Prof. James Petras » 99GetSmart

Ecuador: Left-Center Political Regimes versus Radical Social Movements

Feb 122013

Introduction

On February 17, 2013, national elections will take place in Ecuador in which incumbent left-center President, Rafael Correa, is likely to win with an absolute majority against opposition candidates covering the political spectrum from Right to Left. Since he was first elected in 2006, Correa has won a string of elections, including presidential elections (2009), a constitutional referendum, a constituent assembly and a ballot on constitutional amendments. Correa’s electoral successes occur despite the opposition from the main Indian organizations, CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) and CONFENIAE, the principle public sector teachers unions, environmental NGOs and numerous radical intellectual, academics and trade union activists. He also has routed the traditional pro-US right-wing and liberal parties, successfully defeated and prosecuted the subversive intent of the mass media moguls and survived an aborted police-military coup in 2010. Unquestionably Correa has demonstrated his capacity to win repeated elections and even increase his margin of victory.

The electoral successes of Correa raise fundamental issues which transcend the immediate context of Ecuadorean politics and reflect a general pattern throughout Latin America. These issues include: (1) the relation between mass social movements and left of center electoral parties and politicians. (2) The relation between pro-active extractive capitalist development strategies (mining, oil, agro-business), inclusionary social policies and anti-imperialist regional foreign policies. (3) The inverse relation between the growth and consolidation of a left-center regime and the decline and weakening of radical social movements. (4) The problem of the initial convergence and divergence between radical social movements and left-center political leaders; as they move from ‘opposition’ to political power. (5) The shifts in power between movements and electoral politicians, with the former exercising greater capacity to mobilize during the period of opposition to the Right and the latter dominating and dictating the political agenda subsequent to securing electoral office.

The Politics of Post Neo-Liberalism

Correa’s “citizen based” electoral movement, operates from positions in government and eschews any ‘class framework’. In fact in its broadest terms, it appeals to and directs government programs to both the urban poor and the big foreign petroleum multi-nationals; the small and medium size business people and the Guayaquil business elite; workers in the informal sector and the public sector professionals and employees, the returning immigrants from Europe (especially Spain) and the construction, real estate and communication elite.

In foreign policy Correa has supported and has the backing of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments and is a member of ALBA; it has received large scale low interest loans from China (in exchange for oil investment and trade agreements) and retains commercial ties with the US and EU. Correa has backed greater Latin American integration and signed off on major public-private petrol contracts with US and European oil companies. He claims to be a socialist but condemns the Marxist FARC and praises the Colombian regimes’ ‘neo-liberalism’; questioned the illegal foreign debt (lowering it by 60%) and at the same time retains the dollar as Ecuador’s currency and opens indigenous territories to foreign capital exploitation.

In a word Correa’s “post neo-liberal policies” combine ‘nationalist populist’ and neo-liberal policies more than a program for the 21^st century socialism that he proclaims.

Perspectives on President Correa’s Government

The national-populist extractive policies and development strategy of the Correa regime has polarized opinion across the hemisphere and within Ecuador. On the extreme right Washington and its mass media acolytes view Ecuador as a radical ‘socialist regime’. They take at face value Correa’s embrace of “21^st century socialism”, in large part because of his ties to Venezuela, membership in ALBA, renegotiation of the foreign debt and Ecuador’s giving political asylum (in its British embassy) to Julian Assange, the Wilkileak’s leader.

Echoing Washington’s ‘radical leftist’ label are the traditional and newly minted rightist parties (Sociedad Patriotica) who have been marginalized by Correa’s electoral successes. Their critique of Correa’s early nationalist policies, renegotiating the debt and prevailing oil contracts, is now tempered by his recent large scale, long term investment agreement with several foreign multinational petroleum companies. The Ecuadorean oligarchy while publically condemning Correa are privately busy negotiating public-private procurement agreements especially in communications, infrastructure and banking.

The Indian movement, CONAIE, peasants, the teachers union, the ecology-NGOs and some smaller leftist parties oppose Correa for his “sellout” to the big oil companies, his authoritarian centralized power, the expansion of exploitation in the Amazon region and territorial encroachment and threats to Indian lands, water and health.

In contrast to internal opposition from the social movements, the vast majority of leftist parties and center-leftist regimes in Latin America, led by Cuba and Venezuela, are staunch supporters and allies of the Correa regime based primarily on his anti-imperialist policies, support for regional integration and opposition to US interventionist and destabilization policies in the region.

Internationally Correa has widespread support among progressives in the US and Europe especially for his early policies questioning the legality of the foreign debt, his rhetorical proposal to conserve the Amazon in exchange for cash transfers from the EU/US, his renegotiations of the oil contracts and his anti-imperialist pronouncements. Most important, Correa has secured long term large scale financial aid from China in exchange for exploitation of its oil resources.

Buttressed by allies in Latin America and Asia, Correa has effectively resisted pressures from the outside from the US. Internally, Correa has built a formidable bloc of social and political forces which has effectively countered opposition from the oligarchical right as well as from the once powerful radical social movements. The sustained popular majorities backing Correa from 2006 to the present 2013 are based essentially on several factors – substantial increases in social expenditures benefiting popular constituencies and nationalist policies increasing state revenues. The entire Correa paradigm, however, is based on one singular factor – the high price for oil and the boom in commodity prices which finances his strategy of extractive capital led growth and expenditures for social inclusion.

The Social Bases of Correa’s Popularity

Correa’s electoral victories are directly related to his populist social policies financed by the substantial oil revenues resulting from the high prices and huge increase from the renegotiation of the oil contracts with the multi-nationals – an increase from a 20% to an 85% tax. Correa increased the health budget from $561 million in 2006 to $774 million in 2012, about 6.8% of the national budget. Clinics have multiplied, the price of medications has been reduced as a result of a joint venture with the Cuban firm Enfarm, and access to medical care has vastly improved. Educational spending has increased from 2.5% of GDP in 2006 to 6% in 2013, including a free lunch program for children. The regime has increased state subsidies for social housing, especially for low income classes as well as returning immigrants. To lower unemployment, Correa has allocated $140 million in micro credits to finance self-employment, a measure especially popular among workers in the “informal sector”. By effectively reducing the debt to foreign creditors by two-thirds (debt service runs to 2.24% of GDP), Correa has increased the minimum wage and pensions for low income retirees thus expanding the social security system.

Anti-poverty subsidies, payments of $35 monthly (increased to $50 two weeks before the Elections) to poor families and the disabled and low interest loans have allowed Correa to gain influence and divide the opposition movements in the countryside. Business elites especially in Guayaquil and the middle and upper echelon of the public sector especially in the petrol sector, have become important contributors and backers of Correa’s electoral machine.

As a result of State subsidies, contracts and the backing of business and banking sectors and the weakening of the opposition media elites, Correa has built a broad electoral base that transverses the class spectrum. The entire ‘popular alliance’ is, however, highly dependent on Correa’s pact with extractive multi-nationals. His electoral success is a result of a strategy based on the revenue from a narrowly based export sector. And the export sector is highly dependent on the expansion of oil exploitation in the Amazon region which adversely affects the livelihood and health of the indigenous communities, who in turn are highly organized and in a permanent ‘resistance mode”.

The Contradictions of Extractive Capitalism and Populist Politics: The Threats and Challenges to Social Movements

The oil sector accounts for over 50 percent of Ecuador’s export earnings and over one-third of all tax revenues. Production has oscillated around 500,000 barrels a day, with increasing shares sold to China and a decreasing percentage to the US. In February 2013 Ecuador signed contracts for $1.7 billion in investments to boost output in the Amazon fields with Canadian, US, Spanish and Argentine multi-nationals in association with the Ecuadorean state company Petroecuador.

The biggest oil investments in the history of Ecuador promise to increase the levels of oil spills, contamination of Indian communities and intensification of the conflicts between CONAIE and its ecological and movement allies and the Correa regime. In other words as Correa sustains and consolidates his majoritarian electoral support outside of the Amazon and adjoining regions with increased social expenditures based on rising oil revenues, he will further dispossess and alienate the movements of the interior.

Social inclusion of the urban masses and promotion of an independent foreign policy are based on an alliance with foreign extractive multi-nationals which undermine the habitation and economy of small producers and Indian communities.

The history of petroleum exploitation contamination up to the present day provides little evidence to support President Correa’s claims of environmental safeguards. Texaco/Chevron oil exploitation in the Amazon contaminated millions of acres, dispossessed scores of Indian communities and sickened thousands of inhabitants resulting in a judiciary award of $8 billion dollars in favor of the 30,000 indigenous people adversely affected.

Recently Correa’s proposed oil contracts with multi-nationals to exploit 13 blocks in the pristine Amazon region covering millions of acres and inhabited by seven Indian nationalities, without consulting the indigenous communities thus contravening his own newly written constitution. Powerful mobilizations, led by CONAIE and CONFEIAE (the Ecuadorean Confederation of Amazonian Indian Nationalities) on the 28th of November 2012 in Quito and in the regions targeted for exploitation, has caused several oil majors to delay drilling. In the face of determined Indian resistance, Correa has shown the authoritarian side of his regime: threatening to dispatch the military to occupy and forcibly impose a kind of ‘martial law’, raising the prospects of prolonged political warfare.

While Correa can and does win national elections and routs his electoral opposition in the big cities, he faces a resolute organized majority in the Amazon and adjoining regions. Correa’s dilemma is that unless he diversifies the economy and reaches a compromise via consultation with CONAIE, his dependence on new oil ventures drives him toward de facto alliance with the traditional export elites and greater dependence on the military and police.

The Latin American Context

Correa’s bet on an export strategy based on primary goods has created a potentially dynamic mega cycle of growth but it is increasingly dependent on high world prices for oil. Any significant decline in price would immediately lead to a precipitous fall in social expenditures, erode his social coalition and strengthen the opposition from the right and the radical social movements. Correa’s repeated electoral successes and his widespread support across the progressive and anti-imperialist political spectrum, has seriously weakened the radical social movements a pattern that has been repeated throughout Latin America.

In the previous decade, roughly the period of the 1990’s to the early years of the 21^st century, the radical social movements took center stage in toppling rightwing, US backed neo-liberal regimes. Ecuador was no exception: CONAIE and its urban allies ousted the incumbent neo-liberal President Mahuad in January 21, 2000, and joined with Correa in driving the Lucio Gutierrez regime from power in April 2005. Similar mass struggles and social mobilizations ousted neo-liberals in Argentina and Bolivia, while movement backed center left politicians took power in Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru.

Once ensconced in power the center-left regimes adopted a commodity led export strategy, embraced partnerships with the MNC and built broad electoral conditions which marginalized the radical social movements; with the aid of increased revenues they substituted populist transfer payments for structural transformations.

Nationalist foreign policies were combined with alliances with big commodity based MNC. To the extent that class struggles emerged, the populist leaders condemned them and even accused their leaders of “conspiring with the Right” – thus questioning the legitimacy of their demands and struggles.

The post neo-liberal center-left regimes in Latin America, with their populist politics of ‘inclusion’ have been far more effective in reducing the appeal and influence of the radical mass social movements than the previous US backed repressive neo-liberal regimes.

Those social movements which opted to support and join the center-left regimes (or were co-opted) became transmission belts for extractive policies. Confined to administrating the regime’s anti-poverty programs and defending the extractive capitalist model, the co-opted leaders argued for higher tax revenues and social expenditures, and, occasionally, called for greater environmental controls. But ultimately the “insider strategy”, adopted by some social leaders, has led to bureaucratic subordination and the loss of any specific class loyalties.

Conclusion

National-populism is and will be challenged from within by its ‘allies’ among the MNC who will increasingly influence their ‘public sector partners’ and, from the ‘outside’, by the pressures from the world market. In the meantime as long as commodity prices hold and the nationalist-populist leaders continue their ‘inclusive’ social programs, Latin American politics will remain relative stable and the economy will continue to grow, but it will continue to face resistance from the alliance of eco-social and indigenous movements.

What lessons can be drawn from the past two decades of social movement – populist electoral party alliances? The message is both clear and ambiguous. Clearly movements which do not have an independent political perspective will lose out to their electoral allies. However, there is no question that because of movement action, the populist electoral class has legislated significant social expenditures benefiting the popular classes and pursued a relative independent foreign policy – an ambiguous legacy or unfinished history?

Beyond President Chavez Electoral Victory: Socialism in a Rentier State

Prof. James Petras, Submitted Article No Responses »

Oct 282012

By James Petras, 99GetSmart.com

Introduction

The successful re-election of President Chavez by a resounding 10% margin winning 20 of the 22 states, with a massive 80% turnout provides his government with a clear and decisive mandate to set the political and economic course of the country over the next six years.

To understand the opportunities and constraints which the government faces, it is essential to outline not only the positive strengths of the government but the complex and difficult structural features of ‘transiting’ in an essentially ‘rentier economy and society’ based on extractive enclaves, essentially a petrol economy. The socialist project faces an external environment with contradictory features, which include a highly globalized economy offering trade and investment opportunities and expanding economic partnerships via regional and global organizations ( OPEC, MERCOSUR, UNASUR, PETROCARIBE, ALBA) and political and military threats from its proximity to the North American imperial heartland.

While the institutional foundations and foreign policy initiatives of President Chavez have created a veritable ‘fire wall’ against any direct or proxy US or NATO military intervention – at least in the present conjuncture – similar to what has taken place in Iraq, Libya and Syria, the internal, especially socio-economic and political structures, are more problematical. And for that reason, Washington has refocused and is concentrating on exploiting the structural and political vulnerabilities of the Chavez regime to question and subvert his mandate. This ‘readjustment’ in US imperial strategy ‘toward the inside’ calls for an equally “strategic turn” for the Chavez government: to concentrate on consolidating changes realized and to move toward forms of socialist organization and practice.

Post-Election Responses

The immediate terrain for future struggles, following Chavez’s electoral victory, is evident in the responses by his US and domestic adversaries and by his Venezuelan supporters. The White House praised the electoral process, the peaceful and orderly participation of its citizens, but, unlike the felicitous response of Latin American Presidents, it failed to congratulate President Chavez – a clear sign of continued diplomatic hostility. Washington failed to recognize the relation between the peaceful ‘process’ and the substantive program of the Chavez government: given the immense popularity of his social programs and redistributive programs there was a general consensus (even among the majority of voters for the opposition) that violent disruption and a destabilization campaign would only further isolate Washinton’s proxies, prejudice their electoral prospects in the upcoming elections in December 2012 and February 2013 and polarize the electorate in a highly unfavorable way.

The recognition of the legitimacy and integrity of the electoral process by both the defeated candidate Capriles and the White House is an indication that the prime focus of the opposition is on mounting a major electoral struggle to capture institutional control at the local, state and national legislative level over the next four months. The US is gearing up to pour millions of dollars into the opposition bases of support – above all to use funding to enforce “unity” among the dozens of antagonistic parties, sects, NGO’s, trade unions and property owners associations. Splits and divisions among the opposition will undermine efforts to oust even vulnerable Chavista incumbents.

The pro-Chavez United Socialist Party of Venezuelan (PSUV) believes that the election provides the President with a ‘mandate’ to pursue his socialist agenda. The problem here is that many leaders, mass organizations, neighborhood groups and officials have important differences over what ‘the mandate’ means with regard to to his socio-economic agenda. The problem here is that many leaders, mass organizations, neighborhood groups and officials have important differences over what proximate steps should be taken in pursuit of a “socialist transition”.

