U.S. set back at Panama Summit

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M Summit as if it were the beginning of a ainstream media presented the Panama new era of cooperation. They pondered the end of the Cold War and painted Obama as a model of detente, as opposed to the hawkish Maduro. They also contrasted the reintegra­ tion of Cuba in the region to the isolation of Venezuela and evaluated the encounter as an­ other diplomatic success for the United States. This same balance sheet was presented both before and after the conclave, as if the meeting itself had not made any relevant contribution.

But this narrative failed to recognize that 33 of the 35 representatives present at the meet­ ing rejected the accusation that Venezuela was a “threat to U.S. security.” They all demand­ ed the repeal of the executive order, which blocked goods and restricted visas for citizens of that country. This demand was put forth in emphatic discussions that no friend of impe­ rialism contradicted. Even Obama himself pre­ ferred to withdraw from the plenary in order to avoid questioning. The United States should have postponed its agenda in such a negative setting.

The script and the reality Obama needed to win the struggle unleashed by the decree against Venezuela in order to retake the initiative of imperial hegemony. The consolidation of this domination was the initial objective of the first Summit (Miami-1994) and the previous launch of the ALCA (Quebec-2001). The shipwreck of this project in Mar del Plata (2005) de­ termined the isolation of the giant of the North in the last summit (Cartagena-2012). The creation of new organizations without a U.S. presence (UNASUR-2008 and CELAC-2011) emphasized this retreat and en­ couraged the recognition of Cuba.

After 53 years David has finally beaten Goliath. The Empire could not break the Cuban Revolution, and Obama was forced to liberate the five fighters [the “Cuban Five”] he had held captive. Raul Castro initiat­ ed the country’s return to presidential meetings with a categorical call for the immediate repeal of the order against Venezuela.

All the theories that have counterposed Castro’s “new diplomatic realism” against Maduro’s “outmod­ ed discursive radicalism” ignore the concerted lead­ ership that both governments have assumed in the battle against the Yankee decree. The unanimity was accompanied by strong speeches from other leaders.

None of the rightist presidents (Colombia, Peru, Par­ aguay) were able to sustain the attack against Venezu­ ela. Even the small Caribbean countries that Obama visited before the meeting rejected being stomped on by the U.S. State Department. The same occurred with Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay, which maintain great distance from the Bolivarian process….

All the figures of the anti-Chavez coup mentality ar­ rived in Panama. They made a lot of noise, but had little impact on the Summit. They have become weak because of the failure of the last disturbance, and they were not able to respond with protests against the de­ tention of the conspirators Leopoldo Lopez and Anto­ nio Ledezma.

The leaders of the Cuban counterrevolution also ar­ rived en masse from Miami, wearing their new dis­ guises as “representatives of civil society.” With this makeup, they restarted their project to restore the status of the island as a casino, brothel, or link to the drug trade.

The delegation of gusanos, including the murderer of Che, tested out all kinds of provocations. They pro­ moted political clamoring, shouting matches in front of embassies, interruptions during press conferences, and conflicts with the guards. But they were not able to alter the political climate of the Summit.… Attitudes and arguments The contrast of projects that flourished in the Sum­ mit was signaled by a contrast of attitudes. Obama disembarked in Panama with a great show of planes, helicopters, and armored vehicles. This demonstra­ tion was out of proportion to the actual security needs of the politician. It only served to remind us that the destructive potential of imperialism is not a Holly­ wood fiction.

In contrast, Maduro immediately made his way to the working-class neighborhood of Chorrillos, to pay homage to the victims of the last invasion by the U.S. Marines (1989). He remembered the overthrow of a dictator who was appointed by the United States itself and he waved the Panamanian flag in a place that was forgotten by all the other functionaries.

Evo [Morales] adopted the same conduct during his stay. He proclaimed that “we are better off without the United States embassy” and he refuted the myth of pending U.S. “help” for Cuba. He emphasized that imperialism should compensate the island for the ha­ rassment it had imposed for half a century.

The question of the executive order against Venezu­ ela dominated the Summit. Obama himself discounted the portrayal of this country as a “threat” and justified the decree as a bureaucratic formality. But he could not explain the reasons for maintaining this position.

The so-called “danger” of Venezuela is an unsustain­ able fantasy. The country has not invaded adjoining territories, it does not conduct wars with its neigh­ bors, and it has been an active promoter of peace negotiations in Columbia. But on the contrary, the United States has developed enormous military bases in Peru, Paraguay, Colombia, and the Antilles, con­ trols the seas from its Southern Command in Miami, controls the skies with the latest generation of radar, and nurses the arsenal that the British installed in the Malvinas [Falkland Islands].

