Labor stirs anti-refugee hysteria
Nov 14, 2009 Making revolution
By Kerry Vernon. from www.directaction.org.au
Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, diverted from entering Australia and put on the Australian Customs ship Oceanic Viking, had been refusing food for two days and refusing to leave the ship at Kijang for the Indonesian immigration detention prison, Tanjung Pinang, on Bintan Island on October 26. It had been more than a week since the 78 asylum seekers, including a sick 12-year-old girl, were put aboard the Australian ship after being intercepted by the Indonesian navy on October 11 and diverted from reaching Australia in a deal between Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Obama under growing pressure to end US blockade of Cuba
May 24, 2009 Making revolution
By Marce Cameron
From www.directaction.org.au
US President Barack Obama faces growing pressure to end the US economic blockade of socialist Cuba, imposed in 1962. On April 13, prior to attending the Organization of American States (OAS) heads of government meeting in Trinidad, Obama eased restrictions on Cuban-Americans visiting and sending money to family members in Cuba. He also authorised US telecommunications firms to provide internet, phone and TV services to Cuba.
While these measures leave the blockade intact, the tide is turning against it. It’s likely that during Obama’s term in office significant steps will be taken to dismantle the blockade. This is not because US imperialism has had a change of heart towards the Cuban Revolution, which has suffered the consequences of Washington’s brutal economic siege for nearly half a century. Rather, it is because the blockade has failed to achieve its objective of destroying the revolution, and the political benefits to the US rulers of maintaining the blockade are increasingly outweighed by the costs. This has led to divisions within the US capitalist class and its political elite about how to “deal” with Cuba.
What the US rulers hoped the blockade would achieve was spelt out in a now declassified State Department document dated April 6, 1960: “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba … to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of [Cuba’s revolutionary] government.” By cutting off all trade with Cuba, the US rulers sought to subject Cuba’s workers and farmers to deprivation, hunger and disease until, demoralised, they would rise up against their revolutionary socialist government. In the resulting chaos, the US military could then invade Cuba and install a counter-revolutionary puppet regime. Cuba would be restored to its pre-revolution status as a US neocolony. This would send a chilling message to the workers and peasants throughout Latin America and the rest of the Third World: if you challenge imperialist domination of your countries, you will be crushed by US military might.
Obama’s dilemma
However, as Obama himself recognised in January 2004, when he was an Illinois state senator, the blockade had “utterly failed in the effort to overthrow Castro” (the US rulers pretend that the Cuban socialist revolution is solely the result of the will of one man, not the will of the island’s 11 million working people). Obama’s words were echoed by his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, on the eve of the OAS summit: “We are continuing to look for productive ways forward because we view the present policy as having failed”. In February, Richard Lugar, the senior Republican representative on the US Senate foreign relations committee, delivered a report that concluded: “After 47 years … the unilateral embargo on Cuba has failed to achieve its stated purpose of ‘bringing democracy to the Cuban people’”.
During the presidential election campaign Obama had affirmed he would maintain the blockade against Cuba because, as he told a Cuban-American audience in Miami in August 2007, “it provides us with the leverage to present the [Cuban] regime with a clear choice”. However, as Obama’s 10 predecessors in the White House discovered to their frustration, Cuba’s revolutionary socialist government has never once sought to appease Washington by conceding to the US rulers’ demands to replace Cuba’s own system of people’s power democracy with the money-dominated farce that the US rulers hold up to the world as “democracy”.
This principled stance was reiterated by Cuban President Raul Castro at an April 29 gathering in Havana of ministers from 118 member-countries of the Non-Aligned Movement. “We are willing”, he said, “to talk about everything with the United States, in equality of conditions, but not to negotiate our sovereignty, nor our political and social system, the right to self-determination, nor our internal affairs.” Castro noted that “while the measures recently announced by President Obama are positive, their reach is minimal. The blockade has remained intact.” He pointed out that Cuba had not imposed any sanctions against the US and (in a reference to the US military base at Guantanamo Bay) Cuba does not have “a military base on United States territory, against the will of its people … therefore, it is not Cuba that has to make gestures” toward the US.
Obama and other US officials have made contradictory statements about the US government’s intentions regarding the blockade. At the OAS summit, Obama said that his government “seeks a new beginning on Cuba”. After the summit, he said that Cuba must concede to long-standing US demands to release “political prisoners” and begin moving towards US-style “democracy” before he would take further steps to normalise relations with Havana — hardly a “new beginning”.
These contradictory statements reflect the dilemma Obama faces. He knows that the US blockade has failed, but as the commander-in-chief of the US empire he doesn’t want to be seen to be making too many unilateral concessions to Havana, after decades of US economic, political and military bullying have failed to crack Cuba’s resistance. Obama’s tough line coming out of the OAS summit appears to be face-saving rhetoric, aimed at appeasing the chorus of ultra-conservative condemnation in the US which followed his shaking hands in Trinidad with Venezuela President Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s staunchest ally.
US isolation
The US rulers’ blockade of Cuba, has not only failed to destroy its socialist revolution. It has failed to block the emergence of a new socialist revolution in South America. With solidarity from Venezuela, Cuba is gradually emerging from the harsh “special period” economic crisis that it was plunged into at the beginning of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s principal trading partner. The worst years of this crisis period have been left behind.
The services provided by Cuban health and other professionals in Venezuela have overtaken tourism as Cuba’s largest source of foreign currency earnings. There is growing integration between Cuba’s socialist state enterprises and their counterparts in Venezuela, as more of the Venezuelan economy has been expropriated by the revolutionary working people’s government led by Hugo Chavez.
Together, Venezuela and Cuba have launched ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, and other initiatives for continental solidarity and regional integration. Cuba’s prestige among the working masses of Latin America keeps growing. Such is the admiration and support for Cuba that at the OAS summit, Latin American government leaders from across the political spectrum — including such staunch US allies as Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and Mexican President Felipe Calderon — spoke with one voice to demand that Obama lift the US blockade of Cuba.
The blockade was supposed to isolate Cuba. Yet today it is the US that is isolated. Every year since 1992 the overwhelming majority of UN member countries have voted for Cuba’s resolution demanding an end to the blockade. Last October, Cuba’s resolution was approved by the highest margin ever, with 185 of 192 UN member states voting in favour. When the US imposed its economic blockade in 1962, Canada and Mexico were the only countries in the Western hemisphere not to break off diplomatic relations with Cuba. Following the announcement a month before the OAS summit by the newly-elected leftist government in El Salvador and the conservative government of Costa Rica that they will restore relations with Havana this year, the US will become the only government in the Americas not to have diplomatic and trade relations with Cuba.
Capitalist rivalry
Since the early 1960s, Washington has tried but been unable to get its imperialist allies in Canada, Europe, Japan and Australasia to participate in its economic blockade of Cuba. In an epoch of global capitalist decline marked by saturated markets and vast accumulation of money capital that cannot be profitably invested in expanding the production of goods and services, imperialist transnational corporations cannot ignore even a small post-capitalist “market” of just 11 million people. What makes Cuba attractive for foreign investors is, ironically, the existence of the US blockade, which means the absence of US corporate competition.
When the US Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act in 1996 and then-president Bill Clinton signed it into law, Canada and the European Union protested and asked the World Trade Organisation to intervene and rule against this imposition on “free trade”. The Helms-Burton law threatened third-country companies investing in US property nationalised by Cuba in 1960 with compensation suits in US courts. The law barred executives of such companies from entering the US. Ships involved in trade with Cuba were prohibited from entering US ports for six months after visiting Cuba. In retaliation Canada, Mexico and the EU each introduced legislation to counteract Helms-Burton.
Today more than 2 million Canadian, European and Latin American tourists are holidaying in Cuba annually. Cuba is special not only because of what it has, but because of what it lacks — McDonalds, commercial advertising, abject poverty and hordes of US tourists. As well as being a unique tourism destination, Cuba has 34% of the world’s nickel reserves and 26% of its cobalt reserves. Nickel and cobalt are strategic metals used in the production of high-strength, corrosion-resistant alloys such as stainless steel. In 2000, nickel displaced sugar as Cuba’s top export commodity, thanks to a joint venture with Canada’s Sherritt corporation.
After Venezuela, China is Cuba’s second largest trading partner. China’s capitalist rulers favour good relations with Cuba in order to secure a reliable supply of nickel, and are offering favourable trade and investment deals to resource-rich Third World states in conflict with Washington. Meanwhile, US oil giants have watched from the sidelines as state oil companies from Venezuela, Brazil, China, India and Russia have been bidding for the rights to drill for oil in Cuban territorial waters in the Gulf of Mexico. According to both Cuban and US geological surveys, Cuba’s largely untapped Gulf oil reserves may rival those of the US.
Lying deep underneath the seabed, this oil will be costly and difficult to extract, and it is not yet known exactly how much is down there. Washington’s calculations must take into account the real possibility that Cuba could become an energy independent, oil exporting country within as little as five years. Were this to happen the US blockade would become all but irrelevant — except for the US oil corporations, which would be denied even a slice of the action!
Travel ban
There is already a large crack in the US economic blockade. Under pressure from US farmers and agribusiness companies, an amendment to the US trade embargo against Cuba was made in 2002 to allow US companies to export food products to the island. The Cuban government has steadily increased its food purchases from the US, using trade deals with US farming states as leverage to get them to lobby for Washington to lift the blockade. In 2008, US companies exported US$718 million in agricultural products to Cuba. As a result, the US has become Cuba’s fifth largest trading partner (though Washington still bans all imports from Cuba).
The prospects for further expansion of US trade with Cuba have led some conservative Republicans to join with liberal Democrats in a bipartisan “anti-embargo” caucus that enjoys growing support in Congress. Other sectors of the US capitalist class that would gain from an immediate lifting of the blockade, such as airline and tourism businesses, have begun to lobby harder for an end to the ban on US citizens, other than those with family in Cuba, being able to legally travel to the island.
A legislative bill to end the ban is currently before Congress. “I am very involved trying to get a law passed to lift the travel ban, and we have lots of [bipartisan] sponsors”, United States Tour Operators Association president Bob Whitley told the May 1 USA Today. Whitley thinks the bill could pass this year. While Obama could veto it, he would come under intense corporate and public pressure not to do so. An April 15 nationwide poll conducted by the University of Maryland found that 70% of US residents thought Americans “should be free to visit Cuba”. The same poll found that 49% favoured ending the blockade, with 48% opposed.
Ending the travel ban would undermine the blockade, making its continued existence increasingly untenable. Allowing US residents to travel to and spend money in Cuba without restriction would result in hundreds of millions of dollars annually flowing into the coffers of Cuba’s socialist state. This would have an immediate and tangible impact on the daily lives of millions of Cubans, easing some of the hardships caused by the blockade. Pressure on the US government to allow US construction and services firms to compete with their European and Latin American rivals for contracts with the Cuban state to enter into joint ventures to build and operate tourism hotels and resorts would intensify. Many more Americans would be able to see with their own eyes that Cuba is not the grim caricature painted by US corporate propaganda, and with more Americans able to appreciate first-hand the suffering caused by Washington’s cruel economic siege, US capitalist politicians would find it even more difficult to justify maintaining the blockade.
Cuba’s victory
The conflict between US imperialism and the Cuban Revolution is a life-and-death struggle between two irreconcilable social systems — decaying global capitalism and the shoots of a new socialist world order. As Cuba’s retired president Fidel Castro wrote on May 1, “The collision between the great power of the North and the Cuban Revolution was inevitable. The heroic resistance of the people of our small country was underestimated. Today they are willing to forgive us if we will resign ourselves to returning to the fold as slaves that, after knowing freedom, will accept again the whip and the yoke.”
If the US rulers abandon the blockade this would not be the end of their crusade to destroy the Cuban Revolution; it would merely change the terrain of the battle. The blockade would give way to a more subtle policy in which Cubans’ minds, rather than their stomachs, would be the primary target. The US rulers would seek to flood Cuba with US investments and tourists who, they hope, will dazzle Cubans with the supposed superiority of “the American way of life”. What the US rulers have failed to achieve through force, they would try to achieve through seduction.
This would present new and difficult challenges for the Cuban Revolution and its leadership, but an end of the blockade is what the Cuban government and people, as well as their supporters throughout the world, have been struggling for since 1962. Revolutionary Cuba’s friends should not think that if the blockade is lifted the island will be quickly taken over by US corporations and that there will be a McDonald’s on every street corner. In Cuba, the working people have state power. They can decide how much, or how little, US investment to accept. Other imperialist countries have not blockaded Cuba, but this has not led to Cuba’s workers and farmers handing over their country to the Canadian and European transnational companies.
When the blockade is finally lifted, it will be a momentous victory for the Cuban people and for the working people of the entire world. With Obama being forced to ease the sanctions against Cuba, now is the time to step up pressure on the US government to bring that day closer.
How Long Does It Take?
May 24, 2009 Making revolution
From www.counterpunch.org
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
How long does it take a mild-mannered, antiwar, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, “decapitation” strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses the far end of the globe?
There’s nothing surprising here. As far back as President Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century, American liberalism has been swift to flex imperial muscle, to whistle up the Marines. High explosive has always been in the hormone shot.
The nearest parallel to Obama in eager deference to the bloodthirsty counsels of his counter-insurgency advisors is John F. Kennedy. It is not surprising that bright young presidents relish quick-fix, “outside the box” scenarios for victory.
Whether in Vietnam or Afghanistan the counsels of regular Army generals tends to be drear and unappetizing: vast, costly deployments of troops by the hundreds of thousand, mounting casualties, uncertain prospects for any long-term success – all adding up to dismaying political costs on the home front.
Amid Camelot’s dawn in 1961, Kennedy swiftly bent an ear to the counsels of men like Ed Lansdale, a special ops man who wore rakishly the halo of victory over the Communist guerillas in the Philippines and who promised results in Vietnam.
By the time he himself had become the victim of Lee Harvey Oswald’s “decapitation” strategy, brought to successful conclusion in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy had set in motion the counter-insurgency operations, complete with programs of assassination and torture, that turned South-East Asia and Latin America into charnel houses, some of them, like Colombia, to this day.
Another Democrat who strode into the White House with the word “peace” springing from his lips was Jimmy Carter. It was he who first decreed that “freedom” and the war of terror required a $3.5 billion investment in a secret CIA-led war in Afghanistan, plus the deployment of Argentinian torturers to advise US military teams in counter-insurgency ops in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
(Though no US president can spend more than a few moments in the Oval Office scanning his in-tray the morning after the inaugural ceremonies without okaying the spilling of blood somewhere on the planet, it has to be said that Bill Clinton did display some momentary distaste before settling comfortably into the killer’s role. “Do we have to do this?” he muttered, as his national security team said that imperial dignity required cruise missile bombardment of Baghdad in 1993 in retaliation for a foiled attack on former President G.H.W. Bush, during a visit to Kuwait. The misisiles landed in a suburb, one of them killing the artist Laila al-Attar.)
Obama campaigned on a pledge to “decapitate” al-Qaida, meaning the assassination of its leaders. It was his short-hand way of advertising that he had the right stuff. And, like Kennedy, he’s summoning the exponents of unconventional, short-cut paths to success in that mission. Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal now replaces General David McKiernan as Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan. McChrystal’s expertise is precisely in assassination and “decapitation”. As commander of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for nearly five years starting in 2003, McChrystal was in charge of death squad ops, with its best advertised success being the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaida in Iraq.
The phrase “sophisticated networks” tends to crop up in assessments of McChrystal’s Iraq years. Actually there’s nothing fresh or sophisticated in what he did. Programs of targeted assassination aren’t new in counter-insurgency. The most infamous and best known was the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, designed to identify and eliminate cadres of Vietnam’s “National Liberation Front”, informally known as the Viet Cong of whom, on some estimates, at least 40,000 were duly assassinated.
In such enterprises two outcomes are inevitable. Identification of the human targets requires either voluntary informants or captives. In the latter instance kidnapping (ie extrajudicial seizure of “enemy combatants”) and then torture are certain, whatever rhetorical pledges are proclaimed back home. There may be intelligence officers who will rely on patient, non-violent interrogation, as the US officer, Major Matthew Alexander, who elicited the whereabouts of al-Zarquawi told Patrick Cockburn on this site that he did. There will be others, US personnel who will either personally reach for the garden hose and the face towel, or delegate the task to the local talent. It has been thus, without remit, through the entire course of Empire. Not so long ago CounterPuncher Prof. Bruce Jackson of SUNY, Buffalo, sent us an illustration from the May 22, 1902 issue of the original (pre-Luce) Life. The only military action the US had going at the time was in the Philippines, where Pershing was fighting the Moros — Muslims who wanted independence from US rule. A pipe-smoking GI pours water into a funnel held in the mouth of a barefoot prisoner by another GI, who sits on the prisoner’s genitals and points a pistol at his throat.
McChrystal, not coincidentally, was involved in the prisoner abuse scandal at Baghdad’s Camp Nama. (He also played a sordid role in the cover-up in the friendly-fire death of ex-NFL star and Army Ranger Pat Tillman.)
Whatever the technique, a second certainty is the killing of large numbers of civilians in the final “targeted assassination”. At one point in the first war on Saddam in the early 1990s, a huge component of US air sorties was devoted each day to bombing places where US intelligence had concluded Saddam might be hiding. Time after time, after the mangled bodies of men, women and children had been scrutinized, came the crestfallen tidings that Saddam was not among them.
Already in Afghanistan public opinion has been inflamed by the weekly bulletins of deadly bombardments either by drones or manned bombers. Still in the headlines is the US bombardment of Bola Boluk in Farah province, which yielded 140 dead villagers torn apart by high explosive including 93 children. Only 22 were male and over 18. Perhaps “sophisticated intelligence” had identified one of these as an al-Qaida man, or a Taliban captain, or maybe someone an Afghan informant to the US military just didn’t care for. Maybe electronic eavesdropping simply screwed up the coordinates. If we ever know, it won’t be for a very long time. Obama has managed a terse apology, even as he installs McChrystal, thus ensuring more of the same.
The logic of targeted assassinations was on display in Gaza even as Obama worked on the uplifting phrases of his Inaugural Address. The Israelis claimed they were targeting only Hamas even as the body counts of women and children methodically refuted these claims and finally extorted from Obama a terse phrase of regret.
He may soon weary of uttering them. His course is set and his presidency already permanently stained the ever-familiar blood-red tint. There’s no short-cut, no “nicer path” in counter-insurgency and the policing of Empire. A targeted bombing yields up Bola Boluk, and the incandescent enmity of most Afghans. The war on al Qaida mutates into war on the Taliban, and 850,000 refugees in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. The mild-mannered professor is bidding to be as sure-footed as Bush and Cheney in trampling on constitutional rights. He’s now backing into pledges to shut down the kangaroo courts (“military commissions”) by which means the US have held prisoners at Guantanamo who’ve never even been formally charged with a crime! He’s threatening to hold some prisoners indefinitely in the U.S. without trial. He’s been awarded a hearty editorial clap on the back from the Wall Street Journal:
“Mr. Obama deserves credit for accepting that civilians courts are largely unsuited for the realities of the war on terror. He has now decided to preserve a tribunal process that will be identical in every material way to the one favored by Dick Cheney.”
It didn’t take long. But it’s what we’ve got – for the rest of Obama-time.
The Landscapes Meat Made
From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—when reliable records began to be kept—to the mid nineteenth century, the European diet varied little. Grains took up about 90 per cent of a family’s food budget: rye, buckwheat, oats, barley, maize. From the moments that the victuallers and provisioners in the Napoleonic wars pioneered the organization of the mass-production line and also modern methods of food preservation, the stage was set for the annihilation of both time and space in matters of food consumption. The vast cattle herds that began to graze the pastures of the western United States, Australia and Argentina signalled the change.
David Hamilton Wright, a biologist at the University of Georgia, once wrote that ‘an alien ecologist observing. . .earth might conclude that cattle is the dominant species in our biosphere.’ The modern livestock economy and the passion for meat have radically altered the look of the planet. Today, across huge swaths of the globe, from Australia to the western plains of the United States, one sees the conquest landscapes of the European mass-meat producers and their herds of ungulates. Because of romantic ideas of ‘timeless landscapes’ it is hard to grasp the rapidity of this process, with spans as short as thirty-five years between the irruption of a herd onto virgin terrain, over-grazing, soil erosion, crash and eventual stabilization, with the plant communities finally levelling out, though reduced in richness and variety, and the land altered forever.
As Mexico reels from the swine flu panic, there’s angry talk of the disastrous impact on that country of North American methods of intensive livestock production. The initial swine flu deaths came near the huge pig factories in the state of Veracruz, owned by Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of Smithfield Farms, centered in North Carolina and now expanding into Eastern Europe. Intensive pork production in North Carolina in the 1990s sponsored the emergence of the H1N1 swine flu virus in 1998, the year North Carolina’s pig population hit ten million, up from two million just six years earlier, achieved by cramming 25 times more pigs into each factory, each one a stinking nightmare to the people living nearby.
In our latest newsletter I visit the world that intensive livestock raising has made, from the Valle in Mexico destroyed by Spanish sheep ranching in the 16th century, to the trashed landscapes of Texas and California today. In the same brilliant issue Steven Higgs probes the safety of nanotechnologies. Moms, hold that nano-toy, and that nano make-up! And Senator Jim Abourezk looks back on the occupation of Wounded Knee, and the role he played.
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com