Venezuela to nationalize food distribution

[Judi Lynn]

156. There are so many articles written on the subject, and they can't attack them all, can they?

We've posted them from right after the coup, consistently, every year. There's no doubt whatsoever you are right, of course.

(You've been shown what happens when too many right-wingers have far, far too much time on their Cheetos-stained pudgy hands!)

Here are a few useful "takes":

Those Kids Crossing the Border from Mexico Wouldn’t Be There if Obama Hadn’t Supported a Coup the Media Doesn’t Talk About
By Ted Rall, , www.rall.com
July 13th, 2014

If you’re reading this, you probably follow the news. So you’ve probably heard of the latest iteration of the “crisis at the border”: tens of thousands of children, many of them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to remain here permanently. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention and hearing system has been overwhelmed by the surge of children and, in some cases, their parents. The Obama Administration has asked Congress to approve new funding to speed up processing and deportations of these illegal immigrants.

Even if you’ve followed this story closely, you probably haven’t heard the depressing backstory — the reason so many Central Americans are sending their children on adangerous thousand-mile journey up the spine of Mexico, where they ride atop freight trains, endure shakedowns by corrupt police and face rapists, bandits and other predators. (For a sense of what it’s like, check out the excellent 2009 film “Sin Nombre.”)

NPR and other mainstream news outlets are parroting the White House, which blames unscrupulous “coyotes” (human smugglers) for “lying to parents, telling them that if they put their kids in the hands of traffickers and get to the United States that they will be able to stay.” True: the coyotes are saying that in order to gin up business. Also true: U.S. law has changed, and many of these kids have a strong legal case for asylum. Unfortunately, U.S. officials are ignoring the law. The sad truth is that this “crisis at the border” is yet another example of “blowback.”

Blowback is an unintended negative consequence of U.S. political, military and/or economic intervention overseas — when something we did in the past comes back to bite us in the ass. 9/11 is the classic example; arming and funding radical Islamists in the Middle East and South Asia who were less grateful for our help than angry at the U.S.’ simultaneous backing for oppressive governments (The House of Saud, Saddam, Assad, etc.) in the region.

More:
https://www.popularresistance.org/obama-supported-honduras-coup-root-cause-of-border-crisis/

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Hillary Clinton’s Honduran Disgrace
By Matthew Rothschild on March 05, 2010
Matthew Rothschild

Hillary Clinton continues with her hawkish ways, making Obama’s foreign policy less distinguishable from Bush’s every day. She just met with Honduran President Pepe Lobo, she’s notified Congress that the Obama administration is restoring aid to Honduras, and she’s urging Latin American nations to recognize the Lobo government in Tegucigalpa. The democratic opposition in Honduras boycotted lobo’s election, since he’s allied with the forces that overthrew Manuel Zelaya last June. But for the longest time, Hillary Clinton stubbornly refused to call the June takeover a “coup,” even though her boss, the president of the United States, immediately denounced it as such. She systematically dragged her feet when it came to pressuring the coup leaders to hand power back over to Zelaya. And when Lobo won the election, Hillary rushed to heap praise on him. Now she wants full relations with Honduras restored all around. “Other countries of the region say that they want to wait a while,” she said on her Latin American trip. “I don’t know what they’re waiting for.”

- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/wx030510.html#sthash.Eu6v140g.dpuf

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The high-powered hidden support for Honduras' coup

The country's rightful president was ousted by a military leadership that takes many of its cues from Washington insiders.

July 23, 2009|Mark Weisbrot | Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. (www.cepr.net).

Powerful special interests have flexed their muscles and confronted President Obama on the most important legislative priorities of his domestic agenda. But this kind of politics-by-influence-peddling doesn't stop at the water's edge. And in foreign policy, the consequences can be more immediate, violent and deadly.

Meet Lanny Davis, Washington lawyer and lobbyist, former legal counsel to President Clinton and avid campaigner for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid. He has been hired by a coalition of Latin American business interests to represent the dictatorship that ousted elected President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in a military coup and removed him to Costa Rica on June 28.

