The same meeting was held in the United States 7 months later, on February 4, 1903 in New York, agreed upon by Russell together with Depew Chauncey, and the bishop of New York, Henry Codman Potter, a formal dinner that was organized under the presidency of Bishop Potter. Over the years more and more members of the oligarchy joined the Pilgrim's Society , including almost all the well-known banks, the robber barons and their associates, the Astors, Dukes, Mellons, Stillmans, Aldrichs, Du Ponts, and Meyers. , Vanderbilt, Belmont, Gould, Morgan, Warburg, Baker, Harkness, Peabody, Watson, Carnegie, Harriman, Pyne, Whitney, Dillon, Lamont, Reynolds, Dodge, Lodge, Rockefeller, Drexel, Loeb, Schiff, among others. The ranks of the English "Pilgrim's Society" began to gather together barons, viscounts, earls, marquises and dukes, members of the British royal family, and oligarchs such as the Barings, Hambros, Harcourts, Keswicks, Rothschilds, Kleinworts, Loebs and Warburgs. .

The Pilgrim Society grouped together the main elitist rich men in the United States, while the Skull & Bones encompassed only those at Yale University. The constitution of the " Pilgrim's Society" , along with many other associations, lodges or communities of this type, were an expression of the emergence of the so-called "stabilishment" , that is, the new dominant class in the country that not only includes the oligarchy. of tycoons but also a large number of people who work in high government positions, a group of banks based in New York, insurance companies, law firms, officials and various businesses that rotate like a satellite under its orbit. Under the sphere of "stabilishment" a kind of permanent government of the country is thus established, which emerged as an elite from the northeast that exercised its dominance and class position regardless of who is in the White House.

By forming a structure of civil servants who work to serve their interests, the power of "stabilishment" is felt by the professor seeking a foundation grant, as much as by a candidate seeking a cabinet or the State Department. And it also affects the nation's policies in almost all areas. To the extent that this layer of officials, and the structure of "stabilishment" was consolidated, the relationship between the government and the monopolies completely changed. From the arrival of Hanna to power, relations were established in a conscious, formal and systematic way, and the structure of officials linked to the monopolies began to move as a consolidated body, organized in a premeditated manner in the name of the interests of the whole. of the monopolists.

Even so, the institutional structure of American capitalism was extremely weak. The dominance of the monopolies had already been embodied in the economy, it had established close ties with the high spheres of power and government, and it had begun to go through its first years of the imperialist stage. But each crisis that hit the economy caused an earthquake, and increasingly larger earthquakes that lacked containment as a result of the fact that from an economic point of view there was no institutional structure in line with the economic development of the country. There was no central bank, exchange parities were not clear and definitively established, nor were monetary equivalences clear.

An example of this was the serious crisis of 1907, called the "Panic of 1907." This crisis was caused by unbridled speculation that brought to light numerous cases of corruption as a result of the exuberant accumulation of capital that was carried out by monopolists. Allegations of corruption plagued the establishment, and in 1905, during the term of New York Governor Charles E. Hughes, an investigation was carried out into the use of insurance company funds for speculative maneuvers and investments during the decade. previous, which left the general public exposed to the reckless manipulation of capital, the scams and shady dealings of monopolies with life insurance funds. The result of this investigation was the promulgation of new laws on asset protection and investment of insurance funds, and this caused a free and unrestricted source of capital to be withdrawn from access to speculators at a stroke. The hundreds of millions that for years had been available for the benefit of small groups of powerful businessmen were no longer available.

In turn, the speculative lack of control resulting from the development of monopolies led to a new and deeper crisis. In 1906, the San Francisco Earthquake severely damaged the economy, which further aggravated the vulnerability of the banking system. In October 1907, the "financial panic of 1907 " occurred , a financial crisis that bankrupted many national and local banks, as well as the ruin of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, the 3rd largest trust in New York. The collapse of the Knickerbocker increased fears about the city's funds, while regional banks withdrew their reserves from New York banks, and this led to panic spreading throughout the country. The panic might have deepened had it not been for the intervention of JP Morgan, who pledged large sums of his own money and convinced other New York bankers to do the same, to shore up the financial system.

By November, the collapse of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TC&I) occurred, the outcome of which was avoided by an emergency acquisition approved by President Theodore Roosevelt, a kind of old version of what the bailouts will be like from 2007 onwards. that became widespread with the outbreak of the current global crisis of capitalism. This maneuver, like so many others, expressed the close relationship between the state and the existence of the "Pilgrim's", the oligarchy of millionaire magnates who with their companies came to dominate the country's economy and transform it into an imperialist country. The development of this sector of the bourgeois social class transformed the capitalist structure of the country forever, in a process that had implications not only for the country, but for the entire world capitalist economy.

From the beginning of the 20th century, this class structure was consolidated and became absolutely irreversible, which is why it was necessary to build an institutional economic support that would contemplate the changes that occurred in the country after the Civil War, and drive a series of orientations promoted by the establishment at the beginning of the 20th century. On March 1, 1900, President William McKinley officially decreed that from that day on the value of the dollar would no longer be quoted in silver and would begin to be quoted in gold, thus reinforcing the interests of the monopolies, but it was made other measures were necessary and the emergence of new institutions that would support the scaffolding of the new structure of North American capitalism.

The institutions of the imperialist state emerge

We have seen how through the years and the different stages of development of the country the different institutions of the state emerged, we have analyzed it both in the stage of independence, the Civil War, and the post-War stage. We have seen that the different stages of the country's capitalist development were accompanied by the emergence of different institutions that gave rise to different political regimes. After the United States became an imperialist country, one of the first organizations to emerge, motivated by the outbreak of the " Panic of 1907" that expressed this new character, was the new Central Bank of the United States, which emerged on December 23. December 1913 with the name of the Federal Reserve System of the United States (in English, "Federal Reserve System").

The country did not have any Central Bank since then President Andrew Jackson vetoed in 1832 the law extending the license to the National Bank of the United States that expired in 1836. Since the country did not have any Central Bank, the flow of capital It developed in accordance with the country's annual agricultural cycle, and each fall money left New York City to buy the crops. To attract money again, interest rates were raised, and then foreign investors sent their money to New York to take advantage of the high interest rates. But the severity of the crisis of 1907 revealed that there was practically no control over the flow of capital, and that, faced with the onslaught of speculators, the entire banking system could collapse, without protection of any kind.

This motivated the representatives of the monopolies, officials, congressmen and economists to decide to work together and establish a commission chaired by Senator Nelson Aldrich to propose the solution of a Central Bank. The Central Bank project was outlined in November 1910 at the Jekyll Island Hunt Club of Georgia owned by JP Morgan, in a meeting organized by Nelson Aldrich in which A. Andrew Platt, Frank Vanderiip and Paul Warburg of the Kuhn-Loeb Bank participated. & Company, Henry Davidson, Charles Norton and Benjamin Strong of JP Morgan. It was a carefully prepared secret meeting, from which emerged the current Federal Reserve System, known in economic jargon as the "Fed." The Federal Reserve bill was passed by Congress in 1913 and President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill. The first governor of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve was Benjamin Strong of JP Morgan, and the first governor of the Fed's board of directors was Paul Warburg of Kuhn-Loeb & Co.

The Fed is clearly the emergence of an institution that reflects the dominance of the monopolistic oligarchy over the structure of the country. This profound change and the imperialist character of the state was also expressed in the conclusions reached by the Pujo Committee, a subcommittee of the US Congress that was formed between May 1912 and January 1913 to investigate the so-called "money trust" . This report concluded in 1913 that 18 different large financial corporations were under the control of a cartel headed by JP Morgan, George F Baker and James Stillman through the resources of seven banks and trust companies such as Banker Trust Co., Guaranty Trust Co., Astor Trust Co., National Bank of Commerce, Liberty National Bank, Chase National Bank, Farmer's Loan and Trust Co. who controlled an estimated $2.1 billion.

The Committee also maintained that this "money trust" manipulated the New York Stock Exchange, attempted to evade interstate commerce laws, and highlighted the activity of bankers such as Paul and Felix Warburg, Jacob H. Schiff, and Frank E. Peabody, William Rockefeller and Benjamin Strong who manipulated more than $22 billion in controlled resources through the capitalization of 341 management positions in 112 companies . Many laws, such as the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, attempted in vain to change the situation.

As the monopolies took control of the capitalist economy, the situation of the working class progressively worsened. The exploitation of workers deepened and reached sophisticated forms, one of which was the technique known as "Taylorism", created by the foreman of a steel company named Frederick W Taylor who devised a well-detailed system of division of labor and increased the mechanization of work to increase productivity and business profits. The techniques of Taylorism were to make workers produce on a larger scale by establishing the ability to do simple tasks, taking advantage of every down time, and allowing them to carry out different tasks, which allowed them to transform into interchangeable workers like standard pieces, stripped of qualities and individuality. . The incorporation of these exploitation systems that increased productivity also increased industrial accidents.

At the beginning of the 20th century, worker unionization began to grow as Howard Zinn explains: " Unionization was increasing, but 80% were in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), an exclusive union - almost all men, white, and skilled workers. In 1910, despite making up one-fifth of the total workforce, only one in every hundred women belonged to a union. In 1910, black workers earned one-third of what they earned. The whites won. They were also excluded from the American Federation of Labor... Faced with this situation...they began to work for a new type of union...socialists, anarchists and radical unionists from all over the United States They were founding the union IWW -Industrial Workers of the World" (37)

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) led the Lawrence Massachusetts textile strike by immigrant workers in 1912, prompted by a two-hour pay cut under a new law shortening the work week. The strike spread quickly across the city, growing to over twenty thousand workers and involving almost every mill, uniting workers of over 40 different nationalities, and lasting over two months, challenging the assumptions of conservative unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that immigrant workers could not organize.

With radical measures that included sending hundreds of starving children of strikers to compassionate families in New York, New Jersey and Vermont, the measure achieved victory and workers achieved raises of up to 20 percent. The Lawrence strike is often known as the "Bread and Roses" strike, a phrase from a poem by James Oppenheim published in The Atlantic Monthly in December 1911. One of its most prominent leaders was Frank Little, who along with other leaders such as Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and James P. Cannon promoted the call for "One Big Union" as opposed to the craft unions of the time that only represented the highest paid workers. Although Little was skilled at organizing strikes, the The IWW's leading group split over the question of how to unify the working class and take power away from the capitalists.

Cannon, founder of American Trotskyism, and many others left the IWW seeking the need to build a revolutionary party to lead the way. Little was gruesomely murdered by a group of thugs, but was cheered by crowds as Freedom Socialist Newspaper explains: "... On August 8, 1917, a week after his murder, ten thousand people filled the streets of Butte for the Montana's largest funeral procession in history. They knew who was on their side, who had risked their lives. The city fathers forced mourners to carry the American flag in the procession. But once outside the city , the flag disappeared, leaving only the IWW banner to honor the life of this brave Wobbly. On his tombstone is carved, "Killed by capitalist interests to organize and inspire his fellows" (38)

Pressure from workers and popular mobilizations forced the governments of Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, and Woodrow Wilson to promote a series of laws, resolutions, and amendments to the Constitution that sought to calm the masses and stabilize the country's political situation. . This political period of the country that covers the first 20 years of the 20th century, from 1901 to 1921, is recognized as the so-called "Progressive Period." It was a period motivated by worker and popular mobilizations as well as the growth of socialism, and anarchism among the masses, which was a cause of concern among the dominant classes at that time.

The so-called "Progressive Period" sought to contain the workers' and popular rise as Howard Zinn explains: "It is true that this was the "Progressive Period", the beginning of the reformist era, but it was a reactionary reform, whose purpose was to appease popular uprisings, not carrying out fundamental changes. What gave this period the nickname "progressive" was the fact that new laws were passed. Under Theodore Roosevelt, they passed the Meat Inspection Act, the Hepburn to regulate railroads and pipelines, and a Pure Food and Drug Act. Under President Taft, the Mann-Elkins Act had the Interstate Commerce Commission regulate the telephone and telegraph system. During Woodrow Wilson's presidency, they introduced Federal Trade Commission to limit the growth of monopolies...they proposed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution that would make possible a graduation of taxes and the Seventeenth Amendment allowed the election of senators directly, by popular vote, instead of by legislatures of the states, as stipulated in the original Constitution. Also around this time, a number of states passed laws regulating wages and working hours, providing for safety inspections in factories and compensation for workers who had workplace accidents .

The entire development of monopolies in the country allowed a fabulous accumulation and overaccumulation of capital. In the quarter century from 1890 to 1915, the total capitalization in the form of stocks and bonds of companies grew from less than 200 million to almost 20,000 billion dollars, a huge and historic overaccumulation of capital for that time. The crisis of 1907 had revealed the beginning of a serious and deep crisis, not of the United States but of the entire international capitalist system, as a result of the overaccumulation of capital made by monopolies leading to a crisis. And the crisis of monopolies dragged the entire capitalist economy behind it.

We have seen at the beginning of the chapter how with the Civil War in 1865 it was possible for North American capitalism to overcome the limits and contradictions of its own process of capital accumulation through massacres and violent burning of capital. It was through this brutal process of destruction of productive forces that North American capitalism was able to consolidate an industrial capitalist economic regime that displaced the regime of manufacturing accumulation that was predominant in the Southern states, but which had reached the limits of capitalist accumulation and was exhausted. .

In the same way that this violent burning of capital made it possible to overcome the manufacturing regime and develop the industrial regime, capitalism now faced a new crossroads: The monopolies had over-accumulated capital in a spectacular way, they had reached the maximum limits of the development of capitalist accumulation and They were beginning to enter their exhaustion phase. What had to be carried out now was then a burning of capital that would allow us to overcome monopolies as a form of exhausted accumulation, but the problem was that monopolies were not a uniquely American company. Its development covered many more advanced countries of capitalism such as France, England, Germany. This is how capitalist development required a violent burning of capital and a brutal massacre and destruction but with global reach. The German, French, and English monopolies clashed in their continuous expansion for control of the markets, which put limits on the process of capital accumulation, and this entire process of crisis of the monopolies made world war more than inevitable.

The First World War, developed mainly in Europe, began on July 28, 1914 and ended on November 11, 1918 with the defeat of Germany and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. It was a brutal process of destruction of forces. productive areas of destroyed countries, regions and cities that meant the death of more than 9 million people, an extraordinarily high number, given the technological and industrial sophistication of the belligerents, today considered the fifth deadliest conflict in the history of Humanity.

How did the "Pilgrim's Society" react to the First World War? The powerful monopolistic oligarchy saw in the First War an excellent business opportunity, so large companies and magnates pounced on the enormous possibilities of profits, since the possibility was opened for American capital to reach new markets, rotate to diverse branches of production in a more widespread way, accessing regions, industries and companies where they had not previously reached, which caused a new " explosion" in the development of North American capitalism. As Moody explains : "...a state of chaos ensued in London. Contract hunters and contract brokers pounced on the British War Office...Thus, the war had given Wall Street a completely new role Until now it has been exclusively the headquarters of finance; now it became the largest industrial commercial center the world had ever known. In addition to selling stocks and bonds, financing railroads, and performing the other tasks of a major banking center, Wall Street began trading in shells, cannons, submarines, blankets, clothing, footwear, canned meats, wheat, and the thousands of other items necessary for the processing of a great war..." (39)

What was a disgrace in human terms for the workers, the poor and people who suffered the devastation, was a true business marvel for the US monopolies. The businessmen involved in the business had to face the challenge of accumulating enormous profits without have experience in war business, but was carried out successfully as Moody explains: "This new function had hitherto been unknown to an American businessman. In search of the most qualified man to carry out this campaign. .the Morgan firm discovered Edward R. Stettinius, the president of the Diamond Match Company. Stettinius in turn searched the American industry for the most qualified men to assist him in his gigantic task, with the result that a force was assembled of 175, who were organized into a department humorously known as "SOS" - or "Slaves of Stettinius." Before long this group was purchasing supplies, at a rate of $10,000,000 a day. There was largely never an agency before that had made the materials in the United States, at least in appreciable quantities. They had to massively expand existing munitions factories and build hundreds of new plants entirely. American industry adapted to the new demands quickly and satisfactorily... So the work was successfully carried out until September 1917, the Morgan firm had purchased more than 3 billion dollars in merchandise and ammunition...which It had previously been occupied by European investors." (40)

This is how Howard Zinn explains it: "...American prosperity was now linked to England's war... JP Morgan and company acted as agents of the allies and began lending money in such large quantities that they made enormous profits and linked closely tied American finances to the British victory in the war against Germany" (41) Until 1918, the United States had declared itself neutral in the European conflict and almost abandoned this decision in 1915, when a German submarine sank the Lusitania, an English ocean liner in the that more than a thousand people died, many of them American citizens. The American people asked to declare war on Germany, but President Woodrow Wilson only protested. Wilson declared war on Germany only in April 1917. The country's entry into the First War marked a policy of increasing military interventionism in other countries, such as the intervention in Mexico in 1914 to force the coup general Victoriano Huerta to resign, or the intervention in Haiti in 1915 once President Sam was assassinated to land American troops and companies; or also in 1916, the invasion of the Dominican Republic until 1924, leaving a related government that would open the doors to American investments.

