Last US Troop Out – US Imperialism’s Afghan Adventure
Monthly Archives: August 2021
Two Things Main Stream Media Didn’t Highlight About FDA’s Approval of Pfizer Vaccine – by Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Meryl Nass MD
Buried in the fine print of Monday’s approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration of the Pfizer Comirnaty COVID vaccine are two critical facts that affect whether the vaccine can be mandated, and whether Pfizer can be held liable for injuries.
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Monday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a biologics license application for the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine.
The press reported that vaccine mandates are now legal for military, healthcare workers, college students and employees in many industries. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has now required the vaccine for all teachers and school staff. The Pentagon is proceeding with its mandate for all military service members.
But there are several bizarre aspects to the FDA approval that will prove confusing to those not familiar with the pervasiveness of the FDA’s regulatory capture, or the depths of the agency’s cynicism.
First, the FDA acknowledges that while Pfizer has “insufficient stocks” of the newly licensed Comirnaty vaccine available, there is “a significant amount” of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine — produced under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) — still available for use.
The FDA decrees that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine under the EUA should remain unlicensed but can be used “interchangeably” (page 2, footnote 8) with the newly licensed Comirnaty product.
Second, the FDA pointed out that the licensed Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine and the existing, EUA Pfizer vaccine are “legally distinct,” but proclaims that their differences do not “impact safety or effectiveness.”
There is a huge real-world difference between products approved under EUA compared with those the FDA has fully licensed.
EUA products are experimental under U.S. law. Both the Nuremberg Code and federal regulations provide that no one can force a human being to participate in this experiment. Under 21 U.S. Code Sec.360bbb-3(e)(1)(A)(ii)(III), “authorization for medical products for use in emergencies,” it is unlawful to deny someone a job or an education because they refuse to be an experimental subject. Instead, potential recipients have an absolute right to refuse EUA vaccines.
U.S. laws, however, permit employers and schools to require students and workers to take licensed vaccines.
EUA-approved COVID vaccines have an extraordinary liability shield under the 2005 Public Readiness and Preparedness Act. Vaccine manufacturers, distributors, providers and government planners are immune from liability. The only way an injured party can sue is if he or she can prove willful misconduct, and if the U.S. government has also brought an enforcement action against the party for willful misconduct. No such lawsuit has ever succeeded.
The government has created an extremely stingy compensation program, the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program, to redress injuries from all EUA products. The program’s parsimonious administrators have compensated under 4% of petitioners to date — and not a single COVID vaccine injury — despite the fact that physicians, families and injured vaccine recipients have reported more than 600,000 COVID vaccine injuries.
At least for the moment, the Pfizer Comirnaty vaccine has no liability shield. Vials of the branded product, which say “Comirnaty” on the label, are subject to the same product liability laws as other U.S. products.
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices places a vaccine on the mandatory schedule, a childhood vaccine benefits from a generous retinue of liability protections.
But licensed adult vaccines, including the new Comirnaty, do not enjoy any liability shield. Just as with Ford’s exploding Pinto, or Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, people injured by the Comirnaty vaccine could potentially sue for damages.
And because adults injured by the vaccine will be able to show that the manufacturer knew of the problems with the product, jury awards could be astronomical.
Pfizer is therefore unlikely to allow any American to take a Comirnaty vaccine until it can somehow arrange immunity for this product.
Given this background, the FDA’s acknowledgement in its approval letter that there are insufficient stocks of the licensed Comirnaty, but an abundant supply of the EUA Pfizer BioNTech jab, exposes the “approval” as a cynical scheme to encourage businesses and schools to impose illegal jab mandates.
The FDA’s clear motivation is to enable Pfizer to quickly unload inventories of a vaccine that science and the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System have exposed as unreasonably dangerous, and that the Delta variant has rendered obsolete. Tweet
Americans, told that the Pfizer COVID vaccine is now licensed, will understandably assume COVID vaccine mandates are lawful. But only EUA-authorized vaccines, for which no one has any real liability, will be available during the next few weeks when many school mandate deadlines occur.
The FDA appears to be purposefully tricking American citizens into giving up their right to refuse an experimental product.
While the media has trumpeted that the FDA has approved COVID vaccines, the FDA has not approved the Pfizer BioNTech vaccines, nor any COVID vaccines for the 12- to 15-year age group, nor any booster doses for anyone.
And the FDA has not licensed any Moderna vaccine, nor any vaccine from Johnson & Johnson — so the vast majority, if not all, of vaccines available in the U.S. remain unlicensed EUA products.
Here’s what you need to know when somebody orders you to get the vaccine: Ask to see the vial. If it says “Comirnaty,” it’s a licensed product.
If it says “Pfizer-BioNTech,” it’s an experimental product, and under 21 U.S. Code 360bbb, you have the right to refuse.
If it comes from Moderna or Johnson & Johnson (marketed as Janssen), you have the right to refuse.
The FDA is playing bait and switch with the American public — but we don’t have to play along. If it doesn’t say Comirnaty, you have not been offered an approved vaccine.
Militants Fighting Out of Uniform Are Shot As Spies – Islamist Ahmed Rabbani Demands A Trial
The U.S. Has Held Me For 19 Years Without A Charge. I Have Just One Chance To Be Freed.
“I have been tortured using over 60 different methods… Nearly two decades of my life have been stolen because the U.S. thought I was someone else.”
Next month will mark my 19th year of detention by the United States government, even though I have never been charged with a crime, let alone put on trial.
Earlier this month was the closest I have come to my “day in court,” when my lawyers presented my case to the Periodic Review Board. If the Board recommends my release from Guantanamo, even though this would be a recommendation from the U.S.’s national security agencies, whether I am released and how long this takes would still be up to President Biden. My fate lies in his hands.ADVERTISEMENT
Like everything here, what the Board does is secret. I have not had allegations put to me, so I cannot respond to them. I do know that from the start, my case was one of mistaken identity. Nearly two decades of my life have been stolen because the U.S. thought I was someone else. I was sold for a bounty to the U.S. based on the false claim that I was an extremist named Hassan Ghul.
The U.S. Senate’s Torture Report later revealed that when I was being tortured in the Dark Prison in Kabul into saying I was Ghul, the U.S. actually captured the real Hassan Ghul and brought him to the same prison. But in the end they let him go and sent me to Guantanamo. He apparently went back to what he had been doing before, and the U.S. killed him in a drone strike. Meanwhile, I am simply collateral damage in the so-called “war on terror.”
I have been effectively removed from the world. My wife has had to survive all these years without me. My children, now adults, grew up without their father. I have never met my youngest son, Jawad, who was born after I was detained. He is now 18 years old. I am allowed to have a Skype call with my family roughly once a month, but I have never even touched Jawad. Can any parent imagine that?
What is my life? Is it life at all? My only means of peaceful protest is hunger strikes, which have brought me close to death. Today I am only about 79 or 80 pounds, with more than half of me gone.
If I had to describe Guantanamo to the world, I would say it is a lawless prison where the U.S. has wasted $6 billion to imprison people without trial, earning nothing but a reputation for injustice. They now spend over $13 million a year just to hold me here. Imagine the good that could be done with that money, and the goodwill it could earn. Maybe they could even begin to compensate me for the torture I have suffered.ADVERTISEMENT
What is my life? Is it life at all? My only means of peaceful protest is hunger strikes, which have brought me close to death. Today I am only about 79 or 80 pounds, with more than half of me gone. I take off my prison shirt in my cell in front of the camera and lie on my steel bed, so the guards can see what they are doing to me. I look like one of the starving people in the films of famine in Africa. It is all I can do to physically express both my family’s suffering and my own. I am often paralyzed by weakness, unable to walk or move my body.Subscribe to Must ReadsThe internet’s best stories, and interviews with their authors.
The response I get is a thick three-and-a-half-foot tube driven up my nose ― it’s thick so it hurts more when they pump liquid in faster ― and then pulled out after each feeding in the “torture chair” because that causes more pain. That daily experience sums up my life: a force-feeding procedure that is meant to be carried out kindly in a hospital, but has been amended to inflict intentional pain every day (and is described by the United Nations as torture itself).
It is the latest in a long series of torture methods, totaling more than 60, to which I have been subjected while in detention. In the CIA’s “Dark Prison,” which derives its name from the complete darkness in which we were held, a medieval method of torture was used on me. Designed to cause agony to “witches” and so-called heretics in centuries past, this method, known as the strappado, involved hanging me by my wrists to slowly dislocate my shoulders.
I am under no illusions that I am being force-fed out of any concern for my health. Rather, my death would be a scandal that would shed further light on the grave abuses of our fundamental human rights, and fuel the growing momentum behind the campaign for Guantanamo Bay’s immediate closure.
There was some fleeting hope after Biden’s promise to do just that. But it waned as the reality dawned that Obama made the same promise to no avail. One inmate was recently released ― the first during Biden’s presidency ― but hope is a luxury my family and I simply cannot afford. After the psychological suffering we have endured during my 19-year imprisonment, allowing ourselves to feel hopeful about my release, based on promises by a president that he has not yet fulfilled, could push us to the breaking point.
I try to distract myself ― from the fear that I will never escape this prison, from the feeling that the world has forgotten me ― by painting. But as I continue sketching empty glassware, I am filled with a sense of dread that Biden’s promise to close Guantanamo may be just as hollow as these glasses.
Ahmed Rabbani is a taxi driver from Karachi, Pakistan, who has been detained without charge by the U.S. for 19 years. The extensive torture to which he was subjected by U.S. personnel is detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture.
It’s wrong to say China is heading for socialism, because it never really abandoned it – by Tom Fowdy – 27 Aug 2021
Western coverage of events in China is highlighting a lurch leftwards by Xi Jinping. But this misunderstands Beijing’s approach and is fuelled by dismay that Xi has not followed the path that the West wanted him to.
An op-ed in Japanese publication Nikkei recently warned that “Xi’s leftward shift to a socialist China is for real”. It cites a sudden spree of policies in China put in place over the past year, including harsh regulatory crackdowns on big tech and the dismantling of the country’s private tutor industries, plus references to “common prosperity” by Xi in a recent address 15 times and a new announcement aiming to crack down on harsh working hours.
The article also mentions the purge of a prominent official in Zhejiang province, a key hub of China’s businesses and tech enterprises, on allegations of corruption. Of course, it is interpreted only as a ruthless power play, as opposed to a necessary crackdown on potential wrongdoing. Next year, China is hosting its prominent national party congress, an event of huge significance, and Xi is rapidly implementing his political vision in preparation for it.
The idea of course that China is shifting to socialism implies that in the past it abandoned it. This is a common interpretation given the opening up of its economy and embracing of market reforms. But is this a fair assessment?
In reality, it is misleading to say China is “returning” to socialism because it never actually turned its back on it. The idea of China being capitalist is a simplistic misinterpretation of what Beijing has been actually doing. Whilst it is true that the Xi era has come with a rekindling of ideology and a new emphasis on collectivism and the authority of the party, it is still ahistorical to assume the country ever truly left the path of socialism. This was a highly fanciful Western-centric interpretation.
Why, of course, did China change in a way that embraced private businesses and enterprise? Where did that come from? And what was it all about? It was following the death of Mao Zedong and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution – as well as the travesty of “the great leap forwards” – that Deng Xiaoping ushered in a new regime which saw the country adopt a position known as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
This was a contrast to the sheer revolutionary dogmatism of the Mao era, which had been successful as a guerrilla ideology, but ultimately unsuccessful in building and sustaining a state bureaucracy.
Deng Xiaoping would reinterpret Mao’s ideas and applied his methods of “on practice’’, which argued that the worth of an idea was embedded in its practical results – as opposed to being based purely upon principle – in order to reform China’s political system and embrace market rules for its economy.
This was not an abandonment of socialism per se, but more of a learning curve. Deng described it as “finding stones to cross the river” and that “it doesn’t matter what colour the cat is as long as it catches the mouse” – in other words, if a method works, embrace it, albeit in the long-term pursuit of socialism.
In doing this, Deng was effectively arguing that the economics of the market and capitalism – a monopolistic practice where private interests dominate – were in fact two different things. China, he believed, could operate a socialist economy through market principles, but still for the common good. This coincided with China opening up to the West.
But buying and selling according to market rules should not be equated with the monopoly capitalism of the West. And so, China has developed an economy which has many big private businesses alongside many state-owned enterprises too.
Western nations, on the other hand, failed to understand China’s decision making, and still do today, primarily because they view it through their own ideological lens. They assumed that Deng’s decisions represented a gradual annulment of communism, a change of heart, and Beijing was on an inevitable trajectory to become like the West. The reality was that China did not abandon socialism wholly, but was pragmatic and flexible in adjusting its national policies according to the needs of the time.
In the 1980s, China was a poor country that required rapid development and private capital. The world was moving collectively towards neo-liberal economics led by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and China was a weaker geopolitical player that relied on better relations with the US and its allies. And so, it was able to milk their sense of geopolitical and ideological complacency and engage with them economically, as opposed to the outright Cold War division of the Mao years.
The world of course is no longer the same; the geopolitical environment has changed, China has changed, and so have its needs. In the Xi Jinping era, the solutions of Deng Xiaoping are deemed anachronistic, especially in China’s quest to elevate itself from a manufacturer of exports into a hi-tech nation with a consumer economy. The West, of course, believes dogmatically that capitalism is king, and therefore erroneously conflated the acceleration of capitalism in China with a trajectory of progress assuming the freer the market, the freer the country.
This is, of course, ridiculous, and there are numerous examples of countries, primarily in Latin America, that have demonstrated why the economic model of unlimited capitalism is a failure by creating enormous divides in wealth, small oligarchic elites and an inability for the country to create its own competitive, high-tech industries. This has tended to benefit the US, and nobody else.
As the Nikkei piece highlights, Xi believes it is impossible for China to develop a comfortable and prosperous middle class without socialist policies to support them. These involve fighting back against the rising costs of living, harsh work conditions and big tech monopolies, which limit people’s ability to consume, and take their toll on national birth rates. If China continued on its current path, it would hit ‘the middle-income trap’.
In conclusion, Xi Jinping’s path is simply a deviation from Western expectations of what China should be. It is easy to interpret everything he does in the stereotypical discourse of a dictator who wants nothing more than power, but it takes real critical thinking to recognise his decisions make up the pragmatic approach required to meet China’s needs within a given geopolitical context.
Ultimately, what is behind the coverage you see in the West is a sense of dismay that China did not take the path they wanted. China was a socialist state, and still is, but refines its policies in pursuit of its national goals where necessary. It understands the difference between dogmatism and pragmatism, and that is why it so frequently succeeds.
“Bombshell” study finds natural immunity superior to vaccination (Unherd) 26 Aug 2021
‘Bombshell’ study finds natural immunity superior to vaccination
If the findings are confirmed, the implications for Covid policy will be profound
Credit: Getty
A major study conducted by Israeli researchers into natural immunity has found that immunity acquired via infection from Covid-19 is superior to immunity from the Pfizer vaccine.
Researchers at Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University compared the outcomes of over 76,000 Israelis in three groups: the doubly vaccinated (with the Pfizer vaccine), the previously infected but unvaccinated, and the previously infected with only a single vaccine dose.
They found that fully vaccinated but uninfected people were significantly more likely to have a “breakthrough” Covid infection than people who had previously been infected and recovered from the disease.
“This study demonstrated that natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalisation caused by the Delta variant,” the authors conclude.
The study is only published as a preprint at this stage and has not been peer reviewed. Critics including British immunologist Andrew Croxford have pointed out potential limitations, but it has been described by infectious diseases expert Professor Francois Balloux as a “bombshell” development.
If the findings are confirmed, the implications for global Covid policy will be profound.
It would not undermine the importance of vaccination for more vulnerable groups in society. However it would weaken the case for vaccinating children, despite the programme being confirmed in the UK today, as they (and the people around them) would get superior future protection from contracting the disease. And it would pose a fundamental challenge to the singular emphasis on vaccine passports for travel and large events, if unvaccinated people who have already had Covid actually pose less of a risk.
Discussion
JOHANN STRAUSSNot exactly surprising. Why that wasn’t obvious to the medical establishment is beyond me. Obviously, having COVID-19 will generate both B and T cell immunity against many more targets than vaccines comprising a single component (the spike protein) of the virus.
Hopefully this study will introduce a bit of common sense back into public health policies, especially those concerning vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, vaccination of children and young people. Somehow, however, I doubt it because so many of our public health officials both in the UK and US have gone so clearly off the deep end.
………….
Taliban Opens Chain Of US Army Surplus Stores
DOXXING THE DOXXERS: Half-Egyptian Rich Kid SPLC Enforcer Michael Edison Hayden Is A Weirdo. What Else Is New?
Before failed playwright Michael Edison Hayden [Tweet him] became an “investigative reporter” and spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC), he was a Regime Media JournoFa who covered the “Far Right” for Newsweek and wrote for other top publications. But, like the rest of the doxers VDARE.com has doxed, he turns out to be a spoiled rich kid who spends a whole lot of time trying to ruin ordinary Americans financially and professionally. And as VDARE.com readers know from his report about its new HQ at the Berkeley Springs Castle in West Virginia, he tolerates threats of violence from his followers on Twitter. Of course, he’s a boon companion of Antifa thugs and uses them as sources to dox $PLC’s enemies. He’s the face of the communist coup enabled by the Biden Regime.
You’d think Hayden, 42, would be more careful about his associates given his background. His father, Robert T. Hayden, is the assistant District Attorney for Nassau County in New York State. 2020 Salary: $172,694 [Nassau County Payroll, Newsday]. His mother, Egyptian immigrant Magda Antoun Hayden, is a senior vice president at Bank of America. Salary: $223,359–$341,074 [Salary.com].
Sadly, Hayden seems conflicted about his parentage. He writes glowingly about his mother as an immigrant, but mentions his father only in passing and never by name.
Maybe it wouldn’t do Pop Hayden, who is after all an officer of the court, any good to be tied to $PLC and to a son who tiptoes around the edge of breaking the law.
Robert Hayden, Assistant District Attorney Nassau County, and Bank of America’s Magda Antoun Hayden.
The Haydens reside in Port Washington, New York, an affluent hamlet that inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald’s East Egg in The Great Gatsby. It’s one of “America’s Most Expensive Zip Codes” with a median home price of $1.32 million [Full List: America’s Most Expensive ZIP Codes 2017, by Samantha Sharf, Forbes, November 28, 2017].
Michael Hayden and sister Katie
Hayden attended private and pricey (currently $80,000 a year) New York University and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Playwriting and Screenwriting. His Master of Fine Arts (MFA) came from the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa in 2007.
Hayden’s sister, Katie, lives in Los Angeles. She too is a Leftist extremist and likes several Antifa affiliated pages on Facebook.
One of her favorites, The Capitalism Kills page, encourages fans to “Find and build your local Communist party” and reveres abolitionist mass murderer John Brown, hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry VA in 1859.
“Capitalism Kills” is rich coming from a girl whose mother works for one of the biggest banks on the planet and pulls down about 10 times the $31K salary of the average American.
Significantly, since Hayden began doxing anonymous patriot activists for the SPLC, he has become much more secretive about his own personal information. In 2019, he published “A Guide to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)” in the Columbia Journalism Review which, among other things, detailed the steps he has taken to scrub his own personal information from the internet and public databases. For instance:
- Don’t post any personal information or family images to Twitter.
- Use products like Delete Me to remove yourself from personal information websites like Pipl.com and Spokeo: https://abine.com/deleteme/
- Delete Me doesn’t cover LexisNexis, so send them a separate contact here: https://optout.lexisnexis.com/’
and
- If you choose to lock Facebook down, rather than delete your account, remove all public facing posts and change your name to something only your closest friends recognize.
Pictured: This is Hayden’s private Facebook account.
As a consequence of these measures, Hayden’s current location is unknown. However, since returning to the U.S. from Mumbai, Hayden has been photographed in New York on a number of occasions, for instance, at a New York Islanders hockey game (in Brooklyn) with his sister and in Little Italy (a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan) with his son. Apparently, he isn’t required to check in to the SPLC’s Montgomery AL Poverty Palace.
Michael Hayden’s wife is an Indian national, Aadya Bedi, whom he met at the University of Iowa. The Haydens have moved back and forth between Mumbai and New York, continuing his family’s tradition of treating America not as a distinct entity with values and culture, but as a stomping ground for jet-setting internationalists [A Child Without a Country, by Michael Edison Hayden, Open Magazine, July 17, 2013].
As for Hayden’s “journalism” career, it’s impressive, despite little or no training. He stumbled into the industry during his time as an expat in India, where he embedded himself (so to speak) in the “transgender” community, yet again proving that Leftists are obsessed with sexual perversion [India’s Third Gender, Pulitzer Center, July 31, 2014]. Aside from three grants from the Pulitzer Center for crisis reporting, he’s written for the New York Times, the Times of London, and even National Geographic.
Ironically, it wasn’t so long ago, reporting from India, that Hayden decried censorship as a human rights abuse:
Last Week, Freedom House, an American non-governmental agency that monitors civil liberties including the right to information, reported that India had seen the ‘most significant year-on-year’ decline in terms of internet freedom of any of the 60 countries surveyed. …
By applying India’s often-frivolous censorship standards of television and cinema to the web, the country’s current leadership may be opening the door for future generations of politicians to exploit these precedents in ways we cannot yet imagine. …
[A]s censorship on the web continues quietly to become a large-scale problem in this country, it may be the State that has the last laugh. If so, it will be at the expense of your liberty.
[ Who’s Laughing Now?, by Michael Edison Hayden, Open Magazine, October 9, 2013]
Now, Hayden uses the nearly unlimited riches of the SPLC to lobby Silicon Valley giants to censor and deplatform American political dissidents.
His propaganda has been instrumental in pushing the American government to target domestic dissidents as “domestic terrorists” in a farcical redux of the disastrous War on Terror. Anyone who criticizes these heavy-handed policies of surveillance, censorship and targeted persecution, Hayden labels an “anti-government” extremist. The SPLC then pushes that label to intensify Regime persecution.
In a recent rambling pro-censorship screed for the SPLC, Hayden argued that right-wing speech must be banned from social media because it is “exacerbating mental illness and anxiety” for the Left [‘We Make Mistakes’: Twitter’s Embrace of the Extreme Far Right, July 7, 2021].
Of course, those Hayden wants censored are only his political enemies and almost exclusively White. He admits that he’s not so much a journalist as an “anti-fascist” activist. His weapon is doxing.Audio Player00:0000:00Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
In 2019, online extremist researcher Eoin Lenihan outed Hayden. Lenihan “mapped the social interactions of 58,254 Antifa affiliated Twitter accounts” [Mapping the connections between a designated domestic terror group and the MSM: Reporters from liberal outlets busted working with dangerous Antifa members, by News Editors, Domestic Terrorism, May 22, 2019]. Data showed that Hayden was in the top 2 percent of Twitter users who were tight with Antifa.
Of course, the SPLC covers for these communist vigilantes by refusing to call Antifa organizations what they are: Hate and Terror groups [Southern Poverty Law Center Won’t Call Antifa a ‘Hate Group’ Despite Violence, Censorship Efforts, by Juan Leon, Washington Free Beacon, September 5, 2017]. With $PLC’s bazillions behind him, Hayden openly peddles propaganda from violent Antifa groups through his Twitter account.
But Hayden’s work with Antifa goes beyond transmitting its toxic hate. Hayden has boasted about sending Antifa thugs to the homes of his victims.
“We’re going to find the tiny bald man soon,” he wrote on Gab about Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin. “I know some antifash Cincy who can make this drive. Gonna be fun.”
In addition to that implicit threat of physical violence, Hayden also threatened to harass the families of those who refuse to speak with him.
Hayden also countenanced threats of violence in replies to his tweet about the VDARE Foundation’s headquarters, the Berkeley Castle in Berkeley Springs WV. Followers discussed thermite bombs. One wonders what paterfamilias District Attorney Robert Hayden might think about that threat.
Also of note, given Hayden’s Twitter feed, is what he told (13:44) Christopher Cantwell, a Leftist lawfare target because his presence at events in Charlottesville in 2017: If one of Cantwell’s social media followers harmed Hayden, Cantwell could be sued. Tweet
Two-tier justice: last year after that thread, a federal court convicted right-wing activist Daniel McMahon for threatening a black candidate for elected office on social media…in much the same way Hayden and his Antifa pals threaten those they don’t like [Florida ‘antifa hunter’ sentenced to three years after threatening Black political candidate, activist, by Tim Stelloh, NBC News, August 31, 2020].
Recall that $PLC itself has inspired terrorist attacks, notably the shooting at the Family Research Council in 2013. $PLC was also linked to the attempted assassination of Congressman Steve Scalise and other members of the GOP Congressional baseball team [Support for Southern Poverty Law Center links Scalise, Family Research Council shooters, by Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner, June 14, 2017].
When the feds will come for Hayden, $PLC, and their Antifa comrades, or someone will sue them, we are not given to know.
Aside from tacitly encouraging violence against others, Hayden also stigmatizes blue-collar white Americans who worry about losing their jobs to immigrants. He calls The Great Replacement a “conspiracy theory”—even though $PLC itself tracks those displacement numbers.
The Hayden rationale: If we allow Americans to question immigration policy, terror attacks will ensue. Thus, mass censorship is justified:
Caption: A note on the wall of former $PLC researcher Mark Potok from the documentary Alt-Right: Age of Rage.
Funny thing about that: On November 13, 2019, Hayden appeared on the explicitly Leninist podcast, Historic.ly. While Hayden chuckled approval, Esha Krishnaswamy advocated The Great Replacement that Hayden says is a “conspiracy theory:”
Democrats want (mass immigration policies) to get more votes. I wish the Democrats did that. Because like, imagine if Obama hadn’t deported 3 million people? And just give them amnesty like Ronald Reagan? We would not have had President Trump. But sadly, the Democrats are not trying to bring in more brown people to get more votes.
[Historic.ly Podcast w/ Esha Krishnaswamy, November 13, 2019 / Timestamp: 3:30]
But back to the Hayden-Antifa Connection. Antifa touts its “diversity of tactics,” a mixture of nonviolent pressure campaigns, blockades, and censorship backed by explicit violence [Diversity of Tactics or Unity in Action, by Paul D’Amato, SocialistWorker, March 26, 2012].
