The United States’ border with Mexico hasn’t always been an area of national concern. Back in the 1920s, the US Border Patrol was created to halt bootleggers bringing illegal liquor from Canada. Now, the Border Patrol has turned its attentions to the US-Mexico border. Why did this happen?
It is the nature of many men to ignore warnings because they want to maintain the luxury of living in a way that denies truth. Rich men are not only able to pay enough to live in that way, but to hire others to share their delusions.
DISCLAIMER: This is not about my uncle Chad, who’s doing all right in California. This is about the nation Chad, which has had a very rough time in the past – and things have gotten worse there.
Those who follow my Farmville photos on Facebook know that I like to cover the Great Famines of History when I farm. I recently featured the Chadian Lentil Famine of 2010, pictured to the left. Well, Chad is also having a civil war on top of that. The civil war isn’t over anything complicated: just money. There’s actually money in Chad because it’s pumping oil. The oil won’t go to the poor people of the nation because the leaders there are stealing as much of it as they can and using the rest to buy off rebel factions. When the UN mission protecting Sudanese refugees – yes, there are Sudanese refugees there: I told you things were rough in Chad. Anyway, when the UN mission leaves later this year, they won’t be coming back and observers believe violence in Chad will return in a big way.
Oh yeah… Lake Chad is still evaporating away. Regardless of the cause of that fact, it’s going to lead to more violence as the people there kill each other over water rights. In light of all the above, I’m of the opinion that the US State Department advisory against travel to Chad is not some kind of cover-up.
North Korea’s getting worse. That’s the short version. Deserting North Korean soldiers are telling stories about how even the army is going hungry and that officers are either stockpiling food or planning how to flee to China. Anti-government graffiti is starting to decorate statues of the Dear Leader. Russia just started maneuvers on the North Korean border to test their preparation in the event of a mass wave of North Korean refugees coming their way. Rather than opening up, the guys at the top of North Korea are digging in deeper. My guess is if they hit bedrock, they’ll blast it so the can continue digging deeper still.
Tepito Market in Mexico City is where anyone can get anything – including weapons the police have seized from criminals, then turned around and sold to weapons dealers there.
When you’re being shot by your own guns, you’re losing the war.
Yes, the Deepwater Horizon spill is horrible. Let’s not lose sight of that. But there are a lot of people from other places around the world that look at our reaction to the recent disaster with a mix of irony and hope.
The irony comes from the fact that stuff like this disaster happens every day in places like the Niger Delta or the Ecuadorian Amazon. Outside of the USA, oil companies are infamous for gleefully avoiding any sort of pollution controls in order to maximize their profits. They’re also famous for helping to topple local democratically-elected governments and installing militaristic dictatorships. Chevron helped get the MPLA into power in Angola, for example, largely because of the oil exploitation deal it struck with them… the fact that the MPLA had to invade and conquer Cabinda to get that oil was a side issue. And if you’ve never heard of Cabinda, thank Chevron for wiping that little country off the map less than four months after it declared independence from Portugal. So, yes, people from outside the USA look at the Gulf of Mexico disaster with no small sense of, “Now you know what it’s like.”
That’s where the hope comes in. Ecology nuts aren’t the only people that want to reduce US demand on foreign oil. The people that live in nations that supply that oil want to see the US reduce its dependence on their oil. They’re sick and tired of the way the US government works with the big oil companies to subvert and corrupt their governments, ruin their environments, and subject them to horrible conditions. So if the US stops needing so much oil, it’ll stop enslaving the people of oil-producing countries, so the conventional wisdom goes.
Irony is everything. Who knew that Turkey would be providing humanitarian aid to victims of Israeli oppression? Israel, the state that was supposed to be a haven from ethnic attacks and Turkey, perpetrator of the first modern genocide (which it stridently denies) are caught up in a bizarre dance of moralism and outrage.
What we know is this: An aid flotilla, bound for Gaza, left Turkey and later came under attack by the Israeli Navy, which has been blockading Gaza for three years. We know the Turkish flotilla was in international waters. We know that Israel claims one of its own was stabbed and that there were higher casualties on the Turkish side. We know that the Israeli forces tried to shut down all communications once they boarded the Turkish boats, as evidenced in one broadcast from a Turkish reporter that ended with someone shouting “Shut up!” in Hebrew.
Where to start with this one… how about a Greg Palast report from 2007? It’s a bit dated, but highly pertinent. It’s six minutes long, and it’s free. It also didn’t air in the USA, except on LinkTV. When it aired in England, it led to a change in the law to prevent vulture funds from turning third-world debt relief into a cash cow.
US Representative John Conyers, who watches Palast on the BBC, walked into the Oval Office and confronted George Bush himself about the issue. Bush denied knowing anything about it, and Conyers let Bush know that he knew about it. Bush did nothing about it. Neither has Obama. In the meantime, US-based vulture funds continue to sue third-world nations for the full value of discounted debt. In many cases, that means US aid given directly to a foreign nation winds up in the bank account of a vulture fund manager.
Yes, there are more civilian casualties, eroding goodwill toward the US-NATO forces. Worse, Karzai has pretty much scrapped anti-corruption efforts in his bid for power. It’s a mess there, and no surge of US forces is going to fix things with Karzai still at the top.
Recently, Pat Robertson had this to say about Haiti:
“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti … they were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon the third and whatever … and they got together and swore a pact to the devil, they said, we will serve you, if you get us free from the Prince. True story.”
While it’s easy enough to say Robertson is an out-of-touch old crank, most everyone is taking exception to the devil crack and not to Robertson’s comment that Haiti is in deep trouble while its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, enjoys a happy, prosperous economy. This is wrong.