One week after fatal accident killed crane operator Terry Garr, millwright dies of COVID-19 at Sterling Stamping Plant

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/28/ssp-a28.html




Our reporters
a day ago







One week after the death of crane operator Terry Garr at Stellantis' Sterling Stamping Plant north of Detroit, the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter has learned that another worker, millwright Mark Bruce, has passed away from COVID-19. Multiple sources confirmed the death to a reporting team during a shift change on Tuesday afternoon.

Sterling Stamping, the largest automotive stamping plant in the world, saw its largest one-month surge in new infections in March, with 28 confirmed cases, up from one in the entire month of February. This coincided with a record-breaking surge in cases throughout the state of Michigan, driven primarily by school reopenings. The Autoworker Newsletter had previously learned of severe cases in the plant which required hospitalization, but this is the first confirmed death in plant.

Sterling Stamping workers (WSWS Media)


While United Auto Workers Local 1264 has run several death notices of autoworkers and their family members over the last two months, it has yet to report on Bruce's death. One worker said the UAW and the company were concealing information about outbreaks of COVID-19 in the plant. He said he knew Mark Bruce for a long time. “Mark died of COVID last Friday and nothing is being said about it. I only learned about it because another worker texted me.

“We’re getting notices, sometimes seven times a week, about new COVID cases. But they aren’t saying where and what workers could have been exposed.”

Nationwide, the UAW has helped management impose a blackout on infections and deaths in the auto plants in order not to instill “panic.” This prevents workers who are potentially exposed to the deadly virus from taking the necessary measures to protect themselves, co-workers and family, ensuring even more infections and death. In addition to covering up infections, management is penalizing workers who contract the virus or stay home with symptoms, thus encouraging workers to report to the job when they are sick.

Amid widespread anger over the death of Garr, crushed to death during a die staging at the end of his shift last week, the UAW went into damage control on Tuesday, announcing a token, one minute of silence each shift to honor Garr on April 28, Workers Memorial Day.

While workers want to know the truth about the circumstances which led to his death, in a statement posted on the UAW Local 1264 Facebook page at the plant, LaShawn English, the local president, offered prayers and condolences but no new information on the tragedy. Neither did English outline what steps the UAW is taking to investigate Garr’s death or encourage workers with information to come forward.

Sterling Stamping



A preliminary report from the Michigan Occupational and Health Administration (MIOSHA) indicates Garr was staging a die, which was lifted by a crane. However, the die was not aligned with the locating pins.

While standing between the die and the press, the crane operator maneuvered the die onto the bolster pin. "The misalignment of the hoist to the center point of the die caused the die to swing to the home position, resulting in the die striking the crane operator," the report said. Garr was transported to an area hospital, where he later died, according to Sterling Heights police.

A full report from MIOSHA may take months to produce, according to the Macomb Daily, which originally reported on the preliminary findings.

A worker who contacted the World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter in the wake of the accident suggested the tragedy had been caused by management pressuring die setters to “disregard safety over production.” The fatal accident was due, the worker wrote, because of “Management being in a hurry and pressur[ing] die setters to hurry up and get a job done that management assigned towards the end of shift.”

While Bruce and Garr died of different causes, the common factor in both deaths is management's determination to maintain production in the teeth of the pandemic. While Stellantis, like the other major auto companies, has been forced to idle much of its production due to a global chip shortage, the company is determined to keep Sterling Stamping Plant, which produces critical body panels for much of the company's North American assembly plants at all costs.

Across the street at Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, which produces the company's best-selling and highly profitable Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck, production workers have been on forced over time for most of the year, and skilled trades are working on a brutal new 12 hour day, 7 days per week work schedule.

During a shift change on Tuesday, workers said that the death of Garr coming at the time of surging COVID-19 infections underscored the fact that workers take their lives in their own hands every day they come in to work. “We are signing up for risk every day we work here,” one said.

Said another, “I’ve heard from other workers who said when the plant manager first heard about the accident, he asked if Garr was wearing a hard hat when he was killed, as if that would have saved him.

Other than that, “we haven’t heard anything. Maybe he was working alone when he shouldn’t have been. Maybe they were rushing him to finish a job. All I know is that it is being covered up and we’re not being told anything.”

The situation at Sterling Stamping underscores the urgent need for a four-week national shutdown of production, a demand raised in a statement by the Autoworker Rank-and-File Safety Committee Network. This is not only necessary to prevent new infections spreading outward from plants into surrounding communities, but to put an end to the reckless and dangerous regime of speedup and overtime imposed by management with the support of the UAW.

A veteran worker at the Warren Truck Assembly Plant commented, “Last March, workers stopped the line and that saved lives. We did it out of pure fear. We were afraid for our lives and the lives of our families, and we were asking, ‘Doesn’t anybody hear us?' Six workers have died at Warren Truck and the company and the union did nothing. The UAW are management’s spies and muscle. They are totally corrupt and in cahoots with the bosses.

“Workers getting killed in the plant and dying from COVID is like going back to the immigrant garment workers who were killed in the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. It took a lot of tragedies before things changed. Today, there are tragedies and there are no improvements. Now we have two entities against us, the UAW and the company.”

We urge workers to support the call by Sterling Heights Assembly Rank-and-File Safety Committee Sunday for a full and independent investigation of the circumstances surrounding the death of Terry Garr. For more information contact autoworkers@wsws.org .

Capitalism prepares to fight wars, not the pandemic

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/28/pers-a28.html




Andre Damon
a day ago







Last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread from country to country, working people responded to each new outbreak of the disease, first in China, then Italy, then America, with sympathy and expressions of solidarity.

Workers around the world cheered the doctors of Wuhan and the nurses of Bergamo. Doctors corresponded with their international colleagues, sharing the latest knowledge and tips to save the lives of patients entrusted to them. And scientists closely collaborated across national borders to ascertain the origins of the disease, sequence its genome, and aid the development of vaccines.

U.S. Air Force F-35 stealth fighter jets drop bombs over the Korean Peninsula, South Korea. (South Korea Defense Ministry via AP)



But the world’s governments had other ideas. Last year, as more than 3 million people lost their lives amid a raging pandemic, governments around the world spent a record sum, nearly $2 trillion, on weapons and preparations for war.

Even though global economic output declined by 4.4 percent—the greatest economic collapse since World War II—military spending around the world surged by 2.6 percent.

The United States, the global leader in deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, with 587,000 and counting, is also by far the world’s greatest military spender. The US increased its arms spending by 4.4 percent last year, to $870 billion, more than the next 10 countries combined.

The US military is throwing around money with reckless abandon. Every branch of Washington’s bloated nuclear weapons program, from intercontinental ballistic missiles, to supersonic stealth bombers and nuclear missile submarines, is being rebuilt and expanded from the ground up. Perhaps most dangerously of all, the United States intends to double military spending in the Asia-Pacific region, using the money to ring the Chinese coastline with land-based ballistic missiles stationed in Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines.

The US government’s spending on the military massively dwarfed all emergency federal spending on health care and vaccinations since the start of the pandemic. The CARES Act, passed in March of 2020, included only a few tens of billions of dollars in emergency health care spending, while the American Rescue Plan passed under current President Joe Biden was just one-eighth the annual US military budget for spending on emergency health care measures.

All the world’s imperialist countries are massively expanding their military spending. Leading the pack is Germany, whose aggressive quest for world domination helped trigger two world wars. Germany’s military spending increased by 5 percent last year and is up by nearly a third over the past decade.

France and Britain each increased their spending by 2.9 percent, significantly more than the global average.