The opposition will do everything possible to conserve their institutional power bases; and their US counterparts will certainly exploit to the fullest their access points in the political system. The opposition will oppose any changes in ownerships of the private banks, mass media and strategic economic centers which they dominate. They will promote changes in government policy, calling for budgetary restraint in social spending; support legislation, weakening state regulation; and call for legislative investigations of incumbent Chavista office holders. The neo-liberal opposition will focus on exploiting any mismanagement of public enterprises and claim authoritarian “persecution” if the government prosecutes private sector swindlers, money launderers, and illegal foreign exchange operations by bankers. Most of all both the US and the opposition will claim that “democracy” and ‘freedom’ are jeopardized if organized conduits for channeling US funds to so-called NGO’s are closed down for failing to register as foreign agents. The US government funded NGO’s are thinly veiled “front organizations” playing a major role in financing and propping up the opposition, providing training, advisers, electoral strategists and propagandists. Washington conditions funding to the segmented and divided opposition: unite forces and follow US directives.

The current US strategy following the electoral path does not exclude taking a more violent authoritarian direction in the future. In the aftermath of the October elections, with many access point’s available , strong media and business-banking institutions in place and a relatively stable political environment, Washington believes this is an unpropitious climate for a coup. Washington is prepared to work through the electoral process with the intention of gaining and expanding institutional power to block the President’s socialist agenda via congressional obstructionism. The US will revert to a violent coup strategy if and when it has sufficient institutional power to fabricate an “impeachment” proceeding or call for a referendum. The opposition would claim that Chavez has “exceeded” his constitutional powers, hoping to convert sectors of the “constitutionalist” military or National Guard to its power grab, an approach favored by the State Department in ousting the legally elected Presidents of Honduras and Paraguay. In other words the democratic posture adopted by Washington and the opposition today is compatible with an authoritarian seizure of power in the near future.In fact under present conditions, electoral tactics are a necessary compliment to a future violent strategic regime change.

Chavez in the Post- Electoral Period: Multiple Options

President Chavez has articulated two apparently contradictory responses in the post-election period, each reflecting two distinct political moments. On the one hand he speaks of advancing the socialist agenda; on the other, of opening a dialogue with the opposition including the business/capitalist elite. The socialist position reflects the powerful mandate Chavez received as a result of his recent electoral triumph; the dialogue position is posed with an eye to the upcoming local, state and national elections.

In addition, Chavez faces internal pressures pulling him in both directions. Radical activists, social movement and a few political leaders are pushing for a new round of nationalizations, based on political, economic and ideological considerations. They argue that strategic sectors like banking, agro-business, telecommunications, oil-related industries and others will provide the government with the levers and resources to re-launch its stalled plans for rapid diversification of the economy and speed up growth. Politically they argue public ownership will weaken the financial base of the neo-liberal opposition and close-off channels linking US funding with the government’s right-wing adversaries.

The ‘moderates’ argue that a mixed public-private partnership based on joint ventures will consolidate and broaden Chavez’s appeal to the “middle classes” and prepare the ground for greater inter-governmental cooperation, especially if the opposition gains governorships and a near Congressional majority. The “moderates” argue that a ‘dialogue’ between Chavez and the opposition based on the idea of an alliance with sectors of the ‘productive bourgeoisie’, with specific investment targets, a major infusion of credit and investment in joint projects, will lessen polarization and facilitate a dialogue with the US, especially if Obama is re-elected. The ‘moderates’ are concentrated among senior officials, state governors, ministers, party leaders and among senior presidential advisors, many of whom have supporters among public functionaries.

The larger problems facing both the “radical” and “moderates” are twofold, one political and one economic. Politically, both factions contain officials who have not performed effectively in dealing with their popular constituencies and are facing near elections:they are looking for ways of remaining in office, either via radical promises or by coalescing with the opposition.

Economically both factions, face the deep seated and pervasive problem of trying to formulate a dynamic economic strategy in an essentially rentier state. Despite vast progressive socio-political changes, Venezuela still largely depends on petrol exports and revenues and a labor force looking to petrol earnings to increase personal consumption.

Which faction’s position will influence President Chavez’s decision? This depends on what tasks he prioritizes in terms of realizing the socialist agenda. Chavez seeks a set of political alliances to transform Venezuela from a ‘rentier’ economy and state to one with a productive, diverse economy,which is competitive in international markets.

Obstacles and Opportunities to a Socialist Transition

Building socialism or a new productive capitalist economy is a complex and difficult journey in any rentier economy, including Venezuela.

Executives of public and privately owned firms have demonstrated very little capacity to innovate, invest in new technology, locate market niches and complete projects on time. Instead they rely on the rentier state for public contracts, subsidies, captive domestic markets, easy low interest public loans or grants and political contacts. As a result the advocates of ‘mixed’, ‘socialist’, and ‘neo-liberal’ states each make telling criticism of their opposite number but overlook the same weaknesses regarding their own ‘agency of development’.

Private sector operatives have for decades failed to perform as entrepreneurs, confusing their propensity for quick returns, leveraging differential interest and exchange rates and monopoly profits as a sign of their ‘market magic’. In fact for decades, prior to the Chavez epoch, they chose to milk state rentier oil revenues in order to “invest” in consumer imports, overseas and domestic real estate investments and in a bloated backward service sector. The rightwing neo-liberal claim that the private sector’s miserable track record in investment and innovation is a result of Chavez anti-business attitude doesn’t stand up to the historical record. The same rentier anti-entrepreneurial behavior among the business, banking and agricultural elite pre-dates the Chavez decade. Rentier behavior has deep historical, cultural and economic roots. Venezuela’s bourgeoisie/long ago adapted to a rentier state and instead of fighting it, decided complicity was easier and more profitable; they latched onto oil revenues with phony ‘development projects’ which never came to fruition.

The recent campaign by the losing rightwing candidate Henrique Capriles’claim to be a follower of former Brazilian President Lula D’Silva, promoting private capitalist development with social welfare,is deeply flawed. Capriles overlooks the fact that Lula had the backing of the powerful Sao Paolo industrial bourgeoisie to forge his alliance between the poor and the rich. In contrast, Capriles would have to rely on an anemic rentier bourgeoisie with little competitive productive capacity.

The problem of ‘rentierism’ is not confined to the past and present private bourgeoisie; it is evident in the performance of the senior executives who run the nationalized enterprises. Their production and innovation record runs from mediocre to poor: low productivity, dependence on government subsidies and prone to miss deadlines and to cost over runs (in construction) and mismanagement. It is hard to see how the “moderate” Chavista model of a ‘mixed economy’ based on a joint public-private partnership, combining rentier mentalities, will lead to a ‘productive dynamic economy’ Chavez has very problematic human material to work with in transforming Venezuela away from a rentier economy.

Theoretical Marxist treaties critiquing capitalism and postulating “transitions to socialism” that do not take account of the profoundly ‘clientelist’ rentier character of Venezuelan capitalism have little relevance. The conversion from rentier “capitalism” to a modern productive economy with an effective public administration capable of delivering social services is a central consideration for the transition to 21^st century Venezuelan social;ism.

Reaffirming the socialist objective of the Bolivarian Revolution as a strategic goal depends first of all making the Ministries and their sub-officials accountable to their constituents via empowered citizens councils and professionally trained oversight committees of ‘users of the services’. Current abuses, corruption, inefficiencies, non-delivery of services are chronic, politically costly and mock the socially progressive projects promised by President Chavez. Periodic ‘renovation’ and replacements of Ministers, civilians by military, provide at best a temporary respite: but under conditions of unchecked power, the rentier culture and mentality promptly reasserts itself in the same dysfunctional behavior. Citizen oversight with the power to sanction errant officials provides a more permanent corrective.

The centrality of mal-administration has enormous political consequences; it probably accounted for over half of the minority popular vote which defected to the opposition. It is a mistake to attribute the 45% vote for the opposition as a call for a return to neo-liberalism: in fact it represents a protest vote of Chavez sympathizers against officials who mismanage funds and who appoint incompetent party cronies. It was a vote against Ministers who spend billions but can’t keep the oil flowing, lights on and the water running. Above all the anti-Chavista protest vote was a response to the Ministers of Interior and Defense, civilian or military, who have failed to reduce the crime rate – in the streets, in the private suites and in the public offices.

Elections of citizens’ oversight councils would represent a ‘revolution within a revolution’ – because it will result in greater accountability and the implementation of some of President Chavez’s initiatives. The process may only result in incremental changes at the “micro-level” – improving public services and hastening the processing of public permits – but it certainly would be an improvement over ringing revolutionary proposals which are inconsequential (not implemented) and merely multiply the number of officials at the public trough. Increasing the number of officials only multiplies the tramites (signatures, rubber stamps, payoffs and delays) and increases the protest votes. The danger to Chavez and the PSUV does not come only from US destabilization via their local clients, but, at the barrio level. The erosion of the PSUV comes from the thousands of day to day abuses by local ‘red shirted’ officials who accumulate piles of citizen requests while they file their fingernails, enjoy two hour lunches (debating the “next stage in “the revolution” or the “consolidation versus radicalization strategies”) while lines of petitioners circle their Ministries.

The Responsibility of the President

President Chavez has done wonders in politicizing and inculcating a civic culture among Venezuelan citizens as was evident in the 80% voter turnout. No President in the history of Venezuela (or for that matter in the history of the United States) has done more to create a sense of national identity. He has defended the country with valor and integrity. He has preserved and advanced democratic institutions against US and client attempts to destabilize and destroy the constitutional order. President Chavez has created an extensive social welfare net which has raised millions from poverty, eliminated illiteracy and provided a universal free public health system. Chavez has successfully engaged in consequential international economic aid programs, providing oil at reduced cost to poor countries in Central America and the Caribbean. But now in 2012 he faces new challenges : the battle for a revolution within the revolution in a complex and difficult context. Rentier economies pose numerous obstacles to developing a productive and participatory economy based on an active working class, an innovative and entrepreneurial managerial class,and a responsible and socially conscious middle class. The majority of the social classes in Venezuela support a socialist president but mostly on the bases of expanding individual consumption and social spending. Political militants in the street are ardent advocates of socialism but in office, their behavior is more like their neo-liberal predecessors.

Chavez must walk a tight line between on the one hand revamping the entire administrative system and transforming the rentier economy and on the other hand financing and implementing timely short term social impact programs to secure favorable electoral outcomes over the next four months in order to win the gubernatorial and Congressional elections. Defining the tasks for a rectification campaign are fairly straightforward, but implementing them carries a significant political cost.

To combat cronyism (including private and state cronies), corruption, inefficiency, authoritarianism and incompetence requires; (1) citizen oversight committees, (2) strengthening and training local communal councils, (3) establishing effective legal and judicial processes to investigate administrative malfeasance in a timely fashion, (4) establishing technical, entrepreneurial institutes to identify and design manufacturing and industrial projects which utilize local inputs linked to the oil industry, (5) creating petrol based industries (plastics, chemicals, fertilizers etc. (6) linking up with other productive sectors of the economy (agriculture, technical services). Chavez’s policy interventions should give greater priority to national issues, like public security, economic efficiency and workers participation. He should give greater emphasis on linking social consumption with productive activity, popular power with effective co-operation in local law enforcement.

Above all, Chavez should look toward taking control over the strategic sectors of the economy – the commanding heights – most notably the financial-banking complex. The government’s concern should be directed toward increasing investment in a vast array of petrol based new industries. The social bases of Chavista ‘Bolivarian Socialism’ must shift from ‘consumer consciousness’ to productive consciousness, from social welfare from above to workplace class solidarity and productivity from below.

Today some Marxists advocating greater working class management or control underestimate the limited economistic consciousness which pervades the class – the desire to increase wages and social benefits independently of productivity .Workplace democracy must be linked with a broader mission of converting Venezuela from a rentier to a modern productive and diversified economy. Otherwise working class militancy, harnessed to the consumer – rentier mentality, will ultimately become a major obstacle to Venezuela’s transition to socialism.

Socialism, as President Chavez understands the deepening and expansion of popular power, requires a shift from mega-projects – especially international and multi-national – to well managed and implemented multi micro-projects under worker-citizen oversight with strict and enforceable discipline and guidelines for completion.

The de-politization of appointments to highly technical posts means that effective vote getters are not necessarily the best economic administrators. Currently cost-effectiveness is not taken into account in building a billion dollar transport system or organizing an effective highway system if it helps elect a mayor or governor.

Socialization of the economy may deprive the opposition of strategic financial backing but that has to be weighed in light of how well the public enterprise or bank will function in improving the everyday lives, economic activities and employment of the public at large. A badly managed public enterprise – in the food sector, for example- can do more harm for a socialist strategy than a well regulated ‘functional’ privately owned firm. In other words, socialization should advance to the degree that the state has the capacity (or is in the process of developing the capacity) to run the enterprises.,as Lenin noted in his essay “Better Few but Better”.

Integral to the development of socialism (and not an ‘external’ or marginal feature of it) is public and individual security including private property. Incalculable billions of dollars are lost every year because of crime: fear, intimidation, private security measures, limitations in movements and time, all have a price. So far Venezuela’s security system has a very uneven record: generally, high marks for cross border security,containing external threats and protecting democratic institutions; low grades with reference to street crimes, gang warfare, white collar crime and sabotage and or negligence of key oil and electrical installations.

Crime prevention involves converting the electoral multitudes into a national network of organized local community based crime fighters backed and protected by armed rapid response Special Forces trained in urban crime-warfare. Cuban intelligence advisers may be experts in fighting political terrorists but currently an extraordinary crime wave is ravaging the cities. This speaks to the need for greater intelligence operations against gang leaders and their business and political accomplices and money launderers. Jobs, schools,and welfare programs have not been enough to stop the upward crime spiral. Crime not only grows from social deprivation but from a rentier-like mentality in which high consumption, based on violence and seizure of economic resources is seen as the quickest route to social mobility. Most criminals prey on the working class. If the working class is the bases of a socialist transition, then putting the full power of the state behind law enforcement is an essential defense of socialism – and a positive step in winning over important sectors of the middle class. Crime in the streets is intimately linked to criminal accomplices in public office, including high police and judicial officials, some of whom claim to be “ardent Chavistas”.

No doubt a comprehensive ramping up of internal security will be exploited by the US backed mass media as indications of Chavez ‘authoritarianism’ (by the same opposition who currently cry out against ‘lawless crime ridden Caracas’). But making the cities safe for its citizens, within constitutional procedures, will be immensely popular, and politically and economically profitable.

Final Notes in Place of a Conclusion

The Venezuelan transition to socialism is an ‘open process’ with enormous positive assets as well as formidable obstacles. Immense strength in the dynamic farsighted leadership of President Chavez and his vast army of popular supporters and committed militants; and severe challenges derived from the legacy of a rentier economy, embedded in the ruling class and to a certain degree in the populace at large.

As the government moves forward to socialism it is incumbent upon its leaders to spell out the criteria for the socialization of enterprises, to define the ‘rules of the game’ – namely what enterprises and economic sectors will not be expropriated; what profit margins are acceptable; what sectors are targeted for socialization, joint ventures, worker managed firms and private ownership.

Criterion for Socialization of Enterprises

Political Sabotage: owners who disinvest or who refuse to invest to meet demand, hoard, or deliberately run down operations in an effort to undermine public policy and create social discontent.

