[Fresh Ink] Honduran Coup: Damning Indictment of Capitalism

[Richard Menec]

<http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/honduran-coup-damning-indictment-of-capitalism/>

Dissident Voice                    July 10th, 2009

Honduran Coup: Damning Indictment of Capitalism

by Dennis Rahkonen

Since he's spending his summer vacation at our home, I recently washed my 
11-year-old grandson's dirty clothes.

As I later folded them, small tags told me they were manufactured in the 
Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Not one item bore a "Made in USA" label, which is very sad, considering that 
the unionized needle trades were once a bastion of our country's labor 
movement, and that finding attire produced overseas was a rarity just a few 
decades ago.

All this relates closely to the despicable coup that deposed Honduras' 
democratically elected president, Manuel Zaleya.

Although the coup's initiators say they were motivated by other factors, 
what really spurred their reactionary ire was Zaleya promoting better pay 
and conditions for Honduran workers in general, but particularly for the 
virtual sweatshop slaves whose cruel exploitation by mostly U.S. garment 
firms has been an utterly obscene profit generator for shameless owners 
residing in luxury in the North.

It would be extremely naive to think those "foreign" companies, along with 
others involved in banana and fruit growing, did not facilitate the coup in 
more than minor ways. It goes without saying, also, that U.S. political 
conservatives, with operative ties to covert Central American intrigues 
dating back to the Reagan years, are now malevolently present in 
Tegucigalpa.

Our nation's anti-democratic, imperialist role in Central America is nothing 
new.

Countless religious activists, teachers, clinic workers, union organizers, 
and ordinary campesinos were brutalized by sordid contras secretly armed and 
trained by the U.S. under illegal Reagan administration aegis during the '80s.

Much earlier, however, Yankee pillage of Latin America (as well as other 
world locales) was already standard operating procedure, as starkly exposed 
by former Marine Corps Commandant Smedley Butler:

I spent 33 years (in the Marines).most of my time being a high-class muscle 
man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a 
racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown 
Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for 
American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic 
for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a 
decent place for the National City (Bank) boys to collect revenues in. I 
helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the 
benefit of Wall Street.

In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way 
unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, 
promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do 
was operate in three city districts. The Marines operated on three 
continents.

Progressives familiar with people's history know about the titanic struggle 
it took to unionize U.S. labor, lifting largely immigrant masses out of deep 
poverty, winning them the pay, benefits, and conditions that would shape the 
contours of our storied "good life".

They know, too, that the most militant unions were purged and broken during 
the McCarthyite Red Scare, allowing class-collaborationist tendencies to 
rise, making the decimation of American labor in the aftermath of Reagan's 
firing of the air traffic controllers essentially a cake walk, much to the 
profitable delight of corporate parasites.

Now our working class - the backbone of society and the creator of all 
productive wealth - is losing its jobs, homes, health care, pensions, and 
collective temper on an unprecedented scale.

The savagely exploitative, intensely destructive Walmart labor relations 
model dominates U.S. life, and everything we buy is produced abroad in 
oppressive settings where women and children toil long hours for mere 
pennies. We (and certainly they) are being ground into the dust as a tiny 
minority of private "entrepreneurs" live high on the hog, via stolen wealth 
that properly should be used to improve everyone's living standards.

But capitalism can't do that.

It's unable to function in anything but an increasingly rapacious way, 
shafting majority wage earners ever more painfully, whether through the 
acute injustice that leaves evicted families on the street in U.S. cities, 
or Hondurans fearfully facing military repression and a drastic 
deterioration of their already desperate existence.

As its growing resort to super-exploitation, dictatorial harshness, violence 
and war clearly proves, capitalism is the intrinsic enemy - not the 
ballyhooed champion - of fair play, democracy, simple decency, and peace.

Humanity will have no future worth aspiring to if it stays tied to 
capitalism's irreparable flaws and fiercely down-pulling restraints.

The rest of this pivotal century clearly must be devoted to building truly 
democratic, broadly uplifting socialism on a global scale.

It's the great moral imperative of our era.


Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive 
commentary with a Heartland perspective for various outlets since the '60s. 
Read other articles by Dennis, or visit Dennis's website.