Manuel E. Yepe 239
The Nature of Chinese Society Today
The Nature of Chinese Society Today
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
One of the most lying and repeated resources of U.S. anti-communist propaganda is the assertion that China’s current enviable pace and level of development are the result of its renunciation of the objectives of socialism and the adoption by the great Asian country of capitalist projections.
With this misleading propaganda, the promoters of capitalism have made no little progress in sowing confusion among the ranks of the left and among progressive people throughout the world.
An essay by Andre Vltchek, philosopher, novelist, filmmaker, polemicist, author and Russian-American investigative journalist-specializing in Asian issues, published on October 27 in New Eastern Outlook (NEO), comments that:
“The madness and vileness of what Western propaganda spreads about China in the United States and Europe used to make some of my Chinese friends cry in shame. But things are changing as a result of the frustration and bad manners of the losers. The Propagandists of the Empire, their experts and journalists, do not end up agreeing about what is really wrong in China. But since they are well-paid to find new reasons for scorn, they constantly compete with each other in search of the juiciest and most scandalous stories. It often seems that they find something bad in absolutely everything they see in this country, the most populous in the world and also communist.
China will end extreme poverty by 2020, but it doesn’t find applause in Berlin, Paris, London and Washington. China is far ahead of all the great countries of the world in the construction of the “ecological civilization,” but they don’t notice it. And neither do they warn that the Chinese government is introducing broad educational reforms, while filling the country with large concert halls, museums and theaters of their own for limitless cultural advancement.
Western propaganda is literally trying to discredit China from both the left and the right. The New York Times published a front-page story on October 5, 2018, noting that one of its reporters visited the Chinese city of Huizhou, where he “discovered” a group of Marxist youth who protested and demanded that things be done as in Mao’s time. From this, the newspaper drew the dignified conclusion that China is facing a very serious threat from the left.
See that ignorance, China continues to advance toward the same goal, a democratic and socially-oriented communism, under the same communist political direction of the time. The NYT is definitely not a pro-communist publication, but in order to attack China it appeared sympathetic (to the point of highlighting it as a cover story!) to a small group of young Marxists jealous of its ideas, in order to dispel doubts among readers, and suggest that the Yano Chinese government isn’t as red as before.
The next day (Saturday and Sunday edition, October 6 and 7, 2018), the same NYT contradicted itself on two front pages about China by stating that “China will cut the wings of U.S. private companies” and that “Beijing is returning to business.”
The doctrine of thousands of U.S. and European newspapers that Washington manipulates is to publish anything that could disadvantage China. “The worse, the gloomier and the more negative the news about China, the better. Anything goes.
You are accused of having too much communism or too little. But what is China really? How to classify it in the face of such a dichotomy? Vltchek gives his opinion:
“China is a communist (or socialist) country with thousands of years of long and relatively egalitarian history. It has a mixed economy, but with central planning (the government tells companies what to do, not the other way around). It is clearly the most important nation on earth when it comes to working on behalf of and for the benefit of its citizens. It is also the largest and most peaceful nation on earth. And here are two more essential points: China is at the forefront in saving the world from imminent ecological disaster. It has no colonies or neo-colonies, it is an essentially internationalist state. Its political system, economy and culture are diametrically different from those of the West.
That is why it is elementary that those charged with the task of defining what China is or is not, and what the nations of the entire world are or are not should be, first and foremost, the rulers themselves, the intellectuals and the people of each country as a whole.
And if China declares itself a socialist country with Chinese characteristics, that is the criterion that should prevail, without the arrogance of trying to impose on the greatest civilization on earth the adjective that suits imperialist interests or those of other political forces alien to the best interests of the Chinese people.
November 1, 2018
Voyage to the Israeli Hell of YAMAM
Voyage to the Israeli Hell of YAMAM
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
On October 7, the American magazine Vanity Fair was awarded by the Tel Aviv regime with the exclusive right to a story about the Israeli special police force YAMAM. Today it one of the most sinister anti-terrorist units in the world because its repressive tactics have given it an unarguable prestige.
Under the signature of Adam Ciralsky, the publication included on October 7 a report entitled “From inside the most secret antiterrorist operation…”. The author relates his arrival at a fortified complex in the Ayalon Valley, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv where YAMAM is headquartered.
That’s where a gang of anti-terrorist operatives, whose work for four decades has been shrouded in impenetrable secrecy. The journalist crossed through a uniformed Israeli border police combat post and entered an explosion-proof shed where his credentials were scanned, his electronic devices locked up, and a counterintelligence officer gave them a warning sermon.
