Somehow Hollywood produced a pro-Castro film noir in 1959, something as unlikely in today's noirish landscape as it was then

  

For a while, I couldn’t believe what I was watching on television, a pro-Cuban Revolution, anti-Batista Hollywood film made shortly after the revolution and during the post-McCarthy-era’s continuing nationwide harassment of anything hinting at communism.

 

Pier 5, Havana, a 1959 thriller starring Cameron Mitchell and Allison Hayes, tells the story of the American Steve Daggett (Mitchell) coming to Cuba to find a missing friend and encountering a pro-Batista counterrevolutionary group that has kidnapped his friend to use him to convert airplanes into bombers. Steve finds himself helping to frustrate those efforts and support Fidel Castro’s new government.

 

It’s amazing such a film wasn’t verboten in an America still reeling from U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Commie witchhunt. In the immediate years ahead lay Castro’s conversion to communism, JFK’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 that threatened the nuclear destruction of the world.

 

Today, after decades of economic sanctions that have kept Cuba stuck in a kind of 1950s time warp, U.S. President Trump is threatening another Cuban invasion and takeover. Given his criminal bombing war against Iran, kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and his wife, and killing of boat crews off the coast of Venezuela, Trump’s threats need to be taken seriously.

 

What Pier 5, Havana reminded me, however, is the interesting role of film noir—Pier 5, Havana is considered a “neo-noir”—in exposing the dirty underside of American capitalism. Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s ties to Big Capital and the mafia in the United States were key to his hold on power. He was a handpicked puppet of the U.S. whose domestic support came from sugar plantation owners and the super wealthy in a country that, then as now, suffered from great poverty.

 

Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir, Kiss Me Deadly, is a classic example. Leftwing screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides took the crypto-fascist plot of crime writer Mickey Spillane’s novel and turned it into a fierce cry against the threat of nuclear Armageddon. “This is lousy. Let me see what I can do with it,” Bezzerides told Aldrich after reading Spillane’s novel. Then later: “I wrote it fast because I had contempt for it.”

 

 

Noir is full of working class sympathies and righteous indignation against the abuses and exploitation by the 1 percent. The French identified film noir and named it, but it could only have taken root in American soil, where hyper individualism and its offshoots of greed and selfishness are championed. It’s as American as Apple pie and baseball.

 

Hardboiled writer Jim Thompson, whose books led to several great noirs, was a former Industrial Workers of the World/IWW Wobbly. Dashiell Hammett spent time in prison because of his radical political views and allegiances.

 

Noir grew out of the hardboiled school of writing in the 1920s and the gangland films of the 1930s. G.I. disillusionment after World War II helped set the stage for the dark films that followed. Those soldiers had fought fascism in Europe and Asia only to return to a nation held captive by the U.S. House for Un-American Activities Committee and Joe McCarthy.

 

Trump was an understudy of McCarthy crony Roy Cohn. In many ways, he’s a blast from a not-so-good past. Trump’s world provides dark and fertile soil for a new wave of noir, and I hate it as much as I love those old black-and-white movies.

 

Jesse Jackson in 1988: "I do intend to be a part of the conscience of the nation"

(Jesse Jackson in 2013)
  

I watched Jesse Jackson from a few rows behind him on the yellow school bus in Houston’s crime-and-poverty-ridden 3^rd District as someone in the rear shouted, “We’ve got the president on the bus!”

 

It was late fall 1988, and Jackson was no longer a presidential candidate. He was a campaigner for Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis. Jackson would never be president, and he probably knew it after two unsuccessful runs to become the nation’s first black president.

 

“I will continue working, fighting for justice at home,” the 47-year-old minister and civil rights leader would say soon after that supporter shouted his school bus endorsement. “I will continue to study and grow.”

 

I was a reporter for Gannett News Service in Washington, D.C., at the time, and my assignment was to follow Jackson around the nation as he campaigned for Dukakis. For weeks, we traveled together—from the Texas-Mexico border to Wisconsin’s border with Canada. At each stop, he told the crowds—from domestic workers in Texas to the destitute poor in New Orleans’ Desire Housing Projects to farmers in Wisconsin—to “keep hope alive”, that they are “somebody”, that they need to keep reaching for “higher ground.”

