People Before Profit blog

July 26 on the mind, in Cuba and everywhere

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 12:50:00 +0000

Once more in Cuba July 26 has come and gone. For Cubans the day is a "National Day of Rebellion;" it's their greatest holiday. As always, ceremonies and festivities took place this year throughout the island. Sancti Spiritus, the capital city of Sancti Spiritus province, hosted the main event. Cuban President Raul Castro presided over the gathering there, and Jose Ramon Machado Ventura addressed the crowd. He's a vice president of Cuba's Council of State and second secretary of the Communist Party.

National leaders, foreign visitors in solidarity with Cuba's revolution, and local political leaders and citizens - about 8000 people in all - filled the city's central plaza. The signature event of the July 26 celebrations each year takes place in a province selected because of accomplishments. The speakers in Sancti Spiritus cited the province's advances in agricultural production, tourist facilities, in the energy sector, and in health care, especially its very low infant mortality rate.

July 26 in Cuba commemorates the day in 1953 when youthful armed rebels attacked military installations in eastern Cuba, one in Bayamo and the other in Santiago - the now famous Moncada barracks. The assaults failed utterly. Dozens of captured rebels were tortured and/or killed. Nevertheless, revolutionaries, calling themselves the July 26 movement, went on to defeat the U. S. supported dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. In doing so, they launched the Cuban project of building a socialist society.

Fidel Castro, who led the attacks and later on the July 26 movement, went on trial. Defending himself, Castro, who was a lawyer, explained why Cuba needed a revolution. He explored philosophical, historical, sociological, and idealistic justifications for the uprising. Castro identified tasks for revolutionaries after they gained victory. The printed version of his defense, titled "History Will Absolve Me," circulated in Cuba beginning in 1954. Its English language version, 26,203 words long, surely warrants study now, 63 years after that court session.

Why "Day of Rebellion"?

Every year speakers at the July 26 celebrations recall the revolutionaries' martyrdom, imprisonment, or exile; their military struggle in Cuba's Sierra Maestra after December 1956; their mobilizations in the cities; and their ultimate victory.

Ostensibly the day marks the beginning of a political revolution. But one wonders about the imprecise and bland label of "National Day of Rebellion." Mere rebellion is not enough to propel a social revolution such as Cuba's. So why is not the term "revolution" used?

Here's a theory. Cubans, students and adults alike, might object to a name suggesting that the revolution began only on July 26, 1953. They recall political and social revolutionaries of the 19th century who carried out slave rebellions and fought in Cuba's first war for independence from Spain. They know about General Antonio Maceo whose Protest of Baraguá in 1878 kept alive fights for independence and slavery's abolition.

Above all, they honor José Martí. His anti-imperialism, his propagandizing and organizing for the second war for independence, and his battlefield death in 1895 inspired the revolutionaries of 1953. They were the "generation of the centennial" of José Martí's birth.

Fidel Castro told his accusers in 1953 that, "It looked like the Apostle (Martí) was going to die in the year of his centennial, that his memory would be blighted for always; that was such an affront!"
Revolutionaries laid siege to the Machado dictatorship (1925 - 1933). They agitated and suffered on behalf of revolutionary change amid the turmoil preceding Batista's ascendency in 1934. In short, the July 26 heroes inherited a revolutionary tradition. Cuba's revolution hardly began in 1953, but that year Cuban rebelliousness did strike again, and with momentous effects.

A day to celebrate

From the perspective of history, July 26 in Cuba testifies to a social and political revolution that accomplished much. It joins others like July 4 in the United States, July 14 in France, and October 25 (Julian calendar) in Russia. Only later did a revolution within a revolution convert Cuba's revolution into a socialist one. In fact, revolutions leading to changes on a seismic scale are few, and Cuba's is one of them. July 26 thus is a big day everywhere.

Concluding his remarks in Sancti Spiritus, Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura called upon Cubans "each day to show, in every workplace and with concrete actions" that they could meet current challenges, "as did the Generation of the Centenary on that July 26, 1953 and as so many Cubans have done throughout their exemplary history of struggles and victories for the homeland."

Photo: José Ramón Machado Ventura, second secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and a vice president of the Councils of State and Ministers, during the commemoration of the 63rd anniversary of the assaults on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Garrisons, held in Sancti Spíritus, July 26. Estudio Revolución

Brexit or Lexit – the Left has its work cut out

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 11:01:00 +0000

The result of the vote by the British electorate of 53% to 46% in favour of leaving the European Union - Brexit - seemed a clear indication of where the country stood on the issue. But judging by the reaction that has played out in the country's media, the poll has resulted in spasms of shame-faced confusion.

The reason is that some of the loudest voices for Brexit were also the most reactionary, marinated in xenophobia and racism. They tended to drown out the campaign by more rational forces on the Left for a left wing exit from the EU - a Lexit.

The vote whipped up a storm in the UK's political establishment and among an array of political forces outside it, and as yet very little is clear on how the break with the EU will pan out.

A large chunk of opinion ranging from the left-of-centre opposition Labour Party to much of the ruling right-of-centre Conservative Party campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU. The right wing of the Conservatives through the far right United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) and beyond was resolutely in favour of Brexit.

The mainstream media largely reflected this spectrum of opinion, with the small-L liberal Guardian, the pro-government Times and faux-left Daily Mirror urging the country to "remain", while the populist right wing Sun and Daily Mail were pro-Brexit.

The view that voters favouring Brexit were largely from the right wing or in some way under its sway has prevailed in much of the analysis of the poll result. This bemoans the xenophobic and racist light in which the UK now lies exposed thanks to Brexit.

Right wingers campaigned on a ticket of narrow nationalism that drew heavily on anti-European and anti-foreigner sentiments. For many others Brexit supporters represent the lowest common denominators among the British. Philistine, devoid of the urbane sensibilities of European culture. Little Englanders clinging to a deluded sense of exceptionality amidst their own squalid, class-ridden, greedy dysfunction gearing up to rid the country of "foreigners".

Though much ignorance of what the EU is all about continues to pervade the op-ed columns of the Guardian and other news media, cutting ties with the EU is seen as a kick in the face for internationalism, multilateral cooperation and any sense of pan-European identity. It's as if the UK was about to engineer its own mini continental drift to the Bermuda Triangle.

Britain has always set itself apart from the rest of Europe, often quaintly referred to as "the Continent". Much of the post-referendum hand wringing about "cutting off from Europe" hinges on a dubious equation of the EU with Europe, as if they were somehow synonymous.

This is partly due to the partial success of the EU's self-mythologizing propaganda. It uses Beethoven's Ode to Joy, from the end of the composer's 9^th Symphony, as its anthem. Its flag, adopted in 1985 at the tipping point of the Cold War, is a circle of 12 yellow stars on a blue background, supposedly symbolizing completeness and unity. The blue is meant for some reason to represent the West, though the EU now incorporates the once-red countries from the former Soviet bloc.

Europe Day is celebrated on both 5 and 9 May - an awkward effort to accommodate the wishes of the Council of Europe, the human rights and rule of law organisation that is not part of the EU.

There was nearly an EU Constitution and Charter of Fundamental Rights. They were adopted in 2004 but hastily abandoned due to negative referendum results - not in the UK but in France and the Netherlands.

And there is the euro, the currency used in 19 of the EU's 28 member states, itself as powerful a symbol of a common European identity as the coinage of the Roman Empire was of the power of the Caesars.

Despite its many institutions and programmes that reach into areas such as culture, education, overseas development aid, and satellite technology, the main focus of the EU has been on creating and running an internal market in the combined area of its member states for goods and capital. This covers agriculture and fisheries. It provides for the free movement of labor to enable centres of production to draw on mobile labor forces, depending on what is being produced. The EU has nascent military-defence ambitions but is largely embedded within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Nato.

Much of the work of the EU since it morphed from the European Community to its more integrated present form in 1992 has been on standardising the laws of member states so that they fit the requirements of the internal market. This has meant that the EU has expanded its work into all areas in any way touching on working life and the labor within the internal market.

It regulates occupational health and safety and other areas of health care, some workplace rights, some judicial and home affairs matters, immigration, and a mass of regulations concerning everything related in any way to the many areas of industrial production and manufacturing. From foods to diesel engines. It maintains lopsided trading regimes with developing countries, seen by many as compounding not tackling underdevelopment. And it runs a viciously restrictive border policy to shore up Fortress Europe that has been in part responsible for the deaths of thousands of refugees.

Most areas of EU influence appear to replicate the way states rule themselves, but EU legislation is wholly focused on nurturing the single market and its profit-generating clout, realised through the operations of private enterprises and corporations. National legislation in the member states is left untouched as long as it does not impede EU legislation. If it does, it must be subject to "harmonisation", brought into line with the legislation created by the EU.

In some fields EU legislation has been an improvement on national regulations. The incorporation of, say, the latest developments in occupational health and safety into EU law means that it is easy to see the EU as an innovator in this area. Many of those who regret Brexit feel that the UK will lose out in this respect, and that the door will be open for government and businesses to lower their standards to the detriment of workers.

And yet the majority of big business wants the UK to remain in the EU. EU legislation on the free movement of labor allows bosses to pay workers lower wages. Trade union rights are highly localised, easy to marginalise and do not cover workers coming from other parts of the EU.

Businesses import cheap labour from poorer parts of the EU when manufacturing or sales take place in wealthier countries where local workers are used to better wages and conditions. Conversely, they shift production or processing to poorer parts of the EU, especially the South and East, where local wages are bad and conditions poorly regulated.

The EU's occupational health and safety regulations have scant leverage in such areas, all the more so as the EU favours tough "austerity" policies that depress pay and conditions even further. For big business, the EU means big profits and zero labor union interference. One effect has been to generate conflict and xenophobia between workers from different countries and regions, something that the right wing Brexit supporters capitalised on in their anti-EU campaign.

It is also extremely difficult for social movements, labor organisations or EU citizens (the citizens of EU member states are automatically EU citizens) to have any influence on decision-making in the EU.

The EU resembles an oligarchy. All its top executive positions are filled by appointment. The EU Commission is the main executive body, with commissioners appointed by member states. Its president is appointed on approval of the European Parliament on the basis of a nomination made by ministers from the member states.

The EU parliament, the only direct link to voters in each country, has no legislative decision-making powers or right of veto, nor can it influence the work of the Commission. The Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) represent large wholly unreachable constituencies in their own countries. There are 73 MEPs for Britain's 65 million people.

A key EU institution is the European Central Bank, run by appointees for eight-year tenures. The ECB has been the main player in imposing public spending cuts on Greece, and imposing further austerity policies on the country in return for cash 'bailouts'.

These are some of the reasons why communists and others on the Left in the UK ran the campaign for a left exit - Lexit - from the EU. This campaign sought to inject progressive politics into the arguments for leaving the EU. It's a stance that meshes with that of communist and workers parties in other EU member countries.

The Lexit campaign argued that a vote to withdraw from the EU would lead to the collapse of the Conservative government in London, and that the replacement administration will probably be short lived. The impetus would be for calling an early general election, which in turn would create the conditions for a Labour government to be elected "on a programme of progressive taxation, public investment, public ownership, industrial regeneration and ecological security."

