Manuel E. Yepe 239
AOC dismisses capitalism
Democratic Hopeful AOC Dismisses Capitalism
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, identified in the press by her initials AOC, is one of the probable candidates of the Democratic Party to integrate the candidature for the presidency of the United States in 2020.
Born in New York, on October 13, 1989, she won the Democratic primary in the 14th congressional district of New York after defeating Democratic leader Joseph Crowley by a very large majority. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and has been linked to a wide variety of other progressive U.S. political platforms.
In the course of an interview she gave in Austin, Texas, to The Intercept, AOC gave her opinions on the defects she observed in the capitalist system.
The interview took place when the first vote was being taken in the Senate on a draft resolution known as Green New Deal, a set of her policy proposals for integrating the United Nations Environment Program that originated in a green economy initiative known as the “Global Green New Deal.”
This initiative, which evokes the plans of Franklin D. Roosevelt for economic stimulation triggered by the Great Depression, is a resolution drafted by Alexandria and one of her Democratic colleagues, Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts. Though it is not likely to see the light as legislation, for the time being it symbolizes the new progressive momentum after the Democratic victory in the House of Representatives last November.
The 14-page document calls for a reduction in greenhouse gase emissions by 40% to 60% by 2030 and bringing global emissions down to zero by 2050. AOC has reached that conclusion because she believes that “the United States is dealing with the consequences of putting profits above everything else in our society and that’s what makes the capitalist system, as it is today, irredeemable”.
Although it is seemingly ironic to bash capitalism in the midst of a marketing orgy funded by the technology industry, AOC maintains that “capitalism is the ideology of capital and in this system the most important thing is the concentration of capital, the search for and the maximization of profits… and that’s why I think capitalism can’t be saved “, she said.
Talking about her bill called Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez said she hopes to address minority communities and places like Flint, Michigan, because these groups were left behind by the original New Deal — the one that was approved by President Franklin Roosevelt.
While most Americans view the original New Deal as the precursor of social welfare programs that benefited millions of white and minority Americans, Ocasio-Cortez says the law was, in fact, deeply racist, because of what’s been called the “red line.” “The New Deal was an extremely racist economic policy that drew red lines around the black and mulatto communities to isolate them from white America.”
“It allowed white Americans to access mortgage loans that black Americans could not aspire to and they were denied access to the greatest source of inter-generational wealth,” argues AOC.
Ocasio-Cortez is a progressive member of the Democratic Socialists of America. A defender of universal health care and of the Jobs Guarantee program, she calls for an end to the privatization of prisons and access to public university education free of charge; she also favors arms control policies. She criticizes Israel’s foreign policy and described the death of Palestinian demonstrators on the Gaza border in 2018 as a “massacre.” AOC supports the abolition of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and maintains that this agency uses clandestine detention centers.
In the legislative elections, held on 6 November 2018, she won the seat for New York’s 14th Congressional District. Since her election, she has been the target of all sorts of attacks by conservative sectors in the U.S. She is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress in the history of the United States after surpassing Republican Elise Stefanik who was elected in 2014 at the age of 30.
Although AOC’s political, economic, and international agenda is a long way from being an anti-imperialist program for real social justice, the presence of this possible candidate for the presidency of the United States indicates a healthy trend for humanity.
March 16, 2019.
Who Will Be the War Candidate in 2020
Who Will Be the War Candidate in 2020
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
“The president has said he doesn’t want to see this country wrapped up in endless wars… and I agree with that,” Bernie Sanders said to the Fox News audience last week at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Then, looking directly at the camera, he added: “Mr. President, tonight you have the opportunity to do something extraordinary: sign that resolution. Saudi Arabia must not determine the military or foreign policy of this country.”
Sanders was talking about a resolution on the War Powers Act that would put an end to U.S. involvement in the 5-year civil war in Yemen. This war has created one of the biggest humanitarian crises in the world of our time, with thousands of children dead in the middle of a cholera epidemic and famine.
Supported by a Democratic Party united in Congress, and an anti-interventionist faction of the Republican Party headed by Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee of Utah, the War Powers resolution had passed both houses of Congress.
But 24 hours after Sanders urged the President to sign it, Trump vetoed the resolution, describing it as a “dangerous attempt to undermine my constitutional authority.”
According to journalist Buchanan J. Buchanan, “with enough Republican votes in both chambers to resist Trump’s veto, this could have been the end of the matter; but it wasn’t. In fact, Trump gave the Democrats his them for peace by 2020.”
