By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
“It is depressing to observe how the United States of America has become the evil empire. Having served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and in the Central Intelligence Agency for the second half of the Cold War, I had an insider’s viewpoint of how an essentially pragmatic national security policy was being transformed bit by bit into a bipartisan doctrine that featured as a sine qua non global dominance for Washington.
Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed the opportunity to end once and for all the bipolar nuclear confrontation that threatened global annihilation was squandered. Instead, President Bill Clinton chose instead to humiliate and use NATO to contain an already demoralized and effectively leaderless Russia.”
This is what American journalist Philip M. Giraldi writes in an article dated April 18, under the title “Rumors of War: Washington Is Looking for a Fight”.
American Exceptionalism became the battle cry for an increasingly clueless federal government as well as for a media-deluded public. When 9/11 arrived, the country was ready to lash out at the rest of the world. President George W. Bush growled that “There’s a new sheriff in town and you are either with us or against us.”
Afghanistan followed, then Iraq, and, in a spirit of bipartisanship, the Democrats came up with Libya and the first serious engagement in Syria.
In its current manifestation, one finds a United States that threatens Iran on a nearly weekly basis and tears up arms control agreements with Russia while also maintaining deployments of US forces in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and places like Mali.
Scattered across the globe are 800 American military bases while Washington’s principal enemies du jour Russia and China have, respectively, only one and none.
Venezuela is being threatened with invasion primarily because it is in the western hemisphere and therefore subject to Washington’s claimed pro-consular authority.
Vice President Mike Pence told the United Nations Security Council that the White House will remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power, preferably using diplomacy and sanctions, but “all options are on the table.”
Pence warned that Russia and other friends of Maduro need to leave now or face the consequences. Russia has accepted that war is coming. By some estimates, its army is better-equipped and combat-ready than is that of the United States, which spends nearly ten times as much on “defense.”
Never before in my lifetime has the United States been so belligerent, and that in spite of the fact that there is no single enemy or combination of enemies that actually threaten either the geographical United States or a vital interest of the US.
According to Giraldi, Iran is also upgrading its defensive capabilities, which are formidable. Now that Washington has withdrawn from the nuclear agreement with Iran, has placed a series of increasingly punitive sanctions on the country, and, most recently, has declared a part of the Iranian military to be a “foreign terrorist organization” and therefore subject to attack by US forces at any time, it is clear that war will be the next step.
In three weeks, the United States will seek to enforce a global ban on any purchases of Iranian oil. A number of countries, including US nominal ally Turkey, have said they will ignore the ban and it will be interesting to see what the US Navy intends to do to enforce it. Or what Iran will do to break the blockade.
But even given all of the horrific decisions being made in the White House, there is one organization that is far crazier and possibly even more dangerous. That is the United States Congress, which is, not surprisingly, a legislative body whose decisions are approved and is viewed positively by only 18 per cent of the American people.
April 19, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
By Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Date: April 30, 2019
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews
On April 28, 1979, in broad daylight, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, a group of assassins shot and seriously wounded a young man just 25 years old, Carlos Muñiz Varela, who died after painful agony on the 30th of that month.
It is now forty years of shameful, scandalous, impunity. None of those who planned, directed and executed the crime has been punished. Working hard, without refusing to face the threats, the obstacles, and the disinterest or the complicity of politicians and bureaucrats, his friends and family have not stopped for a moment to demand that justice be done.
It has been an incessant struggle. Over the years it has brought about the revelation of documents, testimonies and other evidence that would have made it possible to completely clarify a fact that still awaits action by the court. Some of the culprits died unmolested. But half a dozen of those who participated in the unforgivable misdeed still circulate freely in Miami and Puerto Rico.
Carlos’ murder could have been prevented if the Puerto Rican authorities or their colonial masters had wanted to do so. During the previous year, 1978, for several months, threats against his life had multiplied, reproduced even in propagandistic attacks by anti-Cuban terrorist groups operating openly on the sister island.
Now, on the eve of the 40th anniversary, “El Nuevo Día,” the newspaper with the largest circulation there, reports other documents that confirm and expand on what was already known thanks to the indomitable tenacity of his colleagues and friends.
Carlos had been born in Cuba and was a very young boy when he was taken to Puerto Rico after the Cuban revolutionary triumph. There he grew up and joined the efforts for the independence of what for him was also his other homeland. He was the initiator of the visits to Cuba by other young Cubans who, as he had been, had been taken to live outside their native land. His work met with fierce opposition from the annexionists – narrow allies of Cuban-born gang members – who even used the colonial “Senate” for that purpose.
This anniversary also coincides with the redoubled attempts to asphyxiate Cuba, which include additional restrictions on travel and family remittances from Cubans living abroad. These were announced in Miami by Mr. John Bolton, in a grotesque ceremony with the defeated invaders of Playa Girón and other mercenaries. There they were, celebrating their impunity, those who took the life of an innocent boy who never hurt anyone and gave his all for the reunion and harmony among Cubans.
His friends did not forget him. We will never forget him.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Cecilia Zamudio is a Colombian-born painter and writer who has lived in a dozen countries around the world. Her work, very versatile and integral defined within Humanist Colorism, stresses her concern and study of social and historical processes.
One of her most recent works is devoted to demonstrating that capitalism is ruthless by nature, that there is no less-savage form of capitalism since it is a social order based on exploitation.
“Poverty is steadily increasing worldwide at the same time that big fortunes are growing exponentially: capitalists gradually degrade the planet and enslave and objectify more living beings.”
“They exclude millions of people from the possibility of a dignified healthy, life while exterminating species and ecosystems,” says the Colombian intellectual.
Millions of human beings, impoverished by the plunder perpetrated by the multi-nationals –that capitalize on the basis of the destruction of mountains and rivers– end up huddled in the miserable slums of the big enriched cities.
The exodus of people from the most brutally-plundered countries to the metropolis of capitalism is intensifying.
But the countries enriched at the cost of impoverishing others cynically appreciate riches but not people. Walls and fences grow while analysis and empathy diminish.
The sand of the beaches is whitewashed with the skeletal remains of the thousands of the gshipwrecked who perish in their attempts to flee from the capitalist cauldron their countries have been turned into due to looting and imperialist wars.
The bosses of the countries in the capitalist metropolis, who also intensify the exploitation against their own workers and make them live in precarious conditions, need a scapegoat. It’s purpose to take the blame for the actions for which they do not wish to be accountable, and to use their media to alienate the majorities on the grounds that the precariousness of their living conditions is caused by “immigrants”.
The promotion of racism and fascism is intensified by the media of mass alienation in order to increase divisions within the working class, and to multiply the levels of racist fanaticism.
Violence against women is also intensely promoted by the media of mass alienation. Given that machismo is an essential part of the capitalist superstructure, the profits of a few grow resting on the aberration of femicide [woman-killing].
The objectification of the human being is promoted to extremes. The values of solidarity are replaced by consumerist pseudo virtues. The notion of “social justice” is to be erased, and supplanted by the perverse, egocentric, and sad concept of “charity.”
“As the media of capitalist alienation homogenize the people with their promoted “don’t change the world, change yourself” (as if were impossible to do both things at the same time) capitalists continue to depredate.
“They implement with greater intensity the idea of planned obsolescence (premature and planned wearing-out of things), turning the planet into a dumpster.
They poison the earth and food in a carcinogenic way, murder by hunger a child every five seconds in a world where today’s agriculture would be enough to feed 12 billion people.”
“Capitalists take advantage of the increasingly precarious conditions of life that they themselves have caused to expand their quarry of enslaved, and thus modern slavery, prostitution, sexual exploitation, and child trafficking grow.”
It is urgent to get out of this system in which a few capitalize on the blood, sweat and tears of the majority.
Faced with the inevitable increase in exploitation of misery and plundering of nature, the big capitalists attack with their think tanks: they try to colonize our minds and manage our perception of reality.
These think tanks try to pose the problem under distorted lights and, in order to gain time, they invented the false dichotomy of a “savage capitalism” versus a so-called “capitalism with a human face”
Capitalism is savage by nature, since it is based on the exploitation of one part of the human race against another: there is not a “less savage capitalism” because its violence is intrinsic to the acceleration of capitalist accumulation that increases every day
And together with it: exclusion, exploitation, looting, repression, state terrorism, imperialist wars, fascism, racism, machismo, and all forms of violence by the rich against the poor.
April 24, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
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