Communists in other parts of Europe have welcomed the Brexit/Lexit poll result as a great opportunity for the Left. The Communist Party of Finland, for instance, stated that most of those in the UK who voted to leave the EU were from working class communities hit hardest by EU policies that had destroyed their livelihoods.

The Communist Party of Spain echoed these views, sensing a chance for "the complete abandonment of the neoliberal strategy that for more than three decades has ruled over Europe, and the adoption an anti-oligarchic vision that has as its center the interests and aspirations of the social majorities."

The Communist Party of Ireland stated "Throughout the EU, millions of workers will welcome this vote to leave, which may well mark the beginning of the end of the EU itself. Project Fear, masterminded by the EU, has been used to bully the Greek, Spanish, Italian, Cypriot and Irish people into accepting debt slavery, that there was no alternative but to bail out the banks and speculators over the rights of the people. But not only them: this strategy has been used against all working people right throughout the EU, using fear to impose the feeling that there is no alternative, using it to mask savage attacks on workers' rights and conditions, and the further erosion of democracy and national sovereignty."

For these and other communist parties, the Left has a chance to reshape Europe into an entirely different entity, unified by socialist values and policies. Or rather the chance to do this is closer now than it has ever been before. Some see the beginning of the end for the EU as its popularity plummets and it loses it grip with the deepening capitalist crisis. Others on the non-communist Left in Europe, including some of the socialist parties that belong to the European Left formation, see Brexit as simply a knee-jerk protest vote that points to the need to reform the EU.

In the UK, the Labour Party is in the throes of an intense class struggle between right wing Labour MPs and the party's burgeoning grassroots left wing membership.

The issue is ostensibly about who will lead the party, whether the Left incumbent, Jeremy Corbyn, or the right's candidate Owen Smith. The core issues, though, are to do with what direction the Labour Party should take, whether to work on a Left platform of social and economic transformation or to return the party to the sort of neoliberal profile it had under Tony Blair and his likeminded successors.

If Corbyn and the wishes of the party's ordinary members prevail, there may be a chance for the Left to seize the initiative in the wake of the post-Brexit vote, which has thrown the ruling Conservatives into disarray. The appointment of the new Prime Minister, Teresa May, and her efforts renew the government will succeed or fail depending on the ability of the Left to get its act together. If it doesn't, Brexit could turn into everything that its right wing supporters have dreamed of.

Mark Waller

First published in People's World

Photo: Flickr (CC)

British Iraq War report is damning for former PM Tony Blair

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 12:25:00 +0000

It took a long time, but the report on Britain's involvement in the planning and execution of the Iraq War was finally published on July 6th. It paints a damning picture of the role of former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Labour Party cabinet.

The Chilcot Report, as it is being called in the media, is the product of years of investigation, testimony and deliberations by a special commission, the Iraq Inquiry, composed of privy counsellors. In Britain's quaint and archaic way of doing certain things, privy counsellors are supposed to be trusted advisors of the monarch.

The five members of the inquiry could hardly have been more "establishment." There is not a labor union leader or radical intellectual among them, and at least one had been a supporter of the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The head of the inquiry is Sir John Chilcot, a career civil servant. The inquiry was also advised by a retired top army general (Sir Roger Wheeler) and a former president of the International Court of Justice (Dame Rossalyn Higgins).

The witnesses called to testify were also an establishment lot, mostly military officers and civil servants.

The inquiry was set up in 2009 and the hearing of testimony finished three years later, but the publication of its results has been delayed until now for more or less obviously political reasons.

Under these circumstances, one might think that the result would be a whitewash. But even though the huge report does not specifically affix blame for the Iraq disaster or call for punishment of Tony Blair, former Foreign Minister Jack Straw and the other British officials who connived with U.S. President George Bush in going into Iraq, it is a damning report. It is embarrassing for Blair and the right wing of his Labour Party and for the British ruling class, as it should be also for former Pres. Bush and all the U.S. politicians and civil and military leaders who brought about the Iraq War and the massive destabilization and bloody conflict that ensued.

It is clear from what has been published so far (the report is 2.6 million words long) that Blair's characterization by British cartoonists at the time as George Bush's "pet poodle" was well justified. The plotting between Bush and Blair started by the summer of 2002, with Blair getting on board the war train in July of that year at the latest.

The only concern that Blair showed about Bush's push toward war had to do with appearances. Blair showed contempt for leaders in Europe who opposed the war policy, saying that such people were acting "stupidly." Blair clearly saw a policy of intervention and regime change as completely justified, not because of Saddam Hussein's beastly behavior toward his own people, but because the Anglo-Saxon countries know best and have the right to do these things. But Blair did suggest mollifying world public opinion by action on the Middle East peace process and other issues. Bush paid no more attention to this than he would have to the yapping of a poodle.

Weapons of mass destruction were the pretext and not the reason for attacking Iraq, as Bush and Blair both knew perfectly well. The Chilcot Report shows that the British cabinet knew that diplomatic measures had not been exhausted, that resorting to arms had a big downside and that at any rate, the existence of weapons of mass destruction had not been demonstrated: At most Iraq had the capacity to create such weapons, which could be said of any country with a modern scientific and industrial setup. Under those circumstances, Blair's claim that Saddam could attack the West with such weapons on short notice was an outright lie. And of course, once the U.S. and Britain invaded and took over Iraq, no such weapons were ever found.

Bush and Blair cynically used and undermined the United Nations by claiming to act on the basis of U.N. resolutions concerning the elimination of weapons of mass destruction, when in fact there was no evidence of such weapons, and, moreover, the U.N. had not voted to authorize the invasion.

But none of this stuff is exactly new. Years ago, British documents had been leaked which clearly indicated that Blair's government was complicit with the Bush administration in faking a pretext for invading Iraq.

The "Downing Street Memo" of July 23, 2002, dated right when Blair was committing his country to the Iraq War, contained the memorable phrase by a British official: "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." In other words, the British government knew perfectly well that the Bush administration was determined to invade Iraq and the "reasons" to be given - terrorism and weapons of mass destruction - were really only pretexts. Other memos showed that the Bush-Blair team were cynically dismissive of any U.N. role in the decision to intervene in Iraq.

In light of these findings, it is quite strange that Blair was, after leaving Number 10 Downing Street, appointed as "Special Middle East Envoy" for the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia. Less pleasing to Blair, no doubt, were demands by South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu and others that he stand trial for war crimes in Iraq.

Upon the release of the Chilcot Report, Blair was "apologetic" but said he still thought it was good that Saddam had been removed from power.

This will not be the end of the matter, however. The Chilcot Report shows that the Bush-Blair team tried to pooh-pooh the issue of civilian and military casualties of the war, but this topic is not going to go away. Among British, U.S. and allied casualties, and casualties of Iraqi civilians and military, some estimates go as high as one million deaths, to which one must add the deaths caused by the sanctions imposed on Iraq before the war even started. And the destabilization of Iraq caused by the intervention has created a level of instability that involves continued massive violence, plus the rise of terrorist groups whose actions have now spread far beyond Iraq's borders.

For Britain's Labour Party, now in opposition, the Chilcot Report comes at a moment when the right wing of the party, i.e., Tony Blair's faction, and Blair himself, have been pushing to oust leftist party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who had opposed the Iraq War from the start and has said that Blair should be investigated for war crimes. Whether the efforts to oust Corbyn will now fail because of the Chilcot revelations is yet to be seen.

Photo: Commondreams.org

Another tragic anniversary this week: July 20, 1944 in Germany

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:23:00 +0000

In a previous article, I wrote about July 18, 1936, the beginning of the Falangist-military uprising in Spain and the Spanish Civil War. There was another tragic anniversary this week: That of the July 20, 1944 attempt to kill Adolf Hitler and overthrow the Third Reich. This too should be remembered.

Briefly, the facts: On July 20, 1944, an officer of the German Army General Staff, Colonel Count Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg, managed to place a briefcase containing bomb under a table in Adolf Hitler's headquarters in the "Wolf's Lair" at Rastenberg, in East Prussia. Hitler was supposed to participate in a military briefing at that place and time, and the colonel managed to place the bomb in such a way that when it exploded, the Fuehrer would certainly have been killed.

The bomb was placed and von Stauffenberg, who had managed to slip out of the building, was able to confirm the explosion. He hastened back to Berlin to take charge of a group of men who were prepared to neutralize other leaders, take over the government and begin to end the nightmare of the Third Reich. Unfortunately another officer had moved the briefcase, and when the bomb exploded, it killed several officers but left Hitler shaken but not seriously injured.

Meanwhile, people who were in on the conspiracy had moved to arrest top Nazi leaders such as Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, and take over key components of the German state. But when the news got out that Hitler was alive, the plot fell apart. The officer who had been sent to arrest Goebbels, Major Otto Remer, found himself talking on the phone in the Propaganda Minister's office with a very much alive and enraged Adolf Hitler; he and others then turned against the July 20 conspiracy leadership. Some of them committed suicide, and others were arrested. Stauffenberg and a small group of fellow officers were put up against a wall and shot by firing squad; the colonel's last words being "Long live our sacred Germany".

In the reprisals that followed, several thousand persons were killed by the vengeful Nazis, or committed suicide to avoid such a fate. The dead included three field marshals (Rommel, von Kluge and von Witzleben, with the first two committing suicide), a number of top generals and other officers, as well as civilian political leaders. German high society was not spared: The executed included a number of counts and barons as well as other members of the social elite of the old pre-Nazi era (this in spite of the fact that so many aristocrats had supported the Nazis). Sadistic methods were used in some of the executions, which were filmed for Hitler's personal entertainment. Children of the dead were separated from the families and taught to hate their parents as traitors. After the war, it took a long while for Germans to see Stauffenberg and his colleagues as heroes.

The people who carried out or supported the effort to get rid of Hitler were a very mixed bag. Most could be called conservative German nationalists. Some acted from religious convictions, either Catholic or Protestant. Unlike the dynamic and charismatic Colonel von Stauffenberg, many of the top army officers, although they had been grumbling about Hitler for years, only acted when it was clear that Germany would lose the war, with bad consequences for them personally. Meanwhile millions died, and these officers sealed their own fates by their dithering and hesitation.

A big fear was that the real winner would be the Soviet Union, and many of the plotters entertained the illusion that once they took over the government, they could negotiate a peace with the Western Allies but not with Moscow. But things had gone too far for that. Some of the plotters had been ardent Nazis before the scales fell from their eyes, either because they had an attack of conscience, or because they realized that Hitler was destroying their country and endangering their own future survival. A very few of the plotters had connections to the suppressed labor unions. Although German communists played a role in other resistance efforts, they were not a part of the July 20 plot, though they certainly were active in other resistance activities. Some members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) were involved with July 20, and lost their lives too.

