John Di Gasbarro's Open Salon Blog

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Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:06:48 -0400

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Mass Murder in Guatemala

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:06:23 -0400

In the waning years WW11, Jorge Ubico's brutal dictatoship in Guatemala overtuned by revolt of the liberal middle class. The new governemt reformed the education system and created a new labour code that alloowed trade unions to develop. Its sucesssor formed in 1951,proceeded to intrduce a land reform program that distributes unused lands to peasants. while landowners were compensated for their loses. Within three years, over 100,000 families had rceived new land.

But while peasants were improving their lot in life, an immensely powerful wealthy US corporation was doing a not very slow burn. The united Fruit Company owned huge estates stretching from ocean to ocean, along with the railway and the port(while paying almost no taxes on bananas and other fruits it exported). Because it used only 8 per cent of the land it owned, the company was threatened with large chunks of its lands being distributed to paesants. outraged by this attack on property, US media soon entered the frenzy of denunciation. A guatemalan colonel trained in the US and backed by American piloted F-47 bombers attacked the country in a fury of vengeance of which officials in Washington proudly clamied reponsibility. In a fiting bit irony, it turned out that the director of the CIA at the time, Allen Dulles, had been on the United Fruit board of directors.

Rather than an aberration, the ovethrow of the reformist government of Guatemala was just part of a long line of US military intervention thoughout the early twentieth century, including coups, occupations or mass murders in Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico and El Salvado. In a paricularly candid reminiscence. US general Smedly D. Butler recalled in 1935:

I spent thirty three years and four months in active service as a member of our country's most agile miltary force - the Marine Corps... And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers, In short, I was a racketeer for capatalism....thus I helped make Mexico and expical Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the Nation City Bank to collect revenue in....I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brough light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for American Fruit companies in 1903;

What was done to Guatemala in 1934 may have been easily recognizable as just anothe act of US imperialism, but few cuold have predicted the longevity of the violence . To this day, the country continues to live in the shadow of the slaughter that stopped land reform and crushed oppostion to American big business. The executions of trade unionist, dissedent intellectuals, pesants and indigenous peoples is unceasing. Whenever popular opposition resurfaces, the brutality escaltes: between 1974 and 1978, for instance, troops and death squads asssassinated 124 union leaders. But the worst year may have 1967 when according to a Catholic priest the US, right wing terrorist killed 2,800 peasants, student, intellectuals and union activists. In a campaign uncompromisingly backed and funded by the US, the military went on a killing spree reminiscent of the conquistadors:

"All the men of the village of Cajon del Rio were exterminated: those of Tituque had their intestines gouged out with knives; in Peidra Prada they were flayed alive; in Afua Blanca de Ipala they were burned alive after being shot in the legs. A rebellious peasant's head was stuck on a pole in the center of San Jorge's Plaza. In cero Gordo the eyes of Jaime Velazques were filled with pins... In San Lucas Sacatpeques, the well yielded corpses instead of water. On the Mirflore plantation the men greeted the dawn with no hands or feet"

The US back terror regime-whose muder toll has now hit 200.000, the mojority indigenous people-remains in place to this day.

George Orwell

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:06:40 -0400

The process of revolution mass mobilization, particiaption in new of democracy, overturning old forms of domination, taking control of workplaces and communities-transforms the participants themselves. Novelist George Orwell captured a sense of this is describing Bracelona in December 1936, at the height of the Spanish revloution:

"It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers...Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying it had been collectivized...Waiters and shop walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily diappeared. Nobody said 'Senor" or "Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' and 'Thou'...Above all, ther was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of suddenly having emerged into era of eqaulity and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine."

Economic and Social Irrationality

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:06:05 -0400

One need only think of the horrific economic crises of the Great Depression of the 1930's out of which grew facism and a world war, to realize that these crises are among the most devastating manifestations of the irrational logic of capitalism. As our analysis implies, crises of this sort are not historical accident. They are inevitable out comes of a system in which capatalists are compelled to do everything possible to increase the production system in which capitalists are compelled to do everything possible to increase the production of their enterprises. In order to keep pace with competition, capitalist must introduce new technologis such as coumputers and fiber optics that speed up the pace of work and lower the costs of their products. But with every capitalist puchasing new machines and equipment and building the most modern plants they can, several things happen. First, they thake on huge new costs, often financed by borrowing from the banks. Second they develop massive new cpacities for producing everyting from cars to computer chips - capacities that often greatly exceed any reasonable expectation of market demand. This result is what Marx described as a crisis of over-accumulation, in which capitalist have accumulated more facilities and means of production than they can possibly use profitably. Faced with massive capacity and the costs these involve the inadequate sales and profits, some capatalists begin to teeter on the erge of bankruptcy. or collapse.

In the world auto indutry today, for instance, frims have the capacity to produce seven to eight million cars more each year than the existing demand requires. That is the equivalent of the world excess of about eighty state of the art car factories. Not suprisingly, when the global economic slowdown hit in early 2001, auto firms begin to lay off worker, close factories and cut cost dramtically: Ford announced layoffs of 5,000 workers in North aAmerica, whic General Motors Europen company Opel gave pink slips to similar numbers. Before the shake-out in the auto industry is over, dozens of factories will close.

Similar trends have hit the telecommunications sector where one compay after another has been melting down. In an analysis that comfirms Marx's basic theory of capitalist over accumulation, a Wall Strret Jounal artical on the telecom crises reported, Oceans of cheap capital and competitive one upmanship drove telecommunications and Intenet service providers to build far more capacity than a realitic forcast of demand could justify. Now, many of those companies are bankrupt, or close to it.

Welcome to the Third World

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:06:28 -0400

When Peter Munk, CEO of Horsham Corp., praised former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet at one of the comapzny's sharholders' meeting he was being uncharacteristically candid. Most corporate leaders share his admiration for Pinochet and other despots, but refrain from admitting it in Public.

Their afection for tyrants is more than professional courtesy. It's natural that, being autocarts themselves, CEOs would approve ot their political couterparts-and envy their ability to crush all opposition. Not of course,being concerned mainly with maximizing their profits, their affinity with Pinochet and his ilk is tied direclty to the bottom line.

Dicatators tend to be very accommodating with tranational corparations. They will give them cheap labour, low or no taxes, exemption from minimum employment, health and safety, and environmental standrds, and if necessary armed protection from peasant uprisings. All of which translate into massive profits.

As Munk pointed out, Pinochet turned Chile into "the highest profit-per-capita country in the world." It is no coincidence that it also remained a low income per capita nation. Under dictatorial regimes high corporate profits go hand in hand with underpaid ind indigent workers.

The TNCs are so delighted with Third World governemts which govern solely on their behalf that they want to do away with democracy everywhere. They can't openly install dictors in western countries-at least, not yet-so they have devised an engenious strategy for Third World condition and politcal system in countries they find easy to subvert.

All they had to do to suppress domocracy was to gain control of the major parties. This was done by infiltrating them, making them dependent on corporate funding, promising their leaders lucrative executive posts when they left politics, or threatening them with an induced economic and financial crises if they refused to adopt the corporate agenda. With the Republicans, Democrats all at their mercy, they had the equivalent of a pro-TNC dictatorship, since , no matter what party "won" an election, the only real winners would be Big Business.