One more example of the expansion of the USA Wall Street Corporate Model: Militarization and Privatized Security in Central America
Cross Post from IfLizWereQueen
Wall Street Owned Globalized Privatized Police–Erik Prince must be salivating at the mere thought of it.
As people all over the world wake up to what the 1% have in store for them we see a global emergence of Wall Street owned military-trained privatized police. First the U.S. Congress made it a crime to protest. Then protesters are labeled as “terrorists.” After that: anything goes. Thanks to a law passed recently, Americans now have no rights. All it takes now is for the police to label you as a “terrorist.” Do you think that it is an accident that the Senate passed this bill 93 to 7 days before the waterfront confrontation between the 99% tomorrow? It remains to be seen whether Obama will veto the bill. He “threatens” to, but we should be familiar by now with the gap between his rhetoric and his actions.
The United States is advancing a regional security strategy which apparently is oriented toward the militarization of Central America and the participation of private security contractors in policing, a strategy also being promoted for the region by the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) and former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe. Uribe. In January of 2009, George Bush, as one of his parting gifts to the global ruling class gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom of Alvaro Uribe. This medal is the highest civilian medal of honor that a President can bestow on a Citizen. He did it to make up for the fact that the Congress refused to pass the Colombian Free Trade Agreement–but no worries, two years later Obama completed that goal for Bush. During Uribe’s 7 year term, 510 unionist were murdered by his right-wing guns for hire thugs.
Last week, the Honduran National Congress passed a law allowing the military to perform police functions, and Assistant Secretary of State Maria Otero visited Honduras with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Todd Robinson, to promote security initiatives.
Just one more example of the US State Department meddling in the affairs of Central and South America.
Read more detail in the Upside Down World.
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ILWQ COMMENTS: WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?
Plenty!
Stop voting for either a Democrat OR a Republican/Tea party candidate. If you don’t know by now that the differences are only in their rhetoric, you need to start paying more attention to their actions and the bills that BOTH Democrats and Republicans in Congress are passing. In the past month they have passed not one but three trade agreements. The Korean Free Trade agreement alone will, according to the CBO, ship 169,000 American jobs overseas and will increase our trade deficit by $16 billion. Their latest affront to the 99% is the Deranged Senate Votes for Military Detention of All Terror Suspects and a Permanent GUANTANAMO.
Support 99% Independent Candidates who are not millionaires and who do not own Wall Street stock. Until we have a majority of these people in BOTH houses of Congress–NOTHING of any good significance for the 99% will change. There will be no job creation. There will be no repair of our crumbling infrastructure. There will be no end to the extreme war profiteering and cynical use of our children as cannon fodder.
Forget the propaganda that you will be hearing on the Wall Street Owned mainstream media in the coming year. The owners of the US mainstream media AND all their leading pundits are members of the 1% club. They will tell any lie to stay in power and continue to be paid their $million + salaries. ANY LIE. They are above nothing.
MSNBC with its purported “liberal” viewpoints is nothing but a sham to make us think that the media is balanced. After all if all networks looked like the obvious right-wing mouthpiece that Fox does, the people would catch on faster. But if MSNBC were “liberal”, Phil Griffin would never have fired Olbermann and Cenk Uygur. They even have Chris Matthews touting Obama as an example of “American Exceptionalism”–which may have been one of the reasons that the 1% allowed him to run for president in the first place. What a better example for their propaganda than to have a black man for president. ”Only in a democracy.” Again. Forget their rhetoric and look at what this “exceptional American” has actually done–not what he said he would do.
As the 99% catch onto their tricks, the mainstream media are becoming more clever with their propaganda. For example, CBS, on their 60 minutes program recently did a show titled “60 Minutes Shames Justice Department Over Wall Street”. You didn’t have to be watching too closely to realize that they were not shaming Wall Street, nor were they shaming Wall Street wealthy investors. In fact, the entire segment was designed to subtly portray Wall Street investors as victims, taken advantage of by greedy unscrupulous poor people and shady low class off-Wall Street players like Country Wide. In addition, another purpose of the segment was to bash the Obama administration and the Justice department in particular (not that they don’t deserve bashing, but not for this reason).
If CBS were sincere in their presentation, they would have produced the story about how Goldman Sachs commodity index traders in 2008 created a bubble in the wheat market that caused prices to skyrocket in a year that saw the largest wheat production in 100 years. Their actions literally starved millions of human beings to death. They created the bubble by buying and buying wheat shares AND not selling. This creates a shortage of the commodity on the market and drive up the prices. At the end of 2008, the wheat that could have been used to keep literally millions of human beings alive was fed to livestock on corporate farms. If Sumner Redstone’s CBS corporation really gave a damn, they would have told this story and then asked: Where is the Nuremberg for the millions who were starved to death by Goldman Sachs?
*Note: Frederick Kaufman published an article on this topic in Harpers Magazine in August, entitled “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away with It” The article chronicles Kaufman’s attempt to get to the bottom of the 2008 food crisis, and the real reason behind why millions of people were shoved into food insecurity and starvation in 2008.
STAND UP AND RUN FOR CONGRESS IN 2012 AS AN INDEPENDENT!
Your life and the lives of the 99% who come after us will not change until decent Americans are installed in Congress.
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