Demonstrators block highways and shut down travel in Illinois, California, New York and the Pacific Northwest.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march during a ‘Strike for Gaza’ protest, calling for a permanent ceasefire [Mario Tama/AFP]
Pro-Palestinian protesters have blocked major roads in the states of Illinois, California, New York and the Pacific Northwest, temporarily preventing travel into some of the United States’s most heavily used airports, onto the Golden Gate and Brooklyn bridges and along a busy West Coast highway.
In Chicago, protesters linked arms and blocked lanes of Interstate 190 leading into O’Hare International Airport at about 7am (12:00 GMT) on Monday in a demonstration they said was part of a global “economic blockade to free Palestine”, according to Rifqa Falaneh, one of the organisers.
Protesters say they chose O’Hare in part because it is one of the largest airports in the US. Dozens were arrested, according to Falaneh. Chicago police said that “multiple people” were taken into custody after a protest where people obstructed traffic but did not provide a detailed count.
In California, demonstrators blocked lanes on the northbound I-880 in Oakland by chaining themselves to barrels, while a separate group of protesters with banners disrupted traffic on the southbound lanes. On the Golden Gate Bridge, protesters impeded traffic in both directions, displaying a banner that read, “Stop the world for Gaza.”
In Eugene, Oregon, protesters blocked Interstate 5, shutting down traffic on the major highway for about 45 minutes.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, protesters marching into Brooklyn blocked Manhattan-bound traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Antiwar protesters have held demonstrations in Chicago nearly every day since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel, which killed about 1,200 people, triggered an Israeli assault on Gaza that has killed more than 33,700 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
O’Hare warned travellers on social platform X to find alternative ways to get to the airport, with car travel “substantially delayed this morning due to protest activity”.
Some travellers stuck in standstill traffic left their cars and walked the final leg to the airport along the freeway, trailing their luggage behind them.
“This was an inconvenience,” Madeline Hannan from suburban Chicago said in a telephone interview as she was heading to Florida. “But in the grand scheme of things going on overseas, it’s a minor inconvenience.”
Inbound traffic towards O’Hare resumed at about 9am (14:00 GMT).
Heavy traffic at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, Monday [Nam Y Huh/AP]
Arrests and calls for Gaza ceasefire
Near Seattle, the Washington State Department of Transportation said a demonstration closed the main road to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Social media posts showed people holding a banner and waving Palestinian flags while standing on the highway, which reopened about three hours later.
About 20 protesters were arrested at the Golden Gate Bridge demonstration and traffic resumed shortly after noon, according to the California Highway Patrol. The agency said officers were making arrests at two points on the highway, including one spot where roughly 300 protesters refused orders to disperse.
“Attempting to block or shut down a freeway or state highway to protest is unlawful, dangerous, and prevents motorists from safely reaching their destinations,” the agency said in a statement.
Oregon State Police said 52 protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct following the Interstate 5 protest in Eugene, Oregon, about 177km (110 miles) south of Portland. Six vehicles were towed from the scene.
New York Police made numerous arrests, saying 150 protesters were initially involved in the march at about 3:15 pm (19:15 GMT) but that the crowd grew quickly.
In San Antonio, protesters holding Palestinian flags obstructed both sides of the Valero Energy Company headquarters, causing traffic congestion on the city’s northwest side.
Pro-Palestinian protests hit the US [Mario Tama/AFP]
Starting with a false view of Darwin’s theory of Evolution right wing leaders of opinion have built a tower of lies to justify their crimes against humanity, as argued from the beginning by the anarchist Peter Kropotkin.
Kropotkin was no pacifist, he was jailed and escaped as a terrorist. But his writings show us how our aggression can be harnessed through love and respect for our fellows and our dying planet. ‘Humans are innately cooperative and empathetic, and this gives us the basis for a new kind of non-capitalist system’.
The researchers claim to be surprised by their findings, but is it really so remarkable?
A large and impressive study of children’s progress into adulthood found that those who display bullying and aggressive behaviour at school are more likely to prosper at work.
They land better jobs and earn more. The association of senior positions with bullying and dominance behaviour will doubtless come as a shock to many.
This is not to suggest that all people with good jobs or who run organisations are bullies.
Far from it.
It’s not hard to think of good people in powerful positions. What this tells us is that we don’t need aggressive people to organise our lives for us. Neither good leadership, nor organisational success, nor innovation, insight or foresight, require a dominance mindset. In fact, all can be inhibited by someone throwing their weight around.
Whether in game theory or the study of other species, you quickly discover how the dominance behaviour of a few can harm society as a whole.
For example, a study of cichlid fish found that dominant males have “lower signal-to-noise ratios” (sound and fury, signifying nothing) and counter-productive impacts on group performance.
Anything sound familiar?
A win for bullies is a loss for everyone else: their success is a zero-sum game.
Or negative-sum: the first study I mentioned also found that school bullies are more likely to abuse alcohol, smoke, break the law and suffer mental health problems in later life.
But the bullies’ triumph is also an outcome of the dominant narrative of our times: for the past 45 years, neoliberalism has characterised human life as a struggle that some must win and others must lose.
Only through competition, in this quasi-Calvinist religion, can we discern who the worthy and unworthy might be.
The competition, of course, is always rigged. The point of neoliberalism is to provide justifications for an unequal and coercive society, a society where bullies rule.
