No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Making out like bandits

In a development that received scant attention in the US media, the White House has in effect put Iraq on the auction block for the benefit of its mega-corporate puppetmasters. Halliburton and Bechtel are already feeding at the trough, their gluttonous greed blinding them to the resentment and violence that will inevitably result from this corporate feeding frenzy in one of the most unstable regions in the world.

This is the inevitable next step in the process of globalization, which has opened the world up to neocolonialism and rapacious exploitation as never before. Can't find a friendly dictator to sell out his country and its resources? No problem, just use the US military machine to destroy it!

Globalization has concentrated wealth in the hands of a small privileged elite, and dispossessed people around the world, in a way not seen in centuries. Basic needs like water are being privatized, forcing desperately poor families to pay a huge percentage of their income for water service. (Though in Bolivia, campesinos won a stunning victory, forcing Bechtel out of the country despite heavy-handed repression by the military dictatorship.) Indigenous cultures are being devastated and the environment is in critical danger (see also this article). Food has become another pawn in the arsenal of the globalizers (See this PDF document.) Small farmers are being forced out of business, and hunger increases as people become dependent on imported food, their own land having been taken over and turned into giant factory farms to feed hamburger to obese Americans. Job security and a living wage are becoming a distant memory, as mega-corporations trawl the world looking for the lowest wages.

Not content with exercising a monopoly on political power in the US, the RRR is intent on spreading its cancerous dogma around the world. Though they are livid about "judicial activism" when judges uphold the Constitution against government establishment of their narrow fundamentalist sect of Christianity, their own judicial activism has had and continues to have a horrific effect. They have twisted the "takings" clause of the US Constitution into an argument that mega-corporations should be "compensated" when environmental regulations prevent them from poisoning the air, land and water. In other words these corporations can hold us hostage and force us to pay billions of taxpayer dollars to them so they won't pollute! And then of course they pollute anyway, and don't even get slapped on the wrist. Worst of all, they are demanding that the US apply the "takings" doctrine extra-territorially, forcing other countries either to pay ransom to US mega-corporate polluters or let their environments be degraded.

Though the whited sepulchres of the RRR are forever bleating about what good Christians they are, I suspect they worship a different Jesus than the one most of us have heard of.