...A document found in a (renovated glass) recycling binat 235 West 23rd Street in New York City, in the year 2010:
http://mltoday.com/en/how-to-take-down-a-communist-party-in-10-easy-steps-653.html
July 31, 2009
How to Take Down a Communist Party in 10 Easy Steps Contributed by Simon Capehart, in Marxism-Leninism Today, July 31st, 2009
...A document found in a (renovated glass) recycling binat 235 West 23rd Street in New York City, in the year 2010:
http://mltoday.com/en/how-to-take-down-a-communist-party-in-10-easy-steps-653.html
Canada: Worker resistance must be armed with a socialist strategy: 22 July 2009
Canada: Worker resistance must be armed with a socialist strategy
22 July 2009
Canada’s corporate elite has launched an assault against the living standards of the working class of unprecedented ferocity and hypocrisy.
The bankers, captains of industry and investment house moguls and their servants in the establishment political parties are demanding that working people—cleaners, autoworkers, miners, garbage collectors and clerks as well as all those families dependent on basic social services—bear the full brunt of the greatest crisis of the capitalist system since the Great Depression.
Job cuts, contract concessions, and government cutbacks are exacting a harsh and ever-widening toll on workers in all parts of the country.
Since last October, more than 450,000 jobs have been eliminated as companies seek to protect the bottom line by destroying workers’ livelihoods.
Retired workers now worry that their corporate pensions may be wiped out—a prospect that caused Ontario’s government to rush to announce that it will not honour a three-decade-old partial pension guarantee.
In industry after industry, workers are facing demands for concessions, including co-pays and the outright elimination of benefits, two-tier wages, wage cuts, longer working hours, and speed-up.
The federal Conservative and Ontario Liberal governments combined this spring to threaten GM and Chrysler workers with the liquidation of the Detroit automakers’ Canadian subsidiaries unless they agreed to sweeping wage and benefit cuts and job-cutting work-rule changes.
Similarly Ottawa has made loans to Air Canada conditional on the airline’s workers accepting a 21 month wage freeze and deferment of the company’s pension plan payments.
The role of the government in tying industry aid to worker concessions stands in stark contrast to its treatment of the banks and their CEOs and shareholders. With the full support of the Liberals and the other opposition parties, the Conservatives have extended the banks tens of billions in no-strings-attached loan guarantees and mortgage buy-backs.
Not satisfied with the massive concessions wrung from private sector workers, the ruling elite have now set their sights on the wages, benefits and working conditions of those in the public sector. There is a growing clamour from big business over the spiralling federal, provincial and municipal deficits caused by the economic slump.
Demands for contract concessions have driven Ottawa Transit workers, British Columbia paramedics, home care attendants in Hamilton, and municipal workers in Toronto and Windsor into bitter confrontations with their employers.
From the standpoint of the ruling class, the attack on those who administer public and social services is a pivotal step in implementing their plans to resolve the state’s fiscal crisis through another round of massive social spending cuts akin to those carried out in the mid-1990s by the federal Liberals under Chrétien and Martin, Ontario’s Harris Conservative regime, and the provincial Parti Québécois government of Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry.
Over the past decade and a half, federal and provincial governments have effected sweeping changes in fiscal policy (including drastic reductions in corporate and capital gains taxes) aimed at swelling the incomes of the rich and super-rich, placing a larger share of the tax burden on working people, and reducing state revenues so as to trump demands for social spending. According to one estimate, the tax cuts made by Ottawa just since 2003 have resulted in $160 billion in foregone revenue.
Now big business wants to use mounting budget deficits as the pretext for again slashing spending on health care, education, social housing, support for the aged, the arts and other vital social needs.
To achieve this goal, they recognize it is necessary to break the traditional militancy of public sector workers. It is this imperative that lies behind the current concession drives directed against Windsor and Toronto municipal workers.
A key element in this campaign has been the non-stop anti-worker propaganda pumped out by the big business press and talk-radio stations. In this propaganda offensive, no lie is too outrageous. Workers who strike simply to maintain a status quo contract and resist massive concessions are pursuing “exorbitant” demands.
The multimillion-dollar bonuses and golden parachutes paid failed corporate executives garner barely a peep from the editorialists and columnists at the Globe and Mail and National Post. But the “greed” and the “selfishness” of garbage collectors who earn $24 per hour throws them into an apoplectic fit. Meanwhile the recent announcements from the Royal Bank, Scotiabank and Toronto-Dominion that they are once again generating profits of nearly a billion a quarter is cause for a media celebration.
The Toronto and Windsor strikes are part of growing working class resistance to big business’ drive to make the working class pay for the crisis of the profit system. Earlier this month, 3,000 workers at Vale Inco in Sudbury and Port Colborne launched strike action against the mining giant’s attempt to slash their pay and impose lower wages for new hires. Auto parts workers in Windsor, Brampton, Toronto, Tillsonburg and Cornwall have organized plant occupations to oppose company attempts to toss them onto the scrap heap without severance pay and even back wages.
But if this resistance is to become a genuine working-class counteroffensive—if it is not to be contained and derailed—it is necessary that workers draw far-reaching conclusions from the bitter reversals the working class has suffered over the past three decades.
Supporters of capitalism, the unions and union-supported New Democratic Party (NDP) have suppressed the class struggle, allowing the big business assault to go unanswered, when not themselves directly imposing job cuts, takeaways and the dismantling of public and social services.
The Canadian Auto Workers, having for decades based its entire strategy on providing the auto makers with a Canadian labor-cost advantage, quickly surrendered before the combined assault of the auto bosses and the federal Conservative and Ontario Liberal governments.
Forced to sanction strikes by Toronto and Windsor municipal workers, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) leadership has done everything to quarantine their anti-concessions struggles and signalled its readiness to surrender the workers’ chief demands—in Windsor opposition to a two-tier retiree benefit structure and in Toronto maintenance of the current sick-day program. The union has made no attempt to answer the ruling elite’s attempt to make city workers scapegoats for the hardships caused by the economic crisis. But if the city workers’ strikes were made the spearhead of working-class opposition to concessions, layoffs and the dismantling of public and social services, there is no question they would rally mass support.
With the full support of the Canadian Labour Congress and Quebec’s major union federations, the NDP responded to the outbreak of the economic crisis by rapidly concluding a coalition agreement with the Liberals, the traditional governing party of Canadian big business. Under the NDP-Liberal accord, the NDP and the unions committed themselves to sustaining in office a Liberal-led government committed to an unabashedly right-wing program, including the implementing of Harper’s $50 billion corporate tax cut plan, upholding “fiscal responsibility,” and waging war in Afghanistan through 2011.
The perspective historically defended by the unions and the social-democratic NDP that it is possible to secure a decent life for working people under capitalism—through collective bargaining and legislative reforms—has manifestly failed.
The break-up of the post-Second World War boom and the globalization of production fatally undermined the ability of the unions to pressure capital for concessions in the national labor market. With the inter-corporate struggle for profits dramatically intensifying and corporations able to shift production where labor costs, including taxes, were the most lucrative for big business, even the limited traditional resistance of the unions collapsed.
The response of the labor bureaucracies to this new environment has been to integrate themselves ever more completely into corporate management. This has gone hand-in-hand with the promotion of national chauvinism and protectionism, which has served to facilitate the corporate drive to pit worker against worker in a fratricidal competition for jobs. Nationalism and corporatism are sister pro-capitalist ideologies. The campaigns mounted by the various nationally-based labor bureaucracies to defend “Canadian,” “American,” or “German” jobs have invariably been combined with the acceptance of major concessions and wage cuts for Canadian and American workers or their counterparts in Asia and Europe
To defend their jobs, wages and rights, workers in Canada and internationally, need a radically new strategy that involves a change in the activity, politics and philosophy of the labor movement. The Socialist Equality Party proposes:
1. Militant industrial action based upon the independent interests of the working class. Workers should answer the attempts of big business and their hirelings in government to make the working class pay for the capitalist crisis by organizing demonstrations, strikes and factory occupations—by reviving the militant traditions of an earlier period that have been suppressed by the trade union bureaucracy.
The Socialist Equality Party calls on workers to form independent rank-and-file factory, workplace and neighborhood committees to organize opposition to the banks, corporations, and governments. Workers should prepare to occupy any threatened plant, store, mine or mill and engage in mass strikes to oppose wage-cutting, social spending cuts, and prevent further shutdowns and layoffs. Such a strategy requires a political and organizational break with the bureaucratically-controlled, pro-capitalist union apparatuses and the creation of new, genuinely democratic forms of working class organization—independent rank-and-file factory, workplace and neighborhood committees.
2. A break with the politics of class collaboration. Industrial action must be linked to a new political strategy: the building of a mass party of the working class so as to fight for the independent interests of working people.
For decades, the unions have promoted the myth that the interests of workers can be advanced through the New Democratic Party, the big business PQ or even the Liberals! These parties, no less than the Conservatives, uphold the interests of the corporations and the banks. Previous NDP governments in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia have slashed social programs, attacked workers wages and benefits and looked favorably on demands to cut corporate tax rates. Only last month, the NDP government won election in Nova Scotia having won the support of much of the business establishment by promising not to rescind the anti-union Michelin bill and by denouncing the Liberals and Conservatives for being insufficiently fiscally conservative.
3. Rejection of the capitalist market and revival of an international socialist movement of the working class. Workers within Canada and throughout the world are facing the consequences of an economic system whose central principle is the pursuit of private profit—regardless of its consequences for society as a whole. In response to the unfolding crisis of world capitalism, the SEP fights for the socialist reorganization of the economy. This includes the nationalization of the banks and basic industry, placing them under public ownership and the democratic control of the working population, and their operation on the basis of social need, not private profit.
If capitalism is incapable of providing working people with a decent standard of living—and it can’t—then working people, those whose collective labor produces society’s wealth, must advance their own plan to organize production and employment based on human need, not private profit and shareholder value.
A revived political movement of the working class must have as its aim the fight for a workers’ government, a government of, by and for the working class.
In every country workers face a similar future: rising unemployment, declining wages, economic depression. Workers should reject all forms of nationalism promoted by the trade unions. The crisis of capitalism is a global crisis and the response of the working class to this crisis must be a global response.
Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved
22 July 2009
Canada’s corporate elite has launched an assault against the living standards of the working class of unprecedented ferocity and hypocrisy.
The bankers, captains of industry and investment house moguls and their servants in the establishment political parties are demanding that working people—cleaners, autoworkers, miners, garbage collectors and clerks as well as all those families dependent on basic social services—bear the full brunt of the greatest crisis of the capitalist system since the Great Depression.
Job cuts, contract concessions, and government cutbacks are exacting a harsh and ever-widening toll on workers in all parts of the country.
Since last October, more than 450,000 jobs have been eliminated as companies seek to protect the bottom line by destroying workers’ livelihoods.
Retired workers now worry that their corporate pensions may be wiped out—a prospect that caused Ontario’s government to rush to announce that it will not honour a three-decade-old partial pension guarantee.
In industry after industry, workers are facing demands for concessions, including co-pays and the outright elimination of benefits, two-tier wages, wage cuts, longer working hours, and speed-up.
The federal Conservative and Ontario Liberal governments combined this spring to threaten GM and Chrysler workers with the liquidation of the Detroit automakers’ Canadian subsidiaries unless they agreed to sweeping wage and benefit cuts and job-cutting work-rule changes.
Similarly Ottawa has made loans to Air Canada conditional on the airline’s workers accepting a 21 month wage freeze and deferment of the company’s pension plan payments.
The role of the government in tying industry aid to worker concessions stands in stark contrast to its treatment of the banks and their CEOs and shareholders. With the full support of the Liberals and the other opposition parties, the Conservatives have extended the banks tens of billions in no-strings-attached loan guarantees and mortgage buy-backs.
