Manuel E. Yepe 239
The U.S. War Against The Weak
The U.S. War Against The Weak
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
War Against the Weak is a well-documented book of more than half a thousand pages, written by Edwin Black. It describes a criminal operation planned by the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century and put into practice between the 1930’s and 1960s with the purpose of creating a dominant superior race.
That U.S. campaign, virtually ignored in the world today because of the media cover up to which it has been subjected, served as a model for the Holocaust of the Jewish population carried out by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Characters and institutions in politics and the economy that today are presented as respectable champions of democracy and respect for human rights, were involved in this genocide.
The book tells us that, in the first six decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Americans labeled as feeble minded –because they did not conform to Teutonic patterns– were deprived of their right to reproduce.
Selected in prisons, asylums and orphanages because of who their ancestorswere, their national origin, ethnicity, race or religion, they were sterilized without their consent, and prevented from procreating and getting married. They were separated from their partners by governmental bureaucratic means.
This pernicious white collar war was conducted by philanthropic organizations, prestigious professors in elite universities, wealthy businessmen, and senior government officials who formed a pseudoscientific movement called Eugenics Its purpose, beyond racism, was to create a superior Nordic race that would impose itself at global level.
The eugenics movement gradually built up a national legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to cleanse the United States of the “unfit.” Intelligence tests colloquially known as “IQ measurements” were invented to justify the exclusion of the “weak-minded”, who were often nothing more than shy people or persons who spoke another language, or who had a different skin color.
Forced sterilization laws were enacted in some 27 US states to prevent the persons so detected from reproducing. Marriage bans proliferated to prevent race mixing. Numerous lawsuits, whose real purpose was to impose eugenics and its tactics in everyday life, reached the Supreme Court of the United States.
The plan was to immediately sterilize 14 million people in the United States and several million more in other parts of the world so that, at a later stage, they could continue eradicating the rest of the “weak” and leave only the purebred Nordics on the planet.
In the 1930’s, some 60,000 people were coercively sterilized. and an incalculable number of marriages were banned by state laws stemming from racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, covered with a mantle of respectable science.
Eugenics, whose objectives were global, was spread by U.S. evangelists to Europe, Asia and Latin America forming a well-woven network of movements with similar practices. By means of lectures, publications and other means, they kept its advocates on the lookout for opportunities for the expansion of their ideas and purposes.
Thus it arrived in Germany, where it fascinated Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. German National Socialism transformed the U.S. search for a “superior Nordic race” into what was Hitler’s struggle for a “dominant Aryan race.”
Nazi eugenics quickly displaced American eugenics because of its fierceness and speed, as well as by the scientific rationality applied by the murderous doctors of Auschwitz. The process had been previously rehearsed at the Cold Spring Harbor Eugenic Labs on Long Island, New York, with the financial support of the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Harriman foundations in whose laboratories the eugenics experiments, that culminated in Auschwitz, began.
When the extermination of Jews was described as genocide in the Nuremberg Trial, the U.S. institutions linked to the practice of eugenics, it was renamed “genetics” and continued its sinister projects for more than a decade.
Edwin Black’s book, a jewel of investigative journalism, provides the reader with the possibility of seeing the common kinship and features of this tragic history with the circumstances the U.S. population faces today.
For electoral purposes, from the beginning of his election campaign, Donald Trump raised the “America First” slogan, backed up with many of his own manifestations of xenophobia, rejection of immigrants and proven identification with white supremacists. He did this within the scenario of deep political fragmentation of a country whose ruling elite has been able to keep the population focused on the naïve alternative between Democrats or Republicans.
Any similarity is pure coincidencidental!
December 31, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
WASHINGTON WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DEAL WITH TWO COLD WARS
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Patrick Joseph Buchanan is an American writer, broadcaster and political commentator characterized –because of his ideological orientation—as fascist and ultraconservative. He began his political career with Richard Nixon and then went on to work as senior advisor to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan.
He ran several times for the presidency of the United States. In 1982, he began working on the TV show Buchanan-Braden sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and became a main voice with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News until 2012, when he was kicked out for racist.
