Archive for March 7th, 2008
Latin American crisis triggered by an assassination “Made in the USA”
Latin American crisis triggered
by an assassination
“Made in the USA”
By Bill Van Auken
7 March 2008
Nearly a week after Colombia’s cross-border raid against an encampment of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement in neighboring Ecuador, Latin America continues to confront its worst regional diplomatic and military crisis in decades. The US government and mass media have weighed in with unsolicited judgments and advice, attributing the tense standoff between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela to the threat of terrorism to Colombia, the complicity in terrorism on the part of Venezuela and overheated animosities between the respective heads of state of these three countries.
State Department spokesman Tom Casey declared that “it’s important to recognize that the events that took place were, in fact, a response to the presence of terrorists.” Similarly, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino affirmed that Colombia “was defending itself against terrorism.”
This official reaction extends to Colombia—Washington’s principal client state in South America and the recipient of some $600 million annually in American military aid—the mantle of the Bush Doctrine, which holds that in the “global war on terrorism” such niceties as respect for sovereign borders and international law no longer apply.
The Washington Post went a step further, calling the March 1 raid a “remarkable success” and accusing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa of “backing an armed movement with an established record of terrorism.” It compared the strike on the FARC camp to US air strikes against Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
And the New York Times, the voice of America’s erstwhile liberal establishment, found it “hard to believe that in the 21st century the democratically elected governments of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela would be talking about war.” While acknowledging that Colombia’s raid constituted “an infringement of Ecuador’s territory—a sensitive issue anywhere,” it urged the presumably hot-headed Latin leaders of Ecuador and Colombia to “cool their rhetoric and begin a serious discussion of how they can jointly secure their borders against the FARC.”
One would never guess that Washington had any role in the bloody events on the Colombian-Ecuadoran border. The Bush administration portrays itself—and is largely portrayed by a compliant media—as a selfless champion of democratic values and faithful ally of the people’s of the southern hemisphere.
The facts, however, tell another, far uglier story. The three Andean nations have been brought to the brink of war by a brutal and cold-blooded political assassination carried out to further the interests of US imperialism at the expense of the Colombian people and the population of the entire region.
The March 1 raid was carried out not to defend Colombia from terrorism, but to murder one man, Raul Reyes, considered the second-in-command of the FARC and the guerrilla movement’s principal international spokesman and diplomatic representative. He was well known in both Latin America and Europe, having served as the principal FARC negotiator in the abortive attempt under the government of President Andres Pastrana (1998-2002) to broker a peaceful settlement of the civil conflict that has wracked Colombia for more than four decades. During that same period, he met with officials of the Clinton State Department.
To carry out this political murder, air strikes were called in against the camp inside Ecuador as Reyes and some 20 of his comrades slept. Commandos were then sent into the camp to finish off most of the survivors and haul Reyes’s bloody corpse back to Colombia as a political trophy for the right-wing US-backed government of President Alvaro Uribe.
This ruthless attack was staged not to ward off some pending terrorist attack. On the contrary, it was designed as a “preemptive strike” against a negotiated release of hostages held by the FARC, among them a former presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, who holds joint Colombian-French citizenship and has been held prisoner by the FARC for six years.
Just two days before the border massacre, French President Nicolas Sarkozy publicly called for the release of the ailing Betancourt and announced that he was prepared to fly to the Colombian border to personally receiver her.
The FARC itself issued a statement that Reyes had been working through Venezuelan President Chavez to concretize plans for a meeting with Sarkozy to arrange for the hand-over of Betancourt.
The French government has not denied this account. Indeed, on Monday, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told the media, “It’s bad news that the man we were talking to, with whom we had contacts has been killed. Do you see how ugly the world is?”
Meanwhile, a French deputy foreign minister confirmed the role played by Chavez in mediating the Sarkozy-FARC hostage negotiations. “President Chavez has taken the initiative, he had taken the initiative earlier on that had allowed for the release of several hostages even though the situation had been blocked for some time, so we are aware of his involvement and the important role he has played,” the minister, Rama Yade, told a news conference in Geneva.
After the news of Reyes’s assassination, the French foreign ministry issued a pointed statement to the effect that the Colombian government was well informed that France was conducting negotiations with him.
This statement was fleshed out this week by the Argentine press. Citing sources in the Argentine foreign ministry, it reported that Sarkozy had sent a delegation of three personal envoys to Colombia and that they were in the border region to meet with Reyes.
