A critique of the US economy in the context of US militarization in Latin America

[Peace Patriot]

This analysis is so good, and so right on, that I am quoting its opening sections in their entirety:

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Nicaragua, ALBA, and Intellectual Betrayal

January 19th 2010, by Toni Solo

People in Latin America have frequently found themselves fighting regular forces and mercenary contractors coordinated ultimately by the United States Southern Command, the State Department and related US government bodies. That was true in Central America in the 1980s. It has been the case in Colombia for many years. On a smaller scale it is happening now in Honduras. Shortly, they may well find themselves fighting regular forces and mercenary contractors coordinated by NATO.

2009 marked the transition via a practically seamless continuity in US government foreign policy in Latin America from one gangster US government administration to another. The international intellectual and information-media manager classes have failed to report assertively and adequately the US government's escalating war on the peoples of Latin America. For overstretched US military forces, anxious to apply pressure to perceived enemies in Latin America, resorting to NATO's mutual defence Article 5 - as they have in Afghanistan - is an attractive option. With its new military bases in Colombia, the US government can readily provoke an incident as they did fifty years ago in the Tonkin Gulf.

The Venezuelan government recently expressed concern about the intentions of the US government in relation to its bases in the Dutch Antilles- Aruba and Curacao. Holland is a member country of NATO. The well known NATO war games known as Plan Balboa posited unequivocally a joint NATO operation against Venezuela. Despite this, leading US intellectuals like Noam Chomsky dismiss the chances of a US government-led aggression against Venezuela. (1) Their failure of imagination only makes sense in the broad economic, political and propaganda context of the Americas.

US economic context

US domestic economic collapse and stagnation seems increasingly to be provoking a militarist US foreign policy in regions around the world. The domestic economic collapse is very clear. The US economy - still losing many tens of thousands of jobs each month (even official figures acknowledge over 2 million jobs lost since December 2007) - needs 100,000 new jobs a month to maintain employment equilibrium. Unemployment in the US is unlikely to recover from current Depression levels – the U-6 unemployment measure is currently over 17% - until 2015 at the earliest. Ignoring the employment crisis, from July 2007 through 2008, the US authorities – the US government and the Federal Reserve – along with allied governments and their central banks, sought to make good the liquidity problems of their vital private sector partners among the major financial companies by stoking inflation.

They hoped to protect bona fide banks and the so-called shadow banking sector from the imploding real estate bubble. For a while, that strategy shored up failing strategic financial partners – US government supported entities, US Primary Government Securities Dealers and their parent companies (2) as well as the giant, world-wide American Insurance Group (AIG). (AIG on its own has been the beneficiary of over US$127 billion dollars in US government (i.e. taxpayer) support. That is ten times Nicaragua's annual budget). In the end, the inflationary binge, culminating in July 2008 with oil at US$147, failed to make good the bankrupt US financial sector.

In the subsequent phase of the crisis, from July 2008 until March or April 2009, Western Bloc governments, central banks and major financial institutions coordinated action that helped encourage global investors and speculators to buy more US Treasury bonds instead of stocks and commodities. That deflationary dynamic dramatically strengthened the US dollar on the international currency markets. It rapidly depressed commodity prices and stocks. The abruptness, incredible size and sheer volatility of market movements frightened US legislators into bailing out insolvent financial institutions.

This phase of the crisis involved a massive redistribution of wealth from the majority of taxpayers in the United States to a corrupt plutocrat elite. Once their rescue by government was guaranteed, the elite's indispensable accomplice institutions – principally the Primary Government Securities Dealers and their parent companies - returned to the international casino of currency, commodity and stock markets, reinforcing their gambling reserves with many billions of dollars of taxpayers' money. By the end of 2009 US banks were paying out record bonuses to staff, while, in the rest of the economy, unemployment, mortgage foreclosures and bankruptcies soared to levels unprecedented in recent history.

Economic crisis : militarist foreign policy

A very strong correlation exists between that blatant domestic intervention by the US authorities to rescue the country's financial and insurance sector and militarist US government foreign policy. In Colombia, increased direct intervention via seven new US military bases now follows billion-dollar military funding for the US government's narco-terror ally, President Alvaro Uribe. In Mexico, Felipe Calderon's usurper government, a few years behind, follows in Uribe's footsteps. Via Plan Merida, the US government is funding intense militarization of Mexico's narcotics wars, just as it did in Colombia from the late 1990s onwards.

