Alexander Fangmann

Cuba is not a workers’ state, and never underwent a socialist revolution.

Earlier this month, Marino Murillo, vice president of the Cuban Council of Ministers, announced that during the rest of this year and through the next the state would enact and carry through the next phase of its privatization and austerity measures, creating “the most profound transformations.”

The measures, which were first announced in 2010 by Cuban President Raul Castro as part of a 300-point plan, represent the deepest changes to the Cuban economy since the taking of power by the Castro regime in 1959. Like austerity plans being carried out elsewhere in the world, the aim of these measures is to make the working class pay for the world capitalist crisis through mass layoffs, privatization, speed-ups, and the elimination of social welfare measures.

Murillo contrasted the upcoming changes with the first phase of reforms that “entailed eliminating the prohibitions in society.” The previous round, a centerpiece of which was the announcement of layoffs of 500,000 state workers, was accompanied by the relaxation of prohibitions on petty business activity, the hiring of labor by individuals, and property transfers as the government cynically encouraged the newly unemployed to go into business for themselves selling candy, cutting hair, or raising rabbits. Politically, however, the encouragement and even adulation of “entrepreneurship” and the use of unemployment as a disciplinary tool represents a shift in the orientation of the Cuban elite toward openly capitalist relations.

The next phase of changes to the economy will deal substantially with the privatization of state-owned companies. Murillo put forward the perspective of the Cuban elite, which is now no longer even interested in maintaining the fiction that Cuba is a socialist society. He indicated that state-owned companies will no longer play even a nominal social role in regard to maintaining employment levels, but will be held to performance measures typical of the market, and said: “We must eliminate all the hurdles that are holding them back.”

More »

John Pilger

“Rise like lions from your slumber - Ye are many, they are few." ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

I have known my postman for more than 20 years. Conscientious and good-humoured, he is the embodiment of public service at its best. The other day, I asked him, "Why are you standing in front of each door like a soldier on parade?"

"New system," he replied, "I am no longer required simply to post the letters through the door. I have to approach every door in a certain way and put the letters through in a certain way."

"Why?"

"Ask him."

Across the street was a solemn young man, clipboard in hand, whose job was to stalk postmen and see they abided by the new rules, no doubt in preparation for privatisation. I told the stalker my postman was admirable. His face remained flat, except for a momentary flicker of confusion.

In 'Brave New World Revisited', Aldous Huxley describes a new class conditioned to a normality that is not normal "because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does".

Surveillance is normal in the Age of Regression - as Edward Snowden revealed. Ubiquitous cameras are normal. Subverted freedoms are normal. Effective public dissent is now controlled by police, whose intimidation is normal.

More »

Philip Giraldi

The pandering to the Israel Lobby à la Samantha Power is incessant and, quite frankly, should be seen as humiliating by every American.

Developments in Syria and Egypt have been a godsend for Israel. The bloodshed and political turmoil have meant that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can continue with business as usual, with no one paying much attention to what is going on as he dismembers Palestine. Amidst all the fun and games, Israel launched a new air attack on Syria, the fourth such incident this year and an act of war, which was scarcely reported in the media while Netanyahu characteristically signaled his contempt for the Obama Administration by announcing a new settlement expansion just as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived to jump start a new round of pointless peace talks with the Palestinians. Israel’s government is also simultaneously moving ahead with the Prawer Plan, which will remove as many as 70,000 Palestinian Bedouin from their ancestral homes in the Negev Desert, the latest phase in the ethnic cleansing of Arabs which has been going on since 1947.

But even when Israel is not featured in the headline, it somehow finds its way into the story. Here in Washington last Wednesday Samantha Power was questioned by Senators to determine her worthiness to become US Ambassador to the United Nations. Power was confronted by the redoubtable Senator Marco Rubio for having suggested on a book tour in 2002 that if the Palestinian-Israeli conflict were moving toward genocide America should be prepared to alienate a powerful "domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import" – meaning the American-Jewish community – to send in a "mammoth protection force" to prevent another Rwanda. The proposal itself might well be considered idiotic, just what one might expect from a Harvard professor, but Power’s comment was also construed as being both anti-Israeli and borderline anti-Semitic because it implies that Jews have a lot of money and political clout while at the same time combining in one sentence "Israel" and "genocide" with the clear presumption that the Palestinians would be on the receiving end.

More »