By Élise Hendrick
Editor’s Note: When we originally published this article we wrongly attributed the piece to Alex Cockburn.  We regret this error and offer our apologies to Ms. Hendrick.

Ron Paul: Upon a little examination, his contradiction jump off the page.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the fragmentary American Left today is the tendency of many leftists in the US (though, obviously, not just in the US) to make decidedly poor choices when it comes to selecting allies. One well-known example of this – tirelessly pointed out by Paul Street, Glenn Ford, and many others – was the combination of wishful thinking and denial that led so many progressives and leftists to hitch their wagons to the star of centre-right neoliberal Barack Obama, the darling of such classic Left institutions as Wall Street and the nuclear power industry.

(This piece can also be read at its original site:

http://meldungen-aus-dem-exil.noblogs.org/post/2011/05/19/189/ )

Over the past couple of years, there has been a dawning realisation that this was a very bad idea indeed, and that many on the Left had fallen for a product of the PR industry specifically designed for them to fall for. It certainly was one of Madison Avenue’s great successes, so much so, in fact, that the Obama campaign beat out Apple in 2008 for the industry’s coveted award for best ad campaign. However, Obama’s PR makeover, which transformed a centre-right, neoliberal militarist only Citigroup could love into the darling of the anti-war movement, can’t hold a candle to the image makeover enjoyed by one Ron Paul. While Madison Avenue managed to transmogrify the centre-right Obama into a supposed stealth leftist, Ron Paul’s PR has managed to make a potential Left ally out of a far-right white supremacist who courts the favour of the sort of people Trotsky once suggested should be ‘acquainted with the pavement’. However, much less has been written about this continuing strategic cockup than the subject deserves.

In the following, I will briefly sketch the actual views of Ron Paul, to show what sort of person so many on the anti-war left have hopped into bed with. I will then propose an explanation for why this sort of thing happens, and keeps happening. The Ron Paul readers will encounter in the following will bear little resemblance to the sanitised Ron Paul who courageously rails against the current wars and declares himself to be against empire and the National Security State, and for personal liberty.

The Real Ron Paul

(Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-Communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressmen [sic]. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan Approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.)

Listen to a black radio talk show in any major city. The Racial Hatred makes a KKK rally look tame. The blacks talk about their own racial superiority, how the whites have a conspiracy to wipe them out, and how they are going to take over the country and enact retribution. They only differ over whether they should use King’s non-violent approach (i.e., state violence), or use private violence.

– Ron Paul on the Civil Rights Movement

When, on occasion, I have attempted to discuss Ron Paul’s views with his fans on the Left, I have regularly been accused of ‘smearing’ him. The accusation is understandable, because Ron Paul espouses views with which no decent person would willingly be associated. As we will see below, Ron Paul, far from being an ‘almost unique’ politician who ‘transcends the left-right pseudo-divide,’  and ‘doesn’t want to make a country of the left or a country of the right”, can in fact be quite easily located on the far-right end of the ‘left-right pseudo-divide’, alongside such ‘almost unique’ politicians as David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Paul Craig Roberts. All that is true in the laudatio quoted above is that Ron Paul most definitely ‘doesn’t want to make a country of the left’.

Before he rose to national prominence, Paul was a little less cautious about publicising his views. In 1996, the year Adolph Reed, Jr. became the first on the Left to call out ‘vacuous to repressive neoliberal’ politician Barack Obama, left-progressive Texan commentator Molly Ivins wrote:

Dallas’ 5th District, East Texas’ 2nd District and the amazing 14th District,which runs all over everywhere, are also in play. In the amazing 14th, Democrat Lefty Morris (his slogan is ”Lefty is Right!”) faces the Republican/Libertarian Ron Paul, who is himself so far right that he’s sometimes left, as happens with your Libertarians. I think my favorite issue here is Paul’s 1993 newsletter advising ”Frightened Americans” on how to get their money out of the country. He advised that Peruvian citizenship could be purchased for a mere 25 grand. That we should all become Peruvians is one of the more innovative suggestions of this festive campaign season. But what will the Peruvians think of it?

This, it should be noted, is one of the relatively innocuous passages from the newsletters Ron Paul has sent out since 1978.

‘The criminals who terrorize our cities — in riots and on every non-riot day –‘, Paul’s newsletter proclaimed on one occasion, ‘are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are. As children, they are trained to hate whites, to believe that white oppression is responsible for all black ills, to ‘fight the power,’ to steal and loot as much money from the white enemy as possible.’ Carjacking, we learn from a 1992 Ron Paul Newsletter, is the ‘hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos.’ This they may have learned by following the example of the ‘pro-Communist philanderer’ Martin Luther King, Jr., who ‘seduced underage girls and boys’, and ‘replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.’ Not unsurprisingly, Paul’s newsletter described Martin Luther King Day as ‘our annual Hate Whitey Day’.

In another story, Paul regales us with tales of ‘needlin’, a new form of racial terrorism’. ‘At least 39 white women’, he claims, ‘have been struck with used hypodermic needles –-perhaps infected with AIDS—by gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14.’ Against this background, it is probably not terribly surprising that Paul’s newsletter refers to African Americans as ‘the animals’, and suggests that a more appropriate name for New York would be ‘Zooville’.

Much has been made of Paul’s attempts to deny any connection to the statements above, and many, many more like them, attempts that he only began making when it became clear that he had a shot at national prominence. Back in 1996, when his opponent for a Texas congressional seat distributed Paul’s newsletters to the voting public, he was not as coy:

Dr. Paul, who served in Congress in the late 1970s and early 1980s, said Tuesday that he has produced the newsletter since 1985 and distributes it to an estimated 7,000 to 8,000 subscribers. A phone call to the newsletter’s toll-free number was answered by his campaign staff. […]

Dr. Paul denied suggestions that he was a racist and said he was not evoking stereotypes when he wrote the columns. He said they should be read and quoted in their entirety to avoid misrepresentation. […]

–Dallas Daily News, 22 May 1996

A campaign spokesman for Paul said statements about the fear of black males mirror pronouncements by black leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has decried the spread of urban crime.

Paul continues to write the newsletter for an undisclosed number of subscribers, the spokesman said.

–Houston Chronicle, 23 May 1996

Essentially, then, Paul’s argument back in 1996 was that his writings – which he publicly admitted were his – were being taken out of context, a symptom of ‘The Coming Race War’, no doubt.

Twelve years later, however, Ron Paul had apparently realised that his ‘Sure, I called black people a bunch of criminal animals who want to rob you of everything you have and give you AIDS, but I didn’t mean it in a bad way’ defence probably would not cut it with his new, left-leaning national audience:

The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’

However, in Paul’s view, African American ‘animals’ are not the only threat we must face. As he explained in a 2007 interview with the white-supremacist website VDare.com (co-edited by none other than Paul Craig Roberts, another strange bedfellow), we face two other great dangers: undocumented workers, the social safety net, and the looming ‘United Nations government’:

Well, I start off with saying that [immigration is] a big problem. I don’t like to get involved with the Federal Government very much, but I do think it is a federal responsibility to protect our borders. This mess has come about for various reasons. One, the laws aren’t enforced. Another, the welfare state. We have a need for workers in this country because our welfare system literally encourages people not to work. Therefore, a lot of jobs go begging. This is an incentive for immigrants to come in and take those jobs.

It is compounded because of federal mandates on the states to provide free medical care—that’s literally bankrupting the hospitals in Texas—and free education.

So my main point is to get rid of incentives that cause people to break the law—entitlements as well as the promise of amnesty, citizenship.

I also want to revisit the whole idea of birthright citizenship. I don’t think many countries have that. I don’t think it was the intention of the Fourteenth Amendment. I personally think it could be fixed by legislation. But some people argue otherwise, so I’ve covered myself by introducing a constitutional amendment.

(emphasis supplied) The problem of undocumented workers taking our jobs is apparently compounded by something Paul calls ‘the racial component’. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

In the same interview, Paul also announced that ‘I don’t think we should have minimum wages to protect the price of labor. I want the market to determine this. At the upper level as well.’ The Haitian approach to labour law.

As a professed ‘libertarian’ (in the appropriated, right-wing sense of the word, not the traditional sense), Paul loves words like ‘freedom’ and liberty’. Indeed, he has said that: “On the right-to-life issue, I believe, I’m a real stickler for civil liberties,’ except those of women:

It’s academic to talk about civil liberties if you don’t talk about the true protection of all life. So if you are going to protect liberty, you have to protect the life of the unborn just as well.

I have a Bill in congress I certainly would promote and push as president, called the Sanctity of Life Amendment. We establish the principle that life begins at conception. And someone says, ‘oh why are you saying that?’ and I say, ‘well, that’s not a political statement — that’s a scientific statement that I’m making!“

I know we’re all interested in a better court system and amending the constitution to protect life. But sometimes I think that is dismissing the way we can handle this much quicker, and my bill removes the jurisdiction of the federal courts from the issue of abortion, if a state law says no abortion, it doesn’t go to the supreme court to be ruled out of order.

(emphasis supplied)

Another "hope" messenger. What else is new?

I’ve heard his Left (yes, Left!) defenders respond to me that Paul merely wants limited government on the issue of abortion, to get the federal courts and government out of the matter so that the states can decide. I wonder how they square that with his vote in favour of the federal ban on the life-saving dilation and extraction (D&X) procedure, upheld by the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Gonzales v. Carhart.

Not surprisingly, then, Ron Paul generates enthusiasm in the sort of people the Left generally do not like to be associated with. The Neo-Nazi website Stormfront donated $500 to his campaign, which Paul pointedly refused to return. For their support, Stormfront leaders were rewarded with a photo-op. As a Stormfronter with the evocative handle ‘Wolfsnarl’ noted:

If we can get them to defend their race without them actively thinking they are doing so in those terms-through mainstream anti-immigration groups like NumbersUSA or Ron Paul activism for example. After all, how many foot soldiers of the jewish [sic]/communist takeover actively thought of themselves as communists or whatever?

Klan leader David Duke, too, ‘like[s] Ron Paul’s campaign’ enough to offer him some free advice on What Ron Paul Must Do to Win, even though ‘Ron Paul does not do enough to defend the heritage and interests of European Americans.’ Note that Duke’s criticism is not that Paul isn’t a white supremacist, but that he isn’t enough of one.

Now, it’s true that a person can’t entirely be faulted for the fans they accumulate. Anyone with any public persona at all will probably acquire a few fans whose views they do not share. Barack Obama, for example, still has quite a few left-progressive, antiwar fans.

However, a person can be faulted for how she deals with those fans. Barack Obama has made valiant efforts to show that left-progressives’ Obama admiration is not mutual. He has ridiculed and disparaged them on numerous occasions, and has pursued an agenda that stands for everything they stand against. Clearly, then, Obama cannot be faulted for the fact that some people just can’t take a fucking hint.

Not so Ron Paul. First of all, as we’ve seen above, Ron Paul does share the views of the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists in his cheering section. Indeed, he has long actively courted them, through his newsletter, by appearing at their meetings, by talking to their media (e.g., VDare), by taking their money, and by grinning into the camera at photo-ops with some of their leaders. This does not sound like the behaviour of a man who opposes everything the swastika-wearing Right stands for; this is the behaviour of someone who considers their views at least palatable, and who values their support. At the very least, Paul is a little too comfortable in the presence of people who would like to beat his Left supporters to a bloody pulp.

Ron Paul: A Symptom of Left Dysfunction

Despite a consistent, decades-long record of public pronouncements that, in any other country, would have anti-fascist activists shouting him down at every public appearance, quite a few left-leaning people in the US will defend Ron Paul to the death, attacking any critic who points out the niggling little matter of his positions on the issues. Why?

Most Left Paul supporters I’ve encountered sum up their support for him more or less as follows: He is anti-war, anti-USA PATRIOT Act, anti-empire, and for the legalisation of drugs. Any reference to the fact that he is also a misogynistic white supremacist who is virulently anti-labour is dismissed either as ‘smears’ or ‘fear-mongering’.

In other words: ‘He’s with us on one or two issues, so we have to support him. Who cares what kind of society he wants to build. You can’t have everything!’

This is the same thinking that has people in the Palestine solidarity movement approvingly quoting the likes of Jeff Blankfort, Paul Craig Roberts, and Gilad Atzmon.

Overall, the idea seems to be that we on the Left are alone in a corner, and can’t be choosy about our friends. ‘Well, if you don’t like Ron Paul’, I’ve often been asked, ‘name a politician you do like.’ The idea that there is no need to limit ourselves, in our search for ‘friends’, to the narrow-spectrum, ‘one-and-a-half-party’ political class, it seems, doesn’t even occur to them. No grass-roots movement building, no eschewing the corporate-managed electoral system in favour of exerting pressure from below and without – You picks yer candidate, and you tries yer luck. You can’t have everything. This is the thinking that allowed the Barack Obama campaign to sedate all of the grass-roots activism of the Bush years.

