In the early 1500s the Spanish Conquistadors came to the shores of what is now known as Florida (Flowery Land in Spanish). At that time the area was populated by groups of Paleo-Indigenous people whose lives were about to change drastically for the worse. The Conquistadors were out for gold and other riches to which purpose the natives were often enslaved. Along with them came Spanish priests whose goal was strictly ideological: the conversion of the natives to Catholicism. The natives would have no choice. From that time onward the sunny and flowery land of Florida proved a place both of wealth and ideological intolerance.

Even when the Spanish lost control of the territory, first to the British and then to the United States, this duality persisted. In the 19th century, for instance, what stood in the way of Florida’s ideological purity was the perseverance of those pesky “Indians.” Andrew Jackson, a rigid-minded fellow if there ever was one, thought he had the answer to this problem when he waged war against the Seminoles who had the audacity to both resist white settlement and harbor runaway black slaves. Eventually he was proved correct. Well-armed racism won the day, and from the 1830s into the 1850s the process of forced eviction cum slaughter of the natives proceeded. By 1845, when Florida became the 27th state of the Union, things were relatively in hand and most of the remaining Seminoles pushed back into the Everglades.

Over the years, the gold that the conquistadors sought transformed itself into citrus fruit and tourism. Today the tourist business brings in over 77 million people a year to Florida and is worth over $57 billion annually to the state’s economy. Three quarters of U.S. oranges are from Florida, as is 40% of the world’s orange juice. Yet, overlaying all this wealth, just like an unhealthy tan, is the persistence of Florida’s ideological obsessions. In contemporary terms, there are two that stand out and we will begin by looking at the one most recently in the news.

Obsessions

1. Cuba – Florida has a very high percentage of Cuban Americans. One third of the population of Miami has Cuban roots and in at least 18 other cities and large towns in the state the percentage approaches half. A high number of these people are staunchly anti-Castro. Among the older generation, this attitude borders on fanaticism. One can see this reflected in the behavior of the state’s political representatives in Congress who fight tooth and nail against any moderation of U.S. sanctions against the Cuban nation–despite the fact that those sanctions help impoverish the country’s people, a state of being Cuban Americans then blame on the Castro government.

For this point of view to be maintained, right-wing Cuban Americans have had to approach history in a highly selective way. When Castro took over in Cuba in 1959 the country was an economic and social wreck. It was ruled by the dictator Fulgencio Batista who had established ties with U.S. mafia families. Gambling and prostitution were major growth industries under this regime. Poverty deepened, illiteracy was widespread, and crime was rampant; nonetheless, Batista was seen as an ally of Washington. That is because he ran an anti-communist secret police, trained and armed by the U.S., which acted as the regime’s Gestapo and SS combined.

When Castro took over in 1959 these conditions changed. To do this he had to nationalize resources, and this step was opposed by a small upper class and a portion of the middle class. It was this group who initially fled to the U.S. Subsequently, they have chosen to forget most of Cuban history prior to Castro’s revolution. They also have a deadly resentment of those who take a different attitude and regularly attempt to ruin anyone who has the audacity to publicly disagree with them. That is how fanatics behave.

Take the recent case of Ozzie Guillen, the outspoken manager of the Miami Marlins baseball team. Guillen made the mistake of saying that he respected Fidel Castro in a recent interview with Time magazine. The result was a “political firestorm” in Miami. Within hours the politicos of south Florida (sounding like the priests of the conquistadors) were calling for his head. The team suspended him for five games and Guillen publicly apologized for “betraying the Latin community” and begged forgiveness in a most groveling way. Nonetheless, elements of the area’s Cuban-American community entered into an orgy of hate and threatened to “boicot” (and therefore economically destroy) Miami’s baseball team unless Guillen was fired.

2. Israel – Florida, and particularly the southern part of the state, has the second highest Jewish population in the U.S. (the first is in New York). Notably, most of them are elderly retirees of passionate Zionist persuasion. One of Miami’s main streets is Yitzhak Rabin Boulevard. Next to the issue of pensions, Israel is what commands their interest. That is why all the Republican primary candidates (except Ron Paul) who visited the state fell over backwards in their support for Israel.

No prominent Florida Jewish resident has yet been silly enough, or brave enough, to go public with anti-Zionist declarations, or statements of admiration for Yasser Arafat. And after an example has been made of Ozzie Guillen, the probability of anyone doing so has to have diminished. This is because the right-wing elements of these two communities are allied and feed off of each other.

Back in the 1980s, when the Cuban American community leaders decided to set up their lobby, originally known as the Cuban American National Foundation, they went to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, otherwise know as AIPAC, for advice and guidance. That relationship has continued ever since.¹ A living representation of this on-going alliance is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, U.S. Representative for Florida’s 18th Congressional District and currently the longest serving woman in Congress. That status has also made her chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ros-Lehtinen describes herself as a “strong supporter of Israel” including its illegal settlements, and has worked hard to cut funds for any United Nations agency that recognizes Palestinian statehood. Of course, she also hates Fidel Castro.

Conclusion

Over-exposure to the “sunshine state” can obviously get you a bad burn, particularly if you are of an open mind and value the principle of free speech. But that is the way it goes when communities form around repugnant ideological cores that then come to characterize their very identity. For many of the Cuban Americans in Florida, to have something good to say about the Castro regime, even if it can be historically substantiated, is the same as betraying their community. For many Jewish Americans in the same state, having something critical to say about Israel and Zionism, even if it is fact based, is the same as declaring yourself an anti-Semite or perhaps a “self-hating Jew.”

What is particularly scary about all of this is that the entire prejudicial mind-set is carried forth unquestionably and in lock step by millions of people. Americans often would point fingers at the Soviet Union, the Chinese communists, and now the “Muslim world” for this sort of totalitarian thinking. All the while, it was right here in our own sunny backyard.

1. For more information on this please see my book Foreign Policy Inc (Kentucky U. Press 2009).

It has now been over half a century since Fidel Castro led a successful armed, popular revolt against U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Washington, though, is long in forgetting those that openly challenge and defy U.S. power (witness U.S. policy towards Iran). Thus, the collective punishment of the Cuban people has long since been cemented as an unquestionable tenet of U.S. foreign policy—the longest and most foolhardy embargo in history remains.

However, with the rise of center-left governments through the Americas, coupled with the weakening of U.S. regional influence attributable to its imperial overstretch in the Middle East, a growing push-back against U.S. Cuban policy has finally begun to take hold. In 2009, for example, the Organization of American States (OAS) voted in defiance of the U.S. to lift its nearly 50-year membership ban on Cuba. (Cuba still refuses to seek entry in the OAS, claiming that the organization is a tool of U.S. imperialism.)

Significantly, this growing impatience with U.S. Cuban policy has not been limited to the continent’s ascendant coalition of center-left governments. In fact, right-wing Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, a stanch ally of the U.S. and avid fighter of the Colombian Marxist rebel group F.A.R.C., publicly expressed his frustration with the obstinate U.S. posture towards Cuba just prior to this weekend’s summit. As Santos warned:

It would be just as unthinkable to hold another hemispheric meeting with a prostrate Haiti, as it would be with Cuba absent… isolation, embargo and indifference have shown their ineffectiveness. It’s an anachronism that keeps us anchored to a Cold War era that’s been overcome for decades now.

Indeed, for Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa boycotted the weekend’s summit, directly citing U.S. policy towards Cuba. The foreign ministers of Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay, moreover, stated prior to the summit that their presidents would refrain from signing any summit declaration unless the US removed its veto of future Cuban participation.

Facing such a diplomatic backlash against his government’s failed Cuban policy, President Obama—quite remarkably, we might add—chose to defend the growing isolation of the U.S. by calling for all to move beyond any Cold War era mindset. As Obama declared:

Sometimes I feel as if in some of these discussions, or at least the press reports, we’re caught in a time warp, going back to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy and Yankees and the Cold War, and this and that and the other. That’s not the world we live in today.

This, though, is in fact the very world in which U.S. policy remains suspended. And if the past weeks have demonstrated anything in this regard, it is a world in which the U.S. shall long remain.

After all, in mid-March, the U.S. State Department rejected applications from two senior Cuban diplomats to travel to New York City to take part in a panel discussion at the Left Forum. The State Department cited Cuba’s refusal to permit American diplomats freedom of travel outside Havana as reason for the travel ban. But unlike the U.S., Cuba has not once tried to overthrow the U.S. government. But such is life in the U.S. Cold War time warp.

And then, of course, this past week saw the U.S. sports world rise to express its collective outrage at the supposedly incendiary comments made by new Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen. Guillen’s crime: a public expression of admiration for Fidel Castro. For such a grave transgression Guillen was forced to issue an immediate apology, and denounce Castro as a universally hated tyrant. Nonetheless, Guillen was still slapped with a five game suspension for ruffling the feathers of the rabidly anti-Castro Miami community. Free speech, Guillen no doubt learned, has its limits.

(Admiration for the Cuban Revolution, it must be noted, ought not be something to instinctively vilify. Since the 1959 revolution wrestled the island free from the jackboot of U.S. imperialism, life expectancy in Cuba has gone from just under 60 years to just under 80 years. And as governments at all levels in the U.S. take a hatchet to social spending, Cubans continue to enjoy free education and health care at every level.)

So, as the states inhabiting the Americas look toward forging a future free from Cold War antagonisms, the U.S. remains fixated on the imagined red menace looming 90 miles off its coast. No U.S. war, it appears, is easily brought to a close.

These are some of the examples from the past decade of how the Holy Triumvirate recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that they can do whatever they want in the world, to whomever they want, for as long as they want, and call it whatever they want, like “humanitarian intervention”. The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.

Next on their agenda: the removal of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As with Gaddafi, the ground is being laid with continual news reports — from CNN to al Jazeera — of Assad’s alleged barbarity, presented as both uncompromising and unprovoked. After months of this media onslaught who can doubt that what’s happening in Syria is yet another of those cherished Arab Spring “popular uprisings” against a “brutal dictator” who must be overthrown? And that the Assad government is overwhelmingly the cause of the violence.

Assad actually appears to have a large measure of popularity, not only in Syria, but elsewhere in the Middle East. This includes not just fellow Alawites, but Syria’s two million Christians and no small number of Sunnis. Gaddafi had at least as much support in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The difference between the two cases, at least so far, is that the Holy Triumvirate bombed and machine-gunned Libya daily for seven months, unceasingly, crushing the pro-government forces, as well as Gaddafi himself, and effecting the Triumvirate’s treasured “regime change”. Now, rampant chaos, anarchy, looting and shooting, revenge murders, tribal war, militia war, religious war, civil war, the most awful racism against the black population, loss of their cherished welfare state, and possible dismemberment of the country into several mini-states are the new daily life for the Libyan people. The capital city of Tripoli is “wallowing in four months of uncollected garbage” because the landfill is controlled by a faction that doesn’t want the trash of another faction.¹ Just imagine what has happened to the country’s infrastructure. This may be what Syria has to look forward to if the Triumvirate gets its way, although the Masters of the Universe undoubtedly believe that the people of Libya should be grateful to them for their “liberation”.

As to the current violence in Syria, we must consider the numerous reports of forces providing military support to the Syrian rebels — the UK, France, the US, Turkey, Israel, Qatar, the Gulf states, and everyone’s favorite champion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia; with Syria claiming to have captured some 14 French soldiers; plus individual jihadists and mercenaries from Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, et al, joining the anti-government forces, their number including al-Qaeda veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are likely behind the car bombs in an attempt to create chaos and destabilize the country. This may mark the third time the United States has been on the same side as al-Qaeda, adding to Afghanistan and Libya.

Stratfor, the private and conservative American intelligence firm with high-level connections, reported that “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue.” Opposition groups including the Syrian National Council, the Free Syrian Army and the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights began disseminating “claims that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a massacre,” and declared that “opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor added that any suggestions of massacres are unlikely because the Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”²

Reva Bhalla, Stratfor’s Director of Analysis, reported in a December 2011 email on a meeting she attended at the Pentagon about Syria: “After a couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF [Special Operation Forces] teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” We know of Bhalla’s comments thanks to the 5 million Stratfor emails obtained by the Internet hacker group Anonymous in December and passed on to Wikileaks.³

Human Rights Watch has reported that both Syrian government security forces and Syria’s armed rebels have committed serious human rights abuses, including kidnapings, torture, and executions. But only the Holy Triumvirate can get away with the sanctions they love to impose. Assad’s wife is now banned from traveling to EU countries and any assets she may have there are frozen. Same for Assad’s mother, sister and sister-in-law, as well as eight of his government ministers. Assad himself received the same treatment last May.⁴ Because the Triumvirate can.

On March 25, the US and Turkish governments announced that they were discussing sending non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, implying quite clearly that until then they had not been engaged in such activity.⁵  But according to a US embassy cable, revealed by Wikileaks, since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria as well as the London-based satellite TV channel, Barada TV, run by Syrian exiles, that beams anti-government programming into the country. The cable further stated that Syrian authorities “would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change.”

Regime change in Syria has been on the neo-conservative wish list since at least 2002 when John Bolton, Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush, came up with a project to simultaneously break up Libya and Syria. He called the two states along with Cuba “The Axis Of Evil”. On a FOX News appearance in 2011 Bolton said that the United States should have overthrown the Syrian government right after they overthrew Saddam Hussein. Amongst Syria’s crimes have been their close relations with Iran, Hezbollah (in Lebanon), the Palestinian resistance, and Russia, and their failure to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, unlike Jordan and Egypt; all this constituting evidence to the Holy Triumvirate of Syria, like Aristide, being “uppity”.

The clinical megalomania of the Holy Triumvirate can scarcely be exaggerated. And never prosecuted.

A closing word from Cui Tiankai, Chinese vice foreign minister for United States affairs:

The US has the strongest military in the world and spends more than any other country. But the US always feels unsafe or insecure about other countries. … I suggest the United States spend more time thinking about how to make other countries feel less worried about the United States.⁶

President Obama’s accomplishments

Last month, Alan S. Hoffman, an American professor from Washington University in St. Louis, was forbidden by the US Treasury Department to travel to Cuba to give classes in a course on biomaterials.⁷

At the same time, the State Department refused to grant two Cuban diplomats in Washington, DC permission to travel to New York City to speak at The Left Forum, the largest annual gathering of the left in the United States, which this year attracted over 5,000 people.⁸

The State Department has also been occupied recently with preventing Cuba from being invited to the Summit of the Americas in Colombia in April.⁹

And that’s just the past month.

I mention all this to keep in mind the next time President Obama or one of his supporters lists US relations with Cuba as one of his accomplishments.

And I still cannot go to Cuba legally.

Another claim the Obamabots are fond of making to defend their man is that he’s abolished torture. That sounds very nice, but there’s no good reason to accept it at face value. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that “rendition” was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported: “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”¹⁰

The English translation of “cooperate” is “torture”. Rendition is equal to torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to name some of the known torture centers frequented by the home of the brave. Kosovo and Diego Garcia — both of which house very large and secretive American military bases — if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business. The same for Guantánamo. Moreover, the executive order concerning torture, issued January 22, 2009 — “Executive Order 13491 — Ensuring Lawful Interrogations” — leaves loopholes, such as being applicable only “in any armed conflict”. Thus, torture by Americans outside environments of “armed conflict”, which is where much torture in the world happens anyway, is not prohibited. And what about torture in a “counter-terrorism” environment?

One of Mr. Obama’s orders required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and perhaps noise, and possibly stress positions and sensory overload.

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had “left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of ‘rendition’ — picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country. But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions “that violate our human values.”¹¹

Just as no one in the Bush and Obama administrations has been punished in any way for war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the other countries they waged illegal war against, no one has been punished for torture. And, it could be added, no American bankster has been punished for their indispensable role in the world-wide financial torture. What a marvelously forgiving land is America. This, however, does not apply to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

In the last days of the Bush White House, Michael Ratner, professor at Columbia Law School and former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out:

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.¹²

I’d like at this point to remind my dear readers of the words of the “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, which was drafted by the United Nations in 1984, came into force in 1987, and ratified by the United States in 1994. Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back.

Joseph Biden

From a document found at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan after his assassination last May: A call to kill President Obama because “Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency. … Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.¹³

So … it would appear that the man America loved to hate and fear was no more knowledgeable of how United States foreign policy works than is the average American. What difference in the War on Terror — for better or for worse — against the likes of bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers could there have been over the past three years if Joe Biden had been the president? Biden was an outspoken supporter of the war against Iraq and is every bit the pro-Israel fanatic that Obama is. In his 35 years in the US Senate Biden avidly supported every American war of aggression including the attacks on Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. Whatever was Osama bin Laden thinking?

And whatever was Joe Biden thinking when he recently said the following after hosting China’s presumptive next leader Xi Jinping in a visit to the United States?

America holds at least one key economic advantage over China. Because China’s authoritarian government represses its own citizens, they don’t think freely or innovate. “Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they’re not innovating.” Noting that China and similar countries produce many engineers and scientists but few innovators, Biden said, “It’s impossible to think different in a country where you can’t speak freely. It’s impossible to think different when you have to worry what you put on the Internet will either be confiscated or you will be arrested. It’s impossible to think different where orthodoxy reigns. That’s why we remain the most innovative country in the world.”¹⁴

Holy Cold War, Batman! This is exactly the kind of stuff we were told about the Soviet Union. For years and years. For decades. Then came Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth’s orbit. It was launched into an Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1′s success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space Race. The USSR’s launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency to regain a technological lead. Not only did the launch of Sputnik spur America to action in the space race, it also led directly to the creation of NASA.¹⁵

1. Washington Post, April 1, 2012
2. Huffington Post, December 19, 2011
3. See the document on WikiLeaks
4. Washington Post, March 24, 2012
5. Ibid., March 26, 2012
6. Ibid., January 10, 2012
7. Prensa Latina (Cuba), March 18, 2012
8. See the video description on Cuba’s UN Ambassador at Left Forum ’12
9. BBC News, “Ecuador to boycott Americas summit over Cuba exclusion“, April 3, 2012
10. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009
11. New York Times, February 6, 2009
12. Associated Press, November 17, 2008
13. Washington Post, March 16, 2012
14. Ibid., March 1, 2012
15. Wikipedia entry for Sputnik 1

The US has applied massive pressure on Egypt to drop the case, sending high-level officials to Cairo for intense discussions and threatening to cut off up to $1.3bn in military aid and $250m in economic assistance if the US citizens were tried. A travel ban was imposed on seven of them by Egypt’s Attorney General, including Sam LaHood, son of Obama’s Transportation Secretary. By the first day of the case all but the seven with travel restrictions had left the country and those who remained did not even attend court. A day after the ban was lifted a military plane removed the remaining seven US citizens from Egypt after the US government provided nearly $5m in bail.

The Egyptian authorities stated that the matter was firmly in the hands of the judiciary and out of control of government and accused the US of unacceptable meddling. The international community has expressed outrage at the affair and accused the Egyptian military of inciting paranoia of foreign interference so as to deflect attention from the slow pace of political and democratic reform a year after the revolution. Amid the high-profile diplomatic strife there has been an almost total global journalistic silence on the nature and funding of these “NGOs”.

State Sponsored Organisations, Not NGOs

The people standing trial are repeatedly referred to by governments and the media as “NGO workers”. The 43 defendants worked for five specific organisations; Freedom House; the National Democratic Institute (NDI); the International Republican Institute (IRI); the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. Only one of these organisations, the ICFJ, can be considered as non-governmental in that it does not receive the majority of its funding either directly or indirectly from a government.

The NDI, chaired by Madeline Albright, and the IRI, chaired by Senator John McCain, represent the US Democratic and Republican political parties. The NDI and IRI, together with the Center for International Private Enterprise, which represents the US Chamber of Commerce, and the Solidarity Centre, which represents the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), make up the four “core institutions” of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED is a non-profit, grant-making institution that receives more than 90% of its annual budget from the US government. While Freedom House claims to be independent it regularly receives the majority of its funding from the NED. The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, sometimes referred to as the German NED, is a non-profit foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union. It receives over 90% of its funding from the German government. This means that the IRI, the NDI, Freedom House and the Konrad Adenauer Stifung – four of the five accused organisation – are state sponsored institutions and can not be defined as NGOs.

Freedom House has long been criticised for its right wing bias, favouring free markets and US foreign policy interests when assessing civil liberty and political freedom “scores” in countries around the world. Freedom House statistics for 2011 claim that Venezuelans had the same level of political rights as Iraqis. Bolivia’s overall score was reduced from “Free” to “Partially Free” after mass protests removed American-educated millionaire Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada from power after he initiated a sweeping privatization program. Now, under the first government in her history to really recognise the rights of the indigenous majority, Bolivia is still rated by Freedom House as only partially free and received a lower overall score than Botswana where one party (the BDP) has been in power since the first elections were held there in 1965. Freedom House has also been accused of running programmes of regime destabilisation in US “enemy states” and a 1996 Financial Times article revealed that Freedom House was one of several organisations selected by the State Department to receive funding for “clandestine activities” inside Iran including training and funding groups seeking regime change, an act that received criticism from Iranian grass roots pro-democracy groups.¹

The most nefarious of these organisations by far, however, are the IRI and the NDI. They receive NED grants “for work abroad to foster the growth of political parties, electoral processes and institutions, free trade unions, and free markets and business organizations.” ²  On March 6th, a protest march was organised by American civil society organisations at the offices of the NED in Washington, demanding; “NO ATTACKS ON DEMOCRACY ANYWHERE! CLOSE THE NED”. Union members and labor activists have protested and campaigned for years demanding that the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center break all ties to the NED.

Board of Directors

Chaired by Richard Gephardt – former Democratic Representative, now CEO of his own corporate consultancy and lobbying firm – the NED’s board of directors consists of a collection of corporate lobbyists, advisors and consultants, former U.S congressmen, senators, ambassadors and military and senior fellows of think tanks. For example, John A. Bohn, a former high level international banker and former President and Chief Executive Officer of Moody’s Investors Service, is now Commissioner of the California Public Utilities Commission, a principal in a global corporate advisory and consulting firm and Executive Chairman of an internet based trading exchange for petrochemicals. Kenneth Duberstein, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff under Reagan, is now Chairman and CEO of his own corporate lobbying firm. He also sits on the Board of Governors of the American Stock Exchange and NASD and serves on the Boards of Directors of numerous conglomerates including The Boeing Company, ConocoPhilips and Fannie Mae. Martin Frost is a former congressman who was involved in writing the 1999 “Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act” also known as the “Citigroup Relief Act”, and William Galston, former student of Leo Strauss, is a US Marine Corp veteran.

The Board also contains four of the founding members of ultra-conservative think tank Project for a New American Century; Francis Fukyama (author of ‘The End of History’), Will Marshall (founder of the ‘New Democrats’, an organisation that aimed to move Democratic Party policies to the right) former congressman Vin Weber (who retired from Congress in 1992 as a result of the House Banking Scandal and is now managing partner of a corporate lobbying firm) and Zalmay Khalilzad. Under George Bush Jr., Khalilzad served as US Ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan and the UN.  He is now President and CEO of his own international corporate advisory firm which advises clients – mainly in the energy, construction, education, and infrastructure sectors – wishing to do business in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also briefly consulted for Cambridge Energy Research Associates while they were conducting a risk analysis for the proposed Trans-Afghanistan gas pipeline.

