blog of the post capitalist transition.. Read or download the novel here + latest relevant posts
El jefe de Estado venezolano ratificó su confianza en el poder de base de las comunas y los consejos comunales. El presidente de Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, ordenó que se agilice la aprobación de recursos para comenzar con los 4.500 proyectos que fueron priorizados por la población en la Consulta Popular Nacional celebrada el pasado domingo.
Presidente de Venezuela ordena iniciar proyectos votados en Consulta Popular Nacional
As students organize and resist to demand action and justice for Palestinians, publishers are offering free books on Palestine, protest, and more, in solidarity. Verso has seven ebooks available for download, including a case for sanctions against Israel, a collection on 2011’s Occupy movement, and a compendium of revolt and resistance.
Verso also collected a list last year of free resources, including books, interviews, and podcasts.
Haymarket Books has a series of books available for free, including Light in Gaza, a collection of writing by Gazans on “their dreams, fears, and aspirations.” Haymarket also organized Until Liberation, a series of events at the end of last year that are all available to watch.
Both Verso and Haymarket collaborated on an essay collection released in December, From The River To The Sea, which includes personal testimonials, essays, and interviews for a free Palestine, and “provide[s] important grounding for the urgent discussions taking place across the Palestine solidarity movement.”
Seven Stories Press is also offering a free, two-volume history of student resistance in the last 20 years. The author Mark Boren writes of his collection: “The explosion of protests in the world has shown us that there are millions of people—many of them young and altruistic—who are willing to stand up to forces of oppression, to risk their bodies, their freedom, and their lives to make the future better than the past, and that is humbling, inspiring, and hopeful for the future.”
If you’re looking for more resources and more to read, In These Times has a great list of digital resources for a free Palestine which includes the Palestinian Museum’s digital archives and an expansive list of zines and books from Publishers for Palestine.
There’s lots to read, but even more to do: Jewish Voice for Peace and The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights have lots of ways to take action right now.
Shaimaa Alareer, an accomplished Palestinian illustrator and the eldest daughter of the murdered poet Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home in the Al-Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City earlier today. The attack also claimed the lives of her husband, Mohammed Siyam, an engineer, and their infant son, Abdul Rahman.
Up until his death (in a targeted Israeli airstrike on December 7), Refaat Alareer was a beloved poet, professor, and activist who taught literature at the (now destroyed) Islamic University of Gaza.
Alareer was also one of the founders of We Are Not Numbers, a nonprofit organization launched in Gaza after Israel’s 2014 attack and dedicated to creating “a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers who can bring together a profound change to the Palestinian cause.”
Through his popular Twitter account, “Refaat in Gaza,” Alareer vehemently condemned the ongoing atrocities committed against his people by Israeli forces, as well as the successive U.S. administrations that enabled them.
In the months since his death, Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” has become both a source of solace and a rallying cry for hundreds of thousands of people around the world—people who hope, as Refaat and his daughter hoped, to someday see an end to the decades-long subjugation and slaughter of the Palestinian people.
Less known than the words of the poem themselves is the fact that Refaat wrote “If I Must Die” for Shaimaa. As he detailed in his introduction to Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2014):
Now when I tell my daughter stories, I usually have in mind the generous Jewish hosts in Atlanta, whose five-year-old sweet daughter, Viola, kept asking me about optical illusions. I never gave Viola an answer to her question, because every time she asked it, my mind went to Shymaa, wishing she and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children had not been deprived by Israel of their right to live a decent life.
Sometimes I think we may one day find it in our hearts to forgive Israeli leaders (when, among other things, occupation ends, apartheid is abolished, justice prevails, equal rights are guaranteed to all, refugees return, and reparations are made), but I do not think we will ever forgive them for not allowing our children to live a normal life, to ask about optical illusions rather than who was killed and why and whether that noise was an Israeli bomb or a resistance rocket.
I want my children to plan, rather than worry about, their future and to draw beaches or fields or blue skies and a sun in the corner, not warships, pillars of smoke, warplanes, and guns.
Hopefully, the stories of Gaza Writes Back will help bring my daughter Shymaa and Viola together and give them consolation and solace to continue the struggle until Palestine is free. Until then, I will continue telling her stories.
If I Must Die
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
Refaat’s first grandchild, the infant boy he didn’t get the chance to meet, will never look to the sky for a kite again. Nor will the 15,000 other children killed in Gaza in the past six and a half months.
Shaimaa will never again find comfort in her late father’s words, or pass on his stories, or read his poems aloud to her husband and baby in rare moments of calm.
There will be no normal lives for those maimed and traumatized children left behind in Gaza’s ruins.
No optical illusions for them to pore over.
No tales to tell but this horror story, the ending of which still seems so very far away.
Press TV – April 26, 2024 US police have arrested more than 500 protesters during a crackdown against pro-Palestinian protesters on university campuses across the country on Thursday. Anti-riot police used chemical irritants and tasers against protesters, who set up camps in defiance of police warnings from Massachusetts to California, to protest against Israel’s savage […]
US campus crackdown: 500 pro-Palestinian protesters arrested
from thefreeonline on 26th April 2024 by Deutsche Welle dw.com
The link between predatory capitalism and the destruction of nature.
Activist Vandana Shiva, director of the Science, Technology and Ecology Research Foundation, based in New Delhi, India. Photo: Mindjazz Pictures
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From April 2, 2024
Vandana Shiva:
“Hunger is created before the temperature rises”
In an interview, Indian activist Vandana Shiva defends indigenous peoples’ knowledge and food sovereignty as a way to combat climate change and rising food prices.
In Tierra viva: my life in a biodiversity of movements, the author revisits 40 years of struggle in defense of food sovereignty and against what she calls the link between predatory capitalism and the destruction of nature.
