And Kerry Lectures Cuba on Democracy.

By Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

The US presidential elections are heating up despite being over a year away. And as usual candidates representing Wall Street are in the driver’s seat. In fact, whichever way it goes, Wall Street will have its man or woman in the White House.

Jeb Bush is a former employee of Wall Street as is John Kasich. (I commented previously on Bush here) . Pat Christie, Chris Christie’s wife and Heidi Cruz, married to Ted Cruz “have decades of experience working for major Wall Street firms..,.,” the Wall Street Journal notes, and are on the campaign trail with their hubbies.

Both these spouses are doing the rounds for their friends on Wall Street, as having former employees in the actual president’s chair provides unimaginable financial opportunities.

If either of these Republicans fail to make it, that doesn’t worry the moneylenders, the Clintons like the present occupant, Barack Obama, are long time friends of Wall Street which, “…is a prominent funding source for leading Democratic contender Hilary Clinton.”, the paper states.

Heidi Cruz knows all about hard work it seems. She spent the entire month of June calling well-healed coupon clippers “averaging 30 calls a days” says the Journal.

Is it possible that Heidi Cruz is working out of a call center in Manila I wonder? I can’t imagine it but 30 calls a day? How does she do it?  Such a pace is humanly impossible surely.

Apparently not for Mrs. Cruz, who recently worked for Goldman Sachs, “It’s that relentless work ethic. I don’t mind when people tell me ‘no’” she tells the Journal.

And John Kerry is in Cuba lecturing the Cubans about Democracy. “Cuba’s future is for Cubans to shape” , Kerry, who is married to the billionaire heir of the Heinz fortune, said yesterday as the US flag was hoisted in Cuba for the first time since 1961. Democratic Senator Robert Menendez was not pleased. “A flag representing freedom and liberty will rise today in a country ruled by a repressive regime that denies its people democracy and basic human rights” he told the WJS.

While Cuba is undoubtedly a one party state, the rest of the world must laugh at these comments from politicians of the 1% whose government supports such undemocratic and ruthless regimes as those in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and funds the Apartheid regime in Israel. Historically US capitalism has installed countless dictatorial regimes over the last 50 years. It organized the coup that overthrew Iran’ secular democratic government in 1953 at the urging of the oil industry. The same year it overthrew Guatemala’s on behalf of the United Fruit Co. and other huge agricultural landowners.  In 1973 Salvadore Allende’s elected government in Chile was overthrown, he was assassinated and the US’s man Pinochet was installed.

I wonder how much the average American worker understands about the history of the US and Cuba. Kerry talked yesterday of the “mutual isolation” and “estrangement that the United States and Cuba have been traveling….”.  Talk about history and its falsification. The estrangement hostility and isolation is a one-way street. In defense of business interests and gambling, it was the US that chose the path of isolation and it wasn’t simply isolation. It was a strategy aimed to starve the Cubans in to submission. Had that been successful, Cuba would not have eliminated illiteracy, reached a life expectancy rate equal to the US and an infant mortality rate that is better than the US.

Haiti has done wonders as a nation (the first black nation) under the domination of US capitalism hasn’t it.