Davis is working with Bennett Ratcliff, another lobbyist with a close relationship to Hillary Clinton who is a former senior executive for one of the most influential political and public relations firms in Washington. In the current mediation effort hosted by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, the coup-installed government did not make a move without first consulting Ratcliff, an unnamed source told the New York Times.

Davis and Ratcliff have done an amazing public relations job so far. Americans, relying on media reports, are likely to believe that Zelaya was ousted because he tried to use a referendum to extend his term of office. This is false.

More:
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jul/23/opinion/oe-weisbrot23

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The Honduras Coup: Is Obama Innocent?
by Michael Parenti

Published on Wednesday, July 08, 2009
by CommonDreams.org

Is President Obama innocent of the events occurring in Honduras, specifically the coup launched by the Honduran military resulting in the abduction and forced deportation of democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya? Obama has denounced the coup and demanded that the rules of democracy be honored. Still, several troubling questions remain.

First, almost all the senior Honduran military officers active in the coup are graduates of the Pentagon's School of the Americas (known to many of us as "School of the Assassins&quot . The Honduran military is trained, advised, equipped, indoctrinated, and financed by the United States national security state. The generals would never have dared to move without tacit consent from the White House or the Pentagon and CIA.

Second, if Obama was not directly involved, then he should be faulted for having no firm command over those US operatives who were. The US military must have known about the plot and US military intelligence must have known and must have reported it back to Washington. Why did Obama’s people who had communicated with the coup leaders fail to blow the whistle on them? Why did they not expose and denounce the plot, thereby possibly foiling the entire venture? Instead the US kept quiet about it, a silence that in effect, even if not in intent, served as an act of complicity.

Third, immediately after the coup, Obama stated that he was against using violence to effect change and that it was up to the various parties in Honduras to resolve their differences. His remarks were a rather tepid and muted response to a gangster putsch.

Fourth, Obama never expected there would be an enormous uproar over the Honduras coup. He hastily joined the outcry against the perpetrators only when it became evident that opposition to the putschists was nearly universal throughout Latin America and elsewhere in the world.

Fifth, Obama still has had nothing to say about the many other acts of repression attendant with the coup perpetrated by Honduran military and police: kidnappings, beatings, disappearances, attacks on demonstrators, shutting down the internet and suppressing the few small critical media outlets that exist in Honduras.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2009/07/08/honduras-coup-obama-innocent

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The US Role in the Honduran Coup of 2009
September 9, 2014

The Civil Democratic Union of Honduras, a network of Honduran NGOs funded by the US Agency for International Development, voiced public support for the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of President Manuel Zelaya on June 28, 2009. The group described the military ouster of a democratically elected President as “democratic regime change,” and welcomed the removal of the President as essential for the protection of the Honduran constitution. Meanwhile, the US State Department under President Barack Obama refused to legally classify the regime change as a coup d’etat.[ii] Instead, State Department officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, argued that both the Honduran military and the ousted government of President Manuel Zelaya shared blame for the events leading to the removal of the Honduran head of state.[iii] The US preference was for a mediated solution to the political crisis, led by President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, who urged both parties in the conflict to accept a power-sharing arrangement in the months leading to the next presidential elections in Honduras. While the Organization of American States condemned the military coup as a blatant violation of international law, and insisted on the return of President Zelaya to power without conditions, the US government negotiated with the coup leaders and Zelaya over the terms of Zelaya’s return to power. The Obama Administration also supported the disbursement of $70 million of assistance to the Honduran government in the aftermath of the military coup, over twice the amount of money that the US had suspended.[iv] These events pose questions about whose interests are being protected by the Honduran military, the US government, and the largest US-funded NGO network in Honduras?

The US role in the aftermath of the Honduran coup illustrates the politics of deep intervention that has guided US foreign policy strategy from the early 1980s to the present. While publicly criticizing the coup as a violation of democratic norms, US foreign policy makers have worked closely with Honduran political and economic elites through an NGO network that is closely linked to transnational business interests. In fact, the Civil Democratic Union is an umbrella group of NGOs that includes Honduran business associations long funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), including the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise and the National Federation of Commerce and Industry. The same NGO groups that applauded the coup against Manuel Zelaya include representatives of telecommunications firms and export assembly companies that are members of the Civil Democratic Union of Honduras.[v] The Honduran opposition to Zelaya is based on his support for policies that threatened the political agenda of significant sectors of Honduran and transnational capitalists represented by this NGO network, which opposed Zelaya’s decisions to raise the minimum wage, to block the sale of the state-owned telecommunications sector to private transnational firms, and to take control of foreign-owned petroleum storage facilities in an effort to check profiteering and to lower the price of gasoline.[vi] As a justification for the coup, Honduran coup leaders were joined by the US-funded coalition of NGOs, the Honduran Supreme Court and the Honduran Congress, in charging Zelaya with violating the Honduran constitution by going forward with plans to have a referendum placed on the November ballot. The referendum in question would have asked Honduran citizens whether or not they supported the convening of a National Constitutional Assembly to change the current Honduran constitution. Opponents of the referendum characterized it as an unconstitutional power-grab that would have extended the presidency of Manuel Zelaya beyond the four-year term limit specified in the Honduran constitution. Defenders of Zelaya contend that the referendum was non-binding and only sought to authorize a constitutional convention after Zelaya left the office of the Presidency.

President Zelaya was moving toward political alliances with the governments of Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica and Cuba, epitomized by his decision to join the Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas (ALBA), a regional trade group formed in 2004 that has sought to counteract the corporate friendly regional trade agreements supported by the United States.[vii] Prior to the coup, Zelaya was in the process of organizing the removal of the US military presence from the Soto Cano airbase, using a fund from the ALBA countries to convert the Pentagon base into a commercial airport. These moves threatened the US-Honduran strategic relationship, and the stability of the Honduran constitution that had been drafted by the Honduran military under US direction in 1982. The US role in crafting the Honduran constitution was central to US geostrategic objectives in Central America during the 1980s, including the use of Honduran territory by the CIA and the Pentagon to finance paramilitary missions against the left throughout the region. At the same time, the constitution provided the Honduran government with a political legitimacy that allowed the dominant Honduran parties to share power within an institutional framework that discouraged the emergence of populist or leftist coalitions that might otherwise challenge the political and economic interests of the Honduran elite.[viii] As sections of the Honduran elite became more closely tied to transnational firms with strong links to the US State Department, the US Agency for International Development began supporting a network of NGOs that have long advocated a neoliberal agenda in Honduras, defined as a deeper integration of the Honduran economy with sectors of transnational capital supported by the US government.[ix]

The US-financed NGOs in Honduras were opposed by a grassroots Honduran NGO network that consisted of labor unions, teachers’ organizations, farmer associations, and professional groups that supported Zelaya’s populist policies. These grassroots organizations were largely cut off from international funding and access to the foreign media enjoyed by the US-sponsored NGOs, which orchestrated an international propaganda campaign on behalf of the provisional Honduran government and in support of the coup. In US newspapers, the pro-Honduran coup supporters were given much more editorial support than their domestic counterparts in Honduras that opposed the coup. Reports by international NGOs such as Amnesty International, which condemned the violence perpetuated by the coup government, were given very little attention in the US media, which focused instead on what US columnists called the “illegality” of the actions of President Manuel Zelaya, whom coup supporters insisted had violated the Honduran constitution and left the government little choice but to react strongly to his transgressions.

More:
http://www.viewfromleftfield.com/the-us-role-in-the-honduran-coup-of-2009/

[center]~ ~ ~[/center] There are tons of articles we can bring to bear on this subject. They lack that dirty spin which has been spewed relentlessly from our corporate media for years. You are dead right to call trolls on their propaganda echo here. Any Democrat by character can smell it a mile away.