Peace and Justice Post

Israeli officials believe Goldstone’s “koshering” of their military inquiries will lift the threat of Israeli politicians and soldiers being arrested on war crimes charges during trips overseas. Several Israeli government ministers are already calling for a Cast Lead 2, notes Jonathan Cook.

Middle East Online, May 2, 2011

Richard Goldstone, the international jurist whose now-notorious report on Gaza tarred the Israeli army with war crimes, backtracked unexpectedly and very publicly on 2 April in the pages of the Washington Post.

For 18 months Goldstone had suffered a campaign of character assassination by Israel and its supporters as they sought to discredit his United Nations investigation into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09. Goldstone, a South Africa judge who made his name undermining the legal foundations of apartheid rule and later prosecuting war criminals from Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, was quickly cast as the self-hating Jew who had helped to author an anti-Semitic report. His professions of “love for Israel,” made as he defended his role, served only to further incense critics.

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The hysteria over the recent royal wedding should remind us that the British monarchy never seem to have done anything productive in the first place.

Sherry Wolf, Socialist Worker, May 2, 2011

THE WINDSORS run quite a racket. In exchange for cultivating an extravagant life of piffle, they manage to grab a king’s ransom of $300 million a year (£180 million) out of Britain’s public coffers–enough to make even Tony Soprano blush.

We in the U.S., descendants of rebels who declared a revolution against the British crown, are taught to believe that Britain’s monarchy today is about honoring tradition. The royals are supposedly powerless celebrities, sort of like the Kardashians or Paris Hilton with better manners.

But the royal family, known as the House of Windsor since 1917 when they de-Germanized their name, may no longer possess any seats in the House of Lords (since 1999), but they do retain certain powers. They can still legally choose the prime minister, dismiss ministers and governments, dissolve Parliament, refuse to agree to legislation passed by Parliament, dismiss the governments of the Commonwealth (more on this below), pardon convicted criminals, declare a state of emergency, issue proclamations, command the army and raise a personal militia.

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Vikas Shah Interviews Noam Chomsky

Looking at the UK, US & Europe, to what extent are our societies free and democratic?

These Societies are quite free by historical standards. They are democratic in the sense that they have formal elections that aren’t stolen, and so on. They’re undemocratic to the extent that forces other than popular will have an overwhelming effect on who can participate in electoral outcomes. The United States is the most extreme in this respect. Right now in the United States, elections are essentially bought. You can’t run an election unless you have a huge amount of capital — which means overwhelmingly, although not one hundred percent, that capital was sought from strong corporate backing. For example, in the 2008 election– what carried Obama across the finish line first at the end was a very substantial amount of support from financial institutions which are now the core of the economy. The coming elections are supposed to be a two-billion-dollar election, and there’s only one place to go for that kind of money.

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Revoulutionary Flowerpot Society, April 3o, 2011

Translation of a joint statement issued by a group of workers’ rights groups in Iran. Read the original, in Persian here.

[Poster to the right, about workers’ action planned in Wisconsin in support of international solidarity, and immigrant and workers rights.]

May 1st, International Workers’ Day, is the global day of unity and protest by workers against the tyranny and inequality of capitalist system. This day is a reminder of the global struggles by workers for achieving their human rights. Iranian workers celebrate this day alongside workers of the world, and, in protest against their inhumane living conditions, they get together on this day every year and by any means at hand they raise their voices in order to achieve their legitimate rights.

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Michael S. Rozeff, LewRockwell.com, May 1, 2011

The peoples of the world once looked up to America and Americans. They held them in high respect and esteem. They respected their ideals. They respected their know-how and products.

Now, by its foreign policies of empire and their domestic counterparts, the U.S. government is destroying the dignity of America and Americans. Our morality is falling along with our productivity. Today, there is less and less of which Americans can be proud and there is more and more of which to be ashamed.

America can go in one of two ways. It can continue on the path of empire, in which case it continues downhill and impedes the world’s progress; or it can renounce empire, in which case it restores the dignity of Americans and imparts new opportunities to the peoples of the world.

America can lead the world down, in which case it becomes a backwater; or it can lead the world up, in which case Americans establish a moral center for freedom that radiates light to the world and opens up new paths for freedom everywhere.

To move America and the world into a more hopeful future in both word and deed, American leadership should make a 180 degree turn. It should renounce empire.

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CAIRO – More than two months since former president Hosni Mubarak was forced from office after 30 years in power, local political figures and analysts warn of “counterrevolutionary elements” still working behind the scenes to thwart Egypt’s ongoing transition to democracy.

A protester holds up his palm during a protest for labour rights on Labour Day or May Day, in Cairo May 1, 2011. The palm reads, “social justice”. (REUTERS/Mohamed Abd El Ghany) “These elements have consistently worked to reverse the gains made by the Jan. 25 Revolution by sowing fear, chaos and fitna (discord) between different segments of society,” Essam al-Arian, spokesman for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood movement, told IPS.

In the first days of the 18-day uprising, the embattled Mubarak regime used its expansive state media machine to spread false news reports of murder and mayhem in hopes of terrorising the public and discrediting the revolution. It went so far at one point as to release convicted criminals from prison.

Mubarak, who relinquished executive power to Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) in February, is now under house arrest, while his ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) has since been dissolved. Nevertheless, many political observers point to “remnants of the former regime” still actively working to maintain the Mubarka-era status quo.

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by Badri Raina, May 1, 2011

May Day is here again,

and Capital is on the wane.

Capitalist treason

flounders in the face of reason.

Our faith in struggle must never end;

our task to build

a new world

for every woman, man, and child

must never lend

the least legitimacy

to crude cunning or chicanery.

Shoulder to the wheel,

we must never fail to share and feel

the pain of oppression;

our job is not done

till we arm justice enough to deal

Capital a mortal body blow,

the sickle must continue

to chop the weeded garden,

and the hoe

must dig till the seed of common love

we sow,

covering the earth from delhi to timbucktoo.