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World News from a Variety of Media Sources
Is Obama Already a Lame Duck? Posted: Sunday, March 7, 2010
¤ Ousted former Honduran leader to head Petrocaribe Ousted former Honduran President Manuel Zelaya is taking on a new role: leading an energy consortium allowing poor Caribbean and Central American nations to buy oil on preferential terms from Venezuela. Zelaya accepted the invitation from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a strong ally both before and after Zelaya was removed from office in a coup last June. Zelaya has been taking refuge in the Dominican Republic.
¤ Greek Protests Mount as Parliament Passes Budget Cuts Striking Greek workers shut down transport and tried to storm parliament as lawmakers passed 4.8 billion euros ($6.5 billion) in budget cuts, including wage reductions, needed to trim the region’s biggest budget deficit.
¤ Our Own Greek Tragedy While President Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care "summit," thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split screen - because they're part of the same story. It's just that Greece is a little further along in the plot.
¤ Brazil rebuffs US, says it will go own way on Iran Brazil vowed Wednesday not to "bow down" to gathering international pressure to impose new economic penalties on Iran over its nuclear program if further negotiations might be fruitful. With visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton standing beside him, Brazil's foreign minister said his country is concerned about Iran's nuclear intentions.
¤ Morales in Mexico It was a hot afternoon in central Coyoacán and the sun beat down heavily on the crowd as they awaited the appearance of charismatic Bolivian leader, Evo Morales. The public queued patiently and edged slowly into the Jardín Hidalgo, following mandatory security checks that are the norm at events of this nature. As the area filled, the more eager of the spectators began to climb onto the bandstand, trees and fences, to get a glimpse of their hero. The smaller members of the audience stood on their tiptoes in preparation for the Bolivian leader’s arrival. A scuffle broke out in the crowd, and the two perpetrators were comically berated by onlookers who reminded them that, “We are socialists, not neocons! Keep the peace.”
¤ Behind Washington’s Iran policy: Myths and reality While Washington’s Iran policy is often described as oriented toward containment of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the aims are much broader, and the assumption that Iran has nuclear weapons ambitions is without foundation. US policy is directed at eclipsing the rise of Iran as an independent economic, military and political power, and seeks as an ultimate objective the subordination of Iran to Washington, economically, militarily and politically.
¤ GM to recall 1.3M compacts for steering problem General Motors Co. is recalling 1.3 million Chevrolet and Pontiac compact cars sold in the U.S., Canada and Mexico to fix power steering motors that can fail.
¤ Blair warned in 2000 Iraq war was illegal An invasion of Iraq was discussed within the Government more than two years before military action was taken – with Foreign Office mandarins warning that an invasion would be illegal, that it would claim "considerable casualties" and could lead to the breakdown of Iraq, The Independent can reveal.
¤ The NAACP House of Shame Suppose the producers of a nominated picture like “Hurt Locker,” donated one million dollars to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and on the night of the Oscar presentations “Hurt Locker” received Oscars for best picture, best actress, best supporting actress and a special honor was awarded to the “producer.”
¤ Hillary in Latin America Hillary Clinton’s Latin America tour is turning out to be about as successful as George W. Bush’s visit in 2005, when he ended up leaving Argentina a day ahead of schedule just to get the hell out of town. The main difference is that she is not being greeted with protests and riots. For that she can thank the positive media image that her boss, President Obama, has managed to maintain in the region, despite his continuation of his predecessor’s policies.
¤ Obama Must Scrap Costly Nukes U.S. President Barack Obama will shortly issue a Nuclear Posture Review, a task each new president must perform. The Nobel Peace Laureate must decide what to do with America’s 5,500 nuclear weapons — enough to destroy the planet at least five times over. Obama, strongly influenced by Defence Secretary Robert Gates, will likely decide to spend $7 billion US modernizing nuclear weapons and plants. This when the U.S. is bankrupt and running on borrowed money.
¤ U.S. criticized on Iran sanctions The Obama administration is pushing to carve out an exemption for China and other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council from legislation pending in the Senate and the House that would tighten sanctions on companies doing business in Iran, administration and congressional sources said.
¤ Executing Handcuffed Afghan Kids? When Charlie Company’s Lt. William Calley ordered and encouraged his men to rape, maim and slaughter over 400 men, women and children in My Lai in Vietnam back in 1968, there were at least four Americans who tried to stop him or bring him and higher officers to justice. One was helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Jr., who evacuated some of the wounded victims, and who set his chopper down between a group of Vietnamese and Calley’s men, ordering his door gunner to open fire on the US soldiers if they shot any more people.
¤ Sunrise or Sunset for Iraq? Operation New Dawn. That is the name the U.S. military will give its operations in Iraq when U.S. military operations in that country end this September. Wait, what? Okay, once more, a little more slowly. The United States has nearly 100,000 military personnel in Iraq right now. In keeping with the January 2009 Security Agreement between Washington and Baghdad, the United States will withdraw all forces and contractors and turn over military installations to the Iraqi government by the end of 2011.
¤ American Genocides: Is Haiti Next? Distinguished historian, scholar and activist Gabriel Kolko studied "the nature and purpose of (American) power (since) the 1870s," calling it "violen(t), racis(t), repressi(ve) at home and abroad (and) cultural(ly) mendaci(ous)." It's been the same since inception, historian Howard Zinn calling colonial America: "a class society from the beginning. America started off as a society of rich and poor, people with enormous grants of land and people with no land. And there were riots, there were bread riots in Boston, and riots and rebellions all over the colonies, of poor against rich, of tenants breaking into jails to release people who were in prison for nonpayment of debt. There was class conflict. We try to" portray a benevolent nation. We weren't then. We're not now.
¤ Washington Times Covers 9/11 Controversy We have no idea what happened on 9/11. But since 9/11 Commission members have reportedly disavowed the full government's story – and one has written a book claiming the commission was serially lied to by the Bush administration, the FBI, CIA, etc. – we have to conclude that there are elements of the official story that are not entirely accurate. We would think that the US government would want to get to the bottom of such a serious matter, in some way or other.
¤ The War on Toyota: It's All Politics Does anyone really believe that Toyota is being pilloried in the media for a few highway fatalities? Nonsense. If Congress is so worried about innocent people getting killed, then why haven't they indicted US commander Stanley McChrystal for blowing up another 27 Afghan civilians on Sunday?
¤ New Grist for Hype on Iran Here we go again. A report issued Thursday by the new Director General of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano, has injected new adrenalin into those arguing that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. The usual suspects are hyping—and distorting—thin-gruel language in the report to “prove” that Iran is hard at work on a nuclear weapon. The New York Times' David E. Sanger and William J. Broad, for example, highlighted a sentence about “alleged activities related to nuclear explosives,” which Amano says he wants to discuss with Iran.
¤ Chossudovsky: US will start WW3 by attacking Iran A UN nuclear watchdog report suggests Iran could be developing a nuclear bomb, apparently confirming long-held suspicions in the West. But Tehran denies the claims, again insisting that its atomic intentions are peaceful. Michel Chossudovsky, who's from an independent Canadian policy research group, believes that what Iran says hardly matters, because the U.S. is planning for war.
¤ Orca Resistance at Sea World It was the first time that a trainer had ever been killed by a group of captive killer whales. There had been previous attempts, a great many actually. But the trainers involved, whether through rescue by other employees or a stroke of luck on their part, had always managed to survive. This attack, however, proved to be different and fatal. It occurred on February 21, 1991 at Sealand of the Pacific.
¤ Stage is set in U.S. for a Greek tragedy With uncharacteristic bluntness, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned Congress on Wednesday that the United States could soon face a debt crisis like the one in Greece, and declared that the central bank will not help legislators by printing money to pay for the ballooning federal debt. Recent events in Europe, where Greece and other nations with large, unsustainable deficits like the United States are having increasing trouble selling their debt to investors, show that the U.S. is vulnerable to a sudden reversal of fortunes that would force taxpayers to pay higher interest rates on the debt, Mr. Bernanke said.
¤ France demands Israel explain Dubai passport affair France demanded on Thursday that Israel explain how a forged French passport came to be used by assassins suspected of killing a Hamas commander in Dubai last month.
¤ British threat to Israel over Dubai Hamas assassination Britain will consider severing its intelligence-sharing agreement with Israel if Mossad agents are proved to have stolen the identities of British passport holders, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.
¤ Clinton clings to Bush ideals on Iran The US policy of engagement with Iran never got off the ground – and now Hillary Clinton has resorted to Bush-era sabre-rattling
¤ Iran: US acting as military dictatorship in ME Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki says the US is acting as a military dictatorship in the Middle East by killing countless number of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
¤ Disgruntled Americans are the New Terrorists Joe Stack, the man who recently flew a plane into an IRS building in Texas, has been described as everything from a true American hero to a ‘lone wolf’ style domestic extremist. However, most are reluctant to brand him with the label of terrorist, although that is the most apt description of Stack and his activities.
¤ Iran Looks Toward an Energy Alliance with China, India and Pakistan While Western attention was focused on Saudi Arabia's possible provision of energy guarantees to China in return for a "yes" vote on Iran sanctions, Iran was working to leverage its natural gas reserves into economic alliances with China, India and Pakistan.
¤ US Media Replays Iraq Fiasco on Iran Major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, are engaged in a replay of the kind of slanted coverage that paved the way to war in Iraq, only this time regarding Iran. The treatment of Iran’s election last June, the depictions of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the alarm over Iran’s nuclear program all parallel the one-sided coverage that the U.S. news media directed toward Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s alleged WMD program before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
Obama is Clueless Posted: Thursday, February 11, 2010
Obama is Clueless I'm with Simon Johnson here: how is it possible, at this late date, for Obama to be this clueless?
John Pilger: Why the Oscars are a Con Why are so many films so bad? This year's Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America's divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory.
Who Wants to Bomb Iran? Meet the men calling on Barack Obama to launch airstrikes against the Islamic Republic.
Is US bullying Toyota on recall? The US transportation chief's public rebukes of Toyota's handling of a massive safety recall have raised eyebrows, given the US government's major stake in rivals General Motors and Chrysler.
India forms new climate change body The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it "cannot rely" on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.
¤ The US game in Latin America US interference in the politics of Haiti and Honduras is only the latest example of its long-term manipulations in Latin America
¤ Thousands protest in Tokyo against U.S. military presence in Japan Thousands of protesters from across Japan marched today in Tokyo to protest against U.S. military presence on Okinawa, while a Cabinet minister said she would fight to get rid of a marine base Washington considers crucial.
¤ The West Owes Haiti a Bailout Last week started with a conference in Montreal, called by a group of governments and international agencies calling themselves Friends of Haiti, to discuss the long and short term needs of the recently devastated Caribbean nation. Even as corpses remained under the earthquake's rubble and the government operated out of a police station, the assembled "friends" would not commit to cancelling Haiti's $1bn debt.
¤ Obama's War for Oil in Colombia This past summer, President Obama announced that he had signed an agreement with Colombia to grant the U.S. military access to 7 military bases in Colombia. As the UK's Guardian newspaper announced at the time, “[t]he proposed 10-year lease will give the US access to at least seven Colombian bases – three air force, two naval and two army – stretching from the Pacific to the Caribbean.” And, these bases would accommodate up to 800 military and 600 civilian contractors of the United States.
¤ Haiti after 5 centuries of genocide, slavery, isolation, colonization and globalization With the devastation of the Haitian earthquake of January 12, many Americans are literally learning of Haiti for the first time. The following is an attempt to present a very brief outline of Haiti's history: first being dominated by Spain, then France and certainly for the last two centuries the United States.
¤ The kidnapping of Haiti The theft of Haiti has been swift and crude. On 22 January, the United States secured "formal approval" from the United Nations to take over all air and sea ports in Haiti, and to "secure" roads. No Haitian signed the agreement, which has no basis in law. Power rules in a US naval blockade and the arrival of 13,000 marines, special forces, spooks and mercenaries, none with humanitarian relief training. The airport in the capital, Port-au-Prince, is now a US military base and relief flights have been rerouted to the Dominican Republic.
¤ Hope for Haiti when? But a question bears asking: How much of this large sum will actually make it to the people of Haiti? As the death toll from the earthquake seems to climb ever higher, it's apparent that real aid is undeniably needed. News from the country itself, however, reveals that what has been coming in looks more like a military occupation than anything resembling help. The presence of the U.S. "stabilization force" has actually meant that barely a fraction of the aid headed to Haiti has gotten into people's hands.
¤ The Fourth Invasion Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, it's now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island's recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti's own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor.
¤ Roots of Liberty, Roots of Disaster The leader of Haiti's historic slave rebellion probably had a good idea of just how vicious the colonial powers could be. He knew they would use all of their political and military muscle to kill the roots of the modern world's first black republic. But L'Ouverture could never have imagined the chain of human tragedies that would follow these vengeful acts of political and economic terrorism. He would never have imagined the national disaster following last week's devastating earthquake
¤ Chavez Writes Off Haiti’s Oil Debt to Venezuela President Hugo Chavez announced Monday that he would write off the undisclosed sum Haiti owes Venezuela for oil as part of the ALBA bloc’s plans to help the impoverished Caribbean nation after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake. “Haiti has no debt with Venezuela, just the opposite: Venezuela has a historical debt with that nation, with that people for whom we feel not pity but rather admiration, and we share their faith, their hope,” Chavez said after the extraordinary meeting of foreign ministers of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA.
¤ ALBA countries allocate $120 million in aid to Haiti he Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) politico-economic bloc, at a special meeting in the Venezuelan capital on Monday, adopted a plan aimed at giving aid to Haiti in the elimination of the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and in the restoration of that Caribbean country. In urgent aid to the medical sector, the ALBA member-countries -- Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and the Caribbean island countries of Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Commonwealth of Dominica -- assigned $20 million.
¤ Security Kills Six days after the earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Southern Command finally began to drop bottled water and food (MREs) from an Air Force C-17. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had previously rejected such a method because of “security concerns.” The Guardian reports that people are dying of thirst. And if they do not get clean water, there can be epidemics of water-borne diseases that could greatly increase the death toll.
¤ Media Failures on Haiti: Great Television, Bad Journalism CNN’s star anchor Anderson Cooper narrates a chaotic street scene in Port-au-Prince. A boy is struck in the head by a rock thrown by a looter from a roof. Cooper helps him to the side of the road, and then realizes the boy is disoriented and unable to get away. Laying down his digital camera (but still being filmed by another CNN camera), Cooper picks up the boy and lifts him over a barricade to safety, we hope.
Haiti: the real looters are sitting in Washington Posted: Sunday, January 24, 2010
¤ Haiti: the real looters are sitting in Washington by Viv Smith FOUR DAYS AFTER the disaster in Haiti, the media shifted its attention from images of suffering to those of looting. Talk has turned to keeping "law and order". Haitians are increasingly depicted as savages. But the real savages and looters are the US ruling class. Instead of helping to rebuild Haiti's infrastructure to meet people's needs, the US is ensuring that the rich who have plundered Haiti for 200 years get even richer.
¤ Haiti: overthrowing slavery and resisting the IMF by Sadie Robinson THE SUFFERING of Haiti's people today is rooted in slavery and imperialism. The Times newspaper has described Haiti as "the unluckiest country" while the racist US evangelical Pat Robertson said that Haitians had "swore a pact to the devil" when they rose up against slavery in the 1790s. But it is imperialism, not the resistance to it, which has been the problem.
¤ How US imperialism has devastated Haiti by Peter Hallward THE EARTHQUAKE in Haiti caused, and continues to cause, such terrible destruction and loss of life because the country is so poor. There are three main reasons for that. Firstly, it is the only place where slavery was overthrown solely by slaves. But it meant a war that lasted 12 years, killed a third of the population, destroyed virtually every city and town, and gutted every plantation.
¤ SA medics en route to Haiti, calls for Aristide by Gia Nicolaides and Jean-Jacques Cornish A South African medical team will be landing in New York on Saturday morning before heading to the earthquake devastated island of Haiti. Meanwhile survivors of the quake are calling for the return of their ousted former president. Another man in the group, who identified himself as Auguste, said that it is remarkable that a concrete monument constructed by Aristide over the road from the palace appears unscathed.
¤ The hate and the quake in Haiti by Sir Hilary Beckles Buried beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda, out of both Western Europe and the United States, is the evidence, which shows that Haiti's independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.
¤ It's Time for a New Relationship With Bolivia Evo Morales is the most popular President Bolivia has ever had, winning re-election last month with 64% of the vote in spite of the fact that he is often at loggerheads with Bolivia's upper classes who have control over the country's print and television media. Evo Morales and representatives of the US government have a history of tense relations as well.
¤ Obama to indefinitely imprison detainees without charges One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the administration's indefinite imprisoning of "War on Terror" detainees without charges of any kind. So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against this policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object: a "legal black hole."
Haiti's tragedy: A crime of US imperialism Posted: Saturday, January 23, 2010
¤ Haiti, Katrina, and Why I Won’t Give To Haiti Through the Red Cross What's charitably given isn't always charitably distributed. In 21st century American and its empire, our corporate and military elite wield immense power. Corporate philanthropy serves corporate interests, not human interests, and corporate control over government, culture and media ensure that even funds donated by ordinary citizens can be directed and harvested for elite purposes too.
¤ When the Media Is the Disaster: Covering Haiti by Rebecca Solnit Soon after almost every disaster the crimes begin: ruthless, selfish, indifferent to human suffering, and generating far more suffering. The perpetrators go unpunished and live to commit further crimes against humanity. They care less for human life than for property. They act without regard for consequences. I'm talking, of course, about those members of the mass media whose misrepresentation of what goes on in disaster often abets and justifies a second wave of disaster. I'm talking about the treatment of sufferers as criminals, both on the ground and in the news, and the endorsement of a shift of resources from rescue to property patrol. They still have blood on their hands from Hurricane Katrina, and they are staining themselves anew in Haiti.
¤ Haiti, Again? by Phyllis Bennis This time, of course, the U.S. is not trying to prevent humanitarian assistance. President Obama made all the right commitments to the Haitian people, promising emergency assistance AND that we would stand with them into the future. He made clear that it is indeed the role and responsibility of government to respond to humanitarian crises, and that's a good thing (even if he also anointed his predecessors to lead a parallel privatized response). But the reality is, on the ground, some of the same problems that we've seen so many times before have already emerged, as U.S. military forces take charge, as the United Nations is pushed aside by overbearing U.S. power, as desperate humanitarian needs take a back seat to the Pentagon's priorities. Saturday morning's New York Times quoted Secretary of State Clinton saying, "we are working to back them [the Haitian government] up but not to supplant them." That was good. But then she said she expected the Haitian government to pass an emergency decree including things like the right to impose curfews. "The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us," Clinton said. So much for "not supplanting them."
