America’s Love Affair with Tyrants

Haiti

Obama has told Aristide not to return to Haiti, at least not until after elections. Apparently, his mere presence could destabilize the elections (which is to say, the people might change their minds and NOT vote for either of the corporatist/coupist candidates and support him, instead). Michel Martelly, one of the run-off candidates, is a pop star, Duvalierist, and a supporter of the disbanded military and the death squads known as FRAPH. He supported the coup that ousted Aristide. Mirlande Manigat, the other runoff candidate, is a former first lady whose husband won the presidency with less than 10% of the vote in an election held by the military in 1988. Her husband is said to have advised Duvalier to form the dreaded tonton macoutes, while her opponent, Martelly, actually served in them. The Duvaliers, of course, were brutal dictators supported by the U.S., while Aristide was a popularly elected president who was ousted in a U.S. supported coup.

So Haiti will get another brutal tyrant, or perhaps a slightly brutal one, dressed up in the garb of democracy, and the U.S. can continue its unsavory relations with the nation, unencumbered by allegations that it is supporting a dictator. Meanwhile, the U.S. will continue to do virtually nothing to help house the thousands still homeless from the earthquake, except saddle the nation with debt to pay off U.S. construction companies, or to quell the still growing cholera epidemic, with total cases expected to approach 800,000 this year.

Egypt

We loved Mubarak so much that we gave him $1.3 billion a year until he was forced by his own people to flee. We loved him because his did our bidding, supported our policies in the Middle East, including supporting Israeli and helping them to repress the Palestinians. Therefore, we did nothing to aid his ouster, even when it became inevitable. In fact, we continued to support him until the day he fled, in hopes of maintaining some semblance of control over this invaluable region. (We wouldn’t want a popular government to arise or another Nassir).

Libya

On the other hand, we hate Gaddafi because he has always gone it alone and refused to do our bidding. However, he hadn’t really gotten in our way much lately, and he was a strong dictator who kept the fundamentalists, communists and unionists all completely suppressed. Therefore, we saw fit to let him run amok until now, when it looks like his ouster may come about despite our inaction, possibly to be replaced with a popular government, or at least one that is antagonistic to the U.S.

Now the U.S. and its allies have insisted on using “any means necessary” in order to Libya’s civilians. Yet, in order to enforce a no fly zone, they will have to bomb the country in much the same way they bombed Iraq, which will no doubt result in far more civilian casualties than Gaddafi has so far caused.

The Arabian Peninsula

Then there are Yemen and Bahrain, where the local governments are slaughtering protesters, sometimes with the aid of the Saudi military and mercenaries from Pakistan. Do we care about these civilians or despise their dictators? Not if it might piss off the Saudis, whose oil and allegiance is far more valuable than the lives and safety of their civilians. So we’ll stand back and allow the local despots quash the uprisings and hope that our shock and awe in Libya will dissuade any would be rebels in other Middle Eastern or North African countries.

From Middle East to Mid-West: Workers Are Pissed!

While regimes across the Middle East face uprisings by workers and citizens fed up with autocratic rule, poverty and corruption, workers in the Mid-West have been protesting attacks on their workplace rights for the past week. The protests began in Wisconsin, in response to Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to ban collective bargaining and striking and his threat to call in the National Guard on workers who do strike. The protests have now spread to Ohio, with similar actions looming across the region. Wisconsin’s workers have been inspired by the uprisings in the Middle East, with demonstrators calling their governor Hosni Walker and carrying signs saying “Protest Like an Egyptian.”

The last time Wisconsin used the National Guard against workers was in 1886, in response to protests in support of the eight-hour day movement that grew out the Haymarket massacre in Chicago. In Milwaukee, the state militia fired on striking steel workers at Bay View, killing seven. Walker’s declaration is a stark reminder of the brutality the state has historically used to defend private profits, and should be seen as wakeup call to workers that history often repeats itself.

In Wisconsin, tens of thousands have been demonstrating throughout the week, with enough teachers calling in sick to effectively shut down the Madison and Milwaukee school districts. 30,000 protested outside the state capital in Madison on Wednesday, with dozens of workers and students camping out overnight. Many private sector workers joined them with some grilling bratwursts and providing other support. Veterans groups also joined the protests and issued condemnations of Walker’s threat to use the National Guard against his own citizens. 1,500 people marched on Walker’s suburban Milwaukee home. Thousands of university and K-12 students also walked out of classes across the state.