“Don’t reveal our location,” “don’t remember our faces,” “forget our names,” and “try to forget everything you see,” were the basic instructions.
YAMAM is part of Israel’s national police. It is not subordinate to the Israeli army or Mossad (Israel’s CIA) or Shin Bet (Israel’s FBI). Its situation in Israel’s organization chart is more like Britain’s M.I.5, although recently the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has blurred some of the dividing lines between the tasks of these agencies. YAMAM’s main task, according to the hosts, is to thwart terrorist plans, engage with opposing militants during attacks, combat so-called crime syndicates and prevent border incursions
YAMAM is considered the most qualified agency of its kind in the West to confront a war of espionage. The organization has devised new methodologies to respond to terrorist incidents and mass shootings, which, until now, it only shared with a few of its politically-related counterparts around the world.
At a time when veterans of the so-called Islamic State or ISIS are attacking Western targets outside their strongholds in the Middle East, their expertise is in high demand. Increasingly, the world’s top intelligence and police chiefs are turning to YAMAM (the Hebrew acronym for “special police unit”).
Yet Israel, which, as an occupying power, faces international condemnation for its unequal war against the Palestinians, boasts that some senior government officials who are very critical of Israel on the world stage have begun to ask them for help with their most intractable security problems.
And now the Israeli regime has evidently felt that the time has come to share its experiences with other countries, for its own benefit of course.
The main objective assigned to YAMAM is to thwart terrorist plans against the government before they occur, to involve the military during attacks, to combat “crime syndicates” and to prevent border incursions. In contrast, the military forces are often called upon to confront protest demonstrations in the West Bank, using what human rights activists call exaggerated force.
But protests along the fence separating Israel from Gaza, said to be organized by Hamas, are met only by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) outside YAMAM. It is these IDF forces that are generally accused of killing unarmed Palestinians, according to Ciralsky,
When Hamas sends rockets or balloons carrying weapons to Israel, or when it launches rockets, it is the IDF that responds with devastating air strikes. Occasionally, members of YAMAM participate in these attacks, although to a large extent they play a secondary role.
For a year, the author and his team traveled to train and exchange tactics with their U.S., French and German counterparts in areas such as the retaking of passenger trains, frustrating suicide attacks, and disarming men armed with grenades or bombs.
YAMAM’s technology includes robots and drones, and dazzles the uninitiated. But so do the statistics: YAMAM performs an average of about 300 missions a year in which its commandos have prevented the explosion of no less than 50 “time bombs” carried by suicide bombers en route to their targets and hundreds of other attacks in early stages.
YAMAM is a lamentable manifestation of the most modern technology designed as part of the Israeli genocide against Palestine, a nation whose people legitimately aspire to their sovereign space.
October 25, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the periodical POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Trump Could Bring Down the US Empire
Trump Could Bring Down the US Empire
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
More than any other presidency in the modern history of the United States, Donald Trump’s has been a permanent threat of socio-political shipwreck. He has deliberately excited and fuelled conflicts, involving xenophobic and racist currents in society, with an always nasty political discourse. Trump’s eccentricities have been widely highlighted by the press, but his attacks on the U.S. military presence in the world and its commitments to that end have received far less attention.
Such is the essence of an essay by journalist and historian Gareth Porter, published on the website TRUTHDIG.
Trump had come to the White House with a commitment to end U.S. military interventions. This was based on a worldview in which wars for military domination have no place. In the last speech of his victory tour in December 2016, Trump promised: “Let’s stop tearing down foreign regimes that we shouldn’t have been involved with. Instead of investing in wars, we will invest in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure…”.
At a meeting in the summer of 2017, where Defense Secretary James Mattis defended new military measures against the Islamic State in North Africa, Trump expressed his displeasure at the endless wars and Mattis claimed that “we are doing it to prevent a bomb from exploding in Times Square,” to which Trump replied, furiously, that the same could be said about anything that happened in any country on the planet.
Trump’s national security team was so alarmed by his questioning of military commitments and troop deployments that they invited him to the Pentagon. They were hoping to make him better understand their arguments with the usual rhetoric of the international democratic order based on the rules of globalism.
