Uruguay to join Bank of the South

[Judi Lynn]

Source: El Universal (opposition newspaper)

Uruguay to join Bank of the South
Caracas, Monday June 25 , 2007

The Uruguayan government Monday decided to join the Bank of the South, said Minister of Foreign Affairs Reinaldo Gargano.

"The cabinet of ministers today (Monday) decided that Uruguay would become a member of Bank of the South," the minister said during a debate hosted by the Portuguese Embassy in Montevideo.

The future Bank of the South was first proposed by Venezuela as an alternative to international lending institutions -World Bank and International Monetary Fund. It was later joined by Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay.

The bank is still to be organized, and is expected to operate as a development bank, where all of the members are to have an equal stake and decision-making power.


Read more: http://english.eluniversal.com/2007/06/25/en_eco_art_uruguay-to-join-bank_25A890351.shtml

[Judi Lynn]

1. Former Uruguayan dictator Bordaberry back in hospital with respiratory problems

Former Uruguayan dictator Bordaberry back in hospital with respiratory problems
The Associated Press
Published: June 25, 2007


MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay: Former dictator Juan Bordaberry has been hospitalized with respiratory problems, his son said Monday.

The local newspaper El Pais reported that the 79-year-old Bordaberry was hospitalized Sunday with a "serious" respiratory ailment. Bordaberry's son Pedro confirmed the report to The Associated Press but would not give more details.

The former dictator was hospitalized in January for breathing troubles, a development that led a judge to let him remain under house arrest rather than be jailed during his prosecution for dictatorship-era homicides. His lawyer has denied the charges.

Elected democratically in 1971, Bordaberry dissolved Congress and banned political parties the following year at the behest of military leaders who seized power outright in 1973. The military ousted Bordaberry in 1976, and Uruguay remained under the control of a right-wing dictatorship until 1985.

More:
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/06/25/america/LA-GEN-Uruguay-Bordaberry.php

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Juan María Bordaberry
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Juan María Bordaberry Arocena is a Uruguayan statesman, who served as President from 1972 to 1973, when he dissolved the General Assembly and continued to rule as dictator until 1976, when disagreements with the military led to his deposition. On November 17, 2006 he was arrested in a case involving four deaths, including two of members of the General Assembly during the period of military rule in the 1970's.

Bordaberry was born in 1928 in Montevideo, Uruguay's capital. He was the heir to one of the largest ranches in the country. Initially, he belonged to the National Party, popularly known as the Blancos, and was elected to the Senate on the Blanco ticket. In 1964, however, he formed the Liga Nacional de Accion Ruralista (Spanish for "National Rural Action League"), and in 1969 joined the Colorado Party. That year he was appointed to the Cabinet, where he sat from 1969 to 1971.

Bordaberry was declared winner in the fraudulent presidential election of 1971, and took office in 1972 in the midst of an institutional crisis caused by the authoritarian rule of president Pacheco. Bordaberry, at the time, was a very minor political figure; he had no qualifications for the job other than being Pacheco's handpicked successor. He continued the authoritarian measures, suspending civil liberties, banning labor unions, and imprisoning and killing opposition people. He also appointed military officers to most leading government positions.
(snip/...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Mar%C3%ADa_Bordaberry

[Judi Lynn]

2. From CBS: Uruguayan Ex-President Arrested

Uruguayan Ex-President Arrested
Juan Maria Bordaberry Held Along With Foreign Minister In Connection With 'Dirty War' Killings



Former Uruguayan President Juan Maria Bordaberry waves as he leaves a court in Montevideo, Uruguay on June 16, 2005. (AP Photo/Marcelo Hernandez, File)

~snip~
The arrest of Bordaberry and former foreign minister Juan Blanco opened a new chapter in efforts by this small South American country to grapple with the 1973-1985 dictatorship and its legacy of disappearances, tortures and the exile of thousands of political dissidents.

“It's the first serious step taken in Uruguay in many, many years since they recovered democracy and civilian control,” Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch, told The Associated Press by telephone from Washington.

The arrests were ordered by Judge Roberto Timbal, who is probing the abductions and killings of two former lawmakers and two leftist rebels in May 1976 that shocked this small South American nation in the early throes of its long military dictatorship.

Leftist Sen. Zelmar Michelini and House leader Hector Gutierrez, two prominent lawmakers who tried to flee Uruguay's dictatorship, were seized from their homes in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and their bullet-riddled bodies were found days later, along with those of the suspected guerrillas William Whitelaw and Rosario Barredo.

Human rights groups have long contended that the 1976 killings were the result of cooperation by South America's military dictatorships that was secretly supported by U.S. intelligence agencies.
(snip/...)

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/17/world/main2198252.shtml

[Judi Lynn]

3. You might want to read about the US torturer who worked for Bordaberry's predecessor,

Dan Mitrione, who had been the police chief of his home town, in Indiana, before working his way to Uruguay as a torturer in Latin America during the 1960's:

Uruguay 1964-1970
Torture - as American as apple pie
excerpted from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum

"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.''

The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo.
Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover, although Mitrione was not one of them.
OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes, student demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events during the past year, and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities, there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the public's imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions, as well as in the military and police.
"Unlike other Latin-American guerrilla groups," the New York Times stated in 1970 "the Tupamaros normally avoid bloodshed when possible. They try instead to create embarrassment for the Government and general disorder." A favorite tactic was to raid the files of a private corporation to expose corruption and deceit in high places, or kidnap a prominent figure and try him before a "People's Court". It was heady stuff to choose a public villain whose acts went uncensored by the legislature, the courts and the press, subject him to an informed and uncompromising interrogation, and then publicize the results of the intriguing dialogue. Once they ransacked an exclusive high-class nightclub and scrawled the walls perhaps their most memorable slogan: "O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie -- Either everyone dances or no one dances."
Dan Mitrione did not introduce the practice of torturing political prisoners to Uruguay It had been perpetrated by the police at times from at least the early 1960s. However, in surprising interview given to a leading Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US advisers, and in particular Mitrione, had instituted torture as a more routine measure; to the means of inflicting pain they had added scientific refinement; and to that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoners that it was his family being tortured.
(snip/...)

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Uruguay_KH.html



Dan Mitrione

From Wikipedia:

Dan Mitrione was an American police officer, FBI agent and torture expert who cooperated with the police in various Latin American countries.
(snip)

Mitrione was married and he had 9 children. His funeral was largely publicised by the US media, and it was attended by, amongst others, David Eisenhower and Richard Nixon's secretary of state William Rogers. Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis held a benefit concert for his family in Richmond, Indiana. Though he was characterized at his death as a man whose "devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere" by White House spokesperson Ron Ziegler, and as a "a great humanitarian" by his daughter Linda, evidence of his secret activities would later emerge, mostly through Cuban double agent Manuel Hevia Cosculluela. One of his sons, Dan Mitrione Jr., also joined the FBI and later got involved in a scandal involving bribes in a FBI drug investigation. Today, although recalled by few Americans, Dan Mitrione Sr. is still a controversial Cold War character.
(snip)

The 1973 movie State of Siege by Costa-Gavras is based on this story, with Mitrione being played by Yves Montand, though with a different name.
(snip)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Mitrione

The movie was almost completely quashed in the States when it was released.

I haven't been able to find any way to find it anywhere.

[ret5hd]

7. maybe here:

http://www.sweetmoviememories.com/_State_Siege.html

[Judi Lynn]

11. ret5hd, I was in such a hurry when I saw that link you posted, I took off,

without a sensible thought in my head to look it up, where I bought the film, and raced back and thanked a great DU'er, gorbal, instead of YOU.

Please, accept my very belated thank you for your kindness, and for showing the way to find something I've been seeking for YEARS.

Very sorry I was in such a rush and screwed this up.

Thank you.

[gorbal]

9. Don't you wish the press had paid attention?

Notice all the attention they pay to Chavez and Castro, how come right-wing dictators don't get any press why left wing leaders who stick up to the US get ALL the press? Makes you wonder.

[Judi Lynn]

10. Gorbal, don't know how you did this. I looked and looked in earlier times, without success.

Just finished getting a copy long after I believed it was possible.

There's a reference to the film in this link:

The film "State of Siege" appeared in 1972. It centered around Mitrione and the Tupamaros and depicted a Uruguayan police officer receiving training at a secret bomb school in the United States, though the film strove more to provide a composite picture of the role played by the US in repression throughout Latin America. A scheduled premier showing of the film at the federally-funded John F. Kennedy Arts Center in Washington was canceled. There was already growing public and congressional criticism of this dark side of American foreign policy without adding to it. During the mid-1970s, however, Congress enacted several pieces of legislation which abolished the entire Public Safety Program. In its time, OPS had provided training for more than one million policemen in the Third World. Ten thousand of them had received advance training in the United States. An estimated $150 million worth of equipment had been shipped to police forces abroad.{24} Now, the "export of repression" was to cease.
That was on paper. The reality appears to be somewhat different.
To a large extent, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) simply picked up where OPS had left off. The drug agency was ideally suited for the task, for its agents were already deployed all over Latin America and elsewhere overseas in routine liaison with foreign police forces. The DEA acknowledged in 1975 that 53 "former" employees of the CIA were now on its staff and that there was a close working relationship between the two agencies. The following year, the General Accounting Office reported that DEA agents were engaging in many of the same activities the OPS had been carrying out.
In addition, some training of foreign policemen was transferred to FBI schools in Washington and Quantico, Virginia; the Defense Department continued to supply police-type equipment to military units engaged in internal security operations; and American arms manufacturers were doing a booming business furnishing arms and training to Third World governments. In some countries, contact between these companies and foreign law enforcement officials was facilitated by the US Embassy or military mission. The largest of the arms manufacturers, Smith and Wesson, ran its own Academy in Springfield, Massachusetts, which provided American and foreign "public and industrial security forces with expert training in riot control".{25}
Said Argentine Minister Jose Lopez Rega at the signing of a US-Argentina anti-drug treaty in 1974: "We hope to wipe out the drug traffic in Argentina. We have caught guerrillas after attacks who were high on drugs. The guerrillas are the main drug users in Argentina. Therefore, this anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerrilla campaign as well."{26}
And in 1981, a former Uruguayan intelligence officer declared that US manuals were being used to teach techniques of torture to his country's military. He said that most of the officers who trained him had attended classes run by the United States in Panama. Among other niceties, the manuals listed 35 nerve points where electrodes could be applied.{27}
(snip)

http://members.aol.com/bblum6/uruguay.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After hearing about this film years ago, and never seeing it surface anywhere, and after having called video places around town, being told they couldn't order it, either, I gave up hope.

Really, really looking forward to seeing this, which was shunned in this country so long ago. I guess they thought they could ignore it and people would forget all about it.

(As a tiny side note, on the late Costa Gavras, the late singer/songwriter, Jimmie Spheeris and the filmmaker, Penelope Spheeris, and musician Chris Spheeris are his first cousins.)

Thanks, so much.

[Judi Lynn]

12. Gorbal, you must think someone had gone wacko. Sorry for the post to you,

which should have been addressed to "ret5hd."

I saw the link to a site which offered the film based on the U.S. torturer from the 1960's, and ran amock!

Very embarrassing, sorry to have addressed you incorrectly.



Never mind.

[gorbal]

16. No anytime:)

:rofl:

[Peace Patriot]

4. The seed of the Bank of the South was when the World Bank crashed Argentina's economy.

The World Bank/IMF works as a sort of mafia protection racket, to enrich U.S. and other first world financial interests, at the expense of the poor. They provide big loans on onerous terms to the rich elite, who rip off the money leaving the poor to pay the debt. The terms include cutting all social programs (education, medical care for the poor, etc.), reducing/eliminating labor/wage protections (resulting in sweatshop labor) and opening the country to vast, unregulated resource exploitation by global corporate predators. (See Greg Palast's wonderful exposition on this, which I'm going to post below.)

Argentina was a basketcase as a result of these World Bank/IMF practices. The people rebelled, and a coalition of the poor and middle class went round with tiny hammers and broke every bank ATM display window in Buenos Aires, in protest. Three governments later--in quick succession--the Argentinians finally got a good leftist government--that of Nestor Kirchner--which promised to get them out of World Bank debt and never get into its clutches again. Enter Venezuela, flush with oil profits and infused with the zeal of the Bolivarian revolution (election of Hugo Chavez, program of social justice, self-determination and regional cooperation). Venezuela bought up a portion of Argentina's debt on easy terms. Argentina quickly began to recover and now all indicators are up. Venezuela thus helped to create a healthy trading partner for itself and other countries like Brazil. Lesson: With LEFTIST (majorityist) government, oil profits can be used not only to bootstrap the poor with literacy classes, adult education, building and staffing schools and medical centers in poor areas never before served by government, and with loans and grants to small businesses and worker coops, land reform and other social justice measures, it can ALSO be used for "big picture" economic purposes such as rescuing third world countries from the talons of U.S. and other first world financial sharks, and cooperative regional projects.

Thus was born the Bank of the South. These small countries which have suffered decades and centuries of brutal exploitation can band together in mutual aid, and, using their communal strength, begin making decisions that benefit the people of the region--not the fatcat billionaires and CEOs in New York and London.

THIS is one of the biggest reasons that the Bush State Department, and its echo chamber, the U.S. war profiteering corporate news monopolies, vilify Hugo Chavez and paint an ENTIRELY FALSE picture of him as some sort of rogue "dictator" (a man who has won four Venezuelan elections--the most highly monitored elections on earth--the latest one with 60% of the vote). He is the LEADER of this self-determination movement! He is helping to free South American countries from their enslavement to the U.S. And he has inspired the rise of leftist (majorityist) leadership throughout the Andes region, where governments committed to social justice, and led by Bolivarians, have been elected in Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina, while the contest between the old dinosauric model of Colombia ($billions in US military aid, torture, death squads, mass graves for union organizers, peasant farmers and political leftists, vast government corruption, and "free trade") is losing to the new South American left, in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, with big leftist movements also in Paraguay and Peru (likely to win future elections), and in Nicaragua and Mexico.

In Bush's recent "tour" (kneecapping visits) to South America, one of the crucial questions to leftist observers was whether or not he would succeed in his obvious "divide and conquer" strategy. Uruguay joining the Bank of the South is one more big indication of his utter failure ('mission NOT accomplished'). There are many others. This may be why some of his corporate puppetmasters seem to be abandoning him (--are permitting some stories about the humongous corruption of his regime to be published). The Bush Junta has basically "lost" South America, and their desperate 'torture, death and assassination' habit of ruling Latin America is no longer working. South Americans have worked long and hard on transparent elections and constitutional government, and their democracies are holding up well, under the Bush Junta's efforts to bully and smash them and re-install rightwing dictatorships.

This is also the great irony of the Bush Junta calling Chavez a "dictator." The Bush Junta would LIKE TO SEE fascist dictatorships all over Latin America. That is their "druthers," as we all know. But, let a real leftist and democrat get elected, honestly, and show FDR-like strength in dealing with the rabid and greedy right, and they cry "authoritarian!," "dictator!", just as the fascists cried out against FDR, in his four terms as president here! 'God save us from government that sides with the poor majority!'

[Peace Patriot]

5. "FOUR STEPS WHICH DESTROYED ARGENTINA," by Greg Palast

Me: This is essential reading for understanding WHY the Bank of the South was created.

--------


FOUR STEPS WHICH DESTROYED ARGENTINA
by Greg Palast

Prosperity, February 2003

"(The following is from Greg Palast's website www.gregpalast.com An expanded American edition of his global bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth About Globalization, Corporate Cons and High-Finance Fraudsters, was released on 25 Feb 2003.)

"Bolivia is in flames, its economy shot dead. And I've got my hands on the murder weapon, the same one that killed Argentina's economy: the "Country Assistance Strategies" of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). They are marked confidential. How I got them -- well, that's not important. But the following is from this month's Harper's Magazine, my exposé of a batch of these secretive plans for the seizure, control and ultimate ruin of the nations the IMF supposedly seeks to save. See "Resolved to Ruin", by me in Harper's Magazine, March 2003:

"Green-haired protesters in the streets of Seattle were ridiculed for their belief that the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the world's finance ministers enter into secret agreements to impoverish developing nations.

"Here, in fact, is one such agreement: Argentina's 'Country Assistance Strategy Progress Report' from June 2001. This document, nominally produced by the World Bank, represents the interlocking directives of both the Bank and the IMF, as well as, indirectly, the wishes of both institutions' largest patron, the United States Treasury Department.

"Marked 'Confidential' or 'Official Use Only,' these reports are seldom publicized to the citizenry bound up in their stipulations. And yet for the 100-plus that rely on IMF and World Bank loans -- countries such as Argentina, Tanzania, Ecuador, Sierra Leone -- such agreements serve as de facto legislation, meticulous in detail and ideological in thrust. Although couched as loan conditions or as helpful development advice, these reports more closely resemble the minutes of a financial coup d'etat.

"To reduce its deficit per IMF decree, Argentina had cut $3 billion from government spending -- a cut that was necessary, the authors note here, to 'accomodat the increase in interest obligations.'

"These obligations, the report did not need to add, were largely to foreign creditors, including the IMF and World Bank themselves.

"Since 1994, in fact, Argentina's budget deficits had been entirely attributable to interest payments on foreign loans. Excluding such payments, spending had remained constant at 19 percent of GDP. Despite the visible harm caused by cuts, the new plan ordered more.

"This, the report promised, would 'greatly improve the outlook for the remainder of 2001 and 2002, with growth expected to recover in the later half of 2001.' The Bank was slightly off the mark. By December 2001, Buenos Aires' middle class, unaccustomed to hunting the streets for garbage to eat, joined the poor in mass demonstrations.

"HOW HAD ARGENTINA ARRIVED AT SUCH AN IMPASSE?

"In the 1990s the nation was the poster child for globalization, having followed without question the IMF and World Bank program.

"The 'reform' plan for Argentina, as for every nation, has four steps.

"The first of these, capital market liberalization, was achieved by 1991's 'Convertibility Plan,' which pegged the Argentine peso in a one-to-one relationship with the U.S. dollar. This peg was designed both to keep inflation low and to make deficit spending difficult, in hopes of attracting and comforting foreign investors. Liberalized markets free capital to flow in and out across borders. But once Argentina's economy began to wobble, money simply flowed out.

"The second step in the IMF/World Bank regimen is privatization. Both at the urging of lenders and out of financial necessity, Argentina throughout the nineties sold off what Argentines now ruefully call las joyas de miabuela, grandmother's jewels: the state's oil, gas, water, and electric companies and the state banks. It was quite a fire sale. Vivendi of France won rural water systems; Enron of Texas the pipes of Buenos Aires; Fleet of Boston took the provincial banks....

"In 1994, at the World Bank's urging, Argentina partially privatized even its social security system, diverting much of it into private accounts. The US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research calculated the revenue loss from this decision alone to be almost equal to the nation's budget deficit during the period.

"The third prong of the laissez-faire putsch is market-based pricing. In Argentina, the main target of this initiative has been labor, that most inflexible of commodities.

"'A major advance was made to eliminate outdated labor contracts,' states this report, noting approvingly that 'labor costs' (ie, wages) had fallen due to 'labor market flexibility induced by the de facto liberalization of the market via increased informality.' Translation: workers who lost unionized jobs were forced into ad hoc arrangements, with far less protection. Here, the report asks the government to decentralize collective bargaining, a move that would reduce union power.

"Far from achieving this goal of 'unemployment in single digits,' the World Bank and IMF saw the jobless figure in the Buenos Aires area rise from 17 percent to 22 percent in the year after the report's issuance. The violence and looting that rocked the city in December 2001 thus represents a stage in the 'austerity' process that Stiglitz terms the 'IMF riot.' When a nation, he said, 'is down and out, takes advantage and squeezes the last pound of blood out of them. They turn up the heat until, finally, the whole cauldron blows up.'

"Step four of the IMF/World Bank program is free trade. The loan terms of the two institutions had required Argentina to accept "an open trade policy." As recession set in, Argentina's exporters -- whose products were effectively priced, via the peg, in US dollars -- were forced into a spectacularly unequal competition against Brazilian goods priced in that nation's devalued currency. Argentina grows a special kind of long-grain rice favored by Brazilians, and yet even as Brazil faced a hunger crisis tons of rice went unsold.

"Before 1980, when the World Bank and IMF set out to rearrange the economies of developing nations, nearly all of them adhered to Keynesianism or socialism. Following the 'import-substitution model', they built locally owned industry through government investment, behind a protective wall of tariffs and capital controls. In those supposed economic dark ages, spanning roughly from 1960 to 1980, per-capita income grew by 73 percent in Latin America and by 34 percent in Africa.

"By comparison, since 1980, Latin American income growth has slowed to a virtual halt -- to less than 6 percent over twenty years -- while African incomes have declined by 23 percent. The IMF itself, in a statement accompanying its April 2000 World Economic Outlook report, noted that 'in recent decades, too many countries, and nearly one-fifth of the world population, have regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th Century.'

"n this, at least, the IMF had it right."

----------------


*****"Please print out, photocopy and distribute these articles. Also copy and paste them to emails, and circulate widely, and please include all the essential contact information (above). Thank you.****

"Essential Further Reading:

"PROSPERITY: Freedom from Debt Slavery
is a 4-page quarterly Journal which campaigns for publicly-created debt-free money. PROSPERITY is edited and published by Alistair McConnachie and a 4-issue subscription is available for £10 payable to PROSPERITY at 268 Bath Street, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, G2 4JR. Tel: [phone]; Fax: [phone], Email: contactus AT ProsperityUK DOT com http://www.ProsperityUK.com All back-issues are still available (link). The 40-page Report, Clarifying our Money Reform Proposals, launched at the 2006 Bromsgrove Conference, is available for £10 payable to PROSPERITY and is essential reading for beginners.

"The Grip of Death: A study of modern money, debt slavery and destructive economics by Michael Rowbotham, and Goodbye America! Globalisation, debt and the dollar empire by Michael Rowbotham, and Creating New Money: A monetary reform for the information age by Joseph Huber and James Robertson are all available from PROSPERITY."

[Judi Lynn]

6. Just discovered your posts on this thread, Peace Patriot.

Rather than reading through too quickly, I'm going to bookmark them to read later this evening when I can completely concentrate.

Thank you so much for your investment of time, thought, and caring in these excellent statements. There's nothing even close to them.

[Judi Lynn]

13. Everyone should see this article on Argentina you posted by Greg Palast.

They should get to learn about what on earth these organizations have been doing, and what really happens once they get their death grip on helpless countries.

People need to know. Period. The more, the sooner, the better. Thank you.

[Vidar]

8. Excellent news!. I greatly appreciate the updates, Judi Lynn & PeacePatriot.

[Judi Lynn]

14. Hi, Vidar. It's ALWAYS good to see your posts. n/t

[pork medley]

15. where is the usual gang of idiots?

you know, the anti-chavez rightwing brigade