Lavalas and Haiti's Student Union Unite

By KIM IVES

Thousands of demonstrators marched through Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince on July 15 to mark the 56th birthday of former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The demonstration, which was called by and adhered to by two rival factions of the Lavalas Family party (FL), was considered a great display of unity by its organizers.

At 9 a.m. the crowds gathered at the gate in front of Aristide's still gutted home in Tabarre. It was decorated with flowers and large photographs of the party's leader, who remains in exile in South Africa over five years after the Feb. 29, 2004 coup d'état against him.

The multitude then moved, like a great river, towards the capital.

Lavalas leaders said that the demonstration was a birthday present for Aristide. "Long live the return of President Aristide!" read some of the posters in the march. " Down with the MINUSTAH [UN Mission to Stabilize Haiti, the military occupation force]! Release of all political prisoners! Reinstatement of all fired State employees! Down with the neo-liberal plan!"

Demonstrators also bitterly denounced President René Préval for betraying their expectations that he would help return Aristide to Haiti and fight neoliberal austerity and privatization. Tens of thousands of Lavalas partisans voted for Préval in 2006, helping him win the presidency.

"Our political organization will defeat all those who are working for its demise," declared Dr. Maryse Narcisse, one of the members of the FL's Executive Committee at the close of the demonstration at the Place of the Constitution on the Champ de Mars, the capital's central square.

Narcisse also criticized Préval for seeking to amend Haiti's 1987 Constitution while at the same time violating its laws. "Lavalas remains true to its dream of a better Haiti, where all citizens can have access to education, health, housing, and employment," she concluded. "Realization of this dream goes hand in hand with the return of President Aristide to Haiti."

Also participating in the demonstration was the singer and activist Annette Auguste, known as So An. She was also named to the FL's Executive Committee but presently does not sit with its other three members, Narcisse, Lionel Etienne and Jacques Mathelier. Her faction of the party has proposed some reforms which has caused controversy within the party.

"I am a dedicated Lavalassian," So An told Haiti Liberté. " President Aristide Lavalas is not more Lavalas than me. President Aristide might turn his back on me, but I will never turn my back on him." She declared her full support for Aristide's return and said that the July 15 demonstration was a living testimony to the FL's strength, power, and vitality.

"This event is great proof that the Lavalas would have won the [April 19 and June 21] senatorial elections boycotted by the national majority," she said. " That is why Lavalas was excluded from those elections. The objectively manifest goal is to destroy the Lavalas."

At the Place of the Constitution, Lavalas activists like René Civil and Lavarice Gaudin criticized the government of Préval and his prime minister Michele Pierre-Louis for pursuing policies condemned by Haiti's masses. They demanded the immediate and unconditional return of Aristide to Haiti.

Meanwhile, the Lavalas base organizations which made July 15 a success have called another major mobilization for Tuesday, July 28, the 94th anniversary of the first U.S. Marine occupation of Haiti in 1915.

The popular organizations have planned the demonstrations with some of Haiti's student organizers, marking the first time that the demands of the Lavalas mass movement and those of the student protests, which have raged at the State University in recent months, will be united.

The demands for July 28th are: 1) MINUSTAH's departure; 2) Aristide's return; 3) Apply the Parliament's vote for a 200 gourde a day [$5.05] minimum wage; 4) Reform at the State University; 5) Justice for Roudy, the man shot dead by MINUSTAH soldiers at the Port-au-Prince Cathedral on June 18; 6) Liberation of all political prisoners, above all Ronald Dauphin; 7) Down with the neoliberal plan.

Among the groups calling the July 28 demonstration are the Cité Soleil Action Coalition of the Lavalas Family Base (ABA SATAN), the Assembly of Organizations for Change (ROC), the Network of Multiplying National Organs of the Lavalas Family (RONMFL), the Network of Organizations of the West Zone (ROZO), the National Organization for the Equitable Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ONAPROEDEF), Alternative for Haiti's National Liberation(ALEH), the Force of Principled Organizations for a National Alternative (FOKAN), Movement to Bury Repression (MARE), Group of Popular Initiative, the student group KOMAP/FRAE, and the International Support Haiti Network (ISHN).

"L'union fait la force" (Unity makes strength) says the motto on Haiti's flag. Organizers of the July 28 march hope that the merging of the Lavalas mass movement with the anti-imperialist student movement will lift Haiti's struggle for justice, democracy and sovereignty to a new level.

Obama’s health care counterrevolution

The New York Times is spearheading the campaign for President Obama’s health care proposals. His drive for an overhaul of the health care system, far from representing a reform designed to provide universal coverage and increased access to quality care, marks an unprecedented attack on health care for the working population. It is an effort to roll back social gains associated with the enactment of Medicare in 1965.
It is a counterrevolution in health care, being carried out in the profit interests of the giant pharmaceutical companies, insurance conglomerates and hospital chains, as well as the corporations, which will be encouraged to terminate health care for their employees and force them to buy insurance plans providing less coverage at greater out-of-pocket expense.
In a full-page editorial published on Sunday, entitled “Health Care Reform and You,” the Times seeks to allay growing concerns in the US population over the legislation proposed by the White House that is currently working its way through Congress. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 21 percent believe they will be worse off under the new legislation, double the number in February.
Employing evasion and deception, the Times preys on the widespread discontent with the current state of the health care system to push for Obama’s proposals. It cites the immense burdens which the existing setup places on ordinary people to suggest that things will only get worse and the sole alternative is the cost-cutting overhaul proposed by Obama:
“Premiums and out-of-pocket spending for health care have been rising far faster than wages. Millions of people are ‘under-insured’—their policies don’t come close to covering their medical bills. Many postpone medical care or don’t fill prescriptions because they can’t afford to pay their share of the costs. And many declare personal bankruptcy because they are unable to pay big medical debts.”
This describes the failure of a health care system based on private profit. This—the central issue—the Times completely evades.
Instead, the newspaper shifts the blame onto the so-called “fee-for-service system.” The newspaper writes, “Virtually all experts blame the system for runaway health care costs because it pays doctors and hospitals for each service they perform.”
What experts? The newspaper does not say.
The editorial justifies Obama’s drive to do away with the fee-for-service system by replying to critics who fear that health care will be rationed to cut costs. “The truth is that health care is already rationed,” the Times writes, adding cynically, “No insurance, public or private, covers everything at any cost.”
The Times notes that “An earlier wave of managed care plans concentrating on reining in costs aroused a backlash among angry beneficiaries who were denied the care they wanted.” In an attempt to disarm such concerns, the newspaper provides a series of sophistic arguments on the theme that ending fee-for-service and imposing cost controls and restrictions will actually improve patient care.
Under the present payment system, it states, “patients often get very expensive care but not necessarily the best care.” Fee-for-service provides a “financial incentive to order excessive tests or treatments, some of which harm the patients.” It adds, “The most expensive treatment is not always the best treatment.”
These are loaded words, which conceal an unstated agenda. What is “excessive” or needlessly “expensive” will be determined not by patients and doctors, but by insurance companies, drug companies and hospital chains, which are driven by the profit motive.
Mammograms do not detect cancer in every instance. By the logic employed by the Times, they can therefore be deemed “excessive.” The most advanced drugs do not always improve medical outcomes. Another source of waste and “inefficiency.”
Needless to say, such judgments will apply only to ordinary people. The rich will continue to have access to the most “excessive,” expensive and “inefficient” care.
It does not take a great deal of critical reflection to recognize that these are rationalizations for depriving millions of workers and poor people access to the most advanced procedures, tests and drugs.
That the newspaper is seeking to sell the public a bill of goods is demonstrated by the deliberately vague terms it employs to describe the Obama scheme. The bills in Congress “would require all Americans to carry health insurance with specified minimum benefits or pay a penalty,” the editorial states. The bills would require most businesses to “provide and subsidize insurance that meets minimum standards for their workers or pay a fee for failing to do so.” The editorial speaks of a “specified level of benefits” and “yet-to-be-determined ‘essential benefits.’” [Emphasis added].
What these “minimum benefits” and “essential benefits” are, the newspaper does not say.
The editorial describes private “health insurance exchanges” that will be established by the insurance companies, and indicates, in deliberately vague terms, that companies will be allowed to terminate health plans for their employees, who would then be forced, by law, to purchase their own insurance, providing unstated “minimum benefits,” from these exchanges.
Talking out of both sides of its mouth, the newspaper at one point asserts that workers “might end up with better or cheaper coverage,” but at another writes: “Less clear is what financial burden middle-income Americans would bear when forced to buy coverage. There are concerns that the subsidies ultimately approved by Congress might not be generous enough.”
In other words, “middle-income Americans,” i.e., the vast majority of the population, will see an immense decline in their coverage. That is not all. People who presently assume that tests, drugs and procedures will be covered by their company plans will suddenly be told that a host of things are no longer covered and will cost extra to receive.
The editorial devotes a section to Medicare, which is a central target of the Obama plan. It suggests the kind of cost-cutting regimen that will be introduced into the government insurance system for the elderly, including “payment incentives in Medicare to reduce needless readmissions to hospitals.”
“Not everyone in Medicare will be happy,” the Times acknowledges. Congress, it notes, is “likely to reduce or do away with” subsidies for Medicare Advantage Plans upon which millions depend to supplement their government benefits. “... many of these plans are apt to charge their clients more for their current policies or offer them fewer benefits,” it states.
Yet somehow, the Times writes approvingly, “President Obama insisted that benefits won’t be reduced, they’ll simply be delivered in more efficient ways...”
Reductions in care for those on Medicare will set a precedent. As the Times puts it, the changes in Medicare will “percolate throughout the health care system.”
As for extending coverage to the 50 million Americans who are uninsured, the newspaper says the various versions in Congress of the Obama plan “do a good job.” In fact, it is estimated that at least 16 million children and adults will remain without any coverage.
Also on Sunday, the Washington Post published an editorial, “The Health-Care Sacrifice,” which provides a more frank presentation of the implications of the Obama plan. The Post criticizes the president for failing to level with the public and prepare it for massive cuts in their health care—a change that has the newspaper’s full support.
“Getting health costs under control,” the Post writes, “will require saying no, or having the patient pay more...”
The newspaper notes that technological innovation in medical care is the fundamental driver of health-care inflation, and declares that reducing costs will require rationing access to the most advanced treatments. “In other words,” it states, “You can’t always get want you want—at least if you want costs to be lower. This would require an enormous change from the current practice, particularly in Medicare...”
Obama’s health care counterrevolution is of a piece with his entire domestic agenda. It parallels the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of the banks, the imposition of mass layoffs and wage and benefits cuts in the auto industry, and a stepped-up attack on public education and on teachers.
The economic crisis has been seized upon by the American financial aristocracy, with the Obama administration as its central instrument, to carry through a class-war agenda, long in preparation, that is directed against the vast majority of the American people. All that remains of the social reforms from the 1930s and 1960s, and the gains won by previous generations of workers in bitter struggle, is to be wiped out.
The immense growth of social inequality and the domination of society and the political system by a financial aristocracy are incompatible with institutions and programs that retain any vestige of a democratic and egalitarian impulse. Public education and health care must be reorganized more openly and directly along class lines.
This is the basic program of all factions of the ruling elite—liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican.

The left's confusion on Iran

THE ELECTORAL coup and the subsequent uprising and suppression of the voters revolting in Iran have prompted all sorts of analyses in Western media from both the right and the left.

The right, mostly inspired by the neo-con ideology and reactionary perspectives, dreams of the re-creation of the Shah's Iran, looks for pro-American/pro-Israeli allies among the disgruntled Iranian public, and seeks an Eastern European type velvet revolution. As there is very little substance to these analyses, they are hardly worth much critical review; and one cannot expect them to try to understand the complexities of Iranian politics and society.

As for the left in the West, confusions abound. The progressive left, from the beginning, openly supported the Iranian civil society movement. ZNet, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Bullet and some other media provided sound analysis to help others understand the complexities if the Iranian situation. Some intellectuals signed petitions along with their Iranian counterparts, while others chose to remain silent.

But disturbingly, like in the situations in Gaza or Lebanon, where Hamas and Hezbollah uncritically became champions of anti-imperialism, for some other people on the left, Ahmadinejad has become a champion because of his seemingly firm rhetoric against Israel and the U.S. Based on a crude class analysis, he is also directly or indirectly praised by some for his supposed campaign against the rich and imagined support of the working poor.

These analyses undermine the genuine movement within the vibrant Iranian civil society, and denigrate their demands for democracy and political and individual freedoms as middle-class concerns, instigated by Western propaganda (a view shared by Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and his supporters).

The most bizarre case is the online journal MRZine, the offshoot of Monthly Review, which in some instances even publicized the propaganda of the Basij (Islamic militia) hooligans and criminals. The Web site has given ample rooms to pro-Islamist contributors; while they can hardly be considered to be on the left, their words are appreciated by the leftists editing the site.

One writer claims that the battle in Iran is about "welfare reform and private property rights"; that Ahmadinejad "has enraged the managerial class," as he is "the least enthusiastic about neoliberal reforms demanded by Iran's corporate interests"; and that he is under attack by "Iran's fiscal conservative candidates." The author conveniently fails to mention that there are also much "corporate interests" controlled by Ahmadinejad's friends and allies in the Islamic Guards and his conservative cleric supporters, and that he has staunchly followed "privatization" policies by handing over state holdings to his cronies.

During the 1979 revolution, the late Tudeh Party, under the direction of the Soviet Union, was unsuccessfully digging deep and looking hard for "non-capitalists" among the Islamic regime's elements to follow a "non-capitalist path" and a "socialist orientation." Now it seems that MRZine is beginning a new excavation for such a breed among Islamists, not understanding that all factions of the Islamic regime have always been staunch capitalists.

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IN "IRAN: An alternative reading" (reproduced in MRZine), Azmi Bishara argues that Iran's totalitarian system of government differs from other totalitarian systems in two definitive ways: Firstly, it has incorporated "such a high degree [of] constitutionally codified democratic competition in the ruling order and its ideology." Bishara does not explain, however, that these "competitions" are just for the insider Islamists, and all others, including moderate Muslims or the wide spectrum of secular liberals and the left are excluded by the anti-democratic institutions within the regime.

The second differentiation Bishara makes is that "the official ideology that permeates institutions of government...is a real religion embraced by the vast majority of the people." He is right if he means the majority of Iranians are Muslim and Shiite, but it is wrong to assume that all are religious and share the same obscurantist fundamentalist version as those in power. He also fails to recognize the existence of a large number of secular people in Iran, one of the highest percentages among Muslim-majority countries.

He praises "such tolerance of political diversity," "tolerance of criticism," and "peaceful rotation of authority" in Iran. One wonders if our prominent Palestinian politician is writing about an imaginary Iran, or the real one.

Could it be that Bishara has not heard of the massacres of thousands of political prisoners, chain killings of intellectuals, and the silencing of the most able and progressive voices in the country? Doesn't he know that a non-elected 12-member conservative body (the Guardianship Council) only allows a few trusted individuals to run for president or the parliament, and that the real "authority"--the Supreme Leader--does not rotate, and is selected by an all-mullah Assembly of Experts for life? The unelected leader leads the suppressive apparatuses of the state and, since 1993, has created his own "Special Guards of Velayat" for quick suppressive operations. So much for tolerance and democracy.

Bishara undermines the genuine massive reform movement and claims that "expectations regarding the power of the reform trend...were created by Western and non-Western media opposed to Ahmadinejad."

Had Bishara done his homework, he would have learned about the massive campaigns led by large number of women's organizations, the youth, teachers and select groups of workers. He warns us of "elitism" and "arrogant classist edge," and implicitly dismisses these movements of "middle class backgrounds," claiming that "these people are not the majority of young people but rather the majority of young people from a particular class." It is unclear on what basis he makes the assertion that most of the youth from poor sectors of the society support Ahmadinejad.

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ONE OF the most shocking pieces is by the renowned controversial left writer and academic James Petras. In his piece "Iranian elections: 'The stolen elections' hoax," Petras conclusively denies any wrongdoings in the Iranian elections and confidently goes into the detail of the demographics of some small Iranian towns, with no credibility or expertise in the subject.

The abundant facts pointing to massive electoral fraud speak for themselves, so I will not waste time refuting his evidence and "sources," but will rather focus on his analysis. The most stunning aspect of the Petras piece is the total absence of any sympathy for all the brave women, youth, teachers, civil servants and workers who have been so vigorously campaigning for democracy, human rights and political freedoms, risking their lives by spontaneously pouring into the streets when they realized they were cheated.

Instead, we see sporadic references to "comfortable upper class enclave," "well-dressed and fluent in English" youth, etc. Women are not mentioned even once, nor is there any recognition of their amazing struggle against the most obscurantist policies such as stoning, polygamy, and legal gender discriminations. Neither is there any reference to trade union activists, writers and artists, many of whom are in jail.

Instead, the emphasis is on crude class analysis: "[t]he demography of voting reveals a real class polarization pitting high income, free market oriented capitalist individuals against working class, low income, community based supporters of a 'moral economy' in which usury and profiteering are limited by religious precepts."

Petras could not be more misguided and misleading. Of course, this would fit well within the perceived traditional class conflict paradigm (with an added touch of imagined Islamic economics!). However, the reality is far more complex. The Ayatollahs on both sides are "market-oriented capitalists," so are the leaders of the Islamic Guard, who run industries, control trade monopolies, and are major land developers.

There are also workers on both sides. Failed economic policies, the rising 30 percent inflation rate, growing unemployment and the suppression of trade unions turned many workers against Ahmadinejad. The communiqués of Workers of Iran Khodrow (auto industry) against the government's heavy-handed tactics, the long strikes and confrontations of the workers of Tehran Public Transport and the participation of workers in the post-election revolts, are all examples of opposition to Ahmadinejad by workers.

It would also be simplistic to talk of the Islamists "moral economy," when both sides have been involved in embezzlement and corruption, much of which was exposed during the debates fiasco in which they exposed each other.

On the basis of his limited understanding of the situation, Petras declares that "[t]he scale of the opposition's electoral deficit should tell us how out of touch it is with its own people's vital concerns." Firstly, like many others he cannot distinguish among different groups and categories of this "opposition," and worse, is telling Iranian women, youth, union activists, intellectuals and artists, that their demands and "concerns" for political and individual freedoms, human rights, democracy, gender equity and labor rights are not "vital."

It seems he's telling the Iranian left: "Rofagha (comrades), if you are being tortured and rotting in prisons, your books are burned and you are expelled from your profession, don't worry, because the 'working class' is receiving subsidies and handouts from the government!" Professor Petras and those like him will not be as forgiving if their own freedoms and privileges were at issue.

The left has historically been rooted in solidarity with progressive movements, women's rights and rights for unions and its voice has been first and foremost a call for freedom. The voices that we hear today from part of the left are tragically reactionary. Siding with religious fundamentalists with the wrong assumptions that they are anti-imperialists and anti-capitalists, is aligning with the most reactionary forces of history. This is a reactionary left, different from progressive left which has always been on the side of the forces of progress.

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IN A much-admired and distributed piece, Slavoj Zizek, the prominent voice of the new left, refers to versions of events in Iran. Zizek explains that "Moussavi supporters...see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution's later corruption."

He adds "[w]e are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution," "the return of the repressed' of the Khomeini revolution."

Zizek does not differentiate between the "partisans of Khomeini" during the 1979 revolution, and the non-religious, secular elements, both liberals and left, who actually started the revolution and in the absence of other alternatives, accepted Khomeini's leadership. Lack of recognition of this reality, that sometimes draws us to despair, is a big mistake.

Along the same line, Zizek wrongly attributes all of today's movement to support for Moussavi: "Moussavi...stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution."

On this basis, he concludes that "the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover." To substantiate his point, Zizek refers to the "incredible effervescence of the first year of the revolution."

