OFF TOPIC: "It is time for concerted action" on health care in the United States

Shit, even Ed Schultz is waking up to the corporate stranglehold on Washington





By Kevin Zeese

Counterpunch

May 6, 2009

Excerpt from report:

Last week Senator Richard Durbin said the banks "own" the Congress. This week it is evident, that, when it comes to health care, the health care profiteers own Congress, especially the Senate Finance Committee. If we do not put forward organized, aggressive, grass roots action we will see a swindle of the American people. In the name of false health care reform, billions in tax payer dollars will go to campaign donors and the health care problem will continue to worsen.

It is time for concerted action...

(click here to view entire commentary)

Latin America news roundup - May 7, 2009

TOP STORY - Augusto Boal, the Brazilian founder of the theater of the oppressed, dies at 78 (Democracy Now!)

Argentina - Evita still Argentina's national legend 90 years after birth (TopNews)

Argentina - Argentine labor offers strong support for Fernandez (Latin American Herald Tribune)

Chile - Bachelet's high approval (Two Weeks Notice)

Chile - Ariel Dorfman: How do you reach the truth if lying has become a habit (Dialogic)

Colombia - Former hostages ask Uribe to end delay of pending hostage release (Colombia Reports)

Colombia - Uribe stays quiet about DAS wiretap scandal (Colombia Reports)

Colombia - High courts demand statement from Uribe about wiretap scandal (Colombia Reports)

Latin America - Health workers aim to vaccinate 30 million in the Americas (Unicef)

United States - Hillary Clinton recognizes multi-polar world, failures of U.S. Latin America policy (Huffington Post)

World - IMF voting shares: No plans for significant changes (Center for Economic and Policy Research)

Miami Herald's "deception-filled feast of fun about Bolivia"

By Otto Rock

Inca Kola News

May 6, 2009

When The Miami Herald starts a report with.....

LA PAZ, Bolivia -- With some newspapers and broadcast outlets relentlessly exposing the government's shortcomings, President Evo Morales and his supporters say the privately-owned media have sided with his opponents yada yada continues here

....you just know you're in for a deception-filled feast of fun about Bolivia. What follows those opening lines is pretty much as you'd expect, laying heavily on anti-Evo BS, slipping cute words like 'autocrat' in there and trying to make out that all the opposition press has been doing in Bolivia is highlighting cases of government corruption. No mention about the racism or support for illegal separatists, or revisionist histories about the Pando Massacre or the innocent chats Ruben Costas enjoyed with then US ambassador Goldberg. All those squeaky-clean reporters have been doing is fighting the good fight against graft...

(click here to view entire report)

BOOKS: Not in my back yard

Review of Grace Livingstone's new book America’s Back Yard: The United States and Latin America from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Terror

By Hugh O’Shaughnessy

Tribune

May 6, 2009

Excerpt from review:

The publication of Livingstone’s book at such a key moment is warmly to be welcomed. She has done her time in the forlorn ranks of those of us who have laboured – without notable success – to bring some fitful gleams of interest in and intelligent coverage of Latin America to organs such as the BBC and even The Guardian.

Hers is a good and powerful book which chronicles how US hegemony over the rest of the continent of America differed little in viciousness from that exercised by Stalin and his henchmen in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Indeed, the wholesale massacres of 200,000 mostly indigenous people in Guatemala, a country of only abut 10 million, and the forcing into exile of 1 million more; the slaughter of dedicated public servants in Sandinista Nicaragua by Contra terrorists orchestrated by a US political fixer who later went on to represent Dubya at the United Nations; and the shooting of the Archbishop of San Salvador; all resulted from US terrorism in the region...

(click here to view entire report)

Latin America news roundup - May 6, 2009

TOP STORY - Thousands march in Salvadoran May Day to celebrate victory and demand change (Mi Gente Informa)

Argentina - Press freedom bill (The New World Lusophone Sousaphone)

Bolivia - Prosecutor says Bolivian opposition backed plot (Reuters)

Colombia - Uribe rejects resignation of official linked to spy scandal (Latin American Herald Tribune)

Colombia - Uribe taught them all they know (Inka Kola News)

Colombia - Obama's next big flip flop: Colombia free trade agreement talks have started (Carlos in DC)

United States - Compañero Obama? Obama mends fences with Latin America (Alternet)

United States - Thousands of Washington Post readers joined Naomi Klein in calling upon the U.S. government to banish Larry Summers from Washington (The Nation)

Venezuela - Venezuelan President calls for “re-definition” of Socialist Party (Venezuelanalysis)

World - The dream of a better world is back (Le Monde diplomatique)

World - Meltdown inevitable as world in need of new economic model (Otago Daily Times)

World - It's all about U.S. (Huffington Post)

World - The treason of the economists (Starbroek News)

Latin America news roundup - May 5, 2009

TOP STORY - Letter from Canadian public sector unions against the Canada-Colombia FTA (The Canada-Colombia Project)

Colombia - Human rights no block to EU-Colombia talks (euobserver.com)

Colombia - Have “false positives” stopped? (Plan Colombia and Beyond)

Colombia - Testimonies of terror and torture (Tribune)

Colombia - Colombian government’s role in human rights abuses (Colombia Journal)

Colombia - Uribe to seek third term (Dow Jones)

Colombia - The autumn of the patriarch (San Diego Union-Tribune)

Latin America - BlackRock bets on Brazil, warns about Mexico (Reuters)

Uruguay - Most Uruguayans praise their government (Angus Reid Global Monitor)

Venezuela - Venezuela orders gold producers to sell more locally (Bloomberg)

Legendary Folk Singer & Activist Pete Seeger Turns 90, Thousands Turn Out for All-Star Tribute Featuring Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Bernice Johnson

Democracy Now!

March 4, 2009

Legendary folk singer, banjo player, storyteller, and political and environmental activist Pete Seeger turned ninety on Sunday. More than 18,000 people packed New York’s Madison Square Garden Sunday celebrate the man, the music and the movement. The all-star lineup included Bruce Springsteen, Joan Baez, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Billy Bragg, Ruby Dee, Steve Earle, Arlo Guthrie, Guy Davis, Dar Williams, Michael Franti, Bela Fleck, Tim Robbins, Dave Matthews, Rufus Wainwright, John Mellencamp, Ben Harper, and Ritchie Havens. We speak with some of the musicians, play Seeger’s music and play excerpts from our hour-long interview with Seeger in 2004.

Latin America news roundup - May 4, 2009

TOP STORY - Watch your back, Evo! (BoRev)

Bolivia - The fun house mirror: Distortions and omissions in the news on Bolivia (NACLA)

Brazil - Tupi oil is 'second independence for Brazil' (upstreamonline.com)

Brazil - Brazil President Lula: Breadth of subsalt oil not yet fully known (Dow Jones)

Cuba - The U.S. and Cuba (Dissident Voice)

Latin America - Greg Grandin, Obama in Latin America (TomDispatch)

Latin America - Iranian Foreign Minister: Clinton contradicting Obama (Press TV)

United States - US authorites divert Air France flight carrying 'no-fly' journalist to Mexico (Telegraph)

Venezuela - Salvador Allende's grandson is the partner of Chávez's daughter (El Universal)

David Letterman's take on Chavez's gift to Obama

By Greg Braxton

Los Angeles Times

May 4, 2009

Excerpt from report:

In one monologue, [Letterman] noted Obama's recent trip to South America, where his lack of knowledge of Spanish prevented him from reading a book presented to him by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez: "It would be like handing George Bush any book."

(click here to view entire report)

Free trade and Mexico's drug war

Miguel Tinker Salas: Collapse of traditional economy created the space for the cartels to grow



Real News

March 3, 2009

In April, US President Barack Obama visited Mexico where he announced that the US needed to take some responsibility for Mexico's ongoing Drug War. He also declared his support for a continuation and strengthening of free trade policies between the two countries. According to Miguel Tinker Salas, it is the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the massive economic transition it precipitated, that has created such fertile ground for the drug economy. The result is that the Mexican government finds itself facing a decreasing level of control over entire regions of the country as the cartels provide the services that the central government no longer does.

Bio

Miguel Tinker Salas is a professor of History and Latin American studies at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He is co-author of Venezuela: Hugo Chavez and the Decline of an Exceptional Democracy and author of Under the Shadow of the Eagles. And his latest book is entitled The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela.

The history of Peru's left-nationalist opposition leader Ollanta Humala

By Justin Delacour

Latin America News Review

May 3, 2009

Although you'd never know it from reading contemporary U.S. reports about Peru, an older Washington Post report from October 30, 2000 does reveal the true history behind the rise of Peru's left-nationalist opposition leader Ollanta Humala. In October of 2000, Humala led a rebellion of mid-level officers to protest not only the tainted 2000 election of Alberto Fujimori but also what Humala and his co-conspirators believed to be Fujimori's continued cooperation with the country's then-fugitive former intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos. Montesinos had a history of repressing Fujimori's political opponents, corrupting the country's media with bribes, and personally enriching himself through the trafficking of drugs and arms.

It is this act of rebellion that launched Humala's political career.

Here are some interesting excerpts from the Post report:

About 60 rebellious army troops seized a strategic mining town in southern Peru today and demanded the resignation of the embattled president, Alberto Fujimori. They fled with hostages, including their commanding general, after failing to immediately inspire a broader military uprising.

...

Today's rebellion, led by Lt. Col. Ollanta Moises Humala Tasso, reflects what analysts say is deep resentment among mid-level officers who believe Fujimori and his top brass still are secretly cooperating with Montesinos.

Opposition leaders were quick to embrace the sentiments behind today's uprising. Alberto Andrade, the mayor of Lima, praised Humala as "a great patriot."

"I don't justify it, but I understand it," Andrade said. "The young army officer who led this was saying, 'Enough is enough; it is time to end all this corruption.' He was sick of what is happening in this country. . . . He was doing what he did with the best intentions for his country."

Chavez’s ‘gift book’ is worth reading

By Nicola Foote, Assistant professor of Latin American history, Florida Gulf Coast University

Naples Daily News

May 2, 2009

Excerpts from commentary:

The encounter between President Barack Obama and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela in which Chavez presented Obama with a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s book, “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,” has made a best-seller of this Latin American classic. For historians of Latin America, like myself, this can only be good news. All too often we have to struggle to get people interested in the past of this fascinating but complex region to our south. Now a work of Latin American history has captured the attention of the whole nation.

Yet much of the debate about this encounter has displayed a misunderstanding of the book itself.

...

The first part of the book examines the nature of the Spanish conquest and the extraction economy that was set up in its aftermath, drawing attention to Spanish brutality against the natives and the obsessive quest for gold. Galeano explains how huge mining operations and the creation of sugar and coffee plantations were used to enrich the Catholic Church and to fund Spain’s wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. The second half of the book traces the rise of U.S. capitalism and the economic dominance attained by corporations such as the United Fruit Co.

While most historians would use more measured tones to relay the events Galeano discusses, few would dispute his core findings. Almost all colonial historians of Latin America agree that the massive mining enterprises produced millions of tons of gold and silver at great human and ecological cost, and that very little of the proceeds benefitted Latin Americans themselves. Plantations created to produce sugar and coffee for export using slave labor created an enduring problem of land concentration and inequality. Similarly, there is a wealth of evidence — including declassified State Department documents — that demonstrate the enormous influence U.S. companies acquired during the first half of the 20th century and that frequent military interventions supported their interests...

(click here to view entire commentary)

Latin America news roundup - May 3, 2009

TOP STORY - U.S. has a 45-year history of torture (Los Angeles Times)

Bolivia - Morales, Carter eye improved Bolivia-US ties (Associated Press)

Brazil - Kennedy's talks with Brazilian President Goulart (The American President Project)

Colombia - The inside story of the Ingrid Betancourt rescue (China Matters)

Cuba - Don't just close Gitmo. Give it back. (Washington Post)

Latin America - Chávez and Morales take on sweeping measures at land reform (Council on Hemispheric Affairs)

Panama - Why Panama tilts right in presidential vote (Christian Science Monitor)

United States - Putting an end to 'stale debates':
Obama and the CIA in the Americas (Countercurrents.org)

Alvaro Uribe: Colombia's paramilitary president?

Uribe sounds an awful lot like the deceased former paramilitary leader Carlos Castaño, pictured below


By Justin Delacour

Latin America News Review

May 3, 2009

As I continue analyzing thousands of old U.S. press reports for my dissertation, I recently came across a report that brought to mind just how strikingly similar Alvaro Uribe is to Carlos Castaño, the deceased former paramilitary leader who was arguably one of the most brutal figures in Colombian history.

A Washington Post report from August 2, 1999 opens as follows:

Sen. Piedad Cordoba was sitting in the waiting room of a Medellin clinic, leafing through her appointment book, when more than a dozen masked and heavily armed assailants burst through the door.

Cordoba, president of the Senate human rights commission, was blindfolded and whisked into a waiting car. Then she was flown by helicopter to a mountain hideout where she met the country's most powerful right-wing paramilitary leader, Carlos Castaño, whose forces she had accused of committing atrocities as part of their long conflict with Marxist rebels.

In a room dimly lit by a candle, Castaño "accused me of being an ally and a spokesperson for the guerrillas," Cordoba recalled in an interview. "He showed me printed transcripts of my telephone conversations and insisted that I was collaborating" with one of the rebel groups.

Cordoba was released two weeks after her May 21 kidnapping, but not before Castaño used the high-profile abduction to reaffirm publicly his intolerance for human rights advocates, whom he has accused of working "at the service of guerrilla diplomacy."

As subsequent events have shown, Alvaro Uribe's feelings toward Piedad Cordoba are virtually indistinguishable from Castaño's. But to really get an idea of just how eerily similar Uribe's manichaean worldview is to Castaño's, I invite you to check out the video below.

Alvaro Uribe and Freedom of Expression from Adam Isacson on Vimeo.

May 1st around the world

The Shock Doctrine

By Walden Bello

Foreign Policy in Focus

November 12, 2007

Excerpt from book review:

With her ability to combine no-stone-left-unturned investigative reporting with in-depth social analysis, Klein is her generation's David Halberstam, her Shock Doctrine and an earlier book No Logo being on par with The Best and the Brightest and War in a Time of Peace. There is one difference, though: Klein is unashamedly a woman of the left, and this is where her analysis derives both its power and its passion.

The Shock Doctrine traces neoliberalism's rise to dominance to a program set up in the mid-fifties to enable Chilean students to imbibe the radical free-market doctrine being propagated by Milton Friedman and his associates at the University of Chicago. The U of C's economics department was then an oasis of radical free-market thinking in a world dominated by Keynesianism in the United States and Europe and "developmentalism" or desarrollismo in Latin America, with their pragmatic compromises between the state and the market, labor and management, trade and development...

(click here to view entire book review)

Obama's Trade Representative seeks to resuscitate Colombia "free trade" deal by whitewashing crimes against trade unionists

Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe shows journalists a diagram he drew for President Barack Obama, who signed it in the upper right, explaining his government's goals during the 5th Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, Saturday April 18, 2009. (AP Photo/Andres Leighton)

By Justin Delacour

Latin America News Review

May 1, 2009

Recently there have been only a few reports about President Obama's "about-face" on the stalled "free trade" agreement between the United States and Colombia.

Despite Obama's previously-stated opposition to such a trade deal, Greg Weeks reports that, now, "the administration's most substantive work is actually a continuation of Bush administration policies--free trade agreements." Weeks notes that U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk is "meeting with Colombian officials to hammer out a deal that might get sent to Congress this year."

What is most disturbing about this whole scenario is that the U.S. Trade Representative's plan for ramming through a Colombia "free trade" deal is to whitewash the Colombian state's long and horrid record of impunity for the murders of thousands of Colombian trade unionists.

Business Week reports:

On Colombia, Kirk will address concerns over the murder of labor leaders by showing that the country is arresting, convicting, and imprisoning those responsible, said Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council.

But in reality, the U.S. Trade Representative's planned talking points are exactly the opposite of what's happening in Colombia.

In an April report entitled "Five trade unionists assassinated in Colombia during March," the British NGO Justice for Colombia reports:

The murders of five trade unionists during March made it the most dangerous month so far [this year] for trade union activists in Colombia. Added to the four assassinations in January and three in February the total for the year now stands at 12 – an average of one killing each week. As in the past the Colombian authorities have not yet arrested anyone for any of the killings leading the CUT trade union federation to describe the situation as a "policy of extermination."

Thus, I'd say it's about time for U.S. activists and the two U.S. labor federations --the AFL-CIO and the Change to Win coalition-- to try to nip this deal in the bud. If we can't even stop a trade deal with a country where one trade unionist is assassinated every week, there will be no end to the madness.

When it comes to Venezuela, The Washington Post can't quite stay consistent

BoRev.Net

April 30, 2009

The Washington Post editorial board is writing about Venezuela again today, but DON'T WORRY they still don't like this Hugo Chavez, not one bit, just like in the last 600 editorials. It never gets boring, this one opinion!

This week they are very concerned that opposition politicians have been investigated for corruption, in particular this one fella Manuel Rosales, who actively fled the country rather than explain what he was doing with all that extra cash money. Not so concerning, apparently, is the fate of former Caracas mayor Juan Barreto, also under investigation for suspicious money acquisition. Barreto, a noted Chavez ally and corrupt douchebag, doesn't get a single sympathetic mention, perhaps because it would just confuse the main point, which is that these investigations are a totally one-sided "crackdown on domestic opposition." Consistency is difficult sometimes!

(click here to view entire report)

Latin America news roundup - May 1, 2009

Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe gestures while giving a speech to media at Apiay military base in Villavicencio December 30, 2007. A delicate mission to free three hostages held by Colombian guerrillas collapsed on the last day of 2007 as the government and rebel leaders accused each other of trying to kill the deal. REUTERS/Carlos Duran

TOP STORY - Colombian President obstructs another hostage release (Colombia Reports)

Bolivia - UN experts concerned over mercenaries' alleged coup plot in Bolivia (YubaNet)

Colombia - Colombia hostage in middle of political tug of war (Reuters)

Colombia - Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement could be a lose-lose deal (Council on Hemispherica Affairs)

Colombia - Prominent Canadians ask Liberal Party leader to put human rights before free trade in Colombia (Council of Canadians)

Mexico - The emerging commonism (Upping the Anti)

United States - Capitalism in wonderland (Monthly Review)

United States - Abolishing the agencies that gave us Iraq and Vietnam (TPMcafe)

United States - Vargas Llosa changes his mind (Mambi Watch)

Venezuela - Chavez says Colombia rebels unwelcome in Venezuela (Associated Press)

Venezuela - Washington agency creates neoliberal university in Venezuela (Venezuelanalysis)

World - UNCTAD chief slams global casino economics (Pambazuka News)