The Morales Government: Neoliberalism in Disguise?

International Socialism

27 March 12

Federico Fuentes

For more than a decade Bolivia has been rocked by mass upsurges and mobilisations that have posed the necessity and possibility of fundamental political and social transformation.¹ In 2005 the social movements that led the country’s water and gas wars managed to elect a government that since then has presided over a process of change that has brought major advances.

Among these are: the adoption of a plurinational state structure that for the first time recognises the country’s indigenous majority; regaining sovereign control over vital natural resources and initial steps towards endogenous industrialisation; an ongoing agrarian reform; and the development of social programmes that have substantially improved the lives of ordinary Bolivians. Democratic rights have been reinforced; forms of self-government by indigenous communities established; and electoral processes expanded to include popular election even of the judiciary. Not least in importance, Bolivia has also become a prime participant in the movement for Latin American anti-imperialist unification and sovereignty and emerged as a major leader in the international fight against capitalist-induced climate change.

In his recent article in this journal, “Revolution against ‘Progress’”,² Jeffery Webber offers a harsh critique of the MAS government, illustrating it by reference to recent conflicts between the government and some indigenous groups involving environmental and development issues. His conclusion: the government remains committed to a neoliberal programme based on “fiscal austerity”, “low inflationary growth”, “inconsequential agrarian reform”, “low social spending” and “alliances with transnational capital”, among other policies. As such, it shares “more continuity than change with the inherited neoliberal model”.

These are sweeping assertions, and many are questionable. Webber criticises the government’s supposed “fiscal austerity”, yet omits the fact that budget spending has increased almost fourfold between 2004 and 2012. He attacks the government for seeking “low inflation” and “macroeconomic stability”, but what is his alternative: high inflation and macroeconomic instability? These were certainly traits of previous neoliberal governments. Furthermore, is it “inconsequential” that in its first five years the Morales government presided over the redistribution or titling of 41 million hectares of land to over 900,000 members of indigenous peasant communities?³ And if the government’s policy can be simply defined as one of forming alliances to benefit foreign transnationals, why is the Bolivian state currently facing 12 legal challenges in international courts initiated by these same companies?

Profile of neoliberalism

Simply put, Webber ignores the real progress made by the Morales government in rolling back the neoliberal project in Bolivia. Neoliberalism is best understood as a class project that sought to reassert capital’s dominance internationally in the wake of the 1970s economic crisis. Neoliberalism, as Webber himself previously noted, was “set in motion on an international scale largely under the tutelage of the US imperial state” and had as its fundamental strategy not only the “privatisation of formerly state or public resources but their acquisition by transnational capital in the US and other core economies”.⁴

Furthermore, current Bolivian vice-president Álvaro García Linera has noted that neoliberalism rested on three additional “pillars”: “the fragmentation of the labouring sectors and worker organisations…the diminished state, and impediments to people’s decision making”.⁵

The impact of neoliberalism in Bolivia includes:⁶

l The sell-off or dismantling of Bolivia’s largest state-owned companies. In the hydrocarbon sector, which accounted for 50 percent of government revenue, privatisation was accompanied by a drop in royalties companies had to pay from 50 percent to 18 percent. The workforce of YPBF (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos) was reduced from more than 9,000 in 1985 to 600 by 2002.

l The state’s dependency on foreign imperialist governments, transnational corporations and their institutions was deepened. International loans and aid covered “roughly half of Bolivia’s public investment”, with each budget deficit bringing further IMF-imposed structural adjustment programmes.

l The removal of state subsidies sent Bolivia’s small industrial sector into crisis. Some 35,000 jobs disappeared in the manufacturing sector alone.

l By 1988 the informal sector had ballooned to 70 percent of Bolivia’s urban workforce, and the few jobs created in the formal sector were subject to labour flexibilisation practices.

l The establishment of power-sharing pacts among traditional parties and restrictions on electoral registration for alternative parties consolidated the grip that neoliberal politicians had on political decision making.

Compare this disastrous record with that of the Morales government. While Bolivia’s state continues to be capitalist, “and the government functions within the framework of deeply entrenched capitalist culture and social relations”, it is equally true that through a combination of successful electoral and insurrectional battles, indigenous-popular forces today are in control of important positions of power within the state.⁷ From these positions, they have used the increased state revenue, generated through nationalisations undertaken across various strategic sectors, to begin breaking its dependency on foreign governments. This strong economic position has allowed those running the Bolivian state to dictate their own domestic and foreign policy, free from any impositions placed by imperialist governments and international financial institutions in return for loans. Ties of the US military to the Bolivian army have been cut.

A constituent assembly wrote a new constitution that for the first time recognises the previously excluded indigenous majority and has recuperated
state control over natural resources. Since the referendum ratifying the new constitution the process of “decolonising” the state has continued, most recently in October 2010, with the holding of Bolivia’s first popular elections to elect judicial authorities. The result was a record number of women and indigenous people flooding into the judicial branch of the state.

The Morales government also initiated a significant shift in Bolivia’s foreign policy, leaving behind the traditional subservient stance towards the US. Instead Bolivia has spearheaded initiatives in the direction of seeking unity with anti-imperialist forces—both at the level of governments and social movements—within the context of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America (Alba), and increasing regional collaboration, through institutions such as the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). Another key focus has been the construction of an international alliance to fight for real solutions to the climate crisis, as evidenced by the World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change held in Cochabamba in April 2010.

An alternative model

Webber ignores most of these achievements and instead focuses on the MAS industrial strategy and the social tensions that have been expressed around this. But he misrepresents the strategy. Let us look first, then, at what this strategy comprises, as it is a central component in the government’s economic vision. A succinct presentation may be found in a recent article on Bolivia’s economic model by Luis Alberto Arce Catacora, the minister of economy and public finance.

For Arce, “the New Economic, Social, Communitarian and Productive Model” that the government is implementing “does not pretend to immediately change the capitalist mode of production, but instead to lay the foundations for the transition towards a new socialist mode of production”.⁸

Unlike neoliberalism, in which surplus value and rents are appropriated by transnational capital, this new model, as the introduction to his article notes, has taken steps towards:

stimulating the internal market and reducing dependency on the external markets. Similarly, it has given the state a watching brief, endowing it with functions such as planning the economy, administering public enterprises, investing in the productive sector, taking on the role of a banker and regulator and, among other things, redistributing the surplus, with preference to those sectors that were not beneficiaries under previous governments.

The priority, Arce says, is promoting communitarian, cooperative and family-based enterprises (together with increasing social spending). Such a strategy is vital to rebuilding the strength of the working class and communitarian forces, pulverised by two decades of neoliberalism.

In summary: reassert state sovereignty in the economy and over natural resources; break out of Bolivia’s traditional position of primary materials exporter through industrialisation and promoting other productive sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture; redistribute the nation’s wealth in order to tackle poverty; and strengthen the organisational capacity of proletarian and communitarian forces as the two vital pillars of any possible transition to socialism in Bolivia today. Such a perspective, which seeks to advance the interest of Bolivia’s labouring classes at the expense of transnational capital, may be decried by some as mere reforms, but it is certainly not neoliberalism. →

“HUMAN RIGHTS” WARRIORS FOR EMPIRE | Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch

 

“Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have chosen sides in the Washington-backed belligerency – the side of Empire.” Syria has no choice but to secure every square foot of its territory. “Faced with the certainty of superpower-backed attack under the guise of ‘protecting’ civilians in “liberated” territory, Syria cannot afford to cede even one neighborhood of a single city – not one block! – or of any rural or border enclave, to armed rebels and foreign jihadis.”

by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“NATO wants desperately to identify some sliver of Syrian soil on which to plant the ‘humanitarian’ flag of intervention.”

The largest imperial offensive since the Iraq invasion of March, 2003, is in full swing, under the banner of “humanitarian” intervention – Barack Obama’s fiendishly clever upgrade of George Bush’s “dumb” wars. Having failed to obtain a Libyan-style United Nations Security Council fig leaf for a “humanitarian” military strike against Syria, the United States shifts effortlessly to a global campaign “outside the U.N. system” to expand its NATO/Persian Gulf royalty/Jihadi coalition. Next stop: Tunisia, where Washington’s allies will assemble on February 24 to sharpen their knives as “Friends of Syria.” The U.S. State Department has mobilized to shape the “Friends” membership and their “mandate” – which is warlord-speak for refining an ad hoc alliance for the piratical assault on Syria’s sovereignty.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are swigging the ale with their fellow buccaneers. These “human rights” warriors, headquartered in the bellies of empires past and present, their chests shiny with medals of propagandistic service to superpower aggression in Libya, contribute “left” legitimacy to the imperial project. London-based Amnesty International held a global “day of action” to rail against Syria for “crimes against humanity” and to accuse Russia and China of using their Security Council vetoes to “betray” the Syrian people – echoing the war hysteria out of Washington, Paris, London and the royal pigsties of Riyadh and Doha. New York-based Human Rights Watch denounced Moscow and Beijing’s actions as “incendiary” – as if it were not the empire and its allies who were setting the Middle East and Africa on fire, arming and financing jihadis – including hundreds of veteran Libyan Salafists now operating in Syria.

“Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch contribute ‘left’ legitimacy to the imperial project.”

Under Obama’s “intelligent” (as opposed to “dumb”) imperial tutelage, colonial genocidaires like France now propose creation of “humanitarian corridors” inside Syria “to allow NGOs to reach the zones where there are scandalous massacres.” NATO flatly rejected such a corridor in Libya when sub-Saharan Africans and black Libyans were being massacred by militias armed and financed by the same “Friends” that now besiege Syria.

Turkey claims it has rejected, for now, the idea of setting up humanitarian “buffer zones” along its border with Syria – inside Syrian territory – while giving arms, training and sanctuary to Syrian military deserters. In reality, it is Syrian Army troop and armor concentrations on the border that have thwarted the establishment of such a “buffer” – a bald euphemism for creating a “liberated zone” that must be “protected” by NATO or some agglomeration of U.S.-backed forces.

NATO, which bombed Libya non-stop for six months, inflicting tens of thousands of casualties while refusing to count a single body, wants desperately to identify some sliver of Syrian soil on which to plant the “humanitarian” flag of intervention. They are transparently searching for a Benghazi, to justify a replay of the Libyan operation – the transparent fact that prompted the Russian and Chinese vetoes.

Faced with the certainty of superpower-backed attack under the guise of “protecting” civilians in “liberated” territory, Syria cannot afford to cede even one neighborhood of a single city – not one block! – or of any rural or border enclave, to armed rebels and foreign jihadis. That road leads directly to loss of sovereignty and possible dissection of Syria – which western pundits are already calling a “hodge-podge” nation that could be a “failed state.” Certainly, the French and British are experts at carving up other people’s territories, having drawn the national boundaries of the region after World War One. It is an understatement to say that Israel would be pleased.

“It is the Libya formula, and might as well have come straight from Barack Obama’s mouth.”

With the Syrian military’s apparent successes in securing most of Homs and other centers of rebellion, the armed opposition has stepped up its terror tactics – a campaign noted with great alarm by the Arab League’s own Observer Mission to Syria, leading Saudi Arabia and Qatar to suppress the Mission’s report. Instead, the Gulf States are pressing the Arab League to openly “provide all kinds of political and material support” to the opposition, meaning arms and, undoubtedly, more Salafist fighters. Aleppo, Syria’s main commercial and industrial city, which had seen virtually no unrest, was struck by two deadly car bombs last week – signature work of the al-Qaida affiliate in neighboring Iraq.

The various “Friends of Syria,” all nestled in the U.S./NATO/Saudi/Qatar cocoon, now openly speak of all-out civil war in Syria – by which they mean stepped up armed conflict financed and directed by themselves – as the preferred alternative to the protracted struggle that the regime appears to be winning. There is one caveat: no “Western boots on the ground in any form,” as phrased by British Foreign Secretary William Hague. It is the Libya formula, and might as well have come straight from Barack Obama’s mouth.

Syria is fighting for its national existence against an umbrella of forces mobilized by the United States and NATO. Of the 6,000 or so people that have died in the past 11 months, about a third have been Syrian soldiers and police – statistical proof positive that this is an armed assault on the state. There is no question of massive foreign involvement, or that the aim of U.S. policy is regime change, as stated repeatedly by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (“Assad must go,” she told reporters in Bulgaria).

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have chosen sides in the Washington-backed belligerency – the side of Empire. As groups most often associated with (what passes for) the Left in their headquarters countries, they are invaluable allies of the current imperial offensive. They have many fellow travelers in (again, what passes for) anti-war circles in the colonizing and neo-colonizing nations. The French “Left” lifted hardly a finger while a million Algerians died in the struggle for independence, and have not proved effective allies of formerly colonized people in the 50 years, since. Among the European imperial powers, only Portugal’s so-called Carnation Revolution of 1974, a coup by young officers, resulted in substantial relief for the subjects of empire: the withdrawal of troops from Portugal’s African colonies.

“Of the 6,000 or so people that have died in the past 11 months, about a third have been Syrian soldiers and police – statistical proof positive that this is an armed assault on the state.”

The U.S. anti-war movement lost its mass character as soon as the threat of a draft was removed, in the early Seventies, while the United States continued to bomb Vietnam (and test new and exotic weapons on its people) until the fall of Saigon, in 1975. All that many U.S. lefties seemed to want was to get the Republicans off their backs, in 2008, and to Hell with the rest of the world. Democrat Barack Obama has cranked the imperial war machine back into high gear, with scarcely a peep from the “Left.”

There was great ambivalence – the most polite word I can muster – among purported leftists in the United States and Europe to NATO’s bombardment and subjugation of Libya. Here we are again, in the face of existential imperial threats to Syria and Iran, as leftists temporize about human rights while the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” blazes new warpaths.

There is no such thing as an anti-war activist who is not an anti-imperialist. And the only job of an anti-imperialist in the belly of the beast is to disarm the beast. Absent that, s/he is useless to humanity.

As we used to say: You are part of the solution – or you are part of the problem. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are part of the problem.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com

Big Greenwashing 101

(Or How Sierra Club Learned To Stop Worrying About The 99% And Love Wall Street)

02/12/12

By Red Emma

Greenwashing—[a compound word modeled on “whitewash”] a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that a company’s policies or products are environmentally friendly.

John Muir must be rolling over in his grave.

The organization he founded in 1892, the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and largest environmental group, have been in cahoots with the worst of the worst corporations in recent years. They’ve been paid tens of millions of dollars by the fossil fuel industry, tyrannical billionaire mayors and Wall Street in exchange for cleaning (and greening) up their public images.  Not only have they acted as a green public relations firm for the bastions of wealth and power, but have also sold out frontline communities most impacted by extractive industry.

Corporations rule our world with an unyielding iron fist. They poison and literally explode local communities with fracking and mountaintop removal. They profit off of dirty extractive industry with multi-billion investments. They empower a police state to repress democratic people’s movements drawing a line in the sand against Corporate America.  But they also insidiously mitigate the power of grassroots resistance movements with a complicit non-profit industrial complex. Most environmental non-profits actively serve as a buffer zone between our people’s movements seeking real change and a corporate state hell bent on sucking every last bit out of the planet and its people before the impending ecological collapse.

In recent years, there has been an expanding critique of the big greens. Corporate executives and the super wealthy occupy the donor rolls and boards of many green non-profits. Organizations like Environmental Defense and Natural Resources Defense Council have actively partnered with the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a front group that helped stop climate legislation in 2010. A 2010 expose in The Nation by Johann Hari revealed that Big Oil made large donations for decades to organizations like Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy to negate bad press over human rights and environmental abuses. Essentially, the big institutions of the environmental movement have been bought and sold.

Sadly, the Sierra Club which boasts a democratic governance system and a healthy grassroots base of local chapters have become part of the corporate world’s equation for control. They’ve partnered with, and been funded by, natural gas corporations to promote gas as a “bridge fuel.” They’ve taken large donations from New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg even as he’s attacked labor unions and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and released his racist police force to harass and demonize the Muslim community. They’ve even been business partners with the worst of the worst Wall Street banks, Bank of America, in greenwashing schemes to repair the bank’s damaged public image to the environmental community.

