Dancing with Monsters: The U.S. Response to the 2009 Honduran Coup

"A coup anywhere in Latin America is a very big deal.”

By Alvaro Valle
Harvard Political Review, April 13, 2015

SNIP...

The U.S. Response

Latin American governments immediately denounced Zelaya’s ouster as a military coup. The United States was not quite as decisive in its diction, with the initial statement from the Obama administration merely calling on “all political and social actors in Honduras to respect democratic norms.” Obama did go on to denounce the coup in the following days, but Frank noted that Obama’s characterization of the government change was very important. “He very clearly failed to call it a military coup. If he had called it a military coup, the United States would have had to immediately suspend all police and military aid,” Frank explained. “Eventually some money sent was suspended, but the vast majority was not.”

Following the coup, President Obama called many times for the reinstatement of Zelaya. In contrast, Secretary of State Clinton made remarks that were far more equivocal. When asked if the United States had any plans to alter aid to the coup government, , “Much of our assistance is conditioned on the integrity of the democratic system. But if we were able to get to a status quo that returned to the rule of law and constitutional order within a relatively short period of time, I think that would be a good outcome.” Clinton seemed to prioritize having a stable regime over preserving democratic ideals.

As further evidence, Clinton wrote in her book, Hard Choices, “In the subsequent days [after the coup] … we strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot,” revealing that even as the administration publicly advocated for Zelaya’s return, Clinton was not working to ensure that it would happen.

Pastor added that Clinton had personal connections with supporters of the coup government that may have led her to soften her stance. For instance, Lanny Davis, Bill Clinton’s former personal lawyer and a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter, lobbied in Washington for the Honduran coup government, Honduran elites, the Business Council of Latin America, and the American companies that took issue with Zelaya’s reforms. Bennett Ratcliff, another top Democratic campaigner with close ties to the Clintons, also worked for the Honduran coup government as a lobbyist in Washington. These personal connections to advocates for the coup government raise troubling concerns that political ties influenced Clinton’s stance.

In Clinton’s defense, these personal connections were not the only political forces supporting the coup. Levitsky noted that initial opposition to the coup in the United States may have given way because “Republicans held a couple of major U.S.-Latin America appointments: the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs and the Ambassador to Brazil. They held these positions hostage to a softening of U.S. policy toward the coup government.”

CONTINUED w/ links sources etc....

http://harvardpolitics.com/united-states/us-honduran-coup/

Toxicology. 2009 Aug 21;262(3):184-91. doi: 10.1016/j.tox.2009.06.006. Epub 2009 Jun 17.

[font size="4"][font color="green"]Glyphosate-based herbicides are toxic and endocrine disruptors in human cell lines.[/font color][/font size]

Gasnier C1, Dumont C, Benachour N, Clair E, Chagnon MC, Séralini GE.

Abstract

Glyphosate-based herbicides are the most widely used across the world; they are commercialized in different formulations. Their residues are frequent pollutants in the environment. In addition, these herbicides are spread on most eaten transgenic plants, modified to tolerate high levels of these compounds in their cells. Up to 400 ppm of their residues are accepted in some feed. We exposed human liver HepG2 cells, a well-known model to study xenobiotic toxicity, to four different formulations and to glyphosate, which is usually tested alone in chronic in vivo regulatory studies. We measured cytotoxicity with three assays (Alamar Blue, MTT, ToxiLight), plus genotoxicity (comet assay), anti-estrogenic (on ERalpha, ERbeta) and anti-androgenic effects (on AR) using gene reporter tests. We also checked androgen to estrogen conversion by aromatase activity and mRNA. All parameters were disrupted at sub-agricultural doses with all formulations within 24h. These effects were more dependent on the formulation than on the glyphosate concentration. First, we observed a human cell endocrine disruption from 0.5 ppm on the androgen receptor in MDA-MB453-kb2 cells for the most active formulation (R400), then from 2 ppm the transcriptional activities on both estrogen receptors were also inhibited on HepG2. Aromatase transcription and activity were disrupted from 10 ppm. Cytotoxic effects started at 10 ppm with Alamar Blue assay (the most sensitive), and DNA damages at 5 ppm. A real cell impact of glyphosate-based herbicides residues in food, feed or in the environment has thus to be considered, and their classifications as carcinogens/mutagens/reprotoxics is discussed.
PMID: 19539684 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

SOURCE: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19539684

Hillary, Honduras and my late friend Berta

By Porfirio Quintano
San Francisco Examiner on May 29, 2016 1:00 am

Just one year ago, I had a joyous reunion in San Francisco with a high school classmate from my native Honduras. Social justice campaigner Berta Caceres came to the Bay Area to receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her leadership among indigenous people opposed to mining and the construction of hydroelectric dams that would destroy their communities.

Unfortunately, in a time when Honduras has grown ever more violent and repressive since its 2009 military coup, Berta’s continued activism and global recognition put a bullseye on her back. On March 3, she was killed by gunmen in her hometown of La Esperanza, not far from where I grew up before emigrating to the United States two decades ago.

This tragedy added Berta’s name to the long list of recent Honduran political martyrs — students, teachers, journalists, lawyers, LGBT community members, labor and peasant organizers and even top civilian investigators of drug trafficking and corruption. More than 100 environmental campaigners have been killed in the last five years. This carnage, along with escalating gang violence, has led many Hondurans to flee the country, often arriving in the U.S. as unaccompanied minors or mothers with small children.

The world learned recently that four people have been arrested and charged with Berta’s assassination. The suspects include a retired military officer, an army major and two men with close ties to Desarrollos Energeticos S.A., the controversial dam builder. As The New York Times reported, Berta’s family and friends “questioned whether the investigation would ultimately lead to those who planned and ordered the killing.”

Flush with tens of millions of our tax dollars for “security assistance,” the Honduran army and national police have acted with impunity since U.S.-trained generals overthrew Manuel Zelaya, the elected president of Honduras, seven years ago. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton toed the White House line that this wasn’t really a “military coup” worthy of near unanimous condemnation by the Organization of American States. The U.S. was more concerned about maintaining its own military presence in Honduras than objecting to local human rights abuses that have increased ever since.

CONTINUED...

http://www.sfexaminer.com/hillary-honduras-late-friend-berta/

Porfirio Quintano works at California Pacific Medical Center and is a member of the National Union of Healthcare Workers.

No Mr. President, Larry Summers Did Not Resolve the Financial Crisis for a Pittance. He Just Papered Over the Problem.

by William K. Black
Oct. 28, 2010

I passed up the obvious title: "Heckuva Job Larry!" That was the moment of President Obama's appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that set all Americans cringing. Yes, he really said that Summers "did a heckuva job." The candidate that was gifted the opportunity to run against the legacy of one of the worst presidents in U.S. history has, as president, used Bush as his role model to continue many disastrous policies. It was strangely fitting that he would channel Bush's infamous praise ("Heckuva job Brownie&quot for the FEMA chief who failed New Orleans so badly in the hurricane.

President Obama understandably wishes to focus attention on the economic disaster he inherited from President Bush. But Jon Stewart's question to him, which led to the president's gaffe, correctly asked about the message that Summers' appointment sent about the administration's commitment to fundamental change.

Summers had financial red ink on his hands at the time he was appointed. He was Rubin's chief minion in the successful effort to defeat effective financial regulation and supervision. (Yes, the effort was bipartisan and the Republican leadership shares in the guilt.) [font color="green"]Summers was not simply wrong, but also arrogant and brutal, in blocking effective regulation at the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Summers was made rich by Wall Street in one of those sordid consulting arrangements designed to buy influence and reward past and future favors.[/font color]

President Obama's appointment of Summers as his chief economic advisor made the administration's overall response to the crisis predictable. (Robert Kuttner gives a detailed explanation of the policies that Rubin's protégés championed in his new book, A Presidency in Peril.) The response would follow the disastrous Japanese model that has harmed their economy and damaged their integrity. The dominant characteristics can be summarized quickly: [font color="green"](1) the government would act for the benefit of the largest financial firms and their CEOs, even when they directed massive frauds, by (2) engineering a cover up of the banks' losses and the CEO's misconduct; (3) the administration would use the fictional reports generated to conduct the cover up to declare victory (due to their brilliance); and (4) the same strategy would impair the recovery.[/font color] (For more on the cover up, see here and here.)

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/no-mr-president-larry-sum_b_775307.html

With Clinton’s Nixonian Email Scandal Deepening, Sanders Must Demand Answers

by DAVE LINDORFF
CounterPunch, MAY 27, 2016

EXCERPT...

