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Tuesday, January 21, 2003
The more wars the merrier "The United States has deployed troops in eastern Colombia in an area rich of oil and widely seen as a stronghold of Marxist rebels. US special forces have begun training Colombian troops in counter-insurgency techniques in the province of Arauca. The army is trying to protect an oil pipeline which has been attacked 200 times in the last two years alone. It is the first time the US military has been directly involved in Colombia's 39-year civil war." This, of course, is pretty much the same path we took when we got involved in the quagmire of Vietnam. This time, though, it's about oil, not Communism. Not that the change in motives will make a difference in the number of people (on both sides) who die. Read more here.
The truth about Venezuela "Walking around Caracas late last month during Venezuela's ongoing protests, I was surprised by what I saw. My expectations had been shaped by persistent U.S. media coverage of the nationwide strike called by the opposition, which seeks President Hugo Chavez's ouster. Yet in most of the city, where poor and working-class people live, there were few signs of the strike. Streets were crowded with holiday shoppers, metro trains and buses were running normally, and shops were open for business. Only in the eastern, wealthier neighborhoods of the capital were businesses mostly closed. This is clearly an oil strike, not a 'general strike,' as it is often described. At the state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which controls the industry, management is leading the strike because it is at odds with the Chavez government. And while Venezuela depends on oil for 80 percent of its export earnings and half its national budget, the industry's workers represent a tiny fraction of the labor force. Outside the oil industry, it is hard to find workers who are actually on strike. Some have been locked out from their jobs, as business owners -- including big foreign corporations such as McDonald's and FedEx -- have closed their doors in support of the opposition. Most Americans seem to believe that the Chavez government is a dictatorship, and one of the most repressive governments in Latin America. But these impressions are false." So begins an excellent piece from the Washington Post about what's really going on in Venezuela. Simply put, the same people who supported the coup attempt against Caavez last year are now behind the "opposition" attempts to oust him now. These people don't really want democracy in Venezuela, they just want a return to the power they had before Chavez was elected. Read the whole article here, and read about Jimmy Carter's attempts to broker a deal between the two sides here.
Another shining moment for Joe "'Governor Ryan's action was shockingly wrong,' Mr. Lieberman said in an interview on Friday. 'It did terrible damage to the credibility of our system of justice, and particularly for the victims. It was obviously not a case-by-case review, and that's what our system is all about.'" I didn't really need yet another reason for disliking Lieberman, but I guess I have one now. He isn't the only Democrat who thinks this way, but fortunately there are also those in the Democratic party who oppose the death penalty. Read about both sides here [registration required].
The anti-war movement "Just maybe the zeitgeist is beginning to shift. This week a Pew poll found that only 42 percent of Americans believe that President Bush has made the case for war—down from 52 percent in September. Last week, a huge Chicago local of the Teamster's—one of the unions that's been cosiest with the Bush White House—hosted the launch of a national labor antiwar coalition. Republican business leaders raised concerns about a war with a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Chicago, the nation's third-largest city, joined a list of 38 city councils that have passed antiwar resolutions. And despite freezing temperatures that never topped 24 degrees, more than 100,000 demonstrators took over the streets of Washington, D.C., on Saturday in the second massive national antiwar protest in three months." Following this past weekends latest round of protests, there is lots of coverage (at least on the web) of the anti-war movement. The Village Voice piece above is one of the better ones, but you can read more here, here, here and lots of other places. Of course, we'll have to wait and see if all of this does any good. Both Bush and his lapdog in the U.K., Tony Blair, seem determined to go ahead with this war no matter what either their own people or the rest of the world think about the idea.
MLK Jr. Day (one day late) "It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about 'the slain civil rights leader.' The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole. What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968). An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV. Why? It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years." Martin Luther King Jr. was more than just a "civil rights leader." He was a man who also spoke out against the gulf between rich and poor in the United States. He spoke out against U.S. foreign policy as well, namely the war in Vietnam. This article from the FAIR archives is a good starting point for remembering the Dr. King that many of those in power would just as soon forget. Read it here, and learn more about King's speeches from the last years of his life here.
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