This is compounded by the often stunning political illiteracy one encounters in the American Left, where conspiracy theories from the far right have a disturbing tendency to migrate leftward (with certain modifications).

Witness the Fed conspiracy theories. The first time I heard someone (falsely) claim that ‘no one knows who owns the Fed’, and go on to (falsely) claim that the Fed is privately owned, it was in a ‘documentary’ called Freedom to Fascism. In this ‘documentary’, we hear that American workers enjoyed an almost utopian degree of freedom and prosperity until 1916, when the income tax was passed into law (women were free to not vote, all working people were free to not join a union or get shot, workers were free to be paid in company scrip instead of real money, African Americans were free to be photographed amongst grinning psychos whilst being burned at the stake, you know the drill). Luckily, the ‘documentary’ informed us that there was no law actually requiring us to pay income tax, quoting a number of notorious hucksters to this effect. Other examples of the looming ‘fascism’ cited by the film included the fact that, during Hurricane Katrina, white Louisiana residents were actually being investigated for opening fire on un-armed black Louisiana residents who made the fatal mistake of crossing a bridge into their neighbourhood in hopes of finding safety.

Two years later, I discovered that this Coughlinesque nonsense about an ‘international (Jewish) bankers’ conspiracy in the form of the ‘privately-owned’ Fed had been lapped up by quite a few left-progressives. Of course, the original narrative of the pre-union rights, pre-income tax, pre-women’s suffrage utopia wouldn’t sell in this crowd. Luckily, someone has come up with an alternate Utopia Lost narrative, using everyone’s favourite war criminal, JFK. JFK had long been the subject of misguided adulation on the American Left based on the idea that he had super-secret plans (so secret that they find not even the slightest hint of support in the declassified record) to end the war that he started and wholeheartedly supported. Now, not only was inveterate red-baiter John Fitzgerald Kennedy secretly going to end the occupation of Vietnam – he was going to take on the Fed by issuing silver certificates.

My intention in bringing this up is not to refute this or any other right-wing conspiracy theory that has made its way leftward – others more masochistic than I have already done an excellent job of that. Instead, my interest in this is that it parallels the dysfunctional choice of ‘friends’ we see in so many people on the fragmentary American Left. The appeal of these theories is not their veracity – they are so false as to be insulting. Their appeal – like that of Ron Paul and those like him – is that they appear, at least superficially, to be challenging powerful capitalist institutions. Moreover, they do so in a way that justifies inaction (they’re all-powerful, the ‘Sheeple’ just won’t listen, etc.), and appears to explain why we have no functional Left in this country without ever assigning any blame to the failure to engage in any sustained organising effort, the failure to distinguish healthy pluralism from dysfunctional opportunism (witness Ron Paul), and the failure to distinguish insistence on principle from insular sectarianism.

To be sure, there is plenty of blame to go around. We have decades-long attempts to infiltrate and undermine Left organisations by the FBI and local red squads, a propaganda system that convinces 80% of the population that they’re in the minority with their views, a Democratic Party that pretends to be progressive when they’re not in office, a Republican Party so scary that the Democratic Party looks good, and any number of other obstacles. However, those external obstacles do not absolve us from the responsibility to take a serious look at our internal dysfunction. There is little that a weak, fragmented, insular Left can do right now about the massive structural obstacles we face, but we can certainly do something about the mess in our own house.

Élise Hendrick publishes a politico-cultural blog, Meldungen aus dem Exil, which we recommend as an incisive reservoir of political commentary on current affairs.

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DOING MILTON FRIEDMAN PROUD—
Bourgeois parties unmask themselves in Britain as they move to dismantle a bastion of socialized medicine.

CHRIS MARSDEN |  20 May 2011

Britain’s Conservative/Liberal Democrat government has set out plans for the destruction of the National Health Service as a universal and comprehensive service free at the point of delivery.

The NHS Bill introduces a competitive market-based system, in which health care will be rationed. Health care will no longer be centrally controlled. Each hospital or NHS Trust will be able to set up joint ventures with the private sector. The bill also abolishes the duty to provide a comprehensive health service and to ensure equality of access. Instead, consortia of General Practitioners will arrange for such services as they deem necessary, based on their budget. GP consortia can enter into arrangements with private providers and will be able to charge patients. Twenty-three for profit companies already run 227 GP practices.

Local authorities can also be required to take over NHS functions, at a time when their budgets are being slashed to the bone.

The bill exposes the Conservative/Liberal Democrat government’s lies–centred on the assertion that the NHS is “ring-fenced” from the impact of its draconian cuts in public spending. Workers will soon find themselves entitled only to a basic menu of treatments, as under the US system of managed care, and ultimately will have to depend on an insurance-based system. These measures will cost tens of thousands their good health, even their lives.

Like every attack waged on working people, the frontal assault on the NHS has been conducted with the active collusion of the Labour and trade union bureaucracy. The privatisation of the NHS began under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1989-90, with the introduction of the “internal market”. But this process went far further under the last Labour government.

Under the banner of “modernisation” and “patient choice,” Labour set up Private Finance Initiative hospitals, privately run clinics for specific treatments and other measures that funneled vast sums of money to the health businesses. As for the trade unions, a few one-day strikes were held for the first time in nearly 20 years in 2006 and then not much else. A three-year no-strike agreement was reached in 2008.

The shared aims of the Tories and Labour was highlighted by the comments of Mark Britnell, the head of health at accountancy giant KPMG, at a conference in New York organised by the private equity company Apax. Britnell stated that the NHS will be transformed into a “state insurance provider, not a state deliverer” of care. This offered a “big opportunity” for big businesses: “The NHS will be shown no mercy, and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years.”

Labour attacked the Tories because Britnell was a member of Cameron’s “kitchen cabinet” on health-care reform. But Cameron was able to counter that Britnell was previously involved in drawing up the Labour Party’s NHS plan in 2000, “including the role of the private sector”, and was appointed the director general of NHS commissioning under the Labour government.

The working class is involved in a fight unlike any other in living memory. The creation of the NHS by the 1945 Labour government was viewed as crucial in slaying one of the “five giants” identified in the Beveridge report that became the template for the post-war welfare state—Want, Disease, Squalor, Ignorance and Idleness. Its destruction heralds a major step along the road to a society where these giants are again crushing working people under their heel.

