Global

August 11, 2018

To the people of Mexico

To the movements of electricity users in resistance

To the media

We are users of electric power who have been organizing for eight years to gain the rights of our families and all Mexicans affected by the high fees charged by the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), the company that has presented us the dilemma of either paying light or eating, paying light or providing our children a decent education, paying light or living a decent life.

“I survived because I was walking to a building that was behind a small hill that faced downtown. I was standing in such a way that the building was to my right and the stone garden was to my left. It was my daughter’s wedding day and I was pushing the wedding dresses in a wheelbarrow to the wedding hall. All of a sudden, for no obvious reason, I was just knocked to the ground. I never heard the bomb. . . I was about to get up when suddenly wood and debris fell from the sky and hit me on the head and back, so I stayed on the ground. . . . I couldn’t even hear the wood falling. . . . When I did start to hear, it was an odd sound. I ran to a hill area where I could look down to the city. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The whole city of Hiroshima was gone. And the noise I heard — it was people. They were moaning and walking like zombies with their arms and hands stretched out in front of them and their skin was hanging off their bones.”

BANGKOK, Thailand -- A defrocked Buddhist monk, extradited from the U.S., received a 114-year prison sentence for fraud and money laundering while police raided some of Thailand's most important Buddhist temples, jailing monks and officials allegedly involved in a separate case of money laundering and kickbacks totaling $10 million.

Investigators are now hunting suspects in that $10 million case who reportedly fled to the U.S., England, Germany and elsewhere.

"This is the purge of a lifetime. Never have there been such high-profile arrests and so many prominent monks falling from grace," said Yale-educated constitutional law scholar Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang.

Thailand's biggest-ever investigation and crackdown against corruption among officials and senior orange-robed Buddhist monks comes amid widespread public dismay about some monks' behavior and lavish lifestyles.

We’ve been given a rare opportunity. While the United States military has slaughtered innocents by the hundreds of thousands in the Middle East over the past couple of decades, almost never have U.S. television viewers seen images of the victims, in particular images of them alive just moments before death rained down on them.

Now we have video footage of dozens of little boys on a bus less than an hour before U.S.-made Raytheon bombs murdered many of them, wounded others, and traumatized survivors.

There is almost unanimous agreement among climate scientists and organizations – that is, 97% of over 10,000 climate scientists and the various scientific organizations engaged in climate science research – that human beings have caused a dramatic increase in the amount of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide released into Earth’s atmosphere since the pre-industrial era and that this is driving the climate catastrophe that continues to unfold. For the documentary evidence on this point see, for example, ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’, ‘Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming’ and ‘Scientists Agree: Global Warming is Happening and Humans are the Primary Cause’.

I’m aware that Canada, unlike its southern neighbor in which I live, has just recently, ever so slightly, stood up to certain of the horrors of the Saudi government. I’m aware of the role Canada has played, albeit imperfectly, as refuge for people fleeing U.S. slavery and U.S. wars and general U.S. backwardness. I’m aware of how many times through history the United States has attacked Canada. I’m aware that just several yards in front of me as I sit in my outdoor office (the downtown mall of Charlottesville) a small army is gleefully creating a police state on the anniversary of a Nazi rally at which similar numbers of soldiers, similarly armed, stood by and watched fascist violence last year. I agree with Robin Williams’ characterization of Canada as a nice apartment over a meth lab.

– Campus Police call transcript, July 31, 2018,
as released by Smith College on August 3

Hear me out.

At least that’s the hope of those who elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, aka Peje, on a platform of sweeping out the corruption — a platform promoted in Obrador’s book, A New Hope for Mexico. That Barack Obama did not permanently decommission the word “hope” for credible electoral campaigns on this continent may be the least of the book’s surprises.