The good news: the attempt by Amazon to get rid of Kshama Sawant in Seattle has failed
Seattle’s socialist Councilmember Kshama Sawant declared victory Saturday after later vote tallies powered her dramatic comeback. She trailed by a large margin on election night before passing challenger Egan Orion on Friday.
The bad news: There was a successful military coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia
Was the United States involved? Well the CIA isn’t dumb enough to leave a long paper trail but the United States government has been trying to get rid of Bolivia for decades. Recall that back in 2013 the Obama administration forced Morales’s plane to land in Vienna then detained (kidnapped) him for the evening because they thought he was going to offer political asylum to Edward Snowden.
Bolivia reacted with fury after a plane carrying the country’s president home from Russia was diverted to Vienna amid suspicions that it was carrying the surveillance whistleblower, Edward Snowden.
France and Portugal were accused of withdrawing permission for the plane, carrying the president, Evo Morales, from energy talks in Moscow, to pass through their airspace.
Officials in both Austria and Bolivia said Snowden was not on the plane. The Bolivian foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, said: “We don’t know who invented this lie. We want to denounce to the international community this injustice with the plane of President Evo Morales.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/03/edward-snowden-bolivia-plane-vienna
Recall also that during the Bush years the United States supported separatist movements in the richest (and whitest) regions of the country.
“According to e-mails, between 2006 and 2009, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) poured at least four million dollars into separatist movements” in four of the nine regions of the country, said the left-wing leader.
In 2008, authorities of the Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija departments, which make up the Media Luna region, carried out referendums in order to form autonomous governments. The referendum organizers, according to Morales, were connected to separatist efforts.
The charges against Evo Morales you’ll here from pro-coup propaganda is that he violated Bolivia’s provision for term limits and that there were irregularities in the vote.
The first is true. Morales did run in spite of term limits although these term limits (like the ones imposed by the American ruling class in response to Roosevelt) were designed to prevent a very popular leftist president from running in another election he would almost surely win.
The second charge (that there were irregularities in the election), is almost certainly false.
Washington, DC ― Statistical analysis of election returns and tally sheets from Bolivia’s October 20 elections shows no evidence that irregularities or fraud affected the official result that gave President Evo Morales a first-round victory, researchers and analysts at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) say. Contrary to a postelection narrative that was supported, without evidence, by the OAS Electoral Observation Mission, statistical analysis shows that it was predictable that Morales would obtain a first-round win, based on the results of the first 83.85 percent of votes in a rapid count that showed Morales leading runner-up Carlos Mesa by less than 10 points.
Writers Without Money 