Quote of the day – hammock literature

This one hits a little too close to home.

…Literature? Yes. Hammock literature. Literature made of sugar and vanilla. Tourist literature. The Blue Travel Guide and General Confederation of Labor. Poetry, not in the least.

…And this:

Oh father of my father, you were standing there before
my soul which had not been born and, under the wind
the dispatch boats glided into the colonial night

Come on now, real poetry lies elsewhere. Far from rhymes, laments, sea breezes, parrots. Stiff and stout bamboos changing direction, we decree the death of sappy, sentimental, folkloric literature. And to hell with hibiscus, frangipani, and bougainvillea.

Martinican poetry will be cannibal or it will not be.

- Suzanne Césaire, “Poetic Destitution,” Tropiques, no. 4, January 1942 (quoted in Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945))

Data on women in parliaments worldwide

Reading this piece, “Latin America: From U.S. Corporate Hegemony to Regional Autonomy,”* by Preeti Kaur, I came across a useful link to the data on the percentage of parliamentary seats held by women in countries around the world.

What surprised me was that so many of the top countries – those with the highest proportion of women in parliament - were poor. It’s interesting to look beyond the regional breakdowns. In the top ten are Bolivia, Cuba, and Ecuador, and also Rwanda, Senegal, and South Africa. Regionally, the Nordic countries are an outlier at the top, but even with them included Europe still comes in below the Americas; with the Nordic countries excluded, Europe is pretty much on par with Sub-Saharan Africa (a difference of only one percentage point). And the percentages for the US and Canada are below the Americas average. In the full list, the US comes in at 72nd, below Pakistan and Bangladesh (Venezuela, home to teleSUR which published Kaur’s article, has nothing to be proud of here, falling even below the US at 82nd).

Overall, it’s fairly depressing, but there does seem to be real progress - which I can appreciate even as an anarchist - in many countries around the world.

* An important, and infuriating, part of the article described the speech by Ban Ki-moon at the Summit of the Americas this past weekend:

Rather bizarrely, the UN Secretary General then went on to spend a third of his intervention at the Summit of the Americas to discuss the importance of business involvement in the post 2015 development agenda, and in the agenda to address climate change. While the Secretary General recognised that the Americas have been at the vanguard of discussions on key issues regarding climate change, he also said that the ‘new global development agenda and the battle against climate change will need resources, technology and capacity’, and as such ‘private sources and partnerships’ would be crucial in the fight against climate change.

‘With business support for implementing the sustainable development goals, we can transform our world. Business is part of the solution to several major global challenges’, said the UN Secretary General. Such an analysis fails to articulate the ways in which businesses are obliged to pursue profit, even at the expense of harmful impacts to the environment, and people. There is an increasing recognition that capitalism has caused climate change, described incontrovertibly in Naomi Klein’s recent book ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’.

The Secretary General’s intervention failed to explain how businesses might turn their minds to address the key issues of our day. Indeed, only three years previously, in Brazil at the Rio+20 sustainable development conference, Canada, and the U.S. united against reaffirming the responsibility of businesses to respect human rights, and protect our planet.

…Big business is the problem, not the solution. While technical innovation is necessary to combat climate change, much of this innovation is tailored to pursuing energy which increases profit opportunities for business, not which effectively reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

More questions about Palmerola

Some news about the planned international airport at Palmerola, which raises even more questions and suspicions: A story appearing at defensa.com a few days ago reported that the US would be sending a special 250-Marine unit there, the Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force-South (SPMAGTF-South). The unit would allegedly, presumably together with Honduran forces, contribute to disaster-response and anti-drug-trafficking operations.

Apparently, this was news to Hondurans, and the public response led the “president” to insist that Palmerola was a Honduran and only a Honduran base (this is…odd), that this was only a proposal for a temporary arrangement and hadn’t yet been discussed or approved (also claimed by US-government representatives; this is questionable), and that the priority was the construction of the international airport (which by no means rules out the arrangement and seems an attempt at deflection).

