news ignored by corporate media because it’s not the “News that’s Fit to Print”. Just one of many, Code Pink who have been covering the movement to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, shared this post from outside the White House Correspondents' Dinner:
@codepinkalert NOW: Protestors are SHUTTING DOWN the entrance to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Western media spreads false anti-Palestinian narratives to justify Israel’s violence and oppression against the Palestinian people. At the same time, they refuse to report on Israel's atrocities. The WHCD is nothing more than a celebration and endorsement of the administration’s actions. That is not journalism. That is complicity. SHAME on the “journalists” who refuse to tell the truth about the genocide the United States & Israel are committing. We will not be silent in the face of propaganda.
♬ original sound - CODEPINK
For all of their problems, TikTok and other corporate social media have been especially important in social justice struggles. From MeToo to Black Lives Matter to any other important movements in the US or internationally, this isn’t something the small indy web can do yet.
I’m all for growing the Indy web but let’s remember how everyone else who is not us is using the web. Grow your awareness beyond yourself enough to know that sites like TikTok are not just being used for trivial attempts at viral humor but that they are being used in meaningful ways by people who have less priviledge than you.
And it will get much, much worse. We are in the earliest days food systems disruption.
Rest assured, we’ll continue to do nothing to solve the problem.
Worst wine harvest in 62 years blamed on ‘extreme’ weather and climate change | Euronews
The International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) says the drink hit its lowest level since 1962. This intergovernmental organisation has 50 member states, representing 75 per cent of the world’s vineyard area.
Experts blame “extreme environmental conditions” including droughts and fires that have been driving the downward trend in production.
Also US misdeeds in Iraq, 1990-91, pre-2001:
Has everyone memory-holed what happened after 9/11? Peaceful protests being declared “un-American”? A 20-year long war that caused an estimated FIVE MILLION deaths?
…Maybe fucking listen to protests sometime. You might learn something.
…It really is frustrating that so many people who were repeatedly, demonstrably wrong about Iraq and the war on terror suffered minimal consequences in terms of credibility, yet the people who were right still get told we don’t understand how the world works.
People are rightly disgusted by the puppy killer Kristi Noem.
But let’s keep in mind how many months Congress and the Biden administration have supported Israel in its ongoing and intentional killing of 34,000+ Palestinian civillians. A number that does not include the missing buried under rubble.