|
(touted by Pelosi, Obama and other Dems) in the U.S./Peru "free trade" (i.e., monopolist corporate) agreement.
The other thing that is happening in Peru are huge labor protests, led by the country's mine workers, who are not benefiting from "free trade" (surprise, surprise). The urban elites are benefiting, as usual. The clerics and latte vendors in the city get bought off with imported trinkets and decent apartments, in a glitzy but unsustainable minority culture, while the people doing the hard work that further enriches corporate CEOs, and the campesinos (small peasant farmers--best food producers) are getting screwed, and, furthermore, the country wobbles into an unsustainable future, with its resources being massively ripped off, its land and water polluted with corporate ag and corporate resource exploitation, often as well saddled with World Bank/IMF debt--and the poorest people, the majority, end up bearing these burdens, always.
The next election will probably settle this. The corrupt 'free tradists' running Peru (Alan Garcia & co.) will likely lose to a real leftist (possibly Ollanta Humala), and that will be that. Every country in South America--except for Colombia--will be headed by strong leftists (Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and, a bit further north, Nicaragua--with the likely election of a strong leftist in El Salvador as well), or center-leftists allied with the strong leftists (Brazil, Chile).
"Free trade" isn't working and was never intended to benefit its victim countries. South America as a whole has realized this, and is fast moving toward a South American "Common Market," without the U.S.--because the U.S. is a fucking bully in the service of global corporate predators--Exxon Mobil, Monsanto, Bechtel, et al. Its big pal, Colombia--the dinosaur of the continent--is a case in point. Nearly 40 union leaders have been murdered in Colombia, by rightwing death squads, this year alone. Its country's leadership has close ties to these death squads and to the ever-flourishing cocaine trade. That's what $5.5 BILLION in U.S. military aid, through Bushite fingers, has bought us. That, and a load of trouble--Bushite war plans against Colombia's oil rich neighbors, Venezuela and Ecuador, and other dirty rotten anti-democratic schemes, all run from the "war room" in the U.S./Bush Cartel Embassy in Bogota.
Colombia, the Bushites and their corporate predator sponsors can still inflict civil wars, destabilization and topplings of democratic governments, even after Bush/Cheney are gone. Obama is talking just like them, about South America. He won't stop them, if they proceed with a private war, and may even aid them, by the U.S. taking "swift action" in support of "friends and allies" in South America, as Donald Rumsfeld urges, in a Dec 07 op-ed in the Washington Post. The U.S. has no "friends and allies" in South America, except for the fascist thugs running Colombia, the corrupt 'free tradists' running Peru, and fascist cells within the leftist countries with the oil, planning secessionist coups. The point is to serve the corporate masters, in whatever they wish to do, to restore corporate predator control of South America, and particularly of South America's OIL, the profits from which are currently being "wasted" on education, medical care and other benefits for the poor.
The U.S. has a BIG PROBLEM in South America. And Obama ain't gonna solve it, the way he's talking. The problem is that democracy has succeeded; most of South America now has transparent, honest elections (unlike the U.S.). And the people of South America are electing whomever they damn please, to serve their own interests, untutored by Exxon Mobil.
The U.S. has never, ever, ever wanted real democracy in South America. It has acted brutally to prevent it, time and again. Now the South Americans themselves have established the rules, and U.S. corporate predators don't like to play by rules devised by the people, as we know. So what I see coming is a permanent and unhealable breach between the northern and southern halves of this hemisphere, with Latin America turning this into their century, and the U.S. becoming the biggest "banana republic" on earth--thoroughly looted, plundered (already done--'mission accomplished')--and oppressed by "Homeland" Security, no matter who gets Diebolded into the White House.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
