Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalCrimea, El Salvador & the Fight Against Public Participation
Weekend Edition March 21-23, 2014
Policing "Irresponsibility"
Crimea, El Salvador & the Fight Against Public Participation
by XAVIER BEST
Contrary to preferred myth, it’s quite natural for political elites to despise democracy. Democracy threatens their wealth and privilege therefore it is to be avoided at any cost. The historical evidence for this assertion is overwhelming. From the overthrow of Iranian democracy in 1953, Guatemalan democracy in 1954, Chilean democracy in 1973 or Haitian democracy in 1990, there are few principles in international relations as enduring as this. Even the Founding Fathers made known their distaste for democratic norms. James Madison, one of the framers of the US Constitution, defined the purpose of government as “[protecting] the minority of the opulent against the majority.” John Jay, author of the Federalist papers, asserted those who “own the country ought to govern it” while Thomas Jefferson endorsed the concept of a “natural aristocracy” as “the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society.”
It therefore should come as no great surprise that the Obama administration embraced this tradition in its refusal to raise a critical word when Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, was deposed in a coup. Less surprising is the fact that the Obama administration welcomed Yanukovych’s successor, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, into the oval office as if he were Ukraine’s legitimately elected leader. Whatever one thinks of the legality of Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the referendum to determine its national status, one cannot take seriously the statements coming out of Washington. President Obama’s statements concerning international law and “illegal elections” not only invites ridicule in lieu of the historical record but current events as well.
Reacting to the 93% of Crimeans who chose to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia, the Obama administration passed an Executive Order imposing sanctions on Russian officials, stating “Today’s actions send a strong message to the Russian government that there are consequences for their actions that violate the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, including their actions supporting the illegal referendum for Crimean separation.” Based on this comment one could get the impression that the Obama administration is in favor of free and fair elections, not “illegal referendums.” Nevertheless, at the same time that the Obama White House was condemning the referendum in Crimea they were “threatening to withhold development aid” from El Salvador unless the winner of its presidential elections, the FMLN’s Sánchez Cerén, adopted “economic policies that are anathema to the ruling coalition of left and center forces that have been working together over the last five years.” Furthermore, the election in El Salvador was declared to be free and fair by the Organization of American States.
According to journalist Madeleine Conway the OAS described the election as “the most transparent in El Salvador’s history.” Brigitte Gynther of School of Americas Watch described the election as “very transparent, with important new electoral reforms being carried out such as neighborhood voting.” SOA Watch’s sponsor, the Center for Exchange and Solidarity, “characterized them as the most efficient and transparent elections they’ve seen in all 10 election observer delegations they’ve done since 1994,” while election monitor Richard Hobbes described the election as “clean and transparent”, attributing the FMLN victory to “significant advances made during the past 4-5 years.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/crimea-el-salvador-the-fight-against-public-participation/
Losses for Three Nations: The NAFTA Scorecard
Weekend Edition March 21-23, 2014
Losses for Three Nations
The NAFTA Scorecard
by PETE DOLACK
The North American Free Trade Agreement has been a lose-lose-lose proposition for working people in Canada, the United States and Mexico.
Let us count the ways: Lost jobs, reduced wages, more unemployment, higher food prices and reversals of environmental laws. NAFTA, a 20-year laboratory for mainstream economics, has been a bonanza for the executives of multi-national corporations, and that is all you need to know why the so-called “free trade” model continues to be promoted despite the immiseration and dislocation it spawns. Agreements like NAFTA, and proposed deals that would go further in handing power to corporate executives and financiers such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, have little to do with trade and much with ensuring corporate wish lists are brought to life.
Not dissimilar to medieval doctors who insisted that having leeches bleed the patient was the only course of action, neoclassical economists, who dominate the field, won’t budge from their prescriptions of neoliberal austerity. But although the medical field has made enormous strides in recent centuries, there is no such progress among neoclassical economists. That is because said economists — most often under the banner of “Chicago School” but sometimes using other names — promote ideology on behalf of the powerful, not science for all humanity.
Thus the spectacularly wrong predictions made for NAFTA before it was went into force on January 1, 1994, have no effect on their predictions for new deals. To provide one example, in 1993 the Peterson Institute for International Economics predicted 170,000 jobs would be created in the U.S. alone by 1995, that the U.S. would enjoy an expanded trade surplus with Mexico and that the Mexican economy would grow by four to five percent annually under NAFTA.
As we will see presently, none of those rosy predictions came close to becoming reality. (True to neoliberal form, the institute is grandly predicting “gains of $1.9 trillion” for the Trans-Pacific Partnership.) The point here isn’t to pick on one particular institution — in fact, it is quite typical. The models developed to make these predictions and explain economics are mathematical constructs disconnected from the real world.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/the-nafta-scorecard/
If Crimea is Not Russia, Why are the Malvinas British?
Weekend Edition March 21-23, 2014
The Big Contradiction
If Crimea is Not Russia, Why are the Malvinas British?
by CESAR CHELALA
Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea has been strongly condemned by the U.S. and the European Union. Particularly vehement in his opposition has been Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron. His reaction begs the question, “If Crimea is not Russian, why does he claim that the Malvinas are British?
There are several historical and geopolitical reasons that explain why Russia claims Crimea is Russian. On 19 February 1954, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union issued a decree transferring the Crimean Oblast (province) from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
This was widely considered a “symbolic gesture” marking the 300th anniversary of Ukraine becoming a part of the Russian Empire, at the time when Nikita Khrushchev -a Ukrainian native- was the General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. When asked about the present situation, Mikhail Gorbachev, a darling of the West, stated, “Earlier Crimea was merged with Ukraine under Soviet laws, to be more exact by the [Communist] party laws, without asking the people, and now the people have decided to correct that mistake. This should be welcomed instead of declaring sanctions.”
If the annexation of Crimea was forceful, so was the British annexation of the Falklands.
On Jan. 2, 1833, Captain James Onslow of the brig-sloop HMS Clio reached the Spanish settlement at Port Louis. Onslow requested that the Argentine flag be replaced with the British one, and the Argentine administration was deported to Montevideo.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/if-crimea-is-not-russia-why-are-the-malvinas-british/
Venezuela: A Revolt of the Well-Off, Not a 'Terror Campaign'
Published on Thursday, March 20, 2014 by The Guardian
Venezuela: A Revolt of the Well-Off, Not a 'Terror Campaign'
John Kerry’s rhetoric is divorced from the reality on the ground, where life goes on – even at the barricades
by Mark Weisbrot
Images forge reality, granting a power to television and video and even still photographs that can burrow deep into people’s consciousness without them even knowing it. I thought that I, too, was immune to the repetitious portrayals of Venezuela as a failed state in the throes of a popular rebellion. But I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in Caracas this month: how little of daily life appeared to be affected by the protests, the normality that prevailed in the vast majority of the city. I, too, had been taken in by media imagery.
Major media outlets have already reported that Venezuela’s poor have not joined the right-wing opposition protests, but that is an understatement: it’s not just the poor who are abstaining – in Caracas, it’s almost everyone outside of a few rich areas like Altamira, where small groups of protesters engage in nightly battles with security forces, throwing rocks and firebombs and running from tear gas.
Walking from the working-class neighborhood of Sabana Grande to the city center, there was no sign that Venezuela is in the grip of a “crisis” that requires intervention from the Organization of American States (OAS), no matter what John Kerry tells you. The metro also ran very well, although I couldn’t get off at Alta Mira station, where the rebels had set up their base of operations until their eviction this week.
I got my first glimpse of the barricades in Los Palos Grandes, an upper-income area where the protesters do have popular support, and neighbors will yell at anyone trying to remove the barricades – which is a risky thing to attempt (at least four people have apparently been shot dead for doing so). But even here at the barricades, life was pretty much normal, save for some snarled traffic. On the weekend, the Parque del Este was full of families and runners sweating in the 90-degree heat – before Chávez, you had to pay to get in, and the residents here, I was told, were disappointed when the less well-to-do were allowed to enter for free. The restaurants are still crowded at night.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/20-6
Washington is threatening to withhold development aid unless El Salvador adopts economic policies
Published on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 by Foreign Policy in Focus / The Nation
A Precarious Victory in El Salvador
Washington is threatening to withhold development aid unless El Salvador adopts economic policies that Salvadorans just voted against.
by Madeleine Conway
After a closely contested election in El Salvador, the progressive Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has emerged victorious, declaring a narrow victory over a right-wing opposition party that appealed to the military for intervention.
The vote marks a hard-fought victory for the FMLN’s ambitious economic agenda, which has included of a host of new social programs that have improved education and healthcare for millions of Salvadorans. But right-wing forces vigorously disputed the election—one that the Organization of American States called the most transparent in El Salvador’s history—and conditions imposed by Washington are threatening to undermine the country’s gains.
While the U.S. embassy officially maintained a neutral stance in the election, Washington is threatening to withhold development aid unless El Salvador adopts economic policies that are anathema to the ruling coalition of left and center forces that have been working together over the last five years. That threat could end up undermining the very programs that contributed to the FMLN victory in the March 9th poll.
A Landmark Election
Since taking power in 2009, the FMLN—a former guerilla movement that became a political party in the early 1990s—has ushered in a host of popular social programs designed to improve living standards in El Salvador, where over a third of the population lives in poverty.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/19-6
55 Years Is Enough: Lift the Cuba Embargo
Published on Wednesday, March 19, 2014 by OtherWords
55 Years Is Enough: Lift the Cuba Embargo
by Dana Brown
Dressed in a blazer, sweater, and gloves to protect him from the cold of a DC winter, petite 79-year old Reverend Raul Suarez loves to tell his story.
The Reverend asked us to stand up and stretch our hands out towards him, as he stretched his hands out towards us.
“We have always known we are very different: I am Cuban, you are North American. We speak different languages and have different cultures. But today, through sitting here and talking together, I think we all realize how similar we are. At the core of it all, we are all human.”
The man then blessed our group, just as he had done with a group of 25 congressional aides the day before.
This is how we, a group of students, religious leaders, and human rights activists ended our incredible encounter with Reverend Raul Suárez.
The founder and director of Cuba’s Martin Luther King Center, Suarez came to Washington recently, along with five other Cuban religious leaders. They met with lawmakers and Obama administration officials about our nation’s outdated and ineffective embargo against the Caribbean country.
More:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/19-7
[center]
[/center]
Rev. Raúl Suárez: "Cuba is not the Kingdom of God but We Have Had Many Achievements"
by Zuleika Rivera, LAWG Intern on March 05, 2014
Reverend Raúl Suárez, the founder and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Havana, Cuba, visited the United States this past week as part of a delegation of religious leaders speaking about religious life and freedom in Cuba. Rev. Suárez was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Cuba from 1971 to 2005 and was the president of the Council of Churches. On February 28, 2014 Rev. Suárez spoke on a panel organized by Witness for Peace, to talk about his trip, religious freedom in Cuba as well as the future of U.S.-Cuba relations. This is what he had to say:
The principal, historic churches of the U.S. understand that now is a historic moment. If the President (Obama) is pressured by the churches, Congressmen and other institutions in civil society then the President might change what he can change. The blockade is a combination of several laws enacted by Congress that the President cannot change but there are some things the President can change. Our work here has been a pastoral work. We are interested in politics but we are not politicians. We are interested in the economy but we are not economists, but we understand that there is a biblical and theological base that drives (these entities) and that is what we wanted to communicate to these politicians in Congress.
I’ve been a pastor for 60 years and I don’t like to read sermons, I like to look at people when I talk and look them in the eyes. You are witness that the news in this country (U.S.) is biased toward Cuba, saying that it is hell. Cuba has many problems but Cuba isn’t hell either. We have many good things that have been achieved in our country (Cuba)…Cuba is not the Kingdom of God but we have had many achievements. Well, I end here because I am more interested in your questions. -
More:
http://www.lawg.org/action-center/lawg-blog/69-general/1308-rev-raul-suarez-qcuba-is-not-the-kingdom-of-god-but-we-have-had-many-achievementsq#sthash.rSRi3X1O.dpuf
Turning Ukrainian Fascists into "Freedom Fighters":Why US Journalists Have Blood on Their Hands
March 19, 2014
Turning Ukrainian Fascists into "Freedom Fighters"
Why US Journalists Have Blood on Their Hands
by ERIC SOMMER
Hey U.S. mass media journalists: A large number of you writing in outlets like CNN, Fox News, New York Times, and Washington Post have blood on your hands. It may initially sound exagerative, but you are complicit in mass murder. In the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi war criminals at the end of WW II, the prosecution powerfully argued that those journalists who use propaganda to prepare the public to accept war crimes are themselves also guilty of those crimes.
As the Nuremberg prosecutor stated: “The use made by the Nazi conspirators of psychological warfare is well known. Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically for the attack….In the propaganda system of the Hitler State it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.¡±”
During the run-up to the Iraq war – an unprovoked war of aggression - many of you endlessly repeated, without proper critique or doubt, the false Bush Administrations claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that this somehow justified military invasion.
By helping to manufacture the consent of the public for that war, and by helping to intimidate opponents of the war, you were complict in sending thousands of young American men and women abroad to kill and be killed; thousands of them died, tens or hundreds of thousands were injured or mentally traumatized, not to mention up to a million Iraquis who died as a result of the war.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/19/why-us-journalists-have-blood-on-their-hands/
Venezuela arrests seven in cocaine case of Berlusconi's ex-aide
Source: Reuters
Venezuela arrests seven in cocaine case of Berlusconi's ex-aide
By Daniel Wallis
CARACAS, March 19 Wed Mar 19, 2014 12:22pm EDT
(Reuters) - Venezuelan authorities have detained seven people, including four young workers at an airport cafe, in connection with the cocaine smuggling arrest of an ex-secretary to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Federica Gagliardi, dubbed the "white lady" by Italy's media, was detained last week by police at Rome's Fiumicino airport who found 24 kg (53 lbs) of cocaine in her carry-on luggage after she stepped off a flight from Caracas.
Venezuela's state prosecutor said on Wednesday a policeman, a National Guard soldier, and a junior official were arrested at the Simon Bolivar International Airport, as well as the four cafe workers.
"Their presumed connection with the trafficking of the drugs seized in Italy was determined by various investigations," the prosecutor said in a statement.
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/19/venezuela-italy-cocaine-idUSL2N0MG0NN20140319?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssIndustryMaterialsUtilitiesNews&rpc=401
Mayor: city worker killed in Caracas while clearing a street barricade
Mayor: city worker killed in Caracas while clearing a street barricade
By Fabiola Sanchez, The Associated Press March 19, 2014 4:50 PM
CARACAS, Venezuela - A municipal worker was fatally shot while removing a street barricade in a middle-class Caracas neighbourhood, Venezuela's federal prosecutor's office said Wednesday, raising to 27 the official death toll from more than a month's worth of protests.
According to preliminary information, Francisco Alcides Madrid Rosendo, 32, was shot multiple times around 10 p.m. Tuesday while he and others were taking down a barricade in the Montalban neighbourhood in the city's western section, according to a statement from the federal prosecutor's office.
~snip~
(OAS)
The body earlier this month approved a declaration supporting President Nicolas Maduro's efforts to start a dialogue with the political opposition. Panama, the United States and Canada voted against it.
Also Wednesday, petroleum workers representative Marla Munoz said on state television that the offices of the oil and mining ministry and state-owned oil company were simultaneously attacked earlier that morning with Molotov cocktails in the state of Barinas, southwest of Caracas. She said the attack was apparently aimed at scaring oil workers into withdrawing their support of the government.
More:
http://www.canada.com/news/Mayor+city+worker+killed+Caracas+while+clearing+street+barricade/9635531/story.html
Ex-paramilitary leader ‘Don Berna’ charged with a further 20 crimes
Ex-paramilitary leader ‘Don Berna’ charged with a further 20 crimes
Mar 19, 2014 posted by Oliver Sheldon
Former paramilitary leader “Don Berna” has been charged with an additional 20 crimes by a Medellin court chamber in charge of investigating crimes committed by the now-demobilized AUC.
Diego Fernando Murillo, alias “Don Berna,” was the leader of the AUC paramilitary organisation as well as the Medellin-based organised crime syndicate, the Oficina de Envigado.
Among the newest charges he is accused of are alleged involvement in 11 forced disappearances, 4 massacres perpetrated in Medellin and Bello in the department of Antioquia, gender-based violence, and the displacement and killing of people in Medellin and the wider Antioquia area, reported Caracol Radio.
Murillo was extradited to the Unites States in May 2008, having previously handed himself in to the authorities after the demobilisation of the AUC in 2005. He was soon incarcerated after reportedly breaking the terms of his demobilisation and his extradition to the United States was on account of the AUC’s involvement in the drug-trade, where he was sentenced to 31 years in jail.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/ex-paramilitary-leader-charged-20-crimes/
Profile Information
Member since: 2002Number of posts: 160,506