Unspinning the News
misled by a line stolen from ancient cold war copy about Russia and China, calling the uniform "a symbolic act in a country where small signals often carry enormous significance." What? Cross that out, too. I don't know if it was ever even true about Russia or China. But, in fact, Cuba is a place where leaders, almost uniquely, very close to always mean what they say. US media never report that because, as business oriented Americans, they can't conceive of it.
In the first place, Fidel was attending a student peace rally. The Granma story (which you can link to from this website) gives some space to a student speaker, too.
The rally began at 7:30 a.m. The first speaker was the president of the Cuban Federation of University Students, Maydel Gonzalez, who expressed the Cuban students’ support of the struggle to prevent a nuclear war.
"The university is a symbol of peace. We are here to prevent war. We are all committed to a love for life. Let us unite and bring this message to all corners of the world, war is not an alternative," said the youth leader.
Fidel was undoubtedly there partly to publicly show he's relatively healthy again, i.e. no longer wearing loose convalescent clothing and no longer confining his appearances to physically easy settings, but also, by supporting the students, whose 2010 pacifism is very timely in a world where wars are spreading, war profits are growing, and the US is deploying more troops more widely, to underscore that Cuba is a country at peace, qualified to critique the brawling world by its honest position on the sidelines, picking fights with no one and with no enemies except those rogue states which arbitrarily call Cuba their enemy and act accordingly.
To me, the significance of the story is (1) that Fidel is still popular with a lot of Cuban youth (if not all) and can still expose himself without fear on a scene as impossible to protect as the university stairs; (2) that his 32-minute speech outdoors, standing up, amounted to a better show of strength than the last time I saw him in public; and (3) that Fidel, the columnist, obviously the elder statesman, though he still sees the big picture more clearly than US politicians and certainly still speaks better than they do, may be, with age, getting a little uncharacteristically confused, since his focus on an imminent nuclear war seems to me a little overblown and a little off target. But only a little.
I think there is actually more will in the world NOW to prevent a nuclear war than ever, and, though the danger of nuclear war always exists and is exacerbated by the growing hysteria of religious nuts everywhere who are capable of using any weapon they get their hands on AND by public acceptance of a succession of belligerent US presidents overtly refusing to rule out a nuclear counter attack or even a pre-emptive attack, what looms much larger and would be a subject more worthy of Fidel is the fact that the US (and its allies and all their arms industries) are ALREADY engaged in what looks like a state of permanent global warfare for profit.
For the umpteenth time (see Misconceptions About Cuba on this website), Fidel did not "turn power over to his younger brother." Raul was the first vice president when Fidel decided he was too ill to continue, and he stepped into the office initially as any vice president in the world would, and he was later appointed president by the Council of State under rules set forth by the Cuban constitution.
-Glen Roberts
Prisoner release in Cuba misinterpreted by US media
14 August 2010:
US media are sure to misinterpret every story they tell you about Cuba,
because they misinterpret Cuba, both on purpose and because they really
don't understand it. I don't fully understand Cuba's decision, now, to
move some prisoners to facilities closer to their families, and to release
others, though, apparently unlike The Times, I have read Cuba's
explanation, which is appended below. But I can tell you some things to
help uncorkscrew the misinterpretation you get from The Times or
from Hillary Clinton doing photo ops.
First, if you believe there are "rogue states"
(besides the US), whose leaders rub their hands together and say, "Heh heh heh," or gnash their teeth and say, "Curses! Foiled again!" you'd do well to set that myth aside and forget it. Cuba is not a "rogue state" and, in stark contrast to Clinton, Biden and Obama, its leaders have GOT their act together.
Second, ignore the oddly scatter-shot implication that having political prisoners is heinous for some countries, though not others. Lots of countries have political prisoners. The US, maybe the only country to make it a political crime to defend your own country from the US, may have the most. Cuba's currently notorious political prisoners, all of whom were duly charged, tried, and convicted, were jailed for treason, which is a crime in most countries.
Third, don't believe the tale that the 75 Cubans jailed in '03 are heroes like the Hollywood image of the French resistance in WWII, being punished for speaking freely. In fact, they were caught conspiring with Cuba's self-declared enemies, the eternally frantic exiles in Miami supported by Washington and a series of US interests officers in Havana. It doesn't matter what their activities were. They weren't convicted of being writers. They were convicted of being paid, trained, and supervised by US agents to subvert and try to overthrow the revolutionary government.
Fourth, Cuba did not just now suddenly become ashamed and decide to repent by releasing political prisoners. Ever since their arrest, the '03 detainees have, a few at a time, been being paroled early. This policy is now being accelerated. A Cuban statement about this was published in Granma and is reproduced below.
Finally, I'm telling you for sure, ostentatiously starving himself does not make a Cuban dissident or anyone else a respectable authority on anything.
Cuban statement published in Granma:
Today, Wednesday July 7 at midday, Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino was received by Cuban President Raul Castro. The meeting was also attended by Spain’s Foreign Affairs and Cooperation Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos and Cuban Foreign Affairs Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla.
Hours before the meeting took place, Cardinal Ortega had held a joint working meeting with Ministers Moratinos and Rodriguez Parrilla.
Today´s meetings dealt with the process opened last May 19 when President Raul Castro Ruz received Cardinal Jaime Ortega and the president of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of Cuba, Monsignor Dionisio Garcia Ibañez.
Up to date, the development of this process has allowed the release of one prisoner and the transfer of another twelve inmates to the provinces where they reside.
In the context of today’s meetings, and giving continuity to the aforementioned process, Cardinal Ortega was informed that over the next few hours another six prisoners will be transferred to their provinces of residence and that another five will be released and will be able to travel to Spain accompanied by their families.
The Cuban authorities also informed that the remaining 47 prisoners of the group arrested in 2003 will be released and will be able to leave the country. This process will conclude in a three-to-four-month period starting from now.
This process has taken into account the proposals previously expressed to Cardinal Ortega by the relatives of the inmates.
Whatever's
up down south
needs clearer focus
4 March 2010:
Too slow. Too slow. Maybe so long overdue that being too
late doesn't really matter anymore, but too slow, anyway. Something IS
happening in Latin America. But so like the movement of rheumatoid old
men is the happening that to tell WHAT is happening is even harder than
spotting that it IS happening.
OK, YES. It's faster than the coming of "change"
under Obama in the US, but "hope" for the US started wilting when Tom
Jefferson retired. I'm talking about more progressive places.
Two days after I wrote two weeks ago that I saw no sign that day of any dramatic moves to revitalize the new Latin American socialist revolution, 32 countries meeting at a Latin American president's summit in Cancun talked about too many other things but, in the midst (maybe at the top) of the agenda, they talked for sure about a new Latin American organization to replace the OAS (or so Hugo Chavez suggested), leaving the US out. Wow! Reading this in Al Jazeera I thought, maybe I spoke to soon.
But BBC only reported some anti-UK discussion of the Falklands at a meeting of some sort in Cancun. US papers eventually reported some such meeting as if it were a peon labor union workshop acknowledged and OK'd by the boss. They made a much bigger, disgracefully one-sided story of a Cuban convict who starved himself to death, without bothering to compare the singular event with the thousands of similar deaths that take place annually in US prisons.
Mexican newspapers featured pictures of Raul Castro and Hugo Chaves clasping hands over their heads in Cancun and reported some anger directed at right-wing presidents Alan Garcia of Peru, Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, and the newly elected but not yet right-wing president of Chile, Sebastian Pinera, for urging inclusion of the US.
The worst of it was that the discussion was continued until the presidential summiteers meet again in Caracas next year. Next YEAR? OK. I'm going to hope, without much clarification coming from anywhere, that the new international group proposed is intended only as an umbrella for several already US free regional Latin American groups that already exist, including ALBA, which have lots of international activities already underway, like the project to help Haiti set up a health care system, to be led by Cuba. International mutual assistance is a Cuban specialty, and Raul's much heralded participation in the Cancun meeting signals Cuba's intention to be deeply involved with any new organization to be founded. That's the best of it.
But I'm not happy with an organization that might indiscriminately include 32 countries, some of which will certainly act as proxies for the US, balk at key moves toward socialism, and clog the works. I'm not happy with the emergence of yet another organization - with the further alphabet-soupization of Latin American progressivism. This proliferation of organizations confuses and minimizes the point, which would be better served if all the existing regional groups attempting to make Latin American business Latin America's business all joined ALBA, which began with a Cuba/Venezuela alliance, which made most sense most emphatically.
US meddling, people's failure combine to doom revolutions
21 February 2010: Chile's recent electoral regression (returning their presidency to conservative hands) and, just before that, Honduras's actually inevitable mini-revolutionary failure can both probably be chalked up to the poisonous influence of Washington, but, whatever you think you think, dear readers, and no matter how many of you think it, it's plain to me that "the" people in both places had a lot to do with the torpedoing of their own future.
At the time of Manuel Zelaya's ouster and first response, my own logical doubts that he had any chance in a country occupied by BOTH the US AND the Honduran people earned me some virulent censure from suddenly fervent bloggers who considered me a traitor to THEIR pro-democracy stance, a religious stance I couldn't betray since I'd never shared it (see Civil State and Democracy on my other site). As a revolutionary for civilization (see Me & Marx on my other site), I'm a communist, because civilization, should it ever be achieved, must be largely defined by strict adherence to an absolutely fair social and economic contract. But, in fact, to any charge that I lack faith in the wisdom of "the" people, I plead guilty. I have NO faith in "the" people's wisdom or in their revolutionary reliability because I am a realist, and in the real world there's not much evidence to justify any such faith.
In the real world, besides ceremonially resting (without much apparent risk to the rich) in the slippery hands of "the" people, who can almost be counted on to switch back and forth between their own side and the wrong side every other election, any hope of wresting actual control from the so-far firmly grasping hands of the rich behind all supposedly (conveniently) democratic scenes, must rest in the hands of frustratingly uncertain revolutionary leaders (who are also, of course, people).
In several posts starting last July 2, besides pointing out the true Obama/Clinton agenda, I declared my hope that Zelaya would succeed, join ALBA, and enlist another Latin American country into what I hoped was a new socialist revolution. And I think that if the Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean presidents had at that time very pointedly joined ALBA, and if ALBA leaders had then decisively withdrawn from the OAS and taken firm steps on Honduras as ALBA, unambiguously declaring that the US must never again be allowed to overthrow Latin American states, Zelaya might have succeeded, Chile's election might not have been lost, and Obama might have been forced to reverse his move into the Republican camp.
But none of that happened, and now, major western media have disappeared ALBA from the news, a strategy that has worked in the past, as all weaklings submissively jump on the insider band wagon. Maybe not, but Chile is going to be at least four years behind the pace now, and you can bet the CIA is working hard to end the Kirchner era in Argentina. And, though the Venezuelan and Bolivian revolutions are clearly still moving forward (slowly), no dramatic international moves to invigorate any all-Latin America revolutionary move (that I know of) is surfacing as of today, Sunday, February 2l, 2010.
Maybe my hopes aren't realistic. I think they are. I think that (as always) it's the world outside my head that's not realistic. But my support for ALBA (Latin America's Bolivarian Alternative) is based on my assumption, based in turn on good but not perfect evidence that ALBA and other leftist Latin American leaders, including now maybe irrelevant Michelle Bachelet, recognize the unfairness of competitive economics and that each went into office aiming to eventually achieve social and economic equality in his or her country.
I do not assume they are all as philosophically sophisticated as they should be, but I have been assuming that each understands or is at least capable and on the verge of understanding that the purpose of a civil state is to provide ALL its participants a good life, and that their undoubtedly varied concepts of an ideal civil state are at least evolving toward an approximation of the definition of a civil state set forth on my other website.
Actually, calls for clarification within ALBA several months ago by Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa suggested that some or most of the ALBA leaders really are politically, socially and economically on my screen, but I've never read or heard anything clearly indicating that any of them, except possibly Fidel, are as ecologically or philosophically as sophisticated as they ought to be. And this is important because, in reality, the political, social, economic failure of humanity is overshadowed by their ecological and philosophical failure.
My support for ALBA is academic, of course, since it's clear to me that all political and social crusading is vain in a collapsing, i.e. literally dying ecosphere.
"Success" of Honduran election threatens Latin American political progress
29 November 2009: Embedded internet news sites barely bothered to report tonight that other Latin American countries won't recognize today's post coup Honduran election because its acceptance legitimizes the coup and will encourage other coups. That's as deep as the reports got. It's probably as deep as tomorrow morning's western newspapers will go.
I just asked Al Jazeera if they're going to leave that fear unexplained. I pointed out that their own credibility hangs on the answer. The same goes for all embedded media that fulfill my expectations. My own credibility should grow a bit, though.
That 60% of eligible Honduran voters reportedly voted (maybe that's not true), almost all of them voting for the two regressive insider candidates, is a crying shame. But I long ago predicted it, because I believed based on my own experience in the country that most Hondurans, like most Americans, are thoroughly and successfully brainwashed anti-communists.
US media will not explain this, but Barack Obama supported the coup against President Manuel Zelaya from the start (Oh yes he did) because, thinking exactly like George Bush or Ronald Reagan (or, let's face it, like any other Democratic US president would), he feared that Zelaya was "going Castro's way," that he was going to succumb to Hugo Chavez' influence, which, by the way, is exactly what the unfortunately regressive Honduran voters thought THEY feared.
I doubt Obama or his CIA advisors feared Honduras would actually be the next domino to fall in the most under-reported story in the world today, i.e. the movement of one Latin American country after another away from US domination and toward civilized socialism. US military presence inside Honduras is too strong to allow that to happen. But he feared the embarrassment (to Washington) of even a strong Honduran twist to the left and the greater embarrassment if the US were forced, in response, to bare its brutal fascist face there.
That may happen yet, if the probably minority progressive Hondurans who have been raging in the streets for the last five months decide not to give up - but to go into the mountains. Honduras did not have a guerrilla movement in the 80's, as neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala did, but they have the possible beginnings of one now. That's just a thought I can't expand on without being there, which isn't in my personal cards right now. So to get an idea if that or something else less explosive but maybe still a threat to US hegemony is in the offing, link from the bottom of my front page to Narco News.
Meanwhile, Jose Mujica, an unrepentant former leftist guerrilla, by winning a run-off election in Uruguay today, succeeded Tabare Vazquez as the second consecutive new left wave president in that country. An important aspect of the Uruguayan election was that Vasquez served only the one term allowed by the constitution, but that's OK because the socialist movement will go on under Mujica. It has become tacitly accepted in Latin America in recent years that the success of the Cuban revolution is owed to the continuity of leadership there. That's why Hugo Chavez sought and got an end to term limits in Venezuela and Evo Morales did the same thing in Bolivia and Daniel Ortega has done the same in Nicaragua. In Argentina, the Kirchners have bypassed term limits by succeeding each other (only once so far). And what the US puppets in Honduras who overthrew Zelaya suspected was that Zelaya was going to abolish term limits so that he could continue in office long enough to do some good.
All this makes sense because what poor Latin Americans (the vast majority) need most is not democracy but a better life. And to achieve that end, democratic elections that did nothing but change the faces every 4 or 6 years have never done them any good. They need continuity of progressive leadership - either one leader like Fidel or Hugo who will stick to the project or a series of like-minded leaders who do the same until they successfully escape the capitalist jungle and reach a state of civilized socialism.
It's too bad that Barack Obama right now appears unwilling to understand that, because the most serious obstacle faced by Latin Americans is not the compromising of democracy but the strong actual probability that the US will try to stop them. And THAT's why Hugo Chavez is reacting so angrily to the deployment of US troops in Colombia. It's not, as US media pretend, that he is jealous of his personal power. It's that Colombia is the only large fascist country left in South America, and Washington's stated reasons for a surge of military presence there is, besides the war-on-drugs scam, to be in position to confront US "enemies" in the region.
This is the situation that justifies fears of more attempted coups in Latin America like the one that just wrapped up its success in Honduras and was very openly approved by the US State Department today. On November 29 2009, that's the way it is.
Was new Honduran script always up US sleeve?
4 November 2009: I don't know. Today's Al Jazeera report of a Clinton spokesperson's denial of any US determination to restore the ousted President Manuel Zelaya to office as part of the re-stabilizing of Honduras DOES seem to contradict yesterday's understanding of the deal, but whose understanding was it? It's interesting that Zelaya didn't accuse his usurpers of treachery today; he wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton begging her to assure him he hadn't understood HER wrong.
This means he knows who's boss. And apparently so does interim President Roberto Micheletti, since his just issued resignation announcement, especially the part about him stepping aside to clear the way for "a government of national reconciliation" (not for Zelaya) didn't necessarily contradict anything Washington has said before and the implication that Micheletti and Zelaya are equally in the way fits perfectly into the comic book story of the US as the virtuously neutral peacemaker, a story that American news consumers, certainly including pseudo progressive Obama supporters, will eagerly swallow. Last week's many implications that the US would put Zelaya back into the presidency can be easily blurred over and forgotten in the US. US media specialize in that kind of stuff, and international media will probably cooperate, too. Al Jazeera is already doing it.
Zelaya's reported request that Clinton "clarify to the Honduran people if the [US] position condemning the coup d'etat has been changed or modified" seems well calculated to embarrass her and Obama, but it might not. In my July 7 posting, I imagined Clinton only assuring Zelaya that she'd get his usurpers to let him come home with a clean slate, and I still think I imagined right, because, while the rest of the world was clearly enough appalled by the coup makers who barbarously yanked Zelaya out of bed and exiled him in the middle of the night, Obama's first reaction on June 28 had been just as clearly directed at "ALL actors" in the Honduran tiff, as if he were less concerned by the coup than by the disagreement that led to it.
Al Jazeera, which is not as sharp as a tack on Latin American affairs, quotes a Cato Institute source's doubt that "the Honduran congress (will) bend to US pressure on Zelaya's planned return to power," and the same source's disingenuous assertion that If Zelaya isn't reinstated, "it certainly will be a diplomatic embarrassment for the United States since they pressured so much for his reinstatement and even threatened to not recognize the election results." The point of that absurdity is to con Americans that the US isn't telling the Honduras Congress what to do.
But they certainly are. The final negotiations, regardless of how long they were dramatically dragged out, began with a night time meeting at the US Embassy (this WAS reported, folks) where the coupsters got their marching orders. The four member panel that contrived the deal was stacked, certainly by the US State Department, 3-1 against Zelaya, consisting of his rep, the usurpers' rep, a US cabinet minister, and a Chilean conservative.
As for the elections (which, IF they're rigged, are ALREADY rigged), international observation of the voting procedure will satisfy most critics that they're fine (it always does), Micheletti's resignation will be enough to assure a world eager to be assured that NOT being held under his regime (sort of) will serve just as well as BEING held under a Zelaya regime to purify them; and Zelaya's return to private life (not jailed after all) will seem to counter Hugo Chavez' supposed attempt to subvert another Latin American country, which is the most important US objective.
Couldn't the Honduran people get so angry at this swindle (it was already a swindle) that they really revolt big time? Yeah. That could happen. But I don't think it will.
Honduras story posted Oct. 8 still works
2 November 2009:You COULD just re-read the October 8 story posted below.If things go as expected (as intended by Washington all along), maybe this week, maybe the next or the next, leaving out Hillary Clinton's blather and your favorite embedded newspaper's claim that the US has finally restored democracy in Honduras, the ousted president Zelaya's days of dangling out in the cold will be done, his chief nemesis Micheletti will (a) stop stalling or (b) end his assigned charade, and all will be as before, with this month's elections somehow magically purified.
In fact,if the elections have already been rigged, they're rigged.If all the candidates were already US approved puppets, they're all still US approved puppets. But the official story is that if it happens after an obediently smiling Zelaya is back in office (even if sans balls), the elections are OK.
Remember how a just elected and immediately ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristides was kept dangling in exile for 4 years until the US put him back in office and restored democracy in Haiti just before the next election of a more familiar and manageable former prime minister. This has been a capsule version of the same comedy.
The point is that Honduras goes on as before, US dominance has been reasserted, Hugo Chavez has been foiled (your favorite newspaper will imply), the new leftist revolution in Latin America will have apparently stumbled, and, if Fidel is right (which he usually is}, more such regressive coups will have been encouraged.
However, off your severely censored screen, the new leftist ruling party of Uruguay has just won a second term without lifting term limits, and Daniel Ortega has just won the right to run again in Nicaragua. Keep tuned in here and through this website's links.
Now read the October 8 story below, pretend it was posted today, and you'll be right up to date.
Peace exactly as usual may be close in Honduras
8 October 2009: It's hard to tell if embedded media have the final word now from their favorite insiders or if they're just conjuring an outcome in Honduras that they, as good Republicans, want. I'm reading between the lines. But today's embedded press reports have coup president Roberto Micheletti "softening" his stance and ousted President Manuel Zelaya probably already signed onto the final deal - that is, he gets to be first for peace (and maybe president) rather than right. To the media and their gullible audience all conflict is generic conflict and peace talks leading to peace are the only conceivably desirable end.
So, if today's reports are right, peace may soon be restored to Honduras, between three and four months after the coup, probably before the elections there in November, under the exact terms set forth by Barack Obama on June 28.
Terms of agreement reportedly anticipated today make it clear (to me) that an end to "repression of the people" (meaning only that the cops will stop beating up anti-coup demonstrators) will take the place of any concern for the historic plight of the poor; Zelaya's support of US compromise terms will take the place of his supposed former intentions to move Honduras to the left; Micheletti, after a suitable delay, will obey US embassy orders and accept the original Arias/Obama/Clinton plan; media will report peace and reconciliation; and Latin American history will go on as before in Honduras UNDER the familiar US thumb and "FREE" of any pesky influence by Hugo Chavez.
On June 28 (see July 2 below), after being PUBLICLY surprised by the coup and claiming to be "deeply concerned," Obama called on "ALL (my caps) political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms (by which he meant business as usual), the rule of law and the tenets of the inter-American Democratic Charter" and to take care of their own problems "through dialogue free from any outside interference (by which he meant Hugo Chavez)."
This was typical wormy Obamaesque which meant what I told you it meant on July 2 and which, in fact, the LA Times, also on July 2, told you it meant in a buried paragraph which, even if it had been printed in red, probably couldn't have gotten past the politically correct denial bump of the pseudo-progressive Obama supporters.
US officials said they would not take action on a threatened aid cutoff until after
the OAS secretary-general reported to the organization on his attempt to negotiate a
settlement. The United States expects Zelaya to change his approach enough for him
to work with the political opposition that threw him out, a senior Obama administration
official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity
of the issue.
The subsequent desperate certainty of US pseudo-progressives that it was Hillary Clinton in peace broker's costume who then betrayed her boss by manipulating the situation to block Honduran participation in the recent Latin American movement to the left is pure denial based on no evidence except their mystic rapport with the Obama myth they still think they elected.
The embedded media won't even touch the question, but if I'm right, and I probably am and will be eventually in any case, I will be left mystified as to why Brazil let its embassy be used to promote the swindle.
As Honduran flap dies,
media revise their lies
3 September 2009: Western media reported today that the US had just announced its decision to suspend non-humanitarian aid to Honduras. But did any live reporter on hand ask, or did any editor receiving the press release call up and ask, "What about military aid?"
Do you think you've read this story before? You have - though not quite. The insiders in the government and media who play with your mind often repeat themselves in order to redefine history so you won't be rebelliously confused about things. But if you're not too confused to remember things you're not supposed to remember without official help, you're right. The first time around on this merry-go-round, Obama did indeed declare that Honduran Military aid would be cut off. Obviously, that was nonsense then (as I explained on this website at the time) and nonsense it would remain if ever mentioned again. This doesn't necessarily mean the media have forgotten the issue. The US military connection with Honduras has always been and still is of critical importance. And they can't shoot a reporter if he or she asks about it. But the embedded media play the game their way, not your way. Always.
And the game today was not to let you know what's up. Very little is apparently up, except for those who think the end-all and be-all of social history is for "the" people to rise up and shout slogans together. You can find out what's up in that vein (even if the mainstream media doesn't tell you) by reading the Narco News every day - which I link to even though I don't share that site's excitement about the current protest activity in Honduras. And by reading Narco News and Chavezcode.com and Fidel's columns in Granma (all linked at the bottom of the front page) for the last two months, you can find out a lot your regular embedded news source hasn't been telling you about the Honduras situation.
But the truth is that the Honduras situation has bogged down. Hope that Honduras would rise up and go "Castro's way" is just about dead. Exiled President Zelaya's continued flocking together with Hillary Clinton type birds indicates he isn't another Hugo Chavez and strongly suggests he does not really believe his people would follow him if he tried to lead a serious revolution. I think I agree with him on that, because I don't think the people in the Honduran streets right now constitute a resolute majority. And the fact that actually (hopefully really) progressive Latin American leaders are focusing on US meddling in Colombia instead now suggests they may agree, too. Their insistence that the Honduran elections coming up in November not be recognized unless Zelaya is returned to office (which will only be BY the US for US purposes, after all) is uninspired (which is why the US has co-opted the position). What if somebody THEY (the Latin American leaders) like is elected?
Anyway, the US is certainly not breaking ties with Honduras, especially not military ties, and today's news was only part of a game being played by the Obama administration, which looks exactly like the Latin American game played by all his regressive predecessors to protect US business and profits at ANY cost. The media's job is to prepare YOU for any new "Operation Condor" (or even military action) your misleaders come up with. They'll keep doing their job and the American people will keep falling for their big lies again and again and again.
Hollywood Honduras solution scenario m-a-a-ay work - maybe
23 July 2009: When I posted my own Honduran solution three days ago (20 July, see below), I hadn't thought of the kind of plan reported today by Narco News (see link at the bottom of my front page) for enough Hondurans (many thousands) to meet exiled President Zelaya at the border tomorrow (or the next day or the next) to pacify the police and army just by their presence and then escort him to the capital with such a show of moral force that the fascists will back down. It's a long walk from the border to Tegucigalpa, and walk they must, to maximize the drama, gather marchers, and let the enemy sweat. It sounds like a movie, but it could work without bloodshed, and I hope it does.
To resolve Honduras crisis, Latin American leaders
must cut US and OAS out of the deal
20 July 2009:
Now that Oscar Arias and Hillary Clinton have failed at their supposed goals for Honduras but may be poised to deliver a coup de grâce, that will include both sides surrendering to US stage management, while another Latin American country's leftward movement is stymied, a coalition of ALBA members still seeking justice for Honduras should cut the US out of the loop, take over the project and proceed in a manner more in keeping with the 21st century Latin American socialist revolution.
Zelaya should encourage his supporters to continue peacefully protesting and growing but give up his wild plan to return to Honduras as a real-life Victor Laszlo and bring his family to Managua. At the same time, all ALBA and potential ALBA countries should cut diplomatic ties with Honduras but encourage the US to continue aid to the pariah nation, while a task force headed by Zelaya but backed by Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega, and Alvaro Colom of Guatemala work together in an internationally legal way to find a Fidel Castro among the protest leaders in Honduras to run for president there in October in the company of enough other protesters running to re-align the legislature.
