Manuel E. Yepe 158
South Korea Has Been the Most Favored
South Korea Has Been the Most Favored
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The recent easing of tensions between North and South Korea, two countries that are still technically at war, has given new life to the debate on the unification of the two countries, which have been divided and confronted since the 1950s.
In my opinion, the most favored part of the development of the events that led to the meeting of the leaders of the two Koreas was South Korea!
The extensive and intense military presence of the United States in the south of the Korean peninsula has always been the main obstacle to the reunification efforts of the Korean nation.
Thus, the only net loser at the end of these events has been Washington, which has seen its absolute empire on the southern part of the Korean peninsula threatened.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has never given in to Washington’s demands. The South has always lacked sufficient autonomy to assert its interests and rights as a formally independent nation, due to the control exercised by the United States over its defenses and war resources.
This is understood by many observers who believe that Seoul derives the greatest benefits from the events that are taking place because they contribute to the collapse of the pretexts for maintaining the semi-colonial status of South Korea. These are invariably based on the supposed danger that North Korea, a socialist country, will absorb the entire peninsula and, with its independence, benefit the left in the world balance of power.
The North Korean authorities’ demonstration of absolute autonomy and total dominance of sovereignty over their territory, before and during the negotiations with Seoul and the United States, refutes the repeated and absurd accusations by the United States in the Western media that the Pyongyang government is a puppet of Moscow or Beijing.
On the other hand, what the most objective observers wondered was the extent to which the Seoul government could act with the minimum degree of autonomy necessary to take decisions that would make viable, or at least accompany, the profound changes that would result from the rapprochement with Pyongyang in its external relations, which had been so subordinate to those of the United States.
Although the hope of lasting peace is a win-win situation for all parties involved, the most significant change in regional policy so far seems to be the one that affects the characteristics of South Korea’s submission to the US strategy of maintaining the status of two countries at war, betting on an eventual reunification forced by the weapons it leaves to the united Korea, but within Washington’s sphere of control.
When the North Korean Communist leader, Kim Jong Un, and the President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, made a commitment to work for the complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula on April 27 at the House of Peace in Panmunjom, inside the demilitarized zone that separates the two countries, they were smiling and shaking hands. At that moment, the brains of the State Department and the Pentagon were plotting how to restructure the imperialist strategy for the region, to make it compatible with the style of its unpredictable President Trump and his team of hawks, almost all as ignorant as its chief in international politics and diplomacy.
Both Koreas announced that they will work with the US and China to reach an agreement soon for a “permanent” and “strong” peace that will officially end the Korean War, which has lasted from the 1950s to the present with only a single ceasefire in 1953.
They promised to work for an agreement for the progressive reduction of military weapons, to cease hostile acts, to transform their fortified border into a zone of peace and to seek multilateral talks with other countries, in an obvious but omitted reference to the United States, whose military forces are still widely deployed in South Korea.
Kim was the first North Korean leader since the 1950-1953 war to visit South Korea. The scenes of Moon and Kim walking together smilingly contrasted sharply with the tensions generated the previous year by the joint South Korean-U.S. military games and, in response, North Korea’s missile tests and its largest nuclear test, which led to the usual U.S. sanctions and increased fears of a new war on the Peninsula.
Humanity expected a lot from the handshake between the two Korean leaders on the concrete strip that marks the border between the two countries in the demilitarized zone. Unfortunately, the most recent visit by Vice President Mike Pompeo to Pyongyang indicates that Washington plans to make mischief.
July 9, 2018.
Mexico Returns to Its Place in the Vanguard
Mexico Returns to Its Place in the Vanguard
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Mexico and Latin America are partying! Mexico elected a President who can rise to the nation’s role in history!
A broad, overwhelming and unquestionable electoral victory made Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) the next President of the United States of Mexico. His candidacy was put forth by the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena), a party he founded and whose most recent national registration, forming the Together We Will Make History alliance, together with the Labor and Social Encounter parties.
His prestige rests mainly on his honesty and his election theme, la esperanze de Mexico (Mexico’s Hope) which has now become a reality.
The popular victory of AMLO in the homeland of the priest Hidalgo, Benito Juárez, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and Lázaro Cárdenas constitutes a political history of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is is a milestone in the political history of Latin America and the Caribbean. It significantly shifts the balance of power in favor of popular struggles, Latin American unity and the support for progressive governments against neoliberalism.
The rise of a popular government whose foreign policy heralds a constant struggle in defense of sovereignty, independence, non-intervention and peaceful resolution of conflicts. These were given in the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace agreed by the the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in its Second Havana Summit, a vital instrument for the defense of peace in the region.
