I Thought the FARC Was “Near Defeat”?

Repost from the old site. A bit dated, but good nonetheless.Here on Robert Lindsay, we do support the FARC and the ELN unequivocally.

This is one hardass rebel army. The US corporate media says they still have 7,000 men under arms, down from 17,000, and in my opinion, their militia numbers in the 100,000’s. I strongly disagree with the 7,000 number, and I think the actual number of FARC troops is probably at least 18,000. They have a presence all over the nation and in several surrounding countries too.

It’s true that they have been dealing with the most intensive military offensive against any rebel group in the history of Latin America, and in recent days, suffered the loss of some top commanders. But they will weather these changes. As soon as a top commander dies or is killed or captured, there is someone else waiting to take his place.

James Brittain notes that the FARC has recently waged some of its most impressive attacks in a long time.

A reporter noted in 2004 that there is an unstated fear that the guerrillas could overrun Colombia’s major cities at any time. As a way of dealing with this, the venal and murderous Colombian ruling class periodically issues proclamations touting the weakness of the FARC, how they are near defeat, how they are suffering from massive defections, etc.

During Plan Colombia and Plan Patriota from 2000-2006, the Colombian regime repeatedly said that the FARC was near defeat. Analysis indicates that instead, attacks have grown over time. During 2008, the US media got into the act, crowing that the FARC was “near defeat”. But this year, the FARC attacked Colombia’s most important oil infrastructure facility and wiped out entire Colombian military battalions.

Between the 29th of April and the 6th of May, 2008, the FARC carried out repeated attacks on Colombia’s largest oil pipeline and halted the export of up to 3 million barrels of oil. At the same time, the FARC attacked various transportation routes crucial to the flow of military supplies and the movement of oil in Colombia’s north.

An essential bridge was destroyed in Cesar Province, preventing the movement of troops and paramilitaries. In Norte de Santander, the FARC attacked forces guarding the Caño-Limón Pipeline.

These last attacks were just hours after the US Ambassador visited the region and crowed about the near-defeat of the FARC. On May 3, 2008, Colombia deployed a battalion to the region to resume the flow of oil. The battalion was quickly destroyed by the FARC, which kept attacking the pipeline for another 2 days.

On May 27, 2008, the FARC attacked Colombia’s largest coal mine, derailing 40 wagons out of a 110 wagon train carrying 110 tons of coal. Further attacks hampered Colombia’s ability to engage in foreign trade by shutting down many export routes.

The North was thought to be relatively free of the FARC in recent years, as their center of operation was said to be in the South, but these attacks proved that wrong. In 2007, when the FARC was “near defeated”, somehow the number of internal refugees grew by 3

The FARC has auxiliaries in all neighboring countries, the FARE in Ecuador, the FARV in Venezuela (demobilized but ready to fight if need be), the FARB in the Dog’s Head of Brazil, and the FARP in Peru.

The FARP has expanded all the way down to central Peru lately, where they have had great success forming base communities with peasants who hate the state but are disgusted by Sendero’s brutality. Many former Senderistas in Peru, up to 1,000, have signed on with the FARP. FARP has linked up with the devastated remains of the MRTA in San Martin Province and sent the MRTA leftovers back to Colombia for armed training.

They have also linked up with what is left of Sendero, a considerably less radicalized organization. A column of Senderistas from the Huallaga Valley was also seen marching off to Colombia. In Peru, the FARC troops are uniformed, healthy, well-armed and supplied, with modern communications equipment and brimming with confidence.

They come into the villages and offer basic necessities and health care to peasants who are pleased to see them and find them impressive compared to the ragtag guerrillas they are used to. Just because Sendero has been badly hammered does not mean that the people of Peru are not in a revolutionary mood.

The FARC also operates R & R bases in Panama and operates all across northern Brazil to southern Guyana, where they tax gold mining operations. This is one way the FARC has reacted to the largest offensive ever launched against any Latin American guerrilla group – they have expanded to all of the surrounding countries.

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When members of the FARC put down their arms to run for office in the 1980’s and formed the Patriotic Union, they were massacred like flies. Years later, 5,000 UP activists lay dead, and the party was disbanded. This is how the Colombian regime responds to challenges from the Left, even unarmed. With bullets. Until that changes, war will go on.

Colombia is currently one of the US’ top allies in the world, and the US’ top ally in Latin America. It’s unfortunate that US’ best friend in the region is such a murderous and fascist state, but it speaks volumes about the nature of the US state itself.

Ian Welsh, “The Depression and the Future”

From Ian Welsh’s glorious blog:

Ok, everyone’s talking about the oncoming recession. What it is is the second downleg of the depression we’ve been in since the financial crisis.

All of this has been baked in since 2009. Since January 2009, when Barack Obama announced his stimulus, which was not just too small, but put together so badly that it was evident it would not kick the economy out of the doldrums.

The stimulus would be seen to fail (it doesn’t matter how many jobs it “saved” what matters if it created a good economy.) Meanwhile Obama made it clear he had no intention of restructuring the economy, shutting down any of the major banks or of disrupting the paper for oil securitization game.

So, anyway, what’s happened since 2009 was baked into the cake. What is happening is what anyone halfway competent should have expected to happen and that includes the massive wave of austerity in the developed world, the high commodity prices, and the continued liquidation of public assets to feed private greed.

If anything it’s slightly worse than I expected. I would have hoped that some nation other than Iceland would prove to have enough guts to tell the vultures to fuck themselves, but apparently we’re all eunuchs or morons these days, and the Greeks still aren’t rioting amongst the mansions of the rich, I notice. So who cares what they think, anyway?

I suppose it’s tiresome to keep saying “I told you so”. Certainly I’m tired of it, but the point is that this could all be predicted, was all predicted (well, not all, I didn’t get the revolutions in Arab countries, though I know someone who did and the clues were there.)

Assume that what is happening is, essentially, what your lords and masters are at least ok with having happen. If they weren’t, it wouldn’t be happening. This isn’t a case of incompetence, they didn’t even try to make this stuff not happen.

The future you’ve got coming from you is a future of unconventional oil extraction: aka fracking. The play is to get back to cheapish oil and make that run for as long as it can. That is what WILL happen. That is baked into the cake. The only economy these people want to run is an petro economy.

They will do whatever it takes to run one and continue to use their position in control of legacy capital to extract rent and tax the future. There will be more controls on so-called intellectual property (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one). There will be more security theater. There will be more austerity, which means taking public assets and turning them into what appear to be revenue producing private assets.

This will go on until the last drop of cheapish conventional oil has been pumped and the last suburb built. Americans, and apparently the developed world, will do whatever is required to see this happen. They will kill whoever they have to kill. That’s what the developed world is, now. This is only compounded by stupidity like Germany going off nuclear without a clear plan of how to replace the energy. Remember, boys and girls, yes, there is blood mixed in with that oil. A lot of it.

This the future, the next goodish economy will come from unconventional extraction. Not sure how long that will last. It will come at great environmental and health costs, but Americans will give up anything to keep the petro-economy going, so, so be it.

What’s this gonna mean for you? The good jobs are going to keep getting scarcer, and if you aren’t willing to do evil (work for any insurance company, anything defense related, most good paying education jobs, most good paying healthcare jobs, virtually all financial industry jobs, etc…) then they will essentially non-existent.

Real wages after real inflation will continue to trundle down. Even inflation adjusted wages as measured by the BLS may show declines. Employment WILL NOT recover in your lifetime if you are over 40. That doesn’t mean there won’t be ups and down, but it won’t have a long sustained up. Financial markets will continue to be a rigged game, and if you want to play, realize you need to play as if the game is rigged, not as if you’re in a free market.

Unless you can pay premium, the quality of everything you buy will continue to go downhill. Want a good burger? Closing in on $8. Want a shitty fastfood burger?  $2 or less. Public transportation will get worse, more libraries will close. The cops will make less calls and be less helpful. The schools will be worse in most places and keep getting worse. Eventually Medicare will be slashed to the bone, and so will SS. Not necessarily destroyed, but so weakened they might as well be.

It’s gonna be a long 20 to 30 years folks. Does this have to be the future? In theory, no. In practice, well, yes, apparently it does.

I keep running Ian Welsh’s pieces because he is one of the finest writers currently writing. He needs to be on TV, in the newspapers or in the newsmagazines, but no wait. That will never happen. They are all owned by the rich. I have decided that I am going to limit my intake of the newspapers of the rich, the newsmagazines of the rich, the radio stations of the rich and the TV stations of the rich.

The rich are my deadly enemies. It’s a war to the death – us and them. I will fight them to the death and then I will dance on their graves forever and a day.

I really don’t understand the rich. They want to rip up the safety net? Got it, they don’t need it.

Destroy public education? Sure, their kids all go to private schools.

Close the libraries? I don’t get it. The rich don’t go to libraries?

Close all the parks? I don’t get it. The rich don’t go to parks? They have private parks and country clubs to go to?

Shut down the state and national parks and national forests? I don’t get it. The rich don’t go on vacation? They don’t go to national forests, national parks, or state parks? Someone clue me in here.

Shut down public transit? Sure, the rich don’t use it.

Destroy all funding for infrastructure? I don’t get it. The rich don’t drive on highways? They don’t drive over bridges?

The model here is Latin America. Latin America, a continent that has been wrecked by the rich from Day One. All of Latin America’s problems are due to rich rule. The public schools are wrecked – the rich won’t pay for them. The highways and infrastructure are a joke. I never understood this until I heard that the Latin American rich simply buy 4-wheel drives to drive over their shit roads. They would rather do this than pay for a road.

Libraries in ruins? No problem, the Latin American rich don’t care about libraries. So where do they get their books?

Medical care in ruins? Who cares, the Latin American rich go to private clinics.

Parks decrepit, falling apart, or closed? In Latin America, this is the case. National parks are horribly underfunded, decrepit or closed. I guess the rich just don’t care?

Even housing standards. After the glorious Pinochet (Tulio’s hero) came into Chile and afterwards, the housing standards put in by Allende were rolled back. That more buildings did not fall down in the Chilean earthquake is largely due to the housing standards that were put in by Allende.

After Pinochet, new governments rolled back these standards or mostly just looked the other way while typical Latin American capitalist criminals violated building codes. As a result, many more buildings were damaged in the earthquake than would have been otherwise. This I don’t get at all. The Latin American rich are such skinflints that they would rather skirt a building code to save a few bucks, and then risk having the building fall down or getting hurt or killed? All the personal risk is worth it to save a buck or two? What scumbags!

The Latin American rich don’t believe in hooking up their countries with electricity. Much of the country lacks power, but they don’t care. They all have generators!

Horrible pollution runs in the public water supply, but they don’t give a fuck. A cholera epidemic rages through Peru, but the rich don’t care. Why not? They all drink bottled water?

The part about the cops I get. Here in California, even the police are cutting back. They often won’t even come out. This is the case in Latin America. In Peru, the cops are so poorly paid that they often stage holdups on the road to get money. I don’t get this. Don’t the Latin American rich worry about crime. I have heard that many of them hire private bodyguards. They’d rather hire private bodyguards than pay for cops?

The Latin American rich won’t even pay for a decent military. During the Civil War in Peru, the soldiers didn’t even have proper boots or uniforms. The rich could not be bothered to pay for them. Now that’s a callous ruling class! So cheap that they won’t even fund the army that keeps them in power. “Oh well,” they figure, “The revolution will always be defeated somehow. We won’t need to pay for an army.”

We Are All Africans

In the comments section, they are debating how many of our genes are “African genes.” One fellow insists that none of our genes are African genes.

I am quite certain that all OOA people have a ton of “African genes,” whatever the Hell those are. All non-Africans outside of Africa came from Africa. Erectus came from Africa and spread out to the OOA world. Before that, Australopithecines were born in Africa and their descendants (Erectus) spread to much of the OOA world. Neandertal and Denisova were derived strictly from African genes. Even Flores Man (possibly not even from Erectus) came out of Africa. All humans and subhumans came out of Africa at one point or another! Period.

Obviously, the vast majority of our Sapiens genes were birthed in Africa. We may well have developed some new genes or new gene frequencies outside of Africa, but as far as our genomes go, we are all Africans.

The problem is that this really infuriates a lot of White people, so profound is their hatred for Black people. “Grandpa was a nigger,” is so insulting that one would think that they are going to kill themselves.

The OOA theory is rock solid proven. All of the OOA people are related to a small group of Africans, probably ~750 people, who left Africa ~70,000 YBP. After they left, they apparently bred in with relict hominids who were still living outside of Africa – . But that’s not the multiregionalist racist line. Multiregionalism as a theory is about dead anymore. It mostly only lives on in White racists. The theory goes like this:

The various races have been separated, and evolving separately, for 1-2 million years. That is, Whites and Asians go back 1-2 million years.

The more radical racists say that Blacks are relict Homo Erectus! It’s interesting that it’s only Whites who seem to get their hides so chipped by the notion that “grandpa was a nigger.”

We had an Asian naitonalist on here at one time. I asked him if it bothered him that Asians were related to Africans who left Africa 70,000 YBP. He said it was no big deal. “After all,” he said, “Long before that, we used to be frogs. Species evolve.”

I told this to a friend of mine and she fell over laughing. “You see!,” she cried out. “That shows you right there that Asians are smarter than Whites!” I agree. Any White person who is bent out of shape because “grandpa was a nigger” needs to have their head examined.

Seriously.

"Is a College Education Worth It?" by Alpha Unit

A lot of people have heard by now of what Peter Thiel has been up to. Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal. The billionaire is giving fellowships to 24 college-aged students, paying them $100,000 each to not attend college for 2 years, as media outlets are reporting it. Instead, they will spend that time developing business ideas in fields like biotechnology, education, and energy. They’ll be working in Silicon Valley with over 100 mentors who will help them develop their ideas. Thiel has drawn students from prestigious institutions like Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Of course, Peter Thiel has been on the record for some time with his belief that college education is greatly overrated in this country. More and more people, some of them highly educated and successful themselves, are openly challenging the idea that a college education is always a great investment – no matter how much massive debt you incur in the process. People are revisiting an old debate, actually: What is the utility of higher education? Are too many people going to college? What are people really hoping to gain by getting a college degree? The Pew Research Center released a report entitled “Is College Worth It?” wherein they questioned 2, 142 adults about the value of higher education. On the question of why kids should attend college:

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College graduates put more emphasis on intellectual growth, while non-graduates emphasized career preparation. Among those who graduated from 4-years schools,

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College graduates believe they earn $20,000 more a year as a result of their education; non-graduates believe they earn $20,000 less a year. This is consistent with the median gap in annual earnings between a high school graduate and a college graduate – $19, 550 – as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2010. As for whether or not a college education is worth the money,

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While the nationwide unemployment rate hovers around

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