In my Reflection of January 14, two days after the catastrophe in Haiti, which destroyed that neighboring sister nation, I wrote: “In the area of healthcare and others the Haitian people has received the cooperation of Cuba, even though this is a small and blockaded country. Approximately 400 doctors and healthcare workers are helping the Haitian people free of charge. Our doctors are working every day at 227 of the 237 communes of that country. On the other hand, no less than 400 young Haitians have been graduated as medical doctors in our country. They will now work alongside the reinforcement that traveled there yesterday to save lives in that critical situation. Thus, up to one thousand doctors and healthcare personnel can be mobilized without any special effort; and most are already there willing to cooperate with any other State that wishes to save Haitian lives and rehabilitate the injured.”
“The head of our medical brigade has informed that ‘the situation is difficult but we are already saving lives.’”
Hour after hour, day and night, the Cuban health professionals have started to work nonstop in the few facilities that were able to stand, in tents, and out in the parks or open-air spaces, since the population feared new aftershocks.
The situation was far more serious than was originally thought. Tens of thousands of injured were clamoring for help in the streets of Port-au-Prince; innumerable persons laid, dead or alive, under the rubbled clay or adobe used in the construction of the houses where the overwhelming majority of the population lived. Buildings, even the most solid, collapsed. Besides, it was necessary to look for the Haitian doctors who had graduated at the Latin American Medicine School throughout all the destroyed neighborhoods. Many of them were affected, either directly or indirectly, by the tragedy.
Some UN officials were trapped in their dormitories and tens of lives were lost, including the lives of several chiefs of MINUSTAH, a UN contingent. The fate of hundreds of other members of its staff was unknown.
Haiti’s Presidential Palace crumbled. Many public facilities, including several hospitals, were left in ruins.
The catastrophe shocked the whole world, which was able to see what was going on through the images aired by the main international TV networks. Governments from everywhere in the planet announced they would be sending rescue experts, food, medicines, equipment and other resources.
In conformity with the position publicly announced by Cuba, medical staff from different countries –namely Spain, Mexico, and Colombia, among others- worked very hard alongside our doctors at the facilities they had improvised. Organizations such as PAHO and other friendly countries like Venezuela and other nations supplied medicines and other resources. The impeccable behavior of Cuban professionals and their leaders was absolutely void of chauvinism and remained out of the limelight.
Cuba, just as it had done under similar circumstances, when Hurricane Katrina caused huge devastation in the city of New Orleans and the lives of thousands of American citizens were in danger, offered to send a full medical brigade to cooperate with the people of the United States, a country that, as is well known, has vast resources. But at that moment what was needed were trained and well- equipped doctors to save lives. Given New Orleans geographical location, more than one thousand doctors of the “Henry Reeve” contingent mobilized and readied to leave for that city at any time of the day or the night, carrying with them the necessary medicines and equipment. It never crossed our mind that the President of that nation would reject the offer and let a number of Americans that could have been saved to die. The mistake made by that government was perhaps the inability to understand that the people of Cuba do not see in the American people an enemy; it does not blame it for the aggressions our homeland has suffered.
Nor was that government capable of understanding that our country does not need to beg for favors or forgiveness of those who, for half a century now, have been trying, to no avail, to bring us to our knees.
Our country, also in the case of Haiti, immediately responded to the US authorities requests to fly over the eastern part of Cuba as well as other facilities they needed to deliver assistance, as quickly as possible, to the American and Haitian citizens who had been affected by the earthquake.
Such have been the principles characterizing the ethical behavior of our people. Together with its equanimity and firmness, these have been the ever-present features of our foreign policy. And this is known only too well by whoever have been our adversaries in the international arena.
Cuba will firmly stand by the opinion that the tragedy that has taken place in Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, is a challenge to the richest and more powerful countries of the world.
Haiti is a net product of the colonial, capitalist and imperialist system imposed on the world. Haiti’s slavery and subsequent poverty were imposed from abroad. That terrible earthquake occurred after the Copenhagen Summit, where the most elemental rights of 192 UN member States were trampled upon.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, a competition has unleashed in Haiti to hastily and illegally adopt boys and girls. UNICEF has been forced to adopt preventive measures against the uprooting of many children, which will deprive their close relatives from their rights.
There are more than one hundred thousand deadly victims. A high number of citizens have lost their arms or legs, or have suffered fractures requiring rehabilitation that would enable them to work or manage their own.
Eighty per cent of the country needs to be rebuilt. Haiti requires an economy that is developed enough to meet its needs according to its productive capacity. The reconstruction of Europe or Japan, which was based on the productive capacity and the technical level of the population, was a relatively simple task as compared to the effort that needs to be made in Haiti. There, as well as in most of Africa and elsewhere in the Third World, it is indispensable to create the conditions for a sustainable development. In only forty years time, humanity will be made of more than nine billion inhabitants, and right now is faced with the challenge of a climate change that scientists accept as an inescapable reality.
In the midst of the Haitian tragedy, without anybody knowing how and why, thousands of US marines, 82nd Airborne Division troops and other military forces have occupied Haiti. Worse still is the fact that neither the United Nations Organization nor the US government have offered an explanation to the world’s public opinion about this relocation of troops.
Several governments have complained that their aircraft have not been allowed to land in order to deliver the human and technical resources that have been sent to Haiti.
Some countries, for their part, have announced they would be sending an additional number of troops and military equipment. In my view, such events will complicate and create chaos in international cooperation, which is already in itself complex. It is necessary to seriously discuss this issue. The UN should be entrusted with the leading role it deserves in these so delicate matters.
Our country is accomplishing a strictly humanitarian mission. To the extent of its possibilities, it will contribute the human and material resources at its disposal. The will of our people, who takes pride in its medical doctors and cooperation workers who provide vital services, is huge, and will rise to the occasion.
Any significant cooperation that is offered to our country will not be rejected, but its acceptance will fully depend on the importance and transcendence of the assistance that is requested from the human resources of our homeland.
It is only fair to state that, up until this moment, our modest aircrafts and the important human resources that Cuba has made available to the Haitian people have arrived at their destination without any difficulty whatsoever.
We send doctors, not soldiers!
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 23, 2010
5:30 p.m.
January 29, 2010
January 26, 2010
Tuesday, January 19, 2010: Victims are not enemys, CANADIAN & US MILITARY SHOULD NOT TREAT VICTIMS OF EARTHQUAKE AS ENEMY, Rebel Youth Blog
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
EXAGGERATED REPORTS OF LOOTING THREATEN VICTIMS
(January 19, 2010) The Canada Haiti Action Network is deeply concerned about the militarization of the relief efforts in Haiti and exaggerated reporting on ‘looting’ and potential violence.
“There is an exaggerated focus on unlawfulness,” says one the group’s representatives in Toronto, Niraj Joshi. “Taking food and water from destroyed stores does not constitute looting,” she said. “It is an instinct of human survival, caused by the failure of the international relief effort to provide timely and effective assistance.”
Many poor neighbourhoods in Port-au-Prince have yet to see any assistance. Yet reports from CHAN’s colleagues and friends in Port au Prince say that human solidarity and a quiet determination to survive prevail. Reports on CBC television and radio are saying the same thing.
Meanwhile, Canada’s emergency relief teams have been sent home, told they will not be deployed.
Roger Annis of CHAN’s affiliate in Vancouver commented, “Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs told the country on anuary 16 that its disaster relief teams are not equipped for Haiti, that only soldiers can do the job. Canadians have apparently been labouring under the false impression that its disaster relief teams are able to handle earthquake disasters.”
“Like Washington,” he said, “Ottawa has quite simply prioritized the sending of its military to Haiti over disaster relief. Are Canadians comfortable with that choice, and what is the purpose of this military show of strength?”
The group says that earthquake victims need food, water, medical treatment and shelter, not more guns pointed at them.
In February 2004, some 500 Canadian troops were dispatched to Haiti as part of a UN Security Council-endorsed mission that followed the overthrow of its elected government and exile of its elected president, Jean Bertrand Aristide. As the AP news service reported today, there is a growing clamour in the poor neighbourhoods of Haiti for the return of the only president in their recent, troubled history that took measures to alleviate their suffering.
Representatives of the Canada Haiti Action Network are available to speak to media in cities across Canada. Consult the “About CHAN” page on the website below
http://canadahaitiaction.ca/
January 24, 2010
[Not merely a US issue!] "Abolish Corporate Personhood": Molly Morgan and Jan Edwards
http://www.californiademocracy.org/resource/abolish-morgan-edwards.html
The history of the United States could be told as the story of who is and who is not a person under law. Women, poor people, slaves, and even corporations had long been considered persons for purposes of following the law. This is because early laws were written “No person shall . . .” Corporate lawyers had tried to avoid these laws by claiming corporations were not persons and therefore not required to follow the law. So it was decided that for purposes of following the law, corporations were persons. This allowed corporations to sue and be sued in court among other things. But corporations were not persons with rights in the law, and neither were women, slaves, indentured servants, or poor people. We know some of the ongoing story of human beings' struggle to gain the rights of persons under law, but how did corporations gain these rights?
To understand the phenomenon of corporate personhood, we start by looking at the foundation of US law, the Constitution. This document was written by 55 gentlemen cleverly described by one historian as “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed.” As some of the wealthiest, most privileged people in the new country, they were highly aware that their power had everything to do with how much property they owned — land, crops, buildings, personal goods, and, for most of them, property in the form of human beings, their slaves. As some of the best-educated men in the world, at least by European standards, they also knew a lot about democracy, and they understood what a threat the real thing represented to their personal power. The kind of democracy they prized and wrote about so eloquently could only be practiced by people like them — certainly not by the rabble. Many of them wrote and spoke at length about the inability of the common people to be self-governing.
So the word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution. What they created was a republic designed to protect property, not people. This didn't play very well with many people in the new United States — at least half of the population was very much opposed to the Constitution. They could see how much power it would take away from them, how much it would compromise the democratic ideals in the Declaration of Independence, and they wanted no part of it. But the Federalists who proposed the Constitution had the finances and the unity to promote their ideas strongly. After a lot of politicking they got the Constitution ratified — but only with the assurance that a Bill of Rights would be added to protect people from the abuses by the government that would be possible under the new system. So let's look at the basic structure they created to protect property.
The Constitution only mentions two entities: We the People and the government. The people are on one side of a line, and we are sovereign and have individual rights. On the other side of the line is the government, which is accountable to the people and has specific duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people. We delegate some of our power to the government in order to perform tasks we want government to do. In a representative democracy, this system should work just fine.
The problem is that the phrase “We the People” is not defined in the Constitution. In 1787, in order to be considered one of “We the People” and have rights in the Constitution, you had to be an adult male with white skin and a certain amount of property. (The states determined who could vote; some states had religious restrictions.) At the time of the Constitution, this narrowed “We the People” down to about 10% of the population. Those who owned property, including human property, were very clear that this was rule by the minority — and that's the way they wanted it.
So here is the first definition of who gets to be a person in the United States. Ninety percent of the people — all the immigrants, indentured servants, slaves, minors, Native Americans, women, and people who don't own property (the poor) — are, legally, not persons. They were not persons with rights, but were persons for following the law. They're like subhumans. The law didn't label people this way in so many words — which is part of the brilliance of the system and why it's lasted so long — but the net effect was clear. By allowing only wealthy, white males to be “persons,” a class system was put in place.
Those who could vote in the republic were able to elect people for the House of Representatives. So the United States held within its republican form the possibility of democracy. More human beings could become part of We the People. And they did. It was not easily won, but eventually all adult citizens became legal persons.
Without using the words “slave” or “slavery,” the Constitution ensures that even if slaves get to free soil, their status as property remains the same. This is just one of the clauses defining property in the Constitution. It also defines contracts, labor, commerce, money, copyright, and war as the province of the federal government. So the Constitution, the foundation of all US law, was not written to protect people — it was written to protect property. The Constitution does contain some protection for people in Section 9, but the Bill of Rights is the concentration of rights for We the People.
Most people believe that the Constitution — specifically, the Bill of Rights — guarantees our rights to freedom of speech, religion, and press, to peaceably assemble, and so forth. People of all political stripes say this. But the truth is, it does no such thing. Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive. So the First Amendment, for example, does not say, “All citizens are guaranteed the right to free speech”; it only says, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . .” The First Amendment just restricts the government from specific encroachments; it doesn't guarantee anything. This was not a concern for the people because they had strong bills of rights in their state constitutions, and at that time, the states had more power than the federal government. The US Constitution allowed slavery throughout the United States, for example, but it was each state's constitution that created free or slave states. Over time, however, the states have lost power to the federal government. The federal laws are now usually ruled to supercede the states' laws. The federal Bill of Rights is where we look to protect our freedoms. The lack of positive protection of these rights weakens them greatly.
If those rights were actually guaranteed in the Constitution, people could, for example, take the Bill of Rights into the workplace, but we can't. Anyone who thinks workers have free speech while they're on corporate property should ask the workers or talk to a union organizer. Because corporations are property, and because the Constitution protects property rights above all, most people have to abandon the Bill of Rights in order to make a living. The way different groups of people — like African Americans and women — have, one by one, acquired rights and become persons under the law is by getting protection from abuse by the government, usually through amendments to the Constitution — not a guarantee.
Another word that appears nowhere in the Constitution is “corporation,” and the reason is that the writers of the Constitution had no interest in using for-profit corporations to run their new government. In colonial times, corporations were tools of the king's oppression, chartered for the purpose of exploiting the so-called “New World” and shoveling wealth back into Europe. The rich formed joint-stock corporations to distribute the enormous risk of colonizing the Americas and gave them names like the Hudson Bay Company, the British East India Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because they were so far from their sovereign — the king — the agents for these corporations had a lot of autonomy to do their work; they could pass laws, levy taxes, and even raise armies to manage and control property and commerce. They were not popular with the colonists.
So the writers of the Constitution left control of corporations to state legislatures (10th Amendment), where they would get the closest supervision by the people. Early corporate charters were very explicit about what a corporation could do, how, for how long, with whom, where, and when. Corporations could not own stock in other corporations, and they were prohibited from any part of the political process. Individual stockholders were held personally liable for any harms done in the name of the corporation, and most charters only lasted for 10 or 15 years. But most importantly, in order to receive the profit-making privileges the shareholders sought, their corporations had to represent a clear benefit for the public good, such a building a road, canal, or bridge. And when corporations violated any of these terms, their charters were frequently revoked by the state legislatures.
That sounds nothing like the corporations of today, so what happened in the last two centuries? As time passed and memories of royal oppression faded, the wealthy people increasingly started eyeing corporations as a convenient way to shield their personal fortunes. They could sniff the winds of change and see that their minority rule through property ownership was under serious threat of being diluted. States gradually started loosening property requirements for voting, so more and more white men could participate in the political process. Women were publicly agitating for the right to vote. In 1865 the 13th Amendment was ratified, freeing the slaves. Three years later, the 14th Amendment provided citizenship rights to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and two years after that, the 15th Amendment provided voting rights to black males. Change was afoot, and so the ruling class responded.
During and after the Civil War there was a rapid increase in the number and size of corporations, and this form of business was starting to become a more important way of holding and protecting property and power. Increasingly through their corporations, the wealthy started influencing legislators, bribing public officials, and employing lawyers to write new laws and file court cases challenging the existing laws that restricted corporate behavior. Bit by bit, decade by decade, state legislatures increased corporate charter length while they decreased corporate liability and reduced citizen authority over corporate structure, governance, production, and labor.
But minority rulers were only going to be able to go just so far with this strategy. Because corporations are a creation of the government — chartered by the state legislatures — they still fell on the government side of the constitutional line with duties accountable to the people. If minority rule by property was going to be accomplished through corporations, they had to become entitled to rights instead, which required them to cross the line and become persons under the law. And their tool to do this was the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. From then it took the ruling class less than 20 years to shift corporations from the duty side of the line, where they're accountable to the people, to the rights side, where they get protection from government abuse.
The 14th Amendment, in addition to saying that now all persons born or naturalized in the US are citizens, says that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” The phrase about not depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of the law is exactly the same wording as the Fifth Amendment, which protects people from that kind of abuse by the federal government; now with the 14th Amendment, the states can't abuse people in that way, either. These are important rights; they're written in a short, straightforward manner; and after the Civil War and all the agony over slavery, the people in the states that ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were clear that they were about righting the wrong of slavery.
But that clarity didn't stop the railroad barons and their attorneys in the 1870s and '80s. As mentioned before, those who wanted to maintain minority rule were losing their grip. There was real danger of democracy creeping into the body politic. Until the Civil War, slavery was essential to maintaining the entire economic system that kept wealth and power in the hands of the few — not just in the South, but in the North as well. It was the legalization of a lie — that one human being can own another. Slavery was at the core of a whole system of oppression that benefitted the few, which included the subjugation of women, genocide of the indigenous population, and exploitation of immigrants and the poor. Now that the slavery lie could no longer be used to maintain minority rule, they needed a new lie, and they used the 14th Amendment to create it. Because these rights to due process and equal protection were so valuable, the definition of the word “person” in the 14th Amendment became the focus of hundreds of legal battles for the next 20 years. The question was: who gets to be a person protected by the 14th Amendment.
The watershed moment came in 1886 when the Supreme Court ruled on a case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The case itself was not about corporate personhood, although many before it had been, and the Court had ruled that corporations were not persons under the 14th Amendment. Santa Clara, like many railroad cases, was about taxes. But before the Court delivered its decision, the following statement is attributed to Chief Justice Waite: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” The statement appeared in the header of the case in the published version, and the Court made its ruling on other grounds. How this statement appeared in the header of the case is a matter of some mystery and competing theories, but because it was later cited as precedent, corporate personhood became the accepted legal doctrine of the land.
What was it in the 14th Amendment that was so valuable to corporate lawyers and managers? Why did they pursue it so aggressively? At the time, as is still true today, corporations were chartered by state governments, and the 14th Amendment reads “No state shall . . . ” If the word “person” in the 14th Amendment included corporations, then no state shall deny to corporations due process or equal protection of the laws. This allowed corporate lawyers to allege discrimination whenever a state law was enacted to curtail corporations. But this was also the beginning of federal regulatory agencies, so because corporations were now persons under the 14th Amendment, it would be discriminatory not to give them the same rights under federal laws. With the granting of the 5th Amendment right to due process (Noble v. Union River Logging, 1893), corporate lawyers could challenge — and the Supreme Court could find grounds to overturn — democratically legislated laws that originated at the federal as well as state levels.
Corporations acquired legal personhood at a time when all women, all Native Americans, and even most African American men were still denied the right to vote. And this was not an era of good feelings between the average person and corporations. It was the time of the robber barons, and the Supreme Court was filled with former railroad lawyers. It was the time of the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement. 1886 was the year of the Haymarket Massacre, the Great Southwestern Strike, and the next year the Pullman Strike. The people were struggling for real democracy and the wealthy ruling class did whatever it took to keep them down.
Ten years later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that legalized racial segregation through what were known as “Jim Crow” laws. In less than 30 years, African Americans had effectively lost their legal personhood rights while corporations had acquired them. And for those still wondering whether the primary purpose of the Constitution and the body of law it spawned is about protecting property rather than people, consider this. Of the hundreds of 14th Amendment cases heard in the Supreme Court in the first 50 years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of African Americans, and more than 50% asked that its benefits be extended to corporations. “Equal protection under the law” turns out to mean: whoever has enough money to go to the Supreme Court to fight for it. Railroad robber barons did; women didn't; and African Americans most certainly didn't. In fact, the pattern over more than two centuries of US legal history is that people acquire rights by amendment to the Constitution — a long and difficult, but democratic, process — and corporations acquire them by Supreme Court decisions.
Once corporations had jumped the constitutional line from the government side to the people side, their lawyers proceeded to pursue the Bill of Rights through more Supreme Court cases. As mentioned above, in 1893 they were assured 5th Amendment protection of due process. In 1906 they got 4th Amendment search and seizure protection (Hale v. Henkel). In 1922 they got the “takings” clause of the 5th Amendment (Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon), and a regulatory law was deemed to be a “takings.” In 1936 (Grosjean v. American Press Co.) and 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) they started getting First Amendment protections.
In 1976 the Supreme Court determined in Buckley v. Valeo that money spent for political purposes is equal to exercising free speech, and since “corporate persons” have First Amendment rights, they can contribute as much money as they want to overturn ballot initiatives or referenda (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti). Every time “corporate persons” acquire one of these protections under the Bill of Rights, it gives them a whole new way of exploiting the legal system in order to maintain minority rule through corporate power. And since 1886, every time people have won new rights — like the Civil Rights Act — corporations are eligible for it, too.
It is important to remember what a corporation is to understand the implications of corporate personhood for democracy. A corporation is not a real thing; it's a legal fiction, an abstraction. You can't see or hear or touch or smell a corporation — it's just an idea that people agree to and put into writing. Because legal personhood has been conferred upon an abstraction that can be redefined at will under the law, corporations have become superhumans in our world. A corporation can live forever. It can change its identity in a day. It can cut off parts of itself — even its head — and actually function better than before. It can also cut off parts of itself and from those parts grow new selves. It can own others of its own kind and it can merge with others of its own kind. It doesn't need fresh air to breathe or clean water to drink or safe food to eat. It doesn't fear illness or death. It can have simultaneous residence in many different nations. It's not male, female, or even transgendered. Without giving birth it can create children and even parents. If it's found guilty of a crime, it cannot go to prison.
Corporations are whatever those who have the power to define want them to be to maintain minority rule through corporations. As long as superhuman “corporate persons” have rights under the law, the vast majority of people have little or no effective voice in our political arena, which is why we see abolishing corporate personhood as so important to ending corporate rule and building a more democratic society.When the Constitution was written and corporations were part of the government, having duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people, the primary technique for enforcing minority rule was to establish that only a tiny percentage could qualify as “We the People” — in other words, that most people were subhuman. As different groups of people struggled to become persons under the law, the corporation acquired rights belonging to We the People and ultimately became superhuman, still maintaining an artificially elevated status for a small number of people.
Today the work of corporatists is to take this system global. Having acquired the ability to govern in the United States, the corporation is the ideal instrument to gain control of the rest of the world. The concepts, laws, and techniques perfected by the ruling minority here are now being forced down the throats of people everywhere. First, a complicit ruling elite is co-opted, installed, or propped up by the US military and the government. Then, just as slavery and immigrant status once kept wages nonexistent or at poverty levels, now sweatshops, maquiladoras, and the prison-industrial complex provide ultra-cheap labor with little or no regulation. Just as sharecropping and the company store once kept people trapped in permanently subservient production roles, now the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's structural adjustment programs keep entire countries in permanent debt, the world's poorest people forced to feed interest payments to the world's richest while their own families go hungry. Just as genocide was waged against native populations that lived sustainably on the land, now wars are instigated against peoples and regimes that resist the so-called “free trade” mantra because they have the audacity to hold their own ideas about governance and resource distribution. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and divisive religious, ethnic, ideological, and cultural distrust were all intentionally instituted to prevent people from making common cause against the ruling minority, and those systems continue their destructive work today.
What would change if corporations did not have personhood? The first and main effect would be that a barrier would be removed that is preventing democratic change — just as the abolition of slavery tore down an insurmountable legal block, making it possible to pass laws to provide full rights to the newly freed slaves. After corporate personhood is abolished, new legislation will be possible. Here are a few examples. If “corporate persons” no longer had First Amendment right of free speech, we could prohibit all corporate political activity, such as lobbying and contributions to political candidates and parties. If “corporate persons” were not protected against search without a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, then corporate managers couldn't turn OSHA and the EPA inspectors away if they make surprise, unscheduled searches. If “corporate persons” weren't protected against discrimination under the 14th Amendment, corporations like Wal-Mart couldn't force themselves into communities that don't want them.
So what can we do to abolish corporate personhood? Within our current legal system there are two possibilities: the Supreme Court could change its mind on corporations having rights in the Constitution, and/or we can pass an amendment to the Constitution. Either scenario seems daunting, yet it is even more difficult than that. Every state now has laws and language in their state constitutions conceding these rights to corporations. So corporate personhood must be abolished on a state as well as a national level. The good news is that almost anything we do towards abolishing corporate personhood helps the issue progress on one of these levels. If a city passes a non-binding resolution, declaring their area a “Corporate Personhood Free Zone,” that is a step toward passing a constitutional amendment at their state and eventually at the national level. If a town passes an ordinance legally denying corporations rights as persons, they may provoke a crisis of jurisdiction that could lead to a court case. We think both paths should be followed. However, it was undemocratic for the Supreme Court to grant personhood to corporations, and it would be just as undemocratic for this to be decided that way again. An amendment is the democratic way to correct this judicial usurpation of the people's sovereignty.
As the rights of human persons in the US are diminished and restricted by the Patriot Act on the one hand, they are also squeezed by corporate personhood on the other. We, the real people, have our rights caught between a rock and a hard place, while the rights of the corporate person continue to expand.
These systems of oppression weren't established overnight; they were gradually and sometimes surreptitiously introduced and refined in ways that made them acceptable. At the time of the Constitution, corporations were widely reviled, but a century later they were a commonplace business institution, and a century after that they've become our invisible government. They accomplished this over decades, changing the law incrementally when most people weren't looking.
Resistance to these oppressions evolved in a similar way. Those who wished to end slavery, for example, worked for many years collecting information, refining their analysis, and debating among themselves. They came to understand the issue as one of human rights and that the whole institution of slavery was fundamentally wrong. They didn't come up with a Slavery Regulatory Agency or voluntary codes of conduct for slave owners. They called themselves Abolitionists — the whole thing had to go.
We look at corporate personhood the same way. We see that corporate personhood was wrongly given — not by We the People, but by nine Supreme Court judges. We further see that corporate personhood is destructive, because it was the pivotal achievement that allowed an artificial entity to obtain the rights of people, thus relegating us to subhuman status. And finally, because of the way corporate personhood has enabled corporations to govern us, we must eradicate it.
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person. Like abolishing slavery, the work of eradicating corporate personhood takes us to the deepest questions of what it means to be human. And if we are to live in a democracy, what does it mean to be sovereign? The hardest part of eliminating corporate personhood is believing that We the People have the sovereign right to do this. It comes down to us being clear about who's in charge.
The history of the United States could be told as the story of who is and who is not a person under law. Women, poor people, slaves, and even corporations had long been considered persons for purposes of following the law. This is because early laws were written “No person shall . . .” Corporate lawyers had tried to avoid these laws by claiming corporations were not persons and therefore not required to follow the law. So it was decided that for purposes of following the law, corporations were persons. This allowed corporations to sue and be sued in court among other things. But corporations were not persons with rights in the law, and neither were women, slaves, indentured servants, or poor people. We know some of the ongoing story of human beings' struggle to gain the rights of persons under law, but how did corporations gain these rights?
To understand the phenomenon of corporate personhood, we start by looking at the foundation of US law, the Constitution. This document was written by 55 gentlemen cleverly described by one historian as “the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed.” As some of the wealthiest, most privileged people in the new country, they were highly aware that their power had everything to do with how much property they owned — land, crops, buildings, personal goods, and, for most of them, property in the form of human beings, their slaves. As some of the best-educated men in the world, at least by European standards, they also knew a lot about democracy, and they understood what a threat the real thing represented to their personal power. The kind of democracy they prized and wrote about so eloquently could only be practiced by people like them — certainly not by the rabble. Many of them wrote and spoke at length about the inability of the common people to be self-governing.
So the word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution. What they created was a republic designed to protect property, not people. This didn't play very well with many people in the new United States — at least half of the population was very much opposed to the Constitution. They could see how much power it would take away from them, how much it would compromise the democratic ideals in the Declaration of Independence, and they wanted no part of it. But the Federalists who proposed the Constitution had the finances and the unity to promote their ideas strongly. After a lot of politicking they got the Constitution ratified — but only with the assurance that a Bill of Rights would be added to protect people from the abuses by the government that would be possible under the new system. So let's look at the basic structure they created to protect property.
The Constitution only mentions two entities: We the People and the government. The people are on one side of a line, and we are sovereign and have individual rights. On the other side of the line is the government, which is accountable to the people and has specific duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people. We delegate some of our power to the government in order to perform tasks we want government to do. In a representative democracy, this system should work just fine.
The problem is that the phrase “We the People” is not defined in the Constitution. In 1787, in order to be considered one of “We the People” and have rights in the Constitution, you had to be an adult male with white skin and a certain amount of property. (The states determined who could vote; some states had religious restrictions.) At the time of the Constitution, this narrowed “We the People” down to about 10% of the population. Those who owned property, including human property, were very clear that this was rule by the minority — and that's the way they wanted it.
So here is the first definition of who gets to be a person in the United States. Ninety percent of the people — all the immigrants, indentured servants, slaves, minors, Native Americans, women, and people who don't own property (the poor) — are, legally, not persons. They were not persons with rights, but were persons for following the law. They're like subhumans. The law didn't label people this way in so many words — which is part of the brilliance of the system and why it's lasted so long — but the net effect was clear. By allowing only wealthy, white males to be “persons,” a class system was put in place.
Those who could vote in the republic were able to elect people for the House of Representatives. So the United States held within its republican form the possibility of democracy. More human beings could become part of We the People. And they did. It was not easily won, but eventually all adult citizens became legal persons.
Without using the words “slave” or “slavery,” the Constitution ensures that even if slaves get to free soil, their status as property remains the same. This is just one of the clauses defining property in the Constitution. It also defines contracts, labor, commerce, money, copyright, and war as the province of the federal government. So the Constitution, the foundation of all US law, was not written to protect people — it was written to protect property. The Constitution does contain some protection for people in Section 9, but the Bill of Rights is the concentration of rights for We the People.
Most people believe that the Constitution — specifically, the Bill of Rights — guarantees our rights to freedom of speech, religion, and press, to peaceably assemble, and so forth. People of all political stripes say this. But the truth is, it does no such thing. Almost all of our constitutional protections are expressed as the absence of a negative rather than the presence of a positive. So the First Amendment, for example, does not say, “All citizens are guaranteed the right to free speech”; it only says, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . .” The First Amendment just restricts the government from specific encroachments; it doesn't guarantee anything. This was not a concern for the people because they had strong bills of rights in their state constitutions, and at that time, the states had more power than the federal government. The US Constitution allowed slavery throughout the United States, for example, but it was each state's constitution that created free or slave states. Over time, however, the states have lost power to the federal government. The federal laws are now usually ruled to supercede the states' laws. The federal Bill of Rights is where we look to protect our freedoms. The lack of positive protection of these rights weakens them greatly.
If those rights were actually guaranteed in the Constitution, people could, for example, take the Bill of Rights into the workplace, but we can't. Anyone who thinks workers have free speech while they're on corporate property should ask the workers or talk to a union organizer. Because corporations are property, and because the Constitution protects property rights above all, most people have to abandon the Bill of Rights in order to make a living. The way different groups of people — like African Americans and women — have, one by one, acquired rights and become persons under the law is by getting protection from abuse by the government, usually through amendments to the Constitution — not a guarantee.
Another word that appears nowhere in the Constitution is “corporation,” and the reason is that the writers of the Constitution had no interest in using for-profit corporations to run their new government. In colonial times, corporations were tools of the king's oppression, chartered for the purpose of exploiting the so-called “New World” and shoveling wealth back into Europe. The rich formed joint-stock corporations to distribute the enormous risk of colonizing the Americas and gave them names like the Hudson Bay Company, the British East India Company, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Because they were so far from their sovereign — the king — the agents for these corporations had a lot of autonomy to do their work; they could pass laws, levy taxes, and even raise armies to manage and control property and commerce. They were not popular with the colonists.
So the writers of the Constitution left control of corporations to state legislatures (10th Amendment), where they would get the closest supervision by the people. Early corporate charters were very explicit about what a corporation could do, how, for how long, with whom, where, and when. Corporations could not own stock in other corporations, and they were prohibited from any part of the political process. Individual stockholders were held personally liable for any harms done in the name of the corporation, and most charters only lasted for 10 or 15 years. But most importantly, in order to receive the profit-making privileges the shareholders sought, their corporations had to represent a clear benefit for the public good, such a building a road, canal, or bridge. And when corporations violated any of these terms, their charters were frequently revoked by the state legislatures.
That sounds nothing like the corporations of today, so what happened in the last two centuries? As time passed and memories of royal oppression faded, the wealthy people increasingly started eyeing corporations as a convenient way to shield their personal fortunes. They could sniff the winds of change and see that their minority rule through property ownership was under serious threat of being diluted. States gradually started loosening property requirements for voting, so more and more white men could participate in the political process. Women were publicly agitating for the right to vote. In 1865 the 13th Amendment was ratified, freeing the slaves. Three years later, the 14th Amendment provided citizenship rights to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and two years after that, the 15th Amendment provided voting rights to black males. Change was afoot, and so the ruling class responded.
During and after the Civil War there was a rapid increase in the number and size of corporations, and this form of business was starting to become a more important way of holding and protecting property and power. Increasingly through their corporations, the wealthy started influencing legislators, bribing public officials, and employing lawyers to write new laws and file court cases challenging the existing laws that restricted corporate behavior. Bit by bit, decade by decade, state legislatures increased corporate charter length while they decreased corporate liability and reduced citizen authority over corporate structure, governance, production, and labor.
But minority rulers were only going to be able to go just so far with this strategy. Because corporations are a creation of the government — chartered by the state legislatures — they still fell on the government side of the constitutional line with duties accountable to the people. If minority rule by property was going to be accomplished through corporations, they had to become entitled to rights instead, which required them to cross the line and become persons under the law. And their tool to do this was the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868. From then it took the ruling class less than 20 years to shift corporations from the duty side of the line, where they're accountable to the people, to the rights side, where they get protection from government abuse.
The 14th Amendment, in addition to saying that now all persons born or naturalized in the US are citizens, says that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law; nor deny to any person . . . the equal protection of the laws.” The phrase about not depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without the due process of the law is exactly the same wording as the Fifth Amendment, which protects people from that kind of abuse by the federal government; now with the 14th Amendment, the states can't abuse people in that way, either. These are important rights; they're written in a short, straightforward manner; and after the Civil War and all the agony over slavery, the people in the states that ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were clear that they were about righting the wrong of slavery.
But that clarity didn't stop the railroad barons and their attorneys in the 1870s and '80s. As mentioned before, those who wanted to maintain minority rule were losing their grip. There was real danger of democracy creeping into the body politic. Until the Civil War, slavery was essential to maintaining the entire economic system that kept wealth and power in the hands of the few — not just in the South, but in the North as well. It was the legalization of a lie — that one human being can own another. Slavery was at the core of a whole system of oppression that benefitted the few, which included the subjugation of women, genocide of the indigenous population, and exploitation of immigrants and the poor. Now that the slavery lie could no longer be used to maintain minority rule, they needed a new lie, and they used the 14th Amendment to create it. Because these rights to due process and equal protection were so valuable, the definition of the word “person” in the 14th Amendment became the focus of hundreds of legal battles for the next 20 years. The question was: who gets to be a person protected by the 14th Amendment.
The watershed moment came in 1886 when the Supreme Court ruled on a case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. The case itself was not about corporate personhood, although many before it had been, and the Court had ruled that corporations were not persons under the 14th Amendment. Santa Clara, like many railroad cases, was about taxes. But before the Court delivered its decision, the following statement is attributed to Chief Justice Waite: “The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.” The statement appeared in the header of the case in the published version, and the Court made its ruling on other grounds. How this statement appeared in the header of the case is a matter of some mystery and competing theories, but because it was later cited as precedent, corporate personhood became the accepted legal doctrine of the land.
What was it in the 14th Amendment that was so valuable to corporate lawyers and managers? Why did they pursue it so aggressively? At the time, as is still true today, corporations were chartered by state governments, and the 14th Amendment reads “No state shall . . . ” If the word “person” in the 14th Amendment included corporations, then no state shall deny to corporations due process or equal protection of the laws. This allowed corporate lawyers to allege discrimination whenever a state law was enacted to curtail corporations. But this was also the beginning of federal regulatory agencies, so because corporations were now persons under the 14th Amendment, it would be discriminatory not to give them the same rights under federal laws. With the granting of the 5th Amendment right to due process (Noble v. Union River Logging, 1893), corporate lawyers could challenge — and the Supreme Court could find grounds to overturn — democratically legislated laws that originated at the federal as well as state levels.
Corporations acquired legal personhood at a time when all women, all Native Americans, and even most African American men were still denied the right to vote. And this was not an era of good feelings between the average person and corporations. It was the time of the robber barons, and the Supreme Court was filled with former railroad lawyers. It was the time of the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement. 1886 was the year of the Haymarket Massacre, the Great Southwestern Strike, and the next year the Pullman Strike. The people were struggling for real democracy and the wealthy ruling class did whatever it took to keep them down.
Ten years later, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court established the “separate but equal” doctrine that legalized racial segregation through what were known as “Jim Crow” laws. In less than 30 years, African Americans had effectively lost their legal personhood rights while corporations had acquired them. And for those still wondering whether the primary purpose of the Constitution and the body of law it spawned is about protecting property rather than people, consider this. Of the hundreds of 14th Amendment cases heard in the Supreme Court in the first 50 years after its adoption, less than one-half of one percent invoked it in protection of African Americans, and more than 50% asked that its benefits be extended to corporations. “Equal protection under the law” turns out to mean: whoever has enough money to go to the Supreme Court to fight for it. Railroad robber barons did; women didn't; and African Americans most certainly didn't. In fact, the pattern over more than two centuries of US legal history is that people acquire rights by amendment to the Constitution — a long and difficult, but democratic, process — and corporations acquire them by Supreme Court decisions.
Once corporations had jumped the constitutional line from the government side to the people side, their lawyers proceeded to pursue the Bill of Rights through more Supreme Court cases. As mentioned above, in 1893 they were assured 5th Amendment protection of due process. In 1906 they got 4th Amendment search and seizure protection (Hale v. Henkel). In 1922 they got the “takings” clause of the 5th Amendment (Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon), and a regulatory law was deemed to be a “takings.” In 1936 (Grosjean v. American Press Co.) and 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) they started getting First Amendment protections.
In 1976 the Supreme Court determined in Buckley v. Valeo that money spent for political purposes is equal to exercising free speech, and since “corporate persons” have First Amendment rights, they can contribute as much money as they want to overturn ballot initiatives or referenda (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti). Every time “corporate persons” acquire one of these protections under the Bill of Rights, it gives them a whole new way of exploiting the legal system in order to maintain minority rule through corporate power. And since 1886, every time people have won new rights — like the Civil Rights Act — corporations are eligible for it, too.
It is important to remember what a corporation is to understand the implications of corporate personhood for democracy. A corporation is not a real thing; it's a legal fiction, an abstraction. You can't see or hear or touch or smell a corporation — it's just an idea that people agree to and put into writing. Because legal personhood has been conferred upon an abstraction that can be redefined at will under the law, corporations have become superhumans in our world. A corporation can live forever. It can change its identity in a day. It can cut off parts of itself — even its head — and actually function better than before. It can also cut off parts of itself and from those parts grow new selves. It can own others of its own kind and it can merge with others of its own kind. It doesn't need fresh air to breathe or clean water to drink or safe food to eat. It doesn't fear illness or death. It can have simultaneous residence in many different nations. It's not male, female, or even transgendered. Without giving birth it can create children and even parents. If it's found guilty of a crime, it cannot go to prison.
Corporations are whatever those who have the power to define want them to be to maintain minority rule through corporations. As long as superhuman “corporate persons” have rights under the law, the vast majority of people have little or no effective voice in our political arena, which is why we see abolishing corporate personhood as so important to ending corporate rule and building a more democratic society.When the Constitution was written and corporations were part of the government, having duties to perform to the satisfaction of the people, the primary technique for enforcing minority rule was to establish that only a tiny percentage could qualify as “We the People” — in other words, that most people were subhuman. As different groups of people struggled to become persons under the law, the corporation acquired rights belonging to We the People and ultimately became superhuman, still maintaining an artificially elevated status for a small number of people.
Today the work of corporatists is to take this system global. Having acquired the ability to govern in the United States, the corporation is the ideal instrument to gain control of the rest of the world. The concepts, laws, and techniques perfected by the ruling minority here are now being forced down the throats of people everywhere. First, a complicit ruling elite is co-opted, installed, or propped up by the US military and the government. Then, just as slavery and immigrant status once kept wages nonexistent or at poverty levels, now sweatshops, maquiladoras, and the prison-industrial complex provide ultra-cheap labor with little or no regulation. Just as sharecropping and the company store once kept people trapped in permanently subservient production roles, now the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's structural adjustment programs keep entire countries in permanent debt, the world's poorest people forced to feed interest payments to the world's richest while their own families go hungry. Just as genocide was waged against native populations that lived sustainably on the land, now wars are instigated against peoples and regimes that resist the so-called “free trade” mantra because they have the audacity to hold their own ideas about governance and resource distribution. Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and divisive religious, ethnic, ideological, and cultural distrust were all intentionally instituted to prevent people from making common cause against the ruling minority, and those systems continue their destructive work today.
What would change if corporations did not have personhood? The first and main effect would be that a barrier would be removed that is preventing democratic change — just as the abolition of slavery tore down an insurmountable legal block, making it possible to pass laws to provide full rights to the newly freed slaves. After corporate personhood is abolished, new legislation will be possible. Here are a few examples. If “corporate persons” no longer had First Amendment right of free speech, we could prohibit all corporate political activity, such as lobbying and contributions to political candidates and parties. If “corporate persons” were not protected against search without a warrant under the Fourth Amendment, then corporate managers couldn't turn OSHA and the EPA inspectors away if they make surprise, unscheduled searches. If “corporate persons” weren't protected against discrimination under the 14th Amendment, corporations like Wal-Mart couldn't force themselves into communities that don't want them.
So what can we do to abolish corporate personhood? Within our current legal system there are two possibilities: the Supreme Court could change its mind on corporations having rights in the Constitution, and/or we can pass an amendment to the Constitution. Either scenario seems daunting, yet it is even more difficult than that. Every state now has laws and language in their state constitutions conceding these rights to corporations. So corporate personhood must be abolished on a state as well as a national level. The good news is that almost anything we do towards abolishing corporate personhood helps the issue progress on one of these levels. If a city passes a non-binding resolution, declaring their area a “Corporate Personhood Free Zone,” that is a step toward passing a constitutional amendment at their state and eventually at the national level. If a town passes an ordinance legally denying corporations rights as persons, they may provoke a crisis of jurisdiction that could lead to a court case. We think both paths should be followed. However, it was undemocratic for the Supreme Court to grant personhood to corporations, and it would be just as undemocratic for this to be decided that way again. An amendment is the democratic way to correct this judicial usurpation of the people's sovereignty.
As the rights of human persons in the US are diminished and restricted by the Patriot Act on the one hand, they are also squeezed by corporate personhood on the other. We, the real people, have our rights caught between a rock and a hard place, while the rights of the corporate person continue to expand.
These systems of oppression weren't established overnight; they were gradually and sometimes surreptitiously introduced and refined in ways that made them acceptable. At the time of the Constitution, corporations were widely reviled, but a century later they were a commonplace business institution, and a century after that they've become our invisible government. They accomplished this over decades, changing the law incrementally when most people weren't looking.
Resistance to these oppressions evolved in a similar way. Those who wished to end slavery, for example, worked for many years collecting information, refining their analysis, and debating among themselves. They came to understand the issue as one of human rights and that the whole institution of slavery was fundamentally wrong. They didn't come up with a Slavery Regulatory Agency or voluntary codes of conduct for slave owners. They called themselves Abolitionists — the whole thing had to go.
We look at corporate personhood the same way. We see that corporate personhood was wrongly given — not by We the People, but by nine Supreme Court judges. We further see that corporate personhood is destructive, because it was the pivotal achievement that allowed an artificial entity to obtain the rights of people, thus relegating us to subhuman status. And finally, because of the way corporate personhood has enabled corporations to govern us, we must eradicate it.
Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person. Like abolishing slavery, the work of eradicating corporate personhood takes us to the deepest questions of what it means to be human. And if we are to live in a democracy, what does it mean to be sovereign? The hardest part of eliminating corporate personhood is believing that We the People have the sovereign right to do this. It comes down to us being clear about who's in charge.
January 23, 2010
Put Parliament Back to Work: Throw Out the Harper War Criminals! by Dave McKee President, Canadian Peace Congress 22 January 2010
For the second year in a row, the minority Harper government is proroguing Parliament to avoid a crisis of confidence. Last year, the issue was outrage over the Conservatives' economic update, which sought to solve the economic crisis on the backs of working people. This time, the issue is the ongoing scrutiny into allegations of Canada's involvement in the torture of Afghan detainees.
The Canadian Peace Congress adds its voice to those of the labour movement, hundreds of progressive social and community organizations, and millions of Canadians who condemn this suspension of democracy as a move by the Conservatives to continue the war in Afghanistan, to avoid real solutions to the economic crisis and climate change, and to body-check Richard Colvin's explosive allegations that Canada and NATO have committed war crimes. We join in the call for ongoing and escalating protests against the Harper government, with a view to unifying all progressive forces into a movement that can throw out the minority Conservatives at the earliest opportunity.
The unjust, imperialist war in Afghanistan must be ended now – Canadian soldiers must be brought home immediately. The cost of the war currently tops $1.5 billion per year. Military spending in Canada is at its highest level since the Second World War, over $21 billion per year, and the Harper government wants to increase it even more. Harper's Canada First Defence Strategy commits the Canadian people to paying for 25 years of annual increases in military spending, to the tune of half a trillion dollars. These funds are needed – and available – to pay for Canada's eroding infrastructure and social service. They are needed for increases in EI and CPP levels, that can guarantee working people a dignified life through an economic crisis that they did not create.
Parliament must hold an immediate and full public inquiry into the allegations of Canadian participation in torture in Afghanistan. Torture is a war crime. If these allegations are found to be true – which seem likely – the government ministers and military leaders involved must be brought to trial.
As we stated during the prorogue in December 2008:
“The Canadian Peace Congress considers that an economic program to protect Canadians from the economic crisis will be successful if it also includes measures to reverse and reduce the Conservative policy of militarization of the economy. Militarism is an impediment, not a stimulus, to the economic expansion and job creation that can only come from public investment in infrastructure, public housing, public transit, environmental projects, justice for Aboriginal peoples, child care, public education, anti-poverty measures, and capital investments in peaceful production.”
This is a crucial moment. The labour movement and its allies, including the peace movement, must work to build a united, growing mass mobilization and action against the Harper Conservatives. A new and better world is needed.
Canadian Peace Congress Executive Council
January 22, 2010
About the Canadian Peace Congress:
The Canadian Peace Congress was formed in 1949 as an organization of Canadian people that works for world peace and disarmament. We maintain that peace, not militarism and war, is the guarantor of democracy, human rights, and social and economic justice. The Congress is affiliated to the World Peace Council and is a founding member of the Canadian Peace Alliance.
For more information on the Canadian Peace Congress, or to join, please contact:
Dave McKee
President, Canadian Peace Congress
dmckee@canadianpeacecongress.ca
January 19, 2010
Fidel Castro Ruz January 16, 2010: Cooperation Spirit Is Put To The Test In Haiti, Cuban News Agency
The news reported from Haiti describe a great chaos that was to be expected, given the exceptional situation created in the aftermath of the catastrophe.
At first, a feeling of surprise, astonishment and commotion set in. A desire to offer immediate assistance came up in the farthest places of the Earth. What assistance should be sent –and how- to a Caribbean nation from China, India, Vietnam and other countries that are tens of thousands of kilometers away? The magnitude of the earthquake and the poverty that exists in that country generated at first some ideas about probable needs, which gave rise to all types of promises that are possible in terms of resources that later on are tried to be conveyed through every possible way.
We Cubans understood that the most important thing at that moment was to save lives, and we are trained not only to cope with catastrophes like that, but also to cope with other natural catastrophes related to human health.
Hundreds of Cuban doctors were working there, along with quite a number of young Haitians of humble origin, who had become well trained health professionals, an area in which, for many years now, we have been cooperating with that neighboring and sister nation. Some of our compatriots were on vacations, while other Haitians were being trained or studying in Cuba.
The destruction caused by the earthquake exceeded all calculations: the humble clay and adobe houses –in a city with almost two million inhabitants- could not stand. The solid government facilities collapsed; entire blocks of houses crumbled over their tenants who, at that time of the day -almost at dusk- were inside their homes; and they were all buried, dead or alive, under the rubble. The streets were filled with people claiming for help. The MINUSTAH -the UN contingent- the government and the police were left without leaders or headquarters. Soon after the earthquake, the main task of those institutions made up by thousands of persons was to know who were still alive and where they were.
The immediate decision adopted by the dedicated Cuban doctors who worked in Haiti, as well as by the young health professionals from Haiti who had graduated in Cuba, was to establish contact among them, know about each other’s fate and wonder what were the resources available to assist the Haitian people in the midst of that tragedy.
The Cuban doctors who were on vacation in Cuba as well as the Haitian doctors who were taking their specialization courses in our homeland immediately readied themselves to leave for Haiti. Other Cuban surgery experts, who had accomplished difficult missions, volunteered to accompany them. Suffice it to say that in less than 24 hours our doctors had already assisted hundreds of patients. Today, January 16, only three and a half days after the tragedy, there were already thousands of people injured who had been assisted by them.
Today, Saturday, at noon time, the head of our medical brigade reported to us, among other data, the following:
“…the work that is being done by our comrades is really commendable. The general opinion is that the Pakistani earthquake has been put in the shade – that was another huge earthquake, and some of these doctors worked there. In that country, many a time our doctors assisted patients with fractures whose bones were not well knitted together, or who had been crushed. But here reality has exceeded the imaginable: amputations abound, surgeries are being performed virtually out in the public. This is the image they envisaged of a war.”
“…The ‘Delmas 33 Hospital’ is already operational. It has three operating rooms, its own power generation plants, doctors’ visits areas, etcetera, but is absolutely full.”
“Twelve Chilean doctors have joined in. One of them is an anesthesiologist. There are also eight Venezuelan doctors and nine Spanish nuns. It was expected that, at any moment, 18 Spanish, to whom the UN and the Haitian Public Health authorities had handed over the control of the hospital, would come, but they lacked some emergency supplies that had not arrived, so they have decided to join us and start working immediately.”
“Thirty two Haitian resident doctors were sent in; six of them were going straight to Carrefour, a place that was totally devastated. Traveling with them were also the three Cuban surgical teams that arrived here yesterday.”
“…we are operating the following medical facilities at Port au Prince:
‘La Renaissance’ Hospital.
The Social Insurance Hospital.
The Peace Hospital.”
“…Four Comprehensive Diagnostics Centers are already working”.
