Whitewashing another US Foreign Policy Failure: Columbia, RSN: Ten Things You Should Know About Marco Rubio

Reader Supported News | 06 February 16

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Robert Reich | Ten Things You Should Know About Marco Rubio 
 
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page 
Reich writes: "He says everyone should own a gun to protect themselves from criminals and terrorists, and would shut down 'any place where radicals are being inspired.'" 
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en things you should know about Marco Rubio:

1. He says everyone should own a gun to protect themselves from criminals and terrorists, and would shut down "any place where radicals are being inspired."


2. He denies human beings are responsible for climate change.


3. His tax plan gives the top 1 percent over $200,000 in tax cuts per year, and would completely eliminate taxes on capital gains. That’s more than Jeb Bush’s proposed tax cuts for the rich, and about on par with Donald Trump’s.


4. He wants to freeze federal spending at 2008 levels for everything except defense.


5. He wants a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq, and would end the nuclear deal with Iran.


6. He wants to repeal Obamacare.


7. We have no way to know where he is on immigration because he’s flip-flopped -- first working on legislation to regularize citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and now firmly anti-legalization.


8. He’s fibbed about his personal history – saying his parents were Cuban exiles although they left Cuba before the revolution.


9. He’s been careless with official money. When serving in the Florida House he charged personal expenses (including a $130 haircut) to a Republican Party credit card intended for official use.


10. And although elected to the Senate as a Tea Party favorite, he’s now the establishment’s favorite Republican. Among his top donors are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer – along with Koch Industries.

What do you think?

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35031-ten-things-you-should-know-about-marco-rubio

Pentagon Releases Innocuous Photos Purportedly of Bush Era Detainee Abuse 
Cora Currier, The Intercept 
Excerpt: "The Pentagon today released 198 photos related to its investigations into abuse of detainees by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan." 
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Beyond Flint: In the South, Another Water Crisis Has Been Unfolding for Years 
NPR 
Excerpt: "It's not simply Flint that has bad water. The Michigan city, which has grabbed headlines recently for its rampant water contamination, is joined in that dubious distinction by another town, much farther south: St. Joseph, La." 
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The GOP Picked the Worst Lawmaker Possible to Chair a Task Force on Immigration 
Esther Yu-Hsi Lee, ThinkProgress 
Lee writes: "Republican lawmakers who are unhappy with the perceived 'executive overreach' of the Obama administration are forming a new task force to find 'legislative solutions' to challenge the president's power - and they picked a telling lawmaker to lead the effort. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), a passionate anti-immigrant hardliner, will serve as chairman." 
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Reclaiming the Computing Commons 
Rob Hunter, Jacobin 
Hunter writes: "The commodification and exploitation of nature; the enclosure of the intellectual and informational commons in medicine, agriculture, and other areas of technical knowledge; the expropriation of public space to secure profit-all define an economic system supposedly premised on freedom." 
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Fifteen Years Later: The "Great Success" of Plan Colombia 
Lisa Taylor, Upside Down World 
Taylor writes: "This February 4, celebrating the 'historic collaboration' between the United States and Colombia, current Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos visited the White House to meet with President Barack Obama as they commemorate the fifteen-year anniversary of Plan Colombia." 
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A Colombian anti-drug policeman stands guard in front of workers while they eradicate coca 

leaf plantations. (photo: Jose Gomez/Reuters)

his February 4, celebrating the “historic collaboration” between the United States and Colombia, current Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos visited the White House to meet with President Barack Obama as they commemorate the fifteen-year anniversary of Plan Colombia.

Signed in 2000 under U.S. President Bill Clinton and Colombian President Andrés Pastrana, Plan Colombia was a $1.3 billion initiative to support the Colombian government’s counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts, based upon the U.S. policy of fighting the War on Drugs from a supply side perspective. With 71% of the funds appropriated as military aid – training Colombian troops, supplying military technology and weapons, and supporting a controversial aerial fumigations program to decimate coca crops – the U.S. has given almost $10 billion in aid to Colombia since the implementation of Plan Colombia in 2001.

In addition to celebrating the “overwhelming success” of Plan Colombia, the visit is expected to promote United States support of the ongoing peace negotiations developing between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC by their Spanish acronym) in Havana, Cuba. Beginning in 2012, the accords have touched on six specific issues – land reform, drug trafficking, political participation, victims’ rights, demobilization, and implementation of the accords – and are tentatively slated to finish on March 23, 2016, ending a 52-year conflict between Colombia’s largest guerrilla group and the Colombian state.

In anticipation of the February 4 event, Colombian ambassador to the US Juan Carlos Pinzón statedthat, “In the year 2000, Colombia was a country at the edge of an abyss. In that moment, the United States government began a support plan that [. . .] achieved the transformation of our country and opened the door for a peace process.”

In the same vein, President Obama commented in an interview with prominent Colombian newspaper El Tiempo that “Throughout various administrations, including mine, the United States has become proud of being Colombia’s partner. That includes our close cooperation through Plan Colombia, which has helped the country to make important progress in security, development, and the reestablishment of democracy.”

Yet despite high-level government rhetoric about the success of Plan Colombia, members of civil society and human rights organizations tell a different story – a story of how US military intervention has increased human rights violations, especially among vulnerable populations including Afro-Colombians, indigenous communities, small-scale farmers, women, trade unionists, and human rights defenders.

In an open letter to President Obama, a network of 135 communities known as CONPAZ (Communities Building Peace in the Territories), writes “We have seen how our rights have been violated using the pretext of the armed conflict. We have seen how our territories have been and continue to be militarized and even worse, have seen a rise in presence of paramilitaries [. . .] Evidently Colombia has changed with Plan Colombia [. . . yet] these changes have not necessarily meant the improvement in the quality of life for the majority of Colombians.”

Although the modern armed conflict can be dated back to 1948, human rights violations skyrocketed in the year 2000 with the massive injection of US military aid under Plan Colombia. In fact, since the implementation of Plan Colombia, there have been 6,424,000 Colombians victimized – a staggering percentage of the 7,603, 597 victims total registered by the Colombian state’s National Victim’s Unit since 1958. That is, over 80% of total victims have suffered human rights violations since Plan Colombia began. Moreover, approximately 80% of deaths have been civilian, according to the National Center for Historic Memory.

Analyzing the human rights abuses of Plan Colombia, labor leader Jorge Parra commented that, “Plan Colombia has been a sinister plan between the two governments [the United States and Colombia] against small-scale farmers and the working class. Period. That’s what one sees from the worker’s point of view, from those who have had to experience this situation. Because for the rich of course it’s been marvelous, and it continues to be marvelous. But we haven’t seen it like this. The violence in the countryside has stayed the same. The hunger in the countryside has stayed the same.”

Parra continues, “They don’t invest in education, in healthcare [. . .] They begin to bring us [. . .] glyphosate [. . .] which has left a huge number of children sick, rivers polluted [. . .] Really this doesn’t address the problem which is a social problem, and the only thing they are doing is continuing to feed what the United States wants, which is war.”

In military terms, Plan Colombia could be classified as a great success – state security forces expanded their reach to almost all municipalities in the country, and the FARC’s ranks dropped from 17,000 to an estimated 8,000 fighters. Yet despite this, civil society groups have shown that paramilitary and state security forces built up by military aid through Plan Colombia have been responsible for the majority of human rights violations.

In fact, paramilitaries and state security forces together are estimated to be responsible for almost 48% of assassinations, while approximately 17% were committed by the guerrilla and the others by unknown armed actors or groups. Various scandals including the 2006 “false positives” scandal and the 2006 parapolitics scandal have further implicated state security forces (funded by Plan Colombia and often trained by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation/School of the Americas) and politicians in massive human rights violations.

One leader from a community called Nilo which is located next to the National Training Center of Tolemaida – the biggest military training base in Colombia – said in an interview with FOR Peace Presence Bogotá that “As a result of Plan Colombia, a lot of farmers have been affected. In the case of Nilo, the farmers have experienced violations of their human rights by the military and the Ministry of Defense, as we had to be confined in our territory. First of all, the military says they need our land for training purposes. Secondly, they say that as all the foreign personnel come to the military fortress Tolemaida to train, they have to provide them more security.”

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35026-fifteen-years-later-the-qgreat-successq-of-plan-colombia

The Hidden Environmental Factors Behind the Spread of Zika and Other Devastating Diseases 
Chris Mooney, The Washington Post 
Mooney writes: "The alarming spread of the Zika virus - caused in major part by the infamous Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can also carry dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya virus - is looking more and more like a public health catastrophe." 
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