Not satisfied with the massive concessions wrung from private sector workers, the ruling elite have now set their sights on the wages, benefits and working conditions of those in the public sector. There is a growing clamour from big business over the spiralling federal, provincial and municipal deficits caused by the economic slump.
Demands for contract concessions have driven Ottawa Transit workers, British Columbia paramedics, home care attendants in Hamilton, and municipal workers in Toronto and Windsor into bitter confrontations with their employers.
From the standpoint of the ruling class, the attack on those who administer public and social services is a pivotal step in implementing their plans to resolve the state’s fiscal crisis through another round of massive social spending cuts akin to those carried out in the mid-1990s by the federal Liberals under Chrétien and Martin, Ontario’s Harris Conservative regime, and the provincial Parti Québécois government of Lucien Bouchard and Bernard Landry.
Over the past decade and a half, federal and provincial governments have effected sweeping changes in fiscal policy (including drastic reductions in corporate and capital gains taxes) aimed at swelling the incomes of the rich and super-rich, placing a larger share of the tax burden on working people, and reducing state revenues so as to trump demands for social spending. According to one estimate, the tax cuts made by Ottawa just since 2003 have resulted in $160 billion in foregone revenue.
Now big business wants to use mounting budget deficits as the pretext for again slashing spending on health care, education, social housing, support for the aged, the arts and other vital social needs.
To achieve this goal, they recognize it is necessary to break the traditional militancy of public sector workers. It is this imperative that lies behind the current concession drives directed against Windsor and Toronto municipal workers.
A key element in this campaign has been the non-stop anti-worker propaganda pumped out by the big business press and talk-radio stations. In this propaganda offensive, no lie is too outrageous. Workers who strike simply to maintain a status quo contract and resist massive concessions are pursuing “exorbitant” demands.
The multimillion-dollar bonuses and golden parachutes paid failed corporate executives garner barely a peep from the editorialists and columnists at the Globe and Mail and National Post. But the “greed” and the “selfishness” of garbage collectors who earn $24 per hour throws them into an apoplectic fit. Meanwhile the recent announcements from the Royal Bank, Scotiabank and Toronto-Dominion that they are once again generating profits of nearly a billion a quarter is cause for a media celebration.
The Toronto and Windsor strikes are part of growing working class resistance to big business’ drive to make the working class pay for the crisis of the profit system. Earlier this month, 3,000 workers at Vale Inco in Sudbury and Port Colborne launched strike action against the mining giant’s attempt to slash their pay and impose lower wages for new hires. Auto parts workers in Windsor, Brampton, Toronto, Tillsonburg and Cornwall have organized plant occupations to oppose company attempts to toss them onto the scrap heap without severance pay and even back wages.
But if this resistance is to become a genuine working-class counteroffensive—if it is not to be contained and derailed—it is necessary that workers draw far-reaching conclusions from the bitter reversals the working class has suffered over the past three decades.
Supporters of capitalism, the unions and union-supported New Democratic Party (NDP) have suppressed the class struggle, allowing the big business assault to go unanswered, when not themselves directly imposing job cuts, takeaways and the dismantling of public and social services.
The Canadian Auto Workers, having for decades based its entire strategy on providing the auto makers with a Canadian labor-cost advantage, quickly surrendered before the combined assault of the auto bosses and the federal Conservative and Ontario Liberal governments.
Forced to sanction strikes by Toronto and Windsor municipal workers, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) leadership has done everything to quarantine their anti-concessions struggles and signalled its readiness to surrender the workers’ chief demands—in Windsor opposition to a two-tier retiree benefit structure and in Toronto maintenance of the current sick-day program. The union has made no attempt to answer the ruling elite’s attempt to make city workers scapegoats for the hardships caused by the economic crisis. But if the city workers’ strikes were made the spearhead of working-class opposition to concessions, layoffs and the dismantling of public and social services, there is no question they would rally mass support.
With the full support of the Canadian Labour Congress and Quebec’s major union federations, the NDP responded to the outbreak of the economic crisis by rapidly concluding a coalition agreement with the Liberals, the traditional governing party of Canadian big business. Under the NDP-Liberal accord, the NDP and the unions committed themselves to sustaining in office a Liberal-led government committed to an unabashedly right-wing program, including the implementing of Harper’s $50 billion corporate tax cut plan, upholding “fiscal responsibility,” and waging war in Afghanistan through 2011.
The perspective historically defended by the unions and the social-democratic NDP that it is possible to secure a decent life for working people under capitalism—through collective bargaining and legislative reforms—has manifestly failed.
The break-up of the post-Second World War boom and the globalization of production fatally undermined the ability of the unions to pressure capital for concessions in the national labor market. With the inter-corporate struggle for profits dramatically intensifying and corporations able to shift production where labor costs, including taxes, were the most lucrative for big business, even the limited traditional resistance of the unions collapsed.
The response of the labor bureaucracies to this new environment has been to integrate themselves ever more completely into corporate management. This has gone hand-in-hand with the promotion of national chauvinism and protectionism, which has served to facilitate the corporate drive to pit worker against worker in a fratricidal competition for jobs. Nationalism and corporatism are sister pro-capitalist ideologies. The campaigns mounted by the various nationally-based labor bureaucracies to defend “Canadian,” “American,” or “German” jobs have invariably been combined with the acceptance of major concessions and wage cuts for Canadian and American workers or their counterparts in Asia and Europe
To defend their jobs, wages and rights, workers in Canada and internationally, need a radically new strategy that involves a change in the activity, politics and philosophy of the labor movement. The Socialist Equality Party proposes:
1. Militant industrial action based upon the independent interests of the working class. Workers should answer the attempts of big business and their hirelings in government to make the working class pay for the capitalist crisis by organizing demonstrations, strikes and factory occupations—by reviving the militant traditions of an earlier period that have been suppressed by the trade union bureaucracy.
The Socialist Equality Party calls on workers to form independent rank-and-file factory, workplace and neighborhood committees to organize opposition to the banks, corporations, and governments. Workers should prepare to occupy any threatened plant, store, mine or mill and engage in mass strikes to oppose wage-cutting, social spending cuts, and prevent further shutdowns and layoffs. Such a strategy requires a political and organizational break with the bureaucratically-controlled, pro-capitalist union apparatuses and the creation of new, genuinely democratic forms of working class organization—independent rank-and-file factory, workplace and neighborhood committees.
2. A break with the politics of class collaboration. Industrial action must be linked to a new political strategy: the building of a mass party of the working class so as to fight for the independent interests of working people.
For decades, the unions have promoted the myth that the interests of workers can be advanced through the New Democratic Party, the big business PQ or even the Liberals! These parties, no less than the Conservatives, uphold the interests of the corporations and the banks. Previous NDP governments in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia have slashed social programs, attacked workers wages and benefits and looked favorably on demands to cut corporate tax rates. Only last month, the NDP government won election in Nova Scotia having won the support of much of the business establishment by promising not to rescind the anti-union Michelin bill and by denouncing the Liberals and Conservatives for being insufficiently fiscally conservative.
3. Rejection of the capitalist market and revival of an international socialist movement of the working class. Workers within Canada and throughout the world are facing the consequences of an economic system whose central principle is the pursuit of private profit—regardless of its consequences for society as a whole. In response to the unfolding crisis of world capitalism, the SEP fights for the socialist reorganization of the economy. This includes the nationalization of the banks and basic industry, placing them under public ownership and the democratic control of the working population, and their operation on the basis of social need, not private profit.
If capitalism is incapable of providing working people with a decent standard of living—and it can’t—then working people, those whose collective labor produces society’s wealth, must advance their own plan to organize production and employment based on human need, not private profit and shareholder value.
A revived political movement of the working class must have as its aim the fight for a workers’ government, a government of, by and for the working class.
In every country workers face a similar future: rising unemployment, declining wages, economic depression. Workers should reject all forms of nationalism promoted by the trade unions. The crisis of capitalism is a global crisis and the response of the working class to this crisis must be a global response.
Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved
Could the great recession lead to a great revolution? A look at mass protests during the past 500 years reveals surprising clues. By Immanuel Ness
csmonitor.com - The Christian Science Monitor Online
from the July 30, 2009 edition -
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0730/p09s01-coop.html
Brooklyn, N.Y.
For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order – the system that dominates the globe today – is the destiny of all nations. The free market's uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.
As a result, we live at an important historical juncture – one where alternatives to the world's neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which laid the foundation for liberal democratic elections and the expansion of the free-market system throughout the world, revolution and protest seemed to lose some of their potency.
Leading historians believed that a new age had appeared in which revolutionary movements would no longer challenge the status quo. Defenders of the contemporary system were suspicious of nearly all forms of popular expression and contestation for power outside the electoral arena. But remarkably, this entire discourse sidestepped the major impulses of human emancipation of the past 500 years – equality, democracy, and social rights.
Proponents of neoliberalism are indifferent to this history and dismiss the notion that "another world is possible" that could alleviate grinding misery and poverty around the world. But in opposition to the contemporary individualistic system of capitalism, evidence of a new global movement dedicated to social justice and human rights has sprung from the ashes of the past. Just in the past decade, we have witnessed the expansion of worker insurgencies, peasant and indigenous uprisings, ecological protests, and democracy movements.
Historians frequently view revolutions as extraordinary and unanticipated interruptions of state social regulation of everyday life.
This isn't the case.
In my work as editor of a new encyclopedia of revolution and protest, I've reviewed 500 years' worth of revolutionary actions. And the surprising pattern I've found is the regularity of volatile and explosive conflicts, commonly revealed as waves of protest from within civil society to confront persistent inequality and oppression. While historians cannot forecast the time and place of revolutions, the past has a sustained, if disjointed, record of popular resistance to injustice.
History shows that revolutions must have political movement and a socially compelling goal, with strategic and charismatic leadership that inspires majorities to challenge a perception of fundamental injustice and inequality. A necessary feature is the development of a political ideology rooted in a narrative that legitimates mass collective action, which is indispensable to forcing dominant groups to address social grievances – or to overturning those dominant groups altogether.
Unresponsive rulers risk possible overthrow of their governments. For example, the vision and struggle of a multiracial South Africa was a guiding principle that put an end to the entrenched white-dominated apartheid system.
A second essential element is what Italian philosopher Antonio Negri calls constituent power, the expression of the popular will for democracy – a common theme in nearly all revolutions – through what he calls the multitude.
Mr. Negri counterpoises the concepts of constituent power and constituted power to demonstrate the oppositional forces in society. Thus, following the American Revolution, the ruling elite created a second Constitution establishing a national government with fewer democratic safeguards.
In response to challenges from popular movements, modern states have concentrated power in constitutions and centralized authority structures to suppress mass demands for democracy and equality. Few democratic revolutionary movements have gained popular power as new states almost always consolidate control, often resorting to repression of the masses that initially brought them to power. Still, virtually all revolutions during the past 500 years have created enduring consequences that, in evolving form, remain forces for justice to this day.
Revolutionary movements must recognize the durability and overwhelming inertia of state power. They must acknowledge that they are highly unlikely to seize power from unjust regimes, even when their objectives have moral force and are deeply popular among the masses. And yet, history is full of exceptions to this rule, so we must conclude that while revolutionary transformation is improbable, it is always a possibility.
At a lecture to Young Socialists in Zurich just one month before the February 1917 Revolution, Vladimir Lenin said: "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution." Less than a year later, Lenin and the Bolsheviks gained power over the Soviet state with the initial support of workers, peasants, and most of the military.