The Treaty of Versailles established the formation of the League of Nations, an international organization that sought to establish the foundations for peace once the First World War ended. But inside the country, the end after the end of the First World War began another war as a result of a brutal reactionary offensive: A furious patriotic turn against all workers' organizations began, thousands of workers were arrested nationwide, the new Communist Parties suffered the brunt of this attack, almost all local organizations, from coast to coast, were raided and practically every leader of the national or local movement was placed under arrest, prosecuted for one thing or another.

Mass deportations of foreign militants took place, as Zinn explains : "...On December 21, 1919, Palmer's men took 249 Russian-born foreigners (including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman), put them on a transport and They were deported to what was now Soviet Russia...These friends of Salsedo's names were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. They were put on trial, found guilty and spent seven years in prison while appeals continued, while throughout the country and all over the world people were interested in their case...Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death for being anarchists and foreigners. In August 1927, and while in the streets the police broke up demonstrations and pickets with arrests and beatings and troops surrounded the prison, they were electrocuted...In February 1919 - just after the war - the leaders of the IWW were in prison..." (42)

The Second World War implied the appearance of a new political element: The existence of Nazism and fascism, which were a totally new political movement for the time, cruel towards racial minorities, Jews in particular, racist, undemocratic, which violates freedoms. democratic, and culminates in a bestial dictatorship capable of implementing genocide and all kinds of crimes against humanity. The appearance of the horrific regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco provoked this reaction, as Zinn explains: " There is some evidence that World War II was the most popular war in the history of North America. It had never before participated in a war. such a large portion of the country: 18 million men entered the armed forces (of which 10 million would go abroad); 25 million workers regularly bought war bonds with their salaries...It was a war against an enemy of "an indescribable evil. Hitler's Germany was spreading totalitarianism, racism and militarism in a war of open aggression the likes of which had never been seen" (43 )

A historical unit

When in 2006 the Bush Administration carried out appointments of new officials in the cabinet to try to reverse the serious political crisis that its administration was facing, all the appointments and renewal of officials had as a characteristic the greater unity of the Bush Administration with Multinational Corporations . In this sense, he was merely repeating a characteristic that had become structural of the country, the growing unity and interweaving of the monopolistic companies that dominate the economy with the state and the government. The close and deep relationship between the Bush Administration and Corporations such as Lockheed Martin, or Goldman Sachs, only confirmed the direction that the relationships between Corporations, Monopolies and Multinationals with the state and government of the country had taken throughout history.

This course was developing increasing present and historical contradictions of the political regime of the United States of America. As we saw, the bourgeois democratic regime of the United States was formed in a historical process, a political and social genesis in which the country was at its birth a small and weak republic, a small capitalist state that emerged in the period of global boom. of capitalism, which achieved its Independence in the 18th century through the First North American Revolution.

To the extent that the military defeat in Iraq and the political defeat caused greater crises in the Bush Administration, these historical contradictions generated in the country's political regime over the centuries became more acute. The Bush Administration was falling into a tailspin, and in its fall it dragged with it all the elements of crisis of the North American imperialist state. At the same time, it incubated an even greater crisis: The defeat of the Administration was the defeat of all of world capitalism, because the Bush Administration's strategy had been adopted practically without exception by almost all capitalist governments in the world. To the extent that rejection of the Bush Administration's racist policy towards New Orleans grew, towards the attack on the freedoms that the Patriot Act meant, and also to the extent that the invasion of Iraq received global repudiation, enormous changes Politicians were incubating as a reflection of the explosion of all the contradictions.

The situation in the country was adopting a growing dynamic of political instability, and the serious crisis was feeding back and began to shake the entire state superstructure of the country, hitting the leadership of the government and having repercussions on Parliament, political parties, and security agencies. , the CIA, the Pentagon, and pressure groups. The way in which the outcome of this crisis occurred, the political and social changes that were generated within the country and the way in which they impacted the entire world political situation are the subject of analysis in the next chapter.

Notes

(1) " Global Corporations are companies that simultaneously dominate several branches of commerce, industry and finance worldwide. If the characteristic of modern post-war multinationals was the dominance of one branch of production on a global scale, corporations "Multinationals are a superior Form of Accumulation because they monopolize several branches simultaneously, which allows them to achieve a capital accumulation greater than that achieved by modern post-war multinationals" Daniel Campos. The End of Multinationals. Chapter IV Globalization. Amazon 2012

(2) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States". 1980

(3) Karl Marx, Die Presse No. 293, October 25, 1861

(4) David Ryazanov. "Marx and Engels" 7th Conference

(5) (6) y (7) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States". 1980

(8) Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln Encyclopedia: The Spoken and Written Words of A. Lincoln Arranged for Ready Reference, Archer H. Shaw (NY, NY: Macmillan, 1950)

(9) , (10) , (11) , (12) , (13) John Moody "Masters of Capital" Chapter I "The Rise of the House of Morgan" 1920.

(14), (15) Ferdinand Lundberg."America's 60 families". Read Books. 2007

(16) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States".1980

(17) , (18) , (19) , and (20) Vladimir I. Lenin. "Imperialism, the upper phase of capitalism". Works, Volume V Editorial Progreso 1973.

(21) Karl Marx. Manifesto of the Communist Party.1848

(22) (23) (24) (25) (26) (27) (28) (29) (30) (31) (32) (33) y (34) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States".1980

(35) Ferdinand Lundberg."America's 60 families". Read Books. 2007

(36)y (37). "A People's History of the United States".1980

(38) "Celebrating the intrepid Wobbly Frank Little" Patrick Burns. Freedom Socialist. December 2017

(39) and (40) John Moody "Masters of Capital" Chapter I "The Rise of the House of Morgan" 1920

(41), (42), (43) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States".1980

Chapter IX Change

"Democracy was everywhere the product of revolution... The Greeks learned from their own experience that democracy was achieved through the direct action of the people and could only be maintained by relentless vigilance against enemies." of their government and their rights"

George Novak. Democracy and Revolution, Section I, Chapter I, 1970

As soon as the Patriot Act was passed, a real rebellion against it began. The rebellion swept through the country and crossed all the institutions of the North American bourgeois state. For this reason, the year 2006 will go down in history as the year in which the Bush Administration's Project for an American Century (PNAC) was defeated, a defeat that meant an enormous triumph for the masses whose impact changed the political situation of the country. country and the global situation as a whole. All, or almost all, of the events that happened in the US and worldwide from 2006 to today can only be explained from the defeat of the PNAC and the Bush Administration: The outbreak of the acute peak of the world crisis of capitalism in 2007, the "crack" of the Multinational Corporations of the years 2008-2009, the bailouts of the capitalist governments to the Multinational Corporations in the years 2008 onwards, the development of the revolutions in the countries of the Middle East and North Africa known universally as the "Arab Spring", the indignant movement in Europe, Occupy Wall Street, the emergence of Black Lives Matters, etc., everything, absolutely everything, is closely linked to what happened since 2006 in the United States. .

In turn, all these events of world politics that have occurred since 2006 today can only be explained from the profound political changes that have occurred in the United States since 2001. The changes impacted the country, the world, and they changed the course of political events, definitively. In this chapter we are going to analyze point by point how the defeat of the PNAC occurred, because we define this as a revolution, and what are the economic, political and social changes that were unleashed from there.

The fight against the PNAC deepens

Throughout 2006 the White House made changes in the cabinet, with the aim of desperately solving the political crisis, the discredit, and the nosedive of the Bush Administration. The Justice Department had frustrated numerous attempts by legislators and civil liberties advocates to learn how the Bush Administration was using the Patriot Act, and the entire battery of antidemocratic measures that the PNAC implied. But Nancy Kranich, president of the oldest and largest library association in the world, the American Library Association (ALA), denounced in 2003 that raids and searches were being carried out in libraries and bookstores, as permitted by article 215 of the Patriot Act; and that federal agents visited around 50 libraries. This was also stated by Deputy Attorney General Viet Dinh before the members of the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives. The rebellion was carried out in the courts, in the streets, in Parliament, in the media, everywhere.

Civil liberties organizations forced the release of reports from the Justice Department by appealing to the FOIA, a federal information law that allows the total or partial disclosure of controlled government information and documents. Justice Department reports revealed that the Attorney General had personally signed more than 170 "emergency foreign intelligence" orders, three times the number authorized in the previous 23 years. At the same time, the complaints indicated that agents from the DEA and the Immigration and Naturalization Service were committing serious violations of civil liberties against immigrants. There was widespread criticism such as that of Republican legislator John Conyers who stated "...we have only begun to scratch the surface regarding the Department of Justice's disregard for constitutional rights and civil liberties. ... I congratulate the inspector general for having courage and independence to highlight the extent to which the government's war on terrorism has harmed innocent victims, with no ties to terror at all" (1)

In May, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency released a report to Congress on its Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) program, which would be responsible for collecting and processing the information and activity records of every American citizen, but there was a Senate rebellion that voted unanimously to end all funding for TIA. This forced Admiral John Poindexter, the architect of the program, to resign from the Department of Defense on August 12, 2003. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) faced the "Improvement Act" . Home Security" called Patriot Act II, with a lawsuit against section 215 of the Patriot Act in 2003. In the federal courts of Michigan and defending the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, the ACLU filed on behalf of six groups and community organizations, including an Arab-American civil rights organization and a Muslim community association, who were under investigation because of their ethnicity.

Laura Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Office, led the fight against the campaign of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who promoted the so-called "victory ride" campaign, and toured 20 cities demanding support for the Patriot Act, and advocating for a new "Patriot III" legislation that would grant the new powers. But Ashcroft's "more Patriot Act" demand was challenged by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which also won a federal district court ruling against provisions of the Patriot Act that claimed it was illegal. provide "expert advice and assistance" to groups designated as "terrorist" by the Secretary of State. Public outcry against violations of civil liberties under the Patriot Act continued to increase. Throughout 2003, 3 states and 149 cities, towns, and counties passed "civil liberties safe zone" resolutions or ordinances, while that same year the National Coalition to Repeal the Patriot Act emerged, which held hearings independent public meetings in cities across the country to collect information and testimonies about the law, civil liberties, racial discrimination and police brutality.

Bookstores and libraries were affected because the Patriot Act forced readers to self-censor what books to buy, especially those people trying to understand the events of 9/11 and read about or obtain information about Iraq, terrorism, or Islam and They could become terrorist suspects and be subject to investigation. The ACLU also urged Florida librarians to post signs warning that they could become the target of government surveillance, and librarians across most of the country joined forces against the Patriot Act. In turn, the ACLU and the First Amendment Center jointly developed a huge and deep battle over the application of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

In 2005, legislator Bernie Sanders presented a bill prohibiting the Department of Justice from using any of the funds allocated to carry out searches in libraries and bookstores: "...we saw it during the persecutions of the Japanese in World War II, the fear of the reds of the 1950s and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and now we see ourselves in the post 9/11 investigations and arrests of Arabs and Muslims" (2 ) John Doe v. Alberto R. Gonzales was a case in which the ACLU, along with libraries and librarians, challenged Section 2709 of the Patriot Act.

That trial was carried out by John Doe, who was the recipient of a National Security Letter (NSL), which requested all the information on one of the computers in his Connecticut library. By taking his case to court with support from the ACLU, Doe was able to have US District Court Judge Victor Marrero strike down the NSL provisions of the USA Patriot Act in September 2004. John Doe again challenged the NSL in Doe v. Ashcroft based on his 1st and 4th Amendment defense, a three-judge panel heard oral arguments on November 2, 2005 in which Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU reiterated the allegations against the NSL.

In the months after 9/11, there was a 20% increase in ACLU membership; between August 2001 and December 2002, total membership reached 330,000, but growth continued and by the month of By August 2004, the total membership of the ACLU had already reached 400,000. These indicators showed the trends that were occurring in the depths of the North American mass movement in defense of democratic freedoms, a people that was once again showing behavior in line with its history.

In those years, the people of the United States, still moved by the terrorist attacks of 9/11, still confused by what their political and union leaders told them, stunned by the mass media, by the systematic campaigns against "Terror" and the "Axis of Evil" , as repression and persecution increased and the curtailment of democratic freedoms increased, resistance to those measures also increased. Simultaneously with the increase in ACLU membership, there was the emergence of movements of the families of 9/11 who demanded an investigation into the attacks, held candlelight vigils in front of the White House and organized themselves into movements such as the " Jersey Girls" and the "9/11 Family Movement", carrying out the mobilization of the relatives of the victims of 9/11 and organizing periodic trips to Washington DC to demand the investigation and fight for the truth of the attacks.

The entire process of resistance to the Patriot Act produced a crisis that led to confrontations between the Executive Branch and the Judicial Branch. This confrontation was expressed around a series of legal battles, some of a historical nature, that set a precedent in the fight to defend democratic freedoms. One was the Rasul vs. trial. Bush who ruled on whether or not the US judicial system has the authority to decide whether foreigners detained at Guantanamo Bay were unjustly imprisoned. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) was the first organization to file two habeas corpus petitions called Rasul v. Bush, and Habib v. Bush. Both petitions challenged the indefinite detention that Rasul and Habib suffered after being captured in Afghanistan.

The government had designated the detainees as enemy combatants and they were not allowed access to a lawyer, the right to a trial, or knowledge of the charges against them. The Supreme Court on June 28, 2004 ruled that Rasul be released, allowed to have private, supervised conversations with his lawyers, and that the interrogations cease. The same failed in the case of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen who filed a very similar lawsuit against Rasul on June 10, 2002. The next battle was the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , a sentence that no one hesitates to describe as historic.

The Supreme Court ruled on June 29, 2006 that the president exceeded his powers by creating military tribunals at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, an important and long-awaited judicial decision that in a few hours went around the world. The ruling by the highest US court dealt a strong blow to the Bush Administration, stating that "the composition and procedures of these courts violate not only the 1949 Geneva Convention, but also the Uniform Code of Military Justice of the United States." The ruling thus put a limit on the alleged blank check that the Bush Administration thought it had received from Congress when it authorized it to use the AUMF, invade Afghanistan, and all subsequent attacks.

An irony of fate meant that the person who dealt this harsh legal blow to the Patriot Act and the AUMF was Osama Bin Laden's own driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was a citizen of Yemeni origin hired as Bin Laden's personal driver. Hamdan was arrested in 2001 during the invasion of Afghanistan, accused of being an "enemy combatant" and tried for "conspiracy and providing material support to terrorism ." Held in Guantánamo he was accused of conspiracy by a military court created on March 21, 2002, but Hamdam asserted his right to habeas corpus , and based his defense on the lack of jurisdiction of the military court. He further alleged that fundamental principles of legal rights and particularly the right of every accused to see and hear the evidence in his case had been violated during the trial.

Still, the Department of Defense continued to hold Hamdan as an enemy combatant at Guantánamo until 2008 when he was transferred in November 2008 to Yemen to carry out the remaining month of his sentence. He was only released by the government of that country on January 8, 2009, and Hamdan's entire conviction was overturned on October 16, 2012 on appeal to the Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, whereupon he was acquitted of all charges. the charges.

But the Bush Administration's response to the landmark Hamdan v. Rumsfeld was to send to Congress a draft "Military Commissions Act of 2006", whose approval established rules for the indefinite detention, interrogation, trial and treatment of suspects for the crime of terrorism, directly, seriously, but " legally" restricting , the rights of detained foreigners, in express collision with International Law, International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Following the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, only worsened the confrontations between the Executive Branch and the Judicial Branch.

The Judiciary had declared Military Commissions unconstitutional following Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and in turn, the fight against the Patriot Act regime continued with the Boumediene vs. Bush , who questioned the legality of Boumediene's detention at the Guantanamo military base, as well as the constitutionality of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. The case of Boumediene vs. Bush allowed those detained by the Bush Administration to obtain the right of habeas corpus , as well as reject their classification as "enemy combatants."

Faced with the growing discontent, mobilization and confrontation with its policies that the Bush Administration suffered, it was forced to legally protect the category of "enemy combatant " and soften part of its antidemocratic policies derived from the establishment of the Patriot Act regime with sent to Congress the " Detainee Treatment Act" (DTA, 2005) and the "Military Commissions Act" ("in English Military Commissions Act ", MCA of the year 2006). These laws sought to change something so that nothing would change. The DTA attributes to the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia the jurisdiction to review the Administration's decision to classify a person as an "enemy combatant", with the result of being able to order the release of a person if said classification is revoked. The MCA recognizes some procedural guarantees in favor of the "illegal combatant" but the essential thing, the "hard core" of the Executive Order of November 13, 2001, was safeguarded.

With the DTA and MCA laws, the category of "enemy combatant" was elevated to legal status and thus became a new basis to justify the detention and indefinite deprivation of liberty of detainees. On the other hand, with these laws, the power to classify a person as an "enemy combatant" continued to correspond to the Executive Branch, although the exercise of this power could be controlled a posteriori by a Judicial Body. But the sanction of the DTA and the MCA, although the system of military commissions dependent on the executive was maintained and legalized, were proof that there was widespread resistance to the Patriot Act regime, and that the Bush Administration should make small legal concessions to prevent the advancement of the fight in defense of democratic freedoms.

Complaints in the media

Along with the mobilizations, the emergence of resistance organizations to the Patriot Law regime, the contradictions between the institutions of the political regime expressed in the friction between the Executive and the Judiciary, complaints began to become widespread in the mass media that They exposed the reactionary nature of the political regime that was being implemented. The Washington Post reported on December 26, 2002 about a secret CIA prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, The Guardian reported on March 14, 2004 the existence of three British citizens held captive at Camp Eco in the Guantanamo Bay complex. On March 4, 2005, the Irish magazine Aldea published an article titled "The Kidnappings Through Shannon" where it stated that Dublin and Shannon airports in Ireland were "used by the CIA to kidnap suspects in their war on terror."

On November 2, 2005, journalist Dana Priest published a serious denunciation in the Washington Post of November 2, 2005 under the title "The CIA takes terrorism suspects to secret prisons" The article claimed the existence of clandestine, extraterritorial CIA interrogation sites which revealed the existence of "Black Sites" and sparked a global debate about their existence. Dana Priest revealed the existence of 750 Guantánamo detainees in military custody, and that the CIA carried out detentions of approximately 30 senior members of the leadership of Al Qaeda, Taliban and approximately 100 infantry soldiers in its own facilities around the world. .

While media outlets such as the Washington Post and The Guardian carried out these complaints, human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International denounced secret prisons managed by the CIA, flights chartered by the CIA to transport prisoners, and provided testimonies from former inmates. of the "black sites". On August 13, 2007, Jane Mayer published in The New Yorker that the CIA had operated "black sites" under direct presidential order from George W. Bush since shortly after 9/11, and that torture was used. On October 4, 2007, The New York Times reported that shortly after Alberto Gonzales became Attorney General in February 2005, the Justice Department issued a secret ruling that for the first time provided the CIA with explicit authorization to torture. to terrorism suspects.

Complaints against the Patriot Act regime also began in Europe. A June 2006 report from the Council of Europe estimated that 100 people had been kidnapped by the CIA on EU territory with the collaboration of members of the European Council, and that these detainees had been handed over to other countries after having passed through the clandestine detention centers used by the CIA. In February 2007, the European Parliament report alleged that the CIA had carried out 1,245 flights, many of them to destinations where suspects could face torture, in violation of Article 3 of the UN Convention.

In November 2005, the Spanish newspaper El País reported that CIA planes had landed in the Canary Islands and Palma de Mallorca, while the prosecutor at the Bobigny court in France opened an investigation to verify the presence in the airport of a plane in Le Bourget that was used to transport CIA prisoners to the Guantánamo Detention Camp. On June 5, 2013, journalist Glenn Greenwald helped break the story of the FISA court's secret order to Verizon to provide the National Security Agency with telephone records of all calls between the US and abroad, as well as all domestic calls.

Greenwald has an extensive history of reporting, initially from his blog called "Unclaimed Territory" and then with various media outlets such as Salon.com, The Guardian, and his own publication, The Intercept, along with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill. Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who has won numerous awards for reporting civil rights violations, had full access in 2013, along with Glenn Greenwald, to the files of the NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Edward Snowden. What led Snowden to contact Greenwald and Poitras was a Salon.com article written by Greenwald in which she explained how Poitras' documentaries had made her a "government target ." Greenwald suffered persecution, and his partner David Miranda was detained in 2013 by London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) for nine hours, the maximum allowed by law, under Schedule 7 of the Counter-Terrorism Act 2000.

That same year, Greenwald testified before Brazil's National Congress that the US government had used the fight against terrorism as a pretext for clandestine surveillance. Also that year Greenwald defended Snowden's case before the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of the European Parliament, and denounced that the United Kingdom, through its interception of submarine fiber optic cables, is the main threat to the privacy of citizens. Europeans, with regard to the use of telephones and emails, in a joint work carried out by the NSA, together with its subordinate junior partner, the British agency GCHQ, and denounces both Democrats and Republicans in their actions.

On February 5, 2007, Portugal's Attorney General Cándida Almeida announced an investigation prompted by complaints from MEP Ana Gomes on January 26, 2007, who reported that illegal flights were frequently allowed during the Durao Barroso governments in the period 2002-2004 and Santana Lopes during the period 2004-2005. Approximately 150 CIA flights have been identified as having flown through Portugal. The European Parliament report concluded that many European countries tolerated illegal actions by the CIA, including secret flights in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The fight against the Patriot Act regime goes global

The Bush Administration was already mired in a serious political crisis that worsened when Alberto R. Gonzales announced his resignation as Attorney General of the United States on August 27, 2007, motivated by scandals surrounding espionage, the controversial dismissal of nine prosecutors and the allegations of torture in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. On July 28, 2007, President Bush announced that his administration had submitted a bill to Congress to amend the 1978 FISA law, suggesting that it was "very outdated" and did not apply to disposable cell phones and newer Internet-based technologies. This new bill addressed these new technologies, and called for Congress to approve the legislation before its August 2007 recess, stating that "every day Congress postpones reforms increases the danger to our nation." The law was signed by President Bush as the "Protect America Act " eliminated the requirement of a FISA warrant for any communication, including telephone communications "without the order or supervision of a court", whereby the law opened the door to domestic espionage.

The ACLU called it the "America's Police Act ", and the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the forces that defended democratic rights within the country, were joined by those who defended those rights internationally, so the fight was strengthened globally with new organizations that joined the confrontation with the Patriot Act regime throughout the world. In December 2006, WikiLeaks emerged and began publishing anonymous reports and leaked documents on its website with a database that grew to accumulate 1.2 million documents. Its creator Julian Assange, Australian programmer, journalist, hacker and activist, had to request refuge on June 19, 2012 at the embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in London, accused of leaking documents from security agencies and collaborating with terrorism. But WikiLeaks helped understand the horrors of the Patriot Act regime when it released a video of the July 12, 2007, airstrike on Baghdad that shows U.S. soldiers shooting Reuters reporter Namir Noor-Eldeen and aide of the.

WikiLeaks made public the "Iraq War Logs" (in Spanish, Iraq War Documents) in October 2010 with 391,831 documents that were leaked from the Pentagon between January 1, 2004 and December 31, 2009, denouncing in them the systematic use of torture, the death toll constituting one of the largest leaks of classified documents in history. Wikileaks continued its campaign of denunciations and leaked files and emails from the private intelligence and espionage agency, the Stratfor company, in February 2012, known as "The Stratfor Files." In the face of WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks, it moved its information to Amazon's cloud computing servers.

But China blocked cyber links to the WikiLeaks site on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 over the possibility of revelations of US diplomatic cables sent by the US embassies to Seoul and Beijing, referring to North Korea. On December 1, Amazon, under pressure from Senator Joe Liberman, stopped hosting WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks responded via Twitter that if Amazon was against the First Amendment it should stop selling books. On December 2, 2010, the company EveryDNS terminated the contract with WikiLeaks, cutting off its access, while French Minister Eric Besson asked OVH to stop hosting the WikiLeaks portal.

On December 3, 2010, a reform of the SHIELD law (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination) was carried out, the Espionage Act that prohibits the publication of classified information on encrypted secrets or international intelligence communications. On December 4, 2010, PayPal canceled the account it had with WikiLeaks, through which the organization obtained funding in the form of donations, and on December 6, MasterCard announced that it would not accept its system as a means of payment to WikiLeaks. while that same day PostFinance-Swiss Postal also blocked the possibility of donations or payments to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks was being persecuted by the US government, the French government, the Chinese government, the US Parliament, the Pentagon, and was also receiving boycotts from companies such as Pay Pal, Amazon, PostFinance-Swiss Postal and Mastercard. On December 6, in defense of WikiLeaks, the Internet group Anonnymus launched Operation Payback of cyberattacks against PostFinance and PayPal, which were joined by VISA on December 7, which withdrew the ability to make donations or payments to WikiLeaks. In response on December 8, the Icelandic company Data Cell that managed payments to WikiLeaks decided to take immediate legal action to make the donations possible. On December 9, 2010, Twitter canceled the account of one of the WikiLeaks support groups, Anonymous, and then Facebook removed the Operation Payback page in defense of WikiLeaks.

The digital war had undoubtedly begun and the battle in defense of democratic freedoms had moved from the streets, newspapers, and mass media to social networks and the Internet. On December 10, 2010, Anonymous decided to modify its strategy and decided to disclose the WikiLeaks leaks, the Reykjavík District Court ruled in favor of those who wanted to make donations to WikiLeaks against the company Valitor, which had blocked Visa and MasterCard payments. The battle continued and everyone positioned themselves on each side of the trench, for example the former Vietnam veteran Daniel Ellsberg who released the Pentagons Papers in 1971 strongly supported Wikileaks, as did the president of Veterans for Peace, Mike Ferner, the documentary filmmaker John Pilger, as well as the controversial Republican congressman from Texas Ron Paul, who was the first American politician to publicly express himself in favor of the founder of WikiLeaks.

On December 9, 2010, the then president of Brazil Lula da Silva defended WikiLeaks and opposed the arrest of Julian Assange. On July 25, 2010, the newspapers The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel made public a set of some 92,000 documents in relation to the War in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009, and on May 20, 2013, protests broke out. global denunciations by Edward Snowden that highlighted the consequences that the passage of the Patriot Act has not only within the United States, but throughout the world. The revelations, the appearance of Wikileaks, and denunciations such as those of Edward Snowden, brought to mind the denunciations of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo known as the " Pentagon Papers." WikiLeaks was not alone in its fight against the Patriot Act regime and the PNAC, but the resistance had become global.

Immigrant mobilizations break out

As if the problems facing the Bush Administration were few, the Latino uprising broke out at the end of March and beginning of April 2006. On May 1, 2006, hundreds of thousands of protesters paraded in the country's large cities to oppose the bill HR3447, by Congressmen Sensenbrenner-King, which had been approved by the House of Representatives. The bill represented a major attack on the rights of Latino immigrants, which provoked anger and protest and unleashed a broad protest movement in the North American territory that had not been seen for several decades with huge demonstrations.

For example, in California there were mobilizations never seen before in the history of the state with more than a million people, accompanied by marches of 50,000 people in other states like Denver, and 20,000 in Phoenix, which was also the largest demonstration in the history of the state. from Arizona. Thousands more marched in places as far away as Charlotte, Milwaukee, Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Chicago, with energetic marches full of enthusiasm, composed mostly of workers. The Sensenbrenner-King Bill proposed harsh measures against the employment of undocumented workers, against immigration, and proposed the construction of a wall nearly 700 miles long.

Latino immigrants erupted throughout the country denouncing that the law was racist, that it criminalized those who cross the border, the workers and the immense Latino people. The HR3447 Sensenbrenner-King Act highlighted a new fact of reality in the country's political life. In the United States there had been an enormous, historic demographic change.

While in 1950 the community of Hispanic origin had a population that did not exceed 1%, in 2006 it had risen to 14% with more than 48 million people. Today the Latin population of the country is already 15% with a constant rate of growth, which is on its way to becoming 25% of the population in 2050. The Anglo-Saxon population, which was 80% of the total population in 1950, It is being reduced to 60%, while the other 40% is being made up of minorities: 15% of Latinos, 14% of African Americans and 10% of Asians and other racial sectors. In turn, Latinos have displaced African Americans from second place in terms of minorities, which makes them a political actor of increasing importance.

Numerous business, executive, and government management positions in mayors, city councils, and governorships are increasingly occupied by Latinos. But also, the composition of the working class in the United States has undergone a great change in recent decades. Due to demographic change, in 1970, only 5.2% of workers were immigrants. But in 1990 this figure had already risen to 8.8%, and by 2011 it reached 16.2%, not only an increasingly important percentage, but also the most combative, by one of the most exploited and oppressed sectors of the society.

This is what the Sensenbrenner-King law revealed, in the same path of confrontation and subjugation of minorities that the Bush Administration had indicated as a political strategy, but which was responded forcefully by the Latino masses. This fact added a new component to the popular mobilization, if in the 60's and 70's the mobilization united the people, the African-American movement, youth and women, now Latinos were incorporated as an active subject of the mobilization, and a revolutionary factor. In April 2006, a simultaneous mobilization took place in 40 cities throughout the country. 

The unions had not had a consistent policy of inclusion towards immigrants, but in 2003 the first important immigrant march was held, organized by the HERE union, and supported by the AFL-CIO headquarters and other unions. The most important demonstration of forces, however, took place on May 1, 2006, the day when millions of immigrants throughout the country took to the streets and made their claim.

A few months after these mobilizations, dangerous movements began in the financial system, because from the very beginning, in the first months of 2007, several investment funds and Multinational Corporations began to suffer serious financial problems, and began to feel the threat of the bankruptcy. The lack of funds to respond to its obligations was a product of the fall of sub-prime, bad loans, which began to hit banks and investment funds mercilessly but spread to all papers, debts, assets and derivatives of the world. After the bursting of the technological bubble at the beginning of the 21st century, between 2000 and 2001 the economy entered a recession, and the Bush Administration's strategy had been to relaunch the economy and reactivate consumption and production through credit. In this case, an enormous flow of capital was established around real estate credit, a strategy of the Bush Administration that caused a great real estate bubble, based on the home construction industry.

But the purchase and sale of housing for speculative purposes was accompanied by high leverage, that is, credit that was added to other credits to continue making speculative maneuvers. Speculators bought houses again with a new mortgage, when both operations were not financed through a bridge mortgage. The market brought great benefits to investors, and contributed to an increase in real estate prices, and, therefore, debt. The housing construction stampede caused an excessive rise in all prices of cement, wood, metallurgy, transportation, as well as all the materials and supplies necessary for construction.

But the rise of the industry was based on cheaper Latin labor, which allows a higher rate of exploitation and profit for companies. That is why the fight of Latinos against the Sensenbrenner-King Law was of critical importance when analyzing the political situation of the country, and the situation of the world capitalist economy. The struggle of Latinos complicated things for the businesses of large companies, because it questioned a law that sought to limit the rights of Latinos to benefit large companies that could hire Latino labor unlimitedly, increasing their profits. The emergence of the Latin insurrection put an end to the plans of large companies, and the Sensenbrenner-King Law was frozen.

The speculative bubble rose until 2004 when the United States Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates to control inflation, and from that year until 2006 the interest rate went from 1% to 5.25%. House price growth was spectacular between 2001 and 2005, but in August 2005 the house price and sales rate fell abruptly. Foreclosures due to non-payment of debt grew dramatically, and numerous entities began to have problems returning money to investors or receiving financing from lenders.

The total number of foreclosures in 2006 amounted to 1,200,000, which led to fifty mortgage entities going bankrupt within a year. By 2006, the real estate crisis had already spread to the stock market: the US Home Construction Index fell 40%. In 2007, the problem of subprime mortgage debt began to contaminate international financial markets, becoming a major international crisis that affected numerous companies. This was the case of New Century, Bear Sterns, Blackstone, National City Home Equity, the IKB of Germany and the BNP Paribas of France, immediately interbank credit, one of the most important institutions of capitalism, and the entire financial system collapsed. world, with different rhythms and inequalities, went bankrupt. This situation forced the central banks to intervene jointly, the Federal Reserve (Fed), the European Central Bank (ECB), the Bank of Japan (BoJ) and the Bank of England (BoE), which began to implement bailouts, an intervention that From there it became chronic and permanent, but it also marked the beginning of one of the most important political events of the 21st century: The global crisis of capitalism.

The outbreak of the acute peak of the global crisis of capitalism

Faced with the outbreak of the crisis, President George W. Bush declared that the foundations of the economy remained solid, but the banks did not listen to him, they did not lend each other more money; or they did so reluctantly, at very high rates, due to mutual distrust. The Bank of England saved Northern Rock whose clients withdrew 3,000 million euros in one weekend, the Swiss bank UBS announced losses of 3,400 million US$, Merrill Lynch for 7,900 million US$, Citigroup for 3,100 million US$ , and Morgan Stanley for US$9 billion, in addition to the sale of 10% of its shares to the Chinese government. The crisis globally affected all the economies of the entire world, in Spain its own real estate bubble collapsed, in Iceland and Ireland the banks collapsed, the British bank Barclays lost assets of 1,818 million euros, the Swiss insurer Swiss Re announced losses of 733 million euros, the British bank Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) announced bad debts for 1,737 million euros.

The global bankruptcy affected interbank credit, credit in general, and the collapse of interest rates affected the process of capital circulation, vital for the functioning of capitalism, similar to the process of blood circulation in the human organism. The interest rate, an expression of the rate of profit, collapsed since the beginning of the crisis and remains at extremely low levels. The central banks tried through bailouts to revive the capital circulation process, but the damage was immense. 2007 closed with a serious disruption of the process of expanded reproduction and capital circulation, which prepared the conditions for the heart attacks that occurred in the capitalist system in 2008 when the heart of capitalism collapsed.

Between March and September, the Investment Banks began to fail. In March, Bear Stearns, which had survived the Wall Street crash of 1929, was the " most admired" in Fortune's rankings, but had debts in the billions and a leverage ratio of 35.5 to 1. The Fed gave a loan to JP Morgan to buy Bear, but the subprime crisis continued to deepen. The Association of Mortgage Banks revealed that the number of defaults was 6 million contracts for 600,000 million US$. House prices fell 8.9%, the biggest drop in 20 years. The Mortgage Bankers Association raised the social gravity of unprecedented magnitude in US history: the executions and expulsions of families who lost their homes reached a record level in history.

After Bear's bankruptcy, the largest bailout in US history occurred, with state funds the giant mortgage conglomerates Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were rescued. Fannie Mae is the popular name for the Federal National Mortgage Association, created in 1938 under the Roosevelt administration. Freddie Mac is the Federal Residential Mortgage Loan Corporation created in 1970. Both managed a volume of US$5 billion, equivalent to the GDP of Latin America, with more than 50% of the mortgages in the country.

The bankruptcy of the two mortgage credit giants threatened Sovereign Bank, Pimco, the largest fixed-income fund manager in the world, the State of China, and numerous Central Banks and Sovereign Investment Funds linked to the mortgage giants. The Bush Administration invested billions of dollars in the purchase of shares of Fannie and Freddie through a multimillion-dollar bailout plan designed by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) James Lockhart, the advisors delegates from both mortgage companies and the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson.

The tranquility produced by the intervention in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae lasted a week, because on September 15 a complete economic earthquake occurred: the investment bank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Lehman had weathered the Civil War and the Great Depression but was riddled with debt and lost 73% of its value. His fall was of such importance that many analysts consider that day as the beginning of the crisis. The fall of Lehman was a blow to world trade because it issued hundreds of billions of dollars in short-term debt, a fundamental pinion in trade that is short-term credits, 30 days, 60 and 90 days. Lehman's papers acted as lubricant and fuel for commerce, but without Lehman, they went into a tailspin. World trade came to a grinding halt, and at the end of 2008 it contracted by 40%.

After the collapse of Lehman, the bankruptcy of American International Group (AIG), the world's largest insurer, occurred after the collapse of its CDS (credit default swaps) market for credit risk derivatives. AIG offered advice on sophisticated tax evasion techniques because the conglomerate is closely linked to offshore financial centers, or "tax havens" The US took control of almost 80% of AIG's shares and Nouriel Roubini ironically: "...with the nationalization of AIG...the United States is now the world's largest insurance company...socialism for the rich...Wall Street, the place where profits are privatized and losses socialized" (3) 

After the bankruptcy of AIG came the starring role of Washington Mutual. Until 2008, the largest bank collapse in North American history had been the fall of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust in 1984. But it paled compared to the one led by Washington Mutual, known as WaMu, the largest savings bank association. largest bank in the country with a history of 119 years, became the largest bank failure in history. If Lehman had an impact on commerce, Fannie and Freddie on credit and AIG on insurance, Washington Mutual did so on commercial banking, and WaMu sold deposits and subsidiaries to JP Morgan Chase, an operation that unleashed all kinds of suspicions because for the second time For the first time in six months, JP Morgan Chase took over deposits and assets of a financial institution, making it the largest bank in the country.

Until that moment, the policy of the Bush Administration, the G7 governments and their Central Banks was to come to the aid of multinationals and corporations to the extent that they required financial assistance and were heading or directly declaring bankruptcy. This policy of "random rescues", putting out the fires that occurred in Europe, the US and Japan as they occurred, began to prove insufficient. To face a crisis of that magnitude, larger operations were necessary, so between the months of September and October 2008 the first coordinated and global rescue process took place, and with this policy the "random" rescue stage ended . .

The stage of coordinated and global bailouts began with the Emergency Economic Stabilization Law of 10/3/08 (in English, "The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act 110-343 "), which implied a bailout in the amount of US$7 billion. S prepared by the Secretary of the Treasury of the Bush Administration , Henry Paulson together with the president of the Fed Ben Bernanke and agreed with the largest banks in the country. The bailout included the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), aimed at purchasing troubled securities with the aim of strengthening banks, recovering credit and reviving the flow of capital. Europe, Japan, China and the BRIC'S followed in the footsteps of the US, the Federal Reserve (FED) and Wall Street set the orientation that all countries adopted.

The EU and the ECB had to put out the fires that threatened all the most important Multinational Corporations. These measures were risky, but motivated by even greater risks: if some of these countries declared bankruptcy, they could cause the collapse of creditor banks such as UBS of Switzerland, the Austrian bank Raiffeisen, Commerzbank AG, Deutsche Bank of Germany or France's BNP Paribas.

There was also the case of countries that sought to become financial havens and suffered a shock from currency leaks, such as Ireland or Iceland, whose stock market sank 76% after being closed for a few days. The hit of the crisis in China forced Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to promote a bailout that reached the figure of 5 billion US$, with the central objective of developing public works and credits to reactivate the economy. The shock suffered by China due to the decline in its exports resulted in the closure of factories in the south of the country and the destruction of thousands of jobs. Growth went from 11.4% in 2007 to 9% in 2008, and the Chinese bailout was transformed into a powerful real estate bubble.

The crisis made it possible to corroborate the central role that the United States maintains as the global protector of capitalism. The dollar and Treasury Bonds became the main refuges against the global meltdown, despite the fact that the crisis broke out in the heart of the US economy. The dollar strengthened because it began to be demanded by US banks. around the world, and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) assessed that the dollar came to represent 55% of assets and liabilities, more than 70% of reserves, 80% of transactions, 70% of imports and almost all oil trade in the world. At the same time that Russia, Brazil, India, South Korea and Taiwan began to lead the world's accumulation of dollar reserves, this currency became, according to the BIS definition, the " favorite currency of central banks."

At the most acute and dramatic peak of the crisis, nothing more quickly refuted the groups of intellectuals and analysts who began to propose the thesis of the "loss of US hegemony", the exclusive fact of reality is that in the midst of the biggest crisis in the history of capitalism and the US economy, the only thing that strengthened was the dollar. All G7 countries, and most of the backward countries, ran to shelter and protect their dollar reserves and US Treasury assets. The demand for the dollar in the midst of the crisis is the clearest sign that large companies, countries and capitalist powers consider the United States with its 7 fleets, its military dominance and arms power as the greatest guarantor of last resort of capitalism, compared to any eventuality that calls it into question.

On November 14 and 15, the G20 met in Washington, an organization that, although it existed since 1999, became an important instrument of the actions of capitalist governments together with the G7 that imposed the global line of bailout, of giving money to multinationals. and Investment Banks, adding words of commitment in the final document, such as " establishing financial regulation standards" , that is, establishing controls on unbridled speculation, an issue that ultimately never happened. The G20 consolidated US dominance, consolidated bailouts as a policy to save multinationals and corporations at any price.

The G20 in Washington included the incorporation of minor capitalist countries such as China, Brazil, India, Russia, Australia and South Africa into decision-making, which is a distorted expression of the blow that the imperialist countries suffered and the historical degree of the magnitude of the crisis of capitalism, which forced the G7 governments to appeal to the support of backward countries to move forward with their plans.

The fall of Bush and the PNAC

The political disaster of the Bush Administration and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) began to affect not only the political situation in the United States, but also the world situation. It ushered in a global crisis of capitalism of historic magnitude that continues to unfold to this day. The fall of the PNAC strategy and the Patriot Act regime was a revolution, the IV North American Revolution of the 21st Century. And but the most reliable, palpable and irrefutable proof that the fall of the PNAC was the Fourth North American Revolution, was the outbreak of a global crisis of capitalism of a magnitude only comparable to the crash of '29 that shook Wall Street and the capitalist world. then.

The Bush Administration came to the end of its mandate due to a political agreement that sustained its permanence in power. It was impossible for it to be sustained in the midst of such enormous discredit, liquidated by the events of the class struggle, both worldwide and within the United States. In the Middle East, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mobilizations liquidated the PNAC. Inside the country they prevented the establishment of the Patriot Act regime. But the most critical moment erupted right at the time of the 2008 presidential campaigns.

The crisis of capitalism broke out right in the middle of the final stretch of the presidential elections. The disastrous Bush administration posed a heavy burden for whoever was nominated by the Republican party, an assessment for which Vice President Cheney did not run for president and George Bush himself was absent from the campaign of his party's candidates, so as not to contaminate them with their bad reputation. So serious was the crisis of the Republican Party that one of the fundamental concerns of the Republican candidate John McCain, who was nominated as a presidential candidate, was having to distance himself from the Bush Administration. During the campaign McCain fled from the public support of the visible heads of the Bush Administration, because given the deep discredit in which the officials found themselves, they took away votes from him.

Barack Obama's candidacy was promoted by the Democratic Party with the aim of diverting the profound rise of masses that had been unleashed in the country and containing popular discontent. With the slogan "Change" and the arrival of an African American to power, he gave the "appearance" of the arrival of a sector of the oppressed to power. Obama's candidacy never questioned capitalism, rather it was presented with the objective of acting as a last trench of defense against the rise and workers' and popular demands, and as such, it presented the features of a popular government alternative that the US ruling classes could offer at that time. Barak Hussein Obama II, was the son of an American mother and a Kenyan father, and when he became a presidential candidate on June 3, 2008, defeating Senator Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, the United States was for the first time in history the doors of having a black president, a racial minority that just a few decades before suffered the ridicule of racial segregation, and that continued to be a victim of racism.

On August 27, 2008, Obama was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for the presidential elections, after which he began a tour of Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Sectors of the poorest sections of the population, Latinos, African Americans, immigrants, and humble workers were attracted and mobilized around his candidacy. Prominent members of " progressive " think-thanks such as David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and David Plouffe collaborated in the design of the campaign , which marked another difference from what had been experienced until now in the country: The Think-thank Neocons were now outside of track, and think-thanks made their entrance on the scene, designing a campaign with a political and social background, based on the economic crisis, war, social inequality, racism, migration, social security and the role of women .

In this last strategy, Michelle Obama played a fundamental role, printing her campaign as a candidate for African-American first lady, attempting to give the image of representing the most oppressed women, women, all of which was combined with an efficient and innovative system of use of social networks and the Internet, which until then had not been an important factor in political technology. The campaign website was created in ten days and managed to attract millions of followers, but it also used Facebook and Myspace in a way never seen before in an electoral campaign, achieving an electronic contact list of more than 13 million people. The Facebook page attracted three million people and MyBarackObama.com had 2 million more people, in addition, more than 2,000 YouTube videos were posted that were viewed more than 15 million times.

Not only in terms of the use of social networks, the 2008 electoral campaign was innovative, but it also presented changes in the structure of political forces with the emergence of the Tea Party, which reached a very important position in the Republican campaign when Sarah was chosen. Palin, the governor of Alaska, as a vice presidential candidate. The Tea Party was a regrouping of the right, and the extreme right, a remnant of the Neocon, which presented itself as a wing of the Republican Party, a radicalized right-wing movement that presented itself under the name of the Boston movements against the British Empire. in the origins of the country, but that in reality marked a political change in the reorganization of the right-wing political forces. ​

Barack Obama's election campaign fundraising broke previous records on several occasions and changed expectations for future presidential elections. The slogan that ran through the entire campaign was "Change We Can Believe In" or (in Spanish, "Cambio en el Que Podemos Creer" ) , and several artists joined the campaign such as Joss Stone, Will.I.Am, Black Eyed Peas, Jennifer Aniston, Leonardo Di Caprio, Eva Longoria, Maxwell D, Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey, as well as traditional political families such as the Kennedys and the Carters.

On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States, sparking multiple celebrations in the United States and around the world with nearly 53% of the popular vote and 365 electoral votes. . Obama was also the president who received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, with a total of more than 69 million votes. Dick Cheney, vice president of the Bush Administration and president of the Senate, together with Nancy Pelosi as president of the Chamber of Deputies, certified the votes of the 2008 presidential election on January 8, 2009, a procedure through which he officially declared that Obama had been elected as President and Biden as the Vice President of the United States. They were the elections until that moment considered the most expensive in history according to the president of the Federal Election Commission Michel Toner, who estimated that to be taken seriously, a candidate would need to raise at least 100 million dollars.

A government of Global Corporations

The economic crisis and the outbreak of the crisis of capitalism began to hit the country and the world hard. Before the winner of the presidential elections was known, there had been meetings between officials of the Bush Administration and the candidates McCain and Obama to take the first emergency measures in the face of the unleashed crisis, and what these measures left is that the priority of the Bush and Obama governments was to save the Global Corporations. The bailouts and billions of dollars injected into the coffers of Global Corporations were made in agreement between the outgoing Bush Administration and the incoming Obama Administration, together with the Republican candidate McCain. A government of the Global Corporations had left, and another government of the Multinational Corporations had arrived, although with a different speech, but with the same objective.

But at the same time, the outbreak of the crisis showed a profound change that had occurred in capitalism: The dominance that Global Corporations have over the world economy. The owners of the world economy are now Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, etc. and over the decades there had been the transition from multinationals to Multinational Corporations, and the enthronement of the latter as the most important companies in the history of capitalism. In the regime of globalization, a new Form of Accumulation was consolidated, multinational corporations, which constitute a process of centralization and capital accumulation superior to modern post-war multinationals.

If the characteristic of modern post-war multinationals was the dominance of a branch of production on a global scale, multinational corporations are a superior Form of Accumulation because they monopolize several branches simultaneously, which allows them to achieve capital accumulation greater than that achieved modern post-war multinationals.

In turn, the dominance over various branches of production, commerce and finance that multinational corporations achieved was the product of a convulsive process of mergers and acquisitions (M&A, Merger and Acquisitions), which increasingly developed. starting in the '80s. M&A are the purchase and sale of companies, commercial movements that express deep clashes between sectors of the imperialist bourgeoisie among themselves, with bourgeois class sectors of backward countries and the workers and people of the world. The strongest sectors liquidate the weakest, as part of a tough and stark battle for control of markets and capital.

The colossal over-accumulation of capital that this new Form of Accumulation represents, caused a spectacular development of speculative and fictitious capital, a colossal over-accumulation, the largest produced by capitalism ever, currently consisting of almost 700 billion U$S in derivative financial products. registered by the Bank of Basel in mid-2008, but adding other speculative businesses, which reaches a financial mass that would exceed US$ 1,000 billion.

Fictitious capital in the period 2000-2009 took a monumental leap and grew 10 times from 95 trillion US$ to 1000 trillion US$, equivalent to around 10 times the world GDP. When we talk about fictitious capital, we are referring to a concept used for the first time by Marx, when he referred to securities for loans whose value is imaginary and illusory and only materializes when they are exchanged for money or goods. The credit created by the banks is the creation of fictitious capital because they make available money that they do not have: "...Not only is the majority of the banks' assets fictitious, since it is composed of securities and this type of wealth in money imaginary...As interest capital and the credit system develop, the entire capital seems to double and sometimes triple...The greater part of this money-capital is purely fictitious. All deposits with the exception of the reserve fund, do not They are more than balances in the banker's power, but they never exist in deposit." (14)

The process of capital centralization took a gigantic leap in 20 years. By 2002, 200 transnational companies out of 65,000 concentrated 30% of the world's GDP, and 91% of the 500 largest are from the US, Europe and Japan. Multinational Corporations had begun to emerge in the 1980s with the governments of Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in the United States. To the extent that they began to take control of the world economy, they consolidated unevenly and combined a new regime of accumulation that we can call "neoliberalism", "globalization", or "New Economy". It is a regime of accumulation diametrically opposed to the Keynesian one in which there were relative economic concessions to the masses.

Globalization meant a violent economic, political and military counteroffensive against the masses of the entire world, to impose low wages, deregulation, privatization, dismantling of workers' and popular conquests, at the same time as a recolonization of backward countries by capitalist powers. The offensive of the governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in England paved the way for the emergence of Multinational Corporations, the accumulation regime of globalization and the development of telecommunications and information technology as a pole of accumulation, made possible the emergence of a new axis of accumulation in California, called the "Silicon Valley". The term refers to the geographic space that encompasses the southern part of the San Francisco Bay, the Santa Clara Valley, and cities such as San José, Palo Alto, and Menlo Park. In this space, a hub of ventures related to the technology industry, computing and the Internet was formed, which constituted the hub of globalization accumulation.

In globalization there was no sustained "boom" of the economy for several decades as in the Keynesian regime, but rather there were alternating periods of growth and decline. The growth stage of the globalization regime was the decade of the '90s, although within the framework of a general decreasing trend and serious turbulence, imbalances and imbalances in the economy, which were the product of a spectacular growth of financial and parasitic capital. . In globalization the accumulation pole changed, the old industries that were the pole in the Keynesian regime were displaced, which created a new accumulation pole around the telecommunications, information technology, biogenetics and pharmaceutical industries. If the automobile was the base commodity of the Keynesian regime, the computer was the base commodity of globalization.

The accumulation term also changed, which became the US-China and Southeast. The development of Japan, the "tigers" and the "boom" of China, caused that starting in the mid-1990s, the center of world trade began to shift from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. In 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was created, which incorporated China, and implied a set of regulations that favored Multinational Corporations such as intellectual property, patents on technological advances, the payment of royalties, the establishment of subsidies and settlement facilities for corporations in countries, regions, municipalities and states where they were tax-free, with labor standards more favorable to the pursuit of profits

The exponential development of fictitious capital represented by multinational corporations has caused capital from diverse origins, from tax havens and organized crime, to rotate and circulate in an increasingly accelerated and convulsive manner, causing serious turbulence and imbalances in the economy. It was precisely on December 5, 1996 that Alan Greenspan, president of the Fed, described this speculative explosion of capitalism by saying that there was an " irrational exuberance" in the markets, as a way he found to describe the serious imbalances that overvalued financial assets were causing. to the extent that megamergers and M&A are not a natural or spontaneous process, but driven by the ambitious heads of the world economy.

The explosion of dot-coms in 2000 opened the crisis in the basic industrial branch of globalization, information technology. After the bubble burst, 4,854 companies disappeared, and the global recession of the years 2000-2003 began, which already expressed the process of exhaustion of multinational corporations as a form of accumulation and of globalization as a regime of accumulation. The enormous masses of fictitious capital had produced a fall in the rate of profit, an accelerated process of devaluation of the economy, but not in globalization were the post-war growth rates reached.

The reason why the economy could not achieve the growth rates in globalization that it did achieve in the Keynesian regime was the result of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Presented as an event that favored capitalism, and like the end of socialism, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a serious blow to capitalism and globalization. When the Wall fell, the governments of the capitalist powers and the Stalinist regimes of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba and Southeast Asia worked in partnership, advancing a brutal exploitative offensive and jointly renewing the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. . But the popular mobilization that overthrew the pro-capitalist dictatorships of those countries hindered the joint plans of the powers.

At the same time, the chain of popular uprisings deepened and after the Stalinist collapse in the countries of Eastern Europe, came the collapse of the dictatorships in the USSR and in the republics under its orbit. The consequences for capitalism were very important, because after the fall of the Berlin Wall the conditions that had allowed the super-exploitation of the European and German working class changed. A fundamental condition to facilitate the exploitation of European and German workers in the postwar period was to maintain their division with the Wall. Its collapse allowed a process of unification of the powerful European and German working class, among the most qualified, concentrated, with the greatest social achievements and with the highest cultural level in the world.

In turn, the oppressed nationalities that had been put under the boot of imperialist domination in the post-war period began a process of liberation, which swept away the borders of Yalta and Potsdam. Thanks to the Stalinist leaders who fell after 1989, imperialism had managed to survive the defeats of Vietnam, China, and Korea, and had been able to continue its systematic destruction of productive forces. He had transformed those political defeats into even greater hardships for the masses, which allowed large profits for multinationals. But after the fall of the wall, these leaders of the "official world left", who had provided great services to capitalism, no longer had that power.

The postwar "world order" fell, and the "new world order " actually resulted in terrible "disorder" for the capitalist powers. This is the explanation why in globalization, capitalism failed to match the economic successes of the Keynesian regime. The fall of the Berlin Wall prevented globalization from having a global political agreement of the stature of Yalta and Potsdam, those agreements that allowed the post-war "boom" were liquidated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and with them, The economic and political order that supported the world economy for more than 40 years fell. The fall of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements that had allowed the "boom" was a strategic blow for capitalism.

Now, the inauguration of the Bush Administration coincided with the exhaustion of the globalization regime. The bailouts of billions of dollars injected into the coffers of Multinational Corporations, agreed between the outgoing Bush Administration and the incoming Obama Administration showed that beyond differences in style and forms, speeches and faces, the Obama Administration was a government of the Global Corporations, which left behind another government of the Global Corporations. The Bush Administration's strategy had failed and put all Global Corporations on the brink of bankruptcy, but the Obama Administration had exactly the same objective. In view of the collapse of Global Corporations, the exhaustion of globalization, and the outbreak of the global peak in the global crisis of capitalism, it is necessary to evaluate the meaning of the political and social events that imply the fall of the PNAC, and the defeat of the strategic project of the Bush Administration.

The fall of the PNAC and the triumph of the IV American Revolution

The fall of the PNAC strategy and the Patriot Act regime was a revolution, the IV North American Revolution of the 21st Century. The most reliable, palpable and irrefutable proof that the fall of the PNAC was the Fourth North American Revolution, was the outbreak of a global crisis of capitalism of a magnitude only comparable to the crash of '29 that shook Wall Street and the capitalist world at that time. The Fourth American Revolution had erased the PNAC, the Patriot Act regime, the Bush Administration, and NATO in Iraq from the map, and had made an enormous global revolutionary process flourish, which shook the capitalist world from its foundations, and had now caused the outbreak of a sharp peak of crisis.

The resignation of Donald Rumsfeld and the establishment of the Hamilton-Baker parliamentary Commission were the end of the Bush Administration, and marked the end of the entire political-social experiment that they built after the 9/11 attacks. The PNAC had It had been extensively developed in neoconservative laboratories and think tanks, but its fall was made possible by an enormous national and international mobilization that liquidated the Bush Administration's plans. This enormous mobilization covered entire continents, and was the trigger for all the political, social and economic changes that today affect the world political situation.

The defeat of the Patriot Act regime and the victory of the global resistance against it are the IV American Revolution of the 21st Century. Why do we define the fall of the PNAC and the Patriot Act regime as a revolution? Several elements define a revolution, but there are 2 features that are central. The first feature that defines a revolution is the partial or total irruption of mass sectors in the political process, as defined by all revolutionaries, analysts and historians such as Leon Trotsky: "The most indisputable characteristic feature of revolutions is the direct intervention of the masses in historical events" (4)

The American Revolution of the 21st century involved a formidable process of national and international mobilization, in which several processes developed simultaneously: On the one hand, the fight for the truth of the relatives of the victims of 9/11, which began as soon as the removal of rubble began. at Ground Zero, which placed the claim of "The Whole Truth about 9/11" at the center . Along with this, a global anti-war movement broke out that triggered gigantic mobilizations on all 5 continents, especially in Europe. These mobilizations, the most important since the Vietnam War, took place along the same path as the anti-war movements led by the families of the soldiers who fell in Iraq.

At the same time, the mobilization of African Americans against the brutal racism demonstrated by the Bush Administration with New Orleans was in full development, after the passage of Hurricane Katrina, and the battle of New Orleans moved the entire African American community, and awakened national solidarity. and international around it. At the same time, the battle of the movements in defense of democratic rights and civil liberties was also taking place, which presented various chapters, some of which were judicial battles such as Hamdam vs. Rumsfeld led by organizations such as the ACLU, or others such as the global denunciations of Wikileaks, or the denunciations of Edward Snowden, which shook world public opinion.

Added to all of these processes was a dramatic and decisive one: The defeat of the Armed Forces in Iraq, which constituted a devastating blow to the institution that is the basis of the capitalist-imperialist state in the country. The military defeat of the Armed Forces in Iraq opened a brutal crisis in the army, in the high command, and in this way also liquidated the PNAC project and the Patriot Act regime that was based on the Armed Forces. For this reason, the Fourth North American Revolution had two central simultaneous developments, on the one hand the collapse of the PNAC within the US when the establishment of the Patriot Act regime was defeated, and on the other hand, the defeat of the PNAC outside the US. USA when NATO and the Armed Forces are defeated in Iraq. But all this was possible thanks to the formidable global mass mobilization unleashed by the attempted establishment of the PNAC, a global irruption of the masses that constitutes the first characteristic of any revolution.

The second characteristic feature of a revolution is the changes it causes in political regimes. Every revolution modifies the spectrum of existing institutions, some disappear, others remain, some change, others emerge, as a result of the clashes between classes and class sectors that inescapably modify any institutional framework. Institutions express class interests and when these interests and class sectors confront and collide with each other, institutions are modified, imposed or disappear according to which class sectors are triumphant and which are defeated. That is to say, the class struggle leaves a mark, a mark in the configuration of political regimes that makes these class confrontations recognizable.

For example, the First American Revolution caused changes in the country's political regime, which went from being an English colony to the formation of an independent nation. In this process, colonial institutions disappeared, and new institutions emerged such as the Constitution and the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Powers. The class clash that the Second American Revolution entailed also caused changes in the political regime: The Confederation of eleven southern states that had formed a country with its own constitution, institutions and army disappeared; slavery, which had been a legal institution, was abolished, and the structure of national unity of the country we know today as the United States emerged.

The Third American Revolution also registered changes in the country's political regime. The entire process of national mobilization for civil rights caused the disappearance of the horrible semi-fascist states of the South with laws that established the regime of racial segregation, the Jim Crow institutions and regulations that segregated the African-American population, in an important part of the country, and affected millions of people. The Third American Revolution also eliminated Nixon's Bonapartist attempt, and led to the defeat of the Armed Forces in their attempted military invasion of Vietnam. The changes in the country's political regime included the emergence of legislation that established equal racial rights, in addition to the right to vote, to abortion, which modified almost a century of segregating, racist and discriminatory Jim Crow legislation, and an entire stage fighting for women's rights.

These revolutions are political revolutions, that is, they cause changes in the political institutions of the state and in the political regime, but they do not modify the fundamental social and economic structures. For example, both the I, II and III American Revolutions modified the political regime, but did not modify the socioeconomic structure of the country. The United States is capitalist when it becomes independent from Great Britain, remains capitalist during and after the Civil War, and remains capitalist when the civil rights movement triumphs. The term "Political Revolution" was coined by Leon Trotsky who designed this concept to define the set of tasks necessary in the Soviet Union, whose political regime had been taken over by a counter-revolutionary dictatorship headed by Stalin's faction.

According to Trotsky, to overthrow this dictatorship it was not necessary to carry out a revolution that would modify the economic-social structure of the country; the USSR was already a workers' state in transition to socialism. For Trotsky, what was necessary to do was a revolution in the political regime against the Stalinist dictatorship, and its change to the regime of a proletarian democracy. Trotsky called this type of revolution "Political Revolution" , that is, a revolution that does not modify the economic-social structure of the state, but rather its political regime, the complex of state institutions.

The Political Revolution is then a different type of revolution from the economic-social revolution. The economic-social revolution modifies the social structure of the state, that is, it modifies the fact of which social class holds social power. For example, the Dutch Revolution against Charles V, known as the Eighty Years' War or War of Flanders of 1648, gave rise to a new state because it was a revolution of the bourgeoisie that dethroned the nobility from its power. Another example is the English Revolution, which began with the Battle of Edgehill in October 1642 and culminated in the final victory of the parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell, which was also an economic-social revolution, because the English bourgeoisie took power. dethroning the nobility, and the rise of Parliament over the monarchy was the expression of the defeat of the nobles at the hands of the bourgeoisie.

So was the French Revolution of 1789 in which power passed from the nobility to the bourgeoisie, and also fell into the category of economic-social revolution. The Russian Revolution of 1917, where the working class took power by dethroning the bourgeoisie, is also an example of an economic-social revolution. Now, both the Political Revolution and the economic-social revolution are deeply related: Political revolutions imply changes in the political regime that are preparatory to the economic-social revolution, they are struggles for control of the state between classes and class sectors. that end up impacting social formations and the mode of production of societies. Therefore, the relationship between political and social revolutions is dialectical, complex and contradictory. Political revolutions establish a permanent dynamic towards social revolution, while social revolution always implies a political revolution.

One cannot exist without the other, and that is why every change in the political regime, and every political revolution, is always the product of a revolution, as Novack explains: " The true source of democracy in the United States was the struggles revolutionaries of their people. In 1776 and 1861 when the further development of the nation required a new path and the forces of reaction stood in the way...the revolutionary democrats accepted the challenge. They armed the people, defeated in the struggle those who They maintained the old order and created a new social and political regime. The specific ideas, demands, institutions and customs of democracy were forged in these revolutionary furnaces..." (5)

The defeat in Iraq: The other side of the IV American Revolution

The military defeat of the Armed Forces in Iraq opened a brutal crisis in the army, in the high command, and in this way also liquidated the PNAC project and the Patriot Act regime that was based on the Armed Forces. The fall of Donald Rumsfeld on November 8, 2006 due to pressure from the high command of the Armed Forces was a devastating blow for the PNAC, which led the Bush Administration to carry out a true "Monday morning quarterback", an expression of its own of American football, which refers to the fact that after Sunday's game, on Monday the quarterback makes a critical analysis and analyzes which plays were good or bad, which decisions he made were correct and which ones were not. The "Monday morning quarterback" carried out by the Bush Administration led it to go all out and make the decision to deepen the PNAC strategy, which only aggravated the political crisis of the country and the army.

The fall of Donald Rumsfeld left the Bush Administration and the PNAC strategy up in the air. The country had been left practically without a government, or with a government that was almost completely powerless, whose strategy had been rejected at home, crushed in Iraq, and buried by the electoral defeat of the Republican Party. On March 15, 2006, the constitution of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) sought to close the growing power vacuum that was developing in the country, and the bipartisan parliamentary Commission led by James Baker, former Republican Secretary of State, and Lee H. Hamilton Democratic leader, sought to close the crisis and prepare some transition towards a concerted exit of power.

On December 6, 2006, the ISG published a report that formulated a strategy opposite to that of the Bush Administration, recognizing that the war in Iraq had been lost and raising the need for a gradual withdrawal of forces, opening a direct dialogue with Syria and Iran were until then considered countries part of the "Axis of Evil". The publication of this report showed the deep crisis of power in which the country was plunged with powers that acted simultaneously, on the one hand the Executive Power exercised by the Bush Administration, a government totally in crisis whose power was diluted hour after hour, and on the other hand On the other hand, Parliament with the bipartisan Baker- Hamilton Commission, which promoted a strategy opposite to that of the Bush Administration. Who really governed the country, the Executive Branch or Parliament?

Parliament decided to come out in defense of the institutions of the country's regime, and the two most important parties in the state had to lead the search for a solution aimed at resolving the acute open political crisis. Behind the design of the new policy was the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a "center" think tank, which marked another difference in the strategy designed by the Bush Administration, since they were no longer conservative think tanks. those who built the strategy, but currents of thought different from Neocon entered the scene. But the Bush Administration had no intention of withdrawing or abandoning its strategy; on the contrary, it had redoubled it, and in the middle of the crossfire between the Executive Branch and Parliament, the Armed Forces were trapped, seeing their situation as increasingly complicated. situation in Iraq, where the Constituent Assembly elections of April 2005 gave all power to Nuri al-Maliki, head of Dawa. As guided by the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton Commission, Maliki began to weave agreements with Iran, all driven by the fear caused by the imposing Iraqi insurrection.

Tehran feared that the insurrection could enter its own country. The Iraqi uprising forced NATO to re-recruit large numbers of troops of all ranks to maintain control of cities, roads and oil infrastructure. After the execution of Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, Maliki imposed the sanction of a very harsh Anti-Terrorism Law to combat the insurgents, and it seemed that the strategy of the Baker-Hamilton Commission was strengthening as Maliki negotiated with Iran, but the Bush Administration responded by intensifying all sources of conflict, contrary to the plan of the Baker-Hamilton Commission, which was to reduce them. The head of CENTCOM John Philip Abizaid, who had taken office on July 7, 2003, replacing Tommy Franks, heightened tensions with Iran by declaring that it was necessary to pressure the international community for Iran to desist from developing nuclear weapons, a proposal in tune with the strategy of continuing to treat Iran as part of the "Axis of Evil".

Contrary to Abizaid and the strategy proposed by the Bush Administration, the director of National Intelligence published a report in which he assessed that Tehran had put a stop to its nuclear weapons program since 2003. This report known as the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE ), was a change in the policy towards the Middle East that had been that of inventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to justify any type of aggression against a country. Now, the position was to be honest with the facts and deny any proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by Iran.

This change in policy left CENTCOM head John Philip Abizaid without support, who was replaced as head of CENTCOM by Admiral William J. Fallon on March 16, 2007. Fallon was in reality the representative of an entire sector of the officers of the Armed Forces made up of the director of national intelligence, Admiral Mike McConnell, the director of the CIA General Michael Hayden, the Chief of Staff of the Ground Forces, General George Casey, and the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen who were concerned about the multiplication of theaters of operations in the war, the dispersion of forces and the exhaustion of troops.

Fallon exercised political ascendancy and influence over this sector of the Armed Forces that openly opposed the leadership of the Bush Administration, and launched an opposite strategy, in view of the symptoms of military crisis that were expressed everywhere, such as when the relatives of Soldiers of the Florida National Guard began a campaign for the return of troops, through an indefinite hunger strike. In southern Afghanistan, NATO had taken over control of the southern region of the country at the end of July 2006, at which point there was an increase in violence in the area with attacks on public officials, schools , and a frequency of daily attacks greater than what was happening in Iraq. In 2007 there was a significant Taliban resurgence, they began to reconquer areas whose control they lost in 2001, and on February 27 there was an attack against the US base in Bagram when Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting in which 18 people died.

In August 2008 the situation worsened for NATO as its casualties increased during the months of June, July and August, producing more casualties than in Iraq. Afghanistan was in a climate of constant war and growing discontent with Hamid Karzai's government. The crisis of the Armed Forces persisted as it was caught in the middle of the tug-of-war between the Bush Administration and the Hamilton-Baker parliamentary Commission. Admiral Fallon was reluctant to carry out the Bush Administration's Iran policy, and Esquire magazine showed this in an article where they called him "The Man Between War and Peace" resisting taking harsher measures against Tehran. But Fallon's situation became untenable, and he resigned on March 11, 2008, leaving CENTCOM once again without political direction.

Fallon was replaced by David Howell Petraeus, an Army general considered the second most influential conservative American internationally. Fallon's fall expressed the struggle for control of military and state power between the Bush Administration and the ISG. The war in Iraq had provoked the largest international anti-war movement in history, it had unleashed the National Liberation struggle of the Iraqi people against the invading NATO troops, it had caused the Iraqi resistance to have more soldiers by 2005 than the total number of NATO troops, and with it, that CENTCOM's chances of winning the war were simply impossible. In Iraq, the war had only been going on for 2 years, and already the "Vietnam Syndrome " was in sight again, the war of national liberation of a town invaded by the US army was once again unified, which converged with international and national mobilization against war.

Anyone can think that with the Obama Administration there was a 180 degree change with respect to the Bush Administration regarding the Middle East. However, this was not the case, in Iraq, the army crisis continued to worsen day after day, with 2007 being the year in which the armed forces had to endure the highest number of deaths and injuries due to the insurgent offensive. In 2007 alone, approximately 904 soldiers died in Iraq and more than 6,000 were wounded, the highest figures in the entire occupation. Such an increase in violence was due to an insurgency offensive in the country's main cities, under Bush still as president when pressures on American troops were aggravated by the continued withdrawal of British forces from the Basra governorate ordered by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Tony Blair's successor.

Just as Britain was withdrawing from Iraq, so was Denmark with the announcement by Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen that he also announced the withdrawal of Danish soldiers. Turkey began a military offensive in northern Iraq against the Kurdish PKK guerrilla, despite Iraqi and Pentagon opposition, which began to create a situation of lack of control in the Middle East region that began to generalize and deepen from now on. more, without a solution of continuity.

The defeat of the Armed Forces and the NATO Coalition was formally recognized by the Bush Administration at the end of 2007, when it signed the schedule for the gradual withdrawal of forces by June 30, 2009 from Iraqi cities, and for on August 31, 2010, the final departure and the end of combat missions with the permanence of 50,000 troops for training tasks of the Iraqi forces until the final departure on December 31, 2011. The signing of that 2007 agreement was the end of the strategy of the Project for a New American Century, of the GWOT, the definitive collapse of the strategies launched by the Bush Administration and the Neocon groups, which caused a total change in the world situation, and in particular in the Middle East region East. However, this policy of withdrawal and recognition of defeat did not mean that the United States stopped attacking, causing massacres or intervening militarily in the Middle East.

In recognition of the defeat suffered, the Obama Administration and the Pentagon decided not to put more troops on the ground. But they maintained a policy of permanent aggression in the region with bombings and drones, a defensive strategy, but no less dangerous and destructive. On January 22, 2009, US President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order that required the CIA to use only the 19 interrogation methods described in the Army Field Manual "unless the Attorney General with appropriate consultation provides additional guidance". The order also stated that "The CIA shall as quickly as possible close the detention facilities it currently operates and will not exploit any detention facilities in the future".

The hope of the closure of Guantanamo permeated the spirit of activists, leaders and sectors defending civil and human rights in the United States and the world. In April 2009, CIA Director Leon Panetta announced that the "CIA no longer operates detention centers or black sites" in a letter to officials and that "those sites would be decommissioned . " In this report, Panetta stated that the CIA was no longer employing controversial "harsh interrogation techniques ," and that people detained by the CIA would only suffer brief detention for the time necessary to transfer them to the custody of authorities in their home countries. , or the custody of another US agency.

However, these announcements were neither true nor real, and the hopes of all those who believed that Guantanamo would end with Obama were frustrated. Human rights activists complained and reproached Obama for refusing to prosecute officials who during the Bush administration approved the use of these interrogation methods, and Guantánamo continued to operate with more than 171 prisoners in horrible confinement conditions. All of them remained in Guantanamo facing the possibility of a trial before a military court, and indefinite detention, without receiving a fair trial.

In October 2009, President Obama signed the Military Commissions Act of 2009, which amended the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which no longer speaks of illegal enemy combatants, but of " unprotected enemy combatant ", but preserving the essential notion of enemy in the penal code, which implies a fusion between criminal law and the law of war. In December 2011, Obama signed the "National Defense Authorization Act" HR 1540 (NDAA), which authorized the indefinite detention, without charge or indictment, of US citizens designated by the executive branch as enemies.

The Americans to whom this new law can be applied are not only those who are captured on a battlefield but also those who have never left the United States or participated in any type of military action. The law targets people the administration has designated as members " of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and who participate in hostilities against the United States ." Obama signed HR 1540 in Hawaii on December 31, and although he publicly acknowledged that certain provisions of the NDAA (contained in Subtitle D-Counterterrorism) are unacceptable, and he could have vetoed it, the NDAA was signed by Obama on the grounds that it was In short, a means to combat terrorism.

That is, the Obama Administration raised the slogan of "Change" on the one hand to differentiate itself from the repudiated and rejected policy of the Bush Administration, but on the other hand it continued to promulgate antidemocratic and repressive laws, with arguments similar to those of the Bush Administration. in the sense of the "fight against terrorism". During the Obama Administration, the "Iraq Syndrome" prevented the Pentagon from putting troops on the ground, but it did not prevent bombings with planes or drones, while military operations forces began to operate in 138 countries, exceeding the number of countries in the that they heard under the Bush Administration.

As time passed, the crimes and attacks on civil liberties that had occurred under the Bush Administration became increasingly clear and became evident. On December 13, 2012, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a ruling that the abduction of Khalid El-Masri was established beyond reasonable doubt and that Macedonia was responsible for his torture and ill-treatment. treatment, which is why El-Masri's kidnapping, detention and torture in Macedonia was classified as a forced disappearance.

On December 9, 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) released a 525-page part containing the main conclusions and an executive summary of the report called the Study Committee on the Detention and Interrogation Program of the Central Intelligence Agency. While the rest of the report remains classified, the 6,000 pages demonstrate the CIA's use of brutal interrogation techniques amid harsh conditions of detention of detainees. The report also contains inaccurate information provided by the CIA to the Department of Justice to prevent an adequate legal analysis. According to the report, at least 26 of the 119 prisoners (22%) held by the CIA were improperly detained, and at least 39 were subjected to CIA interrogation techniques. The existence of a classified part of the report left the Obama Administration in a very bad light, by revealing the impunity that the CIA has, without this report implying trials or punishments for any of the CIA officials.

The report of the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) was whitewashing and public recognition of a reality that was already known due to the spread of social networks and alternative media. On June 2, Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, which places limits and controls on the NSA. The central element of the law is that it removed the NSA's ability to store data on the phone calls of millions of Americans, and placed this data in the hands of telephone companies. Before this reform, spies will be able to access this data. case by case and prior judicial authorization. The vote expressed the triumph of the IV American Revolution, the pressure that forced Obama to take some measures that would mean some concession for the fight that millions in the world had carried out against the Patriot Act regime, and a decisive factor had been are Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA spying, in 2013, and the impact this had on the masses and global public opinion.

However, civil rights groups and academics criticized the Freedom Act, arguing that it allowed the NSA to have unclear parts and perhaps allowed the NSA to seize data on broad swaths of innocent people in violation of their constitutional rights. ACLU Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said "The descriptions of the last two years make clear that we need major reform ," and a group of 60 organizations called on Congress to end the NSA's collection of telephone information under the Act. Patriot. Regarding the Patriot Act, the Obama Administration signed the extension of the Patriot Act until the end of 2017, which was a complete setback for all those defenders of democratic rights and freedoms in the United States and in the world. When the conditions were in place for the repeal and complete elimination of the Patriot Act, and of the entire complex of laws that the Patriot Act implies that attacks democratic freedoms, Obama resolved to allow the life of a Law that is a danger and a threatens civil liberties and democratic rights.

When the Obama Administration could have taken a decisive step in defense of civil rights with broad support from the population, the Law that is a legacy of the Bush Administration remained in force again, but now, by management of the Obama Administration. May 23, 2013 was the day President Obama promised to release all prisoners who had already been acquitted but were still being held at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, and independent journalist Andy Worthington created a clock on the Internet, at gtmoclock.com, and it marks the time that has passed since the date on which the closure of the Guantanamo prison is supposed to have occurred under Executive Order 13492. There are still men held there who were acquitted and They have been waiting for their release for years, an absolutely shocking fact in the fact that many men continue to be held indefinitely in Guantánamo, without charges being filed against them.

Chelsea Manning's crisis

In early 2010, the intelligence analyst assigned to an Army unit in Iraq in 2009, Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, was accused of releasing the largest set of confidential documents simultaneously to the public, in violation of the Espionage Act. These documents revealed war crimes committed by the military, the unjust imprisonment of prisoners at Guantánamo, and the phenomenal waste and corruption involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Manning was sentenced in August 2013 to 35 years in prison, with the possibility of parole in the eighth year and the additional penalty of being discharged from the military.

Manning was born Edward Bradley Manning in 1987 and in a statement he expressed that he had always felt like a woman, which opened the debate on transsexuality in the army. He was unhappy all his life because he could not live as an openly gay man, and even at the risk of being discharged, he wrote to a gender counselor that he felt like a woman, and discussed undergoing surgery. During the trial, the prosecution, led by Captain Ashden Fein, presented 300,000 pages of documents in evidence, including chat logs and classified material, but New York Magazine reported that Manning opposed the kind of war in which she was involved, and the Manning's lawyers argued that the government had exaggerated the damage that the release of the documents had caused, and that it had charged Manning to force her to testify against Julian Assange, the director of Wikileaks. On September 3, 2013, Manning's lawyer requested a presidential pardon for his client, which included a letter of support from Amnesty International arguing that Manning's leaks had exposed human rights violations.

The publication of the leaked material, particularly the diplomatic cables, attracted in-depth coverage from around the world. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen said the leaks had placed the lives of American soldiers and Afghan informants in danger, but journalist Glenn Greenwald argued that Manning was the most important whistleblower since Daniel Ellsber leaked the "Pentagons Papers" in 1971. In 2011, Manning was awarded by the German section of the International Association of Anti-Arms and Nuclear Lawyers of the Federation of German Scientists, in 2012, she was awarded "Public Award" by Global Exchange, in 2013 with the Sean MacBride Peace Award by the International Peace Office and in 2014, she was awarded the Sam Adams Award by Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence. Manning publicly requested to be called Chelsea because she had always felt like a woman and she began seeking hormone treatment therapy, the right to live as a woman, and wear women's underwear.

The authorities' refusal led Manning to file a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, D.C., against Secretary of Defense Hagel, claiming that he had "been denied access to medically necessary treatment." Finally the Army Court of Appeals ruled in 2015 in "Reference for appellant in all future formal papers filed with this court and all future orders and rulings issued by this court must be neutral, for example, Private First Class Manning or recurring, or use a feminine pronoun". In April 2015, Amnesty International posted a letter from Manning online in which she said, "I finally started my prescribed hormone regimen to continue my overdue gender transition in February. It has been an incredible relief to my body." and the brain to finally come into alignment with each other."

Courageous whistleblower and transgender activist Chelsea Manning remained resisting the Army's brutal prison conditions by defending the right and need of whistleblowers, and beginning in 2015, she began writing for The Guardian addressing issues such as war, sex, and freedom of expression. information in two articles: "How to make ISIS fall on its own sword" and "I am a transgender woman and the government is denying my civil rights". She then debuted as an official writer with an article with the title: "CIA torturers and the leaders who approved their actions must face the law" in March 2015. The extreme persecution suffered by Manning made clear the Administration's position. Obama regarding civil rights: While those responsible for war crimes, massacres and torture remained at large, and while the Patriot Act remained a law in force, whistleblowers were permanently persecuted.

Human Rights Watch noted that the "aggressive prosecution and harsh sentences" contrast with the impunity of senior US officials for torture and other human rights abuses. Manning pays with his prison the price of denouncing the war crimes of the Pentagon, the espionage of the NSA, but also for exposing the crisis within the United States army, its brutal, sexist, homophobic and racist regime. Chelsea Manning joined the prisoners' strike to end slave labor in jails and prisons that took place on the same date as the 45th anniversary of the Attica uprising, when a thousand prisoners took control of the notorious New York prison. York to demand political rights and better living conditions, but were brutally repressed by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

The national strike carried out in September 2016 had as its slogan "A call to end slavery in the United States" with measures taken jointly by prisoners in at least 40 prisons in 24 states. Obama commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence and on May 17, 2017 she was released, a tremendous victory that was the product of the demand throughout the country and internationally in favor of Manning, and another sign of the triumph of the Fourth North American Revolution. But still the government's situation remained critical, given the serious situation developing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and completely changed the situation in the Middle East.

NATO withdraws and revolution breaks out in the Middle East

After the defeat of NATO, the Middle East was never the same region it once was. The withdrawal of NATO and the triumph of the Fourth North American Revolution meant for the Middle East the beginning of unprecedented political, social and economic changes, which shook the region from its foundations and completely transformed it. A powerful mass insurrection broke out in the region that did not stop in the face of any dictatorship, no army, and no autocracy, it devastated political systems, erased borders, liquidated regimes, dictators and began a sustained and unstoppable process of uprising, a kind of Regional intifada, which changed the destiny of the area forever.

The year 2009 began in Iraq with a considerable reduction in violence throughout the country, coinciding with the end of the Bush Administration, which was a symbol of the occupation. Obama announced a new plan to withdraw troops and comprehensively review the strategy in Iraq, a logical corollary of the political, social and economic changes in the region, and on August 19, 2010, the United States withdrew almost all of its combat troops from Iraq, leaving only 56,000 combat troops in the country, generally complying with the schedule provided for by the treaty signed by Bush, an operation that was called "New Dawn."

In Afghanistan, 2009 was the most violent year since the invasion in 2001 as a result of the Taliban insurgency increasing attacks throughout the territory, and its advance forced a review of NATO strategy that included the sending of more troops and intensification. of the bombings. In September 2009, an air operation led by the German army caused the death of around 90 civilians, leading to the resignation of the German Chief of Staff for concealing information related to the event. 2010 began with the same Taliban offensive, which led NATO forces to undertake a counteroffensive called " Operation Moshtarak", the largest of the coalition since the invasion of the country.

The crisis in the army continued to worsen, and on June 23, 2010, Obama dismissed Commander Stanley McChrystal, top commander of the troops in Afghanistan, after an article in Rolling Stone magazine was published in which the general publicly criticized to various senior officials of the Obama Administration, including Vice President Joe Biden, General James Jones, the ambassador in Kabul Karl Eikenberry, and the envoy to the area Richard Holbrooke for their management and direction of the war. McChrystal's position was filled by David Petraeus, but in July 2010 the crisis worsened with the leak of thousands of confidential army documents detailing secret operations from previous years, as well as information on the insurgency and border areas. with Pakistan.

On August 1, 2010, the Netherlands became the first NATO member country to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. On September 10, the German base in Badakhshan was attacked with stones by the civilian population. On October 7, a Peace Council began between the Afghan government and the Taliban to reach a peace agreement. To the extent that progress was made in the plan to withdraw troops from Iraq, both that nation and Afghanistan were transformed into devastated, abandoned zones, no man's land, scattered with armies, guerrilla groups, and armed factions, a true broth of cultivation of crisis caused by the growing political vacuum that the departure of NATO and the United States caused in the region.

This situation triggered all kinds of tendencies, confrontations, and attempts to occupy that vacuum, while the process of decomposition of the forces fighting in Iraq gave rise to new forces, currents and movements that tried to occupy the political, military and social vacuum that the withdrawal of NATO troops left in the region. The phenomena that were unleashed after the departure of NATO troops from the Middle East region were in some cases progressive, and in others regressive, but the progressive phenomena were more important and had greater specific weight and in the period of The time that passed between the departure of the troops in 2010 and 2011, some of the most important political and social events in the history of the region occurred that moved it forever.

After the events of December 17, 2010 in Tunisia, the Middle East region would never be the same again. That day in the city of Tunis, a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi was stripped of his goods and immolated himself in protest, which led to an agony during which thousands of Tunisians rebelled against the poor conditions to which the country was subjected. That outbreak gave rise to the development of the spectacular political-social process known worldwide as the "Arab Spring". The fight against the Ben Ali dictatorship that ruled Tunisia for 25 years, known as the "Jasmine Revolution" had been preceded by the uprising in Western Sahara with protests that spread throughout the country and deepened to such a magnitude that It ended with the resignation of Ben Ali, but like a true domino effect, the example of Tunisia spread to the rest of the Arab world and went against the dictatorships of the rest of the countries.

In Egypt, the protests began on January 25, 2011 and had Tahir Square as their epicenter, ending with Hosni Mubarack who dominated the country after 30 years until his fall on February 11, 2011. Then the revolution broke out in Libya, which led to war. civil, with weapons and popular militias where the people overthrew the dictatorship of Muammar Gaddafi after 42 years in power. The revolutionary process spread to Yemen in the so-called "Pink Ribbon Revolution" that ended the 21-year dictatorship of AliSaleh, a process that still continues and develops to this day, transformed into a Civil War with the armed intervention of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Syrian revolution then broke out against the Bashar Al Assad dictatorship, successor of his father Hafez Al Assad whose dynasty has been in place for 50 years. The revolution turned into a civil war, turning Syria into a decaying state.

The revolutionary wave that began between 2010-2011 had an enormous impact on the world situation. Rarely could it be witnessed so many revolutions developing simultaneously, a complex of mass mobilizations that covered more than 20 countries on different continents, in addition to Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, it also reached Mauritania, Algeria, Western Sahara, Arabia Saudi, Oman, Yemen, Lebanon, Kuwait, Sudan, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Palestine, United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Beyond differences and inequalities there were revolutionary explosions with the fall of regimes, civil wars, processes of self-organization, dual power, crisis and division in the armed forces, expropriations, council democracy, mass mobilization, general strikes, armed struggles, emergence of new states and new armies. This entire complex of revolutions produced changes in the countries that are developing to this day, unprecedented in the Arab world.

The Middle East region has always been shaken by spectacular political processes such as the 6-Day War in 1967, the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 or the Palestinian Intifada of 1987, to name a few. But nothing can even be compared to what happened after 2011. Years of poverty, misery, repression, demands for democratic rights, civil liberties, brutal conditions of oppression for sectors such as youth, women, immigrants, discrimination Racial and religious, in addition to the ostentatious life of dictators like kings in luxurious palaces ruling over poor towns, are the basis of the mass outbreak that led to the uprising of entire towns who decided to take their destinies into their own hands.

Added to this secular satiety of the people was the emergence of the global crisis of capitalism, which caused a rise in the prices of basic products, and in the food basket around the world, which hit hard in the Middle Eastern countries and triggered poverty and the food crisis. The political vacuum that it left in the region, the triumph of the masses and the military defeat had caused a global crisis in all regimes and parties, in all governments, and institutions, including religious ones.

In the midst of this state of affairs, and to the extent that NATO troops were withdrawing from Iraq, Al Qaeda in Iraq survived by raising money through activities such as kidnappings, car thefts, assaults on trucks loaded with oil, etc. of demanding taxes from non-Muslims and killing members of rich families who did not pay. According to US intelligence sources, the group had evolved into a kind of "mafia criminal gang", torturing and executing people in secret detention centers. Al Qaeda in Iraq had already changed its name several times, and was based in Falujah and Ramadi.

From there they promoted an anti-government uprising against the then Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, but they were surrounded by the Iraqi army armed and trained by the US. It seemed like the end for the group that would later adopt the name ISIS. But in a confusing and controversial episode, the Iraqi army that had surrounded them six months ago, abandoned the battlefield, leaving behind state-of-the-art weapons with heavy artillery, Humvees all-terrain vehicles, H-60 ​​helicopters, a whole front-line arsenal that fell. at the hands of ISIS precursors.

The Iraqi army of northern Kurdistan, the "peshmerga", under the leadership of Barzani, did not intervene either, and they let the city of Mosul, the oil capital of Iraq, fall into the hands of ISIS in January 2014. There this group of mercenaries and criminals found hundreds of millions of dollars in the banks of that city, which gave them enough capital and weapons to expand. In an unstoppable advance, in 2013 ISIS advanced on Syria that was embroiled in the civil war, which led them to adopt the name worldwide known as "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" (ISIS) to reflect their intervention in the War. 

Syrian Civil. Under the leadership of its top commander and self-proclaimed caliph, Al-Baghdadi, ISIS announced the creation of a provisional government, self-proclaimed " Caliphate" that included rapid expansion into Syria, following the course of the Euphrates, extending to Raqqa from where ISIS He attracted mercenaries from around the world, former combatants from all NATO military forces, criminals and thugs taken from prisons, from all jihadist forces with which he began to structure a fascist organization based on the recruitment of hired killers, experts in killing, torture and all kinds of cruelties such as the sale of women, children, organs, drugs, and all kinds of criminal activities that they film and upload to social networks to intimidate their enemies, showing the executions and torture of the victims. who subjugate their victims.

ISIS grew because of its crimes, its criminal activities, and because both the global and regional powers of NATO and the petro-monarchies that shamelessly financed it. There are complaints about the senator and former presidential candidate for the Republican Party John McCain who in May 2013 was in Syrian territory with Mohammad Nur, spokesman for one of the brigades that made up Al-Qaeda in Syria. On January 27, 2014, Reuters published Mark Hosenball's article "Congress secretly approves flow of US weapons to 'moderate' Syrian rebels" in which they report that the US Congress held a secret session in January 2014 where it approved financing towards the "moderate" Syrian rebel factions, from small arms to anti-tank rockets. 

But there were no "moderate" factions in southern Syria, but ISIS. In line with this attitude of the United States Parliament, an ally of the Pentagon like Saudi Arabia proclaimed through its public television Al-Arabiya that the Islamic Caliphate was under the authority of Saudi Prince Abdul Rahman al-Faisal, brother of Prince Saud al-Faisal - Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs - and Prince Turki al- Faisal - ambassador of Saudi Arabia to the United States and the United Kingdom.

The sinister Erdogan regime in Turkey negotiated oil with these fascist gangs, and provided them with financing. During the entire expansion of ISIS, the Pentagon did not intervene and allowed the Islamic Emirate to continue its campaign of conquest and massacres, until the pressure of public opinion became too intense and forced President Obama to give the order to bomb some positions. of lSIS. But the bombings were purely symbolic, cosmetic actions that did not stop their actions. The Pentagon needed ISIS to stop the "Arab Spring", to prevent the revolutionary processes that were sweeping through the region from giving rise to new forces and states that would promote that revolutionary process.

In 2015, ISIS began a process of defeats and setbacks until it was finally crushed in Raqqa in 2017. During the course of this path of defeats, ISIS committed attacks in Europe such as Paris and others that acted as pressure on the governments of the G7 and the Middle East, in which the demand to put an end to ISIS grew like a clamor among the population. At the same time, the attacks expressed the desperation of the leadership of this group of fascist criminals, which was on its way to final crushing.

The blow to ISIS in 2015 that began the path of its disappearance was not inflicted by NATO, nor the Pentagon, nor Turkey, nor Iran, nor Saudi Arabia, nor Russia. The final blow was delivered by a mass popular guerrilla army led by brave young women. That blow was dealt by one of the most exciting revolutionary processes that exist in the world today, the revolution of the Kurds, one of the revolutions that emerged as a product of the "Arab Spring" and gave rise to the state of Rojava and today, to the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria.

The Rojava Revolution and Occupy Wall Street

It was the intervention of an important sector of the mass movement that really stopped the advance of ISIS. When ISIS threatened to unleash genocide on the population of Northern Syria, a mass army led by Kurdish PKK fighters opened a corridor to allow civilian populations to escape the massacre. When the "Arab Spring" broke out and the Syrian people's struggle against Al-Assad's dictatorship began, the dictator's forces withdrew from the Kurdish enclaves, which fell under the control of local militias called the People's Protection Units (YPG). Thus, a self-determined territory called Rojava emerged between the months of July and August 2012, which in the Kurdish language means "to the west", in northern Syria. The armed militias People's Protection Units and Women's Protection Units (YPG-YPJ) under the mandate of the Kurdish Supreme Committee captured the city of Kobane as well as a dozen other cities. There the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Kurdish National Council (KNC) began a joint administration.

Months later, in January 2013, the cantons Cezire, Kobane and Efrin proclaimed their autonomy as territorial units, on the border with Turkey made up of a population of two and a half million inhabitants, the majority Kurdish, but also Arabs, Assyrians, Chaldeans. , Syrians, Turkmens, Armenians and Chechens. All different ethnic groups that coexist, a mosaic of nationalities that share a joint political project, something that before the Rojava Revolution did not exist in the Middle East. As of January 2013, Rojava was formed as an autonomous and independent region, with its territory of 3 cantons or federated municipalities, and government institutions that are popular assemblies composed of representatives of Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians and other minorities that carry out the management from an interim government. That is to say, the nation's political regime has an unusual feature for the Middle East, the existence of mass organizations that emerged from below that exercise power and are the fruit of the revolution.

But in addition, Rojava has a peculiarity that no country has: In Rojava, women are part of the government on an equal footing with men, they administer the economy, lead the popular assemblies and all instances of organizing autonomy such as the arming of the people, the creation of popular women's courts, schools and academies at the university level, or self-defense militias. In Rojava women have rights that they do not have anywhere in the world, women there. Far from the role that condemns them to cooking, childcare, or domestic chores in most capitalist countries in the world, and even very far from the horrible mistreatment they suffer in most Middle Eastern countries like Arabia. Saudi or Afghanistan where they are subjected to all kinds of humiliations, forced to wear a veil and permanently harassed; Women in Rojava are leaders, and they are a leading element of the revolution.

The emergence of a multiethnic state in the Middle East, based on popular assemblies that has women as fundamental members of its state, its government and its army can only be understood if it is understood as a part of a larger and deeper revolutionary complex. , the "Arab Spring", which has moved the world since 2011.

The YPG is organized as a democratic people's army, with internal elections as a method of appointing officials that, despite the Kurdish majority, has attracted a growing number of Arabs, and all ethnic groups. The clashes between YPG and ISIS was a moving episode in which an armed people defended inch by inch in the streets of Kobane and the YPG fighters defeated them, drove them out and also seized tanks, different types of missiles and weapons. A huge number of foreign volunteer fighters have fought alongside the YPG. The program of democratic demands of the Rojava government which is called "Democratic Confederalism", as well as the economic program based on local community-based cooperatives, even though it is a program that presents important limitations and is difficult to real possibility of development in the current crisis situation of capitalism, is unacceptable for imperialism and the regional bourgeoisies.

For dictatorships, monarchies or imperialist Bonapartist regimes or regional bourgeoisies such as those that exist in Turkey, Russia, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, which have alliances with different imperialist powers and are deeply anti-democratic, the emergence of something like the Federation of Northern Syria no matter how many limitations its political and economic program has.

But in 2011 not only the Arab Spring had developed. Also, and as a result of the outbreak of the global crisis of capitalism, protests broke out around the world. In Greece, huge mobilizations and 11 general strikes took place, the Indignados movement in Spain, the 11-M Movement in Chile, the Yosoy132 Movement in Mexico, the student mobilizations in Colombia in 2011 and 2012, the massive workers' strikes in China focused on the province of Guandong, the Occupy movement in Hong Kong, among other large mobilizations. This global process of mobilizations and revolutions had its expression in the United States as a result of the impact of the acute outbreak of the peak of the capitalist crisis with the consequences of loss of jobs, wages, in addition to the embargoes caused by the mortgage crisis that left millions without living place. The capitalist crisis was placed at the center of national politics.

This is how Occupy Wall Street (OWS) emerged, the mass movement with its epicenter in youth that exploded throughout the country, occupying squares in states, counties, and cities in protest. On September 17, thousands of people flooded southern Manhattan, summoned by the blog of the Canadian magazine Adbusters , which issued a call in mid-July "Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?" asked the magazine's blog, referring to the occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt against the Mubarack dictatorship. Adbusters coordinated the call to occupy Zuccotti Park with a coalition of union activists, students, and community members (NYABC) who convened the first New York City General Assembly (GA) on Tuesday, August 2. That first call on August 2 was disorderly with a significant number of meeting participants who were anarchist militants who wanted to imitate the movement of the Greeks in the squares and the indignados of Spain.

The facts of the world situation had a great impact on decision-making, and at the same time, the effects of the IV North American Revolution were more than visible. It was incredible, but fascinating to observe that in the same country in which during the height of the Patriot Act it was impossible to hold a meeting, even a small one, under the risk of being imprisoned for terrorism, now hundreds of anarchists organized assemblies, coordinated with unions and social organizations, and were preparing to occupy positions. In fact, one of the first topics of debate among OWS proponents was how to deal with the police and the extreme militarization of public space around Wall Street since September 11, 2001. What a remarkable change had happened in the United States! How the political and social conditions of the country had changed! Ten years before, on September 11, 2001, the south of the Manhattan neighborhood in New York was a mountain of rubble and the Pentagon was master of the situation, carrying out a campaign of terror on the population!!!

But by September 17, 2011, exactly ten years after 9/11, southern Manhattan was a breeding ground for hundreds of activists who organized and united through social networks... to Occupy Wall Street! OWS organizers visited the picket line of Verizon workers who had been on strike since August, solidarity that Verizon workers returned with a march from Verizon headquarters in Manhattan to Zuccotti Park. On September 17, meetings began at noon in Bowling Green, a small park near the southern tip of Manhattan that is home to Wall Street's iconic charging bull. The protest began aimlessly, with people milling around the area, but as the afternoon progressed a crowd gathered. Police had set up barricades to prevent protesters from reaching Wall Street. OWS went on to achieve larger protests, but this only occurred after weeks of intense grassroots organizing, and maintaining physical occupation in the face of police repression.

The atmosphere in the park in those days was very free with everyone constantly discussing politics and hungry for ideas, anyone could get together a march, anyone could walk through the park and start a chant. People came to Zuccotti from all over the city, and even the country, to see the occupation for themselves, talk to the occupiers, and discuss politics, all kinds of groups came, students, unions, the nurses were one day , transportation workers another day, teachers, community groups, and well-known writers, artists like Lupe Fiasco, Michael Moore, Roseanne Barr, and Naomi Klein. Zuccotti Park was full of tables, shops, continually experimenting and rearranging the physical space and its organizational structure, with more and more equipment, shelves full of food, kitchens, laptops, media station, thousands of books, stores of medical campaign.

OWS organized the September 22 rally protesting the execution of Troy Davis, which was followed by a two-mile march to Zuccotti, and after several successful marches, OWS defeated Mayor Bloomberg's eviction attempt, which led to A mass mobilization the following day of 100,000 people on October 14 and OWS spread to over 100 cities in the United States, and began to spread around the world. At the same time that OWS was expanding to this scale, activists were building solidarity with the union movement by organizing a grassroots campaign in support of closing Teamsters Local 814.

The choice of "we are the 99 percent " as the central slogan and slogan represented an immense advance in the awareness of a sector of the mass movement about the origin of the attacks that workers face by identifying the ruling class as the " 1 percent", and this social sector as the source of the crisis and with interests opposed to the interests of "99 percent" of the population. OWS' tactics were inspired by revolutions in the Middle East, protests in Europe, and the occupation of the Wisconsin capitol building in February 2011, and brought together people from a wide range of political philosophies, including liberalism, anarchism, socialism giving rise to important debates with different political points of view on the strategy for the movement, or on the economy, the world situation, etc.

The Obama Administration could not allow this movement to develop, its potentially revolutionary content could threaten North American imperialist capitalism. In October 2011, a wave of police evictions swept Occupy encampments across the country, including the brutal nighttime raid on Occupy Oakland on October 25 that left Iraq veteran Scott Olsen in a coma. Oakland activists responded by reoccupying the park the next day and calling for a general strike in Oakland on November 2. Many workers called in sick or left work to join the protest, while the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 shut down the port with a picket line of protesters. This did not stop evictions against OWS from moving forward including Occupy Oakland, which was re-evicted on November 14. In New York Bloomberg prepared the ground for a new eviction attempt through a media campaign and on November 15 the attack occurred that violently evicted Zuccotti Park, which was responded to with a day of national protest.

OWS was defeated. The immaturity of its leadership, anarchist, petty-bourgeois autonomist, and student, could not develop a movement that had mass sympathy. But the emergence of OWS made clear the new stage that was opening in the United States and in the world: The triumph of the IV North American Revolution had completely changed the situation, causing the emergence of the mass movement in the Middle East, after the departure of NATO troops, and then the development of the Arab Spring, the Rojava Revolution and the defeat of ISIS. In the United States, the fall of the Patriot Act regime had allowed the eruption of the mass movement, of blacks, Latinos, the anti-war movement, and later, the eruption of the Occupy movement, which after facing fierce repression entered in a decline, but left a mark on the country's political life. OWS allowed new processes and movements such as Black Live Matters to emerge under the influence of its example.

Black Live Matters

On the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, United States, Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American boy, went to a grocery store and while returning home was shot dead by George Zimmerman, coordinator neighborhood watch whose program was administered by the local police department. Zimmerman maintained that he killed the young man in self-defense, the Sanford Police believed his argument and released him, which caused a wave of indignation worldwide, and shocked the country. The Reverend Glenn Dames, pastor of St James African Methodist Episcopal Church in neighboring Titusville, called Martin's death a " modern-day lynching," and sparked New York City's "Million Hoodie" march , named after him. for the hooded sweatshirt that Martin was wearing the day he was murdered and which constitutes a symbol of racial stereotype.

Trayvon's parents, Tracy Martin and Sabrina Fulton, joined the march in New York City and demanded that the culprit be arrested. However, on July 13, 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted of second-degree murder, and outrage swept the country. Roslyn Brock, president of the Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said: "Today justice failed Trayvon Martin and his family. We demand that the Department of Justice open an investigation into the violation of civil rights committed against Trayvon Martin. At that time, three African-American activists, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, launched the so-called Black Lives Matter (BLM, in English, "Black Lives Matter"), which quickly spread throughout the country and became a movement. in the style of Occupy, but also with many differences. BLM has a heterogeneous composition that in different areas adopts different slogans and programs, for example in some areas and deals with partial demands such as school aid.

BLM is politically eclectic, although mostly inclined to support the Democratic Party. Some regions support African-American candidates in the elections and organize SuperPACs in the Democratic Party, and some of their leaders have met with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Black Lives Matter also develops cultural nationalism as part of the fight against racism, but with a different content from the nationalism of the '70s, developing alliances with other oppressed sectors, what is called "allyship", which tends to mean unconditional support for Black people and other people of color or LGBTQ people, mutual solidarity, and frank dialogue. BLM also emerges as a policy to promote the fight for survival in the face of the wave of police murders, extreme poverty, mass incarceration, and all the other evils that African Americans suffer.

In the midst of the expansion and development of BLM, the murder of Eirc Garner on July 17, 2014 in Staten Island, New York, and that of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, occurred first. Garner was killed by a police officer who grabbed him by the neck even though he said " I can't breathe" eleven times while he was face down on the sidewalk. Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot dead by police officer Darren Wilson, sparking another wave of national outrage that forced Attorney General Eric Holder to launch a federal investigation of the department. Missouri police to examine whether officers had shown racial discrimination or used excessive force.

Darren Wilson has resigned from the Ferguson Police Department. In this process, a clash developed between the young leaders of BLM and the Reverend Al Sharpton and his National Action Network (NAN), who also carried out claims on behalf of African Americans. NAN and Sharpton began to criticize BLM activists, exposing Sharpton's true role as a collaborator of the parties of the political regime and supporter of the police in several districts. Since the 1980s, there have been countless cases of police brutality and murders of African-Americans, from the case of the nine police officers and sexual assault of Abner Louima in 1997, to the murder in 1999 of Amadou Diallo, the young unarmed Guinean immigrant. who died in a volley of 41 bullets fired by police when Diallo reached for his wallet.

Ferguson destroyed the scandalous lie of African-American upward mobility. The truth is that, except for a co-opted minority, the African-American masses are socially worse than ever, for them racism has not ended. In Ferguson, 69% of the population is black, and 29% white, but the mayor, all the councilors except one, the top officials and all the police officers, except 3, are white. Even though the framework of Jim Crow laws is not in force, the obstacles and tricks put in place for blacks to vote or be candidates are very effective. In Ferguson and throughout the region, the poverty rate for blacks is 22%, ten points above the general rate that includes whites, in the midst of a crisis that has hit all workers and popular strata.

The existence of a sector of African Americans co-opted by capitalism deepened after the triumph of the Third North American Revolution. The country's political regime had a policy of co-opting African-American leaders and personalities, artists, intellectuals, athletes and writers who were added to the lists of candidates of the Republican and Democratic parties, who were awarded gold records, and were covered in fame. artistic, starring roles in films, in theaters, placed as officials in the various levels of the government, and on the boards of companies and Multinational Corporations such as Goldman Sachs, or JP Morgan Chase.

A wave of cynicism covered the African American struggle movement, as a result of the fact that by the end of the '70s, enormous advances had been achieved such as the fall of the Jim Crow dictatorship, the achievement of integration and the acquisition of historical rights, but Racism, violence and permanent murders of the black population, hunger and poverty persisted in their communities. The process of cooptation of the African American minority gave rise to the group of young people who managed to "make a career", an example of which are officials such as President Obama, Bush's Secretary of State Condolezza Rice, or General Colin Powell, who commanded the first war against Iraq and was also a member of the Bush government.

This cooptation was accompanied by harsh repression and even the assassination of the leaders and cadres of the black movements, especially the most radicalized ones such as the Black Panthers, the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 and that of Martin Luther King in 1968. , who sought to behead the movement. In the late '60s and early '70s, the African American struggle movement entered into a profound crisis of direction and leadership, as well as a crisis of orientation as to where to direct the course of the battle.

As Tom Boot explains : "On the surface, the movement had been limited to a bread-and-butter program of elemental demands. But this period was also delineated by intense introspection and exploration of the future of the struggle." (28) The defense that African Americans found in their lives, values ​​and communities was emphasizing racial pride and the creation of cultural and political institutions to defend and promote the collective interests of black citizens, the values ​​of African American culture and ensure their autonomy, their heritage , its culture, its racial heritage, the origin and descent of Africa. This process is known as "Black Power" , a term used by Stokely Carmichael as organizers and spokespersons for the Students Against Violence Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on June 16, 1966, after the attempted murder of James Meredith during the March Against Fear. Within Black Power, different trends and ideologies emerged, such as those that promoted the autonomy of African Americans, African-American nationalism and separatism.

Although Stokely Carmichael and the SNCC supported black nationalism, organizations such as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense did not support it because they considered that not all whites were enemies, only those who maintained the structure of racial segregation. Bobby Seale, chancellor and co-founder of the Black Panthers, was especially clear about this difference. He considered that the oppression of black people was due more to the result of economic exploitation than to the inherent racism in society explained in his book Seize the Time, where he affirms that it is a class struggle between the proletarian working class and the small class. ruling class. Seale argued that workers of all races must unite against the oppression and exploitation of the ruling class, a class struggle and not a race struggle. The concept of Black Power was vague and interpreted variously by those who used it, from businessmen who used it to promote black capitalism, to black revolutionaries who wanted to end capitalism.

Even so, the idea of ​​Black Power exerted a significant social influence, contributing to the development of political movements directly and indirectly, and impacting other movements by opening debates on sex, class and sexuality. Many Black Power activists also participated in other similar movements, as was the case with the "second wave " of women's rights activism, supported and organized to some extent by women working in the ranks of the Black Power movement which caused changes by giving impetus to racial solidarity, cultural identity, etc. The impact of the Black Power movement on ethnic identity and black consciousness is manifested in the relatively recent proliferation of black and African academic studies in national and international institutions and the development of studies on the history and culture of African Americans in formal and informal settings. "Black is beautiful" is the phrase that summarizes pride in the African American race related to a historical context of appreciation and valuation of blackness.

The Black Power movement produced artistic and cultural elements that embodied and generated a cultural revolution as well as a political one, which used all types of forms of folkloric, literary and political expression based on the African ancestral past, but promoting cultural updating and definition. By recognizing and legitimizing black culture, the idea of ​​white cultural superiority was challenged, thereby paving the way for the defense of later multiculturalism. The cultural concept of "soul" was fundamental for the individual and community identification of an entire culture that began to develop multiple expressions, from the way of greeting each other, or dressing, to diversifying beauty and aesthetics as the Black Art Movement or MAN emerged in Harlem. In this way, the current called " cultural nationalism" developed with black literature, theater and music that served as a mechanism to confirm black identity and articulating unique impressions of social reality. 

Latinos, Asian Americans, and others began to develop as well. their cultural movements, based on the development of resorting to their own legacy and their history, their tradition and their culture, as Black Power did, a movement that, however, was not free of controversy and debates as was the case of the "Black Macho" approach.

Michele Wallace in her book "Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman" showed how the Black Power movement that attempted to empower African Americans only empowered African American men, African American women remained marginalized, unable to develop a political strategy to take the control of their own lives, an issue that gave rise to the need to fight for the development of their demands and the union with other oppressed sectors such as young people, immigrants, gays, etc.

Wallace argues that African Americans in the process of integration and assimilation acquired white cultural attitudes and values ​​regarding sexuality and gender, as a result of which, African American men became sexist and misogynistic and accepted the negative stereotypes of the culture. dominant over the African race. The 1980s were especially difficult for the African-American movement. As Tom Boot explains : "The escalation of the diabolical Reagan reactionary forces with the poor sold and starved...the Reagan regime has accelerated the deterioration of the social programs of the '60s that provided social stability and imposed the kingdom from social terror to a massive economic attack... the African American community is... facing a frontal assault..." (29)

Mumia Abu-Jamal, an African-American journalist and political activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, was sentenced to death in 1982 for murdering police officer Daniel Faulkner in a biased trial involving an all-white jury. On December 7, 2011, his sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole, following an international pressure campaign for his freedom that transformed Abu-Jamal's cause into an emblem of international efforts to abolish death penalty. Celebrities and activists from around the world petitioned for him, including former French first lady Danielle Mitterrand, German writer Günter Grass and American Noam Chomsky.

Cases of racist and police violence spiked in 1984 with the case of Bernhard Goetz, a white man who shot four unarmed black youths in a subway car after claiming they had harassed him. Then, the murder of Edmundo Perry, then the murder of Michael Griffith at the hands of a group of racists, or the case of Yusuf Hawkins in 1989. The then governor of New York Mario Cuomo was forced to appoint a special prosecutor who obtained convictions then.

Under Bill Clinton's administration in the '90s, the situation for African Americans did not change much; the federal incarceration rate doubled, growing more than it did under the previous 12 years of Republican government, according to the Justice Policy Institute. In 1992, the Los Angeles riots broke out when an almost entirely white jury acquitted four police officers who appeared on amateur video footage beating black taxi driver Rodney King. Thousands of people in Los Angeles, California, mainly young African Americans and Latinos, joined together in a racial and ethnic riot that lasted 6 days, in which they took the city and carried out looting, looting, and burning in an uprising that left 54 ​​dead and more than 2,000 injured. In 1997 there was the sexual assault of Abner Louima, and in 1999 there was the murder of Amadou Diallo, a young immigrant from Guinea who died in a volley of 41 bullets fired by police. In 1999, the federal incarceration rate was 42 per 100,000 residents - more than double the rate at the end of Ronald Reagan and 61% higher than at the end of George Bush.

Bill Clinton had made promises to blacks, women and workers but his program focused on repression presented as "fighting crime" as Howard Zinn explains: "...Clinton made a few cabinet appointments that would give understand that he supported labor and social welfare programs. But his key appointments to the Treasury and Commerce departments went to wealthy corporate lawyers, and the foreign policy team - the secretary of Defense, the director of the CIA and the National Security Advisor...Clinton's economic program - initially announced as a job creation program - soon changed course and focused on deficit reduction...In one year, in In 1988, 40,000 babies died before their first birthday, with the death rate among African-American babies twice as high as among white babies...Democrats and Republicans came together to pass a crime bill, to build more prisons and to lock up to more desperate people, many of whom were young, and many of whom were non-white..." (30)

The enormous and powerful national and international mobilization that the Fourth North American Revolution meant had given rise to the emergence of OWS and BLM, but in no way did the beginning of these new movements mean the end of racial attacks against African Americans. On June 17, 2015, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina suffered a horrific attack when a young white man entered the church and began shooting at worshipers, claiming 9 lives, including that of Reverend and Senator Clementa C. Pinckney. This attack shocked the country, due to the racist and supremacist character of its perpetrator who, while shooting, shouted the arguments of the Klan and the Nazis, but also because the attack was perpetrated against one of the symbols of the fight for civil rights.

As Freedom Socialist Newspaper explains: "... they were intended to destroy everything that the African Methodist Episcopal Church stands for in the fight against racism and forced servitude. This church was founded by Denmark Vesey, who was a former slave and who In 1822 he planned the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States... Vesey's son rebuilt the church, which also became an arrival point for the Underground Railroad. In the 1960s, it was transformed in a civil rights and labor center...This is not the first black church to be attacked. Between 1995 and 1996, about 30 churches in the South were burned down by racists. Clearly, the forces of white supremacy are at work again again. Their targets are people of color, immigrants, Jews, union members, women and homosexuals. This requires a broad self-defense movement" (31)

The pressure of the wave of national indignation caused by the Charleston massacre, and the fear of a powerful uprising, influenced by organizations such as BLM or OWS, forced the Governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley to request the removal of the flag from the Old Confederacy flying in front of the state Capitol in Columbia, five days after the massacre. Haley, a millionaire member of the Tea Party, changed her stance from supporting the flag to calling for its removal as a result of growing fear among the ruling classes that the presence in front of the Capitol of a Confederate flag, a deeply offensive symbol of racism, could provoke a revolt. Following the attack on Emanuel Church, the American and state flags on the Capitol dome were placed at half-staff in tribute to the victims of the Charleston massacre. However, the Confederate flag was not lowered. The attack in Charleston did not cause the effect of fear and intimidation that the supremacists sought to impose, but rather it caused the exact opposite effect.

When images of supremacist Dylann Roof with Confederate flags became known, there was enormous pressure to remove the Confederate flag that hung in front of the Capitol in Columbia. Three weeks after the massacre, both legislative chambers met and agreed to remove the flag that had flown for more than half a century, raised in 1961 by the state government as a gesture of defiance to the nascent civil rights movement. Commercial giants, such as Amazon, decided to stop selling these flags and opposition to Confederate monuments grew throughout the country, and in July 2015 the commissioners of Bexar County, whose capital is the city of San Antonio, Texas, ordered the removal of its public buildings various plaques commemorating the Confederate period, located on the Bexar County Courthouse itself. "We are not going to glorify symbols of hate" said County Judge Nelson Wolff. The University of Texas is considering removing 3 statues honoring Davis, Lee and Johnston, while other monuments were attacked in Denton, a city near Dallas.

The shock waves unleashed by Charleston continued to resonate. Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, Louisiana, introduced a motion 4 Confederate monuments constructed of granite and metal, which, after two tumultuous public sessions in which hundreds of people attended, the city council of the city of New Orleans voted to remove them in December 2015. New Orleans voted to remove them in December 2015. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina opened a dark era of horrible racism for the city perpetrated by the Bush Administration, another hurricane was now sweeping away the Confederate statues. On May 19, 2016, the Lee statue was removed in New Orleans. During its removal, Mayor Landrieu expressed in his speech: "The purpose of these monuments is to celebrate an imaginary and denaturalized Confederation; ignoring the dead, ignoring slavery, and the terror that it actually implied... c About 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 in Louisiana alone..."

The wave of removal of Confederate symbols in the country began to face resistance from supremacist groups, a contractor involved in the removal work abandoned the job after an arsonist burned his car, and threats from pro-Confederacy groups made it difficult Find a new contractor. Then there were lawsuits filed in state and federal courts by the city's memorialists, who called the monuments "cultural artifacts ," to which civil rights groups responded forcefully: Is it an obelisk of granite built in 1891 that commemorates the brief overthrow of the Reconstruction municipal government in 1874 by the White League of Crescent City, part of our "heritage "? 

Those who define these monuments as cultural artifacts are lying. Most of these symbols were placed when the dictatorship of Jim Crow segregation was established. There began a systematic falsification and rewriting of Civil War and Confederate history and the erection of pro-Confederate statues and monuments beginning in 1880, after the Reconstruction governments were overthrown. In New Orleans: Lee in 1884, the obelisk in 1891, Davis in 1911, and Beauregard in 1915. These monuments sought to transform these defenders of slavery into great heroes of the South, while under the Jim Crow dictatorship African Americans were routinely humiliated, brutalized and mutilated.

In August 2017, the Charlottesville City Council's decision to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee led white supremacist groups to protest in the city on Saturday and unleash chaos, causing the death of a woman - struck by a vehicle driven by a neo-Nazi. President Donald Trump condemned both groups by putting an equal sign between supremacists and those protesting against racism. Initially, the president did not strongly condemn far-right violence. This serious event sparked mobilizations throughout the country against the Nazis and supremacists, and accelerated the process of removing Confederate emblems. 

Trump criticized the removal of Confederate statues, and compared General Lee to several of the country's founders and first leaders, since they also had slaves. "Are we going to take down the statues of George Washington? And Thomas Jefferson, what do you think? Because he had a lot of slaves," Trump said at a news conference in New York. But no one heeded his claims. On the contrary, in Durham, North Carolina, a group of protesters tore down a statue of Confederate soldiers. The governor of Tennessee, Republican Bill Haslam, asked to remove from the Capitol a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and one of the first members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In August 2017, the city of Baltimore removed its monuments in the early hours of the morning, and authorities in Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky raised plans to also remove monuments of this type. The wave reached Canada where one of its most emblematic companies, the Hudson's Bay Company, removed a plaque placed in its main store in the Canadian city of Montreal that commemorated Jefferson Davis. The city of Tennessee found a brilliant idea when the state prohibited it from removing the statues: The city sold the parks where they were located to the organization Greenspace.

Far from the massive marches carried out by the KKK at the beginning of the 20th century, today supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazis or the Alt-right movement of Richard Spencer or Lana Lokteff are marginal groups, with little insertion, that must demonstrate escorted by the police because they are rejected wherever they go. The Charlestton massacre fueled a huge wave of collapse of symbols of racism and supremacism, starting in June 2015, a wave that has seen more than 110 Confederate flags, statues and banners removed across the country. And it threatens more, as an expression of the new winds blowing in the United States after the triumph of the IV North American Revolution.

Notes

(1) The Impact of the USA Patriot Act: An Update. Nancy Kranich. "The Free Expression Policy Project" 2003

(2) ACLU "Patriot Act Fears Are Stifling Free Speech"

(3) "Nació la Ussra (United Socialist State Republic of America)". Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor

(4) History of the Russian Revolution. Foreword. Volume I

(5) George Novack. "Democracy and Revolution" Pathfinder Press 1977

(6) Nahuel Moreno. School of Economics (1984)

(7) (8) y (9) George Novack. "Democracy and Revolution" Pathfinder Press 1977

(10) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States" 1980

(11) Nahuel Moreno. School of Economics (1984)

(12) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States" 1980

(13) "Nació la Ussra (United Socialist State Republic of America)". Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor.

(14) Karl Marx Capital Book I Chapter XXIII The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation

(15, 16 and 17) Interview by Lars Schall with Nomi Prins 3-6-2014

(18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24 y 25) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States" 1980

(26) Inauguration of the United States Police State 2012: Obama signs the "National Defense Authorization Act."Michel Chossudovsky

(27) Leon Trotsky. "Europe and America." 1926

(28) and (29) Tom Boot. "Revolutionary Integration: Yesterday and Today." Revolutionary Integration: A Marxist Analysis of African American Liberation. Richard Fraser and Tom Boot. Red Letter Press 2004

(30) Howard Zinn. "A People's History of the United States" 1980

(31) Freedom Socialist Newspaper.

Epilogue