Empire Loves It's Profitable, Pretend Wars

Wall Street's Role in Narco-Trafficking

"Imagine what your reaction would be if the Mexican government agreed to pay Barack Obama $1.4 billion to deploy US troops and armored vehicles to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago to conduct military operations, set up check points, and engage in fire-fights that end up killing 35,000 US civilians on the streets of American cities.

If the Mexican government treated the United States like this, would you consider them a friend or an enemy?

This is exactly how the US is treating Mexico, and it's been going on since 2006.

America's Mexican policy--The Merida Initiative--is a nightmare. It's undermined Mexican sovereignty, corrupted the political system, and militarized the country. It's also resulted in the violent deaths of thousands of mostly poor civilians. But Washington doesn't give a hoot about "collateral damage" as long as it can sell more weaponry, strengthen its free-trade regime, and sluice more drug profits into its big banks. Then everything is just Jim-dandy.

There's no point in dignifying this butchery by calling it a "War on Drugs"?

That's nonsense. What we're seeing is a giant powergrab by big business, big finance and the US Intel services. Obama is merely doing their bidding, which is why--not surprisingly--things have gotten a lot worse under his administration. Obama has not only stepped up the funding for Plan Mexico (aka--Merida) but also deployed more US agents to work undercover while US drones carry out surveillance duty. Get the picture? This isn't some little drug bust; it's another chapter in America's War on Civilization.

Here's an excerpt from an article in CounterPunch by Laura Carlsen that gives a little background:

"The drug war has become the major vehicle of militarization in Latin America. It's a vehicle funded and driven by the U.S. government and fueled by a combination of false morals, hypocrisy and a lot of cold, hard fear. The so called ‘war on drugs’ is really a war on people, especially youth, women, indigenous peoples and dissidents. The drug war has become the main way for the Pentagon to occupy and control countries at the expense of whole societies and many, many lives.

“Militarization in the name of the drug war is happening more quickly and more thoroughly than most of us probably anticipated under the Obama administration. The agreement to establish bases in Colombia, later suspended, sent out one of the first signals of the strategy. And we've seen the indefinite extension of the Merida Initiative in Mexico and Central America, and even, sadly, war boats sent to Costa Rica, a nation with a history of peace and no army...

“The Merida Initiative funds U.S. interests to train security forces, provide intelligence and war technology, give advice on reforming the justice and penal systems and promoting human rights–all in Mexico.” (The Drug War Can't Be Improved, It Can Only be Ended, Laura Carlsen, Counterpunch)

If it looks like Obama is doing his best to turn Mexico into a military dictatorship, it's because he is. Plan Mexico is a sham that conceals the administration's real motives, which is to make sure that the lavish profits from the drug trade end up in the right people's pockets. That's what this is all about, big money. And that's why the death toll has soared while the Mexican government's credibility has hit its lowest ebb in decades. US policy has turned large swaths of the country into killing fields and it's only getting worse.

Check out this interview with Charles Bowden who describes what life is like for the people who live at Ground Zero in the drug war; Juarez, Mexico:

"This is in a city where people live in cardboard boxes sometimes. Ten thousand businesses have given up and closed in the last year. Thirty to sixty thousand people from Juárez, mainly the rich, have moved across the river to El Paso for safety, including the mayor of Juárez, who likes to bunk in El Paso. And the publisher of the newspaper there lives in El Paso. Somewhere between 100,000 and 400,000 people simply left the city. A lot of the problem is economic, not simply violence. At least 100,000 jobs in the border factories have vanished during this recession because of the competition from Asia. There’s 500 to 900 gangs there, estimates vary.

“So what you have is about 10,000 federal troops and federal police agents all marauding. You have a city where no one goes out at night; where small businesses all pay extortion; where 20,000 cars were officially stolen last year; where 2,600-plus people were officially murdered last year; where nobody keeps track of the people who have been kidnapped and never come back; where nobody counts the people buried in secret burying grounds, and they, in an unseemly way, claw out of the earth from time to time. You’ve got a disaster. And you have a million people, too poor to leave, imprisoned in it. That’s the city." (Charles Bowden, Democracy Now)

This isn't about drugs; it's about a crackpot foreign policy that supports proxy-armies to impose order through police-state repression and militarization. It's about expanding US power and beefing up profits on Wall Street."