Foundations for Empire: Corporate Philanthropy and US Foreign Policy

Ceasefire Magazine

May 20, 2012

 

Professor Inderjeet Parmar, chairman of the prestigious British International Studies Association, has written an interesting book: Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power (Columbia University Press, 2012) in which he argues that philanthropic foundations have provided “a key means of building the ‘American century,’ or an American Imperium, a hegemony constructed in significant part via cultural and intellectual penetration.”

In making the case for this uncontroversial conclusion, he acknowledges that his work builds upon Edward Berman’s “excellent monograph” The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (State University of New York Press, 1983). Yet despite these kind words, rather than extending and deepening Berman’s seminal study, Parmar seems to have only revisited it to provide a less radical alternative (albeit Gramscian).

With his sights firmly set on documenting the role of foundations in constructing “global knowledge networks”, Parmar mistakenly concludes that the creation of such networks “appears to be their principal long-term achievement.” However, on a more accurate note, he subsequently adds that “despite their oft-stated aims of eradicating poverty, uplifting the poor, improving living standards, aiding economic development, and so on, even the U.S. foundations’ own assessments of their impact show that they largely have failed in these efforts.”

But while the Big Three foundations may well have created strong global knowledge networks, their principal long-term achievement has simply been to undermine efforts to promote a meaningful democratic alternative to capitalism, both at home and abroad. With foundation knowledge networks being just one instrument among many that have been used to consolidate capitalism.

Other significant tools to enforce American global hegemony include the military, and a commitment to shaping public opinion through propaganda (which is based on the foundations’ “belief in the pervasiveness of popular ignorance and the consequent need for elites to ‘educate’ the people in ‘right thinking’”).[1]

Providing evidence of the central role of foundations in manufacturing consent (both of the masses and of elites), Parmar investigates the work of Hadley Cantril’s Office of Public Opinion Research, a body formed at Princeton University in 1940, with a $90,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Using archival records, Parmar illustrates that Cantril worked with military intelligence agencies during the war, and undertook studies of public attitudes towards Latin America; adding that by 1943 Cantril had received a further $50,000 from the government that did not include “unspecified amounts from the coordinator of inter-American affairs.”

Parmar also points out that the U.S. Army opened a Psychological Warfare Research Bureau within Cantril’s Princeton office. However, despite undertaking archival research into such matters Parmar apparently forgot to conduct a literature review on this subject,[2] only citing one other writer (Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion), whose valid criticisms of foundations he then chose to ignore. →

FLASKBACK | 1997 | Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America

“NGOs emphasize projects, not movements; they “mobilize” people to produce at the margins but not to struggle to control the basic means of production and wealth; they focus on technical financial assistance of projects, not on structural conditions that shape the everyday lives of people. The NGOs co-opt the language of the left: “popular power,” “empowerment,” “gender equality,” “sustainable development,” “bottom-up leadership.” The problem is that this language is linked to a framework of collaboration with donors and government agencies that subordinate practical activity to non-confrontational politics.”

by James Petra

Monthly Review

1997, Volume 49, Issue 07 (December)

By the early 1980s the more perceptive sectors of the neoliberal ruling classes realized that their policies were polarizing the society and provoking large-scale social discontent. Neoliberal politicians began to finance and promote a parallel strategy “from below,” the promotion of “grassroots” organization with an “anti-statist” ideology to intervene among potentially conflictory classes, to create a “social cushion.” These organizations were financially dependent on neoliberal sources and were directly involved in competing with socio-political movements for the allegiance of local leaders and activist communities. By the 1990s these organizations, described as “nongovernmental,” numbered in the thousands and were receiving close to four billion dollars world-wide.

Neoliberalism and the NGOs

The confusion concerning the political character of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) stems from their earlier history in the 1970s during the days of the dictatorships. In this period they were active in providing humanitarian support to the victims of the military dictatorship and denouncing human rights violations. The NGOs supported “soup kitchens” which allowed victimized families to survive the first wave of shock treatments administered by the neoliberal dictatorships. This period created a favorable image of NGOs even among the left. They were considered part of the “progressive camp.”

Even then, however, the limits of the NGOs were evident. While they attacked the human rights violations of local dictatorships, they rarely denounced the U.S. and European patrons who financed and advised them. Nor was there a serious effort to link the neoliberal economic policies and human rights violations to the new turn in the imperialist system. Obviously the external sources of funding limited the sphere of criticism and human rights action.

As opposition to neoliberalism grew in the early 1980s, the U.S. and European governments and the World Bank increased their funding of NGOs. There is a direct relation between the growth of social movements challenging the neoliberal model and the effort to subvert them by creating alternative forms of social action through the NGOs. The basic point of convergence between the NGOs and the World Bank was their common opposition to “statism.” On the surface the NGOs criticized the state from a “left” perspective defending civil society, while the right did so in the name of the market. In reality, however, the World Bank, the neoliberal regimes, and western foundations co-opted and encouraged the NGOs to undermine the national welfare state by providing social services to compensate the victims of the multinational corporations (MNCs). In other words, as the neoliberal regimes at the top devastated communities by inundating the country with cheap imports, extracting external debt payment, abolishing labor legislation, and creating a growing mass of low-paid and unemployed workers, the NGOs were funded to provide “self-help” projects, “popular education,” and job training, to temporarily absorb small groups of poor, to co-opt local leaders, and to undermine anti-system struggles. →

New Twist of Capitalism: The Demobilization of Citizens

Thinkers and strategists of international capitalism are aware of this growing threat of citizen movement in developed countries. In this article we advance some thoughts and arguments about the ways in which capitalism is making a new twist to keep irreplaceable as an economic system: the demobilization of citizens. 

by Rafael Yus and Paco Puche
Rebellion

June 25, 2011

[Translated from Spanish to English via Google Translator.]

Far left Marxist thesis based on the existence of objective conditions (contradictions) so that, mechanically, was given the transition from a capitalist society to a communist society. Capitalism, dominated by the liberal economy and a democratic political system called (but based only deposit a ballot every four years), has been surviving in spite of the continuing crises inherent in the system. The causes are complex and this is not adequate space to develop them, but we note some touches that show the extraordinary capacity for reinvention of capitalism, though not an eternal system, but sooner or later is destined to disappear , as predicted from Marxism.

In the early twentieth century was brought to the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry, under the direction of the first to start a socialist revolution. But this happened in an industrial phase of capitalism that had as resource consumption and market their own national territories. Although the flame lit in some places (Russia, China, etc..), Capitalism reinvented itself through processes of internationalization of the pool of resources and the consumer society. This led to the gradual growth of the middle class, which began to swell up lower sectors of the classic proletariat and bourgeoisie classic. The increase of purchasing power needed to sustain industrial overproduction, caused a feeling of never being felt by the masses of the population and only interrupted by the cyclical crises of overproduction and underconsumption. Thus, the welfare of large middle classes in developed countries rests on the exploitation (development projects via debt or industrial relocation to lower cost of labor) of developing countries, leaving for class developed countries’ average consumption functions of the goods produced, services and speculative capitalism. And also rests on the exploitation of nonrenewable resources unsustainably increasing amounts, not to mention environmental damage and the general loss of environmental quality in developing countries, and further more global impacts but viewed as long-term problems (eg climate change, acid rain, ozone depletion, desertification, etc..) and therefore no concern for short-term enrichment craving and consumption.

The citizens’ movement and the mechanisms of deactivation

In this socio-economic framework, civil society only when threatened by mobilizing their welfare, their access to employment and purchasing power (eg, general strikes and other social movements). In the seasons of bubble development between two crises, however, many sectors of civil society critical of the system, an organized fight against abuses of power and large corporations, through which we generically call citizens’ movement. It is a movement that the system has to admit, while based on constitutional principles inherent in any democracy: freedom of assembly and association. The system supports the citizens’ movement because it is controlled by laws, limiting the possible actions to a legal framework decided only by those who have been chosen as virtual representatives of the community. The recent 15-M Movement is a sign that society is not blind and that clearly warns the pitfalls involved in this system to work as a real democracy seems to enshrine the letter of the Constitution. Thus, a certain level of organization and demands, the citizen movement, through partnerships of various kinds, with their critical disposition and use of the laws, could hinder the development of capitalism in its new phase post- XXI century industrial, or at least undermine the image of “only system capable of ensuring the welfare of the population.” →

USAID Grants $3 Million to Solidarity Center’s Bogotá Office – Unionists Want to Know Why

by James Jordan (Alliance for Global Justice)

The Solidarity Center office in Bogotá has received an unusually large two-year grant of $3 million for its operations in the Andean Region. The scope and dimensions of the grant are not fully known, nor the exact programs to which it will be applied. However, given the history of the Bogotá office and the Solidarity Center’s Andean representatives, observers expect the grant to have major implications for the countries of Colombia and Venezuela, where the office’s work is usually concentrated. The Andean region also covers Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. The Solidarity Center has offices both in Colombia and Peru.

The grant comes from USAID (the United States Agency for International Development). The office receives notice of this funding at the same time that three key developments are underway–in Venezuela, the coming October elections, and in Colombia, the implementation of the new Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US, coinciding with a massive popular mobilization to demand a political solution to the armed and social conflict. Little information is available concerning the details of the grant. Because of the documented history of the AFL-CIO intervention in Venezuela through its Solidarity Center, activists must analyze past history and current circumstances in order to be able to discuss intelligently what we may anticipate from these augmented activities.

The Solidarity Center is one of four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and a creation of the United States’ largest union center, the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Unions). Along with the Solidarity Center, the four core institutes of the NED are: the International Republican Institute (associated with the Republican Party), the National Democratic Institute (associated with the Democratic Party), and the International Center for Private Enterprise (associated with the Chambers of Commerce).The NED was established by the US government in 1983, during the Reagan administration.

The NED exists for one reason–to manipulate governments, social movements and elections in other countries in order to advance the international policies of the US which, in turn, are designed to accommodate private access to natural resources and increase transnational corporate profits. In an interview with the New York Times in 1991, Allen Weinstein, one of the NED’s founders, said that, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly by the CIA.”

Marc Plattner, an NED Vice President, explains the role of the organization in the context of the Imperial strategy that brings together in one fabric the threads of politics, business and the military: “Liberal democracy clearly favors the economic arrangements that foster globalization ….The international order that sustains globalization is underpinned by American military predominance.”

The Solidarity Center receives over 90% of its funding from the public coffers by means of the Department of State, USAID and the NED. Union contributions are typically around two to three percent. Thus, the Solidarity Center has little to do with union locals and rank and file unionists, although it has the full cooperation of the highest officials of the AFL-CIO. Local unions have no input or say in the establishment of international relations or program development. The Solidarity Center has some good and helpful programs and some that are at least more or less benign. But these good programs can act to hide a more fundamental purpose to infiltrate and influence the labor movements of other countries and to provide a channel of interference in their electoral processes.

The NED’s first “success” in Latin America was the defeat of Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista candidate for President, in the Nicaraguan elections of 1990. The US government, via the NED and other channels, spent more than $20 per voter and effectively bought the victory for Violeta Chamorra, its favored candidate. The US spent more per Nicaraguan voter in 1990 than both parties did in the US presidential elections in 1988. It is notable that at the time, Nicaragua sustained a population of only 3 million persons.

Haiti provides another example of how the Solidarity Center operates. in 2004, the Solidarity Center’s partner, the International Republican Institute, not only funded, but convened and trained the coup plotters against the elected government of Pres. Bertrand Aristide. During 2004 and 2005, beginning before the coup and extending into the months afterward there was a bloodbath against the supporters of Aristide that included among its victims members of the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH). Rather than helping this most targeted union, the Solidarity Center channeled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a small labor organization that before and during the coup did nothing to defend the elected government and, in fact, called for Pres. Aristide to step down. →

SAMURAI AMONG PANTHERS: RICHARD AOKI ON RACE, RESISTENCE AND A PARADOXICAL LIFE

Title: Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life
Author: Diane C. Fujino
Publisher: Critical American Studies, University of Minnesota Press

Book Review By Abayomi Azikiwe
Libya 360°

This is a combined autobiography and biographical account of the life and times of Richard Aoki, a Japanese-American, who along with his parents spent time in an internment camp in the United States during World War II. The book covers an important time period in history when the civil rights, left and black power movements had a tremendous impact on the political structures of the country.

