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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 7/7/13

Who Needs the US? And Who Doesn't?

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After his plane was forced to land in Vienna, because France, Spain, Germany and Portugal were told that Edward Snowden was on board, Evo Morales concluded that the USA had been behind his mistreatment. 
Morales, the president of Bolivia, has claimed that the US was behind the pressure to not allow his plane, leaving a Moscow conference, to fly over their territories. 
Evo Morales...
Evo Morales...
(Image by deharris)
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Evo Morales... by deharris

In response, Morales has said that he's considering closing the US embassy in Bolivia, " "We do not need the embassy of the United States."

The Guardian reported that Morales said,
"Being united will defeat American imperialism. We met with the leaders of my party and they asked us for several measures and if necessary, we will close the embassy of the United States," Morales said. "We do not need the embassy of the United States."
That got me thinking. Who DOES need the USA? What nations need the USA. 
First, are the authoritarian dictators who we prop up, like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Then there are the fundamentalist supporting Arab Potentates of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates. We have a long history of standing with tyrants, helping them fight against rebels who wish to free the nation. 
Then, what organizations need the USA?
First, there are the multinational corporations and the globalization organizations that have been created to increase their power-- like WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, the World Bank, and soon to be shoved down our throats, TPP. These organizations have become as powerful in their relations to us as the nations we used to consider our most important allies. 
Next, there is Israel, a nation that has absorbed tens of billions of our dollars while costing us dearly in terms of our relationships with much of the Arab world. Israel is more of a friend to Republicans than to America. We've seen that repeatedly over the years. It's odd, because 75-80% of Jews vote Democratic. You'd think there'd be more room for the US to put pressure on this friend who needs us. But that's not happening... because politically, there are almost  no differences between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to Israel. It's sad. There are many Israelis who don't like the way things are. A huge percentage of them protested just last year. Maybe, at some point the Israelis who protested will join the Egyptians and Turks as part of the middle east summer. 
Then there's Al Qaeda. They definitely need us. Look at the rebels in Syria and we see them getting military aid, in public, in addition to who knows how much has been funneled through secret channels. And then there's that whole recruiting thing. Imagine how minor and small Al Qaeda would be by now if the US hadn't made them the heroes of the Arab World. I'm sure there are hundreds of millions among the 1.6 billion Muslims who see Al Qaeda as heroic resisters of American imperialism and colonialism. 
Who doesn't need the USA?
We can start with Evo Morales and Bolivia and a number of the South American nations with democratically elected leaders-- Brazil, Venezuela, Uruguay. 
Egypt doesn't need us. The signs opposing the US and Obama were out in full force as the massive march that ousted president Morsi exploded upon Cairo, not the US mainstream media showed them. 

Tahrir Square Protest Signs You didn't see in US media by SS&SS

Ironically right wing Breitbart, siezed the anti-obama aspect of the signs, in an article, 
Media buries Egyptian loathing of Barack Obama, 
but didn't get that the people were attacking Obama as a fascist, not as a Democrat.
I'll throw in Cuba too. Cuba is the kind of country the USA needs to become if it is to survive and evolve past the unsustainable, materialistic, consumption monster it currently is. 
Most of Europe doesn't need us. The BRIC countries-- Brazil, Russia, China and India are needing us less and less, except in that the US has become a huge customer for their goods and services. 
Perhaps our grand old allies-- Germany France, UK, Australia-- need us We have similar politics and systems that have been allowed to be corrupted by corporations. 
The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of Evo Morales shutting down the US embassy in Bolivia. The US is out of control, or, more accurately, out of citizen control, no longer accountable and just about fully in the hands of corporatists, with corporatist Barack Hussein Obama at the corporate helm. 
These countries, companies and organizations that need us need a rogue nation that does bad things. That is, I am sad to say, what the US has become.  Obama hopes to take TPP live this fall. He continues to appoint more and more foxes to guard our hen houses. The Democrats and their media enablers-- CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, almost all the people on MSNBC-- keep helping Obama. 
It's ironic. We the people of the United States need people like Evo Morales and Ed Snowden. We sure don't need more militarized police and more financialized government agencies headed by banksters and finance thugs.
Just to wrap up, I'm pasting in this excerpt from my interview with Noam Chomsky last fall

Rob Kall: The US has a standard operating procedure when one of its dictators gets in trouble?  Could you describe that?

Noam Chomsky: Well, it's happened so many times it takes real effort not to see it.  So, let's take, just in recent years, Somoza and Nicaragua.  It was the Carter administration,  which is, you know, maybe the most human rights oriented administration. They supported Somoza right to the end after his troops literally had killed maybe forty thousand people.  

The US continued to support him when the business world turned against him, and it was going to be impossible to support him any longer.  The Carter administration tried to rescue the remnants of the regime, even rescue the hated National Guard, and move them elsewhere, and then try to reconstitute them.  And then Reagan came along and was forced to essentially reconstitute them and overthrow the new government.  That's Somoza.  A couple of years later, Duvalier in Haiti, another favorite dictator, came under internal threat.  Again, the US supported him (this is Reagan now) to the bitter end.  Finally the army turned against him, and then the Reagan Administration flew him out of the country with half the country's treasury on an air force plane, to Paris.  Marcos, in the Philippines, about the same time, same story. Mobutu in the Congo, Suharto in Indonesia. 

I mean this is just retainment. "If you have a favorite dictator, support him for as long as possible.  If it becomes impossible, send him off somewhere, and essentially try to reconstruct the old system."  That's pretty much what happened in Egypt.  The Obama administration supported Mubarak to the very end, practically the last minute, and finally even the army turned against him, and they realized they've got to ditch him.  So, they sent him off to Sharm El-Sheikh, and since then have been trying to reconstruct a regime that would somehow follow the same Neoliberal policies.  You know, they don't control everything, but that's certainly what they are trying to influence.  And, in the countries that really matter to the west, the oil dictatorships that the US has supported, the dictatorships have really harshly repressed any significant effort at reform, and the US has backed them all the way.  France did the same in Tunisia, which was its dependency.  They supported the dictator Ben Ali up to the point where it is becoming a joke, even after people were demonstrating, wildly demonstrating, in the streets.  But that's exactly the way powerful systems act.  

It shouldn't surprise us.  No system of power wants Democracy.  It is a threat to its interest.  I mean, of course they'll all talk about democracy, but you know everybody talks about democracy; Stalin talked about it, the Japanese Fascists talked about it, you know, everyone says democracy is great, but systems of power are not going to like it, because it erodes their power.  I mean, it is as simple as that. And, the evidence for it is just overwhelming.  



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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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