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--South American self-help, South American "Common Market," common currency (being talked of), cooperation, mutual aid, all in the service of uplift to the poor and creating healthy trading partners, with much of this new (and old) notion of self-determination inspired by Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution.
Big threat to Bush's business partners, the Corporate Reich, there and here. He's taking a $4 billion check to the death squad fascists in Colombia (big scandal there re the paramilitaries, so Bush's compadres may be in jail before he gets there), and he will stir up all the trouble and divisiveness he can, but he won't succeed. Bush has "lost" South America, and with the plundering the Middle East not going so well either, I hope he suffers for all this at the hands of those who put him in power, by their abandonment of him to the angry Americans of the north and the honest prosecutor who is pursuing him and Cheney (see Libby trial threads). I think that may be what's at stake for Bush. His trip to South America--with our soldiers dying in Iraq, and that country descending into chaos, and the US fleet lurking in the Persian Gulf-- makes little sense, except that he desperately needs to score some global corporate predator points, or be gone.
Here's how the World Bank/IMF thing worked: World Bank would offer a big loan to a poor country with a rightwing government; the rich would steal the money and leave the poor to pay the debt; the IMF would then demand big cuts in social programs, and open the country to Corporate resource plunderers, as terms of repayment. It's kind of like what they're doing to credit card users in the US. Utterly unregulated, out of control usury. Usury that is so greedy, it is suicidal, and destroys its customers--because the bankers don't care. They have no connection to local communities. They are run by the super-rich, who have no other values except making themselves--the rich few--richer. That the customer may be an upstanding, hard-working citizen, who merely got in over his head on a medical bill (which he is also being gouged for) makes no difference to the billionaire CEOs of banks who fly way above the rest of us. They don't care if he can recover. They want his last dime. They destroy him and everyone else in his same spot. Then they move their investment, and their assets, and their billions somewhere else.
Bankers vs. individual credit card customers = the World Bank vs. individual poor countries.
Argentina got into this World Bank/IMF bind--and it ruined their economy and nearly ruined their society. But the people rebelled. A coalition of the poor and middle class took tiny hammers and went round breaking every bank ATM display window in the country, in protest. Three governments later--in quick succession--they finally got a good leftist (majorityist) government to promise to get them out of World Bank debt and never get into it again. Enter Venezuela. Venezuela, a very progressive country, with a thriving democracy, and flush with oil profits, bailed Argentina out of World Bank debt on easy terms. Argentina is well on its way to recovery now--and is doing so well that Brazil and Argentina have begun talks on a common currency. Argentina thus became a viable trading partner for Venezuela, Brazil and others.
Education--schools for the young, university educations, adult literacy classes--good medical care, good jobs, decent wages, low cost housing, bootstraps to the poor when needed, care for the elderly, help to small businesses, land reform, good infrastructure--these and other social projects are ESSENTIAL for a healthy economy and a good society. The World Bank destroys them--to make bankers filthy rich. But LOCAL institutions, run on principles of self-determination for South American countries, and reflective of the democracies that create them, are able to use common sense and to foster widespread improvement, that helps everybody.
This is what the South Americans are learning. This is what we need to learn, too. We've let these global corporate predators operate from our shores, destroying third world countries. Now they are destroying us, and we wonder what happened.
We need to smarten up. The foundation of the South American revolution is TRANSPARENT elections. TRANSPARENT vote counting is the mechanism of power by which the people exercise their sovereignty--over the the banks, over corporations, over the greedy rich (via taxes), over their country's resources, and of course over their country's military.
We have lost our sovereignty on all these fronts because rightwing Bushite corporations are now "counting" all our votes in electronic voting machines run on "TRADE SECRET," PROPRIETARY programming code--a coup that occurred during the 2002 to 2004 period, engineered by the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress--Tom Delay and Bob Ney--with the complicity of corrupt Democrats (--and there is hardly a top Democrat who is not corrupt on this issue--the worst being Sen. Christopher Dodd). They fast-tracked these extremely insecure and insider hackable voting machines all over the country with a $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle called the "Help America Vote for Bush Act."
We need to undo this, and restore vote counting that everyone can see and understand. We need to throw these election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor.'
The South Americans have been working on clean elections for more than a decade--with the help of the OAS, the Carter Center, EU election monitoring groups and hard-working local civic groups. We need to do this work. It will take time. (Congress ain't gonna fix it--they were all elected by these machines). But we WILL get our democracy back, once we have restored visible vote counting. The lessons of the South America revolution....
1. Transparent elections.
2. Grass roots organization.
3. Think big.
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