The governments of the United States, France, Germany and the UK have all rejected the closure of non-essential businesses to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that society cannot afford these critical life-saving measures.

French President Emmanuel Macron declared that the population would have to “learn to live with” the virus. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in rejecting lockdowns, insisted that the alternative was better: to “let the bodies pile up in their thousands.” In the United States, claiming that mass infection would lead to a faster economic recovery, Trump administration officials declared, “We want them infected.”

But while claiming that containing the pandemic is too expensive, capitalist governments all over the world found $2 trillion for their armed forces and arms manufacturers.

The fight against the pandemic is by its very nature a global struggle. In its statement for the International Online May Day Rally, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) explained:

The emergence of new variants where the pandemic is spreading, potentially resistant to vaccines, demonstrates that the pandemic cannot be eradicated in any single country unless it is eradicated globally. National competition between the capitalist powers has blocked a globally coordinated response to the pandemic. Now the life-saving vaccine is being hoarded by the dominant capitalist countries and used as an instrument in their geopolitical intrigues.

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a ferocious eruption of nationalism, xenophobia, and militarism by capitalist governments and ruling elites around the world.

Former US President Donald Trump called the COVID-19 pandemic the “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu.” The Biden administration is continuing Trump’s efforts to demonize China, falsely claiming that Beijing is responsible for a cover-up and implying that the disease was a biological weapon created in a laboratory. As a result of these efforts to demonize China, racially motivated violent attacks against Asian Americans have surged over the past year.

The massive and record financing of the means of destruction and death, when what is necessary is a globally coordinated emergency program to save lives, exemplifies the historically outmoded and bankrupt character of the entire capitalist order.

In its criminal indifference to human life, in its efforts to desensitize the population to mass death from the pandemic, the ruling elites are at the same time seeking to prepare the population for the horrific consequences of world war.

All over the world, however, a different axis for politics and social organization is emerging. Workers are engaged in a wave of strikes and struggles in opposition to the subordination of all social and economic life to the enrichment of the capitalist oligarchy.

To unify these struggles and develop a counteroffensive against the homicidal policies of governments controlled by the capitalist ruling elites, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) statement called for the formation of an International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees. The IWA-RFC will fight to unify workers throughout the world against all efforts to pit worker against worker, nation against nation.

The development of a powerful counteroffensive must be connected to the building of a socialist leadership in the working class. The fight against militarist violence, as with the fight against the pandemic, is at the same time a fight against the capitalist system and the oligarchy it serves. We urge all of our readers to join this effort and register to attend the International May Day Rally today.

US Fed a “long way” from withdrawing massive financial support for Wall Street

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/feda-a29.html




Nick Beams
7 hours ago







The US Federal Reserve this week again emphasised it is a “long way” from withdrawing the massive financial support that has fuelled the rise of Wall Street and asset prices over the past year during the COVID-19 pandemic, transferring hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of the corporate and financial elites.

The Fed’s commitment to continued support—the purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities at the rate of $120 billion per month and the maintenance of the base interest rate at virtually zero—came despite it upgrading the outlook for the US economy and signs that inflation is starting to rise.

Jerome Powell, Chair of the Federal Reserve, speaks at a press conference on April 28, 2021. (Source: CSPAN)



The Fed’s policy-making committee said that “amid progress on vaccinations and strong policy support, indicators of economic activity and employment have strengthened.” It noted that inflation had risen but said this was largely due to “transitory factors.”

This was to allay concerns in some sections of the financial markets that rising inflation numbers would bring a tightening of the Fed’s monetary policy.

In his opening remarks to a press conference following the two-day policy meeting, Fed chairman Jerome Powell indicated that recent price rises would not impact on its accommodative measures.

“Readings on inflation have increased and are likely to rise somewhat further before moderating,” he said. They were due to one-time effects, such as upward pressure on prices as the economy re-opened.

Powell emphasised that the Fed would maintain its present policies until maximum employment was achieved and inflation expectations were “well-anchored” at 2 percent.

“We expect to maintain an accommodative stance of monetary policy until these employment and inflation outcomes are achieved,” he said, noting that a “transitory rise in inflation above 2 percent this year would not meet this standard.”

In a further reassurance to financial markets that the Fed was not yet even thinking about tapering its support, Powell said: “The economy is a long way from our goals, and it is likely to take some time for substantial further progress to be achieved.”

The first question in the Q&A session of Powell’s press conference was whether it was time to start talking about tapering. Powell replied that “it is not time yet” and the Fed would let the public know well in advance when it was time to have that conversation, which would begin “well in advance of any actual decision to taper our asset purchases.”

There is nervousness in financial markets and within the Fed itself that Wall Street has become so dependent on the outflow of cheap money that any winding back could bring a repeat of the “taper tantrum” of 2013 that saw significant turbulence in response to indications that the quantitative easing program, initiated after the 2008 financial crisis, could start to be eased.

But there are also concerns that if the Fed does not start to prepare markets for some withdrawal of support, then it may have to sharply tighten monetary policy if inflation starts to rise faster than expected.

One questioner referred to the concerns raised by former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and others that things may “get out of hand” with the Fed’s new policy stance and there would be a repeat of the 1960s when “inflation got out of control.”

Powell said there were “many, many differences” and one-time price increases as a result of the economy re-opening were not likely to lead to persistently higher inflation into the future. However, if the Fed saw inflation moving above 2 percent in a persistent way then, “no one should doubt that in the event we would be prepared to use our tools.”

In light of the collapse of the family investment firm Archegos Capital, Powell was asked whether the Fed did not see that multiple banks had large exposures to the firm and if not why not?

Powell provided no clear answer, saying the major banks that had a big risk position with Archegos were not aware that others were in the same position. He said there was “risk management breakdown at some of the firms” and the Fed was looking into it.

He claimed that the Archegos risks were “not systemically important or were not of the size that they would have really created trouble for any of those institutions.”

The Archegos collapse may not have posed the same risk as the downfall of Lehman Brothers in 2008, but it was a clear indication of the growing instability of the financial system as a result of the cheap money policies of the Fed and other central banks globally.

The losses from Archegos have been significant. Further data released this week show the total losses incurred by some of world’s major banks exceed $10 billion.

Credit Suisse has taken a total hit of $5.5 billion. The Japanese financial firm Nomura, which flagged losses of $2 billion last month, increased that estimate to $2.85 billion earlier this week, resulting in its worst quarterly performance since the financial crisis of 2008. The Swiss bank UBS lost $861 million, Morgan Stanley $911 million and the Mitsubishi finance arm took a hit of $300 million.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, the losses of more than $10 billion “make it one of the worst trading incidents in recent years.”

A question on financial stability and whether the Fed and other regulators should think about extending their oversight saw Powell venture into an area which has been largely passed over—the significance and implications of the March 2020 financial crisis that led to the support provided to the financial markets ever since.

The crisis took the form of a freeze in the market for US Treasury bonds, supposedly the most liquid market in the world, the basis of the global financial system, which is regarded as a “safe haven” in times of financial turbulence.

Powell remarked that at the beginning of the pandemic crisis “there was such a demand for selling Treasurys, including by foreign central banks, that really the dealers couldn’t handle the volume. And so what was happening was the market was really starting to lose function, and … that was a really serious problem which we had to solve through really massive asset purchases.”

But more than a year on, the US Treasury and the Fed are nowhere nearer to fully understanding what took place nor what to do to prevent a recurrence of this or a similar event, as indicated by Powell’s somewhat jumbled concluding comments on the subject.

