A group of Indigenous women are walking the length of the Mississippi river — 1,200 miles — to raise awareness about pollution. They carry a 1½ quart bucket of clean water from the headwaters of the Mississippi which they plan to pour into the mouth of the river to show the her what she can be.

Climate Justice activists may be more powerful than we realize. The French energy company, Total, sold its 49% ownership in the Canadian oil sands to the Canadian energy company, Suncor, for a $1.65 billion loss. Why? The cost is getting too expensive and profits are going down. With all of the highly publicized tar sands spills recently in Minnesota, Arkansas and other states, people are seeing the environmental risks. Since we know that the Alberta Tar Sands is the tipping point for climate change, shouldn’t corporations be held accountable for the climate disasters that will inevitably follow? Protest pressure is building.1

The hunger strike continues. Solidarity protests were organized last week by Witness Against Torture against the Guantanamo Bay prison. Guantanamo is an example of criminal injustice. The trial against the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk program is exposing the practice of racial targeting by New York police. This week, one of the commanders caught on tape settled a lawsuit against him for $78,000. We wrote an overview of the abusive criminal (in)justice system, “A Forest of Poisonous Trees.”

In New York City, low-wage, fast food workers walked off the job today in the largest-ever strike against the fast food industry which has virtually no unions. Workers are demanding that chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s raise their wages to $15 an hour and allow them to organize a union without retaliation. More than 400 workers, from 50-some stores, will participate in the surprise strike, doubling the size of their previous walkout and potentially shutting down several fast food restaurants for the day. Waging Nonviolence published an article that explained what it takes to organize a workplace.

A group of Indigenous women are walking the length of the Mississippi river — 1,200 miles — to raise awareness about pollution. They carry a 1½ quart bucket of clean water from the headwaters of the Mississippi which they plan to pour into the mouth of the river to show the her what she can be.

Climate Justice activists may be more powerful than we realize. The French energy company, Total, sold its 49% ownership in the Canadian oil sands to the Canadian energy company, Suncor, for a $1.65 billion loss. Why? The cost is getting too expensive and profits are going down. With all of the highly publicized tar sands spills recently in Minnesota, Arkansas and other states, people are seeing the environmental risks. Since we know that the Alberta Tar Sands is the tipping point for climate change, shouldn’t corporations be held accountable for the climate disasters that will inevitably follow? Protest pressure is building.1

The hunger strike continues. Solidarity protests were organized last week by Witness Against Torture against the Guantanamo Bay prison. Guantanamo is an example of criminal injustice. The trial against the NYPD’s Stop and Frisk program is exposing the practice of racial targeting by New York police. This week, one of the commanders caught on tape settled a lawsuit against him for $78,000. We wrote an overview of the abusive criminal (in)justice system, “A Forest of Poisonous Trees.”

In New York City, low-wage, fast food workers walked off the job today in the largest-ever strike against the fast food industry which has virtually no unions. Workers are demanding that chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s raise their wages to $15 an hour and allow them to organize a union without retaliation. More than 400 workers, from 50-some stores, will participate in the surprise strike, doubling the size of their previous walkout and potentially shutting down several fast food restaurants for the day. Waging Nonviolence published an article that explained what it takes to organize a workplace.

People live in extreme poverty, lacking food and material goods. Things were made worse after the earthquake on January 2010, which killed thousands of people and destroyed almost the entire city of Port-au-Prince. But the people stand tall with dignity, united by their culture, the Creole language, which is spoken only there, and Vudu (equivalent to our Candomblé), practiced by almost everyone, while maintaining a religious syncretism, in style: Catholic Mass on Sundays and Thursdays in the yard.

In rural areas, there are no schools. 70% of the population lives in rural areas. Illiteracy reaches 65% of the population. There is no electricity in the countryside, only in Port-au-Prince. There are only three paved national highways. And there is no drinking water. Everyone needs to buy clean water, at international prices.

Last year, for the first time in its history, there was a cholera epidemic which killed hundreds of people. The medieval disease was brought over by [UN] troops from Nepal, who dumped their sewage in the main river of the country. Would any international tribunal be prepared to sue the United Nations for those deaths?

Over 65% of all food is imported or comes in the form of donations, which suits a black business bourgeoisie, who exploits the population.

