Cuba has demanded for justice and respect from the United Nations Commission for Human Rights (CHR). A statement released by the Cuban embassy in Lusaka stated that it was necessary to put an end to the political manipulation of the works of the CHR.

The statement comes ahead of the Commission's 61st session to take place in Geneva from March 14th to April 22, 2005. It stated that another resolution against Cuba would fuel the spiralling confrontation, polarization and political manipulation, which had been eroding the CHR's authority, increasingly undermined by selectivity and double standards.

"The works of the CHR have been impaired by political manipulation. A small group of powerful countries, most especially the world hegemonic superpower, have turned the Commission into a sort of court of inquisition against countries from the south and against all those who oppose their strategic plans for political and ideological domination," the embassy stated.

According to the embassy, the direct consequence of the political manipulation of bodies such as the CHR had been that the decisions taken by such bodies had less credibility and legitimacy.

"Cuba confirms its stance along those who are willing to uphold truth and justice by confronting the manipulations, pressures and blackmail of those who have no qualms whatsoever about getting away with their strategy of turning the Commission on Human Rights into a blunt tool to support their plans of hegemonic domination," it stated.

According to the statement, Cuba has supported just causes and claims in Africa, Asia and Latin America with thousands of Cubans giving their lives, sweat and struggle against colonialism, apartheid, illiteracy and disease.

"With its resolve and unwavering vote, Cuba has always rejected the manoeuvres of the industrialised powers whose intention is to condemn and stigmatise states from the South in the works of the CHR and the General Assembly," read the statement.

It stated that Cuba was confident developing countries truly committed to the cause of human rights would continue to play a leading role in opposing the actions of those who try to turn the Commission into a court of the inquisition against states from the South.

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Globalization: When people finally accept their own slavery

An Interview with Ignacio Ramonet

By Omar Gonzalez
Taken from CubaNow
February 2005

Omar Gonzalez: The alter-globalization movement is being accused of certain dilettante eclecticism, paralysis, of being less precise each day. I wish you would refer to the historic process of these alternatives, their real impact, the possibilities of changing the world into a better one, and especially regarding the project which in the Porto Alegre edition of the World Social Forum makes a statement regarding what you define as an Alternative Manifest, already outlined in your article “To Resist”.

Ignacio Ramonet: Yes, we had proposed this slogan of “another world is possible” and that's where the word alter-internationalization comes from. As a matter of fact, this movement takes place in the mid-1990s when there clearly seemed to be a new force, a new dynamics controlling international life; when there still wasn't a clear idea regarding the features of that dynamics. That's a bit like when someone is sick and knows exactly what he's suffering from but he doesn't know the name of that disease and what caused it. Then, in an early stage -let's say starting from 1995- we began to mobilize a group of intellectuals, thinkers, journalists and professors too, around Le Monde Diplomatique -our newspaper- to try to identify the features of what we today call globalization, but that we then didn't know how it was called –because something that has been forgotten is that it didn't have a name ten years ago. It was a phenomenon that was explained but, all things considered, it wasn't even named and it's obvious that if you can't name something it's much more difficult to describe it, identify it and fight against it; in short, to criticize it.

The first stage was to identify the phenomenon, describe it like an observational sciences naturalist would do, and description itself was already a way to trigger a different reflection. The second stage was to criticize this globalization. We had created an organization –ATTAC- with the idea that it was possible to stop the phenomenon by mobilizing ourselves; to have some ideas that could allow us to attack the core of its engine. Globalization's engine is the transformation of economy into a financial economy -financial capitalism, which is different from industrial capitalism. The point was how we could –recovering James Tobin's idea- create, throw a grain of sand that could cause the engine's gears to slow down. That's how ATTAC came up. Later, in Seattle, the great protests began against institutions that until that moment were mostly unknown by the public and that received benefits -because they were very technical- from the discretion of keeping out of the media's eye. For instance, the World Trade Organization could only be identified by a few technicians because the broad public didn't know what it was. There are better known organisms, especially in Latin America, like the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank. But in spite of it all, nobody knows how they work either. The interesting thing about that first protest in Seattle was that is was carried out against a WTO summit. It was a way of showing that capital decisions for today's world are not taken by governments but by the institutions that, in the end, are unidentified and unknown. That confirmed what we had been saying for some time: that globalization simply means that now, on a level above governments, there's a sort of supranational government: that of the Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the OCDE. These are the institutions that really dictate, outline and determine the frame and the phenomenon. Therefore, Seattle was a way of making popular the protest that later on quickly multiplied. The third stage was determined by the certain fact that as globalization became multiplied, protests were also multiplied. Huge massive demonstrations against this situation took place, even with violent acts, in Gutenberg or in Florence, where the first victim of alter-globalization appeared, or in Quebec where the way to confront those demonstrations was militarized. We had to respond the criticism that was beginning to take place, to the effect that protest was the only thing alter-globalization did. Well, globalization was criticized; it's true, but only that; people thought that alter-globalization really didn't set out to do anything new. That's where this third stage truly began; the idea that is was necessary to go from protesting to other ways of opposition. At that moment, in Porto Alegre, there was a very original municipal experience: the Workers’ Party governed that city for nearly a decade; it had put into practice the participative budget and had created a kind of government that linked the population to the city's management. That's why it seemed to us that Porto Alegre was somewhat emblematic. First, that it was a southern city, and then, that it was a city with the experience of a new kind of democracy. Another decisive idea was to carry out the Social Forum in a symmetrical way to the World Economic Forum that took place in Davos. We called it Social Forum as a reply to the Economic Forum, while keeping in sight that by holding it at the same time we were in a certain way forcing leaders and journalists to chose: they were going to hear the planet's masters or they were going to hear the people of the world. That was the idea, that the Forum should be the alternative –rather like the first planetary assembly of humanity where people are represented by associations, unions, action groups and so forth and not by governments and the States that are members of the UN, who come, meet and denounce their experience of a life submitted to the pressure of globalization. The Forum started working in 2001 with great success; and also from the point of view that it should not only say how globalization affected and affects our lives but also what kind of solutions we had found against it: the Bolivian miners, the African women, the Indian farmers. That a kind of catalogue of initiatives born in popular bases be born there which have been able of slowing down and can stop globalization. With these three stages we already had a very serious identification of the phenomenon, a practice of protest that had extended worldwide, and a kind of thinking lab-center regarding future steps to take: the embryo of what could be a catalogue of the necessary changes to humanize globalization, or to destroy it, excluding violence in any case. Indeed, this year the Forum returns to Porto Alegre after having gone to Bombay. And we intend to approve the Alternative Manifest that you mentioned.

OG: How was the Bombay experience?

IR: I would say it was very interesting because it's a way of showing that the Forum isn't the property of a continent or of a country; it's a planetary experience…

OG: But, I'm under the impression that it had a lot less repercussion than when it was held in Porto Alegre.

IR: I personally favored that the Forum be kept in Porto Alegre because a certain brand name had been created. Porto Alegre had a meaning in itself and besides being a city it was also a movement. But you have to accept the idea that permanently keeping the Forum in just one place is also a fragmentary and definite way of seeing the phenomenon of alter-globalization; and by moving it to Bombay, the aim was that those regions –especially Asia, with all the capacity it has to protest against injustices- would join the phenomenon and the criticism to globalization. You also have to realize that by holding it for three years in a row in Porto Alegre, in effect practically all Latin America had joined the protest, or the organizations that had been mobilized; a great part of Europe; an important part of the United States; but very few people from Africa and Asia. It was therefore necessary to make this move. To a great extent, the one held in Bombay was above all an Indian Social Forum but you have to keep in mind that India is the sixth part of humanity. There are more than one thousand million people there with huge problems and the fact that most of the unions, associations, action groups and activists from all over India went to Bombay, met one another, saw the capacity they had and have to protest and join with all those present coming from Latin America, Europe, North America, Africa, was a very important thing for alter-globalization and for India in particular. It's a way of realizing that the phenomenon of protest, the same as that of globalization, is planetary; that alter-globalization necessarily has to be planetary. This year, back in Porto Alegre, the idea is to achieve that Alternative Manifest, to achieve what the movement needs today: an action plan; and that from Japan to California, from Norway to the Tierra del Fuego, everybody defends and supports it, regardless of each group's characteristics. At least, identify the fifteen or twenty actions which can be carried out this way, among which would be the suppression of the debt, the implantation of an international rate, the preparation of a protocol in favor of drinking water; in short, a group of goals that allow us to reach a massive consensus for the sake of achieving solutions that can truly and concretely change today's world.

OG: A panoply of alternative means has appeared as part of alter-globalization. What is your opinion regarding the efficiency of those means and the construction of networks that interact and contribute greater coherence and unity to the movement?

IR: We wouldn't have been able to organize such extensive and strong movements without appealing to alternative means, to the networks made possible by Internet -and not just Internet because in Latin America, for instance, communitarian radio plays a crucial role. Radio allows for the mobilization of a lot of people who don't even have access to Internet. On the other hand, we also believe that personal meetings, rallies, conferences, public debates are irreplaceable. But obviously, if email hadn't existed, if there were no possibility of creating websites with their repercussion, to spread slogans, information and documents allowing national and international mobilization, it wouldn't have been possible to achieve this. We were aware of that when we started to plan how to launch the first World Social Forum which, of course, had no tradition when it was just an idea. Why were people going to go to Porto Alegre? To see what? It was very important to create a website in Internet, generate information, systematically feed it and make the networks begin working. Of course, we also have to point out that this very positive aspect of the organization goes hand in hand with faults and inconveniences because much of the information that circulates on those networks isn't always trustworthy. Everybody knows that there's superabundant information on the network: it's very difficult to know if what I am randomly receiving through Internet has any guarantee of being true, if they’re not paranoid elements in terms of complot theory. What I mean is that in the same media that criticize globalization, very dogmatic, very elemental, Manichaean information is placed and it's not always good for us. What is good is that we concretely face reality and see it as it is.

OG: But, regarding communitarian radio, you pointed out that Internet and other media, even the alternative ones, are still determined by those who have access. Although it may not seem so, their reach is still very limited.

IR: Of course, we know, for instance, that less than 2% of Internet users are in Africa; that there are very few possibilities in Latin America (approximately 5,5% of the users). More than 75% of Internet users are in the three world poles of development: North America, European Union and Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. There are very few possibilities outside those three poles. This is the cruel reality.

OG: You mentioned Africa. How is alter-globalization movement expressed in that continent?

IR: Well, curiously enough, there's a very big potential in Africa. I was in the Cotton Social Forum in 2003, organized in Bamako, capital of Mali. Other social forums have taken place in Africa. There was one in Addis Ababa, another one in Dakar, and the idea is that, since these social forums are currently pendular–one year in Porto Alegre, the following in another place in the world and then again in Porto Alegre; the idea is, I repeat, that in 2006 the Social Forum be held in an African country. We still don't know in which, be it in Black Africa, in the South or in the North. There's a discussion at this time but what is very clear is that it will take place in Africa because that's obviously where the world's most contrasting situations exist today, where injustices are most evident and impacting.

OG: That would be very important because Africa is frequently forgotten by a part of the left-wing that doesn't include it in its speech, that doesn't know it and, for that same reason, barely takes it into consideration or distorts its reality. Passing on to another subject, what spaces do culture and art occupy in this movement?

IR: It’s a movement that has always given culture an important space because, although economic and social issues are capital, culture today is part of the economy. You just have to see everything that mass culture includes: leisure, consumption of information, in short, everything we call culture has less and less to do with the historic sense of wisdom, of the classic. Today culture is mainly the great consumption of mass media and we find that culture and communication are much interconnected because they are consumed through the same means, the owners of which are also the owners of the mass cultural corporations. Then, this dimension is very much a part of all this alter-globalization movement, precisely with the idea that it’s necessary to defend the peoples’ cultural identities, the languages, culture in the word's ethnographic meaning. For example, all the indigenist movement in Latin America is part of this concern that cultures, even those that are minorities, be preserved; but also with the idea that true communication prevails. That we are not exclusively informed by those that have a greater interest in misinforming us, without space for diversity or alternatives, without true freedom. This is an essential concern in our times.

OG: We come to the idea of a single way of thinking, very developed by you.

IR: In that stage in which we were trying to identify, should we say, which were the adversary's traits, I had proposed that this be called “single thought”. The expression was well received. In truth, single though is what we call today globalization. This idea that there is only one good way of thinking, one useful way of thinking, one practical way of thinking, one modern way of thinking and that it’s a good, useful, practical and modern way of thinking, consists in accepting the catalogue of ideas of globalization in economy, in work and in everyday life.

OG: It would go hand in hand with a single behavior.

IR: Indeed, with a single behavior. Some have called this the Washington Consensus. That would be, all in all, the single thought. Globalization is the globalization of this kind of culture too.

OG: But imperialism –without this being something new in its repertoire- is each day more brutal in its aggressiveness and the people live a desperate situation. Do you discard in all cases the use of revolutionary violence?

IR: I think that up to the moment, globalization has progressed on two fronts: one we could call economic, with the idea of forcing in any country one way of operating, that is, opening the borders, establishing privatizations, reducing the State budget, suppressing all the public sector in favor of the private sector, all that is the State in favor of the market, all that is collective in favor of what is private. This is confrontation in the economic scenario and there are practically very few governments in the world that have put up resistance. Then there would be the second front, the idea that we have to persuade ourselves and others that this method is a good one. Because the aim of single thought is that people finally accept their own slavery. That's the project: how to make a person voluntarily consent and take part in his own exploitation and in addition, to think he's happy. Indeed, that's the idea. This second front is that of the media or of ideology. The campaign is to transform what we call globalization into a phenomenon that they call modernization: where anyone who thinks differently is archaic because he would be using solutions that have already failed. What would be logical -following this logic of submission- is that “modern” version of the economy. The media sell this idea throughout the planet, they make it progress on all levels. After September 11, 2001, the third front was opened: the military. In fact, the central nucleus of globalization –especially in the United States, also in Great Britain and the countries that are now in Iraq- has said: it’s necessary for globalization to have a military arm because ideological persuasion isn't enough; you have to have a military arm, there's a way of war to achieve establishing globalization. Although they obviously don't say this is the goal; instead, they say “fight terrorism”, “fight against weapons of mass destruction”, and so forth. But, we can't avoid being aware of the fact that those countries could surrender and accept the phenomenon of globalization at all costs. Where it can take place, where this hyper-violence has appeared on both parts, hyper-terrorism has of course appeared –and I don't know if you could call it revolutionary violence. Evidently, I wouldn't call it revolutionary violence.

OG: In no way. But, there is also a resistance which shouldn’t be confused with terrorism; for instance, in Iraq.

IR: Yes, of course, but there’s the hyper-violence of the hyper-power with the preventive war or the war of destruction, we could say, of civilian objectives in a perspective of total war. Before this reality, a movement like that of alter-globalization is convinced that today our societies, or in any case many countries, are not willing to adopt violence as a way to transform the world because those who are using violence –the Al-Qaeda network, the United States- are opposite models. It is precisely what shouldn't be done. On the other hand, it’s still very difficult to distinguish resistance because it has a lot of everything. It’s difficult for an observer to establish the difference between a resistance of national character and a resistance that joins the movement of what is radical Islamism. The phenomenon is very different today from what it was two centuries ago and even from what it was like some decades ago. Radical Islamism doesn't have an explicit social nature, more a messianic nature, very different from that of Marxism or even nationalism. This, in spite of the fact that circumstantial alliances could happen in some countries.

OG: Now, I would like to propose to move on to the subject of Cuba. You have long-standing ties with our country, with the Revolution, and with our culture. How did that relationship come about and based on what motivations?