Furthermore, the Pentagon shamelessly spies on the diplomats, functionaries, and presidents of the region, intercepts everyone’s e-mails, and keeps surveillance over strategic internet servers. Venezuela has not de­ stabilized any government, while imperialism is the main agent of the parliamentary, judicial and police conflicts and coups of the last few years.

The United States has not renounced its past inva­ sions. Nor has it been “more worried” about the Mid­ dle East, China, and Ukraine than about Latin Ameri­ ca. The executive order against Venezuela is the first tentative step toward extending its reach [over the region].

The U.S. functionaries justified their aggression with denouncements of human rights violations. But they have not produced proof of any kind. They dictate les­ sons about democracy while hiding the most recent reports of CIA torture, the continuing use of Guanta­ namo, and the use of the death penalty in their own country.

The State Department further avoids any compari­ son between Venezuela and the rightist administra­ tions in the region. No accusation against the Bolivar­ ian government has the same impact as the assassina­ tions in Honduras, the crimes in Mexico, or the perse­ cutions in Colombia and Peru.

The U.S. economic delegation attempted to light up a little tropical Davos in Panama. They proposed that multimillionaires and Wall Street stars take part in (Above) Obama put on a smile in his meeting with Cuban President Castro (ctr.) but he got little support in his efforts to isolate Venezuela.

the economic forums and presented the slogan of the Summit (“Prosperity with equity”) as a fulfillment of course. Neither did they lack any praise for the trans­ national companies that exploit the population.

The Yankee experts exalt capitalism while keeping silent about the suffering that this system imposes on all the dispossessed. They counterpose the disadvan­ tages of the “populist” governments to the achieve­ ments of the administrations that are guided by the market, without speaking of the precariousness of labor in Peru, the retirement disaster in Chile, or the migrant tragedy in Central America.

The neoliberals showcased Panama as a model of success. They pointed to the skyscrapers that ring the city, while omitting mention of their financing by money laundered by narco-trafficking. They praised the growth of the isthmus, without mentioning the so­ cial segmentation and the “informal-sector” work of a population condemned to hard labor in construction and the hotel industry….

The limits of the counteroffensive The United States attacks Venezuela in order to con­ trol the world’s largest oil reserves. This powerful na­ tion actually uses its supply of crude oil from shale to destabilize the Bolivarian process, enabling the price of the fuel to depreciate worldwide.

The United States does not tolerate the extra-region­ al alliances that Chavez and Maduro arranged. Nor does it accept the will to resist the confiscation of pe­ troleum such as was perpetrated in Iraq or Libya.

The confrontation in turn is trivialized by the ana­ lysts that present the conflict between Obama and Maduro as a “conflict of vanities.” They accuse the Venezuelan politician of exaggerating the dispute, in order to distract the population from their immediate needs.

With this type of stupidity they attempt to disguise the U.S. project to control the natural resources of Latin America. The appropriation of Venezuelan pe­ troleum profits is the first step in a general recaptur­ ing of land, water, and minerals across the continent.

Obama is pushing this plan forward with a new com­ bination of carrots and sticks. In this way, he is able to negotiate with Cuba without abandoning his bel­ ligerence. He will reopen the embassy on the island, but make strong demands [on Cuba] in order to lift the blockade.

The U.S. president took a photograph with Raul Cas­ tro, but he also met with the gusanos from Miami. He complemented his friendly rhetoric with the protec­ tion of the coup-minded politicians who guide Wash­ ington.

This policy repeats the strategy of negotiating with Iran without closing the door to a bombing campaign. The same arm wrestling that Obama pursues with the lobbies of Israel and Saudi Arabia he also extends to the ultra-right Cuban-Americans. His strategy is en­ dorsed by Hillary Clinton and questioned by the Re­ publican candidates for the presidency.

(continued on page 9, in “Racist attacks in Dominican Republic”)

SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2015 7

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... NGOs & myth of civil society (continued from page 6: “GMOs and the myth of civil society”) servancy has used such land to drill for oil!

Then there are the major governmentsponsored NGOs whose aims are barely disguised. These include The National Endowment for Democracy, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the American Center for Interna­ tional Labor Solidarity. The last was pre­ viously called AIFLD (American Institute for Free Labor Development), founded in 1962 by the leadership of the AFL-CIO.

AIFLD’s central purpose, in direct as­ sociation with the CIA and U.S. military, was the organization and funding of anti-communist trade unions—or bet­ ter, company unions—in Latin American and beyond for the purpose of under­ mining governments whose policies ran contrary to U.S. corporate interests. So heinous were AIFLD’s CIA associations and operations that the AFL-CIO’s larg­ est affiliate in the 1960s, the United Au­ tomobile Workers (UAW), led by Walter Reuther, disaffiliated in disgust.

More often than not, NGOs proclaim their “progressive” civil society objec­ tives in liberal terms and deeds, seem­ ingly fighting to protect the environ­ ment, or civil rights and liberties, or helping the poorest of the poor, estab­ lishing cooperatives, organizing “microloans” in the poorest nations, or defend­ ing immigrants. The list of civil society causes is near infinite. Indeed, the April 2015 issue of Monthly Review includes a major article, “The Nonprofit Corporate Complex: An Integral Component and Driving Force of Imperialism in the Phase of Monopoly-Finance Capitalism,” that provides valuable insights into capitalism’s vision of NGO’s today.

Monthly Review author Efe Can Gürcan notes that world capitalism—due to its incapacity to resolve its crises through Keynesian government spending on social programs to create jobs and otherwise mitigate mounting social disintegration on multiple fronts— increasingly uses NGOs to substitute for social pro­ grams that previously were in the purview of the state itself. Public education and a myriad of other social services are prime examples—where NGOs like the Gates Foundation, headed by Bill and Melinda Gates, among the richest people on earth, are leading advo­ cates of the privatization of public education through charter schools and related encroachments on what has traditionally been free public education.

Of course, the aim here, as with an increasing num­ ber of public services across the country, is to funnel state and federal funds from the public to the private sector—that is, to corporate America—yet another mechanism to boost the flagging profits of a crisis-ridden U.S. and world capitalism.

While NGOs are on the rise in the United States, they are relatively insignificant in their reach as compared with some nations, like Nigeria, Haiti, India, and Ban­ gladesh, where NGOs provide a huge percentage of programs that would otherwise be the responsibility of the state.

Haiti, for example, with literally 10,000 NGOs, the highest density (per capita) in the world, uses NGOs to provide some 90 percent of social services—to the extent that these services exist at all! The case is the same with Nigeria, whose social infrastructure is vir­ tually non-existent, whose government is notoriously corrupt, and whose vast oil and other resources are there for the imperialist taking. NGOs there serve to provide only the thinnest veneer of a “civil society;” the charitable NGO expenditures are less than a pit­ tance as compared to the billions of dollars extracted in profits.

In the U.S., a central focus of “civil society” NGOs is to direct into reformist channels, and especially into the Democratic Party, the growing social discontent at capitalism’s increasing inability to provide a decent life for ever more millions of people. Indeed, the Dem­ ocratic Party, the institution that increasing numbers of radicalizing activists call “the graveyard of social movements,” serves a vital social function for capital­ ism.

While most political-activist NGOs espouse liberal and seemingly progressive values and objectives— otherwise they would not be at all useful to help maintain the capitalist status quo—all operate via an unwritten code of conduct. They all offer “solutions” to social crises based on the capitalist market—on 8 SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2015 Sam B / hatha.wordpress.com what they consider “realistic” market adjustments to the capitalist corporations and the system itself. In some cases, these are little more than what the cor­ porations themselves propose or what their repre­ sentatives in the Democratic Party, almost always in collaboration with their Republican partners, meekly offer up in legislative form.

While NGOs are legally barred from formally sup­ porting any political party, the great majority of them have found innumerable ways to mobilize and garner support for Democrats via focusing their fire on the “greater evil” Republicans” or by pressing the pro­ posed legislation offered by Democrats, etc. The NGOs outward appearance of “neutrality” barely masks their objectives—the election to office of the “lesser evil” Democrats.

Of course, the Republicans have their NGOs as well—some almost indistinguishable from the Demo­ crats’ and others aimed at producing the “think-tank” populist ideologies of conservatives or the far right. The liberal-minded ideology “research” factories es­ tablished to prettify capitalist plunder, similarly “dis­ cover” a less abrasive terminology that nevertheless aims to achieve the same objectives.

Here, we are compelled to note that NGOs are at no loss in finding willing citizens to head or otherwise seek employment in their operations, write their grant applications and develop their “mission state­ ments,” the latter designed to ensure that the grantor fully understands that the civil service to be provided and the associated funding requested, in no way con­ flicts with the for profit reason for existence of the corporation itself.

The myriad of NGOs that permeate the social justice scene in the U.S. today usually hire well-educated mid­ dle-class college students or college graduates who, more often naively rather than consciously, promote the reform of capitalist evils as the only possible way forward. Revolutionaries who challenge capitalism at its base are rare in these institutions, to say the least.

The operations of the broad ranging NGO organi­ zations that have emerged to challenge fossil fuelinduced global warming provides some important in­ sights. NGOs centrally involved in this growing move­ ment rarely depart from pressing what are deemed “market solutions,” that is, “solutions” that depend on the capitalist government and corporations regu­ lating themselves. The very corporations whose ex­ traction and use of fossil fuels are the central cause of global warming are called upon to improve their functioning.

A prime example is the mass mobilization in New York City on Sept. 21, 2014, of some 400,000 activists opposed to global warming. The NGOs that organized this mammoth outpouring of rage at the present and impending horrors brought on by global warming and the associated climate and environmental crises failed to present a single demand on corporate Amer­ ica to remedy this impending catastrophe.

There was no rally on Sept. 21 where speak­ ers might have educated the assembled ac­ tivists and pointed them in the direction of organizing an independent mass movement directly focused on the climate crisis perpe­ trators and demanding “100 Percent Sustain­ able Energy Now! Nor was there a platform from which speakers might have demanded the nationalization of the polluting corpora­ tions under the control of working people, or an immediate and massive effort to achieve a rapid transition from fossil fuel to safe and sustainable energy production.

Indeed, the mass march was led by an as­ semblage of film stars, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, and some dozen Democratic Party elected officials—including New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Vice Presi­ dent Al Gore.

We need but note here that the leading cli­ mate specialists around the world have ob­ served, tragically, that the UN’s 21st Confer­ ence of Parties, set for December 2015 in Paris, has no intention of advancing any pro­ posals to thwart the oncoming global climate catastrophe. Bound by the absolute necessity to extract from the earth the trillions-of-dol­ lars worth of known fossil-fuel reserves, no capitalist nation even considers the cost to all humanity.

Thus, NGOs are fully capable of mobiliz­ ing mass forces for profoundly needed social change while simultaneously orienting these forces toward solutions within the framework of predatory capitalism, and all too often ac­ cepting or promoting “solutions” that are ac­ ceptable to the polluters themselves.

While revolutionaries must never fail to ac­ tively participate and build these broad mo­ bilizations, they do so with the intention of encountering the best activists and introduc­ ing demands that are critical to organizing the most effective fight to save the planet. Indeed, the fight for a truly independent mass movement based on prin­ cipled demands that challenge capitalism’s rush to doom is the only way forward.

The reformists face a critical contradiction when they seek to mobilize popular sentiment in powerful mass actions. Despite the limitations of their formal demands, if any, and their less than democratic orga­ nizational forms, these actions have the unintended effect—for the reformists—of widening the gap be­ tween what the masses want and what the govern­ ment and corporate America can and will deliver.

These mass actions inadvertently contribute to the radicalizing process wherein reformist illusions give way to revolutionary alternatives, but only if con­ scious revolutionaries struggle to construct truly in­ dependent alternatives where decisions on policies are made by the masses themselves as opposed to the tiny groups of paid NGO functionaries.

The same can be said for the mass mobilizations for immigrant and labor rights that we have seen over the past several years. These are almost always orga­ nized by reformist forces, including and especially the bankrupt trade-union bureaucracy, who use them to pressure for social reforms on the one hand while de­ livering the uninitiated to the hands of the Democratic Party on the other.

The AFL-CIO mass march on Washington prior to President Obama’s first election victory was a case in point. Of the 40 speakers selected for the podium that day, not one failed to urge a vote for the Democrats to “stop the right.”

NGOs, whether they be the giant and brutal govern­ ment outfits that exist to “peacefully,” and sometimes not so peacefully, orchestrate “regime change” to suit corporate ends or the millions of others who employ more subtle means to achieve the same corporate ends, function as an integral element in the workings of the capitalist system.

They are, of course, accompanied by all other insti­ tutions of the capitalist state, from the three-tiered U.S. governmental system (legislative, executive and judicial) to the military, police, National Security Administration, and related repressive institutions that exist to advance the capitalist status quo. They are aided in this effort by the cacophony of the virtu­ ally monopolized corporate-run media, which daily pounds into the heads of the unaware the carefully promoted ideology and rationale employed by a bru­ tal social system to camouflage its dirty deeds and malicious intentions.

NGOs, in all their manifestations, are not unimport­ ant players in the increasingly Truman Show world* that is capitalism today. n *From the 1998 movie “The Truman Show”—a counterfeit or imi­ tation world created to achieve social conformity.

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Tony Savino / Socialist Action

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After 53 years, David has finally beaten Goliath. The Empire could not break the Cuban Revolution, and Obama was forced to free the Cuban Five.