The estimated 200,000 who have died, the quarter million or more injured and the three million whose homes have been destroyed are victims not merely of a natural catastrophe. The lack of infrastructure, the poor quality of construction in Port-au-Prince and the impotence of the Haitian government to organize any response are determining factors in this tragedy. These social conditions are the product of a protracted relationship between Haiti and the United States, which, ever since US Marines occupied the island nation for nearly 20 years beginning in 1915, has treated the country as a de-facto colonial protectorate.
¤ Costly victory for Haiti—UWI historian by Michelle Loubon With a sense of pride, historians note the island of Hispaniola (Haiti) was the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Liberator Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti a republic in 1804, thereby ridding it from the most oppressive manifestations of slavery. On the flip side, they noted the grave historical injustice—Haiti was the only country to pay its conquerors compensation. France demanded 90 million gold francs, more than US$20 billion for Haitians' freedom. In a telephone interview yesterday, eminent UWI historian Prof Bridget Brereton lent her voice to the chorus calling for reparations from France and the US. Brereton said, "I agree with the various voices, including Barbados' Sir Hilary Beckles saying France has a huge moral obligation to Haiti because of the terribly unjust requirements which France imposed on Haiti."
¤ Haiti needs water, not occupation by Mark Weisbrot The US has never wanted Haitian self-rule, and its focus on 'security concerns' has hampered the earthquake aid response
¤ Haiti: The Spectacle by Robert C. Koehler Haiti falls apart and America's journalists are on the ground, bringing us the spectacle of devastation. We care, we donate, we shake our heads in horror at the human toll of poverty. A bare foot sticks out of a pile of cinder blocks. "They've been digging for five hours," says Anderson Cooper. He sticks his mike in the rubble. Oh my God, she's alive. We can hear her screaming! "They only have this one shovel." OK, freeze frame. Something is so wrong with this picture...
¤ The Disaster Within The Disaster:It's Time To Investigate the Aid Fiasco by Danny Schechter Haiti remains a death trap, with an aid program that has sat by and watched thousands die without relief. The International Red Cross describes the situation there as a catastrophe while the American Red Cross reports raising more than $100 million dollars thanks to texting technologies and backing from the White House. Raising money is their specialty; delivering aid is not.
¤ Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations plane with relief aid for Haiti stranded in Caracas Russia's Charges d'Affaires in Venezuela Vladimir Tokmakov told Itar-Tass that the IL-76 plane was being grounded in Caracas because the U.S. air traffic controllers, who are in control of the Port –au-Prince airport, were constantly delaying permission to fly into the Haitian capital.
¤ The siege of Haiti THE RING of mighty warships off the coast of Port-au-Prince is a stark symbol of the true intentions of the U.S. government in its "humanitarian" mission following Haiti's devastating earthquake. The Navy and Coast Guard vessels aren't there with food or water or rescue teams. They're on patrol to make sure that Haitians don't escape the disaster and try to get to the United States.
¤ A Thorn in the Side of the U.S. Military in Haiti Watch the U.S. media and its coverage of the crisis in Haiti, and you get the impression that Washington is a benevolent power doing its utmost to help with emergency relief in the Caribbean island nation. But tune into al-Jazeera English or South American news network Telesur and you come away with a very different view. I was particularly struck by one hard hitting al-Jazeera report posted on You Tube which serves as a fitting antidote to the usual mainstream fare.
¤ Haitians dying by the thousands as US escalates military intervention Thousands of Haitians are dying every day for lack of medical care and supplies, according to a leading humanitarian aid group. Meanwhile, the Pentagon has announced that it is expanding the US military presence in the country, maintaining Washington’s priority of troops over humanitarian aid.
¤ The Merchants of Fear: Israel's Profiting from Homeland Insecurity "In order to exploit that resource to the full, Israel needed the likes of Chertoff, Lieberman, Schumer and Specter to hype the concept of “homeland security” in the United States. Americans, however, should have been asking a couple of pertinent questions. Which homeland? And whose security?"