Social Conflict: Capitalist firms which refuse to abide by labor laws or engage in collective bargaining with trade unions or fire workers arbitrarily thus providing strikes and lock outs. These firms should be socialized under a management team of worker, consumer, and engineers.

Ideology: Firms identified with the opposition and collaborating with US front groups; firms which pursue political over economic objectives could become targets.

Strategic sectors: Key sectors and firms which play a decisive role in the economy, such as banking, finance and foreign trade should be socialized providing public policy makers with instruments to capture the economic surplus to foment new growth sectors; socially strategic sectors and petro-industrial and food production. Innovative small and medium size firms should not be socialized.

These criteria do not exhaust the possible sectors but are a necessary part of a socialist transition, providing the state has the capacity to run the enterprises. Under no conditions should firms be socialized and turned over to mediocre, incompetent officials or trade union leaders who run them into the ground. Socialism is not a race to see how many firms can be nationalized in the shortest time. In case of limited sate capacity there are several alternative options.

State intervention, regulation and taxation: to insure labor laws are followed, profits are equitably distributed; employers increase social consumption, technical upgrades and worker training.

Worker based production commissions: to ‘oversee the books’ of companies and provide employees with information for collecting bargaining.

Joint ventures between public and private capital: to take advantage of marketing and technical skills of productive capitalists guided by the social criterion of public and worker managers.

Planning via compulsory and voluntary production targets: The private sector especially small and middle size firms should not be socialized especially those which provide vital services, recreation and leisure time activities for the mass of the people. Venezuela should not follow Cuba’s disastrous 1968 policy of closing down thousands of private enterprises which the State had zero capacity to replace. Nor should Venezuela follow Cuba’s 1970’s policy of ‘specialization’ in commodity exports to restricted markets. (The Soviet bloc).

Venezuela needs to create public sector entrepreneurs and technocrats as well critical class conscious working class militants for the productive sector. Management is key to the success of a “socialist transition” because Venezuela is deeply immersed in the global marketplace, which offers great opportunities and pitfalls. The State should invest in management and technical schools which develop and apply socialist criteria for production, marketing, innovation, financing and accounting. It should eschew the use of ‘models’ based on free market orthodoxy found in US textbooks as well as Soviet era manuals. The goal should be to encourage texts which critically apply Marxist writings to the specificities of a rentier economy and to encourage transformative leadership, workers’ participation in planning and the relative autonomy of enterprises.

The Big Picture: Challenges and Opportunists

Transforming a rentier economy and society into an efficient productive and diversified socialist economy is a very difficult, complex and prolonged process. Rentier economies are generally high consumption enclaves drawing rents and surrounded by financial, real estate, and“compradore” capitalists (importers) and avaricious over-paid bureaucratic elites. Agro and industrial business elites transfer earnings from production to the dominant rentier sectors retaining their backward character.

President Chavez has waged a successful political struggle in transferring a substantial proportion of the rents to mass popular social consumption and establishing a political framework and ideology to justify and extend programs of social consumption. He has also taken control over the key sector (petrol) of the rent generating economy. But the entire parasitic ensemble of economic sectors linked to it remain intact and have flourished: finances, bank, real estate and importers’ profits have soared. Diversification based on creating a new set of productive enterprises linked to rent producers has yet to materialize. But their creation is the central task of anything worthy of the name of a socialist transition. Up to now the working class outside of the extractive sector is very limited in size and its militancy is linked to “consumer” rather than class consciousness.

Venezuela has promoted working class consciousness in search of a socialist working class – one not dependent on rent collecting, periodical electoral mobilizations and militant strikes over narrow demands. Currently the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and labor is over shares of the rent, and positions in the rent collecting state bureaucracy.

President Chavez has succeeded in gaining control over the rent-producing enclave and successfully mobilized the mass of citizens for over a decade of electoral victories. The biggest and most strategically important challenge now is to convert those political, economic and foreign policy successes into a productive participatory socialist political economy. One that requires a major transformation of the PSUV and the State from the bottom up. Venezuela must make a major turn toward technical , marketing and innovative competence and not rely on incompetent “party loyalists” and bureaucratic time-servicers.

The ideal is to create cadres who are ‘red’ and ‘expert’ rather than having to choose between one or the other.

The Western Welfare State: Its Rise and Demise and the Soviet Bloc

Prof. James Petras, Submitted Article No Responses »

Jul 052012

By James Petras

Introduction

One of the most striking socio-economic features of the past two decades is the reversal of the previous half-century of welfare legislation in Europe and North America. Unprecedented cuts in social services, severance pay, public employment, pensions, health programs, educational stipends, vacation time, and job security are matched by increases in tuition, regressive taxation, and the age of retirement as well as increased inequalities, job insecurity and workplace speed-up.

The demise of the ‘welfare state’ demolishes the idea put forth by orthodox economists, who argued that the ‘maturation’ of capitalism, its ‘advanced state’, high technology and sophisticated services, would be accompanied by greater welfare and higher income/standard of living. While it is true that ‘services and technology’ have multiplied, the economic sector has become even more polarized, between low paid retail clerks and super rich stock brokers and financiers. The computerization of the economy has led to electronic bookkeeping, cost controls and the rapid movements of speculative funds in search of maximum profit while at the same time ushering in brutal budgetary reductions for social programs.

The ‘Great Reversal’ appears to be a long-term, large-scale process centered in the dominant capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America and in the former Communist states of Eastern Europe. It behooves us to examine the systemic causes that transcend the particular idiosyncrasies of each nation.

The Origins of the Great Reversal

There are two lines of inquiry which need to be elucidated in order to come to terms with the demise of the welfare state and the massive decline of living standards. One line of analysis examines the profound change in the international environment: We have moved from a competitive bi-polar system, based on a rivalry between the collectivist – welfare states of the Eastern bloc and the capitalist states of Europe and North America to an international system monopolized by competing capitalist states.

A second line of inquiry directs us to examine the changes in the internal social relations of the capitalist states: namely the shift from intense class struggles to long-term class collaboration, as the organizing principle in the relation between labor and capital.

The main proposition informing this essay is that the emergence of the welfare state was a historical outcome of a period when there were high levels of competition between collectivist welfarism and capitalism and when class-struggle oriented trade unions and social movements had ascendancy over class-collaborationist organizations.

Clearly the two processes are inter-related: As the collectivist states implemented greater welfare provisions for their citizens, trade unions and social movements in the West had social incentives and positive examples to motivate their members and challenge capitalists to match the welfare legislation in the collectivist bloc.

The Origins and Development of the Western Welfare State

Immediately following the defeat of fascist-capitalist regimes with the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and its political allies in Eastern Europe embarked on a massive program of reconstruction, recovery, economic growth and the consolidation of power, based on far-reaching socio-economic welfare reforms. The great fear among Western capitalist regimes was that the working class in the West would “follow” the Soviet example or, at a minimum, support parties and actions which would undermine capitalist recovery. Given the political discredit of many Western capitalists because of their collaboration with the Nazis or their belated, weak opposition to the fascist version of capitalism, they could not resort to the highly repressive methods of the past. Instead, the Western capitalist classes applied a two-fold strategy to counter the Soviet collectivist-welfare reforms: Selective repression of the domestic Communist and radical Left and welfare concessions to secure the loyalty of the Social and Christian Democratic trade unions and parties.

With economic recovery and post-war growth, the political, ideological and economic competition intensified: The Soviet bloc introduced wide-ranging reforms, including full employment, guaranteed job security, universal health care, free higher education, one month paid vacation leave, full pay pensions, free summer camps and vacation resorts for worker families and prolonged paid maternity leave. They emphasized the importance of social welfare over individual consumption. The capitalist West was under pressure to approximate the welfare offerings from the East, while expanding individual consumption based on cheap credit and installment payments made possible by their more advanced economies. From the mid 1940’s to the mid 1970’s the West competed with the Soviet bloc with two goals in mind: To retain workers loyalties in the West while isolating the militant sectors of the trade unions and to entice the workers of the East with promises of comparable welfare programs and greater individual consumption.

Despite the advances in social welfare programs, East and West, there were major worker protests in East Europe: These focused on national independence, authoritarian paternalistic tutelage of trade unions and insufficient access to private consumer goods. In the West, there were major worker-student upheavals in France and Italy demanding an end of capitalist dominance in the workplace and social life. Popular opposition to imperialist wars (Indo-China, Algeria, etc.), the authoritarian features of the capitalist state (racism) and the concentration of wealth was widespread.

In other words, the new struggles in the East and West were premised on the consolidation of the welfare state and the expansion of popular political and social power over the state and productive process.

The continuing competition between collectivist and capitalist welfare systems ensured that there would be no roll-back of the reforms thus far achieved. However, the defeats of the popular rebellions of the sixties and seventies ensured that no further advances in social welfare would take place. More importantly a social ‘deadlock’ developed between the ruling classes and the workers in both blocs leading to stagnation of the economies, bureaucratization of the trade unions and demands by the capitalist classes for a dynamic, new leadership, capable of challenging the collectivist bloc and systematically dismantling the welfare state.

The Process of Reversal: From Reagan-Thatcher to Gorbachev

The great illusion, which gripped the masses of the collectivist-welfare bloc, was the notion that the Western promise of mass consumerism could be combined with the advanced welfare programs that they had long taken for granted. The political signals from the West however were moving in the opposite direction. With the ascendancy of President Ronald Reagan in the US and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain, the capitalists regained full control over the social agenda, dealing mortal blows to what remained of trade union militancy and launching a full scale arms race with the Soviet Union in order to bankrupt its economy. In addition, ‘welfarism’ in the East was thoroughly undermined by an emerging class of upwardly mobile, educated elites who teamed up with kleptocrats, neo-liberals, budding gangsters and anyone else who professed ‘Western values’. They received political and material support from Western foundations, Western intelligence agencies, the Vatican (especially in Poland), European Social Democratic parties and the US AFL-CIO while, on the fringes, an ideological veneer was provided by the self-described ‘anti-Stalinist’ leftists in the West.

The entire Soviet bloc welfare program had been built from the top-down and, as a result, did not have a class-conscious, politicized, independent and militant class organization to defend it from the full-scale assault launched by the gangster-kleptocratic-clerical-neo-liberal-‘anti-Stalinist’ bloc. Likewise in the West, the entire social welfare program was tied to European Social Democratic parties, the US Democratic Party and a trade union hierarchy lacking both class consciousness and any interest in class struggle. Their main concern, as union bureaucrats was reduced to collecting members’ dues, maintaining internal organizational power over their fiefdoms and their own personal enrichment.

The collapse of the Soviet bloc was precipitated by the Gorbachev regime’s unprecedented handover of the allied states of the Warsaw Pact to the NATO powers .The local communist officials were quickly recycled as neo-liberal proxies and pro-western surrogates. They quickly proceeded to launch a full-scale assault on public ownership of property and dismantling the basic protective labor legislation and job security, which had been an inherent part of collectivist management-labor relations.

With a few noteworthy exceptions, the entire formal framework of collectivist-welfarism was crushed. Soon after came mass disillusion among the Eastern bloc workers as their ‘anti-Stalinist’ western-oriented trade unions presented them with massive lay-offs. The vast majority of the militant Gdansk shipyard workers, affiliated to Poland’s ‘Solidarity’ Movement were fired and reduced to chasing odd jobs, while their wildly feted ‘leaders’, long-time recipients of material support from Western intelligence agencies and trade unions, moved on to become prosperous politicians, editors and businesspeople.

The Western trade unions and the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left (Social Democrats , Trotskyists and every sect and intellectual current in between), did yeoman service in not only ending the collectivist system (under the slogan: ‘Anything is better than Stalinism’) but of ending the welfare state for scores of millions of workers, pensioners and their families.

Once the collectivist-welfare state was destroyed, the Western capitalist class no longer needed to compete in matching social welfare concessions. The Great Rollback moved into full gear.

For the next two decades, Western regimes, Liberal, Conservative and Social Democratic, each in their turn, sliced off welfare legislation: Pensions were cut and retirement age was extended as they instituted the doctrine of ‘work ‘til you drop’. Job security disappeared, work place protections were eliminated, severance pay was cut and the firing of workers was simplified, while capital mobility flourished.

Neo-liberal globalization exploited the vast reservoirs of qualified low-paid labor from the former collectivist countries. The ‘anti-Stalinist’ workers inherited the worst of all worlds: They lost the social welfare net of the East and failed to secure the individual consumption levels and prosperity of the West. German capital exploited cheaper Polish and Czech labor, while Czech politicos privatized highly sophisticated state industries and social services, increasing the costs and restricting access to what services remained.

In the name of ‘competitiveness’ Western capital de-industrialized and relocated vast industries successfully with virtual no resistance from the bureaucratized ‘anti-Stalinist’ trade unions. No longer competing with the collectivists over who has the better welfare system, Western capitalists now competed among themselves over who had the lowest labor costs and social expenditures, the most lax environmental and workplace protection and the easiest and cheapest laws for firing employees and hiring contingent workers.

The entire army of impotent ‘anti-Stalinist’ leftists, comfortably established in the universities, brayed till they were hoarse against the ‘neo-liberal offensive’ and the ‘need for an anti-capitalist strategy’, without the tiniest reflection over how they had contributed to undermining the very welfare state that had educated, fed and employed the workers.

Labor Militancy: North and South

Welfare programs in Western Europe and North America were especially hit by the loss of a competing social system in the East, by the influx and impact of cheap labor from the East and because their own trade unions had become adjuncts of the neo-liberal Socialist, Labor and Democratic Parties.

In contrast, in the South, in particular in Latin America and, to a lesser degree, in Asia, anti-welfare neo-liberalism lasted only for a decade. In Latin America neo-liberalism soon came under intensive pressure, as a new wave of class militancy erupted and regained some of the lost ground. By the end of the first decade of the new century – labor in Latin America was increasing its share of national income, social expenditures were increasing and the welfare state was in the process of re-gaining momentum in direct contrast to what was occurring in Western Europe and North America.

Social revolts and powerful popular movements led to left and center-left regimes and policies in Latin America. A powerful series of national struggles overthrew neo-liberal regimes. A growing wave of worker and peasant protests in China led to 10% to 30% wage increases in the industrial belts and moves to restore the health and public educational system. Facing a new grassroots, worker-based socio-cultural revolt, the Chinese state and business elite hastily promoted social welfare legislation at a time when Southern European nations like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy were in the process of firing workers and slashing salaries, reducing minimum wages, increasing retirement age and cutting social expenditures.

The capitalist regimes of the West no longer faced competition from the rival welfare systems of the Eastern bloc since all have embraced the ethos of ‘the less the better’: Lower social expenditures meant bigger subsidies for business, greater budgets to launch imperial wars and to establish the massive ‘homeland security’ police state apparatus. Lower taxes on capital led to greater profits.

Western Left and Liberal intellectuals played a vital role in obfuscating the important positive role which Soviet welfarism had in pressuring the capitalist regimes of the West to follow their lead. Instead, during the decades following the death of Stalin and as Soviet society evolved toward a hybrid system of authoritarian welfarism, these intellectuals continued to refer to these regimes as ‘Stalinist’, obscuring the principle source of legitimacy among their citizens – their advanced welfare system. The same intellectuals would claim that the ‘Stalinist system’ was an obstacle to socialism and turned the workers against its positive aspects as a welfare state, by their exclusive focus on the past ‘Gulag’. They argued that the ‘demise of Stalinism’ would provide a great opening for ‘democratic revolutionary socialism’. In reality, the fall of collectivist-welfarism led to the catastrophic destruction of the welfare state in both the East and West and the ascendancy of the most virulent forms of primitive neo-liberal capitalism. This, in turn, led to the further shrinking of the trade union movement and spurred the ‘right-turn’ of the Social-Democratic and Labor Parties via the ‘New Labor’ and ‘Third Way” ideologies.

The ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left intellectuals have never engaged in any serious reflection regarding their own role in bringing down the collective welfare state nor have they assumed any responsibility for the devastating socio-economic consequences in both the East and West. Furthermore the same intellectuals have had no reservations in this ‘post-Soviet era’ in supporting (‘critically’ of course) the British Labor Party, the French Socialist Party, the Clinton-Obama Democratic Party and other ‘lesser evils’ which practice neo-liberalism. They supported the utter destruction of Yugoslavia and US-led colonial wars in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Not a few ‘anti-Stalinist’ intellectuals in England and France will have clinked champagne glasses with the generals, bankers and oil elites over NATO’s bloody invasion and devastation of Libya – Africa’s only welfare state.

The ‘anti-Stalinist’ left intellectuals, now well-ensconced in privileged university positions in London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles have not been personally affected by the roll-back of the Western welfare programs. They adamantly refuse to recognize the constructive role that the competing Soviet welfare programs played in forcing the West to ‘keep up’ in a kind of ‘social welfare race’ by providing benefits for its working class. Instead, they argue (in their academic forums) that greater ‘workers militancy’ (hardly possible with a bureaucratized and shrinking trade union membership) and bigger and more frequent ‘socialist scholars’ forums’ (where they can present their own radical analyses … to each other) will eventually restore the welfare system. In fact, historic levels of regression, insofar as welfare legislation is concerned, continue unabated. There is an inverse (and perverse) relation between the academic prominence of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left and the demise of welfare state policies. And still the ‘anti-Stalinist’ intellectuals wonder about the shift to far-right demagogic populism among the hard-pressed working class!

If we examine and compare the relative influence of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ intellectuals in the making of the welfare state to the impact of the competing collectivist welfare system of the Eastern bloc, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear: Western welfare systems were far more influenced by their systemic competitors than by the pious critiques of the marginal ‘anti-Stalinist’ academics. ‘Anti-Stalinist’ metaphysics have blinded a whole generation of intellectuals to the complex interplay and advantages of a competitive international system where rivals bid up welfare measures to legitimate their own rule and undermine their adversaries. The reality of world power politics led the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left to become a pawn in the struggle of Western capitalists to contain welfare costs and establish the launch pad for a neo-liberal counter-revolution. The deep structures of capitalism were the primary beneficiaries of anti-Stalinism.

The demise of the legal order of the collectivist states has led to the most egregious forms of predator-gangster capitalism in the former USSR and Warsaw Pact nations. Contrary to the delusions of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left, no ‘post-Stalinist’ socialist democracy has emerged anywhere. The key operatives in overthrowing the collectivist-welfare state and benefiting from the power vacuum have been the billionaire oligarchs, who pillaged Russia and the East, the multi-billion dollar drug and white slave cartel kingpins, who turned hundreds of thousands of jobless factory workers and their children in the Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, Hungary, Kosova, Romania and elsewhere into alcoholics, prostitutes and drug addicts.

Demographically, the biggest losers from the overthrow of the collectivist-welfare system have been woman workers: They lost their jobs, their maternity leave, child care and legal protections. They suffered from an epidemic of domestic violence under the fists of their unemployed and drunken spouses. The rates of maternal and infant deaths soared from a faltering public health system. The working class women of the East suffered an unprecedented loss of material status and legal rights. This has led to the greatest demographic decline in post-war history – plummeting birth rates, soaring death rates and generalized hopelessness. In the West, the feminist ‘anti-Stalinists’ have ignored their own complicity in the enslavement and degradation of their ‘sisters’ in the East. (They were too busy feting the likes of Vaclav Havel).

Of course, the ‘anti-Stalinist’ intellectuals will claim that the outcomes that they had envisioned are a far cry from what evolved and they will refuse to assume any responsibility for the real consequences of their actions, complicity and the illusions they created. Their outrageous claim ‘that anything is better than Stalinism’ rings hollow in the great chasm containing a lost generation of Eastern bloc workers and families. They need to start counting up the multi-million strong army of unemployed throughout the East, the millions of TB and HIV-ravaged victims in Russia and Eastern Europe (where neither TB nor HIV posed a threat before the ‘break-up’), the mangled lives of millions of young women trapped in the brothels of Tel Aviv, Pristina, Bucharest, Hamburg, Barcelona, Amman, Tangiers, and Brooklyn …..

Conclusion

The single biggest blow to the welfare programs as we knew them, which were developed during the four decades from 1940’s to the 1980’s, was the end of the rivalry between the Soviet bloc and Western Europe and North America. Despite the authoritarian nature of the Eastern bloc and the imperial character of the West, both sought legitimacy and political advantage by securing the loyalty of the mass of workers via tangible social-economic concessions.

Today, in the face of the neo-liberal ‘roll back’, the major labor struggles revolve around defending the remnants of the welfare state, the skeletal remains of an earlier period. At present there are very few prospects of any return to competing international welfare systems, unless one were to look at a few progressive countries, like Venezuela, which have instituted a series of health, educational and labor reforms financed by their nationalized petroleum sector.

One of the paradoxes of the history of welfarism in Eastern Europe can be found in the fact that the major ongoing labor struggles (in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and other countries, which had overthrown their collectivist regimes, involve a defense of the pension, retirement, public health, employment, educational and other welfare policies – the ‘Stalinist’ leftovers. In other words, while Western intellectuals still boast of their triumphs over Stalinism, the real existing workers in the East are engaged in day-to-day militant struggles to retain and regain the positive welfare features of those maligned states. Nowhere is this more evident than in China and Russia, where privatizations have meant a loss of employment and, in the case of China, the brutal loss of public health benefits. Today workers’ families with serious illnesses are ruined by the costs of privatized medical care.

In the current world ‘anti-Stalinism’ is a metaphor for a failed generation on the margins of mass politics. They have been overtaken by a virulent neo-liberalism, which borrowed their pejorative language (Blair and Bush also were ‘anti-Stalinists’) in the course of demolishing the welfare state. Today the mass impetus for the reconstruction of a welfare state is found in those countries, which have lost or are in the process of losing their entire social safety net – like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy- and in those Latin American countries, where popular upheavals, based on class struggles linked to national liberation movements, are on the rise.

The new mass struggles for welfarism make few direct references to the earlier collectivist experiences and even less to the empty discourse of the ‘anti-Stalinist’ Left. The latter are stuck in a stale and irrelevant time warp. What is abundantly clear, however, is that the welfare, labor and social programs, which were gained and lost, in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet bloc, have returned as strategic objectives motivating present and future workers struggles.

What needs to be further explored is the relation between the rise of the vast police state apparatuses in the West and the decline and dismantling of their respective welfare states: The growth of ‘Homeland Security’ and the ‘War on Terror’ parallels the decline of Social Security, public health programs and the great drop in living standards for hundreds of millions.

Greece:What Can be Done?

Prof. James Petras, Submitted Article No Responses »

Jun 172012

By James Petras

Introduction

Greece faces the unenviable choice between accepting the terms of “the Troika” and facing the continuation and deepening of a socio-economic crises, which includes five years of negative growth, over 23% unemployment, an astronomical rise in poverty (from less than 15% to over 40%) and mounting suicides, or a rejection of the “memorandum”, and a likely cut-off of Eurozone funding and capital markets with virtually few reserves to cover salaries, pensions or public services.

While the immediate cost of a break with catastrophic conditions imposed by Eurozone bankers may be high, it opens up the possibility of transforming the internal and external relations and structures which led Greece to ground zero.

Crises as Opportunity?

The prolonged and unending downward spiral of the Greek economy and living standards, the disastrous and destructive policies pursued by the formerly dominant two parties (PASOK and New Democracy) has conclusively demonstrated that Greek “capitalism” and EEC integration has been an unmitigated disaster; tried tested and failed to meet the minimum standards of human existence. Only dogmatic true believers in the innate virtues of ‘capitalism’ and the EEC can continue to prattle about the “need” to continue the same “austerity” policies which have devastated the lives of 80% of the people, closed half the business establishments in the country and fails to provide jobs for half of the young labor force (under 30 years of age).

The profound crises demonstrates the need for basic changes in the organization of the economy, the urgency for new political leadership and the desire for a new political system responsive to the vast majority.

The old ruling oligarchies are totally discredited. The existing links to the EEC only bleed the economy: providing loans which deepen debt and which pass through the economy to overseas bankers. EEC ‘integration’ is in fact a great suction pump which depresses the economy and living standards in order to extract wealth for overseas bondholders.

No capitalist or politician of the old order provides any redeeming argument. In the past they plundered the economy; in the present they extract and transfer wealth abroad; and for the future they can only promise more of the same.

The basic challenge is not the abysmal conditions of the present but the opportunity that exists for a fundamental transformation. The problem is fashioning a transition from an unmitigated disaster to an equitable, dynamic and participatory economy. The problem facing a transition is the flawed structural and behavioral features of contemporary Greek society, polity and economy. Greece is deeply embedded with the legacy of a culture of pervasive state-party corruption and kleptocracy and bloated expenditures for the military and cliental bureaucracies. Most important Greece is dominated by rent seeking economic elites which pretend to be capitalists, but profit from state and overseas handouts from the Eurozone bankers and states.

To effect a transition requires that we first face the negative legacy of the past an order to see what proposals are viable and necessary.

The Negative Legacy and Debt Default: Greece is not Argentina

Many radical critics of the ‘austerity’ and debt crises in Greece cite the “Argentine example” of debt default, (over $100 billion dollars) and its ability to fashion a successful recovery and growth model based on ‘self-financing’. The critical advocates ignore the profound differences in the economic and social structures of the two countries as well as their respective locations in the regional economies.

Argentina, at the bottom of its crises, was actually in a worse situation than Greece today. Unemployment hovered between 25% – 30% and over 50% in many working class districts, compared to 24% in Greece. Poverty levels in Argentina exceeded 45%; in Greece they exceed 35%. The depression in Argentina led to a negative growth rate of approximately 20% over the 3 year duration, equal to the loss in Greece over the past 5 years.

Despite starting from a more difficult and worse situation Argentina had several strategic advantages.

In the first place, in Argentina the ouster from power of the crises driven ruling elite was affected by a mass popular uprising (December 2001 – January 2002). In Greece, while mass demonstrations have certainly politicized, mobilized and radicalized a part of the electorate, the radical coalition vying for power (SYRIZA), has taken the electoral route. Secondly, the Argentine upheaval was a continuous process as mass unemployed picketers (piqueteros) blocked all roads and transport as a negotiating tool to ensure that resources were transferred from debt payments to unemployed workers’ family allowances and in reviving the economy. In Greece the vast army of unemployed has neither the organized capacity to sustain constant transport blockage nor can they count on neighborhood and trade union organizations for anything more than repeated one day work stoppages and marches.

Argentina immediately drastically devaluated its currency – eliminating the dollar peg – from one to one, to three to one and vastly increased the competitiveness of Argentine export products. The center-left regime encouraged the substitution of local products for costly imports. Argentina, unlike Greece was not part of a currency union and could set its own currency rate. Greece, is bound to the euro and will have to convert to the drachma in order to take control over its finances, currency rate and monetary and investment policy tools.

Argentina possessed a substantial industrial – manufacturing sector, idled by the crises, but with the worker-engineering-management capacity to respond to a new stimulus program. In addition, Argentina had a dynamic highly competitive agro-business sector, a world leader in beef, grains and soya, as well as energy (oil) and mineral wealth, which the center-left regime could activate.

Greece, during its 30 year membership in the European Union actually saw its meager and backward manufacturing and agricultural base shrink, in the face of cheap and better imports from developed capitalist countries like Germany, France, Holland and elsewhere. Unlike Argentina, Greece received billions of dollars in “transfers”, compensation funds to upgrade its economy and competitiveness and prepare it for full integration (lowering of tariff barriers). However, the “transfers” were not channeled into productive activity either by the two ruling parties or by the ‘capitalists’ and ‘farmers’. The ruling parties used the transfers to build extensive electoral patronage machines; they squandered funds for overpriced state contracts to provide builders engaged in non-productive building projects (including the multi-billion dollar swindle around the Olympic Games). Tens of thousands of unemployed graduates and party loyalists bloated the national, regional and local bureaucracy, increasing consumption, blocking any meaningful productive activity.

Capitalists designed “productive projects and then transferred EU- loans and handouts to local and overseas real estate investments and luxury purchases. The Greek elite transferred loans to London, Swiss and Cypriot bank accounts – while the government signed off as ultimate guarantor.

In the agriculture sector, many property holders were doctors, dentists, lawyers and high officials who used the ownership of a few dozen olive or orange trees to receive low interest loans, import tax free luxury 4 x 4 vehicle imports and to build second or third vacation houses .Many farmers who received loans and grants, purchased land for homes for their married children or for extra room to rent to tourists or to send their sons and daughters to overseas universities.

Most important, the economic elite – bankers, ship owners, construction-real estate – politicians, speculators skimmed off billions from the EEC transfers in the form of illicit loans to cronies and in the form of fees, management charges for credit dealings and pension funding.

The European bankers, government officials and exporters were acutely aware that the “transfers” were being pillaged – but they went along, for obvious reasons of economic and political gain: lucrative interest payments flowed into their coffers; exporters took over Greek consumer markets; bankers and investment houses found willing pension fund manager’s ‘open’ to dubious investments. Even tourists enjoyed the sun and imports which reminded them of home: wiener schnitzel, English ale, Dutch feta. Moreover, Greece spent 15% of its budget on the military, serving NATO goals and bases.

Contrary to superficial appearances, Greece was not ruled by capitalists, small business people and farmers’ as some political scientists claim. Greece was ruled by an extensive class of kleptocrats, tax evaders and rentiers who pillaged, borrowed, consumed and invested overseas. Technologically Greece was among the most backward agro-manufacturing countries. Its overseas trained and educated professionals, returned and ‘adapted’ to the kleptocratic-rentier culture: most held several positions in public-private activities, guaranteeing a mediocre performance and conflicts of interests.

In summary Greece is not Argentina. A Greek default is an absolute necessity to begin the process of transition toward a productive and equitable economy. But the horrendous Greek legacy raises a whole series of new problems and challenges with few economic resources and in the absence of leading productive classes.

The Difficult Road Out of Crises

Any road map out of the Greek crises will be difficult, complex, and arduous – given the “scorched earth” economy which a left government (LG) will inherit. The first and most basic concern of a LG is to end the policies and especially the agreements with the “Troika” that demand further mass firings of public employees, the reduction in social services, the cuts in minimum wages and pensions. A new LG needs to impose a series of emergency measures to avoid economic bankruptcy.

It is absolutely clear that European bankers and regimes want to punish Greece for transgressions of their “austerity pact”. If Greece should succeed in renouncing the austerity pact, the Euro bankers fear that other countries – Spain, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus and Ireland might follow suite.

