By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
Although there are still several months to go before the U.S. vote is held for the 2020 presidential election, scheduled for November 2020, the U.S. media has been noting concerns about the vulnerability of the event to foreign interference.
The initial factor in the escalation of fear appears to have been the release of a joint statement issued by key members of the Trump administration last November, authored by Attorney General Bill Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire, FBI Director Christopher Wray, National Security Agency Director General Paul Nakasone, and Director of the Infrastructure Security and Cybersecurity Agency Christopher Krebs.
This document states that foreign interference in the voting for the 2020-2024 presidential election is imminent although it admits that there is no evidence for such a claim.
“Our opponents want to undermine our democratic institutions, influence public sentiment, and affect our government policies with Russia, China, Iran, and other malicious foreign actors who will try to interfere with the voting process or influence voters’ perceptions.
“Opponents may seek to achieve their objectives through a variety of means, including social media campaigns, directing disinformation operations, or carrying out disruptive or destructive cyber attacks against state and local infrastructure.
“While we have no evidence at this time that the electoral infrastructure has been compromised or altered to allow opponents to prevent voting, alter the vote count, or alter the ability to count votes, we continue to closely monitor any threats to the U.S. election,” the statement said.
Despite the key caveat that there was no evidence at the time the document was issued, many media reports such as BuzzFeed, ABC News and Newsweek used the statement to claim that foreign interference in 2020 was imminent.
In addition to reports that have confirmed the involvement of state actors – Russia, Iran and China – and despite the lack of evidence, other media have claimed that this supposedly imminent interference will inevitably be successful. This is, in large part, due to claims that the tactics used will be based largely on technologies that the US does not have the capacity to successfully counteract.
CSO Online, an online media outlet that provides news, analysis and research on security and risk management, recently warned that “fixing the United States’ voting and election infrastructure problems is a long-term proposition that will not be solved in time for the November election.
Meanwhile, the New York Times warned of the impending chaos. It said that “stealthy” and malevolent foreign actors had already laid the foundation for “an ugly campaign season marred by hacking and misinformation. The US monthly magazine Wired and its news website of the same name claimed last year that the security of the US elections “continues to hurt on all levels”.
The target is the mind of the American people,” says Joshua Geltzer, former director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council. “In some ways, we are less vulnerable than we were in 2016. In other ways, more. Almost all experts agree on this: The worst-case scenario – for which we must prepare – is a situation that causes Americans to question the very foundations of our democracy – “with free and fair elections.
Long before this kind of rhetoric reached the U.S. media, the Israeli intelligence-linked technology company Cybereason said in a statement on its Web site that “messing with the voter’s mind” would have a greater impact than changing the total vote, even before the 2016 election.
That statement, released by Cybereason before the last presidential election, was written by the company’s CEO, Lior Div, who was then leading offensive hacking operations against nation-states for Israeli military intelligence.
Everything indicates that a great electoral fraud is being prepared for next November’s elections and that the scene is being set for the identification of the “culprits” of an alleged “foreign interference” to cover up the simulation.
February 3rd, 2020.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
There is no doubt that we are facing a wave of extreme right-wing movements. In order to understand what is happening, it is important to turn to a historical perspective. For that, we turn to the explnation given by John Bellamy Foster, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the US left-wing magazine Monthly Review.
The political map on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to reveal a rise of the extreme right in the world. In most European economies, from the largest and strongest to the smallest and weakest, there was an increase in electoral support for right-wing forces. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, these forces of reaction achieved one success after another with impunity by resorting to various forms of disguised violence.
But the clean and resounding electoral triumph of Andres Manuel López (AMLO) in the race for Mexico’s presidency seems to have been a watershed towards a different reality.
It is known that, against this great victory by the Mexicans, there was put into practice a great clandestine Berlin operation. It’s named after the name of the street in the Mexican capital where the clandestine headquarters of the imperialist operation operated.