In fact, much of the "effervescence" of the first year, or before the hostage taking at the American Embassy, was because of the actions of the non-partisans of Khomeini; from the workers' councils movement, to confrontations of Fedais and other left organizations in Kurdistan and in Gonbad, to the women's and university-based movements. It was a period when Khomeini and his supporters had not consolidated their power. After the hostage crisis and beginning of the Iran-Iraq war "the Islam establishment" took over.

All these draw Zizek to conclude that "what this means is that there is genuine liberating potential in Islam." Zizek does not recognize that Moussavi is a conservative Islamist, and this "liberating potential" can hardly be applied to him. For sure, there exists a new breed of Muslim intellectuals, the likes of Mohamad Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar, Reza Alijani and Hassan Eshkevari, who believe in the separation of religion and state, and can be the champions of such liberating potentials--but definitely not the likes of Khomeini and Moussavi.

There is no doubt that the 1979 Iranian revolution is an unfinished business and that its main demands for democracy, political freedoms and social equity have remained unfulfilled. But these were not Khomeini's demands, in the same manner that not all today's demands are those of Moussavi.

What is happening in Iran is a spontaneous, ingenious and independent revolt by a people frustrated with 30 years of obscurantist tyrannical religious rule, triggered by electoral fraud but rooted in more substantial demands. Much to the dismay of the clerical regime and their supporters inside and outside the country, the ever-expanding Iranian civil society brilliantly seized the moment of the election to take strong steps forward.

They have no illusions about the Islamist regime, or about their own capabilities. Their strategy is to gradually and non-violently replace the Islamic regime and its hegemony with a secular democratic one. This is a hugely significant, delicate and protracted confrontation.

It is essential that they get the wide-ranging effective support from the left in the West so that they don't fall prey to the misleading conception of the left not having concerns for democracy and civil liberties.

The 30th Sandinista anniversary and the San José proposal

Fidel Castro Ruz

THE Honduran coup d’état promoted by the ultra-right wing of the United States – which was maintaining the structure created by Bush in Central America – and supported by the Department of State, was not developing well due to the energetic resistance of the people.
The criminal adventure, unanimously condemned by world opinion and international agencies, could not be sustained.
The memory of the atrocities committed in recent decades by dictatorships that the United States promoted, instructed and armed in our hemisphere, was still fresh.
During the Clinton administration and in subsequent years the empire’s efforts were directed toward the plan of imposing the FTA (Free Trade Agreement) on all the Latin American countries via the so-called Summits of the Americas.
The intention to compromise the hemisphere with a free trade agreement failed. The economies of other regions of the world grew at a good rate and the dollar lost its exclusive hegemony as a privileged hard currency. The brutal world financial crisis complicated the situation. It was in those circumstances that the military coup came about in Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere.
After two weeks of growing popular struggle, the United States maneuvered to gain time. The Department of State assigned Oscar Arias, president of Costa Rica, the task of aiding the military coup in Honduras, under siege from vigorous but peaceful popular pressure. Never had a similar action in Latin America met such a response.
The fact that Arias holds the title of Nobel Peace Prize laureate had weight in the calculations of the government of the United States.
The real history of Oscar Arias indicates that he is a neoliberal politician, talented and with a facility for words, extremely calculated and a loyal ally of the United States.
From the initial years of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the United States government utilized Costa Rica and assigned it resources in order to present it as a showcase of the social advances that could be achieved under capitalism.
That Central American country was utilized as a base for imperialism for its pirate attacks on Cuba. Thousands of Cuban technical personnel and university graduates were extracted from our people, already subjected to a cruel blockade, to provide services in Costa Rica. Relations between Costa Rica and Cuba have been reestablished recently; the country was one of the last two in the hemisphere to do so, which is a matter of satisfaction for us, but that should not deter me from expressing what I think in this historic moment of our America.
Arias, who came from the wealthy and dominant sector of Costa Rica, studied Law and Economy in a central university of his country; he studied and subsequently graduated with a Masters in Political Science from Essex University in the United Kingdom, where he finally obtained the title of Doctor of Political Science. With such academic laurels, President José Figueres Ferrer of the National Liberation Party made him an advisor in 1970, at the age of 30 and, shortly afterward, appointed him minister of Planning, a post in which he was ratified by the president who followed Ferrer, Daniel Oduber. In 1978 he entered Congress as a deputy of that party. He rose to general secretary in 1979 and held the office of president for the first time in 1986.
Years before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, an armed movement of Costa Rica’s national bourgeoisie under the leadership of José Figueres Ferrer, father of President Figueres Olsen, had eliminated that country’s small coup army, and his struggle had the support of the Cubans. When we were fighting against the Batista dictatorship in the Sierra Maestra, we received some arms and munitions from the Liberation Party created by Figueres Ferrer, but it was too good a friend of the yanquis and soon broke off relations with us. The OAS meeting in San José, Costa Rica, which gave rise to the First Declaration of Havana in 1960, should not be forgotten.
For more than 150 years, since the times of the filibuster William Walker, who appointed himself president of Nicaragua in 1856, all of Central America suffered and is still suffering from the problem of United States interventionism, which has been constant, although the heroic people of Nicaragua have attained an independence that they are prepared to defend to the last breath. It has not known any support from Costa Rica since it achieved independence, although there was one government of that country which, on the eve of the victory of 1979, earned the glory of being in solidarity with the Sandinista National Liberation Front.
When Nicaragua was bleeding on account of Reagan’s dirty war, Guatemala and El Salvador had also paid a high price in lives due to the interventionist policy of the United States, which supplied money, weapons, schools and indoctrination for the repressive troops. Daniel [Ortega] told us that the yanquis finally promoted formulas that put an end to the revolutionary resistance of Guatemala and El Salvador.
On more than one occasion Daniel had commented to me, with bitterness, that Arias, fulfilling instructions from the United States, had excluded Nicaragua from the peace negotiations. He met solely with the governments of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala in order to impose agreements on Nicaragua. For that, Daniel expressed enormous gratitude to Vinicio Cerezo. He likewise told me that the first agreement was signed in a convent in Esquipulas, Guatemala, on August 17, 1987, after two days of intensive talks between the five Central America presidents. I have never spoken publicly about that.
But this time, at the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Sandinista victory of July 19, 1979, Daniel explained everything with impressive clarity, as he did with all the themes throughout his speech, which was heard by hundreds of thousands of people and broadcast on radio and television. I use his words textually: "The yanquis appointed him a mediator. We have a profound sympathy with the people of Costa Rica, but I cannot forget that, in those hard years, that the president of Costa Rica convened the Central American presidents and did not invite us."
"But the other Central American presidents were more sensible and they told him: ‘There cannot be any peace plan here if Nicaragua is not present.’ In the name of historic truth, the president who had the courage to break the isolation imposed by the yanquis in Central America – where the presidents had been forbidden to talk with the president of Nicaragua and they wanted a military solution – the man who took that valiant step was the president of Guatemala, Vinicio Cerezo. That is the true history."
He immediately added: "The yanquis ran in search of President Oscar Arias, because they know him! to seek a way of gaining time, so that the coup perpetrators begin to make demands that are unacceptable. Since when is a coup leader going to negotiate with a person from whom he is snatching his constitutional rights? Those rights can not be negotiated, President Manuel Zelaya simply has to be reinstated, as stated in the ALBA, Rio Group, SICA, OAS and United Nations agreements.
"In our countries we want peaceful solutions. The battle being waged by the people of Honduras at this time is a peaceful battle, in order to avoid any more pain, which has already come about in Honduras," Daniel concluded, textually.
By virtue of the dirty war ordered by Reagan and which, in part – Daniel told me – was financed by drugs sent to the United States, more than 60,000 people lost their lives and a further 5,800 were maimed. Reagan’s dirty war gave rise to the destruction and neglect of 300 schools and 25 health centers; 150 teachers were killed. The cost rose to tens of billions of dollars. Nicaragua was left with only 3.5 million inhabitants, it no longer received the fuel that the USSR was sending it, and the economy became unsustainable. He convened elections and even brought them forward, and respected the decision of the people, who had lost all hope of preserving the conquest of the Revolution. Almost 17 years later, the Sandinistas victoriously returned to government; just two days ago, they commemorated the 30th anniversary of the first victory.
On Saturday, July 18 the Nobel Prize winner proposed the known seven points of his personal peace initiative, which detracted authority from the UN and OAS decisions and were equivalent to an act of rendition on the part of Manuel Zelaya, which were taking sympathy away from him and would debilitate popular support. The constitutional president sent what he qualified as an ultimatum to the coup leaders, to be presented to them by their representatives, at the same time announcing his return to Honduras for Sunday, July 19, entering through any of that country’s departments.
In the early afternoon of that Sunday, the huge Sandinista event took place, with historic denunciations of the policy of the United States. They were truths that could not be anything but transcendental.
The worst thing is that the United States was encountering resistance from the coup government to its sweetening maneuver. We still do not know the precise moment at which the Department of State, for its part, sent a strong message to Micheletti and whether the military commanders were advised of the positions of the government of the United States.
The reality is, for anyone who is closely following the events, that Micheletti was insubordinate to peace on the Monday. His representative in San José, Carlos López Conteras, had stated that Arias’ proposal could not be discussed, given that the first point – that is to say, the reestablishment of Zelaya – was not negotiable. The coup civil government had taken its role seriously and didn’t even realize that Zelaya, deprived of all authority, did not constitute any risk whatsoever to the oligarchy and would suffer a heavy blow politically if he accepted the Costa Rican president’s proposal.
On that same Sunday 19th, when Arias asked for another 72 hours to explain his position, Ms. Clinton spoke by telephone with Micheletti and maintained what spokesman Philip Crowley described as a "hard call." Some day we will know what she said, but it was enough to see Micheletti’s face when he spoke at a meeting of his government on Monday, July 20: he really looked like a kindergarten kid who had been scolded by the teacher. The footage and speeches of the meeting could be seen via Telesur. Other footage transmitted was that of the OAS representatives making their speeches in the heart of that institution, committing themselves to wait for the final word of the Nobel Peace laureate on Wednesday. Did they know or not what Clinton had said to Micheletti? Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Maybe some, but not all of them knew. People, institutions and concepts had been converted into instruments of Washington’s high and arrogant politics. Never did a speech in the heart of the OAS shine out with such dignity as did the brief but valiant words of Roy Chaderton, the Venezuelan ambassador, in that meeting.
Tomorrow the stony image of Oscar Arias will appear, explaining that they have drawn up such and such a proposed solution in order to avoid violence. I think that even Arias himself has fallen into the large trap set up by the Department of State. We shall see what he does tomorrow.
However, it is the people of Honduras who will have the last word. Representatives of the social organizations and the new forces are not the instruments of anybody within or outside of the country, they know the needs and the suffering of the people; their awareness and their courage has multiplied; many citizens who were idle have joined them; and those honest members of the traditional parties who believe in freedom, justice and human dignity will judge the leaders on the basis of the position that they adopted at this historic minute.
That attitude of the military in the face of the yanqui ultimatums is as yet unknown, or what messages are reaching the officers; there is only one point of patriotic and honorable reference: loyalty to the people, who have endured with heroism the tear gas grenades, blows and shootings.
Without anyone being able to guarantee what the last caprice of the empire will be; whether, on the basis of the final decisions adopted, Zelaya will return legally or illegally, the Hondurans will doubtless give him a great reception, because it will be a measure of the victory that they have already achieved with their struggles. Nobody doubts that only the Honduran people will be capable of constructing their own history!

