In April 2018, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, said that Ghana has “not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America.” His comments came after Ghana’s parliament had ratified a new defense cooperation agreement with the United States on March 28, 2018, which was finally signed in May 2018. During a televised discussion, soon after the agreement was formalized in March 2018, Ghana’s Minister of Defense Dominic Nitiwul told Kwesi Pratt Jr., a journalist and leader of the Socialist Movement of Ghana, that Ghana had not entered into a military agreement with the United States. Pratt, however, said that the military agreement was a “source of worry” and was “a surrender of our [Ghanaian] sovereignty.”

In 2021, the research institute of Pratt’s Socialist Movement produced—along with the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research—a dossier on the French and U.S. military presence in Africa. That dossier—“Defending Our Sovereignty: U.S. Military Bases in Africa and the Future of African Unity”—noted that the United States has now established the West Africa Logistics Network (WALN) at Kotoka International Airport in Accra, the capital of Ghana. In 2019, then-U.S. Brigadier General Leonard Kosinski said that a weekly U.S. flight from Germany to Accra was “basically a bus route.” The WALN is a cooperative security location, which is another name for a U.S. military base.

Now, four years later after the signing of the defense cooperation agreement, I spoke with Kwesi Pratt and asked him about the state of this deal and the consequences of the presence of the U.S. base on Ghanaian soil. The WALN, Pratt told me, has now taken over one of the three terminals at the airport in Accra, and at this terminal, “hundreds of U.S. soldiers have been seen arriving and leaving. It is suspected that they may be involved in some operational activities in other West African countries and generally across the Sahel.”

U.S. Soldiers Don’t Need Passports

A glance at the U.S.-Ghana defense agreement raises many questions. Article 12 of the agreement states that the U.S. military can use the Accra airport without any regulations or checks, with U.S. military aircraft being “free from boarding and inspection” and the Ghanaian government providing “unimpeded access to and use of [a]greed facilities and areas to United States forces.” Pratt told me that this agreement allows U.S. soldiers “far more privileges than those prescribed in the Vienna Convention for diplomats. They do not need passports to enter Ghana. All they need is their U.S. Army identity cards. They don’t even require visas to enter Ghana. They are not subject to customs or any other inspection.”

Ghana has allowed the United States armed forces “to use Ghanaian radio frequencies for free,” Pratt said. But the most stunning fact about this arrangement is that, he said, “If U.S. soldiers kill Ghanaians and destroy their properties, the U.S. soldiers cannot be tried in Ghana. Ghanaians cannot sue U.S. soldiers or the U.S. government for compensation if and when their relatives are killed, or their properties are destroyed by the U.S. Army or soldiers.”

Why would Ghana allow this?

The U.S.-Ghana agreement permits this disregard for Ghana’s sovereignty. Pratt told me that the political ideology of the Ghanaian government that is in power now has been to adhere to a long history of appeasement toward the demands made by colonial and Western states, beginning with Britain—which was the colonial power that ruled over the Gold Coast (the former name for Ghana) until 1957—and leading up to providing “unimpeded access” to the United States troops under the defense deal.

The current president of Ghana, Akufo-Addo, comes from the political ideology that the former prime minister of Ghana (1969-1972) Kofi Abrefa Busia also conformed to. In the early 1950s, Pratt told me, those following this ideology “dispatched a delegation to the United Kingdom to persuade the authorities that it was too early to grant independence to the Gold Coast.” This led to a coup in Ghana, where those supporting this ideology “collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the [then-President of Ghana] Kwame Nkrumah government on February 24, 1966, and resisted [imposing] sanctions against the South African apartheid regime in 1969,” Pratt said. The current government, Pratt added, will do anything to please the United States government and its allies.

Why is the United States interested in Ghana?

The United States claims that its military presence on the African continent has to do with its counterterrorism campaign and aims to prevent the entry of China into this region. “There is no Chinese military presence in Ghana,” Pratt told me, and indeed the idea of Chinese presence is being used by the United States to deepen its military control over the continent for more prosaic reasons.

In 2001, then-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Development Group published the National Energy Policy. The contents of this report show, Pratt told me, that the United States understood that it could “no longer rely on the Middle East for its energy supplies. A shift to West Africa for [meeting the] U.S. energy needs is imperative.” Apart from West Africa’s energy resources, Ghana “has huge national resources. It is currently the largest producer of gold in Africa and… [is among the top 10 producers] of gold in the world. It is the second-largest producer of cocoa in the world. It has iron, diamond, manganese, bauxite, oil and gas, lithium, and abundant water resources, including the largest man-made lake in the world.” Apart from these resources, Ghana’s location on the equator makes it valuable for agricultural development, and its large bank of highly educated English-speaking professionals makes it valuable for meeting the demands of the West’s service sector.