With such a resume, one understands why Pat Buchanan asks, on December 18, on his official website, “Could the United States carry out a Cold War containment policy against the other two existing military powers, while maintaining its defense commitments with dozens of countries around the world? And if we could, how long could we keep on doing it, and at what price?
His doubts are based on three arguments:
“Firstly: because we have repeatedly intervened militarily in the Middle East where no vital U.S. interest was in danger, and got trapped in the eternal war of that Muslim region.
“Secondly: for having extended NATO’s alliance to Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Baltic, thus triggering a Second Cold War with Russia.
“And thirdly: because the United States had been supporting China for decades, before acknowledging that it was turning into a superpower whose ambitions in Asia and the Pacific could only be achieved at the expense of countries friendly to the US.”
The question now being asked by Buchanan is different: Can the United States carry out a Cold War containment policy against the other two great military powers of our time, while maintaining its Cold War commitments to dozens of countries all over the world? And, if so, for how long can we keep on doing it, and at what price?
“Very late has the American establishment become aware,” says Buchanan, “of the historical madness of having accompanied China on the world stage trying to buy their lasting friendship with the sale of trillions of dollars of our trade surpluses from Bush to today.”
For Buchanan, the problem lies in the fact that China has not reciprocated properly to US courtship, and not in the impressive boom that the Asian giant has been achieving without the suffocation it had experienced at the hands of the West until the end of the Cold War.
“Beijing has reaffirmed its sovereignty over the South China Sea. It has built air and missile bases on half a dozen islets in dispute; and has warned U.S. ships and airplanes to stay away.
“China has built and leased ports and bases from the Indian Ocean to Africa. It lent billions to poor countries in Asia and Africa, such as the Maldives, and then when these nations could not fulfil with the debts contracted, China demanded compliance with the commitments undertaken as a basis to build their facilities.”
China has sent hundreds of thousands of students to colleges and universities in the United States, and Buchanan says that many of them have devoted themselves to espionage.
Buchanan accuses China of all the evils the capitalist system has been facing on a global scale. He says Beijing kept its currency below its market value to maintain its trading advantage and attract U.S. corporations to China where, he thinks, they’re pressured to transfer their technological secrets to China.
Among other things, he blames China for taking part in the cyber theft of millions of personnel files of U.S. federal applicants and employees and the credit card and passports numbers of millions of US hotel guests the world over for years; and even for the cyber-security beaches that facilitated the theft of data on the United States F-22 and F-35 aircraft, information which is believed to have played an important role in the development of the fifth generation of Beijing combat fighters.
For decades,” says Buchanan, “we have been funding the development of a China whose ambition is to drive us out of East Asia and the Eastern Pacific, and replace us as the first power in the world.”
However, Washington’s commitment to China has failed and has the US facing a new adversary with a population and an economy ten times larger than those of Russia
.
December 20, 2018.
This article can be reproduced quoting journal POR ESTO as its source.
The Decline of U.S. Supremacy
The decline of United States Supremacy
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
There was a moment, between the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the beginning of the Great Recession of 2008, when, in the great United States, optimism about the global spread of US-style liberalism reigned.
It was believed at the time that the United States could use its economic, military, and political superiority to shape a new world order in which their manipulated versions of democracy, human rights, economic interdependence among nations and long-lasting peace would prevail.
During those years, many new members were admitted to NATO and the European Union.
The perspective that Boris Yeltsin’s Russia would become a neoliberal “democracy,” was considered a close possibility. And it was thought that China would be a “responsible” player in the international community.
But now, “we live in a completely different time,” says Stephen Walt in his new book entitled “The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy”, where he analyzes the spirit of today’s times.
The forecasts on the dissipation of the pre-eminence of the United States have become routine. Anti-liberal — left and right wing– parties and movements (many of the latter xenophobic) — have emerged all over Europe. Britain’s departure from the European Union is near.
Globalization is facing a violent reaction and intolerant nationalism is moving forward from Brasilia to Budapest.
Walt’s assessments about the US foreign policy after the Cold War, describe it as “visible failures without great achievements” and consider that, regarding both the general condition of the world, as well as Washington’s status within it, have declined significantly and steadily between 1993 and 2006.”
The liberal internationalist agenda is attractive, but according to Walt it is based on three erroneous assumptions.
(1) The first is that other countries would embrace liberalism mirroring the US style, despite the world’s political and cultural diversity.
(2) The second — which is widely shared by those responsible for U.S. foreign policy and influential members of the media, academia, and think tanks– is that the US could successfully promote democratic policies all over the world thanks to unipolarity. The democracy-building programs of alleged non-governmental organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the US National Fund for Democracy and the International Republican Institute arose from this belief. And when tougher measures are required, the foreign policy establishment considers that the U.S. military strength can defeat despotic regimes, win hearts and minds, and impose democratic policies.
(3) The third assumption underlying liberal internationalism is that the end of the Cold War will end up rendering the political balance of power obsolete, along with spheres of influence, and the nationalism based on blood, soil and faith.
For Walt, these assumptions constitute a fundamental misunderstanding of the forces that shape the world and, therefore, will inevitably lead to failure.
He believes that the madness and fiascos of the last twenty-five years have been a result of the blind commitment of this endogamy system with liberal internationalism: a vision of the world that unites Democrats and Republicans and Liberals and Conservatives alike, and that was adopted by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
During these three presidencies, the supposed leader was the United States, which, for reasons of principle and self-interest, had to use its unequal power to spread liberal values all over the world. In practice, this meant designing a world in which the majority of the world’s countries — ideally all—would embrace the US pattern of “democratic” ideals, human rights, global governance, markets and rule of law.
Such an international order would not only preserve the preponderance of the United States but would also be safer. Such a belief has been fundamental for the credo of liberal internationalists because “democracies” do not make war against their peers nor do they massacre their citizens or produce bloodshed and agitation that can culminate in civil wars and broken states.
Despite the billions of dollars spent on its promotion, the US model “democracy” failed in 27 states between 2005 and 2015.
December 6, 2018.
Endgame for the Planet
Endgame for the Planet
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation, edited by Walter Lippmann.
In a few years, it’s metastasized to every continent. Its fervent advocates and ill-informed supporters call it populism or nationalism. In Italy, Germany or Spain in the 1930s, they called it by its name: Fascism. Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and Franco in Spain were bloodthirsty tenors of the symphony orchestra of capitalism.
By the time when, in 1945, Russia and the Western allies put an end to the collective psychosis induced by fascism, between 68 and 80 million people had already been killed in the world.
This is how French journalist, analyst, and filmmaker Gilbert Mercier recounts it in a work — published on the News Junkie Post website –devoted to the analysis of this surprising political phenomenon that has been spreading out throughout several countries, to the shame and fear of human kind.
“Neo-fascists have wrapped themselves in the flag of populism and nationalism and have falsely convinced their supporters that they are the champions of the struggle against globalism, elitism and the corruption of the neoliberal political system.
However, they are ferocious defenders of the capitalist dogfight, and its abject systematic exploitation of the working class. They enthusiastically support the global military-industrial complex, as well as the meaningless capitalist exploitation of natural resources through deforestation and mining.
For the neo-fascists, just as for the capitalists, wealth has to be concentrated in fewer hands, and their money must circulate across borders without restrictions, even though ordinary people can’t do this with theirs.”
Some of its leaders, like Trump and Bolsonaro, were elected mainly
on the false premise and racist notion of cultural war and clash of civilizations. That is, the mythical threat that, in an already multi-ethnic world, immigrants and outsiders –often with darker skins or with another religion– represent a present danger to the host countries.
Neo-fascists have been erecting mental walls of hatred in Europe and America.
The global proliferation of neo-fascism is a new way of ideological globalization; and global capitalism is counting on it.
For example, once it became evident that Bolsonaro would be elected president of Brazil, that country’s stock market rose by 13% in two weeks, while the main international markets were dropping.
Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, has already put Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua in the neo-fascist hit-list of his agenda. He called these countries the “troika of tyranny”.
Bolton is counting on Colombia and Brazil as the new regional fascist accomplices of U.S. imperialism to enforce a resurrected Monroe Doctrine.
In the United States and Brazil, the evangelical Christian vote was a paramount factor in the elections of Trump and Bolsonaro.
“The born-again Christian fundamentalists in the United States are concentrated mainly in the former Civil War Confederate states of the South.”
These evangelical fundamentalist communities, to a great extent, reject evolution, secularism, and the reality that climate change is human-made. Many in these communities believe that the US should be a Christian state. These fundamentalists are the most reliable voting block for Trump, just as they were for George W. Bush.
Behind the curtains, very well-financed right-wing fundamentalist think-tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, have been moving the world’s threads since the early 1970s.
Bolsonaro in Brazil was raised as a Catholic, but he became an Evangelical
This could be interpreted as a foresighted opportunistic and cynical political move. It was the evangelical voting bloc that gave him the advantage over his opponent during the presidential elections in October 2018.
The emergence of global fascism offers a gloomier perspective for the survival of humanity. Like Trump in the United States and Bolsonaro in Brazil, neo-fascists deny climate change. The latter could design a dangerously destructive strategy for the Amazon, which can be considered the breathing lung of the Earth because of its ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
The super-rich who control global capitalism will give free rein to their fascist substitutes to increase and use a mass military-police force to repress the billions of people who become climate change refugees and victims of the ecological collapse.
Despite its predictions –handled discreetly by the Pentagon — that climate change is becoming a national security problem; climate change will be the endgame for capitalism. All the gold and diamonds in the world will neither stop the storms, nor protect the atmosphere from the deadly rays of a scorching sun.
December 10, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Washington’s Policy Against Venezuela
Washington’s Exhausted Policy Against Venezuela
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“For those who have followed Venezuela closely in recent years, there is an inevitable sense of déjà vu in U.S. foreign policy toward the South American nation, because Washington’s strategy of regime change there is almost identical to the one it has adopted in Latin America on numerous occasions since World War II. It is a strategy that includes the application of economic sanctions, broad support for the opposition, and destabilizing measures to create a degree of human consternation and chaos that justifies a military coup or direct U.S. military intervention.
That is the introduction that Canadian writer and researcher GaryLeech makes to the readers of his most recent essay entitled “Business as Usual: Washington’s Regime Change Strategy in Venezuela” (GreanvillePost, 23/11/2018).
“Because of how well the strategy has worked for the United States for more than half a century, our elected leaders see no reason not to use it with respect to Venezuela. In other words, from Washington’s perspective, their policies of regime change toward Venezuela constitute the coda of a business that is already customary in Latin America,” Leech says.
This strategy of regime change does not take into account whether it is a democratically-elected government or the human rights consequences of such interventions. Virtually all the Latin American governments that the United States has successfully overthrown in the last 65 years had been democratically elected.
Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti (2004) and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras (2009) have been democratically elected leaders who have been ousted by coups d’état using such methods. Washington pressured all these leaders with economic sanctions and destabilization campaigns that created the economic chaos and humanitarian crises necessary to justify a military solution in their nations.
The common denominator in all these cases has nothing to do with democracy or human rights, but with the fact that the scaled-down governments prioritized the interests of their own people over U.S. provisions.
This was demonstrated by the attitude of CIA director George Tenet during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in February 2002, when he declared that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez “probably does not have the interests of the United States in mind” and two months later, Washington promoted a military coup that attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan leader.
That was the first of many failed U.S. attempts to overthrow Chavez after his electoral victory in 1998. After that failure, Washington multiplied its efforts to install a government in Caracas with its heart set on the interests of the United States.
It increased support for opposition groups by increasing funds for USAID programs dedicated to the goal of turning the population against the government. Wikileaks published a classified headline sent from the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela to Washington in 2006 that clearly stated that USAID funding for local programs sought to influence community leaders by slowly moving them away from “chavismo” and stated that the embassy’s broader goal should be to “isolate Chávez internationally.”
In 2015, President Obama signed a presidential order designating Venezuela as an “extraordinary threat to national security” and explained that U.S. law requires his administration impose sanctions on detractors of his country. On that basis, two years later, Trump declared that he would not rule out a “military option” against Venezuela.
The major U.S. media have played their propaganda role with a narrative aimed at demonizing a Venezuelan government and calling Chávez and Maduro authoritarian, anti-democratic and even dictatorial. They have also focused their attention on food shortages and an alleged humanitarian crisis that would lead Venezuelans to ignore the extraordinary social advances made in education, housing, poverty reduction, participatory democracy, and to abandon their homeland.
In foreign policy, it reproduces measures successfully implemented in past decades that overthrew governments that did not have “U.S. interests at heart.
The strategy of undermining democracy and imposing economic difficulties to achieve regime change worked in several Latin American countries, but this time, with the Venezuelan people, Washington might have run into the last of their shoes.
November 29, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
What’s Behind the War on China
What’s Behind the War on China
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
In geopolitics, it is rare that events are what they seem to be. This is especially true when we look closely at the strange “war” launched by Trump this spring under the guise of a trade war “to make up for the enormous annual deficit in the U.S. trade balance, the most extreme of which is that of China.”
The real motor force for Washington’s tariff war attacks on China can only be understood when we look at it through the prism of the U.S. Administration’s most recent report on the industrial base of US defense industry.
That’s how F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and U.S. professor based in Germany, understands it.
Coming out of the work of a special group charged with it a year ago, by a little-known Presidential Executive Order, the report is a detailed analysis of the sufficiency or incompetence of the industrial supply chain that feeds the vital elements of the U.S. armed forces.
The declassified version of the report cites 300 vulnerabilities or gaps in the nation’s military industrial base. It reveals in great detail that the national economy can no longer provide the basic essentials of national defense as a consequence of globalization and industrial outsourcing.
He details the dramatic shortage of skilled workers in areas such as machining, welding, and engineering. Vital machine-tools are imported, mostly from Germany, a country with which Washington does not have the best relations at present.
Many small suppliers of the main sub-components are specialized from a single source, many of whom are on the verge of insolvency due to U.S. budgetary uncertainties in recent years.
The defense industry depends on China for virtually all of its rare earth metals, as the set of naturally scarce metals that are vital to various technological applications of the military industry are known.
Since the 1980s, domestic metal mining in the United States has virtually collapsed for economic reasons, as suppliers moved to China in search of cheaper sources.
Today, 81% of the rare earth metals needed by military equipment, superconductors, smartphones and other high-tech applications come from China.
The report says that in many cases, the only remaining producer of critical materials is on the verge of shutting down its U.S. factory and importing lower-cost materials from the same foreign producer that forced them to abandon domestic production.
It highlights the alarming potential bottlenecks from dependence on a single source for the propeller shafts of navy ships, cannon towers for tanks, fuel for rockets and space-based infrared detectors for missile defense, among others.
The report is the most comprehensive critical look at the military industrial base that has been made since the early Cold War years in the 1950s. It blames U.S. arms companies for relying on vital components outsourced to China, which it sees as the United States’ greatest strategic threat.
Today Asia produces 90% of the world’s printed circuit boards and half are made in China. Beyond relying almost entirely on Chinese suppliers of rare earth metals, the Department of Defense contracts the acquisition of weapons with the largest consortiums. These in turn subcontract in their supply chain to the most efficient, which are often those of China.
It is claimed that the US defense industry depends on Chinese producers for 100% of its rare earth materials. A report by the Government Accountability Office in 2016 described the issue as fundamental to national security.
The main conclusion of the report is that “China poses a significant and growing risk to the supply of materials considered strategic and critical to U.S. national security.”
This also explains why the focus of the Trump Administration’s current trade war against China is, in fact, to press China to abandon its Made in China 2025 agenda, which aims to bring China to dominate advanced technologies in the coming decades.
The report states that “China’s dominance in the market for rare earth elements illustrates the potentially dangerous interaction between economic aggression against China, guided by strategic industrial policies, vulnerabilities and gaps in the U.S. manufacturing and defense industrial base.”
November 26, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Bolton and Rubio Pushing “Sonic Attacks” Tale
Bolton and Rubio Keep Pushing “Sonic Attacks” Tale
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
There has been an intense and extensive media campaign that involved a group of U.S. officials accredited as diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Havana with strange acoustic attacks. Their origin and actors could not be identified, and then Washington decided to reduce the staff of its representation in Cuba. This had a big impact on consular, political and tourist relations between the two countries.
