From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 5 13:48:16 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2021 08:48:16 -0500 Subject: [Peace] Cuba protest in Champaign Sat. Message-ID: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=search&v=543711840379791&external_log_id=ca7d2b0b-3c3b-4338-b863-4dbf1c4ed83a&q=party%20for%20socialism%20and%20liberation%20-%20champaign-urbana From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 5 13:48:16 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2021 08:48:16 -0500 Subject: [Peace] Cuba protest in Champaign Sat. Message-ID: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?ref=search&v=543711840379791&external_log_id=ca7d2b0b-3c3b-4338-b863-4dbf1c4ed83a&q=party%20for%20socialism%20and%20liberation%20-%20champaign-urbana From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 15 16:11:25 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2021 11:11:25 -0500 Subject: [Peace] The US final stage of decline Message-ID: Given the US decline into poverty, and chaos, supporting wars abroad devastating and destroying so many there, as well as here, one might say the American people are stupid to have allowed this to occur, which is what many non-Americans do say. I prefer the fact that keeping people poor, or indebt, working non-stop to survive they're too busy to think about politics, or to notice what is taking place elsewhere in the world. The incremental changes being imposed over time impoverishing the working class, often go unnoticed until it's too late, unless there is a vanguard offering leadership and education to tackle government abuse and oppression. The lack of non corporate owned media and our manufactured consent, is an important factor as well. Sadly, we lack a significant third Party to challenge our one Party corporate owned system, operating as if two. What is required is a vanguard, or leadership as we once had, during the thirties, to organize the working class, to "think" about politics, and to challenge the system. They were able to pressure the Roosevelt Administration into providing much needed changes, such as seen elsewhere in the world. Fear was the catalyst that brought about the 40 hour work week, social security, etc. It was done to save capitalism. With the destruction of our unions, and the Communists Party's by way of McCarthyism since then, and the creation of a "synthetic left," by the CoIntel Counter Cultural program of the CIA., people were led to focus only on their individual needs, and some local social issues, denying the reality of material conditions as a whole, on a national and/or global sphere. This places the whole of the working class in a state of dependency and despair, whether the issue is healthcare, shelter, debt, jobs, climate change, or war. It's critical that we unite and focus on the need for system change as the US empire of imperialism dies, if we hope to survive what's to come, be it catastrophe due to climate change, economic depression, or WW3. K. Aram From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 15 16:11:25 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2021 11:11:25 -0500 Subject: [Peace] The US final stage of decline Message-ID: Given the US decline into poverty, and chaos, supporting wars abroad devastating and destroying so many there, as well as here, one might say the American people are stupid to have allowed this to occur, which is what many non-Americans do say. I prefer the fact that keeping people poor, or indebt, working non-stop to survive they're too busy to think about politics, or to notice what is taking place elsewhere in the world. The incremental changes being imposed over time impoverishing the working class, often go unnoticed until it's too late, unless there is a vanguard offering leadership and education to tackle government abuse and oppression. The lack of non corporate owned media and our manufactured consent, is an important factor as well. Sadly, we lack a significant third Party to challenge our one Party corporate owned system, operating as if two. What is required is a vanguard, or leadership as we once had, during the thirties, to organize the working class, to "think" about politics, and to challenge the system. They were able to pressure the Roosevelt Administration into providing much needed changes, such as seen elsewhere in the world. Fear was the catalyst that brought about the 40 hour work week, social security, etc. It was done to save capitalism. With the destruction of our unions, and the Communists Party's by way of McCarthyism since then, and the creation of a "synthetic left," by the CoIntel Counter Cultural program of the CIA., people were led to focus only on their individual needs, and some local social issues, denying the reality of material conditions as a whole, on a national and/or global sphere. This places the whole of the working class in a state of dependency and despair, whether the issue is healthcare, shelter, debt, jobs, climate change, or war. It's critical that we unite and focus on the need for system change as the US empire of imperialism dies, if we hope to survive what's to come, be it catastrophe due to climate change, economic depression, or WW3. K. Aram From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 15 19:32:35 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2021 14:32:35 -0500 Subject: [Peace] My response to a question related to my previous posting. Message-ID: A question often asked. Does the American Empire deserve to survive, certainly not, but sadly when it falls it takes everyone with it, not the wealthy, ruling elites, but the poor, the average working class etc. All the animals, all that nature has created. We see the destruction of some of the most beautiful forests known to man across Oregon, from the forest fires, all the wildlife suffering and dying horrifically. To answer the question, it's not a matter of morality, or individuals deserving to live or die it's not a matter of whether the option of a better world is possible if we pursue it. We know that "man," has the capacity to develop, create, and do better, and we should never give up pursuing that option. Giving in to despair should never be an option. From karenaram at hotmail.com Sun Aug 15 19:32:35 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2021 14:32:35 -0500 Subject: [Peace] My response to a question related to my previous posting. Message-ID: A question often asked. Does the American Empire deserve to survive, certainly not, but sadly when it falls it takes everyone with it, not the wealthy, ruling elites, but the poor, the average working class etc. All the animals, all that nature has created. We see the destruction of some of the most beautiful forests known to man across Oregon, from the forest fires, all the wildlife suffering and dying horrifically. To answer the question, it's not a matter of morality, or individuals deserving to live or die it's not a matter of whether the option of a better world is possible if we pursue it. We know that "man," has the capacity to develop, create, and do better, and we should never give up pursuing that option. Giving in to despair should never be an option. From stuartnlevy at gmail.com Mon Aug 16 15:23:53 2021 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (Stuart Levy) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2021 15:23:53 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [Peace] =?utf-8?q?Code_Pink=3A_Today_3PM_Central_time=3A_Afghani?= =?utf-8?b?c3RhbvCfkpQ6IFdob+KAmXMgdG8gQmxhbWUgYW5kIFdoYXQgTmV4dD8=?= Message-ID: Aug 16, 2021 09:41:22 Jodie Evans & Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK : * [http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/themes/5e175b7e22005f25cfc044b2/attachments/original/1612296002/CP_LOGO_2021.png?1612296002###200x28:false###][CODEPINK.ORG][http://www.codepink.org?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=1] * [https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/codepink/mailings/4983/attachments/original/Afghan-Women-Reject-U.S.-Peace-Proposal-Is-This-What-American-Democracy-Looks-Like.jpg?1629121143][Image link][https://www.codepink.org/afghanistan2021?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=2] RSVP for a discussion today on Afghanistan, 1pm PT/4pm ET and *sign the petition to Biden and Blinken[https://www.codepink.org/afghanistan2021?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=3]* *RSVP NOW![https://www.codepink.org/081621?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=4]* Dear Stuart, The scenes out of Afghanistan are heartbreaking. It took only a matter of days for the Taliban to take the capital city of Kabul after 20 years of U.S. invasion and occupation. *Over the weekend, U.S.-backed ??**President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and the Biden administration sent in 6,000 troops.* Among the Taliban fighters who took over the presidential palace was a man who said he spent eight years imprisoned in Guantanamo.? *Thousands are fleeing Afghanistan to neighboring countries and others have flooded the Kabul airport, which is now an epicenter of panic, desperation, and sadness.* *While CODEPINK supported Biden?s decision to leave Afghanistan, we have been shocked by the disastrous exit?taking U.S. troops out only to bring more back again?and by the appalling lack of intelligence about the strength of the Taliban.* *Today at 1pm PT/4 pm ET we will be hosting a discussion on Afghanistan titled Who?s to Blame and What Next?[https://www.codepink.org/081621?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=5]* Our panelists will be retired U.S. Army Colonel and CODEPINKer Ann Wright, former U.S. State Department official Matthew Hoh, Dr. Zaher Wahab, of Lewis and Clark University. *Ann **was on the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001*. *Matt** resigned in 2001 from his post in Afghanistan* with the State Department over the U.S. escalation of the war. *Dr.* *Zaher Wahab, born in Afghanistan, *was the first person in his family to attend school and from 2002 to 2006, *Dr. Wahab served as senior advisor to the Minister of Higher Education in Afghanistan.* *RSVP now to join the webinar **Afghanistan: Who?s to Blame and What Next?, today at 1pm PT/4pm ET.[https://www.codepink.org/081621?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=6]* * [https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/codepink/mailings/4983/attachments/original/AFGANISTAN_WHO'S_TO_BLAME_AND_WHAT_NEXT_%284%29.png?1629121399###600x338:false###][Image link] [https://www.codepink.org/081621?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=7]* As America grapples with the colossal failure of the U.S. war on terror, with* the Afghan people paying a terrible price*, we remember that only one member of Congress, Representative Barbara Lee, opposed the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. *We also remember all our visits to Afghanistan and all the years that we, as CODEPINK, have been calling for an end to the war, while at the same time advocating for the rights of Afghan women.?* Now that President Biden has taken the decision to end the U.S. military involvement in the war but carried it out in such a reckless fashion, we still have a tremendous responsibility to the Afghan people. *Sign our petition to President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken calling for the following:[https://www.codepink.org/afghanistan2021?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=8]* * Support UN efforts to create a humanitarian corridor and guarantee safe passage for humanitarian workers to help the displaced population * Expand qualification categories for Afghan refugees coming to the U.S. and reduce the paperwork required to qualify * Cease all bombings and CIA paramilitary involvement * After U.S. evacuations are complete, remove U.S. forces, except for a residual protective force at the US embassy for possible recognition of a new government. There are many lessons we must learn from this debacle. The U.S. must cease its military interventions around the world and the runaway Pentagon budget must be cut. The U.S. must stop destabilizing the Middle East and Southwest Asia, including lifting sanctions on Iran, stopping weapons export to the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, and the UAE, and pulling our troops out of Iraq and Syria.? CODEPINK was formed in 2002 in opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We have never stopped working to end militarism and we won?t stop until peace and justice are achieved. Join us today for a?*discussion on Afghanistan[https://www.codepink.org/081621?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=9]* and sign our *petition to Biden and Blinken[https://www.codepink.org/afghanistan2021?e=38045e0b248b322e5a3a8b9d6b8774fb&utm_source=codepink&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=afghanistan_national&n=10]*.? */In solidarity with the people of Afghanistan,/* /*Jodie, Medea, Ann, Ariel, Carley, Ally, Ciara, Danaka, Emily, Farida, Justina, Kelly, Leila, Leonardo, Madison, Mary, Marcy, Michelle, Moses, Nancy, Paki, RJ, Shea, and Teri*/ ? 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URL: From stuartnlevy at gmail.com Mon Aug 16 20:04:01 2021 From: stuartnlevy at gmail.com (Stuart Levy) Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2021 15:04:01 -0500 Subject: [Peace] =?utf-8?q?Code_Pink=3A_Today_3PM_Central_time=3A_Afghani?= =?utf-8?b?c3RhbvCfkpQ6IFdob+KAmXMgdG8gQmxhbWUgYW5kIFdoYXQgTmV4dD8=?= In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: It looks as if this message had my e-mail address wired in to it, so when someone signed up, the acknowledgement came to me. Here's the link to the meeting.?? They are starting by playing Biden's press conference live, then they'll respond to it. ????? *https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86264227538* On 8/16/21 10:23 AM, Stuart Levy wrote: > > Aug 16, 2021 09:41:22 Jodie Evans & Medea Benjamin, CODEPINK > : > > RSVP for a discussion today on Afghanistan, 1pm PT/4pm ET > ?????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????? > ?????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????? > ?????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????? > ?????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????? > ?????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????? > ?????????