Tag: United States

Universal Free School Lunch Is an Absolute No-Brainer / by Matt Bruenig

A student eats during lunch period in the cafeteria at Doby Elementary School in Apollo Beach, Florida. (Eve Edelheit for the Washington Post via Getty Images)

Originally Posted in Jacobin on March 22, 2023

Public school in the US is already provided universally, free of charge. There’s no reason we shouldn’t provide free lunch to every child at school as well.

or a hundred eighty days each year, fifty million kids file into a hundred thousand public schools and receive free education that costs $800 billion per year. Around half of these kids get to their school using a free bus service that costs $30 billion per year. At school, these kids receive free bathrooms, free playgrounds, and free access to gyms, textbooks, and computer equipment. If they play sports, they often receive free uniforms and free access to weight rooms and other sports equipment.

Around 90 percent of kids use the free schooling service, with the remaining 10 percent opting for a private religious school (7.5 percent) or a private nonreligious school (2.5 percent). Public school attendance is more common among kids from lower and middle income families, but the vast majority of upper income families also attend public schools.

Around the middle of each school day, the free schooling service is briefly suspended for lunch. Instead of providing free lunches to all of the students, schools charge students $0, $0.40, or approximately $4.33 for their lunch. How much each kid is charged is based on their family income except that, if a kid lives in a school or school district where 40 percent or more of the kids are eligible for free lunch, then they are also eligible for free lunch even if their family income would otherwise be too high.

Each year, schools serve 4.9 billion lunches to a monthly average of 30 million kids. Before COVID, in 2019, 68.1 percent of the kids were charged $0, 5.8 percent were charged $0.40, and 26.1 percent were charged the full $4.33. In the latest year, due to temporary COVID changes, the same numbers were 96 percent, 0.3 percent, and 3.3 percent, respectively.

The total cost of the 4.9 billion meals is around $21 billion per year. In 2019, user fees covered $5.6 billion of this cost. In 2022, user fees covered $0.7 billion of the cost. The rest was covered by public subsidies as part of the free and reduced price lunch program.

The approximately $5.6 billion of school lunch fees collected in 2019 were equal to 0.7 percent of the total cost of K-12 schooling. In order to collect these fees, each school district has to set up a school lunch payment system, often by contracting with third-party providers like Global Payments. They also have to set up a system for dealing with kids who are not enrolled in the free lunch program but who show up to school with no money in their school lunch account or in their pockets. In this scenario, schools will either have to make the kid go without lunch, give them a free lunch for the day (but not too many times), or give them a lunch while assigning their lunch account a debt.

Eligibility for the $0 and $0.40 lunches is based on income, but this does not mean that everyone with an eligible income successfully signs up for the program. As with all means-tested programs, the application of the means test not only excludes people with ineligible incomes, but also people with eligible incomes who fail to successfully navigate the red tape of the welfare bureaucracy. Research on the community eligibility program — a program that makes every kid in a school or school district eligible for free lunch so long as 40 percent of the kids are eligible for it — shows that the program improves food security and nutritional outcomes even among low-income kids who should have already been eligible for free school lunch.

The case for free school lunch is initially the same as the case for child benefits more generally. By socializing the cost of children — including through paid parental leave, child care benefits, K-12 education benefits, and through a cash child benefit — you help equalize the conditions of similarly situated families with different numbers of children. Socializing the cost of children also smooths incomes across the life cycle by ensuring that, when people have kids, their household financial situation remains mostly the same.

Indeed, this is actually the case for the welfare state as whole, not just child benefits. When people become elderly or disabled in our society, their costs are socialized and they are provided a monthly cash benefit, public health insurance, and long-term care. Children are not really any different from the elderly and the disabled. In fact, they are sort of a combination of the two: like the elderly, children’s ages make it so that they should not work, and like the disabled, children’s limited capacity makes it so that they cannot work (in fact, it’s illegal for them to work). For all three populations, worklessness makes it impossible to receive personal labor income, meaning that some other nonlabor income system is required.

Beyond this general case, there are other considerations that are unique to children and to school lunch. Well-resourced children tend to be more productive and less destructive adults, something that benefits the society overall. In the case of school lunch, well-fed kids learn better and are less likely to engage in bad behaviors that are distractive to their peers. Children also go on to become the workers of the society and thus go on to make it possible for earlier generations to retire in old age.

Conservative criticisms of getting rid of school lunch fees mostly fall into two buckets. The first is that the fees serve an important pedagogical function in society to get people to understand personal responsibility. The second is that, because the school lunch fees are means-tested, they serve an important income-redistributive function in society.

Both arguments are hard to take seriously.

Notably, conservatives don’t apply the first argument to any other part of the free schooling bundle nor to free schooling itself. The closest analogue to the school lunch service is the school bus service. The two services cost about the same, but, with an occasional oddball exception here and there, the buses are funded entirely without user fees while the lunches are funded 26.6 percent by user fees and 73.4 percent by public subsidies.

Do conservatives believe that the free bus service, which goes back to the 1800s, is destroying personal responsibility in society and that, in order to resurrect it, we need to start charging means-tested school bus fares? I’ve never seen them say it. Nor have I seen them say that any other aspect of the current free schooling bundle, including arts and sports, should charge means-tested fees.

So from the conservative discourse on this, we are apparently meant to believe that $800 billion a year of free schooling services is compatible with creating a personal responsibility ethic, but that rolling an additional $5.6 billion of spending into that service by eliminating the means-tested school lunch fees is not. This is just an obviously stupid and laughable position.

The conservative argument that means-tested school lunch fees serve an important income-redistributive function is both untrue and at odds with their general attitudes on, not just redistribution, but on how child benefit programs specifically should be structured.

In the last couple of years, we had a big public debate about whether one of the country’s cash benefits for children, the Child Tax Credit, should be extended to the poor. The conservative position on that was that child benefits should specifically be designed so that they exclude the poor and only go to the middle and upper class because such a design will increase the employment rate.

Thus, conservatives believe it is appropriate for a married family with $400,000 of income to receive $2,000 per year per child in cash benefits from the federal government, but somehow think it is wrong for that same family to receive around $800 in free school lunch. And then, on the other end of the scale, conservatives think a family with $0 of labor income should not receive a single dollar from the Child Tax Credit because that will promote worklessness but then think they should receive $800 in free school lunch benefits. Does this not also promote worklessness? It’s all very jumbled.

As far as achieving income redistribution through the application of $5.6 billion of means-tested school lunch fees goes, there are simply much better ways to go about it. As I’ve noted many times before, if you want to reduce the resources of people above a certain income by $5.6 billion, the best thing to do is apply a tax to everyone with income above that level, not dump the entire $5.6 billion charge on families that currently have children in school.

Such a tax would have a larger base and thus represent a smaller share of the income of each person taxed and such a tax would smooth incomes over time. Also, this tax-based approach would allow you to eliminate the means test, which is administratively costly and ends up excluding many low-income kids from school lunch due to administrative burdens, and allow you to eliminate the school lunch payments system, which is administratively costly and forces schools and parents to needlessly give out money to payment processing companies.

My own child currently rides the free bus to school and then, due to the community eligibility program, receives a free breakfast and lunch at the school. Today’s breakfast is an egg and cheese sandwich and a choice of a banana, apple, or orange. Lunch is a choice between cheesy pasta, a PB&J sandwich, and a turkey and ham sandwich with sides of rolls, carrots, broccoli, and fruit. I didn’t have to create a school lunch account and then input my banking information in order to load it up with money. I don’t receive any emails about the balance being low and needing to be reloaded. I don’t have to worry about it at all. Parenting is already full of stresses and hassles. Dealing with one-off payments systems for means-tested school lunch fees is one such hassle I am happy to do without.

Matt Bruenig is the founder of People’s Policy Project.

A few of the Communist women who shaped U.S. history / by Norman Markowitz

Images: People’s World and CPUSA Archives; Emma Tenayuca, “La Pasionaria de Texas” ; Charlene Mitchell campaign poster

Reprinted from Political Affairs (04/2010) in celebration of Women’s History Month.

From its very outset, the struggle for women’s liberation has had deep connections to the development of the socialist movement. The utopian socialist Charles Fourier said famously that a society was judged by its treatment of women. The oppression of women in both work and in the home and the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality were dealt with by Marx and Engels over and over again in their works, not as something separate from the class struggle and the exploitation of the working class by capitalists but integral to it.

In a number of European countries, Marxist socialist parties, in the tradition of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), advocated women’s suffrage and women’s rights when liberal and even self-styled radical parties avoided the issue for fear of losing both their capitalist financial backers and male votes.

Women activists in the United States were a part of the socialist movement and organizations like the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) before women gained the right to vote, although the leaders of the Socialist Party of America (SPA) were no more militant or focused in their support for women’s suffrage and women’s rights than they were in the support for the civil rights and larger social economic liberation of the African American people.

With the formation of the Communist Party USA and its development after 1919, militant women, like militant African Americans of both genders, were drawn to the CPUSA in far greater numbers than the declining Socialist Party or other groups on the left. These included very well-known activists like IWW leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and labor radical Mother Bloor.

Flynn, for whom the martyred IWW people’s singer Joe Hill had written the song “Rebel Girl,” was to become the most famous CPUSA woman leader of the interwar period and would become a Cold War political prisoner in the 1950s. She would end her long and distinguished life as chair of the CPUSA in the early 1960s after her release from prison.

Her life can be contrasted with that of Margaret Sanger, a socialist champion of women’s reproductive rights before and during World War I. Both faced state repression. Sanger, though, left the socialist movement and became a founder of Planned Parenthood in the postwar era. While she remained a progressive, she found herself courting business interests and hobnobbing with overt racists, neo-Malthusian reactionaries, and more covert racist eugenicists whose support for birth control was rooted in a desire to limit working class and minority populations.

Women like the West Indian-born Harlem activist Claudia Jones became, in the 1930s, important grassroots leaders of the CPUSA youth organizations and later the CPUSA itself. Mexican-American activist Emma Tenayuca led striking agricultural workers and was called “La Pasionaria de Texas” in late 1930s San Antonio.

Although male chauvinism certainly existed in the CPUSA, the Communists were really the only political party which used the concept of male chauvinism in any way and sought to combat it. In this sense, it was continuing to develop a concept rooted in both the pre-World War I socialist and feminist movements. At times, these movements were allies, although often divided over what feminists saw as the Socialist Party leadership’s sellout of women’s rights and what male socialists’ saw as feminists’ “bourgeois” orientation, struggling for political rights and entry into elite positions at the expense of the larger working class.

The CPUSA actively bridged these differences, not with complete success by any means but to a greater degree than any other group. Within the women’s labor movement, the number of militant CPUSA-affiliated women who became union leaders was, from my readings, greater in percentage terms than the number of CPUSA-affiliated men, although this is very difficult to quantify since the deforming effects of anti-communist policy meant that CPUSA affiliations were often unacknowledged.

For example, in the rightly distinguished documentary, Union Maids, the stories of three 1930s women labor activists are told without, given the crippling effects of postwar McCarthyite repression, once mentioning that all three were CPUSA activists. In reality, they would have to have been Communists, given the support system they relied on to continue their struggles. In the documentary, all three women are asked to say what socialism meant and means to them. While this is done well, understanding the women and their conceptions of women’s rights, racism, sexism, and socialism is significantly reduced without any treatment of their CPUSA context.

Major histories of women in and of the CPUSA have yet to be written, just as systems of national health care, full employment policies, de jure and de facto gender equality, have yet to be established in the U.S. But there is much that we can say about the Communist contribution to gender equality and the negative effects of both anti-communist ideology and policy in undermining the struggle for women’s rights as it has undermined all people’s struggles.

Even before World War II, Communist-affiliated trade union women in the Communist-led United Electrical Workers union (UE) established the first contract in which women workers were given a larger hourly increase than men in an attempt to make up for long-term gender inequality, an early practical example of what would decades later be called affirmative action.

As the labor movement expanded and millions of new women workers were drawn into war work in the 1940s, Communist-affiliated women in the industrial unions especially fought to protect women workers from on-the-job discrimination and also to support federal legislation to provide public daycare services—legislation which was the first of its kind but which conservative coalition opposition in Congress defunded to the point that it became little more than tokenism.

CPUSA-affiliated women who were the wives of military personnel also organized around military bases in the U.S. (the great majority of the 15 million who served in the military did not see service, much less action abroad) to both fight against the effects of military segregation and also to oppose the racist violence that this segregation helped to engender, especially on Southern bases where legal segregation was in effect.

CPUSA-affiliated women continued to play a leading role in struggles for labor’s rights, against racism, and for peace during the Cold War era—in some respects an even larger role, given the success of the purges and blacklists and anti-Bill of Rights legislation frightening so many away from exercising their rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and association.

Communist-affiliated women played an important role in the formation of Women’s Strike for Peace in the 1960s and the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in the 1970s, even though institutional McCarthyism created in these and other organizations a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

Earlier women like Mary Licht, whom I had the privilege of knowing through the CPUSA’s History Commission and who had participated in the South at great risk in the defense of the Scottsboro Nine, dedicated the rest of their lives to the defense and development of the CPUSA. Women like Dorothy Burnham, African American scholar and intellectual whom I had and have the pleasure of knowing in the CPUSA, played important leadership roles.

In 1968, when the CPUSA, after nearly three decades of repression and what would be considered internationally as persecution, ran its first presidential campaign since 1940, Charlene Mitchell was the candidate at a time when the presidential candidate of any “third party,” left or right, was virtually unknown. She was the first Black woman to run for president of the United States.

