=By=
Chris Hedges

Corporate colonization proceeding as planned.

A decade ago left-wing governments, defying Washington and global corporations, took power in Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador. It seemed as if the tide in Latin America was turning. The interference by Washington and exploitation by international corporations might finally be defeated. Latin American governments, headed by charismatic leaders such as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, won huge electoral victories. They instituted socialist reforms that benefited the poor and the working class. They refused to be puppets of the United States. They took control of their nations’ own resources and destinies. They mounted the first successful revolt against neoliberalism and corporate domination. It was a revolt many in the United States hoped to emulate here.

But the movements and governments in Latin America have fallen prey to the dark forces of U.S. imperialism and the wrath of corporate power. The tricks long practiced by Washington and its corporate allies have returned—the black propaganda; the manipulation of the media; the bribery and corruption of politicians, generals, police, labor leaders and journalists; the legislative coups d’état; the economic strangulation; the discrediting of democratically elected leaders; the criminalization of the left; and the use of death squads to silence and disappear those fighting on behalf of the poor. It is an old, dirty game.

President Correa, who earned enmity from Washington for granting political asylum to Julian Assange four years ago and for closing the United States’ Manta military air base in 2009, warned recently that a new version of Operation Condor is underway in Latin America. Operation Condor, which operated in the 1970s and ’80s, saw thousands of labor union organizers, community leaders, students, activists, politicians, diplomats, religious leaders, journalists and artists tortured, assassinated and disappeared. The intelligence chiefs from right-wing regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and, later, Brazil had overseen the campaigns of terror. They received funds from the United States and logistical support and training from the Central Intelligence Agency. Press freedom, union organizing, all forms of artistic dissent and political opposition were abolished. In a coordinated effort these regimes brutally dismembered radical and leftist movements across Latin America. In Argentina alone 30,000 people disappeared.

Photo by daniel.julia

Latin America looks set to be plunged once again into a period of dictatorial control and naked corporate exploitation. The governments of Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, which is on the brink of collapse, have had to fight off right-wing coup attempts and are enduring economic sabotage. The Brazilian Senate impeached the democratically elected President Dilma Rousseff. Argentina’s new right-wing president, Mauricio Macri, bankrolled by U.S. hedge funds, promptly repaid his benefactors by handing $4.65 billion to four hedge funds, including Elliott Management, run by billionaire Paul Singer. The payout to hedge funds that had bought Argentine debt for pennies on the dollar meant that Singer’s firm made $2.4 billion, an amount that was 10 to 15 times the original investment. The previous Argentine government, under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had refused to pay the debt acquired by the hedge funds and acidly referred to them as “vulture funds.”

I interviewed Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s minister of foreign affairs and human mobility, for my show “On Contact” last week. Long, who earned a doctorate from the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London, called at the United Nations for the creation of a global tax regulatory agency. He said such an agency should force tax-dodging corporations, which the International Monetary Fund estimates costs developing countries more than $200 billion a year in lost revenue, to pay the countries for the natural resources they extract and for national losses stemming from often secret corporate deals. He has also demanded an abolition of overseas tax havens.

Long said the neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s and ’90s were profoundly destructive in Latin America. Already weak economic controls were abandoned in the name of free trade and deregulation. International corporations and banks were given a license to exploit. “This deregulation in an already deregulated environment” resulted in anarchy, Long said. “The powerful people had even less checks and balances on their powers,” he said.

“Neoliberalism is bad in most contexts,” Long said when we spoke in New York. “It’s been bad in Europe. It’s been bad in other parts of the world. It has dismantled the welfare state. In the context where we already have a weak state, where institutions are not consolidated, where there are strong feudal remnants, such as in Latin America, where you don’t really have a strong social contract with institutions, with modernity, neoliberalism just shatters any kind of social pact. It meant more poverty, more inequality, huge waves of instability.”

Countries saw basic services, many already inadequate, curtailed or eliminated in the name of austerity. The elites amassed fortunes while almost everyone else fell into economic misery. The political and economic landscape became unstable. Ecuador had seven presidents between 1996 and 2006, the year in which Correa was elected. It suffered a massive banking crisis in 1999. It switched the country’s currency to the U.S. dollar in desperation. The chaos in Ecuador was mirrored in countries such as Bolivia and Argentina. Argentina fell into a depression in 1998 that saw the economy shrink by 28 percent. Over 50 percent of Argentines were thrust into poverty.

“Latin America,” Long said, “hit rock bottom.”

It was out of this neoliberal morass that the left regrouped and took power.

“People came to terms with that moment of their history,” Long said. “They decided to rebuild their societies and fight foreign interventionism and I’d even say imperialism. To this day in Latin America, the main issue is inequality. Latin America is not necessarily the poorest continent in the world. But it’s certainly the most unequal continent in the world.”

“Ecuador is an oil producer,” Long said. “We produce about 530,000 barrels of oil a day. We were getting 20 percent royalties on multinationals extracting oil. Now it’s the other way around. We pay multinationals a fee for extractions. We had to renegotiate all of our oil contracts in 2008 and 2009. Some multinationals refused to abide by the new rules of the game and left the country. So our state oil company moved in and occupied the wells. But most multinationals said OK, we’ll do it, it’s still profitable. So now it’s the other way around. We pay private companies to extract the oil, but the oil is ours.”

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ong admitted that there have been serious setbacks, but he insisted that the left is not broken.

“It depends on how you measure success,” he said. “If you’re going to measure it in terms of longevity, and how long these governments were in power—in our case we’re still in power, of course, and we’re going to win in February next year—then you’re looking at, more or less in Venezuela 17 years [that leftist governments have been in power], in Ecuador now 10, and in Argentina and Brazil it’s 13.”

“One of the critiques aimed at the left is they’re well-meaning, great people with good ideas but don’t let them govern because the country will go bust,” he said. “But in Ecuador we had really healthy growth rates, 5 to 10 percent a year. We had lots of good economics. We diversified our economy. We moved away from importing 80 percent of energy to [being] net exporters of electricity. We’ve had big reforms in education, in higher education. Lots of things that are economically successful. Whereas neoliberal, orthodox economics was not successful in the previous decade.”

Long conceded that his government had made powerful enemies, not only by granting political asylum to Assange in its embassy in London but by taking Chevron Texaco to court to try to make it pay for the ecological damage its massive oil spills caused in the Amazon, where the company drilled from the early 1960s until it pulled out in 1992. It left behind some 1,000 toxic waste pits. The oil spills collectively were 85 times the size of the British Petroleum spill in the Gulf of Mexico and 18 times the size of the spill from the Exxon Valdez. An Ecuadorean court ordered Chevron Texaco to pay $18.2 billion in damages, an amount later reduced to $9.5 billion. The oil giant, however, has refused to pay. Ecuador has turned to international courts in an attempt to extract the money from the company.

Long said that the different between the massive oil spills elsewhere and the Ecuadorean spills was that the latter were not accidental. “[They were done] on purpose in order to cut costs. They were in the middle of the Amazon. Normally what you’d do is extract the oil and you’d have these membranes so that it doesn’t filter through into the ground. They didn’t put in these membranes. The oil filtered into the water systems. It polluted all of the Amazon River system. It created a huge sanitary and public health issue. There were lots of cancers detected.”

Long said his government was acutely aware that Chevron Texaco has “a lot of lobbying power in the United States, in Wall Street, in Washington.”

“There are a lot of things we don’t see,” he said of the campaign to destabilize his government and other left-wing governments. “Benefits we could reap, investments we don’t get because we’ve been sovereign. In the case of [Ecuador’s closing of the U.S.] Manta air base, we’d like to think the American government understood and it was fine. But it was a bold move. We said ‘no more.’ We declared it in our constitution. We had a new constitution in 2008. It was a very vibrant moment of our history. We created new rules of the game. It’s one of the most progressive constitutions in the world. It actually declares the rights of nature. It’s the only constitution that declares the rights of nature, not just the rights of man. We made Ecuadorean territory free of foreign military bases. There was no other way. But there are consequences to your actions.”

One of those consequences was an abortive coup in September 2010 by members of the Ecuadorean National Police. It was put down by force. Long charged that many of the Western NGO’s in Ecuador and throughout the region are conduits for money to right-wing parties. Military and police officials, along with some politicians, have long been on the CIA’s payroll in Latin America. President Correa in 2008 dismissed his defense minister, army chief of intelligence, commanders of the army and air force, and the military joint chiefs, saying that Ecuador’s intelligence systems were “totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA.”