Here are several articles (in Spanish) reporting on Honduran officials’ attempts to “clarify”:

• “Canciller de Honduras desmiente creación de fuerza especial con sede en Palmerola”

• “Juan Orlando Hernández: ‘Palmerola es de Honduras y de nadie más’”

• “Juan Orlando Hernández: ‘Palmerola es base militar hondureña’”

• “‘Palmerola es una base hondureña y de nadie más’: Juan Orlando”

A principios de esta semana, el portal Defensa.com reveló que EUA prepara el envío de 250 marines de la Unidad Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force-South o SPMAGTF-South (Fuerza de Tarea de Propósito Especial Aire-Tierra de Marines-Sur) a la base aérea de Palmerola, como una unidad especial de respuesta a crisis al estilo de las creadas para África. La información provocó diversas reacciones a favor y en contra y generó contradicciones entre altas personalidaes del Gobierno que negaban y confirmaban la versión periodística.

Sin embargo, la Embajada de EUA en Tegucigalpa se encargó de confirmar la petición planteada al Gobierno hondureño a través de un comunicado y las posteriores declaraciones del jefe de la misión diplomática norteamericana. Nealon dijo que por ahora se trata solo de una solicitud que todavía no ha sido aprobada por parte del Gobierno de Juan Orlando Hernández, de modo que están a la espera de la autorización de las autoridades locales.

Especificó que si la solicitud es aprobada, los marines llegarían entre junio y noviembre de este año y posteriormente se irían.

• “‘La prioridad es construir Palmerola, lo demás es secundario’: Juan Orlando Hernández”

TEGUCIGALPA- El presidente Juan Orlando Hernández expresó este día que la base aérea Enrique Soto Cano ubicada en Comayagua, en la zona central de Honduras, es una zona militar hondureña y de nadie más.

Las declaraciones del mandatario surgen luego que se haya conocido a través del portal www.defensa.com que Estados Unidos ampliará su presencia militar en Latinoamérica con la creación de una unidad especial en Honduras para ‘misiones de colaboración’ en la región, que contará con 250 marines, helicópteros y un catamarán de alta velocidad.

‘Quiero dejar algo claro, Palmerola es territorio hondureño, Palmerola es una base militar hondureña y de nadie más, que no le quede duda a nadie, ni en Honduras ni en fuera de Honduras que ese es un territorio hondureño’, insistió.

Outside of the US military, the only other English-language site that appears to be interested is the Communist People’s World:

…The Soto Cano airbase has been emblematic of the U.S. military’s long presence in Honduras. It’s home-base for 500 U.S. troops and was the organizational center for U.S. support for the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980’s. Critics of a U.S. role in the 2009 military coup that overthrew elected President Manuel Zelaya often cite the Soto Cano base. They point to the stopover there of the plane carrying Zelaya from the capital to exile in Costa Rica….

It’s all highly suspect.

The isolation of the US

I remember years ago (probably in the 1990s) seeing a newspaper photo of a meeting of the leaders of the Americas. The Cuban representative stood out like a sore thumb, the lone figure dressed in a military uniform while all of the others wore business suits. The implication couldn’t have been more clear: the Americas at the end of history were the land of the Washington Consensus, and the Cuban government was pitifully out of touch.

Things have changed. Democracy Now! is covering the Summit of the Americas in Panama and features an interview today with Miguel Tinker Salas and Mark Weisbrot.



I recommend watching the whole thing, especially since – if Rachel Maddow’s sycophantic report last night is any indication* – you’re not going to see any serious analysis anywhere in the US corporate media.

The central theme articulated by both Tinker Salas and Weisbrot is that the US government is so driven by internal forces and so incredibly out of touch with the reality of Latin America and the Caribbean that they continue to speak and act as though the region can be treated as their “backyard,” leading to increasing isolation. They can’t accept a hemisphere in which relations are based on mutual respect, in which people in countries other than the US can elect their own governments and choose their own policies, and in which other governments won’t reflexively accede to the US government’s arrogant attempts to punish leaders who refuse to abide by its wishes. Just listen to Roberta Jacobson! UNASUR and CELAC had to be established precisely because the US and Canada relentlessly seek to dominate any regional organization that includes them. And it appears that the chance of Hillary Clinton taking a different course as president is essentially zero, while any Republican would undoubtedly be worse.

(A note on a topic discussed in the interview: They talk about Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, who was just deported from the US to El Salvador to face justice for human rights crimes during the country’s civil war; and how the US might also deport (to Spain) Inocente Orlando Montano, another former Salvadoran general, for human rights crimes. These include the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. Among the priests was Ignacio Martín-Baró, the great political-humanist-liberation psychologist.)

* My jaw dropped when Andrea Mitchell actually brought up Venezuela, and then returned to place when that discussion went nowhere.