Yet we should remember that when these deeply flawed people acted, they did so knowing that they were very likely sealing their own death warrants, and indeed most of them gave their lives. At least some, especially young army officers, appear to have been genuinely horrified by the atrocities that they saw the Reich army and the Nazi SS and Einsatzgruppen committing on the Eastern Front. Several young officers volunteered to try to kill Hitler by methods that they themselves knew they could not survive-by suicide bombing or by shooting him in front of his armed-to-the-teeth bodyguards.

The success of the July 20 plot would have saved countless lives; among other things the conspirators would almost surely have tried to end the Holocaust, which was well underway. The failure of the attempt condemned millions more to die.

So, although there were elements of farce in the July 20 action, July 20 should be remembered as a tragic anniversary also.

One lesson: Flawed people finally acting, albeit on the basis of decidedly mixed motives, sometimes achieve more than perfect people doing nothing.

A second lesson: The July 20 plotters would never have got as far as they did were it not for the fact that a number of them held key positions in the armed forces. Colonel von Stauffenberg, for example, was in charge of units of reserve troops which he planned to use to overthrow the regime once Hitler was dead.

Another lesson: Never again.

Video: Trailer for the film "Valkyrie." The German army plot to assassinate Hitler was the subject of this popular movie.

Photo: Image from the film "Valkyrie."

Attempted Coup: We want neither the coup nor the one-man dictatorship!

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 09:48:00 +0000

On the night on 15 July, Turkey witnessed a take-over of some critical points in two major cities by soldiers. The plotters took over the headquarters of the Turkish Armed Forces General Staff and the Gendarmerie General Command, an air base and Istanbul Atatürk Airport. The Chief Commanders of the armed forces were detained. Fighter Jets were flying low over cities and later, joined by helicopters, bombed certain targets including TBMM (Turkish Parliament Building), the vicinity of the headquarters of the General Staff and Special Forces Command.

Without enough preparation and power, the plotters, perhaps forced to act by the circumstances and possibly abandoned by sections of the armed forces that pledged support, arrived at a dead end within a matter of hours.

Firstly, they could not win over the people and its organized section. The coup was supported by no organized body such as a political party or a trade union. The four political parties in the Parliament issued a joint statement against the attempted coup.

On the other hand, the plotters could not get the main troops within the Armed Forces on their side. They were confronted by the police and the Special Forces, controlled directly by the government and numbered in their hundreds of thousands. Political Islamist militants, with jihadists among them, showed their level of organization in confronting them hand in hand with the police. They responded to the calls to "take to the streets" by the President, whom the plotters failed to capture. Increasing numbers of AKP supporters and people from those sections of the population that insisted on democracy also filled the streets in defiance of the coup.

In a country that has seen almost ten coups, the only successful ones of which were those backed by the US; the plotters could not secure the support of the US, despite the latter's ambiguous initial stance.

And they were unsuccessful.

However, it cannot be disputed that the line of domestic and foreign policy pursued by the incumbent AKP government and President Erdoğan - who is creating a de facto "one-manship" - dragged Turkey to this circumstance of a coup.

In fact, during the 2010 Constitutional Referendum, the primary claim of the AKP and Erdoğan was that they were "settling the score with the Constitution of the coup" of 1980 and that "there will be no more coups in Turkey"! This has not happened; not only did "settling the score with the constitution of the coup" never took place, on the contrary, all measures taken since have been taken in order to destroy the already weak institutions and freedoms of the country.

Soon after his election as the president, Erdoğan claimed "a de facto regime change" and stated that the parliamentarian system is "put on hold" and took steps in this direction.

Executive power was strengthened by the "Internal Security Act", giving exceptional powers to the police and district and provincial governors. In the war waged in Kurdish cities, armed forces are protected by granting of immunity; soldiers cannot be tried without consent from the Prime Minister.

Legislation has been subordinated to executive power. With the aggrandizement of "National Will"; despite the focus only on the "ballot" rather than democratic rights and freedoms; and finally the removal of the immunity of MPs; this has been advanced to a point of getting rid of unwanted parliamentarians. To prove that "National Will" means the "decision of one-man", people's "will" demonstrated in the elections held on 7 June 2015 saying "No" to "one-man dictatorship" have been rejected. Through instigation of the Kurdish war - fueling chauvinist nationalism - the country was dragged into war and chaos and forced into elections on the 1^st of November.

Legislation has been subordinated to executive power: through "special courts"; alleged "coup plotters" with differing identities; through the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, made up mostly of appointed members. A third of the judges and prosecutors have been relocated. Before the attempted coup it was stated that except for the President of the Supreme Court and the Chief of Justice of the Council of State, all coup - despite the fact that no prosecutor or court having any jurisdiction - was followed by the decisions members of the two institutions will be appointed by the executive power. They attempted to dismiss and take into custody two members of the Supreme Court, 140 members of the Supreme Court and 48 members of the Council of State, and 2745 judges.

Freedom of the press has been almost entirely removed. Freedom of speech, and especially freedom of thought, the right to hold meetings and organize demonstrations have been made impossible. Especially Mayday demonstrations and even the right of the main opposition party members to hold meetings have been denied. In circumstances of war, the defense of peace carries a risk to one's existence; sacking and imprisonment of academics that signed a petition calling for peace is an example of this. It was announced that elected local governments will be discharged and replaced by arbitrary appointments.

The claim to "break free of the laws of coup" was a veil for building arbitrary laws of a "one-man, one-party dictatorship"; removing any meaning from "the rule of law".

This course is domestically carried out by renewed alliance with the Ergenekon soldiers; in the name of "fighting terror" instead of the "peace process"; with the banning of street protests; through a conflict and war that is levelling to the ground those Kurdish cities besieged by tanks and cannons. Furthermore, policies of war, killing thousands of people by removing democratic rights and freedoms is forcing and has forced the country to a situation where it cannot be governed under ordinary circumstances. Primarily, the increase in the use of arms and armed forces led to increased influence of soldiers in the governance of the country; the role this played in making the country more prone to coup attempts cannot be denied.

The same course, has been advanced in foreign policy using politics of war in serving New-Ottoman expansionism. Displeasure with this course and the pursuit of alternatives among the dominant forces, caused by the disharmony with US foreign policy and rendered impossible after the Russian intervention in Syria is understandable. Linked to the domestic Kurdish issue, the "red lines" drawn on Syria lost all meaning and forced the AKP to change its policies; a political line of normalizing relations with Israel and Russia is adopted. However, the collapse of foreign policy targets - indexed to politics of war - led to military influence on foreign policy and provoked military pursuits, and to a conflict between the ruling cliques.

Furthermore, steps taken to unite the ruling classes in the name of transition to a one-man, one-party dictatorship led to discontent and bitterness among reactionary forces. Tax penalties and exclusion from government tenders and sharing of government resources, introduced in an attempt to "convince" even traditional monopolistic capital groups, are some of these steps.

Most serious sanctions targeted the Gülen Movement, an ally of the AKP since its foundation but fallen out with after the 17-25 November corruption investigations. This Movement is not only Islamist but also a big monetary fund. With its bank and investment companies, the largest mining company in the country, widespread investment in media and education sectors, and through its alliance with AKP, this group penetrated most of the state apparatus; primarily within the police, judiciary and the Armed Forces.

Following 25 November, this group was declared a "terrorist organization", its bank and mining company were seized, media and education institutions were closed down; companies and members prosecuted and imprisoned. Following the clean-up in the judiciary and the police, as the appointments and promotions in the Armed Forces at the end of August approached, inquiries, arrests and court proceedings targeting members of this group had already started. This was the "last straw"; the organized forces of this group and other discontented groups in the army attempted a coup; aware of the clean-up lists, instead of being discharged and jailed, they were, in a way, forced into this attempt.

This attempted coup has been shown to be a showdown within the ruling reactionaries and thwarted.

It was undeniable that the coup - with its first stated measures of martial law and inhibition - was going to advance the rise of reactionism in both domestic and foreign policy and hence repelling it was important. However, it is clear that the attempted coup has strengthened the hand of the one-man, one-party reactionism of the AKP. President Erdoğan called this attempt a "gift from god" and stated that it gives him a "chance to cleanse the military". This attempt exposed the Islamist ideological make-up of the police and the existence of a militant organization that played a significant role, after the call to take to the streets by Erdoğan, in suppressing the coup. It also strengthened this organized basis of AKP within the population. Now, under the pretext of a rushed "clean-up of the plotters", an extreme "clean-up" among the judges and prosecutors along with the police and the army, has started. It is clear that this has and will serve the aims to create a state mechanism that follows only the orders of "one-man". The AKP government has already started to legitimize this under the pretext of persecution of the exposed "Gulenist terrorism" - the narrowing of whose objectives they foresee - and cracking down on the plotters of the coup; using it as a catalyst to unite the population - starting with the bourgeois opposition - around its own objectives.

Our party, EMEP, clearly opposed the coup. Our party warns everyone that the defeat of the coup alone does not necessarily mean "democracy" and that democracy - and the rights and freedoms it provides - will be won by a difficult struggle. We call on everyone to the struggle to prevent the one-man, one-party dictatorship.

Photo: Turkish soldiers, arrested by civilians, are handed to police officers in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, early Saturday, after the coup. | AP

Tragic anniversaries with lessons for today

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 11:39:00 +0000

This week the world commemorates two tragic anniversaries.

July 18, 1936, marked the beginning of the fascist-military uprising that led to the Spanish Civil War and 38 years of brutal reactionary rule in Spain.

The event has transcendent relevance for our country and our times.

In 1931, the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, went into exile and the Spanish Republic was declared. There followed five wild years of jockeying for power between left and right, until in February 1936, national parliamentary elections were won by the Popular Front, a coalition of 15 left-wing and centrist parties which included socialists, communists, Catalan, Valencian and Galician nationalists, and non-socialist democrats.

The Popular Front government, headed briefly by Prime Minister Manuel Azaña of the moderate Republican Left Party, who was quickly succeeded by Santiago Cáceres Quiroga, another moderate, began to undertake some cautious reforms of landholding, labor law, the education system and the military. But this was too much for the Spanish ruling class and the political right. The landowning aristocracy, the Roman Catholic Church, big business and the military officers' corps all felt threatened by these moderate steps toward a Spain of greater social justice. Right-wing nationalists were horrified by the government's granting of autonomy to the Catalans and Basques.

The most powerful political party of the right, the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Right-Wing Groups (CEDA) and its allies did not have the votes to defeat the Popular Front's measures in the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, so began a campaign of destabilization while also reaching out to the small fascist organization, the Falange Española y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalistas (the Spanish Falange of National Syndicalist Offensive Committees), which acted in an extraparliamentary, hell-raising capacity to promote chaos. Meanwhile, poor peasants and sections of the working class, unsatisfied with the slow speed of the government's reforms, also opted for sometimes violent direct action, often under anarchist leadership.

The CEDA leader, José María Gil-Robles y Quiñones, hid his relationships to the out-and-out fascists while working with feverish energy to pull all the threads of the right together and to undermine the elected Popular Front government in every way. The fuse was laid. What was needed was a spark.

That came on July 13, 1936, when José Calvo Sotelo, the leader of the strongest right-wing monarchist movement in the Spanish parliament, the Renovación Española, which worked for the return of King Alfonso, was killed by a pro-government police officer who was angry because the fascists had killed a colleague of his.

All the forces of the right now united to support a military uprising, led at the outset by the four generals José Sanjurjo, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, Francisco Franco and Emilio Mola. Units of the Spanish colonial army in North Africa were induced to mutiny, killed all military and civilian officials who tried to stop them, and quickly managed to cross over into Spain and join up with rebellious officers there, as well as militias organized by the Falangists and other right-wing groups. Sanjurjo and Mola died in airplane accidents, and Francisco Franco became the military leader of the revolt - a role which Sanjurjo had originally envisioned for himself.

There ensued an extremely bloody war which lasted until April of 1939. As the fascists moved through towns and villages they rounded up anyone suspected of being a communist, socialist, anarchist, freemason, Jew, labor union activist or official of the Popular Front government, and a lot of other people besides, and murdered them, sometimes in the most sadistic fashion they could think of. Paul Preston documents all this in horrifying detail in his 2012 book "The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in 20^th Century Spain." The mass executions continued after the end of the war. Several hundred thousand were eventually killed. In this endeavor Franco and the Falangist-fascists received massive aid from Hitler and Mussolini. The Spanish Republic received aid only from the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent from Mexico. Many leaders in the so-called "democracies" gave de facto support to the Franco regime.

Franco stayed in power until his death in November 1976. During his reign labor unions, intellectuals, the press and the supporters of the rights of minorities, particularly Catalans and Basques, were suppressed. This did not stop the leaders of the NATO powers from allying with Fascist Spain, for Franco was, after all, an "anti-communist."

When Franco died, there was a partial democratization process, but the old fascist spirit survived, and survives, in sectors of Spanish society. The People's Party (Partido Popular) of the current right-wing prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, has links to the Franco days, and has actively worked to stop any kind of accounting for the murders the dictatorship committed, even by opposing the disinterment of mass graves of the victims of fascism. Founders of the People's Party's predecessor, the People's Alliance (Alianza Popular), included ministers and other leading figures from the later period of Franco's rule. Ironically, the Catholic Church eventually apologized for its role during the Civil War and the dictatorship. But the political right, doing the work of transnational corporations and the Spanish ruling class, still seeks to impose draconian austerity on the working class.

Spain has not yet recovered from the Spanish Civil War and the 38 years of the Franco dictatorship. No punishment has ever been meted out to surviving figures of the Franco regime, and it has been a struggle even to get the bodies of Franco's victims disinterred from the mass graves all over the country in which they lie.

We in the United States should learn from the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Once the extreme right builds itself up to a sufficient level of strength to gain power and impose a repressive and anti-democratic regime, it may take many decades to oust it from power, and nobody knows how long to reverse the damage it has done to the social fabric. Hitler was only defeated when the Soviet army captured Berlin in 1945, and he committed suicide. Mussolini was ousted only when it became clear that Italy would suffer a disastrous rout in World War II.

The lesson is: "Never again."

Photo: Troops at Guadalajara, 1937, Spanish Civil War. | Wikipedia (CC)

This week in history: Peoples’ Olympiad protests Berlin Olympics of 1936

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:11:00 +0000

The Peoples' Olympiad (Olimpíada Popular in Spanish) was a planned international multi-sport event that was intended to take place in Barcelona, the capital of the autonomous region of Catalonia within the Spanish Republic. It was conceived as a protest against the 1936 Summer Olympics being held in Berlin during Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime. The Estadi Olímpic de Montjuïc in Barcelona was intended to be the main stadium for the games.

In 1931, the International Olympic Committee had selected Berlin, then the capital of Germany in the time of the Weimar Republic, to host the 1936 Summer Olympics. Berlin had defeated Barcelona, which was also vying to host the games, by 43 votes to 16. During that same year, Spain had adopted a republican constitution. King Alfonso XIII went into exile, and Catalonia was declared an autonomous region.

Following the 1936 general election in Spain, the newly elected left-wing Popular Front government decided that Spain would boycott the Berlin Olympics in now-fascist Germany and host its own games. Invitations were extended to many different countries, and it was planned to use the hotels built for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition as an Olympic-style village. The games were scheduled from July 19 to 26 and would have ended six days prior to the start of the Berlin games. In addition to the usual sporting events, the Barcelona games would also have featured chess, folkdancing, music and theatre.

A total of 6,000 athletes from 22 nations registered for the games. The largest contingents of athletes came from the U.S., the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and French colonial Algeria. There were also teams from Germany and Italy made up of political exiles from those countries. Teams also registered representing Jewish exiles from fascism, the French département of Alsace, and the Spanish regions of Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country.

Many of the athletes were sent by trade unions, workers' clubs and associations, socialist and communist parties and left-wing groups rather than by state-sponsored committees.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out just as the games were to begin, the alternate games had to be canceled. Some athletes never made it to Barcelona as the borders had been closed, while many who already were in the city made a hasty exit. However, at least 200 of the athletes, such as the anarchist Clara Thalmann, remained in Spain and joined workers' militias that were organized to defend the Second Spanish Republic against Generalísimo Francisco Franco's nationalists.

Barcelona would later host the 1992 Summer Olympics, after the Spanish transition to democracy that followed the end of the Franco dictatorship.

Adapted from Wikipedia and other sources.

Solidarity Center documents wage theft in Zimbabwe

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 12:47:00 +0000

An astounding 80,000 Zimbabwe workers in formal employment-out of some 350,000 workers-did not receive wages and benefits on time in 2014, according to a new Solidarity Center report, "Working Without Pay: Wage Theft in Zimbabwe," released today in Harare.

As a result of this widespread wage theft, many workers say they are forced to eat only one or two meals a day; move repeatedly to access affordable housing; and rent two rooms or fewer for their entire family to make ends meet.

Through first-person interviews and other research by affiliates of the country's main trade union confederation, the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), the report provides hard data behind last week's successful one-day shut-down of businesses, government and services by workers across Zimbabwe outraged over wage theft and a new law targeting market vendors who make up the vast proportion of the workforce.

Paid only enough to get to work

One woman interviewed in the report, whose experience is not uncommon, says she has received $26 a month in wages for the past eight months, although her monthly salary is $342. Yet basic living costs, which on average include $60 for renting a single room, $30 for electricity, $15 for water and $22 for transportation to work, mean she only has sufficient funds to get to and from her job.

"This failure to pay what workers are legally entitled to is wage theft in that it involves employers taking money that belongs to their employees and keeping it for themselves," the report states. "This is a clear violation of international labor standards, as well as national legislation on the employment of workers."

The report traces the ongoing wage theft to 2012, as employers in the public- and private-sector increasingly began delaying wage payments.

Up to 95 percent of Zimbabweans work in informal economy

Simultaneously, the number of jobs in the informal economy has skyrocketed, the report points out. Some 6.3 million people made up Zimbabwe's workforce in 2014, of which 5.9 million workers (94.5 percent) were informally employed, compared with 84.2 percent in 2011, according to "Working without Pay." An additional 800,000 women and men were in the workforce, but unemployed.

Last month, the government introduced a statutory law that bans imports of basic commodities-a law that directly affects hundreds of thousands of informal economy workers who survive on cross-border trading. Up to 95 percent of jobs in Zimbabwe are in the informal economy, and workers say the new law takes away their livelihoods.

Based on surveys at 442 companies, and the result of extensive research by the Labor and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe, the report also documents extravagant salaries and benefits to middle and top management even as workers go unpaid and presents recommendations for action to address the problem.

Companies involved in wage theft must be held accountable

Some of the recommendations include:

The Ministry of Labor, together with representatives of employers and unions, should review the status of companies that are not paying their workers and assist in developing plans to rectify the injustice.
Unions representing workers in companies not paying salaries-in full and on time-should demand that the government bring criminal proceedings under the relevant provisions of the Labor Act against employers.
Trade unions should advocate for payment of interest on late payment.
The government should set an example by reviewing the wage structure in government agencies and quasi-government agencies to limit benefits to top managers, institute a more just pay scale and prioritize payments to workers through collective bargaining or social dialogue.

This article was reposted from Solidarity Center.

Venezuela in crisis, U.S. intervenes

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 12:38:00 +0000

Lisa Sullivan, a U.S. citizen resident in Venezuela for many decades, was worrying about a neighbor "up and waiting in line since 2 am, searching, unsuccessfully, to buy food for her large family." She's concerned too about Venezuela's worsening economic and political crisis.

Venezuela's majority population has experienced major social gains through the Bolivarian Revolution, which its leader Hugo Chávez, president from 1999 until 2013, characterized as socialist. Oil exports fueled them, and now low oil prices are disrupting Venezuela's economy and shaking the foundations of its social democracy.

U.S. intervention, now as before, aggravates internal political conflict. The U.S. Senate in April 2016 passed a bill renewing economic sanctions against Venezuelan leaders originally imposed in 2014. The House of Representatives did likewise on July 6, and President Obama is expected to sign the bill. He had issued an executive order in March 2015 declaring Venezuela to be a threat to U.S. national security.

The State Department on July 7 warned U.S. citizens about travel to Venezuela, citing "violent crime" and noting that "political rallies and demonstrations can occur with little notice." Venezuela's government denounced the "illegitimate sanctions" as "imperial pretensions."

The U.S. government backed an unsuccessful coup against the Chávez government in 2002 and since has distributed tens of millions of dollars to opposition groups. The U.S. government has never extended recognition to Nicolás Maduro as Venezuela's president.

A divided rightwing opposition did score a decisive electoral victory in December 2015 in gaining a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. Maduro's vulnerability has been evident since his election by a narrow margin in 2013. He very likely will be facing a recall vote in the coming months.

Venezuela's economy is in the hands of a business class solidly opposed to the Bolivarian government. Over the past three years, mounting and now astronomical inflation, shortages of essential items, and hoarding of merchandise by importers and wholesalers have together devastated the economy.

The dependency of businesses and merchants on imported goods and materials is the economy's Achilles' heel. After 15 years of the Bolivarian revolution, Venezuela still has to import 70 percent of its food.

The government facilitates imports by selling dollars to importers at low exchange rates. Many of them in turn have responded by selling imported products at inflated prices through the black market, and profiteering. Meanwhile goods people need for survival don't arrive, especially at government markets selling subsidized food and household supplies.

Lisa Sullivan has "witnessed a whole generation of my neighbors and friends gain access to dignified housing, free education, stable jobs with honorable wages, and free health care." She supposes that the "majority of Venezuelans" back neither the opposition nor the Maduro government, but "this doesn't mean that [they] are not fans of Chavismo," she says.

They are angry at governmental corruption, divisions within President Maduro's socialist party, and general disregard of problems at the grassroots. Analysts attribute the government's defeat in the 2015 parliamentary elections to Bolivarian voters withholding their votes, not to their switching to the opposition.

Journalist Tamara Pearson suggests that despite "food shortages, inflation, and queues...millions of people" have "defied right-wing and general expectations, and even perhaps the expectations of the Maduro government, and have become stronger and better organized."

Under Chávez Venezuela's government cooperated closely with, and was supported by, Venezuela's armed forces. Now the military's allegiance is not as certain.

Analyst Milton D'León recalls that Chávez instituted "a dizzying increase in arms spending, the creation of military schools and universities, greater presence in political decisions, higher salaries for officials, and privileges of all kinds." Maduro's 30-member cabinet includes 10 active or retired military leaders. His government has created a "socialist military economic zone" that hosts businesses whose activities contribute to the military's economic development.

D'León warns of danger for "working people [from] the growing role of the military...whether it is supporting Maduro, or spilling over to support a 'transition' by striking a deal with the right wing [and] imperialism."

Marxist analyst Edgar Meléndez sees a constricted future for the Bolivarian government mainly because it never continued the development of its socialist project. He points out that the state sector accounts for 96.6 U.S. dollars out of every $100 gained through exports. Yet these resources eventually "drain" to the private sector. Thus "private accumulation is prioritized over resources the state produces. This is opposite to the interests of working people."

He condemns "mono-production of petroleum accounting for 94 percent of Venezuela's 2014 exports." That and "a parasitic bourgeoisie" are "two of the most noxious characteristics of the Venezuelan economic model.... This situation, within the framework of capitalism itself, is a brake on the development of productive forces in our country."

Lisa Sullivan is a witness to one striking failure of Venezuela's version of socialism. Her neighbors are now growing food, she reports. That would be in response to the nation's over-reliance on imported foods, never remedied by Bolivarian leaders. In terms of socialist development, food sovereignty typifies wealth produced for all through work. Vision or capacity apparently was lacking to move beyond the short-term, capitalist way of doing things. Venezuela has remained stuck in generating wealth almost exclusively through the extraction of oil.

Photo: CC

Bolivarian Venezuela besieged

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 14:55:00 +0000

For over a year, the left-wing Venezuelan government of President Nicolas Maduro has been battling for its life. But it and its "Bolivarian" support base are not giving up.

The sudden and dramatic worldwide drop in oil prices has hit Venezuela hard. Maduro, and his predecessor, the late President Hugo Chavez, had used the country's ample revenues from petroleum sales to greatly improve the living standards of the mass of Venezuela's 30 million people. But now, oil is selling at only $3 a barrel more than it costs to produce it, the price having dropped from $100 a barrel in to $30 a barrel today. It is small comfort for Venezuela that the same sort of thing is happening in all the poor countries that had been surviving until the commodities glut on the sale of oil and similar items.

The drop in oil prices has led to shortages of items which Venezuela does not produce or manufacture itself, because it has become much harder to import them. For example, Venezuela imports 24 percent of its food, and it is no easy matter to make up for the lost imports by increasing the country's own agricultural production. Venezuela is a highly urbanized country.

Also, this situation, combined with a dysfunctional exchange rate regime that actually encourages smuggling Venezuelan products out of the country, has led to rampaging inflation. The government sees speculators and smugglers, along with businesses aligned with the opposition, as sabotaging the economy, and this is also very possible, since wealthy private businessmen control most of retail trade.

Many of the problems have been exaggerated in the corporate owned press in the United States and internationally. For example, the inflation rate is NOT "700 percent" but more like 181 percent, and eggs are NOT selling for "$150 a dozen" in Caracas. Nor is the health care situation nearly as bad as we read about in our newspapers in the United States. There are shortages of such medicines and supplies as have to be imported, but there is not some sort of massive die off of babies in Venezuelan hospitals. These things are just propaganda lies, but the problems are real enough, and the government's situation is very, very tough.

This combination of factors led to a major defeat for the ruling Great Patriotic Pole, the united front that includes Maduro's Venezuelan United Socialist Party, in the legislative elections of December 6, 2015. The right-wing opposition managed to get a supermajority of seats in the National Assembly, and since then have not paused in their attempts to push Maduro from power and dismantle the progress the country has made since the first election of Hugo Chavez in 1998. The Venezuelan right also is determined to work with other right-wing governments, and with the United States, to dismantle the Bolivarian "pink tide" of left-wing governments that has swept Latin America for the past 17 years.

Currently, the effort of the right within Venezuela is focused on promoting a recall referendum to remove President Maduro from office. I will write more on the details of that effort in another article.

At the international level, the Venezuelan right has been trying to marginalize Venezuela within the Latin America-Caribbean context. The lead in doing this has been taken by the right-wing government of Paraguayan President Horacio Cartes. More recently, he has been joined by Luis Almagro, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) and by the new foreign minister of Brazil, José Serra. Serra has been trying to marginalize Venezuela in MERCOSUR, the South American Common Market, where Venezuela was supposed to take up the revolving chair function this month.

At the same time, at the urging of UNASUR, Maduro has offered to sit down and negotiate with the opposition, with former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, former Dominican President Lionel Fernandez, and former Panamanian President Martin Torrijos as mediators. Maduro is willing to do this with no preconditions. The three leaders who have volunteered as mediators are none of them close to either the Bolivarian movement or the right-wing.

So in the OAS, Secretary General Amagro dramatically announced that he was going to invoke articles 20 and 21 of that nation's charter to call for a suspension of Venezuela's voting rights. This "democracy clause" in the OAS charter is intended to be invoked when there is a coup d'état, military or other, or when people in power illegally suppress opposition activity.

Almagro's basis for promoting this use of the democracy clause is based on rather specious arguments. One complaint he has advanced is that the jailing of a number of people after rioting in 2014, instigated by the right-wing opposition itself, led to 143 deaths, mostly of supporters of the government, security personnel or bystanders, constitutes a breach of the democratic order. The people jailed include one high profile opposition politician, Leopoldo Lopez, and one man captured in Colombia and extradited to Venezuela on terrorism charges, Lorent Saleh. Opposition parties and press have not been suppressed, and the jailed individuals were convicted by normal process of law for activities that would get you sent to the slammer in almost any country. Leopoldo Lopez had openly instigated violence that turned deadly, and Saleh was credibly accused of terrorism not just by the Venezuelan government but also by the conservative government of Colombia.

Another beef of Mr. Almagro was that the Venezuelan Supreme Court had ruled that a number of measured passed by the National Assembly since the right-wing took it over were unconstitutional, among them an amnesty which would have freed Leopoldo Lopez and Lorent Saleh. Another law the Court rejected as unconstitutional would have retroactively reduced the length of Mr. Maduro's term. But how the Supreme Court rules on legislation is not the basis for claiming that a breach of the democratic constitutional order has taken place, in Venezuela, the United States or anywhere.

Another complaint was that Venezuelan authorities are taking too long to process signatures on petitions for the recall of Maduro. But the clock has not run out on the process, and besides, the Venezuelan government complains that the opposition handed in a lot of signatures of people who are deceased or do not exist, so doing a careful check is necessary and appropriate.

Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez firmly rejected Almagro's accusations and his attempts to use the OAS as a means of attacking her country and interfering in its government. She rounded on the Paraguayan foreign minister, Oscar Cabello Sarrubi, whose government has been a major instigator of attacks on Venezuela, for his hypocrisy: "How can a government that came to power through a coup speak about democracy? How can authorities tied to Alfredo Stroessner's dictatorship speak about democracy? With what moral compass are you speaking about Venezuela? Enough with the double standards!"

Alfredo Stroessner was the bloodthirsty military dictator of Paraguay from 1954 to 1989. The current Paraguayan government includes many figures connected to the old Stroessner dictatorship; it came to power in a "soft coup" against left-wing President Fernando Lugo in 2012. After a brief interim government, President Horacio Cartes was elected in 2013; since then he has been suppressing disaffected peasants whose land his allies have been transferring to big landowners connected to Stroessner's and Cartes' Colorado political party. There are widespread accusations of human rights violations and corruption.

The matter in the OAS has not yet been decided, although Almagro was allowed to present his accusations to a special session. The opposition in Venezuela has now grown balky on the subject of participating in a dialogue with the government, adding new demands before it will sit down at the table with Maduro. One of the demands is that more Latin American "ex presidents" be brought into the group of mediators. It may be that the opposition won't negotiate seriously as long as it has a chance of getting its way at the OAS But so far, other OAS member states seem cool to the idea of going further with the Venezuela matter.

Meanwhile, the new right-wing government in Brazil, itself of shaky legality and no legitimacy after its "soft coup" against the legally elected president, Dilma Rousseff, is going after Venezuela in MERCOSUR. Brazilian "interim" foreign minister José Serra is trying to block Venezuela's assumption as revolving chair of MERCOSUR. Once more Delcy Rodriguez blasted Serra for his government's hypocritical antics: "The Bolivarian government of Venezuela rejects the insolent and immoral declarations of the de facto foreign minister of Brazil", she tweeted, making a biting reference to the widely denounced illegitimacy of the current Brazilian regime.

This is heroic and hemispheric hypocrisy. Just about every right-wing government in the Americas can be accused of far worse violations than Venezuela. Massacres of teachers in Mexico, murders of environmentalists in Honduras-the list goes on, but people like Almagro and Serra say nothing. This does not exclude the United States, as Delcy Rodriguez pointed out, with our vote suppression, the Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations to buy elections, and our police suppression of minority communities.

However, there are two pieces of positive news. In spite of the hostile attitude that the United States has been displaying toward Venezuela, Rodriguez and Secretary of State John Kerry did have a meeting during the OAS special session, and Kerry stated afterward that the United States supports the dialogue process that Maduro is promoting.

Also, the rains came, filling Venezuela's reservoirs and ending a period of strict rationing of electrical power that had Venezuelan government workers doing two-day work weeks.

Photo: Venezuelan Foreign Minister Delcy Rodriguez. PSUV

European Union goes after Portugal, Spain on austerity

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 14:34:00 +0000

The European Commission, which is the governing body of the European Union, appears to be ready to take punitive action against both Portugal and Spain for not meeting imposed limits on budgetary red ink. Both countries could face substantial fines. Portugal, at least, is fighting back hard.

The European Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance imposed on member states by the European Union leadership in 2012, requires that on pain of financial penalties, no country is supposed to run a budget deficit of more than 3 percent of Gross Domestic Product in any given year. This is easy for wealthier countries like Germany and the Netherlands, who have been promoting strict adherence to this guideline.

It is extremely hard on the poorer countries which are rather insultingly called the PIIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. They are forced to impose measures of austerity that create great suffering for their people as well as shrinking rather than growing their countries' economies.

The penalties, of course, hurt the poor countries much more than the rich ones. Yet people like German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäube and Chancellor Angela Merkel have been very tough on anyone who tries to make this system more flexible.

The government of Greece found this out the hard way. The left wing SYRIZA Party government elected has found itself forced by the Troika, which is the combination of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to impose harsh austerity and privatization measures, the denouncing of which had brought it to power in the first place.

Massive demonstrations in Greece are now directed against the government because of the suffering that these measures have caused.

In October, Portuguese voters gave a big electoral victory to the Socialist Party, sweeping the previous right wing government of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho out of power. Through deft maneuvering, the alliance of the Communist and Green Parties, plus the Left Bloc Party, managed to create an arrangement whereby the Socialist Party was able to form a new government, supported by the left "from the outside" (meaning they did not ask for cabinet positions), with former Lisbon Mayor Antonio Costa as prime minister.

Costa promised to roll back austerity and privatization measures, implemented by Passos Coelho, as a condition for the Communist-Green-Left Bloc support. So far, Costa has been as good as his word, and is doing all right in public opinion surveys.

However, rumblings from Brussels, where the European Union is headquartered, were anticipated, and began at the beginning of the year. The European ruling class is particularly annoyed that Costa's government has raised the minimum wage and restored a 35 hour work week.

The rumbling is getting stronger. On July 7, Valdis Dombrovskis, the Vice President of the European Commission, while recognizing that Portugal, and also Spain, have made some progress in cutting their deficits, have "veered off track in the correction of their excessive deficits, and have not met their budgetary targets." Spain had a budget deficit of 5.1 percent of gross domestic product last fiscal year, more than the interim goal agreed to of 4.2 percent. Portugal's deficit was 4.4 percent. This is deemed unsatisfactory by Mr. Dombrovskis and other leaders of the European Commission.

Ironically, the two countries' governments could hardly be more different. The Spanish government is a mess, as two successive elections this year failed to give any political party a majority nor even create a credible route to a coalition government.

The right wing People's Party Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, is staying on as caretaker prime minister in the meanwhile. Rajoy is a right wing figure, mired in corruption scandals and associated with harsh austerity policies, while Prime Minister Costa of Portugal is rolling back the same sort of policies.

The decision has not been made whether to impose financial sanctions, which could be up to .2 percent of gross domestic product on Spain and Portugal, and could also involve blocking access to further credits. This situation comes as European markets are in turmoil due to the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom; the European Union is now shakier than it has been in many years and its leaders may not want to risk more "exits". So in the end there may be no penalty imposed. At any rate in Portugal, the government and its allies are not taking the situation quietly.

Prime Minister Costa staunchly defended his government's fiscal management in a letter to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Council of Europe President Robert Fico, pointing out the efforts his government has made to control the deficit but also the unfairness to the Portuguese people of imposing more sanctions after they have gone through so much.

The Portuguese left went beyond the prime minister's firm but politely phrased letter. João Oliveira, a Communist Party member of parliament, said of the threatened sanctions: "This is a continuation of the process of extortion, of pressure against our country, with three objectives: cause the reversion of the positive measures which have been taken in recent months; try to restore the program of the previous government [of Passos Coelho] of the aggravation of exploitation and impoverishment; and also the mutilation of [our] national sovereignty and the ability of our sovereign institutions to make decisions about our country."

Catarina Martins, leader of the Left Bloc (Bloco Esquerda) in the Portuguese parliament, was equally fierce. The threatened sanctions, she said "are an attack on Portugal. They "reveal the humiliation which they want to inflict on our country."

At the initiative of the Portuguese Communist Party, the GUE/NGL (The United European Left/Nordic Green Left), which is the bloc of left and Green parties in the European Parliament, slammed the threatened sanctions against Portugal and Spain, in a statement which reads in part: "The GUE/NGL vehemently denounces and firmly rejects the economic and political interference being carried out by the institutions of the European Union, in particular the European Commission, against Portugal and Spain and their peoples. The so called "sanctions" are, independently of the form which they acquire (fines, suspension of European Union funds or whatever other "symbolic" form) as illegitimate and unacceptable.

"The intention of punishing the people of Spain and Portugal, who are victims of an economic crisis which results from the policies of the European Union itself, implemented by previous governments, constitute an aberration, a terrible injustice and an unacceptable act of aggression."

Photo: Anti-austerity demonstration in Porto, Portugal. | Wikipedia (CC)

Australia elections: Right-wing Coalition holds onto power

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 11:59:00 +0000

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced on Sunday July 10 that the right-wing coalition he heads has won enough seats in the country's parliament to continue in power. Australian Labor Party leader Bill Shorten conceded defeat. The election took place on Saturday July 2, but results were so close that it took eight days for a final count to determine the winner. When Turnbull made his announcement, his Liberal-National Coalition of four parties had nailed 74 of the 76 seats needed for a majority in the House of Representatives (lower house). He expressed confidence that he could pick up two more from electoral districts still undecided.

Labor, for its part, had only 67 confirmed seats. So the Coalition will be able to govern either with an absolute, though minimal, majority, or as a minority government relying on some independents and minor party legislators to pass its bills.

Despite the ultimate victory of the conservative Coalition, its vote totals and number of parliamentary seats won represents a substantial drop from the last election, which was held in 2013. The Coalition lost 16 seats, and 3.36 percent of the popular vote. Most of this loss went to Labor: Eleven seats and exactly 3.36 percent of the popular vote.

The Australian Greens party on the left, the centrist Nick Xenophon Team (NXT), and the right-wing populist-nationalist Katter's Australian Party won one seat each, and two independents were elected.

The results of the election to the upper house, the Senate, were very similar. The Coalition parties won 26 of the 76 seats, while Labor won 23, the Greens three, NXT two, and the anti-immigrant One Nation Party got one seat. A number of seats are expected to go to independents or regional parties, and a few were still undecided at writing. Turnbull admitted that he will have a harder time getting his bills through the Senate than through the lower house.

This election was contested on the issue of the neoliberal austerity, anti-labor, and free trade policies implemented by Turnbull and his predecessor as premier, hardliner Tony Abbot, also of the Liberal Party. However, some Australian unionists were far from satisfied with Shorten and the Labor Party's positions on these issues. In particular, a projected free trade agreement with China was seen by some union members, especially in the construction and electrical industries, as being against the interests of Australian workers.

Also, issues of overtime pay (called "penalty rates" in Australia), regulation of the construction industry, and protection of government-provided health care benefits were raised by unions against the Coalition government, but Labor was not seen as being strong enough in defense of workers' interests on some of these matters either. Allen Hicks, national secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying, "When we work overtime, weekends, unsocial hours, and public holidays, we should be justly compensated with penalty rates."

The issue is whether to legislate fixed rules for these penalty rates, as they are currently set by an independent commission.

On health care, the main issue was cuts the Coalition government made in 2014 to Medicare, Australia's government-run universal health care system. Unlike Medicare in the United States, Australian Medicare covers everybody with complete care, irrespective of age, income or health. The 2014 cuts resulted in a reduction of payments to doctors and an increase in the price of prescription drugs. Turnbull admitted that this may have cost the Coalition votes, and promised to review the policy.

The Communist Party of Australia pointed out that the Coalition only secured 42 percent of the popular vote and Labor only 35 percent. This means that an unprecedented 23 percent of voters rejected both of the two major parties. The Communist Party views the Medicare issue as a key one for the Coalition's losses, but does not think that Labor's Shorten took a firm enough position against possible privatization of some health care functions.

The Communists praised the program of the Australian Greens party, which got nearly 10 percent of the popular vote, for its "comprehensive program of progressive reforms including the humane treatment of asylum seekers, strong action on climate change, protection of the environment, support for workers' rights, marriage equality, free public education, affordable housing, and expansion of Medicare to include dental services."

Photo: Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull addresses party supporters during a rally in Sydney, Sunday, July 3, 2016, following a general election. | Rick Rycroft/AP

After Berta Cáceres, another Honduran Indigenous environmental activist murdered

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 10:51:00 +0000

The bloody campaign against opponents of Honduras' right-wing president, Juan Orlando Hernández, continues, as worldwide resistance to the slaughter of indigenous and environmental activists reaches the halls of the U.S. Congress.

On Wednesday afternoon, July 7, the body of Lenca indigenous environmental activist Lesbia Yaneth Urquía was found near the municipal dump of the town of Marcala, about 190 kilometers west of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa. She had either been shot or hacked to death, according to different reports.

Ms. Urquía was a member of COPINH, the Civic Council of People's and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras-the same organization formerly headed by Berta Cáceres, also an indigenous Lenca, who was shot to death on March 3. Urquía, like Cáceres, had been actively involved in organizing protests against mining companies that have been building dams in Honduras to provide water for their environmentally-destructive activities.

Tomás Gómez, the coordinator of COPINH, dismissed the idea that this was a simple crime without political ramifications. Rather, he says, it was an attempt to silence opposition to the activities of extractive industries and their political allies. Since the coup d'état which ousted leftist President Manuel Zelaya in June 2009, more than 100 environmental activists have been murdered in Honduras, many in the same La Paz district where Ms. Urquía lost her life.

This new horror comes at a moment of increased controversy over the Cáceres murder. On June 21, the British Guardian newspaper posted a story based on an interview with a Honduran army officer, who was not named and is now in hiding. The officer, a non-commissioned man who was part of a militarized police unit, the Inter-Institutional Security Force, or FUSINA, reported that in 2015, he had seen lists of opposition activists distributed to the troops and marked as people to be assassinated. Berta Cáceres was one of the people whose name appeared on a list.

This would have been scandalous enough, but the military units which received these lists had been receiving training from the United States Marines and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Presumably, this training was paid for by the money that the United States has been sending to Honduras - $200 million supposedly assigned to "improve security" and thus prevent the arrival of children and families trying to flee violence at U.S. borders. The tendency in Honduras to subordinate policing to the military has been seen by Hondurans and others as a very alarming development, but the money has kept flowing nevertheless.

On the day after the Guardian article appeared, the Honduran government hotly denied the accusations about the hit list, and threatened to sue the newspaper for slandering the country. However, Annie Bird, an expert in the repression of environmental activists in Honduras, quickly demolished Defense Minister Samuel Reyes' claims, presenting detailed evidence of the existence of the units among which the death lists were said to have been circulated and much more.

Last month, the Honduran government reported the arrest of five men for the murder of Berta Cáceres, evidently giving up their original attempt to claim the attack was carried out by rival members of COPINH. The men include one active service military officer, Major Mariano Díaz, who had been trained by the U.S.-supported TESON training program, and Sergio Rodriguez, the former head of community relations for DESA, the main company involved in building the Agua Zarca dam. This is the project Cáceres had been protesting against at the time of her death. The overall impunity rate for such murders in Honduras, however, remains high.

International calls for an end to U.S. support for the Honduran military and security forces continue to mount, including a new statement from the AFL-CIO. The U.S. State Department has at long last announced that it will look into the Guardian's accusations about hit lists, though details of what such an investigation will encompass are yet to be revealed.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., the organization 300 with Dignity (300 con Dignidad) urged the U.S. Congress to pass the "Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act, HR 5474. This law, sponsored by Rep. Henry "Hank" Johnson (D-Georgia), now has 20 co-sponsors in the House and calls for a complete suspension of military and security aid to Honduras.

Members of the public are urged to contact their congressional representatives and insist that they support HR 5474.

Photo: Honduras' largest tribe, the Lenca, protest a proposed hydroelectric dam in October 2006. Lesbia Yaneth Urquia, who also fought the dam, was assassinated. | AP

Europe on the edge after Brexit vote and Spanish elections

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 13:35:00 +0000

On the surface, the June 23 Brexit and the June 26 Spanish elections don't look comparable. After a nasty campaign filled with racism and Islamophobia, the British-or rather, the English and the Welsh-took a leap into darkness and voted to leave the European Union (EU). Spanish voters, on the other hand, rejected change and backed a right-wing party that embodies the policies of the Brussels-based trade organization.

But deep down the fault lines in both countries converge.

For the first time since Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan rolled out a variety of free market capitalism and globalization that captured much of the world in the 1980s, that model is under siege. The economic strategy of regressive taxes, widespread privatization, and deregulation has generated enormous wealth for the few, but growing impoverishment for the many. The top 1 percent now owns more than 50 percent of the world's wealth.

The British election may have focused on immigration and the fear of "the other"-Turks, Syrians, Greeks, Poles, etc.-but this xenophobia stems from the anger and despair of people who have been marginalized or left behind by the globalization of the labor force that has systematically hollowed out small communities and destroyed decent paying jobs and benefits.

"Great Britain's citizens haven't been losing control of their fate to the EU," wrote Richard Eskow of the Campaign for America's Future, "They've have been losing it because their own country's leaders-as well as those of most Western democracies-are increasingly in thrall to corporate and financial interests."

While most of the mainstream media reported the Spanish election as a "victory" for acting Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy's Popular Party (PP) and a defeat for the left, it was more a reshuffle than a major turn to the right, and, if Rajoy manages to cobble together a government, it is likely to be fragile and short-lived.

It was a dark night for pollsters in both countries. British polls predicted a narrow defeat for the Brexit campaign, and Spanish polls projected a major breakthrough for Spain's left, in particular Unidos Podemos (UP), a new alliance between Podemos and the Communist/Green coalition, Izquierda Unida.

Instead, Brexit passed easily and the UP lost 1 million votes from the last election, ending up with the same number of seats they had in the old parliament. In contrast, the Popular Party added 14 seats, although still falling well short of a majority.

Spain's voters deterred from change

A major reason for the Spanish outcome was Brexit, which roiled markets all over the world, but had a particularly dramatic effect on Spain. The Ibex share index plunged more than 12 percent and blue-chip stocks took a pounding, losing about $70 billion dollars. It was, according to Spain's largest business newspaper, "The worst session ever." Rajoy-as well as the center-left Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE)-flooded the media with scare talk about stability, and it partly worked. The Popular Party poached eight of its 14 new seats from the center-right Ciudadanos Party and probably convinced some UP voters to shift to the mainstream SP.

But Rajoy's claim that "We won the election. We demand the right to govern," is a reach. The PP has 137 seats, but it needs 176 seats to reach a majority in the 350-seat parliament. The Prime Minister says he plans to join with Ciudadanos, but because the latter lost seats in the election, such an alliance would put the PP seven votes short. An offer for a "grand alliance" with the Socialists doesn't seem to be going anywhere. "We are not going to support Rajoy's investiture or abstain," said PSOE spokesman Antonio Hernando. An abstention would allow the PP to form a government.

Which doesn't mean Rajoy can't form a government. There are some independent deputies from the Basque country and the Canary Islands who might put Rajoy over the top, but it would be the first coalition government in Spain-and a fragile one at that.

Part of that fragility is a scandal over an email between Rajoy and Jean-Claude Juncker, head of the European Commission, that was leaked to the media. The Commission is part of the "troika," along with the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, that largely decides economic policy in the EU.

During the election, Rajoy promised to cut taxes and moderate the troika-imposed austerity measures that have driven Spain's national unemployment rate to 22 percent, and a catastrophic 45 percent among young people. But in a confidential email to Juncker, the Prime Minister pledged that, "In the second half of 2016, once there is a new government, we will be ready to take further measures to meet deficit goals."

In short, Rajoy lied to the voters. If the PP had won an absolute majority that might not be a problem, but a coalition government is another matter. Would Ciudadanos and the independents be willing to associate themselves with such deceit and take the risk that the electorate would not punish them, given that such a government is not likely to last four years?

Unidos Podemos supporters were deeply disappointed in the outcome, although the UP took the bulk of the youth vote and triumphed in Catalonia, Spain's wealthiest province, and the Basque country. What impact UP's poor showing will have on divisions within the alliance is not clear, but predictions of the organization's demise are premature. "We represent the future," party leader Pablo Iglesia said after the vote.

There is a possible path to power for the left, although it leads through the Socialists. The PSOE dropped from 90 seats to 85 for its worst showing in history, but if it joins with the UP it would control 156 seats. If such a coalition includes the Catalans, that would bring it to 173 seats, and the alliance could probably pick up some independents to make a majority. This is exactly what the left, agreeing to shelve their differences for the time being, did in Portugal after the last election.

The problem is that the PSOE refuses to break bread with the Catalans because separatists dominate the province's delegation and the Socialists oppose letting Catalonia hold a referendum on independence. Podemos also opposes Catalan separatism, but it supports the right of the Catalans to vote on the issue.

Rajoy may construct a government, but it will be one that supports the dead-end austerity policies that have encumbered most of the EU's members with low or flat growth rates, high unemployment, and widening economic inequality. Support for the EU is at an all-time low, even in the organization's core members, France and Germany.

Danger ahead

The crisis generated by the free market model is hardly restricted to Europe. Much of Donald Trump's support comes from the same disaffected cohort that drove the Brexit, and, while "The Donald" is down in the polls, so were the Brexit campaign and the Spanish Popular Party.

The next few years will be filled with opportunity, as well as danger. Anti-austerity forces in Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Ireland are organizing and beginning to coordinate resistance to the "troika." But so, too, are parties on the right: France's National Front, Hungary's Jobbik, Greece's Golden Dawn, Britain's United Kingdom Independence Party, Austria's Freedom Party, Denmark's People's Party, and Sweden's Democratic Party.

Instead of reconsidering the policies that have spread so much misery through the continent, European elites were quick to blame "stupid" and "racist" voters for Brexit. "We are witnessing the implosion of the postwar cultural and economic order that has dominated the Euro-American zone for more than six decades," writes Andrew O'Hehir of Salon. "Closing our eyes and hoping that it will go away is not likely to be successful."

A majority of Britain said "enough," and while the Spanish right scared voters into backing away from a major course change, those voters will soon discover that what is in store for them is yet more austerity.

"We need to end austerity to end this disaffection and this existential crisis of the European project," said a UP statement following the election. "We need to democratize decision making, guarantee social rights, and respect human rights."

The European Union is now officially a house divided. It is not clear how long it can endure.

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

Photo: An "anti-EU" flag. | EU Exposed via Flickr

NATO games 2016: War machine slipping under the radar?

Thu, 07 Jul 2016 11:41:00 +0000

NATO recently wrapped up "Anakonda-16," the largest military exercise in Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. The ten-day war games involved 31,000 troops from 24 countries, including 14,000 from the U.S. While NATO made no secret of its actions, the exercise went largely unremarked in the U.S. media.

Building a military advantage against Russia has of course been one of the intended consequences of the U.S.-sponsored overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Ukraine in 2014 (achieved with the help of the neo-Nazi storm troops of the far-right Svoboda party). The coup created an unelected Ukrainian government in Kiev that immediately threatened the rights of the ethnically Russian population in eastern Ukraine and the centuries-old Russian naval base in the Crimea.

The people of that province voted to secede from Ukraine and asked to be annexed by Russia, to which the latter agreed. The other eastern provinces also revolted, prompting authorities in Kiev to send troops to try to retake control.

The U.S. denied any responsibility for the breakup of Ukraine, placing blame on Russia and its President Vladimir Putin. The Administration and the State Department pressed its European allies to install economic sanctions on Russia in the aftermath of the Crimea referendum. The U.S. also paraded armored columns of troops throughout the countries bordering Russia and has begun installing nuclear first-strike missiles in Poland and Romania.

Despite the U.S. media largely ignoring it, NATO's Anakonda exercise caught the attention of security analysts and observers who have charged that the alliance and the U.S., in particular, are goading Russia into a new Cold War, revving up a new arms race to benefit the military industrial complex and possibly pushing the world towards a third world war.

Even German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, speaking at the close of the exercises, characterized them as "warmongering." He warned that "saber-rattling" and "symbolic tank parades" on NATO's eastern border were no way to make Europe more secure. He went on to say that pursuing partnership with Russia on pressing international issues would yield positive results, citing the recent Iran nuclear deal as an example of the possibilities. He specifically mentioned the need for cooperation in the fight against "radical Islam" in the Middle East as a pressing and urgent matter.

Security analysts have emphasized the contradictory position of the Obama Administration in the current pressure cooker-like atmosphere of international relations. On the one hand, the Administration at times appears to be under the sway of "neocon" hawks from the Bush-Cheney era who have moved back into positions of influence in the foreign policy apparatus. This is especially the case with policy toward Russia, where the neocons have pushed for an aggressive stance in that country's border regions. It is also important to note that President Obama's first secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is considered by most to be more hawkish than her former boss on the assertion U.S. power abroad, and the neocon elements are eager to curry favor with her.

On the other hand, the Obama Administration badly needs a "success" in the war in Syria, a result which can only be reached by cooperating with Russia and President Putin. This is yet another war inflamed by the United States and its Middle East allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Jordan. A number of the latter countries have poured fundamentalist terrorists, weapons, and money into Syria in an effort to overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad, thus replicating a frequent pattern of U.S. policy. NATO member countries have joined in waging the war on Syria.

NATO is holding a summit meeting in Warsaw, Poland on July 8 and 9. Is its purpose to plan even more wars?

Under these circumstances, peace forces in the U.S. have a critical responsibility to oppose NATO's aggressions. There are important anti-NATO demonstrations taking place in Europe, for example in Cyprus, Portugal and the Czech Republic. As the NATO summit is going on, there will be anti-NATO activities in Warsaw and New York. A major "No to NATO, No to War" demonstration is being sponsored by a broad array of organizations for July 9 at the Army Recruiting Center in Times Square, NYC, to protest the NATO summit in Warsaw.

Despite the fact that the U.S. is already engaged in seemingly endless military campaigns in a number of countries, hardly any time is being devoted in the 2016 election campaign to discussing the costs of war and the need for peaceful solutions. The peace movement's anti-NATO actions are part of an effort to inject a peace platform into the public discourse.

Photo: Military vehicles participate in NATO's Anakonda-16 war games in June 2016. | Flickr/U.S. Naval Forces

“We’re with Corbyn”: Stacey Guthrie’s mass art action in Cornwall, UK

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 14:00:00 +0000

This past weekend, on beaches all over Cornwall in the United Kingdom, passersby found the same message written in huge letters in the sand: "We're with Corbyn!" The messages drew the attention of the British media, with reports on the BBC news.

The messages in the sand were all part of a planned "mass art action" organized by the artist Stacey Guthrie, who used a Facebook event to encourage the people of Cornwall to express their support for the socialist leader of the British Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, by writing the message in the sand. When the news outlets caught on to the story on Sunday afternoon, it was as if the very beaches of Cornwall had expressed their unanimous support for the Labour leader.

The timing of the action is particularly significant. The majority of Labour Party legislators are currently attempting to depose their leader, despite the fact that he was elected by a huge majority only 10 months ago. In response to the legislators' anti-democratic gesture, the people of Cornwall embraced a mass action masterminded by a pro-Corbyn Cornish artist.

"I wanted to come up with a creative response to Momentum's call for emergency actions over the weekend," said Guthrie, referring to a Corbyn supporters group, which organized large rallies in support of Corbyn in cities all over Great Britain this weekend. "I put out a call to my creative friends and one of them suggested writing in the sand," she continued.

The significance of "writing in the sand," for Guthrie, is that it's the perfect antidote to the kind of angry politics that's arisen in the country since the EU referendum result last month. With the left-wing Momentum group often caricatured as an angry "mob" and Corbyn himself, only recently, smeared by the right-wing press as "lunging" at a reporter, Guthrie's decision to use sand as the medium for her "mass art action" is celebratory without being overly confrontational.

"I wanted to reach as many people as possible in a way that would provoke curiosity," she said. "Also, writing in the sand is a very non-threatening way of communicating a message. Other forms of public writing can allow the 'protestor' to be pigeonholed as angry or disrespectful of public property... so writing in the sand seemed to be a benign yet powerful way of stating the strength of support for Jeremy Corbyn that is felt by a large number of the population of Cornwall."

Beaches are symbolic of Cornwall, and Guthrie was aware of this while planning the action. Not only are beaches public spaces, images of them tend to reach a huge number of people in a short period of time, as demonstrated by how rapidly the story spread in the media.

"I think the significance of the beaches as a way of conveying a message is primarily that you can reach a large audience with a large-scale piece of writing or art that isn't confined," Guthrie told me. "Of course the image of Cornwall is inextricably linked with its landscape and so it was the ideal media for communicating how a large swathe of the community feel towards Jeremy Corbyn. There is also the romantic notion of the tide coming in and sweeping the 'message' out to a wider audience; of the message being magnified by the dilution of the sea and becoming much more than a sum of its parts."

Democratic, romantic and inclusive, this mass art action will live on in the history of progressive politics long after the messages have faded into the sea. And while the action might be pigeon-holed as a protest or a mere extension of the rallies that took place this weekend, it's actually quite in keeping with the rest of Guthrie's oeuvre, which often incorporates elements of humour and audience participation.

"I am very fond of the notion of leaving art in public for people to find," Guthrie said. "I sometimes leave a piece of my art in town somewhere to be found, hopefully by someone who wouldn't necessarily engage with art in a gallery setting as they see it as 'not for the likes of them'."

Let's hope this action spreads across the beaches of the United Kingdom. After all, it's not just Cornwall that wants Corbyn to stay.

Photo: communist-party.org.uk

This week in history: Argentina independence bicentennial

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 11:22:00 +0000

July 9, 1816 marks the declaration of Argentine independence by the Congress of San Miguel de Tucumán, a city in the northwest of the country. In reality, the congressmen who assembled in Tucumán declared the independence of the United Provinces of South America, which is still today one of the legal names of the Argentine Republic. The borders of the United Provinces did not include the Federal League Provinces in parts of what is now eastern Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. At the same time, several provinces from Upper Peru that would later become part of present-day Bolivia were represented at the Congress.

Eight years before, in 1808, Spanish King Ferdinand VII was deposed by the Napoleonic French. The French occupation is remembered in the paintings of Francisco Goya, and in his print series "The Disasters of War," as well as by Georges Bizet's 1875 opera Carmen. The 1810 May Revolution started in Buenos Aires, capital of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, the Spanish colony that included roughly the territories of present-day Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. The result was the removal of the Spanish Viceroy Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros and the establishment of a local government, the Primera Junta (First Junta), on May 25. It was the first successful revolution in the South American independence process.

After Napoleon was defeated, the Spanish monarchy was determined to recover control over its American colonies. Royalists from Peru had been victorious at several battles in Upper Peru, and seriously threatened the United Provinces from the north. Amid political and military instability in the Río de la Plata area, a General Congress was summoned. Thirty-three delegate deputies, each representing 14,000 inhabitants, were sent from all the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata to the sessions, which started on March 24, 1816 in Tucumán. The Congress had the freedom to choose topics to debate, and endless discussions ensued.

The voting finally ended on July 9 with a declaration of independence. The Declaration, published in both Spanish and Quechua, pointed to the circumstances in Europe of the past six years - not only the removal of the king of Spain by the Napoleonic forces, but the subsequent refusal of Ferdinand VII to accept constitutional rule both at home and overseas. The declaration claimed that Spanish America recovered its sovereignty from the Crown of Castile in 1808, when Ferdinand VII had been deposed, and therefore any union between Spain and its overseas dominions had been dissolved. This was a legal concept that was also invoked by the other Spanish American declarations of independence, such as Venezuela's in 1811 and Mexico's in 1810, which were responding to the same events. Subsequent discussions at the Congress centered on what form of government the emerging state should adopt.

The Congress continued its work in Buenos Aires in 1817, but typically for the new governments in the New World, deep differences emerged between the Unitarian Party, who favored a strong central government, and the Federales, who favored a weak central government.

At that time the South of Argentina, Patagonia, was inhabited almost exclusively by sparsely settled Indigenous peoples. In the North, the dense pre-Columbian Quechua, Aymará and Guaraní populations made up a large percentage of the new country's inhabitants. Beginning in the 1880s, as in the United States, large-scale immigration from Europe started transforming the ethnic character of Argentina. Over the course of a century, Argentina and its neighbor Uruguay became the most "European" nations in South America, and continued to oscillate between liberal and authoritarian government. In the 20th and 21st centuries the influences of British and U.S. neoimperialism have been felt particularly strongly.

Recognition of Argentine independence came haltingly. The first nation to recognize Argentina was the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1818, followed by Portugal in 1821, Brazil and the U.S. in 1822. Spain eventually recognized Argentina in 1857.

A few famous Argentines include Pres. Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Evita, soccer player Diego Maradona, the current Pope Francis, revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, author Jorge Luis Borges, singer-songwriters Carlos Gardel, Atahualpa Yupanqui and Mercedes Sosa.

Adapted from Wikipedia and other sources.

Photo: Declaration of Independence of the United Provinces of South America, in Spanish and Quechua

Senate votes to slash minimum wage for youth in Puerto Rico

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 10:18:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - Holding their noses and faced with a July 1 deadline, senators voted on June 29 for a Puerto Rico fiscal rescue bill that cuts the island commonwealth's minimum wage for young workers, by $3 an hour, to $4.25, endangers overtime pay and imperils union contracts there, the measure's foes say.

Nevertheless, senators voted 68-30 for the legislation, which President Obama worked out with House Republican leaders and which sailed through that GOP-run body earlier this year by more than a 2-to-1 bipartisan ratio.

Had Congress not passed the bill, supporters - including both Senate party leaders - admitted, the Puerto Ricans faced the prospect of something far worse: Defaulting on $72 billion in debt to hedge funds, deepening the decade-long recession there, throwing even more workers onto jobless rolls, closing half of the island's schools and eliminating many pensions.

Sens. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., and Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., back from the presidential campaign trail, led the debate against the legislation. They said all the island's 3.5 million residents would suffer, and that the Senate should have a chance to improve the House bill. Menendez, ten other Democrats, Sanders and 18 Republicans voted against the measure.

Its passage halts the hedge funds' lawsuits in their tracks and preserves some vital services in Puerto Rico. But the bill also sets up an unelected financial control board to run the commonwealth's budget and, Menendez says, veto any legislation the board dislikes.

Menendez concentrated on the harm to Puerto Ricans while Sanders targeted the hedge funds. The AFL-CIO, while taking no official position on the final legislation, blasted the funds' role in the Puerto Rican crisis in an earlier executive council statement.

The bill would "cut the minimum wage to $4.25 per hour for young workers in Puerto Rico," Menendez said. "It is a vote to make Puerto Ricans work long overtime hours, without fair compensation. It is a vote to jeopardize collective bargaining agreements. It is a vote to cut worker benefits and privatize inherently government functions.

"It is a vote to shut schools, shutter hospitals, and cut senior citizen pensions to the bone. It is a vote to put hedge funds ahead of the people. It is a vote to sell off and commercialize natural treasures that belong to the people of Puerto Rico, a vote to fast-track projects without a careful consideration of the environmental and health impacts.

"And, most of all, it is a vote against even attempting to fix these serious flaws."

Sanders went after the financiers who pushed Puerto Rico to the brink. Hedge funds also opposed the legislation, saying it would take away money they claim is legitimately owed.

"This is not just about taking away the democratic rights of the people of Puerto Rico. It is about punishing them economically," Sanders said. "Since 2006, Puerto Rico has been in the midst of a major economic depression. In the last 10 years, Puerto Rico has lost 20 percent of its jobs. About 60 percent of Puerto Rico's adult population is either unemployed or has given up looking for work.

"Over the last five years alone, more than 150 public schools have been shut down and the childhood poverty rate in Puerto Rico is now 58 percent. There is a mass migration of professionals out of Puerto Rico to the mainland because there is simply no work on the island.

"In the midst of this human suffering and economic turmoil, it is morally repugnant that billionaire hedge fund managers on Wall Street are demanding that Puerto Rico fire teachers, close schools, cut pensions, and lower the minimum wage so that they can reap huge profits off the suffering and misery of the American citizens on that island."

What Sanders called "vulture funds" bought Puerto Rican debt for as little as 29 cents on the dollar and are now reaping 34 percent interest on it, so the debt is "unsustainable and unpayable. That is just a fact. You cannot get blood out of a stone," he stated.

But the hedge funds "want a 100 percent return" on their bonds and the financial board would eventually give it to them "while schools are being shut down in Puerto Rico, while pensions are being threatened with cuts, while children on the island go hungry. That is morally unacceptable. That should not be allowed by the Congress."

The AFL-CIO used much the same language, blasting hedge fund "vultures" who "are opposing legislation that would allow Puerto Rico to file for bankruptcy" to restructure its debts. "The hedge funds, instead, are pushing for further austerity measures-an immoral position considering nearly half of Puerto Ricans already live in poverty," the fed said.

Earlier, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Auto Workers, who together represent 50,000 Puerto Rican workers, tried to convince senators to let Puerto Rico reorganize under bankruptcy law. They failed.

Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, Joe Mancin, D-W. Va., and Shelly Moore Capito, R-W. Va., opposed the Puerto Rico measure for a related reason: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., barred amendments, including one they planned to offer to ensure retired coal miners' pensions. The United Mine Workers strongly supports that plan, as the pension fund for the retirees faces its own July 15 deadline.

The union also plans a July 12 demonstration by miners and pensioners at the Capitol.

"We must send a message to the government and pressure them to keep America's promise to thousands of retirees, spouses, and dependents. Coal miners were promised lifetime retirement benefits by President Harry Truman in 1946. So far, they kept that promise with passage of the COAL Act. With the majority of the coal industry in bankruptcy, miners are on the edge of losing everything they have worked for," the union explains.

Photo: Kathy Willens/AP