Radio Havana Cuba-14 February 2002 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Radio Havana Cuba - News Update - 14 Febuary 2002 . *CUBA TO SEND HIGH-LEVEL DELEGATION TO ECONOMIC FUNDING SUMMIT IN MONTERREY *CELEBRATING A CENTURY OF RELATIONS BETWEEN CUBA AND JAPAN *VENEZUELAN STUDENTS VISIT MEMORIAL TO ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA *USA: BIG BUSINESS AND BIG BUCKS AT THE HEART OF AMERICAN POLITICS *COLOMBIA: RIGHT-WING CANDIDATE FAR AHEAD IN POLLS; PEACE PROCESS FLOUNDERS, *SPORADIC PROTESTS CONTINUE IN ARGENTINA *US, CANADA, AUSTRALIA SHIRK RIO SUMMIT COMMITMENTS: GREENPEACE *MEXICO: VICENTE FOX TO ADDRESS NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF NAFTA *Viewpoint: GLOBALIZING POVERTY AND VIOLENCE . *CUBA TO SEND HIGH-LEVEL DELEGATION TO ECONOMIC FUNDING SUMMIT IN MONTERREY Mexico City, February 14 (RHC)--Cuba will send a high-level delegation to the International Conference on Funding for Development, slated for Monterrey, Mexico from the 14th through the 18th of March. According to Havana's ambassador to Mexico City, Jorge Bolaños, the island's delegation to the upcoming UN-sponsored meeting will be headed by Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque and Francisco Soberon, president of the Central Bank of Cuba. During an interview with Prensa Latina News Agency in the Mexican capital, Jorge Bolaños said that delegates to the Monterrey summit will deal with four main points: programs to provide emergency funds, the use of finances in guaranteeing stability of underdeveloped countries, the role of local and regional financial institutions in preventing and dealing with economic crisis and the urgent need to facilitate access to long-term bank credits. In addition to foreign ministers and officials from national ministries of trade and economics, representatives from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization will also be in attendance. Following ministerial debates, the International Conference on Funding for Development in Monterrey will conclude with discussions by heads of State and government. *CELEBRATING A CENTURY OF RELATIONS BETWEEN CUBA AND JAPAN Havana, February 14 (RHC)--The year 2002 marks the centennial anniversary of relations between Havana and Tokyo. According to Japan's ambassador to Cuba, Matsuo Mabuchi, a number of activities are being planned to commemorate 100 years of relations between the two countries. Ambassador Mabuchi told reporters in Havana that among the upcoming events will be a special concert with Japanese jazz musicians, slated for later this month. The Japanese diplomat also announced that during the month of March, a photo exhibit would be opened at the Museum of the Revolution. And he added that cultural and sporting events are being scheduled for later this year, including a friendly baseball series between the best players of both countries. *VENEZUELAN STUDENTS VISIT MEMORIAL TO ERNESTO CHE GUEVARA Santa Clara, February 14 (RHC)--A group of 76 Venezuelan young people, studying here in Cuba to become social workers, visited the Memorial to Ernesto Che Guevara, located in the central city of Santa Clara. The students -- who are also actively taking part in the campaign against the Aedes aegypti mosquito -- laid a floral wreath at the foot of a huge statue of Che and toured the memorial and museum. One of the Venezuelan students, Maria Alejandra Camero, told reporters that she was deeply moved to visit the memorial to Che Guevara -- which she described as an "obligatory pilgrimage for all revolutionaries in Latin America and the world." The young student also referred to the importance of the course she is taking on social work and said that upon her return to Venezuela, she will immediately begin to apply her studies with the same professional integrity and humanistic warmth as in Cuba. *USA: BIG BUSINESS AND BIG BUCKS AT THE HEART OF AMERICAN POLITICS Washington, February 14 (RHC)--The US Congress has passed legislation that some say will squeeze special interest money out of politics and will be the most far-reaching overhaul of campaign finance laws in a quarter-century. But the most radical critics of big bucks and corporate leverage in government say little will really change. According to David Corn, Washington editor of the news magazine "The Nation," while the Shays-Meehan bill will put Congress closer to passing the first major change in the money-drenched campaign finance system in decades, no one should believe the "we've-ended-corruption" hurrahs. The bill targets soft money contributions to political parties, though, according to Corn, it does not ban such contributions to state parties. Though the legislation also prohibits state parties from putting these funds into federal election activity, Corn has asserted that it's a safe bet imaginative bookkeepers will quickly find a way around that restriction. Moreover, he said, contributors could still give up to 10,000 dollars to state and local