Trump Administration Pressures Argentina to Rescind Award to Former President Jimmy Carter

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The Trump Administration pressured the government of Argentine President Mauricio Macri to rescind an award to former US President Jimmy Carter. Argentina was going to honour Carter with the Order of the Liberator General San Martín, the equivalent to America’s Medal of Freedom. However, the Trump administration moved to quash this as Carter is a frequent critic of the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump Administration. The Buenos Aires Herald wrote:

CNN reported this week that the Mauricio Macri Administration rescinded a decision to award former US President Jimmy Carter the Order of the Liberator General San Martín… the highest distinction that the country can give to a foreigner… under pressure from US President Donald Trump’s administration. The official tribute, already approved by the Foreign Ministry and published in the Official Gazette, was cancelled after receiving a specific request by the US government, which suggested it’d be better to delay it. Carter was to receive the award for his work in promoting human rights during Argentina’s last military dictatorship.

30 April 2017

The Intellectualist

https://theintellectualist.co/trump-administration-pressures-argentina-to-rescind-award-to-former-president-jimmy-carter/

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Argentina OKs Russian Bases

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Argentina, the second-largest country in South America, agreed to allow Russian military bases on its territory. Whilst the USA and the whole world were fixated on the events taking place in the Ukraine, Russia stepped up its diplomatic efforts in the Western Hemisphere. President Putin discussed the idea of ​​military bases in South America with Defence Minister S K Shoigu in February. Russia is considering establishing military bases in Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Argentina. In recent years, all these countries were active Russian allies. Argentina’s OK to Russian military bases seriously strengthens Moscow’s position in South America. According to the publication Guardian Liberty Voice, the USA actually slept through the appearance of Russian military bases. A Russian military presence in the Western Hemisphere confronts the USA with a difficult task and marks a reduction in Washington’s influence. The USA has never had sufficient funds for missile defence along its southern borders.

25 October 2014

Military Observer

http://warsonline.info/geostrategiya/argentina-dala-soglasie-na-razmeschenie-rossiyskich-voennich-baz.html

 

EU Pressure on Argentina to Halt Food Imports to Russia Might Backfire

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Peter Koenig, a former World Bank economist, thinks that Argentina would laugh at the EU’s “ridiculously stupid” request not to increase food exports to Russia. A short while ago, the Financial Times reported that the EU was going to try to talk Latin Americans out of supplying Russia with foodstuffs. Several European diplomats visited the region and singled out Argentina as an obvious target for European pressure. Brussels failed to understand that Russia doesn’t need to import foodstuffs from Latin America. In fact, Koenig said that Moscow could help Argentina and other Latin American countries “free themselves from the economic and political pressures constantly exerted … by Washington”.

Commenting on Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the Ukrainian crisis, Koenig said that they’d positively affect Russia, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, etc. They’d encourage those countries to “finally escape the claws of the predator empire of Washington, and go the way of independence, namely, towards a new area of economic sovereignty and a new world monetary system”. Koenig pointed up that sanctions promote greater integration of the BRICS countries. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa are likely to “come to a consensus … and issue their own currency, backed by about one-third of the world’s economic output and about half the world’s population”. Over the last few years, Russia and China “forged a solid political and economic alliance”. Therefore, they could be the first countries to introduce a new currency “delinked from the corrupt predatory western monetary system”. That currency could replace the dollar as a global reserve currency. Russia and China have a combined GDP of 21.1 trillion USD (762 trillion Roubles. 130 trillion Renminbi. 1.28 quadrillion INR. 23.2 trillion CAD. 22.7 trillion AUD. 16 trillion Euros. 12.72 trillion UK Pounds), about 27 percent of world economic output. Therefore, “a Sino-Russian currency would be backed by solid economic output and commodities”. On the other hand, Koenig explained that the US GDP (17 trillion USD (614 trillion Roubles. 105 trillion Renminbi. 1.03 quadrillion INR. 18.7 trillion CAD. 18.3 trillion AUD. 12.9 trillion Euros. 10.3 trillion UK Pounds)) is “mostly based on the output of the financial services industry and its military industrial complex, meaning it’s a GDP of destruction and overconsumption, as well as hollow financial and legal services”.