“And you know,” he said, “we’d like to see if there isn’t something we can do … do we need to build against that kind of extreme tail risk, and if so what would that look like?”

North Carolina judge refuses to release body-cam footage of police killing of Andrew Brown Jr.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/poli-a29.html




Chase Lawrence
7 hours ago







North Carolina judge Jeff Foster refused Wednesday to release the body-camera footage of the police killing of Andrew Brown Jr., agreeing with prosecutors to delay making the footage public for at least 30 days. The only release scheduled was to the family and one lawyer in 10 days under the condition that they do not release it to the public.

The lawyer for the police argued that the shooting was justified, and the argument, accepted by the judge, was that he did not want body-camera footage shown until a possible trial of the officers who killed Brown. Seven officers involved in the shooting have been placed on leave, but no criminal charges have yet been brought against them.

Mario Gonzalez is restrained by Alameda police officers on April 19 in a video from an officer's body-worn camera. (Alameda Police Department)

Brown, a 42-year-old African American father of 10, was shot and killed by deputies from the Pasquotank County Sheriff’s Office serving a drug search warrant around 8:30 a.m. on April 21 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. A private autopsy ordered by Brown’s family found that he was shot five times, with four of the shots hitting his right arm and one shot to the back of the head killing him. The official autopsy has not been released.

Members of Brown’s family were shown just 20 seconds of redacted footage that omitted officers’ faces on Monday. The family’s lawyer who was authorized to view the footage said that the footage showed Brown was executed while sitting in his car with his hands “firmly on the wheel” when deputies began shooting.

Hundreds of residents of Elizabeth City, population 18,000, have been protesting in the streets since the killing of Brown and demanding that the body-camera footage from the shooting be released to the public. Democratic mayor Bettie J. Parker ordered an 8 p.m. curfew Tuesday in response to the protests, and the city and surrounding county are under states of emergency. Six protesters were arrested for curfew violations as militarized riot police confronted peaceful protesters Tuesday night.

Nearly 200 people protested peacefully, chanting, “No charges, no peace!” and “Release the tape! The real tape! The whole tape!” When police began arresting people following the curfew, protesters shouted, “Shame on you!”

Democratic governor Roy Cooper has called for a special prosecutor to investigate Brown’s death and the FBI has launched a civil rights investigation as well, indicating the extent to which the ruling class is concerned over the outrage sparked by the killing.

The only footage that is publicly available was obtained by a local news channel via a Freedom of Information Act Request. The footage from the city’s camera shows deputies arriving in the back of a pickup with tactical gear. The deputies immediately dismounted once in the driveway of Brown’s home, can be heard yelling to Brown to “put your hands up!” then open fire almost as quickly as they dismounted. Afterwards, video shows Brown’s car riddled with bullets with the back window of the car blown out and bullet holes through the remaining windows.

The operation echoes the US-supported, trained and armed paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Afghanistan, or the death squads in the Philippines who murder poor people under the pretext of an antidrug crackdown.

Benjamin Crump, who has taken many high-profile cases of African Americans killed by the police including Brown’s, claimed, “This has become a constant sight across America, the evolution of policing that’s now terrorizing communities of color,” framing police violence as a purely racial problem, despite its impact on workers and poor people of every race and ethnicity. Crump has been criticized by the family of victims of police violence, such as Samaria Rice and Lisa Simpson, who called on him and others affiliated with Black Lives Matters to “stop monopolizing and capitalizing off our fight for justice and human rights.”

Alameda, California

Body-camera footage of the death of Mario Arenales Gonzalez was released on Tuesday. Gonzalez was killed in Alameda County, California by being pinned with his body and face to the ground for five minutes in the same way that George Floyd was. Gonzalez became unresponsive while held down by the police and was later declared dead at the hospital. The killing took place on April 19, 2021, one day before the conviction of former Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of Floyd.

Police were responding to two separate calls about a man who was loitering in a park. The body-camera footage shows Gonzalez struggling to answer basic questions made by the officer, trailing off at points or abruptly changing topics. While the questions are being asked, before the confrontation he can be seen accidentally dropping objects out of his hands while fidgeting with a comb. During this, the officer can be heard requesting another police unit to the scene.

Once the other officer is present, they ask if Gonzalez has an ID to which he cannot answer.

What follows in the footage is extremely disturbing. The officers force Gonzalez’s hands behind his back and ram him into the ground. One officer is asking Gonzalez questions as he is slowly killed by the other officer who aggressively drives his knee and then elbow into Gonzalez’s back, as Gonzalez cries out in pain while also answering the officers’ questions. Three officers were on him at this point, telling him to “stop resisting.” One of the officers asks if they should roll him over on his side with another denying this, saying, “I don’t want to lose what I got.” This continues up until the point that Gonzalez goes limp, after which an officer states that “he’s gone unresponsive.” Shortly thereafter an officer states that “he has no pulse” and they attempt to resuscitate him with CPR.

At no point did Gonzalez portray any aggressive behaviors towards the officers. The footage exposes as a lie the initial Alameda police report that claimed that after officers attempted to detain Gonzalez “a physical altercation ensued.”

Gonzalez’s brother Gerardo Gonzalez said at a press conference Tuesday that “Alameda police officers murdered my brother.”


The lawyer for the family, Julia Sherwin, explained, “His death was completely avoidable and unnecessary,” and that “Drunk guy in a park doesn’t equal a capital sentence.”

The three officers involved in the killing, Eric McKinley, Cameron Leahy, and James Fisher, have been placed on administrative leave.

Chicago, Illinois

Body-cam footage of the killing of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez by a Chicago Police Department (CPD) officer, which shows that he was gunned down as he was running from police, was released Wednesday. The killing came just days after another CPD officer shot and killed 13-year-old Adam Toledo while the latter’s hands were in the air.

The police have not said whether Alvarez was suspected of a crime. What can be seen from video in the early morning of March 31 is that Alvarez was walking away from a gas station with some bags when a CPD SUV came around the corner. Alvarez dropped his bags and started running. After that the video shows Alvarez running away from the police into a residential area, tripping, getting back up and then the police officer raising his gun and shooting Alvarez as he ran. After being shot in the back, Alvarez asks, “Why are you shooting me?” to which the officer responded, “You had a gun.”

The officer who shot Alvarez attempted to handcuff him while he was bleeding on the ground, yelling “Cuff him! Cuff Him!” with his partner insisting that he be rendered aid. Alvarez was later pronounced dead at Illinois Masonic Medical Center.

After the exposure of the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald, the United States Department of Justice found that CPD officers “engage in tactically unsound and unnecessary foot pursuits, and that these foot pursuits too often end with officers unreasonably shooting someone—including unarmed individuals.”

Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot was apologetic towards the police, telling reporters ahead of the release of the video of Alvarez’s killing: “I understand, having investigated many of these shootings, that officers are in many instances called upon to make split-second decisions, particularly in instances like this one where there’s a gun.”

Book-burning comes to America

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/04/29/bail-a29.html




David Walsh
8 hours ago







In a major act of censorship, with chilling implications for democratic rights, publisher W.W. Norton has announced its decision to “permanently” remove Blake Bailey’s biography of American novelist Philip Roth (1933–2018) from print. Several individuals have accused Bailey of sexual wrongdoing, including rape, dating back to 2003. None of them have come forward with any evidence to back up the claims.

