The ravening narcissism that can never, ever be satisfied – The sense of Humanity only as a vague adoring audience “Out There” in an imaginary – endless auditorium – The tantrums – The rages – The petulant behavior of a spoiled brat – The bewilderment that the world could possibly go on without her. Billy Wilder understood it all.
Nearly 70 years ago Wilder one of the greatest movie directors and scriptwriters who has ever lived made the definitive biography of Hillary Clinton, future First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State and Twice (so far and counting) Presidential candidate of the United States when she was only three years old : For Hillary Clinton is Norma Desmond.
And her address is not in upstate New York but in a rotting, eerie old Hollywood mansion with a swimming pool and a dead body floating in it – Street address: “Sunset Boulevard.”
This wonderful genius insight is not mine: I owe it to a lifelong friend and brilliant California lawyer Jeffrey Calkins.
Jeff’s insight cuts to the heart of the strange, miasmic madness which has poisoned US politics ever since The World Turned Upside Down on Election Night 2016. It explains the intensity of the hatred for Donald Trump, who has delivered unparalleled economic growth and Wall Street share surges over the past three years while managing to least avoid starting any new wars to a degree that no other president has managed before him for more at least 40 years.
But Trump’s Original Sin Can Never Be Expunged: He was meant to go down to Humiliating Landslide Defeat in the Coronation of the Great Queen Spider Empress Herself. Instead, he carried 30 out of 50 states.
Nor was this the first time Hillary Clinton squandered a Sure Thing: In 2016, she wasted $1.25 billion in her Presidential Campaign that was universally agreed was Impossible for her to lose. Eight years earlier, she blew away $250 million and never even got as far as the Democratic presidential nomination. Barack Obama, a young first term senator with four years as a national figure to her 26 (since the 1992 campaign elected her husband and made her First Lady) had beaten her stone cold four months before the 2008 Democratic convention.
Hillary is still clearly convinced that she can and will be the Democrats’ candidate to defeat Trump next year. Yet every time she opens her mouth in public, she exposes herself as an ugly and ridiculous ass: Her accusation that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard – who voluntarily served in war zones in the armed forces of the United States – was an agent of the Russian government was as obviously ridiculous as it was repulsive.
This, remember is a woman who on the night of her election humiliation at the hands of Trump came up on the spur of the moment with the Big Lie that Russia had masterminded her election defeat – An accusation which three years of frenzied research by the US Deep State and Democratic Party establishment has failed to find a single iota of evidence to support
Not only was the lie ludicrous: It was also inept. A person who could concoct such a fiction to alibi her own amazing incompetence was risking a collapse of superpower relations that could set off World War III. Such a person should never be allowed within a 1,000 miles of serious political power.
Yet here we are, four years on and Hillary Clinton once again has the mad delusion that the American people – or at least a few dozen of them – really want her to run for president yet again.
This ecstatic delusion eerily echoes Norma Desmond, the raving, mad, long forgotten, silent movie star superlatively played by the great Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.”
We should note here incidentally that in real life Swanson was everything that Hillary Clinton pretends to be but is not.
Ms. Swanson was her own woman first and last. Far from rising to national fame, wealth and political power simply as the supportive wife of an unfaithful, recklessly promiscuous philandering dog, she was filled with talent, beauty, brains, wit and courage. She dispatched several husbands herself and broke up with one lover, Joseph P. Kennedy (the father of THOSE Kennedy’s) when he was unfaithful to her (with other women as well as his wife).
Far from being the monstrous and mad Norma Desmond, in her own life, Ms. Swanson was stunningly beautiful, a pioneer of health food living, the author of an acclaimed, brilliant 500-page autobiography, the mother of several children and she lived a full, happy and amazingly constructive existence well into her 80s.
In other words she wasn’t Hillary Clinton either.
But shrieking Norma Desmond mouthing the immortal screenplay of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett was.
Today Hillary, like Norma Desmond, has no conception that her time has long since come – and gone.
Like Norma, Hillary still imagines that she is “Big” and it is only the rest of her country that got “Small.”
Like Norma, she imagines millions and millions of worshipful believers waiting for her Great Return.
Like Norma, Hillary dances in the limelight in what she imagines are girlish, feminine, alluring and graceful ballets of exquisite perfection when they are only the fantasies of a mad, raddled old hag.
It does not matter: Hillary Knows the Truth:
“You see, this is my life… it always will be…. There’s nothing else, just us, and the cameras… and those wonderful people out in the dark … Alright, Mr. De Mille I’m ready for my close up.”
Martin SIEFF
During his 24 years as a senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and United Press International, Martin Sieff reported from more than 70 nations and covered 12 wars. He has specialized in US and global economic issues.
Never mind obscure troll farms and byzantine cyber-hacking (we’re being ironic here), Russia needs to really raise its game for “interfering” in other nations’ politics. Like, how about President Vladimir Putin going on a national radio show in Britain and telling voters how to vote in the forthcoming election? Now that’s what you call real, in-your-face influence!
