Obama: Yemen dictator can come to US for "legitimate" medical reasons.

Saleh with friend. Can Bush get him the visa?

Obama, the former ant-war turned hawk president has decided that one of US capitalism's few remaining dictators in the Middle East will be allowed "in principle" to come to the US for medical treatment.  Ali Abdullah Saleh is one of the most "reviled Arab figures" in the region by most accounts, even the San Francisco Chronicle.  Saleh will only be granted a visa for "legitimate medical treatment" the Obama Administration claims.

The Administration expects some criticism given Saleh's ruthless undemocratic regime.  But the murderous Shah of Iran was allowed in as was Ferdinand Marcos. When US supported dictators want a way out they can always get sick and come to the US on humanitarian grounds. Its not so easy for US citizens who have worked all their lives to get the same medical treatment if they can pay.  Unfortunately, for Assad of Syria, he is not on Washington's "friendly" dictator list so he, if he has to flee, might be in deep trouble. As a long time ally of the Iranians the US's buddies the Saudi's might not let him in like they did Ben Ali of Tunisia.

The US mass media, the most censored and "unfree" of the advanced capitalist economies, doesn't cover the situation in Yemen quite as aggressively as it did Libya or the ongoing situation in Syria.  The US openly called for the death of Gaddafi, no hospital treatment for him.  Bahrain, the absolute monarchy that has imprisoned medical personnel for treating peaceful protesters harmed by US armed troops gets even less.  This undemocratic regime is very popular with Washington and the Pentagon as it houses 30,000 US troops to protect western oil interests in the gulf.

I was thinking about the earlier blog on the US embassy in Baghdad.  We always hear in the western press about Iran trying to increase its influence in the region.  For this, some US politicians and other nuts are calling for a military strike on Iran. The insanity of it, but the stakes are too high, the profits too great and the US capitalist class is driven to create further crisis by the laws of the market regardless of the consequences.

We can imagine what the US would do if Iran or China invaded Mexico, set up a puppet government and built bases throughout the country including the largest embassy in the world; the folks in the Pentagon would nuke them, they'd certainly want to.  Yet the US surrounds China with bases, surrounds Iran with puppet states that do Wall Street's bidding and this given that the US overthrew the democratic government of Iran led by Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, installed the brutal Shah and also pushed Hussein in to invading the country at a cost of a quarter million Iranian lives.  It's no wonder there's a shortage of trust there.

Some American workers have told me that they have justified supporting these dictatorships because democratic countries with control over their own resources would refuse us oil.  Leaving aside that the environmental crisis cries out for the abandonment of fossil fuels, what are the people of this region going to do with their oil?  They can't eat it. The oil giants like Shell, BP, Chevron and their European partners care about the profits that oil brings, they don't want the people under whose land it resides to control this valuable resource.

This mess cannot be solved within the framework of capitalism. It is the workers of the Middle East and the working classes of the US, Europe and the world that can ensure the fair and equitable trade of the products the natural world offers up to us.  In the US, we have no political voice, the political representatives of the two Wall Street party claim to speak for us but they don't represent our interests no more than the Mullahs of Iran or the monarchs of Bahrain represent the interests of workers or the middle classes in these countries.  They make decisions that affect our lives negatively too and cause millions around the world to feel hostility towards us. As American workers we should consider that in Bahrain, our tax money is being used to prop up an absolute monarchy against those fighting for democratic reforms and a Republic.  The American revolution had the same goals.

We cannot and must not ignore what the unelected few who govern US society do around the world in our name.  We are not "all Americans" of this type and we ourselves are presently under attack by the same forces domestically who are getting richer and richer at our expense. The movements around the world have influenced us here and we see with the Occupy Wall Street the beginnings of a movement struggling to find its feet.  A movement that clearly wants to close the inequality gap and the 1% to pay more.  A movement that is attempting to reach out to all of us including the movement's abroad.  This is a very positive development.

The US capitalist class is attempting to figure out how they can crush this movement, isolate it from the US working class and defeat it.  We must not let this happen.  Sinking deep roots in the working class will make it difficult for the 1% to isolate and crush the movement.

What is missing at this point also is the need for a political alternative to the two Wall Street parties; a mass workers' party can change the balance of forces in the political sphere in the US  and open the door to presenting to the world a face of America that they don't see. It is a step forward that has to be taken if we want to change the direction the unelected minority that govern US society are taking us. We can't pray ourselves of of this crisis; we must act unless praying gives you the strength to act then it's good praying.