forest444
forest444's JournalRacist truck driver plows his truck through Columbus Day protesters in Reno
Source: Daily Kos
An apparently racist truck driver plowed through a group of peaceful protesters in Reno, Nevada on October 10, injuring five with an elderly woman still in the hospital. The marchers were mostly American Indian and speaking out against Columbus Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The marchers stationed themselves under the famous Reno Arch when the white truck pulled up, the driver revved his engine threateningly and after people standing at his window demand that he stop, drove right through the crowd.
Full video taken by Taylor de Lao on Facebook Live shows the driver yelling profanities and shaking his fist at the crowd as he drives by a few minutes earlier.
Taylor Paniagua Sr. said he jumped in front of the pickup in an effort to stop the driver from fleeing. Paniagua said he caught the hood of the truck, but the driver kept going. He grabbed one of the side doors and was dragged toward Second Street, he said. He eventually let go and slid, scraping his arms.
“I had to stand up for my rights,” he said. “I’m Native American myself, and I’m from Oklahoma. It was just uncalled for.”
Paniagua described the men as white, “chubby,” and in their 20s. The driver, who telephoned police to tell his side of the story, is said to be cooperating.
Read more: http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/11/1580999/-Racist-truck-driver-plows-his-truck-through-Columbus-Day-protesters-in-Reno
Argentina commemorates centennial of swearing-in of first democratically elected president
Argentina today marks the 100th anniversary of the swearing-in of its first democratically elected leader, President Hipólito Yrigoyen.
The anniversary was celebrated last Thursday in a Buenos Aires rally addressed by among others writer Mempo Giardinelli, former House Speaker Leopoldo Moreau, and former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The rally was organized by MNA/FORJA, a faction that broke with Yrigoyen's party, the UCR, over its decision to back the hard-right candidate Mauricio Macri in last year's election.
Macri was narrowly elected in November partly as a result, and has moved quickly - often by decree - to rescind the populist policies of his predecessor, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. MNA/FORJA, led by Moreau (MNA) and former Kirchner Deputy Chief of Staff Gustavo López (FORJA), formed an alliance with fellow center-leftist Mrs. Kirchner despite her being a Peronist - the UCR's traditional political rivals since the 1940s.
Yrigoyen had co-founded the UCR, the country's oldest political party still in existence, in 1891. Historically centrist, the UCR has lurched steadily to the right since 1999.
A number of speakers at the rally compared Mrs. Kirchner's 2007-15 administration with that of Yrigoyen, whose two terms from 1916 to 1922 and from 1928 to 1930 were marked by significant strides in economic independence, labor rights, pensions, education, and living standards. Like Kirchner, Yrigoyen was opposed and even personally despised by conservative factions controlled by Argentina's small but powerful landowning clique.
These factions took advantage of the Great Depression to prevail on the Army to overthrow Yrigoyen in 1930 - ushering an era of right-wing military intervention in Argentine politics that culminated in a brutal and disastrous 1976-83 dictatorship.
"Whereas conservatives overthrew Yrigoyen and Juan Perón (the populist leader toppled in 1955) by force, in recent years they've opted for economic coups," Moreau noted. "They did so against Raúl Alfonsín (in 1989) and certainly tried with Cristina. They failed; but not out of a lack of trying, given the financial runs they attempted to provoke while she was in office."
About Yrigoyen
Hipólito Yrigoyen, born to a middle class Buenos Aires family in 1852, became a lawyer in 1874 and later a leading local Free Mason. He co-founded the UCR with his uncle, Leandro Alem, and other lawyers in 1891, and the UCR quickly became the most vocal advocate of electoral reform in Argentina.
The country's electoral system, dominated at the time by the landowner-controlled PAN, was popularly known as the "vote song" on account of its reliably predetermined script and outcome. Yrigoyen's efforts led to the enactment of the universal (male citizen) secret ballot in 1912 by President Roque Sáenz Peña, a friend of Yrigoyen's and fellow Free Mason who signed the bill into law despite his own elite background.
The introverted, melancholy Yrigoyen was elected by a 25% margin on April 2, 1916, and sworn in as president on October 12. He presided over an economic boom with 40% GDP growth in six years and a doubling of real wages from 1918 to 1922. A construction boom transformed downtown and uptown Buenos Aires into the "Paris of South America," as well as improving most other cities, as Argentines came to have the highest living standard in the region.
He had 3,000 schools built in a country of just 9 million, nationalized the universities, and established YPF - the first state oil firm in the world. Despite staunch obstructionism by the conservative-dominated Senate (whose members were selected by provincial legislatures) Yrigoyen practically introduced labor unions; pension funds; mortgages; workplace and product safety regulations; and small business/farm lending in Argentina.
He was, however, quick to remove opposition governors and was particularly intolerant of Anarchist activity, being slow to intervene in a right-wing massacre against them in 1919 and giving the Army carte blanche to quash a lengthy strike by sheephands in Patagonia in 1921.
Yrigoyen feuded with his successor, who led a more conservative faction of the same party; his reforms, however, were largely continued. He was overwhelmingly returned to office in 1928; but the sudden onset of the Great Depression allowed conservatives, with support from Standard Oil (which wanted YPF dissolved), to prevail on the Army to topple the aging leader on September 6, 1930.
Yrigoyen was detained in an island garrison for 18 months, during which his health deteriorated, and he was allowed to return to his ransacked home in February 1932. He was again detained from January to May 1933, and died that July at age 80.
At: http://www.buenosairesherald.com/article/222684/%E2%80%98an-electoral-scam-has-taken-place%E2%80%99
[center]
"Democracy doesn't consist simply of political freedoms; but also of the freedom for all to pursue at least some happiness."
Hipólito Yrigoyen[/center]
Macri administration caught spying on two leading opposition journalists.
Leaked documents from Argentina's Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI) reveal that the Mauricio Macri administration has been illegally spying on two leading opposition journalists.
The targeted journalists, Mauro Federico, 49, and Gustavo Sylvestre, 53, co-host the top-rated nightly economic current events program Minuto Uno (First Minute) and had been critical of the right-wing Macri administration over its austerity policies, the deepening recession, the Panama Papers and dollar futures corruption scandals, and other controversies.
Both took to Twitter to express rejection and concern over the revelations. "I'm not surprised," Sylvestre noted; "but it is very serious and the government should give an immediate response." Sylvestre added that this is part of a pattern of harassment that began when his SUV was destroyed by arson in 2014 in an as-yet unsolved incident that he believes was planned.
Federico, who is also editor-in-chief of Argentina's leading business daily Ámbito Financiero, stated that "the intelligence services are so incompetent they leave their fingerprints on every act of wrongdoing they commit. Nevertheless, we musn't let them off for these things."
This isn't the first time Macri has come under fire for using warrantless surveillance against critics, or even personal rivals.
He and the head of his newly-created Metropolitan Police, Jorge "Fino" Palacios, were indicted in 2009 for running illegal wiretaps on among others Sergio Burstein (head of the main victims' rights group representing relatives of those killed in the 1994 AMIA Jewish community center attack), bidding competitors of his father's (a top local contractor), and Macri's own brother-in-law (with whom his father had a dispute). The charges were dropped last December, two weeks after taking office as president.
Nor was this the first time journalists critical of his administration have been harassed.
While sacking public radio and television hosts seen as critics in January, officials informed a number of those laid off that "we've reviewed your Twitter pages."
A clause buried in a tax amnesty bill introduced by the administration in May would have punished journalists reporting on those benefiting from said amnesty with up to two years in prison and a fine equal to whatever amount was repatriated. The Argentine Journalists' Forum (FOPEA) denounced the clause as unconstitutional, and Macri withdrew it in June.
The production offices of Tiempo Argentino, a center-left Buenos Aires news daily, and its companion radio station, Radio América, were ransacked in July. Local police, controlled by a city government run by Macri's same party, refused to intervene or to allow employees to intervene as the destruction was taking place, and were later filmed escorting a number of vandals out without issuing arrests or removing their ski masks.
Three prominent Macri critics - including a journalist, Cynthia García - had their homes or offices broken into within days of each other in August. García had nothing stolen except two computers, external hard drives, tablet, spiral notebooks, and other research being used in a forthcoming investigative piece.
The country's most popular variety show host, Marcelo Tinelli, was also the target of a massive social media harassment campaign after satirizing Macri in July. The campaign was revealed to have been directed by a partisan "troll center," and that at most 2% of all derogatory posts were in fact linked to real individuals.
Jorge Halperín, one of the public radio hosts fired shortly after Macri took office, noted that spying on journalists was "a matter of course, as if part of Macri's DNA - but no less serious even so."
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.d24ar.com/nota/argentina/385197/sylvestre-mauro-federico-consideran-muy-grave-haber-sido-espiados-afi.html&prev=search
Macri's suspension of Chinese hydroelectric project in Argentina prompts soy oil boycott by China
The Argentine Embassy in Beijing confirmed that China has suspended purchases of soybean oil from Argentina, its largest supplier, for at least the remainder of 2016.