Bailey’s 880-page book, well-received critically and considered one of the important works of the year in its field, will be pulped. Norton also reported its dropping of Bailey’s 2014 memoir.
Blake Bailey, 2011 (Photo credit–David Shankbone)

In a statement dripping with hypocrisy, Norton’s president, Julia A. Reidhead, asserted that “Mr Bailey will be free to seek publication elsewhere if he chooses.” In fact, overnight Bailey has become a “non-person,” he has ceased to exist.

Grotesquely, the book company also said it would match the amount of Bailey’s book advance to donate to “organisations that fight against sexual assault or harassment and work to protect survivors.”

Already, a search on Norton’s website for Philip Roth: The Biography lands one at a message that reads: “Our apologies! We can’t find the page you’re looking for.”

The publishing firm’s mission statement asserts that “Independent since 1923, employee-owned, and proud to publish ‘books that live,’ Norton is here for you.” The book company promises “that we will stick to the business of publishing the best books we can lay our hands on and then keep our hands on them for as long as may be.” Or, until some clique of gender-fixated zealots applies a bit of pressure.
Philip Roth–The Biography

The purging of Bailey’s book sets a sinister example, intended to intimidate artists, biographers and scholars alike. The message being sent is clear: any influential figure who rubs establishment public opinion the wrong way can be denounced and dispatched in like manner.

The filthy snout of the New York Times has been busily at work in this affair. On April 21, the Times published an article setting out the “sexual assault allegations” against Bailey.

There is no reason to give the slightest a priori credence to the claims made in the Times article, which conforms to a pattern of trial-by-media that has been “perfected” since the launching of the #MeToo witch-hunt in October 2017. Bailey has never been charged or convicted of a crime. None of the accusers ever reported the alleged incident to the authorities.

Astonishingly, on the basis of these unsubstantiated assertions, Norton, in the Times’ gleeful phrase on April 21, “took swift and unusual action.” The publishing firm first revealed that it had stopped a 10,000-copy second printing scheduled for early May. Now, Norton has gone one infamous step farther.

Bailey has labeled the allegations “categorically false and libelous.” In response to Norton’s latest announcement, his lawyer condemned the publisher’s “drastic, unilateral decision … based on the false and unsubstantiated allegations against him, without undertaking any investigation or offering Mr Bailey the opportunity to refute the allegations.”

There is an unreal element to the campaign against Bailey’s book. No one argues the biography contains falsehoods or that the author plagiarized another’s work. On the contrary, even hostile reviews acknowledge the book’s thoroughness. No, the biographer has fallen foul of a dubious “morals charge.”

The National Coalition Against Censorship simply repeated an elementary truth, although an imperiled one, when it pointed out, in opposing Norton’s decision, that books “must be judged on their content. Many of literature’s celebrated authors led troubled—and troubling—lives. While a writer’s own biography can certainly impact our interpretation and analysis of their work, the reading public must be allowed to make their own decisions about what to read.”

French author Jean Genet’s “criminality” was embedded in the very title of one of his most important works, The Thief’s Journal (1949), which remains widely and deservedly read. No one has yet suggested that the remarkable novel by another French writer, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932), should be destroyed because the author later became a pro-Nazi anti-Semite.

Individuals convicted of heinous acts have their books published all the time, including death-row prisoners and more. For that matter, of course, a grouping of truly serious criminals, former US government officials and generals, responsible for the deaths of millions in the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia and generally everywhere around the world, has its (ghost-written) memoirs and banal musings published like clockwork.

But one hysterical, Salem witch-trial-like outburst of hysteria, and a respected biographer, author of a volume that was to become the standard work on the subject, vanishes into thin air.

The attack on Bailey is unprecedented since the dark days of McCarthyism, when the US government removed thousands of books by left-wing authors and sympathizers from its overseas libraries. It continues and escalates a recent process that has already involved the ruination (or attempted ruination) of individuals such as the late James Levine, Woody Allen, Kevin Spacey, Placido Domingo, Aziz Ansari, Louis C.K., Charles Dutoit, Garrison Keillor and Geoffrey Rush, and the institutionalization of censorship.

Bailey, a respected literary biographer who spent nearly a decade on the Roth volume, is an undeserving victim of this scurrilous campaign. The presence of Roth himself looms largely over the present affair.

The April 21 Times' article let the filthy cat out of the bag in this regard. It observed that the controversy “that has engulfed Mr. Bailey erupted in part because of the publicity he has received for his Roth biography, which led some of the women accusing him of misconduct to come forward.” Some of the latter “have noted that they were bothered not only by the praise lavished on Mr. Bailey, but by the way, in his Roth biography, that he seemed to excuse the writer’s misogyny. Several literary critics seized on the fact that in the biography, Mr. Bailey brushed off Mr. Roth’s mistreatment of women.”

One does not even have to read between the lines here. Bailey is being punished by the accusers, the Times and, now having fallen into line, Norton for his failure to condemn Roth sufficiently for what they claim is the latter’s “mistreatment of women.”
Philip Roth

Roth’s writing has run afoul of the race-and-gender Mafia operating in and around the Democratic Party, including prominently the pseudo-left and feminist set. The late writer made no secret of his distaste for identity politics, a subject he treated scathingly in The Human Stain (2000). In 2018, in regard to the then recently launched #MeToo campaign, Roth commented that he saw no “tribunal” before which the sexual misconduct allegations might be adjudicated, but instead “publicized accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment. I see the accused denied the right of habeas corpus, the right to face and examine his accuser, and the right to defend himself in anything resembling a genuine judicial setting, where careful distinctions might be able to be drawn as to the severity of the reported crime.”

Roth has fallen out of favor and faces the prospect of becoming a “non-person.” His work will likely be increasingly dropped from college courses and demands will be made that his “immoral,” “libidinous” novels be removed from libraries.

The accusation that Roth in his novels is a “misogynist” deserving of banishment is almost beneath replying to. Roth was an artist, that is to say, someone who attempted to represent reality honestly and without idealization. As a result, he stubbornly refused to see anyone, male or female, as “blameless.” His efforts run counter to the absurd, philistine and thoroughly stupid view now prevalent in establishment circles, something out of a Victorian melodrama, that women are eternally saintly victims who never tell a fib or carry out a betrayal. What passes for the American intelligentsia has fallen to this ridiculous, ignoble level.

In 2014, Roth responded in an interview to the charge of misogyny, noting that the accusation, although absurd, was “not necessarily a harmless amusement.” He continued, “In some quarters, ‘misogynist’ is now a word used almost as laxly as was ‘Communist’ by the McCarthyite right in the 1950s—and for very like the same purpose.”

Indeed, the assault on Roth’s reputation has this definite right-wing character. His critics despise him in the end because of his most admirable and enduring qualities, embodied in his angry and informed artistic treatment of such subjects as petty bourgeois conformism and repression, anti-Semitism, American fascism, Communism, identity politics and more. At his best, Roth offers a troubling, disruptive view of things. The affluent petty bourgeoisie—essentially satisfied with itself and the way things are—always and everywhere mistrusts serious art and, given the proper circumstances, strives to discredit and suppress it.

Instinctively, the American ruling elite, terrified of the inevitable emergence of mass opposition, encourages every attempt to dull popular consciousness and awareness. It inevitably fears any work that sensitizes and alerts the viewer or reader, or encourages a searching, thoughtful approach to public matters. In that sense, every significant attack on democratic rights is an attack on the working class and its political progress.

The Democratic Party wing of the ruling elite is the most vigilant and therefore the most censorious in this regard. No one at the Times, the Washington Post, Salon or the Nation has uttered a serious protest about Norton’s scandalous action. On the contrary.