In Colombia, more than US$5 billion has been spent in recent years so as to deliberately fail to end the “war on drugs”. Narcotics are the economic base of Uribe's political, army and paramilitary allies. Narcotics profits are also a vital component of the US dominated international financial system. UN Office on Drugs and Crime head, Antonio Costa, has asserted that as much as US$325 billion in narcotics profits helped to fund major international banks through their liquidity crisis in 2008 and 2009. (3) His apparently startling announcement covers up the reality that international off-shore tax-havens routinely channel hundreds of billions of illicit funds every year into the international financial system.

The US has now signed an agreement to install seven military bases for its military forces on unprecedentedly humiliating, quasi-colonial terms for Colombia's sovereignty. The targets of that military escalation are not Alvaro Uribe's narcotics allies but the undefeated anti-government Colombian guerrilla movements, the democratically elected governments of Venezuela and Ecuador, and, too, Brazil, the main rival to US regional dominance. The US government is provoking this deliberate regional destabilization in pursuit of political and economic outcomes beneficial to US and allied corporate interests.

In Central America, the United States government effectively facilitated the June 28th military coup against President Manuel Zelaya, subsequently treating Zelaya on equal terms with the coup leaders and deliberately undermining the continental anti-coup-regime consensus. By means of the electoral farce in Honduras of November 29th, the Obama government has sought to legitimize the coup, recovering and securing a base from which to apply pressure against other countries in the region. US government targets for destabilization in Central America are the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the centre-left government of El Salvador, based on the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and even the centrist government of Alvaro Colom in Guatemala, a member of the Venezuelan-led Petrocaribe regional cooperation programme.

Of those target countries in South and Central America, Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua are all members of the ALBA economic and development cooperation community. The ALBA countries have made dramatic improvements in terms of capital investment, current account liquidity and social improvements. Nicaragua and Bolivia have eradicated illiteracy in just three years. Throughout the ALBA bloc, greater access to better health care has been prioritised successfully.(4) ALBA's associated, less comprehensive, Petrocaribe (5) framework provides increased energy security and food security to around 90 million people in over 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

ALBA's fundamental principles of solidarity and complementarity and the absence of conditionality have resulted in very significant economic and social gains for the bloc's member countries. For example, Nicaragua's trade with Venezuela – mostly in agricultural produce - reached over US$110 million in 2009 and is expected to double in 2010. ALBA countries have supplemented relatively modest capital investment from traditional partners in North America, Japan and Europe, with funding from Brazil, China, Russia and India as well as partners like Vietnam and Iran.

For the US and its allies among the Western Bloc countries, the expansion and success of ALBA and Petrocaribe represent two undesirable trends. Political and economic elites in North America and Europe fear and resent the relative decline in their regional influence as Latin America – with ALBA leading the way – develops broader and deeper relations with Western Bloc rivals like China, Russia and Iran. They also fear regional moves towards integration which in practice permit the combination and consolidation of economic and political power by relatively small countries, previously easy to dominate in isolation, but now, united, more ready and able to resist Western Bloc rich-country coercion.

So in Central America, the US is applying heavy pressure on El Salvador's social democrat President Mauricio Funes who has responded by insisting El Salvador will not join ALBA. Regardless, the FMLN revolutionary political party, with which Funes came to power, is integrating its municipal authorities into ALBA's programmes. Under US government pressure, Honduras will most likely withdraw from ALBA**, despite being unable to afford the dramatic drop in economic resources that move would bring. As part of its anti-ALBA offensive, the US government is readying its regional resources for the Presidential elections scheduled in the region over the next two years.

(Some paragraphs on upcoming elections in Latin America, thence to these important points...)

Western Bloc propaganda – the three big lies

Elections in the region occur within the much broader propaganda and perception management theatre of the US government's war against Latin America's impoverished majorities. As in any propaganda war, the main themes are very few and are repeated endlessly, regardless of contrary facts. Those main themes are adapted to fit the requirements needed to render plausible US government aggression against countries that resist regional policy in Latin America of the US and its allies. They are:

---the US government and its allies promote democracy, stability and economic prosperity

---the “war on drugs” requires significant US military presence and large amounts of US aid;

---conversely, the governments of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and of other ALBA bloc countries destabilize the region, are undemocratic, incompetent, corrupt and involved in narcotics and/or terrorism.

These absurd propaganda claims are entirely counterfactual. As in all the most effective propaganda, they are very simple lies, frequently and incessantly repeated via every possible medium. Even a cursory look at the reality of US regional policy in Latin America reveals how (thoroughly) mendacious this propaganda really is.

