Mr. David Alexander of Reuters writes this morning an article on the forth-coming Pan American Summit in Trinidad which is very useful in defining how far the US side are willing to go. And equally useful in defining what is "off the table." We also learn from it the immutable mythos under which USA and British elites still labor.
Mr. Alexander does show us the extent to which US policy wonks are divided on the question of ending the ridiculous 'bloqueo' on Cuba. After a mere half-century!
We have important factions in trade, real estate and agriculture which would like nothing than to try to re-absorb through one-sided trade the island into the empire. Over time this can work just as well as a landing by the Marines. On the other hand the exile community in South Florida (and in the New Jersey of Senator Menendez) allied with the most extreme of the Fascist Right are intransigently committed to the harshest of policy. US President Barack Obama, heading the weakest US administration since Jimmy Carter, must straddle this divide.
Mr. Alexander points out accurately that this paralysis threatens to divide the summit on the question of the continuance or the isolation of Cuba. It seems quite possible that the summit will achieve no more result than the late G20 and NATO meetings in Europe. From our standpoint this would be a good outcome. There is nothing to be gained from concessions to the dying empire. After all, the paralysis in Washington means that not only can Cuba not be discussed rationally here, but neither can the failure of the whole neo-liberal experiment in corporate globalization. The drug war with its military and police implications is likewise non-negotiable. The US delegation must therefore stick with all their traditional scripting.
This is why I still cannot see any good reason for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias to waste his time in Port-of-Spain, other than perhaps, as a respectful gesture towards Premier Manning of Trinidad & Tobago. They are the neighbors, after all.
Where Mr. Alexander and his establishment colleagues utterly fall on their collective tail-bone is toward the end of his article when he notes that Latin America has done fairly well, in the past five years, economically, compared with many other regions of the world. Like most others in the press elites he attributes this to NAFTA, CAFTA and the other mechanisms of corporate internationalism. He cannot bring himself to admit that this is also the very period in which the International Monetary Fund has been more or less expelled from Latin America, thanks largely to Venezuelan funding. It is also the period in which Latin American nations have discovered that their resources are valued, thus salable, all across the world, not merely in the North American empire.
The icing on the cake is that everything the empire formerly produced is available better and cheaper elsewhere ... and the fact the Marines are busy on the far side of the world means that Washington has lost that lever as well: The lever which once meant do it our way or die!
This meeting can do no other than to show the vast gulf between the various parties, as the empire must stick at all cost to its cherished mythologies.
From the imperial capital
