Leftist win in a landslide in Honduras

The gradual return of the Pink Tide is happening. This time it happened in the place where it first receded from - Honduras.

Honduran presidential candidate Xiomara Castro was headed for a landslide win as presidential election results rolled in on Monday, and looked set to put the left back in power 12 years after her husband was ousted in a coup.

Castro, who would be the Central American nation's first female president, has promised big changes in Honduras including a constitutional overhaul, United Nations support in the fight against corruption, and looser abortion restrictions.

She has also floated the idea of dropping diplomatic support for Taiwan in favor of China, a policy proposal keenly watched in Washington, Beijing and Taipei.

With just over half the ballots counted, Castro, the wife of former President Manuel Zelaya, held a nearly 20-point lead over conservative Nasry Asfura, the capital's mayor and candidate for the ruling National Party, who won 34% according to a preliminary tally.

For some reason, the Taiwan thing is very important to Washington.
Turnout for this election was especially high, which gives Castro some credibility.

With 45 percent of the polling station tallies in, Castro had 53 percent of the votes and Asfura 33 percent, according to the National Electoral Council preliminary count. The council said turnout was more than 68 percent.

Castro has her work cut out for her. The outgoing administration did almost everything it could to destroy the nation. It gutted virtually all social services, privatized everything it could get its hands on, and got in bed with drug traffickers.

The election is the latest political flashpoint in Central America, a leading source of US-bound refugees and migrants fleeing chronic unemployment and gang violence. Honduras is among the world’s most violent countries, although homicide rates have dipped recently.

Central America is also a key transit point for drug trafficking, and an area where concerns have grown over increasingly authoritarian governments.

So far Bolivia, Peru, and now Honduras has shifted to the left.
Chile is still up in the air. Leftist Boric lost the 1st round of the election to a far-right candidate, but he's leading in the polls for the fast approaching run-off, and by a considerable amount.

The major Citizen Pulse poll from Activa Research showed likely voters heavily favored Boric, representing a coalition including the leftist Frente Amplio and the local Communist Party, with 53.9% support against Kast's 31.2%...

A second poll from Cadem, which surveyed 1,000 people with a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points, showed Boric ahead with 39% of voting preference versus 33% for Kast. There were still 28% who were undecided or did not intend to vote.

In a hypothetical run-off scenario, that result would translate into a 54%-46% win for Boric.

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are getting overstretched on all the coups they are supposed to foment. Their recent flops in Venezuela, Cuba, and HK must be morale sapping. They could take a page out of the Reagan playbook and target a small island with a population that would fit into the Rose Bowl for an invasion.

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@humphrey they would steal it. Or they would launch another coup.
But it sort of feels like Bolivia, where the public opinion is so much against them, that they lose their nerve.

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@humphrey
Thanks for sharing this.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

She has also floated the idea of dropping diplomatic support for Taiwan in favor of China...

Why???

I'm with Taiwan; the fact that Morgoth has decided to turn on China does not "rehabilitate" the CCP, nor any of its putative ideologies, nor least of all an aspiring leader-for-life so humorless (which as I've said before, I 100% believe ought to be considered a top-tier psychopathology) that he goes all-out to prohibit comparisons to Winnie the friggin' Pooh (I mean, my god, a shrewder autocrat would positively lunge to "own" such a ready-made PR gift).

Okay, she advanced the idea; let's hope she's good enough at the chess-game to make that her throwaway pawn, because if I were the Deep State, I'd consider that the perfect "line-in-the-sand" for jumping in to do that voodoo that they do so well.

Do Chinese ambitions represent a new monster joining the battle between Jihad VS McWorld, or just a rival applicant for the top seat in the latter?

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat
It's because China is going around the world and actually investing on the infrastructure of other nations, as opposed to forcing neoliberalist privatizations, and she wants some of that.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@gjohnsit ...but I've heard those investments come with downright Faustian strings attached (at least for poor/weak countries).

