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![\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/02\/fe-logo-13-feb-09-250-px1.jpg?resize=250%2C133&ssl=1\" "\\"Fe")
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Given our capacity and our history (from Somalia to Iraq)\u0412\u00a0to “Wag the Dog” or in this case pig<\/strong><\/a> as Cam Hassard wrote about, what is it that we’re really looking at? Mexico is contending with a drug war that has killed over 10,000 people over a two-year period.<\/p>\n
During that time, Mexico escalated its ground forces from under 7,000 police in 2006 to 40,000 military to combat cartel forces in the present day.\u0412\u00a0 In early 2009, the intensity of drug war violence was escalating close to the\u0412\u00a0point where\u0412\u00a0it\u0412\u00a0could have been\u0412\u00a0compared to civil war.<\/p>\n
A national health crisis may have been as good a way as any to say curfew to anyone who breathes–that includes law abiding citizens and drug dealers alike.\u0412\u00a0I watched the pigs on parade here at Planet Waves,\u0412\u00a0and did some fishing of the internet just to see what happened on parallel track to the swine flu crisis. With a health quarantine gripping the country, what\u0412\u00a0else was happening there\u0412\u00a0the last few weeks?<\/p>\n
The same day\u0412\u00a0President Obama met with leaders of the Americas, a major drug cartel arrest<\/strong><\/a> took place.\u0412\u00a0 During the crisis, the\u0412\u00a0Mexican Senate<\/strong><\/a> voted for legalization of recreational drugs. Corrupt officers were detained<\/strong><\/a> for suspicion of\u0412\u00a0collaborating with cartels by leaking police information. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms were reported to\u0412\u00a0find methods\u0412\u00a0to stem the flow of firearms from Texas to the cartels in Mexico.\u0412\u00a0\u0412\u00a0A national shutdown caused by the health crisis provided a lull giving both Mexican and American officials a chance to peruse and re-order the criminal, political and economic landscape.\u0412\u00a0Such an interesting trio to consider in one breath.<\/p>\n
Our governments do shield us from the truth or outright lie to us. That is a fact. Because of that, I’ve learned to build up my media-viewing muscles with the eye for trompe-l’oeil,<\/strong> <\/em><\/a>which\u0412\u00a0means “trick of the eye.” What you’re\u0412\u00a0looking at\u0412\u00a0is not what you’re seeing. In this instance, the visuals of the flu monster may not have been a real monster at all, but something else entirely different. A recent fact sheet on U.S – Mexico economic ties states:<\/p>\n
Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Mexico for 2007 was $ 25 billion, up 22% over the previous year. The U.S. was once again the largest foreign investor in Mexico, accounting for 40% ($9.9 billion FDI from the U.S.) of reported FDI. The economic slowdown in the U.S. in 2008 has caused a significant decline in this figure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The “trick” that we may not be seeing is that the over-coverage of the swine flu “crisis”\u0412\u00a0may very well be masking the shoring up of\u0412\u00a0America’s over-extended empire. There are American investments to\u0412\u00a0protect in the food, agribusiness, pharmaceutical and automobile industries invested in Mexico which urge our diligence in the affairs beyond\u0412\u00a0our borders. We are not just trying to contain\u0412\u00a0the flu, we’re\u0412\u00a0trying to contain\u0412\u00a0the more serious contagion of crime and violence, a larger threat to lives and the big\u0412\u00a0companies such as\u0412\u00a0Starbucks, MacDonald’s and Pizza Hut. As reported by Al Giordano on his current post-quarantine visit to Mexico City\u0412\u00a0at The Field:<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n
What has been set in motion is a regional economic crash that will of course hit hardest upon those without any savings at all (a majority, here). I saw something similar happen in Lower Manhattan in the wake of September 11, 2001: so many mom-and-pop restaurants and stores, and citizen tenants, made no income for various weeks as everything under Fourteenth Street had been shut down by writ. The renters could not pay rent, and landlords used their nonpayment as the trigger to evict them. They are now replaced with Starbucks and Walgreen’s and other chain stories, and a more upper class population paying higher rents where the workers used to live. As in New York, everything that was wonderful about Mexico City may be about to go under, or at least enough of it to permanently damage its best people-centered qualities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There are correlations between NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) enacted in 1994 and swine flu. Look at American companies\u0412\u00a0like Smithfield, which brought factory pig farming to Vera Cruz, wiping out smaller, local pig farmers in the region,\u0412\u00a0and creating an ecological disaster<\/strong><\/a> in the area. There are also correlations between NAFTA and the drug cartels,\u0412\u00a0with the loss of locally-generated jobs throughout Mexico collapsing\u0412\u00a0 economies with Wal-Mart efficiency.<\/p>\n
Big multi-national corporations looking to cash in on cheap labor financially eclipse local and regional companies and businesses leaving those who do not get picked up\u0412\u00a0by the corporate trawler nets out in the economic cold. This makes\u0412\u00a0trafficking in illegal drugs an economic opportunity\u0412\u00a0for everyone else in need of a way to make a buck or a peso. A quick perusal of\u0412\u00a0our urban history\u0412\u00a0helps one\u0412\u00a0to\u0412\u00a0understand how people living in blighted communities anywhere in the world with no economic future and no adequate social safety net turn to crime as a means to survive. That goes from Oakland, California to New York City, to Kabul and\u0412\u00a0Juarez, Mexico.<\/p>\n
So in Mexico, there is a contagion alright, but it may not just be viral. The trick of the eye\u0412\u00a0–\u0412\u00a0the trompe-l’oeil<\/em> we’re asked to\u0412\u00a0believe is that\u0412\u00a0the swine flu crisis is a separate, unfortunate event when in reality, it is really a symptom of something larger –\u0412\u00a0perhaps our own\u0412\u00a0methods used to industrialize and cannibalize the world and its people, the price of which is yet to be fully known but seems to be coming due fast.<\/p>\n
Yours & truly,<\/p>\n
Fe Bongolan<\/strong>
\nSan Francisco<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dear Friend and Reader: Call me crazy. All during the “swine flu pandemic,” the latest disaster porn that kept network news anchors employed, I kept asking myself: Why this? Why now? Why Mexico? I started by blaming my suspicion\u0412\u00a0entirely on my heightened sense of left-wing paranoia\u0412\u00a0initiated\u0412\u00a0when Pluto was in Sagittarius through today’s opening innings of … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,1788,1775,52,1797,1323,1356,1322],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14346"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}