Bush Down South

Brazil has the largest plantations in Latin America, millions of hectares controlled by a small, powerful oligarchy eager to do business with global capital and now dreaming of drowning the US in biofuel. But there’s a huge problem. Brazilian alcohol is taxed in the US at a heavily protectionist 54 cents a gallon (14.27 cents a liter).

But there’s a big problem for Bush and his cronies, as Pepe Escobar relates:

Much more than Asia or Africa, South America, politically, is now the most progressive and hopeful region in the world – forging, in a messy, imperfect, even utopian but always exciting way a compound of real alternatives to the ravages of neo-liberalism while Washington, from the peaks of its unrivaled full-spectrum dominance, has nothing to offer but war, death and devastation.

It could be an interesting trip.

SAO PAULO – US President George W Bush – biting the dust in Iraq, contested at home, despised around the world – is taking a break and heading south on a five-stop tour of Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. He is not visiting the 100,000-hectare family ranch his daughter Barbara bought last autumn in the Paraguayan chaco. He might be tempted to stay in.

The Bush reception won’t be exactly of the Rolling Stones variety. Massive protests are scheduled everywhere – even in countries where he is not showing up. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez – Bush’s continental nemesis – will address a huge crowd in Buenos Aires, probably in a soccer stadium, as US Secret Service paranoia turns Sao Paulo into an immense Green Zone.

This had to be, fundamentally, a Bush-against-Chavez tour. Inevitably, it is also a Bush-against-Ahmadinejad tour. Last month, strengthening ties with Latin America, the Iranian president visited Venezuela, Ecuador and Nicaragua, which in the neo-con scheme of things qualify, along with gas-rich Bolivia, as the southern “axis of evil”.

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.

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