Strategies and Tactics at the World Trade Organization (WTO)

Geneva — The WTO is an important multilateral forum because it attempts to negotiate the future. The unacknowledged purpose of creating the WTO was to perpetuate, through international agreements, the pattern of trade imbalances in the international economy. The ploy is to convene a forum to negotiate an equitable amendment. The tactic is to wear down the resistance with an apparently repetitive immobility. Therefore, the Doha Round, labelled Development Round and intended to phase out farm subsidies – which have increased – is now only about market opening and the word development is totally absent.

The irony of the negotiations is that all countries claim to seek greater market opening, while all of them call for “flexibility” to keep them closed.

Castro: US aims to overthrow Chavez’s government

Fidel Castro has accused the US of seeking to overthrow Venezuela’s government and to establish power through its future military bases in Colombia.

The former Cuban leader’s attack on the White House came on the eve of a summit of South American presidents that could be overshadowed by a growing row over a deal between Washington and Bogota to give the American military access to seven Colombian bases.

Washington’s “only purpose with these bases is the ability to put US troops in South America in a matter of hours,” Castro said in an article published on the official government website cubadebate.cu.

The United States insists that the facilities, spread across the territory of its main regional ally, are aimed at fighting drug gangs and left-wing rebels in Colombia.

Castro said America’s real objective was to “eliminate the revolutionary process” begun by Venezuela’s leader Hugo Chavez, a key Cuban ally, and to “gain control of the oil and other natural resources in Venezuela.”

“The delivery of land to establish seven US military bases in Colombia directly threatens the sovereignty and integrity of the peoples of South and Central America and the great Latin American fatherland our forefathers dreamed of,” Castro added.

U.S. Military Bases in Colombia Threaten Regional Peace: ALBA

HAVANA: U.S. military bases in Colombia are a grave threat to the peace, security and stability in Latin America and the Caribbean region, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) said Monday.

In a final declaration at the ALBA summit, the group strongly condemned American political and military activities in the region and an agreement the U.S. signed with Colombia to set up or use military bases in that country.

The ALBA said that Latin America and the Caribbean must be free of foreign military bases, reaffirming that it is unacceptable to use the fight against drug trafficking and international terrorism as excuses to increase America’s military presence in the area.

The ALBA’s member countries said the real aim of the United States was to control the region’s economic resources and markets and to hold back ongoing social changes there.

That aim, the ALBA said, was evident in a document justifying development of the Palanquero air base issued by the U.S. Air Force in May.

The presidents of the ALBA member countries urged Colombia to reconsider the establishment of military bases included in an agreement it signed with the United States.

The establishment of those bases is a real danger to the region and an obstacle for the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean, the presidents said.

The ALBA supports Venezuela’s right of “setting under alert its country” due to the clear risk for its national security because of U.S. troops deployed near its border.

The ALBA is made up of Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, as well as Venezuela.

Rumors Of Coups And War: U.S., NATO Target Latin America

There is no way of overestimating the challenge that the emergence of ALBA and the overall reawakening of Latin America pose to the role that the U.S. arrogates to itself as lord of the entire Western Hemisphere. The almost two-century-old Monroe Doctrine exemplifies Washington’s claim to exclusive influence over all of North, Central and South America and the Caribbean Basin and its self-claimed right to subordinate them to its own interests. Never before the election victories of anti-neoliberal forces throughout Latin America over the past eleven years has the prospect of a truly democratic, multipolar New World existed as it does now.

It is in response to those developments that the U.S. and its former colonialist allies in NATO are attempting to reassert their influence in the Americas south of the U.S. border.

US Military Aggression Against Venezuela Escalating

Caracas, 20 December – Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez revealed today on his Sunday television and radio program, Aló Presidente, that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, have illegally entered Venezuela’s airspace during the past several days. “A few days ago, one of these military planes penetrated Venezuela as far as Fort Mara,” a Venezuelan military fort in the State of Zulia, bordering Colombia. The drone was seen by several Venezuelan soldiers who immediately reported the aerial violation to their superiors. President Chávez gave the order today to shoot down any drones detected in Venezuelan territory. Chávez also directly implicated Washington in this latest threat against regional stability by confirming that the drones were of US origen.

Chavez Warns Against Possible Colombian Aggression at Border

CARACAS: Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that Venezuela is on the alert for a possible Colombian military action at the border.