Greening Natural Gas

In an attempt to stem scandal, the Club’s executive director Michael Brune revealed in Feb. 2012 to Time that from 2007 to 2010 they had taken over $25 million in anonymous donations from the natural gas industry. The industry is most known for the environmentally destructive extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Fracking’s methods of extraction from deep gas shale include the burning of diesel fuel and polluting ground water with toxic chemicals.

From 2007 to 2010, while local chapters in states like New York and Pennsylvania were fighting these gas companies, former Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope developed a cozy relationship with Chesapeake Energy, a leading gas company. Pope, in fact, toured the country with CEO Aubrey McClendon promoting natural gas as a “bridge fuel” because it burns cleaner than oil or coal. Local Sierra activists were outraged that Pope publicly sold them out to the fracking industry. →

Twitterers of the World Revolution: The Digital New-New Left by Dr. K. R. Bolton – Foreign Policy Journal

“Young people have no conception of the conspiracy’s strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below…. They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realise that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes…”

Twitterers of the World Revolution: The Digital New-New Left
Dr. K. R. Bolton. Foreign Policy Journal.
Ephemeris 360°.org

An enlightening article by Tony Cartalucci, entitled “Google’s Revolution Factory”. Here Cartalucci focuses on the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), a.k.a. Movement.org.

Cartalucci states that Movement.org was started in 2008 to co-ordinate “radical” youth movements of what he calls a “left-liberal” nature. Among the founding groups was the April 6 Youth Movement, which has been the vanguard of the revolt in Egypt. What the naïve, the ill-informed, and those who have the disadvantage of a University miseducation will find perplexing is that these young revolutionaries have been sponsored by corporations such as Pepsi, by sundry globalist think tanks and NGOs, and by the U.S. State Department. Cartalucci comments on this:

It is hard, considering these men’s affiliations, to believe that the change they want to see is anything less than a generation that drinks more Pepsi, buys more consumerist junk, and believes the United States government every time they purvey their lies to us via their corporate owned media.

While the activists attending the Movements.org summit adhere to the philosophies of “left-leaning” liberalism, the very men behind the summit, funding it, and prodding the agenda of these activists are America’s mega-corporate combine. These are the very big-businesses that have violated human rights worldwide, destroyed the environment, sell shoddy, overseas manufactured goods produced by workers living in slave conditions, and pursue an agenda of greed and perpetual expansion at any cost. The hypocrisy is astounding unless of course you understand that their nefarious, self-serving agenda could only be accomplished under the guise of genuine concern for humanity, buried under mountains of feel-good rhetoric, and helped along by an army of exploited, naive youth.

Been There, Done That: The Old New Left

A pseudo-revolutionary youth movement controlled by Establishment wire-pullers is not a new phenomenon. The CIA, Tax Exempt Foundations, and Corporate America experimented with AYM’s precursors during the 1960s as a means of dialectical “controlled opposition.” One of these dialectical aims was to push a paradigm shift of the USA in a moderately (?) Leftist direction by sponsoring the extreme New Left nihilists. A concomitant part of this was to also sponsor the “Women’s Lib” of Gloria Steinem, et al, which has assisted the corporate elite in detaching women from the family and incorporating them into the workforce as part of the capitalist production process behind the facade of “equality.”

The ideological foundations for the 1960s “youth rebellion” were laid by dissidents of the Old Left mostly from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, whose academia fell out with Stalin, escaped from Hitler and ended up in the USA at Columbia University and at the New School for Social Research. This coterie from Europe came in under the direct sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Emergency Program for European Scholars, which had last say in who was to be selected.

Under the direction of Theodor Ardorno, this coterie produced the seminal study The Authoritarian Personality, the purpose being to show by the use of personality questionnaires that those who believed in traditional values and especially the family and parental authority were mentally ill, whereas those with a Leftist outlook (presumably like Jim Jones, for example) were mentally healthy. Hence, the ideological basis was laid for a revolt against familial bonds, including traditional gender roles.

From out of this ideological fermentation the individual most responsible for laying the intellectual foundations of the New Left was Herbert Marcuse, who got his start in the USA as one of the refugees sponsored by the Rockefeller program. During World War II, he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, and then for the US State Department until 1950. During the 1960s Marcuse became the “guru of the New Left”, he was “often discussed” by the mass media, and his students began to gain influential academic positions and to promote his ideas, making him a major force in US intellectual life. Marcuse’s Eros & Civilization became the manifesto of the 1960s counter-culture. He received Rockefeller funding for his book One Dimensional Man.

Timothy Leary, like Gloria Steinem, was “handled” by CIA operative Cord Meyer. Leary later credited Meyer with, “helping me understand my political cultural role more clearly.” In 1953, the CIA established a front, The Society for Human Ecology, and spent $25 million on a research programme at Harvard, Stanford and Berkley universities, to experiment with mind-altering drugs, particularly mescaline and LSD. In 1960 Frank Barrow of the CIA established at Harvard the Psychedelic Drug Research Center. At the time, Leary was a lecturer in psychology at Harvard. It is here, under Barrow’s direction, that Leary began his experiments with LSD. Leary later stated, “Some powerful people in Washington have sponsored all this drug research.”

By 1967 Leary had become the icon of the counter-culture, his slogan being: “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out”. The involvement of the Establishment in promoting the drug counter-culture was frankly stated by Leary in an interview with High Times, a leading counter-cultural magazine of which he was an editor, in 1978:

If you look back, many things that we thought were coincidences turned out not to have been accidents. The entire LSD movement itself was sponsored originally by the CIA to whom I give great credit. I would not be here today if it were not for the foresight and prestige of the CIA psychologists. So give the CIA credit for being a truly intelligence agency.

In 1937 the “Radio Project” was established at Princeton University with funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. The head of the Project was Paul Lazarsfeld, an Austrian socialist who had been brought to the USA as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and became one of the most influential social scientists in America as the founder of “public opinion research.” At Princeton Lazarsfeld established the Office of Radio Research. Lazarsfeld’s students were to become the heads of the CBS, NBC and ABC corporations. A biography of Lazarsfeld states:

In 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation radio research grant was transferred from Princeton to Columbia University, where Lazarsfeld became a professor of sociology. In 1944 the Office of Radio Research was renamed the Bureau of Applied Social Research , which became in the 1950s and 1960s the leading university-based social research institute in the United States.

Theodor Adorno was one of the major research scientists employed by the Radio Project as director of the project’s Music Division. His research was nicknamed “The Little Annie Project”. This examined the emotional reactions of listeners to characters and scenes, so that a scriptwriter could influence the response in an audience. Adorno described addiction to music as similar to other forms of addiction and as a means for the socialization of individuals into a mass.

This is the background of what New Left luminary Jerry Rubin described as the formula of the “youth revolt”: sex, drugs and music, Rubin stating of this in his revolutionary manifesto Do It! (obliging published by Simon and Schuster): “We’ve combined youth, music, sex, drugs, and rebellion with treason, and that’s a combination hard to beat.”

Organization and Funding

The same type of corporate and Government-connected sponsorship that has been creating the present reanimated “New Left” to act as the vanguard of the world “velvet revolution” pulled the same stunt on youngsters during the 1960s. The specific institution from which the New Left emerged was the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) initially funded by James Warburg, a scion of the Warburg international banking dynasty, and “by the Warburg family” (sic).

According to Sidney Blumenthal, who conducted interviews with IPS for The Washington Post in 1986, “IPS became a bridge between liberalism and the New Left during the 1960s and 1970s.” IPS co-founder Marcus Raskin for example was associated with the Radical Education Project of the primary New Left movement, Students for a Democratic Society. The IPS continues to receive funding from the major Foundations, including Ford and Rockefeller.

The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was born from the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID). This was the youth wing of the Rockefeller-funded, League for Industrial Democracy, (LID) the U.S. branch of Fabian-socialism. According to Political Research Associates, a prominent Left-wing think tank, SLID was the U.S. affiliate of an international socialist youth movement which received CIA money: LID’s Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID) was an associate member of the CIA-financed International Union of Socialist Youth. SLID received money to maintain its international contacts from the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs, a major CIA conduit for funds. Another recipient of CIA funding since 1950 was the US National Student Association. Philip Agee states that the NSA provided an important basis for the New Left, and was closely associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the SDS:

…[M]embers of Students for a Democratic Society provided important leadership for campus-based activities. According to Angus Johnston, who had been secretary of the US Students Association, “…NSA played a vital role in the wave of student activism that rose in the early 1960s, doing much to advance a student-centered vision for the American university. Many of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) became involved in national activism through NSA…”

One of those involved with founding the SDS, James Kunen, writes in his memoir The Strawberry Statement that Big Business sought to channel funds to the SDS as part of a dialectical process:

In the evening I went up to the University to check out a strategy meeting. A kid was giving a report on the SDS convention. He said that at the convention men from Business International Roundtables, the meetings sponsored by Business International for their client groups and heads of government —tried to buy up a few radicals. These men are the world’s leading industrialists and they convene to decide how our lives are going to go. These are the boys who wrote the Alliance for Progress. They’re the left wing of the ruling class.

They agree with us on black control and student control…

They want McCarthy in. They see fascism as the threat, see it coming from Wallace . The only way McCarthy could win is if the crazies and young radicals act up and make Gene look more reasonable. They offered to finance our demonstrations in Chicago.

We were also offered Esso (Rockefeller) money. They want us to make a lot of radical commotion so they can look more in the centre as they move to the left.

This Big Business dialectic with the New Left is confirmed independently by Gerald Kirk, who as a student at the University of Chicago, and became active in the SDS, the DuBois Club , the Black Panthers, and the Communist Party, as an informant for the FBI. Kirk broke from the Left in 1969. The following year, he testified before the House and Senate Internal Security panels:

Young people have no conception of the conspiracy’s strategy of pressure from above and pressure from below…. They have no idea that they are playing into the hands of the Establishment they claim to hate. The radicals think they’re fighting the forces of the super rich, like Rockefeller and Ford, and they don’t realise that it is precisely such forces which are behind their own revolution, financing it, and using it for their own purposes…

The manner by which the dialectical process works was specifically demonstrated in 1968 when the SDS Columbia chapter instigated a student revolt and take-over of the University. Revolutionary leadership was taken out of the hands of the SDS and was taken over by the Students for a Restructured University (SRU) that had been funded with a $40,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation 1968 annual report states that:

At the University of California (Berkeley), a grant of $500,000 was given for a new university Office of Educational Development that enlists both students and faculty in the planning and conduct of educational experiments. These include new interdisciplinary courses that reflect contemporary social, political, and economic issues, and a system of residential colleges linked to specific student interests rather than to academic fields.

The Ford Foundation was funding in Berkeley, noted as the centre of New Left radicalism, the institutional promotion of New Left ideology. Note the reference to “educational experiments,” “courses that reflect contemporary social, political and economic issues,” and the promotion of a system of so-called “specific student interests.” The 1968 Foundation report states further:

To facilitate thoughtful student involvement in academic affairs, the Foundation granted $315,000 to the National Student Association for a three-year program. The grant will assist two principal activities: a national dissemination program to inform students of various patterns of educational innovation and change and participation of N.S.A. staff as advisors in student reform efforts.

At Columbia University, which was severely disrupted by student demonstrations in the spring, grants were made to three groups studying and redefining the roles of faculty, students, administrators, and trustees. They included a faculty committee and a student organization that was active in the demonstrations but is dedicated to restructuring, not overturning, the university.

The Foundation report cryptically mentions “a student organization” active in the New Left demonstrations with the SDS, Black Panthers and others, referring here to the Students for a Restructured University, without naming the SRU as the recipient. Students for a Restructured University presented themselves as the “moderate” wing of the student uprising, the strategy being to threaten that if their “moderate” demands were not met, the University administration would have to deal with the SDS and other extremists. This was the dialectical strategy in operation.

Here We Go Again

The current use of the young generation for capitalist revolution behind the banner inscribed with left-liberal slogans is therefore a well-tried formula. A difference is that where it was once the CIA which co-opted “radicals” such as Gloria Steinem and Timothy Leary under a program directed by Cord Meyer, a co-director of the United World Federalists along with banking scion James Warburg, the CIA programs have been replaced with those of the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, Soros, and an array of often interlocking fronts, think tanks and NGOs.

Cartalucci has exposed the background of a contemporary major youth movement that is analogous to the New Left of yesteryear, as well as cogently explaining the real purposes of this movement. The by-line of AYM/Movements.org is: “Identify. Connect. Support.” Movements.org states:

We match members of our global network with necessary resources from the technology, media, private and public sectors as well as with each other in order to foster peer to peer capacity building. Movements.org hosts annual summits, regional training events, and on online hub for best practices, lessons learned, discussion and news about the use of new technologies in social movements.

The focus is on the use of digital technology, a feature of the “velvet revolutions” from Eastern Europe, to Central Asia to the current turmoil in North Africa and Iran. Movements.org calls their constituency “digital activists.”

Whereas the CIA covertly channelled funds to the New Left during the 1960s, now the new generation of young revolutionaries proudly display the logos of their corporate sponsors. Under the category of “Sponsors” Movements.org states:

Movements.org has leveraged its relationships with exciting movements in civil society to bring together some of the globe’s top technology and communications companies to share their knowledge and expertise with online activists from across the world. Movements.org has received sponsorship and continues to be supported by global industry leaders…

These corporate sponsors displayed on the AYM website are: Howcast, Edelman, Google, Music TV, Meetup, Pepsi, CBS News, Mobile Accord, Youtube, Facebook, MSN/NBC, National Geographic, Omnicom Group, Access 360 Media, and Gen Next.

The Public Partnerships are: Columbia Law School, and the US State Department.

Most of the logos on the AYM website link directly to the companies so that Movements.org also serves as an advertising medium for corporate America. What is of interest is that the digital technology companies approve and support the manner by which their services are being used in the world velvet revolution. They are not only not indifferent; they are the sponsors of the revolutionaries. This is because the “brave new world” being created by their young “digital activists” will be one in which young consumers will emerge from the traditional societies that are now being overthrown. There will be a larger consumer market; more youngsters addicted to consumerism, as they are in the West.

Howcast, the primary backer of AYM, has for example made a business empire out of “how to” videos based around the banality of the mass consumer, the subjects of wisdom being imparted including: “How to go on a date with someone you met on the internet,” “How to prevent a blister,” “How to headbang,” “How to enter and elegantly exit a car…” …Not exactly in the same category as The Communist Manifesto or The Little Red Book, but fitting articulations of the type of revolution that neocon strategist Maj. Ralph Peters predicted would overtake the old order and reshape the world in America’s image by means of consumer addiction via what he called “creative destruction.”

Howcast CEO Jason Liebman conceived the idea of the Alliance of Youth Movements/Movements.org. His profile on the Howcast website states of Liebman: “Jason is also a cofounder of the Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM), a nonprofit organization that helps young people to effect nonviolent change around the world using 21st-century tools.” Howcast is described as working directly “with brands, agencies, and organizations” such as GE, Proctor & Gamble, Kodak, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Defense, and Ford Motor Company… Howcast is therefore intimately involved not only with global corporations but also with the U.S. Government. Liebman was previously with Google where he forged corporate relationships with Time Warner, News Corp, Viacom, Warner Music, Sony Pictures, Reuters, The New York Times, and the Washington Post Company.

The other Movement.org Board Members and Co-Founders are:

Jared Cohen is director of Google Ideas. “He is also an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focuses on terrorism and counter-radicalization, the impact of connection technologies, and ’21st century statecraft.’” The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the omni-present foreign policy think tank that was founded in the aftermath of World War I by corporate interests in conjunction with academics and politicians, and is the prototype of subsequent think tanks. Cohen is a director and founder of a youth movement that claims to be creating revolutionary change throughout the world, yet simultaneously he advises CFR on “counter-radicalization.” With this it might be discerned the actual purpose of Movement.org: that of co-opting and channeling youth dissent into acceptable forms. The profile for Cohen continues:

Previously, he served for four years as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under both Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. In this capacity, he advised on the Middle East, South Asia, counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, and the development of the “21st century statecraft” agenda. He is twice a recipient of the Secretary of State’s Meritorious Honor Award.

Cohen is author of the books Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide. He has also written several articles, including “Diverting the Radicalization Track” (Policy Review) and “Iran’s Young Opposition” (SAIS Review).