Roth also faces expulsion from the canon because of his personal life, including his numerous affairs. Why should this high-minded campaign stop here? Any writer or artist who has a personal life that in any fashion provokes the disapproval of the moral crusaders risks “permanent removal.” The current atmosphere almost guarantees a vast culling of writers, leaving untouched only those who embraced monogamy or purely platonic relationships. Who shall escape a “whipping” under that scheme of things? We are not convinced it will ensure the finest art is left to us. All of this simply has no relation to reality as it is actually lived.

We unequivocally denounce Norton’s censorship, call for Bailey’s defense and defend Roth’s right to represent the world as he saw it.

OUR ‘DEAR FRIEND’ DEBY IS DEAD

By Maj. Danny Sjursen, USA (ret.), AntiWar.com.April 28, 2021



https://popularresistance.org/our-dear-friend-deby-is-dead/



Yea, About That…

A Peek Behind Chad’s Curtain and President Deby’s Death Shroud.

The tributes to the late President Idriss Deby just poured in last week – especially from Western leaders. And boy were the condolences nauseating – at least to anyone vaguely familiar with Chad and its longtime strongman, or those even faintly fond of decency. The worst of it came – unsurprisingly and unapologetically – from the country’s former (officially) and persistent (de facto) colonial masters in Paris. Coming right on the heels of Deby’s – still hazy on its exact details – death on the battlefield against a rebel rebellion, President Emmanuel Macron’s office released a statement announcing that “France lost a brave friend.”

The White House pulled its pity-punches a bit more than Paris – despite Washington’s extensive support for the dictatorial Deby – and offered only its “sincere condolences” to the people of Chad. The Biden administration could not, however, be nailed down on just why it assumed most Chadians should or would be so inconsolable over the death of their 30-plus-year-tenured oppressor.

The head of the African Union Moussa Faki Mahamat – who just so happens to be a former Chadian prime and foreign minister, plus belongs to the late president’s same Zaghawa ethnic group – called Deby a “great statesman and recognized military leader.” Well, one would expect as much from Deby’s personal plant and mole atop the continent’s premier politico-military multinational body.

Seriously, reading these ready international reactions was beyond bizarre. It was bewildering; enough to wonder whether we’re talking about the same guy. Were these self-styled democratic leaders actually talking about Idriss Deby, of Chad – the guy who seized power in a 1990 military coup (with support from Libya’s Moammar Ghadafi), never left, and had just a day before his death secured a sixth term in office, after amending the country’s constitution yet again so he could stick around the presidential palace? Did these top paragons of the West really mean Idriss Deby Itno, from the Zaghawa ethnic group’s Bidayat clan – who’s been more than credibly been accused of globe-topping corruption, rigging elections, outlawing critical demonstrations, shutting off social media, accepting bribes from Chinese energy firms, conscripting child soldiers (with President Barack Obama’s legally look-the-other-way blessing), and squandering immense oil revenues on weapons while half of Chad’s live in utter poverty?

Then I snap out of it, reenter the world as it is, and remember: But hey, he’s generous with outsourcing his own ill-paid troops as cannon fodder for Franco-American neo-colonial combat so…all’s forgiven, and permissible! Just ask a Saudi prince presiding over a system that still lops-off ladies heads for “sorcery.”

To further ingratiate himself with the global hegemon, and its petulant Parisian little brother, Deby also played nice with Washington’s problematic Palestinian-oppressing pals in Tel Aviv. As a nice touch, in January 2019, Déby agreed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even described his then visit to Chad as “part of the revolution we are having in the Arab and Muslim world.” See, Déby was a revolutionary – only now rebranded as a diplomatic and democratic one, supposedly shedding his rebel coup-artist past. Oh and upon Deby’s violent passing, Bibi – his fellow national longest-serving leader record-holder (who’s even now desperately trying mightily to stay in power amidst a contested election-fallout) – conveyed his Twitter condolences by praising Deby’s “bold leadership and … his historic decision to renew Chad’s relationship with Israel.” What a guy!
The Jeff Foxworthy Treatment

Suppose it’s clear where I’m about to go with this – at least to readers of a certain age. See, one can read all of these global leaders’s glowing eulogies of Deby, and their thoughts-and-prayers offered to Chadians, and almost forget all the evidence that – like ‘90s comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s recurring bit on “rednecks” – the West’s late proxy pal just “might be a [dictator].”

Sticking with Foxworthy’s schtick, consider some indicative highlights:
If you’ve held power since the premier of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on NBC…you might be a dictator.
If your son – Mahamat “Kaka” Deby – takes charge of a “military transitional council” immediately upon your death…
If your dynastic-like successor son has reached the rank of four-star general by age 37…
If you have an elite presidential guard – and it’s commanded by that same son…
If upon your death, you’re posthumously promoted to field marshal…
If after being killed in battle, tanks are immediately deployed on the main roads in your capitol city…
If you’re reign was so punctuated by rebellions and counter-rebellions that you have a three-meter deep trench dug around the capital, and order all the trees cut down around the presidential palace – to increase visibility for the attack helicopters sold to your military by more powerful foreign patrons – well, yea…you might be a dictator.

Get the picture?
Franco-American Apologist-Enablers

The thing is, Deby’s prime Franco-American backers have long bolstered his regime – and appear ready and willing to do the same for King Deby II – with much more than words alone. That said, President Macron used his words at Deby’s funeral oration in N’Djamena last Friday to signal Frances’ past, present, and future fealty to the latest in a long line of loyal Chadian puppets. Furthermore, Macron was hardly subtle, conspicuously seating himself next to Déby’s successor son, despite (completely accurate) criticism that Deby-the-younger’s takeover had circumvented the constitution – well, he just went ahead and dissolved it along with the national assembly anyway – which clearly states that the assembly’s speaker take over as interim leader and that new elections be held within 90 days, rather than the 18-month “transitional period” the youthful General “Kaka” Deby has instead announced.

Some of Macron’s musings – okay, almost all of them – were pretty over-the-top. The French president spoke fondly of Deby as an “an exemplary leader and a courageous warrior,” who “after three decades and so many brave battles, the battles [he has] waged are still aimed at the defense of the homeland, the preservation of stability and peace.”

Naturally, Chad’s never truly been at peace during Deby’s entire tenure – facing at least two coup attempts, several rebellions, Islamist attacks, farmer-herder or ethnic-based violence, and a proxy war with bordering Sudan, plus having its troops sent off on often bloody foreign excursions into Mali, Niger, Libya, and the Central African Republic – among other regional hotspots. As for stability, well – that depends on one’s definition of the word. Deby’s personal power position had been stable, and Islamist, ethnic, or political rebels hadn’t had as much success as they did neighboring states, but violence remained both endemic and systemic in Chad – a way of life even – and according to Human Development Index, the country remains the world’s third-least developed. Then again, indigence and fear can technically be a stable state of affairs all its own. Just ask almost any African citizen in France’s former colonial bloc!

Finally, Macron laid all his cards – and troops, and tanks, and jets, and drones – on the table and straight-up threatened the rebels marching south from Libya (of course!) towards the capital: “France will not allow anyone to question or threaten the stability and integrity of Chad.” I mean, he has to back Deby’s son, he’d likely say, because “The people of the region enjoy a peace pact with France. We have to make sure the pact lives on – and that of liberty and independence.”

Unfortunately, Paris’s promised pact – whereby the French have in actuality maintained immense control over the financial and foreign policy portfolios of their former colonies since handing over official, but ultimately only quasi-, control to actual Africans back in 1960. And, incidentally, even a cursory look at Francophone Africa’s 60-year post-colonial track record, demonstrates rather decisively that Paris’s “peace pact” has brought these post-colonial countries hardly any “peace,” scant “liberty” to their people, or real “independence” for their governments.

