Manuel E. Yepe 239
Manuel Yepe 1936-2022
Cuban journalist and diplomat Manuel Yepe passes away
May 16, 2022
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Prominent journalist and diplomat Manuel Yepe Menéndez. Photo: Taken from Cubaperiodistas.
Prominent journalist and diplomat Manuel Yepe Menéndez passed away this Monday in Havana, after several days of fighting for his life.
Yepe, a renowned columnist for many Cuban and foreign media outlets, was born in 1936 and since 1954 he was an insurrectionary fighter in Havana as a member of the Youth Brigades of the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) at the University of Havana.
He worked in the reproduction and distribution of the defense plea of Fidel Castro as the main accused for the assaults to the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in Bayamo. Between April and July 1958 he edited the clandestine magazine of the M-26-7 called ACCIÓN, which was published weekly in Havana and identified itself as the Organ of the Cuban Youth. When the Revolution triumphed, he was vice provincial coordinator and responsible for the propaganda of the M-26-7 in the province of Matanzas.
With a degree in Law, Economics and Social Sciences, he served as Protocol Director at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cuban Ambassador to Romania, General Director of the Prensa Latina news agency, Vice President of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television, Director of the Guerrillero de Pinar del Río newspaper, National Director of the UNDP TIPS project and member of the Secretariat of the Cuban Movement for Peace.
He defined himself as “a Cuban revolutionary in the ranks” and “one of the many Fidelistas who participated in the Revolution in the second line and gave his life to that beautiful political project”.
Yepe was a member of the Union of Cuban Journalists. The condolences of the national presidency of UPEC go out to his family and friends.
(With information from Cubaperiodistas.)
On the desertion of César Prieto
On the desertion of César Prieto
by Roberto M. Yepe
May 27, 2021
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
No one should be surprised that a baseball player dreams of playing and succeeding in the Major Leagues, just as any soccer player can dream of playing in the leagues of England, Spain, Germany or Italy. It is a perfectly natural and irreproachable aspiration.
The U.S. government’s policy against the people of Cuba makes it impossible for a Cuban baseball player to try to fulfill that dream in the same way that a player from any other country could, by means of legal and contractual mechanisms that allow each party involved (athletes and sports federations of the countries involved) to protect their legitimate interests.
For decades, this situation has allowed athlete traffickers and the Major Leagues to benefit from numerous Cuban athletes, trained for years in their country of origin, without having to make the corresponding consideration, compensation or economic indemnification to the Cuban Baseball Federation.
In the face of such flagrant theft of sports talent, it should be expected that the National Institute of Sports, Physical Education and Recreation (INDER) is keeping a detailed historical inventory in all sports disciplines, with the corresponding updated economic valuation of the compensations due to the Cuban sports federations, which could be very useful the day the U.S. government decides to return to a civilized dialogue with its Cuban counterpart.
On the other hand, while the desire of a baseball player to play in the Major Leagues is irreproachable, the decision of an athlete to abandon a team while taking advantage of an international commitment, leaving his teammates in a compromising situation and disappointing an entire people who are waiting for the results of their national team, is totally reprehensible from an ethical point of view.
However, in this commentary I would like to emphasize the economic dimension of the issue. Sports activity in Cuba is ultimately financed by each of the Cuban citizens who, directly or indirectly, contribute economically to the State. Therefore, Cuban citizens have every right to demand and receive the consideration corresponding to the financing of sports activity in Cuba, which is none other than the duty of athletes to represent local teams and national teams with dedication, professionalism and dignity.
For his preparation in the national baseball team and to be able to get to Florida, César Prieto was totally financed by Cuban citizens, in order to cover his salary, food, lodging, transportation, medical attention, visa procedures, plane ticket, among other possible expenses. Given their decision to defect, one might wonder who will compensate the Cuban citizens for the economic damage caused. In Cuba’s current situation (pandemic, intensified economic blockade, generalized shortages and deep economic crisis), it should be kept in mind that the expenses destined to the preparation of Cuban athletes must necessarily be subtracted from the resources available for the medical care of the sick and convalescents of the Covid-19, the feeding of Cuban children and the care of our elderly, just to mention three examples.
