contributions

Bolvia’s Evo Morales is the sixth presidential candidate in the last seven years to win an election while campaigning against economic neoliberalism.
By Mark Weisbrot
Evo Morales’ election in Bolivia, with an unprecedented (for that country) 54 percent of the vote, is seen and analyzed here mostly in political terms. He is a former head of the coca growers union and opposes the U.S.-sponsored attempts to eradicate the production of coca. He has talked about nationalizing the natural gas (…)

By Congressman John Conyers Jr.
There can be no doubt that today we are in a constitutional crisis that threatens the system of checks and balances that has preserved our fundamental freedoms for more than 200 years. There is no better illustration of that crisis than the fact that the president is openly violating our nation’s laws by authorizing the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance of US citizens.
The Bush Administration offers two arguments to justify their actions. (…)

Peruvian nationalist presidential candidate Ollanta Humala for the first time is leading public opinion polls, 28%, but conservative candidate Lourdes Flores would anyhow defeat him in the event of a run off, 46% to 39% according to the Lima Sunday press.
According to the survey published in Lima’s leading daily El Comercio, anti-establishment candidate Humala leads with 28%, followed by Flores 25% and two former presidents, Alan Garcia and Valentin Paniagua, with 15 and 10%.
Peru’s (…)

Havana, Jan 20, (Granma) The African gathering of the Sixth World Social Forum (WSF) opened in Bamako, Mali on Thursday with around 30,000 participants.
The opening ceremony began with a march from the independence monument to the Modibo Keita Stadium. Aminata Dramane Traere, former minister of culture and Federico Mayor Zaragoza, former general director of the UN Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) were among the participants.
The 2006 WSF is being held at three (…)

Indigenous organizations in the region hope to gain a boost from Evo Morales’s victory in Bolivia.
By Lucien Chauvin
LIMA, PERU - The day before Bolivia’s president-elect Evo Morales dons the presidential sash in front of more than a dozen visiting heads of state Sunday, he will stand barefoot and wear a traditional woven poncho at the Tiahuanaco ruins near the shores of Lake Titicaca, paying homage to mother earth and father sun in an ancient indigenous ceremony.
The pre-inaugural (…)

by Jesse Jackson Jr.
"The vote" is a human right. It is seen as an American right. In a democracy there is nothing more fundamental than having the right to vote.
And yet the right to vote is not a fundamental right in our Constitution. Some liberals argue that the fundamental right to vote for every American citizen is implied in the Constitution, based on Supreme Court precedent. Yet when I ask them about the denial of voting representation in Congress to District of Columbia citizens, (…)

Leaked memo reveals strategy to deny knowledge of detention centres
by Richard Norton-Taylor
The government is secretly trying to stifle attempts by MPs to find out what it knows about CIA "torture flights" and privately admits that people captured by British forces could have been sent illegally to interrogation centres. A hidden strategy aimed at suppressing a debate about rendition - the US practice of transporting detainees to secret centres where they are at risk of being tortured - (…)

I well remember Novembre 2, 2004. The exit polls , they are actually two separate exit polls , showed Democrat John Kerry was headed for a popular vote victory of between 2% - 4%. It wasn’t just the early exits but the third and fourth waves of exit polls that seemed to bode such an ill wind for Team Bush. My hopes soared until are I started monitoring the blog at National Review , the redoubt for bed-wetting chickenhawks who want YOU to die to sate Israel’s grand imperial (…)

WASHINGTON — A Democratic congressman, a prominent legal scholar and a self-described target of government surveillance urged Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee on Friday to consider impeaching President George W. Bush for his domestic surveillance program.
The recommendation by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., law scholar Jonathan Turley and Florida-based political activist Richard Hersh emerged at an unofficial Judiciary Committee hearing staged entirely by Democrats.
The (…)

Legal experts, privacy advocates and Democratic lawmakers on Friday called for congressional and independent investigations into whether the Bush administration broke the law by authorizing a secret program to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without a court order.
Seven Democrats held an unofficial hearing in the basement of a House office building to examine revelations that Bush ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps.
"I want to be absolutely clear, what the (…)