IR: Well, I think it's quite simple. Most of the people of my generation, and for biographic reasons, became interested in the Cuban Revolution. You must realize that when the revolution takes place, in 1959, and especially during the years before, the phenomenon that takes place here is curiously a very original one. What was Fidel Castro, for instance, in 1957 or 1958? Well, it's difficult to compare. We are before a very peculiar figure of contemporary political and revolutionary life, a phenomenon that stood out from the rigidities of the Cold War. Perhaps we could compare it with the meaning that someone like Sub-commander Marcos has in these last years, i.e., someone who immediately attracted the sympathy of all those who didn't want to find themselves prisoners of the alternative imposed by the Cold War at the end of the 1950s. We mustn't forget that this revolutionary phenomenon is carried out against a dictatorship that had a completely terrible image throughout the world, or that US media was of utmost importance in making that fight popular. Fidel Castro's interview with Herbert Matthews, published in the New York Times, had a great international repercussion when it presented the then called “barbudos” as a sort of Robin Hood, whose methods were very different from those who used violence, because it was a violence that never touched civilians; a use of violence exclusively reserved to fight against the military adversary, with great generosity regarding prisoners and adversaries, great respect for farmers considering they paid them for everything they used –among other very specific features. All this ethics of revolutionary behavior, when we compare it with what goes on today with public beheadings, attempts against the innocent, taking hostages in schools; it's radically the opposite. We're talking about a use of political violence with a will not to steer away from the limits of the confrontation and which in no way touches society –such as happens today in many places in the world. Obviously, this was of interest to many people of my generation. I was around 15 at the time; I was a teenager; then the interest in the revolution was very widespread and, also, this revolution immediately put forth projects that seemed to be very generous: literacy campaign, which is a project that immediately wins followers; the agrarian reform, knowing what farmers were and their situation, not just here but also in the rest of the world. Before the interview began, you reminded me that I lived in Morocco for a time; well, colonization ended there in 1956, at a time when the struggle begins here. That same year, the landing of the Granma in Eastern Cuba takes place. Therefore, we had the idea that a country isn’t sovereign just because it reaches independence but when its people are sovereign and not subjected to any kind of feudality. The Cuban Revolution started to encourage this idea, i.e. a great theoretical reflection on its own action, especially by Fidel and also by Che Guevara, with all that this implied for the capacity to extend this model to other places. It was a period when there were many guerrillas, not just in Latin America but also in Africa because Africa was freeing itself at that time: late 50s, early 60s. It's also the Bandung time and the years that followed Bandung; and for the same reason, I would say it was and is very normal to be interested in a revolution which, all in all, has been very faithful to its initial project. It has remained loyal regardless of the period of alliance with the Soviet Union which was indispensable for its survival. At some times we were afraid that the rigid model, lacking political imagination -and imagination in general- that had developed in the Soviet Union, could become established here. There were times of bifurcations where the wrong road could have been taken and it wasn't. Here, for instance, in cultural terms, socialist realism was never well received. In short, I want to say that I believe that this interest I might have in the Cuban Revolution is similar to that of dozens and dozens of intellectuals in Latin America –a lot, probably much more than in other continents- and that it is significant and characteristic of the generation I belong to.

OG: We see today a different situation in Latin America than that of 1959. What do you think about the political and social process that is taking place in Venezuela?

IR: It's very interesting, especially because it's a phenomenon that forces us to think about the limits of a political democracy. What happened in Latin America at the end of the 1980s? Globally, the military dictatorships that had marked the preceding 20 years in the continent started to disappear and Latin American societies welcomed with relief –the same as the whole world- the disappearance of those terrible regimes that had been marked by repression, torture, the destruction of a great part of the intelligentsia -whether by physical disappearance or by emigration. But, as soon as those democratic governments started to rule, they accepted globalization's “solutions” with open arms; they started to privatize massively, to apply the recipes of the International Monetary Fund; and, with time, what we are now seeing took place: deep dissatisfaction in societies which consider that democracy doesn't fulfill its promises. Democracy isn’t just the possibility of picking between one party or the other, to take part in civilian liberties; supposedly, it is also the will to create a fairer society, to distribute wealth better, without polarizing and, therefore, allowing greater economic democracy, social democracy, cultural democracy. These three things haven't come true and we’re seeing how in Latin America people spontaneously rise in revolt to demand the destitution of a president. For instance, in Peru, with Fujimori; in Bolivia, with Sanchez Losada; in Argentina, with De la Rua. Then, in Venezuela, the phenomenon curiously takes place before because there wasn't a dictatorship experience, only a very previous one that ended in 1957 with the fall of Perez Jimenez, much before the cycle of Latin American military dictators. We could say there was greater democracy there than in other of the region’s countries. However, that democratic depth is expressed with the alternating in power of two parties, the social-democrat and the Christian-democrat.

OG: Both of them very corrupt…

IR: Well, which of them was more corrupt? And, a kind of government by a small minority occurs that takes advantage of the country's extraordinary wealth. When a social-democratic leader as important as Carlos Andres Perez uses the same shock therapy Fujimori used a short time later, a sort of social satiation overcomes –that is just what we've seen in Argentina against Menem. And, in Venezuela's case, that movement is also brutally repressed. During the Caracazo they figure there were two thousand victims. Officially, you will see they talk about two or three hundred, but it is believed that there were many more. This created a situation in which a movement appeared that thinks about what the solution to the problem may be. It initially found a solution of a radical nature, and later, in the 1998 elections, the will prevailed to change through ballot boxes the political elites that had ruled with anarchy that country for decades. That's how Chavez comes to power and becomes one of the first political expressions of the on-going alter-globalization process. How is alter-globalization expressed politically? First, it was Sub-commander Marcos -when he occupied San Cristobal de las Casas on January 1, 1994- and made a declaration against the coming into force of the North American Free Trade Treaty (FTAA). This was the first concrete expression of alter-globalization in politics. The second was the takeover by Chavez. Structurally, he's taking part in how to stop the havoc of globalization –the problem we have before us today- but he comes with a program that is a moderate social transformation that he calls Bolivarian Revolution -because it is evidently a revolution. To give the children schools, medical care to people, food, to make an agrarian reform –that's a Revolution and Chavez and his project are a relatively concrete way –I would say - to show what can be done. Not everything can be done, of course. You have to take into consideration that part of the economy can remain articulated to the dominating capitalist world, but you also have to keep in mind that in the major domains, such as education, health care, agrarian reform, the introduction of micro-credits and respect for the identities of the minorities –among other things- it's possible to make progress. The fact of having established, for example, an obligatory minority in Parliament that represents the primeval people of Venezuela, can be done with a little political willpower and in a completely democratic way. President Chavez has shown that each time there has been an electoral stage, he's won the elections and he’s given proof that in a very clean way, that's the politics that most of the Venezuelan population backs up.

OG: What do you think about the behavior of some intellectuals regarding the political processes that are taking place in the Third World? I am referring to certain cardinal stances or others that are fitting to a haggard Jacobinism that is forced to define sign and countersign, past, present and future of those processes or to stigmatize them, as if it were an unavoidable Adamic job.

IR: Well, I think, on the one hand, that societies are no longer willing to accept the positions of many intellectuals as if they were gospel truths because they have made mistakes on more than one occasion. We've seen it recently with the Iraq war, where there have been intellectuals in France, the United States, who favor the war (and of course, others against it). But we’ve seen how some have been systematically wrong. In fact, today's intellectual is in a very uncomfortable position. No longer is there the unanimity that might have existed regarding great figures of other times such as Sartre in France itself; personalities like Arthur Miller and Norman Mailer, in the United States, during the Vietnam war period. The situation today is more pragmatic and that makes these positions more difficult to identify; and as a result of globalization, the most referred to intellectuals are the Americans. Michael Moore, for instance, is a universal reference. Or Chomsky, of which we obviously appreciate all his works, but he's nothing more than a result, a reference for just one part because he’s very attacked even in the United States, absolutely attacked and considered by the intellectual Establishment as some kind of marginal, while for great intellectual sectors throughout the world he’s considered a great reference in many aspects. Lastly, I want to say that this situation has gotten pretty confused and that intellectuals are also the patrimony of the right. President Bush and his team, for example, have a group of neoconservative intellectuals who have created a new reactionary doctrine. They are the theoreticians of what we would have to call The Reaction, and who have indisputably produced a doctrine, falling back on antecedents, on philosophical and cultural references. They are intellectuals who might have been leftists at a certain time and who are now near President Bush. This doctrine has become extended and there are Englishmen, Germans, French, Italians, and Spaniards who take part in the production of these ideas.