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????? > ?????????????????????????????? ????????????????????? > CODEPINK.ORG > > > > > > RSVP for a discussion today on Afghanistan, 1pm PT/4pm ET and *sign > the petition to Biden and Blinken > * > > RSVP NOW! > > > > Dear Stuart, > > The scenes out of Afghanistan are heartbreaking. It took only a matter > of days for the Taliban to take the capital city of Kabul after 20 > years of U.S. invasion and occupation. *Over the weekend, U.S.-backed > ??**President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and the Biden > administration sent in 6,000 troops.* Among the Taliban fighters who > took over the presidential palace was a man who said he spent eight > years imprisoned in Guantanamo.? > > *Thousands are fleeing Afghanistan to neighboring countries and others > have flooded the Kabul airport, which is now an epicenter of panic, > desperation, and sadness.* > > *While CODEPINK supported Biden?s decision to leave Afghanistan, we > have been shocked by the disastrous exit?taking U.S. troops out only > to bring more back again?and by the appalling lack of intelligence > about the strength of the Taliban.* > > *Today at 1pm PT/4 pm ET we will be hosting a discussion on > Afghanistan titled Who?s to Blame and What Next? > *Our > panelists will be retired U.S. Army Colonel and CODEPINKer Ann Wright, > former U.S. State Department official Matthew Hoh, Dr. Zaher Wahab, of > Lewis and Clark University. *Ann **was on the team that reopened the > U.S. Embassy in Kabul in December 2001*. *Matt**resigned in 2001 from > his post in Afghanistan* with the State Department over the U.S. > escalation of the war. *Dr.* *Zaher Wahab, born in Afghanistan, *was > the first person in his family to attend school and from 2002 to 2006, > *Dr. Wahab served as senior advisor to the Minister of Higher > Education in Afghanistan.* > > *RSVP now to join the webinar **Afghanistan: Who?s to Blame and What > Next?, today at 1pm PT/4pm ET.* > > > ** > > > As America grapples with the colossal failure of the U.S. war on > terror, with*the Afghan people paying a terrible price*, we remember > that only one member of Congress, Representative Barbara Lee, opposed > the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. *We also remember all our > visits to Afghanistan and all the years that we, as CODEPINK, have > been calling for an end to the war, while at the same time advocating > for the rights of Afghan women.?* > > Now that President Biden has taken the decision to end the U.S. > military involvement in the war but carried it out in such a reckless > fashion, we still have a tremendous responsibility to the Afghan people. > > *Sign our petition to President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken > calling for the following:* > // > > * Support UN efforts to create a humanitarian corridor and guarantee > safe passage for humanitarian workers to help the displaced population > * Expand qualification categories for Afghan refugees coming to the > U.S. and reduce the paperwork required to qualify > * Cease all bombings and CIA paramilitary involvement > * After U.S. evacuations are complete, remove U.S. forces, except > for a residual protective force at the US embassy for possible > recognition of a new government. > > There are many lessons we must learn from this debacle. The U.S. must > cease its military interventions around the world and the runaway > Pentagon budget must be cut. The U.S. must stop destabilizing the > Middle East and Southwest Asia, including lifting sanctions on Iran, > stopping weapons export to the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, > and the UAE, and pulling our troops out of Iraq and Syria.? > > CODEPINK was formed in 2002 in opposition to the wars in Iraq and > Afghanistan. We have never stopped working to end militarism and we > won?t stop until peace and justice are achieved. Join us today for > a?*discussion on Afghanistan* > and > sign our *petition to Biden and Blinken* > .? > > */In solidarity with the people of Afghanistan,/* > /*Jodie, Medea, Ann, Ariel, Carley, Ally, Ciara, Danaka, Emily, > Farida, Justina, Kelly, Leila, Leonardo, Madison, Mary, Marcy, > Michelle, Moses, Nancy, Paki, RJ, Shea, and Teri*/ > > ? > > Donate Now! > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > This email was sent to stuartnlevy at gmail.com > . To unsubscribe, click here > . > > > To update your email subscription, contact info at codepink.org > . > > ? 2021 CODEPINK.ORG > > | Created with NationBuilder > > > > > > > > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Aug 20 21:29:32 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2021 16:29:32 -0500 Subject: [Peace] Michael Parenti on Afghanistan 2008 Message-ID: Afghanistan, Another Untold Story Michael Parenti December 2, 2008 Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United States. Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet "invasion" of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as "a good thing." The actual story is not such a good thing. Some Real History Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People's Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators. The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. "It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it," writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time. The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed. The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes. A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been "a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city's university. Afghan women held government jobs--in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women." The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world's heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a "genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope." But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government's dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children. Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers. A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military. It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas. In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily. Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year. Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as "a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.'" Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world. Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah's name against the purveyors of secular "corruption." In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes. The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of "immorality" that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research. The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed "immoral" were stoned to death or buried alive. None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban's oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women. If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically. The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water. The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world. US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific. The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush's war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL's hopes for getting a major piece of the action. Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a "rogue state" designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields. In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention. One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, "there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy." But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation. US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives. The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth's dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world. In the face of all this Obama's call for "change" rings hollow. Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely. Michael Parenti is an American political scientist and cultural critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at American and international universities and has been a guest lecturer before campus and community audiences. His books include: "Face of Imperialism " (2011), "God and His Demons " (2010), "Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader " (2007); "Democracy for the Few " (2010); "The Assassination of Julius Caesar " (2004), and "Superpatriotism " (2004). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Fri Aug 20 21:29:32 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2021 16:29:32 -0500 Subject: [Peace] Michael Parenti on Afghanistan 2008 Message-ID: Afghanistan, Another Untold Story Michael Parenti December 2, 2008 Barack Obama is on record as advocating a military escalation in Afghanistan. Before sinking any deeper into that quagmire, we might do well to learn something about recent Afghani history and the role played by the United States. Less than a month after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US leaders began an all-out aerial assault upon Afghanistan, the country purportedly harboring Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist organization. More than twenty years earlier, in 1980, the United States intervened to stop a Soviet "invasion" of that country. Even some leading progressive writers, who normally take a more critical view of US policy abroad, treated the US intervention against the Soviet-supported government as "a good thing." The actual story is not such a good thing. Some Real History Since feudal times the landholding system in Afghanistan had remained unchanged, with more than 75 percent of the land owned by big landlords who comprised only 3 percent of the rural population. In the mid-1960s, democratic revolutionary elements coalesced to form the People's Democratic Party (PDP). In 1973, the king was deposed, but the government that replaced him proved to be autocratic, corrupt, and unpopular. It in turn was forced out in 1978 after a massive demonstration in front of the presidential palace, and after the army intervened on the side of the demonstrators. The military officers who took charge invited the PDP to form a new government under the leadership of Noor Mohammed Taraki, a poet and novelist. This is how a Marxist-led coalition of national democratic forces came into office. "It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it," writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time. The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed. The government also continued a campaign begun by the king to emancipate women from their age-old tribal bondage. It provided public education for girls and for the children of various tribes. A report in the San Francisco Chronicle (17 November 2001) noted that under the Taraki regime Kabul had been "a cosmopolitan city. Artists and hippies flocked to the capital. Women studied agriculture, engineering and business at the city's university. Afghan women held government jobs--in the 1980s, there were seven female members of parliament. Women drove cars, traveled and went on dates. Fifty percent of university students were women." The Taraki government moved to eradicate the cultivation of opium poppy. Until then Afghanistan had been producing more than 70 percent of the opium needed for the world's heroin supply. The government also abolished all debts owed by farmers, and began developing a major land reform program. Ryan believes that it was a "genuinely popular government and people looked forward to the future with great hope." But serious opposition arose from several quarters. The feudal landlords opposed the land reform program that infringed on their holdings. And tribesmen and fundamentalist mullahs vehemently opposed the government's dedication to gender equality and the education of women and children. Because of its egalitarian and collectivist economic policies the Taraki government also incurred the opposition of the US national security state. Almost immediately after the PDP coalition came to power, the CIA, assisted by Saudi and Pakistani military, launched a large scale intervention into Afghanistan on the side of the ousted feudal lords, reactionary tribal chieftains, mullahs, and opium traffickers. A top official within the Taraki government was Hafizulla Amin, believed by many to have been recruited by the CIA during the several years he spent in the United States as a student. In September 1979, Amin seized state power in an armed coup. He executed Taraki, halted the reforms, and murdered, jailed, or exiled thousands of Taraki supporters as he moved toward establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. But within two months, he was overthrown by PDP remnants including elements within the military. It should be noted that all this happened before the Soviet military intervention. National security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski publicly admitted--months before Soviet troops entered the country--that the Carter administration was providing huge sums to Muslim extremists to subvert the reformist government. Part of that effort involved brutal attacks by the CIA-backed mujahideen against schools and teachers in rural areas. In late 1979, the seriously besieged PDP government asked Moscow to send a contingent of troops to help ward off the mujahideen (Islamic guerrilla fighters) and foreign mercenaries, all recruited, financed, and well-armed by the CIA. The Soviets already had been sending aid for projects in mining, education, agriculture, and public health. Deploying troops represented a commitment of a more serious and politically dangerous sort. It took repeated requests from Kabul before Moscow agreed to intervene militarily. Jihad and Taliban, CIA Style The Soviet intervention was a golden opportunity for the CIA to transform the tribal resistance into a holy war, an Islamic jihad to expel the godless communists from Afghanistan. Over the years the United States and Saudi Arabia expended about $40 billion on the war in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies recruited, supplied, and trained almost 100,000 radical mujahideen from forty Muslim countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and Afghanistan itself. Among those who answered the call was Saudi-born millionaire right-winger Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. After a long and unsuccessful war, the Soviets evacuated the country in February 1989. It is generally thought that the PDP Marxist government collapsed immediately after the Soviet departure. Actually, it retained enough popular support to fight on for another three years, outlasting the Soviet Union itself by a year. Upon taking over Afghanistan, the mujahideen fell to fighting among themselves. They ravaged the cities, terrorized civilian populations, looted, staged mass executions, closed schools, raped thousands of women and girls, and reduced half of Kabul to rubble. In 2001 Amnesty International reported that the mujahideen used sexual assault as "a method of intimidating vanquished populations and rewarding soldiers.'" Ruling the country gangster-style and looking for lucrative sources of income, the tribes ordered farmers to plant opium poppy. The Pakistani ISI, a close junior partner to the CIA, set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland became the biggest producer of heroin in the world. Largely created and funded by the CIA, the mujahideen mercenaries now took on a life of their own. Hundreds of them returned home to Algeria, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Kashmir to carry on terrorist attacks in Allah's name against the purveyors of secular "corruption." In Afghanistan itself, by 1995 an extremist strain of Sunni Islam called the Taliban---heavily funded and advised by the ISI and the CIA and with the support of Islamic political parties in Pakistan---fought its way to power, taking over most of the country, luring many tribal chiefs into its fold with threats and bribes. The Taliban promised to end the factional fighting and banditry that was the mujahideen trademark. Suspected murderers and spies were executed monthly in the sports stadium, and those accused of thievery had the offending hand sliced off. The Taliban condemned forms of "immorality" that included premarital sex, adultery, and homosexuality. They also outlawed all music, theater, libraries, literature, secular education, and much scientific research. The Taliban unleashed a religious reign of terror, imposing an even stricter interpretation of Muslim law than used by most of the Kabul clergy. All men were required to wear untrimmed beards and women had to wear the burqa which covered them from head to toe, including their faces. Persons who were slow to comply were dealt swift and severe punishment by the Ministry of Virtue. A woman who fled an abusive home or charged spousal abuse would herself be severely whipped by the theocratic authorities. Women were outlawed from social life, deprived of most forms of medical care, barred from all levels of education, and any opportunity to work outside the home. Women who were deemed "immoral" were stoned to death or buried alive. None of this was of much concern to leaders in Washington who got along famously with the Taliban. As recently as 1999, the US government was paying the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official. Not until October 2001, when President George W. Bush had to rally public opinion behind his bombing campaign in Afghanistan did he denounce the Taliban's oppression of women. His wife, Laura Bush, emerged overnight as a full-blown feminist to deliver a public address detailing some of the abuses committed against Afghan women. If anything positive can be said about the Taliban, it is that they did put a stop to much of the looting, raping, and random killings that the mujahideen had practiced on a regular basis. In 2000 Taliban authorities also eradicated the cultivation of opium poppy throughout the areas under their control, an effort judged by the United Nations International Drug Control Program to have been nearly totally successful. With the Taliban overthrown and a Western-selected mujahideen government reinstalled in Kabul by December 2001, opium poppy production in Afghanistan increased dramatically. The years of war that have followed have taken tens of thousands of Afghani lives. Along with those killed by Cruise missiles, Stealth bombers, Tomahawks, daisy cutters, and land mines are those who continue to die of hunger, cold, lack of shelter, and lack of water. The Holy Crusade for Oil and Gas While claiming to be fighting terrorism, US leaders have found other compelling but less advertised reasons for plunging deeper into Afghanistan. The Central Asian region is rich in oil and gas reserves. A decade before 9/11, Time magazine (18 March 1991) reported that US policy elites were contemplating a military presence in Central Asia. The discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan provided the lure, while the dissolution of the USSR removed the one major barrier against pursuing an aggressive interventionist policy in that part of the world. US oil companies acquired the rights to some 75 percent of these new reserves. A major problem was how to transport the oil and gas from the landlocked region. US officials opposed using the Russian pipeline or the most direct route across Iran to the Persian Gulf. Instead, they and the corporate oil contractors explored a number of alternative pipeline routes, across Azerbaijan and Turkey to the Mediterranean or across China to the Pacific. The route favored by Unocal, a US based oil company, crossed Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. The intensive negotiations that Unocal entered into with the Taliban regime remained unresolved by 1998, as an Argentine company placed a competing bid for the pipeline. Bush's war against the Taliban rekindled UNOCAL's hopes for getting a major piece of the action. Interestingly enough, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations ever placed Afghanistan on the official State Department list of states charged with sponsoring terrorism, despite the acknowledged presence of Osama bin Laden as a guest of the Taliban government. Such a "rogue state" designation would have made it impossible for a US oil or construction company to enter an agreement with Kabul for a pipeline to the Central Asian oil and gas fields. In sum, well in advance of the 9/11 attacks the US government had made preparations to move against the Taliban and create a compliant regime in Kabul and a direct US military presence in Central Asia. The 9/11 attacks provided the perfect impetus, stampeding US public opinion and reluctant allies into supporting military intervention. One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, "there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy." But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation. US intervention in Afghanistan has proven not much different from US intervention in Cambodia, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere. It had the same intent of preventing egalitarian social change, and the same effect of overthrowing an economically reformist government. In all these instances, the intervention brought retrograde elements into ascendance, left the economy in ruins, and pitilessly laid waste to many innocent lives. The war against Afghanistan, a battered impoverished country, continues to be portrayed in US official circles as a gallant crusade against terrorism. If it ever was that, it also has been a means to other things: destroying a leftist revolutionary social order, gaining profitable control of one of the last vast untapped reserves of the earth's dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US bases and US military power into still another region of the world. In the face of all this Obama's call for "change" rings hollow. Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely. Michael Parenti is an American political scientist and cultural critic who writes on scholarly and popular subjects. He has taught at American and international universities and has been a guest lecturer before campus and community audiences. His books include: "Face of Imperialism " (2011), "God and His Demons " (2010), "Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader " (2007); "Democracy for the Few " (2010); "The Assassination of Julius Caesar " (2004), and "Superpatriotism " (2004). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org . -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 26 13:49:50 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 08:49:50 -0500 Subject: [Peace] Truth from The Grayzone Message-ID: DSA/Jacobin/Haymarket-sponsored ?Socialism? conference features US gov-funded regime-change activists Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal ?July 6, 2019 The 2019 Socialism Conference, sponsored by American leftist juggernauts the DSA, Jacobin magazine, and ISO?s Haymarket Books, features regime-change activists from multiple US government-funded NGOs. (Puede leer este art?culo en espa?ol aqu? ) Socialism is now apparently brought to you by the US State Department. From July 4 to 7, thousands of left-wing activists from across the United States are gathering in Chicago for the 2019 Socialism Conference . At this event, some of the most powerful institutions on the American socialist ? but avowedly anti-communist ? left have brought together a motley crew of regime-change activists to demonize Official Enemies of Washington. One anti-China panel at the conference features speakers from two different organizations that are both bankrolled by the US government?s soft-power arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) , a group founded out of Ronald Reagan?s CIA in the 1980s to grease the wheels of right-wing regime-change efforts and promote ?free markets? across the planet. Another longtime ally who has spoken at every single annual Socialism Conference since 2009, Anand Gopal, works at a liberal foundation that is directly funded by the US State Department. He is headlining a panel this year to provide ?A Socialist View of the Arab Spring.? Yet another 2019 conference panel rails against the socialist governments of Nicaragua and Cuba ? two-thirds of John Bolton?s ?troika of tyranny? ? with outspoken proponents of regime change. One of the speakers, Dan La Botz, hosted an event in 2018 that featured right-wing Nicaraguan activists wearing masks and disguised as students, who were junketed to meet with Republican lawmakers in Washington by the US government-funded right-wing organization Freedom House. The Socialism Conference?s regime-change lobbying ?Nicaragua expert? La Botz has admitted in leaked emails obtained by The Grayzone that ?there is virtually no left among the opposition? to Nicaragua?s democratically elected socialist government. La Botz, a leader within Democratic Socialists of America, likewise acknowledged in these emails that there is ?little likelihood of an outcome to the rebellion that goes beyond a more democratic capitalist regime.? But he has still vociferously lobbied for Nicaragua?s Sandinista government to be overthrown by US government-backed insurgents ? and is using his platform at the biggest socialist conference in the United States to do it. Merging of largest US socialist organizations The 2019 Socialism Conference is advertised under the catchy slogan: ?No borders, no bosses, no binaries.? Each ticket comes in at a neat $105 per person (or a $250 ?solidarity rate,? for the hardcore supporters) ? and this doesn?t include the rate for the rooms at the hotel where it?s held. For years, the Socialism Conference functioned as a platform for the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a small group steeped in the tradition of sectarian American Trotskyite politics, which pushed a hardline anti-communism and attacked virtually all socialist governments in history as ?not truly socialist.? Founded in 1977 after a long line of sectarian splits, the ISO never became a significant political force. It was mostly relegated to recruiting young impressionable students on liberal arts college campuses. As an avowedly anti-communist organization, the ISO eschewed symbols long associated with the communist left, like hammers and sickles and red flags. Instead, it chose a clenched fist ? one eerily similar to the symbol used by the US government-funded Serbian activist group Otpor and similar offshoots in Eastern Europe, which carried out Washington-backed neoliberal ?color revolutions? in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism. The ISO claimed to be anti-war, but its leaders spent a disproportionate percentage of their time and resources attacking the anti-imperialist left. They could more accurately be referred to as the anti-anti-imperialist left. This March, the ISO voted to dissolve ? in a decision some former members joked was the most democratic act ever undertaken by the organization, which had been dominated by an unelected leadership of veteran Trotskyite activists. The dissolution was prompted by evidence that the ISO?s steering committee mishandled sexual assault allegations. It also came as the ISO?s membership was shrinking and rapidly being absorbed by a newly burgeoning anti-communist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. Now that the ISO has dissolved, some of its past prominent members have entered the ranks of the DSA, burrowing from within to inject their anti-anti-imperialist politics into the group. Because Trotskyites are so sectarian and notoriously incapable of holding together organizations, they are infamous for infiltrating larger, more popular groups and trying to take them over, in a tactic known as entryism. This is precisely the strategy being used by former members of the ISO ? and by another tiny US Trotskyite organization, Solidarity , which was led by anti-Nicaragua regime-change activist and Socialism Conference speaker Dan La Botz, now a leader in DSA. Democratic Socialists of America is the largest self-described socialist organization in the United States, with more than 60,000 card-carrying members. It is also very heterogeneous, with many internal contradictions and conflicting political views. In 2019, for the first time, the organizers of the Socialism Conference ? including many holdovers from the ISO leadership ? joined together with two new sponsors: DSA, and the closely DSA-allied Jacobin magazine, another platform for anti-communist and anti-anti-imperialist politics. At the bottom of the Socialism conference website , a note reads, ?Brought to you by Haymarket, Jacobin, and the Democratic Socialists of America.? Haymarket is the book publishing arm of the now defunct ISO, and its editorial board features some of the group?s former leaders. Top speakers at the conference include Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, Jacobin magazine founder and editor Bhaskar Sunkara, and journalist Naomi Klein, the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. Klein was chosen to head the final plenary, titled ?Care and Repair : The Revolutionary, Democratic Power of a Global Green New Deal.? The 2019 Socialism Conference, like its annual predecessors, combines calls for radical economic democratic transformation and progressive social progress with the demonization of independent foreign governments that are targeted by the US government for regime change, such as Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria, Iran, China, and Russia. The schedule of panels on foreign policy and international issues features a veritable who?s who of leftist regime-change activists. There is even a talk devoted specifically to demonizing the anti-imperialist left . Curiously, the 2019 Socialism Conference has no panels devoted specifically to Venezuela , which since this January has endured a US-led right-wing coup attempt, and which is suffering under suffocating sanctions that amount to a de facto economic blockade. In the past, the ISO has harshly criticized Venezuela?s democratically elected socialist government, condemning Presidents Hugo Ch?vez and Nicol?s Maduro for not being radical enough and for not supposedly implementing the vague concept of ?socialism from below.? In this way, the 2019 Socialism Conference also stands out as a sign of the effective political merging of what had previously been two distinct political trends: the Cliffite Trotskyites of the International Socialist Organization and the anti-communist social democrats of the Democratic Socialists of America. Anti-China ?workers? rights? groups funded by anti-labor US government One of the most eyebrow-raising panels at the 2019 Socialism Conference is entitled ?China and the US : Inter-Imperial Rivalry or Class Struggle and Solidarity?? The panel portrays the US and China as equally malicious imperialist powers, downplaying and whitewashing the uniquely destructive nature of Washington?s foreign wars and corporate domination. The panel features three speakers, two of whom work for anti-China groups that are funded by the US government?s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy. The third speaker is Ashley Smith, a former leader of the ISO who has spent the past eight years romanticizing foreign-backed, far-right sectarian Islamist ?moderate rebels ? in Syria. The first speaker listed on the panel is Elaine Lu , the program officer at China Labor Watch. This group is described by the Socialism conference website simply as ?a New York-based NGO advocating for workers? rights in China.? What Socialism Conference sponsors DSA, Jacobin, and Haymarket did not disclose is that its speaker?s employer is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED states without qualification that its goals include supporting ?free markets? abroad. At the top of the about page on its website is a video of right-wing cold warrior Ronald Reagan inaugurating the US government-funded body. The National Endowment for Democracy?s 990 tax forms show how Washington?s regime-change arm has bankrolled China Labor Watch for years. Substantial NED funding goes back to at least 2009 . According to the NED?s 2015 form 990 , China Labor Watch received a $150,000 grant that year. On the NED?s 2013 tax form, it lists another $110,000 grant for China Labor Watch. In 2014 , China Labor Watch got $150,000 from the NED . According to the group?s annual report that year , its total revenues for all of 2014 was $238,003, meaning 63 percent, or nearly two-thirds of its funding came from the US government. China Labor Watch?s other major donor is the Tides Foundation, a liberal organization that also happened to be one of the main financial sponsor?s of the ISO?s parent non-profit. In 2014, Tides gave $40,645 to China Labor Watch, another 17 percent of its budget that year. Joining Elaine Lu as the other main speaker on the Socialism Conference?s anti-China panel is Kevin Lin , who coordinates the China program at the Washington, DC-based NGO the International Labor Rights Forum. The Socialism Conference once again failed to mention that this group is also bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy. According to the NED?s 2016 form 990 , the US government?s regime-change arm gave the International Labor Rights Forum $150,000 that year alone. The International Labor Rights Forum likewise received $96,590 from the NED in 2015, and $62,500 in 2014. The Socialism Conference also identified Kevin Lin as a co-editor of the Made in China journal , which focuses on labor rights. A disclaimer at the bottom of the publication?s swanky website notes that it is funded by the European Union?s Horizon 2020 , a neoliberal business program which the European Commission describes as ?the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative aimed at securing Europe?s global competitiveness.? These are the financiers behind the speakers that the Socialism Conference and its sponsors the DSA, Jacobin, and Haymarket brought together to explain why China is a malevolent imperialist power. Some of these groups may seem progressive, but they operate in effect as vehicles for US government soft power, exploiting the cause of human rights or labor rights to undermine and destabilize foreign governments that Washington has targeted for regime change. China Labor Watch and the International Labor Rights Forum are far from the only ostensibly progressive anti-China groups funded by the US government. Other China-related NED grantees include ?human rights? organizations like the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders , Human Rights in China , China Aid , China Change , and China Rights in Action (another Tides grantee), along with the New York-based Chinese Feminist Collective and news websites like China Digital Times . China Labour Bulletin, which maintains a map of strikes going on across the gigantic country, is likewise frequently cited by left-wing websites in the US. While its slogan is ?Supporting the Workers? Movement in China,? China Labour Bulletin (CLB) is not based in the mainland but rather in Hong Kong ? and it is funded by the US government. CLB notes on its website that it ?receives grants from a wide range of government or quasi-government bodies, trade unions and private foundations, all of which are based outside of China.? For decades, CLB?s founder and executive director Han Dongfang broadcasted anti-China programming on Radio Free Asia , a US government-funded propaganda outlet that was founded by the CIA to push anti-communist disinformation. Han?s work is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, and he was a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The ISO?s newspaper Socialist Worker has praised Han Dongfang as a leftist hero, without ever disclosing his extensive links to the US government?s regime-change machinery. Socialist Worker has repeatedly drawn on the work of China Labour Bulletin, over more than a decade . The ISO?s journal the International Socialist Review has also relied on the US government-funded organization?s research, and Jacobin magazine has noted CLB?s ?roots go back to the Tiananmen Square protests.? Human Rights Watch, another key part of the regime-change lobby, has lionized Han, happily noting that his show on the US government?s Radio Free Asia ?is one of the network?s most popular programs .? China is just one of the countries where the US government?s soft-power arm funds such putative progressive groups. The NED likewise funds many liberal anti-Cuba organizations, such as the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, Center for a Free Cuba, the Cuban Institute for the Freedom of Expression and Press, and the news website CubaNet . Or there are NED-funded groups pushing regime change against Syria and Iran, like the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies and Human Rights Activists in Iran . While the United States has one of the lowest rates of unionization in the industrialized world, a bloody history of worker repression and anti-labor laws, and historically weak unions among those that still do exist, its regime-change arm the NED has funded workers? rights groups to promote a progressive image of America abroad. For decades, for instance, the NED has bankrolled the international Solidarity Center of the major union federation the AFL-CIO. The center receives tens of millions of dollars from the US government?s regime-change arm annually, and returns the favor by avoiding topics that would anger the US State Department and bite the hand that feeds it. Throughout the Cold War, the AFL-CIO remained a reliably anti-communist union that received funding from US government agencies, including the CIA, in order to combat and ultimately try to eliminate communist influence in the American labor movement. It was a textbook example of a controlled opposition. This is not to say that NED-funded groups cannot at times have a positive impact on the lives of average people; but their work is always part of a larger agenda, with ulterior imperial motives guiding them along the way. A controlled opposition can make some changes, but it always remains controlled. US State Department-funded speaker providing ?socialist? take on ?Arab Spring? Yet another speaker at the 2019 Socialism Conference works for a liberal foundation directly funded by the US government. Journalist Anand Gopal, who has been a close ally of the ISO for a decade, has a panel all to himself this year: ?A Socialist View of the Arab Spring .? The Socialism Conference website did not provide a bio for Gopal, yet alone disclose that his employer is funded by the US government. It simply described him as a ?Pulitzer-Prize nominated journalist,? and said he will explain how to understand ?the lessons of the protests, uprisings, rebellions, and wars that shook the Arab world beginning in 2011.? Left unmentioned is that Gopal serves as a ?fellow with the International Security Program ? at the New America Foundation. This foundation?s website makes it very clear that it is directly funded by the US State Department , along with massive corporations and banks ? clearly institutions that are invested in advancing the revolutionary socialist cause. Anand Gopal has harshly attacked the anti-imperialist left for opposing the international proxy war on Syria. He strongly supported the Syrian opposition, which is dominated by Salafi-jihadists, but which Gopal has consistently whitewashed and portrayed as a supposedly progressive force . Gopal likewise reported inside al-Qaeda-occupied territory , which The New Yorker euphemistically described as ?Syria?s Last Bastion of Freedom .? And he has constantly downplayed the billions of dollars of funding and weapons from the US, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar that kept the Syrian opposition afloat, fueling the brutal war for years. Going back to at least 2009 , Gopal has spoken at every single one of the ISO?s Socialism Conferences ? in 2018 , 2017 , 2016 , 2015 , 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , and 2010 . Gopal has also done more than a dozen extensive interviews for the ISO?s newspaper Socialist Worker and journal the International Socialist Review , blaming the rise of ISIS on Official Enemies and spreading the conspiracy theory that the US is actually ?helping the regime ? of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, not truly trying to overthrow it. ?Socialist? lobbying for US-backed right-wing coup in Nicaragua Another noteworthy 2019 Socialism Conference panel, called ?Problems of the US Left: The Cases of Cuba and Nicaragua ,? is led by Dan La Botz and Samuel Farber, veteran Trotskyite activists and outspoken proponents of regime change in the two respective countries. The speakers? problem with the US left appears to be that it has demonstrated too much solidarity with socialist governments in Havana and Managua, which, in their view from inside the United States, ?rely more on bureaucracy than democracy.? Farber is a Cuban exile whose family left the country for unspecified reasons when he was a child in 1958 ? a year before its revolution ? and has spent the rest of his life as a professional critic of its socialist government. Today, he contributes regular attacks on the Cuban Revolution to journals from Jacobin to New Politics to In These Times, where he published a trenchant denunciation of Fidel Castro upon his death in 2016. Farber accuses Castro of developing a model of ?state capitalism,? wielding a term Trotskyite ideologues routinely fling at any revolutionary government that is insufficiently pure. He calls for ?a revolutionary democratic alternative? through socialist resistance from below.? The concept of regime change ?from below? is also central to the rhetoric of exile groups like the People?s MEK , a US- and Saudi-backed cult of personality that calls for toppling Iran?s government through ?indigenous regime change.? Dan La Botz, for his part, has risen to prominence as a full-time opponent of another member of the Trump administration?s ?troika of tyranny?: the socialist government of Nicaragua, and the Sandinista movement that it represents. La Botz has published an anti-Sandinista manifesto with ISO publisher Haymarket Books, which is advertised as a survey of ?the failures of the Nicaraguan Revolution, by one of the most important Marxist-historians of Latin America.? In June 2018, as a US-backed, violent regime-change attempt surged across Nicaragua , threatening the rule of democratically elected President Daniel Ortega, La Botz attempted to mobilize left-wing US support for the anti-Sandinista opposition. That month, he joined an anti-Sandinista event ? co-sponsored by DSA?s New York branch, Haymarket, the academic journal NACLA, and the Marxist Education Project ? at Saint Peter?s Church in New York City, to drum up local support for the coup. The event featured speeches by several Nicaraguan anti-Sandinista activists who were involved in the regime-change attempt, including self-described students who wore masks on stage, concealing their identities from the audience. The Grayzone has obtained internal DSA email reports authored by La Botz which revealed that, days after the event at Saint Peter?s Church, those same students met with right-wing Republican legislators on