This information gives only an idea of the work that is being carried out by the medical staff from Cuba and those from other countries working with them, who were among the first to arrive in that nation. Our medical personnel is ready to cooperate and join forces with all other health specialists who have been sent to save lives in that sister nation. Haiti could become an example of what humankind can do for itself. The possibility and the means exist; but willingness is missing.
The longer it takes to bury or incinerate the corpses and to distribute food and other vital supplies, the higher the risks of epidemics and social violence will be.
Haiti will put to the test the endurance of the cooperation spirit before egoism, chauvinism, ignoble interests and contempt for other nations prevail.
A climate change jeopardizes the whole humankind. The earthquake at Port au Prince, hardly three weeks after the Copenhagen conference, is reminding all of us how selfishly and arrogantly we behaved then.
Countries are taking a close look at all that is happening in Haiti. The world’s public opinion and peoples’ criticisms will be ever harsher and unforgiving.
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 16, 2010
7:46 p.m.
January 17, 2010
IMF to Haiti: Freeze Public Wages posted by Richard Kim, The Nation, 01/15/2010
Since a devastating earthquake rocked Haiti on Tuesday--killing tens of thousands of people--there's been a lot of well-intentioned chatter and twitter about how to help Haiti. Folks have been donating millions of dollars to Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti (by texting "YELE" to 501501) or to the Red Cross (by texting "HAITI" to 90999) or to Paul Farmer's extraordinary Partners in Health, among other organizations. I hope these donations continue to pour in, along with more money, food, water, medicine, equipment and doctors and nurses from nations around the world. The Obama administration has pledged at least $100 million in aid and has already sent thousands of soldiers and relief workers. That's a decent start.
But it's also time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice--about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?
Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.
Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF's extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.
For Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti's slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage--external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that's right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, "by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments."
It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum--valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d'etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.
Then of course there are the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. In 1995, for example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent, leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States. As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, "by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US." During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this "charity" came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti's agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti's dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness.
A 2008 report from the Center for International Policy points out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received. As Paul Farmer noted in our pages after hurricanes whipped the country in 2008, Haiti is "a veritable graveyard of development projects."
So what can activists do in addition to donating to a charity? One long-term objective is to get the IMF to forgive all $265 million of Haiti's debt (that's the $165 million outstanding, plus the $100 million issued this week). In the short term, Haiti's IMF loans could be restructured to come from the IMF's rapid credit facility, which doesn't impose conditions like keeping wages and inflation down.
Indeed, debt relief is essential to Haiti's future. It recently had about $1.2 billion in debt canceled, but it still owes about $891 million, all of which was lent to the country from 2004 onward. $429 million of that debt is held by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to whom Haiti is scheduled to make $10 million in payments next year. Obviously, that's money better spent on saving Haitian lives and rebuilding the country in the months ahead; the cancellation of the entire sum would free up precious capital. The US controls about 30 percent of the bank's shares; Latin American and Caribbean countries hold just over 50 percent. Notably, the IDB's loans come from its fund for special operations (i.e. the IDB's donor nations and funds from loans that have been paid back), not from IDB's bonds. Hence, the total amount could be forgiven without impacting the IDB's triple-A credit rating.
Finally, although the Obama administration temporarily halted deportations to Haiti, it hasn't granted Haitians temporary protected status (TPS), which would save them from being deported back to the scene of a disaster for as long as 18 months, allow them to work in the US and, crucially, send money back to relatives in Haiti. In the past, TPS has been given to countries like Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998 after Hurrican Mitch, but it has never been extended to Haitians, even after the 2008 storms, presumably because immigrations officials fear a mass exodus from Haiti.
But decency, as well as fairness, should trump those fears now. As Sunita Patel, an attorney with CCR, told me, "We have granted TPS to El Salavador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan following natural disasters. To apply different rules here would fly in the face of the administration's efforts to build good will abroad."
(UPDATE: It has just been announced that the Obama administration has granted Temporary Protected Status to Haiti. This is a great relief to Haitians in the US and a victory for those who pressured the administration to do so.)
But it's also time to stop having a conversation about charity and start having a conversation about justice--about recovery, responsibility and fairness. What the world should be pondering instead is: What is Haiti owed?
Haiti's vulnerability to natural disasters, its food shortages, poverty, deforestation and lack of infrastructure, are not accidental. To say that it is the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere is to miss the point; Haiti was made poor--by France, the United States, Great Britain, other Western powers and by the IMF and the World Bank.
Now, in its attempts to help Haiti, the IMF is pursuing the same kinds of policies that made Haiti a geography of precariousness even before the quake. To great fanfare, the IMF announced a new $100 million loan to Haiti on Thursday. In one crucial way, the loan is a good thing; Haiti is in dire straits and needs a massive cash infusion. But the new loan was made through the IMF's extended credit facility, to which Haiti already has $165 million in debt. Debt relief activists tell me that these loans came with conditions, including raising prices for electricity, refusing pay increases to all public employees except those making minimum wage and keeping inflation low. They say that the new loans would impose these same conditions. In other words, in the face of this latest tragedy, the IMF is still using crisis and debt as leverage to compel neoliberal reforms.
For Haiti, this is history repeated. As historians have documented, the impoverishment of Haiti began in the earliest decades of its independence, when Haiti's slaves and free gens de couleur rallied to liberate the country from the French in 1804. But by 1825, Haiti was living under a new kind of bondage--external debt. In order to keep the French and other Western powers from enforcing an embargo, it agreed to pay 150 million francs in reparations to French slave owners (yes, that's right, freed slaves were forced to compensate their former masters for their liberty). In order to do that, they borrowed millions from French banks and then from the US and Germany. As Alex von Tunzelmann pointed out, "by 1900, it [Haiti] was spending 80 percent of its national budget on repayments."
It took Haiti 122 years, but in 1947 the nation paid off about 60 percent, or 90 million francs, of this debt (it was able to negotiate a reduction in 1838). In 2003, then-President Aristide called on France to pay restitution for this sum--valued in 2003 dollars at over $21 billion. A few months later, he was ousted in a coup d'etat; he claims he left the country under armed pressure from the US.
Then of course there are the structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and World Bank in the 1990s. In 1995, for example, the IMF forced Haiti to cut its rice tariff from 35 percent to 3 percent, leading to a massive increase in rice-dumping, the vast majority of which came from the United States. As a 2008 Jubilee USA report notes, although the country had once been a net exporter of rice, "by 2005, three out of every four plates of rice eaten in Haiti came from the US." During this period, USAID invested heavily in Haiti, but this "charity" came not in the form of grants to develop Haiti's agricultural infrastructure, but in direct food aid, furthering Haiti's dependence on foreign assistance while also funneling money back to US agribusiness.
A 2008 report from the Center for International Policy points out that in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received. As Paul Farmer noted in our pages after hurricanes whipped the country in 2008, Haiti is "a veritable graveyard of development projects."
So what can activists do in addition to donating to a charity? One long-term objective is to get the IMF to forgive all $265 million of Haiti's debt (that's the $165 million outstanding, plus the $100 million issued this week). In the short term, Haiti's IMF loans could be restructured to come from the IMF's rapid credit facility, which doesn't impose conditions like keeping wages and inflation down.
Indeed, debt relief is essential to Haiti's future. It recently had about $1.2 billion in debt canceled, but it still owes about $891 million, all of which was lent to the country from 2004 onward. $429 million of that debt is held by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), to whom Haiti is scheduled to make $10 million in payments next year. Obviously, that's money better spent on saving Haitian lives and rebuilding the country in the months ahead; the cancellation of the entire sum would free up precious capital. The US controls about 30 percent of the bank's shares; Latin American and Caribbean countries hold just over 50 percent. Notably, the IDB's loans come from its fund for special operations (i.e. the IDB's donor nations and funds from loans that have been paid back), not from IDB's bonds. Hence, the total amount could be forgiven without impacting the IDB's triple-A credit rating.
Finally, although the Obama administration temporarily halted deportations to Haiti, it hasn't granted Haitians temporary protected status (TPS), which would save them from being deported back to the scene of a disaster for as long as 18 months, allow them to work in the US and, crucially, send money back to relatives in Haiti. In the past, TPS has been given to countries like Honduras and Nicaragua in 1998 after Hurrican Mitch, but it has never been extended to Haitians, even after the 2008 storms, presumably because immigrations officials fear a mass exodus from Haiti.
But decency, as well as fairness, should trump those fears now. As Sunita Patel, an attorney with CCR, told me, "We have granted TPS to El Salavador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan following natural disasters. To apply different rules here would fly in the face of the administration's efforts to build good will abroad."
(UPDATE: It has just been announced that the Obama administration has granted Temporary Protected Status to Haiti. This is a great relief to Haitians in the US and a victory for those who pressured the administration to do so.)
January 15, 2010
Au Honduras, les putschistes se parent de légitimité by Cathy Ceïbe In Honduras, the Putschists Adorn Themselves With Legit
ORIGINAL FRENCH ARTICLE: Au Honduras, les putschistes se parent de légitimité
by Cathy Ceïbe
In Honduras, the Putschists Adorn Themselves With Legitimacy
Translated Friday 1 January 2010, by Leslie Thatcher (www.truthout.org) and reviewed by Henry Crapo
Porfirio Lobo was officially declared "president elect" after the November 29 election, the result of which was not recognized by a large part of the international community.
Forty-two murders, 120 disappearances, 4,000 arbitrary detentions ... Human rights have savagely deteriorated since the June 28 putsch.
Well-known analyst of Honduran political life and sociologist at the Francisco-Morazan Teaching University of Honduras Julio Navarro believes that de facto the regime has no choice but to hold talks with the resistance.
Cathy Ceïbe of L’Humanité:
Do you share the much-publicized idea that the November 29 elections have ended the Honduran political crisis?
Julio Navarro: The authors of the coup d’état believed that elections would settle the crisis because the resistance movement was massive. Otherwise, who can believe that they would have executed this forcible coup to stay in power six months only? But the government of Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo, elected by 33 percent of the population, has a legitimacy problem. That ought to favor dialogue with the forces the resistance represents.
For now, "Pepe" Lobo’s actions are moving away from that prospect ...
Julio Navarro: Porfirio Lobo is not acting that way because he believes that, in time, the international community will digest the situation. I believe he’s mistaken. He finds himself in a position all the more complicated in that his Party, the National Party, certainly has an absolute majority in the Congress, but the latter is controlled by close to 100 deputies (out of 128) that constitute the putschist parliamentary bloc.
What are the sticking points for Honduran society?
Julio Navarro: The rupture of the Constitutional order on June 28 and the Constitutional Assembly. If one looks at this country’s antecedents, in 1924, in 1956, in 1965 and in 1982, four coups d’état led to a Constitutional Assembly. But this time will perhaps be the exception. The bloc constituted by the neoliberals, the nationalists, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats is opposed to that process. On the other hand, attention must be paid to other sectors of society. The military, for example, is in favor of a Constitutional Assembly in order to renegotiate its position. Management also needs it in order to redefine the division of wealth and the role of the State. The Honduran church, linked to Opus Dei, is also involved because it wants to keep control over family planning. The coup d’état highlights antagonistic conceptions of society.
And with respect to social inequalities?
Julio Navarro: They have not thrown the thousands of people demanding a better division of economic wealth into the street. Hence, the importance of the resistance which promotes the idea of a recasting of the state to transform the country and its economy structurally.
Has Honduras been the laboratory for a new form of destabilization?
Julio Navarro: In spite of the decisions by the Organization of American States (OAS) and the UN, the military never felt it was in danger because it has the support of the Pentagon. One may talk about a laboratory in the sense that the popular reaction was tested. The best place to do that was Honduras since that country sets off from the cultural given that public opinion has no tradition of vigilance. Now, if the Honduran people have given the lie to that prejudice, imagine elsewhere ... I do not, however, believe in a domino effect, especially in South America where governments have taken precautions by getting rid of the old generations of military. On the other hand, one must remain attentive to this relationship between the military and economic sectors. The day when they reconnect as in Honduras, where the private sector financed the coup d’état, then there will be danger. Whatever happens, the events in Honduras must first serve as a lesson to the region’s presidents. They question the existence of the OAS given that its intentions have no effect. Finally, by its action, the United States leaves behind a damaged and distressing image.
In Honduras, the Putschists Adorn Themselves With Legitimacy: on the Truthout site.
January 14, 2010
REFLECTIONS OF FIDEL, Dec. 28, 10: The right of humanity to exist, translated by Granma International
(Taken from CubaDebate)
CLIMATE change is already causing considerable damage and hundreds of millions of poor people are suffering the consequences.
The most advanced research centers assure that very little time is left for avoiding an irreversible catastrophe. James Hansen, of NASA’s Goddard Institute, says that a level of 350 parts carbon dioxide per million is still tolerable; today, however, the figure is in excess of 390 and it is increasing at a rate of 2 parts per million every year, exceeding the levels of 600,000 years ago. Each one of the last two decades has been the hottest ever recorded. The abovementioned gas increased 80 parts per million in the last 150 years.
The ice of the Artic Sea, the vast, two-kilometer-thick layer that covers Greenland, the glaciers of South America which feed its principle sources of freshwater, the colossal volume that covers Antarctica, the layer that covers Kilimanjaro, the ice that covers the Himalayas and the enormous frozen mass of Siberia are visibly melting. Notable scientists fear qualitative jumps in these natural phenomena that give rise to changes.
Humanity placed great hope in the Copenhagen Summit, after the Kyoto Protocol signed in 1997, which entered into effect in 2005. The summit’s resounding failure gave way to shameful episodes that require due clarification.
The United States, with less than 5% of the world’s population, issues 25% of its carbon dioxide. The new president of the United States had promised to cooperate with international efforts to confront a problem that is affecting that country as much as the rest of the world. During meetings prior to the summit, it became evident that the leaders of that nation and of the richest nations maneuvered to make the weight of the sacrifice fall onto emerging and poor countries.
A large number of leaders and thousands of representatives of social movements and scientific institutions, determined to fight to preserve humanity from the greatest threat in its history went to Copenhagen, invited by the summit’s organizers. In order to focus on the political aspects of the summit, I will not go into details concerning the brutality of the Danish public forces, which attacked thousands of demonstrators and guests of the social movements and scientists who went to Denmark’s capital.
In Copenhagen, real chaos prevailed, and unbelievable things happened. Social movements and scientific institutions were not allowed to attend the debates. There were heads of state and government who were not even able to issue their opinions on vital problems. Obama and the leaders of the richest countries took over the conference with the complicity of the Danish government. The agencies of the United Nations were relegated.
Barack Obama, who arrived on the last day of the summit to remain there for only 12 hours, met with two groups of guests "hand-picked" by him and his collaborators. Together with one of them, he met with the rest of the highest delegations in the plenary hall. He spoke and immediately left via the back door. In that plenary session, except for the small group selected by him, the representatives of other countries were not allowed to speak. During that meeting, the presidents of Bolivia and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela were allowed to speak, because the president of the summit had no alternative than to concede that in the face of the strenuous demands of those present.
In an adjoining room, Obama met with the leaders of the richest countries, several of the most important emerging states, and two very poor ones. He presented a document, negotiated with two or three of the most important countries, ignored the United Nations General Assembly, gave press conferences, and marched away like Julius Caesar during one of his victorious campaigns in Asia Minor, which prompted him to exclaim, "I came, I saw, I conquered."
Even Gordon Brown, prime minister of the United Kingdom, had affirmed on October 19, "If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement in some future period can undo that choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late."
Brown concluded his speech with dramatic words: "We cannot afford to fail. If we act now; if we act together; if we act with vision and resolve, success at Copenhagen is still within our reach. But if we falter, the earth itself will be at risk… For the planet there is no plan B."
Now he arrogantly stated that the United Nations cannot be taken hostage by a small group of countries like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Tuvalu, while accusing China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other emerging states of giving in to the seduction of the United States and signing a document that dumps the Kyoto Protocol into the garbage bin and contains no binding commitment whatsoever on the part of the United States and its rich allies.
I feel obliged to remember that the United Nations was born just six decades ago, after the last World War. There were no more than 50 independent countries at the time. Today, it is made up of more than 190 independent states, after the odious colonial system ceased to exist because of the determined struggles of the peoples. Even the People’s Republic of China was denied UN membership for many years, and a puppet government held its representation in that institution and on its privileged Security Council.
The tenacious support of a growing number of Third World countries was indispensable to the international recognition of China, and an extremely important factor for the United States and its allies in NATO recognizing its (China’s) rights in the United Nations.
In the historic struggle against fascism, the Soviet Union made the largest contribution. More than 25 million of its sons and daughters died, and enormous destruction ravaged the country. Out of that struggle, it emerged as a superpower, capable of countering, in part, the absolute dominion of the imperial system of the United States and the former colonial powers in their unlimited plunder of the peoples of the Third World. When the USSR disintegrated, the United States extended its political and military power toward the East, toward the heart of Russia, and its influence over the rest of Europe grew. There is nothing strange about what happened in Copenhagen.
I would like to emphasize the unjust and offensive nature of the statements of the prime minister of the United Kingdom, and the yanki attempt to impose, as a summit agreement, a document that was never discussed at any time with the participating countries.
At a December 21 press conference, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez stated a truth that is impossible to deny; I will use some of his exact paragraphs: "I would like to emphasized that in Copenhagen, there was no agreement whatsoever of the Conference of the Parties; no decision whatsoever was made with respect to binding or non-binding commitments or international law; there was simply no agreement in Copenhagen.
"The summit was a failure and a deception of world public opinion…. The lack of political will was laid bare….
"It was a step backward in the actions of the international community to prevent or mitigate the effects of climate change….
"The average world temperature could rise by 5 degrees…."
Immediately, our foreign minister added other interesting facts about possible consequences according to the latest scientific investigations.
"From the Kyoto Protocol to date, the emissions of the developed countries have risen by 12.8%... and 55% of that volume comes from the United States.
"One person in the United States consumes, on average, 25 barrels of oil annually; one European, 11; one Chinese citizen, less than two, and one Latin American or Caribbean, less than one.
"Thirty countries, including those of the European Union, consume 80% of the fuel produced."
The very real fact is that the developed countries which signed the Kyoto Protocol drastically increased their emissions. They now wish to replace the base of emissions adopted starting 1990 with that of 2005, with which the United States, the maximum issuer, would reduce its emissions of 25 years earlier by only 3%. It is a shameless mockery of world opinion.
The Cuban foreign minister, speaking on behalf of a group of ALBA countries, defended China, India, Brazil, South Africa and other important states with emerging economies, affirming the concept reached in Kyoto of "common, but differentiated responsibilities; meaning that the historic accumulators and the developed countries, those responsible for this catastrophe, have different responsibilities from those of the small island states, or those of the countries of the South, above all the least-developed countries….
"Responsibilities means financing; responsibilities means the transfer of technology under acceptable conditions, and then Obama makes a play on words, and instead of talking about common but differentiated responsibilities, talks about ‘common, but differentiated responses.’
"He leaves the plenary without deigning to listen to anybody, nor had he listened to anybody before his speech."
At a subsequent press conference, before leaving the Danish capital, Obama affirmed, "We've made meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough in Copenhagen. For the first time in history the major economies have come together to accept their responsibility…"
In his clear and irrefutable statement, our foreign minister affirmed, "What is meant by ‘the major economies have come together to accept their responsibility?’ It means that they are shrugging off an important part of the burden signified by the financing for the mitigation and adaptation of countries — above all the entire South — to climate change, onto China, Brazil, India and South Africa; because it must be said that in Copenhagen, there was an assault on, a mugging of China, Brazil, India, and South Africa, and of all of the countries euphemistically referred to as developing."
These were the resounding and irrefutable words with which our foreign minister recounted what happened in Copenhagen.
I should add that, at 10 a.m. on December 19th, after our Vice President Esteban Lazo and the Cuban foreign minister had left, there was a belated attempt to resuscitate the corpse of Copenhagen as a summit agreement. At that point, virtually no heads of state or even ministers were left. Once again, the exposé of the remaining members of the Cuban, Venezuela, Bolivian, Nicaraguan and other countries’ delegations defeated the maneuver. That was how the inglorious summit ended.
Another fact that cannot be forgotten was that, during the most critical moments of that day, in the early morning, the Cuban foreign minister, together with the delegations that were waging their dignified battle, offered UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon their cooperation in the increasingly difficult battle that is being waged, and in the efforts that must be undertaken in the future to preserve the life of our species.
The environmental group WWF warned that climate change will become uncontrollable in the next 5 to 10 years if emissions are not drastically cut.
But it is not necessary to demonstrate the essence of what is being said here about what Obama did.
The U.S. president stated on Wednesday, December 23 that people were right to be disappointed by the outcome of the Summit on Climate Change. In an interview with the CBS television network, the president noted, "Rather than see a complete collapse in Copenhagen, in which nothing at all got done and would have been a huge backward step, at least we kind of held ground and there wasn't too much backsliding from where we were…"
Obama, according to the news dispatch, was the one most criticized by those countries which, virtually unanimously, believe that the outcome of the summit was disastrous.
The UN is now in a predicament. Asking other countries to adhere to the arrogant and antidemocratic agreement would be humiliating for many states.
Continuing the battle and demanding at all meetings, particularly those of Bonn and Mexico, the right of humanity to exist, with the moral authority and strength the truth affords us, is, in our opinion, the only way forward.
Fidel Castro Ruz
December 26, 2009
8:15 p.m.
Translated by Granma International
January 13, 2010
Wednesday, December 16, 2009 : Reflections on the Cuban Revolution by Gary Prevost, Latin-American Perspectives
Gary Prevost has been Professor of Political Science at St. John’s University since 1977.
When I visited Cuba in the first few days of 1992, it was not clear that the
revolution would survive. Food was in relatively short supply and electricity
blackouts were common. Even long-time supporters of the revolution were
pessimistic about the future. Everything that had been accomplished in its
first 32 years seemed in jeopardy when the Soviet Union went out of existence
at the end of 1991 and canceled most of its trade deals with Cuba. The country’s
gross domestic product was in the process of shrinking by 50 percent.
How did the Cuban Revolution survive that shock, and how is it now coping
with the illness of Fidel Castro and the transfer of power to his brother, Raúl?
The answer lies in a simple truth. The primary strength of the Cuban
Revolution was never its linkage with the Soviet superpower or the leadership
of Fidel Castro. Soviet support in the face of U.S. hostility was crucial in the
early survival of the revolution, and Fidel Castro has been a skilled leader, but
the longevity of the revolution is rooted in the hard work and sacrifice of ordinary
Cubans. The Cuban Revolution has survived because it tapped into the
deep wellsprings of Cuban desire for national independence and because the
Cuban people have constructed a society that has improved living conditions
for the majority through model programs in health and education and the way
it has tackled the historic problems of racism and sexism.
Education is a priority in Cuban society, and the state provides free primary,
secondary, technical, and higher education to all citizens. Cuba has an average
of one teacher for every 45 inhabitants, and its literacy rate of 96.4 percent is
one of the highest in Latin America. Cuba’s health-care system has been a
priority for the revolution and is a well-regarded model for the developing
world, with more than 260 hospitals and 420 clinics. Family doctors are
assigned to each community, and there is a doctor for every 260 Cubans. The
average life expectancy is 77 years, and the infant mortality rate is 5.1 per
1,000—both the best in Latin America.
Women and Cuban citizens of African descent suffered from widespread
discrimination prior to 1959, and the increased prominence of both groups in
Cuban society is one of the major achievements of the revolution. Prior to
1959, women worked outside the home only as domestic servants and
prostitutes, but today women have been fully integrated into the workplace
and have equal access to education and equality before the law. Women also
have much greater control over their lives through the widespread availability
of contraceptives and abortion. As a result of the equal access to education at
all levels since 1959, women now occupy prominent positions in almost all
institutions of the society.
Racial discrimination was formally outlawed at the outset of the revolution,
and long-standing customs that barred black Cubans from many public
facilities were overcome. Equal access to education has allowed Afro-Cubans
to rise to high places in the government, the armed forces, education, and
commerce. Recent years have seen a significant increase in the study and
appreciation of the contributions made by persons of African heritage to the
development of Cuba’s distinctive culture.
The social and economic achievements described above were in great
danger in 1992, but in large measure they survived because of the political
choices made in the revolution’s darkest hours. In a purely economic sense,
the country survived by a dramatic turn to tourism and a significant increase
in the flow of remittances to the island. What is more significant, however, is
that the leaders of the revolution never abandoned its socialist principles and
the country survived its worst economic times through a spirit of shared
sacrifice. Schools and hospitals were kept open, and the rationing of food was
reestablished. These measures ran counter to the worldwide sense that
socialism was dead and capitalism was fully triumphant. Cuba’s voice in the
wilderness was rewarded, and by the beginning of the new century its critique
of capitalism had found new allies in Latin America with the triumph of Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela and the emergence of other progressive leaders
throughout the region. Cuba entered the twenty-first century more confident
and independent than at any time in its history.
The Cuban Revolution entered a new phase in July 2006 when Fidel Castro
entered a hospital with a serious illness and temporarily ceded power to his
brother, Vice President Raúl Castro. Fidel has survived, but his now limited
role in the political leadership was confirmed in February 2008 when Raúl was
formally elected to a five-year presidential term. Initially there was considerable
speculation both inside and outside of Cuba that his assumption of power
would result in significant change of direction for the country. Some analysts
suggested that growing Chinese-Cuban trade ties were a signal that Raúl
would lead the revolution in a more definitively free-market direction
following the Chinese model. Under his leadership there have been some
modest reforms, especially in the agricultural sector, but the wholesale
changes predicted by some have not materialized to date. Raúl’s leadership
style is different from his brother’s, but the basic policy positions remain the
same. This continuity was underscored when the government was reshuffled
following the 2007 elections; key leadership positions in the new government
were assumed by longtime confidants of Raúl from the days in the Sierra
Maestra. For the long haul, the key unanswered question remains what
policies might be adopted under the leadership of a new generation that was
not present at the genesis of the revolution. Whatever the answer to this
question, it will not involve a return to Cuba’s past of underdevelopment and
subservience to foreign powers.
When I visited Cuba in the first few days of 1992, it was not clear that the
revolution would survive. Food was in relatively short supply and electricity
blackouts were common. Even long-time supporters of the revolution were
pessimistic about the future. Everything that had been accomplished in its
first 32 years seemed in jeopardy when the Soviet Union went out of existence
at the end of 1991 and canceled most of its trade deals with Cuba. The country’s
gross domestic product was in the process of shrinking by 50 percent.
How did the Cuban Revolution survive that shock, and how is it now coping
with the illness of Fidel Castro and the transfer of power to his brother, Raúl?
The answer lies in a simple truth. The primary strength of the Cuban
Revolution was never its linkage with the Soviet superpower or the leadership
of Fidel Castro. Soviet support in the face of U.S. hostility was crucial in the
early survival of the revolution, and Fidel Castro has been a skilled leader, but
the longevity of the revolution is rooted in the hard work and sacrifice of ordinary
Cubans. The Cuban Revolution has survived because it tapped into the
deep wellsprings of Cuban desire for national independence and because the
Cuban people have constructed a society that has improved living conditions
for the majority through model programs in health and education and the way
it has tackled the historic problems of racism and sexism.
Education is a priority in Cuban society, and the state provides free primary,
secondary, technical, and higher education to all citizens. Cuba has an average
of one teacher for every 45 inhabitants, and its literacy rate of 96.4 percent is
one of the highest in Latin America. Cuba’s health-care system has been a
priority for the revolution and is a well-regarded model for the developing
world, with more than 260 hospitals and 420 clinics. Family doctors are
assigned to each community, and there is a doctor for every 260 Cubans. The
average life expectancy is 77 years, and the infant mortality rate is 5.1 per
1,000—both the best in Latin America.
Women and Cuban citizens of African descent suffered from widespread
discrimination prior to 1959, and the increased prominence of both groups in
Cuban society is one of the major achievements of the revolution. Prior to
1959, women worked outside the home only as domestic servants and
prostitutes, but today women have been fully integrated into the workplace
and have equal access to education and equality before the law. Women also
have much greater control over their lives through the widespread availability
of contraceptives and abortion. As a result of the equal access to education at
all levels since 1959, women now occupy prominent positions in almost all
institutions of the society.
Racial discrimination was formally outlawed at the outset of the revolution,
and long-standing customs that barred black Cubans from many public
facilities were overcome. Equal access to education has allowed Afro-Cubans
to rise to high places in the government, the armed forces, education, and
commerce. Recent years have seen a significant increase in the study and
appreciation of the contributions made by persons of African heritage to the
development of Cuba’s distinctive culture.
The social and economic achievements described above were in great
danger in 1992, but in large measure they survived because of the political
choices made in the revolution’s darkest hours. In a purely economic sense,
the country survived by a dramatic turn to tourism and a significant increase
in the flow of remittances to the island. What is more significant, however, is
that the leaders of the revolution never abandoned its socialist principles and
the country survived its worst economic times through a spirit of shared
sacrifice. Schools and hospitals were kept open, and the rationing of food was
reestablished. These measures ran counter to the worldwide sense that
socialism was dead and capitalism was fully triumphant. Cuba’s voice in the
wilderness was rewarded, and by the beginning of the new century its critique
of capitalism had found new allies in Latin America with the triumph of Hugo
Chávez in Venezuela and the emergence of other progressive leaders
throughout the region. Cuba entered the twenty-first century more confident
and independent than at any time in its history.
The Cuban Revolution entered a new phase in July 2006 when Fidel Castro
entered a hospital with a serious illness and temporarily ceded power to his
brother, Vice President Raúl Castro. Fidel has survived, but his now limited
role in the political leadership was confirmed in February 2008 when Raúl was
formally elected to a five-year presidential term. Initially there was considerable
speculation both inside and outside of Cuba that his assumption of power
would result in significant change of direction for the country. Some analysts
suggested that growing Chinese-Cuban trade ties were a signal that Raúl
would lead the revolution in a more definitively free-market direction
following the Chinese model. Under his leadership there have been some
modest reforms, especially in the agricultural sector, but the wholesale
changes predicted by some have not materialized to date. Raúl’s leadership
style is different from his brother’s, but the basic policy positions remain the
same. This continuity was underscored when the government was reshuffled
following the 2007 elections; key leadership positions in the new government
were assumed by longtime confidants of Raúl from the days in the Sierra
Maestra. For the long haul, the key unanswered question remains what
policies might be adopted under the leadership of a new generation that was
not present at the genesis of the revolution. Whatever the answer to this
question, it will not involve a return to Cuba’s past of underdevelopment and
subservience to foreign powers.
A Change in Direction? Nope. by Zoltan Zigedy, Marxism-Leninism Today, January 7, 2010
With the New Year, Sam Webb, the chairman of the CPUSA has offered some new, ostensibly self-critical assessments of the Obama Administration's first twelve months. (Observations One Year In). "Ostensibly self-critical" because his latest thinking on wrong estimates that "we" allegedly made, overuses the second person plural, as if the blunders were made just as much by his party colleagues. A more honest leader would own up to the truth that the blunders were his.
Webb's observations are prompted by two facts:
One, his prior assessment is fully out-of-step with nearly the entire left and many of the centrist forces that have now developed a critical posture towards the Administration. A year ago, most saw the Obama election as signaling a qualitative change from the policies identified with the prior Administration. It is no secret that the majority of the left viewed Obama as a progressive and interpreted his campaign positions as a road map to the restoration of Great Society, if not New Deal, policies. In essence, they hoped the election of a young "visionary" with a modest background and a Democratic Congressional majority could begin to overturn the neo-liberal agenda born late in the Carter Administration and fully matured in the Reagan years. I did not share that view, nor did my colleagues at MLToday.
In fact, we argued vociferously that it was both naïve and dangerous. And now reality is intruding on that comforting image, with disappointment widespread. From the health care reform fiasco to the expanding imperialist wars, from the coddling of finance capital to the dire crisis of working people, from the escalation of hostility towards Cuba to the complacency about Israeli aggression, and most recently, the shabby performance at the Copenhagen summit, there are few signs of the expected sea change in US politics. Even The Nation magazine and MoveOn are beginning to vocally reflect this disappointment. Obama-mania is on life support, if not dead.
Two, consequently, many CPUSA members are both unhappy with the prior assessment and more willing to speak out against it.
Even though Webb's reassessment is necessitated by the harsh reality of events he did not foresee, any departure from his slavish defense of the Obama Administration is welcome, a defense that went much further (remember "Springtime of Possibility" and "Out of the Crisis"?) even than important elements in the labor movement, the Democratic Party, and other left-leaning and even centrist organizations.
His Reassessments
1. "To transform the coalition that elected Obama into a powerful political force will take a strenuous and sustained effort."
Webb admits the he did not expect the road to be so "uneven and bumpy," a strange confession for the leader of an organization that historically scouted the road ahead for the masses to follow. But then Webb, on other occasions, confessed that he has rejected the notion that Communists constitute a vanguard of struggle.
The whole notion that Communists can "transform" the diverse forces that coalesce in an electoral campaign into a force affecting political change is backwards. Communists build movements for change that may or may not transform electoral outcomes, but, through persistent, sustained effort definitely reshape the political landscape. The independent movements in the thirties for unemployment insurance and social security forced the issues onto the legislative agenda; the Communist-led movements for racial equality in the thirties and forties paved the way for the civil rights movement; and the post-WWII peace movement laid a foundation for the anti-war movement of the sixties.
2. "Second, our estimate of the balance of forces and trends in Congress was too general. Democratic majorities don't necessarily translate into support for the president's agenda — let alone a people's agenda. Democrats in Congress hold diverse views, and the progressive Democrats, while undeniably more influential, are not yet dominant. A more fine-grained analysis on our part was necessary."
Neither the President nor his Party delivered the goods. More importantly, neither the President nor his Party promised to deliver the goods, except in the minds of many seduced by vague promises of change and an investment in hope. Some of us identified the unprecedented amount of corporate support for Obama in guiding our assessment. Some of us found cause for skepticism in his appointees and advisors. Some of us saw the pattern of previous electoral campaigns and the huge gap between vague promises and performance. Obama's first year has borne out our judgement.
3. "Third, a year ago we resisted placing the administration and its individual members into neat political categories before they began governing. At the time, that was correct, because such categorizations easily lead to narrow tactical approaches, which is especially bad in a moment of political fluidity and crisis. A year later, a closer look at the various trends is warranted, although it shouldn't turn into a daily preoccupation."
It is no sin to miss the signposts that signal an exit. But it is embarrassing to blame that oversight on "political fluidity and crisis." Political fluidity is ever present in political life, and the crisis did not fall from the sky with Obama's election. It is time to move beyond relying upon the Administration to initiate and execute a progressive agenda and urgently press an independent, aggressive and popular program. Millions of US citizens are calling for an immediate end to the occupation in Afghanistan. It's time for Webb to join them. Most of our fellow citizens are profoundly disappointed in the health care reform sell-out. Webb should add his voice.
4. "Fourth, we exaggerated the magnitude of the defeat of right wing extremism. No longer did political initiative reside in its hand nor did it set the agenda, but it didn't follow that right wing extremism became a minor player in the nation's political life. While blue dog and centrist Democrats are a drag on progressive politics, it is the extreme right in Congress and elsewhere that mobilizes a mass constituency, shapes public opinion, and employs racism and other forms of division and demagogy. Their stated aim is to obstruct and derail the Obama presidency."
Right wing extremism has been with us since the country was founded. From the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 through the Patriot Act of our time, there have always been forces of extreme reaction bent upon turning the political clock back as far as possible. Yet is only in our time that the more politically advanced organizations have called for "strategic" retreat and deference to a vacillating center in order to meet that threat. It is disingenuous for Webb to distinguish between an extreme Republican right and a diffident, disinterested Democratic "center," especially when he has no plan to shock the Democrats into action. The Webb approach of ceding to the Democrats leadership of the fight against the extreme right has proven bankrupt.
5. "Fifth, our assessment didn't give enough weight to the fact that the state is anything but a neutral institution standing above society and negotiating between competing interests. Rather it is a class-based, historically determined set of institutions, procedures, policies, and personnel that, taken together, are resistant to any kind of radical (anti-corporate, anti-capitalist) restructuring, no matter how necessary. In recent decades, the interpenetration of big capital — especially finance, military and energy capital — and state/government structures has reached unprecedented levels."
It is frankly appalling that a Communist leader, presumably having read Lenin's State and Revolution at some point, needs reminding that the state is an instrument of the ruling class.
While it is true that the entrenchment of state-monopoly capital – the coalescing of the state and monopoly capital – continues unabated, it should catch no one by surprise. It has long been fundamental to a Marxist-Leninist understanding of contemporary capitalism (see State Monopoly Capitalism Today, http://mltoday.com/en/state-monopoly-capitalism-today-372.html ). It is this lack of attention to longer term trends in socio-economic life that has diverted Webb, and the CPUSA, from a path of militancy and leadership in the fight for both progressive reform and socialism. The Democratic Party and its elected officials will not lead the fight against state-monopoly capital . They are one of the two major party-political expressions of state-monoply capital.
6. "Sixth, our reading of changes in public opinion suffered from one-sidedness. On the one hand, we correctly noted that right-wing and neoliberal ideology resonates less and less with tens of millions of people, who are increasingly skeptical about "free markets" and unregulated capitalism... [On the other hand] "Most people (and social classes for that matter) don't have a consistent worldview; rather, they have a worldview that is eclectic, contradictory and sensitive to changing circumstances and experience, not simply reducible to their place in a system of social production. ... For those who desire progressive change it is essential to better appreciate the complexity and fluidity of popular consciousness. Most people lack a consistent worldview. Gus Hall referred to this phenomena as "shifting thought patterns" because the popular consciousness is bombarded on all sides with a decadent, resistance-strangling ideology shouted by the corporate media."
It is not enough to "appreciate" this destructive force. It is essential to counter it, even with the limited megaphones that we possess on the left. Surely the tens of millions who "are increasingly skeptical about 'free markets' and unregulated capitalism" need to hear of alternatives. That is the real role for the left and the CPUSA: to fill the need for the alternative worldview and organize people for that alternative, not merely muse about them.
No Change in Course
With these miscalculations – and missed opportunities – behind him, one would hope that Webb would propose a new path, a new approach that would return the CPUSA to the militantly oppositional posture that served the Party well through most of its history. While the Party was never large, it was large enough to stir the ruling class into fits of anti-Communist hysteria. Not so today with the timid, vacuous theory of the "all people's front." Instead, the Party buries its identity in a cycle of anonymous, uncritical electoral activities on behalf of the Democratic Party. And Webb has no intention of changing that approach: "Finally, the struggle over the past year in general and the health care struggle in particular bring home the importance of the 2010 elections. The stakes are enormous."
Thus, Webb proposes to invest the Party's energies once again in the Democratic Party's election efforts, as he did in 2008, 2006, 2004, 2002, and 2000. Once again, the CPUSA will be a tiny player in the cesspool of corporate money, back room deals, deceipt, and manipulation that constitutes a Democratic Party electoral campaign. As in the recent past, there will be no focus on third-party candidates or building political independence. Forget about running CPUSA candidates. There will be no concentration of limited resources behind the most progressive primary candidates. There will only be a blank check to the Democratic leadership.
Beyond Webb's now tired call for uncritical support for the Democrats in the forthcoming interim election, beyond his Frank Capra-like, wishful vision "of a coalition of political actors that stretches from President Obama to the core forces of the people's movement, and also includes small and medium sized business, working-class people who are influenced by the right, sections of the Democratic Party and even sections of corporate capital," there is little new in this "reassessment."
It is not even real self-criticism. It is sham self-criticism, slight adjusting the language to deflect growing Party unease at just how dreadfully wrong its leader's estimates have been. Real, Leninist self-criticism doesn't stubbornly reaffirm the same failed analysis and failed policy. Like Obama's "change you can believe in," Webb's inspiring "coalition" is no more than a shallow slogan without a movement to force its realization, a force both critical and independent of the Administration.
As the left and many liberals shed the fairy-tale intoxication of a new American Idol presidency, as activists cast off the logic of "the best we can get" and "fake left, go right," it would be tragic if the leadership of the CPUSA continues wedded to a bankrupt path of doggedly following the Democratic Party – tragic for the Communist Party and tragic for the working class movement.
January 7, 2010
January 09, 2010
Probation Ends for Baucus 8. Group Vows: “The Fight will continue until every person in our nation has access to quality, affordable health care.”
Source: Prosperity Agenda.US
Jan 8, 2010 — Kevin Zeese
Contacts:
Kevin Zeese 301-996-6582,kzeese@earthlink.net
Mark Dudzic 201-314-2653, mdudzic@thelaborparty.org
Margaret Flowers, M.D. 410-591-0892, mdpnhp@gmail.com
Russell Mokhiber 202-468-8868, russellmokhiber@gmail.com
Carol Paris, M.D. 301-904-6210, caparis52@hotmail.com
Katie Robbins 212-475-8350, healthcarenow08@gmail.com
Pat Salomon-Rodriguez, M.D., drpatsalomon@aol.com
Adam Schneider 410-215-8319, aschneider@hchmd.org
Jan. 8, 2010, Washington, D.C. – Members of the Baucus 8 appeared at the H. Carl Moultrie I Courthouse today for their final hearing following 6 months of probation and, for 3 members, 40 hours of community service. The Baucus 8, all of whom are doctors or health advocates, were arrested in the Senate Finance Committee Health Care Roundtable on May 5th for standing up and asking why single payer advocates were not allowed to testify.
Dr. Pat Solomon, a retired pediatrician noted that, “When we looked at the list of 41 people testifying in the 3 days of Roundtables, we saw that not a single witness was an advocate of the principle that healthcare should be a fundamental human right for all in America, nor was there anyone to speak for the majority of the American people who support single payer/Medicare for All.”
Senator Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, convened the May Roundtable to kick off the public consideration of the 111th Congress’ legislative proposals for healthcare reform. The Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care, a coalition of nurses, doctors, labor, faith, health advocate and community groups representing over 20 million people nationwide, sent a request to the Finance Committee for one of their leaders testify. When this was denied, thousands of single payer supporters across the nation contacted the committee to request that single payer be included.
“Despite the outpouring of requests,” said Katie Robbins of Healthcare-Now.org, “we were clearly told that we would be excluded. This cemented our growing impression that the healthcare debate was at best, political theater, and that we would have to try a different tactic in order that the only really affordable health reform solution, that addresses the real health care needs of 100% of our nation be heard.”
Kevin Zeese of ProsperityAgenda.US called the committee “pay to play” because, as he said, “Every seat at the Roundtable was bought by the lobbyists. Senator Baucus received nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the health industry in 2008 and the entire Senate Finance Committee received over $13 million in 2008.”
“Congress and the White House keep calling the medical industry corporations the ‘stakeholders’ in this reform process,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), “But we know that the true stakeholders are those who provide and receive medical care, not those who profit off the current situation.”
"After we were arrested, Senator Baucus admitted that it was a mistake to take single payer off the table," said Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action. "Clearly it was. Both the House and Senate bills would require Americans to buy a junk insurance at an inflated price. This bill is a bailout of the insurance industry. Instead of bailing out the private insurance companies, we ought to get rid of them and replace them with one public insurance pool. Everybody in, nobody out. Congress ought to defeat this monstrosity, start from scratch and pass single payer. We will get single payer sooner or later. Better sooner."
“ Wendell Potter, formerly of CIGNA and Humana (not a member of the Baucus 8) calls this legislation ‘The Private Health Insurance Profit Protection and Enhancement Act,’” stated Dr. Carol Paris, also of PNHP and a practicing physician in Southern Maryland. “And we agree because the final legislation will benefit the medical corporations, further strengthening their ability to buy members of Congress, and will continue the expensive and complicated health situation that we have in this country right now which makes it difficult for patients and doctors to focus on health care.”
In fact, as an example of the revolving door between those who are lobbyists and those who are staff, Liz Fowler, former Vice President of Public Policy at Wellpoint, one of the largest health insurers in the nation, left her lucrative position to work as the point person in the Senate Finance Committee to oversee the legislation. Her name is cited as author of the Senate Finance Bill.
Mark Dudzic of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer said the group’s action has been vindicated by the subsequent actions in the Senate. “The current deplorable proposals for healthcare reform under consideration in Congress show what happens when you start bargaining by conceding all of the terrain to your opponent. Any shop steward in America would have done a better job than the leaders of the political party in control of overwhelming majorities in both houses of congress.”
In addition to probation, the prosecutor insisted that the three defendants who lived in the Washington, DC area also perform 40 hours of community service. “I spend every day serving my community,” said Adam Schneider who is employed by Health Care for the Homeless. “I’m proud of the stand we took and had no problem doing an extra 40 hours of service to my community. But if there was any justice in the world, Senator Baucus and his corporate sponsors would have also been required to spend 40 hours with my clients to understand their desperate need for access to healthcare before they give a $500 billion bailout to the private health insurance industry.”
The group is unanimous that no matter what passes this year, health care reform is not over in this nation. Patients will continue to suffer and die needlessly, families will continue to face bankruptcy and foreclosure because of medical debt until we have a national publicly-financed and privately-delivered single payer/Medicare for all health system. Such a system would be transparent and accountable to the people unlike the current situation in which private insurers are experts at hiding information from the public and at violating their own written rules without recourse.
This year saw tremendous growth in a national movement for Medicare for all. The Baucus 8 vow to continue to do whatever it takes, even facing arrest again, to get an honest and open-minded debate about what type of health system is best so that people in this nation can be healthy and productive and stop worrying about what they will do if accident or illness strikes.
Jan 8, 2010 — Kevin Zeese
Contacts:
Kevin Zeese 301-996-6582,kzeese@earthlink.net
Mark Dudzic 201-314-2653, mdudzic@thelaborparty.org
Margaret Flowers, M.D. 410-591-0892, mdpnhp@gmail.com
Russell Mokhiber 202-468-8868, russellmokhiber@gmail.com
Carol Paris, M.D. 301-904-6210, caparis52@hotmail.com
Katie Robbins 212-475-8350, healthcarenow08@gmail.com
Pat Salomon-Rodriguez, M.D., drpatsalomon@aol.com
Adam Schneider 410-215-8319, aschneider@hchmd.org
Jan. 8, 2010, Washington, D.C. – Members of the Baucus 8 appeared at the H. Carl Moultrie I Courthouse today for their final hearing following 6 months of probation and, for 3 members, 40 hours of community service. The Baucus 8, all of whom are doctors or health advocates, were arrested in the Senate Finance Committee Health Care Roundtable on May 5th for standing up and asking why single payer advocates were not allowed to testify.
Dr. Pat Solomon, a retired pediatrician noted that, “When we looked at the list of 41 people testifying in the 3 days of Roundtables, we saw that not a single witness was an advocate of the principle that healthcare should be a fundamental human right for all in America, nor was there anyone to speak for the majority of the American people who support single payer/Medicare for All.”
Senator Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, convened the May Roundtable to kick off the public consideration of the 111th Congress’ legislative proposals for healthcare reform. The Leadership Conference for Guaranteed Health Care, a coalition of nurses, doctors, labor, faith, health advocate and community groups representing over 20 million people nationwide, sent a request to the Finance Committee for one of their leaders testify. When this was denied, thousands of single payer supporters across the nation contacted the committee to request that single payer be included.
“Despite the outpouring of requests,” said Katie Robbins of Healthcare-Now.org, “we were clearly told that we would be excluded. This cemented our growing impression that the healthcare debate was at best, political theater, and that we would have to try a different tactic in order that the only really affordable health reform solution, that addresses the real health care needs of 100% of our nation be heard.”
Kevin Zeese of ProsperityAgenda.US called the committee “pay to play” because, as he said, “Every seat at the Roundtable was bought by the lobbyists. Senator Baucus received nearly $2 million in campaign contributions from the health industry in 2008 and the entire Senate Finance Committee received over $13 million in 2008.”
“Congress and the White House keep calling the medical industry corporations the ‘stakeholders’ in this reform process,” said Dr. Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), “But we know that the true stakeholders are those who provide and receive medical care, not those who profit off the current situation.”
"After we were arrested, Senator Baucus admitted that it was a mistake to take single payer off the table," said Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action. "Clearly it was. Both the House and Senate bills would require Americans to buy a junk insurance at an inflated price. This bill is a bailout of the insurance industry. Instead of bailing out the private insurance companies, we ought to get rid of them and replace them with one public insurance pool. Everybody in, nobody out. Congress ought to defeat this monstrosity, start from scratch and pass single payer. We will get single payer sooner or later. Better sooner."
“ Wendell Potter, formerly of CIGNA and Humana (not a member of the Baucus 8) calls this legislation ‘The Private Health Insurance Profit Protection and Enhancement Act,’” stated Dr. Carol Paris, also of PNHP and a practicing physician in Southern Maryland. “And we agree because the final legislation will benefit the medical corporations, further strengthening their ability to buy members of Congress, and will continue the expensive and complicated health situation that we have in this country right now which makes it difficult for patients and doctors to focus on health care.”
In fact, as an example of the revolving door between those who are lobbyists and those who are staff, Liz Fowler, former Vice President of Public Policy at Wellpoint, one of the largest health insurers in the nation, left her lucrative position to work as the point person in the Senate Finance Committee to oversee the legislation. Her name is cited as author of the Senate Finance Bill.
Mark Dudzic of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer said the group’s action has been vindicated by the subsequent actions in the Senate. “The current deplorable proposals for healthcare reform under consideration in Congress show what happens when you start bargaining by conceding all of the terrain to your opponent. Any shop steward in America would have done a better job than the leaders of the political party in control of overwhelming majorities in both houses of congress.”
In addition to probation, the prosecutor insisted that the three defendants who lived in the Washington, DC area also perform 40 hours of community service. “I spend every day serving my community,” said Adam Schneider who is employed by Health Care for the Homeless. “I’m proud of the stand we took and had no problem doing an extra 40 hours of service to my community. But if there was any justice in the world, Senator Baucus and his corporate sponsors would have also been required to spend 40 hours with my clients to understand their desperate need for access to healthcare before they give a $500 billion bailout to the private health insurance industry.”
The group is unanimous that no matter what passes this year, health care reform is not over in this nation. Patients will continue to suffer and die needlessly, families will continue to face bankruptcy and foreclosure because of medical debt until we have a national publicly-financed and privately-delivered single payer/Medicare for all health system. Such a system would be transparent and accountable to the people unlike the current situation in which private insurers are experts at hiding information from the public and at violating their own written rules without recourse.
This year saw tremendous growth in a national movement for Medicare for all. The Baucus 8 vow to continue to do whatever it takes, even facing arrest again, to get an honest and open-minded debate about what type of health system is best so that people in this nation can be healthy and productive and stop worrying about what they will do if accident or illness strikes.
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