Cubadebate
El ciudadano norteamericano detenido en Cuba fue contratado por una empresa que recluta para los servicios secretos estadounidenses
Esa es una nueva adquisición que hay en Estados Unidos, y son agentes, torturadores, espías, que en la privatización de la guerra los contratan, explicó el líder parlamentario en conversación con reporteros en la Plaza de la Revolución.
Allí Alarcón participó este miércoles en la toma de posesión de la Comisión Electoral Nacional para los comicios parciales que elegirán en abril y mayo venideros los delegados a las Asambleas Municipales del Poder Popular.
El dirigente comentó que el estadounidense, detenido en diciembre último, continúa bajo investigación y “está mucho mejor, pero mucho mejor -enfatizó- que las víctimas de esos contratistas en todo el mundo”.
Durante la clausura del reciente período de sesiones del Parlamento, también el mes pasado, el presidente cubano, Raúl Castro, aseveró que el enemigo está tan activo como siempre.
Muestra de ello es la detención en días pasados de un ciudadano norteamericano, eufemísticamente denominado en declaraciones de los voceros del Departamento de Estado como “contratista” de su gobierno, puntualizó el mandatario.
Indicó que el sujeto se dedicaba al abastecimiento ilegal con sofisticados medios de comunicación vía satélite a agrupaciones de la “sociedad civil” que aspiran a conformar en contra del pueblo cubano.
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1/7/10
LBJ, Lincoln Gordon and the Origins of the Desaparecidos
The American Elite
By WILLIAM BLUM
CounterPunch
Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon's diplomatic service as "a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment".
You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.
Abraham Lincoln Gordon was also Washington's on-site, and very active, director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964 which overthrew the moderately leftist government of João Goulart and condemned the people of Brazil to more than 20 years of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship.
Human-rights campaigners have long maintained that Brazil's military regime originated the idea of the desaparecidos, "the disappeared", and exported torture methods across Latin America. In 2007, the Brazilian government published a 500-page book, "The Right to Memory and the Truth", which outlines the systematic torture, rape and disappearance of nearly 500 left-wing activists, and includes photos of corpses and torture victims. Currently, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship. (When will the United States create a commission to investigate its own torture?)
In a cable to Washington after the coup, Gordon stated — in a remark that might have had difficulty getting past the lips of even John Foster Dulles — that without the coup there could have been a "total loss to the West of all South American Republics". (It was actually the beginning of a series of fascistic anti-communist coups that trapped the southern half of South America in a decades-long nightmare, culminating in "Operation Condor", in which the various dictatorships, aided by the CIA, cooperated in hunting down and killing leftists.)
Gordon later testified at a congressional hearing and while denying completely any connection to the coup in Brazil he stated that the coup was "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century."
Listen to a phone conversation between President Johnson and Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, April 3, 1964, two days after the coup:
So the next time you're faced with a boy wonder from Harvard, try to keep your adulation in check no matter what office the man attains, even — oh, just choosing a position at random — the presidency of the United States. Keep your eyes focused not on these "liberal" ... "best and brightest" who come and go, but on US foreign policy which remains the same decade after decade. There are dozens of Brazils and Lincoln Gordons in America's past. In its present. In its future. They're the diplomatic equivalent of the guys who ran Enron, AIG and Goldman Sachs.
Of course, not all of our foreign policy officials are like that. Some are worse.
And remember the words of convicted spy Alger Hiss: Prison was "a good corrective to three years at Harvard."
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
By WILLIAM BLUM
CounterPunch
Lincoln Gordon died a few weeks ago at the age of 96. He had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at the age of 19, received a doctorate from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, published his first book at 22, with dozens more to follow on government, economics, and foreign policy in Europe and Latin America. He joined the Harvard faculty at 23. Dr. Gordon was an executive on the War Production Board during World War II, a top administrator of Marshall Plan programs in postwar Europe, ambassador to Brazil, held other high positions at the State Department and the White House, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, economist at the Brookings Institution, president of Johns Hopkins University. President Lyndon B. Johnson praised Gordon's diplomatic service as "a rare combination of experience, idealism and practical judgment".
You get the picture? Boy wonder, intellectual shining light, distinguished leader of men, outstanding American patriot.
Abraham Lincoln Gordon was also Washington's on-site, and very active, director in Brazil of the military coup in 1964 which overthrew the moderately leftist government of João Goulart and condemned the people of Brazil to more than 20 years of an unspeakably brutal dictatorship.
Human-rights campaigners have long maintained that Brazil's military regime originated the idea of the desaparecidos, "the disappeared", and exported torture methods across Latin America. In 2007, the Brazilian government published a 500-page book, "The Right to Memory and the Truth", which outlines the systematic torture, rape and disappearance of nearly 500 left-wing activists, and includes photos of corpses and torture victims. Currently, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is proposing a commission to investigate allegations of torture by the military during the 1964-1985 dictatorship. (When will the United States create a commission to investigate its own torture?)
In a cable to Washington after the coup, Gordon stated — in a remark that might have had difficulty getting past the lips of even John Foster Dulles — that without the coup there could have been a "total loss to the West of all South American Republics". (It was actually the beginning of a series of fascistic anti-communist coups that trapped the southern half of South America in a decades-long nightmare, culminating in "Operation Condor", in which the various dictatorships, aided by the CIA, cooperated in hunting down and killing leftists.)
Gordon later testified at a congressional hearing and while denying completely any connection to the coup in Brazil he stated that the coup was "the single most decisive victory of freedom in the mid-twentieth century."
Listen to a phone conversation between President Johnson and Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, April 3, 1964, two days after the coup:
MANN: I hope you're as happy about Brazil as I am.
LBJ: I am.
MANN: I think that's the most important thing that's happened in the hemisphere in three years.
LBJ: I hope they give us some credit instead of hell.
(Michael Beschloss, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes 1963-1964 (New York, 1997), p.306. All other sources for this section on Gordon can be found in: Washington Post, December 22, 2009, obituary; The Guardian (London), August 31, 2007; William Blum, "Killing Hope", chapter 27.)
So the next time you're faced with a boy wonder from Harvard, try to keep your adulation in check no matter what office the man attains, even — oh, just choosing a position at random — the presidency of the United States. Keep your eyes focused not on these "liberal" ... "best and brightest" who come and go, but on US foreign policy which remains the same decade after decade. There are dozens of Brazils and Lincoln Gordons in America's past. In its present. In its future. They're the diplomatic equivalent of the guys who ran Enron, AIG and Goldman Sachs.
Of course, not all of our foreign policy officials are like that. Some are worse.
And remember the words of convicted spy Alger Hiss: Prison was "a good corrective to three years at Harvard."
William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.
He can be reached at: BBlum6@aol.com
Manifiesto Pikunmapuche
Pikunmapuche
Manifiesto Pikunmapuche
Una organización mapuche que defienda posiciones autonomistas y de clase trabajadora
Un sector importante de la población mapuche, alrededor de un 70%, vive en ciudades, de ese porcentaje de mapuche urbanos o de ciudad, la mayor parte esta radicada en la ciudad de Santiago de Chile.
La discriminación, la opresión nacional y la explotación sufrida por los mapuche, se expresa en tasas de pobreza más altas que el promedio nacional, salarios más bajos y menor acceso a educación. Las zonas de más alta concentración mapuche también son las más pobres de Chile.
El abanico de posiciones políticas que podemos encontrar entre los mapuche, tanto de ciudad como de comunidad es tan amplia como entre la población winka o de cualquier otro pueblo.
Hoy podemos encontrar mapuche que apoyan o trabajan en el comando de Piñera y un porcentaje más amplio que son parte de los partidos de la Concertación; otros apoyan el comando de Frei y algunos apoyaron a Arrate o Enríquez-Ominami.
Por otro lado también hay un porcentaje importante de organizaciones mapuche urbanas que mantienen una cierta independencia política, aunque igual son parte de los proyectos de la CONADI o de algún departamento indígena Municipal, por lo que su independencia es hasta cierto punto relativa.
Los mapuche y las posiciones de clase trabajadora.
Los mapuche que defienden posiciones de la clase trabajadora o se identifican como de izquierda o anticapitalistas, hoy no están representados en ninguna orgánica mapuche que tenga estas características y en la cual podamos sentirnos plenamente representados.
Muchos mapuche que somos parte de organizaciones y colectivos de izquierda o de organizaciones sociales requerimos una nueva orgánica que dé cuenta de las luchas propiamente indígenas, sin que por participar en ella entremos en conflicto con aquellas otras orgánicas anticapitalistas. Por otra parte, es necesario convocar a muchos mapuche que sin ser de “tradición de izquierda”, tienen una clara opción contra el sistema global opresor que hoy es encarnado por el poder transnacional del capitalismo, genocida, ecocida y etnocida.
Por esto un grupo de mapuche que queremos defender posiciones políticas autonomistas y de clase hemos tomado la decisión de crear una organización que tenga estas características.
Como primera labor asumimos ser parte de la lucha de nuestros hermanos y hermanas del sur del país, pero entendiendo que esta solidaridad no puede ser la única razón de nuestra existencia, dado que la mayoría de nosotros vivimos en ciudades. Por esto también asumimos como tarea central levantar un programa reivindicativo que contemple las demandas de los mapuche urbanos o de ciudad.
Los otros pueblos indígenas que se encuentran en el territorio estatal, y el pueblo trabajador chileno mestizo, son nuestros aliados principales y naturales de nuestra causa nacional.
Defenderemos los intereses materiales de nuestro pueblo, y también el derecho a mantener y desarrollar nuestra cultura. El brutal retroceso del conocimiento y el uso de nuestra lengua, el mapudungun, especialmente en las dos últimas generaciones, es uno de los síntomas más evidentes de la opresión nacional que sufre el pueblo mapuche.
El capitalismo, y su búsqueda desenfrenada del lucro, son incompatibles con las tradiciones de la comunidad mapuche, y los valores de la reciprocidad. La destrucción medioambiental es contraria al respeto por la naturaleza de cosmovisión del pueblo mapuche. A la propiedad privada capitalista nosotros anteponemos como valor superior la solidaridad y la colaboración fraternal de la comunidad. Estos valores fundamentan nuestro proyecto socialista.
Nuestra organización procurará establecer sólidas alianzas solidarias con otros pueblos originarios del continente, en particular con nuestros hermanos y hermanas quechuas y aymaras, y desde luego con nuestros hermanos y hermanas mapuche de Puel Mapu (Argentina) cuyas comunidades son amenazadas, por las multinacionales que envenenan la madre tierra, la ñuke mapu, y la privan del agua, con sus mineras, forestales, hidroeléctricas, geotérmicas y termoeléctricas.
Todos están invitados a ser parte de la organización.
Mapuche, mestizos y no mapuche, en el último caso sólo aceptaremos a aquellos que hayan demostrado en el tiempo su claro compromiso con la causa mapuche y que estén en contra de la represión, la discriminación y el racismo en cualquiera de sus formas.
Condenamos y no aceptamos las posiciones paternalistas que tienen algunos sectores de los activistas de izquierda ligados a ONGs, pues es otra forma de discriminación, porque considera a los indígenas como personas inferiores a ellos.
Cualquier relación debe darse en condiciones de igualdad y por ningún motivo se pueden aceptar relaciones de dependencia, ningún pueblo o nación puede estar supeditada a otro.
Trabajo formativo y de difusión de la lucha mapuche.
Asumimos como tarea trabajar fuertemente en la formación y capacitación de nuestros integrantes, a la par de difundir el tema al resto de la población no mapuche, para que puedan entender cual es la raíz del problema, para sensibilizarlos y ganarlos a la causa mapuche.
Nos interesa propiciar la constitución de una coordinación amplia de las organizaciones indígenas urbanas, para superar la atomización y desunión que hoy existe en la región metropolitana.
Nos queda claro que es necesario realizar un diagnóstico objetivo de la situación orgánica del movimiento mapuche, en la región donde estamos ubicados.
Tareas que vamos a emprender en el corto plazo.
Se hace fundamental organizar foros y debates sobre la situación que está viviendo hoy el pueblo mapuche, especialmente denunciar la represión violenta que hoy están sufriendo nuestras comunidades y la situación de los presos políticos mapuche.
Es central romper el cerco informativo que hoy existe, exhibiendo videos, documentales, sobre la realidad de la lucha de la nación mapuche.
Consideramos necesario organizar reuniones y foros con sindicatos, centros de alumnos, federaciones de estudiantes, organizaciones de pobladores, acerca de la historia, cultura y situación actual de la nación mapuche.
Por ahora consideramos que con estas metas tendremos suficiente trabajo para el próximo periodo, por último queremos decir que nuestra organización llevará por nombre Pikunmapuche.
Pikunmapuche:
Guillermo Lincolao
Carlos Ruiz
Nora Huenchuman.
Celso Calfullan.
Patricio Guzmán.
Manifiesto Pikunmapuche
Una organización mapuche que defienda posiciones autonomistas y de clase trabajadora
Un sector importante de la población mapuche, alrededor de un 70%, vive en ciudades, de ese porcentaje de mapuche urbanos o de ciudad, la mayor parte esta radicada en la ciudad de Santiago de Chile.
La discriminación, la opresión nacional y la explotación sufrida por los mapuche, se expresa en tasas de pobreza más altas que el promedio nacional, salarios más bajos y menor acceso a educación. Las zonas de más alta concentración mapuche también son las más pobres de Chile.
El abanico de posiciones políticas que podemos encontrar entre los mapuche, tanto de ciudad como de comunidad es tan amplia como entre la población winka o de cualquier otro pueblo.
Hoy podemos encontrar mapuche que apoyan o trabajan en el comando de Piñera y un porcentaje más amplio que son parte de los partidos de la Concertación; otros apoyan el comando de Frei y algunos apoyaron a Arrate o Enríquez-Ominami.
Por otro lado también hay un porcentaje importante de organizaciones mapuche urbanas que mantienen una cierta independencia política, aunque igual son parte de los proyectos de la CONADI o de algún departamento indígena Municipal, por lo que su independencia es hasta cierto punto relativa.
Los mapuche y las posiciones de clase trabajadora.
Los mapuche que defienden posiciones de la clase trabajadora o se identifican como de izquierda o anticapitalistas, hoy no están representados en ninguna orgánica mapuche que tenga estas características y en la cual podamos sentirnos plenamente representados.
Muchos mapuche que somos parte de organizaciones y colectivos de izquierda o de organizaciones sociales requerimos una nueva orgánica que dé cuenta de las luchas propiamente indígenas, sin que por participar en ella entremos en conflicto con aquellas otras orgánicas anticapitalistas. Por otra parte, es necesario convocar a muchos mapuche que sin ser de “tradición de izquierda”, tienen una clara opción contra el sistema global opresor que hoy es encarnado por el poder transnacional del capitalismo, genocida, ecocida y etnocida.
Por esto un grupo de mapuche que queremos defender posiciones políticas autonomistas y de clase hemos tomado la decisión de crear una organización que tenga estas características.
Como primera labor asumimos ser parte de la lucha de nuestros hermanos y hermanas del sur del país, pero entendiendo que esta solidaridad no puede ser la única razón de nuestra existencia, dado que la mayoría de nosotros vivimos en ciudades. Por esto también asumimos como tarea central levantar un programa reivindicativo que contemple las demandas de los mapuche urbanos o de ciudad.
Los otros pueblos indígenas que se encuentran en el territorio estatal, y el pueblo trabajador chileno mestizo, son nuestros aliados principales y naturales de nuestra causa nacional.
Defenderemos los intereses materiales de nuestro pueblo, y también el derecho a mantener y desarrollar nuestra cultura. El brutal retroceso del conocimiento y el uso de nuestra lengua, el mapudungun, especialmente en las dos últimas generaciones, es uno de los síntomas más evidentes de la opresión nacional que sufre el pueblo mapuche.
El capitalismo, y su búsqueda desenfrenada del lucro, son incompatibles con las tradiciones de la comunidad mapuche, y los valores de la reciprocidad. La destrucción medioambiental es contraria al respeto por la naturaleza de cosmovisión del pueblo mapuche. A la propiedad privada capitalista nosotros anteponemos como valor superior la solidaridad y la colaboración fraternal de la comunidad. Estos valores fundamentan nuestro proyecto socialista.
Nuestra organización procurará establecer sólidas alianzas solidarias con otros pueblos originarios del continente, en particular con nuestros hermanos y hermanas quechuas y aymaras, y desde luego con nuestros hermanos y hermanas mapuche de Puel Mapu (Argentina) cuyas comunidades son amenazadas, por las multinacionales que envenenan la madre tierra, la ñuke mapu, y la privan del agua, con sus mineras, forestales, hidroeléctricas, geotérmicas y termoeléctricas.
Todos están invitados a ser parte de la organización.
Mapuche, mestizos y no mapuche, en el último caso sólo aceptaremos a aquellos que hayan demostrado en el tiempo su claro compromiso con la causa mapuche y que estén en contra de la represión, la discriminación y el racismo en cualquiera de sus formas.
Condenamos y no aceptamos las posiciones paternalistas que tienen algunos sectores de los activistas de izquierda ligados a ONGs, pues es otra forma de discriminación, porque considera a los indígenas como personas inferiores a ellos.
Cualquier relación debe darse en condiciones de igualdad y por ningún motivo se pueden aceptar relaciones de dependencia, ningún pueblo o nación puede estar supeditada a otro.
Trabajo formativo y de difusión de la lucha mapuche.
Asumimos como tarea trabajar fuertemente en la formación y capacitación de nuestros integrantes, a la par de difundir el tema al resto de la población no mapuche, para que puedan entender cual es la raíz del problema, para sensibilizarlos y ganarlos a la causa mapuche.
Nos interesa propiciar la constitución de una coordinación amplia de las organizaciones indígenas urbanas, para superar la atomización y desunión que hoy existe en la región metropolitana.
Nos queda claro que es necesario realizar un diagnóstico objetivo de la situación orgánica del movimiento mapuche, en la región donde estamos ubicados.
Tareas que vamos a emprender en el corto plazo.
Se hace fundamental organizar foros y debates sobre la situación que está viviendo hoy el pueblo mapuche, especialmente denunciar la represión violenta que hoy están sufriendo nuestras comunidades y la situación de los presos políticos mapuche.
Es central romper el cerco informativo que hoy existe, exhibiendo videos, documentales, sobre la realidad de la lucha de la nación mapuche.
Consideramos necesario organizar reuniones y foros con sindicatos, centros de alumnos, federaciones de estudiantes, organizaciones de pobladores, acerca de la historia, cultura y situación actual de la nación mapuche.
Por ahora consideramos que con estas metas tendremos suficiente trabajo para el próximo periodo, por último queremos decir que nuestra organización llevará por nombre Pikunmapuche.
Pikunmapuche:
Guillermo Lincolao
Carlos Ruiz
Nora Huenchuman.
Celso Calfullan.
Patricio Guzmán.
Another Member of the Bautista Triqui Family Murdered in San Juan Copala
UBISORT Seeks to Bring in the Mexican Army
By Nancy Davies
NarcoNews
Another Triqui member of the family of Teresa Bautista, the 24 year old radio broadcaster killed in an ambush in April of 2008, has been murdered. Her brother, a 17-year-old named Isaias Bautista Merino, was killed on Friday while attending the inauguration of new municipal leader Anastasio Juarez in San Juan Copala, the Triqui autonomous town located some 350 kilometers (217 miles) west of Oaxaca city, where more than a dozen indigenous Triqui have died in clashes and ambushes.