“There is an international conspiracy right now, certainly against progressive governments,” he said. “There’s been a few electoral setbacks in Argentina, and Venezuela is in a difficult situation. The media frames it in a certain way, but, yes, sure, Venezuela is facing serious trouble. There’s an attempt to make the most of the fall of prices of certain commodities and overthrow [governments]. We just saw a parliamentary coup in Brazil. [President Rousseff had been] elected with 54 million votes. The Labor Party in Brazil [had] been in power for 13 years. The only way they [the rightists] managed to get rid of it was through a coup. They couldn’t do it through universal suffrage.”

Long said that even with the political reverses suffered by the left it will be difficult for the rightists to reinstate strict neoliberal policies.

“You have a strong, disputed political ground between a traditional right and a radical left,” he said. “A radical left, which has proved it can reduce poverty, it can reduce inequality, it can run the economy, well, it’s got young cadres that have been [government] ministers and so on. I reckon that sooner or later it will be back in power.”

Corporate leviathans and the imperialist agencies that work on their behalf are once again reshaping Latin America into havens for corporate exploitation. It is the eternal story of the struggle by the weak against the strong, the poor against the rich, the powerless against the powerful, and those who would be free against the forces of imperialism.

“There are no boundaries in this struggle to the death,” Ernesto “Che” Guevara said. “We cannot be indifferent to what happens anywhere in the world, for a victory by any country over imperialism is our victory; just as any country’s defeat is a defeat for all of us.”

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Obama – Big Oil Truths and Elisions

By Rowan Wolf, Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Today

“Clean coal” hits the river. Image from Keep WV Wild. Please click on picture for larger image.

On March 29th, President Obama engaged in some of the most honest discussion of the realities of oil and oil corporations I have heard from a politician. He also engaged in some big lies of omission (elisions). So let’s start with the “truths.”

(I have included the video of President Obama’s speech on 3/29/2012, and my transcript of same, at the end of this article so that readers can get the the points in context.)

The purpose of the speech was to encourage the Congress to stop the subsidies for big oil. This was a lost cause as the Democratic measure was blocked by Republican Senators (CNN, 3/29/12). This is not surprising given that “Individuals and political action committees affiliated with oil and gas companies have donated $238.7 million to candidates and parties since the 1990 election cycle, 75 percent of which has gone to Republicans“  – though Obama received $884,000 in 2008 (OpenSecrets.org).

In the course of the speech, Obama tells some truths that I don’t believe any other President has told.

The “truths” that were in this speech

Point: The big oil companies get billions of dollars a year in subsidies, and they have gotten these subsidies for almost a century.

This conveniently leaves out the almost free “leases” of our commons to the corporations ($1.50 to $10 per acre Who Owns the West? Oil and Gas Leases) and the amazingly low “royalties” (roughly 8% after all associated “production” costs American Petroleum Institute). In fact according to API, in 2007 MMS collected about $9.4 billion in oil and gas royalties, $815 million in bonus bids, and $10.2 billion in leases. This comes to a total of $20.42 billion. To put this in context, it is generally estimated that oil and gas companies receive about $24 billion in subsidies a year with a high estimate of $37 billion a year (Common Peoples Source for News). So Big Oil gets somewhere between $3.6 billion to $16 billion more per year than they pay in leases and royalties.

Point: Obama detailed the record profits being made by the oil companies – particularly the top three. He even points out that every one cent increase in the cost of gasoline adds about 200 million in quarterly profits; last year the 3 largest US oil companies had more than $80 billion in profits; and that Exxon earned about $4.7 million an hour last year. However, in spite of all of that, Obama has opened up massive amounts of public land (and coast line) to these rapacious corporations – something he takes credit for.

Despite the significance of the truths above, perhaps the most significant was the following (emphases are mine):

Point(s): “And keep in mind we can’t just drill our way out of this problem. As I said, oil production here in the United States is doing very well. And it’s been doing well even as gas prices are going up. Well the reason is because we use more than 20% of the world’s oil, but we only have 2% of the world’s known oil reserves. That means we could drill every drop of American oil tomorrow, but we’d still have to buy oil from other countries to make up the difference. We’d still have to depend on other countries to meet our energy needs. And because it’s a world market, the fact that we’re doing more here in the United States, doesn’t necessarily help us because even US oil companies are selling that oil on a world-wide market. They’re not keeping it just for us. And that means if there is rising demand from around the world then the prices are going to go up.”

