Manuel E. Yepe 239
North Korea’s Antidote to U.S. War
North Korea’s Antidote to U.S. War
By Manuel E. Yepe
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Mérida, México.
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), North Korea, or Communist Korea is one of the most systematic targets of the pejorative and slanderout propaganda carried out by capitalist-controlled media at a global scale.
But the DPRK has never succumbed to Washington’s intimidation. This has generated, around the world, admiration for the very fact of its survival; and solidarity for the courage with which it faces so much negative propaganda.
Pyongyang has never shown signs of wavering in the face of such threats and, on the contrary, it has even dared to develop a reduced arsenal of nuclear weapons for self-defense in the event that the United States tries to assert its dominance by launching another war like the one it carried out in the nineteen-fifties.
In the wake of the most recent US military provocations against North Korea and the usual firmness of its replies, the US journalist Mike Whitney has spublished a comprehensive article in the digital magazine Counterpunch recalling that:
“Washington has never made any effort to conceal its contempt for North Korea. In the 64 years since the war ended, the US has done everything in its power to punish, humiliate and inflict pain on the Communist country.”
“Washington has subjected the DPRK to starvation; it has prevented its government from accessing foreign capital and markets; it has strangled its economy with crippling economic sanctions; and has installed lethal missile systems and military bases on its doorstep.”
“Negotiations aren’t possible,” says Whitney, because Washington refuses to sit down with a country which it sees as its inferior. Instead, the US has strong-armed China to do its bidding by using their diplomats as interlocutors who are expected to convey Washington’s ultimatums as threateningly as possible. The hope, of course, is that Pyongyang will cave in to Uncle Sam’s bullying and do what they are told.”
“There’s no country in the world that needs nuclear weapons more than North Korea. Brainwashed Americans, who get their news from FOX or CNN, may differ on this point, but if a hostile nation deployed carrier strike-groups off the coast of California while conducting massive war games on the Mexican then they might see things differently. They might see the value of having a few nuclear weapons to deter that hostile nation from doing something really stupid.”
According to Whitney, “the only reason Kim Jong Un hasn’t joined Saddam and Gadhafi in the great hereafter, is because the DPRK has the capacity to reduce Seoul, Okinawa and Tokyo into smoldering debris-fields. Absent Kim’s WMDs, Pyongyang would have faced a preemptive attack long ago and Kim would have faced a fate similar to Gadhafi’s. “Nuclear weapons are the only known antidote to US adventurism,” says the journalist.
“In the early 1950s, during the Korean War, the US dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had dropped in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. This carpet bombing, which included 32,000 tons of napalm, often deliberately targeted civilian as well as military targets. Whole cities were destroyed, with many thousands of innocent civilians killed and many more left homeless and hungry.”
The United States killed over 2 million people in a country that posed no threat to US national security.
Like Vietnam, the Korean War was just another muscle-flexing exercise the US periodically engages in whenever it gets bored or needs some far-flung location to try out its new weapons systems. The US had nothing to gain in its aggression on the Korean peninsula.
“In the US, most people think the problem lies with North Korea, but it doesn’t,” explains Whitney.” The problem lies with the United States; it’s unwillingness to negotiate an end to the war, its unwillingness to provide basic security guarantees to the North, its unwillingness to even sit down with the people who –through Washington’s own stubborn ignorance– are now developing long-range ballistic missiles that will be capable of hitting American cities.
According to Whitney, “relations with the North can be normalized, economic ties can be strengthened, trust can be restored, and the nuclear threat can be defused. The situation with the North does not have to be a crisis, it can be fixed. It just takes a change in policy, a bit of give-and-take, and leaders that genuinely want peace more than war.
April 20, 2017
The Vietnam War and the People of the U.S.
The Vietnam War and the People of the United States
By Manuel E. Yepe
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Mérida, México.
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
“Two of the world’s greatest revolutionaries –Jose Marti and Ho Chi Minh– lived for some time in the United States.
Both had deep knowledge of US history and culture. Both saw the dark side of that nation, but also acknowledged great revolutionary potential in the democratic ideals of the United States. The Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh wrote about the Ku Klux Klan and lynching, while, in the 19th Century, Cuban Jose Martí warned against the evidence of the coming advent of imperialism in North America.”
The quotation is from “Vietnam and Other American Fantasies,” a book by Bruce H. Franklin (b.1934), the multiple award-winning scholar and writer on historical cultural topics.
Franklin’s book attempts to demolish the fantasies, myths, and lies that most people in the United States believe about the relatively recent Vietnam War. It uncovers the truth about what was really an imperialist war against the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
That war was rejected by the heroic struggle of tens of millions of people in the US. The dominant narrative today in the United States claim there was a democratic nation called South Vietnam, and another evil one called North Vietnam that was part of a communist imperial dictatorship. North Vietnam wished to invade South Vietnam.
