HONDURAS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE

President Obama’s speech at the Nobel Prize ceremony:

“…We will bear witness to the quiet dignity of reformers like Aung Sang Suu Kyi (what about reformers like Zelaya?); to the bravery of Zimbabweans who cast their ballots in the face of beatings (and the bravery of the honduran people?); to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran (what about the thousands who have marched through the streets of Honduras?), …"It is telling that the leaders of these governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation (Is he referring to Pepe Lobo?.. I hope so). And it is the responsibility of all free people and free nations to make clear to these movements that hope and history are on their side…"

THIRD FRONT

The United States are back in Latin America. The military coup in Honduras marked the beginning of Washington’s renewed grip on that continent. While another coup was thwarted in Paraguay, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands have been deploying new forces to encircle the ALBA countries with a view to attacking Nicaragua, Ecuador and Venezuela. Readying for the gathering storm, Chile has embraced the North-American camp and stockpiled a powerful arsenal.

OBAMA LIST

• Has he appointed financial officials who have largely served the agenda of the Wall Street and industry interests that funded his campaign?

• Has he embraced many of the Bush/Cheney executive power and secrecy abuses which Democrats once railed against -- from state secrets to indefinite detention to renditions and military commissions?

• Has he actively sought to protect from accountability and disclosure a whole slew of Bush crimes?

• Did he secretly a negotiate a deal with the pharmaceutical industry after promising repeatedly that all negotiations over health care would take place out in the open, even on C-SPAN?

• Are the criticisms of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan valid, and are his arguments in its favor redolent of the ones George Bush made to "surge" in Iraq or Lyndon Johnson made to escalate in Vietnam?

• Is Bob Herbert right when he condemned Obama's detention policies as un-American and tyrannical, and warned: "Policies that were wrong under George W. Bush are no less wrong because Barack Obama is in the White House"?

How far we've fallen from the declaration of Thomas Jefferson: "In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

Obama's domestic policies are equally suspect, if not wholly corrupt:

• His education policy, under Kommandant Arne Duncan, is pure, test-driven, militaristic corporatism and charter schools where the rules can be suspended.
• He's not even trying to rein in the Wall Street banksters, who have ALREADY begun to spin the next bubbles; he has not re-engineered any separation between commercial and investment banks; indeed, if anything, he's made them MORE intertwined.
• Don't even get me started on the gigantic, epochal, astonishingly vulgar and felonious corpoRat clusterfuck that is the "health-care-reform" effort. When the final vote comes, in January, after the SoTU (so the fucktards and the Pukes can smirk about it) it will not be ANY different than if it had been held a year earlier.
• He's not given any indication he'll try to block the NBC/Comcast merger, so he's not gonna use the FCC to block further media monopolism "consolidation."
• He's still pursuing Bushevik challenges to laws and regulations of dubious constitutionality to begin with into the Supreme Court.

And now, he's gonna put another 30K poor, dumb-fuck GIs in harm's way in Central Asia, entirely at the behest of the Military/Industrial complex.

• and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt,

• how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus,

• end torture in our offshore penal colonies,

• abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or

• halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens?

• The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush.

• It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite.

• It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby,

• refuses to enact serious environmental or

• health care reform,

• regulate Wall Street,

• end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or

• stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry.

It’s a dangerous precedent for the people of Latin America when President Barack Obama sides with coup-mongering oligarchs, as he did in recognizing the tainted presidential elections in Honduras. But it’s an even more dangerous precedent for the world, because it shows how easily he caves in to right-wing extremists in Washington.

What happened? According to Jim DeMint, conservative firebrand senator from South Carolina, Obama caved. DeMint is one of the domino-minded Republicans who seem to live in fear of the spread of Chavez’s social programs. Zelaya had begun helping the poor, such as raising the minimum wage 60 percent and offering discounted energy. DeMint sees that and thinks Stalin.

THE THIRD FRONT, AGAIN

Throughout Latin America and much of the rest of the world, the coup in Honduras is seen as a dangerous example of what the imperial strategists are plotting for the region. As one country after another votes in leftist parties—the latest example is Uruguay, where a former guerrilla leader who spent 14 years in prison was just elected president—the U.S. is expanding its military bases in the region. It may still try to cover its dirty deeds with democratic phrase-mongering, but actions speak louder than words.

AL JAZEERA ON HONDURAS

The United States has decided to endorse the result of the upcoming election in Honduras, with or without Manuel Zelaya, the ousted president, in the next government.

Ian Kelly, a State Department spokesman, said the poll on Sunday is a "critical step" towards restoring democracy in the country.

"The holding of a free, fair and transparent election is necessary but not sufficient for Honduras to re-establish the democratic and constitutional order," he said in a statement on Friday.

Kelly said Washington, which originally condemned the June ouster of Zelaya, would continue to push for implementation of a US-brokered deal to create a unity government and let the Congress decide on whether to reinstate Zelaya until the next president takes office in January.

The foreign policy adviser of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva Brazil's president, has said that the US risked souring relations with most of Latin America if it recognised the Honduras election.

HONDURAS COUP ELECTION

The coup and its leaders, as well as their fake elections, are the target of international condemnation. So why is the Obama Administration — after making a strong stand against the coup early on — letting the coup leaders get away with all of this? On the one hand, there’s the Lanny Davis Effect: The good friend of current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also a paid lobbyist for the golpistas. On the other hand, there’s the Jim DeMint Effect: The far-right knuckledragging Senator from South Carolina, who of course just loves the bloody-handed golpistas, has been holding key Obama Administration nominations hostage as a means to keep the White House from intervening effectively against the coup.

For more on what’s been happening in Honduras, see RAJ of Honduras Coup 2009’s brilliant summation.

BRAZIL VERSUS USA

Brazilian diplomats denied Thursday that there is a crisis in relations with the U.S.,
such as Iran's nuclear ambitions and relations with post-coup Honduras.
Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said he spoke more than an hour by telephone with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

"We believe that no one should recognize Sunday's election as legitimate because we believe it is an attempt to erase the coup," Garcia said.

Amorim and Garcia cited another area of disagreement — the deal between Washington and Colombia allowing U.S. troops access to Colombian military bases.

"Having foreign bases in the region, whether from the United States, China, Russia, Iran or whoever, is not something we see as positive," Amorim said.

Brazil will not recognize Honduren elections

"A coup is not acceptable as a means for political change," Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim said on Thursday on the sidelines of a climate summit between Amazon basin countries and France, reported Xinhua.

Brazil has called for Zelaya's return to power. The ousted president is still holed up in the Brazilian embassy in Honduran capital Tegucigalpa.