Pique in (and at) Peiping

Too Big To Boss

A small debt produces a debtor, a large one an enemy
--Publilius Syrus, 1st century Roman aphorist

It’s good, I guess, that one place where the free market is still thriving is the deadbeat sector of our economy. Tune into commercial radio and you’ll be hosed by an infinite assortment of boiler room bandits promising to relieve your debt load. Whether you owe ten large to the IRS or your viscera to Visa, they promise to use their “special” and “secret” programs to lift you out of the hole and make you whole. Just dial the 800 number and you’ll soon be sauntering down Solvency street.
Our government, the biggest deadbeat of all, doesn’t have an 800 number it can call to escape penury. All it can do is to keep borrowing more bucks to cover the vig on those it already owes. This means importuning yet another handout from the Han.
Among ordinary mortals, debtors are afraid of sharks. They worry about being able to walk again after missing a payment. Certainly, they avoid antagonizing their creditors. Things are different at the highest reaches of power. While our treasury department is busy mooching from China, our Pentagon is using that money to muscle it. It’s as if I borrowed bucks from you to buy a gun to stick in your face.
The Chinese are ticked about Obama selling $6 billion in arms to Taiwan, the anomalous island entity that Washington recognizes as a de jure but not de facto province of China. Back in the Cold War, the U.S assumed a security role there analogous to, say, China protecting Hawaii from us.
Pundits see this gun-running to Taiwan as payback by Barack for Peiping’s “unhelpfulness” and “recalcitrance” on issues from Iran to trade and climate change. (Washington uses such terms, along with several others, including the always evocative “anti-American,” as euphemisms for disobedience. In other words, the Chinese are not doing as they’re told.)
The question is what the U.S can do about a willful China--apart from engorging its own military contractors? The answers range from nothing much to nothing at all.
It became obvious from early in George II’s reign that our empire was looking as enfeebled as Dracula confronted with a crucifix. The imperium’s great power was based on the three M’s of manufacturing, money and the military. But its glory days have long passed. Manufacturing has shrunk to 11 percent of the economy as foreign producers expand and domestic companies ship factories and jobs overseas. The mighty U.S. dollar plummets (but not this week) as Americans go into hock to buy stuff no longer made in the States. More concerned with contracts than combat, our bloated military is debilitated by corruption. Its incompetence has left Iraq a bloody mess. After nearly a decade it has yet to best a bunch of feudal cave dwellers in Afghanistan.
All of this is quite obvious to our Cathay creditors. So is the belt of military bases that the Pentagon is endeavoring to wrap around China’s girth. You’ve got to wonder if the Forbidden City honchos are amused or irked at their money being used to intimidate them? Are they’re anticipating the day when Chinese bases will encircle the U.S?
The sliver of the American media that pays attention to events beyond Tiger Woods’ libido has apparently received guidance from on high and has begun covering the new coolness between the colossi. They are discomfited by China’s insolence. They fear a trade war. A few even foresee eventual military confrontation. Others say it’s a teapot tempest that has to calm down because both sides have too much to lose.
The smarter ones, of course, are studying Mandarin.

The Power of Babble
These are frightening times in Washington. Despite his brave talk in the State of the Union, Obama and the Dems have been terrified into backing off their health care and other initiatives. No matter how much they concede to the Reps, they get only the back of John Boehner’s unnaturally bronzed mitt in reply. What’s the ominous threat that has them gasping in their Guccis?
Filibuster, that’s what! The scary spector of Republicans endlessly bullshitting on the floor of the Senate. Will they have to dam Capital Hill to protect against this torrent of verbal diarrhea? Will Harry Reid have to buy ear plugs? Will Jim Lehrer doze off ? Oh, the horror!
Let’s face it, our president had to surrender. Otherwise it would have meant Mitch McConnell droning through the Louisville phone book. If that doesn’t petrify you, how about James Imhofe babbling on about his grand kids?
It’s a turkey and egg question: Do our politicians feed us such preposterous nonsense because they’re contemptuous of us or stupid themselves?
Maybe it’s just that I was younger and more gullible, but I seem to recall that back in the day the solons fed us far more plausible lies. They scared us silly about Russia and China. But those were the two biggest countries on earth with real armies and nukes pointed our way. Now Washington gets our fear factor boiling by endlessly warning us of a few hundred medieval cave dwellers who gained their deadliest success at terrorism armed with no more than box cutters.
More stupid examples:
--The Pentagon says we have to spend billions to protect Iceland from a possible missile attack by Iran.
--The president says we’re taking all of our ‘combat’ troops out of Iraq by this summer. Since Blackwater, KBR and their ilk have profitably taken on just about all of the non-combat stuff in the military, what will our non-combat forces be doing?
--Obama also tells us we’re going to save zillions on health care and cut the deficit by making people buy insurance from financial companies whose only goal is to make more money this year than last year.
--The current and former treasury secretaries testify that it was necessary to save the system not by sending the banksters who wrecked it to jail but rather by making them richer than they were before.
Harry Truman warned us to never kick a fresh turd on a hot day. Would that our present pile of politicians even come close to that sort of simple and honest advisory.