The United States, being the leader of the free world and the defender of democracy on Earth, had to go to South Vietnam in 1965 to defend it and got bogged down in a quagmire. “We could not win the war because we fought with one hand tied behind our back, because of some university students mobilized by veteran left-leaning professors and the actress Jane Fonda.”
In his book, Franklin explains that Vietnam was a single country, not two countries. The US war against Vietnam began in 1945, not in 1965. The anti-war movement was initiated by US soldiers and sailors who were its vanguard, and in the endydct k made it impossible for Washington to continue the war in 1945.
Between 1945 and 1975 the Vietnamese revolution led the global struggle against colonialism that brought independence to half the world’s population. During those three decades, the US struggled to preserve colonialism and became the leader of neo-colonialism, the ultimate form of imperialism in the world.
Franklin recalls the true story of the day when Japan surrendered: August 14, 1945, recalling his experiences that day, when he was eleven years old. He was riding in a van full of children in joyful celebration in the streets of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he then lived. “We believed in a future of peace and prosperity, quite different from that of a nation always at war, as we live in now.”
That day in August was the beginning of the revolution in Vietnam, when the Vietnamese people rose and, in less than three weeks, defeated the Japanese and the French and established the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
On September 2, Ho Chi Minh read out the declaration of independence to half a million Vietnamese in Hanoi, the former capital of a new nation that had been fighting for independence for over 2,000 years.
Suddenly, two fighter planes appeared above the crowd. When the Vietnamese recognized US insignia on the planes, they shouted for joy. They believed that the Americans were their friends and allies, and that they were the champions of freedom and independence from colonialism.
Washington, however, conspired with Paris to launch an invasion against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam whose goal was to restore French colonial rule. The United States would provide arms and financing. This, Franklin points out, was the true beginning of the war against Vietnam and marks the beginning of the US people’s movement against that war.
The British troops who had been sent to Saigon to disarm the remaining Japanese forces, instead gave weapons to the Japanese who had been recently disarmed by the Vietnamese. Soon the Japanese joined the British together with the remnants of the French colonial forces to wage war against the newly-declared independent nation of Vietnam.
When Washington later decided to replace France in the war against Vietnam, fierce opposition from US citizens prevented it, and for that reason, direct US military involvement had to be initially disguised.
Bruce H. Franklin recalls that, although it was the struggle of the Vietnamese which defeated the United States, the anti-war movement, especially in the armed forces, ultimately forced Washington to sign a peace treaty that included, word by word, each demand of the victorious Vietnamese liberation forces.
The Limits of Trump’s Bravado
The Limits of Trump’s Bravado
By Manuel E. Yepe
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Mérida, México.
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
“The use of Russian anti-aircraft defense systems by the Syrian army in retaliation to the US missile strike would have provoked a nuclear conflict. That did not come only thanks to the self-control that Vladimir Putin showed as Supreme Commander of Russia”, daily Izvestia daily reported, quoting Sergei Sudakov, member of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation.
“Many Russian citizens believe Russia should have repelled the aggression. But those who think that way ignore that, had this been so, the shoot-down of US missiles would have provoked a scenario of conflict between two nuclear powers in the territory of a third country.” According to Sudakov, Trump placed humanity at the doors of a true “hot war”.
Military analyst Vladislav Shuryguin clarified in Pravda that the Russian air defense systems deployed in Syria defend the interests of Russia, and are under the military command of Russia. Thus, “when Israel or Turkey periodically bomb Syria, we can protect our air base and its facilities.” Shuryguin believes the Russians made a political decision, because the shooting-down of US missiles would have undoubtedly led to a conflict between Russia and the United States.
Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry denounced the absence of evidence to support the US accusation about the existence of chemical weapons in the Syrian base of Al Shairat which the US used as the pretext to attack that facility.
Press media, firefighters, police and Syrian authorities who went to the base after the US airborne-Tomahawk missile aggression did not find the presence of deposits or bombs with chemical weapons. “People who work there are going about their tasks with total normality; no one is wearing special suits to handle toxic substances,” said Major General Igor Konashenkov, one of the Russian chiefs of the base.
Obviously, observers’ attention was drawn to the similarity between this situation and the white powder shown by Gen. Colin Powell to justify US aggression against Iraq in 2003, or the report to the Parliament of then-British Prime Minister, Anthony Blair, on alleged chemical weapons in that Arab country that same year.
Impartial observers say the United States used the events as a pretext to punish Syria. At the same time, the US attack would delay the defeat of the Islamic State which would consolidate the position of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s legitimate leader.
The Syrian government is calling for the creation of an international committee of professional and independent professional experts to investigate the circumstances which led to the Washington’s attack on Syria. This would be the only legal body capable of verifying whether from that air base chemical weapons could have been used.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons [OPCW] has pointed out that any manipulation or use of toxic substances leaves a trace that can be detected weeks and even months later.
Three years ago, the United Nations verified the total disarmament of chemical weapons in Syria. Therefore, specialized agencies of the world organization would now have to investigate just how the alleged return of this type of weapons to the country took place, and through which border.