(MORE)

http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/5083

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*(The coup Congress in Honduras didn't wait for the martial law-'elected' new government to take power (Jan. 27), but has already canceled Honduras' membership in ALBA, which had been so strongly supported by Honduras' labor unions and so beneficial to poor workers, and which President Mel Zelaya had initiated. Honduras joining ALBA was one of the main reasons for the coup, because ALBA membership bolsters the political power of Honduras' extremely poor population. The other main reason was for the Pentagon to secure the US military base in Honduras. The US military base at Soto Cano, Honduras, was used to refuel the plane that carried kidnapped President Zelaya out of the country. When this happened, I at first thought that there had been some kind of Bushwhack-mole insurrection in the Pentagon, and at the US embassy in Honduras, against President Obama and his state policy of "peace, respect and cooperation" in Latin America. But it now appears to me that the Sec of State Hillary Clinton was in on it, and so also, very probably, President Obama. In any case, IF Obama has good intentions in Latin America, he has no power to implement them. His culpability, or lack of power, is also confirmed by the US/Colombia military agreement, by which the Pentagon is basically setting up Colombia like it did South Vietnam, circa 1963.)

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I want to emphasize all three points mentioned above --the egregious lies on which US policy in Latin America is based. I agree with the author that their purpose is war. I also agree with this statement of the author: "International corporate media religiously and cynically repeat the main US government propaganda motifs on a daily basis." I have often descried the complete loss of objectivity on this matter of every corporate news organization in the western world, as well as two purported public news organizations, NPR and the BBC.

LIE: That the US government promotes democracy in Latin America. It is doing the exact opposite.

LIE: That the US government promotes stability and economic prosperity in Latin America. Nothing could be further from the truth.

LIE: That any US military presence at all is required by anything in Latin America, let alone the failed, corrupt, murderous US "war on drugs." The US has no interest--zilch, zero, zip--in stopping the drug trade. (So what is this big US military build-up in Colombia and in the region FOR?)

LIE: That Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and other ALBA countries are "undemocratic, incompetent, corrupt and involved in narcotics and/or terrorism." All egregious, provable lies.

The author goes on to use Nicaragua as her main example of the application of this "Big Lie" to Latin America. It is an eye-opening analysis, which reveals the same kinds of black holes where information should be that we find in corporate media hit pieces on Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, for instance. Name a leftist government that is doing well by its people, where the previously excluded poor majority now has a voice in government, where poverty and illiteracy have been reduced, and where government leaders are challenging US-enforced corporate rule, and you will find the same set of lies and slanders.

Just one more quote from this amazing article, regarding the "infinite feedback loop" of corporate 'news' disinformation, because it cites a particular falsified factoid about Honduras that really stuck in my craw:

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"The apparently innovative intellectual managerial media process that one sees at work in all the ALBA countries is an infinite feedback disinformation loop. Fake news is fabricated by unrepresentative political cliques and individuals like Carlos Fernando Chamorro and his family, who control major news media in Nicaragua. That fake news is then taken up and distributed by the international corporate media.

The international distribution networks eventually recycle the fake news concoction back to the country it came from and thus reinforce the original fabrication. Neocolonial Left alternative media not infrequently collaborate in that process as was clear in the immediate aftermath of the Honduran military coup. The totally false description of Manuel Zelaya as a leftist populist trying to fix his re-election was almost ubiquitous." --from the article (my emphasis)

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The lie that President Zelaya of Honduras was trying to extend his term office was repeated over and over and over again by the corporate media, way, way beyond the point at which they should have known that it wasn't true. All they had to do was READ the short resolution that Zelaya proposed for a vote of the Honduran people to know this. I found the repetition of this lie throughout the media amazing, despite all that I've come to know about the corporate media over the last ten years--on war, on stolen elections, on everything else. They are not even bothering to give the appearance of objectivity any more. They just LIE! It was a provable, demonstrable LIE, and they damn well knew it.

So, bear all this in mind the next time you read a corpo-fascist 'news' article about Latin America, or witness their use of our public airwaves for selected cuts of 'news' from Latin America. You are being lied to every day in every way.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Looking forward to reading this. The Toni Solo article is also available here:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0912/S00268.htm

Love this term I saw in scanning: "infinite feedback disinformation loop."

So accurate.

Thanks for this material, Peace Patriot.

[EFerrari]

2. A good read if dense. I have to take another swing at it today.

If there was any doubt that the vulture's were considering swooping on Latin America, Haiti has disappeared them entirely.