PCV Statement against the military aggression against the Libyan people and the presence of the President of the United States in Latin American territory, CARACAS, 21 MAR. 2011, Tribuna Popular

http://www.pcv-venezuela.org/


CARACAS, 21 MAR. 2011, Tribuna Popular TP .- The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) rejects the military aggression against the Libyan people and the presence of the President of the United States in Latin American territory, saying that at present the "concern of the people is the struggle for peace and against imperialist aggression. "

This was announced at a press conference,by the national secretary for international relations of the PCV, Latin American Parliament deputy, Carolus Wimmer, who emphasized that "the capitalist ruling-class is once again advancing imperialist aggression in its eagerness to take the energy resources of all our countries. "

The communist leader accused the United States and other members of the Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Resolution No. 1973 of the Security Council of the United Nations (UN), as being on the margin of international law.  "To threaten or attack Libya or any other country with international intervention is totally unjustified," he said.

For the Communist Party of Venezuela indiscriminate aggression on the Libyan people is done with the intention to weaken and to strike at the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in order to control energy resources.  "We reject such an active attack and join with the mobilizations that are taking place in Caracas against the embassies," said Wimmer.

The PCV supported the proposal made by the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, who proposed a peaceful alternative to foster a commission to mediate in Libya's internal conflict and seek a peaceful solution. This is the only real proposal still not too late for that, "he said.  Wimmer said that the conflict in Libya is a dispute for power, for it is the duty of governments worldwide to help peaceful solutions rather than the military aggression that is now being done indiscriminately as "smart bombs are not able to discriminate between civilians and military. "

"The United Nations was created after World War II, for peace, that is the role it should play and not give permission for war," said the communist leader.  The Party calls on the peoples and governments, to pressure the contending parties in Libya, through dialogue, it seeks a peaceful solution that benefits the vast majority of the Libyan people.

Obama's trip to Latin America seeks to regain control of our resources  For the Communist Party, is no coincidence, nor is it surprising that at the same time that there is military aggression against the Libyan people, the United States President Barack Obama, is making a tour of some Latin American countries.  "As Obama himself declared, has two objectives: One, as representing the interests of multinationals, seeking increased exports of waste products from the United States to our countries and, secondly, ensure that natural resources, energy, water and minerals pass  over under the control of the U.S. government, "said Wimmer.

The PCV called for strengthening the anti-imperialist front and join the protests  As part of this counter-imperialist, the Communist Party of Venezuela called on the Venezuelan people, parties and revolutionary movements to mobilize and strengthen the Anti-imperialist front against U.S. aggression and the aggression of the countries of capitalist Europe, stressing that Venezuela is also targeted by attackers.  In this framework, the PCV called to strengthen and consolidate the Bolivarian revolution against imperialism. "The only defense against assault, is a  people united with the revolutionary process, to successfully confront the media campaigns that seek to divide us," he said Wimmer.

Therefore, the Communists made a new call to accelerate the formation of the Broad Front and National Patriotic Pole, a broad range of all patriotic forces, to agree upon an agenda for collective and unified organization, "this is a urgent task to defend against economic and military aggression, "they said.

Mobilization agenda:

Tuesday March 22 at 12 m, protest against imperialist aggression, the U.S. Embassy.

Thursday, March 24, to express our solidarity with the Libyan people in the Libyan Embassy.

Saturday 26 March, "Day of the Right of peoples to armed rebellion", convened by the Continental Bolivarian Movement (MCB), in the parish on January 23 throughout the day with marches, forums and cultural activities in the Plaza Manuel Marulanda.

Philippine Regime's Con-Ass a path to dictatorship, martial law, Posted in BAYAN USA

June 3rd, 2009








Contact: Rhonda Ramiro
Secretary-General, BAYAN USA
secgen@bayanusa.org

http://bayanusa.org/

Filipino-Americans under the banner of BAYAN USA, an alliance of 14 Filipino organizations in the United States, are expressing outrage over last night’s vote by the Philippine House of Representatives to approve House Resolution 1109, which would allow for the convening of a Constiuent Assembly (Con-Ass) made of members of the Lower House and Senate in order to amend the 1987 Philippine Constitution, or enact Charter-Change (Cha-Cha).

“Con-Ass is a major step towards transforming an undeclared martial rule into the official dictatorship of the Arroyo government,” states BAYAN USA Chair Berna Ellorin. “It is one of the biggest threats to democracy in the Philippines since the days of the Marcos dictatorship, and it must be stopped.”

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself has repeatedly sung of the praises of her proposed amendments to the 1987 Philippine Consitution, including total economic liberalization in favor of foreign corporate interests as well as lifting existing provisions prohibiting the establishment of permanent military bases by foreign troops. But it is the proposed amendment by the Arroyo administration to shift the Philippine government into a parliamentary system, combined with the lifting of provisions that limit martial law powers, that has drawn the most opposition from Filipinos in the Philippines and worldwide.

“Arroyo intends to take over as the new Prime Minister with an indefinite term status if Cha-Cha is passed,” Ellorin continued. “This provides an official policy framework in the Constitution for fascist dicatorship and martial law.”

Cronyism

BAYAN USA also criticized the validity of last night’s Lower House vote for HR 1109, as the vote only came from the one legislative body in the bicameral Philippine Congress.

“They cannot vote without the Senate,” Ellorin continued. “This so-called ‘House Majority’ that voted in support of Con-Ass are not Arroyo allies, but those who have been bribed by the Arroyo administration through pork barrel money in exchange for loyalty to Arroyo. Even the opposition was prevented from airing their views. This is cronyism no different from the Marcos era of massive graft and corruption.”

BAYAN USA also raised that with rampant cronyism at play in the Philippine Congress, it is certain that the Constituent Assembly to convene will not have the best interests of the Filipino people in mind when altering the Philippine Constitution.

Clamor Needed Overseas

Record highs in the number of overseas absentee voter (OAV) registration from Filipinos abroad, including the United States, provides strong indication of overseas clamor to vote Arroyo out of office by 2010.

“Filipinos, especially those of us overseas, cannot trust their own government these days. Filipinos abroad are compelled to be part of the change they would like to see in Philippine politics,” Ellorin ended. “But aside from our ballots, we must engage in community actions and public pressure to make our opposition to Cha-Cha visible to Manila. After all, we keep the Philippine economy afloat with our billions in dollar remittances every year. We must be part of saving what is left of democracy in the Philippine Constitution and in our homeland.”

Street demonstrations protesting HR 1109 have already been confronted with violent dispersals by police near the Batasan Complex in Quezon City.

Posted in BAYAN USA

Chomsky on Obama Cairo Speech

WASHINGTON - June 4
NOAM CHOMSKY















Chomsky, whose recent books include Interventions and The Essential Chomsky, sent the following to the Institute for Public Accuracy this morning: "A CNN headline, reporting Obama's plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads 'Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.' Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.

"Keeping just to Israel-Palestine -- there was nothing substantive about anything else -- Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to 'point fingers' at each other or to 'see this conflict only from one side or the other.' There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered.

"Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism.

"Obama once again praised the Arab Peace Initiative, saying only that Arabs should see it as 'an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities.' How should the Obama administration see it? Obama and his advisers are surely aware that the Initiative reiterates the long-standing international consensus calling for a two-state settlement on the international (pre-June '67) border, perhaps with 'minor and mutual modifications,' to borrow U.S. government usage before it departed sharply from world opinion in the 1970s, vetoing a Security Council resolution backed by the Arab 'confrontation states' (Egypt, Iran, Syria), and tacitly by the PLO, with the same essential content as the Arab Peace Initiative except that the latter goes beyond by calling on Arab states to normalize relations with Israel in the context of this political settlement. Obama has called on the Arab states to proceed with normalization, studiously ignoring, however, the crucial political settlement that is its precondition. The Initiative cannot be a 'beginning' if the U.S. continues to refuse to accept its core principles, even to acknowledge them.

"In the background is the Obama administration's goal, enunciated most clearly by Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to forge an alliance of Israel and the 'moderate' Arab states against Iran. The term 'moderate' has nothing to do with the character of the state, but rather signals its willingness to conform to U.S. demands.

"What is Israel to do in return for Arab steps to normalize relations? The strongest position so far enunciated by the Obama administration is that Israel should conform to Phase I of the 2003 Road Map, which states: 'Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).' All sides claim to accept the Road Map, overlooking the fact that Israel instantly added 14 reservations that render it inoperable.

"Overlooked in the debate over settlements is that even if Israel were to accept Phase I of the Road Map, that would leave in place the entire settlement project that has already been developed, with decisive U.S. support, to ensure that Israel will take over the valuable land within the illegal 'separation wall' (including the primary water supplies of the region) as well as the Jordan Valley, thus imprisoning what is left, which is being broken up into cantons by settlement/infrastructure salients extending far to the East. Unmentioned as well is that Israel is taking over Greater Jerusalem, the site of its major current development programs, displacing many Arabs, so that what remains to Palestinians will be separated from the center of their cultural, economic, and sociopolitical life. Also unmentioned is that all of this is in violation of international law, as conceded by the government of Israel after the 1967 conquest, and reaffirmed by Security Council resolutions and the International Court of Justice. Also unmentioned are Israel's successful operations since 1991 to separate the West Bank from Gaza, since turned into a prison where survival is barely possible, further undermining the hopes for a viable Palestinian state.

"It is worth remembering that there has been one break in U.S.-Israeli rejectionism. President Clinton recognized that the terms he had offered at the failed 2000 Camp David meetings were not acceptable to any Palestinians, and in December, proposed his 'parameters,' vague but more forthcoming. He then announced that both sides had accepted the parameters, though both had reservations. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Taba, Egypt to iron out the differences, and made considerable progress. A full resolution could have been reached in a few more days, they announced in their final joint press conference. But Israel called off the negotiations prematurely, and they have not been formally resumed. The single exception indicates that if an American president is willing to tolerate a meaningful diplomatic settlement, it can very likely be reached.

"It is also worth remembering that the Bush I administration went a bit beyond words in objecting to illegal Israeli settlement projects, namely, by withholding U.S. economic support for them. In contrast, Obama administration officials stated that such measures are 'not under discussion' and that any pressures on Israel to conform to the Road Map will be 'largely symbolic,' so the New York Times reported (Helene Cooper, June 1).

"There is more to say, but it does not relieve the grim picture that Obama has been painting, with a few extra touches in his widely-heralded address to the Muslim World in Cairo on June 4."
________________________________________
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/06/04-10

Communist Party of India-Marxist accuses U.S. of interfering into internal affairs

www.chinaview.cn 2009-05-15

NEW DELHI, May 15 (Xinhua) -- The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) has accused the United States of interfering into the internal affairs of India by holding meetings with Indian political parties leaders ahead of the forming of a new government in the country.

The U.S. Charge d'Affaires A. Peter Burleigh met Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani and a number of other parties' leaders over the past few days as India completed its month-long voting in the general elections.

"Its imperialist character has again revealed itself through its brazen interference in the affairs of an independent country," CPI-M politburo member Sitaram Yechury told local media on Thursday.

However, the U.S. embassy immediately rejected the accusation saying "no political meaning should be read into the meetings".

"The U.S. categorically denies any attempt to interfere in India's democratic political process," a spokesperson for the U.S. embassy said.

Analysts said the CPI-M could play a key role in the forming of the next government as the Third Force led by the party has won about one fifth of the seats in parliament, according to exit polls.

The CPI-M is strongly opposed to the Indian-U.S. nuclear deal and said it would scrap the Indian-U.S. defense cooperation framework if it came to power.
____________________________________________________________________________

Cambodia Déjà Vu: the Invasion of Pakistan (excerpt)

Predator drone









Cambodia Déjà Vu: the Invasion of Pakistan
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090513_cambodia_deja_vu_the_invasion_of_pakistan/
Posted on May 13, 2009

By William Pfaff

Last September, during the American presidential campaign, I wrote a column declaring that the United States had again invaded Cambodia, only this time “Cambodia” was Pakistan. President George W. Bush had ordered U.S. ground attacks on the Taliban inside Pakistan’s Tribal Territories, without Pakistan’s authorization.

That was also when Barack Obama’s foreign policy campaign platform was promising withdrawal from Iraq and military emphasis on Afghanistan and Pakistan, location of the “real” problem in the great war on terror.

A younger generation than mine, including senior military officers (not to speak of Barack Obama), may not know exactly why the United States and the South Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in 1970, and what the result was. The invasion was a failure, and the result a humanitarian catastrophe.

Washington, frustrated in its war against the Communist Viet Cong in South Vietnam, which eventually included bombing on a scale greater than the bombing of Germany in the Second World War, decided it could solve its problem by an invasion to cut the Communist supply routes inside neutral Cambodia (which it nonetheless was also bombing: dropping 540,000 tons of explosive on Cambodia over four years).

The invasion accomplished nothing except further destruction in Cambodia. It destroyed the U.S.-supported military government in Cambodia and empowered the native Cambodian Communist resistance, known as the Khmer Rouge, which eventually, in order to create a utopian society, killed some 2 million of its fellow Cambodians.

...

The invasion was occasion for Richard Nixon to declare that the U.S. was not “a second-rate power” nor “a pitiful helpless giant” standing by while “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy ... threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

How long ago it seems—39 years! And here we are again.

The United States, despite its plan to deploy nearly 70,000 troops this year in Afghanistan, finds itself and its NATO allies in danger of defeat by the Taliban guerrillas.

U.S. bombing, with remote-controlled “drones,” of the Pakistani Tribal Territories, where the Taliban take refuge among their Pathan tribal kinsmen, has killed many people but has had no decisive effect on the fighting in Afghanistan.

American bombing inside Afghanistan is protested by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who says the airstrikes are fast turning the Afghans against the U.S., which risks “losing the moral battle” against the Taliban. Gen. James L. Jones, U.S. national security adviser, says, “We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back.”

Karzai says, “How can you expect a people who keep losing their children to remain friendly?” Jones says of Karzai, “I think he understands that we have to have a full complement of our offensive military power when we need it.”

The former Pakistani military government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf was unwilling to send the Pakistan army into the Tribal Territories to attack the Taliban and al-Qaida.

He is now ousted, and the civilian government led by President Asif Ali Zardari, put under immense pressure by Washington, and frightened by the success of the Taliban in operations outside the Tribal Region, has agreed to the ground offensive now going on, in which Pakistani commanders are accompanied by U.S liaison officers and air controllers.

U.S. command in “Af-Pak” now has been transferred, in obvious urgency, to former Joint Special Operations commander Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Will a Special Forces officer think that guerrillas—with refuge in an inaccessible and unconquered region, amid a tri-national ethnic population of some 40 million fellow Pathans—can be beaten by guided bombs or Special Forces raids? Or that an unenthusiastic Pakistani army will do the job? Or 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, when the Taliban can always refuse battle and pull back into the mountains?

Moreover, what is supposed to be accomplished by this war against the Taliban, which threatens to leave Afghanistan in ruins, and to tear Pakistan apart? Do the Taliban threaten the United States? Most of them could not find the United States on a map.

What have they ever done to the United States? What if the United States would just go away and leave the Pakistanis, Afghans and Pathans to settle this among themselves?

President Obama says the war will not be won by military means but by a “surge” of civilian development experts, reconstruction leaders and democracy teachers, just as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently told Congress that the U.S. is training. Will this “surge” get there in time? My own feeling is that President Obama is in over his head; and that American military command, not knowing what else to do, is reverting to Vietnam, which most of its members were too young to experience.

Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.

© 2009 Tribune Media Services Inc.
Predator

blog.wired.com
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.