All these justifications for the cruise-missile attack on Syria are inconsistent with Donald Trump’s statements during his election campaign. Trump announced that, if elected President, he would oppose the involvement of the nation in international conflicts, something undoubtedly in conflict with the agenda of the real power that governs the empire.
Trump had said he would prioritize the defeat of global terrorism, an objective that also contradicts this attack –which in fact prolongs the existence of the main enemy which he had said the United States should focus on– because, with this attack, he saved the Islamic State from imminent defeat at the hands of the Syrian army.
It has become clear, once again, that the underlying policy of the United States, whoever is President and whichever party is in government, is to prolong wars as much as possible in the interest of profit for the industrial military complex.
Donald Trump clearly is not as absurd as it appears in the performance of his presidency. The thing is that the goals he proclaims are almost never real goals. Sometimes they only express a part of his true objectives, to which he intends to arrive by sleight-of-hand.
Trump’s bravado as president no doubt has its limit there where it surpasses the guidelines fixed by the real power that is not achieved in democratic facade elections.
April 11, 2017.
What Trump´s Victory Means
- English
- Español
What Trump´s Victory Means
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Esclusive for Mexican daily POR ESTO!
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
At the onset of the 2016 presidential elections, the elites of the Democratic and Republican parties did not think the issue would be anything but business as usual. The next president of the nation would inevitably have the surname of one of the families who had ruled before: Bush or Clinton; and life in the superpower would continue to be neoliberal capitalist, without changes, as in the last three decades.
But it did not work out that way. It has been consistently shown that, despite the fact that all other elements of power remained the same, the population of the country did not want more of the same. They wanted something new and different in the nation that presumes itself to be a model of democracy for the planet.
Since the previous stage of the process, it became clear that “the oven was not ready for baking” when, within each of the traditional parties, differences were highlighted by unexpected dissent. That made it clear that the phenomenon was not a matter of cosmetic adjustments but of deep surgery. According to the US political qualification patterns, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were identified respectively as “the right of the Right” and “the left of the Left”. They had the support of the Republican and Democrat majorities.
Bernie Sanders’ campaign fell victim to the Democratic party machinery. Insensitive to the expressed tendency, it insisted on the figure of Hillary Clinton who later lost in a fight where she represented the discontented past. The alternative was the billionaire, populist and demagogue Donald Trump. He lacked the determined support of the Republican establishment. Togher with many of the main figures of that machine against him, he was elected despite his proven status as racist, sexist, abusive and systematic target of media mockery.
Although in appearance the bipartisan system of Democrats and Republicans survives, Trump’s victory represents a disaster for the system. The direct and populist style of the now President-elect, appealing to the lowest instincts of certain sectors of society –very different from the usual tone of US politicians– gave him a touch of authenticity in the eyes of the most disaffected sector of the right-wing electorate.
The Republican candidate was able to identify the presence of what can be called a “grassroots rebellion” and the growing gap between the political, economic, intellectual and media elites, on the one side, and the foundation of the conservative electorate, on the other. His rhetoric against Washington and Wall Street captivated the less-educated white voters and sectors impoverished by the effects of economic globalization, which benefited the corporations.
Trump went as far as to say that he was not competing against Hillary but against the dishonest media. This confrontation with media power antagonized the journalistic sector but rallied the support of voters exhausted by corporate media outrages.
Better than anyone else, Trump saw the widening gap between the political, economic, intellectual and media elites, and the base of the conservative electorate.
Trump is not a conventional right-winger. He defines himself as “a conservative with common sense”. He does not oppose the political model, but the politicians who have been running it. His speech is emotional and spontaneous; it appeals to people´s instincts, not to their brains or reason. He speaks for that part of the American people where discouragement and discontent have taken root. He addressed people tired of traditional politics and promised to bring honesty to the system and renew names and attitudes.
The media have given a lot of publicity to his most extreme statements and proposals, such as that he would prohibit Muslims from entering the country, expel the 11 million Latin American undocumented immigrants, and build a three thousand kilometer (1864 miles) border wall –whose $20 billion cost would be borne by the government of Mexico– to prevent the entry of Latin American immigrants.
Criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutional right to same-sex marriage, Trump stated that the marriage of a man and a woman is “the basis of a free society”. He supported so-called “religious freedom¨ laws promoted in several states to deny services to LGBT persons. He said that climate change is a concept “created by and for the Chinese, to make the US manufacturing sector lose competitiveness “.
In truth, it could be said that Trump did not win; instead that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who lost.
November 14, 2016.
EL TRIUNFO DE TRUMP
Por Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusivo para el diario POR ESTO! de Mérida, México.
En el preámbulo de las elecciones presidenciales 2016, las élites de los partidos demócrata y republicano no pensaban que el asunto sería algo más que el negocio acostumbrado. El próximo presidente de la nación exhibiría, inevitablemente, el apellido de una de las familias que han gobernado antes, Bush o Clinton, y la vida en la superpotencia de América seguiría siendo capitalista neoliberal, sin grandes cambios, como en las últimas tres décadas.