Walker’s budget plan would bar public workers from negotiating over pensions, health care benefits, and workplace conditions, while forcing them to double their contributions to pensions and health care, resulting in an 8-20% pay cut for most employees. It would also ban strikes. However, the biggest threat (in the eyes of the union bosses) is the elimination of automatic dues check offs, which would jeopardize millions of dollars of members’ dues that have been used by the union bosses to buy lobbyists, influence politicians, and maintain their seats at the ruling class banquet tables. It is no coincidence that Wisconsin Democratic lawmakers have fled the state in hopes of blocking a vote on the law—they stand to lose millions in campaign contributions.

Unions like the AFT and NEA have sold out their members repeatedly by supporting Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core Standards, their tacit acceptance of NLCB, and in many cases collaborating with districts to impose merit pay and evaluations tied to student test scores. They routinely collaborate with lawmakers to impose wage and benefits cuts, furloughs and pension cuts on their members. It seems unlikely that they would suddenly decide to fight back now, unless there was a stronger motivator than their members’ standard of living. In fact, the unions have made it clear that they will accept Walker's pension and health care cuts, if he would just leave their unions intact. The rank and file workers, however, seem much more concerned with the attacks on their wages and benefits and their right to take collective action in defense of their working conditions. Workers across the country are fed up with the ruling elite’s assault on working people to pay for their greed.

There has been very little labor militancy in the U.S. since the 1980s, after the crushing of PATCO by Reagan, and the defeats of the Hormel, Greyhound and Phelps Dodge workers. Since then, the AFL-CIO and public employee unions have done everything in their power to suppress labor militancy, avoid strikes, and redirect worker frustration to political campaigns.

Contrary to Gov. Walker’s claims, Wisconsin is actually managing relatively well compared with other states. Their current budget deficit is only a $137 million, compared with $25 billion in California. The projection for next year is considerably worse, but nowhere near the scale of the crises in California, Texas and Illinois. What problems there are with the budget can hardly be blamed on teachers and other public employees. Walker gave away $140 million to special-interest groups in January, hardly a prudent move for a man obsessed with closing a budget deficit.

Reality Check: A Military Coup is Not a Revolution

The protests in Egypt have been exciting, inspiring and even potentially revolutionary, (emphasis on potentially). It is stirring to see so many people protesting throughout a region plagued by brutal dictatorships that have until recently terrorized their citizens into submission. However, the protesters in Egypt had only a couple of simple demands: They wanted Mubarak to step down, which they got, and they asked for more freedom, which they have not got. These do not make up a revolutionary platform.

Now that Mubarak has left and the military is in control, the media are calling it a momentous occasion. They’ve claimed that the Egyptian people have changed the world. Yet how is a military coup momentous? And how has the world changed? Another military coup, ho hum, what’s new?

What if the military does allow free elections in which Egyptians get to vote for a plutocrat or “fatherly” military figure? This is certainly not revolutionary, nor momentous. It may not even yield any increase in freedom. It certainly won’t change the economic relations that oppress the vast majority of Egyptians. It can’t, because as long as Egypt remains a client state of the U.S., its rulers must be subservient to U.S. interests, and its citizens subservient to them.

Obama, in his statement on the situation in Egypt, claimed that the future is in the hands of the Egyptian people. Yet it is clearly in the hands of the Egyptian military, which is to say in Obama’s hands, as the U.S. controls the military’s purse strings. He also said that “we” believe that the universal rights of all Egyptians must be respected and their aspirations must be met, yet the U.S. government gave the Egyptian government over $1 billion per year for the past thirty years so that they could buy the latest weaponry, some of which was used to repress ordinary Egyptians, rather than building schools, hospitals or infrastructure—hardly the behavior of a friend or ally of the Egyptian people. In fact, Obama supported Mubarak until the very end, hoping that he would somehow pull off a Hail Mary that would maintain the status quo, at least for U.S. interests.

The last thing Obama or the U.S. ruling elite want is democracy in Egypt.

U.S. More Unequal Than Egypt, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, China, Venezuela

Conservatives have been celebrating the 100^th birthday of Ronald Reagan this weekend, a  president who did more than any other to popularize anti-tax, anti-union and anti-poor sentiments even among the poor and working classes. Since Regan’s reign, the gap between the rich and the poor has escalated rapidly.

According to the CIA World Factbook, the U.S. is now ranked as the 42^nd “most unequal” country in the world, whereas Egypt is the 90^th.

Here’s the list:

1

Namibia

70.7

2003

2	South Africa	65.0	2005

3	Lesotho	63.2	1995

4	Botswana	63.0	1993

5	Sierra Leone	62.9	1989

6	Central African Republic	61.3	1993

7	Haiti	59.2	2001

8	Colombia	58.5	2009

9	Bolivia	58.2	2009

10	Brazil	56.7	2005

11	Bosnia and Herzegovina	56.2	2007

12	Panama	56.1	2003

13	Guatemala	55.1	2007

14	Chile	54.9	2003

15	Honduras	53.8	2003

16	Hong Kong	53.3	2007

17	Paraguay	53.2	2009

18	El Salvador	52.4	2002

19	Papua New Guinea	50.9	1996

20	Zambia	50.8	2004

21	Niger	50.5	1995

22	Swaziland	50.4	2001

23	Gambia, The	50.2	1998

24	Zimbabwe	50.1	2006

25	Dominican Republic	49.9	2005

26	Peru	49.6	2009

27	Sri Lanka	49.0	2007

28	Mexico	48.2	2008

29	Singapore	48.1	2008

30	Costa Rica	48.0	2008

31	Ecuador	47.9	2009

32	Madagascar	47.5	2001

33	Mozambique	47.3	2002

34	Nepal	47.2	2008

35	Rwanda	46.8	2000

36	Malaysia	46.1	2002

37	Philippines	45.8	2006

38	Argentina	45.7	2009

39	Uganda	45.7	2002

40	Jamaica	45.5	2004

41	Uruguay	45.2	2006

42	United States	45.0	2007

43	Cameroon	44.6	2001

44	Cote d'Ivoire	44.6	2002

45	Iran	44.5	2006

46	Nigeria	43.7	2003

47	Guyana	43.2	1999

48	Nicaragua	43.1	2001

49	Cambodia	43.0	2007 est.

50	Thailand	43.0	2006

51	Kenya	42.5	2008 est.

52	Burundi	42.4	1998

53	Russia	42.2	2009

54	China	41.5	2007

55	Senegal	41.3	2001

56	Turkey	41.0	2007

57	Venezuela	41.0	2009

58	Morocco	40.9	2005 est.

59	Georgia	40.8	2009

60	Turkmenistan	40.8	1998

61	Mali	40.1	2001

62	Tunisia	40.0	2005 est.

63	Jordan	39.7	2007

64	Burkina Faso	39.5	2007

65	Ghana	39.4	2005-06

66	Indonesia	39.4	2005

67	Israel	39.2	2008

68	Macedonia	39.0	2003

69	Malawi	39.0	2004

70	Mauritius	39.0	2006 est.

71	Mauritania	39.0	2000

72	Portugal	38.5	2007

73	Guinea	38.1	2006

74	Japan	38.1	2002

75	Timor-Leste	38.0	2002 est.

76	Yemen	37.7	2005

77	Armenia	37.0	2006

78	Vietnam	37.0	2004

79	India	36.8	2004

80	Uzbekistan	36.8	2003

81	Azerbaijan	36.5	2001

82	Benin	36.5	2003

83	New Zealand	36.2	1997

84	Latvia	36.0	2005

85	Lithuania	36.0	2005

86	Algeria	35.3	1995

87	Poland	34.9	2005

88	Laos	34.6	2002

89	Tanzania	34.6	2000

90	Egypt	34.4	2001

91	Estonia	34.0	2008

92	United Kingdom	34.0	2005

93	Switzerland	33.7	2008

94	Bangladesh	33.2	2005

95	Moldova	33.2	2003

96	Greece	33.0	2005

97	Mongolia	32.8	2002

98	France	32.7	2008

99	Tajikistan	32.6	2006

100	Canada	32.1	2005

101	Italy	32.0	2006

102	Spain	32.0	2005

103	Romania	32.0	2008

104	Korea, South	31.4	2009

105	Ukraine	31.0	2006

106	European Union	31.0	2005 est.

107	Netherlands	30.9	2007

108	Ireland	30.7	2008

109	Pakistan	30.6	FY07/08

110	Australia	30.5	2006

111	Kyrgyzstan	30.3	2003

112	Ethiopia	30.0	2000

113	Montenegro	30.0	2003

114	Bulgaria	29.8	2008

115	Finland	29.5	2007

116	Croatia	29.0	2008

117	Cyprus	29.0	2005

118	Denmark	29.0	2007

119	Kazakhstan	28.8	2008

120	Slovenia	28.4	2008

121	Belgium	28.0	2005

122	Hungary	28.0	2005

123	Iceland	28.0	2006

124	Belarus	27.9	2005

125	Germany	27.0	2006

126	Albania	26.7	2005

127	Austria	26.0	2007

128	Malta	26.0	2007

129	Serbia	26.0	2008

130	Slovakia	26.0	2005

131	Czech Republic	26.0	2005

132	Luxembourg	26.0	2005

133	Norway	25.0	2008

134	Sweden	23.0	2005