Manuel E. Yepe 239
US Must Ask Forgiveness
The U.S. Must 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 in there.
At that time, the establishment was forced to take action against the nefarious racial discrimination system but, in some states more and in others less, it kept black citizens legally segregated from white people and limited their civil rights, even without 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 trams”. 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, elevators, brothels, lines or queues, entrances and exits of buildings. Everything could be assimilated into to this U.S. 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 hour at night. In the Jim Crow courts, whites swore with one hand on a Bible and blacks swore on a different copy of the same book..
Black people were excluded from the 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’ Councils and other elements of the American extreme right were acting. A real white terrorist system!
In the face of such outrages, the struggle of black Americans for their civil rights became increasingly intense. It generated such great leaders as Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as hundreds of martyrs, remembered or forgotten, from Black Power organizations and others who, in the 1960s, gave birth to a situation that appeared to be a precursor to a revolution.
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 system.
For the sake of national security, the empire made major reformist “concessions” in race relations in a country where the law was white, and there were white policemen, white judges, white mayors, and white actors and actresses on film and TV screens. Blacks were nearly always represented in submissive and complacent attitudes.
Prior to the 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 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.
The Dark History of the Koch Brothers
The Dark History of the Koch Brothers
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In 2010, when Mike Pompeo arrived in Congress in 2010, he was called “the Koch Congressman” because the amount of the Koch Brothers’ industrial conglomerate’s contribution to his election campaign. Now, when he was approved by Congress as Secretary of State, several media outlets considered that the Koch Brothers finally got their own Secretary of State.
When talking to anyone form the US active in any party about some measure or projection of domestic or foreign policy in his or her country, it is inevitable that the influence that “the Koch brothers” have, or may have, on it is mentioned in one way or another.
Following his confirmation as the new Secretary of State, most of the US media have identified Mike Pompeo as “Koch’s Congressman” or “the Koch brothers’ man”. But outside the U.S. borders, brothers David and Charles Koch are not as well known.
Although they are not among the nation’s leading authorities, there are fundamental reasons for this. Together, they make up the third largest fortune in the country (only Bill Gates and Warren Buffet outnumber them). The two brothers have an annual turnover of more than $100 billion. Their industrial conglomerate is the second largest in the country, behind only the Cargill group. In 2010, it was named the 10th most polluting in the United States by the Political Economic Research Institute of Massachusetts.
Their influence on politics can be calculated by the fact that they have injected around $200 million into the most ultraconservative causes in the last decade and this hardly transcends the media.
The Big Brothers, as they are popularly known, deny their direct link to the Tea Party. They seek to remain invisible from their headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, deep in the heart of the United States. From there, the Kochs have extended the oil empire inherited from their father, Fred, by devising ways of influencing American politics without being noticed too much, through a network of small groups and foundations they have created.
Although not proclaimed a success on its own, the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, created by David Koch in 2004, was the real organizer of the Tea Party revolt. One of its phantasmagorical projects, United Patients Now, organized more than 300 “popular” protests against the Obamacare health reform and another 80 to boycott its climate protection laws.
The real forerunner of the Koch Brothers phenomenon was his father, Fred Koch, who half a century ago warned of the risks of “a communist president.” Also a critic of the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and denounced “the infiltration of communists” into the Democratic and Republican parties. His children inherited, in addition to their fortune, his libertarian creed.
Charles, 74, was always the most discreet. David Koch, 70, made an unfortunate foray into politics in 1980, competing with Ronald Reagan, whom he saw as a danger. David ran as a vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party having been nominated by Ed Clark, its presidential candidate. Among his “libertarian” electoral promises were the suppression of the FBI and the CIA, the elimination of Social Security and Minimum Wages, total deregulation and a drastic reduction in taxes. The government would be reduced to “protecting individual rights”. They got 1% of the vote.
Four years later, as Reagan took over part of his ideology, David Koch officially became a Republican and dragged his brother down the same path.
The youngest of the Kochs suffered a second enlightenment in the 1990s, when he miraculously survived a plane crash. He reinvented himself as a philanthropist for the American Ballet Theater and created the group Citizens for a Sound Economy to continue to defend his multi-million dollar privileges from the shadows.
He then created Americans for Prosperity (AFP), defined as an organization of “grassroots leaders for limited government and the free market.” He could not openly support candidates, but he invested $45 million to support conservative causes in the November 2, 2016 elections.
According to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer, on the first anniversary of Obama’s presidency, billionaire David Koch stealthily took the lead in the “people’s revolution” by announcing that “When we created Americans for Prosperity (AFP), we had in mind a mass movement, state-by-state, with hundreds of thousands of Americans fighting for the economic freedoms that made this nation the most prosperous in history….
May 15, 2018.
Putin Unmasks Anti-Russia Manipulation
Putin Unmasks Anti-Russia Manipulation
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
What would Russia have gained from the murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripel and his daughter Yulia? This is the question asked by Argentine-Canadian international information analyst Alberto Rabilotta. He praises the equanimity and impeccable realism that Russian President Vladimir Putin has demonstrated to show the falsity of the accusations without aggravating tensions that are the goal of the United States and its allies in this and similar conflicts.
The poisoning of the former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain on 4 March occurred when the fable of “Russiagate”, with which Putin allegedly manipulated the US elections in the name of Trump’s victory, was beginning to fall apart.
Anyone who knows about the behavior of the rulers and intelligence services of London and Washington, throughout history, and especially in recent times, knows that there is very good reason to believe that what happened to Skripal and his daughter happened when British Channel 4 journalists were about to reveal that the manipulation of the election in the United States and the Brexit referendum in Great Britain had been the work of the British company Cambridge Analytica (CA), which has offices in London, New York and Washington and which used data from Facebook.
Cambridge Analytica is an “offshoot” of the Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), a company that has manipulated elections in numerous countries – including some in Latin America. This necessarily implies that it had strong links in the political world related to Washington and their structures of government and intelligence. Further proof of this is the fact that one of its main shareholders is the American billionaire Robert Mercer who has financed, among other reactionary campaigns, including that of a number of Republicans, including Donald Trump.
On March 19, TV Channel 4 in Great Britain broadcast a report on CA made with recordings -some of them secretly made- between the end of 2017 and January 2018, in which executives and collaborators of CA exposed the type of manipulation that this firm used in the Brexit referendum in Great Britain and in the United States elections that gave the victory to Donald Trump. On the basis of these, major propaganda campaigns were carried out to show that these events had been manipulated by Moscow.
Interestingly, before Channel 4 broadcast its report, CA founder and director Alexander Nix resigned. This shows he knew what was about to be revealed and what their consequences for the firm and its owners would be. Rabilotta notes that on December 15, 2017, the Wall Street Journal had written that Robert Mueller, special advisor to the Justice Department, had asked CA to submit documents from its investigation “on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.” From this it’s evident that even then the U.S. intelligence services were aware of CA’s role in that electoral process.
Moreover, The Times of Israel revealed that CA worked with Israeli companies and that, in addition to using Facebook data, it carried out classic blackmail operations with honey traps, which are Ukrainian prostitutes who specialize in recording situations that encourage blackmail, using former British and Israeli spies.
With the information available and beginning to emerge, it is clear that this entire operation, as well as those who participated in it and those who benefited from it, were known to the US intelligence services and their allies well before 19 March, the date when British Channel 4 broadcast its report. Thus, long before March 19 and the fateful March 4 – the poisoning of Skripel and his daughter – the key figures in London and Washington knew that Russiagate at the Capitol in Washington was destined to collapse permanently and disastrously. Not only that, but that the political and diplomatic cost of that campaign against Russia, forged from the beginning by millionaires, politicians and companies from the United States and Great Britain, would have to be borne, Rabilotta reiterates.
With the information available and beginning to come to light, it is clear that this whole operation, as well as those who participated in it and benefited from it, were known to the US intelligence services and their allies, long before March 19, when British Channel 4 broadcast its report.
Mr Rabilotta recalls that, on March 1, President Putin announced Russia’s progress on strategic arms and Syria launched an offensive to liberate strategic areas near Damascus controlled by financed and armed terrorist forces financed and armed by imperialism and its allies, who were preparing an operation using chemical weapons that would be blamed on the Syrian government to justify military intervention by the US and its allies.
May 7, 2018.
Fake News as Washington’s Weapons
Fake News as Washington’s Weapons
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Let no one think that using falsehoods as a pivot for the projection and execution of U.S. foreign policy is an innovation or a novel contribution by Donald Trump. This has been a tradition in Washington’s foreign policy since the explosion of the Spanish battleship Maine in 1898 in Havana, which led to the U.S. declaring war on the Spanishmonarchy and whose aftermath was the rise of U.S. imperialism.
In 1997, the release of the feature film WAG THE DOG, a free adaptation of Larry Beinhart’s novel “American Hero”, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro and directed by Barry Levinson, was very successful in the United States.
The film is about a spin doctor and a film producer who are inventing a war to distract voters’ attention from a sex scandal that would hamper the re-election of the President of the United States. The film was released a month before the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory by the Clinton administration and generated numerous comparisons of reality with the film.
On tape, the President is caught falling in love with a young minor in the Oval Office two months before the election. The spin doctor decides to draw the public’s attention with a fictitious war against Albania in order to draw its media attention to this conflict by diverting it from the White House.
The deception initially takes effect by moving the election statistics in favor of the President. But then this clashes with the interests of the CIA, which favors the opposition candidate. All this then is complicated by a succession of dirt and perversions typical of American politics.
Fake news has become a “fourth generation” weapon. Inserted into the new information technology scenarios, it surpasses them widely in scope and validity, given that the scenario in which it is poured exponentially surpasses the level of dissemination of content through the computer media of social networks, where the false becomes true.
An example of recent false news used as weapons of war has been the case of acoustic attacks against U.S. embassy officials in Cuba.
This fake news was denied in many ways, including by an investigation conducted at the University of Michigan by researcher Kevin Fu. He determined that the alleged attacks “were caused by interference between two ultrasound sources very close to those affected: one, a listening and spying device; the other, an ultrasonic blocker of the device. In other words, it was the very espionage activities that the Americans carried out inside their embassy that caused the acoustic attacks that affected their own diplomatic officials.
A large number of previous verifications had confirmed the fallacy, but the aim of this fake news was not to rectify something, but to provoke tension and break ties between Washington and Havana in line with the political objectives of the Trump regime.
Another recent case was that of the poisoning in England of the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. The Russian government was automatically accused, allegedly the only producer of a chemical known as Novichok, which – it became known – is not only produced by Russian laboratories, but can be produced in several British laboratories. This showd that the treacherous accusation sought to discredit the Kremlin.
Worse still, there has been the alleged chemical attack by Syria on the city of Douma, recently liberated by the Syrian Arab Army from occupation by terrorist forces supported by the United States. A team of journalists from the U.S.-based One America News Network (OAN)-which is a purely conservative source of guidance and audience and supports Donald Trump-visited Douma. They publicly stated that it had found no evidence of the chemical attack which allegedly took place on April 7, making a mockery of its President.
The self-esteem of the US superpower’s foreign policy must be in a very bad way when it has to resort over and over again to falsehoods and manipulations to try to keep the idea of the invincibility of the US empire in the collective imagination.
May 3, 2018.
Peace in Korea Not an Impossible Dream
Peace in Korea Not an Impossible Dream
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Calls for talks made by China and Russia, as well as the worldwide outcry for them, outweighed U.S. threats of war and got the two Koreas to sit down and speak and dialogue to prevailed over the cannons, at least for the moment..
Trump’s aggressiveness had to give in to reason, and what seemed less likely to be achieved on the Korean peninsula was dialogue for the sake of concord, peace and national reunification.
Objectively, because of what has happened so far, the only absolute loser for this universal achievement has been the US imperialist foreign policy. It sees its role as a guarantor of South Korea’s security threatened by a hypothetical danger of absorption by Democratic and Popular Korea, the US pretext for its control strategy in that region of Asia.
What is happening on the Korean peninsula today is the result of Washington’s policy of intimidation and threats of violence against Pyongyang, which has intensified considerably since Trump came to power. However, because of the wonders of imperialist propaganda, the media in the U.S. and the many media outlets around the world that are governed by the enormous financial resources that the world’s top power devotes to this, US pressure is presented as the source of the moves toward dialogue on the peninsula.,
It is true that this policy was not invented by the current president, just as it was not he who invented U.S. imperialism, but it is demonstrable that every time a government has responded with concessions to U.S. intimidation, the threats have materialized with the exercise of greater violence. In the Middle East, the centre of Europe and Latin America provides ample evidence.
If the hopes for peace on the Korean peninsula were to be attributed to a positive foreign influence, this could only be credited to the insistence with which Beijing and Moscow have called for a respectful inter-Korean dialogue for a satisfactory solution.
But it is clear that Pyongyang enjoys the national independence that is essential for the achievement of such dialogue, and Seoul, on the other hand, lacks such freedom because of its enormous political and military dependence on the United States.
The extensive and intense US military presence in the south of the Korean peninsula has always been the main obstacle to the efforts for the reunification of the Korean homeland.
The North has never given in to Washington’s demands, and the South has always lacked the necessary autonomy to assert its interests as a formally independent nation, due to the United States’ control over its defenses and war resources.
It was this circumstantial reality that led Pyongyang to propose a development totally independent of its national defence. These include nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, productions monopolized by the highly developed nations, in which North Korea made autonomous inroads through enormous sacrifices for its objectives of expanding the material well-being of its people.
Credit goes to South Korean President Moon Jae-in who, since coming to power last May, has sought to bring the North Korean government closer to the people through dialogue and his insistence that Pyongyang participate in the Winter Games was part of that effort. It is recalled that in September 2017 President Donald Trump offended Moon, in his usual derogatory remarks, by calling him a beggar’, for his insistence on dialogue with North Korea.
Many endeavors will have contributed to the achievement of the admirable events announced today in Korea. At the same time, it must be recognized that the wisdom with which the Korean communists have defended the independence of their homeland has been decisive for the triumph of the Asian nation. It shows that the only way to curb the imperialists’ appetites in the contemporary world is by confronting all risks and not by making concessions.
It is hoped that, in the agreed-upon talks, the US President will seek to advance arguments to safeguard its atomic monopoly by calling for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons as a principle for any agreement. For his part, North Korean Kim will advocate general and total denuclearization as the only form of truly democratic disarmament.
If it succeeds in achieving this goal, the much-vaunted Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will have laid the foundations for an education that the heroic Argentine and Cuban guerrilla fighter Ernesto Che Guevara has always advocated: “Imperialism cannot be granted even a little bit like this, nothing”.
April 30, 2018.
Washington’s Attack on Syria
Washington’s Attack on Syria Was a Mockery of the World
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
An American friend of mine believes that when Donald Trump’s presidency ends – no matter how it ends – the best account will have to be in a comic strip book that would be the most hilarious in American history.
However, the disastrous effects in terms of deaths and misfortunes that the madness of this clown is leaving on people, peoples and nations throughout the world are not compatible with a festive approach to the suffering caused by this grotesque character and his gang of hawks.
In recent days, the US armed forces have made a huge fool of themselves in the name of satisfying the will of their mad president. In the process, they have made their counterparts in France and the United Kingdom look like foolish satellites.
On the night of 13 April, this disparate coalition of powers launched an attack on Syria. “I ordered the U.S. Armed Forces to launch precision attacks on targets associated with the chemical weapons capabilities of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad,” Trump. He wasn’t able to justify the aggression with the testimony of the U.N. experts charged with overseeing the prohibition of the use of chemical weapons. A few hours after the attack, they were to rule on the nature of the alleged attack by the Syrian government against its opponents.
The arrival of these specialists was scheduled for April 14, but the U.S. government decided to act earlier, showing its fear of the verdict of these specialists. Nearly a hundred Republican and Democratic congressmen had sent a message to Trump insisting that he seek congressional approval before attacking. “Engaging our military in Syria when there is no direct threat to the United States and without prior official authorization would violate the separation of powers clearly outlined in the Constitution,” they said.
However, Donald Trump, with his ears deaf to so many calls for sanity, self-rule and international law, launched his air strikes on military positions in Damascus, including a scientific research center in Barzeh and Al-Domair Airport on the outskirts of Damascus. There were also rocket attacks on Damascus International Airport and Mezzeh Military Airport, among other targets.
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, regretted that the attack on Syria by the USA, the UK and France had taken place just when the Arab country had a magnificent opportunity to have a peaceful future.
“First they tried going against the Syrian people using the Arab Spring, then with the Islamic State, and now by launching their smart missiles at the capital of a sovereign country, which for many years has been trying to survive in the midst of terrorist aggression,” Zajárova said.
Both French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May made statements in support of Trump’s barbarism.
What is unique about these statements is that they all start from a hypothetical attribution to the United States and the two ancient former European colonial metropolises to intervene in the internal affairs of Syria, a nation that is a sovereign member of the United Nations.
The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, declared that the alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Duma, which served as a pretext for the start of the military operation against Damascus, was a setup. He declared that he had irrefutable data that confirms it. As the first details about the effects of the unlawful aggression became known, thousands of people in the Syrian capital took to the streets to jubilantly to show their support for President Bashar al-Assad, who had quietly arrived shortly before in his offices in central Damascus.
Syrian television broadcast live the demonstrations of the population. With Syrian flags and clapping their hands, they spontaneously showed their national pride in the actions of the Syrian military. On their own, they had the latest generation of modern military equipment provided by the solidarity of Russian forces, and had been able to successfully carry out the defense of their country against the direct imperialist aggression of the United States. Washington, which possesses the largest arsenal of atomic, chemical and other prohibited weapons in the world, and therefore has no moral right to blame other countries.
It was a unilateral action, on the fringes of the United Nations Security Council, and a flagrant violation of the principles of international law and of the Charter of the world organisation. It was a rude outrage against a sovereign state that, although it left only three people injured, cannot be summed up in a simple cartoon of a comic book about the picturesque performance of an eccentric president.
April 17, 2018.
A Crazy President, But Not So Much
A Crazy President…But Not So Much
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The madman was advised and suspended his visit to Lima where he would have attended the VIII Summit of the Americas as head of the U.S. delegation. Nor will Donald Trump travel to Colombia, as officially announced. The reason given for this was that the president had to deal with the situation in Syria, a country over which a threat of war hangs as a result of the president’s own outbursts. These are based on the worn-out, paradoxical and proven-false accusations against the government of Bashar Al Assad of having used chemical weapons in its internal war against terrorism.
Sarah Sanders, White House spokeswoman, announced that Vice President Mike Pence will be in charge of Washington’s delegation, both in Lima to conduct bilateral talks with Latin American leaders who will be present at the hemispheric meeting and in Bogotá for the meetings Trump had scheduled with Colombian authorities.
There is no doubt that the pretext of the situation in Syria will serve to prevent the United States from having a resounding catastrophe in its relations with the governments of the nations of Latin America.
History shows that when the countries south of Rio Grande act together they are able to shock the empire at its deepest roots. But hardly anyone expected that, as a result of the right-wing movement that has emerged as a result of various US coups d’état on the continent, such unity would be able to achieve such encouraging results.
The planned Summit of the Americas was announced as a likely trigger for the fury of the peoples of the continent against Washington’s most recent impositions and manipulations. But the arrogance and irresponsible actions of President Donald Trump have reached such an extreme that even the rulers of Latin America, who have shown themselves to be more servile in their ties with Washington, have jumped with unprecedented firmness.
An extreme case was produced by the president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, who suggested that the New York magnate review the origin of his anger. “If your recent statements stem from frustration over domestic policy issues, your laws or your Congress, you should address them, not the Mexicans. We are not going to let negative rhetoric define our actions,” Peña Nieto said, when it was announced that President Trump had ordered the deployment of between 2,000 and 4,000 military personnel to support the Border Patrol agents on the southern border of the United States.
The Mexican president’s message also responded to a series of tweets and comments by the magnate-president, motivated by a caravan of Honduran migrants who sought to reach Mexico’s northern border with the United States.
Trump warned that he would cancel the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiations if the Mexican government did not detain Central American migrants.
“It is better that the great caravan of people from Honduras, coming through Mexico to our border of weak laws, stop. NAFTA is at stake, as are foreign aid for Honduras and the countries that will allow this to happen. Congress must act now!“the president tweets threateningly.
To general surprise on the continent, Peña Nieto declared that Mexico will not be afraid to negotiate with the United States, but he demands respect. “We will never negotiate in fear.”
The Mexican Senate also demanded respect from the president of the United States and demanded that the Peña Nieto government suspend binational collaboration on immigration matters.
The four candidates for the presidency of the nation: Margarita Zavala, Ricardo Anaya, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and José Antonio Meade immediately joined in the rejection of the deployment of U.S. troops on the Mexican border. “When it comes to defending national dignity, we all speak with one voice and demand respect,” independent Congresswoman Margarita Zabala wrote to Donald Trump in her tweeter.
Peña Nieto mentioned these statements in his message to the nation while underscoring the negotiating tone with which his government has addressed the U.S. president. “The Mexican government’s efforts have been aimed at building an institutional relationship of mutual respect and benefit for both nations.
The relationship between the two countries “is intense and dynamic but that does not justify threatening attitudes or lack of respect between our countries,” insisted Peña Nieto. “If you want to reach agreements with Mexico, we’re ready. As we have shown so far, we have always been ready to engage in serious, good faith and constructive dialogue.
April 12, 2018.
Truly Human Rights
Truly Human Rights
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Among the many unique qualities of the Cuban political process, and the organization of politics that has emerged from the revolutionary changes on the island, is the achievement of social peace in Cuba. It’s a phenomenon unthinkable in most other nations of the continent including, of course, the United States.
Surprised by this tranquility and security, many of the visitors from the United States who have been able to travel to Cuba with the exceptional authorization of Washington wonder if there are any organizations in Cuba that oppose the government. The answer, which is surprising to many, is that the only effective organizer and leader of the opposition in Cuba is the United States government. This is because Cuba’s citizens enjoy the daily right to participate in the construction of the new socialist order, but they also have the right to dissent. This is exercised in multiple instances of the vast and intense Cuban participatory system.
But another very important reason, one less spoken about, is that U.S. foreign policy has always been obsessive in maintaining a very direct and rigorous control over this dissidence. Very few Cubans agree to align themselves, to make use of their right to disagree, under the directions of a foreign government that openly proclaims itself to be an enemy of the independence, identity and social justice objectives of Cubans, and even less so with let alone do it in exchange for material benefits.
Washington’s instinctive imperialist voracity has never resigned itself to accepting a neighbor which does not blindly submit to U.S. hegemony. If not, they will learn from their own historical-practical experience, as have Puerto Rico, Mexico, Canada, the Dominican Republic and Haiti!
All these countries have suffered, in addition to Cuba, the extreme violence with which Washington is able to impose its neighbors’ submission to US designs.
The methods used by U.S. foreign policy to keep or return its neighbors to the fold have not always been identical. For example, from the dangers of absorption and subtle threats that have advised Canada to stay within the British Commonwealth. Why? To prevent its absorption by its American neighbors to the south. Then, the extension of borders by force with which Washington took half of its territory from Mexico. And, of course, the longest economic blockade in world history that still persists against Cuba. And we’re not even detailing the multiple invasion operations, coups and interventions sponsored by the OAS (Washington’s ministry of colonies), our America has experienced in recent centuries.
In the specific case of Cuba, a fierce campaign for the demonization of the purposes and actions of the Fidelista revolution began to develop before the triumph and seizure of power by the people in January 1959. It has been a sustained and relentless campaign, initially by the powerful US secret services of subversion and later publicly and notoriously, with multi-million dollar programs and plans aimed without discretion or shame at subverting order on the island.
This policy has been complemented, most of the time, by a ban on US citizens visiting the island in search of their own individual assessments.
With William Clinton in the presidency, the “people-to-people” policy was briefly put into effect. It authorized visiting Cuba by a certain category of individuals from academia and universities in general. It was designed with the purpose that the visitors would influence the Cubans by making them see the advantages of capitalism more, as was logical, the opposite was what happened.
President George W. Bush felt compelled to cancel the program, realizing its boomerang effect. By clashing with the truth of Cuba, the visitors became the best spokespersons for the Cuban reality.
In March 2016, then-President Barack Obama used his presidential powers to enact several measures that allowed certain categories of Americans to travel to Cuba with fewer restrictions. Nevertheless, the unconstitutional ban on tourist travel remained in place.
Donald Trump’s autocratic regime has preferred to apply measures of terror and threats in his speeches to counter the interest of U.S. citizens in approaching Cuba.
Cuba’s socialist revolutionary project does not impose anti-capitalist conditions on other countries. All it demands is respect for its experiments, essays, and studies. Cuba’s project is to create an alternative social and economic order to failed capitalism, one that is more just and better for the Cuban people and its independence.
April 9, 2018.
Capitalism and Democracy
Capitalism and Democracy are Opposites
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The capitalist socio-economic order is synonymous with freedom only for those who accept that the first freedom must be for capital and that money must be free to buy everything. When the capacity of money to acquire the goods that sustain life in society is restricted or when it is prevented from behaving in the manner of another commodity that can be bought and sold, it is restricted to capitalism.
That is why it is so important for capitalism that popular consciousness has been manipulated by the system and won over to the idea that “capitalism” equals “democracy” and that any attack on the freedom of money to acquire any of the earthly and moral goods of society is an attack on democracy.
Can you imagine what your country, and this planet, would be like if doctors, educators, courts, governments, the means of production and services, information, cultural expressions and even the conditions for making love were equally available to everyone in a society where money cannot determine differences in the quality and urgency of benefits?
But this would distort the precarious asymmetrical balance present in almost every society on the planet, because capitalism needs such ideas to continue on the fringes of citizen aspirations.
Because, for capitalism, it would be terrible if a person with many economic resources were condemned to the same quality of life and the same conditions of treatment and possibilities of cure in cases of illness as those who lack sufficient money.
Because, from a capitalist point of view, it cannot be considered logical that the descendants of the wealthy should have to share the same classrooms and quality of education with children from poor families.
Because it does not seem rational to a good bourgeois that the poor and the rich should be judged, in the case of crime, by the same standards, nor that they should share galleys in prison with corrupt millionaire and hungry common criminals.
Because in the electoral systems of capitalism, it should not happen that elected leaders should dispense with the donations made by the richest, most influential and responsible individuals and entities of society in their campaigns for office. In their future performance as leaders, they may consider themselves obliged to protect the security of corporate capital and that of the nation’s most important and powerful layer.
Because, in the capitalist order, the media is only free if private capital can buy radio and television stations, magazines, newspapers, news agencies or any other means of communication. This is so that they may be in a position to efficiently ensure that what is published serves their own interests, which are the determining factors in bourgeois society as a whole.
Because the capitalist system needs the best of national and international art and culture to be exhibited or imported for the enjoyment of society’s educated elite, which has the resources to pay for the costs involved through advertising.
Because in a capitalist society it is considered healthy that everything is structured in such a way that the main attraction for gender relations is money and economic position. Thus, the most beautiful men and women are attracted to other beautiful men and woman with greater wealth, without peculiar considerations such as understanding, kindness, sensitivity or other sentimental or otherwise subjective arguments.s.
For capitalism, stimulating competitiveness and the struggle for profit as engines of progress, at every level of the economy, brings the greatest dividends and any other consideration – moral, ethical or patriotic, for example – limits the development of the nation.
When any of the above conditions are missing or are threatened by the misunderstanding that they are inherent to capitalism and that this is the same as democracy, we must act with haste and without mercy.
This is how modern capitalism does it systematically, through the government of the United States and the oligarchies that are submissive to it, anywhere in the world.
The erratic hegemonic performance of the United States in recent years has contributed greatly to the discrediting of the capitalist way of life on a global scale. Capitalism has shown that its model is not in line with the aspirations of the dispossessed classes of the rich countries, nor with those of the peoples of the Third World, who are eager to live in a less cruel and more equitable system.
April 5, 2018.
Washington Suffers a Credibility Crisis
Washington Suffers a Credibility Crisis
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Objectively, the credibility of the US government, with either party at the forefront, has always been in question because its foreign policy pronouncements on peace, freedom, democracy and human rights systematically contradict or contrast with its actions.
These days, the Associated Press (AP), a U.S. news agency, lamented in a commentary by its journalists that the conflictive and misleading daily statements of its President, Donald Trump, and the most important members of its team of senior advisors fuel new doubts about the credibility of the White House.
“Some Republican congressmen even wonder if they have a partner in the president of the nation with whom to negotiate in good faith and how much the president’s word is worth.
An AP paper says the former assistant Republican leader in Congress has told the agency that negotiating with White House officials has become impossible for Republicans, given the president’s propensity to undermine the public and private guarantees of his own team. White House officials have been seen in the unusual position of urging legislators to downplay some of the President’s statements.
“Recently, in one of his usual morning tweets, Trump threatened to veto a massive budget bill after the White House itself had assured legislators that the president would sign it.
The White House officials privately insisted, according to the AP journalist, that the president was venting his feelings after hearing reports that the agreement presented a defeat of several of his priorities.
Although, after hours of uncertainty, Trump signed the legislation into law, this situation disturbed some Republicans. “The lack of control over Trump’s outbursts is a concern on both sides of the House,” said a Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania who has sometimes been critical of the leader. “The disorder, chaos, instability, uncertainty and excessive statements are not the virtues of conservatives,” he said.
Members of both parties have expressed concern that the President seems oblivious to the way in which, by assuming certain positions and then relinquishing them without modesty, he undermines his own influence and agenda.
Trump’s hesitancy with the budget bill was just one in a series of recent incidents that put the credibility of the White House’s words in the spotlight. Earlier this month, during a private fundraising event, Trump boasted of inventing trade data in a conversation with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
In recent days, Trump and his team have strongly denied the possible dismissal of General Herbert R. McMaster as National Security Advisor, as well as likely changes in the legal team dealing with Trump’s role in the special prosecutor’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the presidential election and constitute an obstruction of justice. Beyond public statements, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, had privately assured his staff that there would be no restructuring.
But by the end of the week, McMaster had been separated and the legal team seemed to be looking for his replacement.
Trump’s problems with the truth are not new, the AP commentary says, often altering the facts, from the number of people who came to his inauguration to the scope of the tax reform he signed last year. And just as he did in boasting of his lie to Trudeau, the president rarely seems ashamed to repeat claims that have proven to be false. Polls show that Americans do not believe Trump is truthful, and in a recent poll conducted by Quinnipiac, 57% of respondents said the president is dishonest. The leader’s supporters say he was elected despite similar polls during his campaign.
Such a bias often puts his advisors in the uncomfortable position of issuing strong public statements that the President immediately denies. Spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeatedly denied reports of McMaster’s departure in the days leading up to Trump’s announcement that he had a new National Security Advisor.
Peter Wehner, who worked in the governments of President Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush said, “Trump has no one to blame but himself. He doesn’t even know his own position.
April 2, 2018.
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