The power couple’s two foundations, the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative, now together reportedly worth more than $2 billion, both function effectively as money-laundering operations providing salaries to Clinton family members and friends. And Hillary Clinton, particularly while serving as President Obama’s secretary of state, was in a perfect position to do favors for unsavory foreign leaders seeking to have their countries kept off of State Department lists of human rights violators, and for US businesses seeking lucrative business deals abroad. It’s those kinds of email conversations that would have benefitted from a private server, since US State Department official computers have dedicated back-up systems that would be hard or impossible to wipe, and are also by law subject to Freedom of Information inquiries from journalists and the public.

SNIP...

However Politico reports that on Wednesday, a report by the State Department’s Office of Inspector General, has issued its report on the emails. It is a scathing indictment, concluding that Clinton failed to comply with US government and State Department policies on records, and that counter to assertions made publicly by her, she never sought permission from the department’s legal staff to use a private server — a request which if made, the report insists “would not” have been approved. The inspector general’s report states, “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

It’s not as though Clinton didn’t know what she was doing was wrong and even illegal. The just released report states that technology staff in the State Department’s Office of Information Resource Management, who raised concerns about her private server, were instructed by the department’s director, a Clinton appointee, “not to question the arrangement.” When one staffer mentioned that her private account could contain federal records that needed to be preserved “in order to satisfy federal recordkeeping requirements,” the report says the director of that office “stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by the department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further.” Yet the inspector general says that assertion by the director was false, as there was in fact no evidence that in the State Department’s office of the legal advisor had ever reviewed or approved the private system, or even been asked to do so by Clinton.

Again and again through her four years at State, Clinton is found to have resisted efforts to get her to stop using exclusively her private email to conduct official business. On several occasions, the report says, she expressly said her concern was having her mail subjected to FOIA, or in other words, public discovery. Clinton tried to claim that since her communications with State Dept. personnel ended up on their servers, there were records of her communications there. But as the report notes, that wouldn’t include any State Department-related communications she had with persons outside of the State Department or the government. And those are precisely the kinds of conversations that the public really needs to know about — particularly when we’re talking about someone who is running for the top position in government, and who has demonstrably spent years with her hand out to powerful people and organizations. After all, it is those communications that would include any discussions of financial transactions involving foreign or domestic interests seeking beneficial assistance from the Madam Secretary.

This scandal is not about someone simply ignoring some arcane rules. As Secretary of State, Clinton had a legal obligation to operate in an above-board, legal and transparent manner in conducting the business of government. Instead, for our years in office, she conducted that business in a manner that can only be called Nixonian, opting to openly violate the rules, to hide her communications from government oversight and public review, to dissemble about her allegedly having received clearance to do so, and even to attempt to erase records from her server when ordered to turn them over. Furthermore, suspicions have to be raised because if Clinton’s concerns were about people accessing her genuinely personal emails, she had only to set up a State Department email address and obtain a State Department secure Blackberry phone, and limit her personal server and personal Blackberry to genuinely personal emails and calls, conducting all State Department business on State Department systems. According to the IGO report, she studiously avoided doing that kind of segregation for four years despite frequent instructions and advice to do so.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/27/with-clintons-nixonian-email-scandal-deepening-sandes-must-demand-answers/

MK-ULTRA: The CIA and Mind Control

The People's History
Wednesday, March 12, 2014

“In the 1950's and early 1960's, the agency gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. Many of the human guinea pigs were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts and prostitutes -- ''people who could not fight back,'' as one agency officer put it. In one case, a mental patient in Kentucky was dosed with LSD continuously for 174 days.” - New York Times1

MK-ULTRA is the codename given to a CIA research operation into biological behavioral engineering, also known as mind control. Many people are familiar with the operation but incorrectly assume that it was limited to LSD research. While there were plenty of resources devoted to LSD research, it was only one area of a vast field of mind control operations. MK-ULTRA researcher Ike Feldman said himself that:

“The LSD... that was just the tip of the iceberg... Espionage. Assassinations. Dirty tricks. Drug experiments. Sexual encounters and the study of prostitutes for clandestine use. That is what I was doing when I worked for George White and the CIA.”2

MK-ULTRA had several precursors. There was Project Chatter in 1947, which tested drugs such as the infamous Scopalmine during interrogations.3 There was Project Bluebird in 1949, which began studies into hypnosis.4 The document describing the initiation of Project Bluebird outlines these special problems, among many others, that they were hoping to address:

* Can we in a matter of an hour, two hours, one day, etc., induce an hypnotic condition in an unwilling subject to such an extent that he will perform an act for our benefit?

* Can we create by post-hypnotic control an action contrary to an individual's basic moral principles?

* Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?

* Can we "alter" a person's personality? How long will it hold?

* Can we devise a system for making unwilling subjects into willing agents and then transfer that control to untrained agency agents in the field by use of codes or identifying signs or credentials?5

Project Artichoke began in 1951, with a scope of ... “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”6 All of the above projects were shuttled into MK-ULTRA in 1953, under the Technical Services Division, combining over 150 sub-projects7, undertaken at over 80 institutions8 such as universities, hospitals, prisons and pharmaceutical companies. Many of the projects were covertly ran through front organizations without the knowledge of the institution that hosted them.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thepeopleshistory.net/2014/03/mk-ultra_12.html

Until economic and social rules work for all, they’re not working.

Inspired by the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor, the Roosevelt Institute reimagines America as it should be: a place where hard work is rewarded, everyone participates, and everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity. We believe that when the rules work against this vision, it’s our responsibility to recreate them.

We bring together thousands of thinkers and doers—from a new generation of leaders in every state to Nobel laureate economists—working to redefine the rules that guide our social and economic realities. We rethink and reshape everything from local policy to federal legislation, orienting toward a new economic and political system: one built by many for the good of all.

-- http://rooseveltinstitute.org/about/

The Bruenig Firing: ‘Civility’ As A Tool To Control Political Dissent

by Roqayah Chamseddine

EXCERPT...

On May 20, the progressive public policy organization, Demos, fired Matt Bruenig, a popular writer who covered poverty and inequality.

Demos’ firing of Bruenig was spurred, in part, by his sharp verbal knockdowns of columnist Joan Walsh, and Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress (CAP), both of whom are ardent Hillary Clinton supporters.

Bruenig described Tanden as “a scumbag” and sent heads spinning. Within a few hours, there was a virtual campaign engineered at stripping him of his position at Demos. There was more research done by liberals that day into calculating how much Bruenig makes, where he lives, and what kind of home he and his family reside in, than there was into the policies of Clinton.

SNIP...

Detractors claim Bruenig’s behavior towards women was not only to blame for the loss of his job but that his conduct is an attribute of a larger, uncivilized left, and should they emulate such behavior then they too would suffer the same material repercussions.

These silencing tactics are not new, but they’ve evolved with help from social media and a captivated audience that, especially when drama is involved, is unwilling to log off.

CONTINUED...

http://commondreams.org/views/2016/05/25/bruenig-firing-civility-tool-control-political-dissent

Exposing Trump's Decades of Deep Ties to Organized Crime

Trump's real estate empire and casinos have mob roots.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet May 23, 2016

The first decades of Donald Trump’s career as a New York City builder and Atlantic City casino magnate are filled with lasting and documented ties to organized crime—including mobsters who went to federal prison, according to a recent series of detailed investigative reports.

“No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks,” wrote David Cay Johnston for Politico.com. “In all, I’ve covered Donald Trump off and on for 27 years, and in that time I’ve encountered multiple threads linking Trump to organized crime.”

“Well, to be a developer in New York City, to be fair, you had to, in those days—this is talking about the late ’70s and 1980s, early ’90s—you had to brush up against the mob,” Tom Robbins, who covered organized crime, labor and politics for decades for The New York Daily News and Village Voice, told Democracy Now, when talking about his report for TheMarshallProject.org. “They were a force both on the employer side and particularly on the union side. But despite that problem, Don Trump seemed to keep running into them over and over again. They bought apartments in his Trump Tower, in Trump Plaza. You know, they kept showing up as people that he was carousing with.”

Robbins, who called Trump, “the slickest con-man out of New York City,” said the Republicans had no idea who their presidential nominee was. But as he reported for the Marshall Project, which covers criminal justice issues, and Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning business reporter wrote for politico.com, Trump knew he wanted to make a fortune soon after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and found a role model in one of the sleaziest lawyers in America—Roy Cohn. In the 1950s, Cohn helped Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy persecute Hollywood figures for allegedly supporting Communism. Years later when Trump met Cohn, he had moved to New York City and was advising the city’s leading organized crime figures.

