Manuel E. Yepe 239
Russophobic Madness Affects the USA
Russophobic Madness Affects the USA
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Jack F. Matlock Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, called on his country’s citizens to end the Russian-phobic madness that dominates Congress and many of the media in North America in a recent article in several U.S. media outlets.He cites as a blatant example of this, the New York Times’ leading editorial of February 17 entitled “Stop letting the Russians get away with it, Mr. Trump”, in which the newspaper’s editors repudiate Russia for interfering in the US elections and call for greater sanctions against it in order to protect American democracy’.
“It had never occurred to me that our political system, no doubt dysfunctional, was so weak, underdeveloped and sick that with inept actions on the Internet it could be damaged,” says Matlock. But the New York Times isn’t the only one accused. Most other U.S. print and electronic media have followed suit. “Increasingly, both in Congress and in the media, Russian interference in the 2016 elections has been accepted as a fact.+
Among the Russian actions that have upset the American establishment and are now presented as events that have contributed from Russia to Trump’s rise is the creation by the Russian government of a sophisticated television service (Russia Today or RT) that provides entertainment, information and propaganda to foreign audiences, including that of the United States. The magnitude of its viewers may be several times smaller than that of the big U.S. media, but it has undoubtedly weakened the monopoly on news that the Western media have had and has had a huge reception everywhere, not excluding the United States.
Russian leaders, like most other countries in the world, thought Clinton would be elected, but some senior Russian officials expressed a preference for Trump’s candidacy after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared Hitler to President Putin and urged more active U.S. military intervention abroad, contrasting with Donald Trump, who then spoke out in favor of cooperation with Russia rather than treating it as an enemy, Matlock says.
No one seems to have made even a superficial study of the effect of Russian actions on the vote. There is no evidence that Russian activities have had a tangible impact on the election result, says Matlock.
But the most important fact, obscured by anti-Russian hysteria, is that it was the Americans who elected Trump under the terms set out in the Constitution; the Americans created the Electoral College, which allows a candidate with fewer popular votes to become president, and it is they who manipulate constituencies in favor of a particular political party when it suits the system.
The Supreme Court issued the infamous decision allowing for corporate funding of candidates for political office. The Americans created a Senate that is anything but democratic because it gives disproportionate representation to states with relatively small populations. It was US senators who established undemocratic procedures that allow minorities to block legislation or confirm appointments.
For Matlock, just because the Americans themselves chose their electoral system does not mean that Trump’s choice is good for the country. In his opinion, the 2016 presidential and legislative elections represented an imminent danger to the nation. They have created potential disasters that will severely test the checks and balances built into the Constitution. This is especially true today when both houses of Congress are controlled by the Republican Party, which in turn represents fewer voters than the opposition party.
Matlock claims he did not vote for Trump, but he believes that the allegation that Russian actions interfered with the elections, or damaged the quality of democracy in the country, is ridiculous, pathetic and shameful. “And I should add dangerous because making an enemy of Russia, the other nuclear superpower, is closer to political madness than anything else I can think of.
The former U.S. ambassador concludes his article by calling on his countrymen to desist from the current Russo-phobic madness and to encourage Presidents Trump and Putin to re-establish cooperation on nuclear security, non-proliferation, nuclear material control and nuclear arms reduction, issues that are of vital interest to both the United States and Russia.
June 25, 2018.
Trump’s War Against the Elephants
Trump’s War Against the Elephants
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
One might think that under this title it would be appropriate to read something about the conflicts that affect relations between Trump, the narcissistic president of the United States, and the leadership of the political party that had him as its candidate for that high office.The Republican Party has had the elephant as its electoral symbol since 1887 when a cartoonist drew it in response to the Democratic Party’s electoral symbol, the donkey.
The donkey had emerged in the 1828 elections as a Democratic symbol as an expression of mockery by his opponents of the stubbornness and lack of intelligence attributed to the then-Democratic presidential candidate, Andrew Jackson.
The insult was jocularly assimilated by the leaders of the Democratic Party who adopted the donkey as their electoral emblem, highlighting its capacity for work and its modesty. So the Republican elephant was born in response to the Democratic donkey invoking the mastodons for their memory, docility and submissiveness.
However, Donald Trump is not identified as a historic Republican or any other party member, since his political career has been characterized by repeated changes in party membership since he entered politics.
Trump sought the presidential nomination of the U.S. Reform Party in 2000. It was a populist formation of nationalist economic orientation founded in 1995 and ephemeral in existence. He withdrew before the voting began. He then considered running for high office as a Republican in the 2012 election, but eventually did not.
In June 2015, he officially announced his candidacy for the 2016 elections, and gradually became the favorite among the seventeen candidates in the Republican primaries. In May 2016, the last of his rivals suspended campaigning and in July he was nominated, with Mike Pence as his running mate, at the Republican Convention.
His campaign received unprecedented media coverage and international attention. Many of his statements in media interviews, on social networks and at campaign demonstrations were controversial. No few were considered false, but they were always widely disseminated.
He won the general election on November 8, 2016 against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, and became president on January 20, 2017 at the age of 70, 7 months and 6 days, making him the oldest president to assume this position in his country. He is also the most affluent president, first without military service or political office before being elected and fifth in winning by the votes of the electoral college despite having lost the election by popular vote.
But, to return to the title of this commentary, it is curious that one of the many embarrassing situations Trump has been involved in stems from the accusations made against him for his support of elephant hunting in Africa.
Avaaz, a nongovernmental organization with more than 46 million members who protect nature and the ecosystem, which promotes actions aimed at protecting wildlife, has directly accused President Donald Trump of supporting elephant extermination actions in Africa.
A climax of this ruckus came when the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., mutilated an elephant during a hunt in Africa and appeared in the world’s press in a photo proudly depicting the white hunter with a smoking rifle next to the body of a large elephant. The president came to his aid and ordered the lifting of the ordinance prohibiting such “diversions” because of the danger they posed to this species in danger of extermination.
But this decision provoked justified outrage in the world. While it met the insistent demand of many wealthy American hunters thirsting for the morbid pleasure of killing harmless elephants in Africa in order to bring their ivory tusks to their mansions as trophies for the sake of human dignity and their role on the planet, nature and environmental protection organizations mobilized and succeeded, through massive global protest, in getting the United States to renounce such an offensive practice.
Following the general rejection of the measure, Trump tweeted that he would put this decision on the elephant hunt on “hold” but, earlier this year, in an interview, he assured us that the trophy ban act would not stand for long.
Obviously Avaaz’s protest has continued and the issue of the elephants remains on Trump’s agenda and with it the confrontation between the US president and the Republican party’s electoral symbol that supposedly sponsors him.
June 21, 2018.
Che in Europe a Half Century Later
Che Guevara in Europe a Half Century Later
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Who could separate Che’s image and ideas from the 1968 student explosion, known as the “French May”, which led to a strike of 9 million workers in France, the largest in the history of the workers’ movement, and spread to many other countries in the industrialized world?
The most repeated among the slogans and writings on the walls identified with the student movement that sought to revolutionize French society at the time was Che’s recommendation, synthesized in the phrase “Let’s be realistic: let’s do the impossible”.
The photographic image of Che, with his hair scrambled under his black beret adorned with a star, became famous in the demonstrations against imperialism and the authoritarian and repressive capitalist order, which crowded the streets of Paris, Berlin, Rome and other European cities 50 years ago.
The student protests that took place in many of the great cities of the planet against the U.S. war against Vietnam – which in March 1968 added to its crimes the atrocious My Lai massacre – echoed another of Che’s slogans, that of “creating two, three… many Vietnams”, proclaimed two years earlier from the place where he was already fighting outside Cuba.
For a good part of the intelligentsia and students of the European left, Cuba was an unorthodox, creative and original alternative to the bureaucratic “real socialism” of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact neighbors.
“For an intellectual, it is totally impossible not to be pro-Cuban,” said French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre in an interview. “Fidel started from opposition to Batista and, through the very radicalization of his action, soon discovered that behind Batista was the strength of the army and behind him, the North American power. The logic of radicalization is relentless….” Sartre proclaimed: “Castroism has nothing to give us, except the example of its radicalization.
In January 1968, in front of hundreds of European intellectuals attending the Havana Cultural Congress, Fidel Castro harshly criticized the stagnation of revolutionary ideas in the socialist camp.
