People Before Profit blog

Syria at a tipping point

Wed, 30 May 2012 15:34:00 +0000

Last Friday, at least 108 civilians were reportedly killed in Houla, a group of Syrian villages. The dead included 49 children and 34 women, according to a United Nations count.

Today, UN observers said they had discovered 13 bound corpses in eastern Syria, many of them apparently shot execution-style.

The shocking killings, particularly the slaughtering of families and children, have heightened the talk of foreign military intervention. But such action would be a road to more death and ruin for Syria, and damaging regional fallout.

The United Nations Security Council on Monday unanimously condemned the Houla massacre. It did not assign blame for the killings. However it censured the Syrian government for using heavy artillery against civilians, calling it a violation of international law. It demanded that the Syrian government immediately stop using heavy weapons and pull its troops out of cities and towns.

Most countries and observers across the political spectrum condemn Syria's Assad regime for using heavy artillery in densely populated areas, and for suppressing peaceful protests. We strongly agree.

However the situation on the ground in Syria is often unclear. A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said Tuesday that fewer than 20 of the victims in Houla were killed by tank and artillery fire. "Most of the rest of the victims were summarily executed," the spokesman, Rupert Colville, told reporters. He stressed the difficulty of determining exactly what happened at Houla. "At this point it looks like entire families were shot in their houses."

Local witnesses interviewed by the UN said most of the killing was conducted by pro-government militia gunmen, known as the shabiha.

The Syrian government has denied responsibility for the massacre. Instead it blamed terrorists.

"Deaths from heavy artillery can be pinned on government military forces with relative certainty" because opposition fighters do not have such weapons, the New York Times notes. "But responsibility for deaths at close quarters is harder to determine in a country where reporters have been prevented from moving about freely."

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Friday that recent car bomb attacks in Syria may have been the work of "established terrorist groups." He urged other countries not to supply arms to either the government or rebel forces.

"Those who may contemplate supporting any side with weapons, military training or other military assistance, must reconsider such options to enable a sustained cessation of violence," he told the Security Council in a letter.

Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is back in Syria, trying get both sides to implement his six-point peace plan. According to many reports both sides have violated the agreed-upon ceasefire. Annan said with the renewed upsurge in violence the country was at "a tipping point."

But leading Republicans, including presidential candidate Mitt Romney, accuse President Obama of not doing enough to help the Syrian opposition. Romney said the U.S. should be arming the opposition.

Republican Sens John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have called for airstrikes on Syria.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said continued atrocities may lead to military intervention in Syria if the White House orders it.

At the same time, he told Fox News, "that military option should always be wielded carefully. Because one thing we've learned about war, I have learned personally about war, is that it has a dynamic all its own - it takes on a life of its own."

Along those lines, France's foreign minister ruled out any ground intervention in Syria, saying it would carry the risk of a "regional extension" of the conflict.

China said it "opposes military intervention and does not support forced regime change."

Russia too opposes foreign intervention, although it sharply criticized the Assad regime over Houla and other civilian deaths.

But tensions are ratcheting up. The U.S. Britain, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey and Japan this week expelled Syrian diplomats. Russia criticized this action, saying ousting diplomats closes "important channels" to influence Syria.

Unfortunately, contrary to Ban Ki-Moon's urging, the U.S. has already started working with two of the most reactionary regimes in the Middle East - Saudi Arabia and Qatar - to arm elements of the divided Syrian opposition. Huge sums of money, and weapons, are flowing into Syria - it's not clear to whom - undoubtedly fueling the very violence we supposedly abhor.

Foreign imposition of "humanitarian corridors" and "no fly zones" involves airstrikes and other military actions. As the Libyan NATO intervention showed, airstrikes produce civilian casualties - the New York Times cites an "unspoken civilian toll" in Libya.

Rather than undermining the Annan peace efforts, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to bolster them. This includes keeping diplomatic channels open, not shutting them down. It includes stopping any involvement in cash and arms supplies to any forces within Syria. And it certainly means no U.S. or other military intervention of any kind.

As in Libya, and in Iraq before that, progressive sections of the Syrian population oppose foreign intervention. Syrians themselves are the only ones who can build a democratic and just society there. The best solidarity the world can show the Syrian people is to oppose foreign military intervention.

Photo: Nicolas Mirguet // CC 2.0

Move to rehabilitate Hungary’s ultra-right “heroes”

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:55:00 +0000

A conflict has erupted between the far-right government of Hungary and the new left-center government of neighboring Romania over the proposed reburial of an ethnic Hungarian author with fascist associations. This is not an isolated incident. the Hungarian gcvernment of Victor Orban seems determined to rewrite the history of Hungary in the 20th Century to whitewash some prominent criminal careers.

Jozsef Nyiro was an ethnic Hungarian author born and raised in Translyvania, a formerly autonomous part of Hungary, that was awarded to Romania in the Trianon Treaty after the First World War. Nyiro is "controversial" because he was a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party ( Nyilaskeresztes Párt), a fascist organization that was installed in power in Hungary by the Germans toward the end of World War II, and was responsible for killing thousands of people, including tens of thousands of Jews transported to their deaths at Auschwitz. Nyiro died in Spanish exile in 1953.

Now the extreme right in Hungary wants to return his ashes and bury them in his home town of Odorheiu Secuiesc, Romania. Local officials and the government of Romania are saying no. The effort to rebury Nyiro is not just a sentimental gesture. Odorheiu Secuiesc is an overwhelmingly Magyar (ethnic Hungarian) town in the middle of not only formerly Hungarian Transylvania, but also the original heartland of the Szekelys, a revered Magyar subgroup who were noted warriors in the past.

The awarding of this area to Romania in the Trianon Treaty in 1920 has been a source of friction between Hungary and Romania ever since, and at various points Hungary has claimed the right to represent the Magyar population in Romania politically.

The conflict over Translyvania and the other "lost territories" was part of the dynamic which drew the interwar Hungarian government into its fatal alliance with the Axis powers. Hitler, in fact, had pressured Romania (which was also his ally) into returning most of Transylvania to Hungary, but this was reversed at the end of the war, with Romania switching to the allied side.

So the effort to rebury Nyiro is also part of the long-lasting war of nerves between Hungary and Romania, especially intense at this point because in April, Romania's right-wing government fell due to public anger over austerity measures, and a left-center government was installed to rule until legislative elections due in November. The current government in Hungary is fiercely right wing, but has not been able to deal with economic problems. The speaker of the Hungarian Parliament, Laszlo Kover of the ruling right-wing Fidesz Party, denounced the Romanian refusal to permit the reburial, causing a diplomatic incident.

Another figure undergoing whitewashing is Admiral Miklos Horthy de Nagybanya, who as "regent" for an imaginary king was the head of state of Hungary between the World Wars.

Hungary had a short-lived communist-socialist government in 1919. Under the protection of a French military mission, right-wing members of the old Hungarian ruling class formed a counter-government in the southern city of Szeged, and made Horthy, who had been the last commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, the commander of its "National Army." After a Romanian invasion drove the socialist government out of Budapest, the French unleashed Horthy and his forces, who proceeded to engage in a "white terror" in which thousands of communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jews, liberal intellectuals and others were massacred. The Szeged group became the incubator for Hungarian fascism (the "Szeged Idea"), which influenced other fascist movements of Europe.

The successive conservative and monarchist governments under Horthy's regency managed to get the country entangled in Hitler's and Mussolini's machinations, partly because they were interested in getting back not only Transylvania, but also areas of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia where the Hungarian ruling class had formerly had large landed estates.

But when it became clear that the Axis would lose World War II, Horthy, always a slippery survivor rather than an ideologue, tried to negotiate an exit via contacts with both the Soviet Union and the Western allies. Hitler got wind of this and kidnapped Horthy, installing the Arrow Cross government that led Hungary to disaster and defeat, and full blast participation in the Holocaust with the massive extermination of Hungarian Jews and others. After the war, no fewer than four former Hungarian prime ministers, including two who served under Horthy (Bela Imredy and Laszlo Bardossy) and two had been installed by the Germans (Dome Sztojay and Ferenc Szalasi) were executed as war criminals.

The fact that Horthy and Hitler turned against each other in the end, and that the main massacre of the Hungarian Jews did not happen until Horthy had been overthrown, is used by the contemporary reactionaries in Hungary to portray the admiral as a noble statesman. So now a statue to him is to be erected in the major Hungarian city of Debrecen, despite protests by socialists. Conveniently forgotten is Horthy's role in the White Terror of 1919-1921, his concessions to extreme anti-Semitic politicians, the anti-Jewish laws passed during his regency, and the part he played in embroiling Hungary in the Axis.

Snapping at the Hungarian government's heels is a frankly neo-fascist, anti-Semitic and anti-Roma party, Jobbik, which works to push Hungarian political discourse even further to the right.

In the 2010 elections, Fidesz and its Christian Democrat coalition partners won only a modest majority of the popular vote, but swept the legislative seats, allowing it to impose a far-right program. This electoral victory was made possible by a messy scandal involving the formerly ruling social democrats. We will now see if the left in Hungary can recuperate enough by the next elections, in 2014, to check this dangerous slide to the right.

Quebec student strike: Do you hear the noise?

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:27:00 +0000

Since February, more than 300,000 students in Quebec, Canada, have been on strike over the provincial government's proposed tuition hike. Students have been forced to confront police repression coupled with draconian legal measures to limit the right to peaceful protest. Despite it all, support has grown for the students and their struggle. Most recently, thousands of moms and dads, grandparents and children have been flooding the streets in the early evenings across Quebec, banging pots, lids and colanders-like the Argentina's cacerolazos (protests) during the 1990s against neo-liberal measures-in support of the students and to express opposition to right-wing austerity measures.

The following is a first-hand experience from Quebec, followed by a video that helps capture the mood and beauty of the protests found on Alternavox.

Tonight, I took a casserole [saucepan] and I came timidly out into the street. There were people out. I wondered who had a casserole. I was shy. I didn't want to be out on the sidewalk alone. Disturbing people.

Then, I saw a young boy, also alone, a teenager, with his mother and grandmother. His grandfather was there too, walking behind them, slowly. He was limping. But in his hand, he had a casserole like the others. I joined them. We met up with another girl. As she was wearing a red square, we asked her where the demonstration was. "On Hochelaga," she said, "at Charles-Valois square." There we went with casseroles in hand. On the way, I checked my phone. It was 8:00 PM. And we were still just a small group.

