Showing posts with label Attempts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Attempts. Show all posts
Monday, March 10, 2014
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Honduras attempts to solve their violent crime problem with private cities
Are private cities the miracle cure for Honduras’ surging violent crime, state violence and institutional disarray?
For many Hondurans, the past few years have been among the worst in memory. In the wake of a June 2009 coup that removed leftist president Manuel Zelaya from office, violent crime has soared and state institutions have fallen into disarray if not outright failure. Five months after the coup, the de facto government held elections which members of the political opposition boycotted and regional heads of state overwhelmingly refused to recognize. Under the resulting government, led by the National Party’s Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo Sosa, lawyers, journalists, human rights defenders, and Zelaya loyalists have routinely been the victims of threats, arrests and assassinations.
The role of the national police in violent, often politically motivated crime became a liability for the Lobo administration, which responded by developing a highly publicized police reform law. The bill appeared on its way to passage until November 2012, when a Supreme Court panel, by a 4 to 1 vote, ruled the law unconstitutional. Shortly after the court’s decision, the congress, in an extraordinary session reminiscent of Zelaya’s ouster years earlier, voted to dismiss the four justices who rejected the cleanup law. The press raised concerns that the move could turn into a full-blown crisis, many commentators focused on the police reform ruling as the conflict’s source; others pointed elsewhere.
A month earlier, the same four justices had ruled unconstitutional a law that would allow the creation of privately run municipalities with their own police, tax structures, and judicial systems, known as Regiones Especiales de Desarollo, or RED. According to Russell Sheptak, a Research Associate at the University of California and co-author of the Honduras Culture and Politics blog, the proximate cause for the justices’ removal was their ruling on the police reform law. “However, the muttering against them began at the top with Lobo Sosa chastising them over the RED ruling,” Sheptak wrote in an email, “and remained in the background of the debate about removing them.”
A protest against Charter cities legislation in Honduras. Reading: Coup d’etat: Economic crisis + model cities. Image credits: Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (OFRANEH)
Charter cities in Honduras?
The idea of building private cities is a divisive one. Many of the country’s elite advanced the concept as something new to spur economic growth. The cities would facilitate foreign investment and development, which would reduce the influence of criminal networks. Those opposing the concept, however, variously rejected the proposition as a neoliberal gift to the rich, a continuation of oligarchic rule and a threat to democratic governance. These objections came in the context of economic policies that have exacerbated inequality, poverty and unemployment. According to a recent report by the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, from 2010 to 2011 over 100% of income gains went to the 10% of Hondurans at the top of the income distribution ladder.
In 2009 Paul Romer, an economist then teaching at Stanford University, started presenting his idea to build new cities in poor countries as an innovative economic development strategy. The RED came to prominence in Honduras shortly after Pepe Lobo met with Romer. The new “charter cities,” as the U.S. economist called them, would be overseen by developed countries with a stronger rule of law and would prioritize investments in infrastructure. Each city would resemble a country within a country and would compete for hard-working, law-abiding residents from around the world. The islands of economic development would, in Romer’s vision, pressure governments to clean up their act and, cumulatively, could have a massive global impact.
Honduras’ governing officials enthusiastically embraced the idea and, given the country’s poverty and crime, Romer likely saw it as a natural fit. Yet after Lobo’s emergence through fraudulent elections, with the country’s institutions in shambles and many leading officials suspected of having ties to criminal networks, one could begin to see the plan’s inherent contradiction: How could you build brand new, principled institutions in partnership with a government so plagued by corruption?
Honduras attempts to solve their violent crime problem with private cities
Monday, October 28, 2013
The Lowdown on Social Security, and the Republican attempts to give more to the rich.
For some, Social Security is something that needs to be cut, an “entitlement” that Paul Ryan describes often as a hammock. That “hammock” helped Ryan pay for college.
I ran across this explanation that I thought explained what has happened to SS, no thanks to the Republican whiners who’ve benefited from pillaging the trust fund for their own benefit. Democrats have been a part of this too, but they’re not the ones who want to downsize it.
