This blog will weep no crocodile tears over the death of Colin Powell. 

Powell knowingly duped many into believing the conspiracy that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction and that an armed invasion was required to disarm Iraq. As a veteran of the Vietnam War where one of his roles was to apply damage control limitation to the events of the My Lai massacre of innocent peasants, Powell was skilled at the strategy being practised of destroying a village to save the village. 

Powell served as the convenient camouflage for the US and UK policy of regime change and well before the actual invasion was launched the justifications presented by him at the United Nations had been shown to be false and misleading. There was no mistaken or misinterpreted intelligence. 

Colin Powell deliberately deceived the United Nations and his only regret was that he was later found out to be lying. 

He actively and directly contributed to the death and suffering of millions and is one of those politicians largely responsible for the tragic consequences that our fellow workers are still experiencing today in the region.

This blog does not mourn his passing in the slightest. 

In response to British plans to create an independent state of Malaysia out of its colonial possessions, Indonesia’s left-leaning President Sukarno launched “Konfrontasi”, or Confrontation, an undeclared war that included military incursions over the border into East Malaysia. Sukarno, like many Indonesians, including the PKI, believed the creation of a Malaysian federation was unwarranted regional interference by the British to maintain their colonial dominance. The British were forced to dedicate huge military and intelligence resources to help the emergent Malaysia counter these Konfrontasi intrusions. British policy was to bring an end to the conflict. But the UK’s objectives did not end there.

Like its US and Australian allies, Britain feared a communist Indonesia. The PKI had three million members and was close to Mao’s China. In Washington, the fall of the Indonesia “domino” into the communist camp was seen as a greater threat than the potential loss of Vietnam.

Sukarno’s non-aligned nationalism, anti-colonialism and growing ties to China were viewed as a threat, one that would be lessened if the president and his foreign minister Subandrio were removed from their posts and the PKI’s influence in Indonesia diminished – most plausibly through the actions of the largely anti-communist Indonesian army. In mid-1965 the opportunity arrived. A secret leftwing group, later called the “30 September movement”, coalesced in Indonesia, convinced, with some justification, that the army was planning to overthrow Sukarno and suppress the PKI.

 It is estimated that at least 500,000 people (some estimates go to three million) linked to the Indonesia Communist party (PKI) were eliminated between 1965 and 1966 in one of the most brutal massacres of the post-war 20th century. The campaign of mass murder, now known to have been orchestrated by the Indonesian army, was later described by the CIA as one of the worst mass murders of the century.

Recently declassified Foreign Office documents show British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to urge prominent Indonesians,  including army generals, to “cut out” the “communist cancer”. As the massacres started in October 1965 British officials called for “the PKI and all communist organisations” to “be eliminated”. The nation, they warned, would be in danger “as long as the communist leaders are at large and their rank and file are allowed to go unpunished”.  In 1965 specialist propagandists from the Foreign Office’s information research department (IRD) were sent to Singapore to produce black propaganda to undermine Sukarno’s regime. It produced a newsletter purporting to be produced by Indonesian émigrés and targeted at prominent and influential individuals, including army generals. It also operated a radio station broadcasting into Indonesia.

The propaganda advised that “procrastination and half-hearted measures can only lead to… our ultimate and complete destruction”. Over the following weeks, massacres of alleged PKI members, few if any with any involvement in the attempted coup, and other leftists spread across the archipelago. There can be little doubt that British diplomats became aware of what was happening. Not only could GCHQ intercept and read Indonesian government communications, but its Chai Keng monitoring station in Singapore enabled the British to trace the progress of army units involved in suppressing the PKI.

It was policy  “to conceal the fact that the butcheries have taken place with the encouragement of the generals”, in the hope that the generals “will do us better than the old gang”.

The then “coordinator of political warfare”, a Foreign Office propaganda specialist called Norman Reddaway, considered the downfall of Sukarno to be one of Britain’s greatest propaganda victories. In a letter written years later he said “the discrediting of Sukarno was quickly successful. His Confrontasi was costing us about £250,000,000 a year. It was countered and abolished at minimal cost by IRD research and techniques in six months.”

The outcome of the turmoil was a brutal and corrupt 32-year military dictatorship whose legacy shapes Indonesia to this day.

Revealed: how UK spies incited mass murder of Indonesia’s communists | Indonesia | The Guardian

 More than 100 staff in Clarks’ Shoes main distribution centre in Street, Somerset, where the brand was founded have been on strike for two weeks, having been told they must sign new contracts or risk losing their jobs without redundancy pay. The firm is seeking to cut their wages by almost 15% from the average of £11.16 an hour to £9.50 an hour by using controversial fire and rehire tactics.  They also face cuts to sick pay and reduced redundancy packages as well as the scrapping of paid breaks. 