Insecurity and violence; social inequalities and poverty, all linked to rampant corruption and a tense relationship with the United States, are some of the most urgent and arduous challenges that AMLO will have to face. He will take the presidency of Mexico on December 1, after a five-month transition. In addition, the US president has threatened to build a wall on the Mexican border to isolate himself from the world and to have it paid for by the Mexican treasury
With regard to Mexico’s and Latin America’s relations in with their neighbor to the north, this proverb always resonates: “Mexico, so far away from God and so close to the United States,” Today we recall the prophetic study published by AMLO in April 2017 in Le Monde Diplomatique, on the strategy that would lead to Donald Trump to the US presidency and the situation that would be created for Mexico under Trump’s presidency:
“About two years ago, the future president (Trump) and his advisers began to systematically study the mood of the American people. Among the most frequent feelings they cited were: disappointment, irritation, anger, sadness and despair. It was enough to take advantage of this general mood, to articulate it and to push this interpretation forward in the hope that it would permeate the whole society.
“Long before Trump’s inauguration, it was clear that his campaign, the anti-Mexican approach, did not originate in an economic analysis of his country, but rather in an economic one. that was (and still is) in the political interest of taking advantage of nationalist sentiment in the U.S..”
Mexico’s new president-elect promises to cut the “top of its head” off privileges”, ending the “power mafia”, ending the the corruption by example and giving priority to the poor.
This son of merchants, born on November 13, 1953 in Tepetitán, Tabasco, and known by his initials as AMLO, embodies for many Mexicans the desire for change.
He is a mass leader who conveys confidence and trust in his speech. With a single call from him, tens of thousands of fill up the public squares.
From an ideological point of view, he is not easy to pigeonhole, but the media and the people generally think of him as a politician of the left or as an honest politician.
In economic terms, he is committed to the internal market, to set prices guarantees for the countryside and to review the opening of the oil sector to private capital.
In the social area, AMLO seeks to reduce inequalities but steers clear of issues that would fall within a traditional agenda of the left, such as abortion and same-sex marriages.
After having lost in the 2006 and 2012 elections, in the current campaign, he moderated his tone to attract sectors that previously distrusted his progressive preaching but never got past it. of his identification with the humble.
In fact, he proposes a change comparable to the big transformations in history such as the Mexican Revolution of 1910, as part of the political system.
He has declared that he is inspired by the fathers of the homeland, who left lessons on the fight for justice, for democracy, and for national sovereignty.
July 5, 2018.
The US Left Has a Past and a Future
- English
- Español
THE US LEFT HAS A PAST AND A FUTURE
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The United States is an atypical case among the most advanced industrialized societies because it does not have a large, national-level socialist party. The culture of that great North American nation emphasizes individualism and anti-statism. The role of government in society is much smaller than that of government in other parts of the world, for example in Europe.
During the period of the Great Depression and the economic crisis of the 1930s, many American socialists were hopeful that the time might have come to found a workers’ party in their country. But with the rise to power of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and his New Deal coalition, the working class became a prominent force within the Democratic Party itself and the union leaders saw no benefit in trying to pursue their ideas independently.
The unions were actively working to promote voter participation within the bipartisan U.S. context. After the Great Depression, the trade union movement channeled its support mainly to the Democratic Party, which, in turn, developed a policy of broad acceptance of people on the left side of the U.S. political spectrum.
In recent history, in addition to the well-known Democratic and Republican parties, the Reform Party (far right), the Green Party (left), and the Libertarian Party, have been registered for elections in the United States. In the 1992 and 1996 elections, the Reform Party gained notoriety with Ross Perot as its presidential candidate, who was accused by the moderate right wing of having damaged George Bush senior’s re-election with his participation.
In 2000 and 2004, the participation of Ralph Nader of the Green Party, who was blamed by the moderate left for taking votes away from Democratic candidates, was seen to have benefited the Republican George W. Bush Jr.
FDR is credited with this policy of blocking the creation of a great socialist party in the United States by opening the doors of the Democratic Party to trade unions and many progressive people during the Great Depression. That’s why Roosevelt is considered the closest president to socialism America has ever had. Before World War II, Roosevelt had to confront the forces of the right within his own party to advance his transformative purpose in the United States.
Anti-Roosevelt Democrats even formed the American Liberty League in the 1936 presidential election. The then governor of New York and prominent Democratic leader Al Smith urged her to oppose Roosevelt by proclaiming that “America can have only one capital, Washington or Moscow,” meaning that the Roosevelt supporters’ movement had too many communists and socialists in its ranks.
Roosevelt died in 1945 but, at the end of the war, the left-wing political army of trade unionists, intellectuals and black community leaders that had been structured to support Roosevelt still retained great influence within the Democratic Party. Within the Democratic Party, unions such as the United Auto Workers, the International Longshore Warehouse Union, the National Maritime Union, and the United Steelworkers of America had large pro-Communist factions and leaders of that political orientation, including several members of the National Negro Workers Congress and other civil rights groups directly linked to the Communist Party of the United States.
