I agree with your critique of Cuba, but the US is just as bad.

The Cuban Missle Crisis had nothing to do with Cuba "formenting communist revolution in other countries" and everything to do with the Soviet Union not accepting the double-standard of the US having nukes on the USSR border (in Turkey) ... they just wanted to show the US how it felt to have that threat so close to them.

Fuck the government of Cuba AND the government of the US (and Canada for that matter) - all just a bunch of gangsters who like to tell other people what to do and how to live at the point of a gun. You quibble about minor differences while ignoring the major similarities they all share.

Obama administration expands illegal surveillance of Americans

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/surv-m26.shtml

World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
Obama administration expands illegal surveillance of Americans
By Tom Carter
26 March 2012

Last Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder enacted guidelines that further expand the US government’s asserted powers to collect and store private information, without a warrant, concerning individuals who are not suspected of any crime.

The guidelines constitute a further step by the Obama administration to expand and entrench unconstitutional spying operations on the American people by all levels of government that were spearheaded by the Bush administration.

In the period since September 11, 2001, the US government has secretly compiled vast databases containing private information on the American public. These databases include telephone conversations, the contents of personal emails, visited web sites, Google searches, text messages, credit card transactions, mobile phone GPS location data, travel itineraries, Facebook activity, medical records, traffic tickets, surveillance camera footage and online purchases. The vast quantities of information that are being collected and stored by the US government far exceed what was gathered by the most infamous police states of the last century.

Holder’s guidelines permit intelligence officials to secretly use these databases to profile and track Americans who have no connection to terrorism—alleged or otherwise—for up to five years. The previous guidelines, issued in 2008 by Bush administration Attorney General Michael Mukasey, were understood to limit the retention of such information to 180 days.

According to an article Friday in the New York Times, the new guidelines are expected to result in increased collection and “data mining” of information on ordinary Americans by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

The Electronic Privacy Information Center issued a brief statement denouncing the guidelines: “The change represents a dramatic expansion of government surveillance and appears to violate the Privacy Act of 1974, which limits data exchanges across federal agencies and establishes legal rights for US citizens.”

The guidelines, which are couched in military, legal and intelligence jargon, were drafted in secret and not made available for public comment before they were enacted. In addition to Holder, National Counterterrorism Center Director Matthew G. Olsen and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. signed the guidelines.

The new guidelines must be understood as part of a vast escalation of domestic surveillance being undertaken by the Obama administration. According to a report last week in Wired magazine, the Obama administration is constructing a secret facility of unprecedented size in Bluffdale, Utah to store and process all of the information it is presently gathering about Americans. The new data center is conceived as a central hub that will link to National Security Agency (NSA) electronic eavesdropping facilities that are already operating around the country. “The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013,” the report stated.

“Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails―parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter,’” the article reported.

The Wired report, titled “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say),” confirms that among the major sources for the surveillance databases are “secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities.” The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 retroactively legalized the collusion, illegal when it was initiated under the Bush administration, between private telecommunications companies and government intelligence agencies in the warrantless government compilation of private information.

The magazine reported one unnamed former intelligence official as saying, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

The secret compilation of these databases by the Bush and Obama administrations is entirely unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution provides: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” It requires the police to obtain a warrant before conducting a search or seizure.

“They violated the Constitution setting it up,” William Binney, a senior NSA mathematician-turned-whistleblower, told Wired, referring to the warrantless surveillance initiated by the Bush administration and now being expanded by the Obama administration. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way.”

The pretext for this massive escalation of domestic spying is the so-called “war on terror.” However, the US ruling class is primarily targeting not terrorism in the Middle East, but mounting opposition to its policies within the United States. This is the real reason for its attacks on the democratic rights of the population. They are the preparation for large-scale repression of political and social opposition.

A report last week by AP journalist Frank Franklin II confirmed that “counterterrorism” units in the New York Police Department’s Intelligence Division have been carrying out extensive undercover monitoring of the meetings of liberal and protest groups. Detailed reports on meetings, including the identities of those present and future planned activities, have been generated and transmitted regularly to an “intelligence collection coordinator.”

According to one such briefing, an NYPD undercover agent traveled as far as New Orleans in April 2008 to spy on the activities of left-wing groups. The briefing the agent sent back included the names and backgrounds of speakers at meetings, the names of the organizations involved, the political issues discussed, and all of the sites of future rallies.

Another NYPD undercover agent attended a white-water rafting Muslim religious retreat to spy on those in attendance. The informant, identified as OP#237, reported the details: “The group prayed at least four times a day, and much of the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature.”

The designation “OP#237” suggests that hundreds of such undercover informants and spies are attending political meetings and gatherings from the NYPD alone.

Also revealed last week were Department of Homeland Security (DHS) internal manuals for agents in the department’s Media Monitoring Capability program. The manuals were ordered released pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request. These manuals make clear that the agency has been closely monitoring political discussions and activity on social media sites such as Facebook. The manual identifies as “items of interest” warranting investigation any activity on social media sites concerning “policy directives, debates and implementations related to DHS.”

The escalation of domestic surveillance by the Obama administration is one aspect of the disintegration of American democracy. On December 31 of last year, Obama signed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, which gives intelligence agencies and the military the power to abduct any person, anywhere in the world, including US citizens, and imprison him or her indefinitely in a facility such as the one located at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The NDAA was followed by Holder’s speech earlier this month asserting the power of the president to unilaterally assassinate US citizens without any kind of judicial process whatsoever. The pseudo-legal arguments advanced by the Obama administration in support of these measures exceed the most authoritarian presumptions of the Bush administration.

These unprecedented attacks on democratic rights, in which the entire political establishment and both Democrats and Republicans are participating, must be understood as preemptive preparations by the political establishment to meet the coming social upheavals with police state measures.

Copyright © 1998-2012 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

And are you not guilty of exactly the same mindset when you opposed Proposition 19 in California? The truth is, you have no business interjecting any of your opinions about any laws in my country. The empirical evidence says you are no different than Castro with regard to running your mouth about issues which you have no authority to take up. I would not mind your bullshit except that it`s destructive in the short term, and ruins many opportunities for more suond and stable souls to convine others that legalizing marijuana will not loose tens of millions of DML clones on our population.

"And are you not guilty of exactly the same mindset when you opposed Proposition 19 in California? The truth is, you have no business interjecting any of your opinions about any laws in my country."

What happens in your country ends up happening all over the world. Your country exports both it's prohibitionist and legalization models to my country. It was your country that foisted the 1961 drug control treaty (and all subsequent treaties) onto Canada and the rest of the world. And when California legalized medical marijuana in 1996, Canada legalized medical marijuana soon after in 2000. Every time Canada spoke of drug reform, the US government stepped in and told us not to do it. Same think in Latin America and everywhere else in the world. What makes you think that the California model wouldn't be adopted everywhere had it passed?

The day the US abandons it's control over other countries will be the day everyone else stops giving a shit what happens in the US.


"The empirical evidence says you are no different than Castro with regard to running your mouth about issues which you have no authority to take up."

I'm a citizen of planet earth - you have no authority to tell me what I can or cannot give a shit about.

Furthermore, your country has invaded so many other countries it's fucking ridiculous - there isn't room to cut and paste them all here so click on these links instead:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/US_Interventions_WBlumZ.html

And you have the gaul to tell me that I shouldn't intervene in your country through my computer when your country regularly - without pause - intervenes in the rest of the world's affairs with bullets and bombs. Render unto me a fucking break. Get used to it Yankee, karma's a bitch.




"I would not mind your bullshit except that it`s destructive in the short term, and ruins many opportunities for more suond and stable souls to convine others that legalizing marijuana will not loose tens of millions of DML clones on our population."

Prop 19 wasn't legalization. It was legalization for a few wealthy white guys - the rest of the growers and dealers would still be criminals, and it would have removed med pot cultivation rights and criminalized anyone sharing a joint with a young adult.

I will cut and paste the evidence. In case you want to continue this conversation, it should be based upon facts, not your pathetic fantasy version of events:

Prop 19 – 2010 version

"If it goes totally legal, the mom-and-pop growers are going to be a
thing of the past," – Dale Gieringer, co-author of Prop 215 and state
coordinator of California NORML, High Times, Nov. 2010, p. 80

Prop 19, otherwise known as the "Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010", was not the legalization we’ve been hearing about for the last 40 years from pot activists. Despite claiming on it’s website that it will "Control cannabis like alcohol" [50] it more closely resembled the much more tightly controlled cannabis legalization suggested to us by governments and police. Pay close attention to the wording found in the purposes section – unique to any "legalization" proposition or model ever put before anyone else other than police and governments:

"B. Purposes
5. Put dangerous, underground street dealers out of business, so their influence in our communities will fade." [51]

Keep in mind those "dangerous" underground street dealers once included - and most likely currently include people similar to - people like High Times founder Tom Forcade and med pot movement founder Dennis Peron, and their "influence" in the community include High Times magazine, Prop 215, and "legalization for all".

