¿Qué Pasa?
Jack K. at the Grumpy Forester noted one element of the Shrubbery’s latest passion, the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, that he’s attempting to push through Congress: “need for this agreement is too urgent; the stakes for our national security are too high to allow this year to end without a vote.”
I know a number of Colombians, and they don’t seem to know what the Shrubbery’s talking about. We are rather forceful, if unsuccessful, in blocking the major cash crop of Colombia, cocaine, so what is this about?
If you look at the economy of Colombia, there isn’t much of vital national security interest, unless you are trying to apologize to your wife, because Colombia is an exporter of cut flowers, gold, silver, platinum, and emeralds. Personally I’m a bigger fan of their coffee and bananas. They do export some crude oil, but not enough for Darth Cheney to get greedy over. They have a trade surplus with the US, but they are well down the list of our trading partners.
About the only thing I can think of is that the Hedgemony might think this will annoy Hugo, the mouth of Venezuela, but Hugo doesn’t get along with Colombia anyway, so that’s not much of an annoyance.
Sorry, I’m at loss, just like my friends. This must have something to do with some corporation trying to cut some kind of deal in Colombia that something in this treaty will make possible, because the duties on Colombian products aren’t really significant, unless you’re Eliot Spitzer and need a platinum and emerald ring…and broach…and necklace…and a thousand roses.
8 comments
…thanks, Bryan. Clearly we have gone well past the point where the shrub and his gang are just mailing it in. Mrs. Jack K. refuses to listen to Gee Dub, turning the radio off or the TV to another channel at his first uttered syllable and I should probably adopt the same approach, because I nearly drove off the road when I first heard him make that “national security” claim for the CFTA….
Colombia has its own national security issues: drug gangs, the FARC, the less than warm relationships with its neighbors, but these aren’t US problems, and the US getting involved generally makes things worse.
Colombians still haven’t forgiven the US for stealing Panama through the fake revolution so we could build a canal, so relations will never be “toasty”.
Grumps, now you know why I don’t listen to the network news anymore. I turned on CNN on my Sirius for a few minutes the other day and almost drove off the road myself listening to the reeking propaganda I was hearing. I *knew* it was propaganda because I’d spent a few days researching what they were talking about and knew the actual facts, but if that’s what everyday Americans are subjected to every day, no wonder the nation acts psychotic — they’re like rats who are issued electric shocks at random during their wanderings through the rat maze. If you perform this experiment upon actual rats, you’ll find that the rats then turn aggressive, start just jolting around at random doing nonsensical things, and otherwise behave, well, psychotic. Seems this is what our media has trained our general public to be like too. Sigh.
So my radio now stays stuck on music, and I get my news off the Internet where I can check a half dozen news sources from at least five different countries about any news event to sorta strip the propaganda out and get to what may be the facts. Sad that I gotta do this, but man, the U.S. media just reeks…
The gossip columnists of twenty years ago were better sourced than today’s news media. All they do today is read press releases. You could once rely on NPR and PBS, but those days are gone.
All of this technology has resulted in less information and more propaganda.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/IF28Ad01.html
Point taken, Frederick, but a trade agreement isn’t going to help combat that problem.
I think it’s some stupid notion to piss off Chavez. It would be annoying to him because of our sticking our fingers into another South American country’s pie. We (our govt) can’t seem to keep our hands to ourselves.
The problem that US administrations don’t seem to get is that the countries of Central and South America don’t trust us because we have been messing around down there for almost two centuries and the results never seem to be good for the people who live there.
Hugo Chavez would be gone a hell of a lot sooner if we stop talking about him and reacting to his silliness. Fidel only lasted because the US opposed him.