If you can’t bomb ‘em, Sanction ‘em

 

In one of his lamer songs, Merl Haggard once crooned, “When yer puttin’ down my country hoss, yer walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.”

It seems that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has similar issues, with one minor variation. A U.N. human rights official recently put down Rubio’s country’s corporations. And in doing this, she by God walked on the fightin’ side of him.

 So Rubio  sanctioned that lady!

Let the world be warned: You don’t walk on the fightin’ side of Mark Rubio, Hoss.

The UN official in question is one Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.  In a recent report for the UN, Albanese had the gall to point out that numerous U.S. (among other) corporations were profiting bigly from the U.S./Israel mass murdering and starving of fellow human beings in Gaza.

In her report, Albanese names 48 specific corporations who are cashing in on the

Genocide. They include such American icons as these:

 

Airbnb

Amazon

Blackrock

Booking.com

Caterpillar

Chevron

Christian Friends of Israeli Communities

Google (Alphabet)

Hewlet Packard

IBM

Keller Williams Realty

Lockheed Martin

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Microsoft

Pacific Investment Mgt. Co.

Palantir Technologies

Vanguard (investment management)

 

The Gaza genocide is in fact so profitable that, as Albanese said, “ending it will not happen without holding the private sector accountable, including its executives.

Of course, it’s hard to hold anyone accountable when simply reporting objective facts makes you a criminal.  

The sanctioning won’t affect Albanese much. The penalties include not being allowed to visit the U.S. and having her assets in the U.S. frozen. She lives in Italy and presumably doesn’t have a large amount of money in U.S. banks.

But it’s rather sobering that some unelected rando – Rubio, in this case -- can arbitrarily decide that anyone he doesn’t like is a terrorist and enemy of the state. Chris Hedges summarized the implications of this rather cogently:

 

The attack against Albanese presages a world without rules, one where rogue states, such as the U.S. and Israel, are permitted to carry out war crimes and genocide without any accountability or restraint. It exposes the subterfuges we use to fool ourselves and attempt to fool others. It reveals our hypocrisy, cruelty and racism. No one, from now on, will take seriously our stated commitments to democracy, freedom of expression, the rule of law or human rights. And who can blame them? We speak exclusively in the language of force, the language of brutes, the language of mass slaughter, the language of genocide.

 

 End.