In fact, so supposedly unstable and incapable have Francophonie governments been – and certainly how limited their sovereignty – that French troops have intervened some 50 times in around 20 Sub-Saharan African states since 1960, “primarily with the goal of buttressing weak rulers against domestic opposition,” according to an extensive analysis by the scholar Stefano Recchia. And amid all that decades’ worth of adventurism, no country caught more French military interventions than Chad.

In fact, just as Paris protected (with ample American aid) the late president’s even more grotesque predecessor – the now International Court-convicted and imprisoned criminal-against-humanity, mass-murderer, and sexual-slaver, Hissène Habré (in office 1982-90) – from internal rebellion and Libyan incursions, the French military has also saved Deby’s hide a time or two, and may be set to save his son in a near-future pinch. After all, in 2008, France intervened to stop cross-border rebel movements (notably, with UN Security Council approval and some EU participation). Then, rather more intensely, in 2019 President Emmanuel Macron ordered the aerial bombing of rebel columns advancing on Chad’s capital.

That French planes and/or commandoes didn’t intervene early enough to save Deby’s life from the latest of Chad’s ubiquitous rebellions is interesting – and certainly stoking some conspiracy-theorizing. While the details of Deby’s death remain murky, and the usual accuracy of Occam’s Razor’s accidental- or incompetence-explanations may prevail, the (especially) Afro-skepticism regarding Paris’s place in Chad’s ongoing imbroglio is quite comprehensible. To understand why, one must quit thinking like a the-world-began-yesterday American, and channel the longer memories of repeatedly victimized Africans.

What is it about Paris’s past behavior during Chad’s oft-bloody – and never once peaceful – power transitions, that Africans might recall less than fondly? Well, for starters: Paris has a long sordid history of emplacing, backing, bailing-out, then eventually turning on whichever brutal – and, of course, economically- and French military presence-pliant – strongman sits in N’Djamena’s presidential palace.

The macabre Machiavellian game kicked off straight from post-colonial Jump Street, when just three years after independence, Chad’s first president, François Tombalbaye, banned political parties and thus triggered a rebel movement in the Muslim north – the Chadian National Liberation Front (Frolinat). In 1973, as the revolt turned into a full-fledged insurgency, French troops helped put down the rebellion, though Frolinat continued guerrilla operations throughout the 1980s with Libyan backing. Tombalbaye, however, was assassinated by soldiers commanded by French Army officers in 1975.

Libya annexed a section of northern Chad in 1977, and attempted military incursions or outright invasions in support of one northern rebel rebel group or another for the next decade or so. After Hissène Habré-the-horrendous seized power in 1982, he could count on ample American aid (including CIA covert operations, plus weapons and trainers ), and direct French military support, to fend off the Ghadafi regime’s Libyan forces.

That Habré was even then credibly accused – and much later definitively convicted – of mass political killings during his reign didn’t much factor in Washingtonian or Parisian palaces. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan even hosted Habré at the White House – stating that “It was an honor and a great pleasure to have had him here as our guest.” Only then, in December 1989 the French supported the overthrow of the Habré government and helped install Habré’s former army chief-turned-rebel, Idriss Deby, as president – in part because (get this!) Habré had wanted to sell more Chadian oil to U.S. companies.

In other words, events in Chad have proven that its presidents primarily serve at Paris’s pleasure, and that an ambitious N’Djamena politician’s fortunes – and very survival – usually depend on the preferences of French kingmakers. These days, France has a permanent military base in Chad – along with small cohorts of US advisors – and N’Djamena hosts the headquarters for Paris’s seven-years-itch that can’t quite be scratched Sahel-wide “counter-terror” campaign, Operation Barkhane. Barkhane, of course, seamlessly rebranded and reaffirmed the existent (since 1986) Operation Epervier mission – which was ostensibly meant to re-establish peace and maintain Chad’s “territorial integrity.” In other words, the colonizers are still on hand in a real way in Chad, sending a big message by their very presence.

Again, while France earns top prize for unrepentant imperializing here in the third decade of the 21st century, Washington turned in a typical assist in prevaricating on behalf of Paris’s Chadian long con. At the end of last week, State Department spokesman Edward “Ned” Price fielded a number of questions about Deby’s death and Chad’s ongoing – and obvious unconstitutional coup of a – “transition.” And boy did he offer a deft bit of dissembling – saying nothing whilst speaking plenty words, and without answering any actual questions.

Well, come to think of it, Ned did spend over a decade working for the CIA, and more recently as an NBC News analyst, so – he’s kind of classically trained at the whole “Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations” Agency-act . Consider some transcribed highlights epitomizing the pass that dictatorial Deby gets from Washington – even from the grave:

Tuesday, April 20th


QUESTION: …Just on Chad. Do you think that the appointment of now the late President Deby’s son is in keeping with this Chadian constitution?

MR. PRICE: Well, Matt, what I would say is, again, we are – our thoughts are with the Chadian people at this time. We stand with them. We continue to condemn recent violence and loss of life in Chad, and importantly, we support a peaceful transition of power in accordance with the Chadian constitution. That’s what is important here in terms of what this means going forward.

QUESTION: Okay. But that didn’t answer my question at all.

MR. PRICE: What we are saying and what is important to us –

QUESTION: You get that it doesn’t answer my question, right?…

QUESTION: (Inaudible) what happened is – happened based on the constitution?

MR. PRICE: We are standing, of course, with the people of Chad. We will be watching very closely. We will be supporting the people of Chad and seeking to ensure – to help them ensure that everything going forward is in accordance with their constitution.

[Different reporter/new query]


QUESTION: Just briefly on Chad. Just one thing about it is that the parliament has been dissolved. Is that problematic in any way? Is this still something that you see as consistent with the transition that you mentioned?

MR. PRICE: Well, again, what we want to see is a transition that is consistent with Chad’s constitution. Obviously, Chad’s institutions are enshrined in its constitution. We want to see the elements of that constitution protected going forward, whether that entails a transition of power or the sanctity and integrity of Chad’s institutions.

Wednesday, April 21st:


QUESTION: …One on Chad…Yesterday, you said that you support a peaceful transition in accordance to the Chadian constitution. However, the speaker of the National Assembly has been sidelined. Deby’s son is now in charge of this transitional council. Doesn’t that violate Chad’s constitution? Are you raising any concerns?

MR. PRICE: Well, look, again, we offer our – we offer the people of Chad our heartfelt condolences on the death of President Deby. We continue to stand with the people of Chad during this difficult time. We condemn recent violence and loss of life in Chad. And as I said yesterday, we support a peaceful and democratic transition of power to a civilian-led government. Obviously, developments in recent days and hours are a cause for concern, but we will continue to call for and support a peaceful democratic transition to a civilian-led government.

[Different reporter/new query]


QUESTION: On Chad. Within hours of the coup in Myanmar, you began to review whether or not a coup had been committed. As we’ve said, the opposition, the major opposition parties have called this a coup. Are you undertaking a review?

MR. PRICE: It’s a fluid situation I wouldn’t want to characterize it in any way just yet. What I would say to your question, though, is something I’ve said before, is that we have long encouraged a move towards democracy and representative government in the context of Chad. That is something we’ll continue to do.

