Peter Schwarz

The poster reads: "This definitely is...a Madrid without hope".

The aim of this anti-Islamic campaign is to divide the working class, suppress opposition to imperialist war, whip up right-wing forces, and direct growing social tensions into reactionary, racist channels.

The anti-Islamic film The Innocence of Muslims has triggered a storm of protest extending from Indonesia in Southeast Asia to Tunisia in northwestern Africa. The sheer magnitude of the protests demonstrates that they are not simply a response to the ravings of individual religious fanatics, but an expression of broad popular opposition to the US and its European allies, which have plunged the affected countries into war, humiliated their peoples, and exploited them as cheap labor.

The ruling circles of Europe have responded to the protests by defending the anti-Islamic propaganda in the name of free speech, while suppressing demonstrations against these racist provocations and strengthening their own state apparatuses. The most striking example is France, where the government has banned all protests against the defamatory Muhammad cartoons published by the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

This buildup of state power is directed against the entire working class. The ruling class anticipates violent class struggles. Social contradictions and tensions in Europe are rapidly increasing as the euro crisis intensifies and a new recession gathers pace.

The French government claims it is acting in defense of freedom of expression, but grants this right only to the satirical magazine while denying it to those who feel offended and denigrated by the caricatures. In other countries, too, freedom of expression is used to justify the defamatory cartoons while protests against them are criminalized.

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William T. Hathaway

As the living conditions of ordinary people inevitably worsen under capitalism and as its wars cause increasing devastation, tides of protest rise up from the population. The ruling elite then seek to stem these tides before they reach flood state.

In 2008 the tide was rising to dangerous levels as millions of people worldwide took to the streets to demonstrate against US economic and military imperialism. The elite then defended against a revolutionary flood by heralding the promise of "Change you can believe in." They presented a candidate who seemed to be the total opposite of their previous servant, George W. Bush. Barack Obama promised a new era of peace abroad and progressive policies at home. America and the world loved him. His rhetoric of cooperation instead of confrontation won him the presidency and the Nobel Peace Prize. The tide of protest drained away, mollified by his charisma.

Now the tide is rising again, angrier this time from being duped. And again the elite are seeking to stem it. Their liberal media are taking a populist tone: "Yes, the system is broken, really in need of repair. The financial markets should be regulated to avoid these destructive orgies of greed that have concentrated too much wealth in too few hands. We should even consider tax measures that would redistribute some of this and give the ordinary person a fair chance."

As a model for these changes, some liberal commentators are pointing to the social democracies of Europe. Stephen Hill's new book, Europe's Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age, champions social democracy, claiming it combines positive features of capitalism and socialism by using market regulations and welfare measures to produce a high level of general prosperity. He enumerates the benefits of public health insurance, environmental protection, access to education, decent wages, unemployment benefits, and secure retirement, and suggests we can adapt these in the USA. This call for a kinder, gentler capitalism based on the European model can also be found in The Nation magazine and in groups like Move On. It sounds good, and it was good for a while, but now it's disappearing in Europe.

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Bill Van Auken

There is every reason to believe that the robust CIA presence in Benghazi after Gaddafi’s fall also involved more than just surveillance.

The September 11 attack that claimed the life of the US ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans disrupted a major CIA operation in the North African country.

According to the New York Times, at least half of the nearly two dozen US personnel evacuated from the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi following the fatal attack on the US consulate and a secret “annex” were “CIA operatives and contractors.”

“It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss,” a US official who had been stationed in Libya told the Times. “We got our eyes poked out.”

The Times report describes the mission of the CIA station in Benghazi as one of “conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city,” including Ansar al-Sharia, an Islamist militia that has been linked by some to the September 11 attack, and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM.

It further states that the CIA “began building a meaningful but covert presence in Benghazi” within months of the February 2011 revolt in Benghazi that seized the city from forces loyal to the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Stevens himself was sent into the city in April of that year as the American envoy to the so-called “rebels” organized in the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council (NTC).

What the Times omits from its account of CIA activities in Benghazi, however, is that the agency was not merely conducting covert surveillance on the Islamists based in eastern Libya, but providing them with direct aid and coordinating their operations with those of the NATO air war launched to bring down the Gaddafi regime. In this sense, the September 11 attack that killed Stevens and the three other Americans was very much a case of the chickens coming home to roost.

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Dmitry Sudakov/Paul Craig Roberts

The US today is ruled by an oligarchy of private interests.

Pravda.Ru interviewed Paul Craig Roberts, an American economist, who served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration and became a co-founder of Reaganomics - the economic policies promoted by the U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. We asked Mr. Roberts to share his views about the current state of affairs inside and outside the United States.

Pravda.Ru: Mr. Roberts, you are known in Russia as the creator of Reaganomics, which helped the country overcome stagflation. What were the key aspects of that policy and how would you estimate its results today? Do you think your faith in free market has shattered?

Paul Craig Roberts: Free market means the freedom of price to adjust to supply and demand. It does not mean the absence of regulation of human behavior.

Reaganomics was a political word for supply-side economics, a new development in economic theory. In the post World War 2 western world, governments used Keynesian demand management economic policy to control inflation and to boost employment. John Maynard Keynes was the British economist who explained the Great Depression in the West as a consequence of insufficient aggregate demand to maintain full employment and stable prices. Keynesian demand management relied on government budget deficits and easy monetary policy (money creation) to stimulate demand for goods and services. To control inflation from too much demand for goods and services, high tax rates were used to reduce disposable income.

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