International Politics: June 2006 Archives

Citing labor abuses, Oslo disinvests in globalist monster

Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen revealed Tuesday that two new stocks will be banned from the country's so-called "oil fund," which now is called the Norwegian Government Pension Fund - Global and currently is worth about $250 billion. It ranks as one of the biggest pension funds in the world.

The ministry reported that it's excluding Wal-Mart Stores Inc and Wal-Mart de México "in line with recommendations from the Council on Ethics for the Fund."

Powerful neighbour India was instrumental in the formation of an alliance last year between Nepal's mainstream political parties and Maoists, the rebel leader said in an interview published here.

Once former foes, seven political parties sidelined when King Gyanendra sacked the government in February 2005 entered a loose alliance with the Maoists last November.

"India played a positive role in reaching the 12-point understanding with the seven party alliance," Prachanda said in an interview in the latest edition of the weekly news magazine Nepal.

"These critics on the left argue from a assumption that U.S. foreign policy has been monolithic since World War II, a coherent progression of decision-making directed unerringly at the advancement of U.S. imperial interests. All U.S. actions, these critics contend, are part of a clearly laid-out strategy that has rarely deviated no matter what the party in power. They believe that Israel has served throughout as a loyal agent of the U.S., carrying out the U.S. design faithfully and serving as a base from which the U.S. projects its power around the Middle East."

"Indeed, far from Israel functioning as the junior partner carrying out a U.S. plan, it is clear that the weight of pressure in 1967 was on the U.S. to go along with Israel's designs and that this pressure came from Israel and its agents in the U.S."

"The country's "feudal governance systems backed by the culture of the caste system have been very resistant to change," the researcher told an audience of more than 100 people at a local hotel. Even after the first 'people's movement' in 1990, "the government had gotten used to discussing gender discrimination...but they were still very hesitant to discuss caste and ethnic discrimination"."

KATHMANDU, Jun 11 (IPS) - In 1955 Nepal's revised civil code outlawed untouchability; in 2002 the government created the National Dalit Commission; and three years ago a new leadership pledged to lay charges against anyone accused of discriminating against untouchables, also known as dalits (the broken).

"Large Mexican corporations, which benefited from the privatizations and are strong supporters of the current government, also want Gomez out. In wage negotiations, Gomez demands that workers get a bigger share of currently record-level copper prices."

New America Media, Commentary/Analysis, David Bacon, Jun 09, 2006

Editor's Note: Mexican President Vicente Fox's refusal to recognize the leader of the country's miners' union has sparked strikes and demonstrations across Mexico. David Bacon is an associate editor at New America Media and author of "The Children of NAFTA" (University of California Press, 2004).

"Grandin's more distinctive contribution lies in documenting Latin America's role as a staging ground for the rise of militaristic idealists within the Republican Party."

"With its vivid depiction of neocon militarists, religious evangelicals, and neoliberal economists coming together, Empire's Workshop offers a cogent analysis of how past interventions in Latin America provide the Bush administration with a troubling model for present policy."

The ideology behind current US Middle Eastern policy was shaped close to home.

Empire's Workshop: Latin America and the Roots of U.S. Imperialism. By Greg Grandin. Henry Holt: Metropolitan Books, May 2006, 320 pp., $25,00

In October 2004, during his debate with John Edwards, Vice President Dick Cheney made a comparison that seemed surreal even by the standards of the present administration. He was looking for an example of past U.S. intervention that could be cited as a model for "democracy building" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where did he turn? El Salvador.

"[N]one of the 30 or so working agendas makes any mention of submitting decisions to the U.S. Congress for review and approval. No new U.S. laws are contemplated for the Bush administration to submit to Congress. Instead, the plan is obviously to knit together the North American Union completely under the radar, through a process of regulations and directives issued by various U.S. government agencies."

"What we have underway here with the SPP could arguably be termed a bureaucratic coup d'etat."

In March 2005 at their summit meeting in Waco, Tex., President Bush, President Fox and Prime Minister Martin issued a joint statement announced the creation of the "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America" (SPP). The creation of this new agreement was never submitted to Congress for debate and decision. Instead, the U.S. Department of Commerce merely created a new division under the same title to implement working groups to advance a North American Union working agenda in a wide range of areas, including: manufactured goods, movement of goods, energy, environment, e-commerce, financial services, business facilitation, food and agriculture, transportation, and health.

Full story:
http://www.humaneventsonline.com/article.php?print=yes&id=15233

"In his Universal Fascism (1995), prominent neocon Michael Ledeen (widely accused of involvement in the Niger uranium forgery) wrote, "In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments, the leader may have to 'enter into evil.' This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired and challenging... [W]e [ordinary people] are rotten.... It's true that we can achieve greatness if, and only if, we are properly led." "

According to Laura Rozen of the Los Angeles Times, the Office of Special Plans has been reincarnated as the Office of Iranian Affairs, apparently housed in the same Pentagon offices inhabited by its predecessor and involving some of the same slimy personnel. Notably, Abram Shulsky, who headed the OSP under Douglas Feith, is back. His crew will be reporting to none other than Elizabeth Cheney, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and daughter of the Vice President. Dick Cheney is generally understood to be the strongest advocate for an attack on Iran in the administration. (He is also, by the way, architect of Bush's "signing statements" appended to laws entitling him to ignore them. He is the man behind the throne, surrounded by neocon acolytes.)

"Chinese youths don't know that millions died in the 1950s, or that the CCP ordered a famine in Changchun [Jilin province] that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, far more than died in Nanjing [a Japanese Army massacre]," says Wang Fei-ling, a Chinese-born historian now at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

"The report notes that Chinese naval officers began to 'discuss' aircraft carriers in the late 1970s. In 1998 and 2000, they bought two Soviet carriers. However, neither was turned into a weapons platform. Instead, they were used as (these are the report's words) 'floating military theme parks.' "

"In "With All Our Might," scholars Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul - both Democrats - outline a comprehensive democracy-promotion program. For example, they imaginatively call for transplanting the 1975 Helsinki accords, which insisted upon human rights monitoring in the former Warsaw Pact nations, to the Middle East."

Jacob Heilbrunn, a former Times editorial writer, is writing a book on neoconservatism.

DON'T LOOK now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback - and not among the Republicans who have made it famous but in the Democratic Party.

"The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory."

Full story:
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/patbuchanan/2006/05/23/198421.html

"Never mind that the privatisation of Bolivia's gas and oil in the 1990s was almost certainly illegal, as it took place without the consent of congress. Never mind that - until now - its natural wealth has only impoverished its people. Never mind that Morales had promised to regain national control of Bolivia's natural resources before he became president, and that the policy has massive support among Bolivians. It can't be long before Donald Rumsfeld calls him the new Hitler and Bush makes another speech about freedom and democracy being threatened by freedom and democracy."