 The recent protest demonstrations in Cuba, which started on July 11, have set off a frenzied anti-communist response in the United States, from politicians of both the Republican and Democratic parties and from both right-wing and supposedly “centrist” and even “liberal” sectors of the press and media. One Florida Republican congressman called for the Cuban national leadership to be “executed.” President Biden called Cuba a “failed state.” Even before the protests, Senators Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) and Marco Rubio (R-Florida) renewed the offensive of the U.S. right against Cuba’s much-lauded international health solidarity missions, which have been praised in the many countries where they have helped to fight the Covid-19 pandemic, repeating the canard that the missions constitute “human trafficking.” The fact that there have been much larger pro-revolutions demonstrations in Cuba in response to the anti-government protests has been ignored or distorted, with enemies of the socialist government even mislabeling images of the pro-revolution demonstrations as being anti-government. The major bourgeois media in the United States have covered the recent situation the way they always have: to downplay or ignore completely the role of the 60-year blockade of Cuba by the United States in creating economic difficulties for the Cuban people, and to attribute any disturbances to “failed socialist policies” by an “authoritarian” and “repressive regime.” Not only that, but supposedly professional journalists and editorial commentators give credence to versions of events peddled by discredited right-wing hacks and ideologues. Media outlets forget the much larger protests against right-wing governments. When there are protests in Cuba, major U.S. press and media outlets forget the much larger protests against right-wing governments in many, many other countries, including Haiti, Colombia, Chile, Honduras, and Brazil, all of whose governments are subordinate to U.S. imperialist interests. In Colombia, for instance, the right-wing government of President Ivan Duque, closely allied with the United States, has unleashed a wave of violent repression against all opponents, repression which has cost the lives of many labor, indigenous, youth, and other leaders. There are other manifestations of the corporate media’s propensity to ignore wider context when they are out to do a hatchet job on Cuba or other left-wing-led nations. For example, there has been an uptick in the number of cases of Covid-19 in Cuba (as in the United States and everywhere) in recent days, and this is trumpeted by the right-wing enemies of the Cuban Revolution as proving that the pandemic has been “mismanaged” by the Cuban government. In fact, Cuba has done far better than any of the other poorer countries dominated by imperialism in mobilizing its national resources to fight the pandemic, while its access to vital medications and medical equipment (including syringes needed to provide the population with anti-Covid vaccinations) has been severely harmed by the U.S. economic blockade. The reasons for economic difficulties in Cuba are also distorted. This writer was in Cuba twice: in 1995 and 2017. At the time of my first visit, Cuba had been hard hit by the ending of favorable trade arrangements with the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries. Health care and educational institutions were still operating successfully, but there were serious scarcities and electrical blackouts caused by lack of fuel supplies. The United States government took advantage of Cuba’s difficulties by intensifying its attempts at economic strangulation of the island nation by passing the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996. These acts, along with sundry executive orders, had the purpose of strangling the Cuban economy by making it risky for foreign companies to do business with Cuba, especially if such business was to be done on a credit basis, and by making it extremely hard for Cuba to get hard currency to use in foreign trade. In 2017, improvements in living standards were clearly visible. Cuba overcame these problems by negotiating new international trade networks while also launching new productive enterprises, notably in the biomedical field. Then in December 2014, the Obama administration began a program of rapprochement with socialist Cuba. Agreements between Obama and then Cuban President Raul Castro helped to develop Cuba’s tourism industry by making it much easier for U.S. citizens to travel to the island. But much of the legal architecture of the blockade remained. So when I visited Havana in 2017, significant improvements in living standards were clearly visible. Public transportation was visibly improved by the presence of spanking new Chinese-built buses, cultural activities were thriving, and people were well fed, well dressed, and healthy looking, and Havana was clean and orderly. I even saw people walking “designer dogs”! That was in the spring of the first year of the Trump administration. But things went downhill very soon after that, as Trump reversed most of Obama’s rapprochement policies and added new sanctions, among others, restricting the ability of Cuban-origin residents of the United States to send cash remittances to their relatives in Cuba. Using the still unexplained “Havana Embassy Mystery” as an excuse, the Trump administration imposed new anti-Cuba measures and returned Cuba to the list of countries not cooperating with the United States in the so-called war against terror. These things had their impact, and then on top of them came the Covid-19 pandemic, which stopped tourism to Cuba for more than a year. Tourism had become a major generator of vitally needed foreign exchange funds for Cuba, so this was a serious setback. The pandemic, in the context of heightened U.S. attacks on Cuba, has had an extremely negative effect on the Cuban economy. And this is the moment that hardline anti-communists in the United States, which include influential Cuban-American politicians like Senators Rubio and Menendez, have been waiting for since the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959. A policy to “to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government.” In 1960, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory outlined the imperialist approach to reversing the Cuban Revolution that is still in force today. Noting the popularity of the revolutionary government, he proposed that this popularity should be undermined by employing “every possible means” which should “be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Methods should be employed to “make the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government.” And indeed, this is the policy that the United States has maintained against the Cuban people for nearly 61 years. This is why current U.S. claims to be “defending the Cuban people” are particularly repulsive. But this time, simply ignoring international and historical context has not been enough. Making use of the internet and social media, enemies of the Cuban people have flooded the U.S. public with completely fictitious or doctored material. For example, there are multiple instances in which images of pro-government, pro-revolution counter demonstrations in Cuba have been mislabeled as anti-government protests. False information has been put out concerning the size and effects of the protest demonstrations. For a long time, the U.S. government has been funding organized efforts to support dissident activism in Cuba. Recently, there has been a reliance on social media to achieve this aim. Much of the funding comes from U.S. government agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the U.S. Institute for International Development (USAID), working through a network of right-wing nonprofit and religious organizations in the United States. The Bacardi Family Foundation received $181,699 for its anti-Cuba activities. For example, in 2020 alone, USAID channeled 2.5 million dollars (as far as we know) for subversion in Cuba through dozens of such organizations. Many have connections to right-wing Cuban exile groups such as the Bacardi Family Foundation, which received $181,699. This foundation was established by the family that formerly controlled Cuba’s rum production, pre-revolution. The Cuban Revolution nationalized Bacardi, offering the former owners managerial positions in the socialized enterprise. But like many rich Cubans, the Bacardis decamped to the United States, and since then have been involved in anti-Cuba activities such as a long-running trademark dispute over the right to use the famous “Havana Club” brand name. Another entity, which received $333,122 in 2020, is Canyon Communications, which announces that it is funding young Cuban artists and intellectuals to help them express themselves. A really splendid one is Grupo de Apoyo de la Democracia, Inc., a recipient of $167,107 and like many of these entities based in the right-wing Cuban exile community in Florida; it was accused in 2006 of spending U.S. taxpayer money for illegitimate purposes. The International Republican Institute, connected to the U.S. political party, got $470,267. “Evangelical Christian Humanitarian Outreach to Cuba” got $148,089; its goal is to foment the organizing of independent Evangelical Christian churches in Cuba, a country with plenty of religious congregations of its own. Much of the U.S. money directed at destabilizing Cuba has been directed at funding dissident artists, musicians, and bloggers, giving them the ability to project their message quickly to larger audiences on the island. Some of these artists, like the rapper Yotuel, have strong international networks, including in the Cuban exile circles in Miami. There has been a recent sharp uptick in Covid-19 cases in Cuba. This has also been decontextualized. In fact, overall Cuba has done much better than other Latin American nations in dealing with the contagion, and better than the United States. This recent sharp uptick has not been just a Cuban phenomenon—it is worldwide and is happening in the United States too. For the United States to make it difficult for Cuba to import vital supplies to fight the pandemic, including syringes and medications, is a strange way to “help” the Cuban people. With health services free, sick Cubans are not bankrupted and left homeless by medical bills, as happens in the U.S. The whole issue of Cuban health care, a strong point of Cuba’s socialist system, is constantly distorted. The fact that Cuban doctors don’t drive around in Bentleys has nothing to do with the quality of that country’s health care system. Omitted from bourgeois media accounts of Cuban health care is the fact that medical education in Cuba is completely free, so young doctors are not burdened with impossible student loan repayments as they are in the United States. Instead, they are asked to put time into community service, either in Cuba or, on a volunteer basis, in one of Cuba’s overseas health solidarity missions. And health services are also free, so sick Cubans are not bankrupted and left homeless by medical bills, as happens in the United States. Some so-called pundits express shock that some countries who host the Cuban missions pay Cuba for the service. The truth is that Cuba does not charge anything to provide these services to poor countries, only to countries wealthier than itself. And why not? Why indeed should Cuba subsidize the health care system of a wealthy developed country like Italy? Cuba’s per capita gross domestic product (calculated by the Purchasing Power Parity method) is estimated at $12,300 per year, while Italy’s is $42,492. So Cuba should subsidize Italy? In 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden hinted that if elected, he would return to the Obama administration’s policy of gradual normalization of U.S. relations with Cuba. However, current statements by Biden, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and other administration figures seem to indicate otherwise. However, the direction of the Biden administration Cuba policy should not be seen as immutable. Biden is getting pressure from the anti-Cuba lobby based in South Florida and New Jersey, an old story. This pressure is deliberately exerted in such a way as to threaten the Democratic Party’s hold on the White House and its majorities in Congress and state legislatures. Friends of the Cuban people must find more effective ways of exerting our own counter pressure. Here are some: *Act as a truth squad. Especially those of us who have been to Cuba and follow events there closely should avail ourselves of every opportunity to speak out when wrong information about Cuba is peddled in the press, radio, and television, and especially on social media. Write letters to the editor, call into radio and TV programs, and put out correct information on all online and social media platforms. *Support positive legislation on Cuba by contacting your federal senators and representatives, asking them to sign on to the following bills, and then to work to get them passed: S 249, United States-Cuba Trade Act; S 1694, Freedom to Export to Cuba Act; and HR 3625, United States Cuba Relations Normalization Act. Legislative action on Cuba can be found on the website of the organization ACERE. *Get your city council, state legislature, or other public or private body to pass a resolution denouncing the U.S. blockade of Cuba and demanding normalization of relations with the island nation. More than a score of city councils and state legislatures, including the city council of the country’s third largest city, Chicago, have already done so. *Support the many organizations working to help the Cuban people overcome the imperialist blockade, such as IFCO/Pastors for Peace and many others. *Join the international campaign to award the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize to the outstanding Cuban international health care solidarity campaign of Cuba’s Henry Reeve Brigade. *Support specific campaigns to help Cuba fight the Covid-19 pandemic, like the recent one to send syringes to Cuba. AuthorEmile Schepers is a veteran civil and immigrant rights activist. Emile Schepers was born in South Africa and has a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Northwestern University. He has worked as a researcher and activist in urban, working-class communities in Chicago since 1966. He is active in the struggle for immigrant rights, in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution and a number of other issues. He now writes from Northern Virginia. This article was produced by CPUSA. Archives July 2021
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 An alarming statement was released recently by independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, “”hundreds of Venezuelan cancer patients could die because they have been caught up in excessively strict applications of U.S. sanctions aimed at Venezuela…” Many countries are afraid to conduct business with Venezuela. “Third countries, groups of countries, banks and private companies have been overly cautious in dealings with Venezuela because they fear unintentionally violating U.S. sanctions,” the rapporteurs state. “As a consequence, money cannot be transferred out of Venezuela, and some patients have been stranded, destitute, in countries where they went for treatment.”[1] This report comes amid widespread protest in Cuba, a key Venezuelan ally, spurring widespread debate regarding the role of unilateral U.S. sanctions targeting Latin America and beyond. A remnant of the cold war, the United States embargo against Cuba has continued for the past six decades. Progressives such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have spoken out against the embargo, calling it “absurdly cruel and, like too many other U.S. policies targeting Latin Americans, the cruelty is the point. I outright reject the Biden administration’s defense of the embargo.”[2] These “other U.S. policies” designed to be cruel for the sake of geopolitical interests and hegemony manifest themselves in the conditions of Venezuelan cancer patients. Biden’s repose to the Cuban protest was a continuation of the U.S. foreign policy of previous administrations. He continued to add sanctions on Cuban officials such as the Alvaro Lopez Miera, the head of the Cuban armed forces. While these additional sanctions targeting individuals are unlikely to be impactful, it symbolized the administrations commitment to the ongoing use of economic sanctions. The same has occurred with regards to Venezuela. A U.S. State Department spokesman in July refuted Venezuelan President Maudro’s appeals to ease the sanctions against Venezuela, stating that major policy shifts and dialogue with the illegitimate, U.S. backed Juan Guaidó would be required to reduce sanction measures. Contextualizing Contradictions in CubaMost U.S. analysts fail to grasp the complexities of protest, revolution, projecting their own ideologies to grassroots movements abroad. Protests are full of contradictions and are seldom monolithic in form. Reminiscent of the ’89 Democracy Movement in China, the U.S. government and media are quick to reduce a movement to simple dichotomies. Generally between “freedom” (generally defined as Western neoliberalism of free-markets) and “authoritarianism” (the party). However, what’s missed is the role markets have played in the creation of the discontent of the people. In China, the ’89 movement was shaped by hasty market reforms that produced greater inequality as well as an increasing divide between the rural populations and the urban populations[4]. So while the protestors did demand increased social and political freedoms, these events occurred with respect to a legitimacy crisis of the Chinese Communist Party, as the government towards a liberalized market, leaving behind workers and farmers. Parallels can be drawn with the events in Cuba. President Biden stated, “The Cuban people are demanding their freedom from an authoritarian regime.” This statement implies a universality to the Cuban protests, ignoring the counter-protestors that have come out to support the Cuban government as well as ignoring the conditions causing the protests. The discontent in Cuba can be seen from a variety of positions. Here I will address a handful to add nuance against the binary framing of the U.S. media apparatus. First, there is the effect of the U.S. embargo on Cuba and the long-term impact that the embargo has had on Cuban economic prospects and growth. Second, there have been limits and failures of the Cuban government to create a sustainable economic model in lieu of the embargo. And third, the impact of COVID-19 on the Cuba has damaged the economy particularly as a result of the aforementioned issues. To address the first point, the embargo on Cuba and the exclusion of Cuba from international markets has placed a limit on the economy of Cuba, with the Cuban government estimating that the embargo has cost Cuba $753.69 billion[5]. This, in a country with an estimated GDP of approximately $100 billion. Due to the restrictions of trading partners, Cuba aligned itself with the Soviet Bloc, trading with the Soviets as well as receiving aid. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba saw a severe economic crisis causing mass protests. To pivot their economy in a post-Soviet world, Cuba began increasingly supporting itself through the tourism industry. Since then, Cuba has seen millions of tourists, and with that an increasing liberalization of the tourism sector and welcoming greater foreign investment. In recent years, the Cuban government has allowed significant increases in real estate and tourism investments to attract foreign capital, while decreasing its investments into healthcare[6]. Simultaneously, those investments have not translated to improved conditions with respect to healthcare. Healthcare spending per capita has been stagnant since 2015, and as a percentage of GDP healthcare spending has decreased[7]. It is this context in which the COVID-19 wrecked the tourism industry internationally, reducing available revenue for Cuba while the Cuban people have simultaneously not seen improved conditions as a result of investment in the tourism industries. Therefore it is these contradictions that cause a rupture between the people and the party, and this can manifest itself in various shades of politicization - of those sympathizing with the party as it contends with embargo and worldwide capitalist realism, those protesting market liberalization and demanding a reaffirmation of socialist values and social welfare, and those to whom market freedom and political freedoms are often viewed synonymously. Sanctions in VenezuelaThe U.S. policies towards Cuba have been repeated more recently in Venezuela since the beginning of the Bolivarian movement in 1999, including multiple coup attempts, economic sanctions, and most recently widespread claims of election fraud. Right-wing critics point towards Venezuela’s social spending as the issue, limiting discussion and context. For instance, Venezuelan Dutch Disease, in other words economic dependency on a singular sector causing declines in other sectors, traces as far back as 1929. While Chavez did nationalize the oil industry in order to provide social services for the people, he also pushed to reinforce OPEC to create more stability for oil producers[8]. However, many events of the 2000s such as the wars in the middle east and the Great Recession caused extreme volatility in the price of oil, weakening both Venezuelan’s economy and the strength of OPEC. As Venezuela faced long-rooted issues of Dutch Disease as the oil market declined, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the Chavez regime, further tightening restrictions over the past 15 years through the COVID-19 pandemic. When calculated, the human costs of sanctions are incredibly high. A Center for Economic Policy and Research report estimated 40,000 excess deaths in Venezuela as a result of US sanctions in 2017 alone[9]. In 2014, protests began due to these economic and political issues. The U.S. government has used these protests as leverage to manufacture the consent of the U.S. people in supporting harmful policies that hurt the Venezuelan population. However, in the recent Venezuela parliamentary elections, Maduro’s party, the PSUV, decisively won, reaffirming the support of the people towards the Bolivarian revolution, and acknowledging the culpability of foreign policy in the struggles of the Venezuelan people. The Role of the U.S.Ultimately, the only position for those in the U.S. is to demand that the U.S. government stop exerting itself abroad in the form of economic sanctions. Economic sanctions can constrain and warp a country, causing dependencies, contradictions, and human rights crises. As people of Cuba and Venezuela protest their respective governments, they create an outlet from which their governments can properly and respond to their demands. These demands have diverse and deeply complex roots. Thus, all of those in support of egalitarianism and international rights must not fall for false binaries and limitations imposed by capitalist realism. In particular, the U.S. left must challenge traditional U.S. foreign policy as the U.S. State Department attempts to make foreign intervention more palatable by using finance as opposed to guns and the media to provide justifications. Furthermore, the role of markets as a supra-national body must be recognized by the left in order to envision a better horizon in which sovereignty cannot be challenged by borderless international capital. Notes: 1. “Venezuela: Save lives of cancer patients endangered by U.S. sanctions”, OHCHR, July 21 2021, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=27328&LangID=E 2. John Haitiwanger, “AOC calls out Biden for defending 'absurdly cruel' embargo on Cuba while expressing support for Cuban protestors”, Buisiness Insider, July 16 2021. https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-calls-out-biden-for-backing-absurdly-cruel-embargo-cuba-2021-7 3. Nick Wadhams, “U.S. Rejects Maduro’s Call for Biden to Lift Venezuela Sanctions”, Bloomberg, July 20 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-20/u-s-rejects-maduro-s-call-for-biden-to-lift-venezuela-sanctions 4. Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (Verso, 2009), 19-45. 5. On resolution 70/5 of the United Nations General Assembly, entitled "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba.” June 2016. 6. ”Inversiones Indicadores Seleccionados. Enero-Diciembre 2020.” Oficina Nacional de Estadística e Información. 7. According to World Bank data from the World Health Organization Global Health Expenditure database, https://data.worldbank.org/ 8. For an overview on the history of the Chavez government see Changing Venezuela by Taking Power (Verso, 2007) by Gregory Wilpert. 9. Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs, “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela”, Center for Economic and Policy Research, April 2019. AuthorFrancis Hayes is an activist focusing on international relations, development, and technology. Francis has a Master's degree in Computer Science with a focus on social data mining. Archives July 2021 7/29/2021 Pegasus and the Threat of Cyberweapons in the Age of Smartphones. By: Prabir PurkayasthaRead Now Spyware like Pegasus is dangerous not only because it gives hackers complete control over an infected phone, but also because it introduces the skills and knowledge of nation-states into the civilian sphere. Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, is haunting the Narendra Modi-led Indian government once again. Seventeen media organizations including the Wire, the Washington Post and the Guardian have spent months examining a possible list of 50,000 phone numbers belonging to individuals from around 50 countries. This list was provided by the French journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International. These investigations by the media organizations helped zero in on possible targets of these cyberattacks. The mobile phones of 67 of the people who were on the target list were then forensically examined. The results revealed that 37 of the analyzed phones showed signs of being hacked by the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware or signs of attempted penetration. Of the remaining 30, the results were inconclusive as either the owners had changed their phones or the phones were Androids, which do not log the kind of information that helps in detecting such penetration. The possible targets not only include journalists and activists, but also government officials. This includes 14 heads of states and governments: three presidents (France’s Emmanuel Macron, Iraq’s Barham Salih and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa), three sitting and seven former prime ministers, and a king (Morocco’s Mohammed VI). The three sitting prime ministers are Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Egypt’s Mostafa Madbouly and Morocco’s Saad-Eddine El Othmani. Among the seven former prime ministers are Lebanon’s Saad Hariri, France’s Édouard Philippe, Algeria’s Noureddine Bedoui and Belgium’s Charles Michel, according to the Washington Post. Once the malware is installed on a target’s phone, the spyware not only provides full access to the device’s data but also controls the phone’s microphone and camera. Instead of a device for use by the owner, the phone becomes a device that can be used to spy on them, recording not only telephonic conversations but also in-person conversations, including images of the participants. The collected information and data are then transmitted back to those deploying Pegasus. Successive information and technology ministers in India—Ravi Shankar Prasad and Ashwini Vaishnaw—have stated that “the government has not indulged in any ‘unauthorized interception’” in the country, according to the Wire. Both the ministers have chosen to duck the questions: Did the government buy NSO’s hacking software and authorize the targeting of Indian citizens? And can the use of Pegasus spyware to infect smartphones and alter its basic functions be considered as legal authorization under the Indian Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009 for “interception, monitoring or decryption of any information through any computer resource”? I am going to leave the legal issues for those who are better equipped to handle them. Instead, I am going to examine the new dangers that weaponizing malware by nation-states pose to the world. Pegasus is not the only example of such software; Snowden surveillance revelations showed us what the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States and the Five Eyes governments do and shed light on their all-encompassing surveillance regime. These intelligence agencies and governments have hacked the digital infrastructure of other countries and snooped on their “secure” communications and even spied on their allies. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel was not spared from NSA surveillance. The key difference between nation-states and cybercriminals developing malware is that the nation-states possess far greater resources when it comes to developing such malware. Take the example of a group called the Shadow Brokers, who dumped a gigabyte of weaponized software exploits of the NSA on the net in 2017. Speaking about this, Matthew Hickey, a well-known security expert, told Ars Technica in 2017, “It is very significant as it effectively puts cyberweapons in the hands of anyone who downloads it.” Ransomware hit big time soon after, with WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware creating havoc by using the exploits in NSA’s toolkit. Why am I recounting NSA’s malware tools while discussing Pegasus? Because Pegasus belongs to NSO, an Israeli company with very close ties to Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA. NSO, like many other Israeli commercial cyber-intelligence companies, is founded and run by ex-intelligence officers from Unit 8200. It is this element—introducing skills and knowledge of nation-states—into the civilian sphere that makes such spyware so dangerous. NSO also appears to have played a role in improving Israel’s relations with two Gulf petro-monarchies, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Israel, therefore, sees the sale of spyware to these countries as an extension of its foreign policy. Pegasus has been used extensively by the UAE and Saudi Arabia to target various domestic dissidents and even foreign critics. The most well-known example, of course, is Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and the Washington Post’s columnist, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. NSO’s market capitalization is reported to be in the range of $2 billion, making it perhaps one of the most expensive civilian cyber-intelligence companies. And its tools are frightening, as there does not seem to be any protection against them. Most of these tools are classified as cyberweapons and require the Israeli government’s approval for export, again showing the link between the Israeli state and NSO. The other reason why Pegasus spyware is so dangerous is that it does not need any action on the part of the owner of a phone for the device to be hacked by the spyware. Most infections of devices take place when people click on a link sent to them through email/SMS, or when they go to a site and click on something there. Pegasus exploited a security problem with WhatsApp and was able to hack into a phone through just a missed call. Just a ring was enough for the Pegasus spyware to be installed on the phone. This has now been extended to using other vulnerabilities that exist within iMessage, WhatsApp, FaceTime, WeChat, Telegram, and various other apps that receive data from unknown sources. That means Pegasus can compromise a phone without the user having to click on a single link. These are called zero-click exploits in the cyber community. Once installed, Pegasus can read the user’s messages, emails, and call logs; it can capture screenshots, log pressed keys, and collect browser history and contacts. It exfiltrates—meaning sends files—back to its server. Basically, it can spy on every aspect of a target’s life. Encrypting emails or using encryption services such as Signal won’t deter Pegasus, which can read what an infected phone’s user reads or capture what they type. Many people use iPhones in the belief that they are safer. The sad truth is that the iPhone is as vulnerable to Pegasus attacks as Android phones, though in different ways. It is easier to find out if an iPhone is infected, as it logs what the phone is doing. As the Android systems do not maintain such logs, Pegasus can hide its traces better. In an interview with the Guardian published on July 19, “after the first revelations from the Pegasus Project,” Snowden described for-profit malware developers as “an industry that should not exist… If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.” He called for an immediate global ban on the international spyware trade. Snowden’s answer of banning the sale of such spyware is not enough. We need instead to look at deweaponizing all of cyberspace, including spyware. The spate of recent cyberattacks—estimated to be tens of thousands a day—is a risk to the cyberinfrastructure of all countries on which all their institutions depend. After the leak of NSA and CIA cyberweapons, and now with NSO’s indiscriminate use of Pegasus, we should be asking whether nation-states can really be trusted to develop such weapons. In 2017, Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft and no peacenik or leftist, wrote, “Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage.” It is this concern that certain leading companies within the industry—Microsoft, Deutsche Telekom and others—had raised in 2017, calling for a new digital Geneva Convention banning cyberweapons. Russia and China have also made similar demands in the past. It was rejected by the United States, who believed that it had a military advantage in cyberspace, which is something it should not squander. Pegasus is one more reminder of the danger of nation-states developing cyberweapons. Though here, it is not a leak but deliberate use of a dangerous technology for private profit that poses a risk to journalists, activists, opposition parties and finally to democracy. It is a matter of time before the smartphones that we carry become attack vectors for attacks on the very cyberinfrastructure on which we all depend. AuthorPrabir Purkayastha is the founding editor of Newsclick.in, a digital media platform. He is an activist for science and the free software movement. This article was produced in partnership by Newsclick and Globetrotter. Archives July 2021 7/29/2021 Fed Up With Democrats, Thousands March to Demand Medicare for All. By: Sonali KolhatkarRead Now With a growing realization that Democrats are refusing to use their slim hold on political power to push for a single-payer system of health care, thousands are taking to the streets to demand change. Activists in more than 50 cities across the United States marched and rallied on July 24 to demand a Medicare for All or single-payer health care system. With Congress and the White House more focused on passing an infrastructure bill, conducting an investigation into the January 6 Capitol riot, and reforming our immigration system, the issue of health care has once more been relegated to the back burner. There is nary a peep from most lawmakers on the fact that, even as the pandemic rages on, nearly 30 million Americans remain uninsured (as per the latest available data), and millions more are underinsured. To be fair, President Joe Biden has done what he promised to do during his campaign, which is to preserve and strengthen the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and effectively expand private health insurance coverage via subsidies. The ACA is not designed to cover all people with the best and most affordable health care. Biden’s major legislative achievement thus far, the American Rescue Plan, included more government subsidies for private health insurance plans to cover unemployed Americans while leaving millions more out of the equation. Neither the ACA nor the American Rescue Plan’s health care provisions ensure that all Americans have good-quality free