Greece should suspend debt payments, impose tight capital controls and freeze bank deposits to avoid capital flight, in the face of the Troika cut-off of funding. The LG should convoke a series of emergency commissions to (1) secure alternative sources of emergency financing from several reserve funds with Euro holdings. They must seek loans from Russia, Iran, Venezuela, China and other states not beholden to the Troika (2) make an inventory of available and potential productive enterprises – bankrupt or troubled firms, indebted enterprises – and convert them into state sponsored worker-employee operated co-operatives (3) investigate public debt to determine what can be classified as ‘legitimate’(loans channeled into productive employment) or illegitimate (loans that enriched speculators, corrupt contractors, political leaders) (4) investigate and attach overseas holdings of wealthy Greeks who were engaged in multi-year multi-million tax evasion and who accumulated illicit income via unpaid loans and money laundering. Greek auditors should proceed to demand that Eurozone creditors should collect debt payments from the bank accounts of wealth Greeks who laundered and deposited in London, Zurich, Frankfurt, New York and elsewhere.

The principle of the LG should be “those who borrowed the loans and profited, should pay them”. The European bankers who lent to corrupt politicians and business kleptocrats must assume the loss, for failing to exercise “due diligence” – oversight into the viability of the activity they were financing. After all private business ‘justifies’ its profits by the “risks” it takes. In the case of Greece, Euro-bankers’ demands that private bank loans and repayments be “guaranteed” by the state (no matter how badly they were managed) risk ‘moral hazard’: Guaranteeing bankers’ profits, irrespective of their ‘soundness’, encourages a repetition of reckless speculation such as had transpired in Greece over the past 30 years.

The LG should repudiate illegal debts (the vast majority) and renegotiate and roll-over the rest over an extended time frame, pending an economic recovery.

What should be recognized is that past Greek governments (despite being formally elected) engaged in illegitimate activity which prejudiced the sovereignty, productive capacity and livelihood of an entire people.

What is not acceptable is to force an entire people to sacrifice their lives because a minority of Greeks borrowed and didn’t invest or pay their debts to overseas creditors. Currently the kleptocratic millionaires are given “cover” and their illicit multi-billion Euro bank accounts and real-estate holdings are protected by the banks demanding payments from the Greek government. Their current demands are based on a savage demolition of living standards for a whole people. For outstanding obligations, the Greek LG can transfer tax debts of Greek tax evaders to creditors, letting them attach the overseas accounts of their Greek clients.

The LG can self-finance a recovery by drastically changing budget priorities: mainly by slashing its military budgets. Greece’s military expenditures as a percentage of its total budget, is one of the highest in the European Union. By eliminating expenditures for NATO operations, overseas military expedition and numerous military bases, a LG can prioritize industrial and service investments.

Greece needs a (1) growth tax – a flat tax on the self-employed – professions, shop keepers, hotels, etc. – to ensure that they pay their share in financing the new economy. While the very rich engaged in mega swindles and evasions, it was also the case that the 50% self-employed sector imitated their behavior at the micro-level (2) a tourist tax – at airports, ferry-docks, tour ships stops – with tight oversight and or replacement of corrupt tax inspectors/collectors and customs officials who take a big cut of proceeds. Incarceration of corrupt officials should be mandatory. (3) A real estate tax which reflects the real value of land and property, especially of unused or uncultivated lands. (4) A tax on financial transactions and an end to tax exemptions for major banks, corporations and so-called property developers.

Exploiting Unused or Underutilized Human Resources

The new government has many sources of ‘human capital’ – hundreds of thousands of unemployed young educated people who can be mobilized for work in productive activity through selective public investments in priority areas, especially outside of the “greater Athens region”.

There are many regions and islands which have the potential to provide income and employment, properly addressed. One of the most salient is in food processing; one of the many perversities of the Greek economy is the production and exports of apples and citrus products to Germany and the import of juices. Another is the failure to link local food and manufacturing to the 14 million tourist sector. Most food and furniture is imported; most vacation packages benefit overseas multi-nationals and foreign transport agencies.As a result the Greek economy and labor force derives a small share of total income from its “leading sector”. Greece with 300 days of sun is ideal for solar energy development.

The New Economy Cannot be Built with Kleptocrats of the Past

As mentioned above, Greece had few if any real entrepreneurs, who invested their own profits, invested in research and development and modernized their plant.

Public sector enterprises were overloaded with the unemployed ‘party members’, many virtually ‘no shows’; and many public sector unions engaged in nepotism and multiple-employment at the expense of efficient services, profitability and long-term development strategies. Public sector enterprises require a kind of re-nationalization’, to generate revenues and income to finance new jobs in new enterprises. Management of public enterprises should be transferred from the hands of stagnant ‘life time job-holders’ to dynamic workers – entrepreneurial – engineering management teams looking to broaden the scope and quality of activity within the new economy.

Pension funds and other savings must be mobilized alongside the billions retained by the state’s debt default to pay current expenses (pensions, salaries, basic imports etc.), to stimulate the revival of production among enterprises which show a willingness to rebuild the economy and which show a willingness to collaborate in activating production and employment. Public profits should finance worker takeovers of factories and services abandoned by their previous owners, of which there are thousands.

The public sector must take the lead in investing, servicing and producing to create “confidence” among the small and medium size producers. The public sector must take the lead in negotiating with potential lenders and economic partners outside the Eurozone: new markets and financial arrangements will be necessary if the Eurozone cuts off all funding as a consequence of debt default or a moratorium.

The danger is that SYRIZA follows through on the default and has no alternative emergency plan in place to respond to a Eurozone cut-off. In the face of an EU/IMF offensive and lacking an alternative, a sector of SYRIZA (ex. PASOK public sector unionists) may back-track and seek to accept some form of “renegotiated” pact … which would divide and undermine the prospects for a truly viable and radical transformation and condemn Greece to its catastrophic downward spiral.

Conclusion

SYRIZA has been raised to a serious contender for state power by the most devastating capitalist crises to affect a Western European country since WWII. It gained adherence through its dynamic grass roots organizing and the relative cohesion of its disparate components. It’s clear and forthright exposé of the corruption and pillage of the dominant parties and its image as a party with ‘clean hands’ has propelled it forward among a broad spectrum of classes, regions and generational groups. However, the very depth of the crises, the total pillage and emptying of the treasury by the kleptocratic political-business class and the dismantling of the entire productive sector and the transfer of billions of Euros abroad by the millionaire rentier class, has created an immensely difficult terrain from which to launch the necessary transformation. The new government can and must guarantee the sovereignty of the nation by rejecting imperial dictates and end any further degradation (“austerity”) of the Greek people. Emancipation requires that first and foremost the new leadership takes the lead in making sacrifices: cutting out all the perks of office, salaries and overseas commitments. The new social priorities demand severe cuts in military budgets – bases, NATO, arms purchases. The new leaders must tell the Euro-bankers to collect payments from the accounts of the overseas billionaires who borrowed, bled the country and are now sheltered in the same banks.

The Left must move from criticism to practical deeds; from theorizing to creating jobs! Greece with a new government can put an end to open-ended austerity and decay. It can and must change its place in the international economy. In the final analysis, it is Greece’s last best hope.

US-Israel War on Iran: The Myth of Limited Warfare

Prof. James Petras, Submitted Article No Responses »

Apr 052012

By James Petras

Introduction

The mounting threat of a US-Israeli military attack against Iran is based on several factors including: (1) the recent military history of both countries in the region, (2) public pronouncements by US and Israeli political leaders, (3) recent and on-going attacks on Lebanon and Syria, prominent allies of Iran, (4) armed attacks and assassinations of Iranian scientists and security officials by proxy and/or terrorist groups under US or Mossad control, (5) the failure of economic sanctions and diplomatic coercion, (6) escalating hysteria and extreme demands for Iran to end legal, civilian use-related uranium enrichment, (7) provocative military ‘exercises’ on Iran’s borders and war games designed for intimidation and a dress rehearsal for a preemptive attack, (8) powerful pro-war pressure groups in both Washington and Tel Aviv including the major Israeli political parties and the powerful AIPAC in the US, (9) and lastly the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (Obama’s Orwellian Emergency Decree, March 16, 2012).

The US propaganda war operates along two tracks: (1) the dominant message emphasizes the proximity of war and the willingness of the US to use force and violence. This message is directed at Iran and coincides with Israeli announcements of war preparations. (2) The second track targets the ‘liberal public’ with a handful of marginal ‘knowledgeable academics’ (or State Department progressives) playing down the war threat and arguing that reasonable policy makers in Tel Aviv and Washington are aware that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons or any capacity to produce them now or in the near future. The purpose of this liberal backpedaling is to confuse and undermine the majority public opinion, which is clearly opposed to more war preparations, and to derail the burgeoning anti-war movement.

Needless to say the pronouncements of the ‘rational’ warmongers use a ‘double discourse’ based on the facile dismissal of all the historical and empirical evidence to the contrary. When the US and Israel talk of war, prepare for war and engage in pre-war provocations – they intend to go to war – just as they did against Iraq in 2003. Under present international political and military conditions an attack on Iran, initially by Israel with US support, is extremely likely, even as world economic conditions should dictate otherwise and even as the negative strategic consequences will most likely reverberate throughout the world for decades to come.

US and Israeli Military Calculations on Iran’s Capability

American and Israeli strategic policy makers do not agree on the consequences of Iran’s retaliation against an attack. For their part, the Israeli leaders minimize Iran’s military capacity to attack and damage the Jewish state, which is their only consideration. They count on their distance, their anti-missile shield and protection from US air and naval forces in the Gulf to cover their sneak attack. On the other hand, US military strategists know the Iranians are capable of inflicting substantial casualties on US warships, which would have to attack Iranian coastal installations in order to support or protect the Israelis.

Israel intelligence is best known for its capacity to organize the assassination of individuals around the world: Mossad has organized successful overseas terrorists acts against Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese leaders. On the other hand Israeli intelligence has a very poor track record with regard to its estimates of major military and political undertakings. They seriously underestimated the popular support, military strength and organizational capacity of Hezbollah during the 2006 war in Lebanon. Likewise, Israel intelligence misunderstood the strength and capacity of the Egyptian popular democratic movement as it rose up and overthrew Tel Aviv’s strategic regional ally, the Mubarak dictatorship. While Israeli leaders ‘feign paranoia’ – tossing clichés about ‘existential threats’ – they are blinded by their narcissistic arrogance and racism, repeatedly underestimating the technical expertise and political sophistication of their Arab and regional Islamic foes. This is undoubtedly true in their facile dismissal of Iran’s capacity to retaliate against a planned Israeli air assault.

The US government has now overtly committed itself to supporting an Israeli assault on Iran when it is launched. More specifically, Washington claims it will come to Israel’s defense ‘unconditionally’ if it is “attacked”. How can Israel avoid being ‘attacked’ when its planes are raining bombs and missiles on Iranian installations, military defenses and support systems, not to mention Iranian cities, ports and strategic infrastructure? Moreover, given the Pentagon’s collaboration and coordinated intelligence systems with the Israel Defense Forces, its role in identifying targets, routes and incoming missiles, as well as integrated weapons and ordinance supply chains will be critical to an IDF attack. There is no way that the US can dissociate itself from the Jewish State’s war on Iran, once the attack has begun.

The Myths of ‘Limited War’: Geography

Washington and Tel Aviv claim and appear to believe that their planned assault on Iran will be a “limited war”, targeting limited objectives and lasting a few days or weeks – with no serious consequences.

We are told Israel’s brilliant generals have identified all the critical nuclear research facilities, which their surgical air strikes will eliminate without horrific collateral damage to the surrounding population. Once the alleged ‘nuclear weapons’ program is destroyed, all Israelis can resume their lives in full security knowing that another ‘existential’ threat has been eliminated. The Israeli notion of a war, limited in ‘time and space’, is absurd and dangerous – and underlines the arrogance, stupidity and racism of its authors.

To approach Iran’s nuclear facilities Israeli and US forces will confront well-equipped and defended bases, missile installations, maritime defenses and large-scale fortifications directed by the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Armed Forces. Moreover, the defense systems protecting the nuclear facilities are linked by civilian highways, airfields, ports, and backed by a dual purpose (civilian-military) infrastructure, which includes oil refineries and a huge network of administrative offices. To ‘knock out’ the alleged nuclear sites will require expanding the geographic scope of the war. The scientific-technological capacity of the Iranian civilian nuclear program involves a wide swath of its research facilities, including universities, laboratories, manufacturing sites, and design centers. To destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear program would require Israel (and thus the US) to attack much more than research facilities or laboratories hidden under a remote mountain. It would require multiple, widespread assaults on targets throughout the country, in other words, a generalized war.

Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated that Iran will retaliate with a war of equivalence. Iran will match the breadth and scope of any attack with a corresponding counter-attack: ‘We will attack them at the same level as they attack us’. That means Iran will not confine its retaliation to merely trying to shoot down US and Israeli bombers in its airspace or launch missiles at offshore US warships in its waters but will take the war to equivalent targets in Israel and in US-occupied countries in and around the Gulf. Israel’s ‘limited war’ will become a generalized war extending throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Israel’s current delusional fetish about its elaborate missile defense system will be exposed as hundreds of high-powered missiles are launched from Teheran, Southern Lebanon and just beyond the Golan Heights.

The Myth of Limited War: Time Frame

Israeli military experts confidently expect to polish off their Iranian targets in a few days – some might think a mere weekend – and perhaps without the loss of even a single pilot. They expect the Jewish state will celebrate its brilliant victory in the streets of Tel Aviv and Washington. They are deluded by their own sense of superiority. Iran did not fight a brutal, decade-long war against the US-supplied Iraqi invaders and its western/Israeli military advisers, to just turn over and passively submit to a limited number of air and missile attacks by Israel. Iran is a young, educated mobilized society, which can draw on millions of reservists from across the political, ethnic, gender, religious spectrum, galvanized in support of their nation under attack. In a war to defend the homeland all internal differences disappear to confront the unprovoked Israeli-US attack threatening their entire civilization – its 5000-year culture and traditions, as well as its modern scientific advances and institutions. The first wave of US-Israeli attacks will lead to ferocious retaliation, which will not be confined to the original areas of conflict, nor are will any such act of Israeli aggression end when and if Iran’s nuclear research facilities are destroyed and some of its scientists, technicians and skilled workers killed. The war will continue in time and extend geographically.

Multiple Points of Conflict

Just as any US-Israeli attack on Iran will involve multiple targets, the Iranian military will also have a plethora of easily accessible strategic targets. Though it is difficult to predict exactly where and how Iran will retaliate, one thing is clear: The initial US-Israeli strike will not go unanswered.

Given Israeli-US supremacy in long and medium range sea and air power, Iran will probably rely on short-range objectives. These would include the highly valued US military facilities and supply routes in adjoining terrain (Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan) and Israeli targets with missiles launched from Southern Lebanon and possibly Syria. If a few Iranian long-range missiles escape the Jewish State’s much vaunted ‘anti-missile dome’, Israeli population centers may pay a heavy price for their leaders’ recklessness and arrogance.

The Iranian counter-strike will lead to an excalation by US-Israeli forces, extending and deepening their air and sea war to the entire Iranian national security system – military bases, ports, communication systems, command posts and government administrative centers – many in densely populated cities. Iran will counter by launching its greatest strategic asset: a coordinated ground attack involving the Revolutionary Guards together with their allies among the Iraqi Shia troops, against US forces in Iraq. It will coordinate attacks against US facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the growing nationalist-Islamic armed resistance.

The initial conflict, centered on so-called military objectives (scientific research facilities), will spread rapidly to economic targets, or what US and Israeli military strategists refer to as “dual civilian-military” targets. This would include oil fields, highways, factories, communications networks, television stations, water treatment facilities, reservoirs, power stations and administrative offices, such as the Defense Ministry and headquarters of the Republican Guard. Iran, faced with imminent destruction of its entire economy and infrastructure (which occurred in neighboring Iraq with the unprovoked US invasion of 2003), would retaliate by blocking the Straits of Hormuz and sending short range missiles in the direction of the principle oil fields and refineries of the Gulf States including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a mere 10 minute distance, crippling the flow of oil to Europe, Asia and the United States and plunging the world economy into deep depression.

It should not be forgotten that the Iranians are probably more aware than anyone in the region of the total devastation suffered by Iraqis after the US invasion, which plunged that nation into total chaos and devastated its advanced infrastructure and civilian administrative apparatus, not to mention the systematic obliteration of its highly educated scientific and technical elite. The waves of Mossad-sponsored assassinations of Iranian scientists, academics and engineers are just a foretaste of what the Israelis have in mind for Iran’s outstanding scientists, intellectuals and highly skilled technical workers. Iranians should have no illusions about the Americans and Israelis who seek to thrust Iran into the brutal dark ages of Afghanistan and Iraq. They will have no more role in a devastated Iran than their counterparts had in post-Saddam Iraq.

According to US General Mathis, who commands all US forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, ‘an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for the United States there’ (NY Times, 3/19/12). General Mathis “dire cost” estimate only takes account of the US military losses, likely several hundred sailors on warships within missile distance of Iranian gunners.

However the most delusional and self-serving assessment of the outcome and consequences of an Israeli air attack on Iran, emanates from top Israeli leaders, academics and intelligence experts, who claim superior intelligence, superior defenses and supreme (if also racist) insight into the ‘Iranian mind’. Typical is Israeli Defense Minister Barak who boasts that any Iranian retaliation will at worst inflict minimal casualties on the Israeli population.

The ‘Judeo-centric’ view of re-ordering the balance of power in the region, which is prevalent in leading Israeli war circles, overlooks the likelihood that war will not be decided by Israeli air strikes and anti-missile defenses. Iran’s missiles cannot be easily contained, especially if they arrive several hundred a minute from three directions, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and possibly from Iranian submarines. Secondly, the collapse of its oil imports will devastate Israel’s highly energy dependent economy. Thirdly, Israel’s principle allies, especially the US and the EU, will be severely strained as they are dragged into Israel’s war and find themselves defending the straits of Hormuz, their army garrisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their oil fields and military bases in the Gulf. Such a conflict could ignite the Shia majorities in Bahrain and in the strategic oil-rich provinces of Saudi Arabia. The generalized war will have a devastating effect on the price of oil and the world economy. It will provoke the fury of consumers and workers rage everywhere as factories close and powerful shocks throughout the fragile financial system result in a world depression.

Israel’s pathological ‘superiority complex’ results in its racist leaders consistently overestimating their own intellectual, technical and military capabilities, while underestimating the knowledge, capacity and courage of their regional, Islamic (in this case Iranian) adversaries. They ignore Iran’s proven capacity to sustain a prolonged, complex multi-front defensive war and to recover from an initial assault and develop appropriate modern weaponry to inflict severe damage on its attackers. And Iran will have the unconditional and active support of the world’s Muslim population, and perhaps the diplomatic backing of Russia and China, who will obviously view an attack on Iran as another dress rehearsal to contain their growing power.

Conclusion

War, especially an Israeli-US war against Iran is indissolubly linked to the asymmetrical US-Israeli relationship, which sidelines and censors any critical US military and political analysis. Because Israel’s Zionist power configuration in the US can now harness US military power in support of Israel’s drive for regional dominance, Israeli leaders and most of their military feel free to engage in the most outrageous military and destructive adventures, knowing full well that in the first and last instance they can rely on the US to support them with American blood and treasure. But after all of this grotesque servitude to a racist, isolated country, who will rescue the United States? Who will prevent the sinking of its ships in the Gulf and the death and maiming of hundreds of its sailors and thousands of its soldiers? And where will the Israelis and US Zionists be when Iraq is overrun by elite Iranian troops and their Iraqi Shia allies and a generalized uprising occurs in Afghanistan?

The self-centered Israeli policy-makers overlook the likely collapse of the world oil supply as a result of their planned war against Iran. Do their Zionist agents in the US realize that as a result of dragging the US into Israel’s war, that the Iranian nation will be forced to set the Persian Gulf oilfields ablaze?

How cheap has it become to ‘buy a war’ in the US? For a mere few million dollars in campaign contributions to corrupt politicians, and through the deliberate penetration of Israel-First agents, academics and politicians into the war-making machinery of the US government, and through the moral cowardice and self-censorship of leading critics, writers and journalists who refuse to name Israel and its agents as the key decision makers in our country’s Mid East policy, we head directly toward a war far beyond any regional military conflagration and toward the collapse of the world economy and the brutal impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people North and South, East and West.

The Massacre of the Afghan 17 and the Obama Cover-Up

Prof. James Petras, Submitted Article 2 Responses »

Mar 272012

By James Petras

The March 11 Massacre of the 17 Afghan citizens, including at least nine children and four women, raises many fundamental issues about the nature of a colonial war, the practices of a colonial army engaged in a prolonged (eleven-year) occupation and the character of an imperial state as it commits war crimes and increasingly relies on arbitrary dictatorial measures to secure public compliance and suppress dissent.

After the cold-blooded murder of the 17 Afghan villagers in Kandahar Province the US military and the ever-complicit Obama regime constructed an elaborate cover-up, exposing the Administration up to charges of conspiracy to suppress the essential facts, falsify data and obstruct justice: All are grounds for criminal prosecution and impeachment.

This massacre is just one of several hundred committed by US armed forces according to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. It could ruin the Obama presidency, by putting him on trial for conspiracy to obstruct justice and arguably send him to jail for war crimes.

Obama’s deliberate lies about the events surrounding the massacre and the fundamental responsibility of the high military command for the crimes committed by its troops underscores the breakdown of the occupation of Afghanistan, the very centerpiece of Obama’s war policy. The President of the United States has personally played a major role in the cover-up. From a political vantage point, the executive conspiracy charge has wider and deeper implications than the massacre itself, as horrible as it is.

The Massacre, the ‘Official’ Story (1^st version) and the Cover-Up

According to the US military command in Afghanistan and the Obama regime, at 3am on March 11, 2012 a deranged soldier walked off a Special Forces Base in rural Kandahar Province and without command authority entered two villages (two miles apart), shot and killed 17 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children and wounded an unspecified number of villagers; then he doused their bodies with gasoline, set them on fire and hiked back to base to surrender himself to his commanders. This ‘surrender’, the Pentagon claims, was recorded on video and no less than the President of the United States, Barack Obama, vouched for its authenticity as conclusive proof for the story of a lone, unbalanced mass murderer. The military command quickly whisked the initially unnamed murderer out of the Afghanistan to the maximum security federal prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and only then identified the madman as a 38-year old, multi-decorated, 11-year army veteran, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. The US has rejected all attempts by the Afghan President, the Afghan Army Chief and members of the Afghan Parliament to interview Sgt Bales, gather testimony and bring the suspect to trial in Afghanistan.

According to an independent Afghan parliamentary investigation led by Sayed Ishaq Gillami, and initial investigations by General Sher Mohammed Karimi of the Afghan Army, who interviewed residents of the two villages, there are significant contradictions in the US military’s and President Obama’s “official story”. Eye witnesses have testified that up to 20 soldiers were involved, aided by a helicopter. What they described was typical of a US Special Forces’ night time raid, which involved the systematic breaking down of doors, rousing the sleeping families and shooting Afghan victims.

Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, finds the villagers’ version of events quite plausible for the following reasons: The villages, where the murders occurred, were two miles apart, making it highly unlikely that a lone, fully armed solder could haul a multi-gallon jerry can of gasoline from his base to the first sleeping village, break down the doors of one or more homes, commit the murders, douse and burn his victims and then proceed on foot two miles further on to the second village, shoot, kill and burn the next set of unarmed villagers and then walk back to his base and surrender.

It makes far more sense that a heavily armed group of Special Forces troops, engaged in village ‘pacification’ operations, left their base in military vehicles, passed through the gate in the wee hours of the morning, on a routine official operation, authorized by the bases military command and something went wrong. What was supposed to have been a typical midnight assault on a “pacified” village in search of Taliban supporters, turned into the mass murder of children and their mothers in bed with virtually no adult males (husbands, fathers, uncles or brothers) present to protect them. Typically, all Afghan farmers keep weapons in their homes, but these villages had been disarmed by the Special Forces and the adult men had either been detained in earlier sweeps or were in hiding from just such brutal operations in the expectation that their wives and children would not be attacked.

Whatever triggered the mass murder of mothers and children in their nightclothes in those villages in Kandahar, one thing is clear: the President of the United States conspired with the US military command to obstruct justice in the cover-up of a heinous war crime, a felony punishable with impeachment.

When the implausibility first ‘official’ story became embarrassingly evident to the most superficial observer, the Obama ‘cover-up’ crew released a new version on March 26: According to the revised version of events, the lone, deranged Sgt. Bales committed the first massacre in the early morning hours of March 11, walked back to base for breakfast and lunch and then walked out again to a second village for another round of mass murder – before returning and turning himself in to his commander posing for the video.

Why the Obama Cover-Up: Military Demoralization and the Iran War

Why would President Obama engage in such a clumsy cover-up further eroding US relations with the Afghan President Karzai, the Afghan military and especially the Afghan people? Why would he risk charges of conspiracy to protect war criminals by insisting on an easily refutable cover-up?

The story of the alleged assassin, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, provides some leads about the larger crisis facing the imperial military. Bales is a ‘decorated’ soldier rewarded for his three tours of combat duty in Iraq and his more recent Afghan assignment where he would have participated in similar types of Special Pacification Operations among civilians in the countryside in Afghanistan. In the days after news of the massacre leaked out, a furious Afghan President Karzai claimed that “hundreds” of similar massacres had been perpetrated by US and NATO forces and had gone unreported in the Western media and unpunished. Karzai has repeatedly called for an end to US Special Forces’ night raids on sleeping villages. But, until now, there had been no need for a US Presidential cover-up up. With the approaching US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the growing expressions of militant Afghan nationalism, the Obama regime must hide the true nature of the occupation. Washington’s Afghan clients can no longer ignore US war crimes against innocent children and women and other non-combatants. This is especially true in the so-called ‘pacified’ villages where the adult Afghani men have already been arrested in sweeps or driven into hiding and with the few remaining, disarmed and ‘under the control’ of the US Special Forces.

Considering even the US official story, why would the Special Forces commanders in charge of the Sgt. Bales base ignore the loud bursts of gunfire and screams of women and children in a village within 100 meters of its perimeter at 3 am? According to their official version, the base command only became aware of the massacres when Sgt. Bales walked back to base, raised his hands high for a video-op and confessed to killing and desecrating the bodies of 17, mostly children and women.

Obama has tried to sell the ‘confession’ video as proof of the ‘official version’ of events to a skeptical Afghan President Karzai who contemptuously demanded the ‘alleged’ video be turned over for a detailed examination for authenticity. Obama’s refusal to release the video tends to confirm his role in the cover-up.

Obama’s contention that a ‘lone unbalanced gunman’ committed the crime is completely self-serving and exposes serious and deep structural problems with the war in Afghanistan. US combat troops in Afghanistan are demoralized and angry because their military commanders have marched them into a cul de sac – a dead end. They are engaged in a long, losing war where every dead US soldier is accompanied by scores who are maimed, blinded and mentally traumatized. In Obama’s war, the wounded are patched up and recycled back into the same meat grinder in an increasingly hostile environment, where rape, torture, maiming and murder become their only ‘recreation’. Sgt. Bales was coerced into multiple tours of duty in Iraq and then shipped off to Afghanistan, contrary to his expectations of a promotion and an end to overseas combat assignments.

There is a huge gap between the world of the political warlords in Washington and their accomplices among the warmongering ‘lobbies’ and that of the soldiers who risk their lives in imperial wars of occupation. These dispensable soldiers are repeatedly deployed to brutal colonial wars thousands of miles from their homes to confront an ‘enemy’ they cannot possibly understand. They end up brutalizing the families, friends, neighbors and compatriots of the elusive Afghan anti-colonial fighters – who are everywhere. Back in the Washington none of the political war-mongers ever experience the pain and suffering of a prolonged war, which for any soldier on the battlefield, is ever present, everywhere. Soldiers, like Sgt. Bales, operate in a very hostile environment where, a roadside bomb or a grenade thrown from a motorcycle, or even a ‘trusted’ Afghan ally, who might turn his gun on his US ‘mentors,’ are omnipresent threats to their ever returning home in one piece.

Obama has to conspire with the Pentagon in covering up this mass murder, defending the officers in charge of these ‘pacified’ villages, because there are no alternatives, no back-ups, no new recruits eager to engage in the 12^th year of war in Afghanistan. There are only the re-cycled killers, willing to pursue their career in ‘Special Forces’ involving ‘kill and destroy’ operations. Furthermore, Obama cannot rely on the international allies who are rushing to withdraw their own troops from this quagmire. And Obama has a problem with his allied Afghan warlords and kleptocrats, who managed to run off with over $4.5 billion dollars in 2011 (half of the entire state budget) (Financial Times, 3/19/12, p. 1). President Obama cannot allow an entire garrison, including their commanding officer to be put on trial for the war crimes in this massacre. Holding anyone, besides the hapless Sgt. Bales, accountable for the massacre would incite a general rebellion within the armed forces, or, at a minimum, further demoralize the elite Special Forces who are expected to man these long-term engagements after the regulars withdraw, which in the case of Afghanistan could last until 2024.

This issue has implications far beyond Afghanistan: Obama has developed his entire new counter-insurgency strategy centered on the easy entry and bloody exits of US Special Forces targeting over seventy-five countries. The Special Forces figure prominently in Obama’s military preparations for Syria and Iran, which have been developed at the behest of his Zionist overlords.

In the final analysis, the entire imperial military apparatus of the Obama regime, while formidable on paper, depends on the ‘Special Operations’ formations. As such, they are the centerpiece of the new imperial warfare, developed as a response to the demands for reduced ground forces, budgetary constraints and growing domestic discontent. Their ‘actions’ are designed to leave no witnesses and no embarrassments. They may be the butchers of children, women and unarmed civilians but they are the White House’s butchers.

Despite all their crimes and cover-ups, the Obama regime’s priority is to defend the empire with whatever personnel is available at his disposal. So while Sgt. Bales is in Leavenworth, the Afghan elite cry injustice, the families in Kandahar mourn their dead and the Taliban plan their revenge.

On the domestic front, Obama faces strong popular opposition to the costly unending wars, which have destroyed the US economy, and growing anger and demoralization in the armed forces. As a result of the massive popular discontent among the American people with politicians of both parties who have recklessly sent troops into anachronistic colonial wars, which serve the interest of foreign powers, the President has issued an executive decree, allowing him to assume dictatorial powers in order to militarize the entire economy, its resources and its work force. On March 16, 2012 Barak Obama issued an Executive Order-National Defense Resource Preparedness in order to sustain the global empire.