While Chinese officials have not officially disclosed reasons for the move, the boycott follows a unilateral decision by the right-wing Mauricio Macri administration to indefinitely suspend construction of two large hydroelectric dams that were to be built with China in southern Argentina.
The Néstor Kirchner-Jorge Cepernic Hydroelectric Complex, slated for the Santa Cruz River in Argentina's windswept Patagonia region, was awarded in August 2013 to the Chinese state construction firm Gezhouba and the private Argentine firms of Hidrocuyo and Electroingeniería. The complex, 85% of whose $5 billion price tag was to be financed by China, was designed to add 1,740 MW to installed capacity once completed in 2020 (nearly 5% of Argentina's total).
The Macri administration had already strained relations with China in April by cancelling construction of two 750 MW nuclear power plants (the fourth and fifth in Argentina) agreed to last November. China had similarly agreed to finance 85% of this second project, worth some $15 billion.
Both commitments were secured by Macri's predecessor, former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner - leading to speculation that the projects were scuttled for political reasons. In the case of the canceled nuclear power plants, industry sources have also pointed to "U.S. business interests, which have been intensely lobbying Macri to nix the project."
Rising trade deficit
While soy oil made up only about 7% of Argentine exports to China, the boycott is likely to exacerbate Argentina's yawning trade deficit with the Asian giant. This trend, which began in 2008, led to a similar dispute in April 2010, when China suspended Argentine soy oil imports in retaliation for anti-dumping measures taken by former President Fernández de Kirchner.
The dispute was resolved in May 2011; but Argentina's trade gap with China has continued to worsen, growing nearly 12-fold from $537 million in 2008 to $6.4 billion in 2015 on rising demand for Chinese industrial goods.
China imported 808,000 tons of soybean oil in 2015, of which Argentina supplied 65% (525,000 tons). Argentina, the world's top exporter of soy oil, shipped a record 5,757,000 tons in 2015 - representing $4 billion, or nearly 7%, of all merchandise exports. The largest market, however, was by far India, which purchased 37% of Argentine soy oil exports in 2015; China's share was 9%.
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://supercampo.perfil.com/2016/10/china-paralizo-la-compra-de-aceite-de-soja-a-la-argentina/&prev=search
Colombian leader Juan Manuel Santos wins Nobel Peace Prize
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for his efforts to end a five-decade civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people — and said he received the award in the name of the Colombian people.
The award came just days after Colombian voters narrowly rejected the peace deal that Santos helped bring about. Nobel judges conspicuously did not honor his counterpart, Rodrigo Londoño, the leader of the rebels.
"The referendum was not a vote for or against peace," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, insisting the peace process wasn't dead. "What the 'No' side rejected was not the desire for peace, but a specific peace agreement."
Santos said the Colombian people deserved the honor.
"Especially the millions of victims that have suffered in this war that we are on the verge of ending," Santos said in an interview posted on the Nobel Foundation's Facebook page. "We are very, very close. We just need to push a bit further to persevere."
Reacting to the award on Twitter, Londoño said "the only prize to which we aspire" is one of social justice for Colombia, without far-right militias or retaliation.
At: http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/colombian-leader-juan-manuel-santos-wins-nobel-peace-prize/ar-BBx7A7m?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=ansmsnnews11
Yuan joins club of IMF reserve currencies
Source: Buenos Aires Herald
China’s yuan joined the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) basket of reserve currencies yesterday in a milestone for the government’s campaign for recognition as a global economic power.
The yuan joins the US dollar, the euro, the yen and British pound in the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) basket, which determines currencies that countries can receive as part of IMF loans. It marks the first time a new currency has been added since the euro was launched in 1999. The IMF is adding the yuan, also known as the renminbi, or “people’s money,” on the same day that the Communist Party celebrates the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
“The inclusion into the SDR is a milestone in the internationalization of the renminbi, and is an affirmation of the success of China’s economic development and results of the reform and opening up of the financial sector,” the People’s Bank of China said in a statement. China will use this opportunity to further deepen economic reforms and open up the sector to promote global growth, the central bank added.
The IMF announced last year that it would add the yuan to the basket, so actual inclusion is not expected to impact financial markets. But it puts Beijing’s often opaque economic and foreign exchange policy in the international spotlight as some central banks add yuan assets to their official reserves.
Critics argue that the move is largely symbolic and the yuan does not fully meet IMF reserve currency criteria of being freely usable, or widely used to settle trade or widely traded in financial markets. U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said he will formally label China a currency manipulator if he wins November’s election.
Read more: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/222385/yuan-joins-club-of-imf-reserve-currencies
Argentine GDP declines 5.9% in July from same time last year, most severe contraction in 14 years.
Argentina's economy registered its most severe contraction in almost 14 years in July, shrinking by 5.9% when compared with the same month last year, the INDEC statistics bureau announced yesterday.
GDP so far this year is down 2.3% compared to last year, with the recession appearing to deepen with each passing quarter since the right-wing Mauricio Macri administration took office in December. GDP, which grew 2.5% in 2015, was up by 0.4% in the first quarter, down 3.4% in the second, and with July data in, will likely round out the third quarter down at least 6%.
This was a steeper decline than even the gloomiest estimates, and casts a further shadow over the government’s economic plans. Economy Ministry sources sought to explain away the fall of almost 6% by claiming that last year's figures were "inflated by public spending at its peak."
Their own data shows, however, that the recession has been led by plummeting business investment, which fell by 4.9% in the second quarter compared to the same time last year - a much sharper decline than either private or public consumption. For July, pro-business economist Orlando Ferreres estimates that fixed private investment fell by 9.6%.
The recession is most severe in construction — down 23.1% in a year, and down 14.1% so far in 2016. Manufacturing is also down by 7.9%, with the sharpest drops coming from raw steel (-17%), the auto industry (-12%), and building materials (-11.6%).
Retail sales figures confirm the ongoing consumer recession, as they rose by 30% in supermarkets and 28.2% in shopping centers in peso terms from the previous July - but because inflation has doubled to 47.2%, registered real declines of 11.7% and 12.9%, respectively.
The only genuinely positive figure yesterday came from merchandise trade, which in August reached a surplus of $705 million compared to $51 million surplus registered the previous August. This improvement was largely due to an 8.1% decline in imports, as the recession impacts demand from abroad.
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/222192/indec-economy-shrank-59-in-july
WSJ: Argentines say Mauricio Macri’s policies aren’t the solutions they promised to be
Argentina’s shrinking economy and high unemployment are triggering ever-louder grumbling from its citizens, posing problems for President Mauricio Macri in a country where economic discontent has undone previous leaders.
The difficulty for Macri is that he promised it wouldn’t be like this. When he took office in December vowing to slash inflation and jump-start the economy, he told Argentines they could look forward to a brighter future in the second half of this year.
Investors are closely watching the mood on the streets, where in recent decades economic malaise and social unrest rocked and sometimes toppled politicians who weren’t members of the powerful populist Peronist movement. Macri, indeed, aims to be the first non-Peronist president in at least half a century to complete his term.
But for many here, the situation is far from rosy. “I’m really disappointed in Macri,” said Fabian Vicente, a 55-year-old magazine vendor. “He said he’d get rid of inflation and I thought he would. But he’s done the opposite. People are angry.”
Macri has tried to boost growth and pursue business-friendly policies without provoking a social backlash. Jolting the economy into growth is crucial to his hopes of gaining congressional seats in midterm elections next year, his aides say. Early on, he cut export taxes, ended currency controls and devalued the peso, earning praise from the IMF and U.S. President Barack Obama.
But the country’s economic data have been grim. The economy shrank 4.3% in the 12-month period through June, unemployment hit 9.3% in the second quarter, and in July, industrial production tanked 7.9% from a year earlier.
Tens of thousands rallied at the presidential palace in late August in the largest anti-Macri demonstration yet. This month, pilots at Argentina’s flagship airline, Aerolíneas Argentinas, shut down flights to demand better compensation. Some labor leaders say the time has come for Macri to change his approach and have been calling for a nationwide strike.
Macri inherited most of his problems, including a 4% budget gap and double-digit inflation - albeit at half the 45% current rate. But some are of his own making. He lowered gas subsidies, raising consumer prices so much that heating bills soared — in some cases more than 10-fold — across greater Buenos Aires. Last month, the Supreme Court forced Macri to reinstate the subsidies, saying he must hold public comment sessions before raising prices. The error cost hundreds of millions of dollars and hindered hopes of narrowing Argentina’s deficit this year and next.
“The government’s policies benefit multinational corporations but hurt everyone else,” said Hugo Godoy, general secretary of ATE, a state workers union that is calling for a national strike.
Macri’s approval rating has slid to 40% from 63% in December, according to pollster Hugo Haime. Inflation, which soared after the devaluation, is hitting lower-income families hard. Some 4.5 million people have fallen into poverty since Macri took office, according to a study by the Catholic University of Argentina.
Many on this city’s outskirts fear a “social explosion” if things don’t improve soon, Haime said. “That concern is based on history, not the Macri administration, because we’ve had times when people didn’t have enough money to get by and we had looting in December.”
At: http://www.wsj.com/articles/argentines-say-mauricio-macris-policies-arent-the-solutions-they-promised-to-be-1474673665
Politifact rates Clinton's assertions 82% TRUE/MOSTLY TRUE; 56% of Trump's FALSE/MOSTLY FALSE
Or PANTS ON FIRE outright (none of Clinton's were).
Another 9% of Clinton's statements were "half true" compared to 19% by her opponent - leaving just 25% of Trump's statements as true or mostly true.
This is based on fact-checking done on 11 major points made by Secretary Clinton, and 16 by Trump.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/sep/26/trump-clinton-first-debate-fact-checks/
Argentina's Macri counters falling approval with staged photo-ops using working-class extras.
Argentine President Mauricio Macri came under fire over the weekend for staging a photo-op in which he, Transport Minister Guillermo Dietrich, and other officials in his right-wing administration can be seen riding a city bus with what appears to be a group of working class residents.
The event, which took place on Thursday in Derqui (a small town 20 miles NW of Buenos Aires), was touted by the administration and its supportive media. It was, however, proven by to be a staged photo-op by photos and footage taken during the event, which show Macri and his entourage arriving at the site by helicopter and boarding a presidential VW Touareg to the site of the waiting bus.
The bus was not on its normal route; but was instead commandeered by Macri officials to the site, outside city limits, for the brief, 5-minute ride around a patch of grassland. The riders, though locals, were paid extras.
The sham was first revealed on Saturday by Página/12 writer Gustavo Veiga, who described it as an "attempt to humanize Macri by turning a bus into a photography studio."
Macri ex machina
This is not the first time Macri's use of working-class citizens as props has created controversy since he took office in December.
His visit to a General Motors plant in Santa Fe Province on May 11 was followed by revelations that a number of "workers" who posed, all smiles, with the president during his visit were in fact hired extras.
This was followed by a "neighborhood walk" taken by Macri in Mendoza Province after presiding over festivities for General San Martín Day, which takes place every August 17 and honors the father of Argentine independence. During the brief visit, Macri personally "surprised" local schoolteacher Liliana Monti de Frigoli by ringing her doorbell and requesting use of her facilities.
Mrs. Frigoli was happy to comply - but later admitted in an interview with the right-wing daily La Nación (which supports Macri) that her husband had informed her a day earlier that "an official would be coming by tomorrow to ask to use the bathroom" as part of a staged event.
The "official" was President Macri.
Taken for idiots
These staged neighborly visits coincided with a number of politically damaging controversies for the 9-month old Macri administration.
The first took place shortly after the Panama Papers scandal revealed that he and/or his family control around a dozen offshore shell companies opened over the last 35 years with the apparent intent to evade taxes; the second, following a series of court rulings that struck down Macri's decrees authorizing utility rate hikes of over 300% as illegal because they had been imposed without public hearings (as the law dictates); and the most recent, just days after the ICIJ published its Bahamas Leaks and uncovered another multi million-dollar Macri offshore investment from the past.
A variety of polls released over the past few days show that while Macri's job approval has stabilized at around 44%, they show that if presidential elections were held today he would lose by 13% (he won by 2.7% in November). 57% of those polled, moreover, find they are worse off since Macri took office, with only 17% saying they are better off. A similar share (57%) support calls for a general strike by the CGT, Argentina's largest labor federation.
An estimated 200,000 Argentines have lost their jobs since Macri enacted a sharp devaluation, steep hikes in rates and fares, and other austerity policies since taking office. For those who remain employed, real wages have fallen by an average of 11% and many have lost benefits.
"The administration needs to stage these things because they've broken too many campaign promises," publicist Fernando Braga said, referring to the staged photo-ops. "But the bus event has backfired because people feel they're being taken for idiots."
At: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.diarioregistrado.com/conurbano-registrado/un-video-muestra-el-burdo-montaje-de-macri-en-el-colectivo-de-pilar_a57e92a3dd17589f27a53fee6&prev=search
And: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.diarioregistrado.com%2Fsociedad%2Fmas-de-la-mitad-de-los-trabajadores-cree-que-la-situacion-empeoro-y-apoya-un-paro-general_a57e518c6d17589f27a53f1b8
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