OG: Besides what you have told us, what is Ignacio Ramonet doing now? What are you he writing?

IR: Well, first of all, I’m carrying on with my newspaper which fills all my days –absolutely all of them. Second, I’m finishing a book on the Iraq war which is titled Iraq, The Story of a Disaster. I’m giving it the final touches at the moment. It's about how the intervention was conceived, what its characteristics are, what is really happening in that country. I’m also working on a book that we could call The Black Book of American Imperialism: with the military interventions that took place from the 19th century up to our days, what disasters they caused in many countries. It has been rightly said that the Soviet Union made very serious mistakes; but maybe the crimes committed by imperialism are not remembered enough, especially those in the colonial period. I also want to finish a book about talks with Fidel Castro on which I've been working for two years and which had its audio-visual expression in the series: Moi, Fidel Castro, made by Axel Ramonet and which was screened in France. Finally, there are articles and conferences I frequently have to write and deliver, sometimes in places that are very far away one from the other. That's how my daily life goes, more or less. No time to get bored.

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Scum Also Rises

The Bloody Career of John Negroponte

By Dave Lindorff
Taken from www.counterpunch.com
February 22, 2005

The nomination by President George Bush of John Negroponte for the new post of director of national intelligence, in charge of overseeing all the burgeoning intelligence operations of the United States, is both obscene and predictable.

Negroponte, currently the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and, unofficially, the head of the U.S. occupation of that country, is a career foreign service officer on paper, but in fact a veteran CIA operative responsible for some of the blackest crimes of murder and torture in Central America during that region's dark days of civil war, revolution and counter-revolution in the late 20th Century.

As U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, Negroponte played a key role in organizing the military repression in that poorest of Latin American countries, and in creating and running the so-called Contra's, the U.S-organized military operation to undermine and overthrow the elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

What makes Negroponte the perfect candidate to be America's KGB chief is his refined cover. He has the Republicans on the Republican-dominated Intelligence Committee in his pocket anyhow, and as a career diplomat, urbane and fluent in five languages, he also appeals to the mushy national security state Democrats like John Rockefeller (D-W. VA), Evan Bayh (D-Indiana), Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who will be asked to join in rubber-stamping his nomination.

If his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during hearings on his nomination for the post of ambassador to Iraq is any indication, he will breeze through this next "test." Democratic Senators Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Joseph Biden (D-Del.) gushed over him at those earlier hearings, and didn't ask anything about his role in promoting death squad activities or in covering up human rights abuses in Central America, which included the murders of several dozen priests and nuns.

Americans concerned about our vanishing civil liberties, and about the expanded use of official state terrorism against American citizens and resident aliens should be concerned about this appointment, however. The new intelligence chief will be responsible for overseeing the nation's vast $100-billion spying operation and its ballooning, largely secret budget.

This man's record is not encouraging.

Negroponte deliberately falsified State Department human rights reports every year of his ambassadorship in Honduras. According to the Maryknoll Order, many U.S. missionaries and other religious activists were murdered in that country in the 1970s and especially the early 1980s by CIA-trained Honduran soldiers of the so-called Battalion 3-16, whose operations they claim Negroponte oversaw, or "at best overlooked."

Even The New York Times credits Negroponte with "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua"-an effort which the paper fails to note was illegal, and which ultimately included the trading of guns for drugs on CIA-financed aircraft. Negroponte helped with this massively corrupt and illegal war effort of the Reagan administration even after it had been expressly banned by the U.S. Congress.

One would think that kind of insult to the Congress would elicit at least some opposition to Negroponte's appointment, but not a word about it came up during his ambassadorship hearings (Sen. Dodd actually said, "I happen to feel he's a very fine Foreign Service officer and has done a tremendous job in many places."), and it seems unlikely he'll be asked about it this time around.

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One child dies every three hours from bullet wounds in US

Taken from Granma International
02.09.05

Every three hours in the United States, a child dies from bullet wounds, according to a report from the Children’s Defense Fund and cited today by La Prensa daily in New York.
The daily indicates that the study has raised tremendous concern and reported that 2,867 children were killed by gunfire in 2002.
This means that 239 children die every month, the equivalent of 55 children per week, 24 every day or one child every three hours, it clarifies.
The report adds that firearms are the second leading cause of death after motor vehicle accidents amongst children and teenagers between the ages of 10 and 19.
The report specifies that during 2002, a total of 91 children died from gunfire in New York: 74 were homicides, 14 suicides and three accidents.
In New Jersey, 32 children died from bullet wounds and in Connecticut, there were 15 deaths, it goes on.
The phenomenon does not make any ethic distinctions. On a nationwide level, 1,639 child victims were white and 1,112 were black.
Between 1990 and 2002, 10,000 Latino children and adolescents have died.
The study also shows that the number of deaths by gunfire increased in 21 states and in Washington D.C. during 2001, including the state of New Jersey.
The Fund criticizes the George W. Bush administration for allowing the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban to expire last year.

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"Democracy Promotion" and Resistance

Imperial Delusions
By TARIQ ALI
Taken from www.counterpunch.com
February 7, 2005

The United States, unlike the Empires of old Europe has always preferred to excersize its hegemony indirectly. It has relied on local relays--uniformed despots, corrupt oligarchs, pliant politicians and obedient monarchs--rather than lengthy occupations and nation-building with carefully-controlled forms of elite, low-intensity democracy. It was only when rebellions from below threatened to disrupt this order that the Marines were dispatched and wars were fought.

Despite the changed world that came into existence during the Nineties necessitating a shift in US priorities and the establishment of the Washington consensus, the imperial elite is still allergic to long-term occupations. If, during the Cold War, money was indiscriminately supplied to all anti-communist forces (including the current leadership of al-Qaeda) the 21st century recipients are more carefully targeted. The aim is to slowly replace the traditional elites in the old satrapies with a new breed of genetically programmed neo-liberal politicians, who have been trained and educated in the United States. This is the primary function of the money allocated to ´democracy promotion´ programmes in the US. Loyalty, being a commodity, can be purchased from politicians, parties and trades unions. And the result, it is hoped, is to create a new layer of janissary politicians who serve Washington.

Why is this necessary? Because in the absence of a system whereby the financial benefits of foreign investment accrue directly to the US treasury, the costs of maintaining the Empire must be largely funded by the satrapies. Already the US military budget has reached astronomical heights. The US spends more money on arms then the next fifteen nations combined. Iraqi oil is vital to help maintain the US military bases that now exist in 138 countries all over the globe.

This is what ´democracy promotion´ is all about. Its most recent variant has now been applied in Afghanistan and Iraq and it will hit Haiti (another occupied country) in November this year. Create a new elite, give it funds and weaponry to build a new army and let them make the country safe for the corporations. The Afghan elections of 2004, even according to some pro-US commentators, were a complete farce and the much vaunted 73 percent turnout was a fraud. If this were not the case the US pro-consul would not be engaged in re-building a new alliance with Taliban factions close to Pakistani military intelligence.

In Iraq the turnout (according to DEBKA the totally loyal Israeli intelligence website) was closer to forty percent and in Basra (subcontracted to Tony Blair) was no more than 32 percent. Sistani´s followers voted to please their Ayotallah, but if he is unable to deliver peace and an end to the occupation, they too might defect. The only force which can be relied on at the moment are the Kurdish tribes. The Kurdish 36th command batallion fought alongside the US marines in Fallujah, but the tribal chiefs want some form of independence (even as a US-Israeli protectorate) and some oil. If loyal NATO ally and EU aspirant, Turkey, vetoes any such possibility, then the Kurds too, might accept money from elsewhere. The battle for Iraq is far from over. It has merely entered a new stage. Despite strong disagreements on the boycott of the elections, the majority of Iraqis will not willingly hand over their oil or their country to the West. Politicians, bearded or otherwise, who try and force this through will lose all support and become totally dependent on the foreign armies encamped in their country. The popular resistance will continue. Times have changed. Many in the North find it difficult to support this resistance. The arguments for and against are old ones. In the last decades of the 19th century, the English socialist William Morris celebrated the defeat of General Gordon by the Mahdi: "Khartoum fallen-into the hands of the people it belongs to". Morris argued that the duty of English internationalists was to support all those being oppressed by the British Empire despite one's disagreements with nationalism or fanaticism.