Born on November 20, 1938, Aoki was three and a half years old when his family was relocated to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, just twelve miles south of San Francisco. They were later transferred to the Topaz, Utah concentration camp.

This fact of U.S. history which is often deliberately overlooked as a key component of the war mobilization against Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7,1941, lays bare the false notions of American democracy and the myth of non-discrimination against the “ideal Asian-American community.” The strain of the internment camps led to the separation of Akoi’s parents which had a tremendous impact on his life as a youth in the aftermath of the war.

Aoki and his brother would live with his father in Utah and later in Oakland. However, another traumatic occurrence took place when his father left town when he was a teenager leading him back to living with his mother and reestablishing a relationship with her.

His mother was a working class woman who raised her sons on a salary of less than two dollars an hour during the 1950s. He grew up in the predominantly African American community in West Oakland but had strong interaction and mentorship from other males in his family including a grandfather and uncles.

He would join the military prior to finishing high school and later the reserves. He read voraciously but admits to harboring a false consciousness. When he voted for the first time in the 1960 elections it was for Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate for president.

Akoi described himself at the time as anti-communist and even read the philosophical writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Soon afterwards he would pick up a book by Eugene Victor Debs, the socialist organizer and candidate for president during the early 20th century.

He found the writings of Debs inspiring and would then go on to study the history of the labor movement involving the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). He landed a job in a factory during this period and participated in a strike.

However, it was during the Watts Rebellion of August 1965 that he learned a lesson in both race and class politics in the United States. Akoi recounted that “I remember when Watts busted loose in 1965. I was working in this one factory where 90 percent of the three hundred people working the line were White southerners. Half of them didn’t show up for work the day after the Watts riots.” (p. 86)

Akoi goes on to say “I asked the forman, ‘We got to get the show on the road. Where the hell is everybody?’ He said, ‘Man they’re at home in Richmond or wherever in the tract homes, and they got their front doors barricaded and their guns out for that invasion coming in from Watts.’ I said, ‘There ain’t going to be no invasion coming from Watts.’”

He therefore concluded that “on the one hand, these coworkers of mine were strong union people, you know proletarian-oriented, class-conscious workers. But when it came to race, half the workers, being White southerners, were freaked out over Watts. I was stunned.” →

Inscrutable Icons of Liberaldom by Cindy Sheehan

“Are you a good witch or a bad witch?”- Glinda the Good to Dorothy Gale, Wizard of Oz

June 16, 2012

Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

“In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” – Bertrand Russell

Recently, I featured a young author/activist named, Edmund Berger, who has written two thought-provoking pieces that featured something that I am very interested in: the co-option, or “astro-turfing” of movements and I received some very hostile comments from readers/listeners who were offended that Berger could criticize some icons of “Liberaldom” (my word, not theirs).

First of all, the thought that anyone is above analysis and criticism is wrong, especially people who make a living from notoriety. For example, it’s one thing to attack a person for perceived character or physical flaws, but when one points out iffy connections to foundations with known and deep ties to the establishment, that is, in my opinion, fair game.

Everyone makes mistakes…everyone, with no exception. However, a line is crossed when that person, or organization, leads others astray by not being totally honest about from where the money comes or where partisan political loyalties lie. I will quote examples for some of the seemingly inscrutable ones that I got in trouble for allowing to be criticized. (Apparently, and thankfully, I am highly “scrutable.)

Again, why is the messenger being crucified instead of the information being read and analyzed with some balance instead of some people “pedestalizing” others with knee-jerk adoration?

If we want to have any success as movements and people, we need to realize that there are forces loyal to the Democratic Party that glom on to people and movements to steer what could be actually affective towards electoral politics, usually in favor of the Democrats on the Liberal side of the political spectrum.

There were especially two Inscrutable Icons of Liberaldom that my listeners were offended about being analyzed by my guest, Edmund Berger: Naomi Klein and 350.org. We’ll start with 350.org because Ms. Klein is now on the national board of that NGO.

350.org

The below is from my friend and radical environmentalist (integrity of vision and not co-opted by foundation money), Gregory Vickrey, of Wrong Kind of Green, about the establishment environmental groups:

President Obama has a bevy of support from environmental groups, many of whom (like the Sierra Club) have already endorsed him for a second round of degradation and destruction. This fawning for a Democratic President is certainly not without precedent, but it is particularly egregious when one looks at Obama’s environmental record.

Unlike his over-arching abilities to pre-emptively criminalize the common protester, this President has neither the wherewithal nor the spine to hold BP to account in the ongoing Gulf of Mexico tragedy. Rather, he continues to exacerbate the destruction, fast-tracking oil and gas leases in Alaska and additional deep water drilling in the Gulf.

Notwithstanding the rhetoric over a temporary suspension of the final phase of the Keystone XL pipeline, President Obama gave an enthusiastic pass to a significant portion of the tar sands pipeline (already operational) in 2009, shortly after being inaugurated.

And he (Obama) is more effective than a denier when it comes to climate change, avoiding or stalling mandatory mitigation and adaptation practices that should have been deployed years ago.

His inaction-with-a-purpose preserves the status quo for his corporate, corrupt base of financial support, thus making him the greatest enabler of environmental destruction on the planet, and no resonant speech from on high changes that reality.

And here I must correct myself – stating above that the President has an “environmental record” is almost as recidivist as the man himself.Not to be outdone by the Sierra Club and other corporate-environmental organizations who have endorsed President Obama and his despicable policies, faux “grass-roots” organizations such as the Rockefeller (think oil) funded 350.org likewise lift President Obama up whenever he tosses a rhetorical bone their way. 350 and its corporate marketing arm were quick to praise the President with the Keystone XL delay (“We won! What a brave man you are, Mr. President!” author’s note: there’s a far more complex story behind this), but never utter a word about the realities on the ground of, say, fracking in New York; Or mountaintop removal in West Virginia; Or $2 Billion in coal subsidies to the President’s home state of Illinois; Or those fast-tracked wells in the Gulf; Or those leases in Alaska. Like their partners at Sierra Club and elsewhere, at the end of the day, 350 are nothing more than a faux-roots front for the President and his party, insane environmental policies be damned.

And as Edmund Berger points out in his article published in Swan’s Commentary called: Harnessing People Power Continued: the 99% Spring and the Professional Left:

350.org is what it is, but, please, let’s stop pretending that it is on the side of revolutionary change.

 Naomi Klein

I know Naomi personally and I think she is a sweet person and she has contributed a lot to the world’s understanding of neo-liberalism. There’s no doubt about it, she’s brilliant, but when it comes to being on the board of 350.org and Obama, in my opinion, she is off the track.

In a speech Naomi gave at Loyola University in February of 2009, she was advocating for “collectivism” and “nationalization,” but, as pointed out above her alliance with 350.org is at odds with those goals.

Here is Berger’s analysis of Klein’s connection to 350.org:

In an article called, Criticism of Shock Doctrine from the Left, the author points out:

My question is “small and containable” to whom? In the beginning of the US plague on Iraq called, Shock(ing) and Awe(ful), tens of thousands of Iraqi were killed—war is never “containable.”

On November 11, 2011, despite Obama’s delaying tactic (until 2013, after the 2012 elections, conveniently) Naomi Klein touted a “victory” on the show of another Inscrutable Icon of Liberaldom, Amy Goodman:

But guess what? This from a news article on March 12, 2012:

Barack Obama will speed up approval of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline during his “all of the above” energy road trip, White House officials said.

The president will use a stop in Cushing, Oklahoma on Thursday morning to announce an executive order directing government agencies to speed up permits for the southern US-only segment of the pipeline, running from the town to Port Arthur, Texas…

The article also claims the environmental groups were “angry,” but in searching the internet, I see that there was no angry response from Klein, McKibben, or 350.org to the speech Obama gave in Cushing, Oklahoma. Parts of the pipeline were in construction long before the “protests” in front of the White House last year, anyway. Apparently Obama is more afraid of his puppet-pay masters and the Republican Party than a group of activists who make light demands on him with no consequences attached to Obama’s non-compliance.

There are many other “Inscrutable Icons” of Liberaldom who range from being nearly perfect, in my view (ie, Noam Chomsky), to almost always being an astro-turfer for the establishment (ie, Van Jones)…and I would like my readers to put on their Critical Thinking Caps and research anything that anyone says. That’s not being “divisive,” it’s being responsible.

Ecuador: New Left or New Colonialism?

“Until rich countries are held to account for the crimes they have committed against countries such as Ecuador — something that will require revolutionary struggles breaking out elsewhere — no foreign leftist has a right to denounce the Ecuador government for using wealth from its natural resources to meet peoples’ needs. … Rather than aiming their fire on a supposed “new model of domination”, leftists would do better to focus on the real enemies we and the Ecuadorian people face in common. Ecuador’s fate is intertwined with our fight against Western governments and corporations at home.”

June 17, 2012

By Federico Fuentes

Green Left Weekly

 

Criticism of Latin America’s radical governments has become common currency among much of the international left. While none have been exempt, Ecuador’s government of President Rafael Correa has been a key target.

But a problem with much of the criticism directed against Correa is that it lacks any solid foundation and misdirects fire away from the real enemy.

Correa was elected president in 2006 after more than a decade of mostly indigenous-led rebellions against neoliberalism.

During his election campaign, the radical economist promised to rewrite the country’s constitution, reject any free trade agreement with Washington, refuse to repay of illegitimate foreign debts and close a US military base on Ecuadorian soil.

The social movements had campaigned around many of these demands, which is why most supported Correa in the second-round presidential run-off against Alvaro Noboa, Ecuador’s richest man.

Since then, Correa has largely carried out these election promises. This explains why he has an approval rating of more than 80%, a June 13 opinion poll found.

Left criticisms

But foreign leftists do not share this support.

Raul Zibechi, a Uruguayan journalist whose anarchist-leaning writings have been widely distributed among the English-speaking left, has denounced the Correa government for presiding over “a new model of domination”.

This new model, Zibechi said last year, differs from past neoliberal governments that promoted free market policies to allow transnational corporations to dominate Ecuador’s economy and natural resources.

Zibechi said that today the state plays a larger role in Equador’s economy. But he said the state has simply replaced the role of the market as the principle guardian of transnational interests, which continue to loot the nation’s wealth unabated.

He said as the Correa government “depends on oil exports and mining concessions to make ends meet … resistance now no longer faces multinational corporations, but rather the state apparatus.”

The criticisms of Correa are not just limited to the anti-state left.

In a May 2 article, US Marxist academic James Petras said Correa’s claims to be renegotiating a better deal for the country were false.

Petras said: “The style and substance of the distribution of the powers and privileges in the oil and gas agreements between progressive governments and the multinationals are no different than what transpired under previous ‘neo-liberal’ regimes.”

He said Correa has instead deepened the country’s reliance on agro-mineral and energy exports in its pursuit of “extractive capitalism”. This is because “state revenue and growth” are now “utterly dependent on the increasing demand for raw materials, high commodity prices and open markets”.

Zibechi and Petras agree that Ecuador today is as much or more dependent than before on raw material exports, while transnational corporations reap the rewards.

Zibechi said this reliance on export-driven growth and revenue derived from natural resources — the logical consequences of “extractive capitalism” — has converted the Correa government into the main enemy for those opposed to this “new form of domination”.

Economic reality

Yet these statements bear no resemblance to Ecuador’s economy or the policies pursued by the Correa government.

There is little evidence that transnationals extract more of Ecuador’s wealth, raw materials or profits.

Oil production, the main extractive industry in Ecuador, has fallen from 195.5 million barrels in 2006 to 182.3 million barrels last year.

Crude oil exports have also fallen. The US remains the biggest market for Ecuador’s crude oil, but falling export volumes to the US have been offset by an almost five-fold rise in exports to Latin American countries.