“Because there can be nothing more anti-Marxist than dogma, there can be nothing more anti-Marxist than the petrification of ideas. And there are ideas that are even wielded in the name of Marxism that look like real fossils. Marxism needs to develop, to come out of its stalemate, to interpret today’s realities with an objective and scientific sense, to behave as a revolutionary force and not as a pseudo-revolutionary church.
Upon their return to Europe, the intellectuals sent out vibrant testimony of their experiences in Cuba. They had a strong impact on the European leftist youth and extolled the revolutionary advances in Cuba, its cultural pluralism and the emphasis on moral stimuli to the detriment of material incentives, to create the “new man” Che Guevara dreamed.
Anyone can assume that the critical pronouncements so often made by Che Guevara about the need to overcome the immobility of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR and other countries of “real socialism” were not well-received in those nations. It could not have been pleasant in the official circles of the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe for Che to say in Algeria, at the Second Afro-Asian Seminar, that
“The socialist countries have a moral duty to liquidate their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West and to set aside the supposed principle of reciprocal benefits in trade, because they force the underdeveloped countries to sell with the prices that the law of the value and the international relations of unequal exchange impose on the backward countries.”
In his closing speech to the Havana Cultural Congress in January 1968, before some of the intellectuals who would lead the events of May four months later, Fidel Castro said, in homage to his faithful companion in the struggle:
“Who were the ones who raised their name in Europe, who raised and exalted their example, who were the ones who mobilized, painted signs and organized events all over Europe? It was honest and sensitive men and women who had the attitude to assimilate, to understand, to admire, to do justice; to those who wonder why Che Guevara died, to those who are incapable of understanding, and who will never understand, why he died, nor will they ever be able to die as he died, nor be revolutionaries like him.”
June 18, 2018.
New General Assembly President Elected
UN President Elected Without Yankee Endorsement
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Although it is an elective office with more ceremonial than political importance, the circumstances surrounding the person chosen to chair the meetings of the UN’s highest body has resonanated widely in the diplomatic media around the world.
With a vote of 128 countries in favor and 62 against, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa was elected President of the General Assembly of the United Nations for the 73rd session of the organization’s highest world body, from September 2018 until the September 2019.
The Latin American Information Agency (ALAI) based in Ecuador, is dedicated to the dissemination of information and the defence of the right to information. communication, research and training of experts from the United Nations system. and social organizations in the communication processes of America Latin America. ALAI, points out that Espinosa, 53, became the first Latin American women and fourth in the world to occupy this position. in the f the world organization’s 73 year life.
According to ALAI “this election was a setback for the government of the United States which did not approve of the progressive profile of Foreign Minister Espinosa. In the last eleven years, she has held high office during the government of Rafael Correa and was appointed Foreign Minister of the Republic by the President Lenin Moreno. The latter won with a program that contemplated the continuation of the Citizens’ Revolution led by Correa, on whom Moreno later turned his back.”
Espinosa’s election is a recognition of Ecuador’s foreign policy of recent years. She hass been recognized internationally when she was named chair of the G77 plus China (2017). In addition, Ecuador, together with South Africa, chairs a working group in the Human Rights Council, which seeks to to establish a legally binding instrument to regulate the transnational corporations, among other laudable purposes.
Washington was pulling its strings to block theEcuadorian’s candidacy. It openly supported the Honduran Mary Elizabeth Flores Flake, daughter of ex-president of the President Carlos Flores Facussé, who was trained United States universities.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley met with President Juan Orlando Hernandez for this purpose when he visited Honduras in February of this year to thank Honduras for its vote in favor of the resolution recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel without regard to Palestine.
By the way, this Washington-driven decision was one of the most important reasons that contributed to Flores’s defeat in the election for the United Nations General Assembly presidency.
The choice of Espinosa is also – admits ALAI – a setback. for the Ecuadorian right-wing represented by the Creando Opportunities (CREO) and Social Christian (PSC) parties that have always been ready to follow American policy. In the last few weeks, with the assistance of the major private media and diplomats from the right, a campaign was launched that had never been seen before because of its intensity against Foreign Minister Espinosa. In the media and social networks they launched hateful accusations in which there is they spared no epithets against Espinosa, such as “castrochavista”, “Sandinista,” etc.
