Is Obama Change?

Obama: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

It seems as though all the stars aligned for Barrack Obama. Although symbolic that he has become the first African American President, up to now it seems Obama is just continuing Bush’s agenda. This seems to be the same old U$ imperialism, only this time with a black face. What, for all our faith and hope, has Obama attempted to do for the people? His administration has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to re-inflate the bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. The big banks are laughing on how easy that was to pull off. Not surprising if you consider the people Obama has advising him like Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner and Economic Advisor Larry Summers, all former big bank Wall St. insiders, who should all be held responsible for this economic mess and who should be getting subpoenas.

When it comes to foreign policy Obama has allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next 15 to 20 years. He has expanded the war in Afghanistan, including the use of drones sent on cross-border bombing runs into Pakistan that have doubled the number of civilians killed over the past three months. These policies of bombings on civilians are creating new generation of people that will just hate the U$, eventually increasing the number of terrorist in that region. And what about prosecuting the Bush administration for war crimes, including the use of torture?

Here at home, Obama is not fighting for real healthcare reform and will not even consider single-payer not-for-profit health care for all Americans. He would not back a bill designed to cap predatory credit card interest rates allowing credit card companies to still charge usury rates to their customers. Education has been hurting for a while yet more teachers are being laid off. Public schools have been neglected and are more segregated today than they were 50 years ago. Obama has also refused to ease restrictions so workers can organize. There has been growth, but only amongst the very rich. Although Obama has inherited many of these problems he doesn’t seem to really have any initiative or urgency to reform any of these issues. He seems to be too complacent with the status quo that brought us to this point by their reckless foreign and economic policies. He has become a global celebrity who sounds and looks good, but seems to continue doing the same things the former U$ president did. Right now there doesn’t seem to be much difference between a democrat and a republican administration. This is not what I voted for. This is not change. It’s time to start holding Obama accountable.

By O. Velasquez

Undo the Coup

The first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century occurred last Sunday in Honduras. Honduran soldiers roused democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya from his bed and flew him into exile in Costa Rica. The coup, led by the Honduran Gen. Romeo Vasquez, has been condemned by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, the Organization of American States and all of Honduras’ immediate national neighbors. Mass protests have erupted on the streets of Honduras, with reports that elements in the military loyal to Zelaya are rebelling against the coup.

  The United States has a long history of domination in the hemisphere. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton can chart a new course, away from the dark days of military dictatorship, repression and murder. Obama indicated such a direction when he spoke in April at the Summit of the Americas: “[A]t times we sought to dictate our terms. But I pledge to you that we seek an equal partnership. There is no senior partner and junior partner in our relations.”

  Two who know well the history of dictated U.S. terms are Dr. Juan Almendares, a medical doctor and award-winning human-rights activist in Honduras, and the American clergyman Father Roy Bourgeois, a priest who for years has fought to close the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Ga. Both men link the coup in Honduras to the SOA.

  The SOA, renamed in 2000 the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), is the U.S. military facility that trains Latin American soldiers. The SOA has trained more than 60,000 soldiers, many of whom have returned home and committed human-rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial execution and massacres.

  Almendares has been the victim of that training. Targeted by Honduran death squads and the military, he talked to me from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital: “Most of this military have been trained by the School of America … they have been guardians of the multinational business from the United States or from other countries … the army in Honduras has links with very powerful people, very rich, wealthy people who keep the poverty in the country. We are occupied by your country.”

  Born in Louisiana, Bourgeois became a Catholic priest in 1972. He worked in Bolivia and was forced out by the (SOA-trained) dictator Gen. Hugo Banzer. The assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the murders of four Catholic churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 led him to protest where some of the killers were trained: Fort Benning’s SOA. After six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered in El Salvador in 1989, Bourgeois founded SOA Watch and has built an international movement to close the SOA.

  Honduran coup leader Vasquez attended the SOA in 1976 and 1984. Air Force Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, who also participated in the coup, was trained at the SOA in 1996.

  Bourgeois’ SOA Watch office is just yards from the Fort Benning gates. He has been frustrated in recent years by increased secrecy at SOA/WHINSEC. He told me: “They are trying to present the school as one of democracy and transparency, but we are not able to get the names of those trained here—for over five years. However, there was a little sign of hope when the U.S. House approved an amendment to the defense authorization bill last week that would force the school to release names and ranks of people who train here.” The amendment still has to make it through the House-Senate conference committee.

  Bourgeois speaks with the same urgency that he has for decades. His voice is well-known at Fort Benning, where he was first arrested more than 25 years ago when he climbed a tree at night near the barracks of Salvadoran soldiers who were training there at the time.

  He blasted a recording of the voice of Archbishop Romero in his last address before he was assassinated. He was speaking directly to Salvadoran soldiers in his country: “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cry rises to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you: Stop the repression.”

  Almost 30 years later, in a country bordering Romero’s El Salvador, the U.S. has a chance to change course and support the democratic institutions of Honduras. Undo the coup.

By Amy Goodman

Coup d’etat: Honduras

A demonstrator, with a Honduran flag on his shoulders, stands next to a bonfire near to the presidential house in Tegucigalpa, Monday, June 29, 2009.

Soldiers gather at the Libertad square in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Supporters of Honduras’ President Manuel Zelaya clash with police near the presidential residency.

Honduran army soldiers chase at gun point supporters of ousted Honduran ousted President Manuel Zelaya after violence broke out in Honduras.

A soldier fires at supporters of Honduras’ ousted President Manuel Zelaya during a protest

Some 1,500 protesters, some of them masked and carrying sticks, taunted soldiers and burned tires just outside the gates of the presidential palace in a face-off with security forces.

Soldiers walk near the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa

Soldiers stand next to graffiti outside the presidential residency. The graffiti reads: “This is the house of the people and we do not want the military coup makers”.

Soldiers gather at the Libertad square near to the presidential house in Tegucigalpa

The New World Order

Violent Protest in Iran

 

 

Chevron, Shell and the True Cost of Oil

 The economy is a shambles, unemployment is soaring, the auto industry is collapsing. But profits are higher than ever at oil companies Chevron and Shell. Yet across the globe, from the Ecuadorian jungle, to the Niger Delta in Nigeria, to the courtrooms and streets of New York and San Ramon, Calif., people are fighting back against the world’s oil giants.

  Shell and Chevron are in the spotlight this week, with shareholder meetings and a historic trial being held.

  On May 13, the Nigerian military launched an assault on villages in that nation’s oil-rich Niger Delta. Hundreds of civilians are feared killed in the attack. According to Amnesty International, a celebration in the delta village of Oporoza was attacked. An eyewitness told the organization: “I heard the sound of aircraft; I saw two military helicopters, shooting at the houses, at the palace, shooting at us. We had to run for safety into the forest. In the bush, I heard adults crying, so many mothers could not find their children; everybody ran for their life.”

  Shell is facing a lawsuit in U.S. federal court, Wiwa v. Shell, based on Shell’s alleged collaboration with the Nigerian dictatorship in the 1990s in the violent suppression of the grass-roots movement of the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta. Shell exploits the oil riches there, causing displacement, pollution and deforestation. The suit also alleges that Shell helped suppress the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People and its charismatic leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Saro-Wiwa had been the writer of the most famous soap opera in Nigeria, but decided to throw his lot in with the Ogoni, whose land near the Niger Delta was crisscrossed with pipelines. The children of Ogoniland did not know a dark night, living beneath the flame—apartment-building-size gas flares that burned day and night, and that are illegal in the U.S.

  I interviewed Saro-Wiwa in 1994. He told me: “The oil companies like military dictatorships, because basically they can cheat with these dictatorships. The dictatorships are brutal to people, and they can deny the human rights of individuals and of communities quite easily, without compunction.” He added, “I am a marked man.” Saro-Wiwa returned to Nigeria and was arrested by the military junta. On Nov. 10, 1995, after a kangaroo show trial, Saro-Wiwa was hanged with eight other Ogoni activists.

  In 1998, I traveled to the Niger Delta with journalist Jeremy Scahill. A Chevron executive there told us that Chevron flew troops from Nigeria’s notorious mobile police, the “kill ‘n’ go,” in a Chevron company helicopter to an oil barge that had been occupied by nonviolent protesters. Two protesters were killed, and many more were arrested and tortured.

  Oronto Douglas, one of Saro-Wiwa’s lawyers, told us: “It is very clear that Chevron, just like Shell, uses the military to protect its oil activities. They drill and they kill.”

  Chevron is the second-largest stakeholder (after French oil company Total) of the Yadana natural gas field and pipeline project, based in Burma (which the military junta renamed Myanmar). The pipeline provides the single largest source of income to the military junta, amounting to close to $1 billion in 2007. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, popularly elected the leader of Burma in 1990, has been under house arrest for 14 of the past 20 years, and is standing trial again this week. [On Tuesday the government said it had ended the house arrest of Suu Kyi, but she remains in detention pending the outcome of the trial.] The U.S. government has barred U.S. companies from investing in Burma since 1997, but Chevron has a waiver, inherited when it acquired the oil company Unocal.

  Chevron’s litany of similar abuses, from the Philippines to Kazakhstan, Chad-Cameroon, Iraq, Ecuador and Angola and across the U.S. and Canada, is detailed in an “alternative annual report” prepared by a consortium of nongovernmental organizations and is being distributed to Chevron shareholders at this week’s annual meeting, and to the public at TrueCostofChevron.com.

  Chevron is being investigated by New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo about whether the company was “accurate and complete” in describing potential legal liabilities. It enjoys, though, a long tradition of hiring politically powerful people. Condoleezza Rice was a longtime director of the company (there was even a supertanker named after her), and the recently hired general counsel is none other than disgraced Pentagon lawyer William J. Haynes, who advocated for “harsh interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding. Gen. James L. Jones, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, sat on the Chevron board of directors for most of 2008, until he received his high-level White House appointment.

  Saro-Wiwa said before he died, “We are going to demand our rights peacefully, nonviolently, and we shall win.” A global grass-roots movement is growing to do just that.

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