Tag: Hugo Chavez

As part of the solution to the country’s serious housing shortage, the Venezuelan government will take over 210,000 square meters of land as a first step to utilizing idle land that belonged to collapsed banks of the 1970s and 1990s.

Haitians say protests are the inevitable outcome when troops who have occupied Haiti for five years with seeming impunity have introduced a deadly, misery-multiplying disease.

I was swept up and arrested Friday night in Oakland at the end of the Justice for Oscar Grant march. As usual, most Bay Area TV stations gave a factually awful – very pro-police – spin to what happened.

In response to the California state budget crisis and to global warming urgencies, California's 20th District Assemblymember Alberto Torrico has proposed Assembly Bill 656, a tax "for the privilege of severing oil or gas from the earth or water in this state," to fund higher education, especially renewable energy education, to train a generation capable of helping California make a transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy.

In less than three weeks, 3 million to 4 million people will mobilize to vote for El Salvador's next president - likely ushering in a new progressive chapter in the country's long, violent history of dictatorships.

The Cindy Sheehan campaign to replace Nancy Pelosi in Congress is offering a new vision for San Francisco and the nation. Cindy believes in peace, accountability, freedom and well being for all. She believes that war should be a last resort for defense and not the handy policy tool that it is currently being used as. She believes that healthcare is a basic right in a democratic society and should not be based on ability to pay.

Banco de Venezuela is one of the most important banks in Venezuela, with a 12 percent share of the market in loans and obtained profits of US$170 million in the first half of 2008, a 29 percent increase on 2007, when its profits had already increased by 20 percent. It has 285 offices and 3 million customers. Banco de Venezuela was nationalized in 1994 after a massive banking crisis which bankrupted 60 percent of the banking sector, only to be privatized in 1996 and bought by the Spanish multinational banking group Grupo Santander for only US$300 million. In only nine months Grupo Santander recovered its original investment.

Many of us see, within the Bayview Hunters Point district and without, strategic similarities in the wars being waged in Iraq, in New Orleans and here in our own home town.