Officials in San Juan Copala declared the town an “autonomous municipality” on January 20, 2007.
The struggle for political control of the Triqui lands has left a trail of blood in clashes between supporters of rival groups in recent years: the local organizations of MULT (United Movement of Triqui Struggle), MULT-I, (the Independent Movement of United Triqui Struggle) and UBISORT (Unity for the Social Well-being of the Triqui Region). UBISORT denounced four presumed paramilitaries for the January 1 assassination of Isaías Bautista Merino.
In a press release UBISORT announced, “the young people present indicate that they could fully identify these four who killed Bautista Merino.” UBISORT is widely regarded as being an affiliate of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party which runs the government of Oaxaca under Ulises Ruiz). UBISORT consistently has opposed the autonomy of San Juan Copala.
UBISORT’s press bulletin identified Eugenio Martínez López, the teacher Miguel Ángel Velasco Álvarez, José Ramírez and Jordán Gonzales Ramírez, but did not give their location. It said only that there was a shower of bullets against the young people, and Isaías Bautista Merino was hit by two shots from a .22 caliber weapon and more than eight from an AK-47 assault rifle. The news did not mention that Jordán Gonzalez is the man whose family was kidnapped on December 8, 2009, presumably in retaliation for the murder of Pablo Bautista.
In various press releases in the past two weeks, UBISORT has consistently referred to San Juan Copala as part of Santiago Juxtlahuaca, a bigger Triqui municipality to which UBISORT wants San Juan Copala re-annexed. Also, UBISORT issued press releases of the “elections” in which a PRI candidate was elected, although the town council of the autonomous community consistently denies any such action. The false candidate-now-elected has repeated in various interviews, all printed by media in support of the PRI, that San Juan Copala would benefit greatly by having a PRI connection.
The father of Isaías, Pablo Bautista, was also assassinated, bringing to three the murdered members of that family. It was claimed that Jordán González Ramírez was the man who killed Pablo Bautista in revenge for Bautista’s harassment/assault of Gonzalez, and that the dead Bautista was a militant of UBISORT. At another moment, it was claimed that paramilitaries shot Pablo Bautista, whose corpse was placed on the table in the municipal building in front of the assembly-elected municipal president.
None of this makes sense; lies are swarming like gnats. That Teresa Bautista could have been an UBISORT militant and her father and brother also, flies in the face of the work begun by the radio station The Voice That Breaks the Silence, for which young people, including Teresa Bautista, were trained by people in opposition to the PRI government. If they were members of any group, it was MULT-I, which has supported autonomy and sought to minimize the violence. Nevertheless, charges that all the Bautistas were UBISORT continue, including in an anonymous letter received by Narco News. UBISORT has worked continuously to control the population on behalf of the PRI, and during the period since autonomy was declared, at least a dozen people have been ambushed and killed.
On January 1 the council of elders of San Juan Copala handed the symbol of leadership, a wooden rod, to Anastasio Juárez, the new “elected” municipal president, before about 700 people.
“According to the elders, after the hour at which he was handed the symbolic rod, Anastasio Juárez Hernandez rules with all his authority. It’s a new day. As substitute president Mauro Vásquez Ramírez remains in office; Faustino Vásquez, as municipal mayor; as secretary Bernabé Cruz Santiago. All were chosen in assembly of the citizens of San Juan Copala.” No such, says the “real” president of the autonomous municipality, José Ramirez.
Anastasio Juárez made a speech in which he said that it’s time for us all to come together as brothers— indeed families are divided between those who seek a return to PRI electoral politics and those who oppose it. The youngsters had organized the New Year’s day social event. After the ceremony they left the building to enjoy the festivities.
Apparently “the paramilitaries” were hiding in wait, and shot at all the youth. However, another report was published on January 3, written by Monica Castro Reyes, “correspondent”. She has also been writing about the town’s happy change to a PRI candidate. In her current piece, published in Noticias on the crime page, the killer was none other than the municipal president José Ramirez, who showed up toting an AK-47. Her reports on the crime page almost never coincide with what is reported on the news section. As best I can ascertain, she is a employed by local Juxtlahuaca media.
None of these murders has been solved; the Attorney General for Justice of the State of Oaxaca reported that he had not yet received any information about events in San Juan Copala on January 1, a town, it claims, that police and officials find very difficult to enter.
It has now been repeated several times that the army could be called in. That is the goal of UBISORT and the PRI government, according to other reports.
By Nancy Davies
NarcoNews
Another Triqui member of the family of Teresa Bautista, the 24 year old radio broadcaster killed in an ambush in April of 2008, has been murdered. Her brother, a 17-year-old named Isaias Bautista Merino, was killed on Friday while attending the inauguration of new municipal leader Anastasio Juarez in San Juan Copala, the Triqui autonomous town located some 350 kilometers (217 miles) west of Oaxaca city, where more than a dozen indigenous Triqui have died in clashes and ambushes.
Officials in San Juan Copala declared the town an “autonomous municipality” on January 20, 2007.
The struggle for political control of the Triqui lands has left a trail of blood in clashes between supporters of rival groups in recent years: the local organizations of MULT (United Movement of Triqui Struggle), MULT-I, (the Independent Movement of United Triqui Struggle) and UBISORT (Unity for the Social Well-being of the Triqui Region). UBISORT denounced four presumed paramilitaries for the January 1 assassination of Isaías Bautista Merino.
In a press release UBISORT announced, “the young people present indicate that they could fully identify these four who killed Bautista Merino.” UBISORT is widely regarded as being an affiliate of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party which runs the government of Oaxaca under Ulises Ruiz). UBISORT consistently has opposed the autonomy of San Juan Copala.
UBISORT’s press bulletin identified Eugenio Martínez López, the teacher Miguel Ángel Velasco Álvarez, José Ramírez and Jordán Gonzales Ramírez, but did not give their location. It said only that there was a shower of bullets against the young people, and Isaías Bautista Merino was hit by two shots from a .22 caliber weapon and more than eight from an AK-47 assault rifle. The news did not mention that Jordán Gonzalez is the man whose family was kidnapped on December 8, 2009, presumably in retaliation for the murder of Pablo Bautista.
In various press releases in the past two weeks, UBISORT has consistently referred to San Juan Copala as part of Santiago Juxtlahuaca, a bigger Triqui municipality to which UBISORT wants San Juan Copala re-annexed. Also, UBISORT issued press releases of the “elections” in which a PRI candidate was elected, although the town council of the autonomous community consistently denies any such action. The false candidate-now-elected has repeated in various interviews, all printed by media in support of the PRI, that San Juan Copala would benefit greatly by having a PRI connection.
The father of Isaías, Pablo Bautista, was also assassinated, bringing to three the murdered members of that family. It was claimed that Jordán González Ramírez was the man who killed Pablo Bautista in revenge for Bautista’s harassment/assault of Gonzalez, and that the dead Bautista was a militant of UBISORT. At another moment, it was claimed that paramilitaries shot Pablo Bautista, whose corpse was placed on the table in the municipal building in front of the assembly-elected municipal president.
None of this makes sense; lies are swarming like gnats. That Teresa Bautista could have been an UBISORT militant and her father and brother also, flies in the face of the work begun by the radio station The Voice That Breaks the Silence, for which young people, including Teresa Bautista, were trained by people in opposition to the PRI government. If they were members of any group, it was MULT-I, which has supported autonomy and sought to minimize the violence. Nevertheless, charges that all the Bautistas were UBISORT continue, including in an anonymous letter received by Narco News. UBISORT has worked continuously to control the population on behalf of the PRI, and during the period since autonomy was declared, at least a dozen people have been ambushed and killed.
On January 1 the council of elders of San Juan Copala handed the symbol of leadership, a wooden rod, to Anastasio Juárez, the new “elected” municipal president, before about 700 people.
“According to the elders, after the hour at which he was handed the symbolic rod, Anastasio Juárez Hernandez rules with all his authority. It’s a new day. As substitute president Mauro Vásquez Ramírez remains in office; Faustino Vásquez, as municipal mayor; as secretary Bernabé Cruz Santiago. All were chosen in assembly of the citizens of San Juan Copala.” No such, says the “real” president of the autonomous municipality, José Ramirez.
Anastasio Juárez made a speech in which he said that it’s time for us all to come together as brothers— indeed families are divided between those who seek a return to PRI electoral politics and those who oppose it. The youngsters had organized the New Year’s day social event. After the ceremony they left the building to enjoy the festivities.
Apparently “the paramilitaries” were hiding in wait, and shot at all the youth. However, another report was published on January 3, written by Monica Castro Reyes, “correspondent”. She has also been writing about the town’s happy change to a PRI candidate. In her current piece, published in Noticias on the crime page, the killer was none other than the municipal president José Ramirez, who showed up toting an AK-47. Her reports on the crime page almost never coincide with what is reported on the news section. As best I can ascertain, she is a employed by local Juxtlahuaca media.
None of these murders has been solved; the Attorney General for Justice of the State of Oaxaca reported that he had not yet received any information about events in San Juan Copala on January 1, a town, it claims, that police and officials find very difficult to enter.
It has now been repeated several times that the army could be called in. That is the goal of UBISORT and the PRI government, according to other reports.
Recuento de algunos daños al país que anteceden fuertes luchas y cambios radicales
Pedro Echeverría
AGENPRESS
1. El año 2010 amaneció con más de 110 millones de habitantes, hasta llegar a 112 millones de seres humanos en México. Hace 200 años apenas teníamos poco más de 6 millones con más del doble de territorio (antes que los EEUU nos lo robaran) y hace un siglo, antes de que estalle la revolución de 1910, contábamos con poco más de 15 millones de mexicanos. En los siglos anteriores las poblaciones eran casi totalmente rurales, hoy nuestro carácter urbano es de cerca del 80 por ciento de la población, es decir, se invirtieron los porcentajes. El campo está hoy casi totalmente abandonado por falta de inversiones y trabajo; las ciudades han crecido ilimitadamente. ¿Quiere esto decir que las futuras luchas y trasformaciones tendrán que darse en las urbes? Es casi seguro, pero no olvidar que la ciudad de México, Guadalajara y Monterrey no son las únicas.
2. Hace cinco años los estados de la República con mayor número de habitantes eran el Estado de México (14 millones), D F (8.7), Veracruz (7.1), Jalisco (6.7), Puebla (5.3), Guanajuato (4.8), Chiapas (4.2), Nuevo León (4.1), etcétera, los siguientes son estados medios y menores en número de habitantes. Pero en cada uno de esos estados hoy se registran grandes ciudades con infinidad de problemas que los distintos gobiernos del PRI, PAN, PRD, no han sido capaces de resolver, provocando su agravamiento. Si bien los problemas de la propiedad de la tierra, los créditos y el mercado han provocado mucho descontento y protestas campesinas, éstas han permanecido muy aisladas y el gobierno les ha dado largas a los asuntos sin preocuparse por resolverlos. En las ciudades de México las luchas se acrecientan y se agudizan, por eso el gobierno está acordonándolas.
3. Aunque Calderón, el presidente de facto, esté sacando muchos distractores tales como la reelección de legisladores y presidente municipales, cambios en el gabinete, etcétera, el acento lo ha puesto en hacer más grande el acordonamiento del ejército “en estados problema”, así como ver el absoluto cumplimiento con la llamada “Iniciativa Mérida” que le garantiza tecnología, armas, helicópteros y asesoría yanqui para el ejército mexicano. Son casi 20 mil las personas muertas y asesinadas en el “combate contra el narcotráfico”, la mayoría de ellas inocentes; pero esas muertes no le preocupa al gobierno y sus asesores. El interés de Calderón –que cuenta con asesoría yanqui- es asegurarse que ante la profunda crisis que ha provocado gigantesco desempleo, miseria y protestas, éstas no lleguen al cumplimiento de la cábala de las revoluciones 1810, 1910, 2010.
4. Nuestro espejo es Colombia donde el llamado combate contra el narcotráfico a los pocos años fue convertido en combate contra las luchas del pueblo, contra las guerrillas revolucionarias que se levantaron en armas contra los gobiernos militares asesinos. Colombia firmó en 1999 un Plan con el gobierno de Clinton para que Colombia recibiera durante años todo lo necesario para reprimir la protesta que se acrecientan y al mismo tiempo poner su territorio para la instalación de bases militares. Hoy Colombia cuenta con siete bases militares para llenarlas de aviones yanquis de combate que, sumadas a las de Panamá. Costa Rica y de otros países, amenazan seriamente al continente, en particular a Venezuela, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua y a todos aquellos gobiernos que condenen la histórica agresión yanqui. Colombia así puede ser bombardeada como base yanqui, ¿espera México lo mismo?
5. Si hiciéramos un simple recuento de los 10 puntos que sobresalieron en el gobierno de Calderón durante 2009, encontraríamos un desgobierno: a) La epidemia de la influenza A/H1N1 que provocó muchos problemas porque fue muy mal administrada; b) El incendio en la guardería del Seguro Social en Hermosillo, donde murieron 49 niños que ha quedado impune; c) El desplome de por lo menos 7 por ciento en el crecimiento económico; d) Las inundaciones en estados del noroeste y sureste; e) la tremenda derrota electoral que sufrieron PAN y PRD con la participación del 43.7 de votos; f) La implantación de la Ley de ingresos, el presupuesto de egresos y el alza del IVA; g) Propuesta de reelección de legisladores y presidentes municipales y h) Asalto a las instalaciones de LFC con despido de 44 mil trabajadores electricistas. ¿Qué más se puede esperar?
6. Lo anterior sólo fue algo de 2009, ¿y los que se ha acumulado en los desgobiernos panistas de Fox y Calderón? Por eso la publicación del pasado miércoles que hacía referencia: “En materia económica, la primera década del siglo XXI, (México) exhibió la serie de problemas estructurales que colocan al país como el de menor dinamismo en América Latina, rebasado por naciones como Brasil, Chile e incluso Perú. De confirmarse el desplome de 7% en la producción interna bruta este 2009, la economía mexicana habría registrado un crecimiento anual promedio de apenas 1.6% en los últimos 10 años, el más bajo del que se tenga registro desde los años 20 del siglo pasado” ¿Qué puede esperarse para este año que hoy se inicia en medio de interrogantes, sobre todo si Calderón terminará su mandato a pesar de que la situación del país se parece a la de hace 100 años?
7. Los electricistas pueden aún levantarse, a pesar de que otras organizaciones no han puesto todo el apoyo necesario y que sus dirigentes han sido extremadamente pacíficos, confiando –inexplicablemente- en autoridades que buscan destruirlos. Las demás organizaciones de lucha: la APPO, la CNTE, los mineros, los lópezobradoristas, el EZLN, los universitarios, seguirán fortaleciendo sus contingentes de lucha, pero seguirán siendo golpeados uno a uno mientras no comprendan la necesidad de luchas unitarias. Esto es lo conocido pero lo importante es lo que se mueve abajo y no hemos podido percibir. Mientras el gobierno, los empresarios, los intelectuales integrados, buscan cómo festejar con grandes fiestas el bicentenario –como muy bien lo hizo Porfirio Díaz en 1910 sin pensar que le estallaría en las manos una revolución- el pueblo mexicano sigue buscando su camino.
AGENPRESS
1. El año 2010 amaneció con más de 110 millones de habitantes, hasta llegar a 112 millones de seres humanos en México. Hace 200 años apenas teníamos poco más de 6 millones con más del doble de territorio (antes que los EEUU nos lo robaran) y hace un siglo, antes de que estalle la revolución de 1910, contábamos con poco más de 15 millones de mexicanos. En los siglos anteriores las poblaciones eran casi totalmente rurales, hoy nuestro carácter urbano es de cerca del 80 por ciento de la población, es decir, se invirtieron los porcentajes. El campo está hoy casi totalmente abandonado por falta de inversiones y trabajo; las ciudades han crecido ilimitadamente. ¿Quiere esto decir que las futuras luchas y trasformaciones tendrán que darse en las urbes? Es casi seguro, pero no olvidar que la ciudad de México, Guadalajara y Monterrey no son las únicas.
2. Hace cinco años los estados de la República con mayor número de habitantes eran el Estado de México (14 millones), D F (8.7), Veracruz (7.1), Jalisco (6.7), Puebla (5.3), Guanajuato (4.8), Chiapas (4.2), Nuevo León (4.1), etcétera, los siguientes son estados medios y menores en número de habitantes. Pero en cada uno de esos estados hoy se registran grandes ciudades con infinidad de problemas que los distintos gobiernos del PRI, PAN, PRD, no han sido capaces de resolver, provocando su agravamiento. Si bien los problemas de la propiedad de la tierra, los créditos y el mercado han provocado mucho descontento y protestas campesinas, éstas han permanecido muy aisladas y el gobierno les ha dado largas a los asuntos sin preocuparse por resolverlos. En las ciudades de México las luchas se acrecientan y se agudizan, por eso el gobierno está acordonándolas.
3. Aunque Calderón, el presidente de facto, esté sacando muchos distractores tales como la reelección de legisladores y presidente municipales, cambios en el gabinete, etcétera, el acento lo ha puesto en hacer más grande el acordonamiento del ejército “en estados problema”, así como ver el absoluto cumplimiento con la llamada “Iniciativa Mérida” que le garantiza tecnología, armas, helicópteros y asesoría yanqui para el ejército mexicano. Son casi 20 mil las personas muertas y asesinadas en el “combate contra el narcotráfico”, la mayoría de ellas inocentes; pero esas muertes no le preocupa al gobierno y sus asesores. El interés de Calderón –que cuenta con asesoría yanqui- es asegurarse que ante la profunda crisis que ha provocado gigantesco desempleo, miseria y protestas, éstas no lleguen al cumplimiento de la cábala de las revoluciones 1810, 1910, 2010.
4. Nuestro espejo es Colombia donde el llamado combate contra el narcotráfico a los pocos años fue convertido en combate contra las luchas del pueblo, contra las guerrillas revolucionarias que se levantaron en armas contra los gobiernos militares asesinos. Colombia firmó en 1999 un Plan con el gobierno de Clinton para que Colombia recibiera durante años todo lo necesario para reprimir la protesta que se acrecientan y al mismo tiempo poner su territorio para la instalación de bases militares. Hoy Colombia cuenta con siete bases militares para llenarlas de aviones yanquis de combate que, sumadas a las de Panamá. Costa Rica y de otros países, amenazan seriamente al continente, en particular a Venezuela, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua y a todos aquellos gobiernos que condenen la histórica agresión yanqui. Colombia así puede ser bombardeada como base yanqui, ¿espera México lo mismo?
5. Si hiciéramos un simple recuento de los 10 puntos que sobresalieron en el gobierno de Calderón durante 2009, encontraríamos un desgobierno: a) La epidemia de la influenza A/H1N1 que provocó muchos problemas porque fue muy mal administrada; b) El incendio en la guardería del Seguro Social en Hermosillo, donde murieron 49 niños que ha quedado impune; c) El desplome de por lo menos 7 por ciento en el crecimiento económico; d) Las inundaciones en estados del noroeste y sureste; e) la tremenda derrota electoral que sufrieron PAN y PRD con la participación del 43.7 de votos; f) La implantación de la Ley de ingresos, el presupuesto de egresos y el alza del IVA; g) Propuesta de reelección de legisladores y presidentes municipales y h) Asalto a las instalaciones de LFC con despido de 44 mil trabajadores electricistas. ¿Qué más se puede esperar?
6. Lo anterior sólo fue algo de 2009, ¿y los que se ha acumulado en los desgobiernos panistas de Fox y Calderón? Por eso la publicación del pasado miércoles que hacía referencia: “En materia económica, la primera década del siglo XXI, (México) exhibió la serie de problemas estructurales que colocan al país como el de menor dinamismo en América Latina, rebasado por naciones como Brasil, Chile e incluso Perú. De confirmarse el desplome de 7% en la producción interna bruta este 2009, la economía mexicana habría registrado un crecimiento anual promedio de apenas 1.6% en los últimos 10 años, el más bajo del que se tenga registro desde los años 20 del siglo pasado” ¿Qué puede esperarse para este año que hoy se inicia en medio de interrogantes, sobre todo si Calderón terminará su mandato a pesar de que la situación del país se parece a la de hace 100 años?
7. Los electricistas pueden aún levantarse, a pesar de que otras organizaciones no han puesto todo el apoyo necesario y que sus dirigentes han sido extremadamente pacíficos, confiando –inexplicablemente- en autoridades que buscan destruirlos. Las demás organizaciones de lucha: la APPO, la CNTE, los mineros, los lópezobradoristas, el EZLN, los universitarios, seguirán fortaleciendo sus contingentes de lucha, pero seguirán siendo golpeados uno a uno mientras no comprendan la necesidad de luchas unitarias. Esto es lo conocido pero lo importante es lo que se mueve abajo y no hemos podido percibir. Mientras el gobierno, los empresarios, los intelectuales integrados, buscan cómo festejar con grandes fiestas el bicentenario –como muy bien lo hizo Porfirio Díaz en 1910 sin pensar que le estallaría en las manos una revolución- el pueblo mexicano sigue buscando su camino.
How I Almost Became a Terrorist
Not Everyone Who Opposes U.S. Policy is a Fanatic
By ALAN J. SINGER
CounterPunch
In May 1967 I was a seventeen-year old high school senior and a not particularly religious Jew. I was born in New York City, as were my parents, although my grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. My family strongly identified with the state of Israel and at the time my stepmother was visiting her brother who had emigrated there to fight for independence after serving in the U.S. army during World War II.
The survival of Israel as a Jewish state was important to my identity and the identity of my friends and family members. My friends, siblings, cousins, and I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and we had family members who were murdered. Jews had been victims for two thousand years but the survival of Israel meant we would be victims no more.
As the crisis in the Middle East intensified Americans were evacuated. My father and I spent a night at Kennedy Airport waiting for my stepmother to return home. The next morning two friends and I went to the Jewish Agency to sign up to go to Israel as volunteers in the event of war. We hoped to fight but said we would do anything that was needed.
On June 5, 1967 Israel launched a preemptive strike. The Third Arab-Israeli War lasted six days and ended with a resounding Israeli victory. American volunteers were not needed so we never went. But we would have gone and we would have fought for the survival of Israel and of Jews, whether the United States government gave permission, looked the other way, or even if it tried to stop us.
I am no longer a Zionist and I have not supported Israeli policy, especially the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. I now see Israel as the aggressor in the region, but that is not the point. As a teenager, I would have defied the U.S. government and risked legal repercussions because of my strong sense of personal identity. I wanted to be a freedom fighter for my people.
What if events had been different? What if the war was prolonged and American Jews were needed for Israel to survive? What if the U.S. government, bogged down in South East Asia and dependent on Arab-controlled Middle Eastern oil, ended its support for Israel? What if a desperate Israel attacked civilian populations or even used nuclear weapons against its enemies?
My friends and I, loyal Americans from the Bronx, freedom fighters in defense of our people, would have been seen as enemy combatants, supporters of terrorism, maybe even as terrorists. Many Americans would have wondered, what motivated us to do such terrible things?
I don’t think this is such a big stretch, the United States reversing its position on Israel or us participating as combatants even when ordered not to. We were teenagers. The holocaust was still lived memory. Our existence as a people was threatened.
I have been a teacher for almost forty years and I do not believe the teenagers and young adults I work with are very different from the way my friends and I were when we were their ages. They are upset by what they see as injustice and that to see it rectified. Today, on a daily basis I read in the newspapers about Islamic young men and women who believe their people are under attack by a powerful enemy that disrespects their beliefs and traditions, occupies theirs lands, and is willing to use its military might to force its way of life on them. Like my friends and I forty years ago, their sense of identity requires that they rally in support of their people. They want to be freedom fighters also.
They are not monsters, they are not insane, nor are they are fanatics. To dismiss them in this way is to misunderstand their motives and leaves us incapable of dealing with them. They see themselves as fighting for a just cause. Whether they individually live or die is inconsequential. People they identify with as brothers and sisters are already dying because of their enemy’s actions. They want to participate; they want to do something that is historically worthwhile.
I do not believe in killing civilians. Whether it is done by suicide bombers or by military drones is not an act of heroism nor is it in any way justified. I recognize, and support the need of the United States to take precautions that protect its civilians and military personnel from attack.
But dismissing individuals and movements as terrorist for defying U.S. policies and responding in the only ways they have available to them is counterproductive. It prevents any resolution of the underlying conflict and it ensures new generations of disaffected young people will follow in their path.
As a secondary school teacher I learned that the best, perhaps only way to control a classroom of rambunctious teenagers is through organization and relationship. When classes and lessons are organized and students feel related to the teacher, ninety percent of the problems do not happen. All disruptive behavior does not end, there are always students who are having a bad day or a bad life for one reason or another.
Based on this experience as a teacher, I believe that when Islamic youth believe there is hope for the future, that they have dignity and that their religion is respected, that their lives will change for the better, and that there will be justice in the Middle East, the threat of attack will lessen significantly, although it will probably never end completely. Branding these young people as terrorists will just convince them that their view of the world is accurate and that they need to be martyrs.
Alan Singer is Director of Secondary Social Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Hofstra University. He can be reached at: catajs@hofstra.edu.
By ALAN J. SINGER
CounterPunch
In May 1967 I was a seventeen-year old high school senior and a not particularly religious Jew. I was born in New York City, as were my parents, although my grandparents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. My family strongly identified with the state of Israel and at the time my stepmother was visiting her brother who had emigrated there to fight for independence after serving in the U.S. army during World War II.
The survival of Israel as a Jewish state was important to my identity and the identity of my friends and family members. My friends, siblings, cousins, and I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust and we had family members who were murdered. Jews had been victims for two thousand years but the survival of Israel meant we would be victims no more.
As the crisis in the Middle East intensified Americans were evacuated. My father and I spent a night at Kennedy Airport waiting for my stepmother to return home. The next morning two friends and I went to the Jewish Agency to sign up to go to Israel as volunteers in the event of war. We hoped to fight but said we would do anything that was needed.
On June 5, 1967 Israel launched a preemptive strike. The Third Arab-Israeli War lasted six days and ended with a resounding Israeli victory. American volunteers were not needed so we never went. But we would have gone and we would have fought for the survival of Israel and of Jews, whether the United States government gave permission, looked the other way, or even if it tried to stop us.
I am no longer a Zionist and I have not supported Israeli policy, especially the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. I now see Israel as the aggressor in the region, but that is not the point. As a teenager, I would have defied the U.S. government and risked legal repercussions because of my strong sense of personal identity. I wanted to be a freedom fighter for my people.
What if events had been different? What if the war was prolonged and American Jews were needed for Israel to survive? What if the U.S. government, bogged down in South East Asia and dependent on Arab-controlled Middle Eastern oil, ended its support for Israel? What if a desperate Israel attacked civilian populations or even used nuclear weapons against its enemies?
My friends and I, loyal Americans from the Bronx, freedom fighters in defense of our people, would have been seen as enemy combatants, supporters of terrorism, maybe even as terrorists. Many Americans would have wondered, what motivated us to do such terrible things?
I don’t think this is such a big stretch, the United States reversing its position on Israel or us participating as combatants even when ordered not to. We were teenagers. The holocaust was still lived memory. Our existence as a people was threatened.
I have been a teacher for almost forty years and I do not believe the teenagers and young adults I work with are very different from the way my friends and I were when we were their ages. They are upset by what they see as injustice and that to see it rectified. Today, on a daily basis I read in the newspapers about Islamic young men and women who believe their people are under attack by a powerful enemy that disrespects their beliefs and traditions, occupies theirs lands, and is willing to use its military might to force its way of life on them. Like my friends and I forty years ago, their sense of identity requires that they rally in support of their people. They want to be freedom fighters also.
They are not monsters, they are not insane, nor are they are fanatics. To dismiss them in this way is to misunderstand their motives and leaves us incapable of dealing with them. They see themselves as fighting for a just cause. Whether they individually live or die is inconsequential. People they identify with as brothers and sisters are already dying because of their enemy’s actions. They want to participate; they want to do something that is historically worthwhile.
I do not believe in killing civilians. Whether it is done by suicide bombers or by military drones is not an act of heroism nor is it in any way justified. I recognize, and support the need of the United States to take precautions that protect its civilians and military personnel from attack.
But dismissing individuals and movements as terrorist for defying U.S. policies and responding in the only ways they have available to them is counterproductive. It prevents any resolution of the underlying conflict and it ensures new generations of disaffected young people will follow in their path.
As a secondary school teacher I learned that the best, perhaps only way to control a classroom of rambunctious teenagers is through organization and relationship. When classes and lessons are organized and students feel related to the teacher, ninety percent of the problems do not happen. All disruptive behavior does not end, there are always students who are having a bad day or a bad life for one reason or another.
Based on this experience as a teacher, I believe that when Islamic youth believe there is hope for the future, that they have dignity and that their religion is respected, that their lives will change for the better, and that there will be justice in the Middle East, the threat of attack will lessen significantly, although it will probably never end completely. Branding these young people as terrorists will just convince them that their view of the world is accurate and that they need to be martyrs.
Alan Singer is Director of Secondary Social Studies in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Hofstra University. He can be reached at: catajs@hofstra.edu.
1/6/10
Los presidentes en el imperio norteamericano no son sus emperadores
Rómulo Pardo Silva
Mal Publicados
Los llamados mandatarios son escogidos para los electores por poderosos empresarios que los controlarán y podrían eliminarlos. Reagan, Bush hijo, Obama y Kennedy son algunos ejemplos.
En USA el poder reside en la gran burguesía corporativa que maneja a los militares, políticos, jueces, religiosos, y a la población a través de sus medios de comunicación. No hay ninguna fuerza organizada capaz de enfrentarla.
El actual ocupante de la Casa Blanca fue elevado desde Wall Street debido a su capacidad de crear ilusiones con la palabra, nada más.
Un artículo de Santiago O’Donnell ilustra la lejanía de Obama de los centros de decisión imperial. (1) “Es bueno recordar que Obama proviene de una cloaca…” “En ese país, desde los tiempos de Al Capone y Elliot Ness, cuando se habla de “Chicago politics” o “Chicago ward (distrito) politics”, todo el mundo entiende que se está hablando de la peor clase de política: la de los lobbies, la del clientelismo, la de las maquinarias electorales, la de las coimas, la de los retornos y la de los negocios por debajo de la mesa.”
La ciudad de Chicago en los últimos 53 años ha sido gobernada 40 por Richard J. Daley y su hijo Richard M. Daley, alcalde actual. De los últimos cinco gobernadores de Illinois cuatro han sido procesados por corrupción, tres condenados y uno, Rod Blagojevich, está bajo juicio.
Cuando Obama llegó a Chicago se alineó con los llamados Independientes, movimiento nacido de una alianza de negros moderados y blancos progresistas. Sin embargo cuidó su relación con el clan Daley. Su esposa Michelle trabajó para el hijo del Jefe Daley y Rahm Emmanuel, ahora jefe de gabinete de su gobierno, era un operador en el aparato del clan Daley.
Obama ayudó a un hombre de Daley hijo, Rod Blagojevich, a ganar la gobernación de Illinois en 2002. David Axelrod, su principal asesor en la Casa Blanca, declaró al diario New Yorker que rechazó trabajar en esa campaña porque ya se sabía que Blagojevich era un corrupto. Una vez elegido gobernador Obama fue uno de sus principales asesores.
El 4 de noviembre de 2008 Obama fue elegido presidente de Estados Unidos y el 9 de diciembre fue detenido Blagojevich y su jefe de gabinete.
El gobernador de Illinois estaba siendo investigado, especialmente después que en 2005 durante el juicio a Mike Rezko, lobbista y empresario de bienes raíces, testigos lo involucraron en maniobras delictivas. Por orden judicial sus teléfonos estaban intervenidos.
El reo Rezko había apoyado al gobernador, y también a Obama a quien le vendió su mansión en Hyde Park “a un precio sospechosamente conveniente, al filo de la ilegalidad.”
El FBI a través de las llamadas telefónicas comprobó varios actos de corrupción del gobernador y entre ellos sus maniobras para obtener provecho personal del nombramiento del reemplazante de Obama en el senado nacional, que le correspondía hacer a él según la ley. (2)
El fiscal del caso informó que el gobernador tenía dos ofertas para comprar la banca que dejaba Obama, por entre medio y un millón de dólares. No mencionó los nombres de los interesados. También gestionó colocar a su esposa en el directorio de una empresa que le permitiera ganar hasta 150 mil dólares anuales y hacer la venta a un sindicato por una suculenta suma.
Paralelamente además Blagojevich hizo contactos para ser nombrado por Obama, a cambio del nombramiento, secretario de Salud, de Energía o embajador en un destino elegante e importante. Un informe de la investigación dice que Rahm Emmanuel habló cuatro veces con John Harris, jefe de gabinete del gobernador, para recomendar nombres de reemplazante al senado sin pedir “una cosa a cambio de otra” y que el presidente electo discutió el tema con Emmanuel.
Obama declaró que nunca había conversado del tema con el gobernador y según el fiscal el nombre de Obama no apareció en ningún momento de la investigación.
Greg Craig, un asesor legal de Obama, estuvo a cargo de la pesquisa en el curso de la cual entrevistó al presidente electo, a su jefe de gabinete y a otros miembros del equipo de la Casa Blanca. Concluyó que Emmanuel habló con Blagojevich y John Harris pero que ellos no le pidieron ningún beneficio personal. (3)
Santiago O’Donnell escribe: “… lo que nunca hizo Obama fue romper con los viejos códigos gangsteriles que representan a Chicago… Eso no quiere decir que Obama sea un corrupto, o más corrupto que el político promedio.”
La venta de la senaduría es otra debilidad de Obama y no se ha hecho el juicio. El hecho lo toca: Blagojevich hizo contactos para que a cambio del reemplazo en la banca Obama le diera cargos; Emmanuel confirmó que conversaron sobre la sucesión.
En política a veces se recurre a lo que se llama razón de estado, hacer algo contrario a la ley en consideración a un interés superior del Estado. Pero también se sabe que Estados Unidos tiene una carpeta de Álvaro Uribe con sus antecedentes como paramilitar y narcotraficante y le sirve para manejarlo.
La situación de Obama es evidentemente insegura. Ortega y Cuba le han advertido que puede ser asesinado. Ha recibido más amenazas que ningún otro presidente. Públicamente sujetos republicanos han pedido la muerte del presidente y toda su familia. Él está en manos entonces de los servicios de seguridad como lo estuvieron antes los hermanos Kennedy y el acusado de matar al presidente en Texas.
Sin embargo hay evidencias que no puede confiar en esos servicios.
A una recepción en la Casa Blanca entraron dos personas que burlaron el control y estuvieron cerca del presidente.
El día de Navidad hubo un ataque fallido en un avión en Detroit. Con semanas de antelación al incidente Estados Unidos sabía que un “nigeriano” estaba siendo entrenado en Yemen por una rama de Al Qaida para ejecutar un atentado. (4) La CIA dice que tuvo conocimiento de Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab en noviembre cuando su padre acudió a la embajada e informó de sus ideas radicales; que su nombre fue introducido a la base de datos gubernamental de terroristas, información que se remitió al Centro Nacional de Antiterrorismo.
No obstante el joven no tuvo ningún impedimento para viajar desde Lagos hasta Ámsterdam donde se embarcó con destino a Detroit. En su cuerpo llevaba una sustancia altamente explosiva llamada PETN que trató de activar para destruir el avión con casi 300 pasajeros. Su intento fracasó por errores técnicos en la bomba y la intervención de pasajeros y tripulantes.
La secretaria de Seguridad Interior de Estados Unidos, Janet Napolitano, interpretó el hecho diciendo que el sistema de seguridad “había funcionado” desatando las críticas de los republicanos que acusan a Obama de tomar la defensa del país a la ligera.
Obama entonces salió a criticar a los servicios secretos afirmando que lo que permitió al nigeriano viajar a Estados Unidos fue una falla sistémica de seguridad porque la información sobre el atacante se tenía semanas antes pero no fue distribuida de manera efectiva.
Si se consideran los indicios de un complot interno en el ataque del 11 de Septiembre del 2001, los alemanes, por ejemplo, habían prevenido sobre los planes de uno de los ejecutores, se puede entender que la muerte de los pasajeros en Detroit hubiera sido una bomba política de consecuencias contra el débil presidente.
Sin duda el ex trabajador social de Chicago está en manos de millonarios entronizados hereditariamente en el aparato del Estado y la sociedad norteamericana. Él lo sabe y aceptó.
Notas:
1 Ver http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=77526
2 Ver http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-116440-2008-12-10.html
3 Ver http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/international/newsid_7798000/7798551.stm
4 Ver http://www.rfi.fr/actues/articles/120/article_14026.asp
Mal Publicados
Los llamados mandatarios son escogidos para los electores por poderosos empresarios que los controlarán y podrían eliminarlos. Reagan, Bush hijo, Obama y Kennedy son algunos ejemplos.
En USA el poder reside en la gran burguesía corporativa que maneja a los militares, políticos, jueces, religiosos, y a la población a través de sus medios de comunicación. No hay ninguna fuerza organizada capaz de enfrentarla.
El actual ocupante de la Casa Blanca fue elevado desde Wall Street debido a su capacidad de crear ilusiones con la palabra, nada más.
Un artículo de Santiago O’Donnell ilustra la lejanía de Obama de los centros de decisión imperial. (1) “Es bueno recordar que Obama proviene de una cloaca…” “En ese país, desde los tiempos de Al Capone y Elliot Ness, cuando se habla de “Chicago politics” o “Chicago ward (distrito) politics”, todo el mundo entiende que se está hablando de la peor clase de política: la de los lobbies, la del clientelismo, la de las maquinarias electorales, la de las coimas, la de los retornos y la de los negocios por debajo de la mesa.”
La ciudad de Chicago en los últimos 53 años ha sido gobernada 40 por Richard J. Daley y su hijo Richard M. Daley, alcalde actual. De los últimos cinco gobernadores de Illinois cuatro han sido procesados por corrupción, tres condenados y uno, Rod Blagojevich, está bajo juicio.
Cuando Obama llegó a Chicago se alineó con los llamados Independientes, movimiento nacido de una alianza de negros moderados y blancos progresistas. Sin embargo cuidó su relación con el clan Daley. Su esposa Michelle trabajó para el hijo del Jefe Daley y Rahm Emmanuel, ahora jefe de gabinete de su gobierno, era un operador en el aparato del clan Daley.
Obama ayudó a un hombre de Daley hijo, Rod Blagojevich, a ganar la gobernación de Illinois en 2002. David Axelrod, su principal asesor en la Casa Blanca, declaró al diario New Yorker que rechazó trabajar en esa campaña porque ya se sabía que Blagojevich era un corrupto. Una vez elegido gobernador Obama fue uno de sus principales asesores.
El 4 de noviembre de 2008 Obama fue elegido presidente de Estados Unidos y el 9 de diciembre fue detenido Blagojevich y su jefe de gabinete.
El gobernador de Illinois estaba siendo investigado, especialmente después que en 2005 durante el juicio a Mike Rezko, lobbista y empresario de bienes raíces, testigos lo involucraron en maniobras delictivas. Por orden judicial sus teléfonos estaban intervenidos.
El reo Rezko había apoyado al gobernador, y también a Obama a quien le vendió su mansión en Hyde Park “a un precio sospechosamente conveniente, al filo de la ilegalidad.”
El FBI a través de las llamadas telefónicas comprobó varios actos de corrupción del gobernador y entre ellos sus maniobras para obtener provecho personal del nombramiento del reemplazante de Obama en el senado nacional, que le correspondía hacer a él según la ley. (2)
El fiscal del caso informó que el gobernador tenía dos ofertas para comprar la banca que dejaba Obama, por entre medio y un millón de dólares. No mencionó los nombres de los interesados. También gestionó colocar a su esposa en el directorio de una empresa que le permitiera ganar hasta 150 mil dólares anuales y hacer la venta a un sindicato por una suculenta suma.
Paralelamente además Blagojevich hizo contactos para ser nombrado por Obama, a cambio del nombramiento, secretario de Salud, de Energía o embajador en un destino elegante e importante. Un informe de la investigación dice que Rahm Emmanuel habló cuatro veces con John Harris, jefe de gabinete del gobernador, para recomendar nombres de reemplazante al senado sin pedir “una cosa a cambio de otra” y que el presidente electo discutió el tema con Emmanuel.
Obama declaró que nunca había conversado del tema con el gobernador y según el fiscal el nombre de Obama no apareció en ningún momento de la investigación.
Greg Craig, un asesor legal de Obama, estuvo a cargo de la pesquisa en el curso de la cual entrevistó al presidente electo, a su jefe de gabinete y a otros miembros del equipo de la Casa Blanca. Concluyó que Emmanuel habló con Blagojevich y John Harris pero que ellos no le pidieron ningún beneficio personal. (3)
Santiago O’Donnell escribe: “… lo que nunca hizo Obama fue romper con los viejos códigos gangsteriles que representan a Chicago… Eso no quiere decir que Obama sea un corrupto, o más corrupto que el político promedio.”
La venta de la senaduría es otra debilidad de Obama y no se ha hecho el juicio. El hecho lo toca: Blagojevich hizo contactos para que a cambio del reemplazo en la banca Obama le diera cargos; Emmanuel confirmó que conversaron sobre la sucesión.
En política a veces se recurre a lo que se llama razón de estado, hacer algo contrario a la ley en consideración a un interés superior del Estado. Pero también se sabe que Estados Unidos tiene una carpeta de Álvaro Uribe con sus antecedentes como paramilitar y narcotraficante y le sirve para manejarlo.
La situación de Obama es evidentemente insegura. Ortega y Cuba le han advertido que puede ser asesinado. Ha recibido más amenazas que ningún otro presidente. Públicamente sujetos republicanos han pedido la muerte del presidente y toda su familia. Él está en manos entonces de los servicios de seguridad como lo estuvieron antes los hermanos Kennedy y el acusado de matar al presidente en Texas.
Sin embargo hay evidencias que no puede confiar en esos servicios.
A una recepción en la Casa Blanca entraron dos personas que burlaron el control y estuvieron cerca del presidente.
El día de Navidad hubo un ataque fallido en un avión en Detroit. Con semanas de antelación al incidente Estados Unidos sabía que un “nigeriano” estaba siendo entrenado en Yemen por una rama de Al Qaida para ejecutar un atentado. (4) La CIA dice que tuvo conocimiento de Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab en noviembre cuando su padre acudió a la embajada e informó de sus ideas radicales; que su nombre fue introducido a la base de datos gubernamental de terroristas, información que se remitió al Centro Nacional de Antiterrorismo.
No obstante el joven no tuvo ningún impedimento para viajar desde Lagos hasta Ámsterdam donde se embarcó con destino a Detroit. En su cuerpo llevaba una sustancia altamente explosiva llamada PETN que trató de activar para destruir el avión con casi 300 pasajeros. Su intento fracasó por errores técnicos en la bomba y la intervención de pasajeros y tripulantes.
La secretaria de Seguridad Interior de Estados Unidos, Janet Napolitano, interpretó el hecho diciendo que el sistema de seguridad “había funcionado” desatando las críticas de los republicanos que acusan a Obama de tomar la defensa del país a la ligera.
Obama entonces salió a criticar a los servicios secretos afirmando que lo que permitió al nigeriano viajar a Estados Unidos fue una falla sistémica de seguridad porque la información sobre el atacante se tenía semanas antes pero no fue distribuida de manera efectiva.
Si se consideran los indicios de un complot interno en el ataque del 11 de Septiembre del 2001, los alemanes, por ejemplo, habían prevenido sobre los planes de uno de los ejecutores, se puede entender que la muerte de los pasajeros en Detroit hubiera sido una bomba política de consecuencias contra el débil presidente.
Sin duda el ex trabajador social de Chicago está en manos de millonarios entronizados hereditariamente en el aparato del Estado y la sociedad norteamericana. Él lo sabe y aceptó.
Notas:
1 Ver http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=77526
2 Ver http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/4-116440-2008-12-10.html
3 Ver http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/international/newsid_7798000/7798551.stm
4 Ver http://www.rfi.fr/actues/articles/120/article_14026.asp
Mexico Is On the Brink of Its Third Revolution
The Question is Whether That Revolution Will be Peaceful... Or if it Will be Violent with an Uprising of Millions of Down-Trodden Citizens
By Ramón Alberto Garza
Reporte Indigo
Mexico City, January 1: The question is if that revolution will be peaceful, with a change of attitude and a re-founding of the Republic that would be developed beyond the interests that currently paralyze the nation…
Or if it will be violent, through force, with the uprising of millions of destitute people who can’t manage to guarantee their survival in the present, much less bet on a brighter future.
Let’s look at writer and historian Francisco Martin Moreno’s x-ray of the revolutions that forged the Mexico of today. And with the reflections of historians Patricia Galena, Enrique Serna, and Alejandro Rosas, let’s evaluate the similarities of the conditions that would allow us to understand the changes that are upon us. Let’s analyze…
Mexico is on the brink of its third revolution.
Everyone is aware that the political, economic, and social models that the country experimented with in the 20th century are worn out; they’ve expired. They no longer respond to current demands.
The structures forged in political centralism, which manipulates democracy, and in monopolistic practices of an economy that feigns free competition did not produce results sufficient to close the social gap.
At the dawn of 2010, 100 years after the Revolution and 200 years after Independence, the vices that provoked those revolts and that today create an opportune medium for a shake-up of the system and, consequently, the nation is being recycled.
The demands for fiscal autonomy, which was what set off the Independence, are mirrored in the tax centralism of a federal government that is insatiable, obese, and inefficient.
A government that first feeds its noble bureaucracy and then uses the leftovers to buy new regional leaders, the current governors.
The demands for effective suffrage, the same ones that detonated the explosion in 1910, have arisen once again in the face of a party-ocracy that with its self-serving laws kidnaps the political system and impedes that any Mexican could aspire to hold an elected position. It has to be according to its rules, subdued by its rules.
The legislative seats that decide, those that have real power, aren’t won in the ballot boxes. They are pacted as plurinominals by leaders who are co-opted by de facto power. And the votes that decide the winner in many cases are not the citizens’, but rather the unions’ who serve the highest bidder. Who currently represents Mexicans? Congress? Who listens and complies with their wishes?
A handful of dignitaries decide, as if they were colonial or Porfirian lords, the political, economic, and media game that allows them to impose their conditions over public interest. The benefits are for the few who have more. And those who pay taxes or for overpriced goods and services are the many who have less.
And the inequality that pops up in a nation that, 100 years after its great revolution, is incapable of weaving, beyond its recycled discourses, a horizon of hope for its downtrodden.
The registry that over the past few years has gained more followers was not the registry of the electors, nor the enterprisers, nor the creators of wealth, nor the growing middle class, nor the Mexicans with more or better education. The registry that grew more was that of the poor.
One hundred years after the revolution that demanded social justice, one out of every two Mexicans are inscribed on the ignominious list under the seal of “poor.” The country’s viability is at risk.
Even more when there are two powers that have settled on top of those who should legitimately govern the nation.
One is the power of neo-Porfirism; the control of a privileged caste that enthrones itself in politics and the economy after 70 years of rule by the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI). A political and economic elite that closed ranks behind Salinas’ neoliberalism that even today continues imposing its will upon the national routine.
The same men who inherit legislative seats, the same men who dominate public and private businesses, the same men who, installed in union reserves, charge an arm and a leg for their protection. The other is the power of neo-Villaism. That of a handful of bandits labeled as drug traffickers, the members of so-called organized crime, who impose their law upon the State.
The difference is that at least Francisco Villa put forward a social cause in order to justify his capacity as a bandit. The neo-villaists of today only buy the system at all levels.
What hurts the most is that they corrupt the national health promoting addictions.
And social mobility, which was what set off the growth and consolidation of a middle class during the 1950’s-1980’s, is frozen. People work, not to grow nor to be patriotic, but rather to survive, trapped in a spiral of cycles of crisis upon crisis.
And this whole process occurs while in the nation’s classrooms mediocrity and resignation are incubated. The education system is neither creative nor productive. It is a poorly oiled machine of political control that is incapable of preparing world-class Mexican professionals.
The model that dried up with Luis Echeverria in the Presidency. The first outbreak of insurgency occurred with clandestine armed movements that confronted the established order. But the system turned a deaf ear.
Neither Jose Lopez Portillo nor Miguel de la Madrid could rescue it. [Due to] one’s frivolity and the other’s mediocrity, they barely survived their terms. Carlos Salinas de Gortari designed a revolution of institutions with a vision that seemed almost perfect.
But he failed in the implementation. And he wound up trapped in the same vices of the old system built on control, submission, ignorance, and corruption.
Even worse, the riches generated by his term’s favoritism and the fortunes amassed by the politicians of his administration are the moneys that now oil the machinery that armors the status quo that defines their privileges.
The outbreak of a budding Zapatista neo-revolution and the modern version of a Tragic Decade, brought forth with the assassinations of Luis Donaldo Colosio and Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, stopped the modernizing advances of that were occurring at the time.
The privatizations that were praised by the national and international elites ended up in the hands of a few privileged friends, and the crisis of post-Salinasism, aggravated during Ernesto Zedillo’s administration, brought on the neoliberal Santa Anna effect.
The banking system, the economic territory of the national system of payments, was put in foreigners’ hands, the only such case in the world.
Mexican petroleum wound up being processed by multinationals, and the riches generated were consumed by the running cost of bureaucracy.
Even though Ernesto Zedillo understood the signs of the times, and in respecting the results in the 2000 presidential election he de-pressurized the discontent generated by the recurrent crisis, the political transition was aborted.
Vicente Fox remained trapped in the same fears that Francisco I. Madero had. Subjugated by the interests that refused to give up their spaces to make way for the nation’s new model and letting a Ouija board determine the nation’s destiny.
The “Administration of Change’s” hopeful horizon ran into the president’s incapacity to dismantle the complex network of interests that, faced with the lack of will and decision, returned to the hands of the Salinistas.
The modern Limantours took possession of the national Treasury, and the axis of power moved from Los Pinos [the president’s residence] to the unions, the media, the monopolist businessmen’s offices, and the residences of ex-presidents. To all of those who benefited from the old system. The kidnapping of Felipe Calderon through PRIista electoral favors in order to legitimize his win forced him to cede the urgencies of profound changes, those that demanded a revolution of consciences and a shaking-off of the elite’s privileges.
And while the nation is kidnapped by private monopolies, by official [government-controlled] unions, by political parties, and by the Congress who take away whatever margin of maneuvering that channels Mexico towards progress and liberty, which, undoubtedly, is deserved when it takes its place amongst the greats in the 21st century.
That’s why the year 2010 that begins today is more than just a symbolic date. Because, with other names, the landowners and the day laborers persist.
Because with different clothing, those who feel that the nation has been deeded to them survive.
A new revolution becomes indispensable in order to alter the course of history that is being shaped with a very unhappy ending.
To close the eyes to this reality is to bet on a new outburst, a new uprising without control. Because in contrast to the times of the Independence and the Revolution, today the conditions exist to develop a movement that is not armed, but rather a revolution of national consciousness.
A real and substantial change in the national attitude in order to set specific reforms that break up the circles of political, economic, union, and media privilege which inhibit the development of a Mexico that urgently needs to recuperate its global position, which today is taking a nose-dive.
It is curious that without insurgencies or confrontations, Latin American nations such as Chile and Brazil, with leftist governments, are achieving in just a few years a real modification of their political and economic systems, positively reflected in the war on poverty and the recuperation of hope in the national spirit.
That’s why Reporte Indigo today invited Francisco Martin Moreno, one of Mexico’s most read historians and writers. To make an evaluation of the conditions of the conditions that existed in 1810, in 1910, and those that prevail in 2010.
The author of Mexico Negro and Mexico Mutilado also dialogued about the peculiarities of the insurgent movements and the conditions under which we are currently living with three top-notch historians: Patricia Galeana, Enrique Serna, and Alejandro Rosas.
In the dawn of the bicentennial of our Independence and the centennial of the Revolution, we invite you to reflect together with us about where we are and where we want to go.
About how to take advantage of the vast natural wealth, the immense agricultural expanses, the forests, the coastlines and the seas, to generate the wealth necessary to rescue millions of fellow countrymen from misery.
But above all, to try to debate what we need to do to avoid the repetition of the violent cycle that dominated the past two centuries. We still have time to change history.
Ramon Alberto Garza, director of Reporte Indigo
Originally published by Reporte Indigo, and republished January 2, 2010 on the cover of the daily Por Esto!, The third most read newspaper in the Republic of Mexico.
By Ramón Alberto Garza
Reporte Indigo
Mexico City, January 1: The question is if that revolution will be peaceful, with a change of attitude and a re-founding of the Republic that would be developed beyond the interests that currently paralyze the nation…
Or if it will be violent, through force, with the uprising of millions of destitute people who can’t manage to guarantee their survival in the present, much less bet on a brighter future.
Let’s look at writer and historian Francisco Martin Moreno’s x-ray of the revolutions that forged the Mexico of today. And with the reflections of historians Patricia Galena, Enrique Serna, and Alejandro Rosas, let’s evaluate the similarities of the conditions that would allow us to understand the changes that are upon us. Let’s analyze…
The Third Revolution
Mexico is on the brink of its third revolution.
Everyone is aware that the political, economic, and social models that the country experimented with in the 20th century are worn out; they’ve expired. They no longer respond to current demands.
The structures forged in political centralism, which manipulates democracy, and in monopolistic practices of an economy that feigns free competition did not produce results sufficient to close the social gap.
At the dawn of 2010, 100 years after the Revolution and 200 years after Independence, the vices that provoked those revolts and that today create an opportune medium for a shake-up of the system and, consequently, the nation is being recycled.
The demands for fiscal autonomy, which was what set off the Independence, are mirrored in the tax centralism of a federal government that is insatiable, obese, and inefficient.
A government that first feeds its noble bureaucracy and then uses the leftovers to buy new regional leaders, the current governors.
The demands for effective suffrage, the same ones that detonated the explosion in 1910, have arisen once again in the face of a party-ocracy that with its self-serving laws kidnaps the political system and impedes that any Mexican could aspire to hold an elected position. It has to be according to its rules, subdued by its rules.
The legislative seats that decide, those that have real power, aren’t won in the ballot boxes. They are pacted as plurinominals by leaders who are co-opted by de facto power. And the votes that decide the winner in many cases are not the citizens’, but rather the unions’ who serve the highest bidder. Who currently represents Mexicans? Congress? Who listens and complies with their wishes?
A handful of dignitaries decide, as if they were colonial or Porfirian lords, the political, economic, and media game that allows them to impose their conditions over public interest. The benefits are for the few who have more. And those who pay taxes or for overpriced goods and services are the many who have less.
And the inequality that pops up in a nation that, 100 years after its great revolution, is incapable of weaving, beyond its recycled discourses, a horizon of hope for its downtrodden.
The registry that over the past few years has gained more followers was not the registry of the electors, nor the enterprisers, nor the creators of wealth, nor the growing middle class, nor the Mexicans with more or better education. The registry that grew more was that of the poor.
One hundred years after the revolution that demanded social justice, one out of every two Mexicans are inscribed on the ignominious list under the seal of “poor.” The country’s viability is at risk.
Even more when there are two powers that have settled on top of those who should legitimately govern the nation.
One is the power of neo-Porfirism; the control of a privileged caste that enthrones itself in politics and the economy after 70 years of rule by the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI). A political and economic elite that closed ranks behind Salinas’ neoliberalism that even today continues imposing its will upon the national routine.
The same men who inherit legislative seats, the same men who dominate public and private businesses, the same men who, installed in union reserves, charge an arm and a leg for their protection. The other is the power of neo-Villaism. That of a handful of bandits labeled as drug traffickers, the members of so-called organized crime, who impose their law upon the State.
The difference is that at least Francisco Villa put forward a social cause in order to justify his capacity as a bandit. The neo-villaists of today only buy the system at all levels.
What hurts the most is that they corrupt the national health promoting addictions.
And social mobility, which was what set off the growth and consolidation of a middle class during the 1950’s-1980’s, is frozen. People work, not to grow nor to be patriotic, but rather to survive, trapped in a spiral of cycles of crisis upon crisis.
And this whole process occurs while in the nation’s classrooms mediocrity and resignation are incubated. The education system is neither creative nor productive. It is a poorly oiled machine of political control that is incapable of preparing world-class Mexican professionals.
The model that dried up with Luis Echeverria in the Presidency. The first outbreak of insurgency occurred with clandestine armed movements that confronted the established order. But the system turned a deaf ear.
Neither Jose Lopez Portillo nor Miguel de la Madrid could rescue it. [Due to] one’s frivolity and the other’s mediocrity, they barely survived their terms. Carlos Salinas de Gortari designed a revolution of institutions with a vision that seemed almost perfect.
But he failed in the implementation. And he wound up trapped in the same vices of the old system built on control, submission, ignorance, and corruption.
Even worse, the riches generated by his term’s favoritism and the fortunes amassed by the politicians of his administration are the moneys that now oil the machinery that armors the status quo that defines their privileges.
The outbreak of a budding Zapatista neo-revolution and the modern version of a Tragic Decade, brought forth with the assassinations of Luis Donaldo Colosio and Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, stopped the modernizing advances of that were occurring at the time.
The privatizations that were praised by the national and international elites ended up in the hands of a few privileged friends, and the crisis of post-Salinasism, aggravated during Ernesto Zedillo’s administration, brought on the neoliberal Santa Anna effect.
The banking system, the economic territory of the national system of payments, was put in foreigners’ hands, the only such case in the world.
Mexican petroleum wound up being processed by multinationals, and the riches generated were consumed by the running cost of bureaucracy.
Even though Ernesto Zedillo understood the signs of the times, and in respecting the results in the 2000 presidential election he de-pressurized the discontent generated by the recurrent crisis, the political transition was aborted.
Vicente Fox remained trapped in the same fears that Francisco I. Madero had. Subjugated by the interests that refused to give up their spaces to make way for the nation’s new model and letting a Ouija board determine the nation’s destiny.
The “Administration of Change’s” hopeful horizon ran into the president’s incapacity to dismantle the complex network of interests that, faced with the lack of will and decision, returned to the hands of the Salinistas.
The modern Limantours took possession of the national Treasury, and the axis of power moved from Los Pinos [the president’s residence] to the unions, the media, the monopolist businessmen’s offices, and the residences of ex-presidents. To all of those who benefited from the old system. The kidnapping of Felipe Calderon through PRIista electoral favors in order to legitimize his win forced him to cede the urgencies of profound changes, those that demanded a revolution of consciences and a shaking-off of the elite’s privileges.
And while the nation is kidnapped by private monopolies, by official [government-controlled] unions, by political parties, and by the Congress who take away whatever margin of maneuvering that channels Mexico towards progress and liberty, which, undoubtedly, is deserved when it takes its place amongst the greats in the 21st century.
That’s why the year 2010 that begins today is more than just a symbolic date. Because, with other names, the landowners and the day laborers persist.
Because with different clothing, those who feel that the nation has been deeded to them survive.
A new revolution becomes indispensable in order to alter the course of history that is being shaped with a very unhappy ending.
To close the eyes to this reality is to bet on a new outburst, a new uprising without control. Because in contrast to the times of the Independence and the Revolution, today the conditions exist to develop a movement that is not armed, but rather a revolution of national consciousness.
A real and substantial change in the national attitude in order to set specific reforms that break up the circles of political, economic, union, and media privilege which inhibit the development of a Mexico that urgently needs to recuperate its global position, which today is taking a nose-dive.
It is curious that without insurgencies or confrontations, Latin American nations such as Chile and Brazil, with leftist governments, are achieving in just a few years a real modification of their political and economic systems, positively reflected in the war on poverty and the recuperation of hope in the national spirit.
That’s why Reporte Indigo today invited Francisco Martin Moreno, one of Mexico’s most read historians and writers. To make an evaluation of the conditions of the conditions that existed in 1810, in 1910, and those that prevail in 2010.
The author of Mexico Negro and Mexico Mutilado also dialogued about the peculiarities of the insurgent movements and the conditions under which we are currently living with three top-notch historians: Patricia Galeana, Enrique Serna, and Alejandro Rosas.
In the dawn of the bicentennial of our Independence and the centennial of the Revolution, we invite you to reflect together with us about where we are and where we want to go.
About how to take advantage of the vast natural wealth, the immense agricultural expanses, the forests, the coastlines and the seas, to generate the wealth necessary to rescue millions of fellow countrymen from misery.
But above all, to try to debate what we need to do to avoid the repetition of the violent cycle that dominated the past two centuries. We still have time to change history.
Ramon Alberto Garza, director of Reporte Indigo
Originally published by Reporte Indigo, and republished January 2, 2010 on the cover of the daily Por Esto!, The third most read newspaper in the Republic of Mexico.
La larga marcha de los migrantes
Histórica protesta de indocumentados
David Brooks
Pagina 12
Estudiantes inmigrantes latinoamericanos iniciaron ayer el Camino de los Sueños, una caminata de casi 2500 kilómetros de Miami a Washington DC por la dignidad de su comunidad con la demanda de una reforma migratoria para finalizar con la separación de familias, las deportaciones y la vida infrahumana en las sombras para más de 12 millones de indocumentados.
“Vamos a caminar para compartir nuestras historias a escala nacional y con el mensaje de poner fin a la separación de las familias y el sufrimiento”, comentó Juan Rodríguez, uno de los participantes, quien llegó desde Colombia a los seis años junto con su familia, en entrevista telefónica con La Jornada desde Miami cuando se preparaba la salida.
“Creo que la gente desea libertad, libertad económica, libertad política, pero ocurre lo contrario aquí: estamos viviendo en las sombras. Con esta caminata estamos anunciando que estamos saliendo de las sombras. Sabemos que corremos un riesgo (ser detenidos y hasta deportados, ya que varios son indocumentados y pasarán por zonas antimigrantes), pero ya no queremos vivir más en el miedo”, afirmó Felipe Matos, otro participante, de 24 años, quien llegó a este país de Brasil hace 10 años.
Los cuatro participantes que se han comprometido a caminar todo el tramo son estudiantes activos en movimientos de defensa de los inmigrantes. Caminarán por Florida, Georgia, Carolina del Sur, Carolina del Norte y Virginia para llegar a Washington el 1º de mayo, donde esperan sumarse a miles de inmigrantes que realizarán una manifestación, para marcar una fecha que se ha convertido en el día de los inmigrantes por las movilizaciones que se han realizado en años recientes.
A su paso por pueblos y ciudades realizarán foros y reuniones para intercambiar historias y generar solidaridad, mientras otros estudiantes –migrantes, religiosos, sindicalistas, organizadores comunitarios y simpatizantes– se sumarán para acompañar por trechos a los cuatro estudiantes.
Varios de ellos, que enfrentan situaciones difíciles por ser indocumentados, y otros “legales” que tienen a familiares o compañeros en esas circunstancias, originarios de México, Centroamérica y otros países, se han comprometido a acompañarlos en las diferentes etapas del largo viaje.
La iniciativa surgió de la organización Estudiantes Trabajando por Derechos Iguales (Students Working for Equal Rights, SWER) en asociación con la Coalición de Inmigrantes de Florida y agrupaciones nacionales que promueven una reforma migratoria integral.
Esperan gozar de la solidaridad de otros estudiantes y asociaciones de defensa de los inmigrantes de todo Estados Unidos, como también en otros países.
Casi todos comparten la suerte de cientos de miles de egresados de preparatoria que cada año enfrentan la imposibilidad de continuar sus estudios universitarios por su condición migratoria. Muchos llegaron niños y han vivido aquí la mayor parte de sus vidas.
Entre las iniciativas legislativas pendientes está la propuesta Ley Dream, que si fuese aprobada otorgaría legalización condicional a estudiantes a cambio de completar sus carreras universitarias o dos años de servicio militar.
Los cuatro que iniciaron la caminata hoy tienen carreras estudiantiles estelares, pero dicen que todo eso parece valer nada, ya que se les impide, junto con millones más, poder proseguir con sus estudios.
David Brooks
Pagina 12
Estudiantes inmigrantes latinoamericanos iniciaron ayer el Camino de los Sueños, una caminata de casi 2500 kilómetros de Miami a Washington DC por la dignidad de su comunidad con la demanda de una reforma migratoria para finalizar con la separación de familias, las deportaciones y la vida infrahumana en las sombras para más de 12 millones de indocumentados.
“Vamos a caminar para compartir nuestras historias a escala nacional y con el mensaje de poner fin a la separación de las familias y el sufrimiento”, comentó Juan Rodríguez, uno de los participantes, quien llegó desde Colombia a los seis años junto con su familia, en entrevista telefónica con La Jornada desde Miami cuando se preparaba la salida.
“Creo que la gente desea libertad, libertad económica, libertad política, pero ocurre lo contrario aquí: estamos viviendo en las sombras. Con esta caminata estamos anunciando que estamos saliendo de las sombras. Sabemos que corremos un riesgo (ser detenidos y hasta deportados, ya que varios son indocumentados y pasarán por zonas antimigrantes), pero ya no queremos vivir más en el miedo”, afirmó Felipe Matos, otro participante, de 24 años, quien llegó a este país de Brasil hace 10 años.
Los cuatro participantes que se han comprometido a caminar todo el tramo son estudiantes activos en movimientos de defensa de los inmigrantes. Caminarán por Florida, Georgia, Carolina del Sur, Carolina del Norte y Virginia para llegar a Washington el 1º de mayo, donde esperan sumarse a miles de inmigrantes que realizarán una manifestación, para marcar una fecha que se ha convertido en el día de los inmigrantes por las movilizaciones que se han realizado en años recientes.
A su paso por pueblos y ciudades realizarán foros y reuniones para intercambiar historias y generar solidaridad, mientras otros estudiantes –migrantes, religiosos, sindicalistas, organizadores comunitarios y simpatizantes– se sumarán para acompañar por trechos a los cuatro estudiantes.
Varios de ellos, que enfrentan situaciones difíciles por ser indocumentados, y otros “legales” que tienen a familiares o compañeros en esas circunstancias, originarios de México, Centroamérica y otros países, se han comprometido a acompañarlos en las diferentes etapas del largo viaje.
La iniciativa surgió de la organización Estudiantes Trabajando por Derechos Iguales (Students Working for Equal Rights, SWER) en asociación con la Coalición de Inmigrantes de Florida y agrupaciones nacionales que promueven una reforma migratoria integral.
Esperan gozar de la solidaridad de otros estudiantes y asociaciones de defensa de los inmigrantes de todo Estados Unidos, como también en otros países.
Casi todos comparten la suerte de cientos de miles de egresados de preparatoria que cada año enfrentan la imposibilidad de continuar sus estudios universitarios por su condición migratoria. Muchos llegaron niños y han vivido aquí la mayor parte de sus vidas.
Entre las iniciativas legislativas pendientes está la propuesta Ley Dream, que si fuese aprobada otorgaría legalización condicional a estudiantes a cambio de completar sus carreras universitarias o dos años de servicio militar.
Los cuatro que iniciaron la caminata hoy tienen carreras estudiantiles estelares, pero dicen que todo eso parece valer nada, ya que se les impide, junto con millones más, poder proseguir con sus estudios.
Civil War in Progressive Mega Union
By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Nelson Lichtenstein
In These Times
What can one make of the civil war playing itself out inside the Service Employees International Union? "Civil war" is not far from an exaggeration. When the SEIU leadership decided to move against one of its largest locals--SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West--and place it into trusteeship early this year, they unleashed a storm that few of the leaders apparently believed possible.
The widely unpopular trusteeship not only has met with internal resistance within the local, but resulted in the establishment of a split-off union--the National Union of Healthcare Workers--and fights over who will represent workplaces that SEIU-UHW had held for years. This fight has drawn in many outside friends and observers who have hitherto been loath to get involved in the internal affairs of a national/international union.
Given the stakes, it has been less and less possible to sit on the sidelines.
Trying to keep a bubble under water?
This internal conflict and the emergence of NUHW can only be understood in the context of both the evolution of SEIU since the assumption of leadership by Andrew Stern, and by the 2005 split in AFL-CIO, the labor federation.
After his election in 1996, Stern set out to transform what was already the fastest growing union in the AFL-CIO. Ostensibly he wanted it to grow faster and serve as a flagship for the rest of the union movement. His broader vision was somewhat vague, but clearly contained at the time the rough outlines of a left/progressive contour.
As it turned out, this vision evolved into something else--but in the late 1990s, it appeared that Stern wanted to turn SEIU into an organizing machine that would sweep through a large slice of the nation's swollen service sector. Many people inside and outside SEIU responded with great hope to Stern's aggressive leadership and the ambitions he put on labor's agenda.
Although the SEIU has grown by about 50 percent during the last 13 years, the evolution of the union has been misunderstood by those who have assumed that this growth was a product of progressive and democratic structural change within the organization. While important changes did take place in the governance of the SEIU, it is perhaps better to see these transformations through the prism of the union's shifting internal alliances and leadership purges. Over time, those reconfigurations paralleled the SEIU's development of a new and disturbing set of objectives that it moved to the top of labor's organizational and political agenda.
In his struggle to win the SEIU presidency and consolidate the power of his slate, Stern formed two sets of alliances and inaugurated one important purge of his opponents. First, when Stern sought the presidency he needed the support of then-SEIU President John Sweeney, if only because Stern himself was but a mere staff officer of the union.
Sweeney gave Stern a position on SEIU's International Executive Board (IEB) to insulate Stern from exile if Sweeney's own constitutionally-based successor, the late Richard Cordtz, chose to fire him in the immediate aftermath of Sweeney's victory at the AFL-CIO. Cordtz did try to purge Stern, but Stern, being on the IEB, held a secure post from which he could and did campaign to become SEIU's president.
But this challenge would have failed had Stern not succeeded in working out important alliances with key local unions in SEIU. These alliances were built on popular opposition to Cordtz and Cordtz's running mate, Gus Bevona (the autocratic leader of a large building service local in NYC). In this sense, the 1996 Stern candidacy was primarily an oppositional movement, a throw the bums out candidacy (or, perhaps, a keep the bums out of the International's leadership), rather than a programmatically progressive coalition, despite some innovative proposals from his slate.
Nevertheless, Stern reached out to long-standing critics of John Sweeney, including Sal Rosselli, president of northern California's big Local 250 (and later UHW) and Dennis Rivera, leader of the then independent 1199 National Healthcare Workers Union in New York. Rivera would, shortly after Stern's internal victory, lead 1199 New York into SEIU.
Once in office, Stern reorganized the union in dramatic and traumatic fashion. Departments were closed, others were reorganized, and with Steve Lerner and other veterans acting as a kind of brain trust, Stern emphasized massive and rapid growth, either through mergers, organizing blitzes, or corporatist-style accommodations with key service-sector employers. The "Justice for Janitors" campaign experience had taught Stern and Lerner that unionism would remain but a weak and barely tolerated presence unless organized labor achieved sufficient "density" within an entire labor market or occupational niche.
In Los Angeles, the SEIU could not push wages upward when it controlled but 20 percent of the janitorial labor market, but once that figure moved past the halfway mark, employer opposition to unionism declined. This was an important insight--and a potentially winning strategy--but the quest for "density" could become an organizational fetish, eclipsing and then eviscerating the militancy, participation and democracy that were also essential to union success.
Consolidating power, stifling debate
But all this was in the future. In the struggle to eliminate old enemies, the Stern leadership took on the more corrupt and backward local union leaders. In almost magical fashion, one leader after another fell. In many if not most cases, the weapon of the trusteeship was utilized in order to eliminate this strata, composed in most cases of leaders from Sweeney's generation.
They were replaced with Stern allies, usually younger and progressive. The culture of SEIU, however, permits trustees--the individuals running the local unions during the period in which the SEIU leadership controls the local--to run for office at the time that the trusteeship ends. Thus, many of these trustees had the power of incumbency and the ability to gain and hold office. This became a powerful inducement to align with the leadership of the International even if, and sometimes directly because, one lacked an internal base in that local union.
As this process unfolded, it should be added, attention was turned toward the reorganizing of local unions. The principal vision was that of large local unions allegedly designed to match the power of regional, national and international employers. But the process of local union reorganization eliminated many longer-term local union leaders, particularly those of color. And large, state-wide locals made it very difficult for oppositional candidates to successfully challenge those in control of the mega local's affairs.
As one might expect, these large locals had few tools to elicit informed participation by non-activist members. In furthering consolidation, a process of elimination of potential opponents took place. They were quietly driven from their posts and replaced with individuals whose allegiances were directly to Stern and his soon to be Secretary-Treasurer, Anna Burger.
Such consolidation made the SEIU an increasingly inhospitable venue for dialogue, debate, and dissent. American trade unions have never figured out how to operate with a functioning, internal two party system, so Stern stands in the same tradition as that of John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and even Caesar Chavez. But the more sophisticated union leaders have provided a space for disagreement, even if their latitude is carefully constrained. Stern and his leadership team did not do this, and in the new century they made it increasingly difficult for dissent to operationalize itself, either at the SEIU convention or on the international executive board. Thus when local SEIU unionists disagreed, they did not challenge the leadership but merely ignored it insofar as that was possible.
Paralleling this process of internal consolidation, SEIU leaders grew increasingly frustrated with the pace of change at the AFL-CIO. Despite the bold rhetoric that accompanied John Sweeney's accession to the presidency of the federation, the new leadership there had been unable to convince many old-line unions to ramp up their organizational effort and expenditures. Thus the AFL-CIO was losing millions of members in the wake of the dot.com bust and the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing in the early Bush era.
By 2003, Stern and other impatient union leaders had begun to openly criticize the AFL-CIO in a series of articles and interviews regarding the future of organized labor. This built into a near crescendo in 2004 when, at the SEIU Convention that June, Stern announced in front of former SEIU President John Sweeney that if the AFL-CIO did not change, SEIU would leave the AFL-CIO.
Although something of a cease fire took place during the rest of the 2004 electoral season, the die had been cast. In the summer of 2005, Stern led the SEIU and five other unions out of the AFL-CIO and into a new federation, "Change to Win."
The split in the AFL-CIO is directly relevant to the later civil war in SEIU, precisely because many of the issues that needed to be debated at the time were suppressed and replaced with sound bites. This is especially true about matters such as core jurisdiction (over what sectors a particular union should have responsibility for organizing and representing) and the relationship of bargaining to organizing (and vice versa).
Yet in the absence of debate, the confrontation leading to the AFL-CIO split became more about posturing than substance. Indeed, the split in the AFL-CIO actually hid the fissures that existed both among the Change To Win unions and within them. Subsequent to the split, these internal conflicts began to emerge and today C-T-W finds itself fragmented and adrift.
The end of the beginning
The circumstances leading to the SEIU civil war leaked to the surface in 2007. By then it was clear that the alleged promise of the Change To Win federation had gone unfulfilled. It was also becoming clearer that there were differences within the ranks regarding how the union movement should grow.
The unofficial release of documents from SEIU-UHW in 2007 signaled the opening of what could have been a constructive and insightful debate. As reported by the San Francisco Weekly, the documents constituted a criticism of SEIU's leadership for its approach toward collective bargaining. Originating from within UHW, but shared in other parts of SEIU, the critique focused on the "density" issue, charging that SEIU was sacrificing collective bargaining standards, as well as local union autonomy and democracy, all in the name of membership growth.
SEIU responded with a manifesto, "'Just Us' or 'Justice for All'?" in which the SEIU asserted that "History demonstrates that 'I Got Mine' – 'Just Us' unionism has hurt all workers, including existing members." SEIU charged that even militant locals like the UHW were doing a disservice to the union movement by concentrating on improving their own contacts, even as the majority of workers in the rest of the healthcare industry remained unorganized and poorly paid. The SEIU thought that it might be necessary for existing locals to moderate their wage and benefit demands as part of a "bargaining to organize" strategy, in which companies ceased their opposition to unionization in return for uniform standards throughout the firm or even outright concessions at the bargaining table. (This was a tactic that SEIU imposed on UHW when the International persuaded the big California local to reach a template agreement in the nursing home industry in 2004).
Certainly one could find examples, in history and in the contemporary union movement, of militant but insular unions who protected their own membership but ignored the larger working-class interest. But the UHW was hardly such a trade union. Within the SEIU, UHW had one of the most active, if not the most active, organizing postures in hospitals, nursing homes and among home healthcare workers. UHW leaders thought there was no contradiction between militancy at the bargaining table and an effective effort to extend the benefits of unionism to others in the health care industry. High standards in the core UHW jurisdictions, such as Kaiser Permanente, set a standard for unionism everywhere and made it more attractive to potential union recruits in non-union facilities.
Equally important, the UHW saw itself as a union whose jurisdiction took in all healthcare workers, from doctors and skilled technicians to the more than 60,000 home healthcare workers who had been organized in the last decade. In contrast to the SEIU, which wanted to put all nursing home and home healthcare workers into mega locals that would have the "density" to bargain for all such workers, UHW thought that the home health care workers would be best served if they were part of a larger amalgamation of hospital and nursing home workers.
The SEIU determination to sever 60,000 home healthcare workers from the UHW jurisdiction was therefore not just a turf fight over members and their dues. It reflected key strategic issues of which "density" captures just a part. The SEIU drive to put all these home healthcare workers into one big California local--so as to more effectively lobby for higher levels of support in Sacramento--consigned these tens of thousands of largely immigrant women to the status of welfare recipients. The SEIU drive for "density" was proving the handmaiden of an increasingly austere welfare politics. Indeed, the union's big home healthcare locals in Southern California have failed, for nearly a decade, to materially raise the wages and benefit levels of the hundred thousand plus workers they represent.
As this conflict unfolded in 2007 and 2008, it became intertwined with issues of local union autonomy, the UHW critique of SEIU's overall trajectory, and the personalities and ambitions of the leading antagonists, notably the UHW's Sal Rosselli and the SEIU's Andrew Stern. Had the SEIU leadership taken the high ground, this debate could have been quite instructive for the rest of the movement.
There were a number of issues at stake, including: What sacrifices should newly organized workers be asked to make--in the realm of collective bargaining--in order to be unionized? Specifically, should the standards of a collective bargaining agreement be significantly lowered in order to gain the right to collective bargaining, with the hope that over time standards will be raised? What is the relationship between high standards in collective bargaining and the ability of unions to organize and recruit workers? How should decisions be made in a national/international union when it comes to standards?
The high ground, however, was not taken. Instead, a campaign of vilification began almost immediately, focused on attacking the person and character of UHW President Sal Rosselli. The intensity of the struggle quickly led to an effort to isolate and demonize UHW's leadership. The release by the SEIU leadership of a peculiar letter (written by a defecting UHW leader, and former SEIU International staff person) critical of Rosselli and UHW leadership further distracted from any real discussion of the issues that UHW tried to surface. This was accompanied by a proposal from the SEIU leadership to seize a significant portion of the UHW membership--long-term care workers (nursing home and homecare workers)--and place them into a state-wide long-term care workers local union.
The factors that led to the actual trusteeship are both complicated and to a great extent mystifying. By early 2008, it was clear to most outsiders that preparations for a trusteeship of UHW were underway, in large part because of UHW's vehement opposition to giving up their long-term care members without an honest, democratic voting process. SEIU openly denied that there was any plan for a trusteeship, even after accusing the UHW leadership of moving union money around inappropriately.
After the release of a letter by dozens of academics calling upon SEIU's leadership to engage in principled struggle with UHW and to not repress them via a trusteeship, an orchestrated effort was undertaken to have key SEIU personnel--local leaders and staff--contact signatories of the letter to not only assure them that there was no trusteeship in the works, but that it had been insulting to suggest that Stern had anything other than an honest and restrained attitude toward UHW. (Lichtenstein signed the letter and then received an SEIU phone call.)
Legitimizing the trusteeship
Shortly thereafter, events changed rapidly. First, an internal email was released that demonstrated that the SEIU leadership had misled outsiders. The email confirmed that discussions were underway to trustee or "implode" the local. Secondly, stories came out in the media concerning the leadership of SEIU Local 6434, the California state-wide long-term care workers local into which the SEIU leadership proposed placing UHW members. Tyrone Freeman, head of the local, had for years been a very close ally and protégé of Stern. The allegations against the leadership of the local for corruption became so intense that SEIU trusteed the local, thereby removing Freeman.
SEIU leadership then moved into blitzkrieg mode and announced hearings against the UHW leadership, a precipitous action quite at variance with earlier assurances that SEIU leadership had no intention to trustee the United Healthcare West local.
SEIU chose former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall as the hearing officer for a set of lengthy hearings in the late summer and early fall of 2008. These focused on allegations of financial improprieties on the part of UHW leadership involving the establishment of a multi-million dollar fund that the local seemed ready to use to fight the looming SEIU trusteeship. The hearings had the feel of a big time lawsuit with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to pay dueling teams of outside legal counsel and expert witnesses.
When Marshall finally delivered his 105-page report in early January 2009, he agreed that many of the charges put forward by the SEIU leadership against the UHW officers were valid, i.e., that the big California local did attempt to move several million dollars to a non-profit educational fund that was in reality a resource designed to fight the SEIU should a trusteeship be imposed. Marshall also ruled that the trusteeship threat was not a "retaliation" against UHW's decision to speak out against what many of its members considered undemocratic SEIU policies.
But Marshall made none of this the basis for a trusteeship, arguing instead that the "the underlying issue is a conflict over jurisdiction" involving the home healthcare workers. In effect, Marshall sided with UHW when it argued that the charges and countercharges involving financial malpractice were really "symptoms of the fundamental relationship between the International and the UHW." Marshall called for a peaceful resolution of this conflict, based on a view shared by many unionists that "the main beneficiaries of this conflict are anti-union employers and politicians."
But Marshall's report was not that of a disinterested judge. The former labor secretary sided with UHW in recommending that the SEIU International board not establish a trusteeship on the basis of the specific issues (largely those involving finances) pressed by the SEIU during the lengthy hearings. But in what many observers saw as a tacked-on, last minute concession to Andrew Stern, Marshall amended his report (the typeface is actually different) to call for trusteeship if the UHW refused to abide by the SEIU's decision to force UHW to relinquish jurisdiction over 65,000 long-term care workers and put them in a single state-wide unit.
UHW made an 11th hour compromise offer to the effect that should the long-term care workers vote to leave UHW, the California local would abide by their wishes. But the senior leadership at SEIU was not looking for a way out of the crisis. They ignored the offer and imposed a trusteeship at midnight on January 27, not a minute later than legally possible.
First moments of a new day?
In the history of the U.S. labor movement, as well as that of the SEIU, imposition of trusteeships normally encounter some discontent, but resistance is uneven and generally short-lived. A 1959 law, Landrum-Griffin, enacted when Teamster corruption was in the headlines, is designed to give national union officers overwhelming power to reorganize a local, install new officers, and run its affairs. Even when a trusteeship has been imposed in an autocratic fashion, most union reformers believe the wise course of action is to "take" it, organize an opposition, and then fight to win a new election in a few years.
The leadership of UHW, however, backed by a broad stratum of key activists, has chosen a more radical, confrontational, and democratic path. In a series of meetings in the spring of 2009, the old UHW transformed itself into an entirely new trade union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers. It would challenge SEIU for the allegiance of tens of thousands of hospital, nursing home, and healthcare workers in its old jurisdiction and quite possibly in new ones as well. This was and remains a bold effort, in which virtually all legal, organizational and economic resources are monopolized by the SEIU.
But the NUHW has a powerful resource of its own: the determined support of thousands of workers in some of the best organized and most militant workplaces in the entire healthcare sector. Unlike so many SEIU locals, the old UHW was led by a stratum of activists that reached deep into the ranks of the workforce. Doctors, nurses, technicians, and healthcare aids at Kaiser Permanente have long been in the vanguard of unionism, in the Bay Area and throughout the hospital sector. (Indeed, when SEIU put the old Kaiser local, Local 250, into trusteeship in the 1980s, workers there defeated the leadership put forward by the national SEIU and elected Rosselli as local union president once the trusteeship was lifted.)
It is unclear that SEIU's top leadership truly anticipated the extent and scope of the resistance that emerged in UHW following the trusteeship. They probably did not imagine that this resistance would take the form of the establishment of an independent union that positioned itself as the legitimate successor to UHW. In either case, shortly after the beginning of the trusteeship, the NUHW went about building a resistance movement to the trusteeship. The core founding principles included both the notion of (1) one union for one industry (in this case, a healthcare union for all healthcare workers), and (2) an institutionalized set of participatory, democratic governance practices which devolved power from the staff to the working members.
What has been particularly striking about the NUHW effort is the manner in which its influence has spread within the former UHW jurisdiction. Within weeks, over 50,000 members signed decertification petitions indicating their desire to leave the trusteed UHW and enter into the new NUHW. And in the first major contest between SEIU and the NUHW, which revolved around homecare workers in Fresno, Calif., SEIU won what can only be described as a pyrrhic victory.
In that case, SEIU reportedly spent about $10 million dollars, including the deployment of nearly one thousand staff people, and then won the decertification election by a margin of less than two hundred votes. The NUHW has challenged the result, citing numerous irregularities. Irrespective of the final outcome, the fact remains that in a region and among workers that had not been a strategic base for NUHW, they nevertheless forced SEIU to spend an immense sum of money, and nearly won! Union activists expended all this time and money on a civil war that never should have happened in the first place, rather than on actions desperately needed to generate new growth or advance the political mobilizations necessary to fulfill the promise of the Obama victory just months before.
The underdog's reclamation
Assessing what to make of NUHW and its potential is, at this time, a matter for speculation. Despite having pitifully few resources, the new union is capable of winning. In the NUHW's key jurisdictions, particularly Kaiser Permanente, it is quite conceivable that they will overwhelm the SEIU's imported and maladroit leadership.
This is true for at least three reasons. One, the former UHW has a very capable steward's system and member involvement at Kaiser. Two, the trusteeship is an affront to thousands of staunch unionists and their allies in California where NUHW has won the backing of some prominent liberal politicians and many key unions, including San Francisco's big hotel local.
Three, many among the SEIU staff, imported to California or back in the East and Midwest, are demoralized and do not see NUHW as a true enemy. Thus, if the NUHW can win just a few NLRB certification elections and restart the dues flow, then it will have sufficient resources to hire key staff, "organize" among a wider group of workers, and prevail in California over the still alien group of leaders imported into the state by SEIU. Recent NUHW victories at Los Alamitos Medical Center in Southern California and at an assisted living facility in the Portola Valley indicate that this strategy may be working. There is no reason, short of resources, that NUHW cannot prevail, irrespective of whether they choose to return to a reformed SEIU.
The larger significance of NUHW, however, can be found in possibilities. At this moment, it would be accurate to describe the NUHW effort as a process of reclamation. In other words, the establishment of NUHW is a form of resistance to an unjustified trusteeship. There is an attempt by the sacked leadership of UHW to rebuild the union and to reclaim what was 'occupied' by the International. This point cannot be overemphasized: It illustrates why the fight between NUHW and SEIU is not a question of an old-fashioned "raid" but instead a process which seeks to reestablish an ongoing, democratic, and highly successful trade union whose health and outlook is essential to any revitalization of trade unionism, on both a state and national basis.
In the most common circumstances of raiding, an existing union will target the workers represented by another union and seek to steal them away. (In South Africa, this is called "poaching," probably a more accurate term.) In the AFL-CIO this is supposedly restricted by Article 20 of the AFL-CIO Constitution. For those unions not in the AFL-CIO, however, there are no such restrictions. Thus, it is not uncommon for certain unions to grow precisely by raiding bargaining units of already represented workers.
NUHW bears no resemblance to the traditional raider. In fact, one could argue that their activities do not represent a 'raid' at all, but instead are more akin to an insurrection. Specifically, the activities of NUHW are aimed at regaining representation over units of the old UHW that are controlled by the trustees. There is no indication that NUHW has its eyes on any other part of SEIU. What it may be considering, however, is a broader, national effort to develop and implement the idea that the former UHW leadership had embraced some time ago when it sought the construction of a truly national union of healthcare workers across all the usual employer and occupational boundaries.
But the first question is whether the reclamation effort will succeed and the trusteeship be defeated. The next question is whether reclamation can evolve into union transformation.
And what of SEIU?
The NUHW insurgency has created a crisis within SEIU. While the leaderships of most SEIU locals have failed to stand against the trusteeship--and in some cases actively collaborated with it--there are varying opinions at the staff and local level. A number of resignations from the International staff, the SEIU's California State Council, and some locals have taken place, revealing clear disaffection with current policies. In other cases, staff people who were deployed merely went through the motions rather than throw themselves into an active and energetic re-organizing effort.
Even if it does defeat NUHW, it is unlikely that SEIU will regain the stature that it once had or resolve the internal conflicts that have risen in recent years. The problem for the SEIU, as well as for many of the other unions in the service sector, is that they are essentially staff-drive entities, legal/administrative constructs that are organizational hybrids. They stand halfway between fundraising and propaganda vehicles like MoveOn.org and the self-organized auto workers who once made institutions like UAW Local 600, representing tens of thousands at Ford's River Rouge complex, a watchword for working-class militancy and union democracy.
This tension is apparent in all the service sector unions, where an influx of college-educated activists has revitalized organizing, research, and political mobilization, but where the conditions for genuine internal democracy, i.e., locals that really are local, an elected leadership with actual bargaining power, and the development of an organizing cadre that is responsive to the membership rather than a distant organizing director, remains elusive.
Although some SEIU locals have had histories of varying degrees of internal democracy and transformational politics, the SEIU has looked askance at such localist examples of democratic participation--not because the leadership of SEIU is hostile to mobilization or democracy in any formal ideological sense, but because it has had other agendas that all too often seemed to conflict with a decentralized and democratic structure. Efforts to democratize and transform the union controlled and led by rank and file members have been largely absent. This absence represents a major obstacle for a full renovation of SEIU.
All this has engendered something of a leadership cult within SEIU, a tendency present even prior to Stern's assumption of leadership in 1996. Thus, whether it is Stern, Burger, or a local union president, it is the progressive leader that puts forward a militant and imaginative program and calls for the members to embrace it. Such a scenario guarantees a degree of hero/heroine-worship as well as a tendency to suppress dissent in the name of union solidarity. If truth rests with only one person, how can dissenters be anything other than traitors?
An alternative scenario is that NUHW becomes a catalyst for more widespread change within SEIU. There are reasons to believe that this is quite possible. The actual cost of the SEIU civil war may, at some point, quite literally break the bank and force a realignment of priorities. Local union leaders who have otherwise been unswerving in their loyalty to SEIU leadership may have to examine the checkbook and reconsider their position.
Less cynically, the issues that are at stake in the NUHW insurgency may indeed spread. While the SEIU leadership seems to be going out of their way to continue to demonize NUHW, it is far from clear that this assault is having much impact. What does seem to be the case is that many local leaders and staff activists are keeping their heads down and trying desperately to stay uninvolved in the civil war.
Yet the ideas contained in the NUHW insurgency are contagious. It is not just a question of union democracy, but of how labor is to organize itself in order to confront and defeat major employers and push social policy in a more progressive direction. In this conflict, a structure of democratic participation is not just a moral imperative, but an organizational weapon that sustains struggle and insures that the union remains part of a larger movement for social justice.
NUHW, therefore, offers a challenge not only to SEIU but to the basic question of what constitutes a union in the 21st-century, when the power of employers is aimed at eliminating any sense of worker control and empowerment. One hopes that humility and class consciousness will lead SEIU leaders to understand that their trusteeship of UHW, their current war against NUHW and the bargains they seek to strike with some corporate entities do little but diminish the concept of unionism in the eyes of workers and their allies at a time when we desperately need a social justice movement and social justice unionism.
In These Times
What can one make of the civil war playing itself out inside the Service Employees International Union? "Civil war" is not far from an exaggeration. When the SEIU leadership decided to move against one of its largest locals--SEIU United Healthcare Workers-West--and place it into trusteeship early this year, they unleashed a storm that few of the leaders apparently believed possible.
The widely unpopular trusteeship not only has met with internal resistance within the local, but resulted in the establishment of a split-off union--the National Union of Healthcare Workers--and fights over who will represent workplaces that SEIU-UHW had held for years. This fight has drawn in many outside friends and observers who have hitherto been loath to get involved in the internal affairs of a national/international union.
Given the stakes, it has been less and less possible to sit on the sidelines.
Trying to keep a bubble under water?
This internal conflict and the emergence of NUHW can only be understood in the context of both the evolution of SEIU since the assumption of leadership by Andrew Stern, and by the 2005 split in AFL-CIO, the labor federation.
After his election in 1996, Stern set out to transform what was already the fastest growing union in the AFL-CIO. Ostensibly he wanted it to grow faster and serve as a flagship for the rest of the union movement. His broader vision was somewhat vague, but clearly contained at the time the rough outlines of a left/progressive contour.
As it turned out, this vision evolved into something else--but in the late 1990s, it appeared that Stern wanted to turn SEIU into an organizing machine that would sweep through a large slice of the nation's swollen service sector. Many people inside and outside SEIU responded with great hope to Stern's aggressive leadership and the ambitions he put on labor's agenda.
Although the SEIU has grown by about 50 percent during the last 13 years, the evolution of the union has been misunderstood by those who have assumed that this growth was a product of progressive and democratic structural change within the organization. While important changes did take place in the governance of the SEIU, it is perhaps better to see these transformations through the prism of the union's shifting internal alliances and leadership purges. Over time, those reconfigurations paralleled the SEIU's development of a new and disturbing set of objectives that it moved to the top of labor's organizational and political agenda.
In his struggle to win the SEIU presidency and consolidate the power of his slate, Stern formed two sets of alliances and inaugurated one important purge of his opponents. First, when Stern sought the presidency he needed the support of then-SEIU President John Sweeney, if only because Stern himself was but a mere staff officer of the union.
Sweeney gave Stern a position on SEIU's International Executive Board (IEB) to insulate Stern from exile if Sweeney's own constitutionally-based successor, the late Richard Cordtz, chose to fire him in the immediate aftermath of Sweeney's victory at the AFL-CIO. Cordtz did try to purge Stern, but Stern, being on the IEB, held a secure post from which he could and did campaign to become SEIU's president.
But this challenge would have failed had Stern not succeeded in working out important alliances with key local unions in SEIU. These alliances were built on popular opposition to Cordtz and Cordtz's running mate, Gus Bevona (the autocratic leader of a large building service local in NYC). In this sense, the 1996 Stern candidacy was primarily an oppositional movement, a throw the bums out candidacy (or, perhaps, a keep the bums out of the International's leadership), rather than a programmatically progressive coalition, despite some innovative proposals from his slate.
Nevertheless, Stern reached out to long-standing critics of John Sweeney, including Sal Rosselli, president of northern California's big Local 250 (and later UHW) and Dennis Rivera, leader of the then independent 1199 National Healthcare Workers Union in New York. Rivera would, shortly after Stern's internal victory, lead 1199 New York into SEIU.
Once in office, Stern reorganized the union in dramatic and traumatic fashion. Departments were closed, others were reorganized, and with Steve Lerner and other veterans acting as a kind of brain trust, Stern emphasized massive and rapid growth, either through mergers, organizing blitzes, or corporatist-style accommodations with key service-sector employers. The "Justice for Janitors" campaign experience had taught Stern and Lerner that unionism would remain but a weak and barely tolerated presence unless organized labor achieved sufficient "density" within an entire labor market or occupational niche.
In Los Angeles, the SEIU could not push wages upward when it controlled but 20 percent of the janitorial labor market, but once that figure moved past the halfway mark, employer opposition to unionism declined. This was an important insight--and a potentially winning strategy--but the quest for "density" could become an organizational fetish, eclipsing and then eviscerating the militancy, participation and democracy that were also essential to union success.
Consolidating power, stifling debate
But all this was in the future. In the struggle to eliminate old enemies, the Stern leadership took on the more corrupt and backward local union leaders. In almost magical fashion, one leader after another fell. In many if not most cases, the weapon of the trusteeship was utilized in order to eliminate this strata, composed in most cases of leaders from Sweeney's generation.
They were replaced with Stern allies, usually younger and progressive. The culture of SEIU, however, permits trustees--the individuals running the local unions during the period in which the SEIU leadership controls the local--to run for office at the time that the trusteeship ends. Thus, many of these trustees had the power of incumbency and the ability to gain and hold office. This became a powerful inducement to align with the leadership of the International even if, and sometimes directly because, one lacked an internal base in that local union.
As this process unfolded, it should be added, attention was turned toward the reorganizing of local unions. The principal vision was that of large local unions allegedly designed to match the power of regional, national and international employers. But the process of local union reorganization eliminated many longer-term local union leaders, particularly those of color. And large, state-wide locals made it very difficult for oppositional candidates to successfully challenge those in control of the mega local's affairs.
As one might expect, these large locals had few tools to elicit informed participation by non-activist members. In furthering consolidation, a process of elimination of potential opponents took place. They were quietly driven from their posts and replaced with individuals whose allegiances were directly to Stern and his soon to be Secretary-Treasurer, Anna Burger.
Such consolidation made the SEIU an increasingly inhospitable venue for dialogue, debate, and dissent. American trade unions have never figured out how to operate with a functioning, internal two party system, so Stern stands in the same tradition as that of John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, and even Caesar Chavez. But the more sophisticated union leaders have provided a space for disagreement, even if their latitude is carefully constrained. Stern and his leadership team did not do this, and in the new century they made it increasingly difficult for dissent to operationalize itself, either at the SEIU convention or on the international executive board. Thus when local SEIU unionists disagreed, they did not challenge the leadership but merely ignored it insofar as that was possible.
Paralleling this process of internal consolidation, SEIU leaders grew increasingly frustrated with the pace of change at the AFL-CIO. Despite the bold rhetoric that accompanied John Sweeney's accession to the presidency of the federation, the new leadership there had been unable to convince many old-line unions to ramp up their organizational effort and expenditures. Thus the AFL-CIO was losing millions of members in the wake of the dot.com bust and the offshoring of U.S. manufacturing in the early Bush era.
By 2003, Stern and other impatient union leaders had begun to openly criticize the AFL-CIO in a series of articles and interviews regarding the future of organized labor. This built into a near crescendo in 2004 when, at the SEIU Convention that June, Stern announced in front of former SEIU President John Sweeney that if the AFL-CIO did not change, SEIU would leave the AFL-CIO.
Although something of a cease fire took place during the rest of the 2004 electoral season, the die had been cast. In the summer of 2005, Stern led the SEIU and five other unions out of the AFL-CIO and into a new federation, "Change to Win."
The split in the AFL-CIO is directly relevant to the later civil war in SEIU, precisely because many of the issues that needed to be debated at the time were suppressed and replaced with sound bites. This is especially true about matters such as core jurisdiction (over what sectors a particular union should have responsibility for organizing and representing) and the relationship of bargaining to organizing (and vice versa).
Yet in the absence of debate, the confrontation leading to the AFL-CIO split became more about posturing than substance. Indeed, the split in the AFL-CIO actually hid the fissures that existed both among the Change To Win unions and within them. Subsequent to the split, these internal conflicts began to emerge and today C-T-W finds itself fragmented and adrift.
The end of the beginning
The circumstances leading to the SEIU civil war leaked to the surface in 2007. By then it was clear that the alleged promise of the Change To Win federation had gone unfulfilled. It was also becoming clearer that there were differences within the ranks regarding how the union movement should grow.
The unofficial release of documents from SEIU-UHW in 2007 signaled the opening of what could have been a constructive and insightful debate. As reported by the San Francisco Weekly, the documents constituted a criticism of SEIU's leadership for its approach toward collective bargaining. Originating from within UHW, but shared in other parts of SEIU, the critique focused on the "density" issue, charging that SEIU was sacrificing collective bargaining standards, as well as local union autonomy and democracy, all in the name of membership growth.
SEIU responded with a manifesto, "'Just Us' or 'Justice for All'?" in which the SEIU asserted that "History demonstrates that 'I Got Mine' – 'Just Us' unionism has hurt all workers, including existing members." SEIU charged that even militant locals like the UHW were doing a disservice to the union movement by concentrating on improving their own contacts, even as the majority of workers in the rest of the healthcare industry remained unorganized and poorly paid. The SEIU thought that it might be necessary for existing locals to moderate their wage and benefit demands as part of a "bargaining to organize" strategy, in which companies ceased their opposition to unionization in return for uniform standards throughout the firm or even outright concessions at the bargaining table. (This was a tactic that SEIU imposed on UHW when the International persuaded the big California local to reach a template agreement in the nursing home industry in 2004).
Certainly one could find examples, in history and in the contemporary union movement, of militant but insular unions who protected their own membership but ignored the larger working-class interest. But the UHW was hardly such a trade union. Within the SEIU, UHW had one of the most active, if not the most active, organizing postures in hospitals, nursing homes and among home healthcare workers. UHW leaders thought there was no contradiction between militancy at the bargaining table and an effective effort to extend the benefits of unionism to others in the health care industry. High standards in the core UHW jurisdictions, such as Kaiser Permanente, set a standard for unionism everywhere and made it more attractive to potential union recruits in non-union facilities.
Equally important, the UHW saw itself as a union whose jurisdiction took in all healthcare workers, from doctors and skilled technicians to the more than 60,000 home healthcare workers who had been organized in the last decade. In contrast to the SEIU, which wanted to put all nursing home and home healthcare workers into mega locals that would have the "density" to bargain for all such workers, UHW thought that the home health care workers would be best served if they were part of a larger amalgamation of hospital and nursing home workers.
The SEIU determination to sever 60,000 home healthcare workers from the UHW jurisdiction was therefore not just a turf fight over members and their dues. It reflected key strategic issues of which "density" captures just a part. The SEIU drive to put all these home healthcare workers into one big California local--so as to more effectively lobby for higher levels of support in Sacramento--consigned these tens of thousands of largely immigrant women to the status of welfare recipients. The SEIU drive for "density" was proving the handmaiden of an increasingly austere welfare politics. Indeed, the union's big home healthcare locals in Southern California have failed, for nearly a decade, to materially raise the wages and benefit levels of the hundred thousand plus workers they represent.
As this conflict unfolded in 2007 and 2008, it became intertwined with issues of local union autonomy, the UHW critique of SEIU's overall trajectory, and the personalities and ambitions of the leading antagonists, notably the UHW's Sal Rosselli and the SEIU's Andrew Stern. Had the SEIU leadership taken the high ground, this debate could have been quite instructive for the rest of the movement.
There were a number of issues at stake, including: What sacrifices should newly organized workers be asked to make--in the realm of collective bargaining--in order to be unionized? Specifically, should the standards of a collective bargaining agreement be significantly lowered in order to gain the right to collective bargaining, with the hope that over time standards will be raised? What is the relationship between high standards in collective bargaining and the ability of unions to organize and recruit workers? How should decisions be made in a national/international union when it comes to standards?
The high ground, however, was not taken. Instead, a campaign of vilification began almost immediately, focused on attacking the person and character of UHW President Sal Rosselli. The intensity of the struggle quickly led to an effort to isolate and demonize UHW's leadership. The release by the SEIU leadership of a peculiar letter (written by a defecting UHW leader, and former SEIU International staff person) critical of Rosselli and UHW leadership further distracted from any real discussion of the issues that UHW tried to surface. This was accompanied by a proposal from the SEIU leadership to seize a significant portion of the UHW membership--long-term care workers (nursing home and homecare workers)--and place them into a state-wide long-term care workers local union.
The factors that led to the actual trusteeship are both complicated and to a great extent mystifying. By early 2008, it was clear to most outsiders that preparations for a trusteeship of UHW were underway, in large part because of UHW's vehement opposition to giving up their long-term care members without an honest, democratic voting process. SEIU openly denied that there was any plan for a trusteeship, even after accusing the UHW leadership of moving union money around inappropriately.
After the release of a letter by dozens of academics calling upon SEIU's leadership to engage in principled struggle with UHW and to not repress them via a trusteeship, an orchestrated effort was undertaken to have key SEIU personnel--local leaders and staff--contact signatories of the letter to not only assure them that there was no trusteeship in the works, but that it had been insulting to suggest that Stern had anything other than an honest and restrained attitude toward UHW. (Lichtenstein signed the letter and then received an SEIU phone call.)
Legitimizing the trusteeship
Shortly thereafter, events changed rapidly. First, an internal email was released that demonstrated that the SEIU leadership had misled outsiders. The email confirmed that discussions were underway to trustee or "implode" the local. Secondly, stories came out in the media concerning the leadership of SEIU Local 6434, the California state-wide long-term care workers local into which the SEIU leadership proposed placing UHW members. Tyrone Freeman, head of the local, had for years been a very close ally and protégé of Stern. The allegations against the leadership of the local for corruption became so intense that SEIU trusteed the local, thereby removing Freeman.
SEIU leadership then moved into blitzkrieg mode and announced hearings against the UHW leadership, a precipitous action quite at variance with earlier assurances that SEIU leadership had no intention to trustee the United Healthcare West local.
SEIU chose former Labor Secretary Ray Marshall as the hearing officer for a set of lengthy hearings in the late summer and early fall of 2008. These focused on allegations of financial improprieties on the part of UHW leadership involving the establishment of a multi-million dollar fund that the local seemed ready to use to fight the looming SEIU trusteeship. The hearings had the feel of a big time lawsuit with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to pay dueling teams of outside legal counsel and expert witnesses.
When Marshall finally delivered his 105-page report in early January 2009, he agreed that many of the charges put forward by the SEIU leadership against the UHW officers were valid, i.e., that the big California local did attempt to move several million dollars to a non-profit educational fund that was in reality a resource designed to fight the SEIU should a trusteeship be imposed. Marshall also ruled that the trusteeship threat was not a "retaliation" against UHW's decision to speak out against what many of its members considered undemocratic SEIU policies.
But Marshall made none of this the basis for a trusteeship, arguing instead that the "the underlying issue is a conflict over jurisdiction" involving the home healthcare workers. In effect, Marshall sided with UHW when it argued that the charges and countercharges involving financial malpractice were really "symptoms of the fundamental relationship between the International and the UHW." Marshall called for a peaceful resolution of this conflict, based on a view shared by many unionists that "the main beneficiaries of this conflict are anti-union employers and politicians."
But Marshall's report was not that of a disinterested judge. The former labor secretary sided with UHW in recommending that the SEIU International board not establish a trusteeship on the basis of the specific issues (largely those involving finances) pressed by the SEIU during the lengthy hearings. But in what many observers saw as a tacked-on, last minute concession to Andrew Stern, Marshall amended his report (the typeface is actually different) to call for trusteeship if the UHW refused to abide by the SEIU's decision to force UHW to relinquish jurisdiction over 65,000 long-term care workers and put them in a single state-wide unit.
UHW made an 11th hour compromise offer to the effect that should the long-term care workers vote to leave UHW, the California local would abide by their wishes. But the senior leadership at SEIU was not looking for a way out of the crisis. They ignored the offer and imposed a trusteeship at midnight on January 27, not a minute later than legally possible.
First moments of a new day?
In the history of the U.S. labor movement, as well as that of the SEIU, imposition of trusteeships normally encounter some discontent, but resistance is uneven and generally short-lived. A 1959 law, Landrum-Griffin, enacted when Teamster corruption was in the headlines, is designed to give national union officers overwhelming power to reorganize a local, install new officers, and run its affairs. Even when a trusteeship has been imposed in an autocratic fashion, most union reformers believe the wise course of action is to "take" it, organize an opposition, and then fight to win a new election in a few years.
The leadership of UHW, however, backed by a broad stratum of key activists, has chosen a more radical, confrontational, and democratic path. In a series of meetings in the spring of 2009, the old UHW transformed itself into an entirely new trade union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers. It would challenge SEIU for the allegiance of tens of thousands of hospital, nursing home, and healthcare workers in its old jurisdiction and quite possibly in new ones as well. This was and remains a bold effort, in which virtually all legal, organizational and economic resources are monopolized by the SEIU.
But the NUHW has a powerful resource of its own: the determined support of thousands of workers in some of the best organized and most militant workplaces in the entire healthcare sector. Unlike so many SEIU locals, the old UHW was led by a stratum of activists that reached deep into the ranks of the workforce. Doctors, nurses, technicians, and healthcare aids at Kaiser Permanente have long been in the vanguard of unionism, in the Bay Area and throughout the hospital sector. (Indeed, when SEIU put the old Kaiser local, Local 250, into trusteeship in the 1980s, workers there defeated the leadership put forward by the national SEIU and elected Rosselli as local union president once the trusteeship was lifted.)
It is unclear that SEIU's top leadership truly anticipated the extent and scope of the resistance that emerged in UHW following the trusteeship. They probably did not imagine that this resistance would take the form of the establishment of an independent union that positioned itself as the legitimate successor to UHW. In either case, shortly after the beginning of the trusteeship, the NUHW went about building a resistance movement to the trusteeship. The core founding principles included both the notion of (1) one union for one industry (in this case, a healthcare union for all healthcare workers), and (2) an institutionalized set of participatory, democratic governance practices which devolved power from the staff to the working members.
What has been particularly striking about the NUHW effort is the manner in which its influence has spread within the former UHW jurisdiction. Within weeks, over 50,000 members signed decertification petitions indicating their desire to leave the trusteed UHW and enter into the new NUHW. And in the first major contest between SEIU and the NUHW, which revolved around homecare workers in Fresno, Calif., SEIU won what can only be described as a pyrrhic victory.
In that case, SEIU reportedly spent about $10 million dollars, including the deployment of nearly one thousand staff people, and then won the decertification election by a margin of less than two hundred votes. The NUHW has challenged the result, citing numerous irregularities. Irrespective of the final outcome, the fact remains that in a region and among workers that had not been a strategic base for NUHW, they nevertheless forced SEIU to spend an immense sum of money, and nearly won! Union activists expended all this time and money on a civil war that never should have happened in the first place, rather than on actions desperately needed to generate new growth or advance the political mobilizations necessary to fulfill the promise of the Obama victory just months before.
The underdog's reclamation
Assessing what to make of NUHW and its potential is, at this time, a matter for speculation. Despite having pitifully few resources, the new union is capable of winning. In the NUHW's key jurisdictions, particularly Kaiser Permanente, it is quite conceivable that they will overwhelm the SEIU's imported and maladroit leadership.
This is true for at least three reasons. One, the former UHW has a very capable steward's system and member involvement at Kaiser. Two, the trusteeship is an affront to thousands of staunch unionists and their allies in California where NUHW has won the backing of some prominent liberal politicians and many key unions, including San Francisco's big hotel local.
Three, many among the SEIU staff, imported to California or back in the East and Midwest, are demoralized and do not see NUHW as a true enemy. Thus, if the NUHW can win just a few NLRB certification elections and restart the dues flow, then it will have sufficient resources to hire key staff, "organize" among a wider group of workers, and prevail in California over the still alien group of leaders imported into the state by SEIU. Recent NUHW victories at Los Alamitos Medical Center in Southern California and at an assisted living facility in the Portola Valley indicate that this strategy may be working. There is no reason, short of resources, that NUHW cannot prevail, irrespective of whether they choose to return to a reformed SEIU.
The larger significance of NUHW, however, can be found in possibilities. At this moment, it would be accurate to describe the NUHW effort as a process of reclamation. In other words, the establishment of NUHW is a form of resistance to an unjustified trusteeship. There is an attempt by the sacked leadership of UHW to rebuild the union and to reclaim what was 'occupied' by the International. This point cannot be overemphasized: It illustrates why the fight between NUHW and SEIU is not a question of an old-fashioned "raid" but instead a process which seeks to reestablish an ongoing, democratic, and highly successful trade union whose health and outlook is essential to any revitalization of trade unionism, on both a state and national basis.
In the most common circumstances of raiding, an existing union will target the workers represented by another union and seek to steal them away. (In South Africa, this is called "poaching," probably a more accurate term.) In the AFL-CIO this is supposedly restricted by Article 20 of the AFL-CIO Constitution. For those unions not in the AFL-CIO, however, there are no such restrictions. Thus, it is not uncommon for certain unions to grow precisely by raiding bargaining units of already represented workers.
NUHW bears no resemblance to the traditional raider. In fact, one could argue that their activities do not represent a 'raid' at all, but instead are more akin to an insurrection. Specifically, the activities of NUHW are aimed at regaining representation over units of the old UHW that are controlled by the trustees. There is no indication that NUHW has its eyes on any other part of SEIU. What it may be considering, however, is a broader, national effort to develop and implement the idea that the former UHW leadership had embraced some time ago when it sought the construction of a truly national union of healthcare workers across all the usual employer and occupational boundaries.
But the first question is whether the reclamation effort will succeed and the trusteeship be defeated. The next question is whether reclamation can evolve into union transformation.
And what of SEIU?
The NUHW insurgency has created a crisis within SEIU. While the leaderships of most SEIU locals have failed to stand against the trusteeship--and in some cases actively collaborated with it--there are varying opinions at the staff and local level. A number of resignations from the International staff, the SEIU's California State Council, and some locals have taken place, revealing clear disaffection with current policies. In other cases, staff people who were deployed merely went through the motions rather than throw themselves into an active and energetic re-organizing effort.
Even if it does defeat NUHW, it is unlikely that SEIU will regain the stature that it once had or resolve the internal conflicts that have risen in recent years. The problem for the SEIU, as well as for many of the other unions in the service sector, is that they are essentially staff-drive entities, legal/administrative constructs that are organizational hybrids. They stand halfway between fundraising and propaganda vehicles like MoveOn.org and the self-organized auto workers who once made institutions like UAW Local 600, representing tens of thousands at Ford's River Rouge complex, a watchword for working-class militancy and union democracy.
This tension is apparent in all the service sector unions, where an influx of college-educated activists has revitalized organizing, research, and political mobilization, but where the conditions for genuine internal democracy, i.e., locals that really are local, an elected leadership with actual bargaining power, and the development of an organizing cadre that is responsive to the membership rather than a distant organizing director, remains elusive.
Although some SEIU locals have had histories of varying degrees of internal democracy and transformational politics, the SEIU has looked askance at such localist examples of democratic participation--not because the leadership of SEIU is hostile to mobilization or democracy in any formal ideological sense, but because it has had other agendas that all too often seemed to conflict with a decentralized and democratic structure. Efforts to democratize and transform the union controlled and led by rank and file members have been largely absent. This absence represents a major obstacle for a full renovation of SEIU.
All this has engendered something of a leadership cult within SEIU, a tendency present even prior to Stern's assumption of leadership in 1996. Thus, whether it is Stern, Burger, or a local union president, it is the progressive leader that puts forward a militant and imaginative program and calls for the members to embrace it. Such a scenario guarantees a degree of hero/heroine-worship as well as a tendency to suppress dissent in the name of union solidarity. If truth rests with only one person, how can dissenters be anything other than traitors?
An alternative scenario is that NUHW becomes a catalyst for more widespread change within SEIU. There are reasons to believe that this is quite possible. The actual cost of the SEIU civil war may, at some point, quite literally break the bank and force a realignment of priorities. Local union leaders who have otherwise been unswerving in their loyalty to SEIU leadership may have to examine the checkbook and reconsider their position.
Less cynically, the issues that are at stake in the NUHW insurgency may indeed spread. While the SEIU leadership seems to be going out of their way to continue to demonize NUHW, it is far from clear that this assault is having much impact. What does seem to be the case is that many local leaders and staff activists are keeping their heads down and trying desperately to stay uninvolved in the civil war.
Yet the ideas contained in the NUHW insurgency are contagious. It is not just a question of union democracy, but of how labor is to organize itself in order to confront and defeat major employers and push social policy in a more progressive direction. In this conflict, a structure of democratic participation is not just a moral imperative, but an organizational weapon that sustains struggle and insures that the union remains part of a larger movement for social justice.
NUHW, therefore, offers a challenge not only to SEIU but to the basic question of what constitutes a union in the 21st-century, when the power of employers is aimed at eliminating any sense of worker control and empowerment. One hopes that humility and class consciousness will lead SEIU leaders to understand that their trusteeship of UHW, their current war against NUHW and the bargains they seek to strike with some corporate entities do little but diminish the concept of unionism in the eyes of workers and their allies at a time when we desperately need a social justice movement and social justice unionism.
Campeche: la lucha sigue
Juan Cristóbal León Campos
Rebelión
El hermano Estado de Campeche es ejemplo de las injusticias y de la impunidad que se vive en nuestro país. El 13 de agosto pasado, los pobladores de San Antonio Ebulá (pueblo fundado hace más de 40 años) fueron desterrados por parapolicías (vándalos) pagados por el empresario Eduardo Escalante quien se arroga la propiedad de las tierras, siendo resguardados los vándalos por cerca de cien elementos de la Policía Estatal Preventiva de Campeche. Los ebuleños fueron golpeados y expulsados de su tierra; sus viviendas y pertenencias fueron destruidas y saqueadas; sus animales fueron sacrificados por los saqueadores, e incluso los árboles fueron talados, privando a las familias de sus medios de subsistencia.
Como respuesta los ebuleños realizaron un plantón en los bajos del Palacio de Gobierno de Campeche, por más de 41 días. Gracias a la solida resistencia y al apoyo que ha recibió nacional e internacionalmente, el Pueblo de Ebulá a logrado recuperar 31 hectáreas de sus tierras. El gobierno campechano se comprometió a que el nuevo poblado ebuleño tendría todos los servicios básicos. Además de que recibirían apoyo para su restablecimiento. Hasta hoy no sean cumplido tales compromisos, el gobierno pretende dejar de lado una vez más a los pobladores de este digno pueblo. Por eso la lucha aún continua hasta que todas las tierras estén en manos de sus dueños, los daños sean reparados, y se presten los servicios básicos a San Antonino Ebulá. .
Otro caso de injusticia es el que se vive en el municipio de Candelaria, donde más de 3,500 pobladores de 35 comunidades han conformado el Movimiento Contra las Altas Tarifas de la Energía Eléctrica para resistir los abusos de la empresa paraestatal. Su lucha lleva más de 3 años, en los cuales han realizado diversas acciones de rechazo y denuncia en contra de los abusos económicos efectuados por la CFE. Por lo que el gobierno campechano con los oídos cerrados en su totalidad a las demandas populares, detuvo desde el 10 de junio a 5 integrantes de este justo movimiento. Hasta la fecha han sido liberados Guadalupe Lizcano y Elmer Castellanos gracias a la movilización social y a la solidaridad nacional e internacional mediante el pago de fianzas con un monto de $4,000, permaneciendo bajo proceso jurídico. Mientras tanto, siguen encarcelados Sara López, Joaquín Aguilar y Guadalupe Borja.
Las acusaciones en su contra son totalmente falsas, pues lo único que han hecho es luchar por una mejor condición de vida para los campechanos. La solidaridad no se ha hecho esperar, pues en muchas partes de la república se realizan eventos y acciones para pedir su libertad.
Ante estas injusticias y frente a la impunidad que gozan quienes las cometen, es necesario organizar la solidaridad y al apoyo a nuestros hermanos campechanos. Para exigir juntos que sean liberados los presos políticos, se imponga el castigo que merecen los autores intelectuales y materiales de dichas injusticias, y se establezca la justicia en Campeche regresando al pueblo lo que es suyo.
Rebelión
El hermano Estado de Campeche es ejemplo de las injusticias y de la impunidad que se vive en nuestro país. El 13 de agosto pasado, los pobladores de San Antonio Ebulá (pueblo fundado hace más de 40 años) fueron desterrados por parapolicías (vándalos) pagados por el empresario Eduardo Escalante quien se arroga la propiedad de las tierras, siendo resguardados los vándalos por cerca de cien elementos de la Policía Estatal Preventiva de Campeche. Los ebuleños fueron golpeados y expulsados de su tierra; sus viviendas y pertenencias fueron destruidas y saqueadas; sus animales fueron sacrificados por los saqueadores, e incluso los árboles fueron talados, privando a las familias de sus medios de subsistencia.
Como respuesta los ebuleños realizaron un plantón en los bajos del Palacio de Gobierno de Campeche, por más de 41 días. Gracias a la solida resistencia y al apoyo que ha recibió nacional e internacionalmente, el Pueblo de Ebulá a logrado recuperar 31 hectáreas de sus tierras. El gobierno campechano se comprometió a que el nuevo poblado ebuleño tendría todos los servicios básicos. Además de que recibirían apoyo para su restablecimiento. Hasta hoy no sean cumplido tales compromisos, el gobierno pretende dejar de lado una vez más a los pobladores de este digno pueblo. Por eso la lucha aún continua hasta que todas las tierras estén en manos de sus dueños, los daños sean reparados, y se presten los servicios básicos a San Antonino Ebulá. .
Otro caso de injusticia es el que se vive en el municipio de Candelaria, donde más de 3,500 pobladores de 35 comunidades han conformado el Movimiento Contra las Altas Tarifas de la Energía Eléctrica para resistir los abusos de la empresa paraestatal. Su lucha lleva más de 3 años, en los cuales han realizado diversas acciones de rechazo y denuncia en contra de los abusos económicos efectuados por la CFE. Por lo que el gobierno campechano con los oídos cerrados en su totalidad a las demandas populares, detuvo desde el 10 de junio a 5 integrantes de este justo movimiento. Hasta la fecha han sido liberados Guadalupe Lizcano y Elmer Castellanos gracias a la movilización social y a la solidaridad nacional e internacional mediante el pago de fianzas con un monto de $4,000, permaneciendo bajo proceso jurídico. Mientras tanto, siguen encarcelados Sara López, Joaquín Aguilar y Guadalupe Borja.
Las acusaciones en su contra son totalmente falsas, pues lo único que han hecho es luchar por una mejor condición de vida para los campechanos. La solidaridad no se ha hecho esperar, pues en muchas partes de la república se realizan eventos y acciones para pedir su libertad.
Ante estas injusticias y frente a la impunidad que gozan quienes las cometen, es necesario organizar la solidaridad y al apoyo a nuestros hermanos campechanos. Para exigir juntos que sean liberados los presos políticos, se imponga el castigo que merecen los autores intelectuales y materiales de dichas injusticias, y se establezca la justicia en Campeche regresando al pueblo lo que es suyo.
Did U.S. Forces Execute Kids in Afghanistan?
By Dave Lindorff
OpEdNews
The Taliban suicide attack that killed a group of CIA agents in Afghanistan was big news in the U.S. over the past week. The attack took place on a base that was directing U.S. drone aircraft used to attack Taliban leaders. The airwaves and front pages were filled with sympathetic stories referring to the fact that the female station chief, who was among those killed, was the "mother of three children."
But the apparent mass murder of Afghan school children, including one as young as 11 years old, by U.S.-led troops, was pretty much blacked out in the American media. Especially blacked out was the claim by UN investigators that the students had not just been killed but executed, many of them after having first been rousted from their bedrooms and handcuffed.
Here is the excellent report on the incident that ran in the Times of London (like Fox News, a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication) on Dec. 31:
The article goes on to say:
Compare this article to the one mention of the incident that appeared in the New York Times, one of the few American news outlets to even mention the incident. The article, which appeared on Dec. 28, focused entirely on the difficulty civilian killings cause for the U.S. war effort, and not on the allegations of a serious war crime:
While the article in the New York Times eventually mentions the allegation that the victims were children, not grown men, it nonetheless begins with the unchallenged assertion in the lead that they were "men." There is no mention of the equally serious allegation that the victims had been handcuffed before being executed, and the story leaves the impression, made by NATO sources, that they were armed and had died fighting. There is no indication in the Times story that the reporters made any effort, as the more enterprising and skeptical London Times reporter did, to get local, non-official, sources of information. The New York Times reporters attributed the claim that the victims had been making bombs to an anonymous NATO source, even though there was no legitimate reason for the anonymity ("because of the delicacy of the situation" was the lame excuse offered). Indeed, the use of an anonymous source here would appear to violate the Times' own standards.
It's not that American newsrooms lacked the knowledge that a major war crime may have been committed. Nearly all American news organizations receive the AP news wire. Here is the AP report on the killings, which ran under the headline "UN says killed Afghans were students":
Once again, the American media are falling down shamefully in providing honest reporting on a war, making it difficult for the American people to make informed judgments about what is being done in their name.
If the charges are correct -- that American forces, or American-led forces, are handcuffing their victims and then executing them -- they are committing egregious war crimes. If they are killing children, they are committing equally egregious war crimes. If they are handcuffing and executing children, the atrocity is beyond horrific. If true, this incident would actually be worse than the infamous war crime that occurred in My Lai during the Vietnam War. In that case, we had ordinary soldiers in the field, acting under the orders of several low-ranking officers in the heat of an operation, shooting and killing women, children and babies. But in this case we appear to have seasoned special forces troops actually directing the taking of captives, cuffing them, herding them into a room and spraying them with bullets, execution-style.
Given the history of the commanding general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal -- who is known to have run a massive death squad operation in Iraq before being named to his current post by President Obama, and who is known to have called for the same kind of tactics in Afghanistan -- it should not be surprising that the U.S. would now be committing atrocities in Afghanistan. If this is how this war is going to be conducted, the U.S. media should be making a major effort to uncover and expose the crime.
On January 1, the London Times' Jerome Starkey, in Afghanistan, followed up with a second story, reporting that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is calling for the U.S. to hand over the troops who killed the students. Starkey quoted a "NATO source" as saying that the "foreigners involved" in the incident were "non-military, suggesting that they were part of a secret paramilitary unit based in the capital" of Kabul. He goes on to quote a "Western official" as saying: "There's no doubt that there were insurgents there, and there may well have been an insurgent leader in the house, but that doesn't justify executing eight children who were all enrolled in local schools."
Good enterprise reporting by the London Times and its Kabul-based correspondent. Silence on these developments in the U.S. media.
Meanwhile, it has been a week since New York Times reporters Rubin and Wafa made their first flawed report on the incident, and there has been not a word since then about it in the paper. Are Rubin and Wafa or other Times reporters on the story? Will there be a follow-up?
On the evidence of past coverage of these U.S. wars and their ongoing atrocities by the Times and by other major U.S. corporate media news organizations, don't bet on it. You'll do better looking to the foreign media.
By the way, given that we're talking about allegations of a serious war crime, it is important to note that, under the Geneva Conventions, it is a legal requirement that the U.S. military chain of command immediately initiate an official investigation to determine whether such a crime has occurred. One would hope that the Commander-in-Chief, President Obama, would order such an inquiry.
Any effort to prevent such an inquiry, or to cover up a war crime, would be a war crime in itself. We just had one administration that did a lot of that. We don't need another one.
OpEdNews
The Taliban suicide attack that killed a group of CIA agents in Afghanistan was big news in the U.S. over the past week. The attack took place on a base that was directing U.S. drone aircraft used to attack Taliban leaders. The airwaves and front pages were filled with sympathetic stories referring to the fact that the female station chief, who was among those killed, was the "mother of three children."
But the apparent mass murder of Afghan school children, including one as young as 11 years old, by U.S.-led troops, was pretty much blacked out in the American media. Especially blacked out was the claim by UN investigators that the students had not just been killed but executed, many of them after having first been rousted from their bedrooms and handcuffed.
Here is the excellent report on the incident that ran in the Times of London (like Fox News, a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication) on Dec. 31:
Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children
By Jerome Starkey in Kabul
American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.
Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.
Western military sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and civilians.
"This was a joint operation that was conducted against an IED cell that Afghan and US officials had been developing information against for some time," said a senior Nato insider. But he admitted that "the facts about what actually went down are in dispute."
The article goes on to say:
In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster [of the local school] said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. "Seven students were in one room," said Rahman Jan Ehsas. "A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.
"First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That's why his wife wasn't killed."
A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. "I saw their school books covered in blood," he said.
The investigation found that eight of the victims were aged from 11 to 17. The guest was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said. He said that six of the students were at high school and two were at primary school. He said that all the students were his nephews.
Compare this article to the one mention of the incident that appeared in the New York Times, one of the few American news outlets to even mention the incident. The article, which appeared on Dec. 28, focused entirely on the difficulty civilian killings cause for the U.S. war effort, and not on the allegations of a serious war crime:
Attack Puts Afghan Leader and NATO at Odds
By Alissa J. Rubin and Abdul Waheed Wafa
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The killing of at least nine men in a remote valley of eastern Afghanistan by a joint operation of Afghan and American forces put President Hamid Karzai and senior NATO officials at odds on Monday over whether those killed had been civilians or Taliban insurgents.
In a statement e-mailed to the news media, Mr. Karzai condemned the weekend attack and said the dead had been civilians, eight of them schoolboys. He called for an investigation.
Local officials, including the governor and members of Parliament from Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, confirmed the reports. But the Kunar police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, cautioned that his office was still investigating the killings and that outstanding questions remained, including why the eight young men had been in the same house at the time.
"There are still questions to be answered, like why these students were together and what they were doing on that night," Mr. Ziayee said.
A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s.
According to the NATO official, nine men were killed. "These were people who had a well-established network, they were I.E.D. smugglers and also were responsible for direct attacks on Afghan security and coalition forces in those areas," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.
"When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making I.E.D.'s," the official added.
While the article in the New York Times eventually mentions the allegation that the victims were children, not grown men, it nonetheless begins with the unchallenged assertion in the lead that they were "men." There is no mention of the equally serious allegation that the victims had been handcuffed before being executed, and the story leaves the impression, made by NATO sources, that they were armed and had died fighting. There is no indication in the Times story that the reporters made any effort, as the more enterprising and skeptical London Times reporter did, to get local, non-official, sources of information. The New York Times reporters attributed the claim that the victims had been making bombs to an anonymous NATO source, even though there was no legitimate reason for the anonymity ("because of the delicacy of the situation" was the lame excuse offered). Indeed, the use of an anonymous source here would appear to violate the Times' own standards.
It's not that American newsrooms lacked the knowledge that a major war crime may have been committed. Nearly all American news organizations receive the AP news wire. Here is the AP report on the killings, which ran under the headline "UN says killed Afghans were students":
The United Nations says a raid last weekend by foreign troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight local students.
The Afghan government says that all 10 people killed in a village in Kunar province were civilians. NATO says there is no evidence to substantiate the claim and has requested a joint investigation.
UN special representative in Afghanistan Kai Eide said in a statement Thursday that preliminary investigation shows there were insurgents in the area at the time of the attack. But he adds that eight of those killed were students in local schools.
Once again, the American media are falling down shamefully in providing honest reporting on a war, making it difficult for the American people to make informed judgments about what is being done in their name.
If the charges are correct -- that American forces, or American-led forces, are handcuffing their victims and then executing them -- they are committing egregious war crimes. If they are killing children, they are committing equally egregious war crimes. If they are handcuffing and executing children, the atrocity is beyond horrific. If true, this incident would actually be worse than the infamous war crime that occurred in My Lai during the Vietnam War. In that case, we had ordinary soldiers in the field, acting under the orders of several low-ranking officers in the heat of an operation, shooting and killing women, children and babies. But in this case we appear to have seasoned special forces troops actually directing the taking of captives, cuffing them, herding them into a room and spraying them with bullets, execution-style.
Given the history of the commanding general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal -- who is known to have run a massive death squad operation in Iraq before being named to his current post by President Obama, and who is known to have called for the same kind of tactics in Afghanistan -- it should not be surprising that the U.S. would now be committing atrocities in Afghanistan. If this is how this war is going to be conducted, the U.S. media should be making a major effort to uncover and expose the crime.
On January 1, the London Times' Jerome Starkey, in Afghanistan, followed up with a second story, reporting that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is calling for the U.S. to hand over the troops who killed the students. Starkey quoted a "NATO source" as saying that the "foreigners involved" in the incident were "non-military, suggesting that they were part of a secret paramilitary unit based in the capital" of Kabul. He goes on to quote a "Western official" as saying: "There's no doubt that there were insurgents there, and there may well have been an insurgent leader in the house, but that doesn't justify executing eight children who were all enrolled in local schools."
Good enterprise reporting by the London Times and its Kabul-based correspondent. Silence on these developments in the U.S. media.
Meanwhile, it has been a week since New York Times reporters Rubin and Wafa made their first flawed report on the incident, and there has been not a word since then about it in the paper. Are Rubin and Wafa or other Times reporters on the story? Will there be a follow-up?
On the evidence of past coverage of these U.S. wars and their ongoing atrocities by the Times and by other major U.S. corporate media news organizations, don't bet on it. You'll do better looking to the foreign media.
By the way, given that we're talking about allegations of a serious war crime, it is important to note that, under the Geneva Conventions, it is a legal requirement that the U.S. military chain of command immediately initiate an official investigation to determine whether such a crime has occurred. One would hope that the Commander-in-Chief, President Obama, would order such an inquiry.
Any effort to prevent such an inquiry, or to cover up a war crime, would be a war crime in itself. We just had one administration that did a lot of that. We don't need another one.
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