Breaking News: Venezuela not actually a threat to US national security

Just ahead of the Summit of the Americas, the Obama administration has acknowledged what everyone knew to be true all along: that it lied when it declared Venezuela a threat to US national security. “The United States does not believe that Venezuela poses some threat to our national security,” announced Benjamin J. Rhodes yesterday.

They've only done this, of course, because the backlash was swift and strong and came from virtually the whole of the region (even some in the Venezuelan Right objected to the characterization) and beyond.

The excuse being peddled is that the threat-language was “completely pro forma,” which mischaracterizes the meaning of “pro forma” in a manner most harmful to legality and democracy. What they did was intentionally lie in order to take measures that wouldn't be allowed in the absence of the lie, and they did so with the support of the US corporate media, who are all too happy to play along with government lies. And even now that they've publicly admitted the claim that was the basis for the sanctions decree was false, the decree hasn't been rescinded. Because that's how they roll. Who's the threat, again?

TRNN interviews Miguel Tinker Salas on US government’s actions toward Venezuela

Here’s an interview on the Real News Network with Venezuela scholar Miguel Tinker Salas. (You can watch it there or read the transcript, or watch it on YouTube here. Embedding isn’t allowed, which is annoying.)

What I like about this interview in particular is that it focuses on the US government’s actions and relations with Latin America. Too many interviews, and I think it’s out of fear of appearing uncritical, devote too much time to discussing Venezuela’s domestic economic problems and the internal difficulties of the Maduro government. I have a problem with this tendency for several reasons. First, it can contribute to the arrogant, imperialistic sense that we have in the US (and the global North generally) that it’s our right and responsibility to provide criticism and recommendations to other countries, with the expectation that they’ll listen.

Second, emphasizing these problems in the context of opposition coup-plotting can implicitly normalize the idea that the illegal removal of a democratically elected government, the destruction of democracy, and the sweeping aside of the popular will is potentially justifiable. If things are really that bad or protesters that angry, people could easily start to think, maybe something drastic like regime change might be necessary. This is an idea that would never be accepted by the vast majority of people in North America or Europe with regard to their own or other Northern countries’ governments, but we often have a tendency to see poor countries’ democratic institutions as less sacrosanct and to be less absolute in their defense.

Third, the focus on Venezuela’s current woes removes them from any historical, comparative, or global context, which tends at once to magnify them and to make them appear more potentially tractable for the Venezuelan government. The economic, political, and social problems Venezuela is facing are shared by many other countries, including in the same region, often in far more extreme forms. Further, to dwell on current corruption and shortages and so forth distracts attention from the terrible situation before Chávez was elected, which would certainly recur were Maduro to be criminally ousted. This narrow focus also leads away from an analysis that recognizes both the general difficulties involved with building strong welfare programs and policies of local political involvement in a global capitalist order and the specific effects of the covert campaign of destabilization and economic warfare continuously waged by the rightwing opposition in league with the US. (And it should go without saying that economic improvement wouldn’t deter the Venezuelan Right or the US government in their destabilization efforts at all - these have been a constant since 1999.)

Finally, it distracts from what should be our primary focus, which is to challenge media misrepresentations in our own countries and stop our own governments from persisting in antidemocratic and imperialistic intervention. We should be focused on joining with the people of the region to demand that the US government especially respect the democratic process in Latin American and Caribbean nations and engage with their elected governments in good faith. They aren’t going to do it without sustained pressure from within as well as without.

US government continues to try to overthrow Venezuelan democracy; Latin American resistance continues to grow and organize

The US government has added new sanctions to Venezuelan officials as part of its ongoing campaign to overthrow the democratically elected government of that country. The liberal New York Times continues to shamelessly propagandize on behalf of that campaign.

This film, “Imitation and Copy” – not free of propagandistic intent itself, but providing useful history – describes how many of the techniques employed by the US government in league with obedient or incurious journalists and the Latin American Right today are a continuation of those used to successfully oust the democratically elected Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973 and install the murderous Pinochet regime:



(This is what you’re a part of, New York Times. Be proud, as you apparently are of fawning over Henry Kissinger’s book in your list of the best of 2014.)

There’s no sign that the US government will pull back on its campaign against the people of Latin America or the Caribbean. But there is resistance. Last week, CELAC, the organization of governments in the region formed in 2011 to contest the US-dominated OAS, met and signed the Belen Document, explicitly rejecting US imperialism in the region:

The CELAC is the first time than [sic] 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have been united in a regional organisation without the presence of the US and Canada. The organisation brings together governments from differing and even conflicting ideological orientations, including the rightwing governments of Mexico and Colombia and the socialist administrations in Venezuela and Bolivia.

“Beyond ideological borders and the politics that separate us, there is a diverse America...(the strength of CELAC) is to have achieved unity in diversity, based on respect, solidarity and helping each other in the joint construction of Latin America and the Caribbean,” said Maduro.

During the summit, the Pro-Tempore presidency of the organisation was officially passed over from Costa Rica to Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who applauded Venezuela and Nicaragua's initiative to have US colony, Puerto Rico, occupy a seat at CELAC's next summit. He stated that the action would “demonstrate that America is a region free of colonialism”.

“CELAC must play a protagonistic role in accompanying the process of decolonisation in the Latin American and Caribbean region. In general, it should be the “go to” organisation for the resolution of conflicts or long standing issues which affect the countries in the region,” stated the Ecuadorean president.

...With the exception of the French Caribbean islands, the United States has directly and indirectly intervened or occupied all Latin American and Caribbean countries since the early 19th Century. More recent examples include support for attempted coups against the leftist governments of Venezuela (2002), Ecuador (2010) and Bolivia (2008), as well as for the successful coups against Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009 and Fernando Lugo, the leftist “Priest of Paraguay” in 2012.

As Mano Singham reported today, Latin America is also standing strong against torture. This year really is potentially a turning point in struggles for democracy and social justice.

Tick tock?

GREECE: THE END OF AUSTERITY? from Theopi Skarlatos on Vimeo.

Syriza’s victory in Greece is potentially a huge turning point.

Anti-austerity, pro-democracy and justice movements are rising in Spain, where tens of thousands marched yesterday chanting “Tick tock” to count down the time that could be remaining for the dominance of the country’s traditional ruling parties, and it seems also in Belgium.

We shouldn’t forget that these movements represent only the most recent wave of opposition to austerity programs. These protests have been going on around the world, receiving even less attention and respect from the corporate media than those in Europe, for literally decades. Their success in Europe will hopefully contribute to the renewal or construction of links of solidarity with the millions of people in countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean who’ve been defending their rights against Structural Adjustment for so long, often at great cost.

It’s also important to remember that these struggles are not just about policies and statistics but people’s lives, their pain and their possibilities. As Paul Mason reports from Greece:

The organiser [of a Syriza food bank] tells me: “This is the opposite of charity. We’re supporting 120 families in one area, and a lot of the work we do is about isolation, mental health and shame.” You cannot get more micro-political than sitting in a small room with desperate people and talking them out of suicide. Spin becomes impossible, the trust built hard to destroy.

Austerity policies everywhere create suffering, despair, fear, and hopelessness,* and opposing them can mean healing and health. Reading about the refugees of the Spanish Civil War in Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen is a harsh reminder of what’s at stake. Victories of the Left don’t inevitably lead to perfect solutions, but victories of capital and the far Right lead to the ruin of everything good.

* And I’ll reiterate once more for the record: these are NOT failed policies. No reasonable person could possibly believe, given decades of evidence of their effects, that they represent anything other than successful attempts to achieve the real goals of finance capital and the IMF, and no one promoting or implementing them can claim otherwise in good faith.

Afro-Vegan!

I first learned of this new vegan cookbook by Bryant Terry when flipping through the Rachael Ray magazine at the hair salon. I’m very excited about it. I looked at the preview on Amazon, and not only are the recipes surrounded by historical information but each features a song suggestion. So, for example, Creole Spice Blend might be accompanied by “Creole” by the Charlie Hunter Quartet featuring Mos Def (they’re not all this literal :)).

“…venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity,…”

Aimé Césaire’s 1955 Discourse on Colonialism should be required reading/listening for…the planet.* It’s a brief, lyrical indictment of the entire colonial apparatus. At one point, Césaire tells his anticapitalist-anticolonialist comrades that they should

hold as enemies – loftily, lucidly, consistently – not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress – even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress – all of them tools of capitalism, all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful, all slave-traders,…

And sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook. And do not seek to know whether personally these gentlemen are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally – that is, in the private conscience of Peter or Paul – they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism. [my emphasis]

The list would look much the same today, with a few additions and updated details that change nothing substantive.

* Whatever its problems, and there are problems.