03 July 21
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Ben Burgis | Donald Rumsfeld, Rot in Hell
Ben Burgis, Jacobin
Burgis writes: "Bush administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is dead at the age of 88. It's a tragedy that Rumsfeld died before he could be put on trial for crimes against humanity."
onald Rumsfeld just died at the age of eighty-eight. Obituaries at outlets like the New York Times and CNN consistently mention the same memorable but pointless bits of trivia. He was America’s youngest secretary of defense (in the Ford administration) and the oldest (in the George W. Bush administration). He wrote so many memos about so many subjects that they came to be known as “snowflakes.” Arriving at the Pentagon in the 1970s, the Times tells us, he became famous for “his one-handed push-ups and his prowess on a squash court.”
To see the full absurdity of this, imagine an obituary of Slobodan Milosevic that lingered on innocuous details of his office management style and fondness for soccer, or an obituary of Saddam Hussein that focused on how young he was when he formally became president of Iraq in 1979 and his favorite dessert in his Baghdad palace.
Rumsfeld served in a variety of positions in the Nixon administration throughout Tricky Dick’s first term. He left the White House in 1973 to become the US ambassador to NATO, only to return after Nixon’s resignation to become transition chairman and then the White House Chief of Staff for President Ford. He was Chief of Staff until 1975 — the year the last American helicopter left Vietnam. In October of that year, he became secretary of defense.
To put these bland facts into perspective, remember that Richard Nixon ran on the absurd claim that he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam. As a matter of fact, as Christopher Hitchens explains in detail in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Nixon and his allies conspired to sabotage peace talks between the United States and North and South Vietnam in order to guarantee that Nixon would win the election.
Nixon’s “plan” was, at least in practice, to slowly lose the war — but only after expanding it by bombing and invading neutral Cambodia. During Rumsfeld’s years at the Nixon and Ford White Houses and then NATO, the American Empire was shooting, dismembering, and quite literally burning alive vast numbers of Vietnamese peasants in order to preserve a corrupt and wildly unpopular US-aligned regime.
During this time, Nixon can be heard on his White House tapes referring to Donald Rumsfeld as a “ruthless little bastard.” It’s worth taking a beat to think about what sort of person would earn that kind of admiration from Nixon, a man who illegally conspired against his domestic political enemies and oversaw genocidal levels of deaths in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
To be fair, Rumsfeld spent the first year or so of his time in the Nixon administration helping to shut down programs to help poor people in this country as the head of the Office of Economic Opportunity. In several other positions, though, he was directly involved with the imperial war machine. That alone might have been enough to earn him a stiff punishment if the standards the United States applied to captured war criminals after World War II were ever applied to American officials.
But Rumsfeld’s most significant personal involvement in crimes against humanity happened later, during his second stint as Secretary of Defense. He oversaw the invasion of Afghanistan, kicking off the longest war in US history.
The official justification was that the Taliban government refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden to the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Consistently applied, the principle that harboring terrorists is sufficient grounds for war would license Cuba to bomb Miami. It would also justify escalating any number of tense stand-offs between pairs of nations around the world into all-out warfare and chaos. But the whole point of being an empire is that you get to play by different rules than the rest of the world.
During Rumsfeld’s second year as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense, when Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the rest of the gang were pushing for an invasion of Iraq, the justification was even weaker. Saddam Hussein, we were told, might use “weapons of mass destruction” himself, or share them with Al Qaeda at some point in the future. So it was important to cluster-bomb, invade, and occupy the whole country to make sure that never happened. Ya know, just in case. Imagine if the rest of the world got to play by that rule.
In an infamous column that year at the National Review, Jonah Goldberg made the bluntest version of the case for invading Iraq, approvingly quoting an old speech by his friend Michael Ledeen: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Warming to the same theme around the same time at the New York Times, Thomas Friedman said that “these countries” and their “terrorist” pals were being sent an important message by the very unpredictability of the Bush Administration’s warmongering: We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. “We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld – he’s even crazier than you are.”
Here’s what the craziness of Donald Rumsfeld looked like in practice for the citizens of the “crappy little countries” the United States picked and threw against the wall during Rumsfeld’s years as Bush’s Secretary of Defense: a peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet, one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, in 2006 — the year Rumsfeld left office — estimated 654,965 “excess deaths” in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. That’s 2.5 percent of the total population of the country dead as a result of the violence.
This doesn’t, of course, take into account the spiraling waves of chaos and bloodshed that have continued to rock the region throughout the eighteen years since the region was destabilized by the 2003 invasion. A similar story has played out on a smaller scale in Afghanistan — where US troops are still present and wedding parties are still being bombed almost two decades after Rumsfeld and his friends got their invasion.
And this counting of corpses leaves out the heartbreak of families in these countries that lost loved ones. It leaves out the millions of refugees displaced from their homes. It leaves out the suffering of people who had limbs blown off or had to care for people who did.
And it leaves out one of the most gut-wrenching aspects of Rumsfeld’s time in office: his and President Bush’s open embrace of what they called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or what any human being with a shred of conscience would simply call “torture.” Suspects illegally detained on suspicion of involvement in terrorism (or even involvement in resistance against the invasions of their countries) were tortured under Rumsfeld’s watch in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the notoriously lawless “facility” at Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere around the world. Some of that was done under the auspices of the CIA. But much of it fell under the purview of Rumsfeld’s department of defense.
In 2006, Berlin attorney Wolfgang Kaleck filed a formal criminal complaint against Rumsfeld and several other American officials for their involvement in torture. Needless to say, Rumsfeld never had to see the inside of a courtroom in Germany or anywhere else.
In that sense, and only in that sense, Donald Rumsfeld died too soon.
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Images and videos of the riot show individuals associated with a range of extreme and far-right groups and supporters of fringe online conspiracy theories. (photo: Getty Images)
A Former Cop Charged in the Capitol Attack Has Amassed an Arsenal of Weapons Since January 6
Christopher Miller, BuzzFeed
Miller writes: "While some people charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol have shown remorse for their actions and taken plea deals, Thomas Robertson has posted defiant messages on social media and, according to court records, defied a judge's order to amass an arsenal of weapons."
Thomas Robertson, who was released from custody on the condition that he not possess firearms, had an M4 rifle, ammunition, and a partial pipe bomb when authorities searched his home. And he had just ordered 34 more guns online.
hile some people charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol have shown remorse for their actions and taken plea deals, Thomas Robertson has posted defiant messages on social media and, according to court records, defied a judge’s order to amass an arsenal of weapons.
The former Rocky Mount, Virginia, police officer who stormed the Capitol with his cop buddy and posted a photograph of them inside the building on Instagram was arrested Jan. 13 and released on several conditions, one of which was not to possess firearms.
But when FBI agents searched Robertson’s home on Tuesday they found a loaded M4 rifle, large amounts of ammunition, and a partially assembled pipe bomb, according to a court document filed Wednesday.
The search came after the FBI reviewed emails in Robertson’s Yahoo account that led to records from Gunbroker.com. The records showed that Robertson had ordered 34 weapons from the website, “transporting them in interstate commerce while under felony indictment” after he was indicted on felony charges in January.
According to the court filing, agents also found a box labeled with a blue piece of tape that included the words “booby trap.”
“Inside the box, agents found a metal pipe with two ends caps, with a fuse inserted into a hole that had been drilled into the device; epoxy had been used around the sides of the fuse to secure it,” prosecutors wrote in a motion to revoke Robertson’s release order. “Although this device did not contain explosive powder, such powder was found nearby in the out-building’s reloading station.”
It was not the first time authorities have reported finding weapons at Roberton’s home. After his Jan. 13 arrest, Robertson was also ordered to relocate any firearms in his home within 48 hours.
“Nevertheless, four days later, while executing a search warrant at the defendant’s house in connection with the Capitol riots charges, law enforcement discovered and seized eight firearms from the home,” prosecutors said.
Officers also found large amounts of ammunition, as well as what appeared to be equipment used for reloading.
In the new motion, prosecutors argued that Robertson is a danger to the public and should be jailed until his trial. They said the former police officer’s “extensive and flagrant violations of the terms of his release order, including numerous violations of the federal firearms laws, strongly support revocation of his pretrial release in this case.”
“This conduct, coupled with his calls for future violence, shows that no condition or combination of conditions can adequately protect the public from the defendant, and warrants immediate action by the court through the issuance of an arrest warrant,” they added.
