Let's begin by looking at Haiti, for Haiti is continually in the news as an example of violence, political incapacity, and extreme suffering caused by endemic economic exploitation common to the great majority of Third World nations today. Something so basic, yet most of the attention paid by journalists is on the resulting symptoms, such as Haiti's recent inability to protect itself from hurricanes and of course the death toll.
Now that suffering has again come to a head in Haiti, one might expect to read some in depth treatment of the underlying long term economic situation. A good subject would be that the US government aids and abets the continuing bleeding of Haiti through trade policies which allow the U.S. economy to have a six to one ratio of U.S. exports to Haiti over US imports from Haiti decade after decade. Haiti bears an annual trade deficit of more than a half billion U.S. dollars to its rich giant neighbor to the North.
If the U.S. can regard trade imbalances with China and Japan as threatening, then it is only logical to require government to have a sympathetic appraisal of imbalances suffered by its weaker trading partnerslike Haiti. Even that modicum of U.S. foreign aid, allotted to impoverished nations to help them continue to buy U.S. products was, in the case of Haiti, suspended for many years.
And now we read something even worse:
Rights Groups Assail U.S. for Withholding Aid to Haiti, Citing Political Motives, New York Times, June 24, 2008, by Marc Lacey
"An array of human rights groups has strongly criticized the United States government, saying it withheld money meant to provide clean drinking water to Haiti as leverage for political change in the country.
The loans from the Inter-American Development Bank were intended to revamp the water and sanitation systems in Les Cayes and Port-de-Paix, two Haitian towns in dire need of the money to improve their infrastructure. Nearly 70 percent of Haitians lack regular and direct access to potable water, experts say. The lack of clean water contributes to intestinal parasites and amoebic dysentery."
It was in Fidel Castro's very first UN speech thirty eight years ago, that the human destructiveness of U.S. excessive profits and exploitive arrangements from trade with the nations to the South was so well brought to the world community's attention.
U.S. 'economic terrorism,' of which Haiti is but one example, once addressed could open the way for sanity in the politics of many nations who currently experience violence in the wake of insufferable economic circumstances. But to the contrary, America and the EU continue to use economic sanctions and financial and trade policies to enrich globalized corporations and wealthy investors at the expense of countries such as Yugoslavia, Zimbabwe and even poor Haiti. This cruel globalization of profit is intolerable. Through satellite and electronic media control the super-powerful make themselves look like kind and democratic good guys and paint their victims as criminals. Privatization of endeavor and commodization of natural resources is always the goal.
America should, for its own protection, inhibit corporate exploitation of the economies of defenseless Third World nations, many of which have never recovered from outright colonial occupation. The 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics and former chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, has described this unjust and enormous suffering causing process in his best seller "Globalization and Its Discontents", but corporate and government leaders plan little change.
Children suffer and die young, and their society is degraded, as the economies of nations where the majority of mankind live are financially terrorized by corporate conglomerates abetted by the international fiduciary and regulatory institutions controlled by First World governments led by the U.S. Stiglitz implies it is a form of genocide.
Some respect for human dignity must surpass, in importance, the short term profit motive of corporations as they cast their nets over the globe in base disregard of iniquities caused by foreign corporate interests taking precedence over local cultures, traditions and ethical work and trade.
With corporations having the controlling influence in U.S. foreign policy, an ancient form of undercover financial terror is continually in use, namely, the covert use of money and violence to subvert the democratic process in these defenseless countries. These policies favor groups who will heed the interests of foreign corporations over those of their own countrymen. The open terrorism and financial purposes of gunboat diplomacy has essentially been replaced by a more insidious agenda seen in the machinations of the CIA .
This mindless business-for-business's-sake world wide trampling and co-opting of the commonweal through the power and influence of aggressive rich nation governments legitimizing the loan and debt game of international gangsters who know how to manipulate international law, provokes terrorism as a means of defense against economic terrorism wherein entire populations are forced to suffer privations for the profit of foreigners.
The "renegade" terror of the would-be heroes of the downtrodden, often in the form of indiscriminate manslaughter, is begot by "lawful" economic terrorism and learned from, and taught by, the examples of lawful and official terror tactics.
We can't be serious about combating this response to terrorism and be self-righteous at the same time. The use of terror is as old as Man.
Fascist Germany, Italy and Japan used terror to conquer and subdue. Atom bombs on their civilians terrorized Japan into surrender. Subsequently, over the years, after America actually USED Atom bombs, America threatened to use the atom bomb twelve times with terrorist intentions.
In the U.S. there is pride associated with its use of terror, but one avoids calling it terrorism. A university president, former governor and senator was once decorated for what was a massacre of peasant women and children when he was a US Seal commander in Vietnam. The Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, is proud of having dropped bombs on the city of Hanoi over and over again. If a Vietnamese airman had dropped bombs on Washington DC, Americans would have no trouble recognizing it as "terrorism."
Homicidal terror is meant to intimidate - never mind euphemisms of 'legitimate targets'.
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