The Obama administration is taking its bad August out on Honduras, announcing today the imposition of economic sanctions:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, responding to calls to increase pressure on the de facto Honduras government, announced the termination on Thursday of about $22 million in United States aid that was suspended immediately after President Manuel Zelaya was deposed.
As pointed out at Open Market, there is no legal basis for these sanctions:
Earlier, the State Department planned to cut off aid to Honduras based on the false claim that its removal of ex-president Manuel Zelaya was a “military coup.” But this claim was easily debunked, because Honduras replaced the ex-president with a civilian successor (a Congressman installed by Honduras’s Congress), who is backed by a democratically-elected legislature and a unanimous vote by the country’s supreme court….
Now, the State Department more or less admits that admits that there was no military coup, citing “the participation of both the legislative and judicial branches of government” in the president’s removal.
But while its original justification for cutting off the aid has disappeared, the Obama Administration was determined to cut off aid anyway, logic be damned.
The U.S. also is threatening not to recognize the government elected at the upcoming November election:
The U.S. government on Thursday toughened its stance against Honduras’s coup leaders and supporters, threatening to put them “in a box” by not recognizing the winner of a presidential election set for November.
This is the same U.S. administration which refused to refuse to recognize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s stolen election, and did nothing at all to put economic pressure on the Iranian regime. The same administration which says not a thing about Hugo Chavez’s systematic dismantling of free press and opposition political parties. The same President who sits silently for an hour as Daniel Ortega lashes out at the United States.
How easy for the Obama administration to pick on someone not its size.
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Related Posts:
Don’t Forget Honduras
Let them come to Tegucigalpa
Hands Off Honduras
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Comments
Thanks for a balanced and logical view. Most people of Honduras just want to get back to work. Zelaya was a corrupt president. The US State Department was not sanctioning him then. He has become a rallying cry for bullying small countries. Thanks again!
The reaction of the US Administration over the legitimate removal of Zelaya calls into question their own legitimacy….
Actually I think that Honduras will prove to be bigger than Obama …
http://www.harlemghost.blogspot.com
Obama's Honduran policy is a sop to his left wing base that claims the "military coup" was "engineered by two US companies, with CIA support. And that the US and its new president…[are]…not standing up for democracy." John Perkins, Tikkun Magazine
The Obama policy is not about logic or consistency. It's about grabbing and retaining political power the Chicago Way: first, crush the insects.
Let's hope this time they've stepped on a cow killer.
It's just Obama pandering to the SEIU (Service Employees International Union) that was important to his election. The SEIU leadership is adamant that we had a coup in Honduras, and that pressure should be applied.
The SEIU has also been funding Honduran Union activity. They tend to be the roughest, and most pro Zelaya.
Makes you wonder…
Here are some of the acts which were perpetrated by Zelaya prior to his congressional "termination of Presidential power"
1. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
2. He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
3. He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
4. He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
5. He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
6. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
7. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
8. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
Sound familiar? The Honduras "Coup", as portrayed by the Obama administration, was far more legal and righteous than the world has been led to view it. The numbered paragraphs above were written over 200 years ago by people just like us. They were true allegations of how another Tyrant acted, King George. The rest is history. Seems too familiar to present day governments all over the world, including our own.
The following paragraph is an excerpt from our own Declaration Of Independence.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, IT IS THEIR DUTY, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."
Interesting how history repeats itself. The Declaration Of Independence and the Constitution were meant to be DYNAMIC guidelines, not to be altered or amended to benefit any single company, corporation or individual.
If we should get confused, as a nation, we need only look at the ORIGINAL documents to find our moral compass and it's true north.