Robertson had not immediately filed a response by Thursday afternoon and BuzzFeed News could not reach him for comment. He is accused of obstruction of an official proceeding, entering and remaining in a restricted building, and disorderly conduct in a Capitol building or on Capitol grounds.
Robertson stormed the Capitol with fellow police officer Jacob Fracker, who faces similar charges, and posted a picture of them inside the building on Instagram. Both men pleaded not guilty in February.
In Facebook posts on Jan. 8, two days after the deadly attack, Robertson said he was proud of his actions and repeatedly called for further violence.
“Well.....Fuck you. Being nice,polite,writing letters and sending emails hasn't worked...All thats left is violence and YOU and your ‘Friends on the other side of the isle’ have pushed Americans into that corner,” he wrote in one post documented by prosecutors. “The picture of Senators cowering on the floor with genuine fear on their faces is the most American thing I have seen in my life. Once....for real....you people ACTUALLY realized who you work for.”
In another post, Robertson wrote, “Peace is done. Now is the time for all the braggart ‘Patriots’ to buckle armor or shut the fuck up. Facebook warriors time is done. The next revolution started 1/6/21 in case you ‘Im ready’ and ‘standing by” guys missed it.”
“The next revolution started in DC 1/6/21,” he said in another post the same day. “The only voice these people will now listen to is VIOLENCE. So,respectfully. Buckle armor or just stay at home.”
It’s unclear what Robertson planned to do with the M4, partial pipe bomb, and 34 guns he ordered. The FBI said he was storing the guns with a security company called Tactical Operations Inc. in nearby Roanoke. The owner of the company told the FBI that Robertson had been in his store to handle several of the guns as recently as one week ago.
Robertson and Fracker, who were put on leave and later fired in January, were scheduled to appear in court for a hearing on Thursday, but it was pushed back to August.
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Rep. Ro Khanna. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty Images)
Rep. Ro Khanna Threatens to Subpoena Exxon After Secret Video
Hiroko Tabuchi and Lisa Friedman, The New York Times
Excerpt: "The chairman of a House subcommittee is demanding that executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell, Chevron and other major oil and gas companies testify before Congress about the industry's decades-long effort to wage disinformation campaigns around climate change."
The chairman of a powerful House subcommittee said he is seeking answers from Exxon and other oil and gas giants over their role in spreading disinformation on climate change.
he chairman of a House subcommittee is demanding that executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Shell, Chevron and other major oil and gas companies testify before Congress about the industry’s decades-long effort to wage disinformation campaigns around climate change.
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said Friday he was prepared to use subpoena power to compel the companies to appear before lawmakers if they don’t do so voluntarily.
The move comes a day after a secretive video recording was made public in which a senior Exxon lobbyist said the energy giant had fought climate science through “shadow groups” and had targeted influential senators in an effort to weaken President Biden’s climate agenda. Several of those senators said this week that the lobbyist exaggerated their relationship or that they had no dealings with him.
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India Walton. (photo: Lindsay Dedario/Reuters)
India Walton Is Reviving the American Tradition of Municipal Socialism
Joshua Kluever, Jacobin
Kluever writes: "With her win last week, Buffalo's India Walton will almost certainly become the first socialist mayor of a major US city in years. She's reviving a robust American tradition: municipal socialism."
ast Tuesday, as news coverage focused on New York City’s mayoral race, an upset occurred in New York’s second-largest city. India Walton, a nurse and union activist endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Working Families Party, defeated incumbent mayor Byron Brown in Buffalo’s Democratic primary.
Walton proudly called herself a democratic socialist throughout the campaign, and on election night, she refused to back away from that label. Responding to a reporter’s question about whether she considers herself a socialist, Walton was adamant: “Oh, absolutely. The entire intent of this campaign is to draw power and resources to the ground level and into the hands of the people.”
At a victory party the same night, she laid out her political vision: “All that we are doing in this moment is claiming what is rightfully ours. We are the workers. We do the work. And we deserve a government that works with and for us.”
Having won the primary in Democrat-heavy Buffalo, Walton will almost certainly become the city’s first female mayor — and the first socialist mayor of a major US city in years. Her upset is another milestone in the rise of DSA, which put considerable energy into Walton’s campaign. But her victory also points to an important, if often overlooked, tradition of US politics: municipal and state-level socialism.
During the early twentieth century, the Socialist Party of America (SPA) fielded formidable candidates across the country. The most prominent was Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, including from a federal prison in 1920. (He was serving time for opposing World War I.) New York’s Meyer London and Wisconsin’s Victor Berger both won election to the US Congress as Socialists in the 1910s and ’20s.
The real action, however, was down-ballot, where Socialists secured spots on city councils, state legislatures, county boards, and an array of other governing bodies. The SPA elected over 150 state legislators during the early twentieth century. They also won mayoral races. There was Jasper McLevy in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Louis Duncan in Butte, Montana; J. Henry Stump in Reading, Pennsylvania, and John Gibbons in Lackawanna, New York, just south of Buffalo. In Buffalo itself, Socialist Frank Perkins won a city council seat in 1920. All told, Socialists won office in at least 353 cities, the vast majority in the first two decades of the twentieth century.
The longest socialist administration was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where from 1910 to 1960 the city had three socialist mayors. Emil Seidel, Daniel Hoan, and Frank Zeidler’s administrations promoted “sewer socialism,” a moderate form of socialism aimed at delivering workers immediate material improvements and de-commodifying society through a democratic process. While they de-emphasized strikes and labor struggles, the sewer socialists were able to build an incredibly well-organized machine and a rich working-class culture.
Emil Seidel was elected in 1910, becoming the country’s first Socialist mayor of a major city. During his brief tenure, he created the city’s first public works department and started the city parks system. After losing reelection, Seidel served as Eugene Debs’s running mate in 1912.
Milwaukee Socialists regained power with Daniel Hoan’s victory in 1916. Hoan’s twenty-four-year tenure remains the longest continuous Socialist administration in US history. Milwaukee set up the country’s first public housing project, Garden Homes, in 1923, and the Hoan administration pushed for municipal ownership of street lighting, city sanitation, and water purification. It also financed public marketplaces, raised funds to improve Milwaukee’s harbors, and purged the corruption that had plagued past administrations.
Hoan’s tenure ended in 1940, but socialist governance returned under Frank Zeidler starting in 1948. Zeidler continued the “sewer socialism” tradition while overseeing Milwaukee’s territorial expansion and population rise. He stood out as a strong supporter of civil rights as Milwaukee’s black population increased following World War II (an especially laudable stance given the bigotry of earlier sewer socialists like Victor Berger).
The Wisconsin Socialist Party’s success wasn’t limited to Milwaukee. From 1905 to 1945, Socialists sent seventy-four legislators to the state capital, where they passed over five hundred pieces of legislation, often aimed at supporting the municipal administrations back in Milwaukee. A 1919 socialist bill, for instance, gave the city permission to create public housing.
Like their city-level comrades, Socialist state legislators worked to deliver tangible changes to workers’ lives. Socialists authored Wisconsin’s first workmen’s compensation bill, which passed in 1911, and pushed legislation that allowed women to receive their paychecks instead of having it sent to their husbands. They updated housing codes, reduced working hours for women, and funded public county hospitals. They exempted union property from taxation and made it illegal for company investigators to infiltrate unions.
Socialist state legislators in Wisconsin didn’t accomplish what they did alone. They aligned with progressive Republicans when possible and, as a result, much of the legislation that came out of the legislature looked like a mixture of socialist and progressive positions.
Still, Socialists were more than happy to call out progressives for not going far enough to help the working class. In 1931, the legislature debated a state unemployment system to combat the effects of the Great Depression. The socialist version of the bill called for $12 a week in benefits and included a provision to create an eight-hour working day across all industries. Progressives rallied around a bill that called for $10 a week in benefits and no cap on working hours. Socialist representative George Tews summarized the caucus’s sentiment when he declared on the House floor that a progressive was a “socialist with their brains knocked out.”
The Milwaukee socialists became mainstays of the state legislature, managing to survive the First Red Scare following World War I. Elsewhere, state repression (and deep splits within the party) proved more devastating. In New York, for instance, state officials operating under the anti-radical Lusk Committee targeted Buffalo, where Frank Perkins had been elected city councilor in 1920, and the nearby steel town of Lackawanna, where socialist John Gibbons won the mayor’s office. Under the cloud of federal repression, neither Perkins nor Gibbons won reelection.
The Wisconsin Socialists’ numbers and electoral victories evaporated following World War II, and for decades, socialists largely found themselves outside the halls of power (some exceptions: Oakland, California mayor Ron Dellums; St Paul, Minnesota mayor Jim Scheibel; Berkeley, California mayor Gus Newport; Santa Cruz, California mayor Mike Rokin, and Irving, California mayor Larry Agran — all DSA members).
But DSA victories in congressional, state, and local races have again placed socialism on the map. The key now will be to fight for concrete improvements in workers’ lives, raising their expectations about what is politically possible.
In her victory speech last Tuesday, India Walton laid out an optimistic view of socialist successes to come. “This victory is ours. It is the first of many. If you are in an elected office right now, you are being put on notice. We are coming.”
That kind of optimism was warranted at the state and local level during the early twentieth century. There is no reason it cannot be so again.
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Stacey Abrams. (photo: Erik S. Lesser/Shutterstock)
Stacey Abrams Group Activating Tool for Georgia Voters to Check if They Are About to Be Purged
Errin Haines, The 19th
Haines writes: "Georgia voters who could be among the thousands expected to be purged from the election rolls next month can proactively check their status on a new website announced Tuesday by the voting rights organization launched by Stacey Abrams after her 2018 gubernatorial bid."
Fair Fight Action is helping voters verify if they are on the list of the more than 100,000 voters whose registration could be canceled.
Fair Fight Action’s GeorgiaVoterSearch.com lets voters verify whether they are on the list of the more than 100,000 voters whose registration could be canceled because they have moved or haven’t voted in several years. The state requires them to act to keep themselves on the rolls. The site is part of the organization’s effort to go on offense in the wake of the state’s new restrictive voting measures passed during the most recent legislative session.
Senate Bill 202 makes absentee ballot drop boxes less available, reduces the early voting period ahead of runoff elections, bans handing out food or water to voters standing in long lines at the polls, removes the secretary of state from the Georgia board of elections and allows state election officials to replace county officials whose performance they deem unfit.
On Friday, the Department of Justice announced it is challenging Georgia’s new voting laws under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, arguing that the bill intentionally targets Black voters and seeks to restrict their access to the polls in direct response to their record turnout in 2020. After the election, former President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the election results in Georgia, calling on state election officials to intervene.
Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger declined, declaring the state’s election results accurate after multiple recounts. Still, they signed the legislation in March under the false claim of a threat to election integrity.
Abrams and her organization have been among the highest profile Democrats to push back against voter suppression efforts in Georgia and across the country. Fair Fight Action will attempt to reach 50,000 voters through a text and phone bank campaign later this summer, alerting voters of the coming purge and educating previously purged voters about how they can re-register. State officials say they will notify voters on the list in July and August and those voters will have 40 days to correct the situation if they want to remain on the rolls.
The Georgia website is the only such online effort planned by Fair Fight Action at this time, but organization officials say they will also amplify state partners’ efforts to help voters stay on the rolls.
Ahead of Abrams’ unsuccessful campaign for governor, 534,000 Georgians were purged from the rolls in 2017, the largest removal of registrations ever. In 2019, Fair Fight Action sued after the state attempted to remove 287,000 voters ahead of the November election and held a phone and text bank after the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debate in Atlanta to notify voters that their names might have been on the list.
Fair Fight Action and other Democrats, including Texas lawmakers who recently thwarted state Republicans’ attempt to pass similar restrictive voting measures, are calling on federal lawmakers to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as a firewall to bills advancing or under consideration in dozens of states.
Earlier this month, Senate Democrats failed to advance debate on the For the People Act in a vote split 50-50 along partisan lines. The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is expected to be introduced in the Senate later this summer, but also faces an uphill battle.
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Central American asylum seekers traveling to the U.S. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
There Are No Mass Migrations Without US Meddling and Militarism
Azadeh Shahshahani and Rhonda Ramiro, In These Times
Excerpt: "When Vice President Kamala Harris visited the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, on June 25, she repeated the claim she made during her trip to Guatemala and Mexico earlier that month: The Biden administration is serious about addressing the root causes of Central American migration."
Despite its pledges to aid Central America, the Biden administration continues to deny the United States’ role in destabilizing the region.
“This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue,” Harris said. “We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we’re talking about suffering, and our approach has to be thoughtful and effective.”
Toward this end, the administration has set forth a four-year, $4 billion proposal to increase assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, “conditioned on their ability to reduce the endemic corruption, violence, and poverty that causes people to flee their home countries.” President Joe Biden also issued an executive order that identifies the principal culprits for this present state of affairs as “criminal gangs,” “trafficking networks,” “gender-based and domestic violence,” and “economic insecurity and inequality.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Biden appears to be following the footsteps of past administrations by denying the role that decades of U.S. interventionism and militarization have played in destabilizing the region. What’s worse, officials like Harris continue to order migrants to stop coming to the United States — even as the United States exacerbates the very crises that encourage migration in the first place.
A history of white supremacy and interventionism
Since the early 1900s, the United States has trained and employed law enforcement officers to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border, providing them with virtually unlimited discretion to keep non-white people out of the country. U.S. Border Patrol is itself rooted in white supremacy: At the time of its founding in 1924, many of its members belonged either to the Ku Klux Klan or the Texas Rangers, which was tantamount to a racist paramilitary force. In addition to beating and humiliating migrants, patrols shot, hung and disappeared people who they believed had crossed into the United States outside official ports of entry. Confident in their impunity, border patrollers often tortured migrants into confessions whether they had entered the country lawfully or not.
Even after transferring Border Patrol from the Department of Labor to the Department of Justice, the U.S. government continued to pass laws that effectively criminalized migration while increasing the agency’s powers. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 established immigration quotas from Mexico and other Latin American countries. Twenty-nine years later, under President Bill Clinton, U.S. Border Patrol implemented a “prevention through deterrence” immigration policy that funnels migrants into mortally dangerous terrain by closing off more common points of entry. The policy remains in effect today.
While brutally guarding its Southern border, the United States has spent billions of dollars training Latin American security forces in torture, extortion, blackmail and extraordinary rendition. Formerly known as the School of the Americas, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINESEC) has “educated” over 80,000 officers in more than a dozen countries, in addition to Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials. WHINESEC graduates are responsible for countless acts of abuse, murders and disappearances outside of the United States.
The United States has used WHINESEC-trained security forces and other government resources to destabilize left-wing governments in Latin America. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the CIA backed a coup to overthrow the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz. The Eisenhower administration depicted Guatemala as a pawn of the Soviet Union; in reality, Arbenz’s proposed land reform threatened U.S. business interests, including the United Fruit Company.
The United States also played a key role in El Salvador’s civil war from 1980 to 1992, supplying the Salvadoran junta with $1 million each day to quash the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. During that time, the Reagan administration, working alongside the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, began imposing trade policies on Central American countries that benefited large, multinational corporations at the expense of local people.
In 1999, the United States adopted Plan Colombia, allocating more than $8 billion to arm and train Colombia’s military and police in a so-called war on drugs. The plan, which has targeted narco-traffickers and left-wing guerrillas alike, has forcibly displaced nearly 6 million Colombians and killed thousands more.
These policies at home and abroad have not only generated mass human suffering but waves of forced migration to the United States. The number of Honduran children crossing the border increased by more than 1,000% in 2014, for example, within five years of the Obama administration aiding a coup against Honduras’ democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya.
As another example, immigration from Mexico has doubled since the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, which undercut small business, crushed low-income workers and made migration a matter of survival. School of the Americas Watch, a human rights organization that has long called for the closure of WHINESEC, notes that, “by the 1980s, migration from the South was not for obtaining employment” but was fueled instead by the immediate need to flee the “conditions created by U.S. foreign policy and intervention.”
The foundation of Biden’s platform
So far, the Biden administration appears committed to business as usual when it comes to the Southern border and foreign policy in the Americas. Biden’s proposed U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 reflects two long-standing priorities of past immigration bills. First, it floods Central American countries with money to beef up local military and police forces as a means of promoting “the rule of law, security, and economic development.” Second, it effectively “outsources” U.S. border control by funding Mexico to militarize its own Southern border states, which also works to extend U.S. authority over movement in the broader region.
The United States pursued similar strategies with the Mérida Initiative (2007) and the Southern Border Program (aka Programa Frontera Sur, 2014). Modeled after Plan Colombia and initiated by President George W. Bush and Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón, the Mérida Initiative sought to limit drug trafficking and organized crime by providing Mexico with billions of dollars for military equipment, training and infrastructure. The Initiative also increased security along new “21st-century borders” that are not contiguous with the United States. As of 2013, the U.S. government had financed a dozen advanced military bases and a hundred miles of security partitions along the borders separating Mexico from Belize and Guatemala, respectively.
With Programa Frontera Sur, the Obama administration doubled down, funneling millions more in aid and law enforcement resources to the Mexican government. This time, U.S. assistance included such equipment as high-tech observation towers along the Mexico-Guatemala border, as well as intensive training for local Mexican police and immigration officers.
Many of the countries to which the United States has supplied security aid have embraced this kind of militarization. In the early aughts, the governments of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras each placed soldiers on the streets in an effort to crack down on drug trafficking. Yet, in the years since the Mérida Initiative and Programa Frontera Sur took effect, homicide rates and drug-related violence in these countries have only increased.
Biden again demonstrated his commitment to a failed immigration policy in January when nearly 8,000 Hondurans arrived at the Honduras-Guatemala border seeking refuge from the wreckage of two major hurricanes, the devastating effects of Covid-19 and the extreme violence that has swept Honduras since the U.S.-backed coup of 2009. Unwilling to break with precedent, the Biden administration stood by as 2,000 Guatemalan police officers and soldiers, armed and trained by the United States, fought the migrants back with tear gas and batons. Multiple administration officials would later praise the Guatemalan government for its response.
Steps towards a more just and humane immigration policy
On January 15, days before Biden assumed office, more than 70 human rights organizations published a joint letter urging the incoming administration to make substantive changes to U.S. policy in Central America. Echoing many of the demands that advocates and organizers have made for decades, the letter called on the federal government to end security assistance, training, and weapons sales to the region; increase transparency about where U.S. aid is directed and how it is used; halt all economic sanctions against Central American countries; and drastically limit U.S. involvement in their domestic politics.
Money towards further militarization will only intensity the suffering in Central America. If the Biden administration is truly committed to addressing the root cause of forced migration, it must first acknowledge the destructive force of U.S. interventionism, imperialism and white supremacy. Only then can the administration offer anything approaching a just remedy.
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'The fire started in an underwater pipeline connecting to a platform at Pemex's Ku Maloob Zaap oil development.' (photo: gCaptain)
'The Ocean Is on Fire': Gas Leak From Underwater Pipeline Sees Flames Erupt in Gulf of Mexico
Abrar Al-Heeti and Jackson Ryan, CNET
Excerpt: "A gas leak from an underwater pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico led to a raging fire on the ocean's surface Friday, Reuters reported. The fire, which burned west of Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, was extinguished hours later, state oil company Pemex told the publication."
The fire has been extinguished, says Reuters.
gas leak from an underwater pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico led to a raging fire on the ocean's surface Friday, Reuters reported. The fire, which burned west of Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, was extinguished hours later, state oil company Pemex told the publication.
Twitter user Manuel Lopez San Martin shared videos of the fire, including a shot of boats working to put out the flames.
The fire started in an underwater pipeline connecting to a platform at Pemex's Ku Maloob Zaap oil development, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Workers controlled the fire using nitrogen, one source said. Reportedly there were no injuries.
How can the ocean catch fire?
The powerful images zipping around social media are usually accompanied by the proclamation the ocean is on fire. Not to go full Neil deGrasse Tyson here, but it's worth taking a look at how this might happen.
The fire itself is happening at the surface as Simon George, a professor of organic geochemistry at Macquarie University in Australia, explains. "The fire was caused by methane and probably other wet gas components (ethane, propane etc) igniting at the ocean surface after leaking from the pipeline," he told CNET via email.
He suggests there must have been a continuous enough stream of natural gas in the one place to sustain the fire and keep it churning, resulting in the wild images you can see above. And while a continuous flow of methane is problematic -- it's a greenhouse gas -- he notes that fire may have helped contain some of the damage.
"One good thing about the fire is that it consumed some of the leaking hydrocarbons," he said.
Reuters reports that company workers used nitrogen to control the fire.
An incident report shared with Reuters reportedly said, "The turbomachinery of Ku Maloob Zaap's active production facilities were affected by an electrical storm and heavy rains."
Pemex told Reuters it would investigate what led to the incident. Pemex didn't immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.
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