TF News, Action and Analysis

Source: CounterPunch

I’d like to share with you some questions–some flies that keep buzzing in my head.

Is justice right side up?

Has world justice been frozen in an upside-down position?

The shoe-thrower of Iraq, the man who hurled his shoes at Bush, was condemned to three years in prison. Doesn’t he deserve, instead, a medal?

Who is the terrorist? The hurler of shoes or their recipient? Is not the real terrorist the serial killer who, lying, fabricated the Iraq war, massacred a multitude, and legalized and ordered torture?

Who are the guilty ones–the people of Atenco, in Mexico, the indigenous Mapuches of Chile, the Kekchies of Guatemala, the landless peasants of Brazil—all being accused of the crime of terrorism for defending their right to their own land? If the earth is sacred, even if the law does not say so, aren’t its defenders sacred too?

According to Foreign Policy Magazine, Somalia is the most dangerous place in the world. But who are the pirates? The starving people who attack ships or the speculators of Wall Street who spent years attacking the world and who are now rewarded with many millions of dollars for their pains?

Why does the world reward its ransackers?

Why is justice a one-eyed blind woman? Wal-Mart, the most powerful corporation on earth, bans trade unions. McDonald’s, too. Why do these corporations violate, with criminal impunity, international law? Is it because in this contemporary world of ours, work is valued as lower than trash and workers’ rights are valued even less?

Who are the righteous and who are the villains? If international justice really exists, why are the powerful never judged? The masterminds of the worst butcheries are never sent to prison. Is it because it is these butchers themselves who hold the prison keys?

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Source: The Guardian

Denis MacShane attacks the British left for defending Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, against an onslaught from the media, “new cold warriors”, and rightwing demagogues throughout the world. His rhetorical trick is to tar the left with a new media law currently being debated in the Venezuelan congress, which he says “would impose prison sentences of up to four years for journalists whose writings might divulge information against ‘the stability of the institutions of the state’.”

Of course this is a bad law. There are a number of bad laws on the books in Venezuela, and in fact numerous countries in the region have desacato (pdf) laws that make it a crime to insult the president. Do MacShane’s targets – he mentions Ken Livingstone and Richard Gott – support such laws? I would bet serious money that they do not. So his main line of attack is misleading if not downright dishonest.

MacShane also misrepresents the reality of press freedom in Venezuela. In fact, there is a much more oppositional media in Venezuela than in the US, and a much greater range of debate in the major media. This can be seen simply by looking at the most important media in both countries. In the US, for example, not even the most aggressive rightwing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity would present the idea that the president should be lynched. But Globovision, one of the largest-audience TV networks, had a show where a guest did just that.

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Source: Inter Press Service

In the 1960s, it went by the name of Latin American Security Operation, or Plan LASO; today it is known as Plan Colombia. Back then, the aim was to weed out communism; now it is to combat drug trafficking, while at the same time dealing a blow to the guerrillas.

But at that time or today, the interests of the United States are at stake, although the killing takes place in Colombia – whether in the fight against communists, guerrillas, drug traffickers, or all of them together.

In May 1964, the teletype machines were clicking as a United Press International (UPI) cable arrived from Washington about “a group of special forces technicians of the United States Army…sent to Colombia with (the) purpose of instructing soldiers and police in counter-guerrilla tactics.”
Source: Inter Press Service

The advisers formed part of a campaign started by President Alberto Lleras (1945-1946 and 1958-1962) and continued by his successor Guillermo León Valencia (1962-1966).

The UPI cable goes on to say that “one of the principal tactics employed in the counter-guerrilla operations was the implementation of psycho-warfare which brought about the cooperation and trust of the indigenous population.”

The tactics used in the June 1964 attack on Marquetalia, a remote mountainous region in central Colombia, left no doubt as to who provided the advisers and training for the Colombian troops that, commanded by Colonel José Joaquín Matallana, started their offensive by dropping leaflets from the air urging local peasant farmers not to support the guerrillas.

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Source: Countdown

Source: Smirking Chimp

As I wrote months ago in an article titled America’s Stupid Health Care Debate: Keeping Some Ideas Off the Table and several subsequent pieces on my website, President Obama and the Democrats who currently run Congress have been hoist on their own collective petard by their craven and gutless refusal to consider adopting a Canadian-style single-payer system to finance health care in the US, or simply to expand Medicare, which is a successful single- payer program, to cover everyone, instead of just people over 65 and the disabled.

Instead, because they are the recipients of hundreds of millions of dollars in legal (and probably plenty of illegal) bribes from the health care industry, they have cobbled together a “reform” in name only, which preserves not just the central role of the vampire-like health insurance industry, but also ensures the continued rapacious profitability of the other segments of the medical-industrial complex–the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and the specialist doctors.

Now, like Hillary and Bill Clinton before them, these weasels and slimeballs who pose as the people’s advocates are left with nothing but a Potemkin Health Plan that looks on the outside lie a reform, but that changes little or nothing, leaves vast numbers of Americans uninsured, forces tens of millions to buy crappy plans from private companies, and that will end up doing nothing to halt the continuing rise in health care costs that is bankrupting the people, employers and the country.

Nice going guys!

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Source: Black Agenda Report
August 5, 2009

President Obama told us to judge his first term on whether he managed to provide quality, affordable health care to the American people, especially the uninsured and underinsured.. With various versions of his bill not beginning to cover the uninsured till 2013, it seems a test the administration has forgotten, and hopes that we will too. We won’t. The weeks between now and Labor Day will be decisive in determining what, if anything, comes out of congress this year. This is no time to lay back, or to wait and see. This is the critical time to organize and educate, to mobilize and to act.

While the failure of the Obama Administration and its allies in Congress to agree even among themselves on the contents of health care reform legislation is bad news for the White House, it may be quite good news for the American people. Far from being over, or even being in recess, the scene of the ongoing battle for health care reform shifts between now and Labor Day to hundreds of congressional district offices, to formal and informal house and neighborhood meetings, in thousands of cities and towns, to web sites and email lists across the nation…
For the last two weeks BAR has provided some of the damning and well-known features of HR 3200 which are rarely mentioned in corporate media such as the facts that:

I) few or none of the uninsured would be covered till 2013, II) you could be forced to purchase junk insurance, III) the right to bargain drug prices down has been given away, IV) the administration won’t reimport Canadian drugs, V) the public option will only cover about 10 million people instead of the promised 120-130 million, VI) the public option won’t be able to keep insurance companies honest or drive prices downward, VII) the public option was emphatically NOT Medicare, and expressly designed not to lead to any version of single payer or Medicare for All, VIII) nobody knows what the “health care co-ops” which the administration has agreed might be substituted for the public option are, whether they are “co-ops” of health care providers or health care consumers or health insurance brokers or providers, and no explanations have been offered. [Format adapted for readability - Ed.]

As Barack Obama’s family doctor explained in several interviews, the versions of the bill in several committees were hopelessly compromised and worse than no bill at all. And Congress will not meet again till the first week of September.

Read the text of the bill here & weep (oh c’mon, it’s only 1000+ pages)

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Sources: Business Week, Common Dreams & Physicians for a National Health Program

The fix is in. The game is over for now. With or without the farcical, enfeebled “public option” buried in the 1,000 lobbyist-authored pages of the Democrats’ HR3200 “reform” bill, Business Week reveals that the private insurance companies, not the American public, will be the big beneficiaries of any “reform” legislation emerging from Congress. Obama and the Democrats are poised to deliver a huge boondoggle to the HMO and Big Pharma greedheads who are already bleeding the country white. (The Business Week cover story is excellent but contains two inaccuracies: single payer is not “government-run” health care–it is publicly financed and privately administered, like Medicare and the Canadian system; also, the public option will not lead to “universal coverage”; the CBO estimates that the pseudo-reform being pushed in Congress will still leave some 33 million Americans uninsured and will do nothing to contain spiraling costs.) Read it here.)

For a much briefer summary of Washington’s health-care follies, see this succinct essay by the journalist Normon Solomon, “The Incredible Shrinking Healthcare Reform” Read it here

For a hopeful counterpoint, read this letter to President Obama from Physicians for a National Health Plan, representing 16,000 American doctors. Some 3,500 of them have already signed the letter shown below. Please add your name to it and forward it to your friends, associates, and any sympathetic health-care professionals you know. Read the letter & take action here

Source: World Socialist Web Site
August 7, 2009

The Obama White House has acknowledged it made a deal with drug makers to block moves in Congress to obtain any cost savings beyond the $80 billion already agreed to by the pharmaceutical lobby.

The New York Times reported Thursday that, in return for the $80 billion agreement, the Obama administration pledged that it would work to block any health care legislation that would allow the government to negotiate price-setting on drugs. The deal is further evidence of the corporate forces calling the shots in Obama’s health care overhaul. While touring the country claiming the plan will make the health care giants “honest,” the administration is cutting behind-the-scenes deals to protect and boost their profits.

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Source: Alternet

For the first time in generations, people are challenging the view that a free-market order — the system that dominates the globe today — is the destiny of all nations. The free market’s uncanny ability to enrich the elite, coupled with its inability to soften the sharp experiences of staggering poverty, has pushed inequality to the breaking point.

As a result, we live at an important historical juncture — one where alternatives to the world’s neoliberal capitalism could emerge. Thus, it is a particularly apt time to examine revolutionary movements that have periodically challenged dominant state and imperial power structures over the past 500 years.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which laid the foundation for liberal democratic elections and the expansion of the free-market system throughout the world, revolution and protest seemed to lose some of their potency.

Leading historians believed that a new age had appeared in which revolutionary movements would no longer challenge the status quo. Defenders of the contemporary system were suspicious of nearly all forms of popular expression and contestation for power outside the electoral arena. But remarkably, this entire discourse sidestepped the major impulses of human emancipation of the past 500 years — equality, democracy, and social rights.

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Source: Al Jazeera