Workers Resistance

Category: Elections

  • U.S. trying to oust Assad by any means possible, aims for compliant Syria

    Editors note: Prominent Chicago- based anti-war activist Joe Iosbaker is in route to Damascus, Syria where he will participate in a delegation of observers for the Syrian election’s. Fight Back! will publish commentary by Iosbaker as we receive it.

    Beirut, Lebanon – In a front page story, May 30, headlined “Foreign Jihadis in Syria Pose Risk to West,” the New York Times reports that the U.S. and the UK are concerned about the blowback from the U.S./NATO war on Syria. Hundreds of sectarian fighters have been recruited from the UK and France, and according to the U.S. government, 70 from the US. The article describes efforts by Al Qaeda groups to prepare these recruits to “strike back home.”

    In President Obama’s speech at West Point this week, he announced plans for increasing U.S. support for “moderates” among the Free Syrian Army (FSA). This is another effort to get their war in Syria on course. But this aid to so-called moderates is for public relations in the West. The FSA is not a unified, disciplined army. It is well known that weapons provided to a ‘moderate’ reactionary force today end up in the hands of the most brutal of the sectarian forces tomorrow.

    The most successful armies fighting to overthrow Syria’s government are those of the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Fighters tired of losing will join them. In the fall, the largest of the brigades linked to the U.S.-supported Syrian National Council crossed over and announced they would be affiliating with the Nusra Front.

    To spell it out, the U.S. support of the ‘moderates’ won’t achieve the stated objective of countering the influence of sectarians. So what is the real objective of the White House?

    Ousting Assad by any means

    For three years, the U.S. has funded foreign-led, foreign-dominated armies in Syria. U.S. allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have been responsible for most of the direct aid and delivered most of the weapons. The U.S. began directly providing small arms and other battlefield equipment in the summer of 2013, but was involved from the outset in vetting the forces that the Qataris were backing.

    In the U.S., the Obama administration and the mainstream media stick to the mantra that the U.S. allies operate independent of Washington. This is a pretty weak story. Over a year ago, the New York Times revealed that back in 2011, the CIA had been in the Qatari cabinet meetings where the decisions were being made about which of the Syrian fighters to arm. More than that, the Gulf States and Turkey would never have made those moves if the U.S. hadn’t given them the OK.

    The monarchies in the Gulf States have supplied several billion dollars worth of arms, not just to any of the fighters arrayed against the Syrian Arab Army; they have especially backed the most sectarian of those. Saudi Arabia is the main backer of those linked to Al Qaeda. If Washington truly wanted that stopped, how could the Saudi’s have continued it? The tail doesn’t wag the dog.

    New rhetoric, unchanged U.S. objective

    Increased U.S. training of the ‘moderates’ in the FSA has two purposes. The main goal of everything the U.S. is doing in Syria is to get a government that is compliant with U.S. and Israeli wishes. They have decided that President Assad must go.

    But the problems with the jihadists are something that the U.S. has to address. The imperialists have to be concerned that the fighters will move against targets other than Assad – Israel, for example. Or returning to the U.S. or the UK. This is a public relations problem, as well as a military matter.

    But bad PR won’t stop the U.S. from their course: using any means necessary to achieve their objective in Syria. The anti-war movement must build the movement against the U.S. war of intervention in Syria. We have our work cut out for us.

  • Eyewitness to Syria presidential election: Is the end to the U.S. war in sight?

    Damascus, Syria – Ten people from the U.S., Canada and Ireland have traveled to Syria to observe the presidential elections taking place here June 3. Our delegation is mainly anti-war and international solidarity activists who are members of organizations including the International Action Center, Syria Solidarity Committee, the Anti-War Committee-Chicago, the United National Antiwar Coalition and the International Solidarity Movement. We are hosted by a Iranian non-governmental organization, the International Union of Unified Ummah (Muslim community).

    Since arriving in Damascus yesterday, we’ve had several meetings with officials and experts to get an understanding of the elections and what’s at stake. Our first meeting was with Dr. Bassam Abu Abdallah, a local member of the nationalist Baath Party and director of the Damascus Security Center. He talked about how this will be the first multi-party election for president. The rules of the election were established in a new constitution voted on last year.