They used cyber techniques similar to those used shortly before, under the direction of the CIA. They targeted the electoral processes in Brazil, Ecuador and other points in Latin America and Africa that left distorting fruits of popular will, Operation Berlin was carried out in Mexico. Only this time, in Mexico, they failed. Marxist theorists, along with most historians, have explained that fascism has as its backbone a political alliance between monopoly capital and a certain stratum of the middle class (or petty bourgeoisie).
Historically, the extreme right, too, has gained followers from the countryside, from established religions and from sectors of the armed forces. Fascism is always marginally present in all capitalist societies. It never emerges with all its strength on its own. It is consolidated as a movement only in those cases in which the capitalist class offers its encouragement and support, mobilizing the most reactionary elements of the “middle class”, which acts as the rear of the system.
If, in a period of economic and political crisis, the liberal state becomes an impediment to capitalist government, the existing powers will seek to preserve, consolidate and expand their rule through a regressive change in the capitalist state using the political forms provided by the extreme right.
Neoliberalism de-legitimizes the state. It encourages the development of radical right-wing or neo-fascist movements that oppose neoliberal political elites in the exercise of power and influence impoverished sectors through bribery.
Emerging neo-fascism in the United States is rooted in the “white supremacism” that goes back to slavery and the predominant thinking of the first British settlers, mixed with all sorts of new ideological elements.
Trump’s militant political base is estimated to be between 25 and 30 percent of the electorate and is located in the lower-middle stratum, with family incomes of about $75,000 a year.
It is a very white sector of the population that finds itself in a position of extreme economic insecurity. Its ideology is national-imperialist, with militant racism. A large part of this demographic group is associated with right-wing evangelism. It is something similar to the mass in Brazil that supported Jair Bolsonaro.
Trump’s main value for the ruling class lies in the fact that the radical right has been able to deliver added value to the rich: it has removed obstacles to market dominance over the whole of society.
The notion that coheres its social base is the construction of a wall along the Mexican border and new detention centers. These symbolize a war against poor immigrants. But the economic policies of the Trump administration have little to do with the demands of its social base. Trump has increased the power of financial monopoly capital, given huge tax and subsidy exemptions to big business and the rich. He has promoted economic and environmental deregulation, undermined unions, privatized education, expanded the penal state, destroyed the little progress which had been made in health care, and waged a relentless war for U.S. hegemony. Hence, Mexicans can feel like they are on the cusp of a well-deserved future.
October 31, 2019.
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 emergence of more leftist agendas among some Democratic Party politicians and a certain radicalization of awareness in the “ordinary” U.S. citizenry about social and economic equality in the United States led to an interesting interview with Colin S. Cavell, professor of political science at the helm of Finian Cunningham, conducted and disseminated by the Strategic Culture Foundation.
President Trump has frequently condemned “evil socialism” in his speeches, reflecting the U.S. ruling class’s fear of a shift to socialism in the country. Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard are calling for increased taxes on wealthy Americans and powerful corporations, reversing decades of neoliberal tax policies.
Voters join in calls for more radical redistribution of wealth and support policies against growing inequality in the United States, where a handful of billionaires now own more wealth than half the total population.
Professor Cavell views the current evolution of U.S. politics from a historical perspective of socialist movements in U.S. society, although he warns that the pro-capitalist political class and media work assiduously to thwart any movement toward a more just and democratic society.
Asked if Bernie Sanders, who seems to receive much support from the working class for his policies of Medicare for All and the progressive taxes on the rich if this augurs an American awakening to a socialist government, Cavell responds that most Americans have little understanding of the perspective they delineate since the media only talks about fear of socialism.
“After a century of anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda by the capitalist state and its supporters, socialism, in the minds of most U.S. citizens, is a totalitarian hell with fire and brimstone in which an evil satanic dictator orders everyone to enslave themselves to the detriment of the body politic, coupled with the erosion of individual liberties and personal happiness,” denotes Cavell.
“After the unceasing repetition of such concepts for ten decades, people have begun to glimpse, since the 1970s, and given the stagnation of their wages and living standards (in most cases and setbacks in others) have come to the conclusion that the benefits of capitalism only reach a small part of that class and not the great majorities.
Therefore, they are open to hear the voices of those who, like Sanders and other more leftist Democrats, are calling for the implementation of universal health care for all. It’s an idea that has been so belittled by former U.S. presidents and politicians as “socialized medicine”, a term that most citizens conceive of as the reduction or elimination of health care costs.
As for other aspects of the socialization of the economy, most are not clear about this, although there is strong support for extending access to free education in higher education institutions, called “colleges” and universities. Student loan arrears in that sector currently exceed $1.5 billion and affect at least one-sixth of the U.S. population, about 43 million adults. And, given that the “best job” is the one that pays the most and has the most benefits, there is a tendency to advance through the acquisition of an education with a formalized degree.
Cavell believes that class consciousness is present in most citizens, but rarely articulated. Instead, the notion remains that the United States is a class-free nation in which merit guarantees the best retribution to those who are able to “get up by their own means. Most citizens believe they are members of the middle class even though the vast majority live “from paycheck to paycheck” and have little or no savings for emergencies.
So, what is present there is a working class conscious of its existence, functionality, strength and power, but which does not recognize its historical role called to overthrow capitalism by force if it wants to enjoy a true sense of freedom.
Cavell believes that if presidential elections were held today in the United States, without interference or obstruction from the Democratic and Republican parties, Bernie Sanders would easily be the winner.
This, however, will never happen, as the capitalist class through all its mechanisms will ensure that Bernie will never make it to the Democratic Party nomination and therefore will not be a candidate in the 2020 Elections.
October 19, 2019
(http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com)
(*) This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO! as the source.
The organization condemned Washington’s policies towards the Caribbean country which have had a devastating effect and have hindered the development of solidarity ties between the citizens of both countries.
———————————————————————————————
Author: Web Editor | internet@granma.cu
September 2, 2019 09:09:14
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Washington, The Democratic Socialist Organization of America (DSA) expressed its solidarity with the people of Cuba and expressed its categorical opposition to the economic, commercial and financial blockade that the United States maintains today against the island.
DSA, which identifies itself as the largest socialist organization in the United States, condemned that Washington’s policies toward the Caribbean country have had a devastating effect on the Cuban people and have hindered the development of solidarity ties between the citizens of both countries.
In a statement approved by its National Political Committee and released this week, the group said it opposes U.S. imperialism and economic sanctions or other actions that would undermine the self-determination of the Cuban people.
“We also oppose the continued existence of the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay,” added the communiqué regarding the military enclave maintained by Washington in eastern Cuba against the will of the government and people of the island.
According to the document, the group will work with other organizations in solidarity with Cuba to achieve its objective of defending the sovereignty of the largest of the Antilles, subjected to the siege imposed by the United States almost 60 years ago.
The text also cited a communiqué issued by DSA in 2014, when the administration of former President Barack Obama and the government of the Caribbean country announced the decision to begin a process of normalization of relations, now held back by the Donald Trump administration.
Our government’s actions were never designed to help the Cuban people, but rather to appease U.S. right-wing citizens of Cuban origin and punish a country that rejected imperialism and capitalism, the group said.
We hope that the normalization of relations will reduce the negative actions of the United States in the future, the organization added at that time.
The new declaration on Cuba was the result of the provisions of Resolution 62 of the biannual convention held by the DSA last August 2-4 in Atlanta, Georgia.
According to an article published in The New York Times earlier that month, Democratic Socialists of America went from 5,000 members three years ago to 56,000 today.
Members include Democratic Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, as well as more than 20 local elected officials from across the country.
+++++++++++++++++
TEXT OF DSA STATEMENT ON CUBA:
https://www.dsausa.org/statements/statement-on-cuba/
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The electoral failure of center-left and center parties in Europe and North America has provoked a timid shift to the left in U.S. politics and is encouraging a modest renaissance of the “socialist” option.
With the marginalization of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Socialist Party of France and the Italian Democratic Party by voters angered by their parties’ shift to the right, it was inevitable that some of the leaders of these political formations would project a new orientation, somewhat more to the lef.t. It remains to be seen whether they will implement it. In line with this sentiment, the British Labour Party and the Socialist Party of Spain have made popular advances based on left-wing positions that, in most cases, reproduce the social democratic formulas of the mid-twentieth century.
This is how the acclaimed American communist journalist and writer Greg Godels analyzes it in a thorough work about the situation that left-wing and progressive political organizations in the United States are going through today.
In the United States, the reaction to Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 elections generated further rhetoric to the left and the emergence of an important moderate social-democratic faction within the US Democratic Party.
It is driven by the energetic and youthful “veterans” of Bernie Sanders’ campaign called “Sandernistas”. They rally around the social democrats in the United States. The new left of the Democratic Party is trying to transform the old party. Meanwhile, opponents of this trend from the left, both inside and outside the Party, attack them using every possible resource, says Godels.
This, of course, raises the question of where the left is going. In the U.S., the failure to secure deep roots for an independent, internationalist, principled and revolutionary socialist movement – not totally absorbed by bipartisan electoral politics – means that the genuine politics of the left will have to suffer for the next 17-18 months from the bipartisan electoral circus, with guaranteed unsatisfactory results.
The distractions caused by the absurd RussiaGate, the political trial, the Twitter wars and the mistakes of some celebrities, mean that the fate of Venezuelans, Iranians, Palestinians and many poor and exploited Americans will remain in the hands of the crazy foreign policy team of Trump, a group of which the top of the Democratic Party refuses to shake off.
“We have found a worrying trend toward the normalization of the positive connotation of socialism,” the Victims of Communism (VOC) Foundation bitterly asserted. But most Americans understand socialism very differently from the traditional scientific concept.
According to the VOC study, only 9 percent of respondents associate the idea of socialism with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The most popular reference is Sanders, followed by the leaders of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the New Deal policy set in motion by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression.
Some Americans call developed countries with notable official economic regulation socialist: Sweden, Canada and France, even leaving behind nations that explicitly declare their socialist character, such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, Democratic Korea and Venezuela.
For now, Bernie Sanders seems likely to win the nomination and become the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate.
Unlike the situation three years ago, Sanders would now have to compete with other representatives of the left wing of the Democratic Party. This wing, while not defining themselves as socialists, share some of his more progressive proposals, such as Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, who have supported the fuller version of the free universal health care system proposed by Sanders. Together, they would account for 19% of voters in the primaries, according to this poll.
Since the November 2020 presidential election would probably be the last for Sanders, who will then be 79 years old, it is suspected that his advanced age would lead him to nominate a younger person of a different gender as a vice presidential candidate.
Whatever Sanders’ electoral career, the spread of skepticism toward capitalism within U.S. society results from the country’s socioeconomic status and is objective and positive, experts say.
June 13, 2019.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
It wasn’t surprising to hear multi-billionaires Bill Gates, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, interviewed on CNBC-TV on Thursday, May 9, defending capitalism. But it was indeed surprising that Gates made a positive comment about socialism, or at least about what is defined in the United States as socialism.
Gates pointed out that the current increase in pro-socialist rhetoric in the United States does not really refer to socialism according to any conventional definition of the word. The “socialist” policies that we hear from politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Bernie Sanders are, to a greater extent, about capitalist policies with a strong social security contribution. And that is good!
“Socialism used to mean that a State controlled the means of production”, and, according to Gates, “many people here who promote socialism do not define it in that classical way.”
Gates also says that most people who favor socialism in the United States do not speak of true socialism. And they’re right!
“The majority does not argue against capitalism… only believes that there should be changes in taxes, more progressive tax rates, and the reinstatement of estate tax. What they actually want is capitalism with a better level of taxation,” says Gates.
According to him, most left-wing Americans do not advocate the ownership of the means of production to be passed on to the workers, that all industries be nationalized, and that private property be abolished, which are the real principles of socialist ideology.
The majority of left-wing people support politicians who promise capitalism with a solid social security foundation. But there is no indication that what they are proposing is truly socialism.