In order to prejudice Espinosa’s candidacy at the United Nations, CREO and the PSC tried unsuccessfully to prosecute politically in the National Assembly to Espinosa for “failure to comply with the functions of her office.”
“Sensitive as he is to media pressure, President Lenin Moreno soon winked at the campaign. In his own style and with a little tap under Espinosa, Moreno broke away from the decision to grant Ecuadorian citizenship to Julian Assange, a refugee who had been given asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in the United Kingdom. This was one of the most important themes of the alleged political trial of Espinosa as was the media campaign against her.”
María Fernanda Espinosa dedicated her election “to all the women of the world who today are involved in politics, who are facing attacks by political and media circles marked by machismo and discrimination”, as the Ecuadorian diplomat pointed out in her speech at the United Nations after her election.
She said one of her biggest challenges will be to accompany implementation of reforms to the United Nations system. “We have the challenge of build a stronger and more efficient organization.
Strengthening multilateralism is not an option, it is an obligation. It is urgent that the United Nations show a capacity to respond to the needs of the United Nations global challenges, and for the organization to move closer to people, Espinosa said.
June 11, 2018.
Cultural Civil War in the U.S.A.
Cultural Civil War in the USA
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“America is at war with itself. It is actually a function of the nation’s heritage, the past that challenges specific aspects of a modern present. This gives rise to a flow of traditions. Racism, a pseudo-border mentality and religious fundamentalism persist at the present time. These are the traditions that characterized the first half of the nation’s history, and while some of them may have retreated into latency in the last fifty years, they are now back with us. As a result, Americans are in the midst of an ongoing culture war that in many ways is as old as the nation itself.”
The paragraph above is the opening of an article published in the latest issue of the U.S. online weekly CounterPunch by Lawrence Davidson, a leading scholar who, born in a secular Jewish home in Philadelphia, was one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the war against Vietnam.
In his essay, Davidson states that a racist culture took shape in American life before the founding of the United States. This culture was particularly rooted in the colonies/states of the South, where slavery became not only a fundamental economic institution, but also an institution that projected the image that the South had of itself. In the North, a racist culture was also widespread and society was segregated, but the difference was that the labour system in the North was not based on slavery.
In the South, this deep-rooted culture of racism was briefly interrupted when, after the Civil War, there was a brief period of Reconstruction (1865-1877) during which the northern military occupation suppressed most racist laws. The main reason for this was political and not social. Under the Northern occupation regime, black men were recognized as citizens and could vote. This led to support for Abraham Lincoln’s party and allowed abolitionist Republicans to retain control of Congress. Reconstruction only lasted as long as the abolitionist faction dominated. It ended in 1877.
The US military was withdrawn from the southern states. Almost immediately there was a region-wide reversion to a form of race relations in which the oppression of slavery was replaced by “Jim Crow” laws that legitimized segregation and discrimination against black people.
This situation lasted for nearly another hundred years, until in the 1960s, when a massive civil disobedience movement known as the Civil Rights Movement finally succeeded in outlawing racist practices within the public sphere in both the South and the North.
Davidson stresses that the changes were limited to the public sphere because the private sphere was left to each person’s individual will. Nothing was done to change racist perceptions and behavior within the private sphere. There was not even any effort to force the teaching of acceptance in public schools in order to better erode private racist perceptions.
Racism is an important issue in the nation’s current civil cultural war, but it is not the only one. Another is the fight for firearms laws, which are currently inadequate to ensure public safety.
The myth of the robust and armed individual is in fact a product of the television and film distortion of the history of the “old West”.
Davidson refers to the survival of nineteenth-century Christian fundamentalism, which, while not including all Christians in the country, encompasses millions of believers who still adhere to the “faith of their fathers” in a way that fosters social inequality and undermines the secular nature of the state. It is also a faith riddled with racial and gender intolerance, full of shameful hypocrisy and self-righteous self-centeredness.
The Christian right, along with gun rights enthusiasts and those who privately support a diffuse stream of racist traditionalism, believe that modern movements for equal rights, as well as the demand for security and protection communities through law and regulation, are threats to genuine American culture because they threaten the traditions of “freedom” that make their world ideologically enjoyable.
Against this backdrop, it is clear what the president means when he calls for “making America great again”.
June 7, 2018.
Where Will US Domestic Politics Go?
Where Will US Domestic Politics Go?