Many Roosevelt Democrats had a very positive appreciation of the Soviet Union and the role it played in the defeat of fascism. They had no objection to aligning themselves with the Communist Party and its political environment on local issues.
In this way, the balance of left and right forces was maintained until, in 1946, the anti-communist Cold War repressive operation under Harry S. Truman, FDR’s replacement, began.
During this period of fascist terror against the left, the first targets of the witch hunt were Democrats who belonged to the populist and pro-Soviet left faction entrenched within the party itself.
Alger Hiss, a State Department official who had played a key role in founding the United Nations, was one of the first to be demonized. He was accused of being a Soviet agent and ended up in prison for perjury. Both Democrats and Republicans were harshly repressed by their own parties during this period.
Now, with the advent of Trumpism, everything seems to indicate that new difficult times are approaching for the workers, professionals and progressive members of the American middle class. July 2, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO
LA IZQUIERDA TIENE HISTORIA Y FUTURO EN EEUU
By Manuel E. Yepe
Por Manuel E. Yepe Exclusivo para el diario POR ESTO! de Mérida, México. http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Estados Unidos es un caso atípico entre las más avanzadas sociedades industrializadas, porque no tiene un partido socialista grande de nivel nacional. La cultura en esa gran nación del norte de América enfatiza el individualismo y el anti-estatismo. El papel del gobierno en la sociedad es mucho menor que el que éstos tienen en otros países del mundo, por ejemplo en los europeos.
Durante el período de la Gran Depresión y la crisis económica de los años 1930 germinó en muchos socialistas estadounidenses la esperanza de que pudiera haber llegado el momento de fundar un partido de los trabajadores en su país. Pero con la llegada al poder de Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) y su coalición del New Deal, la clase obrera se convirtió en una fuerza prominente dentro del propio Partido Demócrata y los líderes sindicales no percibían beneficio alguno en tratar de llevar adelante su ideario de manera independiente.
Los sindicatos trabajaban activamente en la promoción de la participación de votantes dentro del contexto bipartidista de Estados Unidos. A partir de la Gran Depresión, el movimiento sindicalista canalizó su apoyo mayoritariamente hacia el Partido Demócrata que, por su parte, desarrolló una política de amplia acogida de gente situada en la izquierda del espectro político estadounidense.
En la historia reciente se han registrado para las elecciones en Estados Unidos, además de los consabidos partidos Demócrata y Republicano, el Partido de la Reforma (ultraderecha), el Partido Verde (izquierda), y el Partido Libertario. En los comicios de 1992 y 1996, cobró notoriedad el Partido de la Reforma con Ross Perot como candidato presidencial, a quien la derecha moderada acusaba de haber perjudicado con su participación la reelección de George Bush padre.
En 2000 y 2004, fue visible la participación de Ralph Nader, del Partido Verde, a quien la izquierda moderada culpó de restar votos a candidatos demócratas, en beneficio del republicano George W. Bush hijo.
A FDR se le atribuye esa política de haber bloqueado la creación de un gran partido socialista en Estados Unidos, al abrir las puertas del Partido Demócrata a los sindicatos y a mucha gente progresista durante la Gran Depresión. Es por esa razón que se considera a Roosevelt el presidente más cercano al socialismo que haya tenido Estados Unidos. Antes de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, ya Roosevelt tuvo que enfrentar las fuerzas de la derecha dentro de su propio partido para hacer avanzar su propósito transformador en Estados Unidos.
Los demócratas que se le oponían llegaron a constituir la “American Liberty League” en las elecciones presidenciales de 1936. El entonces gobernador de Nueva York y prominente líder demócrata Al Smith, instó a la oponerse a Roosevelt proclamando que “¡Estados Unidos sólo puede tener una capital, Washington o Moscú!”, significando que el movimiento de los partidarios de Roosevelt tenía en sus filas demasiados comunistas y socialistas.
Roosevelt murió en 1945 pero, al término de la guerra, el ejército político de la izquierda constituido por sindicalistas, intelectuales y líderes comunitarios negros que se había estructurado para apoyar a Roosevelt aun conservaba gran influencia dentro del Partido Demócrata. Los sindicatos afines al Partido Demócrata como el United Auto Workers, el International Longshore Warehouse Union, el National Maritime Union, y el United Steelworkers of America, tenían grandes facciones procomunistas y líderes de esa orientación política, entre los cuales se incluían varios asociados al Congreso Nacional de Trabadores Negros y otros grupos de derechos civiles vinculados directamente con el Partido Comunista de Estados Unidos.
Muchos demócratas de Roosevelt tenían una apreciación muy positiva de la Unión Soviética y del papel que ésta desempeñó en la derrota del fascismo. No tenían objeción alguna a alinearse con el Partido Comunista y su entorno político en asuntos locales.
Así se mantuvo el balance de fuerzas de izquierda y derecha hasta que, en 1946, comenzó la operación represiva anticomunista de la Guerra Fría bajo Harry S. Truman, reemplazante de FDR.
Durante ese período de terror fascista contra la izquierda los primeros blancos de la caza de brujas fueron demócratas que pertenecían a la facción de izquierda populista y pro-soviética afianzada dentro del propio partido.
Alger Hiss, funcionario del Departamento de Estado que había desempeñado un papel clave en la fundación de las Naciones Unidas, fue uno de los primeros en ser objeto de demonización y acusación de ser agente soviético para terminar encarcelado por perjurio. Tanto demócratas como republicanos, fueron duramente reprimidos por sus propios partidos durante este período.
Ahora, con la llegada del trumpismo, todo parece indicar que se avecinan nuevos tiempos difíciles para los obreros, profesionales e integrantes progresistas de la clase media estadounidense. Julio 2 de 2018.
Este artículo se puede reproducir citando al periódico POR ESTO como fuente.
‘
Trump Administration’s Child Abuse
The Trump Administration’s Child Abuse in the US
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Trump administration is holding 1,500 teens and pre-teens between the ages of 10 and 17 in captivity. Some were captured and separated from their parents along the Mexican border.
This was reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, stating that they were being held in an old abandoned Walmart that was renovated with classrooms, recreation centers and medical examination rooms to house children in federal custody. Children are allowed two hours of free time each day, including one hour of physical exercise and one hour of free time. There are two separate learning shifts due to the high number of children in the institution.
In the old 250,000 square foot supermarket (just over 23,000 square meters) 313 bedrooms were adapted, with no interior ceilings or doors, where children are forced to lie on their beds all the time. Although according to reports from the newspaper, they are being well fed, many of the young people consulted by the media testified that “the food was terrible and everyone was complaining about it”.
It is assumed that most of the teenage children entered the United States alone, but it can be ensured that the younger children were forcibly separated from their parents at the border under the new Trump zero tolerance policy for immigration. It requires a referral to criminal justice of anyone caught illegally crossing the border for, a decision that has resulted in the separation of a large number of children from their families.
“If you cross the border illegally, even if you do it for the first time, we’re going to prosecute you,” Jeff Sessions told the Association of State Criminal Investigation Agencies in May.
“If you are dealing with a child, we will prosecute you, and that child will probably be separated from you, as required by law. If you don’t want your child to be separated, then don’t take him or her illegally to the other side of the border.
“We’re trying to do the best we can to take care of these children. Our ultimate goal is to reunite the children with their families,” he said. “We are not a detention center. … What we operate are childcare shelters. There’s an extremely big difference.
According to federal officials, in the two weeks following U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement of the separation policy, 638 adults accompanied by 658 children were prosecuted.
It has not been explained whether other centers like these are operating in other parts of the country to imprison children in detention camps> It is known that Jeff Sessions ordered all federal prosecutors to bring criminal charges against all women detained for crossing the border illegally.
According to the Associated Press, which analyzed the Department of Homeland Security’s records, 1,995 children were separated between April 19 and May 31 of the year in question because of the new strong immigration policies.
Politically cornered by the widespread outrage that caused the forced removal of thousands of parents and children, Trump signed an executive order on June 21 to put an end to this course of action, which he had previously described as inevitable.
But as those comparisons continued, other signals to the Trump government from international organizations also emerged.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed deep concern about the “cruel practice” of separating children from their parents by force.
“The idea that any state should try to deter parents from migrating by inflicting such abuse on children is inconceivable,” the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, ZeidRa’ad Al Hussein, said at a session of the Council he heads.
Amnesty International’s director for the Americas, Erika Guevara-Rosas, said that “these acts meet the definitions of torture under U.S. and international law” because of the mental harm they cause to families for coercive purposes.
Trump responded to the allegations with a peculiar defense of his government’s policy, suggesting that adult migrants arrested at the border could be murderers and thieves. He also accused the Democratic opposition of being obstructionist and being primarily responsible for the separation of families in the United States.
June 28, 2018.
Russophobic Madness Affects the USA
Russophobic Madness Affects the USA
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Jack F. Matlock Jr., U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, called on his country’s citizens to end the Russian-phobic madness that dominates Congress and many of the media in North America in a recent article in several U.S. media outlets.He cites as a blatant example of this, the New York Times’ leading editorial of February 17 entitled “Stop letting the Russians get away with it, Mr. Trump”, in which the newspaper’s editors repudiate Russia for interfering in the US elections and call for greater sanctions against it in order to protect American democracy’.