In the last century, the opponents of the failed bureaucratic statism in the Soviet sphere and free-market capitalism in the West have struggled to find a discourse of resistance. While democratic opponents defeated Soviet Russia in the early 1990s, opponents of free-market capitalism have yet to gain traction, in part due to the general consensus among global rulers in defense of neoliberalism. As such, revolutionary movements have had to redefine themselves outside territorial borders as powerful tools of the global collective to petition for human rights and social justice for all.
People are inherently cautious and take extraordinary action only when they have little to lose and something to gain. The current economic crisis has pushed more people into poverty and despair than at any time since the early 20th century, to the point where alternatives to the current system can be considered.
Today, throughout the world, peasants, workers, indigenous peoples, and students are galvanized into movements that are challenging state power rooted in global norms of neoliberalism. New movements have gained greater traction with the legitimacy and strength of a global collective behind them, rather than as isolated protests. The oppressed are framing new narratives of liberation to contest power on a state and international level: whether peasants in Latin America or India struggling for land reform; indigenous peoples mobilizing resistance for official recognition of their rights; or workers and students throughout the world waging unauthorized strikes and sit-ins, and taking to the streets in support of democracy and equality.
Immanuel Ness is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and editor of "The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest: 1500 to the Present."
www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2009 The Christian Science Monitor. All rights reserved.
Zelaya’s Supporters Get Ready to Bring their President Back, Cuban News Agency, 30 July, 2009
HAVANA, Cuba, Jul 31 (acn) While the Honduran army and police's repression of peaceful demonstrations against the coup gets harsher, constitutional president Manuel Zelaya is preparing in Managua a campaign to return to his post.
Cuban News Agency
Zelaya announced that a popular pacific army made up of his supporters is being organized to try to revert the coup d’état that ousted him from his position one month ago, reported Granma newspaper.
In Ocotal, Nicaragua, President Zelaya said there is a group of Honduran soldiers and officers who are not happy with the military coup.
During a meeting with hundreds of supporters, Zelaya revealed that he has reports of the existence of army sectors in Honduras that reject the way in which the military leaders have led the armed forces into a sacrifice.
Meanwhile, in Tegucigalpa, for the sixth consecutive day the Venezuelan embassy continues to be protected by members of the National Resistance Front against the Coup d'état.
The activists keep on watch shifts to protect the lives of Venezuelan diplomats and to obstruct any attempts by the de facto regime led by Roberto Micheletti to violently expel all the staff of the diplomatic mission.
Cuban News Agency
Zelaya announced that a popular pacific army made up of his supporters is being organized to try to revert the coup d’état that ousted him from his position one month ago, reported Granma newspaper.
In Ocotal, Nicaragua, President Zelaya said there is a group of Honduran soldiers and officers who are not happy with the military coup.
During a meeting with hundreds of supporters, Zelaya revealed that he has reports of the existence of army sectors in Honduras that reject the way in which the military leaders have led the armed forces into a sacrifice.
Meanwhile, in Tegucigalpa, for the sixth consecutive day the Venezuelan embassy continues to be protected by members of the National Resistance Front against the Coup d'état.
The activists keep on watch shifts to protect the lives of Venezuelan diplomats and to obstruct any attempts by the de facto regime led by Roberto Micheletti to violently expel all the staff of the diplomatic mission.
July 28, 2009
The Underbelly of the “Civilian Surge”: Blackwater Surge, posted on July 28th, 2009 at Return Good for Evil
Much has been made of the so-called “civilian surge” that’s supposed to accompany the military escalation in Afghanistan, but it comes with an ugly caveat: a civilian surge means an escalation in the presence of private military contractors like Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, acting as guards and bodyguards.
Nancy Youssef’s McClatchy article last week details how the security firms are clamping down around civilian life in Kabul and beyond, driving resentment (emphasis mine).
Huge intimidating convoys of armored SUVs now are common sights in the city’s growing traffic jams. …Nearly every day, there’s some incident involving security teams pointing guns out of windows at frightened commuters.
“I have not faced an incident myself, but in front of me I saw foreigners shoot and kill two people in a small bus. We feel like we are condemned in our own country. They came from thousands of miles away, and my car can’t go in front of them. We are not happy about this situation,” said Mohammad Aziz Azizi, 45, the head of a cultural society.
For anyone who’s visited Baghdad in recent years, the feeling is familiar: the tension of never knowing when violence might break out, when a wrong turn or a moment of inattention might bring one face-to-face with a security guard whose first priority is to protect the life of the person he’s assigned to.
We’ve seen this movie before.
These for-profit mercenaries managed to not only incense Iraqis, but U.S. troops as well with their gung-ho brandish-weapons-and-shoot-first mode of operation. A civilian surge of the type pushed by supporters of the military escalation in Afghanistan, though, has the effect of flooding Afghanistan with contractors working for Blackwater and its cousins. Spencer Ackerman:
But what about the firms hired to protect the new State Department personnel on their way to Afghanistan? State Department security contractors like Blackwater Xe, Triple Canopy and DynCorp have been tied to more population-alienating abuses than the ones who work for the Defense Department.
The use of these contractors accompanying a “civilian surge” has a corrosive effect on life in Kabul, and have become a serious political problem for the continued U.S. occupation. Again, from Youssef’s article:
“In the mind of the Afghan people, democracy is tied to the arrival of the foreign forces,” said Wahed Mughzada, a political analyst. “They don’t like it.”
That’s contributing to growing calls for a timetable for U.S. forces to withdraw, said Ashraf Ghani, a leading candidate in next month’s presidential elections. He’s suggesting that the U.S. withdraw in seven years.
“The Afghans want the use of forces to be predictable. They feel they are not being heard,” Ghani said. “The pre-eminent issue is justice.”
Further, as the U.S. counterinsurgency operation established forward operating bases, we will likely see even more private security firms hired and sent to Afghanistan to act as guards.
So let’s recap. First, we find out that the supposed “civilian” surge in Afghanistan would be largely made up of military personnel. Now, we find that it requires widening the use of civilian contractors, including those from the very companies responsible for carnage and popular outrage in Iraq.
This is all starting to feel so very familiar.
Nancy Youssef’s McClatchy article last week details how the security firms are clamping down around civilian life in Kabul and beyond, driving resentment (emphasis mine).
Huge intimidating convoys of armored SUVs now are common sights in the city’s growing traffic jams. …Nearly every day, there’s some incident involving security teams pointing guns out of windows at frightened commuters.
“I have not faced an incident myself, but in front of me I saw foreigners shoot and kill two people in a small bus. We feel like we are condemned in our own country. They came from thousands of miles away, and my car can’t go in front of them. We are not happy about this situation,” said Mohammad Aziz Azizi, 45, the head of a cultural society.
For anyone who’s visited Baghdad in recent years, the feeling is familiar: the tension of never knowing when violence might break out, when a wrong turn or a moment of inattention might bring one face-to-face with a security guard whose first priority is to protect the life of the person he’s assigned to.
We’ve seen this movie before.
These for-profit mercenaries managed to not only incense Iraqis, but U.S. troops as well with their gung-ho brandish-weapons-and-shoot-first mode of operation. A civilian surge of the type pushed by supporters of the military escalation in Afghanistan, though, has the effect of flooding Afghanistan with contractors working for Blackwater and its cousins. Spencer Ackerman:
But what about the firms hired to protect the new State Department personnel on their way to Afghanistan? State Department security contractors like Blackwater Xe, Triple Canopy and DynCorp have been tied to more population-alienating abuses than the ones who work for the Defense Department.
The use of these contractors accompanying a “civilian surge” has a corrosive effect on life in Kabul, and have become a serious political problem for the continued U.S. occupation. Again, from Youssef’s article:
“In the mind of the Afghan people, democracy is tied to the arrival of the foreign forces,” said Wahed Mughzada, a political analyst. “They don’t like it.”
That’s contributing to growing calls for a timetable for U.S. forces to withdraw, said Ashraf Ghani, a leading candidate in next month’s presidential elections. He’s suggesting that the U.S. withdraw in seven years.
“The Afghans want the use of forces to be predictable. They feel they are not being heard,” Ghani said. “The pre-eminent issue is justice.”
Further, as the U.S. counterinsurgency operation established forward operating bases, we will likely see even more private security firms hired and sent to Afghanistan to act as guards.
So let’s recap. First, we find out that the supposed “civilian” surge in Afghanistan would be largely made up of military personnel. Now, we find that it requires widening the use of civilian contractors, including those from the very companies responsible for carnage and popular outrage in Iraq.
This is all starting to feel so very familiar.
Obama and Latin America The First Six Months, July 26, 2009, By Kevin Young, Source: NACLA online, in: Zmag
Far from embodying any dramatic changes, President Obama's foreign policy has thus far tended toward continuity or worse in most major areas. The administration has escalated the US wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan against the advice of knowledgeable observers of the region and against the wishes of the vast majority of the Afghan and Pakistani populations. Despite bowing to overwhelming Iraqi pressure by agreeing to withdraw at least some US forces from Iraq, Obama has pushed hard for continued war funding and has sought to consolidate US control over Iraq "without being seen to do so," as publicly conceded by one high-level official. With regard to Palestine, Obama has refused to endorse the decades-old international consensus and the 2002 Arab League peace proposal calling for a two-state solution on the pre-1967 borders. And he has increased total military spending by four percent over Bush-era levels rather than redirecting those funds to meet human needs [1]. As with domestic issues, Obama's foreign policy rhetoric has sounded more compassionate and far less arrogant than his predecessor's, like when Obama has insisted on an immediate end to illegal Israeli settlements and talked about reconciliation with the Muslim world. Yet even such small steps have usually been confined to the realm of rhetoric; there is absolutely no indication, for example, that Obama has even considered cutting the $2.8 billion in annual US military aid to Israel to force it to comply with international law.
To what extent has this pattern applied to Obama's approach to Latin America? Acutely conscious of the long US history of imperialist intervention in the region and thoroughly disgusted with the US-promoted neoliberal economic policies of recent decades, most Latin Americans have long been anxious to see a new US policy in the region, one that respects international law and national sovereignty while helping to promote sustainable and egalitarian economic development. Any assessment of the new administration must acknowledge, of course, that Obama himself does not singlehandedly determine policy, and that corporate, financial, military, and other elite interests constitute powerful obstacles to substantial change. Yet the President himself and the people he appoints nonetheless deserve a large portion of the praise or blame for the direction of US policy. With this partial caveat in mind, the following evaluates the extent to which Obama administration policy in Latin America has thus far adhered to the ideals of democracy, human rights, and international law.
Obama and the Leftward Turn
The most significant challenge that Latin America has presented to Washington in the last decade has been its much-discussed leftward turn. With just three major exceptions (Colombia, Peru, and Mexico, with possible 2006 election fraud in the last), nearly every country on the continent has elected a left-of-center president promising to abandon economic neoliberalism and to forge strong regional alliances that will increase Latin American economic and political independence. Although the corporate press usually implicates Venezuela's Hugo Chávez as the key culprit behind this shift, recent elections and policy changes have in fact reflected the growth of grassroots social movements and the thorough disillusionment of the region's people with the policies promoted by US leaders and Latin American elites.
Recent Latin American efforts to build intra-regional trade alliances, to institute measures of limited economic protectionism, and to limit the power of foreign capital predictably met with overt hostility from the Bush administration. The Obama administration has once shown signs of change in this regard: in March, after right-wing members of the US Congress had publicly threatened to cut off remittances to El Salvador and deport Salvadoran immigrants if the left-leaning FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes won the presidential election, the administration yielded to pressure from Salvadoran and US activists by issuing an official statement of neutrality—a welcome change from Washington's blatant intervention in support of the far-right ARENA party in the 2004 elections. But unfortunately, a more comprehensive review of Obama's approach to the region suggests that despite this example and despite the often more tolerant, conciliatory tone of administration rhetoric, the basic US policy and strategy have thus far undergone few substantial modifications. The key test of Obama administration goodwill in Latin America—the extent to which it supports the right of Latin Americans to elect presidents who favor economic policies of redistribution and national control over key resources, and supports those presidents once in office—has so far yielded, on the whole, rather discouraging results.
