559. First North American Hunters 1,000 Years Earlier Than Previously Thought, Study Shows

Artist image of the Mastodon

ScienceDaily, October 20, 2011

A new and astonishing chapter has been added to North American prehistory in regards to the first hunters and their hunt for the now extinct giant mammoth-like creatures -- the mastodons. Professor Eske Willerslev's team from the Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen, has in collaboration with Michael Waters' team at the Center for the Study of the First Americans, University of Texas A&M, shown that the hunt for large mammals occurred at least 1,000 years before previously assumed.

This new study concludes that the first-known hunters in North America can now be dated back at least 14,000 years.

"I am sure that especially the Native Americans are pleased with the results of the study. It is further proof that humans have been present in North America for longer than previously believed. The "Clovis First" theory, which many scientists swore to just a few years back, has finally been buried with the conclusions of this study," says Professor Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen.

Spearhead found in mastodon

It is the finding and analysis of a tip from a human-made projectile point (spearhead) gathered from the remains of a mastodon that is behind the rewriting of North American prehistory. The spearhead, which itself was carved out from a mastodon-bone, was found at the Manis site in the state of Washington when archaeologists excavated a mastodon in the late 1970s.

However, 30 years would pass before a team of researchers was able to put a date on the spearhead and establish the identity of both the bone and the spearhead that had been embedded into the rib of the defeated mastodon. This was done through, amongst other things, DNA analysis, protein sequencing, advanced computer technology, Carbon-14 dating as well as comparisons with other mastodon findings in North America, for instance in the state of Wisconsin.

Clovis culture challenged

The first traces of the hunt for mastodons in North America have previously been attributed the so-called Clovis culture. Clovis culture dates back approximately 13,000 years and is viewed as a type of common culture ancestral for all Native American tribes in North America.

"Our research now shows that other hunters were present at least 1,000 years prior to the Clovis culture. Therefore, it was not a sudden war or a quick slaughtering of the mastodons by the Clovis culture, which made the species disappear. We can now conclude that the hunt for the animals stretched out over a much longer period of time. At this time, however, we do not know if it was the man-made hunt for the mastodons, mammoths and other large animals from the so-called mega-fauna, which caused them to become extinct and disappear. Maybe the reason was something complete different, for instance the climate," states Professor Eske Willerslev.

The Road to America

It is no more than three years ago that Eske Willerslev and his research team established that the first traces of humans in North America are approximately 14,340 years old, and that the current Native Americans in the USA are descendants of these migrants who came from Asia. This was done using Carbon-14 dating and DNA analysis of human remains found in caves in the state of Oregon.

Professor Eske Willerslev has been able to add a new chapter to North American prehistory by mapping the now first-known hunters in this part of the world.

558. Amazon Tribes Occupy Belo Monte Construction Site

By Alexei Barrionuevo, The New York Times, October 27, 2011

BUENOS AIRES — Waving bows and arrows and dressed in war paint, hundreds of members of indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon invaded the construction site of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam on Thursday.

Although they had vowed to permanently occupy the site in their latest attempt to stop the dam from being built, the protest disbanded late Thursday.

About 300 people arrived on seven buses at 6 a.m. and made their way to the site in Pará State where the North Energy consortium is building a workers’ camp for the mammoth dam, said Paulo Cunha, an inspector for the Federal Highway Police. The group blocked the Trans-Amazon Highway around the village of Santo Antônio, where it passes the construction site, he said.

Security officials did not try to prevent the demonstrators from entering the property, the police and other officials said.

The indigenous groups demanded the presence of a senior Brazilian official, saying that they wanted to start a new round of negotiations over the dam, Amazon Watch, an organization that works to protect the Amazon region and indigenous people, reported.

“Belo Monte will only succeed if we do nothing about it,” Juma Xipaia, an indigenous leader from the Xingu area, said in a statement released by Amazon Watch. “We will not be silent. We will shout out loud, and we will do it now.”

The move signaled a change in strategy by indigenous groups in their campaign to stop the dam. Legal challenges by local Amazonian communities — backed by international environmental groups like Amazon Watch — have done little to dissuade the government of President Dilma Rousseff to halt work on the dam, which would be the third largest in the world. Brazilian officials say the dam is badly needed to provide for future energy needs in growing cities like São Paulo.