In the same period, the state’s share of oil production has risen from 46% to more than 70%. Last year, transnationals extracted less that half of what they did in 2006.

Oil prices have risen during this time, but this has been accompanied by government measures to ensure more wealth stays in Ecuador, at the expense of transnationals.

In October 2007, the Correa government increased the windfall tax on profits (accrued when oil prices surpass those set down in the contracts signed between companies and the state) from 50% to 99%. It shifted the tax back to 70% when oil prices fell sharply at the end of 2008.

The government also dismantled several oil funds set up under past neoliberal governments that directed oil revenue towards repaying foreign debt. The state’s oil revenue has been consolidated into the government’s budget.

Similarly, Ecuador’s ability to recover from the 2008 global economic crisis and register record economic growth was not export-driven or dependent on the oil sector.

Rebecca Ray, who co-authored a report on Ecuador’s economy for the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, told the Real News Network that Ecuador was among the quickest countries to recover from the global crisis because “it developed its domestic market and it took care of its people domestically rather than trying to ride out the global commodity wave”.

One important move was the government’s decision to provide grants to first homebuyers and make available low-interest mortgage loans.

This boosted the building industry, which became the main driver of growth. It accounted for more 40% of Ecuador’s GDP growth last year. Other key areas of growth have been agriculture, manufacturing and commerce.

Growth in the non-petroleum sector outstripped petroleum sector growth for every quarter from the start of 2007 to the end of 2010.

Ecuador’s revenue from exports fell 25% in 2008-9, with falling oil prices being a key contributor. But the economy was better able to cope due to rising internal consumption, aided by much higher social spending and wage hikes.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research report said: “Between 2006 and 2009, social spending nearly doubled as a percent of GDP … and spending on social welfare more than doubled – from 0.7 to 1.8 percent of GDP.”

It also said the minimum wage “has risen about 40% in real terms over the last five years”.

Dignified salary

Workers have also benefitted from the introduction of the “dignified salary”, whereby Ecuadorian law requires “any business earning a profit [to] first distribute that profit among its employees, until either the employees’ total earnings rise to the level of a living wage or the entire profit has been distributed before reporting the remainder as its final profits”.

These policies have lead to a fall in poverty rates and unemployment.

It is evident that Ecuador’s government, with the support of the people, has stemmed the flow of oil wealth out of the country and begun redirecting it towards meeting ordinary peoples’ needs.

This is not to suggest that Ecuador does not continue to face big challenges; much less that capitalism has been overthrown. There is still a long way to go.

A study by Ecuador’s National Secretariat of Planning and Development (SENPLADES) has shown that almost US$45 billion in public investment and recurring costs will be needed in order to eradicate poverty in Ecuador by 2021.

This is 10 times more than Ecuador’s annual budget for infrastructure investment.

To end poverty, all Ecuadorians would need access to basic services such as water, housing, electricity, transport, water irrigation, sewerage and education and health facilities, among others.

On top of this, it is true that Ecuador’s economy has not fundamentally changed under Correa. The path towards industrialisation and diversification of the economy has been slow and full of hurdles.

The continued existence of a capitalist state apparatus designed to serve the interests of the old elites, not the people, compounds these problems.

Valid criticisms can be made of the impacts that oil extraction, and recent moves to open up a new open-cut mine, have had on local communities. There has also been a lack of government consultation about these projects.

But this is not the same as accusing the Correa government of presiding over some form of “extractive capitalism” that does the dirty work of transnational corporations. This claim lacks any factual basis. Ultimately, it pits leftists against the very same people they claim to support.

No government, even one that comes to power on the back of an insurrection and destroys the capitalist state, would be able to meet the needs of the Ecuadorian people while at the same time halting all extractive industries.

However, it can attempt to strike a balance between protecting the environment and satisfying people’s needs, while empowering the people to take power into their own hands. The difficulty of such a task means mistakes will be made, but also learnt from.

Historic debts

To overcome Ecuador’s legacy of dependency on extractive industries, rich imperialist nations will need to repay their historic debts to Ecuador’s people.

The lack of any willingness to do so has been shown by the response from foreign governments to the bold Yasuni-ITT initiative launched by the Correa government in 2007.

The proposal involves Ecuador agreeing to leave 20% of its proven oil reserves (located in the Amazon) in the ground. In return, it asked Western governments and other institutions to provide Ecuador with funds equivalent to 50% of the values of the reserve, about US$3.6 billion, over 13 years.

So far, Ecuador has been offered a paltry $116 million.

Until rich countries are held to account for the crimes they have committed against countries such as Ecuador — something that will require revolutionary struggles breaking out elsewhere — no foreign leftist has a right to denounce the Ecuador government for using wealth from its natural resources to meet peoples’ needs.

Environmental concerns are valid, but so are the very real needs of people to be able to access basic services that many of us take for granted.

And we should never forget who the real culprits of the environmental crisis are.

Rather than aiming their fire on a supposed “new model of domination”, leftists would do better to focus on the real enemies we and the Ecuadorian people face in common. Ecuador’s fate is intertwined with our fight against Western governments and corporations at home.

Libya & the Left | NATO, Rebels & ‘Revolutionary’ Apologists

The International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT)

Feb 17,2012

Upon hearing of Muammar Qaddafi’s execution, U.S. President Barack Obama, who had shared a photo-op with him as recently as 2009, proclaimed: “working in Libya with friends and allies, we’ve demonstrated what collective action can achieve in the 21st century.” Obama was particularly pleased that, “Without putting a single US service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives,” and alluded to future targets:

“In a line aimed at the region’s other despots, the president said, ‘Today’s events prove once more that the rule of an iron fist inevitably comes to an end.’

“Asked if that sends a message to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who has mounted a brutal crackdown on protesters, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney simply restated existing policy that Assad ‘has lost his legitimacy to rule.’”
—New York Post, 21 October 2011

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden compared the outcome in Libya to earlier, less successful adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan:

“In this case, America spent $2 billion total and didn’t lose a single life. This is more of the prescription for how to deal with the world as we go forward than it has been in the past.”
—Ibid.

Israeli journalist Orly Azoulay praised Obama’s “new war doctrine,” pointing to the integration of “massive air power” and “local rebel forces”:

“General Gaddafi’s death is yet another victory for the new war doctrine adopted by United States President Barack Obama: No ground forces in enemy countries, but rather, utilizing massive air power—including drones—in order to pulverize enemy strongholds. In Libya’s case at least, this doctrine also included cooperation with local rebel forces.”
—Ynetnews.com, 21 October 2011

This is a fair summary of events in Libya—“massive air power” destroyed the armed bodies loyal to Qaddafi and opened the door for local quislings to scramble to fill the vacuum. Yet things do not always go according to plan, and it is sometimes easier to depose an existing regime than to impose a viable successor, as NATO discovered in Afghanistan a decade ago.

In both Libya and Afghanistan, the immediate result of “regime change” was the installation of new puppet leaders with strong American connections. Afghan President Hamid Karzai—who was appointed leader at a conference in Bonn, Germany in December 2001—had worked with the CIA as a fundraiser for the anti-Soviet mujahedin 20 years earlier. Libya’s new prime minister, Abdurraheem el-Keib, who holds American citizenship, attended school in the U.S. and taught at the University of Alabama before moving to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to chair the Electrical Engineering Department at the Petroleum Institute, where his research was partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. With this background, he seems well qualified to oversee the return of Libya’s oil and gas fields (which had been nationalized under Qaddafi in the early 1970s) to Western control.

For Military Defense of Neocolonies Against Imperialist Attack!

Marxists, unlike social democrats, unconditionally defend the right of subjugated nations to resist the predations of the “advanced capitalist” global powers. In 1956, revolutionaries backed Egypt against a joint British/French/Israeli intervention aimed at reversing the nationalization of the Suez Canal. When the U.S./UK and others attacked Serbia in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq two years later, Marxists took sides—despite the reactionary character of the regimes headed by Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein.

The attack on Libya, like the earlier interventions in Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq, was preceded by a barrage of lies—in this case focused on claims of a wholesale slaughter of civilians by the Qaddafi regime following the 17 February 2011 “Day of Rage” protest. The chief source for these reports was Al Jazeera, the news agency operated by the rulers of Qatar, who supplied weapons and hundreds of soldiers to the insurgents. The lurid tales of “massacres” of civilians by the Libyan air force turned out to be grossly exaggerated.

On 2 March 2011, two weeks before the bombs began to fall, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Congressional subcommittee “that the Pentagon has no confirmation that Libyan strongman Muammar al Qaddafi is using his air force to kill civilians” (CBS News, 2 March 2011). On 22 March 2011, after the bombing had commenced, USA Today carried an article by Alan Kuperman of the University of Texas noting that, “Despite ubiquitous cellphone cameras, there are no images of genocidal violence, a claim that smacks of rebel propaganda.” Two weeks later Richard Haass, president of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, wrote that the “evidence was not persuasive that a large-scale massacre or genocide was either likely or imminent” in Libya (Huffington Post, 6 April 2011).

It is now clear that there was no more “genocide” in Libya than “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq in 2003. Justifying military aggression with lies is a time-honored practice, as Adolf Hitler reminded his top commanders on 22 August 1939, as final preparations were underway for attacking Poland:

“I shall give a propaganda reason for starting the war, whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth. When starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory.”
—quoted in Hitler and Stalin, Alan Bullock

This has certainly been the case in Libya. No one in the bourgeois media has shown much concern about following up on stories of civilian massacres by the regime, which had been so important in legitimizing military intervention. The fact that much of the international “revolutionary” left eagerly swallowed and regurgitated this imperialist propaganda—and has yet to admit they were hoodwinked—testifies to their political adaptation to the capitalist social order.

The UN Security Council, professing profound concerns about the well-being of ordinary Libyans, used these tales to justify the imposition of sanctions, the freezing of Libyan assets abroad and the creation of a “no-fly zone.” The latter resulted in the insertion of NATO airpower into what had previously been a civil war between the Qaddafi regime and imperialist-linked dissidents centered in Benghazi.

Estimates of total casualties inflicted by the 9,600 “humanitarian” bombing sorties carried out by British, French and other NATO aircraft from April to October 2011 vary considerably, but it is generally agreed that thousands of Libyans were killed (many of them civilians) and many thousands more seriously wounded. NATO bombs massively damaged Libya’s infrastructure and displaced tens of thousands of people from their homes. The pretence that this destruction was motivated by a desire to “protect” civilians is belied by the casual indifference with which victims of NATO’s air war have been treated.

After months of bitter conflict, the cumulative effect of the imperialist bombardment (supplemented by opposition militias aided by hundreds of foreign special forces) succeeded in decimating Qaddafi’s military. According to many accounts, the most effective indigenous forces fighting the regime were Islamists, some of them linked to Al Qaeda. For the most part, however, the “rebels” were not a major factor, apart from their value in drawing fire from Qaddafi’s forces, who thereby made it easier for NATO airstrikes to target them. The role of the ragtag anti-Qaddafi fighters, like the politicians of the Transitional National Council (TNC—aka National Transitional Council), who enjoyed the backing of the imperialists from the start, was to put a Libyan face on “regime change.”

In a 1915 pamphlet entitled, “Socialism and War,” the great Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin declared that in cases of imperialist military attacks (“humanitarian” or otherwise) on neocolonial countries, “every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slaveowning, predatory ‘great’ powers.” There is no ambiguity: revolutionaries militarily side with oppressed countries against imperialist attack regardless of the crimes (real or imagined) of the ruling regime. When Mussolini attacked Ethiopia in 1935, Leon Trotsky immediately responded: “Of course, we are for the defeat of Italy and the victory of Ethiopia” (“The Italo-Ethiopian Conflict,” 17 July 1935). The fact that chattel slavery persisted under the regime of Haile Selassie was irrelevant:

“If Mussolini triumphs, it means the reinforcement of fascism, the strengthening of imperialism, and the discouragement of the colonial peoples in Africa and elsewhere. The victory of the Negus, however, would mean a mighty blow not only at Italian imperialism but at imperialism as a whole, and would lend a powerful impulsion to the rebellious forces of the oppressed peoples. One must really be completely blind not to see this.”
—”On Dictators and the Heights of Oslo,” 22 April 1936

NATO’s victory over Qaddafi, by vindicating Obama’s supposed “new war doctrine” for U.S. imperialism, helps pave the way for future aggression in Africa and the Middle East. The eagerness with which the overwhelming majority of the world’s self-proclaimed “Trotskyist” organizations accepted the imperialist narrative graphically illustrates their distance from the political heritage they claim to represent. Instead of forthrightly standing for the military victory of Qaddafi’s forces over NATO and its proxies, these revisionists supported the latter as representing a “revolutionary” movement or, at best, adopted a position of effective neutrality. In doing so, they turn their backs on the anti-imperialism of the Communist International under Lenin and Trotsky.