 

Jackson, who died Feb. 17 at the age of 84, kept his promise. He did indeed spend the rest of his life studying and growing and certainly fighting for justice. He was a tireless supporter of black people, yes, but also of all people regardless of race. I remember well his familiar reminder to the huge media presence among his multi-racial audiences that they should consider the hard-working folks who rose early in the morning to come and clean their hotel rooms and make sure they had clean sheets.

 

“I always seek to establish a moral foundation to any speech,” he said to us later on the small plane that flew us to many stops. “There is no greater moral authority than the Bible. Jesus was a master teacher.”

 

In 1988, Jackson’s mission included keeping the national Democratic Party tied to its roots in the working class, and it put him at odds with members of the Democratic Leadership Council, a largely Southern organization led by the likes of Bill Clinton and U.S. Sen. John Breaux, D-La. The DLC wanted the party to shift to the center-right to blunt the hemorrhaging of white males to the Republican Party.

 

Jackson “fits in like a big thorn,” Atlanta-based political analyst Clairbourne Darden told me in 1988.

 

Jackson lost that fight as today’s Democratic Party is largely fixed in a Clintonian center-right mode with little real interest in the party that once put Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson in the White House.

 

In his first bid for the presidency in 1984, Jackson received 3.3 million votes in the Democratic Party primaries. He more than doubled that in his 1988 bid with 6.9 million votes. He was never to win the big prize, but he did set the stage for Barack Obama to become the first black president a couple decades later.

 

Born in 1941 in a three-room house with no running water and an outhouse in the back in Greenville, South Carolina, Jackson played football in college and gravitated quickly toward the burgeoning civil rights movement. He became a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and was with Martin Luther King Jr. when King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968.

 

Jackson would go to make his Rainbow Coalition and Operation Push major forces for social justice (the organizations would later combine). His work reached beyond the United States and made him a voice heard and listened to across the world.

 

“I do intend to be a part of the conscience of the nation,” he told black graduate business students in Houston back in 1988.

 

He was right about that, and his success is one reason why he will be remembered long after his death.

 

 

Trump better hope his gambit in Venezuela doesn't turn into another Vietnam

 (To the right, the author in Vietnam in 1971)

I was an anti-war protester in college who ended up getting drafted and serving as a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam. Burned out with protesting and not wanting to flee to Canada, I was a guy from a blue-collar family without a deferment, like so many of the soldiers who ended up in Vietnam.

 

As a former political activist, however, I couldn’t help from appreciating the irony in a poster I spotted on or near my base in Plantation, South Vietnam, a handful of miles north of Saigon. It was 1971, and Nguyen Van Thieu was running for re-election as president of the “Republic” of Vietnam. The poster encouraged voters to cast their ballots for a man who’d been in charge since 1965.

 

Only problem was he had no opposition. It was a one-man race. Thieu was the only choice South Vietnamese voters had.

 

The point today is that the United States had no problem sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers like me to fight for an authoritarian regime that was anything but a republic or a democracy. Thieu had been a turncoat supporter of the French colonialists before he became a puppet for the Americans.

 

This is important in light of the recent U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife on unproven claims that they are tyrannical drug lords. The U.S. government has no problem with dictators or even drug lords so long as they don’t interfere with the flow of U.S. capital or nationalize industries that once belonged to powerful U.S. corporations.

 

In fact, on December 1, Trump pardoned the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, a convicted drug trafficker.

 

Like his predecessors, President Donald Trump, who campaigned as a “peace” candidate sick of endless wars such as those fought by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan, has become enthralled in the chess game that is international politics. He has threatened another war against Iran and a takeover of Greenland, proposed building a money-making seaside resort in bombed-out Gaza in league with his ethnic cleanser friends in Israel, and rattled his sword at China and occasionally even Russia despite his amateurish efforts to end the war in Ukraine. He has ordered bombing in Iran, Yemen, Nigeria, and Syria.

 

Trump won re-election because voters thought he was going to save them from the “Bidenomics” that had failed to quell inflation or resolve the growing housing issue. A year into his new term he seems to have lost interest in domestic economic issues, and yet, like his predecessor Joe Biden, claims life is so much better in today’s America.

 

The housing crisis? Price of eggs and inflation in general? Health care? Who cares?

 

What’s different about Trump from his predecessors is that he doesn’t sugarcoat his imperialistic motives. He blatantly says he’ll “run” Venezuela in the wake of Maduro’s kidnapping. He claims Venezuelan oil reserves as U.S. oil reserves. He says Greenland should be under U.S. control regardless of Denmark’s claims or what that means to the basic premises or future of NATO’s existence. He lies about why he kidnapped Maduro but he doesn’t couch his motives in talk of “democracy” or “human rights” like so many previous U.S. leaders.

 

His disregard—actually contempt—of his allies in Europe and the rest of the Western world is on full display. As seen in Trump’s year-long struggle to find peace in Ukraine, European leaders themselves have proven they care little about peace or even democracy. They give their blind support to war in Ukraine even though its leader, Volodymir Zelensky, runs an authoritarian regime that allows no opposition. They actually care little about Ukraine. Their sole aim is to keep the United States on board as their protector and benefactor.

 

Europe’s decline as a Western model of democracy and good government is painful for this writer, a former resident of Germany and son of a German mother and an American father who fought for Europe’s freedom against tyranny in World War II. Today’s Europe veers toward being unrecognizable under its incompetent leadership and with the growing presence of migrants who are as autocratic and anti-democracy as the countries they fled.

 

From far away, Russia and China watch as Trump bullies his way across the continents and as Europe falls ever deeper into irrelevance. They are powers that bullies like Trump are wary to confront directly, and they are led by seasoned leaders who understand the chess game Trump treats as checkers. When will they say, “Enough is enough”?

 

I left Vietnam a year or two before the ultimate disaster, when U.S. helicopters full of fleeing Vietnamese and Americans scrambled to lift themselves from Saigon’s rooftops to escape the ignominy of utter defeat.

 

Maybe Trump should have not avoided the draft and spent a little time in Vietnam himself. Already in Venezuela, militias and underground forces are gathering to oppose Trump’s plans for their country. The Bolivarian Revolution led by Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro is alive and well. Like Vietnam, Venezuela has plenty of jungles and mountains where its revolutionaries can hide and launch attacks and mount a potentially long, disastrous war, the kind of war Trump campaigned against.

Was the old warrior Sitting Bull a visionary of future conflicts in the United States?

 

(Sitting Bull in 1883)
 

Sitting Bull, the great Sioux chief, had finally found a degree of peace for his people in Canada in 1877 when the U.S. War Department sent a delegation to try to convince him to return to the United States. Surrender your firearms and your horses, and we will grant you a full pardon, they told him.

 

The truth was Sitting Bull’s very existence was an insult to the U.S. military. He was a legend who had successfully resisted their efforts to silence him forever. He was “a dangerous symbol of subversion,” as writer Dee Brown tells the story in his 1971 classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

 

“There is no use in talking to these Americans,” he told Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner James MacLeod. “They are all liars, you cannot believe anything they say.”

 

Sitting Bull knew of what he spoke. The long, sordid trail of broken promises, greed, and rampant racism that the American settlement of the West had left behind was well known to Sitting Bull, Geronimo, Cochise, and other great Indian leaders. Many had felt it better to die on the battlefield than simply fall prey defenseless to a purposeful genocide.

 

Brown’s book, subtitled “An Indian History of the American West”, makes for painful reading, but it is also instructive of this nation’s long history after the settlement of the West. From the Gilded Age of Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies and their brutal rise to economic power to the strike-breaking militias that kept tenant farmers and cotton mill workers in a kind of human bondage to the anti-communist witch hunts of the early and mid-20^th century,  the stage was set for the broken promises of the post-Cold War era  when the United States ruled as the sole super power.

 

It’s a history that prompts another quote from Sitting Bull. “The white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.”

 

After decades of CIA-prompted coups in places as disparate as Iran, Honduras, and Libya, all in the name of promoting “democracy” even if the result was anything but, a reckoning seems to be coming in Ukraine.

 

As the Soviet Union tottered in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it agreed to allow the reunification of Germany so long as NATO did not expand eastward. No worry, American officials told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. NATO will not expand one inch to the East. What happened? NATO expanded right up to Russia’s borders and included Poland, the Baltic states, and potentially Ukraine. Allegedly a “defense” organization, it even waged war with longtime Russian ally Serbia in the 1990s.

 

Ukraine, however, was the red line to the Russians. American leaders rarely study history and likely had no real idea that Ukraine has an almost mystical place in Russian history, in many ways the core of ancient Russia. Plus, just like the U.S. didn’t want Soviet missiles in Cuba in the early 1960s, Russia didn’t want a hostile, missile-ladened NATO member on a large swath of its border, particularly after the CIA-backed coup of 2014 in Ukraine that overthrew a Russian-friendly leader with pro-West puppets. Those puppets would go on to wage war with Ukraine’s Russian-speaking citizens in the nation’s east.

 

Today, President Trump has initiated a new round of peace talks to end the war in Ukraine. Russia is willing to listen. However, Ukraine’s leaders and their Russophobe European buddies don’t seem willing to give an inch even though Ukraine is clearly losing the war.

 

After failed earlier peace agreements at Minsk and Istanbul, Russia will approach any new peace deal with an understandable amount of skepticism. Trump, although volatile to a fault, seems to really want peace, unlike his predecessor Joe Biden, a neocon warmonger who would’ve truly continued the war until the last Ukrainian soldier fell to a bitter and useless death.

 

Chances seem slim for a real peace deal that doesn’t follow complete defeat on the battlefield. Too many political careers and stuffed bank accounts stand in the way. Kudos to Trump for trying, however, if that’s really what he’s doing. After all, he bombed Iran at the same time he was negotiating with them.

 

If the West’s negotiators are anything less than serious about wanting peace in Ukraine, they may hear Russian leader Vladimir Putin say something similar to what Sitting Bull said when pushed for a peace deal in 1877. “I would like to know why you came here,” he said. “You come here to tell us lies, but we don’t want to hear them. … Go back home where you come from.”

A Labor South organization forms to train young people in labor history and organizing and thereby challenge Trump-inspired anti-unionism

(an 1882 cartoon in Puck magazine satirizing the Knights of Labor's first annual picnic)
 

Between the Knights of Labor’s founding in 1869 and its convention in Richmond, Virginia, in 1886, the local press and political leadership condemned it for opening its doors to all races and sneered at its recruitment of both skilled and non-skilled workers--from coal miners and turpentine workers to dockworkers. Its membership eventually reached an estimated 700,000.

 

Although the bloody Haymarket Affair in Chicago the same year as that Richmond convention would bring a death blow to the future of the Knights of Labor, the all-inclusive union would go on to help inspire the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, in 1905 and the rise of the Congress of Industrial Workers in the 1930s.

 

Before its demise it gained considerable success in the allegedly anti-union South, joining with, for example, the New Orleans-based Central Trades and Labor Assembly, also a bi-racial organization with up to 10,000 members.

 

The Knights of Labor spirit today can perhaps even be felt in the creation of the modern-day Labor South organization. Not to be confused with this decade-plus-old blog, the Labor South: Center for Working Class Studies is a North Carolina-based, region-wide organization that seeks to grow the labor movement through education, training, and organizing. Apprenticeships, training certification, independent courses in labor history and organizing, and media and union collaboration are all included in the organization’s plans and goals.

 

“Through independent study courses, students can gain a deeper understanding of how the labor rights movement has impacted their local community and how it continues to do so,” Labor South director Melinda Wiggins says.

 

 This writer has long lamented the absence of labor history in U.S. history courses. As a (now retired) professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi for more than 30 years, I made sure my Media History students knew all about the 1886 Haymarket Affair as well as other landmark moments of labor history such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City’s Lower East Side in 1911 and the textile strikes in North Carolina in the late 1920s and 1930s. I didn’t preach. I did what a teacher is supposed to do: teach.

 

Other efforts are underway in these troubling times that pose a challenge to the neoliberal, corporate-controlled world modern capitalism has created. A nascent Labor Party has been founded, a People’s Party as well. The Southern Workers Assembly in North Carolina is also gaining momentum.

 

Certainly the times are calling for such efforts. Despite President Trump’s campaign appeals to the working class, his administration has proven an enemy of workers. He has gutted the National Labor Relations Board, nominating Morgan Lewis attorney Crystal Carey to serve as NLRB General Counsel. Morgan Lewis is one of the nation’s most vicious union-busting law firms. He fired NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo and NLRB Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox.

 

Trump’s erstwhile buddy Elon Musk has even gone to court claiming the NLRB is unconstitutional.

 

Trump has stripped 800,000 federal workers of their collective bargaining rights.

 

As for the economy, Trump’s first administration authorized tax cuts in 2017 with 82 percent of the cuts aimed at the nation’s top 1 percent. In his current administration he wants another $4 trillion in tax cuts. Guess who benefits?

 

The people of the United States are watching. A recent Gallup poll showed 68 percent of Americans support labor unions. That’s a number you’d think would impress hapless national Democrats, yet their soothsayers keep telling their candidates to go moderate, not left. In other words, more lip service than action regarding labor unions.

