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You are absolutely correct bvar22. Today, in place of Keynesian economics, our government practices austerity for the masses and welfare for the wealthy. It's all oligarchy, all the time. And if a region or continent in this hemisphere doth stray, it's "Plan Columbia" for everybody.
Hear Hillary Clinton Defend Her Role in Honduras Coup When Questioned by Juan González
DemocracyNow! APRIL 13, 2016
EXCERPT...
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: There was a period there where the OAS was trying to isolate that regime. But the—apparently, some of the emails that have come out as a result of State Department releases show that some of your top aides were urging you to declare it a military coup, cut off U.S. aid. You didn’t do that.
HILLARY CLINTON: Mm-hmm.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You ended up negotiating with Óscar Arias a deal for new elections.
HILLARY CLINTON: Mm-hmm, right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But the situation in Honduras has continued to deteriorate.
HILLARY CLINTON: Right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: There’s been a few hundred people killed by government forces. There’s been all these children fleeing, and mothers, from Honduras over the border into the United States. And just a few weeks ago, one of the leading environmental activists, Berta Cáceres, was assassinated in her home.
HILLARY CLINTON: Right, right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Do you have any concerns about the role that you played in that particular situation, not necessarily being in agreement with your top aides in the State Department?
HILLARY CLINTON: Well, let me again try to put this in context. The Legislature—or the national Legislature in Honduras and the national judiciary actually followed the law in removing President Zelaya. Now, I didn’t like the way it looked or the way they did it, but they had a very strong argument that they had followed the Constitution and the legal precedents. And as you know, they really undercut their argument by spiriting him out of the country in his pajamas, where they sent, you know, the military to, you know, take him out of his bed and get him out of the country. So this was—this began as a very mixed and difficult situation.
If the United States government declares a coup, you immediately have to shut off all aid, including humanitarian aid, the Agency for International Development aid, the support that we were providing at that time for a lot of very poor people. And that triggers a legal necessity. There’s no way to get around it. So, our assessment was, we will just make the situation worse by punishing the Honduran people if we declare a coup and we immediately have to stop all aid for the people, but we should slow off and try to stop anything that the government could take advantage of, without calling it a coup.
So, you’re right. I worked very hard with leaders in the region and got Óscar Arias, the Nobel Prize winner, to take the lead on trying to broker a resolution without bloodshed. And that was very important to us, that, you know, Zelaya had friends and allies, not just in Honduras, but in some of the neighboring countries, like Nicaragua, and that we could have had a terrible civil war that would have been just terrifying in its loss of life. So I think we came out with a solution that did hold new elections, but it did not in any way address the structural, systemic problems in that society. And I share your concern that it’s not just government actions; drug gangs, traffickers of all kinds are preying on the people of Honduras.
So I think we need to do more of a Colombian plan for Central America, because remember what was going on in Colombia when first my husband and then followed by President Bush had Plan Colombia, which was to try to use our leverage to rein in the government in their actions against the FARC and the guerrillas, but also to help the government stop the advance of the FARC and guerrillas, and now we’re in the middle of peace talks. It didn’t happen overnight; it took a number of years. But I want to see a much more comprehensive approach toward Central America, because it’s not just Honduras. The highest murder rate is in El Salvador, and we’ve got Guatemala with all the problems you know so well.
So, I think, in retrospect, we managed a very difficult situation, without bloodshed, without a civil war, that led to a new election. And I think that was better for the Honduran people. But we have a lot of work to do to try to help stabilize that and deal with corruption, deal with the violence and the gangs and so much else.
SOURCE: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/13/hear_hillary_clinton_defend_her_role
PS: Glad you liked the photo. It was taken this afternoon in the Vatican. From their expressions, it looks like they're going over photos on a smartphone.
Here are a couple of similar looks, very different expressions:
Here are a couple of 20th century slavemasters, I mean, bankers...
Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush, sharing a moment and a bit o' information in this small world.
The back of the object they are examining shows typing in a box, formatted in a manner similar to what is often used in official US Government photos, for identifying content on the front of a photograph or treasure map.
Read what you wrote and thought of this:
Is the Clinton Foundation the Dulles Brother’s Sullivan and Cromwell?
by JOHN STANTON
CounterPunch, APRIL 15, 2016
EXCERPT...
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton instigated and legitimized the overthrow of the Honduran government in 2009 not all that unlike the 1954 Guatemala Coup engineered primarily by CIA Director Allen Dulles, supported by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and with the glowing approval of President Dwight Eisenhower.
In a March 2016 interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Greg Grandin, a professor of Latin American history at New York University, discussed the fallout from the 2009 Honduran Coup. “I mean, hundreds of peasant activists and indigenous activists have been killed. Scores of gay rights activists have been killed. I mean, it’s just—it’s just a nightmare in Honduras. I mean, there’s ways in which the coup regime basically threw up Honduras to transnational pillage. And Berta Cáceres [a prominent Honduran activist assassinated in 2016], in that interview, says what was installed after the coup was something like a permanent counterinsurgency on behalf of transnational capital. And that was—that wouldn’t have been possible if it were not for Hillary Clinton’s normalization of that election, or legitimacy.”