parties for voter registration drives, get-out-the-vote drives and political ads, which means that a corporation frozen out of the soft-money business on the national level could disburse millions to parties across the country. Focusing on other details in the legislation, including a raise in the limits on certain types of hard money donations sent directly to political candidates, Corn noted that while one source of special-interest money is curtailed, but not banned, another source is expanded. He and other critics are asserting that politicians will declare the knotty issue of campaign finance resolved and will then feel free to ignore the remaining problems while the need for extensive reform will not fade. *COLOMBIA: RIGHT-WING CANDIDATE FAR AHEAD IN POLLS; PEACE PROCESS FLOUNDERS, Bogotá, February 14 (RHC)--Colombia's independent right-wing presidential candidate in elections next May, Alvaro Uribe, is far ahead in preference polls. According to local surveys, the candidate in favor of breaking off peace talks with leftist rebels and adopting a hard line position in the country's civil war could win the first round with 53 percent of the vote, far ahead of his closest runner-up, Liberal Party candidate Horacio Serpa, with 24 percent. Colombian media outlets are calling the survey results one of the most surprising political developments ever. The findings come as government peace negotiators and the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces insurgency Wednesday resumed peace talks from positions that media outlets are calling practically irreconcilable. While the government is demanding a cease-fire, release of the guerillas' prisoners of war, a halt in attacks against oil pipelines and other infrastructure, the rebels are demanding the setting up of a fund to aid the 2 million 800 thousand jobless Colombians, the expulsion from the country of foreign military advisors, an end to the US-financed military anti-drug program known as Plan Colombia, the dismantling of the right-wing paramilitary organization, and a prohibition on the extradition of Colombian nationals as preconditions for a cease-fire. But the government has insisted that there is no money for an unemployment fund and that Plan Colombia will continue, while asserting that a debate on extradition is not an urgent matter and the fight against right-wing paramilitaries is already one of its priorities. While both sides agree that the Colombian people are tired of war and violence, the rebels say they're also tired of unemployment and hunger. *SPORADIC PROTESTS CONTINUE IN ARGENTINA Buenos Aires, February 14 (RHC)--Sporadic protests continued Thursday in Argentina, with at least 5 public workers injured by police firing rubber bullets in the northern Salta province when they took to the streets to demand their unpaid salaries. Seven people were reportedly arrested in the central Cordoba province in another food riot when some 50 people were looting a supermarket. Municipal authorities in the city Villa Dolores, where the assault took place, distributed free shopping bags of food once police had controlled the disturbance. Another food riot occurred in Alta Gracia, also in Cordoba, where police didn't intervene as women and children looted a supermarket. Late Wednesday in the capital, Buenos Aires, Argentina's Congress was forced to suspend a session that was to see approval of the 2002 budget when protesters forced their way into the building. As protesters entered, Argentineans whose dollar bank deposits were converted into pesos also surrounded congressional headquarters. *US, CANADA, AUSTRALIA SHIRK RIO SUMMIT COMMITMENTS: GREENPEACE Cartagena, February 14 (RHC)--Greenpeace has placed the United States, Canada and Australia at the top of a black list of nations that have not complied with the commitments they assumed during the Earth Summit, held ten years ago in Rio de Janeiro. Greenpeace political director, French Remi Parmentier, said these three countries have played a very negative role in giving priority to sustainable development, the protection and conservation of natural resources and the environment and technical and financial aid to developing nations. Speaking in the Colombian city of Cartagena, currently hosting the Third World Forum of Environment Ministers, Parmentier said that while rich nations do not comply with their obligation to change their unsustainable consumption habits and to provide aid to poor nations, no one is going to take their commitments seriously. 