Angela Merkel's face usually displays a rather plain, friendly, almost benign expression, matching her simple, benign words. But in rare unguarded moments, some claim, they glimpse a very hard visage, which is matched, equally rarely, by hardly benign words, like her annoyed statement that Cyprus was "exhausting the patience of its euro partners." Yes, Angela can get annoyed and lose patience, above all with those irresponsible lands and leaders to the south so reluctant to manfully bear the required share of their burdens.

Such burdens include cutting wages and government salaries, amputating pension rights, letting prices on staples rise, watching joblessness soar while cutting the means of helping those afflicted, and privatizing key elements of the economy, selling them off to the best bidders -- or the most favored ones. Must hospital and child care be reduced, schools starved out? Such prices must be paid if economies are to be rescued "within the framework of the euro." That is Austerity, Merkel's magic codeword for economic revival.

But to ever more of those at the receiving end, such rescues and such a revival are worse than the perils or ailments they aim at. That is why furious people from Lisbon in Europe's far west to Nicosia in easternmost Cyprus, including Rome, Athens, even some in northern Dublin, are painting nasty comments about Germany on posters or even scribbling ugly Hitler mustaches over Angela's so friendly, smiling face.

A Cypriot banking official recalls a meeting in Brussels in 2011 when Merkel, French President Sarkozy, International Monetary Fund boss Christine Lagarde und right-wing European Union leaders Juncker and Barroso made decisions on Greece and even more helpless Cyprus which determined developments up to the present. As the International Herald Tribune put it, "in the three years since Europe's rolling debt crisis first exploded in Greece, governments and citizens in the hardest-hit countries have fumed that decisions taken in Brussels paid little heed to their interests and were dictated instead by the economic concerns and election cycles of Germany (3.17.13, p. 19)." Speaking of such treatment, above all by Germany, one Cypriot expert grumbled: "It was very brutal -- like warfare."

Gary Olson, Empathy Imperiled: Capitalism, Culture, and the Brain (New York: Springer, 2012)

Think of the values and ideas we left progressives tend to identify with and defend and advance against those rapacious “1%”’ masters of capital, for whom the Golden Rule is that “those who have the gold deserve to rule.” Words that first come to mind probably include solidarity, democracy, the common good, equality, justice, peace, and dignity. Other terms might arise: human rights, socialism, freedom, liberty, the commons, people over profits, and people’s power.

It goes back a long way. The modern corporation’s cloak of personhood provides a great shield of invisibility for capitalists who reap enormous benefits from the economies of scale and the barriers to competition afforded by their freedom to combine assets while avoiding liability beyond their individual investment for the harm their agglomerated entities cause. “The basis of a corporation,” Chomsky casually noted last year, “is limited liability, meaning as a participant in a corporation you’re not personally liable if it, say, murders tens of thousands in Bhopal.”[16]

Put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own. Living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It’s not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; or restricting a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or displace Palestinian families from their homes Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
— President Barak Obama in Israel 2013

Would that the President might take his own advice — “Put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes ” — he need only open his eyes beyond the wall that imprisons the Palestinians he speaks about: see how the wall blinds the Jews to the plight of the people they drove from their land, see the barren landscape on the other side rubble strewn, savaged by bulldozers and missiles, see the people caught in a maelstrom of poverty and deprivation, listen to the mothers and wives weep for their husbands and sons jailed without charge in Israel’s Gulag where escape comes by self-starvation as the only defense against indefinite torture and lives lost to family and friends, listen to the cries of the people of the world who have condemned this barbaric behavior only to run into the President’s own wall–the veto in the UN Security Council that effectively denies the justice he so righteously exalts, “Peace is also just. ” How true and how easily it could be made a reality if he were to simply abstain during the vote that sought to bring this defiant state before the International Court of Justice finally after 64 years of impunity to the very justice this President mouths, as though saying it levitates him beyond criticism.

Indeed, “Look at the world through their eyes, ” let Americans look at the state of Israel through Palestinian eyes to witness the monstrous injustice that exists in this “democratic state ” that “shares America’s values, ” America’s only “friend ” in the mid-east. Let’s look at how the Israeli government responds to the President’s call for justice for the Palestinians, within three days of his visit. Let’s report on a peaceful protest that has gone unnoticed by the American press with the exception of Tim King’s Salem-News: “Israeli forces have sprayed Palestinian homes in the village of Nabi Saleh with “skunk “* as a punishment for organizing weekly protests against the Apartheid Wall built on occupied West Bank land (March 26, 2013).1

