What might have been small and manageable in the past decade proved to be very different in the first major recession of the 21st century. After decades of police brutality, corruption, dictatorship and political repression the call to action struck with popular consciousness not just in Egypt but all around the world. Millions watched glued to their screens, the first major revolution of the 21st century. After decades of rule and with no previously obvious signs of collapse the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced from office in the space of two weeks and now faces the death penalty for his crimes against the Egyptian people.
Egypt’s revolution took the rulers of that region completely unaware – Israel today is absolutely terrified they will no longer have a partner to keep Gaza under siege and whose new Parliament may put it’s peace treaty with Israel to a popular referendum, and the US tried hopelessly to maintain Mubarak’s rule in Egypt even as it looked impossible to most observers.
This wave of popular protest wasn’t limited to Egypt either – it has now spread to every Arab country, both pro and anti-US but with the common goal of overthrowing dictatorship and corruption.
This meant the West took very different attitudes to different parts of the Arab Spring. In Bahrain, the USA turned a blind eye as one of it’s most important allies, Saudi Arabia sent hundreds of troops to crush a popular uprising in Bahrain and to preserve the sectarian monarchy that hosts a large US military base on the Island. However when it came to Libya, a bizarre dictatorship which shared many characteristics with other Arab regimes – with the exception that it wasn’t completely in the pockets of the West – a different attitude was taken, with military action conducted by NATO to overthrow the regime.

Not a good year for these guys

This made Libya the third Muslim country in 10 years bombed by the West, after Afghanistan and Iraq. While the campaign in Libya was, from the viewpoint of London, Paris and Washington, a quite easy affair there was one war that finally seems to have drawn to a close – at least for Washington. The 8 year nightmare of Iraq for the USA ended with a formal troop withdrawal from Iraq earlier last year, as Obama redeployed US soldiers from Iraq to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Iraq war, so critical in radicalizing millions of people across the world ended not with a bang but a whimper as the USA has been forced to leave with many of it’s desires – permanent military bases, proxy for strikes on Iran and Syria, dirt cheap oil – unfulfilled. If Iraq has been a disaster, Afghanistan hasn’t turned out much better as it’s Taliban guerillas continue to make the ISAF occupation of the country as pointless, ineffective and bloody as all the previous occupations of Afghanistan have been. The Vice President of the USA, Joe Biden even went as far as to say “The Taliban are not our enemy” – an admission that the USA will negotiate and involve the Taliban in Afghan politics at some point.

The solid decade of occupation and war in Afghanistan and Iraq has proved so costly for the USA that US President Barack Obama has carried out the biggest reform of the US military “since WW2″. Moving it’s forces away from Europe and the Middle East to Asia and the Pacific (hello China) it’s a massive climbdown from the previously almost invincible US military power in the 90′s. But what other choice does Obama have, particularly when in 2011 the US faced a historic first time downgrading of it’s credit rating. When the most powerful nation in human history hasn’t got the best possible record at debt management, it’s a damning indictment of the cost of occupation and war – and may fortunately dissuade the USA from any attack on Iran, at least for the time being.
Many of the historic events we saw in 2011 – such as the resignation of Mubarak – weren’t from our sofas or bedrooms, but with other activists in comrades in the longest running student occupation in UK history. From February to September, Hetherington House a former postgraduate club, was occupied by anti-cuts students at Glasgow University. For 6 months we were able to hold a non-commercial space on Glasgow Uni campus, open to a variety of campaigns – from the protests to stop cuts to nursing, modern languages and adult education at Glasgow University, to the campaign to save the Accord Centre in the East End of Glasgow. This occupation succeeded in acting as a focal point for the anti-cuts movement across the whole of the city, as well as attracting a variety of speakers like Ken O’Keefe and Owen Jones.

While the occupation of the Hetherington House ended, the networks and connections built up between different activists and groups hasn’t disappeared. There’s now a vibrant anti-cuts group for the whole of Glasgow that many of the former occupiers are involved in – the Coalition of Resistance. COR’s been in existence since May and has already become the largest and most active anti-cuts group in Glasgow, organising strike buses for J3O and N30, building the October 1st demonstration, the march to save the accord and providing a space for anyone from any political background who wants to fight the cuts to come to. COR will be an important part of anti-cuts activism in the next year, and a vital space for Socialists to operate in.
Another front that will be opening in the next few years is the Independence campaign in Scotland. After 4 years of SNP minority rule, alongside a Tory Government in Westminster many Labour Party members must have thought they were a shoe in for the Holyrood elections held in May of last year. What they actually faced was the biggest defeat for Labour and Unionism imaginable – central belt seats where the Labour party had majorities you’d normally find in one party states were seized by the SNP for the first time in it’s history, producing a revolutionary result in Scottish politics – a pro-independence majority in Holyrood for the first time ever.

This means after 300 years of unionist misrule, the Scottish population will finally have a choice over our constitutional future. And for Unionism, it couldn’t come at a worse time, where a Tory party that has less MP’s in Scotland than Pandas is trying to force through a brutal package of austerity. This is Scotland’s gain from the revolutionary year that was 2011 – the chance to take our nation out of the world’s oldest empire, and a possibility for the Radical Left to shape that debate and the Scotland that emerges. 2011 will be remembered as the year that saw arrogant, embedded and reactionary power crumble fall – from Cairo to Tunis to Pollok – lets organise to make sure 2012 continues in the same vein.

US Attorney General Eric Holder

Unfortunately for the Iranians the Zeta’s contact in this (alleged) plot was in fact a DEA informant – presumably Jack Bauer on spring break getting MWI in Tijuana. As well as closely fitting the plot of a recent Tom Clancy novel, detailing Taliban collusion with the Juarez Cartel this cartel connection could ostensibly be used for deploying the US army into Mexico, to fight the increasingly brutal drug war going on there – as one Republican Presidential candidate has already suggested. This would give the United States two wars to fight, one in Mexico alongside Iran presumably. Attorney General Holder announced that in the next few hours, measures against Iran would be outlined – that could range from sanctions to bombing a fourth Muslim country in ten years.

There are two factors that may spare Iran war – one is that so far the US Government is accusing “factions” of the Iranian Government as being responsible for the plot, something quite different from saying the actual leadership of the country is behind the assassination attempt. After all it was only a few weeks ago the US accused Pakistani intelligence of supporting insurgents in Afghanistan, despite Pakistan being a US ally. Here it’s specifically it’s the Revolutionary Guard of Iran who are being accused of funding and planning this plot. The Revolutionary Guard are a 125,000 strong armed wing of the Iranian military, whose specific remit is the defence of Iran’s Islamic Revolution – similar in respects to Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, in their role as the best equipped, most loyal defence of an autocratic regime. Naturally this position gives them significant influence in Iranian society, which means it is possible they could have independently organised a terrorist plot in the United States without the knowledge of  Iran’s President Ahmadinejahd or the real power in the country, the Guardian Council. That’s one reason Iran might not be a gigantic car park by the time I finish typing.

The second reason is that Iran is no Iraq – bombing, invading and occupying Iran will not be as easy as the invasion of Iraq. And as some of our more eagle eyed readers may have noticed, invading Iraq was not the greatest plan ever. Iran is a regional power in the Middle East with an army that has not been broken under the weight of sanctions and war, as Saddam Hussein’s was by 2003. Also Iran has significant influence outside it’s borders – namely in Iraq and Lebanon, where Iranian support is provided to the Shia parties of Iraq like SCIRI (The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and more famously, Hezbollah in the south of Lebanon. Any attack on Iran would result in attacks on US personnel in Iraq and Hezbollah – which proved it’s competence as a fighting force in the 2006 war on Lebanon – attacks on America’s ally Israel. Alongside this ability to exert force across the Arab world, Iran would also be able to halt shipping through the Straits of Hormuz – effectively halting a majority of the world’s oil supplies, potentially tipping the entire world into another recession.