“Drink water, enough food and be able to breathe cleanly. These are the basic flows that give us life. And when attempts are made to privatize and close them, what is threatened is the very possibility of living. At this point, if we make a very honest assessment, a large number of our fellow humans, other human beings, as well as other beings on Earth, are threatened and experiencing an extinction crisis,” states Shiva.
In an interview with DW, the scientist also affirms that Brazil needs to change the logic of large-scale production created by the globalized industrial agriculture model, giving way to organic agriculture as a way to combat rising prices.
“The mistake was betting everything on industrial agriculture, reducing agriculture to manufacturing, which uses fossil fuels and obtains raw materials. Globalization further reduces the food system. Before we ate ten thousand species of plants and now we sell corn, soybeans and cotton only because they are genetically modified and generate royalties for large companies,” she says.
DW: In her new book, Living Earth: My Life in a Biodiversity of Movements, she reviews environmental struggles that combine quantum physics with science, technology, and environmental policy.
Vandana Shiva: My values are the same. My orientation comes from the same things: protecting the Earth, defending Human Rights and Justice. When I started, there was a smaller lobby, such as the logging and mining lobby, among others. That was very little compared to what we have today.
Now, as globalization and neoliberalism have emerged, we have reached the point where large corporations want to control all life on Earth through standards and genetically modified organisms.
Continue reading “Vandana Shiva: protect the Earth, defend Human Rights and Justice /Eng/Portugués… video..”from thefreeonline updated July 2024 by Claytoonz
—Weinstein and Cosby were eventually convicted after a multitude of depraved attacks on women, yet big money and endless appeals have freed them. No wonder women don’t often report rapes.
A lot of rape victims never report their rapes because most men, and a lot of women, won’t believe them. They often face persecution, especially if the perpetrators are extremely powerful men. It took years to get charges and trials against rapists like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.
The case against Harvey Weinstein helped launch the #MeToo movement. He was convicted in 2020. This morning, the New York Court of Appeals overturned the ruling and ordered a retrial, ruling that the judge in the original trial improperly allowed testimony about allegations that weren’t part of the case.
The court wrote in a 4-3 decision, “We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes.”
What will this court do next? Overturn the verdict of the E. Jean Carroll case?
Victim Blaming and Fat Wallets enable Macho Predators to Impumity
The good news here is that Weinstein will remain in prison because he’s serving a 16-year sentence on a separate case in California, where he was convicted in 2022 of rape, forced oral copulation and sexual misconduct.
The New York case sentenced him to 23 years. He was convicted of forcibly performing oral sex on a former production assistant, Mimi Haleyi, in 2006, and rape in the third degree for an attack on actress Jessica Mann in 2013.
Dissenting judge Madeline Singas wrote in her opinion that reversing Weinstein’s conviction amounted to “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative” and “continued a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”
One of those in this disturbing trend was the case of Bill Cosby, another that helped start the #MeToo movement, that was overturned in 2021 after he was convicted of sexual assault in 2018 In Pennsylvania.
Cosby had served three years of a ten-year sentence when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that a “non-prosecution agreement” with a previous prosecutor meant he never should have been charged even though over 50 women have accused him of sexual assault and rape.
There don’t seem to be any plans to retry Cosby who is now free to return to pushing roofies and Jell-O.
The #MeToo movement may have lost steam over the past few years but the #WarOnWomen seems to be gaining strength.
from thefreeonline on 26 Apr, 2024 info from Home News/Agencies
Poland agrees to hunt down men. Kiev stops issuing passports/papers, to men outside the country and ups Border Guards to 95K
About 300 Ukrainians have blocked their country’s consular office in Warsaw, demanding passports they have been denied under Kiev’s new mobilization rules.
Men between the ages of 18 and 60 can no longer receive documents at consular offices outside Ukraine, the Foreign Ministry said earlier this week. Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba has confirmed he ordered the measure, intended to force refugees of fighting age to return and be conscripted into the military.
“It’s a disaster,” AFP quoted a 46-year-old artilleryman on the Donetsk front, identified only as Alexander.“When a person knows when he is going to be demobilized he will have a different attitude. If he is like a slave then it will not lead to anything good,” he added.
War to the last Ukrainian: Video evidence
On Wednesday evening, several hundred Ukrainians locked down the ‘Document’ Passport Service Center in Warsaw, located at the Blue City shopping center.
EU state ready to help Ukraine hunt down military-aged men.. Zelensky’s reforms, set to take effect next month, will lower the draft age from 27 to 25, tighten exemptions, and oblige all men, regardless of eligibility, to report to a conscription office to “update” their personal data.
Mobilizing for defeat: The Zelensky regime insists more Ukrainians must die before it’s all over.
Ukrainian casualties are now nearly 500,000 men and despite military squads snatching men off the streets it is impossible to replace them. Meanwhile Russia has suffered a fraction of men lost, due to its tactics of avoiding direct battles and mass attacks, Putin has repeated there will be no new call-up due to massive volunteer numbers.
Russian conscripts commit suicide and flee army bases…- New conscription wave could cause ‘panic’ in Ukraine –
Ukrainian soldiers surviving were promised to be stood down after 3 years compulsory service under martial law, but the new Conscription Law has ruled that they must continue fighting indefinitely, causing fury in the demoralised ranks.. see Ukraine forcing Troops to Keep Fighting after 3 yrs at Front- risks Mutiny as over 400K have ‘fallen’Troops
Ukrainian women should prepare for conscription – top Kiev official – Ukraine buys 50,000 women’s military uniforms
All Ukrainian men between age 18 and 60 will have to register, including those abroad. Failure to do so will count as evading military service. To make sure that compliance can be policed easily, all registered men must have their registration papers on them at all times.
The Free 