Clearly prolonged colonial wars cannot be sustained through the consent of the citizens and such wars cannot be prosecuted according to military manuals and the Geneva Conventions. At this point, only Presidential ‘rule by decree’ can secure compliance of the citizens at home and only massacres and cover-ups can sustain the colonial occupations abroad. But these are desperate and temporary: When the extreme measures have run their course there will be nothing to fall back on and nothing can save the president of a collapsing empire from the revolt of its citizens and soldiers.

PETRAS: “EL BID ES EL MAESTRO DE LAS PRIVATIZACIONES”

Interviews, Submitted No Responses »

Mar 182012

El Profesor James Petras desde Nueva York – Estados Unidos reflexionó para CX36 Radio Centenario acerca de la reunión que el BID realiza junto con el gobierno del frente amplio en nuestro país. Jueves 15 de marzo de 2012. “Deben estar orgullosos porque son buenos alumnos de la política neoliberal del BID. Como buenos alumnos cumplen con las letras de las privatizaciones, las puertas abiertas para la extranjerización de la tierra y también por la política desregulada del sistema financiero…si uno analiza el directorio del BID, los Estados Unidos tiene una representación desproporcionada y no hay ninguna propuesta del BID que no tenga que ser aprobada por los EE.UU. En otras palabras, todos los préstamos que el BID hace están condicionados por las políticas económicas de los EE.UU”

Ángeles: Tenemos la posibilidad en este momento de conectarnos con el Profesor James petras que todos los lunes conversa con la audiencia de la radio y con gente que lo escucha desde muchos lugares del mundo, pero nos parecía que hoy tenía que estar también por esta circunstancia que estamos viviendo: está el BID celebrando su reunión anual en Montevideo; está la Ciudad Vieja y parte del Centro totalmente bloqueados porque sólo ellos pueden moverse allí y queremos tener la opinión de Petras sobre estos hechos.

Buen día, ¿cómo te va Petras?

Petras: Estamos muy bien, preocupados por la visita del BID a Uruguay.

Ángeles: Y recibido acá por el gobierno que está orgulloso de ser el anfitrión del BID.

Petras: Deben estar orgullosos porque son buenos alumnos de la política neoliberal del BID. Como buenos alumnos cumplen con las letras de las privatizaciones, las puertas abiertas para la extranjerización de la tierra y también por la política desregulada del sistema financiero y la forma en que han explotado la economía a partir de asociaciones con el capital extranjero. Hace años yo estuve en Washington entrevistando a funcionarios del BID y uno entiende varias cosas a partir de eso. Una es que por ejemplo si uno analiza el directorio del BID, los Estados Unidos tiene una representación desproporcionada y no hay ninguna propuesta del BID que no tenga que ser aprobada por los EE.UU. En otras palabras, todos los préstamos que el BID hace están condicionados por las políticas económicas de los EE.UU. Por eso muchos países tienen reservas en llegar a acuerdos con el BID Porque por ejemplo durante la época de la primavera del neoliberalismo, cuando Menem, Cardoso y todos los demás gobernantes entreguistas estaban en el poder, el BID consiguió financiar muchos proyectos que facilitaron la entrega de las empresas. En otras palabras, el BID forma parte del triángulo Fondo Monetario- Banco Mundial y BID. Mientras el Fondo Monetario hace políticas totalmente condicionadas por las ventajas que consiguen los capitalistas externos, el BID a veces financia proyectos para aminorar, limitar el daño social. Hay que ver la política del BID como complementaria con la depredación del sector privado .Porque muchas veces las políticas del Fondo Monetario hacen un impacto muy desastroso sobre los sectores populares, por ejemplo las privatizaciones que resultan en despidos, desocupación, limitaciones sobre el mercado de trabajo.Entonces el BID entra con un proyecto de préstamo para generar algún empleo de los desubicados. Ahora con la dinámica de las exportaciones y el crecimiento de la economía en función de las exportaciones agrícolas vinculado con eso hay una enorme desigualdad en los beneficiarios porque los dueños de las exportaciones son una pequeña elite de capitales extranjeros y domésticos. Como encuentra grandes desigualdades, el BID entra para dar algún colchón a este problema, dando algunos préstamos para proyectos sociales. Estos proyectos sociales son típicamente complementarios con la política de depredación. Si uno por ejemplo no apoya dicen ¿qué puedes decir criticando un proyecto social que está financiando el BID? Yo no critico el proyecto en sí, pero hay que verlo en un contexto más amplio: el BID simplemente complementa los negativos efectos de sus socios. Es como el buen policía y el mal policía. El policía malo te golpea y el policía bueno viene a decirte que el otro es cruel pero “yo te voy a ayudar. Tenés los dos ojos cerrados, yo voy a ayudarte a abrir un ojo”. Y este tipo de política del BID, da la imagen de que son entre las instituciones internacionales más reformistas. Pero no son reformistas en este sentido de buscar reformas en sí; son reformas dentro de un marco de dependencia, depredación y más: fortaleciendo a los sectores sociales elitistas en el poder.

Ángeles: Hace un rato precisamente un oyente decía eso: uno es el bueno y el otro es el malo pero los dos tienen el mismo fin.

Acá te digo Petras, hoy que empezó la actividad de esta reunión del BID, la iniciaron en un barrio donde hay mucha pobreza, el barrio Casavalle, y allí fueron a hacer las actividades con un proyecto social que tiene la Intendencia de Montevideo y ellos van a financiar. Es una cancha de fútbol y un tablado para el carnaval pero dicen ellos que con eso apoyan a los jóvenes y para terminar con la diferencia de acceso a los jóvenes.

Petras: Bueno, mejor que toquen el bombo en el carnaval a que toquen el bombo en una marcha para el empleo y contra las depredaciones del capital extranjero y la estructura de clases cada vez más desigual. Esta idea de diversiones populares, no toca el problema. Si uno tiene que jugar fútbol debe hacerlo después de salir de su empleo bien pagado y eso no se trata .Porque financiar proyectos que paguen buenos salarios y den garantías de empleo está afuera del juego .Entonces tocan la pelota, dan una patada, un gol y ya está la gente joven satisfecha.

Yo no creo que estas cosas vayan a engañar a mucha gente. Van a hacer muchos aplausos, van a aprovechar la cancha, pero después van a volver a casa, van a buscar algún peso en el bolsillo y no lo van a encontrar. Hay un contraste entre la diversión y la búsqueda de una vida buena. Una vida buena implica en primera instancia ingresos adecuados para tener casa, ropa, transporte y diversiones como resultado de la buena vida.

Ángeles: te cuento además que van a hacer acá un espectáculo en la calle con artistas populares sin cobrar entrada para que vaya mucha gente. En la Rambla de Montevideo será

Petras: Sí, porque la diversión es para atraer a la gente. Si sólo presentan discursos los funcionarios del BID no van a atraer más que a funcionarios del gobierno que están pagados para asistir. Pero con los músicos tocando la guitarra, cantando y bailando eso sí puede atraer a muchas más personas. Pero van a hacerlo de una forma que entre las canciones y los bailes van a incluir algún discurso saludando el papel del gobierno y sus asociados en el BID. Ese es el viejo estilo de Roma, donde tenían grandes circos y regalaban pan para que las grandes masas romanas no se rebelaran. Porque era muy común en Roma que la gente cuando sentía hambre o la falta de empleo se levantaba y enfrentaba a los senadores del gobierno romano. Por eso inventaron los emperadores esta forma de pacificación montando un circo con elefantes de África y músicos de Grecia, para divertir a la gente y al final de cuentas entregaban algún pan para que se vuelvan a casa.

Ángeles: Mientras tanto en esta asamblea anual del BID el gobierno uruguayo va a aprovechar para asegurarse que le den un crédito de 300 millones de dólares que sería un colchón de efectivo por las dudas si los efectos de la crisis global no le permiten a Uruguay financiarse en los mercados. Eso lo va a querer rematar Uruguay en esta reunión.

Petras: Sí, un préstamo canalizado en el trabajo productivo, Un préstamo que financia la transformación de la economía para que los beneficios de este préstamo pase a las clases populares no es malo, pero es un préstamo dirigido a las clases dominantes que van a aprovechar la gran mayoría de la porción, van a ser los principales beneficiarios. Y lo que pasa en esta situación es que si los beneficios de los préstamos van a un grupo muy exclusivo, el pago de la deuda va a caer sobre todos los ciudadanos incluso la gran mayoría que no recibe nada de los resultados del préstamo. Entonces estos préstamos tienen un efecto muy contradictorio. Hay una divergencia entre los beneficiarios y los que tienen asumir la deuda.

Ángeles: También van a tener un capítulo muy importante sobre privatizaciones, las asociaciones público-privadas. Dicen que el BID va a financiar grandes emprendimientos privados que son emblemáticos para el Uruguay, según el gobierno del Frente Amplio.

Petras: Bueno, ya el gobierno mismo ha anticipado eso con sus propias privatizaciones. No todo viene del BID. Pero el BID es el autor, si quieres es el maestro de las privatizaciones.Como hemos comentado en los años 90 ha sido la vanguardia de la entrega de todos los sectores de comunicaciones, eléctricas, etc. Y es el eje de todo lo demás que está en función de las privatizaciones y la entrega.Por eso van a montar un carnaval, por eso van a montar un estadio; esos son algunos de los colchones. Pero el eje de la visita es forzar o presionar para el sector público se entregue a los sectores privados incluso al capital extranjero que puede aprovechar un buen precio para la privatización y altas tasas de ganancias. Esa es la principal preocupación, pero está incluido en un paquete para disfrazar lo que realmente está involucrado en eso, a partir de la privatización.Lo que llaman asociaciones privados y públicas, que es realmente el eje de la política de la visita.

Ahora, un comentario sobre esas llamadas asociaciones. Si uno analiza las estructuras, el sector privado son los dueños mayores y el sector público es el menor. El sector público da el capital y el respaldo político y la subordinación y mano de obra y el privado maneja las inversiones y determina las ganancias y el reparto de los ingresos .Entonces no es una asociación de iguales. El sector público es quien responde con el dinero y las financiaciones y el privado determina la política económica. Incluso hay una puerta abierta para que los socios públicos entren en un período a asociarse con el privado como asesores y otros funcionarios.

Ángeles: Está claro. Petras, para dejarte ya que sabemos que tenés que hacer otras cosas, te cuento que mañana va a haber una movilización

Petras: Espero que haya una gran participación o por lo menos una presencia crítica en las manifestaciones contra la visita del BID, que debe ser no el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo sino llamarse Banco Imperialista de la Dependencia, BID. Gracias y saludos a los oyentes de radio Centenario.

Ángeles: Gracias a vos Petras, la verdad que un gusto haberlo tenido a Petras en este momento, analizando lo que significa esta reunión que se está haciendo aquí en Montevideo.

www.radio36.com.uy

THE BLOODY ROAD TO DAMASCUS: THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE’S WAR ON A SOVEREIGN STATE

Prof. James Petras, Submitted 5 Responses »

Mar 092012

By James Petras

Introduction

There is clear and overwhelming evidence that the uprising to overthrow President Assad of Syria is a violent, power grab led by foreign-supported fighters who have killed and wounded thousands of Syrian soldiers, police and civilians, partisans of the government and its peaceful opposition.

The outrage expressed by politicians in the West and Gulf State and in the mass media, about the ‘killing of peaceful Syrian citizens protesting injustice’ is cynically designed to cover up the documented reports of violent seizure of neighborhoods, villages and towns by armed bands, brandishing machine guns and planting road-side bombs.

The assault on Syria is backed by foreign funds, arms and training. Due to a lack of domestic support ,however, to be successful, direct foreign military intervention will be necessary. For this reason a huge propaganda and diplomatic campaign has been mounted to demonize the legitimate Syrian government. The goal is to impose a puppet regime and strengthen Western imperial control in the Middle East. In the short run, this will further isolate Iran in preparation for a military attack by Israel and the US and, in the long run, it eliminates another independent secular regime friendly to China and Russia.

In order to mobilize world support behind this Western, Israeli and Gulf State-funded power grab, several propaganda ploys have been used to justify another blatant violation of a country’s sovereignty after their successful destruction of the secular governments of Iraq and Libya.

The Larger Context: Serial Aggression

The current Western campaign against the independent Assad regime in Syria is part of a series of attacks against pro-democracy movements and independent regimes from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. The imperial-militarist response to the Egyptian democracy movement that overthrew the Mubarak dictatorship was to back the military junta’s seizure of power and murderous campaign to jail, torture and assassinate over 10,000 pro-democracy protestors.

Faced with similar mass democratic movements in the Arab world, the Western-backed Gulf autocratic dictators crushed their respective uprisings in Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. The assaults extended to the secular government in Libya where NATO powers launched a massive air and sea bombardment in support of armed bands of mercenaries thereby destroying Libya’s economy and civil society. The unleashing of armed gangster-mercenaries led to the savaging of urban life in Libya and devastation in the countryside. The NATO powers eliminated the secular regime of Colonel Gadhafi and along with having him murdered and mutilated by its mercenaries. Nato oversaw the wounding, imprisonment, torture and elimination of tens of thousands of civilian Gadhafi supporters and government workers. NATO backed the puppet regime as it embarked on a bloody pogrom against Libyan citizens of sub-Saharan African ancestry as well a sub-Sahara African immigrant workers – groups who had benefited from Gadhafi’s generous social programs. The imperial policy of ruin and rule in Libya serves as “the model” for Syria: Creating the conditions for a mass uprising led by Muslim fundamentalists, funded and trained by Western and GulfState mercenaries.

The Bloody Road From Damascus to Teheran

According to the State Department ‘The road to Teheran passes through Damascus’: The strategic goal of NATO is to destroy Iran’s principal ally in the Middle East; for the Gulf absolutist monarchies the purpose is to replace a secular republic with a vassal theocratic dictatorship; for the Turkish government the purpose is to foster a regime amenable to the dictates of Ankara’s version of Islamic capitalism; for Al Qaeda and allied Salafi and Wahabi fundamentalists a theocratic Sunni regime, cleansed of secular Syrians, Alevis and Christians, will serve as a trampoline for projecting power in the Islamic world; and for Israel a blood-drenched divided Syria will further ensure its regional hegemony. It was not without prophetic foresight that the uber-Zionist US Senator Joseph Lieberman demanded days after the ‘Al Queda’ attack of September 11, 2001: “First we must go after Iran, Iraq and Syria” before considering the actual authors of the deed.

The armed anti-Syrian forces reflect a variety of conflicting political perspectives united only by their common hatred of the independent secular, nationalist regime which has governed the complex, multi-ethnic Syrian society for decades. The war against Syria is the principle launching pad for a further resurgence of Western militarism extending from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, buttressed by a systematic propaganda campaign proclaiming NATO’s democratic, humanitarian and ‘civilizing’ mission on behalf of the Syrian people.

The Road to Damascus is Paved with Lies

An objective analysis of the political and social composition of the principle armed combatants in Syria refutes any claim that the uprising is in pursuit of democracy for the people of that country. Authoritarian fundamentalist fighters form the backbone of the uprising. The Gulf States financing these brutal thugs are themselves absolutist monarchies. The West, after having foisted a brutal gangster regime on the people of Libya, can make no claim of ‘humanitarian intervention’.

The armed groups infiltrate towns and use population centers as shields from which they launch their attacks on government forces. In the process they force thousands of citizens from their homes, stores and offices which they use as military outposts. The destruction of the neighborhood of Baba Amr in Homs is a classic case of armed gangs using civilians as shields and as propaganda fodder in demonizing the government.

