April 14, 2008  ECrisis notes that these are trying times- filled fully with so much uncertainty, reprehensible dishonesty on a global scale, political dirty tricks, and new media-political messiahs popping up to save us from ourselves by offering up statist solutions, also called poverty reduction that is neo Marxism or- what do they call it? Populist alternative democracy. Like alternative law and order, which is not law and order, this is not new and it is not democracy. But the wobbly minded and errantly lazy jump for this because...they have no commitment to anything much and believe in nothing much and certainly lead lives that do not mean much. These are called "summer soldiers" - those who only serve when the weather is nice or "sunshine patriots"- those who recall their patriotism when the day is cheery and bright. They are also called limousine liberals- millions now seen eschewing their grand liberal, neo socialist political plans from the back of a speeding limousine while not once looking out the window at the real world, or if they do- the window coverings prevent real vision.
 
Thomas Paine noted over 200 years ago, "These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
 
We pose the question...how expensive is the whole sale remaking of society based on those who serve nothing for their country and stand for even less?

When we plow the fertile minds across Quito and inquire what precisely are dearly held beliefs, of course we are told "family values." Further reviews yield that these "values" are as vague and simply are the outward show of piety at Mass with no further follow on behavioral commitment to anything at all. Thus we have a situation, if we read this right, where emptiness and nothingness is protected at all costs behind gated walls and condominium high rises to protect us from ever once seeing the light of day, interacting with our fellow man and heaven forbid- from actually grasping and assisting the massive poverty that is Ecuador. We stand for nothing and we do even less, blaming deceptively the statist system to supposedly feed and care for the unending unfortunates when this too hands the reigns of power to the very neo Marxists who do bind this nation by the hands and the feet. By doing nothing and living lives of utter vapidity and hollowness, we have ourselves chained this land to the hollowness of the aberrant regime of criminal thugs now running Ecuador.
 
Follows is a superb spotlight on the perils of doing nothing when those around you fall or worse- fail to tell the truth and even worse- refuse to do much more but pretend that life is best served by lying to one's self that manipulative living will save us all. For the last two years, the U.S. Democrats have been lying to the larger world about Colombia and its progress in hopes of isolating or breaking the national political strength, newfound under Alvaro Uribe. As moral relativists, these Democrats appear, as we have noted before, to be under the Rasputin sway of darker issues as engineered by the underlying politics of hatred, mostly paid for by George Soros. But hatred and ennui need no champion although we have one today in Soros. The fact is that everyman owns portions of the evil that is in each of us and is no more apparent than when we "shrink from the service" and fail ourselves by failing to be forthright and deliver acts of compassion to those around us so desperately in need. By refusing to engage in this world and in this time, we enable the march of misinformation, lies, propaganda and wholesale removals of public morality. We are not victims and we are not powerless. We are called upon in this day to stand for what we believe in. The problem is...many refuse to believe in much of anything meaningful except the outward show of their own self promotionals. As the author below notes, this can lead our leaders to put their morals, their ethics and their very manhood in the freezer- in suspension, in inertia, and inactive when its very liveliness is needed today. Dirty tricks and deceptive living always follow. Here then are new truths about what happens when U.S. Democrats, part of an organized political scheme with the US AID-Soros-OAS money teams, organized labor and political greed move forward:

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The Wall Street Journal

April 14, 2008
THE AMERICAS
  

 Unions for Free Trade
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY
April 14, 2008; Page A14
Washington

In the bid for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's support for the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, Gustavo Palacio was no match for John Sweeney.

Mr. Sweeney, the protectionist president of the AFL-CIO, opposes the FTA. Mr. Palacio, a Colombian labor leader in a region that was a killing field until President Álvaro Uribe took office in 2002, wants the trade deal to go through.

Last week I met with Mr. Palacio, the leader of a miners union, and eight other labor leaders, who had traveled here to speak on Capitol Hill about the importance of the FTA in the struggle against poverty and violence in their country. They represent industrial unions, which, unlike the dominant public-sector unions in Colombia, are not aligned with hard-left politics. On Wednesday, in the middle of their visit, Mrs. Pelosi announced that she would stuff the FTA in the freezer, ensuring it cannot come up for a vote without her approval. Perhaps she put it next to her conscience, which also seems to be in cold storage during this election year.

Poverty warriors in the U.S. and Colombia are stinging from Mrs. Pelosi's dirty trick. But it is not the end of history; there is another chapter to write, and in it, Mr. Palacio and millions of Colombians struggling for a better life will overcome the barriers put in their path by American politicians.

The anti-FTA case in the U.S. has been built on two pillars of propaganda. The first is that under Mr. Uribe's leadership, labor unions have suffered disproportionately as a target of assassins. This is false. Murders of labor activists have been reduced sharply under Mr. Uribe, from 196 the year he took office to 26 last year.

Why were unionists getting murdered at such a high rate prior to Mr. Uribe's presidency? In part it had to do with the historical ties between some of the dominant public-sector unions and Colombia's hard left. These organizations have their roots in an anti-American, antidemocratic, antimarket ideology shared with the country's Castro-backed insurgents. Tragically, this has put the dominant unions on the left side of Colombia's violent politics for decades. Those who took up weapons to fight guerrilla aggression have been on the other side of the conflict.

Thousands of civilians, not just left-wing labor activists, have been killed in Colombian violence over several decades and it is not over. One of the union leaders I met with last week is new to his job. His predecessor, who was pro-FTA, was murdered in November.

Even so, things are better than they have been in a long time, thanks to Mr. Uribe. He's restored the state's law-enforcement role, and increased the budget in the attorney general's office to prosecute political crimes. He's also created a special security detail for union activists. No Colombian president has done so much to protect organized labor.

The second anti-FTA myth is that Colombia's largest unions, whose leaders are opposed to trade, are representative of the country's work force. It's true that the big unions represent 86% of all organized labor, but total union membership accounts for just 4.5% of the workforce. This is a decline from a decade ago when membership was 6% of the work force.

The cause of this low rate, the visitors to Washington told me, is the radicalized political agenda of the leadership in the large unions. It can be summed up as "down with the government, down with the imperialists, down with the International Monetary Fund." This rhetoric doesn't fly with most Colombians. They believe that, beyond the U.S. appetite for traditional Colombian exports – coffee, bananas, coal and oil – there is an opportunity to discover new U.S. markets that benefit workers. In a letter to the AFL-CIO dated March 28, the group also charged that the leaders of the large traditional unions are "more interested in achieving personal privileges than in working on behalf of the workers."

It is for this reason that Mr. Palacio and the union leaders I talked with last week want to form a new "centralized trade union" that will be "independent, democratic, pluralistic" and search for "harmonized agreements" with employers. They already represent workers in textiles, utilities, the food and beverage industry, banana growing, metal working, flowers, construction, shoes, confections and fruit growing, as well as Mr. Palacio's miners. Their numbers are small but they believe that they can recruit in the private sector – where 90% of Colombian workers are employed – by offering an alternative to the status quo. They are not afraid to support viewpoints that are shared by the government or the companies.

One example is the FTA. Mr. Palacio says his union of 1,500 workers supports the FTA for two reasons: security and investment. The state of Antioquia, where Mr. Palacio works, has been somewhat pacified under Mr. Uribe. But he says that, if the area hopes to keep the peace, it needs jobs for young people. By bringing investment to the region, the FTA will improve employment prospects. The agreement is also expected to boost the overall wealth of the region, which means better social services and infrastructure.

The other union leaders I talked with share this view. They see the FTA as a tool to attract investors, improve working conditions, and provide higher paying jobs. The former leader of a banana-workers union in Antioquia told me that his former union backs the FTA because it will mean that growers can import machinery, making life easier for workers.

Does any of this matter to the cynical Speaker? Not a bit. She has Mr. Sweeney's backing for November and has stuck it to a U.S. ally in the war on terror to boot. Perhaps if Bogóta had emulated say, Syria, in opposing the Bush foreign policy, it would have a better chance with Mrs. Pelosi."
 
What you may wonder is so wrong about the U.S. Speaker of the House lying to the world writ large to manipulate the facts about Colombia? Why is this so awfully shameful when we, in our own homes, daily perform the same, identical ritual of manipulative living through dishonesty? What is wrong is that evil always follows and goodness and mercy do not. It is that simple.
 
In Colombia, truth tellers are still under fire but they have strong advocates in Bogota and in the USA under the small but meaningful truth tellers outside the U.S. Democratic Party, the Soros-US AID do drugs cabal and the aberrant rackets called offshore bond machinations and Iranian money movers. In Ecuador, what small number exists yet and have not  been overcome by the inertia of their own laziness and irresponsibility to themselves and their families - also called family values today, and preferably living la vida manipulativa, are already on the Correa-Chavez-DISIP hate lists, recently stated as  fact by the Cuban-Stasi trained Correa cabinet leader Gustavo Larrea { also known by his FARC  code name "Juan" ) in his recent interviews, more recently published by HOY and in  black and white print for all to see on pages 52 to 54 of the published interviews with the Correa club actors. Such a hit list of the Correa gang should bring local outrage. But because Ecuadoreans are hastily proving their hollow outward piety at the expense of all other truisms, none move one inch to undo this utter defacing of liberty across Ecuador and all are cowed by threats, bribery and racketeering, called the Correa plan for governance.
 
It is never too late for truth tellers to act. One man and one woman can and do make a difference and contribute to the common good- just as the above article does by simply stating the facts goes a very very long way toward explaining Latin truisms and denouncing the fraudulent and reprehensible untruths uttered today to break a nation, also called a well funded politics of hatred plan. Sadly today, following the unending demands to sell out and hide- called Ecuadorean family values today- the media in Ecuador has lost its vibrancy and commitment to making money from God's gift to mankind called free speech. Ecuador's media today makes lots of governmental pay offs, called millions in ridiculous government backed advertising and propaganda, and has sold its soul to unfree speech. Ecuador's family values are getting Ecuador into unfree speech, pathetic schooling, no job preparation and certainly millions of "citizens" unprepared to do anything but manipulate the world around them, utterly unprepared, undereducated and vapid as they are. Indeed, the Correa regime's response is to socialize all and steal from others, making money from state thefts, drug running with the FARC and pretending that one day all socialists will be wealthy because Ecuador sits on oil, gas and gold patches. What Ecuador, a narcostate now, sits on is in reality a criminal racket selling untruths and self enriching. This is no future at all.
 
The MIAMI HERALD reports today on Bolivia that, "The government and the opposition attempted to negotiate a deal in January but the talks failed. `I think the real threat is serious, serious violence,'' said Mark Schneider, with the Washington office of the International Crisis Group, a London-based organization that tracks international hot spots. `If they do vote for autonomy, they begin trying to implement it, it puts the national police and armed forces in a difficult situation if a court rules that to be unconstitutional. And enforcing it would set up a clash.' '' To be sure, the author, himself backed by the Soros group of neo socialist narco states, tells us that violence will surely follow unless all Bolivians surrender to the mandates of Chavez-Morales-Correa and surrender their love for liberty to  approve the legitimizing of that which should never be legitimate. Insulza of the OAS has his team on the ground in Bolivia now to work the deal to silence freedom lovers and create a more perfect union with the criminal rackets called Bolivarianism. Bolivia is not about autonomy at all. It is not about violence although we wish peace and tranquility for all. Bolivia is about putting democracy in the freezer, along with values, and crafting a narcostate. We caution that whenever narcostate backer Insulza has his team on the ground, complete with his propaganda team called the Soros group of propagandists; one should be afraid- very afraid- that the truth flies out the window. We have seen what this team can do: they lied to the U.S. Congress on April 10, 2008 and insisted that the FARC is not a terror group and that the USA is criminally aberrant for so stating. This then is the level of the Soros-US AID actors and their titular head Miguel Insulza. Be afraid of him and his gaggle.

Like the USA's Democratic Party's candidates and leadership, Insulza mirrors all false prophets "helping the poor" today who are in fact crafting statehood for and by criminal cartels.
 
Recently we got notes telling us that the USA will no doubt elect in November 2008 "Chavez lite"- Barack Obama. Our Venezuelan friends went on to tell us with great glee that the USA will now "know what it feels like for Venezuelans" to be literally living inside house arrest, a political hell of its own creation. These efforts continue to include even more gleeful and wrong headed thinking that the USA must never ever state the facts about Castro's Cuba, about the Chavez-Correa state sponsorship of the FARC and global crime passing through Iran nor utter one word of the facts. Even Hugo Chavez yesterday revealed that both he and Rafael Correa knew well that the FARC's money and political leader was living la dolce vida protected inside Ecuador. Their manipulative theory as global observers is that to state the truth, as required by U.S. law if applied, must be abandoned for the happy prospect of not making Hugo Chavez angry nor irritating the ghoulish tyrant named Castro. They tell us that telling the truth plays in to the hands of murderous thugs. We disagree and prefer the message that the Pope brings to the USA this week and remind that if the days are to go down in the West for civilization's dreams, then we are being led by our own "family values" of emptiness and nothingness to speed the end of our days. This Pope knows the story well and will comment at length on the offer to help turn around the endlessly vapid, irresponsible non moral values we hold dear of deception. We will be watching. We hope that this might impact you enough to get up and commit to living a vibrant time- out of the freezer and in good standing no matter the weather, the storms and the fears. Chavez and Correa have just handed you a continent wide take over of finance-economic mores and practices, bought up and out your media companies, and do now come to take over all military-police-justice systems for their new narcozone. It is time to get out of the very cold back seat of your limousine with Insulza, the U.S. Democrats and Soros and look at the facts on the ground.
 
-Pedro Camargo for ECrisis