Prop 19 limited the number of legal growers to 1) those over 21 who 2) lived on their own in their own house or who rented from a landlord who was willing to risk their property being seized and who 3) would allow themselves to be limited to 25 square feet of grow space – smaller than the average jail cell. [52) It’s hard to estimate what percentage of current growers this would have left "illegal", but I suspect the percentage is greater than 50%.

The meaning of this section was debated constantly before the vote. Did the "25 square feet in your own house to be shared with the rest of the people living in the residence" rules also apply to med pot users who currently enjoyed no such restrictions? Suffice to say that attorney Bill Panzer – despite voting for Prop 19 for the message it would send regarding support for eventual "full" legalization - made the strongest argument (and yet to be answered in public by the yes side) as to why med pot cultivation rights could have been threatened by Prop 19:

"If an appellate court were inclined to find that Prop 19 preserved all 215/420 rights, there is language in 19 to support that. If, on the other hand, an appellate court was inclined to find that 19 allowed local municipalities to impinge on 215/420, there is language that could support that position too. The bottom line is that the body of the statute could have clearly stated that local municipalities are not authorized to pass any ordinance or regulation that infringes on 215/420 in any manner, but it doesn’t." [53]

Another section of Prop 19 made sure only licensed dealers would be allowed to deal – all other dealers were going to be punished by civil fines or worse. [54] The trouble with only allowing licensed dealers to deal is that – in one third of California, places such as Los Angeles and Oakland – there are very few licenses handed out. Oakland has four licenses in a city of 400,000 people – one license for every 100,000 people. Los Angeles has 41 licenses for 14.8 million people – or one license for every 360,000 people. Author of Prop 19 Richard Lee could have chosen to insist on "Sufficient community outlets" to prevent illegal dealing (in other words, unlimited outlets) and affordable, competition-encouraging $1000 licenses for retailers (instead of the current $60,000 or more Oakland retailers must pay) as Jack Herer did in his initiative.

But Lee chose not to remove the discriminatory licensing system in his initiative. This was a tactical error on his part, as the decision not to remove the discrimination spelled doom for any unlicensed grower or dealer (or any family member of any unlicensed grower or dealer) who lived in – or feared they would one day live in – a pro-monopoly jurisdiction such as Los Angeles or Oakland. There are literally hundreds of thousands of these people all over California and they very well may have tipped the scales in favor of the "no" side on Nov. 2nd.

http://www.cannabisculture.com/v2/node/25832

"It essentially protects you from getting an infraction ticket in your own home so long as there are no children under the same roof." - Bill Panzer

http://palmspringsbum.org/blog/2010/10/the-real-debate-over-californias-proposition-19/

Proof the USA has only had 21 peaceful years since 1776:

http://spencerwatch.com/2011/12/20/%E2%80%9Cwe%E2%80%99re-at-war%E2%80%9D-%E2%80%94-and-we-have-been-since-1776-214-years-of-american-war-making/

And you attack a Canadian for peacefully "interfering" in your country - in one of your exported wars!

Does your family take you seriously? Or are you a bit of a joke around the dinner table?

those 21 peaceful years they (USA) probably started a 'covert' war in another country......

Another USA covert war on the people of Honduras.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/hond-m31.shtml

World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
At least 13 dead in another Honduran prison massacre
By Bill Van Auken
31 March 2012

At least 13 prisoners died Thursday in a prison riot and fire in Honduras that has once again exposed not only the desperate conditions in the country’s prison system, but also the overall assault on basic rights of the population by the country’s US-backed government.

The site of the massacre was the main prison in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s northern industrial city. While authorities initially released the names of the 13 dead, whose bodies were recovered, reports spoke of as many as 20 killed.

Authorities have reported that 12 of the 13 bodies bore knife and gunshot wounds. Though a number of bodies were badly burned, they claimed that these wounds were the cause of death.

According to Honduran press accounts, the fire began in the midst of a prison riot that was sparked by an attempt to transfer a group of inmates out of their cell and into the maximum security section. The daily El Heraldo reported that the uprising was directed in the first instance at the so-called “sub-coordinator” of that area of the prison, Mario Antonio Henriquez Alvarez, also an inmate, who had ordered the transfer.

Pent-up anger boiled over, and one of the prisoners grabbed a machete, cutting off Henriquez Alvarez’s head, which the inmates then threw onto a roof near the guard station at the prison entrance.

Prisoners who had backed Henriquez Alvarez joined in the fray, also wielding machetes, knives and other weapons. Other inmates then set fire to a cellblock and the prison bakery.

The riot was only brought to a halt after San Pedro Sula Bishop Romulo Emiliani arrived at the prison to negotiate a halt to the violence, which included a guarantee that heavily armed paramilitary police assembled outside the facility would not invade it.

“Everybody has known for some time that the authorities have no interest in the prisons,” Emiliani told reporters at the scene. “They are a time bomb that will continue to explode.”

The inmates themselves put out the fire that had been started and brought out the charred bodies of 13 of the dead.

Outside the prison, family members of inmates gathered, demanding to know the fate of their loved-ones.

Jesus Menjivar, a journalist from San Pedro Sula, was informed by authorities that his 21-year-old son, arrested for being in a stolen car, was among the dead. “I am destroyed,” he told La Prensa. “My son didn’t deserve this. He wasn’t a criminal.”

The Honduran authorities have relegated the running of the prisons and internal discipline to groups of inmates, frequently tied to influential organized crime groups on the outside. In return for bribes, they have turned a blind eye to the smuggling of weapons and drugs into the facilities.

The Honduran daily Tiempo quoted a caller to a local television station who identified himself as a relative of an inmate as saying that the San Pedro Sula prison was run by a criminal “mafia” that, in collaboration with the police, trafficked in arms and drugs while dispensing both punishment and privileges to other inmates. He said that Henriquez Alvarez, the first one killed in the uprising, had ordered the killing of other inmates. “There was no director there, no police in charge. He was the general coordinator who ran the place,” he said.

The deaths in San Pedro Sula come barely six weeks after the horrific February 14 prison fire that killed 361 people at the Comayagua prison, about 55 miles north of the capital of Tegucigalpa.

In the wake of the Comayagua blaze, the worst single prison death toll in the country’s history, relatives of inmates at the San Pedro Sula prison warned that it was headed for a similar tragedy, given even worse overcrowding and security.

Testifying Tuesday at a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, headquartered in Washington, a Honduran government representative admitted that there are 12,500 inmates in the country’s 24 prisons, which were constructed to hold just 8,000.

Conditions inside the San Pedro Sula prison are among the worst, with 2,200 inmates crammed into a facility meant to house just 800.

Since 2003, a total of 556 Honduran inmates have lost their lives in fires and massacres. According to the government, 56 percent of the prison population is being held awaiting trial—in many cases for years—never having been convicted of any crime.

Amnesty International issued a statement in the wake of the latest prison tragedy: “Inmates in Honduras’s prisons are being denied their basic human rights and this latest horrific incident shows how precarious their situation continues to be—despite the repeated government promises that no more such incidents will occur.”

In reality, the fate of Honduran prisoners is only one of the more extreme expressions of the systematic state violence and abuse of the population by Honduras’s right-wing government and its security forces.

On the same day that the prison tragedy in San Pedro Sula was reported, a farmworkers union leader denounced the shooting deaths of four more farmworkers involved in a land dispute in the Aguan River Valley in northern Honduras. This brings to nearly 50 the number of workers who have been slain by police, security forces and private gun thugs employed by oil palm plantation owners who have attempted to monopolize the land.

These killings, along with those of journalists, political oppositionists, human rights advocates and militant workers have been carried out with absolute impunity since the June 2009 military coup that toppled the elected President Manuel Zelaya. The Obama administration, which issued perfunctory statements deploring the coup, in practice backed it and the regime that issued from it.

Nearly three years later, Washington has cemented close ties with the right-wing government of President Porfirio Lobos, who came to power as a result of illegitimate elections held under the coup regime and boycotted by the opposition.

Vice President Joe Biden flew to Tegucigalpa on March 6 to praise Lobos for supporting the US “war on drugs.” Speaking at Lobos’ side, he hailed the “long and close partnership” between the US and Honduras. He discreetly avoided any details about this historic relationship, in which the United Fruit Co. imposed oppressive conditions that gave rise to the phrase “banana republic” and in which successive US administrations advised, trained and funded a military force that engaged in massacres, extra-judicial executions and torture.

The Obama administration is acting in this bloody tradition, boosting military aid to the Honduran regime, while at the same time investing millions of dollars in the expansion of what is the largest US military facility in the region, the Soto Cano Air Base in Palmerola, Honduras.

Copyright © 1998-2012 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/apr2012/guil-a12.shtml

World Socialist Web Site
wsws.org
US baseball manager suspended for comment on Castro
By Tom Eley
12 April 2012

The American media has been engaged for the last several days in witch-hunting baseball manager Ozzie Guillén of the Miami Marlins for comments he made regarding Fidel Castro, leader of Cuba’s 1959 nationalist revolution and longtime ruler of the Caribbean nation.

Guillén’s remarks, given in an interview with Time magazine, were brief. “I love Fidel Castro… I respect Fidel Castro,” he said. “You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [expletive] is still there.”

These words resulted in a firestorm of condemnation led by America’s corps of sports “journalists.” The affair had particular resonance because Guillén manages the baseball team in Miami, and any positive reference to Castro and the Cuban regime is anathema to the wealthy right-wing Cuban émigrés who exercise enormous political influence in that city, in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Guillén issued repeated apologies beginning over the weekend. This culminated in a Tuesday press conference held in Miami where the Venezuelan native and World Series-winning manager issued a groveling apology that lasted for over one hour. In a spectacle with overtones of a Stalinist show trial, Guillén subjected himself to sharp criticism, at one point calling the comment the “greatest mistake of my life.” While he spoke, a small crowd of well-heeled Cuban Americans protested outside, demanding he be fired.

The affair reveals the utter contempt with which the American ruling class and its media hold the core democratic principle of freedom of speech.

Ken Rosenthal, a baseball writer for Fox News, said a one-month suspension was in order to demonstrate that employees have no free speech rights. A long suspension would “send a powerful message that Guillén’s thoughtless remarks on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro will not be tolerated,” he said. “[T]he Constitution protects free speech only from restriction by the state and federal governments. The Marlins, a private entity, presumably can impose the penalty of their choice on Guillén. … Guillén is an employee, not an owner.”

In an open letter written on behalf of Florida’s Hispanic Legislative Caucus, State Senator René García demanded the Miami Marlins “execute expedient punitive measures against Mr. Guillén which will rectify the situation.”

“Guillén should suffer for this in some way—more than just the sleepless nights he claims to have experienced and the inconvenience of publicly addressing his mistake,” intoned Israel Guittierez of ESPN, the major US sports network.

“[F]ree speech can have consequences, as Guillén is learning,” warned Mariano Castillo of CNN.

The naked hypocrisy of silencing an individual for comments “offending” democracy by allegedly praising a dictator apparently did not dawn on these and the countless other commentators braying for Guillén’s firing.

The hypocrisy was not lost on Cuban media. “It was pathetic this morning to see this sportsman humiliate himself, humiliate himself to the core to try to keep his job,” said Cuban media Miami correspondent, Emilio Garcia.

“How does the much-ballyhooed ‘yankee’ freedom of expression look now,” remarked Cuban TV anchor Julita Osendi.

Nor have the bright lights of the US media taken the time to subject Guillén’s remarks to actual analysis.

His main point, that Castro demonstrated remarkable resilience in surviving numerous US plots on his life, is a statement of fact. These began in the early 1960s under the Kennedy administration, including a scheme to supply Castro with an exploding cigar. In 1975 the US Congress’s Church Committee identified eight separate CIA schemes to kill Castro—the real number is almost certainly far greater—revelations that led in part to President Gerald Ford’s executive order of 1976 banning intelligence agents from carrying out political assassinations.

President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have effectively repealed this ban, declaring the right of the president to assassinate anyone, including US citizens on American soil, whom he declares to be a terrorist. It is telling that the American media has given far more coverage to Guillén’s comments than it did to Holder’s March speech at Northwestern Law School defending this claim of dictatorial power for the White House.

It would be tempting to call the Guillén affair a diversion. With the world economic crisis mounting, with mass unemployment spreading, with politicians everywhere slashing social spending, and with the US engaged in several imperialist wars while gutting democratic rights at home, the media has found its latest unsuspecting celebrity target in order to stupefy the population and debase the cultural and intellectual level.

But the episode has its own significance. It follows last year’s public denunciation of Rashard Mendenhall, the 23-year-old star running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, who tweeted his objections to the official jubilation after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, asking, “What kind of man celebrates death?”

Particularly in the world of professional sports, where athletes are held up as objects of popular adulation and emulation, there is vicious retaliation against any sign of dissent or political consciousness. Even the slightest straying from the narrow spectrum of official politics is considered impermissible.

The author also recommends:

US football player targeted for criticizing celebration of Bin Laden killing
[7 May 2011]

Copyright © 1998-2012 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved