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Wall Street Journal cites Chilean earthquake to praise Pinochet http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/wsjo-m02.shtml

In an editorial published Monday, “A Tale of Two Quakes,” the Wall Street Journal compares the outcome of the massive earthquake that hit Chile on Saturday with the dimensions of the human disaster that has unfolded in Haiti. Citing the far greater scale of death and destruction in Haiti, the newspaper praises the comparatively higher level of preparedness for such a disaster in Chile, and writes: “But such preparation is also the luxury of a prosperous country, in contrast to destitute and ill-governed Haiti. Chile has benefited enormously in recent decades from the free-market reforms it passed in the 1970s under dictator Augusto Pinochet.”One wants to respond, to coin a phrase, “Lie, but at least make sense.”

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BOLIVIA: Cash for Checkups to Slash Maternal Deaths http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50509

A social programme in Bolivia that prevents the deaths of two mothers a day from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth is making headway despite administrative difficulties, and has the potential to cut the alarmingly high maternal mortality rate in this country by up to 80 percent in just five years.A political weapon.The mother-child subsidy was a weapon in the fight for political domination of Bolivia's regions between Morales and the rightwing opposition during the 2009 election campaign. 

It was named Juana Azurduy after a woman who is a symbol of Bolivian women's struggle for emancipation. An outstanding indigenous warrior, she attained the rank of lieutenant colonel in the long battle for South America's independence from Spain, in which Bolivia won its freedom in 1825. In the eastern and southern lowlands provinces of Beni, Santa Cruz and Tarija, controlled by the rightwing opposition, the programme's doctors were initially barred from access to health centres in several municipalities, said national coordinator Nelson Hurtado. "They were against the doctors because they personified President Morales' cash transfer programmes," he said. But now the subsidy is operational in 98 percent of the country's 325 municipalities.

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MIDEAST: Picking Pebbles to Live Somehow http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50512

Under the Oslo accords, Palestinian fishermen should be allowed to fish 20 miles off the coast. Israeli gunboats impose a limit of three miles, firing and shelling on fishermen who venture near or beyond three miles, or even on those nearer in. "We were sardine fishers, but sardines aren't found next to the coast, you need to go out beyond six miles. What could I do? I have six children to feed. So I started selling sand and gravel. This is hard work and I only earn around 30 shekels a day. But it's better than starving." Ninety-five percent of Gaza's industry has been decimated by the combination of the siege - imposed shortly after Hamas was elected in 2006, and tightened in June 2007 - and by Israel's winter 2008-2009 war on Gaza which destroyed or badly damaged 700 factories and businesses, according to Oxfam. 

The nearly 4,000 industrial establishments which formerly operated in Gaza have ground to a halt, leaving a mere 5 percent of factories operating, reports the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), noting that even those operating do so at greatly reduced levels of activity. The combination of siege and the war on Gaza led to a loss of roughly 120,000 private sector jobs since mid 2007, according to OCHA. And while the full closure of Gaza's borders and trade has become most severe in the last three years, Israeli journalist Amira Hass points out that Israel's debilitating policy of Gaza border closures has been in place since the 1990s.

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Video: Venezuela's revolution in its second decade — profile of a people's movement http://www.greenleft.org.au/2010/828/42617

Federico Fuentes is an associate of the Centro Internacional Miranda, an independent agency funded by Venezuela’s Ministry of Popular Power for Higher Education in Caracas. Together with Marta Harnecker, he leads two CIM study projects: “Political Instruments for the 21st Century” and “Popular Participation in Public Management”. He maintains the Bolivia Rising blog and is a member of the Caracas bureau of Green Left Weekly. 

The meeting was sponsered by POIRG-Toronto; Center for Social Justice (CSJ),; Barrio Nuevo; Hands Off Venezuela/Louis Riel Bolivarian Circle; Latin America Solidarity Network-Toronto; Latin@s Canada; Socialist Project; Venezuela We Are With You Coalition;Toronto Bolivia Solidarity; and Toronto Haiti Action Committee.

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David Lewis And The Ever Present “Corporate Welfare Bums.” http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article/235930761-david-lewis-and-the-ever-present-corporate-welfare-bums

If we want to see an example of what happens when corporate welfarism gets out of control all we have to do is look to our Southern neighbor. In what has been termed a “slow motion coup d’etat” we see a country where the legislatures; the Congress and the Senate have abdicated their power to Wall Street, The Pentagon and corporate lobbyists. While the American presidency is vaunted as the most powerful political office on earth, it is more accurately hostage to a truculent and well entrenched status quo. The president may have an agenda for change but political dysfunction reigns supreme.

