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DuctapeFatwa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-20-04 12:59 AM
Original message
Blood, oil, guns and bullets
TERROR, invasion, occupation and militarization are hallmarks of the US-led corporate recolonisation of Iraq. But they have long been the hallmarks of colonialism and imperialism the world over.
Neoliberal globalization and war are two sides of the same coin. So too are oil and imperialism. Former Shell scientist Claude Ake, described Shell's activities in Nigeria, as a process of the “militarization of commerce and the privatization of the state”. In 2003, this process is sweeping across the world, perhaps most visibly in Iraq.

Among today's transnational corporations, the modern day heirs of the colonial chartered corporations, the oil and gas giants are some of the most politically and economically powerful players in the world. The ancestor of the Royal-Dutch Shell group was ‘Royal Dutch Company for the Exploitation of Petroleum Wells in the Netherlands East Indies’. With so much of the world's economy dependent on oil, the colonial exploitation and genocide continues, on an unprecedented scale. The lyrics may have changed a little, but the tune remains much the same.

The U'wa people in Colombia believe that oil maintains the balance of the world and is the blood of Mother Earth - to take the oil is worse than killing your mother. To the US corporate/political/military elites, oil is the lifeblood of capitalist expansion, a national security concern, and a vital resource to be controlled by US corporate interests for American economic and geopolitical dominance. As well as being central to US imperial interests, the interests of the oil and defense sectors are closely intertwined.

Weapons production and the maintenance of US military and economic might across the world depends on massive consumption of oil and petroleum. In turn, massive defense and security spending boosts an ailing US economy, and is a boon to the profits of its defense and security corporations. We hear a lot of talk about weapons of mass destruction. But the so-called “war on terror” is a weapon of mass distraction away from the growing US deficit, from the naked corporate greed and colonial mindset that underpins the US and a model of development that is as exploitative as it is unsustainable, lurching as it does from one crisis of capitalism to the next. And this war kills....

http://www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/business/b1020012004.html

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salinen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-20-04 01:06 AM
Response to Original message
1. Indeed
America figures that to colonize is too expensive so they stay only long enough to impose a pupet government to make easy the extraction of the resources. Back here at home the propagandist describe "others" as subhumans who want to cut our throats and with pleasure watch us die by drowning in our own blood.
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pasadenaboy Donating Member (877 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-20-04 01:12 AM
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2. I hate to tell you
but looking at the result of the caucus, nobody in the party seems to care about this illegal immoral war.

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DuctapeFatwa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-20-04 01:23 AM
Response to Reply #2
3. I think of it as holding a puppy's nose close to his mistake so he can

smell it.

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DuctapeFatwa Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jan-20-04 01:42 PM
Response to Reply #3
4. kick to leave no puppy behind
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