“…they cannot forgive us, who are there in front of their noses and who have made a socialist revolution before the very nose of the United States!”
“…no pueden perdonarnos, que estemos ahí en sus narices ¡y que hayamos hecho una Revolución socialista en las propias narices de Estados Unidos!”

• Fidel Castro, April 16, 1961

“And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.”

• English book of Common Prayer, 1662

After 53 years, we ask. Did the Cuban revolution accomplish its goals? Likewise, what happened to the U.S., which has relentlessly tried to block Cuba’s revolutionary path?

After the January 1959 revolutionary victory Washington’s elite understood that in Fidel Castro they might face serious rebelliousness to the accepted and enforced notion: Washington rules this hemisphere.

In 1954, Washington punished President Jacobo Arbenz for nationalizing United Fruit company property in Guatemala (a U.S.-backed coup d’état), to again dramatize how the U.S. treated disobedience.

Despite the long history of U.S. punishment of insubordinate Latin American leaders, Castro and compañerosremained focused on goals emerging in the 1860s’ revolt against Spain: independence, sovereignty, social justice.

When faced with Washington’s intransigent opposition Cuba’s leaders accepted the consequences of a kind of insurance policy written for their revolution in Moscow. They had no other protectors.

They knew that Latin American leaders who failed to toe the U.S. line faced assassination or military coups.

Unlike U.S. influence, the Soviets would not own Cuban property. The U.S. held the best land in Cuba, the biggest sugar mills, mines, telephone and utility companies, banks, politicians, casinos and much more. The Soviets never possessed an acre of Cuban land. They did, however, expect ideological compliance.

From 1959 through the mid 1970s, Cubans became more literate and healthier. Their social services expanded along with a basically honest government. Cuba became an integrated nation state with a sense of purpose. But U.S. policy directors understood: an external threat would compel revolutionaries to organize their defense.

They grasped Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist #8: “Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct. Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates.”

In Cuba, Batista had not permitted free speech or politics; so no dramatic change took place. Unlike Batista, the revolutionaries had more than personal power to defend. And they understood the possible consequences.

U.S. military forces killed up to 4 million Vietnamese (mostly civilians) and lost 58 thousand U.S. troops as Cuba’s revolution developed. Few people today – or then – could explain the purpose of that war.

While engaged in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the CIA also backed a string of military coups against democratically elected governments of Brazil (1964), Chile (1973) and interfering in political processes of other client states: invading the Dominican Republic and plotting in Argentina and Uruguay.

Cuban doctors and teachers went abroad to aid others, Cuban artists – painting and sculpture, poetry and literature, film, music and dance – made world-wide names for themselves. The CIA in Africa assassinated Congolese liberation leader Patrice Lumumba and backed merciless dictators. Cuban troops helped maintain Angolan independence despite serious threats from South African and CIA-backed troops invading from the south and east.

In 1994, at his inauguration as South Africa’s president, Nelson Mandela acknowledged to Fidel Castro: “You made this possible.” He referred to the role of Cuban troops in 1987-88 in helping the Angolan army administer heavy losses to the South African forces who had invaded southern Angola, forcing the apartheid regime to change its strategy from military to political.

During the 1980s, Washington backed murderous regimes throughout the world, like those in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala; same old policy, but justified by Cold War rhetoric.

After the Soviets disappeared in 1991, the jubilation in Miami exile circles and Washington office parties ran at fever pitch: would the Cuban revolution collapse in a year – or less?

Now, 21 plus years later and still alive, Cuba’s revolution begins to change its economic and administrative orders. The U.S. media routinely describes Cuba as poor, needy, miserable. But in 2012, on Cuba’s non-violent streets there aren’t vast numbers of homeless like those in U.S. cities, and no hungry children (1 of 2 American kids experienced hunger last year).

In “free and democratic” Mexico and Central America thousands of gang-drug-related murders occur annually. Cuba has no drug cartels or children frightened of a drive-by bullet. As U.S. wars killed tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghans and thousands of its own troops, Cuban doctors repaired the sightless vision of thousands of third world people around the world.

The U.S. holds more political prisoners in Cuba – in Gitmo – than Cuba does, and now has laws allowing the President to assasi… oops, execute U.S. citizens he deems “terrorist” (without court procedures). U.S. citizens can get jailed indefinitely with no recourse to Constitutional protections. But Washington blithely accuses Cuba of human rights violations.

Cuba does face a broken economy, a bloated bureaucracy and other serious problems – like no free press. Its leaders have begun a reform process, and a broad dialogue has emerged amongst the population.

In Washington denial prevails. Presidential aspirants on both sides ignore the trillions wasted on destructive wars, rotting infrastructure, spread of poverty, and drop in the standard of living.

Cuba policy remains inflexible. Hard liners demand ever more time for the policy to work! It’s only been 53 years since Washington’s elite decided to force regime change in Havana.

No one asks: What did Cuba do to us again?

Saul Landau’s WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP is available through cinemalibrestore.com. Nelson Valdes is Professor Emeritus, University of New Mexico.

Frank Bardacke has written the comprehensive history of the United Farm Workers, Trampling Out The Vintage: Cesar Chavez And The Two Souls of The United Farm Workers, a definitive biography of Chavez and a magnificent guide to the politics and sociology of the 1960s-80s.

In the mid 1960s a nascent union of field workers transformed themselves into moral guideposts for middle class liberals as well as the first media magnet for Mexican Americans. Cesar Chavez became an almost instant icon, able to marshal a variegated supporting cast of politicized farm laborers, civil rights veterans and radical organizers and make communion with elements of the Catholic Church, the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party.

