Tag: Cuba

IS Our Next War against Cuba? Who Really Threatens Whom?

Readings for 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 22:19-23; Psalm 138:1-2, 2-3, 6, 8; Romans 11:33-36; Matthew 16:13-20

This week, the United States once again identified Cuba as a grave threat to our national security.

Think about that. I have in connection with this Sunday’s readings about keys that open and close the gates of life and death.

Start by considering the hell that the U.S. has created to starve Cubans into submission to the United States empire.

Cuba’s Plight

Cuba is an impoverished island of approximately ten million people. It has no fleet stationed off Florida, no military bases surrounding the United States, and no economic blockade preventing Americans from obtaining food, fuel, and medicine. Its electrical system is collapsing. Its people endure blackouts, food shortages, inadequate medical supplies, and transportation increasingly paralyzed by lack of fuel. And all of this has been caused by our government.

Nevertheless, Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s department recently issued a hundred-page report titled Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism. It accuses that struggling island of mounting a vast subversive campaign against the United States—one allegedly connected with the George Floyd protests, campus activism, peace organizations, socialist groups, and even journalists such as Amy Goodman.

This week Melissa Ford Maldonado of the America First Policy Institute went further. Her report calls Cuba “The Dictatorship Next Door” and a “massive national security threat.” It recommends “sustained maximum pressure,” a permanent U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, weakening Cuba’s government, and restoring “American dominance” throughout the hemisphere.

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis sees where such rhetoric can lead. He asks: Is Cuba to become our next war?

Who”s the Threat?

But first we should ask: Who is threatening whom?

The United States has nearly thirty times Cuba’s population. Its economy is hundreds of times larger. Washington maintains a naval base on Cuban territory at Guantánamo—against the wishes of Cuba’s government. For more than sixty years, it has subjected the island to an embargo condemned almost unanimously by the United Nations General Assembly. Now it is tightening that blockade while ordinary Cubans endure hunger, blackouts, and economic collapse.

And yet Cuba is called the threat.

It is as though Goliath, armed from head to foot and standing on David’s chest, cried out that the boy beneath him was threatening his life.

That reversal of victim and aggressor is essential to empire. The powerful portray those who resist them as dangerous. Enslaved people become threats to enslavers. Colonized people become threats to colonizers. Palestinians become threats to the nuclear-armed state occupying their land. And an impoverished Caribbean island becomes a “massive threat” to the most heavily armed nation in history.

Cuba’s unforgivable offense is not that it intends to invade the United States. It is that Cuba maintains relations with China, Russia, Iran, and other governments Washington calls adversaries. According to that logic, the United States may establish alliances and military bases across the planet, but Cuba may not choose its own friends. The entire Western Hemisphere is treated as Washington’s property.

George Kennan’s Memorandum

That is also the logic behind hostility toward BRICS and the emerging multipolar world. The United States contains only about 4.3 percent of humanity, but its rulers still claim the right to determine everyone else’s economic relationships. Cuba must remain isolated. China must be contained. BRICS must not challenge the dollar. Formerly colonized nations must not become independent enough to close the gap between themselves and their former masters.

George Kennan stated that purpose honestly in a top-secret 1948 memorandum. The United States then possessed approximately half the world’s wealth with only 6.3 percent of its population. Our task, he wrote, was to create “a pattern of relationships” allowing us “to maintain this position of disparity.”

Not eliminate the disparity. Maintain it.

Today’s Readings

That confession helps us understand today’s readings. They concern palace officials, keys, gates, authority, and the difference between power used for the people and power used to protect privilege.

The first reading concerns Shebna, “master of the palace.” He is a high official, keeper of the keys, accustomed to opening doors for some and closing them against others. Immediately before today’s passage, Isaiah condemns him for carving an impressive tomb for himself. Shebna has converted public office into private privilege. So God tells him, “I will thrust you from your office and pull you down from your station.”

That warning addresses every president, secretary of state, bishop, CEO, and ruling class. No one owns authority. It remains legitimate only insofar as it serves the community. When officials use power to enrich themselves, exalt their nation, punish opponents, or preserve an unjust “position of disparity,” they become Shebna.

Eliakim is appointed in his place. God puts “the key of the House of David” upon his shoulder. But the key is not given for personal enrichment. Eliakim must become “a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem”—protecting the household, especially its weakest members.

The criterion for judging government, then, is not military supremacy or the number of countries it can intimidate. It is whether government feeds the hungry, heals the sick, welcomes migrants, protects children, and permits weaker nations to control their own resources and destinies. By that standard, a policy deliberately intensifying deprivation in Cuba stands condemned.