It’s a perfect circle: neoliberalism generates inequality; and inequality, as another paper shows, is strongly associated with bullying at school. With greater disparities in income and status, stress rises, competition sharpens, and the urge to dominate intensifies. The pathology feeds itself.
..The essential background to understand the unthinkable: a 21st century genocide broadcast live 24/7 to the whole planet.
In what can be considered the most crucial podcast of 2024 so far, Professor Michael Hudson – the author of seminal works such as Super-Imperialism and the recent The Collapse of Antiquity , among others – clinically lays down the essential background to understand the unthinkable: a 21st century genocide broadcast live 24/7 to the whole planet.
In an email exchange, Prof. Hudson detailed he’s now essentially “spilling the beans” about how, “50 years ago when I worked at the Hudson Institute with Herman Kahn [the model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove], Israeli Mossad members were being trained, including Uzi Arad. I made two international trips with him, and he outlined to me pretty much what has happened today. He became head of Mossad and is now Netanhayu’s advisor.”
Prof. Hudson shows how “the basic Gaza plan is how Kahn designed the Vietnam War’s division into sectors, with canals cutting off each village, as the Israelis are doing to Palestinians. Also already at time, Kahn pinpointed Balochistan as the area to foment disruption in Iran and the rest of the region.”
It’s not by accident that Balochistan has been CIA jewel territory for decades, and recently with the added incentive of the disruption by any means necessary of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – a key connectivity node of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Prof. Hudson then connects the major dots: “As I understand it, what the U.S. is doing with Israel is a dress rehearsal for it to move on to Iran and the South China Sea. As you know, there is no Plan B in American strategy for a very good reason: If anyone criticize Plan A, they’re considered not to be a team player (or even Putin’s Puppet), so critics have to leave when they see that they won’t be promoted. That’s why U.S. strategists won’t stop and re-think what they’re doing.”
Isolate them in strategic hamlets, then kill them
In our email exchange, Prof. Hudson remarked “this is basically what I said” in reference to the podcast with Ania K, drawing on his notes (here is the full, revised transcript). Fasten your seat belts: unvarnished truth is more lethal than a hypersonic missile hit.
On the Zionist military strategy in Gaza:
“My background in the 1970s at Hudson Institute with Uzi Arad and other Mossad trainees. My field was BoP, but I sat in on many meetings discussing military strategy, and I flew to Asia twice with Uzi and got to know him.
The U.S./Israeli strategy in Gaza is based in many ways on Herman Kahn’s plan that was carried out in Vietnam in the 1960s.
Herman’s focus was systems analysis. Start by defining the overall aim and then, how do we achieve it?
First, isolate them in Strategic Hamlets. Gaza has been carved up into districts, requiring electronic passes for entry from one sector to another, or into Jewish Israel to work.
First thing: kill them. Ideally by bombing, because that minimizes domestic casualties for your army.
The genocide that we are seeing today is the explicit policy of Israel’s founders: the idea of “a land without a people” means a land without non-Jewish people. They were to be driven out – starting even before the official founding of Israel, in the first Nakba, the Arab holocaust.
Two Israeli Prime Ministers were members of the Stern Gang of terrorists. They escaped from their British jail and joined to found Israel.
What we are seeing today is the Final Solution to this plan. It also dovetails into U.S. desires to control the Middle East and its oil reserves. For U.S. diplomacy, the Middle East IS (in caps) oil. And ISIS is part of America’s foreign legion since it was first organized in Afghanistan to fight the Russians.
That is why Israeli policy has been coordinated with the U.S.. Israel is the main U.S. client oligarchy in the Middle East. Mossad does most handling of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and wherever else the U.S. may send ISIS terrorists. Terrorism and even the present genocide is central to U.S. geopolitics.
But as the U.S. learned in the Vietnam War, populations protest and vote against the President who supervises this war. Lyndon Johnson couldn’t make a public appearance without crowds chanting. He had to sneak out the side entrance of hotels where he was speaking.
To prevent an embarrassment such as Seymour Hersh describing the My Lai massacre, you block journalists from the battlefield. If they are there, you kill them. The Biden-Netanyahu team has targeted journalists in particular.
So the ideal is to kill the population passively, to minimize visible bombing. And the line of least resistance is to starve the population. That has been Israeli policy since 2008.”
And don’t forget to starve them
Prof. Hudson makes a direct reference to a Sara Roy piece in The New York Review of Books, citing a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to the Secretary of State on November 3rd, 2008. The cable reads, “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, Israeli officials have confirmed to [embassy officials] on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.”
That has led, according to Prof. Hudson, to Israel “destroying fishing boats and greenhouses of Gaza to deprive it from feeding itself.
Next, it has joined with the United States to block United Nations food aid and that of other countries. The U.S. quickly withdrew from the UN relief agency as soon as hostilities began, doing so immediately after the ICJ finding of plausible genocide. It was the major funder of this agency. The hope was that this would set back its activities.
Answer: The UK Government & their behavioural science advisors Health Advisory & Recovery Team | April 15, 2024 In the knowledge that people are already in a state of heightened anxiety, what government would choose to further frighten and shame them? When citizens have amended their lifestyles in order to function under difficult circumstances, what […]
On Monday April 15, a group of Kaurna Yerta based activists held a ‘die in’ at Senator Penny Wong’s office to protest the government’s ongoing complicity in, and facilitation of, the genocide occurring in Gaza – a genocide which has been enabled by international forces, like Australia, to continue for over six months. This die […]
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