Belarus president banned from EU

[struggle4progress]

Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow and Nicholas Watt in Brussels
Saturday March 25, 2006
The Guardian

Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, is to be banned from travelling to the EU after riot police in Minsk arrested hundreds of opposition activists protesting against the results of last weekend's elections.

European leaders, who had been preparing a milder rebuke, decided to impose the ban on the president and dozens of members of the Belarus leadership hours after riot police attacked the protesters in the early hours of yesterday morning. <snip>

http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,,1739359,00.html

Maybe the EU should prevent visits from warmongering psychopaths, too ...

[MissWaverly]

1. I heard the U.S. denounced the election too

I just wish we could have done more about problems with our own election in 2004, of course
I don't think we have much credibility preaching on free elections now.

[struggle4progress]

2. We can always hope the EU will take a strong stand against ALL ..

.. who seize power through election fraud ...

[MissWaverly]

3. I hope so BUT

the world is becoming much less stable, look at the continuing riots in France. Another
big problem is that America has no credibility now on anything and we are cash strapped.
We are going to be forced to scale back on our global involvement big time.

[struggle4progress]

4. I won't be doing much foreign investment. But our ruling class will:

they spent the last decade or so engineering "free trade" agreements to allow the free transfer of capital across international boundaries, and lately they've been busily raiding the US treasury, workers' pension funds, etc to increase the amount of money they can play with ...

[MissWaverly]

6. their recklessness will do them in

If the dollars become volatile, the values of those petro dollars they have squeezed out
will be gone.

[struggle4progress]

5. Point of #2 was really: EU should ban visits by *

[MissWaverly]

7. They should stand up in the UN and start placing sanctions

it's the only way to go now I think