Cohen has travelled extensively throughout Africa, where he examined issues related to democracy, governance, and genocide. He has also conducted research in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, looking at opposition groups, the spread of technology, and interviewing militants ranging from Hezbollah to several Al-Qaeda affiliated groups.

The other corporate revolutionary Board Member and Co-Founder of Movements.org is Roman Tsunder, founder of Access 360 Media, “the nation’s largest digital Out-of-Home media network focused on shoppers that connects to over 100MM consumers each month in over 10,000 locations through the communication platforms that matter most to them – In-store, Online and Mobile.”

In 2009, Roman created the PTTOW! Summit (www.youtube.com/pttow), an invite only event bringing together 35 top execs from the world’s most innovative companies to discuss the future of the youth industry, representing every major industry category, including: wireless (AT&T), clothing (Quiksilver); gaming (Activision), social media (Facebook), technology (HP), online video (YouTube), beverage (Pepsi), athletes (Kelly Slater) and the US Government.

Tsunder’s agenda is clear enough, as with others, being to create and expand the “youth industry” (sic) and that indicates how youth are perceived by the corporate revolutionaries: as consumers and potential consumers. He is also “a founder and board member of Gen Next (gen-next.org), a non-profit organization focused on ‘affecting change for the next generation.’” Revolution has become another means of profit maximization. Gen Next is one of the corporate sponsors of Movements.org.

The Movement’s “Development and Corporate Partnerships Manager,” itself an interesting title for a supposedly idealistic youth organization, is Rachel Silver, who worked for Liebman’s Howcast, and as such organized the Movement’s summits in New York City, Mexico City and London.

AYM Summits

The Movement has held three summits so far. The 2010 Summit held in London, had as its keynote speaker Scott Heifferman from Meetup.com. Other luminaries at the summit were Kristen Morissey from Google; Juan Zarate, CBS News; Farah Pandith: Special Advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State on Muslim Affairs.

“Guests, hosts and sponsors” included representatives from Google, Rand Corp., Edelman, Howcast, Access 360 Media, World Bank, US Institute of Peace, Global Engagement Group, and Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“Moderators and Speakers were from the National Democratic Institute, Gen Next, Twitter, CBS, Meet Up, Google, World Bank, and You Tube. Farah Pandith and Jared Cohen represented the US State Department.

Movement.org’s Role in the North Africa Tumult

Lest it be thought that Movement.org is not much more than a bunch of nerdish armchair revolutionaries and a past-time for CEO yuppies, the organization has been playing an important role in the North Africa upheavals. Ariel Schwartz writing for the Fast Company, writes:

File this under: Timing is still everything. Just in time to help organize Egyptian grassroots activists with restored Internet access, the Alliance for Youth Movements (AYM) has rebranded itself as Movements.org, an online hub for digital activists….

The AYM has a history of creating change–in 2008, a summit organized by the AYM included leaders of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement, a protest movement seeking political reform and a democratic government.

“Movements.org is the source for anyone who wants to keep up to date on the use of technology for achieving real social change,” said Movements.org and Howcast cofounder Jason Liebman in a statement. “We have existed for three years as a support network for grassroots activists using digital tools, and today we come out of alpha launch to make our platform and resources available to everyone.”

In other words, the revolution is now centralized…

It should be recalled that the April 6 Youth Movement has been a major factor in organizing the Egyptian revolt. The link for the April 6 Youth Movement provided by Fast Company goes to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the veteran globalist institutions, which describes the pivotal role “social media” played in the creation of the April 6 Youth Movement.

In the spring of 2008, over 100,000 users of the social networking website Facebook joined an online group to express solidarity with workers protesting in the Delta industrial city of al-Mahalla al-Kubra. As the protests escalated into a nationwide strike, the Facebook group gained momentum and eventually coalesced into a political movement known as the April 6 Youth Movement.

In 2009, the group still claimed a membership of around 70,000 young Egyptians, most of whom are well-educated and politically unaffiliated. Like Egypt’s other protest movements, the April 6 Youth Movement is not a formal political party, but it nonetheless provides an outlet for a new generation of politically conscious Egyptians.

Google’s Ghonim

One of the first leaders of the riots in Egypt to be detained was Google’s Egyptian executive Wael Ghonim, arrested on January 8, and freed ten days later. “Wael was also active on Facebook and Twitter regarding the Revolution…” Newsweek credits Ghonim with a major role in the Egyptian revolt, with the subheading: “Wael Ghonim’s day job was at Google. But at night he was organizing a revolution.” Although based in Dubai as Google’s head of marketing for North Africa, Ghonim “volunteered to run the Facebook fan page of Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner who had emerged as a key opposition leader.” According to Newsweek, it was Ghonim’s broadcast that actually instigated the revolt that toppled Mubarak:

On Jan. 14, protests in Tunisia felled that country’s longstanding dictator, and Ghonim was inspired to announce, on Facebook, a revolution of Egypt’s own. Each of the page’s 350,000-plus fans was cordially invited to a protest on Jan. 25. They could click “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” to signal whether they’d like to attend.

Interestingly, it is claimed that Ghonim undiplomatically rejected offers by an “American NGO” to fund him. The claim seems disingenuous, given that Google is a U.S. corporation with close contact with the U.S. State Department, sundry NGOs and think tanks and a pivotal part of AYM. The question arises as to whether this is posturing by Ghonim given his comment that he would like to resume his job with Google if he’s not “fired” for his role in “sparking the Egyptian revolution.” The quip is pure cant, as it seems unlikely that Ghonim is ignorant of the role Google and Facebook have played with AYM and the “velvet revolutions.” The following nonsense is supposed to have taken place between Ghonim and Google head office:

On the record, Google’s not talking about Ghonim or the question of employee activism. For his part, Ghonim told CBS’s Katie Couric in an interview on Friday that his participation in the protests had no connection with his employer.

“They did not know anything about this and actually when I took the time off and I went to Cairo, they did not know I was going to the protest,” he said. “But when everything became public, I talked with the company and they suggested that I take a leave of absence and I also suggested that to them and I think it was a good decision for that. Google has nothing to do with this.”

Columnist Charles Cooper is also writing drivel when he questions whether Ghonim is “one off for Silicon Valley” (sic). Ghonim is “one of” tens of thousands of yuppies around the world being agitated, trained and directed towards revolutionary purposes by an array of think tanks, NGOs and US Government agencies. Cooper continues:

Maybe that was meant as a tongue-in-cheek comment. But there’s a larger truth behind his quip. The key role played by one of Google’s key executives in the Middle East revived a decades-old dilemma that many other technology companies face when it comes to the question of political activism: Where should they draw the line?

“It’s one of those things that companies don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole,” a tech public relations exec told me on background.

The obvious truth du jour is that tech companies don’t want to take political positions – even when regimes use their products to oppress their own people.

Cooper is writing unadulterated CRAP. It might be asked whether Cooper is a liar or a half-wit? If he has never heard of AYM, he must surely know about the role long played by the digi-twits in the velvet revolutions in Serbia and elsewhere? Movement.org identifies Ghonim on its timeline for the Egyptian revolt as being the Google executive who instigated the revolt and who was in contact with the April 6 Youth Movement:

…Spring 2010 A group of activists, including Google executive Wael Ghonim and April 6 leader Ahmed Maher, begin meeting once a week to discuss plans for a protest against the government.

… February 8 – Massive protests continue, with many people—inspired by Wael Ghonim —taking to the streets for the first time. Wael speaks to the crowds at Tahrir Square.

Feburary 11 – Wael tells CNN: If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet. http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/wael-ghonim-if-you-want-to-liberate-a-government-give-them-the-internet/

TechCrunch writes of Ghonim and the role that is played by the “digital activists”:

Ghonim, who has been a figurehead for the movement against the Egyptian government, told [CNN’s Wolf] Blitzer “If you want to liberate a government, give them the internet.”

Ghonim, is of course, referring to the fact much of this revolution was organized on Twitter and Facebook (similar to the Tunisian protests). Ghonim was believed to have hosted the first Facebook page that organized the January 25th protests. When Blitzer asked “Tunisia, then Egypt, what’s next?,” Ghonim replied succinctly “Ask Facebook.”

He went on to personally thank Mark Zuckerberg, and said he’d love to meet Facebook’s CEO. Ghonim says that he’s looking forward to getting back to his work at Google but he plans to write a book, “Revolution 2.0? about the role of social media and the internet in political demonstration. There’s no doubt that social media has changed political activism irrevocably, and this moment will surely be a historic moment for Facebook and Twitter.

There is no meaningless rhetoric here about possibly being “fired” by Google, but confidence that Ghonim will return to his job – and I’m sure a promotion – for being what amounts to the epitome of the very “digital activist” who is sponsored by Google, Facebook, Howcast, and the erstwhile social-revolutionaries from AT&T, Pepsi, U.S. State Department, MTV, International Republican Institute, Freedom House, etc.

AYM Inaugural Summit

Movement.org’s inaugural summit in 2008, which the April 6 Youth Movement attended, included a gala hosted by MTV in Times Square. Sponsors of the summit were AT&T, Howcast, Google, Facebook, MTV, and Gen-Next. Eight representatives of the US State Department were present. Some of the speakers were from Columbia Law School, Facebook, Fortune Magazine, Hoover Institution, MTV et al. Panelists included three members of the Obama presidential media campaign; Shaarik Zafar, senior adviser to the US Department for Homeland Security; and Sherif Mansour, Program Officer for Freedom House.

Among the organizations represented were Young Civilians (Turkey), an online activist network of 2,000,000 comprised of sundry “liberals, leftists, feminists, environmentalists, democrats.” Myanmar has a global network working to bring it into the globalist economic fold, the Burma Global Action Network (BGAN) formed by the “‘Support The Monks’ Protest In Burma” group on Facebook, begun 2007. The group at its peak had 450,000 members, which worked together to organize demonstrations around the world.

No Mas Chavez is dedicated to overthrowing a major bugbear of the globalists and the USA, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, whose aim of a Bolivarian bloc in alliance with other nations such as Russia might pose significant opposition to globalism. No Mas Chavez developed from Facebook networking with 80,000 supporters, and has organized demonstrations against Chavez. Another organization at the summit, opposing Chavez was Sumate.

Cuba Development Initiative flagrantly claims to seek the democratization of Cuba as a means of “joining” its “democratic, economic, and social development [with] international financial resources… CDI works with a vast network of individuals and organizations.” Another organization there that is aimed at subjugating Cuba to globalization is Raíces de Esperanza, Inc.: “Our strategy has been to (a) build and unite a student network of campus groups, (b) sponsor academic conferences for Cuban-American youth, (c) mobilize youth abroad in solidarity, and (d) reach out to our counterparts on the Island. We have a committed volunteer core that works on all levels.” (Comment: Whatever happened to the old youth protest slogan: “Hands Off Cuba!”?). CDI was founded by Felice Gorordo, a businessman who has previously worked with the US Departments of State, Commerce and Homeland Security. Another CDI representative at the 2008 summit was Verónica Nur, who “currently works for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as the Associate Director of Strategic Communications for Policy while also managing the Spanish-language media for the department at large.” Nur “has also served as a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, the Cuban Democratic Directorate, the International Youth Committee for Democracy in Cuba, and Raíces de Esperanza.

Speakers at the 2008 summit included Prof. Matthew Waxman from Columbia Law School, who has “served in senior positions at the U.S. State Department, Department of Defense and National Security Council.” Larry Diamond, co-editor of the Journal for Democracy, came from the Hoover Institution and is a director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. “He has also advised the U.S. Agency for International Development (whose 2002 report, Foreign Aid in the National Interest, he coauthored), the World Bank, the United Nations, the State Department, and other governmental and nongovernmental organizations.” Others speakers were from Fortune Magazine, CNN, Facebook, MTV, and PACT (which is said to be the first community youth organization built in the tradition of 1960s New Left revolutionist Saul Alinsky).

Guests included Marc Sageman, founder of Sageman Consulting, who works with think tanks including the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Homeland Security Policy Institute, and is a consultant for the National Security Council, Departments of Homeland Security and of Defense, and “various agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the U.S. Secret Service.” Ambassador Stuart W Holiday from Meridian House, a “public diplomacy institution [that] works closely with the U.S. Department of State, other government agencies, NGOs, international governments, and the private sector to create global leadership programs.” Holiday is also a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and “works closely with the U.S. Department of State, other government agencies, NGOs, international governments, and the private sector to create global leadership programs.”

2009 Summit

The second AYM was held in Mexico City in 2009 and was opened with a video-relayed talk from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. This summit was sponsored by Causecast.org, Facebook, Gen Next, Google, Hi5, Howcast Media, MTV, MySpace, PepsiCo, Univision Interactive Media, Inc., U.S. Department of State, WordPress.com and YouTube.

With the revolutionary zeal of a corporate Trotsky, Richard Lee, vice president of marketing at PepsiCo International, told the summit:

We support The Alliance of Youth Movements and especially the passion, purpose and creativity that young people possess. Today is a moment in time when one individual, with the use of technology can create positive change in the world…and Pepsi will strive to enable this change.

From the U.S. State Department AYM co-founder Jared Cohen stated:

The impact of using online tools and social media to advance positive social change is truly remarkable and exciting. It is critical to encourage and enable today’s youth to apply these technologies as means to catalyze social movements around the world.

Among the “guests, hosts and sponsors” were Juan M. Henao, International Republican Institute; Mick Duffy, PepsiCo International; Sarah Cliffe, The World Bank, et al. There were eight from the US State Department.

Among the participating organizations were reps from the Burma Global Action Network, Corporación Foro de la Juventud Guayaquil, Ecuador; Iranian oppositionist newspaper Etemad Melli; Genç Siviller (Young Civilians, Turkey); JuventudDes (Peru); Tehran Bureau, a “virtual” journalism project; ThinkMoldova, a catalyst for the 2009 so-called “Twitter Revolution” which succeeded in ousting a pro-Russian governing party that wasn’t pleasing to “civil society.”

Raíces de Esperanza, the Cuban oppositionist youth movement, was represented again.

Opponents of Hugo Chavez were represented by Latytud Project who, “So far… have established alliances in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Colombia, and Bolivia.” Another was Movimiento Joven de Venezuela, its representative at the AYM summit being Yon Goicoechea, who is also President of the Caracas Youth, Member of the National Board of Directors of the First Justice Party and Representative of the Movimiento Joven de Venezuela, an NGO dedicated to training and organizing young democratic leaders. Another anti-Chavez organization present was Un Mundo Sin Mordaza.

“Moderators, speakers and panelists” included Jack Dorsey, Chairman, Twitter; James Eberhard, Mobile Accord; Kristen Morrissey, Principle New Business Development, Google; Mario González, CNN Español; Matthew Brady, Program Director, Freedom House; Nicole Lapin, CNN; Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube; and Tara Lemmey, Founder and CEO, LENS, a corporation involved with technology and security issues, among others…

Among guest luminaries were Juan M. Henao from the International Republican Institute; and Mick Duffy and Richard Lee from PepsiCo International; and Sarah Cliffe, The World Bank, along with the AYM executives and others from Howcast, MobileBehavior, Google, GenNext, and Edelman.

From this it can be seen that particularly well represented were the U.S. State Department; Obama’s media experts; opponents of Hugo Chavez; PepsiCola, Freedom House and the International Republican Institute, the latter two particularly involved with training and funding activists of the “velvet revolution” around the world.

Conclusion

While the “Beat Generation” was too whacked out on LSD to comprehend how they were being manipulated by the CIA and others, what is one to make of the “digital generation”? Are they too stupefied by the puerility of MTV, Twitter, Facebook, and Pepsi to find anything questionable about being involved with the US Departments of Homeland Security, State, and Defense; with AT&T, NED, World Bank, Rand Corp., etc., in the name of “revolution,” “human rights” and “democracy”? It is a generation that has been sold on “ideals” that lead to nothing more than the global shopping mall. Their “ideals” offer the “democratic right” for Muslim, Latin American, Asian, and East European youth to become part of that same consumer society that is a manifestation of a civilization in its cycle of decay.

