Since the details of how cuts will be made in Medicare remain unclear patients are bound to worry if the passage of the bill will impact negatively on their care in spite of reassurances from the Obama administration. It is hard to believe that large cuts can be made without impacting the care that is given. Because of this many may think of the bills as not real reforms at all but simply changes that may impact negatively on their own personal care. This is from the NYTimes.
December 5, 2009
Home Care Patients Worry Over Possible Cuts
By ROBERT PEAR
CARIBOU, Me. — Dozing in a big lift chair, propped up by pillows in the living room of her modest home here, Bertha G. Milliard greeted the nurse who had come to check her condition and review the medications she takes for chronic pain, heart failure, stroke and dementia.
Ms. Milliard, 94, said those visits had been highly effective in keeping her out of the hospital. But the home care she receives could be altered under legislation passed by the House and pending on the Senate floor as Congress returned to work this week.
As they are across the nation, Medicare patients and nurses in this town in northern Maine are anxiously following the Congressional debate because its outcome could affect Medicare’s popular home health benefit in a big way. The legislation would reduce Medicare spending on home health services, a lifeline for homebound Medicare beneficiaries, which keeps them out of hospitals and nursing homes.
Under the bills, more than 30 million Americans would gain health coverage. The cost would be offset by new taxes and fees and by cutbacks in Medicare payments to health care providers.
The impact of the legislation on Medicare beneficiaries has been a pervasive theme in the first week of Senate debate, which is scheduled to continue through the weekend.
Home care shows, in microcosm, a conundrum at the heart of the health care debate. Lawmakers have decided that most of the money to cover the uninsured should come from the health care system itself. This raises the question: Can health care providers reduce costs without slashing services?
Under the legislation, home care would absorb a disproportionate share of the cuts. It currently accounts for 3.7 percent of the Medicare budget, but would absorb 10.2 percent of the savings squeezed from Medicare by the House bill and 9.4 percent of savings in the Senate bill, the Congressional Budget Office says.
The House bill would slice $55 billion over 10 years from projected Medicare spending on home health services, while the Senate bill would take $43 billion.
Democratic leaders in the House and Senate justify the proposed cuts in nearly identical terms. “These payment reductions will not adversely affect access to care,” but will bring payments in line with costs, the House Ways and Means Committee said. The Senate Finance Committee said the changes would encourage home care workers to be more productive.
The proposed cuts appear to be at odds with other provisions of the giant health care bills. A major goal of those bills is to reduce the readmission of Medicare patients to hospitals. Medicare patients say that is exactly what home care does.
“It helps me be independent,” said Mildred A. Carkin, 77, of Patten, Me., as a visiting nurse changed the dressing on a gaping wound in her right leg, a complication of knee replacement surgery. “It’s cheaper to care for us at home than to stick us in a nursing home or even a hospital.”
Delmer A. Wilcox, 89, of Caribou, lives alone, is losing his vision, uses a walker and has chronic diseases of the lungs, heart and kidneys. He said his condition would deteriorate quickly without the regular visits he received from Visiting Nurses of Aroostook, a unit of Eastern Maine Home Care.
The Aroostook County home care agency, which lost $190,000 on total revenues of $1.9 million in the year that ended Sept. 30, estimates that it would lose an additional $313,000 in the first year of the House bill and $237,000 under the Senate bill.
The prospect of such cuts has alarmed patients and home care workers. “We would have to consider shrinking the area we serve or discontinuing some services,” said Lisa Harvey-McPherson, who supervises the Aroostook agency as president of Eastern Maine Home Care.
“Our staff are scared,” Ms. Harvey-McPherson said, “but it’s our patients who will pay the price if Congress makes the cuts in home care.”
The four agencies under the umbrella of Eastern Maine Home Care cover a huge geographic area. Its nurses aim to see five patients a day, and they drive an average of 25 miles between patients, traversing potato fields and forests of spruce, birch and maple trees — and a few bear, moose and lynx. In winter, they may need a snowmobile, or even cross-country skis, to reach patients in remote areas.
President Obama has said that the savings in Medicare would be achieved by eliminating “waste and inefficiency” and that “nobody is talking about reducing Medicare benefits.” Moreover, he said, health care providers stand to benefit because they would gain tens of millions of new paying customers.
Home care executives question the arithmetic.
“No family or individual should ever go without health care coverage,” Ms. Harvey-McPherson said, as she drove up to a patient’s home here. “But an increase in the number of people with insurance would not necessarily help our agency because we depend so heavily on caring for seniors, with 80 to 90 percent of our home care revenue coming from Medicare.”
