Category Archives: Counterpunch

By thrusting almost all of the world’s countries’ leaders together in the same place at the same time, it seems almost inevitable that the United Nations (UN) General Assembly meeting will produce its fair share of controversies.

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Another year, another anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I feel compelled once more to follow up on what I have previously argued on this subject, if nothing else in the hope that I will get through to some members of the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement and persuade them what a worthless enterprise their whole project is and, indeed, always has been. In this article I will deal with what motivates me to “go on the attack,” as one Truther put it to me in a recent exchange. First though, let me take you through the back-story.

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On August 20, Ecuadorians went to the polls to elect a new president just over two years since the previous presidential elections of 2021. Luisa González of the Citizens’ Revolution party topped the poll with 33%. But since no candidate achieved the necessary threshold to win in the first round, the election will now be decided via a run-off election in October. She will face political newcomer Daniel Noboa of the center-right National Democratic Action Party, who surprised political observers by placing second in a crowded field with 24% of votes counted.

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Loyal readers: I have finally broken my year and half-long hiatus to weigh in on the Democrats’ naysaying about Cornel West’s Green Party presidential run in 2024. Thank you for your continued interest in my work.

As soon as Cornel West announced that he is entering the 2024 presidential race as a Green Party candidate, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable calls of “spoiler” began coming from all the usual suspects. Establishment Democrats, naturally, have been at the forefront of this predictable scaremongering. Former Obama administration advisor David Axelrod, for instance, stated: “I don’t know why alarm bells aren’t going off now, and they should be at a steady drumbeat from now until the election.” Pennsylvania Democratic congressman Brendan Boyle, meanwhile, said: “Any Democrat who runs an independent or third-party presidential campaign is dramatically helping Republican odds’ of victory.”

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In the month that has now passed since protests erupted across Cuba, much media commentary has focused on how President Biden would react. Earlier this year Biden’s press secretary had said that “a Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” However, the Biden administration is now clearly shifting policy, but not in the direction that Cubans in Cuba and US progressives had been hoping. On August 10, The New York Times published an article titled Biden Ramps Up Pressure on Cuba, Abandoning Obama’s Approach. The article states that, far from pivoting back to the Obama-era normalization process, “Mr. Biden is taking an even harder line on Cuba than his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump, who tightened restrictions on travel and financial transactions.”

Throughout this time corporate media accounts have been loyally parroting Washington’s line that the protesters were primarily motivated by the “authoritarianism” of the Cuban “regime.” As was the case in the run up the Iraq War, the purpose of these reports is to manufacture consent for Washington’s coercive foreign policy and obscure its self-serving and hypocritical agenda. As would be expected, these reports also ignore growing evidence suggesting that the protests were in part orchestrated by Washington as part of its ongoing plan destabilize the country and, in turn, bring about regime change. In a competitive field, one essay in particular stands out for its shamelessly tendentious propagandizing. Published at the online journal The Conversation, the article is condescendingly titled 5 ways Americans often misunderstand Cuba, from Fidel Castro’s rise to the Cuban American vote.

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On July 29, an Associated Press (AP) article appeared online titled With turmoil at home, more Nicaraguans flee to the U.S.  As is so often the case with media reports these days, the article starts off with a melodramatic anecdote that sets the tone and argumentative thrust for the rest of the piece. Emotionally manipulative rhetoric is, after all, more viscerally effective in pulling at the heart strings than facts and figures could ever hope to be. This particular article tells the tale of one Alan Reyes Picado. Picado, the AP tells us, is “one of the thousands of Nicaraguans the U.S. government has encountered at the border in recent months.” Evidently, the report’s author couldn’t even get past the first sentence without laying the blame squarely at the feet of the Sandinista government. The article says that Picado “fled Nicaragua by bus in the middle of the night, haunted by memories of government officials harassing him, throwing him in jail and then leaving him half naked in a dumpster.”

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In the weeks following the protests in Cuba on July 11 questions about how US President Joe Biden would react have dominated headlines. On July 22, Biden seemingly put speculation to rest by announcing that his administration will add a further set of sanctions to the already existing economic embargo. The new sanctions will apply to various figures in the Cuban armed forces as well as Cuba’s Special National Brigade, which is alleged to have engaged in heavy-handed tactics against protesters. The move represents a stunning rebuke to his party’s small progressive wing, which had hoped that he would at least return Cuba policy back to the Obama era by reversing the 243 additional Trump-era sanctions, or perhaps even dropping the embargo altogether. Evidently, however, Biden and the establishment wing of the Democratic Party that he represents are now seizing on the protests as an opportunity to court the right-wing Cuban-American vote in Florida. In the wake of the protests, Politico reported that some Democrats are viewing the situation as a “golden opportunity” to try to win back the former swing state, which went for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

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In the week following the outbreak of protests in Cuba on 11 July, a rapid flow of commentary flooded from the pages of corporate-owned media outlets and the screens of the major US “news” television stations. Predictably, this coverage has both promoted a potential US-led regime change effort and applied gross double standards to Cuba when compared to the US’s treatment of other countries in the region. The two things, of course, are intrinsically linked. If these reports applied their standards evenhandedly then they would inevitably end up presenting regime change as a perfectly reasonable response to mass protests in other Latin American countries such as Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Chile. And this, of course, wouldn’t do given that all these countries have right-wing US-aligned governments that loyally serve Washington’s geostrategic interests and obediently follow its preferred neoliberal economic model.

Almost instinctively, many of these reports have paid particular attention to the taking to the streets of right-wing Cuban-American exiles in various US cities, and especially the Mecca of the exile diaspora, Miami. Apparently, these people’s views on Cuba count for a great deal. So much so, that some publications have reported on how the Democrats are seizing on the protests as an opportunity to win back Cuban-American voters in Florida. These reports remind us that this formerly neck-and-neck swing state went for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020, in no small part due to his administration’s toughened stance on Cuba and close relationship with Cuban-American hardliners like Marco Rubio. Politico, for example, tells its readers that Biden’s Cuba policy going forward “could have a big political impact in a state where Democrats are reeling” and that “Florida Democrats see what many are calling a “golden opportunity.””

As with US intervention, this is presented in corporate media accounts as a perfectly natural and reasonable thing to do. But upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that something is very seriously amiss. Because, in reality, predicating policy toward a foreign country based on the interests and political orientation of that country’s immigrant community within the US, rather than those who actually live in that country, is a totally bizarre, not to mention destructive, modus operandi.

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On 11 July, Cuba saw thousands of demonstrators take to the streets in cities across the island. The protests are believed to have started in the Artemisa Province before spreading to neighboring Havana and further afield, including Cuba’s second-largest city, Santiago de Cuba. Press reports largely claim that protesters are motivated by shortages and the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

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