The young man and I looked at each other. Would we dare? Yes. Him first. Then all of us. We tapped, using wooden spoons, on our old casseroles. We heard another in the distance. Another. Yet another. Young students came out into the street, walking towards Charles-Valois square. They tapped in rhythm. We learned. They walked confidently. They had experience. In the distance was Charles-Valois square.

The grandmother and grandfather found a bench to sit on. They tapped, trembling, on their casseroles. There were a hundred people, then two hundred, then one thousand. We started to walk. Police cars arrived on the street corners and in the alleyways. We crossed paths a few times. Young people looked straight into the eyes of police, without fear and without arrogance, but with conviction. I even saw police officers lower their eyes. I saw one in particular. He was the same age as the students. I got the feeling that he realized he had chosen a line of work he wasn't passionate about. This night, I think, he wasn't doing what he dreamed he would be doing.

Children, men, women, seniors, people in wheelchairs, people of all nationalities, the crowd took the path it wanted, and did so in spite of police, in spite of the law. All along the way, on the balconies, in the windows, people came out with their casseroles, and they made noise too, scratching away at the special law one tap at a time. People protests and laughed and shouted. People clapped. People tapped, loud. Loud. Loud.

Some joined the march. Others, too timid, tapped while staying almost hidden behind a door or a tree. You only heard the casserole.

I am walking, and, all of a sudden, in the window of a building around a corner, I see a woman, in flowing clothes, almost naked, wrinkles showing despite her heavy make-up. She looks at the crowd and smiles. She is young, but she is missing teeth. I see that she is holding a beer bottle in one hand, and a spoon in the other. She is tapping on her beer bottle with her spoon. She is tapping, tapping and I see tears on her cheek.

I have seen and heard all this. I have heard the sound of the casseroles. I have heard the suffering of people. I have heard their loneliness, their pain, their anguish. I have heard them shout their rage, their anger. I have even heard them being proud.

I see all the young people who are hearing and seeing the same things as me. We are calling them entitled? We are called them spoiled children? No! The real entitled ones are steering our government, are selling us, lying to us, cheating us, giving us their advice, making comments, sensationalizing.

The real spoiled children are the ones who make new political parties at the slightest disagreement. They believe themselves superior to everything. They order the police to beat us down and they live in a soundproof room. They believe they can manipulate us with surveys. They try to divide us, old against young, one region against the other, Quebec against Montreal.

The real spoiled children believe that the only way to see the world is in economic terms, their economic terms, in terms of their lies and manipulations. The real spoiled children believe that, in life, some people win and some people lose. No! If only they could know that life is about more than that. No surprise that they don't believe that it is.

Quiet down, you spoiled children, and listen to the noise of the casseroles. Just once. If only they could know that the real great people of the world defied the law themselves. The son of God himself, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, John-Paul II, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, and so on. Social progress is one broken law after another. Enough with your moralizing, ladies and gentlemen who are all too ready to lay down before the law. The people know that law must be respected, and they know what laws to mock. People can think, in spite of your complacency.

I came home tired. I must have marched three hours. I came home while young people were still out marching, still tapping on casseroles.

And these are the ones we said are lazy and spoiled. Listen up! Listen to their words and their casseroles.

Translated from the original French by Translating the printemps érable. Original French text: http://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/351075/entendez-vous-ce-bruit

(Alternavox editor's note) If this article has moved you in any way you may be happy to know that Toronto is joining in the fun. There are over 30 Canadian cities that will be holding their very own casseroles loudness! To check out the massive Toronto event go to the Facebook page

And for visual inspiration:

Photo: via Alternavox

Spanish Civil War vets’ legacy continues

Wed, 30 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000

BERKELEY, Calif. - The Spanish Civil War ended over 70 years ago. But families and supporters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade - Americans who fought alongside Spanish patriots and thousands of international volunteers before finally losing to Spanish fascists in 1939 - have never stopped their fight to end wars and crimes against humanity.

The May 27 celebration of the Brigade's 76^th anniversary, by the Abraham Lincoln Brigades Archives (ALBA), honored Delmer Berg of Columbia, Calif., one of the four "Lincoln vets" who remain from some 2,800 who went to Spain.

Berg, now a vigorous 96, continues active in community and senior affairs. "I'm really happy to be among people who are concerned about what's happening now, and what was happening when we were in Spain," he told the audience.

Also honored was Kate Doyle, the National Security Archive's senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America and co-recipient of the second annual Award for Human Rights Activism, conferred by ALBA and the Puffin Foundation.

She shares the $100,000 award with Fredy Peccerelli, who heads the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.

The two have worked together for 20 years to expose the evidence of human rights violations in Guatemala during the 1960-1996 "internal conflict," during which an estimated 200,000 people were killed and 40-50,000 people "disappeared" by U.S.-trained government forces.

Doyle told the crowd the award will be used to further their work.

Doyle has researched formerly secret documents from the Pentagon and other national security agencies under the Freedom of Information Act, while Peccerelli has exhumed over a thousand bodies, working to identify victims buried as "XX" or "unknown," gathering evidence for use in court and helping family members gain closure.

Through linking documents and DNA from family members, she said, the researchers have identified five previously unidentified victims and are on the verge of identifying a sixth.

In a conversation after the program, Doyle credited Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, appointed in 2010, with permitting "extraordinary work" by evidence gatherers, and "leading the process of turning evidence into trials and convictions."

Among the results, she cited the 2011 conviction of five soldiers in the massacre of 201 people at Dos Erres in December 1982, with each sentenced to over 6,000 years in prison.

Doyle also cited the indictment earlier this year of Gen. José Efraín Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala for nine months in 1982, the year during which nearly half the conflict's human rights violations occurred. Among other crimes, she said, Rios Montt is linked to orders to massacre Mayan Quiché farmers northwest of Guatemala City, the capital. "This was one of the worst," she said. "Thousands of farmers were killed. It was genocide, a crime against humanity."

Doyle said the work is proceeding through "the commitment of Guatemalans, including the family members of victims. As soon as crimes were committed," she said, "families started mobilizing, even in that climate of fear. They testified in church, and in refugee camps. With persistence and bravery, they insisted on knowing what happened."

The program also featured a multimedia presentation recounting the Spanish Civil War in music, spoken word and contemporary photos. A clip from the 2011 film, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator featured the work of Doyle and Peccerelli.

For over seven decades, Abraham Lincoln Brigade members, their families and supporters have kept up their struggle, from protesting Franco's Spain and serving in World War II to participating in all the peace and civil rights struggles that have followed.

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives maintains a year-round schedule of activities, including seminars for teachers who return to their classrooms and teach about the Spanish Civil War, and a contest for the best student essay on the meaning of that war.

The Human Rights Project, initiated last year, connects the veterans' legacy with today's defense of international human rights.

Photo: Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran Delmer Berg, with Judy Ann Alberti. Marilyn Bechtel/PW

Mexico's upcoming elections: The candidates, the issues

Tue, 29 May 2012 17:02:00 +0000

On July 1, Mexico will hold elections for president and for the 128 seat Senate and 500 seat Chamber of Deputies. It seems clear that the presidency will be lost by the candidate of the currently ruling National Action Party (PAN). What is to be decided is whether the candidate supported by most of the left, including independent trade unions and social movements, can come from behind and beat the candidate of the old, formerly ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).

The current president, Felipe Calderon, of the PAN, was elected by a tiny margin in 2006 over former Mexico City "mayor" Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) and the "For the Good of All" Coalition. Lopez Obrador, whom friends and enemies alike call "AMLO", and his supporters insist that the election was stolen, which seems highly likely.

For Calderon, the last six years have been a disaster. Economic problems have worsened, and the sense of security of the Mexican people has been badly shaken by a drug war that has killed at least 50,000 people. President Calderon's solution for the problem of criminal narco cartels has been to declare "war" on them, and to put the armed forces, heavily subsidized by the United States through the "Merida Initiative", onto the streets of cities.

The result has been no letup in the violence of the cartels, but a great increase in complaints about violations of human rights. The elimination of top and intermediate level drug lords has set off violent turf and leadership wars in which dismembered corpses are piled at public intersections as warnings to rival gangs. There have been numerous killings of newspaper reporters trying to cover the drug war. Central American immigrants traveling through Mexico on their way to the United States are kidnapped; sometimes dozens at a time, and either held for ransom or forced to help the cartels. If the ransom is not paid or the migrants refuse to cooperate, they are massacred.

In these circumstances, the PAN candidate for the presidency, former Secretary of Education Josefina Vazquez Mota, finds herself far behind the candidate of the formerly ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) and the Green Ecological Party (a right-wing party in Mexico), State of Mexico governor Enrique Peña Nieto. She has now also dropped behind AMLO in the polls.

Peña Nieto is a media candidate: He is as young and handsome and has a Desi Arnaz coiffure. But as governor of the huge State of Mexico he ran a repressive regime. Furthermore, the PRI was ousted from the presidency in the 2000 presidential elections because voters were sick of its corruption and abuse of power.

The AMLO campaign, carried on via united front called "MORENA," is working to remind voters of the PRI's history, but is hampered by media bias in favor of Peña Nieto. AMLO supporters accuse the TELEVISA network and others of sabotaging the first presidential debate by scheduling coverage of an important football match to conflict with it.

AMLO has the support of most, but not all, of the left, of the independent labor unions and social movements and many other sectors, based on his support for working class interests, but the PRI still has a massive patronage machine at the state and local level, controlling 19 governorships and hundreds of municipal governments. This and the media bias is a daunting challenge for AMLO and his allies running for Senate and Chamber of Deputies seats.

Progressive young people appear to be trying to make up lost time, using the same social media communications techniques that have mobilized so many in the "occupy" movements around the world. On Wednesday May 23, there was a massive youth protest in Mexico City, which was billed as opposition to Peña Nieto and to media bias instead of support for AMLO, but clearly was progressive in tone. There have been demonstrations in many other places. This past weekend, there was a rally in the historic Tlatelolco Plaza, site of a massacre carried out by the Mexican army and police against demonstrating students in 1968.

Mexico does not have a runoff system for either the presidency or the legislative seats (though it does have proportional representation in legislative elections), so the name of the game now is for AMLO, a powerful campaigner, to try to catch up with what most, but not all polls show as a substantial lead by the PRI standard bearer.