Notes

[1] Mr Cartalucci , Land Destroyer, http://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/

[2] Tony Cartalucci, “Google’s Revolution Factory – Alliance of Youth Movements: Color Revolution 2.0,” Global Research, February 23, 2011, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23283

[3] Tony Cartalucci, “Google’s Revolution Factory,” ibid.

[4] “(3) Emergency Program for European Scholars, 1940-1945,” Rockefeller Foundation Archives, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:tXK4eQ5oXbAJ:www.rockarch.org/collections/rf/refugee.php

[5] T W Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper Row, 1950).

[6] K R Bolton, “‘Sex Pol’: The Influence of the Freudian-Marxian Synthesis on Politics and Society,” Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Washington, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 2010.

[7] Encyclopaedia of World Biography on Herbert Marcuse, http://www.bookrags.com/biography/herbert-marcuse/

[8] Douglas Kellner, “Marcuse, Herbert,” The American National Bibliography, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:5_KUmmTtH7QJ:www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell12.html

[9] Herbert Marcuse, “Acknowledgements,” One Dimensional Man: studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society, See for the acknowledgement: http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=63QdLKsuqCwC&pg=PR9&lpg=PR9&dq

[10] “Gloria Steinem and the CIA: C.I.A. Subsidized Festival Trips: Hundreds of Students Were Sent to World Gatherings,” The New York Times, 21 February 1967, http://www.namebase.org/steinem.html

[11] Mark Riebling, Tinker, Tailor, Stoner, Spy, Was Timothy Leary a CIA Agent? Was JFK the “Manchurian Candidate”? Was the Sixties Revolution Really a Government Plot?, Osprey, 1994, http://home.dti.net/lawserv/leary.html

[12] Timothy Leary interview, High Times, February 1978.

[13] “Biographical Memoir”‘ (Washington: National Academy Press, 1987), Volume 56, p. 255.

[14] “Biographical Memoir,” Ibid., p. 258.

[15] “Biographical Memoir,” op.cit., p. 260.

[16] Paul Lazarsfeld, ‘Biography’, http://www.answers.com/topic/paul-lazarsfeld

[17] Jerry Rubin, Do It! Scenarios of the Revolution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), pp. 19, 249.

[18] Institute for Policy Studies, Beginning the Second Decade, 1963-1973.

[19] Institute for Policy Studies, Beginning the Second Decade, ibid.

[20] Sidney Blumenthal, “IPS – Left-Wing Thinkers,” Washington Post, 30 July, 1986. http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:X-SHxRkyN9YJ:www.tni.org/archives/media_ips-wp1986

[21] Green Tracking Library, http://www.undueinfluence.com/index.html

[22] ‘Timeline for the Young Social Democrats’, Young Social Democrats, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:A-JZk7 38J:www.youngpeoplessocialistleague.org/library/timeline.shtml

[23] The International Union of Socialist Youth is the youth affiliate of the Socialist International, comprising social democratic and Labor parties throughout the world. The IUSY was founded in Germany in 1919 under the leadership of the German Bolshevik Karl Liebknacht, and became the Communist Youth International. The IUSY was reconstituted in 1946. ‘International Union of Socialist Youth, Statemaster Encyclopaedia, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:OaAnTsZAgKwJ:www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/International-Union-of-Socialist-Youth.

[24] Political Research Associates, “League for Industrial Democracy,” Right Web, 10 January 1989,

[25] Philip Agee Jr., “CIA Infiltration of Student Groups: The National Student Association Scandal,” Campus Watch, Fall 1991, pp. 12-13, http://www.cia-on-campus.org/nsa/nsa2.html

[26] Ibid.

[27] Angus Johnston, A Brief History of the NSA & USSA, US Student Association, http://www.usstudents.org/who-we-are/history

[28] Left-liberal Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy.

[29] Conservative Southern Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace.

[30] James Kunen The Strawberry Statement: Notes of a College Revolutionary, (New York: Avon, 1970), “At the convention, Men from Business International Roundtables,” pp. 130–131.

[31] A Communist Party front named after Afro-American scholar W E B DuBois.

[32] “Investigation of SDS 1969,” Committee on Internal Security, 91st Congress, 1st Session, Pt. 5, pp. 1654-1705 of hearings.

[33] “Columbia University – Students for a Democratic Society – Unrest,” ABC Evening News, 19 September 1968, Vanderbilt Television News Archive, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:hQs-Ccu5i1IJ:tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/program.pl

[34] An article in a leading British Leftist magazine puts the amount given by the Ford Foundation to SRU at $40,000. Mike Marqusee, “1968 The mysterious chemistry of social change,” Red Pepper, 6 April 2008,

$40,000 is also the amount stated by Joel Geier, Associate Editor of the International Socialist Review, “1968: Year of Revolt,” talk at the University of Illinois, Champaign, Il., March 26, 2008. Geier was a leader of the Free Speech Movement at Berkley during the 1960s. International Socialist review, http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:Tw1lGIjtOAgJ:links.org.au/node/335+

[35] ‘Higher Education: Academic Reform’, Ford Foundation Annual Report 1968,

[36] Cord Meyer was co-founder, with James P Warburg, of the United World Federalists in 1947, to promote a World State. In 1948 Meyer was World Federalist president. (“Opinion in a drawing room”, Time Magazine, 16 February 1948, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,794188,00.html.

[37] K R Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,” February 7, 2011 Foreign Policy Journal, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/07/the-globalist-web-of-subversion/

[38] Movements.org “Mission,” http://www.movements.org/pages/mission

[39] Movements.org “Mission,” ibid.

[40] A recent article on the website of Radio Free Europe/Liberty states of this: “The work of groups like Canvas, combined with the proliferation of social-networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, and the coming of age of a wired — and increasingly disaffected — young generation have combined to create a perfect storm threatening authoritarian regimes from Europe to North Africa, to the Middle East.” “Exporting Nonviolent Revolution, From Eastern Europe To The Middle East,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, February 21, 2011, http://www.rferl.org/content/exporting_nonviolent_revolution_eastern_europe_mideast/2316231.html

[41] Movements.org “Mission,” op. cit.

[42] Movements.org “Sponsors,” http://www.movements.org/pages/sponsors

[43] Edelman is a leading “global” public relations firm,[43] whose clients include fellow Movements.org sponsor Pepsi.

[44] Corporate member of the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR “Corporate Membership,” http://www.cfr.org/about/corporate/roster.html

[45] Corporate members of the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR “Corporate Membership,” http://www.cfr.org/about/corporate/roster.html

[46] Corporate members of the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR “Corporate Membership,” http://www.cfr.org/about/corporate/roster.html

[47] Howcast, http://www.howcast.com/

[48] R Peters. “Constant Conflict,” Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly, Summer 1997, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3011.htm

[49] Howcast, “Meet Our Team,” http://info.howcast.com/about/team

[50] Movements.org. “Team Board,” http://www.movements.org/pages/team#Jared

[51]Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[52] Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[53] Council on Foreign Relations, http://www.cfr.org/about/membership/roster.html

[54] Movements.org. “Team Board,” op. cit.

[55] Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[56] Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[57] Movements.org. “Team Board,” ibid.

[58] US Institute for Peace, “established and funded by Congress.” USIP was created by Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1984. http://www.usip.org/about-us/our-history

The Chairman of the Board of Directors is businessman, government appointee and CFR member J. Robinson West. http://www.usip.org/about-us/board-directors

[59] Center for Strategic and International Studies: “CSIS provides strategic insights and policy solutions to decision makers in government, international institutions, the private sector, and civil society.” CSIS was founded as a Cold War think tank in 1962 to assure America’s world primacy. CSIS, “About Us,” http://csis.org/about-us

Zbigniew Brzezinski (CFR), the veteran Rockefeller protégé, “co-chairs the CSIS Advisory Board.” http://csis.org/expert/zbigniew-brzezinski

Another familiar face is CSIS counsellor and trustee is Henry Kissinger (CFR). http://csis.org/expert/henry-kissinger

[60] Movements.org/Alliance for Youth Movements, “Attendee Biographies, Summit Details,” 2010, http://www.movements.org/pages/the-summit

[61] National Democratic Institute has sponsorship from The National Endowment for Democracy; U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and Middle East Partnership Initiative; United States Agency for International Development (USAID); 18 Governments in addition to that of the USA; OAS, World Bank Group, United Nations organs; and the types of Foundations that one would expect, including Citigroup Foundation, Ford, Soros’ OSI., etc. NDI, “Who supports Our Work,” http://www.ndi.org/who_supports_our_work

The Chairman of NDI is former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, who also serves on the Board of Directors of the omni-present Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). “CFR Membership Roster,” http://www.cfr.org/about/membership/roster.html?letter=A

[62] A Schwartz, “More Tech Tools for Egypt’s Protesters: Movements.org, an Online Hub for Grassroots Activists,” Fast Company, February 3, 2011, http://www.fastcompany.com/1723468/movementsorg-an-online-hub-for-grassroots-activists

[63] ” The April 6 Youth Movement,” Carnegie Endowment, http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-april-6-youth-movement

[64] “Google Executive Freed in Egypt,” February 8, 2011, http://www.politicolnews.com/google-executive-freed-in-egypt/

[65] “The Facebook Freedom Fighter,” Newsweek, February 13, 2011, http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/the-facebook-freedom-fighter.html

[66] It should also be recalled that ElBaradei emerged from the bowels of the International Crisis Group, where he sits with George Soros, to be the man of the hour in Egypt. See: K R Bolton, “What’s Behind the Tumult in Egypt?,” Foreign Policy Journal, February 1, 2011, http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/01/whats-behind-the-tumult-in-egypt/all/1

[67] “The Facebook Freedom Fighter,” Newsweek, op. cit.

[68] “The Facebook Freedom Fighter,” Newsweek, ibid.

[69] Charles Cooper, “Wael Ghonim: A ‘One-Off’ for Silicon Valley?,” CBS News, Tech Talk, February 11, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-20031608-501465.html?tag=mantle_skin;content

[70] Charles Cooper, “Wael Ghonim: A ‘One-Off’ for Silicon Valley?,” CBS News, ibid.

[71] Charles Cooper, ibid.

[72] “Timeline of the January 25 Revolution in Egypt,” AYM, February 14, 2011, http://www.movements.org/blog/entry/timeline-of-the-january-25-revolution-in-egypt

[73] “Timeline of the January 25 Revolution in Egypt,” AYM, ibid.

[74] Leen Rao, TechCrunch, February 11, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/11/wael-ghonim-if-you-want-to-liberate-a-government-give-them-the-internet/

[75] Movement.org, “The Summit: New York City,” 2008, http://www.movements.org/pages/the-summit#2008

[76] A corporate member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[77] A corporate sponsor of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[78] “Alliance of Youth Movement Summits,” New York City 2008, “Attendee Biographies,” http://allyoumov.3cdn.net/f734ac45131b2bbcdb_w6m6idptn.pdf

[79] K R Bolton, “An ANZAC-Indo-Russian Alliance? : New Zealand & Australia’s Geopolitical Alternatives,” India Quarterly, Vol. 66, No. 2 April-June 2010.

[80] For the role of the National Endowment for Democracy see: K R Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,” Foreign Policy Journal, op. cit.

[81] Alinsky was the organizational guru of the 1960s New Left.

[82] Corporate member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

[83] “Alliance of Youth Movements Summit,” 2009, Howcast, http://info.howcast.com/youthmovements/summit09

[84] “Alliance for Youth Movements Second Annual Summit,” http://www.movements.org/pages/284/

[85] Cohen serves on the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff.

[86] K R Bolton, “The Globalist Web of Subversion,” op. cit.

K R Bolton is a Fellow of the Academy of Social and Political Research, and an assistant editor of the peer reviewed journal Ab Aeterno. Recent publications include ‘Trotskyism and the Anti-Family Agenda,’ CKR website, Sociology Dept., Moscow State University (October 2009); ‘Rivalry over water resources as a potential cause of conflict in Asia,’ Journal of Social Political and Economic Studies, and Russia and China: an approaching conflict?, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring 2010; Vol. 34, no. 2, Summer 2009.

ALSO SEE:
ARAB SPRING
LIBYA IS IN THE MIDST OF AN ARMED INSURRECTION, NOT A ‘PEACEFUL PROTEST’
WHO IS MUAMMAR GADDAFI?
LIBYA: WHAT WESTERN MEDIA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW
GENOCIDE IN LIBYA? NATO INVASION UNDER WAY. ITS THE OIL, STUPID.
LIBYA AND IMPERIALISM: THE REAL PURPOSE BEHIND ‘INTERVENTION’
FOR GADDAFI, AGAINST IMPERIALISM
EGYPT’S REVOLUTION: CREATIVE DESTRUCTION FOR A ‘GREATER MIDDLE EAST’
WORLD CHEERS AS CIA PLUNGES LIBYA INTO CHAOS
DEMOCRACY PROMOTION: AMERICA’S NEW REGIME CHANGE FOCUS
GLOBALISTS PREPARE LIBYAN INTERVENTION UNDER HUMANITARIAN COVER
LIBYA: THE REST OF THE STORY
DEFIANT LIBYA
THE GLOBALIST WEB OF SUBVERSION
CIA COLLEGE OF COUPS
SOROS AND THE NEW EGYPTIAN CONSTITUTION
COLOR REVOLUTIONS: EGYPT TODAY. THAILAND TOMORROW.
“COLOR CODED”EGYPT: DID U.S. BACKED NGO’S HELP TO TOPPLE MUBARAK?

© Copyright 2011 by Ephemeris 360.org

This page may be republished for non-commercial purposes as long as reprints include a verbatim copy of the article in its entirety, respecting its integrity and cite the author and Ephemeris 360.org as the source including a live link to the article.

http://alexandravaliente.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/the-alliance-of-youth-movements-color-revolutions-and-the-globalist-agenda/

http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2011/02/28/twitterers-of-the-world-revolution-the-digital-new-new-left/

‘Rain & Fire’ – A Brilliant Statement from a UK FAI sector

Rain & Fire

This text was written during the course of the growing European social war, and our attempts to situate ourselves in the context of that, whilst in the midst of rising fascism, complicity from most of the society and a fractured and divisive anti-capitalist ‘movement’. These scant few pages cannot express the complexity of the various situations being described in any great depth, but we write so that other rebels at the edges can know how it is for us here. As we were putting the final touches to the text, cities in the UK exploded and remain volatile. However this is not an analysis of the riots – this is a text from inside the social conditions which gave rise to the insurrection.

This text has been collaboratively written by many individuals in our network over a period of discussion, planning and attack. We have been brief in our communiques so far, but we felt it was time to write something longer.

“Why are we writing?” Because we know how important it has been for us to hear the knocks on the wall from other renegades in other cells, and because we would like to reach out beyond the people we already know, beyond the realities we have lived in, created, abandoned or remain tied to. As revolutionaries, we are highly critical of these realities and of ourselves, and we write because just, as individuals, we strive to be ‘better’ than we are, we also desire for this world to be better than it is. We are open to the fallacy of our opinions and wish to surpass our expectations, such as they are. We also try to communicate with those outside our circles, and we attempt to staunch the tendency towards self-referentialism which is endemic to many forms of communication. In the end, we have to accept that this text is written to persons unknown and that wherever it is read and whoever it reaches, there will be those who will have an understanding of what is written here – and this is for them.

There is no longer any sure statement that can be made about this changing world, which catches fire more and more, everyday.

The present day United Kingdom is a controlled theme-park, covered in surveillance cameras, vehicle tracking, identical housing estates, post-industrial zones and sprawling road and train networks. There is virtually no wilderness left, the powerful and rich control the ‘countryside’, as much as, or even more than the cities, and there is little freedom beyond the mainstream, unless you take it – the same as anywhere else. The prison of everyday life is so total here that the only choice remaining is its complete destruction.

We welcomed the renewed call by the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire / Informal Anarchist Federation for a world-wide informal anarchist structure based on revolutionary solidarity and direct action: the International Revolutionary Front. As we continue to develop our own project of revolutionary organisation, we affirm the global informal ‘network’ or ‘federation’ of revolutionary groups in existence who are developing, encouraging and participating in uncontrollable confrontation against State and Capital, whilst organising and developing their own initiatives of attack: this is our signal of collaboration.

