General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, now head of Hondutel

I’m sure Hondurans are relieved to hear Velasquez assessment of his abilities.

“One of the specialties that I have is intelligence, and intelligence must be applied properly to try to have as much information to make the necessary corrections,” the General said.

General Velasquez In Charge of Hondutel
March 10th, 2010 · No Comments

The former head of the Joint Chiefs, retired General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, was sworn in yesterday afternoon as Hondutel’s manager. The assistant manager, Jesus Mejia, was also sworn in.

Just 12 days after his removal as Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, General Romeo Vasquez Velasquez was appointed as manager of Hondutel, a government owned company that was pushed to the brink of bankruptcy by previous governments. Hondutel lost over 80,000 customers in 2009.

At a press conference, Vasquez Velasquez said he will fight with “intelligence” the fraud taking place around international phone calls known as gray traffic , wherein professional criminals use technology to make international calls as if they were local. This growing operation takes millions of lempiras from state coffers.

“One of the specialties that I have is intelligence, and intelligence must be applied properly to try to have as much information to make the necessary corrections,” the General said.

Valasquez plans to conduct a study known as SWOT, by which they will determine the strengths and weaknesses that are undermining the company. “We will do a complete study of the best investment plan, and how to rescue the company,” he said.

Romeo Vasquez Velasquez said to journalists, that the “military knows everything” and that accompanies his experience gained in directing the Military Pension Institute IPM and the Military Hospital, both entities belonging to the AA FF Honduras.

“I was president of IPM for five years and vice president of Lafarge Incehsa,” said the new Manager.

Escrito por Fany Rodríguez
martes, 09 de marzo de 2010

Tegucigalpa, Mar 9 Prensa Latina The National Popular Resistance Front FNRP announced on Tuesday the carrying out of a consultation to the population to create a constituent assembly to refound the country.

The Front specified in a press release that the action will take place on June 28, a year after the coup that overthrew President Manuel Zelaya.

The coup army, which is supported by the leaderships of traditional parties, business associations and the church, prevented the carrying out on that day of a national poll on a constituent that was organized by the government of Zelaya.

In the document, the Front underlines that assembly will “represent the will of the people to build a real democracy and transform the system of injustice and repression established by the oligarchy.”

It also convened the Second Meeting for the Refoundation of Honduras that will take place in La Esperanza city on March 12 to 14.

In the press release, the Front condemns the US interference in the internal affairs of the country, which is carried out by its Ambassador Hugo Llorens.

The FNRP maintains that Llorens “tries to give some legitimacy to de facto regime in a coarse way claiming a false national dialogue that ignores the rejection of the majority of the population to the dictatorship.”

It reiterates its non-recognition of the government of conservative President Porfirio Lobo, who was elected in the questioned November 29 elections.

The elected president of a uranium-rich nation morphs into a despot and refuses to relinquish power, prompting the army to stage a popular coup with guns blazing in the name of democracy.

Most governments check executive excesses through sister branches - the Legislature, the judiciary. In Niger, the military has assumed the bizarre yet vital role of safeguarding democratic institutions by force - most recently by blowing a hole through the front gate of the presidential palace this month and taking hostage an entire government.

That sounds like more than just one despot, doesn't it?

The soldiers who overthrew Mamadou Tandja are vowing to restore civilian rule, an assertion that has often proved hollow among Africa’s myriad juntas. The difference in Niger, though, is profound: Most people here actually believe them.

“For democracy activists like us, it’s difficult to applaud a coup d’etat,’’ said Marou Amadou, a leading human rights worker who was jailed for a month and beaten by security forces during Tandja’s regime. “But this had to happen and we are overjoyed. There was no other way.’’

Though officially condemned by governments worldwide, Tandja’s ouster has been widely praised at home: by unions, human rights groups, civil society leaders, and local media.

But the criticism is tepid if any; I haven't heard or seen much of anything here in AmeriKa , as in the case of another approved coup: Honduras.

Whadda ya mean WHO, readers!!!

Of course, you can be forgiven for that.

The trust is so great, in fact, that the director of one widely respected independent Niamey newspaper was working protocol for the junta....

THAT sure sounds FAMILIAR, 'eh, Amurkn?

Tandja ascended to power a decade ago through the ballot box and won elections again five years later. But in the twilight of his final term, he transformed his Islamic nation into a dictatorship, abolishing Parliament and the nation’s highest court and imposing rule by decree.

Sort of like executive orders and signing statements, right?

Been a long time since you heard any flap over them, huh, America?

Obama still issuing them just like Bush.

In a final blow last August, he forced through a controversial referendum that cast aside a constitutionally protected ban on term limits. A new constitution, which critics say was illegal, granted him three more years in power and the chance to run for president as many times as he wanted.

Tandja initially succeeded because, Amadou said, “he knew most our people fall into one of three categories. They are either illiterate, corrupt, or afraid.’’

We are SO ALIKE, my fellow Nigerians!!! Much of my nation is the same way!

The nation of 15 million on the Sahara’s southern edge has the dubious honor of being last among 182 nations on the UN’s Human Development Index, which ranks general well-being. It is regularly battered by drought and food shortages, and its lawless northern deserts have been the scene of repeated insurgencies, and more recently, kidnappings linked to Al Qaeda terrorists.

Just wondering which "Al-CIA-Duh" that would be.

This one?

Or this one?

After the referendum, a regional West African economic bloc suspended Niger from its ranks. The United States cut nonhumanitarian aid. Europe also froze vital support to a country whose budget is 40 percent dependent on donors. Amid the isolation, the putschists had little to lose. And, critics say, much to gain: Oil deposits have recently been discovered and there are plans to build the world’s biggest uranium mine.

Yes, you SEE WHY the nation makes the newspaper, right?

As for the politics, I could not care less.

That is for the NIGERIANS to DECIDE WITHOUT OUR INTERFERENCE!!

Of course, NOTHING about NIGER and the FALSE "yellowcake" story regarding Iraq a market controlled by the French, not Niger .

I notice no mention of the U.S. congressmen on the ground at the time in my MSM reports, either. WTF?

“They present themselves as saviors of democracy, but are they?’’ asked Ali Sabo, a top member of Tandja’s ousted political party. “Who’s to say they won’t loot our country as other military regimes have done?’’

Like what has been done to AmeriKa?

The coup, he said, simply proves the army “is still a powerful political force that can intervene at any moment with arms.’’

Especially when we tell them to.

One reason the educated public has placed so much trust in the military is because it has a track record. Several of the top putschists engineered a similar coup in 1999, and went on to oversee free elections the same year that set the stage for a decade of democratic peace.

Except that a despot was elected ? .

Transparency International’s Aissata Bagnan Fall said the junta appeared comprised of a new generation of soldiers better educated than their predecessors, some of whom could not read or write.

Trained BY WHO, MSM?

Today, most officers have university degrees and many been trained abroad. They’ve studied human rights. Some, like coup leader Major Salou Djibou, have taken part in peacekeeping missions in Congo and Ivory Coast, giving them a firsthand look at how conflict can tear nations apart.

Related: The Quietest Holocaust You Never Heard Of

Yeah, some "peacekeeping," huh?

Also see: Congo Death Count Called Into Question

Oh, okay, yup.

Only one Holocaust™ that can't be questioned, and we all know about that one.

“They have laptops and access to the Internet,’’ Fall said. “They are aware of how they are perceived and that affects how they act.’’

Then how come Israeli leaders don't give a s***?

Still, Fall said the junta should be treated with great caution, because “you can only truly know a man when he is given money and power, and you see what he does with it.’’

What, the liberating coup treated with caution?

Why?

They tossed aside a dictator and the rest of government; somehow that got lost in this piece .

--more--"

So what was the reporting and reaction at the time, dear readers?

Here is what the MSM in AmeriKa gave me, courtesy of New England's largest *ewspaper.

"Rebel soldiers announce coup after seizing Niger’s president" by Dalatou Mamane, Associated Press | February 19, 2010

NIAMEY, Niger - Renegade soldiers in armored vehicles stormed Niger’s presidential palace with a hail of gunfire in broad daylight yesterday, kidnapping the country’s strongman president and then appearing on state television to declare they staged a successful coup.

The soldiers also said on state TV that the country’s constitution had been suspended and all institutions dissolved. Their spokesman said it is being led by the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, and asked citizens to have faith in them.

Smoke rose from the white-hued multistory palace complex, and the echo of machine-gun fire for at least two hours sent frightened residents running for cover, emptying the capital’s downtown boulevards at midday.

Radio France Internationale reported that soldiers burst in and neutralized the presidential guard before entering the room where President Mamadou Tandja was holding a Cabinet meeting. They escorted him outside to a waiting car, which drove him toward a military camp on the city’s outskirts. His whereabouts remained unknown hours later when the coup was announced.

Tandja was elected president in 1999 after an era of coups and rebellions in the landlocked desert country in West Africa. But instead of stepping down in December at the end of his second term, as mandated by law, he triggered a political crisis by pushing through a new constitution last summer that removed term limits and gave him near-totalitarian powers.

So why did the army take over the whole government and dissolve all institutions then if the problem was only one man?

Niger has become increasingly isolated since then, with a 15-nation regional bloc suspending Niger from its ranks, and the United States cutting off nonhumanitarian aid and imposing travel restrictions.

--more--"

Only a photograph the next day:

AFTER THE COUP -- The streets of Niger's capital, Niamey, were crowded yesterday after a junta seized power Thursday. Military leader Salou Djibo reopened the borders yesterday and canceled a curfew, saying "we are in control of the situation" in the uranium-rich country. The African Union condemned the coup.

And nothing since, readers, thus tipping the MSM hand of approval.

This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited on March 5, 2010. If anyone wants to reprint it, please include a link to the original.

But she has been even more diplomatically clumsy that Bush, who at least recognized that there were serious problems and knew what not to say. “The Honduras crisis has been managed to a successful conclusion,” Clinton said in Buenos Aires, adding that “it was done without violence.”

This is rubbing salt into her hosts’ wounds, as they see the military overthrow of President Mel Zelaya last June, and the United States’ subsequent efforts to legitimize the dictatorship there as not only a failure but a threat to democracy throughout the region.

It is also an outrageous thing to say, given the political killings, beatings, mass arrests, and torture that the coup government used in order to maintain power and repress the pro-democracy movement. The worst part is that they are still committing these crimes.

Today nine members of the U.S. Congress – including some Democrats in Congressional leadership positions — wrote to Secretary Clinton and to the White House about this violence. They wrote:

“Since President Lobo’s inauguration, several prominent opponents of the coup have been attacked. On February 3rd, Vanessa Zepeda, a nurse and union organizer who had previously received death threats linked to her activism in the resistance movement, was strangled and her body dumped from a vehicle in Tegucigalpa. On February 15th, Julio Funes Benitez, a member of the SITRASANAA trade union and an active member of the national resistance movement, was shot and killed by unknown gunmen on a motorcycle outside his home. Most recently, Claudia Brizuela, an opposition activist, was murdered in her home on February 24th. Unfortunately these are only three of the numerous attacks against activists and their families…”

Secretary Clinton will meet Friday with “Pepe” Lobo of Honduras, who was elected president after a campaign marked by media shutdowns and police repression of dissent. The Organization of American States and European Union refused to send official observers to the election.

The Members of Congress also asked that Clinton, in her meeting with Lobo, “send a strong unambiguous message that the human rights situation in Honduras will be a critical component of upcoming decisions regarding the further normalizations of relations, as well as the resumption of financial assistance.”

This was the third letter that Clinton received from Congress on human rights in Honduras. On August 7 and September 25 Members of Congress from Hillary Clinton’s own Democratic Party wrote to her to complain of the ongoing human rights abuses in Honduras and impossibility of holding free elections under these conditions. They did not even get a perfunctory reply until January 28, more than four months after the second letter was sent. This is an unusual level of disrespect for the elected representatives of one’s own political party.

For these New Cold Warriors, it seems that all that has mattered is that they got rid of one social democratic president of one small, poor country.

In Brazil, Clinton continued her Cold War strategy by throwing in some gratuitous insults toward Venezuela. This is a bit like going to a party and telling the host how much you don’t like his friends. After ritual denunciations of Venezuela, Clinton said “We wish Venezuela were looking more to its south and looking at Brazil and looking at Chile and other models of a successful country. “

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim responded with diplomacy, but there was no mistaking his strong rebuff to her insults: He said that he agreed with “one point” that Clinton made, “that Venezuela should look southwards more . . . that is why we have invited Venezuela to join MERCOSUR as a full member country.” Ms. Clinton’s right wing allies in Paraguay’s legislature – the remnants of that country’s dictatorship and 60 years of one-party rule – are currently holding up Venezuela’s membership in the South American trade block. This is not what she wanted to hear from Brazil.

The Brazilians also rejected Clinton’s rather undiplomatic efforts to pressure them to join Washington in calling for new sanctions against Iran. “It is
not prudent to push Iran against a wall,” said Brazilian president Lula da Silva.” The prudent thing is to establish negotiations.”

“We will not simply bow down to an evolving consensus if we do not agree,” Amorim said at a press conference with Clinton.

Secretary Clinton made one concession to Argentina, calling for the UK to sit down with the Argentine government and discuss their dispute over the Malvinas Falklands Islands. But it seems unlikely that Washington will do anything to make this happen.

For now, the next crucial test will be Honduras: will Clinton continue Washington’s efforts to whitewash the Honduran government’s repression? Or will she listen to the rest of the hemisphere as well as her own Democratic Members of Congress and insist on some concessions regarding human rights, including the return of Mel Zelaya to his country as the Brazilians also emphasized ? This story may not get much U.S. media attention, but Latin America will be watching.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He is also president of Just Foreign Policy.

About
The Center for Economic and Policy Research is an independent, nonpartisan think tank that was established to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people’s lives. CEPR’s Advisory Board includes Nobel Laureate economists Robert Solow and Joseph Stiglitz; Janet Gornick, Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Director of the Luxembourg Income Study; Richard Freeman, Professor of Economics at Harvard University; and Eileen Appelbaum, Professor and Director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.

Center for Economic and Policy Research, 1611 Connecticut Ave, NW, Suite 400, Washington, DC 20009
Phone: 202 293-5380, Fax: 202 588-1356

Chomsky Post-Earthquake: Aid Should go to Haitian Popular Organizations, not to Contractors or NGOs

Keane Bhatt

For decades, Noam Chomsky has been an analyst and activist working in support of the Haitian people. In addition to his revolutionary linguistics career at MIT, he has written, lectured and protested against injustice for 40 years. He is co-author, along with Paul Farmer and Amy Goodman of Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup. His analysis “The Tragedy of Haiti” from his 1993 book Year 501: The Conquest Continues is available for free online. This interview was conducted in late February 2010 by phone and email. The interviewer thanks Peter Hallward for his kind assistance. This was first published in ¡Reclama! magazine.

Keane Bhatt: Recently you signed a letter to the Guardian protesting the militarization of emergency relief. It criticized a prioritization of security and military control to the detriment of rescue and relief.

Noam Chomsky: I think there was an overemphasis in the early stage on militarization rather than directly providing relief. I don’t think it has any long-term significance…the United States has comparative advantage in military force. It tends to react to anything at first with military force, that’s what it’s good at. And I think they overdid it. There was more military force than was necessary; some of the doctors that were in Haiti, including those from Partners in Health who have been there for a long time, felt that there was an element of racism in believing that Haitians were going to riot and they had to be controlled and so on, but there was very little indication of that; it was very calm and quiet. The emphasis on militarization did probably delay somewhat the provision of relief. I went along with the general thrust of the petition that there was too much militarization.

KB: If this militarization of relief was not intentionally extreme but rather just a default response of the US, is it just serendipity that there is a massive troop presence available to manage the rapidly mounting popular protests post-earthquake? Surprisingly large, politicized group comprised of survivors has already mobilized around demanding Aristide’s return, French reparations instead of charity, and so on.

NC: So far, at least, I don’t know of any employment of the troops to subdue protests. It might come, but I suspect a more urgent concern is the impending disaster of the rainy season, terrible to contemplate.

KB: Regarding relief work, aside from Partners in Health, Al Jazeera noted that the Cuban medical team was the first to set up medical facilities among the debris and constitutes the largest contingent of medical workers in Haiti, something that preceded the earthquake. If their performance in Pakistan [earthquake of 2005] is any indicator, they will probably be the last to leave. Cuba seems to have an exemplary, decades-long conduct in foreign assistance.

NC: Well, the Cubans were already there before the earthquake. They had a couple hundred doctors there. And yes, they sent doctors very quickly; they had medical facilities there very quickly. Venezuela also sent aid quite quickly; Venezuela was also the first country and the only country at any scale to cancel totally the debt. There was considerable debt to Venezuela because of PetroCaribe, and it’s rather striking that Venezuela and Cuba were not invited to the donors’ meeting in Montreal.

Actually the prime minister of Haiti, Bellerive, went out of his way to thank three countries: the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela for their rapid provision of aid. What Al Jazeera said about Pakistan is quite correct. In that terrible earthquake a couple of years ago, the Cubans were really the only ones who went into the very difficult areas high up in the mountains where it’s very hard to live. They’re the ones who stayed after everyone else left. And none of that gets reported in the United States. But the fact of the matter is, whatever you think about Cuba, its internationalism is pretty dramatic. And the people who’ve been working in Haiti for years have been awestruck by Cuban medical aid as they were in Pakistan, in fact. That’s an old story. I mean, the Cuban contribution to the liberation of Africa is just overwhelming. And you can find that in scholarship, but the public doesn’t know anything about it.

KB: On that point, you’ve talked about how “states are not moral agents. They act in their own interests. And that means the interests of powerful forces within them.” How does the history of exemplary humanitarian work as Cuban state policy relate to that thought?

NC: Well, I think it’s just been a core part of the Cuban revolution to have a very high level of internationalism. I mean, these cases you’ve mentioned are cases in point, but the most extreme case was the liberation of Africa. Take the case of Angola for example, and there are real connections between Cuba and Angola—much of the Cuban population comes from Angola. But South Africa, with US support, after the fall of the Portuguese empire, invaded Angola and Mozambique to establish their own puppet regime there. They were trying to protect Namibia, to protect apartheid, and nobody did much about it; but the Cubans sent forces, and furthermore they sent black soldiers and they defeated a white mercenary army, which not only rescued Angola but it sent a shock throughout the continent—it was a psychic shock—white mercenaries were purported to be invincible, and a black army defeated them and sent them back fleeing into South Africa. Well that gave a real shot in the arm to the liberation movements, and it also was a lesson to the white South Africans that the end is coming. They can’t just hope to subdue the continent on racist grounds. Now, it didn’t end the wars. The South African attacks in Angola and Mozambique continued until the late 1980s, with strong US support. And it was no joke. According to the UN estimates they killed a million and a half people in Angola and Mozambique, nothing slight. Nevertheless, the Cuban intervention had a huge effect, also on other countries of Africa. And one the most striking aspects of it is that they took no credit for it. They wanted credit to be taken by the nationalist movements in Africa. So in fact none of this was even known until an American researcher, Piero Gleijeses unearthed the evidence from the Cuban archives and African sources and published it in scholarly journals and a scholarly book, and it’s just an astonishing story but barely known—one out of a million people has ever heard of it.

KB: You mentioned the Venezuelan debt cancellation. At the same time, the G7 is in the process of eliminating bilateral debt. Why is that?

NC: Well they’re talking about it, yeah. The Venezuelans were first. And they just completely canceled the debt. G7 refused. In the Montreal meeting, they refused to even discuss it. Later, they indicated that they might do something. Maybe they’re embarrassed by the Venezuelan action. But I’m not sure how it’s playing out. As far as the IMF is concerned—the IMF is basically an offshoot of the US Treasury Department—they’ve talked about it but so far they have not agreed, as far as I can discover, to cancel the debt.

KB: Bellerive, Prime Minister of Haiti, thanked the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Venezuela. The DR has been lauded for its relief efforts: providing food, materials and medical care, for example. But at the same time there are reports from the border of Dominican troops forcibly deporting family members of Haitian patients and sometimes even the patients themselves, in Jimaní, for example. What is your take on these contrary developments taking place and is there any historical context that you would like to add?

NC: Well, what the Dominican Republic does is up to Dominicans to decide, but the much more striking thing from my perspective, is that the United States has not brought in any—barely any refugees—even for medical treatment. And that was harshly condemned by the dean of the University of Miami Medical School who thought it was just criminal not to bring Haitians to Miami where there’s marvelous medical facilities while they have to do surgery with, you know, hacksaws in Haiti. And in fact one of the first US reactions to the earthquake was to send in the Coast Guard to ensure that there wouldn’t be any attempt to flee from Haiti. I mean, that’s atrocious. The United States is the richest country in the world, it’s right next door to Haiti. It should be offering every possible means of assistance to Haitians.

Furthermore there’s a little bit of background here. I mean, the earthquake in Haiti was a class-based catastrophe. It didn’t much harm the wealthy elite up in the hills, they were shaken but not destroyed. On the other hand the people who were living in the miserable urban slums, huge numbers of them, they were devastated. Maybe a couple hundred thousand were killed. How come they were living there? They were living there because of—it goes back to the French colonial system—but in the past century, they were living there because of US policies, consistent policies.

KB: You’re talking about the forcible decimation of peasant agriculture in the 1990s?

NC: It started with Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson invaded all of Hispaniola, Haiti and the DR, the Wilson invasion was pretty brutal in both parts of Hispaniola. But it was much worse in Haiti. And the reasons were very clearly stated.

KB: Racism.

NC: Yeah. The State Department said, well, the Dominicans have some European blood so they’re not quite so bad. But the Haitians are pure nigger. So Wilson sent the marines to disband the Haitian parliament because they wouldn’t permit US corporations to buy up Haitian lands. And he forced them to do it. Well, that’s one of the many atrocities and crimes. Just keeping to this, that accelerated the destruction of Haitian agriculture and the flight of people from the countryside to the cities. Now that continued under Reagan. Under Reagan, USAID and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn’t cover it up. They gave an argument that Haiti shouldn’t have an agricultural system, it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs in miserable conditions. Well that was another blow to Haitian agriculture, but nevertheless even under Reagan, Haiti was producing most of its own rice when Clinton came along.

When Clinton restored Aristide—Clinton of course supported the military junta, another little hidden story…he strongly supported it in fact. He even allowed the Texaco Oil Company to send oil to the junta in violation of presidential directives; Bush Sr. did so as well—well, he finally allowed the president to return, but on condition that he accept the programs of Marc Bazin, the US candidate that he had defeated in the 1990 election. And that meant a harsh neoliberal program, no import barriers. That means that Haiti has to import rice and other agricultural commodities from the US from US agribusiness, which is getting a huge part of its profits from state subsidies. So you get highly subsidized US agribusiness pouring commodities into Haiti; I mean, Haitian rice farmers are efficient but nobody can compete with that, so that accelerated the flight into the cities. And it wasn’t that they didn’t know it was going to happen. USAID was publishing reports in 1995 saying, yes this is going to destroy Haitian agriculture and that’s a good thing. And you get the flight into the cities and you get food riots in 2008, because they can’t produce their own food. And now you get this class-based catastrophe. After this history—it’s only a tiny piece of it—the United States should be paying massive reparations, not just aid. And France as well. The French role is grotesque.

KB: May I ask, regarding Aristide’s languishing in exile, was he right to go back to Haiti in 1994 in the way that he did, with US troops? Also, was he right to agree, under enormous pressure of course, to the neoliberal reforms laid out in the Paris Accords?

NC: Well, I happened to be in Haiti almost at that time—1993. I was there for a while; this was the peak of the terror. And I’ve been in a lot of awful places in the world. Some of the worst, in fact. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like the misery and the terror that was going on in Haiti under the junta, with Clinton’s backing at that time. And there was a lot of discussion, I talked for example to the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, one of the most popular figures in Haiti, who the government recently forced out, he was then underground in a church but Haitian friends took me to him. He was very close to large parts of the population. I talked to labor leaders who’d been beaten and tortured but were willing to talk, and to activists and others. And what most of them said is, Father Jean-Juste for example, what he said is, “Look, I don’t want a marine invasion, I think it’s a bad idea. But on the other hand,” he said, “my people, the people in the slums—La Saline, Cite Soleil and so on, they just can’t take it anymore.” He said, “the torture is too awful, the terror is too awful. They’ll accept anything that’ll put an end to it.” And that was the dilemma. I don’t have an answer to that.

KB: Was Aristide wrong to argue against calls made by some of his more militant supporters for armed struggle inside Haiti to restore democracy after the 1991 coup?

NC: Not in my opinion. Armed struggle would have led to a horrendous slaughter.