Apart from these economic issues, Pratt said, the United States government has intervened in Ghana—including in the coup of 1966—to prevent it from having a leadership role in the decolonization process in Africa. More recently, the United States has found Ghana to be a reliable ally in its various military and commercial projects across the continent. It is toward those projects, and not the national interest of the Ghanaian people, Pratt said, that the United States has now built its base in a part of Accra’s civilian airport.

This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Ex-CIA agent James McCord didn’t think he would be stopped from installing wiretaps at Democratic National Committee headquarters by an $80-per-week security guard. Neither did fellow Watergate burglar Bernard Barker, a former member of CIA-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s secret police.

On June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a Black worker, was making his rounds on the midnight shift at the Watergate complex when he sounded the alarm about the break-in.

“I put my life on the line. I went out of my way,” Wills told a Boston Globe reporter on the 25th anniversary of Watergate. “If it wasn’t for me, Woodward and Bernstein would not have known anything about Watergate.”

Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got $5 million from the University of Texas in 2003 for their Watergate notebooks and files. Frank Wills didn’t even get a pension.

He died penniless in an Augusta, Georgia, hospital of a brain tumor on Sept. 27, 2000.

Wills couldn’t afford to bury his mother. He lived in a house without lights because he wasn’t able to pay the electric bill.

Wills found it hard to get a job after Watergate. One Washington area university told Wills they were afraid to hire him for fear their federal funds might be cut.

Frank Wills moved back to his home state of Georgia after his mother suffered a stroke. They lived together on her $450 monthly Social Security check.

Richard Nixon’s face was put on a postage stamp. He and his fellow war criminal Henry Kissinger made millions of dollars off their memoirs.

President Nixon’s partner in crime, Vice President Spiro Agnew, got three years’ probation for evading taxes on bribes filched from highway contractors. Frank Wills was sentenced to a year in jail in 1983 for allegedly trying to shoplift a $12 pair of sneakers.

A victim of racial profiling, Wills wasn’t arrested while leaving the store. He was nabbed just for putting the shoes in his bag. He’d wanted to surprise a friend with his gift at the check-out counter.

Never forgot Stephen Johns

Another hero was the Black security guard Stephen Johns. He was killed on June 10, 2009, by the neo-Nazi James von Brunn.

Johns and other security guards were protecting visitors going to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Dozens of visitors, including elderly Jewish people and schoolchildren, could have been slaughtered by Van Brunn.

The attack occurred 10 days after the murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, in Kansas. His assassination was incited by Fox News host and sexual predator Bill O’Reilly, who called him “Tiller the killer.”  

Von Brunn had taken a sawed-off shotgun to the headquarters of the Federal Reserve Bank on Dec. 7, 1981, and attempted to kidnap board members. He spent six-and-a-half years in jail for that act, which could have turned out to be as bloody as the attack on the Holocaust Museum.

Compare this with what happened to Leandro Andrade under California’s “three strikes” law. He was sentenced to two consecutive prison terms of 25 years to life. His alleged crime was shoplifting nine videotapes.

Von Brunn was a notorious figure. How was he able to stage his attack on the Holocaust Museum, just a mile from FBI headquarters?

One of Von Brunn’s friends was the retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin. He praised Von Brunn’s armed attack on the Fed as deserving “the gratitude and assistance of every White Christian citizen.”

Crommelin, who died in 1996, was a member of the violent National States Rights Party and was its vice-presidential candidate in 1960. The leader of the NSRP, J.B. Stoner, called Hitler “too moderate.” Stoner was found guilty of the June 1958 bombing of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Another five NSRP members were convicted in the bombing in October of that same year of an Atlanta synagogue with 50 sticks of dynamite. (“The Temple Bombing” by Melissa Fay Greene)

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover didn’t do anything when another NSRP member, Joseph Milteer, told FBI informant Willie Somersett on Nov. 9, 1963, that President John F. Kennedy was going to be shot in Dallas.

Security guards need union protection

Frank Wills and Stephen Johns show the plight of hundreds of thousands of low-paid security guards today, many of whom are Black. Increased employment in this field has gone hand in hand with the growing army of janitors. Growth of both jobs is a result of the office building construction boom.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been organizing security guards across the country. Frank Wills’ miserable $2-an-hour wage was worth $14.02 in May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator. 

In May, 2021, the median wage of the 1,057,100 security guards in the U.S. was $15.13 per hour. One out of four earned a median hourly wage of just $13.89.

In 2004, SEIU Local 1877 led a drive to organize 10,000 guards in Los Angeles. Union supporters staged a sit-in at the Wells Fargo Tower in September 2004. 

Several months later, with the support of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the union marched through downtown Los Angeles.

This important struggle came out of the union’s “Justice for Janitors” campaign. At one of the early actions by this campaign, on June 15, 1990, Los Angeles cops viciously attacked Service Employees members demanding a union contract at the Century City office complex. At least 148 workers were injured, including a pregnant woman who miscarried.

Despite this police riot, janitors at Century City have a union today. These overwhelming Latinx janitors, 98% of whom are immigrants, were in solidarity with efforts by security guards, many of whom are Black, to be unionized too.

President Joe Biden used the phrase “Putin’s price hike” again in a reaction to the June 10 Consumer Price Index report revealing continued high inflation. Biden isn’t a comedian, like that guy Zelensky in Kiev was before taking on the role of president, so Biden really needed a laugh track played after he said it.

“Make no mistake about it: I understand inflation is a real challenge to American families. Today’s inflation report confirms what Americans already know: Putin’s price hike is hitting America hard,” Biden said.

It was funny because, of course, Putin can’t raise prices on anything in the U.S. Only U.S. businesses can do that. 

Also, when he imposed sanctions on Russia in February, with a lot of bull and bluster, Biden declared: “Defending freedom will have costs, for us as well and here at home.” He got that last part right. It’s costing a lot. So really it’d be better to call it “Biden’s price hike,” even if that’s only part of the inflation.

Prices started to escalate more than a year ago. In fact, the Federal Reserve suggested last December, with inflation at a 40-year high then, that inflation had peaked.

Of course, you probably knew even then that it wasn’t true. Inflation hasn’t peaked yet and no one (including the Fed) knows how many peaks are ahead.

The U.S. sanctions on Russian natural gas, oil, grains and fertilizers have allowed U.S. companies to raise prices. The sanctions are designed to stop trade from Russia and turn the trade over to U.S. corporations, which can demand premium prices because of the sanctions.

Natural gas is a primary energy source in the European Union and is the dominant source for home heating and cooking. The EU imports 40% of its natural gas from Russia. Natural gas from Russia can be piped into Western Europe at a relatively low cost, while natural gas from the U.S. must be liquefied – liquefied natural gas or LNG – then shipped by sea to Europe.

Sanctions cutting off natural gas from Russia was a big bonus for the U.S. oil oligarchy.

Gas and oil prices are rising because supply has been restricted. Supply dropped during the pandemic, raising prices, and now Russian exports are sanctioned by the U.S. and NATO, sending prices ever upward.

Wage and price crisis

But the inflation crisis isn’t just about rising energy prices. Prices across the board, but especially in energy, food and housing, are rising, while real wages have sharply fallen. Price rises are outstripping wage growth nearly everywhere.

Wages are not driving prices up. No, it’s profits that have risen sharply.

Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute noted that while “it is unlikely that either the extent of corporate greed or even the power of corporations generally has increased during the past two years … the already-excessive power of corporations has been channeled into raising prices rather than the more traditional form it has taken in recent decades: suppressing wages.”

In an article on “greedflation,” New York Times business reporter Lydia DePillis says: “There is not much disagreement that many companies have marked up goods in excess of their own rising costs. This is especially evident in industries like shipping, which had record profits as soaring demand for goods filled up boats, driving up costs for all traded goods. Across the economy, profit margins surged during the pandemic and remained elevated. …

“Consider the supply of fertilizer, which shrank when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted sanctions on the chemicals needed to make it. Fertilizer companies reported their best profits in years, even as they struggle to expand supply. The same is true of oil.”

The Fed goes after workers

Biden, the politicians in Congress and the corporate-controlled media have all agreed on one answer to the inflation monster: the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Capitalism’s central banking system is supposed to come to the rescue. Except that it hasn’t, so far.

The chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, announced May 4 that the Fed will be raising interest rates and implementing policies aimed at reducing inflation in the United States. The goal is “to get wages down,” he said. There’s no way reducing wages would stop inflation, though reducing wages does boost profits.

According to a transcript published by the Wall Street Journal, Powell blamed the inflation crisis, which is global, not on U.S. and NATO sanctions on Russia, but rather on U.S. workers allegedly making too much money.

“Employers are having difficulties filling job openings, and wages are rising at the fastest pace in many years,” Powell said. 

“Wages are running high, the highest they’ve run in quite some time,” the Fed chairman lied.

Wages falling fast and faster

The U.S. federal minimum wage is just $7.25 per hour, and has remained at that level since 2009, despite significant increases in inflation.

In 1968, the U.S. federal minimum wage peaked at $1.60, which would be equivalent to $13.29 in 2022 dollars. When you adjust the minimum wage for inflation, you’ll see that it’s been going down every year since 1968.

As the April 12 Wall Street Journal reported, “Unfortunately, inflation-adjusted wages are falling faster than they have in 40 years. Inflation ran 8.5% in the year ending last month, while nominal wages grew only 5.6%, a decline in inflation-adjusted wages of 2.7%.” 

Got that? Wages across the board are down 2.7% this year.

So if wages are already decreasing (and inflation is increasing), how could the Fed’s plan to “get wages down” be a way to stop inflation? If that sounds confusing, that’s because the Fed’s Powell is talking nonsense about wages and inflation.

Raising interest rates, on the other hand, is the standard Fed response to inflation. The only problem there is that experience shows that raising interest rates means businesses cut back on everything, especially jobs. 

Fewer jobs means decay, unemployment and recession – an economic bust. The World Bank warns that the economy appears to be heading into stagflation — high unemployment combined with runaway inflation.

No matter what policy the Fed chooses, what’s coming does not look good.

But labor unions can be part of the answer. The workers who have the best chance of fighting inflation and stopping falling wages are those in a union. 

In fact, every worker already knows that instinctively. That consciousness is part of the union organizing upsurge across the country from Amazon to Starbucks to Apple to REI and on and on. A strong union movement can fight back.

Los Angeles — With 94% of the vote tallied, John Parker for U.S. Senate won over 97,600 votes in the California primaries on June 7. Campaign workers and the candidate declared this a major victory. 

Parker ran openly as a socialist on the Peace and Freedom Party ballot, representing the Socialist Unity Party.

Election results are still being tallied. June 14 is the last day for mail-in ballots to be counted, and voting results will be certified on July 15.

At this writing, Parker is listed in 8th place among 23 candidates. The top two candidates compete in November’s general election.

Supporters of John Parker’s campaign were elated that so many voters chose to support a revolutionary socialist. This despite the fact that Parker interrupted his campaign for over two weeks for an urgent anti-war fact-finding trip to Donbass and Russia, which made the results all the more outstanding.  

Campaign organizer Maggie Vascassenno explained: “We were worried on two levels: first for John’s safety at the front line in Lugansk; and second that he took time away from vital local campaign work to travel to Donbass and Russia. But he insisted on the importance of being able to bring back the truth of what was taking place in the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine.”

John Parker stated: “The issues in California, such as runaway inflation, evictions and homelessness, the outrageous cost of gas and food, even racism and police terror, are linked to the war. The Biden administration is spending $80 billion to continue the destruction abroad while people are suffering here at home.

“What I was able to see with my own eyes and document is the role of fascists and neo-Nazis in the U.S./NATO war against the people of the Donbass region. Nazi propaganda is being proliferated by the fascist forces in Ukraine. 

“The Azov Battallion’s symbol of the black sun was also used by the racist Buffalo shooter, who said that his inspiration came from a person in New Zealand who was in touch with those forces in Ukraine. This is what the imperialist West is propping up in a war not only against the people in Donbass but also aimed at Russia and then China,” proclaimed Parker.

Campaign organizers continue to meet with groups and individuals who were inspired by the campaign. Parker and the Socialist Unity Party plan a national speaking tour about his trip this summer and fall. 

The campaign still needs your support and donations to cover campaign costs and the upcoming speaking tour. Readers can contribute here: https://johnparkerforussenate.org/donate/.

Lebanon was invaded 40 years ago by the Zionist regime that occupies Palestine. At least 48,000 Arab people were killed or injured in the attack that started June 6, 1982.