Today’s responsorial psalm makes the criterion unmistakable: “The LORD is exalted, yet the lowly he sees, and the proud he knows from afar.” The powerful notice generals, investors, contributors, and fellow officials. But God sees the lowly. The psalmist invites us to look at history from that same perspective—from below, through the eyes of those who pay for decisions made in palaces.

That brings us to the Gospel. Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” Significantly, he asks the question at Caesarea Philippi, a place identified with imperial power. In the shadow of empire, Peter identifies not Caesar but an impoverished Jewish teacher as God’s chosen one: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

“Christ” is not Jesus’ surname. It means Messiah—God’s anointed agent of liberation. Peter is saying that God’s saving presence is found not in Caesar’s palace, imperial wealth, or occupying armies, but in the peasant Jesus and the grassroots movement forming around him.

However, Peter does not yet understand what kind of Messiah Jesus will be. In the verses immediately following today’s reading, Jesus predicts that the political and religious establishment will kill him. Peter objects. In response Jesus calls him “Satan.” Peter has the right title but the wrong understanding. He still imagines divine power too much like conventional power.

Jesus will not defeat Caesar by becoming another Caesar. He feeds hungry crowds, heals the sick, forgives debts, welcomes the excluded, challenges religious hypocrisy, and confronts exploitative power. His community is organized not around domination but around service, sharing, forgiveness, and the dignity of those society considers disposable.

As Eliakim receives the key to the House of David, Peter receives “the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” Once again, the keys represent delegated responsibility. Peter does not own the kingdom. Neither does the Church. Its task is to open what domination has closed: food to the hungry, medicine to the sick, shelter to refugees, dignity to the humiliated, truth to those deceived by propaganda, and political agency to the voiceless. This is the thrust of Jesus’ program announced in Luke 4: 14-30.

The Gates of Hell

Jesus’ promise follows: “The gates of the netherworld shall not prevail.” We often picture the Church defending itself against attacking gates. But gates do not attack. Gates keep prisoners inside. Jesus commissions his community to break them open.

The gates of hell today include war, hunger, racism, sanctions, unpayable debt, ecological destruction, and propaganda that transforms victims into enemies. For Cuba, they take the form of fuel deprivation, economic strangulation, medical shortages, blackouts, and threatened military intervention. Those gates were built by human beings. They can be opened by human beings.

Paul offers a final warning: “How inscrutable are his judgments and how unsearchable his ways!” No nation, party, economic system, or Church possesses God. That includes the United States, despite its pretensions to be exceptional or indispensable. God is not America’s counselor, chaplain, or military ally.

Nevertheless, God’s mysterious ways have a recognizable direction. The God whom no empire can possess sees the lowly, removes Shebna, entrusts authority for service, and becomes visible in the crucified Jesus.

Conclusion

So today’s question is not merely, “Who do you say that Jesus is?” It is also: What kind of world does our answer create?

If we proclaim Jesus as Christ while worshipping empire, strangling Cuba, protecting inequality, and keeping the poor locked behind the gates of hell, our doctrinal answer may be correct. But our practical answer is false.

The Church stands upon rock only when it helps break those gates open.

Bread or Blockade? Jesus, Gaza, and Cuba

Readings for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 55:1-3; Psalm 145:8-9, 15-16, 17-18; Romans 8:35, 37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

Today’s Gospel is about hunger. And so, unfortunately, is today’s world. But the kind of hunger I want to talk about today is not simply the tragic hunger caused by drought, crop failure, poverty, or some mysterious shortage of food. I want to talk about something far more disturbing: deliberately inflicted hunger, the use of food, water, medicine, and even fuel as weapons of war.

That’s hardly a new idea. Siege warfare has been around almost as long as warfare itself. If you can’t defeat your enemy on the battlefield, surround his city, cut off his food and water, and wait until hunger accomplishes what your weapons could not. Eventually, the thinking goes, people will become so desperate that they will surrender or overthrow their own leaders.

What’s disturbing for us this morning is that our own government is deeply involved in precisely that kind of warfare today.

Think first of Gaza. For years now Israel has bombed that tiny strip of land, displaced most of its population, destroyed homes, hospitals, farms, bakeries, water systems, and other elements necessary for ordinary human survival. At crucial points it has also blocked or severely restricted the entry of food and other humanitarian supplies. The United Nations Human Rights Office has not minced words about the result. It has said that famine in Gaza resulted directly from Israeli restrictions on goods necessary for civilian survival and has reminded the world that using starvation as a method of warfare is a war crime.

And let’s not pretend that this is simply Israel’s doing and therefore none of our concern. The United States has supplied the weapons, the money, and the diplomatic protection that have made Israel’s war possible. Whatever distinctions lawyers might want to make about degrees of responsibility, as Americans we cannot simply wash our hands and say that the starvation of Gaza has nothing to do with us.

Then there’s Cuba, where our responsibility is even more direct. For more than sixty years, the United States has maintained an economic embargo whose purpose has always been to make life sufficiently difficult on that island to produce political change.

Now the Trump administration has intensified that strategy by going after Cuba’s supply of oil. President Trump has publicly declared that there will be no more Venezuelan oil or money going to Cuba—”ZERO!” was his word—and has told Cuba to “make a deal.” His administration has gone further by threatening economic penalties against countries that supply Cuba with oil.

Think about what that means in practice. Cuba is an island of roughly ten million people. Oil doesn’t simply fuel automobiles. It generates electricity. Electricity refrigerates food and medicine, pumps water, illuminates hospitals, and keeps factories running. Fuel powers tractors and trucks that move food from farms to cities. Cut off the oil and eventually you affect virtually everything necessary for ordinary human life, including food itself.

All of that makes today’s familiar Gospel story about the loaves and fishes sound remarkably contemporary. For what happens there represents almost the exact opposite of what we’re witnessing in Gaza and Cuba.

Today’s story comes from Matthew the Evangelist, but it’s found in all four canonical Gospels. Matthew tells us that five thousand men were present. As so often happens in patriarchal accounts, the women and children disappear from the statistics.

And yet I want to suggest that those invisible women may actually hold the key to understanding what happened.

In any case, a huge crowd has followed Jesus to the other side of the Lake of Galilee, and the people become hungry.

In John’s fuller account, Jesus turns to Philip and asks where they might buy enough bread to feed everybody. Philip effectively replies that they can’t. Even a year’s wages wouldn’t provide everyone with more than a mouthful. So the market solution is briefly considered and dismissed. There simply isn’t enough purchasing power to solve the problem that way.

Jesus solves the problem by doing something surprisingly simple. He has everybody sit down. Mark’s version adds that the people organize themselves into groups. An anonymous crowd begins to look more like a collection of communities. People who had been strangers can see one another’s faces.

Then a child steps forward with five barley loaves and two fish. He offers what he has, Jesus receives it, gives thanks, and begins distributing the food.

And here’s where those invisible Jewish mothers come in. Can you imagine thousands of Jewish mothers setting off with their husbands and children for an all-day excursion into the countryside without packing something to eat? I can’t. Surely there was food scattered throughout that crowd—in bags, beneath cloaks, tucked away for one’s own family. The real scarcity may not have been food at all. It may have been trust. Everyone was holding tightly to what little they had because everyone feared there wouldn’t be enough.

Now, Matthew doesn’t tell us that’s what happened, and I don’t want to pretend he does. But I’ve always found this interpretation of the story compelling. Perhaps when that child opened his bag and offered what he had, others began doing the same. Perhaps the women who had packed food that morning began opening their baskets. Generosity became contagious. What had been privately guarded became commonly shared. And suddenly there was enough—not merely enough, but twelve baskets left over.

If that’s what happened, the “miracle” was a miracle of sharing. In any case, that’s surely part of the story’s meaning. The world God has given us contains enough. The problem begins when some hoard while others starve, when access to life’s necessities depends entirely on the ability to pay, or, even worse, when those necessities are deliberately withheld in order to force people to submit.

And that’s where Gaza and Cuba return to the story.

Jesus confronts hungry people and asks how they can be fed. Our government and the Israeli government it supports are doing something very different. They are asking how control over the necessities of life can be used to achieve political ends. In Gaza that has meant restricting food and other necessities amid a genocidal war.

In Cuba it means deliberately trying to cut off the fuel upon which food production, refrigeration, transportation, hospitals, and water systems depend. In both cases ordinary people—including children who have absolutely no control over the policies of their governments—are made to suffer in hopes that their suffering will produce somebody else’s political surrender.

Today’s Gospel rejects that logic from beginning to end. Jesus doesn’t ask the hungry people whether they support Rome or oppose it. He doesn’t demand that they renounce the Zealot revolutionaries. Nobody has to recognize Caesar, change governments, “make a deal,” or prove political innocence before receiving bread. They’re hungry. For Jesus, that’s enough.