The federal employment guarantee of AOC, for example, would consist of a reference standard for employment that would include a minimum wage of $15 linked to inflation, full medical care, and paid leave for sickness and children.
This proposal would drastically improve the quality of employment in the United States by giving training and experience to the workers and at the same time providing much needed public services to communities in areas such as, education, health, park maintenance, childcare, and environment conservation.
But that’s not socialism in the classic sense of the word. It is capitalism with a strong social safety net. The majority of rich countries in Europe already have what AOC proposes. That doesn’t make them socialists. In any case, it makes them social democrats.
The United States does not have a Social Democratic party, thus, anything to the left of the Democratic Party is called socialism, because Americans do not have a vocabulary that would allow them to speak of these things with greater subtlety than that of a left against a binary right.
Why people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are labeled as socialists, and even sometimes they call themselves by that term?
Because Fox News spent Obama’s years calling all the Democratic Party’s policies so. As a result, there are two generations (Millennials and Generation Z) who simply use the term socialist without worrying too much about what it exactly means.
For the younger generations, socialism only means making sure that everyone can go to the doctor when they need it, or have a roof over their heads, or have money to buy food, regardless of that person’s circumstances.
And these generations believe that all of these can be achieved within the existing system, without overthrowing the ruling class and the setting of a new political system led by the working class.
As Gates points out, there are some real socialists in the world. And there are even real socialists in governments all over the world. But most American socialists are simply leftists who disregard party labels and talk about policies. Bill Gates knows this and Donald Trump knows it too.
It’s not that Bill Gates is progressive. Guys like Gates know clearly that the guillotines are coming, and if the United States continues along the path of austerity and tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, anything can happen.
According to available information, Gates is worth more than $101 billion dollars, which should literally be considered a crime in a civilized society in which 13 million children do not have enough to eat. But, for now, we will have to accept that at least there are some multi-billionaires who recognize the need for real changes in global society.
May 10, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation edited by Walter Lippmann.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, identified in the press by her initials AOC, is one of the probable candidates of the Democratic Party to integrate the candidature for the presidency of the United States in 2020.
Born in New York, on October 13, 1989, she won the Democratic primary in the 14th congressional district of New York after defeating Democratic leader Joseph Crowley by a very large majority. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and has been linked to a wide variety of other progressive U.S. political platforms.
In the course of an interview she gave in Austin, Texas, to The Intercept, AOC gave her opinions on the defects she observed in the capitalist system.
The interview took place when the first vote was being taken in the Senate on a draft resolution known as Green New Deal, a set of her policy proposals for integrating the United Nations Environment Program that originated in a green economy initiative known as the “Global Green New Deal.”
This initiative, which evokes the plans of Franklin D. Roosevelt for economic stimulation triggered by the Great Depression, is a resolution drafted by Alexandria and one of her Democratic colleagues, Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts. Though it is not likely to see the light as legislation, for the time being it symbolizes the new progressive momentum after the Democratic victory in the House of Representatives last November.
The 14-page document calls for a reduction in greenhouse gase emissions by 40% to 60% by 2030 and bringing global emissions down to zero by 2050. AOC has reached that conclusion because she believes that “the United States is dealing with the consequences of putting profits above everything else in our society and that’s what makes the capitalist system, as it is today, irredeemable”.
Although it is seemingly ironic to bash capitalism in the midst of a marketing orgy funded by the technology industry, AOC maintains that “capitalism is the ideology of capital and in this system the most important thing is the concentration of capital, the search for and the maximization of profits… and that’s why I think capitalism can’t be saved “, she said.
Talking about her bill called Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez said she hopes to address minority communities and places like Flint, Michigan, because these groups were left behind by the original New Deal — the one that was approved by President Franklin Roosevelt.
While most Americans view the original New Deal as the precursor of social welfare programs that benefited millions of white and minority Americans, Ocasio-Cortez says the law was, in fact, deeply racist, because of what’s been called the “red line.” “The New Deal was an extremely racist economic policy that drew red lines around the black and mulatto communities to isolate them from white America.”