health care. The only assurance is that private insurance company profits remain healthy. Earlier this summer, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched a campaign to encourage Americans to sign up for private insurance through HealthCare.gov (perhaps a more appropriate address for the website would be HealthInsurance.gov). The Biden administration celebrated the fact that 2 million more Americans were able to purchase low-cost or no-cost private health insurance plans or sign up under expanded Medicaid programs. The insurance industry front group Partnership for America’s Health Care Future echoed that number as an achievement to celebrate. But neither made mention of the tens of millions who remain uninsured and underinsured. There is even less acknowledgment of the fact that tax dollars are subsidizing corporate profits for what is often mediocre health care coverage. This is not surprising given that the federal government treats the health care needs of ordinary Americans as an optional luxury item that can be supplied by the market. For example, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) refers to those needing health care (i.e., all human beings) as “consumers” whom the government agency advises ought to “maximize the savings on their Marketplace coverage” when shopping for ACA plans. In a press release lauding the American Rescue Plan, CMS uses the word “consumers” nearly a dozen times. Rethinking health care as an essential need like education or emergency services will require a major cultural shift among public servants. Proponents of Medicare for All are constantly told it would be far too expensive to extend a government program intended for those 65 and older to everyone else. But a fact that has received little attention is that nearly half of all Americans are already getting health care through some form of government programs or subsidy. An analysis published on Quartz found that 161 million Americans are now receiving health care through Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Health Administration, or CHIP, the Child Health Insurance Program. Those who do not qualify for these programs are forced to acquire private health insurance through employment and pay varying amounts out of pocket for hefty premiums, deductibles and copayments, poor prescription drug coverage, lifetime limits on coverage, etc. Such a patchwork system does little more than ensure large profits for private health insurance companies. Worse, it ties millions of people to jobs they may dislike, or forces them to settle for poor coverage that may not even be adequate for the care they need. For those who are left out of the system entirely, there is no government answer other than to ‘sink or swim.’ A recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that hospitals engage in serious price gouging of the uninsured, charging them far higher prices than they would charge an insurance company for a patient who was covered. Dr. Paul Song, a board-certified radiation oncologist and president of the California Chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, was a featured speaker at the Los Angeles rally and march for Medicare for All on July 24. He explained to me after the event that “people are frustrated” about the fact that “we’ve had so many people succumb to COVID in the United States, and it has really illustrated how broken our health care system is.” The march organizers and attendees wanted to send a message that “we’re not going away; we demand better,” he said. One of the few reports on the Medicare for All marches published by a major corporate-media outlet was this one by David Weigel of the Washington Post who wrote that six months into the Biden administration, “the movement to replace American health care with a cheaper single-payer system has vanished from daily political debate.” He’s right. After Biden emerged as a centrist alternative to Senator Bernie Sanders—one of the most stalwart proponents of single-payer—during last year’s presidential primaries, the next best hope for organizers lay in the appointment of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the HHS. Becerra’s support of single-payer health care offered the promise of federal waivers for states looking to expand government-run health care. So far, even that has not transpired. Weigel noted that Sanders’ 2016 campaign for president “inarguably pushed single-payer health care into the Democratic Party mainstream,” and as a result, “most of the senators who would run for president in 2020 endorsed it.” Arguments over whether a single-payer system was better than the current patchwork of private-public health care “dominated months of primary debates,” he wrote. Polls showed this was an issue deeply important to Democratic voters, and yet once Democrats assumed power in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, the only focus on health care was to entrench and safeguard the ACA while ignoring the health care crisis affecting millions of uninsured and underinsured. The contradictions are starker in California, where Democrats have a far more comfortable margin of power than their federal counterparts in D.C. “You hear crickets right now,” said Song, referring to California Democrats who were vocal about supporting single-payer health care under Republican governors whose veto they could count on, but who are reliably silent when they have the votes to pass a bill. California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom sailed into power on a platform of supporting Medicare for All and said during his campaign in 2017, “There’s no reason to wait around on universal health care and single-payer in California… you have my firm and absolute commitment as your next governor that I will lead the effort to get it done.” Today, California Democrats enjoy a supermajority in the state Assembly and Senate and have an ostensible supporter of a single-payer health care bill as governor. But a bill to advance a single-payer system in the Assembly emerged this year only to be shelved a few months later until next year. Newsom appointed a commission to study the issue, but so far, nothing concrete has emerged. Five years after he first made his campaign promises, Newsom is facing a Republican-led recall effort with a shockingly tepid 50 percent of likely voters supporting him versus 47 percent who are willing to vote him out. One can only wonder how much more support Newsom would be enjoying in the heavily Democratic California had he shown more leadership on his health care promises. Song, who says he supports the governor remaining in office, says, “we should push him to live up to his campaign promises, not only to fight off this recall but to really move California forward.” The moral of the story is that Democratic Party lawmakers at the state and federal level have often pledged loyalty to issues like Medicare for All when running for office or when governing as a minority party and promptly switched allegiance to the private insurance industry once in office or when their party holds enough of a majority to do something about it. No wonder voters are pissed off and marching in the streets. AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives July 2021 7/28/2021 Western Left Intellectuals Love Affair with Colour Revolution in Cuba. By: Josh BergeronRead NowThe Open Letter Left Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar, Paul Le Blanc, Suzi Weissman, Tithi Bhattacharya, Charlie Post, Robert Brenner, Gayatri Spivak, Alex Callinicos, Ashley Smith, Eric Toussaint, Marc Cooper, Etienne Balibar. These are a handful of the over 500 signatories on an open letter directed to the blockaded Cuban government on July 12th demanding “respect for the democratic rights of all Cuban people” and the release of “dissident Marxist” Frank García Hernández and his comrades from jail after the protests of July 11th. These signatories are high-profile academic socialists in the US and Europe, featured prominently in the publication catalogue of Verso and Haymarket Books, or on the editorial boards of online journals like New Politics, Tempest, Spectre, Socialist Worker, and other ex-ISO-now-DSA, SEP, or UK SWP related outlets. Their work also frequently appears in more mainstream left outlets, such as Jacobin and the Nation. Their opinions on the left reach a wide audience and, in some cases, carry significant weight. Their petition circulation effort drew major support on social media in the days after the initial protests in Cuba, helping to stitch together a left-reinforcement to the edifice of the mainstream press, which described the event as an uprising by “political dissidents” against an “oppressive bureaucratic regime” in the pursuit of democracy and freedom of expression. The definition of “freedom” pursued and the political orientation of the protesters in question differed between the tales spun by the New York Times and those of the Socialist Worker, but the story was the same: Repressive government arbitrarily detains political dissidents. And while these signatories differ among themselves over their characterization of the Cuban government and its revolutionary tradition—ranging from the view that Cuba is “state capitalist” that harbors no revolutionary potential to the view that the once-revolutionary state has become an intransigent bureaucracy that is still preferable to the neoliberal model—all seem to find common ground with co-signer Gilbert Achcar’s warning about “the anti-imperialism of fools.” Achcar condemns those who oppose US imperialism no matter its target, because he believes this misses the “nuanced” view that US imperialism might be instrumentalized by popular movements in the pursuit of their own liberation.  Gilbert Achcar has been criticised for his paid work training the UK Military’s “Defense Cultural Specialist Unit” in a series of seminars that he organized for his employer the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Achcar was also flown to Australia as a guest speaker at Socialist Alternative’s Marxism 2014 conference in Melbourne. Our “knee-jerk” rejection of the notion that any positive could ever come from the machinations of empire, in Achcar’s formulation, puts us in the camp of “defending murderous regimes.” Ostensibly, sharing co-signature real estate with the likes of Achcar would suggest that the other petitioners agree with him that anti-imperialism is not always a principled position and the events in Cuba are an example of a situation in which they do not want to end up on the side of “fools.” So without further investigation, they and 500 others signed an open letter condemning the Cuban government for its “repression and arbitrary detentions” of “critical communists.“ AN ALTERNATE VIEW FROM THE GROUND On July 17th, a different narrative emerged from the mouths of Frank García Hernández’s Cuban colleagues themselves. The Comunistas collective Editorial Board, of which Frank is a founder, published an account of events that was much more balanced and far less negative in its appraisal of the Cuban government and its response to the protests than the narrative that was promoted by the petition’s signatories. Rather than a repressive response to an organic anti-state uprising, they portray the events of July 11th as unprecedented protests with a variety of origins and compositions, some legitimate and others manufactured. In their account, the protests were composed of three flanks: a small group of US-funded counter-revolutionaries with massive reach and influence, a small group of anti-state intellectuals with legitimate grievances that were co-opted by the reactionaries, and a much larger group of “non-political” demonstrators demanding an end to austerity and shortages—a crisis which the Comunistas Editorial Board attributes, with some reservations, almost entirely to the exacerbating US blockade and global pandemic. In short, the most explicitly anti-government slogans and orientations were crafted and carried by the US-funded counter-revolutionaries, whereas the majority of the demonstrators lacked a cohesive political consciousness and simply wanted a reprieve from their very real material hardships. As the editorial board asserts, “The protests did not represent a majority. Most of the Cuban population continues to support the government.”  A demonstration in Havana with thousands of people in a show of support for the Cuban revolution | Morning Star Notably, this closely mirrors the public address of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who stated, “The protests involve many revolutionary citizens who want an explanation for the current situation in the country, but are also contaminated by groups of opportunists who take advantage of the current crisis to undermine order and generate chaos.” And while Díaz-Canel expressed full faith in the Cuban people to engage in productive dialogue to resolve the present crises, his calls for revolutionaries to take to the streets to defend the nation against opportunistic attacks and US-financed subversion campaigns was met with scorn from the self-described “anti-campist” or “third campist” Western left. For these Western left critics of the Cuban state, Díaz-Canel’s calls for popular defense of national sovereignty represented a cynical demand by the Cuban state for its supporters to engage in vigilante violence against dissidents like García Hernández. The fact that García Hernández’s comrades—who engage in frequent criticism of the Cuban government themselves—did not subscribe to this narrative of events nevertheless did not discourage the petitioners from propagating the perspective that Frank’s arrest was the smoking gun evidence of Cuba’s authoritarian round up of “critical communists.” ARBITRARY DETENTION OR SAFEGUARDING THE REVOLUTION? No such round-up took place. The arrests that did occur followed outbreaks of violence and vandalism after mostly peaceful and unharassed protests in a number of cities, which the Comunistas collective describes as: “Violent groups carried out acts of vandalism, attacking communist militants and government supporters with sticks and stones.” The Cuban police and defenders of the revolution engaged in kind. In other words, according to this collective of Cuban critics of the state, the violence that resulted in scattered arrests were largely carried out by counter-revolutionary forces against government supporters and other communist partisans. This is a far cry from the narratives emerging out of the US corporate media and academic left circles, which characterized the violence as a one-sided repressive crackdown by an intransigent bureaucratic “regime” and its paid supporters against dissidents striving for freedom and plenty. Nevertheless, Frank García Hernández and some others were arrested—the catalyst for the petition. Frank’s comrades at the Comunistas collective address this too. It turns out, Frank was not arrested for being a “dissident” participant in the protests. In fact, Frank is a member of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) who merely watched but did not partake in the protests, and was arrested by “confusion” as he put it. Frank and another intellectual named in the petition, LGBTQ activist Maykel González Vivero, who did participate in the protests, were picked up after a nearby act of counter-revolutionary violence resulted in injuries and vandalism late in the night. By Frank’s own admission, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The next day they easily proved their innocence and were released without incident. According to his colleagues at Comunistas collective, “During his little more than 24 hours of detention, Frank affirms that he did not receive physical abuse, nor any type of torture.” No other person associated with the publication was arrested or targeted. But here a key detail emerges. Frank’s release actually preceded the publication of the open letter demanding his release by his “comrades” in the US and Europe. And while Comunistas collective maintained their own criticisms of the Cuban government, their characterization of the genesis of the protests, the response of the government to the protests, and the appraisal of the revolutionary process in general, differ significantly from the ostensibly “progressive” critics of the Cuban government in the US and Europe who organized the petition to release their friend who had in fact already been released. Again, these significant discrepancies have not been addressed by any of the prominent signatories and circulators of the petition. In fact, on July 17th, the day that the Comunistas blog collective published their retrospective of the protests and arrests, some of the US-based petition endorsers republished the original petition in Tempest Magazine without mention of any of the above critical divergences from on-the-ground reports. Further, the editorial board of Tempest broadened the appeal to a call for the release of “all detainees in Cuba.” Even the Comunistas collective demanded only the release of the detainees “as long as they have not committed actions that have threatened the lives of other people.” In the week that followed the July 11th protests, the Open Letter Left were confronted with an excess of evidence and investigative research documenting the existence of US CIA front subversion projects, tens of millions of dollars funnelled into counter-revolutionary activities, coup-propagating social media bot farms, and other examples of hybrid warfare that served as the backdrop of the unrest. And yet, they maintained their political line that all arrests were arbitrary and illegitimate. One signatory even asserted that the duty of the left in the West is to support all such protests, “whatever people’s politics involved in these struggles– against whatever states and ruling classes, even those who falsely claim the mantle of ‘socialism.'” This is, of course, a tacit endorsement of the reactionary tail that wags the dog of these astroturfed “color revolutions,” disguised as they are as organic movements of workers and oppressed peoples. WHITHER OPPOSITION TO EMPIRE Taken in isolation, a charitable reading could view signing such an open letter as a political slip-up brewed