Wouldn’t you know it, Hayden might be the first Antifa journalist to explicitly endorse “reporting with a diversity of tactics,” as he told the It’s All Journalism podcast in 2019.
LIke other JournoFa such as Jared Holt and Christopher Mathias, Hayden proudly uses Antifa’s “research” to dox and smear. One source is Anonymous Comrade Collective, a vicious Antifa doxxing group [Neo-Nazi ‘Fixer’ of the Alt-Right Identified, June 21, 2021]. For a hit piece in Newsweek, he accepted information at face value from It’s Going Down, an Antifa website at which users report on “direct actions,” including rioting, arson, and terroristic sabotage of communication and transportation infrastructure [“Antifa” Responsible for Sutherland Springs Murders, According to Far-Right Media, November 5 2017]. Nor did Hayden fully explain IGD’s activities, such as suggesting the guillotine for former President Trump five days after he was elected, and organizing riots in Washington, D.C. when he was inaugurated.
In a significant violation of his profession’s ethical canon, Hayden appeared on an IGD podcast on which he described covering the “Far Right” for Newsweek.
Imagine how Hayden would react if a MSM reporter, who covered the Far Left and favored deporting illegal aliens, appeared on a VDARE.com podcast.
You can’t, of course, because, like Hayden, MSM reporters favor The Great Replacement.
The kind of protest favored by Michael Edison Hayden’s “source,” It’s Going Down.
It’s Going Down encourages Black Bloc riot tactics.
In another podcast in which he self-identified as an anti-fascist, Hayden said that “100 percent Antifa” murderer Michael Reinoehl’s death in a gunfight with U.S. marshals was a “total gift” to Andy Ngo’s Twitter followers. They, Hayden claimed, were “so excited” the terrorist was shot to death.
Hayden said much the same thing on Twitter in a thread that claimed Reinoehl “went out by the feds in a hail of bullets.” Well, yeah, he did … after he threw down on the feds and refused to surrender.
Hayden is hostile to Ngo, the target of a brutal assault by Antifa goons. He’s “not a journalist but Twitter lets him play one online,” Hayden tweeted
And of course Hayden wants to deplatform Nick Fuentes.
Hayden isn’t a journalist either, but anyway, he trolls Twitter by pretending to care about terms of service violations. And of course, he implicates Fox News, Breitbart, Trump, White Nationalists and others in terrorist attacks by advocating policies like reduced immigration or pro-white causes. Tweet
Hayden’s real purpose isn’t, of course, fighting against “violence.” Most anyone who discusses immigration restriction or even advocates White Nationalism is not, unlike Hayden’s bosom buddies in BLM and Antifa, prone to violence. Hayden manufactures panic about “right-wing violence” so that he, with help from the Biden Regime and Big Tech, can censor patriots and deprive millions of Trump supporters the means to communicate with each other. That will stop them from rebuilding a winning political movement [‘They forget that 75 million voted for him:’ Trump supporters reject Biden, AFP, January 20, 2021].
In Hayden’s own words:
[White nationalists] may not be terrorists: I don’t want them on Twitter. You know, let ‘em keep running down handles and keep rescrambling their names or whatever. I want them off. I don’t want them spreading their propaganda. I don’t want to see them. I want them to have as difficult a time to communicate with people as possible.
[Doomed, Episode 46 / Timestamp: 54:45]
Translation: Hayden wants Stalinist censorship on social media for American patriots, but free reign to incite terror for his BLM and Antifa comrades.
Indeed, that’s why Gab, in something of an amusing twist, banned him. Remember his threat to send an Antifa goon squad to Anglin’s home? Hayden “was banned a few years ago for repeatedly breaking our terms of service with regards to threats of violence and doxxing. Mr. Hayden would regularly post private and personal information of other users on Gab without their consent,” Gab founder Andrew Torba told me:
He had also made threatening posts directed at other users on numerous occasions. We take this behavior very seriously which is why we decided to take further action by suspending Mr. Hayden’s account.
Hayden “would often admit to being drunk/drinking late at night on Gab and that’s when he would start provoking users by doxxing and making threats,” Torba added in an email:
He would then get users on Gab to respond in kind and post those messages on Twitter playing the victim. The next morning he would then delete his posts from the night before.
In one Gab post, Hayden confessed that he was “drinking something not coffee in my mug,” and that “I am a total f***ing sh*t mess.”
When I contacted him, Hayden refused to disavow either Antifa or its violence or even speak on the record. So I can’t, and won’t, repeat anything he said.
I can say this: When I pressed him to defend his “journalism,” he was nervous and defensive…like a suspect under the lamp in a police interrogation room.
A final note about Hayden. Like other Leftist doxers such as Mathias, he’s obsessed with perverted sex. Aside from his reports on Indian “transgenders,” he wrote a play called The Books about a dominatrix and a submissive man [The Books, review by Jennifer Rathbone, TheaterOnline.com]. His wife, Aadya Bedi, under the stage name “Mistress Chimera,” performed “a fantasy sequence of sexual domination … adorned in a black latex corset, bob-cropped wig, stiletto boots, and a riding whip. We witness some of the foreplay.”
He wanted his wife to do this?
The answer is unimportant. That any man who would write a play about a dominatrix and put his wife in the lead role tells you everything you need to know.
But hey, consenting adults and all that!
The important thing about Hayden is his inciting a frenzy of hatred against white American patriots. He went from defending free speech for Indians, to being an MSM-$PLC hitman who would shut down free speech for Americans who oppose the radical Left.
When Hayden argues for censoring “disinformation,” he means contrary opinions. When he calls dissent a “conspiracy theory,” he’s attacking the speaker, not refuting facts. And when he calls someone “fringe,” he’s dehumanizing that individual and sending a message to the Twitter mob: attack, attack, attack!
Hayden is every bit the Antifa goon as those black bloc putschists in the streets. Except that he’s actually more dangerous, because of his ability to influence the hate-America Regime Media.
Hayden apparently doesn’t have the courage to “punch a Nazi,” so he hides in his $PLC sinecure and pushes Twitter followers on the one hand and Corporate America on the other to punch for him—literally and figuratively. You might call him Antifa’s propaganda minister.
If The Great Replacement of the Historic American Nation that Hayden supports but calls a “conspiracy theory” succeeds, the crackdown against “white nationalists” and anyone else Hayden doesn’t like will be a simple matter of counting votes.
Halleluiah
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Review – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire –
The 100 best nonfiction books: No 83 –
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776-1788)
Perhaps the greatest and certainly one of the most influential history books in the English language retains its power today .
Edward Gibbon: a peerless prose stylist.
by Robert McCrum
Mon 4 Sep 2017 00.45 EDT
The most celebrated history book in the English language has its own famous founding myth: “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.” Edward Gibbon almost certainly contrived this fanciful recollection, but the scholarship that went into his Decline and Fall still stands, like a timeless Roman ruin: majestic, elegant and even sublime. An object of awe, Gibbon’s history unfolds its narrative from the height of the Roman empire to the fall of Byzantium. The six volumes (published between 1776 and 1788) fall into three parts: from the age of Trajan to “the subversion of the western empire” in 395 AD; from the reign of Justinian in the east to the second, Germanic empire, under Charlemagne, in the west; and from the revival of this western empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
In so doing, Gibbon traces the intimate and profound connection of the ancient world to his own, more modern time, linking more or less explicitly the age of the Enlightenment to the age of Rome. Gibbon may have been an amateur historian (his life was otherwise devoted to nurturing his family’s considerable wealth, and to serving in the militia), but his erudition is staggering. It was commonplace in Augustan England of the 18th century to refer to Virgil, Ovid, or Plutarch. Gibbon alludes to passages in Strabo, Sallust, Seneca, Macrobius and Longinus, among many others.
Next to his learning, there’s his style, whose later devotees include both Winston Churchill, (No 43 in this series), and Evelyn Waugh. “It has always been my practice,” wrote Gibbon, “to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory; but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.”
Decline and Fall is a cathedral of words and opinions: sonorous, awe-inspiring and shadowy, with odd and unexpected corners of wit and irony, concealed in well-judged footnotes. For example, in chapter VII on Gordian, he writes: Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of 62,000 volumes attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation. His footnote provides a witty coda: “By each of his concubines, the younger Gordian left three or four children. His literary productions were by no means contemptible.”
He was also happy to disavow any consequence to this immense undertaking: “History is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortune of mankind.” Gibbon also liked to season his narrative with pithy asides. For example: “Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.” And again, in chapter VIII: “All taxes must, at last, fall upon agriculture.” Sometimes, Gibbon is almost the equal of Tacitus in his brutal summaries of the historical process: “Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.” And then there’s his intellectual background, as a scholar steeped in the age of reason. Gibbon famously blamed Christianity for the disintegration of the Roman empire: “As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse, of Christianity had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire.
The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more Earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.”
However, here and there, as in his account of Constantine’s conversion, he grudgingly allows for the benefits of religion, too: “The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age; but if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser motives, the standard of the republic.
Religious precepts are easily obeyed which indulge and sanctify the natural inclinations of their votaries; but the pure and genuine influence of Christianity may be traced in its beneficial, though imperfect, effects on the barbarian proselytes of the North.
If the decline of the Roman empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors.” After several rewrites, with Gibbon “often tempted to throw away the labours of seven years”, the first volume of his Decline and Fall was published on 17 February 1776, less than six months before the US declaration of independence, a famous climax to the revolution in the American colonies, and a more than passing coincidence.
Two months after the first publication of the first volume of this colossal classic, Gibbon boasted to his stepmother about his work’s reception: “It has been very well received, by men of letters, men of the world, and even by fine feathered ladies.”
It is, in other words, a work of universal interest, and timeless influence, unquestionably a magnificent classic of our literature.
Gibbon’s own farewell to his masterpiece is almost more affecting than his celebrated account of its genesis: “It was on the day, or rather the night, of 27 June 1787, between the hours of 11 and 12, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden… I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.”
A signature sentence “The strength of the frontiers, which had always consisted in arms rather than fortifications, was insensibly undermined; and the fairest provinces were left exposed to the rapaciousness or ambition of the barbarians, who soon discovered the decline of the Roman empire.”
…………………………….
Three to compare: Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796) Winston Churchill, A History of the English-speaking Peoples (1956-58) David Womerseley, The Transformation of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1988)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon is available from the free online Public Domain book site Project Gutenberg – Decline and Fall Text – On the free online Public Domain audio book site Librivox Decline and Fall Audio
“Tax the Rich”? The Working Class Paid For The ‘New Deal’ (Internationalist Group)
Auto workers at GM’s Fisher Body plant reading newspapers during the 1936-37 sit-down strike. Roosevelt made concessions to unions in order to co-opt a radical labor movement led by “reds.” (Photo: United Press International)
The example cited by liberals and reformist pseudo-socialists who promote tax-the-rich schemes as a means to redistribute wealth and amply fund social services is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. This is the reference point for Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” in particular. They would have us believe that the New Deal was a huge wealth redistribution funded by robust progressive taxation on the wealthy. Right-wingers called it “socialism.” Both are far from the truth. The aim of the New Deal was to save the ruling class from the threat of revolution during the worst economic crisis in the history of capitalism, and to rev up “national unity” leading into World War II. Symbolic concessions to labor were needed to co-opt a radical labor movement led by “reds,” including the Stalinist Communist Party in the new mass unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and Trotskyist Teamsters in Minneapolis.
At the time, certain sectors of the U.S. bourgeoisie denounced Roosevelt as a “traitor to his class,” but this was either cynicism or an inability to see the big picture. FDR legally recognized the right to organize unions and collectively bargain in order to exert state control over labor, which was exploding with general strikes, sit-down strikes and other militant tactics. Limited state-funded public employment benefitted consumer-goods manufacturers and retailers, and although the owners of heavy industry were not too happy, such measures ultimately served to prolong American capitalism’s survival. The business journalist Ferdinand Lundberg described the meaning of Roosevelt’s policies in his book profiling the U.S. capitalist elite, America’s 60 Families, published during Roosevelt’s second term:
“The ‘New Deal’ is not revolutionary nor radical in any sense; on the contrary it is conservative…. Roosevelt, addicted as he is to verbal castigation of the wealthy, was supported in 1932 and again in 1936 by some of the richest families of the country…. The ‘New Deal,’ in short, has represented one side of a grave split in the camp of the big capitalists … although questions relating to capitalism and its basic theory have not really been in dispute.”
–Ferdinand Lundberg, America’s 60 Families (1937)
FDR was up-front about the aims of his New Deal. As he introduced his Revenue Act of 1935, dubbed by some of its proponents the “Soak the Rich Tax,” he explained: “I am fighting communism…. I want to save our system, the capitalistic system.” The Act raised the statutory rate on the top tax bracket up to 75 per cent, but in reality, in the words of a bourgeois historian, it “neither soaked the rich, penalized bigness, nor significantly helped balance the budget.”1 The New Deal was funded in the first place, not by taxes, but by government debt. The state handed out loans to sectors of big business through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and sold the debt as bonds to the banks.
A year later, the conservative London Economist applauded Roosevelt’s efforts to shield the ruling class, calling the New Deal “a great success.”2 Although it helped the bourgeoisie stave off the threat of workers revolution, it failed to stimulate economic growth while continuing to balloon debt. It was not until World War II that U.S. imperialism began to reemerge from the Depression, through the direct intervention of the state in channeling investment and by the destruction of the productive power of competing capitalist powers, later to be rebuilt on U.S. credit. As far as taxation is concerned, the New Deal was not progressive, but deeply regressive. FDR’s wealth taxes were purely cosmetic, openly flouted by the capitalists, and contributed little in revenue.
The New Deal was actually financed in large part by excise taxes, hidden taxes on particular manufactured goods that targeted working-class consumption, already suppressed as a result of the Depression. They even taxed matches, playing cards, movie tickets, candy, chewing gum, phone calls, radios and electricity. These excise taxes which hit working people hardest contributed far more revenue during the New Deal than did income taxes on the wealthy. In all:
“[S]ocial insurance and indirect taxes (tariffs; the excise taxes on liquor, tobacco, and selected manufactured items; and the agricultural processing taxes) became the largest share of revenue, jumping from 33 percent in the supposedly business oriented New Era [under the previous Hoover administration] to 47-65 percent in the Forgotten Man’s New Deal.”3
FDR’s legacy with regards to taxation was not “taxing the rich,” but taxing the poor … and slapping federal income taxes on the working class. Roosevelt was responsible for the expansion of federal income tax from a “class tax,” exclusively levied on the wealthy, to a “mass tax” imposed on the majority of working class. Only then did income taxes finally exceed the contribution of excise taxes to government revenue.
During the ’30s no more than 5% of the population paid federal income tax. To fund U.S. involvement in the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration aggressively pushed to expand the tax base, principally with the Revenue Act of 1942, which also charged an additional Victory Tax and reduced exemptions. Payroll tax withholding was introduced the following year, and excise taxes were further increased. At the same time as prices rose, wages were frozen by FDR and a “no-strike pledge” was forced on workers by the government through the union bureaucracy. Between 1940 and 1945 the number of federal taxpayers sextupled, with about 90% of U.S. workers filing income tax forms and 60% paying taxes on their incomes4
As the U.S. was gearing up to join in the imperialist slaughter of World War II, from which it would emerge with the victor’s spoils, George Novack of the Socialist Workers Party (at that time the voice of authentic Trotskyism) wrote an epitaph for the New Deal:
“Roosevelt rode into office thundering against ‘the economic royalists’ on the home front. In 1932 he threatened ‘to drive the money-changers out of the temple.’… Now, in 1940 we hear equally martial music from the White House but on a different theme. The struggle against ‘the malefactors of great wealth’ at home has been set aside for the struggle against ‘foreign aggressors.’… The New Deal has been replaced by the War Deal…. [It] was the price American capitalists had to pay for insurance against social revolution…. Roosevelt’s war policy shows how, under the capitalist regime, the aims, and interests of Big Business force themselves through against all obstacles, until they become the official governmental program, even of erstwhile opponents.”
– George Novack, “Autopsy of the New Deal,” Fourth International, May 1940. ■
- 1. Paul Conkin, The New Deal (Crowell, 1975).
- 2. “The New Deal,” The Economist, 3 October 1936.
- 3. Mark H. Leff, The Limits of Symbolic Reform: The New Deal and Taxation, 1933-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
- 4. Carolyne C. Jones, “Class Tax to Mass Tax: The Role of Propaganda In The Expansion of the Income Tax During World War II,” Buffalo Law Review 37, No. 3 (1988); IRS, “The Wealth Tax of 1935 and the Victory Tax of 1942” (https://apps.irs.gov/app/understandingTaxes/teacher/whys_thm02_les05.jsp).
“Tax the Rich” Is No Answer to Capitalist Inequality (Internationalist Group)
Expropriate the Ruling Class Through Socialist Revolution!
“Tax the Rich” protest outside Washington, D.C. mansion of Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, May 2021.
(Photo: Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)
Inequality in the U.S. – which has long been acute – reached staggering proportions as a result of the economic crisis set off the by the coronavirus pandemic. Low-paid essential workers were made to bear the brunt of the deadly plague at the front lines with little protection from the virus. Millions forced out of work had to rely on financial assistance, many facing the threat of eviction. Meanwhile, the wealthiest capitalists made out like bandits. Since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, as the workers’ income from wages fell, some 660 U.S. billionaires received a windfall of $1.1 trillion (that’s 12 zeros). Of this, $300 billion went to five modern-day robber barons: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett.1
Now a report by the non-profit investigative journalism organization ProPublica has come out revealing that the same five, plus the other 20 richest Americans, paid a minuscule amount in federal income taxes on their growing wealth., How much? A mere 3.4% on their collective haul of $401 billion in increased net worth from 2014 to 2018.2 Some, including Bezos, Musk, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros, managed to pay no federal income tax at all in some years. Buffett, the hands-down champion in tax avoidance, paid 0.1% (that’s one-tenth of one percent) on his earnings of almost $24 billion in that period. The median taxpayer in the U.S., in contrast, paid an average of 14% in federal income taxes.
Modern-day capitalist robber barons Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Elon Musk all managed to pay zero federal income taxes. (Photos: from left, Joshua Roberts /Reuters; Logan Cyrus / Agence France-Presse; Mike Blake / Reuters)
While the titans of U.S. capitalism were raking in their pandemic winnings, the Institute for Policy Study and Americans for Tax Fairness, two liberal think tanks which calculated these figures, noted that that over 73 million U.S. workers lost their jobs after late March 2020, with 16 million still unemployed at year’s end; 12 million lost employer-sponsored healthcare; 29 million adults reported not having enough food in December, while 14 million were behind on their rent. The glaring spectacle of the ruling class gouging megaprofits from disease and death, and being rewarded for doing so with free money in bailouts and tax cuts from the CARES Act, has led to a resurgence of calls to “tax the rich.”
This slogan has become the calling card of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and groups that tail after and adapt to it (Socialist Alternative, Left Voice, Freedom Socialist Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation and others). In New York City, the DSA had a whole “tool kit” with an elaborate infographic at https://taxtherichnys.com/. It put forward a series of legislative proposals to raise state taxes on family incomes above $450,000 a year, a capital gains tax, an inheritance tax, a wealth tax, a financial transactions tax and “fair corporate taxes.” The same tax proposals are raised by the “Invest in Our New York” campaign, a coalition including New York Communities for Change, Make the Road, Alliance for Quality Education and other NGOs (non-governmental organizations), the Working Families Party (WFP) and NYC-DSA.
This is the Democratic Party-NGO complex,3 plus the WFP, a long-time satellite which gives Democratic candidates another ballot line to run on, and the DSA, whose candidates run as Democrats and which is functionally part of this capitalist party. (There are currently six DSA Democrat NY state legislators.) The stated aim of the package of a dozen bills in the New York legislature, said the NYC-DSA, was to ensure “that rich New Yorkers are taxed their fair share.” Other proposals, including a fund to provide aid to workers, mainly immigrants, excluded from federal pandemic programs also called for financing by a “billionaires tax,” which DSA Democrat star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) endorsed in a viral video last summer.
Now Democratic president Joe Biden weighed in with his $6 trillion budget for fiscal year 2022, to be paid for with a “$3.6 Trillion Tax Increase on the Rich and Companies” (New York Times, 29 May). The aim, says his budget document, is to “ensure that large corporations are paying their fair share” and that “high-income Americans pay the tax they owe.” Even Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have called for raising income taxes on the rich. It seems that everyone from Biden and the billionaires themselves to Democratic “progressives” like Bernie Sanders, the Democratic (Party) Socialists of America, and its opportunist left tails are agreed that the rich need to pay their “fair share.” But what exactly does that mean?
DSA supporters in New York City distribute door hangers calling to pressure Democratic state legislators to “tax the rich,” February 2021. (Photo: NYC DSA)
The idea that capitalism can be made “fair,” a staple of bourgeois ideology, was unmasked by Karl Marx a century and a half ago. For pseudo-socialists and labor reformists, the appeal to “tax the rich” is yet another means to subordinate the working class to the Democratic Party, calling on people to pressure their “elected representatives.” It is similar in this way to the calls last summer to “defund the police,” which as we said then sought to divert mass protests in the streets against racist cop murder into lobbying city councils over budget allocations. In this case, the NYC-DSA “blanketed key lawmakers’ districts with door hangers” urging people to tell their legislator to “tax the rich.”4 Revolutionary Marxists, in contrast, are not in the business of advising the capitalist state on how to “fairly” finance its apparatus of war and repression, but call to expropriate the capitalist exploiters.
For capitalist politicians, “tax the rich” rhetoric is a way to hoodwink working people into thinking that something is being done about the obscene capitalist inequality that has escalated for decades as workers’ wages stagnate, and then skyrocketed during the pandemic as the Internet moguls reaped superprofits. Biden, who had more backing from billionaires than Trump, ran his presidential campaign in part off disgruntlement with Trump’s tax cuts. Yet his budget proposal preserves much of Trump’s cuts. Under the Biden budget, only capitalists in the very top bracket will face a pre-Trump marginal rate, an increase of a mere 2.6 per cent, while the corporate income rate will go up just 7 per cent, still lower than before Trump took office. Still, AOC opined that Biden “definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had.”
As for the Biden administration’s plan to almost double the capital gains tax,5 from 20% to 39.6%: “Wealthy Americans will avoid paying 90% of the estimated $1 trillion increase in investment taxes that President Joe Biden is proposing this week, according to new study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School. The Wharton researchers concluded that tax avoidance, much of it legal, would cut nearly $900 billion of what the proposed increase on capital gains taxes could raise for the government.”6
Democrat-WFP-DSA “tax the rich” campaign declares victory in New York state budget, April 2021. (Photo: Invest in Our New York)
Calls to “tax the rich” are just tinkering, and won’t affect the fundamentals of a system that produces fabulous wealth for the owners of capital and grinding poverty for millions, while the working class lives paycheck to paycheck. In New York, a few tax hikes on the wealthy were actually passed in April. “Invest in Our New York” cheered, “We won!” But while their raft of tax bills was supposed to raise from $48 billion to $70 billion in new revenue, what they “won” was only $4.5 billion in increased top-tier and corporation income taxes. The additional tax bite for a couple making $2.5 million a year would be about $21,000, “roughly equal to the cost of a used Chevy Malibu,” as columnist Ginia Bellafante noted in the New York Times (11 April).
These calls also blur over the obvious fact that the government already has at its disposal more than enough funds to meet dire human needs. Such demands are of a piece with reformist calls for “money for jobs/books/education, etc., not for war/bombs/occupation.” They are phrased in terms of budgetary priorities, when the issue is class interests. As liberals push the lie that the capitalist state just doesn’t have enough money, proposals to fill supposed budgetary shortfalls are painstakingly debated and scrutinized, even as enormous subsidies are handed over to the rich without batting an eye. Under the $2 trillion CARES Act, $500 billion in free money was earmarked specifically for large corporations, with no strings attached.7
Democratic president Joe Biden wants to “tax the rich” in order to prepare for war on China. (Photo: Reuters)
The real question to pose is, who does the state power serve? And the answer is: tax hike or no, whether conservatives or “progressives” are in office, this state defends capitalism against the working people. The Democratic politicians who last year imposed racist curfews and dispatched militarized police forces to assault anti-racist protestors are hardline defenders of U.S. imperialism. Biden’s budget says that its aim is to “position the United States to out-compete China,” to “counter the threat from China” and “the growing ambitions of China,” etc. – in other words, to rev up U.S. imperialism’s anti-China war drive. As for military outlays ($753 billion, up from $740 billion under Trump), the Times (29 May) summed it up: “The Pentagon pivots to a possible war with China.” This is an anti-China war budget.
Revolutionary Marxists’ critique of liberal tax gimmickry obviously does not mean opposing raising taxes on the capitalist class, or measures in the interest of working people, such as to increase funding for schools or to provide emergency aid to excluded workers, that are linked to increased taxes on the wealthy. But the “tax the rich” campaigns mean voting for budgets of the capitalist state, the enforcer of oppression. Together with talk of “our tax dollars,” they spread illusions that the capitalist state is somehow accountable to “the people.” The American ruling class never was and never will be beholden to working people. Our aim is not to exact a pittance from the wealthy, but to expropriate the capitalist class so that the exploited and oppressed can take their destiny into their own hands. In a word, revolution.
How Much the Ruling Class Really Pays
“Tax the rich?” Under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, top federal income tax rate was 91% in 1951. Under “Green New Deal” of red-white-and-blue Democratic “progressive” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, top rate would only be 70%. (Photo: White House; CNN)
Calls to “tax the rich” can in fact mean just about anything. Promises of higher taxes on the wealthy and increased social services are easy crowd pleasers on the campaign trail for Democrats. And they don’t have to worry about following through: whatever gets passed in the House, they can blame Republicans and “moderate” Democrats in the Senate for it not getting enacted. While many would-be leftists were skeptical about Biden, even after they called to put him in office, there is a lot of misplaced hope in “progressive” Democrats, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Elizabeth Warren. AOC’s proposal to increase the top marginal tax rate sounds hefty, but even Bloomberg News (7 January 2019) pointed out, “Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% Tax Idea Isn’t Very Radical,” and that “it won’t do much to… raise revenue or lower inequality.”
A glimpse at history shows this. The U.S. maintained top marginal income tax rates of 70% or more for decades, from the Democratic Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) administration in the 1930s and ’40s up until Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, peaking at 94% in 1944-45. Under Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in the early 1950s, the top rate was 91%. Far from serving to reduce inequality, the purpose of this tax policy was, first of all, to fund the imperialist World War II, from which the United States emerged as the dominant world power. Tax rates remained high through the Cold War as U.S. imperialism sought to spur counterrevolution in the bureaucratically degenerated or deformed workers states of the Soviet bloc and China, including waging hot wars in Vietnam and Korea, and building up an enormous (and enormously expensive) nuclear arsenal.
Although taxes then were higher than they are today, the ruling class never actually paid a rate anywhere near 70-90 per cent. Accounting for all taxes on individual incomes, payroll, estates, corporate profits, properties and sales on the federal, state and local levels, the effective tax rate on the “top 1%” peaked during the 1940s and ’50s at between 40% and 45% of pre-tax income. By 2018, with the top income tax bracket at 39%, the effective tax rate on the richest 400 families was down to 23%, lower than the rate on the bottom half of U.S. families. For the bourgeoisie, tax avoidance has become a science, what with the much lower capital gains rate (now 20%); use of “stock options” (taxed as capital gains) for executive pay; tax-deductible “business expenses”; tax dodges like “carried interest,” and myriad other “loopholes.”
Add to that additional deductions for donations, including those that go to think tanks and bourgeois propaganda “foundations,” for owning private jets (as a business expense), yachts (chartered as a separate business), even pools (for proven “medical purposes,” of course). For the last several years Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s salary has been equivalent to the California minimum wage – and he boasts that he’s never even cashed the checks. “In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes,” reported ProPublica (8 June). Yet in 2018 his company gave him $2.3 billion in stock options, “one of the ten largest pay packages of all time” (New York Times, 13 June). And then there is Donald Trump, who got away with paying only $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017.
Meanwhile, the tax rate on the income of corporations is also deliberately much lower than that on individual income, and myriad deductions lower it even further. Take Amazon, which last year paid a federal corporate tax for the first time since 2016, shelling out a mere 1.2 per cent of pre-tax earnings while the statutory rate was 21 per cent. In 2018, after making $79 billion in profits Amazon paid nothing, and received $4.3 billion in rebates from the state. So, yes, wealthy individuals and giant corporations get away with paying very little in taxes, while working people are left holding the bag. But what the “tax the rich” Democrats are calling for would hardly change that.
Elizabeth Warren, now on the Senate Finance Committee, is pushing her “wealth tax.” This would consist of a paltry two cents on the dollar for fortunes greater than $50 million. AOC’s 70% top marginal income tax rate would only be on incomes over $10 million. The cut-offs on these tax plans would let plenty of very rich people off the hook. As we have pointed out about the Occupy Wall Street slogans of “the top 1%” against “the 99%,” often invoked by Bernie Sanders, these give vent to the frustrations of those facing economic hardship under decaying capitalism without challenging the property relations that breed this inequality. What, for example, about the members of the ruling class in the second percentile? And what about the racist cops doing their dirty work, whose incomes put them in the “99%” but who are enemies of the working class?
Fiddling with tax rates is not by any means radical. Increasing taxes on the rich is neither incompatible with the capitalist system in general, nor with the free-market “neoliberalism” that the reformist left lambasts. Some defenders of capitalism support raising taxes on certain sectors of the ruling class in order to promote productive investment rather than financial speculation. So while DSAers hailed Elizabeth Warren as a “foe of Wall Street”8 – even as this former Republican described herself as “capitalist to the bone” – during the Democratic presidential primaries, The Economist (22 June 2019), hailed Warren as the “saviour of capitalism.” This mouthpiece of London financiers quoted Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s remarks that Warren’s policies to revive industry are “like Donald Trump as his best.”9
Expropriate the Capitalist Class with Workers Revolution
“Tax the rich” proponents argue that raising rates on the wealthy would generate revenue to fund social benefits and services for the working class. Again, the issue is not of insufficient funds. Enormous subsidies are handed over to capitalists, and vast expenditures are needed to fund U.S. imperialism’s war machine and domestic repression. The state, which is what taxes go to finance, isn’t some tool that can be taken hold of by anyone, it is the apparatus by which the ruling class defends and upholds its rule, keeping the machinery of exploitation running by squeezing profits out of the labor of the working class. The tax code expresses the budgetary needs of the state; any allocation of revenue towards social programs is part of and subordinate to that goal.
In appendix to their book, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Their Taxes and How to Make them Pay, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman show that working class does not benefit from cash transfers through taxes. (Photo: W.W. Norton Co.)
To the degree that they serve to defuse protest, such social measures may contribute to prolonging the life of the capitalist system. Neither they nor the tax system fundamentally change the position of the working class in respect to the ruling class. In an online appendix to their book The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Their Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (who are advocates of Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax) show that from 1962 to 2018 working-class incomes were consistently lower after factoring in both taxes and cash transfers from the government, concluding: “the working-class does not benefit on net from cash distribution.”10 Using different metrics, Marxist economist Anwar Shaikh calculates the ratio of social benefits to taxes paid by U.S. workers from 1952 to 1993, finding that the working class as a whole received less than it paid for, in effect subsidizing the ruling class via taxes as well as through its labor.11
The 1950s,’60s and early ’70s were marked by grotesque episodes of racist repression, while poverty was rampant in the South, Appalachia and the Northern ghettos, yet the working class received a significantly higher share of national income than it does today. The core reason is not taxes, but the strength of the labor movement. Private sector unionization peaked at 35 per cent in the 1950s compared to 6.3 per cent in 2020.12 From the 1970s onward, seeking to offset capitalism’s falling rate of profit, the ruling class went on the offensive, outsourcing much of U.S. industry and busting unions. That offensive, and the lack of large-scale and militant working-class resistance due to the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy that chains the unions to the Democratic Party, are key to the growing inequality we have witnessed over the past several decades.
“Tax-the-rich” reformist leftists divert social struggles into pressuring the Democrats. Right: Instagram tile for rally on Democrat Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, 20 January 2021, calls to “fight the far right.” (Photo: Socialist Alternative / Instagram)
Calls to “tax the rich” perpetuate this pattern, by spreading illusions and helping divert the struggles of workers and the oppressed into pressuring the Democrats. Under both Bill Clinton (1993-2000) and Barack Obama (2009-2016), Democratic administrations continued the same anti-worker economic policies as Republicans Bush I and II. Meanwhile, they blocked workers’ struggles with anti-labor laws such as the Taft-Hartley Act, administered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), set up by FDR under the 1935 Wagner Act to bring unions under the thumb of the capitalist state. Today, the response of the AFL-CIO tops to the defeat of the union organizing drive at Amazon in Bessemer, Alabama, has been to lobby for the Democrats’ PRO (Protecting the Right to Organize) Act bill – i.e., appealing to the capitalist state.
Reformist union reform groups in New York City held a “tax the rich teach-in” to build support for “progressive” Democrats’ Invest in Our New York campaign, March 2021. (Photo: Local 100 Fightback Coalition / Facebook)
It’s not just the labor fakers sitting atop the unions who peddle this fool’s gold. In March, various union reform groups in New York City – including the Movement of Rank and File Educators (M.O.R.E.) in the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), Local 100 Fightback (TWU) and DC 37 Progressives – joined with the NYC-DSA in a “Tax the Rich Teach-In” to promote the bills in Albany put forward by the “progressive” Democrats’ Invest in Our New York campaign. At the same time, M.O.R.E. issued yet another statement against “being forced back into school” while lamenting that “the ultra-wealthy continue to fight as hard as they can against paying their fair share in taxes.” In the UFT Delegate Assembly, it put forward a “Resolution on Tax the Rich, Invest in Our NY.”
Rather than looking to the capitalist Democratic Party, Class Struggle Education Workers called on unions to use their power to reopen schools safely. Rally for safe schools by Brooklyn, NY UFT chapters, October 2020. (Photo: CSEW)
While the self-proclaimed “social justice unionists” of M.O.R.E. were phone-banking to get teachers “not to go in to work” and to support the Democrats’ “tax-the-rich” bills, Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) called instead to “Use Union Power to Reopen Schools Safely,” calling “For Union-Led Teacher-Student-Parent-Worker Control of the Schools” and denouncing the “bipartisan capitalist war on public education.”13 (The CSEW is a union tendency which works fraternally with the Internationalist Group.) On Amazon, the IG calls to unionize the internet retail giant with hard class struggle, while warning against illusions in the Democrats and the PRO Act, which will continue the subordination of the unions to the NLRB.
At bottom, this is a question of class. Calls to “tax the rich” take responsibility for financing the machinery of the capitalist state, the instrument by which the bourgeois rulers regiment working people and the oppressed. We demand that undocumented immigrant workers get the desperately needed unemployment benefits they have been denied throughout the duration of the COVID pandemic, and billions of dollars go to safely reopening public schools. But we don’t act as advisors to the capitalists and their politicians saying where this money should come from. That’s their problem. And the only way to win these and other crucial demands is through hard class battles, not by leaving doorhangers or voicemails for your local congressperson and state senator.
Some disingenuous opportunist leftists try to justify the “tax the rich” slogan by citing the call of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1848) for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” That demand, raised on the eve of the 1848 revolution, corresponded to a historical period when in much of Europe, including Germany, a bourgeois revolution against feudalism and its remnants in the absolutist monarchies was posed. Marx and Engels proposed a program of immediate tasks, “a first step in the revolution,” to “win the battle of democracy,” consisting of demands that were compatible with a bourgeois revolution but pointed in the direction of attacking the rights of property. Their ten-point program also included “Free education for all children in public schools,” a simple democratic demand, written into many bourgeois constitutions, but which is frequently under attack in capitalist countries.
Yet since the turn of the 20th century, we have been in the era of imperialism, of decaying capitalism. In the U.S., the income tax was graduated, with higher rates for the rich, from its introduction by Woodrow Wilson in 1913. This is almost everywhere the case, for the simple reason that even “soaking the poor” can only raise so much. That doesn’t make a “progressive” income tax “anti-capitalist” – its purpose is to defend the interests of capital, particular in war. Wilson introduced it to finance World War I and Roosevelt greatly expanded it in WWII. As for the rich paying “their fair share,” there is no “fairness” under capitalism. The profit system can’t satisfy human needs, as was shown by the horrendous death toll of the COVID pandemic, with the failure to stop the spread of the deadly virus, the underproduction of medical supplies, etc.
Revolutionary Marxists – Trotskyists – insist that the capitalist ruling class can’t be taxed into providing for social needs, it must be expropriated once and for all. To do that requires an unrelenting fight for working-class political independence from the capitalist rulers. As Karl Marx put it in 1871, “The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goals and its own policy.” The Internationalist Group calls to break with the Democrats, Republicans, and all bourgeois parties to form a revolutionary workers party that can lead the struggle to expropriate capitalism through socialist revolution.
“Fairness”? As Marx wrote in response to the slogans of the reformists of his day:
“Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’”
– Karl Marx, Value, Price and Profit (1865) ■
- 1. “U.S. Billionaire Wealth Surpasses $1.1 Trillion Gain Since Mid-March,” Institute for Policy Studies, 26 January.
- 2. “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax,” ProPublica, 8 June.
- 3. Several are led by members of the Center for Popular Democracy, successor to the ACORN pro-Democratic Party voter registration group.
- 4. “New York Raises Taxes on the Rich as State Shifts Leftward,” HuffPost, 11 April.
- 5. Capital gains are the profit from selling a capital asset (like stocks and bonds) for more than that its cost.
- 6. “Wealthy would dodge 90% of Biden’s capital gains tax increase, study says,” CBS News, 29 April.
- 7. “The U.S. plans to lend $500 billion to large companies. It won’t require them to preserve jobs or limit executive pay,” Washington Post, 28 April 2020.
- 8. Zaid Jilani, “Why the Differences Between Sanders and Warren Matter,” Jacobin website, 8 January 2019.
- 9. “Warren, the saviour of capitalism,” The Economist, 22 June 2019.
- 10. Slide 61, at https://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SZ2019Slides.pdf.
- 11. Anwar Shaikh, “Who Pays for the ‘Welfare’ in the Welfare State? A Multicountry Study,” Social Research, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003).
- 12. Lawrence Mishel, Lynn Rhinehart and Lane Windham, “Explaining the erosion of private-sector unions,” Economic Policy Institute, 18 November, 2020.
- 13. See “Chaotic Reopening of NYC Schools: This Is What Mayoral Control Looks Like,” The Internationalist No. 62, January-March 2021.
http://www.internationalist.org/tax-the-rich-dead-end-2106.html
Escape From Kabul – US Imperialists Escape Helicopters In The Sky
Biden’s Bookends – In Washington in 1975 – In The White House in 2021 – Imperialist Defeats
Ancient Egyptian Novella – Sinuhe – 1,850 BC / BCE (Audio) (41:19 min)
An ancient Egyptian tells his life-story from the walls of his tomb, c. 1850 BC. Read by Barbara Ewing. Translated by Richard Bruce Parkinson.
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Sinuhe is an official who accompanies prince Senwosret I to Libya. He overhears a conversation relaying the death of King Amenemhet I and as a result flees to Upper Retjenu (Canaan), leaving Egypt behind. He becomes the son-in-law of Chief Ammunenshi and in time his sons grow to become chiefs in their own right. Sinuhe fights rebellious tribes on behalf of Ammunenshi. As an old man, in the aftermath of defeating a powerful opponent in single combat, he prays for a return to his homeland:[7]
“May God pity me…may he hearken to the prayer of one far away!…may the King have mercy on me…may I be conducted to the city of eternity!”[8] He then receives an invitation from King Senwosret I of Egypt to return, which he accepts in highly moving terms. Living out the rest of his life in royal favour, he is finally laid to rest in the necropolis in a beautiful tomb.
Composed around 1850 BC, Sinuhe is the supreme masterpiece of ancient Egyptian poetry. The poem is a fictional official’s autobiography, supposedly carved on the walls of his tomb, and his story forms a passionate probing of his culture’s ideals and anxieties. In a moment of panic Sinuhe flees Egypt at the death of his king. His adventures bring wealth and power, but his failure to find a meaningful life abroad is only redeemed by the new king’s mercy, and he finally returns home to be buried.
An annotated translation is in The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems 1940–1640 BC (Oxford World’s Classics 1998).
This recording is part of The Tale of Sinuhe: A Reader’s Commentary (for the British Museum and Oxford University Ramesseum Papyri Project).
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BBC Discussion Of Sinuhe (41:32 min) Mp3
Released On: 01 May 2014
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss The Tale of Sinuhe, one of the most celebrated works of ancient Egyptian literature. Written around four thousand years ago, the poem narrates the story of an Egyptian official who is exiled to Syria before returning to his homeland some years later. The number of versions of the poem, which is known from several surviving papyri and inscriptions, suggests that it was seen as an important literary work; although the story is set against a backdrop of real historical events, most scholars believe that the poem is a work of fiction.
‘American Marxism’ – by Mark Levin – Book Talk (5:18 min) 7 Aug 2021
The Egyptian – A Novel of Ancient Times – by Mika Waltari – 1945 (Opening)
How to Think: The Skill You’ve Never Been Taught
No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems that you haven’t encountered before.
While schools teach us how to solve problems, they don’t teach us the art of thinking. Thinking is one of those things that can be learned but can’t be taught.
Poor thinking has a cost. When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated. When operated correctly you’ll find yourself with plenty of free time. When operated incorrectly, most of your time will be consumed correcting mistakes.
Good thinking makes the future easier, while poor thinking makes it harder. Good thinking means better decisions. Better decisions allow for more free time, less stress, and more opportunity. Poor thinking, on the other hand, leads to decisions that consume time, reduce options, and increase our stress.
How can we learn how to think?
For the answer, we turn to Solitude and Leadership, a lecture given by William Deresiewicz. The entire essay is worth reading (and re-reading).
Learning How To Think
Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.
One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
Improving Thinking
The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend time thinking. The problem is we want thinking to be easy and it’s often not. Easy thinking carries a high cost.
Easy thinking means taking a few minutes here and there, getting the gist of a problem, and making a decision. Hard thinking is understanding the problem, understanding the variables and the nuances, thinking through the second and third-order effects, and often understanding that a little pain now will make the future a lot easier.
“It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise”
— William Deresiewicz
One way to spot a poor thinker is to see how many of their decisions boomerang back to them. The reason this happens is that poor thinkers make poor decisions. And because poor decisions need to be watched and corrected, they consume a lot of time. The time used to correct poor thinking comes from the time that could be used for good thinking.
Good thinkers understand a simple truth: you can’t make good decisions without good thinking and good thinking requires time. If you want to think better, schedule time to think and hone your understanding of the problem.
Good thinking is expensive but poor thinking costs a fortune.
Cuba Protest Truth – Defend the Revolution From US Imperialists (Internationalist Group) 23 July 2021
Counterrevolutionary Instigators Exploit Frustration Over Economic Crisis
The Truth About Cuba Protests
Defend the Revolution Against
U.S. Imperialism and Its Frontmen
Fight for International Socialist Revolution
Break the Blockade – Down with Pandemic Extortion!
U.S., Miami Gusano Mafia: Hands Off Cuba and Haiti!
Mobilize Workers Councils to Defend the Gains of the Cuban Revolution!
Havana, July 11: Anti-government protests were fueled by economic hardship due to coronavirus pandemic and 60-year-old economic blockade, but were instigated, propagated and exploited by counterrevolutionaries (as can be seen in slogans carried by protester). (Photo: Alexandre Meneghini / AP)
23 JULY 2021 – The protests that took place in several dozen cities and towns of Cuba and locations in and around the capital on July 11 were the biggest anti-government mobilizations since the dawn of the Revolution. While fueled by desperation over food shortages, lack of medicine and blackouts that have beset the island in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, the marches were instigated, manipulated and exploited by forces seeking to overthrow the Cuban Revolution. With its exemplary public health system, Cuba has been able to contain the virus far better than almost anywhere else on the planet outside of China. Yet U.S. rulers are seeking to capitalize on the economic toll of the pandemic, and weariness from 60 years of imperialist blockade. In this difficult situation, the first duty of revolutionary communists, in Cuba and worldwide, is to actively combat the forces of capitalist counterrevolution.
The imperialist media marveled at the “the apparently spontaneous eruption,” in what it called a “police state,” against the Cuban government’s “failure to protect the population from a failing economy, energy shortages and the ravages of the coronavirus.”1 The virulent exile milieu in Florida, however, took to social media to rant that the protests were not about a virus or shortages but an uprising against “communist rule.” For these gusanos (counterrevolutionary worms), as Florida Senator Marco Rubio tweeted, “People in #Cuba are protesting 62 years of socialism, lies, tyranny & misery not ‘expressing concern about rising COVID cases/deaths’.” It’s absurd to pretend that the people of Cuba yearn for the “freedom” of the 1950s dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, overthrown by the rebel army led by Fidel Castro on 1 January 1959. But such ravings show what the gusano instigators of the protests are aiming at.
Cuba today is in the deepest economic crisis since the 1990s Special Period after imperialist-led counterrevolution in the USSR cut off its lifeline of Soviet aid. The current shortages, while not as severe as then, have made daily life on the island harrowing, and now the population has internet and smart phones so that interested parties can turbocharge “news,” real or fake. In addition, the counterrevolutionary exile milieu in nearby Florida is itching to provoke disorder in the region in the wake of the defeat of “their” president, Donald Trump, last November. (Miami-based Cuban and Venezuelan gusanos also appear to be intimately involved in the assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse on July 7.) Things could escalate as rightist Cuban Americans in Florida are now talking of dispatching a provocative “freedom flotilla” to lay siege to Havana.
Havana, July 11: Western media didn’t report that hundreds of government supporters (above) took to the streets to oppose counterrevolutionary protests, or mislabeled photos as supposedly showing anti-government protesters. (Photo: Yamil Lage / AFP)
The numbers in the July 11 protests were relatively limited, 3,000-5,000 in Havana, a few hundred or a few score each in smaller cities and towns in four of Cuba’s eight provinces. Hardly an uprising. But the fact that they took place in a number of places simultaneously is ominous – while the fact that they occurred in those locations and not elsewhere points to a basic fact. This was not spontaneous. For many participants, it was no doubt a cry of fatigue over shortages, over endless standing in line and all the other hardships Cubans have had to endure for years due to vicious economic blockade. But the protests were a political act, and judging from online videos they were headed up by groups of provocateurs who set the tone; they were spread by a sophisticated internet operation of thousands of automated tweets, and were trumpeted by U.S. imperialist spokesmen, from Republican Rubio to Democrat Joe Biden.
When the reputed “leader of the Free World” – free for capitalist exploitation, that is – vows to “stand with the Cuban people in their clarion call for freedom,” this is a threat of imperialist action. The Miami-based #SOSCuba campaign has been calling for a “humanitarian corridor” to bring aid to island. What they have in mind is something like the (failed) February 2019 siege of Venezuela, orchestrated by the administration of Donald Trump, that tried to invade that country by sea and land under the guise of bringing emergency aid supplies. The July 11 protests were part of the #SOSCuba operation, yet rather than denouncing this cynical ploy, much of the reformist left in the United States (and some in Latin America) fell into line behind Biden, hailing the manipulated protests. Various social-democratic tendencies which sometimes pose as Trotskyists – which they absolutely are not – were among the worst of these imperialist toadies. (We will soon be publishing an analysis of the positions of several of these currents regarding the recent events in Cuba.)
In contrast, in the face of the counterrevolutionary mobilization, the Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International (LFI) call to defend the Cuban revolution against U.S. imperialism and its frontmen, which highlights the urgency of fighting for international socialist revolution. Against the poisonous talk of a “humanitarian corridor” as a smokescreen for imperialist intervention, we call to break the blockade – down with pandemic extortion. And with Cuba’s socialized economy under siege by anti-communists and endangered by the privatizing policies of the ruling bureaucracy, the Trotskyist LFI calls to mobilize workers councils to defend the gains of the Cuban Revolution!
I. Protests “Made in Miami”
There is no doubt that what fueled the marches were the incredible privations the population has faced in recent months. The food shortages are very real, and a direct result of Cuba’s inability to earn hard (convertible) currency through exports due to the economic blockade, as well as the collapse of tourism in the wake of the pandemic. Likewise, the blackouts were due to electricity generating plants shutting down units for repairs after being unable to import parts. The first protest was in San Antonio de los Baños, just to the west of Havana, sparked by a power outage in the summer heat. The government’s Radio Artemisa put out a detailed schedule for when electrical power would be out for six hours a day in each barrio over the weekend, but then the blackouts extended to 12 hours. On TV on Monday, July 12, the energy minister explained that the units would soon be back on line (which they were by Wednesday), while warning that it could happen again.
Anti-communists instigated march in San Antonio de los Baños, July 11. (Photo: Facebook screenshot)
In the protest that brought out several hundred in San Antonio, videos show marchers calling for vaccines, as well as chanting anti-communist slogans like “libertad” (freedom), “abajo la dictadura” (down with the dictatorship) and “patria y vida” (fatherland and life) – a counterpoint to the slogan patria o muerte, (fatherland or death), closely associated with the Cuban Revolution. Yet Cuba has done remarkably well in fighting the coronavirus pandemic, sending infected persons to hospitals, isolating contacts and using Cuban-developed Interferon Alpha 2B to treat COVID-19 patients. While numbers of cases and deaths are rising with the appearance of the Delta strain, Cuba’s COVID mortality rate (160 per million people) is less than one-tenth that of the United States and one-sixteenth that of Brazil. Cuba has developed several vaccines and is already administering two with over 90% efficacy against COVID-19, Soberana 2 and Abdala, which began mass distribution on July 9.
Videos of the anti-communist protest in San Antonio have been shown over and over on the internet. What they don’t show is that a couple of hours later there was a second march in San Antonio by several hundred government supporters, including workers from the local tobacco plant. Cuban president and Communist Party (PCC) secretary-general Miguel Díaz-Canel spoke with residents in their homes and addressed the press in the town plaza. He then went on TV, radio and Internet speaking of the shortages of food and medicines, the power outages and the media campaign to discredit Cuba, ending with a call on “all revolutionaries to go into the streets to defend the Revolution everywhere.”2 While denouncing “counterrevolutionaries” who led the protest, the Cuban leader said that the marchers included “people in severe conditions” and even “confused revolutionaries” who were “expressing their dissatisfaction.”
Pro-government march in San Antonio de los Baños on July 11 included workers from the Lázaro Peña tobacco plant, named after historic Cuban union leader. (Photo: Alexandre Meneghini / AP)
The fact that these demonstrations were part of an international operation is attested to by the time line of events. At 12:37 p.m. on July 11, a tweet from Yoani Sánchez, the internet anti-communist celebrity, announces that people are marching in San Antonio. At 12:45, a video shows a speaker in San Antonio calling “down with the dictatorship” and denouncing CP leader Díaz-Canel as a “singao” (roughly, fucker). At 12:56, an alert from the Movimiento San Isidro (MSI)3 to stay tuned “in view of the events in San Antonio de los Baños.” At 1:11, the MSI declares “the people of Cuba are in the streets.” At 1:20, a call from #SOSCuba in Miami to rally at 2 p.m. At 1:22 another anti-communist video from San Antonio. At 1:37, the MSI “call[s] on the organizations of civil society to go into the streets.” At 1:41, MSI founder Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara calls for people in Havana to go to the Malecón seaside avenue. At 1:57, a video of a protest in the city of Palma Soriano. At 1:59 a video from the city of Matanzas of a crowd marching.
No, this was hardly a “spontaneous eruption,” as the media portray it. U.S. agencies have spent heavily for years to use the internet to incite and instigate counterrevolution in Cuba. In 2010, the infamous U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) set up the botched messaging app ZunZuneo, hoping that as it reached a critical mass, operators would insert “political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize ‘smart mobs’ – mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring.”4 What occurred on July 11 was the realization of this project, using Facebook and Twitter. But that still requires “assets” on the ground. Whatever the origin of the original event in San Antonio de los Baños, the second outbreak, in Palma Soriano in eastern Cuba, was clearly the work of counterrevolutionary groups. This city has long been a center of Catholic reaction surrounding the cult of the Virgin del Rosario. It is the stomping ground of José Daniel Ferrer, the public face of the counterrevolutionary Patriotic Union of Cuba (UNPACU) and a paid agent of the U.S. This outfit in 2016 received $99,431 from the rightist Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation (CANF).5
As we go to press, an article has appeared in the gusano digital magazine El Estornudo (22 July), “July 11 in San Antonio de los Baños: What You See/What You Don’t See” (in Spanish), which gives an extremely detailed account, complete with screenshots, about how the first protest was organized. It turns out that this was the work of a Facebook group, “La Villa del Humor,” which has been active in the city – the site of Cuba’s most important military airport – since 2017. The main organizer, who uses the pseudonym Danilo Roque, declared later that “I and my team decided it was time to land the blow, since the government was concentrating on COVID.” On July 10, they put out a call on the Facebook group for a protest next day, using the pretext of the blackouts: “Are you tired of not having electricity? … Time to go out and demand.” This “spontaneous protest” was the work of counterrevolutionary provocateurs.
On July 11, as videos and tweets came online they were pumped out on social media in thousands of messages, which “made intensive use of robots, algorithms and accounts that were recently created for the occasion.”6 The Cuban site CubaDebate (12 July) reported how a Spanish internet analyst, Julián Macías Tovar, documented that the first Twitter account using the hashtag #SOSCuba, by a Spanish user, blasted out 1,291 tweets on July 11 alone and over 1,000 the day before. These were then reposted by other accounts, so that on July 11 there were “hundreds of thousands of tweets, many of them from accounts of artists” about protests in Cuba. A posting by a television reporter in Florida about San Antonio de los Baños was retweeted thousands of times. Moreover, “more than 1,500 accounts that participated in the operation with the hashtag #SOSCuba were created on July 10/11.”
A second analysis, by Mint Press (16 July), cited “NBC’s Director of Latin America, Mary Murray, [who] noted that it was only when live streams of the events were picked up and signal-boosted by the expat community in Miami that it ‘started to catch fire’.” It pointed to “hundreds of accounts tweeting the exact same phrases in Spanish, replete with the same small typos.” One read (in Spanish), “We Cubans don’t want the end of the embargo if that means the regime and dictatorship stays, we want them gone, no more communism.” The article also noted the frequent use of photos of large gusano demonstrations in the U.S. in articles about the (much smaller) protests in Cuba, and of several photos labeled as protesters in Havana but actually showing hundreds of government supporters, such as at the monument to Cuban independence fighter Máximo Gómez where demonstrators held the flag of Fidel Castro’s July 26 movement.
#SOSCuba tweet calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Cuba. Petition with 430,000 signatures called for U.S. invasion. Miami mayor called for air war.
The Mint Press article by Alan MacLeod was titled, “The Bay of Tweets: Documents Point to US Hand in Cuba Protests,” a reference to Democratic president John F. Kennedy’s disastrous April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, when Fidel Castro led workers militias and Revolutionary Armed Forces troops in smashing 1,500 U.S.-armed mercenaries. Castro’s response to the invasion was to proclaim that “we have carried out a socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States.” The article also pointed to the 1898 explosion that sunk the USS Maine in the Havana harbor, which the yellow press turned into the pretext for the U.S. war to prevent the victory of Cuban independence forces and wrest the colony from Spain. This time around, a petition on change.org calling for U.S. “humanitarian” military intervention in Cuba has over 430,000 signatures.
Today the imperialist Big Lie propaganda machine is going into high gear to portray the July 11 protests as a popular revolt against communism. The ultra-rightist Cuban exile milieu would like to use them as a pretext for a U.S. invasion, and the mayor of Miami has called for “air war” against Cuba. As Cuban foreign minister Bruno Rodríguez noted in a July 13 press conference, “To call for humanitarian intervention in Cuba is to call for a U.S. military intervention…. A ‘humanitarian intervention’ is what took place in Yugoslavia in 1999,” under Democratic president Bill Clinton.7 That’s what some have in mind for Cuba today. But unlike capitalist Yugoslavia in 1999, Cuba is a (bureaucratically deformed) workers state. When CP leader Díaz-Canel vows that “if they want to overthrow the Revolution, they will have to pass over our dead bodies,” this is hardly abstract. Every Communist Party member is well aware that counterrevolution in Cuba and return of the gusano cutthroats would result in a bloodbath.
II. Cuban “Dissidents” on U.S. Payroll
National Endowment for Democracy Cuba grants in 2018. N.E.D. = CIA.
(Graphic: Cuba Money Project)
The Cuban American National Foundation lobby referred to above is a main conduit for U.S. funding of Cuban “democrats.” In 2011, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) gave the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, a creation of the CANF, $2 million to foster “empowerment” in Cuba. This was supplemented in 2013 with another $1.44 million to “advocate for community needs, thereby increasing expectations and accountability for improved governance” in Cuba. “Tax records show the organization channeled at least $3,324,741 to Cuban dissidents from 2014 to 2018,” according to the Cuba Money Project, led by Tracey Eaton, the former Cuba correspondent of the Dallas Morning News. In actuality, the CIA, NSA, USAID, N.E.D. (National Endowment for Democracy), State Department and other U.S. agencies spend vast sums every year financing anti-communist subversion in Cuba.
As for the Movimiento San Isidro, journalist Ed Augustin, reporting in the London Guardian (6 December 2020), interviewed an MSI member, Esteban Rodríguez, who described himself as a “social media influencer.” The article noted that “State media has cast the San Isidro movement as US mercenaries.” In fact, it continued: “There is clear evidence that some in the San Isidro Movement have ties with the US government. Esteban Rodríguez works for ADN Cuba, a Florida-based online news outlet that was awarded a $410,710 grant in September from USAID, a US government agency. The US spends $20m annually on anti-government media and ‘democracy promotion’ programmes (which critics say are better described as ‘regime change’ programmes).” Augustin goes on to quote Rodríguez as approving Trump’s tightened sanctions, including blocking family remittances, and saying, “If I was in the US, I’d have voted Trump.”
MSI leader Denis Solís shouts “Donald Trump 2020” when Cuban police officer delivers summons on 7 November 2020, right after U.S. elections that Trump lost.
He isn’t the only Trumper in the MSI. When a Cuban police officer came to the home of Denís Solís González last November 7 to serve a summons to appear in court, the Afro-Cuban rapper filmed the encounter in which, along with homophobic insults, he shouts, “Donald Trump 2020. He is my president.” Solís then posted his video to Facebook. When he was jailed for contempt of court, a protest sit-in was staged at outside the Cuban Culture Ministry on November 27. There were no arrests, and instead the deputy minister held a four-hour dialogue with the protesters, ending with an agreement to meet again. But then a new “November 27 Movement” (N27) sent an email demanding that participants in said meeting include notorious counterrevolutionaries. The ministry replied it would “not meet with individuals who have direct contact with and receive financing, logistical support and propaganda backing from the government of the United States and its officials.”
MSI on the U.S. payroll: Contract between National Democratic Institute and Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara shown on Cuban TV, April 2.
(Photo: Screenshot from Canal Caribe.)
The main leader of the MSI is Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, described in the media as a “performance artist.” In April, as he was preparing an “art show” aimed at children consisting of paintings of candy wrappers,8 Cuban television (Canal Caribe) broadcast a program showing a contract between the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Otero Alcántara for a stipend of “up to $1,000 USD” per month, in exchange for a “monthly report on the use of these funds.” The Cuba Money Project (4 April) reported: “The NDI received at least $6,615,674 for Cuba programs from 2002 to 2021, records show.” The NDI is an affiliate of the N.E.D., which since the mid-1970s replaced the CIA in funding anti-communist “dissidents,” and describes its work in Cuba as “capacity building of independent Cuban civil society actors.”
Another Afro-Cuban rapper speaking for the San Isidro Movement is Maykel Osorbo. In a social media posting that was played on Cuban TV on December 11, Osorbo urged Trump to invade Cuba. He starts by calling to intensify the blockade against Cuba, saying there should be “a real embargo, blocking the coasts, so that nothing comes in, nothing goes out.” Finally, he declares: “I would even support an invasion…. Come on, we’re waiting.” Osorbo and another MSI member co-produced the song “Patria y Vida” – which has become the anti-communist anthem – together with the millionaire hip-hop artist Yotuel Romero and some black reggaetoneros (reggaetón music performers) in Miami. The lyrics, reportedly written by Romero, are a recitation of gusano slogans (“no more lies,” “62 years, your time is over”). The song was then popularized via internet by Yankee imperialism’s powerful media machine, what the CIA called its “Mighty Wurlitzer” (jukebox).9
As Cuba Money Project’s Tracey Eaton told the Mint Press about U.S. funding for artists in Cuba, “It’s impossible to say how many U.S. tax dollars have gone toward these programs over the years because details of many projects are kept secret.” He noted that the State Department, USAID and the U.S. Agency for Global Media all run such programs. For its part, the N.E.D. lists recent projects including “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society” (to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region”) and “Promoting Freedom of Expression in Cuba through the Arts.” Since 2017, the USAID has doled out grants of $16,569,889 to “promote democracy” in Cuba, including $4.7 million to the Bacardí Family Foundation just in the last two years, and $20 million to the Grupo de Apoyo a la Democracia, a Miami gusano umbrella group, which then funnels the dollars to subrecipients.10
Clearly, financing counterrevolution in Cuba is a big business. The San Isidro Movement is the current “dissident” darlings for liberals and conservatives alike in the U.S., especially for sparking the July 11 protests. A few years ago, it was the Damas en Blanco (Ladies in White), bankrolled by the CANF. The MSI is a mainly Afro-Cuban group of artists based in the rundown neighborhood of Old Havana for which it is named. It was founded in 2018 to oppose implementation of the Cuban government’s Decree 349 regulating artistic and cultural activities. But the MSI and its supporters in the mainly white November 27 movement are a political movement whose aims go far beyond calls for artistic freedom. The N27 manifesto spells that out:
“2. Economic Freedoms. We affirm the right of every citizen to engage in different forms of economic activity, ownership and management. We value the role of private enterprise and the exercise of economic freedoms that enable the promotion of productive capacities and generate goods and services essential for the development of the nation.”
Not a word about Cuba’s socialized economy, the basis for its great achievements in education, health and medicine, including developing COVID vaccines. The MSI/N27 defense of private enterprise and private ownership of the means of production is a call for capitalist counterrevolution.
One more thing about the San Isidro Movement: Cuban American academic, Javier Corrales, wrote in the N.E.D.’s Democracy Digest (15 December 2020) that the movement was “mounting an attack on the system by placing the issue of racial justice front and center.” Actually, the MSI has said very little about racial equality or discrimination, and this is no accident. The AfroCubaWeb site notes that to do so, it would have to deal with the virulent white supremacy of its backers in Miami. The site also notes that pro-Trump, pro-embargo rapper Solís is also very “pro-Proud Boys, whose leader is an Afro-Cuban.”11 Indeed, Enrique Tarrio, the chairman of the fascist outfit (and a former FBI informant), is a product of the Miami Cuban milieu who spoke to the crowd at the July 11 gusano protest there while holding a banner reading: “Proud Boys, San Isidro Chapter, Down with Díaz-Canel and the Communists.” These sinister facts highlight yet again that promotion of imperialist-backed counterrevolution against the Cuban Revolution goes hand in hand with racist and anti-communist terror here, in Cuba and internationally.
III. Protesters Unleash Violence, Defenders of the Revolution Mobilize
Police cars overturned by anti-government protesters in Havana, July 11. (Photo: Yamil Lage / AFP)
As July 11 wore on, in some places the anti-communist protests in Cuba turned to violence. In Cárdenas, a police cruiser was overturned and an MLC (convertible currency) store looted. Cárdenas, a largely black city in Matanzas province, has been particularly hard hit by the latest COVID-19 outbreak, as many of its residents work in the tourist industry at the Varadero beach resort. In the capital, at two places (both in the 10 de Octubre section of Havana), police cars were overturned and in one case an MLC store was attacked. These were not the same crowds who marched downtown nor did the violence seem to be organized; instead, judging from videos, those involved appeared to be “marginalized” youth from poor barrios lashing out at symbols of authority. Police only arrived in numbers after the fact. Imperialist spokesmen hailed these actions as a sign of anti-regime fervor, whereas they would of course condemn them in the U.S.
Subsequently there has been a hue and cry in the Western media over police repression of the July 11 protests. Among those echoing this cynical imperialist propaganda were “progressive” Democrats Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“we solidarize with [the protests] and condemn the anti-democratic actions led by President Díaz-Canel”) and Bernie Sanders. For the most part, the police let marches proceed, until they grew violent. The Associated Press reported that in Havana: “About 2-1/2 hours into the march, some protesters pulled up cobblestones and threw them at police, at which point officers began arresting people and the marchers dispersed.” It was at that point, as well, that the Communist Party called upon its membership and supporters to “take to the streets to defend the Revolution.” Which they did, many chanting “patria o muerte.” The AP reported: “About 300 people close to the government then arrived with a large Cuban flag shouting slogans in favor of the late President Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution.”
Pro-government demonstrators at monument to Máximo Gómez in downtown Havana, July 11, prominently showing banner of Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement. Photolying: Western media used this photo to purportedly show size of anti-government protests. (Photo: Eliana Aponte / AP)
At first, 100-plus pro-government demonstrators took over the Monument to Máximo Gómez, the Dominican general in the Cuban War of Independence who freed the slaves. Photos of this were widely used in Western media as proof of the scale of the anti-government protests when they actually showed the opposite. Photos then show several hundred demonstrators outside the nearby Museum of the Revolution. But as an anti-communist crowd of by now around 2,000 headed toward the Plaza de la Revolución, Communist Youth members and others rushed to head them off. Many quite sensibly carried sticks – good! Photos of this were cited as proof of “repression.” What those accounts don’t show is that defenders of the Revolution were violently attacked by anti-government protesters. Here is one account, from a woman who works at Cuban radio/TV:
“The [anti-government] demonstrators grabbed stones and threw them at two of my friends…. A car came upon us and tried to run us over, at another point one of them pulled out a knife and everyone started running…. A neighbor had to save us, literally. She opened the door to her home, they were throwing stones, bottles.”12
Another account, “from a comrade who was in one of the rallies in defense of the revolution” quoted by the International Marxist Tendency:
“I was attacked…. They almost lynched me, they threw water, rum and they threw two stones at me, though they didn’t hit me.”
While, again, many if not most of the anti-government protesters were no doubt expressing frustration and anger over shortages, blackouts and a pandemic that has made their lives miserable, the people in the forefront had an agenda. Those who formed the letter “L” (for Libertad) with their thumb and forefinger as they tried to run down supporters of the Revolution – as racists in the U.S. have done against anti-racist demonstrators – were calling for the capitalist “freedom” to exploit, to oppress and to recolonize the island. When they chanted “down with the dictatorship,” they were calling to replace the workers state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) with the dictatorship of capital. As the protests intensified, their counterrevolutionary thrust becoming clearer by the minute, this was a defining moment: where did you stand? Trotskyists would have joined the pro-government mobilization, appropriately equipped to stop those who would bring back the Yankee imperialists and gusanos.
Subsequently, a massive anti-communist media machine – those directly paid by Washington (Cubanet, ADN Cuba, Diario de Cuba, TV and Radio Martí) and those who claim to be privately financed (CiberCuba 147yMedio), plus liberal and right-wing media in the U.S. – unleashed a barrage of lies about brutal repression. Yoani Sánchez’ 14yMedio was filled with rumors of dead and “disappeared” everywhere. (The one person who died was not during the July 11 protests but the next day, during a provocative attempt to march on a police station in Arroyo Naranjo.) As one can see from photos, the police were not carrying firearms, unlike in the U.S. where thousands of heavily armed cops set upon Black Lives Matter demonstrators. In all, there were 200 or so arrests. In the case of the MSI’s Otero Alcántara, arrested on his way to the Malecón, this was certainly justified for his role instigating counterrevolutionary protests.
One of those arrested on July 11 was Frank García Hernández, who was the main organizer of the 2019 Trotsky Conference in Havana.13 An article titled “On the July 11 Protests in Cuba” (in Spanish) on the Comunistas (17 July) blog that he founded explains that he arrived by chance at a place where there had been violent clashes near the Plaza de la Revolución. The article states that when a police official wrongly accused Maykel González, editor of the gay rights magazine Tremenda Nota,of throwing stones at the police, Frank García sought to intervene as a member of the Communist Party, whereupon both were arrested. After a little over 24 hours in detention, when the authorities clarified the events where neither had participated in violent actions, they were both released. “Frank states that he was NOT subject to any physical mistreatment or torture,” the article reports, adding that “Frank García is not presently under house arrest,” but under a restraining order limiting his movements, a normal procedure there until the initial charges are formally adjudicated.
For all the media coverage of the Monday, July 11 protests in Cuba, there has been hardly a mention of the Saturday, July 17 pro-government “Rally of Revolutionary Reaffirmation” that brought out tens of thousands in Havana, as photos clearly show, and thousands more around the country, far more than the much-publicized anti-government marches five days earlier. In the Saturday rally, Cuban president and PCC leader Díaz-Canel ended with a call, “Viva Cuba, sovereign, independent, socialist!” But while talking of “necessary self-criticism, pending rectification, deep revision of our methods,” of “bureaucracy” and “insensitivity,” and the need to “pay more attention to vulnerable sectors,” his main message was that the Cuban Revolution “wiped out forever the seeds of evil, of hate, of dishonor and crime.” Yet abstract appeals to love and civic virtues are far from the revolutionary communist program needed to defeat a cold-blooded enemy.
IV. Bureaucracy Undermines Gains of the Revolution
While Cuba has developed two COVID vaccines (Soberana 2 and Abdala) proven to be over 90% effective, imperialists are hoarding vaccines, refusing to send them to Africa as pandemic enters its most deadly phase. (Photo: BioCubaFarm)
As we detail elsewhere (see “U.S. Blockade of Cuba: ‘Bring About Hunger, Desperation, Overthrow’”), the fundamental and immediate causes of the acute economic and medical crisis facing Cuba today lie in the fact that it is a small island under relentless siege by imperialism and subject to the brutal dictates of the world capitalist market. It is grotesque to accuse Cuba’s government of failing to protect the population from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic when it has in fact done far better than any capitalist country in the hemisphere. Cuba’s development of multiple COVID-19 vaccines is a stunning achievement, especially in the face of the economic extortion to which it has been and continues to be subjected. And such accusations are particularly vile coming from imperialist governments which are literally hoarding vaccines, ensuring that none will be available in Africa, now in the deadliest stage of the pandemic.
By the end of August, the G7 countries will be sitting on 1.9 billion doses more than they need to vaccinate their populations, and “enough to vaccinate the entire adult population of Africa,” according to the ONE Campaign.14 The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) Covax program promised vaccines for poor countries, but shipments simply stopped when India banned exports of the Astra-Zeneca vaccine following the resurgence of the pandemic with the Delta strain earlier this year. One reason Cuba did not join the Covax program (in addition to the fact that it was developing its own vaccines) was concern that in view of the blockade it could be cut off at any point, as all of Africa now has been. For all their cynical professions of concern for the Afro-Cuban population, which has suffered more than any other from the effects of the blockade, the supporters of the blockade now calling for U.S. “humanitarian intervention” should answer for the fact that the would-be imperialist “saviors” are blocking vaccines to black Africa.
Meanwhile, the hard reality is that the effects of the blockade have also been aggravated by the policies of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) leadership, which for the last decade has sought to open the socialized economy to a “private sector.” This began with the “Economic and Social Policy Guidelines” approved at the PCC’s Sixth Congress in 2011. These Lineamientos were pushed in particular by Raúl Castro, after taking over from Fidel Castro as Cuban president three years prior. This mixed bag of measures, some supportable, others clearly dangerous, included leasing state-owned agricultural land to private farmers, introducing private wholesale markets, promoting worker cooperatives, laying off workers from state enterprises, opening a real estate market, allowing mobile phones, easing rules for foreign direct investment, expansion of self-employment (such as taxis) and small businesses (such as family restaurants), and abolition of the dual monetary system of convertible and non-convertible pesos.15
Former Cuban president Raúl Castro stepped down as Communist Party general secretary at PCC Eighth Congress in April 2021, handing reins to Miguel Díaz-Canel (right). Castro has pushed to open Cuban economy to “private sector.” (Photo: Associated Press)
The background to this policy goes back to the origins of the Cuban deformed workers state. Even as the peasant-based guerrillas of the victorious July 26th Movement sought in 1959-60 to carry out a far-reaching agrarian reform, Washington’s economic blackmail pushed them into into nationalizing foreign-owned businesses that dominated the Cuban economy. When the Eisenhower administration banned petroleum sales to Cuba and Esso refused to refine Soviet-supplied crude oil, the petty-bourgeois Castro regime had no choice but to seize the refinery and other U.S.-owned assets. Having been pushed into the arms of the USSR, the Cuban leadership proceeded to build a (bureaucratically deformed) workers state on the model of the latter-day Soviet Union. For three decades the USSR subsidized Cuba, buying sugar valued above the world market price in exchange for oil at below world market prices.
Along with building up a bureaucracy from scratch (in the early years, the Cuban leadership consisted of whoever was sitting in Fidel Castro’s jeep), this also entailed embracing the nationalist program of the bureaucratic regime of Stalin and his heirs.16 Usurping political power upon the death of V.I. Lenin, who together with Leon Trotsky led the 1917 Bolshevik October Revolution, Stalin junked the program of Red October of international socialist revolution on which the Communist International was founded. Instead, placing himself at the head of a privileged bureaucratic layer, he put forward the anti-Marxist dogma of “building socialism in one country.” The Castros embraced this, accentuating a Cuban nationalist outlook while increasingly toeing the conservative Soviet bureaucrats’ line and, after a period of encouraging pro-Cuban guerrillas in Latin America, abandoning them in the 1970s. But with imperialist-led counterrevolution in the USSR and the East European Soviet bloc in 1989-92, Cuba was left on its own.
Since – in the Stalinist framework – international socialist revolution was out, the alternative to bureaucratic mismanagement of the economy was privatizing measures, heightening the danger of capitalist restoration. This was the common thread of Stalinist “reformers” from Khrushchev to Gorbachev in the Soviet Union and Deng in China. So when Cuba was cut off from Soviet aid, after going through the dark days of the Special Period of 1990-9317 when the economy plunged by a whopping 35%, the alternative to bureaucratic stagnation put forward was the policies of growing privatization advanced by Raúl Castro. But although enunciated in 2011, they were only implemented piecemeal, and after 2016 there was backtracking. So in 2018-19, Raúl Castro and Díaz-Canel pushed through a new Constitution, whose Article XXII formally recognizes, along with state property of “the fundamental means of production” (defined as the main form), also “private: which natural or legal persons, Cuban or foreign, exercise over certain means of production.”18
So since 2019 private property of some means of production has a constitutional basis in Cuba, although that has yet to be translated into laws. As the Cuban gusanos and Yankee imperialists certainly recognize, this is hardly the restoration of capitalist class rule – but it is an ominous step that will foster the growth of capitalist inroads and pro-capitalist forces in Cuba, and should be opposed by all revolutionary communists. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, PCC leader Díaz-Canel has been pushing to implement these pro-capitalist reforms. In August 2020, the opening of foreign currency accounts (in state-owned banks) was authorized. At the same time, 72 convertible currency (MLC) stores were opened, where those with an MLC debit card from their bank deposits in dollars or euros can buy goods not available to those who only have Cuban pesos. The government says this was needed to soak up hard currency, but it has made the MLC stores a widely hated symbol of privilege.
In October, a complex of measures supposedly to increase competitiveness was decreed, the so-called Ordering Task (Tarea Ordenamiento), which among other things would eliminate “excessive subsidies” and “inappropriately free goods” and “avoid egalitarianism” (!) instead of “subsidizing people.”19 This is in fact a “neoliberal” reform, in which social policies benefitting all are replaced with welfare measures for the poor. In addition, prices for various products such as milk would be deregulated (except for special categories of the population, such as children). The key measure in the Tarea Ordenamiento was the elimination of the dual monetary system, so that now there would be a single Cuban peso which would be exchanged at the rate of 24 to the dollar. For those who previously had income in convertible Cuban pesos, which had a 1:1 exchange rate with the dollar, this amounted to a 96% devaluation. The minimum wage for workers was quintupled, but the savings of the petty bourgeoisie were effectively wiped out.20
Above: Cuban convertible pesos (CUC). By replacing the CUC with a single convertible peso and devaluing it by 96%, government wiped out savings of petty bourgeoisie and set off inflationary spiral. (Photo: Cuba Money Project)
In short, the Tarea Ordenamiento which took effect on 1 January 2021 implemented many of the privatizing “reforms” that Raúl Castro’s Lineamientos had called for in 2011 but were never or only partially implemented. On top of this, in mid-January the government replaced the list of 127 economic sectors in which private enterprise was allowed with a new list of 124 economic sectors in which it was excluded, everything else being open to private entrepreneurs. This could potentially mean a sizeable expansion of the private sector. But by devaluing the currency and expanding the convertible currency stores at a time of extreme shortages of goods, the result has not been a flourishing of small businesses but a huge increase in inflation, as those with dollars or euros on their tarjeta MLC debit card drive up prices for scarce products formerly distributed with the libreta de canasta básica (ration card).
And it continues: three days after the July 11 protests, Díaz-Canel announced that wages in the state sector would no longer have to be paid according to the official salary schedule. This would “give the management of state enterprises autonomy” so that “those who create more wealth, are more efficient and produce more for the state will earn more.” Hailing this “audacious transformation,” the PCC leader said “the non-state sector has a certain freedom to determine how much will be paid to workers, which we are now incorporating in the functioning and management of the socialist state enterprises.” Eliminating uniform pay scales is an attack on the unity of the working class, and should be opposed by all class-conscious workers as part of defending the socialized economy against the inroads of capitalism and capitalist methods.
In the past, Raúl Castro and some Cuban economists looked to the “Vietnamese model,” but as Díaz-Canel noted last year, Vietnam had not been “subjected to an embargo for six decades.”21 Even though the U.S. lost the Vietnam war, and although there is a sizable Vietnamese anti-communist exile community in the U.S., Washington has allowed American companies to set up shop there while the political apparatus and state sector of the deformed workers state remains intact. It’s about geopolitics. U.S. rulers’ interest in Vietnam is driven by its effort to cordon off China, while Cuba is right in the middle of the U.S. sphere of influence, only 90 miles from Florida in the Caribbean Sea that U.S. rulers since the 19th century have considered an American lake.
With its supposedly “socialist” shock therapy of dangerously pro-capitalist “reforms,” the bureaucratic leadership of the Cuban deformed workers state is promoting measures that foster the growth of counterrevolutionary forces. To be sure, it claims to be upholding the primacy of what is known as the socialist sector (i.e., the state-owned enterprises) and defending the state monopoly of foreign trade, as Raúl Castro said at PCC’s Eighth Congress in April, where he stepped down as general secretary, handing over the reins to Díaz-Canel. But by seeking to assuage the petty bourgeoisie while cracking down on workers and the poor by eliminating “excessive” subsidies, “egalitarianism” and uniform wage scales, the bureaucracy is pushing some of those who should be the solid base of support of the workers state into the arms of capitalist reaction. And the counterrevolutionary forces are every-ready to exploit this, as they showed on July 11.
V. Defend the Gains of the Cuban Revolution –
Smash the Counterrevolution!
Tens of thousands came out to show support for the Cuban Revolution at July 17 seaside rally in Havana. Column in the background is the remains of the former “Remember the Maine” monument erected when Cuba was a U.S. neo-colony. In 1959, Cuban revolutionaries toppled the monument, which was crowned by an eagle. The eagle must not return. (Photo: Letícia Martínez Hernández) Click on image to enlarge.
While opposing any and all measures that undercut or sabotage revolutionary gains, Cuban poor and working people must intransigently defend the Cuban Revolution against the imperialists, their frontmen, PR agencies and apologists who would drown them in poverty while spouting honeyed phrases about “freedom.” The magnificent achievements of Cuba’s school system that eliminated illiteracy and has educated generations of professionals, its unequaled system of medical care that is the envy of Latin America, its development of a biomedical and pharmaceutical industry capable of developing five COVID vaccines despite the imperialist blockade – none of this would be possible under capitalism. That system based on production for profit rather than human needs guarantees that those on the bottom stay on the bottom, where murderous police violence is unleashed to ensure the dictatorship of racist capitalism.
A program to combat the threat of capitalist restoration should begin with a call to form workers councils to defend the gains of the Revolution, not only against the Yankee imperialists and their Cuban collaborators but also against threats emanating from a bureaucracy which is sabotaging those gains. Rather than increasing the power of managers or carving up entities plant by plant, management of state-owned enterprises should be in the hands of plant/workplace committees joined together in a nationwide assembly of workers in the socialized economy. This could promote innovation and efficiency, not by bureaucratic dictate or market competition, but by energizing the creative capacities of the workers who know the problems better than anyone and can resolve them using their collective power. A start could be made in the electrical energy industry, where workers in the power plants of the Unión Eléctrica and distributed (local) generators could work with local workers councils in dealing with power shortages and promote renewable energy.22
A program for workers defense of the Cuban Revolution should include replacing the MLC stores, which whatever limited use they may be in soaking up dollars and euros (in order to sell goods which themselves must be bought with dollars and euros), have enraged the poor, showcasing the consumer goods they cannot get. Unlike in the 1990s, when only those who received dollar remittances from Cuban exiles could shop there, today many (egged on by counterrevolutionaries) see them as symbols of bureaucratic prerogative. As some protesters yelled at PCC members on July 11, “You are the privileged ones, for sure you have MLC cards, you have food in your homes.” In East Germany, where the Trotskyists fought tooth and nail against capitalist reunification in 1989-90, hard-currency Intershops, along with high-priced Exquisit and Delikat stores, infuriated working people who couldn’t afford to buy there, a fury that was exploited by the counterrevolution.
Yes, there is a terrible shortage of consumer goods. The workers movement should call on China and Vietnam, deformed workers states for which overthrow of the Cuban Revolution would be a direct threat, to massively send high-quality sports shoes, consumer electronics and children’s toys (plus, given current shortages in Cuba, shiploads of rice from Vietnam). This would be a tangible example of international solidarity that could inspire besieged Cuban working people to continue resisting the imperialist onslaught. Calls by Latin American workers demanding that their governments pay top dollar for Cuba’s COVID vaccines could point to a source of badly needed convertible currency to pay for Cuba’s dire food shortages while saving hundreds of thousands of lives from the plague ravaging the continent. To stave off looming disaster in Africa, anti-imperialist protesters should demand that the W.H.O. send Cuba billions of dollars and euros to supply the vaccines that the imperialists refuse to provide.
Also: while the 1959 Revolution brought vast gains for Afro-Cubans together with the rest of the working people, the truth is that weaknesses of the Revolution with respect to the black population have been highlighted by the current crisis, and are being cynically exploited by the white-supremacist gusanera. The overthrow of capitalism was an enormous advance for Afro-Cubans, but the participation of impoverished black people in violent actions on July 11 is undeniable. Repression of leading instigators of counterrevolutionary actions is fully justified. At the same time, it is crucial to launch workers brigades to repair the rundown neighborhoods of Havana, Cárdenas and elsewhere. Unemployed local youth should be enrolled, providing decent wages while working with residents to reconstruct these long-neglected barrios. Building vibrant neighborhoods, providing opportunities for artists to colorfully adorn walls with murals, would inspire people and undercut the MSI mercenaries who want to entice children with visions of M&Ms and Chiclets and U.S.-style bling-laden video fantasies. At the same time, the state must aggressively prosecute notorious discrimination against black Cubans in the tourist industry.23
Internationalist Group and Revolutionary Internationalist Youth at July 15 Cuba solidarity rally in New York City. (Internationalist photo)
The fight to defeat the instigators, manipulators and exploiters of the July 11 protests must be waged politically, strategically and above all internationally. Defense of the Cuban Revolution is the task of the world working class, from Latin America to China and the imperialist heartlands in the U.S., Europe and Japan. Faced with the vast power of imperialism, this defense must be able to inspire the masses. The current bureaucratic leadership is incapable of doing so. Those who would write off Cuba, claiming that capitalism has already triumphed, and thus side with counterrevolution; and those who, following in the footsteps of anti-Soviet theorists of old, declare that the brittle, contradictory bureaucracy is itself the “leading force of counterrevolution” and restoration – such pseudo-leftists turn their back on and betray the urgent struggle against the very real imperialist-orchestrated counterrevolutionary forces who exploited the suffering of the Cuban masses on July 11.
U.S. rulers have always had a special hatred of the Cuban Revolution. Under 13 Democratic and Republican presidents they have longed to “avenge” the overturn of their Mafia-infested colonial rule, their humiliating defeat at the Bay of Pigs, Cuba’s role in defending black Angola against imperialist attack, and the very survival of the defiant rebel island they long ago decreed must perish. While Trump added Cuba to the list of supposed state sponsors of terrorism, it is the CIA that sponsored the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles who organized the bombing of Cubana airlines Flight 455 in 1976, killing 73 people. The U.S.’ repeated assassination attempts are vividly depicted in the British documentary, 638 Ways to Kill Castro. In March 2003, terrorists sought to take advantage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to spark an uprising in Cuba by hijacking two Cuban airliners and then a ferry boat.24 The events of July 11 show that the anti-communist Cold Warriors in Washington will use every opportunity, including the difficulties caused by a plague that has killed hundreds of thousands in the U.S., in their unrelenting war to destroy the “first free territory of America.”
Cuba must not stand alone! The League for the Fourth International calls to build a Leninist-Trotskyist revolutionary workers party armed with a program to intransigently defend the Cuban Revolution against imperialism and internal counterrevolution; to replace the stultifying the bureaucracy (whose pro-capitalist policies increasingly endanger the Revolution) with the soviet democracy of workers councils – that is, a proletarian political revolution to defend and extend the historic gains won in Cuba through international socialist revolution. July 11 was a wake-up call for those determined to defeat the imperialist onslaught. Workers of the world unite to defend Cuba! ■
- 1. “Cubans, broken by pandemic and fueled by social media, confront their police state,” Washington Post, 13 July.
- 2. “La orden de combate está dada, a la calle los revolucionarios,” CubaDebate, 11 July.
- 3. See below for a dissection of this pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist artists group.
- 4. “US secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest,” AP, 3 April 2014.
- 5. “Dissident’s arrest triggers debate over funding,” Cuba Money Project, 7 December 2019.
- 6. “Investigación confirma la perversa operación de redes sociales contra Cuba,” CubaDebate, 12 July.
- 7. See “Defend Yugoslavia – Defeat the Imperialist Attack!” The Internationalist No. 7, April-May 1999. The U.S./NATO “humanitarian intervention” led to the forced expulsion of close to 200,000 Serbs and Roma from their homes in Kosovo, the dismembering of Yugoslavia and ultimately the toppling of the Serbian nationalist government of Slobodan Milošević in the first of the U.S.-orchestrated “color revolutions.”
- 8. Otero said the aim of his show was to accuse the government of artificially creating shortages so that Cuban children couldn’t have sweets. But the wrappers he depicts are for Nesquik, M&Ms, Chiclets, Nutella, etc., in other words, for products of huge foreign firms that can only be bought for hard currency.
- 9. On how the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency massively funded “civil society” groups in the anti-Soviet Cold War, see Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Harvard University Press, 2008).
- 10. Tracey Eaton, “The democracy business in Cuba is bustling,” Cuba Money Project, 9 December 2021. Eaton also noted that simultaneous with the appearance of the San Isidro Movement, the State Department offered grants of up to $1 million for projects to promote “civil, political, religious, and labor rights [sic] in Cuba.” And now that #SOSCuba has appeared, USAID is offering $2 million for projects to “advance the effectiveness of independent civil society groups” in Cuba (“$2 million up for grabs for democracy projects in Cuba,” Cuba Money Project, 3 July). See also “Democracy, Inc.,” Cuba Money Project, 4 June, for a rundown of some of the main “democracy” money mills.
- 11. “Movimiento San Isidro – N27,” AfroCubaWeb.
- 12. “Testimonies from July 11: When the Violence Was Unleashed” (in Spanish), CubaDebate, 15 July.
- 13. See “The Havana Trotsky Conference: Notes of a Participant,” The Internationalist No. 57, September-October 2019.
- 14. “Africa’s Covid Crisis Deepens, but Vaccines Are Still Far Off,” New York Times, 16 July; and “Data dive: The astoundingly unequal vaccine rollout,” One.org, July 2021.
- 15. See Vegard Bye, Cuba, From Fidel to Raúl and Beyond (Springer, 2020) for a detailed discussion.
- 16. See the Internationalist Group Class Readings, Cuba: A Bureaucratically Deformed Workers State (August 2010)
- 17. See our article “Cuba in Peril,” published in Workers Vanguard No. 585, 8 October 1993, when it was the voice of revolutionary Trotskyism. It is reprinted in Cuba: A Bureaucratically Deformed Workers State.
- 18. See Nueva Constitución de la República de Cuba (2019).
- 19. “What Is New for Workers in the Tardea Ordenamiento?” (in Spanish), Opciones (13 December 2020).
- 20. Díaz-Canel effectively took over the program of bourgeois economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago in his monograph, The Cuban Economy: The Current Crisis, Its Causes, and Policies for the Future (2020) whose recipe for economic reform began with “Carry out monetary and exchange-rate unification” and “Carry out a comprehensive price reform.”
- 21. “Monetary Unification Will Help Stabilize the Economy,” EFE, 25 January.
- 22. Environmental Defense Fund, The Cuban Electrical Grid (2017).
- 23. See “‘A powder keg about to explode’: Long marginalized Afro Cubans at forefront of island’s unrest,” Washington Post, 19 July. Also: “Blacks and the Cuban Revolution,” Workers Vanguard No. 585, 8 October 1993, reprinted in Cuba: A Bureaucratically Deformed Workers State.
- 24. See our article, “For Revolutionary Internationalist Defense of Cuba!” The Internationalist No. 16, May-June 2003. Also, “Decades of U.S. Biowarfare Against Cuba,” in the same issue.
See also:U.S. Blockade of Cuba: “Bring About Hunger, Desperation, Overthrow”
“Cuba Is Being Accused of Many Things – Let’s Fact Check Them”
Picture North Korea
COVID – Five Vital Facts – Dr. Peter A. McCullough (Video) (3:39 min)
Dr. Peter A. McCullough, one of the most qualified physicians on COVID-19 in the United States, joins LifeSite’s John-Henry Westen to share his advice about this every-changing virus and pandemic.
Short Guide To All The Different Christian Denominations
Catholics — Have an affinity for Latin, guilt, and booze? Go Catholic! The Catholics started off with an epic 1500-year run keeping the denomination game on lockdown before Luther came along in the fourth quarter and messed everything up. Generally seen by Protestants as just one rung above Mormons on the “Are they really Christian” scale, Catholics are known for having lots of rules and praying to Mary and saints for some reason. The religious ‘mass’ that Catholics must attend every single week is a kind of exercise class with the congregants kneeling, standing, kneeling again, sitting for a while, then back on their feet. In order to be a Catholic people must believe that the bread and wine used in the mass are literally changed into the body and blood of Christ. Literally.
Weird!
Anglicans — Kirkland-brand Catholics.
Episcopalians — Kirkland-brand Anglicans.
Eastern Orthodox — Catholics but with cooler beards on priests who are even more openly ‘male oriented.’
Methodists — These folks branched off from the Anglican church after it became too boring, but hung on to all the great Church traditions like organ music, legalism, and holding rummage sales. And if you hold a biblical view of marriage, there’s good news – there are still Methodist churches in Africa and Korea you can go to!
Baptists — Do you hate dancing, rock music, and Dungeons & Dragons? Boy, oh boy, do we have the denomination for you! Baptist churches are trying to move into the 21st century with guitars and drums, but the church secretary Ethel sure is upset about it. One bonus of being Baptist is you can kinda believe whatever, ’cause the pastor probably doesn’t even know what his church’s statement of faith says. Nice!
Evangelical Non-denominational — Undercover Baptists.
Lutherans — All the boring parts of Catholicism married to all the boring parts of Protestantism. The original Protestants, the Lutheran church began in 1963 shortly following Martin Luther’s “I Have A Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. In order to join, a person must be at least 70 years old, live in Lake Wobegon, and have a bizarre obsession with Jell-O.
Presbyterians — Carriers of the moniker “Frozen Chosen” due to their Calvinist beliefs and catatonic state, Presbyterians were predestined to become the denominational equivalent of stale toast. Forget raising your hands during worship – if you so much as show the slightest emotion with your facial expression, you will be flogged by a deacon. Decent beard game.
Mormons — Hey, we said Christian denominations!
Pentecostals — A denomination started in the early 20th century, attending a Pentecostal worship service is like going to a drug-fueled rave—for Jesus! What’s not to like? And best of all, if you don’t like what Scripture says, just have your own personal revelation and write it right in the back of your Bible!
Calvary Chapel — “Whoa, man, we’re totally not a denomination, dude! Come on, bro, we’re just, like, chill Christian dudes hangin’ out and lovin’ on Jesus and surfin’ and stuff! Gnarly!”
Cavalry Chapel — Obscure cult that worships soldiers on horseback.
Churches of Christ — Another non-denominational denomination. They love the Bible and full-immersion baptism as much as they hate musical instruments. They’ve also got the Duck Dynasty guys, drastically improving their otherwise mediocre beard game.
Unitarian Universalists — See: atheists. We’ll even take the Mormons over these guys!
What’s your favorite denomination? Did we miss any? Shout them at your screen now!
Massachusetts: Obama Birthday Party Ruined As Global Warming High Tide Comes In
“How dare you!” shouted Greta Thunberg.
“I knew I shouldn’t have invested in a $12 million-dollar mansion when I’ve warned people over and over again that it would be underwater in just a few years,” said former President Barak Hussein Obama.
Many guests were soaked or swept away into the sea, though John Kerry and Al Gore called their pilots and got picked up in their private jets.
US: Gallup Poll – 20% Of Americans Refuse Experimental Inoculations vs COVID
According to a Gallup poll released on Friday, 6 August 2021, 18 percent of US residents can be described as “vaccine-resistant.”
“These Americans say they would not agree to be vaccinated if a COVID-19 vaccine were available to them right now at no cost and that they are unlikely to change their mind about it,” the Gallup poll report states.
The survey, which claims they polled nearly 3,500 U.S. adults and has a margin of sampling error of ±2 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level, was conducted during a rise in U.S. coronavirus cases but before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its mask guidance for vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
The CDC warns that people who are not vaccinated can contract COVID and spread the virus.
The CDC warns that people who are vaccinated can contract COVID and spread the virus. The claim is that vaccinated people who get COVID who are vaccinated have a less virulent disease. The mRNA particles injected into people are thought to teach the body how to fight the corona virus when exposed to the virus.
Five percent of people would not agree to be vaccinated but say they are at least somewhat likely to change their mind. The remainder of participants either report having already been vaccinated (69 percent) or say they plan to be (8 percent). The vaccinated group is up from 64 percent in May but shows little change from the 68 percent recorded in June, according to the poll report.
“Americans not planning to get vaccinated generally cite three main reasons: They want to wait to confirm the vaccine is safe or gets full FDA approval (18 percent), they have already had COVID-19 and have antibodies (18 percent), or they don’t trust vaccines in general (18 percent),” according to Gallup.
The poll noted that fewer Americans not planning to get the vaccine are less concerned about how quickly the vaccine was developed (14 percent). Thirteen percent do not believe they would face serious health effects from the virus, and 12 percent are concerned about adverse allergic reactions to the vaccine.
Notably, more people now than in spring (18 percent compared to 10 percent) say they have had the virus and, therefore, have antibodies. However, the percentage who believe they will not face serious health consequences from the virus has decreased from 21 percent to 13 percent.
Gallup drew attention to the U.S. vaccination pace, which “has considerably slowed during the summer” despite President Biden’s goal of reaching a 70 percent vaccination rate by July 4.
Biden did not reach his goal until August 2, though he continues to emphasize on dangers of the coronavirus. In early July, he announced plans to go door to door in an attempt to get more Americans to agree to innoculation. He said during a speech in late July, “If you’re out there unvaccinated, you don’t have to die.”
Will the twenty percent of the population that refuse vaccination die? That is 60,000,000 people.
As Biden and the CDC continue to falter on pandemic messaging, the inconsistency only makes some Americans dig their heels in deeper.
“The slower pace is largely owed to the reluctance of many Americans to get vaccinated rather than the availability of the vaccine,” the poll concluded.
Technical Drawing – Oldest example of applied geometry found in 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet
The tablet shows that ancient Babylonians used Pythagorean triples to survey plots of land a thousand years before Pythagoras was born.
by Tibi Puiu
Almost four millennia ago, two wealthy Mesopotamian landowners quarreled over a plot of land, each claiming they were the rightful owner. The dispute was solved not through sheer force and violence — this was the kingdom that laid out the very first written laws after all — but instead through rather modern-style mediation. A skilled surveyor arrived at a site and with his trusted tools, he divided the disputed lands at the border into equal plots and the two landowners were back to their happy neighborly selves.
Such Babylonian surveyors were in charge of writing up the first cadastral documents in known history, during a time when citizens were entrusted with private property which had to be delineated from common lands. These ancient surveyors, known as scribes, didn’t have total stations and GPS at their disposal, and frankly, they didn’t need them. They were very well capable of accurately measuring and dividing plots of land using a yardstick and their mathematical skill.
A 3,700-year-old clay tablet, known as Si.427, is illustrative in this regard. It shows how Babylonian surveyors must have performed geometric operations, even using Pythagorean triples to accurately make right angles, more than a thousand years before the mighty Greek philosopher was born.
In a new study published today in Foundations of Science, Dr. Daniel Mansfield, a mathematician at the University of New South Wales in Australia, explains the rich significance behind what may very well be the oldest example of applied geometry in the world.
Proto-trigonometry: the geometry for the ground
Although Mansfield is a mathematician, his research into Si.427 looked more like that of an archaeologist. The tablet was discovered in Baghdad at the end of the 19th-century but had since changed hands many times and its location remained an enigma. However, Mansfield had heard about it while studying thousands of Babylonian fragments relating to mathematical applications in the old Mesopotamian kingdom.
In 2017, Mansfield studied another similar tablet from the same period, known as Plimpton 322, revealing that its purpose was that of a trigonometric table of sorts. Babylonians did not actually use trigonometry as we know it, as in the branch of mathematics concerned with specific functions of angles and their application to calculations. In fact, these ancient scribes understood only one angle: the right angle.
While Plimpton 322 isn’t a trigonometric table in the conventional sense, it lists a table of rectangles useful in practical measurements. Specifically, it lists Pythagorean triples, right triangles whose three sides are all integers where the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
For instance, a rectangle with sides 3 and 4, and a diagonal of 5 can be divided into two equal halves at the diagonal, leaving two perfect right-angle triangles.
Plimpton 322 doesn’t list all possible Pythagorean triples but rather compiles a number of triples, both as rectangles and right triangles, that were likely commonly encountered in surveying work. It was very much practical rather than theoretical work.
This limitation was owed to the sexagesimal (base 60) Babylonian number system, which means only some Pythagorean shapes can be used in practice. In this system, numbers are written by adding symbols that represent either 10 or 1, in that order. For instance, the number 5 is written as ‘blank space’ to signify no 10s and by five 1s. The number 16 is written as one 10 followed by six 1s. Then these number signs 1–59 can in turn be strung together to write numerals of any length.
The base 60 number system is actually still in use in some instances of our lives, despite the ubiquity of base 10. For instance, we still count sixty minutes in an hour and sixty seconds in a minute, and measure angles in multiples and fractions of 60. This is the legacy of Greek astronomers who adopted the Babylonian base 60 system because their own system was not as suited for astronomical calculations.
But since it is difficult to write and calculate with prime numbers bigger than 5 in base 60, only some Pythagorean triangles were used. This is why Mansfield calls the Babylonian geometry proto-trigonometry, an intermediate step towards modern trigonometry involving sin, cos, and tan.
However, it was not clear how tables such as those found on Plimpton 322 were actually used in practice. Mansfield had heard about another tablet that contained triangles and rectangles, but despite his best efforts to track it down, speaking with many officials at Turkish government ministries and museums (the last known leads for the tablet), he couldn’t find it. However, one day in mid-2018, the mathematician received a photo of Si.427 in his inbox.
“I ran out of my office and found two colleagues in the middle of a meeting. I burst into their meeting and I rambled exciting things about “Pythagoras” and “Babylon”, and my colleagues were kind enough to smile while I got all my excitement out,” he recounted.
Together, Plimpton 322 and Si.427 paint a picture of how mathematics was used in ancient Babylon. Rather than using trigonometric concepts to study the night’s sky, as the ancient Greeks had in the second century BC, the alternative proto-trigonometry employed by Babylonians seems to mostly solve problems related to the ground.
“We knew that the Babylonians were mathematically advanced. They knew all about the geometry of right triangles, but we didn’t know why. What were they doing with right triangles? What were they using them for? This question of “why” motivated me to look at Babylonian artefacts from museums, libraries and private collections around the world. What I discovered is that the Babylonians were applying their understanding of right triangles to accurately measure and subdivide land,” Mansfield told ZME Science.
“The way we understand trigonometry harks back to ancient Greek astronomers. I like to think of the Babylonian understanding of right triangles as an unexpected prequel, which really is an independent story because the Babylonians weren’t using it to measure the stars, they were using it to measure the ground. Perhaps some aspects of this knowledge were transferred to other civilizations, but I’ve not seen any evidence of this,” he added.
Although the discovery of Plimpton 322 prompted some to speculate that its purpose was linked to the construction of palaces and temples, canals, and other practical works, it was only with the discovery of Si.427 that all the jigsaw pictures came together. During the period that these tablets were etched, Babylon was undergoing social change where much land moved became private. Designating proper boundaries without affecting neighborly relationships was essential, which is where the surveyors and their right triangles came in.
Next, Mansfield plans on studying what other applications besides surveying the Babylonians had for their proto-trigonometric tablets. He’s also interested in whether there are any real-world applications for these simple but fast techniques in our modern era. “For example, this approach might be of benefit in computer graphics or any application where speed is more important than precision,” he said.
And as a comical illustration of the essential role surveyors had in the Old Babylon period, here’s a hilarious poem in which an older student berates a younger one for his incompetence in surveying a field. “It’s essentially a 4000-year-old diss track,” Mansfield told me.
Go to divide a plot, and you are not able to divide the plot;
go to apportion a field, and you cannot even hold the tape and rod properly.
The field pegs you are unable to place; you cannot figure out its shape,
so that when wronged men have a quarrel you are not able to bring peace,
but you allow brother to attack brother.
Among the scribes, you (alone) are unfit for the clay.
https://imasdk.googleapis.com/js/core/bridge3.473.0_en.html#goog_1350805578Tags:Babylonmesopotamia
Tibi Puiu
CIA’s Outsourced Torture Is Lost To History – Torture is Intimidation Not An Info Hunt – by Spencer Ackerman
The CIA’s notorious practice of kidnapping and displacement gave birth to the post-9/11 torture program. We know nearly nothing about it.
DESPITE THE REDACTIONS, the pseudonyms, and the thousands of unreleased pages, the Senate intelligence committee’s report into post-9/11 CIA torture – that is, the executive summary available to the public – is the most robust oversight ever conducted of any part of the War on Terror. The committee typically defends the agencies and activities it nominally oversees; remarkably, the torture investigation revealed the gruesome realities inside the CIA’s black sites. It demonstrated, with precision and rigor, how the CIA constructed a Big Lie, called “Enhanced Interrogation,” around its barbarism.
But the committee’s lead investigator says that he could only investigate two of the three components of the torture program. The third is lost to history.
THE CIA CALLED THE PROGRAM RDI, for Renditions, Detentions and Interrogations. “Renditions” are outsourced torture: the CIA abducts someone and sends them to be abused either by their home country’s security apparatus; or, in the “extraordinary rendition” variant, by a third country’s security apparatus. “Detentions” were the maintenance, logistics and direct operations of the black sites where the CIA, not an allied intelligence service, imprisoned people. “Interrogations” were the torture the CIA inflicted.
Renditions were the kernel of the program. They were the only aspect of CIA torture in operation on 9/11. The entity within the CIA Counterterrorism Center that conducted it, the Renditions Group, expanded after 9/11 to become the RDI Group, or “RDG.” One of the people involved in the Renditions Group from inception, Mike Scheuer, explained many years ago in an underappreciated video, “After 9/11, the CIA was the only game in town. The Bush White House pushed on the CIA to accelerate the rendition program.” (Scheuer has been on a journey.)
Yet we know vastly more about the D and the I than we know about the R. The Senate’s investigation solely concerned the CIA’s detentions and interrogations. Over the six years of the investigation, the CIA fought aggressively to restrict even that constrained mandate. It was not going to allow Senate investigators to expand their remit, according to Daniel J. Jones, the lead investigator. “Everything was a heavy lift,” Jones remembers.
And even if the agency somehow had allowed him to investigate renditions, Jones’ experience of digging through deliberately confusing and incomplete records that the CIA provided – and sometimes subsequently disappeared – leads him to the conclusion that the agency’s own renditions records are likely far from extensive.
“The [CIA’s detention and interrogation] records in 2002 are detailed. As the ‘DI’ program went on, we saw less and less robust record-keeping,” Jones recalls. “One could imagine that also applied to rendition.”
All three components of the program were tied together, and so occasionally Jones saw glimpses; suggestions and clues to what rendition was. But not only was rendition beyond the scope of his investigation, he already had to contend with the maddening and painstaking work of figuring out who was and was not in CIA custody, then figuring out how meaningful such distinctions were when it came both to internal classifications and the actual treatment of human beings. It was arduous.
Officially speaking, the Senate was able to tally at least 119 people whom the CIA held in the black sites during their 2002-2008 existence. “There’s a back-and-forth we had with the agency on who was a CIA detainee and who wasn’t. The committee, to arrive at 119, is extremely conservative. Everyone who was involved in this investigation believes there was more than 119 CIA detainees,” Jones explained.
“If the CIA doesn’t know how many people were in its own custody, it’s very unlikely there’s any record-keeping of people who were merely transients” – that is, briefly in CIA custody before being whisked to a partner intelligence service – “and those who weren’t in their custody. …Tenet and every other [CIA] director said [the torture program] was the CIA’s central counterterrorism program at the time. Because it was a central program – and incredibly sensitive – it would be reasonable to think the CIA would maintain a robust classified record,” he continued.
“If, in fact, the ‘DI’ part was viewed as the central component of the War on Terror by the CIA, there’s no reason to believe they would hold better records with the rendition program.”
TWO BROAD FACTS ABOUT CIA TORTURE make Jones’s supposition especially compelling.
First, the only reason the Senate intelligence committee investigated at all is that two leading figures inside the program, Jose Rodriguez and Gina Haspel, destroyed videotapes of the torture of two men inside the first post-9/11 black site – something that also sparked a criminal investigation. Once the Senate learned about the destruction of those tapes from The New York Times, rather than from the CIA, the committee could no longer credibly refuse to open an investigation of its own.
Second, in most major speeches and testimony, CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden repeatedly emphasized that their War on Terror is an international team sport. They did this so often that journalists rarely bothered quoting it; it seemed like boilerplate. It was often self-serving, as when they cited the importance of cooperation with allied intelligence services as a reason to never disclose what that cooperation did. But they’re correct that reliance on various Mukhabarats makes their war viable. “I cannot overstate how vital these relationships are to our overall effort,” Hayden said in one typical September 2007 appearance.
The absence of renditions records, even to the Senate torture report, is no longer exactly news. I reported it in 2016 in this 20,000-plus-word, three-part series for The Guardian. But what has bothered me ever since is how little attention and care that absence has ever received. In the wake of our recent Forever Wars piece about naming the dead, I’ve been thinking about that more and more – the enormous gap in our historical knowledge of renditions; the likelihood that if the Senate torture report couldn’t go there, then we’re probably not going to fill those gaps; and the fact that pretty much no one gives a shit.
The awful conclusion is that disappearances work.
WE KNOW SOME THINGS ABOUT RENDITIONS. In particular, we know that the CIA took bondage nudes of bound prisoners at the point of transferring them. That was documentation of the renditions – presumably made to provide proof that someone who might ultimately die in a foreign torture chamber was alive when the CIA had them.
Human Rights Watch, in 2008, was able to document 14 people the CIA rendered to the Jordanians. One of them, Abu Hamza al-Tabuki, recalled: “from the first day, they began to interrogate me using the methods of terror and fear, torture and beating, insults and verbal abuse, and threatening to expose my private parts and rape me. I was repeatedly beaten, and insulted, along with my parents and family.” Those familiar with the history of torture, particularly in a context of war, will note how present sexual torture is within it.
When the U.S. helped overthrow Moammar Qaddafi in 2011, it inadvertently led to the publication of the files locked in the offices of Qaddafi’s internal-security apparatus. That ended up accidentally exposing what CIA-Libya cooperation looked like in practice. It’s really not a pleasant read. Neither is the messy history of the rendition of Abu Omar, whom the CIA abducted in Milan after Italy had granted him asylum.
In my 2016 Guardian piece, I reported that renditions were the “largest” part of RDI. Jones reminds me, helpfully, that “we don’t really actually know that.”
Fair enough. I was using a European Parliament investigation from 2007 that reported: “at least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA flew into European airspace or stopped over at European airports between the end of 2001 and the end of 2005, to which should be added an unspecified number of military flights for the same purpose; …on one hand, there may have been more CIA flights than those confirmed by the investigations carried out by the Temporary Committee, while, on the other, not all those flights have been used for extraordinary rendition.”
Note that last line. Note how the EU acknowledges the limits of its investigative visibility into European complicity. The EU investigators are able to document over 1,200 CIA flights to Europe over four years. They can’t say each flight was a renditions ferry, or that each flight equals a person rendered. They can say they are unable to answer the question, and as a fallback, offer their best evidence as a proxy for the scale of a program whose surface they can barely scratch, thanks to the obstinacy of several governments.
Hayden, in 2007, weaponized that uncertainty to discredit the EU. “The suggestion that even a substantial number of those 1,245 flights were carrying detainees is frankly absurd on its face,” he scoffed.
Except it’s not absurd at all. It is true that Hayden had exclusive access to whatever remained of the CIA record, so he could make assertions about the CIA torture program being “designed only for the most dangerous terrorists and those believed to have the most valuable information, such as knowledge of planned attacks” from a position of authority.
Unfortunately for Hayden, Scheuer, who said he “ran renditions” when he was at the Counterterrorism Center, accidentally contradicted him in 2008.
“Under Mr. Clinton we had focused on very senior al-Qaeda people,” Scheuer (who didn’t respond to a message seeking comment) recalled at an event at Berkeley that year. After 9/11, he told the audience, “the bar went down a little bit, and we began to pick other people up.” (This is around minute 32:30 in this video.)
Defenders of rendition, Hayden included, tend to describe rendition as lawful, complete with guarantees from other nations of humane treatment. Scheuer is a rare CIA official who acknowledges on record that that’s bullshit. “Under Mr. Clinton, we were to take them off the street and arrange for them to be returned to a government that wanted them for a judicial process,” he said at that event.
We went back to the White House and said, “This was what we planned to do, do you want us to do it?” Yes, was the answer. “Well, we’re going to take them to countries where they’re wanted, but your State Department, every year, is going to say ‘that country is a human rights abuser,’ or its judicial processes are not what we want them to be.” And everybody kind of puckered up and said, “Ooh, that may be a problem. Can you get these countries to say ‘We will treat these rendered people according to our own laws?’” And we said, “Yeah, we’re pretty sure that country X will treat them according [to their own laws] – that won’t get you off the hook!” But that’s as far as it went. Now, President Clinton and [national security adviser Sandy] Berger said that they insisted on guarantees that these prisoners would be treated according to American standards or international law. Now, I was there. I ran the operations. That was never a requirement that I knew of. That’s entirely a kind of after-the-fact defense of what was done.
Hayden has a track record of lying. When Jones was able to examine the records of the CIA’s detentions and interrogations, he saw just how heavily Hayden and others in the CIA manipulated the truth. An entire annex of the Senate intelligence report debunks a fusillade of lies Hayden told about CIA torture in just one day of testimony. (Appendix 3, starting on page 462 of the report.) And that’s not the end of it: see Reign of Terror, out on Tuesday. (Also, I have a story about Hayden showing up at one of my band’s shows; I might write about that for subscribers, so please do subscribe.)
Scroll up in this piece to the quote from Jones about how there’s a “back-and-forth” over who the agency counts as detainees, prompting the Senate to act conservatively in tallying 119 men at the black sites. Hayden, in 2007, claimed the number of black-site prisoners was “fewer than 100.” All this is particularly glaring when reviewing Hayden’s assertion, in the same speech, that “the number of renditions is actually even a smaller number, mid-range two figures.”
WHAT WE LACK, and what we will likely always lack, is a systemic understanding of the renditions, extraordinary and (sighs) “ordinary.” The Senate intelligence committee report emerged from a unique opportunity and set of historical circumstances. Neither will come again. Jones performed an extraordinary service for history. I don’t write any of this to fault him for being unable to unearth the rendition program – no one outside of the Church and Pike committees has done more to force real transparency out of the CIA.
“We had two options in a world of limited resources: to attempt to totally detail all the renditions; or to detail the ‘D and I’ in US custody,” Jones said. “It’s still the right call, but it makes the false assumption that Congress can only have the most minimal of investigative resources. In essence, we’ve decided to live in this world of limited oversight.” Damn. Sit with that quote a moment.
Jones is pointing to a consequence-free obliteration of truth. The mark on the victim’s body is torture’s true measurement, especially when we believe that every human being has inherent worth and dignity. The official denial that the mark was made, aggregated across an unknown number of people, is no longer a crime against them alone but a crime against history. One of the people directly involved in both the mark and the denial, after both were known, rose to become CIA director, to bipartisan acclaim. One of her boosters is, right now, the Director of National Intelligence. Another chairs the Senate intelligence committee.
“The oversight mechanisms and the executive branch have allowed both inappropriate and illegal behavior to happen without consequence,” said Jones. “There’s never any accountability. There is no leash. It’s just unclipped. In such a lax oversight environment, why would they think they need records?”
………………….
https://foreverwars.substack.com/p/the-cias-outsourced-torture-is-lost
US ‘Deep Concern’ Over China’s 350 Nukes – US 1,500 Nukes – Many Aimed At China
Blinken Expresses ‘Deep Concern’ Over China’s Nuclear Arsenal
China’s arsenal is a fraction of what the US and Russia possess by Dave DeCamp
On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US has a “deep concern” over the “rapid growth” of China’s nuclear arsenal, according to the State Department. He made the comments during a meeting with foreign ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
“The Secretary also noted deep concern with the rapid growth of the PRC’s nuclear arsenal which highlights how Beijing has sharply deviated from its decades-old nuclear strategy based on minimum deterrence,” the State Department said in a readout of the meeting.
China’s nuclear arsenal is only a fraction of what the US and Russia possess. Current estimates put China’s arsenal between 300 and 350 warheads, while the US and Russia each have around 6,000. China hawks are predicting that Beijing will double its arsenal over the next 10 years, but that would still fall very short of what Washington and Moscow have.
The best thing the US could do to rein in China’s nuclear weapons is work with Russia to dismantle a significant number of warheads. Until that happens, China would have no interest in participating in nuclear arms control agreements. But that is unlikely to happen since the US has an over $1 trillion plan to modernize its nuclear triad.
Russia has responded to US calls for China to be involved in arms control by suggesting the UK and France should too since their arsenals are similar to Beijing’s. Earlier this year, Britain announced it is increasing its stockpile and setting the cap of nuclear warheads to 260, up from the current limit of 180.
The State Department said Blinken also told the ASEAN that China should cease what he called “provocative” behavior in the South China Sea and raised concerns about “ongoing human rights abuses” in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet. As part of its anti-China strategy, the US is looking to boost cooperation with Southeast Asian nations.
You’re telling me you’re not nostalgic, well, give me another word for it…
China: Western Reporters Act As Foreign Agents – Resent Chinese Dislike Of Them – by Tom Fowdy – 2 Aug 2021
As they do their political masters’ bidding, Western journalists can’t comprehend why Chinese people increasingly dislike them
BBC reporters say they were ‘attacked’ in a ‘state-backed campaign’ while covering floods in China. Can’t they see the backlash is from ordinary Chinese fed up with the way Western outlets misrepresent their country?
As floods raged in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou last week, killing up to 300 and uprooting the lives of many more, foreign reporters in the city complained that they were on the receiving end of hostile responses, abuse and intimidation from local people. Following a confrontation with an angry mob, the BBC press team later put out an official statement claiming “journalists were under attack,” which escalated into widespread claims across social media that the resentment vented towards them was no more than a “state backed campaign” against them.
The US Department of State quickly jumped on the bandwagon to claim that China was again undermining freedom of the press and “turning public opinion” negative towards journalists. This is ironic in itself. In no circumstances was the argument considered that the people of China could have genuine grievances against journalists who cover their country, or that they could legitimately disagree with anything that is reported. Instead, it was simply the binary dictum which many journalists identify with: that they are righteous and infallible bringers of truth and that nobody can authentically question their intentions or work, not least Chinese people.
In reality, this is a patronizing, condescending and harrowing dismissal of Chinese public opinion itself, which is frequently dismissed as invalid and inauthentic because it does not align with the ideological viewpoints of foreign media, and insultingly dismisses the fact that people in China know more about the outside world than they are given credit for.
It also ignores that most Chinese know that Western coverage of their country shifts in line with foreign policy priorities, and has become increasingly negative and vilifying. Subsequently, distrust in the Western mainstream media and their intentions has surged. What we are seeing here is a social reaction to this, and it goes without saying that the Western media has repeatedly shown itself to be a bad faith actor when it comes to manufacturing and manipulating stories to fit the foreign policy goals of Washington or London or Brussels. What is happening in China is not about “freedom of the press”- it’s about people being fed up with biased and untrustworthy reporting.
The journalist mindset is wrapped in the very ideological and ontological assumptions which drive Western political thought as a whole, a belief that they possess an objective, infallible and authentic definition of “political truth,” of which they claim to hold completely independent of material and political interests, and that they have a self-righteous mission to deliver that truth to others.
It goes without saying that mainstream journalists tend to be incredibly self-righteous as a general rule, not least when it comes to China, where they are convinced that they exist on a higher plateau of enlightenment; that they own the only correct “interpretation” of the country, and its own people do not, and that they must fight to transform the citizens to their ideological vision. The “story” of China presented is not so much what China is, but the story of what the West thinks it ought to be.
When approached with conflicting views from Chinese people, who are growing tired of the negative and narrative-driven reporting against their country, the journalists dismiss these people who question this Western “truth” as inauthentic actors, brainwashed and merely the instruments of a malign state who do not hold a legitimate worldview: “How dare they get angry against the perception of China as a dystopian, authoritarian nightmare or for repeatedly peddling the line of the US state department?”
The inherent contradiction in this mindset is that many journalists are seldom honest that their reporting and editorial lines are essentially a form of crusading or propagandizing, often pushing, either directly or indirectly, a political agenda on behalf of others, which is what they always accuse China of doing. Either way, there is the obvious pattern that ideology and narrative always come before empirical facts, and facts that contradict these things are subsequently dismissed or downplayed.
The BBC is particularly notorious for this. It describes itself as the “world’s most trusted” international broadcaster and claims absolute impartiality, despite the fact it has long fused its reporting with an ideological value mission and follows the instructions of the British Foreign Office. When it encounters scrutiny, of which it has increasingly found in China since the mood soured, it reverts to a persecution complex and claims it is being silenced by a hostile authoritarian state who does not accept their exclusively owned conception of “truth.”
In reality, the BBC itself is increasingly promulgating hostility against China. Its agenda over the Hong Kong and Xinjiang issues, in particular, has been absolutely relentless. It is no surprise that this aggravates public sentiment in China, which the BBC also enjoys discarding as “nationalism,” but the key message and assumption peddled is that legitimate criticism of its reporting cannot possibly exist.
The idea that such outlets can pretend that their reporting is independent of the geopolitical tensions they are actively helping push at the behest of their political masters is simply naive at best, and dishonest at worst. China is still somewhat more lenient towards foreign media than many other countries, yet this space is narrowing not because “China is growing more authoritarian,” but because the atmosphere of insecurity and distrust is rising, and subsequently it becomes a vicious circle.
If the Western mainstream media could be more honest, fair and impartial in its reporting concerning China, it would not be in this situation, but instead, it is simply denying that its agendas exist and dismissing all criticism of its work as state-led misinformation. It’s not helping its cause. The media has a growing trust problem in China, and it simply can’t or won’t understand why.
World War Three – Calling Generals And Majors – XTC
COVID Vaccines Do Not Work – Don’t Stop Contracting Disease, Don’t Stop Spreading Infection – by Raul Illargi Meijer – 1 Aug 2021
On Thursday, an internal CDC slide deck was “leaked”. On Friday, an “official” document was presented. The first is more interesting, because it contains things that are ostensibly not meant for public consumption (how to present…). The second is made up of a lot of official looking terminology. What else? But both largely say the same thing: there is no difference between the infection rates of vaccinated and non-vaccinated people. Of course that is then dressed up again in calls to get vaccinated, they can’t help themselves…
In colorful language such as “the war has changed” and “Delta spreads as easily as chickenpox”, the CDC tries very hard to undermine -even deny- it own findings. The slide deck is here:
CNN commented:
“The document – a slide presentation – outlines unpublished data that shows fully vaccinated people might spread the Delta variant at the same rate as unvaccinated people..”
The New York Times said:
“The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated, an internal C.D.C. report said.”
Friday’s document refers to an event in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, where 3/4 of infections were in fully vaccinated people. It’s funny to see people react with: “that makes sense, most people are vaccinated now”, completely forgetting that the vaccines were supposed to prevent infections. And inadvertently admitting that there is indeed no difference in infection rates, ergo: the vaccines don’t work.
In July 2021, following multiple large public events in a Barnstable County, Massachusetts, town, 469 COVID-19 cases were identified among Massachusetts residents who had traveled to the town during July 3–17; 346 (74%) occurred in fully vaccinated persons. Testing identified the Delta variant in 90% of specimens from 133 patients. Cycle threshold values were similar among specimens from patients who were fully vaccinated and those who were not.
Perhaps because of the big words used to dress up the story, or perhaps because people have become so conditioned to react to everything Covid with fear, the logical conclusion of these two documents is not drawn anywhere. Which is that notions such as vaccine mandates and vaccine passports should now be discarded. There is no reason for a “vaccine” to be applied if you get infected with it as easily as without.
Some will still claim that they stop more severe sickness, but evidence of that is scarce at best, and it has nothing to do with the “societal functions” of not infecting others that the mandates and passports are designed for. If we know what’s good for us, it’s back to the drawing board.
There is of course no reason from an individual point of view to get vaccinated either: even if you believe that you might get less sick, you would still have to weigh that against the risks the vaccines come with. And they come in multiple large shapes and forms. There is a group now trying to prove that 500,000 people have died from the vaccines, up from 50,000, and the info from VAERS and other systems remains shaky. You would think every doctor and nurse would consider it a matter of honor to report adverse reactions as accurately as possible, but that’s not the impression we have so far.
Also, you can read everywhere that when numbers of infections (“cases”) are down in a country or region, it’s because of the vaccines. But how is that possible if infections are equally spread between vaccinated and unvaccinated? Where’s the logic? And what’s the logic of blaming the unvaccinated once you know they are no more contagious than the jabbed?
I think perhaps the biggest problem of all right now is that there is so much invested in official narratives. That is as logical as it is unfortunate. And I get it, all those politicians and experts are slowly and very reluctantly realizing that they bet on the wrong horse, and to turn a ship of state around is much harder than for me to change my life.
The alternative to admitting your failures is a very dark place, so maybe you should make sure you’re ahead of the crowd, ahead of your co-PMs and presidents and “experts”, admit your faults, profoundly apologize, and shift that steering wheel 180º if need be. You don’t want to find yourself in that dark place.
Now they want to put masks on the vaccinated. That must mean the vaccines don’t work, right? No, no, they swear, the vaccines are very very efficient. It’s just that you have a very rare breakthrough case now and then, because no vaccine is perfect. So for a few rare breakthrough cases you’re going to tell millions of Americans to mask up? And then you see that New York State alone has 11,000 of such very rare cases.
Pfizer wants to give everyone a booster shot this fall. I was thinking they must have made some improved version against Delta, but no, it’ll be a third shot of the same “vaccine”. But wait, we just found it doesn’t work against Delta. The Israelis give it a 39% efficacy, which is not even enough to get an emergency authorization. Get it off the market then.
Why would I get such a shot at this point in time? The only reason I can think of is that if I don’t, you’ll take my job away, and/or severely screw with my life, and rights, and freedoms, in other ways. But certainly not for protection, because the substance offers me none of that, not for me, not for others. And there’s something terribly wrong with that, with forcing me to make choices based on such warped notions.
The entire grand idea of getting everyone vaccinated is just like Zero covid: impossible and unnecessary grandstanding, obsessed by grand illusions of power over every single individual mind. In reality, it’s everyone’s own choice, and nobody else’s.
For some obscure reason we have accepted the idea that we can do no risk stratification, that everyone is at equal risk, and therefore everyone should undergo the same treatment. And then we find out that this treatment doesn’t work, or only half, or only for a few months, etc. But you can be sure insurance companies are still doing risk stratification, also for Covid, it’s how they make a profit.
We find the vaccine is not a vaccine, but a therapeutic. An untested one at that. While we could have focused on prevention, either for everyone or just for the vulnerable, and early treatment for early victims. As 80% of people were never at risk at all and 80% have already been infected and survived.
There are plenty ways to do prevention and we have discarded them all, in favor for a treatment that now turns against us. That is to say, the vaccine makes the virus more, not less, dangerous. It’s not the unvaccinated that are the pool the virus mutates in, it’s the vaccinated.
And it’s not only the mutations. All Covid therapeutics used in the west induce the vaccinees’ body to produce spike proteins, which are toxic to the body. Initially, it was claimed that they would stay near the site of injection, but we soon found that they spread through the entire body, and assemble especially in the most vulnerable spots: lungs, testes, placenta etc.
And that’s not all either: we now see suspicions that the spike proteins remain active in the body, and continue to be produced inside the body, for much longer than we were told they would be. An as yet unpublished report will claim that they have been found five months after injection, instead of mere days. The potential consequences would be much more disastrous than the virus.
And wouldn’t you know, the moment we find out from the CDC itself that the vaccines don’t work, that same CDC clamors for more vaccinations, and all the usual suspects in the media and politics and “expertise” chime in. Everyone vaccinated now or we’ll take your jobs away, and all of your fun. Children, no matter how young, must be jabbed, even pregnant women. This therapeutic we never really tested is perfectly safe for your unborn child!
Without a jab, you’re a lethal danger to everyone who’s been vaccinated!
Well, actually, I am not, and thanks to the CDC now I can prove it.
The other way around, though, I’m not so sure.
I love Big Pharma!
Pfizer Company Suppressed Ivermectin Use As COVID Treatment – By Mordechai Sones – 1 Aug 2021
If you were wondering why Ivermectin was suppressed, it is because the agreement that countries had with Pfizer does not allow them to escape their contract, which states that even if a drug will be found to treat COVID-19, the contract cannot be voided.”
Unredacted contracts for the experimental biological agent known as the “COVID-19 vaccine” between the Pfizer corporation and various governments continue to be revealed.
Information security expert Ehden Biber told America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS) Frontline News that the first document to recently emerge was discovered by Albanian newspaper Gogo.al. Biber then was able to locate the digitally-signed Brazilian contract, and at least two others, one with the European Commission, and the other with the Dominican Republic.
AFLDS Chief Science Officer Dr. Michael Yeadon responded to the revelations after perusing the Albania contract, saying it “looks genuine.” He continued: “I know the basic anatomy of these agreements and nothing is missing that I’d expect to be present, and I’ve seen no clues that suggests it’s fake.”
Yeadon noted what he found “the most stunning revelation,” citing the clause that stipulates “if there are any laws or regulations in your country under which Pfizer could be prosecuted, you agree to CHANGE THE LAW OR REGULATION to close that off.” (emphasis his)
In a Twitter thread that has since been removed except the first tweet in the thread, Biber explained the significance of the revealed agreements: “Because the cost of developing contracts is very high and time consuming (legal review cycles), Pfizer, like all corporations, develop a standardized agreement template and use these agreements with relatively minor adjustments in different countries.
“These agreements are confidential, but luckily one country did not protect the contract document well enough, so I managed to get a hold of a copy.
“As you are about to see, there is a good reason why Pfizer was fighting to hide the details of these contracts.”
“First,” Biber continues, “let’s talk about the product: The agreement not only covers manufacturing of vaccines for COVID-19 and its mutations, but also for ‘any device, technology, or product used in the administration of or to enhance the use or effect of, such vaccine.’
“If you were wondering why Ivermectin was suppressed, it is because the agreement that countries had with Pfizer does not allow them to escape their contract, which states that even if a drug will be found to treat COVID-19, the contract cannot be voided”
“Supplying the product: ‘Pfizer shall have no liability for any failure to deliver doses in accordance with any estimated delivery dates… nor shall any such failure give Purchaser any right to cancel orders for any quantities of Product.’
“‘Pfizer shall decide on necessary adjustments to the number of Contracted Doses and Delivery Schedule due to the Purchaser … based on principles to be determined by Pfizer … Purchaser shall be deemed to agree to any revision.’
“Just to make it clear: ‘Purchaser hereby waives all rights and remedies that it may have at Law, in equity or otherwise, arising from or relating to:.. any failure by Pfizer to deliver the Contracted Doses in accordance with the Delivery Schedule.
“Once again: ‘Under no circumstances will Pfizer be subject to or liable for any late delivery penalties.’
“You can’t return the product, no matter what: ‘Pfizer will not, in any circumstances, accept any returns of Product (or any dose)…no Product returns may take place under any circumstances.’
“Now for the BIG SECRET: $12 per dosage for about 250K units. Funny that this is the price for a small amount of dosages when Pfizer was charging the U.S. $19.50 per dose.
“U.S. taxpayers got screwed by Pfizer, probably also Israel.
“About payment, the country has no right ‘to withhold, offset, recoup or debit any amounts owed to Pfizer, whether under this Agreement or otherwise, against any other amount owed (or to become due and owing) to it by Pfizer or a Pfizer Affiliate.’
“Damaged goods: THE ONLY WAY to get a recall is if you can prove cGMP fault.
“‘For clarity, Purchaser shall not be entitled to reject any Product based on service complaints unless a Product does not materially conform to Specifications or cGMP.’
“This agreement is above any local law of the state.
“Long-term effects and efficacy: ‘Purchaser acknowledges…the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known.’
“Termination for cause: There are clauses about termination possibility, but in fact, as you saw so far, the buyer has almost nothing that can be considered a material breach, while Pfizer can easily do so if they don’t get their money or if they deem so.
“You must pay Pfizer for the dosages you ordered, no matter how much you consumed, regardless if Pfizer got it approved (it was a pre-EU approval) or if they delivered the Contracted Doses in accordance with any estimated delivery dates set forth herein.
“‘Purchaser hereby agrees to indemnify, DEFEND AND HOLD HARMLESS Pfizer, BioNTech (and) their Affiliates…from and against any and all suits, claims, actions, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, settlements, penalties, fines, costs and expenses…’
“The state must defend Pfizer: ‘(Pfizer) shall notify Purchaser of Losses for which it is seeking indemnification… Upon such notification, Purchaser shall promptly assume conduct and control of the defense of such Indemnified Claims on behalf of (Pfizer)’:
“However, ‘Pfizer shall have the right to assume control of such defense… and Purchaser shall pay all Losses, including, without limitation, the reasonable attorneys’ fees and other expenses incurred.’
“Pfizer is making sure the country will pay for everything: ‘Costs and expenses, including… fees and disbursements of counsel, incurred by the Indemnitee(s) in connection with any Indemnified Claim shall be reimbursed on a quarterly basis by Purchaser’:
“Liability: ‘This shall not include, nor constitute, product liability insurance to cover any third party/patients claims and such general liability insurance shall be without prejudice to Purchaser’s indemnification obligation as set out in this Agreement.’
“There is no limit to the liability of the country in case of ‘the indemnity given by it under Section 8 (Indemnification)’ or if the Purchaser failed to pay Pfizer:
“The Purchaser waives any right for immunity, it give up any law that might cap the obligation to pay damages to Pfizer. Comment: The court in New York has the capacity to hold international assets of a country if the country failed the contract.
“Condition to supply: Purchaser must provide Pfizer protection from liability for claims and all Losses, must implement it via statutory or regulatory requirements, and the sufficiency of such efforts shall be in Pfizer’s sole discretion.
“Confidentiality, part 1: ‘Each Recipient shall safeguard the confidential and proprietary nature of the Disclosing Party’s Confidential Information with at least the same degree of care as it holds its own confidential or proprietary information of like kind’:
“Confidentiality, part 2: ‘Recipient shall disclose Confidential Information only to such of its Representatives who have a need to know such Confidential Information to fulfill its obligations under this Agreement’:
“Confidentiality, part 3: The contract must be kept confidential for 10 years. Why 30 years in Israel?
“‘The provisions of this Section 10 (Confidential Information) shall survive the termination or expiration of the this Agreement for a period of ten (10) years’:
“Arbitration and governing laws: Arbitration must be done in New York, in according to Rules of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce, governed by the laws of the State of New York, USA:
“If a specific ministry was assigned to safeguard the contract, they must continue to so: ‘…attempted assignment of rights or delegation or subcontracting of duties without the required prior written consent of the other Parties shall be void and ineffective.’
“I first stumbled upon a document, called KONTRATEN-E-PLOTE which translates to ‘read the full contract’.
“Only later I discovered it was Albanian website that has published it on January 2021. They deserve ALL the credit for the leakage of the document, and journalists around the world deserves the shame for not discovering and reporting it.
“Countries might claim they negotiated a better deal, but based on the evidence we have received from South America it seems this contract is real, and that it’s similar to what was used worldwide.
“‘One Health Ministry official, Yaron Niv, said in a separate Kan interview that each dose cost Israel $62.’ Netanyahu is indeed a magician – he got Israel to pay 5 times more than Albania and made people worship him for this BAD deal.
“This contract is actually worse than it seems.
“Current Good Manufacturing Practice (CGMP) is regulated by the FDA. cGMP will tell you NOTHING about mRNA, because we never had cGMP of mRNA vaccine, so you cannot prove cGMP malpractice. Tweet
“Addendum: Former president of Pfizer in Brazil and CEO for Latin America testified to the Brazilian committee that Pfizer demanded the same condition for vaccine purchase from all countries:
“Former president of Pfizer in Brazil and CEO for Latin America Carlos Murillo today said in testimony to the COVID CPI that the clauses proposed by the pharmaceutical company for the offer of vaccines to Brazil are not ‘preeminent’, as stated by the former minister of Eduardo Pazuello Health.
“According to Murillo, Pfizer demanded from all countries the same conditions for the purchase of vaccines against COVID-19. In addition, he said that claims that the drug maker would have demanded state assets such as embassies and military bases as collateral are not correct. ‘It’s distorted information,’ he declared.”
Biber concluded: “To those [who] think it is a fake: My university law professor said laws are like computer code. They use legal functions, and variables, and processes. I worked in Big Pharma, I reviewed many contracts in my career, and this document seems to me as real as can be.
“I wrote this on the 13th of July: ‘Israel has turned into a pharmaceutical Banana Republic, where the priorities of a multinational supersedes the priorities of its citizens. It is no longer the Jewish motherland, it is Pfizerland.” Tweet
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‘Unsinkable’ – US Aircraft Carriers (15:59 min) Audio Mp3
Women and the East German Deformed Workers State (Spartakist) 2010
Women and the East German Deformed Workers State – (Part 1 of 2 ) (Spartakist) October 2010
Workers Vanguard No. 976 18 March 2011
For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Women and the East German Deformed Workers State
Part One
(Women and Revolution pages)
The following article was translated from Spartakist No. 185 (October 2010), which is published by the Spartakist Workers Party, German section of the International Communist League. It is based on an International Women’s Day 2010 presentation by Barbara Köhler in Hamburg.
In Berlin, we held our forum on Women’s Day, and on my way to it the subway TV ran a news item that Alice Schwarzer, Germany’s icon of bourgeois feminism, had spoken. She stated that she was against Women’s Day, a “socialist invention” having something to do with striking women textile workers. In her own words: “It’s got absolutely nothing to do with feminism!”
Occasionally even this reactionary lady says something true. As a bourgeois movement, feminism makes men the hindrance to achieving women’s equality. Thereby it deepens the division of the proletariat fomented by the capitalists, setting men against women. We communists know that the oppression of women is inextricably tied to class rule and exploitation. We fight for mobilizing the entire proletariat, men as well as women, against the special oppression of women. Without women, no socialist revolution; without socialist revolution, no liberation of women!
Schwarzer was expressing the hostility of the bourgeoisie to the proletariat—International Women’s Day marks the strike of women textile workers in Manhattan on 8 March 1908. But what we think of above all is 8 March 1917 (February 23 according to the old Russian calendar)—the women textile workers strike in St. Petersburg. That was the beginning of the February Revolution in Russia. For us communists, March 8 commemorates a day of struggle by the entire working class.
Over the entire past year, we ran articles and gave forums counterposing our communist program to the bourgeois propaganda marking 20 years of counterrevolution in the former East German deformed workers state, the DDR, with which we were inundated all year long. It was with this same program that we intervened in 1989-90 in the incipient political revolution in the DDR. The central issues were defense of the DDR against imperialism, proletarian political revolution against the Stalinist bureaucracy as well as socialist revolution in the West—the fight for a Red Germany ruled by workers councils (soviets).
The bourgeoisie would like to lay the DDR to rest once and for all, but it is still obsessively fixated on it. In German bourgeois circles, one of the most devastating labels you can apply is “DDR methods” or “socialism.” When Ursula von der Leyen was still Minister of Family Affairs, she came out for more kindergartens, but only because the German bourgeoisie wants to raise the low birthrate and simultaneously have well-trained women in professional life. And for this sin, even this top-echelon Christian Democratic display model of a mother was accused of DDR methods.
So everybody talks about it, but what was it really like for women in the DDR? As communists, we apply programmatic standards in order to understand and explain things. Thus we cite the utopian socialist Fourier as an authority on the woman question. Fourier stated, “The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women’s progress towards freedom…. The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation.” Marx cites Fourier very approvingly in The Holy Family (1845). This is one of our guidelines. But at least equally central is Engels’ important insight in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) that women’s oppression is rooted in the institution of the family, which is characteristic of all class societies. Engels explains that the first condition for the liberation of women is their integration into public industry and thus into public life, leading to “the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”
The DDR arguably constituted the most advanced society for women so far in the history of mankind. In important respects it was even more advanced than the young, revolutionary Soviet Union. While the Bolsheviks advanced a revolutionary program for women’s liberation aiming at replacing the functions of the family by socializing housework, the material poverty of the young workers state was a huge obstacle to actually putting this into practice. The DDR even at its founding, despite having emerged out of the Second World War and despite the reparations claimed by the Soviet Union, nonetheless possessed the basis for a highly industrialized society. This made a big difference.
At the end of the 1980s, over 90 percent of women in the DDR worked or were in training or ongoing education. They really had lots of economic and genuine personal independence. Women and men both acquired broad scientific training, with women working at highly skilled jobs, much more so than in the West. Among people up to 40 years old—all of whom were raised in the DDR—there were as many women as men in every form of training and education. And single mothers could be professionally active and have children because there was an extensive system of childcare facilities, often linked directly to the factories.
What made this possible in the DDR was the victory of the Red Army over Nazi Germany in 1945. The state machinery and economic power of the German bourgeoisie was smashed in the East and a state was founded based on socialized property forms—in Marxist terms, a workers state. However, this workers state was, as we Trotskyists say, deformed from the beginning because political power did not rest with the working class but with a Stalinist bureaucracy.
On the one hand, there was all this economic independence because women were active in production. But at the same time the institution of the family, which according to Engels is an institution for the oppression of women, existed in the DDR. Not only did the family exist, it was singled out and hailed. This is a contradiction that requires explanation. As Trotsky said in 1940 in regard to the Soviet Union, and is equally true of the DDR: “The workers’ state must be taken as it has emerged from the merciless laboratory of history and not as it is imagined by a ‘socialist’ professor, reflectively exploring his nose with his finger” (“Balance Sheet of the Finnish Events,” In Defense of Marxism).
The East German deformed workers state was Stalin’s “unloved child.” This was one instance of his betrayal of revolutionary opportunities in all of Europe and parts of Asia at the end of the Second World War, betrayals committed by Stalin for the sake of his agreements with his imperialist allies, the U.S. and Britain. For example, in Italy the Stalinist Communist Party made the partisans disarm and itself joined a capitalist popular-front government, thereby preventing a workers revolution and subjecting the workers to the U.S. command. In Germany, following the war the socialist aspirations of the proletariat were bureaucratically throttled. Initiatives by the workers to take over factories and towns and run them through embryonic workers councils—the anti-fascist committees—were suppressed.
The DDR and the other “people’s democracies” arising from these social transformations were deformed workers states that came into being as a defensive Soviet reaction to the imperialists’ escalating Cold War. Thus the DDR set out to build “socialism in one country” on the model of the Stalinist degenerated Soviet Union of the 1940s. The DDR bureaucracy was even willing to give it a try in half a country. This program of “socialism in one country” fundamentally contradicts Marxism, which states that socialism, as a preliminary stage to communism, must be an international social order with a material basis that transcends the bounds of even the most developed capitalist countries. To put it another way: You cannot construct socialism on the basis of material scarcity in an isolated country.
The October Revolution of 1917
Let’s go back to the program of the Bolsheviks that led the working class to victory in 1917. From the outset, their program posited that the revolution had to be extended internationally. They always saw the Russian Revolution as just the beginning of revolution on a worldwide scale, and it never even occurred to them that it could survive in isolation. Early Soviet legislation granted women wide-ranging equality and freedom that even today have not been realized by the economically most advanced “democratic” capitalist countries.
Some central characteristics: civil marriage was introduced, along with divorce at the request of either partner, and any and all laws against homosexuals were abolished. The director of the Moscow Institute for Social Hygiene reported in 1923 on the underlying principles of Soviet legislation: “It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters, so long as nobody is injured and no one’s interests are encroached upon.” And in 1920 the young Soviet Union was the very first government on earth to overturn criminalization of abortion—really and truly a gain! For the first time, women were given the right to control their own bodies and were no longer degraded into reproductive machines.
The Bolsheviks were aware of the fact that the family, along with the social functions it fulfills in class society—raising children, taking care of food and clothing, seeing to education and looking after the elderly—could not simply be abolished by decree. Trotsky spoke of the “family as a shut-in petty enterprise.” These functions have to be replaced through the socialization of housework. In the major cities of the early Soviet Union, the first steps were taken to set up facilities for socializing housework such as kindergartens, canteens and the like, but the material basis for extending them simply was not there. But the Bolsheviks in the revolutionary period of the Soviet Union told workers the truth: the liberation of women will occur once we have been able to socialize housework; at the moment we cannot simply shake this out of our shirtsleeves, but we are fighting for the extension of the revolution to the economically advanced countries—this is the way to get there!
Degeneration of the Soviet Union and Its Effects on Women
These policies of the Soviet leadership changed because the leadership changed. In 1923-24, the hopes of the Russian working class for a speedy extension of the revolution were destroyed, particularly when a great opportunity for the working class to seize power in Germany was wasted. It was the German Communist Party’s policy of looking to the Social Democratic Party and waiting for it that blew it—as well as the Communist International’s hesitancy at this point in time (for more, see “A Trotskyist Critique of Germany 1923 and the Comintern,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 56, Spring 2001). Hence this great possibility for bringing the Soviet Union out of its isolation was allowed to slide by.
With the Russian working class broadly discouraged, a conservative bureaucracy under Stalin seized political power. Its program was to settle down within the status quo, constructing “socialism in one country” and seeking peaceful coexistence with imperialism. Thus the leadership no longer sought to extend the revolution but only reacted to the pressure of imperialism. This bureaucratic layer no longer strove for the extension of the revolution to eliminate material scarcity, instead functioning as kind of a gendarme to administer the existing generalized want.
With Trotsky, we say that this constituted a political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. But the socialized property forms still existed. This is why we fought for a proletarian political revolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state and do so today in the remaining deformed workers states. This means that the imperative task is defending the social basis, the socialization of the means of production. But it is also necessary to drive out the leadership layer, this caste, and restore the entire power of the working class, including its political power. Leading the working class to this point, however, requires a revolutionary party, as in 1917.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s reactionary political line quickly became directed against women. In 1936, a new constitution was adopted that banned abortion and hailed the family as the so-called unit of socialism. In his fundamental work The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky explained the underlying mechanisms:
“Having revealed its inability to serve women who are compelled to resort to abortion with the necessary medical aid and sanitation, the state makes a sharp change of course, and takes the road of prohibition. And just as in other situations, the bureaucracy makes a virtue of necessity. One of the members of the highest Soviet court, Soltz, a specialist on matrimonial questions, bases the forthcoming prohibition of abortion on the fact that in a socialist society where there are no unemployed, etc., etc., a woman has no right to decline ‘the joys of motherhood.’ The philosophy of a priest endowed also with the powers of a gendarme.”
And so it was on the model of this Stalinized Soviet Union that the DDR was constructed.
The DDR: A Deformed Workers State from the Outset
In The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky explained the dual character of the Stalinist bureaucracy. An understanding of this is vital if you want to grasp the contradictions in the DDR’s policies toward women. The bureaucracy is a parasitic caste sitting atop the socialized means of production; it vacillates between fear of the working class and fear of imperialism, trying to maneuver between them so as to preserve its privileges. And though Trotsky’s book was written in 1936, in our intervention into the incipient political revolution in the DDR in 1989-90 we were often told it sounds like it was written about the DDR bureaucracy, as if it were an up-to-date handbook.
The proletarian 17 June 1953 uprising underlined the DDR bureaucracy’s contradictory character as a caste, rather than a class owning the means of production. With this uprising, the working class was attempting political revolution, that is, the overthrow of the leadership to gain political power while maintaining the economic foundation of the DDR. At that time, considerable sections of the Socialist Unity Party [ruling East German Stalinist party] went over to the side of the workers. One can hardly imagine a whole segment of the capitalist class going over to the side of the working class in the event of a socialist revolution! The bureaucracy was not a class but a caste, comparable to the bureaucracy in the trade unions.
Trotsky also explained in The Revolution Betrayed that the bureaucrats actually needed the family, namely for the social regimentation of the populace. Trotsky showed that families, far from being units of socialism, were units of social backwardness in which women, children and youth were held captive, an “archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death.” That was one reason the bureaucrats needed the family—as an instrument of regimentation—but they also needed it to provide the services that society was unable to provide, due to material causes. Here, of course, it is important to see that the leadership in the Soviet Union and later in the DDR generally did not have achieving this material basis as its goal, but rather constructing “socialism” within the confines of a single country.
A revolutionary leadership in the DDR would have presented an internationalist program to the working class. Like the Bolsheviks, it would have said: We want to extend the revolution, we want to expand our material basis; this cannot be done here at this point, but in the meantime we will simply do what is possible. But what is possible cannot be simply dictated by the bureaucracy. Instead, the workers, both men and women, taking the factories as their starting point, must determine the policies of the workers state through workers councils. In a struggle to construct such workers councils, a revolutionary leadership in the DDR would have based itself on the most advanced sections of the working class. That is Trotsky’s program and it’s our program as well. But of course that is just what the DDR bureaucracy did not do, since such a struggle for workers councils would have meant dissolving itself. Hence the family was pushed, presented as a fighting unit of socialism, thus reinforcing reactionary notions within society.
Over the years, kindergartens, canteens, laundries, etc. were unevenly but steadily expanded, with a significant part of these facilities directly linked to the factories. However, the DDR leadership promoted this not because they wanted to do something for women’s liberation but because it desperately needed young, well-educated women in the workforce who in return demanded that childcare be provided by society! The number of daycare slots for children up to three years jumped by leaps and bounds from a scant 4,700 in 1950 to over 50,000 in 1955.
This demonstrates the great effort to attract women into production in the early years of the DDR. There was another great leap between 1970 and 1975: from 166,000 to nearly 235,000 (Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic, 2007). This was to fulfill [Erich] Honecker’s promise to raise the living standard, which in 1975 had been termed the “unity of economic and social policies.” Honecker had replaced [Walter] Ulbricht in 1970-71 following a series of scares the bureaucracy got from working-class actions, starting with the incipient proletarian political revolutions in the DDR in 1953 and Hungary in 1956, through the 1968 “Prague Spring,” to major strikes against price hikes in Poland in 1970.
The bureaucracy talked itself into believing that under Honecker it could eliminate the DDR’s ever-worsening performance vis-à-vis West German imperialism, in regard to the economy and living standards, by running up debts to Western bankers and increasingly cutting back on investment in many areas of the economy. The result was that in 1989 only 30 percent of the country’s machines were operational at any one time, while expenditures for housing construction expanded from year to year right up to 1989. This had brought the DDR to the brink of bankruptcy in the early ’80s, temporarily averted by selling DDR-processed Soviet oil to the West. But doing this caused the efficiency of the DDR economy to collapse even further.
In 1989, there was virtually one kindergarten place available per child, and in many towns the availability of daycare slots stood at over 80 percent. But in some locations women were unwilling or outright refused to use these slots out of concern that kindergarten care was inadequate. Things were even more critical in laundries, where the clothes were damaged or washing took far too long. Trotsky explained this the following way: If workers do not really have control over and cannot determine what they produce, how they do it, how they organize it, then this will impose a sort of gray curtain of indifference upon all labor. And simultaneously this whole stuffy, backward weight of the bureaucracy enveloped society like a suffocating blanket.
Also a problem with childcare facilities was that they generally were not open around the clock. The standard time they were open was approximately 6 a.m. to 6-7 p.m. This of course made it very hard for women working shifts, leaving many women unable to take jobs they would have liked, because the childcare was not there. We are for top-quality childcare around the clock. During our intervention into the incipient political revolution in 1989-90, we often had discussions with women who saw themselves as communists but had been so deeply molded by family propaganda—this mommy propaganda that the DDR bureaucracy constantly churned out—that some were against having round-the-clock childcare, arguing that mommy really should be caring for her children in the evening. This shows how, thanks to the intervention of the bureaucracy, backward notions were preserved and became deeply ingrained in people’s minds.
It is interesting and important to see that there were very many women who wanted to be heard. They felt, OK, we’re told it’s a socialist society, so we have the right to get more of these facilities, which replace housework for us. There were many protests directed at various levels of the bureaucracy, very many letters were addressed directly to Honecker, in which a woman worker would complain roughly: “Comrade Honecker, it’s unbelievable that in the major factory where I work I’m unable to shop for groceries at lunchtime because there’s nothing in the store. You absolutely have to change this.” A very large number of proletarian women, of working women, thought they had the right to more and that they could organize it themselves, and better.
[CONTINUED – Part Two – Below – Or –https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkersVanguard/comments/8tsthx/women_and_the_east_german_deformed_workers_state/?st=jiul6otb&sh=f3c11e93 ]
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/976/women-east.html
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Women and the East German Deformed Workers State – Part 2 of 2 (Spartakist) October 2010
Workers Vanguard No. 977 1 April 2011
For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
Women and the East German Deformed Workers State
Part Two
(Part One can be found here – https://www.reddit.com/r/WorkersVanguard/comments/8tsjo8/women_and_the_east_german_deformed_workers_state/?st=jiuk0f3y&sh=5c96e913)
(Women and Revolution pages)
We print below the conclusion of this article, which was translated from Spartakist No. 185 (October 2010), published by our comrades of the Spartakist Workers Party of Germany. Part One appeared in WV No. 976 (18 March).
The Soviet Military Administration in Germany existed until November 1949, a month after the DDR [East German deformed workers state] was founded. Already in August 1946, the goal of drawing women into production—the so-called “Order 253”—had been promulgated, banning wage discrimination based on sex or age. A comparison: in West Germany such a law only came into existence ten years later. And of course under capitalism such a law—no wage discrimination—exists only on paper. Wage differentials are part and parcel of capitalism, a means of dividing the working class, particularly male and female workers. This is a fundamental component of the economic system.
Just a few days ago, there was a report in Der Spiegel with 2008 statistics showing wage differentials of over 23 percent between men and women. And simultaneously there has been a great increase in part-time work for women, who of course cannot survive on their wages but can’t work full-time, since they can’t get their children taken care of, etc. This law “against wage discrimination” has been in force in West Germany since 1956, but that signifies absolutely nothing.
Certainly, wage differences between men and women did exist in the DDR as well, but first of all they were not as shameless, since the wage range was not as wide and even the lowest wage groups had a secure living standard. It stemmed from bureaucratic misrule and was not inherent to the system. A government of workers soviets would have immediately annulled any wage differences, even if this would have meant opposing more backward elements in the working class.
Taking a look at the Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany (DFD) is instructive here. It was founded in the DDR in 1947, having originally emerged out of the anti-fascist women’s committees, i.e., out of committees that clearly in their own view—and by their very name—embraced a broader horizon. But the East German Stalinist party, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), increasingly tasked the DFD with dealing with “women’s matters.”
The DFD was affiliated with the so-called “National Front,” an attempt by the DDR bureaucracy to mimic West Germany’s “democratic” multiplicity of parties. This DDR formation contained all possible parties, from the Peasant Party to the Christian Democrats, but with the Stalinist bureaucracy setting the tone via the SED. In contrast to the situation under capitalism, this simply parodied a capitalist popular front, which always consists of a class alliance of bourgeois parties and workers parties. In the DDR, however, the bourgeoisie as a class had been overthrown and the National Front had only the appearance of a popular front.
Popular-frontist politics are a deception of the working class, politically disarming the workers by creating the illusion that they have no independent class interests and talking only about an undifferentiated “people.” Internationally this meant that the Stalinist bureaucracies cozied up to bourgeois forces. For workers following Stalinist leadership, all too often this meant deadly defeats—as in the Chinese Revolution in 1927 and the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s, to cite only a couple of examples. For Marxists, the DDR was a dictatorship of the proletariat—albeit bureaucratically deformed —that rested on socialized relations of production, since the bourgeoisie had been expropriated. Within this framework, the National Front was one part of the programmatic propaganda of the DDR bureaucracy, which did not want its working class to come up with the idea that it had its own class interests, namely running the workers state itself via workers councils.
Nonetheless, the following is interesting as a fact: In the DDR, the DFD was a mass organization. These anti-fascist committees and DFD groups had originally existed in all of Germany. In the West, an association arose out of individual state associations in 1952; it was unceremoniously banned by the German bourgeoisie in 1957.
A couple more facts comparing the situation of women in these two countries, East and West Germany. In 1965, a compendium of family law appeared in the DDR stating: “Both spouses must do their part in the education and care of their children and running the household. The relations of the spouses to each other should take such a form that the woman can reconcile her professional activity and her activity in society with motherhood.” While this meant exalting the “holy family,” it still emphasized the equal status of women. In a 1966 report, the government of West Germany set forth that: “A care-giver and comforter is what women should be; an image of modest harmony, a factor for order in the uniquely dependable private sphere; women should enter into gainful employment and social engagement only when the demands placed on them by the family permit them to do so.” In accord with this is the fact that up till 1977 a West German law stated that a wife could not get a job without her husband’s consent.
It was, of course, the socialized relations of production in the DDR that were responsible for these differences. Furthermore, an important aspect was that inheritance played no role in the DDR, since private ownership of the means of production no longer existed. After all, Engels had explained that what had originally been central to the entire institution and ideology of the family was that the husband wanted to know unambiguously: Are these my children or has my wife been playing the field? I want to bequeath solely to my children. That is the root of it.
All this simply played no role anymore in the DDR: There was nothing to bequeath, and thereby this function of the family under capitalism essentially dissolved. But the Stalinist leadership, these backward types, nonetheless kept trying to maintain the ideology of the family, attempting again and again to glue its ideological fragments together. One further aspect of the family is the regimentation of children, and this eroded as well in the DDR due to the socialized relations of production. In the DDR, since 1950 the age of majority had been set at 18; in West Germany this has been the case only since 1975!
Women’s Day was always celebrated with flowers, accompanied with calls for the husband to make his wife a super-duper breakfast on this day and generally to be very supportive, etc. Such calls only made more obvious what was generally the rule: that women had to work a second shift to keep the household going and look after the children. The DDR leadership was truly seeking to drain International Women’s Day of any trace of its being a day of struggle for the entire working class.
When protests from proletarian women over their overly heavy burden of work and the “second shift” got too loud, there were divergent reactions. On the one hand, the bureaucracy sought to make more consumer goods available to lighten the burden of housework, particularly from the early 1970s on. For example, production of family washing machines was promoted. Perhaps it would have been more rational to massively increase the number of public laundromats and equip them better. There were also widespread campaigns for the husband to do more around the house. In fact, for the husband to help in the household was far more widespread in the DDR than in the West. Since 1952, a “Household Day” had existed in the DDR—one free day per month for household chores, but typically granted only to women. Only from 1977 on was it partially accorded to men as well.
“Socialism in (Half of) One Country”
Housing was a scarce commodity in the DDR. The essential reason was that the resources to build adequate housing simply didn’t exist in this half a country, under siege by vengeance-seeking German imperialism, which was continually brooding over how to regain this territory in which it no longer had the say. It is also important to recall that after 1945 West Germany had been beefed up by U.S. imperialism. Moreover, heavy industry plus the entire Ruhr region—i.e., the center of industry—were in the West. That is an important factor.
But the Stalinist bureaucracy in the DDR was unwilling to utter this home truth, instead making a virtue of necessity. “Socialism in one country” meant that the bureaucracy wanted to produce as “autarkically” as possible. Thus 70 percent of the products available on the world market were produced in the DDR, often of poor quality and at inflated cost, while the imperialists could base themselves on a division of labor in the world market, which they dominated. Married couples had first dibs on apartments, again putting pressure on people to get married. The bureaucracy did not proceed linearly here and kept changing its procedures; officially, single mothers and unmarried couples could also lay claim to an apartment. But the feeling among young people was generally that they had greater chances if they got married, strengthening the functions of the family within society.
An important and particularly unattractive aspect of the Stalinist bureaucracies’ program of “socialism in one country”—in their own individual countries and apart from all others—is that it meant nationalism. While the DDR bureaucracy campaigned strongly for marriage and having children, this generally did not apply to contract workers from Mozambique, Cuba or Vietnam: these had no citizenship rights and were often segregated in specific residential areas. If a Vietnamese woman became pregnant, she usually had to get an abortion or return home, leave the country. This was a genuine, major, true piece of piggishness on the part of the bureaucracy. For us communists, it goes without saying, the central slogan is always “full citizenship rights for all immigrants,” as was true for the early Soviet Union: anyone who lived and worked there had citizenship rights.
Down With Paragraph 218!
The notorious [anti-abortion] Paragraph 218 constitutes an extremely important aspect of the woman and family question. This paragraph has existed since the time of Bismarck, since 1871. In the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party [KPD] was well known for its fight against Paragraph 218. There are some expressive posters, for example by Käthe Kollwitz, who for a couple of years was a member of the International Workers’ Aid, the defense organization linked to the KPD. In the Weimar Republic, the KPD repeatedly introduced motions in the Reichstag [parliament] demanding: Down with this paragraph! All were quashed.
The first alteration after 1871 occurred in 1926, through a Social Democratic Party (SPD) motion that did pass. Abortion continued to be punishable under law, both for the woman and for the person performing it, but now it was “only” punished by a jail term and not by sending the perpetrators to a high-security prison. The fact that under the Nazis the death penalty was imposed for abortion—unless it served to prevent the “reproduction of inferior racial groups”—demonstrates the power exercised by the bourgeoisie via Paragraph 218 and just how deeply it cut into people’s lives.
In 1945, the Nazi regime was smashed by the Red Army, through incredible sacrifice by the Soviet soldiers and people. After 1945, in both the East and the West, the Nazi law—i.e., the death penalty—was rescinded, but otherwise the old paragraph in the penal code was left standing. In the East, that is, in what became the DDR, this occurred with a direct reference to the legal code in the Soviet Union, where abortion had been forbidden by the 1936 Soviet constitution. In the areas under the Soviet Military Administration, the 1926 version of the paragraph was in force. Additionally, in some East German states, there was an “indication system,” requiring that certain social or medical conditions be met, e.g., citing rape. There were a couple of minor different possibilities for how a woman might get an abortion, but they still fell under criminal law.
At this time, West Germany often had even stricter penalties for abortion. But before the erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, women from the DDR went to West Berlin for abortions! The West Berlin Senate, usually in the hands of the SPD, obviously kept its eyes closed in the hope of damaging the DDR. This is such an utterly damning judgment on the Stalinists, for women to have to go to the capitalist part of Berlin for an abortion! And later women from the DDR went to Poland and Hungary for abortions: In Poland, a first-trimester law existed, while today, following capitalist counterrevolution, Poland has one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe, with ongoing attempts to ban abortion entirely. This is a result of counterrevolution. But before first-trimester abortions were permitted in the DDR, women really did go to Poland and Hungary, where abortions were more readily available, as well as better and safer.
The question of the pill is also important and interesting. In the West, Schering introduced the pill to the German market in June 1961. In the DDR, there was a lengthy research period, with the pill appearing only in 1965. But it was then distributed free of charge, which made a huge difference. In West Germany in 1965, years after the pill had already been on the market, doctors were still denouncing this “state-promoted lack of restraint.” In the DDR, Professor Mehlan was one of the pioneers of birth control. In 1965, the West German magazine Stern asked him the provocative question: Now tell us honestly—is it true that where you come from, abortion really is not murder? This is the way West Germany was in the 1960s, and even today this is far from being the unfortunate distant past. The Catholic church and other bigots continue to call abortion “murder.” In the U.S., doctors who carry out abortions have been murdered. This rests on the notion purveyed by all churches that the will of God has already endowed the fertilized egg with the “soul” of the future human being.
In general, the Stalinist leadership in the DDR wobbled on the question of abortion and the pill. On the one hand, it cited the KPD in the Weimar Republic, which had fought Paragraph 218. On the other, it pushed the institution of the family; it needed population growth and additional labor and had to attract women into production, which in turn generated problems if women had no access to rational family planning. With their conservative program, the Stalinists were reacting on the one hand to pressure from the proletariat, including proletarian women, on the other to imperialism—they were, so to speak, attempting a wall-balancing act before the Berlin Wall even existed. Here again it is important to state that we Trotskyists defended the Wall, a bureaucratic measure (after all, that’s how the bureaucracy works!) but also, however, a defensive measure to stop the DDR from being bled white of acutely needed skilled workers. Thus we defended the Wall against imperialism.
The DDR bureaucracy’s program of “peaceful coexistence” entails the rejection of workers revolution and the illusory search for “progressive” bourgeois forces in the imperialist countries. The Stalinists always thought and hoped that the SPD—the SPD in West Germany of all things!—might perhaps be an expression of such “progressive forces.” The Stalinists tended to fix their gaze on the SPD in the West the way a rabbit looks at a snake.
When first-trimester abortion was finally introduced in the DDR in 1972, it was also an attempt to trump the imperialist West and the SPD in the minds of women. For in the West in the summer of 1971, a well-known campaign had commenced with major involvement of SPD supporters: “We’ve had an abortion.” Women accused themselves of this “criminal act.” In all probability hastened by this, termination of a pregnancy in the first three months was finally allowed in the DDR. Incidentally, first-trimester abortions were introduced in West Germany in June 1974, only to be nullified the very same month by the Federal Constitutional Court on the grounds that abortion was in principle violating the constitution. Since May 1976, an “indication system” with all its contempt for humanity and with compulsory consultation, often carried out by church officials, has been the rule in West Germany. We communists fight for the unlimited right of women to free abortion on demand, with the best possible medical care!
As recently as 1988-89, a witchhunting trial took place in Memmingen, West Germany, where Dr. Theissen was hauled into court for having performed abortions—safe abortions, fine medical work. He felt that women had the right to decide for themselves. He was hauled into court and put in prison, and we intervened in his defense.
We also intervened for our position for the unconditional right to abortion in major demonstrations that took place in the former DDR following counterrevolution. These demonstrations were protesting introduction of West Germany’s “indication model,” where some guy poses inhumane questions and can judge you. These protests were for maintaining the DDR’s first-trimester laws. And they were so strong that even two years after the counterrevolution two different laws continued to exist in East and West. The bourgeoisie feared this question could spark stronger protests against the Anschluss [annexation] of the DDR. Two whole years, and then the indication system was pushed through in the former DDR as well.
DDR Bureaucracy Capitulates to SPD, Church
Twenty years after counterrevolution in the DDR, both state churches [Catholic and Protestant], whose church taxes are automatically collected by the bourgeois state, were complaining that too few people were attending church in the former DDR.
In the first years of the DDR, there was still quite a lot of support for the church, above all among women in the countryside. One of the first campaigns the church waged was for preservation of the old system of midwives, who attended families at home, and against the new state health centers. Women naturally realized the real advantages of obtaining better, more comprehensive medical treatment in a health center than a midwife could provide at home, and bit by bit the midwives were integrated into the health system. Between 1952 and 1959, in-hospital births rose from 50 to 86 percent. So the churches really lost out with this probing action. And then the churches intervened again massively over the DDR’s family legislation, namely against women in production—women had to remain with the family. This naturally did nothing for the church’s popularity, since women increasingly grasped how their participation in the production process led to more independence.
It really is a case of “being determines consciousness.” Any need for the church simply disappeared over time for women in the DDR. And then the church sought to rise up with a campaign against the first-trimester abortion law of 1971. For the first time, a considerable number of no votes and abstentions were cast in the Volkskammer [People’s Chamber, the DDR parliament] from the Christian Democratic Union, which had seats as a member of the National Front. But the forces of the church could not set the world on fire over this. Under capitalism, private ownership of the means of production, linked, as noted before, to inheritance laws and the bourgeois family, needs ideological sanctification by the church. Capitalism needs the church.
And in all class societies, this goes together with a more or less vigorous persecution of homosexuality. If private ownership of the means of production no longer exists, the church gradually loses its basis. Nobody has any use for it any longer, even though it may take years for its influence to diminish. In the DDR, this was such a long, drawn-out affair because the bureaucrats were hailing the family, thereby implicitly providing ammunition to the church! This glorification of the family in the DDR also brought with it ongoing, greater and lesser harassment of homosexuals, but there was a clear difference with the West and also with the East European states after counterrevolution: In the DDR there were no right-wing or Nazi bands roaming the streets terrorizing, for example, gay bars. There was some harassment, but it was really different from capitalism.
Then, in truly grotesque fashion, from the mid to late 1980s the DDR bureaucracy proceeded to provide ammunition to the church, which had basically been on its last legs with meager support—64 percent of the population did not belong to any denomination—through stupefying bureaucratic repression of all the dissatisfaction that was bubbling to the surface of society. In particular, the Protestant church, which was supported by the West German SPD right down to its last hymnal, made its “free zones” available for discussion and so was able to gain ground. While the Stalinist bureaucrats were rather hard on opponents from the left, they were oh-so-accommodating when it came to the rights and the “free zones” of the church. That’s just grotesque: they assisted the church in becoming a factor in people’s consciousness.
Drawing the Lessons: We Communists Are the Memory of the Working Class
From the outset, there were countless men and women of every age in the DDR who consciously devoted themselves to “constructing socialism,” to the extent that they understood it, even if their consciousness was often distorted. Literature, particularly from the first years of the DDR, shows people who were euphoric over the real possibilities for women and men that had suddenly become available to them, possibilities that their parents, especially their mothers, never had! In the 1960s, for example, many artists and writers sought to bring “art to the working class” and the working class to art—the “Bitterfeld Way”—with slogans like “Reach for the Pen, Mate!” or, conversely, “Writers into Production!” Even if these were in part official slogans of the DDR bureaucracy, they were often seized upon enthusiastically. There were loads of women—Brigitte Reimann, Christa Wolf, Maxi Wander, many others—who wrote very interesting stuff about the situation of women, both in the early years, in the midst of this setting off for new horizons, and afterward. It’s fascinating to read about this.
The proportion of women in the lower- and middle-functionary level in the SED and the state was quite high, among the people who actually kept things going and organized things. But the higher you went in the DDR hierarchy, in the Central Committee or the like, the fewer women there were. The essential reason was that most women in the DDR had a family and children and hence a “second shift” that rested on them like a heavy yoke, so that they simply lacked the energy to fight their way upward. The ossified DDR bureaucrats at the top also emphasized, consciously, the important role of the “mommy.” In the program of the Stalinists, the special oppression of women, which would have had to be fought through socializing housework, simply did not exist.
But the answer did not lie in making feminism palatable to the DDR bureaucracy, as suggested by West and East German feminists alike. The answer lay in counterposing a revolutionary Trotskyist program to the politically reactionary program of “socialism in one country.” This is what Trotsky did and what we did in 1989-90. In January 1990, there was a giant pro-socialist, pro-Soviet demonstration in Berlin against a Nazi desecration of the Treptow memorial to the Red Army. At this giant demonstration of 250,000, which we had initiated, our comrades stood on the speakers platform, and for the first time in all those decades it was possible for Trotskyists to deliver a speech before a mass public in a deformed workers state. We called for the defense of the DDR and Soviet Union, for a new, revolutionary party, for political revolution and for the extension of the revolution to the West.
On the other hand, look at the programmatic spirit that permeated the Stalinist bureaucracy. It was not during the counterrevolution that this manifested itself for the first time in the DDR, though at that point it became crystal-clear. The SED renamed itself the SED-PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism], later just the PDS. And once Mikhail Gorbachev had given the green light to capitalist reunification in the name of the Soviet bureaucracy, Hans Modrow, speaking for the SED-PDS, promulgated the slogan “Germany, united fatherland.” These Stalinist bureaucrats, who called themselves the leadership of the working class and who were seen by many DDR workers as such, suddenly told the workers that the sole possibility was capitalist Anschluss to West Germany.
This was not a sudden, panicked transformation; there was a whole history of this. For example, already in 1987 a joint declaration of the SPD and SED was published under the charming title “The Contest of Ideologies and Joint Security,” in which the Stalinists simply crawled on their bellies before the SPD, pledging not to doubt imperialism’s will for peace and foreswearing the “process of world revolution.” Of course, they had already done this decades before, but now they put it down in writing again, emphatically. All of this was a prelude to Gorbachev’s withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in the spring of 1989, leaving women in particular defenseless before the mujahedin, who had been financed by the CIA and imperialism. When the Soviet Army marched in, we said: “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan—Extend the gains of October to the Afghan peoples!” The woman question was an especially important aspect of our position. Gorbachev’s withdrawal was a criminal betrayal.
Today, the remnants of the PDS are in the Left Party, which constitutes the second reformist mass party in this country—in Lenin’s words, a bourgeois workers party. They are laboring alongside the SPD to chain the German working class to its imperialist exploiters by telling them that there is no alternative to capitalism.
Counterrevolution in the DDR, in the Soviet Union, in the East European deformed workers states hit women especially hard. This is something we have always emphasized. In the DDR, it particularly hit women with jobs in industry, which has been destroyed by an imperialist campaign of vengeance. The number of people who cannot find work and are today forced to survive on inhumanly low Hartz IV unemployment payments is particularly high in the former DDR, and it is single mothers who are especially hard-hit.
Now as before, we Trotskyists call for unconditional military defense of the states where capitalism no longer exists: today China, Vietnam, North Korea and Cuba. These deformed workers states represent a conquest for the entire working class worldwide. Our program is for the working class—men and women—to sweep out the bureaucrats through political revolution and return to the road and program of the October Revolution. In capitalist countries, the bourgeoisie must be expropriated by socialist revolution. It is with this aim in mind that we are building our international party. We are the memory of the working class. We must carry this forward. We want to draw the lessons and learn from them, to prepare ourselves for victories. Women’s liberation through socialist revolution!
http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/977/women-east.html
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One Hour of East German Communist Music – DDR
Books From My Bed – 3 Aug 2021
Iraq: Christian From Mosul Who Survived Nightmare of “The Islamic State” Wins Miss Iraq Pageant
How U.S. revolutionaries can survive and overcome the looming anti-communist extermination campaign – by Rainer Shea – 2 Aug 2021
If you’re in the United States, and your goal is to assist with the anti-colonial proletarian revolution on this continent, you automatically have a target on your back. The biggest target that any political group in this country can have, because the imperialists and the bourgeoisie fear communism and decolonial liberation more than anything else. We’re in the heart of the beast of global imperialism, up against a state that tracks every digital communication and statement we make and that could send in the world’s most powerful military to try to crush us. This is why we can only win by outsmarting the repressive state, which will lead to us having to outsmart the state’s military forces.
Those within our revolutionary cadres need to view their task as a David and Goliath fight, where one side can only achieve victory by finding the very specific tactical routes towards the defeat of an enemy that’s immeasurably more equipped. To succeed in this, we must look at the very most extreme cases of counterrevolutionary warfare. In Nazi Germany, the rate of communists who were killed was almost 100%. In the U.S.-backed Indonesian massacres of the 1960s, a million people were killed as part of a campaign to exterminate all communists and all potentially associated with communism. Colombia’s political genocide against communists killed more than 6,000 through murders, forced displacement, torture, disappearances, and other atrocities. And this genocide took place mainly after Operation Condor, the U.S.-orchestrated political repression campaign across Latin America where 50,000 were killed, 30,000 were disappeared, and 400,000 were imprisoned.
In Indonesia, communist organizing is still nonexistent due to the political genocide, and due to the ongoing ban on the public expression of Marxist-Leninist ideas. And as is the case for the mass political killings under Latin America’s U.S.-installed dictatorships, Indonesia’s Nazi-esque repressive campaign has provided a blueprint for the U.S. empire’s broader anti-communist extermination campaigns. Campaigns which will absolutely be brought into U.S. borders when the class struggle here intensifies enough.
It’s only a matter of time before Indonesia’s underground elements of class consciousness turn into a renewed communist movement, since the accelerating inequality within the country and the looming climate crisis are making this the only route the Indonesian masses have towards survival. But we can’t afford to neglect our task of outmaneuvering the inevitable U.S. anti-communist extermination campaign; the fact that capitalism’s collapse is inevitable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t treat the repressive forces of capital with utmost seriousness, because we’ve seen what these forces are capable of. It’s our responsibility to do all we can to survive, however big the dangers we face. And we can do this by adopting the methods that anti-imperialists abroad are currently taking to evade defeat by the U.S. military, and by Washington’s partnered regimes.
Yemen’s Houthi resistance fighters are one of these examples we need to learn from. In their fight against the genocidal U.S./Saudi coalition, they’ve found a way to keep a guerrilla force alive — and even make it increasingly victorious — in the era of modern digital surveillance. As researcher Michael Horton wrote this year, frequent mobility is crucial to the ongoing existence of the Houthis:
Force mobility has been — and remains — fundamental to the Houthis’ success in battling elements of the Saudi and Emirati militaries as well as those forces they support. These forces include Yemen’s internationally recognized government-in-exile, led by President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, which is allied with Saudi Arabia, and a panoply of militias and armed groups supported by the UAE. The Houthis understand and readily apply what Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley explained in 2016, “on the future battlefield, if you stay in one place longer than two or three hours, you will be dead.” [4] General Milley made his comments in light of the widespread use of drones and other rapidly developing battlefield technologies…In response to what, at times, has been persistent aerial surveillance, the Houthis make extensive use of highly mobile small combat units. These units are critical to the Houthis’ ability to defend territory, harass enemy forces, and plan and launch offensives. The combat units most often consist of no more than 20 men — roughly equivalent to a squad or specialized platoon — who rely on two or three light trucks and/or technicals. These trucks and/or technicals are easy to disguise and traverse Yemen’s worst roads and tracks.
This means that when the moment of revolutionary crisis arrives, and the anti-communist purges begin, we’ll need to flee. Not outside of U.S. borders, but towards safe routes within the country that we’ve devised in anticipation of the extermination campaign. I say “safe routes” instead of “safehouses” because while safehouses will be sufficient for some movement members, we all must prepare for scenarios where we’re on the run from a military that can track us down through drones, satellites, and surveillance towers. This applies both to those who will have to operate in the wilderness, and those who will be cornered in the cities that the military is trying to retain control over; the difference is that the latter contingent will have a more compact set of options for where to flee. We must study the geography in our regions, arrange for refuges and backup refuges, and figure out how our cadre members will have to proceed in the event of a Nazi-esque purge.
If this sounds absurd, know that multiple U.S. military documents from recent years have predicted that the military will be called in to suppress class revolts in the coming decades, with one saying the Army must prepare for “contemporary Stalingrads” on U.S. soil and another describing such a scenario as “unavoidable.” Plus, this vision of the revolutionaries in this country having to fight off a siege from the government is something that the most forward-thinking radical organizations have been seriously considering and preparing for. Last year, the Indigenous Anarchist Federation put forth a guide to secure radio communications equipment that they recommend revolutionary cadres here assemble, under the following rationale:
Cell phones and the internet rely on corporate infrastructure and is subject to both government surveillance and service denial. What do we do when social media bans anti-capitalists and anti-colonialists? What do we do when our cell phones fully become monitoring devices we willingly keep by our side, all to the benefit of state intelligence services? What happens when our cell phone numbers are blocked from service? How will the revolutionaries continue to communicate locally, regionally, and internationally? These are the questions that have been left in the dust, forgotten or ignored in favor of more romantic visions of armed struggle. People forget; no struggle has ever been successful without robust communication networks that are not subject to state control.
The IAF also has guides to the firearms, ballistic protective equipment, and trauma medical gear that we’re going to need to acquire if we stand a chance at staying alive. Cots, life straws, and camping equipment will also be useful in the kinds of scenarios the IAF is anticipating. And that’s aside from the training in arms, martial arts, wilderness survival, and medicine which we’ll need to get to be able to properly use these tools. An Army-level fitness regimen and diet are also important. Joining a revolutionary cadre means committing to whatever the circumstances are going to demand of you, which may be a role that’s as austere and laborious as the roles of those who are currently resisting imperialism through unconventional warfare.
And even all of this preparation will lead us to the fate of the Indonesian communists if we make the mistake of adventurism, of rushing into conflict when the masses aren’t yet ready. We must proceed according to the rules for revolution described by Che Guevara:
During the development of armed struggle, there are two moments of extreme danger for the future of the revolution. The first of these arises in the preparatory stage and the way it is dealt with will give the measure of determination to struggle as well as clarity of purpose of the people’s forces. When the bourgeois state advances against the people’s positions, obviously there must arise a process of defense against the enemy who at this point, being superior, attacks. If the basic subjective and objective conditions are ripe, the defense must be armed so that the popular forces will not merely become recipients of the enemy’s blows. Nor should the armed defense camp be allowed to be transformed into the refuge of the pursued. The guerrilla army, the defensive movement of the people, at a given moment carries within itself the capacity to attack the enemy and must develop this constantly. This capacity is what determines, with the passing of time, the catalytic character of the people’s forces. That is, guerrilla warfare is not passive self-defense; it is defense with attack. From the moment we recognize it as such, it has as its final goal the conquest of political power.
[Editor’s Note: When the man who assassinated Trotsky was released from a prison sentence in Mexico he flew to Cuba and was greeted warmly at the airport by Che. Trotsky organized the Red Army and looked to the working class in the cities to build a revolutionary movement. Guevara ignored workers and looked to the peasant farmers of the countryside as a revolutionary force in South America. Guevara was easily captured and killed in a commando adventure in the jungles. A heroic misguided Stalinist. ]
Which brings me to another example of guerrilla resistance to imperialism that we can learn from: Colombia’s new revolutionary insurgency. This insurgency has been gaining territory from the fascist Colombian government, and it’s been doing this by not just being militarily equipped but by modeling itself in a way which accommodates the masses. The insurgency’s guiding organization Segunda Marquetalia isn’t merely a peasant organization, but an institution which represents all oppressed classes, rural and urban. In other words, it’s followed Che’s advice about making decisions based on the material conditions.
So it’s been able to provide tangible improvements in living conditions for the people under its jurisdiction, making these people reward it with their backing. Such is the reward that we’ll get — ultimately on a continent-wide scale — if we make the right maneuvers. The sacrifices we’ll make are necessary for the liberation of this land from colonialism, and from colonialism’s destructive byproduct capitalism.
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Washington’s Weeping Policemen – “They made me cry”
Wayward Tunisia – Street Graffiti Slide Show
Biden Agonistes
Who Runs Hollywood? C’mon – by Joel Steindec (LA Times) 2008
Who runs Hollywood? C’mon
BY JOEL STEINDEC. 19, 2008 12 AM PT
I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.
How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.
The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)
The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.ADVERTISING
As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day.
So I’ve taken it upon myself to re-convince America that Jews run Hollywood by launching a public relations campaign, because that’s what we do best. I’m weighing several slogans, including: “Hollywood: More Jewish than ever!”; “Hollywood: From the people who brought you the Bible”; and “Hollywood: If you enjoy TV and movies, then you probably like Jews after all.”
I called ADL Chairman Abe Foxman, who was in Santiago, Chile, where, he told me to my dismay, he was not hunting Nazis. He dismissed my whole proposition, saying that the number of people who think Jews run Hollywood is still too high. The ADL poll, he pointed out, showed that 59% of Americans think Hollywood execs “do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans,” and 43% think the entertainment industry is waging an organized campaign to “weaken the influence of religious values in this country.”
That’s a sinister canard, Foxman said. “It means they think Jews meet at Canter’s Deli on Friday mornings to decide what’s best for the Jews.” Foxman’s argument made me rethink: I have to eat at Canter’s more often.PAID CONTENT
“That’s a very dangerous phrase, ‘Jews control Hollywood.’ What is true is that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood,” he said. Instead of “control,” Foxman would prefer people say that many executives in the industry “happen to be Jewish,” as in “all eight major film studios are run by men who happen to be Jewish.”
But Foxman said he is proud of the accomplishments of American Jews. “I think Jews are disproportionately represented in the creative industry. They’re disproportionate as lawyers and probably medicine here as well,” he said. He argues that this does not mean that Jews make pro-Jewish movies any more than they do pro-Jewish surgery. Though other countries, I’ve noticed, aren’t so big on circumcision.
I appreciate Foxman’s concerns. And maybe my life spent in a New Jersey-New York/Bay Area-L.A. pro-Semitic cocoon has left me naive. But I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.
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What God Told Trump Before Leaving Office Will Bore You To Death
Same Old Same Old – Straighten Up and Fly Right – Do As I Say, Not As I Do – I’m God, I’m Perfect, You’re A Sinner – Et Cetera
xenagoguevicene 