Apartment buildings in Beirut were seen on TV being bombed by Israeli war planes while Lebanese villages were shelled by Israeli tanks. The world was horrified by Lebanese and Palestinian children being killed.

The Israeli planes, cluster bombs, tanks and shells were made in the USA. Behind Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Israeli General Ariel Sharon was U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the White House.

Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, called Israel “America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk.” 

While Lebanon was being devastated, the U.S. was installing 108 Pershing 2 nuclear missiles in West Germany. Each of these deadly weapons could carry a nuclear payload three times greater than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Hiroshima’s bomb killed 100,000 people, including 30,000 Korean slave laborers. With a range of over 1,000 miles, the Pershing 2 missiles could strike the Soviet Union in just six minutes.

Millions of people demonstrated in Western Europe against this dangerous escalation in the arms race. At the same time a “nuclear freeze” movement arose in the United States that demanded a stop to any more nuclear weapons.

Reagan’s supporters denounced the nuclear freeze movement. This writer saw preacher Ernest Angley claim on TV that Jesus Christ would return to earth via a worldwide nuclear war.

Six days after Israel invaded Lebanon, a million people came to New York City’s Central Park on June 12, 1982. They demanded a nuclear freeze and peace.

But none of the speakers mentioned the slaughter in Lebanon. The rally organizers thought it was more important to get the endorsement of racist New York City Mayor Ed Koch, a big supporter of Israel.

Koch was hated by the Black and Latinx communities. The year before Koch had closed Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital.

A sit-in there was viciously attacked by police on Sept. 19, 1980, injuring 30 people. The Rev. Wyatt T. Walker, who had been a co-worker of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., called the police brutality as bad as anything that occured in Birmingham or Selma, Alabama.

From Lebanon to Ukraine

The refusal of the “official” U.S. peace movement’s leadership to denounce Israel’s invasion was repulsive. It broke down the anti-war movement.

Later, some of these leaders were apologetic, especially after the September 1981 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Over 3,000 people died there. An official Israeli inquiry admitted that Ariel Sharon was to blame.

In contrast, 100,000 people marched on the Pentagon on May 3, 1981, to demand an end to Reagan’s wars in Central America. For the first time, a Palestinian representative spoke to the crowd.

The march was called by the People’s Anti-war Mobilization (PAM) and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). PAM activists later formed the ANSWER coalition.

PAM called demonstrations against the invasion of Lebanon. At the June 12 rally, PAM supporters distributed tens of thousands of leaflets condemning the U.S.-Israeli invasion.

There were few altercations in Central Park with supporters of Israel. Did the June 12 organizers really believe that Jewish people coming to a peace rally were all supporters of war criminals like Begin and Sharon?

The refusal to mention Lebanon was a capitulation to the capitalist establishment.

In its first stages, the invasion of Lebanon was a U.S. proxy war against the Warsaw Pact. That was a defensive military alliance of the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist countries against NATO.

By directing the Israel air force to shoot down 88 Soviet-built, Syrian-owned MiG jets on June 9 over Lebanon, the Pentagon was telling the Soviet Union that it could do the same over East Germany.

The U.S.-approved invasion of Lebanon and the installation of the nuclear first strike Pershing 2 missiles were both examples of the Reagan regime’s adventurism.

Israel’s nuclear stockpile was also U.S approved. These nukes were not targeted at Rockefeller’s oil wells in the Arab/Persian gulf. They were aimed at the Soviet Union then and Iran today.

The challenge today is NATO’s war against the Donbass republics and the Russian Federation. The U.S. and NATO instigated this war and are giving orders to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Congress can’t find any more money to fight COVID-19 but it’s spending over $50 billion to fund fascists in Ukraine, like the Azov battalion.

Hands off Russia and the Donbass republics!

Hoy quiero comentar sobre un aspecto fundamental del colonialismo que intenta transformar la población en seres sin identidad ni orgullo patrio para así facilitar su dominio y explotación. Este aspecto es el de borrar o transformar a personajes importantísimos de nuestra patria, restándoles su valor histórico como entes altamente honorables, defensores de la independencia, con gran calibre humano y con repercusión internacional. 

