- from Zoltan Zigedy is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

What happens to the US economy when the Federal Reserve stops printing money to buy mortgage based securities, treasury notes, and other bonds? What happens when that body stops injecting 85 billion dollars into the US economy every month?

These questions torture the economic pundits in the mainstream press.

Contrary to what most believe there has been no recovery. The reports from the other principal global economies have been dismal, recording stagnation or anemic growth. In the mean time, the US economy has been sustained by forced feeding. The Federal Reserve quietly prints notes and takes around 85 billion dollars worth of various securities off the market and parks them on the Fed’s balance sheets. The announced reasons for this action are to keep interest rates low, attracting borrowers, and to thus stimulate business growth and job creation. An unannounced consequence of the 85 billion dollar injection has been a surge in equity markets and housing prices. Since both stock portfolios and home values are the principal components in the psychological “wealth effect” — the subjective, personal sense of financial well-being — they have spurred the impression of recovery and consumer confidence. Behind this conjured image of recovery, the US economy continues to stagnate and erode.

Whenever the Federal Reserve has suggested that it might slow or end this life-support, markets have dropped precipitously.

Obviously, the Federal Reserve program, dubbed “quantitative easing,” is a back-door stimulus program. Not a stimulus program of the New Deal type, not public works and public jobs, but more a reclamation of the garbage piled up after the massive, destructive party thrown by the financial sector and a rekindling of the pre-crisis euphoria. No one in the political establishment, neither Republican nor Democrat, had the stomach for a full-blown New Deal program, nor did they have any desire to pass even a little of the cost of a fix-up on to their corporate masters.

So the task of recovery fell in the lap of the Federal Reserve, an ostensibly independent non-political body. The Federal Reserve is not political, except when it is. While it can’t be dictated to by the branches of government, its make-up of ivy league professors and financial industry veterans guarantees loyalty to corporate moguls. It also keeps an ear open to the powerful as well as the rich. On occasion the Fed even hears the voices from the barricades, but only when they are at the barricades!

It shares that “independence “ with the Supreme Court. Like the Supreme Court, the Fed gets occasionally chastised when it either missed or failed to get the message of a ruling class change in policy.

All central banks boast of their independence, but all listen closely for a shift in political favor. The Central Bank of Japan recently demonstrated its fealty to political change. With the election of Shinzo Abe as Prime Minister, the Bank relented to his pressure and began a policy of quantitative easing with the goal of doubling Japan’s money supply in two years. Abe, a right-wing nationalist, advocates purchasing securities and bonds through a speed-up of the Bank’s printing presses, but makes no effort to conceal his real goal: radically reducing the exchange rate of the national currency, the Yen.

Like his foreign policy initiatives, Abe’s currency policy is a bold act of aggression, in this case, economic aggression. A weak yen makes Japanese manufacturing products cheaper in global markets, giving Japan a competitive edge against other global manufacturers. The rise of Japanese nationalism has not gone unnoticed by other Asian powers. Chinese demonstrators have trashed Japanese cars in a way reminiscent of similar spectacles in the US decades ago. Japanese automobile sales have dropped sharply in the PRC.

While retaliation may well be on the horizon, the Abe policies have brought a sharp drop in the Yen’s value, but also great volatility in Asian equity markets.

Similarly, for all the US Federal Reserve’s aggressiveness in printing money, the stock market’s surge and the recovery of housing prices have masked serious issues plaguing the real US economy.

[June 2: “Investors have ignored poor economic news as stocks have risen... The Basil, Switzerland based Bank of International Settlements said... that central banks' policies of record low interest rates and monetary stimulus had helped investors “tune out” bad news-- every time an economic indicator disappointed, traders simply took that as confirmation that central banks would continue to provide stimulus.” as reported by Fox News.]

Disposable personal income growth is collapsing, for example. Excepting the 2008-2009 collapse, disposable personal income growth was lower in 2012 than any time since 1959 and is trending even lower in 2013. Not surprisingly, the personal savings rate– a rate that grew dramatically after the frivolity leading to the 2008-2009 collapse– has now dropped sharply. Clearly, workers are taking home less while reducing their savings to pay the bills. While unsustainable, this tact has buoyed consumer spending.

[May 31: The Commerce Department reported a .2% pull back in consumer spending for April, 2013.]

Manufacturing production in the US has declined for three of the last four months. Caterpillar Inc., a bell weather of the basic manufacturing sector, has witnessed factory orders of machines, calculated on a rolling three-month average, decline steadily throughout 2012, moving into negative territory at year’s end.

Hyper-exploitation in 2009, in the form of unprecedented gains of productivity growth, pulled the US economy from its nadir. But since 2009, productivity gains have slackened with a substantial decline in the last quarter of 2012 and only a very modest recovery in the first quarter of 2013. Consequently, anemic corporate revenue growth is increasingly crimping earnings, once again threatening the rate of profit.

Pressures on profit are demonstrated by the falling yield on junk bonds. The demand for yield– the never-ending search for a higher rate of profit– has driven the yield on the riskiest investments lower than at any time in recent memory (a leading high-yield bond index records a return below 5%, the lowest since records began in 1983!). Conversely, treasury bonds, once popular as a safe haven, are now commanding greater and greater yield despite the fact that the Federal Reserve gobbles them up and removes them from bond markets. Obviously, investors do not want safe Treasuries; investors do want risky junk bonds! The gap between Treasury yields and junk bond yields are narrower than any time since 2007. Are we skating on the same thin ice, the same crisis of accumulation?

