Hugo Chavez met Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas, and presented this gift to the American president: “The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano. At the United Nations General Assembly in 2006, Chavez held aloft Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” encouraging everyone to read it. Is there a common theme to the dark-skinned Chavez’s book recommendations? Chavez’ critics from the Venezuelan upper middle class think he’s no brighter than a monkey. His message, educate yourselves.
Eduardo Galeano was interviewed by Amy Goodman on the day Barack Obama learned he had won the election. Galeano had this hope for the first US President of color: that he never forget that the White House, his new home, had been built by black slaves.
By the way, Galeano’s classic, with which Hugo Chavez hopes to bring Obama up to speed, was published in 1971.
When Obama won the 2008 election, Eduardo Galeano wrote this essay: I HOPE.
10 November 2008
Will Obama prove, at the helm of government, that his threats of war against Iran and Pakistan were only words, broadcast to seduce difficult ears during the election campaign?
I hope. And I hope he will not fall, even for a moment, for the temptation to repeat the exploits of George W. Bush. After all, Obama had the dignity to vote against the Iraq war, while the Democratic and Republican parties were applauding the announcement of this carnage.
In his campaign, the word most often repeated in his speeches was leadership. In his administration, will he continue to believe that his country has been chosen to save the world, a toxic idea that he shares with almost all his colleagues? Will he insist on the United States’ global leadership and its messianic mission to take command?
I hope the current crisis, which is shaking the imperial foundations, will serve at least to give the new administration a bath of realism and humility.
Will Obama accept that racism is normal when it is used against the countries that his country invades? Isn’t it racism to count the deaths of invaders in Iraq, one by one, and arrogantly ignore the many dead among the invaded population? Isn’t this world racist, where there are first-, second-, and third-class citizens, and the first-. second-, and third-class dead?
Obama’s victory was universally hailed as a battle won against racism. I hope he will assume, in his acts of government, this great responsibility.
Will the Obama government confirm, once again, that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are two names of the same party?
I hope the desire for change, which these elections have established, will be more than a promise and more than a hope. I hope the new government has the courage to break with the tradition of the one and only party, disguised as two parties which at the moment of truth do more or less the same thing while simulating a fight.
Will Obama fulfill his promise to shut down the evil Guantánamo prison?
I hope, and I hope he will end the evil blockade of Cuba.
Will Obama continue to believe that it is great to have a wall that prevents Mexicans from crossing the border, while money moves without anyone asking for its passport?
During the election campaign, Obama never honestly confronted the subject of immigration. I hope, now that he is no longer in danger of scaring voters away, he can and wants to break down this wall, much longer and more embarrassing than the Berlin Wall, and all the walls that violate people’s right to free movement.
Will Obama, who so enthusiastically supported the recent little gift of 750 billion dollars to bankers, govern, as usual, to socialize losses and privatize profits?
I’m afraid so, but I hope not.
Will Obama sign and comply with the Kyoto Protocol, or will he continue to give the privilege of impunity to the nation that is poisoning the planet the most? Will he govern for cars or for people? Can he change the murderous course of the lifestyle of the few who are risking the fate of all?
I’m afraid not, but I hope so.
Will Obama, the first black president in the history of the United States, realize the dream of Martin Luther King or the nightmare of Condoleezza Rice?
The White House, which is now his house, was built by black slaves. I hope he won’t forget it, ever.
2. Coal Kills People and Causes Disease
The more I see pundits scoring Barack Obama’s performance based on Wall Street’s reaction, according to how much hope Obama is able to infuse into the public’s faltering confidence in the economy, I have to ponder the uncomfortable etymology of the term CON ARTIST. Con Man is short for Confidence Man, itself a now obscure euphemism for chiseler, defrauder, grifter, scammer, swindler, gouger, or fraud. But the term is still charmingly descriptive.
COS- Having our own Air Force jets flying overhead constantly, I’m surprised more of Colorado Springs isn’t reacting to the F-18 crash in a San Diego residential area. The pilot ejected safely, but left his plane to plow into American homes.
Have I read somewhere that the military has lowered its requirements for who can be a pilot? Before Top Gun, film audiences were led to believe to be an officer meant you also had to be a gentleman.
The American people want to rally around a gang of liars. We have liars in the Bush Administration, liars talking CHANGE, liars in the top levels of almost our entire business sector, and liars above all else in the Pentagon. What is with the American people? 
It’s a multiple billion dollar industry with dangerous ingredients in them, but they haven’t been removed from America’s pharmacies shelves at all. Actually these meds are there now everywhere, including convenience stores, grocery stores, and dollar stores. There are constant ads for them on television counselling parents to buy them for their babies and kids to ingest. Find them on coupons, in magazines, anywhere you might look.
Taxpayers gifting the rich with $7,000,000,000 will not stop the coming capitalist depression at all, because it simply does not address the root causes of anything. We have been told that this crisis is merely the fault of toxic debts piling up from an American ‘housing bubble’, which happened due the crookedness of a few bad apples. Yes, its true, they add a few more details to this sob story but that is essentially all there is to the story line, with none of the American corporate ‘leadership’ class taking any personal or political responsibility at all. That is not too surprising about these moralizing immoralists at all. It is par for their course.
With all this bad private debt being hauled in by the US government hardly any notice has been given to the idea that the US Federal Government itself is putting itself at risk of default, too? In a way a governmental default (declaration of bankruptcy) would be a sort of poetic justice for the people of a country whose government has played an integral part in putting other governments around the globe into default with creditors in the past. 
The non-food additive 
Do you have any ‘toxic debts’? Maybe you moved out of an apartment and the place put hundreds of dollars of extra charges on your credit record claiming you did damages, even though these claims are false? Maybe you ran up 2 cents over on a debit card transaction, and the bank ran up their ‘overdraft protection’ charges on you? Maybe you were sold a junker and it fell apart a couple of miles off the lot? Are they still trying to collect payments from you? 
Most of the food in the American diet is approved by the FDA for irradiation and chemotherapy treatments. Our fresh produce and meat are subjected to these invasive procedures 1) to kill microorganisms and other pathogens 2) to arrest or delay the ripening process 3) to act as a pesticide 4) to prevent spoilage or sprouting. Although they don’t say it explicitly, irradiation also masks serious sanitation problems in both farming and meat processing and provides greater immunity to the food industry executives who can claim that their products were “clean” when they left the facility. 
The process of irradiation is safe? It’s certainly not free of harm. I guess the FDA means that irradiation is safe from public scrutiny, safe from government accountability, safe from ethical study, safe from its own sad truth.
The next time you are in a line of cars wrapped around a fast food outlet showing your interest for a burger. Consider this photograph. These are forty thousand lit candles, held by 40,000 South Koreans who do not want American beef allowed into their food chain. Many nations ban US meat because of its probable Mad Cow contamination, but Korea is being coerced into accepting it, against the will of the Korean people. These 40,000 assembled in the streets not only to protest against the toxic meat, but to block the trucks from removing the poisonous US food product from where it had been safely quarantined.
One of my favorite jump starts to the day is a breakfast of cottage cheese, fresh fruit and almonds. It’s is a simple meal, easy to prepare, and represents a near-perfect combination of protein, carbohydrate and healthy fat. It’s the almonds that provide the magic. In addition to a low glycemic index, which curtails a heavy duty insulin response, almond intake protects proteins from oxidative damage while delivering vitamin E and other antioxidants, magnesium, calcium, folic acid, protein, fiber and living enzymes.