“It had never occurred to me that our political system, no doubt dysfunctional, was so weak, underdeveloped and sick that with inept actions on the Internet it could be damaged,” says Matlock. But the New York Times isn’t the only one accused. Most other U.S. print and electronic media have followed suit. “Increasingly, both in Congress and in the media, Russian interference in the 2016 elections has been accepted as a fact.+
Among the Russian actions that have upset the American establishment and are now presented as events that have contributed from Russia to Trump’s rise is the creation by the Russian government of a sophisticated television service (Russia Today or RT) that provides entertainment, information and propaganda to foreign audiences, including that of the United States. The magnitude of its viewers may be several times smaller than that of the big U.S. media, but it has undoubtedly weakened the monopoly on news that the Western media have had and has had a huge reception everywhere, not excluding the United States.
Russian leaders, like most other countries in the world, thought Clinton would be elected, but some senior Russian officials expressed a preference for Trump’s candidacy after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared Hitler to President Putin and urged more active U.S. military intervention abroad, contrasting with Donald Trump, who then spoke out in favor of cooperation with Russia rather than treating it as an enemy, Matlock says.
No one seems to have made even a superficial study of the effect of Russian actions on the vote. There is no evidence that Russian activities have had a tangible impact on the election result, says Matlock.
But the most important fact, obscured by anti-Russian hysteria, is that it was the Americans who elected Trump under the terms set out in the Constitution; the Americans created the Electoral College, which allows a candidate with fewer popular votes to become president, and it is they who manipulate constituencies in favor of a particular political party when it suits the system.
The Supreme Court issued the infamous decision allowing for corporate funding of candidates for political office. The Americans created a Senate that is anything but democratic because it gives disproportionate representation to states with relatively small populations. It was US senators who established undemocratic procedures that allow minorities to block legislation or confirm appointments.
For Matlock, just because the Americans themselves chose their electoral system does not mean that Trump’s choice is good for the country. In his opinion, the 2016 presidential and legislative elections represented an imminent danger to the nation. They have created potential disasters that will severely test the checks and balances built into the Constitution. This is especially true today when both houses of Congress are controlled by the Republican Party, which in turn represents fewer voters than the opposition party.
Matlock claims he did not vote for Trump, but he believes that the allegation that Russian actions interfered with the elections, or damaged the quality of democracy in the country, is ridiculous, pathetic and shameful. “And I should add dangerous because making an enemy of Russia, the other nuclear superpower, is closer to political madness than anything else I can think of.
The former U.S. ambassador concludes his article by calling on his countrymen to desist from the current Russo-phobic madness and to encourage Presidents Trump and Putin to re-establish cooperation on nuclear security, non-proliferation, nuclear material control and nuclear arms reduction, issues that are of vital interest to both the United States and Russia.
June 25, 2018.
Trump’s War Against the Elephants
Trump’s War Against the Elephants
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
One might think that under this title it would be appropriate to read something about the conflicts that affect relations between Trump, the narcissistic president of the United States, and the leadership of the political party that had him as its candidate for that high office.The Republican Party has had the elephant as its electoral symbol since 1887 when a cartoonist drew it in response to the Democratic Party’s electoral symbol, the donkey.
The donkey had emerged in the 1828 elections as a Democratic symbol as an expression of mockery by his opponents of the stubbornness and lack of intelligence attributed to the then-Democratic presidential candidate, Andrew Jackson.
The insult was jocularly assimilated by the leaders of the Democratic Party who adopted the donkey as their electoral emblem, highlighting its capacity for work and its modesty. So the Republican elephant was born in response to the Democratic donkey invoking the mastodons for their memory, docility and submissiveness.
However, Donald Trump is not identified as a historic Republican or any other party member, since his political career has been characterized by repeated changes in party membership since he entered politics.
Trump sought the presidential nomination of the U.S. Reform Party in 2000. It was a populist formation of nationalist economic orientation founded in 1995 and ephemeral in existence. He withdrew before the voting began. He then considered running for high office as a Republican in the 2012 election, but eventually did not.
In June 2015, he officially announced his candidacy for the 2016 elections, and gradually became the favorite among the seventeen candidates in the Republican primaries. In May 2016, the last of his rivals suspended campaigning and in July he was nominated, with Mike Pence as his running mate, at the Republican Convention.
His campaign received unprecedented media coverage and international attention. Many of his statements in media interviews, on social networks and at campaign demonstrations were controversial. No few were considered false, but they were always widely disseminated.
He won the general election on November 8, 2016 against his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, and became president on January 20, 2017 at the age of 70, 7 months and 6 days, making him the oldest president to assume this position in his country. He is also the most affluent president, first without military service or political office before being elected and fifth in winning by the votes of the electoral college despite having lost the election by popular vote.
But, to return to the title of this commentary, it is curious that one of the many embarrassing situations Trump has been involved in stems from the accusations made against him for his support of elephant hunting in Africa.
Avaaz, a nongovernmental organization with more than 46 million members who protect nature and the ecosystem, which promotes actions aimed at protecting wildlife, has directly accused President Donald Trump of supporting elephant extermination actions in Africa.
A climax of this ruckus came when the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., mutilated an elephant during a hunt in Africa and appeared in the world’s press in a photo proudly depicting the white hunter with a smoking rifle next to the body of a large elephant. The president came to his aid and ordered the lifting of the ordinance prohibiting such “diversions” because of the danger they posed to this species in danger of extermination.
But this decision provoked justified outrage in the world. While it met the insistent demand of many wealthy American hunters thirsting for the morbid pleasure of killing harmless elephants in Africa in order to bring their ivory tusks to their mansions as trophies for the sake of human dignity and their role on the planet, nature and environmental protection organizations mobilized and succeeded, through massive global protest, in getting the United States to renounce such an offensive practice.
Following the general rejection of the measure, Trump tweeted that he would put this decision on the elephant hunt on “hold” but, earlier this year, in an interview, he assured us that the trophy ban act would not stand for long.
Obviously Avaaz’s protest has continued and the issue of the elephants remains on Trump’s agenda and with it the confrontation between the US president and the Republican party’s electoral symbol that supposedly sponsors him.
June 21, 2018.
Che in Europe a Half Century Later
Che Guevara in Europe a Half Century Later
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Who could separate Che’s image and ideas from the 1968 student explosion, known as the “French May”, which led to a strike of 9 million workers in France, the largest in the history of the workers’ movement, and spread to many other countries in the industrialized world?
The most repeated among the slogans and writings on the walls identified with the student movement that sought to revolutionize French society at the time was Che’s recommendation, synthesized in the phrase “Let’s be realistic: let’s do the impossible”.
The photographic image of Che, with his hair scrambled under his black beret adorned with a star, became famous in the demonstrations against imperialism and the authoritarian and repressive capitalist order, which crowded the streets of Paris, Berlin, Rome and other European cities 50 years ago.
The student protests that took place in many of the great cities of the planet against the U.S. war against Vietnam – which in March 1968 added to its crimes the atrocious My Lai massacre – echoed another of Che’s slogans, that of “creating two, three… many Vietnams”, proclaimed two years earlier from the place where he was already fighting outside Cuba.
For a good part of the intelligentsia and students of the European left, Cuba was an unorthodox, creative and original alternative to the bureaucratic “real socialism” of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact neighbors.
“For an intellectual, it is totally impossible not to be pro-Cuban,” said French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre in an interview. “Fidel started from opposition to Batista and, through the very radicalization of his action, soon discovered that behind Batista was the strength of the army and behind him, the North American power. The logic of radicalization is relentless….” Sartre proclaimed: “Castroism has nothing to give us, except the example of its radicalization.
In January 1968, in front of hundreds of European intellectuals attending the Havana Cultural Congress, Fidel Castro harshly criticized the stagnation of revolutionary ideas in the socialist camp.
“Because there can be nothing more anti-Marxist than dogma, there can be nothing more anti-Marxist than the petrification of ideas. And there are ideas that are even wielded in the name of Marxism that look like real fossils. Marxism needs to develop, to come out of its stalemate, to interpret today’s realities with an objective and scientific sense, to behave as a revolutionary force and not as a pseudo-revolutionary church.
Upon their return to Europe, the intellectuals sent out vibrant testimony of their experiences in Cuba. They had a strong impact on the European leftist youth and extolled the revolutionary advances in Cuba, its cultural pluralism and the emphasis on moral stimuli to the detriment of material incentives, to create the “new man” Che Guevara dreamed.
Anyone can assume that the critical pronouncements so often made by Che Guevara about the need to overcome the immobility of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR and other countries of “real socialism” were not well-received in those nations. It could not have been pleasant in the official circles of the USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe for Che to say in Algeria, at the Second Afro-Asian Seminar, that
“The socialist countries have a moral duty to liquidate their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West and to set aside the supposed principle of reciprocal benefits in trade, because they force the underdeveloped countries to sell with the prices that the law of the value and the international relations of unequal exchange impose on the backward countries.”
In his closing speech to the Havana Cultural Congress in January 1968, before some of the intellectuals who would lead the events of May four months later, Fidel Castro said, in homage to his faithful companion in the struggle:
“Who were the ones who raised their name in Europe, who raised and exalted their example, who were the ones who mobilized, painted signs and organized events all over Europe? It was honest and sensitive men and women who had the attitude to assimilate, to understand, to admire, to do justice; to those who wonder why Che Guevara died, to those who are incapable of understanding, and who will never understand, why he died, nor will they ever be able to die as he died, nor be revolutionaries like him.”
June 18, 2018.
New General Assembly President Elected
UN President Elected Without Yankee Endorsement
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Although it is an elective office with more ceremonial than political importance, the circumstances surrounding the person chosen to chair the meetings of the UN’s highest body has resonanated widely in the diplomatic media around the world.
