South America Rejects US Sanctions on Venezuela

Source: Associated Press

South America Rejects US Sanctions on Venezuela
CARACAS, Venezuela May 24, 2014 (AP)

South American governments have rejected an effort by U.S. lawmakers to apply sanctions on Venezuela over human rights concerns.

Foreign ministers from the 12-member Union of South American Nations issued a statement Friday saying that the proposed legislation would constitute a violation of Venezuela's internal affairs and undermine attempts by regional diplomats and the Vatican to foster dialogue between the government and opposition.

Sanctions represent "an obstacle for the Venezuelan people can overcome their difficulties with independence, and in democratic peace," according to a statement after a meeting in the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday is expected to debate a bipartisan bill that would order the Obama administration to ban visas and freeze the assets of Venezuelan officials who've committed abuses during the past three months of unrest. Similar legislation has already cleared the Senate foreign relations committee.

The Obama administration has condemned President Nicolas Maduro's crackdown on protests but wants to hold off on applying sanctions to give more time to dialogue.


Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/south-america-rejects-us-sanctions-venezuela-23856209

The Proud Message of Utah Phillips

The Proud Message of Utah Phillips

May 23, 2014

It is often forgotten that the path to the Great American Middle Class was forged in large part by labor activists and social reformers during the first six decades of the last century, a struggle that left behind a proud culture of music and stories that can inspire the present, as Richard L. Fricker recalls.

By Richard L. Fricker



May is graduation month, the start of the summer season, the time when youth pack off for travels in search of a broader worldly perspective. May is also workers’ month, a celebration of those who have struggled to raise the respect for those who labor and thus to tie together those slender threads of human decency in what we call civilization.

So, May is a good time to celebrate U. Utah Phillips, who lived from May 15, 1935, to May 23, 2008, a labor organizer, poet and folk singer who was known as the “Golden Voice of the Great Southwest.”

Phillips was born Bruce Duncan Phillips in Cleveland, Ohio, to Edwin D. Phillips and Frances Kathleen Coates, both active labor organizers. Their activities and his step-father’s management of vaudeville houses contributed to his becoming an icon of American folk music and the labor movement.

After an army tour in Korea during the mid-1950s, Phillips rode the rails and joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Wobblies. During these travels, he adopted the name U. Utah Phillips in deference to singer T. Texas Tyler.

It is ironic that May 1, or May Day, is celebrated as the day of the worker in almost every corner of the industrialized world, except the United States, where it began in recognition of 1886 Chicago Haymarket Massacre during a battle for the eight-hour work day, to replace the then-standard 60 hours of work over six days a week.

More:
http://consortiumnews.com/2014/05/23/the-proud-message-of-utah-phillips/

The U.S., Colombia & the Spread of the Death Squad State

Weekend Edition May 23-25, 2014
The False-Positive Nightmare

The U.S., Colombia & the Spread of the Death Squad State

by DANIEL KOVALIK


Colombia continues to be ground zero for the U.S.’s crimes against Latin America, and its continued quest to subjugate the region. Several recent events, virtually uncovered in the mainstream press, underscore this reality.

First, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report just this week detailing the grisly practices of paramilitary death squads in the port town of Buenaventura. [1] These practices by the paramilitaries which act with impunity and with the tacit support of the local police, include disappearances of hundreds of civilians; forced displacement; and the dismemberment of individuals, while they are still alive, in local “chop houses.” That the port town of Buenaventura was to be the model city of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is instructive as to what the wages of free trade truly are. Jose Vivanco of HRW called Buenaventura “the scandal” of Colombia. Sadly, it is not Colombia’s only one.

Thus, this past weekend, the VI Division of the Colombian Army entered the peasant town of Alto Amarradero, Ipiales in the middle of the night, and, without warrant and in cold blood, gunned down four civilians, including a 15-year old boy. Those killed were Deivi López Ortega, José Antonio Acanamejoy, Brayan Yatacue Secue and José Yiner Esterilla — all members of the FENSUAGRO agricultural union. [2]

The Army then displayed the bodies of those murdered for all to see, and falsely claimed that they were the bodies of guerillas killed in combat.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/23/the-u-s-colombia-the-spread-of-the-death-squad-state/

You bet! Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada got away with absolutely vicious murders, so far.

