Yes, The 99% Spring Is A Fraud
By Charles M. Young – This Can’t Be Happening – 04/13/2012
With hindsight gained by googling “MoveOn” and “co-opt” after the fact, I can’t claim that nobody tried to warn me. Many websites with left and even liberal politics had said in so many words, “Be wary of this organization called the 99% Spring. It is a Trojan horse for the Democrats.” I just didn’t read that anywhere in a timely fashion. I’ve had a lot of stuff on my plate lately. That’s my excuse. And in my ignorance, I responded to some spam about “nonviolent direct action training” organized by MoveOn and got invited to this 99% Spring thing on April 10 at the Goddard Riverside Community Center in Manhattan. Somebody even called me all the way from San Francisco to make sure I was a sincere seeker on the left and would be attending, along with 120,000 others in training sessions around the country.
Which I did. The meeting was a few blocks from where I live. The spam said it was “inspired by Occupy Wall Street.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I was vaguely hoping that whatever the 99% Spring was, it would start a chapter of Occupy Wall Street on the Upper West Side, conveniently near my abode, and agitate for the Democrats and MoveOn to move left.
The first clue that my evening might go otherwise was the sign-up table, where there were a bunch of Obama buttons for sale and one sign-up sheet for the oddly named Community Free Democrats (are they free of community?), which is the local Democratic clubhouse. That killed the “inspired by Occupy Wall Street” vibe right there. No piles of literature from a zillion different groups, as there had been in Zuccotti Park. No animated arguments among Marxists, anarchists, progressives, punks, engaged Buddhists, anti-war libertarians and what have you. Just Obama buttons, which didn’t appear to be selling.
Inside the hall, it looked like an alumni reunion for the 1966 Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade. Almost all the 150 or so people were 55-80 years old. The ones I talked to expressed curiosity about Occupy Wall Street and enthusiasm about “nonviolent direct action” but didn’t have the knees or the ears for full participation in OWS activities in the financial district.
A large man with long wavy hair combed back started the presentation with a stirring call for…the meeting to be off the record. He didn’t want any stories that would violate anyone’s privacy, and if there were any lurking journalists, they weren’t allowed to use any names and they must see him afterwards for further instruction on the ground rules. This struck an even more dysphoric note than the Obama buttons.
WTF thought #1: This was a public event ostensibly to convince members of the public to engage in behavior that challenged the legitimacy of government authority in public and might cause angry police to beat the public crap out of them. Why would anyone risk that without trying to get publicity for their cause? Nonviolent direct action that no one knows about is like jerking off. It might make you feel better, but you’re not changing the world.
WTF thought #2: Transparency is the only protection that nonviolent people have against police spies and provocateurs and other infiltrators. Occupy Wall Street does a pretty good job with transparency. An organization claiming to be inspired by OWS but shunning transparency is deeply suspect.
WTF thought #3: Washington press corp rules for a meeting on nonviolent direct action?
WTF thought #4: I actually wasn’t there with the idea of writing about it, but neither did I agree to anything, so there was no agreement.
WTF thought #5: The name of the large man with the wavy hair was Marc Landis. He is a District Leader for the Democrats, who were paying for use of the meeting room. He is running for City Council. According to his law firm’s website his areas of experience are: “Real Estate, Banking & Finance, Corporate & Business Law, Securities & Private Placement, Fund Formation & Investment Management Group…” His Facebook page, which is geared for his City Council campaign, makes it sound like his specialty is pro bono community work. I don’t know. He might be a nice guy, but it doesn’t take a lot of intuition to wonder if he’s really been “inspired by Occupy Wall Street.” He’s a corporate lawyer. I can think of no reason for him to demand that the meeting be off the record other than he and his party don’t want to be publicly associated with anything radical, even it’s a pseudo-radical front group meant to steer people away from the truly radical Occupy Wall Street and into pointless activities that don’t embarrass Obama.
Next they showed a video that invited us “to tell our story” so that the 99% Spring could post us online along with hundreds of other people who had been foreclosed, bankrupted, lost their medical insurance or whatever. It appeared they all wanted to raise taxes, so that the rich would “pay their fair share.”
It was sanctimonious. It was supplicating before power. The audience looked like it wanted to puke.
Next some guy whose name I didn’t catch gave an astonishingly simple-minded lecture on the history of American radicalism since the populists. “This might be okay for Iowa, but not the Upper West Side,” said a woman near me.
That’s an insult to Iowa, but let me explain about the Upper West Side. It used to be a liberal-to-radical neighborhood that was ferocious in its support for civil rights and the anti-war movement. Its nickname was the Upper Left Side, and people here could read three biographies of Leon Trotsky before breakfast. Disastrously, it has become the most desirable living space in Manhattan, and Wall Street/corporate/real estate weenies have been taking over. But a significant radical remnant remains, thanks to rent control laws that Democrats seem to understand are necessary to preserve their voters.
“And then in the 50s, we had the civil right movement…” the guy droned.
“ Uh, I think we should conclude the lecture and break up into groups to discuss our nonviolent direct action training,” said Landis. “We seem to be losing people.” A lot of them, too.
So the hundred-odd remaining Upper Left Siders split into four groups for discussion. My group happened to be led by Landis, who directed the 35 of us to sit in a circle and identify ourselves with an explanation of why we were there. I was about #15 in the circle and the people who preceded me all appeared to have no experience with Occupy Wall Street and wanted to get involved. When it was my turn I said that Zuccotti Park was the most entertaining place to be in Manhattan for a couple months last fall and I hoped it would revive. And I said that the other thing I liked was that it was to the left of the Democratic Party and was pushing it from outside. There had been some mention of “the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act during the 90s” and I pointed out that it was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who deregulated Wall Street.
“Excuse me,” said Landis. “We have a limited amount of time and a lot to discuss. We need to let everyone speak.”
I’ve thought about that a lot. I don’t believe I spoke for more than a minute, but I habitually obey the rules in a group, so I shut up. In retrospect, I was censored. I should have demanded a discussion of the true purpose of the 99% Spring and why Obama’s Department of Homeland Security orchestrated the violent destruction of hundreds of nonviolent Occupy camps around the country last fall.
As it was, we finished going around the circle. Everyone was a teacher or writer or connected with the labor movement. Wisconsin came up a few times. Landis asked what kind of a world we wanted to see. Someone said, “Socialism” and Landis said the topic for discussion was now how to plan for a “hypothetical direct action.” Every time somebody brought up something that was actually happening, Landis insisted that our agenda was set and we were only discussing hypothetical situations. So we talked about hypothetically withdrawing money from a hypothetical evil bank, or hypothetically stopping the hypothetical fracking in the Catskills that is going to poison New York City’s hypothetical drinking water.
“What about May 1?” said a retired professor.
“What about it?” said Landis.
“I heard that Occupy Wall Street was calling for a general strike. They’re planning actions all around midtown and they’re saying that nobody should go to work that day.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” said Landis. “We’re talking about hypothetical situations here.”
And so it went from 6:30 to 9:30 last Tuesday night. Over half the crowd left early. Most of those who stayed appeared to be angry and mystified that they had received no training whatever in nonviolent direct action. I doubt that the Democrats or MoveOn succeeded in co-opting anyone, and I predict that they will be inventing more dreary front groups as the election year grinds onward. “Front groups, not issues!” should be Obama’s rallying cry.