But re-read my July 2 commentary on Honduras and Hondurans. Right now, nobody really knows if the Honduran majority are ready for a civilized revolution, and if they're not, a wrong move by Zelaya could provoke a lot of bloodshed for LESS than nothing, since it would be a black mark on the credibility of a continent-wide revolution that is doing very well peacefully.
Skipping the bloody theatrics, however, with an internationally observed election in the air, other Hondurans not now in the streets, who want to join, can be aroused by Hondurans abroad, by world wide publicity, and by the candidacy of an open Zelaya compañero not yet vulnerable to arrest, and then if he is elected, he can immediately tell Barack Obama (vainly I'm sure) to end the Cuban embargo, suspend all plotting against Venezuela and Bolivia, and seriously support the Latin American movement toward social and economic equality for everyone or get out of the way.
And then in January, as the legal and peaceful head of a de facto counter coup (if the US marines haven't taken over by then), he can appoint Zelaya as his vice president; sternly pardon all the June 2008 traitors; unequivocally cut military ties with the US and immediately eject all US military personnel, along with all CIA agents, from the country; and offer the people another chance to approve a revision of the constitution.
Maybe, probably, that's an impossible dream, but it's critically important that the US be cut out of at least the Latin American part of the loop, because right now, here's what's on tap. The Honduran usurpers have offered to accept other terms but to let Zelaya return only as a prisoner facing jail. Next, Arias (Clinton) will say, well then, to avoid angering the whole world any further (which can't help any Honduran government), why not let him return NOT as president but (to save your own face) with a full pardon - as an ordinary citizen with the same rights as other citizens? And if everyone including Zelaya accepts that deal or anything like it the US will have won the chess game and Fidel's prediction will have come true - that other right wing insurgencies in Latin America will have a green light to proceed.
There may be no way to avoid that result but it certainly shouldn't be allowed to happen. A civil war isn't the answer. It almost never is. But US (AND OAS) involvement should be dramatically and pointedly condemned all over Latin America, the world, and even inside the US ignorance bubble. Instead of letting this Honduran fiasco become a stumbling block, turn it into a spotlighted exposé of US meddling for the purpose of stopping the advance of civilization away from the primitive (profitable) jungle of capitalism.
US wants to rescue Zelaya with conditions
that will discourage Latin American reform
14 July 2009:
I don't read unsigned editorials, but, since I fell for the headline, I'll alert you that one sentence in today's LA Times Honduras editorial,"Zelaya should give up on his proposed referendum to tamper with the constitution and on the idea of extending presidential term limits," is THE pill. The rest is sugar coating. The writer even refrained from demonizing Hugo Chavez to smooth the pill's way down for California readers whose own idea of term limits is irrelevant to Latin American realities.
Usurpers of the government in Honduras are now talking to US congressmen through lobbyists suspected of being fellow usurpers,which is OK with Congress, since they and their president regularly usurp Latin American governments, and since most congressmen are bound to sympathize with usurpers sympathetic to US business, anyway, and will see nothing wrong with the conditions the usurpers want to impose on exiled President Zelaya.
Anyway, their conditions for Zelaya's return, as reported yesterday (July 13) by Eva Golinger, framed by an American ideologue and, according to Golinger, approved by Hillary Clinton, DO EXACTLY CORRELATE WITH AND PROBABLY CONFIRM all my analyses and predictions since the coup came off.
The "5 main terms" of the reported conditions (my source is Golinger) are that:
1. Zelaya can return to the presidency, but not to power; 2. Zelaya must not pursue any plans to reform the Constitution; 3. Zelaya must distance himself substantially from President Chávez; 4. Zelaya must share governance with the Congress and those in the coup regime; 5. Zelaya must give amnesty to all those involved in the coup.
OK. Remember that the grounds for the coup were supposedly Zelaya's ILLEGAL intention to stage a public vote for a review and possible overhaul of the Honduran constitution, a supposedly ILLEGAL act because the Honduran legislature and top court had nixed it, and also supposedly because THEY feared that for unmentionable egomaniacal reasons he wanted to change the LAW so he could be reelected for more than one term. Comparing him to Hugo Chavez didn't shore up any supposed legal case in Honduras, but Chavez' name come up I think obviously because Washington and the US business community feared he meant to lift presidential term limits for the same very good but unmentionable reasons Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales did that.
NOW COMPARE the list of conditions above to my July 12 explanation of Obama's initial reaction to the obviously barbaric, illegal and unacceptable coup when Obama only very lamely said - "that he was 'deeply concerned' and called on 'ALL political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the inter-American Democratic Charter' and to take care of their own problems 'through dialogue free from any outside interference.'" (I pointed out that) "this was AFTER the violent kidnapping of the president and yet easily translated to any Latin American news watcher not imitating a sleeping stump only as 'I sincerely hope the coup masters will let the president come back and that he will agree to stop defying the legislature and the court and hereafter ignore the influence of Hugo Chavez.'"
COMPARE to my July 9 explanation of virtually certain US motives for the coup: "the motive and opportunity belonged to the US - to Obama and Clinton and the insiders they represent. It doesn't matter how straight Arias plays it (and I have no faith in him), in the media this will become a clash between an 'emerging free enterprise democracy' and a president who wanted to 'go Castro's way.' Zelaya, by foolishly going to Washington and turning himself over to Hillary Clinton, put the issue firmly into US and OAS (a US front) hands, and that's the way the US, which desperately wants to stop Hugo Chavez and his allies from 'destabilizing' Latin America, wants it."
COMPARE to my July 7 fanciful speculations on what Hillary would tell Zelaya that day: "with an obviously phony smile (trying but failing to imitate her much slicker boss): 'Jose, we really want to help, because we are against all badness and anti freedomanddemocracyness, and we're going to try our best to get you back home, but, of course, it's got to be give and take and we've got to consider the Honduran army's feelings, too. Oh, we'll somehow work it out with them, because we all want to be friends, so don't worry, 'cause I'm sure we can persuade them to let you come back and even run for election again - or something like that - we'll see - maybe four years down the line, hmmm? But we have to give them a little something, too, like a promise that you're going to stop talking to that awful Hugo Chavez. Gee, wouldn't that fill the bill?'"
COMPARE to my July 2 analysis of Obama's attitude toward the Honduran coup when, after initially shrugging his shoulders: "under pressure from the world (and I hope from his naive pseudo progressive constituency), he (then) relatively lamely dissed the coup, but an underplayed graph deep down in the LA Times story today (July 2) went 'Click!' for any reader paying attention."
US officials said they would not take action on a threatened aid cutoff until after
the OAS secretary-general reported to the organization on his attempt to negotiate a
settlement. The United States expects Zelaya to change his approach enough for him
to work with the political opposition that threw him out, a senior Obama administration
official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity
of the issue.
"Clearly Obama, as worried as any Republican about the move toward civilized equality in Latin America, has decided to draw a line in the sand in the handiest place, an already thoroughly compromised banana republic with a docile population and a possibly shady president whose ouster may be justified."
OK. I'm duly noting (right here, right now) that there are some determined Obama fans who are appalled by people like me who are pointing the finger at their president. But this isn't a conspiracy theory. The case for certain US complicity in the Honduran coup was laid out mathematically in my July 12 posting, based on well known general truths just as hard as any more specific facts.
Even without any new anonymous quotes or intercepted State Department memos, it's a general but very hard fact that the move to stop Hugo Chavez and ALBA, a hemispheric phenomenon, is a US mission, and Barack Obama, who has not demonstrated ANY comprehension of Latin American issues (of Cuba for instance), with every opportunity to demonstrate a really "changed" stance, has instead shown Latin America and the world only the same old US anti-communist attitude that always mandates such missions. There couldn't be anything more lock-brain Republican than his declaration that he won't lift the Cuban embargo "until the Cuban people are free." That's the very Miami gusano babble that George Bush embraced.
To his determined supporters who think his supposed cut off of Honduran aid and cut off of military ties proves his honesty, HEY! Honduran aid is only in a pause mode (according to the LA Times today) and US/Honduran military ties have NOT been cut and won't be, and you can put THAT in the bank.
Announced Honduran sanctions aren't the bottom line
12 July 2009:
At the end of his very quickly published denial of responsibility for the Honduran coup, in an essay well written enough to have been waiting in a drawer, Otto Reich, a hard-wired US right-hand man whose name is, as far as I can tell, only a miraculously appropriate coincidence, assures us that IF he'd instigated it, A, B, and C would have ensued and then acknowledges that A, B, and C did, indeed, ensue. Hmmm.
I can't turn that into a confession, but the Cuban news agency accusation he was denying is certainly credible, because (a) he was also credibly accused of involvement on behalf of the US in the 2002 Venezuelan coup, (b) he was certainly in position and in the mood for involvement in both coups, and (c) the US has a history of using fanatically bitter X-Cubans like Reich, "Brothers to the Rescue," and the Alpha-66 mini-Gestapo to do dirty deeds even the CIA is (sometimes) too fastidious to touch.
Though any proof of such complicity by a former deputy Secretary of State (under Bush) who is still an agent or associate of very relevant Washington subsidiaries in Venezuela and Honduras would amount to a US smoking gun, I don't think it's necessary. I expect a paper trail to show up sooner or later leading from US officialdom through somebody like Reich to the coup. But that some or all US agencies and entities in Honduras at the time were at least virtual accessories before the fact is certain anyway. They had to be.
Obama's Obamaesque announcement that he's cutting military "ties" with Honduras (now, or rather right away - after the fact) is like promises to pull out of Iraq, convincing proof of his innocence and sincerity only to his eager-to-hope groupies. Right now it's only words. Obama is getting famous for words that aren't executed. His verbal cutting of Honduran military ties and other aid can't be instantaneous, and as soon as a US engineered compromise between exiled Honduran President Zelaya and the Honduran junta achieves US aims, all the press conference blather can be forgotten while the military ties and aid go on uninterrupted. You can SAY he can't take the chance Zelaya won't double cross him by refusing to compromise, but he IS taking that chance. Embedded American media, after all, can be counted on to blur everything over later or bury it under another celebrity death or something.
All this is eyewash anyway, because the US embassy
(always in contact and collusion with their bureaucratic Honduran protegés),
US business interests (always chummy and influential with their rich insider
Honduran business friends and associates), the CIA (which you surely know
does and keeps doing what it does), and US military personnel (who are deeply
integrated with Honduran military IN AN ADVISORY CAPACITY) ARE there and were
there before and during the coup, which was gestating and known by insiders
(including outsider insiders) to be gestating for some time, during which
Obama's office certainly received reports (which I can accurately call progress
reports) from all and sundry, including Republican congressmen with Honduran
connections. Even US aid is conditional (something Obama is making a show
of now but it was conditional while coup plans were being hatched and reported
to him, too). And the goal of the coup, NOT to punish an Honduran politician
for manipulating the law (come on dammit!), but to stop or "foil" Hugo Chavez
and ALBA (to preserve international usury*), and (as Fidel wrote yesterday**)
to encourage other such coups in Latin America, was and is a US goal, not
a Honduran goal.
All such actors who knew what was happening and what was going to happen, whether they said, "Wow!" or "Right on!" or "OK - you're following my instructions perfectly," sure as hell didn't rush in or ring up and shout, "Stop!" or it would have stopped. So they had guilty knowledge and didn't call the cops in time, which legally translates to complicity. They were all, including Obama, accessories to a major international crime.
I knew all that, and you should have, as soon I read Obama's PUBLIC initial response, that he was "deeply concerned" and called on "ALL (my emphasis) political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms, the rule of law and the tenets of the inter-American Democratic Charter" and to take care of their own problems "through dialogue free from any outside interference." This was AFTER the violent kidnapping of the president and yet easily translated to any Latin American news watcher not imitating a sleeping stump only as "I sincerely hope the coup masters will let the president come back and that he will agree to stop defying the legislature and the court and hereafter ignore the influence of Hugo Chavez." In other words, compared to the response of the rest of the world, his greeting card verse was worse than just self incriminating. It was wormy, i.e. typically Obamaesque.
*see capitalism
under Definitions on my other site, nottalkradio.com
**see www.chavezcode.com linked
at the bottom of my front page
Negotiation farce
lets US interpret Honduras crisis
9 July 2009:
The cross-town "meeting" of Honduran crisis principals and
Oscar Arias in Costa Rica today shouldn't be happening. It is a media event
faked by Washington to legitimize a US puppet police state by treating its
coup-appointed leader and the exiled president as equals. And there's another
more obvious purpose which WILL be served and which, by being so obvious,
as predictable media coverage will certainly demonstrate, should both reveal
itself as the real issue and reveal who instigated the coup.
The motive and opportunity belonged to the US - to
Obama and Clinton and the insiders they represent. It doesn't matter how straight
Arias plays it (and I have no faith in him), in the media this will become
a clash between an "emerging free enterprise democracy" and a president who
wanted to "go Castro's way." Zelaya, by foolishly going to Washington and
turning himself over to Hillary Clinton, put the issue firmly into US and
OAS (a US front) hands, and that's the way the US, which desperately wants
to stop Hugo Chavez and his allies from "destabilizing" Latin America, wants
it.
In US foreign policy lingo, a stable country is a
country from which most of the important resources and most of the profits
flow away smoothly to somebody somewhere else who runs the world, the people
stay desperately poor enough to accept whatever wages are offered without
complaint, and any labor or rebel organizers who try to disturb that pleasant
arrangement are promptly neutralized. That's what stable means.
Almost all Latin America used to be "stable," and
the beneficiaries were US insiders, who have long hated Fidel Castro and are
now infuriated with Hugo Chavez for trying to take a continent and a half
out of their clutches. So, however innocently Jose Manuel Zelaya may have
stumbled into his predicament, he provided the US a perfect chance to strike
back because the US virtually owns Honduras - which is still "stable," by
the way. Ma-a-aybe the US puppet Honduran army's contribution was not made
in the USA, but US/Honduras history tells me that it was.
In any case, the US quickly took advantage of the
situation, with Obama making slippery statements aimed at morally neutralizing
the conflict and then Clinton taking over stage management of negotiations
in a way that also obscures the reasons a president would go left and want
to change the constitution to help him do that. In whatever newspaper or whatever
TV news show you watch now, in connection with the Honduran situation, watch
for a lot of flag waving for democracy and the opportune demonization of Hugo
Chavez and ALBA, but don't expect any clear explanation of ALBA's purposes.
Zelaya erred by going to Clinton and falling into
her trap. Arias is wrong to participate. ALBA presidents are wrong to continue
cooperating with the OAS, which they should be rushing to replace with ALBA.
They should have persuaded Zelaya to stay in Managua and used his situation
as a platform to promote and explain their progressive revolution to the world
(including poor Hondurans) and to encourage the slower leftist presidents
in the region to join, making enough noise about it to collaterally (without
any actual subversion) encourage progressives in Honduras to keep protesting
and the peoples of other countries to elect progressive presidents.
Exiled Honduran
president is going to the dog owners in Washington
7 July 2009:
Why is Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Washington (see front page
link to www.chavezcode.com)? Daniel Ortega's 80's explanation that, if the
neighbor's dog is a problem you talk to the neighbor not the dog, was fine
for Daniel, because Reagan wasn't GOING to talk to him, and his point was
well made and is still worth quoting. But Obama's not Reagan. Reagan was
a straight backward regressive. Obama's the "change" guy - remember?
Zelaya, like Obama's naive constituents, needs
to get it straight that the little smile Obama wears is a smirk. He's a velvet
gloved/iron fisted, say-this/mean-that, smirking hypocrite. Instead of plausible
denial, he has other equally transparent gimmicks: like smilingly telling
Iran or Venezuela or Cuba the outright lie that he's going to actually "listen"
to them - SO THAT, having been charmed by the promise they'll then shut up
and do what they're told. Since he says almost those very words (both parts)
every time, nobody has been fooled yet except his hopeless constituency.
Though the trick is even less convincing when it's turned by his stooges,
Republican Joe Biden and know-nothing Hillary Clinton, maybe because he's
leery of Latin America, he's now left town to peddle his smile elsewhere,
leaving Zelaya nobody to talk to but Hillary, and, for some reason, the fool
seems to be falling for it.
Here's what she'll tell him, with an obviously
phony smile (trying but failing to imitate her much slicker boss): "Jose,
we really want to help, because we are against all badness and anti freedomanddemocracyness,
and we're going to try our best to get you back home, but, of course, it's
got to be give and take and we've got to consider the Honduran army's feelings,
too. Oh, we'll somehow work it out with them, because we all want to be friends,
so don't worry, 'cause I'm sure we can persuade them to let you come back
and even run for election again - or something like that - we'll see - maybe
four years down the line, hmmm? But we have to give them a little something,
too, like a promise that you're going to stop talking to that awful Hugo
Chavez. Gee, wouldn't that fill the bill?"
I suspect, since I can't figure out why else
Zelaya is IN Washington, that it MIGHT fill HIS little bill, if all he really
wants is to be president. I wouldn't want the job. What if the next time
the armado who jerked him out of bed jerks him out of bed he shoots? Then
we'll be reading Joe Biden's explanation that "we" don't tell sovereign nations
what to do. If they want to bomb Iran just in case it might bomb them some
day or shoot their presidents when they have good reason to suspect the rats
are "going Castro"s way," that's up to them.
Continuing
Honduran crisis calls for finesse, not high noon confrontations
2 July 2009:
Once in Santa Rosa de Copan, a group of laughing soldiers asked me to take
their picture in front of their fort. Why not? Then they told me I was in
trouble because the picture I'd snapped was forbidden. While I protested
with all the good humor I could muster, one ran to the fort and brought back
an officer. The officer told me to open my camera and surrender the film
or they'd take me inside and break my arms. Since then, I've never trusted
the Honduran army.
I remembered this as President Zelaya circled the
Tegucigalpa airport an hour ago urging the soldiers below to let him land
and protect his plane. And I also thought, even if some of them seriously
tried to do that, one sniper could turn triumph into disaster.
I'm gratified to see the huge crowd of Zelaya supporters
in Narco News photos from the scene (scroll way down on the front page and
link Narco News), but I'm glad the mission was aborted today without a tragedy.
ALBA is in the right. One thinks they must somehow prevail. But surely they
could think of better ways to pressure the Honduran usurpers than by provoking
a high noon type showdown.