There's one article on a woman who was NOT counted as one of the executed protesters by Goni's military, as she lived on in agony for months until she died. I posted it years ago on this thread, which has more information on the former President:

~snip~
On the morning of October 15, 2003, while the demonstrations that two days later would take down a president spread through La Paz and El Alto, the mineworkers’ leaders of Oruro province decided to march to the capital to support the rebels. In the La Salvadora mine, a 36-year-old woman, widow, and mother of six children between the ages of two and twelve, joined the miners’ contingent. Filomena León, who months later would tell her story before the cameras of Verónica Auza and Claudia Espinoza, was among the people who arrived that morning in the town of Patacamaya, a little more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from La Paz.

“I don’t know how they surprised us. We were getting out of the car peacefully to drink some tea.”

The soldiers had orders to stop the caravan, and held back the miners with gunshots. First, they burst the tires on the miners’ trucks and seized their few belongings, then they attacked the miners, who, armed with sticks of dynamite, resisted the offensive. The palliri (woman miner) was among those injured in the clash. “I felt the bullet, just the bullet. I haven’t risen since. I was ahead of the soldiers and the bullet entered me from behind. I don’t remember anything else.” The high caliber projectile embedded itself in Filomena’s spinal cord. For months, in at least two public hospitals, the brave woman slowly lost her health and will to live; she was paralyzed, and her younger children couldn’t even recognize her.

On April 30, nearly six months after being shot, Filomena León died of a lethal infection at the La Paz Clinic Hospital, according to the Gas War Memorial Testimony – a book put together by Auza and Espinoza to record the dozens of deaths, the hundreds of wounded and mutilated, that were the high price paid by the Bolivian insurrection last year. In the last weeks of her life, one could see a fist-sized hole in her back. Filomena’s sweet voice and black, abundant braids left this land forever. The same happened to Teodocia Morales Mamani (who was pregnant), Marcelo Chambi Mollinedo, Ramiro Vargas Astilla, and many other Alteños (from the city of El Alto), Aymara peasant-farmers, children and grandparents, men and women. And today, despite the Bolivian National Congress having authorized their prosecution, those responsible for so much pain go unpunished.

The Death Sentence

In a story of courage and strength, Bolivia’s poor, most importantly its Aymara indigenous population, defended their natural gas in September and October of last year, blockading highways and paralyzing El Alto and La Paz. Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, serving his second term as president, hoped to export this valuable natural resource to the United States through Chilean ports, against the will of the people. During the conflict, soldiers and police constantly fired on people armed only with sticks, stones, and occasionally dynamite. As in the case of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, or of the insurrection in Argentina in 2001, the repressive forces of the Bolivian state had “orders from above”; a license to kill.

Bolivian ex-president can face rights trial in US

Bolivian ex-president can face rights trial in US
AFP
May 22, 2014, 1:49 pm



Miami (AFP) - A judge in the state of Florida has given a green light for a human rights abuses trial to move forward in the United States against Bolivian ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada.

Fort Lauderdale judge James Cohn, in a ruling dated Tuesday, said that plaintiffs may continue to seek compensation from the former president and his then-defense minister Carlos Sanchez Berzain, under a US law that protects torture victims.

The plaintiffs are eight Bolivians who live in Florida; they are seeking redress for the killing of their relatives in a military repression of civilians that left more than 60 people dead in their South American homeland in 2003.

The former president and his former defense minister fled the country and also are living in the United States.

Lawyers for the two argued that US courts had no jurisdiction since the events took place in Bolivia.

More:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/world/a/23736971/

Evidence that the Meritocracy is Made Up of Poor People

Published on Monday, May 19, 2014 by Common Dreams

Evidence that the Meritocracy is Made Up of Poor People

by Paul Buchheit

Many wealthy Americans believe that dysfunctional behavior causes poverty. Their own success, they would insist, derives from good character and a strict work ethic. But they would be missing some of the facts. Ample evidence exists to show a correlation between wealth and unethical behavior, and between wealth and a lack of empathy for others, and between wealth and unproductiveness.

The poor, along with a middle class that is sinking toward them, make up the American meritocracy. Here is some of the evidence.

