El primero de mayo, el Presidente Evo Morales firmó un decretó trascendental: dispuso que la riqueza hidrocarburífera que estaba en manos de empresas transnacionales "vuelva a manos de la nación y sea utilizada en beneficio del país". Según el decreto, las empresas petroleras que actualmente realizan actividades de producción de gas y petróleo en el territorio nacional, están obligadas a entregar a la estatal Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos –YPFB, toda la producción de hidrocarburos, la que asume, en nombre del Estado, la propiedad de los mismos y su comercialización. Así mismo, se nacionalizan las acciones necesarias, para que, YPFB controle, como mínimo el 50% más 1 en las empresas Chaco S.A., Andina S.A., Transredes S.A., Petrobrás Bolivia Refinación S.A. y Compañía Logística de Hidrocarburos de Bolivia S.A. En los campos de gas natural, cuya producción sea superior a 100 millones de pies cúbicos diarios, el 82% será para el Estado y el 18% para las compañías.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Bolivia asume el "control absoluto" de los hidrocarburos
Morales da seis meses a las empresas para adaptarse a la nueva situación / Los militares toman el control de los campos petrolíferos
Bolivia asume el "control absoluto" de los hidrocarburos
Bolivia asume el "control absoluto" de los hidrocarburos
El presidente de Bolivia, Evo Morales, firmó el decreto de nacionalización de la riqueza hidrocarburífera de la nación, en un acto realizado en el campo petrolero de San Alberto.
A través del decreto supremo No. 28701 el gobierno boliviano nacionaliza de manera definitiva los recursos hidrocarburíferos del país. Con esta medida el Jefe de Estado reivindicó el derecho de todos los pueblos de tener el control de sus recursos naturales.
Con la decisión, el Estado recupera la propiedad, la posición y el control absoluto de los recursos.
Las Fuerzas Armadas bolivianas han tomado el control de medio centenar de campos petroleros distribuidos por el país, incluidos los de Repsol YPF, por orden del presidente de la República, Evo Morales, quien horas antes había firmado el decreto supremo por el que ordena nacionalizar los recursos petroleros.
Unos meses después de ganar las elecciones Morales ha ejecutado una de sus principales promesas electorales: la recuperación de los recursos petroleros para el Estado. Para ello, entre otras medidas, el presidente ha ordenado a las Fuerzas Armadas tomar el control de las 56 instalaciones de campos petroleros y dos refinerías que estaban controladas por las Chaco y Andina, ésta última filial de Repsol YPF, además de la transportadora 'Transredes'.
"El Estado recupera la propiedad, la posesión y el control total y absoluto de estos recursos" lo cual redundará en la política económica del país, afirmó Morales este mediodía al leer el primer artículo del decreto, en un acto público coincidiendo con las celebraciones con motivo del Día Internacional del Trabajo.
El Decreto Supremo 28.701 que ordena la nacionalización establece la recuperación el 82 por ciento de la producción petrolera para el Estado de aquellos campos que hayan alcanzado una producción superior a 100 millones de pies cúbicos diarios de gas durante 2005, según informa la prensa local, recogida por Europa Press.
Además, se establece para las petroleras extranjeras presentes en el país andino un plazo de 180 días para adecuarse a las nuevas reglas para poder seguir operando en el país y advierte de que, en caso contrario, el Gobierno intervendrá sus instalaciones.
En lo que calificó de una "tercera y definitiva" nacionalización, Morales explicó que Bolivia vuelve a asumir la propiedad de este recurso natural que se constituirá, junto a otras acciones, en el pilar central del desarrollo de los bolivianos y de la liberación de un país con los más altos niveles de inequidad en el mundo.
La disposición, que ha sido leída en toda su extensión por el presidente y que está sustentada en la Constitución, la nueva Ley de Hidrocarburos y una serie de acuerdos internacionales que permiten a los indígenas aprovechar sus recursos naturales sin perjuicio del apoyo internacional, se constituye "en una respuesta al pueblo".
Las petroleras están obligadas a entregar toda su producción de gas y petróleo a la empresa estatal Yacimiento Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), que también estará a cargo de la comercialización dentro del país con la definición de las condiciones volúmenes y precios internos y la exportación e industrialización.
El Gobierno estableció que las petroleras que acaten de forma inmediata esta disposición podrán operar en el país, una vez que en 180 días, a partir de este 1 de mayo, negocien nuevos contratos. "Las compañías que no hayan firmado contratos no podrán seguir operando en el país", insistió Morales durante la lectura del decreto supremo.
Con la finalidad de garantizar la producción, la petrolera estatal deberá hacerse cargo de las operaciones en los campos de compañías que se nieguen a acatar o intenten impedir la nacionalización de los hidrocarburos, que también implicará que el Estado acceda a 780 millones de dólares anuales.
Además, a partir del 1 de mayo, "los oleoductos y gaseoductos, los pozos, refinerías y gasolineras están siendo resguardados por efectivos de las Fuerzas Armadas y policiales", según un comunicado emitido por la Agencia Boliviana de Noticias poco antes de que Morales anunciara la nacionalización.
La distribución de los recursos generados por la explotación de los recursos también cambiará. De los recursos económicos generados de aquellos campos donde se haya registrado una producción superior a los 100 millones de pies cúbicos diarios de gas durante 2005 se destinará el 82 por ciento al Estado y 18 por ciento a las empresas.
El presidente de Repsol YPF, Antonio Brufau, en su última visita a La Paz a principios de marzo, en la que se reunió con Morales, anunció la "absolutamente firme decisión" de sentarse a renegociar su contrato "tan pronto como diga el Gobierno", y resaltó el interés de la petrolera de mantenerse en el país y participar en proyectos de industrialización del gas natural.
Mientras, el Gobierno español ha emitido esta noche un comunicado en el que muestra "su más profunda preocupación" por el decreto que ordena la nacionalización y da al Estado y al pueblo boliviano el "control absoluto" de todos los hidrocarburos existentes en sus tierras, y confía en que el plazo dado a las empresas extranjeras abra un proceso de auténtica negociación y diálogo.
Hugo Chavez - ACT FOR THE PEOPLE’S ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE
WORLD SOCIAL FORUM 2006
HUGO RAFAEL CHÁVEZ FRÍAS
CONSTITUTIONAL PRESIDENT OF THE
BOLIVARIAN REPUBLIC OF VENEZUELA
ACT FOR THE PEOPLE’S ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE
VI WORLD SOCIAL FORUM
POLIEDRO, CARACAS
FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2006
HUGO RAFAEL CHÁVEZ FRÍAS
CONSTITUTIONAL PRESIDENT OF THE
BOLIVARIAN REPUBLIC OF VENEZUELA
ACT FOR THE PEOPLE’S ANTI-IMPERIALIST STRUGGLE
VI WORLD SOCIAL FORUM
POLIEDRO, CARACAS
FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2006
President of the Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez: Every time that I come to a very special event like this one, special because, first of all, these are events are overflowing with passion; I always come with the desire, the intention and commitment to reflect on issues and ideas. And there lies the perpetual dilemma— passion vs. reason— but both are necessary. I never know where to begin speaking in events as beautiful as this; I always cover the ideas that flow from the grand emotion, like that which I feel tonight in this gathering of the World Social Forum and in this anti imperialist event. I will begin.
Good evening to all. I greet and welcome you...
Media dishonesty and espionage. Bush is not as bad as Hitler ... he's worse!
Media dishonesty and espionage. Bush is not as bad as Hitler ... he's worse!
Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:09:50 -0500
From: Sabina Becker binabecker@sympatico.ca
To: Editor@VHeadline.com
Subject: Right on target!
Just wanted to say your response to Aaron Schoeffler's letter criticizing Mary MacElveen and Oscar Heck was dead-on. If anyone doesn't like what or how those two write, well -- it's labeled as such on the front page, and he doesn't have to read. It shouldn't impair his enjoyment of the rest of the site -- should it?
It certainly doesn't bother me! In fact, their articles are the ones I am most likely to pass along to my friends, because they are so wonderfully frank about what is really going on, whether in Mary's America or Oscar's Venezuela.
I appreciate their honesty and think it's time we saw more, not less, of the same elsewhere in the media. And I say this as one who has studied journalism at university!
Why does anyone believe there is such a thing as "objective" news reporting when a cursory look at history will confirm that it has never even existed?
Even the overtly right-wing FOX News has the gall to pass itself off as "fair and balanced," which it is not.
And if that doesn't drag the discourse down into the realm of the ridiculous, I don't know what does. Already the damage has been done: The mainstream media, trying hard to outdo FOX at its own dishonest game, has sunk beneath all credibility. Even the New York Times has had to admit that it has fallen victim to blatant BushCo lies!
Why, then, pretend that copying their bland style will guarantee objectivity? It does not; nothing does. So, why pretend?
Let me add that the Bush/Hitler comparison is not "devaluing the entire dialogue" at all, but rather, it is apt and accurate. Anyone who thinks otherwise should get his head out of the sand and look around; what he sees might just scare him if he were to look at it honestly.
My parents were children in Hitler's Germany, and my father (who is certainly no socialist) says Bush is not as bad as Hitler -- he's worse!
My dad may be mistaken about a number of things, but not about this one. Not all fascism marches around in jackboots and swastikas. I fear the other kind, the one that wears a bland, smiling face and moves by "moderate"-seeming increments.
Lest anyone forget, Hitler didn't seem so bad either -- at first. And the first people he massacred were not Jews, but the socialists and democrats who were his primary opposition. The death camps could never have been built without an atmosphere of cowed silence and false smiles pervading all of Germany for several years first.
And what is there now in America, which I recently visited, if not an atmosphere of cowed silence and false smiles?
"We have to support the president, it's a time of war!" seems to be the prevailing mentality. It is as though the very act of dissent is now treason. And when I hear that the Bush administration has even spied on the peaceful, history-honored Quakers under the pretext of looking for "terrorists," what else is there to assume but that fascism has descended on America in earnest?
Nowadays, by muzzling the media into not reporting or publishing anything too "controversial" (read: HONEST), the job gets done even without midnight "disappearances" of socialists and democrats.
Between media dishonesty and administration espionage, it is to be expected that the opposition simply dries up because its voice is taken away and no one finds it worthwhile to speak out against fascism anymore. It's too scary; you could get spied on. You could get arrested. You could "disappear."
And then, Pastor Niemoeller's famous poem once again comes true.
Only a repeated and diligent application of truth can stop the fascists. After all, they don't scruple to use a repeated and diligent application of lies against anyone who opposes them.
Who will speak out for you when they come to take you, if you do not speak out against them now?
Sincerely,
Sabina C. Becker
binabecker@sympatico.ca
Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:09:50 -0500
From: Sabina Becker binabecker@sympatico.ca
To: Editor@VHeadline.com
Subject: Right on target!
Just wanted to say your response to Aaron Schoeffler's letter criticizing Mary MacElveen and Oscar Heck was dead-on. If anyone doesn't like what or how those two write, well -- it's labeled as such on the front page, and he doesn't have to read. It shouldn't impair his enjoyment of the rest of the site -- should it?
It certainly doesn't bother me! In fact, their articles are the ones I am most likely to pass along to my friends, because they are so wonderfully frank about what is really going on, whether in Mary's America or Oscar's Venezuela.
I appreciate their honesty and think it's time we saw more, not less, of the same elsewhere in the media. And I say this as one who has studied journalism at university!
Why does anyone believe there is such a thing as "objective" news reporting when a cursory look at history will confirm that it has never even existed?
Even the overtly right-wing FOX News has the gall to pass itself off as "fair and balanced," which it is not.
And if that doesn't drag the discourse down into the realm of the ridiculous, I don't know what does. Already the damage has been done: The mainstream media, trying hard to outdo FOX at its own dishonest game, has sunk beneath all credibility. Even the New York Times has had to admit that it has fallen victim to blatant BushCo lies!
Why, then, pretend that copying their bland style will guarantee objectivity? It does not; nothing does. So, why pretend?
Let me add that the Bush/Hitler comparison is not "devaluing the entire dialogue" at all, but rather, it is apt and accurate. Anyone who thinks otherwise should get his head out of the sand and look around; what he sees might just scare him if he were to look at it honestly.
My parents were children in Hitler's Germany, and my father (who is certainly no socialist) says Bush is not as bad as Hitler -- he's worse!
My dad may be mistaken about a number of things, but not about this one. Not all fascism marches around in jackboots and swastikas. I fear the other kind, the one that wears a bland, smiling face and moves by "moderate"-seeming increments.
Lest anyone forget, Hitler didn't seem so bad either -- at first. And the first people he massacred were not Jews, but the socialists and democrats who were his primary opposition. The death camps could never have been built without an atmosphere of cowed silence and false smiles pervading all of Germany for several years first.
And what is there now in America, which I recently visited, if not an atmosphere of cowed silence and false smiles?
"We have to support the president, it's a time of war!" seems to be the prevailing mentality. It is as though the very act of dissent is now treason. And when I hear that the Bush administration has even spied on the peaceful, history-honored Quakers under the pretext of looking for "terrorists," what else is there to assume but that fascism has descended on America in earnest?
Nowadays, by muzzling the media into not reporting or publishing anything too "controversial" (read: HONEST), the job gets done even without midnight "disappearances" of socialists and democrats.
Between media dishonesty and administration espionage, it is to be expected that the opposition simply dries up because its voice is taken away and no one finds it worthwhile to speak out against fascism anymore. It's too scary; you could get spied on. You could get arrested. You could "disappear."
And then, Pastor Niemoeller's famous poem once again comes true.
Only a repeated and diligent application of truth can stop the fascists. After all, they don't scruple to use a repeated and diligent application of lies against anyone who opposes them.
Who will speak out for you when they come to take you, if you do not speak out against them now?
Sincerely,
Sabina C. Becker
binabecker@sympatico.ca
Bolivia tras nacionalización de hidrocarburos
Bolivia tras nacionalización de hidrocarburos
LA PAZ, 2 may (PL).— Bolivia parece entrar hoy en una nueva etapa de su historia, con sus campos petroleros, gasoductos, refinerías y hasta gasolineras bajo control militar y todavía estremecida por la nacionalización de los hidrocarburos.
La toma de las instalaciones explotadas por las transnacionales fue ordenada por el presidente Evo Morales, ante posibles sabotajes, al firmar ayer el decreto de nacionalización, abriendo una intensa jornada de júbilo patriótico masivo.
El mandatario llamó anoche a las transnacionales petroleras a acatar la nacionalización de los hidrocarburos, y dijo a las empresas que amenazan con dejar de invertir en Bolivia, "que se vayan".
Agregó que las compañías serán bienvenidas si aceptan someterse a la voluntad soberana del pueblo y subordinarse a las leyes y la Constitución de Bolivia y al decreto de nacionalización.
La medida eleva de 50 a 82 por ciento la participación boliviana en el valor de la producción de los principales pozos productores de gas, y obliga a las empresas a entregar toda su producción al Estado, que controlará su producción, comercialización e industrialización.
También recupera el manejo estatal de cinco empresas privatizadas —dos productoras, una de ductos, una de refinerías y una de logística— mediante la asignación o expropiación de acciones para que la empresa Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) tenga la mayoría accionaria.
Morales admitió que las empresas que han invertido tienen derecho a recuperar sus capitales, pero si no aceptan las nuevas reglas, "mejor que se vayan".
Al subrayar que la medida es apenas el comienzo, adelantó que se proyecta poner en marcha a fines de mayo programas de industrialzación del gas en territorio boliviano.
Prometió también que a la nacionalización de los hidrocarburos se sumará la de la minería, los recursos forestales y todas las riquezas nacionales.
Agregó que está en preparación un paquete de decretos para solucionar el problema de la tierra, planteado por grandes latifundistas que retienen ilegalmente parcelas que los campesinos pobres reclaman para trabajar.
Apuntó que la medida responde a la voluntad del pueblo que votó por él mayoritariamente en diciembre pasado.
El jefe de Estado llamó a la unidad nacional en defensa de la nacionalización, frente a previsibles conspiraciones de algunas transnacionales petroleras.
Washington's anemic and pathetic press corps, and other dirt
While Washington's anemic and pathetic press corps "wooed and wowed" Saturday night at the collection of 2700 Hollywood glitterati and the Beltway's political punditocracy, literati, and lobbying and business elite at the annual navel gazing and self-indulgent White House Correspondents Dinner, serious investigative journalists have been delving into the numerous burgeoning GOP scandals bubbling under the Beltway.
The mainstream media is finally reporting that Valerie Plame Wilson's Brewster Jennings covert CIA team was actively pursuing nuclear component shipments by the Pakistani A Q Khan network to Iran at the time the Bush White House revealed her identity and that of her team. This was previously reported in depth by WMR. The usual press gaggle will be camped outside the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington tomorrow -- since it is expected the grand jury in Leakgate will be meeting -- awaiting possible developments in the Karl Rove case. WMR will be present.
The same type of real estate deal that helped convict former GOP Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham may surround a questionable Alexandria, Virginia real estate swap involving Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman GOP Sen. John Warner of Virginia. WMR is investigating several leads.
Ed. note: Yesterday, WMR was warned by a reliable European source that there was unusual access activity detected regarding our web site. Fifteen minutes later, our server, which also supports other web sites, temporarily went down. But we have the identity of the source of the unusual access activity: the US Army's 5th Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany. Two component activities of the 5th Signal Command -- the 2nd and 7th Signal Brigades -- appear to be involved in information warfare operations and influence operations. Note to 5th Signal Command operators: by hacking into U.S. computers protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you are in potential violation of Federal law (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Section 1030, US Code, Fraud and related activity in connection with computers). If your Commanding Officer, Brig. Gen. Dennis Via, authorizes such illegal hacking, he is in violation of the law and it is your duty, pursuant to Army and DoD regulations, not to obey such illegal orders and report them to the Army Inspector General -- 1-(800) 752-9747, 1-(703) 601-1060 or DSN: 329-1060.
As for yesterday's immigrant boycott, it was huge and very successful and there were more American flags than Mexican flags. But what is all the hypocritical garbage from the right about Mexican and other Latin American flags at the pro-immigration rallies? How come they never complain about Italian, Irish, and Israeli flags on America's streets? Racism, Hmmm???
The mainstream media is finally reporting that Valerie Plame Wilson's Brewster Jennings covert CIA team was actively pursuing nuclear component shipments by the Pakistani A Q Khan network to Iran at the time the Bush White House revealed her identity and that of her team. This was previously reported in depth by WMR. The usual press gaggle will be camped outside the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington tomorrow -- since it is expected the grand jury in Leakgate will be meeting -- awaiting possible developments in the Karl Rove case. WMR will be present.
The same type of real estate deal that helped convict former GOP Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham may surround a questionable Alexandria, Virginia real estate swap involving Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman GOP Sen. John Warner of Virginia. WMR is investigating several leads.
Ed. note: Yesterday, WMR was warned by a reliable European source that there was unusual access activity detected regarding our web site. Fifteen minutes later, our server, which also supports other web sites, temporarily went down. But we have the identity of the source of the unusual access activity: the US Army's 5th Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany. Two component activities of the 5th Signal Command -- the 2nd and 7th Signal Brigades -- appear to be involved in information warfare operations and influence operations. Note to 5th Signal Command operators: by hacking into U.S. computers protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you are in potential violation of Federal law (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Section 1030, US Code, Fraud and related activity in connection with computers). If your Commanding Officer, Brig. Gen. Dennis Via, authorizes such illegal hacking, he is in violation of the law and it is your duty, pursuant to Army and DoD regulations, not to obey such illegal orders and report them to the Army Inspector General -- 1-(800) 752-9747, 1-(703) 601-1060 or DSN: 329-1060.
As for yesterday's immigrant boycott, it was huge and very successful and there were more American flags than Mexican flags. But what is all the hypocritical garbage from the right about Mexican and other Latin American flags at the pro-immigration rallies? How come they never complain about Italian, Irish, and Israeli flags on America's streets? Racism, Hmmm???
Washington's anemic and pathetic press corps, and other dirt
While Washington's anemic and pathetic press corps "wooed and wowed" Saturday night at the collection of 2700 Hollywood glitterati and the Beltway's political punditocracy, literati, and lobbying and business elite at the annual navel gazing and self-indulgent White House Correspondents Dinner, serious investigative journalists have been delving into the numerous burgeoning GOP scandals bubbling under the Beltway.
The mainstream media is finally reporting that Valerie Plame Wilson's Brewster Jennings covert CIA team was actively pursuing nuclear component shipments by the Pakistani A Q Khan network to Iran at the time the Bush White House revealed her identity and that of her team. This was previously reported in depth by WMR. The usual press gaggle will be camped outside the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington tomorrow -- since it is expected the grand jury in Leakgate will be meeting -- awaiting possible developments in the Karl Rove case. WMR will be present.
The same type of real estate deal that helped convict former GOP Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham may surround a questionable Alexandria, Virginia real estate swap involving Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman GOP Sen. John Warner of Virginia. WMR is investigating several leads.
Ed. note: Yesterday, WMR was warned by a reliable European source that there was unusual access activity detected regarding our web site. Fifteen minutes later, our server, which also supports other web sites, temporarily went down. But we have the identity of the source of the unusual access activity: the US Army's 5th Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany. Two component activities of the 5th Signal Command -- the 2nd and 7th Signal Brigades -- appear to be involved in information warfare operations and influence operations. Note to 5th Signal Command operators: by hacking into U.S. computers protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you are in potential violation of Federal law (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Section 1030, US Code, Fraud and related activity in connection with computers). If your Commanding Officer, Brig. Gen. Dennis Via, authorizes such illegal hacking, he is in violation of the law and it is your duty, pursuant to Army and DoD regulations, not to obey such illegal orders and report them to the Army Inspector General -- 1-(800) 752-9747, 1-(703) 601-1060 or DSN: 329-1060.
As for yesterday's immigrant boycott, it was huge and very successful and there were more American flags than Mexican flags. But what is all the hypocritical garbage from the right about Mexican and other Latin American flags at the pro-immigration rallies? How come they never complain about Italian, Irish, and Israeli flags on America's streets? Racism, Hmmm???
The mainstream media is finally reporting that Valerie Plame Wilson's Brewster Jennings covert CIA team was actively pursuing nuclear component shipments by the Pakistani A Q Khan network to Iran at the time the Bush White House revealed her identity and that of her team. This was previously reported in depth by WMR. The usual press gaggle will be camped outside the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington tomorrow -- since it is expected the grand jury in Leakgate will be meeting -- awaiting possible developments in the Karl Rove case. WMR will be present.
The same type of real estate deal that helped convict former GOP Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham may surround a questionable Alexandria, Virginia real estate swap involving Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman GOP Sen. John Warner of Virginia. WMR is investigating several leads.
Ed. note: Yesterday, WMR was warned by a reliable European source that there was unusual access activity detected regarding our web site. Fifteen minutes later, our server, which also supports other web sites, temporarily went down. But we have the identity of the source of the unusual access activity: the US Army's 5th Signal Command in Mannheim, Germany. Two component activities of the 5th Signal Command -- the 2nd and 7th Signal Brigades -- appear to be involved in information warfare operations and influence operations. Note to 5th Signal Command operators: by hacking into U.S. computers protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, you are in potential violation of Federal law (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Section 1030, US Code, Fraud and related activity in connection with computers). If your Commanding Officer, Brig. Gen. Dennis Via, authorizes such illegal hacking, he is in violation of the law and it is your duty, pursuant to Army and DoD regulations, not to obey such illegal orders and report them to the Army Inspector General -- 1-(800) 752-9747, 1-(703) 601-1060 or DSN: 329-1060.
As for yesterday's immigrant boycott, it was huge and very successful and there were more American flags than Mexican flags. But what is all the hypocritical garbage from the right about Mexican and other Latin American flags at the pro-immigration rallies? How come they never complain about Italian, Irish, and Israeli flags on America's streets? Racism, Hmmm???
Gobierno de Evo Morales nacionalizó los hidrocarburos
Gobierno de Evo Morales nacionalizó los hidrocarburos
Al pie del pozo de San Alberto ubicado en el municipio de Caraparí, departamento de Tarija, Evo Morales estampó su firma en el Decreto Supremo 28701, “Héroes del Chaco” que nacionaliza los hidrocarburos.
“Esta es la hora de la tercera y definitiva nacionalización de los hidrocarburos, antes nuestra patria nacionalizó los pozos petroleros explotados por la Standard y por la Gulf Oil, ahora se recuperan las riquezas naturales en manos de las empresas transnacionales, se acabó la ley de capitalización de los gobiernos que entregaron nuestros recursos, ahora recuperamos la soberanía del país”, enfatizó Evo Morales, acompañado por su gabinete de ministros y representantes de los movimientos sociales tarijeños.
Al momento de firmar el decreto y en cumplimiento de sus disposiciones, las fuerzas armadas y la policía nacional han ocupado 52 estaciones hidro-carburíferas en todo el país, las mismas que pasan a ser propiedad de los bolivianos y estarán bajo administración de Yacimientos Petrolíferos Bolivianos (YPFB).
Todas las decisiones para Bolivia
Los volúmenes, precios, comercialización, industrialización y destinos del petróleo, gas y derivados serán decididos por YPFB. Morales hizo un llamado al personal boliviano que trabaja para las empresas transnacionales a sumarse a esta decisión y apoyar en la refundación de la empresa estatal. Asimismo convocó a las empresas para que se adecúen a las decisiones soberanas del gobierno, señalando expresamente que si no lo hacen, la nación boliviana hará el uso de la fuerza. Invocó el derecho que le corresponde a los estados de recuperar y disponer sus riquezas naturales en virtud de pactos y acuerdos internacionales que así lo señalan.
El Decreto de nacionalización otorga un plazo de 180 días para que las empresas extranjeras que operan en Bolivia suscriban nuevos contratos petroleros sobre la base de una participación de 82% para el Estado boliviano. De tal manera se revierte la distribución impuesta por el neoliberalismo que más bien otorgó el 82% para las empresas y sólo el 18% para el Estado boliviano. A partir de la fecha las transnacionales deben entregar toda su producción a YPFB.
La Paz y todo el país se suman a los festejos
En las ciudades de El Alto y La Paz, multitudes de ciudadanos detuvieron el festejo por el 1º de Mayo y entonaron el himno nacional. El Vicepresidente, Alvaro García Linera desde palacio de gobierno, llamó a la movilización de todos los bolivianos, “en esta medida tenemos que jugarnos la vida los bolivianos, tenemos que defenderla, no vamos aceptar presión de ninguna empresa, gobierno o traidor, la patria renace y con esta decisión honramos a nuestros muertos, y defenderemos la soberanía de los bolivianos”.
La población se mantiene expectante y espera el retorno de Evo Morales a la ciudad de La Paz.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Bolivia Nationalizes Natural Gas Sector and Bolivia's military takes control of gas fields
LA PAZ, Bolivia, May 1 (Reuters) - Bolivian President Evo Morales ordered the military to occupy the country's natural gas fields on Monday after nationalizing the energy sector and threatening to expel foreign companies if they do not sign new contracts within six months.
Impoverished Bolivia has the second-largest natural gas reserves in South America after Venezuela, and the question of how the country should manage these riches has been at the heart of several popular revolts since 2003.
Morales became president in January on vows to exert more state control over the country's natural resources, reflecting a growing backlash against free markets and foreign investment in Latin America. Radical leftists recently complained that he had made little progress on this front.
The president chose Labor Day, May 1, to announce the sector's nationalization, which stipulates companies will have to leave the country unless they sign contracts recognizing the new state control of the fields.
"We are not a government of mere promises: we follow through on what we propose and what the people demand," Morales said after signing a nationalization decree at the San Alberto field, operated by Brazil's state-owned Petrobras (PETR4.SA: Quote, Profile, Research) (PBR.N: Quote, Profile, Research) in the southeastern province of Tarija.
"We want to ask (the Armed Forces) that starting now, they occupy all the energy fields in Bolivia along with battalions of engineers," Morales said.
Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia said officials from state energy company YPFB and the military began taking control of dozens of energy installations -- including gas fields, pipelines and refineries -- after Morales signed the document.
At a Labor Day celebration in La Paz's main plaza attended by a large crowd, Garcia said the government's energy-related revenue will jump to $780 million next year, expanding nearly sixfold from 2002.
Morales had promised to nationalize the gas sector even during his campaign but repeatedly said he would not expropriate foreign companies' assets.
Bolivia's actions echo what Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a Morales ally, did in the world's fifth-largest oil exporter with forced contract migrations and retroactive tax hikes -- conditions that oil majors largely agreed to accept.
"This is a continuation of the trend towards increasingly aggressive resource nationalization that we have seen across many countries in Latin America, starting in Venezuela," said energy analyst Antoine Halff of Fimat.
"The measure is in line with the populist tone of the new regime in Bolivia; however how it is carried out in practice still seems somewhat unclear," Halff added.
FROM OWNERS TO OPERATORS
Morales read aloud the government decree, which said that "the state recovers ownership, possession and total and absolute control" of hydrocarbons.
This means the state will own these resources and take charge of their sale, relegating foreign companies to operators. Previously, Bolivian law said the state no longer owned the gas once companies extracted it from underground.
YPFB will pay foreign companies for their services, offering about 50 percent of the value of production, although the decree indicated that companies at the country's two largest gas fields would get just 18 percent.
In the new operating contracts, Bolivia will have to give some incentives to foreign companies to keep investing. YPFB alone has no way of financing the development of gas fields.
Top investors in Bolivia's gas sector include Petrobras, Spain's Repsol YPF (REP.MC: Quote, Profile, Research), UK gas and oil producer BG Group Plc (BG.L: Quote, Profile, Research) and France's Total (TOTF.PA: Quote, Profile, Research).
Spain's foreign ministry said on Monday it was deeply concerned about Bolivia's moves. Repsol said it was too early to evaluate the decree and a Total spokeswoman also said it was too early to comment.
In Brazil, Petrobras officials could not be reached for comment on Monday, a national holiday, although the country's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva planned to meet with senior politicians and energy officials on Tuesday to discuss the move.
BG officials were also unavailable for immediate comment.
Last year, Bolivia's Congress passed an energy law that added a 32 percent tax on production to an already-existing 18 percent royalty. It also required that companies renegotiate their contracts with the state.
South America's poorest nation, Bolivia has natural gas reserves of some 48.7 trillion cubic feet. Foreign oil companies have invested more than $3 billion in the last decade, much of it in exploration.
Fresh investment in Bolivia has stalled due to the legal changes and political turmoil that toppled two governments in as many years. The unrest was partly driven by social groups calling for the nationalization of gas reserves.
Bolivia exports most of its natural gas to Argentina and Brazil, with whom the government is negotiating higher prices.
Impoverished Bolivia has the second-largest natural gas reserves in South America after Venezuela, and the question of how the country should manage these riches has been at the heart of several popular revolts since 2003.
Morales became president in January on vows to exert more state control over the country's natural resources, reflecting a growing backlash against free markets and foreign investment in Latin America. Radical leftists recently complained that he had made little progress on this front.
The president chose Labor Day, May 1, to announce the sector's nationalization, which stipulates companies will have to leave the country unless they sign contracts recognizing the new state control of the fields.
"We are not a government of mere promises: we follow through on what we propose and what the people demand," Morales said after signing a nationalization decree at the San Alberto field, operated by Brazil's state-owned Petrobras (PETR4.SA: Quote, Profile, Research) (PBR.N: Quote, Profile, Research) in the southeastern province of Tarija.
"We want to ask (the Armed Forces) that starting now, they occupy all the energy fields in Bolivia along with battalions of engineers," Morales said.
Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia said officials from state energy company YPFB and the military began taking control of dozens of energy installations -- including gas fields, pipelines and refineries -- after Morales signed the document.
At a Labor Day celebration in La Paz's main plaza attended by a large crowd, Garcia said the government's energy-related revenue will jump to $780 million next year, expanding nearly sixfold from 2002.
Morales had promised to nationalize the gas sector even during his campaign but repeatedly said he would not expropriate foreign companies' assets.
Bolivia's actions echo what Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a Morales ally, did in the world's fifth-largest oil exporter with forced contract migrations and retroactive tax hikes -- conditions that oil majors largely agreed to accept.
"This is a continuation of the trend towards increasingly aggressive resource nationalization that we have seen across many countries in Latin America, starting in Venezuela," said energy analyst Antoine Halff of Fimat.
"The measure is in line with the populist tone of the new regime in Bolivia; however how it is carried out in practice still seems somewhat unclear," Halff added.
FROM OWNERS TO OPERATORS
Morales read aloud the government decree, which said that "the state recovers ownership, possession and total and absolute control" of hydrocarbons.
This means the state will own these resources and take charge of their sale, relegating foreign companies to operators. Previously, Bolivian law said the state no longer owned the gas once companies extracted it from underground.
YPFB will pay foreign companies for their services, offering about 50 percent of the value of production, although the decree indicated that companies at the country's two largest gas fields would get just 18 percent.
In the new operating contracts, Bolivia will have to give some incentives to foreign companies to keep investing. YPFB alone has no way of financing the development of gas fields.
Top investors in Bolivia's gas sector include Petrobras, Spain's Repsol YPF (REP.MC: Quote, Profile, Research), UK gas and oil producer BG Group Plc (BG.L: Quote, Profile, Research) and France's Total (TOTF.PA: Quote, Profile, Research).
Spain's foreign ministry said on Monday it was deeply concerned about Bolivia's moves. Repsol said it was too early to evaluate the decree and a Total spokeswoman also said it was too early to comment.
In Brazil, Petrobras officials could not be reached for comment on Monday, a national holiday, although the country's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva planned to meet with senior politicians and energy officials on Tuesday to discuss the move.
BG officials were also unavailable for immediate comment.
Last year, Bolivia's Congress passed an energy law that added a 32 percent tax on production to an already-existing 18 percent royalty. It also required that companies renegotiate their contracts with the state.
South America's poorest nation, Bolivia has natural gas reserves of some 48.7 trillion cubic feet. Foreign oil companies have invested more than $3 billion in the last decade, much of it in exploration.
Fresh investment in Bolivia has stalled due to the legal changes and political turmoil that toppled two governments in as many years. The unrest was partly driven by social groups calling for the nationalization of gas reserves.
Bolivia exports most of its natural gas to Argentina and Brazil, with whom the government is negotiating higher prices.
How to spot a terrorist
I really had no idea how to spot a terrorist until I studied the manuals published by the Phoenix FBI, the state employees of Virginia, and the Texas Department of Public Safety. Now that I have absorbed these manuals, I not only know how to spot a terrorist, but I have discovered that I probably am a terrorist.
The Phoenix FBI manual was published while Clinton was still president. The Joint Terrorism Task Force was formed to "help preserve the American way of life." Its flyer requested that citizens contact the task force if they saw any of the following:
On to Virginia...This manual tells us to beware of the following people:
The Phoenix FBI manual was published while Clinton was still president. The Joint Terrorism Task Force was formed to "help preserve the American way of life." Its flyer requested that citizens contact the task force if they saw any of the following:
Defenders of the U.S. Constitution against federal government and the UNThe Phoenix Sheriff's Office did not care for the flyer, and it had a short life.
Groups of individuals engaging in para-military training
Those who make numerous references to the U.S. Constitution
Those who attempt to police the police
Lone individuals
Rebels
On to Virginia...This manual tells us to beware of the following people:
Members of anti-government and militia movementsAccording to the authorities in Virginia, terrorists stand out in the crowd because of the stuff they carry:
Property rights activists
Members of racist, separatist, and hate groups
Environmental and animal rights activists
Religious extremists
Members of street gangs
Sketch pads or notebooksAnd finally, there's Texas, whose manual shares with us some characteristics of terrorists:
Maps or charts
Still or video cameras
Hand-held tape recorders
SCUBA equipment
disguises
Focused and committedWell, there you are. Could someone pick you out of the crowd as a terrorist? As an emailing, camera-toting, focused and committed animal rights activist who sometimes looks like a businesswoman, frequently references the Constitution, and still has some leftover costumes from my years in New Orleans, I'm as good as gone.
Team-oriented and disciplined
Familiar with their physical environments
Employ a variety of vehicles and communicate by cell phone, email, or text messaging
Try not to draw attention to themselves
Look like students, tourists, or businesspersons
Travel in a mixed group of men, women, and children
Avoid confrontations with law enforcement
Use disguises or undergo cosmetic surgery
Bush, accomplice to terrorists
CUBAN President Fidel Castro today accused U.S. President George W. Bush of complicity with international terrorists.
Speaking in front of some one million people gathered in the Plaza de la Revolucion for the country’s main May Day event, the Cuban leader referred to the protection that Washington gives to the authors of monstrous crimes against Cuba and other countries in Latin America and the world.
As evidence of this type of alliance with terrorists, Fidel pointed to official acknowledgement of FBI and CIA ties to the operation for illegally bringing into the United States international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, along with the protection he is given.
These facts have been repeatedly exposed by the Cuban government, denied by U.S. authorities and now acknowledged by the Attorney General, immigration authorities and other government agencies, and revealed by the U.S. media itself.
Posada Carriles continued to enjoy privileges while thousands of illegal immigrants are prosecuted, jailed and sent back to their native lands, in the midst of the largest political mobilization by Latinos in recent decades, Fidel added.
He noted that an article published by Mexican daily Por Esto accuses that country’s federal authorities of supporting Posada’s transfer to the United States, calling into question Washington’s credibility – “if it still has any.”
Later, he emphasized that the recent detention in Los Angeles of Cuban-born terrorist Robert Ferro, who was hiding 1,571 weapons in his house, made it possible to learn – through his confession – of his ties to the organization Alpha 66, and how some of those weapons were provided by the U.S. government itself.
The Cuban president recalled that those events cannot be considered separately from the military maneuvers being carried out at this time in the Caribbean by one of the most modern U.S. aircraft carrier ships, with dozens and dozens of sophisticated planes and even a nuclear submarine, with missiles and equipment capable of destroying communications.
Ferro had as many weapons as those brought to Cuba by the 1,500 mercenaries during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 under the protection of a U.S. squadron, including an aircraft carrier and a good number of Marines, the Cuban president noted.
“It’s been a while since they’ve gone around with that garbage, but they are ignoring the people, the masses, the laws of a society and the laws of a Revolution,” Fidel affirmed, in response to those threats.
Continuing his accusations regarding the close and historical relationship between the White House and terrorists, he mentioned how that policy was carried out through a large number of pirate attacks, hijackings of fishing boats, infiltrations and countless attempts to assassinate him.
He described Alpha 66 as one of the most dangerous and active Miami-based terrorist organizations in 45 years, also linked to the criminal crusade dubbed Operation Condor, via which assassinations were carried out, like those of Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and democratic military officers Carlos Pratts of Chile and Juan José Torres of Bolivia.
“Neither oceans nor borders limited their criminal activities, as was demonstrated by the blowing-up of a Cubana Aviation plane over Barbados, and what is important is their relationship to the Bush family, Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles,” he added.
Fidel Castro said that meanwhile, the United States is cynically accusing President Hugo Chávez and Cuba of being terrorists.
Speaking in front of some one million people gathered in the Plaza de la Revolucion for the country’s main May Day event, the Cuban leader referred to the protection that Washington gives to the authors of monstrous crimes against Cuba and other countries in Latin America and the world.
As evidence of this type of alliance with terrorists, Fidel pointed to official acknowledgement of FBI and CIA ties to the operation for illegally bringing into the United States international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, along with the protection he is given.
These facts have been repeatedly exposed by the Cuban government, denied by U.S. authorities and now acknowledged by the Attorney General, immigration authorities and other government agencies, and revealed by the U.S. media itself.
Posada Carriles continued to enjoy privileges while thousands of illegal immigrants are prosecuted, jailed and sent back to their native lands, in the midst of the largest political mobilization by Latinos in recent decades, Fidel added.
He noted that an article published by Mexican daily Por Esto accuses that country’s federal authorities of supporting Posada’s transfer to the United States, calling into question Washington’s credibility – “if it still has any.”
Later, he emphasized that the recent detention in Los Angeles of Cuban-born terrorist Robert Ferro, who was hiding 1,571 weapons in his house, made it possible to learn – through his confession – of his ties to the organization Alpha 66, and how some of those weapons were provided by the U.S. government itself.
The Cuban president recalled that those events cannot be considered separately from the military maneuvers being carried out at this time in the Caribbean by one of the most modern U.S. aircraft carrier ships, with dozens and dozens of sophisticated planes and even a nuclear submarine, with missiles and equipment capable of destroying communications.
Ferro had as many weapons as those brought to Cuba by the 1,500 mercenaries during the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 under the protection of a U.S. squadron, including an aircraft carrier and a good number of Marines, the Cuban president noted.
“It’s been a while since they’ve gone around with that garbage, but they are ignoring the people, the masses, the laws of a society and the laws of a Revolution,” Fidel affirmed, in response to those threats.
Continuing his accusations regarding the close and historical relationship between the White House and terrorists, he mentioned how that policy was carried out through a large number of pirate attacks, hijackings of fishing boats, infiltrations and countless attempts to assassinate him.
He described Alpha 66 as one of the most dangerous and active Miami-based terrorist organizations in 45 years, also linked to the criminal crusade dubbed Operation Condor, via which assassinations were carried out, like those of Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and democratic military officers Carlos Pratts of Chile and Juan José Torres of Bolivia.
“Neither oceans nor borders limited their criminal activities, as was demonstrated by the blowing-up of a Cubana Aviation plane over Barbados, and what is important is their relationship to the Bush family, Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles,” he added.
Fidel Castro said that meanwhile, the United States is cynically accusing President Hugo Chávez and Cuba of being terrorists.
Evo Morales (Bolivia) Nationalizes Natural Gas Industry
LA PAZ, Bolivia - President Evo Morales nationalized Bolivia's natural gas industry and oil Monday, ordering foreign energy companies to send their supplies to a state company for sales and industrialization.
Speaking at the San Alberto gas and oil field in the south of the country, Morales warned that companies that reject the decree will have to leave Bolivia within six months.
The main oil companies operating in Bolivia are Brazil's Petrobras, the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF, British companies British Gas and British Petroleum and Total of France.
"The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources," Morales said from the facility, which is operated by Petrobras in association with Repsol.
After the president spoke, a soldier unfurled a Bolivian flag from atop the installation.
Morales also said the state would retake control of Bolivian hydrocarbons companies that were privatized in the 1990s, with the state taking over shares in the hands of foreign companies and of semipublic Bolivian entities.
He said all the companies must turn their production over to the state's Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos, which was privatized in 1996 and 1997.
Speaking at the San Alberto gas and oil field in the south of the country, Morales warned that companies that reject the decree will have to leave Bolivia within six months.
The main oil companies operating in Bolivia are Brazil's Petrobras, the Spanish-Argentine company Repsol YPF, British companies British Gas and British Petroleum and Total of France.
"The time has come, the awaited day, a historic day in which Bolivia retakes absolute control of our natural resources," Morales said from the facility, which is operated by Petrobras in association with Repsol.
After the president spoke, a soldier unfurled a Bolivian flag from atop the installation.
Morales also said the state would retake control of Bolivian hydrocarbons companies that were privatized in the 1990s, with the state taking over shares in the hands of foreign companies and of semipublic Bolivian entities.
He said all the companies must turn their production over to the state's Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos, which was privatized in 1996 and 1997.
The Second Founding of Bolivia by Eduardo Galeano
On the 22nd of January of the year 2002, Evo was expelled from Paradise. In other words: Deputy Morales was ejected from the Parliament.
On the 22nd of January of the year 2006, in the same hall of pomposity, Evo Morales was consecrated President of Bolivia.
In other words: Bolivia begins to discover that it is a country of an indigenous majority.
At the time of the expulsion, an Indian deputy was rarer than a green dog.
Four years later, many are the legislators who chew coca, a millennial custom which was prohibited in the sacred parliamentary space.
Long before the expulsion of Evo, his people, the indigenous, had already been expelled from the official nation. They were not children of Bolivia: they were merely its hands. Until a little more than half a century ago, the Indians could not vote or walk on the sidewalks of its cities.
With good reason, Evo said, in his first presidential address, that the Indians were not invited, in 1825, to the founding of Bolivia.
That is also the history of all America, including the United States. Our nations were born all false. The independence of the American countries was from the beginning usurped by a very minor minority.
All the first constitutions, without exception, left out women, the indigenous, Blacks, and the poor in general.
The election of Evo Morales is, at least in this sense, equivalent to the election of Michelle Bachelet. Evo and Eva. For the first time an indigenous president in Bolivia, for the first time a woman president in Chile. And the same could be said of Brazil, where for the first time the Minister of Culture is Black. Doesn't the culture that has saved Brazil from sadness have African roots?
In these lands, sick with racism and machismo, there will be some who believe that all this is a scandal.
What is scandalous is that it had not happened earlier.
The mask falls, the face appears, and the tempest roars.
The only language worthy of faith is the language born of the necessity to speak. The gravest flaw of Evo is that people believe him, because he conveys authenticity even when, speaking Castellano [Spanish], which is not his mother tongue, he makes some minor error. The doctors who are masters of echoing others' voices accuse him of ignorance. The peddlers of promises accuse him of demagogy. Those who imposed a single God, a single king, and a single truth in America accuse him of caudillismo. And the assassins of Indians tremble in panic, fearful that their victims will be like them.
Bolivia seemed to be no more than the pseudonym of those who ruled Bolivia and squeezed it out even as they sang its national anthem. And the humiliation of the Indians, made customary, seemed a destiny.
But in the most recent times, months, years, this country lived in a perpetual state of popular insurrection. This process of continuous uprisings, which left a trail of dead, culminated in the gas war, but the process had begun long ago. It had existed long before the recent uprisings and it continued after them, until the election of Evo against all odds.
An old history of treasures plundered for more than four centuries, since the middle of the sixteenth century, was being repeated in the case of Bolivian gas:
the silver of Potosí left a barren mountain,
the saltpeter of the Pacific coast left a map without a sea,
the tin of Oruro left a multitude of widows.
That, and only that, they left.
The people who rose up in the last several years got riddled with bullets, but they prevented the gas from evaporating into the hands of others,
unprivatized the water in Cochabamba and La Paz,
overthrew governments governed from abroad,
and said no to the income tax and other wise orders from the International Monetary Fund.
From the point of view of the civilized media of communication, these explosions of popular dignity were acts of barbarism. A thousand times I have seen, read, heard it: Bolivia is an incomprehensible country, ungovernable, intractable, unviable. The journalists who say it and repeat it are mistaken: they should confess that Bolivia is, for them, an invisible country.
That is not remarkable. That blindness is not only a bad custom of arrogant foreigners. Bolivia was born blind to itself, because racism spins a web that covers the eyes, and there is certainly no lack of Bolivians who prefer to see themselves through the eyes that despise them.
But there must be a reason why the indigenous flag of the Andes pays homage to the diversity of the world. According to tradition, it's a flag born of the mating of the female rainbow with the male rainbow. And this earthly rainbow, which in the native tongue is called the flaming cloth of blood, has more colors than the rainbow in the sky.
On the 22nd of January of the year 2006, in the same hall of pomposity, Evo Morales was consecrated President of Bolivia.
In other words: Bolivia begins to discover that it is a country of an indigenous majority.
At the time of the expulsion, an Indian deputy was rarer than a green dog.
Four years later, many are the legislators who chew coca, a millennial custom which was prohibited in the sacred parliamentary space.
Long before the expulsion of Evo, his people, the indigenous, had already been expelled from the official nation. They were not children of Bolivia: they were merely its hands. Until a little more than half a century ago, the Indians could not vote or walk on the sidewalks of its cities.
With good reason, Evo said, in his first presidential address, that the Indians were not invited, in 1825, to the founding of Bolivia.
That is also the history of all America, including the United States. Our nations were born all false. The independence of the American countries was from the beginning usurped by a very minor minority.
All the first constitutions, without exception, left out women, the indigenous, Blacks, and the poor in general.
The election of Evo Morales is, at least in this sense, equivalent to the election of Michelle Bachelet. Evo and Eva. For the first time an indigenous president in Bolivia, for the first time a woman president in Chile. And the same could be said of Brazil, where for the first time the Minister of Culture is Black. Doesn't the culture that has saved Brazil from sadness have African roots?
In these lands, sick with racism and machismo, there will be some who believe that all this is a scandal.
What is scandalous is that it had not happened earlier.
The mask falls, the face appears, and the tempest roars.
The only language worthy of faith is the language born of the necessity to speak. The gravest flaw of Evo is that people believe him, because he conveys authenticity even when, speaking Castellano [Spanish], which is not his mother tongue, he makes some minor error. The doctors who are masters of echoing others' voices accuse him of ignorance. The peddlers of promises accuse him of demagogy. Those who imposed a single God, a single king, and a single truth in America accuse him of caudillismo. And the assassins of Indians tremble in panic, fearful that their victims will be like them.
Bolivia seemed to be no more than the pseudonym of those who ruled Bolivia and squeezed it out even as they sang its national anthem. And the humiliation of the Indians, made customary, seemed a destiny.
But in the most recent times, months, years, this country lived in a perpetual state of popular insurrection. This process of continuous uprisings, which left a trail of dead, culminated in the gas war, but the process had begun long ago. It had existed long before the recent uprisings and it continued after them, until the election of Evo against all odds.
An old history of treasures plundered for more than four centuries, since the middle of the sixteenth century, was being repeated in the case of Bolivian gas:
the silver of Potosí left a barren mountain,
the saltpeter of the Pacific coast left a map without a sea,
the tin of Oruro left a multitude of widows.
That, and only that, they left.
The people who rose up in the last several years got riddled with bullets, but they prevented the gas from evaporating into the hands of others,
unprivatized the water in Cochabamba and La Paz,
overthrew governments governed from abroad,
and said no to the income tax and other wise orders from the International Monetary Fund.
From the point of view of the civilized media of communication, these explosions of popular dignity were acts of barbarism. A thousand times I have seen, read, heard it: Bolivia is an incomprehensible country, ungovernable, intractable, unviable. The journalists who say it and repeat it are mistaken: they should confess that Bolivia is, for them, an invisible country.
That is not remarkable. That blindness is not only a bad custom of arrogant foreigners. Bolivia was born blind to itself, because racism spins a web that covers the eyes, and there is certainly no lack of Bolivians who prefer to see themselves through the eyes that despise them.
But there must be a reason why the indigenous flag of the Andes pays homage to the diversity of the world. According to tradition, it's a flag born of the mating of the female rainbow with the male rainbow. And this earthly rainbow, which in the native tongue is called the flaming cloth of blood, has more colors than the rainbow in the sky.
Slicing Away Liberty: 1933 Germany, 2006 America By Bernard Weiner
I must confess that I'm utterly baffled by the lack of sustained, organized outrage and opposition from Democratic officials and ordinary citizens at the Bush Administration's never-ending scandals, corruptions, war-initiations, and the amassing of more and more police-state power into their hands.
And so, facing little effective opposition, the Bush juggernaut continues on its rampage. How to explain this? Certainly, one could point to a deficient mass-media, to the soporific drug of TV, to having to work so hard that for many there's no time for activism, to education aimed at taking tests and not how to think, to the residual fear-fallout from 9/11, to a penchant for fantasy over reality, to the timid and unimaginative Democratic leadership, to scandal-fatigue, etc. But I would suggest that even more disturbing answers can be found by examining recent history.
Just so nobody misunderstands what follows: I am not saying that George W. Bush is Adolf Hitler, or that the rest of his Administration crew are Nazis. What I am saying is that since history often is opaque (making it difficult to figure out the contemporary parallels), when the past does offer a clear lesson for those of us living today, we should pay special attention.
What happened in Germany in the 1920s and '30s can teach us much about how a nation in a few years can lose its freedom in incremental slices as a result of a drumbeat of never-ceasing propaganda, strong-arm tactics, government snooping and harassment, manufactured fear of "the other," and wars begun abroad with the accompanying rally-'round-the-flag patriotism.
And so, facing little effective opposition, the Bush juggernaut continues on its rampage. How to explain this? Certainly, one could point to a deficient mass-media, to the soporific drug of TV, to having to work so hard that for many there's no time for activism, to education aimed at taking tests and not how to think, to the residual fear-fallout from 9/11, to a penchant for fantasy over reality, to the timid and unimaginative Democratic leadership, to scandal-fatigue, etc. But I would suggest that even more disturbing answers can be found by examining recent history.
Just so nobody misunderstands what follows: I am not saying that George W. Bush is Adolf Hitler, or that the rest of his Administration crew are Nazis. What I am saying is that since history often is opaque (making it difficult to figure out the contemporary parallels), when the past does offer a clear lesson for those of us living today, we should pay special attention.
What happened in Germany in the 1920s and '30s can teach us much about how a nation in a few years can lose its freedom in incremental slices as a result of a drumbeat of never-ceasing propaganda, strong-arm tactics, government snooping and harassment, manufactured fear of "the other," and wars begun abroad with the accompanying rally-'round-the-flag patriotism.
SUBVERSIVE OIL
Below I am posting an article called "Subversive Oil" by Bernard Mommer. It is a fairly long article and possibly not everyone will read it in its entirety. However, it is a very important article that explains not only why oil is so central to the ongoing battle between Venezuela and parts of the industrialized world (principly the U.S.) but why oil is so central to the bitter internal fight between the the government of Hugo Chavez and those opposed to him.
At every step of the battle between Chavez and his opponents, the Venezuelan state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, has been in the forefront. Those who led PDVSA up until recently have been radically opposed to the Chavez government even going so far as refusing state control of their company and leading several oil production shutdowns, one of which coincided with the April 2002 coup against the government and another of which also sought Chavez's ouster.
Ultimately, Chavez won this confrontation and he has been successful in asserting control over the oil industry - much to the chagrin of the old management which is now unemployed and to the foreign oil companies which have lost a number of very favorable deals they used to enjoy. With the end of the conflict it is easy to forget what a central role the fight over oil policy played in creating an opposition movement to Chavez and its even easier to forget what what it was that brought the conflict about. While Chavez has consistently supported participation in OPEC to seak higher prices and maximizing government revenues from oil to fund social and development programs PDVSA's management had completely different ideas. They wanted to ignore OPEC, maximize production, minimize payments to the government and construct as large and independant of an oil company as possible. This clash of ideas brought about a serious conflict that dominated the first 5 years of the Chavez administration. The excellent article by Mommer, written in 2002, gives the best explanation of the origins of this conflict I have ever seen. So here it is (with key passages bolded - ow):
At every step of the battle between Chavez and his opponents, the Venezuelan state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, has been in the forefront. Those who led PDVSA up until recently have been radically opposed to the Chavez government even going so far as refusing state control of their company and leading several oil production shutdowns, one of which coincided with the April 2002 coup against the government and another of which also sought Chavez's ouster.
Ultimately, Chavez won this confrontation and he has been successful in asserting control over the oil industry - much to the chagrin of the old management which is now unemployed and to the foreign oil companies which have lost a number of very favorable deals they used to enjoy. With the end of the conflict it is easy to forget what a central role the fight over oil policy played in creating an opposition movement to Chavez and its even easier to forget what what it was that brought the conflict about. While Chavez has consistently supported participation in OPEC to seak higher prices and maximizing government revenues from oil to fund social and development programs PDVSA's management had completely different ideas. They wanted to ignore OPEC, maximize production, minimize payments to the government and construct as large and independant of an oil company as possible. This clash of ideas brought about a serious conflict that dominated the first 5 years of the Chavez administration. The excellent article by Mommer, written in 2002, gives the best explanation of the origins of this conflict I have ever seen. So here it is (with key passages bolded - ow):
Bush's Hypocrisy: Cuban Terrorists By Robert Parry
Like an aging rock star singing a beloved oldie, George W. Bush can count on cheers whenever he delivers a favorite line from the Bush Doctrine enunciated after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks: Any country that harbors a terrorist is equally guilty as the terrorist.
Condi, War Crimes & the Press By Robert Parry
During the three years of carnage in Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has shifted away from her now-discredited warning about a “mushroom cloud” to assert a strategic rationale for the invasion that puts her squarely in violation of the Nuremberg principle against aggressive war.On March 31 in remarks to a group of British foreign policy experts, Rice justified the U.S.-led invasion by saying that otherwise Iraqi President Saddam Hussein “wasn’t going anywhere” and "you were not going to have a different Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the center of it." [Washington Post, April 1, 2006]
Rice’s comments in Blackburn, England, followed similar remarks during a March 26 interview on NBC’s "Meet the Press" in which she defended the invasion of Iraq as necessary for the eradication of the “old Middle East” where a supposed culture of hatred indirectly contributed to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
"If you really believe that the only thing that happened on 9/11 was people flew airplanes into buildings, I think you have a very narrow view of what we faced on 9/11," Rice said. "We faced the outcome of an ideology of hatred throughout the Middle East that had to be dealt with. Saddam Hussein was a part of that old Middle East. The new Iraq will be a part of the new Middle East, and we will all be safer."But this doctrine – that the Bush administration has the right to invade other nations for reasons as vague as social engineering – represents a repudiation of the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter’s ban on aggressive war, both formulated largely by American leaders six decades ago.
Outlawing aggressive wars was at the center of the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II, a conflagration that began in 1939 when Germany's Adolf Hitler trumped up an excuse to attack neighboring Poland. Before World War II ended six years later, more than 60 million people were dead.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who represented the United States at Nuremberg, made clear that the role of Hitler's henchmen in launching the aggressive war against Poland was sufficient to justify their executions – and that the principle would apply to all nations in the future.
"Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions," Jackson said.
"Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose, it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment," Jackson said.With the strong support of the United States, this Nuremberg principle was then incorporated into the U.N. Charter, which bars military attacks unless in self-defense or unless authorized by the U.N. Security Council.
Venezuelan Government To Launch International 9/11 Investigation
Venezuelan Government To Launch International 9/11 Investigation
Truth crusaders Walter and Rodriguez to appear on Hugo Chavez's weekly TV broadcast
Truth crusaders Walter and Rodriguez to appear on Hugo Chavez's weekly TV broadcast
Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | March 31 2006
Billionaire philanthropist Jimmy Walter and WTC survivor William Rodriguez this week embarked on a groundbreaking trip to Caracas Venezuela in which they met with with the President of the Assembly and will soon meet with Venezuelan President himself Hugo Chavez in anticipation of an official Venezuelan government investigation into 9/11.
Rodriguez was the last survivor pulled from the rubble of the north tower of the WTC, and was responsible for all stairwells within the tower. Rodriguez represented family members of 9/11 victims and testified to the 9/11 Commission that bombs were in the north tower but his statements were completely omitted from the official record.
Jimmy Walter has been at the forefront of a world tour to raise awareness about 9/11 and has still yet to receive any response to his million dollar challenge in which he offers a $1 million reward for proof that the trade towers' steel structure was broken apart without explosives.
Rodriguez said that he was told an FBI agent had asked the hotel him and Walter were staying in turn over a list of names of residents. Upon hearing this, the National Assembly provided armed military protection for the entirety of the trip. In addition, Walters said that CIA agents were seen surveilling the beach on which he and Rodriguez had handed out free DVD's a day earlier.
The US government attempted to sabotage the trip by putting Rodriguez, who has been decorated at the White House itself, and Walter on a no fly list.
Rodriguez and Walter are educating top Venezuelan officials on the evidence that 9/11 was a self-inflicted wound carried out by the military-industrial complex. They have also appeared on every Venezuelan television and radio station both private and state owned and have given huge presentations to major universities.
Upon visiting, Rodriguez said that the President of the Assembly, Nicolas Maduro's home was brimming with books, videos and documents about the 9/11 cover-up. Maduro, Venezuela's top legislator, intoned that he was ready to create an international investigative committee, looking into the "international crime scene" that is 9/11 and that this would be structured via Hugo Chavez's government.
Rodriguez and Walter are also set to appear on Hugo Chavez's weekly broadcast 'Alo Presidente' - which is often subsequently the source of major international headlines. If there is no coverage of this event then we know for sure that a blackout order is in place.
Rodriguez and Walter offered their full support for Charlie Sheen's recent public stance on 9/11 and were heartened by his efforts. The potential of a government level inquiry endorsed by Hugo Chavez dovetails with Sheen's call for an independent investigation to be carried out by political foreign nationals.
Though the establishment media will no doubt seek to demonize Chavez as a militant with an axe to grind, this is an exciting development and the next step on the road to a genuine investigation that will seek to uncover the truth rather than hide skeletons and whitewash as was witnessed with the staged Kean committee.
-------------------------
Click here to listen to Rodriguez and Walter's interview on The Alex Jones Show. Please support our massive bandwidth costs by subscribing to Prison Planet.tv.
U.S.: More Than 600 Implicated in Detainee Abuse by HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH
U.S.: More Than 600 Implicated in Detainee Abuse
Investigations Lag Two Years After Abu Ghraib Photos
Investigations Lag Two Years After Abu Ghraib Photos
(Washington, D.C., Two years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, new research shows that abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay has been widespread, and that the United States has taken only limited steps to investigate and punish implicated personnel.
United States of Israel? By Robert Fisk
When two of America's most distinguished academics dared to suggest that US foreign policy was being driven by a powerful 'Israel Lobby' whose influence was incompatible with their nation's own interests, they knew they would face allegations of anti-Semitism. But the episode has prompted America's Jewish liberals to confront their own complacency. Might the tide be turning?
Stephen Walt towers over me as we walk in the Harvard sunshine past Eliot Street, a big man who needs to be big right now (he's one of two authors of an academic paper on the influence of America's Jewish lobby) but whose fame, or notoriety, depending on your point of view, is of no interest to him. "John and I have deliberately avoided the television shows because we don't think we can discuss these important issues in 10 minutes. It would become 'J' and 'S', the personalities who wrote about the lobby - and we want to open the way to serious discussion about this, to encourage a broader discussion of the forces shaping US foreign policy in the Middle East."
"John" is John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago. Walt is a 50-year-old tenured professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The two men have caused one of the most extraordinary political storms over the Middle East in recent American history by stating what to many non-Americans is obvious: that the US has been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of Israel, that Israel is a liability in the "war on terror", that the biggest Israeli lobby group, Aipac (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), is in fact the agent of a foreign government and has a stranglehold on Congress - so much so that US policy towards Israel is not debated there - and that the lobby monitors and condemns academics who are critical of Israel.
"Anyone who criticises Israel's actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle East policy," the authors have written, "...stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-Semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israeli lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-Semitism ... Anti-Semitism is something no-one wants to be accused of." This is strong stuff in a country where - to quote the late Edward Said - the "last taboo" (now that anyone can talk about blacks, gays and lesbians) is any serious discussion of America's relationship with Israel.
read on
GIs, Beware Radioactive Showers!
GIs, Beware Radioactive Showers!
By Irving Wesley Hall
Bush’s impending, insane nuclear attack on Iran has provoked an unprecedented rebellion within the top leadership of the United States military. At the same time, depleted uranium (DU) is steadily taking down our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time for the soldiers to follow the lead of their commanders in order to end the war.
Was Army Sgt. Michael Lee Tosto the first American victim of the Bush administration’s March 2003 “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq? The 24-year-old North Carolina tank operator died “mysteriously” in Baghdad on June 17, 2003.
The Iraqi capital was saturated with radioactive dust from the initial explosions of 1,500 American bombs and missiles, many of them made from solid depleted uranium. After the saturation bombing, the city was the scene of street battles with M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, A-10 Warthog attack jets and Apache helicopters firing DU munitions.
The army told Sgt. Tosto’s family that he died from pulmonary edema and pericardial effusion, or cardiac failure, after showing flu-like symptoms.
Young Michael Tosto believed George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. He believed he had been deployed to Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein from nuking the United States. Michael died before we all learned that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are nuking the world.
Michael Tosto died, young and innocent, when they nuked him.
After Michael’s funeral, a fellow soldier contacted Michael’s wife Stephanie and told her that his buddy started coughing up blood and his lips turned blue and was dead within 48 hours after the first symptoms.
By Irving Wesley Hall
Bush’s impending, insane nuclear attack on Iran has provoked an unprecedented rebellion within the top leadership of the United States military. At the same time, depleted uranium (DU) is steadily taking down our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s time for the soldiers to follow the lead of their commanders in order to end the war.
Was Army Sgt. Michael Lee Tosto the first American victim of the Bush administration’s March 2003 “Shock and Awe” attack on Iraq? The 24-year-old North Carolina tank operator died “mysteriously” in Baghdad on June 17, 2003.
The Iraqi capital was saturated with radioactive dust from the initial explosions of 1,500 American bombs and missiles, many of them made from solid depleted uranium. After the saturation bombing, the city was the scene of street battles with M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, A-10 Warthog attack jets and Apache helicopters firing DU munitions.
The army told Sgt. Tosto’s family that he died from pulmonary edema and pericardial effusion, or cardiac failure, after showing flu-like symptoms.
Young Michael Tosto believed George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Condoleezza Rice. He believed he had been deployed to Iraq to stop Saddam Hussein from nuking the United States. Michael died before we all learned that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld are nuking the world.
Michael Tosto died, young and innocent, when they nuked him.
After Michael’s funeral, a fellow soldier contacted Michael’s wife Stephanie and told her that his buddy started coughing up blood and his lips turned blue and was dead within 48 hours after the first symptoms.
Can we make a loud enough noise on Iran? by Stan Goff
Two main points need to be made on this Iran issue. (1) The Bush Administration is not the latest embodiment of the Illuminati that acts independently of its ruling class base. (2) Iran is over a decade away from being able to make a nuclear weapon. Now, these need to be fleshed out a bit.
The antiwar movement is being flushed this way and that like a covey of quail at Dick Cheney’s hunting club. Do we need to put Prozac in the water towers? Boo! There they go… “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” “They’re gonna nuke Iran!!!”
Forgive me, y’all. But a war in the hand, as the saying goes, is worth two in the Bush.
There is a bloody, criminal war in Iraq. The United States military has been sent there, and they are losing the war. On the other hand, public opinion on the war has shifted dramatically in the direction of those of us who said the troops need to come back here where they belong and leave the Iraqis the fuck alone. They’ve had about all the depleted uranium democracy they can stand.
This is a hell of an impasse for the ruling class here. Some of them didn’t like how Bush and Cheney went about it, but they fundamentally agreed that for the US to retain its international power into the forseeable future, it had to readjust its military forces from the old positions to fight the no-longer-existing Warsaw Pact to a place where they could tighten the screws on future competitors if need be. That place was in the Middle East; and that’s because of all the oil that is still sensibly reachable on Earth, over half of it is in that area. That same ruling CLASS, mind you, can pull the plug on Bush and Cheney any time they want… and in fact may be doing that right now. This is not some independent fraternity that is conspiring to take over the world. This is a system. It’s been around for a long time. And it is in trouble. But it is still a system, and it is run by a whole ruling stratum, not one clique.
Every one of them is perfectly capable of reading to the best of my knowledge, and since they are, they know goddamn well that any attack on Iran would make the continued occupation of Iraq untenable.
This administration is not insane, as many people contend. This is just paranoid hyperbole. They are meaner than hell, because they can be, because they are in power. The Bush administration serves at the pleasure of the dominant class. Get your heads around that, folks. The last time a whole destabilized white middle class started convincing themselves that the world was run by a conspiracy, they identified Jews and elected a mediocre Austrian watercolor artist as Chancellor of Germany. This is a dangerous and inaccurate understanding of the world. What you are looking at is disequilibrated imperialism.
Both Nixon and Reagan “played crazy” as a method of political manipulation.
If I were the Bush administration, and I was both losing the war and losing public support like they are, I would give my domestic opposition something new to run off to… like making them believe I was about to attack Iran. Later on, when it didn’t happen, I could portray them all as poule paranoidus. Then they would stop what they are doing… ie, tearing my credibility to shreds and sending my historical legacy into the shithouse.
Think!
If they DID drop a nuke on Iran, and if we didn’t immediately start an open revolt that shut the whole fucking country down, we would deserve everything we get right until the next Zhukov walked his artillery across our own Berlin. We need to be telling them that. Drop a nuke, and we break things. I’ll go on the record right here and right now… modeling it for you… George W. Bush, if your administration drops a nuclear weapon on anyone anywhere, you need to lock me up before you do it. Because at that point, anything except open rebellion against you makes me no better than all the "good Germans." I will not be your good German.
Boo! yourself, Georgie.
Cripes, people! The only power these assholes have is what we continue to collectively grant them.
Meanwhile.... BACK IN IRAQ, where there is an actual war... we need to keep throwing wave after wave of opposition over them. Build an impeachment movement in the streets. Keep educating people about what is really going on there.
Second point... Iran's nukes. This is also a public education responsibility for us, and the media needs to be our first target. Every time those nimrods even suggest that Iran has nukes, is close to getting nukes, or talks about an Iranian nuke-you-ler program without noting boldly that Iran is not within a blue million miles of having a nuclear weapon, then we need to bust them.
We have to say, loudly and clearly and often, this is just another bullshit story. Not, "Omigod, those mean men are going to nuke Iran!" but -- with some authority -- "Stop that goddamn lying!"
Then get back to the business of stopping the real war.
The antiwar movement is being flushed this way and that like a covey of quail at Dick Cheney’s hunting club. Do we need to put Prozac in the water towers? Boo! There they go… “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” “They’re gonna nuke Iran!!!”
Forgive me, y’all. But a war in the hand, as the saying goes, is worth two in the Bush.
There is a bloody, criminal war in Iraq. The United States military has been sent there, and they are losing the war. On the other hand, public opinion on the war has shifted dramatically in the direction of those of us who said the troops need to come back here where they belong and leave the Iraqis the fuck alone. They’ve had about all the depleted uranium democracy they can stand.
This is a hell of an impasse for the ruling class here. Some of them didn’t like how Bush and Cheney went about it, but they fundamentally agreed that for the US to retain its international power into the forseeable future, it had to readjust its military forces from the old positions to fight the no-longer-existing Warsaw Pact to a place where they could tighten the screws on future competitors if need be. That place was in the Middle East; and that’s because of all the oil that is still sensibly reachable on Earth, over half of it is in that area. That same ruling CLASS, mind you, can pull the plug on Bush and Cheney any time they want… and in fact may be doing that right now. This is not some independent fraternity that is conspiring to take over the world. This is a system. It’s been around for a long time. And it is in trouble. But it is still a system, and it is run by a whole ruling stratum, not one clique.
Every one of them is perfectly capable of reading to the best of my knowledge, and since they are, they know goddamn well that any attack on Iran would make the continued occupation of Iraq untenable.
This administration is not insane, as many people contend. This is just paranoid hyperbole. They are meaner than hell, because they can be, because they are in power. The Bush administration serves at the pleasure of the dominant class. Get your heads around that, folks. The last time a whole destabilized white middle class started convincing themselves that the world was run by a conspiracy, they identified Jews and elected a mediocre Austrian watercolor artist as Chancellor of Germany. This is a dangerous and inaccurate understanding of the world. What you are looking at is disequilibrated imperialism.
Both Nixon and Reagan “played crazy” as a method of political manipulation.
If I were the Bush administration, and I was both losing the war and losing public support like they are, I would give my domestic opposition something new to run off to… like making them believe I was about to attack Iran. Later on, when it didn’t happen, I could portray them all as poule paranoidus. Then they would stop what they are doing… ie, tearing my credibility to shreds and sending my historical legacy into the shithouse.
Think!
If they DID drop a nuke on Iran, and if we didn’t immediately start an open revolt that shut the whole fucking country down, we would deserve everything we get right until the next Zhukov walked his artillery across our own Berlin. We need to be telling them that. Drop a nuke, and we break things. I’ll go on the record right here and right now… modeling it for you… George W. Bush, if your administration drops a nuclear weapon on anyone anywhere, you need to lock me up before you do it. Because at that point, anything except open rebellion against you makes me no better than all the "good Germans." I will not be your good German.
Boo! yourself, Georgie.
Cripes, people! The only power these assholes have is what we continue to collectively grant them.
Meanwhile.... BACK IN IRAQ, where there is an actual war... we need to keep throwing wave after wave of opposition over them. Build an impeachment movement in the streets. Keep educating people about what is really going on there.
Second point... Iran's nukes. This is also a public education responsibility for us, and the media needs to be our first target. Every time those nimrods even suggest that Iran has nukes, is close to getting nukes, or talks about an Iranian nuke-you-ler program without noting boldly that Iran is not within a blue million miles of having a nuclear weapon, then we need to bust them.
We have to say, loudly and clearly and often, this is just another bullshit story. Not, "Omigod, those mean men are going to nuke Iran!" but -- with some authority -- "Stop that goddamn lying!"
Then get back to the business of stopping the real war.
Break Up the Big Oil Cartel - Republican Rhetoric; Democratic Cluelessness by RALPH NADER
What a week it has been for the giant oil companies! Billions in record quarterly profits rushing into their coffers. An even bigger round of quarterly profits coming up. Gargantuan executive pay bonanzas. And a pile of "forces beyond our control" excuses to publicize in response to the empty outrage of Washington politicians and the real squeeze on consumers and small businesses.
Oil man Bush, atop his administration marinated with ex-oil executives in high positions, keeps saying there is little he can do. It is the market of supply and demand. Only fuel cells and hydrogen sometime down the 21st-century road can save the country from dependency on foreign oil, he says repeatedly. Plus more drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
The public heat about energy prices prodded Mr. Bush this week, however, to at least make a little change in rhetoric. He repeated his warning that his government will not tolerate any gouging. Yet the supine reporters did not ask him whether he has ever caught a gouger. But he did mumble something about higher fuel economy standards so that your car guzzles a little less gasoline. He said he will be meeting with the domestic auto company executives in the White House in mid-May. He praised ethanol again. He visited a gas station in Mississippi to feel the pain of the motorists.
Will Hollywood ever leave Washington, DC?
On Capitol Hill--aka wurthering heights--the Republicans are starting to talk tough, mumbling about larger taxes on oil industry profits--an idea Bush said he would veto last year. The Democrats cannot even agree on an excess profits tax, preferring the greasy band-aid of lifting the 18.4 cent gasoline tax for sixty days. This new detour is pathetic since it takes the heat off the industry's skyrocketing gasoline price which are well into the $3 to $4/gallon range in many places.
A few, very few members of Congress, like Senator Byron Dorgan (D--North Dakota) know what has to be done to this industry and its long-time grip over the federal government. First, the gouging profits must be recaptured and returned now to the consumer. The government must also invest in advanced public transit systems.
Big oil has been on a marriage binge and the mergers, including the wedding of Exxon (number one) and Mobil (number two), have tightened further the corporate cartel of oil as it feeds off the government producers' cartel of oil abroad. Antitrust break up action is necessary.
The claim by the oil barons that they're just responding to the marketplace of supply and demand is laughable. Why are they making double and triple profits? Why are their top executives tripling their own pay? Hard-pressed sellers of oil would not have such a luxurious profit and pay spiral. Hard-pressed sellers of oil would not have paid $144,000 every day to Exxon CEO, Lee Raymond since 1993 and then send him off with a $398 million retirement deal.
A competitive domestic oil industry would not be so able to close down scores of refineries and then turn "refinery shortages" into higher gas prices at the pump. Nor would competitive companies get away with a return on capital of 46 percent for upstream drilling and production operations, plus a 32 percent for refining and marketing. Washington Post business reporter, Steven Pearlstein, call these returns "hedge fund returns." Except with hedge funds there is a risk of losing from time to time. Not so with the corporate government of Big Oil.
A President, preoccupied with his criminal, fabricated war in Iraq, would not leave Americans defenseless as oil prices eat into their family budgets. A standup President would order an all-fronts investigation of the oil industry's pricing practices from the oil well to the gasoline station.
There would be full use of subpoenas and public testimony from the oil bosses under oath by his regulatory agencies. He would organize with his Republican majority in Congress a repeal of past and recent unconscionable tax breaks and stop giving away your oil on federal property in the Gulf of Mexico to the oil companies without any royalties. He would press for an excess-profits tax and legislation raising by statute the fuel efficiency performance for new motor vehicles, including SUVs, Minivans and light trucks.
A standup President would raise margin requirements to tone down the speculation in oil futures that are swelling the New York Mercantile Exchange and contributing to higher gasoline and heating oil prices. He would support tariffs on imported refinery products to push the companies to expand and build new cleaner refineries in the U.S. Where? In some of the exact locations where the oil industry shut down these refineries over the past thirty years to contract overall output and move operations to cheap labor locations abroad.
A standup President would give an address to the nation that mobilizes small and larger businesses which use oil to join with consumers in a common cause against the looming inflationary jolts that will raise prices for many regular products and lead to higher interest rates by the Federal Reserve.
Bush can never proactively do this for the American people who already by more than a 2 to 1 margin believe he cares more about the interests of Big Business than the interests of regular people.
But, mobilized small business can get him to relent and let some of these changes happen.
The small business revolt can start with several hundred economically squeezed truckers bringing their 18 wheelers to Washington in a protest that encircles in a wide arc the Congress and the White House and the federal buildings in between. Now that would be more than a message. It would be an irresistible visual image for the television cameras day after day.
Oil man Bush, atop his administration marinated with ex-oil executives in high positions, keeps saying there is little he can do. It is the market of supply and demand. Only fuel cells and hydrogen sometime down the 21st-century road can save the country from dependency on foreign oil, he says repeatedly. Plus more drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
The public heat about energy prices prodded Mr. Bush this week, however, to at least make a little change in rhetoric. He repeated his warning that his government will not tolerate any gouging. Yet the supine reporters did not ask him whether he has ever caught a gouger. But he did mumble something about higher fuel economy standards so that your car guzzles a little less gasoline. He said he will be meeting with the domestic auto company executives in the White House in mid-May. He praised ethanol again. He visited a gas station in Mississippi to feel the pain of the motorists.
Will Hollywood ever leave Washington, DC?
On Capitol Hill--aka wurthering heights--the Republicans are starting to talk tough, mumbling about larger taxes on oil industry profits--an idea Bush said he would veto last year. The Democrats cannot even agree on an excess profits tax, preferring the greasy band-aid of lifting the 18.4 cent gasoline tax for sixty days. This new detour is pathetic since it takes the heat off the industry's skyrocketing gasoline price which are well into the $3 to $4/gallon range in many places.
A few, very few members of Congress, like Senator Byron Dorgan (D--North Dakota) know what has to be done to this industry and its long-time grip over the federal government. First, the gouging profits must be recaptured and returned now to the consumer. The government must also invest in advanced public transit systems.
Big oil has been on a marriage binge and the mergers, including the wedding of Exxon (number one) and Mobil (number two), have tightened further the corporate cartel of oil as it feeds off the government producers' cartel of oil abroad. Antitrust break up action is necessary.
The claim by the oil barons that they're just responding to the marketplace of supply and demand is laughable. Why are they making double and triple profits? Why are their top executives tripling their own pay? Hard-pressed sellers of oil would not have such a luxurious profit and pay spiral. Hard-pressed sellers of oil would not have paid $144,000 every day to Exxon CEO, Lee Raymond since 1993 and then send him off with a $398 million retirement deal.
A competitive domestic oil industry would not be so able to close down scores of refineries and then turn "refinery shortages" into higher gas prices at the pump. Nor would competitive companies get away with a return on capital of 46 percent for upstream drilling and production operations, plus a 32 percent for refining and marketing. Washington Post business reporter, Steven Pearlstein, call these returns "hedge fund returns." Except with hedge funds there is a risk of losing from time to time. Not so with the corporate government of Big Oil.
A President, preoccupied with his criminal, fabricated war in Iraq, would not leave Americans defenseless as oil prices eat into their family budgets. A standup President would order an all-fronts investigation of the oil industry's pricing practices from the oil well to the gasoline station.
There would be full use of subpoenas and public testimony from the oil bosses under oath by his regulatory agencies. He would organize with his Republican majority in Congress a repeal of past and recent unconscionable tax breaks and stop giving away your oil on federal property in the Gulf of Mexico to the oil companies without any royalties. He would press for an excess-profits tax and legislation raising by statute the fuel efficiency performance for new motor vehicles, including SUVs, Minivans and light trucks.
A standup President would raise margin requirements to tone down the speculation in oil futures that are swelling the New York Mercantile Exchange and contributing to higher gasoline and heating oil prices. He would support tariffs on imported refinery products to push the companies to expand and build new cleaner refineries in the U.S. Where? In some of the exact locations where the oil industry shut down these refineries over the past thirty years to contract overall output and move operations to cheap labor locations abroad.
A standup President would give an address to the nation that mobilizes small and larger businesses which use oil to join with consumers in a common cause against the looming inflationary jolts that will raise prices for many regular products and lead to higher interest rates by the Federal Reserve.
Bush can never proactively do this for the American people who already by more than a 2 to 1 margin believe he cares more about the interests of Big Business than the interests of regular people.
But, mobilized small business can get him to relent and let some of these changes happen.
The small business revolt can start with several hundred economically squeezed truckers bringing their 18 wheelers to Washington in a protest that encircles in a wide arc the Congress and the White House and the federal buildings in between. Now that would be more than a message. It would be an irresistible visual image for the television cameras day after day.
More Nanny State Attacks on Internet Freedom
Last week, I wrote about the effort by Congress to kill internet neutrality and hand the medium over the massive corporations and relegate those of us not willing to pay big bucks to the slow lane. Now comes word of Congress critter Diana DeGette's proposal to force ISPs to "retain records of their users’ activities," an idea supported by AG Alberto Gonzales. "Last week, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a Republican, gave a speech saying that data retention by Internet service providers is an ‘issue that must be addressed.' Child pornography investigations have been 'hampered' because data may be routinely deleted, Gonzales warned," reports Declan McCullagh of CNET News.
DeGette’s "proposal says that any Internet service that ‘enables users to access content' must permanently retain records that would permit police to identify each user. The records could not be discarded until at least one year after the user's account was closed.... An expansive reading of DeGette's measure would require every Web site to retain those records."
DeGette’s "proposal says that any Internet service that ‘enables users to access content' must permanently retain records that would permit police to identify each user. The records could not be discarded until at least one year after the user's account was closed.... An expansive reading of DeGette's measure would require every Web site to retain those records."
Sunday, April 30, 2006
The link between Jack Anderson's papers, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Iran/Contra, etc.
April 29, 2006 -- FBI agents lied about what they wanted from Jack Anderson's papers. The FBI agents who, in December, approached Olivia Anderson, the widow of deceased investigative reporter Jack Anderson and more recently, in March, author and researcher Mark Feldstein, who is writing a book about Jack Anderson, were interested in far more than the names of sources in the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) espionage case. That explanation by the FBI did not hold any water since Jack Anderson had not been active in pursuing that particular story -- he had suffered from Parkinson's Disease since 1986. According to individuals close to the FBI fishing expedition, the actual documents the FBI wanted to seize were files Anderson collected in the 1960s that linked George H. W. Bush's activities in Texas in 1963 to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 of that year. Bush was a friend of George DeMohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald's Belarusian-born contact officer. DeMohrenschildt befriended Oswald and arranged for him to settle in Dallas after leaving the Soviet Union. DeMohrenshildt "committed suicide" shortly before he was due to testify before the 1978 House Assassinations Committee. The elder Bush's name, address, and phone number in Midland, Texas was found in DeMohrenshildt's address book under the heading "Poppy."
Anderson's papers contain information on George H. W. Bush's role in Dallas in November 1963. Dubya ordered papers seized and withheld as "classified" U.S. government documents. It is clear that the man standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository and his son have much to be worried about.
In addition, the FBI wanted to remove from future public circulation Anderson documents that point to George H. W. Bush conspiring with the government of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran to keep U.S. hostages imprisoned in Iran until after the 1980 presidential election and avoid an "October Surprise" for Carter. The agreement between the Iranians and Bush (who was working with William Casey) sank the chances for Jimmy Carter's re-election and George H. W. Bush's entry into the White House as Vice President. The hostages were released at the very time Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in 1981. That operation would lay the ground for future Bush-Tehran collusion in the Iran-Contra scandal. Another set of files involve the links between the Bush family and that of Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin John W. Hinckley. Had Hinckley succeeded in killing Reagan, the Bush political agenda would have commenced in earnest in 1981 rather than 1989.
The Bush family has been known to use retired FBI agents as their political heavies and clean up men in the past -- most notably to erase the Bush links to Dallas. George W. Bush's departing Press Secretary Scott McClellan has a close relative who continued to muddy the waters about the JFK assassination. McClellan's father, Barr McClellan, wrote a book claiming it was Lyndon Johnson, not George H. W. Bush, who conspired to kill the president.
Anderson's papers contain information on George H. W. Bush's role in Dallas in November 1963. Dubya ordered papers seized and withheld as "classified" U.S. government documents. It is clear that the man standing in front of the Texas School Book Depository and his son have much to be worried about.
In addition, the FBI wanted to remove from future public circulation Anderson documents that point to George H. W. Bush conspiring with the government of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran to keep U.S. hostages imprisoned in Iran until after the 1980 presidential election and avoid an "October Surprise" for Carter. The agreement between the Iranians and Bush (who was working with William Casey) sank the chances for Jimmy Carter's re-election and George H. W. Bush's entry into the White House as Vice President. The hostages were released at the very time Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in 1981. That operation would lay the ground for future Bush-Tehran collusion in the Iran-Contra scandal. Another set of files involve the links between the Bush family and that of Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin John W. Hinckley. Had Hinckley succeeded in killing Reagan, the Bush political agenda would have commenced in earnest in 1981 rather than 1989.
The Bush family has been known to use retired FBI agents as their political heavies and clean up men in the past -- most notably to erase the Bush links to Dallas. George W. Bush's departing Press Secretary Scott McClellan has a close relative who continued to muddy the waters about the JFK assassination. McClellan's father, Barr McClellan, wrote a book claiming it was Lyndon Johnson, not George H. W. Bush, who conspired to kill the president.
Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina Move Ahead on Integration
Caracas, Venezuela, April 28, 2006—Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his Brazilian and Argentine counterparts held a one-day summit in Sao Paulo Wednesday to discuss various topics relating to the integration of South America, while Bolivia’s President Evo Morales announced that he will be signing a People’s Trade Agreement with Cuba and Venezuela in Havana on Saturday.
The focus of Wednesday's summit on integration was the celebrated "Great Southern Gas Pipeline." Presidents Hugo Chavez, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, and Néstor Kirchner have agreed to push ahead with plans for the 10,000 km (6,215 miles) pipeline, which will run from Venezuela to Argentina.
If created, this pipeline would be the largest in the world, more than doubling the immense Druzhba pipeline which pumps oil 4,000 KM from Southeastern Russian into Western Europe.
Chavez declared at the meeting that the pipeline could create a million jobs. Cost estimates run between $20 and $25 Billion, and the project could take at least 8 years (2009- 2017) to complete.
Many possible routes are being evaluated, but nearly all run through the Amazon, which has caused consternation among environmentalists, who fear that the pipeline could wreak environmental havoc on the pristine region, and open the fragile habitat up to development.
At a March lecture on the pipeline at the Venezuelan College of Engineers in Caracas, Petroleum Engineer, Nelson Hernandez called the pipeline “a dream” and raised various similar concerns. Along with the environmental impact, Hernandez asked serious questions regarding the administration, construction, material acquisition, regulation, feasibility, financing, and dispute resolution for the pipeline, which is being planned to run through at least three countries.
Citing the fact that “information on a 5,000 mile long pipeline does not exist,” Hernandez raised concerns that the immense length of the pipeline would out-price Venezuelan petroleum. According to his studies, oil prices are no longer economically competitive once the petroleum has to travel over 3,500 miles. “It’s got to go a long way to get to the market,” he added. “In the Amazon, there is nothing!”
However at Wednesday’s Summit, Chavez denied the potential high cost of transporting the petroleum, and added that, “If Venezuela was motivated by economic interest alone, we would not be discussing this here in Sao Paulo, but in Washington.”
Chavez declared enthusiastically at the Summit “We will have our gas pipeline… Venezuela has 5% of the world's petroleum reserves and 80% of the natural gas in South America.” According to unofficial statistics including previously undeclared crude reserves, Venezuela could have the largest petroleum reserves in the world. Chavez added that the pipeline is an essential element in the region’s independence and development.
At the Summit, Chavez announced that they had “agreed to open the project to all of the South American countries.” Chavez also declared that "the presence of Bolivia is a priority…. They have the second biggest reserves of oil and gas in South America." Chavez affirmed that he would speak with Bolivian President Evo Morales about joining the project, when he meets with him on Saturday.
But even with the recent close relations between Bolivia and Venezuela, Bolivia’s involvement in the project might result difficult. In a BBC interview last week, the Bolivian Vice-minister of Hydrocarbons, Julio Gómez called the proposed pipeline “ridiculous.”
Gómez declared that the idea for the pipeline did not originate with Chavez or Venezuela but with the private oil industry. He also assured that with the environmental impact alone resulting from a pipeline of this magnitude, “the nations of the whole world will react unfavorably to this project.”
The pipeline aside, Bolivian President Evo Morales announced plans Wednesday to sign into effect a “People’s Trade Agreement” (TPC) with Venezuela and Cuba on Saturday.
The TPC is considered to be the first step towards Chavez’ Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a proposed alternative regional trading bloc to counter the US promoted Free Trade Area of the Americas (ALCA).
Morales’ decision comes in the footsteps of Peru and Colombia’s declarations not to renounce their recently signed Free Trade Agreements* (FTAs) with the United States, which provoked Venezuela’s announcement to leave the Community of Andean Nations. In response, Morales declared yesterday, “It is time to look the other way” and announced his trip to Havana to sign the integration agreements with Venezuela and Cuba.
According to the Prensa Latina, the specifics of the agreement will be worked out this weekend where each nation will identify its most important products, volumes, prices and “the mechanisms of commercialization.” Morales has mentioned the possibility of exporting products to Cuba and Venezuela without paying import taxes.
Chavez announced last night that Venezuela would buy all of the Bolivian Soy that will no longer be purchased by Colombia because of its recent FTAs with the United States. Cuba has also expressed interest in purchasing quinoa from the Andean nation and both Venezuela and Cuba are interested in purchasing Coca for legal consumption.
*In addition to Peru and Colombia’s recent FTAs with the United States, a majority of Central American countries have also ratified the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the U.S. CAFTA went in to affect in El Salvador on March 1st of this year. Such Free Trade Agreements have received considerable criticism from human rights and environmental organizations for failing to demand human rights, labor and environmental laws, and for largely benefiting big business at the expense of the local community. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, over 1.5 million Mexican campesinos have lost their land as a direct result, causing inflated levels of migration towards the North.
The focus of Wednesday's summit on integration was the celebrated "Great Southern Gas Pipeline." Presidents Hugo Chavez, Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva, and Néstor Kirchner have agreed to push ahead with plans for the 10,000 km (6,215 miles) pipeline, which will run from Venezuela to Argentina.
If created, this pipeline would be the largest in the world, more than doubling the immense Druzhba pipeline which pumps oil 4,000 KM from Southeastern Russian into Western Europe.
Chavez declared at the meeting that the pipeline could create a million jobs. Cost estimates run between $20 and $25 Billion, and the project could take at least 8 years (2009- 2017) to complete.
Many possible routes are being evaluated, but nearly all run through the Amazon, which has caused consternation among environmentalists, who fear that the pipeline could wreak environmental havoc on the pristine region, and open the fragile habitat up to development.
At a March lecture on the pipeline at the Venezuelan College of Engineers in Caracas, Petroleum Engineer, Nelson Hernandez called the pipeline “a dream” and raised various similar concerns. Along with the environmental impact, Hernandez asked serious questions regarding the administration, construction, material acquisition, regulation, feasibility, financing, and dispute resolution for the pipeline, which is being planned to run through at least three countries.
Citing the fact that “information on a 5,000 mile long pipeline does not exist,” Hernandez raised concerns that the immense length of the pipeline would out-price Venezuelan petroleum. According to his studies, oil prices are no longer economically competitive once the petroleum has to travel over 3,500 miles. “It’s got to go a long way to get to the market,” he added. “In the Amazon, there is nothing!”
However at Wednesday’s Summit, Chavez denied the potential high cost of transporting the petroleum, and added that, “If Venezuela was motivated by economic interest alone, we would not be discussing this here in Sao Paulo, but in Washington.”
Chavez declared enthusiastically at the Summit “We will have our gas pipeline… Venezuela has 5% of the world's petroleum reserves and 80% of the natural gas in South America.” According to unofficial statistics including previously undeclared crude reserves, Venezuela could have the largest petroleum reserves in the world. Chavez added that the pipeline is an essential element in the region’s independence and development.
At the Summit, Chavez announced that they had “agreed to open the project to all of the South American countries.” Chavez also declared that "the presence of Bolivia is a priority…. They have the second biggest reserves of oil and gas in South America." Chavez affirmed that he would speak with Bolivian President Evo Morales about joining the project, when he meets with him on Saturday.
But even with the recent close relations between Bolivia and Venezuela, Bolivia’s involvement in the project might result difficult. In a BBC interview last week, the Bolivian Vice-minister of Hydrocarbons, Julio Gómez called the proposed pipeline “ridiculous.”
Gómez declared that the idea for the pipeline did not originate with Chavez or Venezuela but with the private oil industry. He also assured that with the environmental impact alone resulting from a pipeline of this magnitude, “the nations of the whole world will react unfavorably to this project.”
The pipeline aside, Bolivian President Evo Morales announced plans Wednesday to sign into effect a “People’s Trade Agreement” (TPC) with Venezuela and Cuba on Saturday.
The TPC is considered to be the first step towards Chavez’ Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a proposed alternative regional trading bloc to counter the US promoted Free Trade Area of the Americas (ALCA).
Morales’ decision comes in the footsteps of Peru and Colombia’s declarations not to renounce their recently signed Free Trade Agreements* (FTAs) with the United States, which provoked Venezuela’s announcement to leave the Community of Andean Nations. In response, Morales declared yesterday, “It is time to look the other way” and announced his trip to Havana to sign the integration agreements with Venezuela and Cuba.
According to the Prensa Latina, the specifics of the agreement will be worked out this weekend where each nation will identify its most important products, volumes, prices and “the mechanisms of commercialization.” Morales has mentioned the possibility of exporting products to Cuba and Venezuela without paying import taxes.
Chavez announced last night that Venezuela would buy all of the Bolivian Soy that will no longer be purchased by Colombia because of its recent FTAs with the United States. Cuba has also expressed interest in purchasing quinoa from the Andean nation and both Venezuela and Cuba are interested in purchasing Coca for legal consumption.
*In addition to Peru and Colombia’s recent FTAs with the United States, a majority of Central American countries have also ratified the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with the U.S. CAFTA went in to affect in El Salvador on March 1st of this year. Such Free Trade Agreements have received considerable criticism from human rights and environmental organizations for failing to demand human rights, labor and environmental laws, and for largely benefiting big business at the expense of the local community. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, over 1.5 million Mexican campesinos have lost their land as a direct result, causing inflated levels of migration towards the North.
Latin America's time is now
Bolivia signs agreement to implement the Bolivarian Alternative for the peoples of Our America and the People’s Trade Agreement. On the 1st anniversary of the creation of the ALBA between Cuba and Venezuela, the figures speak for themselves regarding a new integration model based on fairness and respect. In the Plaza de la Revolucion, Fidel exposes the double standard of the United States in its supposed war against terrorism
ONCE again, these April days have gone down in history. April 19 was the day, 45 years ago, that U.S. imperialism suffered its first military defeat in Latin America, on the Cuban sands of Playa Girón, in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion -- and it has yet to recover. This April 29, 2006 in Havana, capital of the first socialist country in the hemisphere, the empire has suffered another defeat, and this time a more far-reaching one, because it is the defeat of its ideas and the imposition of its model of domination.
This time, Cuba was not alone in the battle: Bolivarian Venezuela, under Hugo Chávez, and the Bolivia under indigenous leader Evo Morales were with us.
On the first anniversary of the agreements to implement the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), signed by Cuba and Venezuela, a revolutionary triad has formed with the incorporation of Bolivia into this tool of integration, and the Bolivian president's proposal, moreover, of a People's Trade Agreement (TPC) as an alternative to the free trade agreements used by the U.S. government in its attempts to sink our people into greater exploitation and dependence.
In the documents signed by the three leaders, which include a Joint Communiqué, positions are established on an integration process that, they agreed, must be "based on principles of mutual aid, solidarity and respect for self-determination" with the goal of "providing an appropriate response to raising up social justice, cultural diversity, equity and the right to development that the peoples deserve and demand."
With this step taken by Bolivia, the integrationist efforts taking place throughout the continent under new nationalist and popular governments are deepening, efforts that are already bearing fruit in the case of Cuba and Venezuela.
Fidel, Chávez and Evo also agreed that only a new and genuine form of integration that goes in the opposite direction of the economic and political relations established by the Free Trade Area of the Americas and other free trade agreements can guarantee sustainable and sovereign development for our peoples.
'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq - Robert Fisk: Seen through a Syrian lens,
Robert Fisk: Seen through a Syrian lens,
'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq
By Robert Fisk
04/29/06 "The Independent" -- - In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.
His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.
The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."
'unknown Americans' are provoking civil war in Iraq
By Robert Fisk
04/29/06 "The Independent" -- - In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years - we shall call him a "security source", which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers - waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.
His is a fearful portrait of an America trapped in the bloody sands of Iraq, desperately trying to provoke a civil war around Baghdad in order to reduce its own military casualties. It is a scenario in which Saddam Hussein remains Washington's best friend, in which Syria has struck at the Iraqi insurgents with a ruthlessness that the United States wilfully ignores. And in which Syria's Interior Minister, found shot dead in his office last year, committed suicide because of his own mental instability.
The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."
Time to shut-down the UN
There’s no doubt that if the war in Iraq had been the “cakewalk” the neocons expected, Marines would be unfurling “Old Glory” in downtown Teheran right now. Bush has never wavered in his plan to topple the Islamic regime or to put Iran’s vast petroleum reserves under American control. In fact, the administration’s own policy papers, including the National Security Strategy (NSS) as well as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) assert that the United States has the right to claim these resources if it is in our national interests.
Everyone knows Bush’s grand-plan for the Middle East, so why are the IAEA and Security Council pretending that the administration is genuinely interested in Iran’s fictitious nuclear weapons program?
Haven’t they seen this charade before?
It’s impossible that the main players don’t understand Bush’s real intentions or know that the nuclear issue is simply a pretext for war. Bush has telegraphed his belligerence at every opportunity even going so far as to announce to the Iranian people that his hostility is not directed at them, but at their government.
Bush’s appeal to the Iranian people is absurd. He’s asking them to abandon any sense of national loyalty so that he can violently replace the regime with an American client.
It’s crazy.
Are the Iranians so simple-minded that they don’t know that the Shah’s son is still living in New York and has met regularly with leading figures in the Bush administration?
Imagine a similar situation where Iran provided $75 million (as congress has) to build political organizations within the US with the stated goal of toppling the government; such meddling is tantamount to an act of war and yet the American people shrug it off as “business as usual”.
No one in the Middle East is blind to America’s machinations. The landscape is loaded with clients, toadies, and venal monarchs all acting on Washington’s behalf. If Bush was serious about fighting terrorism he’d focus his attention on Riyadh not Tehran. And, if the IAEA was serious about nuclear proliferation, they’d be challenging the Bush administration’s upcoming tests of “Divine Strake”; the Pentagon’s attempt to create a new regime of low-yield, bunker-busting nuclear weapons. According to Defense Dept documents, Divine Strake is intended to “develop a planning tool to improve the warfighters confidence in selecting the smallest proper nuclear yield necessary to destroy underground facilities while minimizing collateral damage.”
That’s right; the Washington warlords are planning to use nuclear weapons in an offensive attack.
So, why is ElBaradei dithering with Iran while this much graver threat is materializing in front of the whole world?
Why is the Security Council wasting time with imaginary weapons programs when the REAL danger is plain to see?
The international agencies have persisted with their clownish kowtowing to Washington while the administration edges closer towards nuclear Armageddon.
The primary responsibility of the United Nations is to stop wars of aggression. The institution maintained its moral legitimacy by opposing the illegal invasion of Iraq but now it must finish that work by condemning the ongoing occupation and demanding an immediate withdrawal. By ignoring its obligations and devoting its energy to hectoring a peaceful nation that has operated within the requirements of international law and it’s clearly stated treaty rights, the UN has publicly disgraced itself and undermined its raison d’etre.
Similarly, the IAEA has failed to seriously address the issues for which it was formed. How can ElBaradei support a process that penalizes countries that follow the rules when neighboring Israel has secretly stockpiled 200 nuclear warheads and is threatening to attack Iran without any evidence of wrongdoing and without approval of the international community?
This is madness.
And, why hasn’t ElBaradei condemned Bush’s “dirty bombs” in Iraq which have poisoned the land and groundwater with toxic depleted uranium (DU) creating an enduring legacy of thyroid cancer, birth defects and other malignant sarcoma?
Nuclear weapons are being used in Iraq. It is ElBaradei’s job to stop it.
Hugo Chavez was right a few months ago when he said that the United Nations had outlived its usefulness and was only serving the interests of the powerful nations. The “alleged” standoff with Iran proves that the UN has degenerated into a rubber stamp for US aggression. Its main purpose now is to provide international cover for American plans to redraw the map of the Middle East and integrate dissident states into the neoliberal economic system.
When the bombing begins in Iran, the UN can finally board-up its doors and send the diplomats home; there’ll be no more reason to maintain the pretense. An attack on Iranian facilities will signal a period of global realignment where states either submit to the Washington axis or join the growing resistance. We are quickly moving towards Bush’s dream of a world that is divided into "us against them".
Everyone knows Bush’s grand-plan for the Middle East, so why are the IAEA and Security Council pretending that the administration is genuinely interested in Iran’s fictitious nuclear weapons program?
Haven’t they seen this charade before?
It’s impossible that the main players don’t understand Bush’s real intentions or know that the nuclear issue is simply a pretext for war. Bush has telegraphed his belligerence at every opportunity even going so far as to announce to the Iranian people that his hostility is not directed at them, but at their government.
Bush’s appeal to the Iranian people is absurd. He’s asking them to abandon any sense of national loyalty so that he can violently replace the regime with an American client.
It’s crazy.
Are the Iranians so simple-minded that they don’t know that the Shah’s son is still living in New York and has met regularly with leading figures in the Bush administration?
Imagine a similar situation where Iran provided $75 million (as congress has) to build political organizations within the US with the stated goal of toppling the government; such meddling is tantamount to an act of war and yet the American people shrug it off as “business as usual”.
No one in the Middle East is blind to America’s machinations. The landscape is loaded with clients, toadies, and venal monarchs all acting on Washington’s behalf. If Bush was serious about fighting terrorism he’d focus his attention on Riyadh not Tehran. And, if the IAEA was serious about nuclear proliferation, they’d be challenging the Bush administration’s upcoming tests of “Divine Strake”; the Pentagon’s attempt to create a new regime of low-yield, bunker-busting nuclear weapons. According to Defense Dept documents, Divine Strake is intended to “develop a planning tool to improve the warfighters confidence in selecting the smallest proper nuclear yield necessary to destroy underground facilities while minimizing collateral damage.”
That’s right; the Washington warlords are planning to use nuclear weapons in an offensive attack.
So, why is ElBaradei dithering with Iran while this much graver threat is materializing in front of the whole world?
Why is the Security Council wasting time with imaginary weapons programs when the REAL danger is plain to see?
The international agencies have persisted with their clownish kowtowing to Washington while the administration edges closer towards nuclear Armageddon.
The primary responsibility of the United Nations is to stop wars of aggression. The institution maintained its moral legitimacy by opposing the illegal invasion of Iraq but now it must finish that work by condemning the ongoing occupation and demanding an immediate withdrawal. By ignoring its obligations and devoting its energy to hectoring a peaceful nation that has operated within the requirements of international law and it’s clearly stated treaty rights, the UN has publicly disgraced itself and undermined its raison d’etre.
Similarly, the IAEA has failed to seriously address the issues for which it was formed. How can ElBaradei support a process that penalizes countries that follow the rules when neighboring Israel has secretly stockpiled 200 nuclear warheads and is threatening to attack Iran without any evidence of wrongdoing and without approval of the international community?
This is madness.
And, why hasn’t ElBaradei condemned Bush’s “dirty bombs” in Iraq which have poisoned the land and groundwater with toxic depleted uranium (DU) creating an enduring legacy of thyroid cancer, birth defects and other malignant sarcoma?
Nuclear weapons are being used in Iraq. It is ElBaradei’s job to stop it.
Hugo Chavez was right a few months ago when he said that the United Nations had outlived its usefulness and was only serving the interests of the powerful nations. The “alleged” standoff with Iran proves that the UN has degenerated into a rubber stamp for US aggression. Its main purpose now is to provide international cover for American plans to redraw the map of the Middle East and integrate dissident states into the neoliberal economic system.
When the bombing begins in Iran, the UN can finally board-up its doors and send the diplomats home; there’ll be no more reason to maintain the pretense. An attack on Iranian facilities will signal a period of global realignment where states either submit to the Washington axis or join the growing resistance. We are quickly moving towards Bush’s dream of a world that is divided into "us against them".
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