2 March 2021 — Internationalist 360°
The 21st meeting of the Political Council of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of the Americas-Trade Treaty of the Peoples (ALBA-TCP) got off to a strong start in the region on March 1, with the participation of foreign ministers representing the member countries, accompanied by the Executive Secretary of that multilateral body, Sacha Llorenti, and the president of the ALBA Bank, Raúl Licausi, among other authorities present.
17 August 2013 — Open Democracy
For those of us living in a land of economic austerity and political atrophy, seeing a country demonstrate that there is an alternative remains an indispensible component of our long-term struggle to rejuvenate our society.
15 May, 2013 — Global Research – Tortilla con sal
In the interest of sharing diversity of opinions and promoting an atmosphere of exchange and critique, we bring to the attention of our readers the following text by Jorge Capelán and Toni Solo.
This text is in response to a Global Research entitled The Pink Tide in Latin America: An Alliance Between Local Capital and Socialism? , Mahdi Darius Nazemroya, May 03, 2013
18 August 2012
Australian government lines up behind British threats against Assange
World Socialist Web Site Today at 17:01 Canberra’s refusal to publicly criticise, let alone challenge, the British government further demonstrates its role as a co-conspirator in the persecution of the WikiLeaks founder.
9 October 2011 — Stop NATO
11 September 2011 — Stop NATO
25 August 2011 — Venezuela Analysis
Venezuela’s Ambassador in Libya, Afif Tajeldine, speaking in front of rubble from a NATO bombing in Libya (Agencies).
San Francisco, August 25th 2011 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – On Wednesday Venezuela’s ambassador in Libya denounced the looting of his official residence by armed men, calling the assault ‘a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty’ by ‘NATO itself.’ The governments of Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia, among other ALBA nations, denounced the violent attack as a ‘breach of international law,’ as did Venezuela’s ruling United Socialist Party (PSUV).
Speaking to TeleSUR on Wednesday, Venezuelan Ambassador to Libya Afif Tajeldine explained that ‘a group of armed men’ had shot their way in to the official residence, ‘began searching the house and asking for me,’ before ‘looting all things, including the vehicles, the entire house, leaving nothing in the residence and shooting in the air as they left.’
1 May 2011 — Strategic Culture Foundation
As of today, Libyan security service seems successful at keeping M. Gadhafi safe amidst the West’s air raids. Targeting him, NATO drones dropped ‘point strikes’ which left schools, hospitals, and shopping malls in ruins, but Libya’s defiant leader remained unharmed. The Libyan security service also manages to shield Gadhafi from the death squads sent by the CIA, MI6, Mossad, and BND which are literally rivaling over his head.
27 March 2011 — creative-i.info
27 March 2011
26 March 2011
27 March 2011 — creative-i.info
27 March 2011
26 March 2011
5 March 2011 — creative-i.info
7 April, 2010 — Council on Hemispheric Affairs
In January 2006, the sixth gathering of the World Social Forum, during which Hugo Chávez as well as other left-leaning and socialist leaders fiercely criticized imperialist practices, was held in the Caracas Hilton Hotel. As James Surowiecki noted in an article for The New Yorker six months before the conference opened, a meeting sponsored by the Venezuelan Ministry of Finance took place at the same hotel. The aim of the aforementioned meeting was meant to promote American investments in Venezuela. How can one explain such a paradox? Are Venezuela and the United States only rhetorical political foes? Or, is there an underlying economic relationship between these two countries that renders them important trading partners?
24 February, 2010 — joebageant.com
Ajijic, Mexico – Near midnight and I am making tortillas on an iron skillet over a gas flame. Some three thousand miles to the north, my wife and dog nestle in sleep in the wake of a 34-inch snowstorm, while the dogs of Ajijic are barking at the witching hour and roosters crow all too early for the dawn. Yet here I am awake and patting out tortillas, haunted by the empire that I have called home most of my life.
I like to think that, for the most part, I no longer live up there in the U.S., but southward of its ticking social, political and economic bombs. Because the US debt bomb has not yet gone off, Social Security still exists, and the occasional royalty check or book advance still comes in, allowing me to remain here. And so long as America’s perverse commodities economy keeps stumbling along and making lifelike noises, so long as the American people accept permanent debt subjugation — I can drink, think and burn tortillas. Believe me, I take no smugness in this irony.
There is a terrible science fiction-like awe in the autonomous American economic monolith, in the way that it provides for us, feeds on us and keeps us as its both its lavish pets and slaves. The commodity economy long ago enslaved Americans and other “developed” capitalist societies, especially Americans. The most profound slavery must be that in which the slaves can conceive of no other possible or better world than their bondage. Inescapable, global, all permeating, the commodities economy rules so thoroughly most cannot imagine any other possible kind of economy.
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26 January, 2010 — Climate and Capitalism – Latin American Herald Tribune
Once again, the Bolivarian Republic sets an example for the world …
CARACAS – President Hugo Chavez announced Monday that he would write off the undisclosed sum Haiti owes Venezuela for oil as part of the ALBA bloc’s plans to help the impoverished Caribbean nation after the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake.
‘Haiti has no debt with Venezuela, just the opposite: Venezuela has a historical debt with that nation, with that people for whom we feel not pity but rather admiration, and we share their faith, their hope,’ Chavez said after the extraordinary meeting of foreign ministers of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA.
He also announced that ALBA has decided on a comprehensive plan that includes an immediate donation of $20 million to Haiti’s health sector, and a fund that, Chavez said, will be at least $100 million ‘for starters.’
Oil-rich Venezuela is the economic heart of ALBA, which also includes Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Haiti is among several countries that send observers to ALBA meetings.
Chavez said one part of ALBA assistance to Haiti would consist of fuel distribution via ‘mobile service stations’ set to be up and running within a few weeks.
The ALBA plan of aid for Haiti includes support for such sectors as agriculture, production, food imports and distribution, and immigration amnesty for Haitians living illegally in the bloc’s member-states.
Cuba and Venezuela sent assistance and aid workers to Haiti within days of the magnitude-7.0 temblor that left an estimated 200,000 dead and 1.5 million people homeless.
The leftist Venezuelan leader also noted that there are some celebrities who want to work with ALBA, among whom he named actor Sean Penn, who, he said, called him because the members of a team of U.S. doctors now in Haiti want to ‘coordinate’ their activities.
31 December, 2009 — Stop NATO
January 1 will usher in the last year of the first decade of a new millennium and ten consecutive years of the United States conducting war in the Greater Middle East.
Beginning with the October 7, 2001 missile and bomb attacks on Afghanistan, American combat operations abroad have not ceased for a year, a month, a week or a day in the 21st century.
The Afghan war, the U.S.’s first air and ground conflict in Asia since the disastrous wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first land war and Asian campaign, began during the end of the 2001 war in Macedonia launched from NATO-occupied Kosovo, one in which the role of U.S. military personnel is still to be properly exposed [1] and addressed and which led to the displacement of almost 10 percent of the nation’s population.
In the first case Washington invaded a nation in the name of combating terrorism; in the second it abetted cross-border terrorism. Similarly, in 1991 the U.S. and its Western allies attacked Iraqi forces in Kuwait and launched devastating and deadly cruise missile attacks and bombing sorties inside Iraq in the name of preserving the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Kuwait, and in 1999 waged a 78-day bombing assault against Yugoslavia to override and fatally undermine the principles of territorial integrity and national sovereignty in the name of the casus belli of the day, so-called humanitarian intervention.
Two years later humanitarian war, as abhorrent an oxymoron as the world has ever witnessed, gave way to the global war on terror(ism), with the U.S. and its NATO allies again reversing course but continuing to wage wars of aggression and ‘wars of opportunity’ as they saw fit, contradictions and logic, precedents and international law notwithstanding.
18 December, 2009 — Global Research
Mike Whitney—The US media is very critical of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. He’s frequently denounced as “anti-American”, a “leftist strongman”, and a dictator. Can you briefly summarize some of the positive social, economic and judicial changes for which Chavez is mainly responsible?
Eva Golinger—The first and foremost important achievement during the Chávez administration is the 1999 Constitution, which, although not written nor decreed by Chávez himself, was created through his vision of change for Venezuela. The 1999 Constitution was, in fact, drafted – written – by the people of Venezuela in one of the most participatory examples of nation building, and then was ratified through popular national referendum by 75% of Venezuelans. The 1999 Constitution is one of the most advanced in the world in the area of human rights. It guarantees the rights to housing, education, healthcare, food, indigenous lands, languages, women’s rights, worker’s rights, living wages and a whole host of other rights that few other countries recognize on a national level. My favorite right in the Venezuelan Constitution is the right to a dignified life. That pretty much sums up all the others. Laws to implement these rights began to surface in 2001, with land reform, oil industry redistribution, tax laws and the creation of more than a dozen social programs – called missions – dedicated to addressing the basic needs of Venezuela’s poor majority. In 2003, the first missions were directed at education and healthcare. Within two years, illiteracy was eradicated in the country and Venezuela was certified by UNESCO as a nation free of illiteracy. This was done with the help of a successful Cuban literacy program called “Yo si puedo” (Yes I can). Further educational missions were created to provide free universal education from primary to doctoral levels throughout the country. Today, Venezuela’s population is much more educated than before, and adults who previously had no high school education now are encouraged to not only go through a secondary school program, but also university and graduate school.
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19 December, 2009 — Climate and Capitalism – Links International Journal of Socialist Revewal
‘Obama, acting the way he did, definitely established that there’s no difference between him and the Bush tradition’
Speaking on behalf of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela took the floor at the plenary of the COP15 climate talks in Copenhagen to denounce the final ‘deal’ that was soon to emerge and be imposed on the majority poor-country delegates, and which would fall far short of their demands.
Chavez accused US President Barack Obama of behaving like an emperor ‘who comes in during the middle of the night … and cooks up a document that we will not accept, we will never accept.’
Chávez declared that ‘all countries are equal.’ He would not accept that some countries had prepared a text for a climate deal and just ‘slipped [it] under the door’ to be signed by the others. He accused them of ‘a real lack of transparency.’
‘We can’t wait any longer, we are leaving … We are leaving, knowing that it wasn’t possible getting a deal,’ he said.
Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, also took the floor to express annoyance at the way a climate deal was being thrashed out by a small group of world leaders at the last minute. ‘If there is no agreement at this level, why not tell the people?’, he said at the plenary meeting. He called for further consultations with the people.
‘Who is responsible?’, Morales he asked. Concluding that ‘the responsibility lies on the capitalist system — we have to change the capitalist system.’
30 September, 2009, Toronto — Left Streamed
Panel on the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America
• Alissa Trotz, Juan Valencia.
– Facilitator: Melanie Newton. Co-sponsored: Venezuela We Are With You, Center for Social Justice, Latin American Solidarity Network, Toronto Haiti Action, Louis Riel Bolivarian Circle/Hands Off Venezuela.
http://widgets.vodpod.com/w/video_embed/Groupvideo.3724939
30 September, 2009 — Left Streamed
Panel on the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America
Toronto, – Facilitator: Melanie Newton. Co-sponsored: Venezuela We Are With You, Center for Social Justice, Latin American Solidarity Network, Toronto Haiti Action, Louis Riel Bolivarian Circle/Hands Off Venezuela.
• Manuel Morano, Jose Martinez, Paul Kellogg.
http://widgets.vodpod.com/w/video_embed/Groupvideo.3724908
more about “Socialist Project – Left Streamed“, posted with vodpod
25 July, 2009 — Global Research – Strategic Culture Foundation (Russia)
Discussions in George Bush’s team revolved around the timing of the coup. One option under consideration was to synchronize it with Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia in order to demonstrate US assertiveness over all azimuths, but the idea was found too extreme even by the staunchest hawks given the upcoming elections in the US.
-The oil crisis that erupted in Honduras finally convinced Zelaya to change course. US companies, which monopolized the business of importing oil to the country, manipulated prices and created an artificial shortage in the fuel supply. Protests and strikes which left Honduras on the verge of a full-blown crisis made Zelaya temporarily expropriate oil storages owned by US companies.
-As the next step, he forged closer ties with ALBA leaders and signed several deals with Venezuela to buy oil at discount prices, broaden trade between the two countries, and jointly modernize transit infrastructures. One of Zelaya’s priority projects was to construct with the assistance of the ALBA countries a modern airport on the site occupied by the US Soto Cano Air Base….The threat of losing another strategic airbase in Latin America made Washington hurry up with the coup.
-Throughout 2008 Negroponte was building in Central America an intelligence and diplomacy network charged with the mission of regaining the positions lost by the US as well as of neutralizing left regimes and ALBA integration initiative.
The New Dark Age 