It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.
But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.
A far cry from their treatment of the Iranian elections in which its editorial opinion seems firmly on the side of the protestors and their demands for free and fair elections. How come the Wall Street Journal is so concerned about Iranian democracy but so cavalier about the Hondurian coup?
Simple. Iran is an enemy of the US and is therefore safe to attack. Honduras is an ally and what happened there has not be done without at least some level of support or approval from the US government, if not necessarily any official support. It’s an old, old tradition Mary O’Grady engaged in, this whitewashing of a military coup. Nicaragua, El Salvador, Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Argentine; every time the US government meddled in a South American country or allowed its military to thwart a nascent democracy, the newspapers of record were there to excuse it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the “liberal” NYT or the “conservative” WSJ, every time an US supported coup happened, they helped whitewash it. Read Manufacturing Consent, read Killing Hope, dig through the newspaper archives and you’ll find the same thing over and over again.
Construction contractors at Total’s Lindsey oil refinery have settled their labour dispute by agreeing to reinstate 700 sacked workers, amid concerns that the sackings had led to wildcat sympathy strikes across the country.
The deal – brokered at a meeting between the managing contractor, Jacobs, the Engineering and Construction Industry Association (ECIA) and the GMB and Unite trade unions in the early hours of yesterday – will be put to staff working on Lindsey’s hydro-desulphurisation unit building site on Monday. The proposal is expected to be accepted.
[...]
However, the redundancy programme is not over at Lindsey. The dispute started because 51 workers were laid off by one of Jacobs’ subcontractors on the site, at the same time as another was hiring. But the project is nearly finished, so staff will still have to be cut. Once all workers, including the original 51 redundancies, are back at work on Monday a new formal redundancy programme will start.
The reinstatement deal includes an assurance of a minimum of four weeks employment, and guarantees both efforts to co-ordinate new work and normal severance payments in the event of redundancy.
There were disruptions at nine engineering building sites in response to the problems at Lindsey, including the South Hook liquefied natural gas terminal and the Sellafield nuclear plant.
The Lindsey deal is a stark volte-face from the employers’ earlier hardball tactics of immediate dismissal. Sources close to the dispute credit the change in attitude to demands from Total that the completion of its building project take priority over subcontractors’ industrial relations issues. Pressure from other companies affected by the problems was also a factor.
That’s twice now that socalled wildcat strike action forced Total and its contractors into a retreat at Lindsey. Sympathy strikes elsewhere helped put pressure on the bosses, who might have been able to ignore the strike at Lindsey on its own. It also showed that the Thatcherite laws forbidding such wildcat action need to be repealed and until they are, to be ignored by the workers, if not by the unions.
Let’s see. Honduras’ leftist president, Manuel Zelaya is lifted from his bed in the middle of the night by the army, sent into exile into Costa Rica. The speaker of the Hondurian national congress is instead sworn in and immediately sets a curfew for the next two days. All of this is justified with claims that Zelaya was violating the Hondurian constitution. In the background is a deeper social struggle between the old elite and the reformist government of Zelaya. Oh, and the Honduran Joint Chief of Staff was a graduate of the School of the Americas, the US infamous torture school.
Does or does this not sound like a classic South American coup?
UPDATE: According to Eva Gollinger, it does. She provides some background about the conflict between leftist president Zelaya and the coupists:
The current constitution, written in 1982 during the height of the Reagan Administration’s dirty war in Central America, was designed to ensure those in power, both economic and political, would retain it with little interference from the people. Zelaya, elected in November 2005 on the platform of Honduras’ Liberal Party, had proposed the opinion poll be conducted to determine if a majority of citizens agreed that constitutional reform was necessary. He was backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in the country. If the poll had occured, depending on the results, a referendum would have been conducted during the upcoming elections in November to vote on convening a constitutional assembly. Nevertheless, today’s scheduled poll was not binding by law.
In fact, several days before the poll was to occur, Honduras’ Supreme Court ruled it illegal, upon request by the Congress, both of which are led by anti-Zelaya majorities and members of the ultra-conservative party, National Party of Honduras (PNH). This move led to massive protests in the streets in favor of President Zelaya. On June 24, the president fired the head of the high military command, General Romeo Vásquez, after he refused to allow the military to distribute the electoral material for Sunday’s elections. General Romeo Vásquez held the material under tight military control, refusing to release it even to the president’s followers, stating that the scheduled referendum had been determined illegal by the Supreme Court and therefore he could not comply with the president’s order. As in the Unted States, the president of Honduras is Commander in Chief and has the final say on the military’s actions, and so he ordered the General’s removal. The Minister of Defense, Angel Edmundo Orellana, also resigned in response to this increasingly tense situation.
This is a pattern we’ve seen before, a carefully proscribed democracy in which it’s impossible to change the status quo without going outside its legalistic boundaries, at which point the mkilitary has an excuse to intervene to “restore democracy”.
It was an unfortunate mistake. I shouldn’t laugh. No really, I shouldn’t. From the Evening Standard:
WHSmith sorry for Josef Fritzl Father’s Day promotion
Amar Singh
19.06.09
High street chain WH Smith apologised today after promoting a book on cellar rapist Josef Fritzl as a Father’s Day gift.
Shoppers at the Lewisham branch were shocked to see a non-fiction book on the Austrian, who kept his daughter captive for 24 years, in a “Top 50 Books for Dad” display.
Oh no. Not more physics rapping. Where will it all end?
She’s baaack! AlpineKat (a.k.a., Kate MacAlpine), that is, who gave us the Large Hadron Rap last year — currently viewed by over 5 million people on YouTube, and still counting. This time, she busts a rhyme over the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), a new project of the DOE being bult at Michigan State University in East Lansing. MSU hosted an event this past week to celebrate the future of rare isotope research, and AlpineKat was on hand to debut her new rap in full HD version: three elevated screens 14 feet across, augmented by a cutting-edge sound system.
Seen the claim from the PM and the Speaker when both attended ████████ in █████████ paying £ ███.██ just to watch two █████████. Both claimed £ ████.██ as though they actively took part ?
Shocking.
What’s █████████ ? We might well ask.
If it weren’t for the Daily Telegraph’s uncensored leaks, for all we’d know of it █████████ could have been anything, from a Harrods rocking horse to a box of man-size Pampers to an Agent Provocateur gimp mask.
At least if you’re on holiday and it rains this week there’s no need to be bored; you can always play redaction bingo and insert your own words. All those blacked out spaces leave lots of scope for the imagination and reading censored expenses claims is much more entertaining that way. Holiday fun for all the family!
Welcome the new audience for socialism and always remember what they find of interest. What they find of interest is minutae, because they are interested in political clarification and to that end the smallest details are important. Do not neglect the political ferment inside Skegness SWP, a council byelection in Oxford or what was on the front of Socialist Worker in 1969. This should fascinate a younger audience who missed the discussion the first time around (or the first two hundred). Nothing can do more to encourage new people to join the left than to see far leftists screaming at one another: they will surely understand that we need to achieve political clarification before we can really achieve anything. And political clarification, like tomorrow, never comes.
For nearly 90 years, The Royal British Legion has pursued a policy of being scrupulously above the party political fray. It is vital that everyone - the media, the public and our beneficiaries - know that we will not allow our independence to be undermined or our reputation impaired by being closely associated with any one political party. This is more important now than ever.
On May 27th, 2009, the National Chairman of The Royal British Legion wrote to you privately requesting that you desist from wearing the Poppy or any other emblem that might be associated with the Legion at any of your public appearances during the European Parliamentary election campaign.
He appealed to your sense of honour. But you have responded by continuing to wear the poppy. So now we’re no longer asking you privately.
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