Pero no resultó así. Quedó fehacientemente demostrado que pese a que todos los demás factores del poder se mantenían iguales, la población del país no quiere más de lo mismo. La gente quería algo nuevo y diferente en la nación que presume de ser modelo de democracia para el planeta.
Ya en la etapa previa del proceso se puso de manifiesto que “el horno no estaba para galleticas” cuando en cada uno de los partidos tradicionales se destacaron disidencias inesperadas que hicieron evidente que el fenómeno no era cosa de ajustes cosméticos sino de cirugía profunda. Donald Trump y Bernie Sanders, identificados respectivamente como “la derecha de la derecha” y “la izquierda de la izquierda”, según los patrones de calificación política
estadounidenses, acapararon el apoyo de las mayorías republicanas y demócratas.
La campaña de Bernie Sanders cayó víctima de la maquinaria del partido demócrata que, insensible a la tendencia manifiesta insistió en la figura de Hillary Clinton que más tarde cayó en una pelea en la que ella representaba precisamente el sufrido pasado. La alternativa era el multimillonario, populista y demagogo Donald Trump quien, sin un resuelto apoyo del establishment republicano y con buena parte de las principales figuras de esa formación política en su contra, y resultó electo pese a su demostrada condición de racista, sexista, abusador y blanco sistemático de burlas en los medios.
Aunque en apariencias sobrevive el sistema bipartidista de demócratas y republicanos, la victoria de Trump ha constituido para éste una verdadera hecatombe. El estilo directo y populachero del ahora Presidente electo, apelando a los bajos instintos de ciertos sectores de la sociedad, muy distinto del tono habitual de los políticos estadounidenses, le ha dado un carácter de autenticidad a los ojos del sector más decepcionado del electorado de derecha.
El candidato republicano supo identificar la presencia de lo que puede llamarse una “rebelión de las bases” y la ruptura cada vez mayor entre las élites políticas, económicas, intelectuales y mediáticas, de una parte, y la base del electorado conservador, de la otra. Su discurso contra Washington y Wall Street cautivó a los electores blancos menos cultos y a los sectores empobrecidos por los efectos de la
globalización económica, beneficiosa para las corporaciones. Trump llegó a decir que él no estaba compitiendo contra Hillary sino contra los deshonestos medios de prensa. Este enfrentamiento al poder mediático le enajenó simpatías en el sector periodístico pero de atrajo apoyo de votantes exhaustos de los desmanes de los medios corporativos de comunicación.
Mejor que nadie, Trump percibió la fractura cada vez más amplia entre las élites políticas, económicas, intelectuales y mediáticas, respecto a la base del electorado conservador.
Trump no es un ultraderechista convencional. Él mismo se define como un “conservador con sentido común”. No censura el modelo político en sí, sino a los políticos que lo han estado orientando. Su discurso es emocional y espontáneo. Apela a los instintos, no al cerebro, ni a la razón. Habla para esa parte del pueblo estadounidense en la que ha cundido el desánimo y el descontento. Se dirige a la gente cansada de la política tradicional y promete traer honestidad al sistema y renovar nombres y actitudes.
Los medios han dado mucha difusión a sus declaraciones y propuestas más extremas, como la de que prohibiría la entrada al país de musulmanes y expulsaría a los 11 millones de inmigrantes ilegales latinos y construiría un muro fronterizo de más de tres mil kilómetros para impedir la entrada de inmigrantes latinoamericanos cuyo costo de unos veinte mil millones de dólares correría a cargo del gobierno de México.
Trump ha declarado que el matrimonio de un hombre y una mujer es “la base de una sociedad libre” al criticar la decisión del Tribunal Supremo que considera un derecho constitucional el matrimonio entre personas del mismo sexo; ha apoyado las “leyes de libertad religiosa” impulsadas en varios Estados para denegar servicios a las personas LGTB; ha dicho que el cambio climático es un concepto “creado por y para los chinos, para hacer que el sector manufacturero estadounidense pierda competitividad”.
En verdad, podría decirse que Trump no ganó sino que quienes perdieron fueron Hillary Clinton y los demócratas.
Noviembre 14 de 2016.
Cannibis is a Dangerous Gamble for the Caribbean
- English
- Español
Cannabis is a Dangerous Gamble for the Caribbean
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily Por Esto!, of Merida, Mexico
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Marijuana is having a good time in the Caribbean. With the exception of Cuba, cannabis is widespread in the insular Caribbean, although it is no longer the “ganja” that came to the Caribbean from India and was used by humble workers in Jamaica to free themselves for a few moments from their cruel jobs.
So says an article published by the Italian magazine TTC (Travel Trade Caribbean), specializing in the tourism industry of the Caribbean region, today threatened by the dangerous presence of this universal scourge.
In 2015, the growth, trade and private possession of up to 200 grams of marijuana by adults and the growing of up to 5 plants for private consumption and medicinal, religious and scientific purposes was decriminalized in Jamaica, as a celebration of Bob Marley’s 70th birthday, the extraordinary Jamaican musician who was addicted to smoking the weed.
According to TTC, the successes of marijuana have gone so far in 2016 that the Bhang Travel Inc., in Miami, Florida, the Cannabis Industries Premiere Travel and Event Agency, launched the first-ever Jamaican Cannabis Cruise setting sail departing from Miami on January 2017 with destination Ocho Rios Port in Jamaica.
Currently, in many parts of the world, the number and influence of marijuana advocates is increasing. They argue for its general decriminalization or at least for its free use in medicine. Also increasing is the number of the detractors of marijuana which is still classified in the world as a class A (High-risk) drug, together with Heroin, Cocaine, Amphetamines and ecstasy (MDMA).
Cautiously, the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) recommended to its member countries the need for further research, before accepting new programs to liberate its use. The head of the organization, Dr. James Hospedales, advises “proceed with an abundance of caution.” He emphasizes the immense importance of youth protection.
Two Caribbean nations, US protectorate Puerto Rico and Jamaica, already have a medicinal cannabis program in place and others are taking steps to decriminalize it.
According to an analysis posted in the Internet about Jamaica, “the country is trying to cash in on the multi-billion-dollar health and wellness tourism sector that several Caribbean countries are turning to. But it won’t be the use of cannabis for traditional medicine purposes alone it is contemplating. It is also planning to use products made from the herb that would play a major part in the tourism sector”.
Jamaica´s Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett said Jamaica’s lush and rustic southwestern coast is “ideally suited for the concept of “cannabis-infused tourism” where products made from the herb would play a major part in the tourism sector”.
In 2015 the countries that had the least restrictive cannabis laws were Bangladesh, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Germany, the Netherlands, some U.S. states, Native American Indian reservations, and cities as well as some territories of Australia.
The countries that maintain the strictest cannabis laws are China, Egypt, France, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Norway, the Philippines, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and Vietnam.
The global market for a cannabis tourism stands at around US $494 billion, according to the article in TTC.
Although the flow of cocaine heading north has been reduced, violent crime and drug trafficking mean serious threats to Central America and the Caribbean. Given its
geographical location between the main producers of coca in the South and the main consumers of narcotics in the North, the region has become a drug corridor.
October 3, 2016.
The New Cold War Between the U.S. and China
The New Cold War Between the U.S. and China
By Manuel E. Yepe
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Leonardo Boff, is a Franciscan monk who was one of the main creators of the liberation theology-until he decided in 1992 to leave the priesthood. On August 12, he granted an interview to journalist Martin Granovsky, from the Argentine newspaper Pagina 12, in which he analyzed the course that Brazil and Argentina have taken due to their subordination to transnational capital.
Asked about the reasons for the advance of neo-conservative processes in Latin America –by means of a coup, as in Brazil, or by the ballot box, as in Argentina– Boff linked them to a new cold war that is being waged between the United States and China.
The Asian giant, now part of the BRICS bloc, has been gaining presence in Latin America and this contradicts the US purpose to control the continent. By attacking Brazil, the US attacks China and its huge investments in Latin America that only last year meant $54 billion for the railway that would link the Atlantic with the Pacific.
Latin Americans are frightened by the U.S. negotiations with Argentine president Mauricio Macri regarding two new military bases, one on the border between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, and another in Patagonia, near the world’s largest freshwater aquifer, says the leader of liberation theology, who is already 77 years old.
Regarding the coup process in Brazil, Boff reported that the Movimiento Sin Tierra [Landless Movement] has the support of Pope Francisco who got very enthusiastically close to President Dilma Roussef; so much so that she has greeted him on her every trip to Europe.
In one of her trips she was accompanied by the Brazilian actress Leticia Sabatella who gave the Pope a first-hand description of the situation. She let him know that the main issue was defense of democracy, because attacking Dilma would bring violent forms of social repression. After listening to her, the Pope said: “It is the work of capitalism: of Brazilian capitalism and transnational capitalism.”
Boff believes the Pope has seen that neo-liberalism, which gives more value to the market than to the common good for people, produces great marginalization and great poverty. The forty million Brazilians who were rescued from hunger in the country are now begining to return to their previous situation.
“As is known, the deputy who remained as interim president dismissed Dilma´s cabinet and attacked the Ministry of Social Welfare and the agrarian reform. Social projects are increasingly underfunded, attention to culture was scaled down from a ministry to an undersecretary, and Michel Temer cut the subsidies to public universities by half “.
According to Boff, the Pope considered that the parliamentary coup without bayonets seeks the same effect as military coups did before: to reinforce a group of big national capitalists together with transnational capitalists aimed at a greater accumulation of capital by privatizing national assets.