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A Serious Moment--I just heard that Howard Zinn died in California at 87. He spent his life telling us the truth about ourselves. If you have yet to read A People's History of the United States, do it. If you have kids, make sure they read it. He was a writer and a fighter. We lost one of our best.

Sarah's Sighing

Scott’s Personality Parade
Start out with a people globally renowned for knowing little and caring less about the world--except that they should run it. Limit them to a narrow choice of politics consisting of conservatives who seriously believe in a bunch of selfish and self-destructive nonsense, as opposed to weak-willie liberals who long ago gave up the politics of the greater good for those of the lesser evil.
Make sure they learn little in the way of history and critical thinking so that they can keep making the same mistakes forever. See to it that they remain ignorant of economics and consumer savvy so that they can keep being conned and rolled forever. Amuse them with a mercenary media that specializes in treating the trivial importantly and the important trivially. Then never stop telling them that their country is the greatest--even if they’re too dumb to find it on a map.
What you end up with is the American voter. The right can pull up polls showing that the electorate hate the government and want it shriveled to insignificance. The left’s polls indicate, au contraire, that Medicare, Social Security and other government programs are highly popular. Take your pick.
In parliamentary democracies, people vote for parties, meaning policies. Ignorant of ideology, Americans vote for personalities. They see no problem in revering both liberal Dem FDR and rightwing Rep Reagan. Or with going from Teddy Kennedy to his political opposite, Scott Brown. All four had big personalities that counted for more than what they believed about boring stuff like the empire and the economy. Forgetting that basic truism, the arrogant Mass Dems put up a dud to oppose a stud. Game, set and match.
Dems, Reps and the media are blowing smoke about the significance of Brown being the 41st vote necessary to block the Obama health insurance giveaway in the senate. Let it waft on the winds. As prestigious pundit Jon Stewart noted, George W and the GOP got everything they every dreamed of out of the Senate on straight 51 to 49 majority votes. It was the Dems who invented the myth of filibuster-proof 60-vote majority to pre-excuse the failure of their wishy-washy initiatives. Thusly, I have a hunch that the White House and the Dem congressional leadership are not that upset about the Brown upset. It gives them that much more cover for colluding with the Reps.
I can, however, imagine who is pissed as heck: Sarah Palin! She’s going to have pose nekked to catch up with the hunky Brown in the presidential beauty parade that he just joined.

Sarah and Osama

The Poverty of Punditry
A new political tell-all book reiterates that Sarah Palin knows as much about the world as George W's pet goat. This as Fox News announced that Sarah the sagacious would soon be elucidating for the nitwit network (I heard she beat out Noam Chomsky for the job*).
To get the spin twirling, Bill O’Reilly invited her to refute the imputations of ignorance. He advised Sarah to say that the authors' claim that she couldn’t tell North from South Korea was “a lie.” After a moment of fumbling and further prompting by O’Reilly, she crossed her fingers behind her back and agreed it was a lie.
Of course, he never asked her to settle the question by citing a difference or two between the Koreas. To be fair, I don’t think it was because he was covering for a fellow yahoo and Fox kit. Few, if any, mediatricians would have asked that obvious question.
Substance is rarely news in the news. It’s too dangerous. The job of our media is to create yarns suitable for selling stuff and keeping the public dumb and docile. The bare truth has a tendency to shock some people out of their torpor and is therefore regarded as volatile. So, if you watch and read carefully, you’ll notice that the media are far more often telling us what people say about events than about the events themselves.
Consider the fact that Osama bin Laden has been our diablo deluxe for a decade or more. In all that time, I can’t recall one of his rants being translated and transmitted by the major media. What, in his own words, is his weltanschauung? Or his particular gripe with us? He’s given us all this grief, why not give him 30 minutes to explicate the explosions? When I was a kid every public library kept Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in English, on their shelves. To find anything about bin Laden from bin Laden you have to brush up on your Arabic and dig into the nether reaches of the net. Instead we get pundits who don’t know a saalam from a salami telling us that Osama and his acolytes hate us because we’re a free and successful people. They’re pissed because we’re perfect. That’s all you need to know.
If a direct appearance by bin Laden sparked our curiosity to the level of interest we had about Stalin, or more likely Saladin, questions might be raised. Like, what about the business and personal relationships between the Bush and bin Laden clans? That would make a great “24” plot. Or what makes bin Laden so popular with the Arab masses? Meaning what exactly do they have against us? That might bring up our military occupation of their lands and our violation of their holy places. Or our stealing their oil. Or our picking and propping up their potentates for them. We don’t want to get into all that, do we?
In olden days, the ink-stained wretches of the press were smart enough to be cynical. In other words they knew they were bullshitting their readers. By contrast, Sarah is safely entering upon editorialism at at time when it’s a tossup whether the IQs of those in front of or behind the screen at Fox are closer to room temperature. She’ll stand out, if only because she’s not the blond shade of bimbo.