“They are getting ready for an aggression … If you attack Venezuela, you will regret it,” Chavez warned during his weekly television and radio program.

“We must be alert,” Chavez said, adding that Venezuela was armed. However, he stressed that Venezuela does not want a war with Colombia.

He accused the Colombian government of frequently making declarations and threats against his country, including establishing military troops at the border and possible attempts to capture guerillas in Venezuelan territory.

He also accused the United States of sending planes to the Netherlands Antilles, north of Venezuela.

Chavez froze ties with Colombia in July after Colombia agreed to a military cooperation that allowed the United States to use its military bases.

Venezuela, bordering Colombia to the north, is the most vehement opponent of the plan as Chavez said the bases were “a threat” to his country.

The Long Decline of the American Economy

The official position on the cause of the current financial downturn is that it was caused by the reckless practices of financial institutions and the failure of regulatory bodies, and it is likely that these were the proximate causes, but they were not the ultimate cause. Americans, unfortunately, are rarely willing to search for ultimate causes or do anything about them when they are found.

In the 1980s, I was living in a suburb of Washington, DC. One evening, a friend and I were walking the streets of Georgetown when we met a group of Japanese taking pictures of a building they had just purchased. They asked us to take some photographs of them in front of it, which we did. A few blocks further along, we observed a group of teenagers drumming on plastic household buckets. The kids were very good drummers, but I pointed out to my friend that after WW2, the youths of the Caribbean altered abandoned oil drums into musical instruments of various ranges and created a new and unique musical genre—steel drums. Later over dinner, my friend and I discussed what appeared to be a serious decline in America’s economic fortunes and culture.

EU/IMF Revolt: Greece, Iceland, Latvia May Lead the Way

Europe’s small, debt-strapped countries could follow the lead of Argentina and simply walk away from their debts. That would shift the burden to the creditor countries, which could solve the problem merely by a change in accounting rules.

Total financial collapse, once a problem only for developing countries, has now come to Europe. The International Monetary Fund is imposing its “austerity measures” on the outer circle of the European Union, with Greece, Iceland and Latvia the hardest hit. But these are not your ordinary third world debtor supplicants. Historically, the Vikings of Iceland successfully invaded Britain; Latvia n tribes repulsed the Vikings; and the Greeks conquered the whole Persian empire. If anyone can stand up to the IMF, these stalwart European warriors can.

Curacao Is U.S. Spy Base Against Venezuela

Dutch Socialist MP Harry van Bommel has claimed that US spy planes are using an airbase on the Netherlands Antilles island of Curaçao.

Mr Van Bommel has asked Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen whether he is aware that a Boeing RC-135 aircraft has been making regular reconnaissance flights from the Caribbean island’s Hato airport over the past few weeks.

War on drugs

The flights were the cause of angry reactions by Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who accused the Netherlands of colluding with the United States. The Hague government is contributing to rising tensions between Venezuela and Colombia, according to the Venezuelan authorities.

The opposition MP said it is up to the Netherlands to help de-escalate these tensions. He is asking for a ban on American military flights over Colombia from the Antilles. Ostensibly such flights are part of the US “war on drugs” but Mr Van Bommel claims they are also used in a “war on guerrillas”. The MP wants to scrap the US-Netherlands Forwards Operations Location treaty enabling the Americans to use airfields in Curaçao and the Antilles for anti-drugs flights.

Shoot them down

Meanwhile President Chávez has ordered his airforce to shoot down any US plane entering Venezuelan airspace. He said on state television that a US drone, an unmanned plane, had attempted to enter from Colombia on Sunday. Since an agreement with the Colombian government was signed in October, the US military have access to seven military bases in Colombia.

Honduras: The Coup That Never Happened

“When the media goes quiet, the walls speak.” — graffiti in Tegucigalpa.

What strikes a visitor to the Honduran capital most immediately in this moment is the degree to which the social and political conflict that has erupted since the golpe de estado (coup d’etat) on June 28th is actually written on the walls, the fences, the rockfaces, bridges, errant bits of siding, abandoned buildings, and even the concrete upon which one walks. Though the discourse in the international press is muddled and misinformed, the situation in Honduras is very obvious to those who are here – as a quick taxi ride around Tegucigalpa demonstrates.

Nov. 26, 2009 – Tegucigalpa, indeed all of the country, is covered in political graffiti. It doesn’t take long to recognize that the state is in a moment of intense political struggle and repression, despite the international media’s insistence that ‘everything is fine.’