“This is kind of a last resort,” said Atossa Soltani, the founder of Amazon Watch.

Ms. Soltani said indigenous groups were committed to nonviolent action. Last year, at a meeting at a village along the Xingu River, which the movie director James Cameron attended, about 70 indigenous leaders vowed to form a new tribe of 2,500 to occupy the construction site and, if necessary, sacrifice their lives to defend their native lands.

Environmentalists say that the $11 billion dam would flood about 200 square miles of the Amazon region and dry up a 60-mile stretch of the Xingu River, affecting fishing and the indigenous groups’ way of life.

Construction of the workers’ camp began about three months ago, but this was the first time that the indigenous groups tried to invade the site.

“It has been a process,” Ms. Soltani said. “Communities have slowly built enough solidarity where they could sustain it. Now, all of the affected communities are united.”

North Energy said in a statement on Thursday that it would not halt construction work. A judge in Altamira, Cristina Collyer Damásio, ordered the demonstrators to leave the site and prohibited any disturbance that would halt construction work. Violators, the judge said in her order, would be fined about $290 a day.

557. Emergency Labor Network Call for Actions on December 3-10

By Emergency Labor Network, no date

Jobs * Social Security * Labor Rights

Medicare and Medicaid * Peace and Justice

emergencylabor@aol.com

www.laborfightback.org

ELN Calls for Actions on December 3-10

To Preserve & Expand the Social Safety Net:

No Cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Other Social Programs; This is "Ground Zero" in the Fight Against the Wall Street Dictatorship!

The clock continues to tick.

In late September, the Emergency Labor Network expressed a deep-seated concern that if the labor movement and its community allies do not take to the streets in massive numbers to protect and expand vital safety net programs, recipients of benefits under these programs will be targeted for massive cuts.

The dire emergency about which we warned is now just around the corner. In less than one month, the Super Committee of 12 members of Congress (six Democrats, six Republicans) will issue its proposals for $1.2 trillion in cuts (or possibly much more!) over the next 10 years to the social safety net -- including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Speaking on behalf of the six Democrats on the Super Committee, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus has now announced a proposal to cut up to $500 billion in Medicare costs in the next ten years!

On December 23, Congress is scheduled to vote "yes" or "no" on the Super Committee's proposals for additional cuts with no amendments allowed.

If the Super Committee fails to get a majority vote to present its proposals to Congress, a built-in trigger mechanism will come into play, and drastic cuts will be made across the board to military spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants for students, home heating assistance, nutrition programs, and help for the disabled and the homeless.

If, on the other hand, the Super Committee's recommendations are approved by Congress, it will also result in severe cuts to the safety net programs. Either way, over 100 million people will be hurt economically, in their health care and in their retirement security. We must reject all the scenarios now being discussed because each of them leads to the same unacceptable and inevitable result: takeaways of benefits that people have worked a lifetime to earn.

That is why we must call for repeal of the August 2 legislation, which gave birth to the undemocratic and unconstitutional "Super Committee" creation. We must demand instead that legislation be passed increasing the debt ceiling without all the takeaways attached to it, as has been done by Congress repeatedly in the past. And if Congress refuses to go this route and ends up enacting legislation with cuts in federal benefits, then we must demand that President Obama veto the bill.

This is a matter of life and death. As Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, if Congress is able to go ahead and decimate the existing safety net, "there is no question in my mind that many more thousands of men, women, and children will die."

That is no exaggeration. Medicaid alone impacts the lives of 58 million low-income recipients and their family members, with 49% of Medicaid recipients being children. If people on Medicaid lose their benefits, the results will be greater illness and disability, increased poverty, and even death.

All of this will fall most heavily on African Americans and workers of color, who are disproportionately impacted by the racist, sexist and anti-immigrant policies used by corporate greed to super-exploit and divide the working class.

We Can Stop the Cuts!

Hundreds of thousands of people - including growing contingents of trade unionists -- have taken to the streets nationwide over the past weeks in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement to protest against the economic inequality, uneven tax structure, bank bailouts and corporate greed that have brought this country to its current economic crisis. More and more activists are challenging the double-digit unemployment of Black and Latino workers and the increased racist attacks on Black people and immigrant workers.

There is a new fightback mood sweeping the country. Working people, youth, the unemployed are all saying "Enough Is Enough!" and "Wall Street's Been Bailed Out, We've Been Sold Out!"

Sentiment to stop the cuts is widespread within the labor movement.

On September 26, the San Francisco Labor Council  adopted a resolution calling upon the AFL-CIO, Change to Win, National Education Association and other independent unions to "join together to call an emergency mass mobilization ... to demand no cuts in benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid recipients, including for future generations. To the contrary, these programs need to be strengthened and expanded, not undermined." A similar resolution was approved by U.S. Labor Against the War.

On October 19, the New York Central Labor Council voted to mobilize on November 5 to affirm that "Working People Shouldn't Pay for a Crisis That They Didn't Make!" and to demand "No to Layoffs, Budget and Service Cuts!"

The National Nurses Union, which last July called on Congress to "reject the flawed debt-ceiling deal," continues to mobilize to demand an immediate halt to "all federal cuts in job programs, health care, education, retirement security, housing, and nutrition assistance."

Working people and all the oppressed have shown that they are ready and eager to fight back. But what is urgently needed is for the trade unions, our community allies, and the Occupy Wall Street movement to decide that an all-out fight must be waged to stop the cuts to the social safety net programs, cuts contrived by politicians doing the bidding of corporate America.

There could be no bigger blow to the plans of the banksters and Wall Street operatives than to stop and reverse the cuts to our cherished social programs.

Mobilize December 3-10 to Stop the Cuts!

The Emergency Labor Network urges our supporters across the country to do everything in their power to move their labor and community organizations into action during the week of December 3-10 to save and expand the safety net programs.

We urge union members to submit resolutions to their labor organizations, which will call for setting times and places for demonstrations during this Week of Actions demanding "No Cuts!" and with top union officials and national leaders of the labor movement copied and urged to provide leadership. Forming "No Cuts Committees" in local unions and building community coalitions against the cuts can help ensure that resolutions and actions are carried out.

If you believe that massive mobilizations must be organized demanding "No Cuts!", we ask that you let us know. An endorsement form is provided on our website at www.laborfightback.org. Please direct questions to 216-736-4715, or email emergencylabor@aol.com or write ELN, P.O. Box 21004, Cleveland, OH 44121.

In solidarity,

Donna Dewitt

President, South Carolina AFL-CIO

On behalf of the ELN Coordinating Committee

556. What Drives Economic Growth in the United States?

James Livingston

By James Livingston, The New York Times, October 25, 2011

AS an economic historian who has been studying American capitalism for 35 years, I’m going to let you in on the best-kept secret of the last century: private investment — that is, using business profits to increase productivity and output — doesn’t actually drive economic growth. Consumer debt and government spending do. Private investment isn’t even necessary to promote growth.




This is, to put it mildly, a controversial claim. Economists will tell you that private business investment causes growth because it pays for the new plant or equipment that creates jobs, improves labor productivity and increases workers’ incomes. As a result, you’ll hear politicians insisting that more incentives for private investors — lower taxes on corporate profits — will lead to faster and better-balanced growth.

The general public seems to agree. According to a New York Times/CBS News poll in May, a majority of Americans believe that increased corporate taxes “would discourage American companies from creating jobs.”

But history shows that this is wrong.

Between 1900 and 2000, real gross domestic product per capita (the output of goods and services per person) grew more than 600 percent. Meanwhile, net business investment declined 70 percent as a share of G.D.P. What’s more, in 1900 almost all investment came from the private sector — from companies, not from government — whereas in 2000, most investment was either from government spending (out of tax revenues) or “residential investment,” which means consumer spending on housing, rather than business expenditure on plants, equipment and labor.

In other words, over the course of the last century, net business investment atrophied while G.D.P. per capita increased spectacularly. And the source of that growth? Increased consumer spending, coupled with and amplified by government outlays.

