Bolivia president expels US aid agency
Source: Al-Jazeera
Bolivian president Evo Morales has expelled the US development agency from his country for allegedly seeking to undermine his leftist government.
Morales claimed on Wednesday that the USAID is involved with "alleged political interference in peasant unions and other social organisations."
He made the announcement before a crowd outside the presidential palace during a May Day rally.
"Never again, never again USAID, who manipulate and use our leaders, our colleagues with hand-outs," Morales said in announcing the expulsion.
He then ordered David Choquehuanca, Bolivia's foreign minister, to inform the US embassy of his decision
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/05/201351224153629879.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
First of all, there are several posters on this thread who have detailed how USAID is an arm of the CIA. And said it better than I could.
As far as Sibel Edmonds, I said she's saying interesting things and that people should look (read). They can make their own determinations. Edmonds used to have credibility around here. But that can change in the blink of an eye.
I've noticed that progressive bloggers, journalists, (Greenwald, Hedges, come to mind) can be praised for their views, here, and then called morons or worse when they say something that doesn't fit the party line. Thus, I'll wait for Edmonds to be thrown under the bus, not because she's necessarily wrong, but because she's not walking in lock-step.
A good strategy would be to read what she's saying, use one's analytical skills to vet it, compare it to what's being said on other progressive sites and then make up one's own mind.
Here: http://boilingfrogspost.com
I hope I clarified.
Note: Before everyone starts frothing at the mouth - Edmonds was interviewed by David knight. He's with the Alex Jones site. <gasp> 
I am NOT a fan of Alex Jones and don't patronize his site. But let's dismiss everything Sibel is saying just because Jones is nuts. That'll work. Or maybe consider that Sibel's message is too hot for the MSM presstitutes to handle.
...whatever they say, the opposite is true; and, whatever they accuse others of doing, they are doing, or planning to do.
This is a very reliable "rule of thumb" for Bushwhacks in particular--very helpful in figuring out quickly what's really going on--but it is also applicable to other rightwingers, for instance, those who are so ignorant and/or prejudiced that they would call Evo Morales a "banana republic dictator," or Nicolas Maduro, or other legitimate, elected, leftist presidents in Latin America whom you may be referring to, by "these" ("these banana republic dictators"
or "wacks" ("wacks like this Bolivian" .
The opposite of what you said is true. Evo Morales is the first Indigenous president of Bolivia, a largely Indigenous country. The country was run by the rich white minority for centuries. They are so bigoted that, as late as the 1960s, they wouldn't let Indigenous people even walk on the sidewalks! It was very like apartheid South Africa and the segregated U.S. south.
After many years of hard and dangerous work on Bolivia's democratic institutions, Morales was duly elected, by a big majority, in 2006, survived a recall election and was re-elected in 2009, also by big majorities. He is very popular. In 2008, the Bushwhacks mounted a coup attempt against him, right out of the U.S. embassy, funding and colluding with the rich white separatists in eastern Bolivia who wanted to split Bolivia in two and take the provinces with the natural gas--Bolivia's main resource--with them. They rioted and murdered people, and sacked government buildings, and beat up any Indigenous people they came across. Their coup attempt failed, due to Morales' popularity and the unity of South America in opposition to the coupsters. Another reason the coup failed is that Morales threw the U.S. ambassador (Philip Goldberg) out of Bolivia.
Morales knows what he's talking about. Also, unity, cooperation and intelligence sharing among LatAm countries have vastly improved. They have each other's backs. They know what's going on. They are well aware of these kinds of "Big Lies" coming from the U.S. and the corporate media--the kind you just promulgated. They are well aware of the U.S. role in the recent rightwing coups in Honduras and Paraguay, the attempted coup in Venezuela in 2002, the attempted coup in Bolivia in 2008--all U.S. supported--and of the many on-going coup plots, dirty tricks, disinformation, destabilization efforts, use of the "war on drugs" to infiltrate police forces and militaries, thousands of murders of leftists, peasants, labor leaders, journalists, human rights workers and others in U.S. client states such as Colombia and Honduras, and so on and so forth, that the U.S. has been guilty of, recently, and for over half a century.
"Know-nothing" comments like yours don't matter to these new leaders of Latin America and their many supporters. They know what they are about--working together on social justice, inclusionary democracy and regional economic prosperity and independence.
The rich and the rightwing also called FDR a "dictator." It's a hazard of actually representing the interests of the poor majority. The rich will always call you a "dictator" if you dare to regulate them, to tax them, to oppose their exploitation of workers, to curtail their insatiable greed and to act for the common good.