The triumphalist chorus of the corporate and state media of the West reflects a single fact: the Iraqi elections were designed not so much to preserve the unity of Iraq but to re-establish the unity of the West. Already after Bush´s re-election the French and Germans were looking for a bridge back to Washington. The French had collaborated in the occupation of Haiti without any dissent from the French media. The Germans can now re-join the pack. Will French and German troops now join their battered British, American and privatized mercenary colleagues in the war zones of Iraq to seal this unity? And if they do will their citizens object or will they accept the propaganda that sees the illegitimate election (the Carter Centre that monitors elections worldwide refused to send observers) as justifying the occupation. And if French and German troops are dispatched will they be forbidden the use of digital cameras to record the torture that still goes on in open defiance of the Geneva Convention?

The occupation of Iraq involved both a military and an economic invasion as envisaged by Hayek, the father of neo-liberalism. The essential vision of imperial power was firmly embedded in the original doctrine. It was Hayek, after all who pioneered the notion of lightning air strikes against Iran in 1979 and Argentina in 1982. The re-colonisation of Iraq would have greatly pleased him. He despised pieties. Politicians masking their true aims with weasel words about ´humanity´ would have greatly irritated him.

Hayek's followers in Washington, however, did not predict a resistance in Iraq. Nor did most of the Western world, where a majority of intellectuals, TV journalists and web-site afficinados are so disillusioned, bitter and cynical that they assume the bulk of the world is like them. They don't like to be reminded of cases to the contrary. They forget that the graph of history is always twisted. There is never a line of uninterrupted progress. And so it happened that the occupation of Iraq produced a resistance. Contrary to the bulf of reports in the western press, this resistance is NOT dominated by Zarqawwi or his tiny band. If it were it would have been crushed long ago.

There is a popular resistance in Iraq, both armed and non-violent. The bulk of the armed resistance consists of demobilised soldiers and officers, many of whom were disgusted by Saddam's corruption and cruelty and his failure to defend the country. To these one must add both secular nationalist and religious groups who hate the occupation. The left is weak in Iraq because the Iraqi Communist Part backed the occupation and served in the puppet government.

The size and scale of the Iraqi resistance (and, incidentally, it exists also in the Shia south and resistance cells are numerous in Basra) took the world by surprise. The Iraqis were like lightning, compared to the European resistance against the Third Reich. In France, the Vichy regime was popular with a large majority. Not so in Iraq. In occupied Holland the resistance was tiny and very dependent on British support. Not so in Iraq where the resistance receives nil support from its Arab neighbours. In Vietnam, the nationalist resistance to the French, Japanese and American Empires was led by the Communist Party. In Iraq it is completely decentralized. In all the above cases there were collaborators who worked closely with the occupying power. Here Iraq is no different.

Is it a perfect resistance? No. How could a resistance be pretty when the occupation is so brutal and ugly. The senseless violence inflicted upon the Iraqi people by the occupation results in a violent response. It was no different when the Algerians fought the French to a standstill in the early Sixties of the last century. When a leader of the Algerian resistance was asked why they often bombed cafes and killed civilians, he replied: 'Give us planes and helicopters and then we will only target French troops.'

During an early stage of the occupation, US papers reported young kids in Baghdad shaking hands with the Marines. What these newspapers did not report (because the journalists did not speak Arabic) was what the kids with a smile said to the marines; 'We hate you, motherfucker.' These photographs stopped a long time ago. Many smiling children have been shot dead.

And what of the media, the propaganda pillar of the new order? In ´Control Room´, a Canadian documentary on al-Jazeera, one of the more telling and disgusting images is that of embedded Western journalists jumping and whooping with joy as the capture of Baghdad was announced. The coverage of élections´ in Afghanistan and Iraq is little more than empty propaganda.

This symbiosis of neo-liberal politics and a neo-liberal media helps to reinforce the collective memory loss from which the West suffers today. The insistence that the totality of contemporary politics is encompassed by the essential categories of ´friend´ and `´enemy´´ has a long pedigree. It was Carl Schmitt, a gifted legal theorist of the Third Reich, who first developed this view to justify Hitler´s preemptive strikes against neighbouring states. Schmitt´s writing were adapted by local conservatives to the needs of the United States after the Second World war and are currently the bedrock of neo-con thinking. Their message is straightforward: if your country does not serve our needs it is an enemy state. It will be occupied, its leaders removed and pliant satraps placed on the throne. But when the troops withdraw the satrapies often crumble. Occupation, rebellion, withdrawal, occupation, self-emancipation is a pattern in world history.

Only in the North is the death of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians ignored by the mainstream politico-media complex. Iraqi lives don't matter to the human rights brigades in the West. It is this that helps fuel an anger against the West as a whole. The demonisation of Islam has reached such heights that dead Muslims don't have to be counted. And the fount of this demonisation is the government of the United States, a country awash with religion: 95 percent of Americans believe in God, 70 percent in angels, 67 percent in the devil. 'Who believes in the Devil', wrote Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus, 'already belongs to him.' Against the terrorism of tiny Islamist cells is deployed the almighty terrorism of the American state and its allies. But David was always more popular than Goliath. This is what I attempted to explain in my book, Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads, Modernity. For most of the 20th century, conservative Islam was, more often than not, supportive of the British Empire and its American successor. Islam was seen as a conservative social force, rattling the chains of superstiton and fanaticism to stifle even the most fragile tremors of social revolution. The West was delighted to have such an ally. Times change.

I was in Brazil last week for the World Social Forum. In this time of frustration and defeats, when social advance appears marooned on the shoals of the Washington consensus, it was heartening to hear a Latin American leader--Hugo Chavez of Venezuela--address a large crowd of 15,000 participants and defending the resistance in Iraq. The United States had made three attempts to topple him. They had failed. 'If they try by force, we will resist just like the Iraqis', he declared. He called for the establishment of a worldwide Anti-Imperialist Front. The curtain is still down on the main acts of the drama that is history, but the breaks and intervals are also full of tension and conflict.

At the Nurnberg War Crimes trials the German Foreign Minister, Von Ribbentrop, was also charged with war crimes. Why? Because he had provided the political and ideological justification for the pre-emptive strike against Norway.

If this precedent were to be followed in an imaginary dock of some future tribunal, then Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Tony Blair and their big boss in the White House could face a similar indictment. Unlikely, but desirable.

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A New Campaign of Lies: The Assault on Social Security

By Dave Lindorff
Taken from www.counterpunch.com
February 3, 2005

Social Security, the New Deal program that has provided a basic level of economic support for the nation's elderly, disabled and orphaned for 70 years, is in grave danger--not from Baby Boomers, but from a campaign of lies and fear-mongering, led by the president.
The truth? There is no Social Security crisis. None whatsoever.
Yet, in his State of the Union address Wednesday night, President Bush put the campaign to destroy Social Security and its promise of old-age and disability security front and center in his second-term agenda, claiming that the system founded in 1935 is headed for "bankruptcy" in 2042.
Like the mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this was a flat-out, deliberate lie. First of all, even if the date were correct, all that would happen in 2042 would be that the trust fund used to pay out benefits to workers would be exhausted, but even then current workers taxes would continue to cover 73 percent of promised benefits to retirees. More importantly, that 2042 projection by the increasingly politicized Social Security Administration was just a conservative projection made a few years ago based upon unrealistically low estimates of future economic growth. It has already been pushed back by several years' good economic performance, and in fact, the Congressional Budget Office and most independent economists say that the trust fund should enable the system to cover all benefits through at least 2052 and perhaps on out through 2080 and beyond.
Not mentioned by the president or right-wing critics of Social Security is the fact that by 2045, the last of the Baby Boom generation will have already shuffled off this mortal coil, taking their outsized claims for benefits with them.
Given that there is no real crisis, the real unasked question is why the president, right-wing politicians and pundits, and corporate leaders and business organizations--and the media--are all calling for "reforms" to "save" the system.
The real reason for this urgency is that they understand that the Baby Boom generation, which is approaching retirement, does pose a crisis--not for Social Security, but for them and their political agenda.
Consider this: Just as there will be nearly twice as many elderly retirees collecting benefits when the wave of Americans born between 1945 and 1960 hits its retirement age peak (the first Boomers start retiring in 2011), there will also be twice as many elderly voters. And it gets better (or more terrifying, if you are a conservative politician or a corporate executive): while today's seniors came of age listening to Perry Como in the politically quiescent 1950s, tomorrow's retirees will be people who listened to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and cut their political teeth in the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
In a few years then, we can expect to see an unprecedentedly large senior lobby that knows how to organize politically, that knows how to do take it to the street, and that has demonstrated its ability to fight hard when its own interests are at stake (remember those struggles for the vote and against the draft and the Indochina War?). And once they near retirement, this powerful voting bloc will be seeing Social Security and Medicare as their number one political issue. If Social Security is already the "third rail" of electoral politics, not to be touched, in a few years, it will become the Molotov cocktail, exploding the political status quo.
Corporate America knows this. The people in the boardrooms and the conservative think tanks aren't worried about 2042. They don't think that long-term. (If they did, they wouldn't be so cavalier about the destruction of the environment and about global warming.) They're worried about 2010, because this new senior revolution is just around the corner.
They know that today, seniors and people over the age of 65, as powerful an electoral block as they are, represent only 17 percent of the voting age population of the country, while by 2025, when the bulk of Baby Boomers will be in the 65-80 age bracket, retirees will represent 25 percent of the voting-age population, an increase of 45 percent in their relative voting power. If those aged 55-64 are added in--a reasonable assumption, since people who reach 55 are starting to think about their retirement and tend to vote more in line with the interests of actual retirees--the elderly and near elderly will by then represent fully 40 percent of the electorate. That's a 40 percent increase over the 28.5 percent of the electorate this broader group represented in 2000.
Moreover, while the Right talks ominously of a generational conflict between older retirees collecting pensions and younger workers paying the taxes to cover them, in fact, those retirees are the parents of many of those workers (not everyone has children, but everyone has parents!). And how many people complain about the size of their parents' Social Security checks, or would really want to have to be personally responsible for taking care of their elderly parents' finances? There really is considerable support even among young workers, for a secure and generous retirement system, because people don't just vote their own interests; they vote their parents' and grandparents' interests, too.
That's why there is an increasingly panicky aspect to the efforts to destroy Social Security before the Baby Boomer population realizes where its real political interests lie. Social Security's opponents know if the program is effectively killed off before it becomes a core Boomer issue, it will be much harder to re-establish it.
The Right doesn't really have much time on this issue. It appears, to judge by the marketing folks at the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), which offers memberships to everyone turning 50, that somewhere in their mid-50s, people start to think seriously about retirement. Today's oldest Baby Boomers are just hitting that milestone now.
When today's Boomers really start to contemplate their retirement, the picture will not be pleasant. Property values--where many have placed their faith and their savings--are stagnating, not rising, and post-Enron, those 401K pensions that the middle class was all excited about a few years ago, have been treading water. Meanwhile companies are whittling away pension programs as fast as they can, eliminating "defined benefit" plans that paid benefits based upon set formulas in favor of plans that pay depending upon what employees contributed, and on how well the investment portfolio performed--even as those investments that have been made with workers' contributions have been languishing or shrinking in value (if they weren't being pilfered, as happened at Enron).
What's left? Social Security and Medicare. Given the sorry state of the private safety net, it's a safe bet that it won't be long before a movement springs up among the new elderly and near elderly not just to "rescue" Social Security, but to radically transform it into a true retirement program.
Tomorrow's senior lobby won't feel constrained by current law, which makes workers foot half the bill (we're talking about their own kids, after all!). We can thus expect to see more of the tax burden shifted onto employers. We can also expect to see future Congresses pressured into passing reforms that will remove the income cap on the Social Securities tax. (And here's something the president has not told people: if the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, currently set at $90,000 in wages, were eliminated so all income was subject to the tax, there would be no shortfall in the trust fund--not in 2042, not in 2075, never.) We can also expect to see private pensions made fully portable, so that employers can't pocket years of contributions every time they let go workers before they are "vested." As well, we can probably also expect to see a movement to expand Medicare from a niggardly program that only barely covers the medical care of the elderly, to a full-fledged national healthcare program that covers everyone.
That is a scary vision for business and the Right, and it's why Bush is pushing to wreck the system now. If the president were to go before Congress and announce that the banking system was in grave danger, and that the FDIC insurance program could not really insure people's accounts, it would spark a run on the banks and destroy the banking system and the president would probably be impeached. And yet that is exactly what his dire warnings of a bankruptcy of Social Security in 2042 are trying to do-cause a political run on the system.
The president's proposed "solution"--private accounts for younger workers--is really nothing but a classic divide-and-conquer tactic. It doesn't solve the long-term problem, and by most accounts would probably worsen it by removing some contributions that would have helped build up the reserve fund. What it would do though is leave older workers stuck with the current system, while weaning younger workers away with a promise of easy money and a lower tax bite. Then, with fewer people dependent upon classic benefits, it would be politically easier for a future Congress to slash those benefits later, since younger workers with a private "nest egg" would be less affected.
It's time to see the president's attack for what it is: an attempt to destroy the most enduring legacy of the New Deal.

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Strong action against drugs in 2004

Taken from Granma Internacional
February 3, 2005

THE presence of drugs in Cuba diminished significantly during 2004, due to systematic measures directed at eliminating and preventing drug trafficking and narcotics abuse, according to Ministry of the Interior ( MININT) statistics published in the Granma newspaper, which confirm a considerable reduction in trafficking activities in the vicinity of the island.

In this context, it was confirmed that 16 aircraft and 15 vessels were sighted, while 50 consignments were found along the coasts, an inferior number than the 330 discovered last year, and the lowest number of drugs confiscated in those circumstances for the last 15 years.

According to the source, as a result of efforts to combat drugs in general, 3,080 kilograms of narcotics were seized, among the lowest annual figures over 15 years.

These amounts included 2,758 kilograms of marijuana, 307 kilograms of cocaine, 12.56 kilograms of hashish oil, 1.72 kilograms of hashish, small quantities of crack, psychotropic substances, 1,812 marijuana plants and 26,669 seeds.

It was also noted that joint work between General Customs agents and the MINININT resulted in the frustration of nine drug trafficking operations.

That entailed the detention of 10 foreigners, from whom they confiscated 10.82 kilograms of cocaine and 195 packs of LSD.

Also detected were 218 cases possessing small quantities of drugs for personal use (212 at airports and six at maritime borders) involving 239 foreigners and 11 Cubans residing abroad.

There were two incidents of mailed attempts to smuggle small quantities of marijuana and hashish into the country.

The concerted efforts of MININT agencies and the judicial system facilitated expeditious criminal proceedings against the individuals implicated in drug crimes, with 799 trials of 1,854 persons charged.

As a result, 65.8% of the defendants were sentenced to six or more years’ imprisonment, specified the source.

Among other significant facts, the article highlighted the capture of two speedboats involved in international drug trafficking operations.

Another prominent result of the operation designated "H3" was the seizure of 58,932 kilograms of marijuana in the north of the Ciego de Avila province, which required coordinated action between the armed forces and the MININT.

In parallel, a National Drug Commission investigation carried out in Havana confirmed the incipient nature of the domestic market and low rates of use, while policies and plans for preventative action were improved.

During the course of this year a similar study is planned for the eastern province of Santiago de Cuba.

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Final edition for the press

Taken from Le Monde diplomatique

By Ignacio Ramonet

WHAT could be more symbolic of the disarray of the French press, as it faces an alarming fall in sales figures, than that the erstwhile Maoist daily Libération recently decided to cede a major shareholding to the banker Edouard de Rothschild? Last year the Socpresse group, publisher of some 70 major titles including Le Figaro, L’Express, L’Expansion and dozens of regional newspapers, was bought by an arms manufacturer, Serge Dassault. Another arms manufacturer, Arnaud Lagardère, already owns the Hachette group (1), with 47 magazines (including Elle and Première) besides dailies such as La Provence, Nice-Matin and Corse-Presse. If this decline in diversity continues, the independent press (2) risks being controlled by a few industrialists - Bouygues, Dassault, Lagardère, Pinault, Arnault, Bolloré and Bertelsmann - whose busy merger activities threaten plurality (3).