I do not feel the slightest personal animosity against Cesar Prieto, not even now that he has decided to carry the heavy stigma of desertion for the rest of his life. I have long admired his extraordinary athletic talent and, in fact, have been hoping for a couple of years now that he would find a way to make his way to the Major Leagues.
I only wish he had done so with dignity and courage, freeing himself of his commitments to the Cuban Baseball Federation beforehand. However, I understand that in this day and age, perhaps that is too much to ask and that, ultimately, his defection is just one of the many systemic effects of the criminal policy of the U.S. government against the Cuban people.
The permanence and the intensification of such policy raise the need for the Cuban State, taking advantage of the current process of legal reforms, to establish more effective and sophisticated contractual and legal mechanisms to protect the economic rights of citizens against the damages caused by sports defections. If we multiply the case of César Prieto by all the desertions that have historically occurred in national teams in all sports disciplines, we could see the considerable economic damage caused to the Cuban people by the theft of sports talent.
Although I am not an expert in the matter, I wonder if the properties of all kinds that the sports deserters might have left in Cuba could not be seized, confiscated or used in some way to compensate for the economic damage caused to the Cuban people. On the other hand, the corresponding administrative and legal mechanisms should be established so that the sports deserters, if one day they decide to visit or return to the country, would have to assume the corresponding civil liability and compensate the people for the economic damages caused.
Obviously, the application of mechanisms of this nature should not be limited to sports deserters, but should be extended to all professional fields.
https://arboledayepe.blogspot.com/2021/05/a-proposito-de-la-desercion-de-cesar.html
No Democracy Without Sovereignty
You Can’t Have Democracy Without Sovereignty
By Manuel E. Yepe
April 16, 2021
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In Latin America, the U.S. control of the media euphemistically identifies as “return to democracy” or “democratic opening”, the return to civilian hands of the governments of those countries that were subjected to bloody military dictatorships promoted by the United States in the last five decades of the last 20th century.
It must be recognized that, technically, this has been a great achievement of imperialist propaganda because the outgoing military dictatorships had been imposed by the United States when the peoples could no longer stand the reigning order and a period of rebellion for independence was on the horizon.
The peoples were not then rebelling against idyllic democracies as one might think now when one speaks of a “return to democracy” but against the humiliating subordination to the dictates of Washington which had put an end to their patriotic dreams of independence.
The triumph of the socialist and pro-independence revolution in Cuba stimulated the hope that the objective of feeling that they were the owners of their sovereignty was viable.
In reality, except in glorious historical moments -which as a rule were cruelly repressed- what existed in these lands before the barracks imposed their order on the oligarchies, were sad caricatures of democracy. They were, in truth, semi-colonial enclaves headed by oligarchs servile to the United States that the empire itself replaced by military tyrannies when it saw its interests in a given country endangered.
On a regional scale, the strategy outlined by the U.S. power elite was based on the consideration that the oligarchies were not in a position to stop the generalized popular struggle that was then approaching. This was due to the worn-out political model designed in the image and likeness of the U.S. and imposed as the only democratic and acceptable one in the hemisphere.
Those traditional parties without any popular base and burdened by corruption and banditry, which were the protagonists of the model, had nothing to do with a true democratic system.
The Latin American majorities wanted the return of civilians to government. The bloody military dictatorships only had the support of the small segment of society that fattened its coffers in the conditions of security and impunity provided by the repression of workers, students and intellectuals.
But the laboring majorities cannot see a “return” to democracy in the return to the situation of lack of opportunities for education, decent work and medical care or the continuity of poverty, marginality, violence, corruption, forced emigration and so many other ills. In any case, the positive aspect has been the opportunity to resume the civic struggles truncated by the military coups.
It is impossible to speak of democracy in countries where the organizations that are part of the Intelligence Community led by the Director of National Intelligence, who reports directly to the President of the United States, operate with impunity in defense of interests alien to those of the country. The CIA, the DEA and other known intelligence, espionage and counter-espionage bodies; where embassies, consulates and other U.S. offices openly pay followers, recruit mercenaries and corrupt officials and politicians.
If Latin America could show a panorama of progress, freedom and justice prior to the takeover of governments by the barracks, it would be possible to speak of a return to democracy. But nothing could be further from the truth.
The true democracy is the one that is yet to come, the one that will mean, for the Latin American nations as a whole, their second and definitive independence.
In fact, this popular democracy has already begun to arrive and the countries of the continent that are marching in the vanguard along this route are those that today face the most powerful media campaigns of discredit, demonization, intrigues and threats.
To those who advance cautiously, they apply the subtle methods of “soft” diplomacy in order to remove them from the leading contingent, although without renouncing the crude method of the military coup when the door remains ajar and the circumstances are propitious, as happened in the shameful case of Honduras.
Latin America has lived under the neoliberal sign of capitalism for almost four decades, has reaped very little economic and social development, and many vices and apocamientos that have stagnated with respect to the rest of the world, making this region the most unequal on the planet.
The “representative democracy” imposed by the empire is false, is not rational, promotes differences, widens the gap between rich and poor, encourages wars, disunity and discrimination based on race, creed, ethnicity and gender.
In Latin America, democracy must be preceded by independence and the unity of internal anti-imperialist forces.
Latin America needs a democracy of solidarity based on equality and friendship among its nations, not on competition and greed.
Manuel E. Yepe
Manuel Yepe Menéndez (Havana 1936), since 1954 was an insurrectional fighter in Havana as a member of the 26th of July Youth Brigades at the University of Havana. He worked in the reproduction and distribution of Fidel Castro’s defense plea “La historia me absolverá” (History will absolve me). In 1958 he edited the clandestine magazine of the M-26-7 ACCIÓN, which was published weekly in Havana and identified itself as the Organ of the Cuban Youth. He has a degree in Law, Economics Management and Social Sciences. He has served as Protocol Director at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Cuban Ambassador to Romania. He was General Director of Prensa Latina news agency; Vice President of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT); Director of the Guerrillero de Pinar del Río newspaper, and National Director (founder in Cuba) of the UNDP TIPS project. From 2000 to date he has been a member of the Secretariat of the Cuban Movement for Peace. He was a commentator on international issues for the daily newspapers POR ESTO! (2008-June 2020). August 2020
Two Countries Competing in the USA
In the United States, two countries are competing
By Manuel Yepe Menéndez
January 1, 2021
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews
Southern map of the Confederate states.
In the middle of the 19th century, the Republican Party, representing the interests of the nascent U.S. industrial capital, won the military battle against the Southern Democratic Party, which represented and defended the slave plantation and slavery itself.
However, the southern institutions-including its religious system that justified slavery and defined whites as superior social beings-did not disappear. The defeat suffered by the South permeated southern society, which since then has seen the North as foreignizing, secularizing, and foreign: an enemy to be fought. The civil war, which for the North ended in 1865, had just begun for the South.
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln by a Southerner in that year meant the first questioning of the power of the North. This situation has continued until today.
The South, since then, has been discriminated against by the power of the North. As the family farm became extinct, replaced by agribusiness, those displaced farmers who opposed the new capitalism – which, by paying low wages to Mexicans, made it impossible for the farmers to prosper – became allies of the South.
A southern nationalism opposed to the north developed in the south. If one thinks of the United States as a single nation, this phenomenon may go unnoticed. But, in reality, they are two nations with different dynamics.
The southerners were free traders because the plantations in the south depended on cotton exports to Europe. Those in the north who industrialized were protectionists, influenced by an ideology of self-employment oriented to depending on the work of farmers in the field, with or without slaves. In the south, which extended along the east coast to Virginia and reached the gates of Washington, it dominated the plantation.
The South’s military defeat in the Civil War did not mean the defeat of the South’s institutions, nor its ideology. The North became industrialized and today depends on finance, banks and mortgages since the industries disappeared when they were sold to the Third World. The South, on the other hand, continued to be agricultural until the 1920s when large-scale oil extraction began in Texas, Louisiana and Alabama. Therefore, it was in the South where, little by little, the powerful oil power group developed.
In the south, whites were mostly poor but considered superior to slaves. There the Ku Klux Klan emerged in 1866, which soon became the terrorist organization that channeled white supremacist hate in the United States and whose function was to keep alive those practices that the new anti-slavery laws prohibited. The ban on voting for Blacks was maintained and only after a new intervention by the North with federal troops a century later were the civil rights of Blacks legally recognized.
Nationalist and conservative ideology spread in the South as part of the tradition of identifying with the past. The “founding fathers” recognized slavery and did not question it. Even the text of the Constitution, in its original version, allowed slavery.
One element that cannot be ignored is the religious aspect. The ideology of revanchism is based on the religion of Southern Baptists, for whom the South had been God’s chosen people in their struggle against the North. For them, they lost the civil war because God was testing them. The expansion of the country before and after the civil war was led by Southerners. And the same thing happened in the states bordering Canada, where a northern European Lutheran tradition joined with local racist attitudes. Many Southerners left for Alaska. The state of Utah is populated by Mormons, a racist theology with southern bases from that right-wing Arizona tradition.
Blacks and ethnic groups have been influenced by this ideology through the “prosperity gospel” that this movement has emphasized since the 19th century.
When people in North America talk, especially during election periods, about blue states and red states they are referring to two nations.
That’s why it was said that, according to the Southern view, Barack Obama embodied the interests of the North as a northerner (from Chicago), Black, and an ally of the world of finance – the three elements that the Southern right identified in the struggle against the North. On the other hand, to Donald Trump, who was defeated in 2020, was attributed the status of defender of the interests of the red states, because he had assured majority electoral support in the most industrialized states.
It’s Not the Economy, It’s the Virus
It’s Not the Economy Anymore, Stupid. It’s the Virus
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The renowned American opinion columnist and distinguished professor at New York University Graduate Center, Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in international trade and economic geography, summarizes in an article entitled “The Deadly Delusions of Mad King Donald”, published yesterday, the precarious situation in which the American nation is being talked about.
A month ago it was still possible to hope that the impulse of Donald Trump and the Trumpist governors of the Sunbelt states to relax the social distancing and reopen businesses such as restaurants and bars, even though they may not have any of the reasons to do so safely, might not have absolutely catastrophic results.
At this point, however, it is clear that everything the experts have warned of as likely to happen, is happening. The new daily cases of Covid-19 are running two and a half times longer than at the beginning of June, and are increasing rapidly. Hospitals in the early reopening states are under terrible pressure. National death totals continue to decline with the drop in deaths in the Northeast, but are increasing in the Sunbelt. And the worst is surely yet to come.
A normal president and a normal political party would be horrified by this turn of events. They would realize that they’ve done something wrong and that it’s time for a course correction. They would begin to take the health experts’ warnings seriously.
But Trump, who began his presidency with a defiant complaint about “American carnage,” doesn’t seem completely disturbed by the number of victims of a pandemic. It presages killing more Americans than have been killed over the past decade and aims to double that number by the week with the full reopening of schools in defiance of existing guidelines.
Without even calling on Americans to protect each other by wearing masks, or setting an example by wearing one himself, how can we make sense of Trump’s pathologically inept response to the coronavirus?
There is an underlying core of absolute cynicism: clearly, Trump and those around him don’t give a damn how many die or suffer lasting damage from Covid-19, as long as it works in the arena of electoral politics. But this cynicism is wrapped in multiple layers of deception.
Regardless of what one thinks of George W. Bush’s response to September 11 and how Bill Clinton faced stubbornly high unemployment, Trump inherited a nation at peace and in the midst of a long economic expansion that continued, without visible change in that trend, after he took office.
Then came Covid-19. Another president might have seen the pandemic as a crisis to be dealt with. But that thought never seems to have crossed Trump’s mind. Instead, he has spent the last five months trying to get back to where we were in February, when he was sitting on top of a moving train and pretending to drive it.
“This helps explain his strange aversion to epidemic masks: they remind people that we are in the middle of a pandemic, which is something he pretends everyone forgets. Unfortunately for him, and for the rest of the population, positive thinking will not make a virus go away.
However, that’s where the second layer of deception comes in. By now it is clear that the cynical decision to sacrifice American lives in pursuit of political advantage is failing even on its own terms. The rush to reopen produced big job gains in May and early June, but voters were not impressed; their poll still showed the worst. But this year, it’s not the economy that determines, stupid, it’s the virus.
And now the rise in infections may be causing the economic recovery to stall. In other words, the strategy of “ignoring and cursing the experts and going full steam ahead” seems silly and immoral. But Trump, far from reconsidering that he is deepening the hole he is increasingly in, just as he continues to spin the dial on racism despite the fact that it is not benefiting him politically.
Incredibly, as hospitalizations are increasing, he continues to insist that the increase in reported cases is just an illusion created by the increase in evidence.
So what can we do? You may ask Trump – who has another six months left in office if he stays on after January 20 (God save us all). And it is already clear that he will not change course, no matter how severe the pandemic. “We are all passengers at the mercy of a mad captain who is determined to destroy his ship,” Krugman concludes.
July 13, 2020
This article can be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source
What Trump Would be Capable Of
What Trump Would be Capable Of to Get Re-elected
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Humanity will always remember, with sadness and pain, the tragic way in which the hostilities of the Second World War ended in the theater of operations in Asia and the Pacific.
On August 6, 1945, the United States airlifted and exploded an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing 80,000 people in a treacherous manner. This figure increased to 200,000 by 1950 due to the persistent effects of nuclear radiation.
After that horrendous crime against humanity in Hiroshima, instead of showing their repentance by putting an end to such actions against civilians, the political leaders of the United States continued their efforts to dominate the world with the threat of the use of the atomic bomb for their own interests.
On the second occasion, they did so over an even more populous city, Nagasaki, where President Harry Truman became the murderer of some 300,000 additional human beings.
The message was obvious and clear: The United States possesses a terrible weapon and is willing to use it against any nation that opposes its world domination.
The government of Japan at the time was a military dictatorship nominally headed by an Emperor who had crushed all democratic dissent, outlawed the country’s Communist party, and pursued a very aggressive foreign policy against its neighbors.
In December 1941, the Japanese empire-which had occupied a considerable portion of the coasts of China, Korea, and the French colonies of Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) by committing atrocities in much of the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia)-attacked Hawaii, an American possession.
But despite those initial victories, by 1945 Japan was already a defeated empire. It had lost its oil reserves and its naval fleet had been destroyed. Nazi Germany, its greatest ally, had surrendered in May 1945.
In June 1945, the government of Japan had communicated to the neutral governments of Sweden and Switzerland, as well as to its strongest opponent, the Soviet Union, its desire for peace. Their sole condition for surrender was that its emperor remain the nominal head of the Japanese state.
Notwithstanding the above, there are many who even today, 75 years after that monstrous fallacy, accept as true the lie with which the then-American President, Harry Truman, justified the use of the atomic weapon after the genocide. “We have used the atomic bomb to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans.
That horrendous lie – that Japan’s willingness to end hostilities with an almost unconditional surrender that would have saved humanity tens of thousands of dead, wounded and material resources – was the lethal weapon used by the U.S. government to needlessly prolong the war for a few days in pursuit of its spurious goals of global domination.
Since then, the U.S. has continued to prepare a huge military potential for that purpose. It has adopted a doctrine of pre-emptive war, and planned the militarization of space. After the events of September 11, 2001, they unleashed on its own territory the “war on terror”, which was used to justify attacks around the world and a permanent state of war. Now, the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons is increasingly lowered and their use always seems only a matter of time.
For some decades now, the world has been living in the shadow of the probable nuclear outcomes of the “conflicts” that Washington unleashes anywhere in the world. Their goals are either to impose or prevent any free trade agreement by violent means, to overthrow the governments that it calls “failed” and the popular movements that resist the global corporate empire; to promote the plundering of oil and other resources in the weakest countries, or other unspeakable ends.
With an idiot as characterized by his lies and tricks as Trump that the American population currently suffers as President, Humanity has no choice. It must resign itself to waiting for a phenomenon of popular intelligence among the citizens of that great nation, one that that will prevent the magnate from being able to manipulate his election once again, with whatever ignominious recourse he has to appeal to violate the popular will.
Things are much more dangerous in the highly-charged environment that racism has created these days, with the vicious murder of Black American citizen George Floyd by a white police officer in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
June 1, 2020
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Capitalist Crisis Worse than Covid-19
The Capitalist Crisis is Worse than Covid-19
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The confinement finally decreed in the United States to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic has crippled the capitalist economy and thus demolished the process of capital accumulation, writes William I. Robinson, a U.S. professor of sociology specializing in political economy, globalization, Latin America, and historical materialism at the University of California, Santa Barbara
“The fact that this economic paralysis is throwing tens of millions of workers into a crisis of survival is entirely fortuitous for the transnational capitalist class’ concern to immediately resume the machinery of profit, since capital cannot remain idle while it remains capital. The impulse to revive accumulation explains the fact that in many American cities there have been public demonstrations by the ultra-right-wing to demand the lifting of the quarantine, just as the most reactionary sectors of capital promoted the Tea Party in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008, a movement that in turn mobilized in support of Trumpism.
Although the protests seem spontaneous, they have in fact been organized by conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, Freedom Works, and the American Council on Legislative Exchange (coo ALEC), which brings together the CEOs of large corporations along with local right-wing legislators from across the United States.
Donald Trump inflamed the protesters through a series of tweets, including one calling to “Free (the state of) Virginia, and for protecting its great Second Amendment, which is under siege.” The call to defend this amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to bear arms, was almost a call for armed insurrection. In the state of Michigan, armed Trump supporters blocked traffic to prevent the flow of aid. A few days ago, Trump claimed to have “total” power to lift the quarantine.
Despite its populist rhetoric, Trump has served the interests of the transnational capitalist class well by implementing a neoliberal program ranging from regressive tax reform and extensive deregulation and privatization to an expansion of capital subsidies, social spending cuts and union repression.
Trump – himself a member of the transnational capitalist class – picked up where he left off in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse and forged a social base among those sectors of the (mostly white) working class that had previously enjoyed privileges such as stable, well-paid jobs, and that in recent years have suffered acute socio-economic destabilization and downward mobility in capitalist globalization.
Like the Tea Party that preceded him, Trump has been able to arouse increasing social anxiety among these sectors, from a radical critique of the capitalist system to a racist and patriotic mobilization against scapegoats such as immigrants. These Trumpist tactics have turned these sectors into shock forces for the ultra-right-wing capitalist agenda that has brought them to the brink of a truly fascist project.
The growing crisis of global capitalism has led to a rapid political polarization in global society between an insurgent left and ultra-right and neo-fascist forces that have gained adherents in many countries of the world. Both forces draw on the same social base of the millions of people devastated by neo-liberal austerity, impoverishment, precarious employment and their relegation to the ranks of superfluous humanity. The level of global social polarization and inequality is unprecedented at this time.
The richest 1% of humanity controls more than half of the planet’s wealth while the lowest 80% have to make do with just 4.5% of that wealth. As popular discontent against this inequality spreads, the ultra-right and neo-fascist mobilization plays a critical role in the effort by dominant groups to channel such discontent into support for the agenda of the transnational capitalist class, disguised in populist rhetoric.
In this context, the conservative groups are determined to organize a far-right response to the health emergency and the economic crisis, involving a greater dose of ideological subterfuge and a renewed mobilization of their shock forces than to demand the lifting of the lockdown, a resource that could well require the State to provide aid to millions of poor workers and families instead of insisting on the immediate reopening of the economy.
May 25, 2020.
This commentary may be reproduced citing the newspaper Por Esto! of Merida, Mexico as the source.
Refutation of Religious Fundamentalism
Refutation of Religious Fundamentalism
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
According to the German sociologist, philosopher, economist, jurist, historian and political scientist Max Weber, considered one of the founders of the modern study of sociology and public administration, Protestantism is one of the foundational elements of the origin of capitalism.
Based on this same logic of development, it is evident that the reactionary and traditional neo-Pentecostal church – born in and exported by the United States – is a fundamental part of the current neoliberal phase of capitalism. It promotes the non-intervention of the State in society, is in favor of the cruelest individualism, alien to all social solidarity and which even privileges religious control even over the health of the population.
This is approximately how Jorge Elbaum, doctor of economics, sociologist, researcher, teacher, journalist and poet, sees it in his article “Shepherds of the Virus”.
The model of the charismatic mass pastors was exported by the United States to Latin America in the 1970s to weaken Liberation Theology, a current of the Catholic Church committed to the destiny of the poorest.
Pastor Gerard Glenn, a leader of the New Deliverance Evangelistic congregation in Richmond, challenged recommendations of social isolation by stating that “God is greater than this dreaded virus” and warned that he would not consent to the temporary closure of his church. “I’m essential as a preacher because I talk to God,” he said. Glenn died last March 22 from a coronavirus, but his wife is still fighting the disease.
The same fate befell Landon Spradlin, leader of Virginia’s evangelical community, who became a staunch defender of Donald Trump’s tenets. On March 25, he died at age 65, shortly after claiming that the quarantine was basically aimed at “manipulating the lives of American citizens” and that its communication through the media was producing “unnecessary terror.