It is strange that you call these new democratic leaders "banana republic dictators." Do you even know where the phrase came from? Is it ignorance or cruelty that prompts you to say such a thing?
Morales, as head of government, has the RIGHT to throw any foreign ambassador or agency out of Bolivia, on evidence or no evidence. Foreign ambassadors and agencies operate within countries AT THE LEAVE of those countries' legitimate governments!
So, you're saying that, because Morales exercised Bolivia's RIGHT to do this, that makes him a "banana republic dictator"? Cuz he's, um, "dictating" to the United States about its meddling in Bolivia?
i say: THANK GOD Latin America is waking up, uniting, and throwing these malefactors out of their countries! It's about time!
And there couldn't be any better evidence of the strength of Latin American democracy than they are doing just that--defending their people against the bullies, and liars, and rapacious transglobal corporate/war profiteers that run Washington DC!
And you're saying that, because Maduro suspects that Chavez was poisoned and voiced this opinion publicly, he, too, is a "banana republic dictator"? Unwise, maybe. Not appropriate, maybe. But then, he was close friends with Chavez and was in mourning. Forgivable slip-up, it seems to me. Doesn't make him a "wack job." Doesn't make him a "dictator"--let alone a "banana republic dictator."
You have NO credibility on this, so why don't you just say, 'oops, sorry, dumb statements,' and move on?
Origins of the term
In political science, the term banana republic is a pejorative descriptor for a servile dictatorship that abets or supports, for kickbacks, the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation.[2] In economics, a banana republic is a country operated as a commercial enterprise for private profit, effected by a collusion between the State and favoured monopolies, in which the profit derived from the private exploitation of public lands is private property, while the debts incurred thereby are a public responsibility. Such an imbalanced economy remains limited by the uneven economic development of town and country, and tends to cause the national currency to become devalued paper-money, rendering the country ineligible for international development-credit.[5] Such government by thieves is a kleptocracy; such a kleptocratic government is manipulated by foreign (corporate) interests, and functions mostly as ceremonial government that is unaccountable to its nation. The national legislature is, in effect, for sale, influential government employees illegitimately exploit their posts for personal gain (by embezzlement, fraud, bribery, etc.), and the resulting government budget deficit is repaid by the country's working people who earn wages rather than making profits. [5]
The original banana republic
The history of the first banana republic begins with the introduction of the banana fruit to the USA in 1870, by Lorenzo Dow Baker, captain of the schooner Telegraph. He initially bought bananas in Jamaica and sold them in Boston at a 1,000 percent profit.[6] The banana proved popular with Americans, as a nutritious tropical fruit that was more inexpensive to buy than fruit grown locally in the U.S., such as apples. In 1913, for example, twenty-five cents bought a dozen bananas, but only two apples.[7] Its popularity among Americans was also spurred by the American railroad tycoons Henry Meiggs and his nephew, Minor C. Keith, who in 1873 began establishing banana plantations along the railroads to produce food for their railroad workers. This experience led them to recognize the potential profitability of exporting bananas for sale, and they began exporting the fruit to the Southeastern United States.[8]
In the mid-1870s, to manage the new industrial-agriculture business enterprise in the countries of Central America, Keith founded the Tropical Trading and Transport Company: one-half of what would later become the United Fruit Company (Chiquita Brands International, created in 1899 by corporate merger with the Boston Fruit Company and owned by Andrew Preston.) By the 1930s, the international political and economic tensions of the United Fruit Company had enabled it to gain control of 80 to 90 per cent of the U.S. banana trade.[9] Nonetheless, despite the UFC monopoly, in 1924, the Vaccaro Brothers established the Standard Fruit Company (Dole Food Company) to export Honduran bananas to the port of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico coast of the U.S. The fruit exporters were able to keep U.S. prices so low because the banana companies, through their manipulation of the producing countries' national land use laws, were able to cheaply buy large tracts of prime agricultural land for banana plantations in the countries of the Caribbean Basin, the Central American isthmus, and the tropical South American countries--and, having rendered the native peoples landless through a policy of legalistic dispossession, were therefore able to employ them as low-wage workers.[8].
Moreover, by the late 19th century, three American multinational corporations — the United Fruit Company, the Standard Fruit Company, and the Cuyamel Fruit Company — dominated the cultivation, harvesting, and exportation of bananas, and controlled the road, rail, and port infrastructure of Honduras. In the northern coastal areas near the Caribbean Sea, the Honduran government ceded to the banana companies 500 hectares (1,235.52 acres) for each kilometre of railroad laid, even though there was still no passenger or freight railroad to Tegucigalpa, the national capital city. Among the Honduran people, the United Fruit Company was known as El Pulpo, the Octopus, because its influence had come to pervade their society, controlled their country's transport infrastructure, and sometimes violently manipulated the national politics of the Republic of Honduras.[10]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
Banana Republic and "backyard" are equally offensive terms with regard to Latin America.
Do you even know why they are called banana republics? Do you know what was done for the last..what..almost 200 years in Latin America in order for the US/Europe to take advantage of resources and labor down there? What has been done since then, in more recent years, in order to try to keep economic control and political influence in the region?
It would be *less* rational for a Latin American leader to assume there is *no* meddling by the US or other western econ powers than it is to assume the worst. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a reasonable conclusion based on history, including recent history.
Dismissing or ridiculing the leaders down there who have made at least some progress and speak out loud about the realities here does NOT make history go away. "AID" almost always comes with strings attached, sometimes obvious, sometimes not. This is a simple fact and has been part of western hegemony around the world since the days of old school colonialism.
You're contending for Jon Stewart's job, right?
Democrats are NOT supporters of the mind-boggling brutality which has been unleashed upon the Americas all these long, LONG painful years.
Why on earth would ignorant right-wingers not wonder why the expression "Yankee, go home" was used so long ago, and continuously since then? What the hell do you imagine they meant?
It's time to put your idle time to a productive use and start catching up on the history you have clearly avoided learning.
You don't start bitching about things you don't understand to people who KNOW what you haven't bothered to learn. No one can learn this for you. Everyone had to learn it through individual effort, or through real people who have lived through REAL events which seared the lives of people, destroyed people, drove people made, butchered, tortured, terrorized Latin Americans and people in the Caribbean from the first when people in the US started expanding their exploitation into the Americas.
Just because you think there isn't any "proof" for something in the present, why not sit down and THINK about things for a moment. You are NOT going to know when things done covertly have been done until years later, when someone finds out through investigation of declassified papers, or the news finally makes it back after it has been discovered the hard way. Why on earth do you think US Presidents have told operatives to "make sure this doesn't have our figerprints on it?"
They do their bloody business BEHIND people's backs, or things would get a hell of a lot harder for them. What keeps you from THINKING, right-wingers? Is it all that hard for you?
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo-stick.
[center]
[/center]
The answers come later, after evil acts. They are discovered, sometimes by later generations, unfortunately. Take the story of a U.S. journalist who was living in Chile with his wife, who learned of US involvement in the bloody coup, which resulted in the installation of a fascist monster, and sociopathic torturer, Augusto Pinochet. This journalist, Charles Horman, was tortured, then murdered, as well as another U.S. newsman, a photographer, Frank Terrugi.
People in the U. S. didn't know about it, outside his family and a small number of the population, even when it was determined he had been taken and slaughtered by the U.S. puppet for knowing too much, and the general population didn't know anything at all until finally Hollywood made a movie about it years later, with big acting names in it. Even now, a lot of idiot clowns STILL don't know a thing about it, or any of what has happened to Latin Americans due to U.S. interventions over and over again.
You have no one to blame but yourself. You could do the right thing, not the right-wing thing, and start your education now, just as the rest of us have had to do, to get any idea whatsoever about these things.
That information is most certainly there. All you have to do is to get off your ass and get to work learning it. Don't argue from your seat in the Twilight Zone. There's no way to communicate with you until you at least know some of the basic elements of this horrific history.
What on earth do you imagine people have been talking about all this time, anyway? The ignorant ones will continue to gibber about idiotic "crapaganda" tailor-made for fools who won't put out the effort to know anything, and there are so many who live with Fox News, and tv wrestling. If you do, join those people at a right-wing message board.
Have admired him so much for what I had known, and after reading your post went directly to look for information, found this great National Security link which is stupendous, something to occupy anyone interested for a long time:
[center]The CIA's Family Jewels
Agency Violated Charter for 25 Years,
Wiretapped Journalists and Dissidents
Update - Full Report Now Available and Full Text Searchable
CIA Announces Declassification of 1970s "Skeletons" File,
Archive Posts Justice Department Summary from 1975,
With White House Memcons on Damage Control
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 222
Edited by Thomas Blanton
Posted - June 21, 2007
Updated - June 26, 2007, 1 p.m.[/center]
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/
This is an amazing place to spend time. Thank you, so much for taking the time to lead us in this direction. There's so much to learn. It was so thoughtful to mention this valuable resource.
for taking the time. 
Wow..
... and I want to thank you. discocrsco01, for starting one of the most educational and passionate threads I've read lately.