The architects of the Reagan revolution tried to reverse these trends as a cure for the stagflation of the 1970s, but couldn’t. In fact, private or business investment kept declining in the ’80s and after. Peter G. Peterson, a former commerce secretary, complained that real growth after 1982 — after President Ronald Reagan cut corporate tax rates — coincided with “by far the weakest net investment effort in our postwar history.”

President George W. Bush’s tax cuts had similar effects between 2001 and 2007: real growth in the absence of new investment. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, retained corporate earnings that remain uninvested are now close to 8 percent of G.D.P., a staggering sum in view of the unemployment crisis we face.

So corporate profits do not drive economic growth — they’re just restless sums of surplus capital, ready to flood speculative markets at home and abroad. In the 1920s, they inflated the stock market bubble, and then caused the Great Crash. Since the Reagan revolution, these superfluous profits have fed corporate mergers and takeovers, driven the dot-com craze, financed the “shadow banking” system of hedge funds and securitized investment vehicles, fueled monetary meltdowns in every hemisphere and inflated the housing bubble.

Why, then, do so many Americans support cutting taxes on corporate profits while insisting that thrift is the cure for what ails the rest of us, as individuals and a nation? Why have the 99 percent looked to the 1 percent for leadership when it comes to our economic future?

A big part of the problem is that we doubt the moral worth of consumer culture. Like the abstemious ant who scolds the feckless grasshopper as winter approaches, we think that saving is the right thing to do. Even as we shop with abandon, we feel that if only we could contain our unruly desires, we’d be committing ourselves to a better future. But we’re wrong.

Consumer spending is not only the key to economic recovery in the short term; it’s also necessary for balanced growth in the long term. If our goal is to repair our damaged economy, we should bank on consumer culture — and that entails a redistribution of income away from profits toward wages, enabled by tax policy and enforced by government spending. (The increased trade deficit that might result should not deter us, since a large portion of manufactured imports come from American-owned multinational corporations that operate overseas.)

We don’t need the traders and the C.E.O.’s and the analysts — the 1 percent — to collect and manage our savings. Instead, we consumers need to save less and spend more in the name of a better future. We don’t need to silence the ant, but we’d better start listening to the grasshopper.

James Livingston, a professor of history at Rutgers, is the author of “Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment and Your Soul.”

555. It Is Official: The Rich Got Much Richer

By Rober Pear, The New York Times, October 25, 2011

WASHINGTON — The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday, in a new report likely to figure prominently in the escalating political fight over how to revive the economy, create jobs and lower the federal debt.

In addition, the report said, government policy has become less redistributive since the late 1970s, doing less to reduce the concentration of income.

“The equalizing effect of federal taxes was smaller” in 2007 than in 1979, as “the composition of federal revenues shifted away from progressive income taxes to less-progressive payroll taxes,” the budget office said.

Also, it said, federal benefit payments are doing less to even out the distribution of income, as a growing share of benefits, like Social Security, goes to older Americans, regardless of their income.

The report, requested several years ago, was issued as lawmakers tussle over how to reduce unemployment, a joint committee of Congress weighs changes in the tax code and protesters around the country rail against disparities in income between rich and poor.

In its report, the budget office found that from 1979 to 2007, average inflation-adjusted after-tax income grew by 275 percent for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income. For others in the top 20 percent of the population, average real after-tax household income grew by 65 percent.

By contrast, the budget office said, for the poorest fifth of the population, average real after-tax household income rose 18 percent.

And for the three-fifths of people in the middle of the income scale, the growth in such household income was just under 40 percent.

The findings, based on a rigorous analysis of data from the Internal Revenue Service and the Census Bureau, are generally consistent with studies by some private researchers and academic economists. But because they carry the imprimatur of the nonpartisan budget office, they are likely to have a major impact on the debate in Congress over the fairness of federal tax and spending policies.

Also cited as factors contributing to the rapid growth of income at the top were the structure of executive compensation; high salaries for some “superstars” in sports and the arts; the increasing size of the financial services industry; and the growing role of capital gains, which go disproportionately to higher-income households.

The report found that higher-income households got a larger share of the pie, while other households got smaller shares.

Specifically the report made these points:

¶ The share of after-tax household income for the top 1 percent of the population more than doubled, climbing to 17 percent in 2007 from nearly 8 percent in 1979.