Of course, Obama had easier options, and if there
had been a catastrophe today (and maybe there still will be - even two dead
demonstrators is unacceptable), it has to be laid at Obama's feet. He could
have sent a US Marine guard in with Zelaya, telephoned the head presidential
hi-jacker, and ordered up some cooperation. I have no doubt of that.
But that would constitute a victory for the wrong
side of the apparent but not (in my opinion) real triangle. Much better if
the Latin American "axis of good," as Chavez once aptly called them, handle
the situation themselves. Seal the... STOP!
I just erased the rest of what I'd posted because,
on second thought, I don't think Honduras should be sealed off. Sanctions
never seem to work and they hurt too many bystanders. I'm not even sure Honduras
should have been expelled from the OAS, at least not in alliance with ALBA.
The action legitimizes the OAS, which ISN'T legitimate, and it will appear
to legitimize the compromises Obama will impose in coming negotiations.
What's called for, under the aegis of ALBA (which
all progressive Latin American countries should promptly and ostentatiously
join) is a lot of conversation, no matter how long it takes - stern dialogue,
with no sympathy or compromise offered, about president Zelaya's case AND
about the case for universal dignity and economic and social equality throughout
Latin America, always with overt diplomatic support for the Honduran poor,
but, at the same time to promote ALBA - a long and public conversation about
Latin American (and Earth) reality vigorously promoting ALBA and civilization
(some day) everywhere south of the Rio Bravo, including Honduras. But, in
contrast to the American and proxy American way (exemplified by Obama's wars
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, probably Honduras and maybe soon North Korea
and Iran), this should be ostentatiously done with less bluster and more
finesse.
Media fail to provide context for Honduran
crisis
2 July 2009: You can't elect
the truth. You can't determine whether there's a god or whether Barack Obama
is a hero or a worm by asking for a show of hands in a coffee house or a barber
shop. You can't get at the truth in Iran or Honduras today by counting protesters.
There's more to it than that.
The media who report thousands of pro-coup demonstrators
in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula facing only hundreds of pro-Zelaya demonstrators
are leaving out the hard fact that the Hondurans openly for Zelaya KNOW they
are also against the army and the cops. This isn't like when you (maybe) and
I marched in LA and San Francisco against Ronald Reagan. We faced only a slim
chance of being clubbed by an over-zealous right-wing cop, NOT the very different
risk of disappearance, torture, and death. Honduran labor unions, oppressed
indians, and would-be socialists know what they're up against, because what's
happening in Honduras isn't new. The army has even thrown out presidents before.
To understand what's going on in Honduras today, there
are contextual matters you need to know of that go beyond arithmetic. The
media are telling you daily (actually very energetically teaching you talking
points) that Honduras is "divided - polarized" but not that the split is between
a small upper-lower to upper class minority in bed with Washington and a very
poor majority - among the poorest people in the world - who have suffered
for generations from US exploitation.
Some stories, more in Al Jazeera than in the LA Times,
have noted, deep down in the gray copy and without elaboration, that there
is a long-time connection between the Honduran army and US military. Besides
leaving out the US embassy, the CIA, and huge US businesses there, all of
which regularly tell Honduran officials when to breathe (I stole that from
Fidel's column yesterday), that's putting it mildly, since the force that
arrested and exiled President Zelaya WAS the always US proxy and puppet Honduran
army.
Maybe you've forgotten (or were always oblivious)
that in the 80's, while surrounded by rebellion against a red-white-and-blue
system that's never worked for anyone but the insiders, Honduran officialdom
stayed doggedly loyal to Washington and were richly rewarded for their dog-like
treachery to the region.
I remember buying a proud Honduran post card back
then that showed a squadron of new jet fighters Reagan had just given them.
In spite of their poverty, most US aid to Honduras went to their military,
because the Honduran army was helping corporate America fight Nicaragua, the
FMLN in Salvador, and the (in their opinion) greedy poor. Since 1990 when,
following the neutralization of Nicaragua, US media disappeared Central America
from the news, you may have forgotten Honduras existed. But the multifaceted
US team on the spot didn't, and the Honduran military, like the South Korean
military, has always been maintained as a puppet "bulwark against communism."
That's why it's hard to believe that last week's
army coup against President Zelaya, after he broke a cardinal rule of that
army's sponsor by apparently joining Latin America's vigorous new move toward
socialism, wasn't instigated by Washington. Of course it was. And it wasn't
done behind Barack Obama's back. Obama made it clear in Trinidad (see 21 April
below)that he has a capitalist insider's view of Latin America, and after
the US-backed Honduran army's brutal predawn ouster of Zelaya, the wording
of his initial expressions of "concern" were about BOTH the coup AND the political
disagreement that prompted it, just as if the acceptability of a president
being yanked out of bed at the point of a gun might be negotiable if Zelaya
could relieve some of Obama's "concern" by conceding a degree of legitimacy
to the armados who yanked him out of bed. Since then, under pressure from
the world (and I hope from his naive pseudo progressive constituency), he
has relatively lamely dissed the coup, but an underplayed graph deep down
in the LA Times story today (July 2) went "Click!" for any reader paying attention.
US officials said they would not take action on
a threatened aid cutoff until after the OAS secretary-general reported to
the organization on his attempt to negotiate a settlement. The United States
expects Zelaya to agree to change his approach enough for him to work with
the political opposition that threw him out, a senior Obama administration
official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the political
sensitivity of the issue.
Clearly Obama, as worried as any Republican about
the move toward civilized equality in Latin America, has decided to draw a
line in the sand in the handiest place, an already thoroughly compromised
banana republic with a docile population and a possibly shady president whose
ouster may be justified.
I almost hate to go on (I've been through Honduras
many times and have a lot of my own resources and this could become a book),
but I have to tell even those readers who think they're agreeing with me that
the context is deep in some other ways. I'm sure Hugo Chavez, who immediately
shamed the OAS into stepping in, is also drawing a line on principal, both
about sovereignty AND about the legitimate need of Latin American leaders
to eliminate term limits to achieve the continuity of leadership that made
Cuba's success possible. But Honduras and President Jose Manuel Zelaya are
at least questionable chess pieces for his side.
I was up late last night (almost until Wimbledon)
re-reading Medea Benjamin's 1987 book (that you should read), "Don't Be
Afraid, Gringo," about the depth of poverty and official brutality in
Honduras, and I came to an anecdote about Jose Manuel Zelaya - not the current
president, his father of the same name - and his at least reputed involvement
in the torture murder of several union leaders in 1975. Sons sometimes rebel
against their fathers, but follow-up research on the internet (you can do
it, too) verified that Mr. Zelaya entered the presidency as a conservative,
has been convincingly accused of profiteering and worse, and may be illegitimately
now riding the coattails of honest leftist presidents in hopes of redemption.
Of course, his very recent left turn may be real, too.
Also, excuse me but I have to say it (I know pseudo
progressives hate this kind of thing), the Honduran people are questionable.
Popular belief that all "peoples" are equal is nonsense. Traveling repeatedly
through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua in the 80's and 90's, I
found each nationality distinctive, but I found the Hondurans starkly different.
The absence of any insurgency there, while surrounded by revolution, was partly
because they had a tradition of trade union activity instead. But the Hondurans
are simply not like the Nicaraguans or the Maya or the independently thinking
Mexicans.
For one thing, there's a much larger and poorer (and
thus more resentfully and even sometimes belligerently ignorant) poor majority
there. The middle class is tiny and the upper LOWER class tend to look down
on the really poor. Being in the huge army is about the best deal the poor
can get, and Honduran soldiers I've unhappily met are particularly eager to
lord it over their less fortunate country men - and any tourists who unfortunately
meet them. It's as though Hondurans with any kind of power feel compelled
to take out their inferiority complexes on anyone they can. All bureaucratic
encounters in Honduras are absurdly oppressive. Getting arbitrarily stopped
by cops who invent a reason to extort a bribe is common, and border crossing
experiences are the worst I've encountered anywhere.
As for ordinary Hondurans, frankly, I've always found
most of them not very likeable, but unlike the poetic and talkative Nicas,
the irrepressibly talkative Cubans, or the humorously cynical Mexicans, probably
because they take more guff from their officialdom than I do, Hondurans are
reticent, evasive and suspicious, and when I've gotten anyone to apparently
trust me enough to speak, I then wondered if they were just going along with
me. At least since 1980, the seeds of anti-communist propaganda have certainly
been energetically planted and grown spectacularly there. It's ironic that
anti-communist propaganda always works better than it should among the poor
(including in America), but it works best of all in Honduras, where too many
otherwise ordinary people have either swallowed it whole or consider it safer
to pretend they have or just find that it suits them. The result is an air
of fascism that is bound to be to some extent self fulfilling.
My point is that, though it seems wrong, the majority
in Honduras might really BE (or think they are) in favor of the army coup.
If so, the situation could work well for Obama and backfire on Chavez. On
the other hand, the army's rush to carry out the coup before the people could
vote on a review of the Honduran constitution which would probably have led
to suspension of presidential term limits may mean Obama and the Honduran
army give the Hondurans more credit than I do.
But what I'm really worried about, and this worry
may be quickly extinguished on Saturday (I hope so), is the plan of several
Latin American presidents (on July 2) to accompany Zelaya overland from Nicaragua
back into Honduras. I've been across that very uncivilized border many times,
and I REALLY fear what the soldiers manning it might do. I'll be glad to be
wrong about that. But I hope they change their minds.
But, to return to the beginning. Neither the success
or failure of Obama's or Chavez immediate strategies, nor the legitimacy of
President Zelaya, nor the crowd counts or vote counts in Honduras can change
this: that Honduras needs to join Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and the rest of
Latin America in their move away from US colonialism and the barbarism of
capitalism toward civilized socialist equality. ¥ou can't count that truth
up. You've got to understand it.
Americans 'spying' for Cuba get long prison
sentences
5 June 2009: Naturally, a BBC
story of a Washington couple arrested for spying for Cuba quotes nobody who
questions why they should be in trouble. Yet I'm sure most rational people
often wonder why any state has secret information about other peaceful states
or ANY secrets from its own citizens.
In this case, Walter and Gwendolyn Myers, who face
20 years in prison, are accused of uncovering US spy reports on Cuba (or secret
US plans AGAINST Cuba) - of being spies spying on spies. But, while it does
make sense for any honest human to think Cuba has the right to know if the
US, which is NOT a peaceful country and has no business spying on Cuba, is
secretlyplotting against Cuba, US spying on clearly peaceful Cuba is unjustifiable,
dishonorable, and expensive wheel spinning deserving exposure, since (1) Cuba's
only military secrets have to be defensive; (2) Cuba's only threat to the US,
its leadership in the forging of a new hemispheric economic order less vulnerable
to US looting, is just peaceful competition and isn't secret; and (3) US spying
apparently does no good, anyway, since, even with all that "intelligence" at
their disposal, Obama's, Clinton's, and Biden's speeches prove that those unworthies
still know almost nothing about Cuba and understand less.
What makes sense is for Washington to tell all of us
what the "200 sensitive or classified intelligence reports on the subject of
Cuba" that the Myers supposedly leaked are about. It's certainly Cuba's business
and the American taxpayers' business to know, because collecting Miami lies,
which undoubtedly make up the bulk of the material, is a waste of time and
space and money which can't possibly lead to anything good, and many of the
government's Cuba related secrets are probably about what the US is doing or
is thinking about doing that it shouldn't be doing.
Reports of Hugo Chavez threatening banks need
some shading
3 June 2009: Hugo Chavez
is in the news for threatening Venezuelan banks with "sanctions.' Of course,
that's as deep as the story goes. American media are satisfied if their well
brain washed readers just get the impression that Chavez is perversely harassing
the poor banks.
In fact, the privately owned Venezuelan banks are
reluctant to cooperate with Chavez' plans to spread the wealth. The best solution
would be to go ahead and nationalize them, but the Venezuelan president doesn't
want to do that yet. Chavez is a courageous, intelligent, capable man with
the best civilized intentions, but he's not quite an irresistible force and,
besides being unavoidably up against some (not at all immovable but) certainly
very stubbornly entrenched old guard and economic and social infrastructure,
he is also handicapped by a real need to accommodate his allies - an admirable
group of new Latin American presidents with a mandate and a huge poor majority
behind them but (in some cases) with less courage and will than he has.
So Chavez thinks he must transition somewhat gradually
away from the capitalist jungle toward civilization. The goal he shares with
Fidel and other leftist presidents is surely a fully civilized state with a
communist economic sector (see Civil State and Communism under
Definitions), but he thinks that for now he must speak only of socialism, a
transitional phase which, as long as it persists, is always vulnerable to lingering
regressive capitalist institutions. In fact, given the regressive character
of Venezuela's still intact wealthy minority, potentially disastrous subversion
may be unavoidable without speeding up the transition.
I'm sure anyone qualified to be reading this website
can think of dangers that could arise from speeding up the transition. But
I hope it's also apparent that a long history of procrastination hasn't done
the world much good, either.
Obama is lectured in Trinidad by angry Latin
American leaders
21 April 2009, I can't
say much about what went on summit-wise at the "Summit of the Americas" in
Trinidad. My best source is Fidel Castro, who wasn't there, through his Granma
column, well headed "The Secret Summit," since this was the second Latin American
presidents' meeting in less than a month to be disappeared behind a U.S. leader's
photo op.
Almost all western media wrote it up as a clip-out
for Obama fans, blurring over the off-THEIR-screen back talk from a crowd that
WASN'T Obama's fan club. Like loyal embedded press who didn't understand the
issues,anyway, they focused on pix of Obama and read-outs from his slick and
speechy but shallow pronouncements, mixing what he said to the press, to the
assembly, and to private groups of sycophants, with no concern for clarity
or the possibility that anyone in the audience wasn't clapping.
The impression given is of a remote rose garden
meeting of plantation peon reps and their new boss, whom at least the SF Chronicle
had expected to be greeted like a "rock star." Some selected grumbling is mentioned,
a little in this story and a little in that, as a kind of vague context for
the new boss's triumph. But the starry-eyed press is as convinced as Obama
himself that the empty oratorical flourishing and self-consciously velvet gloved
whip cracking that has become his and Hillary Clinton's trademark will both
win the necessary respect of the peons, impress readers, and continue to delight
Obama's heroically oblivious supporters.
I wrote March 30, though (see below), that I would
expect a response to Joe Biden's arrogance in Santiago, and behind the newsprint
veil, my expectations were met in Trinidad. Apparently, while media have been
going on and on and (JHC!) ON about Washington's beautiful new facial expression
and studiously or stupidly ignoring the growing world-wide anger of everyone
who recognizes the same-ol' American whip-hand, the Latin American presidents
who really didn't like being lashed by Biden in March have been lying in wait
for their chance at his fool boss in April.
BBC called it a "sour note" (in the Obama debut symphony
they were stubbornly directing) when Evo Morales demanded an apology for the
Obama State Department's role in a recent attempt to assassinate him (I don't
know about that, but neither do you). But the Bolivian president was actually
perfectly on key.
I'm sure the actual new leaders of the free world
came hoping to disarm America's swell-headed pretender with a generous measure
of diplomatic applause and friendliness up to a point, but I doubt they were
surprised when he stupidly repeated Biden's recitation that the embargo couldn't
be expeditiously ended because "the Cuban people still aren't free" (see the
definition of freedom
on my other website). In fact, they arrived in Trinidad already angry.
Hugo Chavez didn't just run out to the hotel bookstore
for a copy of Eduardo Galeano's " Open Veins of Latin America" and present
it to Obama as a spontaneous response to the American's presumptuous explanation
to a group of new socialist leaders that poverty must be alleviated "from the
bottom up (?)". Obviously, Hugo already knew that his junior colleague needed
educating.
Argentine President Cristina Kirchner wasn't just
ad libbing in response to Obama's asininely boss-like (or Fox News-like) advice
not to blame America for all their problems when she read off a litany of U.S.
business, political, and CIA sins against civilization.
And though Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega's address
was apparently not pre-written, he was only freshly motivated by Obama's repeating
Biden's slander of Cuba when, as part of a list of Nicaraguan grievances against
a comprehensive list of U.S. presidents, he expressed everyone's "shame" for
attending a supposed "summit" from which Cuba was excluded not by the majority,
nor (as the media said) by anonymous organizers, but by the U.S.
Ortega also vainly reminded the comatose press that
Latin America has recently started organizing their own new trading bloc, quarter-world
bank, and progressive summit organization - the most important news blacked
out of the main stream media story from Santiago.
Readers may not know, since the media never remind
them, that The "Summit of the Americas" is an entirely U.S. stage show, invented
by George Bush I just before he left office, for the specific purpose of isolating
Cuba, then being described as regularly as a pop song by tacitly obedient American
media as "the only country in the hemisphere still not free" (see #10 under
Misconceptions About Cuba on this
website). All the command delegates know that and, had they not had slight
hopes for Obama, it wouldn't have surprised me if they'd all boycotted the
Trinidad conference.
In effect, they probably ended its run, as they refused
to sign a "mission accomplished" type summit summary document (written two
years ago in the U.S.) until it declares capitalism the hemisphere's worst
problem and until it adds Cuba to the membership list.
After Obama demonstrated the same velvet insult technique
that isn't fooling Iran by offering to smilingly "listen" to Cuba's admissions
of guilt, and after Raul Castro obviously ironically responded on the radio
from Caracas that he will talk with Obama about several things including a
prisoner exchange, Hillary Clinton dizzily burbled that Raul seemed to be admitting
his errors, but only Obama's team and most of the press were confused.
Just one news account I read that day called Raul's
radio speech "fiery" and "reminiscent of his brother," meaning when Fidel was
angry. And the Washington Post registered two days later that he was actually
offering to trade Obama any Cuban convicts Obama miscalled "political prisoners"
(see my Friendy Critique Of Cuban Press Freedom
for the truth about those guys) for the 5 Cubans jailed in America for spying
NOT on America but on the Miami mafia. But I believe (I hope) Raul's point,
talking about a "prisoner exchange", was that since the embargo, which is based
on the WWII American Trading With The Enemy Act is to be continued,
the opposing commanders in chief could do some legitimately war-related stuff
like that.