(*credit for that line goes to John Fugelsang)

(click on image to enlarge)
A Couple of Car Rentals
I had occasion to rent two cars in recent weeks. The first was a one-hour Zipcar to run an errand while my old Passat was in the shop. The second was a ten-minute van rental. The Zipcar cost $8 for the hour. The van was a little higher. It came to $943, which is $5,658 on an hourly basis or $135,792 for a full 24 hour day rate.
Of course, the van was chauffered and had the word Ambulance written backwards on its front end. It transported me nine-tenths of a mile from my health plan to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where the driver and the other EMT on board checked me in and then joshed a bit with their colleagues in the lobby of the ER before heading off to their next run.
I’m sure the owners of the ambulance outfit can cite the enormous expense of running such an operation and would claim only modest, if any, profit. Hell, they might even be right--but I doubt it.
There are lots of things that separate our health care system from those of real first world countries. The most glaring are the numbers: they’re way out in the exosphere. Near a grand for a shorty ambulance ride! Drugs at $200 that cost $20 in Canada! Surgeries for a few thousand in Europe that are billed here at tens and even hundreds of thousands! U.S. health insurance execs with ‘compensation packages’ soaring into the hundreds of millions! Multi-billion dollar annual profits by the major health care players!
None of this will change when Obama’s health care bill goes into effect. The preposturous numbers will rise to humongous numbers, and then to whatever superlative comes above that. Indeed, the bill was written to insure that progression.
These, of course, are bubble prices, with no relation to reality. But there is no bubble in health care. Never was and never will be. Demand to stay alive and well is constant. Given that reality, the rules of the free market dictate that those who can keep us keeping on on this side of the River Styx can charge whatever the demand for survival will bear.
It’s openly admitted that 45,000 Americans cross that stream every year because they didn’t have the money to stay alive. If four or five of them had been killed by terrorists, we’d spend billions bombing bedouins into oblivion. But to croak from being broke, who cares?
Such deaths hardly exist in the real first world. There people are terrorized by socialistic governments that never send them stupendous bills for hospital stays, but instead pay for everyone’s good health by way of their own taxes. There a jiffy ambulance run priced at a grand would meet gasps of disbelief followed by sighs of relief that they don’t live in such a sick, money-grubbing madhouse.

News Items You Might Have Missed

Bankers’ Acceptances
A cozen of prominent money center bankers visited with President Obama on Dec. 14 to check on how well he’s been representing their interests in Washington. Three of the top execs, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and Richard Parsons of Citigroup, missed the meeting, saying that the fog of war delayed their flights. President Obama apologized for the Washington climate and assured them that the checks were in the mail.

Drone Off
Endorsing Predator air strikes on Pakistan in a Dec. 8 editorial, the New York Times advised that they be carried out with “no publicity” since they are “hugely unpopular” with the locals. Pakistanis are objecting to what they claim are unsightly “We’re Coming to Kill You” billboards that CIA-contracted ad agencies have plastered along Waziristan goat tracks. The media campaign is expected to be suspended at the completion of the mass distribution of the “You Die” potholders that have become ubiquitous in Baluchi kitchens.

Winning Prize Lost
Accepting his Nobel peace prize, President Obama eloquently reserved his right to make war. Meanwhile, it was announced that he didn’t make the running for the Clausewitz prize, awarded to those who win wars. Sam Sun Tzu, a spokesperson for the Clausewitz committee, said that the U.S. quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan made Obama’s defense of war equivalent to the Chicago Cubs declaring their right to win pennants.