If Sanders emerged as the nominee, we would have an election with a Democrat running with the catchphrase “no more wars” that Trump had promoted in 2016. Thus, Trump would be defending the bombing of Yemeni rebels and civilians by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
In 2008, John McCain, hawk leader in the Senate, was defeated by the progressive Illinois Senator Barack Obama, who had won his nomination by defeating the bellicose Hillary Clinton who had voted for authorizing the war in Iraq.
In 2012, the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, who was much more aggressive than Obama in his approach to Russia lost.
However, in 2016, Trump presented himself as a different kind of Republican, an opponent of the Iraq war, an anti-interventionist, and promising to get along with Russian Vladimir Putin and getting out of the Middle East wars.
None of the main candidates for the 2020 Democratic nomination — Joe Biden, Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker– seems as aggressive as Trump has become.
Trump pulled the United States out of the nuclear agreement with Iran, negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry, and re-imposed severe sanctions against the Iranians. He declared the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran a terrorist organization, to which Tehran responded with the same action against the U.S. Central Command.
Trump has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, moved the U.S. embassy there, closed the consulate that was in charge of Palestinian affairs, cut off aid to Palestinians, recognized the annexation by Israel of the Golan Heights snatched from Syria in 1967 and kept silent about Netanyahu’s threat to annex the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Trump has spoken of getting all U.S. troops out of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. However, they are still there.
Although Sanders supports Israel, he says he is looking for a two-state solution, and criticizes Netanyahu’s regime.
Trump came to power promising to get along with Moscow, but he sent Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine and announced the US withdrawal of the 1987 Treaty of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) subscribed by Ronald Reagan, who banned all ground-based nuclear intermediate range missiles.
When Putin sent a hundred Russian soldiers to Venezuela to repair the S-400 anti-aircraft and anti-missile system that was damaged in the recent blackouts, Trump provocatively ordered the Russians to “get out” of the Bolivarian and Chavista country. According to Buchanan, the gravity center of U.S. policy is shifting towards Trump’s position in 2016. And the anti-interventionist wing of the Republican Party is growing.
The anti-interventionist wing of the Republican Party together with the anti-war wing of the Democratic Party in Congress are capable — as they were War Powers Act resolution on Yemen– to produce a new bipartisan majority.
Buchanan predicts that in the 2020 primaries, foreign policy will be in the center and the Democratic Party would have captured the ground with the catchphrase “no more wars” that candidate Donald Trump exploited in 2016.
April 22, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Atomic Bombing of Japan Reinterpreted
Atomic Bombing of Japan Reinterpreted
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In the summer of 1945, U.S. President Harry Truman sought a decisive blow against the Japanese Empire. Despite the allies’ many victories during 1944 and 1945, Truman believed that Emperor Hirohito would urge his generals to continue the fight. The United States had suffered 76,000 casualties in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and the Truman administration anticipated that a prolonged invasion of continental Japan would bring even more devastating numbers. However, Washington was developing plans for a final assault on Japan that it named Operation Downfall.
Estimates of possible mortality were frightening. The Joint Chiefs of Staff estimated that the casualties would be 1.2 million. Admiral Chester Nimitz and General Douglas MacArthur predicted more than 1,000 casualties per day, while the Department of the Navy predicted four million. They estimated that Japan’s enemies would have up to ten million casualties. The slightly more optimistic Los Angeles Times projected “only” one million deaths.
From these figures, it was no wonder that the United States chose the nuclear option when it dropped the bomb called Little Boy on Hiroshima on August 6 and then Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9. Japan surrendered 24 days later, avoiding the dreaded predictions of millions of American deaths cited here.
“Such is the narrative that has been taught in American schools. But like so many other historical versions, it turned out to be an oversimplification and historically distorted,” says Alan Mosley in an article published in the Russian Strategic Culture Online Journal on December 31, 2018.
When President Truman approved the deployment of the new atomic bombs, he was convinced that the Japanese planned to continue the war until the bitter end. Many have argued that victim estimates forced him to act cautiously for the lives of U.S. soldiers in the Pacific, but this version ignores that other figures close to Truman came to the opposite conclusion.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “I was against the use of the atomic bomb for two reasons. First, because the Japanese were ready to surrender and it was unnecessary to hit them with the horrible bomb. Second, because I hated that our country was the first to use that weapon. He used the same argument as then-Secretary of War Henry Stimson in 1945, who recounts in his memoirs:
“I expressed my grave doubts to him, first because I believed that Japan had already been defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and second because I believed that our country should not scandalize world public opinion through the use of a weapon whose use, in my opinion, was no longer obligatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, looking for some way to surrender at the lowest possible cost.