    The three candidates on the ballot were selected from an initial list of 24. The requirements to run include being Syrian, having lived in the country for at least the last ten years, and having the endorsement of 35 members of the national assembly. Previously, the Baath Party was constitutionally the only party that could lead the government. This change was a big concession to demands raised by the protests in the Arab Spring in 2011.

    Dr. Abu Abdallah was asked if the elections would have an effect on the armies fighting the government. He answered yes, that it will demoralize them, saying, “First, they see that the U.S. won’t send troops. They’re tired of fighting and they have no vision, other than dying and going to paradise.”

    As with the liberation of the Old City in Homs, the mercenaries can see the writing on the wall. “First we put them under siege. The foreign-backed armies previously had perhaps 500,000 with them. Now they have only 100,000. Our soldiers in the Syrian Arab Army [SAA] will continue to fight until the last centimeters of land,” Abdullah added.

    Election commission

    On the second day, we met with the election commission. Hasham Al Shaher, the commission head, told us we were free to go where we wanted to observe at the polling places. Some will go to Homs, or Atakia and others will stay in Damascus.

    He explained that the commission is independent of the administration and appointed to four-year terms. People over 18 years of age (15 million people) are eligible to vote. All that is needed to vote is to be a citizen and to have an ID. No one is required to register in advance.

    The Western media was stunned when hundreds of thousands of refugees turned out to vote in Beirut in neighboring Lebanon. It turns out that the commissioners were surprised by the turnout as well. As a result, many thousands were turned away. The Lebanese authorities told them if they returned to Syria to vote, they’d be denied re-entry into Lebanon.

    The outpouring was overwhelmingly people wanting to vote for the current president, Bashar al Assad. Coming from people displaced by the war, this was a clear message of opposition to the so-called rebels. Commissioner Al Shaher said, “This shows the insistence and nationalist feelings of the Syrians. Over 95% of those eligible registered to vote.”

    Speaker of the Parliament

    Speaker of the Parliament Jihad Laham described the political situation they are facing with this war. “We take issue with the criminal American policy to Syria and Palestine. China and Russia have used their veto power to stop the criminal war, while the U.S. has used their veto power 60 times to shield Israel.”

    “Unfortunately,” he continued, “we live in dog eat dog times, where the powerful eat the less powerful.” He explained that they had invited parliamentarians to see the truth, but U.S. and NATO governments pressured them not to. “The U.S. is partnered with Saudi Arabia, which has no elections.”

    He told us, “Most of the organizations fighting have extreme Islamic orientation. Syria has survived because we are in the right.” The speaker related some of the features of the social program of the government. “Basic food is subsidized: two kilos of bread is less than 10 cents. Education is free. Health care is free. Fuel is subsidized.”

    Returning to the countries behind the war, he continued, “Where did the rebels get their weapons? From neighbors with the support of the U.S. and NATO.”

    Regarding the moment of the chemical weapon attack last summer that was President Obama’s ‘red line,’ upon which he threatened to hit Syria with hundreds of cruise missiles, the speaker said, “Syria had requested the U.N. to investigate a sarin gas attack in March 2013. It took three months for the inspection committee to arrive, and just then, there was another attack in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta.”

    He denied the use of sarin by the government forces, noting, “The SAA is victorious daily; why would we need sarin?”

    A question was asked about U.S. objectives and next steps after the election. Laham replied, “The U.S. plan is unchangeable, but sometimes they are forced to delay.” This helped make it clear to the anti-war forces in the room that we had to return to the U.S. and educate people about what we learn from the elections, in order to win people to taking a stand against the U.S. war which has already killed as many as 160,000 people.

  • Queer Eye for Narendra bhai – Affect, Memory, and Politics in Desperate Times: Pronoy Rai

    This is a guest post by Pronoy Rai There is something awfully nostalgic about May 16. The election results brought with them a sense of melancholy-laden déjà vu. For the queers and allies on the political Left, the sinking feeling that May 16 brought with it, was reminiscent of yet another day, December 11, 2013; […]

  • UK Local elections: What a surge!