 

Despite his miserable, war-mongering foreign politics, former President Biden was something of a modern-day Democratic exception on labor. He did try in several ways to live up to his boast of being the “most pro-union” president in the nation’s history. In a recent edition of the publication International Union Rights, writer John Logan calls attention to Biden’s pro-labor appointments to the NLRB, his bailout of the Teamsters’ pension funds, and his appearance on a United Auto Workers picket line.

 

Donald Trump and his crowd will never appear on a picket line unless it’s to bust some strikers’ heads.  As Labor South and other organizations try to educate people about who’s on their side and who’s not, maybe enough will realize their side, if united, has the power to throw the bums out.

 

The world needs cartoonist Art Young to come back and remind us of the evils of war

(To the right, a drawing of Art Young by the Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco)
 

OXFORD, Miss. – During a casual visit to the University of Mississippi library this week, I happened across a couple of books by and about Art Young, the revolutionary turn-of-the-century artist whose cartoons dramatized the issues of his day in publications such as the Chicago Inter-Ocean, New York American, The Liberator, and the socialist monthly The Masses.

 

Born of modest means in Illinois, Young (1866-1943) championed the poor and downtrodden, and he was so virulently anti-war that he and others at The Masses were charged under the Espionage Act with conspiracy to obstruct enlistment during World War I. The trial ended in a hung jury.

 

With wars raging in Ukraine, the Middle East, and elsewhere, the world needs an Art Young today. With U.S. backing, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu continues his genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Israel’s war machine has also targeted Lebanon, Syria, and Iran.

 

(A drawing of war by Art Young)
 

As for the war in Ukraine, U.S. President Trump broke with his warmongering predecessor Joe Biden when he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska in an effort to map out a viable peace plan. The Russians are clearly winning the war and unlikely to make significant concessions, but Putin’s arrival in Anchorage signaled a willingness at least to hear what the other side has to offer.

 

Trump had hardly said goodbye to Putin before he had to meet with Ukrainian strongman Volodymir Zelensky and the leaders of France, England, Germany, and Italy in the White House to calm their rattled post-Anchorage nerves. How small those leaders looked in their White House photo-ops.

 

These European leaders, including their counterparts at NATO and the European Union, simply want more war. They could care less about the continued massive loss of Ukrainian lives. They fear the end of the war may only bring about a disinvestment of the United States from Europe, their greatest fear of all.

 

Zelensky wants the continued funding that war brings. How much of it goes into his and his buddies’ pockets? Plus he dares not offend the neo-Nazis that are the power behind the scenes in Ukraine with concessions to the Russians, such as allowing Russia to absorb the Donbas in eastern Ukraine or Crimea (all of which it already largely controls militarily).

 

The warmongers in Congress, the State Department, and within Trump’s own administration want Russia defeated so they can move on to war with China. A war with Iran in the meantime would be delicious. U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., is the unofficial chief warmonger among them.  His predecessor in Congress, the late U.S. Rep. Mendel Rivers, as chair of the House Armed Services Committee is said to have laden the city of Charleston with so much military that it threatened to sink the city into the ocean.

 

Mainstream media—the New York Times, the Washington Post, television networks, and their European counterparts—want what their Deep State friends and former elite university classmates want: War and more war if it promises to weaken Russia and continue their exalted status quo at home.

 

Trump wants a Nobel Peace Prize, such as the one his despised political enemy Barack Obama won. He campaigned as a peace candidate and boasts of already ending several smaller wars across the globe. However, Trump exhibits little understanding of true diplomacy or of the history that led to the wars in Ukraine--or the Middle East for that matter. His forte remains “the art of the deal,” the skills he learned wheeling and dealing on Wall Street.

(To the right, a drawing by Art Young of Jesus the Peacemaker)

 

Putin, the most capable and mature leader on the world stage today, wants a neutral Ukraine that poses no security threat to Russia. He wants fair treatment of the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine, and before the war would have settled with a real and committed promise to make those goals realities. However, too many have since died simply today to settle for the oft-broken promises of the past.

 

Putin has no desire to extend Russian power into Europe. He doesn’t even want all of Ukraine. If he did, why did he earlier sign on to the peace deals in Istanbul and Minsk that Ukraine agreed to but later broke?

 

Trump has pushed for a Putin-Zelensky meeting. However, Putin does not consider Zelensky to be a legitimate leader of Ukraine since his legal term ended long ago and he has used the war to continue his reign (much like Netanyahu in Israel). Talk of security guarantees in Ukraine as a way to peace has circulated in Washington and across European capitals. However, the Russians will never allow NATO or other European troops in Ukraine as that would undermine the very reasons for the war itself.

 

Ukraine is going to have to surrender much of its eastern provinces and Crimea to Russia. It is going to have to give up ever joining NATO. It’s going to have to allow limits on its future military capabilities, and it is going to have to get rid of Volodymr Zelensky. The West is simply going to have to accept all this even if it ultimately requires a total military defeat for Ukraine.

 

Such are the costs of war. In his art long ago, Art Young showed us the evil of war, its futility, its costs. Two world wars and countless smaller-but-still-deadly wars later, world leaders have yet to listen.

 

The global debt crisis in Argentina and elsewhere owes a lot to Marco Rubio and his friend the hedge fund vulture, Paul Singer

(Marco Rubio)
 

Marco Rubio today may be the head honcho at the U.S. State Department, but it was just a few years ago that he was pounding on the door of that same government entity demanding that it force the government of Argentina to pay Wall Street hedge fund vulture Paul Singer billions in interest on outstanding loans even at the risk of the country going into default.

 

Due to the largesse of his erstwhile political foe Donald Trump, Rubio today gets to hop-scotch around the world, scold other countries for their moral failures, and promote the neoliberal economic model that has made debt a major issue around the world, forcing countries like Argentina to slice pensions, eliminate teacher jobs, and destroy safety nets for the poor so that they can pay Shylocks like Singer their usury.

 

“He is accustomed to thinking about American foreign policy as a responsible policy maker,” Singer said back in 2015 when he threw his substantial financial support to Rubio’s presidential campaign. “He is ready to be an informed and assertive decision-maker.”

 

Today Argentina, under its Trump wannabe leader Javier Milei, is not only still reeling in debt ($40 billion to the International Monetary Fund, and Milei is seeking another $20 billion from the United States) but also from deepening poverty, disappearing government services, and from the fact that some 40,000 former government workers are out of a job due to the chainsaw-wielding Milei.

(To the right, Javier Milei, photo by Gage Skidmore)

 

Milei has cut inflation down from a monthly 25 percent to just 2 percent, but prices are still high in tango land, and pensioners in particular are suffering from the combination of high cost of living and reduced services.

 

Rubio’s friends on Wall Street actually have forced Argentina into default twice—once in 2001 and again in 2014. Here’s how it works: Hedge fund operators purchase the bonded debts of struggling nations and then eventually demand full payment, which with interest can be 10 to 15 times the original debt. With the backing of friendly judges, these “vultures”—tagged that name by Peronist former Argentine leader Christina Fernández de Kirchner—can ignore debt restructuring plans and warnings of default with their insistence on full payment.

 

Argentina actually had worked out a deal with most of its bondholders that would have created a repayment plan albeit with some losses on their investments. Hedge fund operators, however, got involved, bought the bonds at a hugely reduced price (due to the 2001 default), and rejected any such deal. They were backed by U.S. courts.  

 

(Paul Singer)
 

Singer’s hedge fund, Elliott Management, is estimated to have taken in $2.4 billion from Argentina, as much as 15 times the original debt. The fund bought $50 million in Argentine bonds and essentially sold them back for $2.4 billion.

 

It was Rubio, as a U.S. senator from Florida, who kept “banging on the State Department” door, according to journalist Greg Palast, to let Singer have his way in Argentina. “This was money screaming,” Palast said in an interview with Democracy Now.

 

These financial wheeling and dealings aren’t just in Argentina. Global debt is a huge crisis. According to Maryknoll magazine writer Thomas Gould, nearly half of the world’s population “lives in countries that spend more on debt than on either education or healthcare.”

 

The debt arises out of loans provided by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and private lenders. The Oxfam organization estimates those private lenders control more than 50 percent of this debt.

 

Maryknoll, a Catholic publication, notes that the late Pope Francis made debt cancellation a primary focus of his papacy.

 

“The usurer is worse than Judas,” St. Anthony of Padua said back in the 13^th century. “The traitor, having sold the Blood of his Divine Master, brought back to the priests and princes the thirty pieces he had received, but the usurer guards and keeps his unjust gains.”