BEHIND THE ECUADORIAN DECISION TO GRANT ASSANGE ASYLUM: A LONG HISTORY ...
Two days ago - that is to say, Thursday August 16, 2012 - I spoke in my News and Views from the Nefarium about the decision of the Ecuadorian government to grant celebrated (or depending on one's lights, infamous) Wikileaks founder Julian Assange political asylum in its embassy in London. In that talk, I suggested that the Ecuadorian government and foreign ministry had probably done a bit of shrewd geopolitical calculation, and that there was more behind its decision than meets the eye. I suggested that this geopolitical calculation included its own national sovereignty, for the British aide memoire presented formally to its London embassy and simultaneously to the Ecuadorian government in Quito was nothing less than a threat, not a veiled one either, that it would literally invade Ecuador's embassy and physically remove Mr. Assange by force if need be. This, I suggested, was one of the reasons that Ecuador took the decision to grant Mr. Assange asylum, namely, that it would not back down by a threat to its national sovereignty, and a crude threat at that. The United States, prior to Ecuador's announcement, also stepped into the threat game, and indicated Ecuador could face sanctions if it continued to harbor Mr. Assange, whom many American leaders have dubbed a "terrorist," in its embassy. Now I have no idea if Mr. Assange is a terrorist or not, but Ecaudor's decision again flies in the face of all geopolitical logic...
...until one examines the background. In Thursday's News and Views, I also implied that within Ecuador's geopolitical calculations, was the fact that London and Washington's heavy-handedness in the wake of 9/11 is increasingly alienating their traditional allies. THere was a time, of course, that such threats from London and Washington would have made any Latin American country, especially one as small and poor and weak as Ecuador, cave in almost immediately.
Not any longer. The reality is, Ecuador probably privately consulted with the Chinese and Russian embassies in Quito, to sound out the position of those two governments prior to making its decision on Assange. And as I suggested in Thursday's News and Views, should such sanctions be forthcoming from London and Washington, China and Russia will most likely step in to fill the trading void. In short, the West no longer possesses the big stick it once had vis-a-vis South America that it once did. Ecuador's decision thus probably foreshadows more geopolitical realignment, for it is doubtful that it would have taken such action without sounding out Moscow and Beijing, and we may also rest assured, Sao Paolo and Buenes Aires as well. Indeed, the Ecuadorian Foreign Minister, Ricardo Patino, announced that Ecuador would present its case to the Organization of American States, that creation of American foreign policy.
But there is more lurking in the background that explains Ecuador's growing impatience with the West, for it has literally been raped by the financial powers of the West in general and of the United States in particular. If you're not familiar with this story, run, don't walk, to your nearest bookstore or amazon, and get John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, a gruesome expose of the strategies and tactics pursued by the West to subject poor nations to the financial dictates of its bankster class, while raping nations of their resources and cruelly exploiting their peoples.
During the 1960s oil was discovered in the Ecuadorian region of the Amazon basin, and the rest - the IMF loans at outrageous interest, the payoffs to corrupt Ecuadorians, the callous disregard for indigenous Indian populations - all began. (For the story, see Perkins' book, pp. 165-170). One Ecuadorian university professor, however, courageously stood out against the corruption and exploitation of his country: Jaime Roldos. The rest, as they say, is history, and here is how Perkins relates it in his book(and now...for those of you who've been following all the dots in my books, some of these themes will now be clear). Once Perkins, who was then still an economic hit man, had come to Quito to "work his financial country-transforming magic", he had heard of Roldos. Here, it is best to let Perkins speak at length for himself:
"...I heard that (Roldos) accused the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), an evangelical missionary group from the United States, of sinister collusion with the oil companies. I was familiar with SIL missionaries from my Peace Corps days. The organization had entered Ecuador, as it had so many other countries, with the professed goal of studying, recording, and translating indigenous languages.
