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Panels 1-3: Supporting evidence again thanks to Joe Shansky’s article, Killing Activists in Honduras, published in Upside Down World and on his website.
If you can’t wait to read the rest of this final installment of the Honduran Coup, the complete third part is now up online at the Huffington Post. Please leave a comment or RT the link.
In the meantime, become an Archcomix fan or pre-order your Honduran coup comic for $5 plus shipping if you haven’t already – pre-orders close in the next 5 hours.
Panels 1-4: Supporting evidence again thanks to Joe Shansky’s article, Killing Activists in Honduras, published in Upside Down World and on his website.
The big news you’ve all been waiting for – the whole final installment of the Honduran Coup is now up online at the Huffington Post. Please leave a comment or RT the link.
In the meantime, become an Archcomix fan or pre-order your Honduran coup comic for $5 plus shipping if you haven’t already.
Panels 1-3: Supporting evidence thanks to Joe Shansky’s article, Killing Activists in Honduras, published in Upside Down World and on his website.
The big news you’ve all been waiting for should be announced in a few hours time.
In the meantime, become an Archcomix fan or pre-order your Honduran coup comic for $5 plus shipping if you haven’t already.
Panels 1-4: The COFADEH report can be viewed here.
I also have some big news that you can play a part in. I’ll post it on Monday, so be sure to come back and see how you can get involved.
And if you haven’t already…
Become an Archcomix fan or order a copy of the Honduran coup comic – less than a week left for pre-orders.
Panel 1: Direct quote from Hillary Clinton on the State dept website.
Panel 2: Read the COFADEH report here.
And if you haven’t already…
Become an Archcomix fan or order a copy of the Honduran coup comic – less than a week left for pre-orders.
Panel 2: For disputes on the legality of the coup and Zelaya’s supposed infraction of the Honduran Constitution, see the first part of the graphic history as well as the legal evidence here.
Panel 3: Go here for a list of such principles outlined by the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva.
You can still pre-order your own 32p hard copy comic of the Honduran Coup here – $5 plus shipping (US – $2, rest of the world $4)
Given the less than chirpy tone of the last rant, I’ll kick things off with an optimistic bang: news from Japan that the much-maligned military base planned for Okinawa has suffered a ‘setback’, to use US military parlance. In standard english, that means there are now too many people bitterly opposed to it to be conveniently ignored and forgotten about. Think peace in Iraq (we’ll get to that in a second) and you’ll see what I mean.
At last the groundswell of feeling against Uncle Sam’s maniacal militarism has finally found its spokesperson in the form of Susumu Inamine, the newly-elected mayor of Nago, Okinawa, who plans to revoke the 2006 US-Japan agreement that would move the majority of US troops (some 25,000+) currently based in Futenma, Okinawa to his hometown. Whose population is around 60,000. As if the prospective dash of cosmopolitanism wasn’t alluring enough, Nago is also turning down the opportunity to have a US helicopter crash land on its university campus, or servicemen rape its schoolgirls – once in 1995 and again in 2008. The move is a major spanner in the works for the US, who only want to leapfrog onto the undoubtedly far more pliant island of Guam by 2014 anyway. Oh wait, the locals are against a base there too. Don’t they know anything about national security?
The other glimmer of hope comes from the very man who once symbolized hope to millions, el presidente Obama. Speaking out against the indefensibly bad move from the Supreme Court last week to open the sluice gate on corporate contributions to the US electoral process, Barack raged: “[this] opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money in our democracy…This ruling strikes at our democracy itself”. Let’s hope no one reminds him that he has half of Wall Street kicking around in his cabinet. For an educational (and infuriating) way to waste away an afternoon, check out opensecrets.org and trace the flow of green to the white house. It’s not often that I (or anyone) looks to the UK as the paradigm of political process, but at least we have caps on campaign spending.
And now, the bad news. Apparently there aren’t enough accountants in Iraq, and the US-backed reconstruction effort, spearheaded by US firm Dyncorps, is hemorrhaging cash to the tune of $2.5bn lost expenses in training the iraqi police force. Once the moneymen get there, someone point them towards Afghanistan, where -yep, you guessed it- Dyncorps is also in charge of getting things up and running.
Coming soon: tomorrow’s inauguration in Honduras of conservative, coup-supporting President Porfirio Lobo, who takes office after the bloodiest months in his country’s recent history. Fear not, the last installment of the Honduran Coup: the graphic history is on my drawing board as I type. And for that Friday feeling, be sure to check out the sweat patches on Tony ‘Teflon’ Blair as the non-stick ex-PM tells us all how he and Dubya saved us from Saddam at the Iraq Inquiry this Friday.
PS Feel free to share/digg/tweet etc this and any comic from www.archcomix.com, there’s more than enough bile to go around.
Brace yourselves, this is going to be a long one to reflect what an ugly week it’s been in US-related politics. First up, here’s the latest part of the School of the Americas piece – skip back 3 steps to get to the beginning and find out more about SOA/WHINSEC and their illustrious graduates’ violent pasts.
As the estimated number of dead in Haiti rises past the 200,000 mark, several news reports (Democracy Now!, The Guardian and Al Jazeera for starters) are describing the US’s apparent takeover of the main airport at Port-au-Prince. Convoys carrying aid, medical supplies and water are being re-directed to make way for a worrying number of US troops, who are being deployed ‘to ensure security’. Yes Magazine had a great quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, after declaring her expectation that the Haitian government would pass an emergency decree – including things like the right to impose curfews – said, “The decree would give the government an enormous amount of authority, which in practice they would delegate to us”. Of course they would.
Naomi Klein leads the charge for transparency to prevent Haiti from succumbing to the free market agenda that New Orleans did in the aftermath of Katrina. Here’s a checklist of suggested actions sent by Rep. Paul Teller on September 13, 2005 – let’s hope they don’t start happening in Port-au-Prince. One other chilling similarity with Katrina is the already conspicuous presence of Blackwater-esque private mercenary forces, operating under the philanthropically-tinged moniker International Peace Operations Association. For an altogether more upfront description of their services in Haiti, checkout this webpage hosted by a similar private outfit called All Pro Legal Investigations – under the ‘Personal Protection’ header they’ll even deal with ‘worker unrest’ and ‘high-threat terminations’. What more could an International Peacekeeping force want? Jeremy Scahill has the whole scoop over at the Nation.
The bad news then came home, not only with the loss of the Massachusetts Senate seat for the Democrats, but also yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that curbing corporate donations to electoral campaigns is unconstitutional. Why? Because it infringes on the said corporations’ first amendment rights to free speech. I’m sure that’s exactly what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he said, “the end of democracy will occur when government falls into the hands of the lending institutions and moneyed incorporations.” See corporate watch for more info.
Lastly, one piece of good news to try and even up the balance. The online human rights and social justice magazine Independent World Report will publish my 4-page piece on Diego Garcia in their next issue.