Esta semana, después de cincuenta años del fallecimiento de Roberto Clemente en un accidente aéreo cuando se dirigía a Nicaragua el 31 de diciembre del 1972 para llevar ayuda luego del devastador terremoto, es que el gobierno de PR anuncia que se convirtió en ley la celebración del Día de Roberto Clemente cada 18 de agosto. Lo peor del caso es que este tardío reconocimiento lo anuncian con bombos y platillos, no por el gran gesto de humanidad de Clemente, ni por su elocuencia al denunciar el racismo en los Estados Unidos, ni por su ejemplo de dignidad para la juventud, sino porque hace 50 años rompió el récord de los 3000 hits en el juego de pelota estadounidense. 

Así es como tratan a todas las figuras insignes de nuestra historia, ocultándoles su verdadero valor, silenciándolas, omitiendo sus referencias en la educación pública. Un ejemplo sumamente vergonzoso es lo que han hecho con el Padre de la Patria, Ramón Emeterio Betances, conocido como EL Antillano por haber luchado por la unión de las Antillas. Gestor del Grito de Lares por la independencia de PR frente a España en 1898 y colaborador en la lucha por la independencia de Cuba. Fue abolicionista y médico que luchó contra la epidemia del cólera del 1856. Saber sobre sus contribuciones durante ese mismo trabajo salubrista nos ayudaría mucho ahora, porque se podrían poner en práctica medidas por la pandemia del Covid. 

Gracias al constante trabajo de historiadores e intelectuales independentistas, esta historia queda recogida en libros, documentos y vídeos. Sin embargo, el gobierno rehúsa utilizar y promoverlos. 

Esto, compañeras y compañeros de la audiencia, es uno de los obstáculos que tenemos que librar constantemente. 

Desde Puerto Rico, para Radio Clarín de Colombia, les habló Berta Joubert-Ceci.

Esta semana se cumplió un año desde que la privatizadora estadounidense-canadiense Luma Energy tomara el control de la Transmisión y Distribución de la energía en Puerto Rico. Esta compañía fue impuesta por el Congreso de los Estados Unidos y su Junta de Control Fiscal que vino a gobernar a Puerto Rico, con la indignante colaboración del gobierno de Pedro Pierluisi.  

Y esto hay que tenerlo muy claro como un ejemplo de la falta absoluta de soberanía de una colonia que permite imponerle al pueblo entidades incompetentes y mafiosas como Luma a pesar del rechazo popular.

Los desastres causados a negocios, industrias y residencias del pueblo por la incapacidad de esta compañía no tienen precedente aquí y ya el pueblo está verdaderamente harto. 

Por eso el primero de junio se realizaron manifestaciones alrededor de la isla en repudio a este contrato leonino.

Quisiera darle a la audiencia sólo algunos datos que ilustran lo mafioso de esta compañía. 

• Un contrato que dura 15 años con un valor de 1,500.00 millones de dólares que puede hacer lo que le venga en gana porque no está supervisado. 
• Que despidió a 4,000 trabajadores boricuas con experiencia para destruir un sindicato de clase como la Utier.
• Y por eso se ve obligada a subcontratar trabajadores de afuera sin experiencia en nuestra geografía montañosa. 
• Que se ha excedido por millones en gastos para contratistas a quienes les paga viviendas, hoteles, transportación y comidas de lujo. Y estos incluyen a decenas de vicepresidentes que no se sabe ni qué hacen, y a ingenieros sin licencia, lo que está prohibido bajo las leyes locales.
• Y a todo esto, no tiene que invertir ni un centavo.
• Desde que comenzaron prometiendo que no subiría la tarifa de la luz, han pedido ya 6 aumentos. Han ocasionado cientos de apagones y explosiones por falta de mantenimiento, lo que ha redundado en daños de equipos y pérdidas millonarias para negocios, industrias y al pueblo en general.

Esto y mucho más son las agresiones de Luma y las organizaciones entre las que se destacan la Ruta de la Verdad, Jornada se Acabaron las Promesas, la membresía de la Utier, Mujeres contra Luma y el pueblo en general seguirán insistiendo en la anulación de este contrato leonino. 

¡Fuera Luma mafiosa!

Desde Puerto Rico, para Radio Clarín de Colombia, les habló Berta Joubert-Ceci.

Monday, June 20 – 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, 47th St. & 1st Ave., Manhattan

Join us for this historic rally on the 50th anniversary of the case of Puerto Rico before the United Nations.

To the ‘Special Committee on the Situation with Regard to the Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples,’ we say:

End U.S. colonialism!
Independence for Puerto Rico now!