History

The NED was founded in 1983 when Washington was embroiled in numerous controversies relating to covert military operations and the training and funding of paramilitaries and death squads in Central and South America. The NED was formed to create an open and legal avenue for the US Government to channel funds to opposition groups against unfavourable regimes around the world, thus removing the political stigma associated with covert CIA funding. In a 1991 Washington Post article, “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups”, Allen Weinstein (who helped draft the legislation that established the NED) declared; “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”. ³

In 1996 the Heritage Foundation published an article in defence of continued NED congressional funding which accurately summed up the NED as a US foreign policy tool; “The NED is a valuable weapon in the international war of ideas. It advances American national interests by promoting the development of stable democracies friendly to the U.S. in strategically important parts of the world. The U.S. cannot afford to discard such an effective instrument of foreign policy…Although the Cold War has ended, the global war of ideas continues to rage”. ⁴

As well as ongoing campaigns of regime destabilisation in undemocratic US enemy states such as Cuba and China, and its well known funding of “colour” revolutionaries in the former soviet space, the NED has been repeatedly involved in influencing elections and overthrowing governments in left-leaning and anti-US democratic regimes around the world. This is achieved by providing funding and/or training and strategic advice to opposition groups, political parties, journalists and media outlets. As Barbara Conry of the Cato Institute wrote: “Through the Endowment, the American taxpayer has paid for special-interest groups to harass the duly elected governments of friendly countries, interfere in foreign elections, and foster the corruption of democratic movements.”⁵

From 1986 to 1988 the NED funded the right-wing political opposition to Nobel Peace Price winner, President Oscar Arias, in democratic Costa Rica because he was outspokenly critical of Reagan’s violent policies in Central America. During the 1980s the NED was even active in “defending democracy” in France due to the dangerous rise in communist influence perceived as occurring under the elected socialist government of Francois Mitterrand. Money was channelled into opposition groups including extreme right-wing organisations such as the National Inter-University Union. In 1990 the NED provided funding and support to right wing groups in Nicaragua, and Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas were removed from power in an election described by Professor William I. Robinson as an event in which “massive foreign interference completely distorted an endogenous political process and undermined the ability of the elections to be a free choice”.⁶

In the late 1990s the NED provided funding and support to the US backed right-wing opposition against the election campaign of progressive former president, and first democratically elected leader of Haiti, Jean-Betrand Aristide. When a coup removed Aristide from power for the second time in 2004 it was revealed that the NED had provided funding and strategic advice to the principal organizations involved in his ousting. The involvement of the NED in the 2002 attempted coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela has been well researched and documented. Immediately after the coup, however, the then president of the IRI, George Folsom, revealed the institute’s role in the endeavour when he sent out a press release celebrating Chavez’s ousting: “The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…”.

The IRI was also implicated in the 2009 Honduran coup amid claims that the organisation had supported the ousting of democratically elected leader Manuel Zelaya because of his support of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (an anti-free trade pact including Honduras, Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba) and his refusal to privatise telecommunications. According to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs AT&T – an American telecommunications giant – has provided significant funding to both the IRI and Senator John McCain (its chairman) in order to target Latin American states that refuse to privatize their telecommunications industry.⁷

Influence in Egypt and the Arab Spring

The NED works in democratic Turkey but does not provide “democratisation grants” to civil society organisations in Western allied absolute monarchies such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia or Oman. A number of NED backed activists have taken centre stage in the Arab Spring struggles and U.S. supported candidates have risen to occupy leading positions in newly established transitional governments. The most glaring example of this is Libya’s transitional Prime Minister, Dr. Abdurrahim El-Keib, who holds dual U.S./Libyan citizenship and is former Chairman of the Petroleum Institute sponsored by British Petroleum, Shell, Total and the Japan Oil Development Company. He handed the job of running Libya’s oil and gas supply to a technocrat and, according to the Guardian, has passed over Islamists expected to make the cabinet in order “to please Western backers”.⁸ Tawakkul Karman too, of Yemen, who became the youngest ever recipient of a Nobel Peace Price in 2011, was leader of a NED grantee organisation, “Women Journalists without Chains”.

In 2009 sixteen young Egyptian activists completed a two-month Freedom House ‘New Generation Fellowship’ in Washington. The activists received training in advocacy and met with U.S. government officials, members of Congress, media outlets and think tanks. As far back as 2008, members of the April 6th Movement attended the inaugural summit of the Association of Youth Movements (AYM) in New York, where they networked with other movements, attended workshops on the use of new and social media and learned about technical upgrades, such as consistently alternating computer simcards, which help to evade state internet surveillance. AYM is sponsored by Pepsi, YouTube and MTV and amongst the luminaries who participated in the 2008 Summit, which focused on training activists in the use of Facebook and Twitter, were James Glassman of the State Department, Sherif Mansour of Freedom House, National Security Advisor Shaarik Zafar and Larry Diamond of the NED.

This is rather ironic considering that in September 2009 the US authorities arrested Elliot Madison (a US citizen and full-time social worker) for using Twitter to disseminate information about police movements to G20 Summit street protesters in Pittsburgh. Madison, apparently in violation of a loosely defined federal anti-rioting law, was accused of “criminal use of a communication facility,” “possessing instruments of crime,” and “hindering apprehension”. Given that heavily armed police officers were using tear gas, sonic weapons and rubber bullets on protesters Madison’s actions were hardly unjustified. Further demonstrating the hypocrisy of Madison’s arrest is the fact that in June 2009 the State Department had requested Twitter delay a planned upgrade so that Iranian protesters’ tweets would not be interrupted. Twitter Inc subsequently stated in a blog post that it had delayed the upgrade because of its role as an “important communication tool in Iran.”⁹

A leaked 2008 cable from the Cairo US Embassy, entitled “April 6 activist on his US visit and regime change in Egypt”, showed that the US was in dialogue with an April 6th youth activist about his attendance at the AYM Summit.¹⁰  The cable revealed that the activist tried to convince his Washington interlocutors that the US Government and the International Community should pressure the Egyptian government into implementing reforms by freezing the off-shore bank accounts of Egyptian Government officials. He also detailed the youth movement’s plans to remove Mubarak from power and hold representative elections before the September 2011 presidential election.

While the cable revealed that the US deemed this plan “highly unrealistic”, the dialogue proves that the funding of any youth organisation associated with the April 6th movement by a US organisation since December 2008 had been done with Washington and the US embassy in Cairo being fully aware that the movement’s aim was regime change in Egypt. Yet in April 2011 the New York Times published an article entitled ‘U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings’ in which it openly stated that; “A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6th Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the IRI, the NDI and Freedom House”.

According to the NED’s 2009 Annual Report, $1,419,426 worth of grants was doled out to civil society organisations in Egypt that year. In 2010, the year preceding the January – February 2011 revolution, this funding massively increased to $2,497,457.¹¹ Nearly half of this sum, $1,146,903, was allocated to the Center for International Private Enterprise for activates such as conducting workshops at governate level “to promote corporate citizenship” and engaging civil society organizations “to participate in the democratic process by strengthening their capacity to advo­cate for free market legislative reform on behalf of their members”. Freedom House also received $89,000 to “strengthen cooperation among a network of local activists and bloggers”.

According to the same 2010 report, various youth organisations and youth orientated projects received a total of $370,954 for activities such as expanding the use of new media and social advertising campaigns among young activists, training and providing ongoing support in “the production and targeted dissemination of social advertisement campaigns”, building the leadership skills of political party youth, strengthening and supporting “a cadre of young civic and political activists . . . well positioned to mobilize and engage their communities”, and providing youth  training workshops in “professional media skills as well as online and social networking media tools”.

But this is just the funding that is transparently made known to us on the NED’s official website. After the revolution, the NDI and IRI massively expanded their operations in Egypt, opening five new offices between them and hiring large numbers of new staff. The Egyptian authorities claim that they have found these organisations’ finances very difficult to trace. According to Dawlat Eissa – a 27-year-old Egyptian-American and former IRI employee – the IRI used employees’ private bank accounts to channel money covertly from Washington, and an IRI accountant stated that directors used their personal credit cards for expenses. Eissa and a number of her colleagues resigned from their posts with the IRI in October, and Eissa filed a complaint with the government after director Sam LaHood reportedly told employees to collect all of the organisation’s work related paperwork for scanning and shipping to the US.¹²

It is clear that NDI, IRI and Freedom House were training and funding the youth movement in Egypt while the US Government and its Cairo Embassy were fully aware that the youth movement aimed to remove Mubarak from power. Critics claim that the defendants are being charged with a law that is a “relic of the Mubarak era”. But, it may be replied, in what country does the law allow foreign governments to fund and train opposition groups with a stated goal of regime change? It is common sense to assume that if China or Cuba were funding similar oppositionist groups in the US, those involved would be facing far harsher sentences than the 43 now standing trial in Egypt. Yet they continue to hide behind the tattered guise of being “NGO” employees, claiming independence because their US government funding is channelled through the National Endowment for Democracy.

The term “NGO” is used deliberately to create an illusion of innocent philanthropic activity. In this case the Egyptian government is investigating the operations of organisations in receipt of US state funding which have a proven history of covertly funding political parties, influencing elections and aiding coups against both autocratic and democratic non-compliant and left-leaning governments around the world. Yet one mention of the Egyptian government’s raid on the offices of so-called “pro-democracy NGOs” in Cairo was enough to spark an international outcry. The result has been an almost complete failure by the Western press to investigate at all the history of the organisations involved or the validity of the charges being brought against them.

•  This article was first published in Irish Foreign Affairs (Vol 5, No. 1, March 2012)

1. Guy Dinmore, “Bush enters Iran ‘freedom’ debate’”, Financial Times, March 31, 2006
2. National Endowment for Democracy official website
3. Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups by David Ignatius. Washington Post, September 22, 1991
4. The National Endowment for Democracy: A Prudent Investment in the Future by James Phillips (Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs) and Kim R. Holmes (Vice President of Foreign and Defence Policy Studies), Heritage Foundation, 1996
5. Conry, B. (1993) Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, November 8
6. Robinson, William I. (1992), A Faustian Bargain: U.S. Intervention in the Nicaraguan Elections and American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era,  Boulder: Westview Press, p. 150
7. D’Ambrosio, Michaela,  ‘The Honduran Coup: Was it a matter of behind the scenes finagling by state department stonewallers?” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, September 16, 2009
8. “Libyan PM snubs Islamists with cabinet to please western backers”, The Guardian, Tuesday  November 22, 2011
9. Pleming, Sue. “US State Department speaks to Twitter over Iran”,  Reuters, Jun 16, 2009
10. “Egypt protests: secret US document discloses support for protesters”,  The Telegraph, January 28, 2011
11. All figures taken from 2009 and 2010 NED annual report’s for Egypt available on NED’s official website
12. Hill, Evan,  “Egypt dossier outlines NGO prosecution”, Al Jazeera English, February 26, 2012

Why did I, a white westerner get involved in this crazy world of Sinhalese and Tamils? I knew nothing about Sri Lanka until the end of the internal war, May 2009. I was asked by the Latin American Friendship Association in Tamil Nadu, India to look into it, because they knew of my work with Cuba and the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of our America (ALBA).

I am rooted in Martin Luther King’s premise: “Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere”.

I got involved in solidarity with your people’s struggle because you have been so brutally treated, and because of the moral principle of solidarity with the oppressed, the struggle for justice.

In the land of my birth, The Devil’s Own Country, I experienced similar injustice committed against the native peoples and the black people as Tamils suffer. In the 1960-70s, I joined with millions of brothers and sisters of all colors to fight racism, to struggle for equal rights, for education and health care for all, the basic right to vote, and to assist the Vietnamese-Cambodians-Laotians win back their countries from the invading Yankees. We did help end the war in favor of the invaded peoples, and black people did achieve most equal rights.

But now, decades later, the world still looks as bad or even worse.

I recently read Under My Skin, Doris Lessing’s first volume of her autobiography. She wrote this nearly 20 years ago when in her 70s. I quote from a passage on page 282 that took place during World War II or soon afterwards:

“We took it for granted that when the working class – or the blacks or any other disadvantaged people – took power, they would be inspired by only the purest and most disinterested ideals.”

What do we have in the world today so long afterwards?

1. A black-faced man as the most powerful president in the world engaging in more aggressive wars at one time than any time in US history. And where I live, Denmark, the so-called “red” government continues murdering people in Afghanistan and backing up capitalism just as the neo-liberal government did.

2. Former Tamil leaders of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) once fighting for the welfare and liberation of an entire people now engage in murdering, raping, kidnapping into slavery and prostitution, robbing their own people. Karuna, Devananda, Pillaivan—leaders of the groups TMVP, ERDP and others—work for some of the most vicious rulers in the modern world, the Rajapaksa family regime which commits genocide against the Tamil people.

3. Declared Marxists, Communists, Maoists, Trotskyists, Buddhist monks ally with the Rajapaksa reign and other Sinhalese mass murdering regimes before them.

4. Black, brown, yellow-skin people once achieving government power have committed genocide or mass murder and other violent crimes against their own people. Former revolutionary leaders, many of them former guerrillas who fought for liberation of the masses or ethnic groups in many countries of Africa, Latin America, Asia and Europe now work for capitalism and material riches.

The United States committed genocide against the Vietnamese, who are now engaging in capitalism as is China, led by the false Communist party.

5. Cuba, the most successful revolutionary nation promising equality, an end to racism and poverty based upon a socialist economy and aligned with the oppressed of the world is now regressing towards capitalism and inequality, and with a foreign policy that backs the vicious Sinhalese chauvinist governments and ignores the suffering plight of the Tamil people.

I am deeply hurt and disappointed that the government of Cuba—where I lived and worked side by side with the people and government for eight years—as well as the socialistic-progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American governments have not understood that their own principle of international solidarity must apply to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka.

Cuba with the other ALBA countries contend that they are opposed to the United States and European countries “intervening” in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs. But, in reality, all that the US asks is that the Sri Lankan government investigate itself and find some scapegoats to punish for massive war crimes that can no longer be hidden. But the greatest terrorist states’ minor critique of Rajapaksa’s government for “possibly” committing war crimes is only a symbol of critique, which allows these false “democracies” to maintain a public stance, in order to obtain votes from people who can be beguiled that they are really concerned about the human rights of any people. This is the perennial Human Rights Geo-Political Game.

ALBA cannot help but know this is so. They know that the US-UK-France-Israel and others in their alliance have all along supported Sri Lankan chauvinist governments with money, intelligence, surveillance, armaments, military boats and aircraft.

The progressive governments must have forgotten the Marxist principle of self-determination, the very moral principle of the right to life, the right to equality. What would the current government of Cuba mean today about what Fidel Castro told author-photographer Lee Lockwood?

Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are our enemies… Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.¹

What do Cuba and ALBA governments think today of Lenin and Marx on the matter of self-determination? In Lenin’s 1916 theses, “The socialist revolution and the right of nations to self-determination”, he wrote:

Victorious socialism must achieve complete democracy and, consequently, not only bring about the complete equality of nations, but also give effect to the right of oppressed nations to self-determination, i.e., the right to free political secession.

Today this would mean that since the proclaimed socialist state of Sri Lanka—led by a self-proclaimed coalition of socialists, communists, Trotskyists, Maoists, Buddhist monks—refuses to grant equal rights to Tamils and maintains discrimination in language, religion, education and jobs it is necessary that the Tamils achieve self-determination through “free political secession”.

Karl Marx, who lived so many years in England and is buried there, supported national independence for Ireland and did so in the interests of the socialist movement of the British workers. Marx wrote in a letter, April 9, 1870: “It is [Britain’s oppression of Ireland] the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite their organization, it is the secret of which the capitalist class maintains its power.”

This is exactly the situation for the past six decades in Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese workers have been fooled by the Sinhalese ruling class’ promulgation of racism and chauvinism, and the religious system of castes, to discriminate against Tamils. And Tamils have not been insightful enough to try to create working class and solidarity alliances with other ethnic and religious groups.

6. The peoples’ whistle blowing medium Wikileaks is a major factor in our knowing as much as we do today about the crimes of state. These communicators, especially those under attack by the terrorist governments—Julian Assange and Bradley Manning—must be supported. If our joint enemy succeeds in crushing them we will all suffer because of it.

Why is it, then, that there are so few of the 99% who are actually engaged in anti-capitalist action? Why do most of the workers, the poor and disenfranchised still cling to supporting one or another of the capitalist political parties?

The answer(s) could lie in a lack of confidence in our selves as worker leaders. We place too great a reliance on authorities be they religious or spiritual gurus or political leaders. India, for example, is still a hot bed of authoritarianism, which I witnessed recently during my book tour. The caste system is as thoroughly racist as apartheid. It is absolutely maniacal that racism is practiced within the same race or nationality or religion. This self-defeating practice is capitalism’s greatest weapon to divide and conquer. Socialism is absolutely impossible as long as people fall into the self-defeating trap of perpetuating castes and discrimination of one ethnic group over another.

We must realize that government leaders, and most religious-spiritual leaders, are not like us. They are well paid by our taxes, and many skim money from the public tills and under-the-table deals. They do not suffer materially. They are not unemployed or homeless. We must drop the illusion that they will save us.

There are positive struggles

Despite my despair of the inhumanity of humanity we do have some positive movements underway now. The Mondragon cooperatives in Spain is a possible vehicle for the transition from capitalism to socialism, at least the workers are also owners and decision-makers, which is more than socialist states accomplished. The Bolivian indigenous culture to Live Well, and not to live better—never content with just enough—is another equalitarian movement. Another great step forward is that of Occupy Wall Street. The OWS has extended into many US cities and a few other countries. In one important way, it is more advanced than the movements I was part of in the 1960s-70s. Our movements were usually single-issue oriented. Only a minority of us held socialist or communist views and we could not organize any significant movement for socialism. The OWS starts from the logic that it is capitalism that is the true culprit. This movement has to move out to the working class and convince them of this reality. I know many are making efforts.

Then we have Arab Spring. Here are millions of people literally risking their lives, willing to be killed while fighting through non-violent actions a democratic form of rule with jobs and food for the majority who are poor. I am not referring to Libya, which is a different struggle—one mainly rooted in war lord clans seeking national power supported by the imperialists. They were successful in aborting the desires of the initial protestors who were, in fact, positively influenced by the masses in Tunisia and Egypt. Even though two brutal dictators were thrown out, the capitalist system led by the army and corporations are still in control. The US-NATO’s key ally Saudi Arabia is used to brutally put down protestors in Bahrain. Today, the situation in Syria is most complicated. All sorts of forces are at play and there is no clear revolutionary force fighting for justice and equality midst the clash of national and foreign powers’ manipulations.

The Human Rights Game!

As we meet, the 19th session of the so-called Human Rights Council is meeting. Nothing will come out of this farce to favor the Tamil people. The US had hoped that Rajapaksa would ease real critique of his war crimes by adopting his own Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission’s mild findings and recommendations, and that he would say so at this HRC session. But the arrogant king of the lions did not feel compelled to lift even that finger. He has had all the support he needs from the west and genocidal Zionist Israel all these years, and in latter years from India, Russia, China and Iran. But western governments live in an historical conjuncture where they need to raise the façade of protecting human rights, in order to pacify their populations and to conduct “humanitarian operation” wars for profit and global domination.

Unlike in previous years, however, the US now feels like pushing the human rights button a bit more firmly since it has lost its hope of obtaining access to Trincomalee harbor for a naval base. The rising super-power China already obtained its naval-commercial port at Hambontota, and it looks like either it or the former super-power Russia will be granted the Trincomalee port too.

The latest information is that the US will introduce its own resolution regarding Sri Lanka in the last week of the HRC session (March 19-23). It purportedly will call upon the government to implement “the constructive recommendations in the LLRC report and additionally to take immediate steps to…address serious allegations of violations of international law by initiating credible and independent investigations and prosecutions of those responsible for such violations.”

As in the special HRC session in May 2009, the US and its European allies are calling upon Sri Lanka’s government to police itself. But this time, given its loss of favoritism, the US has added that it should initiate “independent investigations”, albeit the US does not back the UN’s own expert panel report calling for “an international independent investigation”.

There is a fine line between the government’s own LLRC and what the US is calling for but there is much fanfare in the world community of geo-politics. Cuba-ALBA, and the Non-Aligned Movement of 113 nations generally, resist, understandably enough, when the major imperialist state and its allies among the former colonial powers demand that they do this or that. Cuba-ALBA lands had long been forced to bow to these demands. While Cuba-ALBA are not terrorist states as are the US-EU-NATO states, they have fallen into the trap of “an enemy of my enemy is my friend”. What they fail to recognize, or admit, is that the western powers are not the only terrorist states. They fall into the double morality trap of backing the sovereignty of all Third World governments no matter how they treat their populations. Sri Lanka government is a terrible violator of human rights, and not just against the Tamils, but also against Muslims, the indigenous tribes, and it also exploits Sinhalese workers, the poor, and lower castes.

Cuba has told Sri Lanka that it “extends its utmost support to Sri Lanka at the 19th Summit of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.” The Cuban ambassador to Sri Lanka who conveyed this message of President Raul Castro is named Nursia Castro Guevara, of all names. She stated that her government “vehemently rejects fake allegations on human rights against Sri Lanka”.

It is immoral, it is a shame that Cuba totally dismisses the testimony of thousands of eye witnesses to and victims of mass murders, rapes, incarceration; and then dismiss as well serious reports by international organizations, including the findings of the UN expert panel on accountability, the videos broadcast by Channel Four, the diplomatic correspondence leaked by Wikileaks.

My statements here must not be taken out of context and misinterpreted, as Sri Lankan officials and some Cuba-ALBA solidarity people have done, to represent my position as one of siding with the US. I have not supported US governments for half-a-century.

I predict that the majority on the HRC will vote against the US’s mild resolution to be put forth and they will do so, in part, because of opposition to the US’s constant human rights abuse in many parts of the world.

But the fact that the US will lose its resolution will result in a victory for it. That nothing will occur at the HRC to force the hand of Sri Lanka’s war crimes will be used by the “democratic” West to pontificate against Cuba-ALBA, NAM, Russia, China, Iran complicity with war crimes. And these war crimes, which the US & co. helped create, will remain without accountability just as the US actually wishes. Otherwise, if there were a real investigation, the US’s own dirty linen could be exposed. Yet for many millions of unaware people in the US, the West generally, and elsewhere, it will seem as though these governments are the good guys fighting the bad guys—communists and former communists, and “colored third world” governments. It should mean a lot of votes for the puppet president of the US.

What can be done!

Tamils must not rely on the greatest terrorist in the world to help them. The Yankees offer no help without dire costs. The United States of America kills tens of millions; tortures hundreds of thousands; starves hundreds of millions. We must be aware that since World War 11, the US has invaded or intervened militarily 160 times in 66 countries. At present they are murdering people in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, and until recently in Libya where their allies continue murdering people. They arm some Syrian rebel elements and prepare to invade Iran, or let Israel do so.

Without US support to Israel, the Palestinians would be a free people today. Zionist Israel commits genocide against the Palestinian people. It offered Mossad intelligence, great amounts of weaponry, fast Dvora naval attack craft, Kfir killer aircraft and even pilots to Sri Lanka to murder the Tamils. After the end of the war, Sri Lanka sent its military chief-of-staff, Donald Perera, to Israel as its ambassador as a reward for Zionist assistance. He told the largest Zionist daily, Yedioth Abornoth,: “I consider your country a partner in the war against terror,” thus coupling terrorism with the Palestinians’ struggle for their homeland and the Tamils’ right to exist in peace and equality. He also supported the cold-blooded murders in international waters, on May 31, 2010, of nine Turkish solidarity activists bound for Gaza with survival supplies.

I believe that your organizations must create grass roots organizations and discuss these realities. You have to abandon false hopes and stop wasting time lobbying terrorist states. You need to discuss these realities with people’s grass roots and indigenous organizations and unions in Latin America, Palestine and elsewhere where people are struggling for sovereignty, for liberation. You must explain to them your history, why you had to take up arms and fight for separation, for an independent nation. They have to hear of your suffering, of your struggles, why Tamil Eelam, political separation is a necessity when ruling powers will not grant a people their basic democratic and equal rights.

The progressive governments have won majority votes for new constitutions in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela that grant equal rights to their indigenous peoples. In Bolivia, for instance, under the new constitution there are four official national languages, three of them are indigenous as well as Spanish. If these people could know you simply want these same rights, they might listen to you and stop backing Sri Lanka.

Tamils, stand up to all terrorist states, which also support the terrorist state of Sri Lanka!

We must work for a worldwide boycott of Sri Lanka and join in the boycott of Israel.

We must communicate with other people who are struggling for their rights and join forces.

We must join with others to combat the growing racism-fascism in the West against Muslims and Arabs.
We must prove the case of genocide against Tamils as did the International War Crimes Tribunal during the war against Southeast Asians. We could ask the Permanent People’s Tribunal—which found that Sri Lanka committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during its sessions in Dublin, Ireland, January 2010—to take up such an investigation.

We have wandered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes; we are many races and nationalities. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together to live in peace and harmony.

Che Guevara would be on our side today!

1. Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel, New York, 1967.

— Associated Press, February 3, 2012

It’s unfortunate and disturbing that Bradley Manning’s attorneys have chosen to consistently base his legal defense upon the premise that personal problems and shortcomings are what motivated the young man to turn over hundreds of thousands of classified government files to Wikileaks. They should not be presenting him that way any more than Bradley should be tried as a criminal or traitor. He should be hailed as a national hero. Yes, even when the lawyers are talking to the military mind. May as well try to penetrate that mind and find the freest and best person living there. Bradley also wears a military uniform.

Here are Manning’s own words from an online chat: “If you had free reign over classified networks … and you saw incredible things, awful things … things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington DC … what would you do? … God knows what happens now. Hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms. … I want people to see the truth … because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”

Is the world to believe that these are the words of a disturbed and irrational person? Do not the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Geneva Conventions speak of a higher duty than blind loyalty to one’s government, a duty to report the war crimes of that government?

Below is a listing of some of the things revealed in the State Department cables and Defense Department files and videos. For exposing such embarrassing and less-than-honorable behavior, Bradley Manning of the United States Army and Julian Assange of Wikileaks may spend most of their remaining days in a modern dungeon, much of it while undergoing that particular form of torture known as “solitary confinement”. Indeed, it has been suggested that the mistreatment of Manning has been for the purpose of making him testify against and implicating Assange. Dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for Julian Assange’s execution or assassination. Under the new National Defense Authorization Act, Assange could well be kidnapped or assassinated. What century are we living in? What world?

It was after seeing American war crimes such as those depicted in the video “Collateral Murder” and documented in the “Iraq War Logs,” made public by Manning and Wikileaks, that the Iraqis refused to exempt US forces from prosecution for future crimes. The video depicts an American helicopter indiscriminately murdering several non-combatants in addition to two Reuters journalists, and the wounding of two little children, while the helicopter pilots cheer the attacks in a Baghdad suburb like it was the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia.

The insistence of the Iraqi government on legal jurisdiction over American soldiers for violations of Iraqi law — something the United States rarely, if ever, accepts in any of the many countries where its military is stationed — forced the Obama administration to pull the remaining American troops from the country.

If Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today, as are the many hundreds/thousands of American soldiers guilty of truly loathsome crimes in cities like Haditha, Fallujah, and other places whose names will live in infamy in the land of ancient Mesopotamia.

Besides playing a role in writing finis to the awful Iraq war, the Wikileaks disclosures helped to spark the Arab Spring, beginning in Tunisia.

When people in Tunisia read or heard of US Embassy cables revealing the extensive corruption and decadence of the extended ruling family there — one long and detailed cable being titled: “CORRUPTION IN TUNISIA: WHAT’S YOURS IS MINE” — how Washington’s support of Tunisian President Ben Ali was not really strong, and that the US would not support the regime in the event of a popular uprising, they took to the streets.

Here is a sample of some of the other Wikileaks revelations that make the people of the world wiser:

• In 2009 Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano became the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which plays the leading role in the investigation of whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons or is working only on peaceful civilian nuclear energy projects. A US embassy cable of October 2009 said Amano “took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded the [American] ambassador on several occasions that … he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”
• Russia refuted US claims that Iran has missiles that could target Europe.
• The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of the inquiry.
• A discussion between Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and American Gen. David H. Petraeus in which Saleh indicated he would cover up the US role in missile strikes against al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh told Petraeus.
• The US embassy in Madrid has had serious points of friction with the Spanish government and civil society: a) trying to get the criminal case dropped against three US soldiers accused of killing a Spanish television cameraman in Baghdad during a 2003 unprovoked US tank shelling of the hotel where he and other journalists were staying; b )torture cases brought by a Spanish NGO against six senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general Alberto Gonzales; c) a Spanish government investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; d) a probe by a Spanish court into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for American extraordinary rendition (= torture) flights; e )continual criticism of the Iraq war by Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero, who eventually withdrew Spanish troops.
• State Department officials at the United Nations, as well as US diplomats in various embassies, were assigned to gather as much of the following information as possible about UN officials, including Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, permanent security council representatives, senior UN staff, and foreign diplomats: e-mail and website addresses, internet user names and passwords, personal encryption keys, credit card numbers, frequent flyer account numbers, work schedules, and biometric data. US diplomats at the embassy in Asunción, Paraguay were asked to obtain dates, times and telephone numbers of calls received and placed by foreign diplomats from China, Iran and the Latin American leftist states of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. US diplomats in Romania, Hungary and Slovenia were instructed to provide biometric information on “current and emerging leaders and advisers” as well as information about “corruption” and information about leaders’ health and “vulnerability”. The UN directive also specifically asked for “biometric information on ranking North Korean diplomats”. A similar cable to embassies in the Great Lakes region of Africa said biometric data included DNA, as well as iris scans and fingerprints.
• A special “Iran observer” in the Azerbaijan capital of Baku reported on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff, Mohammed Ali Jafari, allegedly got into a heated argument with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press.
• The State Department, virtually alone in the Western Hemisphere, did not unequivocally condemn a June 28, 2009 military coup in Honduras, even though an embassy cable declared: “there is no doubt that the military, Supreme Court and National Congress conspired on June 28 in what constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup against the Executive Branch”. US support of the coup government has been unwavering ever since.
• The leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party — neutral, pacifist, and liberal Sweden, so the long-standing myth goes — visited the US embassy in Stockholm and asked for advice on how best to sell the war in Afghanistan to a skeptical Swedish public, asking if the US could arrange for a member of the Afghan government to come visit Sweden and talk up NATO’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Afghan children, and so forth. [For some years now Sweden has been, in all but name, a member of NATO and the persecutor of Julian Assange, the latter to please a certain Western power.]
• The US pushed to influence Swedish wiretapping laws so communication passing through the Scandinavian country could be intercepted. The American interest was clear: Eighty per cent of all the internet traffic from Russia travels through Sweden.
• President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy told US embassy officials in Brussels in January 2010 that no one in Europe believed in Afghanistan anymore. He said Europe was going along in deference to the United States and that there must be results in 2010, or “Afghanistan is over for Europe.”
• Iraqi officials saw Saudi Arabia, not Iran, as the biggest threat to the integrity and cohesion of their fledgling democratic state. The Iraqi leaders were keen to assure their American patrons that they could easily “manage” the Iranians, who wanted stability; but that the Saudis wanted a “weak and fractured” Iraq, and were even “fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government”. The Saudi King, moreover, wanted a US military strike on Iran.
• Saudi Arabia in 2007 threatened to pull out of a Texas oil refinery investment unless the US government intervened to stop Saudi Aramco from being sued in US courts for alleged oil price fixing. The deputy Saudi oil minister said that he wanted the US to grant Saudi Arabia sovereign immunity from lawsuits
• Saudi donors were the chief financiers of Sunni militant groups like Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, which carried out the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
• Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, hired investigators to unearth evidence of corruption against the Nigerian attorney general in order to persuade him to drop legal action over a controversial 1996 drug trial involving children with meningitis.
• Oil giant Shell claimed to have “inserted staff” and fully infiltrated Nigeria’s government.
• The Obama administration renewed military ties with Indonesia in spite of serious concerns expressed by American diplomats about the Indonesian military’s activities in the province of West Papua, expressing fears that the Indonesian government’s neglect, rampant corruption and human rights abuses were stoking unrest in the region.
• US officials collaborated with Lebanon’s defense minister to spy on, and allow Israel to potentially attack, Hezbollah in the weeks that preceded a violent May 2008 military confrontation in Beirut.
• Gabon president Omar Bongo allegedly pocketed millions in embezzled funds from central African states, channeling some of it to French political parties in support of Nicolas Sarkozy.
• Cables from the US embassy in Caracas in 2006 asked the US Secretary of State to warn President Hugo Chávez against a Venezuelan military intervention to defend the Cuban revolution in the eventuality of an American invasion after Castro’s death.
• The United States was concerned that the leftist Latin American television network, Telesur, headquartered in Venezuela, would collaborate with al Jazeera of Qatar, whose coverage of the Iraq War had gotten under the skin of the Bush administration.
• The Vatican told the United States it wanted to undermine the influence of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in Latin America because of concerns about the deterioration of Catholic power there. It feared that Chávez was seriously damaging relations between the Catholic church and the state by identifying the church hierarchy in Venezuela as part of the privileged class.
• The Holy See welcomed President Obama’s new outreach to Cuba and hoped for further steps soon, perhaps to include prison visits for the wives of the Cuban Five. Better US-Cuba ties would deprive Hugo Chávez of one of his favorite screeds and could help restrain him in the region.
• The wonderful world of diplomats: In 2010, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown raised with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the question of visas for two wives of members of the “Cuban Five”. “Brown requested that the wives (who have previously been refused visas to visit the U.S.) be granted visas so that they could visit their husbands in prison. … Our subsequent queries to Number 10 indicate that Brown made this request as a result of a commitment that he had made to UK trade unionists, who form part of the Labour Party’s core constituency. Now that the request has been made, Brown does not intend to pursue this matter further. There is no USG action required.”
• UK Officials concealed from Parliament how the US was allowed to bring cluster bombs onto British soil in defiance of a treaty banning the housing of such weapons.
• A cable was sent by an official at the US Interests Section in Havana in July 2006, during the run-up to the Non-Aligned Movement conference. He noted that he was actively looking for “human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess”. [Presumably to be used to weaken support for Cuba amongst the member nations at the conference.]
• Most of the men sent to Guantánamo prison were innocent people or low-level operatives; many of the innocent individuals were sold to the US for bounty.
• DynCorp, a powerful American defense contracting firm that claims almost $2 billion per year in revenue from US tax dollars, threw a “boy-play” party for Afghan police recruits. (Yes, it’s what you think.)
• Even though the Bush and Obama Administrations repeatedly maintained publicly that there was no official count of civilian casualties, the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs showed that this claim was untrue.
• Known Egyptian torturers received training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
• The United States put great pressure on the Haitian government to not go ahead with various projects, with no regard for the welfare of the Haitian people. A 2005 cable stressed continued US insistence that all efforts must be made to keep former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the United States had overthrown the previous year, from returning to Haiti or influencing the political process. In 2006, Washington’s target was President René Préval for his agreeing to a deal with Venezuela to join Caracas’s Caribbean oil alliance, PetroCaribe, under which Haiti would buy oil from Venezuela, paying only 60 percent up front with the remainder payable over twenty-five years at 1 percent interest. And in 2009, the State Department backed American corporate opposition to an increase in the minimum wage for Haitian workers, the poorest paid in the Western Hemisphere.
• The United States used threats, spying, and more to try to get its way at the crucial 2009 climate conference in Copenhagen.
• Mahmoud Abbas, president of The Palestinian National Authority, and head of the Fatah movement, turned to Israel for help in attacking Hamas in Gaza in 2007.
• The British government trained a Bangladeshi paramilitary force condemned by human rights organisations as a “government death squad”.
• A US military order directed American forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis.
• The US was involved in the Australian government’s 2006 campaign to oust Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.
• A 2009 US cable said that police brutality in Egypt against common criminals was routine and pervasive, the police using force to extract confessions from criminals on a daily basis.
• US diplomats pressured the German government to stifle the prosecution of CIA operatives who abducted and tortured Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen. [El-Masri was kidnaped by the CIA while on vacation in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He was flown to a torture center in Afghanistan, where he was beaten, starved, and sodomized. The US government released him on a hilltop in Albania five months later without money or the means to go home.]
• 2005 cable re “widespread severe torture” by India, the widely-renowned “world’s largest democracy”: The International Committee of the Red Cross reported: “The continued ill-treatment of detainees, despite longstanding ICRC-GOI [Government of India] dialogue, have led the ICRC to conclude that New Delhi condones torture.” Washington was briefed on this matter by the ICRC years ago. What did the United States, one of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of torture in the past century, do about it? American leaders, including the present ones, continued to speak warmly of “the world’s largest democracy”; as if torture and one of the worst rates of poverty and child malnutrition in the world do not contradict the very idea of democracy.
• The United States overturned a ban on training the Indonesian Kopassus army special forces — despite the Kopassus’s long history of arbitrary detention, torture and murder — after the Indonesian President threatened to derail President Obama’s trip to the country in November 2010.
• Since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country.

Fidel Castro (age 85) urged those assembled to a moral duty to prevent the extinction of humankind and challenge the expanding predations of neo-liberal global capitalism. He expressed concern for the inevitable collapse of Wall Street and the international monetary system. Paper money is worthless without backing from gold or other assets, Castro asserted. Environmental destruction is classless in that eventually all will suffer—both the rich and the poor—if neo-liberal capitalism continues on its rampart global destruction, he professed.

Castro’s main message was clear. Cuban socialism is an international example of a humanitarian economy in the world. “We have over 80,000 doctors,” he said, and “we are currently training 830 Pakistani medical students and many others from around the world.”

Fidel Castro, reverently referred to as “Commandante” by many of those present, was flanked by the Cuban Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, and the president of the Cuban Book Institute, Zuleika Romay. The participants in the encounter were invited guests to the 2012 International Cuban Book Fair that ran from February 10 to 19 in Havana.

The nine-hour session went from 1:00 PM until after 10:00 PM, with only two short coffee breaks. Fidel gave extended responses during the event, commenting on the presentations, asking questions, and recalling the history of the Cuban revolution and Cuba’s humanitarian efforts over the past fifty plus years. Some 40 people presented briefings on their concerns. The lies and propaganda of the corporate/capitalist media were important themes for the day. One participant remarked how the global corporate media seeks to create a monoculture of the mind inside the capitalist countries.

As an invited author for the International Cuban Book Fair, I was honored to participate in the discussions held with the “Commandante.” His energy is inspiring and his command of history and contemporary issues is phenomenal. Castro had serious health issues a few years back, but remains mentally alert. He walked with assistance from his bodyguards, but remained fully participatory in the nine-hour session.

Cuba is an international example of the potentialities of socialism, and an ongoing symbolic challenge to marketplace capitalism. In the United States there is a continuing propaganda drumbeat against the Cuban revolution. Castro is often described as a military dictator repressing his people and blocking freedoms in Cuba. But this description ignores some undisputed social advances under his leadership that could serve as an example of what a society can do when it turns its resources to humanitarian purposes.

Contemporary neo-liberal capitalism undercuts wages, unions and social welfare, which results in the expansion of poverty, hunger, and extreme inequality. Cuba is a demonstration that humanitarian socialism can work for the masses. Cuba is the number one organic farming country in the world. Cuba has full employment, zero starvation, and some of the best health care in the world. Cuba’s life expectancy is equal to the United States and education up through university is paid for by the state for all students.

As a media-reform advocate, participant and observer, I watched tens of thousands of young people arrive at the International Book Fair in the old Spanish fort overlooking downtown Havana. These are multi-generations of people who have never suffered media advertisements. Three University of Havana literature majors, with whom I spent a full day, laughed hysterically when I asked them if they wanted a McDonald’s Happy Meal. They represent a people who accept the equality of socialism and collective growth of human betterment, and will strongly defend their way of life if necessary. As literature majors they have completed three years of Latin, and are starting classical Greek. They have had courses in historical and modern Latin American and European literature, and art. Their university education costs them nothing, and the government provides all textbooks and living expenses.

After the collapse of the USSR, Cuba lost most of it subsidies from the socialist block of nations. The early 1990s were a difficult transition. This was when Cuba opened it doors to those who wanted to leave. Some 30,000 people choose to move to the United States. Yet, ten million people choose to stay and build the independent socialist country that Cuba is today. Several other South American countries, notably Venezuela and Ecuador, have taken note of Cuba’s successes and are moving in a similar direction seeking socialist equality.

Some in the US believe that when the senior Cuban leadership from the 1959 revolution passes away, US corporations and displaced Cubans abroad will waltz back into Havana to return capitalism to the island. It is very clear to me, and many contemporary observers, that multiple generations of socialist Cubans will never allow this to happen.

Until the past few weeks it looked as though the “international community” (US, UK-Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan), the east (Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran), the Middle East-Libya/Africa) and the progressive South (Cuba-ALBA+, South Africa)were content with ignoring Sri Lanka’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

This tragedy was not even placed on the agenda despite the UN’s “Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” delivered to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, March 31, 2011. The panel determined that both the Sri Lankan government-military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE/Tigers) had most likely committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. It called for an independent international investigation into credible allegations leveled at the state. The LTTE was crushed by May 18, 2009 and no longer exists.

On the agenda for the upcoming 19th session are 80 reports and missions with 40 addendums concerning about 50 countries. None deal with Sri Lanka, not even under section E, “Combating impunity and strengthening accountability, the rule of law and democratic society.” The 18th HRC session (May-June 2011) had also avoided placing the matter on the table despite the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Navi Pillay) request while the Secretary-General was/is silent.

While there would be no accountability, the “Human Rights Game” requires a façade of concern. At the end of last January, US State Department officials Thomas Melia and Lesley Taylor met with a Tamil citizen group in Jaffna to tell them what to expect at the 19th session. Eighteen notes of the meeting were taken by participants and sent to Tamilnet.

The key points were: “There is no possibility of a resolution” [concerning the UN expert panel and war crimes issue]. This is due, partially, to the lack of “sufficient pressure” from the affected people. What can be expected is a positive reference to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) report conducted by appointees of the Sri Lankan government. While the US may ask the Rajapaksa family government to implement the recommendations the Commission made, which it has done nothing about in the three months since its delivery, the US will do nothing to “antagonize the GOSL” (Government of Sri Lanka) nor is it interested in “instituting an accountability mechanism”.

It may be that high ranking members of the Sinhalese government were not so keen even with this minor pressure to adopt its own commission’s report.

Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission

Led by former Attorney General C.R. de Silva, the eight Rajapaksa appointees on the LLRC did not address possible war crimes and crimes against humanity by the government. The commission of inquiry into the time of ceasefire (2002) and the end of the war found no government or military entities culpable that required any process of accountability. It did, however, poke a hole in the government’s constant litany that “no civilians were killed” by it, and implied that some security forces might have caused some deaths and injuries of civilians although there had been no intent to cause harm. It stated that numerous citizens’ testimonies related to disappearances. It admitted that there may have been some “bad apples” but no systematic atrocities took place.

The LLRC report’s major significance is its recommendations that the north and east be demilitarized, that paramilitary groups be dismantled, that a degree of devolution of local power to Tamils take place, and that the police departments be made a separate institution from the military.

Regarding the last point, there are more military and police today—300,000 —than during the war and all are under the command of the Minister of Defence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, one of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s brothers. G. Rajapaksa uses one-fifth of the state budget, $2 billion. About 40 members of the Rajapaksa family hold government, parliamentary and key institution posts.

Following the Jaffna meeting with a Tamil civilian group, the US initiated meetings with Sri Lanka government officials with the aim of having them step in line. Three leading US officials—Marie Otero, under secretary of state for democracy and human rights; Robert Blake, assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs and former ambassador to Sri Lanka; and Stephen Rapp, ambassador-at-large for international war crimes—traveled to Sri Lanka to let the GOSL know what was expected. Its arrogance was becoming an embarrassment to the Human Rights Game.

The Tamil coalition of political parties, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), must also pay attention. While it has long demanded that accountability of war crimes committed be addressed, some members also call for the LLRC recommendations to take precedence. One significant instance is the confusion caused by two Alliance leading MPs, R. Sampanthan and M.A. Sumanthiran, who told US’s man, Stephan J. Rapp, on February 7, that the TNA wanted an independent inquiry, accountability and “meaningful” devolution of power. One week later, Sumanthiran stated to BBC that the “TNA backs a domestic process to implement the LLRC recommendations. We ask for an international probe only after a failure at that.”

At the same time, a natural ally with the Tamils, South Africa’s government, signaled approval of the LLRC report and recommended the government implement the recommendations. It did say that the LLRC should have delved into accountability. Just the year before, the African National Congress called upon the UN to implement an investigation recommended by the panel of experts.

Perhaps the Rajapaksa brothers were still balking because the media reported, February 10, that Secretary of State Hiliary Clinton sent a letter explaining what the Sri Lanka government must do:

1. Submit an action plan with time frames to establish implementation of the LLRC;
2. Consent agreement to be signed between the government and the TNA;
3. Release General Sarath Fonseka, the key general victor over the LTTE, from prison, where Rajapaksa sent him over differences and because Fonseka challenged him in elections, something that the US might want to see happen again.

For emphasis the US threatened to reveal voice recordings of Defence Secretary G. Rajapaksa and field commanders in which he instructed them to kill all senior members of the LTTE even if they carried a white flag of surrender.

Under secretary Otero told Colombo journalists that the US will support a resolution calling for the government to implement its report. She spoke favorably of Sri Lanka’s government saying the US had over the years supplied it with $2 billion, much of it in military assistance to fight the Tigers and prevent a separate Tamil nation.

“The United States has long been a friend of Sri Lanka; we were one of the first countries to recognize the LTTE as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, in 1997,” she said.

Human Rights Game and the Players

1. The western US-EU-Israel-India axis
2. The eastern Russia-China-Pakistan-Iran semi-alliance
3. The Middle East/Africa parts of the Non-Aligned Movement
4. The progressive Latin American NAM area

Many of these governments, especially the western and eastern ones, have directly supported the various Sinhalese chauvinist governments with money and credits, military equipment, intelligence, military training and mercenaries.¹

In the writing mentioned above,¹ of the states materially and military supporting Sri Lanka, I inadvertently left out Russia, which has sold weapons and military aircraft to Sri Lanka governments over the years. Even after the war in 2010, during which hundreds of thousands of Tamils were suffering in concentration camps, Russia offered Sri Lanka $300 million in credit to buy military aircraft and armaments, among other items. Only $500,000 was allocated for “relief”.

There has not been much or any economic or military aid from Group 3 but these governments support Sri Lanka and oppose not only the guerrilla warfare but the very demand for an independent nation within the state of Sri Lanka. That is what Tamil Eelam means and what, until the end of the war, almost all Tamils in Sri Lanka wanted, including political parties that did not take up arms. Most people in Tamil Nadu, India, and the rest of the Diaspora sought the same.

Group 4 is caught in an ideological bind—between solidarity with oppressed peoples and solidarity with third world sovereign states—but concludes in condemning the Tigers for terrorism, ignoring the victimized civilian Tamils, and politically supporting the Sri Lanka government. In the May 26, 2009 HRC resolution, the Cuba-led majority praised S.L. for its “commitment” “to the promotion and protection of all human rights”; congratulated it for freeing Tamil civilians from the terrorist Tigers; reaffirmed “respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka”.

The Western group opposed this resolution for its geo-political reasons. It asked Sri Lanka to conduct its own investigation and the LLRC is the result.

So, what I think will happen at the 19th session is that there will be no talk about the UN expert panel report or independent investigations into accountability. Some NGOs disagree with me and think that the US will press for accountability.

In my view, the Rajapaksa’s government will present a “National action plan for the protection and promotion of human rights” in conjunction with the LLRC. This will please the US-EU-India axis. Israel may not take any position believing, perhaps, that the Rajapaksan absolute arrogance and unwillingness to do anything was the best course. This course is its’ own against the Palestinians.

If for some odd reason, Sri Lanka does not add implementations into its action plan, there will then be a Group 1 resolution demanding it to do so. The session will end either with the passage of such a resolution or, if Sri Lanka still balks then its ALBA-NAM allies, being the majority on the HRC, will vote down any western approved ploy.

Either way, the Human Rights Game will conclude (for now) thusly:

Group 2 will look gray in its lack of critique of Sri Lanka, its do-nothing approach. Group 3 can contend simply that it supports all 113 NAM governments. Group 4, the socialist-communist and progressive-led governments of Latin America, and especially Cuba-ALBA, will have egg on their faces for having only praised the brutal Sinhalese chauvinist government and not played any Human Rights role in favor of the civilian Tamils. They have only played the Geo-Political Game and done so in a staid manner: the enemy of my enemy is my friend type.

However the play unfolds, I predict that the western group will come out looking like the good guys in the Human Rights Game. The eastern and southern groups will especially look like the bad guys.

This will be the view most westerners, including many progressives, will take. For many voters in the US, Obama will look like the hero on the white horse in the White House.

Sri Lanka-Tamil conflict can also be viewed in the context of the Arab Spring and the role that Group 1 plays in diverting the uprisings to suit its imperial needs. Knowing little of the reality, most liberal-progressive-left westerners think Group 1’s role in Libya was best for the Human Rights Game, and also with the tragedy in Syria where complications are similar to those in Libya.

What should be clear to thinking people, to people who seek real human rights and justice, is that almost no government wants authentic accountability judged upon a friendly government because it could be its turn next.

If there were true accountability spread around how would Group 1 look led by the US with its long history of invading weaker countries for their resources and for political control, committing war crimes including systematic torture? What about accountability for the two-three million Iraqis killed since US attacks on that sovereign nation from 1991 to the present? What about accountability of the “coalition of the willing” for mass murder and seizure of Afghanistan? What about Obama accountability for seven wars for oil-$ and global domination (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya, Uganda); and Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people? What about genocide in Rwanda where the “peacekeeping” mission of the US-UK-France played a major role? Then there is giant China and minority Tibet being overrun with Chinese just as Zionists overrun Palestine and Sinhalese do the same in Tamil’s traditional homeland in the north and east.

This appears to be the view also of at least one of the three international organizations representing Tamils rights and seeking a Tamil Eelam. The Transnational Government for Tamil Eelam issued its news release concerning the upcoming HRC session, February 17:

This dismal failure in the position taken by the US and several other governments to address the crucial issue of justice is a source of grave disappointment to the Tamils”…”Today, again, the world’s governments are disregarding their moral and legal obligations by focusing exclusively on Sri Lanka’s own LLRC Report, which has been rejected outright not only by the Tamil people…

It would be a fallacy to imagine that the very power structure which stands accused of these heinous crimes will now begin a process to bring its own members to justice. Therefore, we perceive the leading governments’ choice to focus exclusively on the LLRC Report amounting to an attempt to derail the mounting international clamor for formal international investigations on Sri Lanka.

Less clear in my eyes is what Cuba-ALBA thinks it achieves from the Human Rights Game by entirely denying Tamils’ suffering. These governments do not mistreat their own nationalities, ethnic groups or religious peoples and, unlike many governments in Groups 1-3, they are not terrorist states. It is also understandable that they are critical of any interference by Group 1, with all its hypocrisy and its subversion against almost all of Latin America. One might think that Bolivia and Venezuela could be skittish about Tamil Eelam because there are groups there that want to create their own separate nation. But these are small groups that are orchestrated by comprador capital aligned with the US and have nothing to do with discrimination against any nationality, ethnic group or religion.

I think that Che Guevara would understand the need for solidarity with the Tamil people. He would be on their side today!

In reality, Rajapaksa’s stonewalling criticism of his regime’s war crimes and his systematic denial of truth is working. Groups 1, 2 and 3 tell Rajapaksa to make a little concession and the Human Rights Game continues. The show must go on!

Out of the negative comes the positive

Although impunity for war crimes will continue, genocide be ignored, and an independent nation a pipedream, there are positive developments.

1. Media attention of the Tamils’ plight was garnered by the whistle-blowing medium Wikileaks, which began leaking correspondence between the US Department of State and hundreds of diplomatic missions around the world on November 28, 2010. Initially Wikileaks convinced five core mass media to use the raw data and produce articles. Subsequent to releases of many files about the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by “cablegate”, hundreds more media picked up revelations of massive governmental lying and corruption, and crimes of many types including war crimes, not the least committed by United States governments. 3,166 of the 251,287 cables concerning Sri Lanka war crimes and obtained by Wikileaks—perhaps through brave Bradley Manning—are from the US Embassy in Colombo.

The Boston Globe reported, December 9, 2010: “No foreign leader fared worse in the cables released by Wikileaks than Sri Lanka’s Mahinda Rajapaksa”, referring to US Ambassador Patricia Butenis implications of his role in war crimes.

Minister of Economic Development Basil Rajapaksa, one of the President’s brothers, candidly remarked, according to Butenis’ January 15, 2010 cable, “I am not saying we are clean; we could not abide by international law—this would have gone on for centuries, an additional 60 years.”

Minister of Defence Gotabhaya Rajapaksa admitted the same to US Senate Foreign Relations staff members. Ambassador Butenis implicated all the Rajapaksa brothers in government as well as other senior civilian and military leaders in conducting war crimes.

World attention concerning the war crimes committed by the Sinhalese chauvinist government(s) has occurred because of the alternative medium Wikileaks but also due to a group of Sinhalese and Tamil journalists who escaped from Sri Lanka and formed the organization and website www.jdslanka.org. The Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka obtained a short video of 17 frames taken by a Sri Lanka soldier showing eight or nine naked prisoners bound and blindfolded being executed at Kilinochchi. JDS presented the film to UK’s Channel 4. After forensic verification of the film, which was taken January 2, 2009, Channel 4 broadcast it on August 25, 2009. Then in June 2011, Channel 4 broadcast the devastating documentary, “Sri Lanka Killing Fields”.

2. Despite the GOSL maintaining a “zero tolerance policy on torture,” the United Nations Committee against Torture (CAT) has determined that torture is apparently accepted and practiced by the government. In its November 28, 2011 report on Sri Lanka it was found that many allegations of torture and ill-treatment were common, also “enforced disappearances, sexual violence, unacknowledged detention” [as well as] “threats to civil society, journalists, lawyers, and other dissenting voices.”

CAT Rapporteur Ms. Felice Gaer asserted that Sri Lanka has the world’s largest number of disappearances. Sri Lankan cabinet advisor and previous Attorney General Mohan Peiris conceded that of the 6,000 people arrested annually, there were “only 400 torture allegations”.

CAT underlined “the prevailing climate of impunity” and “the apparent failure to investigate promptly and impartially wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed.”

CAT also criticized the LLRC for its “apparent limited mandate” and “alleged lack of independence”.

While the US government has a long history of torturing people and even offers instructions about how to torture at its “School of the Americas” in Georgia, its ambassadors do sometimes inform the Department of State when other governments conduct torture. Again thanks to Wikileaks, the world can know about a May 18, 2007 cable sent by Robert Blake, then ambassador to S.L. He reported how government-connected Tamil paramilitary groups, Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal and Eelam People’s Democratic Party, “keep critics of the GSL fearful and quite”.

These anesthetized Tamils torture and/or kill many of their own people, who sympathized with the Tigers or who seek basic rights from the government. The para-militarists also kidnap and sell Tamil women into prostitution and sell children into slavery. Leaders Karuna and Douglas Devananda were former leading Tiger guerrillas who now enjoy government posts. Karuna even joined the leading government party and became a minister.

3. On September 16, 2011, sixteen NGOs asked the HRC president of the 19th session to invite both the GOSL and the UN Secretary-General to place the UN expert panel report on the agenda, as well as the LLRC. This is significant grass roots pressure as the groups include some of the best known, such as Amnesty, but also others from third world countries, such as the African Democracy Forum. Furthermore, the current HRC president is a woman from Uruguay, Laura Dupuy Lasserre.

Following the May 2009 HRC emergency session in which Uruguay voted for the Sri Lanka prepared resolution, a new president has been elected in Uruguay, José Mujica. Not only is he a socialist but he was a guerrilla in the Tupamaro liberation movement. Once captured, he spent 15 years in prison, some of it under torturous conditions, including two years confined at the bottom of a well. It might just be that Uruguay will press for a bit of justice.

4. One institutional voice asking for the UN expert panel report to be taken seriously is the European Parliament. In a “join motion for a resolution”, February 9, 2012, the parliament agreed to “support efforts to strengthen the accountability process in Sri Lanka”, including the establishment of a “UN Commission of inquiry into all crimes committed, as recommended” by the panel.

Although the EP has no binding powers, it can prod and further inform the public.

5. For the first time (to my knowledge) an internationally renowned Buddhist has spoken out publicly against fellow Buddhists’ treatment of Tamils in Sri Lanka. In an apparently undated letter (sometime in February 2012), Thai activist-economist-philosopher Sulak Sivaraksa has appealed to the “Sinhala Buddhists first of all to acknowledge the crimes that they committed against their own Tamil sisters and brothers and ask for forgiveness from the Tamils.

”Rejoicing at the war victories, when thousands have been killed, ‘disappeared’, maimed, raped and hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced and detained, is totally against the dhamma” [the way].

Sivaraksa has been nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize. He received the 2011 Niwano Peace Prize for furthering world peace. He is considered a “Thai institution”.

These positive points I have listed can give us some hope that more and more people are not to be fooled about who the culprits are regardless of how the world’s governments do their best not to assure accountability while maintaining impunity for their war criminals, which otherwise would mean many of their own leaders would be imprisoned.

What to do

I conclude with a few pointers about how we can go forward.

Several Tamils I have come to know tell me that Tamils from Eelam are among the “most inward looking people” while complaining that other people are not interested in their welfare.

Furthermore, most of the Tamils in the Diaspora rely on western governments, and perhaps India, to fight their battles. They ask them to have the Sri Lankan government judged, condemned and punished, and even go so far as to ask for support to create a new legal nation, that of Tamil Eelam within the state of Sri Lanka. But this political-economic world has no place for pipedreams and fairy tales.

I take from the many millions of righteous rebels in the Arab Spring movement—those not doing the West’s errands—as an example of what could be done. I take also from what many of us were doing in the 1960s-70s in the US and around much of the world. I take also from what the folks are doing in the Occupy Wall Street (and beyond) movement today.

1. Drop illusions of winning through political parties’ parliamentary power. Stand up to all terrorist states.
2. Organize from the grass roots. Go door-to-door. Learn and educate.
3. Use fewer speeches, fewer rallies and connect organizing with speeches and rallies..
4. Join in with other peoples’ struggles. Engage in solidarity work especially with the Palestinians whose struggle is nearly identical to your own. Israel is to Palestine what Sri Lanka Sinhalese governments are to the Tamils.
5. We must combat the growing racism/fascism in the West against Muslims and Arabs.

We have wondered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes. We are many races, ethnic groups, nationalities, religions and non-religion. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together if we are to live in peace and equality.

1. See my Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka p. 121-5 to see who financed and finances Sri Lanka’s human rights abuse. Add Russia to the long list: India, US, Israel, U.K., EU, Japan, Iran, Pakistan and the greatest war crimes contributor of them all in Sri Lanka, China.

Jose Marti was among the glorious legion of patriots who. throughout the second half of the 19th century, fought against the loathsome colonialism brandished by Spain for 300 years. Marti most clearly foresaw such a dramatic destiny and expressed this view in the last lines he would write prior to engaging in tough combat against a well-equipped and battle-hardened Spanish column. He declared that the primary objective of his struggles were “… preventing in time, by Cuba’s independence, that the United States should expand through the Antilles and pounce with that added strength on our lands of America. Everything that I have done up to now and will do in the future shall be done for this purpose.”

Today one cannot be a patriot or a revolutionary without thoroughly understanding this profound truth.

Without a doubt, the mass media, the monopoly of technical resources, and the substantial funds earmarked for misleading and making the masses mindless today represent considerable but not insurmountable obstacles.

Cuba showed that —despite being a factory of Yankee colonialism with widespread illiteracy and generalized poverty— it was possible to stand up to the country that threatened to definitively take over the Cuban nation. No one can argue that at the time there was a national bourgeoisie that was opposed to the empire. In fact, the Cuban bourgeoisie at the time had developed such close ties to the empire that, shortly following the triumph of the Revolution, it sent 14,000 unprotected children to the United States based on the horrendous lie that Cuba was to abolish parental authority. History would come to remember this event as Operation Peter Pan and as one of the worst manipulations of children for political ends ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere.

Barely two days after the triumph of the Revolution the national territory was invaded by mercenary forces —made up of former Batista soldiers and sons of landowners and the bourgeoisie— armed and escorted by the United States with ships from the US Navy fleet including aircraft carriers with equipment ready for action. The defeat and capture of almost the entire force of mercenaries in less than 72 hours, and the destruction of their planes that were operating out of Nicaraguan bases and naval transportation means, represented a humiliating defeat for the empire and their Latin American allies who had underestimated the Cuban people’s capacity to fight.

Responding to the stoppage of oil supplies from the US, the previous total suspension of traditional Cuban sugar quotas in the US market, and the ban on trade in place for more than 100 years, the USSR began to supply fuel, to buy our sugar, to trade with our country and, finally, to supply the arms that Cuba could not acquire in other markets.

The idea of a systematic campaign of pirate attacks organized by the CIA, sabotages and military actions by groups created and armed by the US, before and after the mercenary attack and that would culminate with the United States’ military invasion of Cuba, gave rise to the events that pushed the world to the brink of total nuclear war that no sides or even humanity itself would have survived.

Those events no doubt cost Nikita Jruschov his job. He had underestimated his adversary, ignored opinions and information, and did not consult his final decision with those of us who were in the frontline. What could have been a significant moral victory became a costly political setback for the USSR. For many years the US continued to commit the worst crimes against Cuba and many, such as its criminal blockade, are still carried out today.

Jruschov made extraordinary gestures to our country. At the time I did not hesitate in strongly criticizing the agreement reached with the United States without consultation. But it would be ungrateful and unjust to not acknowledge his extraordinary solidarity at difficult and decisive junctures for our people in their historic battle for independence and their revolution in face of the powerful US empire. I understand that the situation was extremely tense and that he did not want to lose a minute when he made his decision to remove the missiles and the Yankees, very secretly, agreed to not carry out their invasion.

Despite all the decades that have passed and make up more than half a century, the Cuban fruit has not fallen into Yankee hands.

Current news from Spain, France, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, England, the Malvinas and several other parts of the planet are serious and all foretell political and economic disaster due to the foolhardiness of the United States and its allies.

I will limit myself to just a few topics. I must point out that the campaign to select a Republican candidate as the possible future president of this globalized and far-reaching empire has become —I say this in all seriousness— the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been heard. But as I have things to do, I cannot dedicate any time to this topic. I knew it would be like this.

I prefer to analyze some other press dispatches that show the incredible cynicism generated by the decadence of the West. One of these reports, with amazing tranquility, tells the story of a Cuban “political prisoner” who, according to the article, died after a 50-day hunger strike. A journalist from Granma, Juventud Rebelde, radio or any other [Cuban] news agency might make a mistake writing on any given topic, but they would never make up a news story and fabricate a lie.

The article published in Granma confirms that the 50-day hunger strike did not take place. The prisoner was in jail for committing a common crime and sentenced to four years for an assault that left his wife’s face battered. The man’s own mother-in-law went to the police to request their help. All family members were aware of all the procedures taken regarding the medical care he received and were thankful of the efforts carried out by the specialist doctors who attended him. The article goes on to say that he received care at the best hospital in eastern Cuba, as any other citizen would have received. He died as a result of secondary multiple organ failure associated with an acute respiratory infection.

The patient had received all the available medical care from a country that possesses one of the best medical systems in the world and that provides these services free-of-charge, despite the empire’s blockade against our country. It simply represents a duty in a country where the Revolution proudly respects, as it always has for more than 50 years, the principles that gave it its invincible force.

Given their excellent relations with Washington, it would be best if the Spanish government went to the United States to take a look at what happens in Yankee prisons, their ruthless treatment of millions of prisoners, their electric chair policy, and the horrors committed against prisoners and public protesters.

On Monday, January 23, Granma published a full-page, hard-hitting editorial entitled Cuba’s Truths. The article details the exceptional degree of shamelessness in the latest campaign of lies launched against our Revolution by some governments “traditionally committed to anti-Cuban subversion.”

Our people are well aware of the standards that have governed over the irreproachable conduct of our Revolution since the first combat and that has never been sullied throughout more than half a century. They also know that they can never be pressured or blackmailed by their enemies. Our laws and regulations will invariably be abided by.

This is worthwhile to point out with total clarity and openness. The Spanish government and the beat-up European Union, in the midst of an acute economic crisis, should know what to abide by. It is a disgrace to read declarations from both regions in news reports that are full of shameless lies attacking Cuba. Try to save the Euro first if you can, try to resolve chronic unemployment that increasingly affects young people, and respond to the indignados who have only received attacks and constant beatings from the police.

We cannot ignore that those who currently govern in Spain are admirers of Franco, who sent members of the Blue Division along with SS and SA Nazis to kill Soviets. Close to 50,000 of them participated in the bloody attacks. In the most cruel and painful operation of that war, the Leningrad Blockade where one million Russian citizens died, the Blue Division were part of the forces that attempted to strangle the heroic city. The Russian people will never forgive that horrendous crime.

The right wing fascists led by Aznar, Rajoy and other servants of the empire must know about the 16,000 fatalities suffered by their predecessors of the Blue Division and the Iron Crosses that Hitler awarded the officials and soldiers of that division.

It is not a surprise then to see how the Gestapo police are treating the Spanish men and women who demand the right to work and bread in the country with the highest unemployment in Europe.

Why do the mass media outlets of the empire lie so shamelessly?

Those who control those media outlets are determined to deceive and make the world mindless with their gross lies, maybe believing that they represent the main recourse necessary to maintain the global system of domination and plunder, especially against those victims close to the mother country —the close to 70 million Latin Americans and Caribbean people who live in this hemisphere.

The fraternal republic of Venezuela has become one of the main targets of this policy. The reason is obvious. Without Venezuela, the empire would have imposed its Free Trade Agreement on all of the people of the continent living south of the United States; an area that holds the planet’s largest reserves of land, fresh water and minerals as well as great energy resources, which, when managed in solidarity with the other people in the world, constitutes resources which cannot and must not fall into the hands of transnationals that impose a suicidal and despicable system.

It is enough, for example, to look at the map to understand the criminal dispossession carried out against Argentina of a piece of its territory in the far south. In the Malvinas, the British employed their decadent military apparatus to assassinate inexperienced Argentine recruits dressed in summer clothing in the middle of winter. The United States and their ally Augusto Pinochet shamelessly supported England in this endeavor. Currently, with the London Olympics on the horizon, British Prime Minister David Cameron is once again proclaiming, as did Margaret Thatcher, his right to use nuclear submarines to kill Argentines. The British government is unaware that the world is changing and that the disdain felt in our hemisphere by the majority of the people against the oppressors is growing with each day.

The case of the Malvinas is not alone. Does anyone know how the conflict in Afghanistan will end? A few days ago US soldiers committed outrages against the bodies of Afghani combatants, killed by NATO drone aircraft.

Three days ago a European news agency published an article stating that Afghani President Hamid Karzai gave his support of a negotiated peace settlement with the Taliban, stressing that it must be resolved by citizens in his country. Hamid Karzai added that the peace and reconciliation process belongs to the Afghani nation and that no foreign country or organization can take away this right from Afghanis.

An article in the Cuban press written in Paris reported:

Today France suspended all its military training and support operations in Afghanistan and threatened to move up the date for the withdrawal of its troops after an Afghani soldier killed four French military officers in the Taghab valley in the province of Kapisa…Sarkozy gave instructions to Defense Minister Gerard Longuet to immediately travel to Kabul, and warned of the possibility of an early withdrawal of troops.

When the USSR and the Socialist Camp disappeared, the United States government thought that Cuba would not be able to support itself. George W. Bush had already prepared a counter-revolutionary government to preside over our country. The same day that Bush began his criminal war against Iraq, I requested that our authorities stop with the policy of tolerance towards the counter-revolutionary leaders in Cuba that had been hysterically calling for an invasion of Cuba. In reality, their actions constituted an act of treason against the Homeland.

Bush and his stupidities reigned for eight years at a time when the Cuban Revolution had already lasted for more than half a century. The ripe fruit has never fallen into the lap of the empire. Cuba will never become another force used by the empire to expand over the people of the Americas. Marti’s blood will not have been shed in vain.

I had become gravely ill on July 26, 2006, a month and a half prior to the summit, and could barely sit up in bed. Many of the most distinguished leaders who participated in the event were kind enough to visit me. Chavez and Evo visited me several times. One afternoon four visitors came by whom I will always remember: UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; an old friend, Abdelaziz Buteflika, the president of Algeria; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran; and the vice minister of Foreign Affairs and current Foreign Minister of China, Yang Jiechi, on behalf of the leader of the Communist Party and the president of China, Hu Jintao. It was really an important time for me; I was in the midst of intense physiotherapy on my right hand that I had seriously injured when I fell in Santa Clara.

With all four I spoke about some of the difficulties facing the world at the time; problems that have become progressively more complex.

During our meeting yesterday, I noted that the Iranian president was absolutely calm and tranquil, completely unconcerned about the Yankee threats and, fully confident in the capacity of his people to confront any aggression and in the effectiveness of their arms —which, in large part, they produce themselves— to inflict an unpayable price on its aggressors.

In reality, we hardly spoke about the topic of war. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was focused on the ideas he had presented at the Main Hall of the University of Havana during his conference on the struggle of humankind:

Moving towards reaching and achieving peace, security, respect and human dignity as a fundamental desire of all human beings throughout history.

I am convinced that Iran will not commit any rash actions that might contribute to setting off a war. If a war were to be unleashed, it would inevitably be completely as a result of the recklessness and congenital irresponsibility of the Yankee Empire.

I believe that the political situation surrounding Iran and the associated risks of a nuclear war that involves us all —regardless of whether one possess nuclear weapons— are extremely delicate because they threaten the very existence of our species. The Middle East has become the most troubled region on the planet, the same region that produces the energy resources vital for the world’s economy.

The destructive power and the mass sufferings caused by some of the weapons used in World War Two led to a strong movement to ban weapons such as asphyxiating gas and others. Nevertheless, conflicting interests and the huge profits made by arms manufacturers led to the production of crueler and more destructive weapons; modern technology has now added the means and material to build weapons that if used in a world war would lead to extinction.

I support the opinion, undoubtedly shared by all those with a basic sense of responsibility, that no country big or small has the right to possess nuclear weapons.

They never should have been used to attack two defenseless cities such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing and irradiating with horrible and long-lasting effects hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, in a country that had already been militarily defeated.

If fascism indeed forced the allied nations against Nazism to compete with this enemy of humanity in the production of such weapons, once the war ended and the United Nations was created, the first duty of this organization should have been to prohibit nuclear weapons without exception.

However, the United States, the strongest and richest power, forced the rest of the world to follow its lead. Today, they have hundreds of satellites that spy and monitor the entire world from outer space. Their naval, air and land forces are equipped with thousands of nuclear weapons; and they control the world’s finances and investments at their whim via the International Monetary Fund.

Analyzing the history of each Latin American nation, from Mexico to Patagonia, by way of Santo Domingo and Haiti, one can observe that each and every country, without exception, have suffered for 200 years, from the beginning of the 19th century up until today. And, in one way or another, they are increasingly suffering the worst crimes that power and force can commit against the rights of a people. Brilliant Latin American writers are emerging in an increasing number. One of them, Eduardo Galeano, author of the book Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that describes the aforementioned, has just been invited to open the prestigious Casa de Las Americas Awards as a recognition to his outstanding body of work.

Events happen incredibly fast; but technologies report them to the public even faster. On any given day, like today, important news comes out a dizzying pace. A cable report dated from January 11 states:

The Danish presidency of the European Union confirmed on Wednesday that a new series of more severe European sanctions against Iran, because of its nuclear program, will be discussed on January 23. The new sanctions will not only target the oil industry but also the Central Bank.

During a meeting with international journalists, Danish Foreign Minister Villy Soevndal said that “We will increase sanctions against the oil industry in addition to sanctions against financial structures.” This clearly demonstrates that, in order to impede nuclear proliferation, Israel can go on accumulating hundreds of nuclear warheads while Iran is not allowed to produce 20% enriched uranium.

Another article, from a respected British news agency, states that “China gave no hint on Wednesday of giving ground to U.S. demands to curb Iran’s oil revenues, rejecting Washington’s sanctions on Tehran as overstepping …”

The sheer tranquility with which the United States and civilized Europe carry out this campaign with incredible and systematic acts of terrorism is enough to shock anybody. Just look at these lines reported by another important European news agency:

The murder on Wednesday of Iranian nuclear specialist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan [a scientist at the Natanz nuclear plant] was the fourth attack to kill a leading scientist in the country in almost exactly two years.

On January 12, 2010:

Massoud Ali Mohammadi, a particle physics professor at Tehran University is killed when a booby-trapped motorcycle explodes outside his home in the capital.

On November 29, 2010:

Two attacks target leading Iranian nuclear scientists on the same day. Majid Shahriari, a key member of Iran’s Atomic Energy Agency, is killed in Tehran by a limpet bomb attached to his car. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi Davani is also targeted by a bomb attached to his car, but escapes.

The car was parked in front of the Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran where both men worked as professors.

On July 23, 2011:

Gunmen shoot dead Dariush Rezaei-Nejad, a senior scientist who is reportedly associated with the defense ministry, and wound his wife as they waited for their child outside a Tehran kindergarten.

On January 11, 2012 —the same day that Ahmadinejad travelled from Nicaragua to Cuba to give a conference at the University of Havana—, scientist Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, “a deputy director at the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, is killed in a car bomb blast outside the [Allameh Tabatabai] University in east Tehran.” As in previous years “Iran once again accused the United States and Israel.”

The killings represent a systematic and selective slaughter of brilliant Iranian scientists. I have read articles by known Israeli sympathizers who write about crimes carried out by Israeli intelligence services in cooperation with the United States and NATO as if they were the most normal occurrence.

At the same time, Moscow news agencies report that “Russia warned that in Syria a similar scenario is developing as to that in Libya, and added that this time the attack will be launched from neighboring Turkey.

The secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said the West wants to ‘punish Damascus not as much for repressing the opposition, but because it is unwilling to sever ties with Tehran.

…NATO members and some Persian Gulf states, operating according to the Libya scenario, intend to move from indirect intervention in Syrian affairs to direct military intervention…This time the main strikes forces will not be provided by France, the U.K. or Italy, but possibly by neighboring Turkey.

Washington and Ankara are now assumed to be negotiating a “no-fly” zone over Syria, where Syrian armed insurgents can be trained and concentrated, added Patrushev.

News is not only coming out of Iran and the Middle East, but also from other parts of Central Asia near the Middle East. These reports show the great complexity of the problems that can arise from this dangerous region.

The United States has been led by its contradictory and absurd imperial policy to get involved in serious problems in countries such as Pakistan, whose borders with Afghanistan were drawn up by the colonialists without taking into account culture or ethnicities.

In Afghanistan, which defended its independence against English colonialism for centuries, drug production has multiplied in the wake of the Yankee invasion. Meanwhile, European soldiers, supported by drone airplanes and armed with sophisticated US weapons, carry out deplorable massacres that increase the people’s hatred and ward off any possibilities of peace. All this and other dirty actions are also reported by Western news agencies.

WASHINGTON, January 12, 2012 – US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta called the actions of four U.S. marines who urinated on corpses in Afghanistan “utterly deplorable” The video of the act was circulated in the Internet.

I have seen the footage, and I find the behavior depicted in it utterly deplorable…

This conduct is entirely inappropriate for members of the United States military and does not reflect the standards of values our armed forces are sworn to uphold…

In reality, Panetta neither confirms nor denies the action, and anyone, including the Secretary of Defense himself, may harbor doubt.

But it is also extremely inhumane that men, women and children, or an Afghani combatant fighting against the foreign occupation, be murdered by bombs dropped by drone planes. Another very serious incident: dozens of Pakistani soldiers and officials who safeguarded the country’s borders have been killed by these bombs.

Afghani President Karzai stated that the outrage committed against the bodies was “simply inhumane.” He asked for the US government “to urgently investigate the video and apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”

Meanwhile Taliban spokespersons declared that “over the last ten years, hundreds of similar acts have been carried out that were not reported…”

One even feels sorry for those soldiers, thousands of kilometers away from their family, friends and country, sent to fight in countries that they might not have even heard of during their school days, where they are assigned the task of killing or dying to enrich transnational companies, arms manufacturers and unscrupulous politicians who each year squander funds needed to feed and educate the uncountable millions of hungry and illiterate people around the world.

Many of these soldiers, victims of the trauma suffered, end up taking their own lives.

Is it an exaggeration to say that world peace is hanging by a thread?

The UN estimated international donors gave Haiti over $1.6 billion in relief aid since the earthquake (about $155 per Haitian) and over $2 billion in recovery aid (about $173 per Haitian) over the last two years.

Yet Haiti looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years. Over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, most of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.

It turns out that almost none of the money that the general public thought was going to Haiti actually went directly to Haiti.  The international community chose to bypass the Haitian people, Haitian non-governmental organizations and the government of Haiti.  Funds were instead diverted to other governments, international NGOs, and private companies.

Despite this near total lack of control of the money by Haitians, if history is an indication, it is quite likely that the failures will ultimately be blamed on the Haitians themselves in a “blame the victim” reaction.

Haitians ask the same question as many around the world “Where did the money go?”

Here are seven places where the earthquake money did and did not go.

One.  The largest single recipient of US earthquake money was the US government.  The same holds true for donations by other countries.

Right after the earthquake, the US allocated $379 million in aid and sent in 5000 troops.  The Associated Press discovered that of the $379 million in initial US money promised for Haiti, most was not really money going directly, or in some cases even indirectly, to Haiti.  They documented in January 2010 that thirty three cents of each of these US dollars for Haiti was actually given directly back to the US to reimburse ourselves for sending in our military.  Forty two cents of each dollar went to private and public non-governmental organizations like Save the Children, the UN World Food Program and the Pan American Health Organization.  Hardly any went directly to Haitians or their government.

The overall $1.6 billion allocated for relief by the US was spent much the same way according to an August 2010 report by the US Congressional Research Office: $655 million was reimbursed to the Department of Defense; $220 million to Department of Health and Human Services to provide grants to individual US states to cover services for Haitian evacuees; $350 million to USAID disaster assistance; $150 million to the US Department of Agriculture for emergency food assistance; $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration fees, and so on.

International assistance followed the same pattern.  The UN Special Envoy for Haiti reported that of the $2.4 billion in humanitarian funding, 34 percent was provided back to the donor’s own civil and military entities for disaster response, 28 percent was given to UN agencies and non-governmental agencies (NGOs) for specific UN projects, 26 percent was given to private contractors and other NGOs, 6 percent was provided as in-kind services to recipients, 5 percent to the international and national Red Cross societies, 1 percent was provided to the government of Haiti, four tenths of one percent of the funds went to Haitian NGOs.

Two.  Only 1 percent of the money went to the Haitian government.

Less than a penny of each dollar of US aid went to the government of Haiti, according to the Associated Press.   The same is true with other international donors.  The Haitian government was completely bypassed in the relief effort by the US and the international community.

Three.   Extremely little went to Haitian companies or Haitian non-governmental organizations.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research, the absolute best source for accurate information on this issue, analyzed all the 1490 contracts awarded by the US government after the January 2010 earthquake until April 2011 and found only 23 contracts went to Haitian companies.  Overall the US had awarded $194 million to contractors, $4.8 million to the 23 Haitian companies, about 2.5 percent of the total.  On the other hand, contractors from the Washington DC area received $76 million or 39.4 percent of the total.  As noted above, the UN documented that only four tenths of one percent of international aid went to Haitian NGOs.

In fact, Haitians had a hard time even getting into international aid meetings.  Refugees International reported that locals were having a hard time even getting access to the international aid operational meetings inside the UN compound.  “Haitian groups are either unaware of the meetings, do not have proper photo-ID passes for entry, or do not have the staff capacity to spend long hours at the compound.”  Others reported that most of these international aid coordination meetings were not even being translated into Creole, the language of the majority of the people of Haiti!

Four.  A large percentage of the money went to international aid agencies, and big well connected non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

The American Red Cross received over $486 million in donations for Haiti.  It says two-thirds of the money has been contracted to relief and recovery efforts, though specific details are difficult to come by.  The CEO of American Red Cross has a salary of over $500,000 per year.

Look at the $8.6 million joint contract between the US Agency for International Development (USAID) with the private company CHF for debris removal in Port au Prince. CHF is a politically well-connected international development company with an annual budget of over $200 million whose CEO was paid $451,813 in 2009. CHF’s connection to Republicans and Democrats is illustrated by its board secretary, Lauri Fitz-Pegado, a partner with the Livingston Group LLC.  The Livingston Group is headed by the former Republican Speaker-designate for the 106th Congress, Bob Livingston, doing lobbying and government relations.  Ms. Fitz-Pegado, who apparently works the other side of the aisle, was appointed by President Clinton to serve in the Department of Commerce and served as a member of the foreign policy expert advisor team on the Obama for President Campaign.  CHF “works in Haiti out of two spacious mansions in Port au Prince and maintains a fleet of brand new vehicles” according to Rolling Stone.

Rolling Stone, in an excellent article by Janet Reitman, reported on another earthquake contract, a $1.5 million contract to the NY based consulting firm Dalberg Global Development Advisors.  The article found Dalberg’s team “had never lived overseas, didn’t have any disaster experience or background in urban planning… never carried out any program activities on the ground…” and only one of them spoke French.  USAID reviewed their work and found that “it became clear that these people may not have even gotten out of their SUVs.”

Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton announced a fundraising venture for Haiti on January 16, 2010.  As of October 2011, the fund had received $54 million in donations.  It has partnered with several Haitian and international organizations.  Though most of its work appears to be admirable, it has donated $2 million to the construction of a Haitian $29 million for-profit luxury hotel.

“The NGOs still have something to respond to about their accountability, because there is a lot of cash out there,” according to Nigel Fisher, the UN’s chief humanitarian officer in Haiti.  “What about the $1.5 to $2 billion that the Red Cross and NGOs got from ordinary people, and matched by governments?  What’s happened to that?  And that’s where it’s very difficult to trace those funds.”

Five.  Some money went to for profit companies whose business is disasters.

Less than a month after the quake hit, the US Ambassador Kenneth Merten sent a cable titled “THE GOLD RUSH IS ON” as part of his situation report to Washington.  In this February 1, 2010 document, made public by The Nation, Haiti Liberte and Wikileaks, Ambassador Merten reported the President of Haiti met with former General Wesley Clark for a sales presentation for  a Miami-based company that builds foam core houses.

Capitalizing on the disaster, Lewis Lucke, a high ranking USAID relief coordinator, met twice in his USAID capacity with the Haitian Prime Minister immediately after the quake.  He then quit the agency and was hired for $30,000 a month by a Florida corporation Ashbritt (known already for its big no bid Katrina grants) and a prosperous Haitian partner to lobby for disaster contracts.  Locke said “it became clear to us that if it was handled correctly the earthquake represented as much an opportunity as it did a calamity…”Ashbritt and its Haitian partner were soon granted a $10 million no bid contract.  Lucke said he was instrumental in securing another $10 million contract from the World Bank and another smaller one from CHF International before their relationship ended.

Six.  A fair amount of the pledged money has never been actually put up.

The international community decided it was not going to allow the Haiti government to direct the relief and recovery funds and insisted that two institutions be set up to approve plans and spending for the reconstruction funds going to Haiti.  The first was the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) and the second is the Haiti Reconstruction Fund (HRF).

In March 2010, UN countries pledged $5.3 billion over two years and a total of $9.9 billion over three years in a conference March 2010.  The money was to be deposited with the World Bank and distributed by the IHRC.  The IHRC was co-chaired by Bill Clinton and the Haitian Prime Minister.  By July 2010, Bill Clinton reported only 10 percent of the pledges had been given to the IHRC.

Seven.  A lot of the money which was put up has not yet been spent.

Nearly two years after the quake, less than 1 percent of the $412 million in US funds specifically allocated for infrastructure reconstruction activities in Haiti had been spent by USAID and the US State Department and only 12 percent has even been obligated according to a November 2011 report by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The performance of the two international commissions, the IHRC and the HRF has also been poor.  The Miami Herald noted that as of July 2011, the $3.2 billion in projects approved by the IHRC only five had been completed for a total of $84 million.  The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), which was severely criticized by Haitians and others from its beginning, has been effectively suspended since its mandate ended at the end of October 2011.  The Haiti Reconstruction Fund was set up to work in tandem with the IHRC, so while its partner is suspended, it is not clear how it can move forward.

What to do

The effort so far has not been based on a respectful partnership between Haitians and the international community.   The actions of the donor countries and the NGOs and international agencies have not been transparent so that Haitians or others can track the money and see how it has been spent.  Without transparency and a respectful partnership the Haitian people cannot hold anyone accountable for what has happened in their country.  That has to change.

The UN Special Envoy to Haiti suggests the generous instincts of people around the world must be channeled by international actors and institutions in a way that assists in the creation of a “robust public sector and a healthy private sector.”  Instead of giving the money to intermediaries, funds should be directed as much as possible to Haitian public and private institutions.  A “Haiti First” policy could strengthen public systems, promote accountability, and create jobs and build skills among the Haitian people.

Respect, transparency and accountability are the building blocks for human rights.  Haitians deserve to know where the money has gone, what the plans are for the money still left, and to be partners in the decision-making for what is to come.

After all, these are the people who will be solving the problems when the post-earthquake relief money is gone.

“To be internationalist is to pay our debt to humanity” says Fidel Castro and this can be read on many billboards in Cuba.

What is internationalism?—cooperation among people and nations, states my dictionary. The book of definitions maintains that internationalism is a principle of communism and socialism. It is the belief of ideological leaders such as Lenin, Fidel and Che.

Che wrote in his essay, “Socialism and Man”, that proletarian internationalism isn’t just a duty but a necessity. If revolutionary leaders forget this, Che wrote, the revolution will lose its inspiration and imperialism will benefit.

Che was also known for having severely criticized Soviet Union leadership for having lost its internationalism with the world’s proletariat and the Third World. Following up on Che’s critique, I find it important to criticize communist and socialist parties, and governments led by these parties, which let down people who are oppressed by, or invaded by, national or foreign powers.

Internationalism in action

1. Internationalists must support resistance fighters against invasions. Therefore, one must chastise political parties and groups that give political or moral support to those who call themselves the Iraq Communist Party as it is part of the Quisling government the USA terrorist state set in. ICP leaders live side by side the invaders in the Green Zone. That there are organizations in the United States, UK, Denmark and elsewhere, which call themselves communist or socialist parties and that cooperate with the world’s greatest terrorist state is incomprehensible, shameful, immoral and anti-internationalist.

2. The same applies to people who still support the Zionist state of Israel, which commits genocide against the Palestinian people. Millions of decent people have gotten together to support Palestinians in many ways, including Ships to Gaza. In Denmark, four groups of people have challenged the state’s terrorist laws by donating solidarity aid to the secular leftist PFLP which is part of the Palestinian resistance. Rebellion (Denmark), Fighters and Lovers, Horserød-Stuthoff Association (veterans of WWII resistance fighters imprisoned in Horserød and Stuthoff prisons), and TIB’s club (local carpenters near Copenhagen) have aided both PFLP and FARC, Colombian armed liberation movement.

3. Internationalist can not cooperate with US-NATO aggressive wars, which always have the goal of controlling that country’s economy and politics for capitalist profits. It is shameful that many experienced socialists and communists, as well as naïve progressive people, have backed up West’s big capitalist plans to take over Libya, and thus have bombed Libya back to the stone age. Denmark was one of only six countries that dropped tens of thousands of bombs on Libya, destroying much of it infrastructure, schools, hospitals…In fact, Denmark dropped more bombs on Libya than it has on any other country in its history, Afghanistan included. And the pilots were cowards as there was no resistance by Libya’s air force, already decimated.

This conflict has little to do with the Arab Spring movement. It is a conflict between internal war lords, with ordinary people involved who wished to increase democracy but who were misled by US-NATO whose forces seek to control Libya’s oil and avoid a gold-based currency that Gaddafi was promoting amongst all African countries. Now, US-NATO has placed a lackey government in Tripoli just as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

4. Internationalists must also criticize comrade governments, such as Cuba and ALBA governments in Latin America, when they make big mistakes regarding internationalism. We can’t be true comrades-solidarity activists by keeping our mouths shut when this occurs. Such is the case with their support of the brutal government of Sri Lanka, which practices genocide against the minority Tamil population. Ever since independence from Great Britain, in 1947, the majority Sinhalese governments and chauvinist Buddhist monk system has discriminated against Tamils. They have constantly been treated as second class citizens, their language and religions relegated to secondary status without national recognition. Even pogroms have been employed with the brutal murder of many thousands on various occasions. And since May 2009, following the end of a 26-year civil war, ethnic cleansing in the traditional Tamil homeland in the north and eastern areas is the rule of the day.

Cuba and ALBA have spoken only positively of their historic ties with the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to which Sri Lanka is a member, but so are 130 other nations. One cannot, in the name of protecting each nation’s sovereignty, avoid critique when one or more of these nations oppresses or conducts pogroms and genocide against part of the population. Nor can we accept as an excuse the immoral geo-political game that nearly all governments of whatever color play.

We shall also criticize Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil and other Latin American progressive governments for helping the US and France in their ouster of the only decent and only democratically elected people’s president in Haiti’s history, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These Latin American governments actually assist the US’s 2004 coup d´état against Aristide by placing occupying troops in the small country, seeking to dampen the people’s anger. These progressive governments should, instead, back up the people’s desire to bring their president back to state power, just as they sought to do for President Zelaya in Honduras where national capitalists and generals kicked him out of office, with background support once again by the United States government.

5. On the personal and organizational plain, internationalism operates when workers of a major firm ask people to boycott a product because of the mistreatment of the workers by the firm. This is the case with Coca-Cola whose workers in Colombia asked us to stop buying the “drink of the death squad” (David Rovics song), because it hires mercenaries to murder workers who seek to organize a union and struggle for collective bargaining. Workers in other countries, such as Guatemala, and farmers in India have asked the same.

It is with joy that I can state that here where we gather (carpenters’ hall in Valby, Denmark), this union is one of the few local unions and political or grass roots groups in Denmark that has boycotted Coca-Cola. This is something any and all individuals can do. It is just a soda drink. So drink something else. Boycotting Coca-Cola is just like boycotting all products from Israel and Sri Lanka. It is a simple act of solidarity, of internationalism.

Charlotte and I have just returned from a six week trip in India where two of my books (“Tamil Nation in Sri Lanka” and “Sounds of Venezuela”) were published by New Century Book House, Tamil Nadu. The Tamil book concerns the history and contemporary life of the Tamil people in that island-nation, and the need to act in solidarity with them. The Venezuela short book concerns this people’s efforts to create a better world for themselves and solidarity with all peoples. When people asked us where we are from we often replied that we are “internationalists”. Interestingly, many Indians understood our meaning and were pleased to think in terms of being brothers and sisters in the world.

This concept, and feeling, of brotherly love, of internationalism has taken off in a bigger way, in 2011, than in many decades. It started in Tunisia, and has expanded to the indignados in Spain, to the anti-capitalists in Wall Street and in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the West.

We have much to criticize and yet much to be glad for as 2012 opens. We must remember and appreciate those who set us off on this new anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist, non-violent and democratic revolution—from the martyr in Tunisia (street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi) and his Iraqi spiritual brother a bit earlier, shoe-thrower Muntazar al-Zaidi, to Occupy Wall Street protestors to Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and co-workers at Wikileaks, who helped spark it all by blowing the whistle on the war criminals. These modern-day Paris Commune resisters without arms—OWS and Occupy the World—are growing and they are presenting a vision and with it a program-in-discussion that must be studied and supported.

Internationalism is an endless struggle, an endless challenge. It does not end even when one or more of our political parties take over the governing reigns. We activists from the streets must always keep our wary eyes pinned on the leaders, regardless of their names, just as our clear eyes cast light upon humanity’s future.

Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a well-conceived and attractive book about the first weeks of the Occupy Wall Street movement that was recently published by the Left imprint Verso Books. It reads like a journal, except the entries are not from just one writer, but a collection of several. They range from the well-known like prison activist and Black Panther Angela Davis to a young activist named Manissa Mahawaral. Edited by a small group of occupiers and the editors of the journals n+1, Dissent, Triple Canopy, and The New Inquiry, this text primarily covers the scene at the Zurcotti Park encampment in Lower Manhattan where the Occupy Wall Street movement more or less began. Part diary and part reflection, some of its most compelling moments come when the younger occupiers write about various realizations they have during the course of the occupation.

My favorite anecdote of this type is from an activist involved in the Occupy movement in Oakland, CA. When she first began participating, she found the dislike of the police from certain members of the camp to be disturbing. After all, they too were part of the so-called 99%. However, after a few days in the camp and the violent police attacks on the Oakland camp and protests following the first raid on Oscar Grant Plaza, her understanding of law enforcement’s role in protecting the wealthy and powerful changed dramatically. “I am ashamed,” she writes. “I was so naive about the cops in Oakland, but even more than this I am furious… that the police are allowed to brutalize people….” It is moments like this where the Occupy movement becomes transcendent and more than the collection of individuals, groups and and encampments that it is. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of drawings and collages that are not only visually appealing but also clever statements about the essential issues involved.

The book is not just a collection observations from the frontlines. Also included are analyses of the economic reasons behind the movement from Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood and a fascinating discussion of the history of the space where Occupy Atlanta was situated. This latter piece is also one of several pieces that discusses the role of people of color in the movement.

As one of the first of many books about the Occupy movement to be published, Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America sets a high standard. One hopes it is read by many, especially among those that couldn’t or didn’t make it to an Occupy camp before the State’s onslaught on them. This movement should not die.

Hot on the heels of the aforementioned book come OR Books addition. Titled Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America, this work covers similar ground to Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America. What it lacks in graphics, it makes up for in content. Written in a continuous narrative broken into chapters, Occupying Wall Street differs from the collection of vignettes contained in the Verso Books text, while also maintaining a more or less chronological telling of the original Zurcotti Park encampment from its beginning to its eventual destruction by the police on November 15, 2011. In addition, Occupying Wall Street spends more time placing the Occupy movement in the context of the international wave of protest that has swept from Greece to Britain to Tunisia and Egypt to the United States and a multitude of other localities around the globe.

Written by a larger collective of writers who modestly call themselves Writers for the 99%, the OR Books text functions as a description of life at Zurcotti Park and within the Occupy movement over the period noted above. If Occupy! Scenes From Occupied America is a journal of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America is the literary equivalent of a wonderfully written diary. These two books are not exclusive to each other. in fact they are companion volumes that read together provide an engrossing and well-told description of one of the most hopeful protest movements to erupt in the capitalist world in decades.

The Young Lords Rise From the Pages

Speaking of attractive books to arrive recently on my bookshelf, the Haymarket Books reprint of the Young Lords 1971 book Palante: Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, 1969-1971 certainly deserves a mention. The Young Lords Party was a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican youth that organized primarily among the young and working-class residents of New York’s Puerto Rican barrios during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Borrowing some of their style from the ideologically similar Black Panthers, this group was a dominant force in barrio politics during much of their existence. Their straightforward approach to solving some of the economic and political inequities in the barrio attracted thousands of supporters in the barrio and hundreds of powerful enemies in Christie Mansion and other edifices of power in New York. When I attended briefly attended Fordham University in the Bronx from Fall 1972 through Spring 1974 one of my smoking buddies was an active member of the group. His knowledge of Marxist theory was impressive as was his commitment to the struggle in the barrio. Needless to say, he and I had many intense discussions that taught me — as no book possibly could — the colonial situation of the Puerto Rican people and helped me unlearn years of misinformation about that island nation.

Palante is a history, explanation and discussion of the Young Lords Party from the perspective of its members in 1971. There is no bourgeois nationalism repeated in these pages. Instead, in the best tradition of other revolutionary nationalism, Palante argues that cultural and social freedom for the Puerto Rican nation is inseparable from economic freedom and a socialist revolution. For those uncertain of the difference, let me quote writer Earl Ofari from a 1969 article he wrote about the two phenomena as they relate to the black people of the United States :

“Revolutionary nationalists, unlike cultural nationalists, recognize that it is impossible to resolve the problems of black people under the structure of American Capitalism. This has led Huey Newton to correctly point out that one who adheres to the philosophy of revolutionary nationalism must of necessity be a socialist. For revolutionary nationalists, by and large, take the position that in order to oppose capitalism it is mandatory that one adopt an outlook of international working class solidarity with particular emphasis on the struggles of Third World people against Imperialism.”

The Young Lords believed the same analysis applied to the situation of the Puerto Ricans.

Looking at it today, the most striking aspect of this book is not the audacious (by today’s standards) writings calling for a revolution in the United States and an independent Puerto Rico. It is the collection of photographs. Difficult to pry one’s eyes away from, the photos herein rank up there with the best photojournalism has to offer. The struggles of the young revolutionaries and the people they worked with are evident in the faces on these pages and the places and actions set down in a darkroom forty years ago. The pride of a people realizing its power and the anger of that people realizing why and who has wronged it radiates from the stark black and white images that fill the last half of this beautiful work.

Speaking to about 500 Mussolini Democrats and more than a dozen reporters at the tactically sophisticated Invertebrates For Obama think tank in Washington, Obama lashed out at “so-called progressives” clamoring for an expanded New Deal.

“Far too many Americans are looking for a hand-out, not a hand up,” he said, apparently targeting the growing Occupy Wall Street movement and its sympathizers. “The reason we must reject socialist economics is that it conflicts with our core political philosophy about the purpose of government.”

“We cannot preserve liberty for ourselves and our posterity if government fails to fulfill its obligation to sustain the free market system with trillions of dollars of bailout money for selfless Wall Street firms deemed ‘too big to fail.’” Therefore we must seek common ground with the GOP and renounce relics of the Communist era like Social Security and Medicare.” To sustained applause the president added, “I hereby do so.”

Obama called for a reform of his own health care law to include a “private option” that would allow HMOs to deport Americans without health insurance to Cuba, in hopes of bankrupting the free health care system available on the Communist-ruled island. “The cost of treating fifty million uninsured Americans should bring down the Castro brothers once and for all,” proclaimed Obama gleefully.

The president said he would grant federal aid to states expelling the medically needy to Cuba, adding that he would veto any attempt to have them treated in the U.S. “We’ve got to get beyond the idea that democratic government means doling out aid to irresponsible citizens who refuse to pull their own weight.” The president emphatically rejected appeals for government assistance from ordinary Americans. “As we all know from civics lessons the only legitimate function government has is performing those tasks that Americans cannot perform themselves – like carpet-bombing foreign nations and giving away the store to transnational corporations and international banks.”

The president went on to state that his reformed health care reform bill would prove itself a more efficient system than the universal care available through Medicare. “Obviously the market is more efficient than government,” said Obama. “I mean, how much equity is returned to stockholders under Medicare? Absolutely none! Whereas under HMOs investors are making a killing, if you’ll pardon the expression,” the president said. Asked about the much higher administrative costs under privatized care, Obama explained that those “don’t count,” because they are passed on to the public.

On issues like declaring the war in Iraq “over,” Obama portrayed himself as the candidate who goes the extra mile for peace. “George Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ in Iraq only once, while I am now working on my second final withdrawal from that liberated country,” the president said with obvious pride.

Obama also called for “staking out the middle ground” by privatizing Social Security, outsourcing the public schools to China, and handing over municipal water systems to corporate polluters in need of infusions of public capital in order to pay off fines imposed for systematically polluting the environment.

Europeans invaded the Americans and stole the lands and wealth held by native peoples for thousands of years. They enslaved black Africans who they held as slaves and even after slavery ended they kept them as second-class citizens.

Black people developed various forms of struggle including civil disobedience, sit-ins, pickets, mass rallies, propaganda, and voting for equality where possible. Another form of struggle was the Black Panther Party’s armed self-defence when attacked by Ku Klux Klan and the ruling class’ police. Another form was the Gravey Movement that called for separation from the United States, demanding territory in the south. Very much like the Tamils after the 1976 Vattukottai resolution.

In the United States millions of blacks and whites fought this racist discrimination for over a century and eventually won most basic rights but not before millions were arrested, imprisoned for long times, and many murdered. Many thousands of black people were lynched, burned alive, mutilated, tortured to death until the 1980s.

Fidel Castro: “Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are out enemies…Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.” “To be internationalist is to settle our debt with humanity.”

Che Guevara from Socialism and Man: “The revolutionary is the ideological motor force of the revolution. If he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution, which he heads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.”

I believe that these principles apply to the Tamils of Sri Lanka. I believe Che would agree with your struggle for equality and when not possible to achieve within the Sri Lankan chauvinist context, he would understand your fight for your own nationhood.

I think this is also what Lenin meant in his 1916 thesis, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”:

“Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realize the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination, that is, the right to free political separation.”

I am hurt and deeply disappointed that the government of Cuba—where I have lived and worked side by side with the people and government for eight years—as well as the socialist-progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American governments have not understood that those principles must apply to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. I got involved in solidarity with your people’s struggle because you have been so brutally treated, and because of these righteous principles expressed by Lenin, Fidel and Che. I have written critically about these governments siding with the Sinhalese governments of Sri Lanka while it denies the Tamil people those basic principles and rights, and commits genocide.

Perhaps Cuba+ have not understood the history of struggle that Tamils have undergone to win full equal rights before taking up arms. For 30 years you fought peacefully but you were met with brutal force, with pogroms/massacres of hundreds and thousands of people—even worse than that used against blacks in the US, and against Palestinians by Israelis. And, unfortunately, it was not only the governments that have done this against Tamils but also misguided Buddhist monks who betray the peaceful, coexistence values of Buddhism.

Your people’s organizations must meet and discuss these realities with the communist and socialist parties and with people’s grass roots and indigenous organizations in Latin America and elsewhere. You must explain to them your history, why you had to take up arms and fight for separation, for an independent nation. They have to hear of your suffering, of your struggles, why Tamil Eelam is a NECESSITY. You must remind them what they say about international solidarity, about what Lenin meant about political separation when the ruling powers will not grant a people their basic democratic and equal rights.

The progressive governments have won majority votes for new constitutions in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela that grant equal rights to their indigenous peoples. In Bolivia, for instance, under the new constitution there are four official national languages, three of them are indigenous ones as well as Spanish. The same equalitarian development is happening in several progressive, pro-socialist governments in Latin America. If these people could know you simply want these same rights, they would listen to you and stop backing Sri Lanka. But they have been misguided because when they hear the worst terrorist in the world—the United States of America government—raise a little finger of possible criticism that maybe the Sri Lanka government should investigate itself to find some official scapegoat for violating human rights, Cuba should react against this hypocrisy. But they must know that in this case the Sri Lanka government is a terrible violator of human rights, and not just against the Tamils, but also against Muslims, the indigenous tribes, and it also exploits Sinhalese workers and the poor, and castes.

We must understand that Cuba, and so many governments and peoples, has been victimized by the United States false accusation that it commits “human rights abuse”. Cuba has been blockaded by the US since its victory in 1959. The US tried to overthrow the new revolution in April 1961. It brought the entire world to the brink of a nuclear war in October 1962. The US has sabotaged Cuba, murdered and handicapped thousands of its citizens; it even infiltrated bacteriological diseases in its livestock, its grains and sugar cane.

What has Cuba done to “deserve” this murderous aggression? It has done what Big Capital does not do, what imperialists will not do. It has introduced full and free education and health care. It has assured every citizen food and shelter. No one starves. 80% of its people own their own homes after paying the state simply what it actually costs to build them.

It has organized an excellent system of disaster management in which people and their animals are evacuated before hurricanes hit the island nation. And more often than not no one is killed, and their livestock is saved. That is not what happens in the United States especially in the areas where blacks and poor people live and are struck by natural disasters.

Cuba came to the aid of Angola when attacked by apartheid South Africa. Cuba, alongside with the new Venezuela, comes to the aid of tens of millions of people in scores of land around the world with their medical care, curing even blindness, and educating people to read and write, offering sports and technical assistance. Cuba has more doctors serving the international arena than is offered by all the governments in the United Nations. Cuba does not export war and torture, disease and starvation. It exports “human capital”.

Tamils in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka Tamil refugees here and in the Diaspora should not rely on the greatest terrorist in the world to help them. The Yankees offer no help without humiliating costs. We must be aware that since World War 11, the US has invaded/intervened militarily 160 times in 66 countries. We must understand that now with a black-faced puppet president of Big Capital, the imperialists are at war in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and now Uganda. They kill tens of millions; they torture hundreds of thousands; they starve hundreds of millions.

US’s staunch ally, Zionist Israel commits genocide against the Palestinian people. It offered Mossad intelligence, great amounts of weaponry, killer aircraft and even pilots to Sri Lanka, in order to murder the Tamils. After the end of the war, May 2009, Sri Lanka sent its military chief-of-staff, Donald Perera, to Israel as its ambassador, a reward for Zionist assistance. He told the largest Zionist daily, Yedioth Abornoth: “I consider your country a partner in the war against terror,” thus coupling terrorism with the Palestinians’ struggle for their homeland and the Tamils’ simple right to exist in peace and equality.

Perera spoke proudly of having “a great relationship with your military industries and with Israel Aerospace industries.”

Perera spoke about the murder, on May 31, 2010, of nine Turkish solidarity activists bound for Gaza with survival supplies: “I can understand that Israel had to protect itself.”

Perhaps because of the complexity of geo-politics, the history of standing for sovereignty of the member nations of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), the leaders of Cuba and ALBA lands (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America) cannot support the goal of a separate nation within Sri Lanka. But they could be convinced to chastise the Sri Lankan government for its atrocities against the Tamil people, and the other oppressed people under the chauvinist Sinhalese leadership. They could see within the context of their moral ideology that it is only right that Tamils must have equality and the basic right to exist without fear of murder and takeovers of their homes and lands. Your peoples’ organizations should remind these pro-Palestinian governments that it is only Israel that supports the US blockade against Cuba; that it is the US and Israel that lead the tiny opposition to Palestine’s right to be a member of the United Nations.

Regardless of whether Cuba has achieved socialism—it is a long process after all and there is so much destruction and subversion coming from the Yankee imperialists—the Cuban people and the government are still worthy of our love and support. They have conducted no wars or torture against any people and they have helped many millions. It is now time that they are approached by all your organizations and become convinced to come to the aid of their natural brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka—the oppressed Tamil people.

We have wandered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes; we are many races and nationalities. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together to live in peace and harmony.

We must unite around the world and struggle for an independent international investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity against Sri Lanka government leaders.

We must call for a worldwide Boycott of Sri Lanka. Che Guevara would be on our side today!

The nativists, xenophobes, racists, and Republican Party activists and legislators who support the harsh new immigration bill (HB 56) targeting undocumented migrants in the state are delighted.

The flight of thousands of Latinos from the state regardless of legal status is not an unforeseen consequence of the legislation — it’s the entire point. As Lindsey Lyons, the mayor of Albertville, Alabama, put it in an interview with National Public Radio: “[W]e’re going to see an exodus of those moving to other states that don’t have any pending legislation.” The point is not immigration reform; the point is to make the growing Latino population go away.

For the law’s authors and backers, the state of Alabama is living a fantasy they have long wished, and worked, to see play out on a national level. Importantly, the fantasy of a vanishing Latino population is not strictly a legal one. It is, in fact, a cultural project, and it has a long history.

Culture, Power and Illusion

How do you make tens of millions of Latinos disappear from the national public sphere? This is a spectacular trick, on the order of illusionist David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty vanish in front of a live television audience. Copperfield’s 1983 deception relied on the cover of darkness and strategic manipulation of the audience’s perspective. The trickery that seeks the relative public invisibility of Latinos in the U.S. is performed in broad daylight using a combination of rhetorical manipulations and legislative measures.

We are all familiar with the rhetoric by now. The constant, drum beat-like association by anti-immigrant nativists of the terms “illegal” and “Mexican” and “immigrant,” amplified and reproduced in the news media and in demagogic political discourse, has created a semantic cloud obscuring the presence, in plain view, of diverse millions of Latinos in American public life.

A restaurant owner in my Minneapolis neighborhood who had emigrated (legally) from Ecuador told me about being questioned by police while taking a summer walk with his son. The police officers’ dogged assumption was that he was Mexican, and they seemed to believe that he had entered the U.S. illegally.

“I am from Ecuador,” he told me, “but all they could see was an illegal Mexican.” The Statue of Liberty, one might say, disappeared before his very eyes.

The public illusion in this instance results from cultural messaging that denies Latinos full cultural citizenship – the right to be different and to bring that difference into the public process. Theoretically, all citizens have equality under the law. In practice, however, public cultural norms are structured by an often unspoken hierarchy of values that privileges some citizens over others.

Think about how in a public meeting the fellow citizen who speaks an English accented by non-English phonetics might carry less moral authority with her audience than the fluent English speaker, despite being equally understandable and possessing the same legal rights. Or think of how a man wearing a West African dashiki might be assumed by many in a U.S. audience to be a non-citizen. Social hierarchies of race, class, gender, and age are reflected in recognition, or denial, of full cultural citizenship to different social groups.

Markers of cultural difference in the body politic can be, and often are, converted into signs of second-class status. This is an important intersection of culture and politics in the U.S., and one exploited actively by those who would make Latinos disappear from the public sphere.

The targeting of immigrants with the rhetorical hammer of “illegal,” pounds into place a chain of equivalences in the public mind. Where Latinos are concerned, the anti-immigrant anvil and hammer of “illegal” and “Mexican” seek to remake brown skin, the Spanish language, and other markers of Latino visibility as signposts of the outer boundaries of American public life. “They,” non-Latinos are being told, are not like “us.”

Behind the media sensationalism and electoral campaign posturing lays a politics of cultural containment and subordination, and of civic divisiveness. As the facile external markers of Latino identity are transformed into the civic equivalent of scarlet letters, Latinos are implicitly rendered less legitimate as public actors, and less visible as fellow citizens. In the process, any resources particular to their cultural heritage that they might bring to the national project are categorically segregated and expelled from the public sphere.

Spanish is preempted as a language of legitimate civic engagement. Regions of the country are subtly (and not so subtly) dispossessed of their rich Hispanic heritage in the minds of many Americans, who are encouraged to forget the pluricultural history etched into Spanish-language place names like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

The U.S. public’s ignorance about Puerto Ricans — who are born United States citizens since passage of the Jones Act in 1917, although without the right to vote in U.S. elections — is deepened and extended to another generation. Bilingualism becomes suspect, rather than being recognized as a tremendous national economic and cultural resource and a civic virtue. Important forms of public culture — murals, corridos, pachangas — are marked as Other. Voices critical of U.S. foreign policy — with personal experience of the human rights implications for Salvadorans, for Guatemalans, and others, of military funding or trade agreements — are silenced.

And my Ecuadorian-American neighbor finds himself caught up in a mass cultural deception that denies him full cultural citizenship, despite his undeniable legal rights. He is denied the power to define his own public presence, his own identity as a fellow citizen, and to be recognized as fully American.

Laws, Politics, and Culture

The dark magic worked by manipulative public rhetoric has its limits, thankfully. People can endure, and respond to, name-calling. And public discourse is never a one-sided affair. My Ecuadorian-American neighbor, for example, has undoubtedly told his story to many of his fellow local citizens, generating a retail-level awareness that counterbalances in some measure the wholesale misrepresentation of national realities by anti-immigrant sensationalism. Educators continue to teach Spanish, and student interest in the language has grown alongside the growing number of Americans who understand the political and economic and cultural value of bilingualism.

And at some point, the anti-immigrant talk begins to say more about the speaker than about the object of the speaker’s rancor. Of the 308 million heads counted by the 2010 Census, more than 50 million, or greater than 16%, identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino. At some point, talking as if 16% of the nation doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist becomes a fool’s strategy.

This is where the policy mechanisms of the cynical anti-Latino vanishing act come into play. A confluence of xenophobic, nativist and Republican Party interests — having watched demographic changes unfold over the past two decades, and their electoral consequences begin to take hold — see an even greater need to contain Latino culture and subordinate Latino public involvement. They have learned that rhetoric alone will no longer do the trick.

Predictably, after the 2008 elections resulted in convincing victories for the Democratic Party with sizable margins of support among Latino voters, several Republican state legislatures have approved laws targeting undocumented immigrants in several states.

The Arizona state legislature in 2010 approved SB 1070, a law that criminalizes the failure to carry immigration documents and allows police to detain anyone suspected of being an undocumented migrant. (In order to make clear that the political and cultural target included Latino citizens, the Republican majority also passed a law banning the teaching of Ethnic Studies in the public schools.) In 2011, Georgia, Indiana, Utah, and South Carolina subsequently passed their own versions of the Arizona law, similarly promoting racial profiling and criminalizing social and economic interaction with undocumented immigrants.

Not to be outdone, Alabama passed HB 56, a law that, among other things, bars undocumented immigrants from attending state colleges, criminalizes “transporting, harboring, or renting property” to them, and requires public schools to verify the legal status of their students.

The laws bring state power — in the form of racial profiling — to bear on the cultural messaging that subordinates and marginalizes Latinos’ presence in the public arena. One measure of the cultural effect of the Alabama law: those Latino children who haven’t disappeared from the public schools now report they are bullied for being “illegals.”

All of these states share two key elements: First, state government is controlled by the Republican Party, and second, the 2010 Census found a dramatic growth rate among the Latino/Hispanic population that sooner or later could jeopardize Republican political dominance in the state.

Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama saw eye-popping growth rates for the Latino/Hispanic population, 96.1%, 147.9%, and 144.8%, respectively. Indiana’s growth rate for the Hispanic or Latino category was 81.7%, and Utah’s was 77.8%, nearly double the national growth rate for that sector of the population. In the case of Arizona, population growth among Latinos/Hispanics was a “mere” 46.3%, but what was likely more troubling for Republicans, racists and xenophobes, the Latino/Hispanic population had grown to represent approximately 30% of the state population.

It is difficult not to view these states’ anti-immigrant legislation as a preemptive effort to change the demographic facts for future elections, and prior to the inevitable moment in which comprehensive federal immigration policy reform provides a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million or more undocumented immigrants nationwide, principally from Mexico and Central America.

At the same time, the state-by-state anti-immigrant legislation can be viewed as a desperate effort to use the law to leverage an extended life for the cultural politics that has long sought to subordinate and diminish Latino participation in the public sphere.

Redefining America

The stakes of the present conjuncture are not just electoral and legal. The cultural parameters of U.S. public life are also in play. The long-term stakes are nothing less than the means and meaning of democratic public life in America, i.e., the question of who is allowed to speak, and how, and about what.

It is important to remember (and remind) that the cultural politics that denies Latinos equality in American public life has a long history. Current efforts to drive Latinos out of public life find common parentage in the assaults on Mexican-Americans that occurred after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the U.S.-Mexico war and called for Mexico to relinquish roughly half of its national territory to the U.S.

The 1848 Treaty included an option for U.S. citizenship for the many Mexicans who suddenly found themselves living in U.S. territory, but xenophobic and racist sentiment conspired with economic interests to drive Mexicans off their land throughout the region, and to strip them of their mining stakes in California. One of the myriad ways these interests operated on the social body to excise the Mexican-American presence was the passage of legislation that directly targeted these would-be citizens.

The “Greaser” laws (as they were called by their proponents) included an 1855 anti-vagrancy statue in California that explicitly applied to “All persons who are commonly known as ‘Greasers’ or the issue of Spanish and Indian blood… and who go armed and are not peaceable and quiet persons.” This legislative assault on the public presence of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans was preceded by the 1850 Foreign Miner’s Tax, which levied an exorbitant monthly license fee on the mining claims of the foreign-born, with the practical effect of driving Mexicans and Latin Americans (and French and Germans) off their claims in the context of the Gold Rush. Of course, the xenophobic hostility stoked against Spanish-speakers made no distinction between native-born Californios and Mexicans.

The cultural politics that aims to make Latinos disappear cannot overcome the blunt object reality of a growing population. David Copperfield could make the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear, but when the sun came up the next morning, there it was. The difference is that Copperfield wasn’t attempting to change the meaning of Liberty.

Recent nativist attempts to update the 19th century “Greaser laws” for the 21st century will not, ultimately, make Latinos literally disappear. But the trickery in this instance changes the potential meaning of America, diminishes democratic possibilities, preempts current and future potential dialogue and social relationships. Cultural resources and perspectives that Latinos could bring to the common table are diminished and sidelined. Efforts to counter the inequality these laws promote must systematically engage the cultural dimension of the struggle over American democracy.

In the past, however, many theorists of imperialism of varying political persuasion, ranging from Max Weber to Vladimir Lenin, argued that imperialism unified the country, reduced internal class polarization and created privileged workers who actively supported and voted for imperial parties.  A historical, comparative survey of the conditions under which imperialism and democratic institutions converge or diverge can throw some light on the challenges and choices faced by the burgeoning democratic movements erupting across the globe.

The Nineteenth Century

During the 19th century, European and US imperial expansion covered the world.  In tandem, democratic institutions took root, the franchise was extended to the working class, competitive parties emerged, social legislation was passed, and the working class increased its representation in the legislative chambers.

Was the simultaneous growth of democracy and imperialism a spurious correlation reflecting divergent and conflicting underlying forces, one favoring overseas conquest and another promoting democratic politics? In fact, there was a great deal of overlap between pro-imperialist and democratic politics and not simply among the elites.

Throughout the 19th and especially in the 20th century, important sectors of the labor and social democratic parties and numerous prominent leftists and revolutionary socialists, at one time or another, combined support for workers’ demands and imperial expansion.  None other than Karl Marx, in his early journalistic writings in the New York Herald Tribune critically supported the British conquest of India as a “modernizing force” breaking down feudal barriers, even as he supported (with criticism) the European revolutions of 1848.

The ruling classes, the driving force of imperialism, were divided. Some saw the democratic reforms, “citizenship”, as a means of raising mass conscriptions for imperial wars; others feared that the democratic reforms would enhance social demands and undercut the accumulation of capital and rule by the elite.  Both were right.  Along with greater popular participation came virulent modern nationalism, which fueled empire building.  At the same time  mass access to democratic rights led to heightened class organizations, which threatened or challenged class rule. Within the ruling classes, democratic institutions were seen as an arena to peacefully resolve conflicts between competing sectoral elites. But once they took a mass character they were perceived as political threats.

Imperial and class-based parties competed for voters among the newly enfranchised urban workers and rural poor.  In many cases, imperial and class allegiances “co-existed” within the same individuals.  The question of which of the two – imperialist or class consciousness – would become ‘operative’ or ‘salient’ was, in part, contingent on the success or failures of the larger competing political projects.

In other words, when imperial expansion succeeded in easy conquests resulting in lucrative colonies (especially settler colonies) democratic workers embraced the empire.  This was the case because empire enhanced trade; namely, profitable exports and cheap imports, while protecting local markets and manufacturers.  These in turn expanded employment and wages for substantial sectors of the working class.  As a result, labor and social democratic parties and trade unions did not oppose imperialism.  Indeed many supported it.

In contrast, when imperialist wars led to prolonged bloody and costly conflicts, the working class shifted from initial chauvinist enthusiasm to disenchantment and opposition.  Democratic demands to ‘end the war’ led to strikes challenging unequal sacrifice.  Democratic and anti-imperialist sentiments tended to fuse.

The conflict between democracy and imperialism became even more apparent in the case of an imperial defeat and military occupation.  Both the defeat of France in the German-French war of 1870-71 and the German defeat in the First World War led to massive democratic socialist uprisings (the Paris Commune of 1871 and the German revolution of 1918) attacking militarism, ruling class domination and the entire imperial capitalist institutional framework.

The Imperialism and Democracy Debate and “History from Below”

Historians, especially practitioners of the fashionable “history from below”, exaggerated the democratic values and struggles of the working class and understated the prolonged and deep felt support among important sectors for successful imperial expansion and conquest.  The notion of ‘inherent’ or ‘instinctual’ class solidarity is belied by the active role of workers in imperial conquest as soldiers, overseas settlers, merchant mariners and overseers.  Imperial collaborators and empire loyalists were numerous among English and French workers and, especially later, within the US labor movement.

The theoretical point is that the pre-eminence of democratic over imperial consciousness and action among workers is contingent on the practical material outcomes of imperial policies and democratic struggles.

Workers and Imperialism

Empire building makes demands on workers to produce more for less in order to export and invest profitably in colonized regions.  This led to capital-labor conflict, especially in the initial phase of imperial expansion.  As imperial rulers consolidated their control over the colonized countries they intensified exploitation of markets, labor and resources.  Imperial exports destroyed local competitors.  Profits rose, wages increased and workers turned from initial opposition toward imperialism to demanding a share of the increasing income of the export oriented manufacturers.  Labor leaders and trade unionists approved of the policies of ‘imperial preference’, which protected local industries from competition and privileged monopoly control of colonial markets.  They did so because imperial policies protected jobs and raised living standards.

Workers who were active in social struggles, blacklisted or jailed, voluntarily moved or were exiled to colonized countries.  Once settled overseas, they were given privileged access to better paying jobs as overseers, skilled employees or promoted to managerial positions.  Imperial based militant workers, once overseas, became colonial collaborators.  Many encouraged former workmates, relatives and friends to join them as successful settlers or contract workers.  The ‘domestication’ of workers and the reconciliation of democratic and imperialist sentiments was a cause and consequent of successful imperialism.

Empire Loyalism:  Not by Bread Alone

While material benefits accruing to workers from “successful imperialism” are one factor enhancing workers’ imperial consciousness, this was reinforced by symbolic gratification, the sense of being a member of the “leading country in the world” where “the sun never sets on the empire”, was equally important.  It is rare to find a country where the majority of workers express “solidarity” with the exploited miners, plantation workers or displaced peasants and indigenous small landholders in the ‘colonies’.  The stronger the hold of the colonial power, the greater the ‘colonial opportunities’, the longer the colonial ties, the deeper the economic penetration, and the stronger the sense of imperial superiority among the imperial states’ workers.

It is not surprising that the British workers, the unions and Labor Party raised few objections to the savagery of the imperial opium wars against China, the imperial-induced genocidal famines in Ireland in the 19th century and India in the 20th century.  Likewise, the French workers’ parties – Socialists especially – were in the forefront of the post WWII colonial wars against Indo-China and Algeria only turning against them in the face of imminent defeat and internal disintegration.

In the same vein, US successful colonial wars against Cuba and the Philippines, its invasions of Caribbean and Central American countries were supported by the American Federation of Labor and many ‘ordinary workers’, even as a minority of radicalized workers opposed these wars.  The ‘partial turn’ of labor against US colonial wars occurred during the Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan wars, and was a result of prolonged losses and high economic costs with no victory in sight.  It should be added that US workers, in opposing the imperial wars, expressed no solidarity with the national liberation and workers movements of the colonized countries.

Imperialism and the “True Democrats”

To argue, as some on the Left have, that imperialism does not co-exist with “true” democracy, is to argue that the last 150 years have been devoid of free elections, party competition and citizens’ rights, however abbreviated, especially over the past decade.  The reality is that imperial intervention and expansion has drawn precisely from citizens’ sense of “obligation” to uphold the democratic institutions, which has enabled imperial leaders to elicit legitimacy and active citizen support or compliance in waging bloody, even genocidal, colonial wars.

If democracy has not usually been an obstacle to imperial expansion – indeed a facilitator under certain circumstances – under what conditions have workers and citizens movements turned against imperial wars?  What has been the political response of the ruling class when the majority of the electorate has turned against imperial wars?  In other words, when the democratic institutions no longer function as vehicles for imperial policies, what gives?

From Imperial Democracy to Imperial Police State

The past ten years provide important lessons on the relation between imperialism and democracy in the United States.

Beginning with the controversial political circumstances surrounding known terrorists’ gaining access to the US and subsequently hijacking the airplanes on 9/11/2001, the US government launched two major colonial wars and numerous overt ‘clandestine’ ground and air attacks in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and other countries.  The “global war on terror”, launched under the Bush regime, and implemented by non-elected senior militarist–Zionist officials in co-operation with NATO and Israel was supported by the democratically elected Congress.  For that matter the vast majority of the electorate, influenced by an immense propaganda campaign of fear, media manipulation and lies endorsed the wars on terror.

Given the unprecedented scope and breadth of the wars, (a global war on terror), the vast increase in military spending and the huge outlays for an all encompassing internal repressive (security) apparatus (Homeland Security), a new executive-centered police state was constructed which superseded the existing democratic institution and rights of citizens.

The trajectory of imperial politics moved from early military successes to problematic prolonged occupation.  This led to escalating resistance, growing state expenditures , a deepening fiscal crises , social decay and rising political opposition.

As in the past, contemporary imperial wars that are prolonged, costly and with no decisive victory in sight, have led to citizen disenchantment, followed by increased open rejection.  The wage and salaried majorities who voted for imperial policymakers and backed their enabling legislation, including laws (Patriot Act) which suspended basic civil and constitutional rights, have turned away from the imperial agenda.  Today the democratic majority prioritize their class, economic interests, especially in the face of a prolonged recession and unemployment and underemployment of close to 20%.  Beginning in 2008-2011 endless wars and prolonged crises have set in motion a conflict between democracy and imperialism.

In other words, the democratic majority has become an obstacle to the implementation and pursuit of imperial wars.  Imperial military activity in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, etc. did not lead to quick victories, the conquest of lucrative export markets and take-over of natural resource.  Jobs were not created and no benefit accrued to employees and workers in the imperial country.  High expenditures for arms undercut public investments in labor-intensive employment in critically overdue infrastructure projects.  The small number of dangerous jobs in occupied countries was unattractive and too risky for the unemployed.

In other words, unlike most previous imperial-colonial wars, none of the plundered wealth was used to secure workers loyalty to the empire.  The burden of empire progressively undercut wage and salaried workers’ living standards.  Over time, regressive taxation gradually eroded any sense of chauvinist grandeur or superiority.  Instead citizens of the empire developed a political inferiority complex.  Faced with determined Islamic opposition and China’s rising economic power, exaggerated bellicosity among a minority and critical introspection among the majority took hold.  Popular consciousness of “something basically wrong” in Washington and Wall Street took over.  The earlier war chants and mindless flag-waving, as the armies of Empire marched to Afghanistan and Iraq, were replaced by angry defeatism directed at misleaders.  Over 80% of the public now articulates a negative view of Congress, rejecting both war parties.  Similar negative views are held toward the White House, the Pentagon and Homeland Security.

After a decade of war and four years of economic crisis, mass protests erupted.  The “Occupy Wall Street” movement puts new options on the table, displacing the imperial agenda with a powerful denunciation of the militarist-financial elite.

The executive rulers, especially the judicial, intelligence and police apparatuses increasingly implemented arbitrary police state measures.  Tens of millions are subject to surveillance by Homeland Security.  The police state intercepts billions of faxes, e-mails, web sites and taps telephone calls.  The link between imperialism and democracy broke at the point where declining empire no longer could secure the electorate’s support or compliance.

More and more bizarre terrorist plots were fabricated by the intelligence agencies.  The Iranian bomb plot against the Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington was the most primitive and crude effort to regain public support for imperial militarism in the Gulf region.  Apart from the politically influential, but infinitely small, pro-Israel Zionist power configuration, US public opinion is not distracted from its domestic agenda, its quest for jobs at home and opposition to Wall Street.

As the conflict between imperialism and democracy intensifies, the previous ‘consensus” fractured.  The White House and Congress opt for imperialism backed by a profoundly anti-democratic police state.  The majority of the electorate presses forward, utilizing their remaining democratic rights to change the political agenda from empire toward a social republic.

Conclusion

We have argued that empire and democracy have been complementary in times of ascendant imperialism.  We have shown that when wars of conquest have been short and inexpensive, and when the results have been lucrative for capital and job-creating for labor the democratic majorities joined in support of imperial elites.  Democratic institutions flourished when overseas empires provided markets, cheap resources and raised living standards.  Workers voted for imperial parties, held positive opinions of executive and legislative officials, and applauded the colonial war veterans (our troops).  Some even volunteered and joined the military.  With vast citizen support for empire, the state more or less ‘abided’ by the constitutional guarantees.  But the marriage of democracy and imperialism is not ‘structural’.  It is contingent on a series of variable conditions, which can cause a profound rupture between the two, as we are witnessing today.

Prolonged, losing, costly imperial wars that increasingly erode living standards for over a generation have undermined the consensus between imperial rulers and democratic citizens.  Early signs of this potential divergence were evident during the latter period of the Korean War, when public opinion turned against President Truman, architect of the Cold War and the US invasion of Korea.  More evidence emerged during the Vietnam War.  Faced with a prolonged, losing war, which imperiled the lives and opportunities of tens of millions of draft age Americans, millions in civilian life and the military opted to end the war and question imperial interventions.  The repressive state was still not organized sufficiently to terrorize and contain the democratic upsurge of the 1970’s.  The end of the Vietnam war represented the high point in democratic America’s quest to counter imperialism and rebuild the republic.

Subsequent small, quick, low cost and militarily successful imperial interventions in Panama, Grenada, Haiti and elsewhere did not provoke any conflict between imperialism and democracy.  Nor did imperial clandestine and surrogate wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and the Balkans elicit any significant democratic opposition since they were low cost (in lives and funding) and were not accompanied by any sharp cuts in social expenditures and incomes.

The onset of the current Afghanistan, Iraq, and global offensive wars were seen by some imperial strategists in the same light: Quick, low cost victories with few domestic costs.  One highly placed pro-Israel official in the Pentagon even argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be “self-financing” via an oil grab.

The 21st century wars turned out otherwise:  They followed the Korean-Vietnam pattern, not the Central American/Caribbean pattern.  Immensely costly, the 21st century wars have not led to quick victories and, worse still, occurred in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, without the manufacturing and market boom of the 1950’s/1960’s which had cushioned the retreat from Korea and Vietnam.

The divergence between imperialism and democracy has become acute.  Democratic dissent has increased and the police state has become more prominent and direct.  Imperialism increasingly relies on “fabricated domestic and external terror plots” to augment the powers of the repressive machinery and rule by fiat.  White House exhortations ring hollow.  The public puts less and less credence in their rulers’ claims of ‘justifiable’ arbitrary detentions, massive surveillance and extrajudicial assassinations of US citizens (and even their children).

We now face long-term, large-scale dangers, inherent in imperial democracies.  Not because of “internal contradictions” but because sooner or later imperial powers meet their match in the form of protracted struggles by anti-imperialist and national liberation movements.  Only when imperials wars take their toll on the wage and salaried majority, does the rupture between democracy and imperialism take place.  Then, and only then, are democratic forces set in motion to create a democratic republic, with social justice and without empire.

The present danger is that imperial structures are deeply embedded in all the key political institutions and are backed by an unprecedented vast and sprawling police state apparatus, called Homeland Security.  Perhaps it will take a major external political-military shock to ignite the kind of mass democratic uprising needed to transform an imperial police state into a democratic republic.  A growing sense of isolation and impotence affects the ruling regime in the face of overseas military defeats and unyielding, deepening domestic economic crisis.  The danger is that these fears and frustrations could induce the White House to attempt to regain popular support by attacking Iran under a manufactured pretext.

A US/Israeli assault on Iran will result in a world-wide conflagration.  Iran could and would retaliate.  Saudi and Gulf oil wells would go up in flames.  Vital shipping lanes would be blocked.  Gas prices would skyrocket while Asian, EU and US economies crash.  Iranian troops with their Iraqi allies would lay siege to the US garrisons in Baghdad.  Afghanistan, Pakistan and the rest of the Moslem world will take up arms.  US forces would surrender or retreat.  The war would shatter the US Treasury.  Deficits would spiral out of control.  Unemployment would double.  This likely sequence of events would trigger a massive democratic movement and a decisive struggle between an emerging republic struggling to give birth and a decaying empire threatening to drag the world into the inferno of its own demise.

Denmark elected a staunch right winger as prime minister. Denmark joined in military attacks with imperialist states against weaker states. I turned to journalist Ron Ridenour, who lives in Denmark, to give a first-hand voice to what is taking place.

I support revolution against occupation, oppression, exploitation; however, I hold that the long-term viability of a revolution must be rooted in the people — not in a personality. Therefore, I have reservations about “leaders” — for example, Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — who (besides implementing socialism for the masses) seemingly covet the esteem, if not the perks, of governmental office. Ridenour speaks Spanish, has lived in Cuba, written many books about the revolution there, so he is an informed go-to person for reflections on the revolution there and elsewhere.

Ridenour, notably, has also given voice to the very marginalized plight of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, has long been active in journalism, has his own website, and in his own words, “Besides using words in an effort to eradicate racism, inequality and wars, I have been an activist against wars, racism, chauvinism and for socialist solidarity.”

This week, I interviewed Ridenour about Denmark, Cuba, and the leaderless revolutionary stirrings against the financial elitists.

Kim Petersen: Denmark is supposed to be a peace-loving state with an envious social safety net. You pointed out in a recent article that the Danish political landscape has slanted rightwards? What caused this? And how can progressivist politics become predominant?

Ron Ridenour: The causes are several, both historical and contemporary. Leftist parties and unionists in Denmark, like people in most of the world, lost faith and hope in socialist-communist solutions due to the atrocities and corruption of Communist parties in power, and then with the fall of those governments in eastern Europe. Even those governments still calling themselves communists base their economies on capitalism today.

One of the main problems of nearly all leftist parties and governments is that they do not believe that the mass—unionists, unemployed, family farmers, students—are actually capable of ruling “sensibly.” One of the best of benevolent “dictators,” Fidel Castro, does not believe such either. Most leaders believe in themselves and not the mass. So, in fact, real socialism has yet to be attempted. No party in power has ever really begun the process of educating workers+ to use political power and then turning over power to the working class, as our ideology calls for.

Another factor, especially Danish, is a national inferiority complex. That is, “We’re just a little country, you know,” so we can’t expect to run things ourselves. This was actually a folksy saying of one of Denmark’s best known politicians, Erhard Jacobsen. For decades, Denmark relied upon Germany and since WWII it relies on the US, first for its economic Marshall Plan and since for its military might. And today Denmark is not a peace-loving state. It is involved in four wars alongside its Big Daddy.

Then there is the national complex of indifference, or “ligegladhed.” There has been a lot of charitable giving of money to the poor abroad but little engagement or true solidarity. Even the left-ish parliamentary party, Unity List (Enhedslisten), opposes support for opponents of the terrorist terror laws, or for armed resistance by the invaded of US-NATO wars.

One can never answer fully what causes policy without taking the economy into account. Danes still live comfortably economically, almost all, in relationship with others even European neighbors. I think that the left parties rely on parliamentarian politics because of this. They do not believe that significant numbers of people will actually support grass roots radical struggles. And the unions long ago aligned themselves with capitalist reformism and oppose extra-parliamentary struggles, including sustaining strikes, of any consequence. Why risk being arrested, losing your job and then your mortgage, your car or one of them simply to do the “right thing”?

How can progressive (?) politics become predominant? Well, if progressive means pushing for reformist policies within capitalism that is becoming dominant now for the two Danish so-called socialist parties in parliament. (Unity List and People’s Party/SF), and it has been so for the major Social Democratic party for decades. But if progressive means radical, then the economy has to collapse, or when it is in deep crises as it is now, then grass roots groups have to take to the streets and stay there just as is possibly happening with Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Uproar, perhaps in Spain and Greece. We have to kick the parliamentary-based politics out of our movements. We have to feel the power in ourselves and push the politicians out.

Yes, there must also be strong unions and workers must strike and/or join Occupy Wall Street. Radical-revolutionary political parties must educate and protest with sensible and morally just programs. They should not act against the more autonomous oriented grass roots groups but in parallel.

KP: This touches on the previous questions, in many countries, people scoffed that Americans could “elect” a born-again, foot-in-mouth, right-winger such as George W. Bush as president. Yet Canadians soon found themselves with Prime Minister Stephen Harper (a man to the right of Bush), and Danes wound up with Anders Fogh Rasmussen as prime minister (also a hawkish right-winger). Why do you think this is happening in much of the western world?

RR: Precisely because the left gave up actually being left. It was too difficult and most got too comfortable within the capitalist system. The left adopted the bourgeois democratic premise of making policy within parliaments whose role is to protect finance power. In Copenhagen, Wall Street is Børsen and its building is literally next door to parliament and the executive government.

When finance crises occur, you only have two sources to acquire money to pay for it: from the workers-pensioners-students or from the owners of capital and industry. The latter approach would mean that the rich will refuse to pay for their crises and so, you must nationalize their “private” property, that is, the production centers where wealth originates and the banks that manipulate the wealth for a few. But that takes guts, struggle, sacrifice.

PM Fogh Rasmussen was awarded the greater job of being the commander of NATO. He is loved by the warmongers on Wall Street and the Pentagon, and hated by the peoples who are invaded, but all the parliamentary parties here congratulated him. He should have been ostracized as well as the biggest of capitalists here, AP Møller-Mærsk, the world’s biggest shipper and a major warmonger. Instead his supermarkets, which take in half the food sales, are much of the left’s favorite stores because they are cheap.

We have to find that indignation that many Arabs have found, that some Spanish and Greeks are finding, that is part of OWS, and that us oldies had in the 60s-70s. We have to practice what we preach. Boycott the worst companies (like Mærsk and Coca-Cola…). Go on strike. Refuse to do the system’s bidding. Find our inner strength and alternative life styles. Act in solidarity with the oppressed-exploited-invaded.

KP: The progressivist image of Denmark is further diminished now with its participation in the NATO (currently headed by Fogh Rasmussen) invasion of a sovereign state. There are reports of Danish troops engaging in torture and massacres. How do you read this playing out on the streets in Denmark?

RR: Unfortunately, nothing is happening regarding these atrocities. There is one small group of pacifists who conduct a vigil in front of parliament daily since the beginning of the war against Afghanistan. But it is more of a curiosity than a threat. The anti-war movement died, in part because the Unity party dropped out of protesting because its leaders wanted “influence” with lucrative jobs in parliament. And the climate movement has so far refused to take up wars as part of their anti-pollution protests albeit wars are a major cause of pollution and adverse climate changes. I think they are just too scared of being accused of being outsiders or radicals….

KP: You hinted at a “shaky future” for the Cuban revolution. Do you see Cuba falling further away from the socialism won through the revolution? Who will stand to benefit (or lose) from Cuba’s opening to capitalism?

RR: Yes, I am afraid that what I foresaw in that piece nearly a year ago it occurring rapidly now. More and more openings for capitalism have been adopted even before the Communist party national conference body has met and decided on precise policies to propose to the state. Raul Castro as both leader of the state and the party, following his brother, has already decided. Now, private property (housing) can be bought and sold; cars can be bought in hard currency at big prices, which very few Cubans can acquire legitimately; small enterprises are encouraged to employ workers, and thereby opening up officially for exploitation of labor.

Who will benefit is a new class of small capitalists and real estate hustlers, and speculation will become widespread. Relatives of Cubans in Miami and Spain will be even more privileged than those Cubans without such remittances. Wall Street will benefit in the end, because the blockade against Cuba will be lifted in the not distant future. Other Wall Streets in the world already benefit.

KP: In a summer article on the state of the revolution in Cuba, you defined ethics partially as “We act so that no one person, race or ethnic group is either over or under another.” You added, “We struggle to create equality for all.” If, indeed, the revolution is a revolution of the people and not about a personality or personalities, what does the unbroken political “leadership” of Fidel Castro from 1959 to 2008 speak to such ethics?

You also quoted from Che that “one must have a great deal of humanity and a strong sense of justice and truth in order not to fall into extreme dogmatism and cold scholasticism, into an isolation from the masses.”

In general I support much of what Fidel Castro has helped to bring about in Cuba, but I find that his one-man leadership of the revolution is dangerous in that it embeds the revolution in a person (in this case in a family) rather than in the people. Is Fidel Castro the only person besides his brother fit to “lead” (and do the people require a leader?) the revolution for Cubans?

RR: The points you quote from my piece and your question are part of dialogue, both fraternal and violently hostile, the non/anti-capitalist left has had for more than a century. In my own view, after half a century of struggle and thought that also embraces these points, my conclusion is NO to your question. And that, of course, holds true for Hugo Chavez (and all other leaders), albeit most of the left in Venezuela, as well as a large sector of the general population, believes Chavez is unique and most be their one and only leader for, perhaps, a lifetime. That was also the case with the Cuban people and Fidel for the first decade or so. Well, that is what the Arab uproar wants to end, albeit those gruesome dictators cannot be compared to the kind-hearted Fidel.

The main problem with one leader syndrome is that it saps the vision, inspiration and energy from the mass. I have seen this happening before my eyes during the eight years I worked in Cuba and lived with the people. They lost hope that socialism could actually be the best solution when they always had to wait for answers/permission/resources/materials from above. The same happened in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Now it has come to past that most Cubans, I think, really don’t believe socialism is worthwhile and they want a chance to try supply-demand marketing. This will split the people into classes and further antagonize the true solidarity amongst themselves and with other peoples that they had assiduously built. And that is the essence of what Che meant in the cited quotation—the state and the party have become isolated from the mass and they see no other way out than capitalism with some bourgeois democratic-oriented reforms, such as what the big powers are endeavoring to impose on the Arab rebellion.

Another major mistake that Cuban leaders made is not separating some powers between the state and the Communist party. As the unity strategy goes in Cuba when the state makes a policy for short-term economic benefit or for some diplomatic reason—such as backing the genocidal, brutal governments of Sri Lanka against the entire Tamil population—the party is disallowed from criticizing this or for showing solidarity with, for instance, the much discriminated-against Tamils.

KP: There is growing dissent in the United States, but it is marginalized and propagandized in the corporate media (nothing surprising there). The Occupy Wall Street movement in the US seems to be gathering momentum, having staying power, and perhaps causing ripples in the system. If the grassroots activism proves influential in the US, how do you think this might affect Europe?

RR: I see that 66% of the people Gallop polled in the US want the rich to be appropriately taxed, and 54% want all politicians out of a job. It is that spirit that has to take root, and that is growing in Europe too.

The most important and radical elements in these protests are that they are 1) anti-capitalist, 2) not led by self-interest seeking persons or parties. In fact, OWS is more radical than what we created in the 60s-70s, because it is primarily aimed at the true enemy: capitalism, which is the main cause for adverse climate changes and aggressive wars.

The first solidarity demos with OWS in Denmark are taking place Saturday (October 15) alongside hundreds other cities in scores of lands. This initiative was taken by the indignados in Spain. There, and in other countries on the verge of bankruptcy such as Greece, there is greater potential for sustained radical movements than there is right now in Scandinavia and Germany. But this economic crisis will not just melt any time soon—a spell of anger is mounting. I think in a few European countries protests will arise and continue sporadically, at least.
I see it as a positive development, in fact, that in the recent Danish election, the so-called red block won and with it the Unity party and SF have dropped key programmatic elements of any socialist nature. I think the Unity Party/SF sellout will help create a backlash that could become a true protest movement. But we must also recognize that too few people are really hurting enough economically here to cause them to develop a real sustained fight. I hope I’m wrong.

In Denmark, we must not go to a demo to hear jazz music and a handful of “leaders” speak and then go home to TV or to a cafe for beer and wine. We must find that inner indignation and with it empower ourselves. We must develop leadership in all of us. We must take over tactical areas and stay there. We have one big problem, even greater than the might of police brutality, and that is the weather. Already temperatures are falling to freezing in the evenings in some of Europe and in NYC it is getting cold too. We might have to postpone our staying power over the cold, raining, snowy winter months and return in even greater numbers and strength in the spring.

I close with a quote from Naomi Klein’s talk at Wall Street, October 6. “We have picked a fight with the most powerful economic and political forces on the planet. That’s frightening… Always be aware that there will be a temptation to shift to smaller targets… Don’t give in to that temptation… Let’s treat this beautiful movement as if it is the most important thing in the world.” “It is!” and she points to her favorite sign: “I care about you!”

The Chinese/Russian veto has revived hopes of peace and security among developing countries, who have watched the orgy of violence unleashed by NATO bombings in Libya over the past 8 months with horror and outrage.

The security forces of the Syrian Arab Republic have been battling armed gangs backed by Western intelligence agencies since February. Thousands of innocent civilians and thousands of security personnel have been killed. NATO’s Blitzkrieg on the people of Libya and the covert war on the people of Syria have  proven the extent of the desperation that now besets Western capitalism and have served to highlight the sharp divide that now exists between progressive countries who are striving to create a multipolar world and the cancerous Western plutocracies now engaging in looting, pillaging and mass murder in a desperate attempt to maintain their global hegemony.

AlBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas) countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba, have been unwavering in their support for the Great People’s Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahirya and the Syrian Arab Republic in their long struggle against NATO backed terrorists.

On October 9th a delegation of Alba officials visited the Syrian capital Damascus to express their solidarity with the terror-stricken country. The delegation included Bolivian Communications Minister Eban Canelas, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro Moros, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Eduardo Rodriquez, Deputy Foreign Minister of Ecuador, Pablo Villa Gomez, and Deputy Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, Maria Rubiales.

Nicolas Madura, Venezuela’s minister for foreign affairs told Syrian television on October 10th:

The world order which dominates the media is using media terrorism, political and psychological warfare to impose its vision on the world.

Madura added that during the past thirty years:

This order has imposed its own culture on the world, a culture of violence, of death and of drugs and it has formed a network of television stations and newspapers to subjugate the world.

The Bolivian communications minister Ivan Canelas told the same TV station:

What we saw on our visit to Syria was very different to what the foreign press have been showing us. We found peace and security here. People go about their business and live their lives normally. It is clear proof that many of the media outlets are working for the profits of the imperialist powers who have made attempting to damage the sovereignty and dignity not only of Syria but of other peoples in the world such as Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Ecuador, Cuba and Peru.

Mr. Canales also stressed the necessity for radical reform of the United Nations so as to free the organization from US control.

Maria Rubiales, Nicaragua’s vice minister for foreign affairs said:

When an immense crisis occurs in the West, especially in the United States of America, the  easiest way for them to get out of it is by destroying other countries.

Referring to the existence of terrorist groups in Syria armed by the West, Rubiales said:

If that happened in the United States of America, they would send in the army to put down the armed terrorists.”

The arrival of the Latin American delegation in Damascus is another poignant example of the growing isolation of the Atlantic imperialist cult.  As more and more people tune into alternative media around the world, the lies and propaganda of the Atlantic imperialist configuration are being continually exposed.

AlBA countries, Venezuela in particular, have close relations with the Syrian Arab Republic. In November 2010, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro visited Damascus where 10 joint projects involving Syria, Belarus and Venezuela were agreed upon.

He told reporters “we are making a tour to consolidate the projects established with these brother countries, for the construction of a new world that has been designed in concrete terms.”

Belarus has been a close partner with Venezuela for many years. Minsk has been able to reduce its oil dependency on Russia through a deal with Caracas involving the importation of up to 10 million metric tons of oil.

On the other hand, Caracas has also benefited from close relations with the former Soviet Republic. Belarus has been helping Venezuela in its ambitious Mision Casa Vivienda, Great Housing Mission, which aims at overcoming the housing deficit in the country.

Belarus has also come under attack from the New World Order with several attempts at regime change there through US orchestrated ‘’colour revolutions’’.

The Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko told Russian reporters on October 7th:

They tried to push a revolution in Belarus through social networks. The person, who was running those social networks is in Poland, guarded by special services and funded by we know whom.

Bilateral trade ties between Syria and Belarus have intensified since 2007. Like the countries of the Bolivarian Alliance, Syria and Belarus strive for autonomy, national sovereignty and independence. The special trade agreements between Venezuela, Belarus and Syria are a cogent example of the desire of developing countries to create a multi-polar world.

The visit of the ALBA delegation to Syria was, unsurprisingly, ignored by the Western media. But the visit is highly significant. Syria has, since February, been fighting a covert war waged by Western intelligence agencies using Islamist terrorists presented to the world as ‘’peaceful protestors’’ by the corporate media.

Many of the ALBA countries have experienced US- orchestrated terrorism in the past.

The  US trained terrorists known as the “contras” used against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the 1980s cost up to 30,000 Nicaraguan lives.  The Nicaraguan terrorists were presented by the Western press as ‘freedom fighters’ just as the terrorists in Syria today are being portrayed as “pro-democracy” and victims of ‘state terror’.  The US backed terrorism campaign was so successful in Nicaragua, Washington decided to send its principal organizer Michael Kozak to Belarus as US ambassador. Kozak told the Times newspaper on September 3, 2001 that ‘’the objective and to some extent methodology are the same” in Belarus as in Nicaragua.

The ALBA delegation’s recent visit to Syria has made it clear that the real international community is aware of the “objectives” and “methodologies” of US imperialism in the Middle East and throughout the world, and, in particular, the nefarious role of the corporate media in misinforming the general public about the reality in Syria. But above all, the ALBA delegation’s visit has sent a signal to the degenerate Euro-Atlantic elites that their attempt to dominate the planet with their “culture of violence, death and drugs” is doomed to fail.

In contrast the same opinion makers, plus their academic counterparts, project images of the United States and the European Union as stable societies, with steady economic growth, incremental expansion of social welfare programs, resolving issues via consensual compromises and practicing sound fiscal policies.

In recent times, the better part of the current decade, these images have taken on the character of ideological dogmas – they no longer correspond to reality. In fact, a good argument can be made that the roles have been reversed: the US and EU are in perpetual crises and Latin America, at least most of the major countries, have experienced stability and growth which is the envy (or should be) of Washington pundits and financial commentators.

This ‘role reversal’ has been recognized by many US, EU and Asian investors and multinationals, even as respectable journalistic hacks for the Financial Times, NY Times and Wall Street Journal still write about vulnerabilities, imbalances and other weaknesses while grudgingly acknowledging the dynamic growth of the region.

Progressive opinion is equally at fault, focusing on the ‘advances’ of the left regimes but overlooking the underlying dynamics affecting most of the region and thus losing sight of the new points of conflict and contention.

We will proceed to outline the contrasting realities between the crises ridden “North” (US/EU) and the sustained growth of the “South” (South America). The analysis will raise questions of whether the South American experience is transferable to the North and what ‘structural adjustments’ would be necessary to pull the US and EU out of the downward spiral of stagnation and violent conflicts which have characterized these regions for the better part of the past decade.

The Lost Decade, US and EU Style

The Latin American countries during the 1980’s experienced a deep and persistent crises, manifested in negative growth, increased poverty levels and heavy indebtedness, which allowed creditors (like the IMF) to impose harsh and regressive austerity measures and “structural adjustment” policies which came to be known as neo-liberalization. These included the privatization of most strategic, lucrative public enterprises, and the ending of any semblance of state-directed industrial strategies.

For the peasants and the working and middle class the short-lived neo-liberal “boom” of the 1990s was a continuation of the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. The neo-liberal policies of the 1990s were based on fundamentally flawed structural foundations and polarizing income and public expenditures involving huge transfers of income to capital and downward pressures on wages and welfare. The neo-liberal regimes went into a deep crisis early in 2000 provoking major popular upheavals. The outcome resulted in a new set of political configurations and social power equations, which evolved into new post-neo-liberal regimes, at least in most of the major countries in Latin America.

In contrast and, in part thanks to the profitable opportunities opened by the debt crises and neo-liberalization of Latin America in the 1990s (and in the ex-Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and the Baltic/Balkan states) the US and EU prospered. In Latin America over 5,000 lucrative extractive resource-based industries, banks, tele-communications and other industries passed into the hands of foreign private MNC and local capital. High returns on bonds and loans and rents from technology transfers enriched the Northern capitalists even as poverty multiplied in the South. The 1990s was the “golden age” of Western capital as profits rose and leftist parties and the traditional urban trade unions appeared unable to withstand the ‘wave’ of predatory capitalism capturing the commanding heights of the economy.

The very successes of the US and EU countries, the enormous easy gains from pillage, speculation, and exploitation led to the dominance of financial capital and the belief in an irrevocable “new world order”. The dominance of the US and EU was built on their military superiority backed by pliant, collaborative, neo-liberal client regimes. The ‘new order’ lasted less than a decade: the economic crises of 1999/2000 smashed the illusions of a century of imperial grandeur. As markets collapsed so too did the Latin American oligarchic electoral regimes (dubbed “democracies”) which along with the financial elite and the military formed the triple alliance that defined Western supremacy. The final blow was the economic crises of 2001-2002 in the US and EU which steeply eroded their capacity to intervene and prop up their collapsing Latin clients ousted by rebellious masses.

The first decade of the new millennia has been the “lost decade”  of the North.   Over the course of the past eleven years the North has witnessed stagnation and recessions which have not given way to recoveries. The capitalist states temporarily saved the bankers but were powerless to set in motion economic growth.

The credit rating of the US economy was downgraded by the risk agencies. Unemployment and underemployment hovers close to one-fifth of the labor force, figures comparable to stagnant Third World countries. Social programs  are severely slashed in the US and throughout the European Union, reversing decades of incremental gains. Trade and budget deficits in the US have become chronic, while private and public lenders are becoming increasingly reticent to lend in the face of deep-seated recessionary tendencies.

The financial sector in the US and EU is rife with large scale fraud, swindles, mismanagement and falsified balance sheets, conditions previously prevalent among Latin economies. Wars proliferate. Military spending far exceeds productive investments, draining the US economy in a fashion reminiscent of the weapons spending during the reign of the warlords of Africa and the military dictators of Latin America.

In the EU, faced with brutal cuts in wages, pensions and jobs millions of workers and unemployed youth in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy have taken to the streets. General strikes threaten the stability of increasingly isolated regimes, reminiscent of the popular rebellions which resulted in regime changes in Latin America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the US, public protests reflect deepening private discontent: over 75% of the population expresses negative views of the Congress and 60% of the White House. Deepening political alienation of the US electorate is comparable to the loss of popular faith in Latin governments during the “lost decades”, 1980-2000.

Both the US and the EU have been radically transformed for the worse during the lost decade of the current century. Economically, politically and socially the ‘North’ has been “Latin Americanized”: social instability, economic stagnation, political alienation, growing class inequalities and poverty is presided over by corrupt political elites.

Signs of the Better Times: Latin America

Recently the finance minister of Brazil raised the possibility that the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) might take a hand in a “rescue plan” to prop up the crises-ridden economies of Europe. While the statement had greater symbolic rather substantive consequences, it does reflect a certain reality: while the North plunges into deeper, unending crises, the Latin economies are doing reasonably well.

Except for the Latin countries still under US dominance, especially Mexico and most of Central America, the rest of Latin America has not only avoided the crises afflicting the North but have been growing at a healthy rate, three times that of the US over the decade. The new millennium, especially between 2003-2011 (except for a brief interlude in 2009) has been a period of high growth, general prosperity, booming exports, rising imports, greater inter-regional co-operation, and large scale poverty reduction.

Brazil alone has reduced the number of poor by 30 million. Regular elections, relatively honest and competitive, result in stable legitimate transfers of political power. Except for US-backed coups in Honduras and intervention in Haiti and Venezuela, violent seizures of power have disappeared over the past decade. Regional institution–building has prospered with the advent of UNASUR and a Latin American regional bank.  Because of fiscal controls and banking regulations, both results of the lessons learned from the crisis of the lost decades (1980-2000), Latin America was only slightly affected by the US-EU financial crash of 2008-2011.

Latin American trade has doubled, especially with Asia, aided by China’s double digit growth. Demand for agro-mineral commodities has tripled. The key to this new export-powered growth is Latin America’s growing economic independence. This has led to the diversification of its markets, taking advantage of new opportunities and reducing their dependence on the US. Latin America’s emphasis on economic growth, new markets and investments has led it to avoid entanglements in the proliferating and costly colonial wars which engage the US and EU.

While the US and EU print more money and increase indebtedness to cover trade deficits, Latin America has quadrupled its foreign reserves. These cushion any downturns and avoid any dependence on the IMF, architect of the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s.

Within Latin America, the issue of poverty reduction has been tackled with varying degrees of effectiveness. With Venezuela under President Chavez leading the way the general direction has been toward increasing social payments, by increments in most cases, but with greater efforts in others. Except for Mexico, nothing resembling the social cuts of the US-EU has taken place in Latin America. The most striking structural advances have occurred in Venezuela and to a lesser degree in Argentina. They have significantly increased the minimum wage and pensions and increased welfare payments to the most vulnerable (single mothers, the disabled, those in extreme poverty).

With the exception of Colombia (the US’s principle military ally in the region) which is still the murder capital of the world for human rights advocates, trade unionists and peasant activists, human rights violations have declined. While the US-EU have vastly increased their human rights violations geometrically via multiple colonial wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and clandestine death squad ‘operations’, Latin America’s overseas human rights violations are largely limited to its occupation forces in Haiti – at the behest of the US and EU. Nevertheless repression of popular movements, especially indigenous peoples and peasant movements and students has increased in Bolivia, Chile, Brazil and elsewhere as the high growth policies on community rights and social expenditures.

Because of Latin America’s current political stability and dynamic growth, institutional and corporate investment is pouring into the region. In contrast the US and EU are suffering from disinvestment and declining rates of private investment. In other words, the development of Latin America is the other side of the coin of the US-EU under-development.

Latin America: New Contradictions

The class struggle is still the motor force in the social progress of Latin America. But unlike EU-US, Latin America’s class struggle is directed at increasing social and monitory wages, even if incrementally, as part of an offensive strategy to capture a greater share of rising income. In the US and EU the class struggle is ‘defensive’: an effort to stop declining income shares, limit job losses and cuts in pensions.

While militant class action including land occupations, street demonstrations and strikes are still part of the repertory of working class social weapons, they take place within the political parameters of democratic institutions. In Europe the elites have increasingly ignored mass street protests and strikes, largely pursuing austerity policies dictated by non-elected domestic and foreign bankers and creditors.

The limitations and ‘contradictions’ affecting all Latin American countries are located in the internal class inequalities. As national income has increased and exports boom, the inequalities between the ruling investor class and the mass of wage earners has increased. While initially the problem of class inequality was papered over by the general rise in living standards and employment, over time the employed and productive classes are no longer satisfied with incremental gains which barely surpass inflation rates. The rising standards of living have raised expectations. The percentage of poor may have declined but subsisting just above $4 dollars a day is increasingly unacceptable. Growth brings forth its own set of contradictions and a new set of demands. Formerly excluded classes included in the system, but exploited, have only their class organizations as their weapons to advance their socio-economic interests.

This is clearly the case in contemporary Chile where long term growth is accompanied by deeply entrenched inequalities comparable to the worse in the OECD. Beginning in July 2011 massive student protests over the high cost of public and private education and low levels of social expenditures have detonated mass activity from trade unions covering the gamut of economic sectors from teachers to copper miners.

The new and explosive issue confronting rulers and ruled in most of high growth Latin America is raising incomes for whom? The class issues are front and foremost in the current period and immediate future.

Growth, stability and democratic class struggles characterize most of the major countries, but not all. In several countries, the authoritarian and violent legacy of the dictatorial regimes continues robust. Colombia’s practice of murdering trade unionists, peasant leaders, journalists and human rights activists continues unabated: over 30 trade unionists were murdered during the first eight  months of 2011.

Honduras’ ruling regime, product of a US-backed coup and its allies among the paramilitary private armies of landowners, have killed scores of peasants and dozens of pro-democracy political and social activists.

Mexico’s killing fields are notorious: over 40,000 people have been killed by the police, military and drug gangs in a ‘war on drugs’ promoted by Obama and implemented by President Calderon.

What these three retro-regimes have in common is that they continue to follow the dictates of Washington, remain highly militarized states, with a strong US military and police presence in the form of bases, overseas advisers, and an intrusive role in setting policy. All three have failed to diversify markets and continue with a high degree of dependence on the stagnant US market. All have secured, or are in the process of signing, bi-lateral free trade agreements at the expense of exploring greater links with the dynamic Asian markets.

The three retro-regimes have never experienced the kind of popular rebellions and resultant center-left regimes which have emerged in most of Latin America. In Mexico pro-democracy candidates were twice defrauded of electoral victories, first in 1988 and later in 2006. In Honduras, a progressive liberal democratic President seeking to diversify markets was ousted by a military coup backed by the Obama regime in 2010. In Colombia, the murder of 5,000 activists and leaders of the pro-democracy Patriotic Union between 1984-86, the subsequent assassination of several thousand social activists, blocked a democratic opening. The abrupt termination of peace negotiations in 2002 and the total militarization of the country (2002-2011) funded by $6 billion in US military aid precluded the emergence of the political and social changes, which have dynamized the rest of Latin America’s sustained growth and opened the door for ‘democratic class struggle’.

While most of Latin America has forged ahead, thus far largely avoiding the instability and economic crises of the US and EU, past legacies and present inequities present a new set of structural impediments to the consolidation of long-term growth and political and social stability. The biggest structural contradiction is found in the high growth/increasing inequalities, socio-economic model based on the “3 ½ alliance”: foreign capital-national capital-the developmental state and the co-opted trade union/peasant leaders.

The profits and investments of this power configuration has been driven by the growth of agro-mineral exports, rising commodity prices, easy consumer credit and state regulation of financial markets. The economic returns on growth have been disproportionately appropriated by the “big three” with incremental payoffs to a minority of better paid organized workers. The ‘residuals’ are used to “lift the poor” from abject poverty to subsistence.

These growing inequalities have been “papered over” by the general rise of income, easy credit and improved public services. But rising incomes have set in motion a new set of class conflicts which will be exacerbated when the prices of commodities decline and the governments can no longer fund incremental improvements. Even today, severe conflicts have emerged between predator mining and timber, multi nationals and Indian/peasants in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Chile. These sometimes violent struggles between the state/MNC and peasants in the “periphery of the countryside” can detonate a larger conflict in the central cities, if export revenues decline.

The second contradiction is between the “marginalized working poor” and a new class of local middle and business class investors who have invested their “savings” in shares of the foreign and locally-owned mining companies. Conservative and closely aligned with the rapacious multi-nationals, these new middle class investors have enriched themselves on the bases of unregulated plunder of natural resources and contamination of the adjoining rural communities. If, and when, commodity prices nose dive, the regimes will face a bankrupt hysterical middle class looking for a political savior where none exist, at least among the existing civilian parties.

The rightward drift of the center-left regimes and their opportune links to big business especially in Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay has led to corruption in high places. Liberalization and exorbitant executive salaries has been accompanied by “unofficial payoffs” to public officials. Corruptions has eroded the social ethic of center-left politicians and replaced it with the ethos of “bringing in new and bigger investments”, whatever shortcuts and payoffs it requires. Corruption at the top spreads downwards greasing the wheels for foreign investors, but certainly lowering the trust and loyalties of employees and formal and informal workers not in the ‘magic circle’, a bribe takers and givers. “Patronage” and poverty reduction payouts can limit the fallout from corruption in high places among poverty-funded recipients. However, in time of economic downturn, it can turn social protests toward political regime change.

The third contradiction is found between the high level of dependency on commodity exports (which heretofore have been the dynamic element of growth) and the relative and absolute decline of manufacturing exports and production. The growth of income from commodities has led to the appreciation of the currency which has lessened the competitiveness of nationally produced manufactured products, leading to a sharp decline in profits and even bankruptcy.

Asian manufacturer-exporters – especially in China and to a lesser extent India and Korea – are increasingly penetrating Latin markets with lower cost finished products “de-industrializing” the Latin economies. In some cases, Latin American capitalists are looking to investing in Asia to lower costs and exporting back to their “home markets”. Brazilian industry, which has been hardest hit, has initiated “protectionist” measures including tariffs, 65% local content rules and state subsidies to counter the de-diversification of the economy.

The fourth contradiction is found precisely in the successful economic growth and high returns, which has attracted both speculative and “takeover” capital as well as productive investments. Speculative capital will flee and destabilize the financial system at the first sign of slowdown. Foreign ownership will lessen the government’s ability to leverage investment decisions in time of crises. Productive investments respond to expanding markets. They do not create them.

In summary, Latin America’s decade long dynamic growth has certainly out-performed the US and EU on a whole series of important economic, social and political dimensions. Yet, out of this growth have emerged a new set of contradictions and the need to correct increasingly grave “imbalances”: popular demands for a shift in income distribution, industrialist pressure for a rebalancing of the economy from dependence on finance and commodities to manufacturing and the urban poor demand improved social services especially in public health care and crowded classrooms.

These changes require a structural adjustment in the power structure. The economic imbalances reflect the growing concentration of political power among the extractive capitalists, bankers and local middle class investors of the major cities. Public employees, labor, the urban poor, the peasants and environmentally concerned Indians and ecologists, are marginalized from the key economic posts. They need to once again take to the streets with new independent movements which raise two basic questions: What kind of growth and growth for whom?

Lessons of Latin America: Listen Yankees and Eurocrats

Can the positive lessons of the dynamic Latin American experience provide a ‘model’ for the US and Europe? Is the “model”, in whole or part, transferable to the North or are the two regions so different that the lessons are not applicable?

Granted there are vast historical, cultural, economic and political differences between the regions yet some lessons from the Latin America’s decade of dynamic growth provides new ideas to counter the negative, self-defeating economic formulas put forth and practiced by US and EU experts, economists and policymakers.

Let us start from the beginning. The rise of Latin America was precipitated by a deep economic crisis, the breakdown of the economy, large scale unemployment and the impoverishment of the middle class. The crises led to the total discrediting of what has been called alternately the “free market”, “neo-liberal” and “de-regulated” capitalist model. So far so good: the US and EU likewise are experiencing a prolonged and deepening economic crises which has bankrupted Southern Europe, plunged the US into a double dip recession and led to a 20% un and underemployment rate. The entire “political class” in the US and Europe is largely discredited. From there forward the regions diverge.

In Latin America, the crises led to mass protests, popular uprisings and regime changes. Post neo-liberal center-left regimes, under mass pressure, subsequently launched employment generating investments and aid poverty reducing public works programs. Argentina, facing a financial crisis similar to Greece, Portugal and Spain today, defaulted on its foreign debt – channeling public revenues into reviving the economy. Because financial speculation linked to Wall Street and the City of London precipitated the crises, the Latin regimes instituted financial controls and regulations which limited financial volatility. The new regimes, influenced by the commodity boom, diversified their trading partners, entering dynamic Asian markets, reaping high returns and stimulating local consumption and public investments. What lessons can the crises-ridden US and EU learn from the Latin America’s successful recovery and expansion?

First, the beginning of a successful response depends on a political transformation. Regime change, a complete break with the ‘neo-liberal’ free market, and the political leaders and parties who are totally embedded in failed institutions and policies. Regime change presupposes the eruption of dynamic mass organizations, new, old, improvised and organized, capable of moving from protest and resistance to political power.

The object is to rebalance the US and EU economies from “financialization” and “militarism” to large scale, long term investments in manufacturing, applied technology, civilian infrastructure and social services. Direct public investments and loans applied to concrete employment-generating projects; total rejection of trickle down, monetary policies which never move from private banks to public works.

The entire militarist- Zionist-permanent war mentality is entirely vulnerable to change: doing so, will create jobs, the top priority for over two-thirds of the US public. The “war on terrorism”, the banner of the warlords in office, is considered a priority by only 3% of Americans. Once again the shift from militarism to the civilian economy in Latin America was a result of popular civilian upheavals via the street and the ballot box.

Of course, the Latin American republics had an easier time in rebalancing their economic priorities from failed military rulers and discredited neo-liberal policies. Citizen movements in the US and EU imperial states will have a harder time in closing down hundreds of military bases, ousting militarist politicians backed by powerful domestic and foreign lobbies and converting the empires to productive republics. Yet, Latin American exporters have prospered by avoiding entanglement in overseas imperial wars. They continue to pursue new markets in the Middle East and elsewhere instead of destroying adversaries of Israel as the EU and US have done through colonial wars in Iraq and Libya and sanctions against Iran, Syria and Venezuela.

The contrasting performance between Latin American republics and Euro-American empire builders is striking. The US and EU should shed their self-centered images of “successful” developed countries and outdated stereotype of Latin America as a collection of “volatile”, coup prone underdeveloped countries. The US is in deep trouble and it is heading into a deeper, less manageable economic crisis with few resources to counter it. Internationally it is increasingly isolated and in conflict with potential economic partners. Washington sides with Israel, alienating over 1.5 billion rich and poor Islamic peoples, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and all points east, west and south. It antagonizes Brazil via financial pump priming, overpricing the real (Brazilian currency) without helping US recovery.
Domestic and international failures multiply as the crisis deepens and nothing proposed by the blighted incumbents and besotted opposition offers any programmatic solution.

As in Latin America during the first years of this decade we need a popular rebellion: we need a profound regime change; we need to think of productive public investments not monumental loss of capital via Wall Street speculation and the waste of public resources via expenditures in weapons of destruction.