America's hidden war

[welshTerrier2]

many of us are swept away by the brazen, bullying abuses of how the American military is used overseas ... there's nothing subtle about it ... even when the government and the press (better named the sup-press) hide the dead and the wounded from the American public, we know our troops are paying with their lives, and their limbs and their livelihoods ... details can be covered up, to coin a phrase from Watergate (hint hint), but the war itself rarely can be ...

but there is a greater force at work than the American military ... and it's a far more insidious force in that it is rarely if ever seen by the American people ... we don't support it; we don't oppose it; we don't elect people based on their views of it ... the problem is, most Americans don't know about it at all ...

and just what is this dark, evil force? it is the economic clout of the US and how it's used to "conquer" other countries and exploit them for the benefit of trans-national corporations ... corporate profits are the pheromones of American foreign policy ... what's tragic is that this policy has been condoned by both republicans and democrats alike ...

if you want to understand exactly how this nasty little game of imperialism is played using primarily economic power, please read the full article below ... and excerpt is provided here:

source: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0608-29.htm

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So there was little reason to be surprised this spring when Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was appointed president of the World Bank This was merely history repeating itself. Yes, Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is a man who seems to define democracy in terms of a people submitting to U.S. military occupation, who advocated the destruction of Fallujah as the means to save it, and who sees the privatization of the Iraqi economy-the opening of its oil operations to U.S. investors-as laying the economic foundation for democracy. Yet the McNamara experience had long ago established the link between U.S. military strategy as carried out in the Department of Defense and U.S. international economic strategy as carried out through the Bank. <skip>

Generally, countries must privatize publicly owned firms and "liberalize," that is, remove barriers to foreign investment and foreign trade. When countries' finances have become especially problematic and their creditors are worried, the Bank works with the IMF to establish "structural adjustment programs" that push governments to balance budgets, restrain expansion of the money supply, eliminate government subsidies for particular products (for example, subsidies on food grains), and reduce tax rates on businesses.

These "structural adjustments" integrate the economies of low-income countries more effectively into the world economy and provide opportunities for U.S.-based businesses (and the businesses based in Europe and Japan) to gain access to markets, labor, and natural resources. But the Bank claims to carry them out in the name of promoting economic development and fighting poverty. <skip>

Paul Wolfowitz and his allies in Washington who designed the U.S. invasion of Iraq took the U.S. on a more extreme course of action than has been the wont of previous administrations. In doing so, they have brought death and destruction to Iraq, and they have created a more unstable and dangerous world situation. But they did not essentially depart from a long pattern of U.S. foreign policy, a pattern that has involved dozens and dozens of military operations-many small and some large-to protect U.S. business interests and promote "democracy" (or, in an earlier era "Christianity").

Likewise, there is little reason to think that Paul Wolfowitz's World Bank will depart from its long pattern of shaping the international economy in line with U.S. business interests. More extreme and perhaps more dangerous than his predecessors, he may be more of a zealot and less pragmatic. But the World Bank under Paul Wolfowitz will be the same World Bank it has always been.

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