Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's Journal'Tactics as Dirty as Their Oil': Leaked Docs Reveal TransCanada's Propaganda Plan
Published on Tuesday, November 18, 2014
by Common Dreams
'Tactics as Dirty as Their Oil': Leaked Docs Reveal TransCanada's Propaganda Plan
Documents show that oil and gas companies are placing serious resources of time, money, and personnel into countering the growing climate justice movement. "What this speaks to is that they are losing," says one campaigner whose group has been targeted by company strategy.
by Jon Queally, staff writer
Internal strategy documents prepared by a public relations firm on behalf of Canadian pipeline giant TransCanada reveal details of an enormous and well-organized effort by the oil industry to neutralized the transnational grassroots movement which has grown up around the industry's effort to expand tar sands mining and the building of huge infrastructure projects designed to get "the world's dirtest fuel" to market.
Obtained by Greenpeace and given to The Guardian newspaper, the documents show that TransCanada—which has proposed building a pipeline called Energy East to bring tar sands from Alberta to New Brusnwick through the largest such pipeline ever built—is aligned with other oil and gas companies placing serious resources of time, money, and personnel into countering the growing climate justice movement which has so far successfully delayed building the Keystone XL pipelein and affirmed its commitment to stopping similar projects in the name of fighting global warming and the resulting threat of climate change.
"These tactics are as dirty as the oil the pipeline would transport," said Mark Calzavara of Ontario, Quebec and Nunavut regional organizer with the Council of Canadians, one of the groups named in the corporate documents. "Filling Energy East would mean the climate pollution equivalent to adding 7 million cars to our roads. It threatens over 1000 waterways along the route with a devastating diluted bitumen spill."
~snip~
Responding to the revelations, Andrea Harden-Donaghue, lead climate campaigner for the Council of Canadians, told the Guardian that the ambitious scale of strategy suggested TransCanada was concerned about growing opposition to the Energy East project. "What this speaks to is that they are losing,” she said. “What these documents reveal is that they are bringing Tea Party activists into the equation in Canada combined with a heavyhanded advertising campaign. They are clearly spending a lot of time and thought on our efforts. I’d rather see them address the concerns that we are raising."
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/18/tactics-dirty-their-oil-leaked-docs-reveal-transcanadas-propaganda-plan
Ten Illegal Police Actions to Watch for in Ferguson
November 18, 2014
Crackdown on the Constitution
Ten Illegal Police Actions to Watch for in Ferguson
by BILL QUIGLEY
When the Michael Brown verdict is announced, people can expect the police to take at least ten different illegal actions to prevent people from exercising their constitutional rights. The Ferguson police have been on TV more than others so people can see how awful they have been acting. But their illegal police tactics are unfortunately quite commonly used by other law enforcement in big protests across the US.
The First Amendment to the US Constitution promises the government will not abridge freedom of speech or to prevent the right of the people to peaceably assemble or to petition to the government for the redress of grievances.
Here is what they are going to do, watch for each of these illegal actions when the crowds start to grow.
One. Try to stop people from protesting. The police all say they know they have to let people protest. So they usually will allow protests for a while. Then the police will get tired and impatient and try to stop people from continuing to protest. The government will say people can only protest until a certain time, or on a certain street, or only if they keep moving, or not there, not here, not now, no longer. Such police action is not authorized by the US Constitution. People have a right to protest, the government should leave them alone.
Two. Provocateurs. Police have likely already planted dozens of officers, black and white, male and female, inside the various protests groups. These officers will illegally spy on peaceful protesters and often take illegal actions themselves and encourage other people to take illegal action. They will even be arrested with others but magically not end up in jail. Others inside the groups will be paid to inform on the group to the government. Comically, when undercover police are uncovered they often claim they have a constitutional right to be there and try to use the constitution they are violating as a shield!
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/18/ten-illegal-police-actions-to-watch-for-in-ferguson/
Water war in Bolivia led eventually to overthrow of entire political order
Water war in Bolivia led eventually to overthrow of entire political order
South American country found itself in need of aid from IMF and World Bank
First published:
Tue, Nov 18, 2014, 01:00
If the debacle of Irish Water suggests the State is “heading gradually” towards ungovernability, as Fintan O’Toole suggested in these pages recently, then events in Bolivia 14 years ago might stand as a warning to our politicians about the passions water can arouse.
Back in 2000, the South American country’s government so badly mismanaged a local dispute over water it escalated into the first water war of the 21st century and eventually helped lead to the overthrow of an entire political order.
Like metering in Ireland, the conflict had its roots when Bolivia became the ward of multilateral organisations, in its case the IMF and World Bank.
In return for the financial aid necessary to rescue a broken economy, these bodies demanded structural reforms, including the privatisation of Bolivia’s state enterprises. Mines, oil and gas fields, railways and electricity companies were all sold off, tens of thousands of workers fired, unemployment soared and poverty intensified.
However, despite the hardship, resistance among the population was patchwork. Until, that is, 1999, when the government gave a multinational consortium headed by US firm Bechtel a 40-year concession to manage the water of Cochabamba, Bolivia’s third-biggest city in return for a commitment to modernise the network.
More:
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/water-war-in-bolivia-led-eventually-to-overthrow-of-entire-political-order-1.2004444
Number of victims of Colombia’s conflict surpasses 7 million
Number of victims of Colombia’s conflict surpasses 7 million
Nov 18, 2014 posted by David Wing
More than seven million Colombians have become a victim of the country’s conflict, according to the government. This year alone, more than a 100,000 people were victimized.
According to the government’s Victim’s Unit, political violence in Colombia left 7,028,776 victims between 1956 and November 1 this year. The majority of these victims were victimized after the year 2000 when the conflict had escalated and leftist rebel groups like the FARC and ELN were fighting both the Colombian military and state-aligned paramilitary groups.
It was in the same period that the fighting between the military and guerrillas, and a violent expansion of paramilitary group AUC caused massive displacement mainly among Colombia’s rural population.
~snip~
The official estimation could be low as independent statistics regarding displacement show a higher number of victims in recent years than the Victim’s Unit has recognized.
According to the latest Victim’s Unit report, 6 million were victim of forced displacement alone, and more than 930,000 people have been killed, 150,000 were forcibly disappeared and 90 thousand lost their home or belongings.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/number-victims-colombias-conflict-surpassed-7-million/
Study: More Homeless Children Now Than Any Point in US History
Published on Monday, November 17, 2014
by Common Dreams
Study: More Homeless Children Now Than Any Point in US History
A new report on child homelessness in America finds that 2.5 million children experience homelessness annually.
by Jon Queally, staff writer
The annual levels of homelessness among children have never been higher in the United States, according to a new comprehensive report released on Monday.
Prepared by the National Center on Family Homelessness, the report—America’s Youngest Outcasts (pdf)—shows that with poverty and inequality soaring in recent years, approximately 2.5 million children in 2013 found themselves without a roof over their head or place to call home. That number equals one in 30 American children nationally, and constitutes an 8 percent increase over the previous year.
"Child homelessness has reached epidemic proportions in America," said Dr. Carmela DeCandia, director of the NCFH, in a statement. "Children are homeless to night in every city, county and state — in every part of our nation.”
Based on federal and other available data and broken down by state, the analysis shows that homelessness among children varies widely depending on geography. The report includes an index ranking based on four basic criteria: 1) the extent of child homelessness (adjusted for population); 2) general well-being of the children; 3) risk for family homelessness; and 4) state policies designed to combat the problem. Ranked from 1-50, the states with the best scores were Minnesota, Nebraska and Massachusetts. The worst states for homeless children were Alabama, Mississippi and California.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/17/study-more-homeless-children-now-any-point-us-history
Fast-tracked bill would shield execution drug
Source: Associated Press
Fast-tracked bill would shield execution drug
By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS, AP Legal Affairs Writer | November 18, 2014 | Updated: November 18, 2014 1:19am
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Opponents have lined up to testify against a fast-tracked legislative proposal to shield the names of companies whose drugs are used for lethal injections in Ohio.
The bill introduced a week ago and already set for a vote later this week in the House Policy and Legislative Oversight Committee also would bar companies from entering into contracts prohibiting states from acquiring drugs for executions.
The bill also prevents information about a lethal injection drugmaker or distributor from being disclosed in court.
Such a proposal raises separation of power issues at the state and federal levels and likely would be ignored by a federal judge, state public defender Tim Young planned to tell the committee.
The Republican-backed legislation is sponsored by state Reps. Jim Buchy and Matt Huffman and pushed by prosecutors, who say the bill is needed to help restart executions in the state. Buchy has said he believes the bill is constitutional.
Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/us/article/Fast-tracked-bill-would-shield-execution-drug-5900027.php
Uribe wants government monopoly of medical marijuana if legalized
Uribe wants government monopoly of medical marijuana if legalized
Nov 17, 2014 posted by David Wing
Colombia’s former President Alvaro Uribe, leader of the conservative opposition in the Senate, wants the state to have the monopoly on the cultivation and sales of medical marijuana if approved by law.
The bill to find a framework for legalizing marijuana for medicinal, therapeutic, and scientific purposes passed the first senatorial debate last week.
The bill is strongly supported by the current governing liberal administration. President Juan Manuel Santos has also declared support in the past for the legalization of medicinal marijuana.
MORE: Santos in favor of legalizing medical marijuana in Colombia
The head of Colombia’s opposition party, Alvaro Uribe, presented an alternative proposal. The main point of his proposal was to ensure that marijuana grown for scientific purposes remains in the control of the government.
“We do not agree with the (Senate's approval). We accept that under the direction of the state we can investigate how a drug, like marijuana, can serve therapeutic (purposes). Now if the state needs crops for research, those crops are in the control of the state,” he said in a press release.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/colombia-opposition-party-demands-government-monopoly-marijuana-legalized/
The floating islands of Peru’s Lake Titcaca
The floating islands of Peru’s Lake Titcaca
By Nicole Crowder November 17 at 10:00 AM
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Andean actors sail in a totora raft during a re-enactment of the legend of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo in an Uros island at Lake Titicaca in Puno. (Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters)
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The Uros islands are a group of 70 man-made totora reed islands floating on Peru’s Lake Titicaca. Its inhabitants, the Uros tribe, pre-date Incan civilization and continue to hunt and fish the plentiful land and waters they occupy.
Photographer Enrique Castro-Mendivile captured Andean actors performing a re-enactment of the legend of Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo on a Uros island in early November. According to an Inca legend, Manco Capac and Mama Occllo emerged from the waters of the lake carrying a golden staff instructed by the sun god Inti to create a temple in the spot where the staff sank into the earth. The actors involved in the re-enactment were locals from the islands.
All photos by Enrique Castro-Mendivil/Reuters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2014/11/17/the-floating-islands-of-lake-titcaca-in-peru/
(Colorful images follow.)
Opinion: A Cuban Brain Drain, Courtesy of the U.S.
A Cuban Brain Drain, Courtesy of the U.S.
Leer en español (Read in Spanish) »
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
NOV. 16, 2014
Cuban health workers in Sierra Leone in October. Credit Florian Plaucheur/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Secretary of State John Kerry and the American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, have praised the work of Cuban doctors dispatched to treat Ebola patients in West Africa. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently sent an official to a regional meeting the Cuban government convened in Havana to coordinate efforts to fight the disease. In Africa, Cuban doctors are working in American-built facilities. The epidemic has had the unexpected effect of injecting common sense into an unnecessarily poisonous relationship.
And yet, Cuban doctors serving in West Africa today could easily abandon their posts, take a taxi to the nearest American Embassy and apply for a little-known immigration program that has allowed thousands of them to defect. Those who are accepted can be on American soil within weeks, on track to becoming United States citizens.
There is much to criticize about Washington’s failed policies toward Cuba and the embargo it has imposed on the island for decades. But the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, which in the last fiscal year enabled 1,278 Cubans to defect while on overseas assignments, a record number, is particularly hard to justify.
It is incongruous for the United States to value the contributions of Cuban doctors who are sent by their government to assist in international crises like the 2010 Haiti earthquake while working to subvert that government by making defection so easy.
American immigration policy should give priority to the world’s neediest refugees and persecuted people. It should not be used to exacerbate the brain drain of an adversarial nation at a time when improved relations between the two countries are a worthwhile, realistic goal.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/opinion/a-cuban-brain-drain-courtesy-of-us.html
Starving Central America
Weekend Edition Oct 31-Nov 02, 2014
The Roots of the Food Crisis
Starving Central America
by NICK ALEXANDROV
“The drought has killed us,” a young Honduran, Olman Funez, explained last summer. He was referring to what the World Bank called “one of the longest droughts in nearly half a century.” A 60-year-old Guatemalan peasant emphasized he had never “seen a crisis like this.” Carlos Román, a Nicaraguan farmer, told a reporter that “there is nothing. We eat what we can find.”
These men are among the 2.8 million Central Americans “struggling to feed themselves” in the region’s “dry corridor”—“a drought-prone area shared by Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua,” according to the UN World Food Programme. The Nicaraguan government described its drought as the worst in 32 years. And last week the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies “said some 571,710 people were affected by the drought in Honduras,” and that “families are selling their belongings and livestock to secure food for survival, while others are migrating to escape the effects of the drought.” But food crises in Honduras and Nicaragua aren’t new phenomena. And in both countries, U.S. policy has helped starve Central Americans.
Consider Honduras, where the Choluteca Department is part of the “dry corridor.” The U.S. Consul in Tegucigalpa wrote in 1904 of Choluteca’s wide “variety of vegetation,” “ranging from the pines and oaks of the highlands to the palm and cocoanut trees along the coast.” These rich woodlands were devastated seventy years later, declining from 29% to 11% of the census area in the 1960s and ’70s. Pastures increased their territorial coverage from 47% to 64% during the same period. “The cattle are eating the forest,” Billie R. DeWalt explained in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists three decades ago. The anthropologist Jefferson Boyer concurred, noting that Choluteca’s ranchers “simply hired labor to slash and burn the trees and brush, opening the land to grass production.”
Honduras was “being converted into a vast pasture for cattle destined for export,” DeWalt elaborated—a development in line with Washington’s aims. Robert G. Williams noted that Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress boosted Central America’s beef-export business,” for example, and that “the World Bank, AID, and the IADB” all viewed beef “as a pragmatic, quick way to achieve export-led growth.” This beef, DeWalt continued, was “not bound for the estimated 58 percent of Honduran children under five years of age who suffer from identifiable malnutrition,” but rather for the U.S.—the source of “insatiable demand for livestock products” and “the largest importer,” by a long shot, “of Central American beef export.” As U.S. citizens gorge themselves on steaks and hamburgers, “food supplies in poorer countries become scarcer, unemployment increases, and the land and other resources are increasingly degraded.” Poor Hondurans thus were forced “to compete with the animals for the locally available resources.”
But many peasants, for whatever reason, couldn’t accept that they mattered as little as beasts grown for slaughter. They responded to the systematic destruction of their way of life by forming self-defense organizations. Landowners reacted in the predictable manner. “Murders by ranchers were common in the 1960s and early 1970s, and several massacres became public,” David Nibert explains. “For instance, in 1975, on a large ranch called Los Horcones”—in the Olancho Department, another site of expanding cattle pastures—“five people were burned to death in a bread oven, two priests were castrated and mutilated, and two women were thrown into a well that was then dynamited. All the victims were connected to a movement organized by subsistence farmers.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/31/starving-central-america/
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