In his column, Fidel virtually told Obama to stop
talking and just end the embargo. He characterized Obama's reference to the
embargo as "aspero y evasivo." The few accounts that have mentioned Fidel's
response translated aspero as terse or gruff, but Fidel
meant that Obama's apparent understanding of his subject was abrasively and
insultingly inadequate, and he added that, being over half as old as Fidel,
Obama was old enough to understand things better than that.
Fidel really nailed Obama as a specimen, however (pay
attention NOW Obama fan club), when he reacted to Obama's ostentatiously diplomatic
admission that Cuba's practice of sending medical missions to other countries
that need them has been more effective than U.S. military missions in gaining
influence for the Cubans. The most highly respected chief of state in the world
explained, "We the Cubans don't do that to gain influence."
President Obama, to whom it is now clear the purpose
of power is power, even if he'd read that might not have understood it or even
believed it, but outside the U.S. ignorance bubble it's understood and believed,
which is why all of Latin America is "going Castro's way (see 20 February below)."
But Obama, who was invited to come along but failed the test when his false
summit collapsed (but who may have been comforted when he was cheered the next
day by CIA torturers he was defending), may not be welcome now in the newly
blossoming progressive government's organization, ALBA (dawn), which, though
still ignored by regressive media, will hopefully soon be leaving the U.S.
dominated OAS behind.
(To follow up this analysis, read
If Not Democracy, What? under On Political Philosophy under Notes To Nowhere
on my other website)
US won't end Cuban embargo, Biden tells press
in Chile
30 March 2009, He said
he wasn't there to talk about Cuba, but exactly as if he'd been sent to Santiago
last weekend to remind Latin America who's boss, U.S. VP Joe Biden, speaking
(I assume) for Barack Obama, told the world and his hostess Michelle Bachelet
(who just got back from Havana) and all the other new regional presidents (who
all just got back from Havana) that the Cuban embargo won't end until the Cubans
are "free."
Since Biden's slickly insulting arrogance perfectly
echoed the 20th Century U.S. plantation-boss stance south of the Rio Bravo,
I'm now awaiting an appropriate response, both from pseudo-progressive American
Obama groupies who surely weren't expecting this, and from Latin American leaders
who surely haven't been falsely raising their poor constituents' hopes.
Brazilian President Lula de Silva, who once asked
the UN to declare inequality a human rights abuse, spoke out at the ignored
Progressive Summit (actually presented by media as a prep for a definitely
NONprogressive G20 meeting this week in Europe), accusing rich nations of turning
the world into "a giant casino," and rejecting "blind faith in the market."
But he's not reported as effectively defending Cuba from Biden's obviously
Miami inspired slanders. Maybe he did or will, but that the Brazilian president
(and other Latin American leaders) let their so-called "Progressive" Summit
meeting be turned into Biden's regressive photo op and press conference and
then went nonstop from Santiago to Doha to embrace the Arab sheiks, among the
world's worst capitalists with the least interest in equality, makes me wonder
how clear Latin America is on their own revolution.
Just talking about arrogant US bullying and exploitation
of the world, Latin America ethically HAS to support Ahmadinejad's refreshingly
logical back talk. But there's little to choose between the west and most of
the middle east. Besides the insiders further enriching their already obscenely
rich ruling families and the outsiders spreading their brutally primitive religion,
what agenda does the Arab world have? One hears of socialist gestures there
but not much and the internet doesn't turn up much, either. I'm for the Latin
American revolutionary ideal of social and economic equality, and I don't think
they should surrender any sovereignty to the systemically stratified U.S. OR
compromise their integrity by getting ambiguously chummy with the religiously
stratified Arabs.
Latin America is a big enough part of the world that,
even with only their own company, they can't be thought of as standing alone.
So I don't see how misalliances with the G20 or the Arabs help their cause.
Trading is OK, although they have everything between them they may think they
need to trade the Middle East OR the U.S. for and Cuba has done more than anybody
for its people for decades without U.S. help. So they don't absolutely NEED
to trade with any brand of fascists their integrity may antagonize.
It would mean a lot to this lost world if Latin America
stood up all together on the podium I thought they were building and, with
a clear conscience, told Biden and Obama AND the feudal Middle East: either
normalize relations with Cuba and recognize the virtue of the Cuban revolution
and the significance of our alliance with the Cuban ideal of economic and social
equality NOW or do without us!
Of course that would be revolutionary.
Media fixated on Middle East fumble Latin American
story
20 February 2009, Maybe
their grip on the Middle East is slippery, too, but thanks to Sunday school,
Christmas carols, and their own obsessive reportage including countless war
maps, even if they've got a lot of them wrong, at least they know there ARE
details there. If it wasn't about Mexican food, most western editors couldn't
pass the simplest pop quiz on Latin America, which (except for the Amazon and
Club Med) most of them think is ALL Gus Arriola's Mexico south of the one and
only border.
It's not that the places they cover aren't important.
My hometown's important and, to the Baghdadians, so's Baghdad. But I'm talking
about a place that starts right across the border from San Diego, includes
half the land area on America's half of the planet (17% of the dry world and
9% of the world population), has oil, winter fruit, art, music, dope, plenty
of newsworthy strife, and maybe the world's only respectable revolution, a
uniquely harmonious multi-country project that actually seems to be going somewhere.
I'm not mistaken. YOU just don't know about it.
Latin America, which doesn't do suicide bombing and
has only a few occasionally tense borders and no international wars, may be
the only part of the world currently progressing (muy poco a poco - very slowly)
toward political and philosophical civilization, eventually to include (if
the CIA and the U.S. Marines will stand for it) actual social and economic
equality - which makes it more important than the U.S., Europe, or the Middle
East. Yet all the embedded news media are strenuously ignoring Latin America.
When I lived in San Diego, there wasn't a highway
sign in town pointing toward Tijuana or Mexico, and there's not much sign of
the approximately 30 countries south of Imperial Beach in the San Diego
Union, either. Nor in the LA Times, SF Chronicle, NY Times or any
major U.S. media. On the world net, Al Jazeera MIGHT have one Latin American
story a day (usually the same one for a week), and BBC and CNN ditto.
A week ago, Michelle Bachelet, the president of Chile
(a country just as modern and twice as big and beautiful as California and
maybe more important right now), paid a visit to Fidel and Raul in Cuba, which
was certainly 10 X as important as Hillary Clinton's farcical runway stop in
South Korea; next day, Venezuelans voted to let themselves keep Hugo Chavez,
whom I consider on solid grounds the real "leader of the free world," as their
president for as long as they need him; then new Guatemalan President Alvaro
Colom almost stepped on Bachelet's heels as he arrived in Cuba specifically
to apologize for his country helping the U.S. attack the Bay of Pigs in 1961
- landmark stories all. But western media news-briefed the first, completely
missed the point of the second, overlooked the third, and made no connection
between them. I was reminded of how all their meager coverage of Argentine
President Cristina Kirchner's campaign, election, and inaugeration focused
on her clothes and compared her image to that of Evita or Madonna; I forget
which.
If you're very young - not even very - just young
- in fact, if you're an American of any age informed of the world mostly by
your own religiously anti-communist media, you may not know or remember that
in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's, there was a strong and rapidly spreading
revolution all over Latin America and even slopping a bit into the U.S. in
the 60's and 80's against local and colonial capitalist poverty and for socialist
dignity and eventual equality, spearheaded by armed guerrillas like FARC in
virtually every mainland Latin American country. American barbershop and coffeehouse
owls, whose predecessors hooted then of "falling dominoes," now think they
think, with media help of course and still NO grasp of their subject, that
all that ended in 1990. But it didn't.
Far from it (see Chapter Two of "Cuban Notebooks"
on this website). It didn't end because poverty didn't end and, in spite of
western media claims that communism had failed, the Cuban beacon was still
there. And, in fact, since Hugo Chavez' emergence first prompted laughable
American "suspicion" that he was "going Castro's way," newly elected leftist
presidents in EVERY South American country but the tiny Guyanas, Peru, and
Colombia have followed him. That's right - almost EVERY ONE. When the FARC
take Hugo's advice to trade their arms for amnesty and equal political participation,
now fascist Colombia will probably follow him, too, and as soon as the once
leftist now quisling Alan Garcia ends his presidential term, Peru certainly
will. And that will make a whole continent "going Castro's way" completely
off the mainstream media screen.
Isn't that a bigger better story than the bloody awful
but endlessly redundant and utterly pointless religious tribal or tribally
religious feuds of the Middle East? OK, I know all the wars (besides boosting
the arms business) are really wars for space and THAT's important, but the
editors don't even know THAT.
Bachelet's visit to Cuba was a landmark because, though
she had looked less certainly militant than other new leftist presidents, she
clearly came out when she recently hosted a South American summit in Santiago
where Evo Morales' eviction of the U.S. ambassador from Bolivia was applauded
and supported, and now she is the next to last of the new leftist presidents
to make what's apparently become (to wide awake people and certainly the CIA)
a necessary pilgrimage, a rite of passage, an initiation for membership in
the new Latin American order. They've ALL done it except the most recent, Paraguay's
President Fernando Lugo, who, from an election celebration platform he shared
with Raul Castro in Asuncion last year, shouted, "Viva Fidel!" Lujo, known as "the rebel priest" before he was elected president, is reportedly planning his Havana visit some time in the next two months.
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