People Before Profit blog

Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement: Potential damage to global public health

Tue, 25 Aug 2015 12:37:00 +0000

NEW YORK - The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade agreement currently being negotiated among 12 Pacific Rim countries, threatens the future availability of affordable generic medicines and could undermine the global HIV response in developing countries, according to a new report released by amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. By expanding intellectual property (IP) protections for existing pharmaceutical products beyond what is required by current international standards, the report warns, the TPP could greatly delay the entrance of generic medicines into the marketplace and keep prices high for lifesaving drugs among populations that can least afford them.

The dozen countries negotiating the TPP represent nearly 40 percent of the world's GDP: Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. If passed, the TPP would become one of the largest free trade agreements in history.

"While we recognize the importance of intellectual property protection in spurring innovation and incentivizing investment, the Trans-Pacific Partnership includes proposed provisions that go above and beyond what is required by international law and show a disregard for public health," said amfAR Chief Executive Officer Kevin Robert Frost. "If the TPP moves forward, it will set a dangerous global precedent and put lifesaving drugs beyond the reach of millions of people with HIV/AIDS, cancer, tuberculosis and hepatitis C."

The new amfAR brief, "Trans-Pacific Partnership: Curbing Access to Medicines Now and in the Future," strongly opposes the aggressive IP provisions of the TPP that could lead to unnecessary loss of life.

TPP negotiations have been conducted in secret, but leaked texts of the draft agreement reveal that the U.S. is proposing several provisions indicating its embrace of aggressive IP protections that go beyond those established by the World Trade Organization's agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS).

Through a provision on patent term extensions, for example, the TPP would make it easier for pharmaceutical companies to demand longer patent extensions and further delay the entrance of generic competition. It could also undermine the entrance of generic biologics - medical commodities developed through biological methods rather than synthetic chemical processes - into the market, including future vaccines. And it would allow the re-patenting of older drugs with minor modifications.

Generic medicines have been crucial to the massive expansion of antiretroviral treatment (ART) for nearly 12 million people with HIV in low- and middle-income countries today. Developing countries and global HIV programs such as the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS , Tuberculosis and Malaria will continue to depend heavily on affordable generic drugs to deliver treatment to the millions of people who still don't have access to it.

However, many newer and better-tolerated antiretroviral drugs are still under patent and remain out of reach for many people in developing countries.

"It's important to note that we never would have been able to take such giant leaps in fighting the global AIDS epidemic if the proposed IP provisions under the TPP were the standard a decade ago," said Greg Millett, amfAR Vice President and Director of Public Policy. "If the door starts to close on generic production of antiretrovirals, any hope of ending the global AIDS epidemic in our lifetime will quickly evaporate."

The full report is available on amfAR's web site at www.amfar.org.

Photo: AZT pills. AZT (zidovudine), the first medication shown to be effective against HIV. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

Mass uprising is shaking up Iraq

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 15:05:00 +0000

Iraq has witnessed over the past few weeks a growing mass protest movement with demonstrations held every Friday since July 31 at Liberation (Tahrir) Square in central Baghdad, as well as eight other major cities. The protests were triggered by severe electricity shortages during an exceptionally hot summer and the death of a young protester in Basra. But they turned into a popular uprising against rampant corruption, the corrupt ruling elite and its anti-democratic sectarian-ethnic power-sharing system that has been in place over the last 12 years, since the invasion and occupation of Iraq which led to the fall of Saddam's dictatorship.

"Lebanonization" of Iraq

The popular uprising may seem spontaneous but it is actually a result of the accumulation of tragic consequences of successive crises produced by the sectarian-ethnic power-sharing setup implemented by the U.S. occupation authorities - leading to a general crisis engulfing all aspects of life. U.S. occupation chiefs set up a governance system based solely and divisively on religion and ethnicity. The sectarian-ethnic power-sharing system in Iraq ensures power distribution in the state according to sectarian (Shia and Sunni) and ethnic (Kurdish) affiliation, rather than considering Iraqis as equal citizens irrespective of their sectarian and ethnic affiliation (as would be the case in a democratic civil state).

This is similar to the Lebanon-style sectarian formula which plunged Lebanon into civil war (thus the term "Lebanonization"). In Iraq too this system exasperated sectarian tensions, resulting in sectarian war during the period 2006-2007, and has pushed Iraq to the brink of division along sectarian-ethnic lines.

Islamic parties therefore compete to monopolize leading posts in government in accordance with this formula. These parties falsely claim to represent the so-called "constituents" of an Iraqi society which is reduced to Shia, Sunni and Kurds, glossing over the country's social structure (and class divisions). In order to maintain their hegemony and monopoly of political power, these parties agitate and stir up sectarian divisions to serve their political agenda.

Rampant corruption and paralysis

This flawed power-sharing system is one of the main causes for the rampant corruption and cover-up scandals through deals between the big political blocs.

The sectarian-ethnic power-sharing system has also led to the paralysis of the parliament and the lack of independence of the judiciary. This is why reforming the judiciary is currently one of the main demands of the protest movement.

The struggle among the ruling groups over power and wealth has been intensifying, even inside each political bloc. Deep divisions, for example, continue to plague the "National Alliance" which groups Islamic Shia parties. Even the Kurdistan bloc has not been spared such inner conflicts, as recent developments in the federal region of Iraqi Kurdistan testify. As a result, the pace of implementing the "Political Agreement," which was the basis for the formation in September 2014 of the current government led by Haider al-Abadi, has been slow, failing to carry through important legislative measures.

Meanwhile, the living conditions of the people have continued to deteriorate, with the miserable failure of the state to provide basic services especially electricity, in addition to the worsening security situation, as a result of rampant corruption in all state institutions.

The ISIS factor

One of the most important factors that contributed to deepening the crisis and intensifying the suffering of the people is the ferocious the war against ISIS (also known by its Arab acronym "Daesh"), since the fall of the city of Mosul on June 10, 2014, and the subsequent loss of government control over one-third of Iraq's territory. It was a result of the collapse of a military and security institution that was built on a sectarian basis and suffered corruption and mismanagement. Although some significant gains were made against ISIS in Diyala and Salah-al-Din provinces, the fall of the city of Ramadi, the capital of Al-Anbar province, west of Baghdad, in May 2015 has revealed that the lessons of Mosul have not been properly drawn.

Poverty growing, wealth for a few

The political crisis was further aggravated by the worsening economic situation after the recent sharp fall in oil prices, leading to the fall of Iraq's oil revenues by half. The existence of more than 3 million internally displaced people, as a result of the war with ISIS, has also created an enormous humanitarian and economic problem that exceeds the capabilities of the state. All this has led to an increase in the proportion of people under the poverty line to over 30% of the population. Meanwhile, a small social stratum of parasitic nature and a corrupt political elite have continued to accumulate enormous wealth and enjoy extravagant privileges.

All these factors confirm once again the conclusion highlighted by the Iraqi Communist Party that the existing political system, based on sectarian-ethnic power-sharing, cannot tackle the fundamental problems facing the people and country, or achieve decisive victories on the military and security front.

The mass protest movement

This situation resulted in growing popular resentment and big protests all over Iraq during recent months. The most outstanding example has been the continuing protest movement, since November 2014, of tens of thousands of workers in the so-called "self-financing" companies of the Ministry of Industry demanding the payment of their wages and resisting privatization plans.

The recent mass demonstrations which erupted against corruption, lack of electricity and basic services, and have continued in recent weeks, should therefore be viewed and analyzed against this political, social and economic background.

The ongoing peaceful protest movement, with demonstrations every Friday in Tahrir Square in Baghdad and other major cities, has a dominant civil and democratic character. It has now attracted hundreds of thousands of people, with a significant participation of youth and women, and from various social strata. The government headed by Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi has so far responded positively to the demands of the demonstrations, announcing a number of reforms and promising some more. These reforms have so far included abolishing three vice presidential positions as well as two posts of deputy prime minister. This meant that Vice President Nouri al-Maliki, who is Abadi's predecessor and main rival, lost his position. Maliki is still the leader of the Da'wah party, a major Shia Islamic party, while Abadi is a member of its political bureau. Other reforms have included reducing the size of his government by a third.

Some victories, but the people want and need more

Abadi's decision to abolish the three vice presidential positions and the two deputy prime minister posts was an important step against the harmful power-sharing system. But far more radical changes and legislation are needed to destabilize the foundations of this system and put an end to it. It is a big challenge. Just to give an example, Maliki is still holding on to his position as vice-president despite the elimination of his post and the parliament's endorsement of Abadi's decision!

If the reforms begin to seriously undermine the power-sharing system, it is expected that the ruling groups (Shia, Sunni and Kurdish) will begin to bury their divisions and unite to preserve their positions in power and privileges. There are already signs of this process beginning.

Iran is also trying to rebuild unity among the major Shia Islamic groups, with the aim of maintaining the cohesion of the Shia alliance and its dominant position in power.

But the demonstrations are pressing for the speedy implementation of these reforms and voicing more demands, including the reform of the judiciary, combating corruption and demanding that those responsible for squandering public money be brought to justice. The momentum of the protests has recently extended to targeting local governments in central and southern provinces, including Basra in the south, demanding the dismissal of several governors and abolishing provincial and municipal councils.

These important developments prove that when the people act in unity, in word and deed, they turn into a powerful force that compels the rulers to comply with their legitimate demands. The parliament was forced to endorse Abadi's proposed first batch of reforms without any debate, and even presented its own additional list of reforms!

The Iraqi Communist Party has declared its full support for the mass protest movement and its demands. It welcomed Abadi's decisions and called for effective measures to turn the promises into real action and to rid the bodies that are charged with implementing the reforms of corruption and incompetence. It voiced its support for the demand of reforming the judiciary. In addition, it has stressed the need for popular oversight, through the participation of representatives of the demonstrations and civil society in the new bodies that are responsible for implementing the reforms. This is essential to monitor implementation and expose those who attempt to impede or obstruct the reforms.

On August 7, when the second big demonstration took place in Tahrir Square in Baghdad, the top Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani announced his support for the demands of the demonstrators and called on Prime Minister Abadi to take firm measures against corruption and corrupt politicians. Sistani's position has so far helped to shield Abadi against his critics and opponents within the Islamic Shia political camp and also against external pressures.

Counterattack

It is now clear that the growing peaceful protest movement is being targeted by political forces that are hostile to the popular demands as well as the civil and democratic character of the demonstrations. During the third massive demonstration in Baghdad's Tahrir Square on August 14, an organized group of thugs armed with knives attacked young protesters. The attack was repulsed but a few people were injured, including a young female activist. In recent days, armed groups have attacked peaceful protesters who had camped out in front of the offices of the provincial government in the cities of Basra and Hilla in southern Iraq.

Prime Minister Abadi has given assurances that the security forces are committed to ensuring the safety of demonstrators and enabling them to exercise their constitutional right to free expression and peaceful protest. However, judging by previous experiences, including attacks on the mass protest movement in February 2011 during the reign of former Prime Minister Maliki, such assurances are not enough.

Achieving the aims of the popular protest movement, and determining how radical the reform measures are, will depend on the unity of the forces participating in the movement and their ability to consolidate it. This is crucial for deterring hostile forces and also resisting external and foreign interference that aims at sabotaging the protests or diverting them away from their objectives. In this respect, it will also be very important to exercise utmost vigilance against attempts to stir up sectarian strife.

Iraq at a crucial turning point

The continuing mass protests have demonstrated once again the tremendous potential for changing the balance of political and societal forces through building a mass popular movement. Only through this change can the root cause of the crisis be tackled, by getting rid of the sectarian-ethnic power-sharing system and laying the foundations of a civil democratic state and social justice.