There has been a significant upsurge in attacks against prison, financial, police and communications targets in the UK, but the obvious truth is that these attacks are few in relation to the task to be undertaken, and the level of engagement with the enemy is still in the early stages of its development.

Over the last two years we have begun a newly co-ordinated revolutionary project. It is our way of starting something new. Something that won’t just disappear like words against the wind. We are some of those who think that the possibility of a conscious, cohesive social revolution involving a critical mass from the general population of the UK is frankly remote. However, we think – and have seen – that widespread chaos and social insurgency are inevitable, and from this, new and better forms of human values could emerge.

If we were to reflect on human life experience – both individual and collective – we would perhaps understand the wisdom that sometimes it takes a total breakdown for things to change. Of course, some people are scared of change, of the unknown. People limp along miserably in all sorts of dysfunctional conditions for years – relationships, jobs, towns etc. – rather than face the necessary and radical alteration of those conditions into a future they cannot yet imagine. And because society is made up of individual human beings, then society is no different. People lap up the distractions being offered – TV, consumables, mainstream cultures, drugs, subcultures, actions, gatherings, spiritual panaceas, anything… so long as they can put off confronting the essential emptiness of everyday life. We are living in the midst of a culture where endemic use of anti-depressants, for example – as Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World – keep people from changing what is making them unhappy and instead make them accept what it is that is making them unhappy. When the individuals in a society are struggling just to get up in the morning because the system exploits them every minute, these people have no energy to revolt against the system. They are caught in its claws. They don’t even seem to recognise this. The totality of this techno-industrial society enslaves them into patterns of repetition, damaging themselves and each other, oppressed on the outside and repressed on the inside. The fundamental distinction between inside and outside prison does not seem to exist in the same way any more: daily life attempts to subject us to a regime of control and routine in every aspect.

In the foyers of the supermarkets and the shopping malls, in pubs and bars, places of work and transport hubs we find, more often than not, those whom the consumer democracy has bought off with the looted capital of those less fortunate. Regularly, we are in the presence of willing captives, of society’s sickness, of reactionary grasping for the means of survival – the exploited against the exploited. People have made a fool’s bargain and have handed over their health, intelligence, curiosity, sense of solidarity, personal authority, and the earth and all that lives and grows on it in exchange for the latest technology, fast food, flash car or social network.

Although present reality shows us an intensification of social conflict with some promising characteristics, we do not yet see ourselves standing amongst a potentially revolutionary mass. We appear to be standing knee-deep in the bloated carcass of a dying civilisation.

Almost seven billion people across the world are hooked into a genocidal and tyrannical system that has insinuated itself as a life-support machine. Civilisation gives the impression that its destruction would mean the end of all life; however an extinction wave is already happening which, if it did continue, would have that exact result, accompanied by near total-victory for the capitalist techno-industrial-military system and the financial power which underpins it.

Environmental catastrophe roars across flooded continents; vast tsunami, extensive desertification and decimated forests. The modern totalitarian nation-states and their imperialist groupings like the G8, G20, NATO and so on, are committed to the murderously terrorist capitalist system as their vision of the future. To a future where everything and everyone is a commodity logged and valued in a mechanical world devoid of any possibility of wildness and freedom. A world of perfect control and domestication. An impossible world. A world which every sane human being and wild creature already fights against – from each and every area regardless of race, creed or species.

We are in the midst of an unprecedented ecological collapse. Various tendencies in the scientific and political communities have spent many years arguing amongst themselves as to whether global warming is or is not a result of human behaviour, citing natural disasters and mass die-offs in pre-history. These arguments are now irrelevant. It is undeniable that grotesque species extinction, habitat loss, light/noise and air/land/oceanic pollution on a worldwide scale, desertification, human encroachment on wilderness are a direct result of human attitudes and economic greed. For decades, changing this was a possibility, now it is too late.

We are witnessing our species suicidally contaminate and destroy its own habitat and that of every other species on the planet: an expanding population which prioritises itself and its own prescribed and enforced lifestyle above all other considerations, living in complete disharmony with the natural world and destroying the fragile eco-system upon which we depend.

The built environments we inhabit are unsuitable even for humans. Land that used to be covered in forest, supporting a wide range of species, becomes ever more covered in concrete. Every available piece of ‘wasteland’ is being sold off for development. Civilisation is genocidal, homicidal, ecocidal and suicidal. From poverty, abuse and domestic unhappiness to the reckless drivers risking pile-ups to get home a couple of minutes faster, to the regular ethnic cleansings and the total pillage of the environment in the scramble for money and control through the securing of natural resources to exploit. This is a violent system, and millions are dying as we speak, here and everywhere: of obesity and malnutrition, of traffic accidents, industrial diseases, war, substance abuse, depression and loneliness. Meanwhile, the comfortable arrange their knives and forks and settle down in front of the television; their empty, meaningless conversations blurring into hollow silence.

These modern societies have come to mean that dreams and desires are warped and dictated from birth (work ethics, conformity to roles, competition, separation, jealousy, class and social deference to authority, the nuclear family, domestication); so much so that it is hard to even know what our unconstrained lives might look like when the State and Capital’s projects and rule are finally rejected en masse.

In Britain, there is a massive amount of class anger encountered every day, but until 7th August 2011 when rioting erupted in London and swept through the country, there has been barely any widespread manifestation of this anger against the capitalist system or government.

There is a sheepish terror amongst the people here that gets into the bones, and although there is a desire for destruction and for attack, there is also a deep fear that paralyses. A consensual censorship exists, between almost every strata and structure of society, that prevents even the ability to express and manifest dissent unless it is within permitted parameters. In such an advanced surveillance society, when the risk of getting caught even for writing some rebellious words on a wall is so seemingly great, it is easy to give into the fear and to imagine that it is a fact that you are going to get caught. The surveillance technology is extensive and reaches inside – if you let it do so. That’s why we love the ‘feral underclass’ who the politicians and their police despise, those who lost their fear from growing up in a police-state – because that is what Britain is, a police-state.

And like any police-state, it only exists because of a vast consensus of subservience from the society. Who has let the social terrain become overrun with surveillance technology? Who has become the eyes and ears of the State? Who turns their own children in to the authorities? Who has watched the Muslims and immigrants become vilified without acting? Who has let the police become embedded in all aspects of the ‘community’? Who has accepted their own powerlessness and swallowed the lies of the media, allowing the politicians to manipulate them and the bankers to rob them? It is the “citizens” themselves.

The reactionary mass of people here are lost in comfortable illusions, bought off by the delights of consumerism. They put out of their minds any actual realities of oppression or exploitation. Of course, they feel deeply the misery of their daily grind, but here they make the bosses’ choice: to be angry with the immigrants, the impoverished and the marginalised, otherwise amusing themselves with the sports section, the lottery, the televised media spectacle of rivalry and competition. Benefiting from and perpetuating a system of global violence, we have little more than scorn for the waste these people make of their lives.

At the same time, the food prices go up, the fuel price goes up, the wages go down, pensions and benefits are cut, mass redundancies are effected (some staff to be rehired if they apply for their old job again, but only at a lower wage). There will be no more inheritance. There will be no more security, even for the nuclear families who bought into the dream of the faded Empire, rotting in sub-standard housing surrounded by decay and breakdown. We see how the technological-capitalist system ties people into ‘needing’ the computer, mobile telephone, car, TV, because putting those things aside means social and cultural isolation and no opiate to bury the alienation, misery and desperation. Nothing exists but a trace of a way of life promised to an elite. The majority are living in debt, and/or hand to mouth; the fortunate are living on their reserves; and the very few are living off everyone else, enjoying the present and securing the future for themselves.

We act against the State and the symbols of the State for many reasons. And of course, one of those reasons is a desire to move beyond ourselves and our small circles. We hope that these attacks will resonate with others and will spread, and indeed they have.

We are not so stupid that we think our attacks – however worthy the targets – will alone bring down this system. We understand that there are other social factors which are necessary. We know that the process of planning and carrying out attacks changes our immediate social relations and our relation with our own sense of self and personal power, so that gradually our actions become bolder, wilder, harder to ignore. This process also changes the general atmosphere, creating an environment where more is possible because less is impossible. We have contributed to a whole plethora of anti-system activities, of which repeated attacks by smaller and larger groups over the past year on infrastructure, banks, and prison institutions have played a part.

With all the billions of people who live in the world, there will never be a time when a particular act against the State and Capital is felt by all or even the majority of people to be appropriate, ‘good’ or desirable. Our small affinity groups – of two, three or more people self-organised into a larger informal structure – simply act according to their own rage, their own analysis, their own choice and at their own risk. To pretend to be someone other than we are is useless, dishonest and lacking in integrity, a posture which could only slowly devastate us and ultimately any collective project arising from this.

By publicising our attacks, we hope to inspire unknown combatants and to disseminate those methods so that they are easy to reproduce by others. This is why we make sure always to communicate them through the independent media, as otherwise there is a media black-out on reporting the claims of sabotage and covering subversive activity in this country, preferring, as it does, stories centred around personalities and the seemingly designed-to-be-unchangeable current political structures. It is important for us who wish to confront and bring down Capital to know that others are attacking the enemy, in order to dismantle any sense of isolation and powerlessness. It is vital to organise, communicate and co-ordinate attacks.

We are very proud of the relationships we have built as individuals together through our project of destruction, as we are of each of our actions, even those that did not meet our expectations. Each of us are individuals who believe that the fundamental base of a strong and healthy way of life is comprised by the individuals themselves, in their decisions, choices and values that go towards freedom and responsibility.

Our project is to quicken the breakdown of society. As revolutionaries, we are a minority – but do not say that we are few. We don’t make predictions as to how society will re-form after the breakdown, although, of course, as anarchists, there are some basic ways we want things to change. And those dreams coincide with those of revolutionaries throughout human history, and indeed they are being realised already across the world.

We are bored to death with reflection, statement and opinion – and even of this analysis – on the condition of this society. We must only attack and destroy – which means using revolutionary violence, in our hearts and in our hands, until our freedom to act is permanent. This continuous project of attack is in order also to break down our fears and to heighten the tension that exists, to give it expression. To understand that in a police-state and surveillance society where fear and paralysis are a daily condition, it is still possible to revolt and to attack, to overcome those that have inserted themselves into positions of power based on the obedience of the crowd.

We are poised at an exciting time in history, although it seems at times like a most relentlessly depressing one. As the material base of people’s lives is tipped into ever increasing fragility and as the sensation of daily precarity and inequality grows, the results are entirely unpredictable (as we have seen here this August in the widespread violent uprising) and it is exactly at such times that even small acts can have the most unpredictable effect.

We want to contribute to the opening up of new possibilities. In a highly symbolic, abstracted and post-modern culture and way of life, and in a situation where even work now is largely providing service and information, there seems to be no end to the targets we can attack – our actions are themselves an exploration. Of what is worthwhile to strike and what is not.

Corporations and government targets are attacked across the world in coordinated and constant acts of direct action. Land and property are occupied in defiance of speculators and landlords. Animals are liberated, bio-science laboratories burnt down. Transgenic crops trashed and business people intimidated. Banks and courthouses are blown up, judges shot and stabbed. Police and their stations are attacked with Molotovs, sticks, dynamite, firearms. Energy supplies are disrupted, television infrastructure attacked, internet cables and mobile-phone masts sabotaged. Supermarkets and department stores are looted and their products distributed. People go on strike, blockade the economy and occupy their places of wage-slavery; ‘labour’ disappears into the generalised insurrection.

Prisoners rebel and overtake their guards, some escape or are freed by their compatriots on the ‘outside’. Communiques of revolutionary international solidarity are circulated by anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist and anarchist groups of the new urban guerilla war; objectives are discussed, concepts exchanged, methods revealed, tactics refined and words of armed joy and love spoken. A sprawling economic and technological apparatus of social control stutters in seizure and fragmentation.

A message to all those who have not yet begun the fight but see the looming clash on the horizon: prepare yourselves, because there is a fierce conflict ahead for the future of our changing world. And this planet is ours. Ours, like the streets of the cities in which we set our barricades. Ours, like the houses, corners and cafés where we meet our friends and accomplices. Ours, like the stones we throw and the fires we set. Ours, like the infinite anarchic dream which wrote itself into existence.

This is a new era of international urban low-intensity war, and our insurrectional project is forged from the multiple efforts of many autonomous and independent combative groups, developing new lines of attack and coordination whilst retaining the individualist character of their own principle concerns and objectives.

It’s not enough to rot our dreams with the incontinence of inaction. The future is yours with every dream you make into reality, and every refusal you make concrete. Whether locked down in jail, on the street, or imprisoned in the family or workplace, each moment of your life depends on your ability to scheme and rebel against anybody and anything which tries to put their authoritative hand upon you; you are the future and the world is yours.

We consider our network a section of the Informal Anarchist Federation / Earth Liberation Front / International Revolutionary Front

We send our solidarity and respect to all those fighting against the system around the world and here in the UK. Our love and drive for freedom to all the comrades in prison and also the dignified prisoners who are in rebellion.

International Informal Anarchist Federation / FAI

http://325.nostate.net/?p=3032

Tar Sands Action & the Paralysis of a Movement [PART II OF AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORT] [Obedience – A New Requirement for the “Revolution”]

Published September 19, 2011 by Political Context: http://bit.ly/njUko9 and Canadians for Action on Climate Change: http://bit.ly/pLDqQi

Part two of an investigative report by Cory Morningstar

Tar Sands Action & the Paralysis of a Movement – Investigative Report Series [Further Reading]: Part I • Part II  [Obedience – A New Requirement for the “Revolution”] • Part III [ Unravelling the Deception of a False Movement]

Obedience – A New Requirement for the “Revolution”

We have now reached a new level of subservient conditioning in an action ironically titled Stop the Machine. If the freedom fighters from liberation armies and resistance fronts read “the rules” that the organizers have established in order to “stop the machine,” they would undoubtedly come to the conclusion that Americans are insane.

The rules put forward by the organizers of this action clearly demonstrate how the mainstream liberal movement as a whole is further embracing its false belief that they (the “leaders” of the movement) have the moral superiority and authority to impose their unnegotiable, absolute tactical doctrine on all others, framing anyone who falls out of line with the dogma as provocateurs or “haters” who wish to incite violence. Such free-thinkers will be verbally chastised, stigmatized, then isolated and marginalized to the best of the ability of those wish to cling to denying reality. To date, these simple steps have proved most effective in stifling dialogue and shutting down dissent.

Some of the actions that have been undertaken include: training “peacekeepers,” a request that participants undergo nonviolence training, employing “peace cameras” to video anyone who might initiate violence with a request that participants bring cameras too and work with police to make them aware of threats and to isolate counterprotesters if they should attend.

Other rules include turning your anger at injustice into a positive, non-violent force; no destruction or vandalism of non-sentient objects; no running or other “threatening” motions; no insulting or swearing; protecting those who “oppose or disagree with us” (i.e., police) from insult or attack; no verbal or physical assaults on those who “oppose or disagree with us” (i.e., police) “even if they assault us.”

Participants are to embrace an attitude, as conveyed through their words, symbols and actions, of openness, friendliness, and respect toward all people encountered, including police officers and military personnel. The participants agree to be obedient to the organizers of the action or, if they do not obey, they must withdraw from the action.

It is nothing less than appalling that citizens are essentially being trained to completely submit to the corporate state – even if they are beaten with weapons. The organizers have obviously embraced the Gandhian myth that all neo-pacifists wear something akin to a shield. They will need this shield in order to protect themselves from their own hypocrisy.

Who needs big brother when you have “the movement” itself protecting the corporate state that is hell-bent on eradicating us?

If it were presented as educational outreach to further ideas and crucial analysis/critiques, this campaign would be deserving of much credit (if we removed the “rules”), as it highlights critical issues such as capitalism, corporate-controlled state and other vital truths that bright green NGOs refuse to address. However, as currently presented – an action to “stop the machine” – to even imply that “the machine” could actually be stopped through the outline and extensive “rules of non-engagement” is nothing less than an irresponsible, misleading nightmare that shields the truth rather than exposing it.

Of course, this is often what happens when activists are replaced with global strategists, finance officers, marketing executives and branding agencies. For countries exploding with citizens holding business degrees and MBAs, we could not possibly be more unintelligent and out of touch with reality, even if we tried. How many species on this planet knowingly and deliberately destroy their own habitat, their own future?