“I’m taking the subway to Wall Street,” said a guy in his 20s (probably the only guy in his 20s) as he walked out the door. “That’s where the action is. People are sleeping on the sidewalk there. Apparently the police can’t arrest you if you take up less than half the sidewalk. Go to Maydaynyc.org if you want to find out about the general strike.”
Related articles
- Reportback: the 99%spring Training for Trainers and the Plot to Coopt #occupy (occupywalkusa.org)
- Infiltration to Disrupt, Divide and Misdirect Is Widespread in Occupy (Part I) (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Counter-Insurgency as Insurgency (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- The 99% Spring Is Here – Let’s Take the Fight to Big Oil, Gas and Coal (ecowatch.org)
What is ObamaCare?
High-Cost Privatized Medicine that Guarantees Billions of Dollars in Profits to Private Insurance Companies
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | CounterPunch | April 11, 2012
Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence.
It has never been revealed how a single citizen, or any number thereof, could possibly comprise a threat to a government that has a trillion plus dollars to spend each year on security and weapons, the world’s largest navy and air force, 700 plus military bases across the world, large numbers of nuclear weapons, 16 intelligence agencies plus the intelligence agencies of its NATO puppet states and the intelligence service of Israel.
Nevertheless, air travelers are subjected to porno-scanning and sexual groping. Cars traveling on Interstate highways can expect to be stopped, with traffic backed up for miles, while Homeland Security and the federalized state or local police conduct searches.
I witnessed one such warrantless search on Easter Sunday. The south bound lanes of I-185 heading into Columbus, Georgia, were at a standstill while black SUV and police car lights flashed. US citizens were treated by “security” forces that they finance as if they were “terrorists” or “domestic extremists,” another undefined class of Americans devoid of constitutional protections.
These events are Kafkaesque in themselves, but they are ever more so when one considers that these extraordinary violations of the US Constitution fail to be overturned in the Supreme Court. Apparently, American citizens lack standing to defend their civil liberties.
Yet, ObamaCare is before the US Supreme Court. The conservative majority might now utilize the “judicial activism” for which conservatives have criticized liberals. Hypocrisy should no longer surprise us. However, the fight over ObamaCare is not worth five cents.
It is extraordinary that “liberals,” “progressives,” “Democrats,” whatever they are, are defending a “health program” that uses public monies to pay private insurance companies and that raises the cost of health care.
Americans have been brainwashed that “a single-payer system is unaffordable” because it is “socialized medicine.” Despite this propaganda, accepted by many Americans, European countries manage to afford single-payer systems. Health care is not a stress, a trauma, an unaffordable expense for European populations. Among the Western Civilized Nations, only the richest, the US, has no universal health care.
The American health care system is the most expensive of all on earth. The reason for the extraordinary expense is the multiple of entities that must make profits. The private doctors must make profits. The private testing centers must make profits.The private specialists who receive the referrals from general practitioners must make profits. The private hospitals must make profits. The private insurance companies must make profits. The profits are a huge cost of health care.
On top of these profits come the costs of preventing and combatting fraud. Because private insurance companies resist paying and Medicare pays a small fraction of the medical charges, private health care providers charge as much as they possibly can, knowing that the payments will be cut to the bone. But a billing mistake of even $300 can bankrupt a health care provider from legal expenses defending him/her self from fraud accusations.
The beauty of a single-payer system is that it takes the profits out of the system. No one has to make profits. Wall Street cannot threaten insurance companies and private health care companies with being taken over because their profits are too low. No health-provider in a single-payer system has to worry about being displaced in a takeover organized by Wall Street because the profits are too low.
Because a single-payer system eliminates the profits that drive up the costs, Wall Street, Insurance companies, and “free market economists” hate a “socialized” medical care system. They prefer a socialized “private” health care system in which public monies flow into private insurance companies.
To make the costs as high as possible, conservatives and the private insurance companies devised ObamaCare. The bill was written by conservative think tanks and the private insurance companies. What the “socialistic” ObamaCare bill does is to take income taxes paid by citizens and use the taxes to subsidize the private medical premiums charges by private health care providers in order to provide “private” health care to US citizens who cannot afford it.
The extremely high costs of ObamaCare is not “socialistic medicine.” ObamaCare is high-cost privatized medicine that guarantees billions of dollars in profits to private insurance companies.
It remains to be seen whether such a ridiculous health care scheme, nowhere extant on earth except in Romney’s Massachusetts, will provide health care or just private profits.
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.
Related articles
- Left Takes ObamaCare To Court – Supreme Court (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Real Health Care Advocates Should Support Repeal of the Insurance Mandate (alethonews.wordpress.com)
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Obama Signs a Phony – and Dangerous – “JOBS” Bill
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford | April 10, 2012
President Obama is ramping up his phony progressive campaign rhetoric, trying to once again masquerade as something other than a Wall Street servant. But this time around, he is weighted down by his actual record in office, which shows Obama to have been a savior to the bankers and money speculators. Now, the president has joined with Republicans to create a whole new class of con men and corporate criminals who will further fatten the fees of banksters by blowing up another multi-trillion dollar bubble of doomed and fraudulent hi-tech firms. To add insult to injury, Obama, his congressional Democrats and his Republican soul mates had the nerve to set the stage for this disaster by passing something they called a “JOBS” bill.
Of course, there are no jobs in the bill. The acronym stands for “Jumpstart Our Business Start- Ups Act,” and it’s an invitation to a con game.
The new law, passed by 73 senators with Obama’s enthusiastic endorsement, allows corporations with less than $1billion in revenues – that’s a billion, as in a thousand million – to avoid hiring a professional auditing firm for five years after the company begins selling stock to the public. That means five long years of taking other people’s money without having to tell the truth about how your business is really doing. The scheme is designed to encourage what the money guys call “crowd funding” on the Internet, with little oversight by regulators.
Make no mistake: this is not an opportunity for those of you who want to open up a restaurant or a bar or a bookstore. Companies making less than $75 million can already avoid being subjected to professional audits; this bill extends the privilege to corporations at the billion dollar mark, who can now ensnare investors in their webs for twenty consecutive quarters without backing up a word of their sales pitch.
Of course, the banksters that handle these transactions and the Wall Street gamblers who bet on them will get over like fat rats – for a while. And then it will all come tumbling down, just as President Bill Clinton’s Dot.com bubble did at the end of the roaring Nineties. The collapse destroyed $5 trillion in investments, and led to the first George Bush recession, from which Black folks did not have a chance to recover before being crushed again by the meltdown of 2008.
Where did this phony “JOBS” bill come from? From the bowels of the Obama administration, where the task of creating employment is the purview of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, packed with corporate executives from General Electric, Intel, Citigroup, Xerox, Boeing and American Express. Organized labor was adamantly opposed, seeing no jobs in the bill. But Obama doesn’t listen to unions, because he knows they will take an infinity of abuse rather than fight with a Democratic president. And the Black misleadership class has made itself totally irrelevant.
The lesson here is: late stage capitalism, which is incapable of creating real jobs in the United States, is pinning its hopes on inflating another hi-tech bubble to keep the casino wheels spinning for a few years. When the bubble bursts, they are confident that a bailout will be made available, no matter which party is in office. And the public will pick up the pieces.
Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
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Robert Samuelson Shows that the Post Has no Fact Checkers on Its Opinion Pages
By Dean Baker | Beat the Press | April 8, 2012
Social Security and Medicare are hugely important for the security of the non-rich population of the United States. For this reason, Robert Samuelson and the Washington Post hate them.
As we know, this is a question of basic political philosophy. In the view of Samuelson and the Post, a dollar that it is in the pocket of low or middle class people is a dollar that could be in the pocket of the rich. And Medicare and Social Security are keeping many dollars in the pockets of low and middle class people.
Today’s column by Robert Samuelson tries to tell us that Franklin Roosevelt would be appalled by the current state of the Social Security program. Of course, he produces not a single iota of evidence to support this position, although it is very clear that Samuelson doesn’t like Social Security.
Samuelson begins by telling us that:
“It [Social Security] has become what was then called ‘the dole’ and is now known as ‘welfare.’ This forgotten history clarifies why America’s budget problems are so intractable.”
He later adds:
“Millions of Americans believe (falsely) that their payroll taxes have been segregated to pay for their benefits and that, therefore, they ‘earned’ these benefits. To reduce them would be to take something that is rightfully theirs.”
Of course Samuelson is 100 percent wrong here. Payroll taxes have been segregated. That is the point of the Social Security trust fund and the Social Security trustees report. These institutions would make no sense if the funds were not segregated.
Samuelson is welcome to not like the way in which the funds were segregated, in the same way that I don’t like the Yankees, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Yankees have a very good baseball team. Since its beginnings, the government has maintained a separate Social Security account. Under the law, no money can be paid out in Social Security benefits unless the Trust Fund has the money to pay for them.
In this sense, the funds are absolutely segregated. Samuelson doesn’t like this, but why should any of the rest of us care? The rest of the piece shows the same dishonesty and lack of respect for facts.
Samuelson later tells readers:
“But now, demographics are unfriendly. In 1960, there were five workers per recipient; today, there are three, and by 2025 the ratio will approach two. Roosevelt’s fear has materialized. Paying all benefits requires higher taxes, cuts in other programs or large deficits.”
Okay, let’s think about this for a minute. We went from five workers per retiree in the 1960s to roughly three workers for each retiree in the 90s. This ratio is projected to fall to roughly two workers per retiree by 2030 (not 2025, as readers of the Trustees report know).
On average we were much richer in the 90s than in the sixties, in spite of the fall in the ratio of workers to retirees. The same will be true in 2030, even assuming that we see the projected decline in the ratio of workers to retirees.
A small fact that Samuelson never mentions in this piece is that the Congressional Budget Office projects the program to be fully funded through 2038, with no changes whatsoever (i.e. no new taxes, contra Samuelson). If we want to make the program fully solvent for the rest of the century, a tax increase that is equal to 5 percent of projected wage growth over the next three decades should be roughly sufficient to do the trick. Are you scared yet?
There is an issue that most workers have not shared in the economy’s growth over the last three decades. This is indeed a problem. If recent trends in inequality persist then any increase in Social Security taxes will be a burden, but the problem here are the policies that have brought about this upward redistribution of income, not Social Security.
Then Samuelson gives us his coup de grace:
“Although new recipients have paid payroll taxes higher and longer than their predecessors, their benefits still exceed taxes paid even assuming (again, fictitiously) that they had been invested. A two-earner couple with average wages retiring in 2010 would receive lifetime Social Security and Medicare benefits worth $906,000 compared with taxes of $704,000, estimate Steuerle and Rennane.”
Okay, this is a really nice trick. Remember we were talking about Social Security? Note that Samuelson refers to “lifetime Social Security and Medicare benefits.” It wasn’t an accident that he brought Medicare into this discussion. That is because Steuerle and Rennane’s calculations show that this average earning couple would get back less in Social Security benefits than what they paid in taxes. That would not fit well with Samuelson’s story, so he brings in Medicare (remember this is the Washington Post).
And, the high cost of Medicare benefits is not due to their great generosity. The high cost is due to the fact that we pay our doctors, our drug companies, and our medical equipment suppliers way more than do people in any other country, and we have no better outcomes. If our per person costs for health care were comparable to costs in Germany, Canada, the UK or any other wealthy country, then workers would be paying far more for their Medicare benefits than the cost of what they are getting in care.
The story here is that Samuelson wants to punish ordinary workers for the fact that we pay doctors and the other big winners in this story too much. That may not make sense, but they don’t call this paper “Fox on 15th Street” for nothing.
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Counter-Insurgency as Insurgency
The “99% Spring” Brings Co-optation into Full Bloom
By MIKE KING | CounterPunch | April 5, 2012
As the Occupy movement begins to come into full bloom across the country this Spring – with plans for massive days of action and demonstrations on May 1st, new campaigns for transit justice on both coasts, continued organizing against foreclosures and police violence, and a slight chance of a bank protest or two – there are several weeds sprouting in the prefigurative garden. Not least of which is the “99% Spring” campaign, led and funded by every corner of the modern Democratic Party machine. One might ask themselves “What is wrong with non-violent direct action?” or “How effective could the ‘Democratic Party machine’ actually be, anyway?” There is nothing inherently wrong with civil disobedience and it surely remains to be seen if this campaign can train 10,000 people let alone the 100,000 they plan to. The campaign director at MoveOn.org, Ilyse Hogue, an organization that seems to be the key player in the 99% Spring, has recently written in the Nation that “Occupy is Dead” and that the 99% Spring will succeed where Occupy has failed – while mimicking their slogans. What they lack in actual knowledge of Occupy’s health, they certainly make up for in co-optive obviousness. Fertilized by decades of expanding inequality, Occupy needs to bloom and transform in the coming months, without getting mired in conflict with the various failed institutions of the organizational Left. However, those flowers of resistance will have to rise above the weeds of a dying order, including the 99% Spring dandelions.
The organizations comprising this effort are a litany of individual trade unions, both trade federations, environmental groups, and a range of non-profits, including groups who have done very respectable work, such as Jobs with Justice. There likely isn’t unified intent on behalf of every actor in this campaign. In Oakland, I have heard of some local participants in the training having serious reservations about the effort, but are participating in it nonetheless. The (potential) intent of these organizations, or the people they will train who will choose to lie down and get arrested, over some other tactics, isn’t the issue. What matters is the effect of this effort in the existing political context of counter-insurgency, the dismissive, patronizing and divisive terms in which this is being put, and the timing – right before the presidential election. If successful, this will undoubtedly serve as a wedge over tactics, exacerbating the “good protester / bad protester” trope that is always used, and that we have heard in the last few months already – from liberal Mayors to Fox News and everywhere in between. This attempts to bring organizations with sordid histories into Occupy, who will invariably try to wrestle legitimacy from a popular, radical movement, into political groups that are reformist at best, wholly complicit with the current order at worst. Hogue has stated that the plans for this effort pre-dated the formation of the Occupy movement in the U.S. The original goal, likely, to generate systemically non-threatening actions to draw attention to inequality and injustice – not to stop it, but to gather votes for Democrats, who, ostensibly, address those issues. Now that the Occupy movement has already done that, inadvertently, they seek to employ the same campaign to contain and defang that movement while preserving their positions as mostly poverty pimps and lazy labor bureaucrats that think strikes have lost their usefulness.
The existing powers, who some of these same progressives have consistently stood against (from their political position), deeply need to weld a safety valve on Occupy. Homeland Security, who has been “advising” police and city governments nationally and who coordinated the mid-November 18-city raid on the Occupy movement, released an article this week entitled “The Occupy Movement: Rising Anarchy” which states:
“So far, Occupy protests in the United States exhibit a mostly peaceful nature. However, certain elements within Occupy that have been seen both here and abroad have the potential to inflict major damage to governments, people and the private sector. If not carefully monitored and mitigated, these elements pose a significant threat to modern democracies.”
The existing order needs an institutionalized, liberal super-hero-on-a-leash to be used (whether the organizations involved all intend to or not) disrupt, discredit and destroy, from the inside, those elements who organized the November 2nd General Strike in Oakland, the militant demonstrations against police violence in New York in recent weeks, or community-led, anti-capitalist efforts against foreclosures in Chicago, or those that set barricades aflame in Seattle on December 12, 2011, or the scores of lesser-reported militant action that have taken place in the last half-year, out of nowhere. They also want to suck in the tens of thousands of young people all over the country, hoping to be able to do the same thing in their cities, into a more palatable strategy. Those in power would like to see nothing more than for 100,000 people to be trained to chain themselves to local bank branches for 6-9 months, hooting about their “greedy side,” get disillusioned at how fruitless that is, and go back to playing video games and downloading pirated music after Obama’s re-election.
Counter-Insurgency by any other name
This is not primarily about tactics, it is about politics. MoveOn.org and reactionary unions are not spearheading this for no reason. Are we to believe that the same unions that discourage their members from taking non-violent direct action during labor disputes, have found both the time and the energy to do a solid favor for the radical Left, by resuscitating a movement they have mistakenly diagnosed as dead? This is primarily about co-option and division, about sucking in a large cross-section of Occupy into Obama’s reelection campaign, watering down it’s radical politics, and using these mass trainings as a groundwork to put forward 100,000 “good protesters” to overshadow the “bad protesters” (who actually take personal risks and/or have radical politics), to ease the State’s ongoing campaign to pick us off one by one. In the words of MoveOn.org’s own campaign director, it is unabashedly and overtly a campaign of clear co-optation. This is not a riding of the coattails of a hip social movement; this will be a form of counter-insurgency. This will be used to disrupt, divide, discredit and destroy the Occupy movement. The parameters of acceptable protest will be imposed, not by some local non-profit starving for funding or wanting to remain relevant, but by city officials, the police, the major media, Homeland Security, Chambers of Commerce, police front groups like “Stand for Oakland,” and on down the line.
The Occupy movement has broken with the Left’s long-standing, self-defeating tendencies of meaningless, police-choreographed marches, 1-day pageant strikes, movement discourse that thinks the logic of the lowest common denominator that wins elections will win social justice (99% frames not withstanding), and non-violent civil disobedience designed to curry favorable media attention that gets de-contextualized and buried in the sea on nonsense entertainment that is the media. This scares the hell out of capital and the State. 99% Spring is not part of some nefarious conspiracy theory with Homeland Security or “the illuminati.” 99% Spring is not Wall Street. But they sure as hell are doing their work, whether some of them want to realize that or not.
“Just Say, No” (to government-sponsored co-optation)
A New York lawyer and some folks from OWS have made an attempt to turn the direct democracy of Occupy into a representation democracy of elected “Occupy politicians” who would have a new-Constitutional Convention this July 4th weekend in Philadelphia, comprised of elected officials from the Occupy Movement (“rising anarchy,” be damned). In short time Occupy Wall Street, from which these charlatans emerged, publicly denounced this attempted event at a General Assembly, along with Occupy Philadelphia. We have (imperfect) emerging direct, democratic institutions in our cities that reflect the will of the movement. We should use them. We should address the Operation 99% Spring Co-optation initiative the same way that New York and Philadelphia dealt with the “new founding fathers.” It is time to weed out our garden, so that real, social justice efforts can bloom.
My knowledge of the Occupy movement is derived primarily from my experience in Oakland. We have seen counter-insurgent efforts of this type before: when Mayor Quan’s Block-by-Block campaign organization tried to set up a “peace camp” right before the raid of the second Occupy Oakland encampment; when the one singular thing reporters wanted to know from press contacts before the December 12th Port Shutdown was “How can we get the protesters to obey police orders?” or their myopic fixation on the property destruction that they consider “violence;” to Quan’s unheeded call for the “leaders of the Occupy movement” to condemn said “violence” (by which she means people carrying shields who were hit with projectiles and beaten, while groups of children were tear-gassed): or how permits, taken out behind Occupy Oakland’s back, were used to arrest people for possession of blankets in Oscar Grant Plaza – some of whom are facing prison time; to Quan’s use of non-profits as a palatable alternative to a violent, discredited, and costly movement in a press-release and subsequent “volunteer fair.” All of this counter-insurgent misrepresentation, baiting, discreditation, and divisiveness is wearying and something we need to get better at combating. It has also only been partially effective. An Oakland Tribune poll found that 94% of Oaklanders support Occupy Oakland, even after all of the efforts I outlined above. We shouldn’t find a false complacency in this. It should be noted that even though most of these were attempts at co-optation, most came from clearly demarcated enemies.
99% Spring is attempting to graft itself to Occupy and hollow it out from the inside out, imposing rigid norms of non-violence and deference to police authority, while watering down our politics and introducing well-funded and trained institutions that are either fully invested in, or dependent upon, the existing power structure – and have the resources, connections and will of self-preservation to navigate the Occupy ship into a doldrums from which it will never emerge. Despite the undemocratic and self-defeating norm of consensus, we, as an Occupy movement, still have a sense of what we came here to do. We didn’t come here to sign petitions or to get Obama reelected. We didn’t come here to “have a voice in the system”; we came here to flip it on its head. We will not be co-opted. We should not have our tactics determined by the Democratic Party. We should not let ourselves be undermined from within. We have the capacity to call the 99% Spring out for what it is – a deluded attempt by the Obama campaign to kill two birds with one stone, to take the hundreds of thousands in the street demanding real democracy (laying bare the utter failure of the Obama administration and the American State) and turn it into a vehicle to re-elect him. So that he can bomb Iran with impunity, or continue to deport more undocumented immigrants than any other president, or cover-up more massacres in Afghanistan, or think that half-baked rhetoric about inequality coupled with more tax breaks for businesses represents “Change we can believe in.”
The Occupy movement may not have the power to change the talking points of duplicitous, liberal Mayors. It may not have the capacity to change the preoccupations of the mainstream media. It certainly doesn’t have much say in the manner in which the police try to suppress it. But we do have control over what goes on in our own house. These people only become part of the Occupy movement if we let them continue to say that they are out of one side of their mouth, while the other side says we are directionless, un-strategic and “dead.” Every single Occupation that doesn’t want to turn into nothing more than an ample pool of chumps registering people to vote for the same Obama administration that has declared an all-out war against us, should bring forward a resolution at their General Assembly to condemn this clear attempt to destroy our movement. This isn’t about violence versus non-violence; this is about autonomy versus co-optation. History will not forgive us if we let the 99% Spring Trojan horse into out movement so that the injustices we rose up against can be perpetuated with our own sanction, in our own name.
Mike King is a PhD candidate at UC–Santa Cruz and an East Bay activist, currently writing a dissertation about counter-insurgency against Occupy Oakland. He can be reached at mking(at)ucsc.edu.
Related articles
- Infiltration to Disrupt, Divide and Misdirect Is Widespread in Occupy (Part I) (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- The 99% Spring aims to train 100,000 in direct action (dailykos.com)
US-Israel War on Iran: The Myth of Limited Warfare
By James Petras :: 04.04.2012
Introduction
The mounting threat of a US-Israeli military attack against Iran is based on several factors including: (1) the recent military history of both countries in the region, (2) public pronouncements by US and Israeli political leaders, (3) recent and on-going attacks on Lebanon and Syria, prominent allies of Iran, (4) armed attacks and assassinations of Iranian scientists and security officials by proxy and/or terrorist groups under US or Mossad control, (5) the failure of economic sanctions and diplomatic coercion, (6) escalating hysteria and extreme demands for Iran to end legal, civilian use-related uranium enrichment, (7) provocative military ‘exercises’ on Iran’s borders and war games designed for intimidation and a dress rehearsal for a preemptive attack, (8) powerful pro-war pressure groups in both Washington and Tel Aviv including the major Israeli political parties and the powerful AIPAC in the US, (9) and lastly the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (Obama’s Orwellian Emergency Decree, March 16, 2012).
The US propaganda war operates along two tracks: (1) the dominant message emphasizes the proximity of war and the willingness of the US to use force and violence. This message is directed at Iran and coincides with Israeli announcements of war preparations. (2) The second track targets the ‘liberal public’ with a handful of marginal ‘knowledgeable academics’ (or State Department progressives) playing down the war threat and arguing that reasonable policy makers in Tel Aviv and Washington are aware that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons or any capacity to produce them now or in the near future. The purpose of this liberal backpedaling is to confuse and undermine the majority public opinion, which is clearly opposed to more war preparations, and to derail the burgeoning anti-war movement.
Needless to say the pronouncements of the ‘rational’ warmongers use a ‘double discourse’ based on the facile dismissal of all the historical and empirical evidence to the contrary. When the US and Israel talk of war, prepare for war and engage in pre-war provocations – they intend to go to war – just as they did against Iraq in 2003. Under present international political and military conditions an attack on Iran, initially by Israel with US support, is extremely likely, even as world economic conditions should dictate otherwise and even as the negative strategic consequences will most likely reverberate throughout the world for decades to come.
US and Israeli Military Calculations on Iran’s Capability
American and Israeli strategic policy makers do not agree on the consequences of Iran’s retaliation against an attack. For their part, the Israeli leaders minimize Iran’s military capacity to attack and damage the Jewish state, which is their only consideration. They count on their distance, their anti-missile shield and protection from US air and naval forces in the Gulf to cover their sneak attack. On the other hand, US military strategists know the Iranians are capable of inflicting substantial casualties on US warships, which would have to attack Iranian coastal installations in order to support or protect the Israelis.
Israel intelligence is best known for its capacity to organize the assassination of individuals around the world: Mossad has organized successful overseas terrorist acts against Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese leaders. On the other hand Israeli intelligence has a very poor track record with regard to its estimates of major military and political undertakings. They seriously underestimated the popular support, military strength and organizational capacity of Hezbollah during the 2006 war in Lebanon. Likewise, Israel intelligence misunderstood the strength and capacity of the Egyptian popular democratic movement as it rose up and overthrew Tel Aviv’s strategic regional ally, the Mubarak dictatorship. While Israeli leaders ‘feign paranoia’ – tossing clichés about ‘existential threats’– they are blinded by their narcissistic arrogance and racism, repeatedly underestimating the technical expertise and political sophistication of their Arab and regional Islamic foes. This is undoubtedly true in their facile dismissal of Iran’s capacity to retaliate against a planned Israeli air assault.
The US government has now overtly committed itself to supporting an Israeli assault on Iran when it is launched. More specifically, Washington claims it will come to Israel’s defense ‘unconditionally’ if it is “attacked.” How can Israel avoid being ‘attacked’ when its planes are raining bombs and missiles on Iranian installations, military defenses and support systems, not to mention Iranian cities, ports and strategic infrastructure? Moreover, given the Pentagon’s collaboration and coordinated intelligence systems with the Israel forces, its role in identifying targets, routes and incoming missiles, as well as integrated weapons and ordinance supply chains will be critical to an Israeli attack. There is no way that the US can dissociate itself from the Jewish State’s war on Iran, once the attack has begun.
The Myths of ‘Limited War’: Geography
Washington and Tel Aviv claim and appear to believe that their planned assault on Iran will be a “limited war”, targeting limited objectives and lasting a few days or weeks – with no serious consequences.
We are told Israel’s brilliant generals have identified all the critical nuclear research facilities, which their surgical air strikes will eliminate without horrific collateral damage to the surrounding population. Once the alleged ‘nuclear weapons’ program is destroyed, all Israelis can resume their lives in full security knowing that another ‘existential’ threat has been eliminated. The Israeli notion of a war, limited in ‘time and space’, is absurd and dangerous – and underlines the arrogance, stupidity and racism of its authors.
To approach Iran’s nuclear facilities Israeli and US forces will confront well-equipped and defended bases, missile installations, maritime defenses and large-scale fortifications directed by the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Armed Forces. Moreover, the defense systems protecting the nuclear facilities are linked by civilian highways, airfields, ports, and backed by a dual purpose (civilian-military) infrastructure, which includes oil refineries and a huge network of administrative offices. To ‘knock out’ the alleged nuclear sites will require expanding the geographic scope of the war. The scientific-technological capacity of the Iranian civilian nuclear program involves a wide swath of its research facilities, including universities, laboratories, manufacturing sites, and design centers. To destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear program would require Israel (and thus the US) to attack much more than research facilities or laboratories hidden under a remote mountain. It would require multiple, widespread assaults on targets throughout the country, in other words, a generalized war.
Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated that Iran will retaliate with a war of equivalence. Iran will match the breadth and scope of any attack with a corresponding counter-attack: ‘We will attack them at the same level as they attack us’. That means Iran will not confine its retaliation to merely trying to shoot down US and Israeli bombers in its airspace or launch missiles at offshore US warships in its waters but will take the war to equivalent targets in Israel and in US-occupied countries in and around the Gulf. Israel’s ‘limited war’ will become a generalized war extending throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Israel’s current delusional fetish about its elaborate missile defense system will be exposed as hundreds of high-powered missiles are launched from Teheran, Southern Lebanon and just beyond the Golan Heights.
The Myth of Limited War: Time Frame
Israeli military experts confidently expect to polish off their Iranian targets in a few days – some might think a mere weekend – and perhaps without the loss of even a single pilot. They expect the Jewish state will celebrate its brilliant victory in the streets of Tel Aviv and Washington. They are deluded by their own sense of superiority. Iran did not fight a brutal, decade-long war against the US-supplied Iraqi invaders and its western/Israeli military advisers, to just turn over and passively submit to a limited number of air and missile attacks by Israel. Iran is a young, educated mobilized society, which can draw on millions of reservists from across the political, ethnic, gender, religious spectrum, galvanized in support of their nation under attack. In a war to defend the homeland all internal differences disappear to confront the unprovoked Israeli-US attack threatening their entire civilization – its 5,000-year culture and traditions, as well as its modern scientific advances and institutions. The first wave of US-Israeli attacks will lead to ferocious retaliation, which will not be confined to the original areas of conflict, nor will any such act of Israeli aggression end when and if Iran’s nuclear research facilities are destroyed and some of its scientists, technicians and skilled workers killed. The war will continue in time and extend geographically.
Multiple Points of Conflict
Just as any US-Israeli attack on Iran will involve multiple targets, the Iranian military will also have a plethora of easily accessible strategic targets. Though it is difficult to predict exactly where and how Iran will retaliate, one thing is clear: The initial US-Israeli strike will not go unanswered.
Given Israeli-US supremacy in long and medium range sea and air power, Iran will probably rely on short-range objectives. These would include the highly valued US military facilities and supply routes in adjoining terrain (Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan) and Israeli targets with missiles launched from Southern Lebanon and possibly Syria. If a few Iranian long-range missiles escape the Jewish State’s much vaunted ‘anti-missile dome’, Israeli population centers may pay a heavy price for their leaders’ recklessness and arrogance.
The Iranian counter-strike will lead to an escalation by US-Israeli forces, extending and deepening their air and sea war to the entire Iranian national security system – military bases, ports, communication systems, command posts and government administrative centers – many in densely populated cities. Iran will counter by launching its greatest strategic asset: a coordinated ground attack involving the Revolutionary Guards together with their allies among the Iraqi Shia troops, against US forces in Iraq. It will coordinate attacks against US facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the growing nationalist-Islamic armed resistance.
The initial conflict, centered on so-called military objectives (scientific research facilities), will spread rapidly to economic targets, or what US and Israeli military strategists refer to as “dual civilian-military” targets. This would include oil fields, highways, factories, communications networks, television stations, water treatment facilities, reservoirs, power stations and administrative offices, such as the Defense Ministry and headquarters of the Republican Guard. Iran, faced with imminent destruction of its entire economy and infrastructure (which occurred in neighboring Iraq with the unprovoked US invasion of 2003), would retaliate by blocking the Straits of Hormuz and sending short range missiles in the direction of the principle oil fields and refineries of the Gulf States including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a mere 10 minute distance, crippling the flow of oil to Europe, Asia and the United States and plunging the world economy into deep depression.
It should not be forgotten that the Iranians are probably more aware than anyone in the region of the total devastation suffered by Iraqis after the US invasion, which plunged that nation into total chaos and devastated its advanced infrastructure and civilian administrative apparatus, not to mention the systematic obliteration of its highly educated scientific and technical elite. The waves of Mossad-sponsored assassinations of Iranian scientists, academics and engineers are just a foretaste of what the Israelis have in mind for Iran’s outstanding scientists, intellectuals and highly skilled technical workers. Iranians should have no illusions about the Americans and Israelis who seek to thrust Iran into the brutal dark ages of Afghanistan and Iraq. They will have no more role in a devastated Iran than their counterparts had in post-Saddam Iraq.
According to US General Mathis, who commands all US forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, ‘an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for the United States there’ (NY Times, 3/19/12). General Mathis “dire cost” estimate only takes account of the US military losses, likely several hundred sailors on warships within missile distance of Iranian gunners.
However the most delusional and self-serving assessment of the outcome and consequences of an Israeli air attack on Iran, emanates from top Israeli leaders, academics and intelligence experts, who claim superior intelligence, superior defenses and supreme (if also racist) insight into the ‘Iranian mind’. Typical is Israeli Defense Minister Barak who boasts that any Iranian retaliation will at worst inflict minimal casualties on the Israeli population.
The ‘Judeo-centric’ view of re-ordering the balance of power in the region, which is prevalent in leading Israeli war circles, overlooks the likelihood that war will not be decided by Israeli air strikes and anti-missile defenses. Iran’s missiles cannot be easily contained, especially if they arrive several hundred a minute from three directions, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and possibly from Iranian submarines. Secondly, the collapse of its oil imports will devastate Israel’s highly energy dependent economy. Thirdly, Israel’s principle allies, especially the US and the EU, will be severely strained as they are dragged into Israel’s war and find themselves defending the straits of Hormuz, their army garrisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their oil fields and military bases in the Gulf. Such a conflict could ignite the Shia majorities in Bahrain and in the strategic oil-rich provinces of Saudi Arabia. The generalized war will have a devastating effect on the price of oil and the world economy. It will provoke the fury of consumers and workers rage everywhere as factories close and powerful shocks throughout the fragile financial system result in a world depression.
Israel’s pathological ‘superiority complex’ results in its racist leaders consistently overestimating their own intellectual, technical and military capabilities, while underestimating the knowledge, capacity and courage of their regional, Islamic (in this case Iranian) adversaries. They ignore Iran’s proven capacity to sustain a prolonged, complex multi-front defensive war and to recover from an initial assault and develop appropriate modern weaponry to inflict severe damage on its attackers. And Iran will have the unconditional and active support of the world’s Muslim population, and perhaps the diplomatic backing of Russia and China, who will obviously view an attack on Iran as another dress rehearsal to contain their growing power.
Conclusion
War, especially an Israeli-US war against Iran is indissolubly linked to the asymmetrical US-Israeli relationship, which sidelines and censors any critical US military and political analysis. Because Israel’s Zionist power configuration in the US can now harness US military power in support of Israel’s drive for regional dominance, Israeli leaders and most of their military feel free to engage in the most outrageous military and destructive adventures, knowing full well that in the first and last instance they can rely on the US to support them with American blood and treasure. But after all of this grotesque servitude to a racist, isolated country, who will rescue the United States? Who will prevent the sinking of its ships in the Gulf and the death and maiming of hundreds of its sailors and thousands of its soldiers? And where will the Israelis and US Zionists be when Iraq is overrun by elite Iranian troops and their Iraqi Shia allies and a generalized uprising occurs in Afghanistan?
The self-centered Israeli policy-makers overlook the likely collapse of the world oil supply as a result of their planned war against Iran. Do their Zionist agents in the US realize that as a result of dragging the US into Israel’s war, that the Iranian nation will be forced to set the Persian Gulf oilfields ablaze?
How cheap has it become to ‘buy a war’ in the US? For a mere few million dollars in campaign contributions to corrupt politicians, and through the deliberate penetration of Israel-First agents, academics and politicians into the war-making machinery of the US government, and through the moral cowardice and self-censorship of leading critics, writers and journalists who refuse to name Israel and its agents as the key decision makers in our country’s Mid East policy, we head directly toward a war far beyond any regional military conflagration and toward the collapse of the world economy and the brutal impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people North and South, East and West.
Related articles
- UK bows to Tel Aviv after warning it against attack on Iran (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- The Real Nuclear Outlaws (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Israel snubs warnings against Iran attack (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Israeli Experts Mum on Iran Attack to Support Bibi’s Bluff (middleeastatemporal.wordpress.com)
EU Adds Venezuela’s State Airline to its List of Banned Airlines
By Tamara Pearson | Venezuelanalysis.com | April 3rd 2012
Mérida – The Venezuelan government rejected the European Union’s announcement today that it is adding Venezuela’s state-owned airline Conviasa to its list of carriers banned from its airspace.
The Venezuelan government created Conviasa in 2004 to replace the private airline Viasa, which was liquidated in 1997. Conviasa flies numerous national and Latin American routes, as well as to Spain, Ecuador, and Syria, at affordable prices. The government has also used it to deliver humanitarian aid to countries in need such as Japan and Haiti.
In June last year, U.S. politicians, during a hearing in the House of Representatives, requested that a number of measures be taken against the Venezuelan government, including sanctions against Conviasa for “supporting terrorism” because of its flights to Syria.
According to the European Commission press statement released today, the ban is due to “numerous safety concerns arising from accidents and the results of ramp checks at EU airports.” The decision, it says, is “based on the unanimous opinion of the Air Safety Committee, composed of representatives of the 27 Members States of the EU, Croatia, Norway, Iceland, Switzerland and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA)”.
“The safety performance of two other Venezuelan air carriers, Estellar Latinoamerica and Aerotuy, was also reviewed in depth; however, measures were not considered necessary at this stage. Nonetheless, these two air carriers remain subject to increased monitoring,” read the statement.
The Venezuelan government has expressed its “firm rejection” of the measure in an official statement today.
The decision is “completely disproportionate and contrary to the conclusions of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) regarding [Conviasa’s] safety performance,” said the Venezuelan government.
“The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is evaluating reciprocal and proportionate actions to protect its fundamental interests and safeguard the prestige of the state-run airline for the Venezuelan people and the international community,” the statement concluded.
The European Union first wrote its blacklist in March 2006, and has since updated it four times a year. It is apparently based on deficiencies found during checks at European airports.
According to Bloomberg, “In addition to imposing an operational ban in Europe, the blacklist can act as a guide for travellers worldwide and influence safety policies in non-EU countries”.
All airlines from Afghanistan, Angola, Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Liberia, Mauritania, Mozambique, Philippines, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Swaziland, and Zambia, are banned from EU airspace. People wishing to travel between those countries must use European airlines or airlines from other countries.
In other cases, only specific airlines are banned, such as Air Madagascar, Air Koryo of North Korea, Iran Air, and Jordan Aviation. In Latin America, only Conviasa of Venezuela and Rollins Air of Honduras are now banned.
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Capriles and Chavez Neck and Neck, and Pigs Might Fly, or Conduct a Poll
By Rachael Boothroyd – Venezuelanalysis.com – April 3rd 2012
According to Latin American polling companies such as Datanalisis and Consultores 21, this year’s presidential elections in Venezuela will be a close-knit affair, with Consultores 21 claiming that there is currently a “technical draw” between the country’s support for incumbent President Chavez and his opponent, Capriles Radonski, and Datanalisis claiming that Chavez leads his rival by just 13 points (44% to 31%). According to other polls, however, Chavez is expected to sweep the elections, with polling companies such as IVAD, confirming that 57 .6% of voters would vote for the president and just 26.6% for Capriles.
Despite the almost disorientating levels of differences between poll results, the international press and in fact, Capriles himself, have decided to cherry pick the Datanalysis and Consultores 21 statistics, and it’s not hard to see why. Part of the opposition’s strategy in the run up to this year’s elections has been to emphasise its unity and its position of strength in relation to the sick/ailing Chavez – for instance, by claiming that over 3 million people had voted in this year’s Roundtable of Democratic Unity (MUD) coalition primary elections, when this is almost certainly a physical impossibility, if not a verifiable one, given that the opposition burnt all the ballot books before an investigation could be conducted.
This could all just be political showmanship in the face of past failures, but it is also possible that this forms part of a broader strategy to contest this year’s election results in October; when it is entirely likely that a sick Chavez will beat the opposition hands down yet again. Notably, the opposition coalition, unlike Chavez, has still not publically confirmed that they will accept the election results no matter what their outcome might be.
Tellingly, whilst Capriles has stated that he does not recognise the results of the other polling companies; he has made an exception for Consultores 21, stating: “personally, I believe in Consultores. I’ve been looking at Consultores’ polls for many years”.
Despite this being exceptionally convenient; it is also a foolhardy thing to say, because Consultores has made some disastrously bad predictions over the past few years. In the 2004 presidential recall, Consultores predicted that there would be a tie between those wanting Chavez to stay in office and those wanting him out, just before Chavez was then ratified as president by 60% of the population. And this wasn’t just a one-off glitch. In 2006 during the presidential run-off between Chavez and opposition candidate Manuel Rosales, Consultores maintained that Chavez had just a 13% lead over his opponent. The president then went on to take the presidential elections with almost a 30% advantage over Rosales (65.8% to 36.9%).
But Consultores is not alone in Neverland, with Datanalisis also possessing a penchant for pie in the sky polling. In 2009, in the run-up to the referendum on whether to eliminate presidential term limits, the polling company consistently predicted that the electorate would vote against the changes in a victory for the opposition – right up until releasing their final poll results, which suddenly showed that 51.5% would vote in favour of eliminating term limits, whilst 48.1% would vote against. Not only was this a dramatic change that was never explained by the company, but it also underestimated the pro-government vote and inflated the opposition’s support. The actual figures demonstrated almost a 10% margin in favour of the reforms, which were passed with 54.5% in favour and 45.15% against.
Of course, in an interview with Globovision last week, Datanalisis’ Director, Luis Vicente Leon, was quick to rectify that the company’s recently released figures are subject to change, given the “unpredictability of polls” – a somewhat surprising statement given that at least three other polls have consistently shown that Chavez’s support has remained stably around the 57% mark for the past 6 months.
These rather serious blunders, which at best could be interpreted as poor polling methodology and at worst, deliberate attempts to manipulate the electorate, are not the only thing which discredits these companies. In fact, both directors of these pollsters have direct relationships to the opposition and the U.S. government, with Leon in particular featuring frequently in Wikileaks’ Cablegates giving advice to U.S. officials at the embassy in Caracas.
Equally, Datanalisis’ surveys are funded by the somewhat ambiguously named private and international “clients,” and despite the company’s alleged commitment to “transparency” on its webpage, there is absolutely no information regarding who the donors and financers of this poll are and in what ways they contributed; with the “Clients” section of their webpage simply featuring a rather ambiguous road sign.
According to Mayor of the Libertador district in Caracas, however, Jorge Rodriguez, one of the company’s principal clients is the Democratic Action party, one of Venezuela’s traditional parties which maintained a rotating democracy with the Christian Democrat Party during the Fourth Republic (1958-1998) and which incidentally forms part of the MUD with Capriles.
Whilst they dismiss other polling companies as state “propaganda,” the media neglects to mention the very obvious links between these polling companies and the opposition, as well as the fact that even pollsters such as Hinterlaces, which are sympathetic to the opposition, are currently putting President Chavez well ahead of Capriles at 52% versus 34%. And although Leon has described these surveys as not “serious”, it is true that pollsters such as IVAD, which despite consistently underestimating the pro-Chavez vote, have evidently been much more effective in predicting the outcome of electoral processes than Datanalisis; including in predicting the public’s rejection of the 2007 constitutional reforms.
Despite this, both companies remain almost exclusively the mainstream press’ sources of choice when hypothesising over the elections. Anyone living in the U.S. or Europe would be forgiven for thinking that Capriles is the “man who would beat Hugo Chavez,” as Reuters UK reports.
However, the media’s fixation on the Datanalisis poll in particular is illuminating for another aspect, and that is because the poll revealed two important political factors which fundamentally contradict the usual representation of the Venezuelan process and which the media have decided to totally ignore.
Firstly, as opposed to the usual claims in the mainstream press that the Chavez ranks are made up of a die-hard Chavista core, the poll found that Chavez’s support was strongest, and indeed growing, amongst the country’s youth, who, according to Jorge Rodriguez, “feel more identified…with the proposal for the future which President Chavez’s presidency represents”. Interestingly, the poll also revealed that whilst 46% of the electorate would vote for Chavez, 40% of those would vote for another member of the PSUV, including Chavez’s brother Adnan or Vice-president Elias Jaua.
What we can glean from this is that a decent majority of government supporters vote for a party and a program, and not simply for Chavez’s “personality cult,” as is usually inferred. A reality which was confirmed when I did a number of interviews outside a rally for the president’s health in February, where every interviewee informed me that they would vote for another PSUV candidate in the event that Chavez were unable to stand; but never for the opposition, which one woman told me would be like “going backwards”.
Given the rather suspect source of these figures, it would be unwise to take them as given. However, they are in fact backed up by other polls conducted by GISXXI and IVAD, which also confirm that over 50% of Venezuela’s youth support Chavez. Similarly, the results of a poll released in February this year by IVAD also reveal that whilst 42.8% of participants belonged to the PSUV party (United Socialist Party of Venezuela), only 3.7% belonged to Justice First (Capriles party), 3.6% to Democratic Action, 3.4% to a New Time, 2.5% to Project Venezuela, with the membership of other parties falling to below 2%. With this in mind, the suggestion that Capriles is currently running neck and neck with Chavez seems about as likely as pigs developing the ability to speak Spanish, sprouting a pair of opposable thumbs and setting about conducting their own set of polls.
The most salient characteristic of all these polls, no matter which one you look at and no matter from what angle; is that after 13 years in government, with a financial crisis, a sick Chavez, and an endless string of destabilisation attempts under its belt, the government still manages to maintain incredible levels of support, and this continues to both baffle and infuriate the opposition; who for all the funding they receive and for all their control of the country’s media, have once again failed to present an alternative to the revolution which is capable of resonating with the Venezuelan people.
Related articles
- New poll shows tight race in Venezuela (local10.com)
- Chavez rival touts poll results showing close race (sacbee.com)
Iranian Diplomat Says IAEA Undermined Recent Talks to Satisfy Israel and West
TheRealNews | April 3, 2012
Gareth Porter: IAEA demanded to see Parchin on recent visit ahead of schedule to make Iran look uncooperative
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The belligerent “friends” of Syria in Istanbul
By Babich Dmitry | Voice of Russia | April 2, 2012
The decision of the United States and several Persian Gulf monarchies to create a fund that would pay “salaries” to opposition fighters in Syria and provide the rebels with Western “communication equipment” removes the last remnants of legality from the foreign involvement in Syria.
At the conference of the so called “Friends of Syria,” held in Istanbul in the beginning of this week and not attended by representatives of Russia, some astounding figures were mentioned. Molham al-Drobi, a member of the Syrian National Council, said his organization had pledges of $100 million in “salaries” for the militants inside Syria, which would help them to prolong the fighting for the next three months. The other motive for handing salaries is to encourage Syrian army soldiers to “defect” (a Syrian legalist worm would say – break his soldier’s oath) leaving the army ranks for greener pastures in the so called Free Syrian Army. Burhan Ghalioun, the head of the Istanbul-based Syrian National Council, promised to organize and keep this army together at the expense of sponsors from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and… the United States.
How very interesting! How would the United States react to a pledge by some “friends of the US” from foreign governments to pay salaries to deserters from the American army in case they join some “liberation struggle” against a bad guy in the White House? Wouldn’t it be a bit too much even for the greatest liberal in Washington D.C.?
There can be a legal basis (albeit a very shaky one) for providing humanitarian aid to the people in Syria’s regions which were devastated by the war. But even on that issue, a pledge of $176 million in humanitarian assistance made in Istanbul is a very arguable one, since the aid will go to Syrians via the hands of the Syrian National Council. An aid to victims of a civil war made via one of the sides in that war is a questionable method of charity activities. One should not forget also that the SNC is just one of many Syrian opposition groups and its source of legitimacy lies outside Syria – it was recognized as a “legitimate representative of the Syrian people” by those same “Friends of Syria” at their meetings in Tunisia and Istanbul.
What is even more stunning is the fact that participants of the conference in Istanbul plan to purchase the weapons for the Syrian rebels on the international “black market” for weapons, as the Washington Post reported. So, what about all the warnings we heard from Washington about the dangers of “black markets” for military equipment and technologies? Weren’t whole countries (such as Iraq) invaded with the official purpose of curbing those black markets?
“The interesting feature of today’s world is that the most unpredictable countries in it are not some God-forsaken Oriental dictatorships, as it was the case earlier, but modern Western states, with their elected governments, modern armed forces and seemingly disparate media,” said Igor Maksimychev, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Europe in the Russian Academy of Sciences.
“Communication equipment,” which US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is planning to provide to the rebels, looks (or, rather, sounds) suspiciously like military equipment, as, in Mrs. Clinton’s own words, it “will help activists organize, evade attacks by the regime, and connect to the outside world.” Obviously, “activists” will need this organization not for Friday night parties. And, since the times of Chinese strategists, “evading attacks” of the enemy is the primary part of warfare, probably an even more important one than actually striking the enemy.
In this situation, Russia seems to be the only heavyweight international player opposed to the trend of arming, wining and dining the anti-government fighters in Syria. A statement issued by the Russian foreign ministry said that the intention of “the friends of Syria” to provide the Syrian opposition military aid goes against the aims of a peaceful settlement of the conflict. “The meeting in Istanbul, unfortunately, retained a unilateral character, its participants did not include the representatives of Syria’s government and many influential groups of Syria’s political opposition,” said Maria Zakharova, deputy head of the department of information and media at the Russian MFA.
Georgy Mirsky, senior research fellow at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, does not see a positive logic in the Western actions against the Syrian government. These actions can be explained only by Damascus’s traditionally close ties to Iran, now perceived in Europe and the US as a hostile country. “Assad personally did not take any Western lives and did not inflict on the West any substantial economic damage,” Mirsky explains. “But talking about Assad Americans have in the back of their minds Iran, and that explains a lot in their attitude to Tehran.”
Interestingly, the current Iranian regime is the result of what is usually termed in the US as a “revolution gone wrong.” The toppling of an authoritarian shah (a sort of an “Iranian spring” in 1978-1979) ultimately brought Islamists to power. Now Islamists are slowly moving to complete power in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia (in Egypt the Christian Copts yesterday left the Constitutional Council, where they were hugely outnumbered by Islamists). So, how many more “aborted revolutions” is the West going to correct via arms from the black market, “defensive” communication equipment or outright interventions?
Related articles
- Russia: “Friends of Syria” Meeting One-Sided, Contradicts Goals of Peace (alethonews.wordpress.com)
- Syria conference: Gulf countries to fund rebels (altahrir.wordpress.com)
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Book Review
New paperback: Butchered by “Healthcare”
Lies are Unbekoming | October 20, 2026
Butchered by “Healthcare” is Robert Yoho’s plain-spoken account of how American medicine stopped being a profession and became an industry. 341 pages. Over a thousand references. Thirty-eight chapters.
“Screening Tests Are Useless”, on tests that find diseases that would never have hurt you. “The FDA Protects the Big Drug Companies”, on an agency funded by the companies it regulates. “The Journals’ Sins Are the Editors’ Sins”, on ghostwritten studies and captured peer review. “Opioids and ‘Pain Management’”, on how a generation was prescribed its way into addiction. “Prozac and Relatives” and “Antipsychotics Are Disastrous”, on what psychiatry does to adults and children. “Surgery: Money Before Patients”. “Failed Cancer Treatments”. “Futile CPR and Overprescribing”. “Billing Scams & Specialty Warfare”. “Hospitals Are Sharks”. Each with a Patient Tips section at the end on how to survive it.
If you have ever walked out of a doctor’s office with a prescription you didn’t ask for, or watched a parent put through a treatment that made them worse, this is the book you want on your shelf before the next appointment. … Full review
Butchered by “Healthcare” is available on Lulu now.
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