It is a crucial juncture in our Iraqi people's struggle.

"When the Iraqi People Have Spoken" - a short film about the mass demonstrations in Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Baghdad:

Photo: A scene from the huge demonstrations happening weekly in Iraq. Salam Ali/Facebook

Guatemalan president accused of massive corruption by UN agency, prosecutor

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 13:41:00 +0000

To nobody's very great surprise, a UN monitoring agency and the Guatemalan prosecutor's office Friday accused President Otto Perez Molina of massive corruption. At the same time, former Vice President Roxana Baldetti was arrested as part of the same corruption investigation. This new development comes as Guatemalans prepare for general elections on September 6.

Iván Velasquez, head of the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), and Attorney General Thelma Aldana announced joint findings that the person mentioned in intercepted incriminating telephone calls as "el mero mero" (Spanish expression meaning approximately "the main man" or "Mr. Big") is none other than Perez Molina himself, and "la mera mera" ("the main woman" or Ms. Big") is Baldetti. Velasquez and Aldana assured the public and press that they have plenty of evidence in addition to the telephone intercepts. The CICIG is a UN agency set up to deal specifically with the issue of impunity of politicians and officials in this Central American country.

According to the accusations, the arrangement, part of the corruption system called "la Linea" ("the line") was that fifty percent of bribes received from foreign companies wanting to invest in or import to Guatemala would be divided evenly between Perez Molina and Baldetti, and the rest would be distributed among other officials involved in the plot. The total amount thus illegally obtained by all concerned is said to be amount to many millions.

Attention was focused on Baldetti when it was found that her main assistant, Juan Carlos Monzón, was the head of the whole scheme. Monzón is on the lam and Baldetti was then forced to resign. Others who have been arrested include Juan de Dios Rodriguez, the former head of the Guatemalan Social Security Institute, accused of fraud for his role in a sleazy contract for kidney dialysis which cost Guatemala's treasury $14 million and has not produced promised services. Rodriguez is the former personal secretary of President Perez. Arrested in the same scandal was Julio Suarez, at the time head of Guatemala's Central Bank.

Last week the Guatemalan Congress refused to strip President Perez Molina of his immunity from prosecution. Unless that is overturned, he will remain in office rather than go to jail until January of next year.

Earlier this summer CICIG had reported that a large number of Guatemalan politicians and political parties had been receiving campaign money from drug cartels. The presidential candidate who had been identified by public opinion polls as most likely to win the September elections, Manuel Baldizon of the Renewed Democratic Liberty party (LIDER), had been praising the investigations of the Perez Molina administration, but recoiled in horror when CICIG announced that his vice presidential candidate, Edgar Barquin, was also suspected of money laundering for drug cartels, along with several other figures in Baldizon's LIDER political party. h Several other candidates and political leaders in the coming elections have also been implicated.

Moreover there have been serious violations of electoral law and the constitution. Baldizon's campaign has spent far more money on the election than law allows, and was told to stop by electoral authorities, but has not obeyed. In evident violation of the constitution, Zury Rios Sosa, daughter of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, is campaigning full blast as presidential candidate of the Vision with Values Party on the far right. The Constitution bans close relatives of people who violated the constitutional order (by carrying out military coups), which General Rios Montt did in 1983 when he led a military takeover and carried out a massacre of the indigenous Ixil Maya people. But a court allowed Zury Rios to run anyway.

Because of this incredibly messy situation, a coalition of 72 labor, peasant, indigenous and other people's organizations is demanding that the election be postponed. Esperanza Tubac of the Ajins organizations told the press that the elections cannot be seen as legitimate because of the multiple scandals concerning violations of campaign laws and the constitution. So the coalition is calling for a national general strike and mobilization on August 25, 26 and 27 to support their demands for a postponement. Tubac said those who would be elected on September 6 would be "corrupt persons and thieves".

However, on Sunday August 23, Perez Molina announced that he refuses to resign, while Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, insists that the elections go forward.

Guatemala, like neighboring Honduras and El Salvador, is the origin of many desperate undocumented immigrants to the United States and therefore the potential recipient of $1 billion in U.S. aid money under the proposed "Alliance for Prosperity." As in Honduras, the massive corruption and abuses of power under Perez Molina might lead to opposition to this funding in the U.S. Congress.

Photo: Coalition, Asamblea Social y Popular (ASP), meeting in Guatemala. Notas periodismo popular, copyleft.

Amid scandal, U.S. lawmakers oppose funding Honduran government

Mon, 24 Aug 2015 10:58:00 +0000

As a massive scandal involving corruption and abuse of power by the administration of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez envelops this impoverished Central American country, a group of 21 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives have sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry calling for the suspension of projected U.S. aid to Honduran police.

The money for aid to the Honduran police is part of an appropriation for fiscal year 2016 that the Obama administration has requested to fund the "Alliance for Prosperity." The appropriation, of $1 billion, would fund aid to social welfare systems but also to the security services of the three northernmost countries of Central America: Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. The Congressional letter, dated Wednesday August 19, addresses itself to the fact that President Hernandez has been pursuing a policy of militarizing the functions of the Honduran police, leading to multiple complaints of violations of human rights.

Hernandez and his administration are also accused of massive corruption, and have been the target of huge demonstrations, calling for his resignation since April.

Hernandez, of the National Party, was elected president in 2013 in an election that was marred by accusations of fraud and the murder of a number of members of the left-wing LIBRE party of former president Manuel Zelaya and his wife, Xiomara Castro, who was LIBRE's candidate in that election and had been expected to win. Since then, it has been found that the previous administration of President Porfirio Lobo, also from the National Party had diverted funds intended for health care of poor Hondurans and used them to illegally support Hernandez' election.

Hernandez, who had been head of the National Congress before his election, had also manipulated judicial appointments to smooth his way to power.

Lobo, in turn, had been elected with U.S. support in a deeply flawed election after President Manuel Zelaya had been overthrown in a military coup in June of 2009.

As early as 2010 Congress members have been writing to the State Department expressing concern about what is going on in Honduras.

In 2013, 108 members signed a similar letter. Again in 2014, another, similar letter was signed by 106 lawmakers.

Both of those letters asked Secretary of State Kerry to look into stories of human rights violations, including killings of oppositionists and electoral fraud, by the successive right wing Honduran governments of Presidents Porfirio Lobo and Juan Orlando Hernandez.

The new letter, however, goes further and calls for the suspension of aid under the $1 billion "Alliance for Prosperity" plan announced by the Obama administration after last years' so called "child migration crisis" was manipulated by the Republican Party for its own opportunistic and partisan purposes.

The Congressional letter points out that the "Military Police" established by Hernandez, in apparent violation of the Honduran constitution, now numbers 3,000 members who are under the command, not of civilian authorities, but of the army.

"According to the Comité de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEHH)[in English, Committee of Relatives of Detained and Disappeared People in Hondurass], a leading human rights organization in Honduras, military personnel have been involved in human rights abuses, including assassinations and intimidation of opposition leaders, land activists, and peaceful protesters."

The letter expresses concern that in May of this year, 300 U.S. military and FBI personnel were sent to Honduras to provide "rapid response" training to this abuse-riddled Honduran military-police amalgam.

The letter emphasizes: "We want to make sure those taxpayer dollars are not used for military-style policing activity that could, in fact, be one of the causes [of the child migration to the United States] as it exacerbates violence in the country." The 21 congresspersons also asked that Kerry assure them that the aid to Honduras does not violate the Leahy Law, which prohibits U.S. aid to repressive military forces.

Signatories of the letter, all Democrats, include Hank Johnson, Jan Schakowsky (Illinois), James McGovern (Massachusetts), Raul Grijalva (Arizona), John Conyers (Michigan), Sam Farr (California), Luis Gutierrez (Illinois), John Lewis (Georgia), Marcy Kaptur (Ohio), Mark Pocan (Wisconsin), Keith Ellison (Minnesota), Maxine Waters (California), Michael Honda (California), Rosa DeLauro (Connecticut), Gwen Moore (Wisconsin), Barbara Lee (California), Karen Bass (California), Zoe Lofgren (California), Danny K Davis (Illinois), Michelle Lujan Grisham (New Mexico), and José Serrano (New York).

Readers who would like to ask their own congressional representatives to support the position taken by this letter can find Congressional contact information at the official U.S. Congress website.

After being contacted by Fruit of the Loom, Inc., People's World offers the following clarification: The photo used to illustrate this story falls under Creative Commons licensing and that is why it is being used. It is not directly related to the story.

Photo: U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry poses for a photo with Rick Medlin, CEO of Fruit of the Loom, Inc. in Honduras, right of the Secretary; Honduran Ambassador to the U.S. Jorge Ramón Hernández Alcerro, left of the Secretary; and Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roberta Jacobson, far left; at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on January 29, 2014. Fruit of the Loom, Inc. in Honduras received the Secretary of State's Award for Corporate Excellence in the large business category. (State Department photo/ Public Domain) | Wikimedia

South Africa: miners’ killing marked with call for unity

Wed, 19 Aug 2015 11:56:00 +0000

President Jacob Zuma called on South Africans Aug. 16 to remember the 44 people killed at the Marikana platinum mine on the third anniversary of the tragedy.

"This day must unite all of us as South Africans. Nobody supports the horrendous loss of life that occurred in Marikana," he said.

"We remember all who lost their lives, including those who were killed before and after Aug. 16, [2012]. All lives are equal and important."

Attempts by owners Lonmin - formerly British firm Lonhro - and the breakaway Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) to undermine the established National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) saw a spate of murders of NUM members, mine security guards and police in the week leading up to August 16 2012.

That day, 34 AMCU members were shot dead by police at a rally near the mine in North West province - allegedly after they had attacked the officers with various weapons, though this version of events is hotly disputed.

More NUM members have been burnt out of their homes, assaulted and killed since then.

The day after the shooting, Zuma flew back from a regional summit in neighboring Mozambique and ordered a public inquiry.

The resulting Farlam Commission took almost three years to report, largely due to AMCU lawyer Dali Mpofu's failed attempts to blame the tragedy on Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Among the recommendations of the Farlam Commission's report, released by the president on June 25, were that the conduct of the police on Aug. 16 should be investigated, especially at a second shooting site where half the 34 deaths occurred.

National Police Commissioner General Riah Phiyega duly submitted her comments to the president on Aug. 1.

However, Lonmin - now owned by Swiss giant Glencore Xstrata - has yet to acknowledge its responsibility for the tragedy as detailed in the Farlam report.

The African National Congress called on mining companies to "learn lessons" from the tragedy and improve living conditions in mining communities in line with the Mining Charter - one of Lonmin's failings identified by the commission.

AMCU, also indicted by Farlam, marked the day with a commemoration for the 34 who died at its rally, but not for those murdered before or since.

Reposted from Morning Star.

Photo: Protest art by anonymous artists remembering one of the casualties of the Marikana massacre, Ntandazo Nokamba, at the corner of Harrington and Roeland Streets, in Cape Town, South Africa. | HelenOnline/Own work/CC BY-SA 4.0 via Commons

A world of contradictions

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 11:16:00 +0000

BERLIN - Germany, like the world, is full of contradictions. Most of Germany has suffered under a long heat wave and damaging drought. Now thunderstorms are predicted, with water, lots of it. I wonder if any parallels or omens can be induced.

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

They had not yet hit as Daniel Barenboim, who has headed the Berlin State Opera for 23 years, conducted his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra for an audience of 15,000 in the outdoor Waldbühne stadium. This group has more than 100 members, aged 14-25, about equal numbers of Israeli-Jewish and Arab musicians, also a few from Spain since the group, formed in Weimar in 1999 by Barenboim with the late Arab-American professor Edward Said, moved to Seville in Andalusia, where Jews, Muslims and Christians lived peacefully together from 711 until 1492. The orchestra's name derives from a collection of poems by Goethe inspired by the Persian poet Hafiz. Despite bitter wars and conflicts since its formation, the young musicians have stuck together and enjoyed great success from Salzburg to Carnegie Hall, from Barenboim's birthplace, Buenos Aires, to London's Royal Albert Hall, and most interestingly in Rabat and Palestinian Ramallah.

Not yet in Israel, however, where some hard feelings remain since Barenboim played a brief encore from Tristan and Isolde, spiting an Israeli taboo against all music by the anti-Semitic Wagner. Perhaps more relevant was his 2004 statement to the Knesset when receiving a prize: "Today, deeply troubled, I wonder whether the occupation and control of another people can be reconciled with Israel's Declaration of Independence. How must one judge the independence of one people when its price is a blow against the fundamental rights of another people?" Barenboim presented his $50,000 prize to music schools for Israeli and Palestinian children. (In Ramallah a young girl thanked him for bringing the first Israelis she had ever seen who came not with tanks and bullets but with flutes and violins.) It was hardly accidental that the Berlin program included both Beethoven, a German, and Tchaikovsky, a Russian.

Anti-Nazi rock festival

Balancing a welcome for Barenboim's anti-racist orchestra in Berlin, there was a very different event in Jamel, a tiny village 150 miles to the north. It's a pretty place with only ten homes - but Nazis live in seven of them and are in control, with a road sign pointing to Hitler's Austrian birthplace, with celebrations of his birthday, and with a grill oven built to recall Auschwitz. Whoever objects is pressured to leave. But Birgit and Horst Lohmeyer, who moved here in 2004 - she a writer, he a musician - defied warnings and threats and turned what began as an enlarged house party into an annual anti-Nazi rock festival at their big barn, always a success despite the snarling neighbors. On the night of August 12^th, the barn was set on fire and burned to the ground. Arson was evident.

But the Lohmeyers did not give up. In two weeks the festival will be held as planned, with the best rock, ska, Latino, Turkish and other anti-fascist musicians from the entire region and beyond. Again barring a thunderstorm the festival will be outdoors, with certain rules seen as necessary during the concerts: no pets, no alcohol, no weapons and no right-wing extremists.

Most hated politician

Despite new proof that he, too, can snarl, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble remains for Germans the second most popular politician, outpointed only by "Mutti" (Mommy) Merkel. The nationalist media has done its job! I know of no polls, but guess that in much of Europe he is moving ahead as most hated politician; those images of a benign modern Germany have not fared well after its vicious treatment of Greece and its lasting "austerity" pressures. Although Germany has reacted better than many neighbors in accepting the desperate crowds seeking asylum after dangerous, often deadly voyages in tiny, unfit vessels, there have been many heartless reactions as well, with the issue more divisive by the week as right-wing forces fill Molotov cocktail bottles (see Jamel) or figuratively sharpen their political teeth.

Greece, Turkey, Spain, Britain

But good omens should not go unnoticed, like the vote for Syriza in Greece and the eloquent, resounding vote for "OXI" - "No" in the referendum. The Schäuble forces succeeded in blocking progress and humanity and may succeed in their aim of splitting Syriza as a warning to others. It is all too possible that Erdogan in Turkey will also achieve his aim of wrecking the new unity between progressive Turks and progressive Kurdish-Turks, which upset his hopes of dictatorship in the last election - hopes obviously behind his attacks in Syria, not against ISIS but against the Kurds. Yet it may well prove impossible to copy North Korea and set all clocks back (there by only 30 minutes). In Spain the advance of popular movements like Podemos may be slowed in the coming elections, but policies like those of the two female mayors in Madrid and Barcelona - like tearing down all Franco monuments and street signs or stopping further evictions - cannot easily be erased.

Events in Britain are also dramatic. The Labour Party, once militantly based on workers' unity, limped into almost total irrelevance when Tony Blair sold out to George Bush and the London City. There, and generally in Europe since 1989 and earlier, genuine left-wing opposition seemed fully lamed while Cameron rode high everywhere but in Scotland. Now, apparently out of the blue, Jeremy Corbyn, 66, a bearded vegetarian Member of Parliament from North London, seems almost sure to get elected as the party's new leader next month by mail-in vote. He attracts big audiences and lifts ever more hearts by demanding real changes: back to government ownership of energy plants and rail transportation, a return to free college education, affordable housing, no more Trident missile submarines. This surge of enthusiasm, Corbynmania, like its sour treatment in the media, resembles amazingly the Bernie Sanders campaign.

Oh yes, the Blair types are whining! Tony himself said: "If your heart's with Jeremy Corbyn get a transplant." They are almost literally shaking in their costly boots, even considering a coup if he wins.

Germany's Social Democrats

Germany's Social Democratic Party has seen no such upsurge. Its leader, Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, scolds lamely about the unapologetic, almost total check of German communications by the NSA in the USA, wobbles back and forth but supports the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP, a clone of the Pacific TIP), goes along with Schäuble's treatment of Greece, and no longer rails at huge German arms shipments to warriors in the Near East, from the UAE and Qatar to Turkey, tanks for the bloody regime in Saudi Arabia or atomic submarines for Netanyahu. And then it wonders why there are so many refugees. Its poll results stagnate around 25 percent, with 40-45 percent for Merkel's party, and about 10-11 percent for the Greens. The LINKE (Left) party, at 9-10 percent, often alone in the Bundestag in sharply opposing such positions, has not been able to move past its internal problems and organize strong resistance in the streets and squares, campuses or factories. Its push to control rents and speed affordable public housing is commendable but has yet to produce any thunderbolts.

And yet we do see stirrings. At Amazon, with about 10,000 employees in Germany, there has been a long fight, with longer or shorter strikes at different sites, to win the same wage rates as other workers in retail and wholesale trade. Amazon has refused to negotiate for two years and has tried, with varying success, to set one group against the other. One wonderful note: Polish workers of Amazon, who get even lower wages and worse conditions, noting that some workdays were up to 12 hours, soon realized that they were being used as scabs against German workers. The message spread; slowdown at work or call in ill. And the Christmas rush is approaching.

Even more dramatically, 30,000 resolute women (and some men) who work in public kindergartens and nursing homes, went on strike last May for seventeen days, demanding a 10 percent raise reflecting the responsible, highly-trained work they do. They went back to work after entrusting union mediators to negotiate with the communal employers, who always complain of lack of funding. But when a deal of only 2-4½ percent was reached, about seventy percent angrily rejected it and sent the union back to win more. Or else! If the communities could get federal aid to care properly for the asylum-seekers they could then better afford properly-paid care for their children. And fewer tanks and warplanes with expensive maneuvers in Poland or Estonia could well make such federal aid possible!

Yes, anger is slowly increasing in Germany - at lousy, part-time, underpaid jobs for far too many and at rapid urban gentrification. This may result, here too, in growing militancy. But there is also that menacing trend to blame all problems on "the foreigners," especially the large numbers arriving from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan - where German weapons have been blasting - or from Africa, where cheaper German goods have helped wreak economic havoc.

Are storms ahead? And if there is lightning will it be the kind that liberates after long stretches of drought - or the kind that sets concert barns and refugee hostels on fire?

Photo: The Barenboim-Said Foundation

Canada's social democrats seek to end decade of Conservative rule

Thu, 13 Aug 2015 14:57:00 +0000

TORONTO - On the same night that Americans were tuning in to find out what the 17 Republican presidential candidates had to offer, north of the border Canadians were watching a debate of their own. The leaders of the country's four major political parties participated in the first debate of what, by Canadian standards, will be a very long campaign with the potential to make history.

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper requested the dissolution of parliament on Aug. 3, setting the stage for an electoral showdown with the opposition center-left New Democratic Party (NDP) led by Thomas Mulcair on Oct. 19. Rounding out the challengers to Harper are the third-place Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau, and the small but growing Green Party headed by Elizabeth May.

After 10 years of Conservative rule, most polls show the combined anti-Harper vote could top 60 percent. The election comes at a tough time for the Conservatives. With the collapse of oil prices and the decline of the resource-based Canadian dollar, most economists are arguing that the country is already in a recession. The Conservative promise to balance the budget in 2015 looks increasingly impossible and Harper's economic management is in question. Starting his political career in oil-rich Alberta, the Prime Minister has long remained committed to an unsustainable economic strategy rooted in the exploitation of the oil sands and other resources rather than encouraging development across varied sectors and industries.

Such economic missteps are only the beginning of Harper's problems. With an ongoing scandal surrounding the illegal use of tax dollars by a number of Harper-appointed senators, an unpopular domestic spying law called Bill C-51, and a heightening of militarism abroad in contrast to past Canadian traditions of peacekeeping, the Conservatives have created many hurdles for themselves.

By calling the election earlier than expected, though, Harper has extended the number of days in the campaign, and therefore the amount of money parties can spend. With his own Conservative Party dominating in the fundraising battle, Harper is betting that his ability to outspend the opposition parties will enable him to drown out their criticisms of his record.

Positioning itself as the home of progressive and center-left voters, the social democratic NDP has presented a platform targeted at a broad majority. Founded in 1961 by a merger between an older socialist party and the trade union movement, the NDP has governed in many provinces but never yet formed a government at the federal level. Under its previous leader, the popular Jack Layton, the party soared into second place in the 2011 election as part of an "Orange Wave," in reference to the party's color. In that year, it knocked out the Liberals as the official opposition and decimated the Quebec sovereignist party, the Bloc Quebecois, winning over 100 seats. Layton unfortunately died shortly after, causing some to question whether the NDP's rise to prominence would stall with the loss of its leader.

Today the party is led by Mulcair, a former Liberal environment minister from Quebec, who has gone toe-to-toe with Harper in parliament on all the contentious issues. Most opinion polls put the NDP in first place, suggesting that the Orange Wave may once again wash over Canada.

The party platform includes a pledge to fund affordable $15-a-day childcare for parents, a $15/hr minimum wage for federally-regulated workers, investments in innovation and technology to promote next-generation manufacturing jobs, tax credits for small and medium sized businesses that create jobs, stronger emissions regulations, and increased investments to repair and expand infrastructure.

The NDP platform is proving popular with many voters and activists. The trade unions and most social movements see the possibility of an NDP victory as the greatest opportunity for progressive advance in decades. In Quebec, the trade union federation announced this week that is was dropping its long-standing support for the Bloc Quebecois party and joining with other unions across the country in backing the NDP. And in one riding (electoral district), 8 of the 10 members on the executive board of the local Liberal Party association have ripped up their party cards and joined the NDP.

With a social democratic government, the political dynamic in the country would certainly shift. Though there are signs pointing to that outcome, it is still a long way to Election Day. Dissatisfaction with Harper runs high, but it remains a tight race.

The goal of unseating Harper is also complicated by divisions on the center-left. The NDP, Liberals, and the smaller Green Party often compete for the same supporters in many ridings, thus splitting the anti-Harper vote. Since the attempt to overthrow Harper in 2008 by means of a Liberal-NDP coalition failed, there have been many "unite the left" proposals put forward, but no official rapprochement between the opposition parties has been forthcoming. Mulcair has expressed his openness to working with the Liberals, but Trudeau has so far refused. Whether the outcome of the current campaign will change the political calculations of the center-left parties remains to be seen.

For now, the NDP is pushing forward with its program to reverse ten years of Harper Conservatism and set Canada on a different path. As the party seeks to make history and inaugurate the country's first social democratic government, the words of its late leader Jack Layton have become a watchword of the campaign: "Don't let them tell you it can't be done."

Photo: NDP leadership candidates debate on March 4, 2012 in Montreal. (Jonathan Allard/CC/Wikipedia)

L’Humanité: France should offer asylum to Snowden and Assange

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 12:30:00 +0000

A basic gesture of solidarity is indispensable in respect of the two whistleblowers threatened with imprisonment and trapped in Moscow and the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Paris should officially grant asylum to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. That would be a fitting response for a country that prides itself on its free thinkers and freedom of information. Paris can no longer argue a lack of proof over the magnitude of Uncle Sam's spying activities, as it did in the summer of 2013 during one of the less glorious episodes in the Hexagon's [roughly describes the six-sided shape of France's borders] diplomatic history: On his return from Moscow, Bolivian president, Evo Morales, had to reroute after France refused to allow him to fly over its airspace following a rumor that whistleblower Edward Snowden was on the presidential plane.

In fact, today, no one should have more interest than the French government in countering the injustice affecting the young system administrator, stuck in the Russian capital for three years. Similarly, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is under "house arrest" in the Ecuadorian embassy, London. Such an offer of asylum would be the only way for France to demonstrate a determination - an unwavering and concrete commitment - to protecting fundamental freedoms. This response would not only be a matter of basic morality, it would also be the only way to force Washington to truly review its unbridled surveillance methods - methods against which many U.S. citizens are fighting. Being the initial targets of these operations, they are fighting for their rights. They are our true special allies across the Atlantic.

The fate of soldier Manning shows the magnitude of the threat facing Snowden and Assange. Condemned to 35 years in prison in 2013, he languishes in a jail, forgotten, after having had the courage to disseminate thousands of documents on Wikileaks showing how the U.S. army knowingly trampled over human rights in Iraq. Paris, which once opposed the outbreak of that war, would be well inspired to also lead a campaign for his release.

Original French article: La France doit offrir le droit d'asile à Snowden et Assange translated by Adrian Jordan.

Reposted from l'Humanité in English. http://humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article2817

Photo: The public art project "Anything to Say?" at the Alexander Square in Berlin, Germany, May 1. Sculptures by Italian artist Davide Dormino shows the whistleblowers Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, from right, to honor their courage. | Michael Sohn/AP

Dissident journalists persecuted in Mexico

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 15:52:00 +0000

In 1978, I traveled by a "Two Star Line" bus from the Revolution Monument in Mexico City to the port city of Veracruz on the Gulf coast. In the process I fell in love with the whole state of Veracruz: From the raffish old port to the flowery capital, Xalapa Enriquez. But even then, it was clear that ugly violence coexisted with beauty.

Vanilla cultivators, mostly members of the Totonaca indigenous people, were under siege from wealthy outside interests which wanted to oust them from their land to make room for beef cattle raising. The ranchers had support from the ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party, while the vanilla farmers created a grassroots defense movement to keep themselves from being driven off their "ejido" lands, communally-owned but individually farmed vanilla orchards that had been guaranteed to them by the land reform program of President Lazaro Cardenas in the 1930s.

While I was there a schoolteacher who had been playing a leadership role in the vanilla farmer protests was shot to death, a crime attributed by local people to the allied PRI and cattle ranching interests.

Today, it would appear that similar dynamics obtain in Veracruz politics. The PRI governor of the state, Javier Duarte de Ochoa, is in the spotlight for a series of scandals including the killing of no fewer than 15 journalists, as well as accusations of drug connections and other crimes. But he appears to be fully backed by Mexico's President, Enrique Peña Nieto, also from the PRI, whom had a similarly scandal-ridden run in his previous job as governor of Mexico state.

The latest horror is the murder, on Friday July 31, of a man and four women in a shared apartment in the Narvarte neighborhood of Mexico City. The dead, who had been tortured and the women raped, included photojournalist Ruben Espinosa from the left wing magazine Proceso, Nadia Vera Perez, a left wing youth activist and anthropologist who had been part of the anti-Peña Nieto "I am number 132" student movement in Veracruz during the 2012 national elections, Mile Virginia Martin, an aspiring model of Colombian nationality, Yesenia Quiroz, a young student, and Olivia Alejandra Negrete, a domestic employee.

Both Nadia Vera Perez and Ruben Espinosa had clashed with Governor Duarte of Veracruz and had expressed fear for their lives. Nadia Vera had previously recorded a chilling video message in which she bluntly stated that if anything happened to her, blame should be laid at Duarte's doorstep.

Ruben Espinosa was evidently on Duarte's special list because of his photojournalism activities, including the investigation of a previous murder of a journalist, Regina Martinez, and especially because of a photo that Proceso published of Duarte with a caption suggesting that he runs a lawless regime. Duarte had recently advised journalists to "behavior yourselves."

It is not clear if the other three women had political involvements.

There is a bad situation of violence in many areas of Mexico. The fate of the 43 students from the Raul Isidro Burgos Normal School in Ayotzinapa, state of Guerrero, is as yet unknown in spite of an international campaign by their parents and supporters. In the process for looking for the 43, searchers found scores of mass graves, and nobody knows who the bodies in them belong to, just that they are not the students. The number of missing in Mexico's internal violence is at least 20,000. About 100,000 people have lost their lives since former President Felipe Calderon, of the right wing National Action Party, declared "war" on drug traffickers in 2006. But Mexico City itself has had, until recently, a relatively low violent crime rate, under a left-center city government.

Duarte was elected as governor of Veracruz in 2010 in an election marred by accusations of fraud; his strongest opposition candidate, from a left-center united front had challenged the results but without success. Since Duarte has been in power, a total of 15 journalists have been assassinated in Veracruz, and there have been many accusations of political corruption, including connections of officials with drug cartels.

In Mexico City, the PRI and its joined-at-the-hip coalition partner, the Green Ecological Party, soon moved to prevent a national investigation of the murders. The prosecutor's office of the Federal District hinted that the killings were merely a robbery gone wrong, or that, because Ms. Martin was from Colombia, this was somehow related to that country's violence. The Federal District Prosecutor seems to be ignoring the threats that Espinosa and Vera had reported; he fatuously stated that Espinosa's murder was probably not related to his photojournalistic work because he was unemployed at the time! Protests by journalists and others have been aimed not only at the PRI and the Greens, but also at the current governor of the Federal District, Miguel Angel Mancera, who was elected with the support of the Revolutionary Democratic Party, originally on the left but itself now under a cloud.

Commentator Laura Carlsen of the Americas Program points out that the U.S. has continued to fund Mexican security services to the tune of $3 billion since 2008, through the Merida Initiative and other programs. This money is supposed to help Mexico "fight drugs", but the entanglement of Mexican state agencies with the drug mafias themselves suggests that this is worse than money wasted.

At writing, Mexico City Police had arrested a suspect in the murders, Roberto Pacheco Gutierrez, and protests by journalists unions and others are mounting.

Photo: Journalists protest the murder of photojournalist Ruben Espinosa Becerril as they hold printouts of his photo, in Mexico City. | Marco Ugarte/AP

Interview with Greece PM Alexis Tsipras: “Austerity is a dead end”

Mon, 10 Aug 2015 14:50:00 +0000

On July 29, Sto Kokkino, the radio station politically close to SYRIZA, broadcast a long interview with Greece's Prime Minister. With permission, substantial excerpts follow, which offer unique insights into the fierce negotiations between Athens and its creditors and on the financial coup d'état directed against Greece's left-wing government.

Let's speak about these six months of negotiations. How would you sum them up?

Alexis Tsipras: We have to be objective in our conclusions. These have been six months of great tensions and emotions, and self-flagellation helps no one. Feelings of joy, pride, dynamism, determination, and sadness have surfaced. But I think that at the end of the day, if we try to look at this process objectively, we can only be proud to have led this fight.

Under adverse conditions and with a difficult balance of forces within Europe and the world, we tried to assert the point of view of a people and the possibility of an alternative path. Ultimately, even if the powerful were able to impose their will, what remains is the absolute confirmation on the international level that austerity is a dead end. This process has established a completely new landscape in Europe.

What about the popular mandate given SYRIZA? The Memoranda weren't torn up. The agreement is particularly hard ...

Alexis Tsipras: The mandate we were given by the Greek people was to do everything possible to create conditions, at whatever political cost, to stop the bleeding of the Greek people.

You said that the Memoranda would be annulled with a single law.

Alexis Tsipras: Before the elections, I didn't say that the Memoranda could be annulled with a single law. No one said that. We never promised the Greek people a walk in the park. That's why they are conscious of the difficulties we've met, which they themselves are facing with remarkable sang-froid. We said that we would carry out the struggle to get out of the asphyxiating framework imposed on the country resulting from political decisions made before 2008, which generated deficits and debt that tied our hands after 2008.

We had a program and we asked the people's support in negotiating under difficult conditions to realize this program. We negotiated hard under conditions of unprecedented financial asphyxiation. For six months we negotiated and at the same time were able to achieve a major part of our electoral program - for six months, constantly worrying whether we could pay salaries and pensions at the end of the month and meet our obligations inside the country, toward those who work. That was our constant anxiety. And in this context we succeeded in passing a law on the humanitarian crisis.

Thousands of our fellow citizens are benefitting from this law right now. We were able to remedy serious injustices, such as those done to housewives by the Ministry of Finance, to school custodians, to employees of the public radio and television station ERT, which reopened. While trying not to prettify the situation we should also not paint it more negatively than it is. If some people think that class struggle evolves in a linear way, that it's won in one election and that it doesn't involve constant struggle, either within government or in opposition, let them explain it and give us examples.

We are confronting the completely new experience of a radical left government within a neoliberal Europe. But we can learn from left-wing government experiences in previous periods, and we know that winning elections does not mean that you get access to the levers of power from one day to the next. Waging a battle at the government level is not enough. It has to be waged on the terrain of social struggles.

Why did you decide to hold a referendum?

Alexis Tsipras: I had no choice. You have to look at what I and the Greek government were facing on 25 June, at the agreement they were giving us. I have to admit that it was a very risky decision. Not only did the will of the Greek government go against the demands of the creditors; it collided with the international financial system, with Greece's political and media system. They were all against us. The likelihood of our losing the referendum was so great that our European partners bet on it with their decision to close the banks. But for us it was the only way since they were offering us an agreement with very difficult measures, somewhat like those we have in the present agreement, though slightly worse, but at any event difficult measures and also ineffective ones in my opinion.

At the same time, they offered no possibility of survival. For, in exchange for these measures, they offered 10.6 billion over five months. They wanted Greece, once it fulfilled its commitments, to take what remained of the previous program in terms of finance, without one euro more, because this is what the Netherlands, Finland, and Germany demanded. The main political problem of the northern governments was that at all cost they wanted to avoid going before their parliaments to give even a single 'fresh' euro to Greece, because they were trapped by the populist climate they had fomented, in which their populations were led to think that they were paying for the lazy Greeks. This is naturally completely false because they are paying for their banks, not for the Greeks. What was the result of the Greek people's strong position, against all odds, in the referendum? It was able to internationalize the problem, to make it spread beyond its borders, to unmask the image of the European partners and creditors. It was able to show international opinion the image not of a lazy people but of a people who are resisting and demanding justice and a future.