The movement with the corporate greens at the forefront refuses to admit – and in many cases refuses to even acknowledge the cold hard fact – that our success in achieving truly substantive change has been essentially zero, completely impotent. And a million “likes” on Facebook won’t make this fact any less so. And as far as preventing our own mass-eradication of unparalleled proportions, the “leaders” of the movement are a trillion miles away in La-La Land and racking up the airmiles. Reality cannot and will not be altered by a belief that the white middleclass can stop the very forces oppressing us with a dazzling dress code and impeccable manners.

Further, a dogmatic refusal to see reality and failure, along with an obdurate insistence on condemnation of those who may choose to take up self-defence (thereby framing anything other than “their way” as unacceptable in the eyes of the public) does nothing but further displace ongoing violence and bone-grinding poverty onto the billions of citizens and species already marginalized and suffering. This is not to say that everyone is expected to participate in self-defence. Rather it is to say that one’s decision must be base upon real facts – not on the doctrinaire delusion that pacifism is a moral virtue.

Militarism and Fossil Fuel Subsidies – A Vicious Cycle of Addiction

Considering that militarism is likely the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet, does it not make more sense for a united global campaign to divert trillions in military funds, which destroy life, to peaceful endeavors that sustain life? Funding militarism ensures we are kept dependent upon oil while continuing to inflict massive suffering and civilian casualties as imperialist states expand their occupations in the Middle East and beyond. Occupying countries in order to steal their resources, which are necessary to fuel further occupations which, in turn, require more resources, commits to a vicious cycle that serves the interests of a handful of corporations tied into the Military-Industrial Complex.

If citizens occupied the industries that supply the occupations, if we stopped this madness as a unified front, on top of eradicating energy wastage (56% of all energy is wasted in the U.S. economy alone) through extensive conservation, we would create the swiftest, most massive dent in the climate crisis possible. Further, if we transferred all fossil fuel subsidies to zero-carbon energy, the dent would be astronomical; over half a billion dollars in direct subsidies are handed over each year to the most profitable fossil fuel corporations on the planet. This does not include indirect subsidies (via externalized costs), which equate to approximately three times that of the direct subsidies. Further, a recent study suggests that indirect and direct subsidies for coal alone in the U.S. amount to a half billion dollars per annum. This equates to more than a trillion dollars per year and tens of trillions of tax dollars (in direct and indirect subsidies) over the upcoming decades gifted to the very industry ensuring our demise. Although this is fairly common knowledge with most NGOs (even the World Bank reached this logical conclusion over a decade ago in 1990), none of them campaign on this imperative. It is a sad statement that the World Bank has more effective solutions than the environmental movement who claims to represent civil society.

These strategies would also slow down the destabilization and leaking of methane hydrates – FAR MORE dangerous than the Keystone XL or anything else for that matter. Methane hydrate release is now occurring in Siberia, and in the short-term (5 to 20 years), methane is 72 to 100 times more powerful than CO2. This is the true carbon bomb that no one speaks of. This discussion has been essentially censored from the public.

“My view is that the climate has already crossed at least one tipping point, about 1975-1976, and is now at a runaway state, implying that only emergency measures have a chance of making a difference.… The costs of all of the above would require diversion of the trillions of dollars from global military expenditures to environmental mitigation.” — Andrew Glikson, Earth / Paleoclimate Scientist

We ignore the solutions at our own peril. Of course, no matter what we do, until we begin to dismantle the root causes of climate change – that of the global industrialized capitalist economic system based on consumption and growth – the planet will continue to heat up. Further, until we reach zero emissions (actually negative emissions) there will be NO LOWERING of atmospheric CO2, which is now approaching 400 ppm (parts per million). Not even a return to 390 ppm is possible until we stop burning all fossil fuels. A return to pre-industrial levels will take hundreds if not thousands of years – which again, is only possible if zero emissions are actually achieved. And this is only possible if specific tipping points are not passed. Once enough tipping points have been passed it is essentially GAME OVER. There is no going back. No second chances. This is what mainstream NGOs, even ones claiming they are the leaders in the climate movement based on climate science (350.org/1Sky), do not share with the public. Why? Because it is terrifying. We must fight to achieve the impossible.

“The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means. It is this species of man who so vehemently and militantly participated in that classically idealistic debate at the old League of Nations on the ethical differences between defensive and offensive weapons. Their fears of action drive them to refuge in an ethics so divorced from the politics of life that it can apply only to angels, not men.” — Saul Alinsky

Ideologies Have Never Won Any Revolutions

“The desire for a nonviolent and cooperative world is the healthiest of all psychological manifestations. This is the overarching principle of liberation and revolution. Undoubtedly, it seems the highest order of contradiction that, in order to achieve nonviolence, we must first break with it in overcoming its root causes. Therein lies our only hope.” — Ward Churchill, Pacifism as Pathology

Film director Josh Fox states that “There’s only been one tool that people have turned to in desperate times to change the world: Civil disobedience.” However, the tactics being pushed by McKibben and others bear no resemblance to those used in the past by the oppressed. Ask the people of Bougainville Island how non-violent civil disobedience worked for their communities who were being exploited and sickened by the mining corporation, Rio Tinto Zinc, before, in self-defence, they rose up in arms against the poisoning of their land and people and forcibly closed down the mine – despite a military occupation and blockade.

The Papua New Guinea Army were mobilized in an attempt to strangle the citizens into submission and destroy the rebellion. The Bougainville Revolutionary Army began the fight with bows and arrows, and sticks and stones. Against a heavily armed adversary they still managed to retain control of most of their island. This is not a story of “uncivilized” citizens; this is a story of courageous people who refused to submit to oppression and exploitation – the world’s first eco-revolution. This story and its documentary could be considered – along with stories told through documentary films such as END:CIV and other courageous screenings (think John Pilger) which speak the unpopular truths – the greatest stories ever told; real life stories of a rising up of the people against all odds – by any means necessary. Such are the stories that the plutocracy and the big greens, who are dependent upon them for their very existence, hope citizens never hear about.

Such instances of people reclaiming their power and land are not televised on corporate media, not even in self-proclaimed progressive media outlets (funded by corporations via their foundations, which serve to protect their interests). Ask the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation (Ipperwash); the Mohawk community of Kanesatake (Oka); or the Six Nations of the Grand River (Caledonia). Ask them how passive resistance assisted their ongoing struggle for rights, respect and compliance with treaties and claims, including land claims. It did not. After exhausting all recourse, these First Nations communities embraced self-defense tactics. In the case of Caledonia, the resistance forced Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty to implement a policy of “passive containment,” which ostensibly stopped enforcement of the rule of law in that area. (Also see “UNDER SIEGE: How the People of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation Asserted Their Rights and Claims and Dealt with the Backlash.”)

“Since the crisis began, Dalton McGuinty’s government has been petrified of taking decisive action, lest the Toronto media compare his actions to those of Mike Harris’ government during the Ipperwash Crisis of 1995. At numerous points during the Caledonia standoff, the OPP has been ordered to sit on their hands despite numerous provocations by native protestors.” — National Post, 16 September 2007

Today, the Canadian federal government, army, police and security agencies are essentially panicked in what they expect will be a unified resistance of First Nations rising up across Canada to reclaim and protect their rightful territories and resources. The strategy to prevent such an uprising from succeeding is continued efforts to further destroy traditional communities: “The First Nations Chiefs and Leaders who become more known and prominent are largely the individuals who have been trained and supported by federal bureaucrats.” (Source: First Nations Under Surveillance: Harper Government Prepares for First Nations “Unrest”)

Video: Photomontage – Crise d’oka (Running time: 2:55)

[Watch the full length Canadian National Film Board documentary, Kanehsatake 270 Years of Resistance: http://www.nfb.ca/film/kanehsatake_270_years_of_resistance. “On a July day in 1990, a confrontation propelled Native issues in Kanehsatake and the village of Oka, Quebec, into the international spotlight. Director Alanis Obomsawin spent 78 nerve-wracking days and nights filming the armed stand-off between the Mohawks, the Quebec police and the Canadian army. This powerful documentary takes you right into the action of an age-old Aboriginal struggle. The result is a portrait of the people behind the barricades.” “The most gripping scene for me was when the Warriors were down and ready to go with the Vandoos; one of the Mothers turned a Warrior right on his heel. You could see his shoulders slump. The love of the women that love us and that we love is a powerful thing.” –Arthur James]

Pacifism is a deadly position for those exploited and facing death. In the case of escalating climate change and collapsing ecosystems, those facing death are us and all living species on the planet. Forever.

Therefore, to be clear, when we speak of force, by any means necessary, we are embracing this essential and vital position, in self-defence.

Hypocrisy

One cannot participate in this system while at the same time morally judging the use of violence – if necessary – as a means to end relentless oppression, and in this case a global genocide / mass eradication of all species on the planet.

The global industrialized capitalist economic system – which most citizens of wealthy nations all happily (to one degree or another) not only condone but also support – is a system built upon and dependent upon unadulterated violence of unparalleled magnitude. Every time one fills their gas tank, they support violence. Every time one flies in an airplane, consumes animal flesh (speciesism), cracks open a can of Coke, purchases garments manufactured in China and other poverty stricken countries by exploited workers, turns on their fossil-fuel-powered heat, purchases the latest war “game” for their nine-year-old or simply pays their taxes – one participates in violence. The list goes on and on. To take the hypocritical position that non-violence is the only acceptable “moral” choice for fighting the system is only possible if one refuses to acknowledge the reality – deep denial in a most dangerous form. And it is of no surprise that such positions are primarily held by the comfortable middle class who are not subjected to severe hardships, gross injustices and bloody warfare.

Pacifism and non-violence are, and will continue to be, critical tactics of resistance. But the rejection of other tactics is detrimental to our survival.

Impartiality is not acceptable either as the question really is one of which side we will ultimately choose to stand on.

Skilled saboteurs are desperately needed. Underground movements and radicals who have the bravery to fight for humanity and for the rest of Nature, by any means necessary, deserve and require our undivided respect, gratitude and public support. Self-defense is not a crime.

During the Civil Rights Movement, organized racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized and murdered thousands of African Americans. In the face of such violence, would anyone judge the brave people who fought back to protect their families from slaughter? In such repressive violence, fighting back to protect those you love from death was, and still is, the only sensible option.

An image from the television series Deacons for Defense, about a small group of African American men in Jonesboro, Louisiana who became a popular symbol of the growing frustration with Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent strategy and a rallying point for a militant working-class movement in the South. Lance Hill, in The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, said of non-violent civil rights organisations, “The hard truth is that these organizations produced few victories in their local projects in the Deep South – if success is measured by the ability to force changes in local government policy and create self-governing and sustainable local organizations that could survive when the national organizations departed … the Deacons and all other blacks who resort to self-defense represent a simple answer to a simple question: what man would not defend his family and home from attack?” – Property is Theft Website

Peaceful protests – as the only tolerated vice – will not end our escalating climate genocide and environmental collapse. We must follow up protests with action that uphold Malcolm X’s phrase ‘by any means necessary’.

In the 29 August 2011 article “¡Will Miller Presente! May Day 1971 D.C. Mobilization: This is What Revolution Will Look Like,” the author states: “The May Day action plan was for affinity groups – tightly knit groups willing to take direct action together and risk arrest – to take over key locations across D.C. and shut them down. In Orin’s case, it was one of D.C.’s circle intersections. In the case of Will, it was the 14th Street Bridge. This collective direct action to shut down the city showed the country’s ‘leaders’ that the anti-war movement was escalating its tactics in response to the growing body counts in Vietnam of both U.S. Soldiers and Vietnamese people.” This represents such actions designed to obstruct the system – not comply with it. Not to be obedient and passive to those oppressing us.

It is imperative that escalating tactics be ensued following any action – especially with respect to the fact the Obama Administration announced their decision to proceed with Keystone XL immediately following the first day of the tar sands action. One would hope there are bulldozers secured and waiting.

“The concept of nonviolence is a false ideal. It presupposes the existence of compassion and a sense of justice on the part of one’s adversary. When this adversary has everything to lose and nothing to gain by exercising justice and compassion, his reaction can only be negative.”— George Jackson, Black Panther Party

From the Phil Dickens article “Why Pacifism is Morally Indefensible“:

My argument here is not that nonviolence is ineffective as a tactic. Indeed, it can yield considerable success given the right arena. It is that pacifism, as an absolute, is fundamentally immoral and unjustifiable within the context of the world we live in….

Whatever else one might say about him, Gandhi could not be accused of mincing his words or shying away from the logical conclusion of absolute pacifism. In Non-Violence in Peace and War, Gandhi offered the following advice to the British people: “I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions … If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.

This is one of the comments which inspired George Orwell to declare that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist“: “This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security…. I am not interested in pacifism as a “moral phenomenon.” If Mr. Savage and others imagine that one can somehow “overcome” the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand “moral force” till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.” …which brings us to the core point on why absolute pacifism is immoral. Unlike a pragmatic recourse to nonviolent resistance only in situations where it will be effective, it offers no recourse for the defense of innocents from injustice and brutality. And, ultimately, there is nothing heroic, even in principle, in offering yourself to the butcher’s knife.

With the Tar Sands Action campaign, spearheaded by Bill McKibben, we also witness a resurgence of religion. From the article “Religious Witness at Tar Sands Action”: “On Monday, August 29, 9 a.m.-12 p.m., Sojourners has organized more than 50 prominent religious leaders from Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Unitarian Universalist, and other faiths to risk arrest at the White House. A Jewish morning prayer service in Lafayette Park will begin at 9 a.m., followed by an interfaith prayer service that will conclude with a blessing for those risking arrest. At 11 a.m. religious leaders will cross to the White House sidewalk.” Bill McKibben said, “It was hard but not impossible – and we woke up Sunday morning singing that old spiritual ‘Certainly Lord.'” Throughout history religion has been used over and over again as a tool – as a means of conditioning, control and obedience to the state. In the meantime the Catholic Church has billions invested in BPI, Philex, San Miguel and other corporations who profit from decimating the planet. Like the Big Greens, the religious organizations are also dependant and feeding upon the very system destroying us.

The Tar Sands Action campaign has no political strategy at all; no plans, no platform. Rockefellers’ McKibben is successfully hindering and delaying the formation of a strong, uncompromising and unified movement. Yet, instead of constructive criticisms and demands coming from citizens and grassroots, even the most intelligent and informed activists are lining up to receive McKibben’s blessing. One would think we’ve witnessed ‘the second coming of Christ’. Hallefuckingluiah and amen. Pass the soma. Perhaps soon we will bear witness to McKibben making an offering or a sacrifice to appease the gods (which will be just as effective).

The Role of Censorship, Which Allows Us to Deny

The role of the elitist Left in furthering and protecting the false illusion and indoctrination of pacifism (as pathology) is clearly demonstrated in headlines such as the Bill McKibben article featured in the Guardian, titled “Martin Luther King’s legacy and the power of nonviolent civil disobedience.” (Here it is critical to note that it was the Birmingham, Alabama civil rights marches, protests and direct actions that degenerated into riots; those riots represent the instrumental element behind what forced law changes at every level of government. As King later said: “The purpose of … direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”) Of course, such fodder by McKibben and others is welcome by all who are secure and comfortable, as a movement based on symbolism will ensure that the violent continuation of full repression, which is felt by others all over the world as a direct result of imperialism, colonialism and our industrialized economic system, will not be felt by our society in the immediate future. (Aside from our growing apathy, denial and sense of superiority.) The mainstream movement has a pivotal role in censoring all but the tactics they embrace, providing justification for us to do essentially nothing – at a time when we must employ all tactics to force the hand of the corporate state. No doubt they are terrified that we may have to fight our oppressors head on – as witnessed by those fighting for their very lives in different countries all over the world. (Whew! Thanks, Bill! Thanks, corporate greens!) Self-proclaimed “progressive” and “alternative” media outlets (such as Grist – whose board McKibben sits on; funded by those dependent upon the industrial machine, including Rockefeller) perpetuate and propel this meme (– nonviolence at all costs), drilling this ideological view into the mindset and conditioning of civil society.