Washington’s rhetorical indictment didn’t identify presumed culprits or evidence of the supposed crimes, nor the sources for the speculative comments that were always anonymous. This peculiarity later served to justify the fact that the main victims could not be met with, given that they were agents of the U.S. intelligence services, and therefore unable by the nature of their functions, to contribute to the inquiries with testimonies related to their secret work at the Embassy.
The Cuban authorities, from the beginning, took on themselves the task of clarifying the facts. Cuba contributed to the U.S. investigative work. This included including supporting the work in Cuba of an ad hoc FBI delegation that traveled especially for that purpose. Then the U.S. government decided to drastically reduce the personnel in its mission in Havana. That aroused distrust with respect to the cooperation offered by the Cuban side.
Faced with the evident impossibility of discovering the origin and identifying the culprits, the idea that it could have been yet another malicious action against Cuba by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gained discreet strength.
But recently, coinciding with the entry into the arena of the ultra-reactionary and shadowy diplomat and politician John Bolton, as Trump’s National Security Advisor, with the prediction that he will soon become the power behind the throne in the White House, the press began to resurrect the issue of sonic attacks, increasing the number and scope of journalistic work on the subject.
A striking report by Jon Lee Anderson in The New Yorker served as a prelude to the resumption of the “acoustic attacks” campaign.
Almost simultaneously, Ottawa’s Globe and Mail reported that Canadian diplomats whose families, by a decision of their government, had to leave the embassy in Havana because of alleged sonic events they were publicly protesting, claiming that Global Affairs, Canada’s foreign ministry, had turned its back on them.
Canadian diplomats complained that, unlike the U.S. State Department, Global Affairs had said very little about the matter in public. It also did not seem to be making their case a priority without which it was difficult for them to get specialized medical attention.
“We didn’t expect to be abandoned, or more precisely, sacrificed. That’s how we feel now,” a spokesperson for the group told the Globe and Mail. Several of those affected believe that Ottawa has said little in public because it wants to maintain friendly relations with Cuba, the newspaper wrote.
Adam Austen, speaking Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, barely said that “we will continue to do everything we can to provide advice and support to those affected,” provoking opinions such as, “Canadian diplomats affected by the unidentified disease in Cuba feel abandoned. They feel that the Canadian government is covering something up, or is indifferent to a problem that someone in Washington is interested in magnifying.
Headlines such as “Canadian diplomats affected by strange ailments in Cuba feel abandoned” proliferated in those countries where information is decisively influenced by U.S. consortia.
It should be noted that investigations have been hindered from the outset by mysterious circumstances. First, because the U.S. side did not allow accredited experts of any nationality clinical access to those affected, nor to U.S. military doctors who could see them within a period of time close to the events, arguing that the patients were personnel working in intelligence tasks, thus obliged to respect strict rules of secrecy by the nature of their tasks.
I still think that the search for an intellectual author of the attacks between enemy persons or governments of the United States ignores the possibility that it may have been authorities of the American intelligence community. They may have been trying out some clandestine program or secret weapon, which for some reason fell into the hands of opportunists such as Senator Rubio with the unscrupulous help provided by Bolton.
Cure for Terrorism Worse Than the Disease
Cure for Terrorism Only Makes Things Worse
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The “wars against terrorism” waged by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan in retaliation for the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington, have caused the death of half a million people, according to a study released by Brown University, which is based in Providence, Rhode Island, United States.
Brown is an important private center of advanced studies and research that is part of the Ivy League. Brown brings together the most accredited and exclusive private universities on the East Coast of the United States, where a high proportion of the political, intellectual, scientific and business leaders of that country graduate.
The surprising new study by Brown University reveals that between 480,000 and 507,000 people were killed during the U.S. Wars after September 11, 2011.
The study examined the three “war on terror” conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – the latter as an extension of the Afghan war and the focus of U.S. drone attacks.
The half a million deaths include those of combatants and civilians due to direct fighting and war violence. However, the number could be much higher, given that the study did not take into account the perhaps much higher number of civilians killed by infrastructure damage, such as the disablement of hospitals or water supplies, or other indirect results of war.
Tragically, civilians account for more than 50% of the approximately 500,000 deaths. The study further estimates that both U.S.-backed foreign forces and opposition militants each suffered more than 100,000 deaths.