The NHS bill stands at the centre of the £100 billion cuts package that constitutes a social counter-revolution setting out to obliterate all of the gains made by working people over the past century. Driven initially by the determination to claw back the billions upon billions handed over to the banks in the aftermath of the crash of 2008, the aim of Britain’s rulers and their parties is to engineer a fundamental shift in relations between the classes in favour of the super-rich.

This is an international phenomenon. The austerity measures in the UK are matched by similar programs in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. These and other European countries face bankruptcy in order to feed the rapacious demands of the bankers and speculators, whose criminal activities plunged the world into an economic nightmare without parallel since the Great Depression.

Along this road, there is no end in sight. Each blow suffered by workers of one country only whets the appetite of the world’s ruling elite for more.

The Tory cuts programme will leave the UK with a lower proportionate level of public spending than the United States—a country whose rudimentary welfare system has long been viewed in Europe as a disgraceful example of unfettered, brutal capitalism. But the Obama administration, with Republican support, is making gargantuan cuts, including slashing trillions of dollars in Medicare and Medicaid, the already minimal health programmes for the elderly and poor. Already almost one-third of Americans under the age of 65 have been without medical insurance at some point during the past two years. After Obama’s cuts, this is set to top 50 percent.

The working class has no choice but to rise to the challenge it now faces. Combating these attacks poses fundamental questions of perspective and programme. The necessary starting point is recognition that the ruling class has broken irrevocably with the previous policies of social compromise and is waging naked class warfare. Workers have to respond in kind.

The NHS and the entire panoply of welfare measures enacted following World War II were portrayed by Labour, the trade unions and the Stalinist Communist Party as proof that capitalism could be made not only into a more humane system, but reformed to such an extent that society would eventually arrive at a peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism.

This claim served to hide the basic truth that all the reforms won by working people in Britain, Europe and throughout the world were the product of huge social and political struggles. Ultimately, they testified to the fear within ruling circles of the spread of social revolution and a repeat of the events unleashed by the First World War that led to the 1917 Russian Revolution.

It is a claim, moreover, that now lies in ruins. The decades-long domination of the working class by these rotten bureaucracies is, in fact, directly responsible for creating the political conditions for the offensive now being waged with such ferocity. This offensive began in earnest following the destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism at the hands of the Stalinist apparatus. This was to be the signal for the proclamation of the “death of socialism” and the embrace of market-fundamentalism by the parties of the so-called “left” and the trade unions, which has to this point left workers with no means of fighting back.

The working class must now consciously reorient its struggles based upon the revolutionary socialist perspective that inspired the October Revolution. There is no solution to the present crisis outside of the mobilisation of a mass political and social movement of the entire working class against the profit system and its defenders—the Tory/Lib-Dem government as well as the Labour and trade union bureaucracy and their appendages in the various ex-left groups.

This is an international struggle, demanding a unified offensive against globally-organised capital by the workers and young people of Britain, Europe, the United States and the entire world. The goal must be the creation of workers’ governments that will ensure the democratic management of the economy to meet the essential social requirements for decent and well-paid jobs, healthcare, education and housing.

Above all else, the working class requires a new and genuinely socialist leadership that will defend its interests with the same radicalism and determination that is presently only evidenced by the political agents of big business.

—Chris Marsden

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WSWS.ORG
20 May 2011

Giant venue: Puerta del Sol, Madrid

Tens of thousands of protestors are continuing to occupy Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and other major public squares in cities across Spain after last Sunday’s mass demonstrations against social cuts. In Madrid, these protests were held in defiance of a ban by local authorities.   Citizens’ committees reportedly have been set up to look after food supplies, coordinate protest actions and handle communications and legal matters during the occupations. Comments on Twitter and Facebook are drawing parallels between ongoing protests in Spain and the mass protests in Egypt, and particularly Tahrir Square in Cairo, that ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Protestors are still occupying the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, as well as squares in other cities including Barcelona, Sevilla, and Bilbao.

On Sunday, more than 100,000 mostly young people joined demonstrations in various areas of the country last weekend under the slogan “Real Democracy Now! (Democracia Real Ya) – We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers”. An estimated 50,000 protested in Madrid, 15,000 in Barcelona and 10,000 in Seville. Smaller demonstrations took place in another 57 cities and towns throughout Spain.

Protestors shouted slogans against politicians, official parties and bankers—also denouncing the cuts in education, health care and other public social services, and youth unemployment and precarious jobs. Banners were waved bearing slogans like “Make the guilty pay for the recession” and “The struggle is on the streets, not in parliament”.

The Madrid Electoral Board banned the demonstration in the capital ahead of Sunday’s municipal elections and elections in 13 of Spain’s 17 semi-autonomous regions, claiming there were “no special or serious reasons” for it to take place. A ban on other protests is also being considered by the Central Electoral Board. Riot police have been drafted into sidestreets in Madrid and are demanding people show their identity cards.

Spain already has high levels of poverty and is among the most socially unequal countries in Europe. The government introduced a €15 billion package of spending cuts, including 5 percent reductions in civil servants’ pay and pensions and raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 years. Reforms of the pension system and labour protection laws are also underway.

Wages have remained virtually stagnant for a decade, while unemployment has soared to 21.3 percent, the highest in the industrialised world, with the jobless rate for youth under the age of 25 reaching 43.5 percent. Recent reports show an unprecedented growth in households headed by unemployed breadwinners to almost 1 million and a similar number of families that have no income whatsoever.

The financial crisis shaking Spain drives the ruling class to further social cuts, to resolve its crisis on the backs of working people. In particular, the Socialist Workers Party government of José Luis Zapatero may apply for a bailout like those imposed on Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

The latest protests show that workers and youth struggling against austerity measures imposed by the Zapatero government have no confidence in the official party and union bureaucracies.

Demonstrations were organised via the social networks Facebook and Twitter by “Real Democracy Now”—led by a “Coordinating platform of groups in favour of mobilising the citizens”. It has a similar character to the Portuguese Geração à Rasca (The “Scraping-By Generation”), which mobilised hundreds of thousands of youth and families earlier this year.

The manifesto of Real Democracy Now declares: “We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us.” The objectives of the movement are diffuse, talking of “inalienable truths”, criticising an economic system that “does not take care of rights” and “a political class that does not listen to us”. It calls for “an ethical revolution”.

At its centre is the claim that mass pressure will force the state and its institutions to reform. This is not, however, the lesson of recent experiences. When in March, the Portuguese Socialist government faced mass protests that it feared were escaping the control of the Socialist Party- and Communist Party-controlled unions, the bourgeoisie took pre-emptive action. It removed the minority Socialist government and applied for an international bailout.