“On Saturday the day of the cross-border raid, the three negotiators were 200 kilometers from the attack zone and were headed for a meeting with Reyes when they received a call,” the daily Pagina 12 reported. It was Luis Carlos Restrepo, head of the Colombian government’s Peace Commission, who warned them not to go to the meeting place.
US role in Reyes’s assassination
Colombian officials have openly acknowledged the role of US intelligence agencies in instigating and coordinating the March 1 targeted assassination. General Oscar Naranjo, commander of the national police told reporters it was no secret that the Colombian military-police apparatus maintained “a very strong alliance with federal agencies of the US.”
The Colombian radio network, Radio Cadena Nacional (RCN), reported Wednesday that Reyes’s location was pinpointed by US intelligence as a result of monitoring a satellite phone call between the FARC leader and Venezuelan President Chavez. The February 27 call—three days before the raid—came after the FARC released to Venezuelan authorities four former Colombian legislators—Gloria Polanco, Luis Eladio Perez, Orlando Beltran and Jorge Eduardo Gechem—who had been held hostage for nearly seven years.
“Chavez was thrilled by the release of the hostages, and called Reyes to tell him that everything went well,” RCN reported. Presumably, the CIA or other US intelligence agencies were also tapping phone calls between Reyes and French officials over the proposed release of Betancourt.
Another Colombian station, Noticias Uno, cited intelligence sources as saying that they had received photographs from “foreign spy planes” pinpointing the location of Reyes’s camp in Ecuador.
The Colombian police commander insisted that, while relying on US intelligence, the March 1 attack was an “autonomous operation.”
This claim is improbable to say the least. US military “trainers” are attached to the elite counterinsurgency units that would have been employed in the ground attack that finished off the survivors of the aerial bombardment.
As for the air raid itself, Ecuador’s Defense Minister Wellington Sandoval reported the attack included the use of five “smart bombs” of the type utilized by the US military. “It is a bomb that hits within a meter of where it is programmed, from high velocity airplanes,” he said. He added that to target Reyes with such weapons, “they needed equipment that Latin American armed forces do not have.”
Both Washington and the right-wing regime in Colombia were determined to stop any further hostage releases in order to further efforts to politically isolate the Chavez regime and to enforce the Bush administration’s proscription against negotiations with “terrorists.”
At the same time, the bombs dropped on the FARC encampment were undoubtedly also meant as a message to Sarkozy not to meddle in Yankee imperialism’s “backyard.” It should be recalled that the French president, shortly after his election, sent his then-wife to Libya to consummate the release of six medical workers who had been held for eight years on false charges. This political coup managed to bypass the European Union, which had been negotiating the release, and paved the way for lucrative Libyan contracts for French corporations. Washington had no intention of seeing Paris pursue a similar path in relation to Venezuela, which constitutes the fourth largest source of US oil imports.
In the final analysis, this episode in the “global war on terrorism,” which has brought three South American nations to the brink of armed conflict, is the product of a filthy political murder carried out to defend the strategic and profit interests of US capitalism.
It is a reminder that “Murder, Inc.”—as the CIA became known during the 1960s and 1970s, when it organized numerous assassinations and assassination attempts, along with right-wing coups and dirty wars—is still very much in business in Latin America.
The Grim Reality of Economic Truths
The Grim Reality of Economic Truths
by Pablo Ouziel
Global Research, March 6, 2008
It is always good to know as a citizen that your leaders think everything is under control, for this reason I can only begin to imagine the relief people in the United States must feel when President Bush publicly acknowledges; “I believe that our economy has got the fundamentals in place.² I must admit however that I struggle to understand where the president is getting his data from and I dread to think what things will look like by the time he admits that ³fundamentals² are not really ³in place². According to Alan Greenspan “as of right now, U.S. economic growth is at zero², ³home prices will continue to weaken² and a boom in oil prices is going to “go on forever”. As he puts it, the US is ³clearly on the edge.”
I remember the time when General Motors Corp. was considered a pillar of the American dream, a fundamental of the economic miracle. Now, after reporting a quarterly loss of $722 million, compared with a profit of $950 million a year earlier, and offering buyouts to all of its 74,000 United Auto Workers employees, GM is clearly not a part of the sound fundamentals which President Bush likes to describe. The same seems apparent with MGIC Investment Corp., the largest U.S. mortgage insurer, which posted a record quarterly loss of $1.47 billion and is also being kept out of the Œpresidential fundamentals equation¹.
Things are so bad in the United States that during the Senate Banking Committee hearing, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson resorted to aliens from outer space to describe how things are looking; “If someone came down – a man came down from Mars – and you were trying to explain the regulatory structureŠ it’s a patchwork quilt, in many ways.” I don¹t blame him for looking for such far fetched metaphors when many economists and banking industry experts according to Time magazine, ³believe the subprime crisis could metamorphose into the biggest debacle to hit the sector since the Savings & Loan catastrophe of the 1980s, which caused some $500 billion in losses to the banking industry.” As Merrill Lynch economist Kathy Bostjancic elaborates ³the impact here could be far larger (than the S&L crisis) in terms of the dollar amount and the spillover effects into other parts of the economy, particularly the consumer.”
Doug Duncan, chief economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association, in his updated 2008 forecast says “the principal concern of the current credit crisis lies in the possibility that banks will eventually run out of capital,” as Dean Baker, co-director of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank, adds, “the amount of debt that’s likely to go bad is virtually certain to be in the high hundreds of billions of dollars, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it ends up crossing a trillion.”
In short, what we have here is the worst housing slump in a quarter century, an economy which in January alone lost 17,000 jobs, and The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index which has fallen three consecutive months, the longest losing streak since 2003. We also have Americans whose December monthly expenditure on debt service, housing, medical costs, and food and energy bills has risen to an unprecedented 66.9 percent of their total spending, the highest since records began in 1980. According to Ron Blackwell, chief economist at the AFL-CIO, “American workers are suffering a generation-long decline in living standards and rising economic insecurity.” To add to this, the four-week moving average of new claims for state unemployment is at the highest level since October 2005, and the University of Michigan¹s consumer sentiment index is marking its lowest point since February 1992 when the economy was emerging from a recession.
I would like to know what the president¹s fundamentals are. The White House seems to be isolated from reality. Data provided by the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America trade group clearly states that U.S. foreclosure rates have risen to their highest since at least World War II, and defaults on privately insured U.S. mortgages have risen 37 percent in December from the same month a year earlier. RealtyTrac Inc. is reporting that foreclosure rates have risen 75 percent in 2007, and the number of homes that have been repossessed, or taken back by the bank, have jumped 50% nationwide last year. According to The National Association of Realtors Pending Home Sales Index, pending sales of previously owned homes have fallen a steeper-than-expected 1.5 percent in December, and prices of existing U.S. single-family homes have slumped 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter versus a year earlier, the largest decline in the 20-year history of a national home price index. The National Association of Realtors has also reported that sales by homeowners have fallen in January to their lowest reading since the group began reporting annual sales pace in 1999, something which Northern Trust chief economist, Paul Kasriel describes as ³more doom and gloom.”
To add to this, home prices continued their plunge during the last three months of 2007, setting a real estate trade group’s record for the biggest-ever quarterly drop, the steepest ever recorded by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), which has been compiling the report since 1979. A Merrill Lynch report in January forecasted price declines of 15% in 2008 and another 10% in 2009 before markets begin to recover. On top of this, mortgage applications volume tumbled 22.6 percent during the week ending Feb. 15 according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s weekly application survey, while Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services said its rating outlook on US homebuilders remains emphatically negative and it believes a recovery is not yet in sight, as six of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders have temporarily stopped foreclosure proceedings, in a joint effort to cool the raging foreclosure crisis through a project known as Project Lifeline.
Things are so bad in the housing sector, a sector which one would deem as part of the fundamentals of a sound economy, that in a conference call with analysts, Kenneth Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America, pointed out that more borrowers appear to be giving up on their homes as prices fall, noting a “change in social attitudes toward default.” Not surprising considering that CIBC World Markets forecast U.S. house prices will end up sliding 20% before the market stabilizes, and estimates 50% of U.S. homeowners who took out below-prime mortgages in 2006 will end up owing more than their house is worth. As Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics put it, “there seems to be a sense of a very deep-seated collapse in the economy.”
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s index of manufacturing activity in the U.S. Northeast also indicated the same disparity between Bush¹s sound fundamentals statement and reality, showing the manufacturing sector in the key heartland of the US is suffering its lowest output for seven years. “As far as this indicator is concerned, a recession, and a severe one at that, is already underway,” said Paul Ash-worth, of Capital Economics. For Merrill Lynch, the collapse in the outlook for activity six months out was even more worrisome since it posted the steepest decline in the 40-year history of this report.
America¹s “new business cycle” which began in the 1980¹s has created as Thomas Palley ex Chief Economist with the US-China Economic Security Review Commission puts it, large trade deficits, manufacturing job loss, asset price inflation, rising debt-to-income ratios, and detachment of wages from productivity growth. It has used financial booms to support debt-financed spending, an easing of credit standards to support borrowing, and cheap imports to ameliorate the effects of wage stagnation. As Palley puts it, with “debt burdens elevated and housing prices significantly above levels warranted by their historical relation to income, the business cycle of the last two decades appears exhausted.²
According to the New York Times, the sound fundamentals Bush likes to refer to, are alarmingly parallel to the ³Japan¹s lost decade², when the Japanese economy after a long boom in the 1990¹s, was stopped by a sharp fall in the real estate market causing a stretch of stagnation which ended only a few years ago. Clyde V. Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington, says ³the American economy is very fragile now,” a sentiment which is echoed by Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, who warns that “the roughly $100 billion in bad loans reported by banks to date could increase nearly tenfold, as the defaults spread beyond the subprime mortgage loans to consumer loans, credit cards and corporate lending.”
European Central Bank council member Guy Quaden points out that “it is clear that the slowdown in the U.S. will be more pronounced than previously foreseen.” According to Bank of Italy governor, Mario Draghi, in the meeting held in Tokyo by the finance ministers and central bank chiefs of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, “Bernanke said that while house prices are falling, they can’t say how long and deep the crisis will be.” But as lawmakers, politicians and bankers continue to debate about the current state of the American economy, what is clear is that the latest consumer price index (CPI), the government’s main inflation indicator shows that for the year ending in January, all prices were up 4.3 percent. Excluding the temporary surges after Katrina, inflation hasn’t been higher since July 1991. As for the producer price index, year over year the PPI is up 7.4% the fastest pace since 1981. As Robert Brusca, chief economist at FAO Economics says, with this data at hand, ³it will be hard for Mr. Bernanke to testify…and hold to the fiction of inflation as under control and the Fed as master of tamed inflation expectations.” Yet Bernanke is telling lawmakers that `²inflation expectations appear to have remained reasonably well anchored,² and George Bush is convinced that fundamentals are in place.
As for now, while talk of subprime exposure has diminished, Ted Wieseman, an economist at Morgan Stanley, warns that ³investor worries about potential further writedowns are shifting in a big way from subprime residential mortgages to commercial real estate lending.² Also as major retailers reported chilly January same-store sales, Wal-Mart with a meager 0.5% increase, Target with a 1.1% drop, Macy’s with a worse-than-expected 7.1% decline, Kohl’s with an 8.3% plunge and Nordstrom with a 6.6% drop in comps, the National Federation of Independent Business said its index of small business optimism slipped to the lowest reading since January 1991, when the U.S. was mired in recession.
To add to this economic and social carnage, Macy’s Inc. has reported that it plans to cut 2,300 jobs across the country, Hasbro Inc the second-largest U.S. toy company, expects a 14 percent to 15 percent increase this year in the costs of made-in-China products, Time Warner has reported a 41 percent decline in fourth-quarter profits, Office Depot a 85% plunge in profit, and Jeffrey Garten, professor of international trade and finance at Yale School of Management has said that the United States “is beginning to look like a bargain-basement.”
Of course, if the world¹s economic engine looking like a bargain-basement is a reflection of sound fundamentals, then I must accept my misreading of today¹s economic reality and subscribe to George Bush¹s sound fundamentals equation.
Pablo Ouziel is a sociologist and a freelance writer based in Spain.
Breaking news:Syria calls its army reserve
Breaking news: Syria calls its army reserve
This is reported in many Arab newspapers since yesterday [Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Al-watan Voice], all the links refer to the Lebanese forces web site I couldn’t find it:
Israel deployed three “Saar” naval corvettes, three Patriot batteries and eight military battalions on the southern Lebanon and the Golan, bout 20 bulldozer prepared places for the stationed soldiers. this development
Syria and Lebanon are aware of development, Armies of both countries are in high alert.
