Honduras

Peter Roskam is an Enemy of Democracy

On October 17, 2009, in Foreign Policy, Honduras, Human Rights, Peter Roskam, by RSR
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Imagine this scenario:

It is the late summer of 2009. There is growing unease in Corporate America. Popular Democratic President Obama has signed into law the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and is pushing a legislative agenda that includes healthcare reform, cap & trade, employee free-choice, and employment non-discrimination. On top of it all he has had the nerve to appoint a “pay czar” to oversee executive compensation at the huge banks that benefited from the Bush bailout. Corporate shills like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and astroturf efforts like the Tea Parties  and the Town Hall riots have damaged Obama somewhat but haven’t dealt a crippling blow. It is time for more forceful action.

Representatives of the U.S. Chamber and the big oil companies meet secretly with friendly generals at the Pentagon and a plan is devised. Early in the morning on Sunday, September 6th, a large contingent of special forces enters the White House grounds and quickly overwhelms the Secret Service detail. President Obama, his wife, and his daughters are dragged from their beds in their pajamas and forced to board a helicopter which takes them to Andrews Air Force Base where they are placed on jet and whisked off to Ottawa. A member of President Obama’s own party, Senator Joe Lieberman, is immediately installed as interim President, to serve until the scheduled end of Obama’s term in 2013. Lieberman immediately declares martial law and imposes a curfew, “temporarily” suspends the bill of rights, and shuts down “unfriendly” news organizations such as NPR, the New York Times, and MSNBC. A number of Democratic Representatives and Senators are arrested and detained. The military is used to quash demonstrations in favor of  Obama’s return and a number of civilians are killed while others are arbitrarily arrested and beaten and tortured. Some just disappear.

The coup is immediately condemned as illegal by the United Nations, the Organization of American States, NATO, and the European Union. The Prime Minister of Great Britain, Gordon Brown issues a call for Obama’s reinstatement which goes unheeded. Instead, the corporate-friendly Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, declares Obama’s ouster constitutional because of his “crimes against free enterprise” and affirms Lieberman’s presidency. Still, not a single country in the world recognizes the Lieberman junta as the legitimate government of the United States. No matter for some conservative M.P.s from Britain who, friendly to British corporations such as B.P. operating in the U.S., journey to Washington to meet with Lieberman and other members of the junta, and then return home praising the Lieberman government in contradiction to Britain’s official policy as articulated by Gordon Brown.

This could never happen here, you say. Perhaps not. But something much like this happened in Honduras over the summer and our own Republican Congressman, Peter Roskam, has endorsed it as a model of democracy.

This past June, Manuel Zelaya, the democratically elected President of Honduras, was overthrown by a right wing military coup. The President was kidnapped by the military and flown out of the country. Roberto Micheletti was installed as “interim President” and he immediately moved to suspend constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and to suppress those elements of the media unfriendly to the takeover. The coup was immediately branded as illegal by the United Nations, the Organization of American Stat, and the European Union. President Obama quickly decried the coup as illegal and insisted that Manuel Zelaya was still the rightful President of Honduras. The administration held off on a formal declaration that the seizure was a coup, in hopes that diplomatic actions could return Zelaya to office. Mediation efforts by Oscar Arias, a Nobel peace laureate and the President of Costa Rica, came to naught, and the Obama administration announced a termination of non-humanitarian aid to Honduras in early September.

Enter Roskam. So Peter Roskam flies off to Honduras in early October in the company of Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Illinois Congressman Aaron Schock and some other dude whose name escapes me at the moment. They meet with the members of the illegal government who can’t figure out why they’re getting such a bad rap since it has historically been U.S. policy to support ruthless rightwing thugs in Central America.  They make no attempt to meet with Manuel Zelaya, the legitimate President, who is holed up in an embassy having recently returned to the country. They also meet with the U.S. Ambassador who Roskam complains is a little defensive (can’t understand why with all these nice Republican Congressman coming down to interfere with U.S. policy).  So Roskam and the delegation give encouragement to the illegal government that is so badly misunderstood and quickly fly back to the U.S., Roskam apparently having developed a serious man crush on DeMint during the trip.

On his return, Roskam begins his own little public relations campaign for the illegal Micheletti regime. He does a couple of radio infomercials on friendly local stations. Here he is last week on WIND’s John & Cisco (You have to listen to him give an update on the status of Republican efforts to kill meaningful healthcare reform first – my audio editor is on vacation):

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On the same date, the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed piece by Peter Roskam on the Honduras situation entitled “Democratic Elections in Honduras Deserve American Support”.

Roskam starts out:

There is little debate about the value of Honduras as an American ally. As a democracy in an increasingly unstable region, Honduras has been a partner in the war on drugs, a necessary check against President Hugo Chavez’s aggressive regime in Venezuela and an important $5 billion export market for American manufacturers through the Central American Free Trade Agreement. A stable and democratic Honduras is unquestionably in America’s best interest.

Lets get this straight. Honduras ceased being a democracy on that day in June when the military junta deposed its democratically-elected government. And this b.s. about Chavez’s “aggressive regime”. Is Venezuela lobbing missiles across our borders? Are they quartering troops in Washington? Are they blowing up our ships in the Panama canal? Just how is the Chavez government aggressive? In fact, if anyone has been aggressive it has been the United States. You may remember that Chavez himself was the tempoarily removed from office by a right-wing coup in 2002 and there is evidence that the Bush administration was involved. Certainly Chavez’ ouster was tied to the same reactionary business interests that Roskam represents in Congress and that are behind Zelaya’s ouster in Honduras. Chavez is also a democratically elected president, having won over 63% of the vote in his last election. He enrages right-wing interests both at home and here in the United States because his policies favor the poor over big business and because of his sharing of the proceeds from the country’s oil wealth with the people.

Roskam writes further:

To be sure, Central America is a tenuous region and the Obama administration must carefully maintain the support of our allies. Moreover, Micheletti has made some very notable tactical errors, including forcibly making Zelaya leave Honduras and then temporarily restricting the freedom of the press.

These are serious mistakes, but they don’t make the case for democratic elections any less warranted.

There remains a solution that will satisfy American interests, provide stability to a region in short supply of it and, most important, give Hondurans what they deserve — fair elections. Even if the State Department will not recognize Micheletti’s interim government, it should support election monitors to observe the upcoming Honduran elections.

So Micheletti made some mistakes, but Obama and the U.S. government (the legitimate U.S. government that is, not DeMint and Roskam) should support him becuse this is all about obtaining free and fair elections, you know, democracy.

So lets take a look at democracy, Micheletti Style. Here’s some video of Micheletti’s police applying a heavy dose of democracy to some peaceful pro-Zelaya demonstrators in Tegucigalpa in June, ordinary folks who were a little upset that their President had been illegally removed from office. That’s tear gas you see in the beginning. A very useful tool for promoting democracy.

When tear gas proves ineffective at achieving democracy, sometimes you have to use bullets.

Making sure the press doesn’t spread “insurrection”, to use Roskam’s term, is an important aspect of promoting democracy. Here Micheletti’s masked police are shutting down a TV station, Channel 36, in September. Apparently this station didn’t understand that press freedom means the freedom to say what Micheletti wants you to say.

When I hear Roskam on the radio or read him in the paper defending this I think my heads going to explode. I used to think Roskam wasn’t such a bad guy though of a decidedly different ideological bent than my own. But now I have to say this man is a pig. He is evil. He does not understand right from wrong or just doesn’t care. Would not be surprised to learn when campaign contribution data becomes available that Roskam received some fat contribution for his P.R. work on behalf of the Honduran junta through one of its high-powered U.S. lobbyists.

Roskam needs to be unelected. Still hoping that we’ll get a strong candidate to step up and slug it out with him in 2010. Tammy, are you up for another go at this creep?

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Peter Roskam’s Conduct in Honduras Is Treasonous

On October 9, 2009, in Foreign Policy, Honduras, Peter Roskam, Peter Roskam's Corporate Agenda, by RSR
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Foreign Policy’s The Cable published this piece on Peter Roskam’s recent trip to Honduras to meet with Roberto Micheletti and other members of the right-wing junta that overthrew Honduras’s Democratically-elected president in June. Roskam was interviewed for the article:

Congressman Peter Roskam, R-Ill, also spoke with The Cable just after returning from Tegucigalpa to talk about his delegation and the strategy behind the GOP’s controversial engagement approach…

Although the State Department tried to prevent the delegation from going, U.S. consular officials did assist the delegation logistically, but did not participate in the meetings, Roskam said. The delegation also had a tense meeting with U.S. Amb. Hugo Llorens, in which Roskam described him as being “very defensive.”

“The very consistent theme that was coming across was a sense of bewilderment from all the Hondurans we were meeting with at their treatment by the United States,” Roskam related.

Micheletti acknowledged to the group that he did not have the authority to physically remove Zelaya from the country, but he seeks communication with the U.S. government and was not pleased that the State Department had cut him off.

The conclusion Roskam drew from the trip was that the problem in Honduras won’t be solved until the Nov. 29 election, in which neither Micheletti nor Zelaya is running — that is, if it can meet reasonable standards of freedom and fairness.

U.S. trade with Honduras is at stake, Roskam argued, and is needed to counter the expanding regional influence of anti-American forces such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez.

This is unbelieveably arrogant, and, I believe, treasonous.

First off, the Republican Party is not entitled to conduct an alternative foreign policy. They lost the Presidential election in November, in no small part because of the horrible mess they made of  U.S. relations  with the rest of the world. They are neither competent to or empowered with conducting foreign policy. That is the role of President Obama.

Second, the policy of the United States of America,  as defined by the President, is that Manuel Zelaya was illegally deposed from power and that the government of Roberto Micheletti is illegitimate and must restore Zelaya to power.  Micheletti admitted to Roskam that he lacked authority for his actions. This policy is shared by the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the European Union. The men Roskam met with constitute a criminal regime and consequently are enemies of the United States.

Third, since Roskam is clearly not acting on behalf of the United States, on whose behalf is he acting? Well, clearly, the criminal dictator Micheletti, who seized power and then terminated the constitutional rights of the press and the people of Honduras. But Roskam told us who he was really acting for when he said this was about trade. He is acting on behalf of the huge U.S. based corporations that do business in Latin America and don’t like the democratically-elected governments because they are supportive of higher wages and better working conditions for those who they employ, endangering their obscene profits.

So Roskam’s project in Honduras is to subvert the legitimate foreign policy of the United States, and give aid and comfort to its enemies, the criminal junta in Honduras, on behalf of another power, the multinational corporations.That sounds like treason to me.

And he complains that the U.S. ambassador is defensive??

Fortunately, in this country, we have the possibility of free and fair elections, at least while the Republicans remain in the minority. 6th District voters should overthrow the treasonous Roskam at the polls in 2010.

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Peter Roskam Keeping the Hemisphere Safe for “Big Fruit”

On October 6, 2009, in Economic Justice, Foreign Policy, Honduras, Human Rights, Organized Labor, Peter Roskam, by RSR
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honduras-nicaragua-map.jpg

Not content with crushing the working poor here at home, Peter Roskam flew off to Honduras this past Friday, in the company of South Carolina’s Christo-fascist Senator Jim DeMint, to meet with members of the right-wing junta which seized power in Honduras in June in a military coup and has since suppressed the press and suspended the constitutional rights of the people including “the right to personal liberty, freedom of association, freedom of movement, and protections against arbitrary detention”.

Roskam framed his meddling as an attempt ensure free and fair elections in Honduras.  That explanation, of course, makes no sense, as Roskam and company met only with members of the illigitemate government that overthrew the democratically-elected President Manuel Zelaya. They made no attempt to confer with Zelaya. The trip is best seen as an attempt to interefere with the Obama Administration’s foreign policy efforts in Honduras to restore the rightfully-elected President. As always, Roskam is acting on behalf of the powerful U.S. corporate interests seeking to subvert the reforms begun on behalf of workers by President Zelaya. Once again, Roskam show’s he has either no understanding of, or no concern for right and wrong. His conduct is despicable. The word “sociopathic” again comes to mind.

Zelaya enjoyed strong support from the poor and from the unions. His offense appears to have been attempting to raise the minimum wage by 60%. This move apparently angered, among others, the giant fruit companies Dole and Chiquita. Chiquita claimed, according to journalist Nikolas Kozloff that it would cost 20 cents more to produce a crate of pineapples and 10 cents more to produce a crate of bananas, eating into corporate profits. While there is no evidence linking these companies directly to the coup, they were, no doubt, among its most important beneficiaries.

The coup against Zelaya was led by Gen. Romeo Orlando Vásquez Velásquez who, according to a report by Linda Cooper and James Hodge in the National Catholic Reporter, is a two-time graduate of the infamous School of the Americas (SOA). SOA is a U.S. military institution, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, located at Fort Benning in Georgia that, according to NCR,  has “trained hundreds of coup leaders and human rights abusers in Latin America”:

The three Honduran generals fit into the larger picture of coup leaders trained by the U.S. Army school, which used to boast about how many of the school’s graduates had become heads of their countries.

The boasting, which stopped after the graduates’ undemocratic paths to power became better known, celebrated such figures as:

* Argentine Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, who seized power in a bloody coup, bringing down another SOA grad, Gen. Roberto Viola, who came to power during Argentina’s Dirty War.
* Guatemalan dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who seized power in a coup in 1982 and conducted a scorched earth campaign against the Mayan Indians.
* Panamanian dictators Gen. Omar Torrijos, who overthrew a civilian government in a 1968 coup, and Gen. Manuel Noriega, a five-time SOA graduate, who ruled the country and dealt in drugs while on the CIA payroll.
* Ecuadoran dictator Gen. Guillermo Rodriguez, who overthrew the elected civilian government in 1972.
* Bolivian dictators Gen. Hugo Banzer Suarez, who seized power in a violent coup in 1971, and Gen. Guido Vildoso Calderon, who grabbed power in 1982.
* Peruvian strongman Gen. Juan Velasco Alvarado, who in 1968 toppled the elected civilian government.

In ousting the Honduran president Sunday, Vásquez Velásquez had the help of other SOA graduates, including Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, the head of the Honduran Air Force.

Another two-time SOA grad, retired Gen. Daniel López Carballo, told CNN that the coup was justified because Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez would be running Honduras by proxy if the military had not acted.

Records show that Vásquez Velásquez took a basic combat arms course at SOA in 1976 and another course on small military units in 1984, while Prince Suazo took a 1996 course on joint operations.

The Obama Administration has responded to Zelaya’s ouster by terminating all non-humanitarian aid to Honduras.  The coup has been condemned by the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the European Union.  Nobel peace laureate Oscar Arias, the President of Costa Rica, tried unsuccessfully to broker a deal to return Zelaya to office.

And yet here’s our pissant Congressman Roskam, cozying up to this illegitimate regime, interfering in the President’s conduct of foreign policy.  I guess it should come as no great shock. This behavior fits right into Roskam’s primary project of promoting the interests of big corporations and trampling the unions and the wage-earners who get in the way. And Roskam’s never met a right-wing thug he didn’t like.

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Is Peter Roskam Taking the War Against Democracy to Honduras? HSIK

On October 1, 2009, in Foreign Policy, Honduras, Organized Labor, Peter Roskam, by RSR
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So is Creepy Pete Roskam off to Honduras or what? Read this Tweet from Pete a little while ago:

Heading to Honduras tomorrow on a CODEL to meet with gov officials and hear about efforts to ensure a free and fair election in November.

“OMG”, I said to myself.  “HFAC. Is he emigrating PTL?” “But WTF is a CODEL?” “Some kind of an airplane?” And then it came to me… “CODEL” is tweetish for Congressional Delegation”.  “He’s going to Honduras to help the military junta that recently overthrew the democratically-elected President, Manuel Zelaya, maintain its grip on power and continue to crush the life out of the poor and the unions.” “Now it makes sense”, I chuckled. “LOL”. “WAJ”. Nothing like a bunch of Republicans to ensure a “free and fair election” is there?

So I went online to check it out and I find that, sure enough, Roskam’s bedfellow Jim DeMint (ideological that is, GAGFI but I think he’s  STR8) from South Carolina (SUFID), is planning an excursion to Honduras to meet with the phony government, PRT, 420, LIK, and maybe score some MOOS action like Sanford. But then I read that John Kerry (HP, SSC) says to DeMint “RMLB You can’t go!” .  So now I don’t know. May be the I&I is off for now and Roskam is SUAC. LMFAO. KYFC.

PIR. BBFN. BBIAW.

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