Got that? Or are you left more confused than you started out by the time Ned’s finished his hornswoggle-hypnotism trick? – because that’s exactly what the guy’s going for. Two things: first off, kudos to some of these journalists and their tough, persistent lines of questioning – credit where it’s due, and all. Also, I think my favorite Ned-ism in the whole charade has to be his not “want[ing] to characterize” Chad’s “fluid situation” in “any way just yet.”

Oh, and one alibi question of my own. In just that two day span, Ole Ned proclaimed that the US”offers [sincere or heartfelt] condolences,” “stands with,” or that America’s “thoughts are with” the “people of Chad,” no less than eight times. Funny, aren’t his brand of polite Dems the same folks always howling that “Thoughts and prayers are not enough” after mass shootings in America? Guess the sentiment stops applying when the mass-shooter and mass democracy-suppressor is a useful “partner” and his victims are African.

The US indecency-enabling in Chad is naught but a less-overt version of France’s more classic-colonial formula. And like the French, the Americans are now trapped in the country’s desert of delusion and disaster. On the day of Deby’s funeral, Macron tweeted that Chad can count on “France’s unwavering friendship.” But as Roland Marchal, a researcher at Sciences Po Paris, explained, France – and I’d surmise also America – “is a prisoner of its relations with Chad, more than Chad is a prisoner of its relations with France.”

By backing tyrants without addressing foundational social, economic, or ethnic issues, Paris and Washington foster the very problems they then feel the need to solve – which further feeds the perceived obligation to justify further support for these same strongmen. Strap in for the vicious cycle-coaster, it’s sure to be one hell of a ride!
The Spoils Of War [Crimes]

Over the years, Chad’s various from a rebel-to-a-king killers and coup artists have happily assented to the Franco-American game of quid-pro-quo – mainly because of the bountiful benefits of the arsenal-quo for their loyalty-quid. Plenty of weapons have headed Deby’s way these past three decades, from decidedly interesting and diverse sources. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), from 2012-20, N’Djamena imported $136 million worth of licit foreign arms. Some $17 million came from the US, another $40 million from Washington’s NATO allies, $38 million (interestingly) from Ukraine, and – get this – $39 million from top single-seller, China. The vast majority of weapons imports – $128 million, or 94 percent – consisted of aircraft and armored vehicles.

The US sent Deby’s regime Cessna-208 Caravan surveillance aircraft, dozens of (Israeli) MDT David Armored Personnel Vehicles (APVs), as well as the Lockheed Martin-produced engines for the C-27J Spartan military transport planes that Italy supplied. Paris also sold scores of APVs and armored cars to Chad, even outfitting Deby’s presidential guard – led by his son and now successor Mahamat “Kaka” – with 22 modern ACMAT Bastion PATSAS variants used by France’s own special forces. That new Western favorite, Ukraine, sent over Soviet-era Su-25 and MiG-29S fighter planes. China sold Chad most of its real ground firepower, though – a few dozen WMA-301 Assaulter wheeled “tanks” with 105mm cannons.

From 2019-21, Congress appropriated $2,430,830 for “Military Intelligence (MI) Advisory Services” to Chad, awarding the contract (naturally) to the private sector – specifically to Crisis Response Company (CRC) LLC, a Texas-based risk management company focused on “providing professional advisors and contingency logistics solutions to clients throughout sub-Saharan Africa.” By the way, CRC is also in on the newest AFRICOM racket: Mozambique – where it’s working to “strengthen its intelligence-gathering capacities.” Anyway, its CEO served 25 years in Marine Corps infantry and recon units (in fact his entire leadership team is a Marine Recon reunion party), and his official bio brags that his:


“…tenacious pursuit of CRC’s strategic goals continues to generate fiscal and geographic growth for the company and value for our clients including the US Department of State, US Department of Defense and the Special Operations community.”

In other words, he openly touts his skillful-spins through the ole revolving door – heck, that’s why he thinks you should hire him! Likewise, the company’s COO was a Marine Corps Force Recon team leader. The senior vice president of their global security division spent 23 years in the FBI and seven more in the Marine Corps. The VP for operations spent 30 years as a Marine officer, and even rose to become the deputy commander of the Marine Corps Special Operations Command. Their business development manager put in 23 years with Marine Recon, then went to work for Lockheed Martin. The CFO isn’t a vet – though she is from South Africa, that veritable mercenary factory of a nation – but her experience at JP Morgan Chase brings a bit of business acumen. Pretty slick business model, no?

CRC’s US Army vet-infused doppelgänger, Apogee-SSU Joint Venture secured a still ongoing contract from the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs in September 2019, with a total value of more than $4.5 million. The exceptionally terse and vague “Description Of Requirement” for Apogee’s assigned scope of work used only 13 of the 250 characters allowed in the ever-tedious government form: “Chad Advisors.”

Apogee, which bills itself as a “small business contracting option,” was founded by a retired lieutenant colonel and a retired major who’d taught together on West Point’s Department of Social Sciences faculty. The former, now the company’s president, even served as Special Assistant to the Chief of Staff of the Army at the Pentagon; the latter, now CEO, was a longtime green beret who served as a military intelligence officer for Special Forces Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina – which probably explains why Apogee is headquartered just outside the base gates in the nearby city of Fayetteville.

All of which further proves every rational observer’s theory: once the US corporate defense industry gets in the game – it’s bound to be a long season of war.

The West’s role in the whole Chadian mess stinks worse than the most potent of Parisian cheeses. The French, for their part, don’t even hide their criminal neo-colonialist instincts and hyper-interventionist reflexes. As Nathaniel Powell, an associate researcher at the U.K.’s Lancaster University, aptly summarized Paris’s position: “The French have made very clear statements that they would much prefer an unconstitutional stability,” rather “than a potentially messy transition.”

The war-hawks in Washington are – if more quietly – basically down for about the same African outcomes. That’s odd though, since I seem to recall a not-so-long-ago moment when that George W. Bush-era hyper-hawk Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld brushed off CNN video images of post-U.S. invasion mobs of Iraqi looters, by huffing that hey – “Stuff happens,” adding that the situation in Iraq was “untidy. And freedom’s untidy.” Can these militarists-from-afar make up their minds or what?

Only in America, ironically – and rather vulgarly at that – it’s often faux progressive polite Democrats who are most bullish on America’s abstract “light footprint,” “low risk-high reward,” tech-savvy and by-proxy African adventures. Yet these are the same folks who so loudly (at least pretend) adherence to racial justice concepts like allowing “agency,” and empowering – not patronizing – communities of color here in the states. Which raises a rarely broached but crucial question: Isn’t the West’s acceptance, apologia, enabling, and frankly – recall the heads-of-state gushing over Deby’s proverbial casket – cheering of petty but deadly African despots just a tad paternalistic, and rather racially-charged?

On some level, the whole enemy-of-my-[Islamist]-enemy act smacks less of savvy foreign policy “realism” than a collective excusal and justification along the unuttered lines of: Well, you know, it’s different over there; come on, these Africans aren’t as deserving of – and certainly not ready for – what OUR people are entitled to. In fact, if we’re being real: maybe these semi-savages NEED a strongman.

Sometimes one wishes the banal bureaucratic armchair-militarists in Washington, Paris, and Brussels would just come out and say as much. Even if there doesn’t seem a hope in hell they’d take it a step further and admit a less indecent truth: their entire premise is flawed, and their resultant support-your-local-friendly-tyrant policies have repeatedly proven counterproductive.

Perhaps they need to hear something pithy, maybe in the vein of Captain Ramius’s (Sean Connery) quip from a blockbuster Hollywood take on Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October – a flick released the very same year (1990) Chad’s Idriss Deby took power:

“I know this book!…Your conclusions were all wrong, Ryan…”

US ROLE BEHIND THE DEFEAT OF ECUADOR’S LEFTIST PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE

By Roger Harris, Orinoco Tribune.

April 28, 2021




https://popularresistance.org/us-role-behind-the-defeat-of-ecuadors-leftist-presidential-candidate/




The US role in the defeat of leftist Andrés Arauz in Ecuador’s presidential contest on April 11 was not overt because it did not need to be, according to a high-ranking Latin American diplomat. We met with the diplomat and others on an official election observation delegation with CODEPINK. Names of some sources remain anonymous due to a hostile political environment towards progressives.

This setback for the Citizens Revolution movement, founded by Rafael Correa, will have profound implications for Ecuador and beyond, fortifying the US-allied reactionary bloc in Latin America.

Former President Correa left office with a 60% approval rating. He had been twice elected president on the first round; unprecedented for Ecuador, which had a turnover of seven presidents in the previous decade. His Alianza País party had won fourteen elections, reflecting the popularity of their wealth redistributive programs, including reducing extreme poverty in half.

His chosen successor, Lenín Moreno, will exit on May 24 with a single-digit approval rating. Much happened in the ensuing four years. Correa went from being the most popular democratically elected president in the country’s history to having his political allies rejected by an electoral majority.
¿Qué Pasó? – What Happened?

In 2017, Correa had campaigned for his former vice president to carry on their Citizens Revolution. However once in office, sitting President Moreno turned sharply right against his former colleagues, employing lawfare to decapitate the leadership of the Citizens Revolution. His own vice-president, Jorge Glas, is now in prison and other top officials have been forced to flee Ecuador. Correa, accused of using “psychic influence,” was convicted in absentia in an evidence-weak corruption trial that prevented him from returning to Ecuador.

According to Correa’s attorney, Fausto Jarrín, Moreno was assisted by the US in this legal dismantling of his own party. Casting pretenses aside, Moreno was in Washington on the day of the first round of the Ecuadorian presidential elections. Just before the second round, Moreno and his top officials flew to the Galapagos to meet with the US ambassador.

Moreno handed the shop over to the US. He revoked Julian Assange’s Ecuadorian citizenship, allowing Assange to be arrested in the UK. He recognized Juan Guaidó’s bogus claim to the presidency of Venezuela. After US Vice President Pence visited Ecuador, the FBI was welcomed back. Even a US military base in the Galapagos archipelago (part of Ecuador) was gifted to Washington.

Moreno expelled the Cuban doctors and withdrew from key regional alliances: UNASUR, CELAC, and ALBA. At a time of COVID, these actions had lethal consequences. Had Ecuador instead maintained its membership in the regional organizations, their collective power could have been used to obtain vaccines and other resources to fight the pandemic.

Moreno imposed an IMF austerity package on Ecuador, only to be partly withdrawn in the face of a massive indigenous-led protest in October 2019. Then under the cover of the presidential election campaign and pandemic, Moreno reinstated the unpopular measures.

The turncoat Moreno adopted a full-throated neoliberal program and is scrambling to enact additional “economic reforms” before his term is over to prevent the next administration from “putting the toothpaste back in the tube.” But he needn’t worry. Incoming President Guillermo Lasso not only shares the same neoliberal program, but members of Lasso’s rightwing political party collaborated with Moreno in the National Assembly.

This has been a brilliant strategy for the right. Ecuador is in an economic crisis with the impacts of austerity measures exacerbated by the pandemic. By putting in place a full neoliberal program before leaving office, Moreno spares Lasso the onus of the unpopular measures while serving international finance represented by Lasso and the US.
Lawfare Used To Rig The Electoral Playing Field

Ecuador’s electoral authority, the CNE, did not recognize the Arauz campaign until December for a February 7 first-round election. Arauz, who was sick with COVID in December, had spent the last four months battling for party certification while the other campaigns were gaining momentum.

Unlike their rich banker opponent, the Arauz campaign was strapped for funds to build an on-the-ground campaign infrastructure. More importantly, lawfare measures prevented them from even using their party’s name, forcing them to cobble together UNES as their new party.

Further, Correa with his considerable name recognition and popularity was banned from running as Arauz’s vice president. Worse, the party was prohibited from using Correa’s image, name, or voice in their campaign materials. Yet other parties could invoke Correa to smear the Arauz campaign by falsely accusing Correa of corruption and associating Arauz with Correa as also corrupt.

Despite all these hurdles, Arauz won the first-round election with a 32% vote, giving him a 13-point lead over second-place Lasso, but short of the 40% or more needed to avoid a second-round contest. Arauz also was leading in the polls, but that was to change with a massive disinformation campaign.
Rightwing Propaganda Campaign

The rightwing mobilized its near monopoly of mass media to spin sworn enemies Moreno and the Citizens Revolution as allied, in what an Arauz campaign leader characterized as the “TikTok and meme-ification” of political discourse.

Arauz, an energetic 36-year-old economic wiz, was portrayed as stupid and lethargic. In contrast, the 65-year-old conservative Lasso put on a pair of red shoes and was marketed as hip.

A four-year rightist media campaign portrayed Correa and associates as corrupt. A Citizens Revolution militant explained, “if you repeat a lie ten times, it becomes a truth.” The “NGO left,” funded by the US and its European allies, contributed to this inversion of reality.
Struggle Ahead In Ecuador

Guillermo Lasso, owner of the second largest bank in Ecuador, won with a 5-point lead. Arauz said in his concession speech: “This is an electoral setback but by no means a political or moral defeat.”

With 49 out of 137 seats in the National Assembly, his party remains the single largest bloc. The task of the Citizens Revolution politicians, according to party leaders, will be to maintain unity within their own ranks while forging coalitions with potential allies.

Meanwhile, they will have to fend off continued lawfare attacks and repression from the right. Some militants have already left the country.

The second largest bloc in the assembly with 27 seats is the ideologically diverse and indigenous Pachakutik. The Citizens Revolution’s relationships with the leadership of some indigenous organizations and, for that matter, certain labor unions have at times been contentious.

Correa opposed the clientelism of the past and shunned “selling” ministries and other positions to politically influential leaders in return for their support. Correa concentrated instead on serving the interests of their constituents with infrastructure projects for underserved indigenous regions, granting water rights, and promoting multi-cultural education and health policies. Likewise, workers got wage gains.

In retrospect, the Citizens Revolution is now openly self-critical about running roughshod over some indigenous and labor leaders. Amends will have to be made, according to a former Correa minister.
“Promoting Democracy” In Service Of The US Empire

Ruling elites hold elections to legitimize their rule, not because they believe in democracy. By the time of the 2021 presidential election in Ecuador, the playing field had been rendered so precipitously unlevel that the US had little need to overtly intervene as it did in Bolivia in 2019.

But that did not mean that the US was not actively intervening. The websites of USAID, NED, NDI, and IRI make no secret of the imperial hubris of pretending to “promote democracy” in Ecuador. The US laid the groundwork, according to a high-level diplomat, to unify the right and rig the contest against the left.

As William Blum revealed, US intelligence had prior to Correa and likely since, “infiltrated, often at the highest levels, almost all political organizations of significance, from the far left to the far right…In virtually every department of the Ecuadorian government could be found men occupying positions high and low who collaborated with the CIA for money.”

Commenting on the new Biden administration, Correa’s former Ambassador Ricardo Ulcuango observed that US foreign policy is the same with Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats, he added, are more dangerous because they are better at speaking about cooperation when they are in fact intervening.