Accelerating private debt in Asia suggests that much of the capital seeking higher profit growth rates has landed there. But Asia is not the hot bed of growth that it was a few years ago. The mounting private debt in Asian economies supports risky, speculative projects and services like commercial and residential real estate. With international trade tepid, these once export-leading countries are attempting to sustain growth through speculation and the hope of global recovery. The new Chinese leadership seems determined to reduce the role of the state sector, market regulation, and public financing, the very factors that allowed the PRC to painlessly weather the global crisis. They are determined to entrust the fate of the economy to global markets. The simultaneous shrinking of government debt and the explosion of private debt underline this policy shift.

[May 31: The Reserve Bank of India reported the lowest annual GDP growth rate in a decade for the end of the fiscal year, March 31.]

The once robust South American economies are also slowing. Exports to the PRC are declining and exports to the EU are on the skids, retarding growth throughout the region. Stagnant growth presents new challenges to the conservative neo-liberal regimes on the continent as well as the more progressive social democratic governments. Nor do South American economies offer any relief, as they have until recently, to the global economy.

And, of course, Europe is in a depression– a deep and profound depression. The EU as a unity faces both centrifugal and centripetal forces that challenge any policy resolution. Moreover, the major parties – conservative, liberal, and social democratic– have exhausted their policy toolboxes. Until a new road is chosen, the European Union will only drag the world economy towards a similar fate.

[May 31: Eurostat reports the EU unemployment rate reached a new high-- 12.2% in April-- the highest level ever recorded since euro-wide tracking began in 1995.]

The global economy faces two stubborn challenges: first, a crisis of accumulation and second, an insufficiency of global demand. They are, of course, inter-related, continuation of the 2008-2009 collapse, and immune to conventional treatment. The vast inequalities of wealth and the resultant massive accumulation of capital hungering for investment opportunities (driven by Marx’s tendency for the rate of profit to fall) stand at the center of the lingering crisis. Capital continues to seek increasingly risky and unproductive profit schemes, schemes that strangle productive, socially useful (but unprofitable!) activities. At the same time, the crisis has immiserated millions and idled a vast mass of human capital. Left with limited resources and limitless insecurities, these casualties of the crisis have necessarily reduced their patterns of consumption. A shrinkage in global demand followed.

Some still harbor illusions of taming capitalism and slaking its thirst for profit. As the years of crisis continue, it looks more and more like the beast must be slaughtered.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

Author Gerald Horne commenting on Russia Today on the Syrian conflict and the hard lessons of history yet to be learned by the US leadership.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9Q0O4r_z4o&feature=youtu.be

- from Zoltan Zigedy is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

In my last posting, I deplored the state of the US left, citing the rise of utopian and reformist alternatives to socialism. Deeply ingrained anti-Communism explains the ready acceptance of the shallow and muddy alternatives to capitalism served up by academic oracles like Professor Gar Alperovitz. These wishful options come at a time when more and more US citizens, especially young people, are showing a hunger to learn more about socialism. But the thin gruel of cooperatives and other small-scale and locally owned enterprises will not satisfy that hunger. Nor does monopoly capital seem too alarmed by the prescriptions of the good Professor. The threat of one, two, three… thousands of little “socialisms” has left big business singularly unmoved in spite of Alperovitz’s reach well beyond the left establishment.

Among those fans of Alperovitz who wish to slink away from Marxism and revolutionary politics it has become customary to cite Lenin’s essay “On Cooperation” from 1923. This shamefully dishonest tactic rips Lenin’s praise of agricultural cooperatives from its context. Writing at the time of the New Economic Policy, Lenin emphasizes that cooperatives are only viable because of Soviet power, the monopoly of “political power is in the hands of the working-class.” He is crystal clear on the cooperative movement under the capitalist state:
There is a lot of fantasy in the dreams of the old cooperators. Often they are ridiculously fantastic. But why are they fantastic? Because people do not understand the fundamental, the rock-bottom significance of the working-class political struggle for the overthrow of the rule of the exploiters. We have overthrown the rule of the exploiters, and much that was fantastic, even romantic, even banal in the dreams of the old cooperators is now becoming unvarnished reality.
“Fantastic, even romantic, even banal…”

Seasoned veterans of the left know that any strategy that promises to be non-threatening and enters through the front door of the monopoly media should be received with suspicion.

Occupy Revisited

For the above reason, I read a recent The New Yorker article with a jaundiced eye. While nearly everyone acknowledges that the Occupy Movement is –if not dead –splintered and marginalized, a New Yorker “critic at large” Kelefa Sanneh, picked this moment to revisit it. Moreover, the usually attuned-to-the-cutting-edge editors indulged five full pages of copy to the movement’s “godfather” and the allure of anarchism.
Just weeks ago, before the elections in Venezuela, the magazine published a long piece scathingly critical of the Bolivarian Revolution and its late leader, Hugo Chavez. No doubt with the approval of The New Yorker’s dogmatic Cold War editor David Remnick, who still sees Stalin lurking under every bed, the author revived the tired canard of Chavez “preventing a coup like the one that put him in office.” [my italics] Of course Chavez didn’t come to office through a coup, a fact that The New Yorker later acknowledged with a small correction. Certainly joining with the mainstream media to trash Chavez and his socialism doesn’t dispose me to expect The New Yorker to experience a sudden change of heart and promote any genuine alternative to capitalism. And they don’t disappoint.

Paint Bombs: David Graeber’s ‘The Democracy Project’ and the Anarchist Revival (5-13, 2013) is a stealth exercise in distraction and diversion. Where many of us saw the Occupy movement as an incipient anti-capitalist movement degraded through its failure to generate organization and focus, Sanneh sees a noble struggle against “verticals” and in defense of the procedures of the “horizontals.” Sanneh crows: “Occupy resisted those who wanted to stop it and those who wanted to organize it”.

Imagine wanting to organize the Occupy movement! The shame!

