WATCH: Concerning Violence

Black Rooted

Black Rooted review, 2018: “Göran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning Violence is the first major film to grapple with the work of the influential Martinican author and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon since Isaac Julien’s biographical documentary Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995). Whereas the earlier film took a holistic, if esoteric, approach to appraising Fanon’s life and ideas (including his upbringing in Martinique, education in France and work in Algeria), the punchy Concerning Violence focuses on a specific sliver: the opening chapter of Fanon’s classic text The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which the author posits the act of one nation colonising another as a form of pure, subjugating violence. Fanon also discusses violence – in the context of uprising and rebellion – as a means of liberation and physical, spiritual catharsis for the oppressed.

When Fanon’s book was initially published in France, it was banned almost immediately by the authorities, who saw it as a recklessly incendiary glorification of violence. This negative view was only burnished by the book’s preface, written by Fanon supporter Jean-Paul Sartre, which wholeheartedly endorsed the thesis of violence as a cleansing act and, according to Fanon biographer David Macey, overshadowed the actual work. However, as the academic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains in the brief, informative contextual preface that begins Olsson’s film, such a reading fails to appreciate Fanon’s nuance; specifically, it neglects to address his anguish – rooted in the realities of his experiences in French-ruled Algeria – at the cyclical, decidedly non-glamorous tragedy of the very poorest people being reduced, and subjected, to violence.

Concerning Violence, then, represents a welcome attempt to reframe and interrogate an influential but highly contested historical text. As in his previous film, The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011), Swedish director Olsson has raided the TV news archives of his home country and emerged with a fount of grainy, absorbing footage, presumably hitherto forgotten. He structures the material into nine chapters of varying length (the film’s subtitle is Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense), and each focuses on a specific struggle for liberation in one of a number of African countries, including Angola, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso; the footage dates from the mid-1960s up to the late 1980s.

Though at first glance Concerning Violence may seem almost utilitarian in its stark, unfussy formalism, Olsson puts his personal stamp on Fanon’s work. Complementary passages from the text are narrated over the images by singer and activist Lauryn Hill, whose delivery – throaty and languid, but also somehow urgent and incantatory – seems designed to evoke the alacrity of the book’s writing: Fanon was terminally ill with leukaemia when he set to work, and he composed and dictated it to his wife Josie in a remarkable ten-week spell.

For a further rhetorical, stylishly pedagogical flourish, much of the text is simultaneously imposed on screen in a white serif font. At this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Olsson mentioned that this device was inspired by the music video for Prince’s state-of-the-nation anthem Sign o’ the Times (1987). Also notable is Neo Muyanga’s subtle score of roiling, percussive jazz, augmented by peals of muted trumpet that ring out like warning clarions. This forceful stylistic unity, added to the binding agent of Fanon’s torrentially persuasive and poetic language, ensures that Concerning Violence resounds as a far more cohesive statement than The Black Power Mixtape.

Olsson and his editing team structure Concerning Violence so that the archival passages comment on each other even as they are in dialogue with Fanon’s text. Consider two back-to-back segments near the start. With Fanon’s words, delivered by Hill (“For if the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists”), ringing in our ears, the film picks up with a black journalist, newly released from a five-year jail spell in Rhodesia. He speaks calmly of his realisation that, from slavery to colonialism, and up to the institutionalised racism and state-sanctioned torture in the country that would become Zimbabwe, the “black man is at the bottom of everything”; torture, he says, made him “feel indifferent”.

This disturbing, layered film is mercifully free of pat attempts to bring things up to date: chronologically speaking, it concludes in 1987. Yet there’s no doubt that its final passage – in which Europe is described as “literally the creation of the third world”, and America as a “monstrous” colonial power – is intended to give the viewer plenty to process with regard to contemporary nations still suffering the pronounced after-effects of colonisation. In many cases, Fanon’s astringent words seem as relevant today as ever.”

Aug 15

2023

Wrong Kind of Green

Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Class Struggle Imperialism

Remembering Luciana Bohne. The Terrorism of Moral Indignation

Rest in peace Luciana Bohne. A retired academic, Luciana’s long life was almost a synthesis of the turbulence of the 20th century. She lived under three systems: fascism, socialism, and capitalism. She had known war, been a refuge and displaced person, an immigrant, and a failed aspirant to bourgeois respectability. [Independent Journalist Corner: A Conversation with Luciana Bohne, Black Agenda Report, March 21, 2018]. Prior to retirement, Luciana was a co-founder of Film Criticism, a journal of cinema studies, and taught at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. Luciana was a fierce anti-imperialist, a brilliant Marxist, and a wonderful mentor to many.

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AUGUST 11, 2017, CounterPunch
The Terrorism of Moral Indignation
BY LUCIANA BOHNE

To be sure, the whole of Western culture is complicit, but what astounds is the complicity of what defines itself as left. Notably, the complicity of those among the left’s comfortable and intellectual “tendencies,” usually called “liberals.” But in general, a whole language has vanished from the Western left’s vocabulary: class struggle, international solidarity, peace among peoples, social justice, exploitation, poverty. They are so illiterate in left theory and experience that the call the ruling class’s booth on their faces, “the deep state.” This today in the West is an amalgam (rather than a conscious political program) of a loose and dangerous left. It dreams, if it dreams at all, of a revolution without struggle. The answer to that pietism is force. Whole nations wiped off the face of the earth.

We now, on this loose left, trade in our critical faculties at the theatre of propaganda. In return, the propaganda pounds, batters, and sequesters our emotions so that we end up identifying with the narrative of power. The narrative insists that the West has the Holy Grail. It insists that it has a messianic mission to improve the world by sharing the Grail’s liberal values. The old conceit of liberal humanism, thus, returns to occupy our psyche, and it’s the same liberal humanism that in the 19^th century enslaved the “lesser breeds” of the planet. Once again, we pick up the “white man’s burden” and his “civilizing mission” to lift up darkling “junior Brothers” from “savagery” and “barbarism” into our magnificent, magnanimous, culturally superior self-image. Massacres, famines, epidemics, and genocides follow.

Who galvanizes the left today against imperialism as Fidel Castro did with his uncompromising demand at the United Nations General Assembly in 1966 that “the exploitation of poor countries by rich countries must stop”? “We hear a lot of talk about human rights,” he said in the 1970s, as Jimmy Carter’s White House launched the rhetoric of human rights, “but we have to talk about the rights of humanity.”

“The rights of humanity,” who remembers them? Chief among them the right to sovereignty, perhaps? The right to foreign non-interference? To living free of threats, sanctions, partition, dismemberment, balkanization, invasion, and occupation? To solving one’s own problems in one’s own country? To choosing one’s economic system? To refusing to become a protectorate of the Big Bully on the Potomac?

What happens when the “rights of humanity” are trampled? Since 1999, with Bill Clinton’s unauthorized war for secession of Kosovo from Yugoslavia (reduced to Serbia and Montenegro by then), unopposed and even cheered by progressive segments of the loose left,

“Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes people and sucks the blood like a vampire.”

These are not the words of a contemporary leftist. These are the words of German socialist Karl Liebnecht, co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany, both murdered by the German social democrat state in 1919. He was referring to WW I, which, alone among the social democrats in the parliament of 1914, he stood up to oppose.

We now, on the loose left, rally to the call of “human rights,” which are invariably being abused outside our national borders. You’d think we lived in the Promised Land, so convinced are we of the responsibility to protect “less fortunate” human beings abroad, who together with the injury of our sanctions and bombs have to endure the insult of our condescension.

We now, on the loose left, cannot see beyond the imbecility of our arrogance that we lack most of the rights said to be “human” by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights right here at home. A report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) summarizes the inability of our society to protect its most vulnerable members, which measure alone judges the vibrancy of a democracy:

“Many US laws and practices, particularly in the areas of criminal and juvenile justice, immigration, and national security, violate internationally recognized human rights. Often, those least able to defend their rights in court or through the political process—members of racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, children, the poor, and prisoners—are the people most likely to suffer abuses.”

Our masters, who incarcerate at home 2.37 million people, the largest prison population in the world, “caused in part by mandatory minimum sentencing and excessively long sentences” (HRW) and detain twelve million people per year in county jails, raise our moral indignation against cherry-picked crusades for human rights abroad. They use this manufactured indignation as a license to attack and terrorize whole nations.

In Afghanistan, in 2001, we bombed to liberate women; we are still there, but we hear no more of the sorrow and the pity of women’s plight. In Iraq, in 2003, we invaded to liberate Iraqis from the “dictator” Saddam Hussein, and one to two million Iraqis were liberated from their lives, millions more from their home and their country. Fallujah alone accuses—left more chemically poisoned than Hiroshima. In Syria, we claim to fight “to democratize” the country and at the same time the Isis cutthroats, but it took the legitimate Russian intervention to prevent a caliphate of cutthroats from ruling in Damascus.

In Yemen,

“In March [2015], a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states began a military campaign against the Houthis in Yemen. The US provided intelligence, logistical support, and personnel to the Saudi Arabian center planning airstrikes and coordinating activities, making US forces potentially jointly responsible for laws-of-war violations by coalition forces.” (HRW)

Most on the loose left ignored Obama’s crimes, among which the war in Yemen may rank as the most cynical, heartless, and inhuman. It even classifies as biological warfare, because bombing water treatment plants then leaving people to die of cholera epidemics cannot be called anything else. Meningitis cases are breaking out. Two UN aid flights to Sanaa are authorized to leave from Saudi Arabia every day for famine relief. Saudi Arabia is refusing fuel. No reason given, reports The Independent on 5 August. Saudi Arabia blockades the Yemen’s airspace. Yemen’s agony continues. No stirrings on the left.

So, too, they ignored Obama’s drone attacks on Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. So, too, they ignored this:

“The US restored full military assistance to Egypt in April [2015], despite a worsening human rights environment, lifting restrictions in place since the military takeover by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2013. Egypt resumed its position as the second-largest recipient of US military assistance, worth $1.3 billion annually, after Israel. In June, the US lifted its hold on military assistance to the Bahraini military despite an absence of meaningful reform, which was the original requirement for resuming the aid.” (HRW)

And this:

“In September [2015], Obama waived provisions of the Child Soldiers Prevention Act to allow four countries—the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan—to continue to receive US military assistance, despite their continued use of child soldiers.” (HRW)

And this:

“Hundreds of thousands of children work on US farms. US law exempts child farmworkers from the minimum age and maximum hour requirements that protect other working children. Child farmworkers often work long hours and risk pesticide exposure, heat illness, and injuries. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency banned children under 18 from handling pesticides. Children who work on tobacco farms frequently suffer vomiting, headaches, and other symptoms consistent with acute nicotine poisoning.” (HRW)

The loose left now calls that grotesque excrescence in the White House a fascist, as if Trump had replaced an administration of enlightened humanitarians. They are calling for virtual presidenticide so that the rule of that enlightened international “vampire,” the Democratic Party, can be restored. But let me tell you: he’s only the last of the “fascists” in a long line since 1945. The loose left just hasn’t noticed because the loose left has no concept of class struggle. It has, therefore, no critical equipment to include imperialism—the war of the class of international imperialist on the class of colonial or semi-colonial peoples—in the catalogue of the crimes of fascism.

Our planners are not stupid. They know how to maintain their minority’s primacy by waging class war. They not only exercise it on the “proletariat” at home but also across the map of the world. In 1948, George Kennan, the architect of the policy of containment, which launched the Cold War, recommended inequality in international relations—that’s war by the imperialist class at the center against whole national peoples at the peripheries. Imperialism, therefore, is just another form of class war.

“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.” (Memo by George Kennan, Head of the US State Department Policy Planning Staff. Written February 28, 1948, Declassified June 17, 1974)

By “we,” Kennan does not mean the 99% of Americans. He means the 1%. The foreign policy he recommends is class-vested and is kept secret, for practical reasons, from the rest of us for two decades. That’s because the resources to support this policy protecting the elite has to be extracted from the rest of us, and counted in losses to social welfare and progress. Class is a relation of power, in which one class determines the direction of the whole of society. This is one example.

Fascism has many faces, but the most constant is that of the supremacist delusion that the West is the carrier of “universal values” and that, as exclusive interpreter and custodian of these values, the West is obligated to act as watchdog of democracy and human rights throughout the globe. In his inaugural address of January 1997, Bill Clinton assumed for the United States the planetary leadership of this humanitarian imperative:

“America stands alone as the world’s indispensable nation. . . . May God strengthen our hands for the good work ahead, and always, always bless our America.”

This is not universalism; this is ethnocentric hubris. This is the terrifying message of one nation “uber alles.” This is totalitarian dogma. This is a profession of democratic faith without the slightest credibility because it does not aim at democratizing international relations but at subjecting them to the discipline and image of the “indispensible nation.” This, in one word, is imperialism–fascism in action. Karl Liebnecht saw it clearly, one-hundred years ago:

“In capitalist history, invasion and class struggle are not opposites, as the official legend would have us believe, but one is the means and the expression of the other.”

Why can the loose left today not see it that way? Why does it abstract the concept of imperialism from the conduct of the Western political order, thus mutilating the totality of reality, especially the reality reserved to the peoples of colonial origins now being reinvaded, partitioned, looted, left to chaos? Why do they see a defense of “human rights” where others, especially the victims, see subjugation, neocolonialism, and imperialism? What blinds the moral vision of the left to the point of reserving the fascist brand to the crude jester, Trump, but denying it to the slick charmer Obama of the Drone-Kill-List, destroyer of Lybia and Syria, architect of regime change in Ukraine, advocate of war with Russia, harasser of China, enabler of Israel in its assault on Gaza, global spymaster, deporter-in-chief, most successful weapons salesman since 1945, including to that obscene abuser of human rights, autocratic Saudi Arabia? This uneven distribution of the fascist brand insures that the next president will be another “fascist,” but more polished, “educated,” grinning confidently with sharp teeth from a shark’s mouth. Trump’s mouth pouts; the image does not inspire confidence.

It’s not that the evidence of the devastation by the “cyclone” or the “vampire sucking the blood” is lacking. Since Clinton assigned to the United States an “indispensible” role in the world, it has bloated its defense budget, embarked with allies and vassals on a war against a tactic (“terrorism”), covering up the war of re-colonization (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, Chad), organized and led coups (Haiti, Honduras, Ukraine, Egypt, Venezuela), mounted “color revolutions” in the former republics of Eastern Europe, dispatched NATO to encircle Russia with aggressive missiles, threatened on a systematic basis North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran in violation of the UN Charter, bloodied the planet with countless uncounted corpses and blighted it with hordes of desperate refugees, blockaded and sanctioned whole countries at will, and virtually scrapped the edifice of international law–which it had itself erected as a monument to liberal democracy after WW II– while claiming to be acting in defense of universal values. The country that imposed the strictest protectionist policies in the world in the 19^th century now recognizes no borders, no national sovereignty, no limits to its expansion.

What is to be done?

End imperialism. As long as imperialism and imperialist centers exist, so long there will be wars. The politics of indignation; the campaigns for human rights do not oppose imperialism; they facilitate it. One has to be either stupid or complicit if he cannot see that the US supports two states with the most egregious records of violations of human rights—Saudi Arabia and Israel—while demonizing the socially progressive government of Venezuela as a “dictatorship.” One has to be either stupid or complicit to call for the removal of President Assad from Syria for being undemocratic, while installing a neo-fascist regime in Ukraine. One has to be either stupid or complicit to believe Iran is the sponsor of terror when all indications point to Saudi Arabia. And then there is Russia. There we risk thermonuclear war—the loss not just of human rights but the loss of life on the planet. We shall become death. That’s what we’re playing with when we consent to distributing human rights across the world to the sound of the crescendo of exploding bombs.

To begin the opposition to war and imperialism, we must start, at a minimum, with a demand to return to the cardinal principle in the Charter of the United Nations for the prevention of aggressive war by respecting the sovereignty of nations. No nation should claim “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) if all nations are equal before international law. That responsibility rests with the UN Security Council, in the interest of peace among nations, which alone has the monopoly on authorizing war. We must, therefore, refuse to empower Western state terrorism through the melodrama and emotionalism of moral indignation. We must remember that Hitler invaded countries on the pretext of defense of “human rights” of German minorities. We must remember, too, that the Charter’s defense of sovereignty was written in response to Hitler’s violation of “human rights” in the name of “human rights.” That his policy broke the peace among nations and set the world on fire. That the whole trauma ended with two mushroom clouds in the sky.

To begin a serious opposition to imperialism and war, we must re-create a sound left—a principled left– and denounce those agents of the fake left who contribute to the escalation of Western military aggression under the banner of “human rights” or any other liberal claptrap such as identity politics, which pleads for “respect” from the state instead of claiming class power, or the power to contrast the state’s foreign and domestic policies:

“These pseudo-left figures and organizations function as what amount to specialized NGOs, acting, much like the National Endowment for Democracy and its constituent elements, as political fronts and facilitators for the CIA and US imperialism.”

A sound left must re-discover, behind the lies and distortions written by its enemies, the theories, the practices, the language, the history, the science, and the errors (most important) of the left’s once living cultures and societies—a left that changed the world. This left must extend the hand of friendship to systems of states that continue to survive in a hostile capitalist world with a socialist perspective. We live in an age of counter-revolutionary reaction in the West. Soon, we’ll forget that we are human and that we can make our own history. Shouldn’t we re-educate ourselves to a conscious, informed, organized, purposeful left or shall we let Hitler have the last word and a posthumous victory? “The problem of how the future . . . can be secured,” he wrote in Mein Kampf about Germany, “is the problem of how Marxism can be exterminated.”

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Luciana Bohne, Why We Persist:

“We are “like-minded,” in general, but we don’t know everything. So, the idea is to grow in knowledge, to correct mistakes in theory and practice by learning from each other. We are not trying to change the minds of the willfully ignorant or those set in their views, happily brainwashed. We are trying to strengthen each other, grow intellectually and factually. We’re not into conversion. I don’t want to convert the fascist, the anti-Soviet, the liberal-stupid. I don’t have any of those among my friends. No Trots, no nazis, no MSM liberal parrots. We don’t have a party–but we have each other. We also work to fight propaganda and disinformation by the MSM. The fight for truth is the frontline now. Much of what I said in 2003 before audiences at Edinboro about Iraq BEFORE the invasion was the truth: no WMDs. I’m proud of that. Truth is the first front in the battle for people’s consciousness, but truth requires knowledge and research. And that’s what we do, not only on our own time but together. We share what we know. So knowledge grows. Strength grows. Our truth is informed.” [With thanks to Ketana Saxon for sharing.]

Mar 23

2023

Wrong Kind of Green

Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Capitalism Imperialism

WATCH: Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood: The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire [2008]

Published April 11, 2013

“This Globalisation Lecture entitled “The Imperial Paradox: Ideologies of Empire” was given by Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood, Professor Emerita of Political Science at York University (Toronto, Canada) on 29 October 2008 at SOAS, University of London.

Professor Ellen Meiksins Wood is the author of many major books on the history of political thought and the history of capitalism. Her most recent works include: Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages (2008); Empire of Capital (2005); and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (2002)” [Source]

[“Ellen Meiksins Wood was born in New York City in 1942. Her parents were Latvian Jews and active Bundists, who had left their home in dramatic circumstances in the late 1930s. After her parents’ divorce and the end of the war, she went to Germany with her mother, who, on assignment from the Jewish Labor Committee in New York, was working with displaced persons. Her earliest experiences were thus coloured by both the leftist commitments of her family and the Left’s response to the tragedies wrought by fascism and the war.”][Source: A Political Marxist: Ellen Meiksins Wood, 1942-2016]

Mar 22

2023

Wrong Kind of Green

Nature Conservancy, Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Barbados Belize Blue Bonds Climate Capitalism Commodification of Nature Credit Suisse Debt-for-climate swaps Debt-for-nature swaps ESG Gabon GEF IMF Imperialism Sri Lanka The Nature Conservancy The Royal Foundation UNDP World Bank “Rhino bond”

Before Collapse, Credit Suisse Quietly Conquered an Obscure Debt Market – Debt-for-nature Swaps

Bloomberg

March 21, 2023

By Natasha White

Image source: Carbon Credits website, November 9, 2022, “Debt-for-Nature Swaps Are Drawing Attention, Carbon Credits Play A Role”

The failure of the Swiss bank leaves a hole in the debt-for-nature market that analysts said could one day exceed $800 billion.

The collapse of Credit Suisse isn’t just worrying for the global financial system. It’s a banking crisis that also has real consequences for the fight against environmental degradation.

Before its rescue by Swiss rival UBS, Credit Suisse had quietly become a major player in an obscure market that purports to help developing countries ease their debt burdens in exchange for protecting nature. Known as debt-for-nature swaps, the complex financial instruments help governments restructure their debt to raise money that can be used to fund conservation efforts.

Credit Suisse was the sole structurer and arranger of the world’s largest debt-for-nature swap, a $364 million deal that it orchestrated in 2021 along with The Nature Conservancy, a charity, for Belize. Last year, it sealed another $150 million deal for Barbados.

The deals were likely a good source of profits for the bank, according to Daniel Munevar, an economic affairs officer at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The Belize deal was “free money for Credit Suisse because they hold no risk whatsoever,” he said. Part of the transaction was insured by the US International Development Finance Corp., which agreed to effectively cover payments if Belize defaulted. Credit Suisse helped design a similar instrument for Barbados, this time backed by the Inter-American Development Bank and TNC.

Officials from Belize, Barbados and TNC said that Credit Suisse’s troubles would have no impact on their existing debt-for-nature arrangements. But any new debt-swap deals that Credit Suisse may have had in the works “will not happen any time soon,” said Munevar.

While debt-for-nature swaps have been around since the 1980s, Credit Suisse has in recent years helped revive interest in the instruments and for the first time opened them up to institutional capital. The bank raised money for Belize and Barbados from pension funds including Sweden’s Alecta and Nuveen LLC, a unit of the US’s TIAA, by issuing so-called blue bonds tied to the deals.

Image source: Carbon Credits website, November 9, 2022, “Debt-for-Nature Swaps Are Drawing Attention, Carbon Credits Play A Role”

To do so, Credit Suisse developed complicated structures involving multiple “special purpose vehicles” responsible for payments that stand alone from the bank after the deal is closed, according to a sustainable bond investor with close knowledge of debt-nature swaps who asked not to be named. Those SPVs will probably insulate borrowers and investors from any fallout from Credit Suisse’s sale, the person said.

The convoluted setup has drawn criticism from sovereign debt experts for its high cost and lack of transparency. And the opaque terms of the Belize and Barbados deals — the first of their kind — mean outside analysts will struggle to assess precisely what comes next.

“We’re feeling around in a dark room,” said Sean Newman, a private investment adviser and former chief investment officer of Sagicor Group, a financial services conglomerate in the Caribbean. “It’s certainly very unprecedented and uncertain times. There may be a gap that will be created and the question then is: Who is going to take that?”

UBS, which declined to comment on the future of Credit Suisse’s debt-for-nature swaps, has indicated it plans to shrink the latter’s investment banking arm.

“Credit Suisse stands by the structures for these transactions, which deliver tangible benefits, as well as their transparency,” the bank said in a statement. “Credit Suisse continues to operate in its ordinary course of business and any suggestion otherwise is false and misleading.”

Several other countries have signaled they’re interested in debt-for nature swaps. Gabon, the world’s fourth most-forested nation, has proposed a $700 million restructuring to protect its marine life. Ecuador is working on an $800 million transaction, Reuters reported, and Sri Lanka is considering a $1 billion deal. Analysts expect the global debt-for-nature swaps market to eventually exceed $800 billion.

The instrument could be a crucial tool for poor countries struggling to find a way to repay debt and protect against nature loss. Thirty-seven low-income countries are currently in or at high risk of debt distress, according to the World Bank. A total of 18 emerging markets have dollar-denominated sovereign debt trading at distressed levels, according to data compiled in a Bloomberg index.Image text: “This project will harness the power of private finance to drive a fundamental change in how we approach conservation by focussing on measuring impact.”

Credit Suisse was also experimenting with other tools to help developing countries fund environmental protection. It was the sole structurer and joint book runner on the World Bank’s $150 million “Rhino bond,” a unique instrument designed to fund the protection of black rhinos in South Africa. The bank had also committed to spend 300 billion Swiss francs ($324 billion) on sustainable finance activities by 2030.

“Anytime there is a bank failure of this magnitude it has a ripple effect across the world,” said Ryan Straughn, an official in Barbados’ finance and economic affairs ministry. “The world cannot afford a financial crisis on top of the climate crisis.”

— With assistance by Sydney Maki and Antony Sguazzin

Mar 22

2023

Wrong Kind of Green

Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Africa C.I.A. Global South IMF Imperialism Nature Debt Swaps Nigeria Sanctions World Bank

WATCH: How American Imperialism Works [in 5 Minutes]

[Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (Editions 1968, 2003, 2021), ‘and forgive them their debts’ (2018), J is for Junk Economics (2017), Killing the Host (2015), The Bubble and Beyond (2012), Trade, Development and Foreign Debt (1992 & 2009) and of The Myth of Aid (1971), amongst many others.]

Apr 08

2022

Wrong Kind of Green

Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Pacifism as Pathology, Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Canadian Labour Congress Class war. Imperialsm Lockdowns Teamsters Truckers Protest Vaccine Mandates Working Class

Why Many Progressives Misrepresented and Condemned the Ottawa Trucker Protest

Chicago ALBA Solidarity

March 27, 2022

By Stansfield Smith

“Mothers hold the line.” – Photo: Cory Morningstar, Twitter, February 18, 2022, Ottawa Truckers Protest

Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” began with protesting rules implemented in January by the Canadian and later the US governments requiring truck drivers to be fully vaccinated to enter their country. It snowballed into a demonstration against dysfunctional coronavirus restrictions. The Ottawa trucker protesters demanded: No Lockdowns, No Mandates, No Vaccine Passports, and if not, that Trudeau resign.

Working people are increasingly angry at the failures of the neoliberal regimes in Canada and the US to meet our needs. Unfortunately, we on the left are not positioned to effectively utilize this sentiment and grow our forces, leaving an open field for leaders with rightwing solutions to fill the vacuum. They played on public resentment to advocate getting the state off our backs rather than our demand that the state prioritize our well-being.

Working class activists should participate and build these protests, bring working class solutions to the problems we confront and lead the people in fighting back. Instead, many on the left condemned the trucker convoy, or sat on the sidelines, seeing themselves as mere critics, not leaders in this class struggle.

Liberal Party Prime Minister Trudeau called the truckers “a few people shouting and waving swastikas,” a “fringe minority” conspiracy theorists “with the tinfoil hats.” They “don’t believe in science.” He threatened, “Do we tolerate these people?” These elitist anti-working class statements echo Hillary Clinton’s dubbing Trump supporters “deplorables.” The hysteria led by Trudeau and the corporate media even reached the point where a Member of Parliament absurdly declared trucker honking of horns meant Heil Hitler. Trudeau’s Big Business dictated covid policies even denied visas to vaccinated Cubans because they had Cuban, not Big Pharma vaccines.

Anti-trucker Leftists Repeat Trudeau’s Smears

Many left criticisms of the truckers follow the rulers’ talking points. For instance, they spread a corporate media cartoon smear, Bryan Palmer’s condemnation of the truckers as a “lumpen” alt-right petty bourgeois protest, as well as anti-war activist Stephen Gowans’ early attack on the Ottawa occupation as “a far-right movement of racists, evangelicals, union-haters, and conspiracy-minded lunatics, inspired and supported by the likes of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Elon Musk.” Gowans complained the Ottawa police had “done nothing to liberate the city” from what were peaceful protesters.

Rather than refuting the rulers’ smears, many either repeated them or remained silent in face of the onslaught. They, in effect, allied with the imperial state’s attacks on the truckers and their working-class allies. They compounded their error by making only mild objections to the central rightwing feature of the Ottawa occupation: Trudeau using martial law measures to crush peaceful protests – measures which could be used against leftists in the future if we become a social force.

What were some of the distortions so many disseminated in their unwitting role as transmission belts for ruling class propaganda against the truckers?

That the protesters were racists and fascists was repeated over and over. Enough evidence shows this was not a racist protest (and here), It was claimed, with scant evidence, that the protest contained numerous Nazi and Confederate flags. A photo showed a man with a Nazi flag and another one or two with a Confederate flag. One man had the Nazi flag on a long pole underneath a sign on top saying “F*ck Trudeau,” which could mean he was equating Trudeau with Nazis. The person holding a Confederate flag was considered to be a provocateur made to leave the protest. Government agent provocateurs have played a role in other Canadian protests.

Benjamin Dichter, who is Jewish, and key spokesperson for the protest, said “Let’s assume there were guys there who did have a Confederate flag. They believe in the Confederacy of states’ rights in a foreign nation? I don’t care. I’m not here to police people’s ideas.” In a swipe at Trudeau, Dichter added “I want to hear unacceptable opinions because I want to challenge them.”

Another Freedom Convoy leader was Metis, Tamara Lich. Pat King, a fanatic racist in the Nazi mold, was portrayed as convoy leader, but this was denied by the actual leaders (and here).

That the right funded the trucker protest became a key charge. Republicans do fund popular protests to further their aims. So do the Democrats, as the women’s marches testify. A protest bringing out masses of people likely involves corporate political party funding. It is a political mistake to condemn or boycott movements, MeToo, Black Lives Matter, anti-vaccine mandate, or climate change protests because they had corporate donors. To condemn a protest funded by Republican corporate donors, but not those funded by Democratic ones, given these donors serve the same ruling class owners of the US, is a double standard. To do so suggests aligning ourselves with the Democratic (or Liberal) Party faction of the ruling class.

Reports on big rightwing funders of the trucker convoy failed to establish significant dollar contributions. PressProgress gave “a round up of some of the big money donors.” The corporate donors listed contributed merely $67,300 of the $10 million raised. That amounts to less than 1% of the total, showing corporate donors gave very minor support.

GiveSendGo raised another $8.6 million for the protesters. The largest, $215,000 came from an anonymous donor, $90,000 from billionaire Thomas M. Siebel, and $75,000 from another anonymous donor. Even if we assume these three are by big rightwing donors, that amounts to $380,000, 4.4% of the total.

A Washington Post article on donors noted, “Only a handful of contributors gave more than $10,000 apiece,” which does not substantiate corporate and billionaire funding of the protests.

It seems these donations do not include seed money for the Freedom Convoy, but they do show it was no “fringe,” but gained broad support.

The GoFundMe platform raised $10 million dollars for the convoy before being shut down. The reason given was for “violating the platform’s Terms of Service prohibiting the ‘promotion of violence and harassment.’” Yet no protester had been charged with violence. Defenders of civil liberties should have condemned that repression, not approve of it.

That the trucker convoy represented a social fringe is belied simply by some news reports, such as this or this.
Many falsely claimed the Freedom Convoy protesters were anti-vaxxers, pointing out that 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. However, the protesters were united against vaccine mandates, not against vaccines. Benjamin Dichter and Chris Barber, two convoy leaders, said they were not anti-vaxxers but fully vaccinated.
Some asserted the truckers were petty bourgeois owner-operators, therefore not working class, because they owned their instruments of production. Even assuming some of the truckers are in the petty bourgeoisie, that in itself is no reason to condemn a petty bourgeois movement in struggle with the big bourgeoisie.

Aren’t owner-operators among the millions of workers who companies “contract out” to cut labor expenses and increase their profits? Are Uber drivers also middle-class owner operators? Or any worker hired by a business as an “independent contractor”? This new category of atomized workers is a product of the long neoliberal offensive to weaken solidarity among workers.

Many used Trump’s support for the truckers as another reason to condemn it. That makes no more sense than saying if Biden or Trudeau opposes the protest, we should too. This liberal-left fear and loathing of Trump ignores a number of commendable statements he made on issues anti-imperialists advocate for.
Some bolstered their attacks on the truckers by referring to the Teamsters and Canadian Labour Congress. The Canadian Teamsters condemned the trucker convoy as a “despicable display of hate lead by the political Right,” but provided no evidence to back that up. The statement said nothing against the central demands of the protest. The Teamsters represent only 15,000 long haul truck drivers of the 300,000 long haul drivers in Canada.

The Canadian Labour Congress condemned the protest but was also silent on vaccine mandates. “This is not a protest, it is an occupation by an angry mob trying to disguise itself as a peaceful protest.” Of course protesters are angry, otherwise they do not protest. Being angry does not mean you are not peaceful. The CLC adds “This occupation of Ottawa streets…is having a devastating effect on the livelihood of already struggling workers and businesses.” Such statements could be used against the Occupy Movement in 2011, or against Black Lives Matter protests, as Trump did. “Frontline workers, from retail to health workers, have been bullied and harassed.” Yet so was at least one pro-trucker Ottawa store owner bullied and harassed for simply donating to the protest.

True, the Freedom Convoy had no working class demands for government action to ease the hardships workers face. Neither did the CLC or Teamsters, actual workers class organizations with the social and economic weight to have their demands met.

Many followed Trudeau and claimed the convoy organizers were violent and extremists. However, the police reported no physical violence, and none of the protest leaders were arrested for violent acts.

Tamara Lich was charged with ‘counselling for the offense of committing Mischief,” convoy leader Chris Barber for the same charge, plus “counselling to commit the offense of Disobey a Police Order” and “counselling to commit the offense of Obstruct Police.” Pat King was charged with mischief, counselling to commit the offence of mischief, counselling to commit the offence of disobey court order, and counselling to commit the offence of obstruct police.

Many had claimed they were guilty of violence, sedition, and attempting to overthrow a “democratic” government. Here they are, charged with “counseling” mischief (interfering with or destroying someone’s property), telling people to defy a court order or police order. What activists have ever been innocent of these charges?

It was claimed the police had treated the protesters with kid gloves. Maybe. Yet, once the police cracked down, they used horses to trample some protesters. When the 2011 union protesters in Madison Wisconsin seized the Capitol building – not for a day but for weeks – the police were not only letting us enter and exit, but periodically joined the protest (and here). That was no sign that the Madison protests were rightwing, nor did leftists object to their solidarity.

As Caleb Maupin pointed out, liberals and leftists took the Fox News playbook to denounce the Black Lives Matter movement and used the same methods to attack the trucker protest. Those who support Black Lives Matter suddenly were okay with police repression of the Ottawa protests. By favoring government crackdown on peaceful protests, we gave the ruling class rope to hang ourselves with.

Working Class and Rightwing Programs towards Covid and Health care

Being vaccinated protects you from getting very sick if you have underlying conditions but does not protect you from being infected or infecting others. People know that, so resent government vaccine requirements.

Mandates work when applied by governments that put the protection of citizens over the protection of corporate profits – not the case in the United States or Canada. Targeted lockdowns once covid makes its appearance, constant testing of the population, combined with a wide array of public health measures neither Canada nor the US ever instituted, has enabled China to almost eliminate deaths from covid.

China contained covid long before their vaccine was even developed. China provided house to house care for those locked down, constant and widespread testing, as well as relatively free health care for all. As a result, China has had three covid related deaths since January 2021, while the US has had one million.

Nicaragua, which has a free, universal preventive health care system, has by far the lowest covid death rate per million inhabitants of all the Americas, yet never instituted any sort of mandate or lockdown, beyond wearing a mask inside public buildings.

Participate in the Ottawa Protests with Working Class Demands

While the demands of the trucker protest had some merit, the Freedom Convoy leaders were ideologically rightwing. Their view of health care as an individual responsibility does not conflict with the neoliberal model. This benefits those with the privileges and financial resources to handle it.

Our working class view sees the state as the protector of public health, since health is a public issue, not simply a “free” individual’s responsibility.

We missed an opportunity to participate in the Ottawa occupation and organize working class solidarity with our message: government should meet the health and economic needs of the people affected by the pandemic; the government protects big business and big pharma super profits during the pandemic while our standard of living suffers; health care is a community issue and should be a human right. It should focus on prevention, with continuous education of the public, and establish clinics in every neighborhood, cultivating regular interaction between the health workers and the community.

If we fail to help lead workers and popular struggles, we leave the field open for middle class or rightwing leaders. Even the sometimes liberal Nation recognized, “the far-right origins of the protest shouldn’t be an excuse for ignoring the fact it is attracting the support of a segment of the population that doesn’t identify with the far right but does feel economically marginalized and hurt by a pandemic now entering its third year…Those who have sympathy for the convoy tend to be poorer, younger, and less educated.”

Some activists did stand for the working class approach to the Ottawa occupation. Dust James, a trucker, encouraged the left to join the protesters and explain to them that all truckers share a common problem with others: small businesses and workers are being crushed by the larger monopolies, big banks are ripping off all of us.

Richard Wolff said leftists made a serious error by not actively participating in and solidarizing with the trucker protest, showing workers how to use their power to achieve their demands. A struggle to push back against mandates that don’t work can ignite actions against other policies that don’t serve people’s interests. Struggles often begin as a fight against a specific injustice, eventually opening the door to struggles on more fundamental issues.

Leila Mechoui and Max Blumenthal applauded actions by working class people to improve their situation and resist impositions by private and public authorities. The truckers protest scared the rulers because they fear losing their control over who determines how society is run. They don’t want workers thinking they should have some say in societal decision-making. They don’t want workers to start thinking “why should we do what the bosses tell us to do if it doesn’t make sense.”

Richard Wolff and Jimmy Dore emphasized we should be and can be everywhere workers are struggling. “The left should not put itself in a situation where the protesters can lump them together with the authorities as enemies of their struggle, which is the case now.” Here, the left isolated themselves from the working class by attacking the movement as a whole.

Why Many Repeated Ruling Class Liberal Smears of the Truckers

Being an anti-war writer like Stephen Gowans does not mean you have close connections with working class struggles at home. Likewise, many working class fighters do not possess an anti-imperialist outlook. Unfortunately, working class and anti-war fighters often operate in distinct social and political milieus.

Many have made critiques of the convoy and Ottawa occupation, such as a recent webinar by left intellectuals. Yet the problem we face is that the function of a working class leftwing goes beyond evaluating a movement. Our function should be to create a plan of action to participate in and help lead social struggles in a working class direction through demands that benefit the working classes as a whole. We are not there, nor are we making headway in building the army of working class activists needed to carry it out.

At present, far too many critics of the truckers feel in their heart of hearts that our white working class is full of “deplorables.” That illustrates the current disconnect of leftists from the white working class. Too many feel the working class may be the force that will overthrow capitalism and build a just society, but not with the working class we have. This white working class today is too ignorant, bigoted, backwards, bought-off, too white privileged. If it is not kept in check, things could only get worse.

So, where do they turn for a social power to rotate around for building progressive social change? Often it means to the more enlightened intelligentsia, the more progressive politicians. That leads to the Democratic Party or the Canadian versions: pressure them from the left and build support for them in their struggle against Trumpers. This approach became pronounced as fear of Trumpism grew.

This may explain why many on the left repeated Trudeau’s smears and may be why they – who normally support workers – sided with the government against working people when they organized and protested. Such an approach, if not corrected, leads to more police state repression and an increasingly divided working class confused over where to turn to solve their problems.

Mar 27

2022

Wrong Kind of Green

Social Engineering, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Amnesty International fascism Guarimba Libya Nazis Nicaragua Syria Truckers Protest

The Outrageous Depths to Which the Fallen Left Have Descended

Internationalist 360

February 22, 2022

By Alexandra Valiente

Featured Image: Orlando Figuera, beaten, stabbed, and burned alive by “protesters”, gangs of the fascist right-wing in Venezuela – a tragic victim of racist hate crimes during the Guarimbas.

As the dust settles over this fallen country, the faux left continue their psychological warfare operation, spinning narrative in a desperate effort to bolster the crumbling edifice of their fortress of deception. However, their workmanship is flawed, their statements unsubstantiated, porous and weak. No effort on their part can prevent their descent into oblivion. The tide of truth is rising. The dams of collective outrage are bursting.

The depths to which they have descended are astonishing. While attention was focused on immediate events, their evolving narrative grew ever more fantastic. One group of collaborators composed an odious statement, Guarimbas in Canada, where they attempted to garner support for their position through distortion and manipulation. The statement offered lame criticism of the Canadian government, while thoroughly demonizing the protesters, presenting as “facts”, statements from corporate and government-funded media and organizations serving empire, including Amnesty International, government-funded Antihate.ca and the utterly discredited Communist Party of Canada. None of the authors of this statement were actually present at the protests.

None of their statements were based on fact and are contradicted by “on the ground” reporting done by journalists from all sides of the political spectrum (extreme right, moderate right, moderate left, extreme left).

By invoking Guarimbas, they went too far. They mocked and desecrated those who died in that tragic wave of terrorist attacks as they cover for the Nazis that supported Guarimbas – the Canadian government.

I challenge these agents of deception to explain themselves. To account for their lies. Show us the corpses, the bodies of our Black or Indigenous brothers and sisters set on fire, or crucified by protesters in Ottawa! Where were the health clinics and maternity hospitals set ablaze with patients inside? Where are the bodies of those massacred in communes and poor neighborhoods in the night, while their homes burned to the ground? Where were the “white Al Qaeda/White Helmets” mercenaries? Where the flaming barricades? The armed gangs? Where was there evidence of right-wing terrorism in Canada’s protests?

If they have forgotten what happened in Guarimbas, there is an archive of these horrific events on this website.

There are no parallels between the Freedom Convoy protests in Canada and the Venezuelan Guarimbas. The only violence witnessed came from the government of Canada itself, deeply infiltrated by Nazis.

I would like them to explain why they ignored or concealed the multi-ethnic components participating in the protests?

[Source: Instagram]

Why did they ignore all the evidence from those on the ground reporting actual events as they unfolded, who shared the stories of the people?

The lies they have promoted are blatant media crimes, including lies of omission, all in service to the oppressor.

In this, they not only betrayed Canadian workers oppressed under the Trudeau dictatorship, they betrayed Venezuelans.

Another journalist who lost his way during the recent protests, made wonderful contributions to unmasking the Nazis in the Canadian government and military.

He said, regarding their involvement in destabilization in Venezuela:

“Over the past two decades Ottawa has aligned with fascistic forces there in the hope of overthrowing a leftist government.
Ottawa supported Juan Guaido’s Voluntad Popular (Popular Will), which repeatedly instigated violent protests. Not long after the Democratic Unity Roundtable opposition coalition presidential candidate Henrique Capriles conceded defeat in a contentious election in January 2014, VP leader Leopoldo López launched La Salida (exit/departure) in a bid to oust Nicolas Maduro. VP activists formed the shock troops of “guarimbas” protests that left forty-three Venezuelans dead, 800 hurt and a great deal of property damaged in 2014. Dozens more were killed in a new wave of VP backed protests in 2017. At a blockade that year protesters burnt a 21-young Black man, Orlando Jose Figuera, alive in what was viewed as a racist, political, attack.” [Source]

Assimilate that.

The same government the faux left provided cover for was behind the atrocities in Guarimbas, whose memory they now invoke to serve a dark purpose.

And let us not forget Canada’s involvement in the Lima Group, their support for the Bolivian dictatorship, for Bolsonaro’s fascist and racist government in Brazil, and in the sanctions and economic warfare against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

If we are to be completely truthful, numerous valid comparisons can be found between the violent suppression of protests in Canada and those in Bolivia under the Canadian-backed coup dictatorship.

In that same article, the author describes how

“In Israel the Canadian government supports openly racist and fascistic forces. The Canada Revenue Agency subsidizes groups that promote racial/religious purity and that finance those colonizing the West Bank.”

And let this next truth be widely known, in defiance of the faux left gatekeepers shielding empire. In the Canadian Freedom protests there were Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Jews, united on the front lines to oppose the fascists in our government that are participating in the oppression of not only our own people, but many others in nations throughout the world. The multitude of incredible examples of unity terrified the Canadian regime. Does this truth in some way also threaten the faux left that they went to such extreme lengths to conceal it?

The author concludes, saying:

“Most Canadians have little idea that in many places their government actively supports groups that are far more fascistic than the People’s Party of Canada.”

If the faux left genuinely want to attack fascists, let them pursue and expose actual fascists and their criminal networks throughout the world.

I encourage people to search the Internationalist 360° website and the archives documenting the destruction of Libya I have constructed over the last 12 years. There are lessons contained therein that will serve us well today. I have always stood with the oppressed in every field of engagement. I have never deviated in my commitment and dedication to exposing Nazis and fascists – and will continue to do so. I am never confused about who the oppressor is in any situation.

The uprising in Canada is not the first time the “left” betrayed humanity. During the war against Libya, “academics and intellectuals” of the left supported the destruction of the Libyan Jamahiriyah. They deployed the same tactics as have been seen today: ignored “on the ground” reports, citizen fact-finding missions, and the voices of the Libyan people. In their articles, letters and statements, they referred to and promoted propaganda by the same agencies – mainstream media, human rights organizations aligned with MI6 and the CIA, and political opposition groups that were funded and backed by foreign governments and linked to international terrorism. At the time this faction came to be known as the “cruise missile left”. The war against Libya was not the only time they acted in this fashion. Many of the same left repeated this treachery against Syria. Before that, they were not opposed to the Arab Spring, or the war against Iraq and Afghanistan. Always their position favored empire’s agenda.

Some analysts have pointed to a remarkable lack of humility and capacity for self-criticism and self-reflection in this faction of the “left”. I can only conclude from what I have observed in the past month from social media comments and articles produced about the uprising in Canada, that they are not acting from confusion, as some have suggested. There appears to be a strategic, willful complicity in the oppression of, and class war against the people, in alignment with fascists. And the defamatory statements made against protesters exercising their legitimate right to dissent were egregious incitements to hatred. This is fifth column phenomenon.

[Alexandra Valiente is the editor of Internationalist 360. ]

Further Reading:

The Freedom Convoy vs the Real Fascists

Mar 27

2022

Wrong Kind of Green

Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Truckers Protest United States Black Caucus

Freedom Convoy – Support Black Truckers

Black Caucus Greens

Feb 22, 2022

The Green Party of the United States Black Caucus (GP-BC) has announced its support for the Freedom Convoy, an educational effort to help the public learn more about vaccine mandates and the best way to respond to government overreach.

“We are calling on all people to unite in solidarity.” says Philena Farley, National Media Co-Chair & Black Caucus Media Coordinator “The time to be divided is over. This is a time to stand together with our sisters and brothers, regardless of race or gender, in this struggle against tyranny. We are under attack by the corporate elites on every level of government. They are robbing us blind. The one thing the elites hate is unity among the working class because they thrive in dividing us by race, gender, politics, religion, class and more.”

Truckers against vaccine mandates is an international movement of citizens and truck drivers who are opposed to the forced use of government vaccines. “Long-distance trucking has been part of my family history since 1975.” Black Caucus Co-Founder George Friday states in remembrance, “My father was a long-distance trucker throughout my high school and college years and all of my brothers have also been truckers. Independence was the reason they chose that profession. A high amount of personal freedom and not too many interactions with racism or discrimination. They got to do things on their own terms and make their own decisions which is important for any of us.”

From Jamil Jivani – debut in Newsweek – Stop Calling Truckers Racist – to correct the record on the trucker convoy in Ottawa, Canada.

A post shared by POC 4 FREEDOMCONVOY (@poc4freedomconvoy)

“We have no reason to believe the majority of truckers in the convoy are racist. In fact, appropriate for the month of February, the trucker convoy is actually a Black history moment.

Countless trucker convoy participants and supporters are Black. A popular Instagram account called “poc4freedomconvoy” (shorthand for People of Color for Freedom Convoy) with over 60,000 followers has documented the outpouring of support that the trucker convoy received from members of Black communities across Canada. The account’s first post is a picture of Chanceline Rukundo that reads, “I am Burundian/Canadian and I support the #freedomconvoy2022.”

This year’s Black History Month is a chance to see that Black people are not merely victims of history, but makers of it—exactly as Dr. Woodson intended. The trucker convoy is an example of Black people playing a meaningful role in shaping their countries. Don’t let liberal politicians or mainstream media corporations convince you of anything less.”

A post shared by POC 4 FREEDOMCONVOY (@poc4freedomconvoy)

The Green Party of the United States Black Caucus calls for the end of vaccine mandates and demands an immediate suspension of all state and federal mandates for vaccinations, including those for children and adults.

The Green Party of the United States Black Caucus, a coalition of Green Party leaders and activists within the African American community.

Please spread the word to fight against these mainstream media blackouts and support our mission to increase the participation and election victories in United States electoral politics of African and African Americans who support the GPUS Platform, and to ensure that the GPUS conducts and implements programs that concretize its platform in the interests of communities of African-American and African descent addressing community needs and disparities.

Mar 27

2022

Wrong Kind of Green

Imperialist Wars/Occupations, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

#BLM Colonialism NATO Nicaragua Propaganda Russia Ukraine

WATCH: Negating Colonial Lies About Russia

Streamed live on March 20, 2022.

Continued discussion on Russia’s defensive war in Ukraine against the global colonial powers.

“The attitude of the Russians were quite different because they are not attitudes that were born, that came from, [that] developed from slavery and colonialism like you find in the so-called West where the colonialism and slavery has its origins, and that continues to dominate the consciousness of white people, here, now. That’s why you see the white left, the so-called leftists in the United States, they are white nationalists. Most of them are like colonialist leftists. They are left colonizers and they’re not, generally speaking, able to unite against the oppression of the peoples of the world – including unite with Russia in this defensive war that is fighting against the United States through Ukraine…

This propaganda against Russia extends beyond just the war – the Russian people are being targeted in various places in the free world, in the colonial world. The fact of the matter is that this left, this left that comrade Tasha is talking about, this left that supports Ukraine,
is the same left that Lenin was criticizing more than a hundred years ago. It’s the same left. It’s an opportunist left. It’s a colonial base left. So it’s nothing new with how this left is acting. In the United States, or in much of Europe. This left supported French colonialism. At the same time the French claimed to be fighting against colonialism, fascism, in the 1940s – they were oppressing and killing black people in in Algeria – and and they continued to control something like fifteen different countries in Africa today under colonialism. And the communists of those countries supported that. They worked with that. So there’s a difference in a struggle against colonialism. If you don’t understand that – that the entire foundation of so-called western civilization rests upon colonial domination of Black people and other oppressed peoples around the world – that’s why we stand with Russia.” — Chairman Omali Yeshitela

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Chairman Omali Yeshitela, African People’s Socialist Party (APSP), Alexander Ionov, President, Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, LIVE from Moscow, Luwezi Kinshasa, Secretary General, African Socialist International (ASI) and Tafarie Mugeri, Director of Organization, ASI Africa Region.

Feb 22

2022

Wrong Kind of Green

Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Allodial Lands Canada Christia Freeland Doug Ford Freedom Convoy Grand River Mohawk Justin Trudeau Ontario Ottawa

A Message from Mohawk Women from Grand River Concerning Vaccine Mandates & Freedom

Real Peoples Media

February 17, 2022

The following is a message from Onkwehon: we Grand River Mohawk women from the Turtle, Wolf and Bear clans to the people standing up for freedom against vaccine mandates.

“At this time I would like to remind you that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. We would like to acknowledge all the ones who listened to their intuition, their gut feeling, in knowing that these vaccines weren’t a thing that resonated with their being.

Thank you for having the courage to say “No” and stand up for what you believe. Continue to be mindful of your thoughts as we enter into these next few days. You are awakened, you are the light, you are the love of humanity. Love will always prevail. Let’s continue to hold each other up as more truth and justice come to light.

This message is for all our sisters, brothers, and allies across Turtle Island and to our honored, age-old international relations.

We send love and gratitude to all of the brave men and women who are holding the line, uniting together with kindness and compassion in their hearts for freedom, so that truth and justice may prevail.

Canada is still a crime scene, and all will be held on genocide. Grand River Mohawks are alive and well. Mohawks still hold the original six international treaties, and we are in the centre of the Covenant Chain.

As women we must remind the Canadian government of their pledge to the Grand River Mohawks and to the Onkwehon: we way of life. The [emergency measures] announcement today by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a breach of this trust.

Women are the allodial title holders. Even if the courts wanted to, they cannot provide the Canadian Government with a casa somasos.

Universal laws are supreme law of the land and no legislative acts will ever supersede them. A formal notice will be sent to the Honorable Governor General Mary Simon ordering her to uphold her fiduciary responsibilities and invoke the appropriate Criminal Codes that we see fit under Royal Assent and international law. Implicating the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Christia Freeland, and the Premier of Ontario Doug Ford.

In peace, freedom, and truth, take care, stay safe. We love you.”

+++

Note: the Latin term “Nemo dat quod non habet” that appears as text in the video means “no one can give what they do not have.” It is a legal rule, sometimes called the nemo dat rule, that states that the purchase of a possession from someone who has no ownership right to it also denies the purchaser any ownership title to it. (Source: Wikipedia).

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