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by Stephen Lendman

For Hondurans, the event marked a new beginning, not an end to their dark history. Widespread killings and human rights abuses followed and a sham November election, installing Porfirio (Pepe) Lobo Sosa president, a US-friendly stooge heading a fascist regime. The nation’s military is firmly in control against popular resistance, street violence and death squad terror its repressive tools. The Obama administrative stands firmly supportive. It blessed the coup, the new government and provides aid, all for hardline rule, none for popular needs. 

Activists and journalists are especially threatened. Honduras is one of the most dangerous countries anywhere for those speaking openly about government corruption, human rights abuses, and despotism, the latest casualty – Radio Internacional reporter Zelaya Diaz, shot dead on August 24 along a rural San Pedro Sula road. According to press reports, he died from two bullet wounds to the head, another in his chest. Like similar past incidents, an investigation, if it occurs, will be whitewashed. No one will be held accountable.

Though not openly threatened, an earlier suspicious fire damaged Diaz’s home, a message perhaps demanding he stop reporting on politics and crime. Since March alone, eight journalists have been killed, a disturbing pattern against others stepping too close to honest reporting about what Hondurans most need to know – the truth about their corrupted, brutal regime.

Despite the UN General Assembly’s June 30, 2009 condemnation of the coup “by acclimation,” 90 nations have now restored diplomatic ties, normalizing relations after the October 30 Tegucigalpa-Jose Accord (the unfulfilled agreement to form a National Unity/ Reconciliation Government) and Lobo’s election – business as usual triumphing over the rule of law and democratic freedoms, Washington always in the lead, pressuring others to go along.

Resistance, however continues. On August 27, Honduras Resists reported that protests and police repression filled Tegucigalpa streets, the nation’s capital, for the third straight day. Security forces surrounded the National Pedagogic University where teachers, students, unionists, campesinos, and other activists gathered inside demanding social justice.

They were attacked, police using tear gas, then beating some overcome and forced outside. Others were arrested. The previous day, thousands of teachers were assaulted near the Presidential Palace (Casa Presidential), the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH) saying a number were wounded, yet Escuela Hospital refused to treat four injured professors. Protests erupted after negotiations with the Lobo government failed. Security forces responded repressively.

Honduran human and worker rights are consistently denied. As a result, on August 31, the National Front for Popular Resistance (FNRP) called for a September 7 nationwide strike for a living wage and other demands, including keeping the nation’s natural resources public, not privatized.

According to Juan Barahona, President of the United Federation of Workers of Honduras (FUTH), it’s also to “express our rejection of this regime,” its repressive policies and neoliberal model.

In addition, FNRP wants a National Constituent Assembly to review and rewrite the Constitution, supported by most Hondurans. It also plans a September 15 national mobilization commemoration on the 187th anniversary of independence from Spain.

It needs another from Washington, Honduras’ ruling oligarchy, fascist government, and repressive military and police, cracking down brutally against activists, campesinos, and supportive journalists for social justice.

Report from Rights Action (RA)

RA focuses on community development, emergency relief, environmental and human rights issues in Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and El Salvador. It aims to “build north-south alliances and carries out education, political and legal work for global equity and justice,” following a “just development model.”

On August 31, it reported that Honduran repression continues, elaborating on three-days of Tegucigalpa crackdowns. It followed weeks of public school teacher demands for the return of $200 million taken from the National Institute of IMPREMA, an institution managing their pension funds.

The umbrella organization FOMH represents six teachers unions and their 63,000 members nationwide. After the June 2009 coup, they said the new regime took the money they want back.

Students have demands as well, wanting 180 fired workers reinstated and National Autonomous University (UNAH) director, Julieta Castrellano’s resignation. Allied with teachers, they also oppose Lobo’s plan to privatize public education. As a result, it’s been in crisis for months without resolution. Students occupied the university. Police assaulted it repressively.

Peaceful protests continued. Hardline crackdowns followed. Police used water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, brutal beatings, and arrests, in the presence of women and children around the National Pedagogical University. From a black Toyota, a gunman fired a 9-millimeter weapon at protesters, the car belonging to the National Congress.

Besides arrests, “Over 100 people were captured and ‘guarded’ by police against a fence outside the University.” After human rights representatives intervened, they were released. Yet many teachers and students were trapped in classrooms suffering tear gas exposure. Seven or more others were injured, including a Globo TV/Radio journalist.