One of those issues tied into the cost of gasoline is an area of dead silence most of the time. Namely, the issue of refineries. This from FactCheck.org:

Though oil refinery productivity in the United States has been improving, the number of operating refineries has been dropping steadily. In 1982, the earliest year for which the Energy Information Administration has data, there were 301 operable refineries in the U.S., and they produced about 17.9 million barrels of oil per day. Today there are only 149 refineries, but they’re producing 17.4 million barrels – less than in 1982, but more than any year since then. The increase in efficiency is impressive, but it’s not enough to meet demand: U.S. oil consumption is 20.7 million barrels per day. Refinery capacity isn’t the only factor in the price of gasoline, and according to the EIA it’s not the most important one either (that would be the cost of crude oil), but it’s certainly a contributor.

Regardless of why refining capacity is not keeping up with demand, the current situation guarantees that prices are going to stay high -and profits for refiners (such as the Koch brothers) remain high as well. A related issue that should breed concern is the aging of those refineries, and the growing risk they pose to the communities in which they reside. Their failure would also dramatic economic and structural impacts on the nation.

Point: Obama was also at least semi-honest about his energy strategy. He stated that his strategy is “all of the above” – meaning everything is on the table.

However, his delineation of that strategy left a number of questionable (and contentious) energy sources out. Namely, he did not mention fracking (and the problems it is causing), nor coal (and his duplicitous “clean coal” which also overlooks the massive destruction coal entails); nor tar sands (and the massive environmental and public health problems attached); nor nuclear power (and the significant issues entailed particularly post Fukushima).

He also conveniently avoids the entire issue of peak oil (Post Carbon Institute), and while encouraging fracking across the country, overlooks the issue of global warming. After all, methane is a more potent green house gas than CO2 – 21 times (EarthSave) to 25 times (Wikipedia) worse in fact. Not to mention the issue of water supplies lost and contaminated (Goodell, 3/15/2012, page 3), or the increasing earthquakes in regions being fracked (Texas – State Impact, 3/30/2012; Ohio – Chesapeake Bay Journal). But then there is the even bigger issue that it appears that the wonders of the “massive” amounts of natural gas to be fracked may be more hype than reality. As stated by Jeff Goodell in his investigation of fracking The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom, “It’s not only toxic – it’s driven by a right wing billionaire who profits more from flipping the land than drilling for gas.” That billionaire, and the focus of the article, is Aubrey McClendon. McClendon’s Chesapeake Energy is very big in natural gas. The Koch brothers (underwriters of the Tea Party and owners of several governors including Scott Walker of Wisconsin) control the nation’s pipelines and refineries. Isn’t it a bit troubling that these folks have a strangle hold on much of the nation’s energy supply, and that they are getting both richer and subsidized by us? Well it troubles me!

Sometimes what is not said is more significant than what is said. As I listened to Obama I was struck that he was saying things that few other politicians are saying. I was also struck by the elisions that were so apparent you could drive an oil tanker through them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROWAN WOLF, our sister and “comrade in informational arms” is editor in chief of Cyrano’s Journal Today, a fraternal site to The Greanville Post.  She lives in Oregon with her partner Kelly and her three dogs. Originally from Kansas City, Missouri, she notes that she “comes from a lower and working class background and [has] survived the juvenile and foster family systems.” She has been actively involved in social change movements and activities since 1972.

Rowan has also been teaching sociology (about which she remains passionate) since 1992. Her specialized areas of interest are systems of inequality (particularly race, class, and sex); globalization; organizations; and culture and socialization. As the essay above proves, she’s also a terrific political analyst and a committed environmentalist, seeking to save our natural environment and its inhabitants and pushing back the notion we have a the “natural right” to destroy or reshape the natural world.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 ADDENDUM

Personal Transcript of President Obama’s speech of 3/29/2012

Today the members of Congress have a simple choice to make. They can stand with the big oil companies, or they can stand with the American people. Right now the biggest oil companies are raking in record profits. Profits that go up every time folks pull up into a gas station. But on top of these record profits, oil companies are getting billions a year, billions a year,  in tax payer subsidies – a subsidy they have enjoyed year after year for the last century. Think about that. It’s like hitting the American people twice. You are already paying a premium at the pump right now. And on top of that Congress (up until this point) thought that it was a good idea to send billions of dollars more in tax dollars more to the oil industry.

It’s not as if these companies can’t stand on their own. Last year the three biggest U.S. oil companies took home more than $80 billion dollars in profits. Exxon pocketed nearly 4.7 million dollars every hour. And when the price of oil goes up, prices at the pump go up, and so do these companies profits. In fact one analysis shows that every time gas goes up by a penny, these companies pocket another 200 million dollars in quarterly profits. Meanwhile, these companies pay a lower tax rate than most other companies on their investments – partly because we are giving them billions in tax giveaways every year.

Now I want to make clear that we all know that drilling has to be a key part of our overall energy strategy. We want US oil companies to be doing well. We want them to succeed. That’s why under my administration we’ve opened up millions of acres of federal lands and waters to oil and gas production. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating oil rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough oil and gas pipeline to circle the earth and then some. And just yesterday we announced the next step for potential new oil and gas exploration in the Atlantic. But the fact is we’re producing more oil right now than we have in eight years and we’re importing less of it as well. For two years in a row Americans bought less oil from other countries than we produce here at home – for the first time in over a decade. So American oil is booming. The oil industry is doing just fine. With record profits and rising production, I’m not worried about the big oil companies. With high oil prices around the world, they’ve got more than enough incentive to produce even more oil. That’s why I think it’s time they got by without more help from tax payers who are already having a tough enough time paying the bills and filling up their gas tanks. I think it’s curious that some folks in Congress – who are the first to belittle investments in new sources of energy – are the ones who are fighting the hardest to maintain these giveaways for the oil companies.

Instead of tax payer giveaways to an industry that has never been more profitable we should be using that money to double down on investments in clean energy technologies that have never been more promising. Investments in wind power, solar power, and bio-fuels. Investments in fuel efficient cars and trucks, and energy efficient homes and buildings. That’s the future. That’s the only way we are going to break this cycle of high gas prices that happen year after year after year as the economy is growing. The only time you start seeing lower gas prices is when the economy is doing badly. That’s not the kind of pattern we want to be in. We want the economy to be doing well, and people be able to afford their energy costs.

And keep in mind we can’t just drill our way out of this problem. As I said, oil production here in the United States is doing very well. And it’s been doing well even as gas prices are going up. Well the reason is because we use more than 20% of the world’s oil, but we only have 2% of the world’s known oil reserves. That means we could drill every drop of American oil tomorrow, but we’d still have to buy oil from other countries to make up the difference. We’d still have to depend on other countries to meet our energy needs. And because it’s a world market, the fact that we’re doing more here in the United States, doesn’t necessarily help us because even US oil companies are selling that oil on a world-wide market. They’re not keeping it just for us. And that means if there is rising demand from around the world then the prices are going to go up.

That’s not the future I want for America. I want folks like these back here and the folks in front to me, to have to pay more at the pump every time there’s some unrest in the Middle East, and oil speculators get nervous about whether there’s going to be enough supply. I don’t want our kids to be held hostage to events on the other side of the world. I want us to control our own destiny. I want us to forge our own future. That’s why as long as I’m President, America is going to pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy. Which means we will continue developing our oil and gas resources in a robust and responsible way. But it also means we are going to Keep developing a more advanced home-grown bio-fuels. The kinds that are already powering truck fleets.

We’re going to keep investing in clean energy – like the wind power and solar power that’s already lighting thousands of homes and creating thousands of jobs. We’re going to keep manufacturing cars and trucks to get more miles to the gallon – so you can fill up every two weeks instead of every week. We’re going to keep building more homes and businesses that waste less energy so that you are in charge of your own energy bills. We’re going to do all of this by harnessing our most inexhaustible resource – American ingenuity, American imagination. That’s what we need to keep going. That’s what’s at stake right now. That’s the choice that we face. And that’s the choice that’s facing Congress today.

They can either vote to spend billions of dollars more in oil subsidies that keep us trapped in the past, or they can vote to end these tax payer subsidies that aren’t needed to boost oil production, so that we can invest in the future. It’s that simple. As long as I’m President I’m betting on the future. And the people I’ve talked to around the country – including the people who are behind me here today, they put their faith in the future as well. That’s what we do as Americans. That’s who we are. We innovate. We discover. We seek new solutions to some of our biggest challenges. And ultimately, because we stick with it, we succeed. And I believe we are going to do that again.

Today, the American people are going to be watching Congress to see if they have that same faith

Thank you very much everybody.

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