In London on Monday 10th August, 21st Century Socialism editors Calvin Tucker and Noah Tucker will present a multi-media report from the front line of the struggle against the coup in Honduras.
Public meeting London: Eyewitness report from Honduras
Day: August 5, 2009
Honduras: Friends of the coup makers By Alan Maass
4 August, 2009 — SocialistWorker.org
Alan Maass reports on the powerful U.S. political figures who are fronting for the coup that toppled Manuel Zelaya in Honduras.
THE OFFICIAL position of the U.S. government is that it opposes the coup in Honduras that drove President Manuel Zelaya into forced exile over a month ago, and put in power the right-wing head of the congress, backed by the military.
But if Lanny Davis gets his way, that will change–and Davis has the friends in high places in Washington, D.C., to make it happen.
Davis is an American lawyer who is registered as a lobbyist for the Honduras branch of the Business Council of Latin America–the country’s equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce, which has provided financial and political support to the coup government led by Roberto Micheletti.
Thinking Left in Bolivia: Interview with Alvaro Garcia Linera By Linda Farthing
3 August, 2009 — Bolivia Rising
Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera first became passionate about politics during the widespread resistance to the Hugo Banzer dictatorship in 1979. Soon after, he left Bolivia to train as a mathematician at Mexico’s National Autonomous University, where he was active in the Central American solidarity Movement. Drawn to sociology, he began reading everything he could in an effort to analyze the situation of Bolivia’s indigenous majority population from a Marxist perspective. In García Linera’s intellectual life, political questions have always been the most important.
Upon his return to Bolivia, he became a founding member of the indigenous Marxist guerrilla organization EGTK (Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army), which disbanded when its leadership was captured in the early 1990s. After five years in prison, García Linera joined the sociology department at La Paz’s public university. He quickly emerged as one of Bolivia’s leading public intellectuals and stayed at the university until 2005, when he became Evo Morales’s running mate in the presidential elections.
Slender, light-skinned and tall, bundled into a Russian great coat that President Morales brought him back from Moscow, and armed with a cup of coca tea in one hand and the ubiquitous cellphone in the other, García Linera wasted little time in formalities when we sat down to talk recently.
The Real News Network – Honduras: Where does Washington stand?
Hylton: By not taking steps prescribed by US law, the US gov’t supporting an increasingly repressive regime
The silence from Washington over the past month of human rights abuses from the de facto Honduran government becomes deafening when one considers that the US government holds both the ability to bring that regime down as well as a recent history of criticizing similar abuses in Iran. Groups inside the US have taken up the call to pressure the government into taking the action required by US law in addressing a military coup.
MEDIA LENS ALERT: SIDING WITH THE GENERALS – THE INDEPENDENT ON HONDURAS
5 August, 2009 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
Iran’s June 12 presidential elections have been widely criticised, both domestically and abroad, as lacking credibility. During the popular protests that followed, some 30 people were killed by government forces with hundreds more arrested. These events have been subject to intense and continuous US-UK media scrutiny.
Also in June, a military coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Honduras. President Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped and deported to Costa Rica on June 28. Initial clashes between troops loyal to the coup plotters and Zelaya supporters left at least one person dead and 30 injured. On July 30, as many as 150 people were arrested, with dozens injured, when soldiers and police attacked demonstrators with tear gas, water cannon, clubs and gunfire. One of the wounded, a 38-year-old teacher, was left fighting for his life after being shot in the head [he subsequently died. The Ed.]. Journalists reporting from the scene were also attacked. (Bill Van Auken, ‘Honduran coup regime launches brutal crackdown,’ August 1, 2009, World Socialist Web Site; www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/hond-a01.shtml)
Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, describes how the Honduran people have been “risking their lives, confronting the army’s bullets, beatings, and arbitrary arrests and detentions”. And yet the US media has reported this repression “only minimally, with the major print media sometimes failing even to mention the censorship there”. (Weisbrot, ‘Hondurans Resist Coup, Will Need Help From Other Countries,’ ZNet, July 9, 2009; www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/21924)
Global Research Disinformation and Warfare Selected Articles 1-4 August, 2009
4 August , 2009 — Global Research
Selected Articles 1-4 August, 2009
Lisa Hajjah, David Swanson, Quentin Young, Barbara-Anne Steegmuller, Rachael Rudolph, Sameh Habeeb on Global Research News Hour
Program details, 3-7 August. Hosts: Stephen Lendman & Michel Chossudovsky
– 2009-08-07
Award Winning Movie: “SUPERPOWER”:
Interview with Filmmaker on RBN this Thursday!
– by Barbara-Anne Steegmuller – 2009-08-06
The Worldwide H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic.