Grand intentions are reduced to rhetoric, and real change becomes as elusive as a frosty Friday in Hell. For a country so bent on exporting its own democratic values around the world, its own is on the verge of collapse. It is a country where hope yields to despair all too quickly, and where the population has for the most part failed to address the real enemy in all its hydra-headed manifestations. But one enemy of the public good all too conspicuous is the stranglehold corporate power has on the levers of government. The USA of today becomes a case study in how corporatism can undermine a democracy and reduce it to an oligarchy.

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Venezuela's US ambassador says Jews NOT targeted by Chavez government http://jta.org/news/article/2010/02/28/1010843/venezuelan-envoy-says-jews-not-targeted

Alvarez sharply criticized the OAS report, as well as an earlier one by the U.S. State Department that cited Venezuela's political and economic ties with Iran, as well as Israeli allegations that Hezbollah cells operate on the offshore island of Isla Margarita."We have a large community of Syrians and Lebanese on Margarita, and those guys are very good merchants, but they don't support terrorism," he said.

In response to a question from JTA, Alvarez defended the close personal ties that Chavez has cultivated with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad."Iran has been a partner of Venezuela for years," Alvarez said, adding later that "We have a good friendship with Ahmadenijad, as we did with Khatami," his predecessor, "and we will be ready to work with any other Iranian president who follows."

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Ecuador: indigenous movement calls national uprising http://www.ww4report.com/node/8404

Following an "extraordinary assembly" Feb. 26 in Ambato, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) issued a call for a nationwide "uprising" to protest the government's development policies and press demands for a "pluri-national state." The statement charged that the government has "not modified the colonial State and continues building the neoliberal capitalist model." CONAIE president Marlon Santi said "CONAIE has terminated the dialogue with the national government, because the process of dialogue has produced no results."

Correa's Minister of Political Coordination, Doris Soliz, said that CONAIE's announcement harms efforts to build the united pluri-national state established by the 2008 constitution. "The decision would mean the loss of a process of joint construction of an inter-cultural and pluri-national state," but would not stop the government from continuing its work on behalf of indigenous rights, she added. (La Gaceta, Cotopaxi, Agencia Pulsar, March 3; EFE, LAHT, El Ciudadano, Quito, Feb. 26)

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Indigenous Struggles in the Americas http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/indigenous_struggles_in_the_americas/

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a writer, teacher, historian, and social activist, is Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies at California State University. She spoke to NLP about the historical and contemporary impact of imperialism in the Americas, and the nature of Indigenous peoples’ resistance to it.

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New psychiatric disorders flag normal human behaviors as "diseases" http://www.naturalnews.com/028280_psychiatric_industry_disease_mongering.html

This new manual, for example, now says that spending a lot of time thinking about sex is a disorder. (That immediately paints every teenage boy as "diseased.")Another new disease is "Oppositional Defiant Disorder" (ODD), which includes anyone who disagrees with authority. All those who are skeptical about the safety of vaccines, for example, are about to be diagnosed with ODD.

Now, people who are antisocial aren't merely antisocial. They're suffering from "Antisocial Personality Disorder" and require pharmacological treatment. So the prick neighbor isn't merely a prick anymore; he's a "sufferer" of a "disorder" who needs "treatment."Children are no longer unhappy or throwing a temper tantrum, they are suffering from "Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria." (I'm not making this up...)

There's another danger in all this psych-tagging of human behavior: What about all the creative, genius children who operate far beyond the intellectual norms of regular, average kids? As George Will explains:"Childhood eccentricities, sometimes inextricable from creativity, might be labeled "disorders" to be "cured." If 7-year-old Mozart tried composing his concertos today, he might be diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and medicated into barren normality."

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Fortress Toronto for G20 summit http://ubisurv.wordpress.com/2010/03/02/fortress-toronto-for-g20-summit/#respond

Rather like the peripatetic monarch’s court that used to be a feature of high mediaeval European societies, the travelling circus of global governance brings with it, its own security norms, creating locked-down ‘islands’ within cities, temporarily removing the rights and liberties of residents, and moving out and on those people seen to be ‘out-of place’ (the homeless, street vendors, protestors and so on). In many cases, ordinary people are suddenly potential troublemakers, and residents are harassed in advance by intelligence services who check profiles, backgrounds, political affiliations and so on.

Business within the zone are usually negatively affected – even if the case is made, as it normally is, that there will be some nebulous ‘economic benefit’, which (oh, so conveniently) happens to cover the costs of security. The events are often also ‘test-beds’ for new technologies of surveillance and security – last year at the Pittsburgh G20 summit, we saw the use of sonic weapons on protestors for example.

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Immigrants on strike - is Italy racist? http://www.thesamosa.co.uk/index.php/news-and-features/society/267-immigrants-on-strike-is-italy-racist.html

What would happen if the four million immigrants who live in Italy decided to not buy any products, make any phone calls, and not go to work for 24 hours? This is what four women thought when they came up with the idea of a symbolic strike and public demonstrations all over the country to raise awareness of the value of immigration in Italy and fight discrimination against foreigners. Immigrants – as well as Italians – are demonstrating together today in at least 70 Italian cities. Milan will host a concert, Bologna a photographic exhibition, and in Varese a yellow bicycle built from recycled material will ride around the city. 

According to a 2009 report by ISTAT, the Italian office of statistics, there are just over 4.2 million immigrants in Italy, 7.1 percent of the overall population. Two million immigrant workers contributed 10 percent of the country’s GDP last year, according to the 2009 Caritas-Migrantes report on immigration. They contributed seven billion Euros towards pensions last year, while just a few thousand of them are retired – whereas one in five Italians are now retired and benefit from the system. But Olawale argues that their job is not appreciated by the Italian authorities: “They highlight only the negative elements of the community, like criminality. I want to remind the Italians that they were the ones who exported organised crime overseas. The institutions see immigrants like oranges to squeeze.”

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New Constitution, same old Neocon influence  http://neoconopticon.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/new-constitution-same-old-neocon-influence/

According to the Samosa:After helping pave the way for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (though Cooper was no longer in London when the latter war was declared, he assisted Blair during its preparatory stages), he explained his worldview in the equally erudite and accessible book The Breaking of Nations. It suggested that a new ethos of imperialism, which emphasises voluntary action over coercion, should be developed for the 21st century.

Cooper cited the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as institutions that provide “a limited form of voluntary empire”, without expressing any concern about the misery they have inflicted on the world’s poor by insisting that governments serve the interests of the markets, rather than those of their own citizens.Cooper has close contacts with some of the more hawkish US representatives in Europe. In 2008, he wrote a pamphlet with Ronald Asmus, Brussels director with the German Marshall Fund of the United States and an inveterate defender of Israeli aggression.

Cooper’s contribution to that pamphlet displayed how he is in awe of American hegemony. “What is the point of the Belgian army today?” he asked. “It is not to defend Belgium, since no one is going to attack it. Rather it is to demonstrate a sufficient commitment to ‘the West’ that friends and allies, above all the USA, will be there if ever Belgium should need help.

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The World Federalist Manifesto I: World Government Takes Green Shape http://euro-med.dk/?cat=5

Bo Ekman (just behind Al Gore) is the founder of the Tällberg Foundation as well as the European Round table of Industrialists, alongside with Rothschild-Rockefeller agent Pehr Gyllenhammar – a club so full of bilderbergers.The vice President of the Tällberg Foundation is also the Vice-president of the Club of Rome, Anders Wijkman.

The International Financial Branch.The functions, the organization and voting system of IMF and the World Bank are very similar. There is no reason why an identical work should performed by two different organizations. The merger of the World Bank Group with the International Monetary Fund would bring a reduction of the administrative costs of both organizations.The Allocation of Authority Between the World Federal Government and the NationsThe confederate system would be created by the vertical separation of functions between international executive bodies and Member States’ governments, characterized by a limitation of federal power to international matters. The horizontal separation of powers would be created by the independence of the legislative, executive, judiciary and financial branches.

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Joe Bageant: Americans Are "Hope Fiends" Because Honestly Looking at the Present Situation Would Destroy Just About Everything We Hold As Reality http://tiny.cc/TomK9

There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other "developed" capitalist societies. But Americans in particular. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.

The rest of the country is oblivious, lost in the anxious clamor for an economic "recovery." The voice of the state defines recovery for them as a return to former levels of the unsustainable superheated capitalism, and increased indebtedness of the populace. "Oh when, oh when will the bankers loosen the credit markets so we can again buy things?" As if their debt slavery were a great gift! The banksters simply do not issue more credit to people they know are dead broke -- because they broke 'em, they will continue to make more money by letting the people wail, and taking the people's money directly from the state as bailouts. Stretched out over the coming years, we will see more of them. It should give us chills.

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Whether One State or Two, Settlements Need to Go http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/71951

"A solution must be found to this conflict, there is no doubt. Whether this solution entails the endorsement of a bi-national state (even if only to pressure Israel) or a two-state solution along the 1967 borders, one thing is certain. Illegal and illegitimate Jewish settlers cannot and must not be allowed to remain in Palestine."How for example, will Palestinians coexist with settlers from say, Yitzhar, in the northern West Bank, when these settlers have burned down neighboring Palestinian homes and fields, have uprooted olive trees or, if in season, stolen the olives?

Or with a settler in Hebron caught on tape boasting of how the Jews killed Jesus, how God gave them this land and how they would kill the Palestinians (and the Westerner taping the whole scene) as well? Some may argue that not all settlers are so belligerent and would be willing to live "side by side" with the Palestinians. There is even a small settler group calling themselves "Settlers for Peace" that propose to solve the conflict by making peace with their Palestinian neighbors. The problem here is not the individual person or even their intentions. The problem is what they stand for, which is a colonialist enterprise on occupied Palestinian land, an enterprise which, no matter how candy-coated we make it, can never be sweetened up enough to be acceptable.

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America's Permanent War Agenda http://mostlywater.org/americas_permanent_war_agenda

Barack Obama - America's New Warrior President.America glorifies conflicts and the righteousness of waging them, packaged as liberating ones for democracy, freedom, justice, and the best of all possible worlds. Obama is just the latest in a long line of warrior leaders promising peace by waging war, justifying them by bogus threats, and calling pacifism unpatriotic to further an imperial agenda for greater wealth, power, and unchallengeable global dominance.

In opposition to his announced Afghanistan surge, peace activists gathered across from the White House on December 12 for an "Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally" organized by "End US Wars"- a new coalition of grassroots anti-war organizations.

Besides the Afghan escalation, he's also destabilizing Pakistan to balkanize both countries, weakening them to control the Caspian Sea's oil and gas riches and their energy routes to secured ports for export. The strategy includes encircling Russia, China, and Iran, obstructing their solidarity and cohesion, defusing a feared geopolitical alliance, weakening the Iranian government, perhaps attacking its nuclear sites, eliminating Israel's main regional rival, and securing unchallenged Eurasian dominance over this resource rich part of the world that includes China, Russia, the Middle East, and Indian subcontinent.

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Coca-Cola Sued in U.S. by Guatemalans Over Anti-Union Violence http://www.insidecostarica.com/dailynews/2010/february/27/centam-10022703.htm

The plaintiffs said they were the victims of violence and retaliation by individuals associated with Industria de Café SA, or Incasa, which operates an instant coffee and Coca-Cola bottling plant in Guatemala City. The plaintiffs said Incasa “is or was previously owned by Coca-Cola.”“Incasa is Coke’s agent,” the plaintiffs said in the lawsuit. “At the time of the events alleged, Coke knew or was substantially certain that it and its bottlers were doing business in an environment in Guatemala where their unionized workers were at great risk of being tortured and/or killed by groups responsible for violence against trade unionists in Guatemala.”

Guatemalan CourtsThe plaintiffs said in the complaint that they filed the lawsuit in New York because Coca-Cola has offices there and because remedies in Guatemala are “inadequate and would not afford the complete relief” available in U.S. courts.“Coca-Cola has done more misrepresenting of their record in the state of New York than anywhere else,” Collingsworth said yesterday in a phone interview.

“Coke assures the public and investors they have told their bottlers and suppliers to comply with international human rights standards and yet they will say in court they have nothing to do with these bottlers and can’t control them.”Collingsworth of Conrad & Scherer in Washington “specializes in litigating cases that seek to hold multinational firms accountable for human rights violations in their global operations,” according to the law firm’s Web site. Companies that he has sued include Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chiquita Brands International Inc., according to the Web site.

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Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Foiling E.P.A. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/us/01water.html?em

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators. As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years

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A closer look at child abuse networks in the Netherlands and Belgium  Apparent top level involvement in both countries http://www.isgp.eu/miscellaneous/Closer_look_at_Belgium_Netherlands.htm