Ignoring decades of wars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, Mattis and other high-ranking officials argued that “this order is what has kept the peace for 70 years.” Trump shook his head in disagreement and diverted the discussion to a subject he found particularly irritating: economic and military relations with South Korea. “We spend $3.5 billion a year there to keep troops in South Korea,” complained Trump. “I don’t know why they’re there. Let’s bring them all home!”
In September 2017, while Trump threatened to destroy North Korea in tweets, he privately held an opinion against the presence of troops in South Korea and his determination was to eliminate it, according to Bob Woodward.
Political-diplomatic events with the two Koreas in early 2018 reinforced Trump’s view that U.S. troops should withdraw from there, so he accepted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s offer to hold a summit.
Trump ordered the Pentagon to study options for the withdrawal of these U.S. troops. That idea was viewed by the media and most of the U.S. national security elite as completely unacceptable. But the Pentagon’s military and intelligence specialists long knew that U.S. troops were not needed to deter North Korea or defend against an attack through the demilitarized zone.
Trump’s willingness to practice personal diplomacy with Kim was driven by his ego, but also by the idea that it would contribute to ending or attenuating the deployment of troops in South Korea. Obviously, such a thing could not happen without a clear rejection of the national security ideology that had dominated Washington’s elites for generations.
Bob Woodward tells in his book “Fear in the White House” that Trump was eager to put an end to the three great wars inherited from Barack Obama: in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, about which he said in July 2017 that he was very tired.
“We should proclaim victory, end wars and bring our troops home,” he said, repeating the political tactic with which Washington covered up its defeat in Vietnam in 1966.
Trump feared he would be held responsible for the consequences of defeat in a war. This was the same fear that had led Lyndon Johnson to abandon his strong resistance to large-scale intervention in Vietnam in mid-1965 and Barack Obama to accept a major escalation in Afghanistan that he had been objecting to.
Trump’s mercantilist worldview poses economic dangers for the United States that may lead him to reject the tactics of multiple permanent wars. But his unorthodox approach has encouraged him to challenge the essential logic of the U.S. military empire more than any previous president. And the final years of his administration will surely bring him more struggles over these issues with those in charge of the empire, predicts Gareth Porter in Truthdig.
October 22, 2018.
This article can be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Cold War II Might Just Have Begun
Cold War II Might Just Have Begun
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence announced what could already be described as the beginning of World Cold War II, with Washington and Beijing as the first belligerents but soon the stage will be global.
Pence spoke at the Hudson Institute, a think tank specializing in interdisciplinary issues related to international relations, culture, defense, economics, technology, and other strategic issues. Like most NGOs in the U.S., the Hudson is funded by tax-deductible contributions from large taxpayers.
There Pence formulated what many observers compared to Winston Churchill’s 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech. The U.S. Vice President, recognizing, in fact, Washington’s defeat in the current trade confrontation with China, proclaimed what amounts to a declaration of cold war:
“China now spends as much on its military as the rest of Asia combined and has prioritized capabilities that erode U.S. military advantages on land, sea, air, and space. China wants to drive the United States out of the Western Pacific and prevent us from coming to the aid of our allies. We hoped that economic liberalization would lead China to greater partnership with us and the world. But it opted for economic aggression, which in turn encourages its growing army. (…) Beijing is conducting a comprehensive and coordinated campaign to undermine support for the President, his agenda, and our nation’s most cherished ideals. (…) China is also applying this power more proactively than ever before to influence and interfere in this country’s domestic politics and politics. Worst of all, China has embarked on an unprecedented effort to influence American public opinion, the 2018 elections, and the environment leading up to the 2020 presidential election. To put it bluntly, President Trump’s leadership is working and China wants a different American president. (…) There can be no doubt: China is meddling in America’s democracy.
“But should China endure the insult and retreat? Of course not,” says an editorial in the Global Times, the English-language Chinese newspaper sponsored by the People’s Daily, which is itself an organ of the Government of the People’s Republic of China. “If China were to respond belligerently to recent US provocations and define Pence’s speech as a declaration of Cold War, it would become a reality.
“China must firmly safeguard its rights and legitimate interests, from trade to defense, and take its own measures against American provocations. We must refrain from increasing friction with the U.S. and not increase the atmosphere of strategic confrontation. Do not allow the conflict with the U.S. to dominate China’s foreign relations or determine the path to be taken by the Chinese government.
“In fact, U.S. efforts to contain China is limited and a trade war will inevitably harm the United States. It would be a stupid choice. It is not realistic to establish a NATO-style organization to attack China. It is impossible to isolate and contain China, given the expansion of its business abroad and in domestic markets.
“It will be difficult for the White House and Congress to mobilize a campaign against China in U.S. society. Gone are the days when the public was willing to step forward in the so-called national interest. As long as China remains calm in the face of hysterical U.S. political elites, the so-called Cold War will not take shape,” the Global Times editorial explains.
“At that point, China should play tai chi with the United States. This is the unique strategic wisdom of the Chinese nation. We must make America feel the pain of trade war and not allow unscrupulous action in the South China Sea and Taiwan Straits. But we must act calmly. China will continue to open up. A deteriorating outside world will not change that picture. China is not the Soviet Union, and the United States cannot deal with China the way it did with the Soviet Union,” the GlobalTimes editorial concludes.
It has been a reprehensible practice in the United States, during many election campaigns, for the ruling party to manipulate some kind of threat of war from abroad in order to obtain public support for the government through subliminal stimulus. No one should be surprised if, on the occasion of the mid-term elections to be held on November 6, something just like this in North America.
October 17, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
US OKs Interfering in Others’ Elections
US Justifies Interfering in Others’ Elections
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“When we try to manipulate or influence the elections of other nations, or even when we have wanted to overthrow their governments, we have done so in the best interests of the people of those countries.” Such a tender philosophy was the one that James Robert Clapper Jr, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), declared before a congressional committee in Washington, D.C.. Clapper did this on May 8, 2018, with all naturalness, trying to justify Washington’s electoral interference in more than eighty countries.
In the same way, this gentleman expressed himself when he promoted his book Facts and Fears, where he tackles issues such as alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and in the Syrian conflict. In Syria, the United States has been the main support for terrorists seeking to overthrow the legitimate government of that Middle Eastern country.
The interference in the electoral processes of more than eighty countries throughout history was done thinking “in the best interests of the people” of these nations, Clapper reiterated in an interview granted to Bloomberg, when speaking of the American history of interference in the elections of other nations.
Clapper is remembered in his country for hiding the truth about the massive surveillance program developed by the National Security Agency (NSA) before it was brought to light by Edward Snowden.
Certainly, intervention in other people’s electoral processes has long been a recurring component of Washington’s foreign policy.
In Latin America, the expulsion from power of a legitimately-elected president is considered the most condemnable intervention, although they abound, practically, in the history of all the countries in the region. Jacobo Arbenz, in Guatemala; Salvador Allende, in Chile, or Joao Goulart, in Brazil, are just some examples that have preceded in time to the recent Manuel Zelaya in Honduras; Fernando Lugo in Paraguay and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
On a global scale, it is known that, in 1947, the U.S. forced the Italian government to exclude all communists and socialists in the first post-war cabinet in exchange for U.S. economic aid to rebuild Europe destroyed by the World War.
Thereafter, the CIA (U.S. Central Intelligence Agency) did everything in its power, legally or illegally, to prevent the participation of Communists in the Italian government, while covertly financing Christian Democratic candidates there and elsewhere in Western Europe.
The Italian elections of April 1948 were the first in which the CIA’s intervention in the affairs of another country was felt. Without the CIA, the Italian Communist Party would have won those 1948 elections broadly.
From then on, for decades, whenever the Communists, either in alliance with the Socialists or on their own, threatened an electoral triumph, the United States raised the threat of exclusion from the Marshall Plan to prevent it.
The now-retired intelligence official explains that he wrote the book to inform the public of the “both internal and external” threats facing the United States, and to explain that President Donald Trump is not the problem of the American country, but only the symbol of a broader problem because “the truth is relative.
On February 13, U.S. intelligence directors warned the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee that “Russia appears to be preparing to repeat the tricks it unleashed in 2016 as the 2018 midterm elections approach: cyberattacking, filtering, manipulating social networks, and perhaps others.
Days later, special prosecutor Robert Mueller used social networks to formulate accusations against 13 Russians and 3 companies run by a businessman linked to the Kremlin in order to attack Hillary Clinton, support Donald Trump and sow discord.
Most Americans were understandably impacted by what they saw as an unprecedented attack on their political system. However, intelligence veterans and academics who have studied covert operations have a different and rather revealing view.
If any government in the world totally lacks the authority and moral standing to condemn the interference of any nation, powerful or weak, large or small, rich or poor, in the internal affairs of another, that nation is the United States because of its long history of abuses against its enemies as well as its allies.
But for Washington to go out and denounce or protest the interference of any nation in its electoral affairs is simply an insult to the collective intelligence of humanity; an unacceptable shame from any point of view.
October 11, 2018.
Miami Cubans and the 2018 US Midterms
Miami Cubans and the US Midterm Elections
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Cuban community residing in South Florida, in the United States, mainly in Miami Dade County, is returning to the state of great anxiety and fear. These are traditionally imposed by the Cuban-American extreme right and its sponsors from the American terrorist extreme right.
Numerous and widely-publicized visits by special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been made to the homes and workplaces of Cuban émigrés in Miami. Those visited have been, for many years, activists for the improvement of relations between the peoples and governments of the United States and Cuba. Now they have reason to be alarmed.
The local media and even the U.S. national media speculate about the reasons for this intimidating campaign by the federal government’s main counterintelligence agency. On September 12, the FBI published an article in the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, stating that the reason for such warning visits was “to send to the Cuban government the message that the FBI is looking for and watching Cuban spies who might be infiltrating the United States.
Andrés Gómez, director of the Areitodigital website, based in Miami, has written that this FBI campaign is for political reasons. “In the first place, it’s because a decisive mid-tern election is about to be held on November 6. Control of both houses of Congress is at stake, as well as the future of the Trump Administration and the Cuban-American extreme right in Washington.
In Gómez’s opinion, “since the Cuban-American extreme right was unable to obtain the changes in U.S. policy towards Cuba that they wanted, the FBI could be giving them these FBI visits in order to partially satisfy them in today’s political environment. In this way, the fantasy of Cuban spies under every pebble and on every grain of sand of our long and famous beaches is once again being imposed on the social and political environment of our community.”
The director of Areitodigital believes that it could also be to warning against the electoral triumph in the mid-term elections on November 6 of candidates more in tune with the new policy toward Cuba laid out in Miami by President Barack Obama in December 2014.
But, according to Gómez, “we are no longer in Florida then, with a demonized Cuba as an evil and perverse enemy. To the horror of the Cuban-American extreme-right in Miami and its political and ideological allies in the rest of the country, and to the resentment of some FBI special agents who are visiting innocent citizens who maintain irreproachable social behavior-even though they defend their right to travel to their native country, and condemn the blockade against Cuba and everything that impedes the development of the Island and the possibilities of the Cuban people to advance and live in peace.”
In the national political environment, and in Florida in particular, there is a close electoral contest for governor between the progressive African American Democrat Andrew Gillum and the racist and reactionary Republican Ron DeSantis. It is feared that African American voters and progressives who do not normally participate in elections will be motivated to go to the polls to give electoral triumph to the most liberal and progressive candidates. That’s what might be motivating the FBI’s current intimidation campaign, notes Andres Gomez.
The official statement issued by the FBI says that “in the course of performing our duties, the FBI -on a regular and open basis- interacts with members of our communities to enhance the mutual trust necessary to combat potential criminal activities and possible threats to our population.
With respect to that, Gómez says “the FBI leadership should appeal to the mutual trust necessary to combat criminal activities, such as the immediate arrest and judicial prosecution of all terrorists of Cuban origin who live freely and with impunity in Miami under the protection of the FBI itself. They have attempted and killed many innocent people over many years, in a campaign of state terrorism sponsored by successive U.S. governments. They targeted the Cuban people and those of us who live in the United States and whom we have supported a more reasonable policy between both peoples and governments, such as the one initiated by President Barack Obama.”
It would have been good for Gomez to point out that the objective of all fifteen presidents of the United States since the triumph of the Cuban revolution, including Obama, has been to liquidate the example of effective independence and socialism that is Cuba. Of them all, Trump’s government is the one that contributes the least to those perverse imperialist ends, because he exposes it so brazenly.
September 10, 2018
Canadian Daily Drags Out Bad Comedy
Canadian Daily Drags Bad Comedy Out
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The Canadian government has partnered with its brain injury experts to investigate the causes and effects of alleged health problems that have affected Canadian and U.S. diplomats accredited in Havana.
So says an article in the Ottawa Starr newspaper headlines, signed by Bruce Campion-Smith, its reporter for local political affairs.
Global Affairs, [the Canadian foreign ministry], has arranged for the Brain Repair Center, affiliated with Dalhousie University, as well as the Nova Scotia Health Authority and IWK Health Center, to investigate the potential causes and mysterious symptoms that allegedly affected a dozen diplomats and their accredited family members in Cuba.
A senior federal government official told The Star that an investigation led by the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) conducted with the cooperation of Cuban authorities, which has lasted more than a year, does not even appear to have come close to determining what may have happened and whether anything really happened.
Since 2016, when several U.S. diplomats were joined shortly after by some Canadians, they have been involved in a series of mysterious incidents that left them suffering symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, headaches and difficulty concentrating, similar to those of a concussion but without cranial trauma to explain the cause, the Canadian newspaper states.
“In spite of all the investigations carried out, the cause or causes of the health incidents experienced by our staff are still unknown. We basically continue to search, investigate and work with our counterparts,” said the official, who spoke on the condition that his testimony remain anonymous, according to The Star.
Investigations have been hampered 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 or to the U.S. military doctors who could see them within a period of time close to their supposedly being affected. They argued that the patients were personnel working in intelligence tasks, obliged to respect strict rules of secrecy because of the profile of their tasks.
In addition, many media outlets have exploded the imagination of their audiences with science fiction versions of ultrasonic weapons that could be microwaves, speculation about the size of such weapons and the capabilities of such presumed devices.
But perhaps the main obstacle has been that the issue has been turned into a vehicle for denunciation of Cuba by Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio. Though he is not Cuban and has never visited the island, Rubio intends to take advantage of his Cuban ancestry to benefit his presidential aspirations, in the context of the tense relations between Washington and Havana.
Rubio managed and obtained support from President Trump to give the issue global resonance. To encourage him, Rubio assured the American President, using false data, that in Florida counties with abundant Cuban population, Trump had obtained the majority of the votes over Hillary Clinton in the 2018 presidential elections, something that was proved to be false and showed Rubio’s scarce political base among Cubans.
Dr. Michael Hoffer, a brain injury specialist at the University of Miami who cared for several Americans with symptoms, confirmed that their cause is unknown.
Like the Americans, Canadians also experienced incidents in their homes or in hotels and at their workplaces. All revealed anomalies in the boody organs that help determine gravity and balance. Americans and Canadians also agree in the experience of having suffered vestibular problems of the ear and in the balance.
It is interesting to note how the course of the investigations always revolves around the search for the perpetrator(s) of the attacks, their motivation and methods. But they overlook the possible responsibility for the harm to American or Canadian personnel is not from countries that are enemies of the United States or Canada. Nor are they caused by mysterious acoustic attacks themseves, but by actions carried out by the authorities of the American intelligence community, carrying out trials of some kind of clandestine program or secret weapon, at the cost of the naïve sacrifice of their own soldiers and allies.
For now, it seems like a comedy with no predictable end.
October 3, 2018.
Trump Represents a Split in the Ruling Class
Trump Represents a Split in the Ruling Class
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
It is good that many on the U.S. left are beginning to see that the clashes between Trump and his supporters against the so-called “resistance,” reflect a “split in the ruling class.”
This is the view of Greg Godels, the prominent American communist journalist who used to use the pen name Zoltan Zigedy. “It is a very healthy advance because it rules out confusion fomented by the Democratic Party leadership, childish sensationalism, and the meaningless simplicity of the capitalist media.
According to Godels, this is a real and fierce battle between different groups among the richest and most powerful. It’s a conflict that gives deeper meaning to the strange mischief of the Trump era. Behind the harsh and illusory images of a corrupt vulgar person like Trump, to whom only by the “heroic” protectors of freedom and security (FBI, CIA, NSA, etc.) object, hides a real struggle for ideas, interests and the future. It is good that more people are seeing it as a struggle between the rich and the powerful fighting over their different visions of the future of capitalism: “a split in the ruling class.”
Many times in the last two years, Greg Godels has written about the emergence of alternatives to market fundamentalism such as neoliberalism and globalization in the conventional wisdom of the ruling class. He has argued that the rise of economic nationalism in advanced economies is an expression of that alternative. Intensified competition in energy policy is offered as a material symptom of economic nationalism, as is disinterest in maintaining a relatively peaceful backdrop for securing and promoting trade.
The United States is more interested in selling arms than in resolving its many wars (it is known that Secretary of State Pompeo convinced members of the Trump administration, publicly embarrassed by the massacre in Yemen, not to cut off support for Saudi Arabia because of such misdeed due to the possible loss of $2 billion in arms sales).
A recent reflection by Joshua Green, Bloomberg Businessweek national correspondent, entitled The Dividends of Anger, accounts for how the recognition of the changing political terrain provoked by the crisis. Trump’s slogan of economic nationalism “Make America Great Again” explains how it was the anger over the financial bailout that gave Trump the presidency. Green recalls Obama’s infamous meeting at the White House with the CEOs of the major banks, where he frankly told them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the gallows.
Reflecting on Obama’s words, Green warns: “Millions of people lost their jobs, their homes, their retirement accounts and fell out of the middle class. Many more live with an anxiety that gnaws at them. Wages were static when the crisis broke out and have remained static throughout the recovery. Recently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the share of U.S. workers in non-agricultural income has fallen almost to its lowest level since World War II.
This harsh indictment of post-apocalyptic capitalism captures well the conditions that have fuelled the fear of such pitchforks. Make no mistake, those who rule the major capitalist centers pay attention to anger, not to respond to it, but to divert it.
The history of American politics in the last decade is the story of how the forces that Obama and the Democratic Party failed to contain, restructured the world by unleashing energies on the left (Occupy Wall Street) and on the right (the Tea Party). The critical mass of conditions that led to Donald Trump had its genesis in these reactions?
Trump was able to prepare a campaign based on responding to anger with measures of economic nationalism, patriotism and, paradoxically, partisanship for the working class.
Of course, the idea that Trump was planning to build a workers party or intended to transform the Republican Party into a “workers party” is ridiculous, but it is remembered that his campaign was driven by anti-immigrant animosity with the argument that jobs were being taken away from them. When Trump declared his candidacy, Americans of all stripes were bitter with the ruling elites of both parties, and on that rests Trump’s opportunistic position of attacking them, including the Republicans.
Greg Godels concludes that only a concerted effort to create or nurture a truly independent, anti-capitalist movement that addresses the real needs of workers makes sense today, when bourgeois parties voluntarily sacrifice workers’ interests for the sake of capitalism.
October 1, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Singularities of Democracy in the USA
Singularities of Democracy in the USA
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The United States is a “democracy” only in the sense that citizens have a theoretical right to vote for a number of proposed officials. It is a freedom that almost half of Americans consider meaningless. This is why only 56% of Americans voted for president in 2016, and for Congress two years ago voted less than 40%.
Like most “democratic” socialists in the United States, Bernie Sanders, the surprising favorite of large numbers of Americans in the 2016 election campaign, conflates bourgeois electoral freedom with real democracy that empowers people to put the political economy at the service of the common good.
In doing so, he seeks to create a chaste foundation for siding with U.S. imperialism, says Glen Ford, executive director of the Black Agenda Report. His in-depth article was reproduced September 20 by the Marxist-Leninist website MLToday.
The U.S. is an oligarchy in which big businessmen almost always get away with it while average citizens and mass organizations have little or no influence in politics.
There is a dictatorship of the wealthy classes, says Glen Ford, recalling that the superpower is governed by oligarchs who, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, are also the biggest promotors of violence in today’s world.
Washington’s closest allies in this global mission are the former colonial powers of Western Europe and the former colonies of white settlers of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The foreign policy of the superpower ruled by white multi-millionaires aims to preserve the global order of white supremacy that served for more than 500 years to keep most of the world under its exterminating and enslaving rule.
According to Ford, “it’s no wonder that Bernie Sanders, and so many other politicians who consider themselves progressive in the United States, avoid articulating clear foreign policy positions. That’s how two-thirds of progressive Democratic candidates for Congress act.”
An example of this is that Sanders’ supporters in the campaign team of Bronx Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left out of their program platform the paragraphs on “Peace Economy,” which denounced U.S. military interventions in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.
A true U.S. foreign policy needs a list of enemies. Sanders found them in an authoritarian axis whose members “share attributes of hostility toward democratic norms, antagonism toward a free press, intolerance toward ethnic and religious minorities, and the belief that the government should benefit its own selfish financial interests. These leaders are also deeply connected to an oligarchic network of billionaires who see the world as their economic toy.”
The U.S. government, as the toy of 12 of the world’s 15 richest people, should be at the top of Bernie Sanders’ list. But no, according to his worldview, only Trump classifies as a world-class villain, even though he is, by himself, a minor oligarch than the rest in the whole.
But it is significant that the geopolitical center of this new oligarchic authoritarian axis of evil is not located on Wall Street or in London, but in Russia and China. They are seen as the enemies whom the warmongers of the Pentagon and the CIA pretend to fear and hate mainly the Americans.
