The Teamsters will bring our battle with Transportation Secretary Mary Peters to a San Francisco courtroom on Tuesday.

Between now and then, tens of thousands of “Fire Mary Peters — She’s a Lawbreakerâ€? bumper stickers are appearing on Teamster cars and trucks throughout America.

Teamsters angry with Mary Peters for illegally opening the border to unsafe trucks from Mexico will rally outside the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday morning.

Inside the courthouse, we will tell the judges just how Mary Peters broke the law when she opened the border as part of a so-called “pilot project.�

The law is very simple: no money can be spent on a “pilot project� to open the border to Mexican trucks. It is an amendment to the Omnibus budget bill, signed into law on Dec. 26.

Congress could not have made it clearer that the amendment was intended to stop the pilot project dead in its tracks. Read the rest of this entry »

Marino Cordoba, founder of the Association of Internally Displaced Afro-Colombians (AFRODES), submitted this post as a guest blogger for The Hill.

The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is considered a non-starter in the U.S. Congress because the country is the world’s deadliest for union activists. Less known, but equally disturbing is the systematic violence now confronting Afro-Colombians.

African descendants comprise 26% of Colombia’s population. As with other African descendants, we face racial discrimination which results in economic hardships far worse than those experienced by the average Colombian. However in Colombia, a vibrant 1980s civil rights movement won full recognition of our cultural rights and collective ownership and community control of our territories and natural resources. The 1991 Colombian Constitution and the landmark Law 70 explicitly enshrine these rights and recognize official democratic Afro-Colombian governance structures, similar to those of your Indian tribes.

The administration of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has worked consistently to undermine our hard-won civil rights and our control of our territories. Systematic violence against our people and assassinations of our leaders continue unabated to this day.

At the end of 2007, angered by the strong opposition of the majority of Afro-Colombian communities to the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA,) Uribe created a new Commission in Colombia that directly challenges our legal governance structure. Read the rest of this entry »

The United States and the international community have struggled for almost two years to implement a force to protect civilians and improve security in Darfur. The United Nations Secretary General, the African Union and the European Union must act to finish what we started by intensifying the diplomatic pressure now on Sudan to allow the UNAMID force into Darfur.

Time is not on the side of the many innocent men, women and children who are desperate for a reprieve from the violence and misery that is Darfur.  We can act now, or be witness to a slow, painful and embarrassing humanitarian catastrophe.

South Africa continues to advance human rights atrocities, support dictatorships, and totalitarian practices reminiscent of its discredited past.

While the betrayal of human rights can be found across the globe, it is nonetheless frustrating when a nation liberated from the yoke of oppression is complicit in promoting oppression elsewhere. Nowhere is this more evident than in the relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Since President Robert Mugube introduced a policy of violent confiscation of white-owned farms in 2000, Zimbabwe, once the jewel of Africa, has been reduced to degeneration, starvation, one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the world and brutality.

In March 2007 Mugabe’s secret police stormed in on his opponents at a public prayer meeting, assaulting the country’s opposition leader, Morgan Tsuangirai. Yet the South African ambassador to the U.N. said Zimbabwe’s issues should “remain local,â€? untrammeled by international intervention. Read the rest of this entry »

Sen. Biden is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

On December 31st, the United Nations and the African Union jointly assumed control of the peacekeeping mission in Darfur.  Thus far, however, their efforts to bring peace to Darfur have been hindered by inadequate resources and a lack of commitment by the international community.

While the United Nations Security Council has authorized over 26,000 peacekeepers, just over 9000 are on the ground in Darfur.  Sudanese obstruction, including an attack on a U.N. convoy, has delayed deployment, but the failure of nations possessing the necessary tactical and utility helicopters to commit vehicles and crews also endangers the mission.  Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called these helicopters indispensable in order to transport and protect peacekeepers and allow them to carry out their mission. Yet, not one nation has stepped forward to offer them.

That is inexcusable. We cannot allow genocide and suffering to continue because the combined nations of the world cannot find 24 helicopters to help stop it.

That’s why Sen. Lugar (R-Ind.) and I introduced a bipartisan resolution yesterday urging the members of the international community, including the United States, to provide the resources the African Union and United Nations need to carry out their joint peacekeeping mission in Darfur. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday’s House Armed Services Committee hearing on US strategy and operations in Afghanistan highlighted how under resourced our efforts are. Additionally, we heard that the US government is not effectively employing the resources it is deploying. Ambassador Inderfurth noted what he called the ‘Popeye syndrome,’ where we spend a vastly disproportionate amount of our national resources on military capability relative to the amount allocated to the economic and diplomatic elements of American power. Ambassador Inderfurth also suggested that a high level US official should be dedicated to coordinating all elements of US power within Afghanistan because Lieutenant General Lute can’t do both Iraq and Afghanistan at a sufficient level of detail. Lieutenant General Barno noted that the State Department has only 6500 Foreign Service officers, and that both the State Department’s capacity and operational culture require reform. Dr. Rubin pointed out that US AID has been reduced to a contracting agency. This testimony is consistent with the recent call by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates for dramatic increases in funding for the diplomatic, non-military side of American power.

Yesterday’s hearing on Afghanistan by the House Armed Services Committee was an opportunity to continue our important dialogue on the current military and diplomatic strategy in Afghanistan. Since the fall of the Taliban and the emergence of a democratic government in Afghanistan, we have faced many challenges – some of which still remain potential roadblocks to achieving our immediate and long-term goals.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Armed Services Committee’s hearing on Afghanistan strategy highlighted issues which continue to confront the United States and NATO: an economy, particularly in Southern Afghanistan, that is almost exclusively based on the cultivation of opium poppies, and a complete lack of infrastructure to support other kinds of crops.

We cannot continue to focus solely on a military response to the resurgence of Taliban forces.  We have to use our knowledge and resources to try to help build a viable agricultural economy in Afghanistan.  That’s the path to a stable government and regional security.

One thing almost all Arab governments do well, the one area where incompetence and failure are apparently unacceptable, is in the field of censorship. Stifling public debate, suppressing political discussion, imposing limits on thought and expression, these are tasks for which most Arab governments appear well-suited, and in some cases, even world-class.

There is also in the Arab world, an ugly adjunct to censorship and restrictions on free expression: the special space left open for anti-Semitism, for Holocaust denial and for incitement to violence. Not only is space left open, but in some cases, these loopholes in censorship for hate are exploited by government proxies, or even, the Arab governments themselves. And in these cases, American interests are effected, and I would argue, badly harmed.

Yesterday, the House passed H. Res. 912, a resolution condemning the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and reaffirming the commitment of the United States to assist the people of Pakistan in combating terrorist activity and promoting a free and democratic Pakistan.

The 27th of December will be remembered as a mournful day for the people of Pakistan and people of goodwill the world over. My deepest sympathies and condolences are with them. As a member of the United States Congress’ Congressional Pakistan Caucus, I am deeply saddened by this dastardly effort to circumvent the democratic process which has claimed the life of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Although this tragic event may call into question the future of democracy in Pakistan, people of goodwill in Pakistan, regardless of political persuasion, must continue the movement to enhance democratic institutions across their nation knowing that freedom, justice, and democracy are difficult to achieve.