in the fog of war that is a developing foreign event. But for many of the most prominent left signatories, this was the only public statement or call to action made regarding the unprecedented events in Cuba. Too few matched their outrage of the arrests with equal outrage over the ongoing illegal blockade of the island by the US, and even fewer (close to none) circulated open letters or petitions calling for anti-imperialist solidarity with Cuban sovereignty against the now well-documented imperial provocations that played an important role in the outbreak and international media coverage of the protests in Cuba. Even after statements of support for the gains of the Cuban revolution came from all corners of the world, demanding an end to the illegal blockade and hybrid warfare, the signatories spared little attention for the very real threat of escalating imperialist intervention. When the mayor of Miami called on the US government to bomb Havana, none of the open letter endorsers change their tune. None came to the defence of Black Lives Matter after the organization’s condemnation of the US blockade brought them heavy backlash. At most, as in the petition itself, the blockade and imperial provocations were mentioned as an almost unrelated preamble to the real point, despite their absolute centrality. No open letter was signed and circulated by this group of Western academic leftists demanding an end to the blockade after the 29th consecutive UN General Assembly majority vote to end the economic siege in June, and neither was there an effort on their part to circulate the campaign to send millions of much-needed syringes to the island to help put Cuban-made COVID vaccines into Cuban arms. When President Joe Biden announced that he would not change course on Cuba and called the nation a “failed state” without reference to the blockade, they issued no scathing open letter. They did not collectively come to the defence of a patriotic Cuban woman who was censored on Twitter after she demanded that the UN Human Rights Council stop using her image as the symbol for the anti-government protesters, when in reality she was in the streets of Cuba defending her revolution. Similarly, many signatories silence on the ongoing violent US-backed state repression of a months-long popular uprising in Colombia, or the years-long popular uprising in Haiti, grew more pronounced with the circulation of this petition. Their priorities were laid bare. When confronted on social media, those that disagreed were accused of supporting “repression” and “ignoring voices on the ground.” No intellectually honest reference was made to the voices on the ground of the 100,000 Cubans who took to the streets of Havana in defence of their revolution. No mea culpas were issued after even Reuters was forced to admit that the media had fallen for lies and manipulations about the protests and the repression that ostensibly followed. Their perception of events, one must assume, remains the same as it was on July 12th. Their own political orthodoxy, it seems, left little room for “dissident Marxists” engaging them in criticism among comrades. On July 22nd, US President Joe Biden announced a new round of sanctions on Cuba, which he promised were “just the beginning.” The Biden administration’s intransigence—and its cynical hypocrisy in denouncing “mass detentions and sham trials” in Cuba that presumably does not describe the US-run torture camp known as Guantanamo Bay—saw a rapidly organized response in the pages of the New York Times on July 23rd. In a full-page advert, the People’s Forum, Code Pink, the Answer Coalition, and over 400 “former heads of state, politicians, intellectuals, scientists, members of the clergy, artists, musicians and activists from across the globe,” issued an open letter to the US government demanding the end to its economic warfare against the Cuban people. Here is an example of the kind of public statement with prominent endorsers that places the responsibility for human rights abuses at the feet of US imperialism, and that expresses solidarity with the working and oppressed people of the globe who resist empire. A rare few signatories of the July 12th petition directed against the Cuban government did sign the “Let Cuba Live” letter in the NYT, including Noam Chomsky. One can only wonder what the political priorities are of those who condemn the imperialism of their own government only after first making demands and criticisms upon the targets of that imperialism. BEWARE THE “ANTI-ANTI-IMPERIALIST LEFT” No matter the developments of the last two weeks, the July 12th petition denouncing the Cuban government has not been renounced by any of its signatories. File this away as one more example of Western academic socialists and progressives being captured by the ideological manipulations of US State Department propaganda and their own internalized colonial chauvinism toward revolutionary projects in the Global South. Other targets of these petitions and open letters in recent years and months have been Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Notably, all are targets of ongoing and well-documented subversion operations, economic sanctions, and electoral interference by the United States, something that is rarely remarked upon by the signatories. The outraged open letter from prominent leftist intellectuals making demands upon anti-imperialist nations and other targets of Western imperialism is one of the most insidious and effective propaganda efforts by non-state actors in the imperial core, as it serves to confuse and disorient the broader left within the belly of the beast, weakening our capacity to collectively undermine and resist the US empire, thus relegating the burden of the struggle against imperialism to the revolutionary peoples of the Global South alone. This is a dereliction of our revolutionary duties. As progressives and revolutionaries living within the empire, we must express an unqualified and unwavering solidarity with Cuba and all targets of US imperialism, and we must organize to put an end to US aggression, political interference, and economic strangulation so that Cuba and all working and oppressed peoples of the world can breathe. A version of this article first appeared in Fight Back News. Red Ant publishes this with permission of the author. AuthorJosh Bergeron This article was republished from Red Ant. Archives July 2021 7/28/2021 Let Cuba Live—The Movement Standing Up to Biden’s Maximum Pressure Campaign. By: Manolo De Los Santos & Vijay PrashadRead Now On July 22, U.S. President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris released a “fact sheet” on U.S. “measures” against Cuba. The release from the White House said that Cuba was a “top priority for the Biden-Harris administration.” On March 9, Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” On July 12, NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell asked Psaki if Biden had reassessed his priorities regarding Cuba after the protests on the island the previous day. “In terms of where it ranks in a priority order,” Psaki replied, “I’m not in a position to offer that, but I can tell you that we will be closely engaged.” Not a priority, closely engaged, top priority: matters have moved rapidly from March 9 to July 22. What moved the Biden-Harris administration to focus so quickly on Cuba? On the morning of July 11, some people in Cuba—notably in the town of San Antonio de los Baños—took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the social and economic problems created by the U.S.-imposed blockade and by the global pandemic. The reaction to these events in Havana and in Washington, D.C., is instructive: Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel heard the news of the protests, got into a car, and drove the 40 miles to San Antonio de los Baños, where he met with the people; while in Washington, Biden used the protest to call for the overthrow of the Cuban government. U.S. government-funded nongovernmental organizations and Cuban American groups hastened to take advantage of the frenzy, excited by the possibility of regime change in Cuba. On the evening of July 11, tens of thousands of Cubans rallied across Cuba to defend their revolutionary process. Since that Sunday evening, Cuba has been calm. Maximum Pressure Eleven days after those events, the Biden administration announced its “measures” for the island. There are two kinds of pressure engineered by the United States government: tightening the blockade and lies. The Biden administration deepened the U.S. blockade that has been in place since 1960. Elements of this deepening include the continued ban on the freedom of people in the United States to make remittance payments to relatives and friends on the island. In October 2020, the United States forced the closure of 400 Western Union offices in Cuba. By this act, the United States denied Cuba between $2 billion and $3 billion in annual remittance payments (Cuba is not among the top 10 Latin American countries that rely on such income). In December 1950, the U.S. government created the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which manages the sanctions programs. Sanctions are a key element in the U.S. government’s “maximum pressure” campaign against its adversaries. Cuban banks and Cuban businesses as well as Cuban government officials populate the OFAC list alongside businesses and officials from about 30 other countries. In the “fact sheet,” the U.S. government mentioned the addition of “one Cuban individual,” namely Cuba’s minister of defense. He is accused of “facilitating the repression of peaceful, pro-democratic protests in Cuba.” The term “repression” is used loosely. In 2020, police officers in the United States killed 1,021 people, almost three people per day. There is no state violence at this scale anywhere in the world, let alone in Cuba. Who Is Álvaro López Miera? Cuba’s minister of defense is Álvaro López Miera, who took this post in April 2021. In 1957, at the age of 14, López Miera went up to the Sierra Maestra to join the rebels against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was motivated by his parents, who had been partisans in the Spanish Civil War, and who fled to Santiago de Cuba when the Spanish Republic was defeated by the fascists in 1939. López Miera was allowed to participate in the Second Front led by Raúl Castro, but only in the education department. He spent the next two years teaching peasants in the Sierra how to read and write. Subsequently, López Miera worked in the Cuban military, volunteering to be part of the anti-colonial Operation Carlota in Angola in 1975 (where he returned in 1987) and to be part of the defense of Ethiopia against Somalia in the Ogaden War in 1977-78. He is now sanctioned by the U.S. government. Diplomacy of Lies The “fact sheet” casually repeats several accusations against Cuba that are simply not true. For one, the U.S. government accuses Cuba of the “intentional blocking of access to the Internet.” Countless reports make this accusation, but their evidence is scant (for instance, the Open Observatory of Network Interference found that as of July 23, the Cuban government had blocked 86 websites, many of them U.S. government-funded regime change sites, while the United States had blocked 2,661 sites); in fact, many U.S. internet corporations—such as Zoom—prevent Cubans from using their technology. Secondly, Biden’s administration repeats the fantasy of a 2017 “sonic attack” on the U.S. diplomatic officials in Havana. After the July 11 events, the U.S. government circulated a one-page “Joint Statement on Cuba” among members of the Organization of American States (OAS) to get them to condemn Cuba. On July 21, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who released the leaked draft on Twitter, strongly criticized the “interventionist maneuvers” of the United States “to intensify the blockade” against Cuba. On July 24, after Biden’s “fact sheet” and “joint statement” made the rounds, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that the Washington-dominated OAS needed to be replaced by an organization that is not “a lackey of anyone.” These comments were made on the birthday of Simón Bolívar, known in Latin America as the Liberator. From the port of Veracruz, Mexico, two ships—Liberator and Papaloapan—left laden with food, medicines and other goods for Cuba. Russia sent 88 metric tons of supplies on two aircraft. Let Cuba Live On July 23, a full-page statement appeared on page 5 of the New York Times under the headline, “Let Cuba Live.” The advertisement, paid for by the Peoples Forum, was signed by more than 400 prominent people including Susan Sarandon, Emma Thompson, Noam Chomsky, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, and Danny Glover. It was an open letter to Biden asking him to end Trump’s “coercive measures” and “begin the process of ending the embargo.” Most of the 193 member states of the United Nations made public statements to defend Cuba against the “maximum pressure” campaign. In a statement, the 120 members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) “strongly condemn[ed] the international campaign organized… with the purpose of destabilizing the Republic of Cuba.” The NAM called for an end to the U.S. blockade. The White House has so far responded neither to the open letter nor to the NAM statement. AuthorManolo De Los Santos is a researcher and a political activist. For 10 years, he worked in the organization of solidarity and education programs to challenge the United States’ regime of illegal sanctions and blockades. Based out of Cuba for many years, Manolo has worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations. In 2018, he became the founding director of the People’s Forum in New York City, a movement incubator for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. He also collaborates as a researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and is a Globetrotter/Peoples Dispatch fellow. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives July 2021 7/26/2021 People Push Medicare For All, As Congressional Advocates Back Off. By: Mark GruenbergRead Now Medicare For All/Twitter WASHINGTON—As citizens keep campaigning from coast to coast for Medicare For All, Congress appears to be even cooler to the cause than it was in prior years. In 56 cities from Washington to San Francisco, thousands of people marched for single-payer government-run health care on July 24. But 170 congressional Democrats, and, now, 17 unions are backing improvements in traditional Medicare, first. That isn’t the only hurdle facing Medicare For All. Lawmakers have yet to even hold a hearing on the single-payer plan, which would cover everyone for everything, including doctor and hospital visits, plus dental, vision, and hearing benefits. That’s unlike the last Congress. Then, under pressure from National Nurses United and other advocates, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., ordered hearings on Medicare For All. Then she told Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., the key committee chair on health care issues, to bury it. If solons were to listen to citizens, they’d hear stories such as that from Joy Marie Mann, one of the speakers at the D.C. rally just 12 blocks from the Capitol. Mann woke up 18 months ago barely able to see. But her sudden myopic degeneration is one big problem. Her other problem: Despite her specialist’s letter saying she needs unique medications to prevent herself from totally going blind, she has to fight with her insurance company to get them to pay. Their denial of her care, despite years of coverage and thousands of dollars in premiums and out-of-pocket costs, is just one example, among millions, of why the nation needs Medicare For All and the end of the entire U.S. for-profit health care non-system, she told more than 100 people gathered for the D.C. rally and follow-up march. Medicare For All, advocates say, would eliminate the rapacious insurance companies, their high co-pays and deductibles, huge profits, multi-million-dollar executive salaries, abrupt decisions to drop which drugs they pay for, denials of care and—studies show—44,000 needless deaths every year of subscribers whom they refuse to cover when they get sick. Mann’s one of those who has to fight her insurer for coverage. Her medications cost $12,000 per eye for 30 days. “They tell me, ‘Sign this form. If you don’t, you have to pay $24,000.’ Or I have to live with 15% eyesight.” The insurers even denied her the $1,500 for a special large-type machine that scrolled her remarks. That’s despite insurers claiming they cover such durable medical equipment. “I couldn’t read a book for over a year” because she couldn’t afford the device, Mann said. “If you have to call the insurance companies every f—ing day to get coverage, that is not right!” she declared. And after Mann’s sight went south, her job—in health care for the elderly—went south, too. She’s had to start a “Go Fund Me” internet drive to pay the bills. The Medicare For All movement appears to be losing momentum in Congress, even though the coronavirus pandemic has torn open the gaping holes in U.S. health care. Not only has Medicare For All bill, HR1976, introduced in March, gone nowhere, but 17 unions announced July 17 they support legislation to bolster traditional Medicare itself. That measure would lower eligibility for Medicare to age 60, add dental, vision, and hearing coverage, and free Medicare to negotiate down prescription drug prices with Big Pharma. Democratic President Joe Biden, who opposes Medicare For All, offered those proposals. At least the president of one of those unions, James Slevin of the Utility Workers, pointedly added that expanding traditional Medicare is a step towards Medicare For All. The for-profit health care system devours one of every six dollars in U.S. gross domestic product, by far the highest share in the world, but does not give the U.S. people the highest-quality care in the world, figures show. The U.S. lags other developed nations in life expectancy and maternal mortality, with women of color three times as likely to die in childbirth as whites. And medical costs are the leading cause of personal bankruptcies.