The impact on Medicare is a major concern for Maine’s senators, Susan Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, both Republicans being courted by the White House. Ms. Collins, a longtime champion of home care, has indicated she will resist the proposed cuts.
“Deep cuts to home health care would be completely counterproductive to our efforts to control overall health care costs,” Ms. Collins said. “Home care and hospice have consistently proven to be cost-effective and compassionate alternatives to institutional care.”
Private insurance companies often follow Medicare’s lead. So cuts in home-care payments could also jeopardize home care for privately insured patients like Christopher M. Hayes, a 35-year-old police officer in Presque Isle, Me. His left leg was crushed when he was struck by a car while jogging. He is learning to walk again with the help of a physical therapist.
In trying to slow the growth of Medicare, Democrats in Congress assume that health care providers can increase their productivity at the same pace as the overall economy.
But Saundra Scott-Adams, executive vice president of Eastern Maine Home Care, said: “That’s a joke for home health care. We provide one-on-one care.”
Her doubts are shared by Richard S. Foster, chief actuary of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Mr. Foster said the health care industry was “very labor-intensive” and could probably not match the productivity gains of the overall economy.
While nurses can monitor some patients with electronic telecommunications devices, they said they still needed to provide hands-on care to many.
Phillip H. Moran, a 65-year-old diabetic in Houlton, Me., lost his right leg several years ago. His kidneys are failing. Without regular visits from a home health nurse, Mr. Moran said, he would be in danger of losing his other leg because of complications from diabetes. As a double amputee, he would be more likely to go into a nursing home.
“The nurses’ visits are really important,” Mr. Moran said. “If they are cut, it could cost people their lives.”
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Chris Hedges: Liberals are Useless
Actually Hedges may be wrong. Liberals such as he describes may be worse than useless since by their actions they prevent the formation and success of third parties that might really challenge the status quo. However at present in the US it would seem that the more likely third party would be on the right, the Tea Party. If this party forms the liberals would shout with glee and continue to support the Democrats since they will benefit from the split of Republican support.
Liberals Are Useless
http://www.truthdig.com
By Chris Hedges
Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.
I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.
“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”
I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.
Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.
I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.
I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.
I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.
Chris Hedges, author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” will speak with other anti-war activists at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 11 a.m. Dec. 12 in a rally calling for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
AP / Jens Meyer
A woman in Germany selects a candy box with President Barack Obama’s face on it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Web site development by Hop Studios Hosted by NEXCESS.NET
Liberals Are Useless
http://www.truthdig.com
By Chris Hedges
Liberals are a useless lot. They talk about peace and do nothing to challenge our permanent war economy. They claim to support the working class, and vote for candidates that glibly defend the North American Free Trade Agreement. They insist they believe in welfare, the right to organize, universal health care and a host of other socially progressive causes, and will not risk stepping out of the mainstream to fight for them. The only talent they seem to possess is the ability to write abject, cloying letters to Barack Obama—as if he reads them—asking the president to come back to his “true” self. This sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.
I am not disappointed in Obama. I don’t feel betrayed. I don’t wonder when he is going to be Obama. I did not vote for the man. I vote socialist, which in my case meant Ralph Nader, but could have meant Cynthia McKinney. How can an organization with the oxymoronic title Progressives for Obama even exist? Liberal groups like these make political satire obsolete. Obama was and is a brand. He is a product of the Chicago political machine. He has been skillfully packaged as the new face of the corporate state. I don’t dislike Obama—I would much rather listen to him than his smug and venal predecessor—though I expected nothing but a continuation of the corporate rape of the country. And that is what he has delivered.
“You have a tug of war with one side pulling,” Ralph Nader told me when we met Saturday afternoon. “The corporate interests pull on the Democratic Party the way they pull on the Republican Party. If you are a ‘least-worst’ voter you don’t want to disturb John Kerry on the war, so you call off the anti-war demonstrations in 2004. You don’t want to disturb Obama because McCain is worse. And every four years both parties get worse. There is no pull. That is the dilemma of The Nation and The Progressive and other similar publications. There is no breaking point. What is the breaking point? The criminal war of aggression in Iraq? The escalation of the war in Afghanistan? Forty-five thousand people dying a year because they can’t afford health insurance? The hollowing out of communities and sending the jobs to fascist and communist regimes overseas that know how to put the workers in their place? There is no breaking point. And when there is no breaking point you do not have a moral compass.”
I save my anger for our bankrupt liberal intelligentsia of which, sadly, I guess I am a member. Liberals are the defeated, self-absorbed Mouse Man in Dostoevsky’s “Notes From Underground.” They embrace cynicism, a cloak for their cowardice and impotence. They, like Dostoevsky’s depraved character, have come to believe that the “conscious inertia” of the underground surpasses all other forms of existence. They too use inaction and empty moral posturing, not to affect change but to engage in an orgy of self-adulation and self-pity. They too refuse to act or engage with anyone not cowering in the underground. This choice does not satisfy the Mouse Man, as it does not satisfy our liberal class, but neither has the strength to change. The gravest danger we face as a nation is not from the far right, although it may well inherit power, but from a bankrupt liberal class that has lost the will to fight and the moral courage to stand up for what it espouses.
Anyone who says he or she cares about the working class in this country should have walked out on the Democratic Party in 1994 with the passage of NAFTA. And it has only been downhill since. If welfare reform, the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which gutted the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act—designed to prevent the kind of banking crisis we are now undergoing—and the craven decision by the Democratic Congress to continue to fund and expand our imperial wars were not enough to make you revolt, how about the refusal to restore habeas corpus, end torture in our offshore penal colonies, abolish George W. Bush’s secrecy laws or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of American citizens? The imperial projects and the corporate state have not altered under Obama. The state kills as ruthlessly and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury as rapaciously to enrich the corporate elite. It, too, bows before the conservative Israel lobby, refuses to enact serious environmental or health care reform, regulate Wall Street, end our relationship with private mercenary contractors or stop handing obscene sums of money, some $1 trillion a year, to the military and arms industry. At what point do we stop being a doormat? At what point do we fight back? We may lose if we step outside the mainstream, but at least we will salvage our self-esteem and integrity.
I learned to dislike liberals when I lived in Roxbury, the inner-city in Boston, as a seminary student at Harvard Divinity School. I commuted into Cambridge to hear professors and students talk about empowering people they never met. It was the time of the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Spending two weeks picking coffee in that country and then coming back and talking about it for the rest of the semester was the best way to “credentialize” yourself as a revolutionary. But few of these “revolutionaries” found the time to spend 20 minutes on the Green Line to see where human beings in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. They liked the poor, but they did not like the smell of the poor. It was a lesson I never forgot.
I was also at the time a member of the Greater Boston YMCA boxing team. We fought on Saturday nights for $25 in arenas in working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown. My closest friends were construction workers and pot washers. They worked hard. They believed in unions. They wanted a better life, which few of them ever got. We used to run five miles after our nightly training, passing through the Mission Main and Mission Extension Housing Projects, and they would joke, “I hope we get mugged.” They knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with across the Charles River. They would have felt awkward, and would have been made to feel awkward, at the little gatherings of progressive and liberal intellectuals at Harvard, but you could trust and rely on them.
I went on to spend two decades as a war correspondent. The qualities inherent in good soldiers or Marines, like the qualities I found among those boxers, are qualities I admire—self-sacrifice, courage, the ability to make decisions under stress, the capacity to endure physical discomfort, and a fierce loyalty to those around you, even if it puts you in greater danger. If liberals had even a bit of their fortitude we could have avoided this mess. But they don’t. So here we are again, begging Obama to be Obama. He is Obama. Obama is not the problem. We are.
Chris Hedges, author of “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” will speak with other anti-war activists at Lafayette Park across the street from the White House at 11 a.m. Dec. 12 in a rally calling for the withdrawal of all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
AP / Jens Meyer
A woman in Germany selects a candy box with President Barack Obama’s face on it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
Web site development by Hop Studios Hosted by NEXCESS.NET
Recent News on Honduras Accord and Elections
You will find almost nothing of this detail in any of the mass media. In fact the most you are likely to find anywhere is just a bald byte that the Honduran Congress says no to the re-instatement of Zelaya. Actually what they did was to pass a motion that again ratified the transition to the govt. of Micheletti. So in effect they have used the Accord brokered by the US to legitimise the coup government. Rather surprisingly the US actually objects and even maintains that Zelaya is the legitimate president. However, they will no doubt do nothing to upset the status quo in which the coup continues and again a unity govt. will be formed without the participation of Zelaya. Perhaps the US hopes to rope Zelaya in to some other face saving farce that will provide a fig leaf for the recognition of the coup government. This material is from this site.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
"Disappointing" vote by Congress "broke" Accord
The Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord committed both the faction of Roberto Micheletti and the legally elected president of Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, to a series of steps that, as has been noted at length here and elsewhere, was fatally flawed by the lack of a sufficiently clear timeline and an undefined mechanism for the formation of the expected "unity" government.
The US government, after it committed itself to recognizing the outcome of the election whether or not Zelaya was restored by the proposed vote in the Honduran Congress, has been held awkwardly to the transparent fiction that the Accord never was intended to imply a vote on Zelaya's restitution had to take place before the elections.
So immediately after the election, the Honduran Congress chose, for whatever reason, not to vote on a straight motion whether or not to restore President Zelaya, but rather, decided to turn the clock back to June 28 and re-enact the passage of the decree through which they claimed to install Roberto Micheletti as replacement president.
Where does that leave things?
Speaking for the US, Arturo Valenzuela said
We're disappointed by this decision since the United States had hoped that Congress would have approved [Zelaya's] return.
He also, remarkably, reiterated that the US continues
to accept President Zelaya as the democratically elected and legitimate leader of Honduras
and that
the status quo remains unacceptable.
In response to questioning after Valenzuela's statement, unnamed Senior Administration Officials expanded on this theme, noting that the November 29 voting
we have always felt, was an important step to the solution of the problems of Honduras, but not a sufficient one, because the restoration of the democratic and constitutional order had to go by additional measures... [emphasis added]
These "additional measures" explicitly included
this vote that the Congress was supposed to take on the restoration of Zelaya...[emphasis added]
Translation: the US expected a different vote than the one they got. What kind of vote? well, I am glad you asked:
That's why we were disappointed. And the fact that the Congress, in fact, did not vote President Zelaya back into office...
And about the unacceptable status quo, the same unnamed officials said
the absence of democratic and constitutional order is the unacceptable status quo
and
we continue to accept President Zelaya as the democratically elected president of Honduras.
For his part, Ricardo Lagos, the former Chilean president who had the bad experience of being part of the all-too-briefly functional "verification" commission, went further. As reported in El Universal of Venezuela, speaking on CNN En Español Lagos said
the refusal of the Honduran Congress to restore the overthrown president Manuel Zelaya "breaks" the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord and will make international recognition "more difficult"
Lagos puts the blame for the breaking of the accord squarely on the de facto regime and the Honduran Congress:
The decision "finishes breaking the accord between the (interim) government and Zelaya..it began to be broken [when] one of the parties thought that he could constitute [the unity government]" in a unilateral form...in reference to the regime of Roberto Micheletti.
Most important, in this interview, Lagos said that
in his reading, the vote on the part of Congress about the situation of Zelaya foressen in the Tegucigalpa Accord carried "implicitly" an "elegant form to restore" the overthrown official.
Or to put it another way: Lagos, like most readers, thought the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord called for a vote on restoring Zelaya as a way to give Congress a face-saving means to redress their original actions.
So, the US and Lagos are in harmony and both consider what the Congress did an unfortunate, even disappointing, waste of the opportunity provided in the Accord. Right?
Well, not so fast. The US manages to add yet another twist to its already contorted position. Valenzuela added to the remarks quoted above the qualification that
the decision taken by Congress, which it carried out in an open and transparent manner, was in accordance with its mandate in Article 5 of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord.
Let us pause to think about the implications here.
The US does not recognize the coup of June 28 as legitimate, and continues to consider Manuel Zelaya the only legitimate president of Honduras (while looking wistfully ahead to the end of January and a new inauguration as their new solution).
Yet the framework now transparently identifiable as forged by the US-- despite the thin veil of Costa Rican mediation cast over it by the use of Oscar Arias as a conduit-- has had one real result: it gave the Honduran legislature a chance to reaffirm the very same unconstitutional actions whose outcoes the US says it still does not recognize.
Quite a powerful tool, that Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord: it apparently cleanses constitutional rupture and makes it something the international community has to accept-- because it was transparent.
But then, so were the events of June 28. They were transparently a coup d'etat.
Yet, the US argues that the exact same decree that was illegitimate on June 28 is legitimate in December because it was enacted in response to the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord.
What a powerful thing that Accord turned out to be: it supercedes the Constitution of Honduras and whitewashes a universally condemned coup.
Posted by RAJ at 7:55 PM 10 comments Links to this post
Labels: Arturo Valenzuela, Congreso Nacional, Honduras coup, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Ricardo Lagos, Tegucigalpa/San Jose Accord
Thursday, December 3, 2009
"Disappointing" vote by Congress "broke" Accord
The Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord committed both the faction of Roberto Micheletti and the legally elected president of Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, to a series of steps that, as has been noted at length here and elsewhere, was fatally flawed by the lack of a sufficiently clear timeline and an undefined mechanism for the formation of the expected "unity" government.
The US government, after it committed itself to recognizing the outcome of the election whether or not Zelaya was restored by the proposed vote in the Honduran Congress, has been held awkwardly to the transparent fiction that the Accord never was intended to imply a vote on Zelaya's restitution had to take place before the elections.
So immediately after the election, the Honduran Congress chose, for whatever reason, not to vote on a straight motion whether or not to restore President Zelaya, but rather, decided to turn the clock back to June 28 and re-enact the passage of the decree through which they claimed to install Roberto Micheletti as replacement president.
Where does that leave things?
Speaking for the US, Arturo Valenzuela said
We're disappointed by this decision since the United States had hoped that Congress would have approved [Zelaya's] return.
He also, remarkably, reiterated that the US continues
to accept President Zelaya as the democratically elected and legitimate leader of Honduras
and that
the status quo remains unacceptable.
In response to questioning after Valenzuela's statement, unnamed Senior Administration Officials expanded on this theme, noting that the November 29 voting
we have always felt, was an important step to the solution of the problems of Honduras, but not a sufficient one, because the restoration of the democratic and constitutional order had to go by additional measures... [emphasis added]
These "additional measures" explicitly included
this vote that the Congress was supposed to take on the restoration of Zelaya...[emphasis added]
Translation: the US expected a different vote than the one they got. What kind of vote? well, I am glad you asked:
That's why we were disappointed. And the fact that the Congress, in fact, did not vote President Zelaya back into office...
And about the unacceptable status quo, the same unnamed officials said
the absence of democratic and constitutional order is the unacceptable status quo
and
we continue to accept President Zelaya as the democratically elected president of Honduras.
For his part, Ricardo Lagos, the former Chilean president who had the bad experience of being part of the all-too-briefly functional "verification" commission, went further. As reported in El Universal of Venezuela, speaking on CNN En Español Lagos said
the refusal of the Honduran Congress to restore the overthrown president Manuel Zelaya "breaks" the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord and will make international recognition "more difficult"
Lagos puts the blame for the breaking of the accord squarely on the de facto regime and the Honduran Congress:
The decision "finishes breaking the accord between the (interim) government and Zelaya..it began to be broken [when] one of the parties thought that he could constitute [the unity government]" in a unilateral form...in reference to the regime of Roberto Micheletti.
Most important, in this interview, Lagos said that
in his reading, the vote on the part of Congress about the situation of Zelaya foressen in the Tegucigalpa Accord carried "implicitly" an "elegant form to restore" the overthrown official.
Or to put it another way: Lagos, like most readers, thought the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord called for a vote on restoring Zelaya as a way to give Congress a face-saving means to redress their original actions.
So, the US and Lagos are in harmony and both consider what the Congress did an unfortunate, even disappointing, waste of the opportunity provided in the Accord. Right?
Well, not so fast. The US manages to add yet another twist to its already contorted position. Valenzuela added to the remarks quoted above the qualification that
the decision taken by Congress, which it carried out in an open and transparent manner, was in accordance with its mandate in Article 5 of the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord.
Let us pause to think about the implications here.
The US does not recognize the coup of June 28 as legitimate, and continues to consider Manuel Zelaya the only legitimate president of Honduras (while looking wistfully ahead to the end of January and a new inauguration as their new solution).
Yet the framework now transparently identifiable as forged by the US-- despite the thin veil of Costa Rican mediation cast over it by the use of Oscar Arias as a conduit-- has had one real result: it gave the Honduran legislature a chance to reaffirm the very same unconstitutional actions whose outcoes the US says it still does not recognize.
Quite a powerful tool, that Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord: it apparently cleanses constitutional rupture and makes it something the international community has to accept-- because it was transparent.
But then, so were the events of June 28. They were transparently a coup d'etat.
Yet, the US argues that the exact same decree that was illegitimate on June 28 is legitimate in December because it was enacted in response to the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord.
What a powerful thing that Accord turned out to be: it supercedes the Constitution of Honduras and whitewashes a universally condemned coup.
Posted by RAJ at 7:55 PM 10 comments Links to this post
Labels: Arturo Valenzuela, Congreso Nacional, Honduras coup, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, Ricardo Lagos, Tegucigalpa/San Jose Accord
Monday, December 7, 2009
Iraq Counterterror leader killed
Rather ironic that this happened in Tikrit that was the home town of Saddam Hussein. This shows that Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups in Iraq are not yet a spent force. Attention has turned away from Iraq to Afghanistan but there are still plenty of unresolved problems in Iraq including the fact that the Sunnis are far from happy with the Shia dominated government and the Kurds are unhappy about the status of cities such as Kirkuk. No oil law has yet been passed federally and that was an important benchmark for progress set by the Bush administration!
News From Antiwar.com - http://news.antiwar.com -
Iraq Counterterror Leader Slain in Tikrit
Posted By Jason Ditz
The death of Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Subhi al-Fahal, one of the top anti-terror chiefs in central Iraq, is being celebrated by insurgents across Iraq, and crowed about on Iraqi al-Qaeda affiliated web sites.
Fahal was an outspoken terror opponent, and rejected government efforts to reform militants, suggesting that only killing them en masse could pacify the region.
And the colonel put his theory into practice, claiming to have single-handedly slaughtered over 250 members of al-Qaeda, at least 200 of them Iraqi citizens.
US officials praised the late Fahal as “brave and effective,” and said “he was the kind of person who was willing to lead Iraq to a peaceful future.” It seems this willingness was irrespective of the number of people he’d have to kill along the way.
But it seems that Lt. Col Fahal’s violent past finally caught up with him yesterday, when a suicide bomber killed him and ten other people. Fahal appears to have been the target of the attack.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from News From Antiwar.com: http://news.antiwar.com
URL to article: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/12/04/iraq-counterterror-leader-slain-in-tikrit/
Click here to print.
Copyright © 2009 News From Antiwar.com. All rights reserved.
News From Antiwar.com - http://news.antiwar.com -
Iraq Counterterror Leader Slain in Tikrit
Posted By Jason Ditz
The death of Lieutenant Colonel Ahmed Subhi al-Fahal, one of the top anti-terror chiefs in central Iraq, is being celebrated by insurgents across Iraq, and crowed about on Iraqi al-Qaeda affiliated web sites.
Fahal was an outspoken terror opponent, and rejected government efforts to reform militants, suggesting that only killing them en masse could pacify the region.
And the colonel put his theory into practice, claiming to have single-handedly slaughtered over 250 members of al-Qaeda, at least 200 of them Iraqi citizens.
US officials praised the late Fahal as “brave and effective,” and said “he was the kind of person who was willing to lead Iraq to a peaceful future.” It seems this willingness was irrespective of the number of people he’d have to kill along the way.
But it seems that Lt. Col Fahal’s violent past finally caught up with him yesterday, when a suicide bomber killed him and ten other people. Fahal appears to have been the target of the attack.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article printed from News From Antiwar.com: http://news.antiwar.com
URL to article: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/12/04/iraq-counterterror-leader-slain-in-tikrit/
Click here to print.
Copyright © 2009 News From Antiwar.com. All rights reserved.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Iraq parliament again fails to pass electoral law
The US is getting quite anxious about this process since the main withdrawal from Iraq is supposed to take place 60 days after the election. If the election is late so may be the withdrawal. Even if the bill goes through today it would seem that election cannot take place until near the end of February.
Iraq MPs again fail to vote on new election law
Baghdad, Dec 5 (AFP) Iraq's parliament met today to vote on a new electoral law for polls early next year but no quorum was reached and the session was postponed until tomorrow, speaker Iyad Samarrai said.
"There are only 113 members present, and therefore no quorum. A new session will take place tomorrow at 11 am (1330 IST)," he told MPs.
There are 275 seats in the Iraqi legislature, and at least 138 members must be present for a session to go ahead.
President Jalal Talabani had called today's session to vote on a draft law to govern legislative elections, urging MPs to quickly pass the law, without which the general election can not proceed.
The United Nations on Wednesday proposed February 27 as the most "feasible" date for parliamentary elections, nearly a month later than the deadline set by the constitution.
Iraq MPs again fail to vote on new election law
Baghdad, Dec 5 (AFP) Iraq's parliament met today to vote on a new electoral law for polls early next year but no quorum was reached and the session was postponed until tomorrow, speaker Iyad Samarrai said.
"There are only 113 members present, and therefore no quorum. A new session will take place tomorrow at 11 am (1330 IST)," he told MPs.
There are 275 seats in the Iraqi legislature, and at least 138 members must be present for a session to go ahead.
President Jalal Talabani had called today's session to vote on a draft law to govern legislative elections, urging MPs to quickly pass the law, without which the general election can not proceed.
The United Nations on Wednesday proposed February 27 as the most "feasible" date for parliamentary elections, nearly a month later than the deadline set by the constitution.
Eric Prince: Contractor, Soldier, Spy
Of course Blackwater sensing that it had a tainted brand is now Xe. It still manages to obtain contracts from the US government. Although the US denies it, there is considerable evidence it is operating in Pakistan. This is just a snippet from Vanity Fair. Prince was a darling of the Bush administration and had huge profitable contracts in Iraq but managed to get itself in hot water because of the actions of some of its employees.
Scandal Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy
Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.
By Adam Ciralsky January 2010
Iput myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.
Scandal Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy
Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.
By Adam Ciralsky January 2010
Iput myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Malalai Joya on the Afghan Mission
This article was written shortly before Obama gave his speech on Afghanistan but she was right about what Obama chose to do. Joya is an outspoken female member of the Afghan parliament who has been suspended for criticising the government. She had the temerity to point out that the group contained warlords guilty of gross human rights violations. The fact that what she said was true did not help her.
Joya has always opposed the occupation at the same time as the opposes the Taliban and the Karzai government. Nevertheless she remains optimistic that the Afghan people themselves will be able to change the situation for the better once the foreign occupiers leave.
A troop surge can only magnify the crime against Afghanistan
If Barack Obama heralds an escalation of the war, he will betray his own message of hope and deepen my people's pain
Malalai Joya guardian.co.uk,
After months of waiting, President Obama is about to announce the new US strategy for Afghanistan. His speech may be long awaited, but few are expecting any surprise: it seems clear he will herald a major escalation of the war. In doing so he will be making something worse than a mistake. It is a continuation of a war crime against the suffering people of my country.
I have said before that by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the US and Nato have pushed us from the frying pan to the fire. Now Obama is pouring fuel on these flames, and this week's announcement of upwards of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will have tragic consequences.
Already this year we have seen the impact of an increase in troops occupying Afghanistan: more violence, and more civilian deaths. My people, the poor of Afghanistan who have known only war and the domination of fundamentalism, are today squashed between two enemies: the US/Nato occupation forces on one hand and warlords and the Taliban on the other.
While we want the withdrawal of one enemy, we don't believe it is a matter of choosing between two evils. There is an alternative: the democratic-minded parties and intellectuals are our hope for the future of Afghanistan.
It will not be easy, but if we have a little bit of peace we will be better able to fight our own internal enemies – Afghans know what to do with our destiny. We are not a backward people, and we are capable of fighting for democracy, human and women's rights in Afghanistan. In fact the only way these values will be achieved is if we struggle for them and win them ourselves.
After eight years of war, the situation is as bad as ever for ordinary Afghans, and women in particular. The reality is that only the drug traffickers and warlords have been helped under this corrupt and illegitimate Karzai government. Karzai's promises of reform are laughable. His own vice-president is the notorious warlord Fahim, whom Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch describes as "one of the most notorious warlords in the country, with the blood of many Afghans on his hands".
Transparency International reports that this regime is the second most corrupt in the world. The UN Development Programme reports Afghanistan is second last – 181st out of 182 countries – in terms of human development. That is why we no longer want this kind of "help" from the west.
Like many around the world, I am wondering what kind of "peace" prize can be awarded to a leader who continues the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and starts a new war in Pakistan, all while supporting Israel?
Throughout my recent tour of the US, I had the chance to meet many military families and veterans who are working to put an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They understand that it is not a case of a "bad war" and a "good war" – there is no difference, war is war.
Members of Iraq Veterans Against War even accompanied me to meet members of Congress in Washington DC. Together we tried to explain the terrible human cost of this war, in terms of Afghan, US and Nato lives. Unfortunately, only a few representatives really offered their support to our struggle for peace.
While the government was not responsive, the people of the US did offer me their support. And polls confirm that the US public wants peace, not an escalated war. Many also want Obama to hold Bush and his administration to account for war crimes. Everywhere I spoke, people responded strongly when I said that if Obama really wanted peace he would first of all try to prosecute Bush and have him tried before the international criminal court. Replacing Bush's man in the Pentagon, Robert Gates, would have been a good start – but Obama chose not to.
Unfortunately, the UK government shamefully follows the path of the US in Afghanistan. Even though opinion polls show that more than 70% of the population is against the war, Gordon Brown has announced the deployment of more UK troops. It is sad that more taxpayers' money will be wasted on this war, while Britain's poor continue to suffer from a lack of basic services.