The WHO plans to vaccinate more than half the World’s population
– by Global Research – 2009-08-04
The Great American Bubble Machine
– by Matt Taibbi – 2009-08-04
London-based activists ‘co-ordinating’ Iranian protest movement
– by Damien McElroy , Ahmed Vahdat – 2009-08-04
Novel Graphics – Fatenah – Palestine’s First 3D Animation
28 July, 2009 — The National
Dar Films is an unassuming studio tucked away in a subterranean apartment on the outskirts of Ramallah’s sprawling urban landscape.
It is also where one of the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ most ambitious cultural endeavours has just been produced, in the form of a 3D animated film entitled Fatenah.
Saed Andoni, 37, produced and edited the movie with the assistance of Ahmad Habash, 33, the project’s director and animator. It tells the story of Fatenah, a woman from Gaza who discovers she has breast cancer. Her struggle for survival brings the audience into the painful and humiliating journey of those who suffer from terminal illnesses in the context of Israel’s debilitating siege.
Though the film is unavoidably sullen in plot, the story of its production is markedly more inspiring. It is a testament to the resourcefulness of its creators and the evolving quest among Palestinian artists and filmmakers to find the best means to express their contemporary condition.
DOW, EXXONMOBIL SLAM NEW YES MEN FILM FOR “INACCURACIES”, “MISREPRESENTATION”; CONCEDE PIC “ENTERTAINING”
5 August, 2009 — Yes Men
U.K. theatrical premiere of “The Yes Men Fix the World” August 7, opens in U.S. theaters in October
Article: www.reuters.com/article/marketsnews/idAFN2448454320090726?rpc=33
Tickets, trailer: www.theyesmenfixtheworld.com/
Yes Men “Challenge” network: challenge.theyesmen.org/
Frequently asked questions: www.theyesmen.org/faq
Beyond Talk: www.beyondtalk.net/
Contact: mailto:press@theyesmen.org
ExxonMobil and Dow Chemical spokespersons have lashed out out at award-winning new documentary “The Yes Men Fix the World” in an interview with the Reuters press agency, shortly before the film’s U.K. theatrical opening.
“We think it is a serious matter when people willingly misrepresent themselves,” said a spokesperson for the world’s largest oil company, responding to the film’s airing on HBO last week. The film will be in theaters in the U.K. beginning this Friday, August 7, and in U.S. theaters in October.
Exxon stopped short of calling the Yes Men outright liars, despite a scene in the film where the Yes Men, impersonating Exxon at a big oil conference in Canada, present the company’s supposed solution to climate change: a new biofuel called Vivoleum, made from the human victims of climate change.
The End of Chimerica? By M K Bhadrakumar
1 August, 2009 — MRZine – Monthly Review
Like the star gazers who last week watched the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, diplomatic observers had a field day watching the penumbra of big power politics involving the United States, Russia and China, which constitutes one of the crucial phenomena of 21st-century world politics.
It all began with United States Vice President Joseph Biden choosing a tour of Ukraine and Georgia on July 20-23 to rebuke the Kremlin publicly for its “19th-century notions of spheres of influence”. Biden’s tour of Russia’s troubled “near abroad” took place within a fortnight of US President Barack Obama’s landmark visit to Moscow to “reset” the US’s relations with Russia.
Clearly, Biden’s jaunt was choreographed as a forceful demonstration of the Barack Obama administration’s resolve to keep up the US’s strategic engagement of Eurasia — a rolling up of sleeves and gearing up for action after the exchange of customary pleasantries by Obama with his Kremlin counterpart Dmitry Medvedev. Plainly put, Biden’s stark message was that the Obama administration intends to robustly challenge Russia’s claim as the predominant power in the post-Soviet space.
Biden ruled out any “trade-offs” with the Kremlin or any form of “recognition” of Russia’s spheres of influence. He committed the Obama administration to supporting Ukraine’s status as an “integral part of Europe” and Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration. Furthermore, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Biden spoke of Russia’s own dim future in stark, existential terms.
William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 72 Keeping track of the empire's crimes
4 August, 2009 — Killing Hope
Keeping track of the empire‘s crimes
If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie jar and the Agency admits the obvious — what your eyes can plainly see — that its hand is indeed in the cookie jar, it means one of two things: a) the CIA‘s hand is in several other cookie jars at the same time which you don’t know about and they hope that by confessing to the one instance they can keep the others covered up; or b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar — it’s an illusion to throw you off the right scent — but they want you to believe it.
There have been numerous news stories in recent months about secret CIA programs, hidden from Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick Cheney, in operation since the September 11 terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al Qaeda operatives or other non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits to some sort of program having existed, but insists that it was canceled; and if it was an assassination program it was canceled before anyone was actually assassinated. Another report has the US military, not the CIA, putting the plan — or was it a different plan? — into operation, carrying out several assassinations including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of the program.[1]
The New Dark Age 