Workers can’t count on ruler-orchestrated “exposés” like Wikileaks to somehow reform the profit system that creates wars without end. Wikileaks is trying to deceive people into believing that “independent” or “alternative” media can expose the capitalist class and somehow organize against it.
Wikileaks’ hackers and their now jailed, phony rebel chief Julian Assange have no intention of attacking U.S. imperialism. If they had:
• They would never have chosen the ultra-Establishment New York Times — and its European equivalents — to edit and publish their huge number of 250,000 “sensitive” State Department cables.
• And this gives the Times and its allies the opening to use the leaks to urge stepped-up U.S. military measures against growing — especially nuclear — threats to U.S. imperialism.
• The leaks also help Obama and the imperialists he serves to shift the spotlight from the disastrous economy onto foreign policy.
Here are some Wiki warnings:
• “A batch of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables released this week lend details to long-suspected nuclear cooperation between [Chinese protectorates] North Korea and Burma, suggesting that hundreds of North Koreans were…working at a covert military site deep in the Burmese jungle.”(Washington Post, 12/11)
• “One of the leaked cables…said the 19 North Korean BM-25 missiles, based on a Russian design known as the R-27, might give Iran the ‘building blocks’ for producing long-range missiles.” (Bloomberg 11/29)
• “Britain’s Guardian newspaper, citing U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, reported…a decision to draft contingency plans to defend the ex-Soviet NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania [from invasion by Russia] had been taken secretly this year at the urging of the United States and Germany.” (Reuters, 12/09)
• “The United States tried to stop delivery of Russian anti-aircraft missiles to Venezuela in 2009 amid concerns it could pass them on to Marxist guerrillas in Colombia or Mexican drug gangs, The Washington Post said on Sunday, citing diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks.” (Reuters, 12/12)
Ruling-class publishers are also spinning the cables to blame U.S. genocide in Iraq on an evil Bush-Cheney-Halliburton cabal instead of the increasing profit needs of the biggest U.S. capitalists. Germany’s Spiegel Online is the English-language affiliate of Der Spiegel, a favored Assange outlet.
Spiegel has close ties to liberal U.S. imperialists. Speigel Online boasts that it’s “valued by policy-makers in…Washington, D.C.” And Spiegel publishes Harvard Business School’s magazine in German.
On December 6, its article…“A Lot of Blood for Little Oil,” [said]: “Contrary to what many people believe, the Iraq war provided few advantages for the U.S. oil industry…. Diplomatic cables show…competitors to the Americans…often did better in the country. Only one U.S. company truly profited: Halliburton.”
Wiki Accuses Bushites, Absolves Exxon of Iraq Carnage
But the actions of Exxon Mobil, the chief beneficiary of the U.S. war machine’s slaughter of millions of Iraqis, prove Spiegel’s “little oil” line a deliberate lie: “U.S. major ExxonMobil and its partners [mainly Anglo-Dutch Shell] raised their production plateau target from Iraq’s West Qurna oilfield to 2.825 million barrels per day (mbd) after adding new reserves to the area covered by their original development contract, an Iraqi oil official said.” (Reuters, 11/28) Those 2,825,000 barrels are more than oil-rich Kuwait or Venezuela or Nigeria pump daily.
U.S. war-makers used hundreds of thousands of GIs (who never enlisted to save Big Oil) and high-paid mercenaries to help Exxon win and hold the largest of Iraq’s six giant fields. The country’s projected total output stands at 12mbd, greater than Saudi Arabia’s current production. (This officially-proclaimed total is perhaps unreachable.)Exxon’s contract, signed in January, runs for 20 years. And Obama will keep the troops there to carry out that mission.
What Did Wikileaks Omit?
Besides distorted Wikileaks and outright Wiki-lies, there are glaring Wiki-omissions. Since at least since 2005, the State Department, supposedly under Assange’s microscope, has held extensive negotiations with Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India about U.S.-funded construction of the gas pipeline TAPI, named for these countries it will traverse. But Wikileaks never mentions TAPI, although the four Asian nations inked the deal for it on December 11.
Meanwhile bloodshed is worsening along its Afghan route through Kandahar and Helmand, always the focus of U.S.-U.K.-led operations. Protecting TAPI will require permanent, massive U.S. and allied military presence there. Nor did Assange’s crew criticize U.S. gunpoint diplomacy with Turkmen bosses regarding the pipeline last month. It led TAPI’s gas suppliers to openly reject Russian Gazprom’s offer to participate in TAPI, while they celebrated the re-opening of Exxon’s office in their capital, Ashgabat.
Now the same U.S. and U.K. governments that practice mass murder in Iraq and Afghanistan — aiding the media barons — are trying to make a martyr of Assange, thereby assuring him a wider public following. Assange sits in London’s Wandsworth Prison, accused of rape charges his increasingly numerous supporters call false.
Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder threatens to try Assange for espionage. But his lawyer, Mark Stephens, who sports impeccable liberal imperialist credentials (see below), is saying Assange went to jail willingly.
According to Stephen’s firm’s website, Stephens “has run and taught courses for” the World Bank and the Open Society Institute. This same U.S.-dominated World Bank imposes worker-impoverishing “austerity budgets” on developing countries to ensure repayment to lenders like J.P. Morgan Chase. And it’s billionaire currency swindler George Soros’s Open Society that tries to buy the election of pro-U.S. politicians, from Belarus to Burma.
Only Working Class’s Communist Revolution Can Destroy War-Making Profit System
The Progressive Labor Party rejects the deadly political error that says our class can have capitalist allies like Assange and his pals. PLP’s goal is to spread our ideas throughout, and participate in, the mass movement — in effect, making the unions, factories, schools, churches, communities and the military “schools for communism,” linking their class struggles to the need to bury the capitalists through communist revolution.
Yes, the war-makers must be exposed, but from a purely working-class point of view, with the ultimate goal of destroying capitalism itself and establishing a society without bosses and profits, run by and for the working class. J