Forty years since the first Moon landing

Patrick Martin

Forty years ago today, on July 20, 1969, two American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin, became the first human beings to land on the Moon. This historic scientific and technological feat is all the more remarkable because the period of manned exploration of Earth’s satellite inaugurated by Apollo 11 ended little more than three years later. All six Moon missions were completed during the first term of a single US president, Richard M. Nixon.

When Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Harrison Schmitt returned to Earth in Apollo 17 on December 19, 1972, Nixon was in the White House, Leonid Brezhnev ruled in the Kremlin and Mao Tse-tung in China. The US military had just begun Operation Linebacker II, the so-called Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, to pressure the North Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace Talks.

Forty years on, the Moon landing remains an unparalleled feat of engineering, organization and daring, using technology that was rudimentary by the standards of the 21st century. Closer to World War II than to our own day, the mid-1960s saw such innovations as the eight-track tape, the first primitive laser and the automobile airbag. The microchip was still in development. The complex calculations required for travel from the Earth to the Moon and back were performed by gargantuan computers built with vacuum tubes and transistors and using punch cards and paper tape.

The successful eight-year effort to put a man on the Moon was the product of specific social and political circumstances that made possible a massive mobilization of resources. When President John F. Kennedy declared the goal of placing a man on the Moon within a decade, American imperialism was at the height of its Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, and was trailing in space, following the Soviet success in launching Sputnik and putting the first man in space, cosmonaut Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin.

Sputnik gave the initial impetus to what became known as the “space race,” but the vast resources of American capitalism, by far the world’s greatest economic power, made possible the ultimate success of the Apollo program. At its height, the program enlisted the technical and manufacturing prowess of 90,000 scientists and engineers and 420,000 workers altogether, and accounted for more than half of all research and development spending in the United States.

While Kennedy had given the initial green light, his motivation was primarily political—to dispel the worldwide prestige gained by the USSR. “I am not that interested in space,” he told James E. Webb, NASA’s administrator in late 1962. “I think it’s good. I think we ought to know about it. But we’re talking about fantastic expenditures.”

By the mid-1960s, NASA budgets began to come under pressure as a result of increased spending on the Vietnam War. By the time of the Moon landing, the NASA and its contractor workforce was being systematically cut back, the planning horizon was narrowed, and the space program was casting about for a new mission—a condition that continues to this day.

The 40-month period of the manned Moon landings, July 1969-December 1972, represents in many ways the critical turning point in the post-World War II history of American and world capitalism. War spending and a wages offensive by the American labor movement had produced increasing strains on the financial position of American capitalism, reflected in mounting balance of payments deficits.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon went on national television to announce a radical shift in US economic policies, ending the international currency system established in 1944 at the Bretton Woods conference, which was anchored by the dollar’s convertibility into gold at $35 to the ounce. He also announced a 90-day wage freeze and a 10 percent tariff surcharge on imports.

These decisions had profound historical significance. American capitalism was no longer capable of playing the role of stabilizer of the world financial system. Faced with resurgent capitalist competitors in Europe and Asia, and a powerful labor movement at home, the US ruling class found it necessary to embark on a drastic change of course in both international and domestic policy.

The 1970s were characterized by sharp recessions and a series of probing attacks against the labor movement, most notably the 111-day walkout by US coal miners in which the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter sought unsuccessfully to use the Taft-Hartley Act to break the strike. By 1980, with interest rates in double-digits, the US ruling elite brought to power the Reagan administration, and embarked on a campaign of open unionbusting and deindustrialization which provoked a decade of bitter strike struggles, all of them isolated and defeated through the collaboration of the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy.

The result of these defeats was a colossal decline in the standard of living of the American working class. It is no accident that the same year, 1972, that marked the end of manned Moon missions also marked the apogee for working class living standards in the United States. American capitalism had entered a period of irreversible historical decline, a process that has found expression in every sphere of social and cultural life.

In its foreign policy, this decline sparked a series of aggressive military adventures. After a period of retrenchment after the defeat in Vietnam, American imperialism began a military buildup directed against both the USSR and the nationalist regimes in the “Third World” which sought to balance between the United States and the Soviet bloc.

The space program was completely subordinated to this drive for military supremacy. Exploration beyond Earth’s orbit was relegated to machines only, and the manned program were devoted to the space shuttle, conceived of particularly by the Reagan administration as an adjunct to its “Star Wars” plans for placing offensive and defensive weapons systems in space.

The space shuttle was given a nominal “civilian” mission—laying the foundations for a permanent space station—but its real purpose was to provide the Pentagon greater capabilities for launching spy satellites and, if they could be successfully developed, actual space weapons. The technological failure of “Star Wars,” however, left the space program with no real purpose, and NASA budgets stagnated.

The loss of Challenger in 1987 and Columbia in 2003 underscored both the inherent limitations in the space shuttle program, and the impact of the deteriorating economic position of American capitalism. Just enough resources were provided to NASA to keep the program running, but not enough to forestall the next catastrophe. Finally, after Columbia, NASA has been compelled to announce the phase-out of the shuttle program and a turn back to Apollo-style rocket boosters, which will not be ready for use until at least 2015.

Moreover, the space station, only just now nearly complete after the expenditure of $100 billion over two decades, will be allowed to die for lack of funding. NASA space station program manager Michael T. Suffredini told the Washington Post last week, “In the first quarter of 2016, we’ll prep and de-orbit the spacecraft.”

The dead end of the US space program did not arise because of failures by the scientists and engineers who joined it out of a genuine desire to make a contribution to mankind’s emergence from a planet-bound to an interplanetary existence. NASA continues to achieve technical and scientific advances with a series of brilliant efforts to explore the solar system through robot spacecraft—in the past year alone, a flyby of Mercury, the Phoenix mission to Mars, the continued success of the two Mars rovers landed five years ago, the repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, and preparations for additional missions to the outer planets.

In the final analysis, the successful exploration of space is beyond the capability of any national state, even the richest and most technologically advanced. And under today’s conditions of worldwide economic crisis, whatever remains of the gains of past decades will be quickly lost.

Like all historically progressive tasks, humanity’s advance into space depends upon the overcoming of the barriers erected by the profit system: private ownership of the means of production, and the division of the world into rival and competing nation-states. In other words, it depends on the development of an independent movement of the world working class, based on a socialist program.