Ingrate Expectations
A member of the Honduran military junta that seized power from the elected government last summer criticized President Obama for failing to publicly endorse the coup. “All we got from the White House was a wink, a nod and tech support," complained Col. Torturo Suplicio. “Hillary and her people were a lot more forthcoming. You would think that Obama would let us crash a state dinner for crushing the threat of constitutional social democracy in our part of the world. Some people are just ingrates.”

Fee Market Advances
The financial industry, celebrating its total 24/7 access to the U.S. Treasury, is getting spiffed for another gold-plated gala. With the expected passage of “health care reform,” Americans are taking a giant step towards a Fee Market society in which they will be obliged to pre-pay a financial company to obtain medical services--and eventually to go to a supermarket, gas up the car or take in a movie. As with health care, these companies will provide no useful service, but simply collect these fees to fuel obscene compensation packages for their executives. Americans have voiced a preference for Fee Markets over socialistic systems in which people pay for goods and services directly or through their taxes without incurring separate fees.

Media for Morons

Stupid Sells
Even in such hard times that the 7-11 is looking like a luxury boutique to the ever growing minions of misery, we abide a politics that limit us to a minimum of ideas and even fewer solutions.
It’s worse than that. How many countries do you know of where stupidos form an influential, if not thoughtful, constituency? This week, the Washington Post allowed Sarah Palin, who promises to get back to us on all matters of substance, to weigh in on the Copenhagen confab. “My daddy told me about that snuff,” she reputedly said. “I hope they have enough spitoons.”
Meanwhile, NPR, America’s topical anesthetic, dispatched anchor Robert Siegel to share some warm and fuzzies with Texas teabaggers. Siegal, who reserves his snide asides for those challenging conventional wisdom, was all empathy when it came to the blitherings of these yahoos, who are to conservatism as Groucho is to Marxism.
If you have some memory cells left, you’ll recall that last summer the vidiot box was awash for days with images of these irate and inane rubes besieging pols at town meetings with mispelled banners and malapropic maledictions. Siegel may be short those cells. Instead of remembering those images, he pretended some vague and distant negative characterization of the teabaggers. Catch this exchange with Lorie Medina, a leader of the group :
SIEGEL: One association that your detractors from afar have with the Tea Parties is rowdiness. It's being willing to shout down other people.
Ms. MEDINA : Yes, definitely, definitely anger. I think some people were scared. They're scared about where the country is going, and so I think it was a lot of emotions that erupted this last summer. And I think if the politicians think that that was the end of it, I think they've got another thing coming.
SIEGEL: Is Barack Obama a lightning rod for all this? I mean, does he infuriate the people who...?
Ms. MEDINA: Yes.
SIEGEL: Yes. Why? What it is about him that annoys people so much?
Ms. MEDINA: You know, it's like I wake up every morning, and there's something new on the news that's upsetting that I read about that he does. I mean, if you said, Lorie, list for me everything that he has done that has upset you since he's become president, I don't think there's any way I could list it all. There's so much. You know, the fact that he apologizes for our country every time he goes overseas. I don't know that I've ever heard him say anything good about America. If you look at the way he speaks, the way you - he talks about our country, if you look at the programs and the things he tries to put into place, it really appears that he does not love our country like most Americans do and like past presidents do.”
Now, let’s review. NPR’s All Things Considered put its senior anchor and presumably a sound tech on a plane to Texas, paid their expenses, plus those for editing the recordings, and then inflicted the drivel they gathered on its millions of listeners. The money media get away with this by claiming that their job is not to ignore idiocy and look for truth but simply to report the news. Of course, they decide what the news is. Or rather, those decisions are made to please the same corporate sponsors who coincidentally write off the permanently lunching teabaggers as a public relations expense.