600 delegates from 120 countries and 70 non-governmental organizations are participating in the Third World Forum of Environment Ministers, as a prelude to the World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held next August or September in Johannesburg, South Africa. *MEXICO: VICENTE FOX TO ADDRESS NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF NAFTA Monterrey, Mexico, February 14 (RHC)--Mexican President Vicente Fox has announced a plan to deal with the negative effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. Though NAFTA is said to have dramatically increased US-Mexico trade and brought more jobs to both sides of the border, it has also clogged roads with trucks, depleted water supplies, led to more sprawling shantytowns and increased air pollution. Despite growing foreign investment and salary and education levels twice the national average in the border region, uncontrolled growth has left cities with crumbling schools, overrun hospitals and dilapidated sewage systems. Fox announced the plan Wednesday during a tour of the northern Mexican state of Monterrey. The plan involves a network of government sectors that will oversee more than 50 programs dealing with the effects of NAFTA. In March, Monterrey will host the United Nations International Conference on Financing for Development, ostensibly called to look at how to redistribute wealth and encourage development across the globe. But anti-globalization activists have announced that they will be there to protest the gathering's free market, neoliberal focus. *Viewpoint: GLOBALIZING POVERTY AND VIOLENCE With the advent of a globalized economy comes a new violence -- one that is globalized and that, for the most part, emanates from Western government-supported multi-national corporations that seek profit at any cost. Huge layoffs that follow buyouts or corporate mergers, result in lowered wages and fewer benefits, leading to severe unemployment, poverty, prostitution, trafficking of drugs, trafficking of human beings, and violent, desperate crime. They also lead to civil unrest and war. Massive arms sales across the globe to anyone with the cash to buy. Western governments that sign landmine agreements with one hand and then make replacement weapons with the other. Civil unrest countered by arms that provide the means to make war. There are more civil wars taking place today than there were 20 years ago. But who asks why? As the world's corporations and venture capitalists, smelling blood, rush to impoverished underdeveloped nations to buy up public utilities and industries at a fraction of the market price, hundreds of thousands are thrown out of their jobs as their new bosses employ what is euphemistically called "downsizing." Public utilities' prices soar, people by their thousands -- unable to pay their bills -- become indebted to loan sharks and seek any means to get out from their new level of crushing poverty. Societies crumble, their governments seek redress and rich nations step in with weapons to implement the redress. As the world's powers compete for a share in the highly profitable arms trade, the violence that is thus globalized becomes a natural successor to the poverty that is also globalized. Yet it is not just the impoverished nations of the world that find themselves in maelstroms of globalized violence, their societies imploding. It is also the nations that got rich profiteering from them. Along with the lack of business scruples and the willingness to do anything for a price comes the resulting breakdown of moral and ethical norms and traditions. This is increasingly evident in the streets of industrialized nations as disaffected youth, seeing the fat cats getting richer through questionable business practices and, more importantly, get away with it, seek to emulate them. Enron is just a drop in the ocean. Street crime is up across Europe, which is not only importing violent US movies, but also the violence that they glorify. Private security firms are now the norm in Europe - a social phenomenon associated with globalization as foreign business executives travel the globe raking in more and more blood money. How do you expect to raise a young person to perform with honesty in trade and industry with role models like Enron President Kenneth Lay? Kenny-boy -- as his friend US President George W Bush likes to call him -- will no doubt walk away with a mild wrist-slap for his $300 million legal theft of his former employees' retirement fund. So will the other executives of the $1.1 billion fraud. Can't sell tobacco in the western world because the profits have been affected by anti-smoking legislation? Go sell the stuff in the Third World. Can't find a place to dump your industrial waste because of annoying Western environmental laws? Go dump it in the Third World. Can't get away with using chemical pesticides at home? Go produce them and sell them in the Third World. Can't overdo the use of weapons against your own population? Go make millions by bombing Third World nations instead. And while the West globalizes the arms trade and allows its executives to send millions more into poverty, Cuba continues to export doctors and nurses -- seemingly working against the current to globalize for humanity instead of for profit. (c) 2002 Radio Habana Cuba, NY Transfer News. All rights reserved. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= rhc-eng-12388 2002-Feb-14 19:34:16