Peña Nieto appears to be a lightweight who has to be carefully guided by his handlers not to spout embarrassing bloopers (he was asked about rising food prices, a big issue in Mexico, and revealed that he knew nothing about it, giving the excuse that he is not the person who does the food shopping in his household).

If Peña Nieto wins, many believe he will cut deals with the drug cartels. He has also promised to deal with the problems of the state owned oil monopoly, PEMEX, by partial privatization that many think is the foot in the door for full privatization.

He has promised to promote "labor reforms" that resemble the right wing policies of Calderon, and that would seriously harm collective bargaining rights that are already severely damaged in practice by heavy handed repression against those unions, like the Electricians and the Mine and Metal Workers, who do not bow to government and management demands. AMLO wants to build up PEMEX without privatization, expand the rights of workers and unions, and defend Mexican national sovereignty.

Photo: Presidential candidates Enrique Pena Nieto (PRI), left, Josefina Vazquez Mota (PAN), second from left, Gabriel Quadri (PANAL), third from left, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (Democratic Revolution Party and Workers Party, PRD,PT), participate in the first presidential debate in Mexico City, May 6. AP

Brazil probes dictatorship's human rights abuses

Tue, 29 May 2012 16:19:00 +0000

Twenty-eight years after the re-democratization of Brazil, the government will investigate human rights violations committed by the right-wing military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985.

The regime began with a U .S .-backed coup d 'ètat that removed democratically-elected President João Goulart from office after he proposed reforms to education, taxation, agriculture and the electoral system.

Four hundred and thirty-seven activists were murdered or disappeared, and thousands more imprisoned and tortured, including current president Dilma Rousseff of the Workers' Party. In late 2011, the government approved establishment of the National Truth Commission to investigate all human rights abuses beginning in 1946 and ending in 1988.

President Rousseff, who was arrested in 1970 and spent three years in jail as a political prisoner, was tortured for her engagement in the Marxist guerilla groups Comando de Libertação Nacional (COLINA) and Vanguarde Armada Revolucionária Palmares (VAR Palmares).

Rousseff's predecessor, Luiz Inácio "Lula " da Silva, a former union leader who was also imprisoned during the military rule, joined three other former presidents alongside Rousseff at the installation ceremony of the Truth Commission on May 16.

"Ignorance of our history does not pacify, on the contrary - it maintains latent heartbreak and resentment. Disinformation does not contribute to peace, it only paves the way to intolerance," said Rousseff while fighting back tears.

The commission will review top secret government documents that could clarify cases of death, torture, and disappearances. It will have two years to present a report on past human rights abuses committed by the Brazilian government.

Through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the seven members of the panel will have access to information regarding the U.S. State Department and CIA's role and cooperation with the military dictatorship in repressing political dissent.

Those seeking information on friends and family members who were victims of the military dictatorship will benefit from the Access to Information Law (Lei de Acesso à Informação), which passed last year with the goal of increasing government transparency.

Top secret documents will now be classified for a total of 25 years, or a maximum of 50 years if its classification status is extended. Previously, secret documents could have the length of its classification renewed indefinitely.

No legal proceedings will be initiated against officials responsible for human rights violations. A 1979 Amnesty Law that allows exiles to return to the country and pardons officials who committed crimes under the dictatorship is still in effect.

Photo: Brazil's President Dilma Roussef, right, talks with former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during the installation of the Truth Commission, May 16. Rousseff swore in the seven members of a truth commission created to look into human rights abuses committed during the nation's long dictatorship. Eraldo Peres/AP

Support grows for striking Quebec students

Tue, 29 May 2012 15:11:00 +0000

VANCOUVER, Canada - Police repression coupled with draconian measures to limit peaceful protest have failed to stop a student strike in Quebec that has shuttered most of the province's universities and colleges since February.

The provincial government of Jean Charest proposed hiking tuition fees $1,625 over 5 years. Charest says that the government needs to hike fees to meet increasing costs.

Quebec has the lowest tuition fees in the country, and students graduate with smaller debt loads than young people in the rest of Canada.

However, the four main Quebec student unions have united to fight the tuition increase. The majority of students at the province's campuses voted to stop attending classes and go on strike until the centrist Liberal Party Charest government withdraws the tuition increases.

Students have made it clear that their campaign is part of a broader struggle against right-wing austerity measures and for a better society with accessible and free education.

Over 300,000 students across the province have at one time or another boycotted classes. Two hundred thousand students are currently out of classes, engaging in daily (and nightly) protest marches and occupations across the predominantly French-speaking province of 7.1 million people.

Many teachers support the students and are attending demonstrations, challenging administrators and refusing to give classes. They have formed Teachers Against Fee Increases.

The provincial labor movement also backs the student strike and has provided material and moral support.

For those engaging in or supporting the strike, wearing or carrying a red square has become a popular symbol identifying support for students.

The Charest government has adopted harsh measures to deal with student strikers. Police are attacking peacefully protesting students with pepper spray, tear gas, clubs and rubber bullets. Thousands of students have been arrested.

Student striker Francis Grenier lost most of his eyesight when a sound grenade was thrown into his face. Maxence Valade lost an eye from a rubber bullet, and Alexandre Allard was in coma for several days from a rubber bullet to the head.

Anonymous Quebec posted a video on the Internet showing police brutally against student protestors. Amnesty International is circulating a petition against police violence.

Four students have been charged under anti-terrorist laws enacted after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The provincial government recently passed Bill 78 that limits the right to peacefully protest. The bill requires students to notify police eight hours in advance of demonstrations, including duration and route, for actions larger than 50 people. It also forbids anyone from, directly or indirectly, delaying or impeding access to classes; makes student organizations responsible for preventing students from protesting; imposes large fines to student groups and labor unions that organize unauthorized demonstrations; allows police to change the route or location of demonstrations; punishes anyone who helps or induces another person to commit an offense under Bill 78; and prevents student protests in front of post-secondary institutions.

Critics have called Bill 78 a draconian measure to restrict freedom of speech and assembly. Louis Masson, president of the Quebec Bar Association, commented, "the bill constitutes a violation of the constitutional and fundamental rights of citizens."

Instead of intimidating students, Bill 78 has increased their resolve. Large protests continue to be held and students and their supporters refuse to recognize Bill 78.

The student movement and union supporters have initiated a court challenge, backed by 140 organizations, against Bill 78 to strike down provisions restricting freedom to peacefully assemble and protest. Students are asking for an emergency injunction to set aside the law until the constitutional questions can be heard.

The public is beginning to openly support the student strike. In the last week, thousands of moms and dads, grandparents and children have been flooding the streets in the early evenings across Quebec, banging pots, lids and colanders-like the Argentina's cacerolazos (protests) during the 1990s against neo-liberal measures-in support of the students and to express opposition to right-wing austerity measures.

Despite mounting protests, the Charest government remains adamant that it will not cancel tuition fee increases. A new round of negotiations have begun this week between the student movement and the government to resolve the conflict.

Last month, a tentative agreement was signed between the government and the student movement whereby tuition fee increases would go ahead but university and college fees would be lowered by an equivalent amount. The Charest government then started back-pedaling on its promise and students returned to the streets.

Photo: Thousands of students march through the streets of Montreal protesting tuition hikes, May 23. Ryan Remiorz /The Canadian Press/AP

U.S. military takes on Honduras

Tue, 29 May 2012 10:51:00 +0000

On May 11 in Honduras' Mosquito Coast region, helicopter gunfire killed two women and two men, and seriously wounded four more people, including children. They were targeted as drug traffickers. The helicopters belonged to the U.S. State Department. On board were agents of the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration in military uniforms, plus Honduran soldiers. Many Hondurans say the U.S. agents did the shooting.

The drug "war" is used to justify U.S. military intervention in Honduras, now a way station for drugs moving from South America to U.S. consumers. The United States has posted 600 soldiers to Honduras and operates an Air Force base and three new so-called forward operating bases there. Meanwhile, political and social deterioration has led to calamity.

Intervention is hardly new in Honduras. U.S. troops invaded in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1912, 1919, 1924, and 1925, usually at times of political turmoil. They were "protecting U.S. interests" like banana plantations, banks, and railroads. In the 1980's Honduras was a U.S. staging area for Contra troops fighting Nicaragua's leftist government.

The United States backed the Honduran government formed by plotters who had arranged the military coup overthrowing President Jose Manuel Zelaya in June, 2009. Now the U.S. government supports a successor regime headed by President Porfirio Lobo, elected under dubious circumstances. Lobo's visit to Washington in October, 2011, got red carpet treatment.

Zelaya experimented with land reform and called for a minimum wage, thereby enraging local political bosses. The U.S. government was offended by his having led Honduras into the anti-imperialist ALBA alliance of Latin American countries.

The wealthy elite behind the coup are prospering. The family of Miguel Facussé is emblematic of ten families which "control everything, telecommunications, electrical generation, marketing of petroleum products, the financial market, construction, food, etc." Facussé's 42, 500 acres in Lower Aguan grow African palms, the oil of which Facussé's Dinant Corporation converts into biodiesel.

A deadly struggle is playing out in Lower Aguan and may soon intensify. Dinant Corporation announced that if by June 1 Facussé has not received government payment for land small farmers are occupying, Dinant would evict farm families. Already private security forces have murdered 48 land reform activists there since September, 2009. The occupations are in fulfillment of land reform measures revived during the Zelaya era.

The United States overlooks landowner repression even though Facussé properties are dotted with traffickers' landing strips. Social catastrophe - 70 percent poverty and 40 percent unemployed - and terror likewise seem to be acceptable. Honduras' is the highest murder rate in the world - 6723 murders in 2011. Political repression has taken the lives of 25 journalists during the Lobo presidency. The body of popular broadcaster Alfredo Villatoro was found on May 15, that of LGBT activist Erick Martinez, two days earlier

U.S. interventionists tolerate governmental corruption. California academician Dana Frank maintains, "[D]rug trafficking is interlaced with the post-coup government...even the Minister of Defense has talked about the so-called Narco Congress people, the Narco judges...The police regularly kill people... None of these people have been prosecuted."

Trafficking bolsters wealth and power. A local Chamber of Commerce official reported drug lords "have bought tremendous tracts, ranches, farms (and) coastlands." The McClatchy story suggests, "Drug profits have filtered into sectors such as banking, construction, sports teams, restaurants, auto sales and private security."

So there's more to U.S. military intervention than just war on drugs. According to an Argentinean analyst, "The Southern Command of the Pentagon throughout Central America is backing 'failed states' in order to justify interventions in the name of national security." Col. Ross Brown, a U.S. commander in Honduras, told a reporter that the U.S. military mission is expanding because of "the potential nexus between transnational organized criminals and terrorists who would do harm to our country."

Uruguayan solidarity activists demand President Lobo take steps "to avoid new bloodshed." They seek United Nations and European Union intervention to protect human rights in Honduras. Representatives of 12 Latin American and European countries joined United Nations officials in Lower Aguan in late May to deal with conflict there.

The people's forces are mobilizing. Formed after the 2009 coup, the National Front for Popular Resistance established the Broad Front of Popular Resistance, which looks toward a constituent assembly and is preparing for presidential elections in 2013. The Front's "social struggle" entails agrarian reform, popular organizing, defending human rights, and opposition to privatization and foreign control of natural resources.

Given the experience of the Chile's socialist government with U.S. intervention in 1973, this is perilous business. Yet the promise is real. Seven years ago social and economic indicators for Bolivia and Honduras were similar: GDP - $10 billion, average annual per capita income - $700 - $800, international financial reserves - $1.5 billion, and rate of extreme poverty - 40-50 percent. In Honduras, these figures have not changed substantially. By contrast, the current GDP in socialist oriented Bolivia is $20 billion, the average annual per capita income was $1833 in 2010; international financial reserves exceed $12 billion; and the rate of extreme poverty is 25 percent.

Photo: Clara Wood Rivas, right, at the grave of her 14-year-old son, who was killed in a recent drug raid. Rodrigo Abd/AP

Try telling John Carlos that sports and politics don’t mix

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:48:00 +0000

Interview: Forty-four years have passed since the most famous protest in sports history. But, talking to John Carlos in London this week, perhaps what is most striking is how few athletes have followed the example of the 1968 Olympian and used the five-ringed circus and the unrivalled platform it provides to make a stand on a political or social issue.

The forthcoming London Games promise to be more sanitized, more awash with corporate sponsors than ever before, but the likelihood of an athlete using their fame to make a political statement is slim.

Back in '68, Carlos and his US team-mate Tommie Smith won bronze and gold respectively in the 200 metres but shocked the world and especially the International Olympic Committee (IOC) by using the medal podium to unleash a multifaceted protest against a range of issues.

These included the treatment of black people in the US and racial segregation in South Africa and Rhodesia, as well as paying tribute to hundreds of Mexican students who had been massacred shortly before the Games that were held in their capital.

Smith and Carlos each raised a black-gloved fist to represent strength and unity. They wore beads around the necks to highlight the history of lynching in the US and they took off their shoes to symbolize the poverty that still plagued much of the US, both black and white.

Smith, Carlos and Australian silver medalist Peter Norman also wore badges bearing the emblem of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, an organization of which Smith and Carlos were members and which had advocated a boycott of the Mexico City Olympics in which they were now present.

From the stands there was a deathly silence. "You could have heard a frog piss on cotton," Carlos recalls in his new book. However boos and abuse soon rained down on the trio, but far worse persecution would follow in the years to come.

Carlos is 67 now, but when I meet him he appears to have lost none of the passion which drove him all those years ago. He carries the scars too, one of them a visible limp from an injury he suffered while trying to forge an ill-fated career as a gridiron player after he was ostracized from the U.S. athletics team.

Indeed, he is well aware that his experiences post-1968 make him as much an example to be feared as followed. He struggled to find work in the 1970s, had to steal or gamble on more than one occasion to provide for his family, suffered torment at the hands of the FBI and saw his marriage to his beloved wife Kim disintegrate. Tragically Kim would take her life in 1977 after years of battling depression.

"There's a lot of young sports people out there today," says Carlos, who is on a tour of Britain to publicize his autobiography, which was co-written by Dave Zirin. "They get told you can't do this or say that or you'll lose contracts. You'll be scorned for stepping out or even run out of professional sports altogether. There are many examples of this."

Still, he is buoyed by a number of recent examples of sports persons and sports teams in his native US, who have made a variety of stands on political issues.

He also believes that the rise of the Internet and the diversity of the media means that the vilification he, Smith and the likes of Muhammad Ali suffered is unlikely to be repeated today. Gone are the days when a handful of columnists could shape national opinion.

"I think America has grown in the sense that it doesn't try to ridicule those individuals," Carlos says. "I think they (critics) have realized that they only put more coal on the fire by trying to denounce or publicly suppress those individuals who choose to speak out."

Yet even today there still exists the view that sport and politics don't mix - an argument Carlos believes is "ridiculous."

That was the line of Avery Brundage, the IOC president between 1952 and 1972 and an infamous anti-semite, who dubbed Smith and Carlos's 1968 protest as a "nasty demonstration against the American flag by negroes."

But as Carlos points out, one person's politics is another person's non-politics.

Brundage long campaigned for South Africa's inclusion in the Olympics, arguing that a country's internal politics should be ignored while conveniently overlooking the fact that allowing the apartheid state's inclusion would also be a political move and one which would give them legitimacy.

"The Olympic Games and politics are like a marriage," Carlos argues. "You can't say: 'Oh, I'll put my head in the glass box and won't pull it out.' People need to open their eyes. Political is correct when the powers that be want it to be, but if anyone else goes down that line and in a way they don't like they kick up a big stink."

I wonder what issues Carlos would be campaigning for if he were 40 years younger and competing at July's Games.

"That's a hard question," says Carlos, leaning back in his chair. "There's obviously the issue of sexual preference. There's the economic growth of the Olympic Committee - corporate entities have come in with a lot of money and taken over the sport."

I suggest that perhaps Saudi Arabia's refusal to send a women's team to the London Games might be an issue that a young John Carlos would have targeted.

"That's been in their culture for aeons," he says after much thought. "But certainly the IOC wouldn't get involved in that. I think they would just sidestep the issue and keep moving."

Carlos seems reluctant to delve to deeply into the issue. He is clearly of the view that the US has historically not always been in the best position to preach to others. "We can't act like we're this clean, purified people, saviors to society who do everything right, because we've been just as guilty as (apartheid) South Africa and many other countries," he says.

That Carlos has felt ashamed of his country comes across loudly in his book. He still has good reason to feel resentful of a homeland, which robbed him of his livelihood, brutalized his family and ultimately left him penniless.

Yet he has been proved to be on the right side of history. His legacy has endured and flourished, while the stock of those who opposed him, most notably Brundage, has fallen spectacularly.

Later that day, Carlos addresses a 1,000-strong audience in London, where he receives a standing ovation. It is a recognition that is long overdue.

This story originally appeared in Britain's Morning Star newspaper. Photo: The salute was a noted human rights protest and one of the most overtly political statements in the 110 year history of the modern Olympic Games. African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos performed their Black Power salute at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. Via Wikipedia.

U.S. intransigence on Cuban Five prisoners a high stakes game

Tue, 22 May 2012 16:20:00 +0000

With appeals all but exhausted, the only hope for relief of unremitting judicial abuse of the Cuban Five lies with President Barack Obama. Supporters of the Cuban Five are demanding that he issue a presidential pardon and free them.

Stephen Kimber, Canadian journalist and author of a forthcoming book, "What Lies across the Water: the Real Story of the Cuban Five," says the prospect of improved U.S.-Cuban relations is also grim, and that nothing will be settled until the Cuban Five political prisoners are released.

Solidarity activists worldwide say the U.S. judicial system railroaded the Cuban Five defenders against terrorism to prison. Both the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and Amnesty International have slammed U.S. judicial proceedings. Yet after 13 years four of the men remain in jail and one of them, Gerardo Hernandez, is still the object of special abuse.

Ramon Labaniño and Antonio Guerrero are serving 30 and 22-year terms respectively. Fernando Gonzalez is nearing the end of his 19-year sentence on lesser charges. Rene Gonzalez, sentenced to 15 years, was released on parole. But why is Gerardo Hernandez serving two life sentences plus 15 years?

Life sentences against Labaniño and Guerrero for conspiracy to commit espionage were reduced on appeal. Hernandez has a life sentence on the same charge still intact. His other life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder also remains. It's clear that the U.S. government has taken special pains to inflict harm upon Gerardo Hernandez.

For example, U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard in Miami, the judge who presided at the trial of the Five in 2001, on May 15 freed Yuby Ramirez after 12 years in prison. Lenard ruled that Ramirez was the victim of incompetent counsel. Ramirez, like Hernandez, had been serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder. Ramirez confessed she had participated in a plot consummated by drug trafficking bosses to kill a government witness. If Ramirez can go free, why not Hernandez?

Hernandez gets special treatment in other ways. The additional burden of a murder conspiracy charge was filed against him came late in the trial of the Five. In demanding the charge go forward, Judge Lenard overruled the prosecutors' reluctance to pursue it on grounds of lack of evidence. In fact, no evidence has ever been presented indicating Hernandez knew about Cuban plans to down two Brothers to the Rescue planes on February 24, 1996. Four pilots died in the Cuban attack, carried out by military aircraft.

Brothers to the Rescue is a Cuban exile organization that had been illegally entering Cuban air space to drop leaflets. The Cuban government complained repeatedly to the U.S. government about these incursions before the shoot-down incident occurred.

As analyst Saul Landau recently pointed out, the claim that Hernandez caused the deaths by alerting the Cuban government of the upcoming flights is meaningless. The U.S. Air Force notified the Cubans that the planes were on the way. Jose Basulto, the Brothers to the Rescue leader, had proclaimed his flight plans publically.

The U.S. government is refusing the request of Hernandez' attorney in a still-undecided habeas corpus plea that the National Space Agency release satellite maps expected to show that the planes had indeed entered Cuban airspace. If that was the case, then the murder conspiracy case against Hernandez collapses.

There is, of course, one major instance in which all the Cuban Five prisoners gained special treatment. In early 1998, Cuban security officials delivered to FBI personnel visiting in Havana reams of material gathered by the Cuban Five and other Cuban agents working in Southern Florida. The FBI thus gained considerable evidence as to terrorist plotting in Florida, past and present, against Cuba. They learned that a boat docked in the Miami River was laden with explosives.

What happened is that on their return to Florida, the FBI ignored evidence implicating private paramilitary groups in their bailiwick and instead arrested the Cuban agents. That was the work of Hector Pesquera, the newly appointed FBI head in Miami.

The new book by Stephen Kimber provides details on Pesquera's role. The local FBI head embarked upon a crusade to persuade a reluctant U.S. Justice Department to arrest and prosecute the Cuban Five, even interceding personally with FBI director Louis Freed to secure authorization. Pesquera, widely known as a friend of powerful, right wing Cuban-American families in Miami, even boasted on radio "It had been he who changed the focus, and instead of the spies spying, he presented accusations against them."

In mute testimony to his softness on terrorists, Pesquera ended his FBI office's investigation into crimes committed by Cuban exile plotter Luis Posada. Pesquera arranged for disposal of documents in the case of Posada, who had engineered the bombing of a fully loaded Cuban passenger plane and hotels in Havana.

Pesquera has recently been appointed police chief of Puerto Rico.

Photo: A billboard with images of five Cubans imprisoned in the U.S., popularly known as the "Cuban Five," in Havana, Cuba, April 11. Franklin Reyes/AP

Another Iraq? U.S. aids Saudis in Syria intervention

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:27:00 +0000

Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other feudal Persian Gulf states are providing millions of dollars in funding to Syrian opposition forces every month, with U.S. backing and coordination.

Rather than directly supplying lethal weaponry such as anti-tank weapons, administration officials told the Washington Post the U.S. "has expanded contacts with opposition military forces to provide the Gulf nations with assessments of rebel credibility and command-and-control infrastructure." In other words, the U.S. is giving the Saudis and their fellow Gulf monarchies contacts and pipelines for funneling cash, and perhaps weaponry too, to Syria's rebel forces.

According to the Post, "opposition figures said they have been in direct contact with State Department officials to designate worthy rebel recipients of arms and pinpoint locations for stockpiles."

A senior State Department official said, "We are increasing our nonlethal assistance to the Syrian opposition, and we continue to coordinate our efforts with friends and allies in the region and beyond."

In addition, a leader of Syria's Muslim Brotherhood said "it has opened its own supply channel to the rebels, using resources from wealthy private individuals and money from Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar," the report says.

As a result, the flow of arms into Syria has greatly increased in recent weeks, according to the Post.

This is taking place even as the United Nations is struggling to preserve the peace plan initiated by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"The cease-fire has been broken by both sides and, as usual, civilians have been the main casualties," reports on-the-scene China Daily journalist Li Lianxing. The United Nations estimates that at least 9,000 people have died in the 14 months of conflict in Syria. Opposition groups say the death toll is more than 11,000.

Meanwhile, according to "a Western diplomat on condition of anonymity," CNN reports that a "confidential draft U.N. report accuses Iran of exporting arms to the Syrian government." The draft report is said to cite two seizures of Iranian arms shipments to Syria in the past year.

The U.S. move to military support for the Syrian opposition represents a shift in the White House approach, says the Washington Post. The Pentagon has also "prepared options for Syria extending all the way to air assaults to destroy the nation's air defenses." U.S. officials, however, have said that such direct involvement remains "very unlikely."
Foreign intervention may already be helping turn Syria into a tinderbox.

China Daily's Li Lianxing cites two massive car bomb explosions May 10 on the Damascus airport road, killing at least 55 people. It was "the sort of attack that's become the hallmark of al-Qaeda."

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said he believed al-Qaeda was behind the attacks.

The agitated crowd that gathered at the Damascus car bombing site "repeatedly shouted slogans in support of the unification of the Syrian people and against Saudi Arabia and Qatar, two countries in the forefront of recent criticism of the Syrian authorities," Li Lianxing reports.

"People realized that the conflict is not simply being played out between the government and opposition, but is developing into a more complex situation, one featuring other, more dangerous players," says Li.

Bassam Haddad, director of Middle East studies at George Mason University, writes of the Syrian uprising against the Assad regime: "This is not simply another uprising against a dictator. It is also being transformed by other players into an effort to redraw the political map of the region and curtail further protests elsewhere."

It brings to mind the Iraq disaster. After the 2003 U.S. invasion, Iraq was ravaged by the emergence of sectarian warfare, armed militias and the so-called Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Knowledgeable Iraqis and others said it was (and continues to be) a "proxy war" between Saudi Arabia and Iran, with the U.S. siding with the Saudis.

Certainly the Saudi interest in Syria has nothing to do with democracy. In his new book "Arab Spring, Libyan Winter," author Vijay Prashad notes that the Obama administration conferred with the repressive Saudi regime about last year's democratic uprising in Egypt. "This is like asking a vegetarian how to cook prime rib," Prashad observes.

A Syrian man sits on the balcony of his destroyed house, damaged from Syrian army forces shelling, in the Hamidiyeh neighborhood in Homs province, central Syria, April 22. AP

Greek coalition says anti-austerity left alliance necessary

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:49:00 +0000

Dimitris Papadimoulis was re-elected as a deputy for Syriza*, the left coalition in Greece, on May 6. He gives his analysis in this interview.

Huma: Syriza has just been charged with forming a government. How will you proceed?

Dimitris Papadimoulis: We're going to try to translate the voters' message in favor of a government with a progressive left-wing content. We shall turn to all the political forces except the Nazis of Golden Dawn. Our priority will be the other left forces, those sitting in Parliament and the ecologists and leftists who were unable to enter the Vouli.

Alexis Tsipras [member of the Hellenic Parliament and head of the Syriza parliamentary group] will meet with all the political leaders and will put forward a set of governmental proposals. If there's agreement, we shall discuss the composition of a government. There cannot be a government guided by austerity and the memorandum; consequently those who voted those measures cannot participate in the government - neither New Democracy [the main center-right party] nor PASOK [the party of Andreas Papandreou].

Huma: The Greek Communist Party (KKE), which is, after Syriza, the main opposition force on the left, has refused [to participate in a government]. What will you do?

Dimitris Papadimoulis: The KKE has always rejected an alliance with Syriza. It has just repeated this. In reality, there are three possibilities. The first one, a strange one, is that PASOK and New Democracy will accord their confidence to a government led by the left, with a leftist program. This would contradict their programs. The second possibility, which is complicated, is a joint government of PASOK, New Democracy and Democratic Left (DIMAR).

The third possibility is that no government can be formed and we shall have new elections in mid-June. We shall seize this historic opportunity to present a package which does not concern only social and economic questions, but also the electoral laws, the independence of the judicial branch... We shall persevere that a left alliance may come into existence. We have a new argument: the people's vote.

Huma: Many abroad say that the "anti-Europeans" have won. What do you say to that?

Dimitris Papadimoulis: The austerity measures and the new accords with the troika are a way of preparing a return to the drachma [the unit of Greek currency that was replaced by the euro in 2001]. We therefore not only demand changes in Greece, but also in Europe, the abandoning of this neo-con approach. The Party of the European Left is also putting forward similar proposals. We aren't anti-European, but we are against Europe as it presently exists.

Original French article: Syriza « Il faut une alliance de gauche, anti-austérité »

Translated May 29 by Gene Zbikowski.

*PW Editor's note: According to Wikipedia, Syriza is an acronym for the Greek words meaning "Coalition of the Radical Left." The coalition includes democratic socialists, greens, Maoist, Trotskyist and eurocommunist organizations.

Photo: At the 2012 May Day protest in Athens. Banner reads ''No''. In debt-crippled Greece, people marched through central Athens protesting the country's harsh austerity program. Thanassis Stavrakis/AP

G8 meets in attempt to stop meltdown

Fri, 18 May 2012 15:17:00 +0000

Leaders of the Group of 8 countries of the world's largest economies are meeting at Camp David, Maryland, to begin talks on the global financial crisis.

European leaders were expected to come under pressure from the United States and Japan to moderate their savage spending cuts and adopt policies for growth - but ahead of the summit there were few signs of fresh thinking from EU mandarins.

Debt levels as a percentage of the EU economy have actually risen over the past year as pressure from Germany to lay off workers, cut pay and reduce spending has shrunk economies.

But at a stormy meeting of the UN general assembly in New York on Thursday European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso claimed that the EU was "on the right track" and "making good progress" despite the contracting economies of Britain, Italy and Spain and the catastrophe engulfing Greece.

He dismissed the idea that new elections could change the Greek government's disastrous austerity course, saying: "We expect the Greek government, current and future, to fulfill the jointly agreed conditions for financial assistance."

Barroso hailed the EU's dictation of Greek economic policy as an example of "unprecedented solidarity to member states."

But U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz hit back that "austerity has not worked and will not work," pointing out that no large economy has ever recovered from recession through an austerity program.

"This decade will be the lost decade for Europe and America," he warned.

And UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon urged G8 leaders to "face the facts - the old model is broken. We need to create a new model for dynamic growth."

Mr Ban said since the world economic crisis took hold 200 million people have lost their jobs and that poverty and inequality were on the rise globally.

Even U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has urged European leaders "to invest in public works projects, like roads and schools" and called for "a better balance between growth and austerity, a more gradual, softer path to restoring fiscal sustainability."

But economist Jacob Kierkegaard said the G8 meeting was unlikely to make a "breakthrough," especially as the group does not include growing economies such as China, India or Brazil.

"There will be nothing here that tackles the fundamental key questions looming over the global economy," he predicted.

This article originally appeared in the Morning Star newspaper.

Striking Los Mineros leader describes horrifying conditions

Fri, 18 May 2012 13:25:00 +0000

Jacinto Martinez is the labor secretary of Section 65 of the Mineros, Mexico's union for miners and one of the oldest unions in the country. His union has been on strike for five years at the huge Cananea mine, one of the longest strikes in the history of North America. Critical support for this strike has come from U.S. unions including the United Steelworkers union, and Los Mineros and the USW have announced their desire to merge to form a single organization. Martinez describes the history of the strike and the horrifying conditions in Cananea today in an interview with David Bacon.

Our town is where the Mexican Revolution began in 1906, at a time when miners there were virtually enslaved. The mine was eventually taken over by the government, which ran it for many years. Nevertheless, over the last hundred years there were many strikes in this mine over wages and working conditions

Finally, in 1989, the government stopped all operations at the mine, and President Carlos Salinas de Gortari declared that the mine was bankrupt. In August of that year the government sent in Federal troops. The miners were expelled from the mine, and the mine was closed for three months. Then Salinas sold it to private owners, Grupo Mexico, the company run by the Larrea family. Really, it was basically given away. The government had just invested 400 million pesos in the ore concentrator alone. Grupo Mexico bought the whole mine for 650 million.

After the Larrea family took over, we've had nothing but battle after battle with them. They are one of the largest mining companies in the world, and one of the richest families in Mexico. The company was forced to make certain commitments in order to take over the mine, but they've never fulfilled any of them. One was to share with the workers five percent of the price they'd paid for the mine. Because of their failure, in 2004 we took action to force the company to pay what had become by that time a debt of 55 million pesos.

After that things became even more difficult. Before, the government was at least a little concerned for our welfare. Now all dialogue with the government has been cut off, and they give total support to Grupo Mexico.

We went on strike again on June 30, 2007, because of the deteriorating conditions in the mine. Once the strike started, the Federal government, through the labor board, declared it illegal several times. Each time we've gone to court, and the courts have overruled the board and restored the strike's legal status. According to the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights, we have a right to return to our jobs.

Once again, on April 14, 2010, the strike was declared legal by the courts. Nevertheless, at 10PM the same day the company withdrew recognition from our union and broke off its employer/union relationship with us. That was completely illegal. But the government then brought in police and troops, and allowed the company to reopen the mine.

At the time we went on strike, there were about 1200 members of our union. Now there are still 850 people on strike, five years later. The company has tried to buy people off by offering them severance pay if they'll give up any claim to their jobs. In my case, after 23 years working in the mine, they've offered me 1,007,000 pesos [about $85,000]. They've said that in addition, they'd give me 830,000 pesos to try to buy me out. But I won't take their offer, nor will any of the strikers.

We don't have Social Security medical insurance, so the medical care we get comes from the company as part of our employment. If we take their offer, we will lose all our medical care. The 850 strikers have been fighting for this too. To make matters worse, on Mother's Day in 2008, the company gave us an additional gift by closing the hospital where we received our care. Counting children and retirees, an additional 1200 people lost their medical care because of that.

The government stepped in to provide some services, but even though we can see a doctor again, we have no money to buy medicine. This has hurt our retirees especially, because now they have to pay for medicine, where in the past the company had to provide it. Some of us have severe problems because of working in the mine, like silicosis and high blood pressure, so doing without medical care is not an option.

To protest government support for the company, about 50 miners have gone to Hermosillo, the state capitol, where they are occupying a site near the government building. When they come back to Cananea, other workers go to take their place. We are not the only local union of miners on strike. Section 17 has been on strike in Taxco and Section 201 in Zacatecas. We are all facing Grupo Mexico.

We are also protesting over what happened at Pasta de Conchos in 2006. The union made many requests to the Labor Secretary, asking that the government conduct inspections of that mine. But there were none, and finally there was a terrible explosion in which 65 miners were trapped inside and died. The only thing they did was close the mine. The company even refused to go in and bring back the bodies, and the government backed them up. The company and government claimed it was an accident. But the president of our union, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, held a press conference and called it industrial homicide. After that, the government tried to arrest him and he had to flee to Canada.

Since we've been fighting Grupo Mexico, we've had the financial support of the United Steelworkers in the U.S., who also gave sanctuary to our president. That's how we've been able to survive. Over 80,000 workers are contributing to our ability to go on fighting. And we are also receiving contributions from our own members in Mexico who are still working. So our situation in Cananea isn't good, but we've been able to continue for five years. Our members still support the strike totally.

The company has been able to restart production, using about 3,000 workers who are employed by contractors. There are about 2,000 Federal soldiers guarding them. They've turned Cananea into an armed camp. They have towers with machine guns watching over people, and you can't even pass through certain streets in the center of town. This is why we're supporting Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in his campaign for President in our national elections in July. He's promised that if he's elected, he'll defend us.

Grupo Mexico is really destroying Cananea. The mine pumps water from about 70 wells. Cananea, with a population of 30,000, only has two or three. The mine is buying up land throughout this area, and now has more land than the town itself. They use it to dump the mine tailings, which have already buried part of the old town.

Meanwhile, of the 300 members of our union who betrayed us and went back to work, only about 50 are left. The only way they've been able to make the mine run is by bringing in 3,000 people from outside, from Oaxaca, Puebla and other states in the south. The economic situation in these states is worse than here in the north. There's no work, no jobs there.

Grupo Mexico has built special housing for many of the strikebreakers on the mine property, called colectivos. They're like barracks. For others, the company rents big houses in town, where a lot of them are housed together. The company then picks them up in busses in the morning and brings them back at night. That way it controls them. And the whole economy of Cananea has collapsed because these workers aren't living in the area like normal residents. Many of them actually come here because we're close to the U.S. border, and they're thinking about jumping the fence. The reality is that the economy here is pretty dead.

Grupo Mexico mistreats these workers. It's gone back to the same conditions people rose up against in 1906, when miners went on strike for the 8-hour day. The strikebreakers are working 12 hours a day. They all have to belong to a protection union, part of the CTM [the Confederation of Mexican Workers, affiliated to Mexico's former ruling party, the PRI]. Then, after working four or five months, the company fires them. They only get 1,300 pesos a week [about $100], so when people want to go home, they don't have enough money to get back. Some of the fired workers wander through the streets, begging for help from other workers so they can get home.

With people brought in from outside to work the mine, the only solution for the people of Cananea itself is to leave, to migrate. There's no other work here. Some go to other states, or to other cities in northern Mexico. They leave by themselves to look for work. Then right after they get paid on Friday, they send the money home to their families. Most go to the U.S. That's logical, because the border is only a half hour away, and Tucson's only three hours from here. And that's where the work is. Sometimes people just go to work for two or three weeks, and then come back, trying to find a way to keep on living here. They try to use the work in the U.S. to build up their reserves. This also happened after the three-month strike in 1998.

The people who are on strike are all people who live here, and most of us have been living here for generations. The head of our strike committee, Jesus Verdugo, is the third generation in his family to work in the mine. Now his children are old enough to work. But if we don't win the strike, they'll never work here. We're losing our traditions; we're losing the whole history of Cananea. And this is because of what Grupo Mexico and the Federal government are doing to us.

You could say we're fighting for our right and ability to keep on living in Cananea.

This article originally appeared in Working in These Times. Photo by David Bacon.

Florida fire, journalist harassment reflect special U.S. rules for Cuba

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:15:00 +0000

Early on April 27, fire destroyed the Coral Gables, Fla., offices of Airline Brokers, a charter flight provider servicing Cuba and other countries. The Fire Department blamed arson.

A U.S. embassy official in Spain a week later was at the Madrid airport to enforce U.S.- imposed "no-fly" rules. The two incidents point to difficulties in applying the U.S. war on terror to Cuba.

Operating for 30 years, Airline Brokers arranges for seven charter flights a week from Miami and Ft. Lauderdale to Cuba. The company limits Cuba travel to "persons who are generally or specifically licensed to travel to Cuba." Cuban Americans last year made 400,000 trips to the island, reports Andres Gomez of Miami's Alianza Martiana. "The criminal action that destroyed the offices of Airline Brokers is a terrorist act," he adds, "not only against this company but even more important, it's an act of terrorism against the right of all U.S. citizens to travel to Cuba."

Company owner Vivian Mannerud pointed out that as of May 2 public officials in Florida hadn't condemned the arson attack. Local observers see Airline Brokers as singled out because of its role in Cuba travel and because of arrangements it made for 340 Florida residents to be in Cuba on the occasion of Pope Benedict XV's recent visit there.

Terror applied to Cuba and people elsewhere working for decent U.S.-Cuban relations is not new. Earlier, bombings and shoot-ups were endemic on the island. Blame fell on violent counter-revolutionaries there allied to the CIA and on Cuban-American private military groups. Perpetrator and ex-CIA operative Luis Posada found refuge in Florida. Florida bias and flawed court proceedings led to long prison terms for the Cuban Five, Cuban defenders against terror. The recent incendiary attack recalls earlier attacks on Floridians and Puerto Ricans trying to re-connect with Cuba. An atmosphere stemming from hatred and violent ideology has contributed to impunity.

A signature U.S. policy is thus marked by contradiction: war is waged on terrorism, while violence against Cuba or U.S. friends of Cuba gets a blind eye.

Journalist Hernando Calvo Ospina is familiar with this skewed approach to anti-terrorism. The Colombian native living in French exile flew from Paris to the Madrid-Barajas airport on May 5. There he learned from a U.S. embassy official that his name was "on a list of persons dangerous to the security of his country" and that his Air Europa flight to Havana would leave without him. He learned that "for a few minutes" the flight enters U.S. airspace.

In 2009, Calvo Ospina flew on Air France from Paris to Mexico City. Over the Atlantic, the plane detoured to Martinique unexpectedly to refuel. On arrival five hours late in Mexico City, he learned his presence on the plane had caused the detour. The flight was to have passed over U.S. soil, and he was "unwelcome for reasons of (U. S.) national security."

As a Colombian journalism student in 1985, Calvo Ospina was captured and nearly killed during a joint Ecuadorian-Colombian military operation. First accused and then cleared of links to leftist Colombian insurgents, he remained imprisoned in a Ecuador prison until worldwide pressure forced his release. Reports of guerrilla associations may still resonate with the U.S. government.

His books may also be worrisome to some. In "Cuban Exile Movement, Dissidents or Mercenaries," released in 2000, Calvo Ospina and colleague Katlijn Declercq interviewed Cuban-American leaders. They demonstrated that foreign intelligence agencies paid for anti-Cuban terror actions. The book highlights U.S.-European cooperative attempts to destabilize the Cuban government.

Two years later, in "Bacardi, The Hidden War," Calvo Ospina accused rum company owners of funding U.S. government and Cuban-American efforts to overthrow Cuba's government. He highlighted Barcardi payoffs to secure passage of the 1996 U.S. Helms Burton Law and fund assassination attempts against Cuban government leaders.

In 2010 Calvo Ospina wrote "The CIA Shock Team." According to analyst Pascual Serrano, the author surveys "crimes, coups, conspiracies, invasions, and occupations organized by the CIA [since 1954]. Its great merit is naming the criminals."

Since 1982 the U.S. government has identified Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Yet Cuban support for Colombian leftist guerrillas, as claimed, is unproven, Basque insurgents were in Cuba at the request of the Spanish government, and sanctuary for a couple of U. S. Black liberation activists from the 1970s is surely small potatoes.

This policy, as with other regrettable consequences of the U.S. anti-terror war - civilian deaths, funds diverted from social programs, and assaults on constitutional rights - unfolds almost automatically. However the U.S. approach to Cuba is grounded upon stark contradiction, plus a pervasive spirit of vindictiveness.

Photo: flippinyank // CC 2.0

Iran rights group warns U.S. Congress: Don’t step up war drive

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:58:00 +0000

Peace and human rights organizations across the world are urging the U.S. Congress not to pass a resolution which they say will increase the chances of war with Iran.

The resolution before the House of Representatives (H Res 568) ostensibly deals with the views of the House on "preventing the Government of Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability." Campaigners however say that the framing of the resolution will significantly lower the threshold for going to war, undermine diplomacy, and take peaceful options off the negotiating table.

British-based CODIR (Committee for the Defence of the Iranian People's Rights) says it is concerned that the vote on the resolution is taking place just a week before the U.S. and Iran resume negotiations that many in the pro-war camp want to sabotage.

CODIR says the resolution effectively calls for a military attack on Iran when it obtains a "nuclear weapons capability" - an undefined term that, by some interpretations, could already apply to Iran, not to mention Brazil, Japan, the Netherlands, and any country with a civilian nuclear program.

"We should not stake questions of war and peace on such shaky foundations," said CODIR Assistant General Secretary Jamshid Ahmadi. "Given the resolution's unambiguous statement ruling out containing a nuclear-capable Iran, this resolution could be construed by this president, or a future resident, as an authorization for launching military action against Iran that would have devastating consequences."

Alex Gordon, of Britain's largest specialist transport union RMT, who is also CODIR honorary president, said:

"Once again, in the run-up to a U.S. presidential election, we hear the beat of war drums from Capitol Hill. Bellicose posturing for a U.S. domestic electorate is a luxury the peoples of the world and the Middle East cannot afford. The last decade witnessed dire results of U.S.-led wars of intervention in Iran's neighbors, Afghanistan and Iraq. Now is the time to support workers, trade unionists and others in Iran struggling for equality, rights and political freedom, not ramp up military tension with coded calls for Western military attacks on Iran. Trade unionists in Britain and all those who support peace will continue to speak out against the warmongers and enemies of workers' and human rights worldwide."

Campaigners are arguing that at the absolute minimum, the resolution should clarify that it is not an authorization of force and does not provide a legal authority for the president to initiate war against Iran.

Ahmadi expressed further concern that there appear to be many in the U.S. who are keen to see war as a first option to contain Iran, even though there is little likelihood of the Islamic Republic developing weapons capability without U.S. knowledge.

"The presence of international nuclear inspectors in Iran and U.S. intelligence-gathering operations make it nearly impossible for Iran to build a nuclear weapon undetected," he said. "U.S. and Israeli intelligence has been clear: Iran has yet to decide whether to actually build a bomb. Our aim must be to use diplomacy to implement the verification measures to guarantee Iran cannot take this step."

CODIR has drawn attention to the negotiations scheduled for May 23 with Iran's Supreme Leader for the first time publicly endorsing negotiations and signaling that Iran is prepared to make key concessions to cap its enrichment in accordance with U.S. national security interests. Campaigners fear that the bill could undermine those talks by signaling to Iran that the U.S. is committed to war.

Ahmadi concluded: "Serious diplomacy is the only way to prevent war, prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon and destruction of such weapons in other countries of the region including Israel, and put mechanisms in place to effectively address human rights abuses in Iran. Congress should support diplomacy, not undermine it."

Photo: Tolka Rover // CC 2.0

Chile launches reforestation campaign for exotic Patagonia

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:43:00 +0000

In Patagonia, an exotic natural region of southern Chile, efforts to begin reforestation are commencing.

In 2011, a fire destroyed 19 square miles of lush forestation in Torres del Paine National Park in the Patagonian region. The area was declared a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1978. However, in the past 100 years, fires coupled with human influence have destroyed more than 900 square miles of forest.

The Image Foundation of Chile (FiCh), Chile's secretary of tourism, Conaf - the government agency that manages Chile's forests, SNP Patagonia Sur, and others intend to plant more than one million trees within this year. The nonprofit project, named "Reforestamos Patagonia," is being largely funded by companies such as Coca Cola, LAN, Rockford, Falabella and Cuprum.

SNP Patagonia Sur, a for-profit company that invests in, protects, and enhances scenically remarkable and ecologically valuable properties in Chilean Patagonia. has been credited in the past for its strong ties with the reforestation movement in Chile. Planting more than half a million trees in the Austral zone of Chile, it has influenced the area to become an icon of environmental and ecological success across South America.

Reforestamos Patagonia urges the support of citizens and people across the world. According to Matías Rivera, head of the project, "Reforestamos Patagonia is a sincere nonprofit and positive campaign. Its success will be determined by our capacity to urge social networks and mass media to sensitize society to the cause and encourage individuals to buy a native tree replacing those that have been lost."

As mentioned by Rivera, to assist in the effort to reforest the Patagonia region, trees are for sale. The public can purchase a tree (for the price of $4.00 USD) and contribute to the cause here.

Photo: Northward View of Cuernos del Paine (The Horns of Paine), Torres del Paine National Park, Chile. Evelyn Proimos CC BY 2.0.

German elections: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:08:00 +0000

BERLIN - In a way, it's a "good news" and "bad news" angle.

The good news: the Christian Democratic Union of Angela Merkel took a real whipping in the election in North Rhine-Westphalia (usually abbreviated to NRW), the largest German state in terms of population. Her smiling, almost benign mien, with little bluster or braggadocio, disguises less and less her tough advocacy of austerity - a code word for overcoming deficits not by hitting big banks and big biz, who caused the calamity, but rather the people who have always been hit worst and who are truly suffering.

Americans may recall Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan's cruel recipes; they are closely related. But the election of the socialist Hollande in France, the current tumult in Greece and demonstrations all over Spain, in Italy, even in London, have shown what many ordinary people think of such austerity!

Now, sixteen months ahead of next year's national elections, Merkel's party took the worst beating in its history in this key state, NRW, which has more people than all of East Germany. Her major opponents, the Social Democrats, were greatly strengthened, their partners, the Greens, held their own and, for better or for worse, the two will now have full sway there.

As for the "bad news," not all of it is world-shaking. The first item involves plans to open the giant new Willy Brandt airport in Berlin June 3 as a match for rival facilities at Frankfurt and Munich. The ballyhoo was immense for a project fought over for decades. Recent TV coverage centered on the amazing overnight switch from the pleasant little Tegel airport in the northwest of this city to the huge new site in the southeast, 20 miles away, without missing a flight.

It was overwhelming - until it was canceled, just four weeks ahead of the opening date. The fire alarm and evacuation systems were not quite ready, it was claimed and, after all, safety must come first! But it soon became almost certain that the big construction consortium had known for months that deadlines could not be met.

Looked very pale

Mayor Wowereit, the person officially in charge, looked very pale, and the postponement will cost the airlines, the retail shops, and transportation companies many millions of euros.

At first, August was offered as a new opening date, then there was talk of October - or maybe December?

A second blow for Berliners was in the offing; the almost certain loss of major league status for its main soccer team. For some - bitter tragedy! Every year the two worst teams out of sixteen drop to second league status while others move up. Only a miracle can save it. Without such a miracle in the remaining final game Berlin, Germany's biggest city, will be the only major city with no team in the major league. At least until next year. And how shameful!

But alas, there was a far more earnest bad news item, though all too few realized its significance. The same election in North Rhine-Westphalia - NRW - which scratched Merkel seriously wounded the other main loser, the Left Party. It was no surprise in view of recent polls, but a shock all the same! It not only failed to reach the five per cent needed to keep any of its seats in the state legislature (it won 11 in the last election) but lost severely, getting only about 2.5 percent!

This was the second West German state in a week where it lost its representation by missing the hurdle, and this state, due to its size, is especially important. It is hard hit by an economic crisis worsened by constant shutdowns of coal mines and steelworks in its Ruhr Valley, a real German Rust Belt. Why did these troubles, with severe cutbacks in the budgets of nearly all towns and cities, not work to the advantage of the Left? And why is this important, even to people in other countries?

Of course the media played a big part in this defeat: except for the very limited left wing press, largely unavailable in much of the country. TV and printed media have a uniform strategy towards the Left. Except for occasionally playing up internal squabbles or problems, real or contrived, they maintain silence about the party's actions and activities. In NRW the Left played an important part in preventing college tuition charges, improving free child care possibilities, fighting for more financial help for local communities, and on many levels town and county councilors of the Left Party have been truly valiant.

But all this was ignored while the catchy new Pirate Party was treated to almost daily pageantry, although it still has virtually no program. It reaped the rewards at the polls, polling over 8 percent.

Cause of the weakening

Most commonly cited as the cause of the alarming weakening of the Left after its hopeful successes a few years ago was the inner quarreling which consumed so much energy and fed the media's appetite for scandals.

The strong Left Party program agreed to almost unanimously in Erfurt last October would, it was thought, heal wounds and break barriers. But it did not.

Now, after defeats in two West German states, there are fears that the coming Congress in early June in Gottingen, when a new slate of officers is to be elected, may not improve the situation.

The conflict involves personalities but, more than that, aims and strategies. The only person thus far to offer himself as candidate for co-president in June is Dr. Dietmar Bartsch, the unusually tall deputy chair of the Left caucus in the Bundestag. Bartsch represents the large Left-voting, mostly East German sector of the party, which still averages between 15 to 30 percent in the five East German states, the former GDR, and shares in the government of one of them, Brandenburg.

This broad base is important as a financial and voting percentage base for the party as a whole. Its leaders, like Bartsch, often called reformers, are in essence pragmatists. "We want progressive reforms in the social system; we must fight for the social benefits now being cut away by the Christian Democrats and their coalition partners, the Free Democrats. To achieve success in this direction we must be ready to ally with two other parties now in opposition, the Social Democrats and the Greens. Sometimes we can join with them in a state government; and it may be possible, it is implied, that after next year's national elections those two parties will need our votes to get over 50 percent of the deputies and gain power. With such hopes at all levels, we must be reasonable in our demands and do as little as possible to antagonize possible future allies. Frequent rejections of any cooperation with us can be seen as election propaganda.

Those opposed to the reformers claim that by being so reasonable, and by down-playing or abandoning main principles, the party moves so close to the Social Democrats that voters will see no real reason for choosing it instead of them.

One basic principle involved is a strict refusal to send German troops anywhere outside Germany and withdraw them from their present deployment in Afghanistan and near the coasts of Lebanon and Somalia (with a new approved prospect of hitting those pirates over land as well as over sea!).

The Social Democrats and Greens have approved foreign deployment and insist on such approval; the "fundis" - or fundamentalist Left - demand an adamant principle of refusal on this; the pragmatist reformers would agree to a position of "maybe, sometimes, with possible exceptions."

Related but deeper

Related, but even deeper in its implications, the more radical fundis insist that repairs and restrictions on the banks and big biz are only half-way measures; we must keep alive the goal of rejecting the capitalist system and replacing it with some form of democratic socialism. The reformers agree that the system is indeed dated, socialism must remain a goal, but a cloudy distant one, and for now the need is to make the banking system work more justly and save social welfare achievements by working together with the other left-of-center parties.

The retort to this is that once Social Democrats and Greens gain power, they always forget most social promises; in recent years they were responsible for painful cuts in many areas. Their leadership (though not always their membership) leans towards accommodating big business, where many of their leaders land when they retire from politics..

A final issue: the reformers agree with all the other parties in decrying the East German GDR as a second dictatorship in Germany, after Hitler, to be condemned almost in its entirety.

The more radical wing, on the other hand, says that the GDR did many bad things, it ultimately failed, but its history must not be simplified in black-white terms, it represented an attempt to break with capitalism and fascism and was able to achieve many good things, from jobs for everyone to free childcare, free medical care and free education for everyone. Its undoubted lack of rights and even its tragedies cannot be equated with the crimes of the Nazis.

One co-president in the past two and a half years was Gesine Loetzsch, a popular leader with roots in an East Berlin borough. Her co-president, Klaus Ernst, was a union leader from Western Bavaria, not so popular in general. A general rule was more or less accepted: a double leadership - a man and a woman , an easterner and a westerner. Loetzsch recently resigned her job because of the illness of her quite aged husband, and will remain only as Bundestag deputy. Ernst has not stated any plans, making Bartsch the only announced contestant as yet.

Looming over the scene

But looming over the scene in a way is the charismatic West German politician Oskar Lafontaine, one-time head of the Social Democrats and very popular in his home region of Saarland. It was to a large degree his work in the new Left Party which helped it gain the crucial support of five to ten percent of West German voters and thus put the party on the all-German map. He withdrew from leadership in 2009 to fight cancer - successfully, it seems. Will he stand for election in June as president or co-president? And if so, with whom? The gains he helped achieve are visibly disappearing. Is that because of his absence or because of the more "leftist" stance of many West German party leaders?

Many reformer leaders in the East dislike Lafontaine, who has taken more Fundi approaches on many questions.

While the Left Party suffered losses in West Germany, interesting local victories were won in eastern Thuringia, including the job of mayor of one well-known middle size city, Eisenach, and county leader in Nordhausen in the Hartz Mountain area.

Interestingly, most Left Party victories in Thuringia were won by women, who are strongly represented at many levels. Perhaps the best known nationally is the East German leader and theoretician Sara Wagenknecht, once head of the Communist Platform group within the Left but in the past two years one of the deputy vice-presidents, she is a convincing speaker and writer.

But she also became Lafontaine's partner in more than just a political sense. Some think that the liaison has moved her ever so slightly towards a less militant position while moving him somewhat leftward. Their relationship would seem to make a joint presidency look more than awkward. It has however supplied grist for many of the media, almost their only reporting on the party for a while.

To sum it up: the coming congress in a few weeks can decide not only whether the Left party moves closer to the Social Democrats and Greens or to a more fundamental opposition, which would be more in tune with many active younger people like those in the OCCUPY groups: it may even determine whether the party moves closer to a split and thus the downfall of an imposin attempts to shake up German politics.

Or can it find new paths to an active, aggressive fight for the rights of the majority of Germans and a move away from Merkel's austerity and military mobilization policies? With Germany the strongest power in Europe (possibly excepting Russia) and one of the strongest economic forces in the world, and with the Left very important to many leftwing parties in Europe, the outcome can have a significant effect on future developments everywhere.

Photo: Cologne, largest city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Rolf H./Wikipedia

Anti-discrimination law protecting gays passes in Chile

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:34:00 +0000

In Chile last week, after a seven-year legislative battle, the country's first all-inclusive anti-discrimination bill became law.

On Mar. 3, Daniel Zamudio was tortured and murdered in San Borja Park, in Santiago, the nation's capital and largest city. At only 24 years of age, Zamudio was killed in an act of homophobia-induced violence.

Zamudio had reportedly been harassed due to his sexuality after leaving gay-themed discotheques in the past, and according to his family, neo-nazis had verbally threatened him the night before his murder.

After observing the scene of the crime, authorities concluded it was homophobic in nature. According to Central Hospital in Santiago, Zamudio was left with a fractured skull, brain injuries, cigarette burns, a broken leg, and with cuts upon his stomach, legs, and arms in the shape of swastikas.

The four young men who committed the crime denied all charges despite their histories of having been arrested in the past for xenophobic-related charges. They are each facing life imprisonment, while the prosecution seeks murder charges. Due to heinousness of the crime it has sparked debate concerning the rights and safety of the LGBT community in Chile.

The murder facilitated increased awareness and pressure on Chilean lawmakers to examine a bill preventing discrimination towards anuyone based on race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender, appearance or handicap.

Originally proposed seven years ago, the anti-discrimination bill has been the topic of heated discussion. The conservative right, the Catholic Church, and other anti-gay marriage groups have strongly voiced their opposition to the bill. However, the Gay Integration and Liberation Movement (Movilh) have been supportive since the beginning.

Movihl, headed by its president, Rolando Jiménez, is a LGBT rights and advocacy group that, in 1999, spearheaded a movement for repeal of legislation banning sodomy as a punishable act.

In response to the passing of the new anti-discrimination Law, Jiménez said in a statement to La Tercera, "Today marks the end of a seven-year process that has given Chileans a way of protecting themselves from and fighting against arbitrary discrimination."

The anti-discrimination law is colloquially known as the Zamudio law, in honor of Daniel Zamudio's death. However, it cannot go without mentioning that countless atrocities towards the LGBT community have occurred in Chile's past.

The Zamudio law itself identifies discrimination as "distinction, exclusion or restriction that lacks reasonable justification" and protects those whom are targeted on the basis of "race, ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic status, ideology, political opinion, religious beliefs, participation in organizations or lack thereof, sex, gender, sexual orientation, appearance, health and disabilities." The law not only defines these groups but also offers them protection if a crime occurs. The law empowers courts to fine offenders a minimum of $4,000USD (two million CLP).

The Zamudio law is the first piece of legislation in Chilean history to comprehensively protect the LGBT community. The nation's LGBT rights groups continue the struggle but now are slightly more hopeful. This legislation sets a precedent in the continued fight for equality and will perhaps lead to same-sex marriage and other LGBT rights in the country of Chile.

Photo: A Chilean lesbian couple kiss during a Gay Pride parade in downtown Santiago. Roberto Candia/AP

French Left candidate goes one-on-one with ultra-rightist

Mon, 14 May 2012 09:54:00 +0000

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the Left Front's candidate in the recent presidential elections in France, has announced that in the legislative elections on June 10 (with a runoff on June 7), he will run as a candidate in the 11^th constituency district in the Pas de Calais region, on the French North Atlantic coast. What makes this even more interesting is that he will be going head to head with Marine LePen, who was the candidate of the far right National Front.

The specific district, called Henin-Beaumont, which Mr. Melenchon has chosen to run in, has an interesting history. It is inward from the Atlantic coast and was heavily damaged by German incursions during the First World War. During the Second World War the Pas de Calais was occupied by the Germans, but had the good luck that it was chosen by the Allied command as the decoy to fool the Germans as to where the D-Day attacks would come.

Field Marshals Erwin Rommel and Gerd von Rundstedt became convinced that the main allied landings would be in the Pas de Calais, so concentrated on defending that area. But of course the attacks came in on the Normandy beaches further west, reducing the damage to places like Henin-Beaumont.

Economically, the Henin-Beaumont area had depended on coal mining, but this has been in decline for a while, and there is now diversified light industry. Historically the left has had a healthy presence in the area, which Hervé Poly, the head of the Communist Party in the district calls "land of the left, which has seen communist deputies, socialist deputies, and tomorrow will see a deputy from the Left Front, that is our wish!"

In the 2009 local elections, the ultra-right wing, anti-immigrant National Front candidate won the mayoral election, with the left candidate second. In the runoff, an independent leftist was elected mayor with the support of all parties except the National Front.

In the first round of this year's presidential elections, the eventual winner, the National Front's Marine LePen got 35.48 percent of the vote, followed by the Socialist Party's Francois Hollande with 26.82 percent, President Sarkozy with 15.76 percent and Melenchon with 11.98 percent. In the presidential runoff, Hollande got 57.86 percent and Sarkozy 42.15 percent, Marine LePen's father, Jean-Marie LePen, got 18.6 percent of the vote in Henin-Beaumont. So the National Front's vote has doubled in the interim, showing a dangerous growth of the ultra-right.

Before Melenchon announced his candidacy, LePen had already announced hers for the same seat. Her program is viciously ultra-right wing, specializing as she does in blaming the country's troubles on immigrants and Muslims.

During the presidential elections LePen, a dynamic campaigner and articulate if nasty public speaker, managed to get Sarkozy to issue his own threats against immigrants, and the victorious Socialist candidate, Hollande, even followed suit to a smaller degree. However, Melenchon, just as effective a campaigner as LePen if not more so, has remained rock-firm against this kind of demagogy. It is a safe bet that the Henin-Beaumont campaign will be full of fireworks, and that France's immigrant communities will find a defender in Melenchon.

At writing, it appears that the Socialist Party will also have a candidate in Henin-Beaumont.

The overall national results of the June 10 and 17 elections are vitally important. If the Socialists, Communists and allies increase their representation, Hollande will be able to push forward his program of change, and of resistance to the austerity policies being pushed by the European right. If, on the other hand, the right and ultra-right pick up seats, he will have a hard time governing, let alone achieving changes in direction.

Currently, the breakdown in the National Assembly has Sarkozy's right wing UMP and allies holding 344 of 577 seats. The left alliance of Socialists, Communists and allies holds 227. The National Front did not win any seats in 2007, but is almost sure to this time around given LePen's result in the presidential election. So a defeat for LePen by the left in Henin-Beaumont would be of great symbolic importance.

Photo: Jean Luc Melenchon speaks with media. Claude Paris/AP