Capitol Hill, including neoconservative Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The students beamed with pride, appearing without masks in photo ops with the avowedly anti-socialist members of Congress. Their trip was financed by Freedom House , a right-wing soft-power organization that is funded almost entirely by the US government. The students? US-backed delegation included Victor Cuadras, a fanatical right-wing activist who openly supported Donald Trump?s agenda for Latin America and blamed the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua for the caravan of desperate asylum seekers on the US-Mexico border. On June 15, 2018, Dan La Botz sent an email report to DSA leadership, reflecting on the event. He acknowledged that ?the Nicaraguans both on the panel and in the public had virtually no political analysis and no vision or program for the future of their country.? Then in a follow-up email report sent to DSA leadership on July 24, La Botz defended the students? collaboration with neoconservative politicians like Rubio and Cruz. ?The students, ages 21 to 24 or so, who spoke on our panel then went off to speak with Republican legislators, guided by a rightwing foundation,? he wrote. ?While, of course, we do not think that this is a good strategy, this is perfectly understandable given that the Republicans are in power and have the ability to do something about Nicaragua.? While marketing the anti-Sandinista activists as grassroots youth deserving of left-wing solidarity, La Botz admitted in his internal DSA report, ?Nicaraguan opponents of the regime in the United States hold a wide variety of political views, though there is virtually no left among the opposition here that I am aware of.? And while publicly framing the regime-change operation in Nicaragua as a progressive uprising, La Botz privately conceded, ?There is, however, little likelihood of an outcome to the rebellion that goes beyond a more democratic capitalist regime.? An excerpt from an email report on Nicaragua to DSA leadership, written by Dan La Botz As The Grayzone reported in 2018, the US government?s regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy boasted of spending millions on anti-Sandinista civil society and media outfits ?to lay the groundwork for insurrection? in the years and months ahead of the coup. While the coup attempt in Nicaragua was portrayed as a peaceful people?s uprising by figures like La Botz, it was in fact a violent putsch that saw armed elements erect roadblocks across the country, holding up ambulances, torturing , brutalizing , kidnapping, and murdering supporters of the Sandinistas. Anti-Sandinista insurgents dragged an unarmed, on-leave police officer to death from a truck and then burnt his corpse at a roadblock. They raped a 10-year-old girl at a roadblock and burnt the homes of local Sandinista legislators. They occupied and ransacked a public university campus , wrecked a women?s health center , and torched a daycare center . The armed opposition wreaked this havoc while attacking police stations with mortars and gunfire, during a national dialogue in which the police were ordered to remain in their barracks. In the end, Nicaragua?s opposition caused the deaths of over 60 innocent people , while grinding the country?s previously productive economy to a halt. Once the coup was extinguished, the US Congress passed the Nica Act without debate , imposing harsh sanctions on Nicaragua?s economy that emulated those already leveled against Venezuela and Iran. On January 9, Dan La Botz appeared at a meeting of the New York City DSA Anti-War Working Group to amp up the attack on Nicaragua?s socialist government. There, he was challenged by Gunar Olsen , a contributor to The Grayzone, about the event he organized last year with masked right-wing Nicaraguan students sponsored by Freedom House. La Botz claimed that the event had originally been planned as a discussion of his book, but that ?somebody said, these students were coming through. And I said, that sounds great.? He continued: ?My view is, they came from their country because someone gave em some money, and they can come to the United States and they wanted to talk to somebody who might be able to help their country? It may have been though that there were some conservative political forces working with them and the Republicans, it may have been that there was some of those four students that was more hip than the others but it wasn?t my impression.? La Botz concluded by telling Olsen and the DSA crowd, ?I don?t feel at all bad, I don?t think it was a terrible thing. I think they were four young people coming to this country that wanted to speak there. We didn?t know they were going there, we didn?t know where they were heading, I didn?t know they were gonna speak there. Would I do it again? If I knew what was going to happen I?d probably say, let?s see if we can find some other students.? However, in his private email assessment of the event to DSA leadership, La Botz had defended the students? subsequent meetings with right-wing Republicans as ?perfectly understandable.? In his internal DSA report, La Botz went on to characterize those in the US left that opposed the coup in Nicaragua as ?foreign leftists? who are ?backers of Putin, Assad, Iran, Hamas, and now Ortega.? La Botz did not respond to several attempts to reach him by phone. Update (August 19): After this article was published, an activist notified The Grayzone of a Facebook conversation in which Dan La Botz admitted he invited a US-backed right-wing Evangelical opposition leader to speak at a panel on Nicaragua, and praised the coup-supporting conservative as ?an authentic voice of the young people of Nicaragua.? On Facebook, the activist noted that, at La Botz?s panel, opposition leader Lesther Alem?n ?was portrayed as a leader of the nicaraguan student left.? In reality, he is a right-wing Evangelical Christian. Alem?n now lives in exile in the United States, where he regularly collaborates with the government of Donald Trump. In July, Alem?n attended the State Department?s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom , a soft-power event that demonizes adversaries of the US government using the language of religious freedom. In an interview with the National Catholic Register , Alem?n called for the US State Department to provide more support to the Nicaraguan opposition. ?It saddens me also that here in the United States we have encountered severe opposition from American leftist groups,? Alem?n said in the interview. ?[We] are not engaged in an ideological struggle.? Asked if he supports sanctions on his former country, Alem?n declared, ?of course I support these measures.? He called for the US government to continue pressuring the Nicaraguan government and imposing more sanctions. In response to this, La Botz wrote on Facebook, ?Lester Alem?n?s decision to participate in a State Department event and his support for U.S. sanctions is in my opinion unfortunate.? But, like usual, La Botz pointed the finger at the government of Nicaragua?s democratically elected president: ?That he and other young people would take such a course is a result of Daniel Ortega and his government having closed democratic options in Nicaragua,? La Botz claimed. ?When Lester Aleman spoke at our meeting, he had not yet come to these conclusions. He was till then an authentic voice of the young people of Nicaragua.? ?Revolutionary socialists? funded by the non-profit industrial complex The force behind the annual Socialism Conference, the International Socialist Organization marketed itself as a radical, even revolutionary movement supporting ?socialism from below.? But it was deeply embedded in the non-profit industrial complex. The ISO operated legally through its parent non-profit organization the Center for Economic Research and Social Change . A tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, CERSC received huge grants from the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation is well known for funding progressive groups, but only as long as they do not rock the boat too much. A Canadian environmental activist who has participated in projects funded by Tides told The Grayzone that the foundation funded a trip to the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, but eventually pulled funding for their environmental group?s excursion to the 2012 UN conference in Doha, Qatar, because the foundation was afraid the activists would carry out peaceful forms of civil disobedience. ?They funded some people ? those who wouldn?t rock the boat because they didn?t want people engaging in civil disobedience,? the Canadian environmental activist told The Grayzone. Another activist published a ?whistleblower?s open letter to Canadians ? explaining that the Tides Foundation, which funded many environmentalists in the country, was ?too afraid of reprisals from the government to act,? after the office of right-wing Prime Minister Stephen Harper threatened to challenge the foundation?s charitable status. Why a milquetoast liberal foundation would fund the ISO, a supposedly revolutionary socialist organization, raises serious questions about that group?s agenda. In fact, while the Tides Foundation was serving as one of the biggest financiers of the ISO, it was also funding Democratic Party-aligned organizations and even pro-Israel groups like J Street and the New Israel Fund, which actively campaign against the Palestinian call for BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel) and support the preservation of a settler-colonialist ethnically exclusivist state. Haymarket Books, blending important literature with regime change propaganda While the ISO was marginal during its existence, it punched above its weight through front organizations and prominent members who worked in the mainstream media and academia. The ISO?s publishing arm, Haymarket Books, has been especially influential. Haymarket describes itself as a ?radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago,? which had been the base for the ISO. Haymarket has indeed published many important books on pressing issues. However, it has supplemented these works with anti-anti-imperialist screeds that echo the US State Department?s rhetoric, but framed as ?from the left.? Among Haymarket?s most aggressively marketed releases of 2018 was ?The Impossible Revolution,? a collection of essays by the Syrian exiled writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh, who now lives in Turkey and functions as a lodestar to self-styled left-wing supporters of regime change in Syria. Al-Haj Saleh?s book was blurbed by Charles Lister , a former functionary of the UK?s Conservative Party who became a top lobbyist for arming Salafi-jihadist insurgents in Syria at the Gulf monarchy-funded Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. State Department cables exposed by WikiLeaks indicate that Yassin al-Haj Saleh was a US government informant in regular correspondence with American officials in Damascus. One such memo, dated April 24, 2006 , features advice by al-Haj Saleh apparently delivered to US officials in the country to use Islamism as a weapon against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Haymarket has also recently published ?Indefensible,? a book-length denunciation of the anti-imperialist left by the writer Rohini Hensman. The manifesto features ham-fisted attacks on journalists Julian Assange , John Pilger, and Seymour Hersh, along with unqualified support for virtually every US and NATO military intervention in the past 30 years, as well as the dirty war on Syria and the Maidan coup in Ukraine. Anand Gopal, the longtime ISO ally who speaks at the Socialism Conference every year, while working for a liberal foundation funded by the US State Department, praised Hensman?s book as a guide to ?how to be a principled internationalist in the era of imperialism.? More recently, Hensman took to the DSA?s official website to attack The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, Seymour Hersh, and Robert Fisk as ?neo-Stalinists? engaged in a ?convergence? with neo-Nazis. No evidence was provided to support the extreme claim. Ashley Smith , an ideologue of the now-defunct ISO, says he is currently writing another anti-anti-imperialist book for Haymarket entitled ?Socialism and Anti-Imperialism.? Tiny, irrelevant Trotskyite groups, from South to North America Trotskyite groups are notorious throughout the world for their extreme sectarian tendencies. The organizations rarely last long, frequently splintering into tiny groupuscules over political disagreements. Unsurprisingly, then, the so-called ?left? opposition in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba ? which is celebrated by Trotskyite groups like the ISO ? is in fact infinitesimal and insignificant. Nils McCune, a socialist and environmental activist who has lived in Nicaragua for years, explained in an interview on our podcast Moderate Rebels that one of these parties, the Movement for the Renovation of Sandinismo (MRS) is a tiny group that is irrelevant in the country. Unable to mobilize popular support, this ?left? opposition can only lobby the US government for regime change. As Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, revealed in MintPress News , the MRS has received direct support from the US government in its campaign to prevent the election of Daniel Ortega as president, and lobbied for sanctions against Nicaragua after he was elected. Similarly, in Venezuela the ostensible left opposition has offered ?critical support? to Washington?s regime change efforts. This February, a leader of the marginal Venezuelan Trotskyite group Marea Socialista held a friendly meeting with Juan Guaid? , the US-appointed right-wing coup leader. On February 5, Guaid? tweeted a photo of a meeting with Marea Socialista?s Nicmer Evans. Juan Guaid? hails from the far-right party Voluntad Popular , which was practically founded by the US government and has been deeply involved in street violence throughout Venezuela. Jesus Rodriguez Espinoza, a Chavista who lives in Venezuela and is editor of the independent news website, the Orinoco Tribune , told The Grayzone when we reported in the country in February that Marea Socialista is ?tiny? and has ?no power.? He was genuinely surprised at how much coverage these minuscule groups have received in the US progressive media, because inside Venezuela they have negligible influence. Yet the Trotskyite organization has constantly been given a platform by the ISO?s newspaper Socialist Worker (Marea Socialista even enjoys its own tag on the website ). Jacobin Magazine, the self-declared ?leading voice of the American left,? has also given a huge platform to Marea Socialista operatives to push for what they call a ?Chavismo from below? ? despite the fact that the Trotskyite group is virtually unknown to average Venezuelans, including to millions of poor and working-class Chavistas. Also featured in the February 5 photo of the meeting with US-backed coup leader Juan Guaid? was the anti-Maduro liberal intellectual Edgardo Lander , who is popular in anti-communist left-wing circles in the US but almost unknown inside Venezuela. Like Marea Socialista, Lander has enjoyed very positive coverage in the progressive Anglo press. Democracy Now , which has advanced regime-change propaganda on Syria on repeated occasions, offered its platform to Lander this May. Hosts Amy Goodman and Nermeen Sheikh lobbed softball questions at the intellectual, and failed to disclose that he met with Guaid?. In his Democracy Now segment, Lander admitted that his outfit is a ?small collective,? whereas the Chavista movement he criticizes is massively popular in working-class barrios across the country. The International Socialist Organization has played a similar role in the US, with little visibility outside the left and almost no grassroots base. Now that the ISO has disbanded, its veterans can reach into the rapidly growing ideologically diffuse world of Democratic Socialists of America, using platforms like Socialism 2019 to infect DSA?s youthful core with the imperial politics of regime change ? but always ?from the left,? and always ?from below.? Anand Gopal Ashley Smith China Dan La Botz DSA Haymarket Imperialism International Socialist Organization ISO Jacobin Marea Socialista Nicaragua socialism Syria Venezuela Yassin al-Haj Saleh -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Thu Aug 26 13:49:50 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2021 08:49:50 -0500 Subject: [Peace] Truth from The Grayzone Message-ID: DSA/Jacobin/Haymarket-sponsored ?Socialism? conference features US gov-funded regime-change activists Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal ?July 6, 2019 The 2019 Socialism Conference, sponsored by American leftist juggernauts the DSA, Jacobin magazine, and ISO?s Haymarket Books, features regime-change activists from multiple US government-funded NGOs. (Puede leer este art?culo en espa?ol aqu? ) Socialism is now apparently brought to you by the US State Department. From July 4 to 7, thousands of left-wing activists from across the United States are gathering in Chicago for the 2019 Socialism Conference . At this event, some of the most powerful institutions on the American socialist ? but avowedly anti-communist ? left have brought together a motley crew of regime-change activists to demonize Official Enemies of Washington. One anti-China panel at the conference features speakers from two different organizations that are both bankrolled by the US government?s soft-power arm the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) , a group founded out of Ronald Reagan?s CIA in the 1980s to grease the wheels of right-wing regime-change efforts and promote ?free markets? across the planet. Another longtime ally who has spoken at every single annual Socialism Conference since 2009, Anand Gopal, works at a liberal foundation that is directly funded by the US State Department. He is headlining a panel this year to provide ?A Socialist View of the Arab Spring.? Yet another 2019 conference panel rails against the socialist governments of Nicaragua and Cuba ? two-thirds of John Bolton?s ?troika of tyranny? ? with outspoken proponents of regime change. One of the speakers, Dan La Botz, hosted an event in 2018 that featured right-wing Nicaraguan activists wearing masks and disguised as students, who were junketed to meet with Republican lawmakers in Washington by the US government-funded right-wing organization Freedom House. The Socialism Conference?s regime-change lobbying ?Nicaragua expert? La Botz has admitted in leaked emails obtained by The Grayzone that ?there is virtually no left among the opposition? to Nicaragua?s democratically elected socialist government. La Botz, a leader within Democratic Socialists of America, likewise acknowledged in these emails that there is ?little likelihood of an outcome to the rebellion that goes beyond a more democratic capitalist regime.? But he has still vociferously lobbied for Nicaragua?s Sandinista government to be overthrown by US government-backed insurgents ? and is using his platform at the biggest socialist conference in the United States to do it. Merging of largest US socialist organizations The 2019 Socialism Conference is advertised under the catchy slogan: ?No borders, no bosses, no binaries.? Each ticket comes in at a neat $105 per person (or a $250 ?solidarity rate,? for the hardcore supporters) ? and this doesn?t include the rate for the rooms at the hotel where it?s held. For years, the Socialism Conference functioned as a platform for the International Socialist Organization (ISO), a small group steeped in the tradition of sectarian American Trotskyite politics, which pushed a hardline anti-communism and attacked virtually all socialist governments in history as ?not truly socialist.? Founded in 1977 after a long line of sectarian splits, the ISO never became a significant political force. It was mostly relegated to recruiting young impressionable students on liberal arts college campuses. As an avowedly anti-communist organization, the ISO eschewed symbols long associated with the communist left, like hammers and sickles and red flags. Instead, it chose a clenched fist ? one eerily similar to the symbol used by the US government-funded Serbian activist group Otpor and similar offshoots in Eastern Europe, which carried out Washington-backed neoliberal ?color revolutions? in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism. The ISO claimed to be anti-war, but its leaders spent a disproportionate percentage of their time and resources attacking the anti-imperialist left. They could more accurately be referred to as the anti-anti-imperialist left. This March, the ISO voted to dissolve ? in a decision some former members joked was the most democratic act ever undertaken by the organization, which had been dominated by an unelected leadership of veteran Trotskyite activists. The dissolution was prompted by evidence that the ISO?s steering committee mishandled sexual assault allegations. It also came as the ISO?s membership was shrinking and rapidly being absorbed by a newly burgeoning anti-communist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. Now that the ISO has dissolved, some of its past prominent members have entered the ranks of the DSA, burrowing from within to inject their anti-anti-imperialist politics into the group. Because Trotskyites are so sectarian and notoriously incapable of holding together organizations, they are infamous for infiltrating larger, more popular groups and trying to take them over, in a tactic known as entryism. This is precisely the strategy being used by former members of the ISO ? and by another tiny US Trotskyite organization, Solidarity , which was led by anti-Nicaragua regime-change activist and Socialism Conference speaker Dan La Botz, now a leader in DSA. Democratic Socialists of America is the largest self-described socialist organization in the United States, with more than 60,000 card-carrying members. It is also very heterogeneous, with many internal contradictions and conflicting political views. In 2019, for the first time, the organizers of the Socialism Conference ? including many holdovers from the ISO leadership ? joined together with two new sponsors: DSA, and the closely DSA-allied Jacobin magazine, another platform for anti-communist and anti-anti-imperialist politics. At the bottom of the Socialism conference website , a note reads, ?Brought to you by Haymarket, Jacobin, and the Democratic Socialists of America.? Haymarket is the book publishing arm of the now defunct ISO, and its editorial board features some of the group?s former leaders. Top speakers at the conference include Democracy Now host Amy Goodman, Jacobin magazine founder and editor Bhaskar Sunkara, and journalist Naomi Klein, the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. Klein was chosen to head the final plenary, titled ?Care and Repair : The Revolutionary, Democratic Power of a Global Green New Deal.? The 2019 Socialism Conference, like its annual predecessors, combines calls for radical economic democratic transformation and progressive social progress with the demonization of independent foreign governments that are targeted by the US government for regime change, such as Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria, Iran, China, and Russia. The schedule of panels on foreign policy and international issues features a veritable who?s who of leftist regime-change activists. There is even a talk devoted specifically to demonizing the anti-imperialist left . Curiously, the 2019 Socialism Conference has no panels devoted specifically to Venezuela , which since this January has endured a US-led right-wing coup attempt, and which is suffering under suffocating sanctions that amount to a de facto economic blockade. In the past, the ISO has harshly criticized Venezuela?s democratically elected socialist government, condemning Presidents Hugo Ch?vez and Nicol?s Maduro for not being radical enough and for not supposedly implementing the vague concept of ?socialism from below.? In this way, the 2019 Socialism Conference also stands out as a sign of the effective political merging of what had previously been two distinct political trends: the Cliffite Trotskyites of the International Socialist Organization and the anti-communist social democrats of the Democratic Socialists of America. Anti-China ?workers? rights? groups funded by anti-labor US government One of the most eyebrow-raising panels at the 2019 Socialism Conference is entitled ?China and the US : Inter-Imperial Rivalry or Class Struggle and Solidarity?? The panel portrays the US and China as equally malicious imperialist powers, downplaying and whitewashing the uniquely destructive nature of Washington?s foreign wars and corporate domination. The panel features three speakers, two of whom work for anti-China groups that are funded by the US government?s regime-change arm, the National Endowment for Democracy. The third speaker is Ashley Smith, a former leader of the ISO who has spent the past eight years romanticizing foreign-backed, far-right sectarian Islamist ?moderate rebels ? in Syria. The first speaker listed on the panel is Elaine Lu , the program officer at China Labor Watch. This group is described by the Socialism conference website simply as ?a New York-based NGO advocating for workers? rights in China.? What Socialism Conference sponsors DSA, Jacobin, and Haymarket did not disclose is that its speaker?s employer is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED states without qualification that its goals include supporting ?free markets? abroad. At the top of the about page on its website is a video of right-wing cold warrior Ronald Reagan inaugurating the US government-funded body. The National Endowment for Democracy?s 990 tax forms show how Washington?s regime-change arm has bankrolled China Labor Watch for years. Substantial NED funding goes back to at least 2009 . According to the NED?s 2015 form 990 , China Labor Watch received a $150,000 grant that year. On the NED?s 2013 tax form, it lists another $110,000 grant for China Labor Watch. In 2014 , China Labor Watch got $150,000 from the NED . According to the group?s annual report that year , its total revenues for all of 2014 was $238,003, meaning 63 percent, or nearly two-thirds of its funding came from the US government. China Labor Watch?s other major donor is the Tides Foundation, a liberal organization that also happened to be one of the main financial sponsor?s of the ISO?s parent non-profit. In 2014, Tides gave $40,645 to China Labor Watch, another 17 percent of its budget that year. Joining Elaine Lu as the other main speaker on the Socialism Conference?s anti-China panel is Kevin Lin , who coordinates the China program at the Washington, DC-based NGO the International Labor Rights Forum. The Socialism Conference once again failed to mention that this group is also bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy. According to the NED?s 2016 form 990 , the US government?s regime-change arm gave the International Labor Rights Forum $150,000 that year alone. The International Labor Rights Forum likewise received $96,590 from the NED in 2015, and $62,500 in 2014. The Socialism Conference also identified Kevin Lin as a co-editor of the Made in China journal , which focuses on labor rights. A disclaimer at the bottom of the publication?s swanky website notes that it is funded by the European Union?s Horizon 2020 , a neoliberal business program which the European Commission describes as ?the financial instrument implementing the Innovation Union, a Europe 2020 flagship initiative aimed at securing Europe?s global competitiveness.? These are the financiers behind the speakers that the Socialism Conference and its sponsors the DSA, Jacobin, and Haymarket brought together to explain why China is a malevolent imperialist power. Some of these groups may seem progressive, but they operate in effect as vehicles for US government soft power, exploiting the cause of human rights or labor rights to undermine and destabilize foreign governments that Washington has targeted for regime change. China Labor Watch and the International Labor Rights Forum are far from the only ostensibly progressive anti-China groups funded by the US government. Other China-related NED grantees include ?human rights? organizations like the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders , Human Rights in China , China Aid , China Change , and China Rights in Action (another Tides grantee), along with the New York-based Chinese Feminist Collective and news websites like China Digital Times . China Labour Bulletin, which maintains a map of strikes going on across the gigantic country, is likewise frequently cited by left-wing websites in the US. While its slogan is ?Supporting the Workers? Movement in China,? China Labour Bulletin (CLB) is not based in the mainland but rather in Hong Kong ? and it is funded by the US government. CLB notes on its website that it ?receives grants from a wide range of government or quasi-government bodies, trade unions and private foundations, all of which are based outside of China.? For decades, CLB?s founder and executive director Han Dongfang broadcasted anti-China programming on Radio Free Asia , a US government-funded propaganda outlet that was founded by the CIA to push anti-communist disinformation. Han?s work is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, and he was a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The ISO?s newspaper Socialist Worker has praised Han Dongfang as a leftist hero, without ever disclosing his extensive links to the US government?s regime-change machinery. Socialist Worker has repeatedly drawn on the work of China Labour Bulletin, over more than a decade . The ISO?s journal the International Socialist Review has also relied on the US government-funded organization?s research, and Jacobin magazine has noted CLB?s ?roots go back to the Tiananmen Square protests.? Human Rights Watch, another key part of the regime-change lobby, has lionized Han, happily noting that his show on the US government?s Radio Free Asia ?is one of the network?s most popular programs .? China is just one of the countries where the US government?s soft-power arm funds such putative progressive groups. The NED likewise funds many liberal anti-Cuba organizations, such as the Foundation for Human Rights in Cuba, Center for a Free Cuba, the Cuban Institute for the Freedom of Expression and Press, and the news website CubaNet . Or there are NED-funded groups pushing regime change against Syria and Iran, like the Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies and Human Rights Activists in Iran . While the United States has one of the lowest rates of unionization in the industrialized world, a bloody history of worker repression and anti-labor laws, and historically weak unions among those that still do exist, its regime-change arm the NED has funded workers? rights groups to promote a progressive image of America abroad. For decades, for instance, the NED has bankrolled the international Solidarity Center of the major union federation the AFL-CIO. The center receives tens of millions of dollars from the US government?s regime-change arm annually, and returns the favor by avoiding topics that would anger the US State Department and bite the hand that feeds it. Throughout the Cold War, the AFL-CIO remained a reliably anti-communist union that received funding from US government agencies, including the CIA, in order to combat and ultimately try to eliminate communist influence in the American labor movement. It was a textbook example of a controlled opposition. This is not to say that NED-funded groups cannot at times have a positive impact on the lives of average people; but their work is always part of a larger agenda, with ulterior imperial motives guiding them along the way. A controlled opposition can make some changes, but it always remains controlled. US State Department-funded speaker providing ?socialist? take on ?Arab Spring? Yet another speaker at the 2019 Socialism Conference works for a liberal foundation directly funded by the US government. Journalist Anand Gopal, who has been a close ally of the ISO for a decade, has a panel all to himself this year: ?A Socialist View of the Arab Spring .? The Socialism Conference website did not provide a bio for Gopal, yet alone disclose that his employer is funded by the US government. It simply described him as a ?Pulitzer-Prize nominated journalist,? and said he will explain how to understand ?the lessons of the protests, uprisings, rebellions, and wars that shook the Arab world beginning in 2011.? Left unmentioned is that Gopal serves as a ?fellow with the International Security Program ? at the New America Foundation. This foundation?s website makes it very clear that it is directly funded by the US State Department , along with massive corporations and banks ? clearly institutions that are invested in advancing the revolutionary socialist cause. Anand Gopal has harshly attacked the anti-imperialist left for opposing the international proxy war on Syria. He strongly supported the Syrian opposition, which is dominated by Salafi-jihadists, but which Gopal has consistently whitewashed and portrayed as a supposedly progressive force . Gopal likewise reported inside al-Qaeda-occupied territory , which The New Yorker euphemistically described as ?Syria?s Last Bastion of Freedom .? And he has constantly downplayed the billions of dollars of funding and weapons from the US, Europe, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar that kept the Syrian opposition afloat, fueling the brutal war for years. Going back to at least 2009 , Gopal has spoken at every single one of the ISO?s Socialism Conferences ? in 2018 , 2017 , 2016 , 2015 , 2014 , 2013 , 2012 , 2011 , and 2010 . Gopal has also done more than a dozen extensive interviews for the ISO?s newspaper Socialist Worker and journal the International Socialist Review , blaming the rise of ISIS on Official Enemies and spreading the conspiracy theory that the US is actually ?helping the regime ? of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, not truly trying to overthrow it. ?Socialist? lobbying for US-backed right-wing coup in Nicaragua Another noteworthy 2019 Socialism Conference panel, called ?Problems of the US Left: The Cases of Cuba and Nicaragua ,? is led by Dan La Botz and Samuel Farber, veteran Trotskyite activists and outspoken proponents of regime change in the two respective countries. The speakers? problem with the US left appears to be that it has demonstrated too much solidarity with socialist governments in Havana and Managua, which, in their view from inside the United States, ?rely more on bureaucracy than democracy.? Farber is a Cuban exile whose family left the country for unspecified reasons when he was a child in 1958 ? a year before its revolution ? and has spent the rest of his life as a professional critic of its socialist government. Today, he contributes regular attacks on the Cuban Revolution to journals from Jacobin to New Politics to In These Times, where he published a trenchant denunciation of Fidel Castro upon his death in 2016. Farber accuses Castro of developing a model of ?state capitalism,? wielding a term Trotskyite ideologues routinely fling at any revolutionary government that is insufficiently pure. He calls for ?a revolutionary democratic alternative? through socialist resistance from below.? The concept of regime change ?from below? is also central to the rhetoric of exile groups like the People?s MEK , a US- and Saudi-backed cult of personality that calls for toppling Iran?s government through ?indigenous regime change.? Dan La Botz, for his part, has risen to prominence as a full-time opponent of another member of the Trump administration?s ?troika of tyranny?: the socialist government of Nicaragua, and the Sandinista movement that it represents. La Botz has published an anti-Sandinista manifesto with ISO publisher Haymarket Books, which is advertised as a survey of ?the failures of the Nicaraguan Revolution, by one of the most important Marxist-historians of Latin America.? In June 2018, as a US-backed, violent regime-change attempt surged across Nicaragua , threatening the rule of democratically elected President Daniel Ortega, La Botz attempted to mobilize left-wing US support for the anti-Sandinista opposition. That month, he joined an anti-Sandinista event ? co-sponsored by DSA?s New York branch, Haymarket, the academic journal NACLA, and the Marxist Education Project ? at Saint Peter?s Church in New York City, to drum up local support for the coup. The event featured speeches by several Nicaraguan anti-Sandinista activists who were involved in the regime-change attempt, including self-described students who wore masks on stage, concealing their identities from the audience. The Grayzone has obtained internal DSA email reports authored by La Botz which revealed that, days after the event at Saint Peter?s Church, those same students met with right-wing Republican legislators on Capitol Hill, including neoconservative Senators Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The students beamed with pride, appearing without masks in photo ops with the avowedly anti-socialist members of Congress. Their trip was financed by Freedom House , a right-wing soft-power organization that is funded almost entirely by the US government. The students? US-backed delegation included Victor Cuadras, a fanatical right-wing activist who openly supported Donald Trump?s agenda for Latin America and blamed the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua for the caravan of desperate asylum seekers on the US-Mexico border. On June 15, 2018, Dan La Botz sent an email report to DSA leadership, reflecting on the event. He acknowledged that ?the Nicaraguans both on the panel and in the public had virtually no political analysis and no vision or program for the future of their country.? Then in a follow-up email report sent to DSA leadership on July 24, La Botz defended the students? collaboration with neoconservative politicians like Rubio and Cruz. ?The students, ages 21 to 24 or so, who spoke on our panel then went off to speak with Republican legislators, guided by a rightwing foundation,? he wrote. ?While, of course, we do not think that this is a good strategy, this is perfectly understandable given that the Republicans are in power and have the ability to do something about Nicaragua.? While marketing the anti-Sandinista activists as grassroots youth deserving of left-wing solidarity, La Botz admitted in his internal DSA report, ?Nicaraguan opponents of the regime in the United States hold a wide variety of political views, though there is virtually no left among the opposition here that I am aware of.? And while publicly framing the regime-change operation in Nicaragua as a progressive uprising, La Botz privately conceded, ?There is, however, little likelihood of an outcome to the rebellion that goes beyond a more democratic capitalist regime.? An excerpt from an email report on Nicaragua to DSA leadership, written by Dan La Botz As The Grayzone reported in 2018, the US government?s regime-change arm the National Endowment for Democracy boasted of spending millions on anti-Sandinista civil society and media outfits ?to lay the groundwork for insurrection? in the years and months ahead of the coup. While the coup attempt in Nicaragua was portrayed as a peaceful people?s uprising by figures like La Botz, it was in fact a violent putsch that saw armed elements erect roadblocks across the country, holding up ambulances, torturing , brutalizing , kidnapping, and murdering supporters of the Sandinistas. Anti-Sandinista insurgents dragged an unarmed, on-leave police officer to death from a truck and then burnt his corpse at a roadblock. They raped a 10-year-old girl at a roadblock and burnt the homes of local Sandinista legislators. They occupied and ransacked a public university campus , wrecked a women?s health center , and torched a daycare center . The armed opposition wreaked this havoc while attacking police stations with mortars and gunfire, during a national dialogue in which the police were ordered to remain in their barracks. In the end, Nicaragua?s opposition caused the deaths of over 60 innocent people , while grinding the country?s previously productive economy to a halt. Once the coup was extinguished, the US Congress passed the Nica Act without debate , imposing harsh sanctions on Nicaragua?s economy that emulated those already leveled against Venezuela and Iran. On January 9, Dan La Botz appeared at a meeting of the New York City DSA Anti-War Working Group to amp up the attack on Nicaragua?s socialist government. There, he was challenged by Gunar Olsen , a contributor to The Grayzone, about the event he organized last year with masked right-wing Nicaraguan students sponsored by Freedom House. La Botz claimed that the event had originally been planned as a discussion of his book, but that ?somebody said, these students were coming through. And I said, that sounds great.? He continued: ?My view is, they came from their country because someone gave em some money, and they can come to the United States and they wanted to talk to somebody who might be able to help their country? It may have been though that there were some conservative political forces working with them and the Republicans, it may have been that there was some of those four students that was more hip than the others but it wasn?t my impression.? La Botz concluded by telling Olsen and the DSA crowd, ?I don?t feel at all bad, I don?t think it was a terrible thing. I think they were four young people coming to this country that wanted to speak there. We didn?t know they were going there, we didn?t know where they were heading, I didn?t know they were gonna speak there. Would I do it again? If I knew what was going to happen I?d probably say, let?s see if we can find some other students.? However, in his private email assessment of the event to DSA leadership, La Botz had defended the students? subsequent meetings with right-wing Republicans as ?perfectly understandable.? In his internal DSA report, La Botz went on to characterize those in the US left that opposed the coup in Nicaragua as ?foreign leftists? who are ?backers of Putin, Assad, Iran, Hamas, and now Ortega.? La Botz did not respond to several attempts to reach him by phone. Update (August 19): After this article was published, an activist notified The Grayzone of a Facebook conversation in which Dan La Botz admitted he invited a US-backed right-wing Evangelical opposition leader to speak at a panel on Nicaragua, and praised the coup-supporting conservative as ?an authentic voice of the young people of Nicaragua.? On Facebook, the activist noted that, at La Botz?s panel, opposition leader Lesther Alem?n ?was portrayed as a leader of the nicaraguan student left.? In reality, he is a right-wing Evangelical Christian. Alem?n now lives in exile in the United States, where he regularly collaborates with the government of Donald Trump. In July, Alem?n attended the State Department?s Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom , a soft-power event that demonizes adversaries of the US government using the language of religious freedom. In an interview with the National Catholic Register , Alem?n called for the US State Department to provide more support to the Nicaraguan opposition. ?It saddens me also that here in the United States we have encountered severe opposition from American leftist groups,? Alem?n said in the interview. ?[We] are not engaged in an ideological struggle.? Asked if he supports sanctions on his former country, Alem?n declared, ?of course I support these measures.? He called for the US government to continue pressuring the Nicaraguan government and imposing more sanctions. In response to this, La Botz wrote on Facebook, ?Lester Alem?n?s decision to participate in a State Department event and his support for U.S. sanctions is in my opinion unfortunate.? But, like usual, La Botz pointed the finger at the government of Nicaragua?s democratically elected president: ?That he and other young people would take such a course is a result of Daniel Ortega and his government having closed democratic options in Nicaragua,? La Botz claimed. ?When Lester Aleman spoke at our meeting, he had not yet come to these conclusions. He was till then an authentic voice of the young people of Nicaragua.? ?Revolutionary socialists? funded by the non-profit industrial complex The force behind the annual Socialism Conference, the International Socialist Organization marketed itself as a radical, even revolutionary movement supporting ?socialism from below.? But it was deeply embedded in the non-profit industrial complex. The ISO operated legally through its parent non-profit organization the Center for Economic Research and Social Change . A tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, CERSC received huge grants from the Tides Foundation. The Tides Foundation is well known for funding progressive groups, but only as long as they do not rock the boat too much. A Canadian environmental activist who has participated in projects funded by Tides told The Grayzone that the foundation funded a trip to the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, but eventually pulled funding for their environmental group?s excursion to the 2012 UN conference in Doha, Qatar, because the foundation was afraid the activists would carry out peaceful forms of civil disobedience. ?They funded some people ? those who wouldn?t rock the boat because they didn?t want people engaging in civil disobedience,? the Canadian environmental activist told The Grayzone. Another activist published a ?whistleblower?s open letter to Canadians ? explaining that the Tides Foundation, which funded many environmentalists in the country, was ?too afraid of reprisals from the government to act,? after the office of right-wing Prime Minister Stephen Harper threatened to challenge the foundation?s charitable status. Why a milquetoast liberal foundation would fund the ISO, a supposedly revolutionary socialist organization, raises serious questions about that group?s agenda. In fact, while the Tides Foundation was serving as one of the biggest financiers of the ISO, it was also funding Democratic Party-aligned organizations and even pro-Israel groups like J Street and the New Israel Fund, which actively campaign against the Palestinian call for BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel) and support the preservation of a settler-colonialist ethnically exclusivist state. Haymarket Books, blending important literature with regime change propaganda While the ISO was marginal during its existence, it punched above its weight through front organizations and prominent members who worked in the mainstream media and academia. The ISO?s publishing arm, Haymarket Books, has been especially influential. Haymarket describes itself as a ?radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago,? which had been the base for the ISO. Haymarket has indeed published many important books on pressing issues. However, it has supplemented these works with anti-anti-imperialist screeds that echo the US State Department?s rhetoric, but framed as ?from the left.? Among Haymarket?s most aggressively marketed releases of 2018 was ?The Impossible Revolution,? a collection of essays by the Syrian exiled writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh, who now lives in Turkey and functions as a lodestar to self-styled left-wing supporters of regime change in Syria. Al-Haj Saleh?s book was blurbed by Charles Lister , a former functionary of the UK?s Conservative Party who became a top lobbyist for arming Salafi-jihadist insurgents in Syria at the Gulf monarchy-funded Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. State Department cables exposed by WikiLeaks indicate that Yassin al-Haj Saleh was a US government informant in regular correspondence with American officials in Damascus. One such memo, dated April 24, 2006 , features advice by al-Haj Saleh apparently delivered to US officials in the country to use Islamism as a weapon against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Haymarket has also recently published ?Indefensible,? a book-length denunciation of the anti-imperialist left by the writer Rohini Hensman. The manifesto features ham-fisted attacks on journalists Julian Assange , John Pilger, and Seymour Hersh, along with unqualified support for virtually every US and NATO military intervention in the past 30 years, as well as the dirty war on Syria and the Maidan coup in Ukraine. Anand Gopal, the longtime ISO ally who speaks at the Socialism Conference every year, while working for a liberal foundation funded by the US State Department, praised Hensman?s book as a guide to ?how to be a principled internationalist in the era of imperialism.? More recently, Hensman took to the DSA?s official website to attack The Grayzone editor Max Blumenthal, Seymour Hersh, and Robert Fisk as ?neo-Stalinists? engaged in a ?convergence? with neo-Nazis. No evidence was provided to support the extreme claim. Ashley Smith , an ideologue of the now-defunct ISO, says he is currently writing another anti-anti-imperialist book for Haymarket entitled ?Socialism and Anti-Imperialism.? Tiny, irrelevant Trotskyite groups, from South to North America Trotskyite groups are notorious throughout the world for their extreme sectarian tendencies. The organizations rarely last long, frequently splintering into tiny groupuscules over political disagreements. Unsurprisingly, then, the so-called ?left? opposition in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba ? which is celebrated by Trotskyite groups like the ISO ? is in fact infinitesimal and insignificant. Nils McCune, a socialist and environmental activist who has lived in Nicaragua for years, explained in an interview on our podcast Moderate Rebels that one of these parties, the Movement for the Renovation of Sandinismo (MRS) is a tiny group that is irrelevant in the country. Unable to mobilize popular support, this ?left? opposition can only lobby the US government for regime change. As Blumenthal, a co-author of this article, revealed in MintPress News , the MRS has received direct support from the US government in its campaign to prevent the election of Daniel Ortega as president, and lobbied for sanctions against Nicaragua after he was elected. Similarly, in Venezuela the ostensible left opposition has offered ?critical support? to Washington?s regime change efforts. This February, a leader of the marginal Venezuelan Trotskyite group Marea Socialista held a friendly meeting with Juan Guaid? , the US-appointed right-wing coup leader. On February 5, Guaid? tweeted a photo of a meeting with Marea Socialista?s Nicmer Evans. Juan Guaid? hails from the far-right party Voluntad Popular , which was practically founded by the US government and has been deeply involved in street violence throughout Venezuela. Jesus Rodriguez Espinoza, a Chavista who lives in Venezuela and is editor of the independent news website, the Orinoco Tribune , told The Grayzone when we reported in the country in February that Marea Socialista is ?tiny? and has ?no power.? He was genuinely surprised at how much coverage these minuscule groups have received in the US progressive media, because inside Venezuela they have negligible influence. Yet the Trotskyite organization has constantly been given a platform by the ISO?s newspaper Socialist Worker (Marea Socialista even enjoys its own tag on the website ). Jacobin Magazine, the self-declared ?leading voice of the American left,? has also given a huge platform to Marea Socialista operatives to push for what they call a ?Chavismo from below? ? despite the fact that the Trotskyite group is virtually unknown to average Venezuelans, including to millions of poor and working-class Chavistas. Also featured in the February 5 photo of the meeting with US-backed coup leader Juan Guaid? was the anti-Maduro liberal intellectual Edgardo Lander , who is popular in anti-communist left-wing circles in the US but almost unknown inside Venezuela. Like Marea Socialista, Lander has enjoyed very positive coverage in the progressive Anglo press. Democracy Now , which has advanced regime-change propaganda on Syria on repeated occasions, offered its platform to Lander this May. Hosts Amy Goodman and Nermeen Sheikh lobbed softball questions at the intellectual, and failed to disclose that he met with Guaid?. In his Democracy Now segment, Lander admitted that his outfit is a ?small collective,? whereas the Chavista movement he criticizes is massively popular in working-class barrios across the country. The International Socialist Organization has played a similar role in the US, with little visibility outside the left and almost no grassroots base. Now that the ISO has disbanded, its veterans can reach into the rapidly growing ideologically diffuse world of Democratic Socialists of America, using platforms like Socialism 2019 to infect DSA?s youthful core with the imperial politics of regime change ? but always ?from the left,? and always ?from below.? Anand Gopal Ashley Smith China Dan La Botz DSA Haymarket Imperialism International Socialist Organization ISO Jacobin Marea Socialista Nicaragua socialism Syria Venezuela Yassin al-Haj Saleh -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 28 14:31:53 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2021 09:31:53 -0500 Subject: [Peace] Fwd: **Emergency Mobilization Against Evictions 8/28** References: Message-ID: > Hey all, > > The unelected Supreme Court struck down the federal moratorium on evictions last night. Illinois' eviction moratorium is set to expire on September 18th -- in just a few weeks. If our moratorium is not extended, there could be massive waves of evictions throughout Champaign county, forcing many of us & our neighbors to become homeless and triggering a spike in COVID cases. > > As such, we're merging our Black August rally planned for tomorrow (8/28) at 4PM outside the Sheriff's office at 204 E. Main St, Urbana with an anti-eviction action called for by the Cancel the Rents campaign. In addition to demanding an end to police militarization & abysmal jail conditions, we'll be calling on the Sheriff to refuse to carry out evictions. > > > > Incarceration and the housing crisis are deeply intertwined issues, especially as more and more cities across the country move to criminalize homelessness. The same law enforcement officers who carry out racist terror will soon be carrying out evictions against working class and oppressed people across the country. Please join us tomorrow in an emergency mobilization to hold law enforcement accountable and renew the struggle against evictions. > > Solidarity! > PSL-CU -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: CancelTheRents.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 159505 bytes Desc: not available URL: From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 28 14:31:53 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2021 09:31:53 -0500 Subject: [Peace] Fwd: **Emergency Mobilization Against Evictions 8/28** References: Message-ID: > Hey all, > > The unelected Supreme Court struck down the federal moratorium on evictions last night. Illinois' eviction moratorium is set to expire on September 18th -- in just a few weeks. If our moratorium is not extended, there could be massive waves of evictions throughout Champaign county, forcing many of us & our neighbors to become homeless and triggering a spike in COVID cases. > > As such, we're merging our Black August rally planned for tomorrow (8/28) at 4PM outside the Sheriff's office at 204 E. Main St, Urbana with an anti-eviction action called for by the Cancel the Rents campaign. In addition to demanding an end to police militarization & abysmal jail conditions, we'll be calling on the Sheriff to refuse to carry out evictions. > > > > Incarceration and the housing crisis are deeply intertwined issues, especially as more and more cities across the country move to criminalize homelessness. The same law enforcement officers who carry out racist terror will soon be carrying out evictions against working class and oppressed people across the country. Please join us tomorrow in an emergency mobilization to hold law enforcement accountable and renew the struggle against evictions. > > Solidarity! > PSL-CU -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: CancelTheRents.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 159505 bytes Desc: not available URL: From carl at newsfromneptune.com Sat Aug 28 15:40:28 2021 From: carl at newsfromneptune.com (C. G. Estabrook) Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2021 10:40:28 -0500 Subject: [Peace] See Jimmy Dore's interview with Chris Hedges Message-ID: See Jimmy Dore's interview with Chris Hedges on Jimmy Dore's channel: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcjeMWrboX0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=NusQH0pnX7Y ?CGE h/t JBN From karenaram at hotmail.com Sat Aug 28 20:12:39 2021 From: karenaram at hotmail.com (karen aram) Date: Sat, 28 Aug 2021 15:12:39 -0500 Subject: [Peace] See Jimmy Dore's interview with Chris Hedges In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Good one Carl, really good. I?ve cc?d Jason on this, in hopes he might be interest in running in on UPTV. > On Aug 28, 2021, at 10:40 AM, C. G. Estabrook via Peace wrote: > > See Jimmy Dore's interview with Chris Hedges on Jimmy Dore's channel: > > https://youtube.com/watch?v=fcjeMWrboX0 > https://youtube.com/watch?v=NusQH0pnX7Y > > ?CGE h/t JBN > > _______________________________________________ > Peace mailing list > Peace at lists.chambana.net > https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace