President Sarkozy was there about a month ago, looking to make a deal with Bolivia's highly popular and very pro-people government--a government headed by the first indigenous president of Bolivia (a largely indigenous country).
What did the Bushwhacks do? Those fuckers were funding and organizing white separatist rioters and murderers right out of the U.S. embassy, last September. The plan was for the white separatists, in the gas rich eastern provinces, to secede from Bolivia and form a fascist mini-state in control of Bolivia's main resource (gas). Morales threw the US ambassador and the DEA out of Bolivia for their collusion with that attempted coup, and was strongly backed up by Brazil and Argentina, and the newly formalized South American "common market," UNASUR (led by Chile at that time).
So now, U.S. corporations are persona non grata in Bolivia. Sometimes I think this is the main reason why our corpo/fascist rulers--who now control our privatized vote counting system, with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled now largely by ONE scarily rightwing corporation (ES&S--which just bought out Diebold, and, believe me, is
worse than Diebold)--permitted Obama to win the 2008 election (while packing Congress with Pukes and "Blue Dog" Democrats, to prevent any real reform). Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld had become "bad for business."
The rest of this article is interesting, and exemplifies what good government is all about--i.e., government of, by and for the people--and also how subtle corpo/fascist propaganda gets worked into articles like this:
---
"Bolivia has invited the various companies interested in the project to present their development plans so they can be considered as potential partners, as the country has ruled out the possibility of selling the lithium as a raw material.
President Evo Morales insists that the companies not only manufacture lithium batteries in Bolivia but also set up factories to assemble electric vehicles.
Bolivia’s mining ministry cites a study by the U.S. Geological Survey suggesting that Uyuni holds 5.5 million tons of lithium.
The leftist president says firms wishing to play a role in the country’s lithium industry have to accept the state’s 'absolute control' over the metal and the principle that La Paz is entitled to 60 percent of the profits.
Morales, an Aymara Indian who took office in January 2006, has imposed a similar model on the firms exploiting Bolivia’s estimated 48 trillion cubic feet of natural gas." (my emphasis)
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=344280&CategoryId=14919--------------------
The Latin American Herald Tribune is a corpo/fascist publication. (Always, always consider the source--and, if you have to, scan the url for items like "laht"--the initials of the source.) Thus, Evo Morales is "the leftist president," whereas George Bush was never "the rightwing president" (or, more accurate, "the fascist president"). Then there is this sentence:
"The leftist president says firms wishing to play a role in the country’s lithium industry have to accept the state’s 'absolute control' over the metal and the principle that La Paz is entitled to 60 percent of the profits.""La Paz" (capitol of Bolivia, seat of government) = the people of Bolivia. And this "60 percent of the profits" that these uppity indians think they are "entitled to" will be used for education, health care, pensions for the elderly and other social decencies in a country with one of the poorest populations in Latin America, where indians could not vote before 1952, and where the white rulers forbade them to even walk on the sidewalks as late as the 1960s. Indians were treated as slaves. By saying "La Paz" (rather than Bolivia, or the people of Bolivia), and by using the term "entitled to," and by prefacing the whole sentence with "the leftist president," the Latin American Herald Tribune is invading your mind with subtle psyops/propaganda in order to make you dislike and distrust Bolivia's president and oppose the idea that the resources of a country should be used to help the people who live there. It is a sneak attack on democracy and the sovereignty of the people. In their corpo/fascist view, profits should all go to the rich and to global corporate predators.
Consider this less propagandistic re-write of the above sentence: "Bolivia's president says firms wishing to play a role in the country’s lithium industry have to accept that the people of Bolivia entirely own this metal and the principle that the people will receive 60 percent of the profits for social programs such as education, health care and environmental protection."
I embellished it a bit with "environmental protection" because I know that the indigenous--and President Morales--are very concerned about the environment, especially with regard to extractive industries. And if anything goes wrong with this extraction, they will have the money to mitigate it (--unlike, say, the 30,000 indians in Ecuador who are suffering from Chevron-Texaco's massive toxic pollution of the Amazon rainforest, and who have had to sue Chevron-Texaco for the utter destruction of the fishery and horrible health problems from the polluted water).
Anyway, LAHT not only slips in subliminal messages--"the leftist president," "the state" (rather than the people), etc.--to the unwary reader, they also provide fodder for rightwing bloggers to berate the Bolivian peoples' democratic choices--and their assertion of sovereignty over their own resources--as "communism" and as doomed to fail. Japan's capitalists--and France's, and others--don't think so. But Freepers want you to think so.
It's interesting what happened in Venezuela, when their also highly popular government asserted Venezuelans' sovereignty over their oil resource, and the Chavez government re-negotiated the oil contracts with multinational corporations. Prior rightwing governments had been basically giving the oil away, in a 10/90 split of the profits, favoring the multinationals (while raking some off the top for themselves and their rich oil elite, and utterly neglecting the poor majority). The Chavez government, through tough negotiating, eventually achieved a 60/40 split, favoring Venezuela and its social programs. At that point, Exxon Mobil walked out of the negotiations, and went into "first world" courts and tried to seize $12 billion of Venezuela's international cash reserves (part of $43 billion total that the Chavez government had saved, through
conservative management of Venezuela's economy--"conservative" in the real sense of the word). Exxon Mobil LOST its case. Meanwhile, France's Total, Norway's Statoil, British BP and others agreed to the 60/40 deal and are now benefiting from their access to Venezuela's oil.
All this occurred while the Bushwhack oil junta was in power here, and the US military had been hijacked for an oil war against the Iraqi people. (--never was against "Saddam Hussein"; it was against the
Iraqi people, one hundred thousand of whom died horrible deaths under U.S. bombs in the first week of the invasion alone). So Exxon Mobil became power-mad (more than usual)--heady with their control of the U.S. government and military--and thought they could stick it to Venezuela. The Chavez government, acting in the interest of people of Venezuela, stuck it to them instead--and they and their corpo/fascist brethren hate Chavez for this, with a seething hatred that is quite evident in corpo/fascist 'news' media.
Exxon Mobil, Bushwhacks, "Blue Dog" Democrats, corpo/fascists of all kinds, and their Freeper echo chamber on the internet, want ALL PROFITS to go the rich and to global corporate predators. They are constantly predicting that countries that operate a mixed socialist/capitalist economy--due to the democratic choices of the people--countries like Venezuela and Bolivia--are going to fail because the government is looking out for the people, and a goodly portion of the profits from the country's resources are being used to benefit the people and to develop the country, with education, health care and other bootstrapping programs, and the creation local and regional infrastructure.
Fail? Venezuela, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Brazil, England, Canada and many other countries--some of which have "cradle to grave" socialism mixed with capitalism, or strong socialist elements (such as England and Canada's free universal health care systems)--are faring much better than the U.S., where the Freeper/Exxon Mobil mentality of massive looting by the rich prevails--at least in Congress and the corpo/fascist media.
Brazil's leftist government, headed by Lula da Silva, in fact just put this very restriction (same as Morales) on its newly discovered big oil reserves--that the oil is owned by the people of Brazil, whose democratically elected government will entirely control it ("absolute control"), and will use Brazil's large share of the profits for the benefit of the poor.
Brazil is doing very well. Venezuela is doing very well. Bolivia will do very well. It is we, the people of the U.S., who are not doing well--because of the corpo/fascist raids on our taxes and resources--mind-boggling looting--and their successful attacks on the "New Deal"
socialist principle of
benefiting the people. The other thing that corpo/fascists are constantly alleging is that leaders like Chavez and Morales are "authoritarian." Ha-ha-ha! Yup, they're "authoritarian" all right, when it comes to the likes of Exxon Mobil!
It's also interesting what one of the Honduran Junta generals said (quoted in a report by the Zelaya government-in-exile). He said that, by their coup in Honduras, they were "preventing communism from Venezuela reaching the United States."
Communism = free universal health care. Communism = transparent elections. Communism = the sovereignty of the people. In their lexicon.
Don't be fooled by their overt--or subtle--crapola.
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