1. The Poor Don't Cheat As Much

An analysis of seven different psychological studies found that "upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals." A series of experiments showed that upper-class individuals were more likely to break traffic laws, take valued goods from others, lie in a negotiation, and cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize.

And this doesn't even begin to examine the many, many significant cases of fraudulent behavior in the banking industry. Or private equity firms that cheat their investors over 50 percent of the time. Or the many unscrupulous corporate tax avoidance strategies.

2. The Poor Care More About Other People

Numerous reputable sources have concluded that lower class individuals tend to be more generous and trusting and helpful, compared to the upper class. As people gain in wealth, they depend less on others, and thus they have less reason to understand the feelings and needs of the less fortunate. The poor are better at interpersonal relationships because they need other people.

In addition, careful studies have determined that money pushes people further to the right, making them less egalitarian, and less willing, as a practical consequence, to provide broad educational opportunities to all members of society.

One neuro-imaging analysis even suggested that the super-wealthy view photos of impoverished people as things rather than as human beings. They react to the poor not with sympathy, but with contempt.

More:
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/19-1

Rios Montt did it all with Reagan's full awareness and his blessing. Horrendous.

Slaughter Was Part of Reagan’s Hard Line
Updated May 21, 2013, 1:54 PM


In 1966, the U.S. Army’s Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines summarized the results of a war game waged in a fictitious country unmistakably modeled on Guatemala. The rules allowed players to use “selective terror” but prohibited “mass terror.” “Genocide,” the guidelines stipulated, was “not an alternative.”

A decade and a half later, genocide was indeed an option in Guatemala, supported materially and morally by Ronald Reagan’s White House. Reagan famously took a hard line in Central America, coming under strong criticism for supporting the contras in Nicaragua and financing counterinsurgency in El Salvador.
Updated May 21, 2013, 1:54 PM

His administration’s actions in Guatemala are less well known, but even before his 1980 election, two retired generals, who played prominent roles in Reagan’s campaign, reportedly traveled to Central America and told Guatemalan officials that “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.”

Once in office, Reagan, continued to supply munitions and training to the Guatemalan army, despite a ban on military aid imposed by the Carter administration (existing contracts were exempt from the ban). And economic aid continued to flow, increasing to $104 million in 1986, from $11 million in 1980, nearly all of it going to the rural western highlands, where the Mayan victims of the genocide lived.

This aid helped the Guatemalan military implement a key part of its counterinsurgency campaign: following the massacres, soldiers herded survivors into “model villages,” detention camps really, where they used food and other material supplied by the U.S. Agency for International Development to establish control.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/19/what-guilt-does-the-us-bear-in-guatemala/guatemalan-slaughter-was-part-of-reagans-hard-line

Everyone in the Courtroom Knew They Were Punishing an Innocent Man: The Innocence of Gerardo

May 20, 2014
Everyone in the Courtroom Knew They Were Punishing an Innocent Man

The Innocence of Gerardo

by RICARDO ALARCON de QUESADA


The meeting in London of the Commission of Inquiry on the case of the Cuban Five examined in depth the specific situation of Gerardo Hernández Nordelo and the infamous charge (Count 3 “conspiracy to commit murder”) lodged only against him. It forms the basis of his sentence, in which he must die two times in prison. He is falsely accused of having participated in the shoot-down of the two planes of the terrorist group that calls itself “Brothers to the Rescue.”

From a legal point of view, for it to have standing in a United States court, the deed in question had have had to occur in international airspace, outside of Cuban jurisdiction. Otherwise, no court of the United States would have been able to take it up.

That is why in the Miami trial the exact location of the incident was discussed at length, repeating what had taken place before in the Security Council of the United Nations and in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). In those discussions, the contradictions between the Cuban radar and those of the United States arose continuously. There is certainly a great deal to write about the U.S. data, for example, the delay of several months in handing it over, which forced a delay in the work of the ICAO and the suspicious destruction of some records, all of which is stated in the ICAO report.

In order to try to resolve the discrepancy in the radars, the ICAO asked the United States to submit the images from its space satellites, a request that was rejected in 1996. Washington also refused to permit the Miami Court to view them. For a long time now it has been opposing the repeated requests by the Center for Constitutional Law and Human Rights of California and has litigated in the Courts of that State in its effort to keep the images from being seen. Soon it will be 20 years of obstinate censorship.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/20/the-innocence-of-gerardo/

American Health Care: a Cuban Fix, A System For the People, By the People

May 20, 2014
A System For the People, By the People

American Health Care: a Cuban Fix

by MATEO PIMENTEL


Despite the fact that the US altogether spends arguably more on public health than any other economic force in the West, next to nothing about its healthcare system is democratic. Like most everything else, this industry, or market sector, only exists to serve profit motive. Any ostensibly beneficial components, which might appear to favor the marginalized, are little more than the usual rotten fruits of a welfare capitalism that keeps the poor, working class divided against itself. As the system grows more and more costly, the rich get richer and the poor invariably continue to suffer. Ultimately, radically democratic change in American healthcare is necessary to fix the problem, and Cuba holds the answer.

When compared to all other so-called “industrialized” democracies, the United States of America is the only one that does not afford its people universal healthcare. The truth is that the healthcare industry is one of the most important pillars of the American economy for the rich; through capitalizing on illness and highly anti-democratic pricing, the plutocracy pools and stratifies incredible amounts wealth. Public funds do little more than grease the profiteering skids. Moreover, the ghastly amount spent on public health is not some dutiful act of governmental benevolence, some compliance representative of popular, democratic sentiment; rather, it is merely another indication of the reverse funneling of public coffers.

Such an incredible amount of spending does not even ensure Americans the best healthcare in the world. It certainly does not secure for its people the best system that money can buy. One report tells of at least 45,000 people dying yearly as a result of having no healthcare or access to it. Furthermore, many social democracies and communist countries from all latitudes score higher than the Yanks when it comes to public health measures and progress on that front. Cuba, say, actually does more with less.

A country like Cuba cannot afford to allow private enterprises to milk public pockets, nor does it want that for itself. Cuba has invoked a radically democratic means to ensure public health standards rise rather than fall in earnest. The result? Cuban healthcare far exceeds that of the US, and it does a far better job treating its body politic than America does her own.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/20/american-health-care-a-cuban-fix/

Cambodia: US Training of Abusive Military Exposed

Cambodia: US Training of Abusive Military Exposed
Exercises May Violate Congressional Restrictions, US Policy
May 20, 2014

(New York) – US military training to Cambodia’s abusive armed forces could easily be misused against the political opposition and labor unions and may violate US law. The US military support was evident in official publicity material and personal pages posted on Facebook during the annual “Angkor Sentinel” exercises conducted from April 21 to 30, 2014.

“It’s shocking that the US military is providing armed soldiers training in kicking down doors soon after Cambodian armed forces killed protesting workers in Phnom Penh,” said Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “While the ‘enemy’ the US is training Cambodia to defend against isn’t stated, these forces of late have only been used against opposition protesters and striking factory workers.”

US military forces have provided training that would assist Cambodia’s military in government crackdowns on the political opposition and civil society activists, Human Rights Watch said. This includes expanded military coordination with local political authorities and the police and a situational exercise centered on “security techniques in an urban environment.” A Cambodian military video featuring the seizure of a building shows troops advancing with assault rifles and kicking down an imaginary door to enter the building while US officers supervise the exercises. A photograph on the official Angkor Sentinel Facebook page, under the caption “vehicle search technique in an urban environment” shows a Cambodian soldier stopping a vehicle by standing in front of it with his assault rifle aimed at the windshield.

US military forces have provided training that would assist Cambodia’s military in government crackdowns on the political opposition and civil society activists, Human Rights Watch said. This includes expanded military coordination with local political authorities and the police and a situational exercise centered on “security techniques in an urban environment.” A Cambodian military video featuring the seizure of a building shows troops advancing with assault rifles and kicking down an imaginary door to enter the building while US officers supervise the exercises. A photograph on the official Angkor Sentinel Facebook page, under the caption “vehicle search technique in an urban environment” shows a Cambodian soldier stopping a vehicle by standing in front of it with his assault rifle aimed at the windshield.

More:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/20/cambodia-us-training-abusive-military-exposed