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Today's Stories March 8, 2007 Elaine Cassel
Christopher Ketcham Christopher
Ketcham Alexander Cockburn / Jeffrey
St. Clair Winslow T.
Wheeler Sean Donahue Dave Lindorff Evelyn Pringle Tao Ruspoli Website of the Day
March 6, 2007 Gary Leupp Uri Avnery Patrick Cockburn Saul Landau Corporate Crime Reporter Ron Jacobs Mike Roselle P. Sainath Joshua Frank Aniket Alam Dave Zirin Website of
the Day
March 5, 2007 Greg Moses Patrick Cockburn James Petras Frida Berrigan Marjorie Cohn Douglas Kammen
and S.W. Hayati Sen. Barack Obama Michael Young Dave Lindorff Sonja Karkar Website of the Day
March 3 / 4, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Corporate Crime
Reporter Jeffrey St. Clair Patrick Cockburn Ralph Nader M. Shahid Alam Gilad Atzmon Fred Gardner George Ciccariello-Maher Rock &
Rap Confidential Gillian Russom Michael McPhearson Kevin Zeese Sunsara Taylor Wendy Thompson Kenneth Rexroth Missy Beattie Don Monkerud Tina Louise Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
March 2, 2007 Roger Morris Phil Gasper Mike Roselle Robert Bryce John V. Walsh Sherwood Ross China Hand David Rosen Chris Genovali Peter Harley Website of the Day
March 1, 2007 Laura Carlsen Paul Craig
Roberts Ray McGovern Christopher
Brauchli Najum Mustaq Brent Bowden Tina Richards Ethan Nadelman Mike Stark Wadner Pierre
/ Jeb Sprague Mike Whitney Website of
the Day
February 28, 2007 Peter Linebaugh Tao Ruspoli China Hand Marjorie Cohn Sarah Olson Susan Van Haitsma Nicole Colson Harvey Wasserman William S. Lind Nicola Nasser Website of the Day
February 27, 2007 Tariq Ali Tom Barry Uri Avnery Antonia Juhasz / Raed Jarrar Jeff Nygaard Hugh O'Shaughnessy Mitchell Kaidy Carl Finamore Anne McElroy
Dachel Ramzy Baroud Andrew Rouse Website of the Day
February 26, 2007 Franklin Lamb Bill Quigley Greg Moses Col. Dan Smith Ralph Nader Paul Buchheit Jeff Leys Dave Zirin Mike Whitney Michael Dickinson Website of the Day
February 24 / 25, 2007 Jeffrey St.
Clair R. T. Naylor Gary Leupp Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Jeffrey Blankfort Chris Sands Gary Freeman Larry Portis P. Sainath Lee Sustar Kevin Wehr Ken Couesbouc Soffiyah Elijah Kathlyn Stone Dave Lindorff Jason Kunin Kevin Zeese Remi Kanazi Missy Beattie Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
February 23, 2007 Franklin Spinney Jonathan Cook Patrick Cockburn Kathy Kelly Chris Dols Evelyn Pringle Stephen Pearcy Dan Brook Yifat Susskind Website of
the Day
February 22, 2007 Robert Fantina Tariq Ali Michael Shank John Ross Christopher Brauchli Cindy Litman Niranjan Ramakrishnan Kevin Zeese Aseem Shrivastava Reza Fiyouzat Illinois Students Against the
War Website of
the Day
February 21, 2007 Maass / St.
Clair Sharon Smith Greg Moses Margaret Kimberly Ralph Nader Nicola Nasser Mike Whitney Tao Ruspoli Byeong Jeongpil Corporate Crime
Reporter Josh Mahan Website of
the Day
February 20, 2007 Sgt. Martin
Smith Werther Corporate Crime Reporter Carl G. Estabrook China Hand Joshua Frank Megan Boler John Feffer Daryll E. Ray Alan Gregory Website of the Day
February 19, 2007 Paul Craig
Roberts Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Michael F.
Brown Robert Jensen Roger Burbach Monica Benderman Sonja Karkar John Walsh Talli Nauman Website of the Day
Feburary 17 / 18, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Tao Ruspoli Gary Leupp Jeffrey St.
Clair Roger Morris Uri Avnery James Brooks Sen. Russell
Feingold Linn Washington, Jr. Michele Brand Fred Gardner Mitchel Cohen Mike Ferner David Swanson P. Sainath Mike Stark Missy Beattie Jonathan Franklin Website of the Weekend
Marc Levy Andrew Cockburn Glen Ford Greg Moses Ron Jacobs John W. Farley James Marc Leas Tim Rinne Albert Wan Website of
the Day
Patrick Cockburn Saul Landau Stephen Lendman Evelyn Pringle Michael Simmons Kevin Zeese Dave Lindorff Pete Shanks Peter Rost Lenni Brenner
/ Gilad Atzmon Website of the Day
February 14, 2007 Tao Ruspoli Dick J. Reavis Margaret Kimberly Christopher Brauchli Paul Craig
Roberts John Ross Michael F.
Brown Dave Lindorff J.L. Chestunut,
Jr. Don Fitz Michael Donnelly Dr. Susan Block Website of
the Day
February 13, 2007 Uri Avnery Patrick Cockburn Ralph Nader Marjorie Cohn Col. Dan Smith Col. Douglas
MacGreagor Thomas Power Nicola Nasser David Swanson Columbia Coalition
Against the War Website of the Day
February 12, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Paul Craig
Roberts John Walsh Dr. John Carroll,
MD Greg Moses Nicole Colson Dave Lindorff Ray McGovern Doug Giebel David Swanson Website of the Day
February
10 /11, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Gabriel Kolko Patrick Cockburn Jeffrey St.
Clair Kevin Alexander Gray M. Shahid Alam Greg Moses Paul Craig
Roberts George Ciccariello-Maher Kevin Zeese Turner / Kim George Duke Walter Brasch Shepherd Bliss Missy Beattie Peter Harley Pat Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Day
Conn Hallinan Gary Leupp Lee Sustar Nikolas Kozloff Newton Garver Yitzhak Laor Dave Lindorff David Swanson Website of the Day
February 8, 2007 John V. Walsh Marjorie Cohn Trish Schuh Ron Jacobs Laura Carlsen Ramzy Baroud Brenda Norrell Bryan Farrell Judith Scherr Website of
the Day
February 7, 2007 Daniel Wolff Tao Ruspoli Tony Swindell Sharon Smith Ken Couesbouc Jeff Cohen Col. Dan Smith Tom Kerr Joshua Frank Adam Elkus Stephen Fleischman Website of
the Day
February 6, 2007 Diana Johnstone Gregory Wilpert Norman Solomon Dave Lindorff William Blum Mike Ferner CP News Service Evelyn Pringle Christopher Brauchli Alan Cabal Website of the Day
Dave Zirin Uri Avnery Ron Jacobs Paul Craig Roberts Newton Garver Bruce Anderson Saul Landau Ralph Nader James T. Phillips Mike Whitney Kenneth Rexroth Website of the Day
Alexander Cockburn Tao Ruspoli Jeffrey St.
Clair Patrick Cockburn P. Sainath Sen. Russell Feingold Diane Christian Brian Cloughley Diana Barahona Timothy J. Freeman Conn Hallinan John Ross Greg Moses Missy Beattie Joshua Frank Evelyn Pringle Stephen Fleischman Muhammad Idrees Ahmad Poets' Basement Website of the Day
Chris Kutalik R. Gibson /
E. W. Ross Pam Martens John Feffer Daryll E. Ray Ronald Bruce
St. John Mitchel Cohen Website of
the Day
Diane Farsetta Marjorie Cohn Mark Scaramella Ranni Amiri Christopher Ketcham Winston Warfield Corporate Crime Reporter Thomas P. Healy Website of the Dau
January 31, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Jean Bricmont Tao Ruspoli James T. Phillips William Johnson Tim Wilkinson Evelyn Pringle Joshua Frank Ramzy Baroud Mickey Z. Website of the Day
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March 8, 2007 The Trip Will Do Nothing to Sway a Region Demanding Fairer Economic PoliciesBush's Latin American Spring BreakBy MARK ENGLER Whether out of a desire to escape his record-low approval ratings at home or a hunger for Mexican tamales and Brazilian rice and beans, George W. Bush is making a run south of the border. This week the president will stop in Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico-making his longest-ever official visit to Latin America. Taking place at a time when feelings of animosity toward the United States are widespread, the tour will serve as Bush's most concerted effort yet to improve relations with the region. What are the odds that his travels will do anything to reverse anti-yanqui sentiment? Not good. Our neighbors to the south have ample reason to be resentful. They have suffered from a White House approach to Latin America that is based on a fundamentally flawed conception of U.S national interest. In a speech on Monday, the president contended that his trip will signal a new, more caring attitude toward Latin America and its people, including the large populations that live in poverty. But actions speak louder than words. Few things say more about the Bush administration's outlook on the region than the appointment in February of John Negroponte to Deputy Secretary of State. Negroponte was an ardent Cold Warrior who served as Ambassador to Honduras for a stretch in the 1980s when the country became a haven for death squads and CIA-funded Contra mercenaries. Negroponte's promotion made it ever more clear that Bush policy is being defined by Reaganite reactionaries whose conception of international relations is based on an outdated notion of U.S. power and Latin American acquiescence. The White House continues to champion flawed economic policies for the region and seems only to appreciate democracy when Latin American elections put pro-U.S. cronies into office. This rearguard policymaking has little chance of swaying a region that is growing increasingly independent. A foreign policy that truly values democratic processes and shows genuine concern for the region's poor would be far more likely to win allies than the diplomatic strong-arming and electoral meddling that has so often marked U.S. relations with our southern neighbors. Such a policy, however, remains a distant dream.
Fates Worse Than Neglect The failure of past U.S. policy is not merely a problem for the current administration; it also presents a challenge for the Democrats. Before gaining a majority of seats in Congress, the Dems claimed that the President had failed to pay enough attention to Latin America. In 2004, John Kerry argued in his campaign that Bush's Latin America policy was marked by "neglect, failure to adequately support democratic institutions, and inept diplomacy." Since then, various Democrats have repeated the charge, using the language of "neglect" whenever Latin America comes up. Yet now that the Democrats hold more power, this observation no longer suffices as a position on hemispheric affairs. Under President Clinton, Democratic policy toward Latin America focused on promoting an aggressive "free trade" agenda and pushing poor countries to pursue a corporate-friendly path to development. Clinton, after all, was the president who ushered the North American Free Trade Agreement through a Democratic-controlled Congress. Clinton further envisioned spreading NAFTA throughout the hemisphere with a Free Trade Area of the Americas. (Thankfully, the FTAA has been buried in recent years by waves of popular resistance, as well as disinterest from the new generation of progressive presidents that has won office in countries throughout the region.) Clinton-style economic neoliberalism failed to benefit the majority of Latin Americans, and this failure is at the very root of the region's recent swing to the left. Policies like privatizing public industries, cutting government social spending, and deregulating financial sectors may have paved the way for multinational corporations to spread. However, they produced two decades of abysmal GDP growth in Latin America. While a small elite grew fantastically wealthy, most people in the region saw few, if any, improvements to their standard of living. The 1990s were supposed to be years of globalizing prosperity. Yet the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reported in 2001 that "nearly 36 percent of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean lives below the poverty line-the same proportion as a decade ago." This number greatly understates the number of citizens who are scraping together only meager livelihoods or relying on money sent back from family members who have migrated north. Moreover, the wealth that has been produced in the region has not been shared equally. As a 2003 World Bank report explains, "The richest one-tenth of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean earn 48 percent of total income, while the poorest tenth earn only 1.6 percent." Of late, economic elitism has been smacking up against the popular vote. Comfortable candidates promising pro-U.S. policies are learning that it's hard to win elections with only that richest one-tenth of the population behind you. The Latin American populace is clearly fed up with neoliberalism's lackluster results, and rightly so. Democrats who propose a return to Clinton-era policy that values "free markets" above all else have missed this key lesson. They may vow to pay more attention to Latin America, but there's no guarantee that such attention will be a good thing. Given their past relations with the United States, Latin Americans are all too aware that there are worse things than neglect. It is incumbent upon the Democrats to offer a positive vision of America's national interest that can transcend both Bush's Cold-War-minded approach to hemispheric affairs and the flawed corporate globalization still favored by segments of the party.
Beyond Hugo Chávez One of the key pressures motivating U.S. action to improve its image in Latin America is the rise of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela as a formidable ideological rival. The most outspoken of the left-of-center Latin American presidents, Chávez has cemented his popularity by using the windfall of high oil prices to fund anti-poverty initiatives in Venezuela and beyond. He has sent upwards of $16 billion in aid abroad in recent years, with especially significant infusions of resources going to Bolivia and Argentina. Chávez has gone so far as to send subsidized heating oil to families that might otherwise go cold in poor sections of New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other American cities. No doubt, there are criticisms to be made of Chávez's style of governing, but the rabid Bush White House and the mainstream newspapers that have followed its lead have lost all sense of proportion in their outrage about Venezuela's "checkbook diplomacy." The denunciations make it sound as if Venezuela could have no humanitarian vision whatsoever about helping those in need, and as if the money that the U.S. sends overseas as foreign aid is offered out of pure, untainted benevolence. Given the Bush administration's well-established ideological preoccupation with shrinking government and its distaste for social safety nets, it has little credibility to speak out about the proper way to deploy the profits from oil resources. As it is, Venezuela's example is a powerful and persuasive one in a region that is ready for more equitable economic policies. Chávez has charged that the intent of Bush's trip is "to divide Latin America." He's right. A main White House strategy for handling newly progressive governments has been to denounce the vaguely ominous dangers of "populism" and try to separate "good" Latin American leftists from "bad" ones. Bush has selected to visit countries where he thinks he can pull leaders away from a Chávez-led regional bloc. But the real issues go far beyond Chávez, and those who want to pin our country's image problem in Latin America on a single antagonist ignore a central reality: Being on the U.S.'s good side hasn't been paying off too handsomely. In Brazil, where President Lula da Silva has worked to maintain good relations with the IMF and U.S. Treasury by largely adhering to neoliberal economic mandates, GDP growth over the past four years has averaged only 2.6 percent. This places Brazil alongside Haiti and El Salvador among the hemisphere's slowest growing economies. As Lula continues to structure his government's budgets around massive debt payments to wealthy lenders, he is left with little funding to devote to his flagship anti-hunger program and other social initiatives. Argentina, by contrast, has seen a 45 percent increase in economic growth since 2002, when it broke with the Washington Consensus, forced creditors to restructure its debt, and began taking a hard line with the IMF, whose recommendations had helped to produce that country's profound economic crisis in 2001. Latin American governments are well aware of the numbers. They are under pressure from the region's angry and enlivened citizenry to forge a more independent and egalitarian paths to development than what the U.S. is offering. That's what democracy is all about. And it shouldn't be considered a foreign policy failure that we must adapt to it. Mark Engler, an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, is author of the forthcoming How to Rule the World: The New Politics of Fighting Empire in the Post-Bush Era (Nation Books, Fall 2007). He can be reached via the web site www.DemocracyUprising.com. Research assistance for this
article provided by Sean Nortz.
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