Together they organized a sector of the middle class: not to buy grapes. Imagine! A group of humble, darker-skinned, poor people requested consumers to postpone their God-given needs for instant grape-ification just to support the cause of a union of those who picked and processed the succulent commodity!

Bardacke chronicles the farm workers’ union’s campaign to convince pre-soccer moms to shun grapes and the organized religious and union-backed march through California’s Central Valley. Together, these campaigns helped pressure major grape growers to recognize the United Farm Workers. Sacrificing consumers and workers rejoiced. But within two decades of its meteoric rise and seemingly solid liberal and political alliances the UFW fell into obscurity.

Bardacke explains the process by which the charismatic Chavez, at the helm of a potential labor powerhouse, then failed to try to organize the majority of California’s farm laborers. The boycotts and political pacts – especially when Democrats lost – proved insufficient by themselves to sustain a viable union. Without the specter of mass union power, powerful adversaries would – and did – squash the UFW.

Chavez played the key role in the UFW’s rise and then undermined its future. Bardacke examines internal union struggles, and those within Chavez himself. “Trampling” dramatizes the man’s legendary strengths, but also his weaknesses.

From his Arizona boyhood, through military service, “Trampling” shows how Chavez emerged as a natural leader. Bardacke also provides perceptive critiques of influences on him, from the Catholic Church through the organizing mantras of Saul Alinsky; and how Chavez used these doctrines to shape his own world-view. The book does not debunk Chavez; it brings him from legend to earth.

Like some devout Catholics, Chavez linked penance with justice. The long Central Valley march became a religious journey, a symbol of “the long road we have traveled… and the long road we have yet to travel, with much penance, in order to bring about the Revolution we need.” Chavez suffered immense physical pain on the pilgrimage, but it offered “an excellent way of training ourselves to endure the long, long struggle.”

“Trampling” also recounts anecdotal biographies of dozens of the countless, extraordinary men and women who contributed their energy, brains, and talent – and sacrificed – to make possible the birth and initial successes of the UFW.

Characters like Gilbert Padilla and Epifanio Camacho emerge alongside Dolores Huerta and the white organizers like Marshall Ganz, Catholic priests and the gifted Luis Valdez who helped organize through theater. His now celebrated teatro campesino employed enormously talented field workers and barrio residents to teach lessons through drama and song.

Bardacke paints 3-D pictures of the characters to emphasize that history is not just class confrontation, but also dialogue and debate, anger and frustration: the intellectual and emotional components of class struggle.

The author refuses to lump tens of thousands of men and women as “farm workers. Instead, we meet apieros (celery choppers) and lechugueros (lettuce pickers) with amazing skills and discipline. Those who tended the grapes and dealt with the eccentricities of broccoli also had full lives. Some could make rousing speeches, or sing and play instruments, plot strategy and become role models.

They didn’t always agree. Indeed, the UFW splintered over the next decade so that most of the thousands of mostly dark skinned people stooping over the crops that feed this nation no longer have a union or even earn a sustenance wage. But they share a legacy that Cesar Chavez helped build. Chavez forged the Chicano identity, but didn’t endure as the labor leader who could lead the working class battle against agri-business and lesser capitalists who reap huge profits from the farm workers’ backs.

The book explores in excruciating detail how Chavez blamed “illegal aliens,” Mexican farm workers for losing strikes. He claimed they weakened the union because they loomed as strikebreakers. Bardacke documents how the UFW actually reported Mexican workers without papers to the INS and how the union forged “an extralegal gang of a couple of hundred people who policed about ten miles of the Arizona-Mexico border, intercepting people attempting to cross it, and, brutalized the captives.”

Chavez leaned toward consumer boycotts over militant organizing. He fasted and indulged in self-sacrifice during tough bargaining. He also exercised ruthless central union control, not allowing organizing initiatives to develop without his approval. Bradacke cites examples of how he actually ousted and even blacklisted some potential leaders who defied his authority. And he also shows Chavez’ virtues: A balanced and just portrait.

(TRAMPLING OUT THE VINTAGE: CESAR CHAVEZ AND THE TWO SOULS OF THE UNITED FARM WORKERS Verso, $54.95, 742 pages) deserves #1 ranking as best labor history of the year. Professors should assign it as a text for labor history, California history, and U.S. history. I suggest it for all book-lovers.

Saul Landau’s WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP is on DVD (cinemalibrestore.com) He’s an Institute for Policy Studies fellow.

He met with officials; I walked Tripoli’s streets. At a coffee shop near the hotel, a group of young men stopped playing with their worry beads, brought their jumping knees into upright positions and followed me. Like most of the young men I saw, my followers were well-dressed and looked healthy, maybe a bit overdosed on caffeine.

I tried to ignore them as I wandered into the Suq – the old market – in downtown Tripoli. It was mostly boarded up. President Qaddafi had built new five-story department stores.

Two nights later, Abourezk took me to a new store. I saw large bins, typical of the U.S. Dollar stores, but filled with expensive cuisinearts. On another floor, shoeless men in robes tried on designer suits (on racks). The Pierre Cardin suits came in loud pink, orange and purple. Strange for a city without pimps or visible prostitutes! I watched some of these shoeless try the garments on and actually buy them.

One day, I dropped a post card to my daughter in a street letterbox. My uninvited escorts roared. In English, I demanded: “Why are you laughing?”

“No one pick up letters from that box,” one replied amidst giggles.

“Why are you all following me?”

The same man young man explained. “We members of secret police.”

“Secret?”

“All Libyans are members of Secret Police,” he clarified.

The group invited me for coffee. They had no jobs, and like most Libyans lived on subsidies. Foreigners did most of the non-government work. At the hotel, Philippino men served as porters, Egyptians manned the front desk, Nubians waited on us in the coffee shop. After coffee and questions about America, they walked “our brother” back to the hotel.

In my neighborhood walks I noticed day care centers, schools, and hospitals. Qaddafi had indeed distributed oil wealth to the 2-plus million Libyans – now 6 million.

Not all Libyans agreed. A waiter in a coffee shop on the road to the Roman ruins at Sabratha hated Qaddafi, “a man from a traitorous tribe.” Together with a National Geographic photographer, I explored the remains of Roman streets and architecture. Awesome! We met no tourists.

In the early 21st Century, Qaddafi shifted his political stance. He had abandoned the terrorist support path and dropped his nuclear weapons program. In response, Western leaders welcomed the Libyan ruler – Berlusconi kissed his hand. Then, in 2011, after the Arab Spring, the elected pinnacles of democracy in NATO capitals charged him with threatening the lives of his own people – as if that would bother colonial powers who had routinely slaughtered Africans and still back ruthless repressive regimes in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The NATO elite convinced a bare majority vote of the Arab League, and maneuvered a UN supporting mandate. Then, NATO launched an eight-month blitz on Libya – to protect its people.

With still uncounted thousands dead, NATO leaders beamed: their air power had finally worked – as it had not in Vietnam or Korea – to destroy a “rogue” government. They forgot (?) that the previous years they had feted Qaddafi; and the Libyan strongman had helped them in the war against terror. For abandoning his nuclear option, Qaddafi learned (briefly): no good deed goes unpunished or remembered.

Natoites flew 26,000 sorties, many with bombs and missiles, but only against “military targets” – not the Roman ruins. They issued no reports of Libyan deaths. But news footage showed dead bodies and destroyed homes. NATO’s spin: “Hurrah, the world is rid of the evil Qaddafi.”

Anyway, the dead were bad guys; otherwise, good NATO pilots wouldn’t have killed them because their mission was to protect innocent civilians.

In 2010, the NATO government encouraged their arms merchants to supply Qaddafi with “a seemingly limitless supply of weapons.” Indeed, “at an arms fair in Tripoli; only a few days before the NATO operations started, French and Italian companies were busily upgrading Libyan air-force and army equipment.” (http://www.caat.org.uk/ Andrew Feinstein, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/26/gadaffis-arms-stockpile. See also: Andrew Feinstein’s The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, Penguin.)

NATO and its entourage located and destroyed many of the European-supplied weapons. When the new government cohered, would the same weapons dealers replace the stock NATO forces had destroyed?

NATO recognized the victorious democratic Libyan rebels. These NATO “democrats” had committed numerous human-rights abuses according to Human Rights Watch monitors. In Sirte, investigators discovered 53 corpses were found in an abandoned hotel – all pro-Qaddafi people. (http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/26/the-libyan-rebels-massacre BBC July 31, 2011)

In Tawarghaby, victorious insurgents took brutal reprisals against pro-Gaddafi residents (“Libya militia ‘terrorises’ pro-Gaddafi town of Tawargha,” BBC News, 31 October 2011).

Secretary of State Clinton chortled (“We came, we saw, he died”) while reporters noted some rebel units refused to disarm; others looted and abused their captives. (David D Kirkpatrick, “In Libya, Fighting May Outlast the Revolution– NY Times, November 3, 2011).

Not important. NATO’s adventure was a successful humanitarian intervention. It saved lives and upheld democracy. NATO withdrew. Who’s next?

P.S. Every day I spent in Libya I saw Qaddafi. At 5 p.m. the TV screen showed desert, with a small black spot in the middle. A very slow zoom began. By 5:05 a back shape emerged, which, by 5:07 appeared to be a man praying. You guessed it. By 5:10 Qaddafi bent his head to the ground and brought it up again in prayer. I won’t miss him – even on TV. But the postcard I mailed at the supposedly dead letterbox arrived in Washington – nine months later.

Saul Landau’s WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP plays Dec 3 at 5:30 and 7:30 at the Kellen Auditorium, New School for Social Research, 66 Fifth Avenue.

http://dailycensored.com/2011/11/02/drugs-%E2%80%98r-us-%E2%80%93-the-american-way/

Afghanistan calling!Ten plus years ago, the United States (oops, NATO) invaded Afghanistan and quickly won the war against the militarily (technologically) inferior Taliban government. Taliban fighters fled to Pakistan. Washington and allies followed their victory by quickly losing the occupation challenge. As W. Bush and allies invaded Iraq, the Taliban crept back from Pakistan and undid the U.S. war victory. So, some 250,000 troops (mostly U.S.) and contractors (U.S.-paid) still occupy that much invaded but never truly conquered country.

Alexander the Great invaded twice (330 and 327 BC) and soon died in Iraq of “Baghdad tummy.” Some 20-plus centuries later the English unlearned Alex’s lesson. They marched (big mistake) on Kabul. They took losses and finally withdrew in frustration.