Social Security is running on a surplus of $ 2.6 trillion, it’s funded until 2037, it cannot run out of money, it cannot contribute to the deficit, it has lower administrative costs than private sector 401k retirement plans, and it’s wildly popular … a report by the AARP Public Policy Institute found that Social Security stimulates the economy, adding more than $ 1 trillion to the U.S. economy each year.
The Free-Market Alternative Doesn’t Work: Stunningly, the number of private sector workers covered by a pension with a guaranteed payout has dropped from 60 percent to 10 percent.
The most important thing to remember about the “evils of redistribution,” it’s just the opposite of what Republicans are telling you. Social Security money has been redistributed to the wealthy, not the other way around:
Redistribution Has Moved Retirement Money from the Middle Class to the Rich: Tax Expenditures — subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes that move tax money to the richest taxpayers — are estimated to be worth up to 8% of the GDP, or about $ 1.2 trillion. That alone is more than enough to pay for Social Security ($ 883 billion).
Because of this misdirected revenue, government has been forced to borrow from Social Security to fund its programs. Most notably, George W. Bush took our retirement money to pay for his two wars and his tax cuts for the rich.
If you take anything away from this article, it’s this:
This last reason, more than any of the others, reveals the overwhelming unfairness of cutting Social Security. In effect, the middle class is being told to replenish its own savings account after those savings were passed along to the military and the super-rich.
The Lowdown on Social Security, and the Republican attempts to give more to the rich.
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
US Attempts to Sabotage UN Chemical Weapons Investigation
Decision to attack Syria already made over a year ago
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
August 27, 2013
Desperate to maintain a narrative that will justify a cruise missile attack on Syria, the Obama administration is seemingly trying everything within its power to sabotage the UN chemical weapons investigation in Syria.
Image: WhiteHouse.gov
The reason is obvious – the last time the United Nations investigated claims of chemical weapons use in Syria, its inspectors concluded that it was the rebels and not Assad’s forces who were likely behind the sarin gas attack.
Eager to avoid a repeat that would completely derail the march to war, the White House in concert with Britain has repeatedly attempted to scupper the UN investigation or render it meaningless.
In the latest example, the Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration told UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon that “there wasn’t adequate security for the U.N. inspectors to visit the affected areas to conduct their mission,” a clear warning (or a blatant threat) that inspectors should pull out entirely.
This warning followed an incident, almost certainly the work of US-backed rebels, where a convoy of UN vehicles was fired upon by a sniper, causing the inspectors to temporarily suspend their work. Rebels have repeatedly acted with hostility against UN workers and peacekeepers, with one FSA group kidnapping 21 peacekeepers back in March.
While discouraging the UN from completing its investigation, the US and Britain have already declared that last week’s attack involved the use of chemical weapons and that it was the work of Bashar Al-Assad’s forces, despite numerous other examples where rebels have prepared and used chemical weapons themselves.
Even when Syria allowed UN inspectors to enter the affected region, the Obama administration responded that it was “too late,” and that the evidence could have been destroyed – so why bother investigating at all?
Washington and Downing Street are preparing to dive headlong into another potentially catastrophic war in the Middle East based on the evidence of a collection of YouTube videos. As in Iraq, it doesn’t really matter how flimsy the actual justification is because the decision to attack Syria was already made over a year ago, with a hyped humanitarian crisis being the agreed upon pretext, and the intervening period was merely an exercise in manufacturing a casus belli.
Why is the Obama administration and the British government so keen to prevent or dismiss as irrelevant the UN’s investigation?
The only reason is that it would threaten the already agreed upon narrative that Bashar Al-Assad, in complete defiance of any logic, ordered a chemical weapons attack right when UN inspectors were already in the country, timing the attack at the most opportune moment to justify western military intervention.
With western warplanes now already in place in Cyprus, along with a number of warships at sea, the die has been cast and the UN chemical weapons investigation will continue to be sabotaged or simply ignored, lest it turn up evidence that contradicts the rush to war.
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This article was posted: Tuesday, August 27, 2013 at 6:19 am
Tags: foreign affairs, war
US Attempts to Sabotage UN Chemical Weapons Investigation
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