These armed mercenaries have no national credibility with the mass of Syrian people. One of their main propaganda mills is located in the heart of London, the so-called “Syrian Human Rights Observatory” where it coordinates closely with British intelligence turning out lurid atrocity stories to whip up sentiment in favor of a NATO intervention. The kings and emirs of the Gulf States bankroll these fighters. Turkey provides military bases and controls the cross-border flow of arms and the movement of the leaders of the so-called “Free Syrian Army”. The US, France and England provide the arms, training and diplomatic cover. Foreign jihadist-fundamentalists, including Al Qaeda fighters from Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, have entered the conflict. This is no “civil war”. This is aninternational conflict pitting an unholy triple alliance of NATO imperialists, Gulf State despots and Muslim fundamentalists against an independent secular nationalist regime. The foreign origin of the weapons, propaganda machinery and mercenary fighters reveals the sinister imperial, ‘multi-national’ character of the conflict. Ultimately the violent uprising against the Syrian state represents a systematic imperialist campaign to overthrow an ally of Iran, Russia and China, even at the cost of destroying Syria’s economy and civil society, fragmenting the country and unleashing enduring sectarian wars of extermination against the Alevi and Christian minorities, as well as secular government supporters.

The killings and mass flight of refugees is not the result of gratuitous violence committed by a blood thirsty Syrian state. The Western backed militias have seized neighborhoods by force of arms, destroyed oil pipelines, sabotaged transportation and bombed government buildings. In the course of their attacks they have disrupted basic services critical to the Syrian people including education, access to medical care, security, water, electricity and transportation. As such, they bear most of the responsibility for this “humanitarian disaster”, (which their imperial allies and UN officials blame on Syrian security and armed forces). The Syrian security forces are fighting to preserve the national independence of a secular state, while the armed opposition commits violence on behalf of their foreign pay-masters – in Washington, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, Ankara and London.

Conclusions

The Assad regime’s referendum last month drew millions of Syrian voters in defiance of Western imperialist threats and terrorist calls for a boycott. This clearly indicated that a majority of Syrians prefer a peaceful, negotiated settlement and reject mercenary violence. The Western-backed Syrian National Council and the Turkish and Gulf States-armed “Free Syrian Army” flatly rejected Russian and Chinese calls for an open dialogue and negotiations which the Assad regime has accepted. NATO and Gulf State dictatorships are pushing their proxies to pursue violent “regime change”, a policy which already has caused the death of thousands of Syrians. US and European economic sanctions are designed to wreck the Syrian economy, in the expectation that acute deprivation will drive an impoverished population into the arms of their violent proxies. In a repeat of the Libya scenario, NATO proposes to “liberate” the Syrian people by destroying their economy, civil society and secular state.

A Western military victory in Syria will merely feed the rising frenzy of militarism. It will encourage the West, Riyadh and Israel to provoke a new civil war in Lebanon. After demolishing Syria, the Washington-EU-Riyadh-Tel Aviv axes will move on to a far bloodier confrontation with Iran.

The horrific destruction of Iraq, followed by Libya’s post-war collapse provides a terrifying template of what is in store for the people of Syria: A precipitous collapse of their living standards, the fragmentation of their country, ethnic cleansing, rule by sectarian and fundamentalist gangs, and total insecurity of life and property.

Just as the “left” and “progressives” declared the brutal savaging of Libya to be the “revolutionary struggle of insurgent democrats” and then walked away, washing their hands of the bloody aftermath of ethnic violence against black Libyans, they repeat the same calls for military intervention against Syria. The same liberals, progressives, socialists and Marxists who are calling on the West to intervene in Syria’s “humanitarian crises” from their cafes and offices in Manhattan and Paris, will lose all interest in the bloody orgy of their victorious mercenaries after Damascus, Aleppo and other Syrian cities have been bombed by NATO into submission.

James Petras latest book, The Arab Revolt and the Imperialist Counterattack

(Clarity Press:Atlanta2012)2^ND EDITION

PETRAS: “NADIE PUEDE CREER LAS PORQUERÍAS DE LA SRA. CLINTON O DE OBAMA CUANDO ESTÁN EN ACUERDO TOTAL CON ISRAEL Y APOYANDO EL PADECIMIENTO DE 2 MILLONES DE PALESTINOS”

Spanish, Submitted Article No Responses »

Feb 102012

Comentarios para CX36 Radio Centenario, del sociólogo norteamericano, Prof. James Petras desde Nueva York – Estados Unidos. Lunes 6 de febrero de 2012. “Cada vez que permiten un avance imperial, los imperialistas exigen más y las denuncias morales no tienen ningún sentido. Estados Unidos sigue tirando bombas en Pakistán, en Afganistán, etc.”

Chury: Estamos en diálogo con James Petras allí en los Estados Unidos con temas muy importantes, como el veto en el Consejo de Seguridad respecto de Siria, el tema de la reunión del Alba pero seguramente Petras tiene preseleccionado los temas que siempre compartimos en el arranque.

Petras buenos días, bienvenido.

Petras: Buenos días ..

Chury: Exacto. Vamos a arrancar.

Petras: Podemos empezar con lo que esta pasando con la relación del ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los pueblos de nuestra América).

Primero algunos comentarios generales y después entramos en la temática más concreta.

Primero el ALBA esta creciendo más alla del núcleo original organizado alrededor de Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador.

Ahora se incluye una serie de nuevos países principalmente del Caribe, pequeños países que antes estaban bajo la hegemonía y dominación norteamericana, y que han tomando una decisión de integrar el ALBA incluyendo a Haití, que sigue siendo ocupada por las tropas de cipayos incluyendo a Uruguay, Argentina y otros. Esperamos que con la entrada al ALBA, por lo menos Bolivia retire sus tropas de ocupación. En este sentido ALBA es un proyecto creciente.

En segundo lugar, se han tomando algunas medidas para profundizar los vínculos económicos, han formado comisiones para discutir las posibilidades de colaboración y el uso de recursos propios para financiar proyectos económicos, que pienso, serán proyectos en el marco de una política más antiimperialista o por lo menos críticos a las políticas norteamericanas y europeas. Incluso en esta conferencia el Presidente de Ecuador, Rafael Correa, llamó a establecer sanciones económicas contra Inglaterra por el hecho de la colonización de Malvinas. Es otro paso importante de este proyecto, de definir algo más crítico a los países imperialistas que lo que existe actualmente en UNASUR y otras organizaciones regionales. Forman parte del ALBA algo más de izquierda que lo que esta pasando con el resto de la integración regional.

Lo que ALBA no hace, y eso es lo que debemos analizar, es que ALBA no trata los temas de transformaciones sociales internamente.

Podemos enfatizar por ejemplo como los gobiernos siguen promocionando la entrada de grandes multinacionales mineras en América Latina, como Ecuador, Bolivia y otros países. Hay una brecha entre la política integracionista y antiimperialista; y la invitación a las multinacionales particularmente de la gran minería, para explotar los recursos.

Ahora, hay indicios de que las presiones populares dentro de los países del ALBA pueden tener un efecto. Por ejemplo en Argentina, las presiones populares forzaron la salida de una empresa minera que explotaba oro a dejar el proyecto. Pero eso no viene de la cúpula de los países, sino que viene de la lucha de masas.

En este sentido, debemos anotar los objetivos del ALBA que son especialmente el crecimiento en las áreas previamente bajo el dominio norteamericano y también, los esfuerzos de autonomía económica como pasos importantes.

El eje de toda esta política, obviamente, es Venezuela que es el principal orientador y financiero de los proyectos del ALBA.

Eso es como el primer punto que quería anotar.

El segundo tema que quería tratar hoy, son los cambios importantes que se están dando en Cuba bajo la dirección de Raúl Castro y su nuevo equipo.

La Conferencia del fin de semana pasado (sábado 28 y domingo 29 de enero) el Partido tomó una decisión muy importante, de separar el Partido de la gestión de las empresas públicas.

Antes el Partido dominaba la gestión de las empresas, muchas veces fijando criterios políticos y aumentando el burocratismo, también la ineficiencia, politizando decisiones económicas, dejando la producción en favor del control político. Ahora la empresa tiene que funcionar con criterios de eficiencia, productividad y tomar decisiones en función de lo que es más lucrativo desde el ángulo de producción y acumulación de ingresos. La ventaja es que con este nuevo sistema los directores, los gestores de empresas, tienen que actuar o pueden actuar más, mejor dicho, dirigidas hacia ventajas del mercado. Esta contradicción se puede controlar en el grado que hay control desde los trabajadores y empleados en la empresa.

No es una abstracción. Es decir, separar el Partido es una cosa, pero alguien tiene que controlar para que los gerentes no se aprovechen de su autonomía para acumular privilegios. Por eso no es el Partido que tiene la responsabilidad en la última instancia. Yo creo que la responsabilidad debe quedar en la asamblea de los obreros para ver en qué grado coinciden los obreros, trabajadores, empleados, con las decisiones tomadas por estos empresarios.

Pero en todo caso es otro esfuerzo de Raúl Castro de desbloquear el estancamiento de la economía cubana y buscar formas de crear empresas más competitivas en el mercado mundial que es donde Cuba tiene que competir.

Esos son los dos puntos importantes que debemos anotar en relación con lo que está pasando en América Latina.

El tercer punto que quiero tocar es algo importante para América Latina que es la decisión del gobierno militar de Egipto de juzgar a los funcionarios extranjeros y también a los funcionarios egipcios en las Organizaciones No Gubernamentales (ONG’s).

Es curioso o paradójico que el gobierno militar pro norteamericano está tomando esta decisión, porque es un problema que enfrenta a toda América Latina incluso los gobiernos progresistas como Venezuela, donde las ONG’s financiadas por el gobierno norteamericano infiltran un país y organizan contrapartidas para la subversión, como han hecho en Venezuela, Argentina y en otros países.

Estos gobiernos progresistas nunca han tomado mediadas para reprimir este tipo de infiltración. Ahora, basta que un gobierno de la derecha, incluso un gobierno represivo por sus propias razones, esta juzgando o poniendo en juicio a los funcionarios norteamericanos en esta actividad .Por eso Washington está muy enojado con el gobierno militar, su propio títere por actuar en esta forma.

Ahora, ¿por qué los EEUU tiene ONG’s operando paralelamente e incluso en la oposición del gobierno militar en Egipto? Porque quieren ampliar sus opciones: para Washington, que apoya al gobierno militar con 1.400.000.000 dólares de ayuda militar por un lado. Ven por el otro lado, las movilizaciones de masas. Entonces quieren tener una mano también en esta otra opción.

Estan jugando las dos cartas; una apoyando al gobierno militar y la otra, ante la posibilidad de que la oposición llegue al poder. Y ellos quieren tener afiliados adentro de este proceso. Mientras el gobierno militar no quiere ver ninguna alternativa, no quiere porque ellos se están sacrificando para los intereses norteamericanos si hay un recambio.

Si Egipto puede empezar un proceso contra las ONG’s financiados por el exterior ¿por qué en América Latina no pueden hacer lo mismo? Porque actúan de la misma manera, no son grupos independientes.

La institución Casa de Libertad, Freedom House, que es una agencia directamente funcionando con el Departamento de Estado y haciendo el trabajo de la CIA, infiltrando sindicatos, formando amarillos. Eso es algo paradójico ahora que tenemos esta oportunidad de explorar como eliminar la canalización de dinero a partir de Washington hacia grupos de base, grupos que trabajan en varios partidos, en movimientos estudiantiles, como agentes de subversión extranjera imperialista.

El cuarto tema, antes de abrir paso a tus consultas, es lo que tiene que ver con Siria, mejor dicho el voto de Rusia y China contra las propuestas imperialistas para tumbar el gobierno de Bachar al Asad. Esta acción de Rusia y China es una rectificación de lo que pasó en Libia donde permitieron una resolución del Consejo de Seguridad para facilitar la intervención militar, la conquista de Libia, el desplazamiento del gobierno y la presencia de un gobierno títere, que excluye los intereses económicos de Rusia y China. No hay que olvidar a los 30.000 trabajadores chinos que tuvieron que irse durante la invasión.

Ahora Rusia tiene intereses muy fuertes en Siria, China tiene relaciones en el Medio Oriente y no pueden tolerar esta agresión militarista norteamericana-europea que está conquistando a estos países para incorporarlos en su órbita.

Por esta razón, para defender su presencia, su economía, Rusia y China tenían que rechazar esta propuesta. Ahora que pasa, es cierto que hay un levantamiento armado, no hay ninguna duda, hemos visto gran número de documentos que nos informa como los países de Europa y EEUU, están canalizando armas a partir de Turquía, Líbano, etc., cruzando las fronteras para montar esta insurrección.

Ningún medio esta dando cifras sobre los civiles pro-gubernamentales que han sido asesinados, no hablan de los asesinatos de soldados; de los ataques con bombas contra las instalaciones de petróleo.Todo el terrorismo que conocemos en otras partes.Pero los medios decidieron que en Siria “son todos civiles desarmados contra un gobierno represivo”, que es totalmente falso, pura fabricación.

Hay grupos armados extendidos están saboteando la economía y las encuestas muestran que más de un 50% de la población de las grandes ciudades sigue apoyando al gobierno actual.

Con eso quiero enfatizar que por fin Rusia y China entienden algo de la agresividad del imperialismo y como no se puede conciliar, porque una vez que ellos dan un paso agarran todo -en el caso de Libia, China perdió enormes inversiones, Rusia también- y también fomentan la mayor agresividad.

Cada vez que permiten un avance imperial, los imperialistas exigen más y las denuncias morales no tienen ningún sentido. Estados Unidos sigue tirando bombas en Pakistán, en Afganistán,etc. Nadie puede creer las porquerías de la Sra. Clinton o de Obama cuando están en acuerdo total con Israel y apoyando el padecimiento de 2 millones de palestinos.

Esos son mis comentarios por lo menos sobre algunos temas, escucho ahora tus preguntas.

Chury: Si Petras que está enramado con esto. ¿Qué repercusión ha tenido en EEUU la actitud de Rusia y China en el Consejo de Seguridad de la ONU?

Petras: En relación con los medios de comunicación aquí es unánime, como siempre, apoyando las denuncias del gobierno, de Obama y de los republicanos. Pues repiten como papagayos que ‘es una vergüenza’, que los gobernantes rusos ‘están apoyando el terrorismo’ y que los EEUU han adoptado ‘una política humanitaria’.

Es más, no mencionan para nada el hecho que la oposición siria que EEUU apoya, utiliza la violencia y está asesinando a cientos de personas. No mencionan nada de eso. Simplemente que denuncian a Rusia y China porque de hecho, defienden la autodeterminación y la no-intervención en Siria. Para los medios todo es humanitario.Aquí solo hablan de los muertos pero no tratan de analizar quién está muriendo, según ellos sólo son civiles y el que utiliza armas es el gobierno de Siria.

Hay medios, de menor alcance, que si mencionan el transporte de armas y el uso de armas contra el gobierno de Siria, pero son la prensa menor, no es exactamente en los grandes medios.No son los títulos del New York Times o el Washington Post.

Aquí la diferencia entre la posición oficial del gobierno y la gran prensa es casi invisible cuando se tocan temas de gran importancia internacional.

Chury: Un abrazo Petras.

Petras: Un abrazo.