Pastor Fride and his idol

On Palm Sunday of this year, Reverend Edward Fride, of Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan, made himself temporarily famous by announcing during the Mass that the parish would be conducting qualifying classes for parishioners to carry concealed firearms. This announcement was met with some resistance from parishioners, to which Fr. Ed responded with a longish letter explaining his position. That letter exploded across the internet, with titles like, “Priest tells flock to pack heat.” This dust-up, in turn, compelled the Bishop of Lansing to issue a (sensible, in my view) cease-and-desist directive to Fr. Ed on gun training in the parish.

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The Colonial Surrogates

If you want to understand who is the true power behind the Honduran coup, you need to find out who is paying Lanny Davis.

-Robert White, former US Ambassador to El Salvador

If you begin with the military sector, the Honduran coup makers can be sub-divided generally by tasks: military tasks, financial tasks, political tasks, and media tasks. The old “send guns, money, and lawyers” trope. Just add, “send well-heeled media.”

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The Coup in Tegucigalpa

There’s a lot of work to do for a coup to be consolidated.

The consolidation phase had failed in Venezuela – in large part through the strategic error of listening to a few bought Generals telling the coup-makers the armed forces would follow the leader. It didn’t hurt that this is what the coup-makers wanted to believe. The young officers and the rank-and-file stood by the new popular Constitution, and one of the three legs to the coup collapsed.
It’s formulaic in the extreme to break coups down this way, so I’ll declaim early.

The three-leg theory of coup-making is necessary but certainly not sufficient to explain this highly complex enterprise. Those three legs are the three dimensions of destabilization: economic disruption and imposed scarcity, political turmoil, and the willing participation of the most powerful military/security institutions.

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Reagan’s Raiders



Beginning with Haiti, we can work back to the Reagan years; and we will see that many of the coup cadre under review on Honduras worked for both Reagan and the Bush dynasty.

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Anatomy and Sequence of the Modern Coup

The Murder of Luis Rolando Valenzuela Ulloa

Valenzuela

On July 1, 2010, Adrienne Pine, and American academic and activist working in Honduras, penned her suspicions in an article for the online site “Honduras Culture and Politics,” called “Honduran suspicions of US complicity in the coup.” (Part 2) With the coup still shrouded in official secrecy, she was simply recounting what she heard on the Honduran street. One of the stories on the street was that Rolando Valenzeula had been murdered.

The North American ambassador accredited to Tegucigalpa, Hugo Llorens, did know about the coup d’Etat against Manuel Zelaya Rosales, the ex-minister of the Zelaya administration, Roland Valenzuela, revealed days before his death, in an interview broadcast by the journalist Ernesto Alonso Rojas, in a local radio station of the city of San Pedro Sula.

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Another One-Trick Pony (The Coup Cadre)

We have talked about how the Fed has but one trick to command the economy (raising and lowering interest rates).  Recently they discovered one more trick that is a form of temporary trauma management in the wake of 2008, called quantitative easing, which basically puts off the inevitable - making the rich richer in the meantime (the Dow as I write this is soaring past 18,000 as the printing presses roll) - and ensures it will be much worse for the rest of us when the trick hits its limit.  That is not the topic of this series, but there is much being said about it elsewhere.

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[A] Hillary Clinton coronation would mean a Democratic nominee with close ties to Wall Street and the neoliberal wing of the party. . ."

-Noam Scheiber

Neoliberalism – A Short History

The notion that a great expansion of the size of ‘capital markets’ is a symptom of positive trends in capitalist production is as false as imagining that a vast expansion of the insurance industry is a sign that the world is becoming a safer place.

-Peter Gowan

In the Beginning…