As for U.S. forces, the report reveals that more than 60,000 U.S. soldiers were killed or injured in the three previously-mentioned conflicts after September 11. This includes 6,951 U.S. military personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since U.S. invasions of those countries in 2001 and 2003.
As for the seventeen years of the so-called “forgotten war” in Afghanistan, the study concluded, according to the Voice of America (VOA), that in October 2018 deaths in Afghanistan numbered about 147,000 people, including Afghan security forces, civilians and opposition fighters. The figure also includes the deaths of 6,334 U.S. soldiers and contractors, as well as more than 1,100 allied soldiers.
In particular, Brown University’s study makes explicit reference to attempts by the U.S. government to “paint an optimistic picture” of wars, which has prevented the American public from knowing the true extent of the civilian casualties from the United States and other countries.
A recently-published study entitled Human Cost of the Post-9/11 Wars: Lethality and the Need for Transparency denounces the fact that: “Full accounting of the total death toll has been “prohibited by governments interested in painting a promising picture of perfect execution and progress” but also points out that war chaos and inaccessibility of dangerous places prevent narrower, more truthful and accurate accounting.
In fact, the total number of direct deaths in these wars may never be known. For example, tens of thousands of civilians may have died in retaking Mosul and other cities held by the Islamic State (ISIS), but most likely their bodies have not been recovered.
In addition, this figure does not include “indirect deaths”. Indirect damage is damage that occurs when the destruction or damage of wars has long-term consequences for the health of people in war zones. For example, due to disruption of access to food, water, sanitation, electricity or other infrastructure.
Estimates compiled in the past by independent monitoring groups and survey organizations have put the death toll in Iraq at more than one million people.
November 12, 2018.
The Resurgence of Political Parties
The Resurgence of Political Parties
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 West in general, and in Europe in particular, there is a resurgence of political parties. Both old parties such as the British Labour Party and new ones such as Podemos in Spain and Insumiso in France have experienced spectacular increases in recent years, with notable organizational innovations.
Paolo Gerbaudo, a British sociologist at King´s College and a specialist in social movements and parties, attaches great importance to this renaissance. This is because, for many years, sociologists and political scientists have predicted, almost unanimously, that political parties were losing preeminence in highly diversified, globalized digital societies.
Indeed, the current revival of the European left has disproved such forecasts. Digital technology there has not supplanted the party and, rather, party activists have used their advances to develop innovative mechanisms to attract citizens, while still asserting that political struggle is their main working tool.
The revitalization of political parties in the old continent has become evident, in the first place, by an increase in membership. By contrast, many historic European parties have had a decrease in membership since the decade of the eighties of the twentieth century, Gerbaudo says.
In Britain, the Labour Party is close to reaching 600,000 members, having bottomed out with only 176,891 in 2007 at the end of Tony Blair’s leadership. In France. Jean-Luc Melenchon’s Insumise France movement has 580,000 supporters, making it the largest party in France just a year and a half after its founding. In Spain, Podemos, founded in 2014, has more than 500,000 members, more than twice as many as the traditional socialist party.
Even in the United States, a country that for most of its history has lacked socialist parties with mass militancy in the European sense of the term, a somewhat similar trend can be observed in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Today the country’s largest socialist formation, it has grown to 50,000 members following Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for the 2016 Democratic nomination.
According to Gerbaudo, this spectacular growth in the number of members of “moderate” left parties, many of which are new formations, contrasts with the forecasts made until recently by many political scientists. Between the 1990s and the period immediately prior to the 2008 financial crisis, many academics agreed in predicting the ultimate demise of political parties. Amid growing voter apathy and shrinking membership, political parties were seen by many as a relic of the past, while the postmodern theory of the “end of history” professed that the party’s history – a decisive historical factor in most traditional Marxist theories – was over.
The scholar at King´s College in Britain argues that Nazism and Stalinism demonstrated the extent to which a party could become a machine bent on manipulating its members and imposing unwavering obedience. But as serious and problematic as that was, the way in which this critique was combined with long-standing liberal resentment against political parties, driven by an undemocratic fear of the organized masses and their demands for democratic control and economic redistribution made it worse.
This liberal discourse of criticism of the political party goes back to the origins of modern democracy. They attacked political parties for subjecting the individual to obedience and uniformity, arguing that instead of serving the general interests of society, parties ended up defending the narrow interests of one faction.
In neo-liberal times, this concern for individual freedom has found a new way to express itself in the over-valuation of entrepreneurship and the spontaneity of unregulated market forces. This makes all forms of collective organization seem illegitimate impediments to private property and individual freedom.
Ironically, says Gerbaudo, much of the rejection people feel today of political parties is a product of neo-liberal ideology, and of the way in which, during the 1990s and 2000s, this ideology facilitated the transformation of the old mass parties of the industrial age into new “liquid parties” in the style of American “professional/electoral parties,” whose cynicism has been captured in the public imaginary by series of TV programs.
Ironically, says Gerbaudo, much of the rejection people feel toward political parties today is a product of neoliberal ideology, and the way in which during the 1990s and 2000s this ideology facilitated the transformation of the old mass parties of the industrial era into new “liquid parties” in the style of American “professional/electoral parties. ” Their cynicism has been captured in the public imagination by television series such as HOUSE OF CARDS and THE THICK OF IT, with spin doctors and interviewers and communication consultants who have an advantage replacing the old apparatchiks and party cadres.
October 29, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
White House Terrified by Socialism’s Growth
White House Terrified by Socialism’s Growth
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Trump and Bolton’s regime has added a new front of war to its theater of operations against the Third World. They’ve targeted the “troika” of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, charging them with nothing less than the crime of being “socialist,”. The White House Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) has released a study titled The Opportunity Costs of Socialism that warns of the “return” of socialism to U.S. political discourse.
The U.S. government feels threatened by a new rise in socialist ideas in the United States on the eve of the November 6 legislative elections, the report notes.
“Coinciding with the bicentennial of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is experiencing a return to the country’s political discourse. Self-styled socialist political proposals are gaining support in Congress and a good part of the electorate,” says the White House in the report.
Some think the CEA has reacted like this after recent polls showed Republicans overwhelmingly support the Medicare for All program that the White House has worked so hard to discredit.
The 72-page report used texts from “white papers” by the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute.
The authors of the report argue that socialism is reappearing in American political discourse. And that seriously concerns at least a subset of the Executive Branch, to the point of devoting entire pages to such “pressing” issues as the socialist debates of a century ago and such significant quotations as “to each according to their ability.
The Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) also compares vaguely social democratic policies -such as the exclusion of private interests from health care- with Mao Tse Tung’s Great Leap Forward. “There are journalists and analysts who openly assert that single-payer programs are more efficient and their objectives are similar in spirit to those of Lenin and Mao,” according to the CEA.
Among the proposals analyzed is universal public health care. Although it’s far from being part of the public opinion debate has begun to gain followers after the momentum given to this by progressive Democrats such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the former Democratic presidential candidate in the 2016 elections.
“Initiatives such as universal public healthcare are very much in line with socialist approaches,” CEA Director Kevin Hassett said at a news conference.
If public health were to be funded by higher taxes, Hassett said, it would lead to “a 9% drop in GDP.”
The document is unusual because the CEA’s job is to offer opinions from an academic and non-partisan point of view.
Hasset links politicians from the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party, such as Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, who defend a social-democratic model within a market economy, with icons of socialist historical thought such as Karl Marx and Vladimir I. Lenin.
In several campaign events prior to the mid-term elections of November 6, U.S. President Donald Trump has rampaged against Venezuela and its Bolivarian revolution, warning that “if Democratic candidates like Florida’s gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Gillum and Texas Senator Beto O’Rourke were elected, the United States would run the risk of becoming another Venezuela.”
“Democrats want to raise taxes massively and impose socialism in our country. We will be another Venezuela,” Trump said recently at a rally in Nevada.
The conclusions reached by the CEA report are what one would expect: Venezuela is doing badly and free markets are doing well.
But what the report really shows is that the White House feels threatened by a rise in socialist ideas when its witch-hunt is most intense.
The CEA’s attitude toward Medicare for All shows that what worries them is the idea of a specifically American democratic socialism emerging.
“Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx, socialism is reborn in political discourse. The political proposals of socialists gain support in Congress and in a good part of the electorate,” the White House laments in its report.
November 5, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
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