ECUADOR has admitted that it ‘partly restricted’ the internet access for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is taking refuge at its London embassy from the various imperialist powers that are keen to get at him after the revelations that WikiLeaks has made about imperialism’s crimes all over the planet.
The crunch for Ecuador came when the US government alleged that Assange had in recent weeks released material that would have a negative impact on the US presidential election, that is, show the real Hillary Clinton and halt her passage into the White House.
In its statement, the Ecuadorean foreign ministry said: ‘In that respect, Ecuador, exercising its sovereign right, has temporarily restricted access to part of its communications systems in its UK Embassy.’
The crimes that provoked a US ultimatum to Ecuador were that the site was releasing material from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including transcripts of paid speeches Mrs Clinton made to the US investment bank Goldman Sachs in the past, which her campaign had long refused to release despite widespread demands.
The scripts reveal exchanges with bank executives, and her very cosy relationship with Wall Street bankers and speculators of all kinds. According to the latest leaked emails, Clinton told a Goldman Sachs conference she would like to intervene secretly in Syria.
She made the remark in answer to a question from Lloyd Blankfein, the bank’s chief executive, in 2013 – months after she left office as secretary of state.
‘My view was you intervene as covertly as is possible for Americans to intervene,’ she told employees of the bank in South Carolina, which had paid her about $225,000 (£185,000) to give a speech. Clinton also complained that the political climate had made it overly difficult for wealthy people to serve in government.
‘There is such a bias against people who have led successful and/or complicated lives,’ Mrs Clinton said. The pressure on officials to sell or divest assets in order to serve, she added, had become ‘very onerous and unnecessary’.
In a separate speech to Goldman Sachs employees, Mrs Clinton said it was an ‘oversimplification’ to blame the global financial crisis of 2008 on the US banking system.
She praised a deficit-reduction proposal from President Obama’s fiscal commission that called for raising the Social Security retirement age, saying that the commission’s leaders ‘had put forth the right framework’.
Such comments would have proven devastating to Clinton during the Democratic primary fight, when Sanders promoted himself as the enemy of Wall Street and of a rigged economic system.
The Clintons have made more than $120 million in speeches to Wall Street and special interests since Bill Clinton left the White House in 2001. Mrs Clinton typically earned $225,000 for speeches.
As she sought to burnish her image as an advocate of working America, Mrs Clinton publicly declared her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Obama’s 12-nation trade pact, and distanced herself from Nafta, which her husband signed into law.
But in a 2013 speech to a Brazilian bank, Mrs Clinton took a far different approach. My dream,’ she said, ‘is a hemispheric common market, with open borders, sometime in the future.’
And ironically, in a 2013 speech to National Multi-Housing Council, Clinton says ‘you need both a public and a private position’ on key policies to get things done. Meanwhile, in one 2014 speech to ‘Goldman-Black Rock’, Clinton said she worries about the ‘growing sense of anxiety and even anger in the country over the feeling that the game is rigged.’
These leaks were the straw that broke the camel’s back. Ecuador was forced to take action, in order that Clinton stand the best chance of getting into the White House, where once elected alongside her Pentagon allies, she will institute a ‘no fly zone’ in Syria and challenge Russia to break it and start a nuclear war, repeating the tactic of the 1962 Cuba missiles crisis!
In the event of such a development, the trade unions in the UK and the US must be ready to call general strikes to bring down their governments and go forward to workers governments and socialism!
