NEW DELHI: According to government sources, the United States has asked India to pull back troops along the Indo-Pakistan border as a gesture of goodwill.
India, in turn, has told America that the country hasn't moved more troops along the border, and that it was the neighbouring country, Pakistan, that deployed more troops along the Line of Control (LoC), and that America should ask Pakistan to pull back its troops.
Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon during his recent visit to the US made this clear to officials there, sources said.
Earlier, defence sources said that Pakistan had deployed several army brigades along Indo-Pak border in Jehlum-Chenab and Chenab-Ravi corridors sparking concern in the Indian armed forces .
The forces had been withdrawn from Pakistan's troubled north-western tribal belt where they were battling Taliban to put pressure on the US, which had been pressing Islamabad to act against terrorists operating from its soil, and diverted to the border with India, they said.
Pakistan had deployed several brigades (each comprising 4,000 to 6,000 personnel), including 33 brigade, 27 brigade, 7 brigade, 28 brigade, 331 brigade, two battalions (with 1,000 personnel each) of 37 Punjab and 39 Punjab Rawalkote in Hajira, Mandol, Hajipeer, Uri, Bhimber, Nikial, Kotli, Sailkote, Zafarwal, Neelam valley and other areas, sources said.
"The deployment had been a surprising move. It is an area of concern for us," they said adding that the Pakistani side has already cleaned the bunkers along the borderline.
The sources said "several brigades involved in the war against Taliban in north-western tribal belt had been withdrawn and deployed along Jehlum-Chenab corridor in the past one week."
The US Embassy here dismissed the media reports saying they were not accurate. In Washington, the State Department said the US has not made any such request as suggested in the media reports
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Pull-back-troops-from-Pak-border-US-to-India-/articleshow/4288579.cmsObama The Warmonger-17 Bombed In Pakistan...Some "Change" huh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aKTPIphDdAObama= WAR in Pakistan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLhWg-8bafM&feature=relatedObama NEVER Leaving Iraq!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TovrzDZlqIMWhy is Obama leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfGieb0NQdM&feature=relatedWhy is Obama leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq? Pt 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGkdEqCgKds&feature=channelObama endorses American imperialism - anti-war activist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StDdCPZUNTE'Obama is a would-be dictator' Alex Jones
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCOkqiohXe8&feature=channel# Jet says :
30 April, 2009 [ 02:36 ]
Buzzito, "Rodrigo" used to go by "Phillip" and has always been this cuckoo. No one here takes what he says seriously anymore, which is why he resorts to just posting those silly youtube links lol. Best thing is just ignore his posts and skip to the ones posted by rational people.
# Rodrigo says :
30 April, 2009 [ 03:52 ]
The WHOLE WORLD H*** Amerikkka
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy4p000WqB0
H*** Amerikkka
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKbEaZ-Jnws&feature=related
H*** Amerikkka 2 Death
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgZ5k2n8k4s&feature=related
H*** Amerikkka, Gently
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjvE3S2cOVU&feature=related
Behold to the Police State of Amerikkka!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jSH9zvP6FQ&feature=related
On the Theory of the Productive Forces (English)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JykCv7IHUc8&feature=related
Final Solution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aFINUlDJq8&feature=related
The American Holocaust
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-C2rAvCcuY&feature=related
# Rodrigo says :
30 April, 2009 [ 03:55 ]
True Face Of "America"
http://songun-blog.blogspot.com/2007/04/true-face-of-america.html
# Rodrigo says :
30 April, 2009 [ 04:07 ]
US Can't Stop North Korean Launch, Gates Says
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates predicted North Korea would launch a missile soon and said there's nothing the United States can do about it.
"I would say we're not prepared to do anything about it," said Gates during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday."
The United States and countries in Asia have been closely monitoring activity in North Korea after learning that the communist country had begun placing a Taepodong 2 missile at a launch facility. North Korea says the missile will be used to launch a communications satellite in early April. But the technology for a satellite deployment can also be used to launch a ballistic missile, and that's why the U.S. and allies have expressed concern that North Korea might test its ability to reach the United States with a missile.
Gates reiterated that concern on Sunday. "I don't know anyone at a senior level in the American government who does not believe this technology is intended to mask the development of an intercontinental ballistic missile," he said.
North Korea currently does not possess the ability to put a nuclear warhead atop its missile, but the country wants that capability, Gates added. Though the missile North Korea currently plans to launch cannot reach the West Coast of the United States, the military might move to strike it down should North Korea target Hawaii.
Gates called the launch of the missile "very troubling" and a sign that the series of meetings between the U.S., China, South Korea, Russia, Japan and North Korea known as six-party talks have not made any headway in getting North Korea to curb its nuclear program.
"If this is [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-il's welcoming present to a new president - launching a missile like this and threatening to have a nuclear test - I think it says a lot about the imperviousness of this regime in North Korea to any kind of diplomatic overtures."
A Japanese newspaper reports that North Korea is preparing to launch a short or medium range missile after it carries out plans to fire the long-range missile, per the Associated Press
http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/03/us-cant-stop-no.html
Iran ready to defend itself from possible U.S. attack - speaker
ISLAMABAD, April 5 (RIA Novosti) - Iran is prepared to defend itself should the United States attack it, the speaker of Iran's parliament said Thursday.
The last few days have seen reports in Russian and foreign media that the U.S. has scheduled an operation, codenamed Bite, against Iran for 4:00 a.m. local time April 6. The operation, should it materialize, would deliver air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over a 12-hour period.
"The Iranian people are ready and determined to protect their land and to repel any enemy attack," Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel said at a press conference during his visit to Pakistan.
However, he said it was highly unlikely the U.S. would attack his country, as "the U.S. has no real reason to do so."
The speaker added that Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had assured him that Pakistan would never get involved in any actions aimed at Iran.
The U.S. has not excluded a military option in the standoff with Iran over its refusal to abandon its uranium enrichment program.
The UN Security Council passed a new resolution on Iran two weeks ago toughening economic sanctions against the country and accepting the possibility of a military solution to the crisis.
The U.S. Administration sees Iran as a "rogue state" and is determined to stop the Islamic Republic, diplomatically or otherwise, from obtaining nuclear weapons. Washington now plans to deploy a missile defense shield in Central Europe allegedly to protect itself from potential missile strikes from Iran or North Korea.
http://en.rian.ru/world/20070405/63182392.html
# Rodrigo says :
30 April, 2009 [ 04:24 ]
Military Alliance: A New Way Forward in International relations
Military alliances which were once seen as threats to world peace are now emerging as new the directions in international relations. Whether these alliances are good for peaceful coexistence in today’s world remains unclear, but this new trend is once again demarcating the world into military zones reminiscent of the Cold War. As countries assemble militarily with the aims of strengthening their defense capabilities, as well as influencing world politics, it is clear that diplomacy which became a talking point during the formation of the United Nations is being replaced by military alliances. The means, the only alternative for weaker states is to organize themselves militarily if the hope to be relevant in world affairs.
Modern military alliance began when Germany formed the Triple Alliance with Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to counter the threat of France following the Franco-Prussia War. In response, France, England and Russia formed the Entente, the outcome brought about World War I. Also following the Second World War, the United States and Britain organized to form North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO as counterweight to the Soviets military might. With NATO’s weight on its shoulder, the Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact, and the result was a Cold war. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1989, most nations, especially developing nations, most of whom bear the brunt of the cold war were convinced it was the end of global domination by military powers. It was assumed that diplomacy will replace militarisms as means of promoting world peace and cooperation. It was also assumed that military options will be the last resort in settling international disputes. However; behaviors by major military powers (U.S, Russia, China & France) in recent years have left weaker nations no option, but to seek refuges in the UN and various regional organizations. United States’ and NATO’s activities in world’s affairs, specifically its military expeditions in Kosovo and Afghanistan, recent decision by NATO to extend membership to former Warsaw members (Croatia and Albania), followed by agreement between NATO and Poland to deploy anti missile shield in Poland and Czech Republic, have heightened fear of renew cold war. NATO’s actions have also sparked the formation of newly organized eastern alliance known as Shanghai Corporation Organization or SCO; whose aim is to counter NATO global domination in world affairs. The existence of these two powerful military organizations is once again creating cloud of discomfort for weaker states which are usually trapped in the middle of this kind of rivalry.
In comparison to NATO, the Shanghai Corporation Organization comprises a quarter of the world’s population, extending from Europe to Asia. It was organized in 2001 as a counterweight to NATO and its members include Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In Aug 2007, when SCO members met in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, among the agenda were mapping out Sino-Russian ties and upgrading bilateral strategic coordination. The Bishkek summit also adopted a declaration that took direct aim at the Bush administration’s foreign policy, including condemning what it sees as “unilateralism” and “double standards”. SCO members also pledged to support “multilateralism,” and “strict observance of international law”, as well as underlining the importance of the UN (People’s Daily, 2007). Nonetheless, this alliance, under the leadership of Russia and China has acted in ways that pose direct challenge to NATO’s influence. For example, when Russia approved and recognized the independence of breakaway Ossetia, amidst opposition and condemnation from the West, Russia’s action was given immediate legitimacy by China and other SCO members. Also, in response to NATO’s Anti Missile system to be deployed in Europe, China and Russia, acting on behalf of SCO announced a resumption of strategic air patrol, improving Russia’s and China’s anti missile system, modernizing their Intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM and constructing new missile firing submarines to protect their members. The growing influence of the SCO is a major concerns of NATO, in part, because some of SCO allies include Iran, Vanezuela and North Korea; countries that the U.S and its allies view as enemies. It is not clear if SCO is going to metamorphose into NATO-like alliance with global domination, but it has certainly built itself a powerful case for geopolitical dominance.
The world is becoming too dangerous and the waves of conflicts and instabilities are becoming too cumbersome for United Nations alone to manage. Matters of international concerns are no longer steered by the UN, but by few military powers. NATO in particular has carried out military operation in numerous places without approval of the United Nations. In 1996, NATO launched a military air and ground campaigns on Kosovo without former UN Security Council’s approval in an effort to end the bloodshed. On 9, September 2001, when terrorists attacked the United States, Bush invoked articles IV of NATO’s Charter, “attacks on one, is attack on all”, to persuade NATO’s leaders to help with the invasion of Afghanistan without United Nations’ authorization. In 2001, Russia invaded Chechenya, without first consulting the UN Security Council, because according to Russia it was an “internal affairs”. Even china had behaved in ways that contravened international laws. China suppression of the people of Tibet, which has been condemned by the UN, Human Rights Watch and other international organizations, as well as it strong arming of Taiwan, despite UN reprobation suggest that the UN is either too weak to control the behaviors of these powerful countries or it lacks the courage to act against them.
United Nations may symbolize Peace and Security in today’s thinking, but it is obvious the real movers and shakers of the world are countries with military alliances. I do not intend to lessen the relevance of the UN as a result of major powers’ unilateral behaviors, but clearly the UN has not been courageous, as well as unwilling to control the behaviors of countries with military powers. United Nation’s influence has only been exerted against weaker powers, especially those in developing countries. This lack of balanced approach by the UN in dealing with issues that confront the world, tell that if developing countries, specifically African countries hope to someday influence world politics, it will require massive military alliances, since it seems, military alliance is the new direction in international relations.
http://www.liberiaitech.com/theperspective/2008/0916200803.html
Russia-China: SCO Military Alliance Challenges US-NATO Unipolar World
SCO REGIONAL CLOUT BOUND TO INCREASE
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, ought to boost its political clout in settling regional conflict in the immediate future. A statement to this effect was made earlier in the week by a group of the Russia-based noted analysts during a Moscow-Beijing video news conference. Aside from maintaining stability and security in Central Asia, the SCO’s vast potential will certainly make it possible for the organization to handle other pressing international problems.
In the wake of Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia on August 8, the SCO, which currently groups Russia ,China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, is sure to play an important role in dealing with fresh geopolitical realities now underway on post-Soviet soils. According to Sergei Kuzyanin, head of the Institute for Eastern Studies, a recent SCO summit in Dushanbe was of great historic significance in terms of SCO support for Russia in the South Ossetian conflict and the organization’s looming enlargement. What’s more, the SCO is bound to play more important role in the Caucasus in the future, Sergei Luzyanin underscored.
The SCO should first of all focus on initiating an array of new proposals on ensuring regional security, Sergei Luzyanin says, adding that a final document is expected to include several peacekeeping missions-leaning initiatives fulfilled jointly with other regional organizations such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization. In addition, the Russian pundit contends, the SCO must continue to position itself as a complex regional structure to provide economic development and security by , notably, fighting terrorism and drug trafficking.
The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ center for SCO and regional problems, Anatoly Bolyatko, said that the recent conflict in the Caucasus underscored the need for a multipolar world order. If NATO and even the UN are unable to settle this conflict, the SCO could well become a viable platform for resolving such problems, even though it is not a military-political alliance:
"The SCO should eventually start playing a new role both in and outside the Caucasus. What we see now is a real crisis of the idea of a unipolar world now that the US and its NATO allies pretend they are unable to get to the core of what’s been happening in the Caucasus. I believe that organizations like the SCO and BRIC, that brings Russia together with Brazil, India and China, should play an important role here. Many people already realize the need for the SCO and other international organizations to start focusing more on ensuring global stability and security…"
Anatoly Bolyatko also said that closer interaction between the SCO and such observer nations as Iran, India and Pakistan could make it a major new instrument of collective security both in the former Soviet Union and neighboring regions.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10104
Is Attacking Iran a Viable Option?
The definitive end of U.S. military supremacy
I have written several articles on the Iran crisis pitting two expanding and important strategic alliances against each other and the similarities to the powder keg of Balkan and European alliances that erupted into World War I.
On one side is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Led by China and Russia, the SCO has four other permanent member states: Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Along with a senior official from India's oil and gas industry, the prime ministers of Pakistan, Mongolia, Afghanistan and Iran attended the last meeting in Shanghai on June 15. It was the first meeting since Iran announced that it had successfully enriched Uranium: Iran was invited to become a full member.
The meeting was about strengthening trade and exports but also had a strong undertone of strengthening the alliance. A verbal oath was sworn for defending each other in the event of any attack. China and Russia have already signed military cooperation agreements with and are the main suppliers of advanced weaponry to Iran and Syria. This gave them verbal military cooperation agreements with all the SCO members, including Iran.
A senior spokesperson for U.S. ally Japan said: "The SCO is becoming a rival block to the U.S. alliance; it does not share our values. We are watching it very closely." The U.S. too was watching it very closely, but from afar because their request for observer status at the meeting had been denied on the grounds that they shared neither land nor fluvial border with any of the SCO member states.
The meeting's undertone of warning the U.S. against attacking Iran was evident in Chinese President Hu Jintao's closing statement: "We hope the outside world will accept the social system and path to development independently chosen by our members and observers and respect the domestic and foreign policies adopted by the SCO participants in line with their national conditions."
Jintao's statement was immediately followed by the verbal agreement -- all members vowing to defend each other's sovereignty and the alliance as a whole.
The strengthening of this rival alliance and its challenge to U.S. supremacy was worrying amid speculation of advanced U.S. plans for war in Iran. The developments in the coming weeks and months increased the powder keg tensions of a well-backed Iranian nuclear standoff.
The start of July, with joint military exercises by U.S., Romanian and Bulgarian armed forces, which continued until September, coincided with the North Korean missile tests of July 5 and began an intense period of war games and weaponry testing from all the major players in both alliances.
Aug. 19 saw the beginning of Iranian military exercises and missile tests in all the border provinces likely to become the frontline in the event of a U.S. attack. The SCO and Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) headed by China and Russia respectively, held joint exercises in coordination with the Iranian exercises, both launched Aug. 24 in Kazakhstan, which between them involved all 10 members of the SCO except Uzbekistan.
The Russian and Chinese exercises were thought to have come in response to mistrust of the U.S.'s intentions in the region, the threat of attack on Iran, the U.S. navy's involvement in the rebuilding of Kazakhstan's navy since 2003, and Iranian fears that the U.S. was attempting to build up their ally Azerbaijan to counter Iranian influence and dominance in the region. Hence, the Iranian exercises along the Azerbaijan border.
These provocative drills from all sides of the powder keg of alliances could easily have took us one step closer to war, because of the strong support from the Muslim world, Russia and China for Iran's stance that it has a right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As the exercises continued, they coincided with Iran's response to the six-nations incentive package on Aug. 22, which was a practically flat refusal to suspend enrichment as a precursor for U.S.-involved talks. This made Iran's failure to comply with U.N. Resolution 1696 and suspend enrichment by Aug. 31 inevitable.
This lead to a stalemate, the U.S. maintaining its hard line toward the rogue regime and immediately pressuring for sanctions, the EU taking the middle ground, and Russia and China effectively vetoing any form of U.N. punishment against Tehran. China is of course heavily dependant on Iran's oil reserves on its path to becoming a world superpower.
As October comes to an end, we are still no closer to a compromise on ending Iranian enrichment and possible proliferation. The U.N. is split and sanctions just do not look viable in the foreseeable future. Yet another draft resolution has been drawn up by the U.S. and its allies and diplomats say it could be presented to Russian and Chinese officials this week. The proposed resolution aims to impose restrictions on Iran's nuclear progression similar to those imposed on North Korea last week with the passing of U.N. Resolution 1718.
However, the fact that North Korea angered China and Russia with its openly defiant and dangerous (for China) nuclear test, has put the bond between China and Russia, and the dependence of China on Iran, foremost in their decision making processes, not to mention strengthening the SCO alliance. All of which makes the passing of this draft resolution unlikely.
As the U.S. has always maintained that it will not let Iran get the bomb, decisive military action continues to become increasingly likely. Who knows, Bush may give us one last expensive war on his way out of office. All the signs seem to indicate that this is highly possible. North Korea, named alongside Iran and Iraq as part of Bush's axis of evil, performed its first nuclear test on Oct. 9. Its defiance of the international community in its six-nations format could and in my view will harden Bush's already hard-line stance toward Tehran's enrichment program and make military action a real possibility should Iran seem close to obtaining the bomb.
The months between Iran ignoring U.N. Resolution 1696 and North Korea's nuclear test brought many statements from senior Iranians. Many speaking on condition of anonymity threatened tough retaliation against any imposed sanctions. The latest announcement, on Oct. 23, that Iran had launched a second batch of 164 centrifuges, bringing the total to 328 interconnected centrifuges, which can enrich uranium for energy or weaponry purposes, further exasperated the Bush administration.
But according to a diplomat close to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, no UF6 uranium gas is being fed into the cascade, as has generally been the case with the first batch: "The second cascade was brought on line earlier this month but they appear to be just running it empty. That is, vacuum-testing to assess durability."
These reported advances in Iran's quest for nuclear power, either for civilian or military use, are increasing the pressure on the U.S., the EU and the fractured UN to end the standoff before it reaches a critical point like North Korea's defiant test. As is Israel's leadership, who have also constantly fueled the tensions over the past months by periodically threatening the use of its military might to end Iranian enrichment, a cycle of responding to Iran's slow but propagandized advances tit-for-tat. Therefore, in such a heightened climate, if Bush puts another wrong foot forward in his handling of Kim Jong-il (that is, concentrates on Iraq and pressurizes Iran while allowing North Korea's nuclear ambitions to become nuclear weapons and reach a catastrophic climax), it could strengthen the Iranians' resolve, which is already strong because of China's large dependence on Iranian oil.
Chinese dependence, which is empowering an Iranian regime bent on becoming a nuclear power, is a dangerous mix in itself. Add to this, reports from Chinese and Russian defectors that a catastrophic conflict with the U.S. has been in the planning for years and that the timetable is to be stepped up in the event of an attack on Iran, and it becomes very dangerous indeed.
Despite the consequences of a U.S. attack on Iran ranging from bad to catastrophic, depending on the strategy and success of the attack, the stalemate within the dysfunctional U.N. is threatening to leave Bush with no option. Speculation over the use of military force against Iran has been rife since Tehran's April announcement of successful uranium enrichment.
The latest surge in tensions is over proposed U.S. naval exercises with Britain, France, Bahrain and Kuwait in the Persian Gulf next week. Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) quoted an unnamed Foreign Ministry official as calling the maneuvers dangerous and suspicious. The official also said the exercises, reported to be practice runs for intercepting and searching ships carrying WMDs, were not in line with the security and stability of the region but instead aimed at fomenting crisis. The source blamed the neoconservatives' warmongering, which is being used in an attempt to achieve success in the mid-term elections.
I believe the proposed exercises are another attempt by the U.S. to provoke Iran into a knee-jerk reaction, which would further it from alienate Russia and China and ultimately allow Bush to use military action to stop Iran's nuclear program.
According to a war game organized by The Atlantic with the help of retired air force colonel and specialist in the field Sam Gardiner, which simulated preparations for an assault on Iran by the next American administration be it Republican or Democrat, such an assault could involve any or all of three separate strategies: (1) a punitive raid on key Revolutionary Guard units to retaliate for Iranian actions in Iraq and elsewhere, (2) a pre-emptive strike on all possible nuclear facilities or (3) the forceful removal of the Mullah regime from Tehran in a regime change operation.
The war games panel decided that the first two could be carried out independently but that the third would require the success of the first two as preparation. In reality, the second option -- a pre-emptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities -- is the one most often discussed. Also in reality, any one of these actions or the encouragement of similar actions from Israel's military forces could well unleash a catastrophic global conflict.
The earliest retaliation would likely come in the form of missile attacks on Israel and other U.S. allies within the range of Iranian missiles (1,280 kilometers), followed by the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil channel, as threatened in the event of sanctions. Also, Iran may decide that a bloody defeat for the U.S., even if it means chaos in Iraq, is something they might actually prefer and begin exerting their significant influence over the majority Shia militias in Iraq to more heavily join the war against U.S. forces. Iran has so far discouraged the Shia communities from becoming involved in the insurgency. This would mean that the number of U.S. forces in Iraq would be greatly reduced for the first time as forces would be needed for the Iran invasion, which would coincide with the most dramatic rise of violence against U.S. forces since the Iraq invasion began.
If the Iran invasion did not go according to plan, the subsequently shrinking number of U.S. troops in Iraq could shortly find themselves unable to control the rising violence and forced into a hasty withdrawal from the Green Zone. Such an outcome would be seen as a defeat and empower the Jihadists for decades to come.
If any or all of the SCO members (China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) were dragged into the conflict with allegiance to Iran, in turn bringing involvement from U.S. allies (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, Japan, Israel and the U.K., although the latter two would quite possibly be involved in some capacity from the beginning), a catastrophic global conflict would become World War III.
If none of these countries became involved but the badly overstretched U.S. military failed to achieve regime change in Tehran, whatever Iranian nuclear capabilities remained would undoubtedly be channeled toward the rapid advancement of any existing nuclear weapons program.
Military action in Iran, therefore, should be consigned to the realm of fiction. But Bush's predisposition to falling for his own rhetoric, and the slim chances of achieving any form of sanctions against Tehran, leave a catastrophic global conflict that could easily become World War III looming over our heads. Whatever the strategy, if Bush or the next American president decides to use military force against Iran, it could easily result in the definitive end of U.S. military supremacy in the 21st century
http://www.uruknet.biz/?s1=5&p=27836&s2=31
# Carlos says :
30 April, 2009 [ 04:29 ]
Good Riddance to Capitalism – Bring on Socialism
Would socialism allow forty-five million of its citizens to go without healthcare? Would socialism allow a justice system to imprison millions for drug use instead of providing drug treatment? Would socialism allow one percent of the population to control the majority of the country’s wealth? Would socialism allow a financial system to go unregulated and thereby cause the greatest economic catastrophe in history?
For far too long those in power have controlled the masses by misleading us all to think that capitalism benefits us all, and that the mention of socialism should make us cringe and scream for help. For far too long we have allowed our so-called experts persuade us to think that America is the place to be because of “Capitalism.”
For far too long we have allowed the mass media to distract, misinform, influence or program us to chase a dream that was never within reach and would never come within reach in our lifetime except for a very few. The capitalism trick is to make a few successful while the majority of the people witness their success and continue to chase after that illusive dream which in the end is never realized. That is the misconception we’ve all had and each day it’s becoming more and more revealed as the “Big Lie,” that has been promulgated by the rich and powerful for generations.
What benefits the majority the most and best is the word those in power fear most, and that is “Socialism.” They want us to think of socialism as communism but it’s not. Socialism is caring for that next door neighbor or someone in your community. It’s the belief that we are our brother’s or sister’s keeper and so forth. It’s the “Pay It Forward,” philosophy. It’s the idea that everyone wins and not just a few.
Those in power want to keep us divided and believe that every man or woman should defend for him or herself when that certainly should not be the case. It goes against the teachings in the bible and the practice of anyone who believes in any form of a higher power, regardless of their religious beliefs. The fear those with power and money have is that they will lose their control and influence if majority of the people were playing on an equal playing field. They use money to separate and by that method alone, they are able to control the masses.
Think about capitalism and how many who actually benefits from it, go back and think of all the people you know in your life and be honest with yourself. How many of your friends own several houses in multiple states and countries, yachts, cars, and get million dollar bonuses for ruining a business?
Capitalism has created an illusion to us all. Make a few people very wealthy, a few more almost wealthy, a few more rich and leave the majority thinking that they can one day become rich while knowing that the system of capitalism only allows those with money to keep on making it and those that don’t to keep dreaming and thinking that they can one day become rich and wealthy. Well thanks to our financial geniuses in corporate America and Wall Street, that illusion is starting to fade and fade fast. The curse of capitalism is starting to be revealed to the masses and guess what? The masses don’t like what they are beginning to see.
People are beginning to realize that capitalism was just a host and never was meant to enrich everyone, only continue to mislead and perpetuate the cycle of the rich getting richer. But the powers that be, blinded by the chase of money, their very own greed have allowed the eyes of people around the world to see the truth. The truth of what really has been going on behind the curtain of capitalism was all based on deception, misinformation, corruption and greed.
If you really want to dig deep, do the research and find out exactly how the big corporations became so powerful in the first place. How did they get their money, how did they grow to become so influential? I would be willing to bet that is was not all ethical or legal. Does free labor or slavery ring a bell?
What if the majority of citizens stopped doing business with the big corporations and started shopping at small, community like stores? If we change our ways and our habits, the rich and powerful would have no choice but to stop their corrupt practices.
The corporate elites want us to think things are scarce when the opposite is true. We live in a world where there is an abundance of everything but scarcity allows the powerful to have control and make lots of money. What if we abolished money and our political system? What if we lived from a resourced based society where everything was in abundance and there was no need for money? These are things we should all ponder going forward.
http://www.wemustchange.org/2009/04/politics/good-riddance-to-capitalism-%E2%80%93-bring-on-socialism/
# Carlos says :
30 April, 2009 [ 04:33 ]
What Socialism is:
"Collective ownership and democratic control
of the material means of production
by the workers and the people
True socialism wants a totally democratic society.
Socialism elevates the common good to the number one priority in all spheres of decision-making. The Anglo-American tradition conceives of democracy primarily as a set of limitations on abusive government power. The socialist critique of capitalism understands that the power that matters in all societies is economic power-- the power to direct men and women in their work.
As a result, prudent socialism applies democracy as the universal anecdote to all abusive power, including capitalist power. Total democracy applies democracy to the economy-- the workplace, the plant, the office, the bank.
Socialism broadly includes many variations, but in all its forms it means:
Basic economic decisions, as well as political decisions, must reflect the common good. The entire economy should operate for the good of the entire society, with no one left behind.
No private concentrations of capital or other wealth, and no other types of private concentrations of power.
The end of money's domination over society. The end of the priority of property and private greed.
Socialism will complete what democracy began-- the transfer of sovereignty in all spheres from elites to the people.
"Communal ownership of land and capital."
--Bertrand Russell in Roads to Freedom.
Democratic socialism is centered on humanist ideals, with the ultimate goal of allowing each individual the opportunity and means for his or her personal development and individual satisfaction. Such self-realization becomes possible in a cooperative, non-competitive social context.
Socialists understand that individuals are embedded in their social and economic environments, and therefore believe that more often than not the good of the individual is best achieved in what is good for the collective as a whole.
Socialists are assured that people are predisposed to cooperation and joint social action. Socialists set up as their opposite the capitalist values of egotism and narcissism.
True socialism is antithetical to capitalism,
and therefore revolutionary.
Socialism elevates the common good to the number one priority in all decision-making, instead of the good of a small ruling class. Many democratic socialists around the world have used electoral politics as a way of becoming accommodating to the capitalist class. Now they refuse to use terms like "capitalist class," and reactionaries get away with denouncing even tepid liberalism as "class warfare."
You bet it's class warfare. The hard facts of the domination of the capitalist class persist and become more outrageous every year. History offers a multitude of examples to contradict the notion that capitalists will voluntarily cede power. German capitalists raised up Hitler in order to stop the socialists and communists. Capitalism has staged bloody and utter illegal means in Greece, Spain, Chile, Nicaragua, Indonesia. McCarthy-ite Conservatives in every country in the world have slandered, persecuted, jailed and murdered leftists, union organizers and civil liberties advocates. Socialism evolved in reaction to the hard fact of capitalist oppression, and thus is directly antithetical to it.
There are many ways of envisioning revolution, and it need not necessarily be a bloody thing. In this Bergonian fantasy, the radicals use electoral politics to score a big victory that paved the way for the subsequent revolution, and in fact Hitler's revolution came about as a result of parliamentary elections. Socialist electoral revolutions were violently aborted by the Fascist Uprising and Civil War in Spain, and by Pinochet in Chile.
But "social democracy" and "Fabian socialism" have not resulted in more than a reform of capitalism. While social democrats in Europe and other parts of the world have succeeded in obtaining pensions, health care, hour and wage protections and the like, a capitalist class still controls the means of production.
And what Socialism isn't:
It's not "Communism," and not necessarily Marxist.
Deriving from Engel's writings, Marxists explicitly recognize two types of socialists: their own kind, the enlightened camp of "scientific socialism," and the deluded and naive krypto-bourgeoisie "utopian socialists." It is true that
Marx of course offered the most complete economic criticism of capitalism, and his theories of surplus labor, money, class conflict, and alienation are useful to Bergonians today. But Marx never adequately asserted the democratic fundamentals of socialism. Nor did he ever realize that basic ethical considerations (e.g. "justice," "community," and "equality") are alone sufficient justifications for socialism. To Bergonians Marx made an extremely simple proposition into a needlessly complex doctrine. Marxists successfully destroyed capitalist tyranny in a number of nations, but in every case they replaced it with an even worse tyranny, contrary to the democratic spirit of socialism. Lenin and his spawn hijacked and betrayed socialism, with Stalin and Mao committing the worst offenses. Thus Red Star Communism is a mutation of socialism.
Non-Marxist Socialist Movements: Socialism-- the idea of collective ownership and economic equality--had a sunny youth before the hard-edged barnacles of Marxism encased it. (see cooperative socialism) This was the era of "utopian socialism." Parallel to the development of Marxist socialism, there have been other important tendencies that have rejected Marx:
(a) French socialism owes as much to Blanqui, Blanc and Proudhon as it does to Marx, and its greatest leader, Jean Jaurès, was hardly an orthodox Marxist.
(b) After the failed Paris Commune of 1871, many French socialists became convinced that workers unions through direct action, culminating in the "general strike," could do in capitalism; they became the syndicalists. See Industrial Workers of the World, the American version.
(c) Fabian Socialism in Britain advocated a gradual, non-revolutionary transition to socialism based on humanist foundations.
(d) Also in Britain were the guild socialists who advocated worker control and self-government, and opposed a strong state.
(e) After World War I the left split into separate communist and socialist movements. Most countries had socialist parties that participated in elections and opposed an active communist party. The split enabled the rise of Fascism, but the pattern prevailed again after World War II.
(f) Neo-Marxists in Western Europe became repulsed with Stalinism and realized the dangers of centralism and the importance of individual liberty. Their theoretical reformulations earned the scorn of the orthodox.
(g) The New Left, having its greatest moment in France, 1968, criticized post-war imperialism and corporate capitalism. In many countries it was associated with, and energized by, opposition to the Vietnam War.
(h) Anarchism shares socialism's enmity toward capitalism, but has opposed socialism in the past, and rightfully opposed socialist statism and all stultifying authoritarianism.
Socialism is not (necessarily) state control-- though a democratic state would coordinate and regulate socialist institutions and planning. One does speak of state socialism sometimes in describing the Soviet-style system, but as a pejorative. "...socialism is not statism, or the collective ownership of the means of production. It is a judgment on the priorities of economic policy. It is for that reason that I believe that... the community takes precedence over the individual in the values that legitimate economic policy. The first lien on the resources of a society therefore should be to establish that 'social minimum' which would allow individuals to lead a life of self-respect, to be members of the community. -- Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, p. xii
Capitalists themselves use the state as a tool to perpetuate control over the working class (e.g. Taft-Hartley), and also to provide regulation they find necessary or useful, allowing Michael Harrington's famous observation of "socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor."
Socialism is most certainly not state tyranny-- Self avowed "democratic socialists" have governed Western Europe without limiting press freedom or individual rights of conscience. In fact, for socialism to really work the way it was intended, the people must be free.
Socialist Idealism Socialism is universally hopeful about the perfectibility of humankind. Socialism most certainly rejects the capitalist model of man: self-centered, greedy, anti-social, driven, obsessed with things. This means that socialists necessarily believe in the historical progress.
But Socialism may expect too much good from people. Perhaps the process of revolution itself contaminates socialism. Revolutionaries are warriors, and warriors of every age & type harden their hearts in war. They start feeling justified in using any means, any method, to win the fight. War and struggle erode every good intention, and often the ideological justifications for the struggle become reduced to slogans.
But if the substance of socialism survives the revolutionary fire, it will remain fragile in the post-revolutionary period. No matter the good intentions underlying a socialist society, some men and women will develop ambition and greed. Others will use their offices or jobs to benefit relatives and friends or punish enemies. Socialism-- that is, true socialism-- is therefore not inevitable. Yes, socialism may expect too much of mankind, but then again so may Christianity and all other religion.
Never discount the idealists, even though conservatives of every age have vilified them and sneered at them.
Once upon a time slavery was assumed part of the natural order of things. Once upon a time every state in the world was despotic, while human rights and elected governments were at best fantasies. Once upon a time there were no such things as trials, and torture was the norm. Modern man breaks records for the size and scope of human cruelty, but modern man has succeeded in moving the norms very far toward the good. A society free of slavery, peonage, hereditary nobility, poorhouses and debtors prisons, with universal public education, socialized health care for everyone, a 40 hour work week, and a popularly elected republican government, would surely have seemed like a pie-in-the-sky utopia to someone alive in 1700. Who even a hundred years ago could have imagined the United Nations functioning as it does. Anyone who thinks we haven't made progress toward the good has not read history. Are Hitler & Stalin so exceptional? Not when we recall Sargon, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Mongols, the Moguls, and Ivan the Terrible. How often did people like Thomas Jefferson, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela appear before 1600?
In this respect, socialism does involve a certain belief in progress. Marx embraced the idea of progressive historical stages, leading to a communist society, and all socialists believe that a better day is always possible, and that good men will not shirk from working for that day.
We've heard it all before:
"Socialism just too pie in the sky. Capitalism will be around forever."
Yeah, right, they said the same thing about slavery, serfdom, monarchy, theocracy, and probably human sacrifice.
"Man is by nature greedy, and capitalism is man's greed harnessed in the best way."
This is Adam Smith's myth. Anthropology rebuts it by demonstrating that humankind is capable of many different cultures, many different motivations, and many different sets of values. Anyone who thinks man is by nature individualistic and selfishly motivated overlooks the many instances of self-sacrifice: the Aztec sacrificial victim, the Samurai & Kamikaze, the Christian martyr, the soldier on the battlefield, the hospital volunteer, the kid who turns in the wallet he found on the sidewalk. Human psychology is far more complex than the Smith Myth allows.
"Free market economies are much more efficient than command economies."
More efficient at what?
Mindless production? An empty goal by itself.
Producing quality goods cheaply? Consider how much price padding results from advertising, packaging, sales commissions, and profit-taking middlemen.
Economic "growth?" The USSR in its earlier decades grew far faster than any other economy ever has, before or since. At no time in American history did the economy grow faster than it did during the government-directed effort of WWII.
Making rich people richer? Yes, capitalism does that very efficiently.
"What's this socialist crap about everyone getting paid the same?"
Some socialists have argued "from every person according to his abilities, to every person according to their needs." However most socialists would allow some pay differential, but pay must relate to the nature of a man's work, not to passive ownership of property. Socialists wish that conservatives were as concerned about the sufferings of the poor as they are about protecting unearned wealth of the rich.
"Capitalism is democratic; socialism is dictatorship."
Conservatives compare the USSR with the "western democracies." But Stalinism and Maoism were malformations, both abhorrent to true socialists. A truly socialist society has yet to exist, but if a society isn't democratic, then by definition it won't be socialist. Neo-liberals take it as an article of faith that democracy & capitalism are co-extensive. It is true that modern capitalism is facilitated by a republican form of government, but there have been too many prosperous capitalist dictatorships to assume that capitalism is by nature democratic. Many modern European democratic states have significant socialist features. Socialists point out as well how badly capitalist money distorts electoral processes.
Capitalism promotes individualism, while socialism forces individuals into artificial collectives.
Well, up to a point this is true. But if one examines the full range of cultures in the world and throughout time, one discovers that American-style individualism is an anomaly. Americans are detached from their communities and families, alone, and subject to high stress. The supposedly free individual is utterly powerless, while groups exercise power. The supposedly free American individual is in fact very conformist and conventional. People are social animals, not quite on the order of cattle, more like dogs & wolves. If we as individuals had a duty to live moral lives, we have just as much a duty to work for a moral society. Socialists believe that wage-labor, like slavery and feudalism, distorts social relationships. Indeed, nowadays it is the mega-corporations that are forcing people into artificial collectives. Socialism most certainly would demand a lot out of an individual, but socialism would give every individual, through collective self-government, control of her own work, freedom from poverty, and liberty to pursue a good life-- and that's the way it should be.
http://www.bergonia.org/Gov/socialism.htm
# # Jet says : says :
30 April, 2009 [ 10:33 ]
# Jet says :
You must all excuse me. I have mental problems due to being abused by my Parents.
I enjoy making up stories of other People. Frankly I do not have a clue who Dr. Jason P. Smith Phd, Philipe or Rodrigo are. For I enjoy insulting anyone who has a difference of opion.
I also enjoy the fact that USA has bullied other countries and commited Genocide worldwide. I get angry at Hugo Chavez for helping poor People as this means US Corporations cannot exploit and Starve the poor People in Latin America.
I totally agree with NAFTA & The FTA as this promotes great wealth to the United States while promoting human misery Worldwide.
And I am very ashamed that China now finances the United States.
I despise the Chinese for having more power than the United States.
Any country that is stronger than the United States should be punished.
I agree with war against Russia, China, Iran, India and Pakistan . It does not matter if these countries have Nuclear Weapons or has other Military Alliances, Beacause lets face it USA will always win, I truly believe this. I am a very intelligent Man, I even watch Family Guy and The Simpsons as they are great intellectual role models.
# Jet says :
1 May, 2009 [ 02:05 ]
LOL Even when he tries to portray me as he did in the post above, Phillip still sounds like Phillip/Rodrigo.
The funniest part is when he brings up "mental problems" or " insulting based on difference of opinion" and yet, this is precisely what HE is known for.
No amount of name changes or using other peoples posting names will be able to hide that.
# hate the haters says :
1 May, 2009 [ 09:44 ]
Rodrigo:
Antipsychotic medications have been available since the mid-1950s. They have greatly improved the outlook for individual patients. These medications reduce the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia and usually allow the patient to function more effectively and appropriately.
# Rodrigo says :
2 May, 2009 [ 08:03 ]
Oh my HAHAHA someone spoke the truth about you. Dont get upset.
Wish it had been me. But then I would have made it a lot longer with video clips & articles just to prove a point.
Nah thats way to short to be me But whoever it was congratulations, unless it was you Jet says admitting your faults nah I doubt you are that truthful HAHAHAHA.
As for # hate the haters says : its you Jet says you are both the same person. You really do have mental problems HAHAHA.
# Jet says :
2 May, 2009 [ 23:09 ]
cuckoo cuckoo LOL
# hate the haters says :
3 May, 2009 [ 00:02 ]
Rodrigo,
There is help available and I can get you in touch with a mental health group and an I am sure if we search, there must be an incest support group that could help you somwhere.
# Jet says :
3 May, 2009 [ 01:49 ]
LOL
# Rodrigo says :
3 May, 2009 [ 07:27 ]
Viva Communism
Fck usa
# manuel says :
6 June, 2009 [ 15:06 ]
Dear Members of the U.S. Congress:
We are concerned Peruvian-Americans, immigrant organizations and human rights
advocates in the United States. We are writing to express our strong opposition to
the Free Trade Agreement with Peru (FTA) and to request its further renegotiation for
the following reasons:
LABOR RIGHTS
In August, Peru’s President Alan Garcia agreed to issue presidential decrees to clarify
specific labor laws during a congressional visit from U.S. Representatives Rangel and
Levin. Yet Peruvian labor leaders argue that this is insufficient because it does not
change the labor laws through legislation and will not guarantee effective
enforcement. Like many workers in Latin American countries, Peruvians face
constant threats to their labor rights. Violations include discrimination against union
organizers, illegal firings and forced overtime without pay. Further, the new system
of fixed-labor contracts and subcontracting radically undermines workers' rights
because it does not guarantee a 44 hour work week or labor standard. Nor will the
presidential decrees protect the rights of the majority of people, seventy-five
percent, who work in the informal sector. And many of the remaining twenty-five
percent work for private employment contracting agencies that are not obligated to
enforce labor rights.
A free trade agreement with Peru should not be approved by the U.S. Congress until
legislation is passed by Peruvian Congress, which guarantees compliance with ILO
standards and guarantees enforcement.
AGRICULTURE, POVERTY & IMMIGRATION
Agriculture is an integral part of Peru's economy with nearly a third of the population
depending on this sector for their livelihood. In the FTA, the U.S. demands that Peru
renounce its rights under the WTO agreements to apply Special Agricultural
Safeguards, designed to protect sensitive sectors. After a thorough analysis of the
trade text on agriculture, the Peruvian National Convention on Agriculture
(CONVEAGRO) estimated that hundreds of thousands of Peruvian farmers would be
negatively affected by the agreement. The U.S. agricultural subsidies constitutes
unfair competition for Peruvian agricultural goods and will impoverish the 700,000
producers of cotton, corn, barley, wheat, oilseeds and dairy products in that country.
Considering that only 3% of Peruvian farmers export their products, it’s very likely
that as hundreds of thousands of Peruvian small farmers lose their markets, they will
be pushed into drug production, and to migrate with their families to already
impoverished Peruvian cities, or as undocumented immigrants to countries like the
U.S.
Even though Peru's economy has been growing continuously in the last 7 years,
almost 50% of the population is still living under $2 per day as a result of neo liberal
economic policies that are very similar to those promoted by this FTA. According to
the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), close to one fourth of
Peruvians live in extreme poverty. People in rural areas are the worst affected;
nearly 70 percent of them are extremely poor.
After NAFTA, over 1.3 million small farmers lost their livelihoods in Mexico due to
agricultural rules that are nearly identical to those included in the U.S.-Peru FTA. As
a result, undocumented immigration from Mexico to the U.S. increased by 61 percent
in the years following the implementation of NAFTA, according to Pew Hispanic
Center. U.S. policies like NAFTA-style “free trade agreements” influence the
economy of Latin America directly. Therefore, solving the problem of undocumented
immigration is a shared responsibility, and it must be addressed by a comprehensive
immigration reform that includes fair trade legislation and that prevents interest
groups from promoting human trafficking, exploitation of workers, broken
communities and cheap labor.
CORRUPTION vs. DEMOCRACY
We must remind you that there are pending cases of human rights abuses and
corruption involving Garcia’s first government. Garcia was reelected in 2006 on a
platform against Toledo’s free trade policies and with a promise to renegotiate the
FTA – the agricultural rules in particular. But, once elected, he instead visited Bush to
request its approval.
This FTA was passed by Peruvian Congress in 2006 in a lame-duck session with very
little public support and ignoring a request for a national referendum. Eighty percent
of Peruvian Congress members who voted for this FTA had already lost their seats in
the elections that predated the vote.
Meanwhile foreign mining and natural gas corporations are making huge profits in
Peru but leave behind underpaid workers, pollution and environmental destruction.
The Garcia administration has ignored popular protests and strongly supports
extractive industries. The Garcia government has abandoned dozens of towns
destroyed by the recent earthquake, even though it has the biggest budget surplus in
history. Public protests regarding this matter have been silenced or ignored by the
government, including closing down a radio-TV station in the city of Pisco that had
been critical of the relief efforts.
We believe that if this FTA is ratified now by the U.S. Congress, it will send a signal
to the Garcia government that its current heavy-handed and anti-public interest
policies are supported by the U.S. Congress. It will further perpetuate the perception
that the U.S. favors the interests of multinationals over protecting human rights and
reducing corruption.
INDIGENOUS RIGHTS & THE ENVIRONMENT
Most Peruvians are of Indigenous and Afro descendant heritage. According to the
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the poorest of the poor in
Peru are the Indigenous/Native peoples. About 73 percent in Indigenous communities
live below the poverty line. This FTA is a threat to indigenous peoples' heritage and
way of life, as it allows agribusiness and pharmaceutical corporations to take over
their traditional medicine and nutrition knowledge for profit.
Mining, oil and natural gas exploration and extraction projects would increase
dramatically with this FTA, leading to extensive damage to the Peruvian environment,
especially the Andes mountains region and the Amazon basin, which is the largest
virgin forest on the planet. With this FTA, multinational corporations would have the
right to sue governments if any attempt to protect the environment would cause the
companies to see their profits reduced. In addition, this agreement establishes secret
trade tribunals, making trade rules more powerful than democratic institutions and
domestic laws.
As a result, entire Indigenous communities could be displaced from their lands and
pushed into extermination. These FTA regulations directly contradict the Declaration
on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples recently adopted by the United Nations, which
includes the rights to protect their land and natural resources.
PUBLIC HEALTH & INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Hundreds of thousands of Peruvians will not be able to afford generic medicines
because of new patents and data-protection regulations included in this FTA are
intended to protect and boost the already outrageous profits of pharmaceutical
corporations. This FTA promotes the privatization and deregulation of services such
as water, health care and education. At the same time, it protects the interests of
multinational corporations benefiting from Peru's bungled privatization of its social
security system at the expense of workers, women, children, senior citizens and the
chronically ill.
CONCLUSION
We strongly encourage you to reject the Free Trade Agreement with Peru – and ask
instead for it’s further renegotiation – because it is not fair for most Americans nor
most Peruvians, and because it was negotiated ignoring the voice of the people of
both the United States and Peru.
We believe that a free trade agreement with Peru must provide safeguards that will
protect vulnerable sectors of Peruvian society, instead of worsening its economic,
social and political inequality.
Trade should be used to promote social justice and progress for all, and not just for
the benefit of the few rich and powerful. The United States can truly spread
democracy and freedom by example, not by imposing economic policies that will
increase corruption, poverty and abuse among impoverished nations.
We believe that fair trade is necessary to address poverty and hunger, and to
promote economic progress and decent living standards, while respecting the UN
Declaration of Human Rights and guaranteeing the protection of our planet.
Respectfully,
Peruvian-Americans for Fair Trade
National Network for Immigrants and Refugee Rights
League of United Latin American Citizens
Group of Andean Immigrants in DC
Casa de Maryland, Inc.
Manuel Zapata Olivella Center for Immigrant Education and Human Development
Alianza Indígena Sin Fronteras
Intercontinental Congress of First Nation People of North and South America
NETWORK – National Catholic Social Justice Lobby
United Methodist Church - General Board of Church and Society
Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns
Washington Office on Latin America
Global Exchange
Global Rights
KAFT - Korean Americans for Fair Trade
AFRODES USA - Association of Displaced Afro Colombians
Mexico & U.S. Solidarity Network - Red Solidaria México & EEUU
NICANET – The Nicaragua Network
Movement for Peace in Colombia - Movimiento por la Paz en Colombia
NYC People’s Referendum on Free Trade
http://www.citizen.org/documents/ImmigrantFaithHRLettertoCongressFINAL.pdf
# Manuel says :
6 June, 2009 [ 15:12 ]
China deepens Latin America ties
China's President Hu Jintao has not been to Latin America since 2005.
But his presence at the Apec summit taking place in Lima this weekend, and his visits to Costa Rica and Cuba, have highlighted China's deepening engagement with the region.
But what exactly is China's interest in Latin America?
President Hu's last visit to an Apec summit in Latin America in November 2004 prompted a flurry of excitement about China's booming economic involvement in the region.
Mr Hu was famously quoted as saying he expected $100bn (£66bn) of Chinese investment in Latin America in the following 10 years.
The Chinese government later corrected this to $100bn in bilateral trade, not investment. That figure was reached sooner than expected last year, and represents a remarkable jump from $13bn (£8.6bn) in 2000.
It still amounts to much less than trade with the US ($560bn) or the EU ($250bn), but the trend is significant. China is buying more and more Latin American commodities like oil, minerals and soya.
 China is purchasing more Latin American commodities like soya |
"China now wants to show it is a responsible stakeholder in the region," says Dan Erikson, a specialist in China-Latin American relations from the Inter-American Dialogue.
"It has the image in Latin America of being 'mercantilist', or only interested in taking out commodities. Now it wants to show it is interested in Latin America's longer-term development."
Crucial partner
China launched its first ever policy paper on Latin America earlier this month. While the document was short on specifics, it aimed to show the world it was serious about the region. It had previously released similar policy papers on the EU in 2003 and Africa in 2006.
As a sign of its long-term intent, analysts point to new free trade agreements (FTAs) between China and individual Latin American countries:
- Chile was the first non-Asian country to sign an FTA with China in 2005
- Peru and China this week successfully concluded talks on a free trade deal
- And a third bilateral deal between Costa Rica and China is under negotiation.
Trade relations have certainly boomed for some Latin American countries since the last Hu Jintao visit. For two of the three Latin American members of Apec, Peru and Chile, China has become a crucial trading partner.
 China and Cuba signed agreements on economical and technical cooperation |
According to UN figures, in 2007 nearly 40% of Chile's exports went to the Asia-Pacific region, mostly China. For Peru, the figure was 19%.
The Peruvian government is keen to deepen trading relations, partly in the hope that China's continued economic growth can help it survive the global recession.
Deputy Foreign Minister Gonzalo Gutierrez described President Hu's visit to Peru - the first ever by a Chinese president - as "of the utmost importance".
However, for Mexico, Latin America's third Apec member, the relative importance of Asia-Pacific remains low (about 3% of its exports) because of Mexico's close ties with the US economy. And the trade that does exist is very much in China's favour.
In 2007 Mexico ran a $28bn trade deficit with China.
"For every $30 of Chinese goods that Mexico imports, Mexico only exports $1 of Mexican goods to China," says Mr Erikson.
Infrastructure
Some Latin American governments complain privately about the low level of Chinese direct foreign investment in the region, which is far less than that of the US or the EU. The official figure is more than $20bn, but critics say much of this goes into offshore tax havens.
According to figures from the Chinese embassy in Washington in early 2008 only about $2bn is direct investment in extractive industries like oil and minerals.
"Investment in infrastructure for example," says Mr Erikson, "has been very disappointing."
Osvaldo Rosales, from the UN's Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) , told the BBC there was a "huge asymmetry between the increasing level of trade between China and Latin America and the low level of Chinese investment".
But he blames Latin American governments for the lack of properly evaluated investment projects for China to invest in.
Football reward
Analysts say that despite some unease about China's close relations with Cuba and Venezuela, Washington is not unduly concerned about China's growing influence and presence in Latin America.
 President Hu was given a warm welcome by his Peruvian host |
President Hu's visit to Cuba was more about trade and meeting Raul Castro than cocking a snook at the US.
Cuba is also a major ally in a region that usually has diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Eleven of the remaining 23 countries that still recognise Taiwan are found in Central America and the Caribbean.
Eyebrows were raised when Hu Jintao chose to go to Costa Rica rather than say, Brazil, China's largest trading partner in Latin America. But Costa Rica was being rewarded with a presidential visit (and a new football stadium) for its decision last year to recognise China. It is the only Central American country to do so.
Even though China is obviously keen to enter into oil agreements with Venezuela, it has shown it does not want to be drawn into any tension between President Hugo Chavez and the US government.
Washington apparently did not object to China becoming a board member of the Inter-American Development Bank and having observer status at the Organisation of American States (OAS).
"So far, it is widely accepted that China trying to act in the region with self-restraint and prudence," Gonzalo Paz, a lecturer at George Washington University, wrote recently.
"The deepening economic crisis will undoubtedly have an important influence on how the next stage develops."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7737554.stm
# Manuel says :
6 June, 2009 [ 15:18 ]
What can Obama do in Latin America?
What if Barack Obama had picked the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel or Democracy Now! anchor Amy Goodman to advise him at the upcoming Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago this week? Unlikely, to say the least, but 75 years ago President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did something just like that, tapping a former Nation editor and fierce critic of U.S. militarism to advise his administration on Latin American policy. As a result -- consider this your curious, yet little known, fact of the day -- anti-imperialism saved the American empire.
FDR took office in 1933 looking not just to stabilize the U.S. economy, but to calm a world inflamed: Japan had invaded Manchuria the year before; the Nazis had seized power in Germany; European imperialists were tightening their holds over their colonies; and the Soviet Union had declared its militant "third period" strategy, imagining that global capitalism, plunged into the Great Depression, was in its last throes.
When, soon after his March inauguration, Roosevelt put forward a call to the "nations of the world" to "enter into a solemn and definitive pact of non-aggression," the colonialists, militarists, and fascists who ruled Europe and Asia balked. Because the new president's global reach came nowhere near his global ambitions, the London Economic Conference -- convened that July by the equivalent of today's G-20 -- broke up rancorously over how to respond to that moment's global meltdown.
Luckily for Roosevelt, the Seventh Pan-American Conference was scheduled to take place that December in Montevideo, Uruguay. Admittedly the very idea of pan-Americanism -- that the American republics shared common ideals and political interests -- was then moribund. Every few years, in an international forum, Latin American delegates simply submitted to Washington's directives while silently seething about the latest U.S. military intervention -- in Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Venezuela, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, or Haiti. (Take your pick.)
Momentum was then building among Latin American nations for a revision of international law, which effectively granted great powers the right to intervene in the affairs of smaller republics. Venezuelan diplomats, for instance, were insisting that the U.S. affirm the principle of absolute sovereignty. Argentines put forth their own "non-aggression" treaty codifying non-intervention as the law of the hemisphere. Caribbean and Central American politicians insisted that detachments of U.S. Marines, then bogged down in counterinsurgencies in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, get out.
FDR dispatched his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to the summit, but instructed him not to offer anything more than a promise to build a few new roads. The demand that the U.S. give up the right of intervention was "unacceptable."
Yet Roosevelt, who had a way of mixing and matching unlikely advisors, also asked Ernest Gruening (recommended by Harvard law professor and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter) to accompany Hull. In 1964, as a senator from Alaska, Gruening would become famous for casting one of only two votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which President Lyndon Johnson would use to escalate the Vietnam War, but in the 1930s, he was already a committed anti-imperialist.
In the pages of the Nation and other left-wing journals, he had helped expose the use of torture, forced labor, and political assassinations that took place under Marine occupations in the Caribbean, atrocities he likened to European brutality in India, Ireland, and the Congo. After touring Haiti and the Dominican Republic, he lobbied Congress to cut off the funding of counterinsurgency operations in the region, and he excoriated the "horde of carpet-bagging concessionaires that are the camp-followers of American militaristic imperialism." That such an uncompromising critic of U.S. diplomacy would be chosen to advise the Secretary of State reflects the strength of the left in the 1930s -- and Roosevelt's willingness to tap it.
Burnin' and Murdewin'
As the delegation set sail for Montevideo, Gruening was shocked to learn that the U.S. had "no program except to be friendly with everyone and radiate goodwill."
"Mr. Secretary," he reported himself telling Hull, "the one issue that concerns every Latin-American country is intervention. We should come out strongly for a resolution abjuring it."
Hull, whom Gruening later described as speaking in the thick accent of a born and bred member of the Tennessee gentry, dropping g's and wrestling with r's, replied that that would be a hard sell.
"What am Ah goin't to do when chaos breaks out in one of those countries and armed bands go woamin' awound, burnin', pillagin' and murdewin' Amewicans?" Hull asked. "How can I tell mah people that we cain't intervene?"
"Mr. Secretary," Gruening responded, "that usually happens after we have intervened."
Hull was, however, afraid of bad press. "If Ah were to come out against intervention," he said, "the Hearst papers would attack me fwom coast to coast... Wemember, Gwuening, Mr. Woosevelt and Ah have to be weelected."
"Coming out against intervention would help you get reelected," Gruening replied. It would, he insisted, help the New Deal jump off the merry-go-round of invasion, occupation, and insurgency that had badly crippled U.S. prestige throughout Latin America and much of the world.
He was right. In Montevideo, Gruening helped bridge the gap between U.S. envoys and "anti-American" Latin American diplomats, including those from Cuba where, well before Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, serial U.S. interventions had strained relations between Havana and Washington. Most importantly, he reconciled the Secretary of State to the principle of non-intervention.
Hull "rose to the occasion magnificently," Gruening wrote, announcing that the United States would henceforth "shun and reject" the "so-called right-of-conquest... The New Deal indeed would be an empty boast if it did not mean that." Latin American delegates broke out in "thunderous applause and cheers." And FDR, ever the agile politician, seized the moment, confirming that the "definite policy of the United States from now on is one opposed to armed intervention."
"Our Era of 'Imperialism' Nears its End," the New York Times announced. "'Manifest Destiny' Is Giving Way to the New Policy of 'Equal Dealing With All Nations.'"
Twenty-One Different Kinds of Hate
Not quite, of course. Washington would return to a policy of interventionism in the Cold War era. Nonetheless, the importance of this diplomatic sea-change cannot be overstated.
Montevideo was Roosevelt's first significant foreign policy success, marking a turn in the country's fortunes as an ascendant superpower. He then ordered the Marines to withdraw from Haiti, while giving the country back its national bank; he abrogated the Cuban constitution's hated Platt Amendment, which had turned the island into a U.S. vassal-state; and he began to tolerate a degree of economic nationalism in Latin America, including Mexico's expropriation of the holdings of Standard Oil.
FDR's enormous popularity in Latin America fired his aspirations to world leadership. Visiting Buenos Aires in 1936, he was greeted by more than a million ecstatic well-wishers who gave him a "wild ovation" and "pelted him with flowers." Even Buenos Aires's usually skeptical press heralded him as a "shepherd of democracy," while hospitals expected an "enormous crop of 'Roosevelts' among baby boys," despite a ban on foreign names for infants.
Improved relations with Latin America also helped the U.S. recover from the Great Depression. With Asia off limits and Europe headed for war, Washington looked south both for markets for manufactured goods and for raw materials, negotiating trade treaties with 15 Latin American countries between 1934 and 1942.
More importantly, Latin America became the laboratory for what eventually became known as liberal multilateralism -- the diplomatic framework that, after World War II, would allow the United States to accrue unprecedented power. With the League of Nations practically defunct, diplomats began to discuss the possibility of a new "League of the Americas," which would eventually evolve into both the Organization of American States and the United Nations. (Each would enshrine in its charter the principle of absolute non-intervention.) Roosevelt himself would hold up the "illustration of the republics of this continent" as a model for global postwar reconstruction.
Cordell Hull got the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to found the U.N. and FDR took credit for overcoming "many times 21 different kinds of hate" to "sell the idea of peace and security among the American republics." But the thanks really should go to anti-imperialists like Gruening and guerrilla fighters like Nicaragua's Augusto Sandino who rendered militarism an unsustainable foreign policy.
Seventy-Five Years Later...
The parallels with today are unmistakable: a global economy in tatters; a new president with a mandate for reform, but blocked abroad by rising rivals and hamstrung by the rapid recession of U.S. power and prestige thanks to years of arrogant, unilateral militarism. And coming on the heels of a London summit of economic powers, a Latin American conference: the Fifth Summit of the Americas to be attended by 34 heads of state representing every American country except Cuba.
The last time this summit convened at the Argentinean beach resort town of Mar del Plata in 2005, Argentines greeted George W. Bush not as a shepherd of democracy but as an evangelizer for war, militarism, and savage capitalism. Thousands turned up from all over the continent to burn the president in effigy. Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Bolivia's Evo Morales convened a festive parallel "People's Summit," while Argentine soccer legend Maradona called Bush "human rubbish" and "a bit of an assassin." To paraphrase Michael Moore's Academy Award homage to the Dixie Chicks, when Maradona is against you, your time in Latin America is up.
With an aircraft carrier stationed just offshore and fighter jets buzzing overhead, Bush still was nervous and seemed distinctly out of his league. Coming just a few months after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans, with Iraq careening out of control, Bush's disastrous performance in Argentina, combined with an impressive display of Latin American unity, hastened the demise of the pretension of the neoconservatives to global supremacy. "The United States continues to see things one way," said one Latin American diplomat at the Summit, "but most of the rest of the hemisphere has moved on and is heading in another direction."
And so it had, with a left turn that started with Chávez's 1998 election as Venezuela's president and still continues apace. Last year, after all, Paraguay elected a liberation theologian as president; and last month, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front -- the guerrilla group turned political party Ronald Reagan spent six billion dollars and 70,000 Salvadorean lives trying to defeat in the 1980s -- finally came to power in El Salvador.
This week many will be watching to see if Barack Obama, in what will be his first real engagement with Latin America, is ready to reverse course at this Summit as Roosevelt did more than three-quarters of a century ago. To the United States, Latin America has not just been a source of raw materials and markets, but a "workshop," a place where rising foreign-policy coalitions try out new ways to project U.S. power following periods of acute crisis. FDR did it, as did Reagan and the New Right when, in the 1980s, they used Central America to experiment with junking multilateralism, while remilitarizing and remoralizing foreign policy.
Today, President Obama is enormously popular in Latin America. A number of local politicians in the region even legally adopted his name to give themselves an edge on ballots, and undoubtedly quite a few baby boys will be called Barack. Brazil's president, known simply as Lula, says he is praying for Obama -- and even Maradona admits he likes him "a lot."
But popularity only goes so far. For the first time in many decades, an American president might find that the days when the U.S. could use Latin America as an imperial rehearsal space are drawing to a close.
The Colombian Option
So what will Obama offer in Trinidad and Tobago? He will, like Hull in 1933, be intent on "radiating goodwill," but he will not necessarily "be friendly with everyone." He's already poisoned the water by insisting that Hugo Chávez is an "obstacle" to progress. Love Chávez or hate him, he is recognized as a legitimate leader by all Latin American countries and is a close ally to many. For eight years, a Bush administration policy of driving a wedge between the rest of the region and the Venezuelan proved a dismal failure, except when it came to increasing the outflow of Washington's hemorrhaging power in the hemisphere.
On many fronts, however, the president is likely to discover that his real obstacles to progress south of the border lie uncomfortably close to home.
In preparation for the summit, the Obama administration has made some overtures to Cuba, responding to demands by nearly every Latin American country that Washington end its cold war against Havana. The need to keep Democratic senators from Florida and New Jersey (states with large Cuban-American populations) in the fold means that the general travel ban and trade embargo will, however, stay in place, at least for now. (In 1933, Hull tried to prevent the Cuban envoy from speaking, fearing that he would give a fiery anti-American speech; Gruening appealed to the principle of free speech to reverse the ban.)
Obama will probably reiterate recent official statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among others, that the United States bears real responsibility for Mexico's drug-war violence and perhaps bemoan the way an "inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border" fuels drug-related killings. Like every other administration, though, Obama's will have to answer to the National Rifle Association (NRA), which at this point carries out its own foreign policy.
In 2005, for example, when Brazil held a referendum to implement a stringent gun-control law, the NRA spent considerable money lobbying to successfully defeat it. So expect the NRA to fight any attempt to stem the flow of guns south of the border. In fact, Wyoming senator John Barrasso hopes to use the fear of Mexican drug violence to force a greater distribution of assault weapons. As he put the matter, "Why would you disarm someone when they potentially could get caught in the crossfire?... The United States will not surrender our second-amendment rights for Mexico's border problem."
And so it goes: On nearly every issue that could either actually help relieve the suffering of Latin Americans or allow the U.S. to win back strategic allies, domestic politics will hinder Obama's range of action, even if not his immediate popularity.
Just recently, a study group made up of some of Latin America's leading intellectuals and policy-makers, including former presidents of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, declared the U.S. war on drugs a failure and recommended the legalization of marijuana. Obama is obviously sympathetic to this position, having instructed his Justice Department to back off "medical marijuana" prosecutions. But will he be able to de-escalate the war on drugs in Latin America? Not likely.
As a candidate, the president did say he wasn't opposed to all wars, just stupid ones -- and this one is as stupid as they come. It hasn't lessened narcotics exports to the U.S., but has spread violence through Central America into Mexico, while entrenching paramilitary power in Colombia. Plan Colombia, the centerpiece of that war, is a legacy of Bill Clinton's foreign policy, and much of the six billion dollars so far spent to fight it has essentially been direct-deposited in the coffers of corporate sponsors of the Democratic Party like Connecticut's United Technologies and other northeastern defense contractors.
Rather than dismantling Plan Colombia, plans are evidently afoot to have it go viral beyond the Americas. Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently commented that "many of us from all over the world can learn from what has happened with respect to the very successful developments of Plan Colombia," and suggested that it be franchised "specifically to Afghanistan." Washington Post White House correspondent Scott Wilson agrees, urging Obama to use Colombia as a "classroom for learning how to beat the Taliban." Buried deep in Wilson's recommendation was a revelation: U.S. officials, he wrote, "privately" told him that death-squad terror was a necessary first step in Plan Colombia, serving as a "placeholder" until the U.S. could train a "professional" army. The Bush administration kept "the money flowing to Colombia's army despite evidence of its complicity in paramilitary massacres."
The Path to Latin America Runs Through Brasilia...
Ultimately, imperial Washington's only real road may run through the Brazilian capital, Brasilia. After all, Obama approaches the region not as a leader of a confident superpower, but of an autumnal hegemon. As such, his best option may lie in forming a partnership with Brazil -- Latin America's largest, most diversified economy, with enormous, newly discovered offshore oil reserves and a fulsome set of political aspirations -- to administer the hemisphere. The White House clearly recognizes this to be the case, which was why an administration official called Lula's recent one-on-one meeting in Washington with Obama a recognition of Brazil's "global ascendancy."
Just before the G-20 meeting convened in London, Lula blamed the global financial collapse on the "irrational behavior of people that are white" and "blue-eyed." Standing next to the blanching British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he continued: "I do not know any black or indigenous bankers so I can only say [it is wrong] that this part of mankind, which is victimized more than any other, should pay for the crisis."
If these words came out of Chávez's mouth, they would have been taken as but the latest indication of his irrational anti-Americanism, but the Obama administration needs Lula. In London, Obama could barely contain himself: "That's my man right here," he said, grabbing Lula's hand as Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner looked on. "Love this guy. He's the most popular politician on earth. It's because of his good looks." That certainly represented an improvement over George Bush, who asked Lula's Brazilian predecessor, "Do you have blacks, too?"
Yet Brazil's cooperation will come at a price, which Obama will have trouble meeting. This country's baroque and bloated farm subsidy and tariff program -- which House and Senate members recently refused to let Obama cut -- will prevent the president from bowing gracefully to Lula's central demand: that the U.S. live up to its rhetoric about free trade and open its economy to Brazil's competitive agro-industry.
...Around Caracas...
And then there's Venezuela. Seventy-five years ago, Secretary of State Hull feared the Hearst papers would attack him "fwom coast to coast" if he renounced interventionism. Well, the more things change...
When Obama's State Department declared Venezuela's recent referendum to remove presidential term limits (and so allow Chávez to stand for reelection) an internal matter "consistent with democratic principles," it was attacked by the Houston Chronicle, which is owned -- you guessed it -- by the Hearst Corporation. More criticism followed, sending administration officials "scrambling," according to the Wall Street Journal, "to assert that the Obama administration hasn't softened U.S. policy toward Venezuela."
Since the ongoing demonization of Chávez carries absolutely no domestic costs and its easing plenty of potential debits, Obama might be forced to keep up some version of the Bush administration's hard-line, perhaps providing the president cover to moderate rhetoric, if not policy, in real danger spots where far more is at stake -- as in the Middle East.
...And Ends in Texas
Immigration is one area where Obama might have some room to maneuver, but he would have to overcome the Glenn-Beck wing of the Republican Party. Ordering Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to stop hunting undocumented Latin American workers (as the presidents of Mexico and Central America have demanded) and opening a real path to citizenship would go a long way toward improving relations with southern neighbors. It would also guarantee the loyalty of the Latino vote in 2012 and, by creating millions of new voters, perhaps even pull Texas closer to swing-state status.
Returning to the Scene of the Crime
Ultimately, however, Obama's vision will be limited by the smallness of the imaginations of the counselors he has surrounded himself with. There are neither Gruenings, nor even Hulls in that crowd. He has kept on George W. Bush's Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Thomas Shannon and has picked Jeffrey Davidow to be his special advisor at the summit.
A career diplomat, Davidow's foreign service has been largely unremarkable, though his first posting was to Guatemala in the early 1970s when U.S.-backed death squads were running wild, and was followed by an assignment as a junior political officer in Chile, where he observed the 1973 U.S.-backed military coup that overthrew elected President Salvador Allende. Committed to the Clinton-era mantra of economic liberalization, these diplomats will never recommend the kind of game-changing ideas Gruening did.
Given that the global financial crisis will dominate this summit, Obama's appearance will be seen by some as a return to the scene of the crime. After all, it was in Chile that the now-discredited model of deregulated financial capitalism was first imposed. This occurred well before Presidents Reagan and Clinton adopted it in the U.S.
As it then spread through most of the rest of Latin America, the results were absolutely disastrous. For two decades, economies stagnated, poverty deepened, and inequality increased. To make matters worse, just as a new generation of leftists, taking measures to lessen poverty and reduce inequality, was recovering from that Washington-induced catastrophe, a reckless housing bubble burst in the U.S., bringing down the global economy.
Latin Americans will want an accounting. As even Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally, put it: "[The] whole world has financed the United States, and I believe that they have a reciprocal debt with the planet." Hugo Chávez couldn't have said it better.
Greg Grandin is the author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (Metropolitan) and Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, forthcoming in June. He can be reached at grandin@nyu.edu.
Copyright 2009 Greg Grandin
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/41702
# Manuel says :
6 June, 2009 [ 15:24 ]
Obama In Cairo: A New Face For Imperialism
By Patrick Martin
05 June, 2009
WSWS.org
The speech delivered by US President Barack Obama in Cairo yesterday was riddled with contradictions. He declared his opposition to the “killing of innocent men, women, and children,” but defended the ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US proxy war in Pakistan, while remaining silent on the most recent Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. These wars have killed at least one million Iraqis and tens of thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.
Obama declared his support for democracy, human rights and women’s rights, after two days of meetings with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, two of the most notorious tyrants in the Middle East. He said nothing in his speech about the complete absence of democratic rights in Saudi Arabia, or about the ongoing repression under Mubarak’s military dictatorship. In the days before the US president’s arrival at Al-Azhar University, the campus was raided by Egyptian secret police who detained more than 200 foreign students. Before leaving on his Mideast trip, Obama praised Mubarak as a “steadfast ally.”
While posturing as the advocate of universal peace and understanding, Obama diplomatically omitted any reference to his order to escalate the war in Afghanistan with the dispatch of an additional 17,000 US troops. And he tacitly embraced the policy of his predecessor in Iraq, declaring, “I believe the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.” He even seemed to hedge on the withdrawal deadline of December 2011 negotiated by the Bush administration, which he described as a pledge “to remove all our troops from Iraq by 2012.”
Obama rejected the charge that America is “a self-interested empire”—a perfectly apt characterization—and denied that the United States was seeking bases, territory or access to natural resources in the Muslim world. He claimed that the war in Afghanistan was a “war of necessity” provoked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This is the same argument made by the Bush-Cheney administration at the time, which deliberately conceals the real material interests at stake. The war in Afghanistan is part of the drive by US imperialism to dominate the world’s two most important sources of oil and gas, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin.
There was of course a distinct shift in the rhetorical tone from the bullying “you’re either with or against us” of George W. Bush to the reassuring “we’re all in this together” of Obama. But as several commentators noted (the New Republic compared the speech line-for-line to that given by Bush to the United Nations on September 16, 2006), if you turned off the picture and the sound and simply read the prepared text, the words are very similar to speeches delivered by Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other officials of the previous administration.
The vague and flowery rhetoric, the verbal tributes to Islamic culture and the equal rights of nations, constitute an adjustment of the language being used to cloak the policy of US imperialism, not a change in substance. Obama made not a single concrete proposal to redress the grievances of the oppressed peoples of the Middle East. That is because the fundamental source of this oppression is the profit system and the domination of the world by imperialism, of which American imperialism is the most ruthless.
Obama made one passing reference to colonialism, and to the US role in the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. But in his litany of “sources of tension” in the region, he offered the same checklist as his predecessor, with the first place given to “violent extremism”, Obama’s rhetorical substitute for Bush’s “terrorism.”
The reaction to the Obama speech in the American media was across-the-board enthusiasm. Liberal David Corn of Mother Jones magazine said Obama’s great advantages were “his personal history, his non-Bushness, his recognition of US errors, his willingness to at least talk as if he wants to be an honest broker in the Mideast.”
Michael Crowley wrote in the pro-war liberal magazine New Republic, “to see him unfold his biography, to cut such an unfamiliar profile to the world, is to appreciate how much America will benefit from presenting this new face to the world.”
Perhaps most revealing was the comment by Max Boot, a neoconservative arch-defender of the war in Iraq, who wrote: “I thought he did a more effective job of making America’s case to the Muslim world. No question: He is a more effective salesman than his predecessor was.”
In his speech in Cairo, Obama was playing the role for which he was drafted and promoted by a decisive section of the US financial elite and the military and foreign policy apparatus. This role is to provide a new face for US imperialism as part of a shift in the tactics, but not the strategy, of Washington’s drive for world domination.
Nearly two years ago, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski gave his public backing to the presidential candidacy of a still-obscure senator from Illinois, holding out the prospect that as an African-American with family ties to the Muslim world, Obama would improve the worldwide image of the United States.
Brzezinski was the leading hawk in the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter and helped instigate the political upheavals in Afghanistan in the hopes of inciting a Soviet invasion that would trap the Moscow bureaucracy in a Vietnam-style quagmire. He has remained steadily focused on what he calls the “great chessboard” of Eurasia, and particularly on oil-rich Central Asia, where a struggle for influence now rages between the United States, Russia, China and Iran.
According to Brzezinski in August 2007, Obama “recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America’s role in the world... Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand. He has a sense of what is historically relevant and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world.”
Brzezinski, a ruthless defender of the interests of US imperialism, has issuing warnings to the American ruling elite of the danger of what he calls the “global political awakening.”
In one particularly pointed comment, he told the German magazine Der Spiegel, only months before he endorsed Obama, that the vast majority of humanity “will no longer tolerate the enormous disparities in the human condition. That could well be the collective danger we will have to face in the next decades.”
To call it by its right name, what the more perceptive elements in the US ruling class fear is world revolution. The effort to prevent such a social upheaval is what impelled them to install Obama in the White House and what set him on his pilgrimage to Cairo.
Copyright © 1998-2009 World Socialist Web Site
http://www.countercurrents.org/martin050609.htm
# Manuel says :
6 June, 2009 [ 15:46 ]
Socialist Revolution and Latin American Unity
Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski
In the 1960s the Cuban revolution projected itself as the beginning of the Latin American revolution, reviving and rearming the old utopia of Latin American unity. Since then I have studied the origins, history and validity of this utopia, in Cuba, Poland, which is my country of origin and in France. I wish to share my reflections with you.
Somebody once said that the historic legend, fabricated by scribblers in the service of the Latin American oligarchies and the colonial or imperialist powers, presents the Libertadores (Liberators) as partisans of the creation of a couple of dozen distinct states, and not one. And that this truly monstrous falsification of “official history” resides in the fact that, whereas in western Europe and the United States nations were constituted as the result of the victories of bourgeois democratic revolutions, in Latin America the states that appeared following the defeat of the bourgeois democratic revolution are considered as distinct nations.
Whoever the author was, it was very well said. Latin America has an extraordinary particularity on the world scale, which it shares with the Arab world, also divided. In his History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky said in relation to the national question, “language is the most important instrument of human communication, and consequently of industry. It becomes national together with the triumph of commodity exchange which integrates nations. Upon this foundation the national state is erected as the most convenient, profitable and normal arena for the play of capitalist relations”. [1].
It is true that many national states do not cover the totality of territories on which their national language is spoken and that - albeit in fairly exceptional circumstances - two neighbouring states sometimes have the same national language.
But what happened in Latin America is very specific. In a continuous territory where the state language is the same or similar, in the classic epoch of the formation of national states, not one state but around 20 were formed. The anomaly is undeniable and its scale is enormous. In it the condition of Latin America as a dependent, exploited and underdeveloped periphery of the world capitalist system is materialized. So it is natural than in Latin America the idea periodically resurges that the homeland is America, as happens also in the Arab world, with the existence of pan-Arab nationalism.
“The junker road was possible in Germany because the road of Münzer had failed”, said René Zavaleta Mercado, referring to the defeat in this country of the peasant war and to the subsequent development of German capitalism by the so-called Prussian, that is oligarchic, road. In the dominant centres of world capitalism all roads, whether democratic, involving the development of capitalism as the consequence of an active bourgeois revolution, led from below and complete, or oligarchic, taken following a passive bourgeois semi-revolution imposed from above, have led to an independent development.
However, in the periphery the oligarchic road could only be a dependent road of under-development of capitalism. As shown by Zavaleta Mercado, if it is precisely this road that has been imposed in Latin America, it is because the road of Túpac Amaru y Túpac Catari has not been taken. [2]
In 1780-81, parallel to the first North American revolution, namely the war of independence of the thirteen British colonies in North America, on the territory of the Inca civilization, a great insurrection for independence combined with a radical uprising of the indigenous peasantry, broke out under the leadership of Túpac Amaru y Túpac Catari. To a much greater extent than the north American revolution, which was fundamentally political, the Andean insurrection was a real and profound bourgeois democratic revolution.
In its class composition and on the basis of its own civilization, it had a much greater potential than any subsequent movement for independence to lay the bases for the unification of Latin America and a democratic and independent development of capitalism.
Its savage suppression and the destruction of the Inca civilization by the Spanish colonial power sounded the death knell of a revolution which could have changed the course of history of the Spanish or Iberian-American part of the hemisphere.
In North America the war of independence in the British colonies was victorious and led to the unification - concretely, to a federation - of the latter. But the maintenance and expansion of slavery in the southern states of the new union prevented the road of development of capitalism - democratic and independent or oligarchic and dependent - from being definitively taken for the next 80 years.
In Latin America the wars of independence waged in the first half of the 19th century, although victorious, were defeated as bourgeois revolutions: they did not succeed in transforming themselves into a Latin American national revolution and building a Latin American union or at least a solid base of support for its formation. Instead of forming a federation or, at least, a confederation, America freed of the Spanish yoke was fragmented into a constellation of states.
- Simon Bolivar
In close articulation with the defeat at this level, the wars of independence did not lead either to the suppression of the colony inside the new republics. On the contrary, after the wars of independence, through numerous civil wars, the dominant classes and the colonial modes of exploitation were preserved. Simon Bolivar had a bad, but brilliant, premonition that the union of the old British colonies in north America and the fragmentation of the former Spanish empire would determine their mutual relations, namely that the United States would dominate Latin America. For this reason he aspired to the unification of the former Spanish colonies in a single nation.
In the United States, 80 years after the first American revolution, the civil war between the states of the north, where capitalism had developed on the basis of the exploitation of wage labour, and the southern secessionist states, where capitalism was based on the exploitation of slave labour, became transformed into a revolutionary war for national reunification and the abolition of slavery. It was thanks to this terrible war that the United States definitively won its national unity. It also allowed the democratic and independent road of the development of capitalism to triumph over the oligarchic and dependent road. If the southern secessionist states had won, which was neither impossible nor improbable, the latter would have triumphed, the US would be divided and would have remained in the dependent periphery of world capitalism. Events a little after the defeat of the South are very revealing of the different and even opposed courses of history in the two parts of America.
In Latin America, a terrible genocidal war led by the triple Alliance of the oligarchies of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay with the support of Britain, the hegemonic world power, against Paraguay led to the complete and irreversible destruction of the sole attempt emerging from the wars of independence to ensure an independent development of capitalism.
The tragic end of this attempt, as audacious as it was disastrously provincial, shows us two things. First, that in this epoch, an independent capitalist development in the dependent Latin American periphery of the world capitalist system was not possible without a prolonged rupture with this system - a rupture as radical as that led by the founder and first governor of independent Paraguay, José Gaspar de Francia. Secondly, that already at this time a durable independent development was not possible in a single country in the Latin American periphery of the world system.
Against any fatalistic conception which suggests that the United States and Latin America were destined to follow the roads that they have effectively followed, it should be recalled that this attitude reflects the fact that history is written by the victors, that “history is not a teleological movement, with a road traced in advance, but a scenario in which classes confront each other”, as Agustín Cueva observed. “As this fatalism is only the other side of elitism, knowledge of the history of the revolutionary movements and the democratic alternatives of Latin America in the 19th century remains still “the bastard of history”. [3]
The big European powers of the time were very conscious that - as French prime minister François Guizot put it - it was the final result of the struggles between the “European party” and the “American party “ which would decide the destiny of Latin America.
Was the victory of the “American party” over the “European party” inevitable in the US, while the opposite was true in Latin America? No, in the two cases nothing was predestined or predetermined. It was in the class struggle and the battlefields of civil wars that the winning party was decided.
Were the big victorious combats waged under the leadership of the head of the “American party” in Mexico, Benito Juárez - the Reform, the civil war and the war of national resistance - destined to end in the super-oligarchic and super-dependent modernization of Mexican capitalism which happened under the regime of Porfirio Diaz? No, they could have ended in a radically different manner.
The calculus of probabilities included the effects of the almost simultaneous victories of the “American parties” in the wars in the US and in Mexico being rapidly extended, with the joint support of their governments, towards the south of the hemisphere, provoking a decisive clash of the continental “American party” with the bastion of the “European party”: the triple Alliance which would crush Paraguay. But this is not what happened, “the defeat of the bourgeois democratic alternative during the period of the Reform”, says Cueva, “consolidates, in any case, the channeling of the whole of Latin America along the reactionary - “oligarchic” - road of development of capitalism, which coincides perfectly with the imperialist phase which the world system had entered, defining a new period of our history” [4]
Two things should be very clear. First, we are talking about the historic epoch of the bourgeois democratic revolutions. Secondly this epoch was closed once and for all on a world scale, only a few years after the defeat of the “European party” of the slaveholders in the US, after the enormous blow administered by the Mexican people to the European bourgeoisie with the execution of the usurper Habsburg in Mexico and after the destruction of Paraguay by the “European party“ of the triple Alliance. It ended with the Paris Commune: the first proletarian revolution to seize power, although only in a transitory manner.
At the end of the epoch mentioned, we thus have two series of logical and historical correlations distributed between the two parts of the hemisphere: north American national unity, the democratic and independent development of capitalism and the promotion of the country to a central position in the world capitalist system; Latin American national fragmentation, oligarchic and dependent underdevelopment of capitalism and a durable peripheral positioning of Latin America in the world capitalist system.
With the transition of capitalism to its imperialist phase, these two series of correlations could produce nothing other than what Bolivar had anticipated: the polarization of the hemisphere between the developed capitalism of the US and the underdeveloped capitalism of Latin America, united inseparably by a relationship of domination and dependence. As Trotsky would say later, Latin America has been subjected by the US to ”national exploitation which completes and reinforces class exploitation”.
In the framework of world capitalism and on the basis of capitalist relations of production there is an unshakable union between these two series of correlations.
Although the historic epoch of the bourgeois democratic revolutions definitively ended in 1871, in every country in the world where the historic tasks of these revolutions have not been completed, they remain still unfulfilled. The contradiction between the irreversible end of this epoch and the delay in the full realization of these tasks means that they can no longer be resolved by the bourgeoisie or by any of its sectors or factions.
The entire subsequent course of history in Latin America and in other parts of the world has fully confirmed this. Now, faced with the bankruptcy of the Latin American bourgeoisie in the accomplishment of its historic tasks it is the revolutionary class whose ineluctable rise had been announced by the Paris Commune, which should accomplish once it had established its own power.
All the same, the idea of the great Latin American homeland survived among revolutionary Latin American nationalists. The most remarkable revolutionary to emerge in Latin America and indeed the whole colonial and dependent periphery during the transition of capitalism to the imperialist stage, José Martí, activated it as a revolutionary strategy.
Pedro Pablo Rodriguez a has described thus this strategy as applied to Cuba: “The war would be for independence, but would include other goals: this would be no more than a landmark in a very long term political strategy which, beginning in Cuba, would continue through the independence of Puerto Rico and the progressive unification of Latin America, in the face of the expansionist attempts of the US, where the West Indies were the first barrage.
This strategy would guarantee the elimination of all vestiges of Spanish colonialism in Latin American societies avoiding the creation of new colonialist forms. In the language of our times, one would call this a continental strategy of national liberation against imperialism (...) It is indubitable that on this road alone Bolivar preceded Marti, when he demanded a Latin American union as powerful as that which had been formed in the north of America.
Nonetheless, the epochs of the two men were very different; Bolivar led the war for the independence of South America when the US began their territorial expansion to the Pacific coast, seizing the lands of the Indians, and Great Britain was dominant in the developed capitalist world. Martí lived through the decisive years of the transition from pre-monopolist capitalism to imperialism in the US, which had ensured its hegemony in the countries of the Caribbean and threw it into competition with the Europeans in the south of the continent. What was a more or less distant possibility in the time of Bolivar was a reality in the time of Martí.” [5]
The references made throughout Martí’s work indicate that for him Latin American unity would imply also the formation of a single “new republic” on the Latin American scale, that is, as defined by Martí himself, a republic that would distinguish itself radically from the traditional Latin American republics because it would combat the colony that survived inside it.
Contrary to what might have been logically expected, the development of the Latin American workers’ movement and its Marxist parties was in no way translated by an appropriation of Bolivar’s and by Martí’s ideas of the great homeland. The first Latin American socialist parties, linked to the Second International, ignored them. It might be supposed that the Communist movement would break radically with this social-democratic legacy.
This was confidently expected by those revolutionary militants influenced by Bolivar and Martí who joined the movement, like Julio Antonio Mella, drawn irresistibly by the October Revolution. But they were quickly disillusioned.
The question was first posed in 1928, at the 5th congress of the Communist International. The Comintern’s main person responsible for Latin American affairs, the Swiss Communist Jules Humbert-Droz, proposed that the Communist movement recognize as one of its major revolutionary tasks the formation of the Union of Federated Workers and Peasants Republics of Latin America. His proposal, while obvious and indispensable, provoked a hostile reaction and he was accused of following a “petit bourgeois nationalist Latin Americanism” in a clear allusion to a movement like APRA. At the same congress, the Comintern eliminated from its programme the struggle for the Socialist United States of Europe.
This was one of the innumerable disastrous consequences of the rise to power of the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and the subordination to its strategy of the construction of socialism in one country that it imposed on the international Communist movement. It followed a sharp break by the Communist parties with the policy, adopted under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, of the united anti-imperialist front and alliance with revolutionary nationalists - a rupture which enormously affected the development of Latin American revolutionary movements. Recall the radical distinction made by Mella between bourgeois and revolutionary nationalism, a political current which is very important in the history of Latin America, in which Mella said that he “wanted a free nation to put an end to the internal parasites and the imperialist invaders, recognizing that the principal citizens in any society are those who contribute to elevating it with their everyday work, without exploiting their fellow human beings.” [6] It is precisely in this sense that we use this term.
Faced with the Stalinization of the Comintern, it was the clearest thinkers and activists of revolutionary nationalism who would preserve the idea of Latin American unity as one of the essential tasks in the fight for liberation from imperialist domination. But, in the direct tradition of the October Revolution, whose original programme Stalin abandoned and betrayed, the main leader, besides Lenin, of this revolution, took up the idea rejected by the Comintern at his initiative. Trotsky not only took it up but also based it on his decisive contribution to Marxist thought, the theory of permanent revolution.
In Russia, not only up until the taking of power by the proletariat in October 1917, but for almost a year after, until autumn 1918, the revolution was proletarian through its leading social force, but bourgeois democratic rather than socialist in its immediate tasks. In taking power, the proletariat first carried out the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution still unfulfilled in this country, including one of the most important, the liberation of nationalities oppressed by the Russian empire, passing immediately, in an uninterrupted or permanent way, from the latter to the first socialist tasks.
Trotsky extended the theory of the permanent revolution, elaborated initially for the revolution in Russia, to all the underdeveloped, colonial and dependent countries. According to him, the possibility of the proletariat taking power in these countries is, naturally, largely determined by the role of this class in the economy of the country, and consequently by the level of its capitalist development. But this was not the sole criterion.
For Trotsky, a no less important question was whether there existed in the country a vast and incandescent “popular” problem, whose resolution would interest the majority of the nation and which demanded the most audacious revolutionary measures. Among the questions of this order he stressed the national question.
Given the insupportable national oppression exerted by the imperialist powers, the young and relatively small proletariat could come to power, in Trotsky’s view, on the basis of the national democratic revolution, before the proletariat of a highly developed country dominant in the world capitalist system could come to power on a purely socialist basis. If the proletariat did take the leadership of an oppressed nation and seize power, no national democratic revolution, even one as great as the Mexican Revolution led by leaders as radical and exceptional as Lázaro Cárdenas, could fulfill its task of freeing the nation from imperialist domination.
Whereas the Stalinized Comintern rejected the idea of Latin American unity in attributing to it the reformist petty bourgeois nationalism of APRA, Trotsky posed the question in a fundamentally different manner. In commenting on the positions of the chief Aprist, he wrote, “Haya de la Torre insists on the necessity of the union of the Latin American countries and ends his letter with this formula: ‘We, the representatives of the United Provinces of South America’. In itself, the idea is completely correct. The struggle for the United States of Latin America is inseparable from the struggle for national independence of each of the Latin American countries. Nonetheless it is necessary to respond clearly and precisely to the question of what road can lead to this unification Some extremely vague formulations by Haya de la Torre can lead one to conclude that he hopes to convince the current governments of Latin America to unite voluntarily... under the tutelage of the United States. In reality, one can only attain this objective with the revolutionary movement of the popular masses against imperialism, including “democratic” imperialism and its internal agents. It is a difficult road, we admit it, but there is no other.” [7]
In indicating the belated and already decadent character of a Latin American capitalism based on the semi-servile conditions of life in the countryside, Trotsky explained: “The American bourgeoisie, which has been capable, during its historic rise, of uniting in a single federation the northern half of the continent, now uses all the power that it has drawn from it to divide, weaken, reduce to slavery the southern half. Central America and South America can only uproot themselves from backwardness and slavery by uniting their states in one powerful federation.
But it is not the backward South American bourgeoisie, venal agency of foreign imperialism, which will be called to resolve this task, but the young South American proletariat, the leader chosen by the oppressed masses. The slogan in the struggle against the violence and intrigues of world imperialism and against the blood-soaked domination of the indigenous comprador cliques, is, then, the Soviet United States of Central and Southern America.” [8]
After having taken up this thesis, the Manifesto of the Fourth International on imperialist war and the world proletarian revolution, drawn up by Trotsky in May 1940, continued, “It is only under its own revolutionary leadership that the proletariat of the colonies and semi-colonies can realize an invincible collaboration with the proletariat of the metropolis and the working class as a whole.
"It is only this collaboration which can lead the oppressed peoples to their complete and definitive emancipation, through the overthrow of imperialism in the entire world. A victory of the international proletariat would deliver the colonial countries from the long and painful stage of capitalist development in opening to them the possibility of arriving at socialism hand in hand with the proletariat of the advanced countries. The perspective of permanent revolution does not mean in any case that the backward countries should await the signal from the advanced countries, or that the colonial peoples should wait patiently for the proletariat of the metropolis to free them. God helps those who help themselves. The workers should develop the revolutionary struggle in all countries, colonial or imperialist, where favourable conditions exist so as to set an example for the workers of other countries. Only initiative and activity, resolution and courage can really materialize the slogan ‘Workers of the word unite!’” [9]
The Cuban Revolution was the first revolution in Latin America which freed the nation from the imperialist yoke and carried out the other democratic tasks historically unfulfilled. It was capable of doing so for a fundamental reason: because in a similar manner to what happened in the Russian Revolution in 1917, it brought to power a consistently revolutionary force which identified itself with the immediate and historic interests of the proletariat and the popular masses and in a permanent and uninterrupted manner passed from the accomplishment of the tasks of the national democratic revolution to the accomplishment of the tasks of the socialist revolution.
Anyone familiar with the so-called stages theory of revolution, then adhered to by the absolute majority of forces on the Latin American and world left as constituting, since the coming to power of Stalin in the Soviet Union, a fundamental principle of the Communist movement, will know what an enormous rupture the Cuban Revolution brought about. The result of the application of the stageist theory has always been the same, where it was applied: not only was the socialist revolution always relegated to the Greek calends, but even the tasks of the first stage were not fulfilled. They could not be fulfilled, because the only possible way of ensuring the conquests of the national democratic revolution is to realize the tasks of the socialist revolution. It is the essence of the theory of permanent revolution. Julio Antonio Mella has summed it up thus: “To speak concretely, absolute national liberation can be won only by the proletariat through the means of the workers; revolution.” [10]
Moved by a powerful Latin American vocation, the Cuban Revolution brought together the programmatic aspirations of the most revolutionary currents of Latin American nationalism with the socialist revolution. For the first time since the death of Martí and inspired by his example, this revolution elaborated during the 1960s a strategy of continental revolution whose audacious implementation was assumed in Latin America by comandante Che Guevara at the head of an internationalist guerilla force. We know today that in Che’s strategic plans, the Army of National Liberation under his command was to unite on the basis of a single strategy all the Latin American revolutionary movements and would one day be integrated into the International Proletarian Army whose formation was announced in his Message to the Tricontinental. After having taken part in the Congolese revolution and witnessed its defeat, Che wrote: “The initiative of the International Proletarian Army should not die before the first setback.” [11]
When Che and his Cuban, Bolivian and Peruvian comrades fought in Bolivia, a historic event happened in Havana. The great majority of revolutionary currents and left organizations from all the countries of Latin America met at the conference of the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS). “The organizations here represented” said Armando Hart, president of the Cuban delegation, “have met to elaborate a common strategy of struggle against Yankee imperialism and the bourgeois oligarchies and landowners, which are bent to the interests of the US government. The Cuban delegation represents a revolutionary party. Our theses are based on the ideology of Marx and Lenin. We are heirs to a fine revolutionary tradition of solidarity between the peoples of this continent. We should be faithful to this tradition. Karl Marx said at the time of the Paris Commune, that the objective of the popular revolution consisted in destroying the military bureaucratic machine of the state and replacing it by the armed people. Lenin said later that in this thought resided the fundamental lesson of Marx in relation to the tasks of the proletariat in the revolution, concerning the state. Our delegation considers that historical experience has confirmed these affirmations of Marx and Lenin. We consider that it is necessary to analyze these approaches of Marx and Lenin in terms of both the theory and their practical consequences.” [12]
In its report on the strategy of the continental revolution, the Cuban delegation recalled that “the value and the profundity of Martí’s conceptions can be measured bywhat follows: [Marti] deepened the Bolivarian ideal consisting in the conception of LatinAmerica as a single great country [and] posed the struggle for the independence of Cuba as part of the Latin American Revolution “. At the same time, the Cuban delegation stated that “today, the revolutionary solidarity of the peoples of Latin America has a greater depth than the antecedents which served as its basis, because the continental conception of a single Latin American people has been strengthened.” [13]
One year later Inti Peredo, a survivor of the Bolivian guerilla force, confirming his faith in “the triumph of the revolutionary forces which will establish socialism in Latin America” and his fidelity to “the dream of Bolivar and Che of politically and economically uniting Latin America”, said: “Our single and final objective is the liberation of Latin America, which is not only our continent, but also our country, currently divided into 20 republics.” [14]
Nearly 40 years later, it is urgent that we reclaim “the continental conception of a single Latin American people” and the idea, with which Che went to fight in Bolivia, that “Latin America will be a single country”, as it is urgent to inscribe Latin American socialist unity in the programmes of the popular movements and revolutionary currents. I believe that, without further delay, we must begin to prepare the conditions for the elaboration, once more, in a future which will probably prove much closer than it appears, of a strategy of continental revolution. A strategy which would correspond to Latin American and world conditions of neoliberal capitalist globalization and a unipolar world dominated by US imperialism, more than ever powerful, aggressive and mortally dangerous but at the same time more than ever decadent and rotten with explosive and insoluble contradictions.
Only the proletariat and its broad popular allies can win that which was not won by the wars of independence and what was irreversibly lost by the Latin American bourgeoisies, making the goal of the great struggles of the exploited and oppressed masses which approach inexorably the unification of Latin America as a single nation. Today, continental unity is posed in a vaster still framework which should be capable of attracting the diverse nationalities of the Caribbean.
In the report, already quoted, of the Cuban delegation to the conference of the OLAS in 1967, we read that there was “an obvious fact which has not been evaluated in all its dimensions: there has never been a group of peoples so numerous, with such a big population and so extended a territory, which nonetheless preserve very similar cultures and interests, and identical anti-imperialist goals. Each of us feels ourselves part of our America. Thus we have learnt from historic tradition, thus we have inherited from our ancestors, thus we have learnt from our predecessors! None of these ideas is new for the representatives of the revolutionary organizations of Latin America.
But have we sufficiently evaluated what these facts represent? Have we analyzed in depth the meaning of the fact that, since the distant epoch of the first years of the 19th century, we have a continental idea of struggle which has developed across Latin America? Have we analyzed with sufficient clarity the irrefutable fact that Latin America constitutes a single and great people?” [15] All these questions are today as pertinent as they were then.
To be a single nation, Latin America should be socialist. To be socialist, Latin America should be a single nation. For Latin America will achieve its second, true and definitive independence, announced more than 100 years ago by Marti and more than 40 years ago by Fidel Castro, when the Latin American revolution again goes on the march until it builds a single Latin American socialist nation. It seems that it is already on the march again with the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.
*Zbigniew Marcin Kowalewski is editor of the Polish review “Rewolucja” (“Revolution”), devoted to the past, present and future of revolutionary movements in the world, a former leader of the Solidarnosc trade union in the Lodz region (1981) and a member of the Fourth International. We publish here his report, presented in the name of the author by Celia Hart, at a conference on “The Utopia we Need” organized on September 10, 2004 in Havana.
Zbigniew Kowalewski was in 1980-81 a member of the regional leadership of Solidarnosç in Lodz. As a delegate to the First Congress of Soldarnosç, he took part in the elaboration of the programme that was adopted. He was in Paris at the invitation of French trade unionists when the state of siege was declared in December 1981. He helped to edit Polish-language Inprekor, a journal of the Fourth International circulated clandestinely in Poland from 1981 to 1990, and published “Rendez-nous nos usines!” (“Give us Back our Factories!)” (La Brèche, Paris 1985). He is at present editor of the trade union weekly Nowy Tygodnik Popularny and of the theoretical journal Rewolucja.
NOTES
[1] Leon Trotsky, “History of the Russian Revolution”, volume 3, chapter 39, www.marxists.org
[2] R. Zavaleta Mercado, “Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia”, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, Mexico, 1986, p. 84-95.
[3] Agustín Cueva, “El desarrollo del capitalismo en America Latina: Ensayo de interpretacion historica”, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, Mexico, p. 49-59.
[4] A. Cueva, op. cit., p. 59-60.
[5] Pedro Pablo Rodriguez, “La idea de liberacion nacional en José Martí”, Pensamiento Critico no. 49, 1971, p. 144, 156.
[6] Julio Antonio Mella, “Documentos y articulos”, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1975, p. 190.
[7] L. Trotsky, “Oeuvres”, Institut Leon Trotsky, Paris 1985, vol. 19, pp. 160-161.
[8] L. Trotsky, “Oeuvres”, Publication de l’Institut Leon Trotsky, Paris 1979, vol. 4, pp. 56-57.
[9] L. Trotsky, “Oeuvres”, Institut Leon Trotsky, Paris 1987, vol. 24, pp. 55-56.
[10] L. Trotsky, “Oeuvres”, Institut Leon Trotsky, Paris 1987, vol. 24, pp. 55-56.
[11] Ernesto Che Guevara, “Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo”, Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires, 1999, p. 32.
[12] “Informe de la delegacion cubana a la Primera Conferencia de la OLAS”, La Habana, 1967, p. 5-6.
[13] Ibid., p. 30, 38-39.
[14] Guido “Inti” Peredo, “ÁLa guerrilla boliviana no ha muerto! Acaba apenas de comenzar”, Tricontinental - Suplemento Especial, 1968, p. 6.
[15] “Informe de la delegacion cubana”., op. cit., p. 26.
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Latin America
# Buzzito says :
8 June, 2009 [ 17:47 ]
The USA has its faults, but the inaction of the majority of countries around the world to stand up to dictators etc outweighs your anti-America rants. My time as with all Americans, is much more valuable than to debate lengthy responses that are articles, quotes or links to videos. Too bad I'll have to cancel a subscription since these bizarre one-person dialogues are useless. Viva The USA and Peru! Viva a Rodrigo/Manuel on the moon!
# Raul says :
8 June, 2009 [ 22:55 ]
Why People Hate America
In the recently international poll, America was at the bottom of popularity nations list (“A Year After Iraq War”). Most US citizens can not believe this and wonder why it is. In spite of doing many good things, America is still hated because Americans impose their values on others, do many immoral things against other nations, maintain its monopoly status, and are the most self serving and arrogant.
First of all, Americans impose their values on others. Americans believe their country is the best of the world. It is the most democratic country. They think others nations are bad such as communism and Muslim. Nobody care about what Americans think until they tried to impose that on other countries. Americans want to interfere in other’s affairs. Americans do it by using their military, economy and media. America has the most powerful army of the world. They spend approximately 50% of global military spending , 626 billions dollars (Shah). They use their army not only to protect themselves but also protect the “freedom” of other countries. They thought communism did not have freedom, so they wanted to stop it from spreading. Particularly in the Viet Nam War, they protected “freedom” in South Viet Nam by invading two countries, Laos and Cambodia, and bombing another country, North Viet Nam.
Moreover, American government can use economic to control other countries. America is the richest country. Its GDP in 2007 was $13.543 trillion (Report for Selected Countries and Subjects.) American government uses its economic strength to put an embargo on other countries. An embargo is the prohibition of commerce and trade with a certain country, in order to isolate it and to put its government into a difficult internal situation. To overcome that problem, these countries have to follow American such as “freedom of speech” or “freedom of religion.” Actually, most leaders of these countries never change their way. America embargoed many countries such as Viet Nam, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Sudan, and Syria (U.S. Treasury). People of these countries live very hard because of this, so they hate America.
America also uses media to spread their ideal. Many Hollywood films were used for political purposes. These films are not true especially for the Vietnam War. In these movies, American soldiers are always heroes, superior, freedom protectors, weak-woman and little-kid protectors. One American can kill one hundred Viet Cong easily like Rambo. That is impossible. When watching them, Vietnamese feel angry. The world feels horrible about what America did in My Lai Massacre. The world knows how bitter when America withdrew from Vietnam. However, Americans are still annoyingly insistent about “freedom” and “democracy.” In brief, people hate America because Americans try to change them into American way.
America is hated not only because Americans impose its value on others but also they act violently against other nations. USA has invaded 67 countries from 1945 to 2004 and has killed some tens of millions of people in military conflicts in that time (Kennington). Americans always say they love peace. They always say the war crimes involved America are only the government’s failures. Actually they are using their own government as a scapegoat. They voted for that government and that government represents themselves. A government cannot oppose its voters’ ideas. For example, a USA Today/Gallup Poll indicated that 75% of US citizens felt the US did not make a mistake in sending troops to Iraq in March 2003 ("PollingReport.com Iraq Polls"). However, according to the same poll retaken in April 2007, 58% of the participants stated that the initial attack was a mistake. In May, 2007, the New York Times and CBS News released similar results of a poll in which 61% of participants believed the U.S. "should have stayed out" of Iraq (Sussman). Many Americans now are putting responsibility on Bush and his government. Bush is just a poor goat for millions of immoral Americans.
American military did many immoral things in the Vietnam War. 3,500,000 people died in this war (“Second Indochina War”). The most evil thing were My Lai massacre and bombing on Christmas days. The My Lai massacre was the mass murder of 347 to 504 unarmed citizens of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), almost entirely civilians and the majority of them women and children, conducted by U.S. Army forces on March 16, 1968. Some of the victims were sexually abused, beaten, tortured, or maimed, and some of the dead bodies were mutilated. The massacre took place in the hamlets of My Lai and My Khe of Son My village. In the article “Murder in the name of war - My Lai”, the BBC described the scene:
Soldiers went berserk, gunning down unarmed men, women, children and babies. Families which huddled together for safety in huts or bunkers were shown no mercy. Those who emerged with hands held high were murdered. ... Elsewhere in the village, other atrocities were in progress. Women were gang raped; Vietnamese who had bowed to greet the Americans were beaten with fists and tortured, clubbed with rifle butts and stabbed with bayonets. Some victims were mutilated with the signature "C Company" carved into the chest. By late morning word had got back to higher authorities and a cease-fire was ordered. My Lai was in a state of carnage. Bodies were strewn through the village.
On Christmas in 1972, President Richard Nixon mobilized 200 B52 bombers to bomb many North Vietnamese cities where millions of civilians were living. American pilots dropped 20,000 tons bombs in twelve days (Tilford, p. 263). Many buildings were destroyed such as schools, hospitals and residential areas; thousands of civilians died. The biggest newspaper in England, the Daily Mirror, commented, “The American resumption of bombing of North Vietnam has made the world recoil in revulsion.”
In that raid on Kham Thien quarter, Hanoi, the house at 51st Kham Thien street was totally destroyed. There were eight people in that family, and nobody survived. On this land, people built a memorial with a plate which was written “Kham Thien khac sau cam thu giac My (Kham Thien people hate American invaders very much).” Since then, annually, people from this quarter and other places come there to memorize the killed victims and American crimes. Vietnamese can forgive but never forget what America did on their country.
Americans not only kill people directly but also kill people indirectly. They supported Khmer Rouge, Taliban, Irish terrorism and trained terrorists in Latin America.
American government backed Pol Pot with arms, training, finance and full diplomatic support for over a decade. This was one of the worst regimes in history, which killed over one third of the population of the country. But the USACambodia with land mines. The rise of Pol Pot started when American airplanes were illegally bombing huge areas of Cambodia and Laos, intentionally killing vast numbers of innocent civilians (Kiernan, Ben, p. 16). supported Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge as they continued to commit atrocities and destroy the country of
America supported for Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan to kill Russians and other Soviet citizens. In the early 1980s, the CIA and the ISI (Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Agency) provided arms to Afghans resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the ISI assisted the process of gathering radical Muslims from around the world to fight against the Soviets. The U.S. poured funds and arms into Afghanistan, and by 1987, 65,000 tons of U.S.-made weapons and ammunition a year were entering the war (Rashid). As a result of US actions in Afghanistan, huge numbers of Russian people were killed. The country's political system collapsed and Taliban took control of Afghanistan. Taliban was a product of CIA, and Taliban later killed Americans.
American government also uses an embargo to punish other countries. American government said that they did that because they wanted those governments would change the policies to be more democracy; their people would have more freedom and be better. However, the consequence is that those people’s living standards worse because of lack of goods and drugs. Looking at North Korea, Americans think Kim Jong-il and the dictatorship are the reasons millions of North Koreans are living in hunger. It is not right. The real reason is because of America, the freedom protector. Because America blocks every way for North Korea to trade, North Korea can not develop its economic to feed their people. Also, because of American threat, it has to spend most of such little revenue on military to protect itself ("Research Library: Korea, South"). In short, America is hated because of its violence against others.
Thirdly, people dislike the US because American government and corporations try to maintain its monopoly power in military and economy. Nobody likes seeing someone sitting over their heads. Nobody like being kept from stronger.
For instances, American government tries to maintain the monopoly of GPS (Global Positioning System) systems for world military dominance (Sample). If the US goes to war with any country, American can ban those countries from using GPS. This makes it more difficult for non-US countries to aim cruise missiles, but it also cripples air travel and sea travel within the region. This power over the whole world is awesome, and the US cannot be trusted with this power. And now they are trying to stop Europe from having their own GPS or taking away the US monopoly. The USA is always against any other country having any sort of monopoly, but fiercely defends its own monopolies.
One of the many clear examples of the USA creating or maintaining world monopolies is Boeing. In the last year or so, the European competitor Airbus Industry announced they would build a very large passenger plane, and the USUSA gives huge tax advantages to its own capitalists so that they can compete unfairly with other countries. Boeing does not have the same burden to contribute to the social welfare that Airbus does in Europe. The Europeans believe that capitalists should pay tax to support the general social good, whereas the USA thinks that the ordinary taxpayers should support their industries. This gives the USA a strong edge in overseas markets because their taxpayers are subsidizing their companies. Therefore it is fully justified for European governments to give a little money back to Airbus to partially compensate for the larger tax burden in Europe (Kennington). government said it was not fair competition because there was some government loan involved. But the
In addition, America does not allow any more country to own nuclear power while it has 4075 active warheads (Norris and Kristensen, 50-53). America can use nuclear weapons to threaten any countries when being afraid of owning nuclear power weapons of others. America is embargoing North Korean and Iran because of this reason. So the third reason is because American government and corporations are trying maintaining its monopoly power.
The next reason people hate America because Americans are the most self serving and greedy. People do thing because of benefit, Americans do too. In the World War One, American corporations sold goods to both sides to earn as much as possible. Near the end of the war, President Wilson and the American government jumped in the Allies side when seeing the Allies would win. Americans were also more callous when calculating delaying participation in the World War Two. Kennington wrote in his site:
During the Second World War, the USA was originally planning to send about 215 army divisions to Europe in 1943 to remove the Nazis. But they worked out that this would negatively impact their economy. So they changed their plans and sent only 90 divisions in 1944. As a result, the US economy improved during the World War II, while the economy of Europe contracted by about 25%.
During the extra year, many million more people died, including 17,000,000 people in Holocaust such as the European Jews (Niewyk). This shows that the USA values its own economy much more than the lives of millions of innocent people in other countries. The US entry into the World War Two was in the US interests, not an altruistic act. Americans only decided to take the side of democracy in Europe when it was clearly in the USA's self-interest to do so. The Russians still bitterly resent the fact that the USA and the UK took several years to open the Western front against Germany in the World War Two. During this time, the Soviet Union lost 23,000,000 lives, mostly civilians (Ellman). President Roosevelt and his government delayed the Western front because they wanted to save thousands of American soldiers and weaken Soviet power even though America and Soviet were in the same side. Americans sold their Allies down the river. The USA finally invaded Europe after it was clear that the Soviet Union was winning against Germany.
In addition, Americans government imposes unfair conditions of trade.US has done, and every country must accept anything that Americans want to export, no matter how much this harms the economies of non-US countries. This often means that even valid health objections are rejected by the USA. When other countries succeed in exporting to the USA, for example farm goods, the USA puts on heavy tariffs and gives substantial support to US farmers. Current estimates are that 50% of US farm income comes from the government (Riedl). Americans can do this but do not permit any other country to do. The globalization makes poor countries poorer and the USA richer. For other example, in March 2002, the USA put up to 30% tariffs on steel imports to protect the inefficient US steel industry and get votes for the next election (“US tariffs cloud steel talks”). If a rich country like the USA needs to protect its industries, then surely the poor countries have even more need. Globalization and free trade is just the way for American corporations get the most benefit from others. So people hate America because it is so greedy and self-interest. Throughout the 1990s, Americans have been imposing globalization and free trade on the whole world. All countries are forced to cut back on all public services and social welfare as the
Finally, people hate America because Americans do not care about international laws. America thinks little of the others. They invaded Iraq without UN acceptance. This event means that the US can invade and occupy any country in the world, and the rest of the world is powerless to stop them.
Americans can justify others, but others cannot justify Americans. After the World War Two, Americans gave Nazis in courts which were for crimes against human being. Nazis killed many people in holocausts. In the same time, America also killed a lot of Axis civilians by bombing cities such as Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Americans explained they did it to free the world. That is not right. Dropping two atomic bombs in Japan was useless. At that time, Germany was defeated, Japan was tired, Japanese many times negotiate with Americans, but American refused Japanese surrender (Freeman). Japanese wanted to surrender with the safety of Japanese emperor, and Americans wanted Japanese to surrender without any condition. Japanese wanted to stop the war, but because of the duty with their emperor, they were willing to scarify their lives to protect him. Americans insisted of refusing because of wanting to trying atomic bombs and showing the power to Soviet. Dropping atomic bombs was useless in against Axis and shows the terrible crime of Americans. That crime was against human being. However, no American was taken to the court. The right always belongs to the stronger.
Americans also do abuse of the IMF (International Monetary Funding) as a tool of international blackmail. We have been seeing in early 2003 how the USAUS uses the IMF as a tool to bribe and threaten poor countries. The original purpose of the IMF was not to provide a tool for bribing and bullying, and yet the government uses the IMF in this way. Kennington wrote:
All of the poor countries on the UN security council are shaking in their boots because of US threats to cut IMF aid if they vote against the unjust war of the USA against Iraq. If it's a question of morality, then why does the USA have to use threats and bribes.
This kind of misuse of the IMF happened many times. The USA misuses also many other international organizations in the same way to bribe and bully other countries. It shows the arrogant behavior of Americans to international laws, and makes people hate America the most.
In conclusion, people still hate America and will hate America. Americans imposes American values on others, does many immoral things against other countries, maintain its monopoly status, and are the most self seeking and arrogant. These can explain why 9/11 event happened. There will be more and more this kind of event if America does not change its behavior.
Works Cited
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“Congressional Use of Funding Cutoffs Since 1970 Involving U.S. Military Forces and
Overseas Deployments,” Congressional Research Service 10 Jan. 2001, pg. 6.
Ellman Michael, “Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: a note-World War II.” Europe Asia
Studie, Jul. 1994.
Freeman Robert, “Was the Atomic Bombing of Japan Necessary?” Common Dream
6 Aug. 2006. 13 Aug. 2008 < http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0806-25.htm >.
Kennington U. Alan, “The United States of America: Why do they hate us so much?”
Isometry 21 Dec. 2001. 13Aug. 2008 < http://www.isometry.com/usahate.html>.
Kiernan, Ben, “The Pol Pot Regime,” 1996, Yale University Press, p. 16.
"PollingReport.com Iraq Polls." CBS News Poll 18 Sep. 2007. 13 August 2008
< http://www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm >.
Rashid, “Taliban.” (2000). 13 August 2008. <Wikipedia.org>.
"Research Library: Korea, South". ICONS Project (2007-05-29). Retrieved on 1 Aug. 2007.
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World Economic Outlook Database. International Monetary Fund (Oct. 2007).
Riedl, “Farm Subsidies for the Rich and Famous Shattered Records in 2001.” The
Heritage Foundation 30 April 2002. 11 Aug. 2008. <http://www.heritage.org/Research/ Agriculture/BG1542.cfm>.
"Murder in the name of war — My Lai." BBC. 20 Jul. 1998.
Niewyk, Donald. The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust, 45-52.
Norris, Robert S. and Hans M. Kristensen, "U.S. nuclear forces, 2008," Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists 64:1 (March/April 2008): 50-53.
Sample Ian, “Europe and US clash on satellite system”. Guardian 8 Dec. 2003.
11 Aug. 2008 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/dec/08/
world.internationaleducationnews>.
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“Second Indochina War.” 11 Aug. 2008.
<http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htm#Vietnam>.
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<http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/ArmsTrade/Spending.asp>.
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York Times 25 May 2007. 13 Aug. 2008<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/25
/washington/25view.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>.
Tilford, Earl H. “Setup: What the Air Force Did in Vietnam and Why.” Maxwell Air
Force Base AL: Air University Press, 1991.
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< http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1869813.stm>.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Why-People-Hate-America
# Raus says :
8 June, 2009 [ 23:26 ]
Now I Understand Why They Hate Us
By David Hilfiker, AlterNet. Posted January 12, 2009.
How a middle-class white guy came to accept the evil embedded in American political and military might.
Shortly after the attacks of 9/11, many American voices raised the question, "Why do they hate us?" The "they," in this case, was Muslim fundamentalists, but the same question could have been asked of South American peasants, of the people of Iraq or Iran, of the poor of India or Indonesia, or, indeed, of the poor anywhere.
In fact, "they" don't only hate us; the feelings of people around the world toward the United States are a complex mixture of positive and negative. On the one hand, for instance, much of the rest of the world is excited by the election of Barack Obama. Almost six years ago, visiting Iraq just before the American invasion, I listened to Iraqis who professed their admiration for much of America and how American democracy has been a "beacon" to the rest of the world. On the other hand, those same Iraqis felt betrayed by the United States that would attack a country that did not threaten it. And by 2008, multiple polls of people around the world revealed a deep anger toward our country: Clear majorities believe us to be the "greatest danger to world peace." My own coming to understand why they hate us has been a painful process, but one I consider important to share with any American who still does not understand.
My Own Conditioning: The City Upon a Hill
I grew up in the 1950s. Americans were still celebrating our critical role in defeating Germany and Japan and, we thought, protecting the world from fascism. Our economy was as big as the combined economies of the rest of the world put together, and we had used some of that economic power through the Marshall Plan to successfully rebuild the economies of war-shattered Europe. We were the rising empire, and we saw ourselves as the world's savior. It seemed to us (middle-class whites) a time of prosperity and suburbanization, an era of magnanimity and cooperation, a period of confidence that our national path would be continuously upward. I remember predictions that our increasing economic productivity would enable us to halve the work week within a generation while still raising our standard of living.
As a society, however, we generally chose not to see the more ominous realities. Few of us reflected upon the wanton destruction of innocent life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The CIA-instigated overthrow of democratically elected leaders in Iran, Guatemala and elsewhere and, a little later, the assassination attempts on Fidel Castro were only outlandish rumors (that only "the paranoid" believed). The white majority could still ignore segregation. I did not find out about the bizarre, anti-communist antics of Sen. Joe McCarthy until I was in college, a decade later.
Little of our dark side entered my consciousness in the 1950s and early 1960s. Rather, I grew up with the unarticulated sense that our nation was nearing the perfect society; we were "almost there," not so distant from the Kingdom of God. In Puritan Christian terminology, we were the "city upon a hill," "the light of the world" that should not be hidden. God had blessed us; we saw ourselves as exceptional people and exceptionally righteous. In 1963, I hitchhiked from London through Europe to Finland to visit my future wife, and I do not remember feeling surprised that the American flag on my luggage made it easier to get rides. Of course foreigners loved Americans; who wouldn't?
Paradoxically, even the moral and political disaster of the Vietnam War reinforced my sense that America would continue to move toward its ideal. I came of age during the war and joined in active opposition to it, ultimately refusing induction into the Army. While still in college, I became a speaker for the War Resisters League, touring campuses and lecturing against the war. I learned about some of the disturbing realities of American imperialism in Southeast Asia, of course, but -- again without articulating it to myself -- I judged it a momentary anomaly of, rather than a continuation of, our history.
Not until much later did I make the connections between the killing of 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese (the vast majority innocent civilians) with the genocide of Native Americans or the enslavement of African Americans or the deaths of the half-million Filipino civilians who died following our 1898 attempt to control their country. Rather, I interpreted the strength of our anti-war protests to block the re-election of President Johnson and ultimately force withdrawal from Vietnam as manifestation of the power and hope of American democracy. Despite the fact that a few years later during my second trip to Europe I was better off hitchhiking without the American flag, the Vietnam War and our resistance to it strengthened my faith in our country, its democracy and its inherent goodness.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, I was immersed in medical school and doctoring in a small town in northern Minnesota. The war in Vietnam was over, I was not paying much attention to foreign affairs, and I was completely unaware of American interventions in Central and South America (such as the CIA participation in the overthrow of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile). From my point of view, American society seemed to work pretty well. We were still the city upon a hill.
Inner-City Injustice
In 1983, I moved to Washington, D.C., to practice medicine in a small clinic in an economically devastated African American ghetto. The injustice of inner-city Washington appalled me. The public perception -- then as now -- was that the behavior of the poor was primarily responsible for their poverty, but as I worked in the midst of that devastation, it soon became obvious that the racism and injustice of our society were the primary causes of the poverty, indeed, the primary causes of even the behavior of the impoverished (for instance, poor education or single parenthood) that society held responsible for the poverty. Still confident in the goodness of our society, however, I naively assumed that correcting the misperception required only educating affluent Americans about the real conditions oppressing the poor, so I began lecturing and writing. I discovered, however, that most affluent people were too comfortable to confront truths challenging their beliefs that they had earned their comfort or that the poor were themselves responsible for not earning theirs. I was beginning to understand that we were not the light to the world I had imagined.
The juxtaposition of the personal generosity of many Americans with their unwillingness to recognize the injustice that made their affluence possible was striking. Most people I knew would reach out to an individual poor person in their community with help, but they were unwilling even to acknowledge the structures that caused the poverty in the first place. Why did moral people not recognize the immorality of their society? I recognize the truth of Brazilian archbishop Dom Helder Camara's statement, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist." It was not enough to keep oneself morally upright and charitable; one had also to confront the structures that elevated some and oppressed other.
During my first years in Washington in the 1980s, I belonged to a faith community that was actively involved in protesting the U.S. role in Central America. Although I was personally more involved with the injustice in the inner city, the direct participation of trusted friends in Central America offered me a very different view of our government's actions there than was available in the mainstream media. The United States was actively involved in supporting military dictatorships in Guatemala and El Salvador, providing military aid and equipment to these, and other, repressive governments, and training their military and police officers in brutal tactics, all of which led to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people. The Reagan administration defied congressional restrictions and funded right-wing attacks on the democratically elected Nicaraguan Sandinista government; it also mined harbors in Nicaragua, an action later denounced by the International Court of Justice. Yet there was very little coverage of any of this in our mainstream media. I watched our government simply stonewall what it was doing, lying to the American people.
I began to sense the connections between the poverty I was experiencing in the inner city of Washington and the devastation caused by American military force around the world. The inner city had itself been militarized with regular use of commandolike SWAT teams and the criminalization of large percentages of the population, especially through the "War on Drugs" that made criminals of addicts, but also through welfare regulations that made criminals of poor families. Both inner-city and foreign devastation were caused by structures that ultimately worked to benefit affluent Americans; both had causes that the American people were not only mostly unaware of but also unwilling to recognize. In neither case did our mainstream media ever give us a clear picture of what was going on, although the truth was in plain sight.
The Iraq Sanctions
But it was the personal confrontation with the economic sanctions imposed by the United States on Iraq that broke through my own reluctance and brought me face-to-face with the evil embedded in American political and military might.
In December 2002, shortly before the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, I visited the country for three weeks, out of a desire as an American to be in solidarity with a people soon to be attacked by my government. I had no particular agenda ahead of time, but I quickly learned about the United Nations economic sanctions that had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children in the preceding 10 years. I also discovered that although these sanctions were officially imposed by the United Nations, they had been sustained entirely at the insistence of the United States. How could my country be responsible for the deaths of so many children?
In August 1990, after a decade of tacit (and sometimes very active) support by the United States, Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait, an action that was universally condemned around the world. In response, under the leadership of the United States government, the United Nations Security Council authorized severe economic sanctions upon Iraq (U.N. Resolution 661) in an effort to force Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait. These were perhaps the most stringent sanctions ever imposed upon a modern nation, so severe that they could only humanely be used as short-term overwhelming pressure to compel withdrawal from Kuwait. It was widely appreciated by experts -- even within our own government -- that any long-term application of this level of economic sanctions would cause lethal civilian consequences, especially for children.
Despite the sanctions, the Iraqi army continued its occupation of Kuwait, so in January 1991, the United States led a coalition of nations in a military attack on Iraqi occupation troops in Kuwait, forcing a hasty retreat. While the military power of the United States and its allies easily overpowered Iraqi forces, the coalition decided for political reasons only to repel the Iraq invasion of Kuwait and attack Iraq by air but not to invade Iraq with ground troops or use military force to remove Saddam completely from power. But during the six-week air war, the Iraqi military had been decimated, including the complete destruction of the air force. The civilian infrastructure of Iraq -- including electrical generation, sanitation and water purification -- had been profoundly damaged.
The Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait fulfilled the stated objective of the U.N. economic sanctions. Nevertheless, the United States government insisted upon continuing the stringent economic sanctions upon Iraq. The intent was to force the people of Iraq to remove Saddam from power, even though it is illegal under international law to punish a population in order to provoke it to overthrow the government. Unfortunately, the original U.N. resolution did not provide for automatic withdrawal of the sanctions upon Saddam's compliance with its requirements to remove his forces from Kuwait; rather, the resolution's language required the passage of a new Security Council resolution to relax or abolish the sanctions. According to Security Council rules, however, any of the five permanent members of the Security Council can veto any new resolution. Over the next 12 years the United States -- sometimes joined by Great Britain -- made clear its objection to any lifting of the sanctions and vetoed periodic attempts by other nations to end them. In other words, although these were technically United Nations sanctions, they continued only because of United States insistence.
Given the previous devastation of Iraqi infrastructure, however, the severity of these sanctions was so extreme that the catastrophic effect on the civilian population (including the deaths of countless civilians) was predictable and inevitable. Indeed, documents obtained later reveal that senior officials within the United States government were well aware of the impact that the sanctions would have upon civilians. Specifically banned by the sanctions, for instance, were replacement parts required to repair the damaged electrical power plants, sanitation infrastructure and water-purification facilities throughout the country. Millions of Iraqis would be drinking contaminated water. The United States maintained these highly lethal sanctions until after the beginning of the Iraq war in May 2003.
While the exact number of casualties is unknown, the United Nations estimated that half a million Iraqi children died between 1991 and 1998 because of the sanctions, most from malnutrition and waterborne disease. Before the 1991 war and the economic sanctions, Iraq had been one of the most advanced countries in the Middle East, with low childhood mortality, high levels of education and relative freedom for women. Although the 1995 U.N. Oil-for-Food Program allowed Iraq to sell some of its oil for food and certain medications, the sanctions remained brutal, preventing repair of the electrical grid or sanitation systems. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, especially children, died; hundreds of thousands more were permanently affected by malnutrition and disease.
As I visited Iraqi families in late 2002, it was not unusual to walk along city ditches filled with sewage in a country that 15 years earlier had been the most modern in the Middle East. I talked with workers at a water-treatment plant. Even when they could jury-rig repairs to the machinery, the intermittent electricity (usually off at least half the day due to the continuing damage to the electrical grid) meant that for those hours there was no pressure in the water pipes -- that paralleled or went right through those sewage ditches -- thus allowing bacteria from the sewage to seep into the pipes. When the power went back on the pipes carried the now-contaminated water to families for drinking.
I also discovered that since 1991, United States air power had patrolled the skies to enforce "no-fly zones" in north and south Iraq, frequently attacking what they believed were military installations, often killing civilians. What was my country doing? How could the reliance on lethal force become such an accepted part of American life that not even the intentional murder of upward of 500,000 children raised any eyebrows? How was this possible?
I returned to the United States in January 2003 as our government was preparing to invade Iraq to realize that few Americans were paying attention to the devastation we had perpetrated in Iraq for the previous 12 years (just as I had not previously paid attention). When I talked with my liberal acquaintances, they were so focused on the Bush administration's aggression that few were willing to consider the bipartisan approval of these sanctions, which were initiated during the George H.W. Bush administration, continued during the Clinton administration, and would only be lifted after we had toppled Saddam's government. Few Americans seemed to care, and the few reports of their deadly effects on Iraqi children were buried in the media and inspired little passion.
But Osama bin Laden and many of the worlds Muslims cared and were impassioned. On Oct. 7, 2001, a few weeks after he unleashed the deadly attacks of 9/11, bin Laden released a video he in which he offered three reasons for his enmity toward the United States; one of them was the Iraq sanctions. "One million Iraqi children have thus far died, although they did not do anything wrong," bin Laden said. Certainly everyone I talked with in Iraq in December 2002 knew why their children were dying; they knew who had blasted their country back into Third World poverty. They knew who was responsible.
A Sense of the Beneficent Amid Pervasive Militarism
I believe that my country has become something different -- almost opposite to -- the country most Americans believe we live in. We see ourselves as benign. We see ourselves as the light of the world. We interpret our actions -- whether military adventures, economic initiatives or cultural exports -- as good and as welcomed by the rest of the world. (In 2005, a majority of Americans believed that most people in the world supported the invasion of Iraq!) We see ourselves as the (perhaps somewhat tarnished) white knight. In other words, we are holding on to a vision that might have had some truth in it right after World War II but that no longer holds true. We see ourselves as a great hope for the rest of the world; others see us as "the greatest danger to world peace."
Although it now shocks me how long it has taken me, how much evidence I previously hid from, only recently have I become conscious of the pervasiveness of American militarism, how it defines who we are and how we are perceived. What do I mean by "militarism?" I mean a general belief within a country that an overpowering military is necessary for national security and a general willingness to spend virtually unlimited funds for that purpose. Militarism means a national conviction that the country must be prepared to use its military power aggressively to maintain its interests. In practical terms, it means that the nation is prepared to turn very quickly toward military solutions to international problems without allowing other measures a real chance to work. The threat of military response becomes ever-present in international conflict and so becomes, at least as far as other countries are concerned, our first response to conflict.
Consider a few examples over the last years: It is militarism that breaks off reasonably successful diplomatic negotiations with North Korea, labeling the country among the "axis of evil" and making take-it-or-leave-it demands not so subtly backed up by our military. It is militarism when the nation refuses to consider internationally coordinated police and intelligence action as a response to al-Qaida's attack on 9/11, but instead insists on invading Afghanistan. It is militarism to refuse to allow the United Nations inspections team to finish its work in Iraq (no weapons of mass destruction had been found) in order to invade in 2003. It is militarism that rebuffs a direct high-level appeal to the Bush administration from Iran (in 2003) to enter into negotiations (in which Iran had suggested trading its nuclear aspirations for a guaranteed non-aggression pact), instead labeling Iran among the "axis of evil" and then leaking repeated threats to invade or bomb military targets.
Since 1941, the United States has been continuously engaged in, or mobilized for, war. That that fact does not seriously disturb or even surprise most of us is a powerful sign of how inured we have become to our nation's militarization. After conflicts prior to World War II, the United States disbanded or sharply reduced its combat forces and military budget when the fighting was over. But instead of reining in our military after World War II, we entered immediately into the Cold War. Even after the demise of the Soviet Union, when there was literally no military threat, our military spending barely hiccuped as we continued our mobilization for war. In addition to the massive expenditures in the Cold War, between the end of World War II and 9/11, the United States conducted approximately 200 overseas military operations in which our forces attacked first. In no case did a democratic government come about as a direct result, although we installed and protected numerous dictators, including the Shah of Iran, Suharto in Indonesia, Batista in Cuba, Somoza in Nicaragua, Pinochet in Chile and Mobutu in Congo/Zaire, not to mention the series of American-backed militarists in South Vietnam and Cambodia. For decades we also ran what can only be called terrorist operations against Cuba and, for a shorter time, in Nicaragua.
As he was leaving office, President Eisenhower famously warned us against the military-industrial complex, in which the extraordinary power of the economic interests that profit from war push us in that direction. But Eisenhower was not the only president to warn us against war. James Madison, the chief author of the Constitution and later a president wrote, "Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it [contains the seed] of every other. No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare." George Washington cautioned against a standing army for similar reasons.
Evidence of our extraordinary militarism is everywhere. Although the exact number is unknown, the United States has at least 731 (according to Pentagon statistics) -- but more probably close to 1,000 -- foreign military bases around the world in more than 130 countries. Although many of those bases are small, each nevertheless represents American military presence in another country. Why are they there, except to project military power and threat? If one is trying to understand the anger in the rest of the world toward the United States, one place to start is imagining, say, German military bases in your community surrounded by the usual bars and brothels. Young GIs who speak no English nor know American customs speed drunkenly through your community on their time off, and there is the too-frequent assault or rape of young women, most of which go unprosecuted. Then imagine that your community is socially and religiously very conservative and that the base has been there for decades.
In September 2002, the Bush administration published an updated United States National Security Strategy that, for the first time, elaborated the doctrine of "preventive war." According to this policy, the United States will not wait until threats against us are "fully formed" but will act militarily to prevent them from developing. In other words, if the president perceives a growing threat to U.S. national interests, our military will force its removal. This unilateral doctrine directly flouts centuries of international law, which forbid attacks upon a country unless that country has already attacked or attack is "imminent" (such as when an enemy's troops are massed on one's borders). This newly formulated, and clearly illegal, doctrine justified our invasion of Iraq, much as Japan used its doctrine of preventive war to justify the attack on Pearl Harbor when it wanted to prevent what its leaders perceived to be the U.S. military threat in the Pacific from becoming fully formed.
Cost
One measure of our extraordinary militarism is the amount of money we spend arming ourselves. Total military expenditures constitute almost $1.5 trillion per year or 54 percent of federal discretionary spending. No other country spends anything remotely similar to this; in fact, the United States spends more than the next highest 16 countries combined. U.S. military spending is currently 47 percent of the world's total.
Militarization in our country has become self-sustaining and now drives our foreign and domestic policies rather than the other way around. The economic interests alone of those who benefit from military spending are staggering. Military contractors have dispersed their operations throughout the country so that virtually every congressperson has military spending in his or her district. In fact, lobbyists do not have to argue the utility of continued spending but only point to the economic importance to the congressperson's district. This is how projects that the Pentagon does not even particularly want end up in the budget. This is the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower so strongly warned against. The political power of the recipients of military spending is overwhelming.
As a writer, I struggle to find the words to express my shock, anger and shame at discovering that my country has been among "the bad guys," responsible for the deaths of millions of innocents in the last half-century, and in the view of most of the world's citizens (according to numerous polls of people in other countries) the greatest threat to world peace. It seems, I suppose, a bit dramatic -- an expression of the hyperpartisan posturing that has characterized politics for the last 15 years -- to express shock, anger and shame at something that has been going on my entire life, right under my nose. But, like the legendary frog that does not notice the water temperature rising in the pot until it is too late, I have been aware of many of the particulars but have not until recently pulled them together into a coherent picture that so massively condemns what we have become.
We Americans have allowed our assumptions that we're the good guys -- that we're acting in the best interests of justice, peace and democracy -- to blind us to the reality of the death and destruction we are responsible for. Even several years after the American invasion of Iraq, when it had become clear that there had been no weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had never been a threat to us, close, well-meaning friends kept assuring me that "President Bush knows something that he can't tell us." And now that it is clear that the president had no secret information, many are blaming him for the disaster. But Iraq is atypical only in that the thin-to-nonexistent rationale for invasion has been so clearly exposed. But Iraq is no different in kind from dozens of other military and covert actions that we have unilaterally and illegally taken in the last 50 years -- from Vietnam to Nicaragua to Panama to Grenada.
Yes, of course, many of us have been shocked by the foreign policy excesses of the Bush administration -- preventive war, torture, extraordinary rendition, foreign policy unilateralism, and so on -- but these are more the extensions of previous American immorality than new directions. This is my country, but I am ashamed that we allow militarism to so dominate it and ashamed that it has taken me so long to see it clearly.
Arrogation of Power and Subversion of the Constitution
One of the major threats to democracy from this state of permanent war is the inevitable transfer of power from Congress and the judiciary to the president as commander in chief. With the entire military under his command, with the intelligence services under his control, with the political power of the military contractors backing him, the president has in wartime extraordinary power, even if it is only his own fiat that has created "wartime." Ongoing war profoundly endangers the checks and balances of our constitutional system.
It is not only the Bush administration; this subversion of the Constitution has happened during most wartimes. President Lincoln illegally suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. President Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese Americans during World War II. Under Eisenhower, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Iran to install the shah. Johnson engineered the Gulf of Tonkin incident to force Congress to authorize the war in Vietnam. President Reagan authorized the illegal Contra war against the government of Nicaragua, even after Congress had expressly prohibited him from doing so. True, the presidential arrogation of power has accelerated under our current president, but it is also a continuation of a long and dangerous trend. (It has also been the trend in many other historical empires just before they collapsed.)
President Bush has declared a "War on Terror." Since the Constitution allows only Congress to declare war, the War on Terror is not a constitutionally legal war, yet the president continues to claim extraordinary powers as commander in chief in "wartime." But how does one know when the War on Terror is over? When there are literally no more terrorists? A president who can define war however he chooses and remain at war as long has he chooses has indefinite dictatorial powers. The militarization of our nation puts us into a state of perpetual war (declared or undeclared), which creates a perpetual transfer of power to the president that makes a mockery of the constitutional balance of powers between the president, Congress and the courts.
When Bush several years ago signed the law (that he had originally opposed) prohibiting torture by U.S. forces, he created a "signing statement" indicating that he would follow the law only if it did not conflict with his understanding of his duties as commander in chief. In other words, he was not bound by the portions of the law he did not like; he was above the law. In reality, signing statements have no standing under the law and are most likely unconstitutional. All recent presidents have occasionally used signing statements, but primarily to clarify for the executive branch of government under him how the law should be interpreted. But under Bush not only have signing statements become routine, they have also been used specifically to nullify parts of the law, further arrogating power to the president. If their use is allowed to stand, they move us significantly toward presidential dictatorial powers.
Citing his authority as commander in chief, Bush several years ago authorized the National Security Administration to wiretap Americans without a warrant from the secret court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In the history of that FISA court, there had been over 18,000 previous government requests for surveillance warrants; only four had ever been rejected, so it is difficult to understand why the president believed it necessary to break the lawb unless he thought that even the compliant court would not tolerate the kind of surveillance planned.
Chalmers Johnson writes that the inevitable result of our failure to reign in military spending once the Cold War was under way (and then even after it was over) was a continual transfer of powers to the presidency exactly as Madison had predicted, the use of executive secrecy to freeze out Congress and the judiciary, the loss of congressional mastery over the budget, and the rise of two new, extraconstitutional centers of power that are today out of control -- the Department of Defense and the 15 intelligence organizations, the best known of which is the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Bush administration is the most secretive in U.S. history. The 1979 Freedom of Information Act requires all federal departments to provide nonclassified documents to any who request it. But Attorney General John Ashcroft sent out explicit, detailed instructions to all government departments on how to foil the law. The Presidential Records Act was passed after the Watergate conspiracy to keep all presidential papers under public administration once the president left office so scholars could eventually determine what actually went on. But Bush signed an executive order contravening the explicit provisions of the act. The courts have not yet ruled on the constitutionality of his order, but that he believed he needed it is significant.
Our democracy is in danger. Congress has chosen not to challenge the arrogation of presidential power, and the Supreme Court has come perilously close to declaring constitutional the "unitary executive theory" (under which this power as commander in chief has flowed to the president). Despite clear Supreme Court precedent to the contrary, the present Court appears now to be one vote away from giving the president the power he demands.
Unfortunately, the danger is not just one man or one administration that will be swept from office on Jan. 20. No modern president has ever turned down the power given to him. As he has discovered the power of the intelligence agencies under his control, for instance, every modern president has used it. The power of the presidency has grown without interruption since the Great Depression. Unless something is done, the next president -- or the one after that -- will maintain these powers and pass them on. Our democracy is in peril.
Public Acceptance of Brutality
The militarization of our nation has had other profound effects. One has been the increasing public acceptance of brutality on the part of the government. Immediately following 9/11, over a thousand foreigners were rounded up. All details of their cases were kept secret, including their names and the charges, if any, against them. They were simply seized, incarcerated -- mostly in New York prisons -- beaten by guards, and, after a lengthy time in jail, deported, usually for the most minor of offenses. Not one of those arrested turned out to have the slightest connection to the 9/11 attacks.
There was no legal basis for any of this. There was also virtually no indignation expressed by the people of this country. Habeas corpus, the right to be brought before a judge to hear the charges against one to prevent baseless detention, one of the fundamental rights of democracy extending back centuries, had been trampled and very few objected.
Over the past several years, as it has become clear that the Bush administration has not only condoned but also encouraged torture from the highest levels (their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding), there has been some objection from both the right and the left. But there has been no general outrage, no mass demonstrations in the street, no general calls for impeachment. According to polls in May 2004, over 50 percent of Americans believed that the government was employing torture "as a matter of policy," yet Bush was re-elected later in that year.
The United States has signed the Geneva Conventions, which means, according to our Constitution, that those provisions have the force of U.S. law. The Conventions prohibit any kind of violence to civilians. During the "shock and awe" phase of the Iraq war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his aides planned to try to kill "high-value targets" like Saddam Hussein. "According to the plans, Rumsfeld personally had to sign off on any airstrike thought likely to result in the deaths of more than 30 civilians. The air war commander proposed 50 such raids and Rumsfeld signed the orders for each and every one." We have become so used to the euphemism collateral damage that many are surprised to learn that the term is not recognized or even mentioned in international humanitarian law. Even without the Geneva Conventions, any interpretation of the just-war theory prohibits violence against noncombatants.
We have apparently become used to our governments acting in immoral, illegal and brutal ways. We apparently find it acceptable.
It's Not as Effective as We Think
An inevitable aspect of militarism is the general tendency to see military force as far more effective than it actually is and to accept it as the first response to conflict. According to firsthand accounts, after 9/11 the administration gave no consideration to a nonmilitary response. The assumption was that only military invasion could capture bin Laden and put an end to al-Qaida's terrorism. Did anyone think that the powerful U.S. military would not be able to capture this one man? It is telling that very few Americans dissented from the decision to invade Afghanistan -- despite the illegality of the invasion and its inevitable, predictable violence toward civilians. Only one member of Congress, California's Rep. Barbara Lee, voted against it.
But what if -- as many of us suggested at the time -- we hadn't glorified bin Laden by declaring war on him and his organization? What if we had declared bin Laden and his accomplices criminals and used intelligence and policing methods to bring him to justice? We had the sympathy and proffered cooperation of virtually every nation in the world. (Even the Taliban government offered to hand over bin Laden to a neutral country, if we provided proof of his guilt; the U.S. government, clearly intent on war, rejected this offer without seriously considering it.) What if we had considered the invasion of Afghanistan the last possible alternative and we had seriously negotiated with the Taliban to hand over bin Laden or allow an international police force to find him? What if we had offered substantial foreign aid to Afghanistan to encourage the citizenry to see the United States positively (we had helped rid Afghanistan of the Soviets in the 1980s) and help us find bin Laden? I obviously do not know what would have happened if we had followed that path, but could it possibly have been worse than what we did, which has clearly increased the number of Islamic fundamentalists willing to wage jihad against the United States? Militarism is not even considering another possibility besides military force.
The Iraq war is another obvious example. It's not surprising that the military power paid for by half the world's budget could easily sweep away the military power of a third-rate power already decimated by a previous war and 12 years of overwhelming economic sanctions. (In fact, Saddam's military hardly resisted; rather, the fighters took their weapons, retreated and waited.) Military power is highly destructive. But how effective has U.S. military might been in overcoming the insurgency or bringing about democracy?
Indeed, in the last 60 years, foreign military force has provided no match for indigenous, insurgent forces anywhere, whether the French in Algeria, the French or the Americans in Vietnam, the "coalition forces" in Iraq, or NATO in Afghanistan. Military force in those cases is not just costly, bloody and violence provoking; it is stupid and ineffective.
Alternatives to Militarism
Unfortunately, there is almost complete agreement among American political leaders that we need more, rather than less, military power and military spending. Even President-elect Barack Obama is part of the post-World War II, bipartisan consensus that views unchallengeable military strength as essential. In his campaign, at least, he called for increased spending on the military. Although he has called for withdrawal from Iraq, he has also called for moving those troops to Afghanistan, a move that will be as futile as the Soviet attempt to tame Afghanistan in the 1980s, unless the endeavor becomes something very different from a military campaign.
What are the alternatives? First, and most importantly, the United States military must become what most Americans believe it should be -- a defensive force that protects the United States from attack. The nearly 1,000 military bases around the world need to be dismantled, and its personnel brought home. Our country must strongly repudiate the pre-emptive-war doctrine of the 2002 National Security Strategy, give up our self-proclaimed role as the globe's policen and follow European nations' examples of having a purely defensive military.
Second, we must take the lead in world nuclear disarmament. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia and the other former Soviet states were eager for the abolishment of nuclear weapons, but the United States government refused to consider disarmament. Instead, we have refused to honor our commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and refused to enter into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. The recent tensions between India and Pakistan (while highlighting the hesitation of nuclear powers to engage in open warfare), and the possibility that the political instability of Pakistan would leave nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists underscore the necessity to abolish these weapons from the face of the Earth. Over the last 20 years, the militarism of the United States has been the greatest barrier to their abolition. We must take the lead in destroying them and leading other nations to do the same.
Third, we must strengthen capacity for international police action. For some time to come, international armed force against terrorist and other dangerous groups will be necessary, but this force must be deployed as police action not as war. (Military attacks always kill and wound civilians and damage civilian infrastructure, leading inevitably to the creation of new antagonisms and through them to the recruiting of new terrorists.) The world's current ability to provide such police force has been hampered by the U.S. insistence on being the sole world policeman. Intelligence services and cooperation with other nations to arrest terrorists as "criminals" (rather than the "freedom fighters" they become in military conflict) is the model used by other Western nations and would be far more productive (and far less expensive) than our current military model. Our country needs to encourage the strengthening of the United Nations or other such international organization that could provide military force when needed in failed states or situations of gross human rights abuses.
Finally, we must use the hundreds of billions of dollars saved from disarmament to provide foreign aid to underdeveloped countries. The growth of terrorism and the failure of states stems directly from poverty and ignorance. Providing enough food, shelter, basic education and adequate health care for everyone in the world is, relatively speaking, not an expensive endeavor, certainly less than we've been spending in Iraq. Only the development of the Third World will give us the potential for freedom from terror. The previous discussion of the financial cost of our militarization offers one clear avenue for reversing the current political consensus in favor of militarism. As Kevin Phillips outlines in his book, Wealth and Democracy, a primary cause of the decline of the last three Western empires (Spain, Holland and Great Britain) has been bankruptcy through militarization.
As each of these empires became wealthy and powerful, it attempted to maintain its world position through military spending, each time imagining that its wealth and power were limitless. In each case, the vast military expenditures crippled the empire, leading directly to its decline. It should be obvious that the United States is well into this process of damaging itself with its own military expenditures. With a $10 trillion debt (much of it to countries that could easily use it against us) and an annual deficit that has been running close to $500 billion, the time is ripe to push for a maximum reduction in military spending (that could reduce the average deficit to zero). While our nation does not have moral right to forego those aspects of the military budget that pay for past wars (primarily veterans' benefits), transforming our military from an offensive weapon into an institution for national defense would be an affirmation of American principles stated in our founding documents, while saving our country from the historical course of all empires that turn toward militarism.
Obama has promised that he will respond to the concerns of the citizenry. While he has indicated the willingness to change course in Iraq and to renounce torture and extraordinary rendition, he has so far demonstrated no consciousness of the danger of militarism or of the threat of the presidential arrogation of power. Now is the time to educate ourselves about our country's extraordinary militarism and begin the political push to change our national direction. American militarism is a dead end; it is time we woke up, smelled the coffee and created the change we can believe in.
Copyright -- David Hilfiker, 2008
See more stories tagged with: united states, empire
David Hilfiker, M.D., spent his medical career as a physician with low-income people in rural Minnesota and inner-city Washington. He is the founder of Joseph’s House, a home and hospice for homeless men and women with AIDS and/or cancer. No longer in active practice, he is a lecturer and teacher and author of books and numerous articles on poverty and other subjects. His most recent book is Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen.
http://www.alternet.org/world/119065/now_i_understand_why_they_hate_us/?page=entire
# Rudy Dantes says :
8 June, 2009 [ 23:39 ]
U.S. loses popularity in Latin America
The Associated Press
Thursday, October 9th 2008, 4:16 PM
QUITO, Ecuador — In a matter of weeks, a Russian naval squadron will arrive in the waters off Latin America for the first time since the Cold War.
It is already getting a warm welcome from some in a region where the influence of the United States is in decline.
"The U.S. Fourth Fleet can come to Latin America but a Russian fleet can't?" said Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa. "If you ask me, any country and any fleet that wants can visit us. We're a country of open doors."
The United States remains the strongest outside power in Latin America by most measures, including trade, military cooperation and the sheer size of its embassies. Yet U.S. clout in what it once considered its backyard has sunk to perhaps the lowest point in decades.
As Washington turned its attention to the Middle East, Latin America swung to the left and other powers moved in.
The United States' financial crisis is not helping. Latin American countries forced by Washington to swallow painful austerity measures in the 1980s and 1990s are aghast at the U.S. failure to police its own markets.
"We did our homework — and they didn't, they who've been telling us for three decades what to do," the man who presides over Latin America's largest economy, President Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva of Brazil, complained bitterly.
Latin America's more than 550 million people now "have every reason to view the U.S. as a banana republic," says analyst Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington. "U.S. lectures to Latin Americans about excess greed and lack of accountability have long rung hollow, but today they sound even more ridiculous."
From 2002 through 2007, the U.S. image eroded in all six Latin American countries polled by the Pew organization, especially in Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia. (The others were Brazil, Peru and Mexico.)
People surveyed in 18 Latin American countries rated President Bush among the least popular leaders in 2007, along with President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and just ahead of basement-bound Fidel Castro of Cuba, according to the Latinobarometro group of Chile.
In three years of presidential elections ending last year, Latin Americans chose mostly leftist leaders, and only Colombia and El Salvador elected unalloyed pro-U.S. chief executives.
In May, the prestigious U.S. Council on Foreign Relations declared the era of U.S. hegemony in the Americas over.
And in September, Bolivia and Venezuela both expelled their U.S. ambassadors, accusing them of meddling.
http://www.nydailynews.com/latino/2008/10/09/2008-10-09_us_loses_popularity_in_latin_america_.html#ixzz0Hu91EQAJ&D
http://www.nydailynews.com/latino/2008/10/09/2008-10-09_us_loses_popularity_in_latin_america_.html
# Raus says :
8 June, 2009 [ 23:42 ]
Venezuela’s Social Missions:
Improving the Lives of Millions
http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com/downloads/Social%20Missions%20List.pdf
# Daniel Batiste says :
21 June, 2009 [ 00:18 ]
Latin America: The rebirth of socialism and revolution
13 February 2009
Luis Bilbao is an Argentine socialist currently based in Venezuela. He is the editor of the Latin America-wide magazine America XXI and is a central participant in the construction of the mass-based United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), the party initiated by President Hugo Chavez to help unite Venezuela’s revolutionary forces to push for the construction of a “socialism of the 21st century”.
He was interviewed by Agustina Desalvo for Argentinian journal Razon y Revolucion (issue #18 second semester 2008).
Bilbao will be a featured guest at the World at a Crossroads conference, to be held in Sydney on April 10-12, organised by the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Green Left Weekly. Visit http://www.worldatacrossroads.org for full agenda and to register.
The interview has been translated by GLW’s Federico Fuentes and a heavily abridged version is published below. The significantly longer full version is published at the socialist e-journal Links, visit Links.
The interview deals with the role of the US in Latin America, which it has long viewed as its “backyard”. US corporations, as well as other First World companies, are infamous for their exploitation of resources and labour across the Americas (a system referred to as “imperialism”).
The US government has consistently intervened into Latin America to protect the interests of US corporations. That has included a number of military invasions and US military coups against governments that have threatened US corporate interests.
As a result of the growth in poverty resulting from harsh neoliberal policies implemented by pro-US governments across Latin America, since the turn of the century there have been a number of mass uprisings and governments elected on anti-neoliberal platforms.
This has led to a push for greater regional integration and independence from the US, and in some cases (such as Venezuela and Bolivia) radical movements winning government with the goal of revolutionising society.
* * *
What is imperialism’s strategy for Latin America? Who are those who are fighting against it and how are they doing so?
For more than 200 years, the US strategy for Latin America has been domination.
However, during the last few years a particular phenomenon has occurred, provoked by the very deep and structural crisis facing the world capitalist system. This has not only led imperialism to further pillage the workers and peasants of all our countries, but has also put the local capitalists [in Latin America] up against the wall.
This has provoked opposition and a clear attempt at strategic resistance. There was the necessity of resisting the indiscriminate, uncontrolled looting by the US of the economies of our countries.
A movement of South American convergence has come into being and dragged governments from a wide political spectrum behind a common position, which is the necessity of putting a brake on the brutal plundering by the US.
But I want to insist: a brutal plundering no longer just of the workers and peasants, but also the bourgeoisies themselves.
The steamrolling entrance of international finance capital into all the areas of the economy of each of our countries has sucked out of them the possibility of generating local wealth, [that is] of the illegitimate ripping-off of wealth that the local bourgeoisies [previously] carried out.
In this way, US strategy now clashes not only with its traditional enemies, with the resistance of workers, students, peasants, but now also clashes with the South American capitalists.
We also have to point out that the local capitalists have a completely limited room for resistance, and moreover are divided in every country, which explains why some do opt — understanding that it is still profitable for them — to place themselves in line with the needs and will of international finance and the US.
This has, without a doubt, created complicated situations in each country. But the result of this very complex set of factors has been seen in the creation of the Union of South American Nations [Unasur, which was launched in 2008 and unites all South American countries into a body that is formally independent of the US].
Unasur is a heterogenous grouping within which exist the most diverse set of forces.
Within this grouping has appeared a force that does not represent the bourgeoisies, but instead represents, in general, “the people” (in the very ambiguous sense of the word, as the word itself presupposes). This group has a perspective of confrontation with imperialism from an anti-capitalist position that is vague and diverse.
A bloc within Latin America has been created. It is called the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) and is made up of Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua — to which we have to add some Caribbean countries that, for different reasons, cannot fully integrate themselves but want to do so. There is also Ecuador, which, for very particular reasons has not become a member yet.
Within ALBA, the determining factor is the will to resist imperialism from a non-capitalist, and in some cases explicitly socialist, perspective.
The US therefore has a double problem: it has to confront those who advance with an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist perspective, who have the capacity to infect the others and lead to a situation of revolutionary transformation of all Latin America, and it has to confront, of course on a different level, Unasur, the whole of the region resisting US policy.
Things have reached such a point that it is an imperative for the stability of regional capitalism and, much more, for US control of the region, to impede the continuity of these processes seeking to move beyond capitalism.
Above all else in two countries — Venezuela and Bolivia [led by democratically elected left-wing governments of Chavez and Evo Morales respectively]. Also, at a different level, Ecuador.
The US has tried everything and failed. It cannot regain the space lost in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador by any means than with arms.
That is why the US general strategy is a strategy of war. The US has declared war on us. And this war against all of Latin America has specific points of leverage in Venezuela and Bolivia.
If they can, they will not carry out the war in a direct manner. They are trying to do this via third parties.
They are trying to force secession in Bolivia, planned, structured and led by the US. If they succeed in splitting off some departments [states], it is highly probable that this would lead to a civil war and abort — or at least make extremely difficult — the process underway in Bolivia.
The US would have the perfect excuse to send troops under the guise of bringing “peace” to Bolivia.
The US is trying the same thing in Venezuela. It is promoting a secessionist policy starting in Zulia province, a petroleum state that borders Colombia and is led by the opposition to the [Chavez-led] Bolivarian revolution.
Of course, this cannot be carried out with the force of Zulia alone; rather it needs the force of the US, backed moreover by the government of Colombia, through paramilitaries who have infiltrated Venezuela.
Through different forms, but with the unequivocal aim of halting these revolutionary processes in Latin America, the US is right now trying to impose its general strategy through a line of military action.
Four years after Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party came to power through elections in Bolivia, what balance do you make of his government?
We have to take as our starting point the reality of the world situation since the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s. A regression occurred in the overall political situation, particularly in the area of ideas and organisations that gave the working class and peasantry of the world even a minimum of organisation and some banners.
A reactionary wave of enormous power was unleashed in 1991, one that is deeply rooted in history and, in the last instance, comes from the degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the middle of the 1920s.
This defeat expanded over the whole continent and placed the exploited masses of the world in a very weak situation. We lost an ideological battle, because in 1990-91, we did not just witness the collapse of the reformist and Stalinist forces that survived off the Soviet Union; we also saw the collapse of those who had resisted the Stalinist degeneration in the 1920s.
These forces also failed. Those who did not hand themselves over to the enemy, passing over completely to the other side of the class line, hid or buried the red flag, and threw out the idea of revolution.
There are always exceptions, of course. But the only one of any weight, with international visibility, was the Cuban Revolution.
Within this international context, we are seeing a rebirth of revolution and a rebirth of the struggle for socialism.
If one tries to draw up a balance sheet of what is occurring in Bolivia without this historic backdrop, they could draw up a correct literary balance sheet, but one which would be politically speaking very incorrect.
All the enormous deficiencies that we can point to over these years of government in Bolivia, in reality, are something completely different when one takes as their starting point the reality out of which the revolutionary government emerged.
Placed in this context, I believe that the Morales government has dealt very well with the essential issues.
What have they achieved? Advances in organisation and raising consciousness, in the general and political education of the masses. Very important steps forward have been taken towards regaining the natural wealth of the country.
Bolivia has aligned itself with the South American revolutionary project and has projected a line of march that systematically advances against the oligarchy, against imperialism and against the bourgeoisies not only of Bolivia but regionally (although, of course, the political leadership in Bolivia does this with a lot of care, precisely because the correlations of forces within which they are working are extremely difficult).
So, that is the real measure of the situation, all of which does not presume that the possibility of risks have been closed off for the Latin American revolution in general, and in Bolivia particularly.
To the enormous difficulty that the masses have in front of them in Latin America, in the world, there is no solution in Bolivia, in Venezuela, nor in Ecuador or any country on their own.
The solution exists at the Latin American scale or it doesn’t.
And if it doesn’t then, put simply, this revolutionary tide that Latin America is living through, this rebellion of the exploited and oppressed masses of the region, will suffer a defeat.
It will be a very terrible defeat because it will be a military defeat. The level reached, in general, of voluntary, organised mass action of the workers, of the peasantry, of the popular masses in some countries — particularly Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia — cannot be wound back simply through an election.
To go back to the past requires losing a war; to advance requires a victorious war. What is at stake is not just any battle, it is a class war.
This war can only be won if we have a policy that can unite millions and millions of people; not only to unite socialists, to unite Marxists. The unity of Marxists will have to be the result of the unity of the masses and not the inverse.
Our great task is the unity of these masses that exist as they do.
That is why my balance sheet of the struggle in Bolivia is very positive. I believe that it has contributed in a lot of ways to this grand task of forming a mass revolutionary, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist Latin American international [organisation].
That is what ALBA is, and I can give you an example of transcendental importance. I’m referring to what occurred on May 2, 2008.
On May 4, the Santa Cruz referendum [on “autonomy” for the resource-rich Bolivian department promoted by the elite and backed by the US] was going to be held. On May 2, Chavez convened a meeting of the presidents of ALBA countries.
What was discussed was not reported in the newspapers and I believe that it did not even pop into the minds of the ranks: they discussed war.
They discussed the war planned to begin in Bolivia [on May 4] because [the referendum] was part of an international plan [to provoke a civil war in Bolivia].
And the presidents resolved that it would not be Bolivia plunged into war, but rather ALBA would take up Bolivia’s war as its own, and military forces would be sent from the countries that make up ALBA to fight in Bolivia [in defence of the elected Morales government].
That single decision postponed the war in Bolivia. It gave more space, more time, to better organise, to win more people, to take space away from and weaken the enemy.
Right now in Latin America, a revolutionary leadership, made up of people who do not refer to themselves as Marxists, although some do, is exercising the revolutionary leadership of a battle against the US and the local bourgeoisies and oligarchies.
The solution is socialist revolution, there is no intermediary solution. And the socialist revolution cannot be carried out just in Bolivia.
What is your general balance sheet of the Chavista process in Venezuela and where it is going?
The general balance sheet is even more positive than what I outlined about Bolivia, because in Venezuela the revolutionary process began with a constitutional reform [in 1999] and two years later began to take very deep social measures.
This led to a [US-backed] coup [in 2002, reversed by a mass uprising], and this coup was responded to with a clear definition. In 2003, in a celebration of the first anniversary of the victory against the coup at a rally of more than 1 million people in Caracas, Chavez formally adopted the anti-imperialist character of the Bolivarian revolution.
And one year later he took the next step and proclaimed the revolution to be socialist.
Following this, he asked the masses to vote on whether they wanted to go toward socialism or not, and stood for re-election in December 2006 with a campaign focused on “vote for me if you want to go towards socialism, if you don’t want to go towards socialism, don’t vote for me”.
And he won with 63% of the vote.
Immediately after the vote, he called for the construction of a mass socialist party.
From that time until now, a mass socialist party (the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, or PSUV) began to be constructed, starting with the signing-up of aspiring members that resulted in the registration of 5.8 million people.
Making a rough calculation, we can say that half of those signed up due to confusion or for opportunist reasons. What are we left with then? A little more than what those who consider themselves to be revolutionary parties have in the rest of the world.
And of those people, some 1.5 million form an active part of the party that every Saturday meets across the country.
There are more than 1.2 million people in the military reserves, what we would call in classical terms popular and workers’ militias, to militarily defend the revolution.
It is the biggest leap forward that has been taken in a very long time. But it is much more than a grandiose leap forward in Venezuela, it is the rebirth of the idea of revolution.
Revolution is no longer just a word in the mouth of some revolutionary.
Now, revolution is something that is becoming real for millions of people, in millions of minds, in millions of hands, and it is the re-vindication of socialism.
Socialism is re-vindicated, but now not only for Venezuela, not only for Latin America, but for the world. The possibility of fighting for socialism has been reborn.
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2009/783/40333
# Carlos says :
21 June, 2009 [ 00:22 ]
Latin America in revolt : Continent defies USA
For over two decades the US has forced neoliberalism — and its accompanying poverty and despair — down Third World throats in order to make the world better for US business. To many, the spreading US economic empire, backed by the point of a gun and a loan, has seemed unassailable. But now, unable to defeat a rag-tag bunch of Iraqi militias, and rapidly losing allies in Latin America, the empire is not looking so strong.
By Stuart Munckton
04/27/05 "Green Left" - - January 1, 2005 was a significant date — not for what happened, but for what didn't. On that day, the Free Trade Area of the Americas was supposed to be signed. The FTAA was one of Washington’s pet projects — it was a major step in removing barriers against US corporate plunder in Latin America. But by late 2004, the FTAA negotiations had been suspended, with governments in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay refusing to negotiate their people’s future away.
The failure of the FTAA negotiations was just another indication of how on the nose Washington is in the continent. A more dramatic indication came on April 21, as embattled Ecuadorian President Luis Gutierrez was forced from office by a Congress faced with mass protests demanding widespread political change. Although elected on an anti-neoliberal platform, Gutierrez abandoned his promises in an attempt to keep Washington happy.
Gutierrez is the latest on a long list of neoliberal Latin American politicians thrown out of office — in elections, or by popular revolt. In the last five years, uprisings have overthrown governments in Ecuador, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia. In Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador and Uruguay, governments have been elected on anti-neoliberal platforms in the last seven years. Left-wing forces are considered a serious chance in upcoming presidential elections in Mexico and Nicaragua.
In Bolivia, even if President Carlos Mesa, himself first brought to power in an upsurge of protest, manages to avoid being overthrown before elections are due in 2007, he looks to be defeated by radical Movement for Socialism leader Evo Morales.
In Colombia, the US-backed government has been unable to destroy a left-wing insurgency, despite staggering amounts of military aid from Washington.
Behind this revolt is a continent that no longer buys the myth of a neoliberal-led drive out of poverty and inequality. Since the 1980s, Washington, and its tame international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, pushed “free trade”, privatisations and redirecting funds to debt repayment from basic services as a way to prosperity. By opening up their economies to “competition” and the “efficiency” of market forces, Latin American countries were promised significant economic growth that would reduce poverty. In fact, what happened was a significant increase in the hold over the economies of Latin America by multinationals, especially US corporations.
Between 1990 and 2002 multinational corporations acquired 4000 banks, telecommunications, transport, petrol and mining interests in Latin America. William I. Robinson, in an article entitled “Storm clouds over Latin America” published in the December 2002 Focus on Trade, wrote that, after a decade of neoliberalism in Argentina, which culminated in an economic collapse in December 2001, the number of people living in poverty increased from one to 14 million.
In a statement to the US Congress House Armed Service Committee on March 5, General Bantz Craddock, explaining the reason for Latin America’s widespread “political instability”, said: “The free market reforms and privatisation of the 1990s have not delivered on the promise of prosperity for Latin America… The richest one tenth of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean earn 48% of the total income, while the poorest tenth earn only 1.6% ... Uruguay has the least economic disparity of Latin American and Caribbean countries, but its unequal income distribution is still far worse than the most unequal country in Eastern Europe and the industrialized countries.”
This increased poverty has brought with it a deep discrediting of the whole neoliberal project. And anger against those who keep implementing the pain has led to huge mobilisations, street protests, factory occupations and militant movements, which in turn have forced many governments to retreat on neoliberal policy in order to maintain control.
In Argentina, Nestor Kirchner was elected president in 2003, after more than a year of crisis, during which the country went through four presidents in less than a week. Kirchner was elected with just over 20% in 2003, in a situation where old-style politics was too discredited to keep control, but the popular movements were not strong enough to take power.
Kirchner, despite emerging from one of the traditional parties of government, has stood up to the international financial institutions, he has managed to renegotiate Argentina's crippling foreign debt down. In a statement on April 5, the Council for Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington-based think-tank, pointed out that both the US and the IMF have not applied their usual pressure on Argentina to adhere to strict debt repayments — no doubt recognising that any government that attempted to continue with the same policies as before the 2001 uprising would not last very long.
However, the most significant breakthrough for the poor majority searching for an alternative to corporate domination has come in Venezuela. Since the 1998 election of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the government has challenged US imperialism and its local allies. Domestically, Venezuela's extensive oil wealth is being used to fund ambitious social programs to improve the lives of the majority who live in poverty. One of the most significant gains has been the mass literacy program, which has succeeded in eradicating illiteracy according to United Nations standards.
An attempted 2002 coup against Chavez, backed by the US, was defeated by mass mobilisation, a part of the organisation of working people that characterises the country’s Bolivarian revolution.
One of the biggest reasons Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution is a threat to the US is because he is seeking to unite Latin American countries, economically and politically, enabling a continent-wide fight back against US economic tyranny.
Chavez has been the most outspoken critic of the FTAA, and his government has worked overtime to promote an alternative — the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), based on economic cooperation and integration amongst Latin American nations. Venezuela has prioritised trade agreements with other Latin American nations with the aim of creating an alternative bloc to that promoted by the US. This includes two significant projects — Petrosur and Telesur.
Petrosur is a proposed Latin America-wide petroleum company, which would unite the state-run oil industries of different governments to create an economic weapon that can challenge US hegemony. Telesur is the Venezuelan-promoted Latin America-wide TV channel that aims to provide news from the perspective of the Latin American people. The only continent-wide TV channel at the moment is CNN In Spanish, which reflects the biases and interests of the US. Argentina, Brazil and the newly elected government in Uruguay are backing both projects.
Chavez has also refused to sign any fresh agreements with the IMF, denouncing them as the “road to hell”. This willingness to stand up to Washington has put enormous pressure on other nations not to meekly submit to whatever Washington insists, or else stand exposed in front of their own people.
This has naturally put Venezuela in Washington's target sights. The US is especially upset with the political and economic ties Venezuela maintains with socialist Cuba.
Since the 1959 Cuban revolution, the US has sought to overthrow — at various times by invasion, assassination, propaganda bombardment and economic terrorism — the Cuban government led by Fidel Castro. The US understands that Cuba is a key threat: not because it has oil or weapons, but because its free education and health care, its world class science and research and development — all are living proof that it is possible for Third World people to live in less than desperate poverty, and to live with dignity. Perhaps more importantly, Cuba provides an example of people taking their destiny into their own hands, and not waiting on politicians.
Cuba is a beacon of hope for the masses of Latin America. Venezuela’s staunch support of revolutionary Cuba is helping ease Cuba's isolation. And, like Cuba, Venezuela is increasingly seen as proof that there is an alternative to neoliberal misery. The resulting popularity of the Bolivarian revolution throughout Latin America has helped protect Chavez from Washington’s wrath.
Despite numerous attempts, Washington has been unable to either overthrow or isolate the Chavez government. The internal opposition to Chavez is now discredited, and the US, which imports 15% of its oil from Venezuela, cannot cut economic ties.
Washington has moved this year instead to try to pressure other nations in the region to diplomatically isolate Venezuela. This campaign has failed dismally — not one country has joined the public condemnations. In recent months, Venezuela has signed far-reaching economic agreements with Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. The Brazilian agreement includes selling Venezuela military equipment, at the same time as Washington is attacking what it calls Venezuela’s “arms race”.
In December, in a plot almost certainly involving the US, Colombia kidnapped, from within Venezuela, a leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which has been waging a decades-long guerrilla war against the right-wing Colombian regime, from within Venezuela. Outraged by the attack on its sovereignty, Venezuela recalled its ambassador and suspended economic ties. Washington promptly backed Colombia, and demanded other American nations “diplomatically isolate” Venezuela. Not only did no other country respond, but Colombia, shaken by the potential loss of lucrative business deals with Venezuela, successfully asked the Cuban government to mediate talks to resolve the crisis.
Then, on April 11, the Organisation of American States, which includes all countries in the hemisphere except Cuba, split down the middle with a tied vote in the election for a new OAS secretary general. The US proved unable to pressure enough nations to win outright support for the candidate it is backing, Mexican foreign minister Luis Ernesto Derbez.
The US is far from out for the count in Latin America. While movements in several countries are threatening to blockade, rally or occupy until there is change, their strength and development varies. However, the concessions forced from the Latin American people, the increased pressure on Latin American governments to take at least some independent stands from Washington, and the support enjoyed by the developing Venezuelan revolution are all signs that the US can no longer force its will on Latin America.
And every time people organise to get rid of a US collaborator, or beat back neoliberal policy — you know that others on the continent are watching and learning.
From Green Left Weekly, April 27, 2005. Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8681.htm
# Roger says :
4 July, 2009 [ 06:08 ]
Reply to David N criticisms about Peru.
Lets not forget how usa exploits poor People in Peru South America & other 3rd World countries worldwide with thier corrupt US FTA & US Imperialiasim. If any country opposes the USA they get bombed.
Well Thankgod for SCO Alliance North Korea and The Russia China Iran & South America Alliance. Goodbye US Imperialism. USA can no longer dominate World. The new way of protecting ones country against Imperialism & US Genocide is via Military Alliances.
North Korea is a Member of SCO and CTSO and Iran is a Member of STO. Venezuela Bolivia Nicaragua Brazil Honduras Chile and Argentina are now also Members of SCO. Most of South America except for Peru & Columbia are now Socialist Goverments. Peru will be a Socialist Goverment by 2011 either Humala or Flores will be President.
In anycase China now owns USA and USA is now called Chimerica HAHAHA.
# Roger says :
4 July, 2009 [ 06:13 ]
Links to check:
Interesting Links:
http://www.liberiaitech.com/theperspective/2008/0916200803.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10104
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1AtF_z-Wyk&feature=PlayList&p=8455E33952483002&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=26
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNLnBnTuxvU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0lcnNb_t7I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeQlTB8Iuyw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao5jKCiYsNI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdFUcBWzCRk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfWpqsgBmsk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOmQS7nJYa4&feature=PlayList&p=19139802F7C40D3E&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BKW7G_dIxc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1vfug4LVxw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_O4D43jrJc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqzlQ0ZEuxc&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y7mQnJOzlk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7nCfRDCcT4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwghwsgZ5AY&feature=fvw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0M6aGbfY04&feature=related
# Daniel Sanchez says :
4 July, 2009 [ 06:44 ]
The Meaning of U.S. Imperialism, Genocide and Militarism
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Time%20for%20change/365
# Carlos Benavides says :
18 July, 2009 [ 01:54 ]
# Carlos Benavides says :
20 July, 2009 [ 03:11 ]
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--The LivinginPeru.com team
# Carlos Benavides says :
20 July, 2009 [ 03:21 ]
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# Simon Turner says :
20 July, 2009 [ 18:03 ]
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# Simon Turner says :
20 July, 2009 [ 18:07 ]
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# Simon Turner says :
20 July, 2009 [ 18:08 ]
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# Carlos Benavides says :
21 July, 2009 [ 02:12 ]
Peru: Blood Flows In The Amazon
By James Petras
17 June, 2009
Countercurrents.org
In early June, Peruvian President Alan García, an ally of US President Barack Obama, ordered armored personnel carriers, helicopter gun-ships and hundreds of heavily armed troops to assault and disperse a peaceful, legal protest organized by members of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous communities protesting the entry of foreign multinational mining companies on their traditional homelands.
Dozens of Indians were killed or are missing, scores have been injured and arrested and a number of Peruvian police, held hostage by the indigenous protestors were killed in the assault. President García declared martial law in the region in order to enforce his unilateral and unconstitutional fiat granting of mining exploitation rights to foreign companies, which infringed on the integrity of traditional Amazonian indigenous communal lands.
Alan García is no stranger to government-sponsored massacres. In June 1986, he ordered the military to bomb and shell prisons in the capital holding many hundreds of political prisoners protesting prison conditions – resulting in over 400 known victims. Later obscure mass graves revealed dozens more. This notorious massacre took place while García was hosting a gathering of the so-called ‘Socialist’ International in Lima. His political party, APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) a member of the ‘International’, was embarrassed by the public display of its ‘national-socialist’ proclivities, before hundreds of European Social Democrat functionaries. Charged with misappropriation of government funds and leaving office with an inflation rate of almost 8,000% in 1990, he agreed to support Presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori in exchange for amnesty. When Fujimori imposed a dictatorship in 1992, García went into self-imposed exile in Colombia and later, France. He returned in 2001 when the statute of limitations on his corruption charges had expired and Fujimori was forced to resign amidst charges of running death squads and spying on his critics. García won the 2006 Presidential elections in a run-off against the pro-Indian nationalist candidate and former Army officer, Ollanta Humala, thanks to financial and media backing by Lima’s rightwing, ethnic European oligarchs and US overseas ‘AID’ agencies.
Back in power, García left no doubt about his political and economic agenda. In October 2007 he announced his strategy of placing foreign multi-national mining companies at the center of his economic ‘development’ program, while justifying the brutal displacement of small producers from communal lands and indigenous villages in the name of ‘modernization’.
García pushed through congressional legislation in line with the US-promoted ‘Free Trade Agreement of the Americas’ or ALCA. Peru was one of only three Latin American nations to support the US proposal. He opened Peru to the unprecedented plunder of its resources, labor, land and markets by the multinationals. In late 2007, García began to award huge tracts of traditional indigenous lands in the Amazon region for exploitation by foreign mining and energy multinationals. This was in violation of a 1969 International Labor Organization-brokered agreement obligating the Peruvian government to consult and negotiate with the indigenous inhabitants over exploitation of their lands and rivers. Under his ‘open door’ policy, the mining sector of the economy expanded rapidly and made huge profits from the record-high world commodity prices and the growing Asian (Chinese) demand for raw materials. The multinational corporations were attracted by Peru’s low corporate taxes and royalty payments and virtually free access to water and cheap government-subsidized electricity rates. The enforcement of environmental regulations was suspended in these ecologically fragile regions, leading to wide-spread contamination of the rivers, ground water, air and soil in the surrounding indigenous communities. Poisons from mining operations led to massive fish kills and rendered the water unfit for drinking. The operations decimated the tropical forests, undermining the livelihood of tens of thousands of villagers engaged in traditional artisan work and subsistence forest gathering and agricultural activities.
The profits of the mining bonanza go primarily to the overseas companies. The García regime distributes state revenues to his supporters among the financial and real estate speculators, luxury goods importers and political cronies in Lima’s enclosed upscale, heavily guarded neighborhoods and exclusive country-clubs. As the profit margins of the multinationals reached an incredible 50% and government revenues exceeded $1 billion US dollars, the indigenous communities lacked paved roads, safe water, basic health services and schools. Worse still, they experienced a rapid deterioration of their everyday lives as the influx of mining capital led to increased prices for basic food and medicine. Even the World Bank in its Annual Report for 2008 and the editors of the Financial Times of London urged the García regime to address the growing discontent and crisis among the indigenous communities. Delegations from the indigenous communities had traveled to Lima to try to establish a dialogue with the President in order to address the degradation of their lands and communities. The delegates were met with closed doors. García maintained that ‘progress and modernity come from the big investments by the multinationals…,(rather than) the poor peasants who haven’t a centavo to invest.’ He interpreted the appeals for peaceful dialogue as a sign of weakness among the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon and increased his grants of exploitation concessions to foreign MNCs even deeper into the Amazon. He cut off virtually all possibility for dialogue and compromise with the Indian communities.
The Amazonian Indian communities responded by forming the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP). They held public protests for over 7 weeks culminating in the blocking of two transnational highways. This enraged García, who referred to the protestors as ‘savages and barbarians’ and sent police and military units to suppress the mass action. What García failed to consider was the fact that a significant proportion of indigenous men in these villages had served as rmy conscripts, who fought in the 1995 war against Ecuador while others had been trained in local self-defense community organizations. These combat veterans were not intimidated by state terror and their resistance to the initial police attacks resulted in both police and Indian casualties. García then declared ‘war on the savages’ sending a heavy military force with helicopters and armored troops with orders to ‘shoot to kill’. AIDESEP activists report over one hundred deaths among the indigenous protestors and their families: Indians were murdered in the streets, in their homes and workplaces. The remains of many victims are believed to have been dumped in the ravines and rivers.
Conclusion
The Obama regime has predictably not issued a single word of concern or protest in the face of one of the worst massacres of Peruvian civilians in this decade – perpetrated by one of America’s closest remaining allies in Latin America. García, taking his talking points from the US Ambassador, accused Venezuela and Bolivia of having instigated the Indian ‘uprising’, quoting a letter of support from Bolivia’s President Evo Morales sent to an intercontinental conference of Indian communities held in Lima in May as ‘proof’. Martial law was declared and the entire Amazon region of Peru is being militarized. Meetings are banned and family members are forbidden from searching for their missing relatives.
Throughout Latin America, all the major Indian organizations have expressed their solidarity with the Peruvian indigenous movements. Within Peru, mass social movements, trade unions and human rights groups have organized a general strike on June 11. Fearing the spread of mass protests, El Commercio, the conservative Lima daily, cautioned García to adopt some conciliatory measures to avoid a generalized urban uprising. A one-day truce was declared on June 10, but the Indian organizations refused to end their blockade of the highways unless the García Government rescinds its illegal land grant decrees.
In the meantime, a strange silence hangs over the White House. Our usually garrulous President Obama, so adept at reciting platitudes about diversity and tolerance and praising peace and justice, cannot find a single phrase in his prepared script condemning the massacre of scores of indigenous inhabitants of the Peruvian Amazon. When egregious violations of human rights are committed in Latin America by a US backed client-President following Washington’s formula of ‘free trade’, deregulation of environmental protections and hostility toward anti-imperialist countries (Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador), Obama favors complicity over condemnation.
http://www.countercurrents.org/petras170609.htm
# Carlos Benavides says :
21 July, 2009 [ 02:18 ]
In early June, Peruvian President Alan García, an ally of US President Barack Obama, ordered armored personnel carriers, helicopter gun-ships and hundreds of heavily armed troops to assault and disperse a peaceful, legal protest organized by members of Peru’s Amazonian indigenous communities protesting the entry of foreign multinational mining companies on their traditional homelands. Dozens of Indians were killed or are missing, scores have been injured and arrested and a number of Peruvian police, held hostage by the indigenous protestors were killed in the assault. President García declared martial law in the region in order to enforce his unilateral and unconstitutional fiat granting of mining exploitation rights to foreign companies, which infringed on the integrity of traditional Amazonian indigenous communal lands.
Alan García is no stranger to government-sponsored massacres. In June 1986, he ordered the military to bomb and shell prisons in the capital holding many hundreds of political prisoners protesting prison conditions – resulting in over 400 known victims. Later, obscure mass graves revealed dozens more. This notorious massacre took place while García was hosting a gathering of the so-called ‘Socialist’ International in Lima. His political party, APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance) a member of the ‘International’, was embarrassed by the public display of its ‘national-socialist’ proclivities, before hundreds of European Social Democrat functionaries. Charged with misappropriation of government funds and leaving office with an inflation rate of almost 8,000% in 1990, he agreed to support Presidential candidate Alberto Fujimori in exchange for amnesty. When Fujimori imposed a dictatorship in 1992, García went into self-imposed exile in Colombia and later, France. He returned in 2001 when the statute of limitations on his corruption charges had expired and Fujimori was forced to resign amidst charges of running death squads and spying on his critics. García won the 2006 Presidential elections in a run-off against the pro-Indian nationalist candidate and former Army officer, Ollanta Humala, thanks to financial and media backing by Lima’s rightwing, ethnic European oligarchs and US overseas ‘AID’ agencies.
Back in power, García left no doubt about his political and economic agenda. In October 2007 he announced his strategy of placing foreign multi-national mining companies at the center of his economic ‘development’ program, while justifying the brutal displacement of small producers from communal lands and indigenous villages in the name of ‘modernization’.
García pushed through congressional legislation in line with the US-promoted ‘Free Trade Agreement of the Americas’ or ALCA. Peru was one of only three Latin American nations to support the US proposal. He opened Peru to the unprecedented plunder of its resources, labor, land and markets by the multinationals. In late 2007, García began to award huge tracts of traditional indigenous lands in the Amazon region for exploitation by foreign mining and energy multinationals. This was in violation of a 1969 International Labor Organization-brokered agreement obligating the Peruvian government to consult and negotiate with the indigenous inhabitants over exploitation of their lands and rivers. Under his ‘open door’ policy, the mining sector of the economy expanded rapidly and made huge profits from the record-high world commodity prices and the growing Asian (Chinese) demand for raw materials. The multinational corporations were attracted by Peru’s low corporate taxes and royalty payments and virtually free access to water and cheap government-subsidized electricity rates. The enforcement of environmental regulations was suspended in these ecologically fragile regions, leading to wide-spread contamination of the rivers, ground water, air and soil in the surrounding indigenous communities. Poisons from mining operations led to massive fish kills and rendered the water unfit for drinking. The operations decimated the tropical forests, undermining the livelihood of tens of thousands of villagers engaged in traditional artisan work and subsistence forest gathering and agricultural activities.
The profits of the mining bonanza go primarily to the overseas companies. The García regime distributes state revenues to his supporters among the financial and real estate speculators, luxury goods importers and political cronies in Lima’s enclosed upscale, heavily guarded neighborhoods and exclusive country-clubs. As the profit margins of the multinationals reached an incredible 50% and government revenues exceeded $1 billion US dollars, the indigenous communities lacked paved roads, safe water, basic health services and schools. Worse still, they experienced a rapid deterioration of their everyday lives as the influx of mining capital led to increased prices for basic food and medicine. Even the World Bank in its Annual Report for 2008 and the editors of the Financial Times of London urged the García regime to address the growing discontent and crisis among the indigenous communities. Delegations from the indigenous communities had traveled to Lima to try to establish a dialogue with the President in order to address the degradation of their lands and communities. The delegates were met with closed doors. García maintained that ‘progress and modernity come from the big investments by the multinationals…, (rather than) the poor peasants who haven’t a centavo to invest.’ He interpreted the appeals for peaceful dialogue as a sign of weakness among the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon and increased his grants of exploitation concessions to foreign MNCs even deeper into the Amazon. He cut off virtually all possibility for dialogue and compromise with the Indian communities.
The Amazonian Indian communities responded by forming the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP). They held public protests for over 7 weeks culminating in the blocking of two transnational highways. This enraged García, who referred to the protestors as ‘savages and barbarians‘ and sent police and military units to suppress the mass action. What García failed to consider was the fact that a significant proportion of indigenous men in these villages had served as rmy conscripts, who fought in the 1995 war against Ecuador while others had been trained in local self-defense community organizations. These combat veterans were not intimidated by state terror and their resistance to the initial police attacks resulted in both police and Indian casualties. García then declared ‘war on the savages’ sending a heavy military force with helicopters and armored troops with orders to ‘shoot to kill’. AIDESEP activists report over one hundred deaths among the indigenous protestors and their families: Indians were murdered in the streets, in their homes and workplaces. The remains of many victims are believed to have been dumped in the ravines and rivers.
Conclusion
The Obama regime has predictably not issued a single word of concern or protest in the face of one of the worst massacres of Peruvian civilians in this decade – perpetrated by one of America’s closest remaining allies in Latin America. García, taking his talking points from the US Ambassador, accused Venezuela and Bolivia of having instigated the Indian ‘uprising’, quoting a letter of support from Bolivia’s President Evo Morales sent to an intercontinental conference of Indian communities held in Lima in May as ‘proof’. Martial law was declared and the entire Amazon region of Peru is being militarized. Meetings are banned and family members are forbidden from searching for their missing relatives.
Throughout Latin America, all the major Indian organizations have expressed their solidarity with the Peruvian indigenous movements. Within Peru, mass social movements, trade unions and human rights groups have organized a general strike on June 11. Fearing the spread of mass protests, El Commercio, the conservative Lima daily, cautioned García to adopt some conciliatory measures to avoid a generalized urban uprising. A one-day truce was declared on June 10, but the Indian organizations refused to end their blockade of the highways unless the García Government rescinds its illegal land grant decrees.
In the meantime, a strange silence hangs over the White House. Our usually garrulous President Obama, so adept at reciting platitudes about diversity and tolerance and praising peace and justice, cannot find a single phrase in his prepared script condemning the massacre of scores of indigenous inhabitants of the Peruvian Amazon. When egregious violations of human rights are committed in Latin America by a US backed client-President following Washington’s formula of ‘free trade’, deregulation of environmental protections and hostility toward anti-imperialist countries (Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador), Obama favors complicity over condemnation.
James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed Books). Petras’ most recent book is Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of US Power (Clarity Press, 2008). He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu. Read other articles by James
http://illvox.org/2009/06/peru-blood-flows-in-the-amazon/
# Carlos Benavides says :
21 July, 2009 [ 02:25 ]
Obama administration…no different than the Bush administration
http://talkradionews.com/2009/04/obama-administrationno-different-than-the-bush-administration/
# Carlos Benavides says :
21 July, 2009 [ 05:18 ]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5ogMIxvmIM&feature=PlayList&p=46DF5943BD570AC0&index=7
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa1M6Axgjuo&feature=PlayList&p=46DF5943BD570AC0&index=6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKixqtPLKI8&feature=channel_page
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao5jKCiYsNI&videos=4TZdx0pLZxo&playnext_from=TL&playnext=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOmQS7nJYa4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i40a6bcSrAQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzX2TKv5pAQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNo21PEWbks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BKW7G_dIxc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeQlTB8Iuyw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqzlQ0ZEuxc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVOuC0qSrR8&feature=PlayList&p=1BA1D7C257721B0C&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=47
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVSjOdRXyyE&feature=related
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After greeting Peru's President Alan Garcia during the 5th Summit of the Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez affirmed there was a good bilateral relationship between his country and the Andean nation.
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