    The “No Vote” Party has a considerable following in the US as well.  About 138 million in the last national election cycle.

    by Michael Roberts

    I don’t usually comment on straight politics on this blog and hardly ever on local elections.  But of course we know that politics and economics are not divorced from each other, as mainstream ‘positivist’ economics thinks. It’s ‘political economy’, after all. So I cannot resist a few words on the results of the seemingly obscure UK local elections in some councils and districts in England.

    The UK media has gone berserk in telling us the the anti-EU, anti-immigration, right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP) had a huge surge from nowhere in its vote.  All the talk was that UKIP was about to win the biggest share of the vote and seats in the European Parliament when the results come out on Monday.  It was now a ‘major threat’ to the centre-right coalition government and could even replace Labour as the main opposition and so on……

    Actually, the local election results do not bear out that conclusion at all.  It was Labour that polled the biggest share of those who voted in these minor elections, albeit only 29%.  The ruling Conservatives also polled more than UKIP at 25%.  UKIP was third at 23-24%, a leap up from last time, but hardly a victory.
    share of vote
    Indeed, this ‘Poujadist’ party will have no more than one-tenth of the council seats won by the two main parties, Labour and Conservative.  And nearly all UKIP’s seats will be concentrated in rural areas, particularly the better-off south-east and east of England (Scotland and Wales did not vote and UKIP is non-existent there).  In London, UKIP did poorly.
    UKIP
    Actually the real winners, as usual, were the NO-VOTE party.  The turnout for these elections was not more than 40%, so most people eligible to vote did not bother.  Translating the share of votes into shares of eligible voters, we find that the winners of these local elections, Labour, got no more than one in eight potential voters to support them and the ruling Conservatives managed only one in ten eligible to vote.

    The government has been crowing about the return of fast economic growth that the UK economy is now experiencing under its policies.  And there was apparently more good news in the this week’s retail sales figures, which showed a big surge.
    UK retail sales
    But it seems that the British electorate does not agree that all is rosy.  And we can see why when the latest data continue to show that average real incomes are falling as inflation outstrips wage increases (see my post,
    (http://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/05/07/britain-is-booming/).  Even now, Britain’s real GDP has not yet returned to pre-crisis levels, and with employment in badly-paid jobs and self-employment rising, the overall productivity of British capitalism has declined.  Indeed, Britons are working harder and longer for less money.
    UK GDP and employment
    UK business investment was up 8.7% in the first quarter of this year compared with a year ago.  That sounds good – until you see that investment is still some 18% below where it was in 2008 and this is nominal terms.
    UK business investment
    The latest data show that the top 10% of British households own 44% of all household wealth (to use Thomas Piketty’s definition) – they are not feeling the depression, only the ‘boom’.  And it’s their sentiments that the government expresses.

    The reality is that there is increasing disillusionment with the mainstream political parties as we shall see when the EU parliamentary elections are announced and I have commented before on the decline in voter turnout for elections in the major capitalist economies – Japan, the US, Germany and the UK.

    In the UK, the combined Conservative and Labour vote in general elections has fallen to 60% from 80-90% in the 1960s, while separatist and other parties have risen from nothing to 12%.  In this little local election, the combined vote of the top two parties was 54%.  Voter turnout has plummeted from 75% in the 1980s to about 60% now, as politicians become increasingly divorced from their voters.  Back in the 1960s, as much as 15% of MPs were manual workers, now it is less than 5% while those MPs who have never had a proper job and are just ‘career politicians’ is now 15%.  The rest had jobs in the ‘professions’ and business and finance etc, with many millionaires among them.

    voters

    The ‘surge’ of  support for parties like UKIP is a frustrated expression of people despairing at the main parties of capitalist democracy ever doing anything to improve their lot or even stop it getting worse.  We’ll see that sentiment expressed in the EU election results on Monday.  I’ll comment on the state of Europe’s economies then.

  • Ras Baraka elected mayor of Newark

    Newark, NJ – The May 13 election of Ras J. Baraka as mayor of Newark is nationwide news, like the 1970 election of Kenneth Gibson. It arouses many expectations.