That’s also why today’s responsorial psalm is so important. It says that God opens God’s hand and satisfies “the desire of every living thing.” Not merely Americans or Israelis, not merely Palestinians or Cubans, and certainly not merely people whose governments we happen to approve of. Bread is God’s gift to everyone.

And if that’s true, food cannot morally be turned into a weapon. Neither can water, medicine, electricity, or the fuel upon which access to all of them depends. Children cannot be starved because we disapprove of their parents’ government. Sick people cannot be deprived of medicine in hopes that their suffering will produce regime change.

Those things may be called foreign policy, sanctions, leverage, or national security. But today’s Gospel invites us to call them something else. It invites us to ask whether deliberately depriving human beings of what they need to live is compatible with following Jesus.

That’s the uncomfortable part of this Gospel for Christians like us. It’s easy to oppose hunger when hunger is nobody’s fault. It’s easy to contribute to Catholic Relief Services after a hurricane or drought. But things become considerably more difficult when our own government is causing the hunger or enabling others to do so. At that point charity isn’t enough. Christian faith becomes political, because following Jesus requires us to oppose policies carried out in our name.

And perhaps that’s the real meaning of those twelve baskets left over at the end of John’s story. There was enough all along. There is enough today as well. The question is what we do with what God has given us. Do we share it, or hoard it? Do we feed people, or blockade them? Do we treat bread as God’s gift to every human being, or as leverage to force our enemies to their knees?

The Jewish mothers in today’s story, at least as I imagine them, opened their baskets. The child opened his. Jesus blessed what they shared. And everyone ate.

That leaves us American Christians with an uncomfortable question. When our government uses hunger and deprivation against the people of Gaza and Cuba, whose side are we on?

Our government’s?

Or Jesus’?

Regime Change in the U.S.: A Taste of Our Own Medicine

 I’ve given up on the United States. It’s irreformable. It’s a failed state.

Think about it.  As things stand, the U.S. can do nothing but fight wars, close borders, impose sanctions, and fight meaningless culture wars. And even at that, despite the more than $2 billion it spends on “defense” each day, our country can’t win its forever wars. It lost in Vietnam, in Iraq, and Afghanistan. It’s in the process of losing in Ukraine. And yet, it’s planning a further foray into China.

Ukraine is the best illustration of the failed policy just mentioned. We’ve sent billions upon billions to support the war there, but the Russians are prevailing, nonetheless.

Meanwhile, our own infrastructure is in decay; millions are without healthcare, millions more are addicted to pain killers; there’s a mass shooting every day (literally); homelessness abounds, young people can’t afford college tuition; prisons are overflowing; our money-driven elections are a sham, and our government is complicit with the genocide unfolding in Gaza. At the same time, we end up blaming the poorest people in the world – the immigrants at our southern gates – for all our problems.

Yes, we need regime change.

And I’m not just talking about changing presidents or even the criminals now “serving” in the Congress.

No, I’m talking about REGIME CHANGE – a new order responsive to people like us, rather than to corporations, bankers, financiers, and Wall Street.

That means replacing all that with a system that would cut military spending by at least 75%, prioritize the issue of climate change, close foreign military bases, eliminate nuclear weapons, practice real diplomacy (which always means dialog and compromise) and derive its leadership from the working class, instead of from the bosses who control our work lives.

So, if we need regime change, why not apply to the U.S. the formula our bosses routinely use for that process — I mean the one it’s employed against the Soviet Union all during the Cold War, against Iran in 1953, Guatemala the following year, Cuba over the last 65 years, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua since 1979; Venezuela since Hugo Chavez instituted his Bolivarian Revolution. . .. The list goes on and on., but the formula’s always the same.

In every case, it’s: (1) make the life of working-class people as miserable as possible (2) by creating crisis. (I’m talking about military coups, sanctions, creation of food and fuel shortages, outright terrorism, and deprivation of human rights.) In fact, (3) make ordinary people so miserable that (4) the victims of such measures will rise and overthrow Stalin, Mossadegh, Arbenz, Castro, Allende, the Sandinistas, Maduro, etc. and (5) introduce a fascist American puppet like Resa Pahlavi or Augusto Pinochet.  

Again, that’s the strategy: immiserate ordinary people and make them overthrow America’s official (usually socialist-leaning) enemies and replace those enemies with right-wing fascist pawns.

The problem is (for the U.S.) that such gambits rarely work for long. They often end up awakening the left who then replace American puppets with leftists like Lula in Brazil.

Well, I’m thinking, why not turn the tables on the bosses and run the same gambit here at home, but this time against the bosses themselves? In our current circumstances, this might entail:

  1. Not voting in the next election.
  2. Alternatively, voting for “uncommitted,” for Cornel West, RFK, or Marianne Williamson.
  3. Thereby, allowing Donald Trump to be elected next November.
  4. He’ll of course make our lives miserable over the short term.
  5. But his policies will make clear the above-noted disfunctions of the system and awaken the currently dormant left.
  6. This may eventually spark a progressive movement for the radical systemic change I’ve been referring to.
  7. Which one way or another may eventually overthrow the corrupt system that even now immiserates our lives.

It’s worth a try. And when you think about it, what have we got to lose? As I said:

  • Our system is broken beyond repair.
  • It is incapable of addressing our real problems noted above.
  • We need something to awaken the left and force the required changes,
  • This means enduring at least four years of fascism under Donald Trump who might refuse to leave office after four years.
  • Sparking even wider discontent and rebellion.
  •  And at the very least, giving us a taste of our own medicine.

In any case, it’s what “our” government has been doing all over the world at least since the end of the Second Inter-capitalist War. There’s no way of sugar-coating the required remedy.

Cuba Develops and Will Share Its Five Vaccines

Yesterday, on “Democracy Now,” Amy Goodman reported good news for the poor countries of the Global South. In the news headline portion of her show , she said, “Cuba has pledged to donate 200 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to low-income countries in the Global South. The move was announced at talks hosted by the Progressive International and was heralded as a possible ‘historic turning point’ in the pandemic.”

You’d think that the announcement would be welcomed and celebrated everywhere and be given at least as much press coverage as the one-day protests in Cuba reported so breathlessly last November 15th. However, no such general celebration occurred. Even on “Democracy Now,” the story went undeveloped beyond the just-quoted headline. Meanwhile, in contrast to its hysteria over Cuban protests last fall, the U.S. government itself has been totally silent about this potentially game changing development.

Nevertheless, according to international health experts, Cuba’s achievement could make vaccinations much more available for example to 1.3 billion Africans whose continent has seen only 7% of its population receive even a single vaccination dose. (And this in contrast to 70% vaccination rates in richer countries.)

According to reports even on CNBC’s online source, the five Cuban vaccines in question:

  • Are a uniquely Cuban development among the former colonies
  • Have been administered in three doses to a higher percentage (86%) of Cuba’s 11 million people than in most of the world’s richest countries
  • Are not dependent on expensive mRNA technology using instead a “subunit protein” variety – like the Novavax vaccine
  • Are cheap to produce
  • Require no special refrigeration
  • Enjoy 90% effectiveness against all strains of COVID 19
  • Will have no patent restrictions on their recipes shared with low-income countries
  • Will be made available to them virtually at cost
  • Are a tribute to Cuba’s legendarily efficient health care system

Currently, Cuba’s prestigious biotech industry is awaiting approval for its vaccine developments from the World Health Organization. That approval is expected early this year. According to Helen Yaffee of the University of Glasgow, “. . . many countries and populations in the global south see the Cuban vaccine as their best hope for getting vaccinated by 2025.”

As for cost and distribution issues, John Kirk, professor of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia added, “The objective of Cuba is not to make a fast buck, unlike the multinational drug corporations, but rather to keep the planet healthy.”

But in news cycles dominated by pharmaceutical corporations that refuse to waive intellectual property rights to their largely publicly funded products, such contrasting humanitarian consciousness goes mostly underpublicized and by such silence, denied.

Denial like that prevails despite the appeals for sharing vaccine recipes by the World Health Organization itself supported by civil society groups, trade unions, former world leaders, international medical charities, Nobel laureates and human rights organizations.

Part of the reparations due Cuba for 60 years of economic embargo and for silence about its achievements is to at last recognize its socialism as a force for global humanitarianism much more beneficial to the world than international capitalism.

 

Podcast Episode 17 in ACIM for Social Activists: “I See Nothing as It Is Now”

AUDIO

TEXT: “I See Nothing as It Is Now“

Today, we have reached Lesson Nine in A Course in Miracles’ Workbook for Students. It reads, “I see nothing as it is now.”

The lesson addresses the fact that most of us are living in the past. So, we end up with a world view dictated by ideas and understandings that my wife, Peggy, keeps dismissing as “so 20th century.”

For those committed to social justice, such dated concepts and explanations have to do with patriotism, but also with Jesus whose voice is centralized in A Course in Miracles.

As for outdated patriotism, we continue to live as though the U.S. were not the failed state that it is – as though, for instance, China’s system were not proving much more efficient in providing for its people and responding to emergencies such as COVID-19. China has been spectacular in eliminating grinding poverty.

Meanwhile, the failed nature of the U.S. system is shown by its systemic gridlock. It simply cannot make the decisions that must be taken even to deal with basic health care. For instance, with a population of just over 300 million, America has lost over 800,000 to COVID-19. At the same time, with a population four times larger, China has lost fewer than 5,000 to the pandemic.

Even more basically, the U.S. economy and political system are far less efficient than China’s.

Here in the United States, we’ve become dependent not on producing goods and services, but on the financial sector – on investments, banking, debt, stocks, and bonds. As economist Michael Hudson keeps pointing out, these sectors are unproductive and parasitic. They represent overhead rather than productive income.

By contrast, China has a far healthier economic system that actually provides manufacturing jobs and a rising standard of living for its people. In our globalized economy, that’s possible, because industries are drawn to China by wages that are much lower than in the U.S.

Yet, even with low wages, the Chinese working class is prospering, because of the country’s centralized economy that provides health care gratis and free education for its people along with subsidized housing, food and transportation. Those “social wages” constitute the equivalent of thousands of extra dollars added to each month’s paycheck for Chinese workers.

Besides that, the nationalized Chinese banking system (absent the profit motive) can easily remedy any debt problems by simply erasing debts should any sector develop problems.

As a result of all this, catching up with China will be virtually impossible for the United States as long it continues embracing the neo-liberal capitalist model. For one thing, that arrangement finds it unthinkable to engage in long-term planning; it can’t see beyond projected returns on a quarterly basis. Among other liabilities, that makes it impossible, for example to cope with climate change, that demands anticipating weather events decades from now.

In fact, to actually compete with the centrally planned elements of China’s economy, the U.S. would have to follow systemic suit. However, America’s programs of privatization, deregulation and tax reduction has the country moving in the exact opposite direction.

Course correction would have to include the ideologically “impossible” steps of taming of wage spirals by:

  • Taking de facto central planning away from Wall Street and returning it into the hands of elected government officials
  • Raising taxes on the 1%
  • Nationalizing the banking system
  • Enacting a Green New Deal to provide productive, environment-saving jobs for the unemployed and under-employed
  • Providing free tuition for all post-secondary students
  • Forgiving the $1.5 trillion that students still owe for their educations, thus freeing them to actually buy homes, automobiles and other necessities
  • Nationalizing health care thus relieving both employers and employees from the burden of meeting the costs of medical treatment and pharmaceuticals

The sad truth however is that without some apocalyptic catastrophe and without transcending our hamstrung two-party system, the chances of taking such measures (even if Democrats were to retain control of both houses of Congress) are nil. Consequently, China will continue to outstrip the United States economically and socially. Simply put, its system is more flexible than the neo-liberal model.

In today’s 9th lesson in A Course in Miracles, Jesus’ voice is once again addressed specifically to North Americans. He calls us to depart from the vision promulgated by the propaganda of our cave-prison. His message suggests for instance that China (and other socialist countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) are not our inveterate enemies. According to A Course in Miracles, no one is our enemy. No one is attacking us. There is really only one of us here. The Chinese are our sisters and brothers. There is no distinction between them and us.

Today’s lesson tells us that understanding this simple idea (as difficult as it might be to accept) “is a prerequisite for undoing your false ideas.” It is necessary to clear the mind of its “debris that darkens it.”

So, today during your practice periods as you watch the news that touches our country’s “official enemies,” say to yourself:

I do not see China as it is now.

I do not see Russia as it is now.

I do not see Venezuela as it is now.

I do not see Nicaragua as it is now.

I do not see North Korea as it is now.

I do not see Cuba as it is now.

See if you can remember to repeat this exercise three or four times during the day.

Chapter 32: Conclusion “Damiana Sets the Pope Straight”

Please excuse me for forgetting to attach the audio file to yesterday’s posting.

Anyway, here’s what I thought I was publishing yesterday. This is the concluding chapter of my novel, The Pope’s Secret. But wait, there’ll be another chapter and epilogue.

For previous chapters, just scroll down.