Conditioning

“Ours must be a leadership democracy, administered by the ‘intelligent minority’ who know how to regiment and guide the masses. The common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality.… If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” – nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, considered the father of the field of public relations

We are being psychologically conditioned to believe that if only we continue to follow the rules and behave responsibly, we need not act in defence of our collapsing ecosystems and other crises unveiling themselves in unprecedented magnitude. This is only possible by clinging to false illusions, deep denial, and an irrational belief in an economic system that is destroying our planet – upon which we all depend – before our very eyes. We have been given a choice: resist or die. Thus far, we have demonstrated that we would rather cling to our illusions, thereby choosing death.

Is this campaign – funded by the world’s plutocracy – nothing but a means to give the false illusion of democracy while successfully conditioning people to further submit to the state – which would be an extremely valuable asset to the state as our planetary multiple crises deepen and escalate? Psychology and propaganda have always been recognized by leaders and the plutocracy as crucial and imperative means of controlling the masses.

http://youtu.be/9Ah20IAyYxg

http://youtu.be/IyPzGUsYyKM

Pacifism as Pathology | Tar Sands Action Déjà vu

“I just came home from Vietnam where I spent twelve months of my life trying to pacify the population. We couldn’t do it; their resistance was amazing. And it was wrong; the process made me sick. So I came home to join the resistance in my own country, and I find you guys have pacified yourselves. That too amazes me; that too makes me sick….” — Vietnam Veteran Against the War, 1970 (quoted in Pacifism as Pathology)

Below is an excerpt from Ward Churchill’s “Pacifism as Pathology,” first published in 1986 (endnotes removed). For anyone interested in mitigating the global collapse of all ecosystems and deterring planet-wide and species-wide genocide, this is essential reading.

For anyone wishing to take a critical look at the tar sands protests by groups funded (and in some cases created) by the Rockefellers and other corporate foundations – who will stop at absolutely nothing to keep the current power structures intact – the excerpt from this essay is sure to wake one from the paralysis that is trapping and constraining movements and societies in the status quo. The parallels between Churchill’s essay and the events in Washington, D.C. that were celebrated and endorsed – while the planet rests on the precipice – are nothing less than Orwellian.

The question central to the emergence and maintenance of nonviolence as the oppositional foundation of American activism has not been a truly pacifist formulation – “How can we forge a revolutionary politics within which we can avoid inflicting violence on others?” On the contrary, a more accurate guiding question has been, “What sort of politics might I engage in which will both allow me to posture as a progressive and allow me to avoid incurring harm to myself?” Hence, the trappings of pacifism have been subverted to establish a sort of “politics of the comfort zone,” not only akin to what Bettelheim termed “the philosophy of business as usual” and devoid of perceived risk to its advocates, but minus any conceivable revolutionary impetus as well. The intended revolutionary content of true pacifist activism – the sort practiced by the Gandhian movement, the Berrigans, and Norman Morrison – is thus isolated and subsumed in the United States, even among the ranks of self-professing participants.

Such a situation must abort whatever limited utility pacifist tactics might have, absent other and concurrent forms of struggle, as a socially transformative method. Yet, the history of the American Left over the past decade shows too clearly that the more diluted the substance embodied in “pacifist practice,” the louder the insistence of its subscribers that nonviolence is the only mode of action “appropriate and acceptable within the context of North America,” and the greater the effort to ostracize, or even stifle divergent types of actions. Such strategic hegemony exerted by proponents of this truncated range of tactical options has done much to foreclose on whatever revolutionary potential may be said to exist in modern America.

Is such an assessment too harsh? One need only attend a mass demonstration (ostensibly directed against the policies of the state) in any U.S. city to discover the answer. One will find hundreds, sometimes thousands, assembled in orderly fashion, listening to selected speakers calling for an end to this or that aspect of lethal state activity, carrying signs “demanding” the same thing, welcoming singers who enunciate lyrically on the worthiness of the demonstrators’ agenda as well as the plight of the various victims they are there to “defend,” and – typically – the whole thing is quietly disbanded with exhortations to the assembled to “keep working” on the matter and to sign a petition and/or write letters to congress people requesting that they alter or abandon offending undertakings.

Throughout the whole charade it will be noticed that the state is represented by a uniformed police presence keeping a discreet distance and not interfering with the activities. And why should they? The organizers of the demonstration will have gone through “proper channels” to obtain permits from the state and instructions as to where they will be allowed to assemble, how long they will be allowed to stay, and – should a march be involved in the demonstration – along which routes they will be allowed to walk. Surrounding the larger mass of demonstrators can be seen others – the elite. Adorned with green (or white, or powder blue) armbands, their function is to ensure that demonstrators remain “responsible,” not deviating from the state-sanctioned, arm-banded plan of protest. Individuals or small groups who attempt to spin off from the main body, entering areas to which the state has denied access (or some other unapproved activity), are headed off by these arm-banded “marshals” who argue – pointing to the nearby police – that “troublemaking” will only “exacerbate an already tense situation” and “provoke violence,” thereby “alienating those we are attempting to reach.” In some ways, the voice of the “good Jews” can be heard to echo plainly over the years.

At this juncture, the confluence of interests between the state and the mass nonviolent movement could not be clearer. The role of the police, whose function is to support state policy by minimizing disruption of its procedures, should be in natural conflict with that of a movement purporting to challenge these same policies and, indeed, to transform the state itself. However, with apparent perverseness, the police find themselves serving as mere backups (or props) to self-policing (now euphemistically termed “peace-keeping” rather than the more accurate “marshaling”) efforts of the alleged opposition’s own membership. Both sides of the “contestation” concur that the smooth functioning of state processes must not be physically disturbed, at least not in any significant way. All of this is within the letter and spirit of co-optive forms of sophisticated self-preservation appearing as an integral aspect of the later phases of bourgeois democracy. It dovetails well with more shopworn methods such as the electoral process and has been used by the state as an innovative means of conducting public opinion polls, which better hide rather than eliminate controversial policies. Even the movement’s own sloganeering tends to bear this out from time to time, as when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) coined the catch-phrase of its alternative to the polling place: “Vote with your feet, vote in the street.”

Of course, any movement seeking to project a credible self-image as something other than just one more variation of accommodation to state power must ultimately establish its “militant” oppositional credentials through the media in a manner more compelling than rhetorical speechifying and the holding of impolite placards (“Fuck the War” was always a good one) at rallies. Here, the time-honored pacifist notion of “civil disobedience” is given a new twist by the adherents of nonviolence in America. Rather than pursuing Gandhi’s (or, to a much lesser extent, King’s) method of using passive bodies to literally clog the functioning of the state apparatus – regardless of the cost to those doing the clogging – the American nonviolent movement has increasingly opted for “symbolic actions.”

The centerpiece of such activity usually involves an arrest, either of a token figurehead of the movement (or a small, selected group of them) or a mass arrest of some sort. In the latter event, “arrest training” is generally provided – and lately has become “required” by movement organizers – by the same marshals who will later ensure that crowd control police units will be left with little or nothing to do. This is to ensure that “no one gets hurt” in the process of being arrested, and that the police are not inconvenienced by disorganized arrest procedures.

The event which activates the arrests is typically preplanned, well publicized in advance, and, more often than not, literally coordinated with the police – often including estimates by organizers concerning how many arrestees will likely be involved. Generally speaking, such “extreme statements” will be scheduled to coincide with larger-scale peaceful demonstrations so that a considerable audience of “committed” bystanders (and, hopefully, NBC/CBS/ABC/CNN) will be on hand to applaud the bravery and sacrifice of those arrested; most of the bystanders will, of course, have considered reasons why they themselves are unprepared to “go so far” as to be arrested. The specific sort of action designed to precipitate the arrests themselves usually involves one of the following: (a) sitting down in a restricted area and refusing to leave when ordered; (b) stepping across an imaginary line drawn on the ground by a police representative; (c) refusing to disperse at the appointed time; or (d) chaining or padlocking the doors to a public building. When things really get heavy, those seeking to be arrested may pour blood (real or ersatz) on something of “symbolic value.”

As a rule, those arrested are cooperative in the extreme, meekly allowing police to lead them to waiting vans or buses for transportation to whatever station house or temporary facility has been designated as the processing point. In especially “militant” actions, arrestees go limp, undoubtedly severely taxing the state’s repressive resources by forcing the police to carry them bodily to the vans or buses (monitored all the while by volunteer attorneys who are there to ensure that such “police brutality” as pushing, shoving, or dropping an arrestee does not occur). In either event, the arrestees sit quietly in their assigned vehicles – or sing “We Shall Overcome” and other favorites – as they are driven away for booking. The typical charges levied will be trespassing, creating a public disturbance, or being a public nuisance.

Documentary: PsyWar – Wake UP!

Chart below +++ Telling. TransCanada (and incidentally Enbridge as well) has managed solid gains in their stock prices despite the latest market volatility.July 14, 2011, Bloomberg News: “TransCanada Corp., Enbridge Inc. and the four other Standard & Poor’s/TSX Composite Index companies that store and transport oil and gas are offering average dividend yields of 4.05%. That’s 1.48% percentage points above the full index’s rate and 1.16 points more than the payout on Canadian 10-year government bonds. The industry’s valuation has jumped to 21 times earnings and reached 22 in May, the highest since 2006.”

Bolivia: Amazon protest — development before environment?

September 9th, 011

By Federico Fuentes

The decision by leaders of the Sub Central of the Indigenous Territory and National Isiboro Secure Park (TIPNIS), to initiate a 500-kilometre protest march on Bolivia’s capital of La Paz capital has ignited much debate about the nature of Bolivia’s first indigenous led-government.

The Sub Central of TIPNIS unites the 64 indigenous communities within the park.

Much analysis has focused on the supposed hypocrisy of the government headed by Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state. The Morales government has been criticised for pursuing pro-capitalist development and trampling on the rights of its own indigenous people.

Many analysts have also highlighted the contradiction between Morales’ public discourse in defence of indigenous rights and Mother Earth, and the proposal of his government’s to build a new highway that would run through this protected area of the Amazon.

According to Raul Prada, until recently a key figure in the Morales government and now ardent critic, the protests are forcing Morales to choose between “defence of life, of forests, of human beings and the vital cycles of the system of life or the path of narcotrafficking, of corrosive trade, extraction-based dependency, of the highways of dependency on emergent powers [a reference to Brazil ] and the empire”.

However, what the protests have actually revealed is the complicated reality of Bolivia’s social movements. It has shown the deep challenges they face in overcoming centuries of underdevelopment and internal fissures, which both threaten to undermine the process of change underway since Morales was first elected in 2005.

Exploitation

Attempts to counterpose the “developmentalist” policies of the government against the “communitarian” logic of the indigenous marchers fails to take into account the long running tensions that underpin the dispute.

For more than 500 years, Bolivia’s indigenous majority have seen their natural resources and wealth continuously pillaged by foreign powers (Spain, Britain and the United States).

The wealth ripped out from this small Andean nation helped fuel the growth of global metropolises such as London. But its local indigenous peoples were forced into a life of extreme poverty and oppression.

Despite sitting upon the second largest gas reserves in South America, and at one time supplying almost 50% of the world’s tin, Bolivia is general considered the second poorest country in the Americas.

The disaster created by imperialist domination not only impact on the livelihoods of ordinary Bolivians. Through the super-exploitation of its wealth, Bolivia’s economy was subsumed into the world market in a subordinate position.

Its economy revolved around the interests of foreign capital rather than the needs of its people.

To ensure this subordination, the Bolivian state was dominated by foreign interests. The local white oligarchy was entrusted with running it.

The state was successful in putting down numerous internal revolts. But it was ineffectual in asserting any real sovereignty over Bolivia and integrating its far flung regions into a dynamic national economy.

One consequence of this was that since independence, Bolivia has lost more than half of its national territories to neighbouring countries.

This included losing its access to the Pacific Ocean to Chile in the 1879-1883 Pacific War. This has cost Bolivia more than US$30 billion since 1970.

Rolling ‘social revolution’

The onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s worsened the situation. It fuelled what one US embassy cable recently released by WikiLeaks called “the country’s rolling ‘social revolution’”.

The cable, dated May 17, 2006, noted that US-imposed neoliberalism led to increased poverty, unemployment, and rural migration towards underdeveloped cities. This left “new urban dwellers clamouring for access to basic services”.

Worsening poverty levels, the cable said, had a “clear rural-urban, a growing regional, and a distinctly racial dimension”.

The cable also noted “growing ethnic consciousness has fed ‘indigenous’ resentment of the dominant ‘white’ minority and the political system that allegedly sustained it”.

“In combination, these factors have undermined the faith of many Bolivians in the old economic and political order”. It said this led to increased support for the Morales government, whose largest support base came from those identified in the US cable as most affected by neoliberalism.

This was the basis for Morales’ election and the displacement of Bolivia’s white elites from their traditional positions of power in the state.

In particular, Morales support base is among the indigenous majority, dividing into 36 peoples that live in the highlands to the west and lowlands to the east.

The two, larger indigenous peoples are the Quechas (2.5 million people) and Aymaras (2 million people). Bolivia’s total population is close to 10 million.

These two peoples have predominately been based in the west.

But the process of internal migration by Aymaras and Quechas indigenous campesinos seeking land in the east (commonly referred to as “colonisers”), has steady increased their numbers in the lowland.

It has also contributed to nearly doubling the size of the city of Santa Cruz in the east over the past 20 years. It is now home to 1.2 million, making it the largest city in Bolivia.

At the same time, rural-urban migration has fuelled the growth of the mostly indigenous city of El Alto, on the outskirts of La Paz.

Its population skyrocketed from around 400,000 in 1992 to current estimates of more than a million.

This overwhelming indigenous city, key to the successive overthrow of two neoliberal presidents, is another heartland of Morales support.

Morales, himself an Aymara, grew up in the altiplano (highlands)> He later moved to the largely Quechua coca-growing region of the Chapare, nestled in the centre of the country.

In the mid-’90s, the Chapare became a battleground of the US “war on drugs”. The cocalero (coca-growers) movement, head by Morales, was the backbone of a rising anti-imperialist movement.

Together with predominately Aymara and Quecha campesinos who made up the country’s largest rural-based organisations — the Sole Union Confederation of Bolivian Campesino Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB), the Union Confederation of Bolivian Colonisers (CSCB), and the National Federation of Bolivian Campesino Women “Bartolina Sisa (FNMCB-BS) — the cocaleros formed what today is commonly known as the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) in the mid-’90s.

It is important to note that as a result of the land reform carried out by Bolivia’s 1952 National Revolution, most of the indigenous peoples in the west were granted access to small land plots (via private deeds).

The traditional union model of organising was imposed upon their traditional communitarian organisation.

This further fractured the communitarian bonds that had already begun to be undermined by centuries of colonialisation.

The result, however, was a certain fusion of elements of both within these organisations.

In the east, where the indigenous population was smaller, land reform was never implemented.

Instead, the east, centred around Santa Cruz, gradually became the new economic motor of Bolivia. This was due to its huge gas deposits and the rise of powerful latifundistas<.em> (large landowners).

This part of Bolivia is home to the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of the East (CIDOB), which unites organisations from 34 of the 36 groups of indigenous peoples. It represents about 500,000 people.

CIDOB and the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ), which unites some indigenous communities in the altiplano, took part in the founding meetings of the MAS.

But the two groups never became organic components of this “political instrument”.

Instead, relationships were maintained between these organisations in two ways. First, the different campesino and indigenous groups came together to form the Unity Pact. And second, various CONAMAQ and CIDOB leaders, such as its current president Adolfo Chavez, were elected as MAS parliamentarians.

Conflicts

At the same time, conflicts between these groups have emerged at different times.

At the root of some of these divergences have been the differing visions between the lowland indigenous movements, with their strong ties to NGOs and the church and their focus on the environment and indigenous control over territory and natural resources, and those of the highland campesino movements.

The highland groups political and anti-imperialist outlook was heavily influenced by the 1952 National Revolution and the 1980s mass emmigration of mine workers into the countryside in search of work.

These differences have played out in TIPNIS over the past decades, especially since “colonisers” from the west began settling in the area as of the ’70s and ’80s.