Been There, Bombed That

Keeping Score On Our Wars
I once worked with a woman who showed up late every morning with a different excuse. She finally got canned after telling the boss that her hair hadn’t dried yet.
I was reminded of her while listening to Obama the other night giving us yet another excuse for a bigger and better war in Afghanistan. Such speeches are always the same except for the name of the nation in which we have decided to kill people and break and take their stuff. Since my childhood, and excluding World War II, the list has included the Philippines, Greece, Korea, China, Lebanon, Angola, Congo, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Libya, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Mozambique, Guyana, Panama, Grenada, Serbia, Somalia, Venezuela, etc.
To be fair, some of those were only air strikes, raids or government overthrows rather than full-bore invasions. If you go back in history to the days when we grabbed off a big hunk of Mexico, invaded Canada thrice, stole Spain's empire, nabbed Hawaii, had our Marines collecting on sovereign loans for our bankers, and our war fleets opening new markets in Asia, you can add a couple of dozen more. And if you tote up our global military interventions over the 233 years of our history, we make the Romans, whose empire lasted 500 years, look like homebodies.
Washington’s excuses for all these armed excursions are inevitably implausible since they're cover stories. Our empire makes war for imperial reasons, then pretends in public that its motives are defensive and/or idealistic . Like my colleague’s excuses, those motives keep changing. There’s been Manifest Destiny, the white man’s burden, christianizing the heathen, teaching the wogs a lesson, war to end war, antifascism, anticommunism, restoring order, nation-building, combating drugs, and lately antiterrorism.
If tardiness was the common thread in my co-worker’s dismissal, greed is the glue that holds our wars together. No matter the reason we’re fighting this time, a few of us are making money on war all the time. So steadily profitable has war become that conservative commentator John McClaughlin says that we have entered upon “an orthodoxy of continuous war.”
Interestingly, if you read through Obama’s speech, he doesn’t give much indication of what victory might look like. At best, there’s hope that the Taliban can be routed and that the thieves market in downtown Kabul can maintain the pretense that it’s a national government. There’s also the usual blather about throttling al Qaeda. This reminds me of the joke about the fellow who comes to see Jerry Lewis claiming that he’s found the cure for muscular dystrophy. “Are you absolutely sure?” asks Jerry. “Absolutely!” replies the visitor. Jerry then produces a gun and shoots the guy dead.
More interesting than Obama’s war speech this week was the release of a Senate Report affirming that the Bush administration let bin Laden and and his cohorts escape from Tora Bora. Why not? There would have been no reason to continue their war if if there was no more al Qaeda!
Such revelations are barely news anymore. The imperial impulse has implanted itself so deeply in our souls by now that we assume that the other 95 percent of the world is there for us to buy off, borrow from, or bomb, as we see fit. Like political campaigns that grew from an election season cottage industry to a non-stop billion dollar business, so our wars are becoming just another permanent economic sector, like sneaker retailing. Wars are good business, as we used to say in Vietnam days. Invest your kid!

A Decade End Review

Checking Out Our Big Ideas
Our leaders have come up with some big ideas in recent years. Virtually all have been bought by ordinary Americans, and many are still being paid for in one way or another. Nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, I thought it a good time to review some of these brainstorms.

FREE TRADE was the idea that we would be able to buy tons of cheap Chinese stuff at Walmart if we merely gave up our good-paying manufacturing jobs and went into hellacious hock to foreigners. It has worked out perfectly--for the Chinese!

DEREGULATION was the idea that if you let greedheads run our financial system without rules and regs, it would not only make everyone rich but automatically correct itself if, by any chance, something went wrong. Though the system then drowned in a cesspool of corruption, that seems no reason to sour on the basic premise of capitalism that the worst people for the worst motives will somehow work for the benefit of us all.


COUNTERINSURGENCY is not what happened at the mall on Black Friday, but is rather a euphemism for conquest. Its main idea is that, using translators, we can get perfect strangers in distant countries to help us kill their own people and run their countries for them. The idea has a spotty record, with its worse recent showing in Vietnam. Two things in its favor are that Americans, particularly SimCity players, love to organize other people’s places, and that since it’s being done overseas and thus out of mind, counterinsurgency offers fabulous opportunities to steal both from foreigners and from our government.


HEALTH CARE REFORM is the idea that if you oblige people by law to buy inadequate insurance from financial companies who make their money by denying health care, they will not only be healthier but somehow save money. This is considered superior to socialistic foreign systems where people go to doctors and hospitals when they get sick.

GREEN is the most dazzling sales tool since the first marketer figured out that you could get people to spend money simply by using the word Save in ads. Just call them Green and you can sell white elephants, red tag items, and blue light specials.


USURY is finally acceptable after centuries on religion’s moral shit list. The Bible dumps on it bigtime, and in 1179 Pope Alex III and his cardinals decreed that it be punished by excommunication. No matter, usury now comes with every credit card in your pocket and personal loan you make. Organized religion, obsessed with matters sexual, seems to have taken a vow of silence on this particular sin. Banks are charging such ridiculous interest rates that loansharks are biting themselves. It won’t be long before Shylock’s House of Vig opens a branch on your block.

FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE is an old idea in a new kevlar helmet. Schemes to take over the world were once evils ascribed to the Soviet communist empire and villains in James Bond movies. Now they’re the official mission impossible of the American empire. This bit of Pentagonese means what it says--that the U.S. and its ‘interests’ should dominate the whole world, including the oceans and the skies, not to mention the oil fields. The other 95 percent of humanity hates FSD, but Americans are either ignorant or approving of it. One of the great questions for history is why the American people, who know nothing and care less about the world, are so willing to empty their wallets and volunteer the lives of their kids to boss it around?

The South Side Comes to South America

Hyde Park in Honduras
I had started to think of Barack Obama as a one-term president. Then a particular quality he's lately displayed gave me the idea that he’ll find a way to win a second one. Probably it’s the Chicago politician in him, but Obama seems to have a warm spot for rigged elections. He just signed off on one in Afghanistan as crooked as Beelzebub’s tail. To top that, he’s okayed a forthcoming vote in Honduras in which I’m sure the late Mayor Richard Daley, and maybe even Benito Mussolini, will cast their ballots.
As I write this, Hillary is in Kabul rubbing kaftans with war lords and heroin traders at President Hamid Karzai’s inaugural. No doubt she’ll use the occasion to tell them to clean up their acts. And no doubt her message will be laughed off as equivalent to the Corleones preaching probity to the Sopranos.
Meanwhile, in Tegucigalpa, the Obamists have heartened the putchists by agreeing to recognize as legitimate the forthcoming November 29 presidential election that the rest of the world dismisses as farce.
If you recall, last summer the Honduran military, a cadet of the Pentagon, busted into President Zelaya’s residence, put guns on him and shipped him off to exile in his pyjamas. The junta appointed a new President named Micheletti whose “every proposal was written or approved by the American” at his side, according to the NY Times. That chaperone would be Bennet Ratcliff, a Clinton operative. Meanwhile, Lanny Davis, personal attorney to the Clintons and a Dem power player, showed up as the junta’s mouthpiece in Washington.
Reaction begets action. Hondurans have taken to the streets in defense of the democracy they voted for rather than the fascism imposed by the generals, the business elite, and their U.S. sponsors. For this, they’re being gunned down, beaten, tortured, disappeared, and arrested by the thousands. Media daring to defend legitimacy are likewise being stomped and silenced.
George Orwell observed that “the nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.” Accordingly, the U.S. media has all but ignored Honduras, or otherwise lied about it. They blame the legitimate president for the coup, saying he was too leftist, too Chavista, and too interested in succeeding himself (that last an outright whopper). His terrible crime is asking what kind of government the Hondurans want. That’s not in the program, according to U.S. ambassador Hugo Llorens, who frankly stated that “we can’t have a constitution that allows the ‘people’ to be involved in government.”
Latins are livid with rage and loathing. They fought for decades to write finis to the regimes of colonels and death squads, with their CIA and Mossad handlers smiling in the shadows. To think that Barack Obama, of all Americans, is trying to bring them back is all the proof they need that the gringos remain incorrigible imperialists, who, in the words of Bolivar known to every Latino, will forever plague the continent in the name of freedom. The countries of Latin America have agreed unanimously to not recognize the Honduran coup or the election the golpistas are concocting to provide themselves with a democratic fig leaf. The European Union is likewise unanimously appalled. Both the EU and the Latins agreed to cut trade with and aid to Honduras.
That leaves Washington all by its lonesome. There’s a price for it. With Honduras declared a pariah and trade with and aid from the rest of the world sharply reduced, American taxpayers will be the ones keeping Honduras afloat. Among the things we’ll be paying for is the repression needed to beat down the majority of the population favoring real democracy. Once again, my government is busy killing and torturing people who have ideas like mine.
Obama’s counterattack in Honduras is obviously aimed at the outbreak of independence and democracy south of the border. It’s of a piece with his dispatch of warships to prowl Latin waters, his addition to U.S. bases in Colombia, and his spooks' continued coup plottings elsewhere (one was just broken up in Paraguay). A restoration of “full spectrum dominance” of the resource rich continent remains U.S. policy. It's now more vigorously pushed by Obama than it ever was by Bush. It will fail, but it will make another big mess in the world.
Since we’re not permitted the option of peace, I’d rather see the U.S. at endless war with the obscurantist medieval cousins of Palin, Beck and company in Afghanistan and Pakistan than raining down death and dictatorship on Latin America’s fresh-minded and hopeful democratic project.