Arrests follow call for Chinese President Xi’s resignation

Peter Symonds

On the eve of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC), an open letter by “loyal Communist Party members” was published on March 4 calling on President Xi Jinping to “resign from all Party and state leadership positions.” The letter presented a scathing critique of Xi for “gathering of all power in your own hands” and causing the “unprecedented problems and crises in all political, economic, ideological and culture spheres” facing the country.

The letter was quickly deleted from Wujie News, a state-run website, which was shut down for several days. Its owners are the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) committee of the Xinjiang region, the SEEC Media Group that runs the financial magazine Caijing and the huge e-commerce corporation, Alibaba.

An English-language translation of the open letter has since resurfaced along with news that as many as 20 people have been detained over its publication. The BBC reported yesterday that the detainees included journalist Jia Jia, who, according to his lawyer, was arrested on March 15 as he attempted to board a flight from Beijing to Hong Kong. He was apparently released yesterday.

An unnamed Wujie staff member told the BBC that 16 others had been “taken away,” including six website colleagues and another 10 people working for an associated technology company. A well-known Chinese dissident Wen Yunchao who lives in New York claims that his brother and parents in China’s Guangdong Province have also been detained in a bid to make him reveal the letter’s author. Wen said he had nothing to do with the letter.

It is not clear who wrote the open letter, which, according to the BBC, was first published on an overseas-based Chinese language website. Nevertheless, the content of the letter does point to deep discontent and factional infighting within the CCP amid China’s deepening economic slowdown and Washington’s confrontational “pivot” to Asia and military build-up against China.

Since taking office in 2012, Xi has concentrated the levers of power in his hands. He is not only CCP chairman, the country’s president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but also presides over six so-called “leading small groups” that set policy in key areas, including the economy, domestic security and foreign affairs.

Xi’s installation took place amid the arrest and conviction of former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai on charges of corruption. Xi extended the anti-corruption drive leading to the arrest of former security chief Zhou Yongkang, Bo’s supporter in the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, as well as senior officials associated with them. The Politburo Standing Committee is the top CCP leadership body.

The crackdown on Bo and Zhou was aimed at suppressing those within the CCP bureaucracy closely associated with large state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Bo advocated protecting and transforming the SOEs into “national champions” to compete on global markets. He was also connected to layers of the Chinese military that have pushed for a more assertive response to the US military expansion in Asia.

The open letter does not reflect Bo’s views but those of sections of the CCP apparatus critical of Xi for holding up pro-market economic restructuring and not doing enough to mollify Washington. It accuses Xi of not following the maxim of former top leader Deng Xiaoping—“hide your strength and bide your time”—and thus allowing “the United States’ successful return to Asia, forming a united front with South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Southeast Asian countries to jointly contain China.”

In a blistering attack on economic policy, the document declared that Xi’s leadership of the Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs had “created instability in the stock market and property market, allowing the wealth of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to vanish. Supply side reforms and production capacity policies have resulted in large layoffs at state-owned firms; and the closing of private firms have also led to many layoffs.”

The letter also attacked Xi’s signature “One Road, One Belt” initiative, which is aimed at the construction of a vast network of land and maritime links connecting China with Europe. It claimed the project put “a huge amount of foreign exchange reserves into chaotic countries and regions with no return.” The letter continued: “The excessive consumption of foreign exchange reserves, and renminbi devaluation cycles, has made everyone’s confidence decline, had brought the national economy to the very of collapse. People want change.”

The reference to last year’s stock market plunge is significant. Premier Li Keqiang was closely associated with the panicky response including a ban on short selling and new stock offerings and share sales by large investors. As premier, Li is in charge of economic policy and was centrally involved in drawing up the China 2030 report, co-authored with the World Bank, which set out sweeping pro-market reforms to further open up the country to foreign investors.

Li was not solely responsible for encouraging the speculative frenzy on China’s share markets, but he has been marginalised. An article in Thursday’s Australian Financial Review, entitled “The cult of Xi Jinjing,” declared that Xi had effectively relegated the other six members of the Politburo Standing Committee to minor roles. “Within this, the biggest casualty has been the technocratic premier, Li Keqiang, who is a much diminished figure after Xi took control of the economy.”

As well as continuing the purge of those associated with Bo, Xi appears to have launched an attack on the party’s Communist Youth League faction associated with Li. Last month, the Beijing Daily branded officials connected to the league as “ambitious aristocrats whose self-serving attitude did no good to the party and led to scandals.” The Australian reported the comments in an article headed “Xi push to remove his rivals and rule for life as ‘another Mao’ and pointed to a study by the CCP’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection had criticised the “mentality” league members.

The connection of the open letter to the CCP’s inner turmoil is uncertain, but it is not alone in criticising Xi’s rapid accumulation of power—the theme that is now being picked up in the international media.

Last month, Ren Zhigiang, an outspoken property tycoon, had his twitter accounts suddenly shut down after criticising Xi’s high-profile visit to three top state-owned media groups—the Xinhua news agency, the People’s Daily and China Central Television (CCTV)—to insist that they toe the party line. He was greeted at CCTV with a fawning banner declaring “CCTV’s surname is ‘the party’.”

Ren, who has some 37 million twitter followers, shot off a post asking “When did the people’s government turn into the party’s government?” In another he declared: “Don’t use taxpayers’ money to do stuff that doesn’t provide services to the taxpayers.” Ren, who is a longstanding CCP member whose father was a vice minister of commerce, has been attacked by the state-owned media but has not been detained.

The CCP leadership is clearly attempting to keep a lid on the affair. An essay by Cai Xia, a professor at the prestigious Central Party School, declared that Ren’s treatment “smacks of a political trial” and was erased from Chinese websites and condemned by a party newspaper.

Significantly, the newspaper of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection published an editorial in late February hinting obliquely at concern over the response to Ren. “Those who succeed in mighty undertakings are always open-minded and willing from the bottom of their hearts to hear different views.” The commission chief Wang Qishan, who heads Xi’s anti-corruption drive and is a Politburo Standing Committee member, has a longstanding personal relationship with Ren.

In the Byzantine world of CCP politics, the open letter is one more indication of the acute tensions being generated in ruling circles by rising geo-political rivalry, China’s economic slump and the growing signs of working-class unrest.

Obama’s pivot to Latin America

Bill Van Auken

“It takes courage for a society to address uncomfortable truths about the darker parts of its past. Confronting crimes committed by our own leaders… is essential to moving forward to building a peaceful and prosperous future in a country that respects the rights of all of its citizens.”