After a historic march by the indigenous peoples of the east in 1990, then president Jamie Paz Zamora declared the 1.2 million hectares that comprise TIPNIS an ancestral territory of the Mojeno, Yuracare and Chiman peoples.

However, this move was unable to put an end to the constant disputes between local indigenous communities and indigenous “colonisers” who have moved in to occupy land for agriculture.

This led to a state of semi-permanent confrontations.

The conflict only subsided after a demarcation agreement was signed in 1992 between Marcial Fabricano, then head of the Sub Central of TIPNIS, and Morales, as head of the cocalero federation that includes the “colonisers” in the southern part of TIPNIS.

The agreement gave existing colonisers the right to land currently occupied while halting further invasions.

These differences were also reflected in the roles played by the various organisations during the period of social rebellion that began in 2000.

US interference

As the uprising against neoliberalism grew in strength, overthrowing a neoliberal president in 2003, US imperialism sought to use money to increase divisions within the indigenous movements.

In late 2005, investigative journalist Reed Lindsay published an article in NACLA that used declassified US documents to expose how US government-funded agency USAID was used to this effect.

USAID was already planning by 2002 to “help build moderate, pro-democracy political parties that can serve as a counterweight to the radical MAS or its successors”.

The downfall in 2003 of president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada triggered a step-up in this subversive activity.

A particular target was CIDOB.

The group was in a crisis after Fabricano was accused of profiting from illegal logging and he accepted the post of vice-minister of Indigenous Affairs under Sanchez de Lozada.

Through USAID funding to the Brecha Foundation, an NGO established by CIDOB leaders, the US hoped to further mould the organisation to its own ends.

Referring to comments made by Brecha director Victor Hugo Vela, Lindsay notes that during this time, “CIDOB leaders allied with Fabricano have condemned the cultivation of coca, helped the business elite in the department of Santa Cruz to push for region autonomy and opposed a proposal to require petroleum companies to consult with indigenous communities before drilling on their lands”.

The CSUTCB (divided between followers of Morales and radical Aymara leader Felipe Quispe), CSCB, FNMCB-BS and organisations such as the neighbourhood councils of El Alto (Fejuve), and to a less extent worker and miner organisations, were at the forefront of constant street battles and insurrections.

CIDOB, however, took an approach marked by negotiation and moderation.

It was not until July 2005 that CIDOB renewed its leadership, in turn breaking relations with Brecha.

CIDOB was not the only target for infiltration.

With close to $200,000 in US government funds, the Land and Liberty Movement (MTL) was set up in 2004 by Walter Reynaga.

As well as splitting the Movement of Landless Peasant’s (MST), one wing of which operated out of his La Paz office, Lindsay said Reynaga, like Vega, tried to win control of the “MAS-aligned” CONAMAQ.

All these groups came behind the campaign to elect Morales in 2005.

Gains

Since then, the Morales government has taken important steps towards breaking Bolivia’s dependency on foreign capital. His government has nationalised Bolivia’s gas reserves and refused to follow International Monetary Fund-diktats.

The government has also moved quickly to tackle the urgent and deeply felt needs of its base.

Data collated by the Unit of Analysis of Social and Economic Policies (UDAPE), a government think tank from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), show just how much progress has been made.

Poverty levels have fallen from 60.6% in 2005 to 49.6% in 2010.

The biggest drop came in rural areas (77.6% to 65.1%). Extreme poverty also fell from 38.2% in 2005 to 25.4% in 2010.

In 2005, the wealthiest 10% received 128 times the amount of income than the poorest 10%. By 2009, this had been reduced to 60 times.

Recent figures from the IMF back these findings and indicate that 1.1 million Bolivians were lifted out of extreme poverty between 2007 and 2009.

Along with tackling poverty, another priority of the first Morales administration (2006-2009) was focusing on the needs of indigenous communities in the lowlands.

This was seen as essential in nurturing social movements that could help counteract the attempts by the right-wing opposition, centred in the east, to overthrow his government.

In regards to TIPNIS, Morales directly intervened in 2006 to expel colonisers who had occupied further lands in the TIPNIS. Many of them were associated with the cocalero federation he still headed despite becoming head of state.

In 2009, the 64 indigenous communities of the TIPNIS, about 12,000 people all up, were finally handed over the title to over 1 million hectares of land. The remaining 200,000 hectares went predominately to the roughly 100,000 colonisers present in the south of the park.

Former vice-minister of land Alejandro Almaraz, who together with Prada is a key spokesperson of a group of former government members turned dissidents, explained in a July 29 interview posted by Rebelion that of the 25 million hectares of land redistributed under Morales until the end of 2010, 16 million was handed over as communitarian lands belonging to original indigenous owners.

In comparison, the campesino sector received less than 3 million hectares in the form of individual or family titles.

Crucially, the unity forged between indigenous peoples of the east and west, and urban and rural areas, was critical to defeating the September 2008 coup attempt by the right-wing opposition sectors in the east.

It was also vital to Morales record re-election vote of 64% in the December 2009 elections.

‘Industrial leap forward’

A big part of Morales’ election campaign was his promised “industrial leap forward”.

Speaking to supporters in El Alto at his campaign closing rally, Morales emphasised industrialisation, the physical integration of the country and social inclusion as key goals of his second government.

The MAS’s election program included a section entitled “roadway revolution for an integrated country”.

This focused on the need to expand and build key highways that could integrate isolated regions, and help promote economic development at the local and national.

Among the proposed roadways was one that would link the northern department of Beni with Cochabamba.

Some have criticised this highway. They point to the fact it is part of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, a Brazilian-led project to economically integrate the continent, as proof of Bolivia’s subordination of Brazilian “sub-imperialism”.

Brazil is footing 80% of the bill for the disputed highway.

Others have noted that the highway is critical to breaking the department of Beni’s dependency on Santa Cruz.

At the moment, all agricultural products must go via Santa Cruz to the east before being able to be transported westward.

The proposed highway would directly connect Beni to Cochabamba. This would reduce costs for agricultural producers (and consumers) and travel distance from 848 kilometres to 306 kilometres.

Given Beni’s status as the largest meat producing department, this would break the hold that Santa Cruz-based slaughterhouses have on imposing meat prices.

This is one of the reasons why important sections of the Santa Cruz elite are opposing the highway.

Also, criticisms of subordination to Brazilian interests have not been made in regards to the many other roadways being funded by Brazil as part of IIRSA. These are strongly supported by the communities that will benefit from greater access to transportation and basic services.

In fact, on August 15, the same day marchers from TIPNIS headed off to La Paz, two other protests were held in the important MAS strongholds of El Alto and Potosi.

These protests included in their demands access to basic services, and the building of more factories and highways. Neither protest raised opposition to the proposed highway through TIPNIS.

In many ways, these protests reflect the increased tensions the MAS government has faced since defeating the right-wing coup attempt and winning re-election.

Various sections of its base, feeling their time has come, are now protesting to demand the government turn its attention towards them.

In all these cases, the demands have been for more, not less development.

In some cases, this has led to increased conflicts within the different social movements. This is reflected by the divisions within the Unity Pact over the push by campesino organisations to redirect government attention towards this sector in its land reform program.

Highway dispute

This is also true in regards to TIPNIS. The various indigenous and campesino movements that are part of it are far from united in their opposition to the roadway.

The main campesino groups (comprised overwhelmingly of indigenous peoples), and leaders from the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), have declared their support for an eventual highway, while maintaining that any final plan take into consideration the needs of local indigenous communities.

Important indigenous organisations have also stated similar positions.

Despite the presence of CONAMAQ leaders such as Rafael Quispe in the march against the roadway, its affiliate organisations from La Paz and Potosi have rejected opposition to it.

The Indigenous Council of Communities of the South (CONISUR), which groups indigenous communities in the south of TIPNIS as well as colonisers that inhabit those areas have come out in support of an eventual roadway.

The Yuracare Indigenous Council, that unites the Yucare, Mojeno and Trinitario peoples, has as well.

All these groups have highlighted the benefits the highway will bring in regards to access to basic services, ability to sell products and travel.

Attempts have been made to equate these organisation’s positions with their vested interests in accumulating land.

This is in line with recent moves by the CSUTCB to shift the government’s land reform policy away from prioritising collective indigenous titles towards providing individual or family titles to its traditional base.

There are elements of truth (and much exaggeration) to this claim, but this should come as no surprise.

The same CSUTCB, and other campesino organisations which led the protests between 2000 and 2005, have always defended this position. This is shown by the history of conflict in TIPNIS.

Demands

And it is also true that the demands of the Sub Central of TIPNIS, and in particular CIDOB, are far removed from any notion of communitarianism.

Although initially focused on opposition to the highway, protesters presented the government with an original list of 13 demands, then extended to 16, on the day the march began.

Among those were calls for indigenous peoples to be able to directly receive compensation payment for offsetting carbon emissions.

This policy, know as REDD+, has been denounced as the privatisation of the forests by many environmental activists and the Peoples’ Summit of Climate Change organised in Bolivia in 2010.

It has also been promoted as a mechanism to allow developed countries to continue to pollute while undermining the right underdeveloped to develop their economies.

Another demand calls for the replacement of functionaries within the Authority for Control and Monitoring of Forests and Lands (ABT).

This demand dovetails with the allegations made by Morales against CIDOB leaders, and never refuted, that they want to control this state institution.

Much focus has been made of the potential environmental destruction caused by a highway that would open the path to future “coloniser” settlements.

But these arguments have only focused on one side of the equation.

Much has been made of a study by Bolivian Strategic Research Program that concluded that 64.5% of TIPNIS would be lost to deforestation by 2030 as a result of the highway.

Few, though, have noted that the same study found that even without the highway 43% of TIPNIS would be lost if the current rate of deforestation continues.

The biggest cause of this is the illegal logging that continues to occur, in some cases with the complicity of some local indigenous leaders and communities.

An environmental impact studies by the Bolivian Highway Authority have found the direct impact of the highway on TIPNIS to be 0.03%.

But this has to weighed up with the fact that the highway would provide the state with access to areas currently out of its reach.

This would enable not only access to services, but a greater ability to tackle illegal logging and potential narcotrafficking in the area.

At the same time, the government has asked the indigenous communities of TIPNIS to help in drafting legislation that would impose jail terms of 10 to 20 years on those found to be illegally settling, growing coca or logging in TIPNIS.

Meeting the needs of the majority

What becomes clear is that far from some polarised debate between "indigenous communitarianism" and the government’s savage “developmentalism”, there is more in common than there is differences between both sides of the debate.

One the one hand, there is the progressive sentiment of wanting to defend cultures and access basic services. On the other, a scramble for control over resources (land, forests, gas).

In this context of competing interests, the Morales government has made clear its intention to construct a highway in the region.

This has included the option of having the highway go around TIPNIS if this is economically and environmentally feasible — although no such alternative has yet been proposed by the protesters.

In doing so, its decision (right or wrong) has been based on prioritising what it sees as the basic needs of the majority, which if not met risks losing support for the government.

At the same time, it has predicating any final route (of which at the moment there are eight options) on a process of consultation with all communities affected.

This stress on dialogue and willingness to consult all those involved has being a running theme in the government’s approach.

In the place of repression (as would have occurred under pre-Morales governments) police have provide protection.

Also, 20 high-level government ministers, vice-ministers and presidents of state institutions have travelled to the remote areas to listen to community leaders in meetings open to all march participants.

One complication that has come relates to the issue of who gets to be consulted. The marchers have ruled out the right of the colonisers, and even some indigenous organisations, to take part.

March leaders also subsequently rejected outright the government’s proposal to carry out a consultation of the 64 indigenous communities within TIPNIS.

A further complication has been the increasingly hostile nature of the debate.

From the government’s side, it has strongly denounced the role of NGOs, USAID and opposition forces from Santa Cruz in fomenting the protests, as evidenced by their offers to provide financial support to the marchers.

Some have noted that opposition forces would like to see sections of the indigenous movement come out opposing the elections of judiciary authorities scheduled for October.

This is a far-reaching measure, which would transform a traditional corrupt judiciary dominated by the old right-wing parties into a popularly elected institution.

It would no doubt lead to indigenous people occupying posts they were previously barred from.

This makes it obvious why such forces are seeking to undermine the vote.

Some CIDOB and CONAMAQ leaders, and the group led by Prada and Almaraz, have come out against the election of the judicial power.

Dangerous positions

It is dangerous to deny, or downplay, the presence of forces such as USAID, NGOs and anti-Morales parties in this dispute — fishing around to win support among disgruntled sectors of Morales bases.

Only the most naive could imagine this was not the case, particularly as there is ample evidence to back up such claims.

However, just as dangerous is the actions of the government that have created an atmosphere were mutual denunciations and accusations take precedence over the much more necessary debate regarding Bolivia’s future.

This has been made worse by the sexist remarks of Morales himself, who called on the “colonisers” to “seduce the Yuracare and Trinitaria women, so that they don’t oppose the road”.

The same is also true of attempts by critics to portray support for the highway as somehow equivalent with support for “narcotrafficking”.

This is a common attack made by the US against the Morales government, and before that the cocalero movement.

On the surface, the issue of TIPNIS revolves around whether the economic interests of uniting Beni and Cochabamba, and the benefits it will bring regarding access to services and ability to sell agricultural products, override those of the local indigenous communities and their ancestral lands, or whether a comprise can be found that takes both factors into account.

But behind this specific issue lies a deeper debate of how Bolivia can promote an economic system that can navigate through the difficulties of overcoming centuries of underdevelopment while respecting Mother Earth.

Such a debate is essential. The current situation provides an opportunity for all involved to open a path in that direction.

This debate can, and should, entail protests such as those occurring now. These could aid in tackling some of the tradition developmentalist mentality prevalent within sections of the government.

But to be successful, this will require going beyond fragmented organisations mobilised behind individual or sectional interests. It will require a movement united behind a radical program for change.

Otherwise the risk is that such fissures within the movement for change become openings for a return to the right.

[Federico Fuentes edits www.boliviarising.blogspot.com]

http://boliviarising.blogspot.com/2011/09/bolivia-amazon-protest-development.html

EDITORIAL: Earth Hour, corporate sponsors and burning planets

14 March 2010

“Earth Hour” will be held around the world on March 27. The event is organised by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and involves participants switching off their lights for the hour as a symbolic declaration of support for environmental action.

The Earth Hour website is sponsored by, among others, Woolworths Limited, the giant supermarket and retail corporation. With the amount of waste and pollution associated with the retail industry in frivolous consumption, built-in obsolescence and so on, this would seem an odd choice for sponsor.

WWF has a shocking record for quite uncritically accepting sponsorship from polluting industries. Back in 2002, Counterpunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair exposed WWF’s links with logging corporation Weyerhaeuser, writing on Dissidentvoice.org that WWF “rakes in millions from corporations, including Alcoa, Citigroup, the Bank of America, Kodak, J.P. Morgan, the Bank of Tokyo, Philip Morris, Waste Management and DuPont”.

In November 2009, more than 80 environmental organisations from 31 countries signed a letter attacking WWF’s founding role in the “Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil”. The letter said: “WWF’s involvement is being used by agrofuel companies to justify building more refineries and more palm oil power stations in Europe.”

The palm oil industry is a leading cause of destruction of tropical rainforests.
Currently, WWF is one of the key “environment” organisations in Australia promoting “clean coal”. This hypothetical technology is the main prop in the Australian coal industry’s smoke-and-mirrors trickery to keep the public off its back.

Clearly, WWF is a willing aide to corporate polluters who want to be seen to be cleaning up their act. How much does the environment get back? Whatever WWF ekes out for payment in its bargaining with the devil, it isn’t working for the environment.

The Earth Hour website includes a link to a calculator where visitors can work out their own personal carbon footprint. If you follow links for what you can do after the event to “make Earth Hour every hour” you will be directed toward various governmental awareness raising schemes and green power providers.

If the event simply raised people’s awareness a little, it would be better than nothing. But sometimes “not enough” is worse than nothing: it’s a false hope. The direct links to our climate-criminal government, as much as any donations from polluting corporations, are like telling people to go back to sleep, not to get up, when the house is burning down.

Although individuals will gain positive feelings from participating in Earth Hour, climate activists have to channel popular concern about climate change into rebellion, not tokenism. Or our whole planet will burn down around us.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2010/830/42717