Sanders does not clearly oppose U.S. imperialism. On the contrary, he offers a supposedly “progressive” justification for preserving it. The new oligarchic authoritarian axis of evil seeks to give “progressives” a reason to accept, and even love, U.S. militarism and imperialism.
Sanders wants the United States to improve relations with “our old democratic allies” in Western Europe because he believes that China and Russia are more dangerous malefactors and function as a single satanic unit.
Glen Ford’s essay concludes by expressing his hope that Sanders will achieve good results in the 2020 primaries, and that he will defeat all other corporate Democratic hopefuls for the nomination. But Ford thinks it will force the top authorities of the Democratic Party to sabotage Sanders’ own campaign once again.
“Sanders will never leave the Democratic Party, but perhaps a critical mass of his followers will come out of that capitalist pigsty in search of real, and truly democratic socialist solutions,” predicts Glen Ford.
September 24, 2018.
This article can be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Digging Themselves Out
Digging Themselves Out of the 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.
It seems that the State Department propagandists, the CIA and other U.S. agencies are not finding it easy to get out of the ridiculous situation they have gotten themselves into with the issue of acoustic attacks against their embassy staff in Havana.
For experts and observers of this type of propaganda at the highest level of government, the denunciation of an imaginary attack against the United States by another country is not something new in Washington. We must remember the explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana Bay; the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii; the incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in Vietnam and the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which respectively served as lying justifications for launching wars against Spain in 1898, Japan in 1941, Vietnam in 1964 and Iraq in 2003.
The first of these invented situations served to inaugurate the imperialist status of U.S. foreign policy by leaving Washington in possession of the vast Spanish colonial empire.
The United States has surprised the world by the naivete with which US public opinion has accepted official versions of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the abominable terrorist act against the Twin Towers. These two fables look more like tales of Hollywood horror and mystery than anything else. The second of these two tales served as pretext for its so-called “war on terrorism” and, as part of it, the curtailment of the civil liberties of the people of the U.S.
As a rule, the Cuban government -which has been one of the preferred victims of U.S. imperialism lately- has avoided responding to each of the media tricks plotted by Washington in order to avoid its further circulation. It has been the facts themselves, and the friends and sympathizers, who have answered them.
In order to attack Cuba, US propaganda has even added to the 20,000 martyrs left by the Batista tyranny imposed on the island by Washington. They’ve added the number of torturers and murderers of the deposed regime executed by judicial sentence of the popular revolutionary tribunals to the triumph of the revolution. They leave out the aggressors and assailants executed because of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs (Girón Beach) sponsored by Washington and the victims of the hundreds of terrorist acts and attacks promoted by the United States against Cuba in recent times.
With these they try to stain with gross manipulation the very clean record of respect for human rights that the Cuban revolution has always maintained.
In the great farce of sonic attacks, which already has the guise of silent comedy, no guilty parties are identified and the alleged victims are not known either because, evidently, they have not existed.
Observers of U.S. politics maintain that Senator Marco Rubio was the one who devised the show so that the great scandal with his hegemonic participation would make him presidential with his sights set on becoming the first Hispanic president of the United States.
Rubio was aware of certain acoustic problems presented by several officials of the intelligence services accredited to the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. There, a lawsuit was being filed against the American Technology Corporation (ATC), manufacturer of the LRAD-RX equipment used by the National Security Subcommittee (NSSC) to communicate with its agents in Cuba who could be responsible for such ailments. This highly-specialized espionage equipment had just been acquired by the State Department for the diplomatic mission in Havana.
Rubio skillfully devised or commissioned the script to be developed for the spectacle of the sonic attacks. His greatest audacity was to involve, as the main sponsor, President Donald Trump. Michael Wolff points out in his book FIRE AND FURY, much has been written about Trump’s “acting like a child, suffering from psychopathologies such as delusions of grandeur and paranoia, that he is an ignorant person who neither reads nor listens and is totally incapable of fulfilling the duties of his office”.
Therefore, it was to be assumed that in a few weeks nobody would remember the farce of Trump’s sonic attacks, which would only have added to the list of his many “eccentricities”.
But the lie took flight and now the US does not know how to get itself out of the mess with as few political casualties as possible.
September 7, 2018.
This article can be reproduced citing the newspaper POR ESTO! as its source.
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