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The surprising performance of veteran Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential elections and the disappointing performance at the top post by the unpredictable Donald Trump have stimulated a very large part of the US public – especially (but not only) Democratic Party supporters – to believe that the United States needs a Sanders and a new party.
Many of those who reason in this way believe that the old Vermont politician should take up the challenge to defeat Trump in 2020, with or without the backing of the machinery of the historic “donkey” party. Others feel that the energy of a younger leader who would take up the ideological banner of the old Sanders, with the support of a new party with or without Bernie, should be available.
These and many other variations have in common the assumption that the current President Donald Trump has already dug the grave of the Republican party and his own with his performance in the first two years of his catastrophic term.
According to the most credible polls, about 60% of U.S. voters in general, and nearly 80% of those who are not affiliated with either of the two major parties, are in favor of the emergence of a new party of majorities.
Writing in the Huffington Post, September 27 of last year, writer and journalist Gail Mellor quoted Sanders’ words calling for “the unity of the vast majority of Americans to survive together, because if we start divided, we will not succeed”. However, she recalls that at least four times in the last two years, when she has been ready to start up a new progressive party, it has been Bernie himself who has blocked it.
According to Mellor, Sanders has been working to unify the deeply-divided and corrupt Democratic party – to which he himself does not belong – but, in practice, his position has not contributed to the rise of a new progressive political force with the potential to come to the forefront of the country’s leadership. This is because he has insisted on the survival of the Democratic Party with a different set of policies as a prerequisite.
The main support Bernie Sanders had when he aspired to the White House came from “Generation Y,” also called “the millennials,” names demographers and researchers give to people born between 1980 and the early years of the new 21st century, who represent 28% of United States voters today.
He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 because young progressives from that party dragged him into an effort to clean up U.S. politics, end ongoing wars, restore social safety nets and confront climate change. They had not been able to recruit someone at the national level of the Democratic or Republican parties to lead the fight for this agenda who was not receiving money from global corporations.
Sanders, an independent (non-partisan), had held state and federal office without party or corporate backing for 42 years. Despite being a convincing, passionate and well-informed politician, he was a stranger at the national level.
It was the millennials of the Democratic Party and its environment, the supporters of the country’s withdrawal from imperialist activity, of a policy of cultural and political change, and of the reorientation toward social democracy, who made him a national public figure and led him to compete for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the White House.
Although formally independent, Bernie acted as a Democrat because he was aware that the two dominant parties of the system had closed access to the Presidency of the nation to anyone who did not do so through them. The Democrats welcomed Sanders as their candidate because he gave the party’s primary campaign an illusion of competition that would help its already elected candidate to legitimize herself.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) calculated that Hillary Clinton would easily beat Trump because she had a huge amount of corporate money, while Sanders, with the support of young progressives, was able to gather, in a short time, large crowds for Hillary Clinton campaign rallies.
It seems obvious that Sanders dreams of the possibility of taking the Democratic Party over, at the head of a vigorous minority movement. This would not be an easy thing to achieve but there remains the alternative, feared by the neoliberals of the party, of going on to the formation of a new independent progressive party.
June 4, 2018.
Support for Gun Control on the Rise
A Mass Killing Filled the Glass. Now it Must Be Emptied
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The shooting that broke out in mid-March at the Parkland student complex in the state of Florida, which killed 17 students and teachers, was greeted in the United States with a sense of fatalism that that the public was destined to become familiar with. While still howling ambulances with their cargo of bodies and survivors in the direction of the hospitals, the authorities of the country, the state and those of the center itself began to make clear their prayers and laments, expressing their deep regret and anguish for what had happened.
A few voices rose to condemn the facts without venturing to blame anyone or anything for the horrible crime. Paul Ryan, a Republican leader in the U.S. Congress and second in the line of presidential succession (after the vice president), warned against unthinking, overly sentimental reactions.
But, surprisingly, something strange happened: the students of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Pre-University in a gathering that they called to that effect, came out against official inaction.
“Every single person here today, all these people, must have been grieving in their homes. But, on the contrary, we are here today united, because if all our government and our president can do is let us know their sorrow and their prayers, we think it is time for the victims to be the motivation for the changes we need to see,” said student Emma Gonzalez in tears and sobs on behalf of everyone.