While the American press offered nothing about this incident, Reuters and the Guardian did as well as The Middle East Monitor which provided this background information: “Israeli forces have sprayed Palestinian homes in the village of Nabi Saleh with raw sewage … as a punishment for organising weekly protests against the Apartheid Wall built on occupied West Bank land. Human rights watchdog B’Tselem published a video showing Israel’s armoured tanker trucks fitted with “water cannons ” which spray the foul fluid at Palestinian protesters. B’Tselem said in a statement that the Israeli forces also targeted all the houses of the village with the sewage. The powerful jet broke windows and caused a great deal of damage in the houses, said the Israeli organisation. “It also causes environmental damage, ” it pointed out. The non-lethal weapon has been added to the Israelis’ armoury for crowd control, said B’Tselem, even though the video shows clearly that it is also used against Palestinian-owned property.”2

At the turn of the 19th century, industrialist and weapons manufacturer par excellence Alfred Nobel, guilt-ridden inventor of dynamite, established the Peace Prize that carries his name, proposing that it go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Over 100 years later, for the first time ever, a Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to an African woman. The 2004 award was controversial. Politicians from the country responsible for the awards, Norway, wanted to know what this woman from Kenya had done for peace. Carl I. Hagen, leader of Norway’s Progress Party, whose senior political adviser, Inger-Marie Ytterhorn, was a member of the Nobel Committee, sneeringly dismissed giving the prize to a mere environmental activist:

I thought the intention of Alfred Nobel’s will was to focus on a person or organization who had worked actively for peace…It is odd that the committee has completely overlooked the unrest that the world is living with daily, and given the prize to an environmental activist.

THE UNITED NATIONS – On the day the Arms Trade Treaty was scheduled to face a consensus vote by 193 countries, ending the years-long process to establish an international agreement to curtail arms trafficking to nations torn by conflict, I listened to a member of the Liberian delegation explain his country’s concerns. “We wanted a much tighter treaty,” he said, referring the large group of African countries most affected by the global black market arms trade. ”Those of us who live in countries devastated by civil war very clearly understand the need for a strong regulatory framework to deter non-state actors from getting weapons. This is why we wanted a mechanism for risk-assessment, and why we wanted penalties.”

The attempt to tame the raging bull that is the $70 billion global arms trade all but guaranteed disappointment. Understanding why begins in the Security Council, where the countries with the most clout in the closed sessions where treaty language is crafted also happen to be the world’s biggest arms exporters. Like all states, the Big Five use weapons sales to strengthen strategic industries, and as tools of foreign policy and national security. The major exporters were never likely to hand significant oversight powers to a U.N. monitoring body. The same is true at the other end of the trade, where a wide range of arms importing states formed a “skeptical” bloc and expressed concern that exporting countries would wield the treaty as a political tool and constrain their access to weapons. In their statements rejecting the treaty last Thursday, Iran, Syria, and North Korea expressed this fear with bombast, but it was hardly a fringe view. With the major exporters and the skeptical states working against a strong treaty, it fell mostly to a coalition of African countries and civil society groups to agitate for something resembling the original “robust” vision for the treaty including strict monitoring, risk-assessment criteria, and penalties.

The NRA’s efforts to thwart what it calls the “U.N.’s never-ending mission to disarm the American people” dates to the first Clinton administration. As Media Matters recounted in its report on July’s ATT talks, the NRA became interested in the U.N. with the establishment of the U.N. Panel of Governmental Experts on Small Arms. To maintain a presence in the process, it set up an umbrella group called the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities and gained observer status for the Small Arms Panel and a subsequent series of regional U.N. workshops across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

This is around the time Wayne LaPierre began fundraising off loud warnings about “global gun grabbers.” In 1996, the NRA’s lobbying arm publically called on Senator Jesse Helms to deny funds to any U.N. program related to “small arms used by the civilian population in the United States.” This included weapons destruction programs in war-torn regions in Africa and the Balkans. When the U.N. Small Arms panel published its first major report in 1997, the NRA warned its members, “A multi-national cadre of gun-ban extremists is lobbying the United Nations, demanding [a] virtual worldwide ban on firearms ownership… What would happen if the UN demands gun confiscation on American soil?” These hysterics continued into the Bush years, and by 2006, LaPierre merely had to cull a decade’s worth of NRA fax and email alerts for his book, The Global War on Your Guns: Inside the UN Plan To Destroy the Bill of Rights.