The influence of political parties and social movements exists on many levels. Betty Friedan, for example, came from a middle-class Jewish American family in Illinois, attended an elite women’s college during World War II, and then did graduate work at Berkeley. There she became involved with a variety of political struggles, some of which included Communist Party activists, and she then went to work for the left-labor Federated Press. This media outlet attempted to provide for working-class media what the Associated Press did for capitalist media.

Friedan later wrote for the UE News and supported the Progressive Party in 1948. She grew up politically in a left movement and culture in which the CPUSA played the leading role. Although the postwar repression ended her career as a left-labor journalist, she continued to try to write for women’s publications as she settled uncomfortably into the role of a suburban housewife.

Issues of male chauvinism inside the CPUSA were revived during the early Cold War era and discussed in party clubs and forums as the repression sought to build what French Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called a “ring of fire” between Communists and their fellow citizens. Friedan, through her early 1960s work The Feminine Mystique, played an essential role in articulating what in socialist and later Communist circles was called “the women question.” She always went to great lengths to hide or simply ignore her past as she became a celebrity, and aimed her feminism initially at college-educated women frustrated with their lives as housewives whose labor was both unpaid and undervalued.

But one can find in her work an analysis of and resistance to ideologies of oppression that was a foundation of the Communist movement in the period in which she came of age politically. One can also find in her later work as a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) an emphasis on building broad, inclusive organizations and acting politically both inside and outside normal channels. She advocated lobbying for changes in the law, organizing mass protests to advance such changes, and preparing the movement for future advances. This kind of strategic and tactical outlook also characterized the Communist Party and the larger left movement which was the leading force in her youth.

The relationship between Communists and feminists in the 1950s and ’60s was complex, usually cooperative, and sometimes contradictory, as it had been much earlier between Socialists and feminists in the pre-World War I era. The ideological straitjacket that Cold War politics sought to trap all Americans in made it difficult to acknowledge and understand those relationships, but understanding them is very important if both the successes and failures of the past are to serve as guides to contemporary struggles.

Angela Davis took a very different path than Betty Friedan. An African American scholar, intellectual, and activist, Davis grew up in the postwar left and CPUSA political culture from which Friedan withdrew. She became a CPUSA member and supporter of the Black Panther Party, a teacher of philosophy, and a political prisoner whose acquittal in the early 1970s was itself a victory over a generation of political repression.

She also worked as an activist against racist and political repression, for comprehensive reform of the criminal justice system, and for the full inclusion of African Americans and all other minority peoples in a pluralistic democratic American culture. Although Davis later left the CPUSA, it was in a non-polemical way and, unlike some others, she never lent her name to anti-Communist activities and remains a friend of the party.

Davis became an international figure through her membership and leadership in the CPUSA for a generation. Her writings here and abroad reached large numbers with their eloquent portrayal of struggles in the U.S. against racism, male chauvinism, imperialism, mass incarceration, and war. She also reflected the CPUSA’s internationalist outlook by relating those struggles with people’s movements throughout the world.

One could go on and on listing the accomplishments of CPUSA and Communist movement-affiliated women to people’s movements and struggles, both the famous, like Anne Braden and Meridel LeSeuer, and the many less well-known activists fighting for tenants’ rights and rent control, campaigning to get city councils to pass resolutions for single-payer health insurance, the establishment of nuclear-free zones and nuclear disarmament, the transfer of billions from the military budget to people’s needs and more.

Although gender integration has advanced greatly in the U.S. and through many organizations, so much remains to be done. But the long-term struggles and achievements of Communist women in the supportive atmosphere the CPUSA established are indispensable contributions to the success of the campaigns to advance women’s liberation in both the present and the future.

Norman Markowitz is a Professor of History. He writes and teaches from a Marxist perspective, and has written many articles on a variety of topics, including biographical entries on Jimmy Hoffa, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the civil rights movement, 1930-1953, and poor peoples movements in U.S. history.

China publishes report on US’ hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices / by Xu Keyue

US double standards.Illustration:Liu Rui/GT

Originally published in Global Times on Fevruary 20, 2023

China on Monday released a report on US hegemony and its perils‡ to expose the US’ abuse of hegemony in the political, military, economic, financial, technological and cultural fields, by presenting the relevant facts, and to draw greater international attention to the perils of the US’ practices to world peace and stability and the well-being of all peoples. 

The report was published as the US has been escalating the great power competition across the globe, and its style of seeking hegemony has been transformed from “benevolent” to aggressive, forcing more and more countries and regions to take sides, said Chinese observers, warning that attempts by the US to suppress and contain China will only intensify in the near future.

Since becoming the world’s most powerful country after two world wars and the Cold War, the US has acted more boldly to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, and to pursue, maintain and abuse its hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community, said the report.

The report pointed out that the US has developed a hegemonic playbook to stage “color revolutions,” instigate regional disputes, and even directly launch wars under the guise of promoting democracy, freedom and human rights. Clinging to the Cold War mentality, the US has ramped up bloc politics and stoked conflict and confrontation. 

It has overstretched the concept of national security, abused export controls and forced unilateral sanctions upon others. It has taken a selective approach to international laws and rules, utilizing or discarding them as it sees fit, and has sought to impose rules that serve its own interests in the name of upholding a “rules-based international order.”

The report listed instances of US interference in other countries’ internal affairs. For example, in the name of “promoting democracy,” the country practiced a “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” in Latin America, instigated “color revolutions” in Eurasia, and orchestrated the “Arab spring” in West Asia and North Africa, bringing chaos and disaster to many countries.

During the past few years, the US also tried to encourage and support “color revolution” in China’s Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). Legislator Nixie Lam, of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong SAR, told the Global Times on Monday that in the past, the US extended its hand to China’s Hong Kong many times. 

Citing the List of Facts of the US Interfering in Hong Kong Affairs and Supporting Anti-China Chaos in Hong Kong, published by the Chinese Foreign Ministry in September 2021, Lam said China has warned US politicians and their agents who meddle in Hong Kong affairs that the Chinese government and people are determined to maintain Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability, and that any outside intervention is doomed to be futile.

Also, the report criticized that the country hosted the first “Summit for Democracy” in December 2021, which drew criticism and opposition from many countries for making a mockery of the spirit of democracy and dividing the world. 

In March 2023, it will host another “Summit for Democracy,” which remains unwelcome and will again find no support, said the report.

The first democracy summit was lackluster, and predictably, this year’s summit will be another ridiculous political show by Washington, Sun Chenghao, a research fellow at the Center for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times on Monday. 

There are plenty of problems with American democracy, and Sun questioned how it could be capable to act as a “democratic leader.”  

The report also pointed out that the US’ surveillance is indiscriminate. All can be targets of its surveillance, be they rivals or allies, or even leaders of allied countries such as former German chancellor Angela Merkel and several French presidents. 

Cyber surveillance and attacks launched by the US such as “Prism,” “Dirtbox,” “Irritant Horn” and “Telescreen Operation” are all proof that the US is closely monitoring its allies and partners. Such eavesdropping on allies and partners has already caused worldwide outrage. 

However, the US has always smeared other countries through spreading fictitious rumors over “surveillance incidents.” 

For example, the US House of Representatives voted to pass a resolution condemning “China’s use of the suspected surveillance balloon” that was shot down by US jets recently, CNN reported on February 9. China has stated that the Chinese civilian unmanned airship straying into US airspace was completely accidental due to force majeure, and it did not pose any threat to US personnel or safety.

According to the Chinese report, the US has fabricated excuses to clamp down on China’s high-tech enterprises with global competitiveness, and has put more than 1,000 Chinese enterprises on sanction lists.

The country has imposed controls on biotechnology, artificial intelligence and other high-end technologies, reinforced export restrictions, tightened investment screening, suppressed Chinese social media apps such as TikTok and WeChat, and lobbied the Netherlands and Japan to restrict exports of chips and related equipment or technology to China, the report said.

Sun believes that the stranglehold by the US on China in the field of science and technology is the most obvious and fiercest, as China’s catch-up momentum in the field is very obvious, which has exposed US anxiety over the potential loss of its leading position in the field.

The report said that the US’ unilateral, egoistic and regressive hegemonic practices have drawn increasing, intense criticism and opposition from the international community.

China opposes all forms of hegemonism and power politics, and it rejects interference in other countries’ internal affairs. The US must critically examine what it has done, let go of its arrogance and prejudice, and quit its hegemonic, domineering and bullying practices, the report concluded.

Xu Keyue is a, Bejing based, Global Times reporter following Australia and Japan issues, also with a focus on social issues and overseas studies.

‡ US Hegemony and Its Perils, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the People’s Republic of China, February 2, 2023.

Russia demands U.N. investigate Nord Stream pipeline sabotage; U.S. calls request a ‘distraction’ / by Roger McKenzie

Natural gas billows up from beneath the sea at the site of the sabotaged Nord Stream pipelines. | Swedish Government video footage via AP

Russia clashed with the United States and its allies on Tuesday over the Kremlin’s call for an investigation of last September’s sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines.

Russia’s United Nations ambassador Vasily Nebenzia told the Security Council that Moscow has “no trust” in the separate investigations being carried out by Denmark, Sweden, and Germany, but it does “fully trust” secretary-general Antonio Guterres to establish an independent international investigation.

Britain, the U.S., France, and others said that the real reason Russia raised Nord Stream 1 and 2 now was to divert attention from the first anniversary of its invasion of Ukraine.

“Today’s meeting is a blatant attempt to distract from this,” U.S. Political Minister-Counsellor John Kelley told the Council.

“As the world unites this week to call for a just and secure peace in Ukraine consistent with the U.N. Charter, Russia desperately wants to change the subject.”

Ahead of the meeting, the ambassadors of Denmark, Sweden, and Germany sent a letter to Council members saying their investigations have established the pipelines were extensively damaged “by powerful explosions due to sabotage,” which they say endangered “international security and give cause for our deep concern.”

The letter said that further investigations are being conducted in all three countries and Russian authorities have been informed about the investigations.

But Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador Dmitry Polyansky told reporters: “They are claiming that they are informing Russia about it which is not true. Any attempt for us to get any information was rejected by them or ignored.”

Russia circulated a draft resolution to council members late last week asking the UN secretary-general to urgently establish a commission to investigate the Nord Stream attacks.

Nebenzia said Moscow hasn’t been allowed to join investigations by any of the three countries, saying they “are not only not transparent, but it is quite clear that they seek just to cover the tracks and stick up for their U.S. brother.”

Russia has alleged that the U.S. was behind the sabotage, which its proposed resolution says “occurred after the repeated threats to the Nord Stream by the U.S. leadership.”

Kelley responded, telling the Council: “Accusations that the U.S. was involved in this act of sabotage are completely false. The U.S. was not involved in any way.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh—famous for exposing the My Lai Massacre, the secret bombing of Cambodia, and torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq—alleges that U.S. forces, with the help of the Norwegian military, planted the explosives that disabled the two pipelines last fall. The U.S. government denies Hersh’s accusation.

People’s World has an enormous challenge ahead of it—to raise $200,000 from readers and supporters in 2023, including $125,000 during the Fund Drive, which runs from Feb. 1 to May 1.

Please donate to help People’s World reach our $200,000 goal. We appreciate whatever you can donate: $5, $10, $25, $50, $100, or more.

Roger McKenzie is a journalist and general secretary of Liberation, a UK-based human rights organization which fights for economic and social justice, and opposes neo-colonialism, economic exploitation, and racism.

People’s World, February 23, 2003

Rage Against The War Machine Speech / By Chris Hedges

Murder King – by Mr. Fish

Originally published in Sheerpost on February 19, 2023

Hedges spoke at the Washington DC rally on Feb. 19 alongside an array of other notable speakers.

Idolatry is the primal sin from which all other sins derive. Idols tempt us to become God. They  demand the sacrifice of others in the mad quest for wealth, fame or power. But the idol always ends by requiring self-sacrifice, leaving us to perish on the blood-soaked altars we erected for others. 

For empires are not murdered, they commit suicide at the feet of the idols that entrance them. 

We are here today to denounce the unelected, unaccountable high priests of Empire, who funnel the bodies of millions of victims, along with trillions of our national wealth, into the bowels of our own version of the Canaanite idol, Moloch.

The political class, the media, the entertainment industry, the financiers and even religious institutions bay like wolves for the blood of Muslims or Russians or Chinese, or whoever the idol has demonized as unworthy of life. There were no rational objectives in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Somalia. There are none in Ukraine. Permanent war and industrial slaughter are their own justification. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman earn billions of dollars in profits. The vast expenditures demanded by the Pentagon are sacrosanct. The cabal of warmongering pundits, diplomats and technocrats, who smugly dodge responsibility for the array of military disasters they orchestrate, are protean, shifting adroitly with the political tides, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Julien Benda called these courtiers to power “the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia.”

These pimps of war do not see the corpses of their victims. I did. Including children. Every lifeless body I stood over as a reporter in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia, or Kosovo, month after month, year after year, exposed their moral bankruptcy, intellectual dishonesty, sick bloodlust and delusional fantasies. They are puppets of the Pentagon, a state within a state, and the weapons manufacturers who lavishly fund their think tanks: Project for the New American Century, Foreign Policy Initiative, American Enterprise Institute, Center for a New American Security, Institute for the Study of War, Atlantic Council and Brookings Institute. Like some mutant strain of an antibiotic-resistant bacteria, they cannot be vanquished. It does not matter how wrong they are, how absurd their theories of global dominance, how many times they lie or denigrate other cultures and societies as uncivilized or how many they condemn to death. They are immovable props, parasites vomited up in the dying days of all empires, ready to sell us the next virtuous war against whoever they have decided is the new Hitler. The map changes. The game is the same.

Pity our prophets, those who wander the desolate landscape crying out in the darkness. Pity Julian Assange, undergoing a slow-motion execution in a high-security prison in London. He committed Empire’s fatal sin. He exposed its crimes, its machinery of death, its moral depravity. 

A society that prohibits the capacity to speak in truth extinguishes the capacity to live in justice.

Some here today might like to think of themselves as radicals, maybe even revolutionaries. But what we are demanding on the political spectrum is, in fact, conservative: the restoration of the rule of law. It is simple and basic. It should not, in a functioning republic, be incendiary. But living in truth in a despotic system, one the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called “inverted totalitarianism,” is subversive. 

The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious mouth pieces in the media and academia, are illegitimate. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins. Prove this truth, as Julian did, and you are crucified.

“Red Rosa now has vanished too…” Bertolt Brecht wrote of the murdered socialist Rosa Luxemburg. “She told the poor what life is about, And so the rich have rubbed her out.”

We have undergone a corporate coup d’état, where the poor and working men and women, half of whom lack $400 to cover an emergency expense, are reduced to chronic instability. Joblessness and food insecurity are endemic. Our communities and cities are desolate. War, financial speculation, constant surveillance and militarized police that function as internal armies of occupation are the only real concerns of the state. Even habeas corpus no longer exists. We, as citizens, are commodities to corporate systems of power, used and discarded. And the endless wars we fight overseas have spawned the wars we fight at home, as the students I teach in the New Jersey prison system are acutely aware. All empires die in the same act of self-immolation. The tyranny the Athenian empire imposed on others, Thucydides noted in his history of the Peloponnesian war, it finally imposed on itself.

To fight back, to reach out and help the weak, the oppressed and the suffering, to save the planet from ecocide, to decry the domestic and international crimes of the ruling class, to demand justice, to live in truth, to smash the graven images, is to bear the mark of Cain.

Those in power must feel our wrath, which means constant acts of non-violent civil disobedience, social and political disruption. Organized power from below is the only power that can save us. Politics is a game of fear. It is our duty to make those in power very, very afraid.

The ruling oligarchy has us locked in its death grip. It cannot be reformed. It obscures and falsifies the truth.  It is on a maniacal quest to increase its obscene wealth and unchecked power. It forces us to kneel before its false gods. And so, to quote the Queen of Hearts, metaphorically, of course, I say, “Off with their heads!” 

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He was an early and outspoken critic of the US plan to invade and occupy Iraq and called the press coverage at the time “shameful cheerleading.” He is the author of the 2002 best seller, War is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, which is an examination of what war does to individuals and societies. He states that war is the pornography of violence, a powerful narcotic that “…has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque.” Hedges has also published the following books: What Every Person Should Know About War (2003); Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America (2005); American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2008); I Don’t Believe in Atheists (2008); Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle ( 2009); and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012). He writes a weekly column for Truthdig.com

China blasts the US for trampling on the sovereignty of other nations / by Morning Star Staff

China has imposed trade and investment sanctions on US military contractors Lockheed Martin and Raytheon for supplying weapons to Taiwan

Originally published in Morning Star: The People’s Daily on February 16, 2023

CHINA’S National People’s Congress’s foreign affairs committee accused US lawmakers on Thursday of trampling on the sovereignty of other nations.

This comes after the United States passed a measure condemning a suspected Chinese spy balloon’s intrusion into US airspace.

The House of Representatives resolution, passed unanimously, condemned China for a “brazen violation” of US sovereignty and efforts to “deceive the international community through false claims about its intelligence collection campaigns.”

The Chinese foreign relations committee said the resolution “deliberately exaggerated the ‘China threat’.”

It said the move was “purely malicious hype and political manipulation.

“Some US Congress politicians fanned the flames, fully exposing their sinister designs to oppose and contain China.”

The statement added: “In fact, it is the United States that wantonly interferes in other countries’ internal affairs, violates their sovereignty and conducts surveillance on other countries.”

The statement repeated Beijing’s insistence that the balloon was an unmanned civilian weather research airship, a claim the US has dismissed.

While China expressed regret over the February 4 incident, it has since toughened its stance in response to the continued rhetoric from Washington.

On Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry said it would take measures against US entities and followed this up on Thursday by sanctioning Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Missile and Defence Corporation, saying they were now on an “unreliable entities list.”

The sanctions against the two major weapons manufacturers are said by the Chinese to be related to the sale of arms to Taiwan, but the new regulations prevent them from “engaging in import and export activities related to China.”

Along with Congress’s passing of the resolution, Washington decided to sanction six Chinese entities it said are linked to Beijing’s aerospace programmes.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also cancelled a visit to Beijing, which helped to plunge relations to their lowest in decades amid disputes over trade, human rights, Taiwan and China’s claim to the South China Sea.

Without providing evidence, US officials have said China operates a fleet of such balloons, which are a relatively inexpensive and difficult to detect method of gathering intelligence.

The US government determined the balloon posed little risk to national security and allowed it to fly across the continent before bringing it down with a missile off the coast of South Carolina.

The Morning Star is a British daily newspaper originally founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), ownership was transferred from the CPGB to an independent readers’ co-operative in 1945. The paper was then renamed and reinvented as the Morning Star in 1966. The paper describes its editorial stance as in line with Britain’s Road to Socialism, the programme of the Communist Party of Britain.

The US Destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline / An Interview with Seymour Hersh by Fabian Scheidler

Seymour Hersh speaking at the Molly Awards banquet on June 10, 2010. (Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc / Getty Images)

Originally published in Jacobin on February 15, 2023

Last week, renowned investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article claiming that the US was responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline transporting natural gas to Germany from Russia. He spoke to Jacobin about the allegations.

On September 26, 2022, the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany was largely destroyed by several explosions in the Baltic Sea. Last week, the award-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published an article, based on information from a single anonymous source, arguing that the Biden administration and the CIA were responsible.

Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for the role he played in breaking the story of the Mỹ Lai massacre, an incident in which US soldiers killed between three and five hundred unarmed civilians. He spoke to Fabian Scheidler for Jacobin about the allegations he made in his most recent article and the influence that the CIA and the national security state has on American foreign policy.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

Please start to lay out your findings in detail. What happened precisely according to your source, who was involved, and what were the motives behind it?

SEYMOUR HERSH

What I’ve done is simply explain the obvious. It was just a story that was begging to be told. In late September of 2022, eight bombs were supposed to go off; six went off under the water near the island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, in the area where it is rather shallow. They destroyed three of the four major pipelines in the Nord Stream 1 and 2.

Nord Stream 1 has been feeding gas fuel [to Germany] for many years at very low prices. And then both pipelines were blown up, and the question was why, and who did it. On February 7, 2022, in the buildup to the war in Ukraine, the president of the United States, Joe Biden, at a press conference at the White House with German chancellor Olaf Scholz, said that we can stop Nord Stream.

ABIAN SCHEIDLER

The exact wording from Joe Biden was “If Russia invades, there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it.” And when a reporter asked how exactly he intended to do it, given that the project was within the control of Germany, Biden just said, “I promise we will be able to do it.”