There is a project to recolonize Latin America and increasingly turn it into an area that only exports pure raw materials without adding value to its products. Brazil itself has more than 70 million hectares to produce and satisfy hunger worldwide, and has more than enough water, said Boff.
“Everything would fall under the control of the privatized or internationalized capital. The Pope is aware of this phenomenon and of the fact that the poor would return to misery and hunger.”
In Argentina, the state caries out a policy of privatization. It talks to the companies. There is no society but individuals. Wealth accumulation is concentrated in a shrinking group. You cannot analyze the situation in Argentina or Brazil separately or assess the attempt by the United States to align the two countries within the imperial strategy in isolation, Boff said.
“In the 13 years when the Workers Party (PT) in power, it was shown that there are two projects at stake. The two want to be democratic, but neo-liberal democracy is for the few and makes rich policies for the rich and poor policies for the poor.”
Boff recalled that there are 210 million people in Brazil and 71,440 superrich who control more than half of the gross domestic product. The World Bank has said that the greatest accumulation of capital in the world is in Brazil, where the most anti-popular and anti-social capitalists reside. They keep much of their fortunes abroad in tax havens and operate through offshore companies. This is definitely an example of the two types of democracy.
The other type of democracy, that of Lula in Brazil, is the inclusive democracy, open to all. The global correlation of forces makes it impossible to prevent the accumulation of capital. But at least we can put some limit to it. In his interview with the Argentine newspaper Pagina 12, Leonardo Boff concluded, “We must do it.
August 22, 2016.
U.S. Elections are Mass Distractions
U.S. Elections are Mass Distractions
By Manuel E. Yepe
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The main utility of presidential elections in the US is simply that it’s a weapon of mass distraction –creating a fiction that presidents actually rule and that voters actually determine the country’s destiny.
In truth, presidents and their minions in Congress and the Supreme Court may govern, but they certainly don’t rule. Elections serve to transfer power from one set of elites to another set of elites, cloaking the spectacle in democratic legitimacy, as the ruling class watch from their corporate suites, pleased with the quadrennial national consensus-building bread & circus event.
This is how Gerald Sussman, a sociologist and Professor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University, defines the US electoral system in his essay “American Elections: Weapons of Mass Distraction”.
If Bernie Sanders had managed to capture the largest number of delegates, the nomination, and the election, it simply would have left a democratic socialist in the White House with all the levers of power intact to discipline him back to what Noam Chomsky has called “the spectrum of thinkable thought.”
“Indeed –wrote Sussman– if the ruling class were a bit wiser, they would have backed Bernie instead of Hillary for the nomination and the presidency just to crush the hopes of the left. The real value of the Sanders campaign was to incite courage in young people to confront the establishment. A Clinton victory in November might bring thousands of protesters into the streets, but a Trump victory would probably bring millions.”
The designation, in recent conventions, of two of the presidential candidates most despised by the activists and supporters of their own parties –Democratic and Republican respectively– has placed millions of voters between the proverbial rock and a hard place before the presidential election on November 8th.
They are equally forced to choose between Donald Trump (R) and Hillary Clinton (D), the lesser of two evils.
Driven by the fallacy that democracy consists of choosing between the two options offered by the two-party system (duopoly) there must be many in the United States today who believe that the small number of options offered is to be blamed for this situation, and think a multiplicity of parties would be the solution.
But soon enough they learn of the existence of many countries where there are multiple parties (dozens and even hundreds), and the situation is the same: power always remains in the hands of rich, who govern for the benefit of the rich.
Historically in the US, whenever an upstart candidate has emerged, having somehow managed to infiltrate the system to the point of seriously jeopardizing the duopolistic control of power (as happened with Jesse Jackson in 1988, Ross Perot in 1992, Ralph Nader and Howard Dean in 2004 and to some extent Bernie Sanders in 2016), they have been confronted by the money, the means and the Machiavellian methods of pressure which, in the end, prove insurmountable, although for some time they serve as a distraction for their followers.
As journalist Barbara G. Ellis has noted on the Truthout website, Bernie Sanders became a monumental threat to the Democratic nomination with demonstrations of tens of thousands of potential voters across the country. Volunteers, mostly young people, vastly outnumbered those of Clinton.
Simultaneously, Trump, with his rallies and wins in the primaries, seemed to be in the same situation with respect to the Republican machinery.
Just as anguish and despair become increasingly pressing for the destitute masses in the world and foreshadow an inevitable popular uprising at a global scale, within the US, the contradiction between the 1% that dominates everything and the 99% who can no longer be fooled by the myths and tricks of representative democracy controlled by the rich becomes more acute.
The experience gathered from the ongoing electoral process in the US clearly shows that small cosmetic changes are not enough to make the current system work. Neither new parties or structural changes in the existing ones, nor unstable coalitions will be able to save the system. The problem lies in the unjust nature of the capitalist system itself that, by its current imperialist nature, hinders the democratic development of the nation and oppresses its citizens.
