From March 4th to March 9th, 2012, 13,000 militant Israel Firsters, took over “political Washington”¹ and imposed a foreign regime’s (Israel) political agenda to the rousing applause and appreciation of their captive vassal US legislators and executives who crowded the halls and platforms groveling for the imperious nods of their visiting Israeli overlords.²  The annual meeting of the American (sic) Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the most outrageous public display of Zionist-Jewish power as it shapes US foreign policy.  The sole purpose of AIPAC is to ensure Israel’s unchallenged military and political power over a huge region from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.  Over three-quarters of the US Congress members paraded themselves before the AIPAC, as well as President Obama and Vice President Biden, and any high ranking Cabinet members in any way related to US foreign policy (Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Panetta included).  They all loudly parroted the political agenda and military priorities that the AIPAC has imposed on the United States.³

AIPAC:  A Launch Pad for Israeli Leaders

The AIPAC gathering is clearly not a meeting of “just another lobby”⁴ : It is the launch pad used by Israel’s top political and military leaders to drag the US into another major war in the Middle East – this time against Iran.⁵ Shimon Peres, Israel’s President, opened the conference, setting the militarist tone and political framework for US President Obama who followed, slavishly echoing the language and substance of the Israeli leader.⁶  The following day the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, spoke, and forcefully laid out the line for a US war against Iran⁷ with thousands of prominent and respectable Jewish Americans, Israel Firsters, leaping to their feet dozens of times in fanatic support for a US war – a war, in which few, if any, of them, their children, relatives or friends will suffer loss of life or limb.⁸ This was the same Bibi Netanyahu who once opined that the 9-11 attack on the US benefited Israel because it linked the US closer to Israeli interests.

Not since the War of 1812, which saw the British occupation and burning of Washington, has the US capital been so utterly humiliated by a foreign power.  Unlike the British crown, which then negotiated a peace settlement, allowing the US to regain its sovereignty and capital, the Israeli leaders and their rabid “fifth column” demand a military agreement, in which Israel dictates the terms under which the US goes to war with Iran.

Israeli leaders have not secured the submission of the US because of Israel’s military, economic or political superiority:  They have a puny economy, a fraction of the US nuclear weapons and have few allies and even less public approval in the international community.  But they do have at least a half million fanatical, unconditional Zionist militants in the United States, including thousands of loyal multi-millionaires and billionaires who fund the campaign of both Democrat and Republican parties⁹.  AIPAC is the vanguard of Israel’s shock troops in the US.  Highly disciplined and organized, AIPAC lobbyists invade the offices of every Congress person armed with a legislative script carefully prepared by, and for, the State of Israel¹⁰. They have secured the full commitment of most members of Congress for Israel’s agenda waving both dollar signs and stars (of David).  As past history has amply demonstrated, Congressional staff or legislators who dare hesitate or ask for time to reflect, rapidly find themselves on the receiving end of AIPAC’s political bullying and threats which usually secure acquiescence.  Refusal to capitulate to AIPAC means the end of a political career in Washington.

The Israeli (and therefore AIPAC’s) agenda is to pursue an unprovoked war, either initiated by the US or as part of a US-backed Israeli sneak attack, against the sovereign Islamic Republic of Iran¹¹. Iran is targeted today because the other opponents of Israel’s colonization of Palestine have been destroyed in previous Zionist-backed US wars; namely, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and the ongoing proxy war against the Assad regime in Syria¹².

Today Israeli leaders insist that Iran should be violently denied what over 120 other nations practice freely:  the legal enrichment of uranium for medical, commercial and scientific purposes.  Past Israeli propaganda, echoed by the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, falsely claimed Iran possessed nuclear weapons or … was in the process of manufacturing them and therefore posed an ‘existential’ threat to Israel.  Even the mere ‘capacity’ to enrich uranium for medical purposes (many times below the level needed for a weapon) is presented as a major threat to the Jewish State.   Meanwhile, the 27 US intelligence agencies (in their yearly ‘findings’) and even the US-influenced International Atomic Energy Agency have found no such evidence of an ongoing weapons program existential threat’.

Israel’s high command has now come up with a new flimsy pretext for war.  Iran’s potential (through its advanced scientific and technical manpower and research centers) for acquiring a ‘nuclear weapon capability’ may constitute a sufficient cause for war¹³. In other words, Israel has ordered its 13,000 AIPAC militants to demand every US Congress person vote for a war resolution on the basis of Iran’s current uranium enrichment program geared to medical uses and on its sophisticated scientific and intellectual potential!  Meanwhile, the Mossad has launched a not-so-secret program of terrorist assassinations of Iranian scientists – in their homes, offices and universities; with nary a protest from the ‘Zionized’ US press.

Israel’s Willing Executioners

Netanyahu’s newest criterion for war (Iranian capability) has the blind support of the major Jewish organizations in the US¹⁴.  American Zionists are the willing executioners promoting an aggressive, unprovoked, military attack against the homeland (and homes) of 75 million Iranians.  Let us be clear, there are naked genocidal impulses permeating some of the pronouncements of leading US Jewish religious leaders.  The executive vice president of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, Rabbi Herring, suggested that Israel should consider “the use of tactical nuclear weapons in areas that aren’t so populated or in the open desert  …to show the Iranians that their lives are on the line, that Israel won’t go quietly”.¹⁵ The rabbi did not specify whether population centers of a quarter of a million inhabitants or less qualify under his definition of “not so populated” and therefore are suitable targets for this educational display of thermo-nuclear destruction, “just to show the Iranians”….  Let us keep in mind that among the Zionist fundamentalists, “not a few organizational leaders … wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons right now”¹⁶.

When Netanyahu gave the command to the AIPAC delegates to invade the US Congress and secure a war commitment on the basis of Iran’s ‘capacity’ (for uranium enrichment), there was no debate and no dissention among the ‘shock troops’ – only blind unanimous approval among Jewish American citizens for their foreign master. These respectable Jewish-Americans marched lock-step in platoons right up to the Congress members on their lists, canned arguments in one hand and Israeli-ghost-written legislation in the other.  They boast of having rounded up a substantial majority of elected US representatives – for war!

If Israel’s power in the US depends on AIPAC’s tight control over the US Congress, the lobby, for its part, depends on the power of the wider Zionist power configuration permeating strategic political and administrative offices, political party structures and the electoral process itself.  This, in turn, depends on Zionist media influence linked back to economic and financial power.  The democratic and representative process has been totally crushed under this narrow-focused juggernaut for war on behalf of Israel.

AIPAC’s Congressional and Executive Collaborators

While much has been made of the influence AIPAC exercises over the US Congress and Executive via ‘lobbying’, better termed intimidation and pressure tactics, a great part of its success is based on the larger Zionist matrix of power operating within the government, civil society and the economy.  When AIPAC lobbyists approach Congress members with Israeli-dictated foreign policy priorities in hand, they coordinate and are given a major platform by the forty-plus elected Zionist legislators who, just happen, to occupy strategic positions, such as the chairpersons of Congressional committees dealing with foreign policy, especially policy related to the Middle East.  In other words, AIPAC’s conquest of Congress is ‘by invitation’.  The relation is ‘reciprocal’.  AIPAC and the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations and various fundraisers mobilize money and activists to help elect the reliable Zionists to office.  Once in place, they openly collaborate in writing pro-Israel legislation and ensuring that ‘majorities’ vote the ‘right way’¹⁷ .

Mark Dubowitz, executive director of “Foundation for Defense of Democracies” helped write the latest (Iran) sanctions bill … (Financial Times March 6, 2012, pg. 9).  The “Foundation” is better known as an unconditional and unquestioning promoter of Israel’s agenda.  Dubowitz is one of many un-elected ‘legislators’ who write and promote laws at Israel’s behest.  The legislation to impose sanctions on Iran, authored by Dubowitz, is designed to brutalize and starve 75 million Iranian citizens into submission to further Israel’s goal of unquestioned supremacy in the Middle East.

AIPAC’s operations are not confined to Congress or to the electoral process.  From the Reagan Administration to the Obama Administration, AIPAC has supplied committed Zionists to key positions in the Treasury, State Department, National Security Council and the President’s inner circle of advisors on the Middle East¹⁸.  AIPAC pressure ensures the appointment of Zionists to the executive branch and has led to the creation of special administrative posts designed specifically to pursue Israel’s agenda.  A good example of AIPAC’s success is the post of Undersecretary of Treasury for Terrorism and Intelligence.  The position was first held by Stuart Levey, a Zionist zealot, whose whole purpose was to design and implement US (and later EU) sanctions against Iran.  His replacement, David Cohen, a clone also from AIPAC, is the author of legislation pushing for punitive sanctions against Syria¹⁹.

Dennis Ross, widely known as ‘Israel’s lawyer’ and a former AIPAC leader, was appointed senior adviser to Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, was the architect of US support for Israel’s starvation blockade and criminal bombing of Gaza (1999), the murderous invasion of Lebanon (2006).  He has provided ‘cover’ for Netanyahu’s massive building of Jews only settlements on occupied Palestinian lands and his cynical ‘peace negotiations’ ploy.²⁰

Jeffrey Feltman, the current AIPAC front man in the State Department, is  the key official in charge of Middle East affairs, especially Lebanon, Syria and Iran.²¹ Obama’s own inner circle of advisers is dominated by unconditional Israel supporters, including David Axelrod as chief confidant and the former Presidential Chief of Staff, dual US-Israeli citizen and current Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel.²² What is striking is the constant cycle from leadership and activity in Zionist (Israeli-front) organizations, entry into powerful government posts, return to one or another pro-Israel think tank, ‘civic organizations’,  electoral office or lucrative private practice – all promoting the interests of Tel Aviv.

AIPAC and the 52 Grassroots Organizations

AIPAC’s power in Washington depends on the activism of hundreds of thousands of American Zionists affiliated with organizations under the 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations (MAJO).  While there is considerable overlap of membership,  MAJO leaders openly serve as a transmission belt for Israel: transmitting the political line from Tel Aviv to their membership, including activist doctors, dentists and stock brokers in New York, Miami, Kansas City, Los Angeles and San Francisco and all points north, south, east and west.  When AIPAC has ‘trouble’ securing an elected representative’s sign-on to legislation for sanctions against whichever country is currently targeted by Israel, the reluctant legislator becomes a prime target for local Zionist notables and ‘fund raisers’, who pay them a ‘visit’ to persuade, if possible, threaten retaliation, if necessary.  If a legislator still refuses to hew to Israel’s line, or considers service to a foreign power to be harmful to United States, he/she will soon find that AIPAC has raised millions of dollars to fund a campaign of slander and electoral defeat.²³

Along with these upper middle class ‘grass roots’ activists there are the numerous highly politicized Zionist mega-millionaires and billionaires, like Adelson, Saban and scores of others, who make no bones about being fanatical Israel Firsters and donate  millions to Congress people willing to subordinate US interests to Israel’s quest for Middle East supremacy.²⁴

Besides this legal corruption of the political process, there is the issue of illegal espionage and thuggery on AIPAC’s part, most recently evidenced by the ongoing law-suit by one of two former top AIPAC officials, Steven Rosen caught spying for Israel (passing classified documents on US military policy towards Iran).   Rosen, who was acquitted in a highly manipulated ‘trial’, maintains that AIPAC routinely encouraged its officials to secure confidential US government documents for Israel.²⁵

And then there are the prominent free-lance Zionists, who engage in vicious, highly publicized, political thuggery, physical assaults and blackmail against critics of Israel.²⁶  The most prominent defamers, like Abraham Foxman of the Anti (sic) Defamation League, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, manipulate legions of respectable and wealthy thugs to pressure schools, universities and other employers to censor and fire critics of Israel.  These Zionist organizations far exceed the reach and effective blacklisting of an earlier generation of witch hunters, like Senator Joseph McCarthy, who were rank amateurs in comparison.  The recent antics of Israel-Firster Andrew Adler, editor of the Atlanta Jewish Times, whose call for the Israeli Mossad to assassinate President Obama²⁷ led merely to his resignation as editor after several weeks of nervous outrage (but no federal investigation or charges).

What is striking here is that while most respectable Zionists dissociate themselves from AIPAC spies and verbal assassins, the power of the Israel Firsters ensures that such goons and thugs are rarely charged for their crimes and have never gone to jail.²⁸

The wider impact of Zionist influence and thuggery is evident in the timorous self-censorship of the majority of Americans who privately express fear and loathing at the confrontational, strident and abusive Zionist-Americans pushing a foreign agenda. ²⁹

Israel, Zionism and the Mass Media

The mass media is a key political resource, which the pro-Israel power configuration exploits to the full.  Not a single major print, television, film or radio outlet is willing to provide a balanced account of the Israel-Palestine conflict.³⁰  Israel’s dispossession of thousands of Arab families from their homes and the daily terrorist Zionist settler and military assaults against Palestinians protesting land seizures go unreported.³¹ The hundreds of nuclear weapons in Israel’s arsenal are never mentioned while the Jewish State’s hysterical claims that non-nuclear Iran represents an existential threat are repeated and magnified, ad nauseam.  The leaders of the 52 know their Goebbels:  A lie repeated often enough becomes an accepted truth.

Zionism and Leveraging Power

What is crucial in understanding the Zionist Power Configuration’s stranglehold over our government is how it leverages power.  For example, a tiny minority falsely claims to speak for all American Jews, who represent about 3% of the US population.  However, based on this claim, they mobilize and raise funds to elect the committed Zionists who hold about 10% of the seats in the US Congress and Senate.  These representatives, in turn, enjoy the support of a tiny cadre of super rich Zionists, whose promotion allows them to gain control over key committees dealing with Middle East policy and security.

Domestic security has been deeply influenced by the Zionist-Israeli agenda:  Former US Attorney General, Michael Mukasey and Homeland Security Tzar, Michael Chertoff, have been among the most prominent officials orienting US domestic security to focus on critics of Israel and the entrapment of Muslim citizens in bizarre webs of phony terrorist plots, while real domestic security has suffered and civil rights have been shredded.  The over-representation of Zionists on the US Supreme Court (3 out of 9) and the careful selection of recent justices, like Justice Sotomayor, underscore the profound nature of the process as it extends to the judiciary.³²

The Zionist Power Configuration controls the Mid-East policies of both Democratic and Republican Party and their Presidential nominees through their Congressional and political party power bases.  The US President, in turn, is leveraged, in order to secure key policy appointments for Zionists in the State Department, Treasury and Pentagon.  Their leverage in the foreign policy establishment allows Zionist officials to put pressure on allies and clients in the United Nations and European Union to support policies, such as Israel’s boycott and punishment of the elected Hamas government in Gaza and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Leverage is how Israel, an infinitely small and insignificant state with less than 1% of world GNP, exports and market shares and occupying .001% of the world’s territory, can play such a disproportionate role in the reconfiguration of power in the Middle East.  Through its American-Zionist influentials, Israel has manipulated the US into a quagmire of wars in the Middle East, costing the world’s consumers of oil untold billions of dollars and pushing the world economy into recession.

Israel’s “Petroleum Tax”: War Threats and the Price of Gas

During the first three months of 2012, the price of oil rose 15% (over 30% since the summer of 2011) largely due to Israel’s war mongering and threats to launch an offensive war against Iran.  Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Peres and Foreign Minister Lieberman have all repeatedly demanded the US bomb Iran, or failing that, they warn, Israel would launch its own offensive war against the Iranian people and drag the US into another war.

Almost all oil experts and political analysts agree that the spike in oil prices is a result of Israel’s war mongering, as major international oil speculators bet that an Israeli assault on Iran will provoke a major disruption in production and transportation of petroleum in the Middle East and provoke a global shortfall.³³

The 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations have added to the war hysteria by echoing and embellishing on Israel’s claims of an Iranian nuclear threat (or Iran’s “growing capacity” to threaten Israel in the future).³⁴

During the first three months of this year alone, the increased price of gasoline – or more accurately Israel’s war tax on the American consumers and drivers — costs an additional 60 cents a gallon, or $9 dollars more to fill a 15 gallon tank.  This represents the tribute the Zionist power configuration has imposed on the American consumers in their push for a new war on Israel’s behalf.  No US politician would dare discuss this issue, let alone speak up and tell the Zionist chattering classes and their “beloved leaders” to stop pimping for war or else risk the cutting off of Israel’s $3 billion dollar annual handout from the US taxpayers.

Leading economists have stated that the price hike in petroleum (caused by a bellicose Israel) is stunting growth and pushing the US and EU back into recession … costing millions more job losses.³⁵  If we add the consumer losses caused by high gas prices to the losses in world economic output, the mere war chants of Netanyahu, Lieberman, Peres and the AIPAC will cost the global economy hundreds of billions over the course of the year.

Any mention of Israel’s gas tax on the American family’s budget will elicit outraged accusations of anti-Semitism from respectable Zionists and ugly threats from their thug accomplices.  When Obama performed his infamous annual belly crawl to pleasure the AIPAC delegates and their Israeli guests, in the midst of cheers over his re-affirmation of America’s unconditional loyalty to the state of Israel, he also quietly asked Israel to lower the war cries at least until after the November elections because of its effects on the price of gasoline on the American voter.³⁶

The high price of oil is damaging Obama’s chances for re-election.  The American electorate may not understand the real cost of Obama’s submission to Israel and may not be aware of Israel’s gas tax, but they are holding their putative President responsible for their pain at the pump!  There is only one thing that Obama cherishes more than Zionist support and that is the votes of an economically squeezed American electorate, who are turning against him in droves as the price of gasoline soars.

Conclusion

The week of March 4 to 11, 2012 will go down in history as a week of national humiliation; a time when legions of fanatical American Zionists took over Washington; when the entire Cabinet, led by President Obama, groveled before the officials of a foreign state – in the heart of Washington DC.  When the President and Prime Minister of Israel directed their foreign legionaires to march on the US Congress and shove their flimsy pretexts for  war with Iran into the faces of cringing legislators, the simplistic and idiotic message was: Bomb Iran because it may soon have … a nuclear ‘capacity’.  If asked what constitutes capacity, they quote their beloved leaders in Tel Aviv, including the semi-literate (former nightclub bouncer) Foreign Minister Avi Lieberman, the morally corrupt Bibi Netanyahu and the quietly diabolic Shimon Peres that Iranians can ‘enrich uranium’ – a capacity long held by 125 other countries.

It is with supreme arrogance that the followers of AIPAC and the 52 Presidents penetrate the US government in order to serve a foreign government.  None bother to hide their past, present or future affiliations with the state of Israel.  They are backed by prestigious Zionist academics, whose tendentious justifications for war have already sent tens of thousands of US soldiers to an early grave or to the wards of military and veteran hospitals and clinics across the country: They have sold us the argument that by serving the interests of the State of Israel we serve the United States. From this, it only follows that to break the law and act as an unregistered agent for a foreign power, to transfer highly classified government documents to Mossad agents at the Israeli embassy and to threaten Americans who criticize or oppose Israel is a patriotic act.³⁷ Naval analyst Jonathan Pollard, the convicted US master-spy for Israel, is widely celebrated in Israel as an honorary Colonel in the IDF and a hero; the leaders of the major Zionist organizations are again pressuring Obama to release this traitor.

The documented performance of the leading Zionists in public office in the United States over the past two decades has been an unmitigated disaster. The self-proclaimed best and brightest have led the country into the worst economic and military catastrophes in a century.  It was Alan Greenspan, as head of the Federal Reserve, who de-regulated the financial sector and optimized conditions for the mega-swindles and speculative frenzy bringing down the entire financial system.  It was his replacement, Ben Bernacke, who pushed for trillions of US tax-payer dollars in bail-out funds to save his cronies on Wall Street and set them back on course, in the last 2 years, to repeat their speculative orgy – and allow such tribal compatriots as Stephen Schwartzman to reap $213 million in earnings in 2011.³⁸

It was Fred Kagan, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Libby, Abrams and Ross, as well as their less prominent lieutenants, who pushed the US into wars on Israel’s behalf in Afghanistan and Iraq, all the while confidently predicting ‘low cost, quick victories’ (even slam-dunks).  Never has such a cohort of Ivy League mediocrities collectively produced so many disastrous policies in such a brief historical time while never being held in any way, shape or form responsible or accountable for their performance.  It is obvious that these policy disasters did not result from faulty intellect or lack of an elite education.  Their apparent ignorance of historical, political, economic and military realities was a result of their blinding Zionist loyalties to the Israeli state whose real interests they embraced.  This lack of accountability guarantees that this process will continue until the US, as a republic, is destroyed for the masses of its misled citizens.

In order to justify a war against Israel’s regional adversaries, these blind mediocrities have distorted the realities of Arab nationalism.  It was with supreme tribal arrogance and racism that they assured themselves that Arabs could never sustain prolonged resistance to their imperial juggernaut.  They believed precisely what their tribal religion/ideology told them:  They were a chosen people (genetic studies aside).  They were the most financially successful investors or speculators.  They attended and taught at the most prestigious universities.  When, on occasion, a leading Zionist philanthropist, like Bernard Madoff, fell afoul—and actually went to jail– it was because, like his fellow tribalists,  Milken, Boesky and Pollard — he didn’t buy his one way ticket to Israel soon enough.

When a country, like the United States, is in decline, it is not because of external competition:  Declining competitiveness is only a symptom.  It is because of internal rot.  Decline results when a nation is betrayed by craven leaders, who crawl and humiliate themselves before a minority of thuggish mediocrities pledged to a foreign state without scruples or moral integrity.

1. For full coverage of the daily activities and the uncritical reportage of the major media see the Daily Alert, the official mouthpiece of 52 Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations, especially March 4 – 6, 2012.
2. See the AIPAC video reports and the list of speakers, 3/2/2012 and subsequent reports.
3. White House press release of Obama’s declaration that US subordinate relation to Israel is “sacrosanct”, March 4, 2012.
4. The reference is to Noam Chomsky whose laughable effort to downplay the influence of the Zionist power configuration is widely rejected and is once again refuted by the most superficial observation of the proceedings, pledges and  prostrations of all top US policy makers at the AIPAC meeting.
5. Netanyahu’s public pronouncements and AIPAC speech were duly recorded, amplified and supported by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and especially the Washington Post (2/6/2012). He explicitly called on the US to militarily attack Iran on behalf of Israel, on the basis of Teheran’s ‘capacity’ to make a nuclear weapon.  According to Netanyahu “we can’t afford to wait much longer …” Prime Minister’s Office 3/5/2012.
6. New York Times, 3/5/2012
7. Prime Ministers Office as quoted in the Daily Alert, 3/6/2012.
8. AIPAC video daily reports, 3/6/12
9. For example, just one of the numerous Zionist billionaires, the casino tzar, Sheldon Adelson has already contributed “tens of millions of dollars” to influence the current Presidential elections. Haaretz, 2/29/12.  Haim Saban, another Israel-Firster billionaire, bought the principle Spanish language TV outlet in the US, UNIVISION, and then proceeded to promote sensationalist Israeli propaganda about an Iranian-Islamist “takeover” of Latin America.
10. AIPAC press releases, 3/7/12 – 3/10/12.
11. A survey of the Daily Alert , from March 4 to March 9, reveals there is not one single article that discusses the alternative of a diplomatic settlement with Iran, while over a dozen articles feature calls for war.
12. For documentation and details on the decisive role of Zionist policy makers in launching the US war against Iraq see my The Power of Israel in the United States (Atlanta:  Clarity Press 2006).
13. New York Times, 3/1/12
14. The 52 Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations repeatedly endorsed Netanyahu’s pretext for war.  See Daily Alert, 3/6/2012
15. Quoted in Mondoweiss, 3/2/12
16. Ibid
17. Key Zionist Congressional operatives include Representatives Berman, Cantor, Harman, Lieberman, Ros- Lehtinen, and Levin as well as their Christian side-kicks, like McConnell and Pelosi among others who appeared at the AIPAC war fest. AIPAC promotional flyer 3/2/12.
18. See The Power of Israel in the United States (op cit),
19. See “On Bended Knees: Zionist Power in American Politics” in James Petras, War Crimes in Gaza and the Zionist Fifth Column (Clarity, Atlanta 2010.
20. The Power of Israel in the United States, op cit.
21. Though Ross has formally resigned, he is still a key Obama adviser on the Middle East.  See Haaretz 1/27/12
22. One of the key Zionist operatives is Jeffrey Feltman, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.  He played a crucial role in support of Israel ‘s bombing  of Lebanon in 2006, during his term as Ambassador, calling Hezbollah a “terrorist organization”. He dictated policy to the US client ruler Fouad Siniora.  Feltman twice served in Israel.  He was stationed in Gaza where he collaborated with the occupying Israeli Defense Forces.  He worked with uber-Zionist US Ambassador Martin Indyk backing Israel’s position in the phony “Peace Process” from 2000 to 2001. Other Zionists in key positions include Jack Lew,  current Chief of Staff to President Obama; David Plouffe senior adviser, Dan Shapiro, Ambassador to Israel; Steven Simon, Head of Middle East/North Africa Desk at the National Security Council; and Eric Lynn, Middle East policy advisor. Jewish Virtual Library, a Division of the American-Israeli Enterprise 2012.
23. Prominent Zionists, who served in strategic positions in the foreign policy realm of the Obama regime, included Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to the President, David Axelrod, Senior Advisor;  James Steinberg Deputy Secretary of State; and  Richard Holbrooke Special Envoy to Pakistan/Afghanistan, deceased.
24. Several studies estimate that Jews make up about 25% of the Forbes 400 richest Americans; over half are contributors to Israel or Zionist organizations or causes.  J.J. Goldberg in his book on Jewish power estimates that 45% of Democratic fundraising comes from pro-Israel Jews.  (Jewish Power: Inside the Jewish Establishment, Reading: Addison-Wesley 1996).
25. Steve Rosen, a top policy director of AIPAC, along with his colleague, Keith Weissman, admitted to handing over confidential documents to the Israeli embassy.  Rosen later filed suit against AIPAC for firing him and Weissman and refusing to pay their legal fees; he claimed that the Lobby frequently condoned its employees’ receipt and illegal transfer of classified US government information citing numerous AIPAC documents to back-up his case.  The Jewish Daily Forward, 12/15/2010.
26. The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, urged Netanyahu to order the Israeli secret spy service, the Mossad, to assassinate President Obama,  Haaretz 1/21/12.  Rabbi Michael Lerner, a moderate Zionist critic of Israel, has been subject to four attacks on his home in the past two years, while accused of being a ‘self-hating Jew’ by Zionist fanatics.  Mainstream Zionist organizations dissociate themselves from physical violence, while slanderously labeling opponents and critics of Israel as “anti-semites”, which has created precisely the political climate that encourages the less balanced among their audience to violent activity. Leading Zionist ideologues have been extremely active in inducing colleges and universities to fire critics of Israel, as was the case in the failure of DePaul University to renew the contract of a widely published scholar like, Norman Finklestein.   Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, authors of an erudite study of The Israel Lobby, were subject to vitriolic attacks by American Zionist leaders, including A. Foxman of the Anti (sic) Defamation League as well as a superficial critique by left-Zionist Noam Chomsky.  The racist rantings of uber-Zionists like David Horowitz and Pamela Geller helped to detonate the Islamophobic and Zionophilic mass murderer, Anders Breivik, in Norway.
27. See the Atlantic Jewish Times editorial 1/20/12.
28. The editor of the Atlantic Jewish Times who called for Obama’s assassination was not charged with any federal security offense. The confessed Zionist spy, Colonel Ben-Ami Kadish, who stole secret US nuclear weapon plans for Israel, did not spend a single day in jail although he paid a $50,000 fine for handing over scores of documents to Israel. See Grant Smith Foreign Agents, Institute for Research Middle East Policy (IRMEP) Washington 2008. On AIPAC spying see IRMEP 2/6/12.
29. Not to be ignored, the rarified atmosphere in high level scientific research journals has been politicized – most outrageous is the censorship of a genetic-immunologic study (by a leading international team of scientists) showing the close genetic relationship, if not identity between Levantine Jews and Palestinians.  University libraries around the world were advised to ‘tear-out’ (eyes closed) the offending study from the pages of the journal, Human Immunology, lest such data might undermine the racist ‘raison d’etre’ for an exclusively Jewish State.  (See Journal axes gene research on Jews and Palestinians, Robin McKie, Guardian-Sunday Observer (London), November 25, 2001 and Hum. Immunol. 62 (9): 889–900).
30. A review of new reports and editorials of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, published by the Daily Alert during the AIPAC conference, reveals a close alignment with the extremist militarist position of the Israeli regime and AIPAC leaders.  See Steve Lendman’s  “‘New York Times Promoting War on Iran” 3/3/12.
31. During the month of February 2012, the Israeli Army and armed paramilitary Jewish settlers carried out 145 attacks on Palestinians, killing and wounding dozens, demolishing homes, seizing thousands of acres of land and uprooting scores of families: The Wall and Settlements Information Center, Palestinian Authority 3/1/12. Neither the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post reported on these Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians.
32. Among Chertoff’s current clients are the manufacturers of the intrusive and nationally detested ‘body scanners’ used at US airports.  He was also instrumental in the release and repatriation of a dozen Israeli Mossad agents arrested in New York and New Jersey within 24 hours of the 9/11 terrorist attack.  Three of the nine justices, Ginsberg, Breyer and Kagan, are Zionists unwilling to challenge the Executive usurpation of war powers and promotion of torture and rendition.  The others are all affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church.  Not a single Protestant-affiliated Justice (numerically the majority religion in the US) has been appointed to the Supreme Court since the 1990 appointment of respected constitutional scholar, David Souter (by George Bush the First), because of their ‘unreliability’ (code-word for upholding the Bill of Rights and Constitution).  The recent appointment of Justice Elena Kagan, whose lackluster academic career did not deter uber-Zionist Laurence Summers from appointing her Dean of the Harvard Law School, uderscores the mediocre criteria used in the high judiciary.  The most recent appointment of Sonya Sotomayor to replace the brilliant (and Zionistically ‘unreliable’) J.P. Stevens, was promoted heaviliy for the Supreme Court on the basis of her strong ties to Israel, starting with her first (of many) ‘leadership’ tours to Israel (see The Jewish Chronicle – Life story Israel trips tie Sotomayor to Jews, Ron Kampeas – May 26, 2009).
33. Financial Times 3/6/12, p. 9.
34. Howard Kohr AIPAC executive director, during his vitriolic war mongering speech at the conference exceeded even Netanyahu’s explicit call for an immediate military attack on Iran.  See AIPAC daily report, 3/16/12
35. Most experts agree that the oil price increase has stymied ‘economic recovery’ and if it continues to rise will plunge the world back into deep recession.
36. Obama’s speech to the AIPAC meeting pointedly called on the Israeli leaders to tone down on their military rhetoric, clearly linking rising oil prices to Israeli war mongering.
37. See Grant Smith, ‘AIPAC Directors Use of Classified Missile Data, Harmed National Security – US State Department’, Business Wire 2/6/12.
38. Financial Times 3/1/12, p. 17

On the other hand Euro-U.S, government spokespeople defend the war by claiming it’s  “all about saving civilian lives in the face of genocide”, calling it “humanitarian intervention”.

Following the lead of their imperial powers, most of what passes for the Left in the US and Europe, ranging from Social Democrats, Marxists, Trotskyists,Greens and other assorted progressives, claim they see and support a revolutionary mass uprising of the Libyan people, and not a few have called for military intervention by the imperial powers, or the same thing, the UN, to help the “Libyan revolutionaries” defeat the Gaddafi dictatorship.

These arguments are without foundation and belie the true nature of US-UK-French imperial power, expansionist militarism, as evidenced in all the ongoing wars over the past decade (Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.).  What is much more revealing about the militarist intervention in Libya is that the major countries, which refused to engage in the War, operate via a very different form of global expansion based on economic and market forces.  China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and Germany, the most dynamic capitalist countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East are fundamentally opposed to the self-styled “allied” military response against the Libyan government – because Gaddafi represents no threat to their security and they already have full access to the oil and a favorable investment climate.  Besides, these economically dynamic countries see no prospect for a stable, progressive or democratic Libyan government emerging from the so-called ‘rebel’ leaders, who are disparate elites competing for power and Western favor.

1.  The Six Myths about Libya:  Right and Left

The principal imperial powers and their mass media mouthpieces claim they are bombing Libya for “humanitarian reasons”.  Their recent past and current military interventions present a different picture:  The intervention in Iraq resulted in well over a million civilian deaths, four million refugees and the systematic destruction of a complex society and its infrastructure, including its water supplies and sewage treatment, irrigation, electricity grid, factories, not to mention research centers, schools, historical archives, museums and Iraq’s extensive social welfare system.

A worse disaster followed the invasion of Afghanistan.  What was trumpeted as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to liberate Afghan women and drive out the Taliban resulted in a human catastrophe for the Afghan people.

The road to imperial barbarism in Iraq began with ‘sanctions’, progressed to ‘no fly zones’, then de facto partition of the north, invasion and foreign occupation and the unleashing of sectarian warfare among the ‘liberated’ Iraqi death squads.

Equally telling, the imperial assault against Yugoslavia in the 1990s, trotted out as the great “humanitarian war” to stop genocide, led to a 40-day aerial bombardment and destruction of Belgrade and other major cities, the imposition of a gangster terrorist regime (KLA) in Kosovo, the near-total ethnic cleansing of all non-Albanian residents from Kosovo and the construction of the largest US military base on the continent (Camp Bondsteel).

The bombing of Libya has already destroyed major civilian infrastructure, airports, roads, seaports and communication centers, as well as ‘military’ targets.  The blockade of Libya and military attacks have driven out scores of multi-national corporations and led to the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Asian, Eastern European, Sub-Saharan African, Middle Eastern and North African skilled and unskilled immigrant workers and specialists of all types, devastating the economy and creating, virtually overnight, massive unemployment, bread-lines and critical gasoline shortages.

Moreover, following the logic of previous imperial military interventions, the seemingly ‘restrained’ call to patrol the skies via “no fly zone”, has led directly to bombing civilian as well as military targets on the ground, and is pushing to overthrow the legitimate government.  The current imperial warmongers leading the attack on Libya, just like their predecessors, are not engaged in anything remotely resembling a humanitarian mission:  they are destroying the fundamental basis of the civilian lives they claim to be saving – or as an earlier generation of American generals would claim in Vietnam, they are ‘destroying the villages in order to save them’.

2. War for Oil or Oil for Sale?

The ‘critical’ Left’s favorite cliché is that the imperial invasion is all about “seizing control of Libya’s oil and turning it over to their multi-nationals”.  This is despite the fact that US, French and British multinationals (as well as their Asian competitors) had already “taken over” millions of acres of Libyan oil fields without dropping a single bomb.

For the past decade, “Big Oil” had been pumping and exporting Libyan oil and gas and reaping huge profits.  Gaddafi welcomed the biggest MNC’s to exploit the oil wealth of Libya from the early 1990s to the present day.  There are more major oil companies doing business in Libya than in most oil producing regions in the world.

These include: British Petroleum, with a seven-year contract on two concessions and over $1 billion dollars in planned investments.  Each BP concession exploits huge geographic areas of Libya, one the size of Kuwait and the other the size of Belgium. ¹ In addition, five Japanese major corporations, including Mitsubishi and Nippon Petroleum, Italy’s Eni Gas, British Gas and the US giant Exxon Mobil  signed new exploration and exploitation contracts in October 2010.  The most recent oil concession signed in January 2010 mainly benefited US oil companies, especially Occidental Petroleum.  Other multi-nationals operating in Libya include Royal Dutch Shell, Total (France), Oil India, CNBC (China), Indonesia’s Pertamina and Norway’s Norsk Hydro. ²

Despite the economic sanctions against Libya, imposed by US President Reagan in 1986, US multinational giant, Halliburton, had secured multi-billion dollar gas and oil projects since the 1980s.  During his tenure as CEO of Halliburton, former Defense Secretary Cheney led the fight against these sanctions stating, “as a nation (there is) enormous value having American businesses engaged around the world”. ³ Officially, sanctions against Libya were only lifted under Bush in 2004. Clearly, with all the European and US imperial countries already exploiting Libya oil on a massive scale, the mantra that the “war is about oil” doesn’t hold water or oil!

3. Gaddafi is a Terrorist

In the run-up to the current military assault on Tripoli,the US Treasury Department’s (and Israel’s special agent) Stuart Levey, authored a sanctions policy freezing $30 billion dollars in Libyan assets on the pretext that Gaddafi was a murderous tyrant. ⁴ However, seven years earlier, Cheney, Bush and Condoleezza Rice had taken Libya off the list of terrorist regimes and ordered Levey and his minions to lift the Reagan-era sanctions.  Every major European power quickly followed suite:  Gaddafi was welcomed in European capitals, prime ministers visited Tripoli and Gaddafi reciprocated by unilaterally dismantling his nuclear and chemical weapons programs. ⁵   Gaddafi became Washington’s partner in its campaign against a broad array of groups, political movements and individuals arbitrarily placed on the US’ “terror list”, arresting, torturing and killing Al Qaeda suspects, expelling Palestinian militants and openly criticizing Hezbollah, Hamas and other opponents of Israel.

The United Nations Human Rights Commission gave the Gaddafi regime a clean bill of health in 2010.  In the end Gaddafi’s political ‘turnabout’, however much celebrated by the Western elite, did not save him from this massive military assault.  The imposition of neo-liberal ‘reforms’, his political ‘apostasy’ and cooperation in the ‘War on Terror’ and the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, only weakened the regime. Libya became vulnerable to attack and isolated from any consequential anti-imperialist allies.  Gaddafi’s much ballyhooed concessions to the West set his regime up as an easy target for the militarists of Washington, London and Paris, eager for a quick ‘victory’.

4. The Myth of the Revolutionary Masses

The Left, including the mainly electoral social democrat, green and even left-socialist parties of Europe and the US swallowed the entire mass media propaganda package demonizing the Gaddafi regime while lauding the ‘rebels’. Parroting their imperial mentors,  the ‘Left’ justified their support for imperial military intervention in the name of the “revolutionary Libyan people”, the “peace-loving” masses “fighting tyranny” and organizing peoples’ militias to “liberate their country”.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The center of the armed uprising is Benghazi, longtime monarchist hotbed of tribal supporters and clients of the deposed King Idris and his family.  Idris, until he was overthrown by the young firebrand Col. Gaddafi, had ruled Libya with an iron fist over a semi-feudal backwater and was popular with Washington, having given the US its largest air base (Wheeler) in the Mediterranean.  Among the feuding leaders of the “transitional council” in Benghazi (who purport to lead but have few organized followers) one finds neo-liberal expats, who first promoted the Euro-US military invasion envisioning their ride to power on the back of Western missiles. They openly favor dismantling the Libyan state oil companies currently engaged  in joint ventures with foreign MNCs.  Independent observers have commented on the lack of any clear reformist tendencies, let alone revolutionary organizations or  democratic popular movements among the ‘rebels’.

While the US, British and French  are firing missiles, loaded with depleted uranium, at the Libyan military and key civilian installations,  their ‘allies’ the armed militias in Benghazi, rather than go to battle against the regime’s armed forces, are busy rounding up, arresting and often executing any suspected members of Gaddafi’s “revolutionary committees”, arbitrarily labeling these civilians as “fifth columnists”.  The top leaders of these “revolutionary” masses in Benghazi include two recent defectors from what the ‘Left’ dubs Gaddafi’s “murderous regime”: Mustafa Abdul Jalil, a former Justice minister, who prosecuted dissenters up to the day before the armed uprising, Mahmoud Jebri, who was prominent in inviting multi-nationals to take over the oil fields, ⁶ and Gaddafi’s former ambassador to India, Ali Aziz al-Eisawa, who jumped ship as soon as it looked like the uprising appeared to be succeeding.

These self-appointed ‘leaders’ of the rebels who now staunchly support the Euro-US military intervention, were long-time supporters of the Gaddafi’s dictatorship and promoters of MNC takeovers of oil and gas fields.  The heads of the “rebels” military council is Omar Hariri and General Abdul Fattah Younis, former head of the Ministry of Interior.  Both men have long histories (since 1969) of repressing democratic movements within Libya.  Given their unsavory background, it is not surprising that these top level military defectors to the ‘rebel’ cause have been unable to arouse their troops, mostly conscripts, to engage the loyalist forces backing Gaddafi.  They too will have to take a ride into Tripoli on the coattails of the Anglo-US-French armed forces.

The anti-Gaddafi force’s lack of any democratic credentials and mass support is evident in their reliance on foreign imperial armed forces to bring them to power and their subservience to imperial demands.  Their abuse and persecution of immigrant workers from Asia, Turkey and especially sub-Sahara Africa, as well as black Libyan citizens, is well documented in the international press.  Their brutal treatment of black Libyans, falsely accused of being Gaddafi’s “mercenaries”, includes torture, mutilation and horrific executions, does not auger well for the advent of a new democratic order, or even the revival of an economy, which has been dependent on immigrant labor, let alone a unified country with national institutions and a national economy.

The self-declared leadership of the “National Transitional Council” is not democratic, nationalist or even capable of uniting the country.  These are not credible leaders capable of restoring the economy and creating jobs lost as a result of their armed power grab. No one seriously envisions these ‘exiles’, tribalists, monarchists and Islamists maintaining the paternalistic social welfare and employment programs created by the Gaddafi government and which gave Libyans the highest per-capita income in Africa.

5. Al Qaeda

The greatest geographical concentration of suspected terrorists with links to Al Qaeda just happens to be in the areas dominated by the “rebels”. ⁷ For over a decade Gaddafi has been in the forefront of the fight against Al Qaeda, following his embrace of the Bush-Obama ‘War on Terror’ doctrine.

These jihadist Libyans, having honed their skills in  US-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, are now among the ranks of the “rebels” fighting the much more secular Libyan government.  Likewise, the tribal chiefs, fundamentalist clerics and monarchists in the East have been active in a “holy war” against Gaddafi welcoming arms and air support from the Anglo-French-US “crusaders” – just like the mullahs and tribal chiefs welcomed the arms and training from the Carter-Reagan White House to overthrow a secular regime in Afghanistan.  Once again, imperial intervention is based on ‘alliances’ with the most retrograde forces.  The composition of the future regime (or regimes, if Libya is divided) is a big question and the prospects of a return to political stability for Big Oil to profitably exploit Libya’s resources are dubious.

“Genocide” or Armed Civil War

Unlike all ongoing mass popular Arab uprisings, the Libyan conflict began as an armed insurrection, directed at seizing power by force.  Unlike the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Tunisia, Gaddafi has secured a mass regional base among a substantial sector of the Libyan population.  This support is based on the fact that almost two generations of Libyans have benefited from Gaddafi’s petroleum-financed welfare, educational, employment and housing programs, none of which  existed under America’s favorite, King Idris.

Since violence is inherent in any armed uprising, once one picks up the gun to seize power, they lose their claim on ‘civil rights’.  In armed civil conflicts, civil rights are violated on all sides.  Regardless of the Western media’s lurid portrayal of Gaddafi’s “African mercenary forces” and its more muted approval of ‘revolutionary justice’ against Gaddafi supporters and government soldiers captured in the rebel strongholds, the rules of warfare should have come into play, including the protection  of non-combatants-civilians (including government supporters and officials), as well as protection of Libyan prisoners of war in the areas under NATO-rebel control.

The unsubstantiated Euro-US claim of “genocide” amplified by the mass media and parroted by “left” spokespersons is contradicted by the daily reports of single and double digit deaths and injuries, resulting from urban violence on both sides, as control of cities and towns shifts between the two sides.

Truth is the first casualty of war, and especially of civil war.  Both sides have resorted to monstrous fabrications of victories, casualties, monsters and victims.

Demons and angels aside, this conflict began as a civil war between two sets of Libyan elites:  An established paternalistic, now burgeoning neo-liberal autocracy with substantial popular backing versus a western imperialist financed and trained elite, backed by an amorphous group of regional, tribal and clerical chiefs, monarchists and neo-liberal professionals devoid of democratic and nationalist credentials – and lacking broad-based mass support.

Conclusion

If not to prevent genocide, grab the oil or promote democracy (via Patriot missiles), what, then, is the driving force behind the Euro-US imperial intervention?

A clue is in the selectivity of Western military intervention:  In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, Qatar and Oman ruling autocrats, allied with, and backed by, Euro-US imperial states go about arresting, torturing and murdering unarmed urban protestors with total impunity.

In Egypt and Tunisia, the US is backing a conservative junta of self-appointed civil-military elites in order to block the profound democratic and nationalist transformation of society demanded by the protesters.  The ‘junta’ aims to push through neo-liberal economic “reforms” through carefully-vetted pro-Western ‘elected’ officials.

While liberal critics may accuse the West of “hypocrisy” and “double standards” in bombing Gaddafi but not the Gulf butchers, in reality the imperial rulers consistently apply the same standards in each region.  They defend strategic autocratic client regimes, which have allowed  imperial states to build strategic air force and naval bases, run regional intelligence operations and set up logistical platforms for their ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as their future planned conflict with Iran.  They attack Gaddafi’s Libya precisely because Gaddafi had refused to actively contribute to Western military operations in Africa and the Middle East.

The key point is that while Libya allows the biggest US-European multi-nationals to plunder its oil wealth, it did not  become a strategic geo-political-military asset of the empire.  As we have written in many previous essays the driving force of US empire-building is military and not economic.  This is why billions of dollars of Western economic interests and contracts had been sacrificed in the setting up of sanctions against Iraq and Iran – with the costly result that the invasion and occupation of Iraq shut down most oil exploitation for over a decade.

The Washington-led assault on Libya, with the majority of air sorties and missiles strikes being carried out by the Obama regime, is part of a more general counter-attack in response to the most recent Arab popular pro-democracy movements.  The West is backing the suppression of these pro-democracy movements throughout the Gulf; it finances the pro-imperial, pro-Israel junta in Egypt and it is intervening in Tunisia to ensure that any new regime is “correctly aligned”.  It supports a  despotic regime in Algeria as well as Israel’s daily assaults on Gaza.  In line with this policy, the West backs the uprising of ex-Gaddafites and right-wing monarchists, confident that the ‘liberated’ Libya will once again provide military  bases for the US-European military empire-builders.

In contrast, the emerging market-driven global and regional powers have refused to support this conflict, which jeopardizes their access to oil and threatens the current large-scale oil exploration contracts signed with Gaddafi.  The growing economies of Germany, China, Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil rely on exploiting new markets and natural resources all over Africa and the Middle East, while the US, Britain and France spend billions pursuing wars that de-stabilize these markets, destroy infrastructure and foment long-term wars of resistance.

The growing market powers recognize that the Libyan “rebels” cannot secure a quick victory or ensure a stable environment for long-term trade and investments.  The “rebels”, once in power, will be political clients of their militarist imperial mentors. Clearly, imperial military intervention on behalf of  regional separatists  seriously threatens  these emerging market economies:

The US supports ethno-religious rebels in China’s Tibetan province and as well as the Uyghur separatists; Washington and London have long backed the Chechen separatists in the Russian Caucuses.   India is wary of the US military support for Pakistan, which claims Kashmir.  Turkey is facing Kurdish separatists who receive arms and safe haven from their US-supplied Iraqi Kurdish counterparts.

The North African precedent of an imperial invasion of Libya on behalf of its separatist clients worries the emerging market-powers. It is also an ongoing threat to the mass-based popular Arab freedom movements.  And the invasion sounds the death knell for the US economy and its fragile ‘recovery’: three ongoing, endless wars will break the budget much sooner than later.  Most tragic of all, the West’s ‘humanitarian’ invasion has fatally undermined genuine efforts by Libya’s  civilian democrats,  socialists and nationalists to free their country from both a  dictatorship and from  imperial-backed reactionaries.

1. Libyonline.com
2. BBC News, 10/03/2005
3. Halliburtonwatch.com
4. Washington Post, 3/24/11
5. BBC, 9/5/2008
6. FT, March 23, 2011, p. 7
7. Alexander Cockburn: Counterpunch, March 24, 2011

The notoriously violent and corrupt elections in the Philippines stand in sharp contrast with those in South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and Malaysia, where the ruling elites have secured their hegemony via economic prosperity, rising salaries, increased employment and extensive social services for their citizens. In these countries, the elite can abide by the results of a relatively ‘open’ election, whereas in the Philippines, any challenge to the closed, family-based ruling class is met with relentless terror.

In the Philippines, stagnation in the agricultural sector and a backward manufacturing sector, combined with electoral politics dominated by a coalition of landlords, warlords and oligarchic family clans, have led to mass poverty, deepening class inequalities and social polarization. The elites are unwilling to tolerate any challenge or movement for change. Since they have not been able to establish their legitimacy or hegemony via programs and policies which create rising prosperity for the Filipino masses, the Philippine political elite rely on the military and paramilitary to repress popular social movements, while their allies among the local warlords and clan leaders ‘deliver’ the votes.

Elections in the Philippines are violent contests between rival ‘oligarchic’ families – a pattern frozen in 19th century style rivalries – where guns and assassinations, as well as ballots, decide which ‘faction’ will rule. Political elites actually enlist the help of the local police, military, paramilitary and death squads to kill leading rival contenders, in order to ensure a ‘win’ for their candidates. The recent massacre of 57 civilians (including 30 journalists), on their way to register a local candidate by a warlord ally of the president, has ensured that the coming election will be among the bloodiest.

The primary challenge to the politics of the oligarchs in the Philippines comes from the independent social organizations. These community-based, grass-roots movements are engaged in organizing health programs as well as environmental and women’s organizations and human rights groups defending workers, peasants and social activists, along with class-based trade unions and organizations of small farmers and rural workers.

The ‘battle for votes’ among the elites is narrowly focused but intense: The perks of office and unfettered access to the public treasury is what sustains Filipino crony capitalism, despite the rhetoric of ‘free market’ and ‘private enterprise’. The electoral ‘process’ ensures the right number of votes for the right candidate through a combination of bribes, threats, violence and outright fraud.

The 2004 Philippine presidential race was the template for election in the ‘death squad democracy’: President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s ‘victory’ was secured through an assassination and terror campaign against candidates and political organizers belonging to the sectoral ‘party-list’ parties representing marginalized groups, like the urban poor, workers, farmers, women and students and guaranteed in an unforgettable taped conversation of the President ordering her election commissioner(“Hello Garci”) to deliver specific percentages of votes.

While elite candidates compete with each other, they work together to oppose any popular social movements that emerge within their social and political domain; hence the unprecedented increase in repression as the electoral process unfolds. For these war-lord politicians, all independent organized activities within their ‘territories’ directly threaten their clientelistic hold over the voters and must be violently stopped. This dynamic is key to understanding the thousands of instances of violence perpetrated against independent journalists, health care workers, legal aid workers, union organizers, teachers, church rural workers and many others.

Mass Arrest of Health Workers Accused of ‘Terrorism’

On February 6, 2010, 300 heavily armed soldiers and militarized police, with their faces masked, broke into the provincial home of Dr. Melecia Velmonte, a distinguished infectious disease specialist and Professor Emeritus of the University of the Philippines, College of Medicine, and arrested 43 rural health workers, physicians and nurses who had been holding a seminar on rural disaster preparedness in the wake of the devastating Typhoon Ketsana. The participants were blindfolded, tied and brought to a military camp where they underwent harsh interrogation and torture and were charged at first with terrorism and membership in the guerrilla movement, the New Peoples Army. The owner of the home where the ‘terrorist’ medical workers were meeting, Dr. Velmonte and her son, who were present during the arrests and protested the invasion of her property without a warrant, were not arrested.

The 43 medical detainees have been held in a military camp ever since without access to family and attorneys. Trumped-up weapons charges against the health workers were based on explosives, guns and ‘bomb-making’ manuals, obviously planted in their belongings. One nurse was accused of keeping a hand-grenade under her pillow. A parade of transparently phony charges, including participation in ‘communist assassination units’ were leveled at the physicians, especially a 62 year old public health specialist suffering from diabetes and hypertension, as well as the nurses and health workers. These preposterous charges, the bizarre commando-style ‘raid’ on Dr. Velmonte’s home and the prolonged isolation and abuse of the detainees were defended at the highest level of government with few complaints or calls for inquiry by the elite-led opposition. The Dean of the University of the Philippines, College of Medicine, issued a stern denunciation of the mass arrest, describing the military’s abuse of medical workers as part of a pattern of attacks on members of the health sector seeking to fulfill their mission of service to the underserved rural population.

The detainees have become known as the ‘Morong 43’ after the village in Rizal Province where the arrest took place. Mass protests and support groups have emerged among a wide range of professional associations, civil society organizations, and class-based popular movements in the Philippines and nurses groups and human rights organizations in North America and Europe. The incident was reported in the Lancet, Britain’s prestigious medical journal. The US press, which routinely covers ‘human rights’ abuses against independent professionals in China and Burma, has yet to mention the detention and torture of 43 medical workers in the Philippines, whose President Macapagal Arroyo is a staunch political ally of the Obama Administration.

The ‘Reasons’ behind the Repression

The Macapagal-Arroyo regime’s brutal assault and arrest of 43 health workers, engaged in providing accessible basic medical services and disaster aid and training to the rural poor, may appear irrational from an economic point of view: After all, in a country where over 70% of the rural population are born and die without ever seeing a physician, these health workers provide vital social services to marginalized populations at no cost to the government.

However, economic considerations are not what inform the politics of an unpopular regime deeply immersed in corruption scandals and electoral chicanery. The principle concern of the Macapagal-Arroyo regime is political: How can this regime retain control of a restless rural electorate deeply disenchanted with the local warlords, clan leaders and paramilitary thugs, who ‘round up’ their votes for the regime’s chosen candidate. In this context, local health clinics run by independent health workers under community control are a threat to the regime’s local chain of command, which runs the vast ‘patronage machine’ dictating who among the people vote and how. Whatever meager social services do exist in the rural areas must be totally under their control to underscore the electorate’s dependency on the local representative of the regime.

Grassroots community health centers, where health workers provide and teach preventative care, basic hygiene, disaster preparedness and many other services, empower small farmers, rural workers and their families to think and act independently of the local bosses. Volunteer health workers provide a micro-model of what a comprehensive rural health program should be like in contrast to the inaccessible, corrupt, privatized system of medical care promoted by the national government.

Under the Macapagal-Arroyo regime, the pillage of the public treasury has impoverished the health system to the point that over 3,000 nurses and doctors are forced to leave the country every year. The private clinics and health insurance companies provide quality medical services to salaried employees of larger businesses, affluent middle class professionals and members of the upper class. In the public hospitals, especially the major teaching hospitals, like the huge Philippine General Hospital, young doctors, who provide critical services to tens of thousands of lower middle class and poor patients, go without salaries for months and even longer. Faculty and department staff are so poorly paid that they are forced to take additional sideline jobs in private clinics to survive.

With the upcoming presidential elections this May, the political elite have made a logical calculation: As a result of their pillage and brutality, promises of prosperity cannot ‘buy’ the support of the electorate whose ‘loyalty’ must then be ‘secured’ through the traditional double G’s of Philippine governance: Guns and goons.

Heavily funded and encouraged by the US in its ‘World-Wide War on Terror’, the regime of Macapagal Arroyo has drawn up its own list of threats: First on the ‘order of battle’ are the popular social movements, whose dedicated activists cannot be bought. This explains the widespread use of mass arrest and continued detention of the ‘Morong 43’ by the regime’s military and the ‘targeted assassination’ of independent, popular political candidates and independent community leaders.

The military has ignored the Philippine Supreme Court’s orders to transfer the 43 health workers to Manila where they would have access to their attorneys and to medical care. The regime’s continued detention and abuse of ‘the Morong 43’ is a gangster-style message to the Filipino civil society movement: “Stay out of poor communities or face a similar fate!” The tactic of the Macapagal Arroyo government and its supporters in the White House is to proceed with the electoral charade as if ‘nothing is wrong’.

What is urgently needed is an international campaign exposing the dark underside of Philippine elections and securing the freedom and safe return of the ‘Morong 43’ to their families and communities. What is at stake is not only the lives of the jailed health workers, but the lives and well-being of many thousands of poor farmers and their families who depend on their vital services.

JUSTICE FOR THE RURAL HEALTH WORKERS!

The Cuban revolution with its socialist economy has demonstrated tremendous resilience in the face of enormous political obstacles and challenges. It successfully defied a US orchestrated invasion, naval blockade, hundreds of terrorists’ attacks and half-century boycott.¹ Cuba was able to withstand the fallout from the collapse of the USSR, the Eastern European collectivist regimes, China and Indo-China’s transit to capitalism and to construct a new development model.

As many scholars and political leaders — including adversaries — have noted, Cuba has developed a very advanced and functioning social welfare program: free, universal, quality health coverage and free education from kindergarten through advanced university education.²

In foreign, as well as domestic, policy Cuba has successfully developed economic and diplomatic relations with the entire globe, despite US boycotts and pressures.³

In questions of national and personal security, Cuba is a world leader. Crime rates are low and violent offenses are rare. Terrorist threats and acts, (most emanating from the US and its Cuban exile proxies), have declined and are less a danger to the Cuban population than to the US or Europe.

It is precisely the successes of the Cuban Revolution, its ability to withstand external threats, which would have brought down most governments, that now has created a series of major challenges, which require urgent attention if the revolution, as we know it, is to advance in the 21st century. These challenges are a result of past external constraints as well as internal political developments. Some problems were inevitable consequences of emergency measures but are now pressing for immediate and radical solutions.
Revolutionary Virtues

The great virtue of the Cuban revolution is that it survived, maintaining many of its positive social achievements, when many previous and subsequent reformist or revolutionary regimes were defeated or overthrown or collapsed. The US and its allies overthrew the reformist regimes of Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Mossadegh in Iran (1953), Allende of Chile (1973), Lumumba in the Congo and many others. The White House ousted the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua in 1989, the Aristide regime in 1992 and 2004 and many others. In contrast, Cuba defeated a US-sponsored invasion in 1961, resisted a US naval blockade in 1962, rebuffed hundreds of CIA-organized assassination attempts and terrorist attacks over a half-century, and overcame a worldwide economic boycott.¹

Thanks to very astute diplomacy, Cuba secured favorable and opportune trade and aid agreements with the former USSR and Eastern Europe. By the end of the 20th century, Cuba had diplomatic and economic relations with almost the entire world despite the US boycott. By 2001 Cuba even broke the US trade embargo by importing (on unfavorable, one-sided terms) food and medicine from US exporters and farmers.

The sudden collapse of the USSR and the conversion of Russia and Eastern Europe into Western capitalist dependencies was a devastating blow to the Cuban economy. The loss of trading partners led to a precipitous decline of production. China and Indo-China’s transition to capitalism offered few alternatives. The Cuban Government adopted an emergency economic strategy inaugurating a ‘Special Period’ of forced austerity and structural adjustment which spread the pain of economic recovery throughout Cuban society — unlike the experience in the capitalist countries. From 1990-2000, Cuba reconstructed its economy to meet the new exigencies of the world economy, while retaining its social safety net, an unprecedented accomplishment.

Cuba’s recovery was based on several new axis: the rapid and comprehensive development of the tourist sector through large-scale, long-term investments in association with European and Latin American multinationals; massive investments in bio-technology to stimulate research and development of pharmaceutical exports; long-term, large-scale trade and investment agreements with Venezuela involving Cuban medical teams and medical facilities in exchange for petroleum products on favorable terms; joint ventures to develop and export nickel, rum, tobacco and citrus products; and food import agreements with US and Canadian agro-business corporations.² The Cubans shut down the majority of their sugar mills and sharply reduced sugar production, reconverting cane fields to alternative crop production on a limited scale.

Major investments in new advanced schools of computer science ($200 million dollars)⁴, medical tourism and external humanitarian projects continued. This economic strategy, combined with favorable external conditions (high world prices for commodities, the radicalization of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the shifts from far-rightwing to moderate center-right neo-liberal regimes in Latin America) and the willing sacrifice of the majority of the Cuban people, led to a gradual but steady economic recovery from 1994, followed by accelerated growth from 2003 onward.⁵

From deep depression to economic recovery, the Cuban Government maintained the basic structure of its social network and welfare provisions. All the major health and educational programs continued free and open to the public. Workers displaced because of economic restructuring continued to receive their wages and were offered state funded jobs and retraining programs. Rents and charges for public utilities remained low. Pensions continued to be paid. Food subsidies and rationing of basic items continued. Cultural, sports and recreational activities progressed despite sharp cutbacks in funding. Despite general scarcities, and social deprivation, crime rates remained far below Latin American and US levels.

National security institutions successfully protected the Cuban public from US-backed terrorist attacks and domestic destabilization efforts sponsored by White House-funded ‘dissident’ organizations.⁶ Despite Cuba’s greater economic vulnerability it rejected US and European Union attempts to dictate its domestic security and economic policies.⁷ Cuba rejected Washington’s attempt to convert Cuba into a free market satellite similar to the Eastern European, Caucasian and Russian examples and pursued its own independent political economic model.

Unlike the ex-Communist countries of the USSR, Eastern Europe and Asia, Cuba’s transition to its new economy did not result in monstrous inequalities in which a tiny group of billionaires and multi-millionaires seized control of public assets and resources and left the rest of the population poor and jobless, facing skyrocketing rents, inaccessible privatized health and education and miserable pensions.⁸ Likewise, Cuba retained majority shares and control over most (if not all) joint ventures with foreign capital⁹, in contrast to the US and European takeovers of almost every major part of the Eastern European manufacturing, financial, media and commercial sectors!

Even more noteworthy, unlike Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR, Cuba did not suffer the massive outward transfer of profits, rents and illegal earnings from large-scale networks of prostitution, narcotics and arms sales. Nor was Cuba’s transition to a mixed economy accompanied by organized criminal syndicates, which played such a major role in the making and unmaking of electoral outcomes in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Albania and the rest of the new capitalist democracies.¹⁰

Cuba’s great success in overcoming world-historic obstacles to its survival, its striking economic recovery and formidable national defense force are in large part due to the combination of popular perseverance, loyalty to revolutionary leaders and embrace of common values of egalitarianism, solidarity, national dignity and independence. Yet the very success of the Cuban government in meeting and overcoming the obstacles resulting from the US boycott and collapse of the USSR has created a new set of challenges and contradictions.

Contradictions and Challenges of the ‘New Post-Special Period’

Promotion of tourism as an axis of economic recovery was the fastest, easiest and most rational use of Cuba’s natural endowment to compensate for the economic depression, scarcity of capital and political isolation. Moreover it was the sector, which most interested prospective foreign investment partners. Tourism generated scarce hard currency to import essential commodities, especially petroleum and manufactured products, medical supplies and food.

However, over time tourism led to major distortions in the economy: unskilled or semi-skilled tourism-connected employment earnings far exceeded those of highly-trained scientists, doctors, skilled workers and agricultural workers among others. Moreover, the ‘mixed enterprises’ in the tourist sector led to the emergence of a new rich bureaucratic bourgeoisie and the growth of inequalities.¹¹ Equally damaging, the massive influx of tourists led to the growth of a lumpen-proletariat, prostitutes, drug pushers and other forms of non-productive ‘hustlers’ whose illicit earnings exceeded those of workers, employees and professionals. This group developed networks with hotel, restaurant and nightclub managers, which encouraged corruption and challenged the revolutionary ethos. Continued scarcity, low real purchasing power and the absence of desired consumer goods weakened the government’s campaigns to ‘moralize’ tourist activity — without driving out the tourists.

Large-scale, long-term investments in tourist infrastructure — hotels, restaurants, imported furniture and food — diverted funds from agriculture: Agricultural production especially in foodstuffs declined significantly, especially the availability for the local population, encouraging the widespread of black, gray and ‘free’ markets. Cuba became a food-dependent country.¹² While tourism attracted hard currency, hundreds of millions was spent on importing food from the US, Canada, Argentina, the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Food dependency on the US increased Cuba’s vulnerability to any tightening of the export embargo. It could be argued that Cuban national security was weakened by Cuba’s paying hard currency upfront, as required by the US Treasury Department, for an increasing proportion of US food imports.

Some political commentators in and out of Cuba argued that US farmers, agro-business firms and politicians (from more than thirty states) involved in the Cuban trade are a powerful lobby capable of pressuring for an end of the White House’s blockade. The data fail to bolster this argument. The past decade, under Presidents Clinton and Bush, showed no real progress in ending US pressure on Cuba. On the contrary, as Cuba’s imports from the US have increased so has Congressional restrictive legislation on travel, remittances, blacklisting third country enterprises as well as White House funding of destabilization and propaganda campaigns.

While tourism served as a necessary immediate strategy in the Special Period, unfortunately it has become an entrenched and strategic growth sector for the economy. Cuba continues to follow its traditional cycle of ‘monoculture’ dependency — shifting from sugar export to the US and then to the USSR and Eastern Europe, then to tourism for Canadians and Europeans. The problem with the new dependency (like the old) is that it provides ‘short term’ solutions while deepening long-term structural problems, including a misallocation of human resources (architects becoming bellboys) and the lack of a diversified economy with resiliency to cope with the inevitable economic cycles endemic to the world capitalist market.

Cuba’s growing food dependency is becoming especially acute, reflected in the increased importation of rice, beans, poultry, pork, beef and other essentials (including, at times, sugar) in the Cuban diet. In his July 26, 2007 speech, Raul Castro pointed to the enormous increase in prices of imported food, citing the threefold increase in the cost of powdered milk in the previous three years; the 10% increase in the price of milled rice between 2006 and 2007 and the doubling of the price of chicken.

Cuba’s agricultural production is directed, in large part, toward the tourist and export market: tobacco, citrus, tropical fruit, sugar (barely); much of the quality fruit, meat, produce and poultry is sold in the private ‘farmers’ markets, or in the special stores which trade in dollars or ‘convertible’ currency. As a result, there is a scarcity of products at the state-subsidized neighborhood stores. The development of ‘urban gardens’ has been one solution for certain neighborhoods — providing fresh quality ‘organic’ produce — but fail to cover much of the population’s needs.

The decline of food production, especially rice (Cuba imports over 75% of its rice) is striking. I was told by a leading Cuban economist that this was the result of a lack of agricultural workers willing to farm rice — a labor-intensive crop — at least for the pay offered in comparison to employment in non-agricultural sectors. Cuba, with its low birth rate and very highly educated population, lacks agricultural workers. However, Cuba, for reasons not clear, rejects the idea of encouraging emigration from countries with a surplus of skilled agricultural workers, like Haiti, to bolster its declining farm labor force and increase the production of basic domestic food crops on which food security depends. Cuba’s agricultural dependency on foreign capital, especially Israeli investors in the citrus sector, is also incomprehensible — given the abundance of agronomists, agricultural extension operators and opportunities to learn marketing skills.¹³ The world citrus market has been especially lucrative to Brazilian capital, at least since the 1960s… while Cuba has belatedly entered the market and in part via foreign capital — transferring profits abroad.

While Cuba has effectively channeled large-scale capital investments into tourism, biotechnology and other productive sectors, it has neglected its housing sector creating a 10-year waiting list for over a million families. The housing deficit is one of the major sources of discontent among the Cuban people, even among its mid-level party and government officials, who have to live with their in-laws. In addition, current housing is in great disrepair, especially pronounced in Central ‘Old’ Havana, where even low cost paint and plaster could re-vitalize working class neighborhoods — now so badly deteriorated.

While the government has announced a program to build 100,000 homes and apartment per year, the program suffers from mismanagement (bureaucratic delays), the pilfering of building materials by officials, low labor productivity and an inadequate supply of building materials.¹⁴ In large part, housing has not received the priority that the hotel building tourist sector received over the past 20 years. The emphasis on ‘economic recovery’ during the Special Period has led to under emphasis in basic consumer needs in the housing sector.

Short-term ‘production’ over consumer strategies is leading to middle and long-term problems. Cuban demographers have noted the absolute decline in Cuba’s population as well as an aging population, lowering the number of people available for productive work.¹⁵ According to Cuban population analysts — the key socio-economic factors accounting for the demographic crisis is the lack of housing and the high cost of living (Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas (ONE) 2007. Cuba’s economic development as well as its social stability and political legitimacy require giving top priority to home building, repair and re-habilitation.¹⁵

Cuba’s low economic productivity, its ‘bureaucratic inefficiencies’ as well as everyday apathy at the work place is in part a result of the very inadequate public transport system — transport for moving people as well as goods, at least in relation to the domestic market. Long waits at bus stops, lack of punctuality, overcrowded buses and trucks ‘converted’ into public transport (the kidney-jarring ‘camelos’) and highly polluting fuels have led to chronic malaise. Tardiness at work resulting from inadequate public transport has contributed to low productivity and occasionally is a ‘legitimate’ excuse for absenteeism. The lack of punctual public transportation undermines morale at work and school: if the public authorities are incapable of administrative discipline in something as basic as transportation, how can they speak to employees of the need for greater work discipline? The lack of managerial discipline is a bad example for all workers.

Cuba’s recent purchase of a thousand buses from China has provided some alleviation but the workers’ extensive reliance on hitch-hiking testifies to the continued inadequacy. Likewise the ‘losses’, which occur during the transport of goods from producers to consumers, have generated chronic shortages of foodstuffs, building materials and petroleum.¹⁶ Corruption, widespread theft, lack of coordination, inadequate managerial supervision are largely to blame as well as lack of mechanisms of political control by consumers and conscientious workers. In sectors where the state has set high priorities, such as tourism, nickel and pharmaceuticals, the transport system functions in a reasonably efficient manner.

The transport problem is not simply due to the lack of political will. Fidel Castro’s announcement in November 2005 that over 50% of gasoline was being pilfered, siphoned and sold on the black market is indicative of the breakdown of governmental authority and administrative oversight.¹⁷ The ministers in charge of energy, transport and commerce were not even publicly reprimanded.

Cuba requires at least 10,000 new transport vehicles — but that is only a start. It needs trained maintenance and staff personnel as well as organized consumer and workers oversight committees to ensure that the new transport, once acquired, serves its stated purpose.

To motivate workers, socio-political education, moral exhortation and citation of exemplary historic leaders are necessary but obviously inadequate in the absence of decent wage and salary levels.

Raul Castro pointed out in his July 26, 2007 speech in Camagüey, “We are also aware that because of the extreme objective difficulties that we face, wages today are clearly insufficient to satisfy all needs and have thus ceased to play a role in ensuring the socialist principle that each should contribute according to their capacity and receive according to their work. This has bred forms of social indiscipline and tolerance, which having taken root proved difficult to eradicate even after the objective causes behind them have been removed.”¹⁸

Low wages, weak motivation, lack of work discipline, low productivity is a cycle that has affected services, manufacturing and agricultures in a vicious cycle, which can be converted into a virtuous cycle. Over the past three years, wages were unfrozen after almost two decades and some relatively substantial increases were granted. Yet relative to the substantial increases in charges for home electricity use, food (a substantial proportion of which is purchased in the ‘free’ market), clothing and other necessities, the pay increases are below what is necessary to stimulate greater productivity.

While greater effective consumer purchasing power is necessary so is the greater availability of consumer items at competitive prices. Salary increases in the face of scarcity leads to greater money pursuing fewer goods and informal price increases eroding the nominal ‘raises’. The economy needs to balance greater production and imports of consumer goods with investments in capital goods and production for export markets. Investments in tourist facilities need to be balanced with capital investments and production for export markets. The gap between luxurious facilities for tourists and poor state of workers’ housing grew enormously during the ‘Special Period’. The continuation of foreign tourism’s expansion during the decade and a half of recovery erodes the socialist ethos as much as inequalities resulting from theft of public resources. Inequalities have widened because of unofficial ‘bonuses’ to top officials engaged in joint ventures, foreign trade and the dollar/Euro economy. A new income policy in itself can contribute to greater incentives for productivity if it is combined with greater direct participation of all workers in the organization and administration of the work place as well as the opening of multiple spaces to discuss the restructuring of the economy.

New income policy should be directed toward promoting strategic sectors of the economy. Stimulating growth in agriculture, manufacturing and applied information systems require changing the direction of government policy and in particular its educational and professional training programs.¹⁹ While most Asian and Latin American countries lagged behind Cuba in the 1960s, they have far surpassed Cuba in diversifying their economies, developing competitive export manufacturing sectors and lessening their export dependence on a narrow group of exports. By adding value to their products, Asian countries have increased earnings, which has led to higher wages and a better ‘fit’ between advanced education and occupational opportunities. Cuba’s economy is marked by a great disequilibrium between a highly developed educational system and a virtual mono-cultural economy, which does not provide jobs appropriate to the universalization of higher education. Cuba needs to adjust its education to train graduates to manage and run industrial and agricultural activity that mass-produces goods for mass popular consumption as well as trained scientists in medical services.

Cuba produces and exports nickel and citrus — yet the downstream value added activity — processing and manufacture of finished products take place elsewhere. Cuba produced 5-6 million tons of raw sugar for export for decades; following the demise of the USSR, it had to sell at world prices. In contrast, Brazil was advancing in the multiple use of processed sugar cane, especially as a source of energy while Cuba wasted scarce foreign exchange importing petroleum, lowering overall growth. Subsequently, Cuba closed many sugar mills. Some former sugar fields were recycled to other products but many sugar fields remained fallow, even as the price of ethanol skyrocketed and Cuban food imports increased. While many critics are right to point to the negative effects of shifting from food production to ethanol, this is not the case for Cuba: fallow fields produce neither food nor ethanol.

Economic growth and social equality is greatly affected by high levels of theft of public property. Fidel Castro pointed to only one indicator: the loss of 50% of earnings in the distribution of petrol, sold on the black market. Official corruption and public theft concentrates income in the hands of the black market operators, increasing inequality and erodes the work ethos among honest workers. Equally important, theft leads to the misallocation of resources, delays in deliveries of goods and services and leads to shortages of goods. Punishing high officials is necessary but insufficient. What especially requires reform is a new system of public accountability based on independent accounting authorities, consumers’ and workers’ oversight commissions with the power to ‘open the books’. Workers and professional control will not eliminate corruption altogether but it will challenge the authorities through independent periodic reviews. De facto President Raul Castro has demanded that Ministers now follow strict agendas, provide up to date written reports relevant to their field of work. Greater accountability within the leadership is necessary but not sufficient. There must be control and vigilance by authorized commissions from below and by a parallel independent general accounting office.

Joint ventures and some degree of class inequalities were perhaps necessary to attract capital during the years of systemic crises and collapsing trade and financial networks — the Special Period. Nevertheless what was seen at the time as a tactical retreat or adjustment to particular time period has become entrenched with far-reaching effects. Social inequalities have created, what Fidel Castro calls, a class of new rich embracing liberal ideology. They pursue greater space for public — private collaboration, ultimately seeking to integrate Cuba into a world market dominated by imperial capital. The public sector in Cuba is still dominant and politically powerful²⁰ but as it fails to come to grips with scarcities in public necessities and to provide for individual consumption, it becomes increasingly vulnerable to liberal critics and self-styled ‘market socialists’. The latter argue that the solution to scarcity is greater space for capitalist investors and commercial interests, both domestic and foreign.

Social inequalities are not solely the result of market forces, corruption and tourism. It is also a product of the concentration of political power over the administration and direction of the economy and disposition of public spending. To curtail the growth of a nouveau riche bourgeoisie requires more than periodic popular mobilizations — such as the social workers taking over the gas stations — and a renewal of moral exhortations (which are important). The struggle against the New Class requires a new system of elected representatives to oversee the allocation of the budget to the various ministries and the power to summon responsible officials to televised hearings for a strict public accounting, when necessary.

One of the most frequent and repeated points of discontent among the general population is the great disproportion between foreign humanitarian aid and the scarcity of goods in the domestic market. No one calls for an end to solidarity with the poor abroad but the Cuban populace does not support the degree to which resources are currently spent, given the scarcities of consumer goods at home.

Several objections have been raised about Cuba’s overseas commitments and misplaced priorities. First of all, much aid is donated and has no practical benefit for Cuba: the health programs are not reciprocated by favorable diplomatic or political responses by the regimes in the recipient countries. In fact Cuban health spending allows many reactionary pro-US regimes to continue to allocate funds for incentives to foreign investors or the purchase military weapons — as is the case in Honduras, Pakistan, Africa and elsewhere — taking popular pressure off of the national governments to provide social services. No doubt Cuba gains the good will of the poor of these countries, but it also provokes the resentment of many Cubans. Given the urgent need to accelerate domestic programs, Cuba is not in a position to maintain costly overseas programs, with no monetary, state or commercial benefits. The same questioning is raised with regard to the subsidies for foreign students, patients and the numerous conference delegates.

Some hard thinking and even harder economic decisions have to be made to strike an effective balance between Cuba’s urgent domestic needs and its overseas humanitarian missions. A positive example of balanced reciprocal relations is Cuba’s socio-economic exchanges with Venezuela: discounted oil, investments and trade from Caracas in exchange for large-scale medical, educational and social services from Cuba’s highly trained work-force.

Cuba is a developing country, which has high expectations and accomplishments, but it is still a country in which poverty is evident in the dilapidated housing and infrastructure of Central Havana.

If Cuba is to defeat the emerging foreign and domestic challenges from incipient neo-liberalism, the public sector must be more responsive to popular needs. To ensure greater transparency and responsiveness it requires greater representation and supervision from consumer and productive sectors.

Culture: Revolution and the Neo-liberal Critics

The threat of neo-liberalism comes from several sources. The most obvious ‘hard threat’ comes from the US empire — from the government and its pseudo-Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) mass propaganda and entertainment media as well as from informal sources like relatives and sports recruiters. I would argue that this ‘hardline’ animosity to the Cuban Revolution is well-known, formidable but the least effective… because it is clearly identified and widely and deeply understood.

The clearest immediate cultural threat to Cuba is from within, evidenced in the decline in revolutionary cultural productions, in cinema, literature, theater and music. In the 1960s-70s, Cuba produced magnificent documentaries on the heroic struggles of the Vietnamese people, the black uprisings in the United States and the contrast between vacillating intellectuals and militant revolutionaries. Over the past two decades there is not a single documentary about the world-historic struggles of the Iraqi, Afghan or Somali resistance to the US directed imperial wars; the Colombian guerrilla struggle against the death-squad ‘democracy; and the struggle of the black masses of New Orleans against capitalist eradication of their homes, schools and hospitals.

I was told by a leading Cuban official in the cinema industry that these were ‘important topics’ but they lacked funds and frequently had to work in joint ventures with Spanish and other European producers who were not interested in revolutionary struggles. The financial argument is not convincing.²¹ Documentaries on anti-colonial wars have been made on a shoestring budget: two air-tickets, a video camera, recorder, sleeping bag and the political will — all for less than $5,000 (less than the price of a single tourism advertisement in a European newspaper). There is no financial need to cater to the tastes of European liberal, post-modern co-producers.

Many so-called ‘critical’ films and writings caricature revolutionaries or militants, or exclude them altogether. One gets the impression from watching, listening and reading current Cuban cultural productions that there are no honest revolutionaries left in Cuba.

Recently Cuban television interviewed literary officials from the 1970s — functionaries who defended rigid and dogmatic cultural positions in that period. The ‘new critics’ raised a hue and cry, not only justifiable criticizing the cultural politics of the former officials, but attacking the TV stations, government cultural policy and calling for dismissals, investigations and censorship.²² In other words, the ‘new critics’ were calling for exactly the same authoritarian methods as their former persecutors. Moreover, the vehemence of their general campaigning took on the coloration of a witch-hunt against any literary or artistic endeavor which sought to defend, project or engage revolutionary values, situations or any positive social realities or situations of contemporary Cuba.

As part of the repertoire of the ‘new cinema’, as a counterpoint to the mechanistic-wooden caricature of revolutionaries, Cuban exiles are portrayed as sensitive individuals who have ‘feelings’ for Cuba but are comfortably situated abroad. The new cinema fails to mention that in the USA the exiles lack universal health care, and free education through graduate school. In their films, the exile protagonists lack any consciousness of the murderous Bush regime killing millions in the Middle East. None of the crimes against humanity enters into the sensitive ‘personal scenarios’ of the new critics.

The new literature in Cuba — in its break with social realism — contains racial and sexual stereotypes — usually featuring the sultry mulata with long legs and prominent buttocks (nalgas). Romantic adventures with European tourists or businessmen lead to tearful departures and promises of a better future abroad.

Considering the decades of close cultural and educational relations with the USSR and Eastern Europe, there is a total absence of any film portrayal or novelistic account of the catastrophic crisis that has affected the post-Soviet society and the rise of neo-liberalism in Eastern Europe. Nowhere do the Cuban artists register the massive socio-economic crises resulting from the foreign take-over of the economies of the ex-communist societies. There are no documentaries or dramatic productions of the pillaging of the pension funds, the vertical growth of criminal gangs engaged in drugs and sex slavery of poor women and girls and the unprecedented decline in population due to drugs, alcohol, suicide and once conquered infectious diseases, like TB and syphilis. In portraying Cuban exile nostalgia, there is nothing of the other side of neo-liberalism, only a vision of the relative affluence in the Western middle class, itself a class with declining living standards.

Can it be that the ‘new critics’ with their own liberal visions refuse to portray the disastrous consequences of ‘market socialism’ or ‘post-socialism’ for fear of undermining their own version of a transition to a ‘new and open Cuba’? In avoiding the horrendous consequences of the transitions to capitalism, they focus instead on the easier task of contrasting the immediate problems and contradictions of Cuba’s past and present to an idealized West. Few artists and intellectuals express concern with the pitfalls and contradictions of their liberal-democratic posture.

There is a need for a cultural revolution in Cuba — to overcome the under-representation of Afro-Cubans in advertising, leadership positions and official visibility; and to deepen and extend the professional formation of Afro-Cubans to lessen their over-representation in boxing and other injurious sports.

Recovery of revolutionary cultural practices and racial affirmative action programs strengthen and deepen the process of 21st century socialism and open the way to critical re-thinking of economic decision-making. Critical reflections and debate on past economic practices is likely to lead to greater attention to greater rationality, coherence and cost-benefit analysis. The reliance on moral appeals for sacrifice is no longer as effective as it was in the 1990s. The introduction of new large-scale public projects with ‘delayed results’ or promises of future deliverance to the populace is not generating popular enthusiasm as Raul Castro explicitly noted in his July 26, 2007 speech.

Cuban investment planning has been dominated by bursts of enthusiasm for a Big Advanced Idea , which may contain certain progressive features, but which, carried out in isolation from other priorities, does not meet criteria of cost-benefit analysis. Two areas stand out: Computerization and biotechnology. Both receive multi-million dollar investments and have produced some innovative results. But this has been at great cost in relation to other sectors.

Cuba’s investment of the equivalent of several hundred million dollars in building an elaborate university specializing in computer science is a case in point. The university project could have been incorporated and integrated with existing university centers and, more important, integrated with key institutions to construct data bases and programs capable of processing information improving the performance of factories, gasoline stations, hospital and patient records etc. The contradiction between a special, costly advanced computer science university and backward data processing in key social and economic institutions is indicative of the tendency to seize on a ‘Big Idea’, computerization, without thinking through how it fits into and can be applied to solving problems of inefficiency, theft and delays.

Biotechnology is the area most cited by Cubans as their future growth sector. Over $1 billion dollars has created first rate facilities, trained and recruited first-rate scientists and produced some important vaccines and advances in medical care. Yet it must be recognized that in Cuba, as in the rest of the world, the returns on biotech investments, both in terms of medical break-through and in monetary terms, has been at best uneven. Biotech innovations have made modest improvements in public health, in Cuba, in Europe and in the US. For every successful discovery, several dozen costly programs have failed. Given Cuba’s need to meet elementary needs of inexpensive and readily available, nutritious food, public transport, family housing and other urgent needs, the question of priorities has to be raised and debated widely and openly in Cuban society. Given the high levels of chronic consumer scarcities, the deterioration of infrastructure, the low salaries, can Cuba continue to invest billions into highly risky sectors?

Is international scientific recognition and humanitarian aid worth the price of disenchantment and declining revolutionary fervor in the face of twenty plus years of domestic scarcities?

Cuban foreign policy has had a great many major diplomatic successes: it has gained 98% support in the United Nations General Assembly and near unanimous vote in the Organization of American States against the US economic blockade. Cuba has trading relations with almost the entire world and even non-reciprocal trade with the US, despite Presidents Clinton and Bush’s enforcement of the Helms-Burton trade and travel embargo. Cuba and Venezuela have successfully promoted a strategic trade, investment and military alliances despite severe pressure from the White House. Cuba’s foreign policy has opened up and expanded diplomatic and economic relations with Washington’s most servile client regimes, despite pressure from Washington. Cuba’s ‘people to people diplomacy’ has created good will with the poor throughout the world. Cuba’s intransigent opposition to free markets and military invasions in Asia and the Middle East (particularly colonial invasions of Iraq, Afghan and Lebanon) has gained Cuba the support of people around the world, and the sympathy of many Third World governments.

The very success of Cuba in breaking the imperial diplomatic and economic blockade has created a new set of contradictions: the legitimate state interest in maximizing Cuban trade and diplomatic support has, at times, led the government to support and endorse some reactionary, neo-liberal regimes like Lula Da Silva in Brazil and to make friendly gestures to the Death Squad President Uribe in Colombia.²³ The key problem is the lack of separation between the Cuban state and the Cuban Communist Party. What is appropriate diplomatically for the Cuban state is politically reactionary from the view-point of the popular mass movements in the countries combating neo-liberal regimes. Cuba could solve the problem if the state and party were distinct organizations. The Party could speak from a revolutionary perspective in solidarity with the people’s struggles and the state could work with the existing regimes.

Conclusion: Contradictions and Alternatives

Cuba’s success in overcoming the collapse of its main trading partners in Eastern Europe and the ex-USSR, and restructuring its economy is one of the most dramatic events in contemporary history. Likewise, Cuba’s national security system’s ability to defeat every effort by the world’s biggest superpower to destroy the revolution is unprecedented in recent world history.

Cuba’s success in securing a modicum of economic recovery, while sustaining important social programs marks out Cuba from the rest of the world where economic restructuring was accompanied by vast reductions in social services. The changes engineered by the revolutionary government however have created important contradictions, which as yet are not system threatening, but could become so if neglected. There are processes, practices, policies and structures which are gradually eroding the basis of mass support and should be addressed with some urgency while they are still solvable. Positive reforms could include:

1. Balanced economic planning, worker-consumer oversight of administration and participation in joint decision making
2. Publication for public scrutiny of accounts, income, expenditures of all ministries
3. Publication of expense accounts, transport, housing, private gifts and assets, overseas purchases, of all top officials.
4. Public debates and referenda on investment priorities, overseas aid versus domestic programs in health, housing, food and transport.

Cuba’s decision-makers should break with this mono-cultural mentality; it is insufficient to break with sugar exports and to rely on a tourist economy and primary products (nickel, citrus, tobacco and so on). It may be politically smart to develop limited ties with US agro-exporters but it makes no sense to become food dependent and surrender food security, especially in non-reciprocal trade with a United States Treasury Department, which demands cash on the barrel (no credits!).²⁴ While ALBA is a great alternative to US-dominated ALCA, Cuba must play its part by promoting food imports (currently near zero) from Bolivia, Ecuador or Nicaragua rather than the US, in exchange for charging for pharmaceutical exports and health and educational services.

Cuba should consider re-opening its too hastily closed sugar fields, especially those (flat lands) amenable to mechanized harvests. With the sustainable high prices for sugar due to the turn to bio-fuels (ethanol), Cuba can earn foreign exchange, produce ethanol and reduce its dependence on imported petrol which even at subsidized prices from Venezuela still runs to over $30 dollars a barrel.

Cuba’s new specialized computer science complex should become integrated into the economy and social service sector: applied programs, work-study programs in hospitals and factories to create information networks linking hospitals, clinics and workplaces are urgent. Transport systems need to be computerized to control punctuality, reduce deviant routing leading to illegal delivery of materials pilfered from state stores to black marketers. Computerization, involving daily or even hourly data on revenue from petrol and other distribution points, will increase revenues and reduce corruption. Computerization and consumer-worker-accountant oversight councils will partially define 21st century socialism.

Industrial diversification, especially in lines directly related to products for the popular economy and export require greater emphasis on professional formation, computer design and consumer surveys. Computerization needs to be more clearly linked to satisfying urgent popular needs.

Cuba needs to invest in industrializing its nickel products, adding skilled manufacturing jobs and value-added to its exports to China and elsewhere. Above all Cuba must regain its food security.²⁵ There is absolutely no good reason why Cuba cannot become self-sufficient in poultry, meats, rice, beans and other essential food stuffs if it restructures its economic development priorities and puts greater emphasis in developing and deepening its domestic market and shifting its investments from the over-developed tertiary sectors to its primary and secondary sectors.

Cuba has over-emphasized its overseas medical aid programs providing new clinics, while its local hospitals are deteriorating. Waiting rooms and hallways of neighborhood clinics need to be clean and neatly painted. Some clinics are understaffed. Maintenance staff is underutilized. Hospitals lack basic training equipment and chemical reagents in diagnostic centers etc. While outside observers rightly compare Cuba’s vast superiority to the poor US public health system, Cubans have recently complained of delays and waits in treatment due to the overseas assignments of medical staff.

Cuba must think, with Marti, in recreating the internal national dynamics of the revolution — by putting first and foremost the meeting of the consumer demands of the Cuban people. This can be accomplished by redressing the imbalances between the export and domestic sectors, the development of advanced training and the practical needs of the economy. The educational system, currently oriented to the service sector, must produce graduates to diversify manufacturing and revive food production.

Cuba has demonstrated its capacity to resolve its internal contradictions in the past. The current contradictions are not irresolvable but they require serious, deep re-thinking of current priorities, strategies and structures. A full-scale open debate among all anti-imperialist Cubans is necessary to deepen and sustain the achievements of the revolution.

The new dogmas and posturing of apolitical and liberal artists, writers and filmmakers are as much of an obstacle to deepening the revolution as entrenched bureaucrats. The Cuban revolution and its leaders can count on an enormous reservoir of good will, solidarity and loyalty from the vast majority of Afro and European Cubans. But there are limits in time and patience — the Cuban desire for a good life is pressing for solutions to everyday needs.

Delays and constant postponements in meeting housing, income and food needs only aids the internal liberal counter-revolutionaries who argue for greater ‘market freedoms’.²⁶ Moral appeals and disciplinary measures are necessary but insufficient if they are not accompanied by greater popular oversight and growing availability of material goods, material incentives, affordable quality and varied food and available housing for each family generation. The future of the revolution is now, not in our lifetime, but this year. Nothing less than the future of the Cuban revolution is at stake as the current wide reaching debate over strategy, social structures and political action proceeds.

As the historic leader of the Revolution of 1959, Commander Ramiro Valdes, stated on May 28, 2007, “Strengthening the internal economy, in the domains of science and technology, in the resolution of social problems and the quality of life of our people are tasks to which we must direct ourselves with greater efficiency, if we, the revolution and Cuban socialism are to be really irreversible, as Fidel and Raul wish.”²⁷

1. Morris Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba (1952-1986), Cambridge University Press, NY 1987.
2. Ernst and Young, A Business Guide to Cuba (February 2006), Bridgetown, Barbados. Part 1. See also Fidel Vascos Gonzalez, Economía Cubana: Se Acelera su Ritmo de Crecimiento, Cubarte 2007.
3. ibid part 3, page 36.
4. Interviews with the Director of the Computer Science University, Feb 11, 2006; see also Ernst and Young opcit part 6.
5. Ernst and Young op. cit. part 1 and 2. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) report for 2006 emphasized Cuba’s sustained growth since 2003.
6. James Petras, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Cuba, the US and Human Rights”, May 6, 2003 Rebelión.
7. Interview with Felipe Perez Roque, Cuban Foreign Minister, Feb 4, 2004.
8. Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in the Age of Gangster Capitalism (Harcourt NY, 2000); James Petras “Global Ruling Class: Billionaires and How They Made it”, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Jan. 2008; David Hoffman, The Oligarchs (Public Affairs NY, 2003).
9. Ernst and Young op. cit. Part IV Foreign Direct Investment and Part VI Sectors for Foreign Investment.
10. Klebnikov op. cit., Hoffman op. cit.
11. Fidel Castro, Speech at the University of Havana, November 17, 2005. (Granma, November 18, 2005). Fidel emphasized the Revolution faced its principle danger from the New Class from within.
12. Raul Castro speech in Camaguey, July 26, 2007. “Year 49 of the Revolution.” Raul emphasized the need for greater domestic agricultural production, especially of food stuff for local consumption — pointing to ‘structural deficiencies.’
13. Gideon Alon, “Just a Farmer in Cuba” Haaretz 3/7/07. The report in theIsraeli press refers to Rafi Eitan, former head of Israel’s secret police, Mossad’s European operations: “Eitan is a partner in a company that owns vast orchards in Cuba…The company deals with agriculture in Cuba… producing citrus juice concentrate in the world’s largest plant.” Israeli capitalists are investing tens of millions of dollars into a Havana office complex, which will consist of 18 six floor office buildings located on 2 million square feet. The project is a joint venture between the Cuban state agency, Cubalse and Grupo BM, an Israeli conglomerate headed by Rafi Eitan.
14. See Juventude Rebelde, June 18, 2007 in Gerardo Arreola “Trabas burócratas ahondan crises de vivienda en Cuba: Juventude Rebelde”. Cited in La Jornada, June 18, 2007. According to the trade union publications, Trabajadores, of 8,934 housing units approved for 2005, only 1445 were built as of May 2007.
15. “La Población cubana decrece y envejece” Xinhua 11/07/2007; Gerardo Arreola “Decrece la publación cubana”, La Jornada March 9, 2007.
16. Raul Castro, July 26, 2007 Speech at Camaguey. Raul cites the example of the waste of petroleum in the transport of milk from dairies to processing plants back to consumers living next to the same dairies.
17. Fidel Castro speech November 2005 – University of Havana (Granma November 19, 2005) and follow-up report in Gerardo Arreola “El Presidente Cubano recibe 2006 en un gasolinera de la Habana”. La Jornada, January 2, 2006.
18. Raul Castro Speech July 26, 2007.
19. Pedro Campos “Debería Cuba reconsiderar comércio unidireccional con EEUU y avanzar a la autosuficiencia alimentica”, June 2007 (Perucho1949 @yahoo.es).
20. On the predominance of state property despite the inroads of joint ventures see the pronouncements of Economy Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez in Gerardo Arreola “Firme en Cuba el predominio de la propriedad estatal: ministro de Economía” La Jornada May 30, 2007. For a detailed discussion.
21. Interview in Havana, Feb. 7, 2005.
22. Gerardo Arreola “Cuba: el fantasma de la censura”, La Jornada January 19, 2007.
23. Gerardo Arreola, “Intercambian invitaciones Castro y Uribe para hacer visitas reciprocas”, La Jornada, April 2, 2007; “Nueva etapa de cooperación y solidaridad con Cuba: Torrijos, La Jornada Dec. 2, 2005. Torrijos is the President of Panama and a notorious free market advocate and backer of ALCA.
24. Cuba’s head of food imports, Pedro Alvarez, projected the purchase of between $1.5 and $1.6 billion dollars in food imports from the United States, the great majority of which could be produced in Cuba. Food imports form the US accounted for more than half of Cuba’s net trade deficit for 2006. Between 2001-2006 Cuba has spent $2.26 billion dollars in food purchases from the US. On Cuba’s food imports from the US, see Ernst and Young, opcit Part II and III; “Cuba preve comprar este año en el exterior entre mil 600 y mil 700 MDD in alimentos”, La Jornada, July 31, 2007. On the exorbitant prices in Cuba’s farmers’ market relative to wages and salaries, see BBC News, July 31, 2007.
25. Raul Castro emphasizes the need to increase food production and industrialize and diversify the economy in his July 26, 2007 speech, criticizing bureaucratic inertia and calling for new forms of property relations including foreign investment (the latter a response to the incompetence of current state administration.)
26. Currently in Cuba, Raul Castro has convoked a series of independent academically-based working groups to consider the problems and deficiencies of state property ownership and alternative public-private relations.
27. La Jornada, May 30, 2007.