“To the politicians who remain in their golden seats in the House and Senate, funded by the National Rifle Association (NRA) telling us that nothing could be done to prevent that we call B.S.,” the student leader said.
The broadcast of her speech was cut off, but that last sentence of Emma’s words became the slogan calling for gun control that would lead the plans for an upcoming national student strike and march on Washington.
A substantial article by George Zornick, editor of The Nation, argues that the power of the NRA as a protective shield for the freedom to buy and sell arms in the United States is rapidly being demystified.
As proof, Zornick says that last November in Virginia, the NRA backed Ed Gillespie as a Republican candidate for governor and he was widely defeated. It supported 13 candidates competing fiercely for seats in the state House of Representatives and 12 of them failed, while the other won by a narrow margin.
At the Virginia state level, gun control advocates have been able to obtain the passage of resolutions and measures that have not been passed by the state legislature, although it should be noted that this occurred when the movement was not as strong as it was after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 when the largest pro-arms control groups were formed.
It should also be noted that Democratic politicians, until recently, never spoke out against gun control for fear of the NRA’s wealthy congressional lobby.
“For the characteristics of our ossified political system, and especially with Trump in the White House thanking the NRA for the $30 million it donated to his campaign, the United States will never pass gun control legislation. But while waiting for the time to elect a new congress and a new president, something can be done considering that arms manufacturers value above all other things, even more than human life: money,” Zornick says.
The journalist from The Nation calls on activists to help deal a decisive blow to these traffickers by withdrawing financial or commercial support from their companies until the arms industry becomes an unviable business. In 2013, the California State Teachers’ Retirement Fund voted to divest itself of millions of dollars in gun industry investments.. The same was done in 2016 by the New York City Public Employees Pension Fund, which also withdrew funds from other large sporting goods stores that deal in arms.
Today, the arms giants are full of debt and face a decline in consumer demand. Centers such as GoodbyeGunStocks.com have been set up to inform about stockholding entities that trade in arms to guide activists eager to boycott those who do so.
The relentless shootings that kill innocents have filled the cup of resistance of the American citizenry. Its assimilation capacity is running out and if that giant rises it would not be unusual for the arms business to be forced to start a countdown sooner rather than later in the United States and around the world.
May 31, 2018.
Independence Sentiment Rising in California
Independence Sentiment Rising in California
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In the face of the madness (or idiocy) of the current President of the United States and the obscure perspectives offered to the citizens by his eventual successors, it is worth remembering that secession is not only a matter of American history, but is an extremely topical sociological and political issue.
Two epic cinematic adventures: “Gone With the Wind”, filmed in 1938 and “Cold Mountain”, a successful novel brought to the big screen in 2003, took wars of secession to shape their plots and rivalries, as well as to denounce dreadful actions on both sides in rejecting the madness of a possible new fratricidal war in the United States.
Technically, if California, which is the richest state in the United States, were to become independent, it would have to overcome two filters: that of the California Constitution itself and that of the U.S. Constitution.
California’s independence movement has existed legally since 2014 and has as its main exponent in an organization called Yes California. It is not a political party and has no elected officials, but it is already nicknamed Calexit (after Brexit in Britain) and has over 25% of the working population in support.
For the time being. Calexit does not claim to be the heir to the American settlers who, after rising on June 14, 1846 against the Mexican authorities, proclaimed an ephemeral independent Republic of California. Later they reluctantly renounced it in exchange for accepting annexation to the United States.
For this reason, the idea that one day the independentistas will be Latrino Californians is not to be dismissed. Neither their their motivation for their emergence will be the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe, by which the United States took away from Mexico -among other territories- that of present-day California, where they imposed the English language.
California’s economic legitimacy as an autonomous nation would be based on the fact that it now pays about $100 billion more than it receives from federal funding, which makes its economic argument appear as a human rights issue. This is because “the Universal Declaration on human rights states in its Article 20 that no one can be forced to belong to an association” and its “right to self-determination” will always take priority over US [federal] law.
Therefore, there would be no need for a constitutional amendment to separate from the United States and integrate it into the international community, in which it would undoubtedly need to be recognized immediately.
In 2016, Red Guard, a self-proclaimed Communist group from Austin, Texas, caused a stir after taking the lead in a demonstration of the Black Lives Matter movement with red flags and guns. It announced its decision to fight against the spread of fascism in the United States.
The confrontation in the streets did not reach violent levels, but it was transferred to the social networks as a reflection of the escalation of social tensions that the country was experiencing. Washington has continued to move around the world stimulating secessionist sentiments as part of an imperialist scheme destined to overthrow foreign governments that were not subordinated to its foreign policy.
However, the United States itself was beginning to exalt similar aspirations to the exercise of sovereignty on the part of those who were the first settlers and true owners of the territory that today form a large part of the states that make up the United States.
The “Yes, California” independence movement, took it’s first legal steps November 21, 2017 towards the secession of California from the United States when presented to the state Attorney General a proposal to call a referendum aimed at this objective.
The separatist idea must gather enough preliminary support in a vote to be held in November 2018. For the referendum to be held, the Yes, California’ movement must collect half a million signatures to place the initiative on the ballot.
If the initiative succeeds because of the support for Calexit, Californians will go to the polls in the spring of 2019 for a historic vote that would decide whether or not California should leave the Union. The plebiscite would be based on article two of the state constitution, which indicates how citizens of the territory can decide whether they belong to the United States.
When, in January 2008, then-President George W. Bush declared himself jubilant because “the Kosovars are now independent” and recalled that this was “something that I have defended together with my government”, several of his allies warned the United States of the danger that this statement represented for the international community, the Security Council, the European Union and the territorial integrity of the United States of America itself.
May 29, 2018.
Between Trump and the Deep State
Between Trump and the Deep State
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In the political lexicon of the United States, since the presidency of Donald Trump, the mysterious concept of a “Deep State” has become fashionable. It’s understood as a kind of mystical adversary that the president’s cabinet must face.
The term has been used to refer to an allegedly secretly operating network of public officials working to prevent Trump from pursuing his policies. The expression is also used to allude to a de facto power of public employees whose stay in office is beyond the control of the president.
But its definition varies according to who uses it. It generally implies the existence of a secret and invisible nebula that operates from the bowels of government and that would be responsible for leaks of sensitive information from public offices, including those of intelligence and those of advisers and analysts directly subordinate to the President.
“The deep state has to stop with its shit,” Roger Stone, Trump’s old political adviser, told The New Yorker magazine on the eve of the president’s inauguration January 20.
He was referring to information published by The New York Times, citing U.S. officials, indicating that the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies were investigating Stone and other Trump collaborators for alleged links to Russia.
Stone denied having had such links, and blamed the “deep state” for the information disclosed.
Different media supporting the government have handled the concept, especially after it was revealed that the Micheal Flynn, Trump’s then- National Security Adviser, had withheld information about his contacts with Russia, which, according to the press, led to his having to resign shortly after taking office.
“The deep state never sleeps. It’s always doing something to undermine Trump’s administration,” said an article on Breitbart News, a right-wing Web site whose founder and former executive, Stephen Bannon, a controversial Trump trustee who was repeatedly accused of anti-Semitism and racism and who served as the White House’s chief strategist.
“The Deep State is here,” Ed Rogers, a Republican columnist in his Washington Post column, wrote a week earlier. “It is a worrying phenomenon to have the anti-Trump organizations and Democratic officials aligned conspiring to work actively against the government in office,” he said.
However, there is no shortage of analysts who reject the idea that in the US there can be a “deep state” acting in the shadows. “The term comes from a kind of conspiracy theory that does not capture what is a normal tension between bureaucrats who have been running political programs for years and who may want to change things themselves,” says Gordon Adams on BBC World.
According to many analysts, the “Deep State” actions that overwhelm Trump derive from the basic contradiction between the federal government and the invisible power of the military and corporations defined by former President Dwight Eisenhower as the Military-Industrial Complex. This tension is manifested, for the time being, as a confrontation between the White House and the intelligence community, in which the latter acts, by definition, in a reserved manner.
When he was Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon defined the government’s goal as the deconstruction of the administrative state, which he believed had been set up by the political left to defend its interests through bureaucratic regulations that must now be corrected.
“If you look at the cabinet appointments, you’ll see that they were made with a goal of deconstructing the administrative state,” Bannon said in a meeting with conservative politicians.
Proof of this is that many people chosen for Trump’s Cabinet have had conflicting positions with those traditionally assigned to the departments for which they were appointed.
For example, for the Environmental Protection Pgency, he chose someone with interests linked to the fossil fuel industry who doubts the existence of climate change. As Education Secretary, he selected a millionaire who is an enemy of public education and public schools. For the Health Department, he chose a doctor who believes that the problem is that “there is too much government involvement in health care.
There are those who appreciate that this conflict of interest between senior government officials and civil service officials supports the existence of a “deep state” operating against Trump as an unpredictable, ignorant person, one incapable of fulfilling the mandate of the dominant forces of the system… much less the mandate of the citizenry.
May 25, 2018.
The US Will Have to Ask for Forgiveness
The United States Will Have to Ask for Forgiveness
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution in late July 2008 apologizing to African Americans for the years of slavery they have suffered. This was the recognition by the U.S. House of Representatives of the injustice and inhumanity of the slave system and “Jim Crow”, as the period of intense racial discrimination between 1865, when slavery was officially abolished and the 1960s, was known.
At that time, the US political establishment was forced to take action against nefarious racial discrimination though, in some states more and in others less, it kept black citizens legally segregated from white people and limited their civil liberties, even denying them the right to vote. This legal segregation was more inhumane and violent in the southern states than in the northern United States.
The name “Jim Crow” applied to that shameful period in American history was that of a comedian and singer named Rice, who composed and performed the song “Jump, Jim Crow” in 1828, about a black servant who danced while brushing his master’s horse. It is not clear why the term “Jim Crow” began to be used to refer to any entity that practiced racial segregation: “Jim Crow laws”, “Jim Crow schools”, “Jim Crow buses”, etc.
There were workplaces, universities, taxis, trains, buses, boats, canteens, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, health services, water fountains, prisons, nursing homes, barbershops, public parks, sports fields, circuses, fairs, theatres, cinemas, concert or party halls, libraries, beaches, swimming pools, waiting rooms, telephone booths, workshops, lifts, brothels, lines, entrances to and exits from buildings. Everything could be ascribed to this form of US form of apartheid.
Segregation applied to marriage, some professions, neighborhoods, churches and cemeteries. In some cities Jim Crow martial law was imposed and blacks could not go out on the street after a certain time of night. In the Jim Crow courts, whites swore with one hand on a Bible and blacks swore on a different copy of it.
Black people were excluded from most trade unions. They were not admitted to Jim Crow sororities, clubs and societies. Board games and sports involving physical contact between blacks and whites, including combat games such as boxing, were prohibited unless the opponent was a foreigner.
Add to this ignominious situation the violence with which the Ku Klux Klan, members of the John Birch Society, the White Citizens’ Council and other elements of the American extreme-right were acting. It was a real white terrorist system!
In the face of such outrage, the struggle of Black Americans for their civil rights became increasingly intense. It generated such great personalities as Malcolm X and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., as well as hundreds of martyrs, remembered or anonymous, from Black Power organizations and others who, in the 1960s, gave birth to a situation that seemed to be a precursor to a revolution.
Although the fear of reprisals by the empire and its control of the media limited the international denunciation of these abuses and global solidarity, the triumph of the revolution in Cuba, the rise of anti-imperialism and the ideas of social justice in Latin America encouraged the just domestic struggle of Black people.
This coincided with the need for the recruitment of black soldiers for the asymmetrical imperialist war against Vietnam and all this forced the establishment to bury the Jim Crow.
For the sake of national security, the empire made major reformist “concessions” in race relations in a country where the law was white, white policemen, white judges, white mayors. And on film and TV screens, actors and actresses were white, and blacks were always represented in submissive and complacent attitudes.
Prior to this request for an apology from the House of Representatives, the other branch of Congress, the Senate, passed another resolution in April 2008 apologizing for “the many cases of violence, abuse and neglect” suffered by Native Americans. The Senate also apologized in 1993 for the “illegal overthrow” of the Kingdom of Hawaii a hundred years earlier.
Yet humanity is still waiting for the U.S. to apologize and compensate so many nations on every continent whose democratic existence the U.S. has assaulted since it became an imperialist power in the early 20th century. And to do so with the promise to never again to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations, as well as to respect the human rights of their own citizens of other ethnicities and ways of thinking.
May 17, 2018.
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