"SIL had been working extensively with the Huaorani tribe in the Amazon basin area, during the early years of oil exploration, when a disturbing pattern appeared to emerge. While it might have been a coincidence(and no link was ever proved), stories were told in many Amazonian communities that when seismologists reported to corporate headquarters that certain regions had characteristics indicating a high probability of oil beneath the surface, some SIL members went in and encouraged indigenous people to move from that land, onto missionary reservations; there they would receive free food, shelter, clothes, medical treatment, and missionary-style education. The condition was that, according to these stories, they had to dead their lands to the oil companies.
"Rumors abounded that SIL missionaries used an assortment of underhanded techniques to persuade the tribes to abandon their homes and move to the missions. A frequently repeated story was that they had donated food heavily laced with laxatives - then offered medicines to cure the diarrhea epidemic. Throughout Huaorani territory, SIL airdropped false-bottomed food baskets containing tiny radio transmitters; the rumor was that receivers at highly sophisticated communications stations, manned by U.S. military personnel at the army base in Shell, tuned in to these transmitters. Whenever a member of the tribe was bitten by a poisonous snake or became seriously ill, an SIL representative arrived with antivenom or the proper medicines - often in oil company helicopters.
"During the early days of oil exploration, five missionaries were found dead with Huaorani spears protruding from their bodies. Later, the Huaoranis claimed they did this to send a message to keep missionaries out. The message went unheeded. In fact, it ultimately had the opposite effect. Rachel Saint, the sister of one of the murdered men, toured the UNited STates, appearing on national television in order to raise money and support for SIL and the oil companies, who she claimed were helping the "savages" become civilized and educated.
"According to some sources, SIL received funding from the Rockefeller charities. Family scion John D. Rockefeller had founded Standard Oil - which later divested into the major, including Chevron, Exxon, and Mobil." (Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, pp. 166-167).
Needless to say, the Huaoranis lost their land, saw little benefit from the drilling, and, for that matter, neither did Ecuador. The result of all of this machination, over time, was to reduce Ecuador to poverty even more crushing than that the USA had ostensibly come to relieve. Perkins puts it with disconcerting clarity:
"In the years since I first went there, in 1968, this tiny country had evolved into the quintessential victim of the corporatocracy. My contemporaries and I, and our modern corporate equivalents, had managed to bring it to virtual bankruptcy. We loaned it billions of dollars so it could hire our engineering and construction firms to build projects that would help its richest families. As a result, in those three decades, the official poverty level grew from 50 to 70 percent, under- or unemployment increased from 15 to 70 percent, public debt increased from $240 million to $16 billion, and the share of national resources allocated to the poorest citizens declined from 20 percent to 6 percent. Today, Ecuador must devote nearly 50 percent of its national budget simply to paying off its debts - instead of to helping the millions of its citizens who are officially classified as dangerously impoverished.
"The situation in Ecuador clearly demonstrates that this was not the result of a conspiracy; it was a process that had occurred during both Democratic and Republican administrations, a process that had involved all the major multinational banks, many corporations, and foreign aid missions from a multitude of countries....
"During those three decades, thousands of men and women participated in bringing Ecuador to the tenuous position it found itself in at the beginning of the millennium."(Perkins, op. cit., pp. 239-240)
Well, I don't know about Mr. Perkins, but I find the collusion of "ministries", oil companies, banks, IMF, and the military to be the very definition of conspiracy, but more importantly, if you want to know why tiny little Ecuador has had it, and has openly defied both London and Washington over the Assange matter, then perhaps one need only look at the history of the West's dealings with the country and its people. The Western financial oligarchs have forgotten the basic lesson that Solzhenitsyn warned the apparatchiks of the Soviet Union about: when you take everything from a man and his family, so that they have nothing left to lose, then, they stand up to you.
Ecuador is standing up, and the guilt or innocence of Mr. Assange is, in the final analysis, no longer really the issue here... and we can bet, their own authoritarianism notwithstanding, that they're listening to Quito in Moscow and Beijing...and we can also bet that Moscow and Beijing will make Quito far better deals than the treatment they've had at the hands of the IMF and western oil companies. It will be subtle, at first...but it will grow. The West, and its power-mad oligarchs, had better start learning the lessons of basic humanity soon, because they are fast running out of friends.
See you on the flip side.