“The American labor movement has fought for more than a century to make quality health care a basic right in the United States. On behalf of our collective membership, we urge you to take action in the American Families Plan package to improve health care for millions of Americans by improving and expanding the Medicare program.” “Nurses across the country have had to counsel and talk with patients who cannot afford care, and often watch as patients who decide not to seek care for financial reasons have simple health issues become life-threatening later on,” added National Nurses United Executive Director Bonnie Castillo, RN. Her union has led the decade-long charge for Medicare For All. “Whether it is lifesaving drugs, critical surgeries, or even just simple procedures, we see day in and day out how many people are being left behind by our current for-profit health care system. “Simply put: By lowering the eligibility age and expanding Medicare coverage, Congress has the opportunity to save millions of lives and prevent millions from going into financial ruin because of health care costs.” The other union signers were the Amalgamated Transit Union, the Government Employees (AFGE), the Teachers (AFT), the Postal Workers Union, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers, Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees/Teamsters, the Communications Workers, the Professional and Technical Engineers, the Painters, the Auto Workers, the Letter Carriers, National Nurses United, the Office and Professional Employees, the Transport Workers, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers and the Steelworkers. “Expanding Medicare benefits as far as possible would move us that much closer to a truly single payer health care system,” Utility Workers President Slevin contended. “Including provisions in the American Families package to improve and expand the Medicare program would be a significant step in the right direction.” The Medicare For All advocates also face another obstacle: Big money in corporate campaign contributions, and a campaign of lies against Medicare For All run by Big Pharma and its allies. They’ve spent millions, especially on Internet platforms, to malign single-payer. OpenSecrets.org, a nonpartisan organization which tracks both campaign finances and lobbying spending, reported health care companies spent $637.44 million on politics in the 2019-20 election cycle alone, the fourth-highest figure among all special interests. They spent another $621 million on lobbying lawmakers at the same time—and about $120 million more on influence-peddling in the first four months of 2021. About half of the 2019-20 contributions went to Democrats and party campaign committees. The rest split between Republicans and “independent expenditure” issue ads. AuthorMark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. This article was republished from People's World. Archives July 2021  Workers decorate an office of the Kurdistan Communist Party - Iraq. With one lonely member of parliament, one might think the KCP is a marginal force, but its influence far outstrips its electoral performance. | Kurdistan TV via KCP SULAYMANIYAH, Iraqi Kurdistan—For those who have followed the development of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq since its formation after the Kurdish rebellion of 1991, the names Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani have been inextricably tied to the region’s politics. Their respective parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), have long dominated the political landscape, dividing the territory of the autonomous region between themselves after a period of intense inner-Kurdish warfare in the 1990s. Today, they each maintain their own Peshmerga military formations, and the KRG often appears to function as a one-party state, though paradoxically, there are two of them.
Then there is the oldest party in the Kurdistan Region, the Kurdistan Communist Party. With one lonely MP, one could be forgiven for having the impression that the Communists are a marginal force. The party’s influence and importance to the region, however, far outstrip its electoral performance. The rich history of the Iraqi/Kurdistan Communist Party The Kurdistan Communist Party was technically founded in 1993, although in reality this simply meant the branch of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) in what had become the Kurdistan Region was now solely responsible for its own affairs in the new de facto independent area. The Iraqi party dates its foundation back to 1934. It played a vital role in the formation of the country’s working-class organizations, including the establishment of trade unions. The party has experienced periods of legality and illegality throughout its existence and had a contradictory relationship with the Ba’ath Party that ruled the country for nearly four decades. In 1963, the U.S.-backed Ba’athist coup that deposed Abd al-Karim Qasim led to thousands of Communist Party members being slaughtered in the following days, with party leader Salam Adil among those executed. However, in the mid-1970s, relations between the Communist Party and the Ba’athists warmed somewhat, with the Communists initially viewing Saddam Hussein positively when he came to power, even referring to him in glowing terms as Iraq’s own variant of Fidel Castro in the aftermath of nationalization campaigns. This led to their inclusion in the National Progressive Front in 1975, which meant accepting the Ba’ath Party’s dominance over Iraqi political life. However, certain contradictions soon began to appear irreconcilable. The Communists were proud of their heritage as a multinational party and advocated an Iraqi state with full rights for both of its dominant nations, Arabs and Kurds. This had initially been the line of the Qasim government that had taken power in 1958, which the Communists generally supported. By contrast, the Ba’athist ideology could make no room for Kurds in its Arab nationalist orientation unless they agreed to a position of subservience and second-class citizenship.
In Sulaymaniyah, where the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) is the dominant political force, I was able to speak with the Deputy Secretary-General for the Communist Party in the governorate, Hawre Gorran. On the right of nations to self-determination Gorran begins by making it clear that the KRG should be united, not divided into two camps that are each under the control of either the KDP or PUK. He is clear in his opposition to the vast privatization that has taken place under each party in the areas of health, education, and electricity, but also keenly aware that division between the Talabani and Barzani cliques has been catastrophic. “The Kurdistan Communist Party played a very important role in mediating between the KDP and PUK during the civil war that was fought between 1994 and 1997. Our leader at that time, Aziz Muhammad, helped bring them together to end the conflict,” he says. Muhammad, who passed away in 2017, was a legendary figure on the Kurdish and Iraqi left and was symbolic of the Communist Party’s approach to unity between Arabs and Kurds, serving as leader of the Iraqi party from 1964 to 1993, then of the independent Kurdish party after that.
When asked about the KCP’s relationships with other communist parties in the region who may oppose Kurdish independence, Gorran attempts to toe a diplomatic line, saying it would probably be better if I ask those parties why they take such a position. In the end, however, he says, “It is clearly related to chauvinism. This is not a communist position. It has nothing to do with Lenin’s conception of a nation’s right to be self-determining.” On the reactionary role of the United States in Kurdistan This question was wrapped up in another extremely important point that needed to be clarified, which is the relationship between Kurdistan as an oppressed nation and the role of the United States in the region. Much of the apprehension that I have often encountered in regards to the Kurdish question from leftists and those calling themselves communists is that Kurds are merely auxiliaries of U.S. imperialism in the region, and therefore their national liberation struggle is not worthy of support. But the KCP makes it clear that they are opponents of U.S. imperialism, and the party is not afraid to speak out against the machinations of Washington in the region or criticize certain decisions taken by parties or organizations they otherwise have friendly relations with. Hawre Gorran says, “The U.S. is working for its own interests all over the Middle East. It doesn’t care about the Kurdish people. For example, they opposed the 2017 independence referendum, and when the Iraqi government captured Kirkuk, an agreement was signed for oil extraction there that clearly benefits imperialism.”
Gorran says in response, “Any agreement that is made has to take people’s needs into account. This agreement offers no protection for the people. The United States and Russia are playing a role in controlling resources in the Middle East. Any force in Rojava should be prioritizing and protecting people’s interests.” On women’s liberation Perhaps the most impressive, progressive element of that struggle in northern Syria, as well as its most concrete achievement, has been the central role that women have played in it. Indeed, the image of the fearless Kurdish woman fighter has become prevalent across the world in recent years as a result. However, there is nothing necessarily new about women playing roles equal to men in the leftist movement in Kurdistan. According to Hawre Gorran, equality of women is “extremely important” to the KCP. He elaborates, saying, “It’s essential that women are not only members of the party, but that they are able to elevate themselves to be leading cadre. In our Central Committee, it is a rule that at least 25% of members need to be women.”
I ask what stands in the way of changing these backward, patriarchal relations. “The mentality of people is a big obstacle. Often, it is their interpretation of religion that makes people believe that things are naturally supposed to be this way.” On the struggle for democracy in Kurdistan If women’s rights in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq continue to be stalled, and only incremental progress has been made, then what does this say about the state of democracy in general in the region? Gorran says, “If we look at the history of any country, we can see that the democratic struggle takes a long time. We had the struggle against the Ba’athist chauvinists, then the inner-Kurdish war. Democracy has not yet reached a higher level. For instance, Massoud Barzani has no official position, yet he still remains the main point of contact for everything in the KRG. Therefore, he effectively runs everything.” He is also eager to point out that while parties such as the PUK and KDP continue the ruling family’s dominance in leadership positions, the KCP has a different idea of democratic norms. “We have changed our General Secretary four times since our party was founded in 1993. This is very different from the other parties.” This kind of non-democratic management of the major parties also has the effect of blurring the lines between the government and what should be fighting organizations of the working class, the trade unions. Gorran says that “Many unions were created here after 1991. Some are not controlled by the PUK or KDP, but some are. For example, they control the Journalists’ Union.” This was quite a revelation. It certainly doesn’t seem far-fetched to believe that the Barzani and Talabani families having this degree of influence over the union of the region’s press workers would translate into—or help to reinforce—their control over the media and dissemination of information. Gorran says that the fighting power of many unions is compromised by these relationships, thus helping maintain the impression that there is more democracy than there often is. “One union, for instance, had a demonstration at a government office. But this union is allied to the PUK. It, therefore, becomes a sort of controlled opposition.” According to Gorran, “You used to only be able to get public sector jobs by being a member of one of the two main parties. Nowadays, this is also applying to the private sector.” In December 2020, anger and frustration at the government’s corruption, nepotism, mass unemployment, and non-payment of salaries to public sector workers for several months led to a series of demonstrations across Sulaymaniyah. In the crackdown unleashed by security forces, ten people were killed. For the Communist Party, these demonstrations were certainly worthy of support, and they played a key role in amplifying the voice of the protesters and rallying to their side, even as they cautioned against the use of violence as a tactic. After nine days, however, the movement seemed to run out of steam, not least because of the harsh repression unleashed by the authorities. “After these protests, only one or two politicians resigned. This shows that we have a long way to go.” Toward a communist horizon in Kurdistan Far from being a political party that can be summed up as operating on the fringes of Iraqi Kurdistan’s social life, I found that in reality, the Kurdistan Communist Party is continuing to build upon its rich history of militant, working-class struggle. Its necessity surely appears validated by the current situation in the region, one in which the democratic struggle feels stifled, and in which the emerging opposition forces of recent years have ebbed in popularity.