We tested the limits of resistance of the euro zone. We had an impact on the relation of forces. France, Italy, and the northern countries all had very different positions. The result, certainly, is very difficult, but, on the other hand, the euro zone had been brought to the limits of its resistance and cohesion. The next six months will be critical, and the relations of forces that will be built in this period are just as crucial. At this moment, the destiny and the strategy of the euro zone have been called into question. There are several possibilities. Those who said 'not a single euro more' have in the end decided not on just one euro but 83 billion. Therefore, from 10.6 billion over five months we've gone to 83 billion over three years, with the additional crucial feature of the commitment around debt reduction, to be discussed in November. This is a key issue, determining whether Greece can enter on a path that gets it out of the crisis.

We have to put an end to the tales told by Messrs. Samaras and Venizelos, who claimed they were getting out of the Memoranda. The reality is that there was a hole in this tale, and that hole is the debt. With a debt at 180 - 200 per cent of GDP you cannot have a stable economy. The only path that we could take is that of debt reduction, cancellation, and relief. The condition for the country being able to gain some financial margin is that it no longer be obliged to run huge budget surpluses intended for a debt that is unpayable.

The referendum's 'no' was a 'no' to austerity ...

Alexis Tsipras: The referendum question had two parts. There was part A, which involved the measures previously required, and part B, which involved the financing timetable. To be completely honest, without embellishing anything, the agreement that followed the referendum is, in terms of part A, similar to the one that the Greek people rejected. On the other hand, in terms of part B, we also have to be honest, and in this respect there is a day-and-night difference. Before, we had five months, 10.6 billion, five months [in which our public expenditures were particularly closely] scrutinized. Now, we have 83 billion - which means a total coverage for medium-term (2015 - 2018) financial needs, of which 47 billion are for foreign payments, 4.5 billion for public sector arrears, and 20 billion for the recapitalization of the banks, and, finally, there is the crucial commitment on the question of debt. Thus, in terms of part A there's a retreat on the part of the Greek government, but for part B there's an improvement: the referendum performed a function.

On the Wednesday evening before the vote, certain milieus were laying the basis for a coup d'état in the country, proclaiming the need to storm the Prime Minister's headquarters, that the government was leading the country toward a terrible economic catastrophe, pointing to the queues at banks. I have to say that the Greek people were able to keep their cool to such an extent that television news channels had a hard time finding people to complain about the situation - the population's sang froid was really incredible. That evening, I addressed the Greek population and I told the truth. I didn't say: 'I'm holding a referendum to exit the euro.' I said: 'I'm holding a referendum to give us a negotiating dynamic.' The 'no' to the bad agreement was not a 'no' to the euro, a 'yes' to the drachma. People can accuse me of poor calculations, of having had illusions, but at every moment I said things clearly; I informed Parliament twice; I told the Greek people the truth.

With the 61.2 percent in your hands that the Greek people gave you, what would have been the agreement that would have satisfied you on your return from Brussels?

Alexis Tsipras: On the morning of Friday, 25 June, the day of the ultimatum, during a meeting we had in Brussels, with prospects of humiliation without any way out, we decided to go ahead with the referendum. For them it was take it or leave it. 'The game is over' is what Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council repeatedly said. They made no bones about it; they wanted a political change in Greece. We had no choice; we chose the path of democracy, giving the word to the Greek people. Returning to Greece that evening I convened the government Council and we took the decision. I interrupted the meeting to communicate with Angela Merkel and François Hollande. I told them of my decision; that very morning I had explained to them that what they were proposing was not an honest solution. They asked me what I would advise the Greek people, and I answered that I would advise them to vote 'no', not in the sense of a confrontation but as a choice to strengthen Greece's negotiating position. And I asked them to help me in completing this process successfully and calmly, to help me in getting the Eurogroup, which was to meet 48 hours later, to agree on a one-week extension of the program so that the referendum would take place under conditions of security and not of asphyxiation, with banks closed. At that moment, both of them assured me that they would do everything possible to that end.

Only the Chancellor warned me that she would make a public statement on the referendum, but representing it as an issue of whether Greece wanted to remain in the euro. I told her that I absolutely disagreed with this, that the question was not the euro or the drachma but that she was free to say what she wanted. That's where the conversation stopped. This promise was not kept. 48 hours later, the Eurogroup made a very different decision. Their decision was made at the moment when the Greek Parliament was voting to approve the referendum. In 24 hours the decision of the Eurogroup led to the ECB's decision not to increase the ELA ceiling [Editor's note: the mechanism for emergency liquidity assistance on which Greek banks depend], which forced us to establish capital controls to head off the collapse of the banking system.

The decision to close the banks was, I believe, a vengeful decision against the choice of a government to defer to its people.

Did you expect this result?

Alexis Tsipras: I confess that up to Wednesday [Editor's note: the Wednesday before the referendum] I had the impression that the results would be indecisive. By Thursday I began to realize that the 'no' would win, and by Friday I was convinced of it. In this victory, the promise I made to the Greek people to not gamble with a humanitarian catastrophe was brought to bear. I didn't gamble with the survival of the country and its popular strata. After this, in Brussels several terrifying scenarios were put on the table.

I knew that during the seventeen hours in which I had to wage this struggle, alone, under difficult conditions, if I did what my heart wanted to do - to get up, bang my fist on the table, and leave - the foreign branches of Greek banks would collapse on that very day. In 48 hours the liquidity that allowed € 60 daily withdrawals would dry up and, worse, the ECB would decide on a reduction of the Greek banks' collateral and would even demand repayments that would have led to the collapse of the whole banking system. In that case, a collapse would have meant not a reduction of savings but their disappearance. Despite all, I waged this struggle trying to reconcile logic and passion. I knew that if I got up and left I would probably have to return under still more disadvantageous conditions. I was facing a dilemma. World public opinion was proclaiming '#This Is a Coup', to the point that it became the leading hashtag on Twitter worldwide that night. On the one hand, there was logic; on the other hand, political sensibility. On reflection, I remain convinced that the right decision was to opt for the protection of the popular classes. Otherwise, harsh reprisals could have destroyed the country. I made a responsible choice.

You don't believe in this agreement and yet you asked the deputies to vote for it. What do you have in mind?

Alexis Tsipras: I think, and I told Parliament this, that what our European partners and creditors wrested is a Pyrrhic victory, but that at the same time it represents a great moral victory for Greece and its left government. It's a painful compromise, both on the economic and the political level.

You know, compromise is an element of political reality and an element of revolutionary tactics. Lenin is the first to speak of compromise in his book Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, where he devotes several pages to explaining that compromise is part of revolutionary tactics. In one passage, he gives the example of a bandit pointing a pistol at you and saying 'your money or your life'. What is a revolutionary supposed to do? Give his life? No, he has to give the money in order to claim his right to live and continue the struggle. We've been facing a coercive dilemma.

Today, the opposition parties and the establishment media are making a tremendous noise, to the point even of demanding criminal proceedings against Yanis Varoufakis. We are completely aware that we are risking our heads in waging a struggle at the political level. But we are waging it with the overwhelming majority of the Greek people at our side. This is what gives us strength.

***

Interview conducted by Kostas Arvanitis (STO kokkino), published in French in L'Humanité, 31 July 2015

translated by Eric Canepa (unauthorised version)

Kenyans and Ethiopians welcome Obama with open arms

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 15:29:00 +0000

PRETORIA, RSA - Africans are used to having heads of state from the global north coming and telling them what they should be doing to lift their countries out of poverty. President Obama's visit to Kenya and Ethiopia in East Africa at the end of July in many respects upheld that time-honoured tradition. But with an important difference.

Obama's Kenyan paternal family background made his presence in the country as much a homecoming as a state visit. He was welcomed with open arms by an adoring public and upbeat local media. The same went for his visit to Ethiopia. For many people Obama is an African who just happens to be President of the United States.

This made it all the easier for him to speak frankly about things that worry many people across the African continent.

In his speeches in Nairobi and Addis Ababa he took up problems that are all too familiar on this continent but which don't always get the high profile attention they deserve: the violent oppression of women and girls, corruption, bad governance in the form of leaders clinging to power, and support for gay rights.

The first three were widely reported by local media. But it mainly ignored the rigidly taboo issue of gay rights, which Obama raised while in Kenya. Most African countries outlaw LGBT identities. Kenya's penal code, for instance, rules against homosexuality, which can carry a prison sentence of up to 14 years.

On the need to rid society of misogyny, Obama scolded Kenyan leaders and a selection of society's elite gathered at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi: "Any nation that fails to educate its girls or employ its women and allow them to maximize their potential is doomed to fall behind the global economy. Imagine if you have a team and you don't let half of the team play, that's stupid... That makes no sense."

He was equally forthright on the blight of corruption: "Nothing will unlock Africa's economic potential more than ending the cancer of corruption," he told African Union leaders assembled in the AU's splendid assembly hall - a gift from China - in Addis Ababa.

These were the topics that grabbed the most mainstream attention, including of the news media worldwide. For the most part they were welcomed as a breath of fresh air compared to the speeches people have to put up from most of the time from political leaders in Africa.

But perhaps that's all it was - air. Because while Obama's visit did result in some tangible investment benefits, what his audience got for the most part was a great dollop of worthy sentiment honed in the imperative. Granted, Obama did it better than almost any other head of state usually does, and he laid on the easy charm and eloquence that we have come to associate with him to make it memorable.

And yet, despite his African roots, Obama was seemingly unable to escape the mindset of a leader of a global imperial power coming to put Africa's house in order, as if the main topics he dwelt on - gay rights included - are not already the subject of much pained effort and struggle for progress in government and society. If he had acknowledged that they are, it might have offered some perspective and nuance.

For Africans, a rule of thumb in such situations is to imagine what the effect would be if they could turn the tables. What if Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress and said, "C'mon guys, if you really want to get the U.S. economy moving you've got to stop oppressing black Americans and stop shooting them on the streets the way you do. Because if you have a team and you don't let all the team play, that's stupid..." and so on. Imagine the headlines.

No matter how right the U.S. president was in the points he made, or even how well most of them were received among local media pundits, it would have made far more sense to cap the rhetoric and offer some practical support. Social spending support for advancing the education and skills of Kenyan women and girls would be welcome. So would boosting the African Union's democracy building capabilities committing states to improved democratic governance. But sentiment is cheaper and makes a more immediate splash.

With much of Obama's input on Africa's problems, we were left with a "yes, but..." feeling. He was right to point out the corrosive impact of corruption, but on shakier ground when he stated that tackling it is the main key to realizing Africa's economic potential.

Most African governments are fully aware that lack of education and skills, infrastructure and other areas of human development are the main blocks to economic prosperity.

Corruption doesn't automatically repel investment. Most transnational corporations that are happy to invest in African countries are rewarded with tailor-made privileges, or operate in the ubiquitous special economic zones, that shied them from being hassled by corrupt officials.

Corruption is not an abstract evil. It is a crude and malign form of wealth redistribution in vastly unequal societies. It can wither away, with the help of law enforcement and clampdowns, once a more equitable dispensation is achieved. But it is notoriously hard to shift. It is more of a symptom than a cause of underdevelopment.

Obama was also right to take a swipe at the erroneous and harmful stereotypes of Africa as beset by war and poverty, long prevalent in the West. But war or armed conflict and poverty are still terrible blights in quite a few African countries and regions.

Twenty-eight African countries are involved in or affected by 21 armed conflicts of different types. Their numbers have grown following a decrease in armed conflicts after the end of the Cold War. New ones have emerged, and they are generally rooted in the meagre levels of social and economic development that most African populations, particularly in sub-Sahara Africa, have to endure.

This doesn't mean that conflict and poverty typecast Africa any more than a lust for invading or sending drones to attack other countries fills the hopes and desires of the average U.S. citizen.

Africa is anyway too diverse, the strong points of its societies too varied and the dynamics of its evident rising prosperity too wide ranging for it to be accurately typified the way it usually is. But it would be unwise to ignore the impact of poverty and armed conflict as very real and growing problems facing parts of the continent.

Obama did address some of the problems of armed conflicts, but more in terms of anti-terrorism efforts against al Qaeda, ISIL, alShabaab and Boko Haram and of strengthening AU peacekeeping.

What he didn't mention was the bigger picture of U.S. military involvement in Africa, especially with the under-the-radar US Africa Command (AFRICOM). This is steadily increasing its presence on the continent and with its "training exercises" gaining an influence over the defence forces of certain, mainly smaller, African states.

Boko Haram style insurgencies are major worries, but the roots of these and the more established conflicts, of the kind we see in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lie in persistent inequality and impoverishment, which the conflicts in turn perpetuate.

Western corporate involvement in Africa and the constant neo-liberal recipes for "structural adjustment" (known in the West nowadays as "austerity") imposed by bodies such as the International Monetary Fund only exacerbate these crises by entrenching inequality, and in particular worsening the exploitation of women and girls.

Though the Obama depicted U.S. involvement in Africa as all about helping the continent realize its full potential, US rivalry with China protruded from some of his remarks.

He didn't mention China directly but it was obvious which country he meant when he said "economic relationships can't simply be about building countries' infrastructure with foreign labor or extracting Africa's natural resources. Real economic partnerships have to be a good deal for Africa. They have to create jobs and capacity for Africans."

True enough. But it would be misleading to assume that China doesn't do that.

For most African countries, China offers better deals, and they result in essential infrastructure, such as power plants, rail and roads telecommunications, transport, construction, waste disposal and upgrading ports. These are all the sorts of infrastructure that in their use and upkeep create jobs for Africans.

The vast difference in scale between U.S. and Chinese trade with Africa also shows that the actual "good deal for Africa" should be measured against what is, by implication, a less good deal for the continent. Last year U.S. trade with Africa was $73 billion, just under half of what it was in 2008. China, meanwhile, has doubled its trade with the continent since 2011 to $222 billion.

Unlike the U.S., China's presence in Africa is accompanied by little or no rhetoric or sentiment on rights, governance or any social issues. China's there to do business and leave the place better equipped than when it came.

The approach seems to have won over many African countries who are anyway increasingly opting for South-South economic relationships, in part because they provide a chance to delink from long-standing and notoriously unequal trade relations with Europe and other Western countries.

Obama's visit to Kenya and Ethiopia did result in some tangible investment deals, though, notably for building a 100MW wind-power pant in Kenya worth $155 million, plus another $46 million toward a wind farm that will produce up to 301 MW of power.

By contrast, China's financing of a 50MW solar facility in the country, together with a 1000MW coal-fired power plant. China's financing of the projects amounts to cash investments six times larger than that of the U.S., and will result in the generation of two and a half times the amount of electricity.

For the crowds and audiences in Kenya and Ethiopia who came to hear Obama, his words struck a chord and his visit was momentous. But it's hard not to think that it is what he didn't say was almost as significant as what he did say.

Photo: Obama visits Kenya. | Evan Vucci/AP

U.S.-Turkey deal: disaster in the making

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 16:08:00 +0000

The recent agreement between Turkey and the U.S. to cooperate against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria brings to mind the sociologist C. Wright Mills description of those who make American foreign policy as "crackpot realists": realists about advancing their careers, crackpots about the policies they pursue.

The plan will allow the U.S. to use Turkish airbases to bomb the IS in exchange for Washington's support for Ankara re-igniting its 40-year-old war with the Kurds. The U.S. will also buy into creating a "buffer zone" on Syria's northern border that, according to Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, will allow "moderate forces like the Free Syrian Army ... to take control of areas freed from the ISIL," or IS. One U.S. official describe the agreement as "a game changer."

In reality it will entangle the U.S. more deeply in the Syrian civil war and give cover to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's gambit to deepen ethnic divisions in Turkey as part of a strategy to bring his conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) back into power.

Throwing Kurds under a bus

The "plan" will also toss the Kurds, one of Washington's most reliable allies in the fight against the Islamic State, under a bus. "The Americans are not very clever in calculating this sort of thing," Kamran Karadaghi, former chief of staff to Iraqi President and Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, told the Independent's Patrick Cockburn. "Maybe they calculate that with Turkey on their side, they don't need the Kurds."

While Turkey is also bombing the IS, the major focus of its attacks have been the Kurds. On July 23 a few Turkish F-16s bombed a handful of IS targets in northern Syria. In contrast, 75 Turkish F-16s and F-4Es pounded the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) with 300 smart bombs, striking hundreds of targets.

Asked about the bombings, U.S. State Department official Brett McGurk said that Washington recognized Turkey's "right to self-defense."

Encouraging extremists in Syria

The massive bombing attack on the PKK in Iraq's Qandil Mountains shatters a two-year truce in a four-decade old war that has killed more than 40,000 people. The ostensible reason for re-starting a war with the Kurds was a PKK assassination of two Turkish policemen following an Islamic State bombing that killed 31 young Kurdish activists in the Turkish border town of Suruc July 20. The Kurds have long complained that the Erdogan government has encouraged the Syrian insurgents, including turning a blind eye to the activities of the IS.

The real reason behind ending the truce, however, was not the assassination of the two policemen, but Erdogan's calculated campaign to spin up a new round of ethnic hated and force another election.

First, there are no "moderate" forces in the Syrian civil war. The Free Syrian Army is, at best, a marginal player. The major antagonists of the Assad regime are Islamic extremists, the al-Qaeda associated Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, and the Islamic State. Indeed, one reason why the Turkish Army is so wary of getting involved in Syria is because it doesn't want to be allied with the groups leading the fighting. A "buffer" zone will allow those extremist groups to take refuge in a zone protected by Turkish air power.

Erdogan is fixated on overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, arguing that a regime change in Damascus will weaken the IS. But many analysts think the exact opposite and cite the Libya experience as an example. If the Assad regime falls, the extremists, not the moderates, will fill the vacuum. A spillover of violence into Jordan and Lebanon is almost guaranteed, just as the Libya debacle has spread unrest throughout Central Africa.

The "buffer" is also directed at the Kurdish forces that have been so effective in fighting the IS, successfully defending the city of Kobani and liberating several other towns.

Bombing is only effective if it is coordinated with ground forces, and right now the only effective ground forces fighting the IS are the Kurds, the ones we just threw under a bus. Bombing by itself has never worked, as the Saudis are rapidly finding out in Yemen.

What you should know about the Kurds

As for the Kurds, a little history.

One of Erdogan's major accomplishments as prime minister was a 2012 ceasefire with the PKK and a promise to deliver more autonomy to Turkey's 25 million Kurds. Erdogan saw the ceasefire as a way to bring the Kurds on board in his campaign to change the Turkish constitution and create a centralized and powerful presidency. With this in mind, he successfully ran for president in 2014.

But the promised reforms in governance, education and language rights - the Kurds speak several dialects, none of them Turkish - never came through, because the AKP also wanted to attract right-wing nationalist voters who were deeply hostile to anything that smacked of Kurdish autonomy.

Nor is the Kurdish community monolithic. Many Kurds - most of them older, rural, and deeply religious - supported the AKP because for them Islam trumped Kurdish nationalism.

But then AKP made a major mistake.

When the Islamic State besieged the town of Kobani, Turkey refused to help the Kurdish defenders. Indeed, Erdogan equated "Kurdish terrorists" with the IS. Demonstrations demanding that Turkey come to the Kurds' aid were brutally suppressed by the police, and scores of Kurds were killed. Kobani and the police attacks shifted sentiment in the Kurdish community and former AKP backers transferred their support to the left-wing People's Democratic Party (HDP).

The HDP also transformed itself from a Kurdish-based party to a national organization, winning 1.1 million non-Kurdish votes and 80 seats in the 2015 parliamentary elections, effectively denying the AKP its majority and derailing Erdogan's drive to create a powerful executive.

The right-wing nationalist National Action Party (MHP) also did well in those elections, winning 80 seats.

Erdogan has maneuvered ever since to force new elections. By attacking the Kurds, he hopes to make the HDP once again into a Kurdish party by forcing it to choose between its base and the rest of Turkey. And he is gambling that the assault on the Kurds will rally right-wing nationalists to abandon the MHP and move to the AKP. If a lot of Kurds and Turks die because of this cynical stratagem, so be it.

The U.S. role

Why is the White House going along with this madness?

In part, because a number of U.S. State Department officials have the same obsession with overthrowing Assad as Erdogan does. In part because the U.S. military generally manages to convince civilians that dropping a lot of bombs will work, all experience to the contrary. And partly that crackpot thing.

As Hugh Roberts points out in his excellent analysis of Syria in the London Review of Books, there is a possible path out, but it is almost exactly the opposite of the one Turkey and the U.S. are pursuing.

A way out of this mess

To begin with, the primary demand that Assad has to go before there can be serious talks is aimed at torpedoing any prospect of negotiations. No one - least of all Assad - is going to negotiate his own demise, and the Syrian Army and the country's Alawite, Christian and Druze minorities know exactly what will happen to them if the Damascus regime collapses. The Nusra Front may not as brutal as the IS, but al-Qaeda only looks good if your standard of comparison is the Islamic Front. Anyone who believes the "moderates" will take over should consider unicorn hunting as a profession.

In the long run Assad should go, and one suspects that Syrians will vote him out at some point. But the "out first" demand is just a way to continue the war. The only real hope is a ceasefire and a national unity government representative of Syria's enormously diverse population. An arms embargo on all parties, and a commitment to block fighters infiltrating the country would encourage the parties to step back from the current stalemate and consider negotiations.

Will that get rid of the IS? Nope. The Islamic State is an actual state, with a large population, a lot of whom are not just waiting to rise against their Islamic captors. The IS is brutal - though the Arabs suffered far more deaths in the invasion of Iraq - but it is not corrupt. To imagine that the inept and corruption-riddled Iraqi Army is up for a serious scrap is delusional.

The Shiite militias are tough and capable, but also very sectarian, and many Sunnis simply don't trust them.

The Turkish Army does not want to go into Syria, and there is zero support in any Western country for a replay of Iraq and Afghanistan. On top of which, a U.S. or NATO invasion is exactly what the IS would like to provoke. Ironically, the only force that could possibility defeat the Islamic State is the Syrian Army. Getting from here to there, however, will require a diplomatic sea change in the region. But one thing is certain: the current U.S.-Turkish "plan" will make everything worse.

How do these crackpots come up with this stuff?

This article originally appeared at Conn Hallinan's blog Dispatches From the Edge.

Photo: Pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) leader Selahattin Demirtas, himself a Turkish Kurd, speaks to the media about Turkey's airstrikes against Kurdish rebel bases in Iraq, in Ankara, Turkey, July 27, 2015. He called for an immediate ceasefire between the Turkish government and armed members of the PKK. (AP Photo)

Fears mount in Guatemala as elections approach

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 15:05:00 +0000

On Sept. 6 there will be general elections in Guatemala, with runoffs on Oct. 25. Voters will elect a new president to succeed Otto Perez Molina of the Patriotic Party, who is not allowed a second term. They will also elect a vice president, all 158 members of Congress and 20 for the Central American Parliament, as well as local officials,

Perez Molina, a right-wing former general, is mired in an immense corruption scandal. The leading role in the corruption investigation has been taken by the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, CICIG in Spanish, working in tandem with the public prosecutor's office.

The CICIG is a United Nations-sponsored entity which was set up in 2006 to deal with impunity in the Guatemalan justice system. In the current case, its investigations found that persons very close to the president were involved in a smuggling and tax evasion scheme; this has led to the resignation of the country's vice president, Roxana Baldetti, plus numerous arrests.

Also, there was corruption in contracting for kidney treatment services for the health care system of the Guatemalan Institute for Social Security. Outraged citizens of all ideological persuasions have, since May, been protesting these abuses.

Scandals have touched opposition parties too. Fourteen political parties have nominated presidential candidates. Perez Molina's own Patriotic Party (PP) is running Mario David Garcia Velasquez, a right- wing radio and TV journalist. The centrist National Unity of Hope Party (UNE) party has nominated Sandra Torres, wife of former president Alvaro Colom. The Renewed Democratic Liberty Party (LIDER) ticket is headed by businessman and death penalty enthusiast Manuel Baldizon.

On the extreme right, Zury Rios Sosa, the daughter of the former dictator, Efrain Rios Montt, will represent the fascist "Vision with Values Party." Her candidacy is being permitted by the courts even though electoral law forbids the presidency to close relatives of people who came to power by violating the constitutional order, as Rios Montt did when he took power in a military coup in 1982.

He carried out a genocidal campaign against indigenous Ixil Maya people during his short reign. Before Rios Montt was overthrown, military forces had killed at least 1,777 Ixils, the largest single burst of murder in Guatemala's long civil war which started when the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency overthrew the democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954.

That war eventually claimed at least 200,000 civilian lives, most at the hands of the military. In 2013 Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide but the verdict was overturned on a technicality. His attorneys claim now that he is senile and unable to stand trial.

Another candidate, Jimmy Morales of the National Convergence, has been surging in polls; he is a comedian who is using social media to crystalize the general discontent with corruption to support his "nationalist" candidacy. He appears to be on the far right also, denying that there was genocide against the Ixils and, like Baldizon, promoting the death penalty.

On the right also is free-marketeer and socially conservative economist Roberto Gonzalez of the Commitment, Renovation and Order Party (CREO).

On the left, two parties are running presidential candidates: The New Republic Party (MNR) whose presidential candidate is a former member of Congress, Anibal Garcia, who was the running mate of Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu when she ran for president in the last elections, in 2011.

For the Broad Left Front of the National Revolutionary Unity Party (UNRG-MAIZ) and the Winaq Party, the presidential candidate this year is Miguel Angel Sandoval, a former student activist and guerilla fighter during Guatemala's civil war.

On July 15, the CICIG dropped another bombshell, revealing that 25 percent of Guatemala's campaign financing has been underwritten by criminal elements, principally narcotics cartels. The CICIG report cited the LIDER party, whose vice presidential candidate, Edgar Barquin, a former president of the Bank of Guatemala, it accuses of being part of a criminal money laundering scheme. The money laundering scandal also touches others, including former President Alvaro Colom and his wife Sandra Torres, the UNE presidential candidate.

Baldizon, LIDER's presidential candidate, angrily accused CICIG and the prosecutor of conspiring against him to undermine his lead in the polls. He ran up to Washington D.C. to complain to the Organization of American States and U.S. politicians.

Guatemala is a country of 15 and a half million, between 41 or 50 percent of whom belong to the multiple indigenous Maya nations. The Mayas developed a high civilization during antiquity, but after they were conquered by the Spanish in the 16th century, they were pushed into a subordinate economic, social and political position which persists today in one of the most unequal societies in the world.

The per-capita gross domestic product of Guatemala (Purchasing Power Parity method) is about $5,300, one of the lowest in the Western Hemisphere. Half the children under five are malnourished, and the poverty rate among indigenous people is 73 percent with 22 percent living in extreme poverty.

A recent plant disease outbreak has devastated the harvest of coffee, the major crop of many farming communities. Since peace accords that ended the civil war in 1996, and the incorporation of Guatemala in the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) in 2006, foreign direct investment in Guatemala has increased, but this has led to its own problems, as foreign companies enter into conflicts with rural communities over land and water use.

The rate of violence in Guatemala, including against women and children, is extremely high, and a situation of impunity reigns in which very few perpetrators are ever brought to book.

It is not surprising, then, that the so-called "child migrant crisis" of 2014 involved thousands of children from Guatemala as well as from Honduras and El Salvador. The Guatemalan child migrants included a high proportion of indigenous people, and more frequently gave poverty and hunger as their reasons for migrating. This crisis may repeat this year.

Reacting to the "child migrant crisis", the United States has proposed funding a new "Alliance for Prosperity" to the tune of a billion dollars. This is currently being debated in the U.S. Congress. Part of the money would go to measures to attract more foreign direct investment to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, while a considerable proportion would go to beefing up security services.

However, the massive theft of social welfare funds in both Guatemala and Honduras, and the well documented abuses by the security services, create a question as to whether the U.S. aid will in fact do more harm than good.

Without a thorough reform, the U.S. funds could end up exacerbating both corruption and repression. So far, it does not look as if the most likely winners of the presidential elections on Sept. 6 hold out promise for achieving such reform. Polls show Baldizon far ahead, followed by Torres, Morales, Rios and Gonzalez.

Various organizations have suggested that given the corruption scandal, the elections be postponed. This appears unlikely.

Photo: Otto Perez Molina, who is not allowed a second term, is currently mired in a corruption scandal. | AP

Social democratic NDP could lead Canada’s next government

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 14:54:00 +0000

VANCOUVER, Canada - If New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Thomas Mulcair has his way, he will head Canada's first social democratic government. With an election just called on Aug. 3, polls indicate that this may happen.

The latest poll from Nanos Research reported that the NDP was the pick of 31.4 percent of voters while the Conservative Party got 30.8 percent , Liberals 26.8 percent , Greens 5.9 percent and Bloc Quebecois 17.3 percent of those in Quebec. The last 10 polls have consistently placed the center left NDP ahead or in a tie with the Conservatives. Already a senior party strategist told the Globe and Mail newspaper that the NDP is looking for someone to become the next finance minister, a key post.

Until recently the NDP had always been a minor party on the Canadian political landscape, capturing between 8 percent and 10 percent of the vote each election. Since it was founded in 1933 during the depths of the great depression, it has never come close to winning at the national level, achieving more success at the provincial and municipal level. The corporate-backed Conservative and Liberal parties have dominated Canadian politics since the country's founding in 1867. When Canadians tired of Conservative right-wing rule, they elected the Liberals who campaigned from the left but ruled from the right, implementing similar neoliberal policies as the Conservatives. The NDP made its first big breakthrough in 2011 when it won 30.6 percent of the vote and elected 103 members to the 338-seat Parliament, becoming the official opposition. The Liberals, with 18.9 percent of the vote, were reduced to a rump group of 34 and the Green Party, with 3.9 percent of the vote, elected its first MP.

Another big breakthrough came earlier this year when the NDP won the provincial election in the province of Alberta, home of the environmentally damaging oil sands industry. Alberta had long been a Conservative stronghold.

Mulcair, a lawyer, who comes from the French-speaking province of Quebec, was elected leader of the NDP in March 2012. While the corporate-owned media is already beginning to speak of an NDP electoral victory in ominous, threatening terms, Mulcair actually comes originally from the center-right Liberal Party. From 1994 to 2007, he served as a Liberal in the Quebec Provincial Assembly. He was minister of Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks in a Liberal government from 2003-2006 until he resigned over differences, supposedly because he refused to transfer park land to a condo developer. He was first elected to the federal Parliament during a 2007 by-election.

If elected, Mulcair promises: the creation of one million $15 a day child care spaces; ending federal cuts to public healthcare and strengthening the health care system; a federal minimum wage of $15; investment in municipal infrastructure and public transit; more stringent environmental regulations; lowering the retirement age from 67 to 65 and protecting private and public pension plans; and implementation of proportional representation to fix the country's broken, undemocratic electoral system. Mulcair has been crisscrossing the country to raise his profile, and his French-accented message of "together, we'll replace the politics of fear with hope and optimism " has been resonating with Canadians, weary of years of Conservative and Liberal Party rule that have worsened poverty, inequality and unemployment.

While the party long ago moved away from the socialist principles (public ownership of the means of production to meet human needs) on which it was founded in 1933, Mulcair has moved the party further to the right, championing efforts to remove any lingering mention of socialism from the party's constitution at the 2013 NDP convention. He supports the construction of a monument to the alleged victims of Communism that a Conservative Party front group Tribute to Liberty wants to build in Ottawa. On its website can be found a letter from Mulcair endorsing the project. The party has shifted its Middle East policy to an overt pro-Israeli position. Mulcair is open to forming a coalition government with the center-right Liberal Party.

While Mulcair criticized Bill C-51 - recently passed Conservative anti-terrorist legislation that makes it easier for the state to crack down on opposition groups - and voted against it, he has only promised that he will remove the most disagreeable parts from the bill if elected prime minister, not scrap it entirely. A wide cross section - from leading corporate CEOs and Amnesty International to the Communist and Green parties - demand that the legislation be rejected in its entirety and tossed out.

The NDP under Mulcair has announced that it will support flawed free trade agreements with other countries such as NAFTA if they improve trade. In the past, the party opposed the free trade agreements with the USA and Mexico which eroded Canada's manufacturing base and led to big job losses. Party trade critic Don Davies said the NDP is waiting to see if it can support the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): "We have from the beginning supported Canada being at the table. But we don't know what's in it. We can't say that we're for or against the TPP until we know what's in it."

While Mulcair raises concerns about widening income inequality and the declining middle class, he has not clarified how he will address the problem or pay for his campaign promises. He has ruled out tax increases on the rich and big business, saying that the affluent pay enough tax. Mulcair has promised juicy tax cuts to big and small businesses (defined as companies with taxable capital below $15 million) to encourage them to invest and create new jobs.

Even the Liberals, now in third place, have begun to attack the NDP for not being progressive enough.

"The NDP, and quite particularly Thomas Mulcair, are obsessed with downplaying their ideological aspects and emphasizing the idea of good, solid public administration," said Jonathan Malloy, chair of Carleton University's political science department. "The mantra of 'tax the rich' is a common NDP one," Malloy said, "but that is exactly the edges that [Mulcair] is trying to sand down, any sort of idea of class warfare."

Photo: Thomas Mulcair gives his acceptance speech after winning the NDP leadership post, March 24, 2012, in Toronto. Matt Jiggins/Wikipedia

Germany's anti-immigrant politicians are today's Know-Nothings

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 13:56:00 +0000

BERLIN - "I don't know." Those words, often repeated 160 years ago in the U.S., earned the gang of those using them the nickname "Know Nothing Party." Those were no expressions of intellectual modesty; their doings were secret, so members were not supposed to disclose anything about them, but just say "I don't know." Their patriotic title was actually "American Party" but many members truly knew almost nothing except that they hated immigrants, especially Catholic Germans and Irish, and wanted to bar them from entry, from citizenship and from the vote. This uplifting program, including violent attacks on those fleeing famine in Ireland or repression in Germany after a lost revolution, won the "Know-Nothings" eight state governorships, five seats in the U.S. Senate and forty-three in the House of Representatives by 1856.

Today's anti-immigrant Know-Nothings in many countries

Today we are also blessed with anti-immigrant Know-Nothings in many countries. We hear similar views in London and Paris, in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, in Munich and Berlin. And we hear of results worse than in 1855 in Maryland or Massachusetts: of desperate misery in the "Jungle" of Calais or at the Italian-French border, of broken windows and flaming roofs in refugee hostels in more and more German towns. Such attacks, vicious graffiti, insulting hog carcasses, Molotov cocktails as well, numbered 173 in Germany alone in the first half of 2015, almost three times the number in 2014.