¶ The most affluent fifth of the population received 53 percent of after-tax household income in 2007, up from 43 percent in 1979. In other words, the after-tax income of the most affluent fifth exceeded the income of the other four-fifths of the population.

¶ People in the lowest fifth of the population received about 5 percent of after-tax household income in 2007, down from 7 percent in 1979.

¶ People in the middle three-fifths of the population saw their shares of after-tax income decline by 2 to 3 percentage points from 1979 to 2007.

The study was requested by Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, when he was the senior Republican on the panel.

Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, said the report was “the latest evidence of the alarming rise in income inequality.”

House Republicans pushed back Tuesday against President Obama’s complaint that they were blocking bills to create jobs. Speaker John A. Boehner said he agreed with Mr. Obama’s new slogan, “we can’t wait,” and he said that 15 House-passed bills were “sitting over in the Senate, waiting for action.”

On Tuesday, the White House endorsed another bill, which is likely to be passed by the House this week with bipartisan support. The bill would repeal a requirement for federal, state and local government agencies to withhold 3 percent of certain payments to suppliers of goods and services and to deposit the money with the Internal Revenue Service.

This requirement was originally adopted as a tax-compliance measure, and the Congressional Budget Office said its repeal would reduce federal revenues by $11 billion over 10 years.

House Republicans would offset the cost with a bill that reduces federal spending on Medicaid under the 2010 health care law. The White House said it supported the bill, intended to fix an apparent error in the law, under which hundreds of thousands of middle-income early retirees can get Medicaid coverage meant for the poor.

The joint Congressional committee on deficit reduction is considering changes in a wide range of benefit programs.

Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat, said Tuesday that he was hopeful but not entirely confident that the panel would succeed in reaching a bipartisan agreement to reduce federal deficits by $1.2 trillion over 10 years.

“Hopeful is not confident,” Mr. Hoyer said.

554. Global Warming Is Real, Another Large Scale Study Confirms

Comparison of data showing decadal land-surface average world
temperature changes from 15 different sources, some going back as
far as 1800. (Credit: Image courtesy of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature)

ScienceDaily, October 21, 2011 

Global warming is real, according to a major study released Oct. 20. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average world land temperature of approximately 1°C since the mid-1950s.

Analyzing temperature data from 15 sources, in some cases going as far back as 1800, the Berkeley Earth study directly addressed scientific concerns raised by skeptics, including the urban heat island effect, poor station quality, and the risk of data selection bias.

On the basis of its analysis, according to Berkeley Earth's founder and scientific director, Professor Richard A. Muller, the group concluded that earlier studies based on more limited data by teams in the United States and Britain had accurately estimated the extent of land surface warming.

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the U.S. and the U.K.," Muller said. "This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

Previous studies, carried out by NOAA, NASA, and the Hadley Center, also found that land warming was approximately 1°C since the mid-1950s, and that the urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results. But their findings were criticized by skeptics who worried that they relied on ad-hoc techniques that meant that the findings could not be duplicated. Robert Rohde, lead scientist for Berkeley Earth, noted that "the Berkeley Earth analysis is the first study to address the issue of data selection bias, by using nearly all of the available data, which includes about 5 times as many station locations as were reviewed by prior groups."

Elizabeth Muller, co-founder and Executive Director of Berkeley Earth, said she hopes the Berkeley Earth findings will help "cool the debate over global warming by addressing many of the valid concerns of the skeptics in a clear and rigorous way." This will be especially important in the run-up to the COP 17 meeting in Durban, South Africa, later this year, where participants will discuss targets for reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions for the next commitment period as well as issues such as financing, technology transfer and cooperative action.

The Berkeley Earth team includes physicists, climatologists, and statisticians from California, Oregon, and Georgia. Rohde led the development of a new statistical approach and what Richard Muller called "the Herculean labor" of merging the data sets. One member of the group, Saul Perlmutter, was recently announced as a winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics (for his work in cosmology).

The Berkeley Earth study did not assess temperature changes in the oceans, which according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not warmed as much as land. When averaged in, they reduce the global surface temperature rise over the past 50 years -- the period during which the human effect on temperatures is discernable -- to about two thirds of one degree Centigrade.