KB: On February 17th, Sarkozy was greeted to street protests by thousands of Haitians holding up images of Aristide, demanding his return, and demanding reparations for what the French extorted in exchange for recognizing Haiti’s independence. At that same address, Preval was shouted down and he withdrew into his jeep. With this kind of sentiment brewing in Haiti right now, do you see Aristide’s return as an important priority, or is it something that might be desirable but not that pressing?

NC: Well, the answer to that question is going to be given in Washington. The United States and France, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, essentially kidnapped Aristide in 2004 after having blocked any international aid to the country under very dubious pretexts, not credible grounds, which of course extremely harmed this fragile economy. There was chaos and the US and France and Canada flew in, kidnapped Aristide—they said they rescued him, they actually kidnapped him—they flew him off to Central Africa, his party Fanmi Lavalas is banned, which probably accounts for the very low turnout in the recent elections, and the United States has been trying to keep Aristide not only from Haiti, but from the entire hemisphere.

KB: By which way is Aristide compelled to remain exiled? How exactly is his persona non grata status in the hemisphere maintained and by whom? What is preventing him from flying into a sympathetic country near Haiti, like Venezuela, for example?

NC: He might be able to go to Venezuela, but if he tried to go to the Dominican Republic, for example, they wouldn’t let him in. And there’s good reason for that. International affairs is very much like the mafia, and the small storekeeper doesn’t offend the Godfather. It’s too dangerous. We can pretend it’s otherwise, but that’s the way it is. There was one country, I think it was Jamaica if I remember correctly, that did allow Aristide in, over serious US pressure and protest. And not a lot of countries are willing to take the risk of offending the United States. It’s a dangerous, violent superpower. I don’t have to tell you, you know the history of the Dominican Republic. I don’t have to tell you about it—that’s the way it works.

KB: Using, as you’ve said, the historical US legacy in the DR, can we turn to recent Dominican history? As this humanitarian aid is provided on behalf of the DR, and it fills in the vacuum left by a weak Haitian state, if we go back to the events leading up to the coup of 2004, it worked under US aegis to actively destabilize Haiti by training the paramilitary rebels, Guy Philippe and Louis Jodel Chamblain…

NC: I know. And providing a base for them.

KB: Is there some kind of a contradiction to provide charity for people who you’ve actually worked to dismantle and destabilize?

NC: Well, you can call it a contradiction if you like, but it’s also a contradiction for Sarkozy and Clinton to appear in Haiti without abject apologies for the terrible crimes that France and the U.S. under Clinton, particularly, have carried out against Haiti. But they don’t do it. The head of Toyota has to go to Congress and apologize for hours because some people were killed by Toyota cars, but does Clinton have to go and apologize for what he did to Haiti? He dealt a death blow. Does Sarkozy have to apologize for the fact that Haiti was France’s richest colony and a source of a lot of France’s wealth and they destroyed the country and then posed an indemnity as a price for liberating themselves, which the country was never able to get out of?

A couple of years ago, in 2002 I think, Aristide appealed to France, to Chirac, to pay some remuneration for the huge debt that Haiti had to pay them…

KB: Twenty-one billion dollars…

NC: Yeah, for this huge debt that Haiti had to pay them. And they did set up a commission led by Regis Debray, a former radical. And the commission said that France has no need to give any compensation at all. In other words, first we rob and then destroy them, and then when they ask for a little bit of help, we kick them in the face. It’s not surprising.

KB: Although at the same time there are sources that say that while France put up an indifferent front, it was actually worried about a head of state bringing a legal case with overwhelming documentary evidence for international arbitration.

NC: Well, they really didn’t have to worry, because the way power politics works, the World Court can’t do anything. Look, there’s one country in the world at the moment which has refused to accept World Court decision—that’s the United States. Is anybody going to do anything about it?

KB: You mentioned Clinton, now UN special envoy to Haiti, who intends to woo foreign investors and continue on a low-wage textile focus for Haitian economic development. The lens of neoliberal economist Paul Collier, special adviser to the UN in 2009, dominates the UN perspective of Haiti. An advocate of sweatshop-led growth himself, he’s lavished praise on the much-resented MINUSTAH occupation force there, and has even said that the Dominican Republic “is not engaged in the sort of activities, such as clandestine support for guerrilla groups, that beset many other fragile states.” Can a true humanitarian like Paul Farmer—representing a different development model based on fair wages, public health, strengthening the Haitian state—influence the UN as deputy special envoy?

NC: It’s a hard choice. I don’t blame him for trying. We live in this world, not another one that we’d prefer, and sometimes it’s necessary to follow painful paths if we hope to provide at least a little help for suffering people. Like Father Jean-Juste and the marines.

KB: You’ve talked about how the media created an artificial distinction between the South American ‘Bad Left’ and ‘Good Left,’ omitting Brazil’s important collaboration with Venezuela in the interest of maintaining this view. However, with respect to Haiti, hasn’t Brazil legitimately earned a secure place within the ‘Good Left’? A center-left government of the South has spearheaded the MINUSTAH occupation and has pledged to increase its presence, after taking it over from the imperial architects of the coup US, France, Canada . What factors made it so vigorous in supporting another deposed president of an equally geopolitically-unimportant country in recent times Zelaya of Honduras ?

NC: Good questions. I haven’t seen anything useful on Brazil’s decisions on these matters.

KB: Any comments on the US media regarding Haiti following the earthquake? For example, Pat Robertson’s ‘pact with the devil,’ David Brooks’ ‘progress-resistant culture,’ pleas with transnational capital to create more sweatshops Kirstof , Aristide being a despot and a cheat Jon Lee Anderson . Even Amy Wilentz has compared Aristide to Duvalier in the New York Times.

NC: It’s been mainly awful, but I haven’t kept a record. The worst part is ignoring our own disgraceful role in helping to create the catastrophe, and consequent refusal to react as any decent person should—with massive reparations, directed to popular organizations. Same with France.

KB: I guess my final question is for the future: there have been a discouraging two decades, from 1990-2010, about the popular mobilization for political change in Haiti, and how to proceed, and I guess now that the Haitian people have struggled so hard through parliamentary democracy for 25 years and have so little to show for it, what are the lessons learned and possible strategies now that they’ve exhausted this parliamentary, democratic approach? Two coups d’etat and thousands tortured and murdered in this process.

NC: The lessons are, unfortunately, that a small weak country that is facing an extremely hostile and very violent superpower will not make much progress unless there’s a strong solidarity movement within the superpower that will restrain its actions. With more support within the United States, I think the Haitian efforts could have succeeded.

And that applies right now. Take the aid that’s coming in. There is aid coming in—we have to show we’re nice people and so on. But the aid ought to be going to Haitian popular organizations. Not to contractors, not to NGOs—to Haitian popular organizations, and they’re the ones that should be deciding what to do with it. Well you know, that’s not the agenda of G7. They don’t want popular organizations; they don’t like popular movements; they don’t like democracy for that matter. What they want is for the rich and powerful to run things. Well, if there was a strong solidarity movement in the United States and the world, it could change that.

Brief Chronology of Events in Haiti

adapted from Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment

courtesy Peter Hallward

August 14, 1791 A slave uprising begins in northern Saint-Domingue

Februrary 4, 1794 Abolition of French colonial slavery

January 1, 1804 Saint-Domingue is renamed Haiti, and declares itself independent of France

1825 France recognizes Haitian independence for the payment of 150 million francs later reduced to 90 million as compensation for lost property

1915-34 The United States under Woodrow Wilson invades and occupies Haiti

September 22, 1957 Francois Duvalier ‘Papa Doc’ becomes president

April 21, 1971 Francois Duvalier dies and is succeeded by his son Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’

February 7, 1986 ‘Baby Doc’ is pushed out of Haiti by a popular uprising; General Henry Namphy takes power

December 16, 1990 Jean-Bertrand Aristide is elected with 67% of the vote; his prime minister is Rene Preval

September 30, 1991 General Raoul Cedras overthrows Aristide, who goes into exile; over the next few years several thousands of Aristide’s supporters are killed

Summer 1993 The paramilitary death squad FRAPH is formed, led by Toto Constant and Jodel Chamblain

September 19, 1994 US soldiers occupy Haiti for the second time; Aristide returns from exile

Early 1995 Aristide disbands Haiti’s armed forces

Mid-1995 Aristide’s party Fanmi Lavalas wins legislative elections

December 17, 1995 Rene Preval is elected with 88% of the vote

Late 1996 Formation of Fanmi Lavalas in opposition to ex-Lavalas faction

May 21, 2000 Fanmi Lavalas wins landlide victories at all levels of government; opponents form a US-backed coalition called the Convergence Democratique

November 26, 2000 Aristide is re-elected with 92% of the vote

July 28, 2001 First of many commando raids on police stations and other government facilities by ex-soliers based in the Dominican Republic, led by Guy Philippe

December 17, 2001 Ex-soldiers attack the presidential palace, provoking popular reprisals against the offices of parties belonging to Convergence Democratique

April 2003 Aristide asks France to repay the money it extorted from Haiti

January 1, 2004 Haiti celebrates bicentenary of independence from France

February 5, 2004 Full-scale insurgency begins, Chamblain overruns Cap Haitien

February 29, 2004 Aristide is forced onto a US jet and flown to the Central African Republic

March 2004 US troops occupy Haiti for a third time, interim government is formed with Gerard Latortue as P.M., the Lancet estimates thousands killed by police and anti-Lavalas paramilitaries

June 2004 US-led force is replaced by a UN stabilization mission MINUSTAH

February 7, 2006 Preval wins presidential elections with 51% of the vote

January 12, 2010 Catastrophic earthquake rocks Port-au-Prince

Dispelled should be all the worries relatively recently raised questioning the terminality of the west prolapse. The west media whores did indeed try staging a “recovery” juggernaut campaign raping all econ indicators, reinventing econ concepts, and razing all reason to justify the west war junta lunatic “out of recession” orgies and zillion bonus rounds but no one with half a brain should fall prey to the west rabid deceit today for west-wide prolapse is not only written in the west own headlines, but in the frightened mugs of the confused west monkey species, west sprawling ghost towns, and in the west giant Land and Cash Reform. In fact, west-wide prolapse should no longer be debated as a econ issue but a matter of the very existence of the west cesspits.

Afghanistan – Talib confirms west attempts to bribe. Apparently, west, among others, had offered ~$30k for safe convoy passage. The answer to west was however was: “get out!”, which precipitated the Helmand #3 assault by the spurned west. Helmand #3 as of Feb 23: west launched 15k troops, jets, drones, 60 gun-choppers, abraham tanks against all life. 53 tanks, 2 drones, 1 carrier chopper, 2 west paradrops have been neutralised. West chief crusader, despite earlier arrogant boasts, concedes facing “stiff resistance” and now threaten 18 month long escalation. USA says it kills less and less civilians now. So the west child murdering beast has at last confirmed in its own words that indeed west has been murdering civilians after all despite the earlier denials thereof. Yes, west is psychotic on every level. USA is now offering $1500-$2000 for a murdered child or adult; $1000 for a maiming; $500 for destroying a vehicle; and $50 for destruction to property. That’s some $70b, one west bankster bonus round, to genocide the whole nation, as per west murder-dollar rate. If this sounds psychotic, that’s cause west is the definition thereof in every aspect. Photo West spreading peace one child at a time. West may pay the lucky parents $1500, unless west finds this child was a “terrist”. Yes, west is THIS sordid, in every aspect, on every level. Feb 22, west attacks civilians murdering 33 including women and children. Dutch governance prolapses over Helmand losses. It was fine for Holland to murder, torture, and sack, so long as there were no losses to this grisly child murdering creature from hell.

Argentina – Taking UK occupation and eco-rape of Los Malvinas to UN seeking resolution against the oil-obsessed britzies. H Chavez to west queen Gotha: “Leave Los Malvinas. Haven’t you noticed, queen, it’s over. It’s not 1982. If a conflict breaks out, be sure, Argentina won’t be alone.” Chavez adds aptly: “How can UK speak of democracy when they’ve got a queen. It’s as irrational as their Los Malvinas claims.” Indeed, all things west are this irrational.

Brazil – Another comrade Obama begging trip celebrates another international embarrassment. Clinton’s begging moved no one and the answer remains “no” to west on Iran.

China – The answer remains “no” to west on Iran.

Egypt – Discovers Amenhotep III statue in Luxor. West magpies and archeological vulture thieves circle in. After all, the west christianic beast still uses the Egyptian “amen” in their jesus sun worship rites and west loves destroying all vestiges of humanity.

Eritrea – Protests west vampire sanctions meted out as punishment for not joining in west genocide of Somalia. West fears all along its oil jugular, like Eritrea’s Assab narrow.

EU – Italy: Apparently, an act of sabotage dumped some 600k litres of oil into Po poisoning the river. Now, how does a refinery even have valves that can dump hundreds of thousand offal into the eco system? All things west are sabotage of humanity and ecology. Bulgaria: Says now it never talked to NATO about hosting missiles against Russia. France: Air traffic controllers walk off job, Feb 22. France: Total oil strikes, Feb 20. As talks prolapse west gets a tiny sample of gas shortage. Of course, this is nothing compared to Hormuz shut off, should west really touch Iran. Germs: Lufthansa goes on a token strike but quickly calls it off. West monkeys can’t even strike right. Germs fighting with yank baboons over Opel prolapse funding. USA wants Germs to pay €3b and EUnuchs are willing to foot only half. Fight on, pirates! Germs: Governance is urging the pedophiles hiding in christianic churches to own up to their pedophile sickness. This is rich, coming from a governance that gave the world 2 world wars murdering tens of millions; running extermination camps; running torture programmes with USA/UK; murdering children in Afghanistan; and taking active part in children traffic for west organ and west sex fiend markets. Greece is no more. Its fiscal command has been decapitated by saxon baboons with GoldSacks rep put on throne of Greek debt office. Further, while receiving no “bailout”, Greece has been castrated of EUnuchia vote. If that wasn’t invasion enough, Germs are now suggesting Athens to begin selling off Greek islands to raise cash. Greece, in a short bout, tells Germs to bugger off reminding the child murderer Baltic tribe that they murdered 300k Greeks and looted Greek gold. Germs responded by screeching fangs not being pleased with reminders of its abhorrent evil. Germs aren’t however pleased with having their evil denied either. E Zundel got 7 yrs of Germ dungeons for just that. How glorious is the west baboon freedom. Spain: Judge Garzon is getting stripped of powers. This is the guy that brought up charges and sought prosecution of west war junta for war crimes. Spain: Unions in the street protesting the rising of retirement age to 67. Poland intercepts 11 tonnes of blood being smuggled from Baxter USA to Baxter Austria. Baxter is the firm that recently gave 18 nations tainted “vaccination”. Yes, west is working night and day on perfecting its bio-WMD stock. Poland admits to torture participation with USA/UK. Didn’t comrade Obama say he does not torture? Swedish Saab-based econ takes a 6/10ths shrivel.

Iran – Advises comrade Obama to reign in USA foreign sec’y petulant ravings about Iran’s west failed revolt. This isn’t the world order the west beast had in mind a few years ago, is it? Arrests west terror operative responsible for kidnappings, bombings, targeting civilians, robberies, and mass murders, the usual west methods of covert war. Note here, that Iran nabbed him outside of Iran. No, this isn’t the wetdream the west monster had about ruling the planet. Announced plans to build 2 more enrichment plants. No, definitely, this isn’t west wetdream anymore. Ahmadinejad “The whole idea of capitalism is based on emptying the pockets of world’s nations to secure the interests of a selected few. West should face up to the fact that the greed of capitalism has pushed it into the brink of collapse.” Indeed, west should fold but alas, the west war junta is believing in WW3 solution.

Iraq – See warnewstoday blog and heyetnet for war news.

Japan – Bloomberg, USA fiscal charlatan, revives the nonsense of “deflation” right after Hatoyama was off fighting “inflation”. Yes, west is completely insane and incapable of even holding its own line of deceit. Hatoyama’s approval plunges below 40%. He’s failed to deliver on his promise to liberate the islands from the USA girl-raping occupiers. Car makers utter the possibility of dumping USA market for the recalls. This could get very fun.

Libya – Tells EUnuchs to bugger off suspending visits from 25 nations of the EUnuch war amalgam.

Mexico – Hosts a 32-nation SouthAm summit that drops the NorthAm baboon from the bloc. USA rushes in to scream that this bloc shouldn’t replace OAS where they have a chair. It’s funny and inexplicable, but the west baboon thinks its somehow needed.

Pakistan – West Peace Laureate comrade Obama murders another 4 with drones.

Palestine – USA scholars call for stopping food and aid supplies to Gaza and an artificial curb of Palestinian birth rate. Beside this being a call for genocide as defined by the laughable UN charter that defines genocide as “intent to prevent births”, the west is losing even their 60 yr old israel experiment. Palestinian births exceed those of Israelis’ by some 4-5 margin making jews minority in israel today. No amount of apartheid or genocide can alter the future here. But that said, it’s amazing to see that west is now publicly espousing genocidal wetdreams and there’s no reaction whatever. It’s not amazing actually for west is the very definition of THE planet’s disease.

Russia – USA governance says that west nuke trench around Russia is NOT against Russia. Considering the lunatic source, this is basically proof that west is prepping Barbarossa II. Putting mil bases in Abkhazia and S Ossetia. It’s safe to conclude that Black Sea, much like Caspian, has now been liberated from the molesting west beast claws. The answer remains “no” to west on Iran. Buying 4 French war-ships. Everything in west is on a garage sale today.

Taiwan – Comrade Obama is peddling fighters to Taipei too now. He says that Taiwan’s jets are too old and “wouldn’t work” against China. This is as clear as it can get. West is still, after 60 yrs of trying, seeking a proxy war on China. The odd thing is that west still believes that there exists power efficient enough against China.

Turkey – Finds temples and pyramids in Gobekli that are 11500 yr old. Watch the west monster send its “archeological” magpies plunder the site for west baboon hates any and all reminders of humanity, something the west neanderthal has failed to achieve itself.

UAE – Bans Israeli travelers, even if they’re just suspected carrying false passports, perhaps issued by UK or some other west governance.

UK – Blast in occupied Ireland, Feb 21. RBS, scotland wank, fully floated by poodle cash manages to lose £3.6b/2009. It’s a small wonder then that their current round of “bonuses” is only £1.6b — that’s BILLION! Photo: Save Our Steel demo, somewhere on Gotha’s isles West baboons haven’t minded their decade long genocide of some 7 nations but now that they’ve lost their crusades, they’re actually daring to seek sympathy. SOS? OK, how about LOL, for an answer?

Ukraine – As soon as Tymoshenko finally buggers off, west is trying to dig claws into Ukraine by pushing Poland to get visa-free access to the long envied nation. NATO joins in this west desperation and says that they haven’t given up on Ukraine. How is the west cretin this delusional?

USA – Admits to consumer confidence prolapsing some more. Just for a joke. Bank-gangrene spreads near 30%/Q4 through the USA wank veins. This while the war junta banks celebrate biggest bonuses and profits ever. Too bad the baboon’s comparative reason has been castrated otherwise they too may enjoy this ultimate irony of their prolapse. 5 more banks die. That’s 21 in 2010 and 161/prolapse thusfar. The west bank death rate is 1 every 2 days or so now. FDIC, USA wank reserve body admits reserve ratio of NEGATIVE half a point at end of Q4. That’s 700+ wanks in the red waiting for the coup de grace. Too bad, the dirty baboon understands none of this otherwise it too could enjoy its econ extinction. Citiwank warns no withdrawals and is asking for notices for withdrawals from all accounts. 45 states admit aggregate $810b+ budget laceration. So where’s the $1,000b from comrade Obama’s budget deficit if not in the states’ pockets? Would that be spent on war and torture implements? Welcome to the very systemic failure of all things west. Boeing zapping 1000. USA post zapping 30k. City of San Francisco zapping and short-waging 15k. 186k baboons zapped in Jan. That’s some recovery, comrade Obama! Still it’s only ~500k on short term rolling unemployment benefits. Note that if USA got rid of unemployment benefits altogether, their unemployment would plunge to zero. Yes, west unemployment numbers are 100% disconnected from unemployment, reality, and reason. Week of Feb 25 saw 22k baboons join the unemployed pool. Governance is right to start debating anti-baboon measures for 85% of the monkeys now realise something’s badly amiss in their capitalist paradise and apparently 75% blame governance. Panarin or not, west-wide prolapse is here. It’s exponential, terminal, and as laughable as no longer avoidable. Governance debates controlling the rising “dangerous unemployed” class of baboons. It’s a small wonder then that USA medical board is classifying “anger” as a mental disease, perhaps requiring a treatment at one of the many concentration camps strewn around west. Autism explosion affects 1 out of 110 baboons now. Still, west offers no explanation on this mental genocide. Director of a mental institution turns out to be a serial pedophile rapist facing some 25 counts now. West institutions like churches, schools, and hospitals are no more than rapist and torture enclaves. State drugging explosion, due to depression and “anger” diseases, grows at 7%. The gap in 2007 grew 5x/decade. 1% owned 65% of USA assets while 90% owned only 12% assets. This is 2007 data! It’s nowhere near reflective of the exponential trend of the Land and Cash Reform happening right now. In 2007, while actively sacked, the common bristly baboon didn’t even notice the noose around its neck, much less its tightening. Unemployment chart Worth a quick look and a long laugh. The last exponential hill is USA’s unemployment. Note it’s the longest and steepest since they’ve kept numbers. Detrot, Michigone, is now boasting 30% home vacancy. Maine stops trains to north since the baboon is out of work, there’s no need to pretend to ferry the animal about. “Baboon Squeeze” is on. As the baboon loses roof over its rump in the Grand Land Reform, 40% are now piling up several generations into one hovel they still have keys to. Over 11m mortgages underwater worth less than debt on the title now. This # is deeply underestimated but still, even at the nominal west deceit rate it confirms the west terminal prolapse. Home sales shrivel 11%+/Jan. Land and Cash Reform going strong as comrade Obama has another plan to repo ~10m acres of land from the baboons. It’s not just the top junta wallet! The west terminal prolapse has hit the wallet of the lowliest baboon that now can’t even afford a toast at his local fast-food trough. Pretty soon, the baboons will be eating each other. State arrests in manacles a 12 yr old girl for doodling on school table. Yes, west is insane and defenceless children are its favourite prey. Comrade Obama announces that the governance has the right to assassinate any USA citizens. Crushes testicles of a child before parents during torture. BTW, this isn’t some side psycho incident but the very west-wide official int’l policy of torturing children before parents to extract testimony. Yes, west is THE disease from top down to the last cubicle west christianic pedophile child-murdering baboon beast. Bill Gates, the man that cleaned his Swiss accounts of dollars in 2006, speaking on overpopulation is heard to say: “if we do a really great job on vaccines, we could lower that perhaps 10 to 15%.”

Venezuela – No recognition of USA puppet governance of Honduras.

Yemen – Mar 1, clashes erupt in south twixt west-proxy governance and Yemen.

The report is expected to draw a sharp response from the firebrand leader, a former army colonel who in 2008 expelled two Human Rights Watch investigators after they released a critical report in Caracas. Chávez has in the past railed against the OAS as beholden to the interests of the United States, a country he calls an empire with diabolical designs on Venezuela.

Yeah, the agenda-pushing MSM has to use the inflammatory rhetoric here because it is the TRUTH!

And I will SPELL it OUT FOR YOU: O-I-L

Btw, ever look at a map and see the proximity of Haiti and the Venezuelan coastline?

Pretty good staging ground for attack and invasion as well as the concealed U.S. military build-up in Colombia which I'm sure will be a surprise.

The OAS report, compiled by the body’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, reflects concern in the region over how Venezuela is governed. It has added weight because the OAS, which is made up of 34 countries and based in Washington, has at times been viewed by critics as weak-willed when it comes to making tough pronouncements about the internal machinations in member states.

Chávez took issue with a report issued this week by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which cited widespread human rights violations in Venezuela. The socialist leader called the 300-page report “pure garbage.’’

I tend to agree with that.

“We should prepare to denounce the agreement in which Venezuela joined . . . this terrible Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and leave it,’’ Chávez said during a television address.

Rights activists praised the account issued by the rights committee, saying it sheds light on widespread rights abuses.

Since Gaza and the US.-initiated Muslim slaughters I've lost all respect for Zionist-supported western rights organizations. Sorry.

The report released Wednesday at OAS headquarters in Washington complains of a lack of independence for Venezuela’s judiciary, the closing of news media outlets that are critical, and political discrimination and repression under Chávez.

“We don’t recognize the commission as an impartial institution,’’ said Gabriela Ramírez, the Venezuelan government’s top rights guarantor. Ramírez said the report incorrectly concludes that “the Venezuelan state threatens democracy and human rights.’’

The report condemned the procedures for appointing and removing judges, saying the regulations “lack the safeguards necessary to prevent other branches of government from undermining the Supreme Court’s independence.’’

Memories of Bush's AttorneyGate, 'eh, 'murka?

Government opponents have long complained that the Supreme Court - whose members are appointed by the predominantly pro-Chávez National Assembly - has been packed with the president’s allies, giving him nearly unlimited power. Chávez denies holding sway over justices.

You know WE HAVE OUR OWN PROBLEMS HERE in AmeriKa!

This is for VENEZUELANS to figure out WITHOUT U.S. INTERFERENCE!!!

The OAS commission also called attention to an increase in sanctions against news media, singling out the case of Globo- vision, a television news network that is fiercely critical of Chávez.

That sounds good to me if you are talking about the damn newspapers!

Globovision has been fined for allegedly violating broadcast regulations, and Chávez has threatened to shutter the network.

But it is STILL ON AIR, huh?

Why did he fine 'em? Did they SHOW a BOOB or SWEAR on TV like HERE, 'murkn?

--more--"

No need to do that in the U.S.: AmeriKan MSM is self-censoring and fully on board with the agenda.

MADRID - ETA chief Ibon Gogeascoechea and two other suspected separatists were arrested in a joint French-Spanish police operation in the village of Cahan, France, following a long surveillance operation on a cottage that had been rented using false identity papers, said Spain’s interior minister, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba.

Well, gee whiz, who would want to do a thing like that?

Judge Eloy Velasco made the allegation in a 26-page indictment in which he charged six members of the Basque group ETA, most of them exiled in Latin America, and seven members of the Colombian leftist rebel group FARC with a variety of crimes, including terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder.

You sure it was them, or....

"undercover US agents posed as rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym, FARC"

I smell ANOTHER FALSE-FLAG SET-UP, don't you?

Spain must have gotten tired of the harassment and threats from USrael over the war crimes cases being brought to trial.

Spain has asked the Venezuelan government and President Hugo Chávez for an explanation.

Velasco wrote that a Spanish investigation launched in 2008 has turned up evidence “that demonstrates Venezuelan governmental cooperation in the illicit collaboration between FARC and ETA.’’

He identified a suspected ETA member, Arturo Cubillas Fontan, as a key figure in links between ETA and the FARC. The man lives in Venezuela, has held a job in the Chavez government, and may still have one, the judge wrote.

Then he is a CIA plant, isn't he?

ETA members have received training or taught in FARC camps and FARC members have traveled to Spain to try to kill former Colombian president Andres Pastrana and the current president, Alvaro Uribe, with help from ETA, Velasco wrote....

Yeah, whatever. I'm not buying anymore.

--more--"

What else is new in Spain, according to the divisive, distorting, and deceptive AmeriKan MSM as chosen by the Glob, dear readers?

"Spain approves more liberal abortion law" by Associated Press | February 25, 2010

MADRID - The new law allows the procedure without restrictions up to 14 weeks and gives 16- and 17-year-olds the right to have abortions without parental consent....

Carmen Duenas, a spokeswoman for the leading conservative opposition Popular Party in the Senate, said: “The government wants to do away with one of the pillars of Spanish society, which is the family.’’

Actually, it's true. Agenda-pushing government and Zionist MSM are doing everything they can to divide us so we don't see the true criminals for who they really are and will slaughter millions in sacrifice to them.

--more--"

By Tamar Sharabi | Upside Down World | February 28, 2010

Johnny Rivas is a vocal member of the Unified Movement of Aguan Farmers MUCA , an organization that claims over 3,500 families demanding the redistribution of land in the North Coast of Honduras. For over five years Rivas has fought for land rights in Aguan, known as the ‘capital of agrarian reform.’ MUCA formed in 2001 in order to reclaim lands that Rivas says “were transferred to corrupt businessmen under fraudulent terms.” Rivas has recently been a target of constant death threats for his participation in the movement.

Palm Oil Cooperatives and Big Business

The Aguan Zone named after its river , is located in the department of Colon and claims some of the most fertile lands in the country. It is known for its African Palm Oil plantations, which occupy over 90,000 hectares according to a Jan 2008 report by the US Embassy. Palm oil is a common ingredient in many food products and can be used as biodiesel.

In 1962 the Law of Agrarian Reform reallocated land from the hands of transnational companies back to Honduran farmers. Cooperatives formed that managed the palm oil plantations. In 1992, 1994 and 1995 many cooperatives sold their land back to wealthy business owners. In a document presented on April 30, 2009 MUCA asked for the annulment of the sale from 1994, on the grounds that the sale was illegal under the Agrarian Reform Laws. The terms of the sale stipulated that the land would remain state owned, but the farmers could continue to cultivate it. The contract expired in February 2005 and has never been renewed.

As a strategy to apply pressure on authorities to negotiate with the farmers, in May 2009 MUCA occupied a palm oil factory that belonged to Miguel Facusse, one of the largest landowners in Honduras. A new agreement was signed on June 12, 2009 with President Zelaya that guaranteed state resources to resolve the conflict. On June 23, after a follow up meeting on the same factory, a member of MUCA, Fabio Ochoa was shot 7 times.

Coup d’etat Halts Negotiations

Although President Zelaya had shown the political will to deal with the country’s agrarian problems, his term was cut short with a coup d’etat last June. Most of the farmer organizations prioritized their efforts to protesting for his constitutional return, temporarily putting their land struggle on hold. Realizing that after several months of nonviolent resistance on behalf of the nations teachers unions, workers, indigenous groups, and farmers, they were unable to reverse the coup, MUCA resumed the land recuperations in December 2009.

According to Rivas, direct land recuperation is “the only strategy farmers have to be heard.” Living in rigged plastic tents among the palm oil plantations that occupy their land, the farmers participating sometimes eat only once a day, under constant threat from the authorities.

The farmers occupied four cooperatives; La Confianza, La Aurora, San Isidro, and San Esteban Cooperative. The National Agrarian Institute

which deals with the appropriation of land has measured 9,000 hectares that are under dispute thus far.

Since December there have been dozens of confrontations between the farmers and security forces in the area. Under the de facto government

of Roberto Micheletti, military forces were used several times to illegally evict the farmers. There have been dozens of detained farmers and there are over 80 orders of arrest for people involved.

Conflict Intensifies

On the evening Feb. 11 witnesses reported that two unidentified helicopters flew over communities participating in the land recuperations. The next morning crossfire left at least four guards from the private security company dead.

Security forces also entered the community of La Concepcion, a commuinty neighboring a land recuperation. When a pastor of the local Mennonite Church saw aggressive driving almost running over children in the community, he intervened and had a firearm pointed at him.

“They came here intimidating the community, pointing out houses. If one of the farmers is killed we will know who to hold accountable,” he said.

In a formal meeting on Feb. 16 with President ‘Pepe’ Lobo, known to MUCA as ‘the son of the coup,’ Lobo promised to disarm the farmers. MUCA maintains that they are not an armed struggle, but will defend themselves against aggression from security forces. Rudy Hernandez, also a member of MUCA, maintained that “we are not a group of delinquents, we are farmers who are here to claim our land because hunger forces us to be here.”

This week Lobo presented two options to resolve the conflict: either purchase a portion of the cultivated land or farmers will be relocated to neighboring areas. Both options look for an immediate resolution to the problem but do not deal with the underlying issue of the concentration of land ownership or the illegal acquisition in the first place.

Unsustainable Investment

As the second poorest country in Central America, Honduras relies heavily on international financing.

“One of the most important things for those of us in Honduras, is the image that we give to the investor” said Facusse.

Facusse admitted to a Honduran newspaper that the World Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank BID and an unnamed German Bank have authorized loans which are currently ‘paralyzed’ due to the situation.

“We paid for the farm and paid well for it, those of the agrarian reform had the money but did not invest and misspent the money, for that I believe that agrarian reform is not the solution,” he added.

Marco Ramiro Lobo, a legal advisor to the National Agrarian Institute INA , previously the legal advisor to MUCA who presented the demand against Facusse in 1994, stated that Facusse’s business interests were never for the social good of the community.

“There are grand restrictions on the workers, miserable salaries, before they were associates and now they are workers. Now they have a salary less then the minimum wage. Most of the farmers live in extreme poverty, which is what is causing this situation,” said Ramiro Lobo. “I don’t think anyone is arguing that Facusse brings investment to the area, but what we are arguing is the form in which the lands were acquired. In reality there is no sustainable development, this is a business model that looks for lucrative pay, not social investment.”

MUCA has the support of dozens of other farmer organizations in the country, including international organizations such as FIAN and Via Campesina. They are also supported by the National Front of Popular Resistance FNRP , an organization which grew out of the resistance movement opposed to the coup d’etat against President Manuel Zelaya.

Tamar Sharabi is an environmental engineer and freelance journalist living in Central America. She is working on media empowerment with human rights organizations and on a documentary about the Honduran coup detat. To support her work visit Give Forward .

By Belen Fernandez |Pulse Media | February 27, 2010

A headline in this morning’s edition of the Honduran daily La Tribuna, fervent defender of last year’s coup d’état against President Mel Zelaya, announces the search for the “gang member” that killed the daughter of veteran union organizer and anti-coup resistance figure Pedro Brizuela. The murder of Claudia Larisa Brizuela Rodríguez, which took place on February 24 in the Céleo González neighborhood in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, had not prompted any prior coverage in the mainstream Honduran press despite the papers’ usual predilection for homicide photographs.

Honduran journalistic traditions had also been disrupted in July 2009 by the murder during a demonstration at the Tegucigalpa airport of anti-coup teenager Isis Obed Murillo, whose picture appeared in the daily La Prensa only after his blood had been removed via the Photoshop program. La Tribuna refrains from erasing the pool of blood surrounding Brizuela Rodríguez’ body on her living room floor, or from explaining how it is that members of the National Criminal Investigation Directorate DNIC are “hot on the trail” of the alleged gang member when the only identifying information provided by witnesses is that he is short.

During a conversation in San Pedro Sula last August, Pedro Brizuela dismissed his daughter’s concern regarding his potential martyrdom on behalf of the resistance and reasoned that he was already old, anyway. As it turns out, Brizuela Rodríguez’ concern was only slightly misplaced, and she was shot at age 36 upon answering the door at her home—a scene witnessed by her two sons, ages 2 and 8. La Tribuna concludes:

The femicide [of Brizuela Rodríguez] has caused consternation among civil and trade union organizations, due to her father’s decades-long involvement in these sorts of activities.”

El Heraldo had demonstrated similar consternation over popular activity in a July 31 article explaining that anti-coup Honduran teacher Roger Vallejo Soriano had “ended up with a head wound”—which promptly killed him—due to the fact that he had “abandoned his classroom in order to go out and protest in the streets.” Brizuela Rodríguez receives more lenient treatment at the hands of La Tribuna, and instead of being blamed for her own demise is cast as the victim of her father’s past, with any other blame for the crime absorbed by the term “femicide,” as gender-related targeting by gangs is less easy to pin on the current administration of Pepe Lobo.

Lobo, an impending beneficiary of the “greater engagement with the countries of the Western Hemisphere” promised by the U.S. State Department, will rendezvous in Guatemala with Hillary Clinton at the beginning of March. As for why Clinton’s Latin America tour includes both Guatemala and Costa Rica but not Honduras, this question was posed by an attendee at yesterday’s press briefing by Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs Arturo Valenzuela, who confirmed the geographical proximity between Central American nations:

QUESTION: And the flight time between Costa Rica and Guatemala and Honduras –

ANSWER: Yeah. Right. Right. Guatemala.

Valenzuela’s discourse does not become any less enigmatic as the briefing progresses, and he proclaims with the regard to the U.S. position on the recent Honduran crisis:

So we see the outcome in Honduras is a very successful case of standing for a very fundamental principle and that is that you cannot tolerate a coup d’état in a country. This sets a terrible precedent. And in that sense, we join the unanimity of the hemisphere in this regard. But at the same time, a solution had to be found to Honduras.”

As is clear from the lack of a U.S. response to the slew of politically-motivated murders that have occurred in the first month of Lobo’s presidential term, these are to be considered part of the Honduran solution and compatible with Clinton’s call for “principled pragmatism” in condemnation of human rights abuses.

By Mark Weisbrot

This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited on February 25, 2010. If anyone wants to reprint it, please include a link to the original.

The increasing independence of Latin America has been one of the most important geopolitical changes over the last decade, affecting not only the region but the rest of the world as well. For example, Brazil has publicly supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium and opposed further sanctions against the country. Latin America, once under the control of the United States, is increasingly emerging as a power bloc with its own interests and agenda.

The Obama Administration’s continuation of former President Bush’s policies in the region undoubtedly helped spur the creation of this new organization, provisionally named the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. Most importantly, the Obama team’s ambivalence toward the military coup that overthrew the democratic government of President Mel Zelaya in Honduras last summer provoked deep resentment and distrust throughout the region.

Although the Obama administration was officially against the coup, numerous actions from day one – including the first White House statement that failed to condemn the coup when it happened – made it clear in the diplomatic world that its real position was something different. The last straw came in November 2009 when the Obama administration brokered a deal for the return of Zelaya, and then joined the dictatorship in reneging on it. Washington then stood against the vast majority of the region in supporting the November elections for a new president under the dictatorship, which had systematically repressed the basic rights and civil liberties necessary to an electoral campaign.

Arturo Valenzuela, the US State Department’s top official for Latin America, said that the new organization “should not be an effort that would replace the OAS”.

The differences underlying the need for a new organization were clear in the statements and declarations that took place in the Unity Summit, held in Cancun February 22 -23. The summit issued a strong statement backing Argentina in its dispute with the UK over the Malvinas as they are called in Argentina or Falklands Islands. The dispute, which dates back to the 19th century and led to a war in 1982, has become more prominent lately as the UK has unilaterally decided to explore for oil offshore the islands. President Lula da Silva of Brazil called for the United Nations to take a more active role in resolving the dispute. And the Summit condemned the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

These and other measures would be difficult or impossible to pass in the OAS. Furthermore, the OAS has long been manipulated by the United States, as from 2000-2004 when it was used to help build support for the coup that overthrew Haiti’s elected president. And most recently, the U.S. and Canada blocked the OAS from taking stronger measures against the Honduran dictatorship last year.

Meanwhile, in Washington foreign policy circles, it is getting increasingly more difficult to maintain the worn-out fiction that the United States’ differences with the region are a legacy of President Bush’s “lack of involvement,” or to blame a few leftist trouble-makers like Bolivia, Nicaragua, and of course the dreaded Venezuela. It seems to have gone unnoticed that Brazil has taken the same positions as Venezuela and Bolivia on Iran and other foreign policy issues, and has strongly supported Chávez. Perhaps the leadership of Mexico — a right-wing government that was one of the Bush Administration’s few allies in the region – in establishing this new organization will stimulate some re-thinking.

There are structural reasons for this process of increasing independence to continue, even if – and this is not on the horizon – a new government in Washington were to someday move away from its Cold War redux approach to the region. The United States has become increasingly less important as a trading partner for the region, especially since the recent recession as our trade deficit has shrunk. The region also increasingly has other sources of investment capital. The collapse of the IMF’s creditors’ cartel in the region has also eliminated the most important avenue of Washington’s influence.

The new organization is sorely needed. The Honduran coup was a threat to democracy in the entire region, as it encouraged other right-wing militaries and their allies to think that they might drag Latin America back to the days when the local elite, with Washington’s help, could overturn the will of the electorate. An organization without the U.S. and Canada will be more capable of defending democracy, as well as economic and social progress in the region when it is under attack. It will also have a positive influence in helping to create a more multi-polar world internationally.

On Feb 22, two major developments occurred in the Americas south of the Rio Grande. The two-day Rio Group summit opened in Mexico and the UK started drilling for oil 60 miles north of the Falklands Islands, known as Las Malvinas to Argentina. The meeting in Mexico was identified as a Unity Summit because for the first time the 24 members of the Rio Group minus Honduras, not invited because of the illegitimacy of its post-coup regime : Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela were joined by the fifteen members of the Caribbean Community CARICOM : Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago. Haiti, Jamaica and Suriname are members of both organizations. Ahead of the summit, the Financial Times wrote:

The Mexican-led initiative, a clear sign of Latin America’s growing confidence as a region, will exclude both the US and Canada. Some observers believe it could even eventually rival the 35-member Organisation of American States, which includes the US and Canada and has been the principal forum for hemispheric issues during the past half century.

In fact, on the first day of the summit Bolivian Pres Morales called for a “a new US-free OAS,” stressing Washington’s centuries-long history of perpetrating military coups, blackmail, looting of natural resources and, over the past generation, the scourge of neo-liberalism in the Americas. In 1986 the Rio Group grew out of the four-member Contradora Group consisting of Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela, which was formed in response to Washington’s Contra and death squad campaigns in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s. Part of the legacy Bolivia’s Morales was referring to. Coinciding to the day if not the hour of the beginning of the summit, the British Desire Petroleum company began exploring for oil and gas off the Falklands/Las Malvinas, seized from Argentina by Britain in 1833 and fought over by the nations in a 74-day war in 1982. “Neighbouring Argentina, which lays claim to the islands, is fiercely opposed to the drilling. Earlier this month, the Argentinian government filed a formal protest with the British government.” Britain lost 255 soldiers in the conflict, the highest wartime fatalities it had suffered since the Korean War and the Malayan conflict. The British death toll in Afghanistan recently surpassed that number. London’s energy grab in the South Atlantic did not go unnoticed in Mexico, where 26 presidents and prime ministers were among the participants at the Unity Summit. Argentine Pres Fernandez denounced the British actions as “unilateral and illegal” and a breach of her nation’s sovereignty. She further stated:

There continues to be systematic violation of international law that should be respected by all countries. In the name of our government and in the name of my people I am grateful for the support this meeting has given to our demands.

Fernandez characterized the unanimous backing provided her at the summit as an “exercise in self-defence for all,” and blasted nations with permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council, undoubtedly meaning Britain, the US and France, for “continuing to use that place of privilege to disregard international law.” Her Venezuelan colleague Pres Chavez, indicating the dangerous dimension a new British-provoked altercation with Argentina can escalate into, said:

The English are still threatening Argentina. Things have changed. We are no longer in 1982. If conflict breaks out, be sure Argentina will not be alone like it was back then. We support unconditionally the Argentine government and the Argentine people in their complaints. That sea and that land belongs to Argentina and to Latin America.

While highlighting the military threat posed by Britain off the coast of Argentina, he alluded to a British submarine site in the Falklands/Las Malvinas and said:

We demand not only that the submarine platform be removed, but also that the British government follow the resolutions of the United Nations and give back that territory to the Argentine People.

Nicaragua’s Pres Ortega stated:

We will back a resolution demanding that England return Las Malvinas to its rightful owner, that it return the islands to Argentina.

The Times quoted Marco Aurelio Garcia, foreign policy adviser to Brazil’s Pres Lula, as adding:

Las Malvinas must be reintegrated into Argentine sovereignty. Unlike in the past, today there is a consensus in Latin America behind Argentina’s claims.

The comments by Venezuela’s president, addressing as they did the threat of a new military confrontation between Britain and Argentina, bear particular scrutiny in light of recent actions by London and statements by its head of state. In late December, Britain conducted a two-day military operation off the coast of the Falklands/Las Malvinas which included the use of Typhoon multi-role fighters and warships. The exercises, code-named Cape Bayonet, “took place during a tour of the Falklands by British forces ahead of the start of drilling in the basin in Feb 2010? and “simulated an enemy invasion.” A news report at the time added:

Britain has strengthened its military presence in the Falklands since the 1982 war and has a major operational base at Mount Pleasant, 35 miles from the capital Stanley. The prospect of the islands transforming into a major source of oil revenue for Britain has raised the military’s argument for more funding to beef up the forces in South Atlantic.

Four days before British drilling began off the islands, UK PM Brown stated:

We have made all the preparations that are necessary to make sure that the Falkland Islanders are properly protected.

Argentine officials have repeatedly denied the possibility of a military response to British encroachments and provocations in the South Atlantic Ocean. On the same day, Feb 18, Argentina’s Vice Minister of Foreign Relations Taccetti accused Britain of “a unilateral act of aggression and subjugation” in moving to seize oil and gas in the disputed region. Buenos Aires has prohibited ships from going to and coming from the Falklands/Las Malvinas through Argentine waters. What is at stake are, according to British Geological Survey estimates, as many as 60b barrels of oil under the waters off the Falklands/Las Malvinas. In RIA Novosti on Jan 28 2010, Russian military analyst Ilya Kramnik explained that even that colossal energy bonanza is not all that Britain covets near the Falklands/Las Malvinas and further south:

Along with the neighboring islands controlled by the UK, the Falklands are the de facto gateway to the Antarctic, which explains London’s tenacity in maintaining sovereignty over them and the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, as well as territorial claims regarding the South Shetland and South Orkney Islands under the Antarctic Treaty. Under the ice, under the continental shelf, there are enormous mineral resources and the surrounding seas are full of bio-resources. In addition, the glaciers of Antarctica contain 90% of the world’s fresh water, the shortage of which becomes all the more acute with the growth in the world’s population.

People’s Daily on Dec 4 2007 described what Britain in part went to war for in 1982 and why it may do so again: control of broad tracts of Antarctica:

The vastness of seemingly barren, ice-covered land is uncovered and exposed to the outside world, revealing a ‘treasure basin’ with incredibly abundant mineral deposits and energy reserves. A layer of Permian Period coal exists on the mainland, and holds 500b tons in known reserves. The thick ice dome over the land is home to the world’s largest reservoir for fresh water; holds approximately 29.3m cu km of ice; and makes up 75% of earth’s fresh water supply. It is possible to say that the South Pole could feed the entire world with its abundant supplies of food and fresh water. The value of the South Pole is not confined to the economic sphere; it also lies in its strategic position. The US Coast Guard has long had garrisons in the region, and the USAF is the number one air power in the region. The South Pole Treaty points out that the South Pole can only be exploited and developed for the sake of peace; and can not be a battle ground. Otherwise, the ice-cold South Pole could prove a fiercely hot battlefield.

Two days before the May 13 2009 deadline for “states to stake their claims in what some experts [have described] as the last big carve-up of maritime territory in history,” Britain submitted a claim to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf for 1m sq km in the South Atlantic reaching into the Antarctic Ocean. An article in this series written five days afterward detailed the new scramble for Antarctica initiated by Britain and Australia, the second being granted 2.5m additional sq km in the Antarctic Ocean in Apr 2008. A newspaper in the UK wrote about London’s million-sq-km South Atlantic and Antarctic ambitions beforehand, saying:

Not since the Golden Age of the Empire has Britain staked its claim to such a vast area of land on the world stage. And while the British Empire may be long gone, the Antarctic has emerged as the latest battleground for rival powers competing on several fronts to secure valuable oil-rich territory. The Falklands claim has the most potential for political fall-out, given that Britain and Argentina fought over the islands 25 years ago, and the value of the oil under the sea in the region is understood to be immense. Seismic tests suggest there could be about 60 billion barrels of oil under the ocean floor.

Last autumn a Russian news source warned about the exact initiative of this, pointed out London’s eagerness to develop new oil fields in South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, and ended with a somber warning:

Many believe that the 1982 war between Britain and Argentina with almost 1,000 servicemen killed in the hostilities was all about oil and gas fields in the South Atlantic. In this sense, Desire Petroleum should certainly think twice before starting to capitalize on what was a subject of the bloodbath in 1982. Given London’s unwillingness to try to arrive at a political accommodation with Buenos Aires, a UN special commission will surely have tougher times ahead as far as its final decision on the continental shelf goes. And it is only to be hoped that Britain will be wise enough not to turn the Falkland Islands into another regional hot spot.

Unlike the first South Atlantic war of 1982, when the regime of Gen Galtieri garnered no support from other Latin American nations, a future standoff or armed conflict between Argentina and Britain over the Falklands/Las Malvinas will see Latin American and Caribbean states acting in solidarity with Argentina. If the UK succeeds in provoking a new war, it in turn will appeal to its NATO allies for logistical, surveillance and other forms of assistance, including direct military intervention if required. In addition to the US and Canada, Britain’s NATO allies in the Western Hemisphere include France and the Netherlands, with their possessions and military bases in the Caribbean and South America. Britain is playing with fire and if it ignites a new conflict it could rapidly spread far beyond the waters off the southern tip of South America.

South Atlantic: Britain May Provoke New Conflict With Argentina
Rick Rozoff

On February 22 two major developments occurred in the Americas south of the Rio Grande. The two-day Rio Group summit opened in Mexico and Great Britain started drilling for oil 60 miles north of the Falklands Islands, known as Las Malvinas to Argentina.

The meeting in Mexico was identified as a Unity Summit because for the first time the 24 members of the Rio Group minus Honduras, not invited because of the illegitimacy of its post-coup regime – Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela – were joined by the fifteen members of the Caribbean Community CARICOM : Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago. Haiti, Jamaica and Suriname are members of both organizations.

Ahead of the summit the Financial Times wrote, “The Mexican-led initiative, a clear sign of Latin America’s growing confidence as a region, will exclude both the US and Canada. Some observers believe it could even eventually rival the 35-member Organisation of American States OAS , which includes the US and Canada and has been the principal forum for hemispheric issues during the past half century.” [1]

In fact on the first day of the summit Bolivian President Evo Morales called for a “a new US-free OAS,” [2] stressing Washington’s centuries-long history of perpetrating military coups, blackmail, looting of natural resources and, over the past generation, the scourge of neo-liberalism in the Americas.

In 1986 the Rio Group grew out of the four-member Contradora Group consisting of Colombia, Mexico, Panama and Venezuela which was formed in response to Washington’s Contra and death squad campaigns in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s. Part of the legacy Bolivia’s Morales was referring to.

Coinciding to the day if not the hour of the beginning of the summit, the British Desire Petroleum company began exploring for oil and gas off the Falklands/Las Malvinas, seized from Argentina by Britain in 1833 and fought over by the nations in a 74-day war in 1982. “Neighbouring Argentina, which lays claim to the islands, is fiercely opposed to the drilling. Earlier this month, the Argentinian government filed a formal protest with the British government.” [3]

Britain lost 255 soldiers in the conflict, the highest wartime fatalities it had suffered since the Korean War and the Malayan conflict. The British death toll in Afghanistan recently surpassed that number.

London’s energy grab in the South Atlantic did not go unnoticed in Mexico, where 26 presidents and prime ministers were among the participants at the Unity Summit. Argentine President Cristina Fernandez denounced the British actions as “unilateral and illegal” [4] and a breach of her nation’s sovereignty.

She further stated “There continues to be systematic violation of international law that should be respected by all countries….In the name of our government and in the name of my people I am grateful…for the support this meeting has given to our demands.” [5]

Fernandez characterized the unanimous backing provided her at the summit as an “exercise in self-defence for all” [6] and blasted nations with permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council – she undoubtedly meant Britain, the United States and France – for “continu[ing] to use that place of privilege to disregard international law.” [7]

Her Venezuelan colleague President Hugo Chavez, indicating the dangerous dimension a new British-provoked altercation with Argentina can escalate into, said, “The English are still threatening Argentina. Things have changed. We are no longer in 1982. If conflict breaks out, be sure Argentina will not be alone like it was back then.” [8]

Before the summit began he said, “We support unconditionally the Argentine government and the Argentine people in their complaints. That sea and that land belongs to Argentina and to Latin America.” [9]

He reiterated that position during his speech on February 22. While highlighting the military threat posed by Britain off the coast of Argentina, he alluded to a British submarine site in the Falklands/Las Malvinas and said “we demand not only [that] the submarine platform…be removed, but also [that] the British government…follow the resolutions of the United Nations and give back that territory to the Argentine People.” [10]

Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, also in attendance at the summit, stated “We will back a resolution demanding that England return Las Malvinas to its rightful owner, that it return the islands to Argentina.” [11]

The Times of London quoted Marco Aurelio Garcia, foreign policy adviser to Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, as adding: “Las Malvinas must be reintegrated into Argentine sovereignty. Unlike in the past, today there is a consensus in Latin America behind Argentina’s claims.” [12]

The comments by Venezuela’s president, addressing as they did the threat of a new military confrontation between Britain and Argentina, bear particular scrutiny in light of recent actions by London and statements by its head of state.

In late December Britain conducted a two-day military operation off the coast of the Falklands/Las Malvinas which included the use of Typhoon multi-role fighters and warships. The exercises, code-named Cape Bayonet, “took place during a tour of the Falklands by British forces ahead of the start of drilling in the basin in February 2010″ and “simulated an enemy invasion….” [13]

A news report at the time added, “Britain has strengthened its military presence in the Falklands since the [1982] war and has a major operational base at Mount Pleasant, 35 miles from the capital Stanley.

“The prospect of the islands transforming into a major source of oil revenue for Britain has raised the military’s argument for more funding to beef up the forces in South Atlantic.” [14]

Four days before British drilling began off the islands, Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated “We have made all the preparations that are necessary to make sure that the Falkland Islanders are properly protected,” [15] although Argentine officials have repeatedly denied the possibility of a military response to British encroachments and provocations in the South Atlantic Ocean.

On the same day, February 18, Argentina’s Vice Minister of Foreign Relations Victorio Taccetti accused Britain of “a unilateral act of aggression and subjugation” [16] in moving to seize oil and gas in the disputed region. Buenos Aires has prohibited ships from going to and coming from the Falklands/Las Malvinas through Argentine waters.

What is at stake are, according to British Geological Survey estimates, as many as 60 billion barrels of oil under the waters off the Falklands/Las Malvinas.

In late January a Russian military analyst explained that even that colossal energy bonanza is not all that Britain covets near the Falklands/Las Malvinas and further south.

Ilya Kramnik wrote that “along with the neighboring islands controlled by the U.K., the Falklands are the de facto gateway to the Antarctic, which explains London’s tenacity in maintaining sovereignty over them and the South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, as well as territorial claims regarding the South Shetland and South Orkney Islands under the Antarctic Treaty.”

Regarding Antarctica itself, “Under the ice, under the continental shelf, there are enormous mineral resources and the surrounding seas are full of bio-resources. In addition, the glaciers of Antarctica contain 90% of the world’s fresh water, the shortage of which becomes all the more acute with the growth in the world’s population.” [17]

A Chinese analysis of over two years earlier described what Britain in part went to war for in 1982 and why it may do so again: Control of broad tracts of Antarctica.

“The vastness of seemingly barren, ice-covered land is uncovered and exposed to the outside world, revealing a ‘treasure basin’ with incredibly abundant mineral deposits and energy reserves….A layer of Permian Period coal exists on the mainland, and holds 500 billion tons in known reserves.

“The thick ice dome over the land is home to the world’s largest reservoir for fresh water; holds approximately 29.3 million cubic kilometers of ice; and makes up 75% of earth’s fresh water supply.

“It is possible to say that the South Pole could feed the entire world with its abundant supplies of food [fish] and fresh water…[T]he value of the South Pole is not confined to the economic sphere; it also lies in its strategic position.

“The US Coast Guard has long had garrisons in the region, and the US Air Force is the number one air power in the region.” [18]

The feature from which the preceding excerpts originated ended with a warning: “[T]he South Pole [Antarctic] Treaty points out that the South Pole can only be exploited and developed for the sake of peace; and can not be a battle ground. Otherwise, the ice-cold South Pole could prove a fiercely hot battlefield.” [19]

Two days before the May 13, 2009 deadline for “states to stake their claims in what some experts [have described] as the last big carve-up of maritime territory in history,” [20] Britain submitted a claim to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf for one million square kilometers in the South Atlantic reaching into the Antarctic Ocean.

An article in this series written five days afterward detailed the new scramble for Antarctica initiated by Britain and Australia, the second being granted 2.5 million additional square kilometers in the Antarctic Ocean in April of 2008. [21]

A newspaper in the United Kingdom wrote about London’s million-kilometer South Atlantic and Antarctic ambitions beforehand that “Not since the Golden Age of the Empire has Britain staked its claim to such a vast area of land on the world stage. And while the British Empire may be long gone, the Antarctic has emerged as the latest battleground for rival powers competing on several fronts to secure valuable oil-rich territory….The Falklands claim has the most potential for political fall-out, given that Britain and Argentina fought over the islands 25 years ago, and the value of the oil under the sea in the region is understood to be immense. Seismic tests suggest there could be about 60 billion barrels of oil under the ocean floor.” [22]

Last autumn a Russian news source warned about the exact initiative of this February 22 in stating “Many believe that the 1982 war between Britain and Argentina with almost 1,000 servicemen killed in the hostilities was all about oil and gas fields in the South Atlantic. In this sense, Desire Petroleum should certainly think twice before starting to capitalize on what was a subject of the bloodbath in 1982….”

Regarding the territorial claims submitted by Britain last May still in deliberations at the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf , the report pointed out London’s “eagerness to expand its Falkland Islands’ continental shelf from 200 to 350 nautical miles, which would enable Britain to develop new oil fields in South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands,” and ended with a somber warning:

“Given London’s unwillingness to try to arrive at a political accommodation with Buenos Aires, a UN special commission will surely have tougher times ahead as far as its final decision on the continental shelf goes. And it is only to be hoped that Britain will be wise enough not to turn the Falkland Islands into another regional hot spot.” [23]

Unlike the first South Atlantic war of 1982, when the regime of General Leopoldo Galtieri garnered no support from other Latin American nations, a future standoff or armed conflict between Argentina and Britain over the Falklands/Las Malvinas will see Latin American and Caribbean states acting in solidarity with Argentina.

If the United Kingdom succeeds in provoking a new war, it in turn will appeal to its NATO allies for logistical, surveillance and other forms of assistance, including direct military intervention if required. In addition to the U.S. and Canada, Britain’s NATO allies in the Western Hemisphere include France and the Netherlands with their possessions and military bases in the Caribbean and South America.

Britain is playing with fire and if it ignites a new conflict it could rapidly spread far beyond the waters off the southern tip of South America.

1 Financial Times, February 19, 2010
2 Prensa Latina, February 22, 2010
3 Radio Netherlands, February 22, 2010
4 Associated Press, February 22, 2010
5 Reuters, February 22, 2010
6 Deutsche Presse-Agentur, February 22, 2010
7 Ibid
8 The Times London , February 23, 2010
9 Reuters, February 22, 2010
10 Xinhua News Agency, February 23, 2010
11 The Times, February 23, 2010
12 Ibid
13 United Press International, December 28, 2009
14 Ibid
15 Reuters, February 18, 2010
16 Xinhua News Agency, February 19, 2010
17 Russian Information Agency Novosti, January 28, 2010
18 People’s Daily, December 4, 2007
19 Ibid
20 Reuters, October 7, 2007
21 Scramble For World Resources: Battle For Antarctica
Stop NATO, May 16, 2009

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/scramble-for-world-resources-battle-for-antarctica

22 The Scotsman, October 23, 2007
23 Voice of Russia, September 16, 2009

Thursday, 18 February 2010
Cuba: Strides Towards Sustainability
Cuba: Strides Towards Sustainability • by Helen Yaffe.

http://ratbnews.blogspot.com/2010/02/cuba-strides-towards-sustainability.html

Cuba’s successful models of sustainable development – food, housing and health – are now being widely replicated throughout Latin America.

by Helen Yaffe

CUBA marked the 50th anniversary of its revolution in 2009. The Cuban people have withstood five decades of hostility from the United States and its international allies. However, Cuba’s best form of resistance has been not just the assertion of national sovereignty, but the creation of an alternative model of development which places ecology and humanity at its core.

Applying the yardsticks of conventional economics to assess Cuban society, for example focusing on disposable income, GDP or levels of consumption, commentators often conclude that the revolution has failed to pull the Cuban people out of poverty, but such criticism omits the fact that the Cuban state guarantees every citizen a basic food supply ‘ration’ ; most incomes are not taxed; most people own their own homes or pay very little rent; utility bills, transport and medicine costs are symbolic; the opera, cinema, ballet are cheap for all. High-quality education and healthcare are free. These provisions are part of the material wealth of Cuba and cannot be dismissed – as if individual consumption of DVDs and digital cameras were the only measure of economic growth.

The challenge is to disentangle our understanding of development from the notion of economic growth. Against great odds, Cuba has transformed itself from an underdeveloped ‘neo-colony’ into an independent state, boasting world-leading human development indicators, internationalist education, healthcare programmes and sustainable development.

It is no mere coincidence that Cuba is the only country in the world, according to the WWF’s 2006 Living Planet report, to have achieved sustainable development: improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of its ecosystem.

Domestic solutions

The collapse of the socialist bloc between 1989 and 1991 led to a collapse in Cuba’s foreign trade. GDP plummeted 35% by 1993 and there were critical scarcities of hydrocarbon energy resources, fertilisers, food imports, medicines, cement, equipment and resources in every sector. Cuba was compelled to search for domestic solutions.

In agriculture, organic fertilisers and pesticides, crop-rotation techniques and organic urban gardens called organoponicos were developed, while tractors were replaced with human and animal labour. Bikes were imported from China and car-pooling was established. As the economy improved, Cuba extended these measures, introducing ecotourism and solar energy.

While economic reforms were introduced, including concessions to the ‘free market’, free universal welfare provision, state planning and the predominance of state property were maintained. Incredibly, given the severity of the crisis, between 1990 and 2003, the number of Cuban doctors increased by 76%, dentists by 46% and nurses by 16%. The number of maternity homes rose by 86%, day-care centres for older people by 107% and homes for people with disabilities by 47%. Infant mortality fell and life expectancy rose. Internationalist links also increased, as thousands of Cuban specialists, including healthcare professionals and educators, volunteered to work in poor communities around the world. By November 2008, Cuba had nearly 30,000 doctors and other health professionals working in 75 countries, providing healthcare and training locals. Its literacy programme has taught over 3,600,000 people from 23 countries to read and write.

2006 dawned as the Year of the Energy Revolution in Cuba, a major state initiative to save and rationalise the use of energy resources: install efficient new power generators, experiment with renewable energy and replace old durable goods refrigerators, televisions and cookers with new energy-saving equipment. Ten million energy-saving light bulbs and over six million electric rice cookers and pressure cookers were distributed free of charge. The aim was to raise the island’s capacity for electricity generation and save the government millions of pesos formerly spent on subsidised fuel. State subsidies mean that energy consumption is not rationed through the market, so energy efficiency, not price hikes, is the principal means of reducing consumption.

Building on the campaign for energy efficiency, in 2008 Cuba launched a campaign to increase food production. Following the closure of many sugar mills, in 2007 up to 50% of Cuba’s arable land lay fallow, while over 80% of the food ration was imported. The international rise in food and fuel prices saw the cost of Cuba’s imports increase by $1 billion from 2007 to 2008. Now, idle land is being distributed in usufruct rent-free loan to those who want to produce organic food.

Already organoponicos in Havana supply 100% of the city’s consumption needs in fruit and vegetables. They are supplemented by urban patios, of which there are over 60,000 in Havana alone. According to Sinan Koont of the Department of Latin American Studies at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, ‘It is not just about economics.producing food and creating employment. It is also about community development and preserving and improving the environment, bringing a healthier way of life to the cities.’

Central to understanding these achievements is the role of the state in Cuba. State ownership and central planning allow a rational allocation of resources, balancing environmental concerns and human welfare alongside economic objectives. Critics who point to the absence of multi-party elections and ‘civil society’ in Cuba fail to appreciate how the island’s alternative grassroots system of participative democracy ensures that the state is representative of its population and acts in their collective interests. Under capitalism, private businesses regard the Earth’s natural resources as a ‘free gift’ to capital. Western-style parliamentarianism dissuades short-term elected governments from calculating the human or ecological cost of their policies on the future, while economic growth wins corporate backing and public votes. The need for sustainable development creates an irreconcilable contradiction under capitalism because it implies obstruction of the profit motive which drives production.

The ALBA model

In December 2004, Cuba and Venezuela formalised their alliance with the formation of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas ALBA . Between 2006 and 2009, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Honduras under Zelaya , Ecuador, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda joined ALBA, turning it into a political and trading bloc of significance. Members are engaged in projects of humanitarian, economic and social cooperation through non-market, non-profit-based exchanges. The Bank of ALBA was inaugurated in December 2008 with $2 billion capital, operating without loan conditions and functioning on the basis of members’ consensus. It contributes to freeing countries from the dictates of the World Bank and the IMF. In January 2010, a new ‘virtual’ currency for exchanges within ALBA will be introduced, undermining the leverage of the US dollar.

ALBA is the fruit of Cuba’s internationalist welfare-based development model. It is also the expression of pan-Latin American integrationist movements and the ascendancy of social movements representing the interests of the indigenous and poor communities. These sectors demand rational development strategies which respect their traditions and environment. The April 2009 ALBA declaration, ‘Capitalism Threatens Life on the Planet’, reflects this:

‘The global economic crisis, climate change, the food crisis and the energy crisis are the result of the decay of capitalism, which threatens to end life and the planet. To avert this outcome, it is necessary to develop and model an alternative to the capitalist system. A system based on solidarity not competition; a system in harmony with Mother Earth and not plundering of human resources.’

The 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution should be celebrated, not as a historical event, but as a living example, with increasing relevance, that it is possible to live with dignity, and sustainably, outside of the capitalist profit motive, with human welfare and the environment at the centre of development. It is a lesson we must learn urgently because, in the words of Fidel Castro at his speech at the Earth Summit in 1992, ‘Tomorrow will be too late…’

Helen Yaffe is the author of Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2009, and is a Latin American history Teaching Fellow at University College London and the London School of Economics. This article is reproduced from Resurgence UK Magazine, No. 258, January/February 2010 .

The U.S. in Haiti: Neoliberalism at the Barrel of a Gun

Illustrations by Lisa Lin

Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide “security and stability” to bring in aid, violence was never an issue, according to nearly all independent observers in the field.

The military response appears to be more opportunistic. With Haiti’s government “all but invisible” and its repressive police forces “devastated,” popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in want to rebuild Haiti on a foundation of sweatshops, agro-exports and tourism. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed it will be done at gunpoint.

The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S. troops crowded out much of the aid being sent to the Port-au-Prince airport following the Jan. 12 earthquake. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights were turned away, while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. By the end of January, three quarters of Haitians still lacked clean water, the government had received only 2 percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. Nearly a month into the crisis, the Washington Post reported, “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”

At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground with 15,000 more troops off shore at one point and dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. Embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, The New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word.”

The real powers in Haiti now are the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen; U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke; Bill Clinton who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts ; and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it,” while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”

While much of the corporate media fixated on “looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as “relatively calm.” Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives told Democracy Now! on January 20: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population … organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps.” In one instance, Ives continued, a truckload of food showed up in a neighborhood in the middle of the night unannounced. “It could have been a melee. The local popular organization … was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion. … They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the U.N.”

A NEW INVASION

But that’s what Haiti is getting, including 3,500 more soldiers and police for the 9,200-strong U.N. force already there. These U.N. forces have played a leading role in repressing Haiti’s poor, who twice propelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency on a platform of social and economic justice. And the poor know that the detailed U.S. and U.N. plans in the works for “recovery” — sweatshops, land grabs and privatization — are part of the same system of economic slavery they’ve been fighting against for more than 200 years. Neoliberal reconstruction, then, will happen at the barrel of the gun. In this light, the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian Army or similar entity as a force “to fight the people.”

This is the crux of the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly the slaughter of thousands by U.S.-armed death squads after each coup, the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires OPs that are the backbone of Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas. Twice last year, after legislative elections that banned Fanmi Lavalas were scheduled, boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the abstention rate was reported to be at least 89 percent.

A new occupation of Haiti — the third in the last 16 years — also fits within the U.S. doctrine of rollback in Latin America: support for the coup in Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, hostility toward Bolivia and Venezuela. Related to that, the United States wants to ensure that Haiti will not pose the “threat of a good example” by pursuing an independent path, as it tried to do under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide — which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in U.S.-backed coups.

SWEATSHOP SOLUTION

In a March 2009 New York Times op-ed, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon outlined his development plan for Haiti, involving lower port fees, “dramatically expanding the country’s export zones,” and emphasizing “the garment industry and agriculture.” Ban’s neoliberal plan was drawn up by Oxford University economist Paul Collier.

Collier is blunt, writing, “Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” He calls for agricultural exports such as mangoes that involve pushing farmers off the land so they can be employed in garment manufacturing in export-processing zones. To facilitate these zones Collier says, Haiti and donors need to provide them with private ports and electricity, “clear and rapid rights to land;” outsourced customs; “roads, water and sewage;” and the involvement of the Clinton Global Initiative to bring in garment manufacturers.

Revealing the connection between neoliberalism and military occupation in Haiti, Collier credits the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti MINUSTAH with establishing “credible security,” but laments that its remaining mandate is “too short for investor confidence.” In fact, MINUSTAH has been involved in numerous massacres in Port-au-Prince slums that are strongholds for Lavalas. Collier also notes MINUSTAH will cost some $5 billion overall; compare that to the $379 million the U.S. government has designated for post-earthquake relief.

Speaking at an October 2009 investors’ conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted dogooders like Gap, Levi Strauss and Citibank, Bill Clinton claimed a revitalized garment industry could create 100,000 jobs. Some 200 companies, half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference, drawn by “Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh,” The New York Times reported. Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of $1.75. The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to about $5 an hour, but it was opposed by the business elite, and President René Préval refused to sign the bill, effectively killing it. This episode sparked student protests starting in June of last year, which were repressed by Haitian police and MINUSTAH .

ROOTS OF REPRESSION

In his work Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “Haiti’s first army saw itself as the offspring of the struggle against slavery and colonialism.” That changed during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Under the tutelage of the U.S. Marines, “the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight against other Haitians. It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen.” This brutal legacy led Aristide to disband the army in 1995.

Yet prior to the army’s disbandment, in the wake of the U.S. invasion that returned a politically handcuffed Aristide to the presidency in 1994, “CIA agents accompanying U.S. troops began a new recruitment drive” that included leaders of the death squad known as FRAPH, according to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.

It’s worth recalling how the Clinton administration played a double game under the cover of humanitarian intervention. Investigative reporter Allan Nairn revealed that in 1993 “five to ten thousand” small arms were shipped from Florida, past the U.S. naval blockade, to the coup leaders. These weapons enabled FRAPH to grow and to terrorize the popular movements. Then, pointing to intensifying FRAPH violence in 1994, the Clinton administration pressured Aristide into acquiescing to a U.S. invasion because FRAPH was becoming “the only game in town.” After 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti, they set about protecting FRAPH members, freeing them from jail and refusing to disarm them or seize their weapons caches. FRAPH leader Emmanual Constant told Nairn that after the invasion the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency DIA was using FRAPH to counter “subversive activities.” Meanwhile, the State Department and CIA went about stacking the Haitian National Police with former army soldiers, many of whom were on the U.S. payroll. By 1996, according to one report, Haitian Army and “FRAPH forces remain armed and present in virtually every community across the country,” and paramilitaries were “inciting street violence in an effort to undermine social order.”

During the early 1990s, a separate group of Haitian soldiers, including Guy Philippe, who led the 2004 coup against Aristide, were spirited away to Ecuador where they allegedly trained at a “U.S. military facility.” Hallward describes the second coup as beginning in 2001 as a “Contra war” in the Dominican Republic with Philippe and former FRAPH commander Jodel Chamblain as leaders. A Democracy Now! report from April 7, 2004, claimed that the U.S. government-funded International Republican Institute provided arms and technical training to the anti-Aristide force in the Dominican Republic, while “200 members of the special forces of the United States were there in the area training these so-called rebels.”

A key component of the campaign against Aristide after he was inaugurated in 2001 was economic destabilization that cut off funding for “road construction, AIDS programs, water works and health care.” Likely factors in the 2004 coup included Aristide’s public campaign demanding that France repay the money it extorted from Haiti in 1825 for the former slave colony to buy its freedom, estimated in 2003 at $21 billion, and his working with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba to create alternatives to U.S. economic domination of the region.

When Aristide was finally ousted in February 2004, another round of slaughter ensued, with 800 bodies dumped in just one week in March. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet determined that 8,000 people were murdered in the capital region during the first 22 months of the U.S.-backed coup government and 35,000 women and girls were raped or sexually assaulted. The OPs and Lavalas militants were decimated, in part by a U.N. war against the main Lavalas strongholds in Port-au-Prince’s neighborhoods of Bel Air and Cité Soleil, the latter a densely packed slum of some 300,000. Hallward claims U.S. Marines were involved in a number of massacres in areas such as Bel Air in 2004.

‘MORE FREE TRADE’

Less than four months after the 2004 coup, reporter Jane Regan described a draft economic plan, the “Interim Cooperation Framework,” which “calls for more free trade zones FTZs , stresses tourism and export agriculture and hints at the eventual privatization of the country’s state enterprises.” Regan wrote that the plan was “drawn up by people nobody elected,” mainly “foreign technicians” and “institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development USAID and the World Bank.”

Much of this plan was implemented under Préval, who announced in 2007 plans to privatize the public telephone company, Téléco. This plan is now being promoted by Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon as Haiti’s path out of poverty. The Wall Street Journal touted such achievements as “10,000 new garment industry jobs” in 2009, a “luxury hotel complex” in the upper-crust neighborhood of Pétionville and a $55 million investment by Royal Caribbean International at its “private Haitian beach paradise.”

Haiti, of course, has been here before, when the USAID spoke of turning it into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” In the 1980s, under Jean- Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, it shifted onethird of cultivated land to export crops while “there were some 240 multinational corporations, employing between 40,000 and 60,000 predominantly female workers,” sewing garments, baseballs for Major League Baseball, and Disney merchandise, according to scholar Yasmine Shamsie. Those jobs, paying as little as 11 cents an hour, coincided with a decline in per capita income and living standards. Ban Ki-moon wants Haiti to emulate Bangladesh, where sweatshops pay as little as 6 cents an hour. At such low pay, workers had little left after purchasing food and transportation to and from the factories. These self-contained export-processing zones, often funded by USAID and the World Bank, also add little to the national economy, importing tax free virtually all the materials used.

U.S.-promoted agricultural policies, such as forcing Haitian rice farmers to compete against U.S.-subsidized agribusiness, cost an estimated 830,000 rural jobs according to Oxfam, while exacerbating malnutrition. This and the decimation of the invaluable Creole pig because of fears of an outbreak of African swine fever , led to displacement of the peasantry into urban areas, and along with the promise of urban jobs, fueled rural migration into flimsy shantytowns. It’s hard not to conclude that these development schemes played a major role in the horrific death toll in Port-au-Prince.

The latest scheme, on hold for now, is a $50 million “industrial park that would house roughly 40 manufacturing facilities and warehouses,” bankrolled by the Soros Economic Development Fund yes, that Soros . The planned location is Cité Soleil. James Dobbins, former special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton, outlined other measures in a New York Times op-ed: “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms” including “breaking up or at least reorganizing the government- controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.”

It’s clear that the Shock Doctrine is alive and well in Haiti. But given the strength of the organisations populaires and weakness of the government, it will have to be imposed violently.

.
For those who wonder why the United States is so obsessed with controlling a country so impoverished, devastated, and seemingly inconsequential as Haiti, Noam Chomsky sums it up best: “Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?”

Up and down the narrow streets, across rocky farms and ranches, this little town at the foot of a dead volcano is coming alive - to celebrate a girl from Langley Park, Md.

Jennifer Sagastume, a high school sophomore from the Maryland suburbs of Washington, stands radiant on the villa’s porch to receive her serenade. The villa is under construction, like so much in this community stretched taut between poverty and progress.

Her mother was born in a shack and left here 18 years ago. Now Jennifer, 15, has returned as an American citizen. She came to be crowned Queen of the Absent Ipalans, the symbolic figurehead of expatriate Ipalans....

Such great expectations have been invested in her, such dreams. She is proof of the future available to the children of those who strike out for a better life in the north. But her presence also speaks of a companion dream: the possibility of return, the possibility of never leaving at all.

Jennifer is origin and destination. The whole aching drama of immigration might be distilled in the story of one transnational teenager on her special day in the pueblo of her mother’s birth.

This day, which unfolded late last month, is called the Day of the Absent Ipalans. It is the fourth day of the annual five-day festival in honor of Ipala’s patron saint, Ildefonso. The day was added three years ago to the decades-old fiesta to acknowledge a bittersweet fact of Ipalan life. It is the day when those who stayed salute those who left, and the day when many of those who left return to donate money, do good works, and reconnect with their roots.

Queen of the Absent Ipalans is the winsome monarch of a faraway kingdom. She will lead the parade of fancifully decorated “carrozas,’’ or carriages, and be crowned in the town square.

Tourist guidebooks tend to overlook Ipala, in the southeastern part of the country near El Salvador and Honduras.

The defining feature is the volcano that blew its top eons ago. Rainwater filled the crater to form a cold, clear lake. Most people live in rural foothill settlements. The compact town center lies on the plain below.

A new style of grander house has appeared among the one-story dwellings. The owners live around Langley Park, sending money to complete construction little by little. Rebar spikes stretch skyward from first-story concrete blocks, like beseeching fingers, like promises and prayers: A second story is coming.

No one can say exactly when the first Ipalan chose Langley Park to launch his American dream.

While yours is in shreds, American.

It was probably the 1970s and he was probably a struggling bean farmer. He found work in landscaping or construction and told his friends about the amazing crossroads of opportunity in the suburbs just north of Washington.

In the last two decades, about 7,000 Ipalans have departed, according to town leaders, equivalent to more than a quarter of the current population of about 20,000. An estimated 5,000 went to the Langley Park area.

You sure it is not Langley, Virginia, WaPo?

This migration was the best and worst thing that ever happened to Ipala.

All depends on who you are, right?

About a third of the economy depends on the $2 million that expatriate Ipalans send back annually.

That is money permanently removed from your economy, America.

Where there once were few paved streets and no telephones or banks, now there is pavement, Internet service, and seven banks and two credit unions to handle the money.

Oh, bully for the suckers.

The further I read into the article, the more convinced I am that these guys are CIA agents. It's a recruitment outpost, readers.

Now you know who is raising hell in Central and South America.

A new dynamic is revealing itself. Fewer Ipalans are choosing to leave. And the American dream has come true for many in the first generation of expatriate Ipalans, who have bought homes and now own the kinds of roofing, landscaping, construction, tree-cutting, and house-cleaning businesses that gave them their first low-paying American jobs.

So they COME HERE, UNDERCUT YOUR WAGES and TAKE the JOBS, send the MONEY BACK HOME, and then BECOME RICH -- while you Americans face foreclosure and job losses?

SOMETHING went WRONG with that GLOBALISM you were promised, America.

And readers, I do not wish to deny anyone their natural right to a good life; however, that is NOT what THIS ARTICLE is about!

This about a GROUP of FAVORED ELITES that are CONNECTED to the AmeriKan power structure somehow -- otherwise, it would not appear in my newspaper.

If the paper were truly interested in justice for Guatemalans they would not cover up the history I mentioned at the top of this post, nor would they ignore the massive poverty must Guatemalans labor under.

Instead we have this agenda-pushing crap by the WaPo picked up by the Glob.

They can now think strategically about supporting Ipala. If more opportunity can be created in Ipala, they say, then the next generation of Ipalans will not have to follow their desperate footsteps to the United States.

How come EVERY ECONOMY in the world is EXPANDING except YOURS, America!?

--more--"

Also see: Guatemalan Can't Escape the Long Arm of AmeriKan Law

By Gabriel Schivone

Published: Thursday, February 4, 2010

After an intensive anti-sweatshop campaign last spring led by students in the Sweatshop-Free Coalition and University Community for Human Rights, President Robert Shelton had the UA divest our financial holdings in the Russell Corporation due to the company’s singularly cruel labor abuses in its factories in Honduras. Now, while all eyes are on Shelton as he continues to sit on the UA’s illegal business contracts with Caterpillar and Motorola, it’s worth noting that divestment activism on campus stretches back far beyond Shelton’s tenure and probably beyond everything else on campus except for the oldest of UA’s buildings.

Reeling through the Daily Wildcat archives from the fall semester of 1985 yields front page after front page of news stories reporting on the state violence committed by the white, minority-led, racist apartheid South African regime over its black majority. The South African blacks were brutally repressed to savage levels that echoed, and in some ways greatly surpassed, America’s own cruel apartheid system dismantled by the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Following waves of anti-apartheid activism led by students and community around the UA and ASU pressuring the Arizona Board of Regents to divest, on Monday Sept. 9, 1985, the Daily Wildcat reported that, at its meeting on Sept. 6, ABOR ordered both universities “to divest their holdings in companies doing business in South Africa,” some $3.4 million.

A collective address was given at the beginning of the meeting by representatives from ASU Black Student Union, Students Against Apartheid at ASU, Arizona Coalition Against Apartheid, Tucsonans Against Apartheid, African Students’ Union and an in absentia representation from a leading union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Regent Edith Auslander introduced the measure at the meeting that led to ABOR’s divestment. Today, after retiring in 2008 from her role as a senior associate in the UA president’s office, Auslander is a development consultant for the UA Foundation. In a phone interview Tuesday morning, Auslander explained, “It’s important to understand that the money was such a drop in the bucket in the total picture of investments in South Africa, and ABOR’s divestment would be a symbolic gesture that could demonstrate anti-apartheid sentiment.”

Seeming to explain such sentiment was Regent Esther N. Capin, who voted for the divestment measure, remarking that “investment has become a symbol for support of policies that I find obscene and abhorrent.”

In addition to divestment from companies involved with South Africa, the Wildcat reported, ABOR made a broader move “aimed at establishing a policy for actions of a similar nature,” modifying the universities’ investment policy “to include non-traditional goals that would preclude investment in corporations with policies or practices that cause substantial social injury.”

But 2010 presents perhaps the most serious challenge yet to the UA’s ability to act honorably in the important social struggles of our time.

Motorola and Caterpillar, two companies perpetuating grisly crimes upon mostly Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, are so unspeakable as to have prompted Jewish South African politician Ronnie Kasrils, who was quoted in the United Kingdom’s Guardian in a 2006 article, to denounce the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation as “much worse than apartheid” of the sort under which Kasrils and others survived for so many long, bloody years.

A rich history has proven that UA students have risen to the occasion of doing everything they can to disassociate themselves and their universities from such atrocities. One doesn’t have to look far to see that such a time has come again.

— Gabriel Matthew Schivone is an art, literature and media studies junior. He can be reached at letters[at]wildcat.arizona.edu.

A United Nations “Peacekeeping” Force is only the latest of US-conceived occupations of Haiti

Benighted Journalists Assail Haiti

By Joe Emersbergerhttp://canuckmediamonitor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=350&st=0#entry499
Friday, February 12, 2010The Economics of Mass Murder German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote that “In democratic countries the violent character inherent in the economy doesn’t show itself; in authoritarian countries the same holds for the economic character of the violence”[1] Burying the Past and the Present It is impossible to rationally assess foreign intervention in Haiti – present or future – without discussing to the two coups against Aristide’s governments in 1991 and 2004. With numerous ideas being floated in the press about how to “fix”, “rebuild” and even “re-imagine” Haiti, it’s instructive to look at how often the coups were mentioned in articles written after the earthquake. the garments industry used to be much larger than it is currently [my emphasis], there is a substantial pool of experienced labor.”[5] if he relied on the corporate media.

There are a few corporate journalists who have broken with the pack in their reporting on Haiti. Two examples, which I pointed out to York, are Andrew Buncombe and Andy Kershaw of the UK Independent. Their work stands apart because they’ve looked beyond establishment friendly sources for information, but their work is so rare that anyone would almost have to know about it in advance in order to find it. Even the liberal newspaper Buncombe and Kershaw work for has taken editorial positions as blinkered and reactionary as one can find in the right wing press – virtually applauding the coup in Haiti in 2004 and openly cheering the one in Honduras in 2009. [8] Securing Disaster and Reviving Colonialism Yves Engler, a Canadian writer and activist, recently pointed out that Haiti now has more foreign troops on its soil per square mile than Afghanistan or Iraq. [12] There is no war going on, but if these troops were providing effective assistance to the victims of the earthquake, then their presence could be justified. The reality is that the militarized relief effort has been a disgrace. SUGGESTED ACTION S 1 If you haven’t already, make a donation to one the relief organizations recommended by the Canada Haiti Action Network CHAN
http://canadahaitiaction.ca/ NOTES
[1] cited by Eduardo Galeano; “Open Veins of Latin America” pg 274

Decent people in North America have tried to help Haitians after the devastating earthquake that struck on January 12, but the corporate media has left them unequipped to do one of the most helpful things they can do – oppose their governments’ efforts to inflict more harm on the victims under the cover of disaster relief. If it seems paranoid to claim that Canada and the US will use the earthquake to further set back development and democracy, it is only because the criminal role they have played in Haiti has been very effectively hidden.

With Brecht’s words in mind, consider that under the dictatorship of Jean Claude Duvalier “Baby Doc” , Haiti became the ninth largest assembler of manufactured goods for the US market. His regime kept wages attractively low to foreign investors through mass murder. By the mid 1980s wages were also kept low through the destruction of Haiti’s agricultural economy. US imports began to flood the Haitian market, ruining its farmers and driving them into urban areas, especially Port-au-Prince, in search of any work they could find. The mass exodus from the countryside also led people to live in shantytowns where they are vulnerable to the impact of hurricanes and earthquakes. [2]

The Duvalier regimes were responsible for the murder of about 50,000 people. That does not include those who died preventable deaths from malnutrition and disease as a direct result of polices designed to enrich a small Haitian elite and foreign multinationals like Disney.[3]

The Duvalierist model of “development” eventually generated so much opposition within Haiti that it became unsustainable with Duvaliers in charge. In 1986, Baby Doc fled Haiti. In 1990 Jean Bertrand Aristide won Haiti’s first free elections. Though the Duvaliers were gone, “Duvalierism without Duvalier” has been the objective of Haitian elite and their foreign allies since 1990. Lavalas, Aristide’s movement of the poor, despite its modest objectives, posed a serious threat to Duvalierism.

Twice, in 1991 and 2004, democratically elected governments in Haiti led by Aristide have been overthrown in US backed coups that led to the murder of thousands of his supporters. US governments and their allies in Canada and France who helped out with the 2004 coup are much like the Mafia. The Godfather has long decided that Haiti will offer some of the world’s lowest wages to multinational corporations like Disney, Levi Strauss and Gilden Activeware. Haiti may be the smallest shopkeeper in the US neighborhood, but no competent Mafia Don lets the smallest shopkeeper defy him. [4]

Between January 12 and February 6, according to Lexis Nexis, the words “Aristide” and “coup” appear in only 6.4% of the articles about Haiti in the major English newspapers 8% in the case of Canada’s five largest newspapers . None of the articles that mention “Aristide” and “coup” in Canada’s major newspapers were editorials. In contrast, two editorials in the Globe & Mail, January 14 and Montreal Gazette, January 16 approvingly mentioned Paul Collier, a World Bank economist and leading proponent of the Duvalierist economic polices described above. Collier has written

“Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China, which is the global benchmark. Haitian labor is not only cheap, it is of good quality. Indeed, because

Just don’t ask how wages will be kept appalling low or how they got that way. Collier’s cheerleaders in the press ignore the violence that has always been required in Haiti for Collier’s, hardly novel and untested, “suggestions” to be implemented.

Even those rare articles that mentioned the coups against Aristide usually regurgitated the version of events offered by the US and Canadian governments. A good example of the standard whitewash appeared in an article written by Geoffrey York for the Toronto Globe and Mail “Exiled Aristide bidding to come home”, January 16, 2010 . [6]

I wrote to Geoffrey York about his article and pointed out facts that, judging by his article, he was completely unaware of. York replied, and a lengthier exchange ensued than I have ever had with a corporate journalist.

The full exchange can be read here

http://canuckmediamonitor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=325

One of the things York said in defense of his work was that “brevity” forced him to leave things out. This is how York summarized recent Haitian history in his article:

“He was elected president in a landslide victory in 1990, but was overthrown in a military coup in 1991.After years of exile in Venezuela and the United States, he was reinstated to power in 1994 with the help of heavy pressure from the U.S. government, including the deployment of 20,000 troops.

In 2000, he won election again, but human-rights groups criticized his campaign for using violence and intimidation. Opposition parties boycotted the election and refused to recognize his victory.

Over the next four years his government was plagued by protests against human-rights abuses, corruption, economic woes and high unemployment. His armed supporters were accused of attacking journalists and political opponents.

The anti-government protests intensified in 2004 and turned violent, and Mr. Aristide was forced to flee the country. He later complained that he was ‘kidnapped’ and bundled onto a U.S. airplane by U.S. security agents. He was flown to the Central African Republic and later to South Africa, where the government gave him a villa in Pretoria.”

Using an equal number of words just as much “brevity” Geoffrey York could have written the following:

“In 1990, after decades of dictatorship bankrolled by Washington, Haitians voted in their first free presidential election. The winner, Jean Bertrand Aristide, was quickly deposed in a US backed coup. Bill Clinton ordered the regime to resign in 1994 but insisted that Aristide’s years in exile count as years served in office and that Aristide implement policies favored by the Haitian elite. Clinton ensured that perpetrators of the coup escaped justice or remained employed in Haiti’s security forces.

From 1995-2002, the US spent 70 million dollars on strengthening Aristide’s opponents. Aristide was elected again in 2000. His opponents used the international media to spread baseless allegations of electoral fraud, human rights abuses and corruption. The US and Canada imposed a crippling aid embargo. Aristide says he was kidnapped by US troops in 2004. The US blocked efforts by the Caribbean Community and the African Union to bring about an investigation. During 2004-2006, under a US and Canadian backed dictatorship, thousands of Aristide’s supporters were murdered.”

No doubt, the need for brevity forces a reporter to over simply things, to leave out supporting facts and arguments that, ideally, would be included. For example, among other things, the two preceding paragraphs do not say enough about Canada’s complicity with the 2004 coup. Canadian troops secured the airport as US troops took Aristide out of Haiti. Canada oversaw the Haitian judiciary as it filled Haitian jails with political prisoners. A Canadian government funded “human rights group” RNDDH spearheaded the campaign to criminalize any association with Aristide’s government. [7]

However, the need for brevity in and of itself does not force anyone to regurgitate government spin. This is trivially obvious, but anyone who has corresponded with journalists knows that “brevity”, “concision”, or “lack of space” is constantly invoked by journalists as an excuse for parroting establishment views.

Geoffrey York also pointed out to me that he is based in Johannesburg and covers sub-Saharan Africa after spending years in China and Russia. This is very important because it means his research about Haiti consisted of reviewing of corporate press reports. It would have been miraculous if York had written differently than he did – putting aside other constraints –

Another one of the few articles to mention coups against Aristide was one written by Peggy Curran for the Montréal Gazette “How Haiti Lost its Way”, January 30 . Curran’s article was over three thousand words long, so brevity would be an especially feeble excuse for her distortions of history.

She wrote about the brutality of the Duvaliers but not about the crucial support they received from the US. She even cast the Reaganites as heroes who pressured Jean Claude Duvalier to flee Haiti in 1986. The US did finally cut Duvalier loose – and immediately transferred support to his military henchmen. In the first year after Duvalier fled, the Haitian military government, generously funded by the US, openly killed more protestors than Jean Claude Duvalier did in fifteen years.[9]

Of the 1991 coup, Curran merely wrote that Aristide was “returned to power with the help of U.S. troops in 1994 after his first term was interrupted for three years,”

The three year “interruption” was a bloodbath sponsored by the US that left 4000 people murdered, thousands tortured, and hundreds of thousands driven into hiding. Emmanuel Constant, one of the key ringleaders, was on the CIA payroll and was protected from deportation to Haiti for years by the Clinton Administration. [10]

Curran wrote of the 2004 coup that deposed Aristide’s second government:

“…he, too, would be forced to flee, scuttled onto a plane to nowhere, one more in a dismal succession of failed leaders and abusive, discredited régimes in a land seemingly forever doomed by its past.”

If her characterization of Aristide were accurate then Rene Preval’s electoral victory in 2006 is impossible to explain. Preval was not part of the US and Canadian funded opposition to Aristide. Preval’s candidacy was violently opposed by supporters of the coup, and, in contrast, endorsed by prominent Aristide allies such as the late Father Gerard Jean-Juste, and applauded by Aristide himself.[11]

I made many of these points in an email I sent to Peggy Curran. She did not reply.

First hand accounts by independent journalists Kevin Pina, Amy Goodman, Ansel Herz , other independent observers Bill Quigley, Timothy Schwatrz and even some corporate journalists Mark Doyle of the BBC have exposed the relief efforts as “pathetic” Doyle’s evaluation . Peter Hallward, in his essay entitled “Securing Disaster”, thoroughly reviewed the evidence that justifies this assessment. [13]

As Hallward and others have argued, while the militarized relief effort has done little for the victims, it could help deal with “the ever-nagging threat of popular political participation and empowerment”.

Corporate pundits have not been shy about calling for direct foreign control over Haiti. The Economist stated uninhibitedly that “Some will object that this would undermine a democratically elected government. But there is not much left to undermine.”[14]

The US occupied Haiti from 1915-1934. Future trampling of Haitian sovereignty will require historical editing of that occupation. Right on cue, Peter Shawn Taylor, an editor-at-large of the Canadian magazine, Macleans, stepped forward with an article entitled “What we can learn form the US Occupation of Haiti.” Globe and Mail, February 1

Taylor wrote that the US occupation was a “golden era” in Haitian history which “provides a convenient frame of reference for what the rest of the world can expect as it tries to rebuild the benighted country.” For readers who will have to look up the word “benighted” as I did , it means “to be in a state of intellectual, moral, or social darkness”. Like all apologists for the US occupation, Taylor raved about the building of roads and other infrastructure.

I wrote to Taylor and pointed out facts his article ignored completely.

My full correspondence with Taylor can bee seen here

http://canuckmediamonitor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=341

The infrastructure Taylor wrote about was built by reinstituting the “corvee” slave labour which had not been used since 1863. US troops and their Haitian collaborators killed 3,000 to 15,000 Caco rebels in order to pacify the country while sustaining only about 98 killed and wounded themselves . Some historians say the death toll for Haitians was higher. North American firms grabbed 266,000 acres of Haitian land by robbing 50,000 peasants of their land in the north of Haiti alone. The US occupation also left behind the modernized Haitian army which would effectively continue the US occupation after it officially ended. [15]

Taylor replied to me by saying that

“…the ‘Golden Era’ for Haiti to which I was referring was in regard to the amount of infrastructure built during the US occupation”.

He made no attempt to explain his silence about slave labor or about the killing and dispossession of tens of thousands of Haitians. He wrote that he had been “thinking of mentioning your point about the gendarmerie [the Haitian army], but ran out of space.”

He ended his reply by asking

“Can you suggest any time period in which more rapid development and modernization occurred in Haitian history?”

I answered his question as follows:

“Yes, under democratic rule between 1994-2000 more schools were built in Haiti than between 1804–1994. By 2003, literacy campaigns reduced the illiteracy rate from 85% to 55%., infant mortality declined from 125 deaths per 1000 to 110. The Haitian army was abolished. All of that just scratches the surface of what was achieved despite the efforts of the US over this period with Canada’s enthusiastic help over the past several years to crush democracy in Haiti.” [16]

I asked Taylor why he didn’t look at what Haitians achieved when they had a limited opportunity to govern themselves – and suggest that era, rather then the US occupation, as the template for moving forward.

He wrote back

“With respect to which period of time has seen more development in Haiti, I think we are at a stalemate. You cite some impressive evidence on building schools from a pro-Aristide group document, however even this paper shows that the American-era saw the construction of more hospitals and clinics..”.
.
Taylor closed by saying

“You may disagree with by perspective, but again, that is a matter of opinion.”

I replied again:

“I don’t see a ’stalemate’ when you consider that between 1994-2003 the Haitian governments under both Aristide and Preval were freely elected and did not resort to the murder and dispossession of tens of thousands of people or to the use of slave labour – all of which the US did during the occupation.

It is shocking to have to make this point – again – to a writer in the 21rst century with access to a large audience.

It comes down to values. A writer who glorifies a brutal occupation through lies of omission does not appear to value basic human rights or democracy.”

Actually, it’s possible that Peter Shawn Taylor does values human rights and democracy – just not for Haitians. That’s an attitude that has proven to be quite prevalent in the corporate media.

2 Send polite, non-abusive emails to the following
copy all letters and replies to Joe@canuckmedeiamonitor.org

Peggy Curran
pcurran@thegazette.canwest.com

Montreal Gazette:
letters@thegazette.canwest.com

Toronto Star
lettertoed@thestar.ca

Toronto Globe & Mail
letters@GlobeAndMail.ca

3 Forward this alert far and wide

[2] see Paul Farmer’s “Uses of Haiti” page 99, 291; also Peter Hallward’s “Damming the flood” pages 5,6

[3] See Hallward’s “Option Zero” essay
http://www.zcommunications.org/option-zero…-peter-hallward

[4] The Haiti as small shopkeeper analogy was used by Noam Chomsky in this 2007 interview
http://www.haitianalysis.com/2007/1/15/god…homsky-on-haiti

[5] Haiti: From Natural Catastrophe to Economic Security: A Report for the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Paul Collier, Department of Economics, Oxford University, January 2009
In Haiti, the menu of policies Collier advocates have, for decades, been derided as the “death plan”.

[6] Rick Salutin and Gerald Caplan wrote articles mentioning US wrong doing in Haiti. Caplan’s was quite hard hitting “Some facts Stephen Harper should have on Haiti, Globe & Mail”, February 5, 2010 but both Caplan and Salutin said nothing about Canada’s deep complicity with US.

Janet Bagnall of the Montreal Gazette took the same approach. My brief exchange with Bagnall is below
http://canuckmediamonitor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=339

Other correspondence with Canadian journalists about Haiti and other topics can be read here
http://canuckmediamonitor.org/forums/index.php?showforum=6

[7] See “Canada in Haiti: Waging war on the poor majority” by Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton

[8] Andrew Buncombe, “Discovered by Columbus, built by France – and wrecked by dictators”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/am…rs-1869513.html

Andy Kershaw; “Stop treating these people like savages.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme…es-1874218.html

Independent Editorial; “At Last, The US joins France to send Forces to Haiti”, March 1, 2004

Independent Editorial; “Guns and Deomcracy” June 30, 2009

[9] See pg 109,110 of Paul Farmer’s “Uses of Haiti”

[10] See my exchange my with Geoffrey York for sources and discussion of HRW’s reporting on Haiti
http://canuckmediamonitor.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=325

[11] On Father Gerard Jean-Juste’s endorsement of Preval see
AP: February 6, 2006 Monday “Haitian priest urges vote for Preval in Haiti election”

See also Hallward’s interview with Aristide in “Damming the Flood”

[12] Yves Engler made the point at the following talk http://www.cctv.org/watch-tv/programs/cata…atural-disaster

[13] Kevin Pina’s reports from Haiti can be accessed here
http://www.flashpoints.net/

Blog reports from Haiti by Ansel Haerz can be accessed here
http://www.mediahacker.org/

For Amy Goodman’s reports see
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/19/hait…ken_to_the_core

See Hallward; “Securing Disaster” for other sources http://www.zcommunications.org/securing-di…-peter-hallward

[14] Economist, January 23, A plan for Haiti; After the earthquake

[15] See “Uses of Haiti” pg 82-85; “Damming the Flood” pg 14

[16] The source I cited about the 1994-2003 era in my exchange with Taylor was the following
http://www.teledyol.net/WWNF/wwnf.pdf

=

More Pain for Devastated Haiti: Under the Pretense of Disaster Relief, U.S. Running a Military Occupation

By Arun Gupta, AlterNet
Posted on February 12, 2010, Printed on February 12, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/145647/

Official denials aside, the United States has embarked on a new military occupation of Haiti thinly cloaked as disaster relief. While both the Pentagon and the United Nations claimed more troops were needed to provide “security and stability” to bring in aid, according to nearly all independent observers in the field, violence was never an issue. in

Instead, there appears to be cruder motives for the military response. With Haiti’s government “all but invisible” and its repressive security forces collapsed, popular organizations were starting to fill the void. But the Western powers rushing in envision sweatshops and tourism as the foundation of a rebuilt Haiti. This is opposed by the popular organizations, which draw their strength from Haiti’s overwhelmingly poor majority. Thus, if a neoliberal plan is going to be imposed on a devastated Haiti it will be done at gunpoint.

The rapid mobilization of thousands of U.S troops was not for humanitarian reasons; in fact it crowded out much of the arriving aid into the Port-au-Prince airport, forcing lengthy delays. Doctors Without Borders said five of its cargo flights carrying 85 tons of medical and relief supplies were turned away during the first week while flights from the World Food Program were delayed up to two days. One WFP official said of the 200 flights going in and out of Haiti daily “most … are for the U.S. military.” Nineteen days into the crisis, only 32 percent of Haitians in need had received any food even if just a single meal , three-quarters were without clean water, the government had received only two percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running “dangerously low” on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. On Feb. 9, the Washington Post reported that food aid was little more than rice, and “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.”

At the same time, the United States had assumed control of Haiti’s airspace, landed 6,500 soldiers on the ground, with another 15,000 troops offshore at one point, dispatched an armada of naval vessels and nine coast guard cutters to patrol the waters, and the U.S. embassy was issuing orders on behalf of the Haitian government. In a telling account, the New York Times described a press conference in Haiti at which “the American ambassador and the American general in charge of the United States troops deployed here” were “seated at center stage,” while Haitian President René Préval stood in the back “half-listening” and eventually “wandered away without a word.”

In the first week, the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Keen, said the presence of the Haitian police was “limited” because they had been “devastated” by the earthquake. The real powers in Haiti right now are Keen, U.S. ambassador Louis Lucke, Bill Clinton who has been tapped by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to lead recovery efforts and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. When asked at the press conference how long U.S. forces were planning to stay, Keen said, “I’m not going to put a time frame on it” while Lucke added, “We’re not really planning in terms of weeks or months or years. We’re planning basically to see this job through to the end.”

While much of the corporate media fixated on “looters,” virtually every independent observer in Haiti after the earthquake noted the lack of violence. Even Lt. Gen. Keen described the security situation as “relatively calm.” One aid worker in Haiti, Leisa Faulkner, said, “There is no security threat from the Haitian people. Aid workers do not need to fear them. I would really like for the guys with the rifles to put them down and pick up shovels to help find people still buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings and homes. It just makes me furious to see multiple truckloads of fellows with automatic rifles.”

Veteran Haiti reporter Kim Ives concurred, explaining to “Democracy Now!”: “Security is not the issue. We see throughout Haiti the population themselves organizing themselves into popular committees to clean up, to pull out the bodies from the rubble, to build refugee camps, to set up their security for the refugee camps. This is a population which is self-sufficient, and it has been self-sufficient for all these years.”

In one instance, Ives continued, a truckload of food showed up in a neighborhood in the middle of the night unannounced. “It could have been a melee. The local popular organization…was contacted. They immediately mobilized their members. They came out. They set up a perimeter. They set up a cordon. They lined up about 600 people who were staying on the soccer field behind the house, which is also a hospital, and they distributed the food in an orderly, equitable fashion.… They didn’t need Marines. They didn’t need the UN.”

Traveling with an armored UN convoy on the streets of the capital, Al Jazeera reported that the soldiers “aren’t here to help pull people out of the rubble. They’re here, they say, to enforce the law.” One Haitian told the news outlet, “These weapons they bring, they are instruments of death. We don’t want them. We don’t need them. We are a traumatized people. What we want from the international community is technical help. Action, not words.”

A New Invasion

That help, however, is coming in the form of neoliberal shock. With the collapse of the Haitian government, popular organizations of the poor, precisely the ones that propelled Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the presidency twice on a platform of social and economic justice, know that the detailed U.S. and UN plans in the works for “recovery” – sweatshops, land grabs and privatization – are part of the same system of economic slavery they’ve been fighting against for more than 200 years.

A new occupation of Haiti — the third in the last 16 years — fits within the U.S. doctrine of rollback in Latin America: support for the coup in Honduras, seven new military bases in Colombia, hostility toward Bolivia and Venezuela. Related to that, the United States wants to ensure that Haiti not pose the “threat of a good example” by pursuing an independent path, as it tried to under President Aristide — which is why he was toppled twice, in 1991 and 2004, in U.S.-backed coups.

With the government and its repressive security forces now in shambles, neoliberal reconstruction will happen at the barrel of the gun. In this light, the impetus of a new occupation may be to reconstitute the Haitian Army or similar entity as a force “to fight the people.”

This is the crux of the situation. Despite all the terror inflicted on Haiti by the United States, particularly in the last 20 years — two coups followed each time by the slaughter of thousands of activists and innocents by U.S.-armed death squads — the strongest social and political force in Haiti today is probably the organisations populaires OPs that are the backbone of the Fanmi Lavalas party of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Twice last year, after legislative elections were scheduled that banned Fanmi Lavalas, boycotts were organized by the party. In the April and June polls the abstention rate each time was reported to be at least 89 percent.

It is the OPs, while devastated and destitute, that are filling the void and remain the strongest voice against economic colonization. Thus, all the concern about “security and stability.” With no functioning government, calm prevailing, and people self-organizing, “security” does not mean safeguarding the population; it means securing the country against the population. “Stability” does not mean social harmony; it means stability for capital: low wages, no unions, no environmental laws, and the ability to repatriate profits easily.

Sweatshop Solution

In a March 2009 New York Times op-ed, Ban Ki-moon outlined his development plan for Haiti, involving lower port fees, “dramatically expanding the country’s export zones,” and emphasizing “the garment industry and agriculture.” Ban’s neoliberal plan was drawn up Oxford University economist Paul Collier. Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff admitted, in promoting Collier’s plan, that those garment factories are “sweatshops.”

Collier is blunt, writing PDF , “Due to its poverty and relatively unregulated labor market, Haiti has labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” His scheme calls for agricultural exports, such as mangoes, that involve pushing farmers off the land so they can be employed in garment manufacturing in export processing zones. To facilitate these zones Collier calls on Haiti and donors to provide them with private ports and electricity, “clear and rapid rights to land,” outsourced customs, “roads, water and sewage,” and the involvement of the Clinton Global Initiative to bring in garment manufacturers.

Revealing the connection between neoliberalism and military occupation in Haiti, Collier credits the Brazilian-led United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti MINUSTAH with establishing “credible security,” but laments that its remaining mandate is “too short for investor confidence.”

In fact, MINUSTAH has been involved in numerous massacres in Port-au-Prince slums that are strongholds for Lavalas and Aristide. But that is probably what Collier means by “credible security.” He also notes MINUSTAH will cost some $5 billion overall; compare that to the $379 million the U.S. government has designated for spending on Haiti in response to the earthquake. It’s worth noting that one-third of the U.S. funding is for “military aid” and another 42 percent is for disaster assistance, such as $23.5 million for “search and rescue” operations that prioritized combing through luxury hotels for survivors.

As for the “U.N. Special Envoy to Haiti,” speaking at an October 2009 investors’ conference in Port-au-Prince that attracted do-gooders like Gap, Levi Strauss and Citibank, Bill Clinton claimed a revitalized garment industry could create 100,000 jobs. The reason some 200 companies, half of them garment manufacturers, attended the conference was because “Haiti’s extremely low labor costs, comparable to those in Bangladesh, make it so appealing,” the New York Times reported. Those costs are often less than the official daily minimum wage of $1.75. The Haitian Parliament approved an increase last May 4 to about $5 an hour, but it was opposed by the business elite and President René Préval refused to sign the bill, effectively killing it. The refusal to increase the minimum wage sparked numerous student protests starting last June, which were repressed by Haitian police and MINUSTAH.

Roots of Repression

Some historical perspective is in order. In his work Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins & Legacy of Duvalierism, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “Haiti’s first army saw itself as the offspring of the struggle against slavery and colonialism.” That changed during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Under the tutelage of the U.S. Marines, “the Haitian Garde was specifically created to fight against other Haitians. It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen.” Its brutal legacy led Aristide to disband the army in 1995.

Yet prior to the army’s disbandment, in the wake of the U.S. invasion that returned a politically handcuffed Aristide to the presidency in 1994, “CIA agents accompanying U.S. troops began a new recruitment drive for the agency” that included leaders of the death squad known as FRAPH, according to Peter Hallward, author of Damning the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment.

It’s worth recalling how the Clinton administration played a double game under the cover of humanitarian intervention. Investigative reporter Allan Nairn revealed that in 1993 “five to ten thousand” small arms were shipped from Florida, past the U.S. naval blockade, to the coup leaders. These weapons enabled FRAPH to multiply and terrorize the popular movements. Then, pointing to intensifying FRAPH violence in 1994, the Clinton administration pressured Aristide into acquiescing to a U.S. invasion because FRAPH was becoming “the only game in town.”

After 20,000 U.S. troops landed in Haiti, they set about protecting FRAPH members, freeing them from jail, and refusing to disarm them or seize their weapons caches. FRAPH leader Emmanual Constant told Nairn that after the invasion the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency DIA was using FRAPH to counter “subversive activities.” Meanwhile, the State Department and CIA went about stacking the Haitian National Police with former army soldiers, many of whom were on the U.S. payroll. By 1996, according to one report, Haitian Army and “FRAPH forces remain armed and present in virtually every community across the country,” and paramilitaries were “inciting street violence in an effort to undermine social order.”

During the early 1990s, a separate group of Haitian soldiers, including Guy Philippe who led the 2004 coup against Aristide, were spirited away to Ecuador where they allegedly trained at a “U.S. military facility.” Hallward describes the second coup as beginning in 2001 as a “Contra war” in the Dominican Republic with Philippe and former FRAPH commander Jodel Chamblain as leaders. A “Democracy Now!” report from April 7, 2004 claimed that the U.S.-government funded International Republican Institute provided arms and technical training to the anti-Aristide force in the Dominican Republic, while “200 members of the special forces of the United States were there in the area training these so-called rebels.”

A key component of the campaign against Aristide after he was inaugurated in 2001 was economic destabilization that cut off much of the funding for “road construction, AIDs programs, water works and health care.” A likely factor in the coup was Aristide’s highly public campaign demanding that France repay the money it extorted from Haiti in 1825 for the former slave colony to buy its freedom, estimated in 2003 at $21 billion, or that Aristide was working with Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba to create alternatives to U.S. economic domination of the region.

When Aristide was finally ousted in February 2004, another round of slaughter ensued, with 800 bodies dumped in just one week in March. A 2006 study by the British medical journal Lancet PDF determined that 8,000 people were murdered in the capital region during the first 22 months of the U.S.-backed coup government and 35,000 women and girls raped or sexually assaulted. The OPs and Lavalas militants were decimated, in part by a UN war against the main Lavalas strongholds in Port-au-Prince’s neighborhoods of Bel Air and Cite Soleil, the latter a densely packed slum of some 300,000. Hallward claims U.S. Marines were involved in a number of massacres in areas such as Bel Air in 2004.

‘More Free Trade’

Less than four months after the 2004 coup, reporter Jane Regan described a draft economic plan, the “Interim Cooperation Framework,” that “calls for more free trade zones FTZs , stresses tourism and export agriculture, and hints at the eventual privatization of the country’s state enterprises.” Regan wrote that the plan was “drawn up by people nobody elected,” mainly “foreign technicians” and “institutions like the U.S. Agency for International Development USAID and the World Bank.”

Much of this plan was implemented under Préval, who announced in 2007 plans to privatize the public telephone company, Téléco, and is being promoted by Bill Clinton and Ban Ki-moon as Haiti’s path out of poverty. The Wall Street Journal touted such achievements as “10,000 new garment industry jobs,” in 2009 a “luxury hotel complex” in the upper-crust neighborhood of Pétionville, and a $55 million investment by Royal Caribbean International at its “private Haitian beach paradise,” surrounded by “a ten-foot-high iron wall, watched by armed guards,” just north of the capital. That “investment,” according to the cruise line operator, included “a new 800-foot pier, a Barefoot Beach Club with private cabanas, an alpine roller coaster with individual controls for each car, new dining facilities and a new, larger Artisan’s Market.”

Haiti, of course, has been here before when the U.S. Agency for International Development spoke of turning it into the “Taiwan of the Caribbean.” In the 1980s, under Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, it shifted one third of cultivated land to export crops while “there were some 240 multinational corporations, employing between 40,000 and 60,000 predominantly female workers,” sewing garments, baseballs for Major League Baseball and Disney merchandise, according to scholar Yasmine Shamsie. Those jobs, paying as little as 11 cents an hour, coincided with a decline in per capita income and living standards. Ban Ki-moon wants Haiti to emulate Bangladesh, where sweatshops pay as little as 6 cents an hour. At such low pay, workers had little left after purchasing food and transportation to and from the factories. These self-contained export-processing zones, often funded by USAID and the World Bank, also add little to the national economy, importing tax free virtually all the materials used. The elite use the tax-free import structure to smuggle in luxury goods. In response, the government taxed consumption-based items more, hitting the poor the hardest.

U.S.-promoted agricultural policies, such as forcing Haitian rice farmers to compete against U.S.-subsidized agribusiness, cost an estimated 830,000 rural jobs according to Oxfam, while exacerbating malnourishment. This and the decimation of the invaluable Creole pig because of fears of an outbreak of African swine fever , led to displacement of the peasantry into urban areas, along with the promise of urban jobs, fueled rural migration into flimsy shantytowns. It’s hard not to conclude that these development schemes played a major role in the horrific death toll in Port-au-Prince.

The latest scheme, on hold for now because of the earthquake, is a $50 million “industrial park that would house roughly 40 manufacturing facilities and warehouses,” bankrolled by the Soros Economic Development Fund yes, that Soros . The planned location is Cite Soleil. James Dobbins, former special envoy to Haiti under President Bill Clinton, outlined other measures in a New York Times op-ed: “This disaster is an opportunity to accelerate oft-delayed reforms” including “breaking up or at least reorganizing the government-controlled telephone monopoly. The same goes with the Education Ministry, the electric company, the Health Ministry and the courts.”

It’s clear that the Shock Doctrine is alive and well in Haiti. But given the strength of the organisations populaires and weakness of the government, it will have to be imposed through force.

For those who wonder why the United States is so obsessed with controlling a country so impoverished, devastated and seemingly inconsequential as Haiti, Noam Chomsky sums it up best. “Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?”

Arun Gupta is a founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper. He is writing a book on the politics of food for Haymarket Books.

Crescono le tensioni militari tra USA e Cina
di Rick Rozoff

Traduzione dall’inglese per www.resistenze.org a cura del Centro di Cultura e Documentazione Popolare

http://www.resistenze.org/sito/os/dg/osdgab08-006308.htm

———-
Anche se il bilancio militare degli USA è quasi dieci volte quello della Cina che ha una popolazione di oltre quattro volte più grande e Washington prevede un bilancio per la difesa di 708 miliardi di dollari per il prossimo anno, rispetto ai 40 miliardi di dollari spesi dalla Russia l’anno passato, la Cina e la Russia sono percepite come minacce per gli Stati Uniti e i suoi alleati. La Cina non ha truppe al di fuori dei suoi confini, la Russia ha qualche squadra nei suoi ex territori in Abkhazia, Armenia, Ossezia del Sud e Transnistria; gli Stati Uniti invece hanno centinaia di migliaia di soldati di stanza in sei continenti. Gates [Segretario alla Difesa nell'amministrazione Bush e in quella Obama, ndt], incaricato delle guerre in Afghanistan e in Iraq e responsabile di quasi metà della spesa militare internazionale si risente che la nazione più popolosa al mondo non voglia “essere minacciata dagli altri paesi”.
———-

Il 23 dicembre dello scorso anno la Raytheon Company [industria di armi e "sistemi integrati per la difesa", ndt] ha annunciato di aver ricevuto da Taiwan un contratto di 1,1 miliardi di dollari per l’acquisto di 200 antimissili balistici Patriot. Ai primi di gennaio il Dipartimento della Difesa degli Stati Uniti ha autorizzato l’operazione, “nonostante l’opposizione della rivale Cina, che ha minacciato sanzioni alle imprese statunitensi che vendono armi all’isola”. [1]
La vendita completa una più ampia fornitura di armi del valore di 6,5 miliardi di dollari approvata dalla precedente amministrazione Bush sul finire del 2008: “Ultima consegna di cui Taiwan era in attesa”, stando alle parole del presidente di Asia Defense News. [2]

L’agenzia Defence News che per prima ha riportato la notizia, ricorda ai suoi lettori che la “Raytheon ha già vinto contratti più piccoli a Taiwan nel 2008 e nel gennaio 2009 per aggiornare i sistemi Patriot che il paese già possiede. I contratti prevedono l’upgrade dei sistemi alla Configurazione 3, la stessa che la società sta completando per l’esercito statunitense.”

La fonte descrive anche in cosa consiste la miglioria apportata ai Patriot: “La Configurazione 3 è il sistema antimissilistico più avanzato della Raytheon e permette l’uso di missili PAC-3 Lockheed Martin’s Patriot Advanced Capability-3 [e] di intercettori Raytheon GEM-T Guidance Enhanced Missile-Tactical [Patriot-2]…” [3].

PAC-3 è l’ultimo e più sofisticato sistema di missili Patriot e il primo in grado di abbattere missili balistici tattici. Rappresenta il livello iniziale di uno scudo missilistico a più livelli, che comprende tutta una serie di apparati: Terminal High Altitude Area Defense THAAD , Ground Based Interceptor GBI , Ground-Based Midcourse Defense GMD , Terminal High Altitude Area Defense THAAD , Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense ABMD navali ed equipaggiati con intercettori Standard Missile-3 SM-3 , Forward Based X-Band Radar FBXB e componenti Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle EKV . Una rete integrata che va dal campo di battaglia sul terreno ai cieli.

Il sistema è modulare e facilmente trasportabile e le sue batterie sono quindi più in grado di eludere i rilevamenti e attaccare. Si amplia di molto anche la portata rispetto alle precedenti versioni di Patriot.

“Gli intercettori PAC-3, attraverso radar avanzati e un centro di comando, sono in grado di proteggere una superficie di circa sette volte maggiore rispetto al sistema Patriot originale”. [4]

Se con l’avvento della nuova amministrazione statunitense di un anno fa, le autorità cinesi, come il resto del mondo, prevedevano una riduzione o l’arresto dei ritmi di espansione militare di Washington a livello mondiale, sono state bruscamente disilluse.

Il vice ministro degli Esteri cinese He Yafei all’inizio dell’anno ha ammonito, per la sesta volta in una settimana, gli Stati Uniti a riconsiderare la fornitura di armi a Taiwan riferendo all’Agenzia di notizie nazionale, Xinhua: “la Cina ha protestato con forza contro la recente decisione del governo degli Stati Uniti di consentire a Raytheon Company e Lockheed Martin Corp. di vendere armi a Taiwan … La vendita di armi Usa a Taiwan mina la sicurezza nazionale della Cina”. [5]

Le ire cinesi si sono accresciute quando al repertorio di informazioni si è aggiunta la notizia che “l’Amministrazione Obama avrebbe presto annunciato la vendita a Taiwan di una fornitura di armi del valore di qualche miliardo di dollari USA che comprenderebbe elicotteri Black Hawk, sistemi anti-missile e progetti per sottomarini a propulsione diesel – in una mossa per irritare la Cina”. [6]

In aggiunta, il China Times ha riferito che Taiwan stava acquisendo otto fregate di seconda mano della classe Oliver Hazard Perry dagli Stati Uniti, oltre ai 200 missili Patriot. Le navi da guerra sono state progettate nel 1970 come alternativa relativamente a basso costo delle cacciatorpediniere della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Il nuovo accordo raddoppierà il numero di fregate a disposizione di Taiwan, portandole a 16. Le fregate rappresentano anche un fattore di accrescimento della difesa missilistica, poiché “L’isola spera di armarle con una versione avanzata del sistema AEGIS, che usa computer e radar per colpire obiettivi multipli, oltre a sofisticate tecnologie missilistiche di lancio ….” [7]

Mentre Washington e Taipei presentano la transazione di armi come di natura strettamente difensiva, è opportuno ricordare che lo scorso autunno Taiwan ha condotto il suo “più grande test missilistico … da una base segreta e ben custodita nel sud di Taiwan”, con missili “in grado di raggiungere le maggiori città cinesi”. [8]

Il Presidente taiwanese Ma Ying-jeou ha assistito al lancio dei missili i quali “includevano il test di fuoco di un missile terra-terra top secret di recente sviluppo, a medio raggio, con una portata di 3.000 Km in grado di colpire le città più importanti della Cina centrale, settentrionale e meridionale”. [9]

I sistemi PAC-3 e SM-3 che gli Stati Uniti stanno fornendo a Taiwan potrebbero essere impiegati per contrastare un contrattacco cinese o per lo meno proteggere i siti di lancio dei missili a medio raggio di Taiwan, che, come osservato in precedenza, sono in grado di colpire la maggior parte delle principale città della Cina.

Pechino ha risposto l’11 gennaio conducendo un test missilistico con un intercettore Ground-based Midcourse [fase centrale del Ballistic Missile Defense, insieme a Boost Defense e Terminal Defense, NdT] sul proprio territorio.

Il professor Tan Kaijia dell’Università della Difesa Nazionale dell’Esercito Popolare di Liberazione ha detto a Xinhua: “Se il missile balistico è considerato come una lancia, ora siamo riusciti a costruire uno scudo per l’autodifesa”. [10]

Time Magazine ha evidenziato il portato del test scrivendo: “Non c’è alcuna possibilità che la mossa della Cina dissuada gli Stati Uniti dal supportare Taiwan …. Ma il test rappresenta il segnale di tensioni stridenti tra Pechino e Washington ….” [11]

Sia la Cina e che gli Stati Uniti, nel 2007 e poi l’anno successivo, con uno Standard Missile-3 lanciato da una fregata classe AEGIS dall’Oceano Pacifico, nel caso statunitense, hanno distrutto satelliti in orbita. L’alba della guerra spaziale era cominciata.

Il 15 gennaio un editoriale su un sito web russo intitolato “Possibili guerre spaziali in un prossimo futuro” fornisce un quadro di riferimento: “È difficile sopravvalutare il ruolo svolto dai sistemi satellitari militari. Sin dal 1970, un numero sempre maggiore di processi, dal controllo truppe alle telecomunicazioni, dall’acquisizione di bersagli alla navigazione dipendono da veicoli spaziali che sono quindi sempre più importanti… Il ruolo dello spazio è direttamente proporzionale al livello di sviluppo di una determinata nazione e dalle sue forze armate” [12].

Cina e Russia da anni chiedono il divieto di utilizzo dello spazio per scopi militari, sollevando annualmente la questione in seno alle Nazioni Unite, a cui però gli Stati Uniti oppongono un fermo diniego.

Per comprendere il contesto in cui i recenti sviluppi hanno avuto luogo, occorre sapere che Washington da tre anni e con sempre maggior determinazione ha incluso Cina e Russia con Iran e Corea del Nord tra i paesi belligeranti in potenziali conflitti futuri.

La campagna è iniziata nel febbraio del 2007 quando l’allora e attuale capo del Pentagono Robert Gates in occasione della definizione del bilancio per la Difesa nell’anno fiscale 2008 ha avanzato una richiesta sostenendo tra l’altro:

“Oltre alla lotta contro la guerra globale al terrore, dobbiamo anche affrontare il pericolo rappresentato dall’Iran e dalle ambizioni nucleari della Corea del Nord e la minaccia che questi due paesi rappresentano non solo per i loro vicini ma a livello mondiale per via del loro record di proliferazione; i percorsi incerti della Cina e della Russia, che perseguono entrambe sofisticati programmi di modernizzazione militare, e una serie di altri focolai di crisi e sfide…. Abbiamo bisogno delle capacità per regolare conflitti tra forze equivalenti perché non sappiamo cosa si sta sviluppando in posti come Russia, Cina, Corea del Nord, Iran e altrove”. [13]

Se può essere obiettato che Gates stava solo alludendo a piani di emergenza generale, che potrebbero applicarsi a qualsiasi tra le principali nazioni, né le sue osservazioni né quelle di altri funzionari della difesa degli Stati Uniti hanno citato, in tono simile, le potenze nucleari amiche – Gran Bretagna, Francia, India e Israele – ma invece hanno ribadito la preoccupazione per la Russia e la Cina con una insistenza allarmante. In realtà la Cina e la Russia hanno sostituito l’Iraq nella categoria “asse del male”.

Sia la Russia che la Cina hanno reagito duramente alle dichiarazioni Gates del febbraio 2007 e solo tre giorni più tardi, alla conferenza annuale sulla sicurezza di Monaco di Baviera con Gates tra il pubblico, il presidente russo Vladimir Putin ha pronunciato un discorso in cui ha avvertito:

“Cos’è un mondo unipolare? Comunque si provi ad addolcire la pillola, ci si riferisce a un situazione specifica in cui esiste una sola autorità, un solo centro di forza, un unico centro decisionale.

“È un mondo in cui c’è un padrone, un sovrano. E alla fine ciò risulta pericoloso, non solo per tutti coloro che sono all’interno del sistema, ma per il sovrano stesso, che si distrugge dall’interno”.

“Azioni unilaterali e spesso illegittime non risolvono i problemi, anzi spesso sono causa di nuove tragedie umane e nuovi focolai di tensione. Giudicate voi stessi: i conflitti locali e regionali non sono diminuiti…. E non sono meno le persone che periscono in questi conflitti, anzi: muoiono sempre più persone. Molte di più, significativamente di più!

“Oggi stiamo assistendo ad un uso quasi incontenibile e ipertrofico della forza – forza militare – nelle relazioni internazionali, forza che sta gettando il mondo in un abisso di conflitti permanenti.

“Uno Stato, gli Stati Uniti, ha oltrepassato i suoi confini nazionali in ogni modo. Questo è visibile in campo economico, politico, culturale ed educativo nelle politiche che esso impone alle altre nazioni….” [14]

L’avvertimento non è stato ascoltato a Washington.

Tre mesi più tardi il capo del Pentagono ha reiterato le accuse. Nel maggio del 2007 il Dipartimento della Difesa ha pubblicato la sua relazione annuale sulla capacità militare della Cina, citando “gli sforzi per proiettare la potenza cinese al di là del suo territorio immediato e per sviluppare sistemi ad alta tecnologia in grado di sfidare i migliori al mondo”.

“Il Segretario alla Difesa Usa Robert Gates ha detto che gli sforzi della Cina lo inducono a preoccuparsi.”

Il rapporto afferma che “la Cina sta portando avanti un progetto a lungo termine di trasformazione completa delle sue forze armate” per “poter proiettare la propria potenza all’esterno e rendere inoffensive le minacce” [15]. Gates, incaricato delle guerre in Afghanistan e in Iraq e responsabile di quasi metà della spesa militare internazionale si risentiva che la nazione più popolosa al mondo non volesse “essere minacciata dagli altri paesi”.

Un anno dopo che Gates associava Cina e Russia con i superstiti dell’asse del male, Iran e Corea del Nord, il Direttore Nazionale dell’intelligence USA Michael McConnell individuava nella Cina, nella Russia e nell’Organizzazione dei Paesi Esportatori di Petrolio OPEC , le principali minacce per gli Stati Uniti, ancor più che al-Qaeda.

Voice of Russia ha risposto a tali accuse, sostenendo tra l’altro:

“La Russia ha chiesto spiegazioni agli USA circa il rapporto del Direttore dell’intelligence nazionale statunitense, in cui Russia, Cina, Iraq, Iran, Corea del Nord e al-Qaida sono descritte come fonti di minaccia strategica per gli Stati Uniti … E’ possibile che la relazione della comunità di intelligence degli Stati Uniti debba giustificare l’impressionante quantità di denaro che viene speso ogni anno per la sua attività. Molto probabilmente Ci devono essere altre ragioni per spiegare perché la Russia è stata inclusa tra gli Stati che costituiscono una minaccia per l’America” [16].

Gates è rimasto nella carica di ministro della Difesa nella nuova amministrazione statunitense e così la retorica anticinese e antirussa.

Il 1° maggio dello scorso anno il Segretario di Stato Hillary Clinton ha detto che “L’amministrazione Obama sta lavorando per migliorare le cattive relazioni degli Stati Uniti con una serie di nazioni latino-americane per contrastare la crescente influenza iraniana, cinese e russa nell’emisfero occidentale….” [17]. Il mese dopo aver pronunciato quelle parole un colpo di Stato militare è stato organizzato in Honduras e due settimane dopo gli Stati Uniti si sono assicurate l’utilizzo di sette basi militari in Colombia.

A settembre il Direttore della National Intelligence Dennis Blair, nella relazione quadriennale sulla strategia nazionale USA ha detto che “la Russia, la Cina, l’Iran e la Corea del Nord rappresentano le maggiori sfide agli interessi nazionali degli Stati Uniti” [18].

Agence France-Presse riprendendo il rapporto ha reso noto che “Gli Stati Uniti mettono l’emergente superpotenza cinese e l’ex nemico russo della guerra fredda a fianco dell’Iran e della Corea del Nord nella lista dei quattro principali paesi in contrasto con gli interessi statunitensi” e, citando la relazione Blair aggiunge: La Cina è stata additata per “la sua diplomazia orientata in modo crescente alle risorse naturali e la modernizzazione militare” e “La Russia che è un partner degli Stati Uniti in iniziative importanti – come la produzione di materiale fissile e la lotta contro il terrorismo nucleare – continua a cercare strade per riaffermare il suo potere e la sua influenza, in un modo che ostacola gli interessi degli Stati Uniti.” [19]

La Cina non è autorizzata a neutralizzare le altre nazioni da eventuali minacce e alla Russia non è consentito di intralciare gli interessi degli Stati Uniti.

La tendenza, inquietante nella sua inesorabilità, prosegue nell’anno in corso.

Il vice presidente di Lockheed Martin, John Holly, ha decantato il ruolo della sua azienda nella produzione del Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System – componenti che vengono consegnati a Taiwan – come “fiore all’occhiello” del catalogo di missili intercettori Lockheed, e secondo un quotidiano della città che ospita l’Agenzia per la difesa missilistica del Pentagono “riferendosi ai programmi missilistici di Corea del Nord, Iran, Russia e Cina”, Holly ha detto che “il mondo non è un posto molto sicuro … spetta a noi del settore fornire [al Pentagono] le migliori funzionalità” [20].

Tre giorni dopo, Wallace Gregson Assistente Segretario alla Difesa del Pentagono per la sicurezza dell’Asia e del Pacifico “ha espresso dubbi circa l’insistenza della Cina rispetto l’uso pacifico dello spazio”, e ha commentato: “I cinesi hanno dichiarato di opporsi alla militarizzazione dello spazio. Le loro azioni sembrano indicare la volontà contraria.” [21]

Il giorno dopo l’ammiraglio Robert Willard, capo del Commando Pacifico USA, ha dichiarato in una testimonianza davanti al Comitato dei Servizi Armati che il “potente motore economico cinese sta finanziando un programma di modernizzazione dell’apparato militare che ha destato apprensione nella regione, una preoccupazione condivisa anche dal US Pacific Command”. [22]

La marina statunitense ha sei flotte e undici portaerei disponibili per essere dispiegate in qualsiasi parte del mondo, ma la Cina con la sola marina di tipo “brown water” navy [flotta di navi militari idonee ad operare in acque fluviali o litoranee da considerarsi potenzialmente subordinata ad una "blu water" navy, che opera in larga autonomia, wikipedia] al largo delle sue coste è motivo di preoccupazione per gli Stati Uniti.

Alan Mackinnon, il presidente della campagna scozzese per il disarmo nucleare, scriveva lo scorso settembre:

“Il panorama bellico mondiale è oggi dominato da un’unica superpotenza. In termini militari gli Stati Uniti siedono a cavalcioni del mondo come un gigante colossale. Un paese che rappresenta solo il cinque per cento della popolazione mondiale vanta il 50 per cento della spesa mondiale di armi.

“Le sue 11 flotte navali pattugliano ciascun oceano e le sue 909 basi militari sono sparse strategicamente in ogni continente. Nessun altro paese ha basi equivalenti sul territorio degli Stati Uniti – sarebbe impensabile e incostituzionale. Sono trascorsi 20 anni dalla fine della guerra fredda e gli Stati Uniti e i suoi alleati non devono fronteggiare alcuna significativa minaccia militare oggi. Perché allora non abbiamo avuto la pace sperata? Perché la nazione più potente del mondo continua ad aumentare il proprio bilancio militare, che oggi supera più di 1.200 miliardi di dollari all’anno in termini reali? Quale minaccia è dovrebbe contrastare?

“La risposta statunitense è stata in gran parte militare e ha concretizzato l’espansione della NATO e l’accerchiamento di Russia e Cina in una morsa di basi e alleanze ostili, mentre continua la pressione per isolare e indebolire l’Iran.” [23]

Osservazioni queste da tenere a mente quando la Cina viene presentata con insistenza come una minaccia strategica alla sicurezza e al controllo esclusivo del mondo da parte di una sola superpotenza militare.

1 Reuters, January 7, 2010
2 Ibid
3 Defense News, December 23, 2009
4 http://www.missilethreat.com/missiledefensesystems/id.41/ system_detail.asp
5 Russian Information Agency Novosti, January 9, 2010
6 Taiwan News, January 4, 2010
7 Agence France-Presse, January 11, 2010
8 Radio Taiwan International, October 14, 2009
9 Deutsche Presse-Agentur, October 14, 2009
10 Asian Times, January 20, 2010
11 Time, January 13, 2010
12 Russian Information Agency Novosti, January 15, 2010
13 http://www.sras.org/news2.phtml?m=908
14 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/12/ AR2007021200555.html
15 Voice of America News, May 26, 2007
16 Voice of Russia, February 8, 2008
17 Associated Press, May 1, 2009
18 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, September 16, 2009
19 Agence France-Presse, September 15, 2009
20 Huntsville Times, January 10, 2010
21 Agence France-Presse, January 13, 2010
22 Washington Post, January 14, 2010
23 Scottish Left Review, November 17, 2009

Monday, February 8, 2010

January 28, 2010 Meeting with Dr. Juan Almendares

Dr. Almendares has been a figure in the Honduran social movements since the 1970’s. He told us that he currently has three projects: One is the resistance; second, the environmental struggle against mining companies and multinationals; and the third is the CPTRT, a center for prevention of torture, and denouncing military and police brutality. He also continues to run a medical clinic for the poor. Below are excerpts from the delegation’s meeting with the Doctor in Tegucigalpa on January 28, 2010.

“I am part of the resistance. I trained as medical doctor in Honduras, then went to California in the 1960’s and was inspired by the political thinking that was growing there, including the movement against the war in Viet Nam, Angela Davis, Mario Savio. I then was at the University of Pennsylvania. I returned to Honduras and eventually became the Dean of the Medical School and then Rector of the National University. In the 1980s, many friends and students were killed in repression. While I was at the University, John Negroponte was the U.S ambassador. He decided that I needed to be discharged from the university and I decided to join popular movement. I was condemned to death by the death squads in the 1980’s and I was captured, interrogated and subjected to psychological torture. For four years, I couldn’t practice medicine because I was prohibited by military. So I began to link with communities.”

Dr. Almendares continued working on health issues, the environment and for social justice in the poor communities of Honduras. He has been very active with communities opposed to the mining concessions near Lake YoYoa. The communities there came to him and wanted him to so a medical brigade visit, “The first thing I saw is at the entrance to the mine was a military battalion, I was not allowed to visit homes of any workers, so I did brigade in the primary school. This kind of mining is most highly contaminating and the main companies are from the U.S. and Canada. We organized a strong movement on the mining issue and it continues”

“I have low profile in resistance, don’t want to have high profile. I have idea that there should be no leaders in resistance, or at least, they should change frequently. Trying to work for unity is challenging, especially for elections. We have seen how our resistance movement surprised everybody here and in the world. Why? —–Because Honduras has been a neglected country in the backyard of the United States.”

“I have never seen the courage of my people like this, and the creativity. Women have become very active. In 1980 we were trying to unite artists and intellectuals, it was impossible. Now we have a different consciousness, now they have to recognize strength of struggle is in poor barrios, and with the campesinos. We have to develop consciousness of people and leadership. Society is macho but now we have a gay, lesbian movement; they are being killed because they are very powerful in the movement .”

“If we analyze the question of why did they have coup in Honduras. Zelaya did not have support of Liberal party, not from Supreme Court or from Congress, or Supreme Tribunal, army, or ruling class. Why did they have to do coup? I believe it is because of the international situation and because of the people. The strategy of right wing is to personify the fourth urn constitutional consultation with Zelaya. That was good strategy because there is not enough political consciousness. But our people are good analysts. Zelaya came from the oligarchy, as did Micheletti. I see a difference between the neoliberal rulers and parasitic bourgeoisie. The parasitic ones have big business with the state and media. The Liberal Party has two currents; Mel Zelaya is from the more nationalistic bourgeois current. But Zelaya became more sensitive to needs of the people and came into contradiction with the oligarchy and bourgeoisie. Zelaya did some very important things like minimum wage. He was also very brave and clear about Chavez and Cuba. Zelaya was consistent, gained credibility with people. I was surprised.”

“What is the future of this country? I believe that the strong force in this country is the resistance.”

February 8
8:31 am
By Kari Lydersen

The body of 29-year-old Vanessa Yamileth Zepeda, still dressed in her nurse’s scrubs and killed by a bullet, turned up in the Loarque neighborhood of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, on February 4. Zepeda had young children and was a leader of the SITRAIHSS labor union Workers Union for the Honduran Social Security Institute . She had been abducted that afternoon while leaving a union meeting.

The administration of the newly inaugurated President Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo has called Zepeda’s murder and other recent attacks common crime. But the Honduran resistance movement – mobilized since the June 2009 coup against then-president Manuel Zelaya – see it as a clear message.

Trade unionists, especially public sector workers like Zepeda, are among the strongest and largest factions making up the resistance coalition. Opposition to powerful unions was apparently among the motivations for the coup in the first place, and all the country’s major union federations are part of the resistance front.
Unions are an impediment to neoliberal pushes to increase privatization, and foreign companies fear clashes with unions or unionizing efforts in Honduras’ maquila factory sector.

Since Lobo’s inauguration on January 27, there have been 10 to 15 assassinations of resistance members and leaders, according to Victoria Cervantes, a Chicago activist who recently returned from meeting with unionists and other groups in Honduras with the group La Voz de los de Abajo.

Since the coup, a number of people have been killed and thousands arrested and detained. Most of the previous deaths involved police and soldiers opening fire on crowds or attacking people in the midst of protests. Such open state violence has ebbed in recent weeks.
But the targeted kidnapping, torture and assassination of a handful of activists like Zepeda is more chilling and evokes hallmarks of the ruthless right-wing death squads of the 1980s in Central America and more recently in Colombia, according to human rights groups.
Jeremy Kryt has been reporting from Honduras on such human rights abuses for In These Times.

“Before you might have had 300 army trucks storming through Tegucigalpa,” said Cervantes. “That could be terrifying, but what’s probably more terrifying is the idea that if you are identified as part of the resistance movement, you or your daughter could be snatched up and tortured. This is more terror at a lower political cost.”

Trade unionists and gay and lesbian groups, who have become increasingly visible and organized as part of the resistance, have been the main focus of recent attacks and intimidation. Campesino communities, especially those involved in contested land takeovers, have also suffered recent increases in violence and repression from police and landowners.
“Campesinos have always suffered some level of violence, but this is different,” said Cervantes.

There have reportedly been beheadings and a man’s tongue was cut out. Cervantes said Honduran officials known for paramilitary activity in the 1980s have also resurfaced as part of the coup and/or in Lobo’s conservative party.

“It’s the same actors as the ‘80s, and they’re desperate to terrify the resistance out of existence,” said Cervantes. “Again, it’s multinational companies tied in with the oligarchy. History keeps repeating itself.”

===================

Vía Campesina

Honduran Resistance against US sponsored Regime Change

Interview with Rafael Alegría by Prof Jeffery R. Webber
Global Research, February 6,

2010 Socialist Project -

2010-02-05 Hundreds of thousands of Hondurans took to
the streets on Wednesday, January 27 to protest the
inauguration of Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Soza. Lobo was the
victor in fraudulent elections held last November and
his new regime is seen by the Honduran resistance as a
continuation and consolidation of the coup regime that
first came to power by overthrowing
democratically-elected President, Manuel Zelaya, on June
28, 2009. During the march I caught up with Rafael
Alegría, a key leader in the National Resistance Front,
and a leading Honduran figure in the international
peasant movement, Vía Campesina.

JRW: What are the principal demands of the resistance in
this march today?

RA: The resistance has two principal pillars -- a social
pillar for the revindication of the people.s rights, in
which the resistance accompanies people in their daily
struggle, for agrarian reform, for just salaries, and
opposition to the privatization of social services. This
is the pillar of social mobilization.The other pillar is
the political arm -- to convert ourselves into a
militant political force which will work toward taking
political power in our country.

JRW: What are the objectives of the Constituent Assembly
that the resistance is demanding?

RA:The power of the people is going to result in massive
transformations in this country. We are demanding a
Constituent Assembly that is going to transform this
country, into a participatory democracy. It will be a
new Honduras -- a country with social justice, with
equality, with a new model of development in which
everyone is included, and, as the Bolivians say, so that
our entire country can live well.It will be very
different than the current situation, in which there is
a privileged oligarchy, which owns and controls
everything, while on the other hand there is an immense
mass of impoverished people. This can.t continue.There
are a huge number of people in this march. And this is
the message we are sending to the entire oligarchic
power groups and to the rest of the people.

JRW: In the next few months, what will the strategy of
the resistance be?

RA: We are in a process of national organization, of
articulation, and establishing schools of political
education. Our mobilizations are also going to continue.
We have a concrete immediate agenda of mobilization.
Beyond that, we.re preparing ourselves to participate in
the elections in three years so that we can take
definitive control.

Jeffery R. Webber teaches political science at the
University of Regina, Canada. He has three forthcoming
books: Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern
Bolivia; The Politics of Evismo: Reform to Rebellion in
Bolivian Politics; and co-edited with Barry Carr  The
Resurgence of Latin American Radicalism: From Cracks in
the Empire to an Izquierda Permitida.

======================

The Corporate Takeover of U.S. Democracy by Prof Noam
Chomsky - February 4, 2010

Jan. 21, 2010, will go down as a dark day in the history
of U.S. democracy, and its decline.On that day the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban
corporations from political spending on elections -- a
decision that profoundly affects government policy, both
domestic and international.The decision heralds even
further corporate takeover of the U.S. political
system.To the editors of The New York Times, the ruling
"strikes at the heart of democracy" by having "paved the
way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to
overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials
into doing their bidding."The court was split, 5-4, with
the four reactionary judges misleadingly called
"conservative" joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. selected a case that
could easily have been settled on narrow grounds and
maneuvered the court into using it to push through a
far-reaching decision that overturns a century of
precedents restricting corporate contributions to
federal campaigns.Now corporate managers can in effect
buy elections directly, bypassing more complex indirect
means. It is well-known that corporate contributions,
sometimes packaged in complex ways, can tip the balance
in elections, hence driving policy. The court has just
handed much more power to the small sector of the
population that dominates the economy.Political
economist Thomas Ferguson.s "investment theory of
politics" is a very successful predictor of government
policy over a long period. The theory interprets
elections as occasions on which segments of private
sector power coalesce to invest to control the state.The
Jan. 21 decision only reinforces the means to undermine
functioning democracy.The background is enlightening. In
his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged that
"we have long since held that corporations are covered
by the First Amendment" -- the constitutional guarantee
of free speech, which would include support for
political candidates.In the early 20th century, legal
theorists and courts implemented the court.s 1886
decision that corporations -- these "collectivist legal
entities" -- have the same rights as persons of flesh
and blood.This attack on classical liberalism was
sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of
conservatives. Christopher G. Tiedeman described the
principle as "a menace to the liberty of the individual,
and to the stability of the American states as popular
governments."Morton Horwitz writes in his standard legal
history that the concept of corporate personhood evolved
alongside the shift of power from shareholders to
managers, and finally to the doctrine that "the powers
of the board of directors "are identical with the powers
of the corporation." In later years, corporate rights
were expanded far beyond those of persons, notably by
the mislabeled "free trade agreements." Under these
agreements, for example, if General Motors establishes a
plant in Mexico, it can demand to be treated just like a
Mexican business "national treatment" -- quite unlike
a Mexican of flesh and blood who might seek "national
treatment" in New York, or even minimal human rights.A
century ago, Woodrow Wilson, then an academic, described
an America in which "comparatively small groups of men,"
corporate managers, "wield a power and control over the
wealth and the business operations of the country,"
becoming "rivals of the government itself."In reality,
these "small groups" increasingly have become
government.s masters. The Roberts court gives them even
greater scope.The Jan. 21 decision came three days after
another victory for wealth and power: the election of
Republican candidate Scott Brown to replace the late
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the "liberal lion" of
Massachusetts. Brown.s election was depicted as a
"populist upsurge" against the liberal elitists who run
the government.The voting data reveal a rather different
story.High turnouts in the wealthy suburbs, and low ones
in largely Democratic urban areas, helped elect Brown.
"Fifty-five percent of Republican voters said they were
`very interested. in the election," The Wall St.
Journal/NBC poll reported, "compared with 38 percent of
Democrats."So the results were indeed an uprising
against President Obama.s policies: For the wealthy, he
was not doing enough to enrich them further, while for
the poorer sectors, he was doing too much to achieve
that end.The popular anger is quite understandable,
given that the banks are thriving, thanks to bailouts,
while unemployment has risen to 10 percent.In
manufacturing, one in six is out of work -- unemployment
at the level of the Great Depression. With the
increasing financialization of the economy and the
hollowing out of productive industry, prospects are
bleak for recovering the kinds of jobs that were
lost.Brown presented himself as the 41st vote against
healthcare -- that is, the vote that could undermine
majority rule in the U.S. Senate.It is true that Obama.s
healthcare program was a factor in the Massachusetts
election. The headlines are correct when they report
that the public is turning against the program.The poll
figures explain why: The bill does not go far
enough. The Wall St. Journal/NBC poll found that a
majority of voters disapprove of the handling of
healthcare both by the Republicans and by Obama.These
figures align with recent nationwide polls. The public
option was favored by 56 percent of those polled, and
the Medicare buy-in at age 55 by 64 percent; both
programs were abandoned.Eighty-five percent believe that
the government should have the right to negotiate drug
prices, as in other countries; Obama guaranteed Big
Pharma that he would not pursue that option.Large
majorities favor cost-cutting, which makes good sense:
U.S. per capita costs for healthcare are about twice
those of other industrial countries, and health outcomes
are at the low end.But cost-cutting cannot be seriously
undertaken when largesse is showered on the drug
companies, and healthcare is in the hands of virtually
unregulated private insurers -- a costly system peculiar
to the U.S.The Jan. 21 decision raises significant new
barriers to overcoming the serious crisis of healthcare,
or to addressing such critical issues as the looming
environmental and energy crises. The gap between public
opinion and public policy looms larger. And the damage
to American democracy can hardly be overestimated.  

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of
Linguistics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S.
foreign policy.

============

Former Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Presidential
Nominee will participate in an International Peace
Conference scheduled to take place in Munich, Germany on
February 6 - 7, 2010 while the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization NATO meets in the same city to plan war. 
McKinney, a long-time proponent of abolishing NATO, is
scheduled to speak on February 6 at a rally to protest
the NATO "security" conference.  After the rally,
McKinney will participate in the International Peace
Conference whose schedule and call to demonstrate
against NATO war policies are included below.Included in
McKinney's program is a meeting with the Munich American
Peace Committee MAPC - www.mapc-web.de which will
present to McKinney its third annual award, "Peace
through Conscience," during the ceremonies of the Munich
Peace Conference on the evening of February 6, 2010. 
The MAPC Peace Prize is normally awarded by the previous
year's winner.  In McKinney's case the honors will be
done by André Shepherd, a U.S. Army deserter from the
Afghanistan and Iraq wars and asylum seeker in Germany. 
Said McKinney of her selection for the award, "I am
humbled to be so recognized.  Clearly, the MAPC gave
more thought to the significance of those whose struggle
for peace is based on principle and an unshakeable
commitment, despite the personal sacrificies required,
than did the Nobel Peace Committee that rewarded our
President for war."  McKinney continued, "In this way of
thinking, peace is now war, lies are now truth, and
ignorance is strength."McKinney calls on Americans
across Germany to converge on Munich and protest U.S.
and NATO war policies.  McKinney will meet with American
ex-patriots in multiple meetings while in Munich.

==================

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, said
Joseph Goebbels, people will eventually come to believe
it. The bailout of Wall Street initiated in September
2008 was premised on the dire prediction that if major
counterparties in the massive edifice of derivative
contracts were allowed to fall, the whole interlocking
house of cards would collapse and take the economy with
it. A hijacked Congress dutifully protected the
derivatives game with taxpayer money while the real
economy proceeded to collapse, the financial sector
choosing to put their money into this protected form of
speculative betting rather than into the more mundane
and risky business of making loans to struggling
businesses and homeowners. In the end, $170 billion of
federal funds went to AIG and the banks feeding at its
trough. Rumor has it that Timothy Geithner is on his way
out as Treasury Secretary, due to his involvement in the
AIG scandal that is now unraveling in hearings before
the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Bob
Chapman writes in The International Forecaster: Each day
brings more revelations of efforts of the NY Fed and
Goldman Sachs to hide the details of the criminal
conspiracy of the AIG bailout. . . . This is a real
crisis on the scale of Watergate. Corruption at its
finest. But unlike the perpetrators of the Watergate
scandal, who wound up looking at jail time, Geithner
evidently has a golden parachute waiting at Goldman
Sachs, not coincidentally the largest recipient of the
AIG bailout. At least that is the rumor sparked by an
article by Caroline Baum on Bloomberg News, titled
"Goldman Parachute Awaits Geithner to Ease Fall." Hank
Paulson, Geithner.s predecessor, was CEO of Goldman
Sachs before coming to the Treasury. Geithner, who has
come up through the ranks of government, could be
walking through the revolving door in the other
direction.  Geithner has been under the House microscope
for the decision of the New York Fed, made while he
headed it, to buy out about $30 billion in credit
default swaps over-the-counter derivative insurance
contracts that AIG sold on toxic debt securities. The
chief recipients of this payout were Goldman Sachs,
Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank.
Goldman got $13 billion, roughly equivalent to its bonus
pool for the first 9 months of 2009. Critics are calling
the New York Fed.s decision a back-door bailout for the
banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for
contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG
been put through bankruptcy proceedings in the ordinary
way. In a Bloomberg article provocatively titled "Secret
Banking Cabal Emerges from AIG Shadows," David
Reilly writes: [T]he New York Fed is a
quasi-governmental institution that isn.t subject to
citizen intrusions such as freedom of information
requests, unlike the Federal Reserve. This
impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the
preferred vehicle for many of the Fed.s bailout
programs. It.s as though the New York Fed was a
black-ops outfit for the nation.s central bank. The
beneficiaries of the New York Fed.s largesse got paid in
full although they had agreed to take much less. In a
November 2009 article titled "It.s Time to Fire Tim
Geithner," Dylan Ratigan wrote: [L]ast November . . .
New York Federal Reserve Governor Tim Geithner decided
to deliver 100 cents on the dollar, in secret no less,
to pay off the counter parties to the world's largest
and still un-investigated insurance fraud -- AIG. This
full payoff with taxpayer dollars was carried out by
Geithner after AIG's bank customers, such as Goldman
Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Societe Generale, had already
previously agreed to taking as little as 40 cents on the
dollar. Even after the GM autoworkers, bondholders and
vendors all received a government-enforced haircut on
their contracts, he still had the audacity to claim the
"sanctity of contracts" in the dealings with these
companies like AIG. Geithner testified that the Fed.s
hands were tied and that the bank could not "selectively
default on contractual obligations without courting
collapse." But if it was all on the up and up, why all
the secrecy? The contention that the Fed had no choice
is also belied by a recent holding in the Lehman
Brothers bankruptcy, in which New York Bankruptcy Judge
James Peck set aside the same type of investment
contracts that Secretaries Paulson and Geithner
repeatedly swore under oath had to be paid in full in
the case of AIG. The judge declared that clauses in
those contracts subordinating other claims to the
holders. claims were null and void in bankruptcy. "And
notice," comments bank analyst Chris Whalen, "that the
world has not ended when the holders of [derivative]
contracts are treated like everyone else." He calls the
AIG bailout "a hideous political contrivance that ranks
with the great acts of political corruption and thievery
in the history of the United States."

Nation By Nation
Insurrection Daily, Feb 4 2010

Beside deliberately targeting children for the gamut of the west beast’s sordid crimes, here’s another 15 reasons accrued just in the last 10 years bolstering the “west is THE disease” concept: Afghanistan, Kosovo, Palestine, Lebanon, Russia, Honduras, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Panama, Eritrea, TCI, Somalia, Sudan, and Haiti. If this seems insane, that’s cuz it is. West is mad on every level, in every aspect, in every trait.

Afghanistan – West admits to 44 troops zapped in Jan. West seems to be at odds with their “ally” Afghan guards. On 30Jan, west killed 4 Afghan troops and Afghan troops killed 2 USA troops. In west/Talib pact making, USA is offering governance posts to Talib and cash for ceasefire. As such, UK quickly unveils $1.5b for “war”. Yes, that’d be the west Talib payroll. USA troops raid another home executing 5 and a baby. NATO admitted the baby murder. Talib/west pact is being turned against Russia. BTW, This is no different than USA/Germ coalition of 1945 planning to go against Russia, as Mr Patton had revealed. Russia responds by mulling sending troops in. Yes, west’s maintaining the planet on now permanent WW3 footing.

Australia – Supporting the fissure twixt west and Afghan “allies”, Aussie troop dressed like a Talib, murdered Afghan guard, a supposed ally of west, in hope to spark internal wars. This is a very common method of west. And laughingly, Cuntberra’s very angry. Why? Cause their murderer in drag got caught. West is a limitless farce and ridicule of all things humane.

Brazil – USA slithers up with $2b to get their talons on the offshore oil action.

China – USA peddling $6.4b worth of arms to Taiwan and threatens Beijing USA will defend Taiwan. Sideline: $6b worth of arms is more than USA 2010 nuke upkeep budget, not just a boatload of rifles. Bought near $30b worth of garage sale items in USA alone plus oil accesses like UK’s E Energy and Swiss’ Aldex. Yes, west is on a going-out-of-business sale. USA is trying to peddle GM’s Hummer division to Beijing. Makes a $1.4b play for Aussia sugar industry but Aussie plays hard to get. This is like with mining. At first, Cuntberra screamed: “Aussia resources to Aussies” in the beginning of 2009. In 6 months, west’s prolapse changed their mind. Foreign reserves grew by $453b/2009 to $2,400b. But reserve holdings in dollars shrank from once 2/3 to somewhere around 1/3 today. Note, this is a diametrically different tale than what all west media whores disseminate via their deceit BBCNN mindrape, in which the west TV and econ bimbos claim China is the real victim of USA prolapse. But then again, *all* BBCNN brainwash is detached from all reason and reality.

EU – With Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, and Ireland on the brink of default, in public, EUnuchs maintain there’ll be no dump of EURo. However, behind the scenes ECB did a little study into the possibility of unhinging of the EURo nonsense. Yes, Grand EUnuchia, barely out of diapers, is already shopping for a casket. EUnuch central wank, UK’s BoE, Swiss nat’l wank end their concerted bailout heist directed by the USA central wank. Henceforth, it may be every pirate for himself on even a grander scale across the west plateaus. The west states may just begin stuffing their own wallets with printed cash. Maybe they’ll even have a race. Greece bond sales aren’t raising the cash and are down 6%/Jan and 11%/3 months. No part of west, even the morally upright parts are worthy of any investment today. To save Grand EUnuchia from folding, IMF is busy extending some loan, of course, with harsh terms of social programme cuts. Italy crawls to Venezuela with €18b to get in on the Orinoco belt oil action and promises of building refineries. Germs offering cash to buy “stolen” Swiss bank data in hope to claim €200m hived away from Berlin in the Swiss vaults. Subterfuge, theft, spying, violation of due process, peddling stolen stuff, street gang mentality, that’s all normal policies in west. Germ jesuit apologises to some 600 students for having been sexually abused in “systematic assaults”. Yes, west is an orchestrated cabal of pedophile-crazed psychos. Germ unemployed at 3.6m in Jan. Germ industry orders shrivel 2.3%/Dec. Foreign orders shrivel by 3.2%. Yes, the Freeworld can manage just fine without “der ultimate driving machine”. GM garage sells Saab for €470m. The prolapsed west concern makes a living by losing over €1m each and every day, weekends included. Russia managed to dump stock and pull out of the holding prior to the sale.

UK Toyota zapping 750 jobs. UK ShopDirect zapping 1,500 jobs. UK AstraZaneca zapping 8,000 jobs. Looks like a damn fine recovery there, doesn’t it? UK BratAir posts £1b loss, which is nominal for the west air traffic industry 20% annual prolapse. In the continuing UBS loot hive battle, the Swiss pirates offer USA pirates 4,000 accounts. But USA pirates want 50,000 accounts and so they threaten to resume the UBS war. And the Swiss pirates threaten to burn down the bank rather than turn the vaults over. Yes, the pirates of the Caribbean are at it. France tests ballistic missile. Note here that neither UK nor USA, the typical two bullies, threatened to nuke or sanction Paris for the provocation. Greece finds another €40b hole in its debts. Romania happy to become USA nuke silo trench against Russia. So far the Barbarossa II front spans Poland, Czech Rep, Romania, Georgia what’s left of it , S Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Moldova and Kaliningrad are under west regime assault to rope them into the Barbarossa II lineup and it seems Ukraine may be wrested out of the claws of the west war fiends. Still, Barbarossa II is already ~4X Barbarossa I. Banksters meet in another orgy in Davos to publicly flaunt their bonuses off the west-wide theft. Oddly, west baboons weren’t the least bit perturbed. The previous orgy in Cop-haggen over west eco-assault falls on its rump as China and India refuse to sign the west glacier-melting rubbish.

Haiti – USA christianic pedophile fiends descend on the defenceless children of the quake-torn island. 10 yank christianics get caught red-handed trying to thieve and traffic 33 kids 2 months – 12yrs old and not all orphaned . The USA jesuits tried beating the traffic charges by saying that west god sent them there to steal the kids. Odd, isn’t it? West god told Busch II to murder millions of Iraqis. West god told USA gen’l to raze Falluja and murder everything that moves. Now, west god is directing children theft. West is THE disease with no competition! BTW, everything about this botched children heist screams “red herring”. Comrade Obama occupation troops halt airlifts of injured victims. Yes, west builds giant concentration camps, organ & sex slave farms, children theft zones, one torn, defenceless nation at a time.

Iran – Wants to extradite USA harboured terrorist linked to the recent n-power professor assassination. Note here that west harbours int’l criminals. Launched satellite leaving the baboon muttering its typical obscenities.

Iraq – Children are the west beast’s favourite target. No other crime can highlight the disease more. West is actually holding hundreds of children in their hellhole concentration camps torturing them by policy. 2 yrs ago, UN reported over 500 children being stolen from parents and tortured in west extermination camps. But to the west populace of the bristly baboon swill, this is “war on terror”. Yes, west — all the way down to the white freckly christianic plebe hunched over a laptop in his grey cubicle of the west slave industrial adult day-detention centres and minding his own child-porn downloading business — is THE disease of this planet! Amara occupation base hit with Katusas, 30Jan. Mortar attack on Green Zone, 31Jan. Ratba occupation base hit with Katyushas, 31Jan. Occupants hit on patrol in Baquba, 1Feb. See warnewstoday blog and heyetnet for war news.

Japan – China placed orders causing Japan’s export to actually grow, beside replacing USA as Japan’s #1 export client. The implication should be obvious: there is no future with west. And the message seems obvious to the Japanese. ~6K tell USA to get out. Hatoyama heard saying he’ll “beat the inflation”. This just for fun. Wasn’t it “deflation” a month ago, that Japan was beating? If one plays with the west disease long enough, one ultimately contracts the sickness. USA strikes out at Japan with a $2b Toyota recall due to “possibly sticky mats”.

North Korea – Exchanges fire with S Korea over protecting newly delineated no-sail zone. Live ammo exchange lasted a few days.

Pakistan – Peace Laureate Obama murders 17 civilians, wounding many more, 2Feb, with another drone bombing raid. Comrade Obama murdered 123 civilians with his relentless drone bombings in 2009. Foregoing the attacks on 3 other nations, this alone constitutes his west’s highest peace laud.

Palestine – Israel stealing Oush-Grab, Bethlehem, 2Feb. Israel attacks civilians and children with their USA-made and given WMDs in southern Gaza, 2Feb.

Russia – Gazprom posts 33% growth in profits. Picks up London newspaper on the west garage sale. Rolls out Sukhoi T50. Arms Libya with €1.3b worth of weaponry. Not long ago, EUnuchs banked on non-Russian energy from Libya. This is not the kind of world order west had in mind. Lukoil lands a contract for 13b barrels in West Quarna. No, this is definitely not the kind of world order west had in mind. And Busch II policy was very specific on this point: “No oil to anyone who didn’t help murder with us.” West launching another orange revolt in Kaliningrad.

USA – Fanny realty lending monopoly urgently needs yet again $55b just to stay afloat in 2010. After all, they’re looking at over $6,300b hole: near $5,000b in prolapsed mortgages and $1,600b in actual debt. Raising debt ceiling yet again, to $14,300b. This is literally months after comrade Obama had upped it to $9,000b. And guess what? The new debt ceiling will have been maxed out before THIS month is out. Exponentially sinking ship? You bet! Spread the message of “west is THE disease” far and wide to prevent someone, in a moment of sudden weakness, from sending liferafts when the baboon flush comes. While the central bank is hiving $2,000b-$3,000b threatening USA bankruptcy if called on it, the top elite banks has just flowed $1b from the bottoms of the bank chain. It should be clear to all, even the yank red rumped baboon, that bailout = grand wealth reform, or to be more precise: the shifting of all west cash into one pocket of the west war child-murdering junta. Comrade Obama sets all sorts of records with his new budget like biggest deficit, biggest nuke spending, the usuals.

In detail: deficit grows to $1,600b from $1,300b; fed borrowing grows to 80% GDP from 77%; Pentagram war machine financing goes to over $700b $160b are going to Afghan and Iraq immediately . And he gives $5b to upkeep of his nuke arsenal outspending Busch II. Exxon profits prolapse 23%. Verizon zapping 13,000 jobs. 15 banks dead in 2010, as of 28Jan. 1 in 8 baboons needs food assistance, a 46% growth since 2006. California, the pride of caPIGtalism, now boasts 20% on average unable to buy enough food today. Remember how west BBCNN media whores and the cretinous west baboons orgasm over their stock market rising upon which the west war cabals weave their laughable tales of west “recoveries” and such? Well, west stocks aren’t up, the prolapse is! First, the fantastic record fall in earnings kicked off a bit after the 2006 dollar monopoly nuking. It’s the greatest and steepest ever, beating even the “Great Depression” stock market crash of 1929. The current west earnings are now touching 1945-46 levels. But the stocks are rising in value, they say. What’s happening? Well, west is mired, and terminally so, in super giant hyper insane off scale inflation. Second, the stock, much like west’s GDPs, and war junta banks profits are bloated with printed and heisted “bailout” cash. In very simple terms, nothing in west is profitable. All west claims of econ recovery and growth are no more than all things west: pathetic deceit. West econ doesn’t exist any longer. All that’s happening in west is the final wealth and real-estate reform. Without dollar monopoly, west cannot be, and some may aptly argue in many respects, that it isn’t. So cheers to that, mates of the Freeworld and No-West-Order! Tell this simple tale to all the west baboon provocateurs and comrade Obama shill armies of mindrapists plaguing forums with their offal tales of west stock bloating.

Fighting the gigantic spurn of vaccines, west medical cabal assaults doctor who linked west autism explosion and vaccinations. Though the west “doctors” are screaming now a different tune, they fail to explain why has autism in west grown into a pandemic. But so long as they have a scapegoat. Hunger pegged at growing 46%/3 yrs. Watch them find a scapegoat and revert all statistics. Home prices plunge 12% on average across the board, despite the garage sale pricing schemes, marking the grandest prolapse in 40 yrs. And this is with comrade Obama’s “bailout” aid, which ends at the end of Q1. But $100m in new bonuses to AIG off “bailout” are fine, says comrade Obama to baboons. Baboons stopped listening the second they heard numbers. 22,000 jobs zapped in Jan. Rolling short term employment at 480,000. The number seemed to have pegged at 500,000 and if it’s dropping it’s cause the benefits are shriveling. Begging Kissinger trips and comrade Obama love letters season is over, after bringing west no more than humiliating embarrassment. Now, warshington’s befriending Dalai Lama to use Tibet as an orange revolt vehicle against Beijing. True to his peace laureates, comrade Obama launches militarisation of space and internet. War is west’s only programme, thought, goal, wish, plan, etc. Pentagram establishing “strategic surprise and deception” dept. As though west doesn’t have one already. If west’s WW3 mobilisation of all its war assets isn’t insane enough, warshington now proposes that the entire planet be NATO’s protectorate zone. Not a joke! They’re truly this diseased. And if this isn’t enough of true, wholesome insanity, consider this. West now wants to explode hundreds of volcanoes to blow rubbish into upper atmosphere to block the sun. Why? To end its “global warming” false op. Yes, west is a lunatic whose only goal, thought, programme, plan, and wish is the total and complete destruction of life on earth. Google join hands with NSA to perfect web spying. Let’s move blog, shall we?

Yemen – USAudi admits 109 troops dead since 3Nov09. Yet, recently foreign ministry claimed no knowledge of the genocide. Truce agreed upon twixt USAudi/Houthis, 27Jan. USAudi resume attacks, 28Jan, firing 94 rockets.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

It’s good news to see that boycott and divestment campaigns against companies profiting from Israeli occupation and apartheid are becoming increasingly mainstream.

Here’s a couple of recent examples.

The National Catholic Reporter ran a great article about the Kairos Document produced by the Palestinian Christian community, calling for churches around the world to intervene for justice and peace in Israel/Palestine via boycott, divestment, and sanctions BDS campaigns:

“The leaders of the thirteen Christian communities serving in the Palestinian territories — including Latin and Orthodox patriarchs — have declared the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories a “sin against God and humanity” and urged Christians everywhere to nonviolently intervene to end its injustices….Such a response, the authors wrote, includes civil disobedience, boycotts, and divestment campaigns. “Resistance is a right and duty for Christians. But it is resistance with love as its logic,” they said….The national committee for the Palestinian Boycott and Divestment and Sanctions campaign said it “saluted the moral clarity, courage, and principled position conveyed in this new document which emphasizes that resisting injustice should ‘concern the church.’ “

The article quotes US Campaign National Media Coordinator David Hosey in regards to U.S. church involvement with divestment campaigns:

“David Hosey, media coordinator for the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and a missionary with the United Methodist Church, said members of the New England conference of that church are in correspondence with the targeted companies, the first step in “phased divestment.” The Methodists adopted a resolution in 2004 opposing the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territories. Various regional conferences are now debating whether or not to express that opposition with divestment campaigns….

As for action from the Roman Catholic Church, Hosey said members of the Sisters of Loretto, a U.S. order of Catholic women religious, were pushing for shareholder resolutions urging Caterpillar to stop its sale of militarized bulldozers to Israel.

Christian calls for divestment have sparked criticism from various Jewish organizations and, at times, strained inter-religious dialogue. But Hosey thinks that could change as more Jewish and Israeli groups endorse using economic pressure to change Israeli action in the Occupied Territories.”

Divestment is becoming part of the mainstream discourse on U.S. campuses as well. The University of Arizona Daily Wildcat now includes a weekly column on corporate involvement in the Israeli occupation. This week’s column notes the connections between corporate accountability work against sweat shops, the BDS campaign against South African apartheid, and the BDS movement against Israeli occupation, as well as highlighting the University’s investments in human rights abusers Caterpillar and Motorola:

“After an intensive anti-sweatshop campaign last spring led by students in the Sweatshop-Free Coalition and University Community for Human Rights, President Robert Shelton had the UA divest our financial holdings in the Russell Corporation due to the company’s singularly cruel labor abuses in its factories in Honduras. Now, while all eyes are on Shelton as he continues to sit on the UA’s illegal business contracts with Caterpillar and Motorola, it’s worth noting that divestment activism on campus stretches back far beyond Shelton’s tenure and probably beyond everything else on campus except for the oldest of UA’s buildings……..Motorola and Caterpillar, two companies perpetuating grisly crimes upon mostly Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, are so unspeakable as to have prompted Jewish South African politician Ronnie Kasrils, who was quoted in the United Kingdom’s Guardian in a 2006 article, to denounce the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation as “much worse than apartheid” of the sort under which Kasrils and others survived for so many long, bloody years. A rich history has proven that UA students have risen to the occasion of doing everything they can to disassociate themselves and their universities from such atrocities. One doesn’t have to look far to see that such a time has come again.”

Check out the US Campaign’s website for resources on starting your own boycott and divestment campaign on campus and/or organizing against Caterpillar and Motorola in your community.

Frustrated Arab\s dairy

In favor, 33 countries, 59% :

• 30 countries 54% initially in favour:
  
  • Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Belorussian SSR, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Sweden, South Africa, Ukrainian SSR, United States of America, Soviet Union, Uruguay, Venezuela.

• An additional 3 5% switched to in favor:
  
  • Haiti, Liberia, Philippines.

Against, 13 countries, 23% :

• Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen.

Abstentions, 10 countries, 18% :

• Argentina, Chile, Republic of China, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia.

Absent, 1 countries, 0% :

• Thailand

NB:

Jordan,Tunis, Algeria,Lybia, Marroco,Kuwait, Sudan , UAE, Cyprus, did not even "exist" so they could not vote........ .

but Haiti,among others, votes "yes" for Israel !!

Uprooted Palestinian

Bill Clinton is another comedian, having got himself appointed the UN’s man in Haiti. Once fawned upon by the BBC as “Mr. Nice Guy … bringing democracy back to a sad and troubled land”, Clinton is Haiti’s most notorious privateer, demanding de-regulation of the economy for the benefit of the sweatshop barons. Lately, he has been promoting a $55m deal to turn the north of Haiti into an American-annexed “tourist playground”.

Not for tourists is the US building its fifth biggest embassy in Port-au-Prince. Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington’s “rollback” plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant oil reserves and sabotage of the growing regional cooperation that has given millions their first taste of an economic and social justice long denied by US-sponsored regimes.

The first rollback success came last year with the coup against President Jose Manuel Zelaya in Honduras who also dared advocate a minimum wage and that the rich pay tax. Obama’s secret support for the illegal regime carries a clear warning to vulnerable governments in central America.