US/Saudi dictatorship in Yemen slaughters more peaceful protesters

The crisis continues in Yemen as the US supported regime continues to massacre unarmed protesters. Yemeni's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh is holed up in Saudi Arabia as his regime hangs on to power.  US capitalism and its Saudi flunkies, (the guys who went in to Bahrain to suppress the movement for democratic reform there) are concerned that if the protests are successful the next regime may not be quite so cooperative in protecting the interests of the oil industry and the Saudi royal family.

The Saleh government has been heavily armed by the US and as the struggle for reform goes on, the US continues to bomb the country with unmanned drones.  As usual, US foreign policy, which comes at a great sacrifice for US workers also as we pay for it in terms of money and cuts in spending on domestic needs like education and infrastructure for example, ends up being the best recruiting tool for Islamic fundamentalist groups or any other "terrorist" type organizations.  Eventually. those whose sacrifices are thwarted by the US and Saudi support for Saleh's regime will find some place to go.

"The US has been more active in bombing (Yemen) than reforming in recent months" writes Simon Tisdall in today's Guardian. The Obama Administration, the favorite of the US trade Union leadership has "significantly increased" the drone attacks. John Brennan, Obama's counter-terrorism adviser told an audience at Harvard (a training center for future leaders of global capitalism)  last week that "The United States does not view our authority to use military force against al Qaeida as being restricted to 'hot' battlefields like Afghanistan" He added, "We reserve the right to take unilateral action if or when other governments are unwilling or unable to take the necessary action themselves."

What would US capitalism do without al Qaida?

I have no idea whether "al Qaida" exists or not but if it didn't they would create it. They lost a very useful tool when the old Soviet Union collapsed.  Prior to that we had a bi-polar world where massive offensive weaponry could be produced at US taxpayer expense and relative peace existed as these two superpowers shared global dominance.  With the collapse of Stalinism, this relatively stable situation ended.  When I was young I went o Iraq by train and from there to Basra.  I remember going through Nineveh and Babylon and although not a religious person was awed that I was in such historic places. The Iraqi's despite the role British imperialism had played in their country were very friendly and good to me. I remember telling some of them my mother worked in a factory, we are the same color as the Queen, we drink tea, the similarity ends there.  We don';t even speak the same English.

I had a dream of working in the gulf.  I had friends who went overland from London to Joburg. Today, half the countries in the world are too unstable to travel in.  This is the legacy of globalization capitalist style.

The first step in political awareness is overcoming the obstacles to free thinking within our own mind.  Overcoming that "stop in the mind" as the British historian Christopher Hill put it. Here in the US we are under assault like never before.  We have two million in prison.  We are being thrown out of our homes at alarming rates and one in six lives in poverty. None of this is the result of foreign despots or ill defined  Yankee hating terrorists.  This assault is mapped out in Jackson Hole Wyoming and other retreats that the bankers, speculators and Wall Street coupon clippers gather at. The designs are then implemented by their representatives in Congress---in other words, by Americans just like us.

Settling accounts with these folks is the task before us and building links with other workers throughout the world will help us in that task.  The capitalist class know this which is why a fear of foreigners and the presence of al Qaida is useful to them.

I think we know that.