“It allowed white Americans to access mortgage loans that black Americans could not aspire to and they were denied access to the greatest source of inter-generational wealth,” argues AOC.
Ocasio-Cortez is a progressive member of the Democratic Socialists of America. A defender of universal health care and of the Jobs Guarantee program, she calls for an end to the privatization of prisons and access to public university education free of charge; she also favors arms control policies. She criticizes Israel’s foreign policy and described the death of Palestinian demonstrators on the Gaza border in 2018 as a “massacre.” AOC supports the abolition of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and maintains that this agency uses clandestine detention centers.
In the legislative elections, held on 6 November 2018, she won the seat for New York’s 14th Congressional District. Since her election, she has been the target of all sorts of attacks by conservative sectors in the U.S. She is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress in the history of the United States after surpassing Republican Elise Stefanik who was elected in 2014 at the age of 30.
Although AOC’s political, economic, and international agenda is a long way from being an anti-imperialist program for real social justice, the presence of this possible candidate for the presidency of the United States indicates a healthy trend for humanity.
March 16, 2019.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
According to Federico Pieraccini, reproduced by Global Times on November 10, the midterm U.S. elections constituted a lottery of public office between Democrats and Republicans that culminated in a defeat for Trump’s administration and a clear victory for Washington’s “War Party”.
While it is true that it is in the Senate that the most important appointments are confirmed, it is the House that carries the main weight when it comes to domestic politics. The fact that Democrats have the majority of seats there makes the battle for Trump’s re-election in 2020 extremely arduous.
Trump should be able to prove to his constituents that he has kept the promises he made in 2016, and this is almost impossible with the House in the hands of his opponents.
As Pieraccini puts it, “the country faces a scenario of surrender to the war party, which is that faction that responds to the interests of specific conglomerates of power and not to voters. The real winners have been the intelligence agencies, Wall Street and the banks, the credit rating agencies, the Federal Reserve, the big media, the think tanks, the political directorates and the military-industrial complex.
Trump has been able to discover, in his first two years as president, how little autonomy he has in foreign policy, because of the warmongering of the American establishment.
The realistic vision of foreign policy on which Trump based his electoral campaign was swept away within days of his victory. Hoping to bribe the hawks in Washington, he surrounded himself with neoconservatives. They ended up trying to box him into something similar to the Washington Consensus in which any attempt at dialogue with opponents is seen as a weakness or a sign of surrender, Pieraccini notes.
“Washington and its elites live trapped in a uni-polar bubble, convinced that the United States is the only world power left on the geopolitical chessboard. Pentagon planners have confirmed in two official documents (the Nuclear Posture Review and the National Defense Review) how international relations have become a multi-polar reality in which the United States will have to deal with competitors like Russia and China.
The outcome of the midterm elections could accelerate this process. With the House of Representatives in the hands of the Democrats, Trump will have to abandon his vulgar foreign policy even more than he has in the past two years. The accumulation of foreign policy concessions is remarkable. Suffice it to note that in the enmity towards Iran is fostered by Israel and Saudi Arabia, which are the Trump administration’s main partners.
The same goes for China, with the antagonism fostered by Trump himself to justify the impoverishment of the American middle class that voted for him to change that situation. And, of course, then there follows the endemic hatred of Russia, the sworn enemy of the Washington establishment.
But after his defeat in the House, in order for the House to approve something, he will have to grant much more freedom in foreign policy to the neoliberals, eager to reactivate the foreign policy of Bush and Obama. Without any concessions from the House, all of Trump’s national promises to his constituents will be thwarted.
The permanent political civil war in the United States seems destined to intensify, and the prospect of an even less independent administration in foreign policy will push the rest of the world to become less and less dependent on Washington and start looking the other way. Even towards European countries like France, Germany and Italy. They seem to have understood that an exclusive alliance with Washington is not beneficial to them.
Indeed, it is doomed to failure as a result of the chaos in US foreign policy. While many Eurasian countries such as India, Japan, Turkey, Iran, Russia, China, Afghanistan and Pakistan try to overcome their differences by creating international cooperation frameworks, Washington unnecessarily pushes the accelerator on disorder.
