Peru: Aymara Indigenous People Announce Resumption of Protests in Puno · Glob... - 0 views
How a divided Spain started a revolution | openDemocracy - 0 views
CIP Americas Program | That Other World - 0 views
Ferguson October: Thousands March in St. Louis for Police Reform & Arrest of Office... - 0 views
Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, ... - 0 views
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Yanukovych sparked massive protests late last year when he turned down a financial deal from the European Union and chose a $15 billion aid package from Russia instead.
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But in any case, the idea of supporting an unconstitutional overthrow of a freely elected Ukrainian government in an uprising based squarely on the volatile linguistic and cultural fault-lines that divide the country seems an obvious recipe for chaos and strife. It was also certain to provoke a severe response from Russia. It was, in other words, a monumentally stupid line of policy (as Mike Whitney outlines here).
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Yet one of the first acts of the Western-backed revolutionaries was to pass a law declaring Ukrainian as the sole state language, although most of the country speaks Russian or Surzhyk, “a motley mix of Ukrainian and Russian (sometimes with bits of Hungarian, Romanian and Polish),” as the LRB’s Peter Pomerantsev details in an excellent piece on Ukraine’s rich cultural and linguistic complexity.
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Why Venezuela Matters to the Indigenous Movement | Onkwehón:we Rising - 0 views
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Independent media and social networking movements continue to bridge lives and lifestyles, the (increasingly small) world over. Collective movements spontaneously emerge, collaborate, simultaneously reflect and mutually contribute to the broad base of ideas constantly being generated, recycled, and renewed, each with their own important cultural perspective and intellectual capital to contribute. This has the potential to create a truly democratic international network of movements where access to information is prized above political indoctrination of any sort. The potential exists today. Yet it may not always be…
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There are insidious policies being pushed through in the darkness of collective public blind spots, international trade agreements that lay the framework for a corporate financial elite to control more and more of…well, everything.
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In this day and age of 24/7 media and meme culture: shares, likes and ‘viral-ness’ really do matter. It is evident of a new form of social capital that is already wisely, if often unethically, being used to drive advertising campaigns.
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Protest Coverage in Haiti and Venezuela Reveals U.S. Media Hypocrisy | North American C... - 0 views
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Both Venezuela and Haiti have been facing anti-government protests, with the respective oppositions citing poor leadership, corruption, electoral fraud, and a deteriorating economy as their primary motivations in calling for change. However, the international media’s escalation of the Venezuelan crisis and their complete silence when it comes to Haiti, raises some important questions about the United States’ inconsistency in upholding the values of human rights and democracy.
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As evidence of Martelly’s unbridled commitment to democracy, instead of holding elections for mayors whose terms expired in 2012, he personally handpicked the representatives, appointing them as “municipal agents.”
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Because the Haitian Senate has only 16 of 30 members currently active, the impeachment vote was not passed on a technicality. This was in spite of the decision, which saw 7 of the 16 members vote in favor of Martelly’s impeachment, with 9 abstentions and 0 voting against the motion. According to the Haitian Constitution, abstentions do not count as votes—with Article 117 stating that “All acts of the Legislature must be approved by a majority of the members present [emphasis added].” Thus, in regular circumstances the decision by the Senate would move forward with the impeachment. Therefore, this purposefully fragmented political system does a great deal to serve the interests of impunity.
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Who Was Responsible for Yesterday's Violence in Venezuela? - 0 views
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The Maduro government controls all branches of the national government and the majority of state and local governments. Most importantly, it controls the military, as well as the state oil company which is Venezuela’s main source of wealth. Two months ago it enjoyed a solid victory at the polls which effectively ended public questioning of its legitimacy. Finally, since the December elections the opposition has been beset with internal conflict and divided regarding what path it should take in the coming months and years.
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Having said this, it should be noted that the Maduro government has done a couple of things that do not exactly exhibit strength and confidence. Yesterday during the conflict it took Colombian television channel NTN24 off the air while it was providing live coverage of the clashes in its usual tendentious style. NTN24 is openly anti-government, but its reach and impact is minimal, much less than the impact taking it off the air had.
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López got ample international backing. In an interview on NTN24 Otto Reich said “the violence you are seeing in the streets is not the result of the people complaining, it is the result of the hordes that Mr. Maduro has organized to attack Venezuelans that are fed up with the incompetence and abuses of this government.”
What the Wikileaks Cables Say about Leopoldo López - 0 views
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Many of the cables focus on internal disputes within the opposition, with Lopez often in conflict with others both within his party and others in the opposition. Given this history, perhaps it isn’t surprising that the current protests that he has been leading, calling for “la salida” – the exit – of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro have also caused internal divisions within the opposition.
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This week, Smilde added in a quote to USA Today, "Before this happened, Lopez was playing second fiddle to Capriles… I think his goal is to try and leapfrog over Capriles. The student protests have put him in the spotlight."
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The U.S. government has been funding the Venezuelan opposition for at least 12 years, including, as the State Department has acknowledged, some of the people and organizations involved in the 2002 military coup. Their goal has always been to get rid of the Chávez government and replace it with something more to their liking. However, their funding is probably not their most important contribution in Venezuela, since the Venezuelan opposition has most of the wealth and income of the country. A more important role is the outside pressure for unity, which, as these cables and the history of the past 15 years show, has been a serious problem for the Venezuelan opposition. The cables also show that this is a serious concern for the U.S. government.
LAB - Venezuela - the real significance of the student protests - 0 views
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Initially organised to protest against economic shortages and insecurity, these demonstrations have been calling for ‘la salida’ – the exit of President Nicolás Maduro. They have been supported by sections of the opposition alliance, Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD), led by Leopoldo López and Maria Corina Machado.
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Maria Corina Machado, a signatory to the 2002 ‘Carmona Decree’ that temporarily dissolved the Chávez government, was a key protagonist of the recall referendum. Her ‘civil society’ organisation, Súmate, received funding from the National Endowment for Democracy in Washington, where she was feted by President George Bush in May 2005.
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The Chavistas learned a number of lessons from the events of 2002-2004: the importance of consolidating grassroots support (hence, the launch of the social policy initiative, the Missions); the need to build regional solidarity (hence, the acceleration of regional integration initiatives such as the ALBA); the capacity of the private sector to paralyse economic activity (hence, the deepening of the state’s role in the economy); and the urgency of countering false reporting on the country (hence, the funding of community and public media and new regulatory codes for broadcasting). It was this period that was the catalyst for the transformation of an initially centrist Third Way project into Socialism of the Twenty First Century.
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How the West Manufactures "Opposition Movements" - 0 views
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Government buildings are being trashed, ransacked. It is happening in Kiev and Bangkok, and in both cities, the governments appear to be toothless, too scared to intervene.
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The rhetoric varies, but in essence, the ‘protesters’ are demanding the dismemberment of the fragile Thai democracy. Most of them are paid by the upper-middle and upper classes.
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the government does not dare to send in tanks or the police to clear the streets. It should. But it is too scared of the army and the monarchy – two pillars of this outrageous hybrid of savage capitalism and feudalism – comparable only to even worse regional nightmares, such as Indonesia and the Philippines.
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"Emerging market bloodbath" as crisis enters new phase | ROAR Magazine - 0 views
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Whatever echoes there may or may not be, what is clear is that the global financial crisis — which many analysts declared to be at end now that the European debt saga finally seemed to be “under control” — is far from over, and may just have entered into a new phase.
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As Larry Elliot of The Guardian, just put it: “all the ingredients are there for social unrest.” It looks like the world will be in for a rough ride in 2014. Better fasten your seatbelts — the next phase of the global financial crisis may be about to get started. Cities will burn and there will be blood. It won’t be pretty.
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