The reactivation of the U.S. Navy's Fourth Fleet last year is now completed by the chain of seven bases that can be used by SOUTHCOM whenever it is deemed convenient. Of course, the White House and the Palacio de Nariño--the home of the Colombian president--are working to maintain the argument that none of these bases will in fact be U.S. military bases; they will continue to be under the control of the Colombian state and armed forces; there will be no increase in the 800 U.S. soldiers and 600 contractors that are currently operating in the country.

India is seeking both to modernize and expand its military forces. It has dramatically increased its military budget, up over 34% alone this year. India now has the 10th-highest military spending in the world. It's becoming a major market for U.S. arms sales. U.S. weapons makers Lockheed Martin and Boeing have already racked up deals worth billions of dollars. But the real bonanza is still to come. India is said to be planning to spend as much $55 billion on weapons over the next five years.

from "the darker nations: a people's history of the third world" by vijay prashad (part III)

(154): The island of Bali lost about 8 percent of its population, or a hundred thousand people, in the assault on the PKI in 1965-1966.... The actual massacre came at the hands of the army and the activists of the right-wing, mainly theocratic, political parties. They had lists of names of activists and organizers of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. They used these lists to gather the victims for execution. Although the US and Australian governments neither instigated nor conducted the massacre, they encouraged the purge, fattened the lists of Communists for the army, funded the paracommandos, and supported the media effort to blame the entire genocide on the Communists.
(156-158): Moscow and Beijing remained mute. Since the 1920s, the USSR had an ambiguous relationship with Communist parties in the darker nations. On the one hand, the USSR had been the one state that gave enormous ideological, diplomatic, and material support to many independence struggles... From the early 1920s to 1935, [the Comintern] urged Communists in the darker nations to keep some distance between their activity and that of the nationalist groups in their regions... In China, though, the Comintern pushed the Communists into an alliance with the nationalist Kuomintang that ended in the disastrous Kuomintang 1928 massacre of the Communists in Shanghai... At the 1935 Seventh Comintern Congress, the Soviet Communists reacted to the development of fascism within Europe by telling Communist parties to work in a "popular front" with all patriotic social forces... While the strategy of the Comintern developed out of the German Communist Party's failure to stop the Nazi rise to power in 1933, that experience now came to dominate the work of Communists in far different settings... By the advent of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the class collaborationist line had substantially weakened the Communist parties in the Third World, and they became easy prey for attack by the CIA and the nationalist regimes... The concepts of the national democratic state and new democracy allowed Moscow and Beijing to accept noncommunist regimes and national liberation movements as sufficient for the nonindustrial world.... Nasser's Egypt, Qasim's Iraq, Boumedienne's Algeria, Indira Gandhi's India, New Win's Burma, Sekou Toure's Guinea, Ayub Khan's Pakistan, and Mobido Keita's Mali became part of the USSR's and the People's Republic of China's most favored states, even though most of these leaders suppressed their local Communist parties.
(158-159): By the early 1960s, the three largest Communist parties (outside a Communist state) in Asia, Africa, and the Arab lands were the PKI of Indonesia, Sudan's al-Hizb al-Shuyu'i al-Sudani (SCP), and the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), respectively. These parties commanded the respect of a large section of their societies... Within a decade, these three parties would be devastated when the national bourgeoisie (with the assistance of the United States as well as a blind eye from Moscow and Beijing) would call the military out of the barracks to exterminate them. If the USSR and the People's Republic of China had taken a strong stand in any one of these instances, they might have given courage to Communists elsewhere... Instead, the silence scared Communists into alliances with political forces that wanted to use and then destroy them. The Communists were useful. Sukarno needed the PKI for its program and cadre. When Brigadier Qasim overthrew the Iraqi monarchy (1958) and Colonel Jaafar al-Nimeiri rejected a corrupt military junta in Sudan (1969), both leaned on the strong Communist parties... A military coup has little institutional basis for legitimacy...
(159): [BAATH PARTY, SADDAM, THE SOVIETS AND THE ICP] When the ICP took advantage of the opening to revive its banned organizations... [it] grew to more than twenty-five thousand cadre members with an additional mass membership of a million (about a fifth of the total population of Iraq). The growth of the ICP and its social power terrfied the dictatorship of Qasim. Shortly after Qasim came to power, the founder of the Baath, Michel 'Aflaq, visited Baghdad from Damascus to promote his party over the ICP. "We represent the Arab spirit against materialist Communism"... The Baath had only three hundred members in Iraq, and would grow to only three thousand in the early 1960s. In May 1959, Husain ar-Radi, the ICP's first secretary, entered a politburo meeting and argued that the time had come for the party to make a move for power. He was outvoted. The Soviets had sent an envoy with a message not to provoke Qasim. The Baath took the initiative; the US backed it. The ICP defended the nationalist military regime when the Baath attempted a coup in October 1959... The Baath's way had been prepared, and it eventually captured the state in 1963... In 1968 Hussein came to power. The USSR became a major ally of Hussein, who cultivated a split in the battered ICP... [A] ppro-Soviet faction of the ICP joined hands with him. The anti-Baath group...felt the wrath of the Baath's militia... The ICP that remained within the government enabled Iraq's 1972 friendship treaty with the USSR, but as Hussein increased his hold on the country he began a campaign against the ICP itself. In 1978, Hussein had the "loyal" party members arrested, executed many cadre... Hussein's campaign against the ICP led to his enhanced stock among Washinton's policymakers, whose own alliance with him began in 1983. The remainder of the ICP's cadre either fled overseas or else remained within Iraq to continue the struggle, notably in the Kurdish regions (long a bastion of the Left).
(160-161): [SUDAN, NIMEIRI AND THE COMMUNISTS] In Sudan, Nimeiri came to power on a Nasserite agenda, and he, like Qasim, could not rule without the SCP. After the coup he banned all political parites, but allowed the SCP to continue its activities. Founded in 1944, the SCP was the onl political party with national standing because, unlike the sectarian and racialist parties, it recruited equally in the north and south, among Christians as well as Muslims. Nimeiri needed the SCP. In the typical formula, Nimeiri first went after his right flank. In 1970, he began an assault on the reactionary Umma Party... When that party had been substantially pacified, Nimeiri turned his attention to the SCP. The brutal repression of the SCP drove the Communists to attempt a coup of their own along with sympathetic army officers... When news of the events in Sudan reached the Soviet leadership, it tried to negotiate with the Nimeiri government, as well as with the Egyptians and the Libyans, for asylum to the SCP's leaders. Once rebuffed, it did not pursue the matter. It is not that Moscow felt nothing for its comrades in the tropics, but that the fortunes of the Communist parties in the Third World came second to the strategy mapped out by the USSR and the People's Republic of China. When the Nimeiri regime executed the SCP leaders despite the entreaty from the USSR, Moscow rewarded the dictator with economic and political treaties as well as a special honored place as a delegate to the Communist Party of the USSR's twenty-fourth Congress in late 1971.
(162): As Sukarno fell, no significant word of protest came from New Delhi, Belgrade, Rangoon, Cairo or Accra... Indonesia's Sukarno had played a crucial role in the creation of the political platform of the Third World, and Bandung had been its omphalos. Yet there was silence. The personal or political demise of the five major leaders of the progressive tendency in Bandung reveals much about the collapse of solidarity: Nehru died in 1964, Both U Nu and Nkrumah had been recently deposed by military coups, Nasser's role had been weakened by the collapse of his United Arab Republic, and Tito had begun a genial rapproachement with the USSR.
(163): At the 1977 NAM meeting in New Delhi... neither Iraq, Sudan, nor Indonesia were laughed out of the room--their pogroms against the Communists in each case became the sacrosanct "internal affairs" of each country. The major Third World powers accepted Indonesia, Sudan, Iraq, and others simply because they signed on to the basic principles of non-alignment, and because they shared a similar international economic analysis... The destruction of the left had an enormous impact on the Third World. The most conservative, even reactionary social classes attained domiannce over the political platform created in Bandung. As an adjunct to the military regimes, the political forces that emerged rejected the ecumenical anticolonial nationalism of the Left and the liberals for a cruel cultural nationalism that emphasized racialism, religion, and hierarchy.
(166): In 1920, the Karakhan Manifesto from the USSR repudiated the treaties between the Czarist regime and the Manchu Empire, with the statement that the Soviet Republic "renounces all the annexations of Chinese territory..." In the late 1950s, the USSR would rescind this statement and insist on territory that it had abrogated.
(167-168): Nehru's Congress Party did not expend foreign exchange on the import of foreign arms. The armed forces had to do with British remainders and whatever could be produced domestically. From 1951-1962, the Indian treasury spent less on arms than either the British government before it or the Indian governments that would follow the Sino-Indian war (1962). Despite the war with Pakistan in 1947-48, the Indian government reduced its military expenses to 2 percent of its total budget... After the war, the Indian government would not stint on its military to become the world's largest importer of weapons by the 1990s.
(168): [WHY 1962 WAR]: Another way to look at the Sino-Indian border war is to see it as a commonplace occurrence in the new postcolonial states that had, as far as the borders went, begun to adopt a more "European" notion of nationalism than their own previous anticolonial form... Indeed, the Himalays that run along the borders between today's states of Burma, Nepal, India, China, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are home to people at high altitudes whose lives rely on transit across the mountain passes to the plains for trade or religious pilgrimages. The boundary is not in the interest of these people...
(170): Colonial powers based their borders on what they were able to conquer, and guarded these boundaries in terms of security rather than any other principle. The cartography of the Himalayas by the British had little to do with the needs and desires of the people who lived in the hills; it had everything to do with the creation of buffer states to protect their Indian empire from the threats by the Czarist Russians and the Manchu Chinese. In 1893, the British created the Durand line, which ran right through the homelands of the Pashtu speakers so as to maintain Afghanistan as a border territory between Russia and India, just as in 1914, the British fashioned the McMahon line to divide their Indian domains from those of the Chinese.
(173): [In the 3rd World, not military Keynesianism, but militarization by gutting of welfare state] WB President Robert McNamara's study of military expenditures in the darker nations found that states had quintupled that one line item between 1960 and 1988; military expenditure increased at twice the rate of per capita income.
(174): China's foreign policy wound its way from Bandung to a rapproachment with the United States and its impossible alliances with dictatorial regimes. As China began its new relationship with the United States, the Chinese government praised the Greek military junta (1972), took the side of Pakistan against the liberation of Bangladesh (1971), welcomed Niemeiri to Beijing after the dictartorship's massacre of its Communists (1971), sent emergency aid to the Sri Lankan government to defeat the left-wing Lanka Samaja Party's insurrection, and quickly recognized Pinochet's coup in Chile (it expelled the Chilean ambassador to China when he refused to support Pinochet). The Sino-Indian war compromised the credibility of India and China.
(178): In 1850, fossil fuels supplied only 6 percent of the world's energy needs, while humans and animals provided the rest. A century later, human and animal power had declined to 6 percent, while fossil fuel use accounted for the remainder.
(178): By 1950, the main energy corporations organized themsleves into seven conglomerates known as the Seven Sisters: Exxon, Shell, BP, Gulf, Texaco, Mobil, and Socal (or Chevron). Even though oil is a lucrative product, in its crude state it is nothing more than a raw material. To remove oil from the ground requires an immense capital outlay, both for exploration and extraction. This initial capital outlay is the carrot and stick used by the Seven Sisters. They came to the oil lands in the early years and staked out "concessions" for themselves... These seven firms, in 1950, controlled 85 percent of the crude oil production in the world outside Canada, China, the USSR, and the United States...
(178): The regimes that ruled over the oil lands could have used the rent paid by the oil companies to increase the social wage--to expand public education, health, transport, and other such important avenues for the overall advancement of the people. Instead, the oil rent went toward the expansion of luxury consumption for the bureaucratic-managerial or monarchal elite--the oligarchy in Venezuela or the Ibn Saud clan in Saudi Arabia--and to oil the military machine (the oil war of Bolivia-Paraguay, 1932-1935, was a preview of the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war)...
(178-179): In 1957 alone the Seven Sisters made $828 million in Venezuela, whose regime allowed them to remit all their profits without restrictions... The United States supported the junta that came to power in the 1940s, whose goal was to maintain good relations with the oil cartel rather than pusrue social development policies... The oil wealth was not, therefore, reinvested for the overall development of the country. The junta reversed the land reforms of a decade previously, sold the land to private speculators, and moved Venezuela to become a net importer of food grains... In 1958 the new relatively progressive government led by Accion Democratica (AD) expressed an interest in recouping a larger share of the profits... Venezuela had been able to increase its share of the world oil market for serendipitous reasons. Mexcio used to be a major provider of the world's oil (25%). After the Mexican Revolution (1911), the new regime attempted to get a better handle on its oil profits... In 1934, after two decades of tussle, the general who had once guarded the oil region, Lazaro Cardenas, became the president... In 1938, Cardenas nationalized the oil industry... The Seven Sisters moved their focus from Mexico to Venezuela...
(180-181): In the late 1940s, Raul Prebisch complained about the low prices earned by the raw material producers because private cartels controlled international prices. Whether the crop is cocoa, sugar, rubber, or oil, the structure of the commodity cartel did not differ much... The declining price of raw materials over time meant that the Third World would never be able to earn enough from the sale of raw materials to effect both meaningful social development and industrial growth. Many of the formerly colonial states had a problem: they had either been carved out as one-commodity producers or else they had developed into one-crop countries. With no economic diversification, these states additionally had less power than the private corporate cartel. They had only one crop, and unless other countries that produced the same crop banded together, they had to accept whatever terms the private corporate cartel offered...
(181): Because of the low level of capital available in the darker nations, the regimes tried to stregnthen the one economic process that had already been perfected: the colonial crop. The regimes in the Third World relied on the singular colonial crop. They also had little capital to refine and process the crop to create some value before export. In other words, its raw material frequently left the old colonial rail lines and ports in its rawest form possible for transport, and brought a mediocre return to the former colony.... The low level of capital in the arsenal of the darker nations meant that they gave "reasonable" terms to the transnational conglomerates that worked in the private cartel, and had the funds to explore and excavate, cultivate and transport. The concessions given to these conglomerates meant that the regime frequently lost control over production, and would only be able to resrict the giants through licenses, increased taxation, and other minor irritations.
(181): By 1980, of the 115 "developing countries," according to UNCTAD, at least half remained dependent on one commodity for over 50 percent of their export revenues. Most of these countries had come to rely on petroleum exports.
183): [JUAN PABLO PEREZ ALFONZO] In April 1959, Nasser's Egypt and the Arab League hosted the first Arab Petroleum Congress... The congress gathered just as the Seven Sisters reduced the posted price for Middle East oil. Venezuela's representative, Juan Pablo Perez Alfonzo, was an experienced AD politician. Perez Alfonzo made his political mark in 1943 during a debate in Venezuela over the oil concessions enjoyed by the Seven Sisters... In 1958, Perez Alfonzo joined the AD government as the minster of mines and hydrocarbons. He led the charge against the Seven Sisters, earned the government 60 percent of the oil revenue, and established the notion that Venezuela had sovereignty over its subsoil so that the entire oil industry was a public utility.
(184): Exxon egged on the nationalists with another price reduction (this time, by 7 percent of the posted price). When the oil producers met in Baghdad in September 1960, a month after the decrease, they came with a purpose: to form a public cartel of oil producers. After a week of deliberation, the group created OPEC. The five charter members nominally controlled or at least produced 82 percent of the world's crude exports...
(185-186): A major disappointment in this was the failure of the OPEC nations to use their massive oil profits for the creation of such a fund to help stabilize other commodities. Not only did the OPEC powers refuse to contribute to a global fund to stabilize raw material prices but they also had a poor record int heir ad contributions to their neighbors... Despite its political origins, OPEC became an economic cartel as it fought to defend oil prices and do little else...
(187): [FAUX NATIONALIZATION] In sum, the nationalization of economic assets from transnational firms replicated the problems of political independence from colonialism; it was an advance, but it created an illusion of freedom. The Seven Sisters transferred the burdens of extraction on to the state, while it continued to enjoy the fruits of the industry. Furthermore, the state's newfound power over the fields and its ability to negotiate with the Seven Sisters over the prices and taxes moved it to bargain on two sides of the commodity cycle: with the oil workers for lower wages, and the Seven Sisters for higher prices. To raise the export receipt and increase the coffers of the state did not itself presage a strategy for the generation of equity.
(191): The announcement of socialism came alongside the recognition that its construction would not be easy in a formerly colonized state. Not only had the German and British colonial regimes stripped bare the economy of eastern Africa but they also left behind a state apparatus designed to exploit and not to liberate. The institutions of the state and the civil bureaucracy grew from a culture of imperial hierarchy, a value quite removed from the egalitarianism of national liberation... Hemmed in by pressures from the advanced industrial states, the aristorcratic rural classes, and the emergent mercantile classes, the new state had little time. Things had to change in a hurry. But socialism requires imagination and time. It cannot be made in a hurry. To create socialism in a hurry without mass support, and institutions that can channel this support, led many Third World states to disaster.
(192): Instead of foreign aid or commercial loans, the national liberation states developed a three-pronged approach to development: the nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy (finance, infrastructure, energy, crucial raw material extraction, and capital goods production), the development of the agricultural sector, and the encouragement of industrialization. The plan expected the capital for industrialization to come from the nationalization of finance and an increase in the agricultural surplus. Nationalization put financial decisions in the hands of the state rather than transnational corporations, and it arrested the hemorrhage of capital...
(193): The Third World agenda, for states such as India and Egypt, was not socialist as much as welfarist. The state centralized and nationalized the commanding heights of the economy to ensure that its dominant classes gained some purchase on a complex international economy... Tanzania under Nyerere's TANU attempted something more than the welfarism of India and Egypt. The Arusha Declaration drew from the socialist experiments: there was an insistence that the state must create equity among the population, and that this equity needed to be crafted at the level of production and not simply consumption.
(194): [BUT] [T]he state talked of the people, and yet it stoopd apart from them... The TANU regime came to power, abolished the trade unions, and collected the unions' personnel into one government-authorized union, the National Union of Tanganyika Workers (1964). The natural aliies of a socialist experiment were marginalized. There was no well-developed strategy for how the state planned to build power for its ideas. Instead, the state stood above the people, directing them, preaching "socialism from above."
(196-197): Tanzanian ujaama is quite of a piece with a vast number of examples of Third World development or Third World socialism in a hurry. Most of the Third World states hurriedly built industrial factories and dams, cleared forests, and moved populations. This labor came for many reasons, of which the most important was to rapidly increase the productive capacity of the new nation, to make a Great Leap Forward into a moment of propserity before the political capital of the liberation movements had been spent... The intentions of the leaership, by all accounts, were not malevolent. Yet its modernist dream--to adminster nature and society, and build vast industrial monuments without either a democratic governance structure or a mobilized population--led to the worst excesses of commandism and bureaucratism. In India, in the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, the state displaced some 25 million people, while in the same period, the Chinese shifted some 40 million people. These are the dramatic figures, because these states have substantial populations, but in small countries the percentage of the population that the state shifted by its bureaucratic commandism is staggering (in Tanzania, a fifth of the population was resettled).
(199): In 1961, after two five-year plans, India's Nehru rued the failure of his regime to tend to the sufferings of the population... Market socialism or the mixed economy was a socialism of consumption not production. In the attempt to industrailize and create agricultural change, there was only a muted effort to change the relations and methods of production. The process of industrial as well as agricultural production remained similar to that found in any advanced capitalist country: workers had no say in the process of production, which was run by a detached management.
(200): In 1932, the El Salvadorian rural elites engineered the massacre of twenty thousand peasants who occupied private land and opposed export-led agriculture.
(200): When India won its freedom, the Congress relied on rural power brokers to deliver the vote. It did not want to alienate the landowners who financed these agents of the party.
(200): In the Philippines, the Land Reform Act of 1955 froze land relations in plantation-like conditions...
(208-209): [In 1983] NAM came to New Delhi at a crucial time for Indira Gandhi... When Nehru died in 1964, Indira Gandhi took on a major role in the Congress Party. In 1966, she won elections and was prime minister until 1977. She returned to power in 1980 with a weakend mandate because of the excesses of the martial law (Emergency) regime she ran from 1975 to 1977. When NAM came to Delhi, the ciety was under siege... In Nellie, Assam, five thousand refugees were killed...
(209): Between the 1966 Tricontinental and the 1979 sixth NAM meeting in Havana, a number of important events transpired. A Marxist revolution in Ethiopia (1974) inaugurated a set of defeats for the imperialist bloc. In 1975, the National Liberation Front defeated the US in South Vietname and the Pathet Lao took Vientiane. That same year, five Portuguese colonies in AFrica seized their independence after the Salazar dictatorship ended in Lisbon. In 1978-1979, the Marxists seized control of Afghanistan, the New Jewel Movement took power in Grenada, and the Sandinista revolution prevailed in Nicaragua. Additionally, a number of African regimes (such as in Benin, Madagascar, Liberia, and Libya) adopted Marxism-Leninism as their official ideology. The mood in Havan was exuberant... The conflict between the capitalist and Communist worlds did not mean neutrality in that struggle. The Havana meeting raised the question of a formal anti-imperialist alliance between NAM and the USSR--a move pushed by Castro...
(210) [BUT] Between Havana and New Delhi, a great deal occured to dampen this enthusiasm. Ronald Reagan's forward policy extended the increase in military expenditure initiated by Jimmy Carter...
(215): By 1983, the NAM states produed less than a tenth of the worlds' industrial output, although transnational corporations controlled three-quarters of the industrial output in these states. Among the NAM states, five produced more than 80 percent of this total industrial output: Brazil, South Korea, India, Mexico, and Argentina.
(215): The changes in the general character of NAM were reflected in the changes within India. By the mid-1970s, India's economic agenda floundered. The long-standing failure to reconstruct agrarian relations, an excessive reliance on industrial development over any other sector, a burgeoning military sector... A dissatisfied population rose in a host of rebellions... The party of the freedom movement claimed to rule with the anticolonial nationalist agenda, but it adopted economic policies inimical to the vast mass of the population...
(217): Mexico, an oil-rich country, defaulted on $80 billion in public-sector debt in 1982. Forty countries joined Mexico in arrears, and a year later another twenty-seven had to restructure their massive debt. The total debt in the brusied nations was $500 billion, which at the time threatened the financial stability of the world market.
(218): The domestic elites were always a weak link for the national liberation agenda. When the benefits of import substitution produced a more aggressive and self-confident bourgeoisie, this class wanted to break the cross-class alliance. This class looked forward to a rearrangement of alliances, with a closer relationship with the "West" for economic gain and consumer pleasure. The erosion of the Third World state allowed this class to carry the standard of the First World. In India, by the early 1980s, this class was the size of the French population.
(218): [ANTICOLONIAL NATIONALISM BECOMES PAROCHIAL, AS ECONOMIC AGENDA IS DERAILED] With the demise of import substitution and no other plans for economic sovereignty on the table that appealed to the masses, the Congress Party lost its claim to anticolonial Third World nationalism. Its leaders knew this implicitly, because Indira Gandhi's clique immediately fanned the flames of ethnic and religious difference to reclaim their electoral majority. The appeal to the "Hindu" majority against the secessionism in the Punjab and Assam as well as against Muslims and oppressed castes opened the door for the corruption of the idea of anticolonial nationalism. The massacre at Nellie, for instance, was a result of this venal appeal. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Congress Party was met toe to toe on this line, and it was found wanting by a genuinely cruel cultural nationalist political force, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
(219): The great home of the bourgeois social imagination was that the international order be based on free markets and individual identities, and that the deracinated latter be able to benefit from the unhampered former. Rather than realize [this] dream, what manifested itself wa the simultaneous growth of IMF-driven globalization and parochially cruel nationalism. Sectarian nationalism in the formerly colonized world is not only an adequate form of globalization, especially as the socialist bloc collapsed later in the 1990s, but it seems to be the form that IMF-driven globalization has taken since the late 1970s.
(220): In 1972, the Third World expended $33 billion on arms, already a vulgar amount. A decade later, the figure totaled $81 billion. In 1977, the Cuban government proposed that $650 billion wasted on the worlds arms trade be transferred into a capital infusion into the Third World. The G-7 did not consider the proposal, the corporate media mocked it, and NAM did not give it serious attention...
(222): In the 1970s, the IMF shifted its three-decades old mission from the provision of short-term credit to countries with current account deficits (lender of the last resort) to the use of its crucial finances as a weapon to demand structural economic changes mainly in the bruised nations. In other words, the new IMF eroded the institutions of state sovereignty...

It's the U.S, according to a new report from the New America Foundation, which "is the world's largest arms supplier". And with 23 billion dollars in receipts in 2007 and 32 billion dollars in 2008, including only foreign sales, the U.S. is also cashing in.
(...) The U.S. has signed more than twice as many arms transfer agreements over the past eight years (200-2007) than its nearest competition. In that time, the U.S. made nearly 124,000 deals, compared to the Russia, which has made just over 54,000. In the past two years for which figures are available, 2006 and 2007, three of the top four largest U.S. buyers in the developing world were Middle East allies. Saudi Arabia acquired 2.5 billion dollars worth of U.S. arms, with Israel dishing out just over 2.0 billion dollars. The post-invasion Iraqi government spent nearly 1.5 billion dollars on weapons. But the U.S. biggest arms client is turbulent Pakistan, which spent more than 3.5 billion dollars on U.S. weapons.

Within this deadly context, George W. Bush proposed the Mérida Initiative, dubbed "Plan Mexico" due to its striking similarity to Plan Colombia. Plan Mexico is a US aid package that will provide equipment, training, and resources to the Mexican police, army, and government to support Calderón's doomed war on drugs and organized crime. While it was originally valued at $1.4 billion over a period of three years, Sen. Patrick Leahy and Sen. Barack Obama have both stated that Bush's proposal falls short and that much more money over many more years will be necessary to fulfill Plan Mexico's mandate.

war immemorial day:
The U.S. spends over $600 billion annually on our military, more than the rest of the world combined. China, our nearest competitor, spends about one-tenth of what we spend. The U.S. also sells more weapons to other countries than any other nation in the world.
(...) The US has used its armed forces abroad over 230 times according to researchers at the Department of the Navy Historical Center. Their publications list over 60 military efforts outside the U.S. since World War II.
(...) Most people know of the deaths in World War I - 116,000 U.S. soldiers killed. But how many in the U.S. know that over 8 million soldiers from other countries and perhaps another 8 million civilians also died during World War II? By World War II, about 408,000 U.S. soldiers were killed. World-wide, at least another 20 million soldiers and civilians died.

[list of post-wwII interventions]

1947-1949 Greece. Over 500 U.S. armed forces military advisers were sent into Greece to administer hundreds of millions of dollars in their civil war.

1947-1949 Turkey. Over 400 U.S. armed forces military advisers sent into Turkey,

1950-1953 Korea. In the Korean War and other global conflicts 54,246 U.S. service members died.

1957-1975 Vietnam. Over 58,219 U.S. killed.

1958-1984 Lebanon. Sixth Fleet amphibious Marines and U.S. Army troops landed in Beirut during their civil war. Over 3000 U.S. military participated. 268 U.S. military killed in bombing.

1959 Haiti. U.S. troops, Marines and Navy, land in Haiti and joined in support of military dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier against rebels.

1962 Cuba. Naval and Marine forces blockade island.

1964 Panama. U.S. troops stationed there since 1903. U.S. troops used gunfire and tear gas to clear US Canal Zone.

1965-1966 Dominican Republic. U.S. troops land in Dominican Republic during their civil war - eventually 23,000 were stationed in their country.

1969-1975 Cambodia. U.S. and South Vietnam jets dropped more than 539,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia - three times the number dropped on Japan during WWII.

1964-1973 Laos. U.S. flew 580,000 bombing runs over country - more than 2 million tons of bombs dropped - double the amount dropped on Nazi Germany. US dropped more than 80 million cluster bombs on Laos - 10 to 30% did not explode leaving 8 to 24 million scattered across the country. Since the war stopped, two or three Laotians are killed every month by leftover bombs - over 5700 killed since bombing stopped.

1980 Iran. Operation Desert One, 8 U.S. troops die in rescue effort.

1981 Libya. U.S. planes aboard the Nimitz shot down 2 Libyan jets over Gulf of Sidra.

1983 Grenada. U.S. Army and Marines invade, 19 U.S. killed.

1983 Lebanon. Over 1200 Marines deployed into country during their civil war. 241 U.S. service members killed in bombing.

1983-1991 El Salvador. Over 150 US soldiers participate in their civil war as military advisers.

1983 Honduras. Over 1000 troops and National Guard members deployed into Honduras to help the contra fight against Nicaragua.

1986 Libya. U.S. Naval air strikes hit hundreds of targets - airfields, barracks, and defense networks.

1986 Bolivia. U.S. Army troops assist in anti-drug raids on cocaine growers.

1987 Iran. Operation Nimble Archer. U.S. warships shelled two Iranian oil platforms during Iran-Iraq war.

1988 Iran. US naval warship Vincennes in Persian Gulf shoots down Iranian passenger airliner, Airbus A300, killing all 290 people on board. US said it thought it was Iranian military jet.

1989 Libya. U.S. Naval jets shoot down 2 Libyan jets over Mediterranean

1989-1990 Panama. U.S. Army, Air Force, and Navy forces invade Panama to arrest President Manuel Noriega on drug charges. U.N. puts civilian death toll at 500.

1989 Philippines. U.S. jets provide air cover to Philippine troops during their civil war.

1991 Gulf War. Over 500,000 U.S. military involved. 700 plus U.S. died.

1992-93 Somalia. Operation Provide Relief, Operation Restore Hope, and Operation Continue Hope. Over 1300 U.S. Marines and Army Special Forces landed in 1992. A force of over 10,000 US was ultimately involved. Over 40 U.S. soldiers killed.

1992-96 Yugoslavia. U.S. Navy joins in naval blockade of Yugoslavia in Adriatic waters.

1993 Bosnia. Operation Deny Flight. U.S. jets patrol no-fly zone, naval ships launch cruise missiles, attack Bosnian Serbs.

1994 Haiti. Operation Uphold Democracy. U.S. led force of 20,000 troops invade to restore president.

1995 Saudi Arabia. U.S. soldier killed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia outside US training facility.

1996 Saudi Arabia. Nineteen U.S. service personnel die in blast at Saudi Air Base.

1998 Sudan. Operation Infinite Reach. U.S. cruise missiles fired at pharmaceutical plant thought to be terrorist center.

1998 Afghanistan. Operation Infinite Reach. U.S. fires 75 cruise missiles on four training camps.

1998 Iraq. Operation Desert Fox. U.S. Naval bombing Iraq from striker jets and cruise missiles after weapons inspectors report Iraqi obstructions.

1999 Yugoslavia. U.S. participates in months of air bombing and cruise missile strikes in Kosovo war.

2000 Yemen. 17 U.S. sailors killed aboard US Navy guided missile destroyer USS Cole docked in Aden, Yemen.

2001 Macedonia. U.S. military lands troops during their civil war.

2001 to present Afghanistan. Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) includes Pakistan and Uzbekistan with Afghanistan. 432 U.S. killed in those countries. Another 64 killed in other locations of OEF - Guantanamo Bay, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, Seychelles, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkey and Yemen. US military does not count deaths of non- US civilians, but estimates of over 8000 Afghan troops killed, over 3500 Afghan civilians killed.

2002 Yemen. U.S. predator drone missile attack on Al Qaeda.

2002 Philippines. U.S. sends over 1800 troops and Special Forces in mission with local military.

2003-2004 Colombia. U.S. sends in 800 military to back up Columbian military troops in their civil war.

2003 to present Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom. 4082 U.S. military killed. British medical journal Lancet estimates over 90,000 civilian deaths. Iraq Body Count estimates over 84,000 civilians killed.

2005 Haiti. U.S. troops land in Haiti after elected president forced to leave.

2005 Pakistan. U.S. air strikes inside Pakistan against suspected Al Qaeda, killing mostly civilians.

2007 Somalia. U.S. Air Force gunship attacked suspected Al Qaeda members, U.S. Navy joins in blockade against Islamic rebels.

another death in rawalpindi:
Today, military analyst Ayesha Siddeque estimates, the five conglomerates, or "welfare foundations," under military control own about $20 billion of assets and twelve billion hectares of land. This stake in the nation's economic life means the military necessarily has a large and persisting interest in control of the politic

how not to win friends:
A recent Congressional Research Service report on international arms sales records that last year the United States delivered nearly $8 billion worth of weapons to Third World countries. This was about 40% of all such arms transfers. The United States signed agreements to sell over $10 billion worth of weapons, one-third of all arms deals with Third World countries. It is easy to put this in perspective: $10 billon a year is the estimated cost of meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for water and sanitation, which would reduce by half the proportion of people in the world without proper access to drinking water and basic sanitation by 2015. Today, about 1.1 billion people do not have access to a minimal amount of clean water and about 2.6 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation.
(...) The largest third world buyer of weapons in 2006 was Pakistan. It purchased just over $5 billion in arms deals. Almost $3 billion of the purchases by Pakistan were new U.S.-made F-16s fighter jets, up-grades to the F-16s Pakistan bought in the 1980s, and bombs and missiles to arm these planes. A White House Press spokesman explained that the sale of the jet fighters "demonstrates our commitment to a long-term relationship with Pakistan."
(...) Since September 11, 2001, the United States has given over $10 billion to Pakistan to buy or reward General Musharraf's support for its newest war, the "war on terror." Pakistan has spent over $1.5 billion of this amount on buying new weapons. To understand the scale of this aid, consider Pakistan's total military budget in 2006, estimated at about $4.5 billion. The United States is now giving Pakistan aid to pay for the new deal for F-16s, bombs, and missiles. It is likely to win few friends.
(...) Attitudes toward the United States have worsened. A 2007 poll found that only 15% of Pakistanis had a favorable attitude towards the United States. An August 2007 poll found that General Musharraf was less popular even than Osama bin Laden; Musharraf had the support of 38% of Pakistanis, Bin Laden of 46%, and President Bush found favor with only 9%. It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of a policy that sought to make friends and build support.

hillary's pro-nuclear stance:
What in the world was Sen. Hillary Clinton thinking when she attacked Sen. Barack Obama for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons in going after Osama bin Laden? And why aren't her supporters more concerned about yet another egregious example of Clinton's consistent backing for the mindless militarism that is dragging this nation to ruin?
(...) Sen. Clinton has treated the military budget as primarily a pork-barrel target of opportunity for jobs and profit in New York state, supports increased money for missile defense and every other racket the military-industrial complex comes up with, and still feels no obligation to repudiate her vote for the disastrous Iraq war.
(...) Just exactly how does one make a compelling case to other nations against the proliferation of nuclear weapons when members of the nuke club, particularly the president of the one nation that has killed hundreds of thousands of people with two of these ungodly weapons, will not, at the very least, promise to abstain from first use of a weapon that could quite easily eliminate most life on this planet?
(...) Great, so forget the hope that a woman president might prove to be more enlightened than macho men in the matter of peacemaking, and instead rest assured that Hillary would have the cojones to "push the button" that would kill us all. Once again, the old Clintonian tactic of triangulation: positioning oneself politically instead of taking a position of integrity.

mechanistic destruction:
To a critical but scarcely exclusive sense, the Pentagon's penchant for military toys makes an ambitious, aggressive foreign policy essential. Without enemies and conflicts, real or potential, there is no reason to spend money, and this reality often colored its definition of Soviet goals after 1947 – despite the objections of senior CIA analysts. But the Defense Department, and national security establishments in general, are immense and all kinds of constituencies exist in them: there are procurement experts who draw up budgets and go after equipment mindlessly, people who have always dominated its actions, but thinkers too. Each does their own thing and they are often very different. It has always had these contradictions.
(...) There is a very profound consensus between the two parties on arms spending, which began under the Democrats a half-century ago and it will not go away – no matter how neglected the bridges and infrastructure, health, or the like. Arms lobbies are not only very powerful in Washington but create crucial jobs in most states and military spending keeps the economy afloat. Weapons producers make money regardless of whether the Pentagon wins or loses its wars – and making money is their only objective. It is surely a key causal factor even if it is far from being the sole explanation of why the U.S. intervenes where it shouldn't.

peace is not presidential:
Since President Bush came into office in 2001, the Pentagon’s budget has increased by more than one-third. The $481 billion proposed for 2008 - the $459 billion appropriations plus the nuclear weapons programs of the Department of Energy - is a jump of more than 10% over current spending. To be clear, this is a huge figure even before factoring in the costs of military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in under the “Global War on Terror.” A recent analysis of the emergency supplemental budgets to pay for the war by the Congressional Research Service finds that (so far) a total of another $607 billion has been spent since September 11, 2001.
(...) The United States is currently spending more on the military than at the height of the Reagan military build-up (when we had a nuclear-armed superpower rival) or during the Vietnam or Korean wars. Thanks to the Bush administration, the United States now spends about as much on its military as the rest of the world spends collectively, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

expanding NAFTA:
The expansion of NAFTA into the Security and Prosperity Partnership reveals the road ahead for other nations entering into free trade agreements. It is not a road most nations -- or the U.S. public -- would take if they knew where it led.
(...) The first problem is that very few people know about this next step of "deep integration." In March 2005, Presidents George Bush, Vicente Fox and Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas launched the Security and Prosperity Partnership with a splash. ... These rules and trinational programs have profound effect on the environment, the daily lives of citizens, and the future of all three countries.
(...) Its security component represents a new and ominous form of integration, all in the name of counter-terrorism.
(...) The official U.S. web page describes the SPP as "a White House-led initiative among the United States and the two nations it borders - Canada and Mexico - to increase security and to enhance prosperity among the three countries through greater cooperation."
(...) "White House-led" is a key element.
(...) Many of the priorities of the SPP benefit only a small handful of powerful actors, such as greater patent protection (Mexico holds very few patents) and joint anti-piracy campaigns (piracy is a major employer in Mexico and benefits low-income consumers).
(...) SPP on the other hand, was born in the "global war on terror" era and reflects an inordinate emphasis on U.S. security as interpreted by the Department of Homeland Security. The head of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, along with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Mexico's Secretary of Finance Carlos Gutierrez, represent the three ministries charged with attending SPP ministerial conferences.
(...) The SPP measures to coordinate security have pressured Mexico to militarize its southern border and adopt repressive measures toward Central and South Americans presumably in transit to the United States. The false conflation of undocumented immigration with security in the United States has also led to measures that have little to do with Mexico's own national security and cause friction with friendly nations, such as the decision to require visas for citizens of Brazil and Ecuador to enter the country.
(...) Moreover, in all three countries, significant civil society movements have questioned whether the high-tech solutions advanced by Homeland Security (and that profit major military suppliers) are really the best and most resource-efficient answer to security challenges. Again, for the most part, the decisions are being made without public knowledge or consultation.
(...) Economic integration under NAFTA has led to job loss and the erosion of job security and quality in the United States, while also increasing unemployment in Mexico. Over thirteen years, the model has confirmed, rather than reversed, Mexico's status as the less-developed partner. The rise in immigration to the United States attests to the failure of NAFTA as a development mechanism. Moreover, it has not increased the U.S. competitive edge although it has delivered record profits to a few major global traders. Unfortunately for the majority, those "few" are now driving the efforts to deepen integration under the NAFTA-plus-Homeland-Security model.
(...) But to deepen integration would mean deepening the contradictions and the problems that have led most Americans to express their rejection of the free-trade model in recent polls, and that has spurred widespread public protest in Mexico and Canada.

thoughts on afghanistan, paraguay, and iraq:
Remember when the U.S. used to claim things like '250 Vietcong' killed during a firefight, most of whom turned out to be civilians? On April 27 the U.S said 'more than 130 Taliban' were killed after Special Forces called in air strikes during a two-day battle in western Afghanistan. Except local residents said there were no Taliban in the village and that the dead included many women and children. With U.S. and NATO forces relying more and more on air power, large numbers of civilian casualties are inevitable.
(...) Drugs. With the help of the CIA, the U.S.-supported regime in South Vietnam and Laos shipped opium from Laos to Thailand, making the Vietnam War ground zero in the heroin epidemic that gripped Europe and the U.S in the late '60s and early '70s. For details see 'The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia,' and Frontline's 'Guns, Drugs and the CIA.' Well, 2006 was a banner year for opium production in Afghanistan and, according to an investigation by the Financial Times, Afghan government claims that it had eradicated 21,000 hectares of poppies in Kandahar and Helmand provinces 'bore little resemblance to reality.' Afghanistan produces 92 percent of the world's opium.
(...) Meanwhile, a number of NATO members are having second thoughts about the Afghan adventure. A recent Der Spiegel poll indicates that 57 percent of Germans want to withdraw from Afghanistan.
(...) 'It costs a couple of hundred dollars for a bomb,' says Sunil Ram, a professor at the American Military University in West Virginia, 'but they can knock out a $3 million or $4 million vehicle, and kill troops that cost millions of dollars to train.'
[on to paraguay]
(...) Lugo's politics are populist-he calls himself 'the bishop of the poor' and says he is 'inspired by some elements of socialism.' There is a lot to work with in Paraguay. It has the singular distinction of having the most unequal distribution of land in Latin America. Some one percent of the population owns 77 percent of the land.
(...) Benjamin Dangl, editor of Upsidedownworld.com, who has traveled widely in the area, says 'for Paraguay, Lugo is a revolutionary.' Dangl says Lugo could 'significantly' change the culture of repression and corruption, but that 'he is not Evo Morales or Chavez. He isn't likely to do too many radical things economically. Perhaps he will be more like Tabare Vasquez of Uruguay.' He says radicals are more 'hopeful' than they are 'satisfied' with his candidacy.
[iraq]
(...) So why are weapon systems that don't work being sent into war? Because Boeing and Bell made $20 billion off of the V-22, and General Dynamics raked in $11 billion on the Stryker. And now the Army and the Marines are pushing for a new Mine Resist and Ambush Protected (MRAPS) armored vehicle. The Pentagon ordered almost 8,000 of them at a cost of $8.4 billion from the International Truck and Engine and an Israeli armor maker. Plans are to order thousands more. War may be Hell, but for some, Hell is very profitable.

god bless america:
First in Oil Consumption:
The United States burns up 20.7 million barrels per day, the equivalent of the oil consumption of China, Japan, Germany, Russia, and India combined.
First in Carbon Dioxide Emissions:
Each year, world polluters pump 24,126,416,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the environment. The United States and its territories are responsible for 5.8 billion metric tons of this, more than China (3.3 billion), Russia (1.4 billion) and India (1.2 billion) combined.
First in External Debt:
The United States owes $10.040 trillion, nearly a quarter of the global debt total of $44 trillion.
First in Military Expenditures:
(...)Military analyst Winslow Wheeler did the math recently: "Add $142 billion to cover the anticipated costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; add $17 billion requested for nuclear weapons costs in the Department of Energy; add another $5 billion for miscellaneous defense costs in other agencies.... and you get a grand total of $647 billion for 2008."
First in Weapons Sales:
Since 2001, U.S. global military sales have normally totaled between $10 and $13 billion. That's a lot of weapons, but in fiscal year 2006, the Pentagon broke its own recent record, inking arms sales agreements worth $21 billion.

(...)After all, what does a drug dealer do? He creates a need and then fills it. He encourages an appetite or (even more lucratively) an addiction and then feeds it. Arms dealers do the same thing. They suggest to foreign officials that their military just might need a slight upgrade. After all, they'll point out, haven't you noticed that your neighbor just upgraded in jets, submarines, and tanks? And didn't you guys fight a war a few years back? Doesn't that make you feel insecure? And why feel insecure for another moment when, for just a few billion bucks, we'll get you suited up with the latest model military... even better than what we sold them -- or you the last time around. Why does Turkey, which already has 215 fighter planes, need 100 extras in an even higher-tech version? It doesn't... but Lockheed Martin, working the Pentagon, made them think they did.

castro on a yellow submarine:
What a feat for the British! The intelligent and tenacious people of that nation will surely not feel any sense of pride. What is most amazing is that with such an amount of money, 75 thousand doctors could be trained to care for 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States. You could build 3 thousand polyclinics, outfitted with sophisticated equipment, ten times what our country possesses.
(...) Since the beginning of the Revolution, Cuba has been engaged in training doctors, teachers and other professionals; with a population of less than 12 million inhabitants, today we have more Comprehensive General Medicine specialists than all the doctors in sub-Saharan Africa where the population exceeds 700 million people.
(...) We must bow our heads in awe after reading the news about the English submarine. It teaches us, among other things, about the sophisticated weapons that are needed to maintain the untenable order developed by the United States imperial system.

the imperial imperative (chalmers johnson):
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration's policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don't agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.
(...) As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: "None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances.... The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them."
(...) And six months after the Democratic Party took control of both houses of Congress, the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open and conducting drumhead courts martial of the prisoners held there; the CIA was still using "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners in foreign jails; illegal intrusions into the privacy of American citizens continued unabated; and, more than fifty years after the CIA was founded, it continues to operate under, at best, the most perfunctory congressional oversight.
(...) Instead of uncovering administration lies and manipulations, the media actively promoted them. Yet the first amendment to the Constitution protects the press precisely so it can penetrate the secrecy that is the bureaucrat's most powerful, self-protective weapon. As a result of this failure, democratic oversight of the government by an actively engaged citizenry did not -- and could not -- occur. The people of the United States became mere spectators as an array of ideological extremists, vested interests, and foreign operatives -- including domestic neoconservatives, Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi exiles, the Israeli Lobby, the petroleum and automobile industries, warmongers and profiteers allied with the military-industrial complex, and the entrenched interests of the professional military establishment -- essentially hijacked the government.
(...) In an interview with Matt Taibbi, Seymour Hersh, for forty years one of America's leading investigative reporters, put the matter this way: "All of the institutions we thought would protect us -- particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress -- they have failed... So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn't. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that's the most glaring.... What can be done to fix the situation? [long pause] You'd have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives."
(...) The idea that the U.S. was an unquestioned military colossus athwart the world, which no power or people could effectively oppose, was hubristic nonsense certain to get the country into deep trouble -- as it did -- and bring the U.S. Army to the point of collapse, as happened in Vietnam and may well happen again in Iraq (and Afghanistan).
(...) Instead of behaving in a professional manner, our military invaded Iraq with far too small a force; failed to respond adequately when parts of the Iraqi Army (and Baathist Party) went underground; tolerated an orgy of looting and lawlessness throughout the country; disobeyed orders and ignored international obligations (including the obligation of an occupying power to protect the facilities and treasures of the occupied country -- especially, in this case, Baghdad's National Museum and other archaeological sites of untold historic value); and incompetently fanned the flames of an insurgency against our occupation, committing numerous atrocities against unarmed Iraqi civilians.
(...) a certain sign of the disaster to come in Iraq arrived via an April 26th posting from the courageous but anonymous Sunni woman who has, since August 2003, published the indispensable blog Baghdad Burning. Her family, she reported, was finally giving up and going into exile -- joining up to two million of her compatriots who have left the country. In her final dispatch, she wrote: "There are moments when the injustice of having to leave your country simply because an imbecile got it into his head to invade it, is overwhelming. It is unfair that in order to survive and live normally, we have to leave our home and what remains of family and friends.... And to what?"
(...) The war and occupation George W. Bush unleashed in Iraq has proved unimaginably lethal for unarmed civilians, but reporting the true levels of lethality in Iraq, or the nature of the direct American role in it was, for a long time, virtually taboo in the U.S. media. As late as October 2006, the journal of the British Medical Association, The Lancet, published a study conducted by researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimating that, since March 2003, there were some 601,027 more Iraqi deaths from violence than would have been expected without a war.
(...) Over 600,000 violent deaths in a population estimated in 2006 at 26.8 million -- that is, one in every 45 individuals -- amounts to a made-in-America human catastrophe.
(...) One subject that the government, the military, and the news media try to avoid like the plague is the racist and murderous culture of rank-and-file American troops when operating abroad. Partly as a result of the background racism that is embedded in many Americans' mental make-up and the propaganda of American imperialism that is drummed into recruits during military training, they do not see assaults on unarmed "rag heads" or "hajis" as murder. The cult of silence on this subject began to slip only slightly in May 2007 when a report prepared by the Army's Mental Health Advisory Team was leaked to the San Diego Union-Tribune. Based on anonymous surveys and focus groups involving 1,320 soldiers and 447 Marines, the study revealed that only 56% of soldiers would report a unit member for injuring or killing an innocent noncombatant, while a mere 40% of Marines would do so. Some militarists will reply that such inhumanity to the defenseless is always inculcated into the properly trained soldier. If so, then the answer to this problem is to ensure that, in the future, there are many fewer imperialist wars of choice sponsored by the United States.
(...) the privatization of military and intelligence functions is totally out of control, beyond the law, and beyond any form of Congressional oversight. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies -- and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts.
(...) America's massive "military" budgets, still on the rise, are beginning to threaten the U.S. with bankruptcy, given that its trade and fiscal deficits already easily make it the world's largest net debtor nation. Spending on the military establishment -- sometimes mislabeled "defense spending" -- has soared to the highest levels since World War II, exceeding the budgets of the Korean and Vietnam War eras as well as President Ronald Reagan's weapons-buying binge in the 1980s. According to calculations by the National Priorities Project, a non-profit research organization that examines the local impact of federal spending policies, military spending today consumes 40% of every tax dollar.
(...) The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department.
(...) Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.
(...) This spending helps sustain the national economy and represents, essentially, a major jobs program. However, it is beginning to crowd out the civilian economy, causing stagnation in income levels. It also contributes to the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs to other countries. On May 1, 2007, the Center for Economic and Policy Research released a series of estimates on "the economic impact of the Iraq war and higher military spending." Its figures show, among other things, that, after an initial demand stimulus, the effect of a significant rise in military spending (as we've experienced in recent years) turns negative around the sixth year. Sooner or later, higher military spending forces inflation and interest rates up, reducing demand in interest-sensitive sectors of the economy, notably in annual car and truck sales. Job losses follow. The non-military construction and manufacturing sectors experience the largest share of these losses. The report concludes, "Most economic models show that military spending diverts resources from productive uses, such as consumption and investment, and ultimately slows economic growth and reduces employment."
(...) I believe that there is only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge (still growing) military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.
(...) Even to contemplate a drawing back from empire -- something so inconceivable to our pundits and newspaper editorial writers that it is simply never considered -- we must specify as clearly as possible precisely what the elected leaders and citizens of the United States would have to do. Two cardinal decisions would have to be made. First, in Iraq, we would have to initiate a firm timetable for withdrawing all our military forces and turning over the permanent military bases we have built to the Iraqis. Second, domestically, we would have to reverse federal budget priorities.
(...) Such reforms would begin at once to reduce the malevolent influence of the military-industrial complex, but many other areas would require attention as well. As part of the process of de-garrisoning the planet and liquidating our empire, we would have to launch an orderly closing-up process for at least 700 of the 737 military bases we maintain (by official Pentagon count) in over 130 foreign countries on every continent except Antarctica. We should ultimately aim at closing all our imperialist enclaves, but in order to avoid isolationism and maintain a capacity to assist the United Nations in global peacekeeping operations, we should, for the time being, probably retain some 37 of them, mostly naval and air bases.
(...) Equally important, we should rewrite all our Status of Forces Agreements -- those American-dictated "agreements" that exempt our troops based in foreign countries from local criminal laws, taxes, immigration controls, anti-pollution legislation, and anything else the American military can think of. It must be established as a matter of principle and law that American forces stationed outside the U.S. will deal with their host nations on a basis of equality, not of extraterritorial privilege.
(...) We would have to end our belligerent unilateralism toward other countries as well as our scofflaw behavior regarding international law. Our objective should be to strengthen the United Nations, including our respect for its majority, by working to end the Security Council veto system (and by stopping using our present right to veto). The United States needs to cease being the world's largest supplier of arms and munitions -- a lethal trade whose management should be placed under UN supervision. We should encourage the UN to begin outlawing weapons like land mines, cluster bombs, and depleted-uranium ammunition that play particularly long-term havoc with civilian populations. As part of an attempt to right the diplomatic balance, we should take some obvious steps like recognizing Cuba and ending our blockade of that island and, in the Middle East, working to equalize aid to Israel and Palestine, while attempting to broker a real solution to that disastrous situation. Our goal should be a return[!?] to leading by example -- and by sound arguments -- rather than by continual resort to unilateral armed force and repeated foreign military interventions.
(...) In terms of the organization of the executive branch, we need to rewrite the National Security Act of 1947, taking away from the CIA all functions that involve sabotage, torture, subversion, overseas election rigging, rendition, and other forms of clandestine activity. The president should be deprived of his power to order these types of operations except with the explicit advice and consent of the Senate. The CIA should basically devote itself to the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence.
(...) In order to halt our economic decline and lessen our dependence on our trading partners, the U.S. must cap its trade deficits through the perfectly legal use of tariffs in accordance with World Trade Organization rules, and it must begin to guide its domestic market in accordance with a national industrial policy, just as the leading economies of the world (particularly the Japanese and Chinese ones) do as a matter of routine. Even though it may involve trampling on the vested interests of American university economics departments, there is simply no excuse for a continued reliance on an outdated doctrine of "free trade." [and what of capital?]
(...) When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase "evil empire," he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. [and that dirty war, chalmers?] But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will "win" or -- even more improbably -- "follow us home." I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on preventive war. I also believe that unless we follow this path, we will lose our democracy and then it will not matter much what else we lose. In the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

pakistan, afghanistan, and current crises:
Pakistan has historically seen both a problem and an opportunity in Afghanistan. The problem is that the British Empire, like all empires, drew its boundaries with no respect for the lives and aspirations of the people on the ground. Its empire in India ended in the Northwest Frontier Province, despite the wars to conquer Afghanistan. While Afghanistan was outside the formal structure of empire, in fact there was social, economic and cultural continuity across the Pashtun region that spans Pakistan and Afghanistan. The new Pakistani leadership saw this as a problem once Pakistan became independent in 1947. Would there be calls for an independent Pashtunistan? Pakistan sought to limit the power of ethnic nationalism to unite Pashtuns across the border. They came to believe that in order to keep the NWFP, they would need leverage over Afghanistan.
(...) In its confrontation with India, especially after 1971 war that spilt off East Pakistan and created Bangladesh, the Pakistani generals looked at a map and thought, given how narrow Pakistan is, if India invades, where do we retreat to and fight back from? They decided they could retreat to Afghanistan and organize the defense from there. To do so they needed a client government in Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the US effort to organize the resistance gave Pakistan a chance. It tried to take advantage of its support for the insurgents against the USSR to establish clients among the Afghan militias. But the real breakthrough came in the chaos after the Soviets left and the Americans stopped caring about what happened in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s military helped create, train, arm, equip and at times led the Taliban to take power in Afghanistan during the 1990s. The goal was to create a client regime there. But, after 9/11, they had to distance themselves from the Taliban because of American pressure. But they seem not to have let go completely.
(...) [excellent summary of US creation of pakistan's military complex] The US and Pakistan have a long military relationship. In 1954 Pakistan signed a military co-operation agreement with the US. Up to that point it was a very small army with very little equipment, inherited from the British army before independence. With this agreement with US, Pakistan hoped to get military aid, training, and equipment to build an army to match India. The US was looking for a Cold War ally and saw Pakistan as pivotal with its proximity to the Middle East and to the USSR and a willingness to support the US. [/] The US poured in money, training, and equipment and redesigned the army on American lines. A generation of officers was sent to US for training. Many went to on to become very senior. They included General Zia-al-Haq, who trained in the US and went on to stage a military coup in 1977 and ruled for over ten years. US training was hugely influential in shaping how the Pakistani military thought about military issues. They developed a taste for American equipment, and American strategy and tactics. [/] From the 1950s to the 1970s, this was conventional training and conventional weapons: tanks, planes, artillery, communications. These were the skills that won ambitious soldiers promotions and medals. As a consequence, these people had an important voice in military planning and decision making. In the 1980s, the Afghan war meant that the focus shifted to organizing and running a guerilla army. In this period the ISI came into its own, going from an insignificant agency to an enormously powerful institution. It received money, training in covert ops, ideology, and developed a capacity for recruiting, training and managing Islamic militants. These became the new ways of war. [/] After the end of the Afghanistan war and the collapse of the USSR, Pakistan was no longer needed. The US imposed sanctions and cut off aid because of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Through the 1990s there was almost no aid or training. It started again after 9/11. The US has resumed cooperation, but its emphasis is countering al-Qaeda and Taliban. It has focused on intelligence sharing, covert action, counter-insurgency, ideology, and propaganda. [/] But many of the Pakistani generals still value Americans weapons. They are seen as high-equalizers against India’s larger numbers of soldiers, tanks, planes and so on. So Pakistan continues to seek big ticket, high-tech US weapons, like F-16s. The US has been pouring in billions of dollars a year in military aid. For the US, this has the added benefit, of course, of directing US government money to American military contractors who make and sell this equipment.
(...) The extent of cooperation is hard to know. The Afghan government is certainly convinced that Pakistan is helping the Taliban. It is clear that the Taliban are being allowed to organize and move freely in certain areas in Pakistan. They also continue to have access to weapons and other supplies, and funds. There has been no crackdown on the madrassas where the Taliban are recruited.
(...) The Taliban have become a more diverse group. The people the US are fighting now are not just the old Afghan Taliban. There are also veterans from the Afghan war in the 1980s against the Soviets. Many who were trained by US to fight Soviets are now on the side of the Taliban. Many Pakistanis also volunteered to go fight against the Americans and started to join the Taliban. And, there are now the Pakistani Taliban, a home-grown movement of Islamic militants, many from madrassas.
(...) They felt they could conduct a conventional war to try to force a negotiated settlement. It didn’t work. Nuclear threats were made by both sides. Both countries came under tremendous pressure to calm things down.
(...) On the other side, the Indian army’s massive military effort for almost twenty years has had a huge impact. The Kashmiri population is small. If you swamp it with soldiers, draconian measures, massacre, murder, torture, detention, as India has done, people back down. And as the movement for independence in Kashmir moved into Islamic militant hands, backed by Pakistan, the degree of identification between ordinary Kashmiris and the people claiming to fight for their freedom decreased. The Islamic freedom fighters, radical and conservative, were against the grain of the kind of Islam prevalent in Kashmir. They alienated the population with their attacks, their reliance on outsiders, and their brand of Islam.
(...) The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan has become a national flashpoint. He decided to hear the cases filed by relatives of people who were rounded up and disappeared, mainly in Balochistan and as part of the Pakistani military’s efforts to wage their own little war on terror. He told the government he wanted to know where the missing people were – habeas corpus. The government said, we don’t have them. The Court was clearly not convinced and has continued to pursue the matter, and held the government in contempt of court. Suddenly people who have been secretly detained for several years turned up in court. Musharraf decided not to tolerate this kind of challenge from the courts, so he took the extreme step of firing the Chief Justice. The real fear Musharraf had was that a Chief Justice and a Supreme Court willing to confront the military government on human rights might also intervene and prevent his securing re-appointment as President.
(...) Pakistan is stuck in its traditional troubles. The military is too strong, controlling the state, society, the economy. This idea is filtering into the common sense of the country, with the crisis in Islamabad. The military want to take the nicest bit of the capital city and build a new facility. This is prime real estate, and they are getting it at below market rates, basically stealing it from exchequer. And political leaders are too weak: You’ve heard how Benazir Bhutto is negotiating for a return to the country on the military’s terms. You accept our power and we won’t prosecute you for corruption. That’s the traditional pattern for Pakistan.
(...) The new thing is the rise of the madrassa phenomenon and the growing role of a generation of young, radical Islamist activists trained in these religious schools. These religious schools were once thought to be confined to the hinterland and to the conservative provinces like the North West Frontier Province (bordering Afghanistan). Many went to fight in Afghanistan. But there were also madrassas in the big cities, including Islamabad. These have created the Pakistani Taliban. The students from there have now become more active. In Islamabad, madrassa students have taken it upon themselves to take over public buildings, take hostages, and there has been a standoff with police for weeks. These are women madrassa students.
(...) Islamabad was a custom-built capital, built in the 1960s by General Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first military dictator. The capital had been Karachi. The dictator chose a green field site, basically farmers’ fields, and said “build me a city”. So it is a city with a master plan, with planned green areas, parks, all built into the plan. But in recent years, people started to build mosques in the green areas, and in shopping centres, without a permit. It is basically the private, illegal appropriation of public land. They got away with it for years. The logic was simple. You build a mosque wherever you want, people will come and pray, and you’ve created facts on the ground – who’s going to demolish a mosque? Finally, the city administration said we can’t turn a blind eye to this anymore. Islamabad is undergoing a massive construction boom, land is suddenly in great demand. This also means the city administration needs to get some control back after years of unregulated development. The city demolished a couple of the illegal mosques and announced plans to demolish many more. In response, in January this year, women students from a local madrassa occupied a public building, a children’s library, saying: you must stop the demolitions and rebuild the demolished mosques. The women students are still there. They wear burqas, but there are reports that some of them are armed with Kalashnikovs.
(...) The protests started over the demolitions, but the students have added other issues. They started protesting corruption and moral depravity in society, and demanding enforcement of sharia (Islamic law). They established their own court - in the capital city – where they pick people off the street and punish them for violations of sharia. This is an amazing development. It shows that the crisis in law and order and state authority has become very acute.
(...) The government has been very passive. They say we don’t want to hurt anybody. But this doesn’t stop the authorities from beating the hell out of human rights protesters, including women activists, and women lawyers. What this suggests is that the insecurity of the regime has reached the point where they don’t want to provoke a confrontation that will unite the Islamic parties and militant jihadis against the state. The Islamists could create a real challenge to the state.
(...) At the same time, Musharraf needs to show public opinion that he is in charge of the situation and no one should think of challenging his government. He also needs to show the West that he can take on the Islamists. He also convince his fellow generals that he can manage all these problems. There is always a risk that he may look for, if not create, an opportunity to be able to put on a show of force.
(...) [tensions within military brass] There are tensions, for instance over support for the Taliban and the Islamists groups. It used to go all the way to the top. Musharraf was one of the architects of the 1999 war with India, that started with Islamist militants crossing over into Kashmir from Pakistan. Among the militants were Pakistani soldiers in camouflage. Musharraf has been involved in all of the decision-making around Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan. But there were more religiously-minded conservative generals for whom support for the Taliban wasn’t just a tactic. Some of those have retired or been pushed out after 9/11. The US was very worried about the Pakistani military leadership for a while. But there is still a lot of sympathy among the military for Islamic groups, ideologically, as well as for strategic and political reasons. This includes people who simply don’t like America’s foreign policy or fighting America’s wars.
(...) In India, it seems we’re starting to see that the process of urbanization, industrialization, and education set in place after independence by the avowedly socialist Congress Party has produced a new ruling class. This new elite has interests in business as well as the state. It is a bourgeoisie that owns means of production, factories, and so on, as well as a middle class to work in these new jobs. The influx of foreign investment into India, with Indian companies and multinationals setting up there, has also created a large group of young people who are seeing rapid increases in income and seeking to satisfy a sense of the “good life”, buying into the American dream.
(...) They have moved towards liberalization – the transfer of public assets and goods into private hands - so that they can make private profit from what was previously public investment. They want state resources to build and strengthen infrastructure for their lives and aspirations. There are more imports of luxury goods and less emphasis on producing within India for Indian needs. This is what Arundhati Roy meant: the successful seek to secede, and they want to take everything with them. The new Indian elite is trying to pull the ladder up after themselves, in the typical pattern. This leaves 3-400 million in desperate poverty and marginalized from economic and political institutions.
(...) It is part of the new sense of success and achievement, a new sense of India’s capacity as a strong state and economy. People have started to say, we have economic growth, we are becoming an economic superpower, we should have the other aspects of great power. This is a sentiment the Americans and Europeans are happy to feed. Buy our weapons. Get big buildings. Buy submarines and jet fighters. The US military-industrial complex finds in India a huge new market in a context when other markets aren’t growing. Indian spending increasing by leaps and bounds with military modernization across the board. They are building nuclear weapons and missiles, aircraft carriers, submarines, jet fighters, new radar systems, everything. It seeks power projection, which requires a huge capacity for logistics, ships, refueling airplanes.
(...) The US State Department went on record and said the US goal is to help India become a major world power and that they understand the military implications of that statement. The US is preparing India to become a major power. The intent is to help India as a competitor to China. That’s also feeding Indian militarization and ambitions.
(...) The Pakistani military sees itself as vulnerable. They see their position eroding. What can they do if the US sells to both sides in South Asia, and India has much more money to spend on weapons? Pakistan can buy more hardware from China, but it is not as good as the US stuff they are used to. The real danger is that as they see the conventional gap grow, they will become more reliant on the nuclear arsenal.
(...) Both Pakistan and India are torn between their regional interests to have good relations with Iran, and their alliances with US. The whole problem is really encapsulated in an important project proposed some years ago: a gas pipeline to bring Iranian gas through Pakistan to western India, to provide energy for India. India does have huge energy needs, natural gas is more environmentally friendly and preferable to coal and nuclear power. The Iranians are happy to sell it and it diversifies their client base. Pakistan would benefit from the gas, the rent they could charge for the pipeline passing through, and the trust it could generate between India and Pakistan.
(...) The problem: the US doesn’t want Iran to sell gas. They told the Indians they can’t buy, they told Pakistan they can’t let pipeline be built. Where Iran could have played a great role in improving the level of cooperation between the two countries, the US is trying to prevent that for narrow short-term interests in trying to control and contain and undo Iran. This is one of the biggest problems.
(...) The second is the Iranian nuclear programme – from an Iranian point of view, the program started in the 1950s, under “atoms for peace”, the same program that helped provide nuclear training, technology, and reactors to India and Pakistan. The Shah wanted a large nuclear program, and nuclear weapons. But he was a US ally and there were not too many concerns about helping Iran’s program as long as he was in power.
(...) The Islamic revolution has an interesting nuclear history. Khomeini denounced the atomic energy program on theological grounds. He also said, we don’t need the stuff. He gave it no attention, and no money. But the scientists managed to stay in business through the hard times. Then the Iran-Iraq war happened and the US provided plenty of help for Iraqis and the international community did nothing while Iraq used poison gas against Iran. The Iranians thought: we have to look after ourselves.
(...) Today the Iranian revolutionary leadership doesn’t have much to show for its 20 years in power. It has a 10-year war and an oil exporting economy whose infrastructure is on the verge of collapse for lack of investment. It has one national project: its nuclear program. Something only the government can do. This has become their measure of achievement. When the west attacks the nuclear program, they see it as proof of its importance – they believe the West doesn’t want Iran to have the program because nuclear technology is so important.
(...) But Iranian mullahs are like mullahs everywhere: they are interested in technology, not science. They want the symbols of being modern, rather than actually wanting to be modern since that would imply a commitment to a different kind of society.

immigration numbers:
When we think of immigrants, we generally picture people from poor countries moving to rich ones. But only about a third of the 200 million people who comprise the global migrant populace moves from developing to wealthier nations. Another third moves between developing nations, and the remainder moves from wealthier nations to developing nations.
(...) Of the many forces that drive individual immigration from developing countries, neoliberal capitalist policies are among the most significant. They have disrupted traditional and protected economies in nations like Mexico and Guatemala. “Free-trade” agreements like NAFTA (and the impending DR-CAFTA) have lowered tariffs and abolished the government subsidy and welfare programs that have sustained the campesino classes of these nations for generations. Absorption into the competition of the “world market”—dominated by heavily subsidized American agricultural corporations—has led to the clearing of indigenous peoples from their land at a rate that reproduces the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” weekly. Displacement in rural regions is matched by urban out-migration, as the “Wal-Martization” of the economy accelerates the rate of deindustrialization.
(...) Overall, the undertow of “economic restructuring” pushes about a million workers a year to risk unauthorized migration across reinforced borders.
(...) Ironically, these same policies make national boundaries increasingly irrelevant for migration in the reverse direction. During the last decade, according to U.S. State Department estimates, the number of Americans living in Mexico has soared from 200,000 to 1 million—a quarter of all U.S. expatriates. But we don’t call these people “immigrants.” They are “retirees.” They are the “managers” and “technicians” in the maquiladoras. They are the “commuters”—the working poor of the United States, gentrified out of inflated housing markets like San Diego and seeking refuge in more affordable Tijuana.
(...) José arrived at the pick-up spot this morning, but others have been waiting here for weeks. Some are among the approximately 850,000 Mexicans who, according to the Mexican Interior Ministry, try crossing each year, get caught, and are deported. Most will try again, because about 350,000 Mexicans do successfully make it to their destinations each year. And about 500,000 people from Mexico and farther south do find work in the U.S. each year.
(...) Since 1994, the U.S. enforcement strategy has been two-pronged: criminalize the immigrants and militarize the borders. The U.S. has choked off traditional urban crossing points by building double and triple walls, increased the number of agents, and introduced military technology and personnel into routine activities. This policy has made the journey more dangerous by pushing crossing points into remote, hazardous regions in desert and mountainous terrain, or into the equally dangerous underworld of human smuggling—through ports of entry as container cargo. Funding for border enforcement has increased from $1.3 billion in 1994 to $7.3 billion in 2005, and the yearly death toll during that period has mushroomed from 23 to 473.
(...) In all, more than 4,000 men, women, and children have died in the act of looking for work in the U.S. But the rate of unauthorized crossings has not slowed.
(...) During the past year, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has issued 3,667 “administrative violations,” which generally involve the apprehension of undocumented immigrants at work sites—up from 485 in 2002.
(...) Another 24,000 people were picked up separately during Operation “Return to Sender.” Although it was theoretically a plan to arrest those with criminal records, two thirds of those apprehended in this operation had committed no crimes at all but were detained as “collateral arrests.”
(...) At least 25,000 undocumented migrants are imprisoned in more than 200 immigrant detention centers across the country. But there is still an overflow. So detainees en route to deportation hearings are routinely housed in local and state prisons, integrated into the general population there, and subjected to a host of foreseeable problems. Since 1995, about 1.5 million people have been ejected from the U.S. through this process.
(...) Deportations have tragic consequences for families. They separate parents from children, husbands from wives, and same-sex partners from each other. An estimated 5 million children in the United States—at least 3.1 million of them U.S.-born citizens—have parents who are undocumented immigrants.
(...) Deported parents, hoping that they can soon return, commonly leave citizen children with relatives. But current immigration law dictates that if an undocumented person is deported or leaves the country voluntarily, he or she cannot re-enter the United States for 10 years. Worse, anti-immigrant opponents have proposed legislation to deny “birthright citizenship,” so that the children of undocumented migrants born in the U.S. would be denied the right to citizenship that has historically been granted by the Constitution to all people born in the United States.
(...) In 2006, 570 immigrant bills were introduced in 32 states, mostly to implement such restrictions. Local governments have enacted restrictions on renting or providing services to migrants without proof of residency, passed “English-only” ordinances, and empowered local police to check immigration status as part of their normal routine.
(...) Despite the virtually open borders for the migration of American capital and people into Mexico (90 percent of the 2,000 foreign-owned firms in Mexico are U.S.-based), many layers of obstruction prevent Mexicans from obtaining authorization to work in the north. For one, displaced laborers or subsistence farmers like José are categorized as “unskilled,” and the U.S. distributes only about 5,000 visas each year for unskilled workers globally. In 2005, only two of those went to Mexicans.