August 16, 2016.
The White Working Class in the USA
The White Working Class in the USA
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Mérida, México.
The surprising successes of Bernie Sanders on the left flank and Donald Trump on the right flank –in part, believed to owe something to the new positions of the “white working class” in the US– have sparked new interest within the political outlook of the nation.
So writes Zoltan Zigedy, a prominent American Marxist political commentator in his “ZZ” column.
The Wall Street Journal calls them the “forgotten Americans.” Others see them as racist and xenophobic. In 2008, then-aspiring-President Obama characterized them way: “And it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.” Whether they are forgotten, dismissed, or demonized, the “white working class” has been discovered this election season.
Even a decade ago, it was widely believed that there was no working class in the US –only a vast middle class and the poor. Fostered by social scientists, mainstream politicians, and trade union functionaries, the fiction prevailed that, apart from the very rich, everyone was either middle class or poor.
Of course, this illusion began to shatter in the wake of the 2008 crash and the ensuing economic stagnation. Likewise, the rebellion against corporate, cookie-cutter candidates in the 2016 primary contests exposed a class division that fit poorly in the harmonious picture of one big class with insignificant extremes at either end.
Whatever else the 2016 electoral campaigns have revealed, they certainly have shattered the illusion that the US is largely a classless society. But US elites and their opinion-making toadies struggle to find the “white working class,” says Zigedy.
Just as the mass media has fostered caricatures of African-Americans, the media and cultural/entertainment corporations craft an unflattering image of white, working class citizens. Whereas Black people are saddled with images of violence, idleness, promiscuity, and criminality, white workers are portrayed as bigoted, socially, culturally and intellectually backward, superstitious, and conservative.
One would never know from the “hood” movies, talk radio hysteria, and the crime-obsessed news anchors, that most African-Americans are a significant part of the working class, maintain stable households, and work diligently for a better life. Similarly, most white workers are neither gun fanatics nor Bible-thumpers. Most white workers do not attack gays, abuse their spouses and children, torch mosques or lynch Black people.
According to Zigedy, the common perception dished out by the mass media is that white workers constitute the electoral base for Donald Trump, when the truth is that the median household income for his primary voters shows that Trump’s followers are more typical of the white petty-bourgeoisie than the white working class.
Certainly media elites, pundits, and politicians do not want to talk about the latent rebelliousness of the white working class. There is a large majority of white workers who believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction. This is an opinion that should not surprise anyone since the median household income in the US has declined by 7% since 2000.
The current crisis of political credibility shows that they, like most of the rest of the population, have yet to find a way out.
Social scientists have begun to acknowledge the toll that corporate pillage has taken on the working class, very dramatically of late in the case of the white working class.
Death rates, especially from alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide have risen sharply among white workers. The institutions that formerly traded a measure of privilege to white workers for their compliance and docility have now abandoned them.
According to Zigedy, the Democratic Party, for example, is so thoroughly corrupted by corporate money that when a benefit or privilege is wiped out linked to interracial prejudice, false friends and bombastic demagogues, enemies of the working class, take the opportunity and use it to mask the identity of the common enemy and thus weaken the unity in the ranks of U.S. workers.
August 13, 2016.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Strip-Tease of Imperialist Politics
The Strip-Tease of Imperialist Politics
By Manuel E. Yepe
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Today increasingly-substantial financial resources are being invested in the creation of new technologies of war and weapons of mass destruction, though there isn’t the least defensive justification for it in the conditions of the post-Cold War world.
Europe, which benefited so much from the conquest and colonization of America, Africa and Asia, has been responsible for dragging the world into two global wars. The so-called old continent should have made a supreme effort to avoid catastrophes like those in the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, as well as the criminal extermination actions which for many years have been perpetrated by the Zionist forces against the martyred Palestinian people, to mention only the bloodiest.
Only 19 years elapsed between the first and second world wars. World War II ended 71 years ago. However, since then there have been conflicts and wars that have employed several times more explosives and chemical weapons than both world wars together.
The policy of allocating more massive budgets for war and lowering taxes for the more powerful contributors means less money for social expenditures. This does not affect the entire US population equally. Neo-liberal practices, together with globalization, ensure that the rich continue to increase their wealth while the poor continue to grow in number and become increasingly poorer.
In the United States, federal programs for education, community development, grants to agencies for environmental protection, financing for development, low-cost alternative energy, disease control, drug abuse treatment, health and occupational security management, as well as public safety are reduced or eliminated; this list includes only the most recently and hardest hit areas.
The United States presents the paradox of being the richest country in the world
and at the same time it has one of the highest indices of poverty among developed countries. The US currently has, proportionally, the largest number of poor people without health insurance, yet with insecurity and food deficiency among the rich countries.
These sad social realities for the people of the United States, caused by imperialist wars in terms of soldier casualties and injuries, cannot compare, however, with the enormous damage that these disproportionate wars have meant for the attacked peoples.
The farcical excuses presented by the United States, first, to justify the occupation and, then, to save face in view of the evidence of a lost war, have been grotesque.
This happens when Washington cannot find a way out of the attacked countries without obtaining substantial economic benefits for the transnational monopolies that were the real reason for the aggression in the first place.
The noble aspiration of mankind to make the twenty-first century the first in history without wars died early. Against the accumulation of hardships, atrocities, cruelties and sacrifices that characterize the reality of war, the struggle of humanity for peace becomes a vital necessity.
Humanity today has sufficient culture and experience to reject the notion that peace must be imposed by war. Peace can and must be a conscious objective of human intelligence and solidarity.
It has been said many times that the people of the United States are the only ones who can carry out the titanic feat of bringing down the most powerful and bloodthirsty empire ever known to humanity. Today, humanity anxiously waiting to see that people react to give it the solidarity it deserves!
These days, people around the world have been able to follow, sometimes with disgust, the process of elections that every four years takes place in the United States.
On this occasion, however, new and striking manifestations of the profound crisis that engulfs the political system of the only superpower of this era have become apparent.
The campaign of the Republican candidate Donald Trump has allowed everyone to see, in all its crudeness, the terrible fascist danger that looms over humanity. By contrast, the Democratic Party candidate, Bernard Sanders, had encouraging messages that had never before been heard from within the highest echelons of imperialist politics.
July 28, 2016.
Donald Trump and His Psychopathology
Donald Trump and His Psychopathology
By Manuel E. Yepe
Exclusive for daily POR ESTO! of Mérida, México.
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Nobody in the world doubts that a victory by Donald Trump in the US presidential election would mean a devastating blow to Americans who are struggling to save democracy and avoid a reversal and the country´s political shift to the right that would be even worse than the one caused by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The most politically-advanced sector of the citizenship of the United States fears, rightly, that the world’s only superpower is living through a crucial time when fascism is casting its ominous shadow.
Trump’s social base consists of an alliance between billionaires and snippets of the lower middle class, which already resulted in such other monstrosities as the Tea Party. Its greatest danger lies in his social base and will be there beyond the elections.
The class struggle opposing this alliance is concentrated, for now, in communities such as the immigrants, women and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and not in the working class, where it has a relatively low support.
But to slow the rise of the right and stop its xenophobic attacks, it is imperative that immigrants, the BLM movement, women and youth form an alliance to strengthen their ranks in the struggle against their oppression by US capitalism.
Trump has been called a megalomaniac, paranoid, a racist, xenophobic… But, in a speech on the third day of the Democratic National Convention, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg clearly questioned the sanity of the US Republican presidential candidate: “Does Donald Trump only say crazy things, or does he say crazy things because he actually is crazy?”
More importantly, the issue of Trump’s emotional stability has also been raised by a growing number of influential and highly-respected mental-health professionals. They have done so out of a sense of urgency, even in the face of a code of conduct promulgated by the American Psychiatric Association that cautions psychiatrists against making public statements about individuals whom they have not formally evaluated.
Political commentator William Blum, in his widely-read column published in progressive US media, warns that if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, he could well be the most profoundly-disturbed occupant of the Oval Office since Richard Nixon, “whose extreme paranoia brought us Watergate and precipitated the most far-reaching constitutional crisis of the late 20th century.”
“Ordinarily, as someone licensed to practice law rather than psychology,” wrote Blum, “I’d stay out of the debate, and remain in my comfort zone of traditional legal and political commentary, committed to exposing the policy shortcomings of both major-party candidates and their surrogates.”
“But Donald Trump has secured the GOP nod for president. He’s one election away from being the commander-in-chief of the most powerful nation the planet has ever seen. As such, he, like Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, deserves heightened scrutiny, both as to policy and personality.”
“Some readers, particularly on the progressive left, who by orientation are predisposed to policy critiques, may not be comfortable with my approach. Some may even ask if it isn’t a waste of time to examine the psyche of a president or a presidential hopeful, noting that even a paranoid Nixon agreed to end the Vietnam War and opened the door to normalized relations with China,” said Blum.
A consensus has emerged that Trump suffers from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) described as a “condition in which people have traits that cause them to feel and behave in socially-distressing ways. This limits their ability to function in relationships and other areas of their lives, such as work or school.”
According to Blum, Trump embodies –in the US electoral scenario– a society brutally-conditioned to accept a dictator in the future.
Trump embodies the US conservative feeling that sees in him the recovery of world power, undermined by Russia and Syria and commercially by China. It is a reality riding on a character who seeks power based on racial superiority.
If Trump made it –as a fascist incarnation—to be a presidential candidate, it is as a result of the extreme right’s work and their well-developed media power.
The political pendulum in the US has swung to extremes since Obama’s election. Everything has been radicalized and, as Blum points out, even if Trump loses the election, the country will have become further polarized.
August 9, 2016.
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