I’m reminded at this point of something Hawre Gorran said as we were wrapping up the interview. Speaking about the importance of maintaining a Marxist perspective in the 21st century, he said “It’s essential that we stay true to our principles. We know that only socialism is the answer to not only Kurdistan’s problems but those of the whole world.” AuthorMarcel Cartier is a critically acclaimed hip-hop artist, journalist, and the author of two books on the Kurdish liberation movement, including 2019’s Serkeftin: A Narrative of the Rojava Revolution, which was one of the first full accounts in English of the civil and political structures set up in northern Syria after 2012. This article was republished from People's World. Archives July 2021 7/24/2021 Sex Workers and COVID-19: Resisting the Pandemic and Criminalization. By: Taroa Zúñiga SilvaRead Now Georgina Orellano, secretary-general of the Association of Women Sex Workers of Argentina (AMMAR), says that “the pandemic has highlighted the inequality” in society and deepened the problems faced by sex workers. Sex work, which is not recognized in Argentina, has become more precarious, she says. Although in Latin America many countries do not have legislation criminalizing sex work, the lack of a legal framework in this regard lends itself to all kinds of abuses. According to an investigation published by the Network of Women Sex Workers of Latin America and the Caribbean, “the application of laws is interpretative and discretionary,” resulting in recurrent violations of the rights of workers, including arbitrary detention; torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment; discrimination in access to health care; and unequal treatment within judicial systems. Multilateral organizations have called for inclusive responses to cushion the impact of COVID-19. Such policies should not neglect the workers who are criminalized, such as sex workers. There is nothing inclusive about the policies that states have adopted. “If we have something to celebrate about the pandemic,” Orellano tells me, “it is that it made it clear—to ourselves—that the only way out of this type of context is to strengthen unionization.” The Organization of Women Workers For labor movements in most industries, there is usually a clear target for workers to organize against, such as business owners or factory managers. But in the context of a sex workers’ union, who takes the place of a boss—the client or the state? “The historical boss of us,” Orellano tells me, “was for a long time the police.” But Orellano is aware that the police—in turn—play a role as agents of the market. It is the police who de facto work to regulate the marketplace of sex work. AMMAR was formed in the 1990s to respond to the desire to end “the naturalized logic in our collective of having to make financial arrangements with the police in order to work,” Orellano says. “What the state does not regulate,” Orellano says, “the market regulates.” The market, for sex workers, is framed by the fact of the criminalization of sex workers. Because sex workers “lack recognition and rights, markets emerge that thrive through our precariousness,” states Orellano. Overcoming Fear to OrganizeAMMAR was born from the first marches organized in Argentina to demand the rights of sex workers. During these marches, it was common for sex workers to attend wearing wigs or oversized dark sunglasses. In interviews with the media, sex workers would ask the television producers to distort their voices, show only their hands but not their faces, or give the interview with their backs to the camera. All this, Orellano explains to me, was “so that the family would not know that the person speaking, defending the rights of sex workers, was their mother or daughter or neighbor.” Sex workers who rally for unionization and fight for their employment rights carry the additional burden of having to overcome the stigma associated with sex work. Orellano says shame, concealment, and silencing are unfortunate byproducts of the prejudices against the industry. “Basically,” she says, sex workers can’t effectively organize when they are hamstrung by the feeling of “not being able to truly tell [people] who you are [when you march or speak to media], for fear of being ostracized by your community.” AMMAR’s approach is to fight the self-marginalization of sex workers. The demand to emerge from the shadows opened several doors. First, it encouraged sex workers to overcome the stigma associated with their work. Second, it permitted many sex workers to move toward unionization. Third, it forced the state to ensure that sex workers have rights and that these rights are not violated—“to accept that we are an existing group,” says Orellano, and to ensure “that not only are our rights as sex workers not violated, but, basically, that our rights as citizens are not violated.” Pandemic and Sex WorkThe restrictions imposed by governments to curb the advance of COVID-19 are a direct threat to the possibility of working in the streets. Quarantines, physical distance, and time restrictions—among other measures—have narrowed the possibilities of livelihoods for sex workers. Many have turned to the virtual world, but those who have continued working on the streets—either because of their own work preferences or because of technological and/or generational gaps—have suffered from institutional violence. Faced with this, AMMAR had to respond, to “occupy the role of the absent state,” in the words of Orellano. The organization has focused on establishing codes of self-respect for sex work in public spaces. And it has focused on building psychological and economic support networks, which are urgently needed in view of the growing number of women who do not know if they will be able to pay their rent or feed their children every month. Even if they comply with basic sanitary measures, this is a job that involves close contact. There is a lot of fear of COVID-19 among clients. Some clients wait to receive vaccines before resuming contact; many have also lost their jobs or lost income as a result of the pandemic, and so they constantly haggle over rates. “This is a fact,” Orellano tells me, “that does not differentiate between those of us who work virtually or those who work on the street.” Political RecognitionThe fact that sex workers are the ones who have supported their peers to survive the pandemic has reinforced awareness within this labor sector of the importance of political agency and collective organizing, Orellano concludes. AMMAR is part of the Argentine Workers’ Central Union (CTA). One of the most important achievements they have had in recent years, from Orellano’s perspective, has been the recognition of sex workers within political and labor organizing spheres. “During the pandemic, our organization has done everything it had to do as a union and much more,” states Orellano. “We have given absolutely everything so that our coworkers can subsist and go through the pandemic on equal terms with the rest of the population.” This has been possible thanks to this labor sector’s efforts to articulate with local and central governments recognition of the political agency of sex workers. “The advance of the expansion of rights—that is, of the visibility of our claims—has generated a lot of violence from some sectors,” adds Orellano. “But also, we received a lot of solidarity from other unions, and from social, feminist and partisan organizations that stretched out their hand to [be] with the whores.” AuthorTaroa Zúñiga Silva is a writing fellow and the Spanish media coordinator for Globetrotter. She is the co-editor with Giordana García Sojo of Venezuela, Vórtice de la Guerra del Siglo XXI (2020) and is a member of the Secretaría de Mujeres Inmigrantes en Chile. She also is a member of the Mecha Cooperativa, a project of the Ejército Comunicacional de Liberación. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives July 2021 7/24/2021 After Devastating DACA Ruling, Dreamers Vow to Push for Legalization. By: Sonali KolhatkarRead Now Democrats are hoping to use the Senate budget reconciliation process to enact immigration reform after yet another GOP-led assault on “Dreamers” has left young immigrants devastated and uncertain. Republican officials in Texas are celebrating a major political win after successfully suing the federal government over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA has been a GOP target since 2012 when then-President Barack Obama first created it and then in 2014 expanded it via executive action. It has faced numerous Republican-led legal challenges and subsequent court rulings as well as an outright suspension of the program during Donald Trump’s administration. In spite of a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that upheld it, a new Texas federal court ruling by a known anti-immigrant judge named Andrew Hanen deemed the program “illegal,” leaving the lives of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in limbo once more. One such immigrant is Fatima Flores, the political director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), who just a week and a half before the ruling had renewed her DACA status. Had Hanen’s ruling come before her renewal, Flores would likely have been among those immigrants at risk of losing her status given that no new applications are being processed. Flores told me in an interview that she sees the devastating ruling as “an attack on our immigrant communities,” and points out that there is a “backlog of thousands of DACA recipient hopefuls [who] will not have a decision on their case.” This means they are in jeopardy of losing employment and benefits, which in turn could result in evictions. The ruling also means that those immigrants who might have been able to adjust their status under DACA are now eligible for possible deportation. Flores explained, “I came to this country when I was six, and I am 30 now. And I am one of millions of people who have been waiting for something to happen [toward legalization].” The ruling is even more disappointing considering the role that DACA holders have played as essential workers and health care workers during the pandemic, delivering lifesaving care to U.S. residents. After the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled against Trump’s suspension of the program—saying that the Trump administration did not provide adequate justification for ending it—an estimated 30,000 health care workers with DACA status were protected from deportation and allowed to continue their critical work. The American Medical Association’s general counsel went as far as citing that the central tenet of health care is “do no harm,” and that, “if we strip this population of caregivers out of the system, that’s pretty significant harm.” Hanen’s ruling threatens to do just such harm at a time when the United States appears to be on the cusp of another surge of COVID-19 infections. Although President Joe Biden has already announced that his Justice Department will appeal Hanen’s ruling, Flores worries such a legal challenge will simply take too long, leaving countless numbers of potential DACA applicants stranded, unable to gain employment and subject to deportation even though the United States is the only country most have known. Worse, if the appeal goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, this time the conservative majority on the court could end the program altogether. She suggested that a more direct pathway to cementing DACA was via the legislative process so that it is no longer beholden to the whims of Republican attorneys general, state governors or presidents. While legislative pathways on immigration have been frustratingly elusive in recent years, and while Democrats have passed far too few bills while holding power in 2021, this time on this issue, success may be within reach. That is because a limited form of immigration reform could pass through the Senate budget reconciliation process, requiring only a simple majority instead of a filibuster-proof supermajority. To that end, Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) just released a $6 trillion budget blueprint that includes $150 billion in funding toward pathways for legal status for immigrants including DACA holders. Flores cited the promising leadership of California’s newly seated Senator Alex Padilla, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s immigration panel and who is working closely with CHIRLA. Padilla is pushing for legalization pathways to be included in negotiations over an infrastructure package and is confident that Biden backs him, saying, “I believe the White House is supportive of both an ambitious infrastructure package, and as substantive immigration reform as you can achieve in any way possible.” Perhaps more importantly, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, one of the most intractable Democrats on progressive legislation, has signaled that he too supports passing immigration reform in this manner. Worryingly, it is the Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough who decides if legalizing DACA through budget reconciliation is acceptable or not, and immigrant advocates slammed Biden’s announcement that he would defer to whatever the unelected official decides on the matter. One can only hope that MacDonough’s past as a Justice Department trial attorney dealing with immigration cases makes her sympathetic to the plight of DACA holders. Her decision earlier this year to deny the inclusion of a federal minimum wage increase as part of the budget reconciliation was met with national outrage. That said, those financial priorities that can be included in reconciliation are indeed narrowly limited. The pursuit of immigration reform through a technicality based on the federal budget is perhaps fitting for a nation whose dominant culture, set by elites, perceives human beings as resources and capital, rather than seeing them through the lens of compassion and empathy. But people like Flores and others in her community have had their lives turned upside down for decades awaiting a political solution. If Democrats see immigrants as financial assets, Republicans see them as future Democratic voters who can jeopardize their ill-gotten hold on political power. Flores said, “we’re here to stand in solidarity with our communities [fighting for legalization] and be relentless because the Republicans and the GOP are relentless against us.” There is a clear economic case to be made for legalizing undocumented immigrants, even outside the traditional bounds of seeing them as a source of cheap labor for the agricultural and apparel industry. A study released in mid-June by the Center for American Progress examined numerous scenarios for immigrant legalization. If all undocumented immigrants were offered citizenship, the authors concluded that it “would boost U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by a cumulative total of $1.7 trillion over 10 years and create 438,800 new jobs.” If only DACA recipients were legalized, it “would increase U.S. GDP by a cumulative total of $799 billion over 10 years and create 285,400 new jobs.” Interestingly, the authors extrapolate that in the former scenario, “all other American workers would see their annual wages increase by $700,” and in the latter, “annual wages [would] increase by $400” across the board. In other words, legalizing immigrants will benefit all American workers over time. Such a conclusion is not based on a complicated economic analysis. Undocumented workers are far more vulnerable to employer exploitation simply because of their lack of legal status. Their status drives down all wages. The converse is also true. Flores pointed out that the clock is ticking. “We can’t leave 2021 without some legalization efforts,” because the 2022 midterm elections are around the corner and those senators up for reelection are likely to be preoccupied by their campaigns next year. Additionally, DACA holders and prospective applicants like her are tired. “For the longest time we’ve been told ‘stay in your lane.’ We’re done waiting,” she said. “We’re done having to take a back seat. We’re done playing nice.” AuthorSonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute. This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Archives July 2021  Gracie Heldman, who struggled 20 years to form a union at Hearthside Foods in Ohio, tells her story of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. She told him of a co-worker who committed suicide. | BCTGM McCOMB, Ohio—For 20 of the 33 years she’s worked at Hearthside Foods, an industrial bakery in McComb, Ohio, that turns out cookies, crackers and candy bars for big firms such as Nabisco and Kellogg’s, Gracie Heldman has campaigned for a union—specifically the Bakery, Confectionery and Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers—there. Three times in 20 years, Heldman and her pro-union colleagues collected enough signed National Labor Relations Board union election authorization cards to demand a vote at the 1,200-worker plant. Once, they got 65% of workers to sign up. Hearthside brought in union-busters. It forced workers to attend anti-union harangues in one-sided “captive audience” meetings, under pain of discipline if they didn’t. Once, Hearthside illegally fired seven union supporters. During another drive, it even threatened, also illegally, to close up shop if the workers went union, Heldman told senators on July 22. The bullying, intimidation, harassment, labor law-breaking and interrogation by union-busters or supervisors while workers were on the job succeeded. Enough people got scared, especially by the firings, that when the votes occurred, after drawn-out anti-union campaigns by the bosses and their “consultants,” BCTGM lost. Heldman brought her story, which is typical of what happens to workers during organizing drives, to the Senate Labor Committee’s hearing on the Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, the wide-ranging pro-worker labor law reform. It would outlaw such abuses, force the union-busters’ shady practices into the open, and do much more. Democratic senators on the evenly divided panel gave Heldman and other pro-worker witnesses—former NLRB Chairman Mark Gaston Pierce of Buffalo and Economic Policy Institute Policy Director Heidi Shierholz—a sympathetic hearing. Not so the Republican senators, even though a new Hart Research poll shows a plurality of rank-and-file GOP voters (45% for-40% against), including a plurality of Trumpites (45%-41%), back the PRO Act and its goals. The poll’s overall national margin for the PRO Act is 63%-25%. Democrats supported it by an 87%-6% score, and independents clocked in at 60%-26% in 4,114 calls stretched over the nine states it covered. Scores were almost as lopsided in those “battleground” states, too. Besides making it easier to organize, the PRO Act would negate so-called “right to work” laws, increase fines for labor law-breaking, and legalize card-check recognition when unions present signed NLRB election authorization cards, independently verified, from a worker majority. It also forces union-busters and their spending and clients into the open. And it mandates binding arbitration when bosses won’t bargain a first contract. Heldman described the obstacles workers face to unionizing. She also gave a simple summary of why workers want unions—which, other polls show, a majority do. In a simple phrase, to protect themselves, not just against bosses’ labor law-breaking, but against rampant corporate exploitation and abuse.  Sen. Sherrod Brown Facebook page “The hours are long” in the 24-hour-a-day seven-days-a-week plant “and the pain can be really bad, especially in your wrists, shoulders and back,” in an industrial bakery, she said. “The company doesn’t take health and safety seriously so it’s not really surprising the McComb bakery has been cited by OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration) many times and is one of the worst offenders in Ohio. That was one of the main reasons so many of us have wanted to join the Bakery Workers since the late ‘90’s. “We have been overworked, we’ve been injured on the job, disrespected by supervisors, and forced to work in bad conditions. We wanted a union to help protect us while we were at work, to give us a say about the conditions we had to work under, and to help us get just a little bit of respect from our bosses.” What they got instead was surveillance, one-sided “captive audience” meetings, closure threats, bosses’ legal stalls and election delays and illegal firings of seven pro-union workers after the second campaign in the early 2000s. That was so scary to other workers that BCTGM lost even after 65% of workers initially signed election authorization cards. At least Heldman is still alive. Northern Virginia Labor Federation President Virginia Diamond reported that in a July 21 meeting with top staffers for undecided Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, Laborers Local 572 member Sonia Luna told of one worker who wanted to unionize Didlake, to have a voice on safety and health issues at that Virginia placement company for people with developmental disabilities. Didlake’s union-buster succeeded in helping bosses beat Local 572. The firm’s still non-union. The worker concerned about safety and health is dead, from the coronavirus. Diamond did not say whether the worker caught the virus on the job. The PRO Act would end all those abuses, and more, Heldman said. Had it been in effect during BCTGM’s first drive, two decades ago, the union would have won, she declared. Expert witnesses Pearce and Shierholz backed Heldman’s story with data and details. “It’s no surprise workers want unions,” Shierholz testified. “When workers are able to come together, form a union, and collectively bargain, their wages, benefits, and working conditions improve. On average, a worker covered by a union contract earns 10.2% more in wages than a peer with similar education, occupation, and experience in a nonunionized workplace in the same sector,” she pointed out. Despite that and other union advantages, relentless corporate campaigns over decades have reduced private-sector and overall union density in the U.S. to just under 11%. Private-sector density alone in the 1950s—before establishment of public sector unions—covered more than one-third of workers. “More than nine in 10 workers covered by a union contract (95%) have access to employer-sponsored health benefits, compared with just 68% of nonunion workers,” Shierholz continued. “Further, union employers contribute more to their employees’ health care benefits. And more than nine in 10 workers—93%—covered by a union contract have access to paid sick days, compared with 75% of nonunion workers.” Pearce told senators “core provisions of the National Labor Relations Act have been eroded by overly narrow NLRB and court interpretations which frustrate the congressional intent” that led to the NLRA. Pearce, a former NLRB attorney, board member and chair added that in the last four years, the GOP majority named by former Oval Office occupant Donald Trump undertook “an all-out assault on (union) access to workers. “The right to engage in protected concerted activity withered away over decades of judicial attack and the policies of labor hostile NLRB majorities. From 1980 until its recent 2018 temporary spike, the worker’s statutory right to strike over working conditions and for mutual aid and protection has been curtailed almost to the point of ineffectiveness,” he elaborated. One key reason: An early Supreme Court decision, that let bosses hire scabs—officially “permanent replacements”—for workers forced to strike for economic reasons. And the Trump majority made it easier for bosses to misclassify workers as “independent contractors,” unprotected by any labor laws, including the NLRA, he said. As witnesses testified to the Senate panel, unions continued their nationwide campaign to convince reluctant lawmakers to pass the PRO Act (see separate stories). Their targets include two recalcitrant Democrats: Virginia’s Warner and Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema. The Hart Poll shows pro-PRO Act majorities in both states: 65%-22% in Virginia and 59%-25% in Arizona. Non-union voters back it 61%-27%, the survey adds. Warner, for one, is keeping silent, Northern Virginia Labor Federation President Diamond told the Metro DC Central Labor Council’s news website. Besides Luna’s story about the pro-union worker at Didlake, “Alfonzo Clements, a DASH bus driver from Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, described how the 16-year campaign to unionize his bus company succeeded in lifting him and his co-workers out of poverty and into the middle class through collective bargaining,” Diamond reported. “Despite these stories, Warner’s staff indicated Warner is still not willing to co-sponsor the PRO Act.” Unite Here President D. Taylor hit the same safety and health theme Luna did. “The Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic has made clearer than ever the critical difference belonging to a union can make, especially for workers of color and women, who have been among the hardest hit by loss of life, health, and employment this last year,” he says in an electronic petition. “That’s why we need the PRO Act.” AuthorMark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. This article was republished from People's World. Archives July 2021  Sen. Mark Warner, Virginia Democratic Senator. The AFL-CIO is pressuring him to change his position to one in favor of the Pro Act. | AP WASHINGTON—Organized labor’s intensive drive to lobby senators, from supportive Democrats to resistant Republicans, to pass the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, revved up the week of July 17-24. It featured rallies, phone banks, and sometimes virtual events in cities ranging from Orlando, Fla., to Fairbanks, Alaska. And the workers picked up notable backing from groups of faith leaders from Judaism, the Catholic Church, Islam, and mainline Protestantism. One non-signer: The right-wing Southern Baptist Convention. The 21 supportive groups cast worker rights as a moral issue, too. And the eight Catholic groups’ stand agrees with the strong, frequent pro-worker pro-union statements of Pope Francis I. “Our belief in the intrinsic worth of both work and workers leads us to strongly support the PRO Act, which will strengthen and expand the right of workers to bargain collectively, form unions, and engage in collective action without fear of retaliation from their employers. Such assurances are also better for employers as they contribute to better productivity, mutual collaboration, and sustainability,” they said. The theme of the pro-PRO Act drive is “Workers’ rights are civil rights.” Details about the legislation, rallies and events are on a new website: www.proact.aflcio.org. Whether all the pressure will convince enough GOPers to defect from the party’s anti-worker, anti-union line is uncertain. And there are still two reluctant Democrats to persuade: Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema and Virginia’s Mark Warner. The Northern Virginia AFL-CIO holds “weekly Wednesday” demonstrations near Warner’s home in the D.C. suburbs. Without those two, plus 10 of the evenly split Senate’s 50 Republicans, a GOP filibuster threat by worker-hater GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would halt the legislation, the most wide-ranging pro-worker labor law reform since the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act, in its tracks. “This PRO Act Week of Action is another full-court press. America’s labor movement is showing up in every corner of our country to demand a fix to our outdated labor laws that are nearly 100 years old,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “Our members and all working people are committed to making the PRO Act the law of the land this year.” That week of action led to rallies and events both thanking supporters—such as a planned July 23 rally at the two Illinois Democrats’ offices in Chicago—and lobbying the others. Those included a press conference in front of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Orlando office, and rallies on June 20 in Juneau, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, Alaska, especially targeting Republican Lisa Murkowski. Federal figures put Alaska fourth in the U.S. in union density, behind Hawaii, New York, and Rhode Island. Those three states each have two Democratic senators, who already support the PRO Act. The religious groups’ letter cast the PRO Act in economic as well as moral terms, pointing out how its passage would help workers of color in particular, by invalidating “the harmful legacy of” state Jim Crow-era so-called “right to work” laws. Bosses use those laws to weaken unions financially and to divide and conquer workers by playing off race against race. “Our current labor laws are no longer effective in protecting the lives and dignity of workers and fall woefully short of allowing workers to productively advocate for their needs from a position of mutuality with employers,” the groups wrote senators. “As union membership has fallen due to counter-productive laws and amendments, inequality has skyrocketed leaving the working class with little constructive power over their own economic security; and thus, also harming sustainable business models.  Pope Francis, an outspoken proponent of labor organizing rights. | Andrew Medichini/AP “The PRO Act addresses these current inadequacies by empowering workers to effectively exercise their freedom to organize and bargain. Critically, it also ends employers’ practice of punishing striking workers, strengthens the National Labor Relations Board and allows it to hold corporations accountable for retaliating against workers, and would help us collectively do better for all our needs by repealing” the federal law—which congressional Republicans enacted in 1947—legalizing states’ RTW statutes. Those state laws “reinforce Jim Crow by maintaining labor segregation and further exploiting workers of color,” since eight of the ten states with the highest percentage of Black residents—and workers—are RTW states, they note. “These restrictions strip funding and bargaining power from unions, which have a devastating effect on the economic stability of people of color,” the faith leaders declare. Eight Catholic groups signed the letter: The Catholic Labor Network, the U.S. provinces of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker of D.C., the Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Pax Christi USA, the Franciscan Action Network, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and the National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Other faith groups signing the letter were: the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the National Council of Jewish Women (all Jewish), the American Friends Service Committee and the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers), the Islamic Council of North America’s social justice commission, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Presbyterian Church’s Office of Public Witness, the Progressive National Baptist Convention (Black Baptists), the Episcopalian, United Methodist, Unitarian churches, and the United Church of Christ. AuthorMark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. This article was republished from People's World. Archives July 2021  I do not wish the future of Cuba to be like the present of Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras or even Puerto Rico, Currently, under contract with the FAO, I advise the Cuban government in the implementation of the Food Sovereignty and Nutritional Education Plan. I know in detail the Cuban daily life, including the difficulties faced by the population, the challenges to the Revolution, the criticisms of the country’s intellectuals and artists. I visited prisons, talked to opponents of the Revolution, lived with Cuban priests and lay people opposed to socialism. When they tell me, a Brazilian, that there is no democracy in Cuba, I descend from the abstraction of words to reality. How many photos and news have been seen or are seen of Cubans in misery, beggars scattered on the sidewalks, children abandoned in the streets, families under the viaducts? Something similar to the cracolândia, to the militias, to the long lines of sick people waiting years to be treated in a hospital? I warn friends:
There is nothing more prostituted than language. The famous democracy born in Greece has its merits, but it is good to remember that, at that time, Athens had 20,000 inhabitants who lived off the work of 400,000 slaves… What would one of those thousands of servants answer if asked about the virtues of democracy? Democracy, in my concept, means the ‘Our Father’ -the authority legitimized by the popular will- and the ‘Our Bread’ -the sharing of the fruits of nature and human labor-. Electoral rotation does not make or ensure a democracy. Brazil and India, considered democracies, are flagrant examples of misery, poverty, exclusion, oppression and suffering. Only those who know the reality of Cuba before 1959 know why Fidel had so much popular support to lead the Revolution to victory. The country was known by the nickname ‘brothel of the Caribbean’. The mafia dominated the banks and tourism (there are several movies about this). Havana’s main neighborhood, still called Vedado, has this name because blacks were not allowed to circulate there…. The United States was never satisfied with having lost the Cuba subjected to its ambitions. Therefore, shortly after the victory of the guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra, they tried to invade the island with mercenary troops. They were defeated in April 1961. The following year, President Kennedy decreed the blockade of Cuba, which continues to this day. Cuba is an island with few resources. It is forced to import more than 60 percent of the country’s essential products. With the tightening of the blockade promoted by Trump (243 new measures and, for the moment, not withdrawn by Biden), and the pandemic, which has completely eliminated one of the country’s main sources of resources, tourism, the internal situation has worsened. Cubans had to tighten their belts. Then, those dissatisfied with the Revolution, who gravitate in the orbit of the ‘American dream’, promoted the protests of Sunday, July 11, with the ‘solidarity’ support of the CIA, whose chief has just made a tour of the continent, worried about the results of the elections in Peru and Chile. Who best explains the current situation in Cuba is its president, Díaz-Canel: “The financial, economic, commercial and energy persecution has begun. They (the White House) want to provoke an internal social explosion in Cuba to ask for ‘humanitarian missions’ that will translate into invasions and military interference. We have been honest, we have been transparent, we have been clear, and at all times we have explained to our people the complexities of the current situation. I remember that more than a year and a half ago, when the second half of 2019 began, we had to explain that we were in a difficult situation. The United States began to intensify a series of restrictive measures, tightening of the blockade, financial persecutions against the energy sector, with the aim of stifling our economy. This would provoke the desired massive social outburst, in order to call for a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, which would end in military interventions.” It is this fragility that opens a flank to demonstrations of discontent, without the government putting tanks and troops in the streets. The resistance of the Cuban people, nourished by examples such as Martí, Che Guevara and Fidel, has proven to be invincible. And we must, all of us who fight for a more just world, stand in solidarity with them. Translation by Internationalist 360° AuthorFrei Betto This article was republished from Internationalist 360. Archives July 2021  A bushfire burns out of control near Tumburumba, NSW, on 11 January 2020 PHOTO: Getty Images Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism provides the key to understanding the environmental catastrophe we’re witnessing, and to gaining a clearer picture of what’s needed to repair our damaged relationship with the Earth. Marx’s concern with environmental questions grew from his understanding of how humanity is bound to the natural world by a thousand threads. “Man lives from nature”, he wrote in the 1844 Manuscripts, “and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature”. In the same passage, Marx describes nature as humanity’s “inorganic body”. What he means by this, is that when we’re thinking about the things comprised in our existence, we should include, alongside our own bodies, all the objects of nature to which we relate ourselves—those that sustain us in a directly physical, biological sense, and those that nourish us mentally, such as objects of beauty and so on. If we don’t have access to healthy food, fresh air and water and so on, our physical health will suffer as a result. And the lack of any capacity to enjoy the beauty of nature—through our contact with it in either work or recreation—will affect our mental health. Every individual must exist in a constant state of interaction with nature to survive, but the particular form this relationship takes can’t be understood in abstraction from the kind of society in which we live. The task for Marx, then, became to explain how and why human society had developed through the course of history, and in particular to understand the destructive dynamics of the capitalist system that was rapidly emerging at the time. The key to this, for Marx, lay in an analysis of what he called the “social relations of production”—the way in which, in any society, people come together and labour to produce the things we need to survive. To the extent that there is a theory of human nature in Marx, it is this: our essence is to labour collectively to shape the world around us in a way that satisfies our needs. For most of humanity’s 200-300,000-year history, we have maintained quite a balanced and sustainable relationship to nature. In Australia, for example, Indigenous societies employed sophisticated land management techniques to maintain a healthy and productive landscape for tens of thousands of years before the British invasion of 1788. And although, wherever human societies have emerged, there has been some impact on the natural environment in which they are situated, it wasn’t really until a few hundred years ago that the scale of the destruction began to become a significant issue. As Marx put it in his notes for Capital, which were later published as the Grundrisse: “It isn’t the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital.”  An open cut coal mine at South Bulga in the Hunter Valley PHOTO: CSIRO The term “metabolic rift” was coined by John Bellamy Foster in his book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, published in 2000, as a way of bringing together the various elements of Marx’s account of the rupture in relations between human society and the natural world under capitalism. Although Marx didn’t talk directly about a “metabolic rift”, he frequently used the German word Stoffwechsel, which translates as metabolism (literally “material exchange”). As today, the word in Marx’s time primarily was used in the context of biology and chemistry to describe the circulation and exchange of nutrients, waste and so on in the human body and other living things. But it was also, from the 1850s onwards, increasingly taken up by those, like Marx, trying to understand the functioning of society. It’s easy to see how the idea of metabolism, or “material exchange”, can be applied in this context. Marx saw human labour as a kind of process of metabolism in which the raw materials of nature are worked up into forms that are useful for human beings. In Capital, Marx described human labour as: “... first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces that belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs.” Human labour acts on nature in a way that’s analogous with the action of the human body on the food that we eat. For instance, just like a tree that is transformed into a wooden shack, so, for example, an apple that we eat goes through a series of transformations until it is broken down into nutrients to be absorbed into our cells, along with waste to be excreted and so on. Marx applied the idea of metabolism not only to the role of labour in shaping the natural world. As well as the metabolic interaction between human society and nature, there is a metabolism within society itself. So in the Grundrisse he writes that the circulation and exchange of commodities within capitalism can also be understood as a kind of metabolism. “Insofar as the process of exchange transfers commodities from hands in which they are non-use-values to hands in which they are use-values, it is a process of social metabolism”, he wrote. The circulation of the products of labour within a society can be understood by analogy with the circulation of blood within the human body. In a healthy body, the blood transports oxygen, nutrients and so on to where they are needed—keeping the body functioning at full capacity. So too in a healthy society, the exchange of products should function to ensure that everyone is able to live a decent life. What, then, is the metabolic rift? In the simplest terms, it is a breakdown in the healthy functioning of the metabolic process human society depends on, in both its external aspect—the exchange of material between human society and nature—and its internal aspect—the circulation of material within society. In pre-class societies, the material exchange that occurs via our labour on the natural world happened in such a way that the two ends of the process—nature and the useful things we produce from it—were related in a more or less direct and transparent way. The raw materials required for the production of basic necessities like food, shelter and so on were mostly sourced from the immediate vicinity of settlements. In this context, it would be very obvious if the metabolism had broken down in some way—say by an area of land being eroded due to the excessive clearing of trees. And it would be similarly clear if the process of exchange of goods within the community broke down, and the health of one section of the population began to suffer as a result. With the emergence of class society, when a minority of the population came to live off the surplus produced by others, the link between the natural basis of human society and the lives of those who made the important decisions became more tenuous. As Marx sees it, however, it’s only with the emergence of capitalism from the seventeenth century onwards that the link is severed completely. Even the wealthiest of feudal lords still had some connection to the land. Their power was bound with a particular estate. As Marx himself put it in a note, “[T]here still exists [under feudalism] the semblance of a more intimate connection between the proprietor and the land than that of mere material wealth. The estate is individualised with its lord: it has his rank, is baronial or ducal with him, has his privileges, his jurisdiction, his political position etc. It appears as the inorganic body of its lord”. If the feudal lord failed to manage the land sustainably, if he logged all the forests, poisoned the waterways and so on, he would undermine not only the source of his material wealth, but his identity and being as a lord. The alienation of the land—its reduction to the status of property that can be bought and sold—is what for Marx constitutes the foundation stone of the capitalist system. The wealth and power of the capitalist class doesn’t depend on their possession of this or that particular piece of property, but rather on their control over capital. Capital can include physical property, such as farmland, machinery, factories, offices and so on, but it is by its very nature fluid and transferable. If a capitalist buys up some land and then destroys it, they can simply take the profits they’ve made from it and move their money elsewhere. At the same time as it completely severs any semblance of connection with the land among the ruling class, capitalism also severs it among workers. The peasants under feudalism had a direct and transparent dependence on the land for their subsistence. But with this came a degree of independence that isn’t afforded to workers under capitalism. The peasants had to give up a portion of their produce to the lord, but outside of that they were relatively free to labour as it best suited them. And no matter how unfree they were in a political sense, their capacity to sustain themselves was at least guaranteed by their direct access to the land and their possession of the tools necessary to work it. For capitalism to be put on firm footing, this direct relationship of the peasants to the land had to be severed. They were, over a number of centuries, forcibly “freed” from the land in order that they could be “free” to be employed in the rapidly expanding capitalist industries. Workers, for Marx, are defined by their lack of ownership of the means of production. They are no longer dependent on the land for their subsistence, but rather on the preparedness of a capitalist to give them a job and pay them a wage. Even if they might still maintain a more or less direct relationship with nature in their work, they have no control over or stake in this at all. Their dependence is on the wage they receive, rather than on, for example, the continuing productivity of the land on which they work. Many workers under capitalism are, of course, concerned with the destruction of the environment. But unlike with the peasantry under feudalism, whose need to maintain a sustainable relationship with the natural world is clear and immediate, the question of environmental protection under capitalism doesn’t appear, on the surface, to relate to our immediate material needs at all. This combination of factors—the capitalist class not having any real incentive to protect the environment, and the working class having no control over it—lies at the heart of capitalism’s unique destructiveness. The “logic” of capitalism is one in which maintaining the health of society’s metabolism—either externally in its relationship with nature, or internally in its distribution of goods among the population—only features to the extent that it assists the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class. The one thing the capitalist class cares about above all else is profit. No matter what the consequences, whether on the natural environment, human health or anything else, if business owners can continue to expand their pool of capital, they will see it as a success. And, due to their lack of means of production, and their dependence on selling their labouring capacities to a capitalist in exchange for a wage, workers have been harnessed to the same destructive wagon.  A boy collects plastic from a stream in Dhaka, Bangladesh PHOTO: Reuters To understand the idea of the metabolic rift better, it will help to provide some examples. For Marx and Engels, writing when capitalism was still only in its infancy, the increasing split between the country and the rapidly growing cities illustrated the point most clearly. In volume 3 of Capital Marx explained that capitalism: “reduces the agricultural population to an ever-decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever-growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is the squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country”. Prior to the emergence of capitalism, the productive life of society was more dispersed through a patchwork of villages and towns. There was no clear divide between the city and the country as there is today. One of the consequences of this was that the nutrients that went into agricultural production could easily be recycled back into the soil from human, animal and plant waste. Once capitalism’s drive to profit kicked in, however, the imperative was to centralise production to increase efficiency and reduce the costs of labour and so on. Industry became more and more concentrated in urban centres. The waste from this human mass, instead of being returned to the soil, was simply dumped into rivers or the sea. As well as making cities like London unbearably smelly and disease ridden, this dynamic also led to declining soil fertility, which worsened as the nineteenth century progressed. Farmers became desperate to find alternative sources of nutrients to regenerate the soil. The first to go were the bones from historic battlefields like Waterloo. Then, following the discovery that guano—more commonly known as bird shit—contained high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus crucial for crop growth, there was a global scramble to secure supplies of this precious resource. In 1856, the US passed the Guano Island Act by which it annexed and occupied more than 100 islands known to be rich in guano. So the disruption of one aspect of the metabolism between human society and nature led immediately to disruption in other areas. With the focus on short-term profits, the idea that you would build a system to recycle waste from the cities back into the agricultural areas didn’t even enter the frame. Why would you invest in a scheme like that when you could make money from importing guano from distant Pacific islands? Marx summed up the situation, again in the third volume of Capital, arguing that “the moral of history ... is that rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system”. Looking at the situation today, it’s hard to argue with this. Massive amounts of labour and resources are spent artificially maintaining the nutrient levels of soils, and more and more forests and other crucial ecosystems are swallowed up in the constant drive to expand agricultural production. Meanwhile most of the nutrient-rich waste produced in our cities continues to be thrown away.  A petrochemical refinery in Port Arthur, Texas PHOTO: New York Times Perhaps the best example of the metabolic rift is climate change. The centrality of fossil fuels to capitalism is, for a start, related to the drive to liberate capital accumulation entirely from any natural constraints. Fossil fuels had the advantage, over other nineteenth century sources of energy, of being easily transportable, and being able to be switched and used at will. This meant production could take place 24 hours a day, independently of climatic conditions or any other external factor, and could be geographically located wherever it was most advantageous to the factory owners. This is one of the main developments that drove the rapid expansion of cities. Instead of having to set up in regional areas, where local traditions of working-class solidarity could be hard to break, industry could be clustered together in one place, forcing masses of workers to relocate and creating huge pools of unorganised labour that could be exploited at will. Even putting aside the question of global warming, which of course didn’t figure in Marx’s time, fossil fuels might, in a society with a healthy external and internal metabolism, have been rejected because of their many other damaging aspects. But with the emergence of capitalism, the only goal that came to matter was the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the bosses. And there has perhaps never been a commodity so profitable for the capitalist class as fossil fuels. Today, the metabolic rift that underlies the climate crisis is even clearer. Scientists have known about the damaging consequences of the burning of fossil fuels for 50 years. And we have long had the technology to begin a transition to alternative sources of power such as wind and solar. Despite this, and despite the increasingly urgent warnings of scientists over the last decades, global emissions are higher than ever, and millions around the world are already suffering from an increasing frequency of extreme weather, droughts, bushfires and so on. What explains the failure to act? A big part of it is that those with their hands on the levers of power are the people who are reaping all the benefits from the continued use of fossil fuels, while those who are feeling the most effects of climate change have the least power to do anything about it. Never has there existed a class of people so cut off from nature as the capitalists and their political servants. Why would we expect them to care much about the damage they are causing when their immense wealth can act as a shield against many of the consequences of their actions? There is perhaps no better expression of the physical and spiritual chasm that has opened up between today’s capitalists and the natural world on which their wealth ultimately depends, than the fad—personified in Elon Musk—for the colonisation of space. It’s telling that the idea of building a new civilisation on Mars is so popular with these people. They have so little sense of their connection to or care for the natural world that the idea of an interplanetary escape seems more realistic and attractive than any real effort to fix the problems we have on Earth. How did Marx foresee the healing of the rift between human society and nature? That this rift is grounded in the fundamental economic structure of society means, obviously, that a bit of tinkering here and there won’t be enough. Marx was unambiguous on this point: to heal our relationship with the Earth, we need revolution. At the heart of this revolution will be the destruction of the system of private property, in which the natural environment is reduced to the status of a commodity to be bought and sold. The healing of the metabolic rift begins with the return of the land, and the means of production required to work on it, into the hands of the working class. Marx’s vision of socialism was of a society centred on the collective, democratic control by workers of the process of production, and of the distribution of goods. Translating this into the language of metabolism, we might say: the conscious, democratic control over society’s internal and external metabolism, a control which would enable us quickly to identify problems and to adjust our practice accordingly. In a socialist society, for example, the barriers to a global shift away from fossil fuels would disappear. There would be no entrenched economic interests fighting tooth and nail to protect their profits. We could have a genuine discussion and debate about the best way forward, informed by the latest science, instead of the mess of misinformation and corporate propaganda that we’re bombarded with today. And we would be able to mobilise immense new resources that in capitalism are tied to useless or destructive industries such as the military, advertising, policing, high-end housing and so on. Instead of everything being geared towards the generation of ever greater profits, we would be thinking about what’s good for society. And for Marx, a healthy metabolism—which ensures both a sustainable exchange of material between human society and nature, and the circulation of goods to provide everyone with a decent life—was the key to a healthy society. Marx summed up his view of the relationship between human society and nature as follows: “From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even an entire society, a nation or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the Earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as good heads of households.” In Marx’s time, the rift between human society and nature was still in its early stages. Today, it has deepened and widened to the point where it threatens global catastrophe. But there is nothing inevitable about the slide towards environmental collapse. Most people gain nothing from the capitalist status quo. Together, we can bring down this rotten system and build a socialist society in its place. AuthorJames Plested is an editor of Red Flag. This article was republished by Red Flag. Archives July 2021  On 9 July we wrote that the Federal Election Commission announced that the German Communist Party (DKP) will not be allowed to participate in September's Bundestag elections and at the same time will be deprived of its status as a political party. The pretext for this shameful decision was the alleged late submission of financial statements. Several Communist and Workers' Parties from across the world have strongly condemned the decision of the Commission and expressed its solidarity to the DKP. But, what is interesting in the whole story is the stance of the so-called "Left Party" (Die Linke). According to unsere-zeit.de, the decision at the Federal Election Commission was taken with only one vote against; the one of Harmut Geil from "Alliance 90/ The Greens" (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen). However, the representative of "Die Linke" in the Commission, Constanze Portner, voted in favor of the ban on DKP's political status. Once again, Die Linke, the "brother party" of SYRIZA in Greece, proves its actual ideological and political orientation, as a party of social democracy deeply committed to serve the capitalist system. A few months ago, Die Linke had adopted a despicable resolution in favor of counterrevolutionary attemps in Cuba. All the communists, the leftists, the progressive people in Germany must draw conclusions from the stance of Die Linke and support the struggle of the German Communist Party. IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM AuthorIn Defense of Communism. This article was republished from Id Communism. Archives July 2021 |
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