These were the words of President Barack Obama in praise of Mauricio Macri, Argentina’s new right-wing president, spoken at a ceremony held in Buenos Aires on March 24, the 40th anniversary of the military coup that brought to power the murderous US-backed dictatorship of Gen. Jorge Videla.

Obama could just as well have been speaking of the crimes committed by the United States against the people of Argentina and the rest of Latin America. But as the remainder of his remarks, aimed at covering up Washington’s crimes, made clear, his policies are directed not at building a society based on peace, prosperity and basic rights, but on defending the wealth and power of a rapacious capitalist oligarchy.

In his brief visit to the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires, dedicated to the 30,000 Argentine workers, students and leftists who were murdered and “disappeared” under the junta, Obama was surrounded by a small army of Secret Service agents, watched over by snipers and helicopters, and kept a safe distance from the hundreds of thousands of Argentine workers and youth who took to the streets to mark the day. He was accompanied by Macri, whose basic policies are in continuity with those of the bygone junta.

What were the “uncomfortable truths” and “darker… past” Obama chose to confront in terms of Washington’s own role in the bloody events in Argentina? US officials, he said, had failed to “live up to the ideals that we stand for” and had been “slow to speak out for human rights.”

It is hard to imagine more mealymouthed and dishonest words from an American president.

If Washington was “slow to speak out for human rights” in Argentina in the 1970s it was because its political, military and intelligence officials were too busy preparing, directing and supporting both the 1976 coup and what followed—repression so savage that it amounted to a form of political genocide.

The generals who formed the fascistic junta in Argentina, like their counterparts who led military coups in Brazil, Uruguay and Chile during the same period, had been trained at the US military’s School of the Americas, then based in Panama. They were advised by large US military missions and CIA stations. The Pentagon and CIA provided direct training in the art of mass repression and the techniques of torture, which were practiced on over 100,000 Argentines.

The highest officials within the US government knew and approved of the mass repression. Previously secret State Department documents record an exchange between US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his assistant secretary of state for Latin America, William Rogers, just two days before Videla seized power. Rogers told Kissinger to expect “a good deal of blood in Argentina before too long.” The incoming junta, he said, was “going to have to come down not only on the terrorists but on the dissidents of trade unions and their parties.” Kissinger’s reply was to order full US support for the dictatorship.

It was not only the State Department, the CIA and the military that backed the coup and the subsequent bloodbath, but also the US corporations operating in Argentina. Companies like Ford Motors fingered militant workers to be killed by the security forces and allowed the junta’s secret police to set up clandestine detention and torture centers inside their plants.

No doubt, Obama would dismiss these events as ancient history, having nothing to do with the new “human rights” regime in Washington. Asked about the US role in backing the dictatorship, he told a press conference in Buenos Aires that he wasn’t interested in discussing “every activity of the United States in Latin America over the last hundred years.”

Far from having to discuss the distant past, Obama could, to start with, speak of the crimes of his own administration. In 2009, his administration backed a coup that ousted the elected president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and brought in a government that has presided over the systematic murder of its opponents. And what of the regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, key pillars of US policy in the Middle East and prime purchasers of American military hardware? The Egyptian regime of General Sisi has carried out mass detentions, torture and murder on a scale rivaling that of the Latin American dictatorships of 40 years ago, while the House of Saud beheads its critics.

In any event, the central purpose of Obama’s trip to Argentina was not to extol “human rights,” but to support the political and economic agenda of Macri, Argentina’s multimillionaire businessman-turned president, who was inaugurated last December.

Washington is banking on Macri’s ascent initiating a “turn to the right” in Latin America, as one government after another that was part of what was previously described as a “turn to the left” is thrown into deep crisis by the collapse of the commodities and emerging markets boom. The US is determined to exploit these crises to further its own increasingly belligerent confrontation with China, which has eclipsed the United States as South America’s leading trading partner.

The US president’s trip to Cuba and Argentina is a political manifestation of what leading Pentagon strategists have described as a “pivot to Latin America,” aimed at preventing US imperialism’s chief global rival from securing strategic advantage in what Washington has long regarded as its “own backyard.”

Obama praised Macri for having “moved rapidly on so many of the reforms that he promised.” What are the “reforms” that the US president finds so attractive?

Macri has presided over mass layoffs that are wiping out at least 50,000 jobs in the public sector and destroying another 75,000 in the private sector. He has scrapped currency controls, leading to a sudden 30 percent devaluation of the peso and a drastic cut in real wages for Argentine workers.

He has begun to implement sweeping cutbacks in education and health care, while scrapping electricity subsidies, leading to a 300 percent rate hike.

Meanwhile, he has slashed taxes affecting Argentina’s big landowners, a key constituency of the political right, and reached a multibillion-dollar deal with Wall Street “vulture” hedge funds, which will reap 10 to 15 times their original investment in defaulted Argentine debt they scooped up for pennies on the dollar.

Along with a sharp turn toward the strategic orbit of US imperialism in Latin America, Macri is pursuing a vast transfer of wealth from the masses of Argentine workers to the country’s ruling oligarchy and that of the United States. In its broad outlines, this is the same economic agenda the Videla dictatorship pursued by means of mass murder and torture. Macri has utilized a series of emergency decrees to impose his right-wing policies, although he has also counted on the backing of a section of the Peronists and the corporatist union bureaucracy.

Should Macri’s attacks on living standards provoke mass upheavals by Argentine workers, one can be certain the Argentine government will revive earlier methods of repression, and Barack Obama will quickly shed his pretense of concern for human rights.

Excessive Dieting Can be Dangerous to Children’s Health

Cesar Chelala

Dieting, the conscious control or restriction of the diet to lose weight, has a long and colorful history. One of the first dietitians was the English doctor George Cheyne. Because he was tremendously overweight, Cheyne began a vegetarian diet, consuming only milk and vegetables. He lost a lot of weight and soon regained his health. In 1724, he wrote a book in which he recommended fresh air and avoiding calories-rich foods to lose weight.

In 1903, U.S. President William Howard Taft pledged to slim down after he was stuck in a bathtub in the White House. In the 1950s, according to legend, the famous Greek opera singer Maria Callas dropped 65 pounds on the Tapeworm Diet, after swallowing a pill containing the parasite. Lord Byron, the famous English poet, popularized the vinegar diet in the 1820s. In order to cleanse his body he would drink plenty of vinegar and water daily.

Today, dieting to lose weight is practiced worldwide, including adolescents and young people. Although in many cases it may be good for people’s health, when diets are followed in an unsupervised way –particularly by adolescents who want to be excessively slim- it can be dangerous to their health.

Although teenagers may have many reasons for dieting, body image dissatisfaction and a desire to be thinner are the usual motivating factors. Adolescents, primarily females, are also targeted by unrealistically thin images in the media that they wrongly equate with beauty, health and personal success. Because society places a high value and youth and physical beauty, adolescents try to imitate those images in the media. As a result, adolescents often engage in unhealthy, unnecessary and unsupervised attempts to lose weight.

To lose weight, many teenagers engage in a series of behavioral changes and alterations in their eating habits such as fad dieting, fasting, skipping meals, using laxatives, practicing self-provoked vomiting and using dangerous supplements or drugs. It has been shown that dieting in teenagers increase in frequency with age and is more prevalent among girls. However, there is no socioeconomic or ethnic group immune to body dissatisfaction and weight loss behaviors.

When teens do not consume enough calories they may become weak, tired and moody. Also, because insufficient calories may affect the functioning of their brains, they may become unable to make the right food decisions which may even affect their learning process at school. If food restriction is greater, it may affect their heart, bones, and other organs and in extreme situations they may even die due to malnourishment.

Some teens may use diuretics (water pills), diet pills, tobacco or other drugs in an effort to control their weight. However, these substances can provoke serious damage to their organs and, in the case of nicotine in cigarettes or amphetamines in certain diet pills they may lead to addiction and overall damage to their health.

It has been found that teenagers affected by chronic illness such as diabetes, asthma, attention deficit disorder, and epilepsy are more prone to be dissatisfied with their bodies and practice unhealthy weight loss behaviors. In addition, teenagers with significant psychiatric symptoms such as depression and anxiety are also more likely to engage in unhealthy dieting practices.

Teenagers who engage in weight-loss strategies, particularly when they are unsupervised, are also more likely to practice other risky behaviors such as substance abuse, unprotected sex and suicide attempts. Girls who are overly concerned about their weight or who are dieting are more likely to start smoking.

To prevent youngsters from following dangerous dieting practices, parents and teachers should teach teenagers the difference between “healthy weight” and “cosmetically desirable weight”. Teenagers should be encouraged to accept a realistic weight for themselves.

Parents and teachers should encourage adolescents to engage in activities such as sports, artistic endeavors and participation in community activities that would provide them with a positive self-image. Children like to imitate their parents, teachers and other role models. It is up to them to help prevent the abuse of diets or other activities to slim down among adolescents, and help them create a positive image of their own bodies.

The Deported: an Endless Story

Ruben Figueroa

Her tears are heavy as they roll down her cheeks. She wipes away the tears from one eye as more tears spring from the other like a river of sorrow.

Estefany is the first of 127 migrants to be deported to Honduras today. She is one of the 920 that are sent back every year.

Confused, she looks all around her and fearfully hugs her body hard. She sits quietly; she seems to be talking to herself. She definitely does not want to return to Honduras.

After two years of living in the state of Georgia, 19 year-old Estefany was detained by the feared ICE agency in mid-December. Her last Christmas in the country was spent in a U.S. detention center.

Her few belongings, like those of the other migrants, are stuffed in a red sack made to carry oranges. Moments before, a group of volunteers from the Attention Center for Returned Migrants (CAMR) brought the sacks out to return them to their owners, calling out each name to claim the meager belongings.

While the migrants unpack their sacks, the volunteers call them up one by one to hand them their identification documents, or in some cases, the birth certificates that have been processed by CAMR. The mostly volunteer staff at the Center offers the deportees coffee and gives them a little money to buy a bus ticket home. Many migrants decide to try their luck again and continue their journey to the United States because attempting to return to their own neighborhoods would mean death.

Outside the center, some families wait anxiously for their sons or daughters, husbands, brothers or parents to exit. When they are reunited with their loved one, they cry, they hug, they kiss. But for most people coming out of the center, no one is waiting for them.

Some of the deportees were caught while attempting to cross the U.S. border and were thwarted in their attempt to reach the much sought-after American dream. This, however, was not the case for Allan Rosales, one of the many in today’s group of deportees.

He reported to the ICE office in Atlanta and was detained immediately. Allan was only sixteen in 2014 when he entered the United States by way of the international bridge in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. A coyote brought him from La Ceiba, Honduras, to the U.S. border for seven thousand dollars. There the coyote left him to walk across the bridge where he would pass through the immigration checkpoint. Rosales was seeking asylum because his life was in danger in his country and his family was trying to save him from being murdered.

In October of 2015, Allan reported to the immigration office. He did not know that a deportation order for him had already been processed. Immigration officers detained him on the spot. He was deported, and at 2:00 pm Allan’s plane touched down in San Pedro Sula, known as the most violent city in the world although the Honduran government claims otherwise.

Allan is 18 now, and he misses his classmates from Berkmar High School. Upon his arrival in San Pedro Sula he borrows a cell phone and calls his aunt to tell his mother that he’s back in Honduras. When he hangs up, he dries his tears and says, “I have to get back because I was working hard in school and I don’t want to lose the academic year.”

Return to Uncertainty

“Welcome Tulito—we’re glad you’re here”, it says on the poster. Rosario and her husband stand outside the Center to greet their nephew, who spent twenty years living up north.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve seen him, we’ve only seen him in photos,” they say, leaving the CAMR. His aunt and uncle recognized Tulito instantly and hugged him. They excitedly showed him their welcome sign, while taxi drives drove in circles around the other migrants, offering them rides to their old neighborhoods or to the central bus station.

Most deportees are between the ages of 18 and 28. They are young people who flee violence looking for a better future by immigrating north. “This year we anticipate that the number of deportations will increase,” says Geraldine Garay, one of the coordinators for the Attention Center for Returned Migrants.

It is five o’clock one cloudy evening in San Pedro Sula. The Center winds up its daily activities. Only empty chairs are left inside, that tomorrow will be filled with new deportees. And so the endless story of deportation continues.

The Myth of the Free World: Not Just Political

Susan Babbitt

Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, in Anthills of the Savannah , tells the following story:

Once upon a time the leopard who had been trying for a long time to catch the tortoise happened upon him on a solitary road. AHA, he said; at long last, prepare to die. And the tortoise said: Can I ask one favour before you kill me? The leopard saw no harm and granted it. But instead of standing still as the leopard expected the tortoise went into strange action on the road, scratching with hands and feet and throwing sand furiously in all directions. Why are you doing that? asked the puzzled leopard. The tortoise replied Because even after I am dead I want anyone passing by this spot to say, yes, a fellow and his match struggled here.

Achebe’s point is that more important than politics is control of the story. According to Achebe, there are some who rush to battle and some who tell the story afterwards. Some think it easy to control the story. But, he says, they are fools.

The tortoise doesn’t fight for his existence. The tortoise is not, after all, a match for the leopard, at least not in usual terms. He just creates conditions, raising a question. And when questions are raised, stories become possible. They become believable where they were not before because there was no need

Simón Bolívar raised a question two hundred years ago. It was about freedom. He admired European philosophers. But he doubted their story about freedom. As a young man, in Rome in 1805, Bolívar noted that “the great problem of human freedom seems to have been inconceivable [to the Europeans], a mystery that would only be made clear in the new World”.

Bolívar made scratches in the sand. And “strange action on the road” has continued in Latin America ever since. There has been no real victory. Not yet. But there should be questions. More and more reasons arise. Obama tells the Cubans about free speech, free discussion of ideas. Yet some ideas barely arise in his country, like the dependence of civil and political rights upon economic and social rights.

Bolívar understood this. So did Peruvian philosopher José Carlos Mariátequi who, like Bolívar, admired European ideas. Mariátequi doubted that “deliberation and votes” offered a way to real freedom because the “collective consciousness” could not support such freedom. He insisted Peruvians “pensar en América Latina”. But like Bolívar, he knew Latin Americanist thinking required economic, social and political transformation, even revolution.

The issue wasn’t just freedom. It was about knowing: How to know that which, according to social expectations, is not plausible. Freedom was implausible, but so was what Paulo Freire called “authentic humanity”. It wasn’t for nothing that the Montecristi Manifesto, initiating the 1895 war of independence from Spain, declared a goal of the Cuban Revolutionary Party to be the “nature of ideas”, in particular, how to know humanness. It is not automatic.

The question remains. A recent award-winning film, Even the Rain,shows how knowledgeable, progressive anti-imperialists fail to recognize the people they interact with as human. It can happen to any of us. It is about the limits of knowledge, and how discovering humanness, in a dehumanizing world, comes at a cost.

The film is about the crew of a low-budget film about Christopher Columbus. The Spanish film crew admires Dominican friars Antonio Montesino and Bartholomé de las Casas, who condemned the Spaniards’ treatment of the local Tainos. Speaking from his straw church in 1511, Montesino asked, week after week, “Are these not men? Do they not also have rational souls? Are you not obliged to love them as yourselves? “

The film crew admires Montesino. Yet they have no qualms about making the movie with Quechua Indians, not Tainos, as if all Indians are the same. And they are not embarrassed about paying the local actors a mere $2 a day.

As it happens, the film (within the film) coincides with the Cochabamba Water Wars (2000) in which Bolivians protested the privatization of municipal water supplies. The lead indigenous actor, Daniel, playing the part of Hatuey (a Taino who resisted the Spanish in Cuba), leads the protests. The European film crew don’t understand Daniel. They urge him to stay out of the protests. He refuses. “Without water, there is no life”, he says, “You don’t understand”.

Indeed, they don’t. And it is not surprising, which makes Even the Rain relevant and powerful. The film crew knows imperialism. They know history. But imperialism has a “logic”, described by Jean Paul Sartre in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth: If some people are considered non-persons, we can exploit them without embarrassment, without discomfort. Without knowing.

Bolívar understood. He argued for strong central government, to challenge such logic through social and political transformation. José Martí understood, and abandoned liberalism, philosophically as well as politically. He saw the connection between a seductive view of freedom and deadening, debilitating ignorance. Europeans talked about individual freedoms and choice without asking how we know individuals affected by our choices, if they happen to be outside our comfort zone.

Like Marx, Martí saw the acquiring of knowledge as dialectical. We live in a causal universe. When we act in the world, the world acts upon us. This how we discover what was previously unknown, including other human beings. But a dialectical causal process involves change, including to oneself. Europeans were talking about freedom as if it comes from “within”, as if the “within” is not a product of the “without”. Lenin called the view a confusion. Martí saw it as unscientific.

In Even the Rain, the Spanish film producer eventually understands. It is because of an emotional connection between Daniel, the indigenous actor, and himself. In a sense, he just identifies one person as human, like himself. But his recognition of shared humanity comes at a cost. It has to because of imperialist “logic”, which is pervasive. He gives up his film project. He now knows the story of Columbus’s racism toward indigenous populations is not a story about others in the past.

Martí considered liberalism a danger to Latin America because it ignored the dependence of individual thinking upon social, economic, political and cultural conditions. Marx saw human beings as “herd animals”, not because we live in communities, but because of how we think, dependent upon community for the concepts we employ. The point is uncontroversial now among philosophers of science. It is mostly ignored in (liberal) political philosophy.

It means we can’t have real human freedom without giving things up. This is because we cannot know human potential without transformation, at least not if that potential is previously unknown, as it will be in a systemically unjust world. Berta Cáceres told Beverley Bell that North Americans’ problem is our love of comfort. And Bell writes that Cáceres never lost her humility. The point is not about morality. Wise philosophers of many traditions have noted the connection between how we live and conceive of ourselves and what we can know.

Some Europeans saw this – Marx, for example. He told a different story about freedom and about knowing. But other philosophers and revolutionaries have also done so. It is not easy to control the story, as Achebe suggests. That is why, in Cuba at least, it is called a battle for ideas. Philosophical liberalism is deep-seated. But the scratches in the sand are compelling, in Latin America and elsewhere. A fellow and his match has struggled, and indeed still does. Obama should take note.

Murder Epidemic Halts Colombia’s Peace Process

W.T Whitney

Paramilitaries and armed thugs have long sullied politics in Latin America, most notably in Colombia and recently in Honduras. A recent increase in politically motivated killings in Colombia coincided with final preparations for signing a peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government, at war for 50 years. The much anticipated accord never materialized.

In Honduras the murder of longtime environmental and indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres caps a wave of killings there of journalists, teachers, women, and especially of agrarian rights activists.

Governments and private parties serving predatory interests evidently regard terror at the hands of thugs or paramilitary forces as useful for maintaining dominion. Colombia’s paramilitary phenomenon warrants a look now because paramilitary attacks have brought Colombia’s peace process to a halt. Fortunately documentation of paramilitary offenses in Colombia provides much by way of details and particulars, more so than in Honduras, for instance. That’s because Colombian paramilitaries have long met resistance and gained special notoriety.

On March 23, after 40 months of talks in Havana, negotiators on both sides in the Colombian peace talks were to have announced a “Final Agreement,” one covering five agenda items they had set out to discuss. But an impasse developed over the last one, designated as “end of conflict.” It entails a “bilateral and definitive cease of fire and hostilities” and laying down arms.