Fleet Admiral William Leahy, the highest-ranking U.S. military officer on active duty during World War II and one of Harry Truman’s top military advisers wrote in his 1950 book “I Was There,” “The use of this barbaric weapon in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material help in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective maritime blockade and the successful bombardment with conventional weapons.
Foreign Policy magazine wrote that the most critical day for Japan was August 9, the first day the Japanese Supreme Council met to seriously discuss surrender. The date is significant because it is not the day after the bombing of Hiroshima, but the day on which the Soviet Union entered the Pacific theater of war invading Japanese-occupied Manchuria on three fronts. Before August 8, the Japanese expected Russia to be an intermediary in negotiations for the end of the war, but when the Russians spoke out against Japan, they became an even greater threat to the Japanese than the United States.
Russia’s position, in fact, forced the Japanese to consider unconditional surrender. Until then, they were only open to a conditional surrender that would guarantee Emperor Hirohito some dignity and protection from war crimes trials. Foreign Policy concludes that, as in European theatre, Truman did not defeat Japan; Stalin did.
Truman never publicly regretted his decision to use atomic bombs. However, subsequent studies supported by testimonies of surviving Japanese leaders involved have testified that Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if an invasion had not been planned or contemplated.
April 17, 2019.
Assange, Between Gratitude and Betrayal
Assange, Between Gratitude and Betrayal
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Special for the newspaper POR ESTO! of Mérida, Mexico.
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann. Julian Assange was arrested in England on Thursday, April 11, and is feared to be extradited to the United States to face charges for his actions during the Obama administration.
According to an editorial in the Washington Post in 2011, such a conviction “would also cause collateral damage to the liberties of the U.S. media so Washington should not attempt to do so with Julian Assange.
The Post’s editorial of years ago is still relevant, given that Assange would be tried for a “crime” which took place almost a decade ago. What has changed since then is the public perception of Assange and, in a supreme irony, that of Donald Trump. At one point in Trump’s demagoguery, he proclaimed himself a fanatic twitter lover of WikiLeaks,. Now he has now been left as the ultimate beneficiary of public support for initiating a process that the Obama administration hesitated to push when he was President.
The current accusation is the extension of a years-long effort, begun prior to Trump, to build a legal argument against those who release secrets the government finds embarassing.
But much of the U.S. citizenry now sees the arrested founder of WikiLeaks through the lens of the 2016 elections, having been denounced as a Russian ally in favor of Trump’s election.
Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, said as early as 2010 the founder of WikiLeaks was the center of an “active and ongoing criminal investigation. At the time, Assange had won, or was about to win, several journalism awards for publishing shameful classified information about many governments, including the video “Collateral Murder” delivered by Chelsea Manning showing a helicopter attack in Iraq that killed two English reporters.
The prosecution is known to say that “it is part of the conspiracy that Assange and Manning took steps to hide Manning as the source of the revelation,” while the defense will argue that reporters have extremely complicated relationships with sources, especially with whistleblowers like Manning, who are often under extreme stress and emotionally vulnerable.
The indictment now filed against Assange is just a technicality: an indictment for a (seemingly unsuccessful) attempt to help Chelsea Manning crack a government password. Assange’s lawyer, Barry Pollock, said the charges “boil down to encouraging a source to provide information and taking steps to protect the identity of that source.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated: “Any U.S. prosecution of Assange for WikiLeaks publishing operations would be unprecedented, unconstitutional, and open the door to criminal investigations by other news organizations.
Assange’s case, and the very serious problems it poses, will be affected by things that happened long after the alleged crimes like Assange’s role in the 2016 election.
Not only did this case have nothing to do with Russiagate, but in one of the strangest unreported details of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, he never interviewed or attempted to interview Assange. In fact, it appears that none of the 2,800 citations, 500 witness interviews and 500 search warrants in Mueller’s investigation pointed to Assange or WikiLeaks.
As for Assange’s case, coverage by a national press corps that welcomed him at the time of these crimes – and that repeated his leaks widely – will likely focus on the issue of hacking, as if it weren’t really about reducing legitimate journalism.
“The weakness of the U.S. indictment against Assange is shocking,” Edward Snowden said on Twitter. “The accusation that he tried to help crack a password during his world-famous report has been public for nearly a decade: he is the count that Obama’s Justice Department refused to accuse, saying it endangered journalism.
In fact, it would be difficult to find a more extreme example of how deep the bipartisan consensus is to expand surveillance of leaks.
Both happened, however, and we should stop being surprised by them, even as Donald Trump takes the final step of this journey begun by Barack Obama.
April 15, 2019.
Venezuela Won the First Round
Venezuela Won the First Round Against the Empire
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The clash between Venezuela and the Empire last weekend ended with a humiliating defeat for Elliott Abrams, the alleged designer of the operation.
What the neocons initially planned may never be known, but what is known is that they could not culminate in an invasion or another false flag operation.
The most notable facet of the confrontation, according to the most objective international experts and observers, has been the scant effect that Anglo-Zionist propaganda had inside Venezuela.
Although certainly a few senior officers and Venezuelan soldiers betrayed their country by uniting with the enemy, the overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan military remained faithful to the Constitution and their homeland.
President Maduro and his government successfully carried out a strategy that combined roadblocks, a musical concert on the Venezuelan side, and the minimal – but effective – use of riot police to keep the border closed and order throughout the homeland. Most notably, the “unidentified snipers” did not seem to shoot on both sides (the Empire’s favorite tactic to justify its interventions).
Outside Venezuelan national territory, this first confrontation was also a defeat for the Empire. Not only because most countries in the world refused to recognize Washington’s puppet, but because the level of rejection of a possible invasion proved remarkably intense, and the Internet and the blogosphere overwhelmingly opposed U.S. intervention. This situation created many internal political tensions in several Latin American countries whose public opinion is firmly opposed to any form of U.S. interference in Latin America, even if not with the historic oligarchy.
The leaders of the Empire and their puppets do not hide the fact that their goal is to overthrow the constitutional government and to replace it with the kind of regime that Washington seems to have been able to impose on Colombia. Pompeo, Abrams, Pence, Elliot Abrams and Marco Rubio were particularly hysterical in their threats, although the oligarchies (not so the peoples) of the “Lima Group” countries submissively abided by them.
Certain American politicians resorted to their usual childish language for threats in situations of gravity as an obvious show of contempt for their own population. For those bewildered because adult politicians used the language.
No one should be surprised when they claim that Maduro is a “new Hitler” who commits a “genocide” against his own people. Or that he is accused of using “chemical weapons”.
Last weekend’s military defeat of Venezuela’s self-appointed interim president, Juan Guaidó, has been publicly reproached by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. The White House has attempted to evade responsibility for what its espionage and subversion agencies have been unable to achieve. They’d saught the adherence of an emblematic number of traitors from the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB) to the action of the alleged coup plotters, and failed to get it. Pence reproached the supposed interim president of Venezuela for the failures suffered after his recognition last January 23, actions called to justify the military intervention designed by Washington.
Their main demand was against the support of the FANB for the legitimate president, Nicolás Maduro.
Guaidó had promised the U.S. government that if the majority of world leaders recognized him as president of Venezuela, at least half of the FANB officers would defect, which did not even remotely happen.
The U.S. official also questioned the uncommitted attitude of Venezuelan millionaires abroad who “were expected a more determined contribution of money to finance the bribery of police, military and politicians and their adherence to the Guaidó sphere, which did not happen either.
Important international decision-making centers allied to the Trump regime have warned that the Venezuelan opposition “could lose the momentum” that the U.S. supposedly provided with the sudden appearance of the puppet Guaidó. He certainly has not yet found territory to govern and perhaps would have to do so from Colombia or another nation whose government is not ashamed to cede a piece of its sovereignty to the United States.
March 4, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
WAR AGAINST THE CHINESE ECONOMIC MODEL
WAR AGAINST THE CHINESE ECONOMIC MODEL
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The growing hostility of Western governments towards China has more to do with the interests of Western investors than with legitimate security fears, according to Stephen Gowans, a Canadian political analyst, who regularly publishes in the Voltaire Network, Global Research and other progressive media.
The U.S. National Defense Strategy for 2018 ranks China at the top of the world’s external threats to the United States, even above Russia, North Korea, Iran, and “various terrorist groups with global reach”.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo describes China as the “great long-term threat to the United States” and the Trump administration, according to the Washington Post, considers China to be “the real enemy.”
What has China done to deserve so many “distinctions”? The answer –according to Gowans– is that China has developed a state-led economic model that limits the profit opportunities of the U.S. investors and defies their control over high-tech economic sectors that include artificial intelligence and robotics, which are essential to U.S. military supremacy.
“Washington is immersed in a multi-faceted war to prevent Beijing from going ahead with plans to become world leader in10 broad areas of technology, including information technology, aerospace and electric vehicles”. Washington seeks to “curtail China’s plans to develop advanced technology ” and “force China to allow US companies to sell their products and operate freely” in China, in conditions that will allow the United States to maintain its economic and military supremacy.
For its part, “China seeks to alter a global economic system that only allows them to manufacture t-shirts while the US is in charge of high-tech productions,” according to Yang Weimin, senior economic advisor to Chinese President Xi Jinping. But now Xi is “determined to have China dominate its own microchips, systems, and other basic technologies” in order to become “technologically self-sufficient.”
But self-sufficiency in industries such as aerospace, telecommunications, robotics and artificial intelligence means taking China –a huge market– out of the scope of US high-tech companies.
In addition, given that the supremacy of the West has always depended on technological superiority, China’s efforts to challenge the monopoly of high technology directly generate a renewed challenge to Washington’s capacity to utilize the Pentagon as an instrument to obtain advantages in trade and investment opportunities for U.S. entrepreneurs.
China’s economic model is called state capitalism or “market socialism.”
Both terms refer to the two defining factors of the Chinese model: the presence of markets, for materials, products and labor force, and the role of the State, in charge of the industrial planning and corporate ownership.
The “pillar of the economy” is made up by the more than 100,000 state-owned enterprises of China. The State has a strong presence in the higher echelons of the economy.
“Key sectors, such as banking, are dominated by companies controlled by the State”. State-owned enterprises “represent about 96% of the telecommunications industry, 92% of energy and 74% of automobiles”.
Beijing is the largest shareholder of the country’s 150 largest companies.
The state National Commission of Development and Reform is in charge of industrial planning. The Commission uses a variety of means to foster Chinese industry in key sectors, and develops plans to give preferential treatment to Chinese companies in strategic areas.
Beijing is counting on state-owned companies to become leaders in semiconductors, electric vehicles, robotics and other high technology sectors and finances them by means of subsidies and funding by state-owned banks.
The Planning Commission also guides the development of steel, photovoltaic energy, high-speed trains and other critical industries.
Beijing has closed the door to foreign ownership in sectors it considers strategic or vital to national security. These include “finance, defense, energy, telecommunications, railways and ports”, as well as steel.
All the steel companies are state owned and are all financed by state owned banks.
In total, China has restricted or closed foreign investment in 63 sectors of its own economy, such as stem cell research, education and training, satellites, prospection and exploitation of numerous minerals, the media, as well as research institutes in the humanities and social sciences.
January 24, 2019.
A FORECAST OF DONALD TRUMP’S FIASCO IN VENEZUELA
A FORECAST OF DONALD TRUMP’S FIASCO IN VENEZUELA
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In late November, President Donald Trump announced that Washington had withdrawn its recognition of Nicolas Maduro as the President of Venezuela, and has now given it to the Head of the National Assembly in contempt, José Guaido.
In this way, the United States will openly support the regime change in Caracas This has been the dream of the Neo-cons for a long time and can become a nightmare for Trump.
“Why does the American President act like this?” Ronald “Ron” Paul wonders on his blog. Paul, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, member of the Republican Party and former representative to the House in the U.S. Congress, who holds the largest record of conservative votes for a representative in Congress since 1937.
He has been called the “intellectual godfather” of the Tea Party. He has achieved notoriety for his libertarian positions on many political issues, often clashing with the leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties. Paul has run for the Presidency three times: in 1988 as candidate of the Libertarian Party, and in 2008 and 2012 as a Republican.
“According to the U.S. State Department, the Administration is acting to help enforce the Venezuelan Constitution… As if the Administration were so anxious to enforce its own Constitution!” Paul ironically wrote on January 29.
It’s also ironic that Trump — a president who has spent his first two years in office fighting accusations that a foreign country interfered in U.S. elections– not only meddles in a foreign election, but also grants himself the right to appoint the president of a foreign country.
“How would we react if the Chinese and the Russians decided that President Trump is not upholding the U.S. Constitution and recognized Nancy Pelosi as President of the United States?” asks Paul.
Even those who would like to see a change of government in Venezuela should reject any notion that such change must be “helped” by the United States. According to news reports, Vice President Mike Pence was so involved in Venezuelan internal affairs that in fact he urged Guaido to name himself president and pledged America’s support. This is not just foolish but also very dangerous. A Venezuelan civil war would result in massive death and even more economic misery.
Regime change has long been the U.S. policy for Venezuela. The United States has been waging an economic war against it practically since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, was first elected in 1998. The objective of the U.S. sanctions and other measures against Venezuela and other countries targeted by Washington’s is to make life so miserable for the average citizen that it would make them stand up and throw out their leaders. But, of course, once they do, they must replace those leaders with someone approved by Washington.
“Remember,” writes Paul,” after the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, when the people rose up and overthrew their leader, the “wrong” candidate was then elected. The army moved and deposed the elected president and replaced it with one approved by Washington. The then Secretary of State, John Kerry, called that “restoring democracy.”
“It’s tragicomic,” says Ron Paul, “that Trump appointed the convicted criminal Elliot Abrams, as his key person to “restore democracy” in Venezuela. Abrams played a key role in the Iran-Contras scandal and became one of the main architects of the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. His role in the promotion of the horrible violence in Latin America in the decade of the 1980’s should disqualify him from returning to any public office.
“Instead of this coup d’état, a better policy of ours to relate to Venezuela in the last 20 years should have been one of commitment and trade. If we really believe in the superiority of a free market system, we must also believe that we can only preach by example, not by forcing our system on others,” stresses Paul.
Just four months ago, President Trump said at the UN that he respected “the right of every nation to practice its own customs, beliefs and traditions. The United States cannot tell others how to live, work or worship. In return, we should only ask respect for our sovereignty.”
“Unfortunately, it seems that these were just empty words. We know from what happened in Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. that this will not end well for Trump… or for the United States. We must leave Venezuela in peace!” concludes Ron Paul whom no one can accuse of being a defender of Socialism.
January 31, 2019.
U.S. PLANS AGAINST CARACAS ARE WORSE
U.S. PLANS AGAINST CARACAS ARE WORSE
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“Contrary to what Venezuelans believe, the objective of the United States is not to overthrow President Maduro but to apply in the “Caribbean Basin” the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski doctrine, and to destroy the state structures in the countries of the region. This requires the elimination of Nicolas Maduro, but also of Juan Guaidó”.
That’s how Thierry Meyssan, founding president of the Damascus-based Voltaire Network, and a brilliant specialist on Middle East topics, sees it.
This scheme was already used in 2011 to make the internal issues that took place in Syria appear as an external aggression perpetrated by an army of mercenaries.
In the case of Venezuela, the Organization of American States (OAS) — known around the world as the Yankee Ministry of Colonies, and whose Secretary General immediately recognized Guaidó as President – undertook the role that the Arab League had in the case of Syria. The role of the so-called Friends of Syria’s (which in fact were of Washington’s) was played by the Lima Group, also under U.S. control.
Burhan Ghalioun, an old collaborator of the American National Endowment for Democracy ( NED), played the part of leader of the opposition in Syria. He was soon replaced by another little character, who, in turn, was replaced by another, then by another, and again for yet another; so many times that no one remembers their names anymore. You can assume that Juan Guaidó will be quickly discarded in the same way.
But the Syrian scheme of the United States worked only in part because: in the first place, Russia and China opposed it in the UN Security Council repeatedly; secondly, because the Syrian people supported their government and gave evidence of exceptional resistance; and, finally, because Russia managed to support and equip the Syrian Arab Army in time for its confrontation with NATO and the foreign mercenaries.
It is known that Washington, knowing that the Pentagon will not be able to continue using the jihadists to weaken the Syrian state, is now proposing to place the Syrian case in the hands of the U.S. Treasury Department who, in turn, will do everything possible to prevent the reconstruction of the Syrian country and state.
The idea is for the self-proclaimed Interim President Guaidó to head a parallel administration that focuses its objective on: obtaining oil money in various lawsuits; “settles” the territorial dispute with Guyana; “satisfactorily” negotiates the question of refugees; “agrees” with Washington on all the foreign policy issues, and manages to imprison in the United States the Venezuelan Chavista leaders under various pretexts.
Based on the experience of the last eight years in the Middle East, what is happening in Venezuela cannot be compared with what happened in Chile in 1973. The United States was then trying to control the Americas and close the way to all forms of Soviet Union influence. They wanted to exploit the natural riches of that part of the world, leaving the least possible control in the hands the national governments… at the lowest attainable cost.
Today, on the contrary, the United States persists in considering the world as uni-polar. It has no friends or enemies. According to its vision, every population integrated into the globalized economy or living in a territory that has natural resources that the United States wants to control (not necessarily exploit immediately), these must be under the shared control of the Pentagon in the nations where they are located.
Therefore, Washington is trying to prevent the proper functioning of the state structures of those countries.
“It is possible that Juan Guaidó believes he is really capable of solving the crisis and serving his country by proclaiming himself interim president. But in fact it would actually have the opposite effect, because it would create a situation similar to a civil war. He, or his successors, will ask for help from Brazil, Guyana and Colombia, which will deploy “peace keepers” with support of Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States. And the violence would continue until entire cities are in ruins.
It doesn’t matter if the Venezuelan government is Bolivarian or liberal, whether their relations with Washington are good or not. The goal is not to achieve a “regime change” as in Syria, but to weaken the Venezuelan state as much as possible. That process would begin in Venezuela and immediately extend to other countries in the region –such as Nicaragua– until there remains no real political power in the region as a whole”, predicts Thierry Meyssen.
“This situation is very clear for many Arabs whose countries already fell into that trap. But now, it does not seem to be seen with enough clarity in Latin America”, warns the expert.
“Of course, it is also possible that Venezuelans may become aware of the manipulation, put aside their divisions and save their country,” concludes Meyssen.
January 28, 2019.
The Demonization of Russia by The United States
The Demonization of Russia by The United States
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In the original Cold War there was a certain balance between the contending parties.
This led independent observers to believe that the Soviet Union, decimated in World War II, was so keen on maintaining peace that Washington could achieve an advantageous agreement for the West and avoid the possibility of nuclear war without making too many concessions.
However, U.S. diplomacy and propaganda had become fixated on a campaign to demonize Russia. This considerably diminished following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But in very recent times it has been revived due to the visceral hatred of Democratic Party supporters towards Trump, after Hillary Clinton’s humiliating defeat in the 2016 presidential election.
The Democratic Party leaders blamed Hillary Clinton’s defeat on the interference in US elections by Vladimir Putin. This was a justifying argument to be fed to Democratic followers, ashamed of their terrible performance against a “minor” opponent like Donald Trump, at the time considered an upstart in “major politics.”
Irish journalist Bryan MacDonald, in a recently published article, analyzed the presidential race of Vladimir Putin and the reasons for his growing popularity in Russia.
Firstly, he considers that Putin’s victory in the most recent elections was involuntarily facilitated by the West.
Western leaders and opinion makers in Washington believed that sanctions and economic pressure would encourage Russians to become more active against Putin. But they couldn’t have been more wrong.
In this respect, Alexey Pushkov, representative of the Council of the Russian Federation notes that: “Putin’s demonization by the West has had the opposite effect in Russia: citizens have rallied around their top figure in an unprecedented way. The results of the elections confirm this”.
It is fitting to recall that in 2011 and 2012 there were demonstrations in Moscow organized by a group that was baptized as the “Moscow elite” against President Putin.
Western media correspondents accredited in the Russian capital, with little knowledge about the situation in the rest of the country, made their readers and/or viewers believe that something substantial was taking place, when the reality was much less dramatic.
Although the Kremlin suspected interference, Hillary Clinton, then U.S. Secretary of State, had really very little influence on these events.
The situation was totally different from what had occurred in 2013 and 2014 in the Ukraine, when the United States openly intervened in support of the street protests against the Russian Government.
Another fact that illustrates this point was the vicious campaign of attacks against Russia in connection with the case of the former double agent Sergei Skripal.
In the words of Andrei Kondrashov, spokesman for the Putin’s election campaign in Moscow: “Voter turnout was eight to ten percent higher than we expected, because the United Kingdom, pretending otherwise, pressured us right at the precise moment when we had to mobilize to go out and vote.”
Kondrashov, ironically, thanked the British Government for that result. The accusations made by London against Moscow in relation to the poisoning of the former double agent Skripal helped bring about the surge in the number of voters who participated on the March, 2018 presidential elections in Moscow.
The spokesperson said that the high turnout at the polls was proof of the way Russian people reacted when their country was accused “out loud and without evidence.”
The dispute around the attempted murder of agent Sergei Skripal with poison gas increased electoral turnout by several percentage points, according to the spokesman. At the end of the day, Putin was the ample winner of the contest.
Russians are fully aware that the campaigns against their country and the demonization of their president require a strong citizen response. They generally support the status of Crimea and resent the anti-Russian hysteria in the West.
In fact, it is precisely this negative image of Russia, broadcast in the West, that has determined the repeated success of Putin in various electoral consultations.
For years it has been more than evident that the foreign policy of the United States should draw lessons from these procedures which have been proven to be counterproductive in other parts of the world.
An extreme example of this is the genocidal siege policy held for 60 years against Cuba. A policy almost unanimously rejected by the world community of nations.
January 17, 2019.
NATO’S Cruel 70-Year History
NATO’S Cruel 70-Year History
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The ultra reactionary American writer, columnist, politician, and radio commentator Patrick (Pat) Joseph Buchanan recalled, on January 18th in his column widely circulated in several countries, that on this date, seventy years ago, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed. He did so with a memorable quotation from the undisputed French leader General Charles De Gaulle who said in 1966, when he was ordered to leave his headquarters in Paris: “Treaties are like roses and young girls. They last while they last.”
“NATO this year celebrates a major birthday. The young girl of 1966 is no longer young. The alliance is 70 years old.
“And under this aging NATO today, the U.S. is committed to treat an attack on any one of 28 nations, from Estonia to Montenegro to Romania to Albania, as an attack on the United States.
The time is ripe for a strategic review of these war guarantees to fight a nuclear-armed Russia in defense of countries across the length of Europe that few could find on a map.”
“Apparently,” Buchanan writes, “President Donald Trump, on trips to Europe, raised questions as to whether these war guarantees comport with vital U.S. interests and whether they could pass a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.
Trump even raised this issue in front of Europeans and suggested that the establishment, frozen in the realities of yesterday, should study the matter in the light of current events and ought to be made to justify these sweeping war guarantees.
In 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, Germany joined NATO, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, the USSR was divided into several nations and Leninism expired in its place of origin.
As the threat that had led to NATO disappeared, many argued that the alliance created to deal with that alleged Soviet threat should be allowed to fade away, and Europe should now provide for its own defense.
It was not to be. The architect of Cold War containment, Dr. George Kennan, US Ambassador to Moscow, warned that moving NATO into Eastern Europe and former Soviet republics would prove a “fateful error.”
Soon afterwards, the doctrine of “containment” became official U.S. policy, and even Kennan himself, whose policies he had helped launch, started criticizing them.
Before the end of the year 1948, Ambassador Kennan was convinced that negotiations could be initiated with the Soviet government, but his proposals were rejected by the Truman administration.
“But Kennan was right,” says Buchanan. “America is now burdened with the duty to defend Europe from the Atlantic to the Baltic, even as we face a far greater threat in China, with an economy and population 10 times that of Russia.”
“And we must do this with a defense budget that is not half the share of the federal budget or the GDP that Eisenhower and Kennedy had.”
“Trump is president today because the American people concluded that our foreign policy elite, with their endless interventions where no vital U.S. interest was imperiled, had bled and virtually bankrupted us, while kicking away all of the fruits of our Cold War victory,” says Buchanan
“Halfway into Trump’s term, the question is whether he is going to just talk about halting Cold War II with Russia, about demanding that Europe pay for its own defense, and about bringing the troops home — or whether he is going to act upon his convictions,” says Buchanan.
Celebrated as “the most successful alliance in history,” NATO has had two histories.
The capitalist version is that in 1948, Soviet troops, occupying eastern Germany all the way to the Elbe and surrounding Berlin, imposed a blockade on the city. The regime in Prague was overthrown in a Communist coup. In 1949, Stalin exploded an atomic bomb equal in power to the ones that the United States – inhumanly and unnecessarily—had exploded in two densely populated Japanese cities causing a still uncalculated number of victims.
As the U.S. Army had gone home after V-E Day, Washington formed a new alliance to supposedly protect the crucial European powers and make sure that all of them remained at its service.
What remains of NATO today is twelve nations that, with more or less consistency, serve the interests of the greatest superpower which has not yet stopped aspiring to be the only one.”
January 21, 2019.
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