Koenig thought that Argentina could become the first country “to free itself from the economic sledgehammer of the immoral USA and at the same time enter into trade agreements with Russia and China”. That could be reasonable, considering that “90 percent of Argentina’s foreign trade takes place outside of the realm of the US dollar”, and that it’s likely to be an outsider in a dollar-based financial system. Koenig is confident that it’s only a matter of time until much of the rest of the world “jumps on the occasion and abandons the dollar. All it needs is one country that dares to take this first step, fearless of sanctions”. Koenig also said that if Brussels keeps on pushing Argentina, thus, “helping Obama and his blood-thirsty NATO war machine engage Russia in World War III”, Europe runs the risk of destruction. He asked, “Don’t they realise that Russia not only wants to save Europe from another humanitarian disaster, but would like to help them out of their Wall Street imposed economic disaster?” Koenig maintains that Europe must realise it should “get rid of their Washington-imposed neoliberal thieves” and seek a healthy alliance with the East. He emphasised that it’s never too late to make the right choice.

26 August 2014

Stanislav Fisher

Rossiya Segodnya

http://en.ria.ru/authors/20140826/192347091/Argentina-Would-Laugh-at-EU-Request-to-Decrease-Food-Export.html

Top Pope Ally Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga urges Vatican Doctrine Chief Müller to Loosen Up

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On Monday, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, an influential aide to Pope Francisco Bergoglio, criticised Vatican doctrinal watchdog Archbishop Gerhard Ludwig Müller and urged the conservative prelate to be more flexible about reforms being discussed in the Catholic Church. Rodríguez, the head of a “kitchen cabinet” the pope created to draw up reform proposals, said that Müller… who opposes any loosening of church rules on divorce… was a classic German theology professor who thought too much in rigid black-and-white terms. In a rare public criticism amongst senior church figures, Rodríguez rhetorically addressed Müller in an interview with the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, saying, “The world isn’t like that, my brother. You should be more flexible when you hear other voices, so you don’t just listen and say, ‘Here’s the wall'”. Rodríguez, Archbishop of Tegucigalpa in Honduras, didn’t cite any possible reforms in particular, but said the pope’s critics, such as those upset by his attacks on capitalism, were “people who don’t understand reality”.

Former Pope Benedict XVI Ratzinger picked Müller in 2012 to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the successor office to the Inquisition. Benedict ran that office as the powerful and feared guardian of Church orthodoxy for 24 years as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, until his election as pope in 2005. However, its influence waned under Francisco, who soon after his March 2013 election reportedly told visiting Latin American priests and nuns not to worry if the CDF wrote to them criticising what they were doing.

In an article in the Vatican daily last October, Müller firmly rejected growing demands for the Catholic Church to reinstate divorced and remarried Catholics as full members of the Church. At present, the Catholic Church excludes Catholics who divorce and remarry in a civil ceremony from communion because the Catholic Church teaches that Christ declared marriage an indissoluble bond. With divorce on the rise, more Catholics are asking Rome to show mercy for them. German bishops have been in the forefront of reform thinking and one archdiocese even published guidelines on how to readmit them, which prompted Müller’s article. The Vatican is due to consider reforming its rules on divorce at a worldwide synod of bishops next October.

Müller also strongly defended Bishop Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, who reaped stiff criticism from German Catholics, earning the title “luxury bishop” in the media after it came out that he spent at least 30 million Euros (1.38 billion Roubles. 40.7 million USD. 45 million CAD. 46 million AUD. 24.5 million UK Pounds) on a new residential complex. Tebartz-van Elst’s grand plans were so far from the modest approach favoured by the Argentine-born pontiff that Rome sent an envoy to inspect his diocese and later sent him off to a monastery for a leave of absence pending a final decision. Rodríguez didn’t think Tebartz-van Elst would return as Bishop of Limburg and said that Latin Americans like himself and the pope found it hard to understand spending so much money for opulent features such as a 15,000-Euro (690,000 Roubles. 20,350 USD. 22,500 CAD. 23,000 AUD. 12,250 UK Pounds) free-standing bathtub, dryly observing, “For most people, a shower and a toilet are enough. They’re enough for the pope in his three-room apartment, too”.

20 January 2014

Tom Heneghan

Reuters

http://news.yahoo.com/top-pope-ally-urges-vatican-doctrine-chief-loosen-205104072–sector.html

Editor’s Note:

George Weigel is having conniptions, isn’t he? Boo-hoo! He and all the other righties are shown up to be “cafeteria Catholics” (they’re going to pick n’ choose what they’re going to believe… what a scream! They truly don’t like it when we turn their own wacko verbiage against them… watch ‘em squirm!). Francisco is turning out to be a real Albino Luciani (Pope John Paul I). Only this time, he didn’t die after a VERY short reign. As for me, I believe that Luciani died a very natural death, as his health wasn’t the best. I don’t favour conspiracy theories… sometimes, shit just happens, and there’s no cabal behind it (although the Curia IS a snake-pit full of ambitious and unscrupulous SOBs, to be sure… just as our First Families are, to be frank). Conspiracy theorists bore me… they should get lives… that’d take up their time, wouldn’t it?

BMD