In mid-April, Life Way Christian Resources of Tennessee published the results of a survey on pastors’ perceptions of the pandemic: 81 percent of those surveyed said that “the love of many believers is dissipating as a result of social distancing,” which is why their congregations should be kept open.
In South Korea, the Church of Jesus – known as the congregation of Shincheon, which promotes mass assemblies – became the epicentre of the COVID contagion in that country. Its leader, Pastor Lee Man-Hee, urged his followers to oppose the government’s harsh isolation measures. Sixty percent of the total number of infected people in the country belong to this group.
In crisis situations like the present one, religious fundamentalisms (of all denominations) counterpose human regulations to the law of God, demanding obedience to divine mandates that they supposedly interpret and manage. Their open-minded claims are motivated by expectations of losses in the collection of contributions and tithes from parishioners.
Leaders of denominational orthodoxy believe that lack of income can lead to the failure of their business enterprises. The logical fear generated by the pandemic allows fundamentalist leaders to appeal to apocalyptic discourse and to advise sinners of a return to revealed truth.
In Latin America, the neo-Pentecostal tradition was consolidated by spreading the so-called prosperity gospel, which holds that wealth is a divine gift. Billionaires, for that tradition, are subjects who have been rewarded by the deity and lack responsibility for the inequity they create.
According to their references, they cannot be accused of pettiness because by accumulating wealth they subject the rest of humanity to misery. This ideological position defends sexism and patriarchy, and attacks LGBT identities, feminist movements and/or those who promote the voluntary termination of pregnancy.
May 18, 2020.
This article can be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
If Human Hopes are Dashed
If Human Hopes are Dashed
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
An eventual re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States would once again frustrate the expectations of many. These are people who, throughout the world, have believed it possible for the American people, on their own, to be able to condemn the policy contrary to international law and the rules of coexistence practiced by the governments of both parties representing the oligarchic interests that alternate in the presidency of that North American country.
The 2020 presidential election will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2020, and will be the fifty-ninth (59th) presidential election in the United States. On November 3, 2020, voters will elect the electors who will in turn choose the new president and vice president through the Electoral College.
Only about half of Americans – because most who are eligible to vote are not interested in or don’t trust the political system that calls itself the most democratic in the world. They will go to the polls to complete the ritual of voting for the man who will govern the most powerful country in the history of our planet for the next four years.
The usual thing is that there is not much difference between the options presented to the voters. They are always two billionaires who identify very little with the interests of the average citizen and much less with the needs of the lower income population, which has never been taken into account in that very rich country.
But what is unusual about these 2020 elections is that the comparison regarding the candidates’ finances has been replaced by ideological approaches, since one of them has broken with the rules that have governed candidates’ speeches.
As Obama’s vice president, Biden was characterized by support for Obama’s policies on international relations and social issues, especially in designing the strategy for troop withdrawals from Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
His negotiating experience was useful during negotiations with the Republican Party in Congress on tax policy, the economy and budgets, and was vital in the passage of the 2011 Budget Control Act and the 2012 Tax Relief Act.
In addition, there was his role in the Obama administration’s efforts to limit gun sales, fight sexual abuse on college campuses, and seek remedies for the lack of health insurance in the low-income population.
But let no one be fooled. There’s an opulent economic oligarchy that no one has ever elected and that has never been put to the test. It’s a plutocratic oligarchy of big corporations, which is the real core of real power. It will continue to rule the destiny of the great American nation and will remain the determining factor in American national and global political life.
It is well-known that at the head of the empire there would still be that US economic hierarchy that would only formally cede its power to a political leadership that -using the government- would make the oligarchic morality and laws prevail, while taking care of internal order and neutralizing the internal conflicts.
Although this supreme power of the enormous transnational corporations also determines domestic policy, it is in the sphere of foreign policy that its control is most clearly expressed.
It was American businessmen and bankers who determined the transformation of the world into a marketplace. They also wanted the replacement of diplomacy by the system of pressure, threats, blockades, aggressions and occupations of entire countries that currently characterizes US foreign policy.
It was they who introduced the practice of relations between countries under their imperial domination through proconsular ambassadors and puppet presidents.
Unlike politicians – who must face up to electoral contests and exercise administrative tasks in which they show their faces – the economic hierarchs exercise their power without individual commitment, without pre-determined limits and without being subject to ethical or moral standards.
Paradoxically, large corporations tend to be appreciated and respected because they theoretically generate jobs that bring well-being, while politicians, who collect taxes and repress with their police, courts and prisons, wear themselves out, degrade and take the blame.
April 29, 2020.
Precedents in Cuba of “Operation Gideon”
Precedents in Cuba of “Operation Gideon”
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The partial or total crushing of Operation Gideon against Venezuela left a significant number of mercenaries captured, including a self-confessed DEA agent supposedly dedicated to the fight against drug smuggling and abuse.
The DEA, which employs more than 10,000 people to implement its objectives as well as to prosecute money laundering linked to these crimes, also often serves the imperialist purposes of the U.S. government in Latin America and other parts of the world.
This new victory of the Bolivarian Armed Forces and the Venezuelan people has been another defeat for Donald Trump’s neo-colonigializing policy. It has created a focus of violence in various Venezuelan states and in the capital, Caracas. It’s done against a backdrop of systematic campaigns of lies in the hegemonic media aimed at spreading disorder in order to make governance impossible.
The idea is to create a matrix of opinion that shows Venezuela as an ungovernable country by forcing its president, Nicolas Maduro, to ask for support from the OAS and Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), first. These would then approve a humanitarian military intervention in his country.
It is not news that President Trump and his officials have denied Washington’s participation in the defeated maritime incursion. They know that it would be contradictory and unacceptable for the U.S. government to appear linked to mercenaries and drug traffickers. Such a scenario is not compatible with the image of representation that they want to project to internal and external public opinion, much less admit this scandalous failure now.
That is why Mr. Mike Pompeo told the press in his defense that “if we had been behind those actions the result would have been different”, omitting any comparison of such a humiliating American defeat what happened in Vietnam.
Something similar was done by the US ambassador to the UN, Adlai Stevenson, on April 15, 1961, when he denied any link of his country with the bombings of mercenary planes against Cuba.
The Cuban Foreign Minister at the time, Raúl Roa, unmasked this when it became known that the mercenaries in the service of Washington had surrendered to the Cuban militia troops barely 64 hours after the invasion landed at Playa Girón (Bahía de Cochinos, aka Bay of Pigs).
Stevenson made an ethical gesture and recognized that this was the greatest humiliation that his government would have received, an ethical gesture that cannot be expected from Trump or Pompeo.
But now the shot has backfired on Trump, who apparently did not know that drug trafficker and DEA agent Jose Alberto Socorro-Hernandez, aka “Pepero,” had been apprehended in Caracas. There, he confessed to the instructions he received to carry out various violent actions in the state of Miranda that were carried out by DEA-oriented drug gangs and common criminals,
According to Pepero, they were intended to divert the attention of Venezuelan security services to entertain them and to guarantee protection for the landing plan, which took place this past May 3 in the town of Macuto, in the state of La Guaira.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the U.S. government has used the DEA to carry out these actions, as well as to play a façade role in Operation Gideon. If this turned out to be successful, there would be applause, if it went wrong, they would disqualify their agent.
Poreso did not use an American, but rather the Venezuelan drug trafficker-agent Socorro Hernández (aka) Pepero, who is linked to the Colombian cartels operating in Zulia. This is on the border with the Upper Guajiracolombian-Venezuelan region, a territory that was under the control of the powerful leader of the Northern Block of the narco-paramilitaries, Rodrigo Tovar Pupo, extradited by Álvaro Uribe Vélez in 2008, who claims that Uribe betrayed him.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the U.S. government has used the DEA to carry out these actions, as well as to play a role as a front for Operation Gideon. If it went well, they would applaud it; if it went badly, they would disown their agent, and therefore they did not use an American, but a Venezuelan counter-revolutionary drug trafficker.
The installation of 10 U.S. military bases in Colombia, officially agreed to by the government of Barack Obama, is a humiliation to its people and a regional threat. It will take years for the Colombians to eliminate this Yankee military occupation. Guantánamo is an example, illegally occupied and denounced in all international forums whose agreements are not obeyed and/or blatantly violated.
May 13, 2020
This article can be reproduced quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source
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