“Trump’s mentor on issues of politics and business was Roy Cohn, a lawyer whose other clients included a passel of mobsters, among them the bosses of the Genovese and Gambino crime families,” wrote Robbins. “Cohn… operated out of a townhouse on East 68th Street where clients Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul ‘Big Paul’ Castellano were regular visitors. Besides getting advice on their legal problems, as a former secretary later recalled to [Village Voice reporter] Wayne Barrett in his 1992 book, “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” the visits by the mob titans to their lawyer's office allowed them to talk shop without having to worry about FBI bugs. Cohn told a reporter that Trump called him ‘fifteen to twenty times a day, asking what’s the status of this, what’s the status of that,’ according to Barrett’s book.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/exposing-trumps-decades-deep-ties-organized-crime

Government Nanny Censoring "Conspiracy Theories" Is Also Responsible for Letting Bush Era Torture and Spying Conspiracies Go Unpunished

Washingtons Blog, Oct. 7, 2010

EXCERPT...

Prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service, (Sunstein) argued, and Democrats should avoid replicating retributive efforts like the impeachment of President Clinton — or even the “slight appearance” of it.

SOURCE w links n details: http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com/2010/10/main-obama-adviser-blocking-prosecution.html?m=1

Least Transparent Administration Ever: A New Front in Obama’s War on Whistleblowers

By Juan Cole Juan Cole
Informed Comment | Mar. 5, 2014

The Obama administration has just opened a new front in its ongoing war on whistleblowers. It’s taking its case against one man, former Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Air Marshal Robert MacLean, all the way to the Supreme Court. So hold on, because we’re going back down the rabbit hole with the Most Transparent Administration ever.

Despite all the talk by Washington insiders about how whistleblowers like Edward Snowden should work through the system rather than bring their concerns directly into the public sphere, MacLean is living proof of the hell of trying to do so. Through the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice (DOJ) wants to use MacLean’s case to further limit what kinds of information can qualify for statutory whistleblowing protections. If the DOJ gets its way, only information that the government thinks is appropriate — a contradiction in terms when it comes to whistleblowing — could be revealed. Such a restriction would gut the legal protections of the Whistleblower Protection Act and have a chilling effect on future acts of conscience.

Having lost its case against MacLean in the lower courts, the DOJ is seeking to win in front of the Supreme Court. If heard by the Supremes — and there’s no guarantee of that — this would represent that body’s first federal whistleblower case of the post-9/11 era. And if it were to rule for the government, even more information about an out-of-control executive branch will disappear under the dark umbrella of “national security.”

On the other hand, should the court rule against the government, or simply turn down the case, whistleblowers like MacLean will secure a little more protection than they’ve had so far in the Obama years. Either way, an important message will be sent at a moment when revelations of government wrongdoing have moved from the status of obscure issue to front-page news.

The issues in the MacLean case — who is entitled to whistleblower protection, what use can be made of retroactive classification to hide previously unclassified information, how many informal classification categories the government can create bureaucratically, and what role the Constitution and the Supreme Court have in all this — are arcane and complex. But stay with me. Understanding the depths to which the government is willing to sink to punish one man who blew the whistle tells us the world about Washington these days and, as they say, the devil is in the details.

CONTINUED...

http://www.juancole.com/2014/03/transparent-administration-whistleblowers.html

Russ Tice, Bush-Era Whistleblower, Claims NSA Ordered Wiretap Of Barack Obama In 2004

The Huffington Post | By Nick Wing
Posted: 06/20/2013

Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst who in 2005 blew the whistle on what he alleged was massive unconstitutional domestic spying across multiple agencies, claimed Wednesday that the NSA had ordered wiretaps on phones connected to then-Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004.

Speaking on "The Boiling Frogs Show," Tice claimed the intelligence community had ordered surveillance on a wide range of groups and individuals, including high-ranking military officials, lawmakers and diplomats.

"Here's the big one ... this was in summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator for Illinois," he said. "You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives right now would you? It's a big white house in Washington, D.C. That's who they went after, and that's the president of the United States now."

Host Sibel Edmonds and Tice both raised concerns that such alleged monitoring of subjects, unbeknownst to them, could provide the intelligence agencies with huge power to blackmail their targets.

"I was worried that the intelligence community now has sway over what is going on," Tice said.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama_n_3473538.html
The JFK Assassination: A False Mystery Concealing State Crimes