Earlier in August, security forces brutally beat three union leaders and one teacher, fingered by regime infiltrators in their marches. The corporate-owned media call protesters “instruments of violence,” accusing them of disrupting children’s education. In fact, they’re Hondurans for social justice.

On August 31, the Honduras Solidarity Network (HSN), a coalition of US organizations, denounced state repression, saying:

“the recent brutal attacks by government forces against non-violent protests show that there has been no reconciliation after last year’s coup d’etat, and the US government’s policy of support for the current government must be changed. We call for an immediate end to the repression and human rights violations against the opposition movement,” its teachers, students, unionists and other supporters.

HSN spokeswoman Vicki Cervantes said “The United States government continues its support for the oligarchy and Lobo in the form of aid and pressure on other governments in the hemisphere to accept” its legitimacy when, in fact, it has none.

Meanwhile, popular opposition is growing. For the first time since 1954, Honduran trade union federations called a general strike. In addition, nearly one million eligible voters signed letters demanding a National Constituent Assembly to rewrite the Constitution. So far, hardline repression continues, Washington providing weapons and ammunition.

Campesinos Struggling for Their Rights

They’re ongoing throughout Honduras, including in the northern Valle de Aguan, once the country’s agrarian reform capital, campesinos now contesting their land rights agreed to in a MUCA arranged deal – the Movimiento Unificado Campesino del Agua.

Signed in December, they agreed to abandon occupied areas in return for 11,000 acres of cultivated and uncultivated land. However, powerful landowners objected, using security forces to intimidate, threaten, and persecute farmers, killing eight or more and arresting others on grounds of “theft and trespassing.”

The Aguan land struggle continues, the Committee in Defense of Human Rights (CODEH), saying “the facts show that the justice system like the Public Ministry and the Police are allied with the landowners of the zone to persecute those who try to challenge their privilege.”

Decades of the country’s dark history under a ruling oligarchy left up to two-thirds of Hondurans impoverished, unable to meet basic needs. Most are landless or have too little, over half unemployed or underemployed, while wealthy landowners control most valued areas and want more, never satisfied with enough.

Despite the 1962 agrarian reform, the 1992 Law for Agrarian Modernization rolled back earlier gains. Thereafter, indigenous movements only marginally restored losses, no match against wealthy oligarchs backed by repressive state forces, enforcing death squad terror.

Honduras’ class struggle persists in the hemisphere’s second poorest country after Haiti, committed to end decades of repression, injustice and poverty, a growing problem throughout most of the world, dark interests wanting more wealth and power at the expense of easily exploitable people.

Final Comments

In America, the major media suppress the Honduran story – the coup, deep repression, and popular struggle for change. Committed grassroots pressure continues, what’s mostly absent in the United States on a fast track toward despotism, the kind Central America has long experienced, Haitians and Hondurans most affected, yet persist for their rights against long odds they’re determined one day to overcome.

by Stephen Lendman

Wall Street and other financial scammers do it from the living, Prudential and many insurers from the dead, ripping off families of killed war vets. On July 28, Bloomberg.com’s David Evans discussed how it works in an article titled, “Fallen Soldiers’ Families Denied Cash as Insurers Profit,” a polite way of explaining grand theft. From the living, it’s bad enough, from the dead, it gives chutzpah new meaning, affecting countless thousands of bereaved families. 

Evans wrote about one, Cindy Lohman. Two weeks after her son Ryan was killed, she received a Prudential Financial, Inc. “9-inch-by-12-inch envelope,” the company managing life insurance for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).

A letter explained. As his beneficiary, she was entitled to $400,000 in death benefits along with something looking like a checkbook. The funds “would be placed in a convenient interest-bearing account, allowing her time to decide how to use” them, the letter saying:

“You can hold the money in the account for safekeeping for as long as you like,” plus a disclaimer in easily overlooked fine print, explaining “what it called its Alliance Account,” a non-FDIC insured scheme, a ripoff to defraud beneficiaries like Lohman.

After leaving the funds untouched for months, she tried unsuccessfully using one of the “checks,” then failed a second time. She was “shocked,” saying she thought the money was FDIC insured, in a bank, to be used freely.

Not so. The “checks” were drafts or IOUs. “That money – like $28 billion in 1 million death-benefit accounts managed by (130 insurers like Prudential) wasn’t actually sitting in a bank.” It was in Prudential’s general corporate account earning income – around 4.8% for insurers, 1% or less for survivors. This summer it was 0.5%, less than half what some banks pay on jumbo CDs, and way less than insurers yield on their investments.

“It’s a betrayal,” said Lohman. “It saddens me as an American that a company would stoop so low as to make a profit on the death of a soldier. Is there anything lower than that?”

For sure – waging an illegal war of aggression, sending young men and women to die for a lie, Ryan Lohman one of thousands affected (plus others maimed and disabled for life), their deaths compounded by insurance fraud ripping of their survivors, and VA officials doing nothing to stop it, claiming ignorance when they damn well knew or easily could have found out. For every branch of government, the business of America is business, the public their patsies to be scammed of their money, health and welfare.

So-Called “Retained-Asset” Accounts

They’ve become standard practice “in an industry that touches virtually every American: There are more than 300 million active life insurance policies in the US, and the industry holds $4.6 trillion in assets, according to the American Council of Life Insurers.”

Insurers tell survivors their money is safe, guaranteed by them not the government, making them woefully unsafe when investments are ripped off, and the principal depends on the company’s health.

According to Jeffrey Stempel, Law Professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, the “checkbook” system cheats survivors.

“It’s institutionalized bad faith. In my view, this is a scheme to defraud by inducing the policyholder’s beneficiary to let the life insurance company retain assets they’re not entitled to. It’s turning death claims into a profit center,” and Washington lets them get away with it.

Three firms, including Prudential and Metropolitan Life, handle retained-asset accounts for about 130 life insurers. No public records show how much, but at least $28 billion is involved.

Besides scamming beneficiaries, insurance companies may be violating federal bank law – a 1933 statute making it “a felony for any company to accept deposits without state or federal authorization.” Only chartered banks and credit unions can do it. Insurers aren’t chartered or regulated, so funds they hold for beneficiaries will disappear if they go under.

Further, the bogus Obama administration “financial reform” doesn’t address retained-asset accounts, only a new federal insurance office with no teeth. The same holds for the entire bill, a gift to Wall Street and big insurers, small investors left unprotected, or as one analyst explained – “austerity” for the public, high times for the big boys, and why not. They wrote the bill and got what they want as they did for “healthcare reform” and everything else Congress enacts, corporate occupied territory like the White House and all federal agencies. How else could Wall Street and insurers like Prudential commit fraud and get away with it.

Pru and Met Life alone rip off hundreds of millions of dollars annually, stealing one of their main profit centers with no accountability. Since 1999, the VA let Prudential send survivors “checkbooks” for its Alliance Account. “In 2009 alone, (recipient) families….were supposed to be paid” $1 billion in death benefits “immediately, according to their insurance policies. They weren’t.”

Pru VA policies offer either a lump sum payment or 36 monthly installments. About 90% choose the former and get a “checkbook,” not a cashable check. Yet under a 2008 law, recipients have one year to put their funds into a tax-free Roth IRA. Lohman said Pru never told her. Unless Congress corrects the fraud, she and other recipients “will remain a secret profit center for the life insurance industry,” their officials robbing the graves of dead soldiers.

Parents Sue for Lost Benefits

On August 30, AP reported that the parents of six dead soldiers “are suing Prudential Financial, saying it paid paltry interest on military life insurance benefits while keeping more generous” payouts for itself.

Filed in Springfield, MA US District Court, it accuses Pru of using “bookkeeping maneuvers,” misrepresenting how benefits are handled. “Their attorneys are seeking class-action status” for potentially tens of thousands of others.

One of four attorneys involved, Cristobal Bonifaz, said lost interest varies, “depending on how quickly beneficiaries withdrew the money,” those leaving it untouched (the great majority) owed the most, as much as $30,000 per recipient.

“What we’re saying to Prudential is, ‘You kept investing the money, but that money did not belong to you as of the day that person died, and whatever you made off it, you should give to those persons it was meant for.”

Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. Plaintiffs in the current suit are parents of soldiers who died in Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and those dying after returning home.

Lead plaintiffs, Kevin and Joyce Lucey, spoke for many saying: “It’s totally unacceptable for any company to think they can treat any family that has gone through this kind of trauma, especially military families. (We) think it becomes part of our responsibility to make sure no one has to go through anything similar to this.”

Given Washington’s complicity with banksterism, insurance fraud, and numerous other corporate scams, imagine how many others haven’t come to light. Imagine also the challenges ordinary people face for restitution, even by class-action, deep-pocketed bigness and business-friendly courts huge hurdles to overcome, plus interminable litigation years, especially when high stakes are involved.

by Stephen Lendman

Drilling means spilling, hundreds of annual incidents, most small, unreported, yet their cumulative effect is devastating, what the industry and nightly news won’t mention or explain.

On February 25, 2009, Environmental Research web.org writer Kate Ravilious did, headlining “Small unreported oil spills add up to major damage,” saying:

Big spills make headlines while small ones “often go unnoticed and unreported. But these little slicks could be just as damaging to the environment as large spills, according to new research findings.”

Barcelona, Spain Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya Professors Jose Redondo and Alexei Platonov developed a way to spot spills from satellite images. They show that “small oil spills are very common, and when added together they become comparable to large” ones. Their frequency makes them damaging, yet little about them is reported.

Studying European waters alone, they determined that major spills happen every few years, large ones three or four times a year, and smaller ones virtually daily. Extrapolated globally over time amounts to a major environmental problem, compounded by many small incidents and natural seepage – as much as 14 million barrels a year globally offshore.

“For example, it seems that there are four to five times more spills (large and small) in East Asia than in European Coastal waters,” and Middle East ones experience “significantly more spills.” Most often, negligence to cut costs is why.

According to Redondo and Platonov, “the cumulative effect and toxic dose (of small spills) is the same as a large spill, and will be detected in the long run,” as well as their environmental damage, slowly destroying the health of global waters.

Charles Clusen, Natural Resources Defense Council National Parks and Alaska Projects director believes up to 500 spills happen annually and will increase with greater production, plus natural seeps adding more. According to former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA) supervisory researcher Jeff Short:

“Once you have a spill, you are pretty much screwed. That’s because oil spreads on water at a rate of one-half a football field per second. Recovery can take decades.”

Another expert says offshore spills cause more damage than a terrorist attack. They’re unacceptable risks – reason enough to ban all shallow and deep water drilling and strictly regulate the rest. Besides daily spills, the Gulf of Mexico alone has experienced over 500 oil rig fires since 2006, most never reported, the latest on September 2. More on it below.

Exhibit A in Alaska was the Prince William Sound Exxon-Valdez incident. After over 20 years of natural weathering, it remains an environmental and human catastrophe, and it was minor compared to BP’s greatest ever environmental crime.

On land, drilling is hazardous, but offshore requires complex technology, greatly increasing the risks. According to UC Berkeley Engineering Professor Robert Bea:

“This is a pretty frigging complex system. You’ve got equipment and steel strung out over a long piece of geography starting at the surface and terminating at 18,000 (or more) feet below the sea surface. So it has many potential weak points,” compounded by negligence to cut costs. “Just as Katrina’s storm surge damage found weaknesses in those piles of dirt – the levees – gas likes to find weakness in anything we connect to that source.”

Drilling is a dirty, dangerous business. The long-term harm greatly outweighs the benefits. Besides spills and other accidents, the ecological damage is immense, contaminating waters and shorelines. Drilling releases toxic muds, containing poisonous heavy metals, including mercury, cadmium and lead, as well as dangerous amounts of arsenic, benzene and radioactive minerals. According to the EPA:

Drilling “may leave behind waste containing concentrations of naturally-occurring radioactive material (NORM) from the surrounding soils and rocks. Once exposed or concentrated by human activity, (it) becomes Technologically-Enhanced NORM or TENORM. Radioactive materials are not necessarily present in the soils at every well or drilling site. However, in some areas of the country, such as the upper Midwest and Gulf Coast states, the soils are more likely to contain radioactive material.”

“Radioactive wastes from oil and gas drilling take the form of produced water, drilling mud, sludge, slimes, or evaporation ponds and pits. It can also concentrate in the mineral scales that form in pipes (pipe scale), storage tanks, or other extraction equipment.”

Naturally occurring radioactive materials include radium and radon gas, potent carcinogens that accumulate in water, wildlife, plants and vegetables, and take 1,600 years to degrade. Combined with other toxins (after decades of offshore drilling) has left vast areas of global waters dangerously toxic – why nothing in them should be eaten.

The Latest Reason to Ban All Offshore Drilling

On September 2, operating 100 miles south of Louisiana’s Vermilion Bay in shallow water (several hundred feet deep), a rig operated by Mariner Energy, Inc. (a Houston-based independent oil and gas producer) exploded and caught fire, a company press release saying:

The company “confirms that a fire has occurred at a production platform located on Vermilion Block 380, approximately 100 miles from the Louisiana coast. All 13 members of the crew have been evacuated and safely accounted for. No injuries have been reported. In an initial flyover, no hydrocarbon spill was reported.”

False. Workers told rescuers they heard a blast, saw a fire, and had to jump into Gulf waters to be safe. One injury was reported. The Coast Guard said a mile-long, hundred foot wide oil sheen was seen near the site, then later about-faced saying no oil was spotted. It’s there and spreading, but there’s no indication how much or whether the release was contained. First reported at 9:20AM, the fire was extinguished about six hours later.

Mariner’s rig is a production, not drilling platform like BP’s. At year end 2009, it produced 47% oil and 53% natural gas. The company has interests in nearly 350 offshore leases, including over 80 in deep water down to 7,100 feet. More than 110 are in development.

According to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Regulation and Enforcement (BOE, formerly the Mineral Management Service – MMS), federal authorities cited Mariner and its related operations for 10 Gulf accidents in the past four years. They included platform fires, oil spills and a blowout. In a 2008 incident, one employee sustained serious injuries. In early 2010, the company was fined $55,000 for safety violations.

Consider its history. As a former Enron unit, it faced bankruptcy, saved only by private equity investors buying it at fire sale prices. On April 15, Apache Corp., America’s largest independent oil and gas producer, announced plans to buy Mariner, calling the deal “a strategic step and a natural extension into the deepwater Gulf….provid(ing) an exciting new platform for growth….” The agreement is still on, Apache saying it’s monitoring developments closely but hopes to complete its acquisition in a matter of weeks.

Final Comments

Despite offshore drilling dangers; the industry’s history of violations, accidents, and spills, some major like BP’s; and the growing contamination of waters and coastal areas, the rage to drill is unabated, few in Congress willing to challenge Big Oil’s muscle.

After the Mariner explosion, however, environmental groups are flexing theirs, wanting offshore drilling banned, Greenpeace USA’s oceans campaign director, John Hocevar, saying:

“How many times are we going to gamble with lives, economies and ecosystems? It’s time we learn from our mistakes and go beyond oil,” for sure stop drilling offshore to get it.

Jackie Savitz, senior campaign director for the environmental group Oceana agrees, saying:

“We think all offshore oil drilling should be banned, but not just the deepwater drilling. Even oil spills in shallow water are bad. It doesn’t have to be in deep water to be a disaster.”

Environment America’s Mike Gravitz said Obama “need(s) no further wake-up call to permanently ban new drilling.”

In a September 2 press release, the Center for Biological Diversity said:

“Today’s explosion….is the latest in a string of accidents in recent decades illustrating the dangers of offshore drilling in shallow (or deep) waters.” It called for expanding the moratorium, explaining that “Offshore drilling is an inherently unsafe, toxic activity that, every day, puts people and the environment at risk.” Only one solution can work – a total ban.

After the BP incident, a coalition of 14 environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace, wrote Obama, urging a permanent moratorium, saying:

“In response to the BP drilling disaster, we specifically urge you to establish a presidential drilling moratorium which would permanently restore coastal protections for areas currently not leased for offshore oil and gas drilling, and cancel exploratory drilling permits for the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. Furthermore, we urge you to use the full force of your office to push for a comprehensive bill that cuts oil consumption, curbs global warming pollution and shifts us towards clean energy.”

The group also called for a “top to bottom review of worker safety, blowout avoidance technology, and oil spill clean up plans for operations in the Outer Continental Shelf.”

Others believe only a total ban can work, shifting America’s fossil fuel addiction to alternative, clean sources. The choice is simple – either a healthy, safe environment or one contaminated and destroyed. There may be little time left to decide.