The administration's approach to its predecessor's arch-enemy in the region, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, has involved a bizarre mix of conciliatory gestures and rhetoric, on the one hand, and occasional statements that have outdone even the Bush administration in their hostility toward Chávez, on the other. In the first category, Obama has restored the US ambassador to Venezuela, whom Chávez had expelled last September to protest US support for right-wing separatist groups in Bolivia. And in a small move that triggered an absurd amount of commentary in the mainstream press, Obama greeted and shook hands with Chávez at last April's Summit of the Americas. At the same time, much administration rhetoric has continued to vilify Chávez and to blame him for the continent-wide revulsion against Washington's neoliberal policies. In a January interview broadcast on Spanish-language television, Obama labeled Chávez "a force that has interrupted progress in the region" and, with no evidence whatsoever, accused Chávez of "exporting terrorist activities"—a charge that, as analyst Mark Weisbrot notes, "would not pass the laugh test among almost any government in Latin America." At other moments Obama has called Chávez "despotic," while Hillary Clinton and Vice President Biden have each called him a "dictator" [2].
Obama's hostility toward Bolivia has extended beyond rhetoric into concrete policy actions, with potentially dire effects for tens of thousands of Bolivian workers. On June 30 Obama declared that Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, no longer deserved US trade preferences. President Bush had rescinded those preferences last fall, but Obama had widely been expected to reinstate them; instead, he permanently eliminated them. The public rationale of both presidents has been that Bolivia has failed to reduce cocaine and coca leaf production, a major stipulation of the original agreement. Leaving aside the question of whether Washington has the right to prohibit Andean nations from growing the coca leaves which are central to Andean highland culture, the statistics on coca production suggest that the Bush-Obama policy of revoking Bolivia's trade preferences has political motives. While Bolivian coca production increased by only 5 percent in 2007, Colombian coca production increased by 27 percent. The 2008 figures released in June do show a significant decline in Colombian coca and cocaine production, but Colombia remains the leading producer of both products [3]. Yet while the Obama administration punishes Bolivians by ending much-needed trade preferences, it has rewarded the Colombian government with over half a billion dollars in aid for next year (see below).
With regard to Cuba policy, Obama has done nothing that US business elites and the Cuban-American mafia in Florida would find offensive. He has maintained the 47-year-old embargo—which has been roundly condemned in the international community for decades—in nearly every point [4]. While the press has showered much attention on the ending of travel restrictions on Cuban Americans, with many hailing this change as a progressive move, Obama explained during his campaign why he did so. In May 2008 he appeared before a cheering audience of the Cuban American National Foundation, a group long known to have planned and promoted terrorist operations in Cuba, and told the group that the US needs "a new strategy" for converting Cuba to a subservient, neoliberal economy, since the old strategy (five decades of terrorism, economic strangulation, and attempts at isolation) hasn't worked. "There are no better ambassadors for freedom than Cuban Americans," he said, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton adding that they would also serve as "ambassadors...for a free market economy." At the same time, Obama has said plainly, "I will maintain the embargo" [5]. Obama's approach to Cuba, far from constituting any substantial progressive change from the Bush era, is rightly viewed as a more intelligent use of US coercion to obtain the desired results. There are signs that Raúl Castro is more open to certain capitalist policy shifts than Fidel was—Raúl has, for example, publicly defined "equality" as the "equality of rights, of opportunities, not of income"—suggesting that perhaps Obama's approach may prove a more effective imperial strategy for influencing developments on the island [6].
Honduras
Obama's most publicized test on Latin America, however, has come from an unexpected source. On June 28 the Honduran military overthrew and kidnapped the democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya in the first Latin American coup in five years. Since his 2005 election Zelaya had surprised his right-wing supporters by promoting a minimum-wage increase and a number of other mildly reformist measures, and on the day he was deposed had planned to poll Hondurans as to whether they would like to convene an assembly to re-write the Constitution [7]. In a nearly unprecedented show of hemispheric unity, Latin American governments—including even US allies—immediately denounced the coup and called for Zelaya's reinstatement. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed Latin America's lead by calling for a restoration of "Constitutional order." The US reaction to the coup at first glance seemed to signal a refreshing change from the Bush administration, which supported the last two coups (Venezuela in 2002, Haiti in 2004) against democratically-elected Latin American governments.
Upon closer inspection, though, the Obama response appears more equivocal. At least some in the administration (though perhaps not Obama himself) knew about the coup plot beforehand and did nothing to prevent it. Once the military had seized power, the administration refused to officially label it a "coup," which would have legally required it to cut off all military aid to the new regime. On July 8 Obama did end direct US military aid, totaling $16.5 million, though as of this writing has left the rest of the aid package ($180 million) intact. Meanwhile, Honduran soldiers continue to receive training at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA (which Obama has also left open for business) and US military personnel continue operating without any change inside Honduras itself. The US ambassador, who lent tacit cooperation to the coup once it was in motion, remains in Honduras. The administration has tried to justify the maintenance of these links using the rationale that "engagement" enables the US to exert positive leverage over a regime's behavior—reasoning that sounds suspiciously similar to one excuse given in the 1970s and 1980s for aiding Latin America's many terrorist states in their wars against their own people. But even this rationale does not accord with the actions of Obama, who has issued no condemnation of the violent repression and press censorship that the illegitimate Honduran government has unleashed since seizing power [8].
Obama administration officials have at least once called for Zelaya's reinstatement, but have tended more often to emphasize instead the need for "dialogue" between the two parties. Obama, Clinton, and others thus supported the mediated negotiations that began in Costa Rica on July 9 between Zelaya and the coup leaders [9]. The implicit message to all would-be coup plotters throughout Latin America is that an illegal military coup will result not in a prison sentence but in at least a seat at the negotiating table and, if they serve US interests in the region, permission to stay in power. Needless to say, the US equivalent—a renegade band of military brass overthrowing President Obama—would hardly be greeted with cool-toned calls for "dialogue" here at home.
On one hand, the Obama administration has sometimes appeared quite forceful in its rhetorical condemnations of the coup. But it has used ambiguous and carefully-selected language and has refrained from taking many of the substantive measures (e.g., freezing the bank accounts of the coup leaders) that might lead to Zelaya's reinstatement. Like in other areas of its Latin America policy, the hope-inspiring tone of the Obama administration's public rhetoric has not been matched by its actions.
Obama and the Ever-Faithful: Colombia, Mexico, and Peru
Though it has garnered far less media fanfare, the administration's policy toward key US allies in the region will have extremely important consequences in the years to come. In his first six months Obama has placed Colombia and Mexico in particular at the top of his Latin America agenda with emphasis on expanding US trade and "security" links with the two countries.
On June 29 Obama welcomed Colombian President Álvaro Uribe to Washington, assuring him that "moving forward on a free trade agreement" with Colombia was among the administration's top priorities and in "the interests of both countries" [10]. Obama firmly believes in the general desirability of the so-called "free-trade" agreements that have increased poverty and inequality throughout Latin America. His partial hesitance toward a free-trade agreement with Colombia has never derived from the well-known detrimental effects of such agreements on the vulnerable sectors and the environments of underdeveloped countries, but from the constant and undeniable human rights violations of the Uribe government.
Recently, though, Obama has even suggested that he may be willing to overlook the Uribe regime's human rights record—by far the worst in Latin America—in the interest of passing a trade agreement. On June 29 he praised Uribe's "diligence and courage" and applauded "the progress that has been made in human rights in Colombia," noting that "obviously we've seen a downward trajectory in the deaths of labor union[ist]s and we've seen improvements when it comes to prosecution" of the offenders. Obama neglected to note the
specifics of that downward trajectory: from 2007 to 2008 in Colombia there was a 34-percent increase in murders and disappearances of trade unionists (49 were murdered last year, the most in the world), plus a 52-percent increase in forced displacement and a 102-percent increase in death threats [11]. Obama has rewarded Uribe for that downward trajectory by continuing the Clinton-Bush legacy of extending massive military aid to Colombia, although his 2010 budget reduces by about $36 million the amount dedicated exclusively to Colombia's military and police apparatus. Next year Colombia is slated to receive over $508 million in US aid, $268 million of which being military and police aid. Recently the administration has also sought to finalize agreements that will expand the direct US military presence within Colombia [12].
But Mexico will become the hemisphere's top recipient of US military aid over the coming year, displacing Colombia to second place. In June the US Congress approved a $420 million supplemental allocation to the Mexican government to combat Mexican drug cartels, bringing total 2009 US military and police aid to Mexico to $832 million. This latest allocation comes as part of the Mérida Initiative (also known as Plan Mexico) that Bush signed last year and which the Obama administration appears eager to continue. Obama's 2010 budget includes an additional $481 million for the Mexican government, increasing the three-year total for Plan Mexico to $1.6 billion. The current administration's approach to the drug trade in Mexico has thus far been modeled on the deeply-flawed US approach in Colombia over the past decade, placing heavy emphasis on military aid and paying insufficient attention to the endemic corruption and culture of impunity for human rights violators that characterize the governments of both countries. And Obama, like Bush, has done nothing to reassure those who worry that the Mexican government may also use US aid to help repress domestic dissent, as it has been quick to do in recent years and as the Uribe government in Colombia has done quite unabashedly with the help of US military assistance. The White House's aid request for 2010 actually proposes eliminating even the tepid human rights conditions upon which current aid to Mexico and Colombia is contingent [13].
Peru is less prominent on the US radar, but did present the Obama administration with an important symbolic test in early June when government police forces massacred around 60 indigenous protesters who were seeking to prevent the entry of mining, logging, and biofuels companies onto their land. The massacre was clearly linked to the expansion of Washington-style neoliberal globalization: after the implementation of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement in February, Peruvian President Alan García had signed a series of laws facilitating the entry of extractive industries onto indigenous land. Following the massacre a wave of Peruvian and international condemnation forced the government to rescind two of the controversial laws [14]. The Obama administration did not join in that condemnation, however, remaining entirely silent. Such silence suggests that Obama, like his predecessors, is willing to overlook the crimes of those who support US economic and geopolitical interests in Latin America. By contrast, those who "interrupt progress" in the region, like indigenous communities in Peru who foolishly believe they should they have a say in how their resources are used, will continue to pay the price for their misbehavior.
An Obama Doctrine for Latin America?
It may still be too early to talk of a distinctive "Obama Doctrine" in Latin America. Moreover, doing so is difficult because of the conflicting signals the administration has sometimes sent. Historian Greg Grandin noted recently that "what you see often in the Obama administration is Obama making very good pronouncements on any number of issues...and then on-the-ground, second-level officials either hedging or being actually quite provocative." Secretary of State Clinton, for example, has been considerably more bellicose in her statements on Venezuela, Cuba, and Honduras, consistent with her past record of greater contempt for international law. One of Clinton's advisers is reportedly John Negroponte, the man who helped militarize Honduras and direct Reagan's terrorist war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, and Clinton also has close links to lobbyists hired by the Honduran coup leaders. Other Obama advisors with much-vaunted Latin American experience include Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela (a Plan Colombia architect) and Summit of the Americas adviser Jeffrey Davidow (who served as ambassador to Chile when the US helped overthrow the Allende government in 1973). Clinton, Davidow, Joe Biden, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, and others have all made public statements that seem to outdo Obama in terms of hostility toward left-leaning governments [15].
