House Sergeant-at-Arms ordered security barricades moved the day before January 6 attack on the Capitol

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/23/coup-a23.html




Jacob Crosse
13 hours ago







During a House Administration Committee hearing on Wednesday, it was revealed that those attacking the Capitol on January 6 were aided by what were described as “illogical” security decisions from then House Sergeant at Arms (SAA) Paul Irving.

The revelation came in the course of a question-and-answer session between the ranking Republican on the committee, Rodney Davis of Illinois, and Capitol Police Inspector General Michael Bolton. Davis told Bolton that an email was uncovered “this week” that revealed, “a US Capitol Police directive initiated by then House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving to the Architect of the Capitol sent on January 5.”

US Capitol Police at The Supreme Court (Lorie Shaull/Wikimedia Commons)

Davis said the email from Irving asked the Architect of the Capitol, J. Brett Blanton, “to move approximately 500 bike racks serving as security barricades away from 1st Street Northeast and Constitution Avenue to the east front.”

Davis asked Bolton if he was aware of this extraordinary request, to which Bolton replied that he was not aware and that he had not “delved into that.”

Davis continued his line of questioning, stating that, “this week we’ve uncovered emails from the Architect of the Capitol where it is clear that this was directed by the House sergeant at arms against the legitimate security concerns from the AOC [architect of Capitol] where the AOC Blanton called it ‘illogical.’”

“This is yet another example of the dysfunction of the security decision-making process of the Capitol Police Board,” Davis added.

This is a stunning revelation. Irving demanded that security barriers be repositioned less than 24 hours before a mob of Trump supporters and fascists would descend on the Capitol from the very direction where the barriers were removed. There is no innocent explanation. It adds further evidence of the active role of highly placed security officials in facilitating the security stand-down of the Capitol in support of Trump’s coup attempt.

The email recalls similar memos issued by highly placed officials in the Department of Defense to District of Columbia Guard Commander William Walker, in the days leading up to the coup, which effectively prevented Walker from deploying his troops. In both cases the effect of the “unusual” (Walker) and “illogical” (Blanton) requests was to clear a path for Trump’s mob to attack Congress.

The day of the attack the Capitol Police Board was comprised of Irving, Blanton, Steven Sund, then Capitol Police chief, and then Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Michael Stenger. The board oversees the Capitol Police and has final say over security matters, including when to declare an emergency and request National Guard support. After the attack, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi requested the resignation of Sund and Irving; Stenger also resigned after Senate leaders of both parties demanded it.

In congressional testimony in February, Sund alleged that the Police Board had prevented him from seeking National Guard support prior to the attack. Sund alleged that the Police Board denied his request for Guard support on January 4 and delayed subsequent requests the day of the attack.

Sund testified that he had spoken to Irving specifically on January 6, and requested he declare an emergency and request Guard support at 1:09 p.m. Sund’s request would not be honored by the Police Board until 2:10 p.m. However, further delays at the Pentagon meant that Gen. Walker would not be granted permission to deploy his soldiers until 5:09 p.m., well after the worst of the siege had ended and Trump’s objectives failed.

During the February 23 hearing, Irving disputed Sund’s timeline and alleged that he did not receive a call from Sund until “around 1:28, 1:30.” In a follow-up hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, acting Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman confirmed through telephone records that Sund actually first called and spoke to Irving to request Guard support at 12:58 p.m. the day of the attack.

In another revelation further implicating the Capitol Police leadership in facilitating the attack on the Capitol, Committee Chair Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat, alleged that radio communications made during the morning of January 6 by an unnamed Capitol Police officer, recently found by the Office of Professional Responsibility, advised “all outside units’” to not look “for any pro-Trump in the crowd.” Instead the voice said, “We’re only looking for any anti-Trump who wants to start a fight.”

Lofgren did not identify the Capitol Police officer who issued the directive. Neither the Capitol Police nor Congress have released audio of the broadcast despite requests to do so from major media organizations.

The Capitol Police department, which has yet to hold a public news conference since the attempted coup over three months ago, issued a statement on Thursday attempting to refute Lofgren’s allegation, stating that the radio call, “has been misquoted and is lacking … necessary context.”

In their statement, the department included what it says is the transcript of the broadcast, which reads: “With regards to pedestrian traffic on—on the grounds today, we anticipate a—a large presence for pro-Trump participants. What we’re looking for is any anti-Trump counter protesters,” the transcript reads, according to the Capitol Police statement.

As the Capitol Police department’s own statement makes clear, the police were looking for “any anti-Trump counter protesters.” This is despite the fact that the department’s own intelligence report issued on January 3 warned that unlike previous “Make America Great Again” rallies held in November and December in D.C., the pro-Trump mob assembled on January 6, comprised of fascist militias and white supremacists, would be targeting “Congress,” not antifa or anti-Trump protesters. The intelligence report even said that those gathered on January 6 saw the stopping of the congressional certification of the Electoral College vote as “the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election.”

The latest revelations come on top of a mountain of evidence of state complicity in the attempted coup that was revealed during last week’s House Administration Committee hearing. It was revealed that:

• Capitol Police were directed by at least one “assistant deputy chief of police” not to use “heavier” crowd-control devices, such as 40 mm launchers or sting ball grenades, out of concern that their misuse could cause “life-altering injury and/or death.”

• Rank-and-file police were not briefed on intelligence reports that warned that “Congress itself” would be the target on January 6.

• Capitol Police were woefully unprepared for the crowd. Inspector General Bolton found that unlike previous protests, Capitol Police failed to preposition ammunition caches within the Capitol or set-up a “decontamination area” for officers who were attacked with chemicals.

• The Capitol Police’s equivalent of “riot police,” the Civil Disturbance Unit, did not have access to riot shields which were apparently locked on a bus.

The latest revelations conclusively demonstrate that the attack on the Capitol on January 6 was not simply an “intelligence failure” compounded by unprepared police and exuberant Trump supporters duped by Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election. It was a deliberate attempt to stop the certification of electoral votes, seize hostages and maintain Trump in power as a dictator-president.

The growing evidence of the complicity of elements of the state with Trump’s coup has been met with deafening silence in the corporate media, which has reported very little from the House Administration Committee hearings. Nor have the Democrats who run the committee sought to highlight this evidence or draw public attention to it.

UAW works to sell out New York University strike before it starts

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/23/asop-a23.html




International Youth and Students for Social Equality at New York University
11 hours ago







The IYSSE at NYU will be hosting a meeting, “A socialist perspective for Columbia and NYU graduate students,” on Wednesday, April 27, at 7 p.m. We encourage graduate students, undergraduates and workers from the New York City area to attend.

More than 2,000 graduate student workers at New York University (NYU) are preparing to go on strike on Monday for living wages, proper health care coverage, safe working conditions, adequate child care benefits, and the demand “NYPD off campus.” Two weeks ago, over 96 percent of the members of the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) at NYU, which is affiliated with the UAW, voted in favor of a strike.

A sharp warning must be made: Before the strike has even begun, the UAW is doing everything to sell it out. During 10 months of negotiations, NYU has done nothing but stonewall workers’ demands while the GSOC has worked to prevent a strike, making ever-greater concessions to the university and repeatedly extending the 2015 contract that includes a “no-strike clause.”

New York University campus in Manhattan (Photo: nyu.edu)

Since the strike authorization vote, the GSOC has stepped up its efforts to create conditions that would allow them to call off any strike action at the last minute. The GSOC has made significant concessions to the university, including further lowering wage demands from $38 per hour to $32 per hour and lowering remission on combined tuition for working Masters students from 100 percent to 40 percent.

The lowering of these demands went against votes by the membership last week, and had not been communicated to GSOC members until after the proposals were presented to NYU.

The president of GSOC Local 2110, which also includes Columbia graduate workers, is Maida Rosenstein. Rosenstein spoke to the Bargaining Committee (BC) and a small group of rank-and-file workers between bargaining sessions with the university on Thursday. In the discussion, she strongly advocated for further lowering demands on compensation, stressing that $32 was “unrealistic.” She also peddled the lie that a strike by graduate workers could harm lower-paid workers at the university, actively discouraging graduate students from going on strike.

Then, after a whole day of bargaining, the BC offered to be “available” for further negotiations with NYU all weekend. There is a real danger that the strike will be called off at the last minute, with none of the major demands by graduate students met.

The experience of the strike at Columbia University offers important lessons for NYU graduate students and places the question of leadership front and center. The same UAW Local 2110 that the GSOC is affiliated with is working to shut down the strike of more than 3,000 graduate workers at Columbia University, just six miles north of the NYU campus. The UAW has kept the strike hidden from its nearly 400,000 members and has facilitated economic blackmail against the strikers by issuing a measly $275 a week in strike pay, despite sitting on a strike fund of almost $800 million. Rosenstein, the local president, has explicitly opposed uniting the Columbia University graduate workers’ strike with the strike at NYU.

As the strike was gaining momentum in its third week, the Bargaining Committee for the Graduate Workers of Columbia (GWC) agreed to a strike “pause,” against the will of the rank-and-file. On Monday, a week before the NYU strike deadline, the GWC BC agreed to a tentative contract with the university that imposes a de facto pay cut in the first year and does not come close to meeting any of the original demands advanced by graduate workers. The tentative contract includes a “no-strike clause” and guarantees the deduction of 2 percent of workers’ wages for union dues payments to the UAW.

The Columbia strike clearly demonstrates that not one step forward can be taken while graduate workers are tied to the trade unions. The UAW is one of the most prominent examples of the degeneration of the trade unions over the last 40 years. Although originally formed by left-wing workers during the semi-insurrectionary class battles of the Great Depression that won significant gains for auto workers, the UAW ceased to be a workers’ organization decades ago.

With globalization, the rise of transnational corporations, and the ever-deepening crisis of US capitalism over the last 50 years, the trade unions, based on a national program and tied to the capitalist nation-state, have become integrated into corporate management and the state apparatus. Since the late 1970s, they have worked together with the ruling class to strangle workers’ struggles, increase profits, and line the pockets of a small layer of union executives.

Over the last year, the UAW has obediently carried out the dictates of the ruling class by keeping workers in contaminated factories and workplaces amid the pandemic to ensure the continued production of profits. For these services rendered, it has received an enormous payoff.

After over four decades of betrayals, large sections of workers no longer see a way forward within these rotten organizations and are entering into a rebellion against the unions. The rejection of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) by workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, plant two weeks ago sharply exposed the extent of workers’ alienation from these organizations.

At Columbia University, anger within the rank-and-file about the blatant union betrayal is running high. A significant section of Columbia graduate workers are organizing to stop the union from ramming through the sellout contract.

However, the experience of all previous struggles—including the Columbia strike itself—shows that militancy from the rank-and-file alone is not enough. What is urgently required is a political perspective and new organizations.

The struggle of graduate workers will not succeed outside of the development of a political leadership oriented toward the struggles of the entire working class for its social rights. Fundamentally, this requires a socialist perspective and an understanding that, implicitly, what is involved is a struggle against the capitalist system.

When workers at NYU and Columbia enter into a fight against their universities, they are battling the powerful forces of Wall Street, the state and the Democratic Party. Both schools embody the subordination of academia to private profit and the state. NYU and Columbia are run by a collection of Wall Street and Democratic Party operatives and maintain deep ties to US imperialism.

Over the last month, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth and student wing of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), has powerfully intervened in the Columbia graduate strike. Basing itself on a Marxist perspective, the IYSSE has consistently warned of and exposed the treachery of the UAW. We have fought for the expansion of the strike to other campuses and, most importantly, into the broad sections of the working class in New York City and beyond that are now entering into struggle.

To take the control of these strikes out of the hands of the unions, we are calling for the formation of rank-and-file committees. In New York, across the US and internationally, such committees have already been formed among teachers as well as auto and Amazon workers. They are completely independent from the unions and the Democratic Party and answer to workers only. They advance demands based not on what the universities and corporations claim is “affordable” but what workers need.

Significant layers of graduate students, workers and undergraduates in New York have followed this coverage and our exposures. We now call upon all those who agree with this perspective to contact us, join the IYSSE, and take up the fight for socialism!

India ravaged by COVID-19 pandemic—a global catastrophe

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/23/pers-a23.html




Keith Jones
11 hours ago







India is now being ravaged by a tsunami of COVID-19 cases and deaths. This surge threatens to dwarf anything yet seen in a global pandemic that has already officially infected 145 million people and killed almost 3.1 million.

Yesterday India reported a single-day world record of 314,644 new COVID-19 cases, bringing the country’s total new infections since Monday to well over 1.1 million and an Indian record of 2,104 deaths.

People receive the COVAXIN vaccine for COVID-19 as others wait at an indoor stadium in Gauhati, India, Thursday, April 22, 2021. (AP Photo/Anupam Nath)

Both the infection and death totals are undoubtedly gross undercounts. Death and cremation statistics tabulated by journalists and health experts reveal a vast discrepancy between the actual number of fatalities and the official numbers provided by government officials. A Financial Times study of seven of India’s 718 districts concluded that the true death count could be 10 times higher than what is being officially reported.

Chilling reports are emerging from across the country of crematoriums and cemeteries engulfed by corpses. In Bhopal, India’s 16th largest city, crematoriums are said to be operating at their highest levels since the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak disaster, which killed more than 2,200 people in its first hours. In the western state of Gujarat, where crematoriums have been working 24 hours nonstop, their metal supports have reportedly begun to melt.

India’s ramshackle health care system is collapsing, as chronically understaffed hospitals run out of beds, oxygen, and anti-COVID 19 drugs like Remdesivir. News reports from Delhi and Mumbai, respectively the capital and financial centre, show crowds of COVID-19 victims and their relatives outside hospitals clamouring for help, only to be told none is available.

Yet India’s government and ruling elite are utterly indifferent and impervious to this mass suffering and death.

Prioritising corporate profits over working people’s health and lives, India’s national and state governments have adamantly refused to order a lockdown as COVID-19 infections cases rose with ever increasing speed for the past two months.

In an address to the nation Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed India must be “saved” not from the pandemic but from a lockdown aimed at halting the virus’s advance and saving lives! “In today’s situation, we have to save the country from lockdown,” he declared. He then went on to urge state governments to similarly forswear lockdowns.

Dire and harrowing as is the current situation, all evidence suggests that infections and deaths will continue to grow exponentially for weeks, even months, to come.

In the two weeks since April 8, the number of active cases in India rose more than 250 percent, from 910,000 to almost 2.3 million. This surge is being fueled by new, more infectious and lethal variants, including a “double-mutant” strain first identified in India that combines mutations in two different “variants of concern.”

All but a tiny fraction of the population remain at risk of infection. Just 8.4 percent of Indians have received a first vaccine dose, and only 1.4 percent are fully inoculated.

Moreover, hundreds of millions are desperately poor and malnourished, lack ready access to clean water, and live in one-room dwellings, meaning they cannot implement social distancing measures and, in many cases, are already in compromised health. If, as has been tragically demonstrated in recent days, hospitals in the country’s largest cities are being overwhelmed, the situation remains bleaker still in the large swaths of rural India, where public health facilities are all but nonexistent.

The catastrophe in India, it must be emphasized, is a global catastrophe in the face of a virus that respects no national borders and needs no passport. The decision of the world’s governments, led by the United States and the other imperialist powers, to abandon any systematic effort to halt the spread of the pandemic has created conditions in which COVID-19 has been able to mutate and develop more virulent, potentially vaccine-resistant strains. Unless and until there is a coordinated global, science-based effort to eradicate COVID-19 predicated on protecting people’s lives, not capitalist profit, this process will continue. Sparks from the current pandemic wildfire in India will cause blazes around the world. Indeed, cases of the Indian double-mutant variant are now being reported in North America, Europe and the Middle East.

Furthermore, in a reactionary, panicked response to the disaster produced by its own actions, India, a major supplier of generic drugs and vaccines to middle- and low-income countries, has stopped the export of COVID-19 vaccines.

What stands in the way of mobilizing the world’s resources to fight the pandemic are the profit and predatory geopolitical interests of the rival national-based capitalist cliques.

Take the case of India. Not just Modi and his far-right Hindu supremacist BJP are responsible for the mass death that now stalks the world’s second most populous country. The entire ruling class and political establishment are responsible.

For decades, the Indian state, whether under governments led by the BJP or Congress Party, has spent a derisory 1.5 percent of GDP on health care. Although the World Health Organization, among many others, pointed to India’s great vulnerability in the face of COVID-19, due to its mass poverty and derelict heath care system, the Modi government took no substantive measures to fight the pandemic for the first two and a half months of 2020. Then on March 25, with no foreplanning and less than four hours’ notice, it imposed a calamitous nationwide lockdown that failed by every measure. Failed because it was not accompanied by mass testing and contact tracing, a vast infusion of resources into the health care system, and the provision of social support to the hundreds of millions whom the lockdown deprived of their livelihoods overnight.

Subsequently, spearheaded by the Modi government, but with the support of the state governments whether led by the BJP or the ostensible opposition parties, India embraced a policy of “herd immunity.” Beginning at the end of April, the government started “reopening” its economy and this continued, with one measure after another jettisoned over the next six months as infections and deaths soared.

Giving voice to the mindset of the ruling elite, Modi government health advisor and epidemiologist Jayaprakash Muliyi blithely declared that given the immense size of the country’s population, mass deaths on a scale not seen outside the world wars of the last century would be acceptable. “With a substantial opening up of the lockdown, India may see at least two million deaths,” said Muliyi. “Mortality is low, let the young go out and work.”

As India’s COVID-19 “second wave” gathered strength in late February and March, the political establishment in unison declaimed against lockdown measures. Taking their cue from Modi, they pronounced India’s supposedly “world-beating” vaccination campaign as the answer to the pandemic. In this they were acting at the behest of big business, whose media voices like the Times of India have been churning out editorial after editorial denouncing “lockdowns” as “unaffordable.”

To further this mercenary campaign, they have cynically pointed to the hundreds of millions whose livelihoods have been devastated by the pandemic. A recently published Pew Research study found the number of Indians earning less than 150 rupees per day (US $2) more than doubled during the pandemic’s first wave to 135 million, and that 32 million more had seen their income fall below $10 per day.

For the political and ideological representatives of the ruling class, it is, of course, unthinkable that even a fraction of the fortunes of India’s billionaires—which, according to Forbes, nearly doubled to $596 billion in 2020—be seized to provide social support to the population while the spread of the pandemic is halted.

The “open” economy, “herd immunity” policy of the Modi government is the cutting edge of an intensified assault on the working class and rural masses. In the name of reviving the economy, Modi has introduced a raft of “pro-investor” measures. These include a fire sale of public sector enterprises, a pro-agribusiness reform of farm laws, and changes to the labor code to further expand precarious contract employment, empower large employers to fire workers at will and outlaw most strikes.

At the same time, the BJP government has further integrated India into US imperialism’s war drive against China, through the US-led Quad, and a growing web of bilateral and trilateral strategic ties with Washington’s principal Asia-Pacific allies, Japan and Australia. This is both to strengthen the India capitalist elite’s hand against the working class and pursue its own great power ambitions.

This class war assault and the Modi government’s attempt to whip up communalism so as to divide the working class are encountering mass opposition. Strikes and protests have erupted across the country against speedup, poverty wages and the lack of PPE (personal protective equipment). Tens of millions joined a one-day nationwide strike last November 26 to oppose the government’s pro-investor reforms and demand emergency support for the hundreds of millions whose incomes have been slashed by the pandemic. And for the past five months hundreds of thousands of farmers have been camped on the outskirts of Delhi to demand the repeal of Modi’s farm laws.

But as everywhere the striving of the working class to assert its class interests is immediately blocked by the organizations that claim to speak in its name: the procapitalist trade unions and the establishment left parties. Under conditions of the eruption of the greatest crisis of world capitalism since the Great Depression of 1930s the twin Stalinist parties—the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India—have cemented their political alliance with the Congress Party. The traditional governing party of the Indian bourgeoisie, the Congress Party has focused much of its attack on Modi over the past year on the claim that he is “soft on China.”

The pandemic has starkly revealed the utter incompatibility of the capitalist profit system and the selfish class interests of the bourgeoisie with the most essential needs of society. At the same time, it has exacerbated all of the malignancies that have increasingly characterized capitalism for decades—ever growing social inequality, intensifying interimperialist conflict and great power rivalry, the breakdown of bourgeois democracy and the ruling class’s cultivation of far-right, fascist forces.

The pandemic is a global crisis that can only be brought under control through the coordinated independent action of the international working class to impose the public health measures and secure the social support needed to protect workers’ lives and livelihoods worldwide.

Likewise workers’ struggles to defend their social and democratic rights and against imperialist war and reaction is a global struggle that necessitates the building of new mass organizations of struggle. Against the transnational corporations, the rival capitalist governments, and the trade and military alliances through which they seek to advance their predatory global ambitions, the working class must mount a common and coordinated struggle on the basis of a socialist internationalist program.

It is to develop such a global movement animated by the great liberating ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky that the World Socialist Web Site and International Committee of the Fourth International are holding an online May Day rally on Saturday, May 1—“One year of the coronavirus: From global pandemic to global class struggle.” We urge workers, youth and socialist-minded professionals in India and throughout the world to make plans to attend the event.

Illegal COVID vaccination cards sold online as ‘freedom cards’

https://www.oregonlive.com/coronavirus/2021/04/illegal-covid-vaccination-cards-marketed-online-as-freedom-cards.html









A screen shot of reporter Kyle Iboshi's conversation with someone claiming to sell COVID vaccine cards online.
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By Kyle Iboshi | KGW.com


The online advertisement offered “freedom cards” for $40. The listing on OfferUp included a photo of what appeared to be official CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Record Cards. The seller included contact information using an Oregon area code of 971.


“Are they real?” this reporter asked by text message. “Yes,” the seller responded. “Have connections.”


Oregon’s Attorney General warns the sale of fake coronavirus vaccination cards is illegal and could undermine efforts to end the pandemic.



“Hundreds, if not thousands of these cards have already been sold and we want to put a stop to it,” said Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum.



“Basically, they’ve either stolen the cards from some place or they have counterfeited the cards, which of course is illegal,” explained Rosenblum. She, along with 47 of her colleagues, signed a letter demanding e-commerce platforms crack down on the sale of illegal COVID vaccine cards.



The FBI also issued a warning that if you didn’t receive the vaccine, do not buy fake vaccine cards, do not make your own cards, and do not fill in blank vaccination record cards with bogus information.



“People seem to take this like it is some sort of a joke when it is not a joke. People’s lives are at stake,” explained Nenette Day, an assistant special agent in charge at the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general’s office.



“On any given day, up to 40 to 50 percent of our complaints are related to reports of fake vaccination cards,” said Day.



Day worries that falsified cards, bought online, or made at home, could endanger lives.



For example, if someone pretended to be vaccinated by using a fake card to enter a school, work or nursing home, they could potentially put others at risk.



Shortly after KGW alerted OfferUp about the listing for “freedom cards,” the advertisement disappeared.



“We have only seen a small number of prohibited posts with vaccine cards, but we see this is a serious matter and have disabled any accounts that provide them,” an OfferUp spokesperson wrote in a statement to KGW. “We are eager to cooperate with any law enforcement agencies who would be willing to pursue this matter.”






--Kyle Iboshi/KGW.com

Root Causes

https://www.resumen-english.org/2021/04/root-causes/#more-17430




By David Brooks on April 19, 2021


Photo: Revistafal.com

Ever since the issue of migration flows at the U.S.-Mexico border intensified, the Biden administration has made addressing the “root causes” of migration from Central America and Mexico at the centerpiece of its response. Biden, his vice president, Kamala Harris, and America’s foreign policymakers have held talks, made trips and commented on initiatives to address those “root causes” in Mexico and Central America. Harris even recently announced her intention to travel to Mexico and Guatemala.

But perhaps they should save themselves all that traveling and stay home in Washington to first address one of the main “root causes” of the phenomenon that is manifesting itself at the border: U.S. economic and so-called “security” policies throughout the region over the past several decades.

Before traveling and offering money to who knows who in those countries to keep the migrants and refugees at home, perhaps they are the ones who should stay at home and convene a large cast of historians, journalists, analysts, former officials, clergy, human rights advocates and more. They can perhaps tell them, if they do not remember, of the long and violent history of the U.S. over more than a century in that region.

They might recall what their country’s then most decorated soldier, General Smedley Butler, summing up his career, said in the 1930s: “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street…”

And from then until now, they could go through the list of interventions, military support for dictatorships, death squads, training and financing of torturers, where forces openly or clandestinely supported by Washington, first with the justification of the Monroe Doctrine, then, with the Cold War, against “communism” and more recently against allies of progressive Latin American governments that dared not to obey the wishes and prescriptions for “democracy” and “freedom,” murdered tens of thousands in those countries. Or how the Obama State Department, led by Hillary Clinton, supported the coup d’état in Honduras in 2009 (several of the coup leaders were graduates of what used to be called the School of the Americas, where the United States trains Latin American military), which is where the current government comes from.

They could review the effects of the neoliberal policies of the so-called “Washington Consensus,” including the free trade agreements still in force with Mexico and Central American countries, the empirical result of which is that the biggest and most successful exports of this region — measured only by international income — are its human beings and illicit drugs.

They could also evaluate why Washington, almost without exception, has supported repression against any movement, political front, politicians, leaders and more, who sought to change the conditions of injustice, violence and corruption in their countries.

Washington cannot be held exclusively responsible for what the political and economic leaders of all these countries have implemented in their countries, but if there is truly an interest in locating and addressing the “root causes” of the migration problem, Washington should not only look at its counterparts in Mexico and Central America, but also take a good look at itself.




Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English

Richard Wolff VS Destiny DEBATE! SOCIALISM VS CAPITALISM

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvblUZ3wbI&t=4s

Richard Wolff DESTROYS Destiny in HEATED Debate - Reaction & Best Moments

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IefpLq1W3Ts