SEYMOUR HERSH

His under secretary of state, Victoria Nuland, who was deeply involved in what they call the Maidan Revolution in 2014, used similar language a couple of weeks earlier.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

You say that the decision to take out the pipeline was taken even earlier by President Biden. You lay out the story from the beginning, chronologically from December 2021, when the national security advisor Jake Sullivan convened, according to your piece, a meeting of the newly formed task force from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the State and the Treasury departments. You write, “Sullivan intended for the group to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines.”

SEYMOUR HERSH

This group initially was convened in December to study the problem. They brought in the CIA and so on; they were meeting in a very secret office. Right next door to the White House, there’s an office building that’s called the Executive Office Building. It is connected underground through a tunnel. And at the top of it is a meeting place for a secret group, an outside group of advisors called the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. I only reported that to let the people in the White House know that I do know something.

The meeting was convened to study the problem: What are we going to do if Russia is going to war? This is three months before the war, before Christmas of 2022. It was a high-level group; it probably had a different name, I just called it the “interagency group” — I don’t know the formal name, if there was one. It was the CIA and the National Security Agency, which monitors and intercepts communications; the State Department and the Treasury Department, which supplies money; and probably a few other groups that were involved. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had representation as well.

The big task they had was to give recommendations about what to do about stopping Russia, measures that are either reversible, like more sanctions and economic pressure, or irreversible, kinetic things — exploding things, for example. I don’t want to talk specifically about any particular meeting because I have to protect my source. I don’t know how many people were at the meeting, do you understand what I mean?

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

In the article, you wrote that, in early 2022, the CIA working group reported back to Sullivan’s interagency group and they said, “We have a way to blow up the pipelines.”

SEYMOUR HERSH

They did have a way. There were people there who understood what we call in America “mine warfare.” In the United States Navy, there are groups that go into submarines — there’s also one command about nuclear engineering — and there is a mining command. Underground mining is very important, and we have skilled miners. Probably the most important place for training miners is in this little resort town called Panama City in the middle of nowhere in Florida.

We train very good people there and we use them. Miners are very important. You get clogged entries into ports; they can blow up things in the way. If we don’t like a certain country’s underwater pipelines for oil, we can blow them up too. It’s not always good things they do but they’re very secretive. For the group at the White House, it was clear they could blow up the pipelines. There’s an explosive called C-4, which is incredibly powerful, devastating particularly with the amount they use. You can control and operate it remotely with underwater sonar devices. They send very low-frequency signals.

So it was possible, and they told the White House that, by early January, because two or three weeks later, Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said we can do it. I think this was January 20. And then the president as well, with Olaf Scholz, said on February 7 that we could do it. Scholz said nothing specific; he was vague. But a question that I would ask Scholz, if I had a parliamentary hearing, is this: Did President Biden tell you about this? Did he tell you at that time why he was so confident he could blow it up?

We didn’t have a plan yet, but we knew we had the capability to do it.

Gas emanates from the damaged Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the Baltic Sea, September 28, 2022. (Swedish Coast Guard via Getty Images)

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

What role did Norway play in the operation?

SEYMOUR HERSH

Well, Norway is a great seaman nation, and they have underground energy. They’re also very anxious to increase the amount of natural gas they can sell to Western Europe and Germany. And they have done that, they’ve increased their export. So, for economic reasons, why not join with the United States? They also have a residual dislike of Russia.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

In your article, you write that the Secret Service and the navy of Norway were involved, and you say that Sweden and Denmark were sort of briefed but not told everything.

SEYMOUR HERSH

The way it was put to me is: if you didn’t tell them, you didn’t need to tell them. In other words, you were doing what you were doing, and they knew what you were doing and they understood what was going on, but maybe nobody ever said yes. I worked on that issue very much with the people I was talking to. The bottom line is, to do this mission, the Norwegians had to find the right place. The divers that were being trained in Panama City could go to three hundred feet underwater without a heavy diving tank, only a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen and helium.

The Norwegians found us a place off Bornholm island in the Baltic that was only 260-feet deep so they could operate. They would have to return slowly. There was a decompression chamber, and we used the Norwegian submarine hunter. Only two divers were used for the four pipelines.

One problem was how to deal with those people who monitor the Baltic Sea. It is very thoroughly monitored, and there’s a great deal of openly available information, so we took care of this; there were three or four different people for that. And what we then did is really simple. Every summer for twenty-one years, our navy Sixth Fleet, which has control of the Mediterranean and also the Baltic Sea, has an exercise for NATO navies in the Baltic (BALTOPS). And we’d bring a navy carrier or large ships around. It was a very open thing. The Russians certainly knew about it. We did publicity. And in this one, for the first time in history, the Baltic Sea NATO operation had a new program. It was going to have an exercise in dropping mines and finding mines for ten or twelve days.

Several nations sent out mining teams, and one group would drop the mine and another mining group from their country would go hunt and blow it up. So you had a period where there are things blowing up, and in that time the Norwegians could recover deep-sea divers. The two pipelines run about a mile apart; they’re under the dirt a little but they’re not hard to get to, and they had practiced this. It didn’t take more than a few hours to plant the bombs.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

So this was in June 2022?

SEYMOUR HERSH

Yes, they did it around ten days into June, at the end of the exercise, but at the last minute the White House got nervous. The president said he’s afraid of doing it. He changed his mind and gave them the order that he wanted the right to bomb anytime, to set the bombs off anytime remotely by us. You do it with just a regular sonar, actually a Raytheon build. You fly over and drop a cylinder down. It sends a low-frequency signal — you can describe it as a flute sound tone, you can make different frequencies. But the worry was that one of the bombs, if left in the water too long, would not work, and two did not — they only got three of the four pipelines. So there was a panic inside the group to find the right means, and we actually had to go to other intelligence agencies that I didn’t write about.I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

And so what happened then? They placed it, they found a way to control it remotely . . .

SEYMOUR HERSH

Joe Biden decided not to blow them up. It was in early June, five months into the war, but then, in September, he decided to do it.

I’ll tell you something. The operational people, the people who do kinetic things for the United States, they do what the president says, and they initially thought this was a useful weapon that he could use in negotiations.

But at some point, once the Russians went in, and then when the operation was done, this became increasingly odious to the people who did it. These are well-trained people; they are in the highest level of secret intelligence agencies. They turned on the project. They thought this was an insane thing to do. And within a week, or three or four days after the bombing, after they did what they were ordered to, there was a lot of anger and hostility. This is obviously reflected in the fact that I’m learning so much about it.

And I’ll tell you something else. The people in America and Europe who build pipelines know what happened. I’m telling you something important. The people who own companies that build pipelines know the story. I didn’t get the story from them but I learned quickly they know.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

Let’s go back to this situation in June last year. President Joe Biden decided not to do it directly and postponed it. So why did they do it then in September?

SEYMOUR HERSH

The secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, said a few days after the pipeline was blown up, at a news conference, that a major economic and almost military force was taken away from Vladimir Putin. He said this was a tremendous opportunity, as Russia could no longer weaponize the pipelines — meaning that it was not able to force Western Europe not to support the United States in the war. The fear was that Western Europe would not go along any longer in the war. I think that the reason they decided to do it then was that the war wasn’t going well for the West, and they were afraid with winter coming. The Nord Stream 2 has been sanctioned by Germany, and the United States was afraid that Germany would lift the sanctions because of a bad winter.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

According to you, what were the motives when you look behind the scenes? The US government was opposed to the pipeline for many reasons. Some say they were opposed to it because they wanted to weaken Russia, to weaken the ties between Russia and Western Europe, Germany especially. But maybe also to weaken the German economy, which, after all, is a competitor to the US economy. With the high gas prices, enterprises have started to move to the United States. So what’s your sense of the motives of the US government, if they blew up the pipeline?

SEYMOUR HERSH

I don’t think they thought it through. I know this sounds strange. I don’t think that Blinken and some others in the administration are deep thinkers. There certainly are people in the American economy who like the idea of us being more competitive. We’re selling LNG, liquefied gas, at extremely big profits; we’re making a lot of money on it. I’m sure there were some people thinking, boy, this is going to be a long-time boost for the American economy.

But in that White House, I think the obsession was always reelection, and they wanted to win the war, they wanted to get a victory, they want Ukraine to somehow magically win.

There could be some people who think maybe it’ll be better for our economy if the German economy is weak, but that’s crazy thinking. I think, basically, that we’ve bitten deep into something that’s not going to work. The war is not going to turn out well for this government.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

How do you think this war could end?

SEYMOUR HERSH

It doesn’t matter what I think. What I know is there’s no way this war is going to turn out the way we want, and I don’t know what we’re going to do as we go further down the line. It scares me if the president was willing to do this.

And the people who did this mission believed that the president did realize what he was doing to the people of Germany, that he was punishing them for a war that wasn’t going well. And in the long run, this is going to be very detrimental not only to his reputation as the president but politically too. It’s going to be a stigma for America.

So what you have is a White House that thought it may have a losing card: Germany and Western Europe may stop giving the arms we want and the German chancellor could turn the pipeline on — that was always a fear. I would be asking a lot of questions to Chancellor Scholz. I would ask him what he learned in February when he was with the president. The operation was a big secret, and the president wasn’t supposed to tell anybody about this capability. But he does talk. He says things that he doesn’t want to.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

Your story was reported in Western media with some restraint and criticism. Some attacked your reputation or said that you have only one anonymous source, and that’s not reliable.

SEYMOUR HERSH

How could I possibly talk about a source? I’ve written many stories based on unnamed sources. If I named somebody, they’d be fired, or, worse, jailed. The law is so strict. I’ve never had anybody exposed, and of course when I write I say, as I did in this article, it’s a source, period. And over the years, the stories I’ve written have always been accepted. I have used for this story the same caliber of skilled fact-checkers as had worked with me at the New Yorker magazine. Of course, there are many ways to verify obscure information told to me.

And, you know, a personal attack on me doesn’t get to the point. The point is that Biden chose to keep Germany cold this winter. The president of the United States would rather see Germany cold [because of energy shortages] than Germany possibly not supportive in the Ukraine war, and that, to me, is going to be a devastating thing for this White House. For me, and I think also for the people on the mission, it was appalling.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

The point is also that it can be perceived as an act of war not only against Russia but against Western allies, especially Germany.

SEYMOUR HERSH

Let’s keep it simple. I can tell you that the people involved in the operation saw the president as choosing to keep Germany cold for his short-range political goals, and that horrified them. I’m talking about American people that are intensely loyal to the United States. In the CIA, it’s understood that, as I put it in my article, they work for the Crown, they don’t work for the Constitution.

The one virtue of the CIA is that a president, who can’t get his agenda through Congress and nobody listens to him, can take a walk in the backyard of the Rose Garden of the White House with the CIA director and somebody can get hurt eight thousand miles away. That’s always been the selling point of the CIA, which I have problems with. But even that community is appalled that he chose to keep Europe cold in support of a war that he’s not going to win. And that, to me, is heinous.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

You said in your article that the planning of the attack was not reported to Congress, as is necessary with other covert operations.

SEYMOUR HERSH

It also wasn’t reported to many places inside the military. There were other people in other institutions that should have known but were not informed. The operation was very secret.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

There was some critique of your article by people who are engaged in evaluating open-source intelligence (OSINT) on ships and airplanes in the Baltic Sea region, saying that no Norwegian plane was detected directly at the spot of the explosions on September 26 or the days before.

SEYMOUR HERSH

Any serious covert operation takes OSINT into account and works around it. As I said, there were people on the mission who took care of this issue.

FABIAN SCHEIDLER

What role does courage play for you in your profession?

SEYMOUR HERSH

What’s courageous about telling the truth? Our job isn’t to be afraid. And sometimes it gets ugly. There have been times in my life, when — you know, I don’t talk about it. Threats aren’t made to people like me; they’re made to children of people like me. There’s been awful stuff. But you don’t worry about it — you can’t. You have to just do what you do.

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American investigative journalist.

Fabian Scheidler is a Berlin-based journalist and the author of The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization.

Mexico’s President Would Build Alliance to Counter Cuba Blockade / By William T. Whitney Jr.

Photo credit: People’s Dispatch

On the occasion of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s visit recently to Mexico, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) raised the possibility of many nations cooperating to oppose the U.S blockade of Cuba. AMLO has become Cuba’s champion in the international arena, and perhaps not accidentally: the governments of the two nations each originated from social and political revolutions.

The two leaders have built a tight relationship.  Diaz-Canal visited to Mexico in September, 2021. AMLO was in Cuba in May, 2022. And AMLO refused to attend a U.S – organized Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles in June 2022 because Cuba had been excluded. 

Accompanied by Cuban government officials, Díaz-Canel on February 11 joined AMLO in the Mexican state of Campeche. That Cuban medical teams are working there now may have helped determine the meeting’s location.

In remarks at a medical center,  AMLO lauded Cuba’s medical solidarity and described his own people’s unmet social needs. He called upon the U.S. government to end its blockade of Cuba:

[Cuba] has our respect, our gratitude, our support, and we are going to continue demanding the removal, the elimination of the blockade against Cuba, which is inhumane. And there’s more than voting in the United Nations where the anti-blockade resolution is always approved overwhelmingly, and then it’s back to the way it was.

I promise President Miguel Díaz-Canel that Mexico will be leading a more active movement so that all countries come together and defend the independence and sovereignty of Cuba. No longer will there be anything about treating Cuba as a terrorist country or putting Cuba on the black list of supposed terrorists.

Cuba has been able to count on support from Mexico. As the Bay of Pigs invasion was unfolding in 1961, former Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas spoke in defense of Cuba before 80,000 people in Mexico City’s Zocalo. Soon afterwards, Mexico’s government backed Cuba in the United Nations. Later Mexico rejected calls by the U.S. – dominated Organization of American States for member states to impose economic sanctions against Cuba and break off diplomatic ties.

AMLO visited Cuba in May, 2022. Speaking before Cuban leaders, he recalled “times when the United States wanted to own the continent …. They were annexing, deciding on independence wherever; creating new countries, freely associated states, protectorates, military bases; and … invading.”  The U.S. government, he declared, needs to know “that a new relationship among the peoples of America … is possible.”

While in Cuba he signed agreements for Mexican young people to study medicine in Cuba, for Cuba to provide Mexico with anti-Covid vaccines, and for hundreds of Cuban physicians to work in Mexico in underserved areas.

Months before, in September 2021, Díaz-Canel was the honored guest at celebrations in Mexico City of the 200th anniversary of Mexico’s national independence. Welcoming his guest, AMLO praised Cuba’s steadfastness in defending its revolution. Calling upon U.S. political leaders to lift the blockade on Cuba, he appealed to their good sense and rationality, saying nothing about nations uniting in opposition to the blockade. 

Photo credit: People’s Dispatch

[The U.S. government] must lift its blockade against Cuba, because no state has a right to subjugate another people, or another country … [And] It looks very bad that the U.S. government uses the blockade to hurt the people of Cuba in order to force them by necessity to confront their own government … President Biden, who shows political sensitivity, [must] take a wider view and put a permanent end to the politics of grievances against Cuba.

The emphasis was different, however, when the two leaders met recently, on February 11 in Campeche. AMLO unveiled an evolved and more forceful approach to ending the blockade. He bestowed upon Díaz-Canel Mexico’s highest recognition extended to foreign notables, the Aztec Eagle, and then praised Cuba as a special case for its strenuous resistance to U.S. enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine. He continued: 

I also maintain that it is time for a new coexistence among all the countries of America, because that model imposed more than two centuries ago is completely exhausted, it is anachronistic, it has no future. There is no way out, it no longer benefits anyone, we must put aside the trade-off imposed on us either to go along with the United States or be in opposition, courageously and defensively. 

It is time to express and explore another option, that of dialoguing with the leaders of all the countries and especially with U.S. leaders, and convince and persuade them that a new relationship between the countries of our continent, of all America, is possible. I believe that conditions are perfect now for achieving this goal of mutual respect.

In an interview later on, Mexican foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard offered some specifics:

President Lopez Obrador wants to bring the presidents of the progressive states of Latin America together to address food security, well-being and other issues that are important for our community of nations. This is something we have to discuss with other foreign ministers and move forward in the coming months. 

The progressive governments AMLO has in mind, according to Ebrard, are Mexico, Argentina, Brazil. Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, and Honduras. They include “the three largest economies in Latin America.” The implication may be that these countries, collaborating on various issues, political ones included, have sufficient economic clout to pressure the United States on Cuba.

President Díaz-Canel himself has been building other bridges. In recent weeks he visited Belize, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Barbados, for the 7th CARICOM (Caribbean Community) – Cuba Summit meeting.

AMLO’s focus on progressive nations is crucial. He has worked toward reviving the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) as a vehicle for collective action, despite participation there by conservatively-governed nations. Yet he did not attend the CELAC summit taking place in January and so may be discouraged as to prospects for CELAC serving his purposes. 

AMLO’s power to orchestrate regional support is limited. Only 18 months remain of his six-year term as president of a country dependent economically on the United States and divided geographically, ethnically, and by social class. Nevertheless, Cuba, whose external resources for ending the U.S. economic blockade are hardly infinite, badly needs international partnering that offers persuasive power. Lifelines thrown by AMLO are a start in that direction. 

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.

Chomsky and Prashad: Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism / BY Noam Chomsky, Vijay Prashad

José Rodríguez Fuster (Cuba), Granma, 2013. Source: “A Bit of Hope That Doesn’t Come from Miami: The Sixteenth Newsletter (2021),” The Tricontinental, April 22, 2021.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Cuba, a country of 11 million people, has been under an illegal embargo by the United States government for over six decades.

Despite this embargo, Cuba’s people have been able to transcend the indignities of hunger, ill health, and illiteracy, all three being social plagues that continue to trouble much of the world.

Due to its innovations in health care delivery, for instance, Cuba has been able to send its medical workers to other countries, including during the pandemic, to provide vital assistance. Cuba exports its medical workers, not terrorism.

In the last days of the Trump administration, the U.S. government returned Cuba to its state sponsors of terrorism list.

This was a vindictive act. Trump said it was because Cuba played host to guerrilla groups from Colombia, which was actually part of Cuba’s role as host of the peace talks.

Cuba played a key role in bringing peace in Colombia, a country that has been wracked by a terrible civil war since 1948 that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. For two years, the Biden administration has maintained Trump’s vindictive policy, one that punishes Cuba not for terrorism but for the promotion of peace.

Biden can remove Cuba from this list with a stroke of his pen. It’s as simple as that. When he was running for the presidency, Biden said he would even reverse the harsher of Trump’s sanctions. But he has not done so. He must do so now.

Noam Chomsky is a linguist, philosopher, and political activist. He is the laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. His most recent books are Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet and The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

MR Online, February 14, 2023, https://mronline.org/

Info-Picketing Starbucks Stores for Valentine’s Day / by CP Maine Staff

Today, Starbucks workers and their allies were out in front of over one hundred stores across the nation, explaining to customers that union-busting not only hurts workers, but customers too.

Biddeford Maine Starbucks | twitter.com/MaineSBWU

They informed customers about the impact of the company’s reduction of labor hours on customer service and working conditions. This, they explained, was the reason for the longer wait times customers are experiencing. They asked customers for their support, requesting that they sign the “No Contract, No Coffee Pledge.”

Customers received flyers that stated, “Starbucks thinks there are too many workers making your order, so they are cutting labor and you are paying the price. Same cost to you, but double the wait times, and less time connecting with our community.”

Handing out flyers outside the Starbucks store on Congress Street in Portland, Maine, Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) supporters said that their interactions with customers and other passersby were overwhelmingly positive.

Valentine’s Day may be all about “sharing the love,” but today Starbucks workers and allies decided to share with the people “the love they lack from the company whose profits are soaring.”

“Starbucks is cutting labor hours despite record breaking profits year after year,” according to a recent SBWU statement, “[t]his causes workers to be financially stressed and overworked, and it causes customers to experience significantly longer wait times. We’re asking customers to stand with the over 7,000 baristas who have joined Starbucks Workers United as we fight this retaliation.”

The SBWU is making good on its promise to increase its efforts to enlist the company’s customers as allies in its nationwide organizing drive.

The SBWU is asking supporters to sign this pledge:

https://crm.broadstripes.com/ctf/SJID0H

Starbucks Workers United