The fall in circulation is now affecting the quality press. For the first time in more than 15 years Le Monde diplomatique is also in the firing line. Since 1990 we have had a regular rise in sales. Between 2001 and 2003 we saw record sales, a cumulative rise of more than 25% (4). However, for 2004 (although the final results are not in yet) we expect a fall of about 12% (5). Most major dailies will also report falling sales, on top of already disappointing figures from 2003: Le Figaro -4.4%; Libèration -6.2%; Les Echos -6.4%; Le Monde -7.5%; and La Tribune -12.3%.

This is far from being a French phenomenon. Sales of the American daily, the International Herald Tribune, dropped by 4.16% in 2003; in Britain sales of the Financial Times have fallen by 6.6%; over the past five years, newspaper sales have fallen by 7.7% in Germany, 9.5% in Denmark, 9.9% in Austria and 6.9% in Belgium. Even in Japan, with the highest purchase of newspapers in the world per head of population, sales have fallen by 2.2%. Over the past decade in the European Union the number of papers sold overall has fallen by a million a day. Worldwide, the distribution of purchased (rather than free) papers has been falling at an average of 2% a year. Some people are beginning to wonder whether the printed press is a thing of the past, a relic of the industrial era destined for extinction.

Titles are disappearing everywhere. In Hungary the daily Magyar Hirlap (owned by the Swiss Ringier group) closed on 5 November 2004. The previous day in Hong Kong, the prime reference weekly for Asian affairs, the Far Eastern Economic Review (owned by the US Dow Jones group), went out of business. In France, on 7 November 2004, the monthly magazine Nova suspended publication. In the US, between 2000 and 2004, more than 2,000 press jobs were lost - 4% of the total workforce. The recession has also hit agencies that provide papers with information, with the industry giant, Reuters, recently announcing the lay-off of 4,500 staff.

Give-away dailies, and the internet

The external causes of this crisis are well-known. There is the devastating onslaught of give-away dailies. In France 20 Minutes leads the way with more than 2 million readers a day, with runners-up Le Parisien (1.7 million) and Metro (1.6 million). These free papers drain substantial advertising revenue from the traditional press, since advertisers do not care care whether readers pay for the papers.

As a way of countering this competition - which could kill dailies and already threatens weeklies - some titles, particularly in Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey (although the phenomenon is spreading in France), are offering DVDs, CDs, cartoon strips, books, atlases and encyclopaedias, plus stamp collections, collectable banknotes, sets of glasses and chess games, all in return for a small increase in the cover price. This only worsens the confusion between information and commodification, with the danger that readers no longer know what they are buying. In adopting these tactics, newspapers lose their distinct identity, their status is downgraded and they venture on a slippery slope with an unpredictable outcome.

The other external cause is, of course, the internet, which continues to expand at an extraordinary rate. During the first quarter of 2004 more than 4.7m websites were created. The world currently has some 70m websites and the net more than 700 million users. In developed countries many people have given up reading newspapers, and even watching television, in favour of the computer screen. The arrival of ADSL (asymetric digital subscriber line) has changed things dramatically. For between €10 and €30 a month people can enjoy broadband access. In France 5.5m households have already signed up, giving them high-speed downloads of online news (79% of the world’s newspapers have online editions) and a huge range of other information, email, photos, music, radio and television, films and video games.

There is also “blogging”, which exploded worldwide in 2004. “Blogs” are personal diaries that mix news and opinion, verified facts and rumours, documented analysis and personal impressions. They have proved so successful that most online newspapers now have them. Their popularity suggests that many readers prefer the subjectivity and partiality of the bloggers to the hypocritical and false objectivity and impartiality of major papers. The growing possibility of connecting to the net through the new generation of mobile phones is likely to accelerate this process. Information is ever more mobile and nomadic. People can now access what is happening anywhere in the world at any moment of every day.

In India the Times Internet company, a multimedia subsidiary of the daily Times of India, has a service that every month sends to subscribers more than 30m messages via SMS, a technology that is rapid, concise and inexpensive. In Japan and South Korea a growing number of people now receive the day’s news via their mobile phones, which give continuous access to radio, plus television and 24-hour news channels. As a result, competition between non-net news sectors has now become so severe that all the providers are losing audiences (6).

The internal causes

But this crisis also has internal causes, which are mostly due to the loss of credibility of print media. One serious reason is that the press is being taken over by industrial groups that both run the economy and are in league with those who control politics. Another is that onesidedness, lack of objectivity, lies, manipulations and fraud are on the increase. We are under no illusion that there was ever a golden age of news, but such excesses now affect even the quality press. In the US the scandal of Jayson Blair - a journalist who falsified facts, plagiarised articles and invented stories - did huge damage to the New York Times, which had often put his stories on the front page (7). This newspaper of reference among the professional classes went through enormous structural changes afterwards: executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced to resign, and for the first time a post of ombudsman was created - Daniel Okrent, opinion columnist and former editor-at-large of Time Inc.

A few months later came an even more shocking scandal at the leading daily, USA Today. Its readers were astonished to discover that its most celebrated journalist, Jack Kelley, a star who had interviewed 36 heads of state, covered a dozen wars and been a household name around the world for 20 years - was a compulsive fabricator of stories, a serial forger. Between 1993 and 2003 he had invented hundreds of sensational stories. By luck he always seemed to be on the spot when things happened, and readers would be treated to his graphic descriptions of them. He claimed to have witnessed a bombing in a pizza parlour in Jerusalem and described how three men next to him had been lifted up bodily by the explosion; they came down again with their heads blown off and rolling around in the street.

Another outrageous story was his article about Cuba. Kelley had photographed a worker in a hotel (“Jacqueline”) and reported on her clandestine flight aboard a makeshift boat, and how she drowned in the straits of Florida. In reality the woman (real name Yamilet Fernandez) is alive and well, and never endured any such dramatic events. Another USA Today journalist, Blake Morrison, met her and revealed that Kelley had made up the story (8). The Kelley frauds, now regarded as among the gravest scandals in the history of US journalism, cost the jobs of the USA Today editor, Karen Jurgensen, executive editor, Brian Gallagher, and news editor, Hal Ritter (9).

More recently, during the presidential election campaign, a new ethical storm hit the media. Dan Rather, star presenter of CBS’s television news programme and anchorman for the prestigious Sixty Minutes programme, admitted that he had made public, without checking, forged documents that cast doubt on President George Bush’s service in the Texas National Air Guard (10). Rather announced that he was stepping down from his job.

Agents of propaganda

Compounding these disasters we now have a situation in which major media, notably television’s Fox News (11), have been transformed into propaganda organs for White House lies about the war in Iraq. Newspapers failed either to check or challenge statements from the Bush administration. If they had, a documentary such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would not have enjoyed the success that it did. The information in the film had been around for a long time, but it had been kept under wraps by the media.

Even the Washington Post and the New York Times took part in this “brainwashing”, as was revealed in a recent article by John Pilger (12). He quoted headlines claiming that Iraq had secret arsenals of bacteriological, chemical and nuclear weapons and concluded that all these articles were propaganda. An internal email from New York Times star reporter Judith Miller (which was published in the Washington Post) admitted that her main source for such stories had been Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile known for his dubious statements. He was the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), based in Washington and funded by the CIA. A US Congress inquiry later concluded that all the information supplied by Chalabi and other INC exiles had been worthless.

A CIA officer, Robert Baer, revealed how the system of disinformation worked. The INC took information from supposed defectors and passed it to the CIA. Then the INC would tell reporters, “If you don’t believe us, phone the CIA”, setting up a self-confirming loop. In this way, the New York Times could claim that it had two sources for its stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Washington Post likewise. Journalists didn’t bother to inquire further. Anyway their editors were asking them to support the government, out of patriotism (13).