In the 20th Century, the Soviets spent a decade of failure trying to subdue CIA-backed Afghans. Washington cheered and its generals thought they could do better than the Soviets. But after ten years of occupation, the UN reported higher civilian and military casualty rates than in preceding years – and with no clear road to meeting any realistic goals. The West set out to build “our kind of third world nation” – one with a bare façade of democracy, like elections that pass minimal scrutiny.

Similar to the Vietnam scenario of the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. forces trained vast numbers of local cops and troops – some who don’t enjoy fighting potential brothers; others occasionally use their training and weapons to kill U.S. and NATO soldiers.

Once again, (Vietnam?) nation building re-entered the U.S. vocabulary. Fighting goes with making an infrastructure and inculcating modern values like women’s rights, but the military comes first, so Afghan women wait – and their babies die prematurely at world record rates for lack of care (funding). Some still get stoned for offenses (acting like women) that confound westerners. Indeed, Afghanistan has always confounded the invaders from afar.

We obviously have a more rational society. Look at the facts. Despite overwhelming public disapproval, Congress, between 2001-2008, allocated some $100 million a day for military purposes in Afghanistan. But all the NATO countries combined managed to cough up a whopping $7 million a day for non-military aid.

Congress feeds $120-plus billion a year into the Afghan operation – far more than the Afghan national budget – so that we can show results: Tens of thousands of wounded and dead. No NATO control. Our President there (Hamid Karzai) may win a place in the Guinness Book of Records for corruption. Under his supposed rule elections proved his country had copied U.S. democracy: low turn out and vote-rigging – like Florida in 2000.

Our 10 years of paying for and training Afghan cops and spooks have also produced other dubious results unless one favors hanging detainees by their hands, beating them with cables, and twisting “their genitals until the prisoners lose consciousness.”

The New York Times, citing a UN report (Oct. 10), stated that such torture occurs systematically at “these sites run by the Afghan intelligence service and the Afghan National Police.”

NATO officials admit they knew of the abuses and in the summer stopped sending prisoners to some of the torture sites. But they did not make it public. U.S. officials denied knowledge and continued to pour money into the very system that produced the routine torture.

Did U.S. trainers close their eyes and ears? Or did U.S. complicity coincide with possible benefits “from information obtained from suspects who had been tortured?” (New York Times, October 11, 2011)

The UN Convention Against Torture prohibits the transfer of a detained person to the custody of another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that the detainee is at risk of torture.

“Use of interrogation methods, including suspension, beatings, electric shock, stress positions and threatened sexual assault is unacceptable by any standard of international human rights law,” the report said (Alissa J. Rubin, New York Times, October 11, 2011). Did someone in the U.S. command forget to read that?

U.S. collaboration with other allies like Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Colombia and El Salvador have raised similar issues (2006 RAND Corporation report), but when it comes to war it’s “allies first, UN conventions second.”

October 7 marked the 10th anniversary of the invasion. Afghanistan has not achieved stability. In September, a suicide squad attacked near the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Under NATO occupation, opium production has increased – up 60% next year, according to experts. President Obama, who received detailed reports on the non-progress, faces the dilemma posed to all Presidents who want to pull out but can’t. He hears Republicans – even those who demand he withdraw – in the upcoming election campaign shouting: “He’s weak. He lost the war.”

Like those in Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” U.S. presidents feel trapped by circumstances of their political reality – or political stupidity.

If he does withdraw now Obama will have nothing to show for all the death and destruction, not even the impending Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline, due to commence in 2012, and start oil flow in 2014. Without NATO forces there, forget it!
A year before elections, presidents do what’s good for their re-re-elections. These choices do not coincide with what’s good for the poor dogs fighting that war – or for the American psyche.

Saul Landau’s WILL THE RERAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP is available on DVD at cinemalibrestore.com.

WILL THE RERAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP? will show at Pomona College on Nov 2, 2011.

Politicians face a spreading revolt against Wall Street, financial tycoons, banks in general and an insensitive government that ignores people’s needs. The latest poll shows a radical lack of confidence for those running the government

A September 30 Gallup poll said 81 percent felt dissatisfied with the way those running country. Congress’ rating fell from the toilet seat into the toilet (15% approved of them). The public had similar low opinions on those aspiring for office. Force yourself to watch the Republican Presidential “debates”!

Most mass media sources didn’t even report the Gallup findings, or did so in low priority spots. Nor did they pick up on key specifics. New York Times columnist Charles Blow (Oct. 2) noted that the Gallup survey showed that “Americans sense that the federal government poses an immediate threat to individuals’ rights and freedoms is also at a new high.”

Imagine if Cuba or Iran released such a poll! See, we would say: “This is what people feel if they have no democracy.”

But we elect our government – well, less than 50% vote, but who wants to get picky? Well, how come we don’t like or approve of our officials or have any confidence they can run the country? Is there a hole in our democratic logic? Or is discontent with government here and in the rest of the world a signal that systems (economic and environmental) have raced beyond control of the current institutions and imaginations of political leaders?

When many angry tens of thousands hit the streets in Greece, Spain, England, Israel and Chile it is because they had no institutions through which to channel their grievances. No political party or union could negotiate for them; nor could their governments satisfy their basic demands: jobs, housing, free education, safe environment.

Neo liberalism’s failure stares us in the face as tens of millions of jobless despair; millions of homeless seek shelter; natural disasters challenge national capability to deal with them.

The American right blames third world foreigners, sins of abortion and homosexuality and calls for ever more guns and aggression, while slashing budgets meant for the poor: the new Christians. In Europe socialist parties have lost credibility by adopting neo liberalism; communists in the post-Soviet era have splintered and disintegrated into spattering sects in some of those countries.