Specifically, the Berkeley Earth study concludes that:

•                The urban heat island effect is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to the average land temperature rise. That's because the urban regions of Earth amount to less than 1% of the land area.

•                About 1/3 of temperature sites around the world reported global cooling over the past 70 years (including much of the United States and northern Europe). But 2/3 of the sites show warming. Individual temperature histories reported from a single location are frequently noisy and/or unreliable, and it is always necessary to compare and combine many records to understand the true pattern of global warming.

•                The large number of sites reporting cooling might help explain some of the skepticism of global warming," Rohde commented. "Global warming is too slow for humans to feel directly, and if your local weather man tells you that temperatures are the same or cooler than they were a hundred years ago it is easy to believe him." In fact, it is very hard to measure weather consistently over decades and centuries, and the presence of sites reporting cooling is a symptom of the noise and local variations that can creep in. A good determination of the rise in global land temperatures can't be done with just a few stations: it takes hundreds -- or better, thousands -- of stations to detect and measure the average warming. Only when many nearby thermometers reproduce the same patterns can we know that the measurements were reliably made.

•                Stations ranked as "poor" in a survey by Anthony Watts and his team of the most important temperature recording stations in the U.S., (known as the USHCN -- the US Historical Climatology Network), showed the same pattern of global warming as stations ranked "OK." Absolute temperatures of poor stations may be higher and less accurate, but the overall global warming trend is the same, and the Berkeley Earth analysis concludes that there is not any undue bias from including poor stations in the survey.

Four scientific papers setting out these conclusions have been submitted for peer review and will form part of the literature for the next IPCC report on Climate Change. They can be accessed on: www.BerkeleyEarth.org. A video animation graphically shows global warming around the world since 1800.

Berkeley Earth is making its preliminary results public, together with its programs and dataset, in order to invite additional scrutiny. Elizabeth Muller said that "one of our goals is to make the science behind global warming readily accessible to the public." Most of the data were previously available on public websites, but in so many different locations and different formats that most people could access only a small subset of the data. The merged database, which combines 1.6 billion records, is now accessible from the Berkeley Earth website: www.BerkeleyEarth.org.

What Berkeley Earth has not done is make an independent assessment of how much of the observed warming is due to human actions, Richard Muller acknowledged. As a next step, Berkeley Earth plans to address the total warming of the oceans, with a view to obtaining a more accurate figure for the total amount of global warming observable.

More information about Berkeley Earth is available at www.BerkeleyEarth.org.

553. UN Condemns U.S. Embargo of Cuba, Again

By Anita Snow, Associated Press, October 25, 2011

The U.N. General Assembly voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba for the 20th year in a row.

The final tally was 186-2, with only Israel joining the United States as it did last year. The small Pacific nations of Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands abstained as they also did last year.

Last year's tally for the symbolic measure was almost identical, 187-2, with three abstentions.

Envoys for Vietnam, Russia, Nicaragua and many other countries, as well as the 120-member Nonaligned Movement, spoke Tuesday in favor of the measure calling for the end of the American embargo against the Caribbean country.

"The only consequences of the sanctions are the deterioration of the living standard of the Cuban population, creation of artificial barriers to its economic growth and infringement on the rights and interests of third countries," Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said.

Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez said that the sanctions have caused direct economic damages of close to $1 trillion to the Cuban people over nearly half a century.

The United States has not eased the embargo in the nearly three years since President Barack Obama's election raised hopes for a change in policy, he added.

"Despite the false image of flexibility that the current U.S. administration intends to portray, the blockade and the sanctions remain intact," Rodriguez told the assembly.

"Why doesn't President Obama's administration take care of the U.S. problems and leave us Cubans alone to solve ours in peace?"

The United States has made clear it is not prepared to lift the sanctions entirely until the communist-run nation makes more far-reaching political and economic changes.

American Ambassador Ronald D. Godard, U.S. Senior Area Adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs, said the embargo is a bilateral issue and "not appropriately a concern of this assembly."

Godard said the sanctions represent "just one aspect of U.S. policy toward Cuba, whose overarching goal is to encourage a more open environment in Cuba and increased respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms."