We shouldn't be surprised by anything George Bush does in these final days, and it ranks fairly low in terms of the effect it will have on people's lives, but this is noteworthy
Bush is awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and to two former leaders: former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
Tony Blair and John Howard are one thing. Blair may (it's possible, albeit unlikely) redeem himself somewhat in his current position as Middle East Envoy.
Howard is the scumbag who said this about President-Elect Obama
"If I were running al Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats
But Uribe is an entirely different kettle of fish.
In addition to having been a narcotics trafficker, he's better known for his appalling record on preventing the murder of unionists.
From Human Rights Watch
Colombia has the worst record of violence against trade unionists in the world, with more than 2,500 killings since 1985 and nearly 3,500 threats against trade unionists since 1991, according to the National Labor School (ENS or Escuela Nacional Sindical), a highly respected labor rights group in Colombia. While the numbers of yearly killings fluctuates, during the administration of President Álvaro Uribe, the ENS has registered more than 400 killings and more than 1,300 threats against trade unionists.
A significant factor contributing to the violence is the Colombian government’s persistent failure to bring the perpetrators to justice and fully dismantle paramilitary mafias that have deliberately targeted trade unionists. Fewer than 3 percent of the killings have ever been solved. Last year, the Colombian Attorney General’s office established a specialized sub-unit to reopen some of these cases. However, it is too early to assess whether the sub-unit will produce substantial results.
When the Colombia-U.S. Free Trade Agreement was proposed, knowledge of this deplorable record led the AFL-CIO to send a delegation down there to investigate the situation.
In mid-February, Linda Chavez-Thompson, AFL-CIO executive vice president emerita, and Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America, led a union fact-finding delegation to Bogotá, Colombia.
...
The delegation spent many hours with both leaders and rank-and-file members of Colombian unions, listening to their stories of struggle against unscrupulous employers and often-hostile government bureaucrats. Trade unionists from all over the country and from dozens of sectors—including oil, flowers, health care, education, telecom, taxi drivers, municipal workers, retail, transport and bananas, among others—came to Bogota to share their anger, their frustration and their reality with the AFL-CIO delegation.
The Colombian workers told heart-breaking stories of trying to form unions through legal channels, going through the prescribed steps of holding national assemblies and filing required paperwork, only to be told repeatedly that they had fallen short on ever-shifting and arbitrary criteria. They told of the abuses of the "collective" system, in which employers can declare their workplace a collective, and the employees "owners," thereby depriving workers of the right to unionize. They told of receiving death threats for their union activity and of losing friends, family and colleagues to murder. And they told of mass firings of union leaders and the government’s failure to hold law-breaking employers accountable.
A striking common theme was heard from the Colombian unionists who spoke to the AFL-CIO delegation. They all agreed that the six years of the Uribe administration had seen a systematic attack on workers’ rights and on unions. "They are not just murdering union leaders," said one unionist. "They are murdering the unions." Others spoke of the slaughter, genocide, extermination and destruction of the union movement by the Uribe government.
These same issues are what led President-Elect Obama to oppose the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, even as he supported the agreement with Peru. From a profile done by the all-powerful Paul supporter-feared folks at the CFR
President-elect Obama generally supports free trade policies,
...
In a March 2008 speech, Obama said he would oppose a free trade agreement with Columbia, because "the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements."
But hey, why would we expect this to concern George Bush?