The emergence of apparently spontaneous groups like Real Democracy Now, and the popular support they attract, testifies to the huge gulf between workers and the political establishment, including the social democratic, Stalinist and trade union organisations. At the same time, they are given great publicity in the media such as El País, Público and others, as the perspective of protest politics does not pose a genuine threat to the financial oligarchy.

The struggle now unfolding in Spain must learn the lessons of other struggles, particularly in Greece, Portugal and Ireland and particularly the Arab countries—where the working class still faces the task of overthrowing dictatorial capitalist regimes backed by Western imperialism.

What is now required is for workers and young people to form independent organs of struggle. Rank-and-file strike committees, independent of the union apparatus in every workplace and neighbourhood, can mobilise the support of public and private sector workers, youth, the unemployed, pensioners and all those opposed to the attacks on social and democratic rights.

The most important issue is the question of leadership and perspective in the working class. Only on the basis of a conscious struggle based on a revolutionary programme will the working class be able to fight back.

***

The World Socialist Web Site interviewed demonstrators in Barcelona, where the regional government under the right-wing Convergència I Unió is imposing budget cuts of 10 percent, the worst being in education and health care. The last demonstrations against the cuts were held in April, when more than 20,000 workers marched through the central streets of Barcelona.

Ines and Isabel are two nurses working in Bellvitge Hospital, Barcelona. Ines said, “We are here because we are against the cuts, against an exploiting social system. The banks are robbing and destroying us”.

Isabel stated, “We want that the politicians listen to us and defend our interests, not the interests of the banks, and the only thing the trade unions do is do deals behind our backs with the government”.

Asked how this economic crisis affects them, Ines explained, “I have a son who has a university career, philosophy, but he works in precarious jobs, if he is lucky! I am also having difficulties with the cuts in salaries and now they are talking about privatising the health system.”

Luis and Diana, two high school students, said that they attended the demonstration to demand work. “I have family that has been over two years unemployed. My father is a self-employed worker, meaning he is working lots more hours, earning less than before,” said Diana.

Luis was in favour of the objectives of the demonstration, stating that we are here “to struggle against the job insecurity, precarious jobs, the cuts, and to point to those responsible for the crisis: the banks.”

Asked about the role of the unions in the crisis, Diana said that “before they use to be, to some extent, responsive to workers, but now they defend the state. How are they going to defend us if they receive such huge subsidies from the state?”

Marta, aged 31, currently unemployed, said, “I am sick of so many robbers; they are making us responsible for their crisis. Cuts in health care, education and social services, this is the capitalist crisis; they rob the poor to give to the rich.”

“I am here to make it clear that I am not going to stand still while they take our rights and impose cuts,” she continued.

Mali, currently unemployed, and Badara, who is also unemployed and studying Catalan and Spanish, are “illegal” workers, originally from Senegal. Badara explained, “We are here to struggle for our rights. We are the worst off. They search us out, carry out raids and accuse of us of being responsible for the crisis.”

Asked about the objectives of the demonstration, Badara replied, “Social injustices, cuts in salaries…there is a common root of the problem and that is the politicians and the banks. The people have the right to have a guaranteed future.”

Mali said, “We are an association of illegal immigrants who are trying to defend our rights. The people accuse us of being responsible for this crisis. I have been a year without a job.”

BONUS FEATURE

Protests Gathering Momentum in Advance of Spanish Elections

May 20, 2011 By Amanda Payne

The people of Spain are coming out into the streets in their thousands to voice their dissatisfaction with the economy, corruption and unemployment.

Spain goes to the polls on Sunday 22 May 2011 to vote for local and regional government representatives but despite the election posters, cars driving round the streets with mega-phones blaring out party slogans and millions of leaflets being pressed into the hands of passersby, one movement in particular is really making its voice heard. Starting last Sunday, 15 May 2011, a group of mainly young people under the title “Democracia Real Ya” (Real Democracy Now) or ‘Movimiento 15-M” (15 May Movement) began a series of protests in cities across Spain, but mainly focused on the capital, Madrid.

Social Media Helps Organisation Of Protests

The group set up camp in the famous Puerto del Sol square in the city, where they would more normally gather for New Year’s Eve celebrations. Other camp sites have now spread across the country and even abroad with protests in front of embassies in London, Berlin and Amsterdam already in place and a demonstration planned for Saturday 21 May 2011 in New York’s Washington Square Park. As with the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, which have helped inspire the people of Spain, especially the young to stand up and be counted, the demonstrations have been organised through social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.

The group are protesting over their loss of faith in the main political parties, who they feel no longer represent their interests; the ever increasing rate of unemployment which is especially high amongst young people (currently 42% for 18 – 24 year olds) and corruption which many people feel is rife throughout Spanish mainstream politics, amongst other things.

Corruption, Unemployment And Loss Of Faith In Political Parties

El Pais newspaper, in an article written by Soledad Alcaide, quotes some of the protestors and their reasons for joining the movement. “There were people represented there who had never bothered with politics until now,” explains Javier de la Cueva, a 48-year-old lawyer specializing on internet issues” and “Fabio Gándara, the spokesman for Democracia Real Ya, said that the goal of the protest was to bring together the entire civil society. “It is time to leave all ideologies and specific interests aside, and focus on the things that make us angry,” says this 26-year-old unemployed lawyer who is studying to be a civil servant. “What we’re denouncing is the lack of real democracy and the tendency toward a two-party system where corruption at all levels is simply scandalous. These issues bring a large group of people together.”

In fact, far from it being just a group of young people causing trouble, people of all ages and standing in life are coming out to join the protests, especially since an attempt was made on the night of Wednesday to ban the campsite and clear the Puerto de Sol square. However, nobody was moved. According to El Pais, the Central Election board has declared a ban on protests planned for Saturday 21 May 2011, traditionally a ‘day of reflection’ when no electioneering is allowed and on election day itself but on Friday 20 May 2011, ministers in the Spanish government called on the Security Forces not to use violence to clear the protestors if they refuse to move, which at this point, seems very likely .

It would seem that the people of Spain, living in a country whose economy is on its knees and which has been rocked by corruption scandals in recent years, have decided that the time has come for their voices to be heard and rather than put their faith in the ballot box, have decided to come out onto the streets of the cities and towns to let their government know exactly how they feel.

Copyright Amanda Payne, whom we thank for penning this helpful independent report.

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“Under the Republicans, man exploits man. With the Democrats, just the opposite is true.” —American bumper sticker

MORRIS BERMAN
SO LET’S HUNKER DOWN, now, and have a serious discussion as to exactly where the United States is heading these days.

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Top Democrats celebrate 2008 victory. The rottenness at the core goes on undisturbed.

It wasn’t that popular, the idea of American decline, when I published  The Twilight of American Culture eleven years ago. Now, I seem to find discussions of it everywhere. In his last column for the New York Times, for example (“Losing Our Way,” March 26), Bob Herbert wrote:

“So here we are pouring shiploads of cash into yet another war, this time in Libya, while simultaneously demolishing school budgets, closing libraries, laying off teachers and police officers, and generally letting the bottom fall out of the quality of life here at home….Limitless greed, unrestrained corporate power and a ferocious addiction to foreign oil have led us into an era of perpetual war and economic decline. Young people today are staring at a future in which they will be less well off than their elders, a reversal of fortune that should send a shudder through everyone….When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely….Income and wealth inequality in the U.S. have reached stages that would make the third world blush….The richest 10% of Americans received an unconscionable 100% of the average income growth in the years 2000 to 2007….In 2009, the richest 5% claimed 63.5% of the nation’s wealth. The overwhelming majority, the bottom 80%, collectively held just 12.8%.” 

Herbert goes on to cite the March 25 NYT article by David Kocieniewski, on how General Electric reported profits of $14.2 billion in 2010, and not only paid no taxes on this, but actually claimed a tax benefit of $3.2 billion. And it turns out (here’s a shocker) that its CEO, Jeffrey Inmelt, was appointed head of the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness by Mr. Obama(!), to make sure that the fox will continue to guard the hen house. 

Meanwhile, on the street level, the American public is so dumb that it is literally breathtaking. I had collected some of the stats in the Twilight book and also in Dark Ages America; since then, chronicling the collapse of the American mind has become something of a national pastime, way beyond the mild banter of Jay Leno’s street interviews. For example, Newsweek recently gave 1,000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test (“How Dumb Are We?,” Newsweek, March 20), and it turned out that 29% couldn’t name the vice president; 73% couldn’t say why we fought the Cold War (official version, that is); 44% were unable to define the Bill of Rights; and 6% were not able to circle Independence Day on a calendar. Another study, conducted two years ago by theEuropean Journal of Communication, turned up the fact that 42% of Americans were not able to identify the Taliban (by comparison, only 25% of the Brits couldn’t do it). Newsweek’s summary of all this is not exactly any great intellectual breakthrough, either: “The country’s future is imperiled by our ignorance.” No shit, Sherlock.

About a week after the Newsweek article, Ray Williams did a piece for Psychology Today that listed a large number of poll results of this sort, including the fact that 77% of Oklahoma public school students don’t know who George Washington was (not kidding, folks), or who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But the most telling bit of evidence, for me, were the elementary errors of English made by the author of the article himself. His title—Are Americans getting “dumber?”—fails to put the question mark where it belongs (outside the quote mark); and he writes that “Morris Berman…decries the need to preserve what was best in American culture.” But this indicates that Mr. Williams doesn’t know what “decries” actually means, namely, “publicly denounces.” In fact, I “decried” nothing of the sort; instead, I encouraged Americans to do the work of cultural preservation. (If I was decrying anything, it was our cultural collapse.) So here we have an essay whose purpose it is to show how intellectually challenged we are, which itself contains two major English-language errors. Mr. Williams, it turns out, is co-founder of something called Success IQ University.

As I argued in Twilight, severe income inequality and widespread stupidity were crucial factors in the decline of Rome, and the same applies to the decline of our own empire. And other factors, of course, can be added to this list. But the interesting thing about social analyses of this sort, i.e. diagnoses of our civilizational collapse—and this is something I have pointed out again and again, in articles and lectures and interviews—is the obsessive habit of American optimism that befuddles our ability to draw the obvious conclusion. One author after another will weigh in with massive data on our political, social, economic, and cultural disintegration, and then at the eleventh hour pull a rabbit out of a hat and assure us that with the application of enough effort and right attitudes, we can turn this situation around. Rutgers historian David Greenberg, in a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review (“No Exit,” March 20), says of the genre of American social criticism, “Practically every example of that genre, no matter how shrewd or rich its survey of the question at hand, finishes with an obligatory prescription that is utopian, banal, unhelpful or out of tune with the rest of the book.”

It’s not hard to find examples of this, and Greenberg scores Walter Lippmann, Allan Bloom, Al Gore, Upton Sinclair, Eric Schlosser, Robert Putnam, and Daniel Boorstin as obvious examples. “Even those social critics who acknowledge the difficulty of [implementing] their solutions,” he writes, “cannot help offering up the equally quixotic hope that people will somehow rise up spontaneously against the diagnosed ills.” The authors use words like “should” and “must,” as though voluntarism and some inner decision (in the U.S., it’s always a personal solution, i.e. a nonsolution) are what we need to alter centuries-old structures of politics/economics/society/culture. Schlosser, for example (Fast Food Nation), calls on Congress to “fight against dangerous concentrations of economic power” (rotsa ruck with that, amigo). Boorstin (The Image) says that “each of us must disenchant himself…must prepare himself to receive messages coming in from the outside.” (This was in 1961; fifty years later, we might conclude that Americans didn’t quite manage to follow his suggestions.) Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) documents the collapse of social life in America in exhaustive detail and then says that we all must “resolve to become reconnected with our friends and neighbors.” (This could well be the best example of brain damage among Harvard sociologists ever recorded.)

As Professor Greenberg tells us, H.L. Mencken knew a lot better than these pundits. The “imbecility” of the masses, Mencken wrote (in his attack on Lippmann), cannot be cured “by spreading enlightenment.” Just ain’t gonna happen, he said, and added that it was part of the national temperament to insist that every problem had to have a solution, when the truth is that very often—it doesn’t.

As a final example of this national blindness, consider Chris Hedges’ essay, “The Collapse of Globalization,” which was posted on truthdig.com on March 27. Now as most of you know, I adore Chris; I love everything he writes, and regard him as one of the most clear-sighted and courageous journalists left in this country. But the essay has the same problem limned by Greenberg, that of piling up huge amounts of evidence showing in no uncertain terms that the nation is going down the tubes, and then insisting that this can be reversed by an act of will. Since most of you are familiar with the evidence for national collapse (or if not, can access the essay on truthdig), let me focus on the unwarranted optimism:

“We must embrace [writes Hedges], and embrace rapidly, a radical new ethic of simplicity and rigorous protection of our ecosystem…. We must rebuild radical socialist movements that demand that the resources of the state and the nation provide for the welfare of all citizens and the heavy hand of state power be employed to prohibit the plunder by the corporate power elite. We must view the corporate capitalists who have seized control of our money, our food, our energy, our education, our press, our health care system and our governance as mortal enemies to be vanquished.”

Uh…who, exactly, is “we”? The sixty million white underclass folks who regularly vote against their own interests? (On this see Joe Bageant’s brilliant memoir, Rainbow Pie.) The 44% of the American public who don’t know what the Bill of Rights is? The 77% of the Oklahoma public school students who can’t identify George Washington? The overwhelming majority of the population that is being economically squeezed half to death, and can only think in terms of how to individually get out from between a rock and a hard place? And in such a context, what does “must” mean, really? I mean, none of this is going to happen, as all of us know. As for Chris, he is a very bright fellow; he has to know that this call to colors is hand-wringing, wishful thinking—nothing more. As he himself points out, all of our “liberal” institutions (press, universities, organized labor, Democratic Party) refuse to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy of the sacredness of the market, and this permits the corporations to continue their assault on us. Their propaganda, he says, constitutes a “steady barrage of illusions,” which is impervious to truth; and “those who dissent—from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky—are banished as heretics.”

Chris, of course, is among those heretics, and his voice—which I in fact cherish—makes no difference at all, in terms of the way power is arranged and money distributed. Thus it bothers me when he writes that we have to “awake from our collective self-delusion,” because “we” are going to do no such thing; or when he (correctly) points out that “dying civilizations often prefer hope, even absurd hope, to truth.” Because he is apparently unwilling to bite the bullet here, and to say, with Professor Greenberg: No Exit. In doing so, he shows that he himself prefers absurd hope to truth. For the truth is now manifest, and Chris simply cannot be unaware of it: we shall not embrace a radical new ethic of simplicity (which was something of a fad in the seventies); we shall not rebuild radical socialist movements (which historically were pretty feeble to begin with); and we shall certainly not vanquish corporate capitalism. What could be more obvious? Americans have neither the will nor the interest nor the intellectual/emotional resources to accomplish any of these things; and if anything radical does occur within the next decade or so, we can be sure that it will come from the political right. Indeed, as Chris himself has pointed out on a number of occasions, this latter trend is already underway. To live in truth at this point means to understand that all of the healthy options for the United States were foreclosed long ago. Utopian impulses are fine, but only when there is some possibility of their being realized.

Which means, of course, that I have to stick to my guns here and not start pulling a rabbit out of the hat at the eleventh hour either. Rest assured: I’m not going to. There is no rabbit, and the hat is falling apart at the seams. All I can suggest—and this to the tiniest fraction of the population—is that if you are going to remain in the U.S., to tough it out and live among the ruins, as it were, one thing you can do is stay awake. Read Hedges and Nader and Chomsky. Read Walter Hixson and Sacvan Bercovitch and William Appleman Williams. Stay in touch with truthdig, alternet, commondreams, and the rest of the websites that offer serious political analysis instead of mainstream b.s. Form study groups—and not just virtual ones. Because the choice is not whether or not the country is going to die: it is, don’t be deluded on that score. All I’m suggesting is that ignorance is not bliss, and that it’s better to die with your eyes open and your boots on, than to be part of the huge mass of lemmings slowly drifting toward the abyss.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. During 1982-88 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness–The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)–and in 2000 his Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review. During 2003-6 he was Visiting Professor in Sociology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. Dr. Berman relocated to Mexico in 2006, and during 2008-9 was a Visiting Professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City.

© Morris Berman, 2011

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Obama’s speech on the Middle East, and especially his remarks about the Israeli-Palestinian impasse, have detonated the usual storm of confusion in America, with many people–abetted by the media–taking at face value Obama’s allusions to the building of a two-state solution.  Ignoring the pervasive hypocrisy in the presidential speech, and the fact it is riddled with enormous topical holes, the right wing is already on the march berating him for “betraying Israel,” as the Israeli right wing and its well-placed supporters in the US  provide the usual hysterical chorus. The baying and howling from the right may be so loud that some progressives, as it happened with Obama’s healthcare reform,  may be pardoned for actually believing the president has actually advanced something progressive.— P. Greanville

By Bill Van Auken, Senior political writer, WSWS.ORG | 20 May 2011

Obama's speech on the Middle East: Far less than meets the eye.

In his “Arab spring” speech Thursday, Obama sought to cloak US imperialism’s predatory aims in the Middle East and North Africa in a mass of hypocritical and empty “democratic” rhetoric.

While promoted by the White House as the initiation of a change of course in US policy, Obama’s rambling and distorted review of recent developments in the region offered nothing of the kind.

Rather, they signaled US imperialism’s determination to continue its drive to exert hegemonic control over the oil-rich countries of the Middle East and North Africa in the face of a powerful revolutionary challenge from below and ever stiffer competition from economic rivals in China and Europe.

According to initial press reports, the speech was largely received with dismissal and contempt in the Arab countries. Despite Obama’s use of the word “democracy” or “democratic” 23 times in his address, there was no sense in the speech that anything has changed in the policy of a government that has steadfastly backed ruthless dictatorships and monarchies in the region and given unqualified support for six decades to Israel’s suppression of the Palestinian people.

Obama began by summarily dismissing the significance of the two US wars that began under the Bush White House and have continued under his presidency, claiming the lives of over a million people.

“Now, already, we’ve done much to shift our foreign policy following a decade defined by two costly conflicts,” he said. “After years of war in Iraq, we’ve removed 100,000 American troops and ended our combat mission there. In Afghanistan, we’ve broken the Taliban’s momentum, and this July we will begin to bring our troops home and continue a transition to Afghan lead.”

As if militarism and war did not continue to “define” US foreign policy. In Iraq, nearly 50,000 US troops remain, and the Pentagon is maneuvering with the Iraqi government to keep a significant number of them there permanently. As for the claim that the US has “broken the Taliban’s momentum,” with nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, violence remains at record levels and there is every indication that the population is turning ever more hostile to the US occupation and the puppet government that it has maintained.

Obama went on to boast of the US killing of Osama bin Laden as a “huge blow” to al-Qaeda, while in the same breath acknowledging that the former CIA ally had lost his “relevance” in the face of the upheavals in the Middle East over the past several months. The attempt to segue from a dirty assassination to the revolutionary uprising of the masses fell flat.

Perhaps the most hypocritical aspect of the speech―and one that will evoke contempt throughout the Arab world―was Obama’s attempt to identify US policy and “values” with the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.

He began by retelling the story of Mohammed Bouazizi, the young Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire in protest over abuse at the hands of the Tunisian authorities, an act that inspired protests that spread and grew, finally leading to the ouster of the dictatorial regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Obama’s invocation of Bouazizi’s name is beneath contempt. While the young man lay dying and Tunisians were being shot and beaten in the streets, his administration approved a $12 million military aid package in an attempt to keep the regime in place.

The same pattern was repeated in Egypt, where the Obama administration sought to the very last to salvage the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, whose regime had been kept in place with US military aid and political support for three decades. Only after the Egyptian military made the decision to pull the plug on Mubarak’s rule did Obama publicly state his support for the dictator’s ouster.

Obama continued by proclaiming, “In too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of the few. In too many countries, a citizen like that young vendor had nowhere to turn―no honest judiciary to hear his case; no independent media to give him voice; no credible political party to represent his views; no free and fair election where he could choose his leader.”

The US president cast these conditions as characteristic of the Middle East. But are they really so inapplicable to the United States itself, where federal and state governments are imposing drastic social cutbacks that will deny “dignity” to millions, and where power and wealth is more concentrated in the hands of a few than virtually anywhere on the planet?

Do Bouazizi’s American counterparts, the millions of unemployed and underpaid young workers in the US, have anywhere to turn in terms of political parties that will represent their interests or a media that will speak to their concerns and demands?

Yet Obama tried to cast the US as the example to be emulated and the benevolent power whose role it is to guide the Arab peoples to democracy.

He said that the US would continue to pursue its “core interests” in the region, which he defined as “countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce, and safe-guarding the security of the region, standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace.”

Oddly missing from this list, and indeed from the entire speech was one three-letter word, “oil.” Its omission underscores the lying character of the entire address.

The US, Obama said, would continue to pursue these “core interests” with “the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they are essential to them.” He didn’t bother to explain―much less apologize for―how the defense of these regional interests was anchored for three decades in the repressive apparatus of the Mubarak dictatorship.

Now, he said, the US would support “universal rights” of freedom of speech, assembly and religion, the rule of law and “the right to choose your own leaders―whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus, Sanaa or Tehran.”

Noticeably absent from this list were Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Kuwait, all reactionary monarchical dictatorships that serve as lynchpins of the domination of US energy conglomerates and the US military’s operations in the region.

Obama included in the speech a somewhat hasty and unintentionally revealing defense of the US-NATO war against Libya. He began by claiming that the Iraq experience had taught Washington “how costly and difficult it is to impose regime change by force―no matter how well-intentioned it may be.” He continued, “But in Libya, we saw the prospect of imminent massacre…. Had we not acted along with our NATO allies and regional coalition partners, thousands would have been killed.”

By attributing good intentions to the Bush administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US president endorses a war of aggression launched on the basis of lies. He then acknowledges that the war in Libya, ostensibly carried out to protect civilian lives, is in fact a war for “regime change.” The claims that if Washington and NATO had not acted “thousands would have been killed,” has never been substantiated. And, in fact, thousands have died―and millions have been turned into refugees―as a result of a civil war that is being prosecuted by means of NATO military power.

In both Iraq and Libya, the wars involve not “universal rights,” but rather “core interests,” above all US imperialism’s drive to exert hegemony over the world’s strategic energy reserves.

In short, the “universal values” espoused by Obama are imminently flexible, their method of application determined entirely by US imperialism’s “core interests.”

The speech also promoted US initiatives to “advance economic development for countries that transition to democracy.” Obama asserted that this was based on the understanding that the revolutionary upheavals in the region were driven by concerns over “putting food on the table” and being “unable to find a job.”

What Washington’s proposed economic policies amount to is an attempt to use the changes brought about by the mass protests to open the region up even more fully to the exploitation of American capitalism and US-based transnationals.

He said that US policy would “focus on trade, not just aid; and investment, not just assistance.” Its aim, he said, would be opening up the region’s markets, while “ensuring financial stability.”

It was precisely the pursuit of capitalist free market policies under the dictatorships of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Mubarak in Egypt that produced staggering levels of social inequality and opened up these countries’ economies to the impact of the financial meltdown of 2008, producing the growth in unemployment. These conditions of inequality and unemployment played the decisive role in sparking the resistance of the working class in the first place.

The aim of the Obama administration is to use limited credits―$1 billion in debt relief and $1 billion in new borrowing from the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) ―to tie the Egyptian economy more closely to the US. These sums are eclipsed by the billions of dollars in military aid that Washington to continues to bestow on Mubarak’s successor regime, which is essentially a military junta that continues to repress the Egyptian people and lock up and torture dissidents.

The section of Obama’s speech that has drawn the most attention from the US media is his remarks on the Israeli-Palestinian question. Much has been made of his call for a resumption of negotiations based on the goal of creating two states―Israel and Palestine―“based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

The Republican right has seized on this statement, claiming it represents a betrayal of Israel. The more astute reactions in Israel to the speech, however, were quite different.

“Obama has granted Netanyahu a major diplomatic victory,” the Israeli daily Haaretz commented. It noted that the US president had invoked the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders “without defining the size of these lands” and providing for “swaps” that would allow Israel to retain control of the vast settlements in the West Bank, rendering any new state unviable.

The report also noted that Obama made no condemnation of the illegal settlements nor did he demand a freeze on settlement activity, which is sharply accelerating with plans unveiled Thursday for building 1,550 new homes in the occupied territories around Jerusalem.

Dripping in hypocrisy, Obama’s speech referred to Israelis living in fear of their children being killed and Palestinians’ “suffering and humiliation” under occupation. One would never guess that Israeli occupation has claimed 100 Palestinian lives for every Israeli killed in the conflict or that just days before, Israeli troops had shot to death 16 unarmed Palestinian protesters who sought to assert their right to return to their homeland by scaling borders into Israeli occupied territory.

That these demonstrations, which were joined by many thousands of workers and youth who marched on the borders from squalid refugee camps, are part and parcel of the revolutionary wave sweeping the region was utterly excluded from Obama’s “vision.”

In the end, the speech presented nothing new in terms of US policy and expressed the Obama administration’s commitment to using the traditional tools of militarism, economic domination and CIA destabilization to assert US control over the region’s strategic energy resources and to quell the struggles of its working class.

At the same time, however, this absence of substantive initiatives and utter inability to make any credible appeal to the Arab masses express the decline of US imperialist influence in the region and the increasing desperation of the American ruling elite as it attempts to fend off the threat of revolutionary upheaval