We've seen the "here comes the Big Friendly Giant to rescue us from Old Emperor Evilpants" spiel somewhere before, haven't we...?

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat
But at least they are getting scraps.
The current U.S. alternative doesn't even leave scraps.

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CB's picture

@The Liberal Moonbat

The U.S. and China Are Battling for Influence in Latin America, and the Pandemic Has Raised the Stakes
...
The political debate in Paraguay reflects a broader battle raging across Latin America about China’s swelling influence. As countries in the region grapple with a cascade of challenges to their developing economies, they increasingly look not to the North but to the East. Today, China is South America’s top trading partner. In 2019, Chinese companies invested $12.8 billion in Latin America, up 16.5% from 2018, concentrating on regional infrastructure such as ports, roads, dams and railways. Chinese purchases of minerals and agricultural commodities helped South America stave off the worst privations of the 2008 financial crisis.
...
Already, 19 governments across Latin America and the Caribbean have joined Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a $1 trillion transcontinental trade and infrastructure network. Shanghai-based China Cosco Shipping is building a new $3 billion port at Chancay in Peru, while there are ambitious proposals for a transcontinental railway linking South America’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts from Brazil to Chile.

COVID-19 presented another opportunity. By late October, China had provided over 179 billion masks, 1.73 billion protective suits and 543 million testing kits to 150 countries and seven international organizations around the globe. “The pandemic has opened up a diplomatic opportunity that China did not have before,” says Benjamin N. Gedan, a former South America director on the White House’s National Security Council, now with the Wilson Center. This has not gone unnoticed by Washington; the U.S. State Department’s J-Bureau–charged with “elevating and integrating civilian security in U.S. foreign policy”–has been parsing China’s mask diplomacy to decipher where Beijing is attempting to gain influence, sources involved tell TIME.
...
The U.S. may have succeeded in putting a pause on the growth of Panama-China ties, but American diplomats say these kinds of setbacks won’t deter China from further geostrategic needling. “For China, the United States has its navy in the South China Sea, a military ally in Taiwan and has been harassing [them] about Hong Kong,” says Shannon. “So isn’t it great to have a dominant position in the greater Caribbean? That way China can show the United States that we can play in your neighborhood just how you play in ours.”
...
If, under Biden, the U.S. continues to push regional players into a corner, it’s no sure thing whom they would choose. “If you press these countries too hard, beware,” says Enrique Dussel Peters, an expert in China–Latin America relations at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “They might say, ‘Huh, O.K., then I stick with China.'”
...
That generosity won’t go ignored in Latin America as the human and economic toll from the pandemic mounts. In January, Sixto Pereira, an opposition Senator in Paraguay who earlier coordinated the Chinese donation of PPE, accused the country’s government in local media of bowing to U.S. pressure in rejecting offers of vaccine support from China. “We must overcome political and ideological barriers if we’re going to fight the evil of the pandemic,” he says. It may be a simple reading of geopolitics, but it’s a frustration that many in Latin America are feeling as the region navigates not only its path out of COVID-19, but also its road to future trade and development in the emerging world order. “The Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War finished,” Pereira says. “In this globalized world, we don’t want to be any country’s backyard.”

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@CB ...but why must other countries choose between Taiwan and China? America certainly trades with both; why would this otherwise good-sounding candidate act as if Honduras's freedom needs to come at the expense of Taiwan's???

This sounds like...divide-and-conquer, honestly.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

snoopydawg's picture

Kidding, but glad to see countries not giving up after we interfered with their governments.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@snoopydawg I don't get the specific tie-in.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

snoopydawg's picture

@The Liberal Moonbat

It’s just an old joke from DK and that McCain never saw a country that he wasn’t in favor of regime change if they wouldn’t let us tell what they need to do. Or bomb if they absolutely refused.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

snoopydawg's picture

What will the CIA do now?

They already lost their heroin supply from Afghanistan.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

on Bolivia and Honduras.

Something to be glad about today.

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NYCVG

results.

https://www.the-journal.com/articles/leftist-holds-commanding-lead-in-ho...

Excerpts from the article.

Castro declared herself the winner despite orders from the National Electoral Council to political parties to await official results.

“We win! We win!” Castro, Honduras' former first lady who is making her third presidential run, told cheering Liberty and Re-foundation party supporters when only a fraction of the ballots had been tallied. “Today the people have obtained justice. We have reversed authoritarianism.”

The National Party also quickly declared victory for its candidate, Tegucigalpa Mayor Nasry Asfura, but the early returns were not promising.

The National Electoral Council stopped updating the preliminary results just before 7 a.m. As the morning wore on, concern grew that there was a problem.

However, council systems engineer Gerardo Martínez explained that those early results were made possible through the Preliminary Results Transmission system (TREP), an effort to get preliminary results more quickly to the public.The system had worked and on Monday morning, having served its purpose, it was disabled, he said.

“Its job was to divulge preliminary results and that already ended,” Martínez said. “Starting this afternoon we move to counting mode.”

Martínez explained that the council was now waiting for all of the physical voting place tallies to arrive at its warehouses to begin the process of counting the votes in front of representatives of the political parties. Then the updating of the results will resume.

There has not been any updates of the results in the last several hours!

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@humphrey From Wikipedia

Before any official results had been announced, Hernández declared himself the victor, and Nasralla followed by also claiming victory.[23] The following day, the TSE released its first preliminary results: with 57% of the votes counted, Nasralla held a 5-point advantage over Hernández, with 45.17% to Hernández's 40.21%.[24]

The TSE then halted the count for 36 hours[25] and announced that final results may not become available until Thursday, 30 November.[23] Over the course of the week, the TSE released updated vote totals, which saw Nasralla's lead steadily erode and Hernández pull ahead in the vote count.[25] After the TSE again paused in its vote totals for several hours, claiming to have experienced a glitch in the computer system,[25] Nasralla denounced the TSE for fraud, declared he would not recognize the results, and urged his supporters to take to the streets, which they did across the country.[26] According to an analysis done by Georgetown University professor Irfan Nooruddin for the Organization of American States, there was a sudden swing in the vote totals after 68 percent of the votes were counted.[6] Nooruddin concluded that the "differences are too large to be generated by chance and are not easily explicable, raising doubts as to the veracity of the overall result."[27]

On 30 November, with approximately 94% of the votes counted, Hernández's lead had climbed to 42.92% compared to 41.42% for Nasralla.
...
On 2 December, the Honduran National Roundtable for Human Rights issued a press release, in which it declared that the government actions were state terrorism against civilians, it warned that the declaration of a state of exception was in order to create repression to ensure electoral fraud labeling it as illegal after reading several articles of the Honduran constitution.[30]

As of 2 December, at least 7 people had died in the protests with more than 20 injured.[31] On the second night of the curfew, thousands of people participated in what is known as "cacerolazos", banging pots and pans in protest.[32][33]

As of 15 December 2017, the court had finished a recount of ballot boxes that presented irregularities but had still not declared a winner, and protests continued throughout the country, with 16 deaths and 1,675 arrests, according to Honduras' National Human Rights' Commission

On the positive side, in 2017 they only had to steal 5% of the vote. This time they have to steal 20%. You can't steal that much without making the election a complete joke. Essentially, they'd have to run another coup.

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TheOtherMaven's picture

@gjohnsit

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There is no justice. There can be no peace.

CB's picture

They never did leave Southeast Asia. They are now ramping up regime change in the small countries adjacent to China.

Excellent discussion by Li Jingjing and Brian Berletic:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3w3HCd2-iM]
There's a hidden link among all the seemingly spontaneous violent protests in Thailand, Hong Kong, and Arabic countries --- the National Endowment for Democracy, the regime-changing tool funded by the US government.

Using Xinjiang, Hong Kong and many Southeast Asian countries to destabilize the region to encircle China, bringing chaos to people living in the region and benefiting a few elites in the US government, has long been written in US foreign policy.

In this episode, Brian Berletic, a geopolitical analyst and a former solider of US Marine Corps, explains how he decided to expose US global atrocities, the unreported truths in Thailand, Myanmar, and the danger of US interventions.

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If wiki can be believed it is over with 91.45% of the votes in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Honduran_general_election

Party Votes %
Xiomara Castro Liberty and Refoundation 961,694..53.61%
Nasry Asfura National Party..................607,492..33.87%
Yani Rosenthal Liberal Party...................165,255...9.21%

Edited to add:

I guess that I commented too soon as the % of the the vote reverted back to the earlier number. Someone must have been playing around with the entry.

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@humphrey It's all over

Nasry Asfura, the ruling party candidate in the Honduras election, has conceded to his opposition rival, Xiomara Castro, who will become the country’s first female president and the country’s first left-wing leader in 12 years.
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zed2's picture

Democracy is that the will of the people is followed and sacred. Left and right are increasingly useless labels being used to cheat the people of their will being followed.

Oligarchs understand that. They are united against what they call majoritarianism.

If they have their way only the rich could vote.

What happened at WTC7 ?

That it happened and cannot be explained by the NIST's whitewash should tell us something important.
Suppose the NIST's explanation was true, if it was that would be the cause for massive revisions in building codes based on its novel findings, right? Those revisions have never been done. Showing that nobody takes the report seriously. Meaning that its not true.
I want to point to the fact that along with humanity's property interest in Earth, the neoliberals are also successfully "rolling back the state" and national sovereignty, probably because they see it as potentially trying to stop their neo liberal takeover (foreclosures of property, like housing and seizures of national resources like water and other essentials.. takings that are being enabled by financialization of everything.)

Be aware that all of these new publications are SPIN. but their numerous nature in appearing now, should hopefully awaken people to the fact that everything is being taken right now, and powerful people want to confuse people about who and why this is being done, so they can successfully do that (steal the Earth) and prevent us from moving up in our evolutionary development as a species. They are trying to drag us back into a feudalism. Or worse, a world where money (alone) is everything and it and only it endows people with a right to speak or live.

This is perhaps illustrated by the Neoliberals embrace of the Nazi's legal theorist Carl Schmidt.

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zed2's picture

Right now its Africa they are focusing on but in the recent past it was Asia and South America. A giant resource and land grab.

Fake NGOs and global temping/staffing firms (who promote new form of quasi-slavery and drain away a large part of the new world order's wages they funnel upward to the oligarchs) Guest workers and semi-bonded labor for multinational corporations are a big part of this global pillage. The oligarchs want and get a huge cut of wages and people's (family, usually) sometimes also have to pay bribes to get their children into vanishing entry level jobs in the nations that have work.

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zed2's picture

China and Taiwan "are the same country" (Cough!) now 70 years after the 1949 transition. Taiwan is actually a democracy now. The powers that be are angry at it because it rejected the PRCs "trade deal on services" decisively.

There we have proof that the P.r China is actually allied with the other odious oligarchs (crooks like their own gerontocracy) in this strategy of beating the will of the people down. Profoundly evil trade deals that are intended to nullify democracy everywhere. These same rats nests of deception here also show us the DNC is fundamentally evil and not democratic in any way.

If they were they would reject these deals from hell. I hope we and they understand what they are all doing. Its against everything we are told America stands for.

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zed2's picture

>"It's because China is going around the world and actually investing on the infrastructure of other nations, as opposed to forcing neoliberalist privatizations, and she wants some of that."

Only In your dreams my friend. Part of it is to play into the fake propaganda both blocs are still trying to leverege that remains from the 20th century. And their own past. But only idiots would think that either of the blocs were in any way being altruistic.

Its far more likly thatChina and the US are helping faciulitate the takeover of the political world, the imperious, by both serving as a distraction of their people hiding the reality of a neoliberal takeover by the Geneva School, (NOT the ChicagoSchool) and creating a double government a double world government, similar to the concept in Roman Law of the Imperium and domestic law, which contolled property, ownership, etc. See Quinn Slobodian's book Globalists' introduction, first chapter. We ignore this at our own peril.

Now let me get back to the thread I was on..

Only sane (lets define it as non narcissistic) people do things like that (altrusism, selfless giving, etc.) , narcissists often try to act in visibly altrustic ways as one of their tricks, to deceive other people. Its a bit like how they appropriate clusters of things we associate with sane well balanced people, in order so that we accept them as being real. Its a trick. Shape shiftng, call it. Remember, being narcissists requires developing the parts of the brain that facilitate lying to a very large degree is why we often find narcissists seeking out the jobs they do. Its actually been proven that there are structural differences in NPD brains.

So back to China. No they are not altruists. They are just oligarchs. Pretending to be something else They are setting up debt traps they can use to protect themselves - just like the oligarchs here, with the US people. They are using debt as a weapon of control. They probably see it as using our own weapons against us. Just like India, they have the ace in the hole, in the form of these debts they can use to prevent us from fully making use of the offensive financial warfare system we have been setting up against them.

Remember the Asian financial crisis of the 1990s? Few of you likely do. Well, its all about balance of payments. The US's biggest vulnerability when it comes to China is its external debt. Beware of debt, as they are setting us up for their theft.

With india they now claim we owe them a huge debt which magically appeared January 1, 1995 , basically all the jobs they can do we will owe them, if they can do them cheaper. Even if we are successful in forcing them to pay a "legal US wage" which seems to me to be prohibited by the WTO law on market access, GATS Article XVI as its an arbitrary limit.

The law against slavery by race is an example of a trade barrier but one that might be able to be justified. But a general law against slavery without the race part might not as it inhibits trade. So buying and selling of criminals and or the indebted may be legal. I am sure the oligarchs of many countries intend to revive he full on brutal slavery eventually globally in some form. "if duly convicted of a crime" They want the total control that will bring. Its all economics. As the value of unskilled labor falls it becomes more likely. Humans are rapidly moving towards not being the cheapest supercomputers available and the loss of that superior means that our labr will decline relative to the cost of maintaining us. Imagine the Eargth without most of us. How easy it would be to fix the crisis de jour by eliminating indebted people because they no longer had a right to breathe.Some people could earn vouchers entitling them to a months oxygen. Or water.

Paradise for the oligarchs.

And they can. They hav

People need to know that the things they think of as rights, particularly those involving work and permission to work have become no longer exclusive - thats that has become discrimination and forbidden to exclude the more than 7 billion other potential workforce members. Thereby making on one fell swoop, labor potentially much less expensive. All those people have to eat and as the value of their labor declines, they have to work more and more and its like the story of John Henry, exactly, its a race humanity cannot win, against machines, who will always win. So more and more work will gradually become nearly worthless, as will the lives of most of humanity under this way of thinking. Of course they realize this.

"But thats immigration" you say. NO, its not, its work and so its under WTO law. Immigration is only permanent migration that does not involve Whats defined as Mode Four and Three under the GATS, look up the four modes of supply, in its definition (Article I of the WTO general services 'agreement').

intra company transfer Idiots are falling for this trick which is repeated again and again - Why do you think we were given President Trump? To confuse all these issues so this huge theft would work? To make subjects that needed honest discussion TOXIC?

Our people are being conned by the best con artists in the world. That means they will fool you and others. They are playing this game to steal the entire world. And as shown by the John Henry story, slavery still exists and it should be evident it will be a key part of how the world we know is being stolen by the very wealthy turning people into serfs..

The part they dont want people to know is the vehicle how this is done, trade deals. The world is being stolen in a form of legal tricks commonly used by the rich in stealing from poor people. Its a language THEY know well but the 99% dont know at all.

All the red flags are in writing and we are beijng deceived, and its obvious how and why . Dont be idiots.

You folks should read more. Dont allow yourselves to be tricked so easily by such well known and shameless con artists. .

We have monetized everything so it could be taken away easily and instantly, when people or countries fall deeply into debt. Everything can be taken away, even our water and other natural commodities. GATS turns them into commodities. S everything can be taken, under the new digital totalitarianism.. Possession is 9/10 of the law. People without tons of money who arent very poor can never get any help in America, Its been that way for a long time, creating a zone where the rich could steal at will just by taking things from people who could not afford to exist in the US legal system. Nor could they afford to get legal help. And NGOS represent a system that rigged for the rich, that the non rich are almost completely excluded from. Free legal services are only available to the "worthy" which means they are means tested and the middle class excluded. The middle class are those who have something worth stealing so that suits them fine. Now they are stealing on a massive scale in the US and thanks to GATS, increasingly elsewhere.

GATS makes it the same everywhere else. The middle class and the idea of a middle class which they hate is under attack everywhere. The 20th century was the century of the m"middle class" they intend for the 21st to be the century of the demise of the concept of a middle class.

Many might realize that the rich are more narcissistic (NPD), and the (rapidly shrinking) middle class is what we call normal.

Putting the whole world into the situations where far more narcissists are created during the short widow (under age 7 yrs) when narcissists are created by extreme stress is kind of like creating more narcissists by design. And reducing the number of people who have a moral compass on a large scale. Totalitarianism is what happens when narcissistic personality disordered people form governments.

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zed2's picture

@snopydawg

How would they "give up" exactly?

>Kidding, but glad to see countries not giving up after we interfered with their governments.

Looking through William Blum's well researched book "Killing Hope" I am struck by how unsuccessful American interventions have been. Its quite striking how few of these expensive and often horriffic "interventions" could even remotely called "successful" in hindsight One has to wonder why or how our people don't realize this.

Do any of you see one as unequivocally successful? Which one, and why?

How do they define "success" that question has to be asked.

Chamlmers Johnson's book "Blowback" (2000, Henry Holt, pub) perhaps tries to answer that question. Atleast in regard to Asia. But he comes up short. It doesn't look good.

We likely would have been much more "successful" if we just stayed out of those interventions.

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zed2's picture

done a lot of work on electronic voting machines that's very much worth reading.

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zed2's picture

@humphrey.

No, I dont wish "failure" and I must speak up in response to what you said, thats just wrong.

We should wish for a awakening of the futility of violence in ever solving anything.

I hope for success for all of us and for our country in all good things, However I think interfering with other countries elections is evil. And that we evolve and move beyond our past approach in nonviolent ways. And de-associate with the neoliberal ideology and its failures. Our ideology is poisoning our nation and its image. Making us look like terrorists. This puts the nation in a position where failure to stand up for what we say we stand for is a mistake.

We should resist militarism and corporate goaded glorification of violence. ll people have a right to live. Corporations are not people. Money is not free speech. All humans have a right to live on the earth and not have essential resources like water stolen and sold (privatized) .

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zed2's picture

1989. Yes, really.

This was at the Shangri-La dialogue imn Singapore around two years ago. The remarks were made by the PRCs defense minister. Investors just wanted to get high returns from the exploiutation of China's workforce to the maximally possible extent, perhaps. Anywy, Americans should know that China's low wages is what the investors want to continue forever. .

Guess the foreign investors wanted to see repression, they seemed to be trying to say. So all the criticism the PRC got from other countries was likely insincere. Including our own, quite possibly it was just for appearances. We are so naive about stuff like this.

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zed2's picture

I do not want to see US foreign policy failures. I want us to be what we claim to be and support freedom. I want labor standards to rise. Of course they have made it FTA illegal for us to demand such things. with the WTO.

So the very best means we had in the past to successfully exert pressure for change on Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa.. is now forbidden.

Thanks, Bill and Hillary

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