Francesca Albanese: Boldly Speaking Truth To Corporate Power

by C.A. Matthews

Serving as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories of Palestine is a tough job, and Francesca Albanese knew when she took on the position that she was bound to make her share of enemies. However, the vile things coming out of the mouths of genocide-enabler Donald Trump and his boyfriend, genocide-instigator Benjamin Netanyahu, about Albanese’s recent work reporting on the economic conditions of the genocide in Gaza are unbelievable.

Even US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to get in on the feces-slinging by “sanctioning” her for standing up for the Palestinian people’s human rights. He posted on X:

Secretary Marco Rubio @SecRubio

Today I am imposing sanctions on UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese for her illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt @IntlCrimCourt action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.

Rubio, a former “human rights attorney”, is coming down heavy on a fellow human rights attorney? Is this a Monty Python sketch or am I just dreaming? If it is a dream, it’s a nightmare, that’s for certain.

Will Francesca Albanese suffer personally from US sanctions simply for doing her job? I hope not...

...In spite of the pressures and threats from bullies such as Trump and Rubio, Ms. Albanese carries on. She even calmly explained why she’s under fire for exposing state and corporate complicity in Israel's genocide:

It's a sign the system is cracking; it is punching back. But it will only win if we are scared, if we stop standing with one another.

Good advice. We need to stand with each other and not let the bullies shut us down.

The system is cracking, but it’s possibly not quite the system most imagine...

 

To find out what kind of system Francesca Albanese is really taking on (and just how dangerous it is), please continue reading the rest of this article on Substack. Just copy or click on this link: 

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This article is the 528th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or Buy Me a Coffee or Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

 

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ~Buckminster Fuller, US Architect, Systems Theorist, Author, Designer, Inventor and Futurist

Making The Existing Model Obsolete

by C.A. Matthews

“That’s the way it is,” I’m often told whenever I criticize the corrupt governmental system in the US. “We can’t do any better than that,” I’m informed. “It’s the best we’ve got.”

I’m not one for absolutes. My usual response to that kind of statement is, “How can you be so sure it’s the best? Have we ever tried anything radically different and compared the two?”

My challenge to their belief that they live in a “democracy” isn’t what most people want to hear. It makes them uncomfortable. If our system of government in the US was compared to something else and found wanting, well… You get where I’m coming from.

Americans who don’t like change are comfortable with the status quo. They’re not hurting financially or going without health care. They’re not starving or skipping meals. They’re not sleeping rough in the streets.

Sure, these Americans might have some beefs about paying taxes and they’ll hold grudges against elected officials who failed to stand up to their promises, but they’re not going to welcome an entirely new system of government just because of those things. A sudden change in the governmental system might upturn these comfortable Americans’ apple cart. They can’t have that.

I’m not one of those people. I’m not that comfortable financially, physically, or intellectually with the existing model. I can’t stand the hypocrisy, hate, and violence the American system engenders. I’m for Revolution, a complete change of direction, a total tear-down of the prevalent framework and a building of a different model that works for working people, not corporations and their CEOs.

I go along with Buckminster Fuller—we need to create a better model or style of government so we can completely junk the old one that doesn’t work for the majority of us.

So, what would I replace the present “representative democracy” (that is, in reality, an oligarchy according to the 2014 Princeton study) in the United States with? Change always starts with an idea. I have an idea, a pretty good idea. It may not be your idea, but I thought I’d float it by you and get your feedback...

 

To discover my unique model of government that actually works as a democracy, please continue reading the rest of this article on Substack. Just copy or click on this link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

There you'll see related article and video links, all the graphics, and be able to leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly posts in your email box, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

Subscribe to The Revolution Continues on Substack today. Power to the people! 

This article is the 527th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or at Buy Me a Coffee or at Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

 

I’d like to share this great comment by UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories of Palestine Francesca Albanese on the food blockade to Gaza, the GHF, and the lack of response from the international community:

This is the most sadistic exercise in intellectual gymnastics I’ve ever come across. (Found at the 42 minute mark: youtu.be/tLa4BT0J8Q4)

More videos featuring Francesca Albanese are listed on the Substack post.

The Goal Is An Endless War

 

Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds. --Arundhati Roy

Random thoughts about the current state of the world while a cat sits on top of my head while I lie awake in bed during the dark hours before dawn. Happy "Independence" Day, USA. 

The Goal Is An Endless War (Not A Successful War)

By C.A. Matthews

Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange once said “The goal is an endless war, not a successful war.”

Whatever did Assange mean by that? Surely, the goal of warfare is to beat your opponent(s) and achieve the results you wanted when you began the fighting, right? Otherwise, what is the point of war? It can’t simply be about endless death and destruction and if-I-can’t-have-it-neither-can-you, can it?

The endlessness is what really gets to me. Who comes up with the concept of endless war? Only persons who see a need for endless growth and endless chaos would even consider endless war as beneficial—or possibly even necessary—to their side of the conflict.

Endless growth of the economy, endless chaos of competitors, endless hoarding of wealth, endless destruction of the environment and the Earth’s ecology… Hmm, all that sounds oddly familiar.

Could it be it’s capitalists who have behind all this endless warfare in the last hundred+ years? 

 

To find out more on the endless war and its monstrous goals, please continue reading the rest of this article on Substack. Just copy or click on this link: 

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There you'll see related article and video links, all the graphics, and be able to leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly posts in your email box, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

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This article is the 526th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or at Buy Me a Coffee or at Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

 

 

AT&T Hates Our Cat

by C.A. Matthews

We returned home from the cat shelter around 1 PM with our new foster cat Elsie, a twelve-year-old tabby with a sweet disposition who we hoped would be a friend to our four-year-old cat, Bowtie. Since Bowtie had been cooped up for a while, and it is his normal schedule to take a romp in our garden in the afternoon, we let him out so we could concentrate on settling Elsie into her new home. We have a long lot with trees and many raspberry bushes on a slight incline away from our house, so we were unaware that anything was amiss with our back fence line when we let him out.

Little did we know that while we were out picking up Elsie contract workers for AT&T had bent over our wire fence, dug a deep trench, cut away limbs from the trees behind us, and opened an exit for a curious and frightened cat to dart through when he heard the loud noises of their equipment shoving fiber optic cable underground. We had received no warning from AT&T that they would be doing such work in our area. Nothing—no paper hanger on the door, no post card in the mail, no phone call. We had no idea that their workers could casually knock over our fence and leave it that way, causing our beloved pet to escape...

...I believe this incident sends a message: Those of us who live in normal, working class neighborhoods have zero rights compared to huge corporations. Our local officials can’t be bothered to stand up for us if our property is damaged and our pets or family members become lost or hurt, either...

 

To hear the end of the story and how it relates to how corporations treat us and what we can do about it, please continue reading the rest of this article on Substack. Just copy or click on this link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

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This article is the 525th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or at Buy Me a Coffee or at Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

 

  

It’s been a long two years, hasn’t it? So many people have stopped speaking to others they don’t see eye-to-eye with. To quote an old cliché: Things will never be the same again...

 

Imagine Living In A World…

by C.A. Matthews

Imagine living in a world where you could get arrested for saying “Don’t kill the children!” because it might hurt the feelings of the killer.

Imagine living in a world where all children are cherished and taken well care of, always have enough to eat, a safe place to live, access to a decent education, and medical care whenever necessary.

Imagine living in a world where your country uses your tax dollars to provide the armaments, bombs, planes, and bullets for a genocide of innocents and won’t allow you to speak out against these war crimes upon pain of prosecution.

Imagine living in a world where you are free to speak your mind about the immorality of genocidal war crimes no matter how it casts a dark shadow upon the reputations of those in power, the oligarchs their political henchmen, and their celebrity endorsers, and your tax dollars go to support programs that actually serve the public.

Imagine living in a world where proxy wars have become commonplace and your tax dollars go to finance these conflicts in order for wealthy CEOs in the oil industry, the military-industrial complex and related industries to make even more billions at the expense of millions of lives.

Imagine living in a world where the polluting fossil fuels industry is no more because clean and plentiful sources of green energy from the sun, the wind, the tides, and the geothermal activities of the Earth itself have been developed and made available to all, thus making the need to start wars for oil and other resource grabs entirely unnecessary...

 

To imagine what life would be like living in a better world, please continue reading the rest of this article on Substack. Just copy or click on this link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

There you'll see related article and video links, all the graphics, and be able to leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly posts in your email box, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

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This article is the 524th blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or at Buy Me a Coffee or at Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

 

Lessons Learned

by C.A. Matthews

Welcome to our tenth anniversary celebration of The Revolution Continues!

It’s been ten years this month since I agreed to become blog editor. TRC had another name originally, and it was posted on another social media platform, but it gradually transformed into what you’re reading today. That tentative first step kicked off a busy decade of writing, editing, reading, and researching how human beings manage to screw things up and try to put them back together again.

Ten whole years. Would I agree to do it all again, knowing what I do now? Hmm… Let me think about it.

Some folks place TRC under the category of “political science,” but I prefer think of it more as a study in anthropology, history, sociology, and psychology. People making life either harder or easier for themselves or others is what our time on this planet is all about, in my humble opinion. And it’s amazing just how many in power enjoy making life more difficult for others in order to “get ahead.”

It’s issues like these that trigger my spidey-sense gained from my background in psychology. Why do sociopaths get such satisfaction from the struggles and suffering of their fellow human beings? Can’t we simply learn to respect each others’ differences, and live and let live? Most days, apparently not.

And with that insight, I’ll share ten pearls of wisdom gathered over the last decade from fighting in the trenches of American politics and activism. I’m sure you’ve discovered most of these yourself. Feel free to comment on which one(s) has/have made the biggest impression on you.

Ten Tough Lessons Learned Over the Past Ten Years 

 

1. We must act as our own heroes.

Nobody is going to become our “savior” and save us from our failures as a nation or as a people or as a species. We must learn to save ourselves and do it over and over again. This is what the brave crew of the Madleen in the Freedom Flotilla are attempting. This is what the March to Gaza is all about.

Political heroes in particular are more than likely to let you down. Take for example Bernie Sanders. This blog began as The Bernie Blog in 2015 when a handful of enthusiastic “Berners” came together in hopes of spreading the word that democratic socialism could solve all of America’s problems. The only problem with that idea was that the corrupt system under which Americans elect their leaders and solve their society’s challenges didn’t want to have anything to do with people like Bernie or his followers. They particularly despised any philosophy of governance containing the word “socialism” in it as well.

More on that corrupt system in a moment. One day soon I promise to write more about the origin story of the TRC blog and how our relationship with Bernie changed. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of funny, scary, and very educational stories to tell about how we survived it all...

 

To learn the remaining nine lessons, please continue reading the rest of this article on Substack. Just copy or click on this link: 

https://therevolutioncontinues.substack.com

There you'll see related article and video links, all the graphics, and be able to leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly posts in your email box, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

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This article is the 523rd blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or at Buy Me a Coffee or at Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.

 

 

The United States of Hypocrisy

by C. A. Matthews

I went through the same indoctrination program most American children are put through. We heard the same narrative over and over again in school and in the Boy and Girl Scouts, 4-H, Junior Achievement, church and civics organizations... I learned more or less what other people in my age group did.

I know the Pledge of Allegiance and at least the first verse of the Star-Spangled Banner. I learned what the Latin phrase e pluribus unum means on our coins. Ask me how many members are in the House of Representatives (435) and how many senators there are (100). I can even recite the Preamble to the Constitution fairly well.

I know the correct way to fold a flag when you take it down from a flag pole. I can name you all fifty states’ capitals (at least I used to be able to). But none of this nonsense means a damn thing in the year 2025, and I’m sorry I wasted so much time learning it.

Why? Because the United States of America is dead.

Maybe it was never alive, but it most definitely is dead and gone today—or at least the picture I had of it in my mind growing up and even into a good portion of my adulthood. What’s left of it is the true image of the current monster that masquerades as a “beacon of democracy.” With “liberty and justice for all” it prances about like a flashy red-white-and-blue Captain America action figure as it doles out bunker busting bombs to genocidal maniacs. 

I call what remains of my birth country “The United States of Hypocrisy.”

Feel free to call it the United States of Hypocrisy (USH) if you feel the same way I do. Tell your friends and family members they can do so as well, unless that gets you into a world of hurt...

 

To learn more about the hypocrisy of the US (and some actions you could take to undo it), please continue reading the rest of this article on Substack. Just copy or click on this link: 

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There you'll see related article and video links, all the graphics, and be able to leave comments. You can become a free or paid subscriber and receive weekly posts in your email box, along with occasional special articles just for paid subscribers, too.

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This article is the 522nd blog posting of The Revolution Continues. We began in June 2015, and we're still going strong. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing to help TRC continue for another ten years. 

You can make a donation at https://paypal.me/camatthews or at Buy Me a Coffee or at Ko-fi. Every little bit helps since this is my only source of income. Thank you.