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for French corporations (Bolivia has a big reserve of the rare mineral needed for electric cars and computers). The terms were a processing plant (jobs) in Bolivia, and a big contribution to Bolivian education/training, among other things. I think it's very interesting how governments and corporations of France, Spain, Norway, England, China, Russia and many others, carry on quite reasonable negotiations with the Bolivarian leftists, respecting the sovereign right of these governments to demand profits and benefits for their people, and respect for the environment, while US corporations throw childish tantrums and become ugly bullies when their insatiable greed for all the profits and all the resources is thwarted--as when the Chavez government renegotiated the oil contracts with multinationals for a 60/40 split, favoring Venezuela. Exxon Mobil stomped out of the negotiations, and went into "first world" courts to try to seize $12 billion of Venezuela's foreign assets. They lost in court. The winners: France's Total, Norway's Statoil, British BP and others. They get to make a DECENT profit, while paying their social dues. And Exxon Mobil has to hijack the US military to get it some oil and to protect those contracts, after slaughtering a million Iraqis. (We ought to include the US military in the package of "welfare for the rich" that US taxpayers are forced to provide.)
Then there is Chevron-Texaco, involved in classic corporate "musical chairs," with Chevron buying up Texaco, and then refusing liability for the "Rainforest Chernoybl" that Texaco inflicted on 30,000 indigenous people with a swath of toxic goo polluting a portion of the Amazon as big as Rhode Island in Ecuador and stretching all the way to Peru. A lone, self-educated, very poor indigenous lawyer fought them for over a decade, on behalf of the sick and the dying, and the Amazon's destroyed fisheries, and was on the point of winning, when Chevron, using at least one felon from the US as an operative, produced tapes that they allege compromise the Ecuadoran judge. He says they doctored the tapes and I believe him, after following stories about CIA and/or Rumsfeld's "Office of Special Plans-in-exile" and their rotten black ops treachery targeting President Correa in Bolivia, Chavez in Venezuela and other leftists.
This is the shit that US corporations pull--in addition to genocide--to get ALL the profits and pay NO social dues (and, indeed, suck blood from the poor). And this, of course, is why US corporations hate leaders like Morales, Correa and Chavez, and vilify them in the corpo-fascist press, and use the US government as their mafia enforcer. They hate a "level playing field," and, most of all, this spawn from our shores hates democracy itself.
Obama and Clinton are trying to achieve a friendlier atmosphere for US corps in Latin America. Critically important to that goal was their successful removal of the Junta in Honduras yesterday--four months after they should have done-- a coup which was openly supported by the worst elements in our political establishment--McCain, DeMint, Negroponte, James Baker--and was quite probably instigated by Bushwhack moles in the Pentagon, the State Dept. and the CIA, with or without Obama/Clinton collusion (not possible to tell for sure at this point). Obama's stated policy is peace, respect and cooperation in Latin America. The Honduran coup said otherwise, as do these seven new US military bases going into Colombia--a country with the worst human rights record on earth--and other hostile and threatening actions (such as the US reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet in the Caribbean) that may or may not be part of an oil war plan that Rumsfeld left on the desk, and that Obama/Clinton may or may not agree with, or may or may not have the power to curtail (also hard to tell). Will US corps (which are really not "of" the US anymore--but are multinational entities, almost floating countries, not loyal to anybody)--be content with "level playing fields" in Latin America? Or will they do to Latin America what they did to Iraq?
It's also interesting--and exceedingly ironic--that, last year at this time, the Bushwhacks were funding and instigating a white separatist insurrection in Bolivia, the goal of which was the split off the oil/gas-rich eastern provinces into a fascist mini-state in control of Bolivia's main resources. Morales had just DOUBLED Bolivia's gas revenues, in negotiations with Brazilian and Argentine corporations, and these fascists and their US handlers wanted it all for themselves. They rioted, trashed government buildings, took over an airport, sabotaged a gas pipeline and machine-gunned some 30 unarmed peasant farmers. Morales threw the US ambassador and the DEA out of Bolivia for their collusion with these white separatists, and leftists like Chile's Michele Batchelet, Brazil's Lula da Silva, Argentina's Cristina Fernadnez, went into action to back up Morales.
They called an emergency meeting of UNASUR (the newly formalized South America "common market"), passed unanimous resolutions condemning the attempted coup, and sent delegations to Bolivia to help quell the rebellion. Similar to Honduras, the coupsters wouldn't listen to anybody--and everybody tried, including the Catholic bishops--because their coup had US backing. But several things happened simultaneously to defeat the coup, besides Morales' firmness and courage and that of the people of Bolivia: UNASUR was able to bring economic clout to bear (Brazil and Argentina--Bolivia's chief gas customers--said that they would not recognize nor trade with a rebel Bolivian state); Bolivia's neighbor Paraguay elected a leftist president, after 61 years of rightwing rule, possibly cutting off planned US military support to the white separatists from across the border in Paraguay; and the Bushwhacks were busy inflicting a Financial 9/11 on the US and the world, and covering their tracks (frying hard drives, shredding paper, etc.) on their way out of the White House.
This is the background of Bolivia's new prosperity. Yet another democratic government that the Bushwhacks tried to destroy is doing quite well because they fought back, because they are democracies with widespread support, and because the new left in South America has good solidarity.
"Divide and conquer" has failed. Billions of US tax dollars to fascist political groups all over Latin America have failed. Very intense psyops, disinformation and propaganda have failed. CIA coups have failed (and the one in Honduras has only partially succeeded--they have retarded fundamental reform, but at the same time have inspired grass roots groups to pursue it vigorously). Central America is also going left (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua have elected leftist presidents, and a leftist revolution is also brewing in Mexico.) Bribery, kneecappings and every kind of bullying have failed. What is there left by which to inflict US-based corporate domination on Latin America?
I think we should be very worried about those US military bases in Colombia, the huge military aid to Colombia ($6 BILLION!), the reconstitution of the US 4th Fleet, this securing of the US military base in Honduras (by means of disempowering Zelaya--he proposed to convert it to a commercial airport), and the plans sitting around on the desks in the Pentagon and the "Southern Command" for obtaining sufficient oil to run the US war machine. Our corpo-fascists don't like the "sovereignty of the people" here or there. They very clearly intended to create mayhem in Bolivia, to destroy a democracy. Do they have plans to do that to all of Latin America, say, with a similar civil war strategy, and using Colombia and Honduras as the launching pads? There is a lot of evidence that they do, and we have only Obama's stated policy of peace, respect and cooperation as evidence of any opposition to this war plan within the US government.
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