Greetings everyone. I write this diary entry from sunny Caracas, Venezuela. I am here for a week to attend the wedding of my cousin this afternoon and have been spending quality time with the half of my family that I rarely see, largely thanks to the distance and expense associated with making the trip. I thought I would share a very interesting conversation I had with my uncle as he was driving us to the Teleferico, an amazing cable car that takes you up into the mountains for a stunning view of the city...
Oil Countries Deadlocked
Should They Be Obscenely Wealthy Or Just Filthy Rich?
Richieville News Service - JIDDA, SAUDI ARABIA Hopes for a breakthrough that would halt soaring energy prices were dashed today when oil exporters meeting here could not agree on exactly how stinking rich they should be. The emergency global energy summit ended without a hoped-for agreement to increase oil production. Instead, the representatives remained deadlocked, split between those who said that rolling in dough was sufficient for them at this time and others who maintained that they needed more money than they knew what to do with.
Austalia's "The Age" (The Age, June 9, 2008) published an article this morning which reports that Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, has called on Colombia's FARC, a guerilla group which has fought the official Colombian government for 40 years, to release its more than 750 hostages and disband.
Sunday, he bluntly said what will no doubt leave many of his opponents stunned, calling into question the FARC's existence: "This far along in Latin America, an armed guerrilla movement is out of step, and that has to be said to the FARC."
And Chavez slammed the rebels, saying their insurgency was giving the United States the excuse to make of terrorism in Latin America.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez described UNASUR as the culmination of the region’s search for unity since South American independence two centuries ago. "Only in unity will we later have, progressively, complete political, economic, cultural, scientific, technological, and military independence," Chávez commented.
Luis Posada Carriles, an admitted terrorist wanted for crimes in Latin America, had a nice dinner the other night.
...the man being honored by 500 fellow Cuban Americans at a sold-out gala was Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges and under a deportation order for illegally entering the United States three years ago.
Posada Carriles should be behind bars right now. He's an international terrorist who was trained and financed by the US government. He was the ringleader in the bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people, has bombed hotels in Havana and abroad, tried to assassinate Castro, all with the full knowledge of the CIA. But he's not only free, but feted as a hero.
I know Hugo Chavez is a controversial topic even on sites like Daily Kos, but I see the two sides going at it as unequal. One side repeats only unsubstantiated talking points, innuendo, and rumors. The other side has been studying the situation for a long time, and has a deep and comprehensive understanding of the Venezuelan situation. This article, and the link within it to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, should give people a basic understanding of the Venezuelan economy in the last 10 years, and give a proper context to the lies being spread about Venezuela and it's popular president, Hugo Chavez.
While the U.S. Congress is holding hearings yet again, scoring points at the expense of oil company executives while doing nothing, somebody's actually doing something about it:
...Iran was preparing the world for an emerging stable energy supplier, making new relationships, strategic trading partners and restructuring the Middle East via its influence in Iraq. All the meanwhile defying the US and its imperialistic ambitions.
After 9/11, the Bush administration got a tremendous opportunity to not only unify the country around a common cause of fighting terrorism, but to unify the world against radical Islam. 9/11 made the world aware of the possible ramifications of having a brutal regime like Taliban in unstable places of the world. Instead, Bush-Cheney administration squandered that opportunity and instead chose to bully the world into its national cause. It chose to do so by following the Neo-Conservative dream of finally invading Iraq, creating a client state and securing energy resources for another several decades. During this time, the moderate Iranian government headed by Khatami offered the US help in Afghanistan. More importantly, it indicated its willingness to engage US diplomatically for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The Bush-Cheney administration again chose to ignore that diplomatic gesture hoping that it would get even more concessions under its newly announced Grand Strategy.
According to a report appearing at the website of El Espectador (an independent newspaper in Colombia), [about]an investigation by officers of the Ecuadorian air force, 10 high-technology bombs did the job in the attack to the FARC encampment on March 1st, 2008. None of the bombs used can be carried by Colombian planes. For the sake of providing this information to this website’s readers, following is my translation of the report (found at http://www.elespectador.com/... ), and the Spanish text (with misspellings included). Apologies are offered beforehand for any defects in the use of the English language.
[Updated to add [about] above]
[Updated to take out Spanish language text, since it is available via link.]
As a native of Maracaibo in Venezuela, close to the border with Colombia, I watched in much distress as tanks and the threat of war showed their face in our peace-loving land. I will avoid the politics behind it all. My interest is sharing my joy at what happened after the war machinery rolled away, and a heeeeoooooge concert for peace took place, starred by some of the greatest in Ibero-American music.
MIL GRACIAS A JUANES, RICARDO MONTANER, JUAN FERNANDO VELAZCO, CARLOS VIVES, JUAN LUIS GUERRA, ALEJANDRO SANZ Y MIGUEL BOSE
Get out the popcorn and watch John Pilger's excellent documentary on the real American agenda in the Third World. Spreading democracy? Hardly. Try propping up murderers, dictators and rightwing terrorists so we can loot the resources of poor countries.
You are in a park...a man approaches, you just know this is a dope sale pitch, but you arn't sure if it's a sting, so you engage this guy and he opens his pocket to show you pack after pack after pack of sniff and rock and he says, "I got crack, I got blow, I'll take you anywhere you want to go."
Sounds like the 1980's when the snowstorm of cocaine unleashed upon the nation funded the Contra armies and death squads in Central America. Oh yeah, just like Noriega in Panama, our point man in the coke trade who was so useful...until he wasn't.
Well guess what, the Chimpy Junta is up to mischief! Hey, everything old is new again I guess, because the dirty bastards are doing it again. This time the target is Venezuela. Let's jump.
The Organization of American States issued a compromise resolution Wednesday that said Colombia had violated Ecuador's "territorial integrity'' by attacking a left-wing guerrilla base in Ecuador.
I don't like candidate advocacy or trash diaries, but recent comments from the Hillary Clinton campaign have reinforced the worst of her toxic militaristic foreign policy brew, extending beyond the Middle East to entangle recent events in South America.
The "evidence" that Iran is interested in producing a nuclear bomb rests largely on alleged documents found on a laptop computer. Now the threat of war looms in South America, and as part of hyping that threat and making sure we understand it's all in the name of "fighting terrorism" we're told that plans found on a FARC laptop computer show they were planning to make a "dirty bomb" with 50 kg of uranium. There's just one problem. We learned back in 2004, in the case of Jose Padilla, that you cannot make a dirty bomb with uranium:
