July 26, 2008

Barack Obama appeared to have scored a major success in projecting “commander-in-chief” ability and foreign policy savvy in his visits to Afghanistan and Iraq last week, and continued that path as he traveled to Jordan, Israel, the West Bank and then on to Western Europe.

Ecuador: Reckoning for past crimes
Senegal: Africans, choose your union!
Iran: U.S. tries diplomacy
Ukraine: NATO is not welcome
China: Wal-Mart store unionized
Cuba: Major land use reforms

OAKLAND, Calif. — Thousands of service workers returned to their jobs on University of California campuses July 21, after a week-long strike to protest the university’s stonewalling of their demands for fair compensation in contract negotiations dragging on since last year.

In an unlikely team-up, impartial investigators from the Government Accountability Office joined a low-income workers’ advocate at congressional hearings July 15 to tell lawmakers that President Bush’s Labor Department has failed to enforce minimum wage and overtime laws and that low-wage workers are routinely being robbed of their earnings.

In Buenos Aires earlier this month, Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Shannon rejected theories that the U.S. Fourth Fleet, assigned to watch over South America, had been reactivated for offensive purposes. So that means defense, Brazilian Senator Pedro Simón observed, “but defending against whom?”

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The Canadian government is once again being accused of breaking international human rights laws, including the Geneva Convention. Newly released documents and DVD footage reveal that the Canadian government knew, as far back as 2003, that American interrogators had tortured Canadian prisoner Omar Khadr at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

Sen. Edward Kennedy’s appearance in the Senate recently, in the midst of his personal battle against brain cancer, to break a Republican filibuster against a bill to save Medicare will go down in history. Days later, on July 15, as the result of a 383-41 congressional vote to override a Bush veto the progressive measure became law.

The good news is Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama continues to project withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq by mid-2010. The bad news is, he is proposing to transfer a significant number of those troops to Afghanistan.

Under the title “Listening to America,” the Obama campaign issued an open invitation to voters to organize meetings in their homes, union halls, churches and schools this month to discuss what planks should be added to a 2008 “Platform for Change.” In the past, the Democratic Party platform was written by “paid professionals,” the call said. “This year, that’s going to change.”

The analysis published by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker recently [“Preparing the battlefield: The Bush administration steps up its secret moves against Iran”] is revealing in a number of respects regarding the position of the Bush administration in relation to Iran.