Clarks – which was taken over by a Hong Kong-based private equity firm, LionRock Capital, in March – closed its last UK shoemaking plant in 2006. But the company’s headquarters and main distribution centre are still in Street.

Many staff fear they will not be able to keep up with their rent or mortgage payments if their pay is cut. Many in the town appear to be turning against Clarks. The workers have been inundated with messages of solidarity, with postal staff refusing to cross their picket line and food donations arriving daily.  Delegations of council workers, firefighters and train drivers have joined the picket lines. 

Dave Chapple, secretary of Mendip Trades Council, said: “Is this really the future for work in this country: no more collective bargaining negotiations, just industrial dictatorship?”

The strike comes as concern grows about employers’ use of fire and rehire. At least 28 firms, including British Gas and British Airways, have been accused since the start of the pandemic of threatening to sack workers who do not accept new contractsA poll for the TUC this year found one in ten 10 workers – three million people – had experienced the tactic.

 A letter addressed to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Chargé d’Affaires ad interim to the United Nations agencies in Rome Jennifer Harhigh signed by nearly 70 groups including ActionAid USA, the National Family Farm Coalition, and Oxfam America is urging the Biden administration’s approach to international food and agricultural policy to break “with the U.S. government’s historical alignment with corporate agribusiness and neoliberal, unregulated trade orthodoxy.”

“For too long,” they wrote, “our constituencies’ needs and interests have been unrepresented, unsupported, and undermined by the U.S. government in these policy-making spaces, as the U.S. government has promoted a policy agenda that reflects the narrow interests of the corporate agribusiness sector.”

The UN Declaration on Rights Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas emphasizes in Article 15.4, when it states, “ Peasants and other people working in rural areas have the right to determine their own food and agriculture systems, recognized by many States and regions as the right to food sovereignty. This includes the right to participate in decision-making processes on food and agriculture policy and the right to healthy and adequate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods that respect their cultures.”

Peasant Agroecology, which is fundamental to ensuring food sovereignty in our territories, is now recognized at the FAO as central to the fight against global warming.

The promoters of the capitalist world order realize that food sovereignty is an idea that impinges on their financial interests. They prefer a world of monoculture and homogenous tastes, where food can be mass-produced using cheap labour in faraway factories, disregarding its ecological, human and social impacts. They prefer economies of scale to robust local economies. They choose a global-free market (based on speculation and cut-throat competition) over solidarity economies that require more robust territorial markets (local peasant markets) and active participation of local food producers. They prefer to have land banks where industrial-scale contract farming would replace small-holder producers. They inject our soil with agro-toxics for better short-term yields, ignoring the irreversible damage to soil health. Their trawlers will again crawl the oceans and rivers, netting fishes for a global market while the coastal communities starve. They will continue to try to hijack indigenous peasant seeds through patents and seed treaties. The trade agreements they craft will again aim to bring down tariffs that protect our local economies.

None of this is new to us. Corporations want to control our lives, whether they’re agribusiness, technology, or big pharma—getting bigger, getting more control, and having too much influence over legislation. They really don’t care about how they make their profits, only how much they make. Those condemned to the peripheries of our societies by a cruel and all-devouring capitalist system have no choice but to fight back. 

Opinion | Food Sovereignty: A Manifesto for the Future of Our Planet | La Via Campesina (commondreams.org)

Coalition Urges Biden to Make ‘Transformative Change’ in Approach to Global Food and Agriculture (commondreams.org)

“HERE WE DROWN ALGERIANS”

60 years ago around 30,000 Algerians had taken to the streets of Paris in a peaceful protest against a curfew, and calling for independence nearly seven years into the war against French rule in North Africa. In 1961, tensions were running high and on 5 October the Parisian authorities banned all Algerians from leaving their homes between 20:00 and 05:30. The march was called in protest at the curfew

 The global palm oil market is dominated by Indonesia and Malaysia, which together produce more than 80 percent of the world’s supply. In Latin America, though, Guatemala is second only to Colombia – and it is the world’s sixth top producer. Oil palm plantations have nearly doubled in area over the past decade.

Last year, Guatemala produced some 880,000 tonnes of crude palm oil. Roughly 80 percent of it is exported, mainly to Mexico, a few European countries, and other Central American nations. Palm oil and its derived ingredients are commonly found in processed foods, cosmetics, and cleaning products.

Oil palm in Guatemala is concentrated in the north, northeast, and the Pacific slope region. Plantations cover more than 1,800sq km (695sq miles), nearly 2.5 percent of the country’s arable land. 

In the Izabal department, where Chinebal is located, they cover nine percent of arable land.

The indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ community of Chinebal are involved in an escalating land struggle in this remote area of eastern Guatemala. Community members accuse a Guatemalan company of planting oil palm on their traditional lands, and they have built homes to reclaim the disputed tract – spurring an eviction notice, several police operations and  violence.

The established village of Chinebal sits in the foothills of the Sierra de las Minas mountain range, 280km (174 miles) northeast of Guatemala City.

 “All of this was lands our grandparents farmed,” Juan Perez, Chinebal’s auxiliary mayor, said of the disputed land, which stretches a few square kilometres. “This piece of land belongs to us.”

NaturAceites, one of Guatemala’s top palm companies, claims ownership of the land under dispute and had planted it with oil palm. Maya Q’eqchi’ residents claim it historically belongs to Chinebal.

With no land to farm or build a home, some Chinebal residents moved onto the contested land, clearing parts of the plantation. Close to 100 families now live there growing maize and other subsistence crops.

“The expansion of [oil] palm is dispossessing communities of their lands,” said Marcelo Sabuc, the national coordinator of CCDA, a rural development and land rights movement organisation. “It is also causing environmental destruction.”

 Police operations have struck fear in many community members. 

 Abundant liquidity, soaring stock markets and accommodating tax policies have been favourable for the growing dynastic wealth of the world’s 25 richest families who are now worth $1.7 trillion, a 22% increase from a year ago. 

The Waltons of Arkansas, who own nearly half of retailer Walmart Inc., top the list for the fourth year running with a net worth of $238.2 billion. Their fortune grew by $23 billion in the past 12 months, despite the family selling $6 billion worth of stock since February. 

Austerity cuts to the NHS, public health and social care have killed tens of thousands more people in England than expected, according to the largest study of its kind by the University of York.

Researchers who analysed the joint impact of cuts to healthcare, public health and social care since 2010 found that even in just the following four years the spending squeeze was linked with 57,550 more deaths than would have been expected. The findings, worse than previously thought.

The research also found that a slowdown in life expectancy improvement coincided with the government’s sharp cuts to health and social care funding after David Cameron came to power a decade ago.

“Restrictions on the growth in health and social care expenditure during ‘austerity’ have been associated with tens of thousands more deaths than would have been observed had pre-austerity expenditure growth been sustained,” said Prof Karl Claxton of the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. “Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the slowdown in the rate of improvement in life expectancy in England and Wales since 2010 is attributable to spending constraints in the healthcare and social care sectors.”

Researchers said real social care spending rose by 2.2% per capita of the population between 2001-02 and 2009-10, but fell by 1.57% between 2010-11 and 2014-15. The loss of social care funding caused 23,662 additional deaths, according to the findings. Real healthcare spend per capita rose by 3.82% between 2001-02 and 2009-10, but only by 0.41% between 2010-11 and 2014-15. The cuts to healthcare spending between 2010-11 and 2014-15 led to 33,888 extra deaths, the researchers calculated. In total, the study suggested the constraints on health and social care spending during this period of austerity have been associated with 57,550 more deaths up to 2014 than would have been expected if funding had stayed at pre-2010 levels.

David Finch, an assistant director of healthy lives at the Health Foundation thinktank, said the study showed why ministers must put now health at the “front and centre” of their levelling-up agenda.

Even before Covid, he said, there was “an extremely concerning pattern of stalling life expectancy, particularly in the poorest areas of the country”. The pandemic had “since laid bare the tragic consequences of underlying poor health”, he said.

Separate research by Imperial College London, published in the Lancet Public Health journal, found life expectancy in many communities in England was falling even before the pandemic. While life expectancy rose in most places during the first decade of the millennium, from 2010 in some areas it started to decline. By 2014 that deterioration had accelerated, researchers discovered, with life expectancy falling for women in almost one in five communities (18.7%), and for men in one in nine places (11.5%).

Austerity in England linked to more than 50,000 extra deaths in five years | Public sector cuts | The Guardian

 Honduras will choose a new president on November 28.

The current Honduran government headed by President Juan Orlando Hernández does have excellent relations with the United States, despite fraud and violence marking his second-term electoral victory in 2017, an illegal second term but for an improvised constitutional amendment, testimony in a U.S. court naming him as “a key player in Honduras’ drug-trafficking industry” and, lastly, his designation by U.S.  prosecutors as a “co-conspirator” in the trial convicting his brother Tony on drug-trafficking charges.

Some 200 U. S. companies operate in Honduras. The United States accounted for 53% of Honduras’s $7.8 billion export total in 2019. U.S goods, led by petroleum products, made up 42.2 % of Honduran imports.

Honduras’s Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDE) reflect planners’ exuberant imagination. They envision privately owned and operated “autonomous cities and special investment districts” attracting foreign investment and welcoming tourist and real estate ventures, industrial parks, commercial and financial services, and mining and forestry activities.

Banks and corporations active in the ZEDEs will appoint administrative officers,  mostly from abroad and many from the United States. They, not Honduras’s government, will devise regulations and arrangements for taxation, courts, policing, education and healthcare for residents.

The first ZEDEs are taking shape now. Meanwhile.

Honduras’s poverty rate is 70%, up from 59.3% in 2019. Of formally employed workers, 70% work intermittently; 82.6% of Honduran workers participate in the informal sector.  A severe drought over five years has decimated staple crops. Nearly half a million Hondurans, many of them small farmers, are struggling to put food on the table. The UN humanitarian affairs agency OCHA reports that as of February 2021, “The severity of acute food insecurity in Honduras has reached unprecedented levels.” The Covid-19 pandemic led to more than 50,000 businesses closing and almost half a million Hondurans losing their jobs. Some 30,000small businesses disappeared in 2020 owing to floods caused by hurricanes. Violence at the hands of criminal gangs, narcotraffickers, and the police is pervasive and usually goes unpunished.  Honduras was Latin America’s third most violent country in 2019 and a year later it registered the region’s third highest murder rate. 

For the sake of survival, many Hondurans follow the path of family and friends: they leave. Among Central American countries, Honduras, followed by Guatemala and Mexico, registered the highest rate of emigration to wherever between 1990 and 2020. The rate increases were: 530%, 293%, and 154%, respectively. Between 2012 and 2019, family groups arriving from Honduras and apprehended at the U.S. border skyrocketed from 513 in 2012 to 188,368 in 2019.

Department of Homeland Security figures show that between 2015 and 2018 the yearly average number of Hondurans apprehended at the border was 63,741. Recently the number has increased – 268,992 Honduran refugees.

Defense spending for 2019 grew by 5.3 %; troop numbers almost doubled. For Hernández, according to one commentator, “militarism has been his right arm for continuing at the head of the executive branch.”  The military forces, like the police, are corrupt, traffic illicit drugs, and are “detrimental” to human rights.

According to Amnesty International, “The government of Hernández has adopted a policy of repression against those who protest in the streets. The use of military forces to control demonstrations across the country has had a deeply concerning toll on human rights.”

The U.S. A. has provided training, supplies, and funding for Honduras’s police and military. Soto Cano, a large U.S. air base in eastern Honduras, periodically receives from 500 to 1500 troops who undertake short-term missions throughout the region, supposedly for humanitarian or drug-war purposes.

US Intervention and Capitalism Have Created a Monster in Honduras – CounterPunch.org

 More than 10,000 production and warehouse workers at 14 John Deere plants in Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado and Georgia walked off the job at midnight, in the latest in a wave of industrial unrest in the US.

The workers, represented by nine locals with the United Auto Workers (UAW), voted 99% in favor of a strike authorization in September after receiving the initial six-year contract proposal from John Deere. 

It is the biggest private sector strike in the US for two years, since the UAW led an action against General Motors. It also comes amid threats of other strikes in the US and widespread labor problems in an economy still recovering form the battering inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

On 10 October, workers voted overwhelmingly by 90% to reject the tentative contract agreement offered by John Deere.

David Schmelzer, a quality control inspector at John Deere in Milan, Illinois for 24 years and former chairman of UAW Local 79, said that in 1997 workers took several concessions from John Deere in contract negotiations at the time, which included creating a two-tier system of employees, with workers hired after 1997 receiving fewer benefits.

“We sacrificed, and we want that back now,” said Schmelzer. “Workers in this country need to understand that we have a considerable amount of power in this country, if we choose to utilize it, and there’s no reason why we should stand back and let these companies just completely exploit our labor for billions of dollars and fight tooth and nail not to give us anything.”

John Deere has reported record profits in 2021, with a $4.7bn profit in the first three quarters of this year, compared to their previous record profit year of $3.5bn in 2013. The company spent over $1.7bn on stock buybacks in the first nine months and paid out $761m in dividends to shareholders.

“A lot of what’s been going on in the country over the last couple of years has definitely made people more aware of the disparity between corporate and income inequality. Just massive amounts of corporate greed,” added Schmelzer. “The majority of people want a bigger share of the success of this company, the success that we’ve been a major part of.”

Over 10,000 John Deere workers strike over ‘years’ of poor treatment | US unions | The Guardian