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40 Years After CIA & ITT’s 1973 Coup In Chile: A Look At Democracy Now!’s ITT-Lannan Foundation Connection | Part 2

Where’s the Change?

Jan 7, 2014

by Bob Feldman

weatherunderground

Bernardine Dohrn addresses a radical gathering in 1969. Picture: David Fenton Source: Getty Images

On Sept. 28, 1973 the now-defunct Weather Underground anti-imperialist political group sent a letter and communique to various underground newspapers and aboveground U.S. media outlets. The letter from the Weather Underground stated the following:

“Dear Friends,

“We are sending this communique to newspapers and radio stations around the country. Our purpose is to help explain the role of ITT and the U.S. in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende and the popular government of Chile…This communique accompanies the bombing of the Headquarters for Latin America of ITT in New York City, which was carried out today…”

And the Weather Underground’s September 28, 1973 communique included the following text:

“Tonight we attacked the ITT headquarters for America in New York City, in support of the people in Chile, and to add our voice to the international expression of outrage and anger at the involvement of ITT and the U.S. government in the overthrow of socialist Chile…

“Without the machinations of ITT and the U.S. government these events would not have happened. In spite of their insolent denials they stand indicted by their own words and deeds. The blood of thousands of people is on their hands.

40 Years After CIA & ITT’s 1973 Coup In Chile: A Look At Democracy Now!’s ITT-Lannan Foundation Connection | Part 1

Where’s the Change?

by Bob Feldman

Jan 6, 2014

lannan-640x300

Not only do we suffer the financial blockade, we are also the victims of clear aggression. Two firms that are part of the central nucleus of the large transnational companies that sunk their claws into my country, the International Telegraph and Telephone Company and the Kennecott Copper Corporation, tried to run our political life.

“ITT, a huge corporation whose capital is greater than the budget of several Latin American nations put together and greater than that of some industrialized countries, began, from the very moment that the people’s movement was victorious in the elections of September 1970, a sinister action to keep me from taking office as President.

“Between September and November of 1970, terrorist actions that were planned outside of my country took place there, with the aid of internal fascist groups. All this led to the murder of General Rene Schneider Chereau, Commander in Chief of the Army, a just man and a great soldier who symbolized the constitutionalism of the armed forces of Chile….ITT…has admitted that in 1970 it even made suggestions to the Government of the United States that it intervene in political events in Chile….

“Last July the world learned with amazement of different aspects of a new plan of action that ITT had presented to the US Government in order to overthrow my Government in a period of six months. I have with me the document, dated in October 1971, that contains the 18-point plan that was talked about. They wanted to strangle us economically, carry out diplomatic sabotage, create panic among the population and cause social disorder so that when the Government lost control, the armed forces would be driven to eliminate the democratic regime and impose a dictatorship.

Economic Lessons From the Most Unlikely Country – Eritrea

“Very rational and analytic article. But I doubt if you are going to be heard by fellow African heads. Because, the majority of African leaders are too busy doing their homework (prescribed to them by Westerners and their stooges in Addis Ababa) to demonize the “bad good example”, the sister country of Eritrea.” – Sophia Testamariamm, analyst, writer

OWACHGIUD

October 26, 2013

Independent-Eritrea

Image: http://www.raimoq.com/eritrean-independence-day-is-african-liberation-day/

The recent drought and resultant famine that hit the horn of African countries has brought back Eritrea to the spotlight, with analysts saying Eritrea too is suffering silently, though Eritrea’s former Marxist rebel leader and current president Isaias Afwerki still maintains he is not ready to lead another “spoon fed” African country that relies on foreign aid as remedies to internal shortages. Eritrea is doing something unheard of in Africa – it is turning away millions of dollars in aid, including food donations from the World Food Programme. The poor country turned down offers of more than $200 million in aid from ‘hypocrite western donors’ last year alone.

Thirty Years After the U.S. Invasion of Grenada, the First Neoliberal War

Zero Anthropology

October 28, 2013

by Maximilian Forte

grenada_invasion

U.S. forces in Grenada in 1983

This past Friday, October 25, marked the 30th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada. There were many meanings and consequences of that invasion, not just for Grenada itself, or for the wider Caribbean region (including the increased militarization of the region in the aftermath, the importation of U.S. national security doctrine, and the scandalous collaborationism embodied by Dominica’s then Prime Minister, Eugenia Charles, and Barbados’ then Prime Minister, Tom Adams–and the advent of the Caribbean Basin Initiative), but also meanings and consequences for the onset of the “new world order” of the post-Cold War period which was just a few years away. (From a personal perspective, the revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua, where I spent months in the 1980s, formed an important foundation of my own development and impelled me in certain directions with my own studies.)

Friends of Syria or Friends of Imperialism?

what’s left

October 23, 2013

By Stephen Gowans

FriendsofSyria

 

The Friends of Syria—an 11 country coalition ranged against the Syrian government—favors what it calls a “democratic” transition in Damascus. There are multiple problems with this.

The coalition says that the current president, Bashar al-Assad, must have “no role in Syria.” How odd that an ostensibly democracy-promoting coalition should dictate to Syrians who it is who can’t be president of their country, rather than democratically leaving the question up to Syrians themselves.

9-11-73 | Never Forget | Remember Allende

Last Words : Ultimo Discurso (Salvador Allende)

In 1970, Salvador Allende was the people’s choice for the President of Chile. However, he was not the choice of the establishment, the armed forces or the CIA – who financed an 8 million dollar campaign to de-stabilise his democratically elected government, and provided logistical support to the military coup which deposed him and led to 17 years of military dictatorship under General Pinochet. This film recalls Allende’s last radio speech before he died in the Presidential Palace, Santiago de Chile, on the morning of the eleventh of September 1973.

Deja Vu | War Against Syria: Built on a Lie

Demonstrators-syria

Demonstrators take part in a  protest calling for no military attack on Syria. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

September 1, 2013

by Roxanne Amico

“Many voices saying the same things may not all speak at once, but they will reach a wider audience.”

Today, Sunday the 1st of September, as I write this, there was another rally against another attack by another US president (Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize Winner) on another land and peoples, this time Syria.  There have been, are, and will be 100’s more such rallies against US imperialism throughout the world, because people will never stop resisting…

I share the quote above (found at a comment section online somewhere in my research), because recently a friend who’s a filmmaker asked me if I think that filmmaking is enough to combat the war on the planet and our people by the profiteers of empire and colonialism.  His recently released film, “Who Are My People” explores the issues of “renewable energy”, and exposes the green-wash of imperialism’s impact on the Mojave, Chemehuevi, Yaqui, and Quechan/Kumeyaay people of the Southwest desert, whose lives & culture are threatened by industrial solar power. I believe that his filmmaking is a key component of what is a necessary weapon to dismantle the systemic forces at work in destroying the only planet we have to live on. We’re all colonized. We’re all captive to the empire. And yes, there is a history of the colonized turning colonizers. But there is also a history of resistance; of colonized awakening; of colonized uniting with the colonized, and turning their weapons on the real enemy. I see Lundahl’s important work on “Who Are My People” as a critical part of that. Because lots of people don’t see that they are colonized subjects of the empire; don’t see how they are doing the bidding of the masters. Stories like Robert Lundahl’s film tell that story, and are part of the resistance movements needed. So, we all have talents, skills, and gifts to bring to the forefront against criminalities we’re facing.  We do this in part by telling our story, in relationship to that place and the people, too. 

The Unwitting Agents of the Imperial Order | The Wishful Thinking Left

by JEAN BRICMONT

Once upon a time, in the early 1970?s, many people, including myself, thought that all the “struggles” of that period were linked: the Cultural Revolution in China, the guerillas in Latin America, the Prague Spring and the East European “dissidents”, May 68, the civil rights movement, the opposition to the Vietnam war, and the nominally socialist anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. We also thought that the “fascist” regimes in Spain, Portugal and Greece, by analogy with WWII, could only be overthrown through armed struggle, very likely protracted.

The Konyism of Samantha Power, US Ambassador to the United Nations

jadaliyya

August 15, 2013

by Vijay Prashad

Kony2012Poster

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“Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise,” Samantha Power, 2003.

On 10 August, the newly appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, addressed the Fourth Estate Leadership Summit, an event of Invisible Children. This was Ambassador Power’s first public address since she took her seat at the United Nations. Invisible Children is the campaign group that has been behind several iterations of the “Stop Kony” video, which went viral in 2012. Power praised the group for its “new kind of activism” whose “army of civilian activists” had pushed the Obama administration to tougher action against Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and whose example had helped Kenyans and Russians and most of all Arabs, who “barely knew democracy as recently as three years ago,” to use the Internet to hold governments accountable. Power is not naïve. She knows that the Internet is not sufficient, since it is simply “a means to an end. What matters is the real world scoreboard.” The “real world scoreboard” touts up the exertions of power by actors that Power sees as benign, such as the United States government. Internet activism can prod the US government to action, and when it does, then it is effective. World history can only happen when the US government’s snout pushes along the Dialectic; anything else is simply the passage of time. 

Protesta Popular Triunfa contra Presión de EEUU en Paraguay y Destituyen a Gloria Rubin

Blogueros y Corresponsales de la Revolución

publicado por Luis Agüero Wagner

el agosto 12, 2013

Una fuerte protesta popular y de toda la sociedad paraguaya finalmente se impuso a las presiones de la embajada norteamericana, y el presidente electo Horacio Cartes decidió destituir a la polémica Ministra de la Mujer Gloria Rubin.