Rationalizing Support for Imperialist Auxiliaries

Probably the most overtly pro-imperialist position was taken by the British Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL), which blandly observed:

“The most far-reaching of the [North African] uprisings so far has been in Libya. Of course it is unusual in that its ultimate success was dependent on military intervention by NATO.”

•     •     •

“Successful campaigning by the Western left to prevent NATO intervention would have flown in the face of the express wishes of the revolutionary movement itself, and resulted in a massacre in Benghazi which would have been a tragedy in itself but also an enormous defeat for the ‘Arab Spring’ as a whole.

“Workers’ Liberty didn’t oppose the [NATO] intervention.”
—5 October 2011

The AWL’s characterization of the motley collection of long-time imperialist assets, Islamic reactionaries and defectors from the Qaddafi regime in Benghazi as the leaders of a “revolutionary” movement whose wishes had to be respected was widely shared by many supposedly Trotskyist groups, although most were less candid about NATO’s central role in the conflict and less willing to spell out the ultimate logic of their position. Instead, they employed varying combinations of factual misrepresentation, non sequiturs and special pleading in awkward attempts to maintain some pretence of “anti-imperialist” orthodoxy while supporting NATO’s “rebel” proxies (who were falsely equated with the courageous youth who had earlier brought down the hated pro-imperialist dictators in Tunisia and Egypt).

Alan Woods, a leading figure in the ultra-opportunist International Marxist Tendency (IMT), was among those offering the most unqualified endorsement of NATO’s Benghazi allies:

“[Frederick] Engels explained that the state is armed bodies of men. In Benghazi and other cities controlled by the rebels, the old state has ceased to exist. It has been replaced by the armed people, revolutionary militias, which Lenin said were the embryo of a new state power.”
—“Uprising in Libya: Tremble, tyrants!,” 23 February 2011

An essentially similar, if slightly more restrained, assessment was advanced by the Committee for a Workers’ International (CWI—from which the IMT split in 1992), which also characterized the Benghazi uprising as a “revolution” while warning that it might be “hijacked by remnants of the Qaddafi regime, pro-bourgeois opposition ‘leaders’, reactionary tribal leaders and imperialist interests” (“Gaddafi must go! It’s a fight to the finish,” 28 February 2011). A few weeks later the CWI was denouncing the UN “no-fly” zone as an imperialist military intervention:

“The UN Security Council’s majority decision to enact a militarily-imposed ‘no-fly-zone’ against Libya, while greeted with joy on the streets of Benghazi and Tobruk, is in no way intended to defend the Libyan revolution. Revolutionaries in Libya may think that this decision will help them, but they are mistaken. Naked economic and political calculations lay behind the imperialist powers’ decision.”
—“No to Western Military Intervention—Victory to the Libyan Revolution—Build an Independent Movement of Workers and Youth!,” 19 March 2011

While recognizing that “The largely self-appointed ‘National Council’ that emerged in Benghazi is a combination of elements from the old regime and more pro-imperialist elements” (Ibid.), the CWI continued to hail the supposed “Libyan revolution” spearheaded by the TNC.

The CWI’s competitors in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) took an essentially similar approach—touting the “revolution” while warning that appeals to the West for funds and NATO air support invited imperialist “blackmail”:

“Libya’s Transitional National Council (TNC), the body that grew out of the revolution, made a series of simple demands in the first crucial days of the uprising. It asked for the recognition of the TNC, access to the billions in sequestrated regime funds in order to buy weapons and other crucial supplies, and an immediate halt to the ‘mercenary flights’ that provided Gaddafi’s regime with its foot soldiers.”

•     •     •

“The West, in effect, blackmailed the revolution.”
—Socialist Worker, 26 March 2011

Like the IMT and CWI, the SWP treated the 17 February 2011 protests that kicked off the revolt as largely spontaneous in origin:

“Inspired by the events in Egypt and Tunisia, a loose network of young activists joined by notables, among them judges and respected lawyers, called for peaceful protests on 17 February. These protests, despite the modest demands, turned into the first public displays of opposition to the regime.”
—Socialist Review, April 2011

In fact, it was not “a loose network of young activists” but rather the imperialist-linked National Conference for the Libyan Opposition (NCLO—subsequently subsumed by the TNC) that initiated the 17 February demonstrations, as the SWP subsequently admitted. While not explicitly repudiating its previous claim that the protests had originated with “a loose network of young activists,” the May 2011 issue of Socialist Review stated that: “Exiles in the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition coordinated with dissidents to plan a ‘Day of Rage’ for 17 February.” There was no need to “blackmail” the NCLO, an organization whose founders included people with a long-standing connection with the CIA, as documented in our 1 April 2011 statement (see “Defeat the Imperialists!” reprinted on 37).

The “Trotskyist” publicists for the Benghazi rebels initially brushed off reports of support for the imposition of a “no-fly” zone and played up expressions by the TNC of formal opposition to foreign military intervention. For example, on 1 March 2011, the IMT wrote:

“According to Al Jazeera, Abdel Fattah Younes, Libya’s former interior minister who defected to the opposition, has stated that the idea that the people would welcome foreign troops was ‘out of the question.’

“This has been confirmed by Hafiz Ghoga, spokesperson of the newly formed ‘National Libyan Council’ [i.e., TNC] that has been set up in Benghazi. Ghoga is quoted as saying: ‘We are completely against foreign intervention. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people…and Gaddafi’s security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya.’”
—”No to imperialist intervention in Libya”

The TNC’s initial posture of opposition to Western intervention may have been motivated by a desire to consolidate popular support and rebut the regime’s (essentially correct) claim that the leaders of the revolt were in league with foreign interests whose chief objective was to re-appropriate Libya’s fossil fuel resources. During the first few weeks, several prominent figures (including both the justice and interior ministers) defected, and the Benghazi rebels, along with their backers, may well have hoped that the regime would simply implode. As Qaddafi’s loyalists regained their balance and moved to recapture Benghazi, the TNC began desperately demanding NATO air cover. The fact that this shift apparently failed to produce any sort of rift within the rebel camp refutes the narrative of a hijacked revolution.

There was, in fact, no “Libyan revolution”—the Benghazi revolt was, at its core, an expression of a long-standing division among the traditional ruling elites in which an unstable amalgam of monarchists and former Qaddafi loyalists (joined by cadres of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group) made a bid for power. Their revolt tapped a deep well of popular anger and resentment, and most of the TNC’s supporters doubtless imagined that they were involved in another chapter of the “Arab Spring” which had already toppled dictators in the region. But the revolt in Libya had a different character right from the outset, which explains the enthusiastic support from Washington, Paris and other NATO capitals.

By mid-March 2011, as the bombing was about to commence, even the IMT expressed some uneasiness about the character of the “rebel” leaders they had been promoting:

“These people successfully stepped into the vacuum of leadership that emerged in Benghazi when the state collapsed in the face of the revolution, but rather than strengthening the revolution, they weaken it. There are also Islamists, who can be of no appeal to working people in the cities. There are human rights activists and pro-democracy groups, whose main objective is some kind of bourgeois democracy, but who do not take into account the social and economic demands of ordinary working people. Side by side with all these there is the revolutionary youth and the working class and poor.”
—”Why has the revolution stalled in Libya?,” 17 March 2011

A few weeks later the IMT downgraded its assessment of the “rebel leaders” even further, comparing them to “the Karzai regime in Afghanistan or the Maliki regime in Iraq”:

“This brings us to the role played by the Interim Council that was established in Benghazi. This Council was thrown up by a situation in which the masses had brought down state power, but did not know what to replace it with. There was a de facto power vacuum created. In this situation accidental elements came to the fore, who are now clearly playing a counter-revolutionary role.”
—”Libyan Interim Government—agents of imperialism,” 1 April 2011

The TNC leadership was indeed counterrevolutionary, but it was hardly “accidental”—it was made up of representatives of most opposition formations, including the initiators of the 17 February “Day of Rage.”

In October 2011, as the imperialists celebrated Qaddafi‘s murder, Alan Woods was still blathering about a continuing “Libyan Revolution”:

“It is a confused and contradictory situation, the outcome of which is as yet unclear. On the one hand, the mass movement, including the working class, is pushing for its own demands. On the other hand, the bourgeois elements are manoeuvring with the imperialists to take control of the situation. The main motor force of the Revolution is the young rebel fighters who are honest and courageous but also confused and disoriented and can be manipulated by the fundamentalists and other demagogues.”
—”After the death of Gaddafi: Revolution and counterrevolution in Libya,” 21 October 2011

The essential elements of the situation were clear enough—NATO had orchestrated a low-overhead “regime change” in Libya, designed to reopen its oil and gas fields for foreign exploitation. However “confused and disoriented” young Libyans may have been, it is hard to imagine that they were more befuddled than those IMT members who took Woods’s brainless objectivism seriously.

Unlike the IMT, many former boosters of the TNC-led “Libyan revolution” had some inkling that when Tripoli fell, it was the imperialists, not the Libyan masses, who had come out on top. The British SWP, for example, schizophrenically “celebrated” Qaddafi’s fall while acknowledging that the main beneficiaries were likely to be Western oil corporations:

“The end of Gaddafi’s regime is a cause for celebration. He will be the third Arab dictator to fall this year.

“But the nature of the struggle in Libya is now fundamentally different from the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt that originally inspired it. It became so once Western forces decided to appropriate it.”

•     •     •

“The imperialist powers hijacked the Libyan revolt and bent it to their own needs. They forced the new rebel authority in Benghazi to reaffirm trade contracts and international oil deals.”
—Socialist Worker, 20 August 2011

Other groups also pushed the notion of a “hijacked” revolution. The French Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste (NPA), which in March 2011 had co-signed a declaration with the Stalinist Communist Party and others demanding that French imperialism recognize the TNC, issued a 21 August 2011 statement insisting that while events in Libya had paralleled the “revolutionary processes underway in Tunisia and in Egypt,” somehow “under cover of a resolution from the UN, the member countries of NATO attempted to hijack the process underway by an aerial military intervention.”

Socialist Action (SA), an American group historically linked to the NPA, also hailed the Libyan “revolution,” but attempted to give its backing of the TNC a leftist spin by offering “political support in their fight against the quislings who would turn over Libya to imperialist intervention” (Socialist Action, March 2011). The fact that the TNC quislings were soon actively demanding imperialist intervention presumably contributed to SA’s eventual decision to rethink its position. But as NATO was preparing to go in, Socialist Action (along with the rest of what remains of the late Ernest Mandel’s “United Secretariat of the Fourth International” [USec]), was critical of “the role of Hugo Chavez, Daniel Ortega and Fidel Castro in their one-sided, if correct, denunciation of imperialism’s interests and intentions in this affair, while denying or ignoring Qaddafi’s repression and murders” (Ibid.). It is hardly surprising that such left-nationalist or Stalinist bonapartists (whom SA and the USec have fawned over for years) were not particularly concerned by Qaddafi’s anti-democratic transgressions. But at least they understood what the imperialists were up to and did not ascribe a transcendent “revolutionary” dynamic to the TNC.

Socialist Action‘s line change (which they have yet to acknowledge as such) was not made public until after Tripoli had fallen to the TNC/NATO alliance in August. In a 2 September 2011 statement entitled, “Imperialist Victory Is No Gain For Libyan People,” Jeff Mackler, Socialist Action’s leading figure, wrote:

“In the early days of these mass protests, there were unmistakable but only modest indications of the independent character of at least a portion of the anti-Gadhafi leadership, as when anti-government protesters unfurled massive banners from rooftops, declaring, ‘No Foreign Intervention: The Libyan People Can Manage It Alone.’ Even then, it was not always clear whether opposition to foreign intervention referred to troops on the ground only, since major elements of the opposition had announced early on, and even demanded, support by U.S./NATO forces and a ‘no-fly zone.’”

At a point when it appeared that the Qaddafi regime might melt down, it made sense for the leaders of the TNC lash-up to assert their preference for rearranging Libyan society without foreign supervision. However, as soon as Qaddafi’s supporters proved capable of organizing a serious counter-offensive, the TNC’s tune changed. In his statement, Mackler acknowledged the abrupt shift in attitude:

“Whatever self-organization was evidenced in the earliest days of the mass protest was essentially spontaneous and created to organize the distribution of food and the coordination of vital services as Gadhafi’s forces bombarded Benghazi. We have yet to see any indication that these organizational forms gave rise to or were based on independent political forces aiming at developing a program to advance the interests of the masses. Nor is there evidence that they took on the task of consolidating an alternative to the leading bourgeois and pro-imperialist forces, which fully understood the need to rush to the ‘leadership’ of the mass movement.

“Given the political void among the anti-Gadhafi forces, the TNC was quickly recognized as the nation’s ‘legal’ government….The Europeans’ and Americans’ public pretensions of ‘protecting civilians’ from Gadhafi’s forces rapidly gave way to their real objectives—‘regime change’ pure and simple.”

Characterizing the conflict after NATO’s intervention as an “imperialist-led conquest of Libya,” the SA statement continues:

“The right of self-determination of all oppressed nations, even those led by heinous dictators, must be supported as against imperialist interventions. Imperialism’s defeat in any confrontation with oppressed nations weakens its capacity for future interventions and opens the door wider for others to follow suit. While revolutionary socialists have every right and obligation to criticize and oppose dictatorships everywhere, these criticisms are subordinate to the defeat of imperialist intervention and war. Revolutionaries are not neutral in such confrontations. We are always for the defeat of the imperialist intervener and would-be colonizer.”

This implies, but stops short of explicitly stating, that socialists should have taken a position of militarily supporting Qaddafi’s forces against the imperialists and their TNC proxies (rather than pretending that a revolution was unfolding as Socialist Action and its co-thinkers did). Mackler’s statement also fails to acknowledge the role of the CIA-connected NCLO in organizing the original “Day of Rage,” and instead treats the Benghazi events as essentially spontaneous in origin. He does, however, note that with the TNC’s ascension to power, “we are compelled to recognize the tragic truth that a severe defeat has been inflicted on the Libyan people”:

“Today the imperialist boot is on the ground in Libya and deeply implanted. The Libyan masses have not been liberated. Thousands have been killed. Imperialism’s sights are now focused on doing the same in Syria and eventually in Iran.”

While belated and inadequate, SA’s line change does at least recognize that the overthrow of Qaddafi was a victory for imperialism and a defeat for working people and the oppressed. This represents a clear shift to the left, the origins and ultimate implications of which remain unclear.

Ken Hiebert, a long-time USec supporter in Canada who is critical of Socialist Action’s change of position, inquired why—if March 2011 marked the beginning of “a six-month imperialist-led onslaught that wrought death and destruction on the Libyan people”—SA was “still calling for Victory to the Uprising! as late as April 28, 2011[?] Why is it that only in the September issue of their paper does SA revise its view?” Hiebert suggests that the logic of SA’s new position means that those groups that wanted to see a victory by Qaddafi’s forces against NATO were “more far-sighted than the leadership of SA.” He also wonders, if “the only force that could oppose the imperialist intervention was the Libyan army, shouldn’t we have been supporting the army and it [sic] leadership?” But thus far, to our knowledge, Socialist Action has not chosen to respond.

To avoid promoting politics that lead to “severe defeats” in future, Socialist Action needs to answer Hiebert’s questions and make an honest accounting of the roots of their original mistake and the process through which they came to reject it. They should also explicitly state that in hindsight they recognize the necessity to side militarily with Qaddafi’s forces against NATO.

WSWS: NATO Defeatist, but not Libyan Defensist

The policy that Socialist Action retrospectively adopted parallels the one arrived at by David North’s World Socialist Web Site (WSWS—aka Socialist Equality Party [SEP]). Initially the WSWS (18 February 2011) observed:

“The events in Libya are part of the uprising that is engulfing the Middle East and North Africa. The protesters themselves draw a parallel between what is happening in Libya and what has already taken place in Egypt and Tunisia.”

There is no question that the mass mobilizations in Tunisia and Egypt resonated in Libya, and doubtless most of those who demonstrated against Qaddafi saw themselves as participating in a revolt inspired by the overturn of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak. But it is also indisputable that the 17 February 2011 “Day of Rage” which kicked off the Benghazi uprising was initiated by the NCLO, which was founded by Libyan “dissidents” with long-standing CIA connections.

Unlike the left groups which began by identifying the Benghazi revolt with those in Tunis and Cairo and then proceeded to claim that a good revolt had been “hijacked” by bad elements, the WSWS did not shrink from the unpleasant truth about the pro-imperialist character of its leadership. While still characterizing the rebellion as a “legitimate popular uprising,” the SEP leadership quickly decided that it was morphing into something else:

“What began as a popular revolt against the repressive Gaddafi regime is increasingly being channelled, with the help of an interim administration in Benghazi, Libya’s second city, into the pretext for an imperialist intervention. Such an operation would seek to establish a de facto client state in Libya. It would help imperialist forces assert control over the country’s large oil and gas fields and serve as a bastion of reaction against the working-class uprisings sweeping the entire region, from Morocco to Iraq.”

•     •     •

“Inside Libya, Gaddafi’s former justice minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who now heads the opposition National Libyan Council in Benghazi, called for foreign air strikes and a no-fly zone. Citing sources within the council, the New York Times reported that this stance was adopted at a heated council meeting where ‘others strongly disagreed’. There has been deep opposition to such a call within popular protests against Gaddafi, because of fears of a return to neo-colonial rule—fears that Gaddafi is exploiting to posture as a defender of Libyan sovereignty.”
—5 March 2011

When NATO bombing commenced, the question of Libyan sovereignty was indeed clearly posed, and the nature of the conflict changed from being an intra-elite struggle to a fight between a neocolonial regime and a coalition of imperialists and their lackeys. The attitude of Marxists changed accordingly—from defeatism on both sides to military support for Qaddafi and his supporters against the imperialists and their TNC auxiliaries. The WSWS correctly assessed NATO’s intervention as intended:

“to ensure that any regime that replaces Gaddafi serves not the interests of the Libyan people, but rather the demands of Washington and Big Oil. The US hopes to use Libya, moreover, as a base of operations for suppressing revolutionary movements of workers throughout the region.”
—18 March 2011

The next day the WSWS issued the following appeal:

“The World Socialist Web Site calls on workers and young people to reject the war propaganda under a humanitarian guise with the disgust it deserves. The fight against political oppression, social exploitation and war is inseparable from the building of a socialist movement that unites the international working class in a struggle against capitalism and imperialism.”
—19 March 2011

What was missing was a call for military support to Qaddafi’s forces attempting to resist the imperialist assault. This was not an accident—the unwillingness to adopt a Libyan defensist position derives from the SEP’s contention that Lenin’s policy of recognizing the right of all nations to self-determination is no longer applicable. This position was spelled out in a 1994 document entitled, “Marxism, Opportunism and the Balkan Crisis”:

“In politics, terms which had a definite social and class content in one period often come to represent something quite different in the next. This is the case with the slogan of ‘self-determination.’

“Vast changes in world economic and political relations have created corresponding changes in the character of the national movements….

“Can one speak today of the national bourgeoisie of Bosnia, or Kazakhstan or Kashmir seeking to ‘capture the home market,’ thereby creating conditions for the ‘victory of commodity production’ and hence a fuller development of the class struggle?

“On the contrary, these new ethnocentric movements seek the Balkanization of existing states. Rather than proposing to create a home market, they desire more direct economic ties with imperialism and globally-mobile capital. The ‘right to self-determination’ is invoked as a means of advancing the interests of small sections of the local bourgeoisie.”

The political conclusion drawn by the SEP is that “there is no answer to the problems of national divisions” short of socialist revolution. The political logic of such sterile ultimatism was evident in the WSWS treatment of events in Libya. While denouncing the imperialist assault (and accurately describing the TNC as “dominated by recent defectors from the regime, along with CIA assets and other reactionary forces” [24 March 2011]) the SEP’s response was profoundly flawed by its refusal to takes sides in what boiled down to an attempt to re-impose neocolonial rule.

Workers Power—Centrist Confusionism & Imperialist Lackeys

While failing to defend Qaddafi’s forces, the SEP at least pointed out the predatory intent of the NATO powers and their Libyan auxiliaries in the TNC. The same cannot be said for the British Workers Power group (flagship of the League for the Fifth International [L5I]), well known for incongruously combining leftist rhetoric with grossly opportunist positions. It was no surprise to find that Workers Power’s initial take on what it termed the Libyan “revolution” was virtually identical to that of the IMT, CWI, SWP and assorted other revisionists. When NATO started bombing, the L5I loudly denounced the UN-mandated imperialist intervention, while continuing to “unconditionally support” the imperialist quislings of the TNC:

“The rebellion against Gadaffi’s dictatorship deserves unconditional support and that is not altered by the UN decision….

“Those who oppose powerful states have the right to get hold of arms wherever they can and to take advantage of any weaknesses in their oppressors’ situation. That remains true even where the weaknesses are the result of imperialist action. If, under cover of the no-fly zone, Libyan insurgents and revolutionaries can retake positions, undermine the morale or the loyalty of Gadaffi’s troops and even advance on the capital, Tripoli, that is a step forward for the Libyan revolution and should be welcomed.

“At the same time we must oppose the US, British and French attack.”
—“Victory to the Libyan Revolution!,” 19 March 2011

A week later Workers Power sought to explain why, if indeed it opposed the imperialist attack, it refused to side with Qaddafi:

“Others on the left decided to support Gaddafi when the bombs started falling, calling on all the Libyans to form an anti-imperialist united front. This position assumes that the working class should automatically side with those targeted by imperialism, irrespective of political context or the war aims of either side….Are the workers and the poor of Libya supposed to make common cause with Gaddafi so that he can continue his repression of their revolution?”
—“Nato over Libya—the tide begins to turn,” 26 March 2011

Workers Power viewed NATO’s military intervention into what had been a nascent civil war as an opportunity “the forces of the democratic revolution” (i.e., the TNC and its followers) should take advantage of: “It would be bizarre, indeed, to refuse to continue the campaign against Gaddafi’s repressive apparatus because it had been weakened by imperialist action!” (Ibid.). As the months went on, the L5I leadership was compelled to offer a series of shifting rationalizations for supporting NATO’s proxies. In June 2011, the L5I asked: “Are the rebels fighting on the ground simply tools of imperialism? No. First as we have said the NATO powers did not give weapons or munitions to the rebels—i.e. they did not enhance the latter’s independent capacity to overthrow Gaddafi” (“Libya and the struggle against imperialism,” 15 June 2011).

How then to explain the widely-publicized presence of hundreds of NATO and other special forces sent in to stiffen the TNC militias? The article continues:

“Despite having military operations in Libya for three months a direct command structure to liaise between the NATO air force and naval actions and the Benghazi ground forces was only established in early June.”

The existence of a “direct command structure” linking the rebel militias and NATO controllers might seem to most people to be pretty good evidence that the former were being wielded as “tools of imperialism.” Workers Power admitted that the “rebels” not only had a “pro-imperialist counterrevolutionary leadership,” but had been involved in “racist pogroms against sub-Saharan Africans.” Yet none of this made any difference:

“Socialists will always support a genuine mass movement that is fighting for democratic rights against a dictatorship, no matter how ‘anti-imperialist’ their credentials….

“In Poland in the 1980s it was right for socialists to support Solidarnosc as a mass trade-union movement—again despite the pro-capitalist, pro-catholic, policies of its leadership. In France in the Second World War Paris was liberated by a Communist Party led resistance movement that was certainly not anti-imperialist in any sense.

“The crucial perspective within all these social movements is to fight for a revolution within the revolution. Every revolutionary movement carries within it the seeds of a counter-revolution, whether it is the threat of co-option or bureaucratisation. The threat for the Libyan resistance is very real—the TNC is staffed with ex Gaddafi men, pro-privatisation, pro-imperialism and anti-working class.”
—Ibid.

Revolutionary movements are not, as a rule, led by those with “pro-imperialist and anti-working class” programs. In Russia in 1921 there was a “genuine mass movement…fighting for democratic rights against a [Bolshevik] dictatorship” that extended from the confused Kronstadt mutineers to the hardened counterrevolutionary officers of the White Army. The “socialists” who supported this movement (like Workers Power and other leftists who backed Lech Walesa and the rest of the capitalist-restorationist leaders of Poland’s Solidarnosc in 1981) were acting as shills for imperialism. In a polemic aimed at Workers Power written a few years prior to the triumph of counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc, we observed:

“The duty of revolutionists is to tell the truth—not to ascribe ‘revolutionary’ dynamics to reactionary political movements. In following the leadership of Solidarnosc, the bulk of the Polish workers were acting against their own historic class interests.”
—”Solidarnosc: Acid Test for Trotskyists,” 1988

The same could be said of those workers in Libya who identified with the TNC. In a statement marking the triumphant entry of NATO’s proxies into Tripoli, Dave Stockton, one of Workers Power’s founding cadres, wrote:

“Those imperialists who once supported him [Gaddafi] have gone over to opposing him and are trying to bring him down—to them we say: get out of the way, this has nothing to do with you, the people of Libya alone will defeat Gaddafi and his wretched cronies….”
—”Should socialists support the Libyan revolution?,” 22 August 2011

Who was Stockton hoping to fool? The “people of Libya” did not bring down Qaddafi—NATO did, as even the newest recruit to Workers Power must be aware. Stockton neatly encapsulates the rightist thrust of the L5I’s crystallized confusionism by observing: “In conclusion, socialists always oppose imperialism but they do not always support those who are fighting imperialism.”

Contrary to Workers Power, revolutionaries always, and without exception, militarily side with those neocolonial forces resisting imperialist aggression. It is impossible to “always oppose imperialism” without also militarily supporting those who resist attempts to reimpose neocolonial rule, however unpalatable their leaders may be. This policy, which originated with the Third (Communist) International under Lenin, and was upheld by the Fourth International of the 1930s and 1940s, retains all its validity today for reasons Trotsky spelled out over 70 years ago:

“The struggle of the oppressed peoples for national unification and national independence is doubly progressive because, on the one side, this prepares more favorable conditions for their own development, while, on the other side, this deals blows to imperialism. That, in particular, is the reason why, in the struggle between a civilized, imperialist, democratic republic and a backward, barbaric monarchy in a colonial country, the socialists are completely on the side of the oppressed country notwithstanding its monarchy and against the oppressor country notwithstanding its ‘democracy.’

“Imperialism camouflages its own peculiar aims—seizure of colonies, markets, sources of raw material, spheres of influence—with such ideas as ‘safeguarding peace against the aggressors,’ ‘defense of the fatherland,’ ‘defense of democracy,’ etc. These ideas are false through and through. It is the duty of every socialist not to support them but, on the contrary, to unmask them before the people.”
—“Lenin and Imperialist War,” 30 December 1938

 

Coup in Mali Exposes All Opportunists Which Feed Off African Resources

What began as a mutiny on March 22, 2012 at Kati’s army barracks near Bamako quickly became a coup against the former general, Amadou Toumani Touré.

Public speculation has it that the reason for the overthrow was Touré’s incompetence. Captain Amadou Sanogo, a coup leader, argued that the ousted government had failed to provide the national army with adequate means to defeat the rebellion against the Taureg people in the north of Mali.

At no point have coup leaders spoken out against imperialism or neocolonialism. History has shown us that military coups are a quick way for elements of the military sector of the African petty bourgeoisie to seize power and secure large chunks of resources for themselves.

Touré himself came into power in a coup against the former neocolonial dictator, Moussa Traore, in March 1991.

Today, the constitution of Mali has been suspended, its borders closed, and several ministers arrested.

The deposed president is currently in hiding.

Neocolonialism benefits only the parasitic imperialists in Mali

The neocolonial state was created to repress the toiling masses, for the benefit of parasitic French rulers and black collaborators.

The country of Mali is a former French colony landlocked between Algeria, Guinea, Niger, Senegal, Côte D’ivoire, Burkina Faso and Mauritania — artificial borders created by white rulers at the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, with neither the consent nor the participation of African people.

Some observers feel there is evidence of a U.S.-led white imperialist scheme to carve up Africa and recolonize it at the expense of Africans.

Mali is vulnerable to severe drought conditions and hunger. Its most important mineral export is gold, but the reality is that Mali cannot develop economically within its present context, which is determined by imperial powers that are lining up to exploit its vast resources, including increasing U.S. influence.

The U.S. provides “military and economic aid of $70 million each year and another $70 million for food and other humanitarian needs.”

As a result of this U.S. intrusion, Mali has now been brought into a U.S.-led military program known as the Trans-Saharan Counter Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI).

Colonial borders represent the status quo: tear them down!

Despite the coup, power remains in the hands of the African petty bourgeois, class-enemy-from-within that rules at the expense the African working class and the poor peasantry.

The liberal democratic rights that we saw in Mali were actually a political space for sectors of the African petty bourgeoisie to compete for access to State power — not a space where imperialism could be fought.

We must turn our backs on both coup leaders and the deposed government.

We need a transformation of Mali — powered by the people — to satisfy the material needs and legitimate aspirations of the people of Mali.

Workers, peasants and honest progressive forces, including progressives in the armed forces in Mali, must fight for a people’s State.

The people’s State must be based on struggle for a revolutionary national democratic program that will sweep away all remnants of the neocolonial State, which is rotten to the core.

This type of State, created to repress the toiling masses for the benefit of parasitic French rulers and black collaborators, must go.

The democratization of Mali must mean that the people come to power anchored around a new revolutionary State, which must be born against parasitic capitalism and Berlin conference-created nationality, which does not serve the African working class in Mali or anywhere else.

Any news or “aid” coming from the African Union, Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), United Nations or coup leaders represents the status quo. →

What the “Professional Left” Refuses to Share With Their “Followers”: 2011-The Year of the Dupe

WKOG editor: This article contains a mountain of factual information/evidence. Acknowledging such evidence is critical if we are to see the light through veils and illusions. As only then does the possibility for a real influence and positive outcome arise from orchestrated events which are being engineered with a false exterior to serve corporate and Imperialist interests. The very forces we claim to oppose continue to successfully reabsorb us into the very system destroying us – the very system we must starve, struggle against and ultimately dismantle. This is where we fail. If we continue to deny these truths, rather than confront them, our collective denial will serve as the instrument to our own annihilation. [About WKOG]

A timeline & history: One year into the engineered “Arab Spring,” one step closer to global hegemony

by Tony Cartalucci

Editor’s Note: The title, “Year of the Dupe,” was inspired, and indeed coined by Dr. Webster Tarpley of Tarpley.net, who is noted below as giving the initial tip-off regarding Egypt’s unrest back in January 2011.

dupe (dp, dyp)

tr.v. duped, dup·ing, dupes To deceive (an unwary person).

December 24, 2011 – In January of 2011, we were told that “spontaneous,” “indigenous” uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East in what was hailed as the “Arab Spring.” It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but “spontaneous,” or “indigenous.” In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, “U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings,” it was stated:

“A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington.”

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

“The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. “

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous foundations, organizations, and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. As we will see, preparations for the “Arab Spring” and the global campaign that is now encroaching on both Russia and China, as predicted in February 2011’s “The Middle East & then the World,” began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first “fist” was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

The Timeline – 2008-2010 Preparing the Battlefield

December 3-5, 2008: Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM’s various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO “Otpor” who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a “well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States.” After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

Photo: Serbia’s “Otpor,” a model for future US-backed color revolutions.

Foreign Policy Magazine would report in their article, “Revoluton U,” that CANVAS assisted protesters in the “Rose Revolution” of Georgia, the “Orange Revolution” of the Ukraine, and is currently working with networks from Belarus, Myanmar (Burma), all across the Middle East and North Africa, as well as with activists in North Korea, and 50 other countries.

2009: In a US State Department funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Libery (RFE/RL) article titled, “Exporting Nonviolent Revolution, From Eastern Europe to The Middle East,” it was stated, “Popovic then exported his nonviolent methods, helping train the activists who spearheaded Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004. And now, Popovic is deploying his new organization, called Canvas, even farther afield — assisting the pro-democracy activists who recently brought down despotic regimes in Egypt and Tunisia.”

Activists from Iran, Belarus, and North Korea were also confirmed by RFE/RL as having received training from CANVAS. The RFE/RL article places the activists’ meeting with CANVAS sometime during 2009.

February 2010: The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while awaiting for ElBaradei’s arrival at Cairo’s airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his “National Front for Change” and began preparing for the coming “Arab Spring.”

Clearly then, unrest was long planned, with activists from Tunisia and Egypt on record receiving training and support from abroad, so that they could return to their home nations and sow unrest in a region-wide coordinated campaign.

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm this, when US State Department’s Michael Posner stated that the “US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments.” The report went on to explain that the US “organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there.” Posner would add, “They went back and there’s a ripple effect.” That ripple effect of course, is the “Arab Spring.”

The Timeline – 2011 Year of the Dupe

January 16, 2011: Al Arabiya News reported in their article, “Tunisian exiled reformist to head back home,” that Moncef Marzouki was returning to Tunisia (from Paris) amidst the chaos sown by US State Department trained, supported, and equipped mobs who were “triggered” by the convenient release of US State Department cables via Wikileaks. Quite clearly, considering the training Tunisian opposition groups received long before the cables were released, the Wikileaks cables were merely used as a planned rhetorical justification for long ago premeditated foreign-funded sedition. Since then, Wikileaks has been employed in an identical manner everywhere from Egypt to Libya, and even as far flung as Thailand.

Moncef Marzouki, it would turn out, was founder and head of the Arab Commission for Human Rights, a collaborating institution with the US NED World Movement for Democracy (WMD) including for a “Conference on Human Rights Activists in Exile” and a participant in the WMD “third assembly” alongside Marzouki’s Tunisian League for Human Rights, sponsored by NED, Soros’ Open Society, and USAID.

A “call for solidarity” by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) mentions by name each and every group constituting the Tunisian opposition during the “uprising” in January 2011 as “FIDH member organisations.” These include Marzouki’s “Tunisian League for Human Rights,” the “Tunisian Association of Democratic Women,” and the “National Council for Liberties in Tunisia,” or CNLT. FIDH, acting as an international nexus for various foreign-funded organizations carrying out sedition worldwide under the guise of “human rights,” is itself fully funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros’ Open Society, and many others with clearly compromised affiliations.

January 28, 2011: After a warning by journalist/activist Dr. Webster Tarpley of World Crisis Radio, the alternative media began looking closer at the unrest in Egypt which began shortly after Tunisia’s growing crisis. In “All is not what it seems in Egyptian Clashes,” it was noted that protest leader Mohammed ElBaradei was in fact a devoted agent of the West, with a long standing membership within the Wall Street/London funded International Crisis Group (ICG) along side “senior Israeli officials” including the current Israeli President Shimon Peres, the current Governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, and former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami. The ICG also includes senior American bankers and geopolitical manipulators including George Soros, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Armitage, Samuel Berger, and Wesley Clark.

Ironically, Western media outlets insisted ElBaradei was both anti-American and strongly anti-Israeli in a rouse best described a year earlier in March 2010 in the Council On Foreign Relations’ paper, Foreign Affairs’ article “Is ElBaradei Egypt’s Hero?”:

“Further, Egypt’s close relationship with the United States has become a critical and negative factor in Egyptian politics. The opposition has used these ties to delegitimize the regime, while the government has engaged in its own displays of anti-Americanism to insulate itself from such charges. If ElBaradei actually has a reasonable chance of fostering political reform in Egypt, then U.S. policymakers would best serve his cause by not acting strongly. Somewhat paradoxically, ElBaradei’s chilly relationship with the United States as IAEA chief only advances U.S. interests now. “

The most recent manifestation of this came when Israel farcically called ElBaradei an “Iranian agent.” This latest performance further illustrates the immense level of duplicity with which world events are being manipulated.

February 17, 2011: The London-based National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) calls for a Libyan “Day of Rage” to match the US-destabilization rhetoric used in Tunisia and Egypt. The NFSL has been backed by the CIA-MI6 since the 80’s and had made multiple attempts to overthrow Qaddafi’s government with both terrorist attacks and armed insurrection.

Photo: Please note the “EnoughGaddafi.com” signs. EnoughGaddafi.com’s webmaster is listed on the US State Department’s Movements.org as the “Twitter” to follow.

February 18, 2011: In the wake of Honsi Mubarak’s ousting, billionaire bankster George Soros’ Open Society Institute was found to be behind NGOs drafting Egypt’s new constitution. These “civil society” groups include the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information openly funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute and the Neo-Con lined NED funded Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. It appears that while the International Crisis Group was turning out the strategy, and their trustee ElBaradei leading the mobs into the streets, it is the vast array of NGOs their membership, including Soros, fund that were working out and implementing the details on the ground.

February 21, 2011: An interview with Ibrahim Sahad of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on ABC Australia, featured every talking point covered by the mainstream corporate media from previous weeks regarding Libya, all with the White House and Washington Monument looming over him in the background. He made calls for a no-fly zone in reaction to unsubstantiated accusations Qaddafi was strafing “unarmed protesters” with warplanes.

March 2011’s “US Libyan Policy: Zero Legitimacy,” noted the clearly heavily armed, western-backed insurgency that was still being disingenuously portrayed by Western media as “peaceful protests.”

February 28, 2011: “Destroying Libya” stated:

While Libyan opposition leader Ibrahim Sahad leads the rhetorical charge from Washington D.C., his National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL) on the ground is armed to the teeth, as it has been throughout its 20 year history of attempted CIA backed rebellions against Qaddafi. In 1984, the NFSL tried to overthrow Qaddafi in a failed armed coup. The Daily Globe and Mail also recently confirmed that the NFSL along with the Libyan National Army, both under Sahad’s new National Conference of Libyan Opposition (NCLO), had both “attempted coups and assassinations against Col. Gadhafi in the 1980s.”

Already at this point, both British and US representatives were admitting Libyan rebels were indeed heavily armed, and instead of condemning the violence, openly called for additional weapons and military support to be provided.

March 17, 2011: The UN decided to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya to save the globalist-backed rebellion sputtering in failure and bordering on a “Bay of Pigs” disaster. Canadian, US, French, Arab, and UK jets were already reported to be preparing for the operation.

March 24, 2011: Unrest had already begun in Syria, as NATO began bombing Libya while Egypt and Tunisia had already fallen into political and economic chaos. In “Globalists Hit in Syria,” the opposition is closely examined and documented to be once again a creation of Western-backed opposition groups.

Much of the “evidence” of Syria’s unrest was being filtered through organizations such as the London-based Syrian Human-Rights Committee whose hearsay statements posted on its website were cited by corporate news media in outlandish reports of violence that also include “activists say” after each allegation. The “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights,” also London-based, is now the exclusive source cited by corporate-media reports regarding Syria.

March 26, 2011: In Egypt, signs of a counterrevolution and the first signs of weakness in ElBaradei’s chances to be installed as president began to show. Mobs pelted ElBaradei with rocks calling him “an American agent.” Wikileaks would again come to the aid of US interests and try to reintroduce the “anti-Western” image ElBaradei had been hamfisted in portraying.

Photo: The “barrier of legitimacy” is broken: a mob shouts “American agent” as they hurl rocks at ElBaradei who most certainly is an American agent – a trustee of the US International Crisis Group alongside George Soros.

March 28, 2011: Fortune-500 funded Brookings Institution’s “Libya’s Test of the New International Order” is reported on – exposing the war as not one of a “humanitarian” nature, but one aimed explicitly at establishing an international order and the primacy of international law.

April 17, 2011: Syria’s unrest yields widespread arson as well as reports of gunmen targeting both protesters and state security forces in a bid to escalate violence. In, “Globalist War Machine Fixates on Syria,” the “Libyan Precedent” is already being cited by US and French politicians as justification to use force against Syria. A later article, “Color Revolution’s Mystery Gunmen,” establishes a historical context within which to view the current violence in Syria and the fact that it is provocateurs sowing much of the violence.

April 21, 2011: Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko announces that his nation is now also under covert attack by Western forces to foster an “Arab Spring-style” insurrection. In, “Besieging Belarus,” documented ties between Belarus opposition members and the same Western organizations and institutions fueling the Arab Spring are illustrated.

April 22, 2011: John McCain touches down in Benghazi, Libya and consorts with verified terrorists who were fresh back from Iraq and Afghanistan, killing US troops. A West Point report would later confirm (.pdf from West Point’s CTC can be found here) with absolute certainty that the region from which the Libyan rebellion began was also the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group’s (LIFG) center of operations. It would also expose the fact that LIFG were in fact long-time affiliates of Al Qaeda with LIFG members occupying the highest levels of leadership within the terrorist organization.

Photo: Ultimate act of treason: McCain calls for recognition and extra-legal support for the very men who had killed US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By denying “Al-Qaeda” a base in Iraq, but handing them the entire nation of Libya, he has brought American foreign policy
to a new level of surrealism.

May, 2011: In “Libya at Any Cost,” the conflict in Libya was reported to be escalating, including NATO attempts to assassinate Qaddafi and the targeted killings of several of his family members including several of his grandchildren.

“America’s Arab Deception” attempted to review the past several months of engineered chaos blowing through Northern Africa and the Middle East, while it was noted in, “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” that the National Endowment for Democracy already began its first round of self-aggrandizing, and passing out awards to several of the dupes and collaborators that made its campaign of carnage throughout the Arab World a reality.

June, 2011: In “Arab Spring brings Corporate Locust,” the true agenda behind Egypt’s, and indeed the entire “Arab Spring’s” unrest became apparent as US representatives gave Fortune 500 executives a tour of destabilized Egypt and Tunisia in an effort to promote economic liberaliztion and privatization. John McCain and John Kerry led the tour and had co-sponsored bills to promote what would essentially be the meshing of Egypt and Tunisia’s economy into the Wall Street/London international order.

Photo: McCain (left) and Kerry (right) gesticulate as they explain their paymaster’s agenda within the confines of an Egyptian Coca-Cola factory. This is part of their latest trip surveying the effects of their US-funded opposition overthrowing Hosni Mubarak’s government.

In late June, France would admit to violating the terms of UN resolution 1973, and arming Libyan rebels.

July, 2011: The African Union would wholly reject the International Criminal Court’s mandate against Libya, exposing the severe illegitimacy with which it operates. Ties to corporate-financier funded organizations are revealed in “It’s Official: International Criminal Court has ZERO Mandate,” as well as the tenuous nature of the ICC’s claims against Libya’s Qaddafi. It would later be confirmed by members of Libya’s “human rights” community that indeed they, in collaboration with the rebel leaders, fabricated the numbers supplied to both the UN and the ICC, and that no verified or documented evidence of Qaddafi’s “atrocities” were produced.

In Thailand, another long-running US-backed color revolution finally yielded results and saw the return of Wall Street proxy, Thaksin Shinawatra’s political party to power. Various mouthpieces of the global elite, including the Council on Foreign Relations itself, gave stern warnings to Thailand’s establishment to accept the tenuous results of the July election or face isolation and other consequences. Another Southeast Asian country, Malaysia would also see color revolution take to their streets – this time in Malaysia by the yellow-clad, NED-funded Bersih movement.

Photo: Thaksin Shinawatra, a long time servant of the global elite, since before even becoming Thailand’s prime minister in 2001, reports to the CFR in New York City on the eve of the 2006 military coup that ousted him from power. He has now returned to power in Thailand via a proxy political party led by his own sister, Yingluck Shinawatra. Securing the votes of only 35% of eligible voters puts on full display how tenuous his support really is within a nation he claims stands entirely behind him.

August, 2011: By August, even the corporate-media began admitting that Syria’s opposition was “mostly unarmed,” or in other words, armed. The opposition was starting to be more clearly defined as armed ethnic groups and armed militants of the Muslim Brotherhood.

By late August, NATO began a coordinated attack on Tripoli, Libya, involving an elaborate psychological-operation that claimed to have eliminated or captured the entire Qaddafi family in a single day. The following day, Saif Al-Qaddafi would turn up alive and well, and free, while leading fierce fighting that would carry on until October and result in NATO leveling the cities of Bani Walid and Sirte in particular, into piles of rubble. It had become entirely clear that NATO was providing air support not for democracy-loving freedom fighters, but for hardcore terrorists who were carrying out a systematic campaign of genocide and reprisals throughout the country.

Photo: Libya’s rebels are far from motivated by democratic aspirations. Their grievances lie along ethnic, not political divides. “Gaddafi supporters” is the euphemism being used by the global corporate-media in describing the generally darker skinned and African tribes that form the majority of Western Libya’s demographics and who are bearing the brunt of NATO-backed rebel atrocities.

September, 2011: Sensing victory in Libya, corporate-financier funded think-tanks began preparing for the rebuilding and despoiling of the Libyan economy. In “Globalists to Rebuild Libya,” NATO’s Atlantic Council wrote a report detailing just how they would go about doing this.

Also as Libya’s violence spiraled out of control and atrocities carried out by the rebels and their NATO backers became more obscene, it became clear how fraudulent the “War on Terror” was. In “Libyan Rebels Listed by US State Department as Terrorists,” it is illustrated how NATO members were guilty of anti-terrorist laws for providing material support for listed terrorist organizations.

Image: A screenshot taken directly from the US State Department website showing the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) clearly listed as a foreign terrorist organization. This is important, as US Code prohibits providing material support to listed terrorist organizations. With revelations of Al Qaeda and LIFG fighters leading the Libyan rebellion with NATO-members’ full military, financial, and diplomatic support, attempts are being made to plea ignorance as to the true nature of the rebels. Listed below LIFG, is MEK, an Iraqi/Iranian group also being armed and supported by the US. (click on image to enlarge)

September also saw real humanitarian catastrophe unfold in Uganda, where a British corporation sanctioned genocide to clear land they had “leased” from the Ugandan government. Thus illustrates how the cause of “humanitarian concerns” is called on only when it serves Wall Street and London’s interests, and otherwise ignored when it involves verifiable genocide carried out in the pursuit of furthering their wealth and power.

Photo: Robert Devereux, a long time investor, a long time con-artist spinning his company’s despoiling of Africa as some sort of cutting-edge investment strategy that makes money and “helps” people. Even as Devereux made his disingenuous statements in 2010 regarding New Forests, the villagers in Uganda he was “helping” had already filed a court case a year earlier protesting the British company’s encroachment on their land. These villagers would be forcibly displaced, many of them killed by Ugandan troops acting on behalf of Devereux.
….

John McCain would land once again in Libya, this time in Tripoli to celebrate the destruction of the country and shake hands once again with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group that delivered Qaddafi’s Libya into the hands of the Wall Street/London elite.