Three days after Boris Johnson’s Conservative government announced on October 28 that a snap parliamentary elections would be held on December 12, lo and behold American President Donald Trump gives a “world exclusive” interview to Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage on October 31.
Farage, who counts himself a personal friend of Trump, hosts a nationwide radio talk-show. For nearly 28 minutes, Trump fawned over Farage and repeatedly told listeners how he thought Farage and Boris Johnson were “two brilliant people”. Trump also described Johnson as “the right guy for the times.”
Don’t forget, these public and partisan endorsements of British politicians by the US president are being given while a general election in Britain is underway.
Three times during the interview, Trump urged Farage and Johnson to form an electoral pact in order to push through the long-delayed Brexit plan to leave the Europe Union.
“I’d like to see you and Boris get together cos you would really have some numbers [of votes]… I think it would be a great thing… an unstoppable force,” Trump opined to Farage’s radio listeners.
It was also an opportunity for the American president to explicitly tell the British people to not vote for Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
“Corbyn would be so bad for your country,” said Trump menacingly. “He’d be so bad. He’d take you in such a bad way. He’d take you to such bad places.”
Prime Minister Johnson has previously rebuffed the idea of forming an alliance between the Conservatives and Farage’s Brexit Party, even though both are ardent advocates of Brexit and share a similar nationalistic, neoliberal capitalist view. The two parties are in competition for the same constituency of voters. But more centrist Conservatives tend to see Farage’s party as too rightwing and toxic.
For his part, arch Euro-skeptic Nigel Farage had vowed that his Brexit candidates would fight in every parliamentary constituency – nearly 600 – across Britain in order to push their “clean-break Brexit” agenda. Farage was highly critical of the Tories (Conservatives) under former premier Theresa May for selling-out the 2016 referendum vote to leave the EU. By standing in the forthcoming election, Farage said the Brexit Party would give voters the chance to voice their demand to get “Brexit done”.
This week saw a spectacular U-turn by Farage when he declared that the Brexit Party would not be standing in any areas – some 317 seats – held by Conservative parliamentarians. Tory leader Johnson welcomed that announcement as it would ensure no losses for his parliamentarians.
Farage, however, said his party will contest the 243 seats held by Labour. The objective is to try to steal votes from Labour supporters who are pro-Brexit and to keep the leftwing Corbyn out of power.
So, what we have here is a de facto electoral pact between the Conservatives and Brexit Party – just as President Trump had urged in the national broadcast nearly two weeks ago.
The intervention this week prompted Labour’s Corbyn to denounce what he said was a “Trump-Farage-Johnson alliance”. He also said such an alliance is designed to take British politics in a “hard-right nasty” direction of neoliberalism “on steroids” which will be bad news for workers’ rights, the National Health Service and other public services.
As if that American full-frontal interference in British democracy was not brazen enough, this week also saw Hillary Clinton plunging her oar into the electoral waters. The former Democratic presidential candidate who lost to Trump in 2016 was in Britain promoting a new book. She gave interviews to the BBC state-owned broadcaster and to the Guardian newspaper in which she peddled her nonsense about alleged Russian interference in US elections and Western democracies more generally. You could hardly make the irony of this up.
Clinton used both interviews to accuse Johnson’s government of covering up Russian interference in British politics. This contorted speculation was based on Downing Street delaying the publishing of a parliamentary report into allegations of Russian influence in the 2016 Brexit referendum and in the previous 2017 parliamentary elections. Johnson’s government has cited procedural issues for the delay and said the report will be released after the elections on December 12.
To the BBC, Clinton said it was “shameful” of the British government to not publish the report sooner. “Because there is no doubt – we know it in our country, we have seen it in Europe, we have seen it here – that Russia in particular is determined to try to shape the politics of Western democracies… I find it inexplicable that your government will not release a government report about Russian influence. Inexplicable and shameful.”
Thus, here we have Hillary Clinton pre-empting a secret report by telling Britons that Russia is interfering in their political sovereignty – unlike her or Donald Trump who has single-handedly shaped the electoral landscape of British parties with his proposed Johnson-Farage alliance.
By the way, the most likely explanation for why Johnson is not rushing to publish the said intelligence report is because there is no simply evidence that Russia did interfere in Britain’s politics. Sources close to the report have already told media there is “no smoking gun”. Which corroborates what Moscow has been saying all along; that it was not running any malicious influence campaigns in Britain (or the US and elsewhere in Europe.)
And let’s take the egregious US interference in foreign politics up yet another notch. How about Washington’s sponsorship of violent streets protests in Bolivia to foment a coup against the elected President Evo Morales which Trump this week called, with Orwellian double-think, a “great moment for democracy”?
The absurd hypocrisy of American politicians is only matched by the absurd hypocrisy of Western media which “report” naked and nefarious interference by Washington as if it is normal, benign and acceptable.
Finian CUNNINGHAM
Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages
Whether the information originated from hacked e-mails and computer files or Freedom of Information Act requests, the revelations about the political and business activities of Hillary and Bill Clinton and their cronies hearken back to another era, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crime spree of another unscrupulous couple: bank robbery desperados Bonnie and Clyde.