Why would Iran want to kill the Saudi ambassador anyway? Israel seems an obvious enough target, but why target the Saudis? Alongside the well publicized Arab-Israeli conflict, there’s another less well known cold war in the Middle East – that between the regional powers of Iran and Saudi Arabia. It goes right back to Iran’s revolution itself, which overthrew the pro Western monarch of Iran, The Shah. The Gulf is chock a block full of similar pro Western monarchs – in Dubai, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, and the biggest one of all, Saudi Arabia. All of these rulers are shit scared at the idea of being overthrown by the poor and dispossessed sections of their society, mobilised under the flag of Islamic revolution.  One most recent example of this was in Bahrain, where the monarchy (who are Sunni Muslims, and the minority of the population) faced an uprising from the population (who are mostly Shiite Muslims). Here the US sided with Bahraini government, who allow the US to station a naval base in the country and turned a blind eye to the Saudi Arabian monarchy’s deployment of armed forces to the Kingdom to suppress the rebels.

Bahrain's uprising, crushed by Saudi troops.

The movement in Bahrain was not Islamist in nature, and a far cry from the Islamic revolution in Iran during the late 70′s – instead taking it’s inspiration from the secular movement that brought down Mubarak in Egypt. But any mobilisation of Muslims against these Gulf monarchies – specifically those of the Shia – will always be linked to Iran by their ruling elites. That’s why there’s a Saudi Arabia/Iran hostility in the Arab world – a hostility that even sometimes breaks ranks with the traditional Arab/Israeli confrontation, like when Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister described the Shiite and Iranian supported Hezbollah millitia as a “bunch of adventurers” and blamed them, and not Israel for the 2006 war.  Saudia Arabia ‘s even shares Israeli and US hostility to Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme – a wikileaks cable revealed the Saudi King Abdullah was encouraging the US to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Saudi Arabia have – alongside Israel – played the role of US ally in the Middle East for decades, and have been armed to the teeth by the West. The United States simply can’t allow the world’s largest oil producer to fall to an Arab nationalist or Islamic revolution. It’s why despite spending $39 billion on arms, the Saudi Arabian army is deliberately kept weak; the weapons are “pre-positioned” to be used by US forces to quash any uprising, and the army is kept weak to stop any coup against the monarchy.

Despite all the hostility between Iran and Saudi Arabia there’s still no guarantee the US Government of all people are honest in this terror accusation – America has been chomping at the bit for years to attack Iran, and now they may have their pretext. The Iranians would have to have been spectacularly reckless to believe they could blow up the Saudi Ambassador in America’s capital – particularly through the alleged middlemen of the Zeta’s cartel, a non-political organisation whose only objective is to sell drugs and make money – without facing retaliation. The Zeta cartel themselves would have a lot to lose by signing up to such a scheme – almost guaranteed US military assistance to the beleaguered Mexican Government that’s desperately trying to crush them. These accusations against the Zeta’s only serve to make them sound even more like something out of a Bond movie – the Los Zeta’s Cartel were originally an elite special forces squad in Mexico, who decided that there was a lot more money in drugs so decided to defect to the side of the cartels they used to fight. Their special forces background means they’ve been able to run rings around the Mexican state, and many US government agencies too…

Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. Quality polis, aw the way.

Which brings us to scandal that’s gone unreported this side of the Atlantic, which has embroiled the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) bureau of the US Government and the Attorney General Eric Holder – who broke the story about the alleged terror plot. The scandal sounds like something out of a Hollywood movie – specifically the title – “Operation Fast and Furious”. This ATF operation didn’t involve Vin Diesel in charge of a carjacking ring though – instead it was an authorized US Government operation to force gun stores in the US to sell firearms to people with links to drug cartels. Here ATF officers ordered gun stores to sell firearms to criminals, ostensibly so they could be tracked to the leaders of the cartel and convicted on conspiracy charges. But the entire operation was blown when a US Border Patrol guard was shot dead by one of the “Fast and Furious” weapons and an ATF agent blew the whistle. It’s been described as Obama’s “potential Watergate” due to the national scandal of a US Government agency allowing the sale of thousands of firearms to be used to kill on both sides of the Mexican border. Some of the Right Wing in the USA have an easy answer as to why this gunrunning was allowed – to allow the Democrats to clamp down on gun sales in the States, in the wake of massive violence from the Cartels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvRzrSXota8

ATF Whistleblower exposes state sanctioned supply of arms to drug cartels

But there is another more convincing – and sinister- explanation; the US Government is deliberately facilitating the sale of arms to one side in the Mexican drug war – the Sinaloa Cartel – in exchange for that organisations assistance in destroying rival cartels. Rival cartels like Los Zetas. Vicente Zambada-Niebla, a top ranking cartel boss extradited to the US went further and claimed the Sinaloa Cartel were actually allowed to transport cocaine across the border without US Government interference. It may sound far fetched, but it’s happened before. The entire crack epidemic which took hold of the USA in the 80′s was orchestrated by the anticommunist Contra rebels in Nicaragua, with the CIA turning a blind eye to their shipments of cocaine to the US that were used to fund their war against the Socialist Sandinista Government.

There’s also been collaboration between US agencies and Latin American Governments with drug cartels in the past. In Colombia, during the hunt for Pablo Escobar the Billionaire drug lord, an organisation called Los Pepes sprung up. Los Pepes ostensibly stood for “People persecuted by Pablo Escobar” but was in reality a front for the Cali cartel who were in competition with Pablo’s Medellin organisation. Los Pepes were vital in helping the US bring Pablo down, as they could wage a war of terror against his family and business associates that the Colombian state was unable (openly) to do. Because Los Pepes were murdering his lawyers, cousins, business partners Pablo was unable to launch a full scale war against the Colombian wealthy for fear his wife and children may be killed (who were refused amnesty by the US).  Previously when Escobar was on the run from the Colombian state he deployed his private army to indiscriminately terrorize the wealthy in Colombia – with bombings, drive by shootings and kidnappings against the well heeled. This had the desired effect of Colombia’s elite feeling the heat of the drug war and demanding the Colombian Government give in to his demands – which were effectively to continue running his own business from a luxurious private “prison” he designed, built and staffed.

Coming soon to an ATF bureau near you.

Killing Escobar itself had no real effect on the drug trade. With Escobar removed the Cali cartel simply took over the gap in the market. And then when they were removed, the Mexican’s took over the trade. If Apple stopped producing computers tomorrow people would still buy computers – it’s just that they would buy them from Dell or Microsoft. The same principle works for cocaine. Remove one supplier and another takes their place. So why were the American’s desperate to destroy Escobar? Largely because he became a threat to the Colombian state and American security itself. Escobar did not keep his head down like the Cali cartel, and carry out business discreetly. Instead Escobar was elected as a Colombian Senator, funded welfare projects for the poor – and bombed an airline to try and assassinate a Colombian Presidential candidate who threatened him with extradition. This bombing killed US citizens, and was an unacceptable level of violence for a drug lord in the eyes of the US Government.

Given the accusations against Los Zetas – that they were approached by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to conduct terrorism - could the ATF be repeating the strategy used by previous US administrations to bring down Escobar? Perhaps Los Zetas have now become a threat to the national interests of the US in the same way Escobar was, and the US Government is willing to fund and assist a rival cartel to see their removal. There’s already been accusations that the Mexican Government has not prosecuted it’s war on drugs against the Sinaloa cartel to the same extent that it fight Los Zetas. It’s possible these accusations against Los Zetas to justify US military intervention against a well organised drug cartel manned by former special forces.

It might even be just the stimulus package the ailing Obama administration needs – invade Mexico and Iran, and kickstart your economy with World War 3.

Talk of deficits, massive debt and brutal public spending cuts are pretty much in the British news 24/7 these days, so if you’ve noticed the recent debt crisis in the USA you’ll have noticed some of the same terms being thrown about, but if you paid close attention you might have noticed that unlike the UK there’s been a standoff between the two main political parties in how to handle the debt crisis.

This crisis started when the US Treasury requested an increase in the amount of money it was able to borrow – but this amount, known as the debt ceiling has to achieve backing for the US Congress. Unfortunately for Democratic President Barack Obama, the Congress is currently in the control of the Republican Party. Ouch. And many of these Republican Congressmen and women are members of the Tea Party, a political movement that  was formed in opposition to public spending and incurring any more government debt. Double ouch.

This standoff between the Republicans – who wanted no tax increases but massive public spending cuts and the Democrats,  who wanted some tax increases, but still some massive cuts as well – went on for weeks with angry Americans venting their frustration on twitter, as pundits warned that the most powerful superpower in human history was about to follow in the footsteps of Hearts of Midlothian FC. Fortunately, after days of wrangling the politicians managed to sort it all out – a compromise was reached, and the USA can go back to hopey changey goodness under President Obama – right?

Unfortunately not – the Democrats led a full scale surrender to the most extreme Republican demands in Congress. In exchange for extending the debt ceiling, there will be spending cuts of a whopping $2.5 trillion over the next 10 years, made in the very, very limited welfare net of the USA. Just to clarify, $2.5 trillion is how much money you would need to pay Bill Gates for him to shit himself in public with his mum and dad watching. These cuts come a few months after Republican hardliners – many of them from the Tea Party – refused to ditch Bush era tax cuts, designed to help the richest 2% of Americans. At the same time as these cuts are made, there will be no new taxes to raise revenue – not even on the super rich in the USA, who have seen their personal wealth skyrocket in the past 30 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e5CI8zkAbM

“I’ve spent all my money bombing the middle east and bailing out the worst bankers in history, at a time of capitalism in collapse. Can I get credit? AYE!”

The Republicans have pushed for these cuts supposedly to stop “out of control” Government spending, but the reality is that the US debt has been incurred largely due to the bailout of multiple US banks and corporations and maintaining the most powerful army in mankind’s history (currently at war in three countries, with dozens of bases dotted across the globe). The picture painted by Republicans of a Socialist Obama borrowing money recklessly to give to the poor is a complete fantasy . Like in the UK, the political establishment in the USA, both Democrat and Republican, supported massive bail outs of failed private enterprises with virtually no control or direction on how US taxpayers money should be spent.

This combination of no  new taxes on the super rich, but also a desire to maintain a massively expensive military industrial complex is a contradiction that the credit ratings agencies of the USA haven’t ignored – as noted by the US Darpa’s continued research into rocket planes in the same couple of weeks that Bright House came to the White House asking for their telly back. In a historic first these credit agencies downgraded the United State’s credit rating from AAA to AA+. It may not sound so bad – if you came home with a AA+ mark in a Maths exam you’d probably be quite chuffed – but when the self-described leader of the free world, the victor of the Cold War and the world’s only Hyperpower has a credit rating lower than those cheese eating surrender monkeys in France, you can see why a lot of the miniature American flag brigade are worried.

This supposed threat of bankruptcy in the USA has been grist to the mill of the Tea Party movement, an organisation which is known internationally for their hilarious placards and obsession with long form birth certificates. The Tea Party came to prominence in the wake of the massive bail out of US Banks at the start of the economic crisis a few years ago, alongside the election of  President Barack Obama. Their raison detre is opposition to the US Government incurring any more debt and “big government”. Don’t try to point out to them that the Republican Party also voted for the bail out of Wall Street or that part and parcel of “big government” is the ability to bomb foreign people half the world away with missiles wi cameras attached so you can upload it to your you tube account. You’ll probably just get screamed at that you’re an IslamoMarxist as well.

As hilarious as many of these nutters are, they are dangerous not just to millions of the poorest Americans, but to the billions of people in the world who are intertwined with the USA through it’s domination of finance capital and military power. Right wingers in the USA often go a bit funny when a Democrat gets in, exaggerating things somewhat – like believing Bill Clinton is a Marxist NWO member cos of Waco, or calling JFK a traitor and arranging for him to drive in an open top car at 5mph through Dallas. But the Tea Party are something special.

The Tea Party are a movement of white, upper middle class wealthy Americans fearful of the world economic crisis and it’s threat to their privilege. Regular slogans at Tea Party rallies and protests talk about how they want to “take back America” – a declaration that the Tea Party don’t think the votes of African Americans and poor whites should determine who occupies the White House, but rather the organised block vote of Christian Evangelicals across the USA. As well as demanding massive public spending cuts, the Tea Party also gives a platform to racists angry at the first Black President in the USA – Tea Party placards in Washington declared “The Zoo has an African Lion and the White House has a Lyin’ African”. This is alongside their ongoing campaign to demand Obama’s birth records, to prove he is a Kenyan and not an American citizen.

Mad as a bag of cats

The Tea Party’s biggest prejudice is their naked class hatred towards the poorest in the USA. The Tea Party live in a fantasy world where the unemployed, immigrant, low paid, Hispanic and African American population of the USA live a life of luxury off the back of their tax dollars in free healthcare and benefits. One Tea Party supporter, South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer (no relation to Jack we presume said)

“My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that.”

This was in reference to a program in his state that allowed students to receive subsided lunches. Tea Party supporters quite literally look upon the working class in the USA like they’re animals. They’re the worst kind of right-wing libertarians who don’t ever stop to consider the link between a massive pool of cheap exploited labour and their personal wealth. Nowhere do the Tea Party try to hold accountable the billionaires in the USA who wrecked the economy with their own rampant greed – probably because despite the mom and pop apple pie image, the Tea Party are funded by billionaires, happy to have an astroturfed campaign to defend their right to be filthy rich.

Unfortunately there’s been little sustained attack from the Left against the Tea Party. With the exception of the heroic struggle against Republican union-busters in Wisconsin, most of the Left in the USA has fallen back to defending Obama, despite the fact he’s been totally unable to harness the millions involved in his election campaign to push forward a halfway progressive agenda in the states. This means that it’s by no means certain Barack Obama will be re-elected in next years Presidential elections – and that the door is open for a Republican President influenced and supported by the Tea Party’s ideas.

One possible candidate is Texan Governor Rick Perry. Despite being a former Democrat, Perry has been described as “George Bush on steroids”, which comes as a terrifying shock for those of us who took a big sigh of relief when a bourgeois capitalist politician who could tie his own shoelaces took over in 2008.  Perry has been described as the “closest thing to an establishment candidate that the tea party is going to accept, and he is the closest thing to a tea party candidate that the GOP (Republican – ed) establishment is going to accept”.

We're doomed. Again.

Perry’s already made moves to court the nutter vote, by saying the Chairman of the federal reserve would be guilty of treason if he printed more money before the 2012 election – a pretty harsh statement, given treason is more usually associated with trying to undermine or overthrow the democratic process – possibly by systematically lying about a country’s threat in the build up to a war for example. While opposing any tax increases on the rich, Perry decries that only half of Americans pay tax – posing towards Tea Party supporters and backing their assertions that they are the dynamic, wealth producing section of American society that keep the country afloat. In reality, in Texas the poorest 20% pay 6% of their income on sales tax while the richest 20% pay only 1.3% – “Texas is not a low-tax state if you’re low-income” one analyst correctly noted. This is in line with other right-wing “low tax” regimes, like Thatcher in the 80′s – where the poor ended up paying more in tax, through an increase in regressive taxes and the Poll Tax.

As well as backing Tea Party tax policy, Perry has also called for the use of (unarmed) predator drones to patrol the border between Mexico and the USA. This anti-immigrant rhetoric is justified by the ongoing “War on Drugs” across the border in Mexico, as the cartels and the Mexican Government destroy both each other and Mexican society in the crossfire. Perhaps some slack should be cut for Perry – he identified the Mexican city of Juarez as the most dangerous city in America. Oops.

Geography lessons for Perry

If Perry’s geography skills are a bit shite his scientific knowledge isn’t better. Perry supports the teaching of intelligent design ie creationism in schools, and also believes global warming is a myth. So far this is all pretty standard fare Evangelical Christian stuff; alongside support for creationism, Perry also responded to a drought in his state with the same policy plan as the ancient babylonians – with a three day designated “Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas”. Unfortunately, in a shocking victory for athiests in the Republican state, praying for rain did not work and the drought got worse. This might scupper some future Perry Whitehouse initiatives, such as “Praying nobody trades oil in euros instead of dollars week”, “national month of deficit reduction mass” or “Praying the Chinese never want all that money  back”.

As well as being fond of the old Christianity a bit much, Perry’s also controversially hinted at support for the secession of Texas from the Union – a risky policy gambit not tried in a Whitehouse race since pre-Civil War America. Perry said to journalists after a Tea Party rally that,  ”Texas is a unique place. When we came into the union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that… My hope is that America and Washington in particular pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.” It’s a pretty bold statement from someone who a) wants to be President of the USA and b) is happy to accuse folk of treason for pursuing different economic policies than his.

Rick Perry supports the use of B-52 bombers to defend the unborn foetus.

It’s easy just to put the blame for extreme right-wingers in the USA like the Tea Partiers and Perry down to stupid Americans voting for mad people with crazy ideas. The problem is that in one sense the Tea Partiers are right – they are getting support because the USA is in the middle of a crisis, just not the one they think it’s in. The USA is a superpower whose economic power is dependent on a massive military industrial complex – one big enough to stop anyone trading oil in anything other than dollars, for example – but free market fundamentalists in the USA are unwilling to call for even slight tax increases on the super rich to fund this military power. This contradiction is what’s forced credit agencies to downgrade the credit rating of the USA, in an attempt to force the political class in the USA to get it’s act together, and run the most powerful capitalist superpower with responsibility to the needs of finance and bankers. Because this system is international – the US debt crisis has had negative effects on the world’s stock markets – the far-right in the USA’s total support for complete free market capitalism could help plunge the world into a second recession. Forget George Bush dragging us into Iraq – the American empire might yet bring the world into a much greater economic disaster if we don’t find a way to declare independence from the mad, mad world of the stock market.

Bin Laden may be dead, but authorities are still trying to track down Bert.

He was the Salafist Jihadist Terrorist Princess Queen of Hearts. We’ve spent almost 10 years growing up in his Bond-villain like shadow, but after nearly a decade of hiding from US intelligence they finally got round to finding the best hide and seek champion in the Islamic world – Osama Bin Laden is dead. Watching President Obama’s address to the nation (coming a couple of days after he released a document showing he himself wasn’t a mad Islamic terrorist) he outlined the unique care and rules of war America abides in dealing with terrorists – they found him, shot him in the head and then dumped his body in the sea, presumably whilst pished and chanting “USA, USA, USA”. Bin Laden’s death also follows the killing of Saif Al Arab Gaddaffi, one of Colonel Gaddafi’s younger sons who never made it into Italian Serie A football. It just shows you what the American’s can do when the PS3 network is down, and that America’s idea of what present you give to a newlywed Royal couple is somewhat tasteless.

But now Bin Laden is dead, Is Al Qaeda finished? is the War on Terror over? Will the occupation of Afghanistan end? The reality is that Bin Laden’s death will not significantly change the fortunes of the three. Al Qaeda as an organisation in Afghanistan was already effectively destroyed in the late Autumn of 2001 with the Western bombing and invasion of the country. It’s training facilities (which consisted of sinister looking jungle gyms)  and headquarters were overrun, and organising the most wanted terrorist group in the world was a bit more tricky in a country occupied by thousands of NATO soldiers with assistance from Afghan warlords to boot.

Al Qaeda as an organisation was also an illusion – the idea of a world wide terrorist organisation, with branches in hundreds of countries taking orders from Bin Laden was and still is a myth, as this excellent BBC series outlines. President Obama is continuing to promote that myth by declaring that Bin Laden was the “leader” of Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda as it actually exists is completely different. Al Qaeda is not an organisation but more a means of conducting terrorism and an ideology that justifies that terrorism on the basis of an apocalyptic clash between Islam and unbelievers.

Al Qaeda came out of a small hardcore of Islamist militants in the late 80′s, who were Arabs who had travelled to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. After their victory against the Soviets, they intended to form a network of Islamist militants to take the fight to their own Arab regimes (who they believed were too secular) and to the corrupt and morally bankrupt Western Christian countries who backed them. They organised Al Qaeda like a franchise, allowing Islamists from anywhere in the world to blow up people in the name of a cosmic struggle between the West and Islam and to do so in the name of Al Qaeda. There’s very rarely any direct link between Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda cells, let alone direct orders.

Some attacks attributed to Al Qaeda have shown considerable deviation from the “leadership” of the Al Qaeda idea as outlined by Osama Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Al Zawahiri. The 2004 Madrid bombing for example, was conducted only a few days before the Spanish Elections, and resulted in the removal of the pro-Iraq War Popular Party government and it’s replacement with PSOE who opposed the invasion of Iraq. Bin Laden and Zawahiri would never be motivated to bomb a country on the basis of changing it’s unbeliever Government – they see their struggle as a cosmic clash of Islam and Crusaders, in which changing one non-Muslim Government to another non-Muslim Government as having little point to their struggle. Zawahiri has also criticised the head of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Musab Al Zarqawi for carrying out a massive sectarian bombing campaign explicitly targeting Shia civilians. While Zawahiri agrees that Shiites are deviating from Islam he outlines in his statement how bombing civilians instead of occupying armies is bad for PR. These examples show Bin Laden simply never was the leader of a cohesive terrorist organisation. There is no equivalent of an Al Qaeda “Army Council” which directs it’s war like the Provisional IRA had.

The name Al Qaeda itself also shows that it is more of an ideology instead of an organisation. Al Qaeda is Arabic for “The Base”; meaning a base of ideas, a manual for how to conduct jihad and what should motivate Islamists. It was originally coined by Abdallah Azzam, Bin Laden’s mentor who wrote “Every principle needs a vanguard to carry it forward and [to] put up with heavy tasks and enormous sacrifices. This vanguard constitutes the strong foundation (al qaeda al-sulbah) for the expected society.” As Jason Burke points out Azzam was talking about a strategy, not an organisation. Al Qaeda only became an organisation at the insistence of the US judicial system when an Islamist militant Jamal Al Fadl turned informant after embezzling over $100,000 of Al Qaeda’s money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mztfFdpd1Rk

The US wanted to indict Bin Laden for the bombing of their embassies in Africa and used Al Fadl’s testimony to create a picture of Al Qaeda as an organisation with a leadership, branches and hierarchy – so that Bin Laden could be prosecuted for the crimes other Islamists committed because he was supposedly in the same organisation as them. Having this vision of Al Qaeda meant that the US Government could prosecute Bin Laden using the same laws that they use to arrest the heads of the Mafia and other organised crime families. In these cases it is crucial to have an organisation that someone is a member of in order to successfully obtain a prosecution – the problem is that this simply does not exist in Al Qaeda’s case.

Even Al Qaeda’s most famous atrocity, the 9/11 attacks was not Bin Laden’s idea, but that of Khalid Sheik Mohammed (who was arrested in 2003). Khalid obtained financial support from Osama for the 9/11 attacks, but it was he who organised it. This is how the 9/11 attacks were really organised – a network of Islamists worked together and were funded by Bin Laden’s considerable personal wealth. Bin Laden’s role in Islamist terrorism has not been primarily that of an organiser but a financier. Different terrorist cells and organisations can approach Bin Laden and request funds for operations against the West. This loose, network is what makes Al Qaeda amorphous and potentially dangerous. The death of Bin Laden will not do much to practically impede this network’s activities against the West – Bin Laden was already isolated and could not provide much practical assistance to Al Qaeda affiliates.

Bin Laden was useful as a symbol however, a charismatic figurehead for the Al Qaeda brand’s form of extreme Islamism. Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri may become the new “face” of Al Qaeda but he does not have the same charm and charisma of Osama. The real danger from Al Qaeda’s brand of terrorism is still the same (and as overhyped) as it was before Bin Laden’s death. It’s based on angry, Muslim, predominantly middle class men operating loosely as cells without a central leadership. Bin Laden’s death may even spur some of these groups on to carry out attacks – possibly in a half-arsed manner, like the Glasgow Airport Attacks.

Bin Laden’s death is already being celebrated across the USA, but the reality is that the so-called “War on Terror” will go on regardless – because both the terror networks known as Al Qaeda will still exist, and because the War on Terror itself was never about fighting terrorism. It was a convenient label to cover up what wars have always been about, control of the world and it’s resources.

Bin Laden’s death may have the positive effect of putting more pressure on the USA/UK to end it’s occupation of Afghanistan, as the original reason for the NATO invasion – hunting down Bin Laden – has been resolved. In reality however the occupation of Afghanistan is motivated not by fighting Al Qaeda but on the control of a strategically important country in the middle of some of the largest natural gas fields in the world. The War on Terror didn’t just start using terrorism as a justification to control the world’s energy resources in Iraq – it was a motivation from the very start in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden died a prisoner of his own security, unable to effectively organise or finance terrorism personally, due to the worldwide manhunt for him. Despite this he goes to his death with his and Al Qaeda’s ideas immensely stronger. The 9/11 attacks did not only succeed in massacring thousands of casualties and damaging the pride of the USA, it has also embroiled the West in two bloody and expensive wars, Iraq and Afghanistan. Bin Laden may not have seen the invasion of Iraq coming (although he and Al Qaeda have benefited from it enormously) but it was inevitable the USA would invade Afghanistan after 9/11.

Two days before the September 11th attacks Al Qaeda members assassinated the anti-Taliban warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud, the most credible anti-Taliban figure in Afghanistan and a natural puppet leader for the US. In killing Massoud Al Qaeda knew that if Afghanistan was invaded once again, they could make the subsequent occupation much harder for NATO by removing a unifying figure. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are repeating the strategy they used in the 80′s against the Soviets – dragging a superpowers army into their backyard, and bleeding them. The ongoing quagmire in Afghanistan is Bin Laden’s victory in death.

Now that Osama Bin Laden has been killed it’s time for Socialists and the anti-war movement to call for a complete end to the so-called War on Terror. The very flimsy justification for this war is now gone, and the continuing war against Muslim and Arab countries – from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya – is the exact strategy Bin Laden has fought for all his life, a bloody clash between Muslims and Christians, a clash that will only result in increasing support for Al Qaeda type networks across the globe.

It’s also a clash which, contrary to the predictions of Al Qaeda supporters and anti-Muslim bigots is not inevitable. Al Qaeda may be stronger in some respects given the West has acted as a recruiting sergeant for fundamentalist Islam, due to it’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it is also much, much weaker in another and far more important battlefield; Al Qaeda has been left behind by the pro-democracy movement in the Middle East. Across the entire Arab world a tidal wave of people power is challenging the established pro-western, corrupt dictators – and Al Qaeda and fundamentalist Islam is nowhere to be seen.

The wave of protest is almost entirely secular in it’s makeup and demands. Al Qaeda has spent 20 years bombing civilians across the middle east and the Islamic world to try and change their societies, all without any success whatsoever, with no real threat to the regimes they oppose. In contrast a secular, working class, non sectarian movement in Egypt brought the most powerful Arab regime to it’s knees within a month. Al Qaeda know how to react to Western bombing campaigns, Arab autocracies, and Israeli atrocities – but they have no idea how to respond to the mass movement of millions of Arabs fighting against dictatorship using their power primarily as a class of workers, and not as Muslims pitted against other religious groups.

It’s those ideas currently sweeping the Arab world that will defeat the ideas of Al Qaeda, not the abuses of Guantanamo Bay, Al Ghraib and the senseless bombing campaigns in Afghanistan and Libya today.

Edited to include some political points at the bottom

The occupied Wisconsin State Capitol

One of the police said “We have been ordered by the legislature to kick
you all out at 4:00 today. But we know what’s right from wrong. We will
not be kicking anyone out, in fact, we will be sleeping here with you!”. For a State to lose control of it’s police force is unprecedented in recent history, and a sign that the Wisconsin demonstrators are now winning groups to their struggle who, to put it mildy, are not generally associated with trade unions and radical struggle.

The origin of these protests lies in an attempt by the Tea Party supported right-wing Republican Governor Scott Walker to destroy the power of the unions in Wisconsin. Walker wants to remove the rights of unions to collectively bargain with the Government over all other issues apart from pay – ie, holidays. pensions, benefits etc.

Walker claims that this is necessary to deal with the state deficit, but the reality is that – just like the Tories in the UK – the Tea Party and it’s allies want to use the national debt as an excuse to do all the things they’ve wanted to do to Trade Unions but didn’t have an excuse to do. It’s the Shock Doctrine for Wisconsin – terrify people into accepting horrendous “reforms” whilst they’re scared of a financial crisis. Whilst attacking collective bargaining for Unions and attacking their members pensions and healthcare, Walker’s budget proposes tax cuts for the richest in the State.

Walker’s plan is summarised quite well here, as a three pronged attack on the unions.

“In part one, their ability to bargain benefits for their members is reduced. In part two, their ability to collect dues, and thus spend money organizing members or lobbying the legislature, is undercut. And in part three, workers have to vote the union back into existence every single year. Put it all together and it looks like this: Wisconsin’s unions can’t deliver value to their members, they’re deprived of the resources to change the rules so they can start delivering value to their members again, and because of that, their members eventually give in to employer pressure and shut the union down in one of the annual certification elections

And because the Unions provide large donations to the Democratic Party, as well as neutering class struggle in the State it also removes finances from a political opponent – OR it forces the Democrats to seek funding from non-union sources, like millionaire businessmen. This means either the Democratic Party loses funds, or has to shift more and more to the right to win the money of big business – shifting right on to a territory the Republican Party already hold. It’s a Machiavellian plan to fundamentally change the political terrain in Wisconsin in favour of the ideas of the Right and business.

The Unions in Wisconsin responded with a protest on February the 15th, as the joint finance committee in the State would hear ALL speakers who wanted to speak in favour or against the bill. Exploiting this loophole rather spectacularly, the Unions managed to rally thousands of people to come to the State Capitol building to testify against the bill.

Given the vast number of citizens who opposed the bill, unsurprisingly there wasn’t enough time to hear them all. Instead of leaving though, the protesters stayed overnight in the Capitol Building and have remained there for two weeks – with thousands more coming to join in their occupation and to protest outside the building.

This militant defiance of union busting by the Labour movement in the USA has even, dragged the Democratic Party in the State leftward. In both the Assembly and the Senate of Wisconsin the Democrats are a minority – having lost out to the Republican Party’s gains in the midterms. They cannot vote to defeat Walker’s proposals.

But instead the Democratic Party’s Senators have gone into a kind of political exile to Illinois. It sounds mad but is actually an inspired counter-move. The Republicans have 19 Senators in the state compared to the 14 Democratic Senators. But in order for any law to pass, there must be a quorate of at least 20 senators – so the Republicans have been unable to pass this law because the Democrats have fled the state! The Democratic Party are effectively acting in defiance of normal parliamentary practice to stop the Republican Party from crushing the Trade Union movement.

Walker has of course found allies from the Tea Party, who have organised counter-demonstrations against the Unions. But they have been massively outnumbered by the pro-Union rallies, which are the biggest demonstrations Wisconsin has seen since the Vietnam War. In a national poll over 60% of Americans opposed Walker’s plan being enacted in their own states, and even contributors from Fox News have realised that Walker’s argument is “malarkey” and that it’s all about union busting.

These protests show that while the USA isn’t normally seen as a hotbed of class struggle, when it happens they don’t mess about. The struggle in Wisconsin is reminiscent of other mass mobilisations of workers in US Labour Movement history – like the Bonus Army, who set up an illegal camp in Washington DC in protest at the President’s refusal to pay them their bonus after fighting in WW1. The US Army was eventually brought in to clear the camps, which it did at the point of bayonets and the use of chemical gas.

Of course this time round, if Walker wants to use the State’s security forces to clear the State Capitol he won’t have the support of the Police. What remains to be seen is if other parts of the State will obey his orders – he’s already declared his willingness to use the National Guard to bust Unions, a tactic that Mubarak would have been happy to use. State Troopers have even been dispatched to try and drag the Democratic Senators back to the occupied Capitol Building, to try and facilitate a “democratic” process through state sponsored kidnapping.

The struggle in Wisconsin shows that the Left in the USA are starting to fight back after being left in the shadow of the Tea Party and Obama’s failures and betrayals. Along the way, they are winning mass support and a few unusal (but not unwelcome) allies to their cause.

The prison industry in the United States is big business as outlined here – “prison workers provide ninety eight percent of the total market for equipment assembly services.  They produce ninety three percent of paints and paintbrushes, ninety two percent of stove assemblies, forty six percent of body armor, thirty six percent of all home appliances, thirty percent of all microphones, headphones, and speakers, and they even manufacture twenty one percent of all office furniture”.

Prisoners don’t only make commercial goods, they’re also an important part of the US Military Industrial Complex – they produce “100% of all helmets ammunition belts, bullet proof vests, Identification tags, shirts, pants tents, bags and even canteens are produced by prison labour”. This means that by jailing a large whack of it’s own population the United States can afford to keep supplying it’s massively overstretched military maintain bases around the world and invade other countries.

This massive industry has been used by the largest corporations in the USA to undercut workers rights and make a killing -

* A Washington company “hired” prisoners to wrap software for Microsoft.
Golden arches, golden shackles? Oregon inmates produce electronic menu boards for McDonalds.
* In New Mexico, inmates take hotel reservations by telephone. California convicts took TWA airline reservations over the phone — during a flight attendants’ strike.
* Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest of the nation’s 88 private prison operators, teamed up with Company Apparel Safety Items in the first partnership between a private prison and a private manufacturer.
* Next time you’re turning the lights down and getting all comfy, consider this: Prisoners in South Carolina made lingerie for Victoria’s Secret.

Using prisoners as virtual slave labour has meant that for once, the practice of American jobs being outsourced to the Third World has reversed, for example an assembly factory in Mexico and sweatshop in Indonesia were closed down with their trade brought back to the USA – because even prisoners can be paid less than workers in the developing world, as little as 25c an hour.

Not only can companies in the USA get prisoners to make all their crap on the cheap, they can actually run prisons themselves. Since the 1980′s the private prison industry in the USA has boomed (more on this later).

As the US prison population skyrocketed, the ruling class in the United States did what it always does, and pointed to the free market for a solution to it’s jailing of millions of it’s own citizens; It let private prisons ease the burden on the Federal Government. The problem is that even the US Bureau of Justice says the efficiency savings private prisons were meant to make ““have simply not materialized.” What happened was that a spate of violent prisoners escaped because privatised prisons cut corners for profit – just like Railtrack in the UK, privatisation of what should be a not for profit social service resulted in a disastrous risk to people’s safety.

This graph makes sense when you realise the War on Drugs kicked off in 1980.

The reason the prison industrial complex has grown to become such a massive part of the US economy is simple – the prison population in the United States has quadrupled in the past 20 years. The USA imprisons more people than any other country in the world at any time in human history. With only 5% of the world’s population, the USA has almost 25% of the world’s prison population. A whopping 2,500, 000 Americans are behind bars.

Despite this massive increase in prisoners, reports of crime have actually decreased in the same 20 years. The right-wing in the USA claims the two are related – more people in jail, less violent offenders on the streets. But the overwhelming majority of prisoners in the USA are held for non-violent crimes.

The massive increase in jailed Americans is due to the beginning of the “War on Drugs” in the 1980′s. Just like the prohibition of alcohol in the 20′s, politicians in the US used the massive crack cocaine epidemic that hit the states as an excuse to jail hundreds of thousands of people, so they could pose as being tough and win votes for fighting a “war” (this was during the Cold War where fighting an actual war abroad to win elections was frowned upon by the Soviet Union).

The majority of people arrested were not drug dealers though – they were actually drug users. The penalty for drug use in the USA makes the UK look like Bob Ainsworth’s psychedelic drug paradise – you can get 5 years without any chance of parole for possessing 3.5 ounces of smack/5 grams of crack.

This means those jailed for drug offences are predominantly poor and Black. As well as looking back to the war on alcohol, the “War on Drugs” helped reintroduce another American tradition; making lots of Black men slaves – almost 40% of the US prison population is made up of Black males, despite them only making up 12% of the population.

While black males were jailed en masse, many of the people who were actually responsible for letting crack into the United States were protected because crack cocaine helped to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. The CIA actively assisted the distribution of crack cocaine in the USA so they could illegally arm these rebels, and unlike their victims, none of them have ever done any jail time for it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UT5MY3C86bk

At least one polis gets it.

The war on drugs itself was biased against Black males, with people who smoked crack (the cheap form of cocaine taken by poor folk, a lot of whom were also Black) being treated much more harshly by the Justice system than cocaine in it’s pure form (the kind of cocaine taken by people in the Justice system). For example you’d need to get found wi 500 grams of pure cocaine to get the same punishment (5 years) as someone wi 5 grams of crack. Cocaine is a hell of a drug (for jailing lots of folk).

The War on Drugs, and the massive increase in prison population and jailing of Black males means there are more Black men in jail than in college than the USA. SSY is still waiting for Mr-Change-You-Can-Believe-In to rectify this situation but we won’t hold our breath. As Stephen Fry outlines below, keeping lots of young black guys in jail makes a few white guys in Washington a lot of money.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un-4_J5oWMY

Well done American ruling class, I see what you’ve done there.

There are some cases where encouraging folk to work in prison is something Socialists should support – it keeps them active, it can help rehabilitate them, teach them new skills and prepare them for life outside. But the fact is right now, rehabilitation in the United States isn’t just frowned upon as being too liberal, it’d be a hammer blow to large parts of the economy. Societies are ordered by what makes money for the people in charge of it, and there’s no motivation to stopping the Justice system from jailing millions of folk in the USA – the opposite in fact.

People on the conservative right in the USA often attack Socialists for all the dodgy stuff that happened in the Soviet Union – one of which was the Gulag, a massive Prison Industrial Complex which used to exist in Russia. Aside from the fact we don’t actually support that, the Gulag system in the Soviet Union was a massive white elephant which lost the Soviets millions of roubles as prisoners dug meaningless canals to nowhere. These projects were quickly scrapped by the Soviet leadership after Stalin kicked the bucket.

In contrast, the US Prison Industrial Complex is very, very profitable for the people who can get a cut out of it. The War on Drugs may have failed to stop drug use in the USA but it has been a roaring success for the shareholders of hundreds of companies, private prisons and military suppliers who have jailed drug addicts to use as slaves.

People who commit the worst, most violent crimes of murder, assault, rape etc shouldn’t be anywhere else but behind bars but those Americans who get addicted to drugs should get help from their Government to go clean, instead of working for years in the 21st century equivalent of cotton picking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJA86H7YeFY

Russians, shortarse Frenchmen, artistic pictures of horses and people who duet with Blue: Just some of the things that the US government HATES

The publication last week of the first few batches of leaked US embassy cables has brought whistleblower website WikiLeaks – as well as the fate of its founder and editor in chief Julian Assange – dramatically to the front pages and top bills of news media around the world. As this article was being drafted, Assange, the website’s principal spokesperson and main public figure, is reported to be have been taken into custody in London, in connection with alleged sex offences in Stockholm in August this year. Unlike some others, SSY prefers to take rape allegations seriously, at least until substantial evidence suggests we should do otherwise.

To deal with this issue first, first of all let’s say something – Wikileaks is not Julian Assange, and Julian Assange is not Wikileaks. Attempting to repress and punish Wikileaks for being inconvenient and worrying to the establishment is not the same as a man being arrested because he is suspected of the very serious crime of rape. Let’s not confuse Assange with Wikileaks. Wikileaks (with Assange as its public face), as we will go on to discuss, has made a brilliant contribution to anti-imperialist activism and we absolutely applaud it for that. Do not let the fact that Wikileaks has got the right ideas about freedom of information blind us to the fact that rape is one of the most reprehensible crimes someone can commit, and that violence (sexual, physical, psychological, emotional) against women (which the overwhelming majority of the time goes unpunished) should be opposed in all its forms – and perpetrators brought to justice where it has been committed.. We offer no opinion on whether Julian Assange is guilty of the crimes that he has now been charged with. It wouldn’t be appropriate. But neither is it appropriate for socialists to promote the position that the women who have made allegations against him should be disbelieved, simply because Assange’s organisation Wikileaks do good things, or because of what the women have said on the internet in the past, or because they are women – which is what a lot of the ‘Defend Assange’ stuff out there on the interwebs is boiling down to. Just because we consider someone to be a “good man” who promotes some of the same ideals that we do does not mean that, if they HAVE abused women, they should get away with it, sticking it to the man yeah? Many men, men who consider themselves to be left wing, are using this arrest as an excuse to propagate often repeated rape myths, and this is unacceptable. Rape myths should always be challenged, no matter how suspicious you find the timing of Assange’s arrest. It’s sad to see people we respect, like Naomi Wolf join in the reactionary smear campaign against the women who reported Assange to the Swedish authorities. This is a misguided approach to anti-imperialism. You have to be anti-patriarchy too, or sorry, you’re not a socialist. For a brilliant article on the meaning of the word ‘consent’, visit Feministe. No means no, and tricking someone in to consenting to sex is rape. That goes in all cases, not just the ones where there’s no left wing icons who might be involved. Now, on to the substantial issue of the leaked cables..

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006, originally adopting a wiki-style of organisation (similar to Wikipedia, where users could freely upload, edit and discuss documents. However it has since taken on a far tighter editorial policy, as it became clear the wiki format wasn’t appropriate for the organisation’s aims.

The ongoing release of US embassy cables – taken from the US military internet system SIPRNet (insert Terminator joke here) and representing a database of some quarter of a million secret communications from US embassies around the world – is just the latest in a long line of high profile stories broken by the organisation.

These include the website’s role in releasing the membership lists of the British National Party (BNP) in November 2008 and October 2009, the release of US military footage of an airstrike in Baghdad that appeared to show the gunning down of civilians and journalists, their involvement in the controversial so-called “climategate” leak of emails from the University of East Anglia and the 2009 Trafigura scandal concerning the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, and this year’s release of many thousands of secret documents concerning the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What's an assange? A smelly orange?

As Assange told an audience of journalists and students in London earlier this year, the idea behind the website was to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the internet to “find a way to not be scared to publish…anything”. Unlike the journalism of mainstream media organisations, WikiLeaks perceives of its duties being primarily to its sources – to publish what they say they will publish, not to step back or take things down; to protect those sources as much as possible – as well as to what Assange refers to as “achieving just reform”.

It is perhaps unsurprising that such a project has inspired a vitriolic reaction in the seat of power. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has condemned the most recent leaks as life-endangering, ‘illegal’ and a threat to US national security. Others have taken this much further, with former Vice-Presidential candidate (and likely future Presidential candidate) Sarah Palin describing Assange as “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” and calling for him to be “pursued with the urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders”, while other political leaders have openly called for his assassination. As has been repeatedly pointed out by WikiLeaks’ spokespeople and supporters, no evidence of anyone’s life being endangered has been forthcoming, and the timing of the releases and the care taken in their publication makes the endangerment of individuals unlikely. Also of note is that US authorities were approached prior to publication to ensure anything they felt might have been explicitly dangerous to individuals could be redacted – the US however refused to cooperate.

The embassy cables released to date have contained so many revelatory details that stories that would otherwise have ran for days have been almost buried in an avalanche of new disclosures. So far we have discovered that the US has been spying on UN officials, that leaders of various Arab states have been calling for a US attack on Iran (as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, despite opinion polls showing the populations of those countries perceive the US and Israel as by far the greatest threats in the region), that the Labour government “put measures in place” to protect the US during the Iraq inquiry, and much more. It’s a lot to sift through, and according to Assange only 200-odd cables out of a staggering 25,000 have been released so far. You can browse the cables by which country you want to hear US diplomacy staff slag off using this handy Guardian guide.

Wank, wank, daft guy, wank

In this then sense WikiLeaks is very much a political project, both with respect to press freedom and independence, and with challenging US power. In an online Q&A session with Guardian readers, it would even seem that Assange is informed by something of an anti-capitalist perspective. In response to a question about press freedom and the west, he answered:

“The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be “free” because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.”

However it would be misleading – as some have attempted – to try and claim WikiLeaks and Assange to any particular political current or outlook. As Assange told the audience in London earlier this year:

“[…]we can all have particular brands of politics, but I say it’s all bankrupt. And the reason it’s all bankrupt, and all current political theories are bankrupt…is because actually we don’t know what the hell is going on. And until we know the basic structures of our institutions, how they operate in practice… until you know that, how can you possibly make a diagnosis?”

In contrast to this, some on the left have argued that the leaks have told us nothing we didn’t already know. Leaving aside that reports so far have only covered a fraction of the database, this is clearly a bit of an overstatement. As with the Pentagon Papers undermining the US case for war in Vietnam, the leaking of the embassy cables has opened up aspects of US power to a level of scrutiny previously unimagined. While it mostly confirms what many of us already knew about the role of the US empire in world politics, it would be foolish to dismiss such knowledge as of no use, or to pretend that the details don’t matter. While the contents of the cables might not substantially change our understanding of global power relations and US imperialism, they will be a valuable resource for activists, journalists and historians.

Assange and Wikileaks’ lack of ideology beyond a commitment to sharing information and protecting and supporting whistleblowers is appropriate in the project of trying to create a genuinely free news media – even while it might sometimes be counterproductive for those with progressive aims (witness for example the tremendous – and unjustified – ammunition given to climate change-deniers by the release of the University of East Anglia emails last year). In cases like this, those who fund mainstream news outlets have been able to use their money and power to criticise scientific consensus, and nearly trash the reputation of some of the most valuable climate scientists in the world at present.

Tellingly, as the whistleblower’s website hints at what a genuinely free and critical news media might look like and achieve, mainstream press commentary – as well as some mind boggling leftie websites – has echoed the US government and right-wing politicians attacks as irresponsible and dangerous. The weakness of the mainstream media and its subservient relationship to political and economic power is what makes WikiLeaks so vitally important. What the US government and politicians have failed to grasp in focusing so much on Julian Assange is that WikiLeaks can and will continue without him; and if one site is shut down another can appear to take its place.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell our state secrets to Wikileaks

The man who the US government have identified as the source of the leaks, Bradley Manning, is now languishing in solitary confinement in a US army prison in Kuwait, facing 52 years in jail. A huge injustice, THIS is what you call a political arrest. Manning is a young Welsh guy, who joined the US army and found himself putting his intelligence and technological skills and to use working for US intelligence gathering agencies in Iraq. Evidently he realised the extent of the deception, unfairness and murder being committed by the American government, and the ease with which he could access so much secret information. He was already having a shit time in the army, especially badly treated by the repressive Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy which forces LGBT people to live a depressing lie or be kicked out of the army. For an example of how homophobic the rhetoric around this issue can be, check out this lovely piece by the vile Ann Coulter (choice quote: “Let’s check our “Gay Profile at a Glance” and … let’s see … desperate for acceptance … delusions of grandeur … yep, they’re both on the gay subset list!”). It’s a separate discussion, but if readers are interested in the debate around the campaign to end Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a short while ago there was an open letter sent to vocal campaigner Lady Gaga from a gay Iraqi fan which is worth a read.

Clearly, Manning was fucked off with working for an oppressive murder machine like the American government. A lot of people are, but Manning, it’s alleged, chose to do something about it, and he’ll go down in history for it.

Manning is suspected mainly based on this discussion with a former hacker, who reported him to the authorities. Whistleblowers put themselves at great risk to expose the awful truth about war and corrupt governments. They do an incredibly important job for democracy. All socialists and progressive people should support the growing campaign to defend Bradley Manning. Don’t fall prey to the reactionary idea that Wikileaks are “putting lives at risk” by revealing the truth about the American and other capitalist, imperialist governments. They’re saving lives. There have been 108, 094 documented civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began in 2003, and who knows how many haven’t been counted. Up to 34, 240 documented deaths in Afghanistan. We deserve the truth, and those innocent people deserved to live.

(Co-authored by Neil B)

You might remember from 5 years ago the moment that broke from the script in a televised charity ‘give-money-cos-the-government-can’t-be-arsed-athon’, to declare “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIUzLpO1kxI

But now, he’s felt it necessary to go on US TV to apologise to Bush:

“I would tell George Bush, in my moment of frustration, I didn’t have the grounds to call him a racist. But I believe that in a situation of high emotion like that, we as human beings don’t always choose the right words. And that’s why I’m here.”

In a radio interview he even went further:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjTLUxaWtlM

The comments come after Bush referred West’s comments in 2005 as “the most disgusting moment of my Presidency.”

It’s worth noting that the whole story has become about how Kanye called Bush “a racist” when he actually said no such thing. When this was pointed out to him he said that’s what it had meant to him.

“I didn’t appreciate it then. I don’t appreciate it now. It’s one thing to say, ‘I don’t appreciate the way he’s handled his business’. It’s another to say, “This man’s a racist”. I resent it, it’s not true and it was one of the most disgusting moments in my presidency . . . The suggestion that I was racist because of the response to Hurricane Katrina represented an all-time low.”

You know what would be way worse than this? Getting slagged on telly

At the time, Kanye’s comments were heard round the world, and he became a hero to many as they saw the outrageous response by the US government to Hurricane Katrina. They were sampled and reused again and again.  The fact that he’s climbed down from the remarks 5 years later will be a big disappointment for the many people who respected him for speaking his mind.

The reason for that is that the way the government handled the destruction of New Orleans was racist. New Orleans at the time was one of the poorest cities in the US, with a 67% black population. When it was clear that a disastrous hurricane (likely to have been made worse by the heating of the ocean’s surface by climate change) was going to hit, the poor majority, who didn’t own cars they could use to leave, were left to fend for themselves. At least 1836 people died as a result, and five years later refugees are dispersed across the US, unable to return. The reason why they haven’t been able to go home is that the wealthy and the their friends in government saw it as an opportunity to transform the city, evict the people that live there, and seize the land where their homes were to make a profit at their expense.

Even worse than their inaction was the action that Bush’s government did take. As they left people to starve or die of thirst, people were forced to fend for themselves to survive. They did this by taking what they needed from abandoned stores. But the US military was deployed to protect private property rather than human life, shooting the “looters” who the media dutifully condemned with made up stories of murder and violence. Vigilantes and cops shot and killed those trying to flee the disaster, under the watch of President Bush.

The truth of the matter is that George Bush doesn’t care about anybody except the wealthy elite that put him in power in the first place. What happened in New Orleans was disaster capitalism in action – using a crisis as an opportunity to transform the face of the city in favour of the rich. Kanye West seemed to get that at one point (see his comments from 3 years ago below), but now he’s backed away. You also can’t deny that part of what happened was racism, that it was a fact that the government, headed by Bush, didn’t care about the black people of New Orleans.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcgPsEubkjo

It’s even more disappointing that the thing that seems to have prompted Kanye to take this step is the racist abuse he faced as a result of his madcap behaviour at the VMA awards when he interrupted Taylor Swift getting the best video prize. After that, many ignorant white people in the US labeled him a racist, and accusation that’s patently ridiculous. Yes, it was daft and strange what he did, but the fact that some claimed it was motivated by a hatred of white people says more about them than it does about Kanye West.

One infamous Twitter response to the VMA awards

With the US electing its first ever black President to succeed Bush, there is a huge backlash of racial unease underway in the US. Part of the same politics was what motivated the furious backlash against Kanye for something that didn’t really matter. But the idiots saw a classic racist script of innocent white womanhood being violated by a black man, and went berserk, accusing him of racism. Rude, yes. In the words of Obama, a “jackass”, yes. But racist, no.

This continued pressure on him though has pushed Kanye into capitulating, which is sad and disappointing from someone who sometimes shows some flashes of social conscience and is from a family of Black Panthers.

Of course, what all the fuss ignores is the fact that Bush felt getting slagged on telly was the worst moment of his Presidency. Not the hundreds of thousands of people that died as a result of his actions in Iraq. Not the economic crisis which he helped create by allowing finance capital run riot. Not the the thousands that died in New Orleans. All these pale into insignificance compared to a famous rapper giving you some lip on TV.

Bush doesn’t deserve apologies, he deserves to be put on trial for the crimes committed by his regime.

Bonus: There’s obviously a lot more we could go into about why Bush is racist, such as his policies on affirmative action, his party’s approach to racist white southern voters, or the fact that he was only able to seize power in the first place by systematically disenfranchising black voters. But we’ll leave you with these two slightly more banal examples, firstly by him and then by his mum.

The exception to this right-wing tide sweeping America seems to have been California, where the Democrats held onto both their Senate seats, and gained the Governorship back from the GOP (The Governator RIP). In California, however, there was another election going on which has been the subject of much attention over the past few months, since it qualified to get on the ballot back in March. This was Proposition 19, a proposal to legalise, tax and regulate the manufacture and use of cannabis.

Unfortunately, Prop 19 fell yesterday, but it was a close run battle, with 46.3% – nearly 3.3 million – voters favouring legalisation, and 53.8% against. The bill had attracted widespread support, backed by a number of high profile former police chiefs, medical professionals, district attorneys, trade unions, politicians from all ends of the spectrum, and even the guy who invented Gmail. But lining up on the other side was an equally high number of police chiefs, politicians, big business, nearly every newspaper in the state, and Arnie himself. The state attorney general had also vowed to use the full force of federal authority to crack down on the legalisation.

The opposition to Prop 19 ran a ridiculous scaremongering campaign, claiming that if it passed that the state’s entire workforce, from school bus drivers to teachers, would suddenly be incapacitated by pot, that streets would be flooded with ‘marijuana advertisements’ and that the proposals are a ‘jumbled, legal nightmare’. Much unlike current drugs laws then!

Although the vote was lost, Prop 19 campaigners are heartened by the huge support that they did gain, and have succeeded in bringing arguments against drug prohibition into the mainstream. Cannabis use is already a huge grey area in the state, where there’s a thriving medical marijuana business. But there’s still tens of thousands of arrests relating to cannabis every year – 78,000 in 2008. It’s particularly notable that the legalise campaign received big support from black civil rights organisations like the NAACP – drug prohibition is a civil rights issue, with the arrest figures speaking for themselves: in LA, 10% of the population is black, but are 30% of cannabis-related arrests.

California borders on part of Mexico, where the drug war continues to bring daily death and destruction to millions of peoples lives. A new approach is needed, and although the proposition fell, it was nonetheless an important step forward in the fight to bring an end to the madness of global drugs prohibition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_oIpIyZRu0

California: where retired police officers do TV adverts for legalising weed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEFWDYB0rWo

The man in the above clip was going with his wife to a women’s health centre in Boston for surgery. It followed the devastating news that their unborn child had been diagnosed with Sirenomelia, otherwise known as ‘Mermaid Syndrome.’ The child had both legs fused together and no bladder or kidneys – there was a zero chance of survival. The surgery was so the woman involved would not have to give birth to a stillborn baby.

On there way to what they describe as “the worst day of their lives”, they were accosted by two anti-abortion protesters, shouting “You’re killing your baby!” and holding up pictures of aborted fetuses. In his article, Aaron Gouveia describes what happened next:

Running on pure adrenaline, and without even a hint of a plan, I grabbed my cell phone and crossed the street. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, I just knew I wanted to make public the cowardice of these protesters . . .

I learned a few important things from this encounter. First, these people aren’t used to being confronted. They prey on the weak and they pounce on the wounded. It’s easy to berate people and shame them when they’re too beaten down to fight back. But I chose to do just that, and you can see what happened.

They spout the same tired rhetoric passed out at rallies and subway stations. They don’t have one salient response to any of my questions . . .

Consider this my plea: stop terrorizing women. Stop adding trauma to their trauma. If you’re able, stand up to these bullies in nonviolent ways. Speak out. And if you have a camera, use it.”

Bonus: Check out SSY’s confrontation of anti-abortionists earlier this year, and their hilarious/horrendous responses.