Lebanese newspaper Sada Al-Balad, reported today that Syrian workers in Lebanon told the work-owners, they must leave Lebanon and go back home before 10-March to join the army because the Syria authority called the reserve soldiers in the recent high alert situation.
http://www.roadstoiraq.com/2008/03/06/syria-calls-its-army-reserve/
Emeutes de la faim dues à la hausse des prix alimentaires
Emeutes de la faim dues à la hausse des prix alimentaires
— « Nous savons comment remplir vos caddies– blocage des prix contre la vie chère et nouveau Bretton Woods contre les spéculateurs », voici les principaux slogans des candidats de Solidarité et Progrès aux cantonales du 9 mars (voir ici). Si la hausse des prix alimentaires étrangle le consommateur français, elle provoque des émeutes de la faim dans les pays pauvres. L’ampleur de la menace confirme les avertissements de Lyndon LaRouche : si rien n’est fait, la crise terminale de la mondialisation financière pourrait plonger le monde dans un nouvel âge des ténèbres comparable à celui du XIVème siècle en Europe.
Des responsables du Programme alimentaire mondial de l’ONU (PAM) viennent d’annoncer « l’apparition d’une ‘nouvelle zone de famine’ dans le secteur en voie de développement, où même les classes moyennes et les populations urbaines sont écartées des marchés de la nourriture par la hausse des prix ». Le PAM, dont la mission principale était jusqu’ici d’aider les régions victimes de pénuries alimentaires, doit désormais intervenir à cause des hausses de prix. Parmi les pays cités : l’Indonésie, le Mexique et le Yémen. L’Egypte vient aussi d’étendre son programme d’aide alimentaire pour la première fois depuis deux décennies et le Pakistan a réintroduit un système de carte de rationnement qui avait été abandonné dans les années 80. Josette Sherran, présidente du PAM, soulignait que dans certains pays, les gens ont dû réduire leur ration de 3 à 1 repas par jour. Cette année, les pays pauvres devront payer 35% plus cher leur facture de céréales importées.
Bien que des problèmes climatiques et une demande accrue aient contribué à l’augmentation des prix, le PAM dénonce parmi les causes principales « l’appétit de céréales de l’industrie des biocarburants ». Un autre facteur entre en jeu, avec la spéculation pure et simple sur les produits agricoles dans les Bourses des matières premières et l’orientation par les gestionnaires de fortune de leurs clients vers l’investissement dans les produits agricoles, autrement plus sûrs que les « subprimes » et les produits structurés ! Mentionnons enfin l’incapacité des gouvernements à intervenir sur les marchés pour faire baisser les prix, l’idéologie néo-libérale les ayant pratiquement conduits à éliminer leurs stocks. Ainsi, les stocks de céréales de l’UE seraient passés de 14 à 1 million de tonnes en un an.
Conséquence de cette situation, des émeutes de la faim ont secoué des pays qui ne sont pas forcément parmi les plus pauvres, tels que Mexique, Yémen, Mauritanie, Sénégal, Pakistan, Ouzbékistan, Maroc ou Guinée. Le PAM a averti que les coûts augmentant de plusieurs millions de dollars par semaine, il devrait restreindre son aide, déjà minuscule, à 73 millions de personnes dans 78 pays, soit moins de 10% des sous-alimentés du monde entier.
Rappelons qu’en France, la hausse des prix est l’une des principales causes de la chute vertigineuse de popularité de Nicolas Sarkozy, seulement neuf mois après son élection.
Russia test flies ‘4++ generation’ Su-35 strike fighter
Russia test flies ‘4++ generation’ Su-35 strike fighter
07/ 03/ 2008
MOSCOW, March 6 (RIA Novosti) – The Sukhoi aircraft maker has conducted another test flight of its new state-of-the-art Su-35 Flanker multirole air superiority/strike fighter, the company said on Thursday.
A company spokesman said the aircraft was flown for over two hours, primarily to test the operation of its engines and control system, adding that both had performed admirably.
The manufacturer said last month that the new aircraft, billed as “4++ generation using fifth-generation technology,” would enter service with the Russian Air Force in two to three years.
The Su-35, powered by two AL-37F engines, combines high maneuverability and the capability to effectively engage air targets using both guided and unguided missiles and weapon systems.
The Su-35 prototype made its maiden flight on February 18, and two more aircraft are being prepared for similar tests at an aircraft manufacturing plant in Russia’s Far East.
Sukhoi, which is part of Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation, is planning to export over 40 combat aircraft in 2008.
In 2007, Sukhoi exported about 50 Su-30MK2, Su-30MKM and Su-30MKI aircraft, including to Algeria, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Venezuela.
The company also announced that its 2007 sales had grossed over 50 billion rubles ($2 billion).