In an April interview with Dana Frank, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, on Democracy Now, Frank indicated that President Obama had basically turned over Central and South America to Hillary Clinton. Frank then said this: “I think it’s really about the U.S. pushback against the democratically elected governments of the left and the center-left that came to power in Latin America in the ’90s and in the 2000s—Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, El Salvador, all these countries. And Zelaya was the weakest link in that chain. He, himself, did not come out of a big social movement base at the time of his election, certainly since the coup. And I think they were—the U.S. was looking for a way to push back against that. There’s a very important military base, U.S. military base, Soto Cano Air Force Base, in Honduras. And Honduras has always been the most captive nation of the United States in Latin America. So, I think they were testing what they could get away with. And they got away with it. It was the first domino pushing back against democracy in Latin America and reasserting U.S. power, in service to a transnational corporate agenda.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/15/is-the-clinton-foundation-the-dulles-brothers-sullivan-and-cromwell/
It is the foreign policy of Empire -- war abroad and repression at home to empower and profit the connected few.
PS: Here's important news regarding CIA and its contract with Murder Inc: Dick Cheney helped Jerry Ford in covering up CIA's dirty laundry, Big Time.
"Peace and Prosperity" was more than a campaign slogan: Kennedy used the powers of government to make life better for ALL Americans. He also believed in democracy for other countries, from Congo to Vietnam. Then U.S. foreign policy suddenly changed with the death of JFK.
Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa
“In assessing the central character ...
Gibbon’s description of the Byzantine general
Belisarius may suggest a comparison:
‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times;
his virtues were his own.’”
— Richard Mahoney on President Kennedy
By Jim DiEugenio
CTKA, From the January-February 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 2)
EXCERPT…
The Self-Education of John F. Kennedy
During Kennedy’s six years in the House, 1947-1952, he concentrated on domestic affairs, bread and butter issues that helped his middle class Massachusetts constituents. As Henry Gonzalez noted in his blurb for Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street, he met Kennedy at a housing conference in 1951 and got the impression that young Kennedy was genuinely interested in the role that government could play in helping most Americans. But when Kennedy, his father, and his advisers decided to run for the upper house in 1952, they knew that young Jack would have to educate himself in the field of foreign affairs and gain a higher cosmopolitan profile. After all, he was running against that effete, urbane, Boston Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge. So Kennedy decided to take two seven-week-long trips. The first was to Europe. The second was a little unusual in that his itinerary consisted of places like the Middle East, India, and Indochina. (While in India, he made the acquaintance of Prime Minister Nehru who would end up being a lifelong friend and adviser.)
Another unusual thing about the second trip was his schedule after he got to his stops. In Saigon, he ditched his French military guides and sought out the names of the best reporters and State Department officials so he would not get the standard boilerplate on the French colonial predicament in Indochina. After finding these sources, he would show up at their homes and apartments unannounced. His hosts were often surprised that such a youthful looking young man could be a congressman. Kennedy would then pick their minds at length as to the true political conditions in that country.
If there is a real turning point in Kennedy’s political career it is this trip. There is little doubt that what he saw and learned deeply affected and altered his world view and he expressed his developing new ideas in a speech he made upon his return on November 14, 1951. Speaking of French Indochina he said: "This is an area of human conflict between civilizations striving to be born and those desperately trying to retain what they have held for so long." He later added that "the fires of nationalism so long dormant have been kindled and are now ablaze....Here colonialism is not a topic for tea-talk discussion; it is the daily fare of millions of men." He then criticized the U. S. State Department for its laid back and lackadaisical approach to this problem:
One finds too many of our representatives toadying to the shorter aims of other Western nations with no eagerness to understand the real hopes and desires of the people to which they are accredited.
The basic idea that Kennedy brought back from this trip was that, in the Third World, the colonial or imperial powers were bound to lose in the long run since the force of nationalism in those nascent countries was so powerful, so volcanic, that no extended empire could contain it indefinitely. This did not mean that Kennedy would back any revolutionary force fighting an imperial power. Although he understood the appeal of communism to the revolutionaries, he was against it. He wanted to establish relations and cooperate with leaders of the developing world who wished to find a "third way," one that was neither Marxist nor necessarily pro-Western. He was trying to evolve a policy that considered the particular history and circumstances of the nations now trying to break the shackles of poverty and ignorance inflicted upon them by the attachments of empire. Kennedy understood and sympathized with the temperaments of those leaders of the Third World who wished to be nonaligned with either the Russians or the Americans and this explains his relationships with men like Nehru and Sukarno of Indonesia. So, for Kennedy, Nixon’s opposition toward Ho Chi Minh’s upcoming victory over the French in Vietnam was not so much a matter of Cold War ideology, but one of cool and measured pragmatism. As he stated in 1953, the year before the French fell:
The war would never be successful ... unless large numbers of the people of Vietnam were won over from their sullen neutrality and open hostility. This could never be done ... unless they were assured beyond doubt that complete independence would be theirs at the conclusion of the war.
To say the least, this is not what the Dulles brothers John Foster and Allen had in mind. Once the French empire fell, they tried to urge upon Eisenhower an overt American intervention in the area. When Eisenhower said no, Allen Dulles sent in a massive CIA covert operation headed by Air Force officer Edward Lansdale. In other words, the French form of foreign domination was replaced by the American version.
CONTINUED…
http://www.ctka.net/pr199-africa.html
Jim DiEugenio is a DUer. Of course, other aspects of "national security" policy would change:
The Nation magazine wanted to know "Why don't Americans know what really happened in Vietnam?" Interesting read, it brings up how much USA uses the volunteer military and observes the corporate owned news media don't want to bring that up so that people continue to thank the troops for their service without wondering why they're tasked with missions in 133 countries around the world. What the article missed and people need to know:
JFK had ordered withdrawal from Vietnam with National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263. LBJ reversed it four days after Dallas with NSAM 273.
The 1,000 advisors were the beginning. All US military personnel were to be out of the country by the end of 1965, reported James K. Galbraith.
Then in NSAM 273, four days after the assassination in Dallas, LBJ changes the policy to stay and support South Vietnam in its "contest against the externally directed and supported Communist conspiracy."
History doesn't stay in the past, so bringing it to the light of day is important for democracy.
"Glorious Victory" by Diego Rivera
In 1974 Call to Abolish CIA, Sanders Followed in Footsteps of JFK, Truman
by Jon Schwarz
The Intercept, Feb. 22 2016
According to an article in Politico, Bernie Sanders, during his 1974 campaign for the Senate on Vermont’s Liberty Union Party ticket, called the Central Intelligence Agency “a dangerous institution that has got to go.” Sanders complained that the CIA was only accountable to “right-wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”
Jeremy Bash, a former CIA chief of staff who is now an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, told reporter Michael Crowley that Sanders’s comment “reinforces the conclusion that he’s not qualified to be commander in chief.” Bash explained: “Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength.” Bash was chief of staff for Leon Panetta at both the CIA and Defense Department, and now runs a consulting firm called Beacon Global Strategies.
But Sanders’ position is not that radical: many prominent politicians, including two previous Democratic commanders-in-chief, have called for the CIA to be dismantled or severely constrained.
John F. Kennedy famously described his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds” after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Peter Kornbluh points out in his book Bay of Pigs Declassified that the State Department at that same time proposed that the CIA should be stripped of its covert action capacity and renamed. However, the CIA escaped any serious repercussions — partly because, as Kornbluh explains, the CIA’s then-director John McCone made sure that most of the copies of a damning report on the Bay of Pigs by the Agency’s own Inspector General were literally burned.
Then in 1963, after Kennedy’s assassination, Harry Truman wrote a newspaper column explaining that “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations … I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President … and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.”
CONTINUED...
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/22/in-1974-call-to-abolish-cia-sanders-followed-in-footsteps-of-jfk-truman/
by Jon Schwarz
The Intercept, Feb. 22 2016
According to an article in Politico, Bernie Sanders, during his 1974 campaign for the Senate on Vermont’s Liberty Union Party ticket, called the Central Intelligence Agency “a dangerous institution that has got to go.” Sanders complained that the CIA was only accountable to “right-wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”
Jeremy Bash, a former CIA chief of staff who is now an adviser to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, told reporter Michael Crowley that Sanders’s comment “reinforces the conclusion that he’s not qualified to be commander in chief.” Bash explained: “Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength.” Bash was chief of staff for Leon Panetta at both the CIA and Defense Department, and now runs a consulting firm called Beacon Global Strategies.
But Sanders’ position is not that radical: many prominent politicians, including two previous Democratic commanders-in-chief, have called for the CIA to be dismantled or severely constrained.
John F. Kennedy famously described his desire to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds” after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Peter Kornbluh points out in his book Bay of Pigs Declassified that the State Department at that same time proposed that the CIA should be stripped of its covert action capacity and renamed. However, the CIA escaped any serious repercussions — partly because, as Kornbluh explains, the CIA’s then-director John McCone made sure that most of the copies of a damning report on the Bay of Pigs by the Agency’s own Inspector General were literally burned.
Then in 1963, after Kennedy’s assassination, Harry Truman wrote a newspaper column explaining that “I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations … I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President … and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.”
CONTINUED...
https://theintercept.com/2016/02/22/in-1974-call-to-abolish-cia-sanders-followed-in-footsteps-of-jfk-truman/
When secret government agencies and secret government agents act to benefit secret agendas and secret groups and secret individuals, it isn't democracy. It's not even an oligarchy. It's a form of tyranny so creepy it deserves to be called: "Unspeakable."
"What was your original face—the one you had before your parents gave birth to you?" -- Wei Shan