The UK government has also tried to silence dissent, for instance by arresting Joe Glenton, a British soldier who has refused to return to Afghanistan. I had a chance to meet Glenton when I was in London last summer, and together we spoke out against the war. My message to him is that, in times of great injustice, it is sometimes better to go to jail than be part of committing war crimes.
Facing a difficult choice, Glenton made a courageous decision, while Obama and Brown have chosen to follow the Bush administration. Instead of hope and change, in foreign policy Obama is delivering more of the same. But I still have hope because, as our history teaches, the people of Afghanistan will never accept occupation.
Joya has always opposed the occupation at the same time as the opposes the Taliban and the Karzai government. Nevertheless she remains optimistic that the Afghan people themselves will be able to change the situation for the better once the foreign occupiers leave.
A troop surge can only magnify the crime against Afghanistan
If Barack Obama heralds an escalation of the war, he will betray his own message of hope and deepen my people's pain
Malalai Joya guardian.co.uk,
After months of waiting, President Obama is about to announce the new US strategy for Afghanistan. His speech may be long awaited, but few are expecting any surprise: it seems clear he will herald a major escalation of the war. In doing so he will be making something worse than a mistake. It is a continuation of a war crime against the suffering people of my country.
I have said before that by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the US and Nato have pushed us from the frying pan to the fire. Now Obama is pouring fuel on these flames, and this week's announcement of upwards of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will have tragic consequences.
Already this year we have seen the impact of an increase in troops occupying Afghanistan: more violence, and more civilian deaths. My people, the poor of Afghanistan who have known only war and the domination of fundamentalism, are today squashed between two enemies: the US/Nato occupation forces on one hand and warlords and the Taliban on the other.
While we want the withdrawal of one enemy, we don't believe it is a matter of choosing between two evils. There is an alternative: the democratic-minded parties and intellectuals are our hope for the future of Afghanistan.
It will not be easy, but if we have a little bit of peace we will be better able to fight our own internal enemies – Afghans know what to do with our destiny. We are not a backward people, and we are capable of fighting for democracy, human and women's rights in Afghanistan. In fact the only way these values will be achieved is if we struggle for them and win them ourselves.
After eight years of war, the situation is as bad as ever for ordinary Afghans, and women in particular. The reality is that only the drug traffickers and warlords have been helped under this corrupt and illegitimate Karzai government. Karzai's promises of reform are laughable. His own vice-president is the notorious warlord Fahim, whom Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch describes as "one of the most notorious warlords in the country, with the blood of many Afghans on his hands".
Transparency International reports that this regime is the second most corrupt in the world. The UN Development Programme reports Afghanistan is second last – 181st out of 182 countries – in terms of human development. That is why we no longer want this kind of "help" from the west.
Like many around the world, I am wondering what kind of "peace" prize can be awarded to a leader who continues the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and starts a new war in Pakistan, all while supporting Israel?
Throughout my recent tour of the US, I had the chance to meet many military families and veterans who are working to put an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They understand that it is not a case of a "bad war" and a "good war" – there is no difference, war is war.
Members of Iraq Veterans Against War even accompanied me to meet members of Congress in Washington DC. Together we tried to explain the terrible human cost of this war, in terms of Afghan, US and Nato lives. Unfortunately, only a few representatives really offered their support to our struggle for peace.
While the government was not responsive, the people of the US did offer me their support. And polls confirm that the US public wants peace, not an escalated war. Many also want Obama to hold Bush and his administration to account for war crimes. Everywhere I spoke, people responded strongly when I said that if Obama really wanted peace he would first of all try to prosecute Bush and have him tried before the international criminal court. Replacing Bush's man in the Pentagon, Robert Gates, would have been a good start – but Obama chose not to.
Unfortunately, the UK government shamefully follows the path of the US in Afghanistan. Even though opinion polls show that more than 70% of the population is against the war, Gordon Brown has announced the deployment of more UK troops. It is sad that more taxpayers' money will be wasted on this war, while Britain's poor continue to suffer from a lack of basic services.
The UK government has also tried to silence dissent, for instance by arresting Joe Glenton, a British soldier who has refused to return to Afghanistan. I had a chance to meet Glenton when I was in London last summer, and together we spoke out against the war. My message to him is that, in times of great injustice, it is sometimes better to go to jail than be part of committing war crimes.
Facing a difficult choice, Glenton made a courageous decision, while Obama and Brown have chosen to follow the Bush administration. Instead of hope and change, in foreign policy Obama is delivering more of the same. But I still have hope because, as our history teaches, the people of Afghanistan will never accept occupation.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