The self-styled and New Yorker-anointed guru of the “horizontal” movement is David Graeber, an anthropologist and author of an interesting, eccentric book on debt. Sanneh acclaims Graeber as “the most influential radical political thinker of the moment” (Take that, Gar Alperovitz!). The arch enemies of the “horizontal” movement are “verticals” represented by Marx, the Soviet Union, and parties, leaders, and demands. Sannah claims to see this through the prism of Occupy:
…instead of arguing about economics and ideology, the Occupiers could affirm, instead, their unanimous commitment to freedom of assembly. Occupy may have begun with a grievance against Wall Street, but the process of occupation transformed the movement , peopled by activists demanding the right to demand their rights…

Perhaps no one could say exactly what the Zuccotti Park occupation wanted, but lots of people knew how it worked.

At a critical moment in an economic crisis adversely affecting millions, the “horizontals” were able to transform a movement against Wall Street into a statement “demanding the right to demand… rights.” Thankfully, this does not characterize all Occupy experiences outside of Zuccotti Park. In many cases, Occupiers joined activists in their cities and neighborhoods fighting for health care, jobs, economic justice, and against US aggression. They found righteous demands and learned valuable lessons in organized struggle.

Sanneh concedes that the “rehabilitation of the anarchist movement in America has a lot to do with the fall of the Soviet Union, which lives in popular memory as a quaint and brutal place– an embarrassing precursor that modern, pro-democracy socialists must find ways to disavow.”

So it’s embarrassment and not ideology, disavowal and not commitment that drives the popularity of anarchism. Does this not reek of opportunism? An opportunism that prefers to swiftly and resolutely condemn and separate from the Soviet experience in the face of a “popular” inquisition rather than candidly address both the Soviet strengths and weaknesses?

However, embarrassment should be felt for the anarchist blueprint for forging a new society. Rather than the vision offered by “grim joyless revolutionaries,” Graeber wants “a kind of de-centralized socialism, with decisions made by a patchwork of local assemblies and cooperatives…” – in his own words – “something vaguely like jury duty, except non-compulsory.” Thus, the road to an other-than-capitalist future is paved with “open mics,” assemblies, cooperatives, and a fuzzy analogy.

Adding more to the anarchist strategy are the views of a fellow anthropologist and ally, Yale professor James C. Scott. Scott salutes anarchism for “its tolerance for confusion and improvisation.” He finds anarchism’s foot print in such acts of resistance as “foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absenteeism, squatting, and flight.”

“Grim joyless revolutionaries” will be surprised to learn how easy is the road forward. Instead of tiresome organizing, demonstrations and marches, instead of demands and manifestos, instead of meetings and planning sessions, instead of party-building and coalition work, acts of individual and often covert defiance mark the way.

One suspects that despite the rhetoric of radical and participatory democracy advocated by Graeber, Scott, and other anarchist “influentials,” their ideas were not forged in the cauldron of struggle, their thinking was not the product of collective, “horizontal” decisions. The professors decry leadership, but contradictorily speak authoritatively for their movement with little hesitation. They are unsanctioned spokespersons for a leaderless movement. Strange.
To appropriate an old expression: Scratch an anarchist and find an angry, embittered liberal. Like all liberals, modern-day anarchists are obsessed with procedure. It’s not a program that defines their agenda, but the ritual of decision making. It’s no surprise that the liberals at The New Yorker are fascinated. And it’s no surprise that they take us no further from a decadent, crisis-ridden capitalism.

Zoltan Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

By Nick V. Loew

David Brooks, based in the United States, writes for the progressive Mexican La Jornada newspaper. “There are weeks,” he wrote in February, “when one cannot report from the United States rationally about what frequently is, objectively, a mosaic of craziness. If one does so, there is the suspicion is that it’s only because one has ended up as another inmate in the madhouse.” He had examples:

• Congressional leaders are refusing to ban assault weapons, ostensibly because public support for prohibition had fallen from 52 to 43 percent. Public approval for Congress remains steady at 12 percent.
• In an interview, James Goodale, New York Times lawyer in 1971 when the Pentagon Papers were released, opined that press freedoms are now “antediluvian, conservative, retrograde – worse than under Nixon.”
• A new report indicated that Halliburton Corporation, once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, benefited from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the tune of $39.5 billion.
• The Obama administration appointed nuclear scientist Ernest Morits as Secretary of Energy. Big energy corporations financed his research. He was their consultant and served on their boards of directors.
• Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that 80 Chicago public schools would be closed because of a municipal budget deficit. Yet, as in other cities closing schools, ample funds are available for establishing new charter schools.
• “In this climate of austerity, there are also funds to build more prisons.” The U.S. penitentiary system costs $70 billion in public funds annually. “States spend almost as much on prisons as on universities,” Brooks observed.

He concluded: “All this and much more are reported as if it were more or less normal. Craziness has been turned into something normal. But surely such information is classified as secret for the good of all of us inside the madhouse.”
Brooks may gain points for the picturesque way he characterizes political turmoil. Certainly the business at hand is serious enough, however, to warrant exploration into why things go wrong and what to do to fix them. Instead he invokes a relic of medical history, the “madhouse,” to dramatize catastrophe that is mysterious and without a ready cure. But a famous scientist long ago succeeded in explaining and offering a solution for another dangerous medical scenario as mysterious as the one Brooks puts forth. That his solution was political suggests rational political analysis may still be possible, even now.

At the request of the Prussian government in 1848, pathologist and cell biologist Rudolf Virchow submitted a report on a typhus epidemic then ravaging the half a million people living in Prussian – occupied Upper Silesia, many of them miners and weavers. The death toll was comparable to the calamitous 1848 famine in Ireland. In one district 10 percent of the population had died from typhus or starvation in one year.
Little else was certain. The idea that microbes caused human illness was not well established, and antibiotic treatment was a century away. Nevertheless Virchow, looking at demographic and sociologic data, found that cause and cure lay in the political realm. Adverse social conditions were to blame, particularly extreme poverty, worker oppression, social stratification, and isolation. He recommended “full and unlimited democracy.” According to a scholar, Virchow “outlined a revolutionary program of social reconstruction, including full employment, higher wages, agricultural cooperatives, universal education, and the disestablishment of the Catholic Church,” He demanded that Upper Silesians be allowed to speak in their native Polish language.

In his report Virchow observed that, “The interests of the human race are not served when, by an absurd concentration of capital and landed property in the hands of single individuals, production is directed into channels that always guide back the flow of profits into the same hands.” Prussian officials were unhappy at Virchow’s foray into politics. He told them, “Medicine is a social science, and politics nothing but medicine at a larger scale.”

Scientists like Dr. Virchow learn by focusing primarily on things rather than on abstractions, things as they are and were. They separate things into their parts, the better to know them. They study data and correlations handed down by scientific forbearers. This is the methodology of choice, we suggest, for anyone in our own era wanting to avoid the intellectual dead end where Mr. Brooks abandoned his readers.

Another famous scientist, a compatriot and contemporary of Virchow, was similarly adept at basing his political conclusions on down to earth realities. Dr. Karl Marx utilized the scientific method in his studies of history, economic, and the daily lives of oppressed people.

The problems Brooks finds with charter schools, prisons, U. S. war-making, the nuclear industry, and gun sales could have been attributed at least in part to profit-taking. The concept of surplus value, a notable discovery of Marx, does clarify the profit phenomenon, but these days, even among the general public, the fact of profiteering by the few is well known. Dr. Marx’ approach of first identifying how things happen and then prescribing is perhaps more to the point as regards Mr. Brooks’ “madhouse.”

Marx would say that victims in Brooks’ version of events have much in common with each other. As beleaguered individuals, insecure in one way or another, they come together as a large class of people – workers and their allies. It’s a class long at odds with another class –based conglomeration of interests notorious for monopolizing resources and manipulating the state to its advantage. And, says Marx, confrontation between oppressed groups and the rich and powerful will continue. And for the sake of change, it must continue. Notions of banning assault weapons, cutting off war contractors, slowing down prison construction, protecting public schools are moral, fair, and reasonable ideas. The point is, however, that qualifications of an idea are not enough for it to take root in real life. Instead, aggrieved peoples must come together and fight for ideas. People’s power is what works, not the virtue of good ideas. Marx, the agitator, might have observed too that fighting over gun control separates potential allies and impedes their joining together.

The method of these two scientists is not complicated and obviously not new, yet it remains elusive. The turmoil so vividly depicted by the Jornada correspondent morphs into a laboratory experiment of sorts calling for analysis based on so-called historical materialism. It’s an exercise where orderly thought processes would prevail over intellectual chaos. All too many in our era are clueless about that way of proceeding. The challenge for consciousness-raising is clear.

Letter to President Barack Obama from Jacqueline Roussie:
(Ms. Roussie, a retired professor living in Southern France, has written President Obama on behalf of the Five every month for several years. She is a member of the [French] Committee for the Freedom of the Five.)
May 1, 2013, President Obama, the White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., Washington DC 20500
Mr. President,
For more than 14 years your country has kept the Five Cubans Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino, and René González in prison.
You know very well Mr. President that these Five patriots are perfectly innocent and the trick in convicting them was to charge them of “conspiracy to” [do something]. That does not require any evidence. Like the proverb says – “Anyone wanting to kill his dog accuses him of rabies!”
We focus attention this month on the charge of “conspiracy to spy.”
Specialists in various areas of U.S. intelligence like Col. George Bücker, Admiral Eugene Carroll, and Generals Charles Wilhelm and Edward Atkeson, said that these Five Cubans had no access to any information of a strategic nature, either at close range or from far away. No document containing state secrets was ever in their hands! Those Five men nevertheless received very severe sentence for just having the idea of spying.
Nevertheless, true spies apprehended with important documents receive only relatively light sentences. Some are just released under bail. Here are three examples – and there are others – who were processed during the presidency of your predecessor
To begin: there is the incredible case of Leandro Aragoncillo, a former U.S. marine, detained on October 5, 2005 in New Jersey. He had in his possession the little trifle of 733 secret documents from the White House, from the Pentagon, and from the Defense Department. He was spying on them all, while working first for Al Gore and then for Dick Cheney. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.
One of the most spectacular cases is that of agent Donald W. Keyser of the Central Intelligence Agency, who on December 12, 2005 confessed to Judge T. S. Ellis in Washington that he had stolen 28 documents classified “top secret.” 1976 documents classified “secret,” and 1655 documents classified as “confidential.” These documents had been handed over to Isabelle Cheng of the Taiwanese intelligence service.
Keyser remained free on $500,000 bail. He was electronically monitored. On January 22, 2007 he was sentenced to a year and a day in prison and a fine of $25,000. Without being accused of spying or conspiracy to spy! In the year 2000 he had already stolen the portable computer of Secretary of State Madeline Albright, which didn’t keep him from being appointed to the office of the Director General of the Foreign Service. (Keyser’s association with the CIA is not clear, despite such a claim by Cuba’s Granma newspaper in 2007. Keyser’s wife was a long time CIA agent.)
I will finish: with the example of Lawrence A. Franklin, a colleague of Donald Rumsfeld, who spied for Israel for many years. He delivered an impressive quantity of Pentagon information about Iran to Israeli agents Steve Rosen, Keith Weismann, and Naor Gilon. The first two agents had as protection their jobs with the “American Israel Political Affairs Committee,” the biggest Israeli lobby in Washington. The third was political councilor of the Israeli Embassy in Washington (He is presently Israel’s ambassador to Italy). Laurence A. Franklin was sentenced to a year in jail before being released on bail. (He actually received a sentence of 10 months of house arrest followed by 100 hours of community service.)
As you can see, Mr. President, the Five Cubans are not spies. They are a children’s choir compared with big league espionage hitters. Their mission was to infiltrate Mafia groups in Miami, which is hardly the same. The Five permitted delivery to the FBI on June of 1998 of a considerable number of documents by which several [terrorist] attacks were avoided.
Ramón Labañino and Gerardo Hernández have had to endure the grief of losing their mothers during their incarceration. René González who has been free on probation in the United States since 2011 even though he finished his sentence satisfactorily, can’t return to Cuba until 2014. In 2012 he lost his brother Roberto. He has just lost his father and was unable to be present to comfort him at the end of his life. (On May 3 Rene, while in Cuba to attend memorial services for his father, learned that he may remain there.)
Since their arrest in September, 1998, hopes of Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González, and their wives of being able to have children are waning every day. Your country continues to deny a visa for entry into the United States to allow the wives of Gerardo Hernández and René González [to visit them]. That’s an inhuman situation for those two couples.
Often persecution, especially against Gerardo Hernández who still remains in a high security prison, is added to these injustices. For example, on April 7 the actor Danny Glover went to his prison in California to visit him. Sadly, he had to return without seeing him. The visit was denied even though Danny Glover is one of the people authorized to visit Gerardo Hernández.
As you can see Mr. President, your administration carries out real ferocity against these Five patriots, and purposively so. We really do demand on your part a return to the worthy values of the Nobel Prize you received. You have the possibility of putting an end to so much injustice against the Five. You must act speedily!
Mr. President, please accept this most sincere expression of my humanistic feelings.
(signed) Jacqueline Roussie
64360 Monein, France Copies to Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Kathryn Ruemmler, Janet Napolitano, Joe Biden, John F. Kerry, Denis Macdonough, Harry Reid, Eric Holder, Pete Rouse, Rick Scott, and U. S. Ambassador in France Charles Rifkin.
Source: http://martianos.ning.com/profiles/blogs/carta-a-obama-desde-los-pirineos-por-jacqueline-roussie-9 Translated by W. T. Whitney Jr.
(N.B. Ms. Roussie points out that at least one of these real spies entered into a plea bargain with U.S. government prosecutors. That the Cuban Five, true to the purpose of their U. S. mission, refused such deals testifies to their heroism.)
**********
Por Jacqueline Roussie
1º de mayo de 2013, Señor Presidente Obama, The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., Washington DC 20500
Señor Presidente,
Hace más de catorce años que su país tiene presos a los Cinco cubanos Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino y René González.
Usted lo sabe Señor Presidente, estos Cinco patriotas son perfectamente inocentes y la astucia para condenarlos fue acusarles de “conspiración para… “, que no requiere ninguna evidencia. Como dice el proverbio ¡quien quiere matar a su perro, lo acusa de rabia! Veamos este mes con atención la acusación de “conspiración para espiar”.
Especialistas de diferentes áreas de la Inteligencia de los Estados Unidos como el coronel George Bücker, el Almirante Eugene Carroll, los Generales Edward Atkeson o Charles Wilhelm, dijeron que estos Cinco cubanos no tenían acceso, ni de cerca ni de lejos a cualquiera información de carácter estratégico. ¡Ningún documento conteniendo secreto de estado ha estado jamás, en poder de ellos! Sin embargo estos Cinco hombres fueron condenados a penas muy pesadas por tener la intención de espiar
Verdaderos espías quienes fueron tomados con documentos importantes, solo tuvieron sin embargo relativamente ligeras condenas, e incluso libertades bajo fianza. Aquí tres ejemplos entre otros, que se llevaron a cabo bajo la Presidencia de su predecesor.
Para comenzar, el increíble caso de Leandro Aragoncillo, un ex marine del ejército de los Estados Unidos, detenido el 5 de octubre de 2005 en Nueva Jersey. Él tenía en su posesión la bagatela de 733 documentos secretos de la Casa Blanca, del Pentágono y del Departamento de defensa. Espiaba todo, mientras trabajaba primero para Al Gore, luego para Dick Cheney. Fue condenado a diez años de prisión.
Uno de los casos más espectaculares es el del agente Donald W. Keyser de la Agencia Central de Inteligencia, quién, el 12 de diciembre de 2005, ha confesado al juez T. S. Ellis de Washington, haber robado 28 documentos clasificados “top secret”, 1976 documentos clasificados “secreto”, 1655 documentos clasificados como “confidencial”. Estos documentos habían sido entregados a Isabelle Cheng, del servicio de inteligencia de Taiwán.
Keiser ha quedado en libertad con fianza de 500000 dólares y con una pulsera electrónica. El 22 de enero de 2007 fue condenado a un año y un día de prisión y una multa de $25000, ¡sin ser acusado de espionaje o conspiración de espionaje! Él ya en el año 2000 había robado la computadora portátil de la Secretaria de Estado Madeleine Albright, lo que no impidió que fuera nombrado a la Dirección General de los Servicios Exteriores.
Para acabar, el ejemplo del espía Lawrence A. Franklin. Este colaborador de Donald Rumsfeld ha espiado durante años por cuenta de Israel. Entregó una cantidad impresionante de informaciones del Pentágono sobre Irán a los agentes de Israel Steve Rosen, Keith Weissman, y Naor Gilon. Los dos primeros agentes tuvieron como protección un trabajo en el “American Israel Political Committee”, el mayor grupo de lobby israelí en Washington, el tercero fue consejero político en la Embajada en Tel Aviv en Washington.
Lawrence A. Franklin fue condenado a un año de cárcel en 2006 antes de ser A. frankin was sentenced to a year in jail before being released on bail.
Como lo puede ver Usted Señor Presidente, los Cinco cubanos no son espías, son un coro infantil al lado de estos grandes bateadores del espionaje. Ellos tenían por misión infiltrar a los grupos de la mafia de Miami, lo que no es igual. Los Cinco permitieron en junio de 1998 la entrega al FBI de un número considerable de documentos y haber evitado muchos atentados. Esperando su liberación que tarde o temprano va a ocurrir porque la justicia vencerá, estos Cinco hombres siguen privados de libertad.
Ramón Labañino y Gerardo Hernández han tenido el dolor de perder a su madre durante su detención. Ramón Labañino and Gerardo Hernández have had to endure the grief of losing their mothers during their incarceration. René González que está en libertad condicional en los Estados Unidos desde el año 2011, aunque purgó completamente su condena, no puede regresar a Cuba antes de 2014. En 2012 perdió a su hermano Roberto. Acaba de perder a su padre, sin poder por su presencia, ablandar el final de su vida. Desde su arresto en septiembre de 1998, la esperanza de Gerardo Hernández, Fernando González y sus esposas, de poder tener hijos está disminuyendo cada día. Su país continúa negando el visado de entrada a Estados Unidos a las esposas de Gerardo Hernández y de René González, inhumana situación para estas dos parejas.
A estas injusticias se añade a menudo persecuciones, especialmente para Gerardo Hernández que se encuentra todavía en una prisión de alta seguridad. Por ejemplo el 7 de abril, el actor Danny Glover fue a su prisión de California a visitarlo. Lamentablemente tuvo que regresar sin verlo, la visita le fue negada. Danny Glover es sin embargo, parte de las personas autorizadas a visitar a Gerardo Hernández.
Como puede ver Señor Presidente, su administración se dedica a un real encarnizamiento contra esos Cinco patriotas. Realmente queremos por su parte una vuelta a los valores dignos del Premio Nobel que le fue atribuido. Tiene la posibilidad de poner fin a tal injusticia contra los Cinco, ¡debe usted actuar con rapidez!
Reciba Señor Presidente, la expresión de mis sentimientos humanistas más sinceros.
Jacqueline Roussie
64360 Monein, France Copias a: las Señoras Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Kathryn Ruemmler, Janet Napolitano, los Señores Joe Biden, John F. Kerry, Denis MacDonough, Harry Reid, Eric Holder, Pete Rouse, Rick Scott, y Charles Rivkin, Embajador de EE.UU. en Francia.
Jacqueline Roussie profesora retirada y miembro del Comité por la Libertad de los CINCO

- from Zoltan Zigedy is available at:
http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/

It’s hardly a secret that the US left is barely alive. While left-wing movements in the US have hardly shaken the foundations of power in my life time, they have known moments of modest success, reshaping the political landscape in significant and irreversible ways. Since World War II, left activism has stirred and nourished important movements like the struggles for African American equality and against US aggression in Vietnam. The left has also played important roles in fueling struggles for women’s and gay rights and for strengthening environmental protection. While 1960s talk of revolution and radical alternatives were more hyperbole than real, the ferment of those days was real.

Unfortunately, little of the US left’s modest success penetrated the labor movement, a social force defanged and declawed by anti-Communism early in the Cold War. And little of the left’s wave of vitality challenged the two-party system in any serious way. As the risings of the sixties recede further and further in our collective memory, the quantity and quality of popular struggle diminishes as well.

It’s not just the number of actions or the size of the crowds that are shrinking, but also the ideological understanding that purports to animate our US left. That is, the ideas embraced by various elements of the left have grown more and more murky and superficial.

What Ails the Left?

There are many symptoms and causes of the relative decline of the US left.

But always looming in the shadows of struggles for social justice is the demon of anti-Communism. Other peoples have suffered periods of hysterical, paranoid anti-Communism, but few countries outside of the US have elevated it to a state religion. While fear of Islam may have currently replaced Cold War fears as the national obsession, anti-Communism remains deeply embedded in the national psyche. Recent movies featuring West Coast and East Coast invasions of the US by forces from the tiny Democratic People’s Republic of Korea only underscore the persistence of this demon.

Of course the US left is neither immune from nor unwelcoming to Red-baiting. From the fifties, “leftists” could earn respectability and credibility with the public ritual of denouncing Communism. It was from this period that critical financial umbilical chords from the most prominent, most influential left and liberal formations to wealthy donors, foundations, and, in some nefarious cases, the security services were established. Any independent organizations deriving grass roots funding from workers’ organizations or the nationally oppressed were routinely looked at suspiciously for Red ties.

By the early sixties, the purge of everything Red or even Pink was largely completed. Everything—words, ideas, associations—even vaguely linked to Communism had disappeared from the mainstream. And the rise of a “new” left reflected the weight of that legacy. Both opportunism and ignorance led most of the left’s new leadership to establish a political camp to the right or left of Communism, demonstrably distant from Communism: radical democracy and social democracy to the right; Maoism and anarchism to the left.

Arguably this failure to establish an honest, objective encounter with Communism, this Cold War attitude of framing all politics as a counterweight to Communism, contributed mightily to the decline of the left in the next decade. The student base and alienation from working people demonstrated the shallowness of New Left ideology. Most leaders and activists turned to careers, the Democratic Party, the social service bureaucracy, or retreated to the universities.

Anti-Communism continued and continues as a blind faith. The fall of Soviet and Eastern European socialism added a new dimension to the anti-Communist canon: Not only was Communism evil, but it didn’t work.

Without the foil of real existing socialism, the US left drifted aimlessly. Some found an ideological anchor in “market socialism,” especially with the rise of Market-Leninism in the Peoples’ Republic of China. Others found romantic answers in Comandante Zero, a pipe-smoking, inscrutable poet/revolutionary diminutive caricature of Che Guevera. Still others attempted to restore life to the New Left of the sixties. One cannot but be reminded of the situation of Russian revolutionaries after the suppressed 1905 uprising as described by Lenin:

The years of reaction (1907-10). Tsarism was victorious. All the revolutionary and opposition parties were smashed. Depression, demoralisation, splits, discord, defection, and pornography took the place of politics. There was an ever greater drift towards philosophical idealism; mysticism became the garb of counter-revolutionary sentiments. (Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder)

Where most European Communists degenerated into social democrats in this period, US leftists, scarred by anti-Communism and with no similar tradition, found hope in narrow-issue activism, cult-like formations, or the unlikely revival of the New Deal Democratic Party.

Obama and the Left

The candidacy of Barack Obama proved to be a disaster for the US left. Anti-war and social justice activists put aside their signs and plans and flocked to the Obama campaign. Grandiose expectations were conjured out of thin air; a candidate associated in the past with conservative Democrats and a professed admirer of Ronald Reagan was imagined to be the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and even cautious measures of critical support were overwhelmed by wild-eyed enthusiasm.

After the election, most of the US left kept faith with Obama, a faith that has produced very little of the anticipated change, but succeeded in disarming the left. The big loser was the historically most progressive element in US politics: the African American community. Understandably, African Americans rallied to support the first African American president, but his administration has neither represented African Americans nor lifted a finger to relieve the sinking material conditions of life for that community. In fact, often more has been done for African Americans under Republican presidents when the left is actively and vocally pressuring and Democrats are in opposition! As an example, no Republican president would get away with so few African American appointees or nominees in an administration as has the current President!

The US ruling class has successfully and opportunistically gauged the hard won level of racial tolerance of US voters. The new face of US policy and diplomacy presented by Obama was welcomed everywhere—at home and abroad—over the failed Bush regime. A byproduct of this tactic is the disarming of the left and the silencing of African American leaders. Tragically, the US left has accepted the shallow symbolism of an African American president at the expense of the African American masses.

The Crisis and the Left

For the left in the US and internationally, the profound economic crisis beginning in 2008 and continuing today offers a great opportunity to mount an anti-capitalist offensive and project a clear alternative. For over a century and a half that alternative was socialism. The vision articulated over that period differed from time to time, but shared some straightforward features: the theoretical primacy of class relations, public ownership of productive assets, an end to exploitation, a new democracy based upon the rule of the working majority, and social and economic planning. Each feature clearly addresses a glaring, unacceptable shortcoming of capitalism.

But in the US, our left will not address the devastation wrought by capitalism and embrace these features or even discuss them honestly. One of the most prominent and respected national leaders of the anti-war movement recently said: “I used to think I was a socialist… But I also think that people should have the right to be individually enterprising. I have yet to see the society that I would like to live in but I see pieces of it, bits and pieces of it here and there.” This is hardly encouragement for the 11.7 million US citizens looking for a job, the nearly 8 million who would prefer a full-time job over their part-time employment, or the tens of millions who still lack health insurance, all benefits once guaranteed and delivered by real, existing socialism.

Another prominent left pundit, in reviewing another left oracle’s “new economy” manifesto, remarks that the author’s assumptions are “…that socialism, as we have known it in the 20th century did not work.” He blithely concedes that the book’s author “spends little time critiquing 20th century socialism.” Not deterred by the lack of argument, the reviewer affirms that “I was persuaded… that a glimpse into the future is critical largely due to reality of the failure of 20th century socialism, or more accurately, what is better described as the crisis of socialism.” “…did not work, “failure,” “crisis” are the unexamined, easy assumptions of our floundering left.

So what do they offer as an alternative?

Anything but the socialism associated with Communism. They take us back to the foolishness that Marx and Engels called “utopian socialism,” the schemes concocted by Fourier and Owen in the early 19th century. In the Communist Manifesto they conclude that utopians “…therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realization of their social utopias, of founding isolated phalansteres, of establishing ‘Home Colonies,’ or setting up a ‘Little Icaria”—pocket editions of the New Jerusalem—and to realize all these castles in the air, and they are compelled to appeal to the feeling and purses of the bourgeois… They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new gospel.”

We find a modern incarnation of utopianism in the “New Economy” movement, the US left’s current flavor of the day. Back in late 2011, Professor Gar Alperovitz reached for the golden ring of utopia with his America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming our Wealth, our Liberty, and our Democracy, a book that promised to take the disenfranchised in the US from peasants to lords. Alperovitz, like his utopian predecessors, believes that ideas generously given from a fount of wisdom will, if only embraced by those below, lead to “democratizing capital.” Alperovitz’s magical ideas are the spawning of “thousands of co-ops, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, and municipal enterprises” that will, with time, “democratize the deep structure of the American economic system.” A more romantic version of Marx and Engel’s derisive “new gospel” I cannot imagine.

The very notion of “democratizing” something, let us say “capital,” that doesn’t wish to be “democratized” is mind-boggling. Will capital be embarrassed into sharing the wealth? Will the success of co-ops demonstrate to Exxon that energy should be free to all and produced in an environmentally sound manner? Will the 17-trillion-dollar US-based multinational corporate behemoth shudder in the face of worker-owned enterprises and co-ops, surrendering control of the boards of directors to the people?

I don’t think so.

Alperovitz points to existing self-styled alternative ownership models like ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Programs), community development corporations, co-ops, etc. as the way forward (he concedes that ESOPs have a dubious record). As such, they would offer a relatively painless “evolutionary” road different “from traditional theories of ‘revolution’.” Many “businessmen, bankers, and others, in fact, commonly support the idea [of co-ops] on practical and moral grounds,” Alperovitz proclaims. Of course they do; they see no challenge to capitalism and a possible opportunity to cash in!

The fact that “castles in the air” ideas like Alperovitz’s actually gain traction demonstrates the sad state of the US left. The fact that opinion polls show a decided increase in interest in socialism is encouraging; however, the fact that those new to the idea must taste through the unappealing, non-nourishing gruel currently favored by so many on the left is disappointing.

For more than a century and a half, socialism—the public and democratic ownership of the essential means of production under a majority peoples’ democracy—continues to be the only ultimate answer to a tenuous and destructive capitalist system.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com

By Tom Whitney

May 8, 2013

Bombs set off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 killed three and wounded over 200 people. The metropolitan area became a virtual war zone. Officials at every level let loose with doomsday-style retaliatory proclamations. For many, however, the clamor served to resurrect memories of U.S. terrorism against Cuba and anti-terrorist verbiage that is full of contradictions.

Almost one year before the Marathon bombings, on April 27, 2012, the office of a tourist agency in Coral Gables, Florida that promotes charter flights and legal travel to Cuba was firebombed and destroyed. A local blogger said of owner Vivian Mannerud, “Too bad she was not inside the office.”

Ms. Mannerud pointed out recently that, “to this day, not one elected official — and in particular, James Cason, mayor of Coral Gables — has ever come out to denounce this act of terrorism.” There are still no suspects and few signs of ongoing investigation. The Boston and Florida situations are very different, and perhaps the lack of deaths and injuries in the Florida case account for some of the muted response there. But in the past even when Cuba and supporters of Cuba are beset with chaos and calamity reminiscent of the Boston experience, impunity prevailed.

Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada engineered the murderous downing of a fully loaded Cuban airliner at sea in 1976. Posada alone arranged for hotel bombings in Cuba in 1997. They found safe haven in Florida.

The U.S. government itself is a purveyor of terrorism. Wars, drones, economic sanctions, puppet insurgencies, torture regimens, and prison abuses terrorize peoples throughout the world. The United States exports spies and informants and supports the militarized police forces and national armies of puppet governments. Terror fostered by the United States aggravates hostilities and swells enemy ranks. Vicious cycles ensue and conflicts expand. Openings multiply for the U.S. government to claim victimization and to rationalize its own terror attacks.

Cuba stands alone as remaining apart from this deadly interchange. Anti-Cuban terror flows in only one direction. Cuban sources indicate that U.S. – based terrorists have killed almost 3500 people over 50 years, either Cubans or friends of Cuba. By contrast, U.S. military and intelligence officials now and then reiterate that Cuba represents no military or economic threat to the United States.

Yet the U. S. government maintains Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Apologists point to Basque separatists welcomed in Cuba and to sanctuary given leftist Colombian guerrillas. Spain, of course, asked that Cuba take in the Basques, and Colombia embraced Cuba’s offer to host government negotiations with the guerrillas. And political refuge provided for Assata Shakur has long been cited.

Having escaped from a U.S. prison, the black liberation combatant moved to Cuba. Conveniently enough, the United States was recently able simultaneously to announce that Cuba will remain on its list of terror – sponsoring states and that Assata Shakur was being placed on the FBI’s ten “most wanted terrorist” list, also that the bounty for her capture and return to the United States was re-set at $2 million. Many legal observers remain highly critical of the prosecution and trial in 1977 through which she was convicted of murdering a New Jersey policeman.

Why then, if Cuba is quite blameless as a sponsor of terrorism, have terror attacks against Cuba continued?

The assumption here is that the U.S. government, as minder of an empire, is serious about its duty to counter revolutionary and anti-imperialist movements from their earliest stirrings to their taking of power and beyond. U.S. governments have been dealing with Cuban revolutionaries for almost 150 years. In reaction to anti-annexationist, anti-racist independence struggles led by Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo, the United States ended up invading Cuba. U. S. troops helped beat down an Afro-Cuban uprising in 1912. In the early 1930’s student and labor mobilizations, anti-imperialist in nature, were harbingers of a socialist revolution that took charge in 1959. Special treatment for Cuba may stem, in part, from an anti-imperialism that never quit.

That’s not all U.S. power brokers have to worry about. Despite bashings, Cuba poses the threat of a good example. The socialist state has ensured prolonged life expectancy, low infant mortality, ready access to high quality education and jobs, adequate nutrition and housing, and inculcation of ethical, communitarian, and culturally-inherited values. Cubans even weather natural disasters in exemplary fashion. Cuba’s adventures in international solidarity add insult to injury. Beleaguered Cuba contested apartheid in southern Africa, cares for the sick and injured throughout the world, and educates young people from all over.

And annoyingly Cuba defends itself against terror in targeted, non-violent ways not likely to provoke retaliation. Cuban volunteers moved to Florida to monitor U.S. based terrorists so that Cuba could prepare against attacks, maybe prevent them. For their pains, the Cuban Five, as they are known, were subjected to a biased trial and long, cruel sentences. A worldwide movement is demanding that U.S. President Obama release them.

Because the Five targeted violent private organizations operating from bases in Florida, their activities and their trial highlighted the general role of proxy warriors. Use of proxies frees central authorities from having publically to take responsibility for state – sponsored terror campaigns. In effect, the Five helped elucidate similarities among a variety of non-state perpetrators, specifically between Florida private paramilitary groups and terrorist individuals and autonomous groups elsewhere, even those at war with the United States. That bit of political education may have earned the Cuban Five a good part of their wildly excessive penalties.