Photo: It’s all smiles and laughs in Tripoli as McCain, a chief proponent and driving force behind the US intervention in Libya, literally glorifies Al Qaeda’s exploits in the now ruined nation. Miles away, the very rebels he was praising are purposefully starving the civilian population of Sirte in an effort to break their will, while they and NATO indiscriminately use heavy weapons aimed at crowded city centers.

October 2011: While Tunisia and Egypt had fallen, and Libya too being seized by proxy forces fueled by the West, the Obama administration began withdrawing troops from Iraq. This suspicious withdrawal when otherwise the rest of the Middle East was under US proxy assault raised serious suspicions that an escalation, not retreat was to follow.

Rhetoric for war with Iran had been steadily increasing and the beginning of what looked like a covert war was being fought inside and along Iran’s borders. A disastrous ploy of framing Iran for the alleged planned assassination of a Saudi ambassador in Washington D.C. fell apart when Iranians linked the plot to US-backed terrorist organization Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Image: MEK. Admittedly a terrorist organization, listed by the US State Department as being such, it is fully funded, armed, and backed by the United States, based in France and US-occupied Iraq, and allowed to conduct terrorist operations against the Iranian people. The “War on Terror” is a fraud.

It is more than likely that the withdrawal of troops from Iraq would simply provide the US “plausible deniability” for an Israeli airstrike on Iran.

November 2011: Syria’s “peaceful protesters” who had been all along fully armed and attempting to stoke a Libyan-style civil war, were finally acknowledge as such by the corporate-media and more importantly by the corporate-funded think-tanks that supply them with their talking points. In “IISS: Syria’s Opposition is Armed,” it is states that a report out of the International Institute for Strategic Studies by Senior Fellow for Regional Security at IISS-Middle East, Emile Hokayem openly admitted that Syria’s opposition was armed and prepared to drag Syria’s violence into even bloodier depths.

Also in November, Wall Street and London’s assault on Libya came full circle with the installation of Abdurrahim el-Keib as prime minister. El-Keib who spent decades in exile in the US, was formally employed by the Petroleum Institute, based in Abu Dhabi, UAE and sponsored by British Petroleum (BP), Shell, France’s Total, the Japan Oil Development Company, and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

Photo: And so begins the farce that is Western “democracy.” One corporate-fascist puppet Mahmoud Jibril , steps down, another, Abdurrahim el-Keib, takes his place. In reality, it is NATO-states and their corporate sponsors that now determine Libya’s fate. Pictured above, el-Keib poses with Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, chairman of the unelected, NATO-backed “National Transitional Council.”
….

In Egypt, in late November, a second “revolution” began unfolding on the streets. In reality it was the same Western-backed forces led by ElBaradei and the emerging Mamdouh Hamza, against Egyptian military forces that seemed to have gone back on whatever arrangements they made with the West after the fall of Mubarak.

The UN, in another attempt to escalate foreign intervention in Syria, would release a UN Human Rights Council report regarding Syrian “crimes against humanity” which was actually co-authored by Karen Koning AbuZayd, a director of the US Washington-based corporate think-tank, Middle East Policy Council, that includes Exxon men, CIA agents, US military and government representatives, and even the president of the US-Qatar Business Council, which includes amongst its membership, AlJazeera, Chevron, Exxon, munitions manufacturer Raytheon (who supplied the opening salvos during NATO’s operations against Libya), and Boeing.

The report itself contained no verifiable evidence, but rather hearsay accounts recorded in Geneva by alleged “victims” “witnesses,” and “defectors,” put forth by “all interested persons and organizations.” In other words, it was an open invitation for Syria’s enemies to paint whatever image of the ruling government they pleased.

December 2011: With Tunisia and Libya fully run by Western proxies, Egypt and Syria still mired in chaos, and with globalists calling for war on Iran, the “Arab Spring” was nearly complete. However, the “Arab Spring” was only the first leg of a grander strategy to encircle Russia and China. In December, the campaigns to move in on Russia and China would begin in earnest.

Image: The “String of Pearls:” China’s oil lifeline is to be cut by the destabilization and regimes changes being made throughout Africa and the Middle East. Along the “String” the US has been destabilizing nations from Pakistan to Myanmar, from Malaysia to Thailand, to disrupt and contain China’s emergence as a regional power.

Hillary Clinton, in Foreign Policy Magazine would pen, “America’s Pacific Century,” a Hitlerian declaration of imperial intent for American “leadership” in Asia for the next 100 years. From “Hillary Clinton and the New American (Pacific) Century:

“Upon reading Clinton’s declaration of intent for American leadership into the next century, readers may recall the similarly named, ranting “Project for a New American Century” signed off on by some of America’s most notorious Neo-Conservatives, which almost verbatim made the same case now made by Clinton. In fact, America’s evolving confrontation with China, marked acutely by Obama’s announcement of a permanent US military presence in Australia just this week, is torn directly from the pages of decades old blueprints drawn up by corporate-financier funded think-tanks that truly rule America and its destiny.

 

As reported in June, 2011’s “Collapsing China,” as far back as 1997 there was talk about developing an effective containment strategy coupled with the baited hook of luring China into its place amongst the “international order.” Just as in these 1997 talking-points where author and notorious Neo-Con policy maker Robert Kagan described the necessity of using America’s Asian “allies” as part of this containment strategy, Clinton goes through a list of regional relationships the US is trying to cultivate to maintain “American leadership” in Asia.

 

For example, the recently reinstalled Wall Street proxy regime in Thailand led by Thaksin Shinawatra and his sister Yingluck, has received reassurances by Clinton herself just this week stating that, “it is in the national security and political interest of the United States to have this government succeed.” As reported in-depth in “CONFIRMED: Thailand’s “Pro-Democracy” Movement Working for US,” Thaksin Shinawatra and his political regime have had long standing, well documented ties to Wall Street and London. The US backing of puppet-regimes like Thaksin, installing them into power, and keeping them there is central to projecting power throughout Asia and keeping China subordinate, or as Kagan put it in his 1997 report, these proxy regimes will have China “play Gulliver to Southeast Asia’s Lilliputians, with the United States supplying the rope and stakes.””

In Myanmar (Burma) “democracy icon” Aung San Suu Kyi, whose entire movement is a creation of Wall Street and London, received Hillary Clinton as well as Thailand’s proxy-PM Yingluck Shinawatra in a globalist show of support designating her as the defacto leader and point of contact within the Southeast Asian country. Clinton’s visit coincided with a successful campaign led by US NGOs to oust Chinese interests in the nation that resulted in the halting of a dam that was to provide electricity, revenue, flood control and irrigation for the people of Myanmar.

Image: The Myitsone Dam, on its way to being the 15th largest in the world until construction was halted in September by a campaign led by Wall Street-puppet Aung San Suu Kyi, a stable of US-funded NGOs, and a terrorist campaign executed by armed groups operating in Kachin State, Myanmar.

Meanwhile in Russia, Wall Street and London attacked more directly, attempting to interfere with Russian elections in December and resulting in several street protests led by overtly linked NED, Soros, and Rothschild operatives. NED-funded NGO “Golos” played a key role in portraying the elections as “rigged” and constituted America’s extraterritorial meddling in Russia’s sovereign affairs.

Image: NATO’s creeping encirclement of Russia has now been combined with another round of “color revolution” destabilizations in Belarus and now in Russia itself.

A concerted effort by the corporate-media to misrepresent the unrest in Russia was pointed out in, “Russian Protests: Western Media Lies ,” illustrating just how coordinated the overarching global destabilization being carried out actually is. In “Wall Street Vs. Russia,” it was concluded:

“It is quite clear that the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, the Foreign Policy Initiative, and even the US State Department whose new foreign affairs advisory board is full of think-tanks representing overt corporate-financier interests, are not interested in “democracy,” “human rights,” or “freedom” in Russia, but rather removing the Kremlin out of the way, and reestablishing the parasitic feeding on the Russian people and its economy they enjoyed after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

In late December it would be confirmed that the same Al Qaeda militants that ravaged Libya with NATO’s aid, were on their way to Syria to help overthrow the Assad government. LIFG leader Abdel Hakim Belhaj was confirmed to be on the Syrian border preparing troops of the so-called “Free Syrian Army.”

This wasn’t the only recent example of the West operating in tandem with listed terrorist groups. It was also reported in, “EXPOSED: US Troops Guarded Terrorist Camp in Iraq,” that the US has been guarding a terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq training camp inside Iraq with US troops and is planning to relocated them, possibly in a freshly abandoned US military base in Iraq while D.C. lobbyists work feverishly to have them de-listed, armed, and sent to conduct terrorist operations in Iran. Shocking comments are made in the Brookings Institution’s report, “Which Path to Persia?” where US policy experts conspire to use the terrorist organization against the government of Iran. In essence, corporate-funded policy makers have transformed the US into a state-sponsor of terror.

Conclusion

The year 2011 was surely the year of the dupe. Youth enamored with lofty, naive notions of “freedom” sold to them by corporate-fascist funded NGOs were brought into the streets to create chaos and division which was then capitalized on by covert political and even military maneuvering by the West and its proxy forces. In Egypt the nation is teetering on the edge of being fully integrated into the Wall Street/London international order, while a big-oil representative is enjoying his new position as prime minister of Libya. In Tunisia a life-long stooge of Western machinations is now president, and an alarming campaign of NATO-backed violence and terrorism is gripping Syria.

With the encirclement of Russia and China, these dupes have witlessly brought the world to the edge of World War III, and clearly done nothing at all to improve their own state of being. As their nations fall under the control of increasing Western influence, the resources once used to placate them and defend their nationalism will now be diverted into the bottomless maw of the parasitic banking combines that are currently destroying both North America and Europe.

February’s “The Middle East & then the World” is well worth reading again – to see how far we’ve come over the last year since it was written, and what is left for the globalists to do. As the globalists come ever closer to China and Russia’s doorsteps the stakes will continue to rise and the placid spectating Americans and Europeans have enjoyed this year will forever be lost.

Finally, consider what was written in one of the last articles of this year, “The End Game Approaches:”

“Complacency will kill, apathy is complicity: as the elitist-engineered “Arab Spring” reaches its conclusion, we stand on the precipice of being meshed into an inescapable, corporate-fascist, scientific planetary regime…. the End Game approaches.

 

Now more than ever, “we the people” must steel ourselves against this immense corporate-fascist empire as it sprawls death, destruction, and domination, militarily and economically, across the planet. We must, our very survival depends on it, boycott and replace entirely the corporate-financier interests that drive this dark, expansive agenda. It has been literally spawned of our apathy, complicity, and ignorance, fueled by us – the very source of corporate fascism’s power – and it must be our activism, resistance, and intellect that brings it to an end.

 

As far fetched as it may sound, every Pepsi we swig, every day we decide to drink beer and tune into our corporate-sponsored bread and circus, be it the modern day chariot races of NASCAR or the gladiatorial contests of the NFL, we bring inescapable eternal servitude to a corporate-fascist scientific dictatorship one step closer.

 

It is now “do or die” – unlike in the past, mankind now possesses the technology to render the vast majority of the population intellectually inferior through mass medication, food poisoning, GMO crops that rot our bodies and minds from the inside-out, and the martial means of eliminating vast swaths of the population permanently. Not only is this a possibility, it is a reality the global elite have conspired over at great length through texts like Ecoscience penned by current White House science adviser John Holdren and former White House science adviser Paul Ehrlich who openly talk about mass, involuntary medication to forcibly sterilize the population, reduce our numbers and confine us within what they literally call a “planetary regime.” The End Game approaches.”

Let us not “hope” next year fairs better for free humanity. Let us with our two hands, our will, and our capable intellects ensure that it is better. The decision is not that of our “leaders” or “representatives,” it is the decision of each and every one of us and what it is we do with our time, our money, our resources, our energy, and to where we pay our attention – each and every day. Let us define where it is we want our destiny to take us, and start taking one step at a time to get there.

Let us wait no longer for “saviors,” but rather look in the mirror and realize, God, the Universe, or whatever higher power you believe in, has already endowed you with everything you need, in your heart, your mind, and within your hands to prevail in whatever noble pursuit you, or “we the people” choose.

Source: Land Destroyer

Published December 24, 2011