An example of Washington’s decline can clearly be seen in Korea, where Seoul and Pyongyang seem to be heading towards peaceful reconciliation, without the direct participation of the US.
In India’s disagreements with China and Japan’s disputes with China and Russia, the tension is always centered on the interests of distant Washington rather than those of the others involved. The next two years will resolve the question of whether the current reality is already multi-polar, or whether the uni-polar order remains, Washington being the indispensable nation for its friends and enemies.
November 12, 2018.
This article may be reproduced by citing the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews
CNN journalist Jim Acosta is in the news because he had an incident with U.S. President Donald Trump during a press conference at the White House. Acosta first asked about President Donald Trump’s description of the caravan of Central American immigrants seeking to enter the United States as an “invasion”. Acosta accused Trump of demonizing them and in the exchange, a White House intern tried to remove the microphone but that time Acosta resisted and asked a second question about “the Russian investigation.”
As a result, Jim Acosta was expelled from the press conference and his White House credential was withdrawn. This has generated thousands of news dispatches. What none of those reports has remembered is that, when Jim Acosta was in Havana, “embedded” in the delegation headed by then-U.S. President Barack Obama who visited the island, he had another tense dialogue. That one was with Cuban leader Raul Castro, but no one tried to take his microphone or put him out of the room:
Jim Acosta: “Why do you have Cuban political prisoners and why don’t you release them?”
Raul Castro: “Give me the list of political prisoners now to release them. Or give me a list of names if there are political prisoners. And if there are those political prisoners, before nightfall they are going to be released.
Needless to say, Acosta did not turn in any lists, but no one expelled him from Cuba because of it.
CNN’s concern, and that of the American press in general, for political prisoners and liberties, and also its hostility toward Donald Trump, is a little selective. During his visit to Israel, which coincided with the numerous and harassed demonstrations by Palestinians in support of their prisoners in Israeli jails, nothing was asked of the Israeli President or said in those media about political prisoners in Israel.
As for the “invasion” of Central American emigrants, mainly Hondurans, neither Acosta nor CNN, nor any U.S. media has alluded to the responsibility of the United States for the state of poverty, social crisis and violence faced by the countries of the so-called Northern Triangle (Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras), who have been devastated by decades of dirty war and neoliberalism encouraged by Washington.
Particularly in the case of Honduras, when it began a path to address social needs, integrating into the education and health programs of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) was impacted in 2009 by the military coup that began the U.S. counteroffensive in Latin America aiming to re-establish its hegemony in the region. That was led by Barack Obama’s White House, who by the way has been the U.S. president who has deported more immigrants than any other in history.
In Honduras, 15 journalists were murdered after that coup supported by the United States.There is even a video in which the murder of an informant is ordered, after the uncomfortable question to a powerful businessman linked to the coup plotters (see 10:25 minutes of the documentary The Deadliest Place in the World for a Journalist: which has been on the Internet since October 2011), but neither Democrats nor Republicans demonstrated on the matter, much less CNN nor any US corporate media. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=633&v=dvg1JcvC3KM
One thing that Trump, Jim Acosta, Barack Obama, CNN and all the “free press” agree on is that the United States, unlike Cuba, is a country with democracy and freedom of expression, but more and more common things happen there in the countries classified as “banana republics,” a term coined in his volume of stories Cabbages and Kings by the American writer O. Henry to refer to Honduras, something that is the result of repeated military interventions and economic looting, along with the export of violence, armed gangs and corruption, as well as the export of violence, armed gangs and corruption.
But what is happening in Trump’s United States, with scandals over the president’s relations with prostitutes, dismissals of officials for spurious motives, and even brothel owners who win elections even after death, surpasses novels like The Autumn of the Patriarch or the Resource of the Method. Of course, these are conclusions too deep to be told by Jim Acosta or CNN, and, if they were to be addressed, it would be to say that it is the exceptional result of the management of an irresponsible madman, never of a system where he sends the money and thanks to which a tycoon who runs a country as if it were his company was able to become President.
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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