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Unfortunately they shut down the last bookstore here in Puerto Rico so getting that book is near impossilbe here now welcome to the future ignorance is strength.
Well put.
I think you should combine both screenplays and somehow convert them into a sequel to MEATBALLS.
ASSANGE IS AN INTELLIGENCE PYSOPS
Assange, a former computer hacker, leads a nomadic existence and cultivates an aura of mystery.
He describes the leaks as an opening of worldwide anarchy in .csv format, it’s climategate with a global scope and breathtaking depth, it’s beautiful and horrifying.
Julian Assange’s lawyer is Mark Stevens – who is also the Lawyer for George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
George Soros is a listed “advisor” to wikileaks. Soros funds Wikileaks through – OSI his open Society Institute.
http://itmakessenseblog.com/2010/12/05/george-soros-is-the-money-behind-wikileaks/
I’ve often entertained writing a book detailing the gruesome deaths of Christian missionaries over the last few centuries at the hands of the natives they are disturbing. I think it would be a fun read for a lot of people.
I still need to finish my screenplay about a young man who, while attending Oxford University pursuing a PHD in Patristics, has a feverish dream late one night where he descends into purgatory and has to play in a ping pong tournament competing against a slew of Nazis (alive and dead) in order to save his soul. The film culminates in the final match where the young student has to play the brilliant, but blind, deaf and handless Burkhard Heim. The referee is Woody Allen. The screenplay is in the style of “My Dinner With Andre” with lots of banter between the student and his nazi opponents on a multitude of topics covering philosophy, physics, God, secret weapons, aliens, Internationals, conspiracies, etc. Unfortunately the screenplay is over a thousand pages long and I just can’t find an ending for it. The student will hopefully be played by George Clooney or Justin Timberlake.
After that I plan to write a screenplay about a young boy in public school who, while daydreaming during his Holocaust class, decides to build a time machine and travel back in time to rescue Ann Frank. Fortuitously, he befriends an elderly holocaust survivor (as part of his course work he must do chores for a holocaust survivor or their heirs). The holocaust survivor tells him about the secret weapons, including a time machine, he worked on as a prisoner in a nazi concentration camp. He even has some of the math equations for the time machine tattooed on his forearm. Together they build the bell shaped time machine in the old man’s garage and the young boy successfully travels back in time to rescue Ann Frank. I haven’t decide on an ending yet. Either he returns to the present with Ann Frank and she moves to Los Angeles to get in the adult film industry or she heroically refuses to leave Holland and her family so the boy departs leaving behind his ball point pen which she then uses to write her diary. Another ending would be– he just can’t find Ann Frank.
Unfortunately, if they do pretend to learn a basic concept of humanity again, it will likely only last long enough for them to regroup and come up with an even more diabolical plan that punishes us for daring to stand up to them. Unfortunately it’s the nature of control freaks. They never forgive, forget, or give up. The harder you make them work for their goals the more you will have to pay for transgressions against their authority. Letting them have their way ussually leads to a swifter end however because they don’t know how to quit and only get more destructive and sick because it is your begging and whinning that they are addicted to receiveing and its not really about what is best for them or us as they see it. They can’t help destroying and killing everything they can get under their control if what they seek to control doesn’t decide they’ve had enough and take them out of the equation first. I wish human’s could evolve above this but it’s hard when we let leaders with these personality disorders get in charge.
Several authors have gone into the modus operandi of the “West’s” extraction process; that guts the sovereignty of the country, for the benefit of a few elite at the expense her people. Greg Palast is one that also keys on this, especially in the PETROLEUM/FINANCE(“they”) industry.
You could say “they” are the cause an industrial strength “rape”, writ large around the globe.
Great analysis Joseph! Perkin’s book is so right on, I even have very conservative friends who are stunned by his stories. During the years we worked with Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan refugees we got further confirmation of how the IMF and the CIA were raping the Latin American countries, including organized torture and extermination.
Thanks again.
Noé of only México could do the same novecientos, as far as looking for support from China or Russia, but we are just right underneath the border… I give my beloved country a few good years before it becomes another colony like Puerto Rico…. Just sounding off the general talk among us the disenfranchised.
Am I mistaken, or was Jaime Roldos the leader for whom Perkin’s feel personal responsibility for his assassination (due, as I recall, to the fact that Roldos refused to be bribed by Perkins and, therefore, the “jackals” were sent in to take him out).
Perkin’s book IS an eye-opener. It was one of those books that makes me sometimes feel that certain person’s lifepaths take them down the dark side by design, so that they can then come out and tell the story with some credibility when they finally develop a conscience.
Good morning,
I lived in Ecuador throughout 2010. I can attest to their high standard of living thanks to non-neoliberal economic policies. Correa has been in power for a good while now and the country is rich in natural resources with which to generate wealth. There is lots of opportunity and since the banksters never generated a civil war like in Colombia, it is a country that you can go anywhere in without running into heavily armed illegal groups. To give you a few examples: 1 large tank of cooking gas is $3 in Ecuador while in Colombia it’s $23 dollars. The natural gas supposedly belongs to all the countries citizens in both countries but that’s just a bedtime story. Gasoline is $2/gallon in Ecuador while it is $5 in Colombia and sold to you by Rockefux’s Exxon-Mobil.
On and on I could give you examples but you get the picture. Venezuela is the same thing. Venezuela’s poverty rate has halved since Chavez took power. The majority of colombians living in Colombia’s poorer northern, Caribbean area want to go live there, voting with their feet.
It is only in fascist media controlled dreamland that Chavez and Correa are the bad guys. But I guess some people in the US are starting to get it. Whenever you hear that so and so leader is a bad guy just assume the opposite and 9 times out of 10 you’ll be right.
Call my cynical … While Mr. Perkins book was certainly eye opening and showed how the dirty rotten scoundrels weave their dirty webs for power and control, what I find curious and suspicious is what John Perkins is doing now. After his “confessions” we find him now “saving the world” through an earth-based sustainable development approach… smells a lot like Agenda 21. Did he have a twofold mission in Latin America? The books he wrote in the 90s were about shapeshifting, shamanism, psycho navigation and indigenous culture in the Amazon. Is there another agenda behind his confessions & hoodwinked books? You can’t let a good hit man go to waste – just wonder if he is now using his talents for persuasion and deception with secret marching orders to help usher in the next phase – fall of traditional book-based religions and the new communitarian culture based on saving the environment by placing the next idol before us – worship of Gaia?
Must listen:
Rosa Koire – Hour 1 – Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21
August 16, 2012
Activist, speaker, and blogger, Rosa Koire is a forensic real estate appraiser specializing in eminent domain valuation. Her research into and fight against redevelopment led her to UN Agenda 21 and was the genesis to co-found the Santa Rosa Neighborhood Coalition, Democrats Against UN Agenda 21, and the Post Sustainability Institute. She has been speaking and inspiring groups nationally to take action. She is the author of Behind The Green Mask. Don’t miss this important program as Rosa details how Agenda 21 is being used to transition the world into a global totalitarian state where one must pay to live. She’ll explain how this agenda is the biggest public relation scam in history. We’ll cover how this plan is designed to destroy the individual, create scarcity and make us vulnerable to control. Rosa talks about the ideology of Communitarianism, which is similar to Communist China, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Later, we’ll discuss the hypocrisy, the propaganda and how to fight back. In the second hour, we’ll talk about how we’ll see Agenda 21 in our towns as well as the different names gives for the agenda. We’ll speak more about Communitarianism. Agenda 21 calls for people to be moved out of the rural areas and into the cities, living in high rise gulag-esque apartments. Rosa talks about the covert ways in which they’ll fulfill their agenda. She’ll speak more how this agenda is a comprehensive plan for every part of our lives from exercise, to diet and lifestyle. We’ll also discuss how eugenics, surveillance, mind control techniques and corrupt companies are connected to Agenda 21. The middle class is now deemed “un-sustainable” and must fall far for “social equity.” Later, we’ll discuss newspeak, religious aspects of the green movement and what the world will look like post sustainability. Rosa speaks more about what the resistance to Agenda 21 can do.
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2012/08/RIR-120816.php