    Gibson was the first African American mayor of a major northeastern city. The Democratic Party bosses had their own candidate. A homegrown alliance upset the machine’s applecart. A historic Black and Puerto Rican Political Convention was held in 1969. It nominated Gibson and pulled off a major upset of the machine. The architect of the alliance was Amiri Baraka, the father of Ras Baraka.

    Gibson’s election came at time of social upheaval. The defeat abroad of the U.S. wars of aggression in Southeast Asia, the Civil Rights Movement and the succeeding Black Power Movement at home all combined to bring a time of political and ideological crisis. Amiri Baraka later said it was only the time of crisis that allowed for the defeat of the machine.

    There are many parallels today. U.S. imperialism is bogged down in stalemate and disaster in its many wars of aggression, all of which will sooner or later end in defeat. War weariness, worsening abuses of oppressed peoples, the growth of incredible wealth for a few while the majority face depression conditions and loss of constitutional rights have bred a climate of rebelliousness.

    Newark is the scene of a huge parental rebellion against the closing of schools by a state-imposed superintendent. Small children will have to travel around a large city due to the loss of neighborhood schools and district schools are being stripped of resources in favor of charter schools, etc. Youth unemployment, gang violence and imprisonment are acute problems that have gone on for years with nothing being done beyond a little lip service here and there.

    Baraka’s opponent, Shavar Jeffries, was lavishly funded, with at least $2 million to spend. He had the support of two Democratic Party bosses. Joseph D. Vincenzo (“Joey D” to those he likes) can sway any election in the northern part of the state and George Norcross runs things in the southern part. Democrat or Republican, it doesn’t much matter, one or the other of them can pretty much set you up. Both are close to Governor Chris Christie, who also supported Jeffries. Like previous Newark mayor Cory Booker, Jeffries got a totally artificial national media buildup. Jeffries’ big weak point is that he has no real history in Newark.

    In contrast, the Newark-born Ras Baraka, formerly a high school principal and city councilman, has been locally prominent in his own right for decades. He has long spoken out against police brutality, in defense of regular district public schools and on many other issues of immediate interest to the community. Thus the election was a notable test of people’s demands that their needs be met, versus Democratic Party routine. Baraka did not have as much money as Jeffries, but he benefited from a real popular enthusiasm among Newark’s large community of active and aware citizens. That more than made up the difference. The election returns showed him getting 54% of the vote. Just as in 1970, it was an outcome of a time of crisis.

    His written platform statements are much more extensive and detailed than usual – on jobs, education, economic development, etc. There are things that can and must be done. The schools have been controlled by the state since 1995 and the results are disastrous. The school system must be returned to local control, even if it takes a pitched people’s political battle to drive the state out.

    But no bones can be made about it: the possibilities of real benefit to the masses are limited. The city’s problems are the problems of capitalism itself. cannosult of the country having become too rich, or “es are limited. the many other issues of immediaIts finances are firmly in the grip of Wall Street and no election can change or ‘democratize’ that.

    Kenneth Gibson fell back into the Democratic Party mold within a few years. A small sector of middle income and moderately wealthy people benefited. Most did not. The way Gibson’s administration played out was a great lesson to many people, Amiri Baraka not least among them. The challenge before Ras Baraka is to continue to rely on the people and their struggle. More struggle, more active people, more aware people—that is the real criterion of progress.

  • PFLP: Boycott occupation elections in Jerusalem

    Fight back News Service is circulating the following Oct. 12 statement from the Popular Font for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)

    The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called for a boycott of the occupation municipal elections in the city of Jerusalem. The Front called on our people in the city of Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the Palestinian people, to boycott these occupation elections which are part of the policy of Judaizing Jerusalem in various fields. This includes undermining the Arab status of Jerusalem and the political, spiritual, cultural, economic and social development of our people, and repression of the people of the city of Jerusalem.

    The Front said that the occupation authorities in Jerusalem are pushing demographic and geographic changes through rampant settlement, home demolitions, economic strangulation, ethnic cleansing and compromising of sacred Islamic and Christian holy sites. These acts are invalid and contrary to historical facts and international law, and are part of the war crimes being waged against the Palestinian people, their land, holy sites and inalienable rights to return, self-determination and sovereignty.