The Sacred and the Dead

I will be reading from my book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, at the Lake Forest Friends Meeting House at 6:30 p.m. Friday, May 6. A potluck supper will precede the reading. Please come if you can! The meeting house is located at 101 West Old Elm Road, a block west of Route 41, in Lake Forest, Ill.

By Robert C. Koehler

How do values enter politics?

The Bolivian national legislature, pressured by a movement of indigenous people and small farmers, may be about to birth a stunning global precedent in the creation of an environmentally sane future: establishing legal rights for Mother Earth.

On the one hand, huh? How can we reduce nature itself — the entirety of the universe beyond humanity’s small outpost of self-importance — to an entity that requires bureaucratic recognition? On the other hand, Mother Earth — Pachamama, in indigenous Andean parlance — is humanity’s vulnerable context, without which, though the universe will go on, we will not. As Bron Taylor, author of Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality and the Planetary Future, put it: “Ecologically maladaptive cultural systems . . . eventually kill their hosts.”

Latin America condemns US/UN invasion of Libya

Bolivia’s Morales demands Obama forfeit his Nobel Prize

By Efe – Agency
Los Tiempos
(Partly Translated by Bolivia Weekly)

As US President Obama visits neighboring Chile, Bolivian president Morales has called on the Nobel committee to strip him of his peace prize and has called for the United Nations (ONU in Spanish) to be renamed “ONI,” The United Nations of Invaders.

“If the Nobel Peace Prize committee was to dignify this prize, they should revoke it from the US President,” said Morales at a press conference. Morales himself received the $50,000 “Gaddadi Human Rights Prize” before becoming the Bolivian president and said that the world should ask itself if Obama is defending peace or provoking massacres.

Morales said that the United Nations was bombing hospitals and schools on the pretext of savings lives. He said that the Libya invasion was just a pretext to invade and take Libya’s natural resources.

“How is it that a Nobel Peace Prize winner heads a groups of gangsters to assault and invade? This is not part of the defense of human rights, nor the rights of self determination of peoples.”

CIA Agent Captured in Cuba

By Eva Golinger

An employee of a CIA front organization that also funds opposition groups in Venezuela was detained in Cuba last week

An article published in the December 12th edition of the New York Times revealed the detention of a US government contract employee in Havana this past December 5th. The employee, whose name has not yet been disclosed, works for Development Alternatives, Inc. (DAI), one of the largest US government contractors providing services to the State Department, the Pentagon and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The employee was detained while distributing cellular telephones, computers and other communications equipment to Cuban dissident and counterrevolutionary groups that work to promote US agenda on the Caribbean island.

Che Guevara, until Victory Always

Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna (Photo by Alberto Korda)

By Fidel Castro

On 18 October 1967, 10 days after Che Guevara’s death, the details of the revolutionary hero’s last moments finally emerged. Before a nation in mourning, Fidel Castro gave this speech. In this emotive text brought to you by Pambazuka News, ‘El Lider Máximo’ revisits the journey of his comrade-in-arms, revealing Che’s human side, his military prowess, his philosophy and his great revolutionary pedigree.

Militarizing Latin America

bobrow.wordpress.com

By NOAM CHOMSKY
September 9, 2009

In the past ten years, South America has moved toward integration, a prerequisite for independence; has broadened international ties; and has addressed internal disorders—foremost, the traditional rule of a rich Europeanized minority over a sea of misery and suffering. It rejects the US “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror.” 

The US doesn’t like this, and plans to make its new seven military bases in Colombia the center of its Latin American operations.  The Obama administration is also building mega-embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan.