Tag: human rights

Love for the New Members of Congress

~ cafebedouin ~ 1 Comment

Between Reps. Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, it’s hard to decide who’s kicking more ass this week.

During a House Foreign Affairs committee meeting, Rep. Omar asked Elliott Abrams, the special envoy to Venezuela for President Donald Trump’s administration, the following:

“On February 8, 1982, you testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about U.S. policy in El Salvador,” Omar added. “In that hearing, you dismissed as communist propaganda [a] report about the massacre of El Mozote in which more than 800 civilians, including children as young as two-years-old, were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained troops.”

“During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping 12-year-old girls before they killed them. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a fabulous achievement. Yes or no? Do you still think so?”

Basically, she’s asking whether the guy that trained and put weapons in the hands of right-wing militias that committed human rights abuses in Latin America will be up to his old tricks in Venezuela. It seems like a rather pertinent question to me, and one only the Muslim freshman Representative had the gumption to ask.

Of course, Abrams threw a tantrum then lied through his teeth, as The Intercept outlines in detail.

Then, Mother Jones reported that “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a picture of a line of people outside a House committee hearing on homelessness. According to Ocasio-Cortez, the people in the photo are homeless and were paid by lobbyists to hold their places in line.”

I can only hope that more women (and men!) get elected to Congress follow their example and shine a light on all this nonsense. Make America Great Again, indeed.

Leading Marxist Scholar David Harvey on Trump, Wall Street, and Debt Peonage

~ cafebedouin

“I remember watching a speech that Castro gave in which he was talking about, he was lambasting a report by Human Rights Watch, the U.S.-based human rights organization, which often does do the kind of ideological bidding of the U.S. government in the way that it applies its filter to different societies versus the United States, although less so now than it was before. And Castro said that there is essentially a “Western” meaning, like, white-Anglo states’ view of human rights and then there is a different version of what it means to have human rights in countries like Cuba. And he basically was saying, in the West they cherish freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and these things that are sort of of the mind. And here [in Cuba] we would list as human rights, housing, education, health care, etc. Does that absolve Castro of the need to — I mean obviously he’s no longer with us but to embrace the idea that freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are in fact somehow inherently human rights that we all are entitled to just because they’re giving people affordable or free healthcare, affordable or free education, affordable or free housing? I mean is he correct in saying, “Well, these are two different views of what the priorities are in human rights.”

—David Harvey. Interview by Jeremy Scahill. “Leading Marxist Scholar David Harvey on Trump, Wall Street, and Debt Peonage.” The Intercept. January 21, 2018.

Interesting throughout.