Day: January 19, 2009

Obama Throws First Stone

Is this what we have to look forward to in Latin American policy?

In an interview shown in the past week on the Spanish-language network Univision, U.S. President-elect Barack Obama said that Venezuela’s firebrand president, Hugo Chávez, has hindered progress in Latin America, and he expressed concern that Chávez’s leftist government has assisted Colombia’s biggest guerrilla movement, a group the United States considers a terrorist organization. Chávez responded this weekend by saying that Obama had “the same stench” as President Bush, a frequent target of Chávez’s remarks.

The interview with the president-elect, shown in two segments that aired Sunday and last Tuesday, included Obama’s most extensive comments to date about Venezuela, Cuba and Mexico — countries that are expected to require swift attention from the new administration. Mexico is convulsed by drug violence that is spilling into the United States; Cuba’s longtime leader, Fidel Castro, is suffering from a serious undisclosed illness; and Chávez’s government is reinforcing ties with such U.S. adversaries as Iran and, authorities in Bogota say, Colombian rebels.

Obama said his administration is open to starting talks with Chávez to improve relations, which have frayed badly since the Bush administration celebrated Chávez’s brief overthrow at the hands of rebellious military officers in 2002. But in the 13-minute interview aired by Univision, Obama said Chávez had “been a force that has interrupted progress in the region.”

Ok I have read all this stuff and feel I need to comment……interrupted progress?  what the hell does that mean?  If he is talking aboput the screwing that American corporations took then , it depends on your way of thinking.  If you are talking about the programs that Chavez has started to aid the poor then I would say that it was not interrupted.  Is Chavez a tool?  Most assuredly.  Have the poor of Venezuela profited from his presidency?  Absolutely.

Maybe he, Obama, should wait until he is the official president before he starts alienating other countries.  Just a thought.

Maybe people should realize that Latin America is a two class system…..wealthy and poor, the middle class does not exist Chavez has done some amazing things for the poor, but in the same breath I have to say that he will be a thorn in Obama’s side.  But unfortunately, he has to be dealt with.  And dealings most be done with the poor of the country in mind.

Tomorrow It Begins

A national poll suggests that President-elect Barack Obama is more popular than ever despite recent speed bumps on the road to his inauguration.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Sunday also indicates that most Americans see Obama’s inauguration as a chance for the nation to come together.

Eighty-four percent of those surveyed say they approve of how Obama is handling the presidential transition. That’s up 2 points from the middle of December and up 5 points from the beginning of December.

Tomorrow he takes the oath of office and from that time on it will be all his problem.  But there is also something disturbing on the horizon.

From ABC News:

The prospect of a Black president has America’s bastions of hate in an uproar. Leaders, including the wizard of the Imperial Klans of America, Ron Edwards, have long warned the white race is under attack and must be defended. Federal authorities say web sites have featured ugly calls to target Senator Barack Obama.

And twice now since August, two sets of self-proclaimed neo-Nazi skinheads have been caught in what officials say were feeble but still troubling plots to assassinate Obama.

“If Obama is elected president, these people see the world as they know it to end,” said Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In the most recent case, federal agents say two men, Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, planned to go on a killing spree against more than a hundred African Americans and then, they told the Secret Service, go out in a blaze of glory, dressed in white tuxedos and top hats during the assassination attempt. Cowart is described as the leader.

“We’re being discriminated against just because we believe in our white rights,” said Steven Edwards of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, who is considered the leader of the Supreme White Alliance.

Like his father, the Klan wizard before him, Edwards represents yet another generation of Americans who find comfort in hate. It is a fringe group, but one that will be even more closely watched if the country elects as President a mixed-race Black man who represents all they fear.

In an contentious interview with ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross on Nightline Tuesday, Edwards said that the assassination plot alarmed him and he sought to portray his group as a social club, with no ties to two men under arrest.

This could be a very scary thought and a tragedy in the making.  Please be vigilant!

What Is The UAW Up To?

An organization that accepts a government ban on the most elementary form of workers’ resistance demonstrates thereby its fundamental opposition to the interests of the working class. The UAW’s complicity in the so-called “bailout” of the auto companies, with its provisions for impoverishing the workers and stripping them of their right to strike, is the inevitable outcome of the entire policy of the UAW and the American trade unions as a whole and the culmination of their trajectory over many decades. To argue, under these conditions, that the UAW bureaucracy presides over a genuine workers’ organization is to engage in self-delusion or deliberate deception.

For three solid decades the UAW has concentrated its efforts on suppressing the resistance of autoworkers to the destruction of jobs, living standards and working conditions, under the banner of labor-management “partnership” and “Buy American” chauvinism. It has deliberately sought to extirpate all remnants of class consciousness among its members, in order to facilitate its ever closer integration with corporate management and the government. In the figure of Gettelfinger—a man who cannot even conceive of an independent role for the working class, and who views the world entirely from the standpoint of a junior partner of the auto bosses—one sees a concentrated expression of the degeneration and transformation of the UAW.

Obama’s Stimulus Plan

President-elect Barack Obama’s $825 billion plan to jump-start the economy and create or save up to 4 million jobs includes twice as much money for spending as for tax cuts, setting up an early battle with Republicans in Congress who favor a different approach.

Obama declared that he would oversee regulatory reform to halt “reckless greed and risk-taking” by banks and financial institutions, while reassuring Wall Street that the public funding spigots would remain open to bail out the most powerful firms. “It means preventing the catastrophic failure of financial institutions whose collapse could endanger the entire economy,” he said.

He essentially whitewashed the pervasive fraud and criminality of the US financial elite and the collusion of the US government, saying, “No longer can we allow Wall Street wrongdoers to slip through regulatory cracks. No longer can we allow special interests to put their thumbs on the economic scales.”

As though the plundering of the US economy over the past thirty years was a matter of a few “wrongdoers” and “cracks” in the government regulatory machinery! In fact, parasitism and fraud on a colossal scale have become the mode of operation of the banks and the dominant feature of an economic system whose decay is expressed in the destruction of industry and the basic productive forces. Successive administrations, Democratic as well as Republican, have systematically dismantled regulatory oversight of the banks, and the role of government regulators has been to facilitate fraudulent practices and shield the most powerful and influential perpetrators.

Truce Comes To Gaza–Day 2

But now that the battle is over — or has paused, after Hamas agreed Sunday to a one-week cease-fire with Israel — what has been accomplished is unclear. Have three weeks of overpowering war by Israel here weakened Hamas as Israel had hoped, or simply caused acute human suffering? Israel knew it could not destroy every rocket or kill every Hamas militant. Israel said its central aim was deterrence, to make Hamas lose the will to keep shooting at Israel’s cities. Did it succeed?

Israeli officials themselves said Sunday in briefings to the cabinet that even though Hamas institutions had been badly damaged, its militants might well keep shooting rockets just to prove otherwise. The chief of military intelligence, Amos Yadlin, asserted that even Hamas had to figure out how badly it had been harmed.

What is clear is that, despite vague Israeli hopes that Hamas could be completely removed, that has not happened. Much of the group’s manpower remains, mostly because it made a point of fighting at a distance — or not at all — whenever possible despite the fury of the Israeli advance and bombardment.

Yes the Palestinians need to put Hamas on a short leash.  If they would just look at what Hamas has given them, they might could find a better way.  Rockets, ain’t doing it!