Waves of refugees and asylum seekers

No-one can deny that serious problems exist. Refugees today are not from Ireland or Germany, now one of their main goals; 160,000 applied here in Germany for asylum by June 30^th and the numbers are increasing. Very many are fleeing war zones, their direct dangers and their hunger and destruction - people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Turkey, Sudan and South Sudan. Hunger and destitution play key roles for many from African countries, often paired with repression. Then there are those from Bulgaria, Rumania and the countries carved out with the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. These Eastern Balkan asylum-seekers are mostly Roma ("Gypsies"), discriminated against nearly everywhere, pressed into miserable schools, largely bound to the worst of jobs or none at all, subject to hatred and often violent attacks. All the refugees want only a chance to earn a living, care for their families, return where possible or to find peaceful new homes.

Germany was often faced by waves of newcomers, not only in past centuries. Millions of ethnic Germans, forced to leave Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary after 1945, faced difficult, often frosty receptions in places where they were resettled. Then huge sums were invested to build up West Germany and workers from Spain, Italy and then Turkey were "imported" by government agreement, especially after 1961, when the Wall prevented further recruitment of East Germans. Most of these nicely titled "guest workers" were given heavy and dirty jobs, on shift work and assembly lines, and their employment helped keep wages down in Germany while lessening unemployment and political radicalization in their home countries. The program ended in 1973; almost all 14 million returned home; two million stayed, grew roots, fetched and raised families and are now in their second and third generations. But the integration process is far from concluded and was complicated in the early 1990's by German unification - or annexation. There was nasty violence against people with different colors, clothes and languages, by West Germans but even worse by East Germans suddenly deprived of their jobs, less accustomed to many nationalities hence more easily misguided in their frustration and disappointment to attack peaceful, industrious people they were led to see as intruders.

Sympathy

The situation cooled somewhat after 2000. But today, with large new numbers arriving, it is again threatening, indeed very threatening. Despite some people's theories, however, not all Germans are the same! Many feel great sympathy toward immigrants after the terrible scenes of warfare in Syria and Iraq or the terrible tragedies of capsized vessels and lost human beings in the stormy Mediterranean. Perhaps some recalled their own travails. In addition to many who accept the newcomers with at least mental welcome mats, not a few offer food, clothing, toys and personal care items to help them settle at least temporarily. Thousands, especially young people, demonstrate in their defense, march with "Welcome" signs, and defiantly confront that other contingent - the modern Know-Nothings.

However, as more and more are assigned to city boroughs, small towns, even villages, as container homes are erected and even school gymnasiums get filled with cots or mattresses, it becomes easier to stir up hatred, spread fear of disease or crime and warn of dangers to schoolchildren. Public aid sums are falsely magnified to encourage envy. Donald Trump's vicious words about Mexicans or pictures of anti-alien vigilantes in the U.S.-Southwest can give a hint of this. But very icy fears are born of recollections of the not so distant German past, of similar visages and bulging, shaven napes.

Pegida, AfD, Third Way

Among such German Know-Nothings are still the Pegida demonstrators with their "anti-Islamic" shouts and banners. Nationally more organized are those in the Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), which recently ousted its moderately far right leader and moved even further to the racist right; the split cut its poll numbers to 3-4 percent, which would at least keep it out of the Bundestag. The older National Democratic Party (NPD), no longer seated in Saxony's legislature but very present in its main districts, has now been augmented by a newer group called the Third Way, a mix of violence-prone neo-Nazis which has spread from Bavaria to the eastern Brandenburg - and of course Saxony.

Though small in number, they are clever in stirring fear and resentment, especially when those responsible for bringing in refugees fail to discuss and explain the move to local residents. Freital near Dresden, in GDR days a flourishing steel town, has been plagued for weeks by noisily menacing rallies led by such right-wing forces. The police hold them back from the hotel assigned to asylum-seekers, but just barely; at a public meeting those supporting the refugees were booed and denied the word, including Saxony's Interior Minister, who as mayor in another town once took a strong stand on the issue, but more recently, like his boss at the helm in Saxony, often seems nearly tongue-tied.

Freital's mayor, on the other hand, was anything but tongue-tied during his election campaign when he demanded "sanctions against the swarming, violent asylum-seekers...adventurers coming to Germany to live a life of ease at the cost of the community." All three politicians are from the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the party of Angela Merkel.

One city councilor, a leader of the LINKE (Left) party who took a courageous stand for the refugees, awoke one night when his car exploded. Threats mailed to him had been dismissed by the police. In Meissen, to the north of Dresden, threats to a building being repaired for use by the new arrivals were similarly dismissed. It was also wrecked by fire.

German politics are again split. With a low birthrate and sinking population, new people are needed by many corporations, to whom national background is of little importance. Upright democratic words come easily to the tongue-tips of politicians - if they want them. But above all the demands of working people must be contained, and how better than, despite all doubletalk, to let them be misled into fighting not the big firms but those "greedy foreigners" - whether Greeks in Athens or Syrians in Dortmund? New laws now demonstrate this bipolarity; refugees who have lived here four to six years, if they speak German and have jobs, have better chances to remain, which is humane. But for those refugees still outside the borders it will be tougher.

Perhaps not for all of them. Qualified engineers, doctors and other desirable professionals will now have better chances, for they are needed. The right-wing Bavarian leader Horst Seehofer had a new plan, now being copied elsewhere. Sort out those from the "East Balkans" with little hopes of acceptance, keep them in gyms or tents and throw them out speedily. Only a few on the Left or some Greens have noted the possible resemblance of such "Gypsy camps" with those of the Nazis before the trains brought the Roma to Auschwitz.

No, it's not the same. But too few realize that the wars which force so many to risk their lives in leaky death traps were caused or armed by the major western powers (in Bagdad, Kabul and Aleppo), or that the poverty sending Africans along the same route derives from giant, lasting exploitation, with cheap exports of "northern" goods destroying the livelihoods of small farmers, tailors and other craftsmen, forcing them into giant, hopeless slums and from there across the deserts to Libya, where warplanes of the great powers created the chaos conducive to today's racketeering boat-dealers.

The solutions will not be easy

The solutions will not be easy. They demand peace and justice in the Near East, without western armies and armaments, they demand truly independent, healthy development in Africa, north and south, and fair, humane treatment of everyone living in a country, regardless of origin. No, not easy!

The old Know-Nothings in the U.S., with nothing to offer voters except hatred, were soon overrun by the approaching Civil War, though the human problems still remain. In Europe, especially in Germany, the forces misusing the problems of properly treating such increasingly desperate "undesirables" represent a growing threat, far more dangerous than the old Know-Nothings, and actively awaiting their chances in all continents.

Photo: Left-wing demonstrators stand with refugees in front of building accommodating immigrants in Freital near Dresden, Germany, June 26. Across from them members of Pegida, the right-wing movement that staged regular rallies in Dresden and elsewhere against immigrants and Muslims, initiate protests and demonstrate against the arrival of refugee families. | Jens Meyer/AP

Shielded for decades, Pinochet thugs now face justice

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 12:48:00 +0000

Chilean President Michelle Bachelet has called for an end to the "pact of silence" that for more than 25 years has protected those who conducted the reign of terror during the 17 years of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

Bachelet herself had been imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet junta. She said, "There are people who know the truth about many cases that are still unsolved." She urged those who know to come forward "and help to repair so much pain."

Encouraged by Bachelet's words, some people are, indeed, coming forward and recently several of those responsible for torture and murder have been indicted by Chilean courts.

On September 11, 1973, Augusto Pinochet, then army commander-in-chief, took control of Chile. He led a U.S.-sponsored coup that murdered popularly elected President Salvador Allende and overthrew the governing coalition headed by the Socialist Party. Pinochet ruled Chile until 1990, when he went back to being the commander-in-chief of the army.

To run the economy Pinochet installed "the Chicago boys," trained by right-wing economist Milton Friedman. Among other things, they restricted labor unions and privatized Social Security. A few corporations made billions, but the standard of living of most Chileans plummeted.

To enforce his rule, Pinochet instituted state terror. Some 3,200 people were killed, 80,000 people were kidnapped and about 30,000 were tortured.

Carmen Quintana, an attaché of the Chilean Embassy in Ottawa recently said, "There is an entire system to cover up human rights crimes of the Pinochet era."

In 1986, Quintana, then 18, and Rodrigo Rojas, 19, were captured by Chilean soldiers while observing a workers' strike in Santiago against the Pinochet dictatorship. Rojas, a budding photographer, had been born in Chile but grew up in Washington, DC. He had returned to see the land of his birth.

The soldiers severely beat Rojas and Quintana, doused them with gasoline and left them for dead. They were found by local workers and taken to a hospital.

Quintana was severely disfigured. Rojas died within four days.

The case of "los quemados," the "burned ones," brought outrage from human rights groups around the world, but no one was held accountable until two weeks ago.

De-classified papers recently posted by the National Security Archives show that Pinochet, the U.S. State Department, the CIA and President Ronald Reagan knew almost immediately what had happened to Rojas and Quintana.

Nevertheless, Pinochet and his subordinates concocted the story that the two teen-agers had been "terrorists" carrying a Molotov cocktail that accidently blew up. No U.S. official publicly questioned this account.

However, Rojas' mother, Veronica De Negri, would not let the matter rest. Aided by human rights groups, she kept the case alive for almost 30 years. She herself had been imprisoned, tortured and expelled from Chile by the Pinochet regime. She had settled in Washington in 1977 with her two sons, Rodrigo and Pablo.

De Negri was gratified when Fernando Guzmán, a former soldier, told a judge about a year ago that he saw Julio Castañer a lieutenant in Pinochet's army, set fire to Rojas and Quintana. Castañer was indicted June 21, along with six former soldiers. At the time of his arrest, Castañer was serving as an assistant chief of staff in a division of Chile's army. The judge refused to indict 17 other soldiers who had participated in the crime.

Meanwhile, a Chilean court has indicted 10 former army officers for the 1973 torture and murder of Victor Jara, a world-renowned singer-songwriter and poet. The officers had cut off Jara's fingers and beaten him. What's more, a U.S. court has ruled that the man identified as the killer, former lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, could be prosecuted in the U.S. under a suit brought by Jara's family. For many years, U.S. courts had protected Barrientos from having to stand trial in Chile. He had moved to Florida in 1989 and was immediately given U.S. citizenship.

Furthermore, a Chilean court has ruled that "the military intelligence services of the United States had a fundamental role in the creation of the murders of the two American citizens in 1973, providing Chilean military officers with the information that led to their deaths." The Americans were journalist Charles Horman and student Frank Teruggi. The court ruling paves the way for new trials.

Despite all these measures aimed at bringing Pinochet's thugs to justice, fear of retribution for speaking out is still strong. Fernando Guzmán, the former soldier who gave evidence against those who killed Rojas and maimed Quintana, says he is afraid for his life.

Veronica De Negri says that although the pact of silence has been cracked, it remains very strong. "Some who participated in these events continue to lie today," she said, "and continue to blame the victims of crimes."

De Negri has announced that "after we finish with the case of Rodrigo, I'm going to start pushing my own. The soldiers who hurt me have never been punished."

She is currently in Chile to make sure that the wheels of justice continue to turn.

Photo: Those involved in and responsible for the military takeover of Chile in 1973 are facing justice. | AP