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<H2 class=date-header><SPAN>Tuesday, April 2, 2013</SPAN></H2>
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itemscope="itemscope" itemprop="blogPost"><A name=2187886129040384507></A>
<H3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">US capitalism's stooges in
the Gulf states clamp down on dissent </H3>
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<TD style="TEXT-ALIGN: center" class=tr-caption>Bush and Crown Prince
Sheik Mohammed of the UAE</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>by Richard Mellor<BR><BR>Some
of the Pentagon's best buddies in the Middle East are cracking down a bit.
I'm not talking about the Zionists whose brutality is well documented and funded
by the US taxpayer but the medieval monarchies that Washington props up with our
tax money. After seeing such staunch friends of US capitalism like Hosni
Mubarak fall prey to uprisings against autocratic rule, these 7th century feudal
rulers threw a few hundred billion dollars at the masses in order to head off
the possibility of the Arab Spring taking hold in the gulf states. Most of
these states rely on a lot of foreign workers, both skilled and unskilled which
does present some problems in Saudi Arabia which has the world's highest level
of youth unemployment outside of sub-Saharan Africa according to the <A
href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323783704578247463248840232.html">Wall
Street Journal. </A><BR><BR>But the sheiks are getting a bit nervous.
As we saw during the Arab Spring, social networking sites like Twitter and
Facebook played a significant role in organizing protests and keeping activists
connected and the rest of the world tuned in. There are some one million
Twitter users in the gulf states as well as Facebook users which has potential
to upset the apple cart for the thugs that control these societies with US
military backing. Bahrain is a perfect example where peaceful protests for
democratic reform were met with a brutal response from the monarchy and an
invasion by Saudi troops at the request of Washington. The 30,000 US
troops in Bahrain were no guarantor of democratic rights there.<BR><BR>All the
gulf states are clamping down on social networking sites and punishing
dissenters who use them to criticize the regimes. Kuwait, the family run nation
state that the US went to war to defend, just sentenced one twitter user to 5
years for <I>"defaming"</I> the ruling prince. Another user, Rashid al
Enizi got two years for tweeting that the ruling Sheik Sabah was "<I>The coward
that ran away after issuing an order."</I> Dangerous stuff indeed. The reason
for the attack was that his Shiekness had issued a decree limiting parliament's
powers and then left the country for a nice vacation, no doubt to Monte Carlo or
Las Vegas where these characters can use prostitutes, gamble and maybe drink and
smoke a little something he'd have you whipped or even beheaded for back home
perhaps. Hence the "coward" label. You can't call a macho Sheik with
absolute power including over women a coward and get away with
it.<BR><BR>Charles the first of England lost his head for dissolving parliament
some 350 years ago. Propping up such regimes in the 21st century tells us
something about politics. Economics and politics are inextricably
linked. Greece was a democracy but not for slaves. We live in a
democracy, a bourgeois democracy. We get to vote every two or four years
for one or the other candidates of Wall Street.<BR><BR>In Qatar a poet who put a
video of himself on YouTube reading a poem praising the revolution in
<I>"insulting the country's ruler and inciting the overthrow of the ruling
family"</I> according to the WSJ. On appeal, the sentence was reduced to
15 years. How nice. The ruling family of Qatar are the owners of al
Jazeera, the Arabic and English language news service that was set up after the
BBC's Arabic Language station was closed down. al Jazeera has won numerous
awards and can be viewed in many countries although there is pretty much a
blackout in the US. No cable company airs al Jazeera here I don't
think. Still, al Jazeera doesn't have much credibility being owned by a
ruling monarchy that hands out life sentences for supporting uprisings in other
countries that demand more openness and democratic rights. Despite this
weakness, for information, al Jazeera is far superior to US news outlets which
are among the most censored and opinionated in the world.<BR>
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<TD style="TEXT-ALIGN: center" class=tr-caption>Insult this friend of the
US: get 15 years in the slammer</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE><BR>The support the US
gives these regimes is one reason for the anti-American feeling that has grown
over the past period and that has found expression at times in violent religious
extremism. The US media does on occasion publicly criticize it's friends
in the gulf states but rarely in the mass media as opposed to their publications
aimed at their own class like the Wall Street Journal which provided much of the
information in this blog post.<BR><BR>The other destabilizing factor in the
region of course is US support for Israel and this apartheid state's treatment
of Palestinians. The fear mongering about Iran is a smoke screen and its hard to
believe many Americans believe it but the media is so controlled and general
knowledge about what is actually going on in the world so poor, that the US
bourgeois feel very confident that their version of global events will
prevail.<BR><BR>As Americans feel the effects of a declining world power, albeit
one that can still blow all of us to pieces and will if not stopped; and having
to pay for US capitalism's predatory foreign policy through declining living
standards, cuts in social services, education transportation, public parks etc.
we will be forced at some point to intervene.<BR><BR>Here in the US there are
thousands upon thousands of small groups around various issues that have arisen
since the Great Recession hit in 2007. There are numerous groups around
housing and foreclosures, health care, police brutality and opposition to
environmental degradation like the Keystone XL pipeline and
Fracking.<BR><BR>There will be an explosion at some point in this country as the
inequality gap continues to grow and attacks on living standards persist in
order to pay for US imperialism's global wars in defense of the corporations and
the market. One of the reasons for the delay I believe is that there is
presently no social force of any real significance that can link all these
individual forces of opposition together and provide an outlet for the
tremendous anger and frustration that exists beneath the surface of US
society. Organized Labor can play this role but the Union hierarchy is a
staunch defender of US capitalism and has the same world view as the bosses,
with an army of full timers (many of them leftists or ex leftists of one type or
another) the heads of organized Labor act to hold back and suppress any movement
that threatens this world view.<BR><BR>Since the Battle in Seattle in 1999, US
capitalism has increased its domestic surveillance and beefing up of police and
security forces. As the UK Guardian reported in a <A
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/mar/31/anti-drone-hoodie-big-brother">piece
about anti-drone Hoodies </A>that can protect the wearer from thermal imaging,
there is expected to be more than 20,000 drones in the skies over America in the
next 15 years. These will be owned by law enforcement, security firms and
private individuals of some wealth.<BR><BR>The Guardian: <I>"In the UK, several
police forces are already experimenting with drones, and not just for thermal
imaging. "They can be equipped with things called IMSI-catchers that will work
out the mobile phone numbers of any people in a certain area," explains Richard
Tynan, research officer at campaign group <A title=""
href="https://www.privacyinternational.org/">Privacy International</A>. 'If
police deploy these things for crowd control there's no issue with them figuring
out every single person who's in there – and their mobile phone numbers. They
can also intercept calls and send out false messages. It's not just the police
either. Cybercriminals can use these, or even business opponents. This
technology already exists.'"</I><BR><BR>All this weaponry and the laws aimed at
foreign terrorism will be used and is being used against youth and workers in
the US as the movement against the offensive of capital and the placing of the
US working class on rations intensifies.<BR><BR>We will see our <I>"US
Spring"</I></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>