A suicidal error

By Fidel Castro Ruz
IN my reflection written last Thursday night, June 25, I said: "We do not know what will happen tonight or tomorrow in Honduras, but the brave conduct of Zelaya will go down in history."
Two paragraphs before I noted: "What is happening there will be a test for the OAS and for the current United States administration."
The prehistoric Inter-American institution had met the other day in Washington and in a muted, lukewarm resolution, promised to immediately take the pertinent actions to seek harmony between the warring parties. In other words, negotiations between the coup plotters and the constitutional president of Honduras.
The top military chief, still commanding the Honduran Armed Forces, was making public statements in disagreement with the positions of the president, while recognizing the latter’s authority merely in formal terms.
The coup plotters did not need anything else from the OAS. They didn’t give a damn about the presence of a large number of international observers who traveled to that country to vouchsafe a popular referendum and to whom Zelaya spoke until late in the night. Before dawn today they deployed 200 professional and well-trained soldiers to attack the president’s residence. Roughly pushing aside the Honor Guard squadron, they then kidnapped Zelaya, who was sleeping at that point, took him to the air base, forcibly bundled him aboard an airplane and transported him to an air base in Costa Rica.
At 8:30 a.m. we heard the news of the assault on the Presidential residence and the kidnapping via Telesur. The president was unable to attend the opening event of the referendum that was to take place this Sunday. It was not known what they had done with him.
The official television channel was silenced. They wanted to prevent premature broadcast of the treacherous action via Telesur and Cubavision International, which were reporting the events. For that reason, they suspended all the retransmission centers and ended up by cutting off electrical power throughout the country. The Congress and the higher courts involved in the conspiracy had not yet published the decisions that justified the plot. First they executed the indescribable military coup and then they legalized it.
The people awoke with the deed consummated and began to react with growing indignation. Zelaya’s whereabouts was unknown. Three hours later, the popular reaction was such that women could be seen striking soldiers, whose guns almost fell out their hands out of pure confusion and nervousness. Initially, their movements resembled a strange combat against phantoms; later they tried to block the Telesur cameras with their hands, aiming their guns shakily at the reporters and at times, when the people advanced, falling back. They sent in armoured transport carriers with cannons and machine guns. The population argued fearlessly with the crews; the popular reaction was amazing.
At around two in the afternoon, working in coordination with the coup leaders, a domesticated majority in Congress deposed Zelaya, the constitutional president of Honduras, and appointed a new head of state, affirming to the world that the former had stepped down, and furnishing a forged signature. A few minutes later, from an aircraft in Costa Rica, Zelaya recounted everything that had happened and categorically refuted the news of his resignation. The conspirators made themselves look ridiculous before the world.
Many other things happened today. Cubavision dedicated itself totally to unmasking the coup, informing our population all the time.
There were actions of a purely fascist nature which, while not unexpected, still come as a shock.
Patricia Rodas, the foreign minister of Honduras, was the fundamental target of the coup leaders. Another detachment was sent to her residence. Brave and determined, she moved quickly, not losing a second to denounce the coup by all means available. Our ambassador contacted Patricia to find out what was going on, as did other ambassadors. At a certain point, she asked the diplomatic representatives of Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba to meet with her, given that she was being relentlessly hunted down and needed diplomatic protection. Our ambassador, who was authorized to offer maximum support to the constitutional and legal minister from the outset, left to visit her at her own residence.
When he was already in her house, the coup command sent in Major Oceguera to detain her. They (the ambassadors) placed themselves in front of the woman and stated that she was under diplomatic protection and could only be moved in their company. Oceguera argued with them respectfully. A few minutes later, 12 to 15 uniformed and hooded men entered the house. The three ambassadors put their arms around Patricia; the masked men, acting in a brutal manner, managed to separate the ambassadors of Venezuela and Nicaragua; Hernández took her arm and clasped it so strongly that the masked men had to drag them both toward a van; they drove them to the airbase, where they managed to separate them, and took Patricia off. As he (the Cuban ambassador) was detained there, Bruno [Rodríguez, Cuban foreign minister], who was informed of the kidnapping, called him on his cell phone; a masked man tried to grab it from him and the Cuban ambassador, who had already been struck while at Patricia’s house, yelled at him: "Don’t push me around, goddamn it!" I don’t recall if the word he uttered was used at any time by Cervantes but, doubtless, ambassador Juan Carlos Hernández has enriched our language.
After that they left him on a highway far from the embassy and before abandoning him, said that if he talked, something worse might happen to him. "Nothing is worse than death!" he replied with dignity, "and not for that do I fear you." People living in the area helped him to get back to the embassy, where he immediately communicated again with Bruno.
That coup high command cannot be negotiated with, they have to be made to resign and other, younger officers who are not committed to the oligarchy should take over the military command, or there will never be a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" in Honduras.
The coup plotters, cornered and isolated, have no possible salvation if the problem is confronted with determination.
By the afternoon, even Mrs. Clinton had declared that Zelaya is the only president of Honduras, and the Honduran coup leaders can’t even breathe without the support of the United States.
In his nightshirt up until a few hours ago, Zelaya will be acknowledged by the world as the only constitutional president of Honduras.

Obama’s neocolonial mission in Africa

Last week, President Barack Obama flew from the G8 summit in Italy to Accra, the capital of Ghana in West Africa, for his first visit to Sub-Saharan Africa since becoming president. “I have the blood of Africa within me,” he told his Ghanaian audience, “and my family’s history reflects the tragedies and triumphs of the larger African story.”
The value of Obama’s family background was recognised early in his bid for the presidency by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter and a key figure in the formulation of Obama’s foreign policy. In August 2007, Brzezinsky declared that Obama “recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America’s role in the world.”
Brzezinsky was among major figures in the US foreign policy establishment who saw in Obama a means of giving the United States a “new face” to the rest of the world, something they deemed critical after the blunders and setbacks to American imperialism under Bush.
Obama lived up to expectations in Ghana. He played on his African ancestry, just as he had emphasised his Muslim heritage the previous month in Cairo.
The image of the two Obama children walking out into the sunlight from the “door of no return” at Cape Coast Castle, from which so many Africans did not return, was a carefully crafted photo op. Leaving this scene of so much human suffering, Obama said, “It reminds us that as bad as history can be, it's always possible to overcome.”
This was meant to imply that no matter what Africa has suffered in the past, and no matter what the continent continues to suffer at the hands of the banks, corporations and Western governments, the responsibility—and the fault—rests with the African people themselves.
Obama brought an uncompromising message, spelling out in a more open way than George Bush dared to do during his visit to Ghana last year that aid would be made available only in return for the implementation of policies that serve the interests of the US government and corporations--and that there would be less of it in future.
“Development,” Obama told parliamentarians, “depends upon good governance. That is the ingredient which has been missing in far too many places, for far too long. That is the change that can unlock Africa’s potential. And that is a responsibility that can only be met by Africans.”
“Africa's future is up to Africans,” he repeated.
The lecture also carried a threat. “We have a responsibility to support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don't, and that is exactly what America will do,” Obama declared.
The BBC’s correspondent, Andrew Harding, was struck by the bluntness with which the president felt able to speak to his hosts. He wrote: “It was a very broad-ranging speech, but Mr. Obama has an ability because of his heritage, his Kenyan father, to reach out and speak to Africans in a way that I think most foreign leaders would find very difficult.”
It was “a message no pink-faced Western leader could have delivered without arousing resentment in Africa and politically correct abuse from hand-wringers at home,” Libby Purves, a columnist for the London Times noted.
Purves’ derogatory reference to politically correct hand-wringing is a significant one. It is incontrovertible that any possibility of Obama presenting himself as a progressive alternative to the “pink-faced” Bush is largely thanks to the claims of his liberal and “left” apologists that an African-American in the White House represents a gain for black people everywhere and marks a new era in US and world politics.
Obama’s Ghana speech was warmly received by the Republican right. Bret Stephens, writing in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “Obama Gets It Right on Africa,” described the speech as “by far the best of his presidency.”
Stephens continued: “Since British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave his ‘Wind of Change’ speech (also in Ghana) nearly 50 years ago [The speech was, in fact, delivered in South Africa] Western policy toward Africa has been a matter of throwing money at a guilty conscience (or a client of convenience), no questions asked... Maybe it took a president unburdened by that kind of guilt to junk the policy.”
The provision of aid has always been a political mechanism to force semi-colonial countries to pursue policies that serve the interests of the imperialist donors. But whereas Bush was obliged to make some token gestures, such as setting up the Millennium Challenge Account and increasing funding for Aids and malaria, Obama has used the kudos he derives from his ancestry to insist point-blank that African governments toe the US line.
Obama’s insistence that Ghana and other African governments achieve “good governance” is a demand for more of the free-market measures that are already being imposed with disastrous results for the social conditions of the population. “Good governance” means privatising essential services such as telecommunications, water and power, as well as social services like health and education. It also means removing subsidies from small farmers and abolishing import controls.
Ghana has gone a long way down that route, which is why it has been favoured with visits from two US presidents. It is far from being one of Africa’s poorest countries, but 70 percent of the population in its northern regions live on less than a dollar a day. Life expectancy is only 58 years. Women often have to walk more than 3 kilometres to find water, and it is seldom clean.
This situation is set to worsen dramatically. The recession has hit Africa hard. Ghana was among those countries granted debt relief in 2005, but with the value of its currency falling, it is rapidly sliding into debt once more. The government’s response has been to impose an austerity budget in an attempt to balance the books.
Obama has shifted the emphasis of the “war on terror” from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the place of Africa in US global strategy remains essentially the same. First, it is a vital source of strategic resources such as oil and gas, but also many key minerals. Second, a high proportion of the world’s shipping lanes run close to Africa’s shores. It follows that any American administration must make the establishment of US domination of Africa a priority.
Obama’s speech was directed to the ruling elites throughout Africa, and the same message will be delivered by other administration officials. He was unable to visit Kenya, his father’s homeland, because a year after the election and the intercommunal violence that followed, the country is still unstable. But Secretary of State Hilary Clinton will head a delegation for trade talks in Kenya later this summer.
Like Obama’s trip, the underlying aim will be to re-establish US hegemony in the face of increasing competition from Europe, India and China. The old colonial European powers are long-standing rivals in Africa. Both France and Britain have their interests in West Africa. China is a relative newcomer. Trade between Africa and China was worth $10 billion in 2001. By 2008 it had increased to $107 billion.
Ghana is a new oil producer. The first supplies came on tap this year. It is valuable both for its modest supply of oil and because it may offer a military staging post to give the US reach over the whole West African region.
With less aid forthcoming, Obama will have to rely more than ever on US military might to secure its control of Africa—both through the supply of military equipment to its clients and through direct intervention.
No African country has yet offered to host a base for the new US African command, Africom. Ghana may well be the first, judging from the attention it is getting from the White House. Obama has made much of the “war on drugs” and has given Ghana three new gunboats for patrolling its coastline.
The purpose of the Africom bases is to provide facilities that will allow the rapid deployment of highly mobile troops. Djibouti has provided a valuable base for this kind of action in Somalia. US special forces from Djibouti took part in the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006 to support the Transitional Federal Government, plunging the country into another round of civil war. Obama has recently increased military aid to the US-backed regime in Somalia.
A network of such bases would enable the US to intervene at will under the cover of proxy forces, while cynically claiming that Africans are sorting out their own problems along the lines of Obama’s rhetoric in Ghana.
Ann Talbot

We have to go on fighting- Affirms first lady of Honduras Leads Tuesday’s march

AFTER having been hunted down along with her family, the first lady of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, yesterday headed a mass march in Tegucigalpa for democracy, against the coup d’état and for the restoration of the Honduran constitutional president, Manuel Zelaya.
In her speech to the population engaged in non-violent resistance, Xiomara affirmed her solidarity with the Honduran people and the families of the victims of the dictatorial coup regime installed in that country after the coup d’état.
At the same time, she called on the people to go on fighting, not to be afraid, "because what we are doing is right. We have to continue expressing ourselves, because we are all equal before a small group that is imposing force."
"I want to demonstrate my solidarity with the people who, in one way or another, have been abused by our country’s armed forces, as well as with the families of those who have lost their children, who were killed not as delinquents, but because they were fighting for the return of constitutional order and democracy in the country," she stated.
She affirmed that it is the people who have given her strength, "that this blood that ran on this land is not in vain, that it has meaning and will serve to achieve the return of democracy, the rights of our people and of peace in our country."
Xiomara Castro de Zelaya confirmed that, from this Tuesday, she will constantly accompany "all the efforts made for peace, to allow the people to be consulted, to be able to express themselves."
The wife of the country’s constitutional president was underground until Monday for her personal security. However, in her words to the crowds gathered in support of her husband, she stated that she could not remain in hiding because her life was in danger, while "there are men and women who are giving their hearts and their lives to this cause… I couldn’t keep quiet in this struggle, far less, because I believe in it."
"President Zelaya raised this banner, which is not his, but that of the people, but not those people joining marches with women who have just come out of the beauty salons or wearing expensive sunglasses, but the real people that we are seeing here, the majority in our country, campesinos, workers and other sectors," she emphasized.
She condemned the fact that the coup perpetrators have trampled on the constitutional rights of all the people, on human rights and justice. "Today, there is no security for anybody; today they can freely enter people’s homes; today they can kill; today they can take people prisoner, and so we have to keep speaking out against all this."
Xiomara Castro criticized the media blockade being maintained in Honduras, although the coup faction insists that there is freedom of expression, and the continuing persecution of the people and of journalists.
The night before, Zelaya’s wife attended a meeting of leaders of trade unions, campesino, student, youth and other organizations, who have committed themselves to redoubling their peaceful demonstrations to achieve the restoration of constitutional order in the country.

The Honduran coup: A warning to the working class

Since the June 28 coup by the most right-wing sections of the ruling elite, backed by the US-trained military, Honduran workers have waged an implacable struggle against the imposition of an illegitimate and repressive regime.
Over 60,000 Honduran teachers have carried out an indefinite strike since June 29, the day after the elected president, Manuel Zelaya, was seized at gunpoint by the military and bundled onto a plane that flew him out of the country. Schools remain shut nationwide, with students and parents supporting the action. Other sections of the Honduran working class have joined in this struggle, threatening to escalate it through the erection of barricades on the nation’s highways.
This heroic resistance has been carried out in the face of a de facto state of siege. Honduras remains under curfew, with the military controlling the streets. Basic democratic rights have been suspended, and nearly 1,000 opponents of the coup regime have been arrested. Sections of the media that voiced opposition to the takeover have been shut down, with broadcasting facilities taken over by armed troops and individual reporters threatened with death.
On Sunday, the coup claimed its first fatality, 19-year-old Isy Obed Murillo, shot down by Honduran troops at the Tegucigalpa airport, where thousands turned out to show support for Zelaya, whose plane was not allowed to land.
There is every reason to fear that this is only the beginning, and not just in Honduras. The country’s ruling oligarchy is among the most backward and reactionary in the region, while its military command is trained by the Pentagon, which maintains a key military base at Soto Cano, where over 600 US troops are deployed.
The danger that workers in Honduras could face a bloody tragedy like those inflicted upon working people in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina more than 30 years ago is real and present.
In Honduras, as elsewhere in Latin America, there has been no real settling of accounts for the crimes carried out by the fascist-military regimes headed by thugs like Chile’s Pinochet and Argentina’s Videla. Those who led the US-backed Honduran military death squads that carried out massacres, assassinations, “disappearances” and torture 25 years ago continue to enjoy impunity, as do most of their counterparts in the region.
The deepening of the world economic crisis—which has driven the buying power of Hondurans down 30 percent compared to just a year ago—is ushering in a new period of intense class struggle, undermining the façade of democratization erected when Latin America’s military rulers handed the reins of the state back to civilian politicians in the 1980s.
The lessons of the previous defeats must be learned to prevent new ones. Above all, as was demonstrated time and time again, from the Brazilian military coup of 1964, to Chile in 1973 and Argentina in 1976, the working class cannot defend itself against the threat of dictatorship by subordinating its struggles to supposedly “progressive” factions within the native ruling elite.
Nowhere is this truer than in the case of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, who, like the coup leaders themselves, is seeking the intercession of the Obama administration in Washington to uphold his presidency’s political legitimacy.
After his theatrical flight over Tegucigalpa Sunday—Zelaya announced that he would “jump” if he could find a parachute—the ousted president has abandoned his pledge to return to Honduras by “air, land or sea,” instead flying to Washington Tuesday for a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
The outcome of that meeting was Zelaya’s agreement to “mediation” by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias between the elected president and those who overthrew him. Arias is a veteran of such dirty deals, having officiated in the late 1980s in the so-called Esquipulas process that brokered an end to the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador, consolidating power in the hands of US-backed factions within the ruling elite.
Significantly, Clinton refused to call for the restoration of the overthrown president, allowing only that the US administration favored “a peaceful resolution of this matter” and “the restoration of democracy.”
There is no question that the coup in Honduras was prepared with Washington’s foreknowledge and blessing. According to published reports, US diplomats were in discussion with Zelaya’s opponents about removing the president, and it impossible to believe that the Honduran military would be deployed without the approval of its US overseers.
Washington’s aim was to replace the Honduran president in order to effect changes in Honduran policy that would prove more favorable to US interests in the region, including the severing of the close economic and political ties established by Zelaya with the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. It was hoped that Obama’s rhetoric about “mutual respect” in the hemisphere together with a few formal protests would create the conditions for a “velvet coup.”
Zelaya’s decision to turn to Washington and comply with its demands for mediation with the coup leaders expresses his own class position. The product of a wealthy landowning family with interests in the timber industry, he came to power as the candidate of the Liberal Party, which has alternated with the National Party and the military in holding power since the end of the 19th century, and with the support of some of the richest men in Honduras.
Zelaya turned to Venezuela for cheap oil as well as loans granted without any troubling questions about his government’s handling of public funds. This, together with his use of empty radical phrases, has been used to promote him as a “leftist” leader challenging the oligarchy.
The reality is that Zelaya secured support for joining ALBA (the Spanish acronym for Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas, the Venezuelan-sponsored regional trade group), by promising to support the presidential candidacy of Roberto Micheletti, the right-wing leader of parliament who has now been installed in that office by the coup.
However bitter the differences between Zelaya and the right-wing elements that overthrew him, both are staunch defenders of the interests of the country’s capitalist ruling class. A resolution of the current crisis on the basis of a mediated settlement between them would spell a political defeat for the workers of Honduras, while helping to legitimize military coups, making new ones more likely elsewhere in Central America and throughout the hemisphere.
Only the Honduran workers, who have been the main force resisting the coup, can defeat such a reactionary settlement of the current crisis. The critical task is the building of a revolutionary political movement of the working class, independent of all factions of the bourgeoisie and armed with a socialist program. Such a movement must be built to fight for a workers’ and farmers’ government and the socialist transformation of not only Honduras, but the entire region as part of a United Socialist States of the Americas.
Workers in Honduras and throughout Latin America will find support not in the imperialist maneuvers of the Obama administration, but in the working class of the United States, which is itself being driven by the economic crisis into struggle against capitalism.
Bill Van Auken

Tehran and Tegucigalpa: A tale of two capitals

In Tehran, demonstrations called by the defeated US-backed presidential candidate are given non-stop, wall-to-wall coverage by the American media. The charges of former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi of a stolen election and a “coup d’etat” are embraced uncritically and reported as fact by the New York Times, the Washington Post and other “authoritative” newspapers, without any independent investigation or substantiation. A media propaganda campaign ensues aimed at isolating and destabilizing the ruling faction in Iran headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The protests are dominated by better-off sections of the urban middle class, who largely voted for Mousavi and support his right-wing program of closer ties to American and European imperialism and a rapid introduction of pro-market policies. The working class, seeing nothing to support in the faction of “reformists” headed by Mousavi and the billionaire former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, abstains from the protests.
The media dispenses with any pretence of objectivity and proclaims the protest movement and its leaders the spearhead of a “green revolution” for democracy. Every act of repression by the Iranian regime is given headline coverage, and rumors of hundreds of deaths are reported as fact. The US media focuses its wrath in particular on the regime’s efforts to block Internet and mobile phone communication.
Two weeks later, the US-trained and equipped military of Honduras breaks into the home of the elected president, bundles him onto a plane and flies him out of the country at gunpoint. The basic crime of the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, is aligning his government with Washington’s nemeses in Latin America, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and carrying out modest popular reforms within Honduras, such as raising the minimum wage.
There can be no dispute that Honduras has undergone a coup. But the event is barely reported by the US press and broadcast media. Neither are the arrests and deportations of ministers of Zelaya’s government, the closures of local media outlets sympathetic to the ousted president, the arrests of foreign journalists and shutdown of US-based outlets such as CNN, and the imposition of a de facto state of siege, including a dusk-to-dawn curfew and the mobilization of thousands of Honduran troops in every major city.
The coup regime, which is backed by the Honduran business elite, the Congress, the courts and the Church, seeks to halt Internet and cell phone communication—evoking no protest from the US media.
Demonstrations in support of the coup staged by the new regime are dominated by the wealthy middle class of the capital, Tegucigalpa.
In the teeth of state repression, the Honduran teachers union launches a 60,000-strong strike that closes the schools, and thousands demonstrate in Tegucigalpa. The demonstrations are dominated by trade unionists, workers, the unemployed and the rural poor. This working class resistance to the coup barely gets a mention in the US media.
On Sunday, July 5, troops barricading the airport at Tegucigalpa fire on unarmed demonstrators who have gathered to welcome Zelaya as he attempts to land a chartered plane and resume his office. A 19-year-old youth is shot and killed. Again, barely a mention in the US news media.
One can only imagine how the US media would have responded had Ahamdinejad arrested Mousavi and thrown him out of Iran. Or the howls of indignation that would have erupted had the Iranian president blockaded the airport to prevent him from returning.
Examples of the double standard applied to Iran and Honduras abound. Just to cite a few:
CNN made great play of the efforts of the Iranian regime to censor the news and intimidate foreign journalists. It has said nothing about the shutdown of its own broadcasts by the Honduran coup government.
On July 4, CNN.com reported that it had received a video tape showing Honduran troops shooting out the tires of buses bringing anti-coup demonstrators to Tegucigalpa from the countryside. This video has been given little, if any, airplay by the network.
Most significant is the virtual absence of coverage in the US media of the murder and wounding of anti-coup demonstrators at Tegucigalpa airport on Sunday. The Financial Times on Monday provided a chilling account of the atrocity which makes clear its premeditated character. Reporting that a crowd of about 1,500 had gathered at the perimeter fence of the airport to welcome Zelaya’s plane, the newspaper writes:
“However, at about 3 PM on Sunday, soldiers guarding the runway to prevent the return of Mr. Zelaya launched an offensive against the unarmed crowd, according to witnesses.
“They opened fire from positions inside the airport and then sent teargas into the crowd.
“Moments later, a handful crossed the perimeter fence, which had been cut by the demonstrators, raised their automatic rifles and pointed them towards the mass of terrified men, women and children. Then they opened fire again. At least one person was killed, and as many as 30 were injured.”
The Latin American press has widely published photos of the fatally wounded youth, Isis Obed Murillo, being dragged away by fellow protesters. No such photos have appeared in major US newspapers or on television news channels. Murillo remains unnamed and unmourned in the American media.
One need only compare this callous treatment to the media frenzy over the death on June 20 of Neda Agha Soltan in Tehran. The death of the 27-year-old student, who was reportedly a bystander at a pro-Mousavi protest, occurred under murky circumstances. The government denied responsibility, but the media immediately declared her a martyr of the “green revolution.” Her picture was splashed across the front pages of newspapers and broadcast by every TV channel. “Neda” was proclaimed the “Joan of Arc” of the Iranian opposition.
This tale of two capitals provides a graphic illustration of the character and role of the American media. Owned and controlled by corporate goliaths, it functions as an adjunct of the state and a propaganda machine in behalf of US imperialist interests. Its class bias—and that of the lavishly paid individuals who serve as top editors, senior reporters and TV anchormen—is underscored by the diametrically opposed responses to the protests in Tehran and Tegucigalpa.
The same role is played by the so-called “progressive” liberal media, which has uniformly lined up behind the US campaign against the ruling faction in Iran. The web site of the Nation magazine on Wednesday carried as its lead an article by its Iran correspondent, Robert Dreyfuss, hailing calls by pro-Mousavi forces for new demonstrations. One searches in vain for an article on the events in Honduras.
The American media adheres to no standards and observes no limits in carrying out its function of manipulating public opinion in accordance with the objectives, domestic and foreign, of the American ruling elite. Nothing so clearly demonstrates the decay of American democracy and the “free press” in the United States than the manner in which it lines up behind phony “color revolutions” against regimes deemed inimical to US interests and ignores flagrantly antidemocratic measures by regimes backed by the CIA, the military and the State Department.
Barry Grey

The roots of Iran's revolt

Lee Sustar sets out 30 years of background to the mass demonstrations that shook Iran after the June 12 election.
WITH REPRESSION silencing most street protests for the moment as hardliners tighten their grip, is a democratic transformation--or revolutionary change--possible in Iran?
Answering that question requires looking at Iranian history, politics and society beyond the disputed June 12 election, in which the government made the outrageous claim that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received more than 62 percent of the vote--24.5 million, compared to 11 million votes for his leading opponent, Mir Hussein Mousavi, who was gaining growing support in the weeks before the vote.
In the aftermath of the election, what began as a factional dispute between two wings of the Iranian ruling class sparked mass demonstrations in the capital city of Tehran that, according to the city's mayor, involved some 3 million people.
While the protests have receded in the face of vicious attacks by security forces--which killed at least 17 and arrested hundreds--Iranian politics will never be the same. The country's rulers and institutions are discredited, and the pro-democracy movement, previously led by students and intellectuals, has greatly expanded its social depth.
Rather than end that movement, the government's crackdown marks the beginning of the movement's transformation into a more powerful social force in the months and years ahead.
But before looking at the roots of that movement and the prospects for its development, it's necessary--strangely enough--to take up the question of whether the Iranian popular struggle is a legitimate one.
Both neoconservatives on the right and some prominent figures on the left have argued--echoing Ahmadinejad--that the protests are just the noisy complaints of disgruntled middle-class minority that's sore over an election loss. Some on the left further suggest that U.S. covert operations must be behind the protests--given Washington's funding and support for the color-coded "revolutions" that toppled leaders in Serbia, Ukraine and other countries.
Certainly the U.S. is intervening in Iran by imposing economic sanctions over that country's nuclear energy program. It is also aiding armed rebellions by national minorities, such as the Kurds and Balochis, and allowing an Iranian Sunni Muslim extremist group, Jundallah, to conduct terror campaigns in Iran from across the border in Pakistan.
But the idea that Iran's mass democracy movement is a creation of Washington is simply ludicrous. This argument was systematically debunked by Reese Erlich, the veteran independent journalist and author of a recent book on Iran, who was in Tehran during the elections. In an article titled, "Iran and Leftist Confusion," he wrote:
[T]he multi-class character of the most recent demonstrations, which arose quickly and spontaneously, were beyond the control of the reformist leaders in Iran, let alone the CIA...
Frankly, based on my observations, no one was leading the demonstrations. During the course of the week after the elections, the mass movement evolved from one protesting vote fraud into one calling for much broader freedoms. You could see it in the changing composition of the marches. There were not only upper-middle-class kids in tight jeans and designer sunglasses. There were growing numbers of workers and women in very conservative chadors.
Erlich's observations are correct. The social composition of the movement has changed rapidly--and its further development will require sinking more roots into the working class. To better understand how the movement took shape, and its future prospects, it's helpful to look briefly at the history of Iranian politics in the 30 years since the 1979 revolution.
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Revolution and counterrevolution
IF THE hardliners around Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei are seeking to crush the revolt in Iran today, it's because they well remember the revolutionary potential of the Iranian working class.
Its mass strikes compelled the U.S.-backed dictator, the Shah of Iran, to flee the country. "Indeed, the entry [into activism] of the working class made possible the eventual triumph of the Islamic Revolution," wrote Ervand Abrahamian, a leading historian of Iran. Abrahamian continued:
By the third week of October [1978], a rapid succession of strikes crippled almost all the bazaars, universities, high schools, oil installations, banks, government ministries, post offices, railways, newspapers, customs and port facilities, internal air flights, radio and television stations, state-run hospitals, paper and tobacco plants, textile mills and other large factories. In effect, the working class had joined the middle classes to bring about a massive and unprecedented general strike...The Shah faced not just a general strike but a political general strike...
[B]y December 25, a series of general strikes had again brought the whole economy to a grinding halt, and grassroots strike committees had occupied many large factories, government ministries and communications centers.
These factory councils, or shoras in the Farsi language, were classic examples of workers' power seen in previous revolutions, as in the Russian soviets in 1905 and 1917, Barcelona in 1936 and Hungary in 1956. But the central leader of the revolution wasn't the left, but the clergy and middle-class elements who looked to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Khomeini appropriated the language and demands of the left to call for an Islamic society.
After Khomeini's return to Iran from exile in February 1979, revolutionary committees loyal to him set up an Islamist parallel to a provisional revolutionary government. These forces dismantled working-class organization and divided the left--and later, violently smashed it. Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran, launched with the approval of the U.S., created a siege atmosphere that helped Khomeini and the clerics consolidate their power.
As historian Nikki Keddie explained in her history of modern Iran:
Increasingly in the post-revolution period, political power was concentrated in the hands of the Khomeneist clergy and the bazaar bourgeoisie. Soon after the revolution, there were land seizures by peasants in some regions, and factory strikes and workers' committees set up in urban areas, but the authorities, whether by compromise, persuasion or force, gradually brought such movements under control.
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Post-revolution faction fights
After imprisoning, executing or forcing into exile its opponents on the right and left, the new ruling class soon divided into rival political groupings. Central to the debate was how to manage the economy. Large sections of industry came under control of the state or religious foundations controlled by Shia clergymen who were closely tied to the state.
The divisions broke out roughly into three camps: an Islamist left, which maintained some of the social rhetoric of the revolution; an Islamist right, based around the most conservative clergy; and a pragmatic right dominated by clerics who were close to, or had become part of, big business interests. Over the next two decades, these factions would clash over how Iran should engage with the world, economically, politically and culturally.
During the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88, the Islamist left was ascendant. Mir Hussein Mousavi, then prime minister, oversaw extensive state control of Iran's economy. Government rationing was used to feed workers and the poor during periods of runaway inflation of food prices.
Mousavi justified his policies on religious grounds. "The way of Islam is to attend to social justice," he said, adding elsewhere, "the security of the revolution lies in the eradication of poverty and serving the destitute...Capital must not rule and the priority of the regime should be the poor and not the well-off." Mousavi's economic policies emulated earlier attempts at using state capitalist methods of national development, as pursued by Egypt under the Nasser governments of the 1950s and 1960s.
The end of the war, and Khomeini's death a year later, brought the factional struggles into the open. The cleric Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a wealthy businessman and leader of the pragmatic right, forced a constitutional change that eliminated the post of prime minister, and soon was elected president himself. He succeeded Ali Khamanei, who went on to replace Khomeini as supreme leader, despite a lack of religious qualifications for the post.
Rafsanjani, a staunch defender of private property, favored more engagement with the West. (Rafsanjani had been a key player in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Iran bought U.S.-made weapons in exchange for helping to get Western hostages released in Lebanon. The money Iran spent on weapons went to fund Nicaragua's right-wing counterrevolutionary uprising, in violation of U.S. law.)
In his two terms as president, Rafsanjani failed to find a way out of Iran's international isolation. The economy recovered partially from the devastation of the war years, as Rafsanjani used the state to rationalize industries with the aim of development, following the example of the East Asian "tiger" economies.
But Iran's economy was still weak, vulnerable to slumps in oil prices and beset by chronic inflation. Workers' living standards declined, leading to riots in 1992 and, despite savage repression, again in 1994-95.
With Rafsanjani barred by Iran's constitution from seeking a third term in the 1997 presidential elections, the pragmatic conservatives aligned themselves with elements of the Islamist left. With its faith in state-controlled industry shaken by the collapse of the USSR, the Islamist left shifted towards the pro-market, neoliberal policies that had come to dominate the world economy.
Thus, the Islamist left morphed into reformers who emphasized political freedoms, human rights and an easing of state-imposed Islamist behavioral norms. And with the backing of Rafsanjani and his allies, the reformist candidate, Mohammad Khatami, a former minister of culture, won the 1997 presidential vote by a landslide.
But in his two terms in office, Khatami failed to deliver. The Islamist right, thanks to support from Supreme Leader Khamanei, controlled all key government ministries and stymied most reforms. Khatami also failed to protect students in the pro-democracy movement, whose protests were violently attacked by police and the basij, a paramilitary force based in the mosques and controlled by the right. Pro-reform newspapers were regularly shut down by the authorities, and their editors detained. In 2004 the clerics' Guardian Council, which must approve candidates for office, barred 2,000 reformers from running for the majlis, or parliament, including 80 incumbents.
The intellectuals and middle class elements who had high hopes in Khatami felt disillusioned, if not betrayed.
Workers, who were promised little by Khatami, faced much worse conditions. Khatami's economic program promoted privatization and deregulation, which led to stepped-up attacks on wages and working conditions, even as the traditional bazaar bourgeoisie blocked most economic reforms. Unemployment and persistent inflation added to workers' misery.
As the Khatami era wound down, workers began to make their own voices heard through a series of struggles that defied the ban on independent unions. In January 2004, 1,500 workers at a copper smelting plant near the village of Khatonabad went on strike and occupied their plant when management fired all but 250 of them. After eight days, security forces shot into the crowd from helicopters, killing as many as 15 workers and injuring 300. Eighty were arrested; upon their release, they showed signs of torture.
Rather than having a chilling effect on strike action, the repression spurred similar action across the country in a variety of different plants, and a strike in March 2004 that involved up to a third of Iran's teachers.
Workers often organized these actions by setting up workplace-based charity committees that served as underground unions. In the northeastern town of Gilan, workers fighting privatization in 2004 revived the workers' councils, or shoras, that had first emerged during the revolution.
In their 2007 book Iran on the Brink, journalists Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian interviewed several workers about their struggles. One of the workers in the important Khodro plant, the largest vehicle plant in the Middle East, explained their brief strike action in January 2004:
The only thing we want is the right to improve our situation. We fight for the right to go on strike, to form a union, all these basic democratic rights. Everything we do must be kept secret. But we can't just sit twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the Islamic Republic to fall. We must take the right to organize, practice it, without waiting for someone's permission. That means we must be ready to sacrifice, as the people did in Khatonabad.
Perhaps the best-known Iranian workers' struggle outside the country is that of the Tehran bus drivers, who have braved beatings, arrest and imprisonment for fighting to create an independent union. In 2005, the 17,000-member Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company refused to accept riders' fares to protest fare hikes and bad working conditions. Union leader Mansour Osanloo was arrested; upon his release, he led another strike in 2006 and was imprisoned soon afterward.
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The Islamist right strikes back
Khatami's reform program was seen by the Islamist right as a mortal threat. To counter it, the conservatives built up networks of former Revolutionary Guards, an elite military force--as well as the basij, a kind of paramilitary organization intertwined with, and funded by, the mosques and the bazaar bourgeoisie and backed by the national security establishment.
The basij were given official status by the majlis in 1992. Later on, they were charged with enforcing religious laws known as Propagation of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice. "Essentially, this meant 'unleashing' the basijis as the moral soldiers of the Islamic Republic, more specifically the conservative right factions," wrote historian and author Mehdi Moslem.
The basij thus helped build the careers of a cadre of Islamist student revolutionaries from the 1970s who had become members of the Revolutionary Guard during the Iran-Iraq War.
One of those war veterans was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose political connections got him promoted from governor of a small province to appointment as mayor of Tehran, where he used the basij to build a political machine. Khamanei became the sponsor and protector of this younger generation of Islamist rightists, and threw his weight behind Ahmadinejad as the right's candidate in the 2005 presidential race.
The high rate of abstention from pro-reform candidates, plus some likely vote-rigging, vaulted Ahmadinejad from nowhere into a runoff election against Rafsanjani. Ahmadinejad presented himself as a populist with a modest lifestyle, in contrast to the very wealthy Rafsanjani, a figure often accused of corruption and whose family dominates the lucrative market for pistachio exports.
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Ahmadinejad's pseudo-populism
The conventional media portrayal of Iranian politics is a contest between the populist Ahmadinejad, who has the backing of the rural poor and workers, versus the middle-class and wealthy backers of the reformers around Mousavi.
In reality, Ahmadinejad's populism is a pose, notwithstanding his grab bag of local development programs and some highly publicized, pre-election handouts and bonuses for state employees. Ahmadinejad last year tried to remove subsidies on staple goods for the poor in exchange for higher state benefits--although inflation would have soon eliminated those gains.
To be sure, Ahmadinejad differs with the reformers about the extent to which Iran's economy should open to the West and what types of investments should be pursued. But he shares their neoliberal framework--and his embrace of privatization bears this out.
As left-wing Iranian scholar Kaveh Ehsani points out, shortly after Ahmadinejad's 2005 election victory, Supreme Leader Khamanei himself gave privatization a major push by issuing an order reinterpreting the Iranian constitution's support for a state-dominated economy.
As a result, he writes, "the government was ordered to reduce its share in "non-essential" sectors annually by 20 percent and to privatize some 80 percent of its assets in "essential" sectors--mining, heavy industry, downstream oil and gas, banking, insurance, energy, communications and even some military industries."
Ahmadinejad pursued this agenda with gusto. As journalist Billy Wharton points out, the Iranian president has already privatized the postal service, sold shares in two state-owned banks and a sale of 5 percent of shares in a state-owned steel company. According to the Iran Privatization Organization, a state ministry, some 247 state enterprises been partly or fully privatized since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005.
Ahmadinejad has tried to camouflage the privatization process by doling out "justice shares" of stock in privatized state companies to the poor. These assets, distributed to about 6 million people, were worth $2.5 billion in the first two years of Ahmadinejad's term.
The model here is the privatization process in Russia and Eastern Europe, where crooked entrepreneurs were able to buy up the stocks for cheap to create huge new private monopolies based on former state assets. In any case, stocks thinly scattered among the poor won't provide much help for the 8 million people (out of a population of 76 million) who live in extreme poverty.
Nevertheless, as Ehsani points out, the state still dominates the Iranian economy, with 500 big state-owned companies that account for 76 percent of the national budget and two-thirds of Iran's gross domestic product (GDP). That means the real fruits of privatization have yet to be plucked by private Iranian capital--so the question of who will benefit from the sell-off of state assets was a looming issue behind the 2005 vote.
Indeed, if Ahmadinejad succeeds in handing the benefits of privatization to his allies in the basij and the security apparatus, it could reconfigure Iranian capitalism. The Islamist right and the war veteran generation could make the transition from their careers in the national security apparatus and sanctions-busting smuggling operations into entrepreneurs, much as the Stalinist bureaucrats did in Russia during the 1990s.
That's a threat to established business tycoons like Rafsanjani and his allies, who could be marginalized by new players. And at the same time, the reformers around Mousavi would lose the strategic levers that they believe they need to restructure Iranian capitalism on a more rational basis.
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Election, coup and resistance
All this set the stage for the sharp split in the Iranian ruling class around the June 12 vote.
Rafsanjani went all out for his old rival Mousavi in order to stop Ahmadinejad and Khamanei. And Mousavi used televised debates to cut into Ahmadinejad's claim of economic success, highlighting the difficulties facing workers and the poor. The strategy worked, producing a late surge for Mousavi in the form of massive election rallies in Tehran and other cities that brought in supporters far beyond the stereotypical middle-class base of the reformers.
Young people were particularly energized--not only because of Mousavi's promise of a more liberal stance on social questions, but because of their terrible economic circumstances. In recent years, the jobless rate for men in their early 20s has been above 20 percent. For women that age, unemployment is estimated at 40 percent.
This display of mass support for Mousavi panicked Ahmadinejad and Khamanei into announcing an overwhelming victory for the incumbent in order to avoid a second-round election contest between the two. In this way, what began as a faction fight between two wings of the ruling class turned into a virtual coup.
Since the June 12 coup, the protests by millions in the street have been battered down by repression carried out mainly by basij thugs on motorcycles. The video recording of the murder of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, has become a symbol of the mass outrage over the repression.
While the mass protests have subsided, smaller demonstrations continue. And the splits in the Iranian ruling class have meant that the repression, while terrible enough, isn't nearly as bloody as it could have been. That's a sign that Ahmadinejad and Khamanei are still somewhat tentative in their clampdown.
If they show weakness by making some sort of power-sharing deal with Mousavi and Rafsanjani, they risk encouraging the movement to push for even greater change. But if they move decisively against Mousavi and Rafsanjani with arrests and imprisonment, the regime would shed whatever legitimacy it has left, and become simply a police state.
There are rough parallels here with the revolutionary crises in Eastern Europe under Stalinism, such as in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. There, divisions between reformers and hard-liners led each side to try to mobilize mass support, thereby destabilizing the entire system. Ultimately, such splits led to paralysis and collapse in the revolutions of 1989.
In the case of Iran, a dispute over a stolen election has opened the way to a mass upsurge for democracy and a movement that won't simply evaporate under repression. The size and character of the movement inevitably raises social questions and the need for the independent organization of the working class and the revival and extension of workers' struggles that emerged in recent years--most recently, in the illegal May Day protests earlier this year.
The pro-democracy movement among students, the underground unions and the street protesters that emerged in recent weeks together have the potential to interact to create a new movement for democracy and revolutionary change. The international left must do all it can to support that struggle.