This is the first in a five-part series of articles that compare three alternatives to the traditional coffee trade industry: fair trade, direct trade, and Starbucks’ C.A.F.E. program. However, before we compare these three alternatives to one another, let’s take a look at why fair trade coffee was created in the first place. What conditions in the traditional coffee industry have created the need for fair trade, or some alternative that resembles it?
There seems to be an emerging consensus that so-called "free trade" is dead. Even the business press is beginning to accept the inevitable. So, maybe we can now begin a rationale debate about trade, without meaningless marketing phrases like "free trade".
YES Magazine, Summer '08 Edition, has a number of really good articles, and an interview, that should be read and obsorbed as to some of what we should be putting into public discussion as we try to turn this ship of state around and head in a direction that should already have been. These articles touch on a number of important issues, Very Important, not only for us, as a country, but our place in the world and for the world as a whole. They are also a matter of our Security and the Security of the planet
This one with Shultz might sound abit familiar for any who heard him talking when they returned from this conferance, but this is an Extremely Important subject and not only for us, and our National Security but the Security of everyone.
John McCain is heading to Colombia today to meet with President Alvaro Uribe, a man McCain considers a "friend". I would like to educate McCain about his so-called friend and enlighten those of us here at Daily Kos about the horrific failure of our government's main aid package to Colombia, known as Plan Colombia. I wrote a paper for my Foreign Relations of Latin America course at George Washington University recently about Plan Colombia's failure, and I would like to share it with all of you. It lays out in stark detail the abuses of Uribe's government, the coordinated killings of labor leaders and academics, and the actions of rogue U.S. soldiers in Colombia. Uribe has met several times with paramilitary leaders who are currently in U.S. custody on drug trafficking charges. Are these the kind of "friends" you are looking for, Senator McCain? My paper starts over the fold...
The School of the Americas is a military training facility in Columbus, Georgia that trains military forces from Latin America in techniques of torture and counterinsurgency. This facility is taxpayer funded and has hosted more than sixty thousand soldiers since it was opened in 1946. The SOA, which was renamed a few years ago to the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security and Cooperation, is known around the world for the role that it has played as an institution for training soldiers in techniques of torture.
In those three words you can resume Obama's mayor speech on his policy toward the Americas and the Caribbean.
Besides the excellent proposals, and the wise analysis, it's really refreshing to see the next President of the United States treat its neighbors as his equals, as partners, not looking down upon them. One of the main problems Latin America has with Bush is not his policies, or the war in Iraq (ok, we have major issues with those as well), but his total lack of deference towards the Region. You could say that, except for Colombia and Mexico, the Bush Administration has completely ignored Latin America.
But other that the brilliance of his plan, it's the brilliance of his timing. In a one-two punch, he gives Cuban American voters in Florida major news, and tomorrow he will be in Puerto Rico a week before the primary, where I hope he expands on his plans!
Si Se Puede, indeed!
Primary news from Puerto Rico below.
Got on the Rec List! For more background on PR check out my older diaries.
Sustainable Development for Latin America and the Caribbean. This is something I had not heard honestly addressed by anyone in the United States Government since Bill Clinton was President. Obama laid out in specifics and great detail today what he will do as President to show leadership in joining together with raising up all of us who live in this hemisphere.
EcoNoticiario # 5 covers a broad range of topics: health of forests and wetlands in Spain and Cuba, a whole range of environmental news from Colombia, the effects of drought, rising energy costs and volcanic eruptions in Chile, and the ongoing farmers' strike in Argentina.
How many of you have ever read Democratic Left the magazine of the Democratic Socialists of America ? If you haven't, you are missing a vital part of the spectrum of diverse views that go to make up this great Democratic Party. The history of the Democratic Party will reveal many significant contributions from DSA . The founding editor of Democratic Left was Michael Harrington (1928-1989). My diary Michael Harrington: An American Socialist who influenced the democratic party was well recieved here and had a significant impact. As we struggle with a situation that seems to have created a consensus for change, the question of what we want that change to be will be a central topic for some time to come. It is worth having a good source of information to counter the misleading approach the corporate media throw at us without ceasing. Look below to see what Democratic Left has to offer you.
An amazing story slipped by me last week. I am writing about it today because, given the turbulence of the Pennsylvania primary, it probably slipped by many of you as well.
If there has been one country in Latin America that seemed that it was permanently sunk into a morass of reactionary totalitarianism, it is Paraguay. Paraguay, the longtime fiefdom of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, notorious retirement village of departed Nazis. Of all of the countries in the region, this was the one where one could bet change would not come. That may be one reason that President Bush followed "Reverend" Sun Myung Moon in buying a huge tract of land in Northern Paraguay. (Follow down the thread.)
And then a week ago, guess what?
Paraguay chose as its new President Fernando Lugo, a man knows as "the bishop of the poor."
The little noticed, but ominous news that the US is moving towards reactivating its Carribean and Latin America Naval fleet after an absence of almost 60 years should be ringing serious alarm bells that the US's Latin American policy is dangerously adrift and being militarized to a dangerous level.
For anybody with any rudimentary knowledge of the last 100 years of Latin American history, the norteamericano hand in economic manipulation, dirty wars, coups, undisguised fascism and a seemingly endless war upon the poor is not something for which the United States can soon atone, even were its leadership willing. Institutionally confabulated rationalizations of Cold War exigency aside — which some will surely still argue — American guns, chicanery and capital have served as an ominous, razor-wire-dressed bulwark against the merest, most modest steps towards inclusionary democracy and social and economic justice for half the hemisphere.
The revolutionary wave in Latin America reached Paraguay yesterday, as a combination of union, indigenous, and campesino power ejected the 61-year rule of the Colorado Party. Will Hillary and Obama embrace this change, or will they adopt the Bush Administration's ham-handed belligerence to the Left in Latin America?
In this week's EcoNoticiario: water, lack of water, and water politics, fudging CO2 emissions, saving sea turtles, global warming and indigenous peoples, skyrocketing energy costs, and did I mention water?
Spain features very prominently this week because of a slow week in Latin American environmental news combined with a fascinating developing story in Catalonia over how Barcelona is going get enough water to drink.
Many of the critics [of the School of the Americas] supported Marxism -- Liberation Theology -- in Latin America -- which was defeated with the assistance of the U.S. Army.
This week's stories include melting glacier ice in Peru and Argentina, undersea waterfalls near Spain, a meeting on sustainable forestry in Cuba, biodiversity education in Costa Rica, and water policy in Colombia. We also have two stories from Chile: one concerning La Niña and the country's ongoing drought, the other about plans to build an Antarctic museum on the Strait of Magellan in Punto Arenas.
Get out the popcorn and watch John Pilger's excellent documentary on the real American agenda in the Third World. Spreading democracy? Hardly. Try propping up murderers, dictators and rightwing terrorists so we can loot the resources of poor countries.
YES Magazine, Summer '08 Edition, has a number of really good articles, and an interview, that should be read and obsorbed as to some of what we should be putting into public discussion as we try to turn this ship of state around and head in a direction that should already have been. These articles touch on a number of important issues, Very Important, not only for us, as a country, but our place in the world and for the world as a whole. They are also a matter of our Security and the Security of the planet