The Washington Post’s editor, Steve Coll, was forced to resign on 25 August 2004, after an inquiry highlighted the lack of space given to articles that contested the government’s positions before the invasion of Iraq (14). The New York Times also offered a mea culpa in an editorial on 26 May 2004, in which it admitted a lack of rigour in its presentation of events leading up to the war, and publicly regretted having given “erroneous information”.

France has also had its share of media disasters, including the way major papers treated recent stories about the victimisation of an Algerian-born baggage handler at Orly airport, a paedophile ring in Outreau and a woman who falsely claimed to have been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack on the Paris underground. Similar things have happened in other countries. In Spain, after the Madrid bombings of 11 March 2004, the media controlled by the government of José-Maria Aznar tried to manipulate the situation for electoral purposes by concealing the involvement of al-Qaida and blaming Eta, the Basque separatist organisation.

Journalism of compliancy

All these scandals, plus media cosying up to the economic and political powers-that-be, have done tremendous harm to press credibility. They reveal a disturbing democratic deficit. A journalism of compliance is in the ascendancy and critical journalism on the decline. We could be forgiven for thinking that, given the new realities of globalisation and media mega-groups, the idea of a free press is threatened with extinction.

Recent statements by Serge Dassault confirm the worst fears. When he took over Le Figaro, he told his editors: “I would hope that, where possible, the newspaper will devote more thought to our commercial interests. In my view, there are sometimes news items that require a lot of caution. For instance, articles that talk about contracts being negotiated. There is some news that does more harm than good. The risk is that it threatens the commercial or industrial interests of our country” (15). What he meant by “our country” was his arms manufacturing company, Dassault-Aviation. Presumably it was also to protect his company that he censored the story about the fraudulent sale of Mirage aircraft to Taiwan, and the story about discussions between Jacques Chirac and Abdelaziz Bouteflika on the planned sale of Rafale aircraft to Algeria (16).

He set off alarm bells for journalists when he expanded on his reasons for deciding to buy L’Express and Le Figaro (17). A newspaper, he said, “makes it possible to convey a certain number of healthy ideas . . . Leftwing ideas are non-healthy ideas. Today we’re in a mess because of leftwing ideas that are still around” (18). We could put these remarks beside comments by Patrick Le Lay of French media giant TF1. Describing his company’s mission he said: “The job of TF1 is to help Coca-Cola to sell its product. What we sell to Coca-Cola is an availability of human brain-time” (19). Such statements express starkly the dangers inherent in the overlap of information and marketing. Obsessive commercialism directly contradicts the ethics of journalism.

Commercial interests can make substantial inroads into journalism without readers even realising it. Walter Wells, editor of the International Herald Tribune (which belongs to the New York Times, a company that is quoted on the stock exchange) recently warned of the dangers of press enterprises going public on the Stock Exchange. As he said, when people take an editorial decision they have to ask themselves whether it will raise or lower the value of their publishing company’s shares. This has become a major preoccupation. Editors constantly receive directives from a paper’s financial owners, which is something new in journalism (20).

On the net, manipulation and entrapment of readers can go even further. So the Forbes.com site, owned by US economics journal Forbes, creates new possibilities for advertising by including promotional links within the content of articles. Advertisers buy keywords, and when a reader’s mouse passes over them, a pop-up appears with an advertising message. Journalists are not told in advance which keywords have been bought, and some wonder if they will soon be asked to write articles containing keywords to keep advertisers happy and revenues rolling.

Public awareness

The public is increasingly aware of these new dangers and sensitive to media manipulation. Yet it also paradoxically believes that, despite the media saturation in our society, we live in a state of information insecurity. Information may proliferate but we have zero guarantee of its reliability. It may turn out to be false. Journalism today is characterised by speculation and spectacle, to the detriment of properly investigative journalism. Display and packaging have taken over from verification of facts.
Instead of functioning as a last bastion against standards declining because of the pressures of high-speed communication, newspapers are failing in their duty. By sometimes adopting a lazy police-style (21) approach to investigation they have helped discredit an institution that used to be regarded as the fourth estate. As Le Monde diplomatique’s founder, Hubert Beuve-Méry, always used to remark: “Comment is free; facts are sacred.” But current media attitudes take the opposite position - and editors seem to think that their opinions, rarely substantiated, are sacred, while facts can happily be distorted to fit those opinions.

In our current situation, in which enthusiasm for action is waning and people’s visions of the future are pessimistic, the editorial team of Le Monde diplomatique is making every effort to improve its content. For us, it is crucially important not to betray our readers’ trust. More than ever we rely on their activity and solidarity to defend our independence and the freedom that this guarantees for us. We would like to remind them gently that the best way to support us is to subscribe and to encourage friends and family to do the same.

We are the paper of a society in movement, of those with a critical view of society, of those who want the world to change. We intend to stay faithful to the fundamental principles of our way of making news. That means slowing down the acceleration of media; opting for journalism that can illuminate the darker areas of present reality; interesting ourselves in situations that are not in the media’s spotlight, but that can help us to a better understanding of the international context; offering even more complete, deep-ranging and better-documented supplements on major contemporary issues; going to the heart of those issues with rigour and seriousness; presenting news and information not often published, and, indeed, often concealed; and daring to go against the tide of the dominant media.

We remain convinced that the quality of public debate depends on the quality of available information, and that the quality of public discussion is the crucial factor in creating a rich democracy.

Notes

(1) Hachette Filipacchi Médias, a subsidiary of Lagardère Media, is the biggest magazine publisher in the world, with 245 titles in 36 countries. See “The concentration of media in France” on the website of the Observatoire français des médias. Within the Le Monde SA group - the main shareholder (51%) in Le Monde diplomatique SA - the Lagardère group has a 10% share in Midi Libre, Le Monde’s printers, and in Le Monde interactif.

(2) The main independent newspaper group in France, La Vie-Le Monde, recently had several major upsets, especially the resignation of the editor of Le Monde. Given the paper’s fundamental role in French intellectual life, we hope it can be protected from potential predators. We also hope its new phase will be characterised less by display and more by a “quest for accuracy”, providing “reliable information, sound opinions and guarantees of reliability . . . a newspaper in which competence takes priority over collusion”, as Jean-Marie Colombani wrote in Le Monde, 16 December 2004.

(3) In a BVA opinion poll, 69% thought that media ownership concentration threatened the plurality of the press and the independence of journalists. See Le Monde, 20 August 2004.

(4) Inevitably our success has led to attacks from some journalists -and the violence and timing of their attacks is food for thought.

(5) But the number of articles read daily on our (free) French site, www.monde-diplomatique.fr, more than doubled in 2004. Our international readerships also continue to grow; we currently have 45 international editions, in 20 languages, and their combined circulation is now more than 1.1 million. For the English language website see www.mondediplo.com

(6) In the US, average evening viewing figures for major television news channels fell from 36.3m in 1994 to 26.3m in 2004.

(7) See Le Monde, 21 May 2003 and Time, 16 June 2003.

(8) See Usa today

(9) Le Monde, 30 April 2004.

(10) Le Monde, 28 September 2004.

(11) See Robert Greenwald’s documentary, Outfoxed (2004).

(12) John Pilger, “Fabriquer des citoyens consommateurs, mal informés et bien pensants”, Le Monde diplomatique, October 2004.

(13) In Robert Greenwald’s documentary, Uncovered (2003).

(14) Washington Post, 12 August 2004.

(15) Le Monde, 9 September 2004.

(16) Le Canard enchainé, 8 September 2004.

(17) After Dassault’s effective takeover of Socpresse, 268 of its journalists, 10% of the workforce, announced that they were leaving.

(18) Interviewed by Pierre Weill, France Inter, 10 December 2004.

(19) In Les Dirigeants face au changement, Editions du Huitième Jour, Paris, 2004.

(20) El Mundo, Madrid, 12 November 2004.

(21) In which all too often no distinction is made between informants and paid informers, between sources properly investigated and people with an axe to grind.

Up

FEBRARY


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Interview with Cuban Parliament President
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Final edition for the press


JANUARY