In the United States, bereft of left parties, people began to demonstrate against the Wall Street criminals (bankers and brokers) whose behavior helped induce a massive collapse. In Manhattan, hundreds of protesters in painted white faces and costumed as corporate zombies rocked and rolled past the New York Stock Exchange. Many showed cameras their handfuls of phony money.

In Chicago, drummers marched through the financial district. Some pitched tents and in them made anti-banking and corporate greed signs, which they showed to gawkers in passing cars.

Instead of the New York mayor offering the imaginative demonstrators a chance for dialogue, he set the police on them, a good lesson for some middle class protestors who said the streets belonged to the people not the police – who pepper sprayed them.

The U.S. protests began earlier in the year, in Wisconsin where a right wing Governor declared fiscal war against the working people. The New York demonstrators demonstrated the same rebellious spirit, turning the Gallup survey results into action instead of griping to pollsters. Like the New Yorkers, young people in Boston, St. Louis, Kansas City, Portland Maine, Los Angeles and other places expressed political indignation over corporate greed. They marched on Federal Reserve banks and camped in parks. All share the anxieties of the wobbly economy, but the leaderless coming together against a common enemy – finance capital – with common values of decency and justice has held people together – including some Tea Partiers. They communicate through websites and streaming video and have invented democratic forms of assembly.

Like their counterparts in the other countries the U.S. demonstrators found no channels for their grievances. Gradually, liberal Democrats and progressive unions begin to support this movement – or moment – and call on others to join them. But can their messages seep into the ossified political membranes of established structures? Can their energy transform a dysfunctional political establishment into one that begins to transform the nation?

The financial sector lends to the corporate elite who impulsively try to reduce the socially necessary cost of labor, which makes life more desperate for the already poor. The elite immunize themselves against the rage over wage differentials of 325 to 1 for corporate executives and workers (See the Institute for Policy Studiesreport). They ignore pleas for environmental sanity, or embrace denial on climate change.

Without lobbyists the American public had no voice – until it hit the streets. Politicians who throw their weight around for epical interests demonstrate their national concern by “supporting our troops – after 10 years of no progress in Afghanistan and destroying Iraq – and love our country.

Mostly, they woo corporate funders to insure their reelection, while the executive elite hide behind the biblical phrase “National Security,” which the President imposed to justify assassinating a U.S. citizen (al-Awlaki) and denying basic rights to prisoners suspected of terrorism – and harboring anti-Castro terrorists in Miami. The “indignants” remain on The Street. Has the American Spring arrived in the fall?

By Saul Landau

Politicians face a spreading revolt against Wall Street, financial tycoons, banks in general and an insensitive government that ignores people’s needs. The latest poll shows a radical lack of confidence for those running the government

A September 30 Gallup poll said 81 percent felt dissatisfied with the way those running country. Congress’ rating fell from the toilet seat into the toilet (15% approved of them). The public had similar low opinions on those aspiring for office. Force yourself to watch the Republican Presidential “debates”!

Most mass media sources didn’t even report the Gallup findings, or did so in low priority spots. Nor did they pick up on key specifics. New York Times columnist Charles Blow (Oct. 2) noted that the Gallup survey showed that “Americans sense that the federal government poses an immediate threat to individuals’ rights and freedoms is also at a new high.”

Imagine if Cuba or Iran released such a poll! See, we would say: “This is what people feel if they have no democracy.”

But we elect our government – well, less than 50% vote, but who wants to get picky? Well, how come we don’t like or approve of our officials or have any confidence they can run the country? Is there a hole in our democratic logic? Or is discontent with government here and in the rest of the world a signal that systems (economic and environmental) have raced beyond control of the current institutions and imaginations of political leaders?

When many angry tens of thousands hit the streets in Greece, Spain, England, Israel and Chile it is because they had no institutions through which to channel their grievances. No political party or union could negotiate for them; nor could their governments satisfy their basic demands: jobs, housing, free education, safe environment.

Neo liberalism’s failure stares us in the face as tens of millions of jobless despair; millions of homeless seek shelter; natural disasters challenge national capability to deal with them.

The American right blames third world foreigners, sins of abortion and homosexuality and calls for ever more guns and aggression, while slashing budgets meant for the poor: the new Christians. In Europe socialist parties have lost credibility by adopting neo liberalism; communists in the post-Soviet era have splintered and disintegrated into spattering sects in some of those countries.

In the United States, bereft of left parties, people began to demonstrate against the Wall Street criminals (bankers and brokers) whose behavior helped induce a massive collapse. In Manhattan, hundreds of protesters in painted white faces and costumed as corporate zombies rocked and rolled past the New York Stock Exchange. Many showed cameras their handfuls of phony money.

In Chicago, drummers marched through the financial district. Some pitched tents and in them made anti-banking and corporate greed signs, which they showed to gawkers in passing cars.

Instead of the New York mayor offering the imaginative demonstrators a chance for dialogue, he set the police on them, a good lesson for some middle class protestors who said the streets belonged to the people not the police – who pepper sprayed them.

The U.S. protests began earlier in the year, in Wisconsin where a right wing Governor declared fiscal war against the working people. The New York demonstrators demonstrated the same rebellious spirit, turning the Gallup survey results into action instead of griping to pollsters. Like the New Yorkers, young people in Boston, St. Louis, Kansas City, Portland Maine, Los Angeles and other places expressed political indignation over corporate greed. They marched on Federal Reserve banks and camped in parks. All share the anxieties of the wobbly economy, but the leaderless coming together against a common enemy – finance capital – with common values of decency and justice has held people together – including some Tea Partiers. They communicate through websites and streaming video and have invented democratic forms of assembly.

Like their counterparts in the other countries the U.S. demonstrators found no channels for their grievances. Gradually, liberal Democrats and progressive unions begin to support this movement – or moment – and call on others to join them. But can their messages seep into the ossified political membranes of established structures? Can their energy transform a dysfunctional political establishment into one that begins to transform the nation?

The financial sector lends to the corporate elite who impulsively try to reduce the socially necessary cost of labor, which makes life more desperate for the already poor. The elite immunize themselves against the rage over wage differentials of 325 to 1 for corporate executives and workers (See the Institute for Policy Studiesreport). They ignore pleas for environmental sanity, or embrace denial on climate change.

Without lobbyists the American public had no voice – until it hit the streets. Politicians who throw their weight around for epical interests demonstrate their national concern by “supporting our troops – after 10 years of no progress in Afghanistan and destroying Iraq – and love our country.

Mostly, they woo corporate funders to insure their reelection, while the executive elite hide behind the biblical phrase “National Security,” which the President imposed to justify assassinating a U.S. citizen (al-Awlaki) and denying basic rights to prisoners suspected of terrorism – and harboring anti-Castro terrorists in Miami. The “indignants” remain on The Street. Has the American Spring arrived in the fall?

Wednesday, 20 July 2011 10:21 Saul Landau

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By Saul Landau

Rupert Murdoch finally got his you know what caught in the proverbial ringer – for his employees’ hacking, not for contributing to the prolonged murder of English-language journalism. Wars, revolutions, famines and disasters occurred and Murdoch’s “journalists” juxtaposed lurid “blood” photos with half naked “Zoozoos” who divorced “Googoos” to wed “HooHahs.” Stories on poverty, unemployment and foreclosures get dwarfed by reports of Lindsay and Britney making X-rated videos before going into rehab. And millions bought his newspapers and watched – and rely on – his TV “news.”

In the name of freedom of the press Rupert’s Fox News and commentators spew verbal venom on notions that smack of socialist, pink or liberal thought – like taxing billionaires and regulating their corporate and banking behavior. Indeed, the Foxers promote billionaires not paying taxes as an example of virtue and freedom. “You don’t want your government squandering taxpayers’ money.” Sure, imagine life without cops, firemen, schools, road repair service, etc.

Murdoch’s New York Post and The Sun sell vicarious thrills – reading about celebrity sex and drug adventures, which imply it’s better and less risky than having your own adventures. Murdoch sold sex as news to make money and gain political influence. He succeeded.

He taught his staff to define a “breaking story” as any personal idiosyncrasy of a famous person – especially regarding unconventional use of reproductive organs (including toes) – or intake of taboo substances.

The Australian-born tycoon discovered that Protestant England’s repressive cultures, exported to some of its former colonies like America, make for great markets for the sale of sex news as a commodity.

Behind Murdoch’s gaudy publishing aesthetic, however, lies a drab political and economic imperative: destroy any form of regulation on capital. To achieve that end and expand his monster-size publishing and broadcasting empire, Murdoch courted, extorted and intimidated the powerful, while supporting their “patriotic” wars.

Fox and its British sisters perpetrated the fiction that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and ties to Al-Qaeda. They never atoned for that journalistic sin. They even hired the disgraced New York Times “rogue” reporter Judy Miller, who promoted that crap and got it past her editors on the Establishment newspaper’s front page.

Several Members of Congress have asked authorities to investigate if News of the World had also hacked U.S. citizens, relatives of 9/11 victims. But have journalists inquired if Murdoch’s Fox operation copied its British sister? After all, Murdoch “news” outlets share the gossip-smear-ridicule-sneer ethos the tycoon has cultivated in his lust for media power and profits. He has surpassed William Randolph Hearst – “Get me the photos and I’ll get you the war,” Hearst’s 1898 dictum to help start the Spanish-American War – in practicing yellow journalism. The hacking scandal may have finally given corruption, itself, a bad name.

The investigation has just begun, but already his employees’ antics threaten to dwarf even the Watergate scandal. Nixon as President ordered crimes. Murdoch can’t even invoke the two holy words, “national security,” as a pretext for the crimes of his News of the World “journalists” and editors.

Murdoch’s supposed journalists hacked thousands of private phone messages, including apparently those of Prime Minister Cameron, actor Hugh Grant and Prince William – and quite possibly the Queen (did she get her toes sucked by someone other than her husband?). The intimate lives of murder victims and their families and the relatives of dead soldiers also became hacking fodder for “stories.”

Reporters have begun to ask the Watergate questions – not of the dead Nixon, but of the 80-year-old Murdoch. What did he know and when did he know it? Yawn. He created the perfect atmosphere for criminal activities and called it “freedom of the press.” Sell papers, get political influence, buy or extort protection from the cops – hey, go for it!

What really worries Murdoch, apparently, is not the damage his employees’ methods have cost on people’s lives, his undermining of public trust, his manipulation of popular taste from the banal to the gross; rather, he frets over the real possibility that this indignity will cost him a major and very lucrative business acquisition – the Sky Satellite (BSkyB) communications contract.

The non-Murdoch press inundates its readers, viewers and listeners with stories about the $13.6 billion deal, as if by knowing the amount of money the wily geezer was going to invest in order to make more, we would somehow function better as citizens. Indeed, the public watches the Murdoch drama as another scandal, rather than as another example of institutional dysfunction. Nations default, banks and major investment companies go belly up without warning, and governments bicker over debt ceilings while millions fruitlessly seek jobs, teachers and cops get laid off, and health and other services deteriorate.

Meanwhile, as cable TV induced the 24/7 news programs, tailor-made for Murdoch’s outlets. The public got inundated with gossip and meaningless reports of Libyan rebels gaining, losing, freeing, looting – without ever informing us of the identity of these rebels “we” support. Like the dubious and mysterious “insurgents” and “militants” in the Middle East our “good guys” become fogged in mushy language. Only the stark details of celebrity gossip get luridly reported in detail.

It’s getting hotter, rivers keep rising, tsunamis threaten while government officials bicker over budgets and the media feasts on Murdoch’s boo boo.

Something is rotten – and not only in Denmark. But English parents enraged over the revelation of private material from a dead girl’s phone rose up and instigated the attack on the smarmy Murdoch Empire. Let us push for similar action on other needy fronts as well.

Saul Landau is an Institute for Policy Studies fellow. His WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP plays Sept. 21 at 6 and 8 PM at the Guild Theater, Albuquerque NM

By Saul Landau

The political elite and its stenographic media don’t classify types of terrorists. If they did we would get the good, the bad and the crazy.

Since no one is perfect, the virtuous purveyors of death and destruction naturally need flexibility. Mistakes occasionally occur. For example, when U.S. drones – a basic weapon for virtuous terrorists – routinely whack civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and other remote areas, the Pentagon occasionally admits its honest mistake. The drone directors, of course, had every reason to believe that the corpses, when alive, were terrorists and not school children and housewives.

Similarly, in late July when NATO bombs destroyed a hospital in Libya, the spokespeople for that once anti-Soviet defense organization admitted to yet another well-meaning error. Had the bomb hit the evil (everyone knows that!) Col. Gadaffi’s troops or supporters, they inferred, a humanitarian cause would have been served. After all, look what that the treacherous Gadaffi had done to the United States and Western Europe! (Why he had even cut deals with Western oil companies and abandoned his nuclear weapons program; not having learned the lesson from Iraq, he made himself vulnerable.)

While the world followed Libyan and Afghan wars in which “good-terrorist” bombs blew away scores of bad people and bad-terrorist bombs blew away additional scores of good ones, few paid attention (certainly not the mass media) to the June celebration in Hialeah Florida. Mayor Carlos Hernandez invited the media to “join us at our next City Council meeting where Cuban activist and artist Luis Posada Carriles will receive the Key to the City of Hialeah, along with a proclamation naming the day Luis Posada Carriles Day in Hialeah.”

The invitation explained that Posada “is being honored for his unwavering dedication towards advancing democracy and demanding freedom in Cuba and the western hemisphere.”

How exactly Posada – a freedom fighter, thus a good terrorist – “advanced democracy” by masterminding, with fellow Cuban exile Orlando Bosch (who recently died after being honored multiple times in Miami), the bombing of a Cuban airliner over Barbados, almost 35 years ago, never became clear. Everyone, however, agreed on the facts: 73 passengers and crewmembers perished. Trinidad police arrested Posada’s and Bosch’s henchmen who named the two as masterminds of the act. Venezuelan authorities then arrested the dynamic duo. (The price good terrorists must sometimes pay!)

Bribes from rich exiles and pressure from U.S. government officials got the two heroes released. To advance the cause of freedom, authorities occasionally look the other way.

Let’s not carp on the nature of Cuban exile violence. In 1976, exiles seeking freedom for Cuba bombed the Miami FBI headquarters and Post Office; big deal that in that same year five members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement worked with the Secret Police of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to car bomb Orlando Letelier, Chile’s former Ambassador to Washington, and his colleague Ronni Moffitt, less than a mile from the White House. Letelier was a socialist and Ronni – well, collateral damage, as they say.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, anti-Castro freedom fighters, the media rarely remind us, detonated hundreds of bombs, killed scores of their enemies on U.S. territory, not in Cuba. Max Lesnik, a magazine publisher and writer who disagreed with the violent exiles, got repeatedly bombed, but miraculously survived. He never grasped the logic of those whose aim was to bring down the Cuban government exploding bombs in U.S. cities. Often times, the good terrorists’ methods seem to defy ordinary human reason and seem to be nothing more than insane acts or means of extorting money. But the media and key Florida politicians always explain that these well-meaning bombers are passionate and will do anything for freedom.

Their bombs sometimes get exploded just to make a point. In 1970, the New York’s Fifth Avenue Cinema announced it would run my “Fidel” documentary. Public Television had broadcast it a year earlier, an act of provocation to Cuban exiles. Why else would they bomb the station except to demonstrate the moral perfidy of portraying ideas contrary to their own.

Shortly before the screen lit up, bombs exploded in the theater, canceling the opening. Weeks later they torched the Los Angeles movie house, which had announced the next showing of the film.

None of the hundreds of bombings, deaths by shooting and other violent acts by Cuban exiles should qualify as examples of bad terrorism since they had no Muslim connections.

Bad terrorists, like those who did the World Trade Center and regularly detonate themselves in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and the weirdos who hid explosives in shoes and knickers, have caused our government to reduce our freedoms. That’s how dangerous they are.

The cuckoo category, however, emerges every so often, the latest being in Norway. The first reports from “experts” on Anders Breivik’s massacre blamed Muslim jihadists – as they did some 20 years earlier when ex GIs bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. When big-time violence occurs, the media turns to people like Stephen Emerson, self-dubbed “expert”, who immediately blamed the Oklahoma bombing on Muslim extremists – as did other “experts.”

As the Norway assassin carried out his “mission,” the media gave less attention to a man shooting eight people at a Seattle car show and another killing his ex wife and five members of her family at a Texas roller rink. More crazies! Another loony shot Rep. Gabby Gifford and a dozen others in Tucson. Shocking because a Christian did them!

Christians with guns have helped Oakland, California, earn the name “Little Iraq” among the locals. The Unabomber, from whom the Norwegian slaughterer borrowed passages for his 1,500 page manifesto, and MacVeigh of Oklahoma fame from whom the Norwegian got his explosives formula also belong to the crazy category. They claimed their violence was part of a larger mission, just as do those who order drones and B52s to kill.

When the categories get confusing turn to another section of the newspaper and find out if Angelina has adopted another orphan.

Saul Landau’s new film, WIL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP is available in DVD from Cinema Libre Studio. He’s an Institute for Policy Studies fellow.

“There have been charges that it is morally wrong for the U.S. to aid undemocratic regimes to strengthen their security systems, thereby serving to entrench them in power.” But “the U.S. cannot afford the moral luxury of helping only those regimes in the free world that meet our ideals of self-government. Eliminate all the absolute monarchies, dictatorships and juntas from the free world and count those that are left and it should be readily apparent that the U.S. would be well on its way to isolation.” – Al Haney, C.I.A. official for Operation Success, 1954 covert action that overthrew the elected government of Guatemala. (Tim Weiner, ”Angleton’s Secret Police,” NY Times, June 26, 2007)

The United States, as we learn from first grade on, represents the world’s best economy and most successful democracy because we live by the rule of law. And we rightfully tell other countries how they too can measure up to our standards – including how to deal with our terrorist foes. And we help them.

U.S. forces, for example, intervene in Pakistan to assassinate our enemies (who should also be their enemies), which creates collateral damage: kids, women, and other innocents also get whacked. But none of this should interfere with the virtuous rhetoric behind our policy. Indeed, using the United States as her model, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton lectures our erstwhile ally, Pakistan, on how democracies should behave.

“One of my pet peeves” she told the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition conference in September 2010, is a country (Pakistan) “that will not tax their elite who expect us to come in and help them serve their people are just not going to get the kind of help from us that historically they may have.”

A few in the audience thought of the ridiculously low taxes paid by U.S. billionaires and the zero taxes paid by U.S. oil companies. But even the United States is not perfect. Hilary bridled over the idea of Pakistan having “a tax rate of 9 per cent of GDP when landowners and all the other elites do not pay anything or pay so little it’s laughable. And then when there’s a problem everybody expects the U.S. and others to come in and help.”

Secretary Clinton told reporters in Brussels after her talk that she pleaded with Pakistan to “expand its tax base.” She emphasized that “it is absolutely unacceptable for those with means in Pakistan not to be doing their fair share to help their own people.” Pakistan must “urgently mobilize its own resources and the international community can only do so much.” (Could an aide have copied parts of a speech intended for the US Congress into her speech for Pakistan?)

Pakistan had sinned for not having told Washington the address of one of its residents. Had the CIA known Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts the heroic Navy Seals could have, years before, assassinated (brought to justice without a trial) him. Our President and people would have felt less anxious, if not downright elated.

How can we trust them after they allowed OBL to hide in plain sight for almost a decade? Some Pakistani army and intelligence officials even support the Afghan Taliban and branches of Al-Qaeda. That entire country has become a problematic ally – and a pain in the ass. How can we justify giving them more than $1 billion in aid – mostly military – a year when polls show “that Americans are widely disliked and distrusted by Pakistanis.” Worse “a recent poll showed that 80 percent of Pakistanis believe their country should not cooperate with the United States in the war on terror.” (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/27/cnn-poll-u-s-not-too-fond-of-pakistan/ and Business Insider Feb. 9, 2011)

Shockingly, leading Pakistani government and military officials consider India a much more important enemy than Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Those ingrates have no problem taking our hard earned dollars, so they should automatically make our enemy into their enemy.

Imagine, some Pakistanis feel outraged over the fact that in January Raymond Davis shot and killed two men in Lahore, because he suspected them of malice when they pulled in front of his car at a red light. Davis said he shot them in self-defense when he fired his Glock into the back of one of the fleeing Pakistanis. Pakistani authorities charged him with murder, but Washington claimed he had diplomatic immunity.

Pakistanis fumed. But Davis left jail and returned to the States, thanks to U.S. persuasion. So they paid off the dead guys’ families – probably more than they were worth!

Then, many Pakistanis objected also to our Seals coming to their country to kill bin Laden and members of his clan. Some even complain of our drones bombing terrorists in Pakistan – just because lots of non-terrorists die in those strikes as well. Hey, if they don’t want us doing that, the Pakistani army or police should kill them. That’s what they do in a democracy.

The U.S. economy tanks, the government loses voters’ credence, the political elite ignore climate change, and a horrific wealth gap and the suffering of tens of millions. But U.S. leaders continue to spread democracy with troops, drones and righteous lectures to other countries on how to be like us. That’s democratic chutzpah!

Saul Landau’s WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP is available on DVD and for theatrical screenings from Cinema Libre Studio. He as an Institute for Policy Studies fellow.