Aside from Hillary Clinton running her own lucrative «off-the-books» foreign policy via her private email servers and e-mail chain of associates and flunkies, it was her and her husband’s joint Clinton Foundation and Teneo Capital operations that scream out the word «corruption.» The servers were merely a mechanism by which the Clintons ran their own «pay-to-play» racketeering operation, something that would have been the envy of a contemporary of Bonnie and Clyde, Chicago crime boss Al Capone.
Teneo, which runs a hedge fund operation and a «private intelligence» service jam-packed with former Central Intelligence Agency operatives, is where Mrs. Clinton’s «gal pal» and aide Huma Abedin worked simultaneously to her government employment with the State Department. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of 650,000 emails found on the laptop computer of disgraced former New York Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Abedin, is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. While FBI agents pore through Abedin’s emails that were discovered on the laptop and looking Mrs. Clinton’s emails that were either not destroyed by her aides or which were never accounted for, the real story is the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Teneo.
Five FBI field offices are investigating the racketeering of the foundation and the foreign connections of Teneo. The offices include New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Miami. Little Rock is the home of the Clinton Foundation, while New York is the home base of Teneo. The addition of the Miami field office to the Clinton probe is significant. One of Teneo Intelligence’s many global offices is located in Bogota, Colombia. A secretive Colombian private equity fund, «Fondo Acceso», financed by Mexican mega-billionaire Carlos Slim and Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office. Tracking the money being fed into the Clinton Foundation may include proceeds from the illegal narcotics traffic in Colombia and other nearby countries. The Bogota activities of the Clinton Foundation, «Fondo Acceso», which ironically means «Access Fund», and Teneo appear to be concentrated in the Chico Business Park in the Colombian capital. Therefore, the involvement of the Miami office, in investigating Clinton Foundation funding, including the major donations from Slim and Giustra, makes a world of sense.
Teneo was co-founded by longtime Bill Clinton associate Doug Band, who served in Clinton’s White House Counsel’s Office and later as Clinton’s chief aide in the Clinton Foundation and its associated Clinton Global Initiative. Band’s brother is Bill Clinton’s medical doctor who accompanies the ex-president on foreign trips. Doug Band was the point person who lobbied the incoming Barack Obama administration in 2008 to appoint Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at State ensured that there was little separation between her department, the Clinton Foundation and Global Initiative, and Teneo. Abedin served as Mrs. Clinton’s «transition team» leader as the Secretary of State left the department to launch her presidential candidacy after the November 2012 election. From that time on, Mrs. Clinton, Abedin, Doug Band, Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta, and others engaged in an email flurry to 1) ensure that the files in the private servers were either scrubbed or sanitized; 2) to officially sever all links between them and the Clinton Foundation and Teneo; and 3) to paint a picture for the public that all was well and legal with Mrs. Clinton’s term as America’s chief foreign policy executive. Unfortunately, the entire Clinton team has been exposed with the publication of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s swearing in as Secretary of State in 2009 to after she launched her campaign for the White House in 2013.
The picture painted by the emails is one of modern-day gangsters milking everything they possibly could out of supposed public service.
The FBI’s New York field office is also likely looking at Teneo’s dealings with other Clinton allies. It was Teneo that advised former New Jersey Democratic Governor Jon Corzine's MF Global investment firm as it was collapsing amid charges of major fraud by Corzine, a Clinton loyalist. It is also known as Mrs. Clinton communicated with President Obama over her private server and that Obama used a pseudonym. Obama lied to the American people when he stated that he first learned of the existence of Mrs. Clinton’s server from news media reports. There is little wonder why Obama has refused to condemn FBI director James Comey for re-launching his probe of the Clinton emails, based on the discovery of the additional traffic on Weiner’s laptop. Presidents who dug themselves deep into scandals by lying about «what they knew and when they knew it» helped sink the administration of Richard Nixon and almost cost Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton their presidencies. Obama was wise not to interfere in the FBI’s many criminal cases now building up like a tidal wave against Mrs. Clinton.
The many Clinton scandals also involve the illegal shipment of U.S.- and foreign-manufactured weapons to jihadist rebels in Libya and Syria against U.S. law. When Clinton and Abedin oversaw the jihadist rebellions in both countries, the U.S. was subject to imposing a United Nations arms embargo directed against both civil war theaters. The sudden decision on October 5, 2016, by the Justice Department to drop all charges against the State Department-licensed Turi Defense Group of Arizona and its owner, Marc Turi, for violating U.S. law by shipping unregistered weapons to Libyan rebels, some of which were transferred to Syrian rebels by the CIA station in Benghazi, indicates that Attorney General Loretta Lynch wanted the Turi case to disappear before the November 8th election.
The federal trial of Turi and his company was due to begin on November 8th. The indictment of Turi was brought in the U.S. Court for the District of Arizona in Phoenix. Phoenix's Sky Harbor International Airport was the scene of an impromptu and highly-questionable tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch on June 27, 2016. Turi claims that approval for the secret weapons shipments to Libya and onward to Syria were personally approved by Mrs. Clinton and had a green light from the CIA. Any new email or other evidence that Mrs. Clinton authorized illegal weapons shipments to jihadist terrorists would have required the FBI to broaden its investigation of both Hillary and Bill Clinton, as well as Lynch. Mrs. Clinton may have violated federal law by permitting the shipment of weapons to belligerent parties in Libya and Syria; Mr. Clinton may have obstructed justice in talking to the Attorney General; and Lynch may have violated her oath of office in misusing her position as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.
The Clinton scandal, in many ways, resembles the Iran-Contra episode more than it does Watergate. In Watergate, the cover-up by Nixon and his cronies, in many respects, was worse than the original crimes. In Iran-Contra, the arms and drugs smuggling crimes were equal to the cover-up, including the criminal role of then-Vice President George H. W. Bush in the entire affair. With the Clintons’ «E-mailgate», shipping U.S. weapons to terrorists and accepting foreign campaign donations from dodgy regimes in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Qatar are every bit as bad as the obvious ensuing cover-up by Hillary Clinton and her and her husband's cronies.
If these many cases are what the FBI and its offices in Washington, New York, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Miami, and possibly Phoenix, are now looking at, the FBI director had every right and a constitutional responsibility to inform Congress and the voting public. And FBI director Comey has every right not to tip off to the Clinton gang what he and the bureau may have on them, evidence demanded now by Mrs. Clinton and her supporters. This evidence may become material to the impeachment of Mrs. Clinton from the office of president of the United States should she be elected on November 8th
WayneMADSEN Investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club
The low-ball mudslinging and pantomime palaver among America’s political class is like a theater of absurd. Any form of vilification is now acceptable. President Trump and his Twitter rants may have helped set the bar of indecency to an all-time low, but Democrats and Republicans have quickly joined the descent into madness.
The sanity test was spectacularly failed recently when former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton lashed out at her party member Tulsi Gabbard, inferring she was a “Russian asset”. The Hawaii congresswoman, who is vying for a run at the presidency in next year’s elections, was defended by some fellow Democratic politicians. But many Clinton aides and media pundits doubled down on Clinton’s smear campaign, reiterating that Gabbard was “working for the Kremlin”.
This bipartisan Russophobia can be traced back decades to the Red Scare paranoia of the Cold War and McCarthyite persecution during the 1950s of suspected Soviet sympathizers in Washington and Hollywood. But for the past three years, since the 2016 election, the Cold War has been crazily enlivened with the “Russiagate scandal” of alleged interference in American political affairs by Moscow. It was the Clinton campaign, establishment media and her intelligence agency supporters that launched that canard against Trump.
Despite lack of evidence and credibility as shown by the vacuous Mueller probe earlier this year, the ridiculous Russiagate narrative and its underlying Russophobia still manages to dominate the views of the US political class, as exemplified by how Clinton’s preposterous smearing of Gabbard was given undue media coverage and supportive commentary. Affording trust and respect for such inane paranoia is surely a sign that America has officially gone insane.
Another symptom of collective madness is seen when truth and factual evidence are presented, but then the truth-teller is pilloried and the facts are blankly ignored.
Tulsi Gabbard told the truth on a recent national TV debate when she said plainly that “the US supports Al Qaeda terrorists”. The incredulous looks from the other Democratic candidates indicated that they are cocooned in a fantasy-world of official American propaganda which claims that US military forces are in Syria and elsewhere to “fight terrorism”.
For speaking such unvarnished truth, veteran servicewoman Gabbard was savaged in media reports and commentary for disseminating disinformation and lies. As well as being labelled a “Russian asset”, she is also denounced as an “Assad apologist”.
However, this week two developments demonstrate that Gabbard is correct in her linking of US support to terror groups in Syria and the Middle East more widely.
First, we had President Donald Trump announcing approval of $4.5 million in aid to the White Helmets, the so-called rescue group operating in Syria. Trump hailed them as “important and highly valued”. Last year, the president also signed off on $6.8 million of aid to the White Helmets.
Despite this group winning an Oscar award for one its propaganda films, the White Helmets have been outed by several investigative reports as a media arm for the Al Qaeda-affiliated Hayat Tahrir al Shams (formerly, Nusra Front) and other Islamic State (ISIS) outfits. The pseudo rescue group only works in the diminished areas that are under the control of the jihadist terror network. The White Helmets are unknown to, or repudiated by, most of the Syrian civilian population. They have been exposed for having mounted false-flag terror attacks with chemical weapons and falsely attributing the attacks to the Syrian Arab Army or allied Russian forces. “They are a complete propaganda construct,” says award-winning journalist John Pilger.
For Trump and other Western governments like the British and French to openly support the White Helmets with millions of dollars is irrefutable proof of the official sponsorship by Western powers of the terrorist network in Syria. Of course, that is consistent with the analysis that these same governments have waged a covert criminal war of regime change against Syria. Again, it is only Tulsi Gabbard among American politicians who has explicitly stated this nefarious involvement of Washington in Syria. Yet she is condemned from all sides as a liar and foreign agent.
The second development this week indicting US links to terror groups – but which is studiously ignored by the Western media – are credible reports of American military force airlifting Al Qaeda-type jihadists out of northeast Syria.
Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu this week confirmed that hundreds of suspected jihadi prisoners had escaped from jails and camps amid the turmoil of the Turkish offensive against Kurdish militia.
Syrian state media reports that, “US occupation continues to transport hundreds of Daesh [ISIS] terrorists from Syria to Iraq”.
Many of the detained terror suspects were lifted by American transport helicopters from the giant Al Houl camp near Hasaka city and relocated to western Iraq. Rather than handing over these illegal militants to advancing Syrian state forces, the Pentagon seems intent on holding on to its proxy assets. Maybe to fight in a renewed insurgency against Syria or elsewhere that Washington designates for regime-change operation.
In separate media reports, US forces are also being relocated from eastern Syria to set up bases in western Iraq. This suggests a concerted consolidation between US military forces and the terror groups which were used to wage the failed war in Syria.
Whenever Washington’s political class has descended into name-calling and smearing based on clueless prejudice and paranoia, and whenever the stark truth of America’s criminal war-making is roundly rejected – indeed twisted to demonize truth-tellers like Tulsi Gabbard – then we surely know that the USA now stands for the United States of [Mental] Asylum.
Finian CUNNINGHAM
Former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages
Ten years after a US-backed coup handed Honduras over to big business, the country is rising up. A leader of deposed President Manuel Zelaya’s party explains to The Grayzone what’s behind the protest wave.
By Alex Rubinstein
The streets of Honduras were filled with protesters and clouds of tear gas as the month of June began. The national police fanned out through the country to crush the protests with heavy-handed tactics at the direction of President Juan Orlando Hernández, the US-supported neoliberal leader who won power in elections marred by documented fraud.
As the protests peaked, fire was set to the doors of the American embassy in the capital, Tegucigalpa, in an apparent act of retribution against the United States for its role in propping up the widely unpopular president. It was a striking act of symbolic resistance that recalled events in 1988 when Hondurans burned the vehicles of US embassy personnel to protest Washington’s dirty war against Nicaragua. The fortifications installed around the US embassy after that incident may have prevented the latest burning from consuming the rest of the building.
Ten years ago, the democratically elected center-left Honduran President, Manuel Zelaya, was whisked away from his residence in a brazen military raid supported by the United States. Zelaya’s removal cleared the path for the interests of big business across the country. As the ten year anniversary of the U.S.-supported coup approaches, Hondurans are rising up against neoliberal austerity measures imposed by Washington and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that have triggered mass public sector layoffs and raised prices on basic goods.
Following mass demonstrations on Friday, May 31 which were especially sizable in the capital of Tegucigalpa, The Grayzone spoke by phone with Gerardo Torres, Secretary of International Affairs for the Liberty and Refoundation Party (LIBRE), the new party to which Zelaya now belongs.
“Yesterday and today we declared a national strike, which was successful. The estimate is that there were over a hundred demonstrations in Honduras in the last two days,” he said.
Throughout the month of May, healthcare workers and educators organized widespread demonstrations against decrees by Hernández that put their livelihoods in immediate jeopardy. Honduran citizens have followed these public sector workers into the streets, infuriated by IMF loans that required the government increase electricity costs while slashing healthcare and education. Anger about the abuses of foreign mining companies was also a major factor in the protest grievances.
“Honduran people went out in the streets. And not only the health workers and teachers, but all of the workers and political organizations and people that are fighting against mining companies; the people that are fighting for land and for the defense of their territories; for their natural resources – we all got together with the teachers and the health workers,” LIBRE’s Torres explained. “We have been in a struggle for more than a month. In recent days, the demonstrations have increased.”
Right now, Honduran police are repressing a protest & road blockade in southeastern Danli while today, they repressed protest at El Salvador-Honduras border (see video). There was also a march in Tegucigalpa today #Honduras
In early May, the IMF and the Honduran government reached a “staff-level” agreement on a USD $311 million loan, meaning that it still requires approval from the IMF executive board. According to the IMF, the agreement “reforms” the public electricity company, Empresa Nacional de Energía Eléctrica (ENEE). Energy distribution was privatized in 2014 and sold off to the highest bidder: the Honduran Commercial Finance Bank. It isn’t clear what reforms the new IMF deal will bring on.
Torres said that “the IMF is demanding that education and healthcare – the public system – should pass to the control of intervention boards that would oversee and manage a change to the system. The problem is that those agreements that the government has already signed allowed them to fire many people.”
“A key objective of the economic program is to maintain macroeconomic stability, while enacting economic and institutional reforms to foster inclusive growth. Policies will build on previous achievements to strengthen the policy and institutional framework,” the IMF says.
By touting its “previous achievements” in Honduras, the IMF has signaled how out of tune it is with the country’s poor and working class, who have experienced no such gains in their own livelihoods. While the IMF’s “macroeconomic” agenda has fostered economic growth, it has been anything but inclusive; restricted to country’s elite and the drug cartels they work with. The conditions faced by the poor majority have only worsened.
Negotiating a neoliberal nightmare
While the measures that would be imposed under the new IMF deal remain unknown, the effects of neoliberalization on Honduras’s health and education sectors have brought economic punishment down on the country’s workers.
The government’s spending on education, nearly a third of the overall budget one year after the coup, has been slashed to less than a fifth, according to Honduran economist Hugo Noé Pino. Healthcare spending was slashed by 20 percent, meanwhile. “
Honduras has the highest poverty rate in the continental Americas: 65.7%, by the last available official government count in 2016, with a staggering 42.5% of the entire population classified as living in extreme poverty.
The harshest austerity measures were meted out by Juan Orlando Hernandez, a US-friendly politicians whose election in 2013 violated the Honduran constitution and was marred by fraud. Following his first year in office, Hernández oversaw the layoffs of 2,000 employees of the government-owned electric company known as ENEE. Thousands of sanitation and public telecommunications workers have also been let go under the government of Hernández.
Meanwhile, repeated fuel price hikes since 2012 have devastated the working class and sparked popular resentment.
Corruption has gone hand-in-hand with the austerity measures, and are now described simply as Honduras’s “Operating System.” Massive protests in 2015 followed the revelation that Hernández’s allies had gutted the Honduran Institute for Social Security (IHSS), stealing healthcare funds to finance electoral campaign and defrauding the public through selling wildly overpriced placebos to the IHSS for vast profits.
While protesters demanded an anti-corruption body akin to the then-robust United Nations-led CICIG in neighboring Guatemala, they were instead handed a toothless anti-fraud mission called MACCIH.
Anthropologist Adrienne Pine, an Associate Professor at American University who has lived in Honduras and written extensively on the country, told The Grayzone, “The MACCIH is frankly something of a laughingstock in Honduras, seen as a technocratic tool of the U.S. government to legitimize the Hernández regime. It has pursued mostly small, safe targets in cases that do little to threaten the current structures of power put in place through the U.S.-supported 2009 coup.”
“But when the biggest example of corruption imaginable — the blatant theft of the country’s election — happened on its watch in 2017, the MACCIH remained silent,” Pine said. “And when you have violently anti-democratic policies like IMF-led efforts to privatize healthcare and education overriding the will of the Honduran people, that doesn’t fit within the MACCIH’s narrow definition of ‘corruption’ either.”
Back in 2014, a paper from the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) think tank on a $189 million IMF loan notedthat the poor would bear the brunt of the economic shock therapy. Five years later, with this prediction confirmed, Hernández is pushing for more austerity in the name of “reform.”
As Torres explained, “We have seen in the Hernández government how he has destroyed all of our public services with the intention to transfer those public services to private hands in a neoliberal strategy that we all know very well: you destroy the public institutions and then you say that there is no other way to save it unless it’s passed to the private sector.”
Designing a de facto dictatorship
When he was elected president of Honduras in 2009, Manuel Zelaya struck a less radical posture than those of most of his progressive counterparts across Latin America. He brought a minimum wage to the country and instituted some much-needed economic reforms.
It was only after he signed cooperation agreements with Venezuela through the PetroCaribe economic alliance and began to work towards resolutions on land disputes between poor and indigenous populations that multinational corporations, government insiders and U.S.-backed civil society groups began to turn up the heat.
In the lead-up to the coup, CIA cutouts like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) were pumping $50 million a year into Honduras for “democracy promotion.” US-backed civil society groups like the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise and the Center for International Private Enterprise focused on driving a wedge between big business and Zelaya.
By June 2009, the coup plotters were confident enough to make their move. The night before they came for Zelaya, they met with a high-ranking U.S. military official. The Defense Department was reportedly concerned that Zelaya’s presidency gave Venezuela’s then-President Hugo Chavez increasing influence in the country.
In an early morning military operation, Zelaya was rushed onto a plane bound for Costa Rica. The plane took a pit stop at the U.S.’s Soto Cano air base, known locally as Palmerola. Zelaya described the operation as a kidnapping upon landing in Costa Rica.
A little less than a month later, the U.S. embassy in Honduras sent a cable to the White House and a handful of higher-ups in the State Department, including Secretary Hillary Clinton. The cable, later released by WikiLeaks, declared that there was “no doubt” that the raid “constituted an illegal and unconstitutional coup.”
Describing the coup as a “kidnapping,” the embassy concluded that none of the arguments of regime change supporters had “any substantive validity under the Honduran constitution. Some are outright false.”
While Clinton’s State Department did not openly endorse the coup, it immediately defied the Organization of American States’ (OAS) unanimous demand that Zelaya immediately return as president. Clinton unilaterally circumvented the OAS, informally recognizing the business-friendly Roberto Micheletti as the democratically-elected president to be.
Then-Secretary of State Clinton with coup leader Porfirio Lobo in 2010
The negotiations took place at gunpoint once Zelaya returned to Honduras, and were designed to legitimize the coup behind democratic guise. Clinton’s long-time confidante, Lanny Davis, meanwhile, was hired by the Honduran chapter of the Business Council of Latin America to serve as the primary Beltway lobbyist for the coup. Together with Clinton, Davis consolidated a regime change narrative within Washington circles..
