TF News, Action and Analysis

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The recent clash between indigenous peoples and Peruvian national police sends a powerful message from the Amazon jungle straight to Washington: The enormous social, political, and environmental costs of the free-trade model are no longer acceptable.

Using a combined offensive of helicopter and ground forces, the police attacked a peaceful demonstration of 2,000 Wampi and Aguaruna indigenous people near the town of Bagua. The protesters belong to the interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Jungle, an organization of about 300,000 members and 1,350 communities in the region. They blocked roads and occupied oil facilities to protest the executive decrees of President Alan García to implement the U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA). The decrees open up the Amazon to foreign investment, particularly gas and oil extraction.

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Source: Huffington Post

Over many years, I have developed an intimate relationship with the sweet, lager taste of Yuengling Black & Tan. After moving to the cutthroat world of Washington, D.C. politics, I found that Yuengling always comforted me with memories of my working class roots and the world of flannel hunting jackets, wedding receptions at union halls, 4th of July barbecues, and tailgate parties that represented my native Western Pennsylvania. I took pride in introducing my friends to this beauty of a beer–cheap, delicious, and made by union workers back home in Pennsylvania. Women had come and gone, dogs had died, but Yuengling had always been there for me - until now.

This past weekend when I discovered that Yuengling had illegally busted their union, I was emotionally devastated.

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Source: The Dominion

“Thank God for Nickelsville.” That’s how two women living at the site summed up their feelings towards the “permanent homeless shantytown” currently set up in the side lot of the Bryn Mawr United Methodist Church in northeast Seattle, WA, USA.

Its existence has provided a safe place to people who would otherwise have nowhere to live, allowing residents to “provide for themselves a basic level of safety and sanitation when their government steadfastly refuses to do so for them,” according to the Nickelsville website.

Nickelsville got its start on city property on September 22, 2008, in response to a lack of city action in response to growing of homelessness.

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Source: Green Left Weekly

“Under the influence of your company, the Papua New Guinea government has imposed a virtual state of emergency in Porgera”, Jethro Tulin, from the Atali Tange Association (ATA) of the Porgera Valley in Papua New Guinea, said at the annual general meeting of Barrick Gold in Toronto on April 29.

“While I am standing here before you, their houses are being burnt down and they are fleeing for fear of their life”, he told shareholders and executives.

Tulin is from the Porgera Valley in the Enga province of PNG’s highlands. The province is home to the indigenous Ilipi people and one of the world’s richest gold mines.

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Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

Sudan: The two F-16s caught the trucks deep in the northern desert. Within minutes, the column of vehicles was a string of shattered wrecks burning fiercely in the January sun. Surveillance drones spotted a few vehicles that had survived the storm of bombs and cannon shells, and the fighter-bombers returned to finish the job.

Syria: Four Blackhawk helicopters skimmed across the Iraqi border, landing at a small farmhouse near the town of al-Sukkariyeh. Black-clad soldiers poured from the choppers, laying down a withering hail of automatic weapons fire. When the shooting stopped, eight Syrians lay dead on the ground. Four others, cuffed and blindfolded, were dragged to the helicopters, which vanished back into Iraq.

Pakistan: a group of villagers were sipping tea in a courtyard when the world exploded. The Hellfire missiles seemed to come out of nowhere, scattering pieces of their victims across the village and demolishing several houses. Between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, 60 such attacks took place. They killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda members along with 687 civilians.

In each of the above incidents, no country took responsibility or claimed credit. There were no sharp exchanges of diplomatic notes before the attacks, just sudden death and mayhem.

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Source: The Real News

Clashes between police and indigenous protesters over drilling for oil and gas in rain forest

Recent free trade agreements signed with the American and Canadian governments fueled the government to go ahead with changes to domestic laws that would seek to advance mineral, logging, oil and agricultural ‘development’ into previously untouched areas of the Amazon. This touched off a over-50-day protest that has shut down parts of the Amazon.


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Source: Global Research

“Afghanistan’s parliament plans to pass an approval and send all related documents to the country’s High Court as well as the international Hague tribunal,” Khawaasi said.

This is the first time that Afghanistan’s parliament has decided to file a lawsuit against foreign forces based in the country and described them as “war criminals.”

Afghanistan’s parliament is to send all documents regarding foreign troops’ crimes to the Hague tribunal. Afghanistan’s Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of parliament, has accused foreign troops based in the country of war crimes, urging a trial for the criminals.

Wolesi Jirga secretary Abdul Sattar Khawaasi told reporters that 73 members of parliament are collecting documents regarding foreign troops’ crimes and offences in Afghanistan.

“The foreign troops came to the country claiming to bring security, but the crimes perpetrated by the them are not pardonable,” he said.

Khawaasi added that foreign troops based in Afghanistan have violated the Constitution as well as international agreements in more than 20 instances.

In May, the Afghan parliament slammed the brutal bombardment of civilian areas by US-led forces, demanding legal restrictions on the activities of foreign forces.

Nearly 150 civilians were killed when US warplanes dropped bombs last month on two villages in Bala Baluk district in western Farah Province.

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Source: Democracy Now!

The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to pay a $15.5 million settlement to avoid a trial over its alleged involvement in human rights violations in the Niger Delta. The case was brought on behalf of ten plaintiffs who accused Shell of complicity in the 1995 executions of Nigerian writer and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others. We speak to Ken Wiwa, the son of Ken Saro-Wiwa, and attorney Judith Brown Chomsky.

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Source: NACLA

On June 6, near a stretch of highway known as the Devil’s Curve in the northern Peruvian Amazon, police began firing live rounds into a multitude of indigenous protestors – many wearing feathered crowns and carrying spears. In the nearby towns of Bagua Grande, Bagua Chica, and Utcubamba, shots also came from police snipers on rooftops, and from a helicopter that hovered above the mass of people. Both natives and mestizos took to the streets protesting the bloody repression.

From his office in Bagua, a representative of Save the Children, the child anti-poverty organization, reported that children as young as four-years-old were wounded by the indiscriminate police shooting. President Alan García had hinted the government would respond forcefully to “restore order” in the insurgent Amazonian provinces, where he had declared a state of siege on May 9 suspending most constitutional liberties. The repression was swift and fierce.

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Source: The Exiled
May 22, 2009

Last week, Obama moved another step closer to creating the ultimate retro-70s Middlebrow-ocracy when he appointed a loathsome overachieving hamburger-head named Cass Sunstein to a little-known but highly-powerful government post: director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—otherwise known as the “Regulation Czar.” Before the financial crash, we wouldn’t have thought much of how powerful a post like this is, and how it can shape our lives and help decide whether we have retirement money, a home mortgage, and a plutocracy-led society.

Since it’s the behind-the-scenes activity that is defining our lives, I took a trip into the Heart Of Blandness that is Cass Sunstein’s life story, and the men and women who’ve helped define him. Conclusion: a new set of horrible ghouls are moving in to rule us, and it won’t be perty…

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