La ansiedad por la expansión de la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte (OTAN) hacia la frontera rusa es una de las causas de guerra en Ucrania. Sin embargo, este no es el primer ni único intento de expansión de la OTAN, una organización creada en 1949 por los Estados Unidos para proyectar su poder militar y político sobre Europa. En 2001, la OTAN llevó a cabo una operación militar “fuera del área” en Afganistán, que duró 20 años, y en 2011 – a petición de Francia – bombardeó Libia y derrocó a su Gobierno. Las operaciones militares de la OTAN en Afganistán y Libia fueron el preludio de los debates sobre una “OTAN global”, un proyecto para utilizar la alianza militar de la OTAN más allá de las obligaciones de su propia carta, desde el Mar de China Meridional hasta el Mar Caribe.

La guerra de la OTAN en Libia fue su primera operación militar importante en África, pero no la primera huella militar europea en el continente. Después de siglos de guerras coloniales europeas en África, tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial, surgieron nuevos Estados para afirmar su soberanía. Muchos de estos Estados – desde Ghana hasta Tanzania – se negaron a permitir que las fuerzas militares europeas volvieran a entrar en el continente, por lo que estas potencias tuvieron que recurrir a asesinatos y golpes militares para ungir Gobiernos pro occidentales en la región. Esto permitió la creación de bases militares occidentales en África y dio libertad a las empresas occidentales para explotar los recursos naturales del continente.

Las primeras operaciones de la OTAN se mantuvieron en los límites de África, siendo el Mar Mediterráneo la principal línea de frente. La OTAN creó las Fuerzas Aliadas del Sur de Europa (AFSOUTH) en Nápoles en 1951, y luego las Fuerzas Aliadas del Mediterráneo (AFMED) en Malta en 1952. Los Gobiernos occidentales crearon estas formaciones militares para guarnecer el mar Mediterráneo contra la armada soviética y para crear plataformas desde las que poder intervenir militarmente en el continente africano. Después de la Guerra de los Seis Días de 1967, el Comité de Planificación de la Defensa de la OTAN (disuelto en el 2010) creó la Fuerza Naval de Reserva del Mediterráneo (NOCFORMED) para presionar a los Estados pro-soviético (como Egipto) y para defender a las monarquías del norte de África (la OTAN no pudo evitar el golpe antiimperialista de 1969, que derrocó a la monarquía en Libia y llevó al poder al coronel Muammar Gaddafi; cuyo Gobierno expulsó las bases militares estadounidenses del país poco después).

Las conversaciones en el cuartel general de la OTAN sobre las operaciones “fuera de área” se produjeron con creciente frecuencia después de que la OTAN se uniera a la guerra de los Estados Unidos en Afganistán. Un alto funcionario de la OTAN me dijo, en 2003, que los Estados Unidos habían “desarrollado un apetito por utilizar la OTAN” en su intento de proyectar su poder en contra de posibles adversarios. Dos años después, en 2005, en Addis Abeba (Etiopía), la OTAN comenzó a cooperar estrechamente con la Unión Africana (UA). La UA, que se formó en 2002 y fue la “sucesora” de la Organización de la Unidad Africana, luchó por construir una estructura de seguridad independiente. La falta de una fuerza militar sostenible hizo que la UA recurriera a menudo a Occidente en busca de ayuda, y que pidiera a la OTAN apoyo logístico y aéreo para su misión de mantenimiento de la paz en Sudán.

Junto con la OTAN, los Estados Unidos operaron su capacidad militar a través del Mando Europeo de Estados Unidos (EUCOM), que supervisó, desde 1952 hasta 2007, las operaciones del país en África. Posteriormente, el general James Jones, jefe del EUCOM de 2003 a 2006, creó, en 2008, el Mando de Estados Unidos en África (AFRICOM), cuya sede se encontraba en Stuttgart (Alemania), porque ninguna de las 54 naciones africanas estaba dispuesta a darle un hogar. La OTAN comenzó a operar en el continente africano a través del AFRICOM.

Libia y el marco de la OTAN para África

La guerra de la OTAN contra Libia cambió la forma de relacionarse entre los países africanos y Occidente. La Unión Africana desconfiaba de la intervención militar occidental en la región. El 10 de marzo de 2011, el Consejo de Paz y Seguridad de la UA creó el Comité ad hoc de alto nivel sobre Libia. Entre los miembros de este comité se encontraban el entonces presidente de la UA, Dr. Jean Ping, y los jefes de Estado de cinco naciones africanas (el ex presidente de Mauritania Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, el presidente de la República del Congo Denis Sassou Nguesso, el ex presidente de Mali Amadou Toumani Touré, el ex presidente de Sudáfrica Jacob Zuma y el presidente de Uganda Yoweri Museveni), quienes debían volar a Trípoli (Libia) poco después de la creación del comité y negociar entre las dos partes de la guerra civil. Sin embargo, el Consejo de Seguridad de las Naciones Unidas impidió que esta misión ingresara al país.

En junio de 2011, en una reunión entre el Comité ad hoc de alto nivel sobre Libia y las Naciones Unidas, el entonces Representante Permanente de Uganda ante las ONU, Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda, dijo: “No es prudente que ciertos actores se intoxiquen con la superioridad tecnológica y comiencen a pensar que ellos solos pueden alterar el curso de la historia humana, hacia la libertad para toda la humanidad. Ciertamente, ninguna constelación de Estados debería pensar que puede recrear la hegemonía sobre África”. Pero esto es precisamente lo que los Estados de la OTAN comenzaron a imaginar.

El caos en Libia puso en marcha una serie de conflictos catastróficos en Mali, el sur de Argelia y algunas partes de Níger. A la intervención militar francesa en Mali, en 2013, siguió la creación del G5 Sahel, una plataforma política de los cinco Estados del Sahel (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania y Níger) y una alianza militar entre ellos. En mayo de 2014, la OTAN abrió una oficina de enlace en la sede de la UA en Addis Abeba. En septiembre de ese mismo año, durante la Cumbre de Gales de la OTAN, los socios de la alianza tomaron en cuenta los problemas del Sahel, que fueron incluidos en el Plan de Acción de Preparación de la alianza, que pasó a ser “[el] motor de la adaptación militar de la OTAN al entorno de seguridad cambiante y en evolución”. En diciembre de 2014, los ministros de Asuntos Exteriores de la OTAN revisaron la aplicación del plan y se centraron en las “amenazas que emanan de nuestra vecindad meridional, Oriente Medio y el norte de África” y establecieron un marco para hacer frente a las amenazas y los retos a los que se enfrenta el sur, según un informe del ex presidente de la Asamblea Parlamentaria de la OTAN, Michael R. Turner. Dos años después, en la Cumbre de Varsovia de 2016, los líderes de la OTAN decidieron aumentar su cooperación con la Unión Africana. “[Satisfechos con] el sólido compromiso militar de los aliados en la región del Sahel-Sáhara”. Para profundizar en este compromiso, la OTAN creó una Fuerza Africana de Reserva y comenzó el proceso de formación de oficiales en las fuerzas militares africanas.

Mientras tanto, la reciente decisión de expulsar a los militares franceses nace de una sensibilidad creciente en el continente, que va en contra de la agresión militar occidental. No es de extrañar entonces que muchos de los países africanos más grandes se negaran a seguir la postura de Washington en la guerra de Ucrania, con la mitad de los países absteniéndose o votando en contra de la resolución de la ONU para condenar a Rusia (esto incluye a países como Argelia, Sudáfrica, Angola y Etiopía). Es revelador que el presidente de Sudáfrica, Cyril Ramaphosa, dijera que su país “está comprometido con la promoción de los derechos humanos y las libertades fundamentales no sólo de nuestro propio pueblo, sino de los pueblos de Palestina, el Sáhara Occidental, Afganistán, Siria y de toda África y el mundo”.

La ignominia de las maniobras de Occidente (y de la OTAN), incluidos los acuerdos armamentistas con Marruecos para entregar el Sáhara Occidental al reino y el apoyo diplomático a Israel mientras continúa el apartheid contra los palestinos, contrastan fuertemente con la indignación de Occidente ante los acontecimientos que tienen lugar en Ucrania. La evidencia de esta hipocresía sirve de advertencia ante el lenguaje benévolo utilizado por Occidente cuando se trata de la expansión de la OTAN en África.

Este artículo fue producido para Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad es un historiador, editor y periodista indio. Es miembro de la redacción y corresponsal en jefe de Globetrotter. Es editor en jefe de LeftWord Books y director del Instituto Tricontinental de Investigación Social. También es miembro senior no-residente del Instituto Chongyang de Estudios Financieros de la Universidad Renmin de China. Ha escrito más de 20 libros, entre ellos The Darker Nations y The Poorer Nations. Su último libro es Washington Bullets, con una introducción de Evo Morales Ayma.