Colombia’s Invasion of the United States (Another top Clinton campaign aide paid a $40,000 per month

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.narconews.com/Issue52/article3059.html

By Al Giordano
Special to the Narco News Bulletin

April 8, 2008

The stunning events of recent days, in which the chief strategist for the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton, Mark J. Penn, was publicly demoted (but really, not: he’s still there) have torn a curtain. Behind it are the highest paid mercenary soldiers of the Colombian civil war: lobbyists, public relations firms and political consultants, doing the bidding of a foreign power in Washington.

Penn was just one of the mercenaries serving this foreign power against the interests of US citizens and workers. He was caught in the act by the Wall Street Journal last week, holding a private meeting with the Colombian ambassador, whose government had put his company on a $300,000 annual retainer to push its agenda in Washington. The revelation came on the same week when Colombian President Alvaro Uribe launched a public attack on Senator Barack Obama, who is Clinton’s rival for the Democratic nomination for US president. The public relations disaster – casting doubt on Clinton’s claims to oppose a US-Colombia “free trade” agreement – led to Penn’s public “demotion” (which has proved to be just another political stunt: Penn remains firmly ensconced in the high echelons of the Clinton campaign).

That the Colombian regime – pressing a bloody civil war not only against a guerrilla insurgency but also against peaceful labor, farmer, indigenous, pro-democracy and social movements – has received more than $4 billion dollars from the US government for its military and police apparatus under Plan Colombia, plus another $800 million dollars for economic and social programs (the largest US aid giveaway in the hemisphere) is not enough: The Uribe government wants more, and is spending parts of that money on Washington lobbyists and power brokers to push a “free trade” agreement that US President George W. Bush sent to Congress yesterday.


Another top Clinton campaign aide – spokesman Howard Wolfson – is an owner of the Glover Park Group, to which the Colombian government pays a $40,000 per month retainer to lobby for the US-Colombia “free trade” agreement.


When President Bill Clinton proposed Plan Colombia in 2000 he originally stated it would spend $1.3 billion dollars fighting the war on drugs (Colombia produces more cocaine than any other country) and against left wing rebels. But do the math above, and you’ll see that the failed program has already eaten more than $5 billion US dollars… and the beast is still hungry.

As the American (and Mexican) people have learned from the devastating effects of the North American Free Trade Agreeement (NAFTA), of 1993, these agreements raise unemployment in both countries but provide windfall profits for multinational corporations and the politicians they bankroll. They are Robin-Hood-in-reverse scams that steal from the poorest of the poor to give to the richest of the rich. Colombia, being an oligarchy (in which a small number of families and their business interests control government, industry and media, and utilize severe and violent repression to squash any dissent to the contrary) is led by a political and economic class that sees great benefits to it – a higher concentration of the nation’s wealth, primarily – through a “free trade” pact.

US corporations, likewise, see greater profits from a deal that will open the doors to their fast-track looting of Colombian human and natural resources.

FULL story at link.