Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalWhat “Free Trade” Has Done to Central America
What “Free Trade” Has Done to Central America
Warnings about the human and environmental costs of “free trade” went unheeded. Now the most vulnerable Central Americans are paying the price.
By Manuel Perez-Rocha and Julia Paley, November 21, 2014.
With Republicans winning big in the midterm elections, the debate over so-called “free-trade” agreements could again take center stage in Washington.
President Barack Obama has been angling for “fast-track” authority that would enable him to push the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP—a massive free-trade agreement between the United States and a host of Pacific Rim countries—through Congress with limited debate and no opportunity for amendments.
From the outset, the politicians who support the agreement have overplayed its benefits and underplayed its costs. They seldom note, for example, that the pact would allow corporations to sue governments whose regulations threaten their profits in cases brought before secretive and unaccountable foreign tribunals.
So let’s look closely at the real impact trade agreements have on people and the environment.
A prime example is the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement, or DR-CAFTA. Brokered by the George W. Bush administration and a handful of hemispheric allies, the pact has had a devastating effect on poverty, dislocation, and environmental contamination in the region.
And perhaps even worse, it’s diminished the ability of Central American countries to protect their citizens from corporate abuse.
More:
http://fpif.org/free-trade-done-central-america/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=free-trade-done-central-america
Lawyer: Tipster had 'confidential' leads on Jacksonville businessman's Venezuela death
Lawyer: Tipster had 'confidential' leads on Jacksonville businessman's Venezuela death
By Steve Patterson Fri, Nov 21, 2014 @ 11:33 am
The attorney for relatives of a missing Jacksonville businessman says a tipster tied to national security issues fed him “highly confidential” information for a court fight over the businessman’s reported death in Venezuela.
The information “confirmed that Jose Lantigua is deceased,” but shouldn’t become public because it “is sensitive in nature and relates to matters of national security,” attorney Joshua Woolsey said in an affidavit filed last week in the family’s fight with life insurance companies that refused to pay out on Lantigua’s multimillion-dollar policies. The document didn’t detail the tipster’s information.
Lantigua, who owned Circle K Furniture stores on Jacksonville’s Westside and Southside, was reported dead in April 2013 while traveling in Venezuela, and was reported to have been cremated there.
But a string of insurers have challenged that, with one, Hartford Life and Annuity Insurance Co., telling the family last year that “Mr. Lantigua is alive and living in Venezuela.” Hartford is making its case in state court, while four others are arguing in federal court that they shouldn’t have to pay.
Woolsey said he was researching the death when he contacted a man whose phone number and email Lantigua had given to his wife, Daphne Simpson, before he traveled to South America.
The affidavit said the phone number was for a public affairs office at the Central Intelligence Agency, which didn’t confirm or deny knowing the man Lantigua had mentioned to his wife. But an email Simpson received last fall said the man was constrained by his government job.
More:
http://jacksonville.com/news/crime/2014-11-21/story/lawyer-tipster-had-confidential-leads-jacksonville-businessmans?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JacksonvillecomNews+%28Jacksonville+Local+News+%E2%80%93+Jacksonville.com+and+The+Florida+Times-Union%29
Colombia’s Labyrinth of Violence
Colombia’s Labyrinth of Violence
by Joseph Grosso / November 19th, 2014
On May 16 of this year, in the rural Colombian town of Jardines de Sucumbíos (In the department of Narino), farmer Leonardo Obando offered the first floor of his home to four guests who had spent the day preparing for the town’s mother’s day festivities. The four men were: Brayan Yatacue Secue, Jose Antonio Acanamejoy, Jose Yinder Esterilla, and 15 year-old Deivi Lopez Ortega, all members of the agricultural union FENSUAGRO.
Around 4am, Obando and his family were awakened by the sound of gunfire as members of the Colombian military forcibly entered the house. Upon being found by soldiers Obando was given the choice of turning over the house to be used as a military base or being taken prisoner. As Obando and his family left the house he saw the dead bodies of his four guests- soon to be displayed and photographed on the front lawn and foully denounced as ‘guerillas’.
Killings like this, where military personal, apparently motivated by superiors to increase body counts (and thereby keep American aid flowing), kill civilians and report them as combatants killed in action, are often termed ‘false positives’. These have been a staple in Colombia, especially during the presidency of Alvaro Uribe (2002-2010). If the number has reduced since clearly the killings haven’t ceased (see Human Rights Watch 2014 country summary).
Colombia has long been a horrific place for union members and their leaders. Dozens are murdered every year, over 2500 in the past 20 years, more than the rest of the world combined according to British NGO Justice for Colombia. Meanwhile the actual guerillas are in talks with the government to end the multi-decades long struggle that partly explains why Colombia has the second highest number of internally displaced people in the world. Colombia also has the distinction, singular these days in South America, of essentially being an American client, the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the Western Hemisphere.
More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2014/11/colombias-labyrinth-of-violence/
Two children sexually abused every hour in Colombia
Two children sexually abused every hour in Colombia
Nov 20, 2014 posted by David Wing
Two children are sexually abused in Colombia every hour, the country’s Medical Examiner’s Office said Tuesday.
The office made the claim based on data compiled between January and September of this year, for a total of 10,442 cases.
Of the total cases, 83% of the victims were female with almost half of them being between the ages of 10 and 14 years old. The majority of male victims were abused between the ages of five and nine years old.
Angela Rosales, National Director of SOS Children’s Villages in Colombia, stated that families have the capability to teach their children their rights in order to prevent these incidents.
The data also shows that me majority of abuses are perpetrated “by a member of the family or in the household.” Just under 50% of the alleged perpetrators were family members. The abuse was perpetrated by someone the child lived with in 40% of the cases. This means that the family may not have an incentive to educate the children on their rights. It may be a factor in another problem: the institute estimates that its data only represents about 30% of actual abuses that took place in Colombia this year.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/two-children-sexually-abused-every-hour-colombia-report-says/
US blacklists Colombia’s Envigado soccer club over drug money laundering
US blacklists Colombia’s Envigado soccer club over drug money laundering
Nov 19, 2014 posted by Robin Llewellyn
Envigado FC of Colombia’s top soccer league has been placed under on the “Kingpin List” for supporting the Medellin-based “La Oficina de Envigado” crime syndicate.
Designation on the list freezes all United States-based assets of the club and prevents US citizens engaging in transactions with them.
Soccer club owner Juan Pablo Upegui Gallego was also named by the US Treasury as an important member of the crime syndicate who allegedly has placed the club’s finances at the service of the cartel for years.
Founded in 1989, the club has built a reputation for developing young stars including James Rodriguez and Juan Fernando Quintero, and won promotion to the top league during its first season of professional soccer in 1991.
But the club has been visited by controversy before. According to organized crime website InSight Crime, Oficina assassin Daniel Mejia killed former club owner Gustavo Upegui Lopez in 2006.
The crime syndicate, originally founded by slain drug lord Pablo Escobar, has emerged as the leading organization managing local militias and gangs in the area around Medellin following the death of its founder in 1993, cooperating with AUC (United Self Defense Forces of Colombia) paramilitaries.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/us-blacklists-colombias-envigado-soccer-club-drug-money-laundering/
Football-Sized Tumor Successfully Removed from Mexican Boy after 12-Hour Surgery
Source: Tech Times
Football-Sized Tumor Successfully Removed from Mexican Boy after 12-Hour Surgery
By Sumit Passary, Tech Times | November 19, 9:01 AM
Doctors have successfully removed a football-sized tumor from a Mexican boy. The surgery involved 25 medical professionals and lasted 12 hours.
The patient is Jose Antonio Ramirez Serrano, 11, a resident of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which is known to be one of the deadliest cities not only in Mexico but the entire world due to the presence of drug cartels. The young boy had been afflicted with the tumor since birth. The deadly tumor had occupied parts of his shoulder, torso and neck.
Jose's parents are glad that their son has finally received treatment. They explain that the tumor had become so massive that it affected Jose's eyesight. They also feared that the tumor would spread to the heart, which may become fatal.
The patient's family tried to raise money or get treatment in their hometown and also in El Paso, Texas, but their efforts failed.
Members of the First Baptist Church of Rio Rancho saw Jose's suffering while on a visit to Ciudad Juarez. The members of the church found the boy walking in the city streets; his parents had lost all hope to get Jose treated.
Since then, the congregation started to raise money for Jose's surgery. When stories and pictures of the boy with the massive tumor went viral, the church also witnessed a spike in the donations.
The church also received help from the U.S. Homeland Security Department to get Jose and his family to New Mexico where his surgery would take place.
Read more: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/20528/20141119/football-sized-tumor-successfully-removed-from-mexican-boy-after-12-hour-surgery.htm#ixzz3JYZ3IHXA
Whales vs. the US Navy
November 19, 2014
War-Gaming the Pacific
Whales vs. the US Navy
by ELLEN TAYLOR
One radiant, still morning a few days ago three jets, at what seemed eye level to observers on a 350-foot bluff overlooking the Mattole estuary, screamed in from the sea, instantly vanishing up the valley behind Rainbow Ridge. Ears ringing, the observers turned back along the trajectory for some explanation of this apparition, and settled suspiciously on the horizon, where sapphire waves sparkled and danced. The Navy Northwest Testing and Training Area boundary is 12 miles off-shore….but other, more joyful apparitions will soon materialize out there. Soon the spouts announcing the annual procession of grey whales will dot the sea as they cavort their way down to Baja to have their babies. And, even now, individuals of the Mattole’s own special race of Coho and Chinook salmon are nosing their way through the California Current, across the NWTT, seeking the estuary. Along the Pacific Flyway, shorebirds are migrating.
But, could there be an aircraft carrier out there too? Or, could these airships have been a new model of drone? More than whales and salmons are gestating out there. The NWTT is an important spawning ground for new Shocks and Awes, cradle for Bunker Busters, experiments with electro-magnetic and sonar radiation for hundreds of thousands of hours, and high tech weapons of death us primitive shore-dwellers can’t even imagine. The Navy predicts 11.3 million “takes”(destroyed or damaged animals) will result from their activities over the next 3 years.
The Navy has been testing weapons offshore for decades. In recent years they have been required to invite public comment: that the responses are almost universally negative explains the Navy’s preference for low-profile publicity. For example, the Navy recently launched a plan to install equipment on Octopus Mountain, on the Olympic Peninsula, which would operate Mobile Electronic Emitter Warfare Training systems mounted on vehicles throughout state and federal lands on the peninsula. Low-flying jets would cruise over the forests and obliterate the emissions, as practice for destroying enemy communications. The emissions are said to be powerful enough to “melt a human eye”.Though the Navy claimed it had posted the plan in the local papers, it completely escaped the notice of the mayor and all residents of the nearby town of Forks, as well as the Audubon Society, until it was too late to comment. Wrote Christi Baron, Forks Forum editor, “Does the Navy and the USFS believe that “we” the people that live in Forks are not worthy of knowing what is planned?”
Last weekend the Wall Street Journal ran an article about a lawsuit against the Navy, brought by the Conservation Council for Hawaii, Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council. The suit claims that Navy use of sonar violates limits on the levels officially permitted as safe for marine mammals. It recognizes that marine mammals must die in order to protect American security; the issue, as the WSJ points out, is just how many should be saved.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/19/whales-vs-the-us-navy/
‘Persistent challenges to labor rights’ in Colombia: US govt
‘Persistent challenges to labor rights’ in Colombia: US govt
Nov 19, 2014 posted by Joel Gillin
A recent report by the United States Government Office of Accountability (GAO) claims that, despite positive steps, labor rights face “persistent challenges” in Colombia.
According to the report, requested by the US Congress to assess the “status of (free trade agreement) labor provisions in partner countries,” the Colombian government has “acted to change labor laws” and “acted to address violence against union members.”
~snip~
“Workers attempting to organize and negotiate better working conditions and wages consistently face the threat of violence, including murder, and the loss of their jobs. Few if any of these murders, assaults, bombings, let alone hundreds of death threats, are fully investigated and prosecuted. Illegal sub-contracting remains common,” claimed McGovern, a member of the congressional Monitoring Group on Labor Rights in Colombia.
The Congressman claimed the Colombian government has failed to effectively implement worker protection policies, as “inspections by the Labor Ministry are infrequent and uneven in quality. And when sanctions are levied against abusive employers, they are generally ignored,” said the Congressman.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/persistent-challenges-labor-rights-colombia-us-govt/
Trade deals criminalise farmers' seeds
Trade deals criminalise farmers' seeds
GRAIN | 18 November 2014 | Against the grain
What could be more routine than saving seeds from one season to the next? After all, that is how we grow crops on our farms and in our gardens. Yet from Guatemala to Ghana, from Mozambique to Malaysia, this basic practice is being turned into a criminal offence, so that half a dozen large multinational corporations can turn seeds into private property and make money from them. But people are fighting back and in several countries popular mobilisations are already forcing governments to put seed privatisation plans on hold.
Trade agreements have become a tool of choice for governments, working with corporate lobbies, to push new rules to restrict farmers' rights to work with seeds. Until some years ago, the most important of these was the World Trade Organization's (WTO) agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Adopted in 1994, TRIPS was, and still is, the first international treaty to establish global standards for “intellectual property” rights over seeds.1 The goal is to ensure that companies like Monsanto or Syngenta, which spend money on plant breeding and genetic engineering, can control what happens to the seeds they produce by preventing farmers from re-using them – in much the same way as Hollywood or Microsoft try to stop people from copying and sharing films or software by putting legal and technological locks on them.
~snip~
Onslaught of FTAs
The North America Free Trade Agreement – signed by Mexico, Canada and the US, at about the same time TRIPS was being finalised – was one of the first trade deals negotiated outside the multilateral arena to carry with it the tighter seed privatisation noose. It obliged Mexico to join the UPOV club of countries giving exclusive rights to seed companies to stop farmers from recycling and reusing corporate seeds. This set a precedent for all US bilateral trade agreements that followed, while the European Union, the European Free Trade Association and Japan also jumped on the same idea.3
A nonstop process of diplomatic and financial pressure to get countries to privatise seeds “through the back door” (these trade deals are negotiated in secret) has been going on since then. The stakes are high for the seed industry. Globally, just 10 companies control 55% of the commercial seed market.4
More:
http://www.grain.org/article/entries/5070-trade-deals-criminalise-farmers-seeds
California Tells Court It Can’t Release Inmates Early Because It Would Lose Cheap Prison Labor
Published on Tuesday, November 18, 2014
by ThinkProgress
California Tells Court It Can’t Release Inmates Early Because It Would Lose Cheap Prison Labor
by Nicole Flatow, ThinkProgress
Out of California’s years-long litigation over reducing the population of prisons deemed unconstitutionally overcrowded by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010, another obstacle to addressing the U.S. epidemic of mass incarceration has emerged: The utility of cheap prison labor.
In recent filings, lawyers for the state have resisted court orders that they expand parole programs, reasoning not that releasing inmates early is logistically impossible or would threaten public safety, but instead that prisons won’t have enough minimum security inmates left to perform inmate jobs.
The dispute culminated Friday, when a three-judge federal panel ordered California to expand an early parole program. California now has no choice but to broaden a program known as 2-for-1 credits that gives inmates who meet certain milestones the opportunity to have their sentences reduced. But California’s objections raise troubling questions about whether prison labor creates perverse incentives to keep inmates in prison even when they don’t need to be there.
The debate centers around an expansive state program to have inmates fight wildfires. California is one of several states that employs prison labor to fight wildfires. And it has the largest such program, as the state’s wildfire problem rapidly expands arguably because of climate change. By employing prison inmates who are paid less than $2 per day, the state saves some $1 billion, according to a recent BuzzFeed feature of the practice. California relies upon that labor source, and only certain classes of nonviolent inmates charged with lower level offenses are eligible for the selective program. They must then meet physical and other criteria.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/18/california-tells-court-it-cant-release-inmates-early-because-it-would-lose-cheap
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