Of course, this lack of coherence might not be entirely accidental. For an administration facing pressures from many sides, part of the strategy may be for Obama to issue hopeful and inspiring rhetoric to placate those demanding change, and then for his subordinates and his actual policy formulations to dispel any illusions of a genuine change in US policy. As some of the more perceptive critics have pointed out, Obama seems to have a unique ability to mesmerize everyone—including much of the Left—with his rhetoric while implementing or continuing policies that bear no necessary relation to that rhetoric [16].
In any case, at least one general tendency of Obama's policy thus far has been clear: to continue discriminating against, albeit with less confrontational rhetoric, the most left-leaning governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. In marked contrast, "moderate Left" governments like Brazil, Chile, and Argentina have enjoyed much stronger support from Obama's Washington, signaling a relative continuity with the Bush strategy of trying to split the "aggressive" and "moderate" Latin American leftists and thereby promoting adherence to the latter position. As one close observer of Bolivia, Jim Schultz,
suggested following Obama's June 30 elimination of Bolivia's trade preferences, the administration may have "decided that Bolivia might make a nice line in the sand." Deputy Secretary of State Steinberg publicly advocated this strategy when he spoke of the need to foster a "counterweight to governments like those currently in power in Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the interests of their people or the region" [17].
In sum, the Obama Doctrine gradually taking shape is less brazen and less confrontational than what Latin Americans have seen coming from the North in recent decades, but is so far substantively quite similar to the approach of the Clinton and Bush administrations. As Greg Grandin
predicted he would about a year ago, Obama has begun "to implement a more rational, less ideologically incandescent deployment of American power." Journalist Eva Golinger refers to this strategy as "smart power," featuring "a mix of military force with all forms of diplomacy, with an emphasis [on] the use of ‘democracy promotion' as a principal tactic" (as Golinger notes, Obama's 2010 budget has increased the funds allocated for this latter activity, which has often included channeling money to opposition groups in Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia). Long-time solidarity activist Chuck Kaufman describes it as "a kinder, gentler imperialism," a phrase that others have also used to describe Obama's more general foreign policy approach (although it's difficult to see how some of Obama's policies are any kinder or gentler than Bush's) [18].
Whatever label is applied to characterize it, this approach bears some resemblance to that of past US presidents who have been faced with waning US power in the hemisphere. Some have compared it to FDR's
Good Neighbor policy, which responded to the rise of nationalism in Mexico and Central America and the crisis of capitalism at home by renouncing direct intervention and opting instead for bilateral trade agreements geared toward rehabilitating capitalism and reaffirming Latin American economic dependence on the US. A quarter-century later the Kennedy State Department bemoaned the fact that Latin America's "poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living." Its response was three-pronged, combining hopeful and progressive-sounding rhetoric about the need for social reform; economic aid intended to curb the spread of redistributive and nationalist inclinations; and a huge increase in military assistance to Latin American governments [19].
Obama shares Roosevelt and Kennedy's rhetoric of respect and cooperation, and as they did he surely understands that such rhetoric is necessary if the US is to stand any chance of recouping its declining influence in the region. Yet as in times past, and as in Iraq right now, the nice-sounding rhetoric also conceals a desire to strengthen US control in the region "
without being seen to do so." And like FDR and JFK, Obama has suggested that there are real limits to this newfound tolerance: just as Roosevelt welcomed Somoza in Nicaragua as "our son of a bitch" and Kennedy authorized any number of illegal actions against Cuba, Obama has remained quite hostile to the three most left-leaning governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba [20].
If the Obama administration believes it can reassert US power in the region through a strategy that tries to pit "good Left" against "bad Left," it will probably fail; Latin American governments, despite their diversity, are more united in support of democratic sovereignty than at any time in recent memory, as their unanimous denunciations of the Honduras coup and of last fall's right-wing violence in Bolivia have demonstrated. Mark Weisbrot
writes that "when the Obama team is convinced that a ‘divide and conquer' approach to the region will fail just as miserably for this administration as it did for the previous one, then we may see the beginnings of a new policy toward Latin America" [21]. I hope so, but with one qualification: what is needed is not just a new strategy that leaves intact many of the traditional assumptions about US rights and privileges in the region, but an entirely new perspective that breaks, explicitly and completely, with the Monroe Doctrine and all its concomitant attitudes and policy formulations.
Notes:
[1] On Iraq, see Michael Schwartz, "Colonizing Iraq: The Obama Doctrine?" TomDispatch, July 9, 2009, and Democracy Now! headlines for June 17 and June 25, 2009. On Afghan and Pakistani public opinion, see the 2009 Western-run polls cited here and here. On Israel and Palestine, see Noam Chomsky, "Obama on Israel-Palestine: Carefully Framed Deceit," Z Magazine (March 2009), and, on Iraq and Central Asia, Chomsky's "Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours," June 2009 speech reproduced on Democracy Now! July 3, 2009. Also useful is Jeremy Scahill and Anthony Arnove's joint interview, "Rebranding War & Occupation," ZNet, June 18, 2009, where Schahill points out that Obama will "say a few things...that sound like they're new, like a totally different U.S. approach, but then he'll also at the same time roll out a policy that is further than even Bush took things."
[2] Quoted in Garry Leech, "U.S. Policy Towards Venezuela and Colombia Will Change Little Under Obama," Colombia Journal, January 20, 2009, and in Weisbrot, "Venezuela, an Imaginary Threat," Guardian, February 18, 2009.
[3] UN statistics quoted in "Morales: Bolivia Trade Suspension Shows Obama ‘Lied to Latin America'" (headline), Democracy Now! July 2, 2009; UN Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2009 (New York, 2009), 11.
[4] Every year since 1992 the UN General Assembly has condemned the embargo; in October 2008 the most recent resolution passed by a vote of 184 to 4. See AP, "U.N. Again Urges U.S. to Lift Embargo against Cuba," October 30, 2008.
[5] Carol J. Williams and Johanna Neuman, "Obama Says He Would Meet with Cuba's Leaders," Los Angeles Times, May 23, 2008; "Senate Confirmation Hearing: Hillary Clinton," New York Times, January 13, 2008.
[6] Sarah Miller Llana and Matthew Clark, "Cuba under Raúl: Creeping toward Capitalism?" Christian Science Monitor, July 23, 2008. Though the writers probably exaggerate the younger Castro's capitalist proclivities, and like other US commentators erroneously attribute the thrust of Cuban economy policy to a single man rather than the wishes of the Cuban people, the difference in rhetoric between the two Castro brothers is significant.
[7] On Zelaya's background see Benjamin Dangl, "Showdown in Honduras: The Rise and Uncertain Future of the Coup," Toward Freedom, June 29, 2009, and Stephen Zunes, "Showdown in ‘Tegucigolpe,'" Foreign Policy in Focus, July 10, 2009.
[8] "Obama Condemns Honduran Coup, But Won't Suspend Aid," Democracy Now! June 30, 2009, and DN's collection of news and interviews on the coup; John McPhaul, "U.S. Suspends Military Aid to Honduras before Talks," Reuters, July 9, 2009; James Hodge and Linda Cooper, "U.S. Continues to Train Honduran Soldiers," National Catholic Reporter, July 14, 2009; "Honduras Rivals Back Peace Moves," BBC, July 8, 2009; Nikolas Kozloff, "Obama and Honduras: It's All About the Constitution," ZNet, July 19, 2009; for evidence that the State Department had prior knowledge of the coup, as well as the argument that the Obama administration may have been closely implicated in it, see Eva Golinger, "Honduran Coup: Made in Washington," MRZine, January 15, 2009; for a recent report on over 1,000 human rights violations in the two weeks following the coup, see Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH), Informe preliminar: Violaciones a derechos humanos en el marco del golpe de estado en Honduras (Tegucigalpa, July 15, 2009).
[9] "Honduras Rivals Back Peace Moves," BBC, July 8, 2009; "Obama Calls for Reinstatement of Honduran President," Irish Times, July 8, 2009.
[10] White House, Office of the Press Secretary, "Remarks by President Obama and President Uribe of Colombia in Joint Press Availability," June 29, 2009.
[11] Escuela Nacional Sindical, Sistema de Información Sindical y Laboral (Sislab), 1º reporte a diciembre de 2008 (Medellín, June 2009), 41.
[12] See "FY2010 International Affairs (Function 150) Budget Request—Summary and Highlights," released May 7, 2009, the Colombia portion of which is summarized here; on US military bases see the Center for International Policy's Colombia Program, "U.S. Use of Colombian Bases: More Questions than Answers" (blog), July 16, 2009.
[13] "Obama Signs War Funding Bill" (headline), Democracy Now! June 25, 2009; Bill Weinberg, "Plan Colombia: Exporting the Model," NACLA Report on the Americas 42, no. 4 (July/August 2009); Abigail Poe, "Mexico to Surpass Colombia as the #1 Recipient of U.S. Aid in Latin America" (blog on Just the Facts website), June 17, 2009; Kristina Aiello, "Obama's Choice: Human Rights First or Plan Mexico," NACLA (online), June 1, 2009; White House Office of Management and Budget, FY2010 Budget Request for Department of State and Other International Programs, 883, 895, with analysis by the Center for International Policy's Colombia Program here. For the ways in which "Washington is funding both sides of the drug war" in Mexico, see Todd Miller, "Mexico's Emerging Narco-State," NACLA (online), July 1, 2009.
[14] Laura Carlsen, "Victory in the Amazon" (Special Report of the Center for International Policy's Americas Program), June 22, 2009.
[15] Greg Grandin, Interview by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! July 2, 2009; Mark Weisbrot, "Who's in Charge of US Foreign Policy?" Guardian, July 16, 2009; Stephen Zunes, "Hillary Clinton's Disdain for International Law: Change We Can Believe In?" AlterNet.org, December 1, 2008; Eva Golinger, "Honduran Coup: Made in Washington."
[16] See especially Paul Street's "Obama's Violin: Populist Rage and the Uncertain Containment of Change," Z Magazine (May 2009), and "‘Business Liberalism': The Real Meaning of Obama's ‘Pragmatic' Reluctance to ‘Tilt at Windmills,'" ZNet commentary, June 26, 2009.
[17] "President Obama Ends U.S. Trade Preferences for Bolivia" (blog on website of The Democracy Center), July 2, 2009; Steinberg quoted in Weisbrot, "Venezuela, an Imaginary Threat."
[18] Grandin, "Losing Latin America: What Will the Obama Doctrine Be Like?" TomDispatch, June 8, 2008; Golinger, "Honduran Coup: Made in Washington"; Chuck Kaufman, personal correspondence; Corey D.B. Walker, "A Kinder, Gentler Imperialism? Getting Beyond the Either/Or Choice," Counterpunch.org, July 18, 2008.
[19] Clifton Ross and Marcy Rein, "Honduras, Washington and Latin America: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor," UpsideDownWorld.org, July 8, 2009; "Summary Guidelines Paper: United States Policy toward Latin America," July 3, 1961, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. XII: American Republics (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1996), 33; Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 47-49.
[20] The approach taking shape under Obama also has at least something in common with that of two less likely figures, Eisenhower and Nixon. Both presidents were firmly committed to projecting US power in the region, but also sought to minimize the use of overt, direct US intervention (though both men would authorize major direct interventions, most notably in Guatemala, Cuba, and Chile). Eisenhower emphasized covert action and, in the case of the Bolivian Revolution, a policy of engagement and US aid in order to channel the revolution in safe directions. Nixon sought to reduce direct US military involvement by shifting military responsibility onto Latin American forces themselves. (To be sure, there were also significant differences among these presidents—Roosevelt, for example, was far less open to overt intervention in Latin America than Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon all were).
[21] Weisbrot, "Venezuela, an Imaginary Threat."
Thanks to Chuck Kaufman of the Alliance for Global Justice for his comments on the first draft of this essay.
PEACE CONGRESS DEMANDS "CANADA OUT OF NATO", April 16-30, 2009, issue of People's Voice
(The following article is from the April 16-30, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)
Excerpts from a statement by the Canadian Peace Congress on April 4, the 60th anniversary of the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Since its inception, NATO has been an aggressive military alliance whose purpose is to be the self‑appointed enforcement officer for the strategic and economic interests of Western capitalist states. The alliance started out as an anti‑Soviet institution of the Cold War, taking in countries in North America and Europe and dominated by the military‑industrial complex of the United States. The end of the Cold War meant the vaporization of its mission to "contain communism" and NATO itself should have disappeared. Instead, the military alliance has expanded, both in membership and scope, and drawn more countries into its role of controlling and directing the resources of the world toward the benefit of capitalist countries and particularly U.S. capitalism.
This shift in NATO's role is exemplified by its aggression against Yugoslavia. After several years of harassment and interference, NATO began bombing Yugoslavia in 1999, under the pretense of humanitarian intervention but with the very clear objective of breaking up the last socialist‑oriented country in Europe and forceably reorienting it toward a neoliberal, capitalist economic model. In the middle of the bombing campaign, NATO chiefs gathered for a gala celebration of the alliance's 50th anniversary and to announce NATO's "new strategic concept", which extended its scope beyond the North Atlantic arena and allowed it to militarily attack anywhere in the world on "humanitarian" grounds. The war against Yugoslavia revealed much of NATO's "humanitarian" vision - the bombing campaign was savage, unilateral and criminal, and it resulted in a destroyed infrastructure and thousands of dead or displaced civilians.
NATO's ongoing war against Afghanistan is the current "theatre of operations" for the new strategic concept, and it clearly exposes the intent of U.S. imperialism and its NATO and EU allies to perpetuate in the 21st century the cycle of wars of aggression, militarization and economic crisis that characterized the 20th century. Afghanistan represents two significant and troublesome "firsts" for the alliance: it is the first time NATO has undertaken a mission outside of the North Atlantic arena, and it was the first time that the alliance's "mutual defence" clause had been invoked. Both of these developments were nothing less than desperate attempts to secure a role for NATO in the world. Specifically, NATO and its core membership of Western imperialist states have used the war in Afghanistan to secure a foothold in the resource‑rich areas of Asia, controlling strategic pipeline routes and encircling China and Russia.
Shamefully, successive Canadian governments - both Liberal and Conservative - have supported and facilitated NATO's new role. Canada participated in the wars against Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, and Minister of National Defence John McCallum facilitated the transfer of command of the Afghanistan mission from the United Nations to NATO...
Canada's participation in NATO and its complicity with the alliance's policy of aggression and domination is not only a threat to world peace, but is an increasingly dangerous and self-destructive policy for Canada. Canada's membership in NATO requires an abdication of Canadian sovereignty in the areas of military and foreign policy, and it necessarily means that a growing amount of domestic legislation is subject to the policies of the military alliance. For example, through NATO membership Canada is committed to helping to pay for the maintenance of NATO's nuclear armaments around the world and to developing and contributing to NATO's nuclear policy; this impacts directly on Canadian government policies toward resource and industrial development in Canada.
NATO's strategic view of the Middle East, and the role that the state of Israel plays in that vision, has undoubtedly been a factor in the dramatic changes in Canada's foreign policy toward Palestine, which is now nothing more than embarrassing parroting of U.S. policy. Furthermore, NATO's current exercises and buildup in the oil‑rich areas of Africa will no doubt place pressure on the Canadian government to circumvent the democratic process as it frames its foreign policy toward this area. Canada's withdrawal from NATO is a necessary first step to securing an independent foreign policy of peace, disarmament and international cooperation for Canada. This has been the policy of the Canadian Peace Congress since 1949.
Wherever NATO intervenes in the world, it commits and encourages flagrant violations of basic principles of international law and the founding Charter of the United Nations. As a global military alliance, its very formation contravened the provisions of the Charter of the newly‑formed United Nations; in the six decades since, NATO has sought to undermine the U.N.'s mission to bring peace to the world. NATO's longstanding policy of first‑strike, or pre‑emptive attack, and its maintenance of its right to use nuclear weapons are both outright violations of the precepts of the United Nations.
Clearly, the time has come for a massive movement of people calling for the dissolution of NATO and all military alliances, and replacing it with instruments that facilitate equal and genuinely cooperative relations between states, based on respect for sovereignty and self‑determination. On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of NATO, the Canadian Peace Congress calls for such a mobilization and launches its own campaign for Canada to withdraw from NATO. It is up to the people in NATO countries to stop the drive to war - the military‑industrial complex of the United States and its allies around the world must be stopped.
A new, progressive, democratic world order is possible. As a first step, the Canadian Peace Congress encourages all peace‑supporting people in Canada to mark the 60th anniversary of NATO's formation by taking action to force Canada's immediate, unilateral withdrawal from NATO.
The Left Front [in France]: What Next ? Translated Saturday 25 July 2009, by Kristina Wischenkamper, from original art. in l'Humanite
ORIGINAL FRENCH ARTICLE : Le Front de gauche, et après ?
By Sébastien Crépel
Marie-George Buffet has announced initiatives to continue the front beyond the European elections and open it up to citizens and interested groups with a view to making it a majority force.
Is the Left Front an electoral coup without a future? Marie-George Buffet gave the lie to sceptics very clearly yesterday by announcing a series of steps to be taken to ‘continue and build the Left Front making it more popular, open to more citizens and more progressive groups’. The election result, considered ‘satisfactory for a new and growing initiative’ is thanks to the militant mobilisation in which the communists played a ‘key role’ (6.47% nationally and 5 MEPs) and encourages a ‘pursuit of the united movement’ beyond the European elections, she said. ‘It’s the only way’ insists the communist leader ‘to create the conditions for a popular majority movement’ of a progressive Left.
A popular majority movement
What needs to be done? For Marie-George Buffet ‘the Left Front has no limits’, it does not confine itself to representing ‘the left of the Left’ but sets its sights on creating a popular majority movement for a Left that wants change. Criticising the imagined moves to rethink the Left around François Bayrou and then, since Sunday, Daniel Cohn-Bendit as ‘unserious because they take too many shortcuts’, the national secretary of the PCF (French Communist Party) deems that ‘social democrats have shown no response’ to the crisis other than anti-Sarkozyism. This in itself does not allow ‘the creation of a project, propositions, and a union to defeat the Right’. ‘I don’t relish this’ she declared announcing initiatives on a number of fronts. ‘The PCF calls upon all of the Left, the political groups but also the entirety of the women and men of the left, to work on a political project which will meet all the popular demands’, she announced. "Voters and active members of the PS (Socialist Party) and NPA (New Anticapitalist Party), which didn’t join the Left Front, but who feel the relevance of such a Left Front can take part without being self-contradictory" she explained.
She also proposed to her colleagues in the Left Front (Parti de Gauche [Left Party], Gauche unitaire [United Left], République et socialisme [Republic and Socialism]*) ‘to create a platform for open debate for all the women and men of the left so that they can take charge of this Left Front’. Propositions which will be made locally throughout the country, Olivier Dartignolles, speaker for the PCF made clear, with the objective of bringing them all together at the Humanité Festival in September.
In the meantime the PCF proposes that political groups, intellectuals, trade unionists, economists, artists, and elected members active in the Left Front "work together to organise a meeting at the end of the month in a large Paris assembly room to establish the working plan for a political project emerging from the very heart of the current social struggles".
Coming back to the abstention that marred the European elections, the deputy of Seine-Saint Denis thinks that the electors were expressing ‘social suffering’ and ‘doubts about the efficacity of their vote’ in the face of "a Europe which is made without them and against them’ as witnessed by the fact that ‘their vote of 2005 was ignored". "Since Sunday the Right is trying to make the vote its own, but June 7th hasn’t given the go ahead to the liberals", remarks Marie-George Buffet who suggests the UMP score be put in context in terms of the abstention, with ‘7 million fewer votes for the UMP’s lists, a very far cry from the score in the presidential elections’.
Finally, according to Buffet, the high score of Europe Ecologie bears witness to "the aspirations of our fellow citizens to take into account environmental concerns". She repeated that the Left Front shares these concerns but calls for a "debate about the political choices implied by sustainable development", which demands notably a battle to defeat liberalisation such as in transport, or more so "a rethink of industrial development" so as not to put it in direct opposition to ecological preoccupations.
Sébastien Crépel
Note * A political break-away group formed in response to their party - Mouvement républicain et citoyen (Citizen and Republican Movement) - voting not to join the Left Front
By Sébastien Crépel
Marie-George Buffet has announced initiatives to continue the front beyond the European elections and open it up to citizens and interested groups with a view to making it a majority force.
Is the Left Front an electoral coup without a future? Marie-George Buffet gave the lie to sceptics very clearly yesterday by announcing a series of steps to be taken to ‘continue and build the Left Front making it more popular, open to more citizens and more progressive groups’. The election result, considered ‘satisfactory for a new and growing initiative’ is thanks to the militant mobilisation in which the communists played a ‘key role’ (6.47% nationally and 5 MEPs) and encourages a ‘pursuit of the united movement’ beyond the European elections, she said. ‘It’s the only way’ insists the communist leader ‘to create the conditions for a popular majority movement’ of a progressive Left.
A popular majority movement
What needs to be done? For Marie-George Buffet ‘the Left Front has no limits’, it does not confine itself to representing ‘the left of the Left’ but sets its sights on creating a popular majority movement for a Left that wants change. Criticising the imagined moves to rethink the Left around François Bayrou and then, since Sunday, Daniel Cohn-Bendit as ‘unserious because they take too many shortcuts’, the national secretary of the PCF (French Communist Party) deems that ‘social democrats have shown no response’ to the crisis other than anti-Sarkozyism. This in itself does not allow ‘the creation of a project, propositions, and a union to defeat the Right’. ‘I don’t relish this’ she declared announcing initiatives on a number of fronts. ‘The PCF calls upon all of the Left, the political groups but also the entirety of the women and men of the left, to work on a political project which will meet all the popular demands’, she announced. "Voters and active members of the PS (Socialist Party) and NPA (New Anticapitalist Party), which didn’t join the Left Front, but who feel the relevance of such a Left Front can take part without being self-contradictory" she explained.
She also proposed to her colleagues in the Left Front (Parti de Gauche [Left Party], Gauche unitaire [United Left], République et socialisme [Republic and Socialism]*) ‘to create a platform for open debate for all the women and men of the left so that they can take charge of this Left Front’. Propositions which will be made locally throughout the country, Olivier Dartignolles, speaker for the PCF made clear, with the objective of bringing them all together at the Humanité Festival in September.
In the meantime the PCF proposes that political groups, intellectuals, trade unionists, economists, artists, and elected members active in the Left Front "work together to organise a meeting at the end of the month in a large Paris assembly room to establish the working plan for a political project emerging from the very heart of the current social struggles".
Coming back to the abstention that marred the European elections, the deputy of Seine-Saint Denis thinks that the electors were expressing ‘social suffering’ and ‘doubts about the efficacity of their vote’ in the face of "a Europe which is made without them and against them’ as witnessed by the fact that ‘their vote of 2005 was ignored". "Since Sunday the Right is trying to make the vote its own, but June 7th hasn’t given the go ahead to the liberals", remarks Marie-George Buffet who suggests the UMP score be put in context in terms of the abstention, with ‘7 million fewer votes for the UMP’s lists, a very far cry from the score in the presidential elections’.
Finally, according to Buffet, the high score of Europe Ecologie bears witness to "the aspirations of our fellow citizens to take into account environmental concerns". She repeated that the Left Front shares these concerns but calls for a "debate about the political choices implied by sustainable development", which demands notably a battle to defeat liberalisation such as in transport, or more so "a rethink of industrial development" so as not to put it in direct opposition to ecological preoccupations.
Sébastien Crépel
Note * A political break-away group formed in response to their party - Mouvement républicain et citoyen (Citizen and Republican Movement) - voting not to join the Left Front
el Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España :EL GOLPE MILITAR FASCISTA EN HONDURAS Y LA AGRESION IMPERIALISTA EN AMERICA LATINA
Actualidad and Comunicados and Comité Central
COMUNICADO COMISIÓN ANTIIMPERIALISTA DEL CC DEL PCPE: EL GOLPE MILITAR FASCISTA EN HONDURAS Y LA AGRESION IMPERIALISTA CONTRA LOS PROCESOS DEMOCRATICOS EN AMERICA LATINA 28 July 2009
El pueblo hondureño resiste frente al golpe de estado en Honduras, consciente del momento histórico se enfrenta a los militares golpistas en las calles, en las universidades, en los centros de trabajo.
Siguen produciéndose detenciones ilegales, asesinatos, militarización de instituciones públicas, los escuadrones de la muerte han rescatado a sus antiguos dirigentes con experiencia en la práctica de desapariciones y torturas, algunos incluso han sido elevados a la categoría de asesor político de los golpistas, como es el caso del torturador Billy Joyer, sicario de los 80 e integrante del escuadrón de la muerte 3-16.
A pesar de que el gobierno estadounidense se ha empleado en ganar tiempo a favor de los golpistas, el pueblo hondureño no se rinde.
El carácter fascista del régimen autoritario que hace 26 días se instaló en Honduras ha recibido significativos apoyos desde el exterior como el de la familia Pinochet o la fundación de Aznar (FAES) y la organización neofascista UnoAmerica que asesoró a los autores del fallido intento de asesinato de Evo Morales en Abril pasado.
En el interior del país los grandes medios de comunicación al servicio de la oligarquía se posicionaron inmediatamente al lado golpista, entre ellos Canal 6, propiedad de Ralph Nodarse, multimillonario conocido en los años 80 por dirigir a instancias de la CIA el intento de emisión de radio hacia Cuba desde una organización que se denominaba “fuerzas especiales de la guerra anticomunista”, Ralph Nodarse acogió en 2004 al terroristas Posada en Carriles en transito hacia EEUU.
La agresión al pueblo hondureño es un claro intento de frenar los procesos liberadores en America Latina, el imperialismo prepara el escenario para futuras agresiones a los pueblos latino americanos que se rebelan contra el neoliberalismo, que rechazan el tratado de libre comercio que el gobierno estadounidense quiere imponer para continuar con la expoliación.
El imperialismo cuenta con su fiel lacayo Uribe, que pone Colombia al servicio de los proyectos. La instalación de cinco nuevas bases norteamericanas en Colombia con inmunidad frente a la justicia colombiana, facilita al imperialismo la intervención en otros países.
Colombia se refuerza como elemento estratégico, su presidente en consonancia con la política de terror imperialista, es responsable en su país de miles de desapariciones, asesinatos y de millones de desplazados.
Conocidos personajes de la política injerencista como William Brownfield, que en Diciembre de 1989 participó en la invasión de Panamá, causando 2000 muertos civiles (entre ellos el fotógrafo español Juantxu Rodríguez), era el embajador de EEUU en
Venezuela cuando se produce el golpe de estado contra el gobierno de Chávez, y nunca ha desmentido su participación en ese golpe, en la actualidad es embajador de EEUU en Bogotá.
Convertir Colombia en un centro de operaciones militares, configurar la plataforma necesaria para agredir a países de la región, son parte de la política injerencista del gobierno estadounidense presentada bajo el plan “estrategia hacia una ruta global”.
Denunciamos la complicidad de los medios de comunicación internacionales que silencian la resistencia del pueblo hondureño, el sometimiento de los gobiernos títeres del imperialismo que han puesto sus esperanzas en el paso de tiempo y esperan pacientemente a recibir la consigna del gobierno estadounidense para reconocer a los golpistas, así como las maniobras manejadas en la sombra por el imperialismo tendentes a otorgarle legitimidad y reconocimiento al presidente y gobierno golpistas, como son los encuentros que promueve Oscar Arias, presidente de Costa Rica, que desconecta con las declaraciones de organismos internaciones como la Asamblea General de la ONU e incluso la OEA.
Con la seguridad de que el pueblo hondureño vencerá, que los procesos en America Latina son imparables, que la historia les pertenece, desde el Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España hacemos un llamamiento a la unidad frente a las agresiones imperialistas, a movilizarnos para defender los procesos democratizadores y libertadores que se abren camino, America Latina es una, la solidaridad debe ser una, la unidad vencerá.
ALERTA, ALERTA QUE CAMINA LA ESPADA DE BOLIVAR POR AMERICA LATINA !!!
Comisión Antiimperialista del CC del PCPE
25 de julio de 2009
US Med Graduates Thank Fidel Castro and the Cuban people,Cuban News Agency
HAVANA, Cuba, Jul 24 (acn) US graduates in Cuba Pragveleen Valcourt and Sarpoma Sefa-Boakye thanked this Friday Fidel Castro and the Cuban people for the opportunity they were given in Cuba to study medicine and become doctors.
Both youngsters participated this Friday in a meeting held at the Friendship House with the 20th USA-Cuba Pastors for Peace Friendship Caravan, which collected over 115 tons of humanitarian aid for Cuba in an open defiance to the US blockade laws against the Caribbean nation.
With tears in her eyes, Valcourt, an African-American woman from New York, told ACN news agency that this day she is receiving her diploma of Medical Doctor, after seven years of studies, which has allowed her to fulfill a dear wish, impossible to achieve in her country due to her humble origin.
In these years here I have learnt a lot from the Cuban people and its capacity to resist the cruel blockade, she explained and went on to stress that she will return to her New York community of Hampstead to put into practice what she learnt in the Caribbean nation with great effort and sacrifices.
Sefa-Boakye, born in California and of Ghanaian origin, said she is taking back with her all the love she received from Cubans and the concept of medicine, which prioritizes the human aspect of the work over profit and benefits, two aspects that prevail in the sector of medicine in the United States.
We learnt how to do many things with few resources and to accomplish our mission of mitigating pain and healing people.
She denounced that the US terrible economic war against Cuba forced her parents to travel through a third country to be able to make it on time to her graduation at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM).
Ellen Bernstein, Associate Director of the Inter-religious Foundation for Community Organization IFCO/Pastors for Peace, told ACN that this Friday 17 US youngsters from humble and discriminated sectors graduated as doctors.
Message from Kalispell: Give us health care reform NOW! by Tim Wheeler, People's Weekly World
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People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/27/09
Steffi Baca of Kalispell was one of hundreds of Montana constituents who rallied outside the district offices of Democratic Sen. Max Baucus July 24 to demand that he include a strong public option in the health care reform bill his committee is drafting.
Baca, a recently retired public school teacher, told the World she and several others went to Baucus’ Kalispell office to protest his failure to include the Medicare-like public option in legislation before his Senate Finance Committee. Baca said a Baucus aide asked them to write out in longhand their views on what should be in the health care reform package. They wrote those messages on the spot.
Baca, herself, is a living testament to the need for a public plan. “I worked three years with heart failure and two years after I was diagnosed with cancer,” she told the World in a phone interview from her home. “I shouldn’t have been working but I couldn’t retire until I was covered by Medicare,” she said. “I’m sitting pretty now. I have Medicare and I’m very happy I have it.”
She said she has written letters, telephoned, emailed and marched for health care reform. “I’m in the process of writing a letter to our local paper, which is slanted against anything government,” she said. “I am FOR universal health care at government expense.”
Far bigger rallies were staged outside Baucus’ district offices in Missoula, location of the University of Montana, and in the state capital, Helena, she said.
Baca also signed an ad appearing on television across the state hammering Baucus for accepting $3.9 million in contributions from big HMOs, pharmaceutical corporations and other health care profiteers while refusing to heed the 76 percent of the people who favor a strong public option. The ads are sponsored by Democracy for America, the grassroots committee set up by former Democratic Party National chairman Dr. Howard Dean, and its offshoot, Progressive Change.
Kalispell is not the only town that debunks the corporate media’s Big Lie that the people are apathetic or even opposed to President Obama’s health care reform legislation. More than 200 people overflowed the largest meeting room at the Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles, Wash., July 22, for a forum on health care reform sponsored by the Clallam County League of Women Voters. The film “Health, Money, and Fear” was shown, followed by a panel discussion featuring aides of Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell and Rep. Norm Dicks, all Democrats.
The keynote speaker, Dr. Tom Locke, public health director, for the North Olympic Peninsula, told the crowd the best solution is single-payer health care like that enjoyed in Canada and most other industrialized nations. But he warned against making “the perfect the enemy of the good,” given the reality of limited support for single-payer on Capitol Hill. He urged the crowd to fight for the public option as an important step forward.
Rep. Dicks’ aide told the crowd he is answering the phone every day and “no one is calling on us to support single-payer.” A loud, indignant groan went up from the crowd, clearly a majority for single-payer. His constituents have bombarded Dicks with so many messages that he become the 87th member of Congress to endorse HR 676, the single-papyer “Medicare for All” bill authored by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.
Someone in the audience asked if the “public option” is a step toward single-payer. Kristine Reeves, an aide to Sen. Murray, replied that no bill enacted into law should be viewed as the end of the road. “Keep working for what you think is the best solution and yes, that solution might be single-payer,” she said as the crowd applauded.
Two days later, folksinger Anne Feeney and four fellow singers performed at Peninsula Community College, in Port Angeles, July 24, as part of her West Coast “Sing-Out for Single-Payer Roadshow.” The crowd sang along with her song about nurses toiling in sweatshop hospitals: “We’re running as fast as we can, We’re nursing as fast as we can. Our patients are sicker, the discharges quicker. We’re running with bandages and bedpans.”
At one point she paused and addressed the crowd, “We are the victims of the most expensive disinformation campaign in history. It's easy to get confused they tell so many lies ... When a congressman asks you what kind of health care you want, tell him: The same kind you have!”
During the intermission, people sat and wrote letters to Cantwell, Murray and Dicks urging them to give strong support to President Obama’s three principles of health care reform including universal coverage and a strong public option.
greenerpastures21212 @ yahoo.com
Marc Laitin, AFL-CIO Online Mobilization For Real Healthcare Reform
Marc Laitin, AFL-CIO Online Mobilization
Dear Activist,
Our all-out push for real health care reform continues—we can’t afford for Congress to wait any longer.
We need to fix our broken health care system with a reform bill that provides a quality public health insurance option, calls on employers to pay their fair share and doesn’t ask workers to pay more for what they already have.
This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. The time is now, and we need a few minutes of your time today to make sure Congress acts now. Call on your representative to support real health care reform today.
Call your representative toll free today: 1-877-702-0976
Across the country as a part of a nationwide call-in day, tens of thousands of activists like you are calling their representatives demanding real health care reform with the following three conditions:
-A quality public health insurance option.
-Requirements that all employers pay their fair share.
-No taxation of workers’ benefits.
This is a historic opportunity to fix our broken health care system, and we need every member of Congress to understand this. Working together, we can make sure everyone in America has access to quality, affordable health care.
Call and tell your representative to support real health care reform: 1-877-702-0976
It’s absolutely critical that you call today. Insurance company lobbyists and the Chamber of Commerce are doing everything they can to slow down the process and ultimately kill reform. Don’t let them block reform. The time for waiting is done. We want quality and accessible health care for all NOW. Call your representative today.
In solidarity,
Marc Laitin
AFL-CIO Online Mobilization Coordinator
P.S. We voted for change last November. Now it’s time for Congress to deliver real health care reform. Call your representative today!
Dear Activist,
Our all-out push for real health care reform continues—we can’t afford for Congress to wait any longer.
We need to fix our broken health care system with a reform bill that provides a quality public health insurance option, calls on employers to pay their fair share and doesn’t ask workers to pay more for what they already have.
This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. The time is now, and we need a few minutes of your time today to make sure Congress acts now. Call on your representative to support real health care reform today.
Call your representative toll free today: 1-877-702-0976
Across the country as a part of a nationwide call-in day, tens of thousands of activists like you are calling their representatives demanding real health care reform with the following three conditions:
-A quality public health insurance option.
-Requirements that all employers pay their fair share.
-No taxation of workers’ benefits.
This is a historic opportunity to fix our broken health care system, and we need every member of Congress to understand this. Working together, we can make sure everyone in America has access to quality, affordable health care.
Call and tell your representative to support real health care reform: 1-877-702-0976
It’s absolutely critical that you call today. Insurance company lobbyists and the Chamber of Commerce are doing everything they can to slow down the process and ultimately kill reform. Don’t let them block reform. The time for waiting is done. We want quality and accessible health care for all NOW. Call your representative today.
In solidarity,
Marc Laitin
AFL-CIO Online Mobilization Coordinator
P.S. We voted for change last November. Now it’s time for Congress to deliver real health care reform. Call your representative today!
July 27, 2009
Book Review: The Hot ‘Cold War’: The USSR in Southern Africa, Political Affairs , By Gerald Horne
Soviet Union Mandela Salute Stamp: 1988
The conventional wisdom in the North Atlantic community nowadays is that the Cold War confrontation between the US and USSR was a disaster for an Africa that was squeezed by both sides. Actually, as this informative memoir cum history suggests, the reality was that – for example in apartheid South Africa – Washington was supportive of the white minority regime, while Moscow backed those fighting this illegal government.
The author is uniquely situated to tell this story, as he now serves as Deputy Director of Russia’s Institute for African Studies and once served as Moscow’s chief liaison in the region. He recounts events over a three decade long period – 1960-1990 – with grace and detail. Not only does he provide a useful perspective on the largely successful effort to dismantle apartheid but, as well, provides an enlightening viewpoint of tumultuous events that enveloped Namibia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola. Washington was enraged since Moscow not only provided scholarships so that African youth could receive higher education but, similarly important, provided arms so that apartheid and colonialism could be ousted forcibly from power.
Angola had suffered grievously over the centuries because of the depredations of Portuguese colonialism. During the unlamented horrors of the African Slave Trade, this nation sited in southwestern Africa was a hunting ground for human chattel and came to comprise a considerable portion of those now routinely referred to as “African American” (not surprisingly, a major prison in Louisiana, heavily populated with African American men, is located in the city of Angola).
The tide turned in the region when on 25 April 1974, decades of political organizing within the Portuguese military – an object lesson for us all – culminated in the overthrow of the fascist dictatorship and the emergence of a left-leaning regime (deeply influenced by the Portuguese Communist Party) that moved to liquidate Lisbon’s colonial possessions. What emerged was a complicated battle between and among Angolan factions backed by the progressive community globally (including Moscow and Cuba), who squared off against forces backed by a motley coalition which included US imperialism, apartheid South Africa – and Maoist China. Fortunately, the latter did not prevail and this was due in no small part to arms supplied to militant Angolans by Moscow – and military assistance and training provided by Havana. The author also observes that during this tense era, African nations linked arms with Cuba and the USSR; in the first place this list included Nigeria under the adroit leadership of Murtala Muhammed, who was assassinated under suspicious circumstances shortly thereafter, plunging his huge nation into a maelstrom of difficulties from which it has yet to emerge.
Serendipitously, relations between Moscow and Beijing have improved tremendously since the heyday of this intensely conflict-ridden era, but the author does not stint in recounting the unsavory details of China’s alliance with imperialism and apartheid that almost led to an African disaster. For Beijing not only supplied arms to reactionary bandits in Angola but, as well, dispatched scores of military trainers to the region.
Nowadays in Washington and Wall Street there is much tongue-wagging about how “Africa” is lagging behind economically, as if this has nothing to do with the centuries’ long agony of slaving, colonialism and an endless litany of horrors perpetrated by the myrmidons of the North Atlantic community. Least of all is there acknowledgment that when nations like Angola opted for a non-capitalist path of development, US imperialism armed their internal critics who then proceeded to blow up bridges, destroy clinics and wreak havoc on the economy. The author is harsh in his evaluation of this now forgotten era and does not spare his compatriots, recalling how former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “was in a hurry to trade the interests of the USSR and its friends for the fictitious benefits of cooperation with the West and even with [apartheid] Pretoria,” which further compromised the struggling masses of nations like Angola.
A similar process unfolded across the continent in Mozambique, whose attempt to break with imperialism was met with external support of internal brigandage, after a bloody war for independence that culminated in victory in 1975. Zimbabwe, a former British colony, has endured a similar experience. Strikingly, Moscow during the war for independence that triumphed in 1980 was not enthusiastic about the winning party led by Robert Mugabe, who was backed by Beijing. Today, Mugabe is demonized widely in the North Atlantic community, not least because of his expropriation of financial interests controlled by a hegemonic European minority. (Interestingly, Mugabe is not viewed as harshly in Africa itself, nor Latin America, nor Asia.)
Nonetheless, as early as 1961, students began streaming into Moscow from Zimbabwe for higher education. During the liberation war, Moscow supplied fighters with thousands of Kalashnikov rifles, as well as self-loading carbines, pistols, RPGs, mortars, trucks, cars, boats – not to mention expert military training. When the time came for Zimbabwean fighters to negotiate at Lancaster House in London in 1979, it was Moscow who then supplied constitutional lawyers, diplomats and other experts. It was little wonder that such assistance raised hackles among North Atlantic elites – more distressing was the fact that some in the US who ostensibly backed African liberation were unsparing in their denunciation of the Africans’ primary backer: Moscow.
In Namibia, which was colonized in the late 19th century by Germany, then endured a genocide against the Herero people that prefigured what was to occur in Eastern and Central Europe a few decades later, Moscow was also quite active. After Berlin’s loss in World War I, South Africa seized control of this sprawling land and imposed a draconian rule that in some ways was more horrific than apartheid. Naturally, Pretoria was backed by the North Atlantic nations – principally US imperialism – while Moscow supported those fighting this illegal setup. Independence came in 1990 after a bitter and bloody struggle and Namibia’s current leader, Hifkipunye Pohamba, was among those who received higher education in Moscow.
The author has written an entire book about Moscow’ crusade against apartheid South Africa itself, so this story does not receive a full ventilation in this volume, though it is well-known in the region that the triumphant African National Congress (and its close ally, the South African Communist Party) were quite close to the then socialist camp, receiving armed assistance, not to mention military and intelligence training.
Today, it is widely believed among many who really should know better, that the entire Soviet era was a catastrophe and a disaster – yet those who espouse such a wrongheaded view rarely, if ever, filter their faulty suppositions through an African prism. For if they did, they would be forced to recognize that one of the more heroic chapters in both African and Soviet history was Moscow’s all-sided assistance that rescued millions from an ill-fated destiny. Thanks to Vladimir Shubin this history stands as a bright beacon illuminating the path for those who continue trying to build a socialist future.
July 26, 2009
The mistake of US military bases in Colombia, 17 JULY 2009, Sebastian Castaneda
Colombia’s sovereignty will be blatantly violated by the United States very soon. This will officially take place when the militarization process, which is euphemistically called “cooperation agreements”, allowing US troops to use Colombian bases, is signed. However, things have changed and this time the US has not invaded – or “liberated,” as it has been known since 2003 - Colombia. This agreement was conducted with explicit approval and self-interest of the national government.
The Colombian ruling class and their supporters have readily embraced this cooperation agreement that would give Carte Blanche with total immunity (or impunity) to US troops and civilian contractors for the utilization of three Colombian bases - the government had actually offered five - for an initial period of ten years. Other incentives may include exemption from environmental laws, paying for environmental damages, and clean up exercises, things that Okinawa (Japan) knows too well.
As is normal with dubious and dangerous agreements this has been marred with secrecy. It has not only totally disregarded Congress in a clear violation to the Constitution but also some government officials. For instance, the Colombian ambassador to the US, Carolina Barco, failed to answer simple questions regarding these so-called “negotiations” in a radio interview. It is important to clarify that these are impositions rather than negotiations since Colombia has never had any leverage in negotiations with the US and with the current Colombian government this could not be truer.
The Interior and Justice Minister, Fabio Valencia Cossio, has remarked that “[the agreement] does not authorize [US forces] to attack other countries, which is what the constitution says.” However, it is difficult to trust a Minister who thinks the Constitution is written on a white board and can be altered as the government deems necessary to remain in power. This so-called Justice Minister naturally does not have any objections regarding the immunity granted since he proposed immunity to Colombia's law makers. Nevertheless, this is also a sticky point for many reasons among them the cases of rape by US servicemen, which has already taken place in Colombia.
Colombian Foreign Minister, Jaime Bermúdez, noted Wednesday, after repeated calls for information, that “the objective [of this agreement] is the fight and the end of drug-trafficking and terrorism...and activities against the Colombian Constitution or international law would not be permitted.” Incidentally, the US has been losing the wars on drugs and terror since 1971 and 2001 respectively. More difficult still is to believe that the US will not utilize its bases in any way that serve its interests. After all, the CIA kidnapped and transported up to 100 terrorist suspects via European airports to third countries to face torture after 2001, in clear violations to these countries’ laws and international law.
Bermúdez forgets that the US has been heavily involved in these two fronts (drugs and terrorism) with limited success. The amount of cocaine entering the US has remained steady and coca production have decreased for other reasons, among them manual eradication. Successful operations against the FARC were possible thanks to US technology, but unfortunately the group is far from finished. Nevertheless, this is the strategy the US has taught the Colombian ruling class; perpetual wars will always serve their interests. Let's not forget that the guerrilla does not represent the same danger to civilians that paramilitaries and the army do with their massacres, para-politics scandals and extrajudicial killings.
Allowing US troops to freely use Colombian soil is not for the benefit of Colombians, but in the interest of the US. After all, the US has relied on its more than 700 military bases around the world to further and protect its economic interests, which by definition are against the majority of the population in these countres. Latin America - or the backyard of the US as the Monroe Doctrine determined in 1823 - is a land with vast natural resources, thus strategically important. More vital still as more independent governments sprout in the region. In consequence, at a time when the region has started to recover their dignity and commenced the formation of important regional blocks such as UNASUR, Colombia is bound to become more isolated.
This “cooperation agreement” - like the FTA, which will now be definately signed - is clearly not in the best interests of Colombia. The independence that other countries have achieved, not only militarily, but also economically in order to pursue more socially just societies is the independence that Colombia's traditional elite has decided to dismiss. Unfortunately, it seems the country would remain at the mercy of the interests of the US aligned with those of the Colombian elite for some time to come.
After thought: Colombian culture is not only cruel to innocent indigenous, Afro-Colombians and peasants, displaced peasants, the poor youth, the forgotten by society, bulls and roosters but now also to hippopotamuses!
Author Sebastian Castaneda is Colombian and lives in Hong Kong
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