With a vote of 128 countries in favor and 62 against, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa was elected President of the General Assembly of the United Nations for the 73rd session of the organization’s highest world body, from September 2018 until the September 2019.
The Latin American Information Agency (ALAI) based in Ecuador, is dedicated to the dissemination of information and the defence of the right to information. communication, research and training of experts from the United Nations system. and social organizations in the communication processes of America Latin America. ALAI, points out that Espinosa, 53, became the first Latin American women and fourth in the world to occupy this position. in the f the world organization’s 73 year life.
According to ALAI “this election was a setback for the government of the United States which did not approve of the progressive profile of Foreign Minister Espinosa. In the last eleven years, she has held high office during the government of Rafael Correa and was appointed Foreign Minister of the Republic by the President Lenin Moreno. The latter won with a program that contemplated the continuation of the Citizens’ Revolution led by Correa, on whom Moreno later turned his back.”
Espinosa’s election is a recognition of Ecuador’s foreign policy of recent years. She hass been recognized internationally when she was named chair of the G77 plus China (2017). In addition, Ecuador, together with South Africa, chairs a working group in the Human Rights Council, which seeks to to establish a legally binding instrument to regulate the transnational corporations, among other laudable purposes.
Washington was pulling its strings to block theEcuadorian’s candidacy. It openly supported the Honduran Mary Elizabeth Flores Flake, daughter of ex-president of the President Carlos Flores Facussé, who was trained United States universities.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley met with President Juan Orlando Hernandez for this purpose when he visited Honduras in February of this year to thank Honduras for its vote in favor of the resolution recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel without regard to Palestine.
By the way, this Washington-driven decision was one of the most important reasons that contributed to Flores’s defeat in the election for the United Nations General Assembly presidency.
The choice of Espinosa is also – admits ALAI – a setback. for the Ecuadorian right-wing represented by the Creando Opportunities (CREO) and Social Christian (PSC) parties that have always been ready to follow American policy. In the last few weeks, with the assistance of the major private media and diplomats from the right, a campaign was launched that had never been seen before because of its intensity against Foreign Minister Espinosa. In the media and social networks they launched hateful accusations in which there is they spared no epithets against Espinosa, such as “castrochavista”, “Sandinista,” etc.
In order to prejudice Espinosa’s candidacy at the United Nations, CREO and the PSC tried unsuccessfully to prosecute politically in the National Assembly to Espinosa for “failure to comply with the functions of her office.”
“Sensitive as he is to media pressure, President Lenin Moreno soon winked at the campaign. In his own style and with a little tap under Espinosa, Moreno broke away from the decision to grant Ecuadorian citizenship to Julian Assange, a refugee who had been given asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in the United Kingdom. This was one of the most important themes of the alleged political trial of Espinosa as was the media campaign against her.”
María Fernanda Espinosa dedicated her election “to all the women of the world who today are involved in politics, who are facing attacks by political and media circles marked by machismo and discrimination”, as the Ecuadorian diplomat pointed out in her speech at the United Nations after her election.
She said one of her biggest challenges will be to accompany implementation of reforms to the United Nations system. “We have the challenge of build a stronger and more efficient organization.
Strengthening multilateralism is not an option, it is an obligation. It is urgent that the United Nations show a capacity to respond to the needs of the United Nations global challenges, and for the organization to move closer to people, Espinosa said.
June 11, 2018.
Cultural Civil War in the U.S.A.
Cultural Civil War in the USA
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“America is at war with itself. It is actually a function of the nation’s heritage, the past that challenges specific aspects of a modern present. This gives rise to a flow of traditions. Racism, a pseudo-border mentality and religious fundamentalism persist at the present time. These are the traditions that characterized the first half of the nation’s history, and while some of them may have retreated into latency in the last fifty years, they are now back with us. As a result, Americans are in the midst of an ongoing culture war that in many ways is as old as the nation itself.”
The paragraph above is the opening of an article published in the latest issue of the U.S. online weekly CounterPunch by Lawrence Davidson, a leading scholar who, born in a secular Jewish home in Philadelphia, was one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during the war against Vietnam.
In his essay, Davidson states that a racist culture took shape in American life before the founding of the United States. This culture was particularly rooted in the colonies/states of the South, where slavery became not only a fundamental economic institution, but also an institution that projected the image that the South had of itself. In the North, a racist culture was also widespread and society was segregated, but the difference was that the labour system in the North was not based on slavery.
In the South, this deep-rooted culture of racism was briefly interrupted when, after the Civil War, there was a brief period of Reconstruction (1865-1877) during which the northern military occupation suppressed most racist laws. The main reason for this was political and not social. Under the Northern occupation regime, black men were recognized as citizens and could vote. This led to support for Abraham Lincoln’s party and allowed abolitionist Republicans to retain control of Congress. Reconstruction only lasted as long as the abolitionist faction dominated. It ended in 1877.
The US military was withdrawn from the southern states. Almost immediately there was a region-wide reversion to a form of race relations in which the oppression of slavery was replaced by “Jim Crow” laws that legitimized segregation and discrimination against black people.
This situation lasted for nearly another hundred years, until in the 1960s, when a massive civil disobedience movement known as the Civil Rights Movement finally succeeded in outlawing racist practices within the public sphere in both the South and the North.
Davidson stresses that the changes were limited to the public sphere because the private sphere was left to each person’s individual will. Nothing was done to change racist perceptions and behavior within the private sphere. There was not even any effort to force the teaching of acceptance in public schools in order to better erode private racist perceptions.
Racism is an important issue in the nation’s current civil cultural war, but it is not the only one. Another is the fight for firearms laws, which are currently inadequate to ensure public safety.
The myth of the robust and armed individual is in fact a product of the television and film distortion of the history of the “old West”.
Davidson refers to the survival of nineteenth-century Christian fundamentalism, which, while not including all Christians in the country, encompasses millions of believers who still adhere to the “faith of their fathers” in a way that fosters social inequality and undermines the secular nature of the state. It is also a faith riddled with racial and gender intolerance, full of shameful hypocrisy and self-righteous self-centeredness.
The Christian right, along with gun rights enthusiasts and those who privately support a diffuse stream of racist traditionalism, believe that modern movements for equal rights, as well as the demand for security and protection communities through law and regulation, are threats to genuine American culture because they threaten the traditions of “freedom” that make their world ideologically enjoyable.
Against this backdrop, it is clear what the president means when he calls for “making America great again”.
June 7, 2018.
Where Will US Domestic Politics Go?
Where Will US Domestic Politics Go?
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The surprising performance of veteran Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential elections and the disappointing performance at the top post by the unpredictable Donald Trump have stimulated a very large part of the US public – especially (but not only) Democratic Party supporters – to believe that the United States needs a Sanders and a new party.
Many of those who reason in this way believe that the old Vermont politician should take up the challenge to defeat Trump in 2020, with or without the backing of the machinery of the historic “donkey” party. Others feel that the energy of a younger leader who would take up the ideological banner of the old Sanders, with the support of a new party with or without Bernie, should be available.
These and many other variations have in common the assumption that the current President Donald Trump has already dug the grave of the Republican party and his own with his performance in the first two years of his catastrophic term.
According to the most credible polls, about 60% of U.S. voters in general, and nearly 80% of those who are not affiliated with either of the two major parties, are in favor of the emergence of a new party of majorities.
Writing in the Huffington Post, September 27 of last year, writer and journalist Gail Mellor quoted Sanders’ words calling for “the unity of the vast majority of Americans to survive together, because if we start divided, we will not succeed”. However, she recalls that at least four times in the last two years, when she has been ready to start up a new progressive party, it has been Bernie himself who has blocked it.
According to Mellor, Sanders has been working to unify the deeply-divided and corrupt Democratic party – to which he himself does not belong – but, in practice, his position has not contributed to the rise of a new progressive political force with the potential to come to the forefront of the country’s leadership. This is because he has insisted on the survival of the Democratic Party with a different set of policies as a prerequisite.
The main support Bernie Sanders had when he aspired to the White House came from “Generation Y,” also called “the millennials,” names demographers and researchers give to people born between 1980 and the early years of the new 21st century, who represent 28% of United States voters today.
He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 because young progressives from that party dragged him into an effort to clean up U.S. politics, end ongoing wars, restore social safety nets and confront climate change. They had not been able to recruit someone at the national level of the Democratic or Republican parties to lead the fight for this agenda who was not receiving money from global corporations.
Sanders, an independent (non-partisan), had held state and federal office without party or corporate backing for 42 years. Despite being a convincing, passionate and well-informed politician, he was a stranger at the national level.
It was the millennials of the Democratic Party and its environment, the supporters of the country’s withdrawal from imperialist activity, of a policy of cultural and political change, and of the reorientation toward social democracy, who made him a national public figure and led him to compete for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the White House.
Although formally independent, Bernie acted as a Democrat because he was aware that the two dominant parties of the system had closed access to the Presidency of the nation to anyone who did not do so through them. The Democrats welcomed Sanders as their candidate because he gave the party’s primary campaign an illusion of competition that would help its already elected candidate to legitimize herself.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) calculated that Hillary Clinton would easily beat Trump because she had a huge amount of corporate money, while Sanders, with the support of young progressives, was able to gather, in a short time, large crowds for Hillary Clinton campaign rallies.
It seems obvious that Sanders dreams of the possibility of taking the Democratic Party over, at the head of a vigorous minority movement. This would not be an easy thing to achieve but there remains the alternative, feared by the neoliberals of the party, of going on to the formation of a new independent progressive party.
June 4, 2018.