The post-coup elections in 2009, marked by fraud and violence, brought Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa into the office of presidency. Lobo Sosa, like the current president, was also adjacent to drug trafficking. His son, Fabio Lobo, is serving a 24-year sentence in the United States for conspiring to import cocaine into the country.
Meanwhile, Lobo Sosa’s wife, Rosa Elena de Lobo, is facing up to 80 years in jail for having pilfered nearly USD $500,000 from public coffers during his time in office. Ironically, Lobo Sosa is now callingfor his successor, Juan Orlando Hernández, to resign.
Due to austerity measures ushered in by his government and enforced through the militarization of the country, Juan Orlando Hernández quickly became a hated figure among average Hondurans. Nevertheless, he announced he would run for reelection, which is explicitly banned by the constitution. What’s more, Hernandez’s party was banking its success on a series of dirty tricks.
During the run-up to the 2017 election, The Economist obtained a two-hour recording from a “participant” in a training session held by Hernández’s National Party for party activists “manning voting tables at polling stations on election day.”
“By The Economist’s count, the session’s leader advocates at least five vote-rigging methods, couching them in banal terms such as ‘strategy’ and ‘technique,’” the magazine reported.
Hernandez’s opponent, Salvador Nasralla was five points ahead with most of the vote counted. But suddenly, election authorities stopped releasing results. Almost two days later, when the vote counting resumed, Nasralla’s lead had vanished, allowing Hernández to squeak by with a tiny margin of victory.
Election observers from the Organization for American States noted “the lack of guarantees and transparency, as well as the accumulation of irregularities, mistakes and systemic problems that have surrounded this electoral process during the pre-electoral phase, election day, and the post-electoral phase, that as a corollary do not allow the Mission to have certainty about the results.”
From an on-the-ground perspective, Torres recounted the timeline of the vote-counting process to The Grayzone: “When they had 80 percent of the votes counted we were winning by five points, and so they shut down the system 466 times until they started winning again. We went to the streets and we were on the streets for a month fighting. Then the U.S. ambassador, Heidi Fulton, appeared before the nation saying that the United States recognized Hernández as the winner. Then they provided the support of the United States military forces and they continued giving money to Hernández.”
Repressing the resistance
Protests against the apparent fraud exploded around the country. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights foundthat at least 22 civilians were killed in the protests, and at least 16 of them were gunned down by police. 1,300 people were thrown in jail, many in military detention centers.
“We have two compañeros who are still in prison a year and a half after they were accused of burning the front door of a hotel in Tegucigalpa,” Torres noted. Edwin Espinal and Raúl Álvarez await trial in the military-run, U.S.-style maximum security “La Tolva” prison 16 months later.
Above: Edwin Espinal, a veteran human rights defender held by the Hernandez government
“Edwin Espinal and Raúl Álvarez are political prisoners. Edwin’s case in particular is particularly egregious, as he is a well-known human rights defender who has been threatened, arbitrarily detained, and even tortured dozens of times by Honduran security forces since the coup for his work organizing for social justice causes,” Adrienne Pine told The Grayzone.
“His criminalization for standing up for human rights and democracy stands in stark contrast to the impunity enjoyed by the violent state security forces and death squads,” Pine continued. “The fact that Edwin has protective measures issued by the Inter-American Human Rights Court meant nothing to the U.S.-supported regime, which has placed him and Raúl in pre-trial detention in a prison designed for the most violent organized criminals, putting both of their lives at serious risk. Edwin has lost nearly fifty pounds and has been refused necessary medical care.”
Honduran prisons are notoriously inhumane due to poor sanitation, overcrowding, and insufficient nutritional standards. The country’s prison system is designed to accommodate 10,600 inmates, but held nearly twice that in 2018.
The UN High Commissioner’s Office cites “credible and consistent testimonies” that those detained during the 2017 electoral crisis were subjected to abuse in some cases constituting torture and that the police had fired upon protesters indiscriminately. The same report also found that during the protests, at least six journalists were attacked by police and broadcasts that criticized the government were shut down.
Attacks on the press during the post-electoral crisis were just the tip of the iceberg, however. Even the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights of Honduras, itself a part of the government, documented the murder of 25 journalists between 2014 and 2016 while Hernández was in power. In 2016 the body also registered 16 violent attacks on lawyers, in which 13 were killed.
Since the 2009 coup, according to the human rights organization, Cattrachas, more than 300 LGTTBI (Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Travesti, Bisexual and Intersex) Hondurans have been killed. The numbers represent a dramatic increase in violent hate crimes against the community compared with previous periods.
The below graph shows the number of violent murders against members of the LGTTBI community per year (in red), compared with the number of cases for which anyone has been charged with the crime.
And in 2019 alone, prior to the current uprising, the UN Human Rights Office “received 51 complaints about murders of human rights defenders in the country, of which at least 21 have been verified by UN Human Rights Office.”
A new criminal code to go into effect in November, published on May 10, lays bare the prosecutorial priorities of the Honduran government. For one, the law reduces the maximum prison sentence for aggravated drug trafficking by five years. Some new penalties introduced under the law bring prison sentences as low as four years for trafficking crimes. It also opens up the door for traffickers who cooperate with investigations by authorities.
The legal reforms were proposed in the wake of the 2018 arrest of President Hernández’s brother, Juan Antonio Hernández, in Miami on drug trafficking charges. According to LIBRE’s Torres, the US has looked the other way while the Hernández government has done the bidding of powerful local drug cartels.
“The United States knew in 2017 that Juan Orlando Hernandez was being investigated over participation with drug cartels and still supported him and allowed him to forcefully stay in power with an illegal reelection, and without winning,” he said.
Meanwhile, journalists and publishers face fresh risks under the new criminal code, including “crimes against honor” and “crimes against morality.” Defamation and slander may now come with increased prison sentences, including more than a year behind bars.
Prison sentences for women who get abortions and doctors who perform them will increase to up to six and 10 years, respectively.
Participation in “illicit meetings and protests” will also be punishable by up to four years in prison, while protest leaders and financiers could face 15 years.
These draconian measures have been met with virtual silence from Washington and little coverage in a corporate US media that served as a megaphone for Nicaragua’s right-wing opposition when it launched a coup in April 2018.
“The hypocrisy is really obvious,” Torres said. “Nicaragua is just beside Honduras. We are neighbors. And it’s interesting how in two countries that are so close, that are in the same region, the U.S. has such different policies.”
The contradiction in treatment between Honduras and Nicaragua can be easily understood in terms of US military interests. Just over 50 miles from Tegucigalpa is the Palmerola Soto Cano military base, where the US army has free reign.
Hernández supported US threats against Venezuela, acceded to Trump’s call to move the Honduran Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in violation of international law, and agreed to surges in US troops in the country’s Northern Territory to have more control in the Caribbean and Central America.
“Even though the DEA has some investigation into Hernández it is clear that the U.S. Southern Command wants Hernández in power,” Torres explained.
The United States gave more than $80 million in military assistance to the Hernández government between 2013 and 2017, according to the Security Assistance Monitor.
Taking aim at the fountainhead
On Friday, tires were set on fire in the doorway of the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa. The Associated Press reported that it wasn’t clear why those who set fire to tires at the embassy’s doorstep “weren’t stopped by guards outside the embassy.”
While the uprising has been largely peaceful, acts of property destruction have occurred. Protest leader and head of the Honduran Medical Association Dr. Suyapa Figueroa, blamed “infiltrators from this country’s dictatorial government.”
In response to a tweet Friday by reporter Gilda Silvestrucci noting that 20 minutes has passed since a group of masked individuals set and there were no police officers or firefighters to be seen, the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras, OFRANEH, responded“what a coincidence [that this would happen in] one of the most surveilled and protected locations in Honduras…”
Earlier in the day, a National Police truck was seen transporting tires.
Manifestantes queman sede de la Embajada de Estados Unidos en Tegucigalpa, #Honduras, como protesta del apoyo de Donald Trump al Gobierno corrupto de Juan Orlando Hernández. Como no es #Venezuela los medios CALLAN el hecho. @antonioguterres@mbachelet@ONU_es@Pontifex_es@UN
Adrienne Pine, the anthropologist at American University, noted, “The similarities between false flag operation that took place at the Tegucigalpa Marriott and the embassy fire are obvious. In the former instance, police uncharacteristically disappeared from the scene. Numerous infiltrators from the National Party were clearly identified and recorded inciting and participating in violence; yet only longtime human rights defenders were criminalized and are being held as political prisoners.” Pine continued: “The same thing happened last Friday–you see the unprecedented absence of security forces at the U.S. embassy just before a group of heavily disguised individuals set the fire, and the immediate targeting of social justice activists, despite a similar lack of evidence that they played any role in the vandalism.”
While the fire very well may have been an act of sabotage by an agent provocateur, it could have also been the result of the pent-up anger of the Honduran population at the United States for its role in the coup and dictatorship that followed. Bystanders at the scene chanted, “American trash, American trash” as the fire burned.
Since May 24, the embassy had issued three “security alerts” and two “demonstration alerts.”
It also issued a statement condemning the arson, which read: “The acts of violence that took place today at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras are unacceptable. We are working closely with the Honduran authorities to bring those responsible to justice.”
A week later, protest leaders refused a government offer for dialogue, vowing only to engage in talks once the government’s IMF-backed scheme targeting the healthcare and education sectors are withdrawn.
A few days later, activists announced that social security workers from the IHSS would join the struggle.
Though the protests were triggered by the latest round of privatization measures, Hondurans are also lashing out against the outside powers that imposed these policies. “The action against the U.S. embassy is something that has been, historically, prepared in the mind of the people,” Torres told The Grayzone.
“People are aware that the United States embassy is the only reason why Juan Orlando Hernández is still the president of Honduras.”
Alexander Rubinstein is a staff writer for MintPress News based in Washington, DC, covering foreign policy, police, prisons, and protests. Follow him on Twitter at @RealAlexRubi.
