Protest Against Kishida/Yoon Visit

Friday (11/17), South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida will exchange speeches ON  the Stanford U Campus at the Hoover Institution, moderated by Secretary Condoleezza Rice. 

THE WAR SYSTEM AND ITS VICTIMS

Harry Targ, 

Tuesday, October 17, 2023

“When we humans see instances of violence, we are often quick to respond, sometimes with efforts to assist the victims, often with efforts to punish the perpetrators. It is important that we are able to feel the pain of each individual case. It is equally important to find out why there are so many cases. For this to take place it is important to examine what common underlying levers are causing the human family to engage in such protracted and recurrent violence.”

— Marc Pilisuk and Jennifer Achord Rountree, The Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits from Global Violence and War, Monthly Review Press, 2015.

The Tragedy of Our Times

We are living in a time when people are killers or victims, or often both. If people are in the line of fire they bleed. If they are observers from afar they shed a tear. And behind this extraordinary human tragedy are capitalists, arms manufacturers, media liars, power hungry politicians who will promote any policy, and masses of people who do not have enough information to just say “no,” or “we have had enough killing.”

Let us consider this as “the war system.” It is a system that promotes war and violence such that masses of people become killers and the killed while ruling classes literally make out like bandits. The ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinian people  (which has its modern roots in 1948 and the establishment of Israel) is truly a tragedy with deaths of innocents on both sides. We appropriately grieve for those who died while enjoying a music concert on the Israel side and the masses of Palestinians who lose loved ones, their homes, and now are without food and water as ethnic cleansing proceeds in Gaza.

And we should  have nothing but disdain for President Biden and the US foreign policy team, the neo-fascist Israeli leadership, and the leadership of Hamas who have made this killing yesterday, today, and tomorrow a reality.

It is time to  build a movement that opposes the war system, a system that was borne in the global economy of capitalism, with a military class, a culture that celebrates killing, and a media that mystifies and distorts reality. What has been the outcome-massive slaughter, millions of fleeing migrants, grotesquely expanding economic inequality, starvation and brutal destruction of the environment.

One terrible but undeclared war is being forced upon the Cuban people by the U.S.:  starvation.  Trump tightened the already powerful blockade by the U.S. around the island, that has beggared the people and was causing malnutrition for decades.  Biden reopened the American consulate in Havana but did not ease the blockade.  Instead it seems more destructive than ever. 

 Yosy Perez in Habana, who is a staff member of Radio-TV Cuba, messaged us:

In all of Cuba, there is literally no food... and the little that there is is sold in MLC, a currency that nobody has access to, if you don't have a relative abroad to send it to you, the only thing the government has given for the whole month, it has been two packages of hash, one of sausages and a bottle of oil, the chicken has not come, and no one has given an explanation of why, since the chicken comes from the United States.

The food situation in Cuba is now critical, red alert...the prices are impossible to pay for a normal worker like me for example.

There is even a report from Unicef and the UN about this... so imagine, the simplest: milk and eggs are impossible to buy, since they cost both products, cheap anywhere in the world, here it is half the salary of a worker, a kilo of milk costs 1,900 pesos, someone who earns 3,000 pesos cannot drink milk, an egg carton with 30 eggs between 2,000 and 2,500, impossible.

And what to tell you about a package of chicken on the black market, a one-kilo package of chicken is between 3,000 and 3,500.

And I am not exaggerating, all prices are through the roof... and the government does nothing to lower them, just more repression.

The current Cuban reality is very sad.

That is why there has been so much emigration, it is impossible to live in a country that does not guarantee basic food, and everyone who can escape does.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGsmWvfzMkKddPHBZrxrRjjbDnM

Hartung and Freeman, The Twenty-First Century of (Profitable) War May 4, 2023 Honestly, it should take your breath away. We are on a planet prepping for further war in a staggering fashion. A watchdog group, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), just released its yearly report on global military spending. Given the war in Ukraine, you undoubtedly won't be surprised to learn that, in 2022, such spending in Western and Central Europe surpassed levels set as the Cold War ended in the last century. Still, it wasn't just Europe or Russia where military budgets leaped. They were rising rapidly in Asia as well (with significant jumps in Japan and India, as well as for the world's second-largest military spender, China). And that doesn't even include spiking military budgets in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere on this embattled planet. In fact, last year, 12 of the 15 largest military spenders topped their 2021 outlays. None of that is good news. Still, it goes without saying that one country overshadowed all the rest -- and you know just which one I mean. At $877 billion last year (not including the funds "invested" in its intelligence agencies and what's still known as "the Department of Homeland Security"), the U.S. military budget once again left the others in the dust. Keep in mind that, according to SIPRI, Pentagon spending, heading for a trillion dollars in the near future, represented a staggering 39% of all (yes, all!) global military spending last year. That's more than the next 11 largest military budgets combined. (And that is up from nine not so long ago.) Keep in mind as well that, despite such funding, we're talking about a military, as I pointed out recently, which hasn't won a war of significance since 1945. With that in mind, let Pentagon experts and TomDispatch regulars William Hartung and Ben Freeman explain how we've reached such a perilous point from the time in 1961 when a former five-star general, then president, warned his fellow citizens of the dangers of endlessly overfunding the -- a term he invented -- military-industrial complex. Now, let Hartung and Freeman explore how, more than six decades later, that very complex reigns supreme. Tom     Unwarranted Influence, Twenty-First-Century-Style Not Your Grandfather’s Military-Industrial Complex By William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman   https://tomdispatch.com/unwarranted-influence-twenty-first-century-style/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=7540d2f8fe-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2021_07_13_02_04_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1e41682ade-7540d2f8fe-308765045#more                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               The military-industrial complex (MIC) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned Americans about more than 60 years ago is still alive and well. In fact, it's consuming many more tax dollars and feeding far larger weapons producers than when Ike raised the alarm about the “unwarranted influence” it wielded in his 1961 farewell address to the nation.  The statistics are stunning. This year’s proposed budget for the Pentagon and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy is $886 billion -- more than twice as much, adjusted for inflation, as at the time of Eisenhower’s speech. The Pentagon now consumes more than half the federal discretionary budget, leaving priorities like public health, environmental protection, job training, and education to compete for what remains. In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. Click here to read more of this dispatch.

NEWS

January 18, 2023

A Tuesday report by the Government Accountability Office revealed that the Department of Defense failed its fifth audit in a row after it could not account for at least $220 billion in government-furnished property, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

The DOD has been mandated by federal law to complete audits since 1994; however, the mandate was ignored for decades due to the agency's massive size, according to Military.com. Since launching its first independent audit in 2017, the Pentagon has never passed.

The Pentagon failed its fifth audit in November after the agency could not prove expenditures for 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets. To perform this year's overall audit of the DOD, which was expected to cost $218 million, the agency aggregated 27 separate audits conducted by approximately 1,600 auditors. According to Military.com, the auditors performed 220 in-person site visits and 750 virtual site visits.

Venezuela Fiercely Rejects US Senate’s Passing of BOLIVAR Act

 DECEMBER 19, 2022   Venezuela Fiercely Rejects US Senate’s Passing of BOLIVAR Act – Orinoco Tribune – News and opinion pieces about Venezuela and beyond

This Friday, December 16, the US Senate unanimously approved the Law to Prohibit Operations and Leasing with the Illegitimate Authoritarian Regime of Venezuela (BOLIVAR Act), presented by the ultra-conservative Floridian senator, Rick Scott. The discussion of the interventionist act in the lower house of the US Congress is still pending.

“The regulations prohibit federal agencies from doing business with anyone who supports the oppressive Maduro regime,” reported the official website of Scott, who was one of the primary promoters of the law. Scott was joined by far-right Senator Marco Rubio as well as other far-right congressmen. The bill had been unanimously approved by the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs in March 2021, as a preliminary step before being discussed in the Senate.

The new imperialist act against the democratically elected government of President Nicolás Maduro was approved just one day after the anniversary of the death of the founding father of Venezuela, Simón Bolívar, who, at the beginning of the 20th century, already questioned US imperialism with his famous phrase: “The United States seems destined by providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”

On Saturday, via a statement, the Venezuelan government spoke out fiercely in response, condemning this new aggression by the United States and indicating that the proposal seeks to make the policy of illegal sanctions against the Venezuelan people irreversible.

Answering directly to the news, Foreign Minister of the Republic Carlos Faría tweeted: “The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela strongly condemns a new attempt by the US Congress to violate the economic rights of the Venezuelan people and offend the memory of the liberator, Simón Bolívar.”

The text of the statement, which was also published on the website of the Ministry for Foreign Relations, rejects the bill, both in its name and in its content, for violating economic freedoms and representing “a serious offense to the Venezuelan people.”

It also stresses that the act is “contrary to international law and is conceived from the extremist sectors of United States politics.” Likewise, it points out that this measure “demonstrates, once again, the cruelty of ultra-conservative sectors and coup leaders in US politics that repeat their attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government.”

It indicates that these sectors of the United States Congress “have no interest in seeing a development process in Venezuela.” Likewise, it rejects the name of the bill “for offending the Venezuelan people, its history and its liberator.”

Below you will find an unofficial translation of the statement:

Venezuela rejects the shameful bill by US Congress that violates economic freedoms and offends the liberator, Simón Bolívar
The Government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela fiercely rejects the approval by the US Congress of a nefarious bill that, both in its name and in its content, constitutes a violation of economic freedoms and a serious offense against the Venezuelan people.

This instrument, contrary to international law and conceived from the extremist sectors of politics in the United States, violates the integrity of the sovereign people of Venezuela as well as that of the United States companies themselves, by placing them at risk of being penalized, in an arbitrary, unfair and illegal manner, by exercising their right to free trade through contracts with the Bolivarian government.

This abusive measure demonstrates, once again, the cruelty of ultra-conservative sectors and coup leaders in US politics that repeat their attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government and sabotage any possible route to dialogue and constructive relations between the two countries.

With this bill, which seeks to make unilateral coercive measures irreversible, it is confirmed that these same sectors have no interest in seeing a development process in Venezuela or any improvement in the quality of life of our population, much less that they are interested in guaranteeing free and fair elections, as they are promoting more obstacles and hostile measures against the country.

The name of said instrument, moreover, offends the Venezuelan people, its history and its liberator, whose republican values ​​and commitment to the principles of freedom and peace are far above those of a handful of legislators ignorant of [Venezuela’s] glory, and that they will only be remembered in history due to their complicity with the aggression against free and sovereign countries.

Faced with a Monroist threat and its war-builder heirs, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela will continue to cultivate and defend the legacy of the liberator Simón Bolívar, carving out its own path of political and social stability, economic recovery and peace diplomacy, for a world free of hegemonism, colonialism and imperialism.

Caracas, December 16, 2022

Orinoco Tribune Special by staff