FARC negotiators held back; an epidemic of killings during March revived long-held FARC concerns about the safety of ex-guerrillas in a time of peace. Others worry too.

The Executive Committee of the Patriotic Union (UP), a leftist political party, reported March 18 that in the previous three weeks “unknown armed men,” presumably paramilitaries, had carried out 11 politically motivated killings and “disappeared” three other people – whose bodies were found later.

Speaking to reporters, Aída Avella, the UP president, accused business leaders of financing the resurgence of paramilitaries. She also accused military leaders of being “immersed” in paramilitary operations. Avella herself went into foreign exile for 17 years in 1996 after a rocket destroyed the car in which she was a passenger.

In an open letter to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, Andrés Gil, a leader of the Patriotic March, condemned the assassinations. “[I]f we continue to be killed,” he wrote, “then the conclusion will be that really there’s no room for anyone on the left…. You will pass into history not as the president for peace but as the one who didn’t take the fight against paramilitaries seriously.”

Referring to the flood of paramilitary victims, the FARC peace delegation released a statement asking, “How can this be in the midst of a peace process now approaching the signing of a final accord?” Colombian authorities, the FARC said, “can no longer delay clearing away the phenomenon of paramilitarism.”

The FARC has reason to be alarmed. Many FARC guerrillas left the insurgency in 1985 in accordance with an agreement signed with President Belisario Betancur. They engaged in electoral politics as candidates for the UP party. That provoked a massacre; some say almost 5000 UP activists have since been murdered.

FARC negotiator Carlos Antonio Lozada may have been thinking of that experience when he told reporters March 14 that, “[W]e have to take measures to avoid being betrayed and attacked as happened in the past.” He noted that the government recently dismissed a technical sub-commission report, already agreed upon, calling for “a bilateral and definitive ceasefire.”

The FARC negotiating team took the occasion of Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit with them on March 21 to seek help in regard to the paramilitary problem. Kerry had accompanied President Obama on his historic visit to Cuba. The negotiators released a communication saying, “Mr. Kerry, we ask through you that the United States help curb paramilitary violence, which in the midst of the peace process keeps mowing down the lives of defenders of human rights and social leaders.”

The request is not without irony. The United States provides funds for the Colombian army, known to facilitate paramilitary operations. And in the early 1960s U. S. military experts advised the Colombian government to utilize paramilitaries to augment its campaign then of pushing back against leftist guerrillas.

In a joint press conference February 4 with President Santos in Washington, President Obama introduced a U. S. plan called “Peace Colombia.” The two leaders had met to celebrate the upcoming peace accord and the end after 15 years of Plan Colombia, that U.S. mechanism for supporting counterinsurgency and drug-war efforts in Colombia.

For Voz newspaper editor Carlos Lozano, the name of the new venture signifies a “Pax Romana, or peace of the graveyard.” He lamented that “within Peace Colombia there’s not one entry for combating paramilitarism, which is the principal obstacle to peace in Colombia.”

Trivializing the FARC and thereby perhaps signaling the guerrillas’ irrelevance in a Colombia at peace, the New York Times recently headlined a reporter’s story thus: “Inside a Rebel Camp in Colombia, Marx and Free Love Reign.” It celebrated the collapse of communism by likening the supposed decline of the FARC to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

To the extent that such triumphalism extends to official U. S. attitudes, prospects for peace in Colombia are diminished.

Nevertheless, neither Colombia’s government nor the United States will likely have the final say in regard to disruptions at the hands of paramilitaries. Other forces, powerful and based on realities, are in play, and have been. A voice on their behalf is heard from, of all places, inside prison.

Political prisoner Húbert Ballesteros joined the Communist Party and Patriotic Union in 1986. More recently he’s been a leader of both the Fensuagro agricultural workers’ union and the CUT labor federation.Writing on March 12, he reflects upon “the killings in Antioquia, Sur de Bolívar, Arauca, Bogotá, and Cauca; the jailing of social leaders in Cauca, and the spread of paramilitary bands the length and breadth of the country.” According to Ballesteros, “We can no longer continue assuming that this oligarchy wants peace [other than] a cheap peace, a silencing of the guns.”

He knows what to do: “[W]hile we are building scenarios of peace, we must organize the people for resistance, and do so massively and convincingly so that this government understands that people are no longer content to live under its domination.” We must deal with “the true problems of the country, which are unemployment, poverty, corruption, and social and political marginalization.”

BJP Fuelling Kashmir Militancy

Mohammad Ashraf

(The recent actions of BJP Government have driven Kashmiri youth to a corner which is fuelling the new wave of militancy)

In these columns it had been pointed out that a new wave of militancy has been rising in Kashmir for past some time. This wave was of young committed and highly educated youth without any external support or motivation. The main reason has been total clamp down on free expression and extreme alienation due to excessive suppression by the security agencies. The spur in this wave was caused by the joining of a Kashmir centric mainstream party having the motto of the “healing touch”, with the extremist Hindutva groups to form a government in the state. This was in spite of the fact that the said party explicitly opposed the entry of Hindutva elements into Kashmir during their election campaign. The youth that had supported and helped the party during election campaign felt betrayed and stabbed in the back. Even the leader of the party Mufti Sahib was reluctant to join and dithered for a month or so. In fact, apparently, he was persuaded by some other members on the plea that it was essential to align with the Government in Delhi to get the massive funds needed for rehabilitation and development. Unfortunately, in spite of a total surrender to the Hindutva party, the promised funds never came and Mufti Sahib virtually died of that shock!

RSS and BJP have always been anti-Muslim. In fact, before the independence of the country, they even opposed the freedom movement and sided with the British. According to Rajeshwar Dayal, the Chief Secretary of the United Provinces in 1947-48, Golwalkar had planned to carry out a Pogrom of Muslims. In his book, “Bunch of Thoughts”,he writes about non-Hindus: “The non-Hindu people of Hindustan must either adopt Hindu culture and language, must learn and respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but of those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture ... In a word they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment—not even citizens' rights.” RSS is now giving practical shape to these ideas of Golwalkar through their nominee, Narendra Modi. In this game plan Kashmir and especially, the Kashmiri Muslims have been their favourite targets.

Their first onslaught was in fifties through the Parija Parishad agitation in Jammu for complete merger of J & K state into the Indian Union. This resulted in the dethroning and arrest of the then tallest leader of Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah who had been duped into accepting India as a progressive and a secular country by Nehru and others. However, these so called progressive leaders of the freedom movement led by Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru were able to contain these extremist Hindus only partially. They did not fully succeed in eliminating these extremist Hindutva elements as they had themselves accepted the partition of the country on the basis of religion. These elements continued their movement covertly and came into the open off and on. Now, they are in the open with full onslaught on Muslims especially those from Kashmir who have always been portrayed as “Pakistani Agents”. These days it is a fashion to be anti-Muslim and specifically anti-Kashmiri Muslim as that behaviour is construed to be true “nationalism”! The onslaught is so strong that even the most progressive and secular elements of the recent JNU agitation had to back out from their pro-Kashmiri stand! From “Azadi” for Kashmir they came to the oft repeated slogan of the “Integral Part”!The Hindutva wave has covertly seeped into every institution including Army, Administration and even the Judiciary.

Within Kashmir, the witch hunt and suppression of youth had reached a peak which has now resulted in more and more youth joining militancy. In fact, the DG, CRPF has also said that the youth joining militancy is a cause for concern. Now, the whole thing has been topped up by missive from the Ministry of Home Affairs to various agencies and states to check all Kashmiris in every part of India. Already in Goa, Kolkata, Delhi, and some other places checking of all Kashmiri students, employees or businessmen has started. Because of disturbed conditions in Kashmir, many parents had sent their children to various peaceful institutions in India for studies. Similarly, many Kashmiris right from nineties had set up businesses in different parts of India. However, it seems now, thanks to BJP, no place in India is safe for Kashmiris. Probably, they are being given the final “healing touch”!

The most surprising are the contradictions at the highest political level. The top political leadership in the two neighbouring countries is exhibiting bonhomie by embracing and hugging each other while as at the ground level the Kashmiris supposed to represent the “core” problem are being witch hunted and driven to a wall. The “new nationalists” in India have made it abundantly clear that they want the land of Kashmir and are not interested in the fate of Kashmiris. A columnist friend has called for a debate on the issue. Well, debates do not solve problems. It needs an unconditional stand by all concerned within Kashmir regardless of their ideology or their political streams. In fact, all progressive, secular and truly nationalist persons in India should come out openly to defend Kashmiris all over India. Now that Mehbooba Ji is satisfied with her meeting with the Prime Minister regarding implementation of the Confidence Building Measures, the first CBM to be implemented on the ground should be to ensure safety of Kashmiris within Kashmir and in every part of India. Rehabilitation and development can wait but not the right to life! The alternative, as already pointed out, would be a spur in the new wave of militancy which would be a colossal disaster for the entire sub-continent and ultimately for the entire South Asia if the two sides lose their cool! 

If Syria Is To Fall, Others Will Follow: The Pandora’s Box Of Federalism

Ramzy Baroud

The apparent sudden Russian military withdrawal from Syria, starting on March 15 left political commentators puzzled.

Few of the analyses offered should be taken seriously. There is little solid information as of why the Russian leader decided to end his country’s military push in Syria. The intervention, which began last September, was enough to change the direction of the war on many fronts.

However, one thing is for sure: the Russian withdrawal is reversible, as indicated by Vladimir Putin himself. “If necessary, literally within a few hours, Russia can build up its contingent in the region to a size proportionate to the situation developing there and use the entire arsenal of capabilities at our disposal,” he said at the Kremlin on March 17.

In fact, all parties involved are taking such a threat seriously, for the abrupt withdrawal has not renewed the appetite for war and does not present an opportunity for any major party in the conflict to pull out of the Geneva peace talks.

It is safe to say that after five years of war in Syria, the conflict is entering into a new phase. No, not a political resolution, but a grand political game that could divide the country into several entities, according to sectarian lines.

If that takes place, it will bode badly, not only for Syria alone, but the whole region. Division would then become the buzzword according to which all current conflicts would be expected to be settled.

While Russia’s motives behind the withdrawal are yet to be clarified, the intrinsic link between it and the current talks, in which dividing Syria into a federations have been placed on the agenda, is unmistakable.

“UN mediator, Staffan de Mistura, should be ashamed to have put ‘federalism’ on the agenda of this week’s talks on ending the Syrian war and fashioning a ‘new’ Syria,” wrote Michael Jensen in the Jordan Times. “Moscow, plus some Western powers, should also be sharply criticized for thinking of such a possibility.”

Indeed, the model is not entirely Russian. The latter managed to rebalance the conflict in favor of the government of Bashar Al-Assad, but various other parties, western and Arab, in addition to Turkey and Iran, have also managed to steer the conflict to a virtual deadlock.

With no goodwill involved, and little trust among the conflicting parties, dividing the country morphed from a far-fetched possibility to an actual one.

Therefore, it came as no surprise that, while the Russian withdrawal was still taking place, and shortly after the resumption of talks in Geneva, the Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria declared itself a federal region in the north. Of, course, the move is unconstitutional, but Syria’s violent bedlam has become the perfect opportunity for various groups to take matters into their own hands. After all, the very violent Daesh had carved a state for itself and fashioned an economy, created ministries and written new text books.

But the move by the Syrian Kurdish PYD is, in fact, more consequential. Daesh is a pariah group that is not recognized by any party in the conflict. PYD, which is considered an offshoot of the Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), on the other hand, has much sympathy and support, from both the US and Russia.

The group was credited for intrepidly fighting Daesh, and expected political dividends for that role. However, the PYD was not invited to join the talks in Geneva.

Although their decision was seen as a retribution for being excluded from the talks, it is unlikely that the PYD made the decision without covert support from its main benefactors who have been floating the idea of federation for months.

For example, the idea was articulated by Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institute in a Reuter’s op-ed last October. He called for the US to find a ‘common purpose with Russia’, while keeping in mind the ‘Bosnia model.’

More recently, during a testimony before a US Senate committee to discuss the Syria ceasefire, Secretary of State, John Kerry revealed that his country is preparing a ‘Plan B” should the ceasefire fail. It may be “too late to keep Syria as a whole, if we wait much longer,” he said.

The Russian partaking of the war may have altered the landscape of the conflict on the ground, but it also further cemented the division model.

Recent comments by Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Ryabkov, that a federal model for Syria "will work to serve the task of preserving (it) as a united, secular, independent and sovereign nation," was the Russian spin on Kerry’s remarks.

Considering the current balances of power in Syria itself and the region as a whole, it might eventually become the only feasible solution for a country torn by war and fatigued by endless deaths.

Qatar and other Gulf countries have already rejected the federalism idea, although considering the Syrian government’s latest territorial gains, their rejection might not be a pivotal factor. The Turks also find federalism problematic for it will empower its arch enemies, the Kurds, who, according to the model, will be granted their own autonomous region. The PYD announcement was a trial balloon at best, or a first step towards the division of the whole of Syria.

Considering how grisly the Syrian war has been in those past years, federalism might not strike many as a dreadful possibility, but it is. Arab countries are historically an outcome of western and foreign meddling that divided the region in accordance to strategic convenience. That ‘divide and rule’ mindset has never been vanquished, but rather strengthened under the American occupation of Iraq.

“‘Federalism’ in the context of this region is another word for division and partition. It is a curse word and a curse concept for countries in this region where sectarian and ethnic communities have been planted for centuries in the bodies of states, like raisins in a Christmas fruitcake,” Jensen elaborated.

The Arab region was divided in 1916 to resolve outstanding conflicts between Britain, France and, to a lesser extent, Russia. The proposed division in Syria follows the same logic.

But if this Pandora’s Box is to open, it is likely to find itself on the agenda of future peace talks, where Libyans and Yemenis might find themselves contending with the same possibility. Both of these countries were, at one point in the past, also divided so it is not entirely an implausible notion.

It is important that dividing the Arabs does not become the modus operandi in managing conflict, the region and its resources. Federalism does not just undermine the identity of the Syrian nation, but it also plants the seed for further conflicts between warring sects, not in Syria alone, but in the Middle East at large.

Only a united Syria can offer hope for the future. Nothing else does.

Corbyn’s six months as UK Labour leader: A record of capitulation and betrayal

Robert Stevens

After half a year in office, nothing remains of the platform Jeremy Corbyn put forward in his election campaign for the leadership of the British Labour Party. He won the leadership contest by appealing to mass opposition to war and austerity, gaining 60 percent of the vote and trouncing three candidates associated with the former right-wing leaders of the party, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

The most recent example of Corbyn’s abandonment of all of his campaign promises was the pro-austerity pledge made earlier this month by his closest political ally, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. McDonnell’s statements had more in common with the economic nostrums of Margaret Thatcher than even the thin gruel of mid-twentieth century Labour Party reformism.

On March 11, in advance of the March 16 budget of Conservative Party Chancellor George Osborne, McDonnell cast Labour as a party that could be trusted by the ruling elite to continue imposing austerity. Labour should “show how we can account for every penny in tax revenue raised and every penny spent,” McDonnell declared.

To erase any doubt about the Corbyn leadership’s commitment to permanent austerity for the working class, McDonnell went on to pledge that Labour would operate under a “fiscal credibility rule” and “commit to always eliminating the deficit on current spending in five years.”

Speaking to the Guardian, he baldly declared, “Socialism is about planning, and planning is about making sure every penny is spent effectively.” On March 12, six months to the day of Corbyn’s election, McDonnell told the BBC, “Let me make it absolutely clear. I will be absolutely ruthless about how we manage our spending.”

His statements on economic policy are in line with an unbroken chain of reversals by Corbyn of the pledges on which he was elected, carried out in the name of preserving “party unity”—that is, capitulating to the party’s right wing on all fundamental issues.

Corbyn set the rightward course of his tenure immediately after his election by naming a shadow cabinet prominently featuring various Blairite warmongers, including Hilary Benn as his foreign secretary. He stood down from the Stop the War Coalition, of which he was a founding member and chairman from 2011.

At Labour’s annual conference later that month, Corbyn agreed to cancel his proposed debate on scrapping Britain’s Trident nuclear submarine missile system after the UK’s three biggest unions said they opposed ending Trident. Corbyn proceeded to junk other policies he has advocated for years, including a promise to renationalise the public utilities privatised by the Tories under Thatcher.

His response to the November 13 terror attacks in Paris was to cancel a speech he was to make the next day criticising the UK’s foreign policy as one based on perpetual war. The Paris attacks were utilised by Tory Prime Minister David Cameron to push for a “yes” vote in parliament to intervene militarily in Syria. Just prior to the December 2 vote, Corbyn commissioned a survey of Labour Party members showing that 75 percent were opposed to air strikes in Syria.

Despite this backing, Corbyn authorised a free vote by Labour MPs, meaning they would not be censured or disciplined for supporting war. He did so knowing that a large contingent of Labour MPs would line up behind the Tory war resolution. In the event, 66 Labourites backed military action, giving the Tories the significant majority they politically required to start bombing Syria.

That same month, Corbyn and McDonnell issued a letter instructing local Labour councils to abide by the law and impose austerity cuts demanded by the government.

Within two weeks of assuming office, Corbyn had already abandoned his lifelong opposition, based on a programme of economic nationalism, to the European Union (EU). He has now pledged Labour to campaign for the UK to remain in the EU in the June 23 referendum called by Cameron.

The significance of these retreats was underscored within days of McDonnell’s pre-budget utterances. Osborne’s attacks on disability allowances, even as he gave further tax breaks to the rich, was used by the anti-EU wing of the Tory Party to stage a rebellion—including the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith as secretary of state for work and pensions. Duncan Smith, who railed against a budget that was “deeply unfair” and criticised the government for targeting the poor because they “don’t necessarily vote for it and may never vote for it,” was able to posture as more sympathetic to the poor than Labour, adding fuel to the efforts of the ultra-right forces leading the “Leave” campaign ahead of the June referendum on EU membership to tap into working class anger over austerity and inequality.

With the Tories torn apart by factional conflict, widely despised and resting on a wafer thin majority, Corbyn and McDonnell are seeking to position Labour as trusted guardians of the interests of the British bourgeoisie should a general election be called. Their sole aim is to preserve social order, while carrying out the anti-working class policies required by the ruling elite, dressed up in the language of “equal sacrifice.”

There is a stark symmetry between the treacherous and cowardly course of Corbyn’s tenure and the betrayal carried out by the Syriza government in Greece, which similarly repudiated all of its campaign promises and imposed a European Union austerity package more savage than those that had preceded it. It is as if the fake-left Labour Party leader were following a script penned by his brother in arms Alexis Tsipras.

Notwithstanding the fact that Corbyn operates within a long-established social democratic instrument of the British bourgeoisie, while Tsipras heads a “left” bourgeois formation that rose to prominence due to the shipwreck of the social democratic PASOK, the two figures, both promoted by the entire fraternity of pseudo-left parties internationally, play identical roles.

They both serve as lightning rods for social discontent and political instruments for diverting it into harmless and impotent channels. These two strategic experiences of the European and international working class—first in Greece and now in Britain—demonstrate the utterly reactionary and anti-working class character of the pseudo-left.

Syriza’s betrayal was neither an aberration nor the result of mistakes or misconceptions on Tsipras’ part, as various pseudo-left organisations now claim. The treachery of Corbyn underscores that these experiences reveal the class character of all of the anti-Marxist, fake-left tendencies, speaking for privileged layers of the middle class—the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, the New Anti-capitalist Party in France, the Left Party in Germany, the International Socialist Organization in the US—which have integrated themselves into bourgeois and imperialist politics.

Their essential function in behalf of crisis-ridden capitalism is to preempt and prevent the emergence of an independent political movement of the working class for socialism.

Corbyn’s evolution has completely vindicated the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party of Britain during his campaign for the leadership of the Labour Party. In August of 2015, prior to Corbyn’s election victory, we wrote:

“Above all else, what has been proved by the bitter experience made by Greek workers with Syriza is that it is impossible to defend anything—jobs, wages, essential social services—without breaking the stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over economic and political life. It demands the independent political mobilisation of the working class against the major corporations and banks and their government—which Greece has also proved will stop at nothing to safeguard their interests, even if this means destroying a country and plunging millions into abject poverty.

“Corbyn offers no such struggle. Should he win the leadership of the Labour Party, or become the focus of a political regroupment of the pseudo-left, he will betray all of those who voted for him just as surely as did Alexis Tsipras of Syriza.”

The claim of the pseudo-left that Corbyn’s election showed it was possible through pressure from below to transform the Labour Party into an instrument of working class struggle and progressive change lies in tatters. The turn is to the building of the Socialist Equality Party in Britain and the International Committee of the Fourth International around the world to arm the emerging mass struggles of the working class with a revolutionary socialist and internationalist programme. This is inseparable from the struggle to expose and defeat the pseudo-left defenders of the capitalist status quo.

University of California installs secret spyware system

Norisa Diaz

Over the last few months, reports have revealed that the University of California (UC) Board of Regents, presided over by ex-chief of Homeland Security and former Democratic Governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, has sanctioned a secret spyware system capable of monitoring and collecting data from all individuals within the networks of the ten UC campuses and five medical centers throughout California.

As head of the UC Board of Regents, Napolitano is one of 26 members who oversee one of the state’s largest institutions and employers. The University of California is comprised of almost 20,000 faculty members, 200,000 staff, and a student body comprised of nearly 250,000. The spyware system has been installed in complete secrecy, without the knowledge or consent of students, faculty, and staff.

The UC Office of the President (UCOP), has issued statements that the spyware is necessary to prevent “cyber-attacks” and what it terms “Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs).” The office cites a July 2015 UCLA cyber-attack that put the personal and medical information of 4.5 million people at risk. The UCOP stated that from “time to time, if a serious cybersecurity threat arises that may potentially impact multiple campuses, the Office of the President may direct campuses to coordinate security monitoring, investigation, and threat remediation activities.”

Though the spyware has been in place since August 2015, information of the spyware was not revealed until December 2015 when Ethan Ligon, an associate professor at the UC Berkeley campus and member of the Academic Senate-Administration Joint Committee on Campus Information Technology, sent an email to faculty members, ignoring orders by the UC administration to keep the project confidential.

“The intrusive device is capable of capturing and analyzing all network traffic to and from the Berkeley campus, and has enough local storage to save over 30 days of [all] this data… This can be presumed to include your email, all the websites you visit, all the data you receive from off campus or data you send off campus,” Ligon wrote in the email.

UC Berkeley campus IT staff also showed the device to Associate Professor Greg Niemeyer because they felt “sufficiently uncomfortable” with the system and its lack of transparency. Niemeyer told the DailyCal, “Right now we don’t know, we can’t ask and we can’t find out…The whole operation is covert, and we can only assume from the hardware we see that it’s extremely expansive.”

The UCOP has chosen a data collections system, Fidelis XPS, made by Fidelis Cybersecurity, which has the ability to inspect and intercept all communications, including encrypted emails, and has the ability to analyze the contents of that communication.

Upon revelations of the Fidelis spyware, students, staff, and faculty have justifiably vocalized the threat of such a spyware system to their privacy rights and academic freedom.

“Unfortunately, many have been left with the impression that a secret initiative to snoop on faculty activities is underway,” Napolitano said in a statement Monday. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

There is no reason to take Napolitano’s statements for good coin. As the former chief of Homeland Security for the Obama administration, Napolitano possesses an immense familiarity with NSA spyware systems and privacy infringement.

In 2012 while serving in her previous post, she oversaw the “Secure Communities” program to identify and gather fingerprint and other information on immigrants. She also expanded the 287(g) program which cemented partnerships between federal government and local police to enforce immigration law.

Expansion of these programs were deemed necessary to counter “home-grown threats,” Napolitano said, and called for “a culture of collective responsibility” in which all individuals act as government informants.

When asked the question if she was suggesting that US citizens “from school days on” should be trained “to watch more carefully their schoolmates, their coworkers, their families and their neighbors and then more effectively report what they say to some authority,” Napolitano replied to the questioner that they were in fact “getting the gist of what I’m saying.”

Napolitano and the UCOP insist that the aggregated data will not be used for “non-security purposes.” However, it is not difficult to imagine a situation in which student protests and strikes for higher wages are easily categorized as “security purposes” by the UC administration. Additionally the security policy makes an exception to disclose the personal data for those considered to be engaged in “illegal activity.”

The 26 member UC Board of Regents are handpicked by the Governor to serve 12-year terms. Like the majority of the board, Napolitano has no experience in higher education. While governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009, Napolitano oversaw $100 million in cuts from the Arizona State Universities and another $40 million from the state’s community colleges. Such was the extent of her previous experience overseeing higher education.

The Regents and UC administration are overseeing a virtual wrecking operation increasing tuition all while libraries, art centers, classes, and campus services are cut. The Regents are so widely despised by students, faculty and staff that the board has been forced to hold meetings in secret, as all publicly known meetings have been meet with protests.

Currently, students are protesting the chancellor of UC Davis, Linda P.B. Katehi , after the Sacramento Bee reported her ties to private companies, including for-profit universities such as DeVry, and having received $420,000 over three years for serving on the board of textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons, exposing a true conflict of interest.

There is little doubt that such a protest would constitute “illegal activity” in the eyes of the administration, giving license to the administration to spy on student and faculty organizers protesting Chancellor Katehi’s obscene conflicts of interest.

Above all it is Napolitano’s background as Chief of Homeland Security which has made her the most desirable candidate to enforce cuts which will dramatically impact the lives of students, faculty, and workers throughout the system.

Like the other governor-appointed members, Napolitano hails from the highest echelons of the ruling elite. The students, faculty, and staff of the UC system have every reason to believe the Fidelis spyware and other methods will be directed and used against them as social struggles emerge in the coming period.