Guy Mitchell

Happily married.Retired. 3 grown Up Children. 2 Grandchildren.Bibliophile. Secular humanist. Democratic socialist. Animal lover. DON’T DO MONEY OR OF 🇵🇸🏳️‍⚧️

[Guy Mitchell @guymit]

“To learn without thinking is fatal but to think without learning is just as bad”. The Analects of Confucius II, 15

[Guy Mitchell @guymit]

@shakily3tl The watch and the shirt knots

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Imagine spending 66 years under an embargo imposed by a country 90 miles away that has tried to assassinate your head of state over 600 times.

And then being lectured by that country about democracy.

Cuba has survived this.

Cuba is still there.

The lecture continues.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the United States.

It has a longer life expectancy than many countries far wealthier than it.

It produced a medical system capable of sending doctors to dozens of countries, including some that sanctioned it.

It did all of this under 66 years of economic blockade.

Now imagine what it might have built without the blockade.

The people who imposed the blockade have imagined this too.

That is why the blockade continued for 66 years.

Not because Cuba was failing.

Because Cuba was, in specific and inconvenient ways, succeeding.

And a Cuba that succeeded under its own system was more dangerous to the argument than a Cuba that failed.

The blockade was not punishment for failure.

It was prevention of success.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

The most honest statement ever made about Cuba policy came from a State Department memo in 1960, written before the sanctions were fully implemented.

The memo, written by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Lester Mallory, stated that the U.S. should pursue a policy to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of the Cuban government.

Not: respond to "Cuban repression."

Not: protect Cuban human rights.

Not: promote democracy.

Hunger. Desperation. Overthrow.

This memo is declassified. It is in the historical record. It is not disputed.

It means that every subsequent year of sanctions, every subsequent citation of Cuban poverty and dysfunction as evidence of socialist failure, every subsequent American official expressing concern for the welfare of the Cuban people:

All of it happened downstream of a documented decision to deliberately produce hunger and desperation in that population.

This is not a conspiracy theory.

It is a declassified government document.

The conspiracy was the policy.

The theory was written in plain English by an American official in 1960 and has been implemented faithfully for 66 years since.

What they wanted to prove, they engineered the conditions to prove.

And then they called it evidence.

[Guy Mitchell @guymit]

@teddyrewa 49

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

The most immoral army continues to slaughter children. Nearly daily.
UN bodies and human rights groups have documented the pattern in detail. Anyone who denies it should read these reports.
We keep receipts and there will be accountability.
#PalestineTrials

[Guy Mitchell @guymit]

@Mindsparkx__ Pull the plug, like a normal person

[The Lucky Heron @LuckyHeronSay]

This nonsense has gone far enough

[Guy Mitchell @guymit]

@Lara_0xo Urgency. Unruly. Untidy....

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

They tell you to be afraid of these countries.

And I want to ask you, seriously, to sit with this:

Name the last country Iran invaded.

Name the last country Cuba destabilized through a coup.

Name the last population North Korea bombed into the Stone Age.

Name the last foreign president China abducted in a military raid.

Now do the same exercise for the country that told you to be afraid.

The fear is a product.

It is manufactured, distributed, and renewed on a regular cycle because fear justifies the budget.

And the budget justifies the bases.

And the bases justify the fear.

You are not afraid because these countries are "dangerous."

You are afraid because someone, very powerful, very expensive, needs you to be.

Follow the money.

Follow the bases.

Follow the bombs.

And then ask yourself one more time:

Who, in this picture, should actually be afraid of whom?

[Guy Mitchell @guymit]

@shakily3tl Ear rings

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

Here is a question they will never ask on the evening news:

If American-style capitalism is so self-evidently superior that it wins any free competition...

Why does it require sanctions, coups, trade wars, regime change, military bases, and the systematic destruction of any country that tries something different in order to prove its superiority?

A system confident in its own merits does not need to eliminate the competition.

It wins the competition.

The effort required to prevent alternatives from functioning is itself the most honest testimony available about how the comparison would actually turn out if the competition were allowed to be free.

They know what an undisturbed Cuba might look like after 66 years.

That is precisely why Cuba has not been left undisturbed.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

America does not have allies.

It has assets with expiration dates.

The relationship is entirely clear if you read it without the vocabulary it comes wrapped in.

You provide something: a base, a border, a resource, a regional buffer, a vote in an international body, a population willing to fight a war Washington wants fought but not by Americans.

In exchange, you receive support. Weapons, money, diplomatic cover, the protective association of American power.

The transaction is real. The support is real.

What is not real is the implication that the transaction is permanent.

The moment you stop providing what they came for, or the moment they find a cheaper source, or a new strategic priority makes your geography irrelevant, or domestic politics make the relationship a liability, the transaction ends.

And you will be left holding weapons that need American spare parts, an economy restructured around American investment, a military trained to American doctrine, and the discovery that none of it came with a guarantee.

This is not betrayal.

It was never a promise.

It was always a transaction.

The tragedy is being the last one in the room to understand that.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

That story about Google killing hundreds of thousands of trees in Finland for its data center project is such a perfect microcosm of what capitalism is doing to our world.

Recent mass media headlines are saying the tech giant "illegally" cut down "250,000" trees, but both claims paint an inaccurate picture of what actually happened. Google killed 400,000 trees (250,000 near a town called Muhos and another 150,000 near the village of Otanmäki), and unless the company's executives actually wind up going to prison for this, their actions cannot properly be described as "illegal".

I don't know who first coined the saying "If the penalty is a fine, then it's legal for rich people," but it certainly applies here. The Finnish Licensing and Supervision Authority has reportedly ordered Google to suspend all “measures that significantly change the environment," saying it will "consider enforcement proceedings and fines" if the megacorporation does not comply. Google's parent company Alphabet has a net worth of around four trillion dollars. Whatever paltry penalties Finland might impose for these ecocidal actions, it won't have any meaningful effect on Google.

Giant corporations do this shit all the time. They calculate that the fines incurred by their abusive actions will be dwarfed by the massive profits they generate, issue fake apologies as needed, and leave it to their armies of lawyers to minimize the damage. That's why the Sackler family is still worth billions despite all the fines Purdue Pharma was slapped with while creating the US opiate epidemic.

A 2017 Harvard study titled “The Opioid Epidemic: Fixing a Broken Pharmaceutical Market" contains the following paragraph:

"Although civil claims and criminal charges were brought against Purdue and its executives, the resulting penalties paled in comparison to extended-release oxycodone profits. In May 2007, the company and its president, chief counsel, and former chief medical officer pled guilty to falsely marketing extended-release oxycodone as 'less addictive, less subject to abuse and diversion, and less likely to cause tolerance and withdrawal than other pain medications.' As part of the plea bargain, Purdue agreed to pay the federal government $600 million and 27 states $20 million. The three executives agreed to $34.5 million in fines but avoided jailtime. By contrast, Purdue has earned an estimated $31 billion in total revenues from extended-release oxycodone since its launch. Rather than deterring fraudulent marketing, the penalties simply became a cost of doing business."

A cost of doing business.

That's how things work under capitalism. The law primarily exists not to protect people or the environment, but to protect the interests of capital. If you destroyed a Google data center you'd probably be charged as a terrorist and spend decades in prison, but Google can destroy the natural world around you and get off with a finger wag and a symbolic fine. If you stole millions of dollars from your employer you'd go to prison for grand larceny, but if your employer steals millions from its employees you need to win a class action lawsuit to get back what they stole from you.

Proponents of capitalism often pretend they support minimal government intervention in civilian affairs, but their entire model is at all times propped up by state power using force to protect the haves from the have-nots at every level of our society. Corporations are free to destroy the environment, destroy your health, rob you, exploit you, and manipulate your government to their advantage, and if you ever take action to stand up to this world-devouring onslaught, the state will lock you in a cage.

In school we are taught that that the law exists to protect ordinary people from bad people, but that's not true at all. Under capitalism, the law exists to protect the very worst among us from everyone else. That's why we are seeing our planet being turned into dust and ashes for no reason other than shareholder profit.

It's an insane system, and it needs to end. These freaks are feeding our entire biosphere into the woodchipper.

[Tiberius @tiberiusfiles]

Translation: Netanyahu is planning to kill some more Zionists in a false flag attack to disrupt his election defeat if the signs look bad — and blame it on Iran

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

I can't stop thinking of how Apartheid Israel has killed Palestinian media workers (~300) and their relatives (700+), making Gaza the deadliest place for journalists EVER.

Time to make sure the genocidaires and their cheerleaders are held to account.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

They will tell you the Arab world is divided because of tribalism.

Because of sectarianism.

Because of ancient hatreds between Sunni and Shia, Arab and Persian, dynasty and republic.

All of these divisions are real.

None of them are natural in the sense of being inevitable or ungovernable.

The Ottoman Empire governed the region for four centuries with more internal coherence than the post-colonial arrangement has managed in one.

What changed?

The borders changed.

The borders were redrawn, after the First World War, by Britain and France, building on the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, a document explicitly designed to divide the region into spheres of external control rather than units of internal coherence.

The "ancient hatreds" were then poured into those new containers and sealed.

Tribalism didn’t fracture the Middle East.

Tribalism was the tool used to justify a fracture that was engineered for someone else’s benefit.

That someone else is still benefiting.

[Guy Mitchell @guymit]

@Palestinedaily1 Yws

[Craig Mokhiber @CraigMokhiber]

Lana Nusseibeh (pictured here with Israel regime ambassador Gilad Erdan) who is being pushed by US-Israel aligned Gulf monarchies and several US and Western figures to become the next UN Secretary-General, is most known in diplomatic circles for running cover for the genocide in Sudan and for pushing to normalize the Israeli apartheid regime as it perpetrates a genocide in Palestine. Fluent in Hebrew and with a master’s degree in Israel studies, she has been a key actor in pushing the treacherous “Abraham Accords” and Trump’s colonial “Board of Peace